Habermas E-Book

William Outhwaite

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 396

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This new edition of a well-regarded book provides a concise and exceptionally clear introduction to Habermas's work, from his early writings on the public sphere, through his work on law and the state, to his more recent discussion of science, religion and contemporary Europe. Outhwaite examines all of Habermas's major works and steers a steady course through the many debates to which they have given rise.
A major feature of the book is that it provides a detailed critical analysis of Habermas's most important work, The Theory of Communicative Action. As well as looking at Habermas's appraisal of figures such as Foucault and Derrida, the book also examines his resolute defence of the Enlightenment project, his work on law and democracy and its implications for the important topic of European integration.

This book quickly became established as an authoritative guide to Habermas's work, and this updated new edition will be an invaluable critical introduction for students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities, especially sociology, politics, philosophy and social theory.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Key Contemporary Thinkers Series

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 The Roots of Habermas’s Thought

The public sphere

Theory and practice

2 Scientism in Theory and Practice

The logic of the social sciences

Knowledge and human interests

Second thoughts

Habermas’s early work in retrospect

3 Communication and Discourse Ethics

Universal pragmatics

Moral competence and discourse ethics

4 Social Evolution and Legitimation

Social evolution

Legitimation

5 Rational Action and Societal Rationalization

Rationality of action

Societal rationalization

6 The Colonization of the Lifeworld

Reconceptualizing the lifeworld

The uncoupling of system and lifeworld

The tasks of critical theory

7 The Theory of Communicative Action: An Assessment

8 Modernity and Philosophy

The philosophical discourse of modernity

Beyond metaphysics

9 Law and the State

10 Two Kinds of ‘Post’

Conclusion: Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory

Bibliography

Index

Key Contemporary Thinkers Series

Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau

Michael Caesar, Umberto Eco

M. J. Cain, Fodor

Filipe Carreira da Silva, G. H. Mead

Rosemary Cowan, Cornel West

George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin

Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell

Reidar Andreas Due, Deleuze

Eric Dunning, Norbert Elias

Matthew Elton, Daniel Dennett

Chris Fleming, René Girard

Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir

Andrew Gamble, Hayek

Neil Gascoigne, Richard Rorty

Nigel Gibson, Fanon

Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin

Karen Green, Dummett

Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell

Christina Howells, Derrida

Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz

Simon Jarvis, Adorno

Sarah Kay, Žižek

Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said

Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls

Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler

James McGilvray, Chomsky

Lois McNay, Foucault

Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl

Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes

Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak

Harold W. Noonan, Frege

James O’Shea, Wilfrid Sellars

William Outhwaite, Habermas: Second Edition

Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner

John Preston, Feyerabend

Chris Rojek, Stuart Hall

William E. Scheuerman, Morgenthau

Severin Schroeder, Wittgenstein

Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous

Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn

David Silverman, Harvey Sacks

Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman

James Smith, Terry Eagleton

Nicholas H. Smith, Charles Taylor

Felix Stalder, Manuel Castells

Geoffrey Stokes, Popper

Georgia Warnke, Gadamer

James Williams, Lyotard

Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick

Copyright © William Outhwaite 2009

The right of William Outhwaite to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2009 by Polity Press

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For Laura and Daniel

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank John Thompson for his enormous help and patient encouragement throughout the long preparation of this book. I also benefited from discussions with a number of Sussex University students and colleagues working on Habermas – in particular Angela Clare, Christy Swords, Simon Hollis, Julien Morton and Catherine Skinner. Roy Bhaskar and others took time off from their own work to read the manuscript and encourage me to finish it, and Barbara Kehm in Kassel and Stefan Müller-Doohm in Oldenburg generously kept me up to date with Habermas’s output over the past years. My thanks also to Diane Jordan, who typed the greater part of the manuscript, and to Linden Stafford for her meticulous copy-editing of the first edition.

For this second edition, I should also thank the translator for the Danish edition, Henning Vangsgaard, who pointed out some errors in the references. Thanks also to Jay Bernstein, Maeve Cooke, Gordon Finlayson, Hans Joas, Daniel Steuer and Simon Susen for various bits of help and advice.

In rededicating this book to Laura Marcus I must also thank her, not just for a further fifteen years of happy companionship, but for leading me to Edinburgh. Thanks also to Daniel Outhwaite for good-humouredly accepting this transition, and to my new colleagues and friends at Newcastle for making me so welcome.

The author and publisher are grateful for permission to reproduce copyright material:

Figure 1 (fig 16) and text extracts from The Theory of Communicative Action by Jürgen Habermas, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Beacon Vol VI 1984, and Polity Vol I 1986), Copyright © 1984 by Beacon Press. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press and Polity Press.

Figure 2 (fig 28) and text extracts from The Theory of Communicative Action by Jürgen Habermas, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Beacon Vol VII 1987, and Polity Vol II 1988), Copyright © 1987 by Beacon Press. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press and Polity Press.

Table 1: from The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas by Thomas McCarthy (Polity, 1984). Reprinted by permission of Polity Press and MIT Press.

