The Long March Through the Institutions: Critical Theory and Its Academic Career
Post 3 of 8 — The Inheritance: Western Civilization, Its Critics, and What Is Actually at Stake
The ideas that currently govern elite universities, school curricula, corporate diversity programs, and mainstream cultural journalism did not arrive by spontaneous generation. They have an intellectual history, a set of founding texts, a recognizable methodology, and a career arc that can be traced with precision from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Understanding that history is essential, because the ideas are not going to be effectively answered by people who do not understand them.
The intellectual lineage runs from Gramsci through the Frankfurt School, through French poststructuralism, through the American university’s adoption of postcolonial theory, and finally into CRT — and they share a single underlying purpose: replacing the search for truth with the analysis of power. Every iteration of the tradition is a variant on this move. What looks like scholarship is, on examination, advocacy. What claims to be analysis is, on examination, a predetermined verdict.
As Douglas Murray observes with his characteristic directness: “As usual with bad ideas, they originated in the universities” [1].
The Genealogy: From Class to Culture
The starting point is not the Frankfurt School but Gramsci, whose concept of cultural hegemony made the decisive move that shaped everything that followed. Marx had argued that the ruling class maintained power through economic control; Gramsci added that it maintained it through cultural dominance — through control of the ideas, values, and assumptions that most people regard as simply normal and natural. The corollary was that the path to revolutionary change was not primarily the seizure of economic power but the long march through the institutions — the gradual capture of schools, universities, media, and cultural organizations that shape what is regarded as normal and natural.
This was a much more penetrating analysis of how liberal societies actually function than anything Marx had managed, and it proved far more practically effective. The Frankfurt School — Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and their colleagues, many of whom migrated to American universities after fleeing Nazi Germany — extended this analysis into culture, art, and psychology. Where classical Marxism had analyzed economic relations, critical theory analyzed cultural ones. The form of analysis was the same: identify the hidden power structure that oppressive norms serve, and expose it.
The shift from class to identity as the primary analytical category came later, and it came partly from practical failure. Marxist economics had not produced revolution in the Western democracies. But the structural analysis proved exportable to race, gender, and cultural identity — and those proved far more effective as mobilizing categories in late twentieth-century liberal societies.
Derrida and the Disenchantment of Truth
Reno’s analysis of Derrida’s role is worth examining carefully, because it corrects a common misconception. Derrida is often portrayed as a revolutionary or an agent of deliberate cultural destruction. Reno argues that he was neither. Derrida was a theorist of the postwar consensus — not a revolutionary. He became famous because he made disenchantment the theoretical basis of culture, turning the historical contingency of the postwar consensus into a timeless, anti-metaphysical truth [2].
What this means in practice is that poststructuralism did not bring new radical content from outside the Western tradition. It took the postwar consensus’s commitment to weakening all strong cultural attachments and gave it a philosophical foundation that made it appear to be a timeless truth about language and knowledge rather than a historically conditioned response to 1933-1945. Once you accept that all texts are exercises of power, that all truth-claims are historically conditioned, and that all cultural ideals are rationalizations of interests — what Reno calls “the thoroughgoing therapy of disenchantment” [3] — then every inherited institution, every received truth, and every cultural tradition becomes an object for critique rather than transmission.
An educated person in the twenty-first-century West is now an expert at unmasking pretensions to transcendent truth, exposing them as instruments of economic competition, class domination, patriarchy, and white privilege. We no longer think of higher education as the source of strong truths. It is instead devoted to critique and reduction [4].
Postcolonialism and the Warping of Historical Scholarship
The migration of these ideas into the study of empire and colonialism produced postcolonial theory, whose bible is Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Murray’s analysis of Said is pointed. Said’s framework treats all Western scholarly study of non-Western cultures as an exercise of imperial power — the Western gaze is inherently oppressive, the Western scholar is inherently suspect. Yet for Said, so long as the people doing the looking are Western and the cultures being looked at are not, it is very sinister indeed. He ignores the fact that the Orientalists he spurns were remarkable men and women: people who learned the languages and dialects of faraway societies and who studied these cultures almost always because they were fascinated by and admired them [5].
Murray also identifies the structural irony at the heart of postcolonial theory: “Intent on shrugging off the legacy of Western colonialism, they find an answer for every non-Western society in Western Marxism.” Marx was a Western thinker with next to no knowledge of non-Western cultures. To deploy Marx as the tool of decolonization is to replace one form of Western intellectual imperialism with another [6].
Karp and Zamiska trace the metastasis of this framework beyond the academy. Beginning in the late 1990s, postcolonial studies was no longer simply an academic field but an entire worldview, with its highly particularized jargon — ‘the other,’ ‘hybridity,’ ‘difference,’ ‘Eurocentrism’ — terms that could now be found in theater programs and publishers’ lists, museum catalogs, and even Hollywood film. A broad swath of intellectuals and those adjacent to academia situated their politics around this worldview without ever reading its founding texts [7].
Stanford and the Death of Western Civilization in the Curriculum
The institutional turning point in American higher education was Stanford’s elimination of its Western Civilization course requirement in 1987. Murray’s account: “In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford’s lead. The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject — the product of a bunch of ‘dead white males’” [8].
