Michael Walsh’s latest book is nothing if not ambitious. According to the jacket summary, it “exposes the overlooked movement that is Critical Theory” and “explains how it . . . has affected nearly every aspect of American life and society.” If that thesis sounds broad enough, Walsh himself articulates a still broader one, declaring at the outset of Chapter Nine that he aims to prove that “the heroic narrative is not simply our way of telling ourselves comforting fairy tales about the ultimate triumph of Good over Evil, but an implanted moral compass that guides even the least religious among us.”
This is heady stuff. Readers might be forgiven for wondering what the heroic narrative has to do with the Frankfurt School; they might, indeed, be forgiven for making it to Chapter Nine still wondering how the Frankfurt School fits into the book at all. For the most part, Walsh assumes the dastardly character of critical theory as a premise. Only a few pages of the book are devoted to real textual analysis. Three particular members of the Frankfurt School (Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Wilhelm Reich) are given at least a cursory treatment, but Milton, Goethe, and Wagner are all discussed in considerably more detail, and Walsh draws freely throughout on a cornucopia of cultural figures, from Boethius to Francis Ford Coppola. It’s a bit disorienting. One keeps wondering when the central argument will begin.
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