For those of you who haven't been formally introduced to the sociological doomsday weapon of the 20th century, critical theory is an approach to analyzing society not for the purpose of understanding it, but for the purpose of transforming it by undermining its existing institutions.  The hard work of understanding how and why people do things is unnecessary if your goal is merely to take a sledgehammer to the machinery.  Critical theory is the invention of the Marxist Frankfort School of the 1930s, so, as one might expect, it reinterprets everything it looks at through a Marxist (or neo-Marxist) lens.  The women's studies, racial studies, and gender studies curricula found in almost every university in the West are the direct products of the more general critical theory program.  Many things that end in "theory" (e.g., deconstruction theory, queer theory) are also critical theory's progeny. The connection between critical theory...(Read Full Article)