Left Behind

There exists a strand of social thought, stretching from Georg Hegel in the 19th century through to Max Weber in the early 20th and Jürgen Habermas in the postwar era, that insists a hallmark of modernity is the differentiation of forms of human knowledge. The sophistication of culture is defined in part by the autonomy of science, morality, and art from religion and their mutual incommensurability. Any undoing of this development, according to these thinkers, would mean regression to a less sophisticated form of culture.

What then is to be made of “theory,” a term that became in vogue among English-speaking intellectuals in the second half of the last century? Defined not by a focus on a specific subject domain—biology, say, or sociology—but instead by its commitment to producing concepts that could then be applied to different forms of thought, theory became a catch-all phrase for whole swaths of (primarily French) philosophy and cultural criticism from the late 1960s on. There were, however, some unifying features of the genre, including the commitment on the part of its most famous