Radicalism, Respectability, and the Colour Line of Critical Thought: An Interdisciplinary History of Critical International Relations

Abstract

The epithet ‘critical’ has become both coveted and contested. A long-established lodestone of personal, political, and professional commitment within academia, its meanings are multiple, and its histories are poorly understood. This article reconstructs an interdisciplinary history of debates concerning what it is to ‘be critical’, beginning in the 1930s but focusing on the late 1960s to the late 1990s. It argues the significance of the category ‘critical’ to be that it can connote political radicalism while allowing for a degree of professional respectability. Furthermore, the article shows that claims and counterclaims upon the parameters of criticality have privileged certain thought traditions. In particular, while contemporary discourses of ‘anti-wokeness’ caricature critical academics as being prepossessed with issues of coloniality and race, traditions of thought dealing with these issues have, until recently, been rather marginalised. The enduring ‘colour line’ of critical thought is not only unjust but also deleterious to political imagination.