The Theory of Communicative Action E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 957

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

This study offers a systematic reconstruction of the theoretical foundations and framework of critical social theory. It is Habermas' "magnum opus", and it is regarded as one of the most important works of modern social thought. In this second and final volume of the work, Habermas examines the relations between action concepts and systems theory and elaborates a framework for analyzing the developmental tendencies of modern societies. He discusses in detail the work of Marx, Durkheim, G.H. Mead and Talcott Parsons, among others. By distinguishing between social systems and what he calls the "life-world", Habermas is able to analyze the ways in which the development of social systems impinges upon the symbolic and subjective dimensions of social life, resulting in the kind of crises, conflicts and protest movements which are characteristic of advanced capitalist societies in the late-20th century.

Leseprobe

Contents

Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason

Translator’s Preface

V The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim: From Purposive Activity to Communicative Action

1. The Foundations of Social Science in the Theory of Communication

A.

B.

C.

D.

E.

2. The Authority of the Sacred and the Normative Background of Communicative Action

A.

B.

C.

3. The Rational Structure of the Linguistification of the Sacred

A.

B.

C.

D.

E.

VI. Intermediate Reflections: System and Lifeworld

1. The Concept of the Lifeworld and the Hermeneutic Idealism of Interpretive Sociology

A.

B.

C.

D.

E.

2. The Uncoupling of System and Lifeworld

A.

B.

C.

D.

E.

F.

VII. Talcott Parsons: Problems in Constructing a Theory of Society

1. From a Normativistic Theory of Action to a Systems Theory of Society

A.

B.

C.

2. The Development of Systems Theory

A.

B.

C.

3. The Theory of Modernity

A.

B..

VIII. Concluding Reflections: From Parsons via Weber to Marx

1. A Backward Glance: Weber’s Theory of Modernity

A.

B.

C.

2. Marx and the Thesis of Internal Colonization

A.

B.

C.

3. The Tasks of a Critical Theory of Society

A.

B.

C.

Notes

Index

Analytical Table of Contents for Volumes 1 and 2

First published in 1981 as Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Band 2: Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main

Translator’s preface and translation copyright © Beacon Press 1987

This edition first published in 1987 by Polity Press in association withBlackwell Publishers Ltd.First published in paperback 1989Reprinted in 1992, 1995, 1998, 2004, 2006

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ISBN 0–7456–0770–5 (pbk)

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Translator’s Preface

In preparing this translation, I was greatly reassured by the author’s willingness to read through a first draft and suggest whatever changes he thought appropriate. The reader should be advised that, while these changes were introduced to capture more precisely his meaning or to make the translation more readable, they often resulted in minor departures from the original text. At such points, then, the correspondence between the German and English versions is not exactly that of translation.

I am indebted to Victor Lidz and Jeffrey Alexander for reading and commenting upon the translation of Chapter VII, and to Robert Burns and Carol Rose for helping with the legal terminology in Chapter VIII. I am particularly grateful to Sydney Lenit, Marina Rosiene, and Claudia Mesch for undertaking the hardly inconsiderable task of typing and retyping the manuscript.

Thomas McCarthyNorthwestern University

V

The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim: From Purposive Activity to Communicative Action

In the Marxist reception of Weber’s theory of rationalization, from Lukacs to Adorno, the rationalization of society was always thought of as a reification of consciousness. As I have argued in Volume 1, the paradoxes to which this conceptual strategy leads show that rationalization cannot be dealt with adequately within the conceptual frame of the philosophy of consciousness. In Volume 2 I will take up the problematic of reification once again and reformulate it in terms of, on the one hand, communicative action and, on the other, the formation of subsystems via steering media. Before doing so I shall develop these basic concepts in the context of the history of social theory. Whereas the problematic of rationalization/reification lies along a “German” line of social-theoretical thought running from Marx through Weber to Lukacs and Critical Theory, the paradigm shift from purposive activity to communicative action was prepared by George Herbert Mead and Emile Durkheim. Mead (1863– 1931) and Durkheim (1858–1917) belong, like Weber (1864–1920), to the generation of the founding fathers of modern sociology. Both developed basic concepts in which Weber’s theory of rationalization may be taken up again and freed from the aporias of the philosophy of consciousness: Mead with his communication-theoretic foundation of sociology, Durkheim with a theory of social solidarity connecting social integration to system integration.

The ideas of reconciliation and freedom, which Adorno—who in the final analysis remained under the spell of Hegelian thought—merely circled around in a negative-dialectical fashion, stand in need of explication. They can in fact be developed by means of the concept of communicative rationality, toward which their use by Adorno points in any case. For this purpose we can draw upon a theory of action that, like Mead’s, is concerned to project an ideal communication community. This Utopia serves to reconstruct an undamaged intersubjectivity that allows both for unconstrained mutual understanding among individuals and for the identities of individuals who come to an unconstrained understanding with themselves. The limits of a communication-theoretic approach of this sort are evident. The reproduction of society as a whole can surely not be adequately explained in terms of the conditions of communicative rationality, though we can explain the symbolic reproduction of the life world of a social group in this way, if we approach the matter from an internal perspective.

In what follows, I will (1) examine how Mead develops the basic conceptual framework of normatively regulated and linguistically mediated interaction; he arrives at this point by way of a logical genesis, starting from interaction mediated by gestures and controlled by instincts, and passing through the stage of symbolically mediated interaction in signal languages. (2) In the transition from symbolically mediated to normatively guided interaction, there is a gap in the phylogenetic line of development which can be filled in with Durkheim’s assumptions concerning the sacred foundations of morality, the ritually preserved fund of social solidarity. (3) Taking as our guideline the idea of a “linguistification” [Versprachlichung] of this ritually secured, basic normative agreement, we can arrive at the concept of a rationalized lifeworld with differentiated symbolic structures. This concept takes us beyond the conceptual limitations of the Weberian theory of action, which is tailored to purposive activity and purposive rationality.

