The Habermas Handbook 9780231535885

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THE HABERMAS HANDBOOK

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

Amy Allen, General Editor New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and globalization and their complex interconnections. Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy Allen Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, Donna V. Jones Democracy in What State?, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, Slavoj Çiäek Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, Jacques Rancière The Right to Justification: Elements of Constructivist Theory of Justice, Rainer Forst The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment, Albena Azmanova The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Adrian Parr Media of Reason: A Theory of Rationality, Matthias Vogel Social Acceleration: The Transformation of Time in Modernity, Hartmut Rosa The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization, María Pía Lara Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism, James Ingram Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Axel Honneth Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary, Chiara Bottici Alienation, Rahel Jaeggi The Power of Tolerance: A Debate, Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, edited by Luca Di Blasi and Christoph F. E. Holzhey Radical History and the Politics of Art, Gabriel Rockhill The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel, Robyn Marasco A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique, Anita Chari The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Amy Allen Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity, Axel Honneth and Jacques Rancière, edited by Katia Genel and JeanPhilippe Deranty What Is a People?, Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, and Jacques Rancière Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism, Benjamin Y. Fong Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Enzo Traverso Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later: The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics, edited by Olivia Custer, Penelope Deutscher, and Samir Haddad

THE HABERMAS HANDBOOK EDITED BY HAUKE BRUNKHORST, REGINA KREIDE, AND CRISTINA LAFONT

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2009 J. B. Metzler’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung und Carl Urnst Poeschel Verlag GmbH Stuttgart, Germany English-language edition copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brunkhorst, Hauke, editor. | Kreide, Regina, editor. | Lafont, Cristina, 1963– editor. Title: The Habermas handbook / edited by Hauke Brunkhorst, Regina Kreide, and Cristina Lafont. Other titles: Habermas-Handbuch. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2017. | Series: New directions in critical theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017005584 (print) | LCCN 2017027977 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231535885 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231166423 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Habermas, Jèurgen. | Philosophy. | Sociology—Philosophy. Classification: LCC B3258.H324 (ebook) | LCC B3258.H324 H32213 2017 (print) | DDC 193—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005584

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America

Cover design: Lisa Hamm Cover image: © SZ Photo / Regina Schmeken/Bridgeman Images.

C ON T EN T S

Preface

xi

PART I. INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY 1 HAUKE BRUNKHORST AND STEFAN MÜLLER-DOOHM

PART II. CONTEXTS

1. The Philosophy of History, Anthropology, and Marxism AX EL H O N N E TH

2. The Frankfurt School and Social Theory

31

AX EL H O N N E TH

3. Constitutional Law

36

W I LLI AM E. SC HE UE RM AN

4. Pragmatism and Ultimate Justification

43

M AT T H I AS K E TTN E R

5. Hermeneutics and the Linguistic Turn CRISTINA LAFONT

6. Speech Acts P ET ER N I ES E N

58

49

27

vi

Contents

7. Psychoanalysis

64

J O EL W H I TE BOOK

8. Postmetaphysical Thinking

71

K EN N ET H BAY N E S

9. Kant

75

I N G EB O R G M AUS

10. Cognitive Psychology

92

G ER T R U D NUN N E R -WI N KL E R

11. The Epitome of Technocratic Consciousness

98

M AR C ELO NE VE S

12. Evolutionary Theories

105

K LAU S ED ER

13. Power Discourses

111

AN D R EAS NI E D E R BE R GE R

14. Juridical Discourses

117

K LAU S G Ü NTHE R

15. The Theory of Democracy

122

R AI N ER SC HM AL Z- BRUN S

16. Moral and Ethical Discourses: The Distinction in General 133 GEORG LOHMANN

17. The Constitutionalization of International Law J EAN L. C OHE N

18. European Constitutionalization CHRISTIAN JOERGES

19. The Theory of Justice REGINA KREIDE

20. Deconstruction

170

T H O M AS K H URAN A

21. Poststructuralism

177

AM Y ALLEN

22. Feminism

183

AM Y R . B AE HR

23. Neopragmatism

188

RICHARD J. BERNSTEIN

162

153

143

Contents

24. Jewish Philosophy

vii

196

MICHA BRUMLIK

25. Monotheism

207

FELMON DAVIS

PART III. TEXTS

26. Schelling, Marx, and the Philosophy of History: Das Absolute und die Geschichte: Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken (The Absolute and History: On the Ambiguity in Schelling’s Thought, 1954) 219 M AN F R ED F RAN K

27. The Theory of the Public Sphere: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) 245 N AN C Y F R ASE R

28. Technology and Reification: “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’ ” (1968) 256 ROBIN CELIKATES AND RAHEL JAEGGI

29. Critique of Knowledge as Social Theory: Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) 271 W I LLI AM R E HG

30. Communicative Rationality: Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Preparatory Remarks for a Theory of Communicative Action, 1971) 288 CRISTINA LAFONT

31. Late Capitalism and Legitimation: Legitimation Crisis (1973)

306

F R AN K N U LLM E I E R

32. History and Evolution: Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (1976) 325 T H O M AS M C C ARTHY

33. Aporias of Cultural Modernity: “Modernity—an Unfinished Project” (1980) 334 CHRISTOPH MENKE

34. Stand-In and Interpreter: “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter” (1981) 349 HAUKE BRUNKHORST

35. The Theory of Society: The Theory of Communicative Action (1981): A Classic of Social Theory 360 DAVID STRECKER

viii

Contents

36. The Discourse Theory of Morality: “Discourse Ethics—Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification” (1983) 383 RAINER FORST

37. Defense of Modernity: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985): Modernity as Rationalization and the Critique of Instrumental Reason 394 SEYLA B EN HABI B

38. Democracy, Law, and Society: Between Facts and Norms (1992): Points of Reference: The Emergence of Political Philosophy from Theoretical Philosophy 417 CHRISTOPH MÖLLERS

39. Europe, European Constitution: “Why Europe Needs a Constitution” (2001) 432 AN D R EW ARATO

40. Religion, Metaphysics, Freedom: “Faith and Knowledge” (2001) H ELG E H Ø I BRAATE N

41. Human Nature and Genetic Manipulation: The Future of Human Nature (2001) 461 THOMAS M. SCHMIDT

42. The Constitutionalization of International Law and Politics: “Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?” (2004) 474 JAM ES B O H M AN

PART IV. CONCEPTS

43. Cognitive Interests

489

W I LLI AM R E HG

44. Colonization

494

M AT T I AS I S E R

45. Communicative Action

499

CRISTINA LAFONT

46. Communicative Anthropology DIRK JÖRKE

47. Conservatism M I C H A B R UM L I K

507

504

444

Contents

48. Constitutions and Constitutional Patriotism R AI N ER N I C KE L

49. Cosmopolitan Condition

517

K EN N ET H B AY N E S

50. Counterfactual Presuppositions

520

AN D R EAS KOL L E R

51. Deliberation

528

N I C O LE D EI T E L HOFF

52. Discourse

533

K LAU S G Ü N THE R

53. Discourse Ethics

538

RAINER FORST

54. Equality

541

K EN N ET H B AY N E S

55. European Citizenship

544

CHRISTIAN JOERGES

56. Evolution

549

M AR C ELO NE VE S

57. Historical Materialism

554

M AR T I N H ARTM AN N

58. Human Rights and Human Rights

558

REGINA KREIDE

59. Ideology

562

M AR T I N SAA R

60. Intellectuals

565

RENÉ GABRIËLS

61. Late Capitalism

571

F R AN K N U LLM E I E R

62. Learning Processes

577

G ER T R U D N UN N E R -WI N KL E R

63. Legal Wars Versus Legitimate Wars

581

AN N A G EI S

64. Legality, Legitimacy, and Legitimation R AI N ER N I C KE L

586

513

ix

x

Contents

65. Mass Culture and Cultural Criticism G ER T R U D KOC H

66. Postmetaphysical Thinking

594

GEORG LOHMANN

67. Power

598

M AT T I AS I S E R

68. Pragmatic Turn

602

ALI M . R I Z VI

69. Public Sphere

605

PAT R I Z I A N AN Z

70. Radical Reformism

610

HAUKE BRUNKHORST

71. Rational Reconstruction

614

M AT T I AS I S E R

72. Rationality and Rationalization HAUKE BRUNKHORST

73. Social Pathology

623

M AR T I N H A RTM AN N

74. Society

627

H AR T M U T ROSA

75. System and Lifeworld

632

M AR C ELO NE VE S

Appendix: Chronology 637 Bibliography 641 List of Contributors 649 Index 653

619

590

P REFACE

J

ürgen Habermas’s contributions to the theory of society, politics, and legal and social philosophy represent one of the most widely read bodies of work in the twentieth century. His work has generated, in addition to heated polemics, rejection, and criticism—which occasionally took unproductive paths, including neoconservative surveillance efforts in the 1970s that went so far as to affirm ties between the theory of communicative action and bomb-throwing terrorists—a current of criticism that has refined opposing positions (especially among other variants of systems theory in Germany and France). Various approaches have taken up Habermas’s work and developed it. Since the 1970s, ongoing discussions have occurred on an ever-broader scale, often adding further depth to his reflections. As occurred for Hegel and Luhmann, left and right wings have already emerged among Habermas’s readers. Lateral and sometimes parallel connections play early writings out against later ones; other efforts address only recent texts and have long abandoned the author’s points of departure in Schelling, Heidegger, Marx, and even the social sciences. That said, when discussing a thinker who publishes roughly an essay a month, all commentary is necessarily provisional. At least half of Habermas’s writings take stock of current research and new fields of inquiry and, in so doing, modify his own theory. Observations to be made depend on the positions and responses offered by an author who—like Talcott Parsons or Richard Rorty—is engaged in a continuous process of critique and response, polemic and discussion, with alternate programs of theory and research.

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Preface

The volume at hand is addressed, in equal measure, to the scholarly community and to a broader public interested in politics and philosophy. Habermas remains as relevant as ever both in the academy and as a diagnostician of contemporary events, and he continues to be the focus of controversies and debates that he often initiates. In this regard, this book strikes only a provisional balance, yet it offers more, too: the works Habermas has already published—as well as the reception they have met with on a global scale, which is all but impossible to survey—stand as an epochal achievement that bears on and has influenced politics, law, social sciences, psychology, and public life. The task, then, is to present this body of work to the public in all its complexity yet in a readily comprehensible manner. A handbook along the lines of the present volume provides an appropriate medium. At the same time, the editors mean for it to intervene in ongoing debates as part of a work in progress conducted by countless others, too. To this end, a brief intellectual biography provides the theoretical context for key studies, relevant authors, debates, and contemporary points of reference. It is followed by an extensive account of individual works, monographs, and essays that have commanded particular notice, in order to provide an overview of key assumptions and important claims as well as of the reception they have met with across the disciplines and the ways they have been developed in other contexts. A concluding section consists of shorter essays that elaborate central concepts of Habermas’s work as a whole. As a rule, standard English translations are used; when a date is provided, it refers to subsequent, expanded editions. For the most part, essays from collected volumes of the author’s work are indicated by the title of the book, not the title of the article. The bibliography includes, in addition to information about English translations, the publication date for the German originals. Many people have contributed to this wide-ranging volume. Great thanks are owed to Semhar Marcos, Marieke Kupers, and, especially, Sophie Wulk, for checking texts thoroughly. Erik Butler is hereby thanked for ably translating the German contributions into English. With characteristic professionalism, Nikolaus Gramm took on final editing and provided important feedback on content and organization. Carlos Pereira Di Salvo provided translation assistance with the back matter and proofread the book. Last but certainly not least, a special thanks to Columbia University Press, particularly Amy Allen, editor of the series New Directions in Critical Theory, and her colleagues Wendy Lochner and Christine Dunbar. While answering countless questions and offering their expertise to help the book achieve its final form, they gave us complete freedom to shape matters of content.

PART I INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY HAUKE BRUNKHORST AND STEFAN MÜLLER-DOOHM

B

etween the ages of ten and sixteen, Jürgen Habermas was just old enough to experience, in conscious manner, World War II and its aftermath: first, Germany’s victories and conquest of all of Europe, then, the country’s unconditional surrender and the Nuremberg Trials. In August 1939—under orders from the Führer—Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Jodl, Arthur Seyß-Inquart, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg, Wilhelm Keitel, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, and others had carried out the attack and despoilment of Poland, where they erected camps for forced labor and extermination. Millions of human beings were deported, enslaved, and murdered. Over the next five years, the same operation occurred throughout Europe, especially in the east. In October 1945, the organizers were put on trial; one year later, they were hanged. The generation that had joined the Hitler Youth during the war and even served as Flakhelfer (antiaircraft auxiliaries) or participated in the Volkssturm at the end—including later intellectual figures such as Niklas Luhmann, Hermann Lübbe, Ralf Dahrendorf, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ulrich Wehler, Odo Marquard, Alexander Kluge, the brothers Hans and Wolfgang Mommsen, and Günter Grass, as well as politicians including Helmut Kohl and Johannes Rau (all of whom were approximately the same age as Habermas)—experienced their primary and secondary socialization (childhood and school years, puberty and adolescence) under the National Socialist regime; their tertiary socialization (that is, the prolongation of youth that

2

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occurs during university study) occurred in an occupied Germany divided between the Allied Powers. The rupture that took place after 1945 profoundly shaped members of this generation: the Reich collapsed, yet the state was preserved because of the vehement—and successful—efforts of conservative German jurists. When events of the Nazi years were brought to light, Habermas once said in an interview, it was clear that he and his contemporaries had lived under a regime that was criminal through and through. Now, however, there existed the newly founded German Federal Republic in the western part of the erstwhile Reich; it switched out almost all institutions of government in a few years and took the place of a regime that, in a world that has never lacked atrocities or crimes of state, was perhaps the worst of all time. Now, there existed a parliamentary democracy tailored to the West, without an army or the death penalty (Müller-Doohm 2014). Even if they comported themselves differently and expressed different opinions about the past, intellectuals such as Habermas, Enzensberger, Lübbe, Dahrendorf, Kluge, and Luhmann hardly had a chance—in the transition from the authoritarianism of the 1930s to the kindly paternalism of the 1950s, the move from a state ruled by National Socialists to one governed by Christian Democrats—to repress, deny, or even come to terms with German fascism. They had to live with it. Nor could they simply carry on as before (as far too many parties in government, education, and industry were able to do). They had no past to continue. They might, like Habermas or Enzensberger, criticize others’ repression of history (especially in the so-called Verdrängungsantikommunismus of the 1950s, which forgot the past to fight communism) as the aftereffect of the Nazi regime, yet they were shocked again and again by the continuity between “then” and “now.” For example, the case of Habermas’s teacher in Bonn, Oskar Becker, made it clear that a highly esteemed professor might have a dubious political past. Alternatively, one might overlook or tacitly justify collaboration between scholars and Nazi authorities by following the motto “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and observing “communicative silence” (kommunikatives Beschweigen) on the “brown” portions of professors’ biographies. One could view the employment of instructors from the Nazi era as a catastrophe of “social hygiene” (Habermas) or consider it a morally problematic and “asymmetrical” operation that, all the same, was necessary for maintaining social order (Lübbe). Finally, one might compare—in markedly disengaged terms—the functional equivalency of the Nazi regime, however hated it was, and the subsequent rule of the occupiers. Luhmann observed that he was beaten by a German superior when he was a Flakhelfer and then by the English soldiers who took him prisoner. He added laconically—if without the intention of neoconservatives—that

Intellectual Biography

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“personnel” and “contents” had changed but functions and roles remained the same. This sociological insight, which represented a theoretical gain for Luhmann, necessarily appeared to be a “bad abstraction” (in Hegelian terminology) to Habermas, his foremost intellectual opponent in later years; at any rate, it exemplifies what Habermas, in his debate with Luhmann at the beginning of the 1970s, called the “epitome of technocratic consciousness.” The change that occurred in 1945 marked intellectual figures belonging to the generation of Wehler, Habermas, Enzensberger, Luhmann, Kluge, Grass, and Dahrendorf personally and politically, and it left an imprint on their writings. One can see the traces in almost every sentence that Habermas has written. In one way or another, the personal experience of fascism—and, even more, the shock of liberation—is always there. The intellectual aggression that Habermas has displayed, time and again, comes from his abiding concern for the weal of political culture in the Federal Republic, which he means to defend. This is also the case for Luhmann. Even though he was much less engaged politically, he avoided, as much as Habermas did, the many thinkers around Carl Schmitt; in Luhmann’s works, the twelve years from 1933 to 1945 form a constant presence. Just as Habermas replaced Martin Heidegger (with whose thought his studies began) with Charles Sanders Peirce, Luhmann distanced himself from Arnold Gehlen and certain other German intellectuals when he took up the works of Talcott Parsons. Whether they said so or not— and whether they wished to do so or not—the sixteen-year-olds of 1945 could hardly, after the fact, perceive the year of 1945 as anything other than the “new beginning” that Hannah Arendt announced—abruptly yet full of hope—at the end of her grim book on totalitarianism. A few exceptions notwithstanding, the vehemently polemical debates that distinguished this generation’s relationship to its teachers did not concern relativizing a war of aggression or questioning the legitimacy of decisions at Nuremberg so much as explaining “National Socialist” or “fascist” (the very terminology is contested) horror—whether it was at all comparable to other forms of totalitarianism (in particular, to Stalinism). It is no coincidence that the idea of a “causal nexus” between the revolution in Russia and Hitler’s crimes, which later gave rise to the Historikerstreit in the 1980s, came from the generation immediately preceding the war, whose ideas were then taken up by younger, neoconservative historians. For the most part, members of the war generation and parties belonging to the generation before the war, whose tertiary socialization coincided with the period of Nazism (or who, indeed, engaged actively for the cause in 1933), balked at the ideas of egalitarianism, freedom, and political autonomy that now penetrated Germany from the West. Contempt for liberalism and democracy remained. Intellectuals such as Heidegger, Schmitt, Hans Freyer, Ernst

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Jünger, and Gehlen belonged to the first group. Habermas’s teacher, the Bonn philosopher Erich Rothacker (who even published an essay on the importance of philosophy for the war effort in 1944), Helmut Schelsky, Ernst Forsthoff, and Joachim Ritter belonged to the second—a generation that was politically and professionally active in the “Third Reich.” In either case, eloquent silence, repression, and denial predominated. Carl Schmitt even displayed malicious defiance and open anti-Semitism in the self-justification he presented in a collection of aphorisms right after the war; still today, the work counts as holy to his students and apologists. Schmitt acted as if he had always warned of the demise of the Nazi state, even though he only “discovered” an unambiguous formulation of this position after the war had ended. In 1963, he added a foreword to The Concept of the Political; thereby, he took aim at the Federal Republic and not at the “Third Reich.” The only parties belonging to these two generations who could not repress or deny anything had been illegal resistance fighters like Wolfgang Abendroth, who, after his cover was blown in 1937, was imprisoned before being sent to join the notorious Strafdivision 999 for the remainder of the Nazi period. Alternatively, they numbered among the few liberal opponents of the Hitler regime who stayed in the country and did not go underground—for example, Karl Jaspers. There were also individuals such as Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Thomas Mann, Karl Löwith, Franz Neumann, Hans Kelsen, Ernst Fraenkel, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, who had to leave not just Germany but Europe. Finally, a few escaped from concentration camps— like Eugen Kogon, in 1945. During the war or immediately afterward, these individuals authored books that, to this day, remain the most important works on National Socialism and the epoch of fascism: Neumann’s Behemoth (which he wrote secretly in Germany in the 1930s), Fraenkel’s Doppelstaat, Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Kogon’s SS-Staat. However, given the public sphere in Adenauer’s republic—which, despite the occasional emergence of voices of opposition, stood under hegemonic control and was hermetically sealed—their views could not be heard until the 1960s. Adenauer, the erstwhile centrist opponent of Nazism, adopted a strategy of communicative silence whose stakes were made plain when he knowingly surrounded himself with figures from the regime such as Heinrich Globke, the coauthor of the Nuremberg Laws. The opposite occurred among members of the generation following Habermas, Luhmann, Dahrendorf, Grass, Lübbe, and Mommsen—that is, among the student revolutionaries of 1968. Born after (or at) the end of Hitler’s Reich, theirs was the first generation to be shaped by the Federal Republic and the West, by Europe and America—that is, by an upbringing that had become more liberal. They did not view the events of National Socialism in terms of their own biographies; whatever parts of their parents’ lives were connected

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to the regime preceded their birth. They knew about National Socialism only from newspapers, books, films, and anecdotes. The Spiegel affair and the Auschwitz trial provided the key experiences of their political awakening. Through these events, National Socialism turned into a present past; at the same time, it remained an unattainable past present as far as personal biography was concerned, for it could not be brought to bear on their own lives other than by accounts from witnesses, history, literature, art, and acts of imagination. Such a mediated presence of history facilitated the perception of the latent fascism in everyday life in the Federal Republic as well as in the imperialism of Germany’s western neighbors—especially during the Vietnam War. The state of affairs also promoted immoderate exaggeration: the copying of left-wing radicals and communists of the Weimar Era (an act that only seemed to be revolutionary); the tendency to confuse enduring Nazi sympathies in a country governed by Christian Democrats with overt, fascist rule; and the overly hasty equation of imperialistic military engagement with the purposes of American democracy as a whole. Most fatefully, it encouraged actionistic efforts to make latent fascism manifest through calculated provocation and experiments in violence (as in the case of Rudi Dutschke), so that the public might see what radicals knew was lurking beneath the surface. While still a student—one year before submitting his dissertation—Habermas published an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (July 1953) entitled “Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken: Zur Veröffentlichung von Vorlesungen aus dem Jahre 1935” (“Thinking with Heidegger Against Heidegger: On the Publication of His Lectures from 1935”). Here, Habermas not only took Heidegger to task for his involvement in National Socialism but took issue with his thought, as well. Heidegger had republished a lecture from the 1930s without any commentary; for the sake of his own reputation and renown, however, he touched up remarks concerning the “inner truth and greatness of this movement”—which referred to National Socialism, of course. In the process, he also added a parenthetical remark to “this movement”: “(namely . . . the encounter between technology on a planetary scale and modern man).” Yet Heidegger had explicitly taken issue with technology only after the war; now, his amended text would appear, to readers familiar with his earlier writings, to provide an early indication of his distance from the Nazi regime (cf. Texte, 76). In the 1950s, Heidegger’s main work of the 1920s, Being and Time, shaped German philosophy as a whole. Significantly, Heidegger’s abiding respect for National Socialism did not occasion controversy; rather, it was Habermas’s critique of his person and work that was considered scandalous because it violated the commonsensical agreement to observe communicative silence. Philosophical minds were shocked and dismayed not so much by the fact that

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Habermas recommended thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger but that he justified doing so in political terms. In the following years, Habermas moved further to the left. His involvement with two figures who had been persecuted by the Nazis—Adorno (at whose Institute for Social Research he studied and practiced sociology) and, a little later, Abendroth (under whom he wrote his Habilitation)— made Habermas, the left-wing Heideggerian, into a neo-Marxist, even if he did not adhere to orthodoxy and revised many of its tenets. Still today, idiosyncratic Marxism forms a key component of his work; much of Habermas’s thought cannot be properly understood without a thorough knowledge of Marx and Marxist literature—especially an understanding of the cultural conditions and tremendous intellectual upheaval that occurred in the times between Hegel and his heir. Even though Kant has come to play a greater and more fundamental role in Habermas’s thought, Marx remains essential (see chapter 1). Habermas’s work differs from that of his contemporaries—both sociologists like Luhmann and philosophers like John Rawls (chapter 19)—inasmuch as it combines normative claims with empirical theory. Marx had replaced Hegelian Spirit with the concept of social interaction; this reorientation separated modern critical thought from that of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Habermas’s project preserves this dialectical synthesis—and adds to it elements derived from critical theory in its New York exile (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Löwenthal). Habermas accepts that the foundation of philosophy is reason, which he understands in terms of language and discourse; his interest, however, is to elaborate a theory of society and social relations. This approach is based on the idea—already anticipated by the Austrian Marxist Max Adler—of transforming epistemological critique into social theory. It would be wrong to understand Habermas merely as a philosopher who justifies social observations by way of rational argument or appeals to the ethics of discourse; equally, it would be mistaken to view him only as a social scientist and sociologist. Even though Habermas has always sought to defend his project with the appropriate disciplinary language, he is not a philosopher and a sociologist. Rather, he has created a truly interdisciplinary theory of society by working as a professional sociologist (from 1956 through 1959, and again from 1964 through 1982) and as a professional philosopher (1961 through 1971 and 1983 through 1994). The concept of society occupies the center of Habermas’s work. The introduction to Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) sums up his program: “A radical critique of knowledge” is possible “only as social theory” (Knowledge, 58). With The Theory of Communicative Action, which appeared fifteen years later, the project of justifying social theory epistemologically—and, conversely,

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grounding epistemology in social theory—was completed (see chapters 28, 29, and 45). Habermas’s relationship to the broad array of philosophical and social-scientific programs of theory and research is dialogical and predatory at once. The thinker boards an academic discourse, appropriates its terminology, engages in combat with colleagues in the field until they accept him and quote him, but then, at the very moment his interlocutors seek common ground, he abandons ship in order to integrate what he has acquired into his own theoretical project, leaving the specialists shaking their heads. In such productive eclecticism, Habermas’s work may be likened perhaps most of all to that of the great American sociologist Talcott Parsons. Habermas develops large swaths of his own theory through the immanent critique of works by other authors. In The Theory of Communicative Action, which he wrote while directing the Max Planck Institute at Starnberg and published before beginning his second tenure in Frankfurt (1981), Habermas engages with the classics of sociology, phenomenological theories of action, functionalistic systems theory, the philosophy of speech acts (Austin, Searle), and empirical and hermeneutic theories of rationality. By summarizing, reconstructing, and critiquing works from these fields, he sought, time and again, to find what would hold up to his own theses. Unlike Luhmann—whose work proceeds much more constructively and tends to obscure its sources—Habermas lives entirely from ongoing communication and exchange with others, alternately integrating and excluding foreign material. This is especially true of the projects that are most important for his version of critical theory: the Frankfurt School and functionalistic systems theory. Habermas’s disagreement with Luhmann—with whom, in 1971, he conducted a widely publicized and muchdiscussed feud (documented in the volume Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie? [Social theory or social technology?])—connects his work with the turn toward communication in social theory and marks the thinker’s distance from the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Despite his immanent critique of the (supposedly) defeatist conception of reason displayed by critical theorists such as Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas—in a program that he understands in terms of engaged philosophical enlightenment—has participated in the continuity of the intellectual tradition they inaugurated. Habermas has adhered to the maxim of dialecticians, according to which the significance of critical theory involves thinking against one’s own position—that is, one should neither dogmatize nor “musealize” insights but rather expand them systematically on the basis of new historical phenomena and experiences. Habermas assumed the inheritance of critical theory, meaning to transform it along the lines of a linguistic and pragmatic turn (cf. chapter 5)—to the dismay of all who cannot imagine such an enterprise as anything other than the analysis of false consciousness. Indeed,

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Habermas has freed Adorno’s “negative dialectics” from the paralysis of thoroughgoing negativity and transformed the latter’s project into a theory of society that both is postmetaphysical and possesses normative content. Habermas’s proximity to Adorno becomes clear, above all, in his approach to moral points of view. This approach is animated by the “negative idea of abolishing discrimination and harm” (Inclusion, xxxvi)—even though Habermas rejects Horkheimer and Adorno’s gloomy philosophy of history (see chapter 70). Habermas dismisses the previous generation’s conception of utopia: a state wherein mankind has been freed from all constraints. In taking distance from his own early thesis of “communication free of domination” (herrschaftsfreie Kommunikation), Habermas has also come to reject Adorno’s negativism. Totality is neither the True (Hegel) nor the Untrue (Adorno); rather, its substance depends on coincidental circumstances that are variable and on the results of our practical activities. In matters of thought and the world, truth and falsehood represent practical concerns (a point on which Habermas agrees with Heidegger, pragmatists, and the early Marx). Habermas’s examination of critical theory has occurred in an entirely dialectical spirit. Horkheimer and Adorno always stressed that their socialtheoretical reflections were to be situated historically—that a “seed of time” (Zeitkern) formed part of their truth. Accordingly, it is only logical for Habermas to understand his version of critical theory as a “theory of society which has renounced all the certainty of a philosophy of history without having renounced its claims to have a critical edge” (Habermas 1991, 260). Here, the indeterminate utopia of a wholly different world gives way to a notion of intersubjective understanding meant to enable agreement when and where the better argument prevails. In this way—by presenting critique as a method of resolving contested claims by argument and subjecting their validity to verification—Habermas can repair the absence of a normative foundation in critical theory, which otherwise is guided primarily by moral intuitions. Such praxis-oriented reorganization has led to intellectual connections that extend far into the political mainstream—that is, into the platforms and activities of both the main parties in the Federal Republic, from which Habermas has otherwise held his distance. (At any rate, he has always expressed reservations and offered ironic commentary on their initiatives and policies; consider, for example, his venomous endorsement of Gerhard Schröder before the 1998 elections.) In addition—and especially in recent years—the reworking of critical theory has led to numerous attempts to put Habermas (alongside Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, among others) in the service of radical social critique that need not endorse social democracy or parliamentarianism (see chapters 11 and 20). In his many diagnoses of contemporary ills and numerous intellectual interventions, Habermas is concerned with philosophical norms, sociological

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theory, and the reflexive self-description of the society in which we live. For decades, he has, time and again, provided the Federal Republic with keywords marking sites of political debate and conflict. Thus, Habermas has combined the antifascist consensus (a phrase coined for the period before 1945) with a phrase from when the Federal Republic was founded in 1949: constitutional patriotism. This terminology, which came from the “conservative liberal” Dolf Sternberger, he has reinterpreted along the lines of a postnational constellation (thus the title of a book from 1992); in the 1980s, the idea circulated to great effect (see chapter 48). The notion of the public sphere stems from the late 1950s (chapter 27). This concept, which combines theory and critique, lies at the core of Habermas’s intellectual enterprise. His Habilitation, in which he first elaborated the notion, critiqued the depoliticization of 1950s society. This period—after the constant mobilization of the preceding years—was characterized by powerful media conglomerates that dominated public life, on the one hand, and, on the other, by the social conformism of a populace that the expanding welfare state had pacified and atomized (and not just in Germany). One consequence of the gentle and democratic Gleichschaltung engineered by the Christian Democratic government occurred when, in the Spiegel affair, the state curtailed freedom of the press; another example may be seen in the active and passive resistance that occurred when National Socialists began to be tried in German courts. To be sure, countermovements arose, but they were slight compared to the call for a repoliticization of public life that provided the slogan for the student movement in the following decade. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere exercised great influence on budding student radicals. This book—a combination of acute social critique and academic jargon from the fields of sociology and political science—fit well into the milieu of smoky gatherings of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student League, SDS). (Habermas was part of the organization’s founding generation—and a member of its Förderverein [friends’ association]—after it split from the Social Democrats.) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere articulates the central demand of the revolutionaries of 1968: the creation of deliberative space in all bodies and organizations where matters of general concern are presently decided in processes closed to public supervision and participation. Democracy should be a shared undertaking and not just a feature of the political system—a matter left to parties, parliaments, and executive committees. Society as a whole and the groupings that constitute it (e.g., unions) should take part in political life. Since then—that is, after efforts in the 1970s (some of which were successful, others less so)—the hope that democracy might be renewed through public spaces within organizations has vanished, but the core idea that

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democracy/democratic legitimation concerns society as a whole and not just the political class and parliamentary organs has remained. In today’s global society—whose dimensions could scarcely have been anticipated in the 1950s or 1960s—the idea has only gained in currency and urgency. In the late 1960s, public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) was a key term for parties opposed to the progressive dedemocratization that was occurring through the “establishment” and consumerism. At the same time, however, Habermas rejected student leaders’ call for the transformation of all social relations, and he qualified the effort as “a revolution in appearance only” (Scheinrevolution). Habermas never believed that the complete elimination of late capitalism—of which students from Berlin to Berkeley dreamed—was possible; indeed, he saw a methodical (if not substantive) affinity with Italian fascism in their actionism. Yet despite the sharp tone one can hear in references to “left-wing fascism” and “Scheinrevolution” (which, of course, gave rise to vehement objections), Habermas’s criticism of the student movement—unlike the belated self-reproach of its erstwhile adherents today—represented critique from within. Habermas did not object to the Marxism of student leaders; instead, he faulted them for falling back onto the orthodox theories of class and value, which had been valid for the nineteenth century, at best. Using the language of Marx, he criticized the “utopian socialism” of Rudi Dutschke and the voluntaristic acts he advocated, which sought to make the latent violence of the system manifest through preemptive acts of violence. Although Habermas labeled activities of this kind “left-wing fascism,” he qualified his use of the phrase in numerous interviews and position statements. Later, he admitted that he had underestimated the innovative potential of imaginative, nonviolent acts of disruption; he could recognize their merit as protest—that they had substantially repoliticized the public sphere—only after the fact. In lectures and essays, Habermas analyzed and tried to assess the chances for success of the newfangled, spontaneous, and—for the first time—global political movement, which had its main seats in Berlin, Paris, New York, and Berkeley (where he was teaching when the movement was at its peak). At the end of the 1960s, he attended meetings and gatherings of student radicals— especially in Frankfurt—where he engaged in debate more often than his academic colleagues (Kraushaar 1998). Today, it seems one can explain how students (“Hitler’s children”) identified their own revolt with uprisings in the so-called Third World in terms of a pathological projection resulting from the contamination of their ideas by the collective, neoliberalist consciousness. Habermas, however, already had an alternate interpretation, which is certainly more accurate. For Habermas, it was a matter of new moral sensibilities that had been made possible by the permissive upbringing/education of the 1950s and 1960s

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as well as the prolonged attendance of school and extended adolescence. He observed: “Personal identification with people in the Third World who are starving, wretched, and dependent speaks for the power of moral imagination, it is moreover a necessary impulse for investigating causal connections between repression here and repression in underdeveloped lands” (Rational Society, 183). For this reason, he rejected overly harsh criticism of the students’ supposed utopianism (which he, too, had voiced—at first). After all, students wanted “to employ technologically available means to satisfy needs articulated without force”—and, in the process, to free themselves from a repressive and (at least partially) unnecessary demand for achievement/success (what, in German, is called the Leistungsprinzip). On this point, Habermas agreed with Marcuse (Rational Society, 183; cf. Rational Society, 90ff.); at the same time, he saw no reason “to abandon the basis of legitimation provided by our constitution” (183) by changing the institutional framework of late-capitalist society or democratizing it comprehensively. Maintaining equal distance from the technocratic reformism of the “Great Coalition” of the Social and Christian Democrats, on the one hand, and the starry-eyed romanticism of student radicals (above all, that of his contemporary Hans Magnus Enzensberger), Habermas responded to the question “Reform or Revolution?”—which Spiegel submitted to German intellectuals in 1968—by advocating a program of radical reform. That is, Habermas affirmed that the ways and means offered by constitutional democracy were sufficient to reconfigure social relations in a revolutionary manner. When the Social Democrats came to power—and announced, with Willy Brandt’s slogan, “Mehr Demokratie wagen! [Risk More Democracy!]”—it seemed the day had come for the radical reform that Habermas had long endorsed. The leaden 1970s quickly dashed such hopes. Now, Habermas—whom neoconservative opponents denounced as the spiritual father of terrorism—saw “another republic” emerging, and he feared it would no longer be free and democratic. He refused to publish anything more in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and considered having his political essays appear in comparable (and, at the time, significantly more liberal) journals in Italy and France. Habermas was especially disappointed and embittered when Ernst Albrecht, the Christian Democratic Ministerpräsident of Lower Saxony, demanded that a group of left-wing professors sign a statement affirming the principles of the Federal Republic (the so-called freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung, FdGO). The initiative stood out among other ignominious reactions to terrorism—which government officials and the Springer publishing concern magnified into a crisis of state, even though it never represented a greater danger than everyday violent crime—because parties suspected of left-wing tendencies were already forbidden from holding office. (Ironically, this measure had been initiated under Willy Brandt, a Social Democrat; needless to say, the Bonn republic

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survived the artificial state of emergency—just as, a decade later, democracy survived even Germany’s reunification.) Another catchword of the 1960s was late capitalism. Like crisis—a term that also gained currency at the time—it was not Habermas’s invention. However, Habermas took it up, reinterpreted it, and gave it an original spin when he addressed the late-capitalist legitimation crisis (German: Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus). Habermas’s book of the same name (German, 1973; English, 1975), which summarized his earlier positions and developed their implications in a new context, found a broad—indeed, an international— readership (see chapter 31). It was published at the same time as another successful title, Claus Offe’s Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates (Structural problems of the capitalist state). Both works struck a nerve among Social Democrats, who had finally come to power with the election of Brandt and now harbored great hopes—which, as noted, were disappointed soon enough. It seems that the flexibility and elasticity of late capitalism confounds all projects of reform. On the one hand, the economy appears to be under control and, indeed, to assure abundant prosperity (a state that, in turn, permits a halfway equitable distribution of wealth—even if it needs to be won in protracted class struggles and only extends to the victors of history). Habermas’s argument is that, at the same time, other crises—especially problems of motivation and rationality—undermine the structures from which the social order under late capitalism derives its justification. The concept of legitimation crisis demonstrates the political relevancy of theories that describe—and explain—new phenomena in a scientific manner. Habermas’s thesis accounted for how and why the social-democratic program had failed in West Germany and states throughout the northwestern corner of the globe. This book (which employed the vocabulary of systems theory for the first time on a larger scale) assessed the insolubility of problems of governance—the impossibility of uniting “structurally inherent system-imperatives that are contradictory” (Legitimation Crisis, 2). Economic reasons underlie the crisis, but its symptoms manifest themselves above all in the political and sociocultural spheres. The complementary notions of legitimation crisis and motivation crisis name phenomena that are distinct from purely economic problems yet still belong to the sphere of material reproduction; the terms refer to problems that arise when economic factors compel the state to adopt (restrictive) policies promoting order. When governmental strategies fail, a crisis of rationality results. Against traditional Marxist diagnoses—and taking up his own earlier engagement with Marx’s theory of value in Theory and Practice (1963)— Habermas seeks to show that, in the late-capitalist societies that have taken the place of classical, liberal capitalism (that is, in political orders where the state intervenes economically to social ends), class struggle has transformed

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into class compromise: political criteria determine how the gross national product is distributed. Under normal circumstances, the economically induced crises of late capitalism can be minimized (even if, in the tumult of globalization, the safeguards afforded by traditional forms of the state are becoming fewer and fewer). Even when the worst is averted, contradictory steering imperatives that assert themselves in the pressure for capital realization . . . produce a series of other crisis tendencies. The continuing tendency toward disturbance of capitalist growth can be administratively processed and transferred, by stages, through the political and into the socio-political system. I am of the opinion that the contradiction of socialized production for particular ends thereby directly takes on again a political form—naturally not that of political class warfare. (Legitimation Crisis, 40)

Habermas does not exclude the possibility that legitimation crises will escalate—and that, consequently, societies will grow less democratic in seeking to avoid needing to justify their existence with reasons anchored in state constitutions. Crises of legitimation menace the integrity of society, which depends on the renewal of reliable structures of intersubjectivity providing justified and credible norms. When disruptions of norms occur, crises of motivation may result: tradition ceases to “hold” and assure societal integration when its fundaments stop being believable (as occurred, for example, when the ideology of “achievement”/“success” [Leistung] broke down in the 1960s). Habermas has pointedly rejected all strategies of compensation of the technocratic or neoconservative varieties, which seek to engineer legitimation, credibility, and meaning by artificial means: “there is no administrative production of meaning” (Legitimation Crisis, 70), he affirms. Instead, he emphasizes that enlisting norms to produce societal integration will likely occasion resistance: “Only if motives for action no longer operated through norms requiring justification, and if personality systems no longer had to find their unity in identity-securing interpretive systems, could the acceptance of decisions without reasons become routine, that is, could the readiness to conform . . . be produced to any desired degree” (Legitimation Crisis, 44). For Habermas, technocratic expediency of this kind is both improbable and undesirable. Instead, he affirms that a real social value may be found in the normative potential of democracy—a matter that political and economic actors must consider when pursuing their interests. In Habermas’s eyes, progressive democratization remains the only way to avoid the systemic dangers within

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democracy and the pressures of hegemonic class structures that weigh upon it. (Just because class conflict has been neutralized and institutionalized does not mean that it has disappeared.) The well-known words of John Dewey— that the only therapy for the ills of democracy is “more democracy”—express the political stakes of Habermas’s theorem. Only an egalitarian democracy nourished by the communicative power of the “untamable” and “anarchic” public sphere (see Between Facts and Norms) can control the dynamics of power and money—which always pose the risk of crisis—without destroying the productivity they unleash. The Theory of Communicative Action (which appeared in German in 1981) fleshes out the matter of problems of legitimation, revising earlier ideas and defining them with greater precision. At the same time, however, the base assumption of an irreconcilable polarity between capitalism and democracy does not change. Habermas remains convinced that only a strong democracy, constantly renewed and enlarged by social struggles “from below,” can check the dangers of capitalist expansion: Between capitalism and democracy there is an indissoluble tension; in them two opposed principles of societal integration compete for primacy. If we look at the self-understanding expressed in the basic principles of democratic constitutions, modern societies assert the primacy of a lifeworld in relation to the subsystems separated out of its institutional orders. (Communicative Action, 2:345)

