Critical Theory, Implicit Nationalism, and the Political Economy of Colonialism

Frankfurt School critical theory is grounded in a theory of capitalist modernity which, in common with wider sociological approaches, elides histories of colonialism. This results in a misdiagnosis of current problems of inequality and inadequate solutions for their address. Many critical theorists, for example, focus primarily on issues of redistribution associated with a capital-labour relation organised nationally and now seen to be threatened by globalisation and migration. Such an understanding fails to account for how the decommodification of labour through the development of national welfare arrangements in the West – an explicit issue for critical theory from Habermas’s Legitimation Crisis onward – has been bound to wider colonial histories and, specifically, colonial patrimonies. A proper address of these issues requires a more expansive approach to distributive justice conducted in a reparative frame that recognises the ways in which the legacies of our shared, but asymmetrically experienced, colonial pasts continue to configure the present and its possibilities. It involves making colonial histories central to understandings of capitalist modernity and to the normative address of inequalities that otherwise risk being legitimated by the standard accounts of critical theory. In this paper, I take issue with the central conceptualisation of modern society as capitalist at its core, and the way in which capitalism is understood separately from colonialism. I further question the implicit nationalism of critical theory and argue that what is missing from it is a political economy of colonialism.