The Limits of Immanent Critique
Immanent critique is the ultimate academic flex. It shows that you understand your opponent’s argument better than they understand it themselves.
BY TOBY ROGERS
View original article at Brownstone.org.
Introduction: What is Immanent Critique?
The first year of my Ph.D. program, I had a supervisor who was a poststructuralist. I came out of every meeting with him more confused than when I went in. Eventually, I organized a group with the four other doctoral students who shared this same supervisor, and we met a few times for lunch to try to decode what he was saying to us.
At one of these meetings, I said, “He keeps suggesting that I do an imminent critique and I have no idea what’s he’s talking about.” Yes, I should have asked for clarification when meeting with my supervisor but the Commonwealth postgrad educational system generally operates from the principle of ‘Figure it out for yourself.’
A student in the group who was about to graduate graciously explained that it was not “imminent critique” (as in “happening soon”) but “IMMANENT critique” (“emerging from within”). Turns out Immanent Critique is a whole methodological approach with a rich history. Now, after having studied and used it for years, I think it’s a brilliant approach to social change.
The etymology of “immanent” is fascinating. From Grok:
The word “immanent” comes from the Latin term immanens, which is the present participle of the verb immanere.
Immanere is a compound of in- (“in, within”) and manere (“to remain, to stay”).
Thus, immanere means “to remain within” or “to dwell in.”
The participle immanens carries the sense of “remaining within” or “inherent.”
The explanation of immanent critique from Grok is so magnificent, I’m just going to quote it at length (even though it pains my soul to use this tool):
Immanent critique is a method of analysis where one evaluates a system, ideology, or set of ideas using its own internal standards, assumptions, or principles — rather than applying external criteria. The goal is to reveal contradictions, inconsistencies, or unfulfilled promises within the system itself, exposing its limitations or flaws from the inside out.
For example, if you were critiquing capitalism using immanent critique, you wouldn’t judge it based on, say, moral ideals from socialism, Christianity, or Stoic philosophy. Instead, you’d look at capitalism’s own stated goals — like efficiency, freedom, or prosperity — and show how it fails to meet those goals on its own terms (e.g., how free markets lead to monopolies that undermine free markets).
The term “immanent” comes from the idea of staying within the thing being examined, as opposed to “transcendent” critique, which brings in outside perspectives. It’s a way to challenge something by holding up a mirror to itself.
Immanent critique is similar to Rapoport’s Rules for how to compose a successful critical commentary:
You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
The difference, though, is that with immanent critique, one should only offer criticism from within the logic and worldview of the other person rather than imposing it from the outside.
Immanent critique is the ultimate academic flex. It shows that you understand your opponent’s argument better than they understand it themselves. It disarms your opponent without a clash of swords (metaphorical or literal). In general, it’s really difficult to change someone’s mind. But if one is to have any chance of changing someone’s mind, immanent critique is probably one of the best ways to do it.
A strong case can be made that the success of the abolition movement, the Suffragette movement, Gandhi’s anti-colonial movement in India, and the civil rights movement, to name a few, stems at least in part from their skillful use of immanent critique (although one would have called it something different at the time and each of these movements used a blend of rhetorical and political organizing strategies).
The abolition movement and the civil rights movement challenged oppressors in society to live up to the highest values of the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution.
Likewise, the suffragettes in the US critiqued the exclusion of women from voting using the internal logic of democracy and appealed to the sweeping emancipatory language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (particularly the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment).
Gandhi successfully challenged the British Empire to live up to its stated values of justice, liberty, and the rule of law.
I suppose one could even argue that Luther’s 95 theses were an immanent critique of the Catholic Church in 1517 — particularly the claim in Thesis 21 that the sale of indulgences contradicted scripture and the Church’s own stated mission of salvation through faith and repentance.
The Use of Something Akin to Immanent Critique by the Medical Freedom Movement
When Robert Kennedy, Jr. endorsed Donald Trump for president, he said it was to stop the epidemics of chronic disease in children.
Almost immediately, the goalposts started to move.
As the medical freedom movement was rebranded as MAHA, the focus on the harms of vaccines was broadened to include highly processed foods, seed oils, high fructose corn syrup, food dyes, regenerative agriculture, etc.
The medical freedom movement generally trusts Bobby, and by November, enough of his supporters shifted to Trump to provide the margin of victory in the election.