What is more, the tension between capitalism and democracy—which is dangerous and productive in equal measure—yields a deadly antagonism to the extent that the steering media of money and power take hold of and “colonize” practices of communication in the everyday lifeworld. The balance between the three principal media of societal integration achieved over the course of modernity is being jeopardized because markets and administrative power are displacing social solidarity—i.e. the coordination of action through values, norms, and language use oriented to reaching understanding—from ever more domains of social life. (Naturalism, 111)

Political resistance must be mobilized against such colonization—and this can only occur within the discursive public sphere. Only through the public mobilization of communicative power—which for Habermas (as for Hannah Arendt) is not an academic matter so much as a public concern whose material potential involves avenging violence (a notion that is often misunderstood, needless to say)—is it possible to protect civil

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society against economic imperatives and autonomous state organs. Consensual decisions—which are achieved through engaged discussion and the mobilization of communicative power—provide a standard for controlling both the economic and the political systems. Habermas dispenses with the utopian idea that the economic sphere might be democratized from within— i.e., that participation and self-determination might steer its course. Yet at the same time, he holds—with Marx, in his later writings—that activity of this kind is necessary. Through democratic self-determination, “the systemic imperatives of an interventionist state apparatus and those of an economic system” may be held “in check,” and this task “is formulated in defensive terms. Yet, this defensive resteering will not be able to succeed without a radical and broadly effective democratization” (Habermas 1991, 261). In complex societies, it is necessary for the normative status of a realm of freedom to trump the domination exercised by power and money. Today, the epochal dynamics of globalization and economic deregulation lend further urgency to the call for democratization. Parallel to the expansion of capitalism into a worldwide system and “following the collapse of the bipolar power constellation” (i.e., the dichotomy of East-West), democracy runs the risk of occupying a (permanently) defensive position within what Habermas has called the “postnational constellation” (Naturalism, 312, 327). Like the one that preceded it, this constellation involves system crises that the administrative organs of the state manage; when such control is removed, the crises return in greater force (just as situations of social conflict have reemerged even though social democrats engineered wealth redistribution from top to bottom). For this reason, “the conception of a world society under private law” that “deflates . . . claims for legitimation” merits renewed discussion and critique (Naturalism, 345). In his writings of the last two decades on global capitalism, law, and politics, Habermas has advocated “global domestic politics without a world government—or, alternatively, “world society without a world government” (Naturalism, 319). Above all, the tasks of a supranational world organization should center on peace, human rights, and the environment. The primary focus ought to concern “[overcoming] the extreme disparities in wealth within the stratified world society, [reversing] ecological imbalances, and [averting] collective threats, on the one hand, while endeavoring to promote an intercultural discourse on, and recognition of, the equal rights of the main world civilizations, on the other” (Naturalism, 333). As the most important institution of domestic world politics, the United Nations would be measured by democratic criteria of legitimation. After all, “neither deliberation nor the public sphere is inherently limited by national borders” (Habermas 2007, 436). Today, the idea of a deliberative democracy (developed in Between Facts and Norms [see chapters 38 and 40]) plays a key role in discussions about globalization. Occasionally, this

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is misunderstood as an elitist compensation for the massive lack of democracy in the world—a matter of simply creating (more) forums of discussion that will prepare and accompany actual decision making. However, Habermas has always insisted that the deliberative procedures of resolving problems within an inclusive public sphere can only amount to actual democracy when they are structurally linked to egalitarian processes of decision (which need not be parliamentary in form). In the 1970s, concepts that had remained largely abstract—even to Habermas—began to receive attention (e.g., communication and discourse). When large-scale reforms were implemented in Germany, Habermas’s ideas entered into broad circulation, especially in the educational system. The concept of emancipatory cognitive interest (emanzipatorisches Erkenntnisinteresse)— pioneered by Habermas and his friend Karl-Otto Apel (eight years his senior and a classmate during his studies)—had already exercised a strong influence on student radicals’ critique of science and the university system in the 1960s. Although Habermas held that his views had been largely misunderstood, his ideas were important for others’ diagnoses of the times. What is more—despite the fact that it originated in a different theoretical context—Habermas’s notion of “discourse” connected with French poststructuralism (especially the writings of Michel Foucault). Although Habermas has always rejected voluntarist theory and praxis (a hallmark of his French contemporaries), his view of discourse offers a way to examine the complexities and internal differentiations of knowledge from a critical perspective (see chapter 20). For him, “discourse” has an explicitly political meaning, albeit one that stands in the service of reform. In his new introduction to Theory and Practice (which originally appeared in 1963), Habermas addressed the “institutionalization of practical discourse” in an effort to distance himself from the neo-Leninist voluntarism of Maoist organizations he observed in the 1970s. At around the same time, specialists in the field of education took up his terms of “discourse” and “domination-free communication” (herrschaftsfreie Kommunikation); numerous books were published on the subject—written by pedagogues seeking to resolve disputes through dialogue and by therapists who wished to change the atmosphere and interpersonal dynamics in corporate settings. Notwithstanding the broad attention they received, Habermas’s ideas were misunderstood inasmuch as they were held to be concrete prescriptions. Instead of offering instructions, his theory of communication identifies different ideal conditions—truth, truthfulness, normative rightness, and logical consistency—that must be observed and imputed to every speech act, whether we want to do so or not (see chapters 5, 30, 40, 42, 47). This is a matter of theory, not legislating standards. (In contrast to Habermas’s actual purpose, much of the literature invoking his ideas considered them to be

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programmatic—and sought to apply them in educational, therapeutic, and business settings as if they constituted positive law or represented “facts” of natural science.) A reflexive theory such as Habermas’s includes itself within the field of inquiry; the point is to identify conditions that make processes of emancipation possible—not to dictate modes of interaction. Habermas’s purposes concern the logic of social praxis and emancipatory instruction; as such, his theory cannot simply be deployed as if it were a doctrine of virtue (Tugendlehre), a set of good advice, a series of imperatives and maxims, or so many strategies of instrumental reason. His analyses address, above all, the qualities of the presuppositions underlying speech acts, which make arguments possible. They do not set objectives that can be planned and achieved through rational action. Habermas is not concerned with the communicative means and techniques that might emancipate one from domination; rather, he explores the conditions of possibility for communication—which, because they do not boil down to instrumentally rational programs, must necessarily defy the goal-oriented thinking of pedagogues, therapists, and corporate supervisors. In the last part of Habermas’s two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (his most important work, which appeared at the beginning of the 1980s) stands the diagnostic formula: colonization of the lifeworld (see chapter 44). This diagnosis—which is a matter of some political import—represents the functional equivalent of older, Marxist terminology combining theoretical explanations with praxis-oriented interpretations of the world. The phrase is meant to substitute for—and, at the same time, actualize—terms like “exploitation” (whose semantic contours were dissolved by the welfare state) and “alienation” (which lost its political force at the latest when it was adopted as a part of theological discourse in Protestant academies). Here, both conceptual fields are joined in a single expression. This also explains why Habermas employs the dramatic imagery of “colonial masters” who “make their way . . . from the outside . . . and force . . . assimilation” (Communicative Action, 2:355). The new colonial masters—unlike the old ones—are completely impersonal, and their orders represent “the imperatives of autonomous subsystems” (Communicative Action, 2:354): technoscientific civilization, law and juridification, money and capital, and administrative and social power. They no longer invade distant tribal societies abroad; rather, they penetrate the communicative infrastructure of the lifeworld familiar to us in everyday existence. This social lifeworld is not an archaic or premodern community like what one would have found in Africa, America, or Australia two, three, or four hundred years ago; rather, it is a rationalized, modern environment that is internally differentiated to a high degree. All the same—and like older forms of social organization—this modern environment relies on forms of communication and consensus formation, which cannot be replaced by statistics, court

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decisions, or administrative measures without triggering life-threatening crises and pathologies. System imperatives dispossess the lifeworld of its communicative substance (Marx would have spoken of expropriation), which they then exploit and give back to the lifeworld in reified form—after assimilating all forms of communicative agreement and conflict to the ways that law, power, and the market resolve problems. One recent example of colonization of this sort is found in university reforms that have occurred on the business model—reforms that, although enacted legally, go against the will of those who study and work in institutions of higher learning by cutting off scholarly exchange, research, and instruction from their source in communicative life and assimilating them to the logic governing the flow of money and products. Habermas’s theory of colonization can be readily reconciled with Foucault’s brand of diagnostic poststructuralism (even though, instead of proceeding genealogically, Habermas takes up the Marxist and neo-Marxist critique of reification). Even a quick glance at a modular, goal-oriented syllabus reveals that monetary colonization gives university education the form of a commodity (Adorno) and, at the same time, produces a new disciplinary subject (Foucault). The Critique of Political Economy (Marx) and The Critique of Instrumental Reason (Horkheimer) yields The Critique of Functionalistic Reason—hence the subtitle of the second volume of Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action. It would miss the point of Habermas’s colonization diagnosis to understand it in purely strategic terms (on the model, say, of locating engine difficulties in a car or determining where, precisely, a broken limb is fractured). Diagnoses of social pathologies combine awareness that a communicative context has been ruptured with strategic options. Therefore, it is not experts so much as the parties affected who recognize the situation in the first place. What the young Hegel (1976) wrote of the mind—“A mended sock is better than a torn one. Not so with self-consciousness” (4)—applies here: the tear in subjective self-consciousness also represents the disruption of social communication; at the same time, it is not simply a mistake, for it reveals a social truth that has lain hidden until now (which may yet promote growth beyond standing borders). In contrast, “the sound mind whose soundness is what ails it” (Adorno 1981, 300) remains undivided in homey harmony until it is too late—and a child takes up arms. Diagnosing a social pathology is similar to the determinations of psychoanalysis—a comparison Habermas already made in Knowledge and Human Interests (1968). Diagnosing social pathologies has the strategic purpose of fencing in, controlling, steering, and bridling political and economic power as well as positive law. However, it is citizens who must erect the barriers in question. Only based on consensus, for example, can the instrument (or medium) of positive law—which is precisely what constitutes the modern republic—be

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democratically legitimate. In the process of democratic legitimation, public will formation—which involves decisions that are subject to change and modification (i.e., positive law)—are combined with invariable (nicht manipulierbar) claims to truth, such as occur in practical discourses (chapter 38). Democratic legitimation—as Habermas has sought to demonstrate in his philosophy of law—functions only to the extent that it is removed from the strategic intentions of self-interested actors and, through the changes introduced by positive law, enacts the “unforced force of the better argument” (Habermas 1971, 137). Law that has been posited democratically—Habermas argues in Between Facts and Norms—ensures that the positive fact of legislation and its discursively produced validity coincide. A democracy that sought only to balance and coordinate interests of a strategic and instrumental nature (i.e., the kind discussed by Schumpeter, Weber, Popper, and Luhmann—which Habermas has derisively called “post-truth democracy”) “would no longer be a democracy” at all (Naturalism, 144). As the consequences of increasing globalization assumed ever-clearer dimensions—and after the end of the Kohl era in Germany (now that, for the first time, government was shifting toward a “Red-Green” coalition)— Habermas returned, with increased frequency, to diagnosing the times with a view to countering “enlightened perplexity.” In the spring of 1998, at the invitation of the American University in Cairo, he offered reflections on totalitarian features of the age in a talk entitled “Learning from Catastrophe? A Retrospective Diagnosis of the Short Twentieth Century.” A few months later, he offered a further analysis of the present at the cultural forum organized by the Social Democrats; on the balcony of the Willy Brandt House, Habermas signaled the destruction of liberal political culture produced by social insecurity, disintegration, and exclusion, poverty, and related factors. He observed that the emergence of a transnational worldeconomic system endangers the very conditions that made compromise possible within the welfare state. Habermas advocated a form of modernization that differed from Schröder’s governmental program: a plan based on social justice, within an economic order that seeks more than simply to establish global markets. European democracy, he argued, should prefigure a civil society extending beyond national borders. While Habermas greeted the new Red-Green coalition, he did so only after voicing numerous reservations and words of caution—offering qualifications of and ironic commentary on all the government programs. It was difficult to tell whether he was for or against the parties now in power, which had traditionally formed the opposition. Ultimately, his endorsement echoed ambivalence: only because Habermas rejected Kohl and twenty years of his party’s policies could he now speak of “a democratic sensibility . . . [taking] root” (Time, 3).

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The same year, Habermas intervened in the growing debate about bioethics for the first time. In two newspaper articles, he criticized genetic manipulation as a “presumption” that led to “subjugation.” Clones, he wrote, seem like the slaves of their makers (Süddeutsche Zeitung, January 17, 1998; Die Zeit, February 19, 1998). More than anything else, Habermas sought to defend the autonomy of the subject—a condition that obtains only when one has a free relationship to one’s natural existence (as cannot be the case for an artificially produced, “enslaved” being). Displaying open horror at “genetically manufactured chimeras,” Habermas spoke of the “history of the species” (Gattungsgeschichte)—thereby employing terminology he had abandoned in the 1970s. Although it was no longer a suitable carrier for critical theory, he maintained that the concept was valid for limit cases—when, as occurs with genetic manipulation, “the ethical self-understanding of language-using agents is at stake in its entirety” (Future, 11). In the fall of 2001, Habermas published The Future of Human Nature: On the Way to Liberal Eugenics? This book, which addresses the reification of human nature through biotechnical intervention, is sparing in ethical prescriptions; instead, the author relates his deontological moral philosophy, by way of Kierkegaard, to the (negatively) good—thereby reconnecting with anthropological considerations he had abandoned in his “linguistic turn” during the 1970s. In his renewed engagement with politics and public matters, Habermas also addressed the war in Kosovo, when—under a Red-Green government, no less—the Bundeswehr was deployed for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic. Despite lingering doubts, Habermas defended the government’s decision to intervene in a front-page article for Die Zeit. Even though the use of military force (and especially without a mandate from the United Nations) seemed questionable to him, he held that it was occurring for the legitimate purpose of asserting human rights; therefore, it served the longterm goal of securing the “cosmopolitan law of a society of world citizens” (Time, 21). The fact that Habermas appealed to the creation of a new legal order when justifying military engagement (to say nothing of the fact that military action violated the law as it stood) prompted a great deal of criticism—which also came from parties who generally shared his political views. Indeed, Habermas’s argument declaring NATO to be the international police force of the future was problematic, for international law did not provide for any such function. (This is why Christian Tomuschat, for example, spoke out against international law when he endorsed NATO’s intervention.) Whereas the military operation—which the international community accepted, for the most part—might have marked a shift toward international law centered on human rights going beyond the UN Charter, nothing of the kind in fact occurred. In 2002, Habermas was prompted to revise his position

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when the broad international consensus that would have been necessary to support the second Iraq War was not forthcoming—and, moreover, after the manipulations of the U.S. State Department before the Kosovo War had come to light (to say nothing of “collateral damages” that subsequently occurred). In the spring of 2001, Habermas traveled for the first time to China—a country that had long fascinated him. At Tsinghua University (Beijing) and Fudan University (Shanghai), he lectured before audiences numbering in the thousands. “I was counting on conversations among academics. Now, I found myself suddenly speaking in giant halls. Everything is much more political than I thought” (Die Weltwoche, April 26, 2001), he reflected. Over two weeks, Habermas addressed globalization, the postnational constellation, and human rights, taking part in exchanges at academies, the Party Institute for Higher Education, and informal gatherings. Many of his works had been translated into Chinese, which meant that his interlocutors were thoroughly informed about Western philosophy. Habermas’s thesis that human rights are paramount—surpassing even the sovereignty of state governments—proved controversial. (At the same time, he affirmed—with a skeptical look to the West—that human rights should not be used as a political weapon.) When Habermas returned, the media reported that the philosopher and sociologist was to receive one of the greatest honors in Germany: the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. This distinction is reserved for a party “who has accompanied the Federal Republic of Germany in both a critical and an engaged fashion . . . and is considered by an international readership to be the decisive German philosopher of the age.” When the prize was bestowed at St. Paul’s Church (Frankfurt) on October 14, 2001, the audience of some thousand people included numerous political figures: the German president, chancellor, foreign minister, minister for economic affairs, chief justice of the Federal Constitutional Court, and Kulturstaatsminister were all in attendance. Habermas’s acceptance speech, which appeared in all major newspapers the following day, took the recent attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., as the occasion to reflect on modernity and secularization. Right away, Habermas announced the basic concerns underlying his remarks. On September 11, “the tension between secular society and religion exploded in an entirely different way” (Terror, 179). Habermas called upon his listeners to keep events in perspective and enjoined them to consider the course that secular society had followed in Europe and the United States. Like Jacques Derrida—who, just a few days earlier, had been awarded the Adorno Prize at the same location— Habermas drew attention to the fact that this mad and criminal act might contain elements of justified criticism concerning the instrumental rationality that prevails in the West. Since the 1990s, Habermas’s interests and political positions have focused increasingly on international politics and law. One of his books, The Divided

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West, addresses the lines of division and partisanship that are emerging within the global public sphere and polarizing all lands and groups within them. Habermas’s enduring presence as the author of both academic works and essays certainly represents an uncommon level of self-discipline; at the same time, it is a sign of his canny sense of publicity and politics. Habermas does not just devise theories of discursive reason; he also knows how to engage in effective discursive practice. Besides presenting reasoned arguments, Habermas is a masterful polemicist—a skill he has employed, time and again, to stimulate political debate in Germany by awakening its citizenry from selfrighteous slumber. Habermas presents oppositional viewpoints, and he risks daring hypotheses. At the same time, he practices politics within the standing order and with an extremely realistic sense of power relations (which would be for naught, of course, if he lacked strong arguments). From the 1950s until the present day, Habermas has repeatedly entered the political fray as a public intellectual. In the process, he has come to exercise a degree of influence that is not inconsiderable. “Influence”—unlike the purely instrumental media of administrative power and money—operates by means of arguments (whether good or bad), and it exercises hegemonic—or, in Habermas’s case, counterhegemonic—attraction. As Habermas writes: What we need is to practice a little more solidarity: without that, intelligent action will remain permanently foundationless and inconsequential. Such practice, certainly, requires rational institutions; it needs rules and communicative forms that don’t morally overtax the citizens but rather exact the virtue of an orientation toward the common good in small change. If there is any small remnant of utopia that I’ve preserved, then it is surely the idea that democracy—and the public struggle for its best form—is capable of hacking through the Gordian knots of otherwise insoluble problems. (Past, 96)

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1981. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. “Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommunikativen Kompetenz.” In Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie, by Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, 101–141. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1991. “A Reply.” Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones. In Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, 214–264. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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——. 2007. “Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik: eine Replik.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 406–459. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1976. “Aphorisms from the Wastebook.” Trans. Susanne Klein. Independent Journal of Philosophy 3:1–6. Kraushaar, Wolfgang. 1998. Die Frankfurter Schule und die Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946–1995. 3 vols. Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins. Müller-Doohm, Stefan. 2014. Jürgen Habermas: Eine Biographie. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

PART II CONTEXTS

1 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND MARXISM A XEL HONNETH

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t would be nearly impossible to describe the concerns Habermas articulates and addresses in his theory without referring to the three intellectual traditions named above. All his innovations—indeed, the motivational bases for his project as a whole—are so strongly shaped by the philosophy of history, philosophical anthropology, and Marxism that even the attenuated presence of these traditions in his later writings cannot conceal how much, in changed form, they have always determined his work. The following brief sketch will provide a kind of archeology of Habermas’s social philosophy in its mature phase and make plain the theoretical elements that form the core of his thought. If one digs for the deepest-lying and most fundamental intellectual stratum of Habermas’s thought, one strikes the bedrock of philosophical anthropology. At the first stage of his career, Habermas (whose studies in Bonn concluded in 1954 with a dissertation supervised by Erich Rothacker) received a significant impetus from Arnold Gehlen’s anthropological theory of action (Gehlen 1988) and from Martin Heidegger’s Daseinsanalyse (Heidegger 1962). Although these thinkers’ projects—which were enormously influential at midcentury—stand at odds in many respects, they share the assumption that human beings essentially create their own lifeworld/existence by means of practical operations enabling them to master deep-seated constraints imposed by the process of social reproduction. From Gehlen Habermas took the model of human action within a natural environment, the idea of distinguishing

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between different forms of behavior in this setting, and, above all, the methodological task of empirical verification. Heidegger’s Being and Time, in turn, gave Habermas the idea that the historical development of forms of action (such as Gehlen identifies) can be viewed in a critical light—when, that is, one considers the original/originary constitution of human Dasein. The effort to combine these intellectual projects—the anthropological theory of action and the diagnostic criticism of the same—yielded the essay “Dialektik der Rationalisierung” (“Dialectic of Rationalization,” 1954), which articulated concerns that would distinguish Habermas’s critical social theory at a later stage. Here, in his diagnosis of alienation, Habermas elucidates the negative effects that technological progress leaves in the social lifeworld inasmuch as it promotes orientations focused on “making available” (Verfügbarmachen); in this process, the material world of things, instead of being experienced by the senses, vanishes from the horizon of experience (Habermas 1954). Habermas’s early diagnosis of the times (Zeitdiagnose) amalgamates philosophical anthropology and existential analysis. Following Gehlen, Habermas considers the optimization of instrumental action by technological means the defining feature of human history; as a result—and here he takes up Heidegger’s reflections—alienation mounts, and our lifeworld undergoes progressive deobjectification (Entgegenständlichung). At the same time, Habermas’s view of  highly developed modern societies holds that this imperfect state of affairs  stems from one-sided, technical/instrumental rationalization—a condition that entails social anomie and pathological relations to life as it is given. When—to his great dismay—Habermas learned the extent of Heidegger’s ideological entanglement with National Socialism, he distanced himself from the philosophy that had inspired this early essay (Profiles, 53–60) and dropped the normative framework of Daseinsanalyse he had found in Being and Time. Habermas kept the anthropological theory of action, however. In the following years, it assumed greater importance as he generalized its theoretical implications and expanded his empirical focus (Kultur und Kritik). In broad, architectonic terms, Habermas devised an empirical philosophy of history oriented on German idealism. Habermas’s dissertation—albeit in peripheral fashion—addresses Marx’s adaptation of Schelling’s idea of a “contraction” of God to suit his own, materialist project: faulty and corrupted social relations in the present day can be interpreted as a “fall of Man” in a secular sense; this condition, Marx avers, is to be replaced by a project of emancipation in which humanity, by uniting as producers, liberates itself from the domination of matter (Theory and Practice). Habermas never incorporated into his own theoretical framework Marx’s call to negate or sublate, through revolution, the “natural” necessities

The Philosophy of History, Anthropology, and Marxism 29

that bedevil human life. However, Marx’s idea that we can assure ourselves of the faultiness or pathology of our current condition by reflecting on the entanglements for which mankind is responsible proved sufficiently convincing that Habermas assigned it a productive role in his own project. Habermas’s early writings adopt historical figures of philosophical thought insofar as they establish a norm against which modern, instrumental action orientations may be diagnosed and critically assessed. Instead of invoking an originary, authentic mode of relating to the world (à la Heidegger), critical theory should reflect on the shortcomings of the human species as such— especially insofar as instrumental attitudes have produced forms of domination and problems of communication in the present. Habermas soon recognized that this approach—which draws on the history of philosophy but is ultimately modeled on psychoanalysis—rests on the fiction that the human species is something like a subject conceived as a collective entity, which can reflect on the infelicities of its evolution through the ages (Kultur und Kritik). Therefore, in his debate with Niklas Luhmann in the early 1970s, he replaced the scheme he had used with the less speculative notion that development in human societies occurs by rationalizing—along lines that can be theoretically reconstructed—different types of action, labor, and communication. All the same, Habermas found himself obliged to retain aspects of the conception of evolutionary progress that he had learned from the philosophy of history; after all, the theory of communicative reason is supposed to be an organ of critique, which articulates claims to reason and does so on the basis of structures that have developed through rational progress. Of the three intellectual traditions that inform Habermas’s early writings, only the last has survived the author’s revisions, expansions, and reconfigurations without significant alteration. While Habermas has held fast to aspects of Gehlen’s anthropological theory—especially the notion that action and knowledge derive from the same source—he has substantially reworked his views along the lines of pragmatism and speech-act theory. Similarly, Habermas has replaced the philosophy of history with an empirical theory of evolution/ development based on the works of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. Only a few core tenets of Marxism have retained their central position in Habermas’s thought. Although he critiqued aspects of Marx’s thought in his early works, Habermas made his own the idea that social pathology in modern society must, in some way, relate to market pressures to increase profit and revenue. The dynamic that “Dialectic of Rationalization” already understands in terms of instrumental attitudes—a phenomenon Habermas later called the “colonization of the lifeworld”—occurs when calculations of economic interest contaminate discrete spheres of social activity. As much as Habermas, in subsequent additions to his theory, has reformulated and qualified—by way of empirical

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research and linguistic analysis—the intellectual traditions that shaped his original ideas (philosophical anthropology, the philosophy of history, and Marxism), he has never abandoned the Marxist thesis that the economic forces that determine social action have become autonomous and therefore represent a problem; still today, this insight represents a vital component of his social theory.

References Gehlen, Arnold. [1940] 1988. Man: His Nature and Place in the World. Trans. Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer. New York: Columbia University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1954. “Die Dialektik der Rationalisierung.” Merkur 8, no. 78: 701–724. Heidegger, Martin. [1927] 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper.

2 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND SOCIAL THEORY A XEL HONNETH

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n 1950, when the Institute for Social Research reopened in Frankfurt, its activities resumed without a direct connection to the way the organization had operated in the 1930s and 1940s. There was no continuity between the sociological studies that were now being conducted and the philosophical, cultural, and critical projects that Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse (who remained in the United States) were continuing to pursue. Henceforth, critical theory ceased to be a “school” of unified endeavor, at least in terms of method. Despite their differences, the three representatives of the “original” institute (who shared a background in, and assumptions about, the philosophy of history) interpreted historical development as a process of technological rationalization culminating in the closed system of domination that beset contemporary society. Another project—which initially went unrecognized as a new beginning—distanced itself from the historicophilosophical premises that underlay this diagnosis. Although Jürgen Habermas served as Adorno’s assistant in Frankfurt, he had little in common, in terms of training and orientation, with traditional critical theory. Ultimately, he would incorporate the perspectives of philosophical anthropology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, and linguistics into his project. But already in the 1950s, Habermas’s work included elements of theories that members of the older generation surrounding Adorno and Horkheimer had always held at arm’s length—which, indeed, they viewed with hostility. Gradually, it became clear that Habermas’s works, although they came from a different perspective, shared the goals of critical theory and, as such, renewed the project in a manner one should take seriously. Even though it had occurred at the margins of the Institute for Social Research, a concern with intersubjectivity had been voiced early on. Now, in Habermas’s writings, the matter attained self-awareness: a distinct theoretical framework within which to view society and social relations stood at the ready. At the basis of Habermas’s innovations lies the insight that intersubjective structures inform social action. Habermas found his way to the conceptual

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core of his theory by engaging with Wittgenstein’s philosophical analyses of language, from which he learned that the medium of linguistic communication “always already” connects subjects with one another. Human existence is distinguished by intersubjectivity anchored in language; therefore, linguistic interaction between subjects represents a fundamental and necessary precondition for the reproduction of the structures constituting society and ways of life within it. Habermas added theoretical weight to this thesis when he made it the point of departure for his engagement with the traditions of social philosophy and sociology. This occurred in his critique of modern social philosophy’s tendency to reduce intersubjective praxis to the matter of arriving at technically appropriate decisions (Theory and Practice). The same gesture was repeated when he took exception to functionalist conceptions of the social sciences. The task of social reproduction, Habermas observed, is always determined by the normative self-understanding of subjects whose relations are mediated by communication—that is, the “functions” necessary for life are impossible to locate outside of the concrete contexts in which social existence takes place (Logic, 74ff.). Ultimately, these considerations led Habermas to critique Marxism, whose conception of history he supplemented with a theory of action: if human existence is determined by linguistic communication, then social reproduction cannot be reduced to labor to the extent that Marx proposed; instead, one must examine the praxis of linguistically mediated interaction alongside the  transformation of nature (Naturbearbeitung) as a fundamental factor in the historical evolution of societies (Knowledge, chaps. 1, 2, and 3). Thereby, Habermas implicitly distanced himself from the basic historical assumptions that had framed traditional critical theory (Wellmer 1977, McCarthy 1981, Honneth 1982, Brunkhorst 1983). Unlike Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, Habermas no longer sought to explain human life in society in terms of the ever-expanding conquest of nature; instead, he pointed out that collectives secure their material existence—from their inception—by assuring communicative agreement. Human beings can only develop articulated personal identities by “growing into” a social group constituted by intersubjectivity and then operating within the “world” to which they belong. Therefore, the precondition for survival is damaged when the process of communication experiences interruption: communication is just as fundamental as mastering nature through joint efforts. Linguistic communication provides the medium through which individuals assure themselves that their actions and values are shared, and assurance that this is the case is necessary for mastering the task of material reproduction. The philosophy of history—which serves as the frame of reference for critical theory in its original conception—abstracts from this dimension of

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social interaction; for this reason, Habermas’s predecessors succumbed to illusions of functionalism à la Marx (and considered social phenomena only in relation to the transformation of nature). Habermas took a decisive step toward his own theory of society—and, in the process, toward a new understanding of critical theory—when he identified work and interaction as different types of rationality/rationalization. He did so, in immediate terms, by taking issue with Marcuse’s critique of technology; in a broader perspective, Max Weber’s concept of rationality provided the theoretical framework for his reflections (Rational Society, 81–82). In his critique of Marx, Habermas considers the modes of action he identifies both as models for specific forms of activity and as the means by which particular forms of knowledge are acquired; it is possible, he concludes, to assign to both the fundamental dimensions of social reproduction—“work” and “interaction”—a distinctive epistemological form and, for this reason, a particular mode of “rationality” as well. On this point, Weber’s concept of rationalization proves too narrow: just as one can posit specific forms of rationalization for instrumental activities and technical knowledge, it must be possible to show that separate possibilities of rationalization exist for communicative praxis, on the one hand, and the knowledge embedded within it, on the other. Habermas summarizes the general thesis that follows from his critique of Weber in terms borrowed from systems theory. Whereas the species (Gattung) continues to exist by accumulating technical and strategic knowledge in subsystems of action occurring through instrumental reason (i.e., work within society [gesellschaftliche Arbeit] and political administration), it evolves inasmuch as it liberates itself from constraints that restrict communication within the institutional framework that reproduces the norms effecting social integration (Rational Society, esp. 124ff.). From this conception of society—which holds that systems of action organized by instrumental reason occupy a position distinct from the sphere of everyday communicative praxis and that particular forms of rationalization obtain in both social realms—follow all the theoretical modifications Habermas undertook in the course of the 1970s. His universal pragmatism elucidates the linguistic infrastructure of communicative action (“What Is Universal Pragmatics?” in Pragmatics, 1–20). The theory of development/evolution clarifies the logic according to which social knowledge is constituted (that is, rationalized along twin lines) (Rekonstruktion). Finally, a modified conception of systems theory accounts for the mechanisms through which social spheres of action come to be organized in instrumentalized form (Habermas 1971). Although Habermas’s theoretical efforts extend in many different directions, they meet up inasmuch as they seek to provide a foundation for the critical examination of society, a foundation anchored in the theory of communication. In this way, Habermas has sought to demonstrate that the rationality of

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communicative action provides a basic condition of social development (and that Adorno and Horkheimer’s diagnosis of the tendencies of instrumental reification are one-sided inasmuch as they concern only one aspect of the phenomenon). Habermas’s program assumed systematic form when he published The Theory of Communicative Action (1985 [1981]; see Bernstein 1985; Honneth 1991, esp. chap. 9). This work in two volumes—which brings together the results of the author’s varied research projects—presents the rationality of communicative action within the framework of speech-act theory. In addition, it reviews the history of sociology from Weber to Parsons, synthesizing scholarship into a comprehensive theory of society. Finally, on the basis of the innovative theoretical standpoint that results, The Theory of Communicative Action offers a critical diagnosis of the present day. Since The Theory of Communicative Action, the concept of communicative rationality has occupied, in Habermasian theory, the same key position that the notion of instrumental rationality holds in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Just as Adorno and Horkheimer developed their ideas by examining the form of rationality governing the human conquest of nature, Habermas elaborated— on the basis of the potential for rationality within communicative action—the dynamics of a historical process that has led to the present moment of crisis. His fundamental insight is that the speech acts through which individual actions are coordinated contain culturally invariable claims to validity, which emerge gradually and in differentiated form over the course of processes of rationalization. The knowledge that obtains in the lifeworld—whose horizon encompasses the whole of communicative action—produces a cognitive attitude, according to which subjects relate to their environment only in terms of “success” (unter Erfolgsgesichtspunkten). Habermas considers this strategic orientation, which is historically determined, to provide the social condition for the emergence of systemically organized spheres of action: when subjects learn to act only with a view to success, it is possible to coordinate social actions through nonverbal media such as money and power (Communicative Action, 2:258ff.). The spheres of action that acquire autonomous status pursuant to the institutionalization of these steering media are economic production and political administration. From now on, the economic system and the realm of governmental activity possess integrity independent of communicative understanding: in modern societies, they operate as systems that are unregulated with respect to those spheres of action that are still organized in a communicative fashion (i.e., where the symbolic reproduction of social life proceeds as before). On the basis of the historical disjunction between “system” and “lifeworld,” Habermas introduces the two-tiered conception of society that completes his theoretical edifice. Here, the process of communicative interaction continues

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to represent the fundamental mechanism of reproduction in modern societies. At the same time, however, the existence of such norm-free spheres of action is presented as the product of a historical development—a matter to be discerned only by a systems-theoretical analysis. The key insight afforded by the sociological theory of modernity concerns the entanglement (Verschränkung) of communication and system: every analysis of the processes of interaction through which societies reproduce themselves with respect to the lifeworld must be supplemented by a systems analysis examining modes of material reproduction. From this dualistic construction Habermas ultimately derives the framework for his critical assessment of the present day and its ills. In so doing, he seeks to interpret the “process of Enlightenment” in a way that avoids the resignation to which Adorno and Horkheimer were driven. It is no longer the existence of instrumental reason organizing the whole of social life that represents a crisis. Rather, the problem concerns its penetration into realms of society constituted by processes of communicative understanding. Herein lies the pathology that Habermas diagnoses in modernity.

References Bernstein, Richard J. 1985. Habermas and Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 1983. “Paradigmenkern und Theoriedynamik der Kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft.” Soziale Welt 34:22–36. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. “Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Niklas Luhmann: Systemtheorie oder kritische Theorie der Gesellschaft.” In Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie, by Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, 142–290. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Honneth, Axel. 1982. “Von Adorno zu Habermas. Der Gestaltwandel kritischer Gesellschaftstheorie.” In Sozialforschung als Kritik, ed. Wolfgang Bonß and Axel Honneth, 87–126. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1991. The Critique of Power. Trans. Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. McCarthy, Thomas. 1981. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Wellmer, Albrecht. 1977. “Kommunikation und Emanzipation. Überlegungen zur sprachanalytischen Wende der Kritischen Theorie.” In Theorien des Historischen Materialismus, ed. Axel Honneth and Urs Jaeggi, 465–500. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

3 CONSTITUTIONAL LAW WILLIAM E. SCHEUERMAN

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hen reminiscing about his student days in Frankfurt during the 1950s, Habermas has occasionally mentioned Horkheimer’s worries that he and other young leftist students would get hold of old copies of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, safely locked away in the cellar of the Institute for Social Research apparently in order to repress the memory of its radical past. Although the young Habermas had already read Marx, Lukács, Bloch, and Dialectic of Enlightenment before coming to Frankfurt, he admits he initially had little knowledge of the interdisciplinary Hegelian-Marxist research program that the institute had brilliantly pioneered in the 1930s (Dews 1986, 94–95). Although his assistantship under Adorno quickly altered this surprising state of affairs, at least some credit for initiating Habermas into the rich tradition of interwar and especially German-Jewish leftist thought should go to the jurist and political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth (1906–1985), long the Federal Republic’s only Marxist tenured professor and whom Habermas in an appreciative 1966 Die Zeit essay dubbed the “Partisanenprofessor” (Habermas 1966). The label was well chosen: the left-socialist Abendroth had been active in the anti-Nazi underground, fought among antifascist partisans, and spent his entire life deeply involved in leftwing political movements and parties. Those familiar with Habermas’s biography already know the sad tale of Horkheimer’s hostility to the young Habermas and how Habermas was driven to leave Frankfurt and pursue his Habilitation—the path-breaking Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962)—under Abendroth’s guidance at Marburg. What sometimes gets lost in the story, however, is Abendroth’s relatively significant intellectual and political impact on the young Habermas. In 1950s West Germany Abendroth represented a rare link not only to a Marxist political tradition that Nazism had nearly extinguished but also to the vibrant intellectual culture of left-wing Weimar jurisprudence and political theory (Dietrich and Perels 1976; Balzer, Bock, and Schöler 2001). A student of the socialist jurists Hugo Sinzheimer and Hermann Heller, Abendroth’s greatest intellectual and political achievement in Adenauer’s Germany was to salvage the original interpretation of the idea of a “social Rechtsstaat,” which Heller (and, though sometimes forgotten, also the young Franz L. Neumann)

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had desperately advocated in Weimar’s waning days. In his much-discussed “Zum Begriff des demokratischen und sozialen Rechtstaates im Grundgesetz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland” (1954), Abendroth defended the original Weimar understanding of the idea of a “social Rechtsstaat” as an opening for democratic socialism (Abendroth 1967). In opposition to conservative followers of Schmitt, for example Ernst Forsthoff, Abendroth refused to permit Article 20 of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) to be interpreted as a rigid codification of the economic and social status quo and thus as little more than a constitutional basis for limited interventionist correctives to a fundamentally capitalist economy. With the emergence of massive concentrations of economic power threatening “formal” democracy, in conjunction with the collapse of the classical liberal state/society divide, only a far-reaching democratization of both state and economy could realize the original humanistic ideals of the unfinished liberal and democratic revolutions. Although Abendroth admitted that Article 20 entailed no express decision in favor of a democratic socialist future, he insisted—prompting angry catcalls from the right-wing detractors who dominated German law faculties in the 1950s—that it not only allowed for a socialist Federal Republic but in fact immediately required wide-ranging egalitarian social reforms that would likely propel West Germany in a leftleaning direction. Anyone familiar with the concluding programmatic sections of Structural Transformation will immediately recognize parallels to Abendroth’s agenda. Like Abendroth, the young Marxist Habermas relied on a grand narrative about capitalist transformation to help buttress a radical reading of the idea of a “social Rechtsstaat,” interpreted as requiring democratization of a “neofeudal” institutional configuration that had emerged in the context of organized capitalism and the collapse of the classical liberal state/society divide (Structural Transformation, 222–235). Although somewhat more cautiously than Abendroth, Habermas pushed for a reform agenda possessing impeccable democratic-socialist credentials. Even Habermas’s own creative insight— that new forms of critical publicity would need to be institutionalized effectively in the context of the novel modes of decision making and interest mediation that had come to dominate the postliberal political universe—could be legitimately interpreted as a theoretical extension of Abendroth’s overall vision. Not surprisingly, in his “Problem der innerparteilichen und innerverbandlichen Demokratie in der Bundesrepublik” (1964), Abendroth enthusiastically praised Habermas’s ideas, seeing in them a normative enrichment of his own proposals (Abendroth 1967, 273, 281ff.). More generally, Abendroth probably helped acquaint Habermas with—or at least provided him with professional and intellectual space to interrogate— broader leftist currents in 1920s and 1930s political theory and jurisprudence. To be sure, Habermas’s writings always evinced greater appreciation than

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those of either Abendroth or his Weimar leftist forebears for normative political theory and especially the normative foundations of democracy. Yet his far-reaching debts to leftist Weimar political and legal thought in Structural Transformation and even more so in “Zum Begriff der politischen Beteiligung,” the lengthy introduction to Student und Politik (1961), remain indisputable. Especially in the latter, Habermas updated a core thesis that Neumann and Ernst Fraenkel (both also Sinzheimer students) had formulated in the 1930s: with the transition from competitive to monopoly or organized capitalism, the classical rule of law and especially the central place of the general legal norm necessarily found itself under attack. Citing extensively from the mostly Jewish émigrés, including Otto Kirchheimer, whom Abendroth later described as “the most gifted and most intelligent” of the Weimar socialist jurists (Dietrich and Perels 1976, 146), now based in the United States, Habermas reiterated an argument that directly echoed their most radical writings: organized capitalism was resulting in parliamentary decay, administrative as well as judicial discretion, and increasingly authoritarian forms of political domination. Directly taking up Heller’s central claim from Rechtstaat oder Diktatur? (1930), Habermas similarly prophesized that either decisive steps toward social democratization would have to be taken, or fledgling liberal democracies like Germany faced nothing less than the terrifying prospect of a resurgence of political authoritarianism. Here as well, he endorsed Abendroth’s view—directly influenced by the Weimar debates—that social-democratic state intervention could preserve the normative kernel of the rule of law by guaranteeing social rights as well as relatively predictable forms of state economic activity in accord with regularized procedures. No wonder that an increasingly cautious and even conservative Horkheimer was so hostile to this and other writings by the young Habermas: they must have brought back painful memories of 1930s Germany, for him a traumatic period in his view apparently best left buried deep in his psyche—and in the institute basement. Habermas has on many subsequent occasions praised Abendroth’s political and intellectual integrity while gradually but unambiguously distancing himself from the reformist Marxist vision of democratic socialism his Marburg teacher always defended. Apt appreciation for the fact that ours is necessarily a functionally differentiated society, Habermas has argued, proves inconsonant with holistic models of a planned democratic-socialist economy in which the rightful autonomy of market mechanisms necessarily must be neglected. Traditional socialists like Abendroth succumbed to a naïve view of bureaucratic state intervention and failed to grapple sufficiently with the necessary limitations of the legal medium and the perils of juridification (Verrechtlichung). In his magnum opus in political and legal theory, Between Facts and Norms, debates in Weimar political and legal theory make a peripheral

