Introduction: Against Positivism and Relativism and For an Objective Basis of Critique

Michael J. Thompson’s Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism is a book of fundamental importance. It stands within the Frankfurt School critical theory tradition, which it continues, critiques, corrects, and resets on a truly productive path. Written with articulacy and clarity, it smashes through the timorous liberalism and aggressively obscurantist postmodernism that have so clouded academic social and political thought in recent decades and that have produced an intellectual culture entirely impotent before neoliberalism’s economic brutality and cultural debasement. Twilight of the Self develops Thompson’s previous attacks on the tendency of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth to turn critical theory away from Marxism and political economy and toward a neo-idealist and pragmatist focus on communication, interaction, and the symbolic politics of recognition. Political theories of communicative-interactional deliberation over values and recognition of identities are incapable of exposing and overcoming the depth at which values and identities in capitalist societies are shaped by functional systems. In modern societies, individuals are immersed in such systems and their conscious thoughts and unconscious desires profoundly shaped by these social institutional systems. Individuals’ integration into these systems has eroded autonomy in ways for which liberal and deliberative theories cannot account and which such theories evade.

Thompson develops a conception of social ontology on the basis of which he shows both how domination can inhere in the very structural-functional constitution of social institutions and how, through their automatic adherence to reified norms, individuals reproduce these structures in their action. This conception of social ontology is also developed by Thompson to show that individual autonomy, agency, and flourishing depend on objective social prerequisites. Critical social ontology therefore provides an objective basis for the evaluation of social norms and institutions and a stronger basis for critical theory than communicative interaction.

This objective basis for evaluation should not be confused with positivistic-reformist forms of technocratic-managerial sociological political argumentation according to which certain reform measures can be shown to produce certain optimal outcomes measurable in terms of indices of health or economic growth. Such positivistic sociological arguments, hypostatizing social forces as ‘variables,’ exemplify the kind of reified consciousness that Thompson seeks to overcome. Empiricist sociology remains trapped within the normative assumptions of capitalist society. Any ‘policy’ criticisms it can make are fragmentary, piecemeal and tied to the reified outlook of the administrators of the cybernetic society.

Thompson’s ontological, rather than empiricist, analysis is critical and dynamic in showing social structures to be constituted by social praxis which has become reified. De-reification is the key to the relationship between critical ontology and critical agency. In this way, Thompson puts forward a sociological political theory that overcomes the reification inherent in positivistic sociology. In Lukácsian terms, Thompson retrieves the character of the human being as a historical being, actively making and transforming their social world. His critique is therefore inherently revolutionary rather than reformist. It is a sociologically informed political theory, which surpasses and overcomes sociology by being truly political. In other words, Thompson demonstrates the potential for conscious collective action that does not adapt to, but instead transforms, social structures.

In The Domestication of Critical Theory (2016) and The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of Political Judgment(2020), Thompson showed how the communicative turn created an insipid form of critical theory that won academic respectability at the expense of a reformist accommodation to capitalism and loss of the capacity to expose ideological false consciousness.[1] These previous books by Thompson complement this negative task with the positive reconstruction of an ontological foundation for critique. In these works, Thompson strengthens and adds sophistication to Marxian base-superstructure analysis by combining Marxism with a critical application of structural-functionalist sociology. He also develops a theory of “constitutive domination” by weaving together the arguments on social ontology of the analytical philosopher of language and mind, John Searle, with the insights of Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács into consciousness, ideology, reification, and social being. Twilight of the Self builds on Thompson’s previous books by developing and applying the theory of constitutive domination to show how domination operates through the cybernetic systems of modern capitalist society.

Thompson demonstrates that modern domination operates specifically through reification. Domination in complex modern rational capitalist society takes the form of a normative order that is reified in the sense of becoming routinized, rationalized, and taken for granted. This reified normative order is theoretically reflected in structural functionalist sociology as classically developed by Talcott Parsons. Structural functionalist sociology is, in that sense, the truereflection of the reality of the structural functions of domination of the mass of human beings by complex systems that operate in the interests of an elite minority. Reification is the process through which this domination is embedded in everyday social life while removed from consciousness as people go about their daily life. In that sense, Thompson’s structural functionalism is a critique of sociology analogous to Marx’s critique of political economy. Parsons is to Thompson as Adam Smith and David Ricardo were to Marx. Parsons reveals the reified normative order of the capitalist social system but does so only in reified form.

Sociologists today tend to dismiss functionalism (while often tacitly presupposing it), just as the labor theory of value is regarded as surpassed by neo-classical economics. But just as Marxists see the labor theory of value as truer to the real operations of capitalist accumulation than the later developments in bourgeois economics that mask labor, Thompson regards Parsons’ structural functionalism as the true sociological mirror of capitalist society. This implies that structural functionalism’s abandonment by the discipline of sociology by the late 1970s (coincident with the rise of neoliberalism and the abandonment of Keynesianism for monetarism by bourgeois economics) was because structural functionalism revealed too much. The image of a totally functionally integrated society was appealing to liberals during the prosperity and welfarism of the post-war boom. Hence, Ralf Dahrendorf (1958) argued that Parsons’ image of functional integration was utopian.[2] But an image of functional normative integration combined with the inequality and social austerity of neoliberalism has a dystopian pall. This dystopia, according to Thompson, exists today. Sociologists recoiled from functionalism as it turned from utopia to dystopia, saying that it ‘left no room for agency.’ But according to Thompson, functionalism reflects the actual lack of agency of individuals under late capitalism. Thompson insists on the significance and validity of Parsons’ account, but as true image of an actual cybernetic dystopia. This means that Parsons and sociology, as the reflection of a dystopian totality, must be suppressed and overcome as part of the process of humanity breaking free from this cybernetic system. Sociology must be realized in the sense that the social essence of humanity must be recognized and achieved in a fully social existence. At the same time, sociology must be suppressed in the sense that the reified social facticity that it represents and the reified consciousness through which it refracts this reified actuality must be overcome.

In opposition to the reified consciousness produced by capitalist cybernetic social relations, Thompson proposes critical ontology and critical agency. Critical ontology reveals the ontological reality of social facts but also the processual nature of these social facts as the congealment of human doing. Critical agency is individual activity in which the individual is conscious of their inherent sociality, of how their actions are shaped by and shape a broader social totality, and therefore of how their actions support value-rational forms of social life or instead feed into pathological forms of social connection that derive from an irrational social totality. In line with the tradition of critical theory, Thompson rejects the neo-Kantian and positivist conception of values as split off from fact. Since it excludes Kant’s value-rationalism, positivism leaves values as unsubstantial subjective preferences. Thompson rejects the related postmodern anarchy of value relativism. Against these forms of subjectivism and relativism, and as a profoundly important intervention, taking forward the Frankfurt School search for grounds of critique, Thompson argues for the ontological reality of values.[3] Value propositions do not stand alone but fit into schemes of values, the coherency of which can be assessed, and which have as their corollary and implication real actions that support or undermine real forms of social life. It is therefore possible to assess whether the values one holds support or undermine forms of social life that promote autonomy and the flourishing of human individuals. Values are real in their consequences and these consequences are rational or irrational.