Introduction

Jürgen Habermas is still remarkably active and productive, but the overall shape of his work is now firmly established. It was dramatically altered by his Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and, developing and applying the model worked out there, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Between Facts and Norms (1992) and a number of more recent shorter works. It is also only since the beginning of the 1980s that he has dealt systematically with the complex issue of the relationship of his thought to that of the earlier generation of critical theorists, notably Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.

The Theory of Communicative Action and Between Facts and Norms also, however, recall some of the themes of one of his earliest works, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Finally, the issue of his relationship to the history of Germany and the development of the Federal Republic has been given a new twist by his edited volume on the ‘Spiritual Condition of the Age’, his critical interventions in the so-called ‘Historians’ Dispute’ over the interpretation, forty years on, of the Third Reich, his discussion of the 1989 revolutions and of the reunification of Germany and his analyses of the ‘postnational’ and the ‘postsecular’ in relation to contemporary Europe.

Habermas has described modernity as an incomplete project, and the same is true of his own work. In this book, I attempt to bring out the continuities in Habermas’s developing work, while paying due regard to the shifts of orientation and emphasis and the reasons for them. My aim is to present his thought and indicate its interest and importance, rather than to argue for an alternative theoretical model; the more important criticisms will, however, be noted, especially where they have led to modifications of Habermas’s own position.

Compared to the dramatic experiences of exile forced upon the first-generation members of what came to be called the Frankfurt School, Habermas’s life has been relatively uneventful – at least after the overthrow of the Nazi regime. Born in 1929, he grew up in the small town of Gummersbach, some 35 miles east of Cologne, where his father was director of the Chamber of Commerce. He describes the political climate in his family as one of ‘bourgeois adaptation to a political environment with which one did not fully identify, but which one didn’t seriously criticize either’, and recounts ‘the impression of a normality which afterwards proved to be an illusion’.1

As Habermas notes, the shock of the Nuremberg revelations and the fact that his first education in liberal democratic theory was in the context of ‘re-education’ separates his generation from those who had known the ‘half-hearted bourgeois republic’ of Weimar,2 which made some of them impatient with the elements of restoration in post-war western Germany. It also separates his from the later generation, growing up under a democratic regime which some of them were quick, in the late 1960s, to dismiss as an illusory democracy (Scheindemokratie). Habermas himself soon became anxious about the continuities in personnel between the Nazi regime and the emergent West German state, as it rearmed in the 1950s.

Habermas studied philosophy, history, psychology and German literature at the University of Göttingen, and then in Zürich and Bonn, where he obtained his doctorate in 1954 with a rather traditional dissertation on Schelling. After some time as a journalist, which perhaps still shows in the vigorous style of some of his later newspaper polemics, he became, in 1956, Adorno’s assistant at the reconstituted Institute for Social Research, where he participated in an empirical study on the political awareness of students, published in 1961. From 1959 to 1961 he worked on his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962); this was rejected by Adorno as a Habilitation thesis and supported instead by Wolfgang Abendroth in Marburg.

After a period as Professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg, Habermas returned to Frankfurt in 1964 as Professor of Philosophy and Sociology, where he delivered the inaugural lecture on ‘Knowledge and Interest’, reprinted with other essays in his Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie (Technology and Science as Ideology) of 1968 and in English in Knowledge and Human Interests. His other works of this period are the essays entitled Theory and Practice (1963) and a survey work on The Logic of the Social Sciences (1967).

The year 1968 was of course the time of major student-led protest, in West Germany as elsewhere. Habermas participated fully in the movement, welcoming its intellectual and political challenge to the complacency of West German democracy (and incidentally to the gloomy diagnosis in Student und Politik of the unpolitical orientation of West German students). As Habermas put it in his introduction to his essays Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform,3 ‘the SDS [the Socialist Student Association] was the motor of a “movement” which opened up an unforeseen political terrain and thus the prospects of enlightenment for the purposes of a radical reformism’. But the movement went too far for Habermas and in what he considered to be unrealistic directions, dangerous both politically, given the repressive capacities of the state, and intellectually, in its tendency to reject scholarship as bourgeois. Although Habermas saw his criticisms as coming from within the movement, his relationship with the activists turned increasingly sour. He has, however, continued to give a very positive view of the long-term effect of the movement on the political culture of the Federal Republic, while deploring the short-term legacy of its failure: a decline into apathy and desperate terrorism.

In 1971 Habermas left Frankfurt for Starnberg, Bavaria, to take up, along with the natural scientist C. F. von Weizsäcker, the directorship of the newly created Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Conditions of Life in the Scientific-Technical World. In an environment which attracted some of the most brilliant younger sociologists in the country, he published an enormous amount of material, including the well-known Legitimation Crisis (1973) and culminating with The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). In 1982 he returned to Frankfurt, to the chair in sociology and philosophy from which he retired in 1994, and he continues to live in Starnberg, making frequent trips to the USA and elsewhere in the world.

