This chapter presents an experientalist model of social critique and theorizing. I begin from the tradition of emancipatory critical theory and then present the opposition between objectivist and experientalist models of critique. I then turn toward existential phenomenology for more tools for experientalist theorizing. I discuss Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception as a philosophical framework which allows me to show why perception matters when constituting theoretical accounts of freedom and political agency. I then discuss Hannah Arendt’s idea of freedom as only experienced in action within a public realm to show how the experience of freedom is always an intersubjective phenomenon and dependent on the existence of a public realm.