When RFK, Jr. was nominated as HHS Secretary, we were obviously elated and worked hard to get him confirmed (flooding Senator Cassidy’s phone lines with so many calls that his office ceased to function for several days). There was an assumption that RFK, Jr. would get to pick his own team to lead NIH, FDA, CDC, and CMS and that he would pick the heroes in the movement including Aaron Siri, Pierre Kory, Joseph Ladapo, Paul Marik, James Neuenschwander, Larry Palevsky, Meryl Nass, Ryan Cole, etc. to lead those agencies.
But then the nomination process got bogged down in politics and we were left with modest institutional reformers (who think that they are radical reformers because that’s what their colleagues keep calling them but the fact that they were not fired during Covid suggests that they carefully stayed within the Overton window amidst the darkest days of the global fascist takeover of society).
Now the MAHA insiders appear to have settled on a strategy that sounds something like this, ‘We never promised that we would withdraw the shots on day 1. Our job is to release all the data and restore proper scientific practices to these agencies.’
I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to this approach (at least I was until Dave Weldon’s nomination to be CDC Director got torpedoed today). As I wrote in a Substack note back in January:
Robert Kennedy Jr.’s big bet is that he can turn institutionalists into paradigm shifting radicals (because modest reforms will not be enough to stave off collapse). It’s a crazy gamble. But I like the guy and hope it works. Quite literally the Republic itself and the future of humanity depend on Kennedy’s wager paying off.
RFK, Jr., Del Bigtree, Calley Means, and other MAHA insiders are engaged in a sort of immanent critique. They believe that they can gather enough evidence and present it to the scientific and medical community and somehow move the entire industry to stop poisoning the people in their care.
Specifically, (using the language of immanent critique) the MAHA insiders seem to believe that they can inhabit the logic of allopathic medicine and public health and show that the vaccine program was never actually based on proper double-blind randomized controlled trials (the gold standard of evidence for those professions) and that the vaccine program has produced more harm than good for society. (Or something like that — in the replies, please post your own immanent critique of allopathic medicine if you wish.)
AND — the argument goes — IF they are successful at convincing the scientific mainstream to stop rigging studies and faking data, the change will be much more enduring and widespread than if we had attempted to overthrow the entire system all at once.
As I said above, changing hearts and minds is difficult. If one wants to change hearts and minds, immanent critique is probably one of the best ways to do it.
The Limits of Immanent Critique
Thus far, I’ve tried to make the best possible case for immanent critique. As the title of this essay suggests, however, I’m actually here to argue against the use of immanent critique for our purposes in the medical freedom movement.
It seems to me that there are at least two circumstances where immanent critique is the wrong approach to social change — 1.) when dealing with fascism; and 2.) when what you really need is a massive paradigm shift in science. And unfortunately we’re dealing with medical/scientific fascism, so we’re afflicted with both of these exceptions to the general rule.
Let’s take the fascism piece first. The White Rose movement in Germany in 1942, at least in their first leaflet, attempted to use immanent critique and nonviolent resistance to challenge the Nazi regime. They quoted German cultural icons including Goethe and Friedrich Schiller to argue that the regime was betraying core German values of honor and freedom. But the leaders of the White Rose movement were arrested and executed in 1943.
Regarding the sciences…German physicist Max Planck was one of the fathers of quantum theory in the early 20th century. In his autobiography, he famously observed:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
That statement is often condensed in popular discourse to “science proceeds one funeral at a time.”
Planck knew the scientific process from the inside — he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Yet in essence he argued that scientists don’t change their minds when presented with new evidence. For Planck, the process of change in science was more like a series of dynasties — one set of gatekeepers controls the discourse, then they eventually die and a new set of gatekeepers can control a new paradigm. The young guns never actually convince the old guard of anything.
Today the US is characterized by medical and scientific fascism. As you know, vaccine makers were given liability protection in 1986 and over the next four decades they used that Get Out of Jail Free card to enslave society via iatrogenic injury.
I suppose, theoretically, immanent critique should work as well in dismantling fascism as it did with slavery. But fascism moves so quickly and comprehensively to shut down debate that immanent critique does not have time to do its work (of changing hearts and minds). It’s notable that the expansion of the vaccine program was accompanied by the largest propaganda and censorship operation in American history.
Immanent critique seems to function best when the transcendent values of freedom, liberty, and/or love are already previously embedded in the system. With fascism I feel like order, hierarchy, and control are ends in themselves even if they were initially proposed as a means of reducing crime and chaos or increasing efficiency.
So too with the scientific community — theoretically, immanent critique should have a reasonable chance of success. In the scientific community internal consistency is a stated goal and it has accessible and explicit standards that one could harness to point out where actual practice falls short.