Habermas’s massive intellectual achievement will be discussed in detail in the following chapters. In concluding this biographical introduction, it may be appropriate to make some general remarks about his role as an intellectual.4 Rather as Max Weber has been described as a bourgeois Marx, Habermas might be summarily characterized as a Marxist Weber. His Marxism, as will be seen in the next chapter, is anything but orthodox, but he continued to describe himself as a Marxist, and not only out of solidarity with others and as a provocation to the circumscribed political culture of the Federal Republic. The reference to Weber is justified by Habermas’s role as one of the leading intellectuals in Germany and in the world. Like Weber, he is basically a thinker rather than a man of action but one who intervenes in political issues when something, as he often puts it, ‘irritates’ him. These interventions began with a critique of Heidegger’s failure to reflect on his Nazi past, and the politics (in a broad sense) of the Federal Republic of Germany, in its Western and its now unified form, has been his principal concern.5 More recently, he has intervened on a wider range of topics, such as the wars in Iraq and Kosovo, the ethical issues raised by genetic engineering, and the future of the European Union; he has also commented in detail on the place of religion in Europe.

Habermas’s collected ‘political writings’ – a broad category which includes newspaper and journal articles, occasional lectures and interviews – run to over ten volumes. Although he rejects Weber’s doctrine of the value-freedom of science, like Weber he insists on the distinction between scholarly and political discourse.6 Like Weber, and Karl Jaspers7 in the post-war period, he has operated in some way as the intellectual conscience of Germany, with a public profile higher than one would expect of someone who has not sought out a political role. The comparison with Weber is perhaps also not inappropriate in intellectual terms. In my view, Habermas is the most important social theorist of the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first – a judgement shared by contemporary theorists much less enthusiastic than I am about the content of his work. The remainder of this book attempts to justify such an assessment.

Notes

Translations not quoted from published English-language editions are my own unless otherwise stated.

1 Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, ed. Peter Dews (1992), p. 78.

2 Ibid., p. 79.

3Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1969), p. 9.

4 Cf. Stefan Müller-Doohm, ‘Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas – two ways of being a public intellectual: sociological observations concerning the transformation of a social figure of modernity’, European Journal of Social Theory, 8, 2005, pp. 269–80. See also Christian Fleck, Andreas Hess and E. Stina Lyon (eds), Intellectuals and their Publics. Perspectives from the Social Sciences (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008).

5 See Charles Turner, ‘Jürgen Habermas: European or German?’ European Journal of Political Theory, 3, 3, 2004, pp. 293–314.

6 Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, p. 127.

7 Cf. Carl Jaspers, Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik? (Munich, Piper, 1966).

1

The Roots of Habermas’s Thought

Habermas combines a deep grounding in the philosophical tradition with a remarkable openness to a wide variety of contemporary philosophical and social theories.1 Entire books could be written about the respective influences of Kant and Hegel, Marx and Weber, Parsons and Piaget, pragmatism and so on. The most important source is, however, without question the broad Marxist tradition which also inspired the original Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.

The history of Marxist thought in the twentieth century is in large part a process for which the pejorative term is revisionism, involving the abandonment or relegation of certain Marxian principles, the incorporation of, or at least engagement with, non-Marxist theories such as those of Kant, Nietzsche or Freud and a tendency to pay more attention to superstructural processes, whether political, ideological or more particularly artistic, than to the so-called ‘base’.2

The Hungarian Marxist György Lukács can be seen as a crucial figure in this development: one channel at least through which German idealism, with important modifications by the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel, was transmuted into ‘critical theory’. This term is used in two main ways: first, to refer to a tradition beginning with Simmel and Lukács; second, more narrowly, to refer to the work of some of the writers associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. (The term ‘Frankfurt School’, which tends to be used interchangeably with ‘critical theory’ in the English-speaking world, was used in West Germany to refer to the Institute after its re-establishment in 1950.)

The history of the Institute, and its relationship to the Marxist tradition, have been thoroughly discussed in a variety of books, and it has become clear that Habermas’s relationship to Frankfurt critical theory was rather less immediate than is often assumed.3 Max Horkheimer, the Director of the Institute, seems not to have been at all concerned to establish a continuity with its pre-war interdisciplinary Marxist research; indeed he kept the back numbers of the Institute’s Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung locked away in a cellar.4 His interests, like those of Theodor Adorno, had become increasingly philosophical, and their critique of instrumental reason, expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), suggested a considerable scepticism about empirical social research. In intellectual terms, Habermas is closer to the Institute’s earlier programme, with its emphasis on the interdisciplinary appropriation of material drawn from various social sciences.