Parsonian Functionalism as Cybernetic Blueprint

Thompson develops a critical functionalism, transforming what critical sociologists from C. Wright Mills to Alvin Gouldner had regarded as the capitalist liberal apologetic theory of Parsons into a resource for a critical theory of the cybernetic society. Rather than being an idealized account of a self-stabilizing liberal-democratic capitalism as a model of modernity, Thompson treats Parsons as having revealed the structure of a perfected mechanism of smoothly administered control. This mechanism has erased the capacity of the self for autonomy. In the cybernetic society, the functional imperatives of the base have achieved total domination over the superstructural institutions of politics and culture. Through determining the constitutive rules of superstructural institutions, these functional imperatives pattern individuals’ desires and consciousness. Thompson writes, “The functionalist account of domination therefore looks for the elements of domination not in the relation between agents (something characteristic of premodern forms of domination) but in the systemic ways that individuals come to accept systems of authority as legitimate and worthy of their obedience.” What “defines modern domination… is routinized and rationalized norms and conventions that come to be embedded in our institutions that forms subjects through socialization” (Twilight of the Self, p. 88, emphasis in original. All subsequent page numbers in parentheses are from this book). Thompson describes “the subsumption of the self” as arising in “the ways that the inculcation of these system logics and norms colonizes the collective-intentional structures of social cognition, thereby securing institutional patterns” (p. 71, emphasis in original).

Thompson treats Parsons’ structural-functional model of society as the map of a social world totally subsumed by and subordinated to the imperatives of capital. The cybernetic society is the pattern of social norms binding human action to, and therefore continuously reproducing, what Lewis Mumford called the “megamachine” (p. 44). Parsons’ structural-functional sociology is therefore the model of a society in which the cybernetic methods developed for the control of machine production have come to subsume social relations as a whole and, in this process, to subsume the self through modes of socialization that undermine the capacity for autonomous thought: “Capital’s incessant capacity and drive to absorb everything external to it into the realm of the market, to commodify everything possible, has finally penetrated to the level of the personality, to the psychic world within” (p. 5).

Parsons defined quintessentially sociological thought as that which departs from the utilitarian model of the rationally self-interested individual in order to conceptualize social action as motivated compliance. This, for Thompson, renders Parsons the quintessential theorist of modern social control under which the autonomy of the self is eroded as the individual internalizes the pattern of norms that functions to maintain the smooth operation of the social system. What emerges is an image of the discipline of sociology as it took shape in the twentieth century as being the key theorization and legitimation of the dialectical turn of Enlightenment against itself: sociology as the rationalization of counter-Enlightenment.

Thompson stresses that the emergence of the autonomous individual was the most important progressive achievement of the Enlightenment: “Throughout the unfolding of the modern world, the individual’s self-consciousness as a rational social agent has been at the center of the projects of modern democratic life, philosophical insights into human value and integrity, no less than the aesthetic insights of modern literature, painting, and music” (p. 2). Thompson follows the central thread of Frankfurt School critical theory, articulated in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, in seeing Enlightenment reason turned against itself.[4] For Thompson, this takes the form of the elimination of the autonomous self by rationalized systems. Sociology is implicated in this process in the sense that, in the form of structural-functionalism, it provided the model of such systematized control and legitimized these systems.

Sociology was a product of the Enlightenment in its aspiration for a complete science of human relations. But it incorporated strands of conservative counter-Enlightenment thought that treated autonomy as a problem to be overcome in the pursuit of social integration and control. In particular, structural functionalism’s account of social order as dependent on socialization processes was an attempt to provide an updated traditionalism for modernity. Individuals would internalize norms, such that individual action would be invisibly directed in conformity with cultural patterns. Sociology’s neo-traditionalism provided the template for a social scientific legitimization of a modernity without autonomy. The portrait of modern society that Thompson presents is of a neo-traditionalism, in which the individual becomes again “a passive role-occupying part of the whole… follow[ing] the scripts available to it in the given world” (p. 3). But these scripts are not the organic inheritance of tradition formed over long periods of time. Instead, these scripts are the product of engineered systems and commodified environments geared toward efficient commodity production and consumption. This is “a phase of social development marked by social relations that have displaced the organic forms of community and mechanical forms of solidarity that characterized earlier phases of social reality and replaced them with one rooted in efficiency, control, and conformed socialization” (pp. 21-22).

In putting forward the case for symbolic interactionism against the currents both of functionalism and positivistic variable analysis that had come to prevail in American sociology by the mid-twentieth century, Herbert Blumer wrote: “Sociological thought rarely recognizes or treats human societies as composed of individuals who have selves. Instead, they assume human beings to be merely organisms with some kind of organization, responding to forces which play upon them.”[5] The symbolic interactionist Erving Goffman sought to uncover the ways in which individuals preserve some semblance of autonomy and dignity through subtle forms of resistance and self-distancing, seemingly hiding an inner life behind their social masks and outward displays of conformity, as exemplified in the secret “underlife” of total institutions.[6] But such micro-interactional forms of resistance were inherently fragile and ephemeral, as the mechanisms of control have grown more sophisticated and burrowed deeper into the self. Dennis Wrong’s critique of Parsons’ “oversocialized conception of man,” Thompson argues, was the reflection of a period in which subjectivity still retained some oppositional power. In the 1960s counterculture, as yet not completely assimilated “reservoirs of psychic need and energy… burst forth” in cultural revolt. But these very energies came to be themselves harnessed to the very real “oversocialization” of the individual in late capitalism, since “desublimation could be captured and contained within a culture of hyperconsumption” (p. 65). The subsumption of subjectivity by the economic base goes along with the marketing of subjectivity as escape from the compulsions inherent in the economic base, a marketing which is in fact the extension of this compulsion beyond the base to the superstructure and deep into subjectivity. Late capitalism sells an illusory image of infinite freedom and enjoyment, while entrapping the self in networks of control.[7] Daniel Bell’s cultural contradictions of capitalism have, Thompson argues, been resolved so that “economy, polity, and culture have merged rather than exist in tension with one another” (p. 58, emphasis in original). For example, “The creative energies and power of sexuality are attenuated through their commodification in pornography just as drives for self-expression are captured by the market” (p. 18).

