The principled argument

Engagements with defending democracy in contemporary critical theory suggest that it is possible to defend democratic principles and institutions consistent with them. Institutions not corresponding to these principles are opposed as drivers of authoritarian developments (eg Mouffe Reference Mouffe2019; Forst Reference Forst2023). These elements of the ‘principled argument’ characterise much of critical theory’s engagement with defending democracy today.Footnote ¹ Advocates of this argument refer to superordinate, transformative democratic principles to justify and to oppose defensive interventions, depending on the consistency of interventions with these principles.

It is beyond this article’s scope to cover all principled arguments in critical theory regarding defending democracy. To cover a broad range of arguments, contemporary ‘Frankfurt School’ critical theorists (Forst Reference Forst2023), egalitarian social democrats (Näsström Reference Näsström2021), and radical democrats (Mouffe Reference Mouffe2019) are discussed.Footnote ² This shows that the principled argument is pervasive and thereby imposes restrictions on public defences of democracy in critical theory.

Consider, firstly, Forst’s (Reference Forst2023) essay ‘The rule of unreason: Analyzing (anti-)democratic regression’. Forst begins by calling for ‘further conceptual reflection and clarification’ rather than taking the concept of regression at face value (Forst Reference Forst2023: 217). He criticises that the concept of regression relies on a ‘status quo ante fixation’, on a ‘reduction of the concept of democracy’, and on a ‘misclassification of critiques of democracy’ (ibid.). To summarise what this entails: Forst argues that ‘regression’ likely overvalues and idealises existing, non-ideal democracies; it likely abstracts from the transformative demands of democratic principles and their significance for political struggle; it likely misjudges authoritarian calls for participation and change as legitimate democratic demands (Forst Reference Forst2023: 218–221).

In other words, a principled, normative defence of democracy is tenable, whereas a ‘conventionalist’ defence of existing institutions is not. Critical theorists may relate defensively to existing institutions from a ‘justifiable normative standpoint’ (Forst Reference Forst2023: 219), grounded in a ‘first principle’ (Forst Reference Forst2023: 220) that is not reducible to the existing institutional order. They cannot refer to the conventionalist argument ‘that something has once been established or recognised’ and should therefore be defended (Forst Reference Forst2023: 219). Forst opposes recourse to ‘already achieved and institutionalised standards or socially accepted ideals’ and links corresponding defences of democracy, at worst, to an ‘ideological nostalgism’ (Forst Reference Forst2023: 219).

Forst’s essay exemplifies the ‘principled’ defence of democracy. The critical thrust of defensive interventions is secured via superordinate normative principles, such as Forst’s own theory of justification,Footnote ³ which are counterposed to the existing institutional order. Public interventions which defensively refer to existing institutional orders rather than to ‘first principles’ risk being dismissed as merely ideological.

Similar arguments pervade egalitarian, social democratic political theory and some variants of radical democratic theory. At first glance, these traditions seem to oppose the principled character of Forst’s critical theory. Social democratic theory commonly promises a firm grasp of practical matters. Radical democratic thought emphasises ‘political’ over ethical concerns. Nevertheless, their defensive arguments refer to strong principles. As such, they clarify that the adopting of ‘first principles’ is not only ethically significant, but also it enables and constrains the substantive politics possible within the realm of critical theorising.

Näsström (Reference Näsström2021) suggests an egalitarian, social defence of democracy in addressing the ‘substantial’ question ‘what kind of democracy is worth defending’ (Näsström Reference Näsström2021: 377, 391). Social democratic measures, on her account, correspond simultaneously to the principle of equality and to the principle of democratic openness: ‘their purpose is to tame […] [democratic] uncertainty by sharing and dividing it equally’ (Näsström Reference Näsström2021: 389).