But, if Habermas was dissatisfied with the form of Adorno and Horkheimer’s thought from Dialectic of Enlightenment onwards, he shared their substantive preoccupation with the way in which enlightenment, in the form of instrumental rationality, turns from a means of liberation into a new source of enslavement: ‘Already at that time [the late 1950s] my problem was a theory of modernity, a theory of the pathology of modernity, from the viewpoint of the realization – the deformed realization – of reason in history.’5

In Habermas’s early work this preoccupation took three forms. First, a working-through of the classical philosophical texts: Marx and Weber, but also Kant, Fichte and Hegel – not to mention the Greeks. Second, a preoccupation with technology and the attempt to construct a ‘left’ alternative to the technological determinism arising in part from Heidegger and in post-war Germany from Arnold Gehlen and Helmut Schelsky. Third, and relatedly, a concern with the conditions of rational political discussion or, more grandiosely, practical reason, in the conditions of modern technocratic democracy. The first of these themes predominates in Theory and Practice; the second can be found in Habermas’s early journalism and in Technology and Science as Ideology; the third theme occurs in both these works, but is first addressed in Student und Politik and Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

Student und Politik is based on an empirical study carried out in 1957 on a sample of Frankfurt students: Habermas was responsible for the theoretical introduction on the concept of political participation and the sections on the students’ ‘political habitus’ and ‘image of society’. Habermas argues, in a move which may seem obvious but is actually not so common in the literature on participation, that this should not be considered as a value in itself but related to the conditions in which it occurs. His account of the contemporary situation in West Germany and related state-forms prefigures that given in his later book on the public sphere. With the partial resolution of the ‘social question’ in a welfare state with a fully democratic franchise, and with the decline of open class antagonism, the contradiction ‘has changed its form: it now appears as the depoliticization of the masses coinciding with the progressive politicization [in the sense of party political and parliamentary incorporation] of society itself’.6 This society ‘increasingly functionalizes its citizens for various public purposes, but it privatizes them in their consciousness’.7 It is thus not surprising that a large proportion of students, even those who consider themselves to be ‘good citizens’, are relatively distanced from politics.

The results of the survey caused a certain amount of public anxiety, in a country with a tendency to pull up its newly planted democracy to see how it was growing. The analysis of the limitations of German democracy, however, seems to have had a more lasting influence on the political consciousness of students and other radicals.

The public sphere

The same is true of Habermas’s first major book, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), translated after a long delay as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In this book, Habermas applies, at much greater length, to the concept of public opinion the kind of analysis which he had earlier given of political participation.

‘Public opinion’ takes on a different meaning depending on whether it is brought into play as a critical authority in connection with the normative mandate that the exercise of political and social power be subject to publicity or as the object to be molded in connection with a staged display of, and manipulative propagation of, publicity in the service of persons and institutions, consumer goods, and programs.8

Habermas’s strategy is to relate the concept of public opinion back to its historical roots in the idea of public sphere or public domain (Öffentlichkeit) in the hope of ‘attaining a systematic comprehension of our own society from the perspective of one of its central categories’ (p. 5). The literate bourgeois public (Öffentlichkeit again) of the eighteenth century, which had cut its teeth in literary discussion, took on a political role in the evaluation of contemporary affairs and, in particular, state policy. The clubs, salons and coffee-houses (there were 3000 of the latter in London in the early 1700s) supported by the growing and increasingly free press formed a critical forum, in which gentlemen independent of the court and other political institutions could get together on a basis of relative equality and discuss the great events of the day.

Among the causes of this development was a shift in the relationship between state and society which prefigures the later one described in Student und Politik. With the growth of trade and industry, state policy came to have an importance for the growing bourgeoisie which it had not had in a society of small-scale household production and retailing; hence the enormous growth in the newspaper market. In addition to any independent desire for greater democratic influence, people needed to know what the state was doing or failing to do and to influence it as far as they could. Habermas’s explanation of this process may be a rather materialist one, but the ideal of rational, informed discussion of public policy is one which runs like a red thread through the whole of his later work.9

Of course, Habermas admits, the idealized concept of public opinion as it was incorporated into constitutional theory was not at all fully realized; he notes, somewhat casually, the limitations of class and gender (pp. 85ff) and the tendencies to commercialization in the press (pp. 181ff). The second of these processes forms part of what Habermas calls the transformation of the public sphere – a shift from publicity in the abstract sense of what Gorbachev called glasnost, openness, to the modern sense of the term in journalism, advertising and politics (p. 140). In addition to these trends, there is the expansion of the state’s role as it develops into a welfare state, and the growth of large private concerns with a ‘quasi-political character’ (p. 148). Private law, especially in relation to property rights, is transformed as it necessarily becomes relevant to public law, in, for example, labour law or the law of tenancy, or in increasingly frequent contracts between the public authorities and private individuals or corporations. This blurring of the distinction between public and private law corresponds to a changed relationship between state and society (see e.g. pp. 151, 231).

Interestingly, Habermas does not put much emphasis on the general process which he and others have come to call Verrechtlichung – the trend to legal regulation of private life in, for example, family law. The ‘hollowing out’ of the intimate sphere of the family, as outside influences on family members become stronger, with the growth of labour markets and social insurance, and developments in suburban architecture tending to open up the family house to public gaze, is discussed in language which anticipates the later theme, in The Theory of Communicative Action, of the ‘colonization’ of the lifeworld by the market economy and legal-bureaucratic regulation.