What Marcuse called “repressive desublimation,” in programmed commoditized ‘fun,’ has become central to the culture of late capitalism.[8] Just as cities advertise their nightlife, universities advertise their brand of “college experience.” Sociologist Joseph Hermanowicz observes that, as universities market both commodified education and commodified fun, students experience a paradoxical combination of “fun” and “despair.” A hedonistic culture of alcohol, drugs, and hookup sex is, Hermanowicz writes, “coincident with another dramatic pattern: burgeoning mental health problems of college students,” with high levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Hermanowicz argues that escapist risk-taking fun, and despair, are subjective responses to an environment in which “neoliberalism not simply pervades this space but goes so far as to infiltrate the lives of students.”[9]

British cultural criminologists Steve Hall, Simon Winlow, and Craig Ancrum find, in deindustrialized cities of the northeast of England, a working class with its solidarity broken, in which young men engage in crime, especially drug dealing, in order to fuel conspicuous competitive consumption. Their criminal motivations are rooted in a basic conformity with the deep values they have imbibed from mass media and the ambient culture of consumerism. They demand recognition as part of the elite of consumerism, looking down on the shabby herd from which they seek to distinguish themselves. Drawing upon the Lacanian theory of Slavoj Žižek, Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum argue that the young men they study are ruled by

the super-ego injunction to enjoy. Consumerism now has a firm grasp on both the ego and the super-ego, which operate together as a joint psychodynamic force rather than as oppositional forces in tension. Thus infantile narcissism is now part of our way of life, and the conscience is merged with the aggressive quest for recognition in the social mirror, interfering with the fragile Enlightenment project of autonomous, ethical self-governance.[10]

Goffman’s search for hidden strategies for preserving the self within the total institution was reflected by the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies who theorized “resistance” to capitalist hegemony in the “rituals” of youth subcultures, based on a theoretical perspective that integrated the symbolic interactionist sociology of deviance with Gramscian Marxism. Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum reject any such suggestion of resistance, arguing instead for the relevance of Robert Merton’s functionalist conceptualization of crime as anomie, in which deviant normative strategies for achieving consumerist success combine with conformity to the prevailing capitalist values. They write, “Thus the normative strategies of law-abiding consumers differed from those of criminals and appeared as distinct values and practices, whereas in actuality deep, economically functional values with their accompanying desires and goals remained precisely the same.”[11] So functionalism remains valid as a representation of value-integration, even while these core values disintegrate social solidarity. A consumer society is organized in mass fascination by the spectacular image, while relations between people become increasingly fractured, so that life is rendered ‘liquid’ in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms.[12]Society becomes more individualized, but individuals lose their ability to self-regulate and self-determine.

While culture in the past regulated individuals according to social mores, today individuals’ susceptibility to the demands of the dominant culture is highly dysregulating and disorganizing. While, therefore, contemporary society shares something with traditional societies in individuals’ passivity and lack of ability to critically self-determine, a key difference is the lack of cohesion, both of society and self, that is paradoxically produced by the shared symbolic order. Thompson draws on Mark Fisher’s account of the use of devices and cultural products such as social media and mobile phones to retreat from society into a narcissistic haven of privatized consciousness and “into hedonic (or anhedonic) lassitude: the soft narcosis, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana” (Fisher quoted on pp. 221-222). Since the 1960s, consumer capitalism has perfected the selling of “a plethora of avenues of escape” from the alienation and loneliness that it itself produces. So Thompson provides the important insight that “Our society is not, as thinkers such as Foucault believed, a ‘disciplinary’ society; it is more aptly characterized as populated by persons in possession of regressed egos that find gratification in the flat forms of escape the culture industry provides” (p. 221). In the anti-social society of consumerism, individuals are lost even as they all together stare at their screens and all buy from Amazon.[13] There is a combination of centralization and dissipation. Conformism coexists with, and reinforces, disorder, including the internal disordering of the self.

The consumer society, Thompson argues, produces a “weakened, withered ego” (p. 198). One might see this shift as reflected in the displacement of psychoanalysis by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The self formed by Oedipal struggle with the authoritarian father, internalized in a powerful super-ego, suffered from what Marcuse called “surplus repression,” desire leaking out in neurotic symptoms.[14] Psychoanalytic methods such as free association and dream analysis were oriented to giving play to suppressed psychic life. Today, the techniques of CBT, treating pervasive anxiety, depression, and addiction, utilize a range of mental exercises, conceptualized as ‘tools’ which the patient learns in order to bolster, or even substitute for, what Thompson calls internal “struts for ego strength” (p. 210). CBT provides an external scaffold to substitute for the lack of an internal architecture of character. The disorganization of the self, Thompson argues, is exacerbated by the stresses placed on family life, which cannot possibly support the psychic demand on its relationships generated by the growing need to retreat into it as a “haven” from an increasingly pathological public world.[15] The anxious “overscheduling” helicopter parenting of today’s middle-class family combines with “The proliferation of television shows, portable internet devices, and videos, games, and other distractions that saturate even the youngest child’s environment… all this crowds out the autonomy of imagination and free time so essential to childhood” (p. 202).

Followers of Donald Trump seem to have a strong libidinal bond with the authoritarian leader, in the way that Franz Neumann argued was involved in twentieth-century fascism. But cybernetic society can function instead by creating a generalized retreat from public political involvement. Thompson writes: “Libidinal ties are now not so much focused on the strong leader but on the ego ideals that the culture industry is able to project and that hold the development of the self hostage… The anxiety produced by the alienation of agency… can lead to the need for ego-soothing that undermines the requisite ego-strength needed for critical civic life and consciousness” (pp. 209-210). Democracy then shrivels through placid withdrawal into private subjective worlds which are themselves saturated by the kaleidoscopic electronic hedonism of media spectacle. It is significant in this respect that Trump embodies the merging of the culture industry entertainment world of ‘reality television’ with the charisma of the authoritarian leader.[16]

Participation in creating one’s own personalized spectacular bubble replaces social and political participation. Hence, Thompson writes, “Public life has gradually petered out, replaced by a world where our identities and our former domain of privacy have been subsumed by a new digital face of capital” (p 4). The entrapment of subjectivity in commodification is promoted by the pseudo-rebellion and pseudo-transgressiveness of carnivalized consumerism. This produces what Lauren Langman and Maureen Ryan call the “carnival character” in which, they write, “the dominant mechanism of escape is privatized hedonism.” Langman and Ryan observe:

This has in turn led to an enfeeblement of the self that is hidden behind a plurality of masks drawn from popular culture. If the “marketing character” sold him/her self as a commodity, the carnival character creates his/her identity through seemingly transgressive consumption in an ever changing plurality of fusions and/or contradictory appearances. While psychoanalytic discourses have moved from the classical pathologies of repression to the contemporary pathologies of the self e.g. “narcissistic character disorders”, false self and borderline personality disorders, such concepts must be understood as manifestations of the new forms of consumer-based selfhood that are increasingly indifferent to the political.[17]

Such indifference to politics is central to Thompson’s analysis of what he describes as the “withering” of self. Thompson writes, “The apraxic individual moves away from political life and activity, does not participate in civic life, and generally remains passive to moral and political problems” (p. 147). The decline of the individual in late capitalism goes along with the decline of the public sphere and of the institutions and forms of subjectivity that made possible citizenship as an accomplishment of modernity.

