The Humanities' Political Turn
Steven Mintz Invites the Texas Legislature to Shut Down His Department
On Friday the 13th, Inside Higher Ed ran an essay titled “Understanding the Humanities’ Political Turn.” The author, Steven Mintz, is a history professor at UT-Austin. Mintz has published many books with prestigious presses and raked in millions of dollars in grants over the course of his career, which began in the 1970s. I became aware of his piece when Eric Adler of the University of Maryland, whom I interviewed for this Substack back in June, tweeted it out with some comments.
Mintz acknowledges what people like me have been saying for some time: that humanities departments around the country have made activism one of their major endeavors in recent years. However, he claims that this development is “a good thing,” and that it is an expansion of the humanities’ historic core, not a repudiation of it.
Mintz is a fairly prestigious scholar, and his essay, which runs to almost 3,000 words, deserves a response that is more comprehensive than what I can provide off the cuff here. It’s possible that Mintz is writing this essay in an effort to reconcile his Boomer sensibilities with the prevailing winds in his discipline and to signal to the Young Turks in the professional associations that he’s on board with their agenda. But I think it’s more likely that he wants people who have been on the fence about the direction of the humanities to buy in to the activist vision. If that’s the case, I don’t think his essay will have its intended effect. In fact, it might backfire.
First, a little personal context. I witnessed firsthand the early stages of this political turn when I was in graduate school in the humanities 25 years ago. The majority of the courses I took were taught by what might be called Old-School Humanists, senior scholars who were certainly left of center in their political views, but who loved the material they taught—history, literature, philosophy, music history, art history—and inspired a love of it in their students, who held views from across the political spectrum.
However, I also took a handful of courses taught by Young Turks, recently minted Ph.D.s from Ivy League schools who seemed more interested in tearing down the classics of their discipline or shoehorning them into Marxist and postcolonial narratives. These courses were definitely inferior to the ones taught by the Old-School Humanists; the assigned readings were of lesser quality, and we came out of class sessions feeling as though we weren’t learning much. Yet it seemed clear that as the senior scholars retired or died, the Young Turks’ method would eventually become dominant. That expectation has now been fulfilled at most large, public universities.
Back to Mintz’s essay: Eric Adler is correct to criticize the straw-man claim in the introduction that before this recent political turn, the humanities were a “purely aesthetic and theoretical endeavor.” Adler exclaims in his tweet thread: “Read some Cicero! Read some Petrarch! Read some Arnold!” The whole point of the reorientation of the curriculum away from mathematics and towards the humanities (studia humanitatis) during the Renaissance is that the humanities were understood as being more important for those entering public life.
The humanities have always been concerned with “the pressing social, political, and cultural issues of our time” (Mintz’s phrase). Imagine reading Sophocles’s Antigone and not attempting to wrestle with the question of the limits of just political authority. Or studying the late Roman Republic without attempting to understand what factors lead to a crisis of legitimacy in a regime. Or reading Shakespeare’s King Lear without pondering the roles of filial piety and sentiment in just family relationships. I don’t know what Mintz thinks scholars in the humanities have been doing for the past couple of centuries, but it’s certainly not confined to aesthetics and theory.
What, then, is different now? Mintz is upfront about this: the humanities have adopted critical theory as their primary interpretive lens:
Today, the humanities stand at the intersection of traditional scholarship and activism. Critical theory has emerged as a key framework, challenging long-held assumptions about culture, power and knowledge. This movement mirrors broader societal debates about justice, equality and the role of education in fostering social progress, transforming academic disciplines like history, philosophy, literature and cultural studies into politically engaged spaces.
One of the key developments in this transformation is the rise of critical theory. Movements such as postcolonialism, feminist theory and critical race theory have fundamentally altered the way we study culture and knowledge. Scholars now challenge the notion that knowledge production is neutral, emphasizing how literature, history and art are deeply entwined with systems of oppression.
Postcolonialism, for example, interrogates how literature and culture have been used to justify imperialism and highlights the ways Western narratives about the “East” were constructed to assert dominance. Feminist theory questions gender binaries and traditional roles, examining how society constructs and maintains gender norms. Critical race theory explores how race and racism are embedded in legal, cultural and social systems, influencing history, literature and sociology.