In Structural Transformation, however, Habermas focuses on the role of publicity and public opinion in these changed conditions. The principle of critical publicity gets watered down as it expands into wider and wider areas of modern life. The reading public, which had prefigured the political public, also prefigures the latter’s decline into ‘minorities of specialists who put their reason to use publicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical’ (p. 175). ‘Whereas the press could previously merely mediate the reasoning process of the private people who had come together in public, this reasoning is now, conversely, only formed by the mass media’ (p. 188). The same is true of the political process, split between a small number of party activists and a basically inactive mass electorate; public opinion ceases to be a source of critical judgement and checks, and becomes a social-psychological variable to be manipulated. The result is a ‘gap between the constitutional fiction of public opinion and the social-psychological dissolution of its concept’ (p. 244; cf. section 24, pp. 236–44).

The contradiction is obvious: a proliferation of the social conditions of private existence that are maintained and secured by public authority, and therefore ought to be clarified within the communication process of a politically autonomous public of citizens, that is, should be made a topic for public opinion. Although objectively greater demands are placed on this authority, it operates less as a public opinion giving a rational foundation to the exercise of political and social authority, the more it is generated for the purpose of an abstract vote that amounts to no more than an act of acclamation within a public sphere temporarily manufactured for show or manipulation. (p. 222)

Habermas writes at times of a dialectic of Öffentlichkeit, and it is not too far-fetched to see Structural Transformation as a social-scientific remake of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Just as the Enlightenment critique of myth turned into another myth, the principle of the bourgeois public sphere, the critical assessment of public policy in terms of rational discussion oriented to a concept of the public interest, turns into what Habermas calls a manipulated public sphere in which states and corporations use ‘publicity’ in the modern sense to secure for themselves a kind of plebiscitary acclamation. Habermas’s version, however, is both more carefully grounded in the results of historical, sociological and political scientific research, and also somewhat less pessimistic in its conclusions. If some of his younger readers drew the conclusion that there was nothing for it but to join the SDS, Habermas envisaged certain counter-tendencies to, and opportunities in, the process he described.

When the liberal constitutional state develops into a welfare state and thus massively extends the range of its activity, ‘the requirement of publicity is extended from the organs of the state to all organizations acting in relation to the state’ (p. 232). These organizations are thus opened up to scrutiny by, and dialogue with, a corresponding variety of interest groups which link together members of the public concerned with specific aspects of welfare state provision.

Although the bureaucratization of administration seems, as Max Weber had noted in relation to parliamentary politics, to remove the activity of specialists from rational control, it might yet be possible to create, by means of public communication within these organizations, ‘an appropriate relation between bureaucratic decision and quasi-parliamentary deliberation’ (p. 234). This cautious conclusion seems to point in two main directions: (1) the critique of technocratic ideology and (2) the attempt to work out an intellectual and practical basis for public discussion and effective control of public policy. The first theme points towards Habermas’s essays in Technology and Science as Ideology and the philosophical critique of positivism; the second theme finds its full development in The Theory of Communicative Action and in Between Facts and Norms.

Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit sparked off a considerable discussion in West Germany. One possible response for those who wholly accepted Habermas’s diagnosis of the disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere was to join the revolutionary student movement. Along with Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, published in 1964 and translated into German in 1965, the book was a central text for radical critics of West German society, even after Habermas’s own relations with the student movement had become strained and discussion of his work increasingly hostile.10

Most critics of the book, from whatever direction, shared an anxiety at Habermas’s rather idealized account of the bourgeois public sphere. Marxists pointed out its limitations in terms of class, and feminists in terms of gender, while liberal-conservative critics also tend to stress the importance of private interests as against a warmed-up notion of the general will. Wolfgang Jäger argued this in historical terms, referring especially to English interest-group politics,11 while the system theorist Niklas Luhmann roundly dismissed, in the name of sociology, the very idea ‘that the individual … can find something common to all humanity, that he can reach a consensus, even truth’.12

For all these lines of criticism, the historical doubts feed into a critique of Habermas’s diagnosis of the present and his proposed solutions. For the liberal-conservatives, the present situation is not as bad as Habermas, following too closely the old Frankfurt critique of the ‘culture industry’, presents it; and his alternatives are Utopian, if not Jacobin or terroristic. For Luhmann, for example, public opinion as a sphere of communication becomes, like most things, more and more differentiated, specialized, institutionalized and professionalized. It is no longer appropriate, if it ever was, to think in terms of a subject of public opinion, the ‘public’ whose opinion it is claimed to be. For Marxist critics, Habermas’s account is either just insufficiently materialist, too concerned with ‘superstructural’ issues or, in the more positive critique presented by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge,13 insufficiently sensitive to the prospects for the promotion of an alternative, proletarian public sphere.

