For those who have been reading Critical Review over the years, the journal is synonymous with Jeffrey Friedman, who founded it in 1987 and edited it until his sudden death in December 2022. Trained as an intellectual historian at the University of California, Berkeley, and then as a political theorist at Yale University, Friedman founded it when he was still a graduate student at Berkeley with the goal of putting various philosophical and political ideologies in conversation to scrutinize both their strongest and weakest arguments. It was, as one early ad in the New York Review of Books put it, the place where Marxists and libertarians could talk to one another.
As Friedman’s interests evolved over the years, so did the journal, but he always treated Critical Review as a forum for critical intellectual debate. As he saw it, no single ideology captures the full complexity of the economic, social, and political spheres. Yet while casting a critical eye on all orthodoxies, he willingly published debates between scholars with radically different perspectives.
As Friedman conceived it, the broad mission of the journal was to both model and promote an open society where participants would be self-conscious enough of their own fallibility that they would eagerly question their own premises, while also paying scrupulous attention to competing claims.
This broad mission led Friedman to adopt, as its corollary, a subsidiary mission: to determine the best tools for analyzing the sources, nature, and effect of human fallibility in the face of the complexity of contemporary society. It was thus, from the beginning, interdisciplinary in orientation, as Friedman sought to canvass and evaluate the tools from such fields as economics, history, sociology, philosophy, and political science. Starting in the 1990s, when Friedman entered graduate school in political science, this subsidiary mission developed a focus on the epistemology of modern political society. While the journal first attended to epistemic democracy, it soon widened its scope to address the epistemic dimensions of political culture, taken in the most capacious sense as including not just congressional, legislative, presidential, and ordinary electoral politics, but the articulated and unarticulated ideas that animate political behavior and thought.
In 2008, in organizing a conference on political epistemology that was published in the journal, Critical Review spearheaded the development of the field of political epistemology: examining the cognitions—ideas, beliefs, perceptions, theories—of ordinary citizens, journalists, politicians, scholars, etc., in order to understand what motivates political action (“empirical political epistemology”) and to assess the reliability of putative political knowledge (“normative political epistemology”). Friedman’s interest in political epistemology culminated in his masterpiece, Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy (Oxford, 2019), which provided an immanent epistemic critique of technocratic politics by asking whether technocracy is successful by its own criterion of solving social problems so as to cause more good than harm.
The book was made the subject of a symposium in a special issue of Critical Review guest-edited by Paul Gunn (vol. 32, nos. 1–3). As Friedman’s response to the symposiasts indicates, in the last few years his interests were evolving in two directions. First, he came to believe that technocratic politics is a necessary feature of modern governance and is determined by political culture. To examine the roots of modern culture, he thus turned to critical genealogy as a crucial component of political epistemology. This interest in critical genealogy is evident in several special issues of Critical Review: a symposium on the 35th anniversary of Bernard Yack’s The Longing for Total Revolution (Friedman’s introduction lays out his understanding of critical genealogy) (vol. 33, no. 2); a special issue on the 200th anniversary of the publication of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (vol. 33, nos. 3–4); a special issue on Foucault Today (vol. 34, no. 4); and a forthcoming symposium on Michael Rosen’s The Shadow of God (vol. 35, nos. 3–4).
The second evolution was toward anthropology as a foundation for political epistemology. In his book Friedman had argued that idiosyncratic, potentially heterogeneous ideas of political actors were crucial in accounting for the complexity of modern governance—and a potential stumbling block to technocrats untrained in recognizing such ideas. Friedman thus sought to develop an anthropology that would recognize our fallibility by recognizing the path-dependent (and thus contingent) sources of our ideas. At the time of his death he was just embarking on a new study of Marx’s epistemology, and he was planning another book on a new type of humanism grounded less in human freedom than in our ideational and fallible nature. Had he lived, this interest would have likely shaped the agenda of the journal. Whatever direction the journal may take in the coming years, it would fulfill its essential mission in bringing critical epistemological attention to all orthodoxies.