All of Liberty’s political theory classes latch on to the idea of absolutization. There’s always an absolute whether the holder knows it or not, and it’s either God correct or something else and incorrect.
This is a really useful frame to look at critical theory, because whatever the theory is named, that’s probably what it absolutizes: anti-blackness, race; feminism, sex relations; queer theory, sexuality; classical Marxism, class; and so on and so forth.
Where things get interesting is when the theory is facially unable to actually explain the whole world. Fat studies, to be coherent, need to either subsume fatness under a different critical theory or answer for what happens to a hunter gatherer society runs into a calorie deficit. Racial theories need to explain a world of isolated tribes without intercultural interaction. Settler colonialism needs to explain a world before colonialism. Migrant theories need to explain a world before work visas and a welfare state. (Classical Marxism dodges the problem by saying that history moves in stages with technology which is one of the reasons why debaters become communist when arguing against other branches of critical theory.)
This all reminds me of a quote from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:
A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.
Basically, you can have an ideology that can answer every question put to it, but still have a small worldview, a narrow frame which is incomplete in reality even as it operates fully consistently as a theory. Critical theories are bullet sized worldviews, and the smallness of it all makes one thing seem huge. The thing that Chesterton goes on to argue is that smallness of the self in the bigness of the world is a better (and more truthful) way to live. Perceiving yourself as small is where you get to wonder at the bigness of the world.1
Footnotes
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I’ve poorly explained the message; I’m doing my best.
TL;DR critical theories absolutize their object, Chesterton says that doing so creates a internally consistent but still incomplete model of the world that is ultimately hostile the human condition. ↩