Feminist critiques of Habermas appeared rather later, and thus tended to focus more on his recent work than on Structural Transformation. Feminists have pointed out that Habermas’s ‘sex-blind’ categories fail to thematize the exclusion of women from the bourgeois public sphere and, more generally, the gender dimension of the public–private split. For some critics, this leads into a far-reaching and powerful critique of the abstract character of the Enlightenment (and Habermasian) model of the egalitarian interaction of rational citizens. This ‘excludes bodily and affective particularity, as well as the concrete histories of individuals that make groups unable to understand one another’.14 The feminist critique of Habermas’s theorization of the private–public division takes on a new form in relation to the opposition between ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’, which is the dominant motif of Habermas’s later work, and the contrast between an abstract ethics of duty and one which is grounded more substantially in notions of human community and solidarity.

I shall not discuss these three lines of criticism in detail here. Luhmann’s sceptical position has been a major preoccupation for Habermas, both in his exchange at the beginning of the 1970s15 and in substantial discussions in The Theory of Communicative Action and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, as well as in shorter essays such as ‘Can complex societies construct a rational identity?’ As we shall see, Habermas takes Luhmann very seriously indeed. His own rejection of neo-Marxist ‘praxis philosophy’ is based in good part on a Luhmannian doubt about the possibility of collective self-reflection – though Habermas continues to see a problem here, where Luhmann’s ‘sociological enlightenment’ suggests that one should simply reformulate the problem in terms of institutional specialization and technocratic management.

The negative Marxist critique which saw Habermas as just another bourgeois ideologist has lost what credibility it ever had with the demise of Marxism-Leninism, at least in Europe, as a political project. The more positive approach of looking towards the growth of a proletarian public sphere also seems less promising than it did in the 1970s. A more fruitful prospect is provided by the new social movements, though their ‘alternative public sphere’ is hardly distinct from that of the wider society and the movements’ efficacy depends largely on this close interaction.16

At a more empirical level, it is clear that Habermas’s thinking about the mass media was heavily influenced by Dialectic of Enlightenment’s model of the ‘culture industry’ and other models dominant in the 1960s. Media analysts have moved away from the conception of the public as passive recipients of commercial and political messages, as Habermas himself has noted in his occasional references to this issue, notably in his introduction to the second German edition of Structural Transformation. If this has taken some of the sting out of Habermas’s critique of the disintegration of the public sphere, his diagnosis of the limitations of mass representative democracy seems as relevant as ever. Although rather few politically active members of modern societies would uphold the ideas of council democracy or radical participatory models in the way that was common in the 1960s and 1970s, these themes have had a substantial influence on thinking about ways in which representative democracy might be radicalized and developed.

In his introduction to the second German edition, Habermas takes up the question of the exclusion of sub-bourgeois strata and women from the liberal public sphere. He concedes that he might have said more about the existence of various forms of ‘plebeian’ public sphere, and notes that the exclusion of subordinate strata from the bourgeois public sphere leads paradoxically to the latter’s pluralization, thus casting further doubt on his tendency to present it as a homogeneous entity. This process of exclusion remains fundamentally different, he insists, from that found in the ‘representative’ public sphere of traditional societies, in which the people are merely a background to royal, ecclesiastical and aristocratic displays of status.17

The exclusion of women, Habermas now believes, had more radical consequences. Just as popular culture, as described by Mikhail Bakhtin, operated as a counter-culture to the hierarchical and disciplined official culture, so the exclusion of women defined the public and private sphere in gendered terms, showing up the former as based on a ‘fraternal’ social contract, in Carole Pateman’s phrase.18 As his work moved on, Habermas did not respond systematically to criticisms of Structural Transformation until the publication of the second edition, but the main critical thrust of the book will be seen to return throughout his later work, notably Legitimation Crisis, On the Reconstruction of Historical Materialism, The Theory of Communicative Action and Between Facts and Norms.

Theory and practice

Habermas’s first volume of essays, Theory and Practice, was published in 1963 and contains material written over the previous six or seven years.19 In the preface, Habermas described these studies as ‘historical preliminaries to a systematic investigation of the relationship between theory and practice in the social sciences’. In the introduction to the fourth edition, he describes them somewhat more ambitiously as an attempt ‘to develop the idea of a theory of society conceived with a practical intention, and to delimit its status with respect to theories of different origins’ (p. 1).

Taken as a whole, the book has three main themes which recur in Habermas’s later work: (1) a critical evaluation of the Marxist tradition; (2) some reflections on the possibility of what he later called the ‘reconstruction’ of historical materialism; (3) a methodological comparison between the unity of empirical and normative, or technical and ‘practical’ issues to be found in Aristotle, in natural-law theory and in Marxism, and the scientistic, ostensibly value-free approach of the modern social sciences. The second and third of these themes lead us into Habermas’s subsequent work, where they are more systematically discussed; his early account of Marxism is, however, of considerable interest in delimiting his attitude to this body of theory.

