The Theory of Communicative Action E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 925

Beschreibung

Here, for the first time in English, is volume one of Jurgen Habermas's long-awaited magnum opus: The Theory of Communicative Action. This pathbreaking work is guided by three interrelated concerns: (1) to develop a concept of communicative rationality that is no longer tied to the subjective and individualistic premises of modern social and political theory; (2) to construct a two-level concept of society that integrates the 'lifeworld' and 'system' paradigms; and (3) to sketch out a critical theory of modernity that explains its sociopathologies in a new way. Habermas approaches these tasks through a combination of conceptual analyses, systematic reflections, and critical reconstructions of such predecessors as Marx and Weber, Durkheim and Mead, Horkheimer and Adorno, Schutz and Parsons. Reason and the Rationalization of Society develops a sociological theory of action that stresses not its means-ends or teleological aspect, but the need to coordinate action socially via communication. In the introductory chapter Habermas sets out a powerful series of arguments on such foundational issues as cultural and historical relativism, the methodology of Verstehen, the inseparabilty of interpretation from critique. In addition to clarifying the normative foundations of critical social inquiry, this sets the stage for a systematic appropriation of Weber's theory of rationalization and its Marxist reception by Lukacs, Horkheimer and Adorno. This is an important book for degree students of philosophy, sociology and related subjects.

Leseprobe

Contents

Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society

Translator’s Introduction

Author’s Preface

I. Introduction: Approaches to the Problem of Rationality

1. “Rationality”—A Preliminary Specification

2. Some Characteristics of the Mythical and the Modern Ways of Understanding the World

3. Relations to the World and Aspects of Rationality in Four Sociological Concepts of Action

4. The Problem of Understanding Meaning in the Social Sciences

II. Max Weber’s Theory of Rationalization

1. Occidental Rationalism

2. The Disenchantment of Religious-Metaphysical Worldviews and the Emergence of Modern Structures of Consciousness

3. Modernization as Societal Rationalization: The Role of the Protestant Ethic

4. The Rationalization of Law. Weber’s Diagnosis of the Times

III. Intermediate Reflections: Social Action, Purposive Activity, and Communication

IV. From Lukacs to Adorno, Rationalization as Reification

1. Max Weber in the Tradition of Western Marxism

2. The Critique of Instrumental Reason

Notes

Index

For Ute Habermas-Wesselhoeft

First published as Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, Band I: Handlungsrationalitat und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung, © 1981 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main

Translator’s preface and translation copyright © Beacon Press 1984

This edition first published 1984 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

First published in paperback 1986.

Reprinted 1991, 1995, 1997, 2004

Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0–7456–0386–6

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Translator’s Introduction

Since the beginning of the modern era the prospect of a limitless advance of science and technology, accompanied at each step by moral and political improvement, has exercised a considerable hold over Western thought. Against this the radicalized consciousness of modernity of the nineteenth century voiced fundamental and lasting doubts about the relation of “progress” to freedom and justice, happiness and self-realization. When Nietzsche traced the advent of nihilism back to the basic values of Western culture—“because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideas”—he gave classic expression to a stream of cultural pessimism that flows powerfully again in contemporary consciousness. Antimodernism is rampant today, and in a variety of forms; what they share is an opposition to completing “the project of modernity” insofar as this is taken to be a matter of rationalization. There are, of course, good reasons for being critical of the illusions of the Enlightenment. The retreat of “dogmatism” and “superstition” has been accompanied by fragmentation, discontinuity and loss of meaning. Critical distance from tradition has gone hand in hand with anomie and alienation, unstable identities and existential insecurities. Technical progress has by no means been an unmixed blessing; and the rationalization of administration has all too often meant the end of freedom and self-determination. There is no need to go on enumerating such phenomena; a sense of having exhausted our cultural, social, and political resources is pervasive. But there is a need to subject these phenomena to careful analysis if we wish to avoid a precipitate abandonment of the achievements of modernity. What is called for, it might be argued, is an enlightened suspicion of enlightenment, a reasoned critique of Western rationalism, a careful reckoning of the profits and losses entailed by “progress.” Today, once again, reason can be defended only by way of a critique of reason.

Jürgen Habermas has been called “the last great rationalist,” and in a certain sense he is. But his is a rationalism with important differences; for, in good dialectical fashion, he has sought to incorporate into it the central insights of the critique of rationalism. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns,published in two volumes in 1981, represents the culmination to date of his efforts.1Reason and the Rationalization of Society is a translation, with minor revisions, of the first volume; a translation of the second volume, System and Lifeworld: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, will follow.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to publishing the two volumes separately. On the positive side, the Anglo-American reception of a major work in twentieth-century social theory can get underway sooner, at a time when the questions it treats are moving rapidly to the center of intellectual interest. As the English-language discussion of these issues has not yet congealed into hard and fast patterns, the appearance of this volume at this time may well play a significant role in structuring it. On the negative side, there is the fact that Habermas sustains a continuous line of thought across the nearly 1,200 pages of the two volumes. The part of the argument deployed in Volume 1, while certainly intelligible and interesting in its own right, might well be misconstrued when detached from that larger context. In this introduction I hope to reduce that danger by sketching the argument of the book as a whole, especially the points developed in Volume 2.

