What is critique?

What is critique and what does it mean to critique? They are the questions at hand. Critique or critical theory has many different meanings for different writers or ‘critical theorists’. Critical theory first emerged from the work of German theorists who were collectively known as the Frankfurt school (Calhoun, 1995, p 13). To critique something is to problematize an issue or to look at a perspective from an alternative view, looking at something from a different sense. This essay will discuss what is critique or critical theory by looking at the various approaches illustrated in the work and research of Craig Calhoun, Dorothy Smith and Fuyuki Kurasawa.

Craig Calhoun describes the ‘philistine’ as someone who is unreflective, passive, someone who does not look deeper then what they see on the surface in the academics sense. He sees it as someone who is content in a world that is not in any way fully understood and greatly unexplored, basically an inability to think more then they see needed (Calhoun, 1995, p 1). In a way it is an academics failure to deal with the real world and is not able to be critical of this real world as they are distracted by the academic exercises or way. Calhoun’s description of the philistine is an interesting one as it underlines in a way of what it means to critique, but in an opposing sense to what was just explained. He sees that academics or social scientists are very much interested in exploring this unexplored world, but when exploring they seem to be held back by boundaries. These can be viewed as boundaries of convention, or boundaries of structures of knowledge that are self-evident, seeing it as not going beyond the familiar and not realizing any other possibilities (Calhoun, 1995, p 2). It i...

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... she wants to alter so that women’s perspectives and experiences are viewed in the same forefront.

Works Cited

Calhoun, Craig. 1995, Rethinking Critical Theory, in Calhoun, Craig, Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference, Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass., 1-42.

Smith, Dorothy. 1990, Women’s Experience as a Radical Critique of Sociology, Sociological Inquiry, 44 (1): 7-13.

Smith, Dorothy. 1997, Comment on Hekman's "Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited" Chicago Journals, Vol. 22 (2): 392-398.

Smith, Dorothy. 1999, Sociological Theory: Methods of Writing Patriarchy into Feminist Texts, in Smith, Dorothy, Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 45-69.

Kurasawa, Fuyuki. 2000, The Ethnological Counter-Current in Sociology, International Sociology, Vol 15(1): 11-31.