In 2017, I wrote a blog post about academic book reviews because I was irritated by a review that

(1) that it didn’t seem to even try to understand the context of the book on its own terms, (2) didn’t (try to) understand the actual arguments of the book, (3) didn’t understand basic facts (e.g., about the Greek language) and (4) was written by a senior scholar who was attacking a younger scholar’s work.

I recently came across another book review that also seemed to get some basic facts wrong. Specifically, this review claimed that

The adjective ‘critical’ in the volume’s title originated in the so-called Frankfurt School, which was founded by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. As Leszek Kołakowski points out in his magisterial Main Currents of Marxism (1976; English translation 1978), the main thought behind ‘critical theory’ is that philosophical, religious and sociological ideas are merely emanations of the unconscious interests of social groups (although Horkheimer also tried to argue, albeit inconsistently, that critical theory is not merely another product of such interests). When we deal with any manifestation of ‘critical theory’, even in its most recent incarnations, we should remember that, as Kołakowski puts it (Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3 [1978], p. 352), ‘For critical theory … there is no such thing as “facts”’. Indeed, this is the true meaning of the authors’ programmatic rejection in this volume of ‘the false positivism of the West’ (see e.g. p. 207).

This seemed at odds with my own (admittedly weak) understanding of critical theory, so I looked up what Kołakowski actually wrote. In a discussion of the 1937 essay “Traditional and critical theory” written by Max Horkheimer, Kołakowski writes on pp. 352-353 (bolded sentence corresponds to the short bit quoted in the review):

In studies of social phenomena up to the present it has normally been assumed either that these should be based on the ordinary rules of induction and should aim at formulating general concepts and laws, expressed quantitatively as far as possible, or else that, as phenomenologists believe, it is possible to discover ‘essential’ laws independent of empirical results. In both cases the state of things under observation was separate from our knowledge about it, just as the subject-matter of natural science was furnished to it ‘from outside.’ It was also believed that the development of knowledge was governed by its own immanent logic, and that if some theories were discarded in favour of others this was because the former involved logical difficulties or proved incompatible with new data of experience. In reality, however, social changes were the most powerful agent of alternations in theory: science was part of the social process of production, and underwent change accordingly. Bourgeois philosophy had expressed its misguided faith in the independence of science in various transcendentalist doctrines which prevented people realizing the social genesis and social functions of knowledge; they also maintained a picture of knowledge as an activity that consisted of describing the world as it was but not of going beyond it or criticizing it, since this required evaluative judgements which science could not supply. The world of science was a world of ready-made facts which the observer sought to reduce to order, as though perception of them was quite independent of the social framework within which it took place.

For critical theory, however, there is no such thing as ‘facts’ in this sense. Perception cannot be isolated from its social genesis; both it and its object are a social and historical product. The individual observer is passive vis-a-vis the object, but society as a whole is an active element in the process, although unconsciously so. The facts ascertained are in part determined by the collective praxis of human beings who have devised the conceptual instruments used by the investigator. Objects as we know them are partly the product of concepts and of collective praxis, which philosophers, unaware of its origin, mistakenly petrify into a pre-individual transcendental consciousness.

I included this very long quote to indicate the context of the short bit quoted in the review, to make it clear that the point of this passage is certainly not that ‘For critical theory … there is no such thing as “facts”’. That is a gross misreading of Kołakowski. I also looked at the Horkheimer essay that Kołakowski is summarizing (“Traditional and critical theory”; I read the English translation of Matthew J. O’Connell in Critical Theory: selected essays [1972]) and it’s clear there that Horkheimer believes in facts. Horkheimer says things like

In both types of theory [ed.: traditional and critical] there is a strict deduction if the claim of validity for general definitions is shown to include a claim that certain factual relations will occur.

The large class of private property owners exercised leadership in the society, and the whole culture of the age bears the impress of this fact.

According to critical theory the present economy is essentially determined by the fact that the goods which men produce beyond their needs do not pass directly into the hands of society but are privately acquired and exchanged.

Horkheimer, then, is arguing against naïve positivism, not facts.

There’s something wonderfully absurd about a review that insists on the need for agreed-upon facts in order to do serious scholarship and at the same time does a poor job quoting major reference works in order to make false claims about a major theoretical movement. I agree with the reviewer that facts matter. Unfortunately it makes their review impossible to take seriously.

Why is it that reviews are (admittedly, only occasionally) like this, and why do journals publish such reviews? (I note that this review was published in the most influential review journal in Classics in the English-speaking world). Is it the fact that journals rarely take any time and effort to vet reviews in the way that other publications are peer-reviewed and vetted, and knowing this, reviewers are sloppy or write things that they know wouldn’t pass muster in other publications? If so, then one wonders what the scholarly value of this genre is, as traditionally defined, and if we shouldn’t be moving with more speed and purpose towards new models, like the one practiced by Rhea Classical Reviews.