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appearance, with Habermas openly criticizing interpretations of the rule of law having as their centerpiece the generality of the legal norm. Referring expressly to Student und Politik, Habermas now apparently sees in it little more than a peccadillo: in his view, its reformulation of 1920s and 1930s Hegelian and Weberian-Marxism was shaped inordinately by a tendentious view of the generality of the legal norm deriving from Carl Schmitt and his 1928 Constitutional Theory and then imported into left-wing German legal discourse by Neumann and others (Facts, 563–564). Despite the theoretical distance from Abendroth, his influence remains palpable. Habermas continues to defend an interpretation of the “social Rechtsstaat” as calling for what he now dubs the “reflexive” reform of the social-welfare state (Facts, 388–446). Although rather weak on concrete details, this model interprets the unfulfilled project of the social-welfare state as necessitating substantially more ambitious measures than mere regulatory correctives to contemporary capitalism. In short: Habermas has never made his peace with the social and economic status quo or with a model of the welfare state as offering nothing more than paternalistic public services (Daseinsvorsorge). Its theoretical contours have obviously changed over the decades, yet the original demand for a far-reaching democratization of society has by no means vanished either, even though Habermas tends to highlight the difficult challenges posed by social complexity and functional differentiation to conventional left-wing programmatic ideas. The systematic attempt in Between Facts and Norms to draw integral links between and among radical democratization, the rule of law, and a “reflexive” welfare state also arguably contains significant remnants of Abendroth’s original critical response to Schmittians who sharply juxtaposed the rule of law to the welfare state. When leftist critics lament a lack of radicalism in Habermas’s recent writings, what they in fact are addressing is the demise of a plausible model of democratic socialism along the lines once advocated by Abendroth. There can be no question that Habermas’s skepticism remains justified, however. His own caution about the possible contours of a fundamental alternative to the political and economic status quo, at the very least, gives expression to genuine dilemmas facing the democratic left today. In another fashion as well, Habermas remains directly indebted to Abendroth and the jurists of the interwar left whose memory Abendroth helped preserve in postwar Germany. The target of much of his political and legal thinking remains Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), Germany’s premier twentiethcentury right-wing legal thinker and, at least for a few years, the eager “crown jurist of the Third Reich.” Abendroth, as noted, waged intellectual and political battle with Schmitt’s students in the context of debates about the “social Rechtsstaat” in 1950s West Germany. A generation earlier, Neumann and Kirchheimer, the Weimar leftist lawyers and then first-generation political

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and legal theorists of the Institute for Social Research, also focused their theoretical and political ire on Schmitt and his disciples. Habermas’s writings similarly reveal an impressive familiarity with Schmitt’s far-flung writings, along with deep political and moral revulsion (“The Horrors of Autonomy,” in New Conservatism, 128–139). On one reading of Neumann and Kirchheimer, they attempted to proffer a social-democratic rejoinder to both Schmitt’s normative dismissal of modern democracy and the rule of law and also to his empirical diagnosis that “normativistic” legality inexorably must decay under contemporary political and social traditions (Scheuerman 1994). Interestingly, Habermas has pursued a parallel strategy of attack, repeatedly criticizing Schmitt and at times envisioning his own theorizing as best capable of providing the requisite antipode to the dangerous temptations of Schmitt’s decisionism. Opposition to Schmitt runs like a red thread throughout his political and legal theorizing: Schmitt is a key target not only in Habermas’s early political writings but also in his latest discussions of globalization and the prospects of postnational democratization. As Habermas revealingly noted in a 1984 interview with Peter Dews and Perry Anderson, “I was critical of decisionism from the very beginning—from the minute when I read Schmitt, for instance” (Dews 1986, 194). Although in fact deeply critical of Schmitt even at the outset of his career, Habermas’s early political writings occasionally marshaled Schmitt and his disciples (e.g., Forsthoff and Werner Weber) in order to document worrisome empirical trends—for example, the decay of deliberative parliamentarism— which Habermas, in contradistinction to Schmitt, hoped to counter. In these first jousts with Schmitt, Habermas—directly echoing Neumann and Kirchheimer— seems to have interpreted Schmitt’s troublesome authoritarian political and programmatic preferences as reifying disturbing real-life empirical trends (Structural Transformation, 205). When Structural Transformation thus outlined the ominous prospects of an executive-dominated plebiscitarian regime in which uncoerced debate, the rule of law, and parliamentary rule had been jettisoned for manufactured publics, legal arbitrariness, and acclamation mobilized from above, Habermas’s description of its main components mirrored Schmitt’s defense of mass-based authoritarianism. By way of countering a decisionist model of law and politics, Habermas early on turned to precisely that feature of classical liberalism which Schmitt had scorned: whereas Schmitt had denounced the liberal bourgeoisie as a mere “talking class” whose impulses were harmlessly apolitical at best and dangerously anarchistic and power dissolving at worst, Habermas proposed a deliberative conception of political legitimacy that hinted at the possibility of a fundamental transformation of the modern state and perhaps even the dissolution of “the political” as conventionally understood. Pace Schmitt, power and law could be reduced to ratio, if properly interpreted in a deliberative fashion. When combined with

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radical social-democratic reforms, liberal bourgeois society’s most important gift to modernity could thereby be preserved. Venues for effective critical publicity and deliberative will formation, in opposition both to Schmitt’s normative wishes and his dreary empirical diagnosis, could be guaranteed. Habermas’s lifelong quest to sketch out a defensible deliberative model of politics and law, grounded in a rigorous theory of communicative action, can be plausibly interpreted at least in part as an attempt to discredit Schmitt’s political existentialism and antirationalism. When criticizing technocracy in “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’ ” (Rational Society, 81–122), Habermas thus identified parallels with Shmitt in Hermann Lübbe’s updated version of a politics of the “pure decision,” while in Legitimation Crisis (1975 [1973]), Niklas Luhmann was interpreted unsympathetically as a closeted follower of Schmitt and his decisionistic legal theory. The critical strategy in these texts was not so much that of “guilt by association” but rather an implicit acknowledgment of Schmitt’s broad intellectual and political appeal and thus the necessity of countering even relatively moderate reformulations of his ideas. Not surprisingly, Habermas’s most impressive analyses of Schmitt are probably found in Between Facts and Norms, where he moved beyond stock criticisms of decisionism to tackle Schmitt’s specific contributions to political and legal scholarship. Here Habermas defended the right of courts to engage in constitutional review in part by responding to Schmitt’s Weimar-era polemics against Hans Kelsen’s defense of constitutional courts. He also countered Schmitt’s influential account of parliamentary decay in part by appealing to a theory of deliberative civil society: even if modern legislatures are by no means freewheeling deliberative bodies, they operate in conjunction with a civil society in which deliberation and debate, at least occasionally, remain vibrant. In the last decade or so, Schmitt has made frequent appearances as a target of Habermas’s emerging defense of global governance. The rather ambivalent record of “humanitarian military intervention” in the former Yugoslavia and in the Middle East has undoubtedly helped gain a second intellectual life for Schmitt’s critique of so-called discriminatory wars, according to which liberal states typically mask their fundamental brutality and imperialistic intentions under the hypocritical mantle of humanitarian rhetoric and liberal international law. Even for leftist critics of NATO military intervention in Yugoslavia, for example, or the first UN-endorsed Gulf War, Schmitt now exercises a certain amount of drawing power, as is readily apparent from the pages of the New Left Review and countless left-leaning academic journals around the world. With this development in mind, Habermas in The Divided West and elsewhere has taken it upon himself to remind Schmitt’s latest fans of the troublesome fact that the critique of discriminatory war rests on an untenable vitalistic and existentialist “concept of the political.” Schmitt and those now influenced by him also conveniently miss that interstate relations have been

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undergoing an ambitious process of juridication: amid the ongoing legalization of interstate affairs, Schmitt’s anxieties about a “moralization” of warfare are both misleading and overstated. Even more ambitiously, Habermas has joined forces with Schmitt’s most impressive nemesis in international political theory: Habermas is now busily reformulating Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitan vision of a global constitutionalization of law without a world state. With great acumen, he is defending a pacific yet nonstatist variety of cosmopolitan global governance—in other words, Carl Schmitt’s worst nightmare (Divided West, 188–193).

References Abendroth, Wolfgang. 1967. Antagonistische Gesellschaft und politische Demokratie. Aufsätze zur politischen Soziologie. Neuwied: Luchterhand. Balzer, Friedrich-Martin, Hans Manfred Bock, and Uli Schöler, eds. 2001. Wolfgang Abendroth: Wissenschaftlicher Politiker. Bio-Biographische Beiträge. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Dews, Peter, ed. 1986. Habermas: Autonomy and Solidarity—Interviews with Jürgen Habermas. London: Verso. Dietrich, Barbara, and Joachim Perels, eds. 1991. Wolfgang Abendroth: Ein Leben in der Arbeiterbewegung. Gespräche. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976. Habermas, Jürgen. 1966. “Partisanenprofessor im Lande der Mitläufer. Der Marburger Ordinarius Wolfgang Abendroth wird am 2. Mai sechzig Jahre alt.” Die Zeit (April 29, 1966). Habermas, Jürgen, et al. 1961. Student und Politik: eine soziologische Untersuchung zum politischen Bewusstsein Frankfurter Studenten. Neuwied: Luchterhand. Heller, Hermann. 1930. Rechtsstaat oder Diktatur? Tübingen: Mohr. Scheuerman, William E. 1994. Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1928. Die Verfassungslehre. München: Duncker & Humblot.

4 PRAGMATISM AND ULTIMATE JUSTIFICATION MAT THIAS KET TNER

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ürgen Habermas’s intellectual itinerary can hardly be understood without considering its critical and constructive interplay with the thought of Karl-Otto Apel—interactions between the two theorists have often marked significant turning points in Habermas’s project. Without the theoretical-architectonic alternatives that Apel’s reflections open, it would be impossible to evaluate the philosophical course Habermas has steered. Apel and Habermas are united by a lifelong professional friendship, which began when they studied together in Bonn in the early 1950s; since then, the liberating encounter with American pragmatism—of which Apel was one of the first German translators (1967, 1970)—has strengthened their ties. Although it is a simplification, it is not false to compare the differences between Apel and Habermas—and they have grown larger since the mid1980s (Apel 1988, 103–153) and now run deep (Apel 1998, 24–27, 649–838)—with the two different strains of American pragmatism represented by Charles Sanders Peirce, on the one hand, and John Dewey, on the other. Apel’s Transformation der Philosophie (1973) continues figures of thought that have characterized transcendental projects since Kant: the effort to uncover, through philosophical reflection, the “necessary conditions of possibility” for rationality; in a further step, Apel renews Peirce’s realist conception of semantics in the context of the linguistic turn. What connects Peirce with Apel at the deepest level is the conviction that regulative ideas hold value for a postmetaphysical, sense-critical philosophy and the insistence that philosophical argumentation should encompass forms of argument whose specific validity claims are not subject to revision through progress made in the empirical sciences. The keywords “ultimate justification” (Letztbegründung) and “a priori of discourse” (Diskursapriori)—which relate, in dialectical fashion, both to an ideal community of communication and to the real one here and now (Apel 1998, 598–607)—name central aspects of Apel’s “transcendental pragmatics of language” (1998, 9–32). In contrast, Dewey, Rorty, and Habermas wish to eliminate transcendentalism and affirm continuity between

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philosophy and the empirical study of culture/society against the backdrop of reconstructive naturalism. The philosophical consequences of Apel and Habermas’s pragmatism, then, are altogether different. One can say, with only slight exaggeration, that Apel considers it both possible and necessary to establish rationally definitive justifications (Letztbegründungen) for validity claims of principled philosophical thoughts, whereas Habermas deems doing so neither possible nor necessary. This fundamental disagreement has, in recent years, prompted Apel to think “with Habermas against Habermas” time and again. In the following, I will describe Apel’s most important reservations concerning Habermasian “universal pragmatics,” all of which derive from this point. For reasons of space, how Habermas has responded cannot be discussed here (see Habermas 2002). How, in summary fashion, can one define the phrase “ultimate justification”? Needless to say, the words sound ominous—and not just in a postmodern context. The idea of a reflexive, ultimate justification is central to transcendental pragmatics (Kuhlmann 1993, Böhler 2002). It means that the intellectual preconditions necessary for raising a validity-challenging question cannot themselves be questioned—if, indeed, such preconditions exist at all. Such insight stems from the self-understanding of rational persons who, being engaged in the practice of argumentation here and now, reflect on how they must conceive of themselves, and likewise of anyone else who is actually or could potentially be participating in their discourse, as a generic practical subject (Diskursteilnehmer; see Niquet 1999). By performing appropriate argumentative acts, participants in discourse can test whatever claims to intersubjective, generalizable validity someone makes concerning propositional content by pitting the respective claims against purportedly good reasons we have for criticizing, defending, or justifying them. Apel operationalizes Kant’s demand for the “selfconsistency of reason” as a test for avoiding performative self-contradiction in making universal validity claims from within the practice of argumentative discourse. Like Apel, Habermas—ever since his engagement with speech-act theory and his discovery of the double structure of performance and proposition— has granted that there are intellectual-conceptual presuppositions of argumentation that cannot be circumvented in or through argumentation; were this not so, what the speaker meant would be contradicted by what he or she did (on “performative self-contradiction,” see Kettner 1993). However, for Apel—and not for Habermas—the nexus of normative presuppositions of argumentative discourse that are not rationally possible in another form (that is, noncontingent) contains ultimate constraints on validity claims for statements with a normative status (e.g., normative moral judgments) as well as  ultimate constraints on validity claims for statements of theoretical

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philosophy that aspire to the status of objectivity (e.g., philosophical semantics, ontology, philosophy of mind; see Raz 1999). The first point has consequences for discourse ethics and the normative basis of critical social theory (Kettner 1996); the second is significant for the philosophical theory of reason—for example, as a metacritique of attempted radical critiques of reason that ignore the strictures of performative selfconsistency (Selbsteinholbarkeit) (Apel 1994b, Hellesnes 2007). According to Apel, Habermas can eschew strictly reflexive transcendental arguments only at the price of inconsistency. Although his theory of communicative action describes a moral process of rationalization, it cannot justify its criterion for evaluating progress—that is, Habermas’s postconventional morality of discourse ethics (Apel 1998a, esp. 680–693) remains unjustified. Therefore, Apel maintains, Habermas undercuts the aim of critical theory to provide an empirically rich, metaphysically sober, yet not value-neutral reconstruction of sociocultural evolution. Instead, the Habermasian project of reconstruction is but one of many merely immanent critiques of the status quo. It would be preferable, Apel continues, to situate the claims of critical theory within an emancipatory ethics of responsibility secured by an “ultimate justification.” Against the attempt to ground important critical evaluative standards, Habermas has objected that skeptics, nihilists, and others could simply bypass discourse and its intrinsic normative commitments (the consensualist conception of justice in his discourse ethics; see Justification and Application). Apel finds Habermas’s reservations mistaken or at best irrelevant: irrelevant, since one can de facto ignore rational commitments of any kind; mistaken, since, if the distancing is intended for skeptical or other reasons, it already represents an argumentative move within discourse and therefore presupposes recognition of its constitutive norms. In excluding the matter of ultimate justification from the context of justification of critical social theory, Habermas must—at a price that Apel considers excessive—promote, in quasi-Hegelian fashion, the ethics of the lifeworld to a position where it stands as the paramount source of moral normativity. In the process—and whether he wants to or not—Habermas transfigures the inner fissures, belatedness, and conventionality inherent in the lifeworld into a harmonious arrangement. Apel diagnoses conservatism in Habermas’s pseudoWittgensteinian pose of reliance on the lifeworld and a self-denial of critical theory, most notably in Habermas’s dictum that “everyday moral intuitions do not require elucidation by philosophers.” Habermas’s attempt to fit the discourse-reflexive approach to the issue of ultimate justification entails even more massive problems. This is evident when he claims primacy in a number of ways, in The Theory of Communicative Action, for language use oriented toward understanding, whereas language use oriented toward success (e.g., “strategic” use) is deemed “parasitic.” According

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to Apel, with only sociological methods on board, such claims admit proof only superficially, and they founder entirely with respect to cases of openly strategic action, where language is used without even the pretense of being oriented on reaching a common understanding. That strategic use is parasitic on the communicative use of language can only be demonstrated in and relative to a theoretical framework that Habermas’s universal pragmatics cannot provide, i.e., the framework of a philosophical theory of different types of rationality that would also elucidate the relations of interdependency, as well as mutual support, that hold between these types. Apel maintains that it is only within the context of argumentative discourse that we can prove, by reflecting on discursive practice from within, that purely strategic bargaining is derivative, since it depends, in this context, on communication aimed at reaching consensus about validity claims (Apel 1998b, 701–726, esp. 723–724; Apel 1994a). A third set of objections that Apel, thinking “with Habermas against Habermas,” presents is directed against Habermas’s theory of discourse as it  concerns democracy and law in Between Facts and Norms (Apel 1998c, 727–838, esp. 738). If Habermas both wishes to account, in historical terms, for how the process of normative differentiation yields a universalist morality of justice, the ethics of the good life for individuals and groups, and positive law founded in democracy and also wishes to reconstruct and justify this process, which encompasses manifold discourses and spheres—up to and including the model of a deliberatively democratic constitutional state as a process of progressive rationalization across various normative fields—then he would have to work out justifications of standards of justification that can only be elaborated by recourse to a discourse principle that must have morally normative content and unassailable rational credentials. However, the discourse principle Habermas comes up with in Between Facts and Norms—“Just those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourses” (Facts, 107)—is supposed to have so scant a normative content—pure impartiality—that Habermas proclaims its “neutrality” vis-à-vis the indifference between moral normativity and juridical-legal normativity. In other words, it has no determinate moral content. But once outsourced, such content cannot be reintroduced into the construction of the theory without a petitio principii. The architectonics of ramifications that Habermas introduces in Between Facts and Norms lacks a normatively integrating apex and is thus susceptible to collapse (Apel 1998c, 735–742; Kettner 2002). The alternative Apel proposes is a theoretical framework of an “ethics of responsibility that relates to history” (geschichtsbezogene Verantwortungsethik) (Apel 1998c, 759–837; see also Apel 1988). The basic moral norm of this framework involves the “demand to solve all morally relevant conflicts of

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interest through practical discourses about claims to validity, and without strategic practices of violence” (Apel 1998c, 754). The undeniable intersubjective validity of this norm can be demonstrated by strict reflection on normative presuppositions inherent in and constitutive of the practice of argumentative discourse. This basic moral norm stands in a critical tension to the social status quo, not as an otherworldly utopia but in the sense of a regulative ideal. What Apel architectonically calls “Part B of discourse ethics” involves necessary reflection on the conditions—some of which are favorable (e.g., the culture of human rights) and some of which are not (e.g., constraints of the economic system)—for gradually realizing the foundational norm of discourse ethics in the world today (see esp. Apel 2001). This high-flying theoretical framework permits Apel to offer some very realistic objections to Habermas’s alignment of, and tendency to equate, the principles of law and democracy. Among others, the following: It is impossible, Apel maintains, to expunge historical contingency and abstract from the fact that in today’s world, popular sovereignty is organized in the form of multiple autonomous systems that realize the imperatives of their systemic selfpreservation in and through the medium of political power, notwithstanding the existence of governance structures that operate by free and equal citizens building consensus in many of these systems. This condition of systemic domination will persist for as long as a global legal order for all citizens of the world remains a utopia. At the same time, Apel observes that the principle of law is universalist and possesses an inherently global reach, at least inasmuch as one considers its discursive articulations from the perspective of human rights (Apel 1998c, 820–821). Unlike Habermas, Apel understands human rights to represent a polynormative universal that occupies a position between positive law and universalistic morality. And the discourse principle, the way Apel construes it, operates not only within the principle of democracy and that of law but also on a level of justificatory thought that is deeper than both.

References Apel, Karl-Otto, ed. 1967. Charles Sanders Peirce, Schriften, Bd. I: Zur Entstehung des Pragmatismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1970. Charles Sanders Peirce, Schriften, Bd. II: Vom Pragmatismus zum Pragmatizismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1973. Transformation der Philosophie. 2 vols. Vol. 1: Sprachanalytik, Semiotik, Hermeneutik. Vol. 2: Das Apriori der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1988. Diskurs und Verantwortung. Das Problem des Übergangs zur postkonventionellen Moral. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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——. 1994a. “Ist die transzendentalpragmatische Konzeption der Diskursrationalität eine Unterbestimmung der Vernunft?” In Grenzbestimmungen der Vernunft, ed. Petra Kolmer and Harald Korten, 77–102. Freiburg: Alber. ——. 1994b. “Die hermeneutische Dimension von Sozialwissenschaft und ihre normative Grundlage.” In Mythos Wertfreiheit? Neue Beiträge zur Objektivität in den Human- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Karl-Otto Apel and Matthias Kettner, 49–76. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1998. Auseinandersetzungen in Erprobung des transzendentalpragmatischen Ansatzes. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1998a. “Normative Begründung der ‘Kritischen Theorie’ durch Rekurs auf lebensweltliche Sittlichkeit?” In Auseinandersetzungen in Erprobung des transzendentalpragmatischen Ansatzes, 649–700. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1998b. “Das Problem des offen strategischen Sprachgebrauchs in transzendentalpragmatischer Sicht.” In Auseinandersetzungen in Erprobung des transzendentalpragmatischen Ansatzes, 701–726. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——.1998c. “Auflösung der Diskursethik? Zur Architektonik der Diskursdifferenzierung in Habermas’ Faktizität und Geltung.” In Auseinandersetzungen in Erprobung des transzendentalpragmatischen Ansatzes, 727–838. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2001. The Response of Discourse Ethics. Leuven: Peeters. Böhler, Dietrich. 2002. “Dialogreflexive Sinnkritik als Kernstück der Transzendentalpragmatik.” In Reflexion und Verantwortung. Auseinandersetzungen mit Karl-Otto Apel, ed. Dietrich Böhler, Matthias Kettner, and Gunnar Skirbekk, 15–43. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Habermas, Jürgen. 2002. “Zur Architektonik der Diskursdifferenzierung. Kleine Replik auf eine große Auseinandersetzung.” In Reflexion und Verantwortung. Auseinandersetzungen mit Karl-Otto Apel, ed. Dietrich Böhler, Matthias Kettner, and Gunnar Skirbekk, 44–64. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hellesnes, Jon. 2007. “Das Selbsteinholungsprinzip und seine Feinde.” In Filosofia trascendentalpragmatica – Transzendentalpragmatische Philosophie, ed. Michele Borrelli and Matthias Kettner, 225–234. Cosenza: Pellegrini. Kettner, Matthias. 1993. “Ansatz zu einer Taxonomie performativer Selbstwidersprüche.” In Transzendentalpragmatik, ed. Andreas Dorschel et al., 187–211. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1996. “Karl-Otto Apel’s Contribution to Critical Theory.” In Handbook of Critical Theory, ed. David M. Rasmussen, 258–286. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ——. 2002. “The Disappearance of Discourse Ethics in Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms.” In Discourse and Democracy: Essays on Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms, ed. Rene von Schomberg and Kenneth Baynes, 201–218. Albany: SUNY Press. Kuhlmann, Wolfgang. 1993. “Bemerkungen zum Problem der Letztbegründung.” In Transzendentalpragmatik, ed. Andreas Dorschel et al., 221–237. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Niquet, Marcel. 1999. Nichthintergehbarkeit und Diskurs. Prolegomena zu einer Diskurstheorie des Transzendentalen. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Raz, Joseph. 1999. “Notes on Value and Objectivity.” In Engaging Reason: On the Theory of Value and Action, 118–160. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

5 HERMENEUTICS AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN CRISTINA L AFONT

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n the foreword to the second edition of On the Logic of the Social Sciences, Habermas writes that the incorporation of hermeneutics into his project during the 1960s played a key role in transforming critical theory from an enterprise based on the philosophy of the subject into one founded on communication. This undertaking culminated in his main work, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). Although Habermas indicates that his encounter with analytic philosophy (see chapters 6 and 30 in this volume) is also of central importance, in examining his turn toward the philosophy of language it is necessary to take a closer look at the fraught role that Heidegger’s philosophy played in this development. The best-known biographical fact about Habermas’s “broken” relationship with Heidegger is the article he published in July 1953 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken: Zur Veröffentlichung von Vorlesungen aus dem Jahre 1935” (“Thinking with Heidegger Against Heidegger: On the Publication of His Lectures from 1935”). Here, Habermas criticized Heidegger for publishing lectures in which he had spoken of the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi movement without further commentary or expressions of regret—to say nothing of apology—about his involvement in the Nazi regime. Besides directing a personal reproach at Heidegger, Habermas examined how his moral failure related to the structure of his philosophy. This is a question that Habermas has confronted and answered in slightly different ways in several publications over the past four decades (Profiles, 53–60; Discourse, 131–160; Texte und Kontexte, 49–83). In all these discussions, Habermas maintains that Heidegger’s path to his famous “turn” (Kehre) is better explained by external factors related to Heidegger’s political involvement with Nazism than by the internal development of his philosophical project as originally conceived in Being and Time. This diagnosis makes Habermas’s strongly critical attitude toward Heidegger’s late philosophy compatible with another element of his evaluation of Heidegger that has equally remained constant, namely, his claim that Being and Time is the “most significant philosophical event since

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Hegel’s Phenomenology” (Profiles, 55). Even though Habermas does not always make it clear why, precisely, he esteems Being and Time so highly, it is plain that the self-imposed task of “thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger” would be meaningless without such a positive underlying assessment of his predecessor. The comparatively simpler alternatives of thinking against Heidegger rather than with him or leaving his philosophy by the wayside would seem more appropriate. Certainly, the meaningfulness of the task Habermas sets himself can be understood in a purely historical light. By the 1950s, Heidegger’s main work had achieved a position of incomparable influence both in Germany and abroad; indeed, its influence only grew over the following decades. What is more, the influence of Being and Time on Habermas’s philosophical development is unmistakable. Habermas has observed on multiple occasions that he was “a Heideggerian through and through” until 1953 (Dews 1986, 194). Even a cursory glance at Habermas’s dissertation on Schelling confirms this statement. These historical and biographical details notwithstanding, it is more interesting to address the systematic question of the nature and extent of the internal relationship between Heidegger’s and Habermas’s philosophy. Taking Habermas’s self-imposed task as a guide, I will identify first the most significant overlapping elements of both approaches. Once it becomes clear how far Habermas’s “thinking with Heidegger” goes, it will be possible to address, in a second step, the question of how far his “thinking against Heidegger” succeeded. Needless to say, with such philosophically complex approaches as Heidegger’s and Habermas’s it would be hopeless to aim at a complete account of their interconnections. Thus I am going to focus exclusively on some core elements that, in my opinion, are particularly significant to the extent that they have directly influenced the development of Habermas’s own approach. If one situates Heidegger’s and Habermas’s approaches in the context of the philosophical programs they aimed to continue and transform, the crucial element they share is the attempt to articulate an alternative to the philosophical paradigm of mentalism (what Heidegger calls the “subject-object model” and Habermas the “philosophy of consciousness”). This is the explicit objective of Heidegger’s hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology in Being and Time; the same idea guides Habermas’s realignment of critical theory toward language in The Theory of Communicative Action. To overcome the subject-object model that underpins traditional philosophy, Being and Time transforms hermeneutics from a method for interpreting authoritative texts (mainly sacred or legal ones) to a way of understanding human beings as such. Heidegger’s hermeneutics offers a radically new conception of humanity’s unique status: to be human is not primarily to be a rational animal but first and foremost to be a self-interpreting animal, in Charles Taylor’s (1985) terms. Precisely because human beings are nothing but

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interpretation all the way down, the activity of interpreting a meaningful text offers the most appropriate model for understanding any human experience whatsoever. This change of perspective amounts to a major break with traditional philosophy, which had been guided, for the most part, by a diametrically opposed impulse to model human experience on our perception of physical objects. Heidegger confronts this attempt with two major objections. First, he argues that by trying to model human experience on the basis of categories taken from a domain of objects radically different from human beings (i.e., physical objects), traditional philosophy provides an entirely distorted account of human identity. To show this, Heidegger articulates an alternative, hermeneutic model that makes it possible to understand human beings as essentially selfinterpreting creatures. Second, Heidegger argues that by focusing on perception as the private experience of an isolated subject, the subject-object model incorporates a methodological individualism (even solipsism) that entirely distorts human experience (giving rise to nothing but philosophical pseudoproblems such as the need to prove the existence of the external world). Heidegger offers an account of our experience that makes it possible to understand human beings as inhabiting a symbolically structured world in which everything they encounter is already understood as something. As a consequence, the central feature of Heidegger’s hermeneutic turn lies in the introduction of a new notion of world. After the hermeneutic turn, the world is no longer the totality of entities but a totality of significance, a web of meanings that structures Dasein’s understanding of itself and of everything that can show up within the world (Lafont 2000, 2005). Following Heidegger, HansGeorg Gadamer, in Truth and Method, significantly expanded this model of a linguistically articulated and intersubjectively shared lifeworld that enables mutual understanding. As Habermas aptly put it, Gadamer “[urbanized] the Heideggerian province” (Profiles, 189). Habermas’s appropriation of hermeneutic concepts played a key role in his split with the paradigm of mentalism. He blames this model for the gravest shortcomings of the works by the first generation of critical theorists. As Habermas observed in an interview with Peter Dews, his predecessors’ theoretical systems left “no room” for “ideas of the lifeworld or of life forms”; consequently, those who came before him “were not prompted to look into the no-man’s-land of everyday life” (Dews 1986, 196). This is also why the writings of first-generation critical theorists provide no sustained engagement with linguistic communication as the mechanism for reproducing the structures of the lifeworld. In On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967), Habermas already observed the superiority of the hermeneutic conception of language over the phenomenology of the lifeworld articulated by A. Schütz from a Husserlian point of view and over the “positivist analysis of language” that at the time he

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saw exemplified by the early and later Wittgenstein. Whereas the latter conceptions share an instrumental view of language as a mere tool for communication, the hermeneutic conception articulates a constitutive view of language as world disclosing. According to Habermas, the crucial methodological difference between these conceptions is that the Husserlian and positivist approaches rely on the possibility of adopting an observer or external perspective from which language can be objectified (i.e., become the object of analysis), whereas hermeneutics recognizes the impossibility of adopting such a perspective. In “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality,” Habermas (1990) describes the issue as follows: “Hermeneutics has taught us that we are always a participant as long as we move within the natural language and that we cannot step outside the role of a reflective partner” (254). At the same time, however, Habermas is well aware of the difficulty this claim poses for any attempt to combine the internal perspective of a participant in a linguistically articulated lifeworld with the external perspective of a social critic that the project of a critical theory requires. It is precisely this methodological difficulty that motivates Habermas’s criticism of the hermeneutic claim to universality, which is the main target of his article as a whole. We can distinguish two slightly different problems involved in this methodological issue, problems he had already identified in this article and has continued to elaborate in the following decades. One is descriptive, the other normative. At the descriptive level, there is an unavoidable explanatory limitation built into the hermeneutic approach, since speakers, as participants in a shared cultural lifeworld, do not have access to the type of external empirical knowledge that the reconstructive sciences provide. Hermeneutic self-reflection, as Habermas (1990) indicates, “throws light on experiences a subject makes while exercising his communicative competence, but it cannot explain this competence itself” (249). This explanatory deficit is not only obvious with regard to the reconstructive sciences that Habermas discusses in this context, such as linguistics and developmental psychology. It is equally the case with regard to most of the causal knowledge provided by the empirical sciences, including the social sciences. In particular, as Habermas will argue in his Theory of Communicative Action, systemic mechanisms that affect the lifeworld from the outside are inaccessible from the participants’ perspective. Access to them requires that the social theorist adopt an external perspective, as articulated in the broad tradition of functionalism by authors such as Marx, Parsons, or Luhmann. From this point of view, Habermas’s criticism of hermeneutics’s structural blindness toward the material (social and economic) circumstances of the reproduction of the lifeworld echoes the main arguments against Heidegger’s approach that members of the first generation of critical theory, most notably Marcuse, had already articulated in the 1930s (McCarthy 1991, 83–96).

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Now, it is one thing to recognize the need to integrate the functionalist and hermeneutic perspectives in social theory. It is quite another to provide a convincing account of society as constituted by both self-sufficient systems and the lifeworld. This difficult question, however, need not be explored here, for it concerns that part of critical theory least related to hermeneutics. Let us instead turn to a different normative difficulty resulting from Habermas’s attempt to integrate hermeneutics and critical theory. While the limited explanatory potential of hermeneutics makes it plain why critical theory needs to incorporate empirical knowledge from the social sciences, the same cannot be said concerning the normative limits that hermeneutics imposes on the critical aims of the social theorist. Recognizing that “as long as we move within the natural language we are always participants and we cannot step outside the role of a reflective partner” poses a normative challenge to the authority claimed by the theorist to criticize the prevalent societal understanding as ideological. Gadamer made this point in his famous debate with Habermas (see Gadamer 1986a; 1990a, 147–158; 1990b, 273–297; as well as Habermas 1990, 245–272) when he observed that in adopting an external perspective the social theorist engaged in the critique of ideologies breaks the symmetrical dialogue among participants and, in so doing, can only impose her own views about the good society under the presumption of a knowledge monopoly or a privileged access to truth. Thus, the critical theorist becomes a “social technocrat” in disguise (Gadamer 1990b, 274–275). In a critical theory with these characteristics, the emancipatory interest of the critical theorist simply collapses into the technical interest of a “social engineer” who prescribes without listening. In sharp contrast to this conception, Gadamer argues, the hermeneutic perspective of a symmetrical dialogue oriented toward understanding prohibits its participants from ascribing to themselves a superior insight into the “delusions” of other participants that would eliminate the need for the validation of their own views through dialogue. Seen from this perspective, the normative limitation of the hermeneutic approach poses a real challenge to the aspirations of critical theory. Any departures from the symmetrical conditions of dialogue among equal participants automatically raises questions concerning the legitimacy of the theorist’s criticisms as well as her right to impose her conception of the good society upon others. To avoid giving up the possibility of social critique, Habermas confronts this challenge with two main strategies, which together constitute the original core of his distinctive approach to critical theory. The first concerns the idea that lies at the heart of hermeneutics, namely, the view of language as constitutive of the lifeworld. Habermas’s conception of communication cannot be described in detail here (see chapter 30), but let me briefly indicate what I consider to be the main break with the hermeneutic approach. The main

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innovation of the Habermasian approach lies in its ability to incorporate externalism in an account of linguistic communication (Lafont 1999, 227–274). From the hermeneutic perspective, a shared linguistic world disclosure, or, in Gadamer’s terminology, a common tradition, is the precondition for any understanding or agreement that speakers may bring about in conversation. Once this is accepted, however, it becomes unclear how speakers can ever question or revise such a factually shared world disclosure or how they can communicate with those who do not share it. Our linguistic world disclosure seems unrevisable from within and inaccessible from without. In order to avoid these counterintuitive consequences, Habermas rejects the hermeneutic claim that understanding is only possible on the basis of a factual agreement among speakers with a shared linguistic world disclosure. Instead, Habermas claims that understanding depends on a “counterfactual agreement” that all speakers share just in virtue of their communicative competence. This agreement is based on formal presuppositions and thus does not depend on shared content or a shared world disclosure among participants in a conversation. According to Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality, speakers who want to reach an agreement about something in the world have to presuppose the truth of what they are saying, the normative rightness of the interaction they are establishing with the hearer through their speech acts, and the sincerity or truthfulness of their speech acts. Complementary to these three validity claims (truth, normative rightness, and sincerity), speakers must also share the notion of a single objective world that is identical for all possible observers. As Habermas points out in The Theory of Communicative Action, “actors who raise validity claims have to avoid materially prejudicing the relation between language and reality, between the medium of communication and that about which something is being communicated” (1:50). Only in this way is it possible for “the contents of a linguistic worldview” to become “detached from the assumed world-order itself” (1:50–51). Obviously, if participants in communication are to evaluate whether things are the way they think they are or are as someone else believes, they cannot at the same time dogmatically identify their own beliefs with the way the world is. This is why communication oriented toward understanding requires that the participants distinguish, however counterfactually, between everyone’s (incompatible) beliefs and the assumed world order itself. Put in Habermas’s own terms, they have to form “a reflective concept of world.” The formal presupposition of a single objective world is just a consequence of the universal claim to validity built into the speakers’ speech acts. It is just an expression of the communicative constraint that makes rational criticism and mutual learning possible, namely, that from two opposed claims only one can be right. Thus the formal notion of world and the three universal validity claims build a system of

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coordinates that guides the interpretative efforts of the participants in communication toward a common understanding, despite their differences in beliefs or worldviews. This formal framework allows speakers to assume that they are referring to the same things even when their interpretations differ (Truth, 27–28). As a consequence, they can adopt the externalist attitude necessary for disagreement and criticism without ever having to leave their shared communicative situation. Inasmuch as such an externalist perspective is equally accessible to all participants in communication, Habermas can reject Gadamer’s objection that the critical theorist, in order to carry out her critique, has to break the symmetry of communication oriented toward understanding and become a social technocrat in disguise. Habermas makes the point as follows: “In thematizing what the participants merely presuppose and assuming a reflective attitude to the interpretandum, one does not place oneself outside the communication context under investigation; one deepens and radicalizes it in a way that is in principle open to all participants” (Communicative Action, 1:130). In this remark we can identify the second strategy that Habermas has followed to confront the hermeneutic challenge. By identifying the possibility of adopting an externalist perspective as a structural element of any communication oriented toward understanding, Habermas can reject the charge of paternalism that Gadamer raised against his approach to critical theory back in the 1970s. At the same time, however, it becomes clear that this strategy is based on the acceptance of the criterion of legitimacy that underlies the charge, namely, that the ultimate criterion of validation of any criticism or proposal for social change is the actual dialogue among all participants involved. Thus, no matter how superior the empirical and theoretical knowledge of the critical theorist may be, she must situate herself as a discourse participant among equals to validate her criticisms and proposals through actual dialogue. As Habermas stresses in Between Facts and Norms, “in discourses of justification there are in principle only participants” (172). This is indeed the most distinctive element of Habermas’s approach to critical theory. As he sees it, the critical theorist is not supposed to base her criticisms of current societies on her particular conception of the good society but is supposed to leave space for the citizens themselves to determine and develop their different collective and individual life projects (Facts, 82ff.). To that extent, critical inquiry does not seek to achieve specific ends but to bring about those social conditions in which its insights and proposals might be validated or falsified by citizens themselves. This decidedly democratic turn of critical theory makes it possible to justify the claim that the evaluations on  which the theorist’s criticisms are based do not illegitimately constrain the space of citizens’ political self-determination and thus do not amount to a  tendentious attempt to advance the critics’ own political preferences

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concerning the good society under the aegis of their self-proclaimed epistemic authority. With this proposal, critical theory definitively breaks with the paternalistic tendencies of the Marxist tradition and emphasizes the normative importance of citizens’ political self-determination. In so doing, however, it does not give in to the hermeneutic temptation to cede to the participants and their traditions the only say about the significance of the social practices they engage in. The theoretical reconstruction of the communicative and social conditions under which any political proposals could be validated or falsified by citizens themselves provides the critical theorist with a powerful criterion for measuring current social conditions and criticizing those responsible for the perpetuation of injustices. At the same time, insight into the validity of such a criterion does not derive from any privileged access to truth on the side of the critical theorist but is anchored in the communicative practices that the discourse participants already share. Consequently, this kind of criticism is not only open to all participants but is also publicly addressed to them. It remains an open question whether the Habermasian approach to critical theory can succeed in its goals and thus offer a solid basis for a fruitful research program. The scope of the theory of communicative rationality on which it is based is breathtaking, so it is too early to say whether future research will validate or undermine the numerous claims on which the success of the whole approach depends. All the same, it is incontestable that Habermas offers a genuinely critical alternative to the hermeneutic approach.

References Dews, Peter, ed. 1986. Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas. London: Verso. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2011. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Continuum. ——. 1986. Hermeneutik II. Gesammelte Werke 2. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ——. 1986a. “Rhetorik, Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik. Metakritische Erörterungen zu Wahrheit und Methode.” In Hermeneutik II. Gesammelte Werke 2, 232–250. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ——. 1990a. “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem.” In The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, 147–158. Albany: SUNY Press. ——. 1990b. “Reply to My Critics.” In The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, 273–297. Albany: SUNY Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality.” In The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, 245–272. Albany: SUNY Press.