A democracy worth defending, according to Näsström, is a democracy based on two core principles. Corresponding interventions may combine the development of ‘political institutions and social policies’ (Näsström Reference Näsström2021: 392). These transformative measures serve the purpose of ‘motivating commitment to democracy’ rather than merely ‘keeping democracy’s enemies in check’ (ibid.) through legal or political measures. While avoiding more abstract, ethical reference to first principles, Näsström’s social model for defending democracy thus relies on the principled, transformative defence of equality and democratic openness. It does not allow for the status-quo-preserving defence of existing institutions that are inconsistent with these principles.

Some variants of radical democratic theory share in this principled understanding of democratic defence, despite claims to the contrary. Authors like Mouffe oppose the ‘liberal democratic’ attempt of ‘formulat[ing] a definitive list of rights, principles, and institutional arrangements that are unassailable’ (Mouffe Reference Mouffe2020: 138–139). As a consequence, radical democratic thought has been criticised for an alleged normative-institutional deficit (on this see, eg Westphal Reference Westphal2019; Flügel-Martinsen Reference Flügel-Martinsen2022). Regarding the question of defending democracy, however, Mouffe advocates ‘certain forms of consensus relating to allegiance to the ethico-political values that constitute [democracy’s] principles of legitimacy, and the institutions in which these are inscribed’ (Mouffe Reference Mouffe2019: 93; see also McNay Reference McNay2014).

This principled, ethico-political baseline justifies repression. Those who ‘reject the conflictual consensus that constitutes the basis of a pluralist democracy’ are an ‘enemy’ of democracy and beyond the ‘limits of pluralism’ (Mouffe Reference Mouffe2019: 91–92). Mouffe’s argument is principled insofar as it justifies exclusionary defences of existing institutions with their correspondence to a constitutional baseline. This baseline, in turn, is consonant with transformative democratic principles. On the other hand, Mouffe opposes merely ‘managing the established order’ (Mouffe Reference Mouffe2019: 17), for example, by conservatively preserving existing institutions.

An emphasis on superordinate, transformative principles distances Forst, Näsström, Mouffe, and much of contemporary critical theory from ‘conventionalist’ defences of democracy that seek to preserve existing institutions because they exist.Footnote ⁴ This principled anti-conventionalism both enables and constrains how critical theorists can act as public intellectuals in civil society efforts to defend democracy. It enables public advocacy for superordinate democratic principles and interventions consistent with them. It constrains defending non-ideal institutions that do not correspond to these principles. Critical public intellectuals usually critique existing institutions for not corresponding to the principles that they champion. Preserving such institutions is inconsistent with the principled argument outlined in this section. As a practical consequence, critical public intellectuals tend to defend democracy by seeking the transformation of existing institutions rather than their preservation.

Early critical theory and ‘dubious democracies’

Not only do contemporary authors think of critical theory’s thrust as primarily geared towards changing existing institutional orders. Critical theory has also been defined by its radically transformative orientation ever since Horkheimer’s programmatic essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, which identifies the latter as ‘driv[ing] towards the transformation of the social whole’ and as a ‘struggle against the existing’ (Horkheimer Reference Horkheimer2009 [1937]: 193, 203). The ‘first generation’ of Frankfurt School critical theory, spearheaded by Horkheimer and Adorno, is still commonly identified in engagements with today’s authoritarian resurgence as the origin of critical theory (see, eg Brown et al. Reference Brown, Gordon and Pensky2018).

The practical politics of early critical theorists in the post-war era, especially Adorno’s, are defined by public intellectualism. This led to unresolved tensions. Critical theorists were ‘calling upon people to change their attitude while claiming that things can’t really be changed’ (Heins Reference Heins2012: 79). They denied the possibility of meaningful praxis beyond interpretation: ‘Adorno’s view comes down to saying that people have tried to change the world, in various ways; the point in the 1960s was to interpret it’ (Freyenhagen Reference Freyenhagen2014: 885). Any praxis is always already (also) wrong, the practice of public intellectualism being included. Critical theorists intervened into public debates, but undermined any basis for doing so ‘correctly’. This contradictory predicament finds an expression in an oscillation between a radical critique of the existing political order and what has been described by contemporaries as a conservative accommodation to that very order (Cooke Reference Cooke, Gordon, Hammer and Pensky2020: 584).