The citizen as active self-creating political agent has given way to the consumer, who considers themselves to be active but is only so in choosing among the one-dimensional pseudo-alternatives of commoditized lifestyles and symbols of distinction.[18] The consumer is fundamentally passive, indifferent, and resigned when it comes to the social totality which confronts them in reified form. Society appears not as a human world in the creating of which they participate, but as an alien world in which they can play a part only by possessing its commodified products. The individual retreats into the private domain, but this is not truly private, since it is algorithmically programmed and surveilled.[19]

While the mid-twentieth century sociology of Parsons provided the clearest and most explicit analytical model of the cybernetically controlled society, the academic discipline of sociology itself was too traditionalistic and contemplative to actively implement it. Instead, the actual design of these systems for the engineering of passivity and conformity has been carried out by the propagandists of consumerism, the advertisers, and the technologists as emphasized by Jacques Ellul (p. 51). In Philip K. Dick’s 1977 science fiction novel A Scanner Darkly, the protagonist’s self fragments and dissolves under the influence of addiction and ubiquitous surveillance; with a split identity as undercover cop and drug addict, he carries out the absurd task of spying on himself.[20] This is an apt allegory for the world of surveillance capitalism that has come to fruition since Dick wrote.[21] Programmed addiction to commodity consumption and technological devices, keeping us hooked and hooked up to programmed fun, combines with a massive and insidious technological apparatus of corporate and governmental surveillance. The self is today entirely transparent to the agents of addiction and control. In destroying the boundaries of privacy around the self, this surveillance apparatus has undone the conditions for individual autonomy. Hence, as Thompson writes, “Now, more than ever, we are confronted with forces that seek to fit each of us into a grand pattern of being, to manage and engineer not only our institutions but also our inner thoughts and desires, the very essence of our subjectivity” (p. 27).

Critical Social Ontology versus Reification

Alongside this negative critique of contemporary culture and society, Thompson develops an intellectual project that seeks to construct a positive basis for the renewal of autonomy in terms of what he calls in Twilight of the Self“autonomy as critical agency” (pp. 229-271). He writes, “Autonomy as critical agency is… a ‘cure’ for the constrictions of self-consciousness placed on us by the thick forms of socialization and reification inherent in cybernetic society” (p. 232). Critical agency is different from the liberal possessive individualism deriving from Hobbes and Locke. Rather, Thompson follows a tradition of social ontology from Aristotle to Rousseau to Hegel to Marx in which, as he states in The Specter of Babel “human freedom, self-determination, and so on have an irreducibly social basis and this sociality has certain basic features that can be seen to be constitutive of our collective and individual lives.”[22] Critical agency rejects the liberal doctrine of negative freedom. The individual cannot exist outside the web of social norms. Autonomy is not asocial. Rather, “I am autonomous as a critical agent when I inquire into the ways that the norms, practices, relational structures, and purposes of the social world I inhabit are shaped” (p. 232). Sociality and autonomy are compatible if the individual is a critical agent, capable of questioning the normative order in which they, as a social being, are embedded. In this way, critical agency means a de-reified relationship to norms. The capacity for autonomy requires that “one’s self-understanding be tied… to a sense of whether the webs of norms and practices that constitute our social world are legitimate—as Rousseau would have maintained, that they serve common ends and purposes… What is rational, on this account is a feature of the ontology of our social world—of the kinds of norms, practices, relations, processes, and ends that shape it” (p. 243, emphasis in original). Critical agency is the ability to judge social norms and the actions that they mandate, based on self-awareness of being, ontologically, or in one’s very constitution as a human being in a human-made world, a social being.

Critical agency is therefore tied to what Thompson calls “critical social ontology,” which he has outlined and defended in The Domestication of Critical Theory and The Specter of Babel.[23] The individual is autonomous when they know that they are ontologically socially determined but they are able to critically evaluate their determinations. The individual as critical agent evaluates what ends are pursued by the institutions in which they are embedded. The critical agent decides whether such institutions warrant their cooperation, obligation, and support, or whether they will resist these institutions.[24] There is an affinity between Thompson’s argument regarding autonomy and social determination and Hegel’s conception, as discussed by Engels in Anti-Dühring, that “freedom is the insight into necessity.”[25]Thompson is arguing that autonomy consists in understanding one’s social being, and therefore how one is determined by social forces, while also understanding that these forces are nothing but reified collective human agency in which one participates. Hence, Thompson describes critical agency “as a form of self-conscious activity constituted by an awareness of the ways that we sanction and grant legitimacy to forms of social reality” (p. 249). This is different from Habermasian deliberation or Honneth’s politics of recognition because the politics that Thompson is proposing have definite content based on social ontology. The ontological grounds of politics that Thompson proposes involve a conception of the common good, arising from recognizing the inherent sociality of the individual. These grounds of politics therefore have affinity with Rousseau’s ‘general will.’[26] But Thompson’s critical ontology represents an advance over Rousseau in providing a more sophisticated account of the social-ontological basis of general will, informed by Marxism and modern social theory.

Thompson’s ontological account is deeply informed by his reading of  Lukács’ History and Class Consciousnessand his later The Ontology of Social Being.[27] In this latter work, having established the ontological implications of Hegel and Marx’s thought, Lukács sets out his own materialist conception of the ontology of the social as created in, and based on, the practical activity of labor.[28] In laboring on the physical world, the human being constitutes themselves as separate from that world and as a subject with their own purposes which they impose on the world around them.[29]Labor introduces purpose into the world, since it involves, in  Lukács’s words, a “teleological positing.”[30] In non-human nature, “there are only actualities.”[31] Labor raises consciousness to something more than an epiphenomenal accompaniment of activity (as it is for animals) so that now, in human activity, consciousness makes a difference, and realizes itself, by realizing its purposes in the world. So, in labor, consciousness, as the reflection of being, becomes more than a reflection and is now involved recursively in shaping being. Intentional activity comes to be directed not only at the physical world but at other human beings and the relations between human beings.[32] There arises therefore a complex recursiveness between language and labor, “a continuous influence of labour on speech and conceptual thought, and vice versa.”[33]

Lukács shows labor to be the material foundation of the meaningful socially constructed world of culture made in language, through which human beings socially represent reality to themselves and construct a social reality. Lukács writes that

the reflection of reality, as a precondition for the end and means of labour, gives rise to a separation, a freeing of man from his environment, a distancing, which is clearly revealed in the confrontation of subject and object. In the reflection of reality, the depiction is severed from the reality depicted, and channeled into a ‘reality’ of its own in consciousness… Ontologically, social being divides into two heterogeneous moments, which not only confront one another as heterogenous from the standpoint of being, but are in fact actual antitheses: being and its reflection in consciousness. This duality is a fundamental fact of social being.[34]