1. The Foundations of Social Science in the Theory of Communication

Early in the twentieth century, the subject-object model of the philosophy of consciousness was attacked on two fronts—by the analytic philosophy of language and by the psychological theory of behavior. Both renounced direct access to the phenomena of consciousness and replaced intuitive self-knowledge, reflection, or introspection with procedures that did not appeal to intuition. They proposed analyses that started from linguistic expressions or observed behavior and were open to intersubjective testing. Language analysis adopted procedures for rationally reconstructing our knowledge of rules that were familiar from logic and linguistics; behavioral psychology took over the methods of observation and strategies of interpretation established in studies of animal behavior.1

Despite their common origins in the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, these two approaches to the critique of consciousness have gone their separate ways and have, in their radical forms, developed independent of one another. Moreover, logical positivism and behaviorism purchased their release from the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness by reducing the traditional roster of problems with a single coup de main—in one case through withdrawing to the analysis of languages constructed for scientific purposes, in the other by restricting itself to the model of the individual organism’s stimulus-induced behavior. The analysis of language has, of course, freed itself from the constrictions of its dogmatic beginnings. The complexity of the problematic developed by Peirce has been regained along two paths—one running from Carnap and Reichenbach through Popper to postempiricist philosophy of science, the other from the early Wittgenstein through the late Wittgenstein and Austin to the theory of speech acts. By contrast the psychological theory of behavior has, notwithstanding occasional moves for liberalization, developed within the bounds of an objectivistic methodology. If we want to release the revolutionary power of the basic concepts of behavior theory, the potential in this approach to burst the bounds of its own paradigm, we shall have to go back to Mead’s social psychology.

Mead’s theory of communication also recommends itself as a point of intersection of the two critical traditions stemming from Peirce.2 Although Mead took no notice of the linguistic turn in philosophy, looking back today one finds astonishing convergences between his social psychology and the analysis of language and theory of science developed in formal-pragmatic terms. Mead analyzed phenomena of consciousness from the standpoint of how they are formed within the structures of linguistically or symbolically mediated interaction. In his view, language has constitutive significance for the sociocultural form of life: “In man the functional differentiation through language gives an entirely different principle of organization which produces not only a different type of individual but also a different society.”3

Mead presented his theory under the rubric of “social behaviorism” because he wanted to stress the note of criticism of consciousness. Social interactions form symbolic structures out of sentences and actions, and analyses can deal with them as with something objective. There are however two methodological differences separating Mead’s approach from behaviorism. The model from which he starts is not the behavior of an individual organism reacting to stimuli from an environment, but an interaction in which at least two organisms react to one another and behave in relation to one another: “We are not, in social psychology, building up the behavior of the social group in terms of the behavior of the separate individuals composing it; rather, we are starting out with a given social whole of complex activities, into which we analyze (as elements) the behavior of each of the separate individuals composing it.”4 Mead rejects not only the methodological individualism of behavior theory but its objectivism as well. He does not want to restrict the concept of “behavior” to observable behavioral reactions; it is to include symbolically oriented behavior as well, and to allow for the reconstruction of general structures of linguistically mediated interactions: “Social psychology is behavioristic in the sense of starting off with an observable activity—the dynamic, ongoing social process, and the social acts which are its component elements—to be studied and analyzed scientifically. But it is not behavioristic in the sense of ignoring the experience of the individual—the inner phase of that process or activity.”5 In comparison with the aspect of behavior, the meaning embodied in social action is something nonexternal; at the same time, as something objectivated in symbolic expressions, it is publicly accessible and not, like phenomena of consciousness, merely internal: “There is a field within the act itself which is not external, but which belongs to the act, and there are characteristics of that inner organic conduct which do reveal themselves in their own attitudes, especially those connected with speech.”6

Because Mead incorporated a nonreductionist concept of language into behaviorism, we find combined in him the two approaches critical of consciousness that otherwise went their separate ways after Peirce: the theory of behavior and the analysis of language. His communication theory is not restricted to acts of reaching understanding; it deals with communicative action Linguistic symbols and languagelike symbols interest him only insofar as they mediate interactions, modes of behavior, and actions of more than one individual. In communicative action, beyond the function of achieving understanding, language plays the role of coordinating the goal-directed activities of different subjects, as well as the role of a medium in the socialization of these very subjects. Mead views linguistic communication almost exclusively under these last two aspects: the social integration of goal-directed actors, and the socialization of subjects capable of acting. He neglects the achievement of mutual understanding and the internal structures of language. In this respect, his communication theory stands in need of supplementary analyses of the sort carried out since in semantics and speech-act theory.7

The paradigm shift prepared by Mead’s social psychology interests us here because it clears the way for a communication concept of rationality, to which I shall return later. In this section I want (A) to characterize the problem that serves as the point of departure for Mead’s theory of communication, in order (B) to show how he explains the transition from subhuman interaction mediated by gestures to symbolically mediated interaction. (C) The results of Mead’s theory of meaning can be rendered more precise by drawing upon Wittgenstein’s investigations of the concept of a rule. () I would like then to show how language is differentiated in respect to the functions of mutual understanding, social integration, and socialization, and how this makes possible a transition from symbolically mediated to normatively guided interaction. () A de-socialized perception of things, a norming of behavioral expectations, and a development of the identity of acting subjects serve as the basis for a complementary construction of the social and subjective worlds. Mead did not develop the basic concepts of objects, norms, and subjects from a phylogenetic perspective—as he did the basic categories of the theory of meaning—but only from an ontogenetic perspective. This gap can be closed by drawing upon Durkheim’s theory of the origins of religions and ritual.