In the preface, and elsewhere, Habermas tells us that The Theory of Communicative Action has three interrelated concerns: (1) to develop a concept of rationality that is no longer tied to, and limited by, the subjectivistic and individualistic premises of modern philosophy and social theory; (2) to construct a two-level concept of society that integrates the lifeworld and system paradigms; and, finally, (3) to sketch out, against this background, a critical theory of modernity which analyzes and accounts for its pathologies in a way that suggests a redirection rather than an abandonment of the project of enlightenment. Part I of this introduction deals with the first of these concerns; part II considers the lifeworld/system question and its relevance for a theory of contemporary society. But first, one general remark on Habermas’s approach: He develops these themes through a some-what unusual combination of theoretical constructions with historical reconstructions of the ideas of “classical” social theorists. The thinkers discussed—Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Mead, Lukacs, Horkheimer, Adorno, Parsons—are, he holds, still very much alive. Rather than regarding them as so many corpses to be dissected exegetically, he treats them as virtual dialogue partners from whom a great deal that is of contemporary significance can still be learned. The aim of his “historical reconstructions with systematic intent” is to excavate and incorporate their positive contributions, to criticize and overcome their weaknesses, by thinking with them to go beyond them.

Interspersed throughout these critical dialogues with the classics are numerous excurses and two chapter-length Zwischenbetrachtungen or intermediate reflections, devoted to systematic questions. The concluding chapter attempts to combine the fruits of his historical reconstructions with the results of his systematic reflections in sketching a critical theory of modernity.

For reasons that Habermas sets forth in the text and that I briefly mention below, he holds that an adequate theory of society must integrate methods and problematics previously assigned exclusively to either philosophy orempirical social science. In the first portion of this introduction I consider some of the more “philosophical” aspects of the theory of communicative action; in the second part, I turn to more “sociological” themes.

I

The Cartesian paradigm of the solitary thinker—solus ipse—as the proper, even unavoidable, framework for radical reflection on knowledge and morality dominated philosophical thought in the early modern period. The methodological solipsism it entailed marked the approach of Kant at the end of the eighteenth century no less than that of his empiricist and rationalist predecessors in the two preceding centuries. This monological approach preordained certain ways of posing the basic problems of thought and action: subject versus object, reason versus sense, reason versus desire, mind versus body, self versus other, and so on. In the course of the nineteenth century this Cartesian paradigm and the subjectivistic orientation associated with it were radically challenged. Early in the century Hegel demonstrated the intrinsically historical and social character of the structures of consciousness. Marx went even further, insisting that mind is not the ground of nature but nature that of mind; he stressed that human consciousness is essentially embodied and practical and argued that forms of consciousness are an encoded representation of forms of social reproduction. In establishing the continuity of the human species with the rest of nature, Darwin paved the way for connecting intelligence with self-preservation, that is, for a basically functionalist conception of reason such as we find in American Pragmatism. Nietzsche and Freud disclosed the unconscious at the heart of consciousness, the role of the preconceptual and nonconceptual within the conceptual realm. Historicism exhibited in detail the historical and cultural variability of categories of thought and principles of action. The end result was, in Habermas’s phrase, a “desublimation of spirit” and, as a consequence, a “disempowering of philosophy.”

But the history of ideas is full of surprises; and twentieth-century philosophy bore witness to the continued power of the Cartesian model, in a variety of forms—from Edmund Husserl’s openly Cartesian phenomenology to the Cartesianism lying just below the surface of logical empiricism. More recently, however, the critique of this model has been vigorously renewed. Thus we are said to be living in a “post-Heideggerian,” “post-Wittgensteinian,” “poststructuralist” age. The spirit has once again been desublimated. Subjectivity has been shown to be “infiltrated with the world” in such a way that “otherness is carried to the very heart of selfhood.” This “twilight of subjectivity” is not merely an intraphilosophic affair, a reminder to philosophers that they are not after all the high priests of culture. It is the theoretical center of the stream of antimodernist thought I mentioned at the outset; thus it has implications that go well beyond the confines of academic philosophy. The critique of “rootless rationalism” goes hand in hand with an unmasking of the anthropocentric, egoistic, possessive, and domineering aspects of Western individualism; together they frequently serve as a prologue to the rejection of central concepts of European humanism. We cannot ignore the question of whether, in the absence of an archimedean point outside the world, anything can be salvaged from these emphatic concepts and the universalist claims connected with them. And if the subject is desublimated, can we really expect much more from general social “theory” than a historicist contemplation of the variety of forms of life in the of the past; or a hermeneutic dialogue with other cultures and epochs about the common concerns of human life; or, perhaps, a genealogical unmasking of any pretense to universal validity?