To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, by Carl R. Trueman. B&H Academic, 2024, xi + 240 pages, $34.99.

Over the past decade or so, ideas that used to be the near-exclusive province of left-wing professors and campus groups have spilled over into mainstream society through things like Black Lives Matter, the 1619 Project, DEI initiatives, and Pride month. At the root of all of this is critical theory, which sees Western civilization (especially its American embodiment) as so morally compromised that it needs to be completely dismantled. In the words of Brian Lozenski, a Minnesota education professor and appointee of Governor Tim Walz,

The United States as constructed is irreversibly racist. So if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with. It must be overthrown. . . . You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S. It is a[n] anti-state theory that says the United States needs to be deconstructed, period.[1]

One of the features of this kind of thinking is that it produces an entirely different conception of morality. As Daniel Mahoney explains, this is an ideological project that says that “whatever promotes world-transforming revolution is necessary and good, and whatever stands in its way is, by definition, retrograde and evil.” Mahoney also notes that such “ideological fanaticism is the inevitable consequence of a nihilistic denial of an order of things, of a natural moral order available to human beings through reason and experience.”[2] In other words, when man rejects God’s moral order, he usurps God’s place and creates his own system of morality. One would hope that all Christians would reject ideas rooted in something so radical that it redefines the categories of good and evil. Unfortunately, this has not been the case.

In To Change All Worlds, Carl Trueman provides the helpful service of tracing the historical development of critical theory by explaining the teachings of the figures who were instrumental to its formation. In his introduction, Trueman notes that an understanding of critical theory is important not merely due to its political significance, but also because of how it relates to the modern world’s dwindling ability “to define what it means to be a human person” (2). While critical theory is eager to dismantle, it rejects “the very idea of human nature as something stable across time and cultures and that carries with it significant moral implications for how we live.” This makes it unable “to articulate a clear vision of what the future of human society should look like” (5). As noted above, for those in the thrall of critical theory, good and evil do not correlate with any objective moral standard or end, but with one’s stance towards the way society is fundamentally ordered. Society is so irredeemably corrupt that it needs to be laid waste and rebuilt from scratch into an amorphous “better place.” Those on board with this program are good, even when they support things that would traditionally be seen as evil, such as rioting and looting. Those against the program are evil, even when they support things that would traditionally be seen as good, such as preventing men from entering women’s restrooms or participating in female athletic competitions.

Trueman explains from the outset that his book is neither polemical nor constructive, but descriptive. That is, his “main purpose is to explain the basic elements of early critical theory—in historical context” (4–5). He begins with G.F.W. Hegel and Karl Marx, moves on to later Marxists Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács, focuses on figures from the Frankfurt School, and then considers later proponents of critical theory. One thread that runs throughout the book is the effort of these thinkers to break down “the illusory absolutism of the established ‘natural’ ways of thinking and acting” (28) and to show that reality is not objective but is a construct shaped by ideas. Truth claims are dismissed as the manipulative efforts of those with an interest in maintaining the status quo. As Trueman explains, for critical theorists,

approaches that seem to be objective, commonsensical, or simply stating the obvious are in fact means by which the latent interests of the dominant group within society are asserted and protected. . . . [Critical theorists] believe that the concepts with which society operates—such things as justice, equality, fairness, legality, and the like—are all products of a particular form of society rather than transcendent categories of universal application. (85, 108–9)

This is why proponents of critical theory do not see any need to engage opposing arguments. Anyone who appeals to reason is simply demonstrating his captivity to the false constructs erected by society. One popular example of this is Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility, in which she contends that when white people object to her allegation that all whites are racist, they are only confirming their racism.