So Lukács addresses what Durkheim called “the dualism of human nature.”[35] For Durkheim, this was the duality of the material body that remains individual and the mind which is an instantiation of the conscience collective.  But Lukács shows how the Cartesian dualism reproduced by Durkheim is overcome in the practical activity of labor which produces social consciousness and realizes this consciousness in the material world as well as in the (seemingly immaterial) relations between human beings.[36] This means that Durkheimian ‘social facts,’ or the objectivity of social institutions and structures, do indeed have ontological reality, but that this ontological reality is produced by the activity of labor, in a dialectical process of what Anthony Giddens calls structuration.[37] Lukács describes the growth of social complexity as arising from labor in which simple teleological positing in any particular task gives rise to “a whole ‘period of consequences’” as choices between alternatives ramify outward in a complex “causal series.” In their complexity and expansion across space and time, these consequences take on an objectivity over and above and beyond conscious intention. So, as Marx said, “They do not know it, but they do it.”[38]

Lukács provides the starting point for a social ontology founded on labor, which allows for the integrated conceptualization of the ontological reality of the cultural world of socially constructed meanings and the causal properties of social relations congealed in material objects. Human action in accordance with social rules produces and reproduces, in a process of structuration, lasting institutions that have objective reality as social facts. It is on this basis that Thompson has developed the social-ontological reconstruction of critical theory. Thompson further develops beyond Lukács the theorization of the ontological status of social institutions that, while resting ultimately on the material basis of labor as the metabolism of human beings with nature cannot be conceptualized as in themselves material but nevertheless have ontological reality. He does so by showing how the conceptualization of social life in terms of forms of life, language games, and speech acts in philosophy of language from Wittgenstein to John Searle may be integrated with the Marxist materialism of Lukács. In this way, he provides a stronger basis than Weber himself did for combining interpretative understanding with causal explanation and, implicitly, an argument against the view put forward by Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Winch in The Idea of a Social Science that causal explanation does not apply to meaningful social action.[39]

In The Specter of Babel, Thompson considers Wittgenstein’s well-known illustration of a form of life. He quotes Wittgenstein’s thesis from Philosophical Investigations:

The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words “block,” “pillar,” “slab,” “beam.” A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.—Conceive this as a complete primitive language.[40]

Thompson writes:

Consider this example from a different perspective. The very existence of the relation between A and B, between builder and assistant and how that relation constitutes a structure, how this structure contains and is constituted by a system of norms and value orientations, and how it interacts with the material world and orders and reorders that world, as well as the purposes and ends of the labors of those actors, and so on. All of this points to a much thicker and richer social ontology within which language games are embedded and which orients and structures those language games and the phenomenological experiences the participants have.[41]

Builder and assistant are status functions that have ontic reality as social facts. And, this social ontology is inherently related to purposes carried out in the material world of blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. The language game inheres in their practical activity which is both social interaction and interaction with the material world. It is their physical, bodily labor, on the material world, that gives them in Lukács’ terms (following Engels) “something to say” to one another.[42]

The language game, as the following of a rule, is inherently normative. It is in the nature of a rule that there is a right way and a wrong way of following it. One is following the rule or one is breaking the rule. But rules have interpretative flexibility, according to Wittgenstein. They can be interpreted and applied in different ways, in different contexts. And indeed, if it were not for this flexibility, if the rule was absolutely rigid, it would cease to be useful as a guide to action in the complex and changing concrete contexts in which human beings must act in the world. So what then is the normativity of the rule? What constitutes following the rule, given the flexibility of interpretation? The rule-following in the language game of the builders, such and such passed object corresponding to such and such called-out word, is inseparably connected with the purpose of building a house, and doing so according to a plan, thereby translating the plan and the purpose it entails, into reality, thereby realizing that plan or purpose.

For Lukács, labor is the meeting point of teleology or human purpose with the material causality of nature. It is of fundamental importance that material nature pushes back in relation to human purposes. Lukács writes that “Man in his labour must necessarily seek success for his activity. But he can only obtain this if both in the positing of goals and in the selection of means towards them, he directs himself undeviatingly to grasping everything connected with his labour in its objective being-in-itself, and behaves appropriately towards both goal and means.”[43] Labor is always in struggle to impose human teleology on nature, which resists this imposition and creates its own alternatives to the causal chains that human purpose seeks to select from the myriad possible causal chains inherent in the natural properties of materials. So “However great the transforming effects of the teleological positing of causalities in the labour process, the natural boundary can only retreat, it can never fully disappear; and this refers to the nuclear reactor as much as to the stone axe.”[44]

It is this resistance of nature to human purposes, the facticity of nature, Lukács argues, that gives rise to morality, in the form of self-control. Successful labor requires “the victory of correct understanding over mere instinct…. Man must devise his movements expressly for the work in hand, and execute these in constant struggle against mere instinct in himself, against himself.”[45] In this way, while labor “alters the environment itself,” it also requires the transformation of the human subject. So human “self-creation” takes place necessarily in the realm of necessity, the objective material world of nature, which is always present in human endeavors.[46] Oughtness in human activity therefore involves not only the selection of goals but also the selection of the correct means of achieving those goals faced with the material resistance of nature. This material resistance bears on the selection of goals themselves, which must be realistic or realizable given the way the world is as a matter of fact.

So in labor there is the teleological positing of the goal and there is the “ontological positing of concrete causal series.”[47] Lukács writes of “The ontological coexistence of teleology and causality in working (practical) human behaviour” and of the “ontological co-presence of teleology and posited causality.”[48] The labor process is guided, “teleologically directed,” by the goal, so the behavior involved in labor is “governed by the ‘ought’ of the goal.”[49] It is the pursuit of the goal (and not passive, abstract contemplation) that provides the impetus to knowledge of nature and its causal processes:

What is involved here is not simply a correct reflection of reality in general, an adequate reaction to it, but rather that each particular correctness or error, i.e. each particular decision between alternatives in the labour process, can only be judged exclusively by the goal and its realization. Here, too, we are referring to an indelible interaction between the ‘ought’ and the reflection of reality (between teleology and posited causality).[50]

It is the labor process that gives rise to ‘ought.’ The oughtness or morality intrinsic to human social relations is founded on the purposeful, teleological character of labor. But this teleological character of labor, or teleological positing, is imbricated with the positing of causality, the chain of events which human action sets in motion that leads to the desired outcome, or not.

Lukács writes that “the metabolism between nature and society is so important” since it is “the foundation of both the rise of the ‘ought’ in general, from the human and social type of need satisfaction, and of its specificity, its special quality and its being-determining limits, which are called into existence and determined by this ‘ought’ as the form and expression of real relations.”[51] The “being-determining limits” are the objective limits set by the material reality of nature as these are manifested in the success or failure of strategies of realizing teleological positings through causal positings. Ought is constraining because it has its basis ultimately in objective materiality, in and through the human/social metabolism with nature.

If this is correct, then the limitation on interpretative flexibility within a form of life is not merely given by social sanction internalized through socialization and embedded in tradition and convention but rests ultimately (although in a highly socially mediated way) on the firm correct and incorrect, yes and no, given by nature as it pushes back against the particular alternatives that human beings willfully try to impose on it. Causal chains ramify through the human metabolism with nature, and through social relations, providing the ultimate basis for doing things this way rather than that way. Therefore labor is the source of ‘ought,’ in its teleological and causal positings and in the way in which these positings reach success or failure in their struggle with the objective properties and potentialities of natural objects.