Rather than amounting to a simple contradiction, Horkheimer and Adorno’s example raises the question of how radical opposition to the existing institutional order and the defence of particular institutions can be brought into convergence. The argument developed in this section is that early critical theory’s oscillation between philosophical radicalism and ‘conservative’ political praxis helps broaden the range of interventions available to critical theorists intending to defend democracy today, even where it produces unresolved normative, political, and philosophical problems. Early critical theory does not hold ready-made answers. As an example of bringing the defence of democracy and critical theory together in ways that sharply differ from current attempts at doing so, it provides a useful contrastive foil.

To illustrate, consider Horkheimer’s (Reference Horkheimer2002: viii) insistence that ‘a dubious democracy, for all its defects’ demands (also) protection and preservation in the face of totalitarian dangers. A democracy is openly objected to as suspect, dubious, and thus potentially bad. Yet, even though it seems to fall short of any principle that would allow for judging it as good, it deserves defensive intervention. This critical but defensive relationship to existing democracies is programmatic for Horkheimer and Adorno’s political involvement in post-war Germany.Footnote ⁵ They chose not to confine their political praxis to a marginal radical philosophical habitus. Instead, they took a controversial role in the ‘restorative’, ‘intellectual founding’ of the Federal Republic of Germany (Albrecht et al. Reference Albrecht, Behrmann, Bock, Hohmann and Tenbruck1999).

Especially, Adorno’s public intellectualism echoes concerns of contemporary democratic defence. Adorno publicly opposed ‘the afterlife of National Socialism within democracy’ (Adorno Reference Adorno2016: 556), confronting his contemporary right-wing radicalism (Adorno Reference Adorno2019) and antisemitism (Adorno Reference Adorno2024) in this context. In these interventions, Adorno occasionally adopts a non-conformist, radical posture, which explains his appeal to protesting students of the 1960s and 1970s (Demirović Reference Demirović1999; Albrecht Reference Albrecht, Fischer and Moebius2019). Surprisingly, however, Adorno also refers favourably to particular ‘democratic’ institutions such as the separation of powers, going so far as identifying them with the idea of critique (Adorno Reference Adorno2016: 785). His private friendship and televised ‘coordinated […] controversies’ (Link Reference Link2016: 238) with conservative public figure and former NSDAP member Gehlen, as well as his insistence that he had ‘never said anything that was immediately aimed at practical actions’ (Adorno Reference Adorno2002: 15), further complicates his public persona. Ultimately, contemporaries accused Adorno of a conservative retreat from political action and resulting accommodation to the status quo, a charge that sticks with early critical theory until today (Lukàcs Reference Lukács1971; Krahl Reference Krahl1974; Harcourt Reference Harcourt2022).

The ambiguity of Adorno’s public interventions intensifies once reading them in tandem with developments in early critical theory’s philosophical outlook. In the 1930s, Horkheimer had conceptualised critical theory as a particular approach to immanent critique (Horkheimer Reference Horkheimer2009 [1937]). By the end of the Second World War, Horkheimer and Adorno considered the normative commitments necessary for immanent critique untenable. This development is set in motion with the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno Reference Horkheimer and Adorno2016 [1947]), and it culminates in Negative Dialectics (Adorno Reference Adorno2004 [1966]). In these canonical contributions to critical theory, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that Enlightenment normativity, the normative basis available to critical theory, collapsed under National Socialism. Consequently, there are no remaining superordinate principles to rely upon for grounding their critical enterprise. The position of a critical public intellectual becomes utterly precarious. If there is no principle that allows for identifying any particular practice as right, then the practice of public intellectualism is wrong by implication.

Much of early critical theory’s reception suggests that the ‘conservative’ bent of Horkheimer and Adorno’s engagement as public intellectuals results from their giving up on the very principled stance that contemporary critical theorists consider necessary for sustaining the ‘critical’ character of public interventions. Paradigmatically, Habermas claims that Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment reason is self-defeating: ‘If they […] want to carry on their critique, they must preserve at least one standard for their explanation of the corruption of all reasonable standards. In the face of this paradox, the totalising critique loses its direction’ (Habermas Reference Habermas1982: 28).