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Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper. Lafont, Cristina. 1999. The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy. Trans. José Medina. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 2000. Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure. Trans. Graham Harman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2005. “Heidegger’s Hermeneutics.” In A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall, 265–284. Oxford: Blackwell. McCarthy, Thomas. 1991. Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Taylor, Charles. 1985. “Self-Interpreting Animals.” In Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers, 1:45–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6 SPEECH ACTS PETER NIESEN

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ystematic philosophical engagement with speech acts began when John Langshaw Austin corrected his original conception of performative utterances. Previously, Austin had maintained that philosophy of language had overvalued the declarative aspect of linguistic utterances and underestimated the acts one can perform/convey in making them. Whereas he initially held that constative utterances (which can be true or false) may be distinguished from performative utterances (which meet with success or failure but are neither true nor false), he found himself forced to admit, in the final installment of his William James Lectures, that some performative utterances claim to be true or false and that some constative utterances can prove unsuccessful (Austin 1962). A warning about conditions that do not hold proves false; similarly, a factual account involving the current king of France must fail because such a person does not exist. Austin distinguishes two kinds of possible miscarriages: when no successful utterance is performed (e.g., when one tries to give orders but lacks authority), and when a speech act is successful but defective (e.g., when one makes a promise that one does not intend to keep). Finally, no lexical or grammatical markers exist that might permit one to differentiate between constative and performative utterances. For these reasons, in the second part of How to Do Things with Words, Austin replaces the distinction between performative and constative utterances with a distinction between different types of performatives—to which he now assigns constative speech acts. Austin now holds that one says something (locutionary act) and, at the same time, does something by saying it (illocutionary act). Locutionary and illocutionary acts cannot be performed separately, but their relationship may vary: what one says can remain the same while the force of illocution (the role of the utterance) changes—and vice versa. However, Austin’s conception of the locutionary act did not survive intact, either. In addition to partial— phonetic and lexical (“phatic”)—components, the locutionary act was to include “rhetic” elements, i.e., expressions that possess a linguistic meaning. John Searle (1968, 407) has objected to Austin that indicators belonging to the illocutionary act—for instance, verbs like “order” and “assert”—also possess linguistic meaning. Invoking Frege, Searle introduces the more abstract distinction between propositional and illocutionary acts. He now distinguishes

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between the “contents” of a proposition and its force or the role it plays (illocution) but no longer between what is said and what is done. In addition to their illocutionary forces, Austin and Searle note the perlocutionary effects of speech acts—for example, the fact that one can make someone afraid or happy by saying “pass the salt.” As effects of verbal actions, perlocutions do not directly form part of communication, whereas this is always the case with illocutionary acts/successes. According to Austin, one difference between illocutionary aspects of speech and perlocutionary effects lies in the fact that the latter cannot be included in communicative action on the basis of convention. For example, the speech act “I hereby convince you. . .” does not exist. In contrast, for Austin and Searle, illocutionary acts depend on convention. The conventionality of illocutionary acts has social, grammatical, and semantic dimensions. Institutional speech acts—which Austin often uses as examples—presuppose established social practices. If I claim to christen a ship or order a person to do something, I need to occupy a certain social position; otherwise the conditions for success will not be fulfilled. Another aspect of conventionality comes into play when Austin and Searle affirm that it is always possible to determine the force of an utterance by the choice of words. I can promise that I will leave the country by employing a performative verb: “I promise that I will leave the country.” Linguistic convention entails the overt (or, at least, the potentially open) quality of illocutionary roles, but the same does not hold for perlocutionary effects. By employing suitable indicators of force, the speaker makes clear what kind of illocutionary act is occurring in the utterance. On the basis of the grammatical conventions observed, the performance of illocutionary acts (assuming, that is, that the utterance is understood) occurs at the speaker’s command. A third dimension of conventionality involves the rules governing linguistic meaning, which extend both to illocutionary and to perlocutionary elements of speech. Austin and Searle maintain that linguistic action is based on invoking the literal meaning of expressions in “serious and genuine” utterances and that the nonstandard employment of linguistic expressions is “parasitic” and derives from standard usage (on which their significance ultimately depends). Yet not all speech acts fulfill the requirements of explicit, serious, or genuine literal utterances. Austin qualifies, for example, ironic, monologic, dramaturgical, and poetic speech as nonstandard uses of language. Jacques Derrida (1985) has ironically commented on the “parasitic” quality attributed to nonliteral uses of speech and affirmed that the “iterability” of linguistic signs— which stay the same even as contexts vary—forms the core of linguistic behavior. Searle (1977, 205) has rejected such criticism: “There could not, for example, be promises made by actors in a play if there were not the possibility of promises made in real life.” Searle does not address whether the possibility of dramaturgical (insincere, ironic, etc.) usage is not, in the same sense, a necessary

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condition for the existence of genuine promises in real life. Even if the complementarity of standard and deviant usage did not hold, the critic of linguistic conventionalism could rightly observe that the possibility of deviant usage always accompanies standard usage. The existence of conventional verbal indicators of force, for example, entails that they can be exploited in inauthentic speech (Davidson 1982). Even if serious and literal utterances rely on convention, the seriousness and literalness of linguistic usage itself cannot be signaled by convention. Peter Strawson (1964) has sketched a continuum extending from linguistic actions that are entirely conventional to those that are not conventional at all. He replaces the purely conventionalistic theory of meaning with one that combines Austin’s rule-based semantics and H. P. Grice’s nominalistic notion of “speaker meaning” (see, also, Searle 1969). Grice holds that a person, in order to mean something by an utterance, must intend at least three things: (1) that he or she seeks a certain reaction on the part of the listener, (2) that this intention be recognized, and (3) that the recognition of the intention give the hearer a reason to display the intended reaction (Grice 1976). Space prohibits discussion of the research that has expanded on—and contested—this notion (see Avramides 1989), but it is distinctive of Grice’s program to disregard conventionality and, by focusing on achieving a reaction instead, equate the illocutionary and perlocutionary aspects of linguistic actions. The question remains whether the terminological distinction between illocution and perlocution can be retained if we label a particular kind of effect an illocutionary, but not a perlocutionary, success (that is, when the meaning of an utterance is understood but its intended effect does not obtain [Hornsby 2006])—or if, instead, one should consider illocutionary acts a special kind of perlocution, namely, one reached by an openly declared intention (Meggle 1997). Conventionalist approaches continue to claim completeness, if only to maintain a meaningful distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts (Alston 2000). Habermas has taken up speech-act theory for reasons stemming from the philosophy of language and the theory of rationality. With regard to the former, speech-act theory helps us avoid an impoverished conception of meaning. Traditional semantic theory, favoring the analysis of propositional contents, dispenses with examining the aspect of force and assimilates the significance of all utterances to that of statements. Speech-act theory gives Habermas a way to discern the “seat of rationality” in the illocutionary component of utterances (Postmetaphysical, 74); that is, a way to correct individualistic and teleological abstractions made by theories of action and the means to uncover an alternate mode of reasoning in linguistic communication. In his critique of semantic abstractions, Habermas finds a point of orientation in Karl Bühler’s taxonomy of linguistic functions, which distinguishes between communication concerning states of affairs in the world, the

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production of interpersonal relations, and the expression of intentions or experiences (Bühler 1934; Postmetaphysical, 57). Accordingly, Habermas distinguishes between declarative, regulative, and expressive uses of language, and he employs this classification to replace those of Austin and Searle, which were established by induction. Habermas emphasizes that, in principle, all instances of linguistic action can be examined in terms of all three functions— the conveying of a proposition, the creation of an intersubjective relation, and the articulation of intentions; at the same time, he maintains that one of the three dimensions stands in the foreground or “becomes thematic” in every speech act. The innovation of his approach lies in assigning different kinds of validity claims to the three dimensions of meaning. That is, Habermas assesses claims of propositional truth, normative correctness, and expressive (or artistic) authenticity; these claims all trigger different types of reasoning in order to be “redeemed.” By applying claims of validity and acceptability to analyses of linguistic action, Habermas is able to combine theories of meaning and rationality— a matter expressed in the famous formula: “We understand a speech act when we know what makes it acceptable” (Communicative Action, 1:297). In Habermas’s pragmatic theory of meaning, validity claims perform two functions. They indicate the unavoidable obligations taken on by the speaker— which classical speech-act theory describes as commitment (Searle 1969) or, alternatively, as responsibility (Alston 2000). Utterances “count as” something for which the speaker is ultimately answerable. Validity claims generalize the role that was played by the notion of “truth” in classical semantics—that is, the equation of what linguistic expressions mean with the conditions under which they hold true: if a speech act is “valid,” then matters stand as expressed. The bridge Habermas strikes between the way utterances are understood and the conditions under which they prove acceptable also enlarges his conception of illocution. A successful speech act achieves illocutionary goals in the narrower sense insofar as it is understood—and in the extended sense, in that the hearer accepts it. While Habermas agrees with Austin, Strawson, and Searle about illocutionary success in the narrow sense, as determined by what a speaker can anticipate under normal circumstances, he holds that illocutionary success involves precisely what the speaker cannot foresee (whether, that is, the hearer will accept the statement). Habermas also goes beyond classical conceptions of speech acts in the relation he sees between the aims of reaching understanding/comprehension and those of reaching agreement. The key difference concerning communication, on the one hand, and communication with a strategic motivation, on the other, is whether the speaker is pursuing illocutionary goals (i.e., the understanding and acceptance of utterances he or she makes) only in a conditional manner with respect to reasons and objections that can be made to the validity claims at issue. Linguistic action seeking understanding and agreement

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counts as the original mode, whereas strategic speech acts have a derivative status (Communicative Action, 1:316). Habermas adopts Austin and Searle’s thesis of “parasitism” for undeclared strategic utterances—when a hidden goal can be achieved only if a quite different illocutionary objective is accomplished. Openly strategic speech acts such as threats, bargaining, and (some) commands prove more difficult to assess: they do not seem to focus on freely reaching agreement at all inasmuch as they owe their acceptability exclusively to the status of the speaker and are meant to be accepted independently of possible objections to the normative correctness of what they propose. However, such “simple exhortations” are also comprehensible to hearers we do not credit with high-level linguistic competence involving reasoned agreement (Habermas 1991, 291n56); understanding openly strategic speech acts cannot be a purely derivative matter, then. For this reason, Habermas considers “simple exhortations” to represent limit cases. In recent works, he has responded to the problem and elaborated a new distinction within the theory of communicative action: between communicative action in a weak sense, which includes speech acts that rely solely on status and authorization, and communicative action in the strong sense, which rests on an intersubjectively shared foundation (Truth, 107). Another aspect of Habermas’s “original mode” thesis is that he defends, with Austin and Searle and against Derrida and Davidson, the primacy of literal meaning over nonstandard uses of expressions. The norm that one is to use words in a commonly accepted way is thus akin to the three validity commitments. Unlike Searle, however, he stresses that it is false—“counterfactual”— under normal circumstances to assume that speakers and hearers will use and understand expressions in a consistent fashion over time. The ability to apprehend literal meaning, as Habermas views it, does not represent a condition sufficient for actual comprehension. The question, then, is why Habermas should take it to be a necessary condition, in contrast to Davidson, who cites misstatements and jokes to illustrate that, in some cases, literal meaning is neither sufficient nor necessary to understand an utterance (Davidson 1986). Although Habermas sides with conventionalists against intentionalists, he presents arguments taken from his more comprehensive conception of reason in so doing. In a Gricean sense, the rationality of linguistic action must be limited to the pursuit of individual aims. To be sure, the category of “weakly” communicative action that Habermas introduces includes Gricean “meaning” as the attempt to have a hearer understand an illocution as communicative action, not strategic action. The basic phenomenon characterizing linguistic communication as such remains the fact that illocutionary goals (in the broader sense) can be realized only inasmuch as the validity claims they imply are not contested (which is necessary for “strong” communicative action).

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The illocutionary force of an utterance must be asserted without reserve, yet such directness corresponds to the qualified pursuit of further goals in communicative action: if the validity claims are rejected for legitimate reasons, then the speaker is rationally bound to retract his or her claim(s). Compared to the classical conception of speech acts, then, the theory of communicative action pursues a more ambitious account of linguistic normativity. That said, one should counter the frequent criticism that Habermas holds to an excessively normative conception of linguistic action by distinguishing linguistic normativity from other kinds of normativity. Habermas has repeatedly stressed that standards of meaning and validity are neither morally obligatory nor in any other sense prescriptive (Naturalism, 78).

References Alston, William P. 2000. Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Avramides, Anita. 1989. Meaning and Mind: An Examination of a Gricean Account of Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Bühler, Karl. 1934. Sprachtheorie. Jena: Gustav Fischer. Davidson, Donald. 1982. “Communication and Convention.” In Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation, 265–280. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——. 1986. “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs.” In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore, 433–446. Oxford: Blackwell. Derrida, Jacques. 1985. “Signature Event Context.” In Margins of Philosophy, 308–330. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grice, H. Paul. 1957. “Meaning.” Philosophical Review 66, no. 3: 377–388. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. “A Reply.” In Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, 214–264. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hornsby, Jennifer. 2006. “Speech Acts and Performatives.” In Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, ed. Ernest LePore and Barry C. Smith, 893–909. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meggle, Georg. 1997. “Theorien der Kommunikation – Eine Einführung.” In Kommunikationstheorien – Theorien der Kommunikation, ed. Geert-Lueke Lueken, 14–40. Leipzig: Universitätsverlag. Searle, John. 1968. “Austin on Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts.” Philosophical Review 77, no. 4: 405–424. ——. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 1977. “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida.” Glyph 1:198–208. Strawson, Peter F. 1964. “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts.” Philosophical Review 73, no 4: 439–460.

7 PSYCHOANALYSIS JOEL WHITEBOOK

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he way Horkheimer and Adorno formulated the dialectic of enlightenment left only two options: political resignation or utopianism. Herbert Marcuse took the second and tried to break out of the seemingly implacable logic of Horkheimer and Adorno’s position insofar as it was formulated in psychoanalytic terms (Habermas 1985, 74ff.). Where the utopian idea of a nonrepressive society had only been advanced as a theoretical possibility in Eros and Civilization, by the late sixties, Marcuse, under the influence of the New Left, was advocating it as a concrete political program. Habermas, on the other hand, a self-proclaimed radical reformer who rejected both political quietism and the idea of revolution, chose a different strategy. He challenged the underlying assumptions of Horkheimer and Adorno’s construction and thus freed himself from having to choose between two equally unacceptable alternatives. His debate with Freud in Knowledge and Human Interests represents, among other things, a contestation of the psychoanalytic presuppositions of Dialectic of Enlightenment. When Horkheimer and Adorno formulate the dialectic of enlightenment with the help of Freud—they also draw on Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber—they make the assumption that the formation of the self is always self-defeating and violent. They arrive at this position by applying the general law of equivalence—that is, everything that happens has to be paid for—to the development of the self, where it assumes the form of “the introversion of sacrifice” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 55). Mythical cultures, they argue, attempted to influence the course of human and natural events by offering sacrifices to the gods, hoping the deities would reciprocate and intervene on their behalf. Odysseus, whom they see as the prototype of the modern bourgeois man, thought he could emancipate himself from the prerational and preindividuated world of myth and escape the law of equivalence through renunciation. Rather than sacrificing a piece of the external world, he would sacrifice a part of his inner nature, of himself. He figured that by bringing the formlessness of his internal nature under the control of a unified ego, that is, by repressing his unconscious-instinctual life, he could outwit the law of equivalence and survive the numerous dangers—which represent the various

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regressive temptations of the archaic world—that awaited him on his journey home. But there is a flaw in Odysseus’s strategy, and it becomes the “germ cell” out of which the dialectic of enlightenment unfolds. Though not directed outwardly, the renunciation of inner nature that “man celebrates on himself” is no less a sacrificial act than the immolation of the hindquarter of an ox (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 54). And as such, it remains subject to the law of equivalence. A price must therefore be paid for Odysseus’s survival—that is, for victory over the dangers posed by internal and external nature—and it is the reification of the self. To the extent that the ego distances itself from its archaic prehistory and unconscious-instinctual life, it loses its mimetic relation to the world and becomes reified. But there is also a perverse sense in which mimesis is preserved in the process. For an objectified self mimics the reified world it has objectified. Horkheimer and Adorno’s assumption that the process they described in Dialectic of Enlightenment constitutes the only path to ego formation led them to elevate the autocratic ego into the ego as such. For them, the integration of the self is inherently violent: “Men had to do fearful things to themselves before the self, the identical purposive, and virile nature of man was formed, and something of that recurs in every childhood” (34; see also Castoriadis 1987, 300–301). Furthermore, to preserve its unity, its identity, the ego must continuously and vigilantly maintain its boundaries on two fronts, against outer nature and inner nature, including the nature-like demands of the superego, alike (Freud 1961, chap. 5). The goal of the Enlightenment was the emancipation of humankind from fear and immaturity and the promotion of its fulfillment through the development of reason and the mastery of nature. But as Horkheimer and Adorno present it, the whole process of ego formation, and hence the project of enlightenment, is self-vitiating. Because it involves the progressive reification of the self, the formation of the self systematically destroys the conditions for achieving the goal of a successful life. After World War II, Adorno continued to pursue the psychoanalytic problematic spelled out in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Because of his proposition that the whole is the untrue, which prohibited him from indulging in positive speculation, Adorno could only use psychoanalysis for critical ends. He argued that any attempt at envisioning a “more human existence” would necessarily amount to “ideology,” that is, “false reconciliation within an unrecognized world” (Adorno 1968, 83, 86). There was, however, one place where, as Wellmer has observed, Adorno disregarded his concerns about false reconciliation and prohibitions against positive speculation, namely, in his aesthetic theory. There he claimed that new forms of less repressive synthesis—consisting in a nonreified relation between particular and universal, part and whole— had already been achieved in exemplary works of advanced art, especially

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Schoenberg’s music and Beckett’s theater. Indeed, he went so far as to suggest that the sort of aesthetic integration displayed in these works might prefigure a postreified mode of social synthesis, which could possibly be realized in a future society. But, perhaps because of a lingering Marxian prejudice against psychology, Adorno never allowed himself the same speculative liberty with respect to the synthesis of the self. That is, he never attempted to extrapolate possibilities for new, less repressive forms of self-integration from the “nonviolent togetherness of the manifold” he thought he perceived in advanced works of art (Wellmer 1991a, 1991b; Whitebook 1995, 152–163). This is unfortunate, because by challenging the assumption that the integration of the self is necessarily violent, he might have found a way out of the dialectic of enlightenment. Habermas argued that, in general, Horkheimer and Adorno’s impasse resulted from their theoretical monism, that is, their attempt to conceptualize historical and individual development only along one dimension, namely, instrumental rationality (see Communicative Action, vol. 1, part 4; Philosophical Discourse, chap. 5). He countered their monism—and this was his decisive move against them—by introducing the second dimension of communicative rationality. Although his theory of communicative rationality has assumed many versions and has softened over his long and remarkably productive career, Habermas has retained his basic intuitions about communication with remarkable tenacity. He has repeatedly argued that the aporia not only of the Frankfurt School but also of contemporary philosophy as a whole can only be resolved by adopting the standpoint of communicative reason. In general, Habermas had the right desideratum, for, unlike Adorno, he was willing to adumbrate a positive conception of the self. But the very thing he used to reformulate psychoanalysis, namely, his theory of communication, also caused him to move away from psychoanalysis. And in leaving Freud behind and embracing the cognitive psychology of Piaget and Kohlberg, he deprived himself of the means to achieve his desideratum adequately. In line with his broader program, Habermas brought a linguistic analysis to bear on psychoanalysis, which he thought was an instance of a successful human science—albeit one that had not understood itself properly precisely because it had lacked a robust theory of language. He reinterpreted the psychoanalytic theory of false consciousness—which sought to explain dreams, neurotic symptoms, parapraxes, and cultural illusions—as a theory of “systematically distorted communication” (for a programmatic statement, see Habermas 1970). To do this, he had to show that the self is formed through communication and, moreover, how it hides from itself through language. But this way of putting things involved a serious problem, one that proved to be of enormous import for the development of Habermas’s career. Logically, the very notion of systematically distorted communication seems to require

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an idea of undistorted communication to make sense of it. Because of Habermas’s opposition to the philosophy of consciousness, the extent of his Cartesianism is not easily recognized. Yet despite his rejection of first philosophy, Habermas, like Descartes, takes radical skepticism as the nemesis that must be defeated—something a postmetaphysical philosopher should know is impossible. Whereas, for Descartes, the evil genius’s trickery takes the form of systematically distorted perception, for Habermas it manifests itself in systematically distorted communication. And just as the specter of systematic and totalized distortion led Descartes to search for an Archimedean point in consciousness to overcome it, so Habermas, to defeat his linguistic trickster, tries to find his Archimedean point in an ideal speech situation. The idea of undistorted communication was the “germ cell” that Habermas’s increasing movement away from the Feuerbachian materialism of Freud and toward the transcendentalism of Kant grew out of. Indeed, the Kantian quest for theoretical and normative foundations for critical theory—albeit without recourse to an “ultimate justification”—which came to dominate Habermas’s thinking, directly conflicted with his stated goal of retaining the Feuerbachian materialism of the early Frankfurt School. And nowhere is this conflict more visible than in his encounter with Freud in Knowledge and Human Interests. What Habermas gives in his discussion of clinical phenomena, he takes back in his linguistic reformulation of metapsychology. Like Paul Ricoeur in Freud and Philosophy, Habermas wants to avoid abstract epistemology. He therefore undertakes a transcendental analysis of psychoanalytic phenomena to determine its essential features. And ubiquitous in analytic practice is resistance. Both analyst and analysand, as Habermas observes, encounter a force that opposes them in their effort to gain insight and understanding. He acknowledges, moreover, that resistance is more than a purely cognitive (or linguistic) phenomenon, recognizing that it is useless simply to present patients with the cognitive content of their repressed ideas without having addressed the force that is repressing them and then having worked it through. To do so, as Freud (1957) wryly notes, would have “as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger” (225). Habermas grants that the existence of resistance—and the necessity of exerting effort to counter it—requires the positing of “forcelike,” which is to say “naturelike” (naturwüchsig), phenomena functioning in the human psyche. And, he acknowledges, a purely hermeneutical approach is not sufficient to apprehend or engage these forces. Even if we assume that the goal of psychoanalysis is ultimately hermeneutical—and this is debatable—technique (which is more than interpretation) must be used to remove the objectified blockages to insight in order to achieve understanding. Clinical experience,

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Habermas notes, demands that psychoanalysis unite “linguistic analysis with the psychological investigation of causal connections” (Knowledge, 271). Indeed, these considerations lead him to soften his charge of scientism against Freud and admit that the latter’s scientific self-understanding was not “entirely unfounded” (Knowledge, 214). At roughly the same time—and out of similar theoretical motives—Paul Ricoeur (1970) argued that because the psyche objectifies itself to hide from itself, Freud’s “objectivism” and “naturalism” are “well-grounded” (434). But after having offered an accurate account of clinical experience, forcelike phenomena do not enter into Habermas’s “metapsychological” account of repression—which is the original source of the resistance. Instead he puts forth a purely hermeneutical analysis. His thesis is that repression is an intralinguistic process, namely, of “excommunication.” When children feel that their “need interpretations” (wishes) are too dangerous to express in public, they “degrammaticize” (repress) the forbidden thoughts—that is, remove them from the logic of ordinary language communication (secondary processes)— and banish them to the unconscious. The unconscious is thus understood as the realm that contains all the delinguistified (primary process) ideas. If repression consists in degrammaticization, Habermas reasons, then the job of analysis is to reverse the process by regrammaticizing the forbidden ideas and bringing them back into the public web of intersubjective communication (secondary processes). On this account, there are no forcelike extralinguistic phenomena obstructing the translation of a delinguistified idea into a linguistified one. The closest Habermas comes is the notion of “the causality of fate,” which he borrows from the young Hegel. However, he never satisfactorily explicates the forcefulness of that force—which, one senses, must be connected with another instance of forcefulness that requires further explanation, namely, “the unforced force of a better argument.” Habermas’s linguistifying program compels him to reject as “unsatisfactory” a cardinal tenet of Freudian psychoanalysis, namely, the existence of a nonlinguistic unconscious (Knowledge, 241). Although degrammaticized, the Habermasian unconscious is still linguistic in that it can be regrammaticized. By rejecting the existence of a nonlinguistic unconscious, Habermas lessens the alterity of the subject’s inner foreign territory. Qua linguistic, the unconscious is in principle homogeneous with consciousness. The rejection of a prelinguistic unconscious has an undesired theoretical consequence for Habermas. Despite his supposed refutation of “the hermeneutic claim to universality,” he in fact ends up advancing a form of linguistic monism (Habermas 1980, 190). With the linguistification of the unconscious, we are “always already” in the sphere of language, with no external nonlinguistic phenomena acting on it. Gadamer, who was no maven of psychoanalysis, recognized this and argued that Habermas’s rejection of a nonlinguistic

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unconscious entailed the affirmation of the hermeneutical claim to universality (Gadamer 1976, 41). Throughout his career Habermas has clung to the notion that, with regard to the human subject, it is language all the way down. One has the impression that Habermas believes that the defense of this thesis—which entails the claim that the self is social all the way down—is necessary for maintaining the possibility of a progressive political program. But if the denial of the extent of the presocial and antisocial, that is, the irrational dimension of human nature, is required to maintain hope, then that hope must have been somewhat shaky to begin with. Habermas’s discussion of Foucault’s theory of madness is instructive. He objects to the French philosopher’s thesis that—because it stood for Reason’s excommunication of its Other—the “great confinement” of the mad in the sixteenth century constituted the founding act of modern rationality. Habermas grants that this may be true for a narrow scientistic subject-centered form of rationality. But German idealism, he argues, in fact pursues the sort of dialogue between Reason and its split-off Other that Foucault calls for—a dialogue that would lead to the creation of richer, broader, and more flexible synthetic achievements. Moreover, where the German idealists could not fulfill this program because they remained stuck within the framework of first philosophy, Habermas claims he can achieve it with his theory of communicative rationality (Philosophical Discourse, 412; Whitebook 2005). But Habermas makes things too easy for himself and thereby deprives himself of a richer result. The degree of the alterity of the Other determines two things: how difficult communication with the Alter will be and how much growth can result from an encounter with it. That is, while diminished alterity makes for easier dialogue, it also results in the diminished potential for growth. With respect to psychoanalysis and the desideratum of a less violent synthesis of the self, the denial of a prelinguistic unconscious reduces the extent of the split in the subject and the magnitude of the integrative task that confronts the ego. And, to the same degree, it also diminishes the ego’s potential for growth. What Derrida said about the “dialogue with unreason” in Foucault can also be said of the self’s encounter with its interior Other in Habermas. The whole process is “interior to logos” (Derrida 1978, 38). A linguistic unconscious is logos’s pseudo-Other, and it never contacts its real Other in any significant sense. Finally, it is telling that, although Habermas calls for the linguistification of inner nature, he never entertains the idea of the instinctualization of the ego (Habermas 1979, 93).

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References Adorno, Theodor W. 1968. “Sociology and Psychology (Part II).” Trans. Irving N. Wohlfarth. New Left Review 47:79–97. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “Cogito and the History of Madness.” In Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 36–76. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, Sigmund. [1910] 1957. “Wild Analysis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 11:219–227. London: Hogarth. ——. [1923] 1961. “The Ego and the Id.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 19:1–66, London: Hogarth. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1976. “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection.” In Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge, 44–58. Berkeley: University of California Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1970. “Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence.” In Recent Sociology, No. 2: Patterns of Human Communication, ed. Hans Peter Dreitzel, 115–148. New York: Macmillan. ——. 1979. “Moral Development and Ego Identity.” In Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 69–94. Boston: Beacon. ——. 1980. “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality.” In Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy, and Critique, ed. Josef Bleicher, 181–211. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——. 1985. “Psychic Thermidor and the Rebirth of Rebellious Subjectivity.” In Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein, 67–77. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Wellmer, Albrecht. 1991a. “Truth, Semblance and Reconciliation.” In The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley, 1–35. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 1991b. “The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism.” In The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley, 36–94. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Whitebook, Joel. 1995. Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 2005. “Against Interiority: Foucault’s Struggle with Psychoanalysis.” In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, 312–347. New York: Cambridge University Press.

8 POSTMETAPHYSICAL THINKING KENNETH BAYNES

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abermas’s endorsement of what he calls “postmetaphysical thinking” can easily be misleading. It is not intended as a rejection of the sort of inquiry pursued, for example, in the more recent revival of “analytic metaphysics” associated primarily with David Lewis and the “Australian metaphysicians.” Rather, at least in the first instance, it is directed against both the tradition of metaphysical thought that reached a culmination in the philosophy of Hegel and German idealism and in the various—and, ultimately, for Habermas, still “metaphysical”—attempts to escape that tradition in the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. The charge that these latter thinkers remain metaphysical is likely to be controversial. However, it should be recalled that Heidegger read Nietzsche as the last of the great metaphysicians and also that Derrida claimed that Heidegger had not sufficiently broken with the “metaphysics of presence.” As a rejection of these forms of philosophical reflection, the call for “postmetaphysical thinking” is another way of formulating Habermas’s attempt to move beyond the “philosophy of the subject,” or Bewusstseinsphilosophie, in a manner that would be more decisive than what he considers to be the failed attempts of much recent continental philosophy. It is thus also consistent with his earlier arguments presented in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that Nietzsche and his “postmodern” successors remained ensnared in the philosophy of the subject despite their own intention: In their efforts to overcome the deficits of the philosophy of the subject, these thinkers either relinquished too much (sacrificing, for example, the achievements of modern reason) or continued to regard philosophy as a privileged form of inquiry that yielded insight distinct from the empirical sciences. Or they did both (roughly, Habermas’s controversial interpretation of Heidegger). In Postmetaphysical Thinking, Habermas does, however, also take issue with the return of metaphysics found in the post-Kantian metaphysics of Dieter Henrich. In fact, the career-long engagement of these thinkers with each other’s positions presents a concise and fascinating way of formulating Habermas’s reservations about the continuation of metaphysical thinking. In a series of works, Henrich has repeatedly sought to show the indispensable  need for a philosophical clarification of the structure and role of

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self-consciousness. As he argued in an influential essay on Fichte (Henrich 1966), if an unending regress is to be avoided, there must be a (nonobjectivating) self-relation and self-knowledge prior to any (epistemic) relation between self and object. For Habermas, by contrast, Henrich’s attempt to provide a central, even foundational, role for the philosophy of the subject fails to appreciate the significant achievements in philosophy, pragmatics, and action theory that support his own call for a paradigm shift. Whatever insights such philosophical inquiry might offer a phenomenological clarification of selfconsciousness, it is neither likely nor desirable that it will be able to fulfill the ambitious claims Henrich sets for it (see Postmetaphysical, 10–27). On the other hand, Henrich has charged that Habermas’s “paradigm shift” from selfconsciousness to communicative action is less radical than it appears and only gains its initial plausibility by sweeping unavoidable traditional metaphysical issues under the rug (see Henrich 1982). Indeed, the exchange between these two theorists touches upon many pressing philosophical questions, such as the relationship between philosophy and naturalism, the place of philosophy in a modern and pluralist world, and the relationship between philosophy and the other sciences (including the social sciences). It is fair to conclude, however, that Habermas advocates a much less ambitious, more modest role for philosophy than that held by many philosophers. Given the wide range of thinkers Habermas identifies as metaphysical, it is therefore appropriate to ask what it is that Habermas finds so objectionable in “metaphysical thinking” and what prospects there are for making a radical break with it. Further, at least the suspicion must be addressed that Habermas’s characterization of metaphysics (now in the pejorative sense) is so broad that it would include almost all philosophical inquiry. How, in other words, does he propose to shun metaphysics (as he understands it) without dismissing philosophical reflection altogether? By metaphysical thinking Habermas means, most generally, the tradition of classical metaphysics from Plato through the medieval period, the “philosophy of the subject” that arose in response to the emergence of science as a competing form of knowledge, the critique of this form of metaphysics in twentieth-century continental thought, and some more recent attempts to continue the “philosophy of the subject” (again, as represented by Dieter Henrich). What these forms of thinking share in common, beginning especially with the “philosophy of the subject,” is the view that there is a form of inquiry and knowledge proper to philosophy that is, on the one hand, quite distinct from that found in the natural and social sciences and, on the other, one that can nonetheless yield a special and authoritative insight into questions concerning both the meaning of life and how the world, in the broadest sense, “hangs together.” What Habermas denies in his call for postmetaphysical thinking is that this remains a plausible and coherent task for philosophy

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today. However, if this description is not to be so broad as to include potentially all philosophical inquiry, it must be made more precise. Habermas does not claim that there are no tasks left for philosophy—indeed, this would preclude the roles he assigns to philosophy as the “guardian of reason” and as cultural interpretation (“Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter,” in Moral Consciousness, 1–20). Rather, what he questions more specifically is whether there is a form of knowledge—either in the sense of (strong) transcendental inquiry or in a new form of thinking, such as Heidegger’s Andenken—that yields a special and authoritative insight into the world or the meaning of life. For Habermas, by contrast, in a world distinguished by the “fact of reasonable pluralism” (Rawls) and a rationality that has turned increasingly procedural and nonsubstantive, philosophy must relinquish this larger ambition, which it once shared with religion. In this regard, two forms of metaphysical thinking are for him especially paradigmatic: again, first, the tradition of the philosophy of the subject or “philosophy of reflection,” in which the knowing subject, through a special reflective turn or gaze, acquires knowledge that is more basic than, and indeed even foundational for, the warrant or justification of other forms of knowledge; and, second, the form of “fundamental ontology” advocated by Heidegger and his successors that, in contrast to the knowledge of beings reserved for the empirical sciences, would yield a special kind of knowledge into the question of the meaning of Being. What Habermas objects to in particular is the way in which both of these forms of inquiry isolate themselves from any sort of challenge from the empirical sciences broadly understood. This interpretation of what Habermas means by metaphysical thinking is supported by his own alternative sketch of the task of philosophy, which he aligns either with the so-called reconstructive sciences that attempt to make explicit the practical knowledge of competent speakers and actors, on the one hand, and the more broadly interpretive or hermeneutic role of philosophy as an interpreter of culture, on the other (see Moral Consciousness, 1–20). In each of these roles, the knowledge yielded by philosophical inquiry is fallible, open to criticism from the sciences, and always dependent on prior social practices. First, as a “guardian of rationality,” philosophy picks up and elaborates aspects of a (now largely procedural) conception of rationality as it emerges in various domains of inquiry (including the philosophy of language and pragmatics, action theory and moral psychology, and legal and political theory). However, in contrast to earlier models, philosophy is not an exclusively “a priori” discipline; though it still attempts to identify something like “conditions of possibility” that are constitutive for various human competences and social practices, it does not cut itself off from the insights of other empirical sciences and looks to them for confirmation of its fallible claims. Second, in its role as an interpreter, it attempts to mediate between various forms of expert knowledge, on the one

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hand, and the more mundane self-understandings and social practices that constitute the everyday lifeworld. In neither case, however, does philosophy possess a unique methodology or claim a special source of authority distinct from other disciplines or even from that of a self-reflective citizen (see Truth, 277–292). Thus, though it must relinquish the privileged position that metaphysics once claimed for itself, philosophy nonetheless retains an important if nonexclusive role in capturing and making explicit its own time in thought.

References Dews, Peter, ed. 1999. Habermas: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Henrich, Dieter. 1966. “Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht.” In Subjektivität und Metaphysik: Festschrift für Wolfgang Cramer. Frankfurt: Klostermann. ——. 1982. Fluchtlinien: Philosophische Essays. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

9 K ANT INGEBORG MAUS

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abermas’s thorough engagement with the works of Kant is evident in every aspect of his philosophy. The following discusses this engagement with respect to moral philosophy; the theory of law and democracy, including the theory of international law; and epistemology.

Moral Philosophy Habermas has the avowed intention of (re)formulating Kant’s moral philosophy in terms of discourse theory (Justification, 3). This implies shifting focus away from the philosophy of consciousness, which concentrates on the individual subject, and toward an intersubjective theory. Habermas’s corresponding ethics of discourse replaces Kant’s Categorical Imperative with a process of moral argumentation that gives everyone a procedure for him- or herself to test maxims for conduct: practical moral discourse cannot occur monologically. It requires multiple participants, prompted by a conflict within the lifeworld—whereby maxims for conduct hitherto followed without reflection now prove controversial—to work out a common method of testing these maxims (Justification, 8). Although Habermas disregards Kant’s different articulations of the Categorical Imperative and concentrates on the idea underlying them all (Moral Consciousness, 63), one can recognize two versions of the Categorical Imperative in two principles of his theory of discourse. Habermas’s “principle of discourse ethics (D)” holds that only those norms can claim validity that meet with agreement among all involved in practical discourse (Moral Consciousness, 66; Justification, 7). This can be read as a discourse-theoretical translation of Kant’s (2012) monologic test: “that my maxim should hold as a universal law” (18). Moreover, Habermas’s “principle of universalization (U)” provides a rule of argumentation according to which the validity of norms depends on whether “all affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of the interests of each” (Justification, 32; emphasis added; cf. Moral Consciousness, 66). One may view this as a reformulation of another version of the Categorical Imperative, one that ultimately seeks the formal

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mediation between material purposes. Kant explains the instruction: “act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” From this recognition of every person as an “end in itself,” Kant deduces the demand “to further the ends of others” and to contribute to “the happiness of others” (2012, 52; emphasis added). The comparison above leaves open whether identity obtains between Kant’s notion of everyone’s “ends” and “everyone’s interests” as articulated by Habermas. Either way, the point is to refute the claim—made by Reinhard Brandt (2002, 55–56)—that a “salto mortale” into the sphere of pure freedom separates Kant’s moral philosophy from the perspectival weighing of interests that occurs in Habermas’s discourse ethics. While one may agree with another thesis advanced by the same critic—that Habermas’s “discourse-theoretical way of reading” the Categorical Imperative (first version) misses Kant’s intention inasmuch as it expects everyone “to occupy the perspective of all others, in order to evaluate whether a norm could be desired from the view of any one of them” (Brandt 2002, 54; regarding Habermas’s Inclusion of the Other)—it is not possible to agree with Brandt’s mode of reading “intelligibility.” Kant’s formulation admits an interpretation compatible with the self-deception of narrow-minded egoists: each individual has to ask whether he or she would wish that the maxim of his of her own actions—a maxim elevated to the generality of law—should be used against him or her. Conversely, the formulation of the Categorical Imperative that incorporates material purposes in general—those of anyone else at all—is doubtlessly altruistic and requires changes of moral perspective. (On the reflexivity of the relationship between moral principle and happiness in Kant, see Maus 1992, 265, 267ff.) On the whole, Habermas agrees with Kant’s moral philosophy to such an extent that he applies “Hegel’s objections Kant” to his own discourse ethics and analyzes them in great detail (Justification). Above all, this involves Hegel’s criticism of the formalism of the Categorical Imperative, the objectively given “primacy of morality over the ethical life,” and, finally, the “impotence of the mere ought” (Ohnmacht des blossen Sollens). In responding to the criticism Hegel aims at Kant, Habermas refutes misunderstandings that impede the reception of discourse theory even today. Hegel’s critique of formalism holds that the Categorical Imperative is ensnared in tautology insofar as every determinate maxim corresponds to the pure indeterminacy of the abstract principle of generalization. As Habermas shows, this objection is invalid because formal evaluation does not demand logical or semantic consistency. Instead, it involves assessing the generalizability of the will with respect to the generalizability of a maxim into law; at the same time, the tested “contents” of maxims are actual standards of behavior (Justification, 9). Both

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the Categorical Imperative and practical discourse derive such positive content from the “lifeworld” (Justification, 9; Moral Consciousness, 106). Habermas criticizes Hegel’s “primacy of the ethical life over morality”—an argument directed against Kant’s “abstractions” (Maus 1992, 267ff.)—for declaring habitual and institutionalized modes of behavior within the “lifeworld,” which he identifies with the ethical life, to be normative. If they are viewed in this way, they can no longer be criticized on the reflexive level of cognitive morality (Moral Consciousness, 107–108). At the same time, however, Habermas manages to derive meaning from Hegel’s argument inasmuch as it serves to clarify the field of application for ethics in the Kantian tradition: they concern only what norms of conduct should accomplish—not what values are to be deemed preferable. Habermas does not respond to the “impotence of the mere ought” by rejecting Hegel’s objection. Instead, he answers by pointing out how he has modified Kant’s moral philosophy. By undercutting Kant’s dualism between ideas given a priori and empirical praxis, Habermas negates the specific difficulty inherent in this kind of moral philosophy. Kant was able to present freedom (as the precondition for moral action) only as a possibility, not as a reality; therefore, he ultimately invokes the simple “fact” of (moral) reason (Kant 2012, 62). Habermas reformulates the problem along the lines of the philosophy of language: he refers to the idealizing excessive self-demands settled at the heart of the everyday praxis of linguistic communication (Facts). Thereby, Kant’s opposition between being and ought is mediated in the factual force of counterfactual presuppositions (Justification, 81) that every speaker is forced to make because he or she must observe the pragmatic and linguistic demand for reciprocal recognition among all interlocutors. At the same time, these presuppositions remain standing as normative criteria. Even if the linguistic coordination of social action that occurs could never be “ideal,” counterfactual presuppositions prevent language from being abused and used to repressive ends.