Society only exists in the interactions between biological human beings. It therefore only exists as the organization of the collective metabolism of these biological beings, Homo sapiens, with the rest of the natural world. Social ontology is in that way fundamentally material. The reality of social things is built on material nature. However, the ontology of society, as Thompson argues, is not identical with materiality. The reality of social things cannot be reduced to material reality. Hence, Thompson draws on Searle’s conception of “constitutive rules” to argue that “A legal code, money, rules and the kind of rule-following that allows for the game of baseball or checkers – all are objective social facts that constitute objects that possess social facticity rather than material (or natural) facticity.”[52] This also gives the material objects used in such codes and games an ontology over and above their materialist ontology. For example, a piece of wood shaped into and used as a gavel in a courtroom can only be used as such, can only have its meaning and its coercive force as a gavel, in the context of the courtroom. A baseball bat is really a baseball bat, it has real existence as such, even though materially it is only a piece of wood. Its existence as a baseball bat is a function of the teleological positing of the labor involved in shaping the wood to certain specifications oriented toward the use of the piece of wood within the game that is entirely socially constructed.

Thompson draws on Searle to show the “deontic power” of social facts, in other words how “the norms we accept as constitutive of social facts make demands on us and our commitments, behavior and conscience… the capacity of any social fact to be able to cause us to perform, think or feel in some way.” Thompson argues that “Social reality would not be real in any efficacious sense if it were not able to have some causal power.”[53]  This causal power grows as the chains of purposive action and choices between alternatives become increasingly complex: “as these kinds of activities congeal into more complex social forms, they further develop their ontological sophistication and reality.” Hence, “social reality is systemic meaning.”[54] Thompson turns to functionalism to develop the understanding of the emerging and growing systematicity of meaningful social action and the way in which social causation operates. In doing so, Thompson shows how functionalism can provide a sophisticated defense of the Marxist base-superstructure model.

In The Domestication of Critical Theory, Thompson analyzes the terminology of causation through which Marx stated the determination of consciousness by being. Thompson emphasizes that Marx’s notion of determination “does not imply a mechanistic form of causation” but rather “the act of placing limits… controlling the fundamental, rule-governed structure of any process or structure… In this sense, the act of determining any thing is the result of the kinds of patterned forms of life and action that any structure (in Marx’s case, the economic structure) can impose on agents.”[55] Thompson argues that this determination needs to be understood in relation to Searle’s notion of “constitution,” in the sense in which rules and rule-following action are constitutive of social things. So “structures and institutions are themselves constituted by human beings and their respective beliefs and practices.”[56] Social determination therefore takes place through primary, i.e. more dominant, structures and institutions imposing certain definitions on the rules and norms through which secondary, or subordinate, structures and institutions regulate and order action. The more dominant structures may limit the rules or norms of the subordinate structures. Further, Thompson argues, “institutional norms possess a socializing function on agents, thereby granting them a determining character on the personality system of subjects.”[57] By imposing certain rules or norms, the dominant structures and institutions shape subordinate institutions. The dominant structures and institutions also shape the selves of the individuals whose action takes place in the setting or context of institutions. Dominant structures and institutions thereby shape the consciousness and action of the individuals through whose agency structures and institutions are reproduced.

In this way, Thompson establishes the basis for a functionalist account of base-superstructure determination. On this model, causation operates in a non-mechanical way such that there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between particular economic interests and the particular acts or policies of superstructure institutions. Rather, the rules and norms of superstructure institutions are defined, interpreted, and followed in such a way as to replicate the rules and norms of base institutions. The standards of legitimacy by which rules, norms, and actions in superstructure institutions are judged have a close correspondence with the rules, norms and actions institutionalized in the economic base. This instantiates Lukács’ argument that “the development of a mode of being consists in the gradual—contradictory and uneven—acquisition of predominance by its own specific categories.”[58] The categories arising within the base become the categories, or define the meaning and application of other categories, in terms of which action within the superstructure is defined and assessed. So there emerges a correspondence, or institutional isomorphism, between the overall functional imperatives (and patterns of organization following from those imperatives) of the base and the normative imperatives institutionalized in the superstructure.[59]

The teleological positings of the base (not as particular individual purposes and actions but as complex chains of purposive action interconnecting systemically) condition the teleological positings of the superstructure, systemically organized through rules and norms. Values or oughtness, rooted in the base, come to be expressed in the constitutive rules, criteria, judgments of legitimacy, and mental attitudes that pervade the superstructure. So activities, and justifications of those activities, in the cultural, administrative and political organizations are tightly bound to the imperatives of capital. Thompson writes: “Hence, each sphere of society can be adapted to the goals of economic imperatives: schools away from education and toward training for the demands of the business community, artistic expression and taste toward the most profitable forms of entertainment, the ends of scientific research away from genuine needs and toward marketable ends, and so on.”[60] In contrast with mechanistic modes of causal explanation, this functionalist model incorporates the teleology and causality that Lukács argued were combined in labor and therefore in social action that has its basis in labor. In functional dominance of base over superstructure, what is prescribed in social institutions is determined by the demands of the economic base and hence of capital. The causal power of economic necessity (not of nature itself but of nature shaped by the labor process organized in the interests of, and through, the teleological positings of capital) necessitate following the demands of capital and limit the possible interpretations of norms to what ultimately will serve and be rewarded by capital.

Having Nothing to Say to One Another: The End of Work and the End of Mind

The cybernetic society is one in which the functional determination of the superstructure of culture and politics by the economic base has become especially powerful and tightly bound. This has occurred at precisely the same time as political contestation has shifted away from direct engagement with the economic base and has been increasingly directed at subjectivity, consciousness, and culture. This shift is evident in the decline of trade unionism and socialism and the turn of left-wing politics toward questions of identity oriented to gender, sexuality, and race. This shift is also evident in critical theory itself, which as Thompson argued has been “domesticated” through the Habermas-Honneth turn away from Marxism and political economy and toward abstract ethics of communication and recognition.[61] This turn in critical theory is itself a reflection of reification which Thompson defines as false consciousness incapable of grasping the totality. False consciousness arises from the functional dominance of the superstructure by the base, i.e. “a patterning by the economic system of other spheres of social and cultural life… [which] results in a deep distortion of the subject’s capacity to gain critical cognition of what we can call the ‘false totality’ of capitalism” (p. 173, emphasis in original). The Habermas-Honneth turn away from political economy itself is a weakening of the theoretical resources for critical cognition so that “such theoretical projects do little more than refract reified consciousness back onto the judging subject” (p. 191). The turn in critical theory toward subjectivity is really nothing but an instantiation of reification and therefore an accessory of the subsumption of subjectivity by capital. This undermining of critical theory from within, as the theoretical reflection of increasing cybernetic domination, takes place at the same time that capital subsumes the self through commodification while presenting new forms of commodified selfhood as escape from domination and alienation.

