Reconstructing Critical Social Theory

Critical social theory has arguably undergone three major phases: its insurgent origins in the mid-nineteenth century, when it primarily addressed the ills of emergent industrial capitalism; its institutionalization in the early twentieth century with the development of social democracy; and its decolonial and new left renewals of the 1960s onward, where the national, women’s, and racial questions were taken up. Yet despite the enduring legacies of each expanding phase, contemporary critical social inquiry has failed to cohere around a shared intellectual center or unified theoretical project. Instead, it has fragmented into specialized conversations at precisely the moment when integrated, humanistic, and publicly accessible ways of interpreting the world are needed.

The current historical moment presents unprecedented challenges for humanistic inquiry and practice. We face overlapping crises, what scholars now call a “polycrisis” or an “organic crisis,” comprised of dramatic climate breakdown, lurching authoritarian forms of political governance, economic stagnation and deepening racialized inequality, political polarization and the fragmentation of coalitions for change, and the erosion of older forms of social practice, such as trade unions and mass parties, that once produced emancipatory movements. The prior three waves of critical social theory are simply not up to the task of making sense of and transcending these forces. Thus, our aim is to forge a “fourth wave:” to fortify new scholarly and political communities to make sense of capitalism’s ecological dimensions, contemporary articulations of race and class, and the fragmentations of politics. 

CUES Director Hillary Angelo and Community Studies Program Director Michael McCarthy are leading a multicampus collaboration to orient future programming, teaching, and research, “Reconstructing Critical Social Theory.” This collaboration across UCSC’s Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies and Community Studies Program, UC Berkeley’s Sociology Department, and UCLA’s Center for Social Theory and Comparative History aims to establish a synthetic interpretive framework for critical social theory addressing four themes: new political economies, class fragmentation and racial formation, alternative ecologies, and emancipatory futures.

Through workshops and public-facing events, we will help forge new communities of scholarly and non-academic publics.