Another area explored by Trueman is how critical theorists have responded to the way the modern world has assigned supreme authority to science, a move based on the (scientifically unprovable) assumption “that the whole of reality can be encompassed and exhaustively understood by the scientific method of measurement and calculation” (127). Frankfurt School members Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer critiqued this as serving the interests of bourgeois capitalism because it objectively reduces people into things. They also noted that when reality is reduced to that which can be measured and calculated, there is no basis for the morality upon which bourgeois culture depends. While Immanuel Kant sought to address this through his categorical imperative, this is “an ethic predicated on treating the others as subjects, as free individuals of unique value, to be treated not as means to an end but as ends in themselves,” Adorno and Horkheimer astutely pointed out that such an ethic “runs afoul of a view of the world that turns the other into an object of study and analysis” (131). In spite of this insight, the fundamental problem remains with Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis: “The failure to have any normative notion of human nature” leaves us “with nothing more than the pious hope that an unalienated humanity will emerge from the historical process, though we have no way of knowing in advance of that moment what such might look like” (143). This is why the Christian response to critical theory needs to focus on the fact that human nature is more than a social construct, and that the church, with its announcement of the grace of God in Christ, “is the place where alienation is overcome” (143).

Critical theory also relates to much of what is being said in our day about matters of sex and gender. Because Freud played a key role in shaping contemporary thinking on this, Trueman spends many pages summarizing his thought and the ways it influenced others. Especially of note is the claim that sexual desire is the essence of a person’s identity. Those who embrace this idea see society’s sexual codes as repressive because they prevent “people from being who they would desire themselves to be” (149). This is why proponents of critical theory call for the destruction of the institution of monogamous marriage and the traditional family, an effort that has made significant headway in the world in which we live today. Yet once again, the rejection of the natural moral order has wreaked havoc, emptying sex of any intrinsic meaning. This leads Trueman to contend that “perhaps human beings do have a nature, an essence, and perhaps the careful regulation of sexual behavior in a manner that reflects and reinforces natural dependencies and obligations is essential to human freedom” (180).

One profitable insight from critical theory has to do with the way popular culture and mass forms of communication are used “in the manufacture of social conformity and political passivity” (183). Even though this originated as part of a critique of bourgeois capitalism, it is something to which Christians should pay careful attention in a screen-dominated age. Image-based forms of communication operate on us in a different manner than word-based forms. Because the viewer is largely passive in his engagement with image-based media, he is also rendered highly suggestible. As philosopher Colin McGinn explains, “What we see on the screen is intended to engage our emotions directly. This is the sensory manipulation of emotion. . . . The kind of seeing we experience in the cinema is emotional seeing—the seeing of emotions with emotions.”[3] If we want to avoid being manipulated, we need to be aware of the way today’s cultural products can subtly shape how we understand the world.

The reason why every society bears the taint of evil is due to the universal sinfulness of man. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously observed,

If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? . . . It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.[4]

Due to its embrace of such notions, “the West has a capacity for self-criticism and self-correction that sets it apart from other present and past civilizations. . . . The highest virtues of the West do not stem from self-satisfaction but from an aspiration to meet an objective standard of natural right.”[5] This stands in sharp contrast to critical theory, whose rejection of the notion of a natural moral order does not result in the destruction of its advocates’ innate moral impulse, but in its inversion. No longer having any basis for a sense of moral restraint, those inspired by critical theory regard as righteous anything that is done to destroy the hopelessly corrupt status quo. As Michael Polanyi explains, this is a mindset in which the “moral needs of man, which are denied expression in terms of human ideals, are injected into a system of naked power, to which they impart the force of blind moral passion.”[6] This should be reason enough to reject critical theory.

Endnotes

[1] Cited in “Walz Education Appointee Calls for the Overthrow of the U.S.,” Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online, September 25, 2024, https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/walz-education-appointee-calls-for-the-overthrow-of-the-u-s/.

[2] Daniel J. Mahoney, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (Encounter, 2025), 32, 120.

[3] Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (Pantheon, 2005), 104-105. Italics original.

[4] Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–56: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, abridged ed. (Vintage, 2018), 75, 312.

[5] Luke Foster, “For the Glory of France,” Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2025, 56.

[6] Cited in Mahoney, 123.

Andrew S. Wilson is an Orthodox Presbyterian minister and serves as the pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Laconia, New Hampshire. Ordained Servant Online, October, 2025.