Is it correct to affirm that French postmodernism (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, etc.), and American Critical Theory (Adorno, Marcuse, etc.), and their heirs such as gender and postcolonial studies (Butler, Saïd) are collectivist theories (in contrast to individualistic theories: John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith); in the sense that they emphasize the group, the collective, over the individual, in their understanding of sociological phenomena?
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not really no. adorno is usually considered an individualist. they tend to be more marxist and less liberal, i guess. i suppose if you consider property right the core feature of individuality.– user65145Commented Mar 8, 2023 at 10:00
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@anonymous What is marxism if it is not a collectivism?– StarckmanCommented Mar 8, 2023 at 10:05
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that's quite a broad question. the critical theorists you mention are often called "individualist" and they are more marxist than the others. it would be wrong to assume that the more influenced by marx a philosopher is the more collectivist they are.– user65145Commented Mar 8, 2023 at 10:08
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@anonymous My question on whether these theories are collectivists is not underlied by the assumption that these authors have marxists tendencies (the link between marxism and these theories as far as I understood is very complicated), but by the assumption that they understand social phenomena almost exclusively through ideas such as social system, social constructs, structures, etc.– StarckmanCommented Mar 8, 2023 at 10:12
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1@anonymous From philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/36687/…: First, following Hegel, the Marxist picture is such that the whole is the real. "In the Hegelian picture, this whole is "spiritual" but in the marxist version it's somehow merely a material whole. Consequently, the individual is not of prime importance as in views like existentialism. Instead, the individual is a part of something larger." This to me suffices to say that marxism is collectivist. And I don't mean it in a pejorative sense.– StarckmanCommented Mar 8, 2023 at 10:50
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