These fields have transformed the humanities, moving them away from merely cataloging texts or interpreting art in isolation. Instead, they now focus on understanding how cultural productions reinforce or resist social power. By deconstructing the dynamics of inequality, these movements have led to a more inclusive and politically engaged humanities, where identity, justice and resistance are central concerns.
I was first exposed to critical theory 25 years ago by one of those Young Turks, who required his hapless students to read Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, one of the field’s foundational texts. Recently, I’ve been brushing up on critical theory by reading Carl Trueman’s new book on the subject, To Change All Worlds. The intellectual genealogy Trueman lays out is evident in Mintz’s essay, even though Hegel, Marx, Adorno, and the rest are never mentioned by name. For example, Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach—”The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”—undergirds all of critical theory and frames Mintz’s discussion of the humanities’ political turn.
But anyone who has studied it knows that critical theory does not aim to make reforms to existing systems. Rather, it seeks to overthrow the system in a revolutionary fashion. Where lesser reforms are endorsed, it is usually because the critical theorist believes they will expose the “inner contradictions” of the system and hasten its eventual demise. This is one reason why it’s often called “cultural Marxism.” Marx created an elaborate critique of what he called “capitalism” to persuade his contemporaries to revolt against it. Critical theorists do the same with contemporary culture. It’s racism, sexism, and oppression all the way down, and it must be overthrown.
(Significantly, neither Marx nor the exponents of critical theory have much to say about what will replace the existing system once it has been destroyed. They tend to offer platitudes about equality and a just society without offering specifics of how these are to be achieved or how things will actually work in their post-oppression society. It’s much easier to tear down than to build.)
Chris Rufo’s book America’s Cultural Revolution, another of my recent reads, traces the influence of critical theorist Herbert Marcuse and his disciples from the 1960s to our own time. After the failure of the New Left’s “direct action” in the streets, Marcuse’s acolytes found positions in the academy and began the activity that eventually led to the creation of academic programs in gender studies and the like, and eventually the insinuation of DEI initiatives into government and corporate America. By the 2010s, their ideas had even trickled down to elementary schools in blue states like Oregon, where dramatic curriculum changes were made in some school districts. Students going through those schools might not learn how to read, but they get experience protesting capitalism and racism.
It’s important to understand that the critical theory underlying all these fields takes the necessity of the system’s overthrow as axiomatic, not as a proposition to be established. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay do a good job of showing this in their 2022 book Cynical Theories, It’s why normal people get frustrated when trying to have a conversation with, for example, an anti-racism activist who has drunk deeply from the wells of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Any questioning of the assumption that America is a systemically racist society is met with denunciation.
I see no evidence in Mintz’s essay that he envisions more modest reforms to a liberal system that is essentially sound at its roots. He uses phrases like “deconstructing power and privilege” and “reimagining justice and equality,” all of which track with the radical agenda of critical theorists. He claims that this will make the humanities “more relevant” in the 21st century, overlooking the fact that student affinity for the humanities started to collapse at the same time activists dragged the field into this political turn.
In the subtitle of this post, I said that Mintz has invited the Texas legislature to shut down his department. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I don’t think it’s much of one. With public approval of institutions of higher education at record lows, the much-ballyhooed “demographic cliff” in college enrollment looming, and a red wave in the most recent election, writing an essay trumpeting the redefinition of your discipline in explicitly far-left terms seems little short of suicidal.
Red-state legislatures are being handed plenty of ammunition to use to justify defunding low-return departments trumpeting an ideology that is repugnant to a supermajority of their taxpayers. I could easily see Texas passing legislation similar to Florida’s recent general education reform, which would prohibit courses based on identity politics from satisfying a general education requirement. That’s actually a fairly modest step well within a legislature’s prerogative, but it would cut the legs out from under many of these departments that have redefined themselves in these terms. They need that gen-ed eligibility to boost enrollment in their departments’ courses; without it, they’ll probably lose a significant amount of their funding and faculty positions.
We’ll see if anyone in the Texas legislature is paying attention to what’s being published at Inside Higher Ed. If so, 2025 could be an interesting year.