But the current culture of science and medicine is built to resist change:
The training follows a military hierarchy and is often abusive (long hours, lack of sleep) to the point of brainwashing.
New entrants in the profession are usually deeply indebted and financially dependent on those above them in the department.
Science and medicine are closed systems that do not accept critiques from outside their membership and certainly not from the public at large.
The actually existing scientific community is characterized by large egos, lack of self-awareness, rent-seeking behavior, and political fiefdoms even though many of these people believe that they are neutral observers following the data.
Whistleblowers cost their superiors money so feedback and reporting mechanisms are discouraged or blocked.
I also think that immanent critique fails in the scientific community because science as currently constituted is largely about economic class. The stated goal is to gather evidence and test hypotheses to better understand the material world. But that ideal gave way to economic self-interest a long time ago. The underlying goal, the end goal, appears to be giving a certain group of people wealth, power, and control over society by any means necessary. Science could be a tool of liberation but the actually existing scientific community is usually in league with its financial backers in the ruling class.
I would just add that Big Pharma started faking data and ignoring harms because they had quarterly profit targets to meet. Actual innovation in medicine is really difficult, and regulatory capture is relatively inexpensive yet almost certain to increase revenue. None of those structural problems necessarily changed just because we had an election.
Revolutionary Critique
One alternative to immanent critique is revolutionary critique.
A revolutionary critique is an analysis or evaluation of a system, structure, or ideology that seeks to fundamentally challenge and overturn it, rather than merely reform or adjust it. It typically comes from a perspective that views the existing order — whether political, social, economic, or cultural — as deeply flawed, oppressive, or unsustainable, requiring radical transformation to address root causes of injustice or inefficiency.
I don’t want to save allopathic medicine from itself. The existing model of ‘vaccinate, cut, burn, and poison’ is never going to work because it’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the body and the natural world are and how they function. At best, allopathic medicine is stuck in an 18th-century Newtonian understanding of the world that has since been surpassed in every scientific field except medicine and public health.
I want a revolution in how we think about health that will reveal the barbarity and savagery of our current era. I’m not here to restore trust in science and medicine — I want to smash the institutions that are engaged in iatrogenocide so that something new and better can take their place.
I think MAHA is making a tactical error by 1.) assuming that evidence will change minds and 2.) trying to bring along the existing gatekeepers into the new era. To my knowledge, MAHA has NOT solved the problem best described by Upton Sinclair — “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
If Planck is correct, the existing gatekeepers will never change their minds; the only political opening comes when they die. But in some ways, Planck may have been too optimistic. It is entirely possible that the next generation, indoctrinated in the old ways, will just reproduce the same failed paradigms when they come to hold positions of power.
I think this is just a numbers game, and we win through assembling the largest army of supporters and mobilizing them in every election from city council to the president and then engaging in grassroots lobbying during the year. I want Sherman’s March to the Sea, not inside baseball and compromise with people who don’t share our values.
One can make the case that these things are not mutually exclusive. An immanent critique can turn into a revolutionary critique. And one can argue that immanent critique is about methods and revolutionary critique is about aims. But in general, I think we need to push for much bigger and more wholesale changes across the board.
Conclusion
In the fight for medical freedom, no one knows for sure what will work to change hearts and minds. We probably need to hedge our bets with a multitude of different strategies and may the best one win. MAHA is pursuing a strategy akin to immanent critique that seeks to shame/cajole/encourage the scientific and medical communities to live up to their highest standards. Immanent critique has a long track record of producing enduring change in society. But we might be making a category error. Given that immanent critique has not been shown to produce change in fascistic or scientistic systems, perhaps we would be better off pursuing revolutionary change to produce the profound paradigm shifts we seek.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Says Toby Rogers about the MAHA movement: "We need to push for much bigger and more wholesale changes across the board."
Health care does not lend itself to improvement under capitalism. We need to call for the end of patents on drugs and medical products. We need three branches of society: government, business, and non-profit, and these three should operate as independently of each other as possible. Let the government provide funds to build and maintain hospital buildings with research center buildings, but let the local doctors, scientists, and community run the facilities charging minimal fees to patients. Yes, I know: how could enough money be raised for health through charity? Enormous amounts of money currently go into public health pursuing all the wrong agendas. Maybe we can do better with much less.
Thank you. Balanced and informative. The extent to which MAHA will be successful remains TBD, but I think they absolutely have to move through this immanent critique model given they are working within the administration after a marginal electoral victory and not post a revolution.