The essay ‘Between philosophy and science: Marxism as critique’ begins with ‘four facts’ often held to count ‘against Marx’. First, the interpenetration of state and society in organized capitalism means that one can no longer treat political phenomena as simply dependent on an economic base. Second, the very widespread increase in prosperity in these societies means that ‘the interest in the emancipation of society can no longer be articulated directly in economic terms’ (p. 195). The crude power relation embodied in the wage labour contract has been overlaid by more complex forms of indirect manipulation. Therefore, third, ‘the designated executor of a future socialist revolution, the proletariat as proletariat, has been dissolved … the exclusion from control over the means of production is no longer bound up to such an extent with deprivation that this objective situation would still in any way be expressed subjectively as proletarian’ (p. 196). Finally, Soviet Marxism, in both theoretical and practical forms, has ‘paralysed’ ‘systematic discussion of Marxism, and with Marxism’ (p. 197).

These phenomena (noted long before in the earlier phase of critical theory) ‘form an insuperable barrier to any theoretical acceptance of Marxism’ (p. 198), and perhaps also to the ‘hidden orthodoxy’ (p. 203) which applies Marxist value theory to the cultural sphere.20 But Habermas is equally hostile to the attempt, represented here by Schumpeter, to separate Marxism into economics, sociology, philosophy and political prescription. This kind of asset stripping ‘only ends up with disjecta membra, torn out of the context of a theory envisaging society as a totality and related to practice’ (p. 205). The concept of society as a totality unites ‘the economic and sociological aspects’, but Marxism contains two further themes:

the dialectical conception of society as a historical process … which in the conflict of specifiable tendencies drives forward to produce one situation out of the other; and finally, a relation between theory and praxis which Marxism explicitly incorporates into reflection. For Marxism’s structure, from the perspective of the philosophy of science, corresponds to that of a philosophy of history with practical intentions. (p. 205)

It therefore cannot be reduced to ‘pure’ science, nor to ‘pure’ philosophy, but lies somewhere in between.21 Thus it takes up the philosophical concept of critique; it is ‘explicitly undertaken with political aims, and yet scientifically falsifiable’.

It is the latter point which comes to the fore in Habermas’s exposition of Marxism. The politicization of capitalist economies renders the base–superstructure distinction ‘problematic’ (p. 235), and thus raises problems for Marxism seen as a science, but a second area of difficulty concerns the conception that Marx’s critique of ideology is nothing more than a science. The dependence of ideas on interests arising from a system of production is originally a dialectical notion, linking ideas and material interests in a model of the process of social reproduction. But Engels, and Marx from 1859 onwards, turn this into a naturalistic theory. Thus ‘the correct ideology was distinguished from the false solely according to the criteria of a realist theory of knowledge’ (p. 238).22 Marxism, in other words, failed to uphold its ‘philosophical’ content in setting itself up as one positive science among others. ‘Marx never explicitly asked himself the epistemological question concerning the conditions of the possibility of a philosophy of history with a political intent’ (p. 242).

This conception forms the basis of what Habermas later came to call the reconstruction of historical materialism. The ‘presuppositions of a materialist philosophy of history’ are, at their most general, ‘the consciousness of global unity which arose in the eighteenth century’ (pp. 249–50) and, secondly, the idea, coming from Vico and Hegel, that ‘Human beings can only rationally appropriate their history insofar as it is their own work’ (p. 250). These two themes are now more compelling than ever in the age of nuclear weapons: ‘mankind has never before been confronted so sharply by the irony of a capacity to make its own history, yet still deprived of control over it … On the other hand … the framework which philosophy has taken over from theology, of history as totality, becomes questionable’ (p. 251). The unity of history is a fiction, as is that of a unified historical subject.23

An important element of Habermas’s reformation of Marxism is the distinction between work and interaction. Hegel’s early lectures in Jena, Habermas argues, contain a valuable model of ‘the inter-relation of work and interaction’ (p. 159) which is abandoned in his later works. At this time, Hegel was studying political economy, and Marxist commentators have welcomed the concrete and almost materialist emphasis at this stage of his work, before he came to treat real-world processes as mere aspects of the self-development of mind or spirit (Geist). In Hegel’s early work, it is, so to speak, the other way round:

it is not the spirit in the absolute movement of reflecting on itself which manifests itself in, among other things, language, labor, and moral relationships, but rather, it is the dialectical interconnection between linguistic symbolization, labor and interaction which determine the concept of spirit. (p. 143)

Work and interaction, the latter analysed in terms of a struggle for recognition,24 are two interrelated processes by which human beings come to terms with external nature and internal or human nature. Whereas Kant’s principles of moral action are those which a human subject can adopt on his or her own or, as Habermas puts it, ‘monologically’, morality for Hegel involves the mutual recognition of socialized human beings; this, rather than an abstract ‘practical reason’, is the real source of ethical norms.25 Already at this early stage in Habermas’s work we find him distinguishing between strategic action, including both the self-interested action of homo economicus and, ‘as a special case’, moral action as described by Kant on the one hand, and ‘communicative actions under common traditions’ on the other (p. 151).