In critiquing Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas thus programmatically formulates what has above been called the ‘principled argument’. At least one strong standard, a principle, is needed for keeping the practice of critical theory going. This position separates Habermas from Horkheimer and Adorno and approximates later ‘generations’ of critical theory. It is consistent with Habermas’ reflections on preserving the democratic constitution. While Habermas insists that existing institutions cannot constitute the limit of liberal democratic tolerance, basic ‘constitutional principles’, the ‘normative base of the constitution’ (Habermas Reference Habermas2004: 9, 18; see also Habermas Reference Habermas2022: 25) do. Habermas’ involvement as a public intellectual reflects this stance: his norm-driven consensus-orientation contrasts with Adorno’s ‘anti-consensual’ interventions (Müller-Doohm Reference Müller-Doohm2005: 278).Footnote ⁶

Contemporary critical theorists, as shown above, suggest that defensive interventions that do not depart from a superordinate, transformative principle are ‘conventionalist’. It is neither possible to consistently defend existing liberal democratic institutions, nor is it possible to remain critical of them, as long as there is no principle available to guide critical theory. Horkheimer and Adorno’s interventions in defence of existing liberal democratic institutions thus are not only contradictory but flat out impossible for them to justify.

Contradictions in Horkheimer and Adorno’s public intellectualism, however, may also be read as an unfinished attempt to sustain critical praxis without strong normative principles (an attempt that others, such as Habermas, continued in a different direction). As such, the historical example of early critical theory’s defence of democracy maximally contrasts with defences in contemporary critical theory. Rather than offering a ‘more critical’ blueprint for defensive practice, however, early critical theory only poses the question whether, and if so, under what conditions critical theorists can publicly defend particular institutions in the absence of strong principles.

Defending bad institutions?

The above has shown that for critical theorists, the defence of existing institutions is difficult to justify if principled reasons are unavailable. It has also been shown that historically, critical theorists have nevertheless defended ‘bad’ institutions. This, contemporary critical theorists have argued, leaves a number of problems unresolved. It remains unclear whether and, if so, how such a defence can be motivated. It further remains unclear how it can differentiate between particular institutions. In short: why should critical theorists defend, and which, bad institutions?

Maeve Cooke argues that, absent credible, context-transcending normative claims, critical theory cannot motivate political practice. It is the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s claim that ‘a repressive instrumental rationality has pervaded every part of the social order, including the consciousness of its inhabitants’ that renders critical theorists ‘unable to appeal to the intuitions and expectations already contained within existing social reality for rational support for their views’ (Cooke Reference Cooke2006: 191). As a consequence, critical theory risks becoming authoritarian: it can only appeal to the knowledge of critical theorists (Cooke Reference Cooke2005: 389; see also Cooke Reference Cooke, Gordon, Hammer and Pensky2020). On this view, the absence of positive normative standards makes it impossible for critical theorists to engage as public intellectuals in non-authoritarian, ‘democratic’ ways.

Departing from similar observations, Niesen (Reference Niesen2023) argues that a specific justification for the defensive ‘imperative of non-regression’ that especially Adorno formulates in his public interventions remains wanting, producing an abstract relationship to particular institutional orders. All that Adorno can offer by way of such a justification is a theory of civilisational regression that he derives from a universalisation of National Socialism as an ‘encompassing regressive phenomenon’ (Niesen Reference Niesen2023: 210–211). Absent further concretion, such an encompassing notion of regression can sustain only a generalised defensive imperative. As a consequence, Adorno cannot conclusively differentiate between institutional and social orders (for a similar argument, see Forst Reference Forst2023: 219). On Niesen’s view, this is illustrated by Adorno’s failure to account for his relative preference for post-war over National Socialist Germany (Niesen Reference Niesen2023: 214).

