system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What actually is Critical Theory?

It seems like it’s become a buzzword recently but I very often hear conflicting politicised definitions. Upon doing a quick google of the term I can’t say I found a consistent or understandable (at least for me) definition.

It often seems to be used in the same breath as other buzzword like identity politics or neo-segregation but I still have no clue as to how much they relate.

The general gist from what I’ve gathered is that it seeks to criticise society based on underlying social systems and structures as a conflict between oppressed and oppressor.
But I feel I’m completely wrong on this definition and am not sure how to remedy my misunderstanding. Not to mention the added confusion caused by certain prefixes such as ‘postmodern critical theory’.

What actually is it?
gpt
Nope I'd say that's pretty good as an initial definition. But some context might help. In the first instance 'critical theory' was a school of thought that emerged in Germany in the 1930s in response to dissatisfaction with orthodox Marxism. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno were early important figures here in the so-called 'Frankfurt School'. The argument was that orthodox Marxism had paid too narrow attention to economic issues and neglected culture (Antonio Gramsci in Italy took a rather similar view). This was why it had struggled to explain things like the willingness of the working class to divide up along national lines and fight for their countries in WW1 rather than show the kind of international solidarity that Marxism thought class consciousness would make clear to them was in their real interests. Another problem was the failure of the revolution to occur in the West, but had happened instead in Russia which was relatively economically underdeveloped and thus not ripe for the overthrow of capitalism (it hadn't even gone capitalist yet). So in many ways, critical theory began as a neo-Marxist critique of culture; Horkheimer and Adorno argued that oppression was deeply rooted in Western thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example. Later figures like Jurgen Habermas from the 1960s onwards have added the problems of language to those of culture and have also moved in a more social democratic and less revolutionary direction while still retaining the desire to, as you put it, ' criticise society based on underlying social systems and structures '. There's a good but rather dense history by Martin Jay of the Frankfurt School. So see also Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory, for a short sympathetic introduction. Of course, critical theory, since it is broadly on the radical left, also has plenty of critics!  But insofar as it is a critique of capitalism it can also sometimes line up, oddly enough, with certain varieties of conservative thought that dislike the rationalist reduction of society to market relations. See Michael Oakeshott as a case in point here.