Theory of Law and Democracy The very fact that Habermas presents his most fully articulated theory of democracy—Between Facts and Norms—as the core of his legal philosophy attests to his agreement with Kant in the highest degree. Habermas’s early engagement with Kant addressed, above all, the principle of the “public sphere” (Structural Transformation, 89–90); subsequent works retained this orientation in the conceptions of critical public space, deliberative politics, and structures of civil society they presented. Between Facts and Norms is the

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first book to describe, in reference to Kant, (1) the reciprocal relations between democracy and law and (2) a distinction earlier works did not address: the difference between law and morality. Habermas translates Kant’s ideals into an exceedingly complex form of discourse theory—and, in so doing, he modifies the way he understands his own project (Facts, 118–119). Finally, (3) Habermas’s reasons for a “logical genesis of rights,” which implies the “equiprimordial” status of rights to freedom and popular sovereignty, develop a conception that is one of the reformulated elements of Kant’s theory. (The latter are discussed subsequently, in describing Kant’s principles of a democratic constitution. Kant’s very special constructions are mentioned later, in a comparison between Habermas and Kant.) In this context—and before taking up Kant’s theory of democracy—we should observe that Habermas does not commit a common error concerning Kant’s view of systems of governmental authority (and the demands placed on them), namely, that they are to be endured “provisionally” until the united people is the only legislator and sovereign (Kant 1996, §52 [111–113].) The deep connection between the radical principle of popular sovereignty and constitutionality is evident in the fact that Kant avoids the word “democracy.” In the eighteenth century, this term referred to ancient democracy, which knew no division of powers. This is why Kant uses “republic” to refer to his strong conception of a democracy, which is distinguished by the strict division of power between legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Only the lawgiver wields sovereignty, while the executive and judiciary act “in conformity to law” and “in accordance with the law” (Kant 1996, §45 [90–91]). When Kant affirms that “legislative power . . . can only belong to the unified will of the people,” he establishes a connection between popular sovereignty and constitutional government in which the division of powers not only limits popular sovereignty but also—and above all—provides the condition of its possibility. Because “the people” (directly or through representation [Kant 1991, 76]) only wield legislative power yet wield it all, they are not authorized to perform individual acts of government and judicial decisions. However, the fact that individual determinations of the government and the judiciary are bound to general rules (this dependence is even formulated in terms of the logic of subsumption: Kant 1996, §45 [90–91]) means that state apparatuses are subordinate to the will of the people, all the same: the state’s monopoly on force (Gewalt) can be employed only according to directives given by the social base. Such a division of power matches the form of government established by Locke and Rousseau and has characterized the parliamentarianism of England and continental Europe since the nineteenth century. It is the opposite of the structure foreseen by the American constitution, which—because it distributes legislative sovereignty between the legislative, executive, and judiciary (by presidential veto and judicial review) along lines foreseen by

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Montesquieu—does not democratize state power but “constitutionalizes” it. In establishing the grounds for privileged legislation by a sovereign people, Kant proceduralizes the popular will in the legislative process; this informs the structure of laws: “insofar as each decides the same thing for all and all for each,” a precondition exists to avoid unjust laws (Kant 1996, §46 [91–92]). Whereas the executive and judiciary make particular or singular decisions respectively, the threefold generality of democratic law—participation in establishing it, in applying it, and in its contents—corresponds to a principle analogous, but not identical, to those of evaluation in Kant’s method of moral verification. The monologic test of generalization provided by the Categorical Imperative (first version) refers only to the generality of a fictive law—the form of law as such (Kant 2012, 18); in factual existence, however, the democratic law of right is predicated on evaluation by all actual participants, imposing the law on themselves. This (implied) measure to avoid willfulness would not obtain in executive or judicial decisions made by a democratic sovereign. Kant’s further demand of the law that “precision analogous to that of mathematics” hold for determinations of content (Kant 1996, §E [25–26]) is also directed against arbitrariness on the part of the executive and the judiciary. A matter easily mistaken for pedantic nitpicking in fact provides the criterion for realizing popular sovereignty: the subjection of state apparatuses to  the legislative will of the people, whose specifications deny leeway (Spielraum) to the decision-making instances. In making this demand, Kant designates the neuralgic point where, still today, one may gauge the extent to which democracy exists. Even if it proves impossible to fulfill Kant’s radical demand that the law be applied according to the logic of subsumption, it remains decisive whether decisions made by the state apparatus at least respect the wording of the law. (According to this criterion, constitutional states and democracies do not exist today: the juristic methods of interpretation and indeterminate definitions incorporated into laws since the twentieth century displace the determination of the contents of laws into the situation of their application.) Kant’s opposition between law and ethics—insofar as it does not concern the level of grounds (see below) but the determination of their respective modes of functioning—attaches great importance to the criterion of determinate legal content inasmuch as law differs fundamentally from ethical norms, whose application in individual cases is distinguished by “leeway” (Spielraum) (Kant 1996, §E [25–26]). Kant’s vehement pronouncement against any and all attempts to undermine, by way of ethics, the subordination of political power to law can be explained by conditions he posits affirming that the demands of law—unlike those of ethics—do not concern human motives but only external actions and that, whereas the number of ethical obligations is great, only few of them can ever be codified in legal language (152–154), that is, made a matter of external constraint rather than self-control. Were this to occur, it would

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explode all the borders the state places on citizens through legal structures: the state’s claim only to require external conformity of individuals would expand into the right to punish beliefs, the re-ethicization of the law would increase the areas subject to control, and the multiplication of laws that would occur by legislating ethical obligations would negate the freedom of all citizens. If, for example, one compares a typical legal formulation involving, for example, defamation with the indeterminately broad ethical norm “Thou shalt not lie,” it is clear that shifting from legal norms to ethical ones would delimit the power of the state in such a way that open terror would result (cf. Maus 1992, 308–328). A frequent misunderstanding of Kant’s call for the “agreement between politics and morality” (Kant 1991, 125) occurs only because of the language Kant employs when affirming that morality supersedes ethics and law. In fact, his position could not be clearer: “Politics can easily be reconciled with morality in the former sense (i.e., as ethics), for both demand that men should give up their rights to their rules. But when it comes to morality in its second sense (i.e., as the theory of right), which requires that politics should actively defer to it, politics finds it advisable not to enter into any contract at all” (130). While Kant affirms the interconnection between rights of freedom and popular sovereignty, he makes a pointed distinction between “natural law,” “which rests upon manifold a priori principles,” and positive law, which stems from the will of the legislator. The sole “inborn right” (angeborenes Recht—the eighteenth-century term for “human right”) that he names is “freedom”; this principle already implies “equality” in exercising freedom in general and freedom of speech (Niesen 2005) in particular (Kant 1996, §44 [89–90]). Kant again mentions “inborn” rights as “inseparable” legal attributes of “citizens of the state” (that is, members of a society who have united in order to legislate)— modified as “freedom,” “equality,” and (economic) “independence” (§46 [91–92]). Because some secondary literature makes the latter the key of its understanding of Kant’s theory of democracy as a whole, a side remark is warranted. Kant holds that only “independent citizens” should have voting rights as “active citizens.” Although this distinction is scandalous, it is a variant of the principle of inclusion/exclusion that occurs everywhere in the eighteenth century (including in the writings of the “radical democrat” Rousseau—e.g., Constitutional Project for Corsica), and it should not be confused with democratic popular sovereignty, which is its opposite. Ironically, in today’s democracies—where the right to vote extends to so many formerly disenfranchised groups—the principle of popular sovereignty (which constitutions continue to invoke) has no substance inasmuch as elections influence legislative agendas, but laws, which are more and more deformalized in actual fact, prove nonbinding for the instances of application. The self-programming that occurs in state apparatuses produces a populace that enjoys equality only as “passive citizens.”

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Regarding the relationship between rights to freedom and popular sovereignty, Kant calls the first “a priori principles” as the foundation of every legal condition (Kant 1991, 74; cf. 1996, §55 [115–116]) and at the same time qualifies them as the result of the “highest authority” of the sovereign legislative people, from which all rights of individuals must be derived (Kant 1996, §51 [110–111]). This twofold determination—which holds that rights to freedom are simultaneously the precondition for and the result of popular sovereignty— implies the “positivization of natural law” (as Habermas remarks in regard to instituting a constitution during the French Revolution [cf. Theory and Practice, 45ff.]). This means that the equivocal character of the rights to freedom, being statutory law and extrapositive law at the same time, is not in question. Analogously, Kant applies this equivocal character to specific asymmetries of the principle of popular sovereignty. The first involves the subjection of all citizens to the state’s monopoly on force (which lies in the hands of the executive and judiciary), and the second the subjection of state apparatuses to the legislative sovereignty of the people. It follows from the nature of rights to freedom, which antedate the state, that its apparatuses can bring no extrapositive legal argument to bear against individuals: appealing to extrapositive law is a privilege of those who are not political functionaries but “merely” human beings (citizens). Only the latter may demand their extrapositive rights in free speech and concretize them as positive rights by legislative procedure. In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas works out a system of rights in which the elements of Kant’s theory discussed above can be found. The latter stand in such a narrow context that a separate representation would be inadequate. Habermas presents them already on the level of grounds (Begründung). Like Kant (2012, 62ff.), he assumes that modern philosophy can no longer presume the existence of objectively given entities and must therefore employ “circular” grounds. Habermas’s explication of a logical genesis of rights in a “circular process” (Facts, 122) also presumes that the principle of discourse (which until this point was a principle of morality)—as a “neutral” one with respect to law and morality—refers to norms of action in general and that the principle of democracy is tailored to legal norms (Facts, 104, 118). The circular process negates the hierarchy between natural law and positive legislation so that rights to freedom and popular sovereignty are “equiprimordial” (127). As a “logical” genesis, the “circular process” begins when the principle of discourse is applied to the subjective right to action (that is, to the form of law as such), and it ends in the institutionalization of democratic legislation— through which, “retroactively,” the rights of subjective freedom arise (127). As in the works of Kant, then, rights to freedom are introduced as both the precondition for and the result of democratic legislation—whereby Habermas observes that these rights, as conditions for the possibility of legislative sovereignty, cannot restrict it (127). Habermas’s circular grounding is immune to

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objections that fault it either for a conception of rights analogous to natural law or, conversely, for the absence of a catalog of normatively “correct” fundamental rights; on the other hand, it guards against excessive (“wild”) or restricted popular sovereignty. The “fundamental rights” of free, subjective action introduced by the circular process at first do not occupy a position superior to the “fundamental rights” of political autonomy that follow because they refer only to “categories of rights” and as actual rights emerge only “from politically autonomous elaboration” (Facts, 122–123). Habermas’s minimalistic scheme for grounding rights avoids the determinations of both material natural law and “expertocratic” determinations of justice (which could undermine the democratic process) and appeals only to the form of legality as such—that is, to the “language” that must necessarily be spoken in procedures that concretize the rights. Prima facie, Habermas seems to agree with Kant (almost) completely on the level of grounds, too. In the eighteenth century, the democratic theory of natural law was circular, as well. The point of entry into the circle occurred through “inborn” rights, in which Rousseau—like Kant—viewed the necessary foundation for the democratic structure of legislation; in turn, this structure should protect—and continually concretize—the Rights of Man (cf. Maus 1995, 523n71). These “inborn” rights were also not something “given”; instead, they derived from a theoretical postulate: only within the hypothetical construct of the state of nature—that is, abstracting from all factually existent relations of force in political society and hierarchies—could “freedom” and “equality” possess a counterfactual grounding. (However, there are also differences that exist between the perspectives of philosophy of the subject and discourse theory; other ones are caused by Habermas’s specific reading of Kant, which underestimates the significance of the latter’s project for his theory of discourse—above all, with respect to the separation between law and morals [Maus 1995, 539ff.; cf. Brandt 2002, 57–58].) The rights to freedom that Habermas considers “equiprimordial” with popular sovereignty are not the same as those that Kant affirmed. From the inception, Kant understood “freedom” and “equality”—“inborn, inalienable rights necessarily belonging to humanity”—both as general rights to exercise freedom privately (Kant 1991, 74) and as principles that condition the democratic structure of law itself by making private arbitrariness compatible within society and guaranteeing, at the same time, participation in the process of democratic legislation (Kant 1991, 99; 1996, §46)—without being superordinate to the latter (which Habermas incorrectly denies in Between Facts and Norms [93]). Kant clearly distinguishes between freedom as “legal autonomy” and moral autonomy (Kant 1991, 99–100n; see also Kant 1996, §46). For him, freedom is “the competence not to obey any external laws except those to which I have been able to give my assent” (Kant 1991, 99–100n). The rights to freedom

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that Kant upholds, then, represent the rights of private autonomy and political autonomy in one; private freedom to act is secured through participation in legislation. In this way, the rights of freedom and popular sovereignty are—as Habermas puts it—“pre-understood.” In contrast to Kant, Habermas considers that equal, subjective rights to act occupy a position of structural opposition to the right of political autonomy and that a much more complex theoretical framework is required to bring them into agreement. He qualifies the difference between rights to private autonomy and political autonomy in discourse-theoretical terms: the first group “delivers” one from the “obligation of communicative freedom” to take a position on validity claims that are raised intersubjectively, whereas the second guarantees “entitlements to the public use of communicative freedom” (Facts, 119–120, 127). This opposition yields the “paradox” that intersubjectively determined rights must also be guaranteed by the legal form invested by subjective freedom (130–131). To bridge this contradiction within the legal institutionalization of strategic and communicative action, Habermas elaborates discursive formations (157ff.) that ground the communicative rationality of parliamentary procedures and, ultimately, the “legitimacy of law” (102). Habermas rightly contests Kant’s mediation of rights to freedom and popular sovereignty because it is not based on discourse; however, he unfairly denies that Kant’s mediation as such, because it makes no distinction between law and morality, entails subordinating the democratic legislator to morally substantive norms (Facts, 105–109). Readers of Kant disagree—as far as the level of grounds is concerned—whether he derives the principle of law from that of morality. It is worth noting that—already in the “introductions” and “divisions” at the beginning of The Metaphysics of Morals—Kant discusses the separation of law and morality over the course of thirty-one pages; this fact, however, is obscured by terminology that differs from vocabulary in use today: in contradistinction to natural laws, Kant calls “moral” all “laws of freedom” that provide the object of practical philosophy—which he then divides into “juridical” and “ethical” ones (Kant 1996, 14). Kant, therefore, treats “morality” as an umbrella term covering law and ethics when he speaks of the ability (Vermögen) to bind others—that is, “the concept of law” (Begriff des Rechts) can be developed because the “moral imperative” commands obligation (347). In other words, with respect to law and ethics, Kant’s conception of morality is “neutral”—like Habermas’s revised principle of discourse. That said, one should take issue with Habermas when he affirms not only that Kant’s “merely” “inborn” right to equal freedom but also the multiplicity of concrete laws existing in the state of nature (which Kant calls “private rights” [cf. Maus 1992, 148ff.]) possess a moral foundation that the democratic legislator need only positivize (Facts, 104ff.). To do so would mean voiding Kant’s principle of popular sovereignty. Rather: according to Kant, in

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opposition to “inborn” freedom, the “mine and yours” that exists in the state of nature is merely an “acquired” right, and its acquisition—qua pure act of force—occurs in a manner so unencumbered by morals that Kant accords it only “provisional” validity (Kant 1996, §15 [51ff.]) (a point where he differs from Locke). No “commandment”—just a “permissive law” of reason (16, 41; see the fundamental remarks in Brandt 1982, 233ff.)—demands that rights that obtain in the state of nature hold until the “public” (öffentlich) democratic legislation of civil society recognizes them as permanent, whereby “the will of the legislator” is “irreproachable” (Kant 1996, §48 [93]). Only the theoretical premise of “private rights” in a “legal postulate” of practical reason holds that the “external usable” should belong to someone in general (§1 [37ff.]). This relationship between property at all and the need to assure its legal foundation corresponds, approximately, to two formulations guaranteeing rights of possession in the German constitution (Grundgesetz): the first holds that “property” is “guaranteed”; the second reads: “their content [!] and limits shall be defined by the laws” (article 14, paragraph 1). Here, Habermas’s “circular process” of legal genesis is repeated both in terms of the relationship between rights that the constitution concretizes and in their (subsequent) elaboration in positive law.

Theory of International Law Habermas’s engagement with Kant’s theory of international law has occurred at a critical distance, for the most part. Observing that the globalization of many social subspheres has made it difficult for nation-states to regulate them (which often means that they prove impossible to regulate at all), Habermas elaborates principles of domestic world politics in order to theorize a “constitutionalization of international law.” In so doing, his political position of the “world citizen” enters into the philosophical controversy—albeit not to strategic ends, as was typical of the reading of Kant over the last two centuries (Eberl 2008). Whereas many theorists have directly invoked Kant’s theory of international law (Kant 1996, §53ff.; Kant 1991, 87–92, 93–130) to suit their own political objectives, as dictated by context, Habermas—by situating his reading in contemporary debates—makes it clear where he differs with Kant. The prevalent reading of “Perpetual Peace” in our day finds in it a source of legitimation for international politics that—in anticipation of a worldwide system—disregards the UN Charter and demands the immediate implementation (even by force) of equal human rights in all societies across the globe. Accordingly, Kant’s text is strategically exploited to advocate a global state and to support military intervention. Habermas’s reading goes in a different direction. Drawing attention to the “historical distance of two hundred years,”

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Habermas first declared key parts of “Perpetual Peace” to be obsolete—above all because it gives up the idea of a global state, as he remarked accurately— and pejoratively—in Inclusion of the Other (165ff.). Subsequently, Habermas grew convinced of the prevailing Anglo-American view (Divided West, 125n24), namely, that Kant’s text ultimately provides its grounds. At the same time, Habermas advocated a world constitution without a global state; the change of perspective gave rise to the specific complexities of Habermas’s later readings of Kant in the context of his own project of “constitutionalizing international law” (Divided West, 106ff.). In “Perpetual Peace” itself, the connection between rights to freedom and popular sovereignty—a matter that will be familiar from Kant’s conception of domestic (innerstaatlich) democracy—is augmented by the additional element of peace; this constellation presumes the optimization, on all sides, of these principles. In this spirit, Kant affirms that “securing peace” provides the “entire final end of the doctrine of right” (Kant 1996, 123) and that the progressive “republicanization”—that is, democratization—of all states represents the crucial precondition of peace. At the same time, this process does not represent a means to a (final) end, for democratic organization—in keeping with the design of the social contract, which gives it form and substance—is an end in itself (Kant 1991, 73–74; cf. Maus 1992, 43ff., 54–55). The means by which world peace is to be brought about must suit this purpose. The demand articulated in the First Definitive Article—that “the Civil Constitution of Every State shall be Republican” (Kant 1991, 99)—is compatible with the peace-promoting nature of a state organized in this way insofar as it is the citizens themselves (who must, after all, bear the burdens of armed conflict) who decide about war or peace; in the absence of modern mass media, they naturally prefer the second option. (The republic’s end-in-itself is already evident in Kant’s detailed account of the principles of its constitution.) Kant’s advocacy of a federation essentially rests on this precondition. His decision, which the Second Definitive Article justifies, is anticipated by two of the Preliminary Articles, where Kant indicates the basis for securing peace in the first place. By the same token, the Preliminary Articles elaborate the connection between the “social contract” and democratic organization, on the one hand, and the relationship between domestic and international aspects of democratic self-determination (that is, popular sovereignty and state sovereignty), on the other. Preliminary Articles 2 and 5 (Kant 1991, 94, 95) exclude the possibility of an “independent state” being “acquired” peaceably under private law through another state or that a state may “forcibly interfere with the constitution and government of another.” The same rationale applies in either case: the state “is” the people, a society of human beings who have united into a community of citizens according to the “idea of an original contract” (99–100).

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The acquisition of a state does not injure it as such; rather, it offends the state as a “moral person” (in contemporary usage: as a juridical person), that is, the state as an association of citizens. In such a case, the latter are demoted to “things” and deprived of their right, as citizens, to self-determination (as occurred, in Kant’s day, when Genoa sold Corsica to France). Likewise, in the case of “forcible interference” (for the purpose of changing a bad constitution or when a constitution is threatened by internal separatist movements), this “scandal” “make[s] the autonomy of all states insecure” by involving the violation of “the rights of an independent people which is merely struggling with its internal ills” (Kant 1991, 96; emphasis added). It follows directly from these formulations that state sovereignty deserves international recognition because it is the external aspect of domestic popular sovereignty. This normative qualification of state sovereignty by popular sovereignty provides the basis for Kant’s rejection of a world republic that melts all states together. Admittedly, the grounding in the “idea” of the original contract (which, for Kant, involves free and equal individuals and already contains the structure of democratic legislation) leaves open the question of what to do with regard to the internal state structures actually in place—a matter that can be explored only after interpretation of the extremely controversial Second Definitive Article (Kant 1991, 102ff.). Some readers interpret Kant’s decision against a world republic—and for the “negative surrogate” of a federation—as a provisional compromise with international law and its practice as it stood in his day; his objective, then, is to work—by secret, as it were—toward a world republic, after all. Against such a view stands the argument that Kant’s objections to a world republic are exclusively normative in nature (on the following, see Maus 2006). The disputed passage in “Perpetual Peace” reads: There is only one rational way in which states coexisting with other states can emerge from the lawless condition of pure warfare. Just like individual men, they must renounce their savage and lawless freedom, adapt themselves to public coercive laws, and thus form an international state (civitas gentium), which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the peoples of the earth. But since this is not the will of the nations, according to their present conception of international right (so that they reject in hypothesi what is true in thesi), the positive idea of a world republic cannot be realized. If all is not to be lost, this can at best find a negative substitute in the shape of an enduring and gradually expanding federation likely to prevent war. (Kant 1991, 105; emphasis added)

Kant’s central declaration—that the peoples of the earth “reject” the international state “in hypothesi” even though it “is true in thesi”—should not be

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understood in reference to factually extant attitudes or in the sense of giving up “theory” for the sake of empirical “practice.” Because Kant derives the categorical obligation to seek eternal peace only from the fact that the impossibility of this goal cannot be proven, judgments concerning the means to this end are necessarily “hypothetical” (Kant 1991, 88ff.). Thereby, the philosopher justifies the view of the “peoples of this earth” “in hypothesi,” and he presents it as the result of a process of evaluation that, as a matter of “determinative power of judgment” (bestimmende Urteilskraft), has been transferred from theoretical philosophy to the philosophy of peace. In this process, Kant’s “political principles”—which make it possible to compare both models of peace (Kant 1996, 95–98)—function in a manner analogous to the transcendental schemata of theoretical philosophy, which govern the subsumption of an object under a pure conception of mind (for example, a plate under the notion of a circle). Thereby, it emerges that, of the two inherently “reasonable” models of peace—the world republic and the federation of states—only the latter corresponds to all the normative criteria of peace when one considers its realization in “hypothetical” terms; the world republic, on the other hand, would violate this idea, were it realized. In turn, Kant defines these normative criteria in terms of the continuum of peace, rights to freedom, and democratic autonomy—which exclude the “churchyard peace” of a world republic. In a state spanning the globe—for reasons of dimension alone—democratic legislation could not be organized nor laws implemented; consequently, a state of anarchic despotism affording neither freedom nor peace would result (Kant 1991, 90; 1996, 96). A federation, in contrast, would preserve the domestic connection between democratic freedom and peace; therefore, Kant concludes, a global federation of individual states would recognize state sovereignty as popular sovereignty. According to Kant, then, the “idea” of the original contract can only be realized in individual states; at the same time, however, it must be achieved asymptotically—through historical development. Therefore, state sovereignty is merely the condition of the possibility of popular sovereignty. Given that the vast majority of states are still far from achieving democratic freedom, and in view of the normative directive that even a democracy may not be introduced against the will of the people (Kant 1996, 112), Kant develops, in an international perspective, the “permissive law” (Erlaubnisgesetz) of reason. It tolerates unjust constitutions for as long as they cannot be changed without producing the risk of society collapsing back into a “state of nature” without any law or constitution at all (Kant 1991, 97 and n.; cf. 82). This permissive law serves the purposes of peace and self-determination of citizens alike, taking into account the time required by independently occurring processes of learning within different societies on their way to democracy.

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The project for “cosmopolitan right” (Weltbürgerrecht) in the Third Definitive Article has such a specific status in Habermas’s late reading of Kant that it can be discussed only now in this context. Kant’s supposed advocacy of a world republic is, as mentioned, significant for Habermas’s new perspective of interpretation, now in a critical tendency (Maus 2007, 358ff.). On the one hand, Habermas considers Kant an early theorist of cosmopolitan constitutionalism; on the other hand, he derives the constitution he envisions by abstracting it from its (Kantian) foundation in the world republic. Habermas’s particular way of reading Kant as the advocate of a world republic relates to the aforementioned “cosmopolitan right” through which he—according to Habermas—transforms it from law-between-states into rights of individuals “as members of a politically constituted [!] world society” (Naturalism, 314). Therefore, Kant could not have conceived such a global constitution, which corresponds to the individual rights of “world citizens,” in the absence of a “world republic” (314). In his own project of “constitutionalizing international law,” Habermas deems Kant’s “cosmopolitan condition” to be “so abstract . . . that it is not the same thing as the world republic and cannot be dismissed as utopian” (315). At the same time, this act of abstraction—like the matter of renouncing a world republic—matches Kant’s own intentions more than anticipated. The only passage in which Kant evaluates cosmopolitan right in the context of “a universal state of mankind” (Kant 1991, 87) does not discuss a state but only human beings. The matter only seems paradoxical, for the latter are not citizens of such a state; rather, they should be viewed as such. At issue stand the rights of human beings—depending on the perspective and role of each individual, such rights can possess civil, international, and cosmopolitan dimensions. For this reason, Kant speaks only of every legal constitution, “as far as . . . persons [!] are concerned” (Kant 1991, 98n), and not of constitutions that organize political communities irrespective of size. The “cosmopolitan right” elaborated in the Third Definitive Article (105ff.) holds to the same level of abstraction. This right concerns “general hospitality” when borders are crossed—a matter that presumes the existence of borders. The goal Kant sets with regard to reciprocity of intercourse—above all, between representatives of “our part of the world” and oppressed and exploited regions, whose relations stand to be ameliorated by means of “public law” that moves “gradually” toward a “cosmopolitan constitution” (106)—does not go beyond a legal constitution “as far as . . . persons are concerned” (98n). Rather, it argues a “necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity” (108). Kant’s “cosmopolitan right”—even if it were “written”—would not be a matter of supranational but of transnational law. Although Habermas’s

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view—that Kant cannot imagine a world constitution without a state—is correct in principle, the agreement exists only in the negative. Kant rejects, after all, the American constitution, which establishes a state as a model for securing world peace (Kant 1996, 123). For the latter, Kant insists on a contractual federation between sovereign states. Habermas’s own project for a global constitution approaches Kant’s. The “multilevel federal system” (Naturalism, 315) that he discusses displays, by his own estimation, the traits of a federation (335). A reformed worldwide organization would address only the matters of securing peace and human rights at the top; “global domestic politics,” on the other hand, would be reserved for continental regimes consisting of federated nation-states (Divided West, 118ff.). Of course, the “constitution”—into which the provisions of the UN Charter would be transformed—would assign the politics of human rights to the world organization in a way that separated them from democratic and constitutional processes; therefore, it would stand diametrically opposed to both Kant’s and Habermas’s own conception of a domestic constitution. For this reason, Habermas calls for “embedding” (the) global politics (of the United Nations) into the worldwide public sphere (Naturalism, 342), whereas the legitimacy of domestic world politics would involve the resources of legitimation available in nation-states (Divided West, 139).

Epistemology Although the consequences of the “linguistic turn” for Habermasian epistemology cannot be discussed here, it is worth noting that Habermas employs pragmatism, which deflates Kant’s approach (Naturalism, 7). Kant’s transcendental philosophy, which already discounts unmediated access to objects of knowledge and concentrates on the conditions of its possibility, proclaims a “revolution” of the way of thinking (Kant 1998, 107). Knowledge no longer complies with the object; in contrast, the object complies with the condition of the cognitive faculty (25). Kant responded to the famous question of his transcendental philosophy— “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” (59)—by affirming that objectively valid knowledge is achieved only on the basis of principles that precede all experience and constitute it in the first place: subjects cannot recognize “things in themselves” but only objects synthesized from diffuse perceptions by way of a priori forms of intuition and a priori concepts of mind. By tracing the recognizable world of appearances to operations of the subject, Kant liberated the latter from both the superior force of the reified objectivity of premodern thought and from the claims to positive truth of precritical, “dogmatic” metaphysics. In so doing, of course, he saw fit to present himself as

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the strict expert on matters of properly employing the cognitive faculty alone—precisely this claim of mastery is what Habermas’s discourse theory “democratizes” (Moral Consciousness, 12). Habermas does not reformulate epistemology in terms of principles of reason held to be uniquely correct and anterior to experience in general but in terms of elements of discourse that “already” occur in all intersubjective communication about the world of objects—elements “built into” the pragmatic components of speech. Participants in discourse mutually—and reciprocally— impute things to one another, both on the level of grammar and in the idiom they share; this requires that a shared universe of objects (Naturalism, 32)— “a world ‘identical for all’ ” (32)—be grounded and established. Following Hilary Putnam—because “everything is real that can be represented in true statements”—Habermas opts for “internal realism” (35). But the question arises whether Kant’s dualism between the “things in themselves” and the “world of phenomena” reemerges when Habermas affirms (with Peirce) that the “world,” which we understand “as the totality of objects” (that we can “run into”), should not be confused with “reality,” which “can be represented in true statements” (33; emphasis added). The difference between the two epistemological positions seems to concern the “democratization” posited by discourse theory. However, the “internal realism” this presumes is even less realistic than Kant’s “transcendental idealism.” Kant derives “phenomena” from the mental representations that “things in themselves” (which cannot be known) bring about through their influence on the apperceiving subject’s senses (Kant 2004, 69–70); the “internal” reality of objects discussed by discourse theory, however, is exclusively caused by the linguistic communication that occurs between subjects. All the same, Habermas observes critically (Communicative Action, 1:387), Kant’s philosophy of consciousness is antiquated inasmuch as it remains tied to the paradigm of a subject processing both itself and the objects of perception. The relationship Kant posits between subject and object—a relationship he conceives without communicative mediation, which “produces” the object to be known in the first place—originated in a social (and historical) context where the working transformation of external nature was so dominant that it determined even the way philosophy conceived of connections between concepts and things. The “effort and exertion of the concept”—as Adorno put it—“was unmetaphorical.” In contrast, Habermas’s theoretical distinction between “work” and “interaction” (Rational Society, 91ff.) permits a more complex version of epistemology— one fitted to a social context in which “interaction” has become so dominant that even direct contact with objects (which, for Kant, occurred through the subject’s “sensorium”) only takes place in “communicated” form. On the whole, then, Habermas’s engagement with Kant may be understood as the transformation

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of a philosophy of consciousness based on “work” into a philosophy of the modern-day communicating society (Kommunikationsgesellschaft).

References Brandt, Reinhard. 1982. “Das Erlaubnisgesetz, oder: Vernunft und Geschichte in Kants Rechtslehre.” In Rechtsphilosophie der Aufklärung, ed. Reinhard Brandt, 233–285. Berlin: de Gruyter. ——. 2002. “Habermas und Kant.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 50, no. 1: 53–68. Eberl, Oliver. 2008. Demokratie und Frieden: Kants Friedensschrift in den Kontroversen der Gegenwart. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Kant, Immanuel. 1991. Political Writings. Trans. Hans S. Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 1996. The Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2004. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics: That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. Trans. Gary Hatfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2012. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maus, Ingeborg. 1992. Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie. Rechts- und demokratietheoretische Überlegungen im Anschluss an Kant. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1995. “Freiheitsrechte und Volkssouveränität. Zu Jürgen Habermas’s Rekonstruktion des Systems der Rechte.” Rechtstheorie 35, no. 4: 507–562. ——. 2006. “Kant’s Reasons Against a Global State: Popular Sovereignty as a Principle of International Law.” In Kant’s Perpetual Peace: New Interpretative Essays, ed. Luigi Caranti, 35–54. Rome: LUISS University Press. ——. 2007. “Verfassung oder Vertrag: Zur Verrechtlichung globaler Politik.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit. Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 350–382. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Niesen, Peter. 2005. Kants Theorie der Redefreiheit. Baden-Baden: Nomos.

10 COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY GERTRUD NUNNER-WINKLER

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ehaviorism understands cognitive learning as a cumulative process of forming associations based on the perception of contingencies, and normative learning as a process of adopting desired modes of behavior in response to punishment and reward (that is, as a process of conditioning). From a psychoanalytic perspective, development is a matter of constructing mental patterns on the basis of the relationships experienced in early childhood. Norms are observed because the child wishes to avoid pangs of conscience (i.e., the revenge of the superego, which internalizes the fear of castration); alternatively, this occurs because the structure of biological needs has undergone change in response to the child’s fear of losing the affection of others. Both these theoretical traditions rely on a functionalistic understanding of truth, present a conventionalist conception of correctness, and acknowledge only instrumentalist motivations for development. Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, in contrast, hold that the development of cognitive and moral capacities of judgment progresses because of the subject’s intrinsic interest in the truth and the universal justifiability of moral norms.

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development For Piaget (1963), cognition is neither a copy of reality nor simply a mental construction. Instead, it is determined by the competencies that a subject has already developed, which, seeking to grasp reality in a manner that is increasingly accurate, undergo further evolution. In this perspective, mental structures emerge in keeping with a developmental logic: the process occurs in a universal, irreversible sequence of stages; each is a structured whole, and they build on one another as a matter of logical necessity; it is impossible for intermediate phases to be skipped. This progression tends, increasingly, toward generalization, abstraction, and adequation to reality. The motor of development lies in active engagement with the environment: the child identifies contradictions and seeks to resolve them on a higher cognitive level. In other words, thinking evolves in the measure that actions are interiorized.

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Cognitive development begins with the sensomotoric stage (zero to two years): schemata of action are constructed and coordinated, and initial representations of causality and space are acquired. In the preoperational stage (two to seven), symbolic thinking begins. At the same time, however, the child is still inclined toward animistic, artificial, and finalistic explanations of nature; it cannot yet consider multiple dimensions of reality simultaneously or understand hierarchical classification schemes. The concrete operational stage (seven to twelve) overcomes these difficulties. In the formal operational stage (from twelve on), thought grows reflexive for the first time. The maturing child can operate on operations—that is, it can reflect not only on concrete things but also on thoughts; it can draw conclusions from data and seek out, in systematic fashion, the necessary information it lacks. The child’s newly acquired capacity for hypothetical thinking discloses the concept of chance—now, it realizes that circumstances given in fact are the contingent realization of far more numerous possible outcomes.

The Development of the Capacity for Moral Judgment Piaget (1962) identifies two stages of moral development. In the child’s initial, heteronomous understanding of the world, authorities establish norms, and violations are to be punished. When the stage of autonomy is achieved, the child recognizes that norms hold on the basis of agreements, and it observes them for reasons of contractually established self-obligation. According to Kohlberg’s (1984) revised developmental model, moral consciousness unfolds in six steps, whereby—as is the case for Piaget—the understanding of the validity of norms and the motives for following them correspond. In the preconventional stage (until the age of ten or eleven), children believe that norms are valid because they are set by authorities and either involve sanctions (level 1) or open, mutually advantageous possibilities of exchange (level 2). On the conventional level—which is the characteristic stage of operation for most adults—norms are valid either because they are factually prevalent in the subject’s own group (level 3) or because they prevail in society as a whole (level 4); one observes such rules in order to achieve social acceptance or to avoid pangs of conscience. In the postconventional stage (which few adults achieve), insight into universal acceptability provides the foundation of morality. Norms are founded on contractual agreement (level 5) or through universal principles such as equality and respect for personal dignity (level 6); they are observed to honor an agreement or because of a voluntary commitment to principles the subject recognizes as valid. For various reasons, higher stages count as “better”: they increasingly integrate relevant considerations—positive and negative consequences, loyalties,

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the observance of law and contracts, and universal justifiability. The process of evolution extends the range of perspectives considered; it leads from ego, over the dyad, the small social unit and society, until the subject adopts a perspective that takes all reasonable beings into account. Increasing expansion of role-taking abilities provides the structural basis for the development of moral competence. Subjects in fact prefer higher-level arguments. Piaget and Kohlberg employed the method of the hermeneutic-reconstructive interview in their studies. Subjects explained the solutions they developed to the various cognitive tasks and moral dilemmas they were presented with; subsequently, they justified their decisions when the interviewer raised objections. In this way, researchers were able to reconstruct and understand examinees’ points of view. By raising objections, interviewers could distinguish between opinions that had been casually adopted, on the one hand, and firmly anchored convictions, on the other; this permitted them to evaluate subjects’ levels of competence even when their performance was hampered by fatigue, disinterest, and the like. Stage assignment is based not on the content of answers but on the structure of justification set forward.

The Premises of Piaget and Kohlberg’s Theory Anthropological View For both behaviorist and psychoanalytic approaches, the child is a passive object. It receives formative impressions early on (through explicit educational efforts or through attachment experience), and its actions find orientation primarily in outer and inner (that is, internalized) sanctions. The cognitive approach, on the other hand, holds that human beings actively strive—and, according to Klaus Riegel’s concept of “post-formal levels” and Kohlberg’s “level 7,” they do so their entire lives—to improve the capacity for knowledge and judgment.

Developmental Logic A constitutive element of the approach is the idea that cognitive and moral competence universally follows an immanent logic of developmental improvement. The motor of this process is provided by the experience of contradiction—conflicts between action schemes so far developed and new experiences and between judgments from one’s own perspective and that of

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others; in addition, development occurs through pragmatic efforts to resolve instances of incommensurability that have been identified—i.e., when the subject revises and modifies his or her thought structures in order to achieve integration on a higher level.

Research Methods According to positivistic conceptions of scientific inquiry, only the identical wording of questions and answers grant the equivalence of stimuli and reactions. By proceeding in this manner, however, researchers determine the meaning of the questions posed, which they—mistakenly—take to be objectively given. In reconstructive interviews, on the other hand—i.e., the method employed by Piaget and Kohlberg—researchers try to apprehend the views of subjects. In the exchange of arguments, investigators and subjects establish an egalitarian relation. Because comprehension is the object of study, the subjects’ claims concerning the truth or rightness of their judgments are taken seriously, even when they are mistaken or their considerations remain “stuck” at low levels of development.

Bracketing Content In focusing on the universal development of formal structures of thought and judgment, Piaget and Kohlberg disregard the positive “contents” of what is said. More recent studies (in the fields of information processing, the novice-expert paradigm, and intuitive psychology) have demonstrated—and in detail—the significance of content-learning processes that occur differentially. Likewise, empirical studies have shown that the influence of convictions that vary between cultures and sociohistorical circumstances is important for the formation of moral judgments.

Habermas and the Cognitive Approach Especially during his tenure at the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, Habermas recognized the importance of developmental cognitive psychology. Basic points of theoretical and strategic agreement with his own project stimulated him greatly, and he employed the empirical findings of this field of study extensively to lend support to the core tenets of his own theory. Below are some points of overlap.

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Theory of Socialization Already in his Frankfurt lectures, Habermas expanded his analyses of societal structures by incorporating questions of socialization. Contra the stimulusresponse model of behaviorism and the assumptions of functionalist role theory (which focuses on conformity), he stressed that varying degrees of freedom allow actors to display more or less autonomy when faced with the repressiveness, rigidity, and internalization requirements that obtain in a given system of roles. At the time, Habermas formulated his conception of ego identity and requisite ego strength in the psychoanalytic terminology of ego psychology. At Starnberg, he incorporated the developmental dynamics of a self-sufficient, intrinsic concern for truth and justice in subjects, which cognitivist approaches have shown to obtain both in theoretical terms and through empirical research.

Morality Equally, Habermas’s understanding of morality was influenced by his encounter with cognitivist research. Its findings—that subjects, in developing moral competence, learn to distance themselves from conventional norms and prove capable of resolving conflicts in view of the potential consent of a more inclusive sphere of parties who might be affected—afforded Habermas an empirical guarantee for the core assumptions of his communicative action theory: understanding and justifiable agreement.

Developmental Logic The progressive emergence of rational argumentation observed in the process of ontogeny assumed a position of key theoretical/strategic importance at Starnberg, where research groups transferred and applied the concept to other fields—e.g., the evolution of the sciences and of worldviews, the understanding of democracy and of the legal system. Habermas described social formations as a sequence of learning steps following the model of developmental logic.

Basic Epistemological Convictions The foundational assumptions implicit in the developmental approach and hermeneutic-reconstructive methodology correspond to the theory of three worlds presented by Habermas’s conception of communicative action. Here,

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the objective world (the sum total of conditions that exist, will exist, or will be brought about), the social world (the sum total of valid norms, opinions, and motivations), and the subjective world (the sum total of personal experiences) are brought together, and the subject capable of language, action, and reflection is deemed competent to take a rationally motivated stand on validity claims raised in any and all of these spheres—the realms of truth, rightness, and authenticity. Actions can now be coordinated by agreement that occurs through cooperative interpretation, and they are complemented by validity claims concerning the universal justifiability of moral norms.

Bracketing Content Several modern moral philosophers (among others, Martha Nussbaum, Bernard Gert, and John Rawls) have sought to derive a basic set of positively determined norms from the fundamental conditions of human existence and social cooperation. Habermas, however—and on this point, he follows the structuralists, who only sought to analyze formal ways that judgments are founded—merely tries to determine the process whereby norms are grounded/justified. In his view, when conditions of uncoerced (herrschaftsfrei) discourse obtain, the universal validity of agreed-upon norms is secure. In a postmetaphysical age, however, the material contents of these norms are no longer determinable.