This distinction between work and interaction runs right through Habermas’s writings; it also forms, along with the methodological issues discussed above, the main structuring element of Habermas’s critical appropriation of Marxism. Marx, in Habermas’s view, reduces communicative action to ‘instrumental action, the productive activity which regulates the material interchange of the human species with its natural environment’ (p. 169). This encourages a ‘misinterpretation’ of Marxism in terms of a mechanistic relationship between forces and relations of production which affects it both as an explanatory theory and as a theory of human liberation:

to set free the technical forces of production … is not identical with the development of norms which could fulfill the dialectic of moral relationships in an interaction free of domination … Liberation from hunger and misery does not necessarily converge with liberation from servitude and degradation; for there is no automatic developmental relation between labor and interaction. (p. 169)26

Habermas’s relationship to Marxism may perhaps best be described as one of positive critique. It embodies a qualified acceptance of historical materialism and the Marxist project of human liberation. This is, however, coupled with a strong sense of what has changed since Marx’s time, putting his substantive analyses in need of major revision, and a rejection of two sets of reductionist tendencies within Marxism: first, its methodological or metatheoretical reduction to science; second, its theoretical reduction to a technological determinism which replaces Marx’s dialectical conception of the interrelation between forces and relations of production.

Although the work/interaction distinction runs through Habermas’s work, and is most systematically expressed in The Theory of Communicative Action, in the contrast between strategic and communicative action, it is worth noting here some of the criticisms which have been addressed to it. First, one may question the value of separating out in this way two elements which are fused together in the Marxian concept of praxis; these doubts are shared by orthodox Marxists and, for example, by Anthony Giddens.27 Second, McCarthy and other critics have pointed to ambiguities in Habermas’s formulations; in particular, he tends to slide between the common-sense notions of work and interaction as concrete forms of human activity and a more abstract conception of them. (‘By “work” or purposive-rational action I understand either instrumental action or rational choice or their conjunction.’28) In a third line of criticism, which I shall discuss in more detail later and which goes to the heart of Habermas’s project, Giddens argues that Habermas’s concept of communicative action is too closely related to speech and to normative frameworks, and insufficiently oriented to ‘the production and reproduction of society’. This omission Giddens calls the ‘absent core in Habermas’ writings’. And, although Habermas denies Giddens’s charge that he assimilates the work/interaction distinction to that between forces and relations of production, his gloss on relations of production seems likely only to reinforce Giddens’s anxiety: ‘They make up the core component of a political, legal and social order that provides contexts for action orientated to reaching understanding.’29

Axel Honneth, in an article published (in New German Critique) in the same year as Giddens’s, usefully locates Habermas’s account of the concept of work in the context of twentieth-century social theory, in which the degradation of work in Taylorism is paralleled by a theoretical abandonment of the notion found in Marx (especially in his earlier writings) of work as self-fulfilment. At first sight this might seem a welcome exercise in demythologization on the part of people whose preferred form of work involves reading and, from time to time, speaking and writing. And there is surely much to be said for the view that what people value in their work is often precisely its communicative aspect. The force of Honneth’s point emerges in its negative form, when he points to the very substantial resistance offered to the rationalization of work processes where this involves a reduction in the workers’ autonomy in the direction of their work. The resistance to external interference with one’s work is a form of ‘practical rationality’ which ‘corresponds neither to the logic of acts of communication arrived at the coordination of actions via mutual understanding, nor to the logic of instrumental actions aimed at the technical domination of actual processes’.30

Whatever the analytical merits, then, of Habermas’s categories of instrumental and strategic action, they do not amount, as they might have seemed to in his earlier writings, to a concept of work.31 And, whatever may have been said about the end of the ‘work society’ and the decreasing importance of work for social identities,32 it remains a central aspect of life for most people. Honneth puts it neatly:

The foundation of historical materialism upon communication theory has at least the advantage of diverting attention to the structures of an evolutionary process of communicative liberation which is no longer attributable to a specific class. But its categorial weakness, as I see it, is that its basic concepts are laid out from the beginning as though the process of liberation from alienated work relations, which Marx had had in mind, were already historically complete.33

Having noted these objections, it is worth recalling the central purpose which the work/interaction distinction serves, for better or worse, in Habermas’s work. McCarthy expresses it well:

The point of insisting on the ‘heterogeneity’ or ‘irreducibility’ of work and interaction is to avoid just that conflation of techne and praxis, of technical progress and the rational conduct of life, that we found to be at the roots of the technocratic ideology. Rationalization is not emancipation. The growth of productive forces and administrative efficiency does not of itself lead to the replacement of institutions based on force by an organization of social relations bound to communication free from domination. The ideals of the technical mastery of history and of liberation from the quasi-natural forces of social and political domination, as well as the means for their realization, are fundamentally different. For this reason it is of decisive importance for a critical theory of society that the different dimensions of social practice be made explicit; only then can we comprehend their inter-dependence.34

This passage both marks the status of the work/interaction distinction in relation to the overall purpose of Habermas’s historical essays and points us forward to the reflections on positivism and technocracy which form the subject of the next chapter.

Notes