In a 1937 program for Critical Theory, Max Horkheimer indeed called for the critical theorist to interrogate received economic categories such as “work, value, and productivity” and to “look towards a new kind of organization of work.” But at the same time, Moyn notes that the Frankfurt theorists themselves “missed the decolonization of the world—in part due to Eurocentric and racialist blinders—though it may have been history’s most emancipatory event.”

This roundtable uses this centenary as a springboard for considering related deficits in the field of modern European intellectual history, a field in which critical theory has played an outsize role owing to the towering influence of Martin Jay. It will examine how these issues have been addressed in recent, more global, intellectual histories that recenter political economy. It brings together intellectual historians working on diverse geographies and at different career stages who have (re)embraced political economy—and, relatedly, historical consideration of law as a material, living social practice—as central lenses through which to understand modern European society. In this they have implicitly followed Moyn and Andrew Sartori’s calls to abandon the transcendent idealism of the “history of ideas” in favor of reconceiving intellectual history as the study of “the social imaginary,” which would connect ideas relationally with their material underpinnings, social theory with social practices, and abstract ideas with the ideologies that constitute and sustain identities and social-political orders. Invoking the French historian Pierre Rosanvallon, Moyn called for intellectual history to reach beyond “representations” and to incorporate “the most intimate and decisive matters of social experience.”

Panelists will address questions including: Is critical theory really dead, or have its key insights simply been incorporated into contemporary intellectual practice (an argument that could also be made for French counterparts such as Michel Foucault)? What are the stakes of reintegrating political economy into the (social) history of ideas, and doing so today? How can class be resurrected as a category of historical analysis in post-Marxian frameworks? How might recentering political economy, production, and social reproduction also open up the subfield beyond its traditionally and provincially Eurocentric and cisheteropatriarchal concerns?