References Gibbs, John C. 2003. Moral Development and Reality: Beyond the Theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE. Hopf, Christel, and Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, eds. 2007. Frühe Bindungen und moralische Entwicklung. Weinheim: Beltz. Inhelder, Bärbel, and Jean Piaget. 1958. The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. New York: Basic Books. Killen, Melanie, and Judith Smetana. 2006. Handbook of Moral Development. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1981. Essays on Moral Development. Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row. ——. 1984. Essays on Moral Development. Vol. 2: The Psychology of Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Oerter, Rolf, and Leo Montada. 2008. Entwicklungspsychologie. Weinheim: Psychologie Verlags Union. Piaget, Jean. 1962. The Moral Judgment of the Child. New York: Collier. ——. 1963. The Origins of Intelligence in Children. New York: Norton. Turiel, Ellot. 1983. The Development of Social Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

11 THE EPITOME OF TECHNOCRATIC CONSCIOUSNESS MARCELO NEVES

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he debate between Habermas and Luhmann goes back to the end of the 1960s—a time of extreme “ideological” confrontation in the fields of social science and philosophy. Matters became especially intense upon the publication of Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie—Was leistet die Systemforschung? (Social theory or social technology—what does systems research accomplish?; Habermas and Luhmann 1971). This book occasioned heated discussion and, in almost no time at all, two supplementary volumes. Over the years, the matter has grown more complex inasmuch as Habermas has tempered his earlier criticism on a few points—or, at the very least, relativized it. From the outset, Habermas recognized the social-theoretical and philosophical significance of Luhmann’s systems theory. In this context, the following quotation is revealing: Luhmann combines the tradition of critical social theory going back to Marx . . . with an interest in analyzing society as a whole; this prompts him to elaborate a theory of social development (like the project of Historical Materialism), as well as a theory of social structure (like Political Economy). Moreover, Luhmann shares with Marx—and this separates him definitively from Parsons—the notion that theory and practice form a unit, as well as the concomitant idea that the species (Gattung)—or, as the case may be, “society”—is a self-constituting entity. (Habermas 1971, 142–143)

Despite the words of appreciation, Habermas did not integrate the systemstheoretical view of society into his own project. As he put it, “systems theory shares the plane of theoretical reflection [Theoriebildung] with critical social theory, but it pursues an opposing strategy” (143). At this early stage, Habermas held that Luhmann’s project represented a mode of “sociotechnically

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oriented analysis” that sought to dispense with discourse on practical concerns in social life (144). Consequently, Habermas offered the dramatic pronouncement that systems theory affords very little room for actual reflection: “This theory represents, so to speak, the epitome of technocratic consciousness, which, from its inception, defines questions, which today count as practical, as technical matters and thereby permits them to be withdrawn from unforced public discussion” (145). This judgment—together with the critical discussion that followed (a view already reflected in the title of the book in which Habermas presented his views)—met with widespread agreement. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Habermas’s determination gave discussants a simplified way to understand systems theory, and it set the mood and terms of debate in Germany and abroad. Luhmann was counted as an advocate of “technocratic domination” (technokratische Herrschaft), and Habermas was considered to be its most foremost critic. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, this oversimplified contrast was questioned more and more. Even adherents of Habermas’s discourse theory (see Günther 1995; Brunkhorst 1997; 2001, esp. 626; 2005, 88ff.) expressed their doubts. In response, Habermas assigned systems theory a central role in his main sociological work, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). Here, Luhmann’s analytical categories play a role that is not technocratic in the least. Instead, they serve in an explanatory and critical capacity. Indeed, in this new framework, systems theory performs the function that the first generation of the Frankfurt School reserved for Marxian categories of analysis. In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas does not understand systems theory in reference to what admits of change only though strategic and instrumental intervention—i.e., what he previously faulted Luhmann for (over)emphasizing. Now, systems theory enables him to analyze conditions that can be changed only by sacrificing the complexity and productivity of modern society—forces that, because of their inherent dynamism, endanger the social and communicative cohesion of life (Lebenszusammenhang). All the same, Habermas continues to maintain what he affirmed in 1976: that Luhmannian “system-rationality” (Systemrationalität) represents “instrumental reason transferred and applied to self-regulating systems” (Rekonstruktion, 261). As late as 1988, Habermas referred to his rival’s theory as the “ingenious continuation of a tradition” in which “the cognitive-instrumental one-sidedness of cultural and societal rationalization” finds its fullest expression (Discourse, 384). Time and again, Habermas has presented systems theory as a model for how one can understand modern society essentially—and even exclusively—in terms of instrumental organization. Such a view was and is incorrect, however, for Luhmann holds that instrumental models are only “deployed [eingesetzt] when the problems to be resolved have acquired

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specific structures—that is, when complexity has already been largely absorbed” (Luhmann 1973, 156; see also Luhmann 1983, 223; 1971, 294). In this context, it is worth remarking that systems theory has taken spheres of communication such as love and religion very seriously (Luhmann 1984, 1998, 2013). Here, the symbolic and expressive dimensions are relevant; one cannot claim, then, that Luhmann views modern life and social phenomena only in terms of instrumental reason. To understand how Habermas understood systems theory as the “epitome of technocratic consciousness”—or, as he also put it, “one-sided cultural and social rationalization in terms of cognitive instrumentalism”—it is important to note the stress he placed, at the beginning of the 1980s, on the connection between systems theory and decisionistic proceduralism. This distinction goes back to Max Weber and Carl Schmitt. Habermas identified a close relationship between the former’s concept of legitimation (which derives from a “belief in legality” [Legalitätsglaube]) (Weber 1978, 2003), the latter’s strictly political understanding of legitimation (Schmitt 2004, 2008), and Luhmann’s (1983) notion of “legitimation by procedure.” In response to the question— “How can a form of domination whose legality is based on law viewed purely in decisionistic terms  .  .  . be legitimated at all?”—these three thinkers all answer: “through procedure” (Communicative Action, 1:265). Habermas’s criticism is not altogether convincing. In the first place, one should not put Weber in Schmitt’s company (despite the skepticism they share about the degree to which practical matters admit rationalization). Although Weber equates legitimacy and belief in legality, he would hardly have been sympathetic to Schmitt’s conception of politics, which puts “legality” in strong “opposition to legitimacy” (Schmitt 2004, 6–7). Unlike Schmitt—whose decisionistic conception of constitutionality maintains that law is subordinate to politics (Schmitt 2008, esp. 76)—Luhmann stresses the horizontal differentiation that obtains between the two. Indeed, he considers it the defining trait of modern constitutional democracy: from his perspective, the constitution is the structural coupling of both these social systems in equal measure and through reciprocal interpenetration (wechselseitige Durchdringung) (Luhmann 1990a). Moreover, in the 1960s, Luhmann distanced himself from Weber’s conception of legitimacy and criticized him (hardly his favorite author) for “understanding legitimacy to refer only to the effectiveness of rule [Herrschaft]” (Luhmann 1965, 140). That is, Luhmann critiqued his forebear’s conception of legitimacy for being “simply a consequence of his factual belief in the principle of legitimation” (144). Unlike both Weber and Schmitt, Luhmann (1983) argued that legitimation by procedure implies the “transformation of expectations” (esp. 33ff., 119, 171, 199, 252); for this reason, it involves “presumed [unterstellt] consensus” about the binding quality of norms and decisions (1983, 122; 1985,

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201; 1981, 133)—that is, institutionalization. In his later works, Luhmann once again distanced himself from Weber and Schmitt and presented legitimation as the “contingency formula” of political systems. From an internal perspective, this means that “no politics would be necessary without the possibility that legitimation will be required” to justify decisions. In external terms, it means “there would be no problems of legitimation if an out-differentiated [ausdifferenziert] political system did not exist” (2000b, 126). In the 1990s, Habermas did not change much in his critical appraisal of Luhmann. In his own theory, he continued to discuss the latter’s ideas in relation to the opposition between systemic and intersubjective (democratic) autonomy. Although Habermas connected the concept of constitutional government to the idea of legal autonomy, he justified autonomy in terms of morality—thereby setting his conception apart from Luhmann’s law as autopoiesis (see above all Facts, 49–55; and Habermas 1988, 251–259). Law, for Habermas, does not represent a self-steering and self-legitimating functional system, as it does for Luhmann; instead, it requires procedural justification. Especially in his discussions of Weber, Habermas had already expressed reservation on this point: “The particular accomplishment of the positivization of the legal order consists in displacing problems of justification, that is, in relieving the technical administration of the law of such problems over broad expanses—but not in doing away with them” (Communicative Action, 1:261; cf. Communicative Action, 2:304). Now, he formulated his opposition to the positivity of autonomous systems—a matter that Luhmann emphasizes—in stronger terms: A legal system does not acquire autonomy on its own. It is autonomous only to the extent that the legal procedures institutionalized for legislation and for the administration of justice guarantee impartial judgment and provide the channels through which practical reason gains entrance into law and politics. There can be no autonomous law without the realization of democracy. (Habermas 1988, 279; see Habermas 1987, 16, for a similar view formulated in terms of ethics instead of morality)

Habermas’s demand that law be rationally justified is an attempt to avoid confusion between morality and law. For all that, it does not mean that the law depends only on the lifeworld. Rather, it constitutes a sphere that mediates between system and lifeworld. Here, Habermas sets himself apart from Luhmann’s position in two regards. First, he defines systematicity as a component of the process whereby law is politically instrumentalized; for this reason, systemic dimensions stand opposed to autonomy. Second, he indicates that law possesses (or should possess) a moral foundation; according to the Luhmannian paradigm, however,

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this amounts to negating the autonomy of the legal system. In other words, as Habermas views matters, the autonomy of law—which stands opposite to (administrative) power and the economy—depends on the emergence of universalistic, postconventional morality. For Luhmann, in contrast, the legal system possesses autonomy to the extent that it is immune to the immediate constraints of political power and other systemic media (or codes) and to the extent that laws are neutral with respect to morality (which is socially reproduced in a diffuse and fragmentary fashion through the binary code, esteem/ disesteem, that applies to persons). According to Luhmann, today, discursive/reasonable forms of clarifying acceptable—or, as the case may be, unacceptable—value positions remain stuck in the realm of personal experience. The central precondition for practical philosophy—the idea that, by way of debating what one calls “values,” one may come closer to [real] action—can no longer be maintained; this is no longer tenable under the contemporary conditions of a world far richer in possibility. (1981, 389n33)

Habermas, on the other hand, holds that procedural legitimation means juridical principles and that rules may be critiqued (and improved) by allencompassing discursive rationality—which incorporates legal questions (of consistency), pragmatic questions (of goals and the appropriate means to achieve them), ethicopolitical questions (of values), moral questions (of justice), and, finally, questions concerning fair compromises (Facts, 139ff.). Needless to say, this view changes the thrust of the debate: for Habermas, systemic dimensions shrink and come to include only the political and economic instrumentality of law; its autonomy relative to the media of money and power follows from the way it is justified by discursive rationality—in other words, by procedural reason. Within this framework, the concept of “system” (in contrast to “lifeworld”) is defined very narrowly, and it refers only to social realms reproduced through the media of money and (administrative) power. In this context, one should also note that if Habermas occasionally speaks of “institutional systems” (Institutionssysteme)—e.g., education, health care, religion, or law—the “system” in question does not stand opposed to the “lifeworld.” In such cases, Habermas’s (narrow) definition of system is not at issue. Rather, he has in mind institutions that are based on (and in) the lifeworld. Here, the law acts as an instance that effects “transformation” (Facts, 56, 81, 176) by functioning “as a hinge between system and lifeworld” (56). Debate about the function, autonomy, and justifiability of law and the democratic constitutional state culminated in a conference held at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, New York, on September 20

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and 21, 1992. Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms provided the focus of discussion (see Habermas et al. 1996). At this meeting, Luhmann finally took up the matter of Marxism, which Habermas had often challenged him to address. With a measure of irony (especially in reference to Facts, 46), Luhmann now affirmed that he— Luhmann—stood closer to critical theory of the truly Marxian variety, which focuses on factual conflicts in society. Habermas, he observed, seeks only (ideal) consensus (Luhmann 1996, 899). This prompted Habermas to abandon, once and for all, his earlier criticism (that systems theory represents “the epitome of technocratic consciousness”) and to acknowledge that he had “always learned” from his “long-lasting discussion” with Luhmann. Without a trace of irony—albeit with an element of poison in his praise—Habermas called Luhmann “the true philosopher” (1998, 448). With these words, he pointed out that Luhmann—at least in his later writings—had, to some degree, given up a scientific perspective and fallen back on the metaphysical premises of classical philosophy. Now, his earlier criticism of his rival no longer held. The following year—in 1997—Luhmann expressed a deeper level of agreement with Habermas apropos of the book they had coauthored decades earlier: “The irony of the title was that neither author wished to stand up for social technology, but we differed on what a theory of society ought to be” (Luhmann 2012, 1:xi).

References Brunkhorst, Hauke. 1997. “Abschied von Alteuropa: Die Gefährdung der Moderne und der Gleichmut des Betrachters: Niklas Luhmanns ‘Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft.’ ” Die Zeit (June 13, 1997): 50. ——. 2001. “Globale Solidarität: Inklusionsprobleme der modernen Gesellschaft.” In Die Öffentlichkeit der Vernunft und die Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit: Festschrift für Jürgen Habermas, ed. Lutz Wingert and Klaus Günther, 605–626. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2005. Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community. Trans. Jeffrey Flynn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Günther, Klaus. 1995. “Vom Zeitkern des Rechts.” Rechtshistorisches Journal 14:13–35. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. “Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie? Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Niklas Luhmann.” In Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforschung? by Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, 142–290. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1987. “Wie ist Legitimität durch Legalität möglich?” Kritische Justiz 20:1–16. ——. 1988. Law and Morality. Trans. Kenneth Baynes. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ——. 1998. “Reply to Symposium Participants, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.” In Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges, ed. Michael Rosenfeld and Andrew Arato, 381–452. Berkeley: University of California Press. Habermas, Jürgen, et al. 1996. “Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges.” Cardozo Law Review 17, no. 4–5: 1477–1558.

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Habermas, Jürgen, and Niklas Luhmann. 1971. Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas, ed. 1991. Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1965. Grundrechte als Institution: Ein Beitrag zur politischen Soziologie. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. ——. 1971. “Systemtheoretische Argumentationen: Eine Entgegnung auf Jürgen Habermas.” In Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforschung? by Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, 291–405. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1973. Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität: Über die Funktion von Zwecken in sozialen Systemen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1981. Ausdifferenzierung des Rechts. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1983. Legitimation durch Verfahren. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1984. Religious Dogmatics and the Evolution of Societies. Trans. Peter Beyer. New York: Edwin Mellen. ——. 1985. A Sociological Theory of Law. Trans. Elizabeth King-Utz and Martin Albrow. London: Routledge. ——. 1990a. “Verfassung als evolutionäre Errungenschaft.” Rechtshistorisches Journal 9:176–220. ——. 1990b. Paradigm lost: Über die ethische Reflexion der Moral − Rede anläßlich der Verleihung des Hegel-Preises 1989, mit einer Laudatio von Robert Spaemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1996. “Quod Omnes Tangit: Remarks on Jürgen Habermas’s Legal Theory.” Cardozo Law Review 17, no. 4–5: 883–899. ——. 1998. Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. ——. 2000. Die Politik der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2012. Theory of Society, vol. 1. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. ——. 2013. A Systems Theory of Religion. Trans. David Brenner and Adrian Hermann. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Müller-Doohm, Stefan, ed. 2000. Das Interesse der Vernunft: Rückblicke auf das Werk von Jürgen Habermas seit “Erkenntnis und Interesse.” Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Neves, Marcelo. 2000. Zwischen Themis und Leviathan: Eine Schwierige Beziehung – Eine Rekonstruktion des demokratischen Rechtsstaats in Auseinandersetzung mit Luhmann und Habermas. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Schmitt, Carl. 2004. Legality and Legitimacy. Trans. Jeffrey Seitzer. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ——. 2008. Constitutional Theory. Trans. Jeffrey Seitzer. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 2003. “The Three Pure Types of Legitimate Rule.” In The Essential Weber: A Reader, ed. Sam Whimster, 133–145. London: Routledge.

12 EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES KL AUS EDER

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he theory of social evolution plays a key role in the foundation of Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Since Marx, the evolutionary perspective has struggled with the fact that the position the observer occupies must necessarily be, at the same time, the endpoint of the process in question—and therefore a point of teleological narrowness restricting the scope of social theory. Over time, this problem has lost none of its actuality for projects that seek to address processes of societal development. Durkheim, for example, was wedded to the model of phase-specific progression as much as, more recently, Parsons, Luhmann, and Habermas have been. Moreover—beyond the specific details of historical developments as they occur in spatially and temporally distinct societies (e.g., Germany, preColumbian Mexico, or Papua New Guinea)—evolutionary theory permits one to establish a general concept of society. As Habermas views it, the matter involves the social bond tying human beings and their capacities to one another (whether constructively or destructively) in processes of linguistically mediated communication. Two problems arise when one seeks to provide theoretical grounding to this perspective on society (alternatively, this perspective on the evolution of society). The first concerns the danger of homogenizing distinct historical forms of social evolution by declaring the existence of a single evolutionary path for societal development. Above all, it involves causal explanations, which must account for the numerous variants and many constellations to be considered. The second problem, which stands independent of the first, concerns differences between human and nonhuman forms of social evolution. This is not a matter of determining causality but of theorizing the constitution of the “object” to be examined. Since its earliest formulation, the idea of social evolution has represented a scandal inasmuch as it views the process of social evolution among humans in relation to biological theories and associates causal assumptions with the mechanisms at work. Sociobiological approaches to the matter suggest that, “in the final instance,” one should view sociality in biological terms. Although reservations are warranted, such assumptions do not, in principle, lack an empirical foundation. Indeed, social evolution—understood as changes that

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occur in social relations—is a phenomenon one may observe in other species. This circumstance means that the theory of social evolution offers an analytical tool enabling one to identify breaks and discontinuities within the evolution of communicative relations—points that determine the particular paths social phenomena follow in the course of development. Social evolution that occurs through linguistically mediated communication, then, represents one course among others. Paradoxically, a “full” theory of social evolution would also account for the evolution of social theory. Habermas’s project can be understood in this way, too, and contrasted with competing projects in terms of the particular aspects of social evolution that make the course it follows possible. As a rule, the sociologists who have ventured upon this theoretical terrain have offered rather general and vague assumptions about what, precisely, constitutes the field of communicatively regulated social relations. Luhmann, for example, held that the ability to say “no” represents a determining factor for the evolution of societies; Marx, in contrast, used “labor” to define the field of investigation—a concept he associated with a very particular model of socialization and social evolution. Habermas, however, bases his view of social evolution—and here lies the significance of his thought—in a genuine theory of social relations: the theory of communicative action. Sociality is built into the formal conditions of understanding and agreement, he affirms. Consequently—as a theory of the way “the Social” is constructed through linguistically mediated exchange— Habermas holds that it unfolds as the “delivery” (Entbindung) of communication in social evolution. Language offers the key to understanding the means by which relations between human beings are established, within which largerscale social phenomena emerge and evolve. The point is not unproblematic, for the particularity of human society is thereby tied to the assumption that communicatively regulated social relations mark a threshold leading upward from a lower condition of sociality (or even nonsociality). Communicative action permits the Social to develop beyond what nature can provide. Accordingly, social evolution—mediated through linguistic exchange—becomes the “royal road” and leaves other paths behind. In such a perspective, evolution necessarily represents change for the better. This presupposition forms the core of the theory of communicative action insofar as it is held to be superordinate to, if not a phenomenon encompassing, all other forms of social activity. Consequently, the field of objects available to analysis is restricted to actions that display this particular (evolutionary) quality. Habermas considers only those forms of the Social that involve the critical capacity of human beings: public discourse, science, education, and (in part) religion. Other spheres, which follow this model of action only conditionally— e.g., family structures, markets, economics, and labor—are held to belong to

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the “system environment” or, alternatively, to that part of the “lifeworld” which has not yet been verbalized. At the same time, Habermas’s narrow view of what comprises the Social possesses strength inasmuch as it makes it clear how the evolution of the Social cannot be meaningfully conceived if one does not pay due attention to the modalities of linguistically mediated understanding and agreement. Discursive events have real effects, and debates that occur in the public sphere represent a medium of human social evolution with manifold aspects. Indeed, Habermas affirms as much—and at a central point in his theory—when he discusses the verbalization of the Sacred. Social evolution means releasing the linguistic component within the Sacred and freeing up its rationalizing potency. This need not mean that it dissolves into discourse. On the contrary: it can reflexively assure and strengthen elements of mutual recognition within the Sacred. In this way, too, the evolution of the Social concerns—and in decisive fashion, at that—the normative dimension of cognitive reflexivity. The formulation above reinterprets Habermasian theory insofar as it does not presume that social evolution is the last stage of general evolution occurring only through linguistically mediated communication. The idea of “development by stages,” which holds that the social development of communicative structures represents a continuation of what obtains in a precommunicative world, is not necessarily tied to the program of evolutionary theory. For one can readily see that social development through communicative understanding constitutes a particular process that runs parallel to other processes of social evolution. Social relations do not emerge though the medium of linguistic communication alone; they are also constituted through other media. The Social can be produced in many ways (as is emphasized, for example, by Bruno Latour and actor-network theory). No pure form of the Social exists that one might privilege to explain its evolution in its varied and (necessarily) contingent aspects. This exceptional quality does not vanish when one identifies particular mechanisms that explain its distorted and repressive aspects; indeed, such an approach entails the autoimmunization of evolutionary theory. In contrast, communications theory makes it possible to determine the specific dynamics at work in processes of social evolution. Habermas has sought to define this particularity on three points: by breaking with Marx, by elaborating Parsons’s theory in light of Weber’s fundamental reflections, and, finally, by means of critiquing—and incorporating—aspects of Luhmann’s systems theory. In his engagement with Marx, Habermas above all means to limit the concept of “labor” and, instead, understand the social sphere in terms of communicative relations. His strategy is to address only what is “authentically social”—i.e., communicative activities. Only those actions that meet the implicit requirement of mutual recognition may be considered to effect social evolution. Labor, as defined by Marx, involves forms of

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sociality that fail to achieve this objective; thereby, it produces—and reproduces—an illusory explanation that must answer for the real consequences of Marx’s own theoretical project. Inasmuch as he limits himself to “intersubjective communication,” Habermas brackets labor as a mode of social and communicative relations; thereby, he overlooks the fact that, inasmuch as labor forges relations, social evolution also takes place (and in a different way than communicative action, in its “strong” conception, can account for). Following Weber and Parsons, Habermas considers the particular role of communicative action in social evolution to concern “rational structures.” Weber already assigned the complex of rationality (Rationalitätskomplex) a central position in his account of universal history, and he affirmed the key importance of rational structures in his efforts to explain historical change in human societies. In this perspective, evolution is a process of rationalization that opens the way to understanding the internal dynamics of world history. Parsons broadened Weber’s perspective and presented antiquity as the cradle of reason (a view that Shmuel Eisenstadt later formulated in more radical terms with his thesis of the Axial Age)—in this light, one can see both prehistory and history itself as the self-realization of reasonable, socialized mankind. (That said, the underlying assumptions are subject to debate to the extent that the general, historical validity of these rational structures may be deemed a matter of Western prejudice.) Habermas’s engagement with Luhmann has led to a theoretical division of labor. On one side stands the social evolution of reason, which makes an emphatic conception of society possible (Habermas); on the other stands an ensemble of evolving systems that produce the Social through schemes of functional self-organization (Luhmann). These two models for the production of sociality contain an idea that has resonated more and more strongly in recent debates: that the Social evolves along parallel lines and through processes that connect and disconnect at various points. Even though the operative concept of society often grows fuzzy in the process, it remains clear enough so long as “society” (Gesellschaft) is taken to refer to that form of the Social by means of which we assure ourselves of mutual recognition in shared existence. The coexistence of two social forms—which Habermas designates “system” and “lifeworld”—is theoretically determined first in terms of evolution, then in terms of contingency: if systems penetrate the lifeworld, problems result; if the lifeworld penetrates systems, the same is presumably the case. (The matter might be explained more clearly, to be sure.) However, the “strong” conception of normativity remains problematic in Habermas’s understanding of social evolution. No one would contest that normativity represents a mode of social development for his theory of communicative action. However, the fact that it possesses an exclusive status in this process gives rise to suspicions that Habermas has fallen back upon a form of

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(secret) teleology that he does not declare openly—namely, the idea that Reason achieves progressive realization through the process of social evolution. This Hegelian remainder in Habermas’s theory can be resolved—and dissolved—if one considers that the social evolution of reason (i.e., sociality constituted through “reasonableness” [Vernünftigkeit]) forms a dimension that is impossible to circumvent—a thorn in the flesh of the Social, as it were, which subjects its other parts to the demand for justification. Finally, the status of evolutionary theory is problematic from a historicalempirical perspective—that is, one that concerns how social evolution relates to the actual development of historical societies. When one incorporates communicative socialization into the evolutionary process, it makes many— contradictory—options available. Marx had already surmised that social evolution takes place not just through forces and relations of production but through the state and ideology, as well—and that the interaction of multiple factors determines the concrete forms that societies assume in the course of history. This intuition suggests that one should qualify social evolution in three (or four) regards: the aspect of the Social that results from forces of production, the part that derives from relations of production, and, finally, the component produced by the state and ideology. The way that social evolution occurs, then, would be a matter of combinations and links between different processes. At the same time, one would no longer be able to assign the function of guidance or orientation—to say nothing of teleology—to any one of these formative dimensions. One may privilege social evolution in the medium of reason and investigate to what extent this particular mode of development, grounded in communications theory, produces causal effects in historical processes—observing, in so doing, the constellations where its effect are more pronounced. However, this does not offer a theoretical “guarantee” of causality. Ultimately, then, Habermas’s view of social evolution amounts to a partial theory. Specifically, it reveals a factor in the couplings and uncouplings of social processes that is conceived in terms of communications theory and historical development: the part played by structures of rationality (Rationalstrukturen) in the evolution of other social (e.g., technological and bureaucratic) structures. Habermas’s perspective offers more than Marxism inasmuch as its arguments run counter to reductionistic ways of assessing ideas and ideologies (e.g., through the lens of relations of production). Viewed in this light, Habermas’s theory of social evolution is compatible with the notion that multiple historical developments are possible (including—and especially—the idea of “modernity”); moreover, it can be adapted to questions concerning the particularities of modernity in space and time (that is, it addresses the matter of “multiple modernities”). Modernity—in the Habermasian sense of a “project”—then, would represent a particular form of the Social, which emerges (or emerged) in particular locations and at particular

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times as a culture of universalism and, in the process, introduced those structures of rationality to the world that already fascinated Weber so greatly. Finally, Habermas’s theory of cultural evolution permits one to discern an ideal form of communicative socialization, which can connect with other forms of the Social, degrade into ideology, or shrink together into a utopia. Such, then, would be History. Society, from this perspective, would refer to a form of ideal coexistence—one that Habermas’s theory of social evolution grounded in communicative action analyzes more clearly than the explanatory schemes offered by Weber, Parsons, and Luhmann.

References Eder, Klaus. 2004. “Kulturelle Evolution und Epochenschwellen: Richtungsbestimmungen und Periodisierungen kultureller Entwicklungen.” In Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften. Bd. 3 Grundlagen und Schlüsselbegriffe, ed. Friedrich Jaeger and Burkhard Liebsch, 417–430. Stuttgart: Metzler. Luhmann, Niklas. 1976. “Evolution und Geschichte.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 2, no. 3: 284–309. ——. 1978. “Geschichte als Prozess und die Theorie soziokultureller Evolution.” In Historische Prozesse, ed. Karl-Georg Faber and Christian Meier, 413–440. München: DTV. ——. 1992. “The Direction of Social Evolution.” In Social Change and Modernity, ed. Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, 279–293. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Parsons, Talcott. 1991. The Social System. London: Routledge.

13 POWER DISCOURSES ANDREAS NIEDERBERGER

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he topic of power—and especially power that is exercised in an illegitimate, oppressive, or violent manner—stands at the center of many articulations of critical theory (Honneth 1993). Habermas’s work occupies a special place in the tradition, for it conceives power—or, as the case may be, the ways it is produced and functions—as a matter bearing (and in necessary fashion, at that) on the constitution of both theory and society; indeed, it may even be seen to express freedom. As a consequence, the critique of power and the role of this critique in critical theory must also change in Habermas’s view. Above all, Habermas arrives at his conclusions by engaging with the writings of Talcott Parsons and Hannah Arendt on power. Their reflections permit him to counter Michel Foucault’s conception of discourse and power while incorporating more convincing aspects of the latter’s approach into his own theory (see chapter 67).

Parsons’s Systems-Theoretical Concept of Power Power occupies a central position in Parsons’s (1967) political sociology, where it represents the general medium for declaring and achieving collective goals. Power is necessary so that collectively binding conditions for action will hold; as a medium, moreover, it provides a standard for evaluating individual actions and their results (or goals). Parsons’s (systems-theoretical) perspective on power differs from Max Weber’s (1980, 28) definition in two respects. The latter holds that power represents the capacity to make another party act according to one’s own will. For Parsons, power does not represent a resource that stands directly at the disposal of social actors. Instead, in political activity agents seek to acquire or produce power; only then can they exercise influence on other social actors and their (possible) actions. Power, in Weber’s view, is a medium insofar as it marks a relationship between agents; only in instances of concrete use (Zugriff ) does it influence other parties. Even in such cases, however, power never “materializes” completely as an individual resource—for example, in the “power” wielded by a ruler. The conditions enabling the medium to determine relations between

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actors remain inaccessible to those who (supposedly) possess power. Because it is a symbolic medium, power depends on what is attributed to it and what is expected of it; to be effective, power must be recognized by those at whose actions its codifications are directed. At the same time—and this is the second point—power does not represent a general symbolic medium. It possesses this status only as part of a specific social subsystem. The function of this subsystem is to recognize, set, and implement goals—goals that, further internal differentiations notwithstanding, make different social realms into a society in the first place and determine the relationship between this particular society and others. Since power serves to achieve collective aims (which are meant to be valid for all), it depends, in order to fulfill the symbolic demands that constitute it, on modes of legitimation that make it clear that shared objectives—and not merely those of individuals—are at issue. Conceiving power along these lines (which, moreover, correspond to the operations of the generalized medium of money in the economic sphere) enables Habermas to describe how social actions are coordinated in systems opposed to communicative coordination in the sphere of the lifeworld (Communicative Action, 2:199–203). On a large-scale, systemic level, actions are directed toward gaining power that makes it possible to exercise it; alternatively, they seek to avoid the sanctions that follow when “empowered” instances are not observed. Within this framework, it is possible to understand how conditions are reproduced guaranteeing that general structures and rules expected will in fact be binding—that is, structures and rules that apply independent of contingent motivations and communicatively reached agreements. Such a view, however, cannot explain why systems are steered through the medium of power. The functionalist perspective is insufficient for providing recognition of the symbolic medium Parsons considers necessary. Habermas rejects Parsons’s explanation of recognition and retains only the observation that power should not be thought to have obtained legitimacy on the basis of direct agreement between the parties affected. Because it cannot be legitimated in terms of function alone, Habermas argues that power is predicated on a consensus that arises by linguistic means (Communicative Action, 2:276). At the same time—and given the complexity of modern states (that is, the identity-in-difference that constitutes them)— the fact that consensus would need to be achieved/renewed constantly means it would never emerge in actual practice. For in order to stand—and remain standing—social actors must (be able to) pursue actions that prove successful in terms of the power relations that prevail without being directly motivated to form a consensus. Social actors experience power as the claims—which are underwritten by force in a limit case—that authorities (Machthaber) will

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make if their rule is contested. Accordingly, when a government/administration is in place, the matter of forming a consensus only bears indirectly on the power that exists in a society.

Arendt’s Communicative Conception of Power To explain how consensus formation is relevant all the same, Habermas takes up Arendt’s distinction between power and violence (Profiles, 171–188). Arendt affirms, in a modern context, the Aristotelian notion that politics is to be held strictly separate from the social sphere (or, as the case may be, from the economic sphere). According to this view, politics is the pure constitution of freedom—that is, political disagreement should not express class struggle, for in such a case, social actors remain “stuck” to their contingent socioeconomic interests and fail to employ their truly human and political capacity for new beginnings. When freedom is achieved, Arendt maintains, actors can join together and act in agreement with others; as a consequence, power originates among all parties involved and, at the same time, transcends them. This power involves actors being mutually (wechselseitig) bound to a collective project, which affords them the ability—paradigmatically expressed in revolutions—to establish law (Recht setzen) and found institutions. At the same time—inasmuch as power closely depends on (continued) human praxis and consensus production—it can dissolve at any point, thereby imperiling the existence of law and its institutions (Arendt 1970, 36ff.). For Habermas, it is only when power is conceived in this way that one can understand why consensus formation represents an indispensable foundation of its existence. Arendt’s considerations make it clear that arrangements (Einrichtungen)—whose factual effectiveness is often explained in reference to an external instance of power—themselves express constituent (gründend) power (Facts, 147). Consequently, at least some legal principles and entitlements—to say nothing of institutions—must be understood as having been produced by communicative power and therefore being “founded” by it. Law, then, is not merely a demand to be asserted by force (Gewalt); rather, it is because potential/power for agreement exists that law can be constituted and claim validity in the first place. At the same time, however, the communicative perspective only permits one to discern how power is produced. It cannot explain how power functions within governmental/administrative structures or the ways these structures relate to individual actors. Power can only endure through organizations that do not require that their foundational practice be repeatedly reactualized (Communicative Action, 2:271). Consequently, the requirement that power, as a

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symbolic medium, be acknowledged cannot be fulfilled by perpetuating the practice(s) by which power is produced within the system of action it steers. For this reason, Between Facts and Norms views law as a medium connecting communicative power and administrative power (Facts, 147). Agreement that occurs in unforced and free praxis must be articulated and concretized in the form of law if it is to yield communicative power; correspondingly, agents of the state must show that they are bound to, and authorized by, the law if their decrees and policies are to fulfill expectations of legitimacy—that is, if the state is to wield administrative power. In the system of action through which government and administration “exercise power,” the lawfulness of such activity provides sufficient proof that recognition is due. The need to justify decisive instances within this system is greater than it is in the economic system. At the same time, however, it has clear limits; therefore, the need for communicative understanding, which is potentially limitless, does not undermine either the efficiency or complexity of standing operations.

Foucault and the Problematic Effects of Power Such a “deproblematization”—i.e., the notion that power is produced through unforced communication and depends on consensus as a matter of principle—is open to criticism of various kinds. Habermas anticipates one particular objection and offers a response. According to this line of criticism, the distinction between power and violence is not descriptive but normative in nature, which raises a question: what guarantees that power is actually a matter of forging (vermitteln) a connection between communicative power and administrative power? For Habermas, the answer lies in the constitutional state, which, qua organization, assures that administrative power is bound to communicative power—an arrangement that makes “social power” irrelevant (Facts, 148). A second line of criticism, which concerns a more fundamental level of reflection, holds that Habermas’s notion of “communicative power” presents conditions for understanding (or, as the case may be, agreement/true insight) that involve problematic asymmetries/forms of discipline. According to this view, the power wielded by governmental/administrative institutions—even if it derives entirely from communicative agreement—relies on practices that produce one set of options while eliminating others. Such a view is articulated most forcefully by Michel Foucault, whose works pose a particular challenge to Habermas because they continue the project of critical theory in a way that differs from Habermas’s own efforts. Foucault shares Habermas’s assumption that—at least in the modern world—power must be produced through communication and also, ultimately,

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preserved by this same means. However, his theory of discourse holds that this does not mean that power is therefore bound to the rationalizing effects of communicative agreement; instead, power may be exercised in an particularly concerted fashion inasmuch as its effects are only felt indirectly—because, that is, they occur through the process of communication itself (Foucault 1972). Determining how relations are shaped—or, alternatively, what form collective goals should assume—requires the application of standards and procedures concerning what should be considered—or adjusted—in communicative practice. When externally or transcendently justified instances of power are absent, then, communication opens the way for structures and systems of control to be imposed by stealth. According to Habermas, Foucauldian theory considers Power, writ large, to provide the transcendental concept for understanding history in its entirety. It explains the integration and coordination that occur in societies solely in terms of achieving the control, selection, and exclusion of social actors’ options; in the modern world, this can only be assured when actors (presumably) “discipline” themselves—as Foucault puts it—by means of communicative understanding (Discourse, 261–265). Habermas grants that Foucault’s revised conception of the critique of ideology is interesting and lends a new dimension to the question of how the social sciences and humanities in fact represent forms of (repressive) social technology. However, such a conception of power does not confront Habermas’s version of critical theory with an insurmountable difficulty, for Foucault cannot explain the status of his own reflections without contradiction. Power cannot at once be the necessary and problematic effect of truth-oriented discourse; at the same time, the theory that presents matters as Foucault does itself raises a claim to truth (Discourse, 266–293). All the same, Habermas holds that Foucault is right to point out that “deproblematizing” power—even partially—means one must be alert to the communicative conditions whereby it is produced—and especially to strategies of political deliberation that exclude or stigmatize dissenting opinions and contributions whose irrelevancy or inadmissibility has not yet been demonstrated (Unübersichtlichkeit, 126–131). In offering a two-tiered conception of power, Habermas affirms that communication is open to contingency precisely to the extent that it reduces elements of arbitrariness in systems of administrative and political action (Niederberger 2007, 199–213).

References Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Foucault, Michel. 1972. “The Discourse on Language.” In The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, 215–237. New York: Pantheon.

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Honneth, Axel. 1993. The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory. Trans. Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Kelly, Michael, ed. 1994. Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Niederberger, Andreas. 2007. Kontingenz und Vernunft: Grundlagen einer Theorie kommunikativen Handelns im Anschluss an Habermas und Merleau-Ponty. Freiburg: Alber. Parsons, Talcott. 1967. “On the Concept of Political Power.” In Sociological Theory and Modern Society, 297–354. New York: Free Press. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press.

14 JURIDICAL DISCOURSES KL AUS GÜNTHER

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mong the controversies of jurisprudence that gripped the Federal Republic of Germany in its early days, one of the most pressing concerned the “social and constitutional state” (sozialer Rechtsstaat). In the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) (1949), one reads the pithy commandment (article 28, paragraph 1): “The constitutional order in the Länder must conform to the principles of a republican, democratic, and social state governed by the rule of law, within the meaning of this Basic Law.” In similar fashion, article 20, paragraph 1 affirms that the Federal Republic of Germany is “a democratic and social federal state.” Debate concerning the meaning and function of the adjective “social” has not occurred only in an academic context; behind such exchanges stands a disagreement—which goes back to the time before the foundation of the Federal Republic and has set the course of its development—about the country’s economic order and the distribution of property that underlies it. In the early days of the Federal Republic, the matter went beyond the legal and constitutional question whether the new state order should accept property relations as they stood and the economic power relations this arrangement had produced—whether, that is, the state should and simply order them by means of formal rules about property, contracts, and competition or whether, conversely, the state was authorized and obligated, on a constitutional basis, to alter property relations through acts of intervention with a legal foundation (e.g., through efforts to redistribute wealth, achieve social justice, or establish participatory rights in matters of business). The issue that prompted political activity of nearly every kind in the founding years of the Federal Republic was whether—and to what extent—the capitalist economic system and relations of private property had been responsible, at least in part, for the collapse of civilization under National Socialism and during the Second World War. Even if the Economic Miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) and the Cold War gave rise to measures seeking distance from the planned economy and collectivization now in place in the German Democratic Republic—which meant that the question ceased to be posed as insistently—disagreement about the meaning and function of the “social-state” provision echoed a fundamental dilemma.