A new study shows that half of British teenagers feel addicted to social media. According to the study’s director, “Self-perceived social media addiction is not [necessarily] the same as drug addiction. But it’s not a nice feeling to feel you don’t have agency over your own behaviour.”[62] One does not become addicted to enlivening stimuli, according to Erich Fromm, but to simple stimuli, which consumerism tends to provide.[63] In social media, communication is reduced to simple stimuli. John Clark observes that, since the 1960s, capitalism has mastered “the trick of overstimulating and overexciting consumers at the same time that it was depressing and boring them.”[64] In post-industrial society we seem to talk without having “something to say.” Thompson observes that “the reason that the meaninglessness and loneliness is so profound is due to the extent that elites and the organization of society in general no longer need people—except for consumption” (p. 221). The shift in what Langman calls the “mediation of hegemony,” from the active political form of selfhood that was the citizen to the politically passive consumer, goes along with the expulsion of individuals from forms of work that enabled them to experience themselves as active creators of their material environment.[65]

Thompson observes that “the continued degradation of work, deskilling, lowering of wages, and erasure of class consciousness were complemented by a resurgent reengineering of desire toward consumption” (p. 13). Thompson notes that the retreat into hedonistic passivity goes along with the prevalence of forms of work that provide no sense of participation in the active making of the world one inhabits:

As the economy becomes increasingly technologically complex, we do not need more engineers and educated workers, as theorists of postindustrial society believed, but fewer and fewer of them. And those that are needed require less and less technical virtuosity. The economy now needs service workers, those that can serve the top echelons of the economy, from baristas to Uber drivers to a vast army of delivery personnel. The systematic disinvestment that society has placed in its youth, as evinced by the collapse of the nonelite university system and forms of education at all levels, has resulted in the unconscious introjection of valuelessness (p. 221).

As more and more skill and decision-making is taken over by computer systems and artificial intelligence, subjectivity is simply cut out of the circuits of production and power. Lukács argued that the human species gave birth to itself when, through its labor it made consciousness active in making the world and making itself, so that in humanity consciousness ceased to be an epiphenomenon. Cybernetic capitalism has now made human consciousness an epiphenomenon.[66]

Domesticated critical theory has sought to move political attention away from the economic base and toward a supposedly autonomous realm of deliberation and intersubjective recognition. Occupy Wall Street activists naively thought that open-ended deliberation would be ‘prefigurative’ of post-capitalist utopia. Much political attention is taken up in online argument which so often degenerates into vituperation. Communication proliferates, but is wearyingly impotent, without causal power. It is as if a new philosophical idealism has become actualized, in which argumentation over ought is detached from factual causal powers of and over the material world. Lacking substance and causal efficacy, this argumentation is experienced as meaningless chatter, prompting withdrawal. There is a great deal of talk, without anything feeling worth saying. Whereas the emergence of citizenship out of subjection occurred with the emergence of the actively built world of industrial capitalism, the degeneration of citizenship and the twilight of the self is occurring with the rise of the hyper-reified world of de-industrialized cybernetic consumer capitalism.

Conclusion

 This raises the problem of how autonomy as critical agency can, in this hyper-alienated post-industrial context, be more than distance, withdrawal, or individual forms of refusal and disobedience. Thompson notes that “Cultural modernism registered the shock” of the emergence of mass society “as the individual searched inward, deeper into the self and its own psychology, for the energy to compensate what was being lost in the vast machinery of modernity” (pp. 3-4). Part III of Twilight of the Self, which contains Chapter 8 on “Autonomy as Critical Agency” is intriguingly titled “To the Lighthouse.” Does the lighthouse signify the inwardness of Virginia Woolf’s cultural modernism or alternatively does it represent the necessity of a goal or teleological positing? Thompson points the way forward for the individual who seeks to cultivate in themselves a critical perspective on the prevailing social norms. One cannot escape the social but one can gain critical distance from its determinations. And one can express one’s critical agency in principled disobedience, as did Thoreau, quoted in The Specter of Babel.[67] Social change requires individuals to be critical agents, with the willingness and resolve to disobey. But it also requires more than individual acts. Thompson writes, “The individual’s consciousness of his or her interdependence with others marks a metaphysical shift not only of the self but of a new kind of sociality as well. Social solidarity becomes genuinely possible when individuals seek to relate and act in concert according to common needs and purposes” (p. 270). Nevertheless, while Twilight of the Self points the way toward adequate forms of critical judgment, it does not clarify how to act in concert on the basis of this judgment.

Here, perhaps, the materialism of Lukács’ critical social ontology is key. Social life and individual human life are ultimately material and rest on the metabolism with nature. The disordering of this metabolism by capitalism threatens the future existence of human life itself. The perpetuation of war also threatens human survival. Imperialism, unless its dynamic is halted by mass action, appears set on a path toward another world war, which would be the last.[68] Can these material conditions of our common survival provide a basis for the galvanizing of critical agency into solidarity? Can growing material hardship make the level of inequality today, as society’s resources are hoarded by a narrow elite, come to be experienced as simply intolerable? Is participation of students and young people in Palestine solidarity demonstrations across the US and around the world indicative of new solidarities forming and new forms of consciousness breaking out of institutions that are so clearly not only hollow but venal? Is there dialectical potential in the internet, social media, and communication technologies to galvanize and coordinate protest rather than be merely a distraction machine?[69] Or are these new energetic outbursts of youth destined to dissipate as a result of repression, contemptuous mockery and vilification by the entire apparatus of corporate media, and cooptation by pseudo-left, pseudo-radical politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, so that, as Thompson writes, “Social protest becomes a spectacle rather than a manifestation of political power and will” (p. 224). Has protest itself been domesticated as an intense experience or as a form of symbolic communication without causal power?[70] Is protest just, to use Goffman’s words, “Another standard method of cooling the mark out…  to allow the mark to explode, to break down, to cause a scene, to give full vent to his reactions and feelings, to ‘blow his top.’”[71] Does the re-emergence of large-scale strikes, such as by US auto-workers in 2023, suggest a rekindling of class struggle, after being suppressed for so many years?[72] Or does the tamping down of these strikes by the corporate-bureaucratic unions show the continued efficacy of cybernetic control? Are these manifestations just afterimages of a politics that no longer exists? Are they “post-emotional” scripted enactments of a memory of what people would have done, in the past?[73] The logical next step in Thompson’s political theoretical project would seem to be to address the question of whether, and how, critical agency can become critical solidarity.

Notes

[1] Michael Thompson, Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022); Michael Thompson, The Domestication of Critical Theory (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016); Michael Thompson, The Specter of Babel: The Reconstruction of Political Judgment (New York: State University of New York Press, 2020).

[2] Ralf Dahrendorf, “Out of Utopia: Toward a Reorientation of Sociological Analysis,” American Journal of Sociology (1958) 64: 115-127.