Given these problems of motivation and institutional specificity, it may seem as if it was altogether untenable for critical theorists to publicly intervene on behalf of any particular institution, unless in arbitrary and ultimately authoritarian ways (thus mirroring deficits of ‘militant democracy’, Invernizzi Accetti and Zuckerman Reference Invernizzi Accetti and Zuckerman2017). Critical public intellectuals, this would imply, ought to critique existing institutions in defence of a transformative normative standard. Otherwise, they risk slipping into a conservative-authoritarian defence of existing liberal democratic institutions, thereby surrendering their status as critics.

Despite this, some critical theorists have attempted to justify critical practice in the absence of strong principles. Importantly for this article, they have also argued that under such conditions, a non-arbitrary defence of existing institutions remains possible. To this effect, Fabian Freyenhagen (Reference Freyenhagen2013, Reference Freyenhagen2014) suggests that a ‘negative’ normative standard is sufficient for the defence of ‘democratic’ political orders. In a nutshell, his argument is that it is possible to counterfactually posit a maximal normative standard that remains unattainable under present conditions. This allows for criticising the existing ‘negatively’, as falling short of the minimal conditions that would be required to approximate this standard.

In practice, this means that certain ‘bad’ institutions can be maintained as ‘lesser evils’. Adorno’s engagement as a public intellectual, Freyenhagen suggests, is driven by the conviction that the collapse of liberal democracy ought to be prevented, which he seeks to achieve by critiquing authoritarian regimes in ‘even stronger’ terms than the political ‘West’ (Freyenhagen Reference Freyenhagen2014: 879). This relational defence of the liberal democratic ‘West’ hinges on the use of its political order as a reference category. To be able to put up an ‘even stronger’ critique of authoritarian institutional orders, critical theorists tacitly provide ‘relative’ justification to the ‘West’s’ institutional order without being able to positively identify it as ‘good’. If reference institutions become objects of critique at a later point, however, this produces performative contradictions.

Others, such as Gordon (Reference Gordon2023), have suggested that critical theorists need not retreat to such a defeatist, and ultimately self-defeating relational strategy of critique. Instead, he suggests that critical theory should focus on rare experiences that serve the verification of an at least ‘precarious’ existence of a maximal good within the existing order. Because the status of this maximal good is marginal within the existing order, it is near-impossible to attain it within the confines of the existing. Such an unattainable ‘standard’, consequently, justifies the continuous critique of existing orders (Gordon Reference Gordon2023: 170).

In practical terms, Gordon (Reference Gordon2023: 429–430) suggests, defensive and critical tasks converge: the ‘catastrophe’ of the good’s final disappearance can only be prevented if the existing order is wholly transformed. This suggestion illustrates that Gordon makes a revised ‘principled argument’. Only a maximal, indivisible, and irreducible standard that points beyond the existing institutional order enables the defence of democracy. The intention to preserve existing institutions, on the other hand, cannot halt catastrophic developments.

Summarily, it must then seem as if the defence of existing institutions was an altogether inconsistent, precariously justified aim for critical public intellectuals. This applies to the ‘principled argument’ and to the argument that strong principles are unavailable to critical theorists. Both streams of critical theory, sometimes inadvertently, concede that the defence of particular institutions becomes arbitrary in the absence of grounding in a transformative, maximal standard.

Critical theory as defensive praxis

The above has shown that it is difficult to sustain the defence of institutions that do not correspond to strong principles. Thus, while critical public intellectuals may unproblematically defend democratic ‘first principles’ and institutions consistent with them, attempts to defend ‘bad’ institutions appear to inevitably drive them into self-contradiction. As a consequence, critical public intellectuals lose much of their potential capability to contribute to civil society efforts to defend democracy under non-ideal conditions. This section proposes three conditions that may help render publicly defending existing ‘bad’ democratic institutions as a consistent aim for critical public intellectuals. Critical theorists ought to: avoid strong ‘principled’ claims; harness institutional potential for radical change; and reconceptualise institutional ‘value’.