For the first time since the 1970s, theory seems to be lagging behind practice. The effects of the 2008 crash moved quickly across the globe, accelerating inequalities, destabilizing ruling blocs and unleashing a wave of uprisings, from Occupy Wall Street and the movement of squares, to Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock, to the Gilets Jaunes and the Hong Kong protests. How will theory keep apace of these social movements? What new configurations of theory and practice will suggest themselves as these struggles unfold? How should theorists orient themselves politically in the 2020s? These are the questions taken up by Bernard Harcourt in Critique & Praxis, a book written with an apt sense of urgency. ‘We are living through one of the most critical periods, if not the most critical, in human history’, he writes, as intensifying climate change, vertiginous degrees of inequality, digital surveillance, the rise of new right-wing forces and the social devastation wrought by neoliberalism combine in unprecedented fashion. But at this moment of danger, critical theory is ‘missing in action’.

‘To change the world!’ is the resounding first sentence of Critique & Praxis. In Harcourt’s telling, Marx was the historic progenitor of critical philosophy, sealing its birth certificate with the Eleventh Thesis. For a century, critical theory took its political practice to be, broadly speaking, proletarian revolution. But since the defeat of the movements of 1968 and atomization of organized labour, that link has been broken. There is no longer a coherent relation between theory and ‘praxis’—generally understood in an earlier Marxian tradition as political struggle informed by the critical understanding of a wider class-consciousness. Meanwhile, critical theory has lost its way. First restricting itself to questions of ideology or critical analysis, it then became the preserve of the professoriat in ‘effete universities’—and even there, was largely confined to the English departments. Worse still, it has become bogged down in an internecine feud between the heirs of the Frankfurt School and those of Foucault. Harcourt’s mission, then, is to resolve that feud and return critical philosophy to its original world-changing mission.

This is quite a task, but Harcourt’s roster of achievements is undeniably impressive. As a us litigator, he has been representing death-row inmates in Alabama for thirty years. He gives a powerful account here of travelling to Montgomery in 1989 as a third-year Harvard Law student, after hearing a college talk about conditions there. Meeting the prisoners on death row and witnessing the ‘justice’ they confronted—one prosecutor had potential jury members listed under the headings ‘Strong’, ‘Medium’, ‘Weak’, ‘Black’, then started striking jurors from the bottom of the ‘Black’ list, to ensure that African-American defendants would face an all-white jury—Harcourt says, simply, that he knew what he had to do. In addition to legal work, he completed his PhD at Harvard in 2000 with a dissertation on ‘broken-windows’ policing, plunging into deep study of Foucault and Nietzsche.

Scion of a French-Jewish intellectual family, the Hamburgers, who fled to New York in 1940, Harcourt has maintained strong connections with the Hexagon. He is the editor of several volumes of Foucault’s lectures (Théories et institutions pénales, 1971–72; La Société punitive, 1972–73), focusing above all on the militant years when Foucault and Daniel Defert were involved in solidarity actions with the Maoist students jailed in France under Pompidou’s post-1968 crackdown, rather than the notably neutral commentator on neoliberalism or advocate of care of the self. Harcourt currently holds a named chair in law at Columbia University, where he runs the Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, and has a teaching position at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Ironically for an opponent of the death penalty, he is also executive director of the Eric Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia. (As Obama’s Attorney General, Holder was notorious for defending the extrajudicial execution of American citizens by drone strike, regardless of any threat to national security, as well as prosecuting a record number of whistle-blowers under the 1917 Espionage Act, denying Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and others the right to plead that they were serving the public interest.) Over the past fifteen years, Harcourt has also published a notable sequence of critical studies on policing, punishment, the illusion of the free market and the us mode of counterinsurgency, works that trace a steady leftward curve.

Critique & Praxis, though, marks something of a change of pace for Harcourt. It is at once a synoptic work, covering an astonishing range of critical theorists and practices; a Foucauldian settling of accounts with the Frankfurt School; and a somewhat indirect appeal for critical theorists to take political action. In this third register, following Foucault’s demurral in a 1977 interview—‘It is not up to us to propose. As soon as one “proposes”, one proposes a vocabulary, an ideology, which can only have effects of domination’—Harcourt explains that the critical theorist must not impose his or her praxis on others and should only write in the first person. Accordingly, Harcourt proposes a new ‘model’ which ‘turns the analysis entirely on my own practices and confronts only my praxis and my critical theory.’ The classic question ‘What is to be done?’ needs to be reformulated for our reflexive age as the more modest: ‘What work is my praxis doing? What more am I to do?’

How then should we conceive the relation between theory and practice? Following in the footsteps of Richard Bernstein’s Praxis and Action (1971) Harcourt tracks the question from Aristotle to Marx. Though he firmly denies any contemporary relevance for the author of Capital, Harcourt has a soft spot for the young, constructivist Marx and would like to recover his way of ‘doing critique’, oriented to both intellectual emancipation and social change. Noting Adorno’s classical formulation of a continuous dialectical contradiction between the two poles, Critique & Praxis identifies four further positions. First, the idea that critical theoretical work is itself a form of critical practice—the diagnosis of crises or critique of ideology, for example; Harcourt identifies this position with Foucault’s declaration that the most he can offer is ‘tools’ for others to use, dismissed as ‘too contemplative’. Second, the notion that critical theory should guide practice—‘help the proletariat to see’, as Horkheimer put it in ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ (1937). This is the position adopted by Hardt and Negri, as counsellors to the movement, in Assembly (2017). For Harcourt, this falls foul of the Foucauldian knowledge-power problem: they will simply be offering a new form of domination; besides, even if Hardt and Negri are good theorists, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are good strategists or practitioners.

Third, one can theorize praxis after the event; Harcourt offers the example of Banu Bargu’s Starve and Immolate (2014), which builds a biopolitical framework on the basis of Turkish political prisoners’ hunger strikes. The fourth position posits the autonomy of praxis: revolts are generated by political-economic dynamics; theorists are irrelevant to this spontaneous process. Harcourt rejects all of these, in favour of a method that would ‘accentuate’ the tensions and contradictions between theory and practice, force them into collisions: ‘Put them into a Large Hadron Collider. Smash them to pieces.’ This is the way to create a ‘unified field’ of critical theoretical practice—‘in the conflict between my praxis and my critical theory, I develop and push both.’ In answer to the question, ‘What more can I do?’, he duly replies: ‘I litigate, I militate, I write, I advocate, I organize, I teach, I convene—and throughout, at all times, I brutally confront my own praxis with critical theory, and vice versa.’ As a result, his critical praxis has evolved to include not just the abolition of the death penalty in the us, his starting point, but the broader goal of abolishing the punitive paradigm of governing—America’s ‘punitive society’.