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In 1954, at the meeting of the Staatsrechtslehrervereinigung (Association of Teachers of Constitutional Law), Ernst Forsthoff tried to demote the matter of the social state to a mere suggestion made to governmental administration (Forsthoff 1968). Wolfgang Abendroth, on the other hand, interpreted the provision as a constitutional obligation: democratic legislators should transform property relations (Abendroth 1968). In numerous rulings, the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) understood the adjective “social” to apply to rights of political participation; over time, these decisions defined the character of the Federal Republic as a social and constitutional state. In this way, it was gradually established that, without a social balance checking advantages that are individually acquired and legally determined within a liberal order of property and economy, it would be impossible for all citizens to hold the same basic rights to freedom and the same political rights of participation in democratic opinion formation. The influence of this drawn-out process on politics and law is evident, among other places, in Habermas’s essays “Natural Law and Revolution” (Theory and Practice, 82–120) and “Paradigms of Law” (Facts, 388–446). At the same time, the slow and tentative emergence of the social and constitutional state gave rise to new problems, not just the question whether this compromise would be able to attenuate problems of legitimation and motivation under late capitalism (cf. Legitimation Crisis) but, above all, the question of the relationship between this form of government—which had been established primarily through case law (Rechtsprechung) and administrative decision—and democracy. Moreover, by interpreting basic rights as objective norms, the Federal Constitutional Court had erected an order that both inhered in and transcended the constitution—an order that could, by turns, spur democratic legislators to action or restrict them (in matters ranging from, e.g., participation in workplace decisions to time limits imposed on abortion). Whereas it was possible to view the progressive extension of rights and the broadening of democratic participation as evidence of postconventional moral consciousness (according to which the legal order as a whole requires justification and is subject to critique [Rekonstruktion, 20–27]), the “pushes” that occurred with the mounting juridification of everyday life made plain the factual absence of democracy (Kübler 1985; Facts, 427–446). According to Rudolf Wiethölter, the deficits of bourgeois-liberal law (Max Weber) within the social state could only be remedied through a proceduralization of the legal category (Wiethölter 1989; cf. Habermas 1990, 51–64; Facts, 427–446). Legal theorists were still treating these problems as matters of applied law and juridical interpretation with the categories supplied by hermeneutics (to which they added sociological reflections on the consequences of judges’ decisions) when Robert Alexy’s (1989) groundbreaking dissertation (Göttingen, 1978) presented a way to connect methods of juridical justification and

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interpretation, on the one hand, and international discussions of analytical ethics and theories of argument, on the other. This study made an important contribution to Habermas’s theory of rational discourse inasmuch as Alexy formulated, explained, and justified the rules and forms of general, practical interaction in a way that made it easier to clarify how rational justification of normative propositions is possible (see, among other works, Habermas 1988, 97–104 [not included in the English edition of Postmetaphysical Thinking]). Alexy presented juridical argumentation as a special case of general practical discourse. Hereby, practical argumentation is limited by relevant laws and specific codes governing procedure; this permits participants to pursue their own interests strategically instead of debating with one another whether a claim of practical “rightness” holds or can be achieved. The unique position occupied by juridical argumentation determines its structure. The juridical syllogism—the justification of a concrete legal instruction (Gebot) in terms of propositions with features concretized in general rules—follows the pattern of logical inference and justifies arguments internally. In turn, individual components of the syllogism require external justification—for example, through rules of legal interpretation, church dogma, or relevant precedents, which may then be qualified in terms of general practical discourse (on such instances of elaboration and nuance, see Alexy 1995). Because even a universalistic justification of practical norms still does not guarantee that they will be applied impartially—individual cases cannot be anticipated—a “discourse of application” (Anwendungsdiskurs) must complement the practical discourse that provides their rational justification (Günther 1989, 1993; critiqued by Alexy 1995, 52–70; for a critical account of the discursive theory of juridical argumentation and an elaboration of discursive legitimation in terms of the principle of formal equality, see Lieber 2007, 235–304). Both Alexy’s view of juridical argumentation as a special case within the practice of rational discourse and the effort undertaken by Habermas and his collaborators in Starnberg to connect the evolution of law and subjective moral development with reflexive, universalistic, and procedural morality presumed—at least implicitly—the subordination of positive law to postconventional morality (see the critical résumé in Frankenberg and Rödel 1981, 9–31). This enterprise conflicted both with the legal realities of the social and democratic state—which focus on consequences for society as a whole—and with positivistic ways of understanding case law and jurisprudence. Internationally, legal positivism—in forms inherited from Hans Kelsen (above all, by H.  L.  A. Hart at Oxford and his students—e.g., Joseph Raz and Neil MacCormick)—dominated the way jurists understood the field. The new perspective also competed with many other currents of thought within the tradition of legal realism. The “Critical Legal Studies Movement,” which began at Harvard, advanced the position that unavoidable, immanent contradictions

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exist within the law when society is marked by economic polarities; such contradictions, which are “resolved” on the basis of unvoiced political orientations in the courts, are to be made explicit and subjected to critique (see, for example, the works of David Trubek, Jerry Frug, and Duncan Kennedy). In this context, Ronald Dworkin contested legal positivism’s claim that law is independent of morality. He based his objection on two points. The positivistic view holds that the normative order of law admits only all-or-nothing decisions—so that, in difficult cases that do not admit determination according to a valid rule of law, the judge is authorized to make the law on his or her own qua political decision. Against this position, Dworkin observed that, even in such cases, judges make decisions according to normatively justified measures—and they do so by appealing to principles whose weight differs depending on the case at hand (which, moreover, are conditioned both by other applicable principles and by political objectives). His second point concerns the positivistic thesis that laws do not derive their validity from moral norms but from a system of primary and secondary rules, whose validity is ultimately determined by a basic standard or rule of recognition. Dworkin countered such claims by affirming that judges, in difficult cases, justify their decisions through arguments from principle. Moreover, he contended, judges do not choose these principles arbitrarily; rather, they justify them from a moral standpoint because this gives them the best means to offer a coherent interpretation of all the normative elements of the legal system (constitution, precedents, common law, etc.) as well as the moral principles underlying their decisions (Dworkin 1978, chaps. 2–4). In other words, the judge is measured (and measures him- or herself) on the ideal of a Hercules capable of taking all relevant considerations into account. Only because of the justificatory need that arises from a moral demand do subjective (basic) rights “trump” the political objectives that are pursued through legal norms (Dworkin 1985, 158ff.); only as a consequence of the moral obligation to arrive at the best possible interpretation do judges bow to the regulative idea of seeking the “one right answer” to a difficult case (Dworkin 1978, 448ff.; Dworkin 1986, 119ff.). In anticipation of the charge that he was seeing matters through “rose-tinted glasses,” Dworkin declared that his perspective does not conceal contradictions—rather, it is only possible to uncover and critique the contradictions that invariably arise if one demands the best possible justification for rulings (Dworkin 1986, 271ff.). Taking up Dworkin’s distinction between rules and principles, Alexy (2002) developed a theory of the form of basic rights (Grundrechtsform), which asserts that legal decisions must be optimized; in so doing, he provided a rational basis for assessing conflicts that occur between equally fundamental rights. Alexy’s thesis concerning the mode of argument in exceptional cases, his perspective on evaluating basic rights that stand in conflict, his reflections on the “discourse of application,” Dworkin’s theory of coherent interpretation,

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and the writings of the “Critical Legal Studies Movement” offer points of reference for Habermas’s own theory concerning legal indeterminacy and the rationality of case law (Facts, 238–286). In particular, the position Dworkin assigns to judicature prompted Habermas to take a stand on the relationship between democracy and justice—above all, with regard to the Federal Constitutional Court and its authority to reject decisions made by democratic legislators (Facts, 287–328; Dworkin, Habermas, and Günther 1997).

References Abendroth, Wolfgang. 1968. “Zum Begriff des demokratischen und sozialen Rechtsstaates im Grundgesetz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.” In Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Sozialstaatlichkeit, ed. Ernst Forsthoff, 114–144. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Alexy, Robert. 1989. A Theory of Legal Argumentation: The Theory of Rational Discourse as Theory of Legal Justification. Trans. Ruth Adler and Neil MacCormick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——. 1995. Recht, Vernunft, Diskurs. Studien zur Rechtsphilosophie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2002. A Theory of Constitutional Rights. Trans. Julian Rivers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dworkin, Ronald. 1978. Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ——. 1985. A Matter of Principle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ——. 1986. Law’s Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Dworkin, Ronald, Jürgen Habermas, and Klaus Günther. 1997. “Regiert das Recht die Politik?” In Philosophie heute, ed. Ulrich Boehm, 150–176. Frankfurt: Campus. Frankenberg, Günter, and Ulrich Rödel. 1981. Von der Volkssouveränität zum Minderheitenschutz. Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Forsthoff, Ernst. 1968. “Begriff und Wesen des sozialen Rechtsstaates.” In Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Sozialstaatlichkeit, ed. Ernst Forsthoff, 165–200. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Günther, Klaus. 1989. “Ein normativer Begriff der Kohärenz für eine Theorie der juristischen Argumentation.” Rechtstheorie 20:163–190. ——. 1993. The Sense of Appropriateness: Application Discourses in Morality and Law. Trans. John Farrell. Albany: SUNY Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. Die nachholende Revolution: Kleine politische Schriften VII. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1988. Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kübler, Friedrich, ed. 1985. Verrechtlichung von Wirtschaft, Arbeit und sozialer Solidarität. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lieber, Tobias. 2007. Diskursive Vernunft und formelle Gleichheit. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Wiethölter, Rudolf. 1989. “Proceduralization of the Category of Law.” In Critical Legal Thought: An American-German Debate, ed. Christian Joerges and David M. Trubek, 501–510. Baden-Baden: Nomos.

15 THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY RAINER SCHMALZ-BRUNS

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look at the 1958 introduction to Student und Politik—“Zum Begriff der politischen Beteiligung” (On the concept of political participation)—makes plain that Habermas chose, early on, to pursue his research on democracy in conjunction with a discussion of German constitutional law. More than twenty years later, the first pages of The Theory of Communicative Action confirmed—in the context of political science—that his decision involved the theory of rationality as a matter of principle. Considerations of this kind have remained key throughout the philosopher’s career; at least in terms of theoretical strategy, Habermas has consistently explored the interconnection (Verzahnung) between democratic participation and a certain conception of the law (Facts, 437ff.). Habermas has analyzed political participation and the conditions under which it can be achieved in terms of structural changes that occurred as the liberal, constitutional state transformed, first, into a social-welfare state (Legitimation, 52ff.; Structural Transformation, 222ff.) and then into a “security state” focused on “overcoming situations of collective endangerment” (Facts, 433–434). The same concerns are evident in his main work of democratic theory, Between Facts and Norms (1992). More recently, they have shaped his reflections on “domestic world politics without world government” (which Habermas has elaborated in close consideration of changes to international law). Habermas’s theory of democracy analyzes shifts in the relationship between state and society. It moves, in a normative fashion, between considerations of how social forces are politically mobilized to form public opinion and a public will, on the one hand, and, on the other, examining the need for a “certain autonomy within the political sphere” (Kultur und Kritik, 54; see also Logic). His thought is decisively shaped by engagement (which began early on) with Weimar constitutional doctrine (Staatsrechtslehre)—the works of authors such as Hermann Heller, Otto Kirchheimer, Franz Neumann, and even Carl Schmitt (see chapter 3). At the same time, Habermas has always made it clear that a critical perspective on the constitutional doctrine of the Federal Republic holds special significance for his project. Above all, this means the writings of Wolfgang Abendroth and Helmut Ridder. In the early 1950s (when he

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studied with Ridder in Frankfurt), Habermas had already felt their influence. It is evident throughout his works—and especially in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1961). Since the beginning of the 1970s, Ingeborg Maus has drawn from the same tradition. Beginning in the mid-1980s, her ideas have flowed back into Habermas’s works on democracy and law, inspiring him to employ Kant’s legal theory to radically democratic ends. Finally, Habermas has taken up the reflections of Joshua Cohen to add nuance to his deliberative model of democratic politics—incorporating a discursive conception of law and a communicative understanding of society into his theory. While he uses Cohen’s works sparingly, they are of great importance inasmuch as they permit him to renew the question that has proven decisive ever since The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: the relationship between state and society (or, alternatively, between public politics and spaces that exist within institutional frameworks).

The Constitutional State and Democracy: Intellectual Sightlines in Habermas’s Theory In “Zum Begriff der politischen Beteiligung,” Habermas formulated his understanding of democracy in a phrase that has been often quoted. In direct reference to Neumann’s studies, his programmatic declaration—which holds to this day—affirms that democracy is not a form of government among others: Rather, its essence consists of the fact that it enacts far-reaching social changes that increase the freedom of human beings—and, ultimately, can perhaps create them in the first place. Democracy works upon mankind’s self-determination, and only when the former is real [wirklich] is the latter true [wahr]. Political participation, then, is identical to self-determination. (Kultur und Kritik, 11)

Without a doubt, these words underlie the radicalism that has led Habermas to envision reform beyond national borders. In hindsight, however, his conviction that democracy ratifies processes of social development seems overly optimistic—even excessive. Now, greater restraint is evident in his writings. After engaging with systems theory, basic aspects of his view of society— which The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) articulates in terms of the distinction between “system” and “lifeworld”—underwent a change. All the same—despite the varying contexts in which they have been made and different points of emphasis—Habermas’s statements on democracy are conceived along the same strategic lines. The position presented in “Zum

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Begriff der politischen Beteiligung” (which, in turn, found systematic exposition in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) holds that the institutional “fantasy” necessary for democratic development is not limited by (more or less rigid) linguistic prescriptions concerning parliamentary debate and legislation. Instead, the proceduralistic medium of discursive opinion and will formation offers a means to integrate democratic claims, in ways adapted to specific institutional settings, into transformations taking place in the structures of state and society. As Habermas observes in Between Facts and Norms, such a view avoids “overly concrete” models for achieving law and democracy (Facts, 437). Needless to say, Habermas faces the task of articulating and explaining, from a more abstract perspective, how inclusive opinion and will formation is to be institutionalized. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere already affirmed that one must identify, in the conditions necessary for reasonable public discourse, two fundamental elements in the way the constitutional state conceives law: the claim to offer equality to all, on the one hand, and the claim of being “right” (that is, of possessing “justice-guaranteeing truth” [Structural Transformation, 225]), on the other. In other words, it is a matter of “the institutionalization of various discourses . . . that . . . open up possibilities of access to . . . corresponding sorts of reasons” (Facts, 438) so  that citizens have the ability to shape the positive content of law and administration. The close connection between the idea of the constitutional state and the way(s) it promotes democratic self-determination is evident in two aspects of Habermas’s reflections. The first concerns the evolution of the constitutional state in terms of legitimacy and legality. The second involves the relationship between state and society. The first point continues discussions of the social state from the 1950s and early 1960s. Here, Habermas—in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and in the essay “Natural Law and Revolution” (in Theory and Practice)—establishes how the constitutional state first emerged; at the same time, it addresses how to overcome the fact “that constitutional principles . . . are insufficiently institutionalized” (Facts, 436). Habermas’s underlying belief is that legality can found legitimacy only insofar as one manages to preserve the “moral core” (Habermas 1988, 227) of formal bourgeois law while producing, through procedure, abstract universal law (229, 275); in this process, the inherent tension between the “indisponibility and the instrumentality of the law” (268) holds even when the executive intervenes in politics. Second, Habermas’s democratic theory is marked by the way that the relationship between state and society is constituted. The matter involves changes in how public space functions, as well as institutional connections between opinion and will formation in civil society and within the political system.

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Habermas avoids all hints of affect-laden statism (a spirit that has long irritated him, especially in Carl Schmitt’s works) when he notes, with programmatic intent, that the “secularization of the spiritual bases of governmental authority, by now long under way, suffers from a deficit” that is to be “met”—i.e., remedied—“by more extensive democratization” (Facts, 443–444). At the same time, he notes that capitalist society—especially inasmuch as it runs the risk of “refeudalization” (Structural Transformation, 195) through the market—can only provide a sociologically plausible point of reference for democratic evolution if it can guarantee, in its organizational form, the demands that follow from the principle of the public sphere; inasmuch as this situation obtains, opinion and will formation that is both “oriented to the state” (staatsbezogen) (Structural Transformation, 209) and oriented “in terms of the common welfare” (198) legitimates the structures in place. With these considerations in mind, Habermas focuses on structural transformation in democracy in response to (external) change—particularly in the sphere of administration, which grows increasingly burdened by steering tasks (Facts, 440). In keeping with the “reciprocal interpenetration [Durchdringung] of state and society,” functional losses in both institutionalized and noninstitutionalized public spaces—as well as the attendant strengthening of administration, on the one hand, and the increased role played by political parties and associations, on the other—must be remedied by new forms of democratic participation (Structural Transformation, 197).

Helmut Ridder: The Social State and Democracy; the “Therapeutic” Self-Definition of the Basic Law Habermas eschews “anarchistic” perspectives that, in seeking to remedy the lack of democracy in the contemporary world, affirm that society consists of horizontally arranged networks of voluntary associations; these positions appeal to participants’ readiness to seek consensus and to coordinate responses to problems through group efforts (Facts, 481). Habermas’s objections involve functional considerations inasmuch as such strategies must necessarily founder simply because of the need for steering and organization in modern societies (481). His reasons are also normative inasmuch as the positions he criticizes would restrict the space of private life—a matter deeply anchored in the liberal tradition of “individual liberties” (Ridder 1960, 25–26) he values. Finally, efforts of this kind could occur only if they pervaded society in general—which would annul individual liberty and amount to the “totalitarian absorption [Einsaugung] of the state into society” (Ridder 1960, 15). The standard Habermas establishes for the theory of democracy—which rejects the notion of a “society autonomously determining itself through the

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state without coercion” (Ridder 1960, 15) as utopian—makes the many points of contact and overlap between his thinking and that of Ridder especially clear. Habermas and Ridder share views not just on diagnostic and analytical questions but also on the conceptual frameworks in which these matters are situated. Ridder’s (1960) program reads as follows: “Free political society encompasses the organs of the state—which, in keeping with the state’s commandment of democracy, are obligated to be public—in order, in a permanent process of public opinion and will formation, to guarantee freedom by acting as a corrective to the governmental exercise of power” (14). To this end, Ridder incorporates three considerations into his theory of democracy. First of all, he rejects the “sociological positivism” of postwar German Staatsrechtslehre—the efforts of Ernst Forsthoff and Werner Weber (among others), who, in opposition to constitutional law and constitutional reality as it stood, sought to reestablish a conception of the constitution that included juridical norms (Normbestände). Their views, Ridder believed, served the conservatives’ “restless” search for power deriving from statehood itself (1975, 15). In contrast, he insisted that democratic and constitutional rule could not admit “more state” than what the constitution provides normatively and in writing (17). In so doing—and this is the second point—Ridder offered a “therapeutic” understanding of the constitution (which he first developed in debates about the “social state” during the 1950s and 1960s). This view enabled him to identify another dimension of government extending beyond social services and external relations between citizens. The very idea of liberal (freiheitlich) democracy, he argued, demands that the social state influence the inner structure of “collective actors” (businesses, associations, unions, parties) in a way that assures democratic equality. His call for the normative architecture of the Grundgesetz to be interpreted as encompassing state and society derived from a particular connection—which he affirmed early on—between the right to express opinions freely, on the one hand, and “public reason,” on the other. The notion of public reason holds that expressions of opinion are not bound to the guiding, ethical ideas of Truth or Reason (as classical conceptions of freedom of opinion had maintained) and seeks to “protect the free formation of public opinion—that is, to protect the individual parties among whom it arises” (Ridder 1954, 265). Such are the outer lineaments of Ridder’s conception of democracy—a picture he drew by linking, in systematic fashion, the legal and social provisions of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. For all that, Ridder evinced a relatively agnostic attitude toward the actual model of democracy that had resulted. He insisted that the Grundgesetz does not prescribe that the political system be founded on “any one of the competing conceptions of democratic order” (1979, 11); rather, it provides for “freedom to express and ratify

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the will of the popular majority, to legal effect” (10–11). For this reason, normative barriers to the development of democracy exist wherever “illiberal” majority rule threatens to bypass the procedural guarantees that stem from interaction between political (governmental) institutions and public (social) processes of opinion and will formation (1960, 12). Inasmuch as it occupies a space beyond this frontier, Ridder maintained, the constitution can at best provide normative regulations that make it possible for democratic will formation to influence—reflexively and in a “therapeutic” manner—the conditions under which public autonomy is exercised. The very structure of democracy blurs the boundaries separating state and society, then. This is why liberal democracy is not a form of government among others; it englobes the relationship between state and society as well as those structural elements within society that are relevant to its continued operation (1960, 13). Ridder’s interpretation of the Grundgesetz—which, as we have noted, sought to counter the conservatism of Weimar-era conceptions of government (particularly, arguments advanced by Carl Schmitt and his students)—embedded democratic progress within the constitutional state. In his early writings, Habermas was able to build effortlessly on the foundation Ridder had secured. One sees as much in his many references to Ridder’s works (e.g., “Freedom of Opinion” [1954] and “The Status of Unions in Constitutional Law” [1960], in Structural Transformation). As a student in the early 1950s, Habermas had attended Ridder’s lectures in Frankfurt; even if one does not speculate about the extent of their personal contact, direct influence during the late 1950s and early 1960s can be concretely demonstrated. Over time, Habermas struck out in a related but new direction. That said, Between Facts and Norms only mentions Ridder once—in rather summary form, and in a footnote (Facts, 544).

Ingeborg Maus: Rational Law and the Transition from Substance to Procedure Habermas has charted a new course by engaging with the works of Ingeborg Maus. Her Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie (Elucidation of the theory of democracy, 1992) draws on considerations that are not unlike Ridder’s. At the same time—and much more decisively than Ridder—Maus derives her theory of the democratic state and constitutionality (as well as inner connections between the constitutional state and democracy) from fundamental distinctions made by Kant. Maus’s thought has progressed in three distinct stages. At the same time, these stages—which are represented by Bürgerliche Rechtstheorie und Faschismus (Bourgeois legal theory and fascism, 1976), Rechtstheorie und Politische

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Theorie im Industriekapitalismus (Legal theory and political theory in industrial capitalism, 1986), and, finally, Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie— seek the answer to a single question: How—under the conditions of advanced industrial society (with all the developments this entails), up through organized capitalism in the late twentieth century and the new forms of trans- and supranational regulation that mark the twenty-first century—is it possible for democratic self-determination and individual liberties guaranteed by the rule of law [Rechtsstaatlichkeit] to exist at all? (Niesen and Eberl 2006, 12)

Throughout her studies, Maus employs the notion—rooted in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution—of “democratic legal positivism” (demokratische Gesetzgebungspositivismus) as the means to counter both the bourgeois legal theory of Weimar Germany (that is, the “tradition of independent, reified conceptions of law” that work “against democratic processes of will formation” [Maus 1986, 7]) and “fundamentalist legal critique  .  .  . that considers every form of juridification to amount to the destruction of autonomous social organizations and participatory democracy” (7). Time and again, Maus identifies Carl Schmitt as the godfather of the latter movement within legal theory—a school of thought that undermines the practical dimensions of legality, on the one hand, and, on the other, tears apart the core relation between the rule of law, popular sovereignty, and individual autonomy. Schmitt’s predilection for deformalizing law and declaring political institutions to be autonomous (and, therefore, independent of the normative claims of democratic self-determination [see Maus 1986, 278 and passim]) yields a paradigmatic theory of “constitutive legal acts” (Maus 1976, 81ff.) that Maus contests. Ultimately, the perspective displays “fascination for all that is not organized, not institutionalized, and not established—fascination for whatever is irregular [das Irreguläre schlechthin]—hypostasizes intellectual quantities and substance”; this, in turn, feeds the claims “of an elite that considers itself free to make formative and unprecedented decisions” (Maus 1986, 85). Maus seeks to counter this development within bourgeois jurisprudence. Her comprehensive essay “Entwicklung und Funktionswandel der Theorie des bürgerlichen Rechtsstaats” (The development and structural change of the theory of the bourgeois constitutional state) (Maus 1996, 11–82) begins with Kant’s understanding of constitutional government as democracy and incorporates theoretical debates up to Luhmann. Maus identifies relevant aspects of the secularization that occurred when the liberal state gave way to a democratic and social form of government. This and other studies (which

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incorporate the perspectives of Kirchheimer, Neumann, Heller, Habermas, Abendroth, and Ridder) are concerned with how the state can exist under the rule of law, given the changes in social structure that followed upon industrialization. Because these changes have concentrated economic, social, and administrative power, Maus concludes that fundamental rights guaranteeing equality and freedom can only be preserved if the principles underlying them prove capable of influencing the way various sectors of society are constituted (Maus 1976, 61ff.). Maus (1992) invokes Kant to secure the fundaments necessary for establishing a paradigm at whose core she—like Habermas—sees a combination of both legally institutionalized and noninstitutionalized forms of popular sovereignty united in reciprocal mediation. At the same time, however, she seeks an instance that can claim general validity on a purely formal level by guaranteeing procedural conditions that secure freedom and equality. This abstract formulation acquires definition in light of three further distinctions—which ultimately put her “attempt to reconstruct, under the social conditions given today, the essential intent [Intentionen] of the principle of popular sovereignty” (Maus 1992, 224) in a tense relation to Habermas’s ideas. First, Maus’s answer to the question—“How can the will [Willkür] of the democratic legislator, which has been declared autonomous by the theory of sovereignty, be combined with the normative provisions of natural law?” (Maus 1992, 161)—involves temporal and normative processes of differentiation bearing on matters of content and procedure. Second, she articulates the further demand (which follows from the distinction between self-legislation and self-government) that the task of setting norms (Normierung der Normsetzung) remain the responsibility of the legislative center (i.e., the parliament) and not be delegated to peripheral instances (225). Finally, Maus calls for caution, lest the claim to universality made by legislators rest upon the wrong kind of reasons. She points out the dangers involved by way of the distinction between law and morality: legal decisions should not be legitimated by direct appeal to moral principles, because doing so (and here her words take aim at the practices of German Federal Constitutional Court) promotes decisionism on the part of decision-making institutions (171)—i.e., the suspension of legal limits, which amounts to the “negation of restrictions placed on governmental regulation” (309).

Joshua Cohen: The Model of Deliberative Politics Maus energetically opposes all efforts to constitutionalize international law that might curtail the sovereignty of states—for state sovereignty, she argues, potentially represents popular sovereignty as well (Maus 2007, 366). Her

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arguments have elicited equally strong objections from Habermas (Habermas 2007, 442). Retrospectively, as it were, their exchanges have made two basic traits of the latter’s theory of democracy clear. Habermas discounts conceptions of democracy that consider it a form of social self-organization mediating between various societal elements along “horizontal lines” at the base (Facts, 481). Instead, he places his hope in processes of opinion and will formation occurring though the “parliamentary complex” (448), which institutionalizes and “domesticates” them. Habermas’s next step explores the interplay between this realm and the noninstitutionalized opinion formation that occurs in the public sphere and in civil society— an exchange that takes place through procedural law, which provides filters of legitimation for the political processes of governmental administration (484). At the same time, however, Habermas urges epistemic restraint with respect to state power—if not social power. In this way (albeit with less methodological rigor), he is able to focus matters of democratization on changes of structure and place that occur in politics—and to call for “institutional imagination” (484). Ultimately, both considerations derive from the fact that, in Habermas’s view, the need for political shaping and steering that arises from the complexity of social relations can no longer be mediated socially, even on a primary level. Conversely, the communicative infrastructure of a “society that is deliberatively steered as a whole and is thus politically constituted” (305) is overtaxed because—as Habermas notes (somewhat unclearly)—“democratic procedure is embedded in contexts it cannot itself regulate” (305). With that—and also through the absence of statements on the relationship between advisory practices and informal processes of opinion formation (372)—Habermas adjusts, once more, the framework within which Cohen’s (1987, 1988, 1989) understanding of deliberative politics can, in his opinion, be seen to hold. The demanding conditions of discursive, decision-oriented counsel upon which Cohen’s notion of democratic legitimacy focuses should be understood only as a complement to the core political structure as a distinct social system. To be sure, in making this qualification, Habermas also allows that, in a heuristic capacity, it may stimulate “institutional imagination” in a productive manner—as Cohen intends for it to do. Subsequent publications have described what this means in systematic terms: first, a “politics of association” (Cohen and Rogers 1995) and, second, “directly deliberative polyarchy” (Cohen and Sabel 1997). Thereby, Cohen follows the same intuitions that guided Maus, affirming that, when actualized, the principle of popular sovereignty extends in two directions: on the one hand, toward forms of decentralized self-legislation and, on the other, toward a vertical division of will formation on multiple levels. Cohen’s model of deliberative polyarchy begins with a decentralized perspective; his reflections on

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the politics of association are intended to promote, across the social spectrum, conditions favoring will formation through discourse, politically meaningful equality, fairness in wealth distribution, and civic consciousness (Cohen and Rogers 1995, 34ff.). In the framework Cohen elaborates, the significance of democratic group politics involves, above all, the fact that attention—especially in mass-mediated public space—can be condensed, concentrated, and stabilized so quickly that it may increase the visibility and influence of unrepresented or underrepresented groups; the resulting “schools of democracy” ultimately contribute to the formation of civic consciousness (42ff.). The core idea is not that these effects will occur on their own, given the world of social organization and the many-layered asymmetries it hosts. Rather, the matter calls for a purposeful politics of association with four dimensions: promoting and supporting associations, structuring processes of will formation within them, adapting their structure to those of the political system, and, finally, putting networks between them in place (48ff.). The question remains open, to what extent such an egalitarian politics of group formation—unfolding on many different levels of the political process— is actually capable of realizing the promises that Cohen and Rogers attach to it: agenda setting, formulating a political program, and implementing it (55ff.). Likewise, it remains an open matter why Habermas has, for the most part, declined to expand his model of deliberative politics—at least a little—in this direction (especially since it seems to confirm his reservations concerning the unjustified splitting of deliberative politics into a “structure shaping the totality of society” [Facts, 305]). Perhaps, however, he is following an impulse behind his discussions of the constitutional state in the 1950s and 1960s—the belief, namely, that the claims of public and private autonomy are both to be protected. Habermas’s theory of democracy values the normative substance of processes of differentiation, which blocks efforts to level the difference between society and state in the name of democracy.

References Cohen, Joshua. 1989. “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.” In The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State, ed. Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit, 17–34. Oxford: Blackwell. ——. 1997. “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.” In Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg, 67–91. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 1998. “Can Egalitarianism Survive Internationalization?” In Internationale Wirtschaft, nationale Demokratie: Herausforderungen für die Demokratietheorie, ed. Wolfgang Streeck, 175–194. Frankfurt: Campus.

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Cohen, Joshua, and Joel Rogers. 1995. Associations and Democracy. London: Verso. Cohen, Joshua, and Charles Sabel. 1997. “Directly Deliberative Polyarchy.” European Law Journal 3, no. 4: 313–342. Habermas, Jürgen. 1988. “Law and Morality.” Trans. Kenneth Baynes. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ——. 2007. “Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik: eine Replik.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 406–459. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Maus, Ingeborg. 1976. Bürgerliche Rechtstheorie und Faschismus: Zur sozialen Funktion und aktuellen Wirkung der Theorie Carl Schmitts. München: Fink. ——. 1986. Rechtstheorie und politische Theorie im Industriekapitalismus. München: Fink. ——. 1992. Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2007. “Verfassung oder Vertrag: Zur Verrechtlichung globaler Politik.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 350–382. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Niesen, Peter, and Oliver Eberl. 2006. “Demokratischer Positivismus: Habermas/Maus.” In Neue Theorien des Rechts, ed. Sonja Buckel, Ralph Christensen, and Andreas FischerLescano, 3–28. Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius. Ridder, Helmut. 1954. “Meinungsfreiheit.” In Die Grundrechte: Handbuch der Theorie und Praxis der Grundrechte, ed. Franz L. Neumann, Hans Carl Nipperdey, and Ulrich Scheuner, 2:243–290. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot. ——. 1960. Zur verfassungsrechtlichen Stellung der Gewerkschaften. Stuttgart: Fischer. ——. 1968. “Ex oblivione malum: Randnoten zum deutschen Partisanenprogreß.” In Gesellschaft, Recht und Politik: Wolfgang Abendroth zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Heinz Maus, 305–332. Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand. ——. 1975. Die soziale Ordnung des Grundgesetzes: Leitfaden zu den Grundrechten einer demokratischen Verfassung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ——. 1979. “Der Demokratiebegriff des Grundgesetzes.” In Zur Ideologie der “streitbaren Demokratie,” Argument Studienheft 32, ed. Helmut Ridder, 10–20. Berlin: Argument.

16 MORAL AND ETHICAL DISCOURSES The Distinction in General GEORG LOHMANN

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rom the beginning, Jürgen Habermas has elaborated his theory of discursive ethics by engaging with Hegel’s critique of Kant. He shares both these philosophers’ view that morality, under the conditions of modernity, can no longer be understood—as had been the case for Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas—by way of all-encompassing prescriptions concerning the “good” or “happy” life (eudaimonia, summum bonum). Kant distinguishes between questions involving happiness (which may be answered in a way that varies from individual to individual) and questions about what is unconditionally Good in a moral sense (which admits only responses that are valid in general terms). In like fashion—albeit on a different conceptual basis—Habermas makes a distinction between moral and ethical issues. For him, moral discourses raise the question, from an impartial perspective, of “what is equally good for all”—that is, what represents a matter of unconditional duty. Ethical discourses, on the other hand, concern “what is good for me/us.” “Ethics”—as the phrase “discursive ethics” makes clear—no longer refers to the “science of morality” (Wissenschaft der Moral); rather, it has the new, specific meaning of a doctrine concerning individual and/or collective forms of life that deserve to be called “good” on the basis of reflective evaluation. Habermas limits moral discourses to matters of interpersonal justice and solidarity. Ethical discourses, on the other hand, address questions of the good life in view of the plurality of values (that is, the fact that human existence and action can assume many different forms). Habermas follows Kant in making the difference hinge on the unconditional and universal claim to justification that moral duties imply. At the same time, however, he admits there are ways to conceptualize the connection between morality and ethics that differ from the notion of the “highest good” his forebear endorses (see chapter 9). As occurs throughout his writings, Habermas presents his own ideas by engaging with the writings of both classical and contemporary authors. In a

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first step, he discusses the criticisms that Hegel directed at Kant. His next move is to elaborate the distinction between morality and ethics by taking up the findings of developmental psychology and sociology—in particular, the works of George Herbert Mead, Émile Durkheim, and Lawrence Kohlberg; on this basis, Habermas elaborates his own comprehensive theory of rationality. Finally, he makes the finer points of his insights clear by contrasting his views with those of contemporaries, subjecting the theoretical edifice he has constructed to metaethical revision. It remains to be seen whether the incorporation of bioethics will occasion further modifications in Habermas’s theory.

Hegel’s Critique of Kant and the Distinction Between Morality and Ethics Habermas tests his distinction between moral and ethical discourses by seeing whether they stand up to “Hegel’s objections to Kant” (Justification, 1ff.). Hegel sets his own conception of mediating and foundational ethics (Sittlichkeit) against both the “abstract universalism of justice” found in Kant’s notion of autonomy and against the “concrete particularism of the common good” advocated by the tradition following Aristotle and Aquinas. In particular, Hegel opposes the empty formalism, abstract universalism, “impotence of the ought,” and “moral terror” (Gesinnungsterror) of Kantian ethics. In his discursive ethics, Habermas seeks to preserve the Kantian separation of morals from ethics while, at the same time, reformulating the mediating functions that Hegel’s Sittlichkeit performs (without, however, granting it positive substance). To counter Hegel’s charge of formalism, Habermas affirms that the principle of moral universalizability, although a schematic notion, is neither empty nor tautological. Instead—and as Kant had already observed—it verifies, but does not generate, the moral contents of the maxims (or norms) that govern action. Habermas recognizes that Hegel’s objection to Kant’s morality of respect (Achtungsmoral) is more substantive. Verification of maxims, which occurs regularly in day-to-day existence, entails abstraction—that is, the separation between moral norms (which can be universalized) and value declarations (which have an ethical meaning that relates to one “good life” in particular). This implies the loss of concreteness and meaning (Inhaltlichkeit) and therefore reveals the arbitrariness and irrelevancy of abstract morality. Against this view, Habermas declares that universal and formal norms, once they are verified by discursive ethics, do in fact possess positive moral content, which then performs the ethical mediation outlined in Hegel’s system, albeit in a “weak” capacity.

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Because individuals only achieve individualization through intersubjective relations of recognition (Postmetaphysical, 170ff.), the integrity of their being can be protected only through “interweaving relations of respect that are necessary for life” (ein lebensnotwendiges Geflecht reziproker Anerkennungsverhältnisse). Universal norms verified by discourse assure that the same consideration will be shown to the interests of all and their individual liberties; that is, universal norms honor demands of justice and solidarity. Moreover, they protect the intersubjective relations of recognition to which subjects owe their individuality in the first place and, thus, “the social bond that unites humanity as a whole” (Justification, 130). In this respect, Habermas’s discourse ethics goes beyond Kant, reconstructing “the concrete totality of . . . existential orientations within which the limited role, but also the existential significance, of morality first becomes comprehensible” (Justification, 70). Human rights represent a particularly noteworthy example (Justification, 91). The way Habermas responds to the objection he imagines Hegel making to his own project is significant inasmuch as it raises the question of how his (implicitly) universalistic conception of justice fits with assessments of the “good life” in intellectual terms. Habermas asks “whether any concept of justice can claim universal validity” independent of “a particular idea of the good life” (Justification, 121); in so doing, he anticipates a point often raised by his critics. For now, it is enough to note that moral principles “relate to damaged life in the negative” instead of referring “to the good life affirmatively” (121; translation modified). Habermas responds to Hegel’s objection to abstract universalism by affirming that discourse ethics does not disregard or repress concrete and particular ways of life; nor does it neglect the consequences of actions. At the same time, the matter requires that one distinguish, in terms clearer than Kant’s, between questions of justification and matters of application (Justification, 35–36). Here, Habermas seeks to counter the claim that universal norms always require “situated” judgment. He observes that topoi of general and “impartial application” exist, which permit moral and ethical lines of argument to be distinguished in practical cases. (On this subject, he refers to a relevant study by Klaus Günther [1988].) Still more important for the distinction between morals and ethics is Hegel’s objection to the “impotence of the ought” because universalistic morality that fails to determine what the good life means must remain of no consequence. Ancient virtue ethics, conceptions of morality that follow Hume, and Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit all begin with the problem of motivation, so to speak—that is, they subordinate matters of justification to the forces and circumstances that actually give rise to moral actions. Habermas offers three ways to “solve” the problem of motivation in universal morality, all of which

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concern the impulses underlying lived ethics in different ways—without, for all that, giving up the distinction between ethics and morality. Kant insists on the autonomy of reason and finds, in the moral wellspring of respect (Achtung), a motivating instance that reason effects on itself. Wary of such idealism, Habermas avers that the moral insights achieved in discourse “do not of themselves lead to autonomous actions” (Justification, 14; emphasis added); at the same time, however, he grants that they provide motivation in the narrow sense. The “weak force” of “good (epistemic) reasons” is evident in moral sensations—especially the stirrings of a “bad conscience” that are felt when we act against better judgment (Inclusion, 35–36; Wellmer 1986). Of course, if one pursues this line of thought, it becomes clear that impartial and rational reasons do not produce the effect in question; rather, it occurs inasmuch as one views impartial reasons as if they were one’s own—an operation that means they have been integrated into a personal conception of the proper way of living and acting (Justification, 14; Korsgaard 1996). Habermas anticipates an objection to the position he articulates—namely, the view that “insight is compatible with weakness of will. Without the support of complementary processes of socialization and structures of identity” (Justification, 33; emphasis added), moral judgment remains contingent and must therefore be supported externally. Much earlier—in 1961—Habermas had addressed the matter of such favorable conditions (in social life) when discussing assumptions of historical progress that were articulated in Scottish moral philosophy: “The sociology of the Scottish thinkers could confine itself to an interplay with the political public sphere that was ready to ‘meet it halfway’ in order to give individual action an orientation, in furthering practically—in the narrow sense—the historical process” (Theory and Practice, 78). Ever since, Habermas has “distributed” progressive assumptions about proper actions between social evolution and the moral-political public spheres that “meet it halfway.” Likewise, he has stressed that formal and procedural discourses rely on favorable social circumstances in order to be effective in other contexts; in some measure, unexpressed hope derived from the philosophy of history has always been present in his thought (Lohmann 1998). Since factors like the preceding—“weak force” and the happy event of “meeting halfway”—are too uncertain and vague, Habermas recognizes the necessity of supplementing morality with law/rights. “The validity of moral commands is subject to the condition that they are universally adhered to as the basis for a general practice” (Justification, 34). First in a debate with Thomas McCarthy (1991; Justification, 88ff.), then with more nuance (Facts, 104ff.; Inclusion, 256ff.), Habermas sees mandatory laws as guaranteeing the rationality of following moral judgments; needless to say, laws provide other kinds of motivation, too (which are, admittedly, external to moral decision).

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Finally, Habermas responds to Hegel’s charge of “moral terror” by means of his own moderate philosophy of history, which denies—in pragmatic fashion and less forcefully than Kant—that any “prior telos” (Justification, 12) exists for the course of human events. Habermas’s view is comparatively negative (in the Benjaminian sense) in that it “sublates” the wrongs of the past while denying that moral theory possesses “substantive content” (Justification, 90).

Rationalizations and Aspects of Practical Reason Habermas’s distinction between moral discourses and ethical ones, then, is not to be understood as sharply and simply as often occurs. At the same time, it has proven sufficiently provocative to occasion lengthy critiques, discussions, and responses. Reading Mead and Durkheim (Communicative Action [1981]), Habermas derived the “basic assumptions of a communicative ethics” from sociology and evolutionary theory. This permitted him to identify the difference between formal justifications of moral norms through the “universe of discourse” (Communicative Action, 2:94–95), on the one hand, and the “clinical” matter of empirically assessing individual and/or collective forms of life (Communicative Action, 2:109ff.), on the other. In the Howison Lectures Habermas delivered at Berkeley in 1988 (published as “Remarks on Discourse Ethics”), he articulated the finer points of the distinction; now, “the good” and “the just”—complemented and “completed” by “purposiveness” (Zweckmäßigkeit)—counted as markers of a postmetaphysical version of practical reason. The lecture gave rise to numerous responses, both critical and appreciative (see Justification, 19–112). Although space prohibits discussion of individual aspects of the debates, the following indicates the relevant authors and positions.