William McNeill of the University of Chicago had resisted the earlier pressures in this direction, defending Western civilization course requirements against what he identified as “patently false assertions of the equality of all cultural traditions” [9]. He lost. The assertion that all cultural traditions are equally valuable — which Biggar calls a claim of basic cultural equality and radical moral relativism — became the founding premise of the reformed curriculum. To argue otherwise was to be racist.
Victor Davis Hanson documents where this ended: universities that “saw themselves no longer as teachers of the inductive method and the elements of foundational knowledge” but as activists intent on shaping young minds to adopt a politicized agenda — whether defined as unquestioned embrace of climate change activism, identity politics, or redistributive economics [10]. The deductive method — picking and choosing examples to conform to a preconceived result — replaced the inductive method that had been the basis of genuine intellectual formation.
The Logical Endpoint: The Anti-University
The trajectory of this tradition leads, with grim logical consistency, to the King’s College London grading guidelines examined by Michael Rainsborough in 2024. The guidelines: flexible assessment criteria, rejection of ‘one-size-fits-all’ assessment as exclusionary, the designation of ‘Standard Academic English’ as an oppressive tool [11].
Rainsborough identifies what this represents with the precision the moment deserves: “These ‘guidelines’ mark the natural endpoint of post-structuralism in academia. If there is no such thing as objective truth, then there can be no objective educational standard. And if there is no educational standard, there is no university. Only its successor remains: the post-academic university, the anti-university — an institution that has mislaid the very reason for its existence and decided to celebrate the loss” [12].
This is not a satire. This is where the long march arrives. The tradition that set out to expose the hidden power structures of Western knowledge has, at the endpoint, abolished the distinction between knowledge and power — and in doing so, has abolished the possibility of the institution whose purpose was to pursue the former. The university has become what it set out to critique.
Referenced Highlights
[1] “As usual with bad ideas, they originated in the universities.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[2] “Derrida became famous because he made disenchantment the theoretical basis of culture, laying the foundations for the fusion of economic and cultural deregulation that characterizes mainstream, establishment politics today. His singular contribution was turning the historical contingency of the postwar consensus into a timeless, anti-metaphysical truth.”
Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise
[3] “We see it at work in postmodern academic theory, which reigns in universities and provides the intellectual underpinnings for multiculturalism. At every turn we analyze ‘down,’ beginning our critique of social reality with things that might attract our loyalty and devotion and analyzing downward to the low, the ugly, and the base. What is today called ‘critical thinking’ amounts to a thoroughgoing therapy of disenchantment.”
Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise
[4] “We no longer think of higher education as the source of strong truths. It is instead devoted to critique and reduction. An educated person in the twenty-first-century West is an expert at unmasking pretentions to transcendent truth, exposing them as instruments of economic competition, class domination, patriarchy, and white privilege.”
Return of the Strong Gods — R.R. Reno. Open in Readwise
[5] “For Said, so long as the people doing the looking are Western and the cultures being looked at are not, it is very sinister indeed. He ignores the fact that the Orientalists who he spurns were remarkable men and women: people who learned the languages and dialects of faraway societies and who studied these cultures almost always because they were fascinated by and admired them.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[6] “Intent in shrugging off the legacy of Western colonialism, they find an answer for every non-Western society in Western Marxism. Marx was a Western thinker, with next to no knowledge of non-Western cultures or societies.”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[7] “Beginning in the late 1990s, ‘postcolonial studies was no longer simply an academic field,’ but rather an entire worldview, with a highly particularized jargon, including ‘the other,’ ‘hybridity,’ ‘difference,’ ‘Eurocentrism’ — terms that ‘could now be found in theater programs and publishers’ lists, museum catalogs, and even Hollywood film.’”
The Technological Republic — Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. Open in Readwise
[8] “In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford’s lead. The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it became something of an embarrassment: the product of a bunch of ‘dead white males.’”
The War on the West — Douglas Murray. Open in Readwise
[9] “William McNeill had the temerity to resist the rise of what he would describe as the moral relativism that was ascendant in the second half of the twentieth century... McNeill wrote in an essay published in 1997 that attempts to construct world history courses had themselves ‘often been contaminated’ by what he regarded ‘as patently false assertions of the equality of all cultural traditions.’”
The Technological Republic — Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. Open in Readwise
[10] “Too often the universities saw themselves no longer as teachers of the inductive method and the elements of foundational knowledge. Instead, they were activists. They became intent on shaping young minds to adopt a politicized agenda.”
The Dying Citizen — Victor Davis Hanson. Open in Readwise
[11] “The document warns that ‘Standard Academic English’ (once known as ‘English’) is an oppressive tool that advantages ‘already privileged students’. The implication, apparently, is that requiring coherent writing is a form of violence.”
King’s College London Has Ceased to Be a University — Michael Rainsborough. Open in Readwise
[12] “These ‘guidelines’ mark the natural endpoint of post-structuralism in academia. If there is no such thing as objective truth, then there can be no objective educational standard. And if there is no educational standard, there is no university. Only its successor remains: the post-academic university, the anti-university.”
King’s College London Has Ceased to Be a University — Michael Rainsborough. Open in Readwise