[3] On the question of grounds for critique, see Raymond Geuss, The idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

[4] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).

[5] Herbert Blumer, “Society as Symbolic Interaction,” in Jerome G. Manis and Bernard N. Meltzer, Symbolic Interaction: A Reader on Social Psychology (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1967), 139-148, on 143.

[6] Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961).

[7] Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); David Hancock, The Countercultural Logic of Neoliberalism (New York: Routledge, 2019); Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (New York: HarperBusiness, 2004); Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005).

[8] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

[9] Joseph C. Hermanowicz, “A Theory of Despair Among US College Students”, Planetary Sociology, Current Perspectives in Social Theory Vol. 40 (2023), 227-249, on 236, 244.

[10] Steve Hall, Simon Winlow and Craig Ancrum, Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime, Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissism (Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2008), 17.

[11] Hall, Winlow and Ancrum, Criminal Identities, 128.

[12] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, [2000] 2012).

[13] Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

[14] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, [1955] 1966).

[15] Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

[16] In his novel, Kingdom Come (New York: Liveright, 2013), first published in 2006, J. G. Ballard presented a fictional depiction of the merger of consumerism and fascism.

[17] Lauren Langman and Maureen Ryan, “Capitalism and the Carnival Character: The Escape from Reality,” Critical Sociology 35 (4) (2009): 471-492, on 472.

[18] Lauren Langman, “From Subject to Citizen to Consumer: Embodiment and the Mediation of Hegemony,” in Richard Harvey Brown ed., The Politics of Selfhood; Bodies and Identities in Global Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 167-188.

[19] John Cheney-Lippold, We are Data: Algorithms and the Making of our Digital Selves (New York: New York University Press, 2017).

[20] Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (New York: Pantheon Books, [1977] 2006).

[21] Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power(New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).

[22] Thompson, Specter of Babel, 26.

[23] Thompson, Domestication of Critical Theory, 179-204; Thompson, Specter of Babel, 159-307.

[24] Thompson, Specter of Babel, 296.

[25] Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1987),  1-309, on 105. See also Christopher Caudwell, The Concept of Freedom (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965).

[26] Thompson, Specter of Babel, 182-191, 317-318

[27] Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990); Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being 3. Labour, trans. David Fernbach (London: Merlin Press, 1980).

[28] See also Matthew J. Smetona, “Lukács’s Ontology of Social Being and the Material Basis of Intentionality,” in Michael J. Thompson ed., Georg Lukács and the Possibility of Critical Social Ontology (Chicago: Haymarket, 2019), 41-77.

[29] Reha Kadakal, “Lukács and the Problem of Knowledge: Critical Ontology as Social Theory,” in Thompson ed., Georg Lukács, 392-418, on 408.

[30] Lukács, Ontology, 3.

[31] Lukács, Ontology, 20. See also Filippo Menozzi, “Reading Hegel after Marx: Lukács and the Question of Teleology,” International Critical Thought 12(1) (2022): 98-115, on 103.

[32] Lukács, Ontology, 21, 38, 47.

[33] Lukács, Ontology, 50.

[34] Lukács, Ontology, 26.

[35] Emile Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions,” Durkheimian Studies 11 (2005): 35-45.

[36] Pace Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 29, 290-294.

[37] Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

[38] Lukács, Ontology, 18, 33, 56. See also George V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 66-70.

[39] Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965). For a Marxist engagement with, and critique of, Winch, see Paul Mattick, Social Knowledge: An Essay on the Nature and Limits of Social Science (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020).

[40] Wittgenstein, quoted in Thompson, The Specter of Babel, 226

[41] Thompson, Specter of Babel, 226.

[42] Engels, quoted in Lukács, Ontology, 100.

[43] Lukács, Ontology, 41.

[44] Lukács, Ontology, 34.

[45] Lukács, Ontology, 43.

[46] Lukács, Ontology, 44.

[47] Lukács, Ontology, 55.

[48] Lukács, Ontology, 55, 65.

[49] Lukács, Ontology, 66.

[50] Lukács, Ontology, 67.

[51] Lukács, Ontology, 74.

[52] Michael Thompson, “Marx, Lukács and the Groundwork of Critical Social Ontology,” in idem ed., Georg Lukács, 419-455, on 433.

[53] Thompson, “Marx, Lukács and the Groundwork,” 434.

[54] Thompson, “Marx, Lukács and the Groundwork,” 435. Emphasis in original.

[55] Thompson, Domestication, 97-98. Emphasis in original.

[56] Thompson, Domestication, 98.

[57] Thompson, Domestication, 99-100.

[58] Lukács, Ontology, 67.

[59] Thompson, Domestication, 111-112. See Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” American Sociological Review 48 (2) (April 1983): 147-160, esp. 150, 157.

[60] Thompson, Domestication, 103.

[61] Thompson, Domestication, esp. 63-82.

[62] Hannah Devlin, “Revealed: almost half of British teens feel addicted to social media, study says,” The Guardian, January 2, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/02/social-media-addiction-teenagers-study-phones. The insertion “[necessarily]” is in the newspaper article.

[63] Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 240-241.

[64] John Clark, “The Spectacle Looks Back into You: The Situationists and the Aporias of the Left,” in Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson eds, Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics: The Betrayal of Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 210-236, on 219.

[65] Langman, “From Subject to Citizen to Consumer.”

[66] Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (London: Penguin, 2017).

[67] Thompson, Specter of Babel, 333.

[68] Emanuele Saccarelli and Latha Varadarajan, Imperialism Past and Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[69] Cf. Lauren Langman, “After Marcuse: Subjectivity – From Repression to Consumption, and Beyond,” Radical Philosophy Review 20 (1) (2017): 75-105; Ruth Milkman, “A New Political Generation: Millennials and the Post-2008 Wave of Protest,” American Sociological Review 82 (1) (2017): 1-31; John Della Volpe, Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling their Fear and Passion to Save America (New York: St. Martin’s Press 2021); June Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner, “Global Generations: Social Change in the Twentieth Century,” The British Journal of Sociology 56 (4) (2005): 559-577; Cecile van der Velde, “‘What Have You Done to Our World?’: The Rise of a Global Generational Voice,” International Sociology 38 (4) (June 2023): 1-27.

[70] Vincent Bevins, “The Mass Protest Decade: Why Did the Street Movements of the 2010s Fail?” The GuardianOctober 10, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/10/the-mass-protest-decade-why-did-the-street-movements-of-the-2010s-fail; James Treadwell, Daniel Briggs, Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, “SHOPOCALYPSE NOW: Consumer Culture and the English Riots of 2011,” British Journal of Criminology 53 (1) (2013): 1-17.

[71] Erving Goffman “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure,” Psychiatry 15(4) (1952): 451-463.

[72] Brennan Doherty, “How ‘Strike Culture’ Took Hold in the US in 2023,” BBC, September 28, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230927-how-strike-culture-took-hold-in-the-us-in-2023

[73] Stjepan Meštrović, Postemotional Society (London: Sage, 1997).