(Postmodern) Critical (Race) Theory

Sociology (Humanities), 1937

An attempt to apply Marxism to basically everything taught in a university.

First defined by sociologist Max Horkheimer at the Frankfurt School in his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” as a modernist attempt to do for sociology against positivism what Marx had done against capitalism, but things took a turn for the worse when it just wasn’t cool enough for Foucault and his ilk to conform, which resulted in Boje, Fitzgibbons, and Steingard’s 1996 manifestos creating the Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science. By 1981, alternative law programs had spun off Critical Race Theory. Even in 1997, judges in the US were labelling “critical race theorists and postmodernists the ‘lunatic core’ of ‘radical legal egalitarianism”.