Elaborations, Explanations, Critique Habermas elaborates his understanding of ethical questions about the good life (see Steinfath 1998) by taking up Charles Taylor’s (1985) notion of “strong evaluations.” This means that, in “ethical-existential discourses,” the affected parties must rely on “intersubjective” communication—which all can follow— concerning “the prior telos of a consciously pursued way of life” (Justification, 12). Taylor himself (1997) and Rainer Forst (2001) have continued inquiry along the same lines. Forst has shown that “the space of ethical justification is threedimensional”—that is, “subjective, intersubjective, and objective perspectives are combined in acts of evaluation” (Forst 2001, 349ff.)—even if, at the same time, the “subjective view” retains “priority.” Seyla Benhabib (1993) and

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Alasdair MacIntyre (1990; cf. Forst 2001) have critiqued this view for amounting to the “privatization of the good.” Habermas avoids such charges by affirming that questions concerning the good life (“what is good for me or us”) must be evaluated in a context-specific manner; the issue must always be examined in terms of what is shared (gemeinschaftlich), even if what is morally right eludes determination in this way (Wingert 1993, 131ff.). Moral discourses require that people “distance themselves from the life histories and forms of life in which they actually find themselves” (Justification, 12). That is to say: the fact that moral norms possess cognitive value—as Habermas has affirmed (Truth, 33ff.)—means that it is necessary to occupy an impartial standpoint that “explodes” the “subjectivity of the individual participant’s perspective” (Justification, 12). At the same time, moral impartiality is not—as Habermas observes, contra Thomas Nagel (1986)—the “external standpoint” of an observer (Justification, 180–181). Nor, for that matter, is impartiality assured when—as Ernst Tugendhat (1993, 287ff.) has argued (along lines that are ultimately egocentric)—“an uninvolved party [ein Unbeteiligter] weighs the goods and harms that are at stake for any individual” (Inclusion, 274; translation slightly modified). Instead of following his contemporaries on these points, Habermas sees parallels between his own view and John Rawls’s complicated, constructivist notion of “reflective equilibrium” (Justification, 25ff.), which confirms the conception of impartiality central to discourse ethics: a process (Verfahren) occurring between affected parties. At the same time, Habermas criticizes Rawls for holding that one need only conclude a “contract” following instrumental purposes, instead of acting on the basis of “moral insight” (Justification, 25ff.). For this reason, he endorses Thomas Scanlon’s (1982) critique of Rawls, which holds that “principles and rules can only meet with general agreement, if all parties may be convinced that each of them could express personal assent from his or her own perspective” (Habermas 1991, 58). Habermas finds support for his position in the fact that Lawrence Kohlberg assigns the “moral point of view” to level 6 of judgment formation, the “postconventional” stage (Kohlberg 1986, 220–221; see also chapter 10 of this volume); here, Kohlberg takes up Mead’s notion of abstract role playing, which involves reciprocal changes of perspective between interlocutors. Even if Habermas ultimately takes issue with Kohlberg’s attempt to combine universal justice and benevolence (Justification, 78ff.), nevertheless (and like KarlOtto Apel) he holds that the “discourse-ethical alternative” of impartiality represents a process of judgment formation involving all parties in reciprocal relations (Justification, 114ff.; Truth, 243ff.; Lohmann 2001). Habermas has held fast to this definition of the moral standpoint guaranteeing that “what should be done” can redeem (einlösen) the cognitive and universal demands that it makes. He defends his understanding of what is

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morally right—in terms analogous to the way he understands truth—against the positions advanced by contemporary moral philosophers (see Truth). Although space does not permit discussion of the matter here, one should note that he has never stopped affirming the universal and unconditional claims of moral duty—that is to say, the priority, posited by Kant, of the Just over the Good. Habermas has also discussed the priority of the Just over the Good in terms of political ethics—that is, in the context of the debate between communitarianism and liberalism. Habermas sides with others in the Kantian tradition (Rawls 1971, Dworkin 1984, Nagel 1986, Apel 1988). From this position, he critiques opposing views that affirm that the Good has priority over the Just (e.g., MacIntyre 1985, Sandel 1982, Walzer 1983, Nussbaum 1986, Spaemann 1989, Taylor 1989; for an attempt to strike a balance, see Seel 1993). At the same time—and especially in his discussions of Rawls’s (1995) political liberalism (Justification, 25ff.; Inclusion, 49–102)—Habermas has made it clear that, although he agrees with the latter’s proceduralist and constructivist approach (to say nothing of the stress he places on justice), he cannot endorse the way it is grounded. In particular, Rawls’s theorem of “overlapping consensus” earns his criticism because of the way it qualifies the superiority of modern, “reasonable world interpretations” over those of premodern (or non-Western) societies, which (so the argument goes) fail to “transcend the social and historical context of [their] particular form[s] of life” (Justification, 24). Throughout such exchanges, Habermas’s persistent defense of the autonomy of abstract moral discourse has prompted him to reject all attempts to ground moral universalism in an ethical framework. This applies to Taylor’s (1989) moral universalism in terms of a modern ethics of goods (Güterethik) (Justification, 69ff.), MacIntyre’s (1988) antirelativistic theory of untranslatability (Justification, 102ff.), and Richard Rorty’s contextual pragmatism (Truth, 96ff.). Habermas also rejects efforts to interpret cognitive aspects of universal morality in terms of realism (Truth); nor does he believe it possible to subvert the difference between values and norms by way of the “dense ethical vocabulary” afforded by “moral facts” (Putnam 2002; Truth, 213ff.).

General Ethics of the Good Life? If, in these discussions, Habermas has sought to defend the foundational distinction between moral and ethical discourses, his recent engagement with the challenges posed by developments in the modern biological sciences suggests a change in the way he understands ethical discourse. Ernst Tugendhat (1984) already tried to develop a formal concept of the good life that held up to the justificatory demands of Kantian morality. Habermas, too, spoke of

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general “characteristics of ‘the’ good life” (Justification, 123). Although he stresses, in an intellectual exchange with Martin Seel, that “formal determination of the good” amounts to paternalism and/or tautology (Seel 1995; Inclusion, 22–23), Habermas nevertheless takes up considerations offered by Tugendhat and Seel when he declares: “the good at the core of the right reminds us that moral consciousness depends on a particular self-understanding of moral persons who recognize that they belong to the moral community” (Inclusion, 29). The challenges of bioethics and the threat of “liberal eugenics” have prompted Habermas to articulate this implicitly ethical quantum with greater clarity, and in two regards. First, he has renewed the Kierkegaardian discourse of responsibility for one’s own life (Biographie)—a matter addressed in earlier works (Communicative Action, 2:141; Justification, 66). In a remarkable interpretation, Habermas has recently shown how Kierkegaard, by way of the formal concept of “being-able-to-be-oneself ” (Future, 5ff.), arrived at a postmetaphysical and negativistic conception of the unmisspent life. Whoever is the “responsible author” of his own existence is determined only with respect to the measure in which he fails himself; because concrete matters are not at issue, this mode of being is compatible with the unconditional demand of autonomy in moral discourse. At the same time, the moral agent depends on something other, which transcends him: for Kierkegaard, this means God; for Habermas, it is the “transsubjective  .  .  . power of the intersubjective” (Future, 11). This point leads to the second criterion Habermas uses to determine, in formal terms, a “good life” in human community that is also adequate to the conditions of universal morality. Once more, he takes up the “social bond” (Justification, 18) in which morality must be “embedded”—a context he calls “species ethics” (Future, 80ff.). Here, the “unavailability [Unverfügbarkeit] of the biological foundations of personal identity” (Future, 27; translation slightly modified) pertaining to morality gives rise to “an intersubjectively shared ‘we’-perspective” that makes possible “value orientations which can be generalized” (Future, 55). The fact that “an assessment of morality as a whole” stands at issue does not mean, for Habermas, that it is “itself . . . a moral issue”; rather, it is “an ethical one, a judgment which is part of the ethics of the species” (Future, 73; Lohmann 2004). Species ethics makes plain the imperative that communicative theory places at the heart of everyday action: that, inasmuch as we understand ourselves as moral beings, we cannot do otherwise than entertain an evaluative and constitutive relation to intersubjective conditions of morality applying to humanity as a whole.

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References Apel, Karl-Otto. 1988. Diskurs und Verantwortung: Das Problem des Übergangs zur postkonventionellen Moral. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Benhabib, Seyla. 1993. “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, 73–98. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Dworkin, Ronald. 1978. Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Forst, Rainer. 2001. “Ethik und Moral.” In Die Öffentlichkeit der Vernunft und die Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit, ed. Lutz Wingert and Klaus Günther, 344–371. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Günther, Klaus. 1988. Der Sinn für Angemessenheit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kohlberg, Lawrence, Dwight R. Boyd, and Charles Levine. 1986. “Die Wiederkehr der sechsten Stufe: Gerechtigkeit, Wohlwollen und der Standpunkt der Moral.” In Zur Bestimmung der Moral, ed. Wolfgang Edelstein and Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, 205– 240. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Korsgaard, Christine M. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lohmann, Georg. 1998. “Kritische Gesellschaftstheorie ohne Geschichtsphilosophie? Zu Jürgen Habermas’ verabschiedeter und uneingestandener Geschichtsphilosophie.” In Soziologie und Geschichte: Zur Bedeutung der Geschichte für die soziologische Theorie, ed. Frank Welz and Uwe Weisenbacher, 197–217. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ——. 2001. “Unparteilichkeit in der Moral.” In Die Öffentlichkeit der Vernunft und die Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit, ed. Lutz Wingert and Klaus Günther, 434–458. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2004. “Unantastbare Menschenwürde und unverfügbare menschliche Natur.” In Menschenwürde: La dignité de l’être humain. Jahrbuch der schweizerischen philosophischen Gesellschaft, ed. Emil Angehrn and Bernard Baertschi, 55–75. Basel: Schwabe. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1985. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. ——. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. ——. 1990. “The Privatization of Good: An Inaugural Lecture.” Review of Politics 52, no. 3: 344–361. McCarthy, Thomas. 1991. “Practical Discourse: On the Relation of Morality to Politics.” In Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory, 181–199. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Nagel, Thomas. 1986. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1986. The Fragility of Goodness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, Hilary. 2002. “Values and Norms.” In The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays, 111–134. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ——. 1995. “Political Liberalism: Reply to Habermas.” Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3: 132–180. Sandel, Michael. 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Scanlon, Thomas M. 1982. “Contractualism and Utilitarianism.” In Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Bernard Williams and Amartya Sen, 103–128. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seel, Martin. 1993. “Das Gute und das Richtige.” In Zur Verteidigung der Vernunft gegen ihre Liebhaber und Verächter, ed. Christoph Menke and Martin Seel, 219–240. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1995. Versuch über die Form des Glücks. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Spaemann, Robert. 1989. Glück und Wohlwollen: Versuch über Ethik. Stuttgart: KlettCotta. Steinfath, Holmer, ed. 1998. Was ist ein gutes Leben? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Taylor, Charles. 1985. Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 1997. “Leading a Life.” In Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reasons, ed. Ruth Chang, 170–183. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Tugendhat, Ernst. 1984. “Antike und moderne Ethik.” In Probleme der Ethik, 33–56. Stuttgart: Reclam. ——. 1993. Vorlesungen über Ethik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality. Oxford: Blackwell. Wellmer, Albrecht. 1986. Ethik und Dialog. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Williams, Bernard. 1981. Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana. Wingert, Lutz. 1993. Gemeinsinn und Moral. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

17 THE CONSTITUTIONALIZATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW JEAN L. COHEN

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ince the mid-1990s Habermas has been articulating a project for a future world order involving the “further constitutionalization of international law.” Wed to the Kantian (1991) conception of cosmopolitanism, his goal is nonetheless to show that a global legal system with binding hard law, coupled to a politically constituted world society that is neither a world state nor a loose confederation of states, is conceptually conceivable. The cosmopolitan multilayered global political system he proposes would consist not only of individuals (world citizens) but also of states that would nonetheless not be relegated to mere parts of an overarching hierarchical superstate. The project is to bind global, regional, and national power to law to facilitate the peaceful resolution of disputes, while protecting individual freedom through human rights. Thus, like other eminent critics of institutional cosmopolitanism (Rawls 1999, Nagel 2005, Walzer 1992) who reject a world republic as the wrong model, Habermas seeks to develop a “feasible utopia” for the global political system of world society. Unlike Rawls, he insists that membership in the supranational political organization of that society be inclusive of all states rather than an association restricted to liberal and decent societies. Unlike Nagel, who restricts the circumstances of distributive and procedural justice to the nationstate, he argues that transnational forms of governance already replacing the regulatory state entail the requisite degree of coercion and impact on people’s lives to perpetrate injustice, so they are a suitable referent for a global domestic politics. Unlike Walzer, Habermas rejects the unmediated moralization of a global rights-based politics that goes with the revival of just-war discourse. For Habermas, international law matters but should be transformed into cosmopolitan law regulating both states and world citizens. A cosmopolitan condition that does not involve the erection of a world state requires the further constitutionalization of international law. Habermas argues that the concept of a binding legal system and constitution can be applied to postnational, nonstate orders. Yet under the influence of Hauke Brunkhorst (2005), Bardo Fassbender (1998), and Klaus Günther (2001),

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he weds the Kantian conception of a cosmopolitan condition to a Kelsenian monist conception of a global constitution. The tensions and ambiguities in his project can be traced to this fateful conceptual framework.

The Cosmopolitan Condition The revival of cosmopolitan discourse and the project of constitutionalization are Habermas’s response to a diagnosis of crisis of the international state system, of the irrelevance of the old discourse and metaprinciple of national sovereignty, and of increasingly anachronistic conceptions of multilateral institutions as mere treaty organizations. It is also meant as an alternative to the two most alarming contemporary projects: an American-dominated neoimperial world order invoking human rights and security to remoralize politics at the expense of the existing constraints of international law and the revival of sheer (balance of) power politics by new great powers willing to flex their muscle and eager to become twenty-first-century “Großräume,” as exemplified by Russia’s recent foray into Georgia, unrestrained by multilateral organizations or international law. Kant is the starting point of Habermas’s theoretical reflections and the impetus behind his effort to find a “third conceptual path” that adapts cosmopolitan intent to contemporary conditions. Accordingly, a cosmopolitan condition is a legal (and moral) condition in which law serves as a framework within which peace can be connected with freedom. There is a “conceptual connection” between a freedom-guaranteeing and peace-securing legal order, and the cosmopolitan extension of a condition of civil liberty first established within the constitutional state is a command of practical reason for Kant as well as for Habermas. The latter reminds us that Kant grounded every legal order from the original right that attaches to each person qua human being: “Every individual has a right to equal liberties under universal laws” (Inclusion, 180). This “grounding” of human rights in a moral right, however, does not obviate the necessity of a legal order that first constitutes the basic human rights. A cosmopolitan condition involves the creation of such law-governed relations regulating the constitution of a community of states and individuals. Kantian universalism stipulates that all human beings are the bearers of rights, and all modern legal orders must have an “essentially individualistic” character. “The point of cosmopolitan law is . . . that it bypasses the collective subjects of international law and directly establishes the legal status of the individual subjects by granting them unmediated membership in the association of free and equal world citizens” (Inclusion, 181; for Kant, then, a cosmopolitan legal order would have direct effect and supremacy and construct

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individuals as bearers of actionable subjective rights). Habermas will add to this “unmediated” “not exclusive”—states are also members of the global political system. The moral justification of this cosmopolitan condition is monist, although membership in the politically constituted world society is dualist (collective and individual) and its structure, multilayered (with supra-, trans-, and national levels). There’s another impetus behind Habermas’s project of constitutionalization: the need to counter the arguments of Schmittians, who equate the idea of a human rights–based cosmopolitanism, “just-war” discourse, and the demotion of sovereignty to a bundle of conditional prerogatives to an unmediated and dangerous moralization of international law and politics that risks undermining the unity of states, legally pacified domestic constitutional orders, and realistic foreign policy. Habermas’s answer is that while it is possible to justify human rights exclusively from the universal (cosmopolitan) moral point of view, they have a juridical character nonetheless. Basic individual rights are concrete legal entitlements and thus belong structurally to a positive and coercive freedom-guaranteeing legal order that founds actionable individual legal claims. At present, international human rights only have a weak force in international law and, despite important developments, still await institutionalization within the framework of a cosmopolitan order that is only now beginning to take shape. If we take the step from an international law of states to a cosmopolitan law of individuals, the charge of moralization of politics can be parried. Basic human rights would have to be legally guaranteed at the global level and the consequences of their violation specified. This is part of the task of the “further constitutionalization” of international law.

Constitution and Constitutionalization Beyond the State Habermas thus attempts to wed cosmopolitan morality not to a world state but to a cosmopolitan legal condition appropriate for a dualistic world society composed of individuals and states and organized into a “multilayered” global political system. Apparently, he shares Kant’s view that a world state would entail despotism, and, presumably, he also wants to avoid the violence it would take to get there. Given the fact that states still control the means of force and cling to their (however diminished) sovereignty, under present conditions the path (and the likely outcome) would be an imperial one. What concept of constitution is adequate to the job, and why accord states such a key role in the global political system? On sound realist grounds, Habermas contends that states will in the foreseeable future remain the most important actors in the global political system, if not the only ones. But there are also normative reasons for according the state a key role in a global

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political system regulated by cosmopolitan law. Only within states can we attain full congruence between the subject and the author of the law, for only within states are there administrative mechanisms able coercively to ensure equal inclusion of citizens in the legislative process, which in turn ensures impartiality regarding the institutionalization of their equal liberties (Inclusion, 141). Although state building and constitutionalism have often gone hand in hand in modern history, Habermas distinguishes conceptually between the concepts of constitution and state, arguing that the nation-state is not the only form of political order amenable to constitutionalization (Inclusion, 131). His point is a double one: First, that constitutionalization of international law need not follow the same path as that of the modern state. Second, the constitution of the global political system needn’t take the same form. So, what concept of constitution is appropriate for nonstate global orders consisting of individuals and states? The normatively demanding concept of constitution just invoked, that is, the endpoint of the process of constitutionalization of the modern state, is an ideal one that suits the kind of comprehensive domination, control of force, and jurisdiction specific to the modern state. It is, however, in Habermas’s view, inapplicable to the postnational global order. It would be a mistake to construe the constitutionalization of international law as a continuation of the development of the constitutional state at the global level. The latter involves a shift on the international level from a nonhierarchical association of collective actors (states) involved in a legal community based on the principle of sovereign equality (international society) to the supra- and transnational organizations of a cosmopolitan order regulating a dualistic international community composed of states and individuals. In light of their nonstate character— supranational organizations do not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, lack the tax-based administrative and military apparatus of the modern state, and are functionally delimited rather than comprehensive structures of domination—there is no need to insist that their constitutionalization conforms to the demanding type of republican constitution both Kant and Rousseau had in mind and on which Habermas’s ideal model is based. Instead, following the lead of Hauke Brunkhorst and Christoph Möllers, Habermas suggests that the path of constitutionalization for politically organized world society is more analogous to the trajectory of premodern legal orders characteristic of the Ständestaat (corporative state) as reformulated in the liberal version of constitutionalization found within the English rule of law and the German Rechtsstaat traditions. Constitutional limitation of domination through the division of governmental authority and securing of group rights—the premodern formula—was reinterpreted in the individualistic terms of modern law and human rights in English liberalism and in German

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constitutionalism on the basis of a functional division of powers (between legislation, administration, and adjudication). Accordingly, the “liberal” type of constitutionalization involves the division and legal regulation of existing power relations, as distinct from republican revolutionary constitutionalism that overturns established powers, founds a new political authority grounded in the rational will of the united citizenry, and precludes any residue of state power behind the law, which remains untouched. It is the former rather than the latter that is appropriate to the supranational level. The analogy does seem strong between the Ständestaat and the constitutional charters of international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union, both of which contain and balance autonomous political powers and affirm basic privileges of member states (legal standing, nonintervention, cultural integrity, etc.). If the dual reference to collective and individual actors is made explicit in the further constitutionalization of international law, then the analogy with liberal constitutionalism could seem appropriate. A supranational constitution would regulate the interplay of collective actors with the goal of establishing mutual restrictions on their power; they would direct the exercise of power governed by treaties into channels that conform with human rights, and they would leave the task of applying and developing law to courts without being exposed directly to democratic inputs and controls. This is the model of constitution that would allegedly be appropriate to the multilayered structure of a politically constituted global community. However, despite the superficial analogy, the model of the Ständestaat is not apposite to modern constitutional discourse because it did not entail the bringing of autonomous powers under law. Instead it remained a bargaining arrangement between autonomous powers in which the stronger party stood to win and in which the unequal privileges (“rights”) of each estate were maintained in a constellation of force. The Ständestaat was an “order” that did not involve a state, but neither did it involve anything resembling a modern constitution in the formal or material sense. It is unclear how the elite bargains in that context set limits to political domination. What Habermas understands as liberal constitutionalism did involve the development of constitutionalism and a modern conception of subjective individual rights. But liberal constitutionalism also requires strong states, their internal separation of powers notwithstanding. Indeed, the liberal version of constitutionalism is secretly statist because it presupposes a strong “third-party enforcer” to manage the shift from estate privileges to individual rights, to ensure the impartial granting of equal liberties along with the Gleichschaltung of the autonomous power bases of the Stände (corporate groups) into a unified egalitarian, sovereign, individualistic legal and political order. Thus neither of these two orders and no combination thereof provides an

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appropriate model for a global constitution linked to a nonstate political order that tames power by bringing it under law and dividing it. The problem is this: If major powers remain the masters of the constitution, as they do in the Ständestaat’s contractual strategic arrangements, then one has not created a cosmopolitan condition or a constitution in Habermas’s sense. But if, as per the liberal model, a shift from the (contractual) international law of states to a cosmopolitan (constitutional) law of individuals is to occur, then the question of enforcement becomes central, as does the legitimacy of enforcement power accrued at the center. It does not help to insist that the dual reference to collective and individual actors marks a “fundamental conceptual distinction” between the “thoroughly individualistic” legal order of a federal world republic and the politically constituted world society (Inclusion, 135). For in the liberal model there would be no autonomous states within the state. It is unclear to what degree a Gleichschaltung of autonomous sovereign states should occur and in favor of what sort of global power. Habermas himself raised the disturbing question as to what would prevent a “liberal” constitution beyond the state from being anything more than a hegemonic legal façade. His concern stemmed from the deviation from his own ideal concept of a constitution (the republican one), which turns on the coequivalence of human rights, popular sovereignty, and democratic legitimacy. The liberal model of constitutionalization breaks the direct link between the rule of law and democratic legitimacy and dissolves the congruence between the subjects and authors of the law. Habermas answers in several steps. First, he insists that the channels of democratic legitimation between supranational constitutions and the democratic constitutional state must not be severed. On the substantive level, he argues that the normative content of basic rights, legal principles, and criminal codes that are developed in the charters of supranational organizations evolved from learning processes tried and tested in constitutions of the republican type within democratic nation-states. In this respect, the constitutionalization of international law retains a derivative status because it depends on “advances” from those states. Because states remain the key players and the final arbiters (as they alone retain military forces), they can provide indirect legitimation for the liberal constitution of the global political system even though they now have to share this arena with other entities. Second, Habermas maintains that since the supranational level of the global political system would not entail a state but “only” a functional organization restricted to the tasks of securing peace and protecting human rights, it would not need the same high threshold of legitimacy that comprehensive coercive legal orders of states require. “Luckily,” the clear negative duties of a universalistic morality of justice—the duty not to engage in wars of aggression and not to violate basic human rights—are already consonant common cultural dispositions around

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the world and thus inform our contemporary global political culture. Backing by a supportive and vigilant global civil public sphere would also help. Accordingly, the global political constitutional order has neither the same sort of legitimacy needs nor the same requirements of solidarity as the democratic nation-state.

The Institutional Model This brings us to the debates around the institutional model of the global political system. Habermas imagines a tripartite structure consisting of a global, a transnational, and a national level that would be the referent of “liberal” constitutionalization. On the supranational level, the political system would be organized into a “suitably reformed” world organization based on universal membership that includes all states and individuals (qua citizens of the world) but that is restricted to the functions of securing peace and promoting human rights in an “effective, nonselective” fashion. On the transnational level, the allegedly more political issue of devising a global domestic politics addressing economic matters is ascribed to continental regimes on the model of the European Union and/or twenty-first-century great powers such as the United States, China, Russia, India, etc. Political plurality and international relations would continue to exist on this level, although recourse to war and violations of human rights would be precluded. On the national level, states would continue to exist, retaining their monopoly of force, making this available when needed to implement human rights and policy decisions of the other levels and generating the crucial resource of indirect legitimacy for the supranational level. But they would no longer be sovereign. This seems like a sober and feasible utopia. However, when framed in terms of the creation of a cosmopolitan condition, it appears ambiguous and has generated a series of critiques. As Scheuerman (2008) and Walker (2005) point out, deep disagreements about which human rights should become hard law and enforceable on the global level make the argument about the nonpolitical nature of rights and the lower threshold of legitimacy for the supranational level unconvincing. Even if there is a general consensus over their function— legalized human rights in the global political system would determine the threshold of tolerance below which some kind of forceful intervention is deemed appropriate—which rights rise to this level is a highly contentious issue. Advocates of a more ambitious cosmopolitan reading, such as Lafont (2008), challenge the specific assignment of competences to the different units of the system. The claim is that leaving socioeconomic issues (global domestic politics) to the logic of regional compromises screens out issues of global

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economic injustice and blocks legitimate claims to distributive justice. According to Lafont, cosmopolitan principles require that bargaining among regional powers be conducted against a background of a global system that prevents compromises from generating economic injustice for other individuals. In view of the tight connection between justice and human rights, it is incumbent upon the global political institution to guarantee the socioeconomic conditions necessary to achieve the human-rights goals of the charter and to frame the scope of basic human-rights provisions in these terms. Others, for example Schmalz-Bruns (2007), question whether it is possible to reconcile the Kantian cosmopolitan starting point with the insistence on retaining the kinds of attachments, solidarities, and legitimacy-generating forms of democratic participation that have been achieved only on the level of the nation-state. Although it is conceivable that solidarities and “constitutional patriotism” could emerge on the regional level, these would still be particular vis-à-vis wider cosmopolitan obligations. The dualistic membership of the global political system creates contradictory imperatives for citizens. It is unclear how the perspective of nationally or regionally based citizenship could be reconciled with that of the world citizen, especially if the former may legitimately be oriented by and demand governments to pursue national or regional self-interest in lieu of the universal standards of global justice (cosmopolitan morality) that should orient the world citizen.

The Model Revised Habermas recently revised his model in a more cosmopolitan direction in response to these criticisms. He openly asserts his commitment to Kelsenian legal monism, ascribing supremacy to the global political constitution over the domestic legal orders of member states now construed as subordinate parts of a hierarchically structured single legal system. This finds its political analogue in a world organization that not only represents the unity of the global legal system but also embodies the international community of states and citizens in its reformed central instance: a representative and legislative General Assembly. The latter has two key functions: devising appropriate standards of justice to guide transnational negotiation systems and a legislative role restricted to elaborating the meaning of human rights; conflict is confined to interpretation of the constitutional charter. It is worth noting the shift in the conception of constitution and constitutionalization that accompanies these revisions. It seems that Habermas has embraced a version of the republican conception, for we are now told that the juridification of world politics is a matter of founding, involving two categories of founding subjects: constitutional states and individual world citizens.

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Partly because the decision-making competences of the global governance institutions would intervene deeply into the social relations of member states, they could not be legitimated by a mere treaty. Hence, the need to convene a constituent assembly to draft a charter that could become a cosmopolitan constitution: this could begin as an international treaty, but it would have to be ratified via referenda and enacted in the name of citizens of the world, echoing the formula of the European draft constitution. The product of this constituting process would be a monistic constitutional political organization whose legal order is in a hierarchical relationship with its member states’ constitutions. Indeed, the political constitution of member states would have to conform to the constitutional principles of the world organization. Habermas still insists that those subjects (states) who already control the legitimate means of violence will have to be among the key actors in the constitutionalization process. He also cautions that the “monistic constitutional political order” that is constituted should not lead to a “mediatization” of the world of states by the authority of a world republic that ignores the “fund of trust” accumulated in the domestic sphere, the associated loyalty of citizens, or the distinctive national character of states and forms of life. On the other hand, the latter must also not weaken the effectiveness and binding implementation of supra- and transnational decisions. Yet he concludes by stating that the meaning of sovereignty has already shifted in the cosmopolitan monist direction anticipated by Hans Kelsen. Accordingly, when relevant, states would function as the organs of the international community, and the legal validity of state constitutions would now clearly derive from the hierarchical sources in the monistic legal order, i.e., from the constitution of the world organization. This resolves the ambiguities of the model in ways that make it more internally consistent and cosmopolitan yet also less feasible. It is now even more difficult to differentiate the constitutionalization process and its product from the making of a decentered federal world republic. But all of his insights and arguments against such a model remain valid. We are thus left with a conception of constitutionalization that is hard to defend.

References Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2005. Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community. Trans. Jeffrey Flynn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Fassbender, Bardo. 1998. “The United Nations Charter as Constitution of the International Community.” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 36, no. 3: 529–619. Günther, Klaus. 2001. “Rechtspluralismus und universaler Code der Legalität: Globalisierung als rechtstheoretisches Problem.” In Die Öffentlichkeit der Vernunft und die Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit, ed. Lutz Wingert and Klaus Günther, 539–567. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy” and “Remarks on Legitimation Through Human Rights.” In The Post-National Constellation, trans. Max Pensky, 58–129. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 2006. “Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?” In The Divided West, trans. Ciaran Cronin, 115–210. Cambridge: Polity. ——. 2007. Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik: eine Replik.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 406–459. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2008. “The Constitutionalization of International Law and the Legitimation Problems of a Constitution for World Society.” Constellations 14, no. 4: 444–455. Kant, Immanuel. 1991. “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.” In Political Writings, trans. Hans S. Reiss, 93–130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lafont, Cristina. 2008. “Alternative Visions of a New Global Order: What Should Cosmopolitans Hope For?” Ethics and Global Politics 1, no. 1–2: 41–60. Nagel, Thomas. 2005. “The Problem of Global Justice.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no. 2: 113–147. Rawls, John. 1999. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Scheuerman, William. 2008. “Global Governance Without Global Government? Habermas on Postnational Democracy.” Political Theory 36, no. 1: 133–151. Schmalz-Bruns, Rainer. 2007. “An den Grenzen der Entstaatlichung: Bemerkungen zu Jürgen Habermas’ Modell einer ‘Weltinnenpolitik ohne Weltregierung.’ ” In Anarchie der kommmunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 269–293. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Walker, Neil. 2005. “Making a World of Difference? Habermas, Cosmopolitanism, and the Constitutionalization of International Law.” European University Institute Working Paper Law no. 2005/17. Walzer, Michael. 1992. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. New York: Basic Books.

18 EUROPEAN CONSTITUTIONALIZATION CHRISTIAN JOERGES

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or years now—across the continent, in all languages and lands— talk has been animated: Europe must determine what state it finds itself in, whether its legal system may be understood as a constitutional order, whether it can—indeed, should—be democratic, what democracy in a European union means, and what the chances of this really occurring are. The constitutionalization of Europe involves both the analysis of actual processes that make the phenomenon itself comprehensible and a normative framework offering tools of measurement—and specifying conditions necessary—for determining whether the emergent configurations “deserve recognition.” Yet analytical and empirical questions are empty—and normative and institutional ones are blind—if they do not relate to one another. The notion of “constitutionalization” concerns this very connection: It names both the form and the formation of Europe. It holds to what the constitutions of democratic nation-states have achieved or promised and, at the same time, seeks to acknowledge the fact that the circumstances framing European unification are constantly changing. It is impossible to reach back to a blueprint, and so constitutionalization must be understood as an ongoing process. Since 1991, Habermas has offered transnational and transdisciplinary points of orientation for approaching the phenomenon. Two concerns inform his contributions: on the one hand, an altogether passionate advocacy of the European project and, on the other, worries about the accomplishments of democratic states to date. His concerns have come to be shared by scholars across the academic spectrum—and especially by the political scientists and legal theorists who dominate the field of European studies. At the same time, however, the effect of Habermas’s interventions has remained singularly limited to day-to-day academic activities. This circumstance relates to the twofold orientation of Habermas’s goals. In his works theorizing legal discourse, Habermas (1995) has penetratingly analyzed the inner connection (Zusammenhang) between the state under the rule of law (Rechtsstaat) and democracy—a matter that remains inaccessible both to political scientists who observe the causal and empirical conventions of their field and to jurists who focus on

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technical interpretations of authoritative texts and offer conceptually coherent but ultimately formalistic legal doctrines (Faltering). Specialists who honor disciplinary divides cannot appreciate Habermas’s contributions, which are both critical and constructive. Their import becomes clear only when one juxtaposes the questions and evaluative criteria Habermas draws from his theory of legal discourse, on the one hand, and the intellectual models that prevail in European constitutionalism, on the other. The points of contrast can be illustrated in three domains of inquiry: first, ways of “dealing with” the past; second, the European model of social welfare; and third, the transition to “new modes of governance.” Ultimately, the spectrum marks the neuralgic points within European constitutionalism.

Working Through the Past The democratic constitutional state did not fall from the sky. The history of the institution is important because it determines the possibilities open to us—the tasks we must complete. Habermas has shown as much on the example of Germany (e.g., Facts, 109ff., 541ff.). At present, there exists no corresponding reconstruction of the European project as a whole—how it came to be. All the same, no textbook or Sunday sermon fails to remind one of the catastrophes and errors of the past—especially in Germany. The oft-quoted diagnosis by Joseph H. H. Weiler (1994), that the primary concerns of Europe are securing peace, overcoming discrimination, and increasing prosperity, involves motivations that are high-minded and trivial at once. Such statements pass over in silence the troubling legacy of the Holocaust, which defines European identity—in negative terms—to this day, as well as the conflicts of postwar Europe, the role played by decolonization in the reorientation of the political map, and the current strategic interests of individual states (Judt 2006). The expansion of the European project to the east has likewise increased the dimensions of historical factors and deepened points of socioeconomic divergence. It is misleading to represent the process of integration occurring in European law simply as a constant, institutional progression that always manages to overcome obstacles—which, now that Soviet domination has collapsed, will achieve a happy ending in a ratified constitution. Moreover, there is certainly nothing more mistaken than the notion that Europe can assemble its legal code from the bricks left over from the past, which legal historians have now brought to light (Keiser 2005). Habermas’s views do not fit into the rosy picture painted by (some of) his  contemporaries. His remarks concerning the historical significance of European unification address the most sensitive points of European

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constitutionalization. Most recently, this occurred in the “Steinmeier Speech” of November 7, 2007. Here, Habermas observed that the “smoldering conflict over the future of Europe”—which continues behind the façade of everyday politics—“gains . . . explosiveness from . . . conflicts of interest rooted . . . in the divergent developmental paths of the nation-states and in diverse national historical memories” (Faltering, 83). Prior to this, he had issued the same call to the European public after the American invasion of Iraq on May 31, 2003 (Divided West, 39–48): here, too, Europeans were united by the burdens they shared. But how should debates about European constitutionalization treat the continent’s history—or, better, its histories? What could the Convention on the Future of Europe (2001) even have accomplished in the brief time it had to work on its mandate? The convention did not observe silence about the past but embellished it instead. The self-portrait offered in the preamble of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, invoked, above all, the cultural greatness of the continent. It made no mention of murdered Jews (whose memory Habermas and Derrida have called to mind). Nor did anything of the like occur when, later—at the instigation of Poland—the Intergovernmental Conference incorporated the “bitter experiences” of a “henceforth united Europe” into the preamble: even this small addition fell victim to thoroughgoing efforts made in the Treaty of Lisbon (signed on December 13, 2007) to avoid any and all symbolic gestures. Is it possible to imagine another way for Europe to engage with its past? Could Europe possibly derive legitimacy from confronting its history/ histories in ways that do not simply endorse an all-encompassing “contract for a European constitution” and diplomatic efforts to realize—or, as the case may be, save—the project? Germans should not insinuate anything of the kind, Habermas tells his countrymen and -women; the way he does so, however, urges them to do precisely this (e.g., Time, 38).

The European Social Model Even if their practical relevancy is difficult to gauge, preambles reveal a great deal about constitutional politics. Matters are different when decisions relating to the economic and social order are at issue. Tellingly, the first great controversy of constitutional politics that occurred in the early days of the Federal Republic—which produced effects felt still today—concerned this very relationship. The positions articulated by Ernst Forsthoff and Wolfgang Abendroth at the conference of Staatsrechtslehrer in 1954 are still relevant. Forsthoff argued that provisions of social welfare (Sozialstaatlichkeit) do not occupy the same level of constitutional significance as those of law (Rechststaatlichkeit).

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Administration and taxation are matters of the first order, this pupil of Carl Schmitt maintained. In contrast, Abendroth (taking up the arguments of Hermann Heller) averred that Sozialstaatlichkeit was now a legal principle according to the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) and therefore a matter incumbent on legislators to address. The debate was witnessed by a school of thought the battling academics failed to notice—which would soon take the lead and become uncommonly influential, first in the Federal Republic of Germany and then throughout Europe, through the model of the “social market economy.” Like the positions of Forsthoff and Abendroth, the “third way” this party proposed had also been prepared under the Weimar Republic—by a group of economists and jurists who were equally skeptical about laissez-faire liberalism and efforts to shape and steer the economy by political means. They had declared the ordering of the economy to be the task of a strong state; with the help of forceful legal prescriptions, the government would “bring out” and reinforce the inherent stability of private economic activity (Manow 2001). On this view, “the economic order and the constitution of the state” were connected on a deep level. Both conditioned the other mutually—and therefore demanded political recognition while, at the same time, providing the legal guidelines for political decision making to observe. Habermas sided with Heller and Abendroth. The positions he articulated (especially in Structural Transformation, 229ff.) were taken up during debates about reform in the Federal Republic—particularly by student radicals around 1968. Habermas’s way from here to the discourse theory of law elaborated in Between Facts and Norms was long, but—at least as far as the principle of the social state was concerned—it led in a straight line. His theory has preserved the tradition of the social state established by Heller. Heller had already seen clearly what Abendroth soon elaborated in detail—the fact that social justice within the framework of the state cannot be “derived” or simply “imposed”; instead, it must achieve legitimacy through democratic political processes, which in turn require legal guarantees. The same insight has prompted Habermas to proceduralize the category of laws and rights. The matter is fundamentally compatible with constitutionalization that does not depend on parliamentary legislation but instead counts on positive justification in other forums and processes (even though, as Habermas admits, it functions only to the extent that such processes deserve recognition). For quite some time, European politics remained unaffected by these debates. Significantly, however, German jurisprudence proved particularly sensitive to the tension between, on the one hand, the call for democracy on the national level and, on the other, the project of European unification. Indeed, Germans led the effort to “immunize” the European government against the demands of democracy. The exemplary attempt to do so occurred

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when Hans Peter Ipsen (1972) sought to qualify communities merely as “administrative units of functional integration” (Zweckverbände funktionaler Integration) that fulfill technocratic tasks. In contrast, ordoliberalism—the school of thought that held sway in private and economic law—held that “Europe” would provide the opportunity to bring about a nonpolitical economic constitution internationally, a project that had failed to be achieved on the level of individual states (Mestmäcker 1973). In some respects, these views represented German exceptions (Sonderwege), but both sides got on well enough within the edifice of legal doctrine that, after 1961, had assumed the form of the “constitutional charter” of the European Court of Justice. (That is, they had no problems with its “direct effects”: basic economic freedoms, the priority of European law, and the fact that the European Court of Justice itself played a privileged role in matters of legal interpretation.) The fact that the Treaty of Rome (1957) inaugurated European institutionalization as a project of economic integration by dissolving the constitutional provisions for work and social services of member states did not prove bothersome for some time. German perspectives on the issue focused on abstract definitions. “Integration through law” by way of the European Court of Justice seemed to be of no concern in political terms; on a practical level—during the “golden age” of the nation-state—there were no immediate signs of danger for social protections, either. The situation changed fundamentally, however, once the process of economic integration had moved forward. Calls to strengthen the “social dimension” of Europe were heard, above all, prior to the Maastricht Treaty (1992), which led to increased jurisdiction over economic and employment law through the so-called social protocol, with its “agreement on social policy.” In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas examines law in the democratic state from the perspective of discourse theory. This framework provides no indication of “what the constitution of Europe is supposed to be.” At the same time, the theory places demands on the legitimacy of political rule—standards that may not simply be disregarded in the name of “Europe.” This is how I read Habermas’s call for a European constitution in general and for preserving the “European social model” in particular. The connection between and interdependency of democracy and the state of rule under law entails the obligation to construct spaces for political action that do not deprive the citizens of Europe of a voice in matters of social justice. Habermas has often intervened in debates on the related issue of challenges posed by open European markets and increasing globalization. For example, he observes: To the extent that Europeans wish to counterbalance the undesirable social consequences of growing distributive inequities and seek a certain reregulation

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of the global economy, they must take an interest in the power to shape institutions and outcomes which would accrue to a politically effective European Union within the circle of global players. (Time, 96)

Pronouncements of this kind do not really match the mounting interest in European social and employment politics. Unlike Habermas, European constitutionalists treat the social implications of integration pragmatically—as matters of managerial decision. The elimination of the social deficit produced by the European project is not understood to provide a constitutive precondition for securing democracy in the union. Instead, constitutionalists applaud incremental progress (or what appears as such). This holds especially for provisions in the Lisbon Treaty that call for “a highly competitive market economy,” a “charter of rights,” and an “open method of coordination” where employment and social issues are concerned. For all that, Europe by no means has the necessary conditions for a social democracy at the ready. And so—posthumously, unnoticed by legislators, and behind the backs of the continent’s citizenry—Forsthoff has gained the upper hand against Heller. In this respect, French voters were not mistaken in voting against the proposed Constitution of the European Union.

Transition to “New Modes of Governance” Bad prospects for success would not provide sufficient grounds to abandon experiments in “new modes of governance.” In terms of constitutional politics, however, such new methods—and particularly the “open method of coordination”—have occasioned concern that, if the social state is not preserved, the rule of law may be imperiled. Even so, compelling reasons exist to turn away from the “community method” of governance. Tellingly, forms of coordinated action first emerged in the sphere of agricultural politics, which is strongly communitarized. As regulatory practices extended into the spheres of worker, environmental, and consumer protection—a process that accompanied the development of domestic markets—the need for an active “political administration” increased dramatically. The advisory structure that emerged in the context of agricultural policy flourished as “comitology” in many fields of regulatory politics. Soon, many “European agencies” that had little legal power but great capacity for practical intervention had joined in. The “open method of coordination” initially conceived for the social sector was transferred to, and implemented in, more and more spheres. In point of fact, this form of rule can now be restrained

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only with difficulty by legal means. This difficulty involves both the new “governance arrangements” that solidify connections between national and European actors and the influence of experts of every kind, who now count as indispensable in even the slightest matters. Since irreversible developments in political arenas of great significance are at issue, the legal problematic of how they relate to the agenda of European constitutionalism should be considered a high priority. The core question, in constitutional terms, is whether one may see, in “new modes of governance,” a kind of “democratic experimentalism” that dissolves legal categories into communication (for this perspective, see, above all, Sabel and Zeitlin 2008) or whether law can react constructively to the fact that traditional modes of steering are being replaced by new forms of procedure (Joerges 2007). In the meanwhile, European political practice has come to be shaped by institutions that observe processes of decision making in a precise way but at the same time—inasmuch as they privilege expert opinion—disregard both regional differences and the public sphere within civil society. This holds especially for newer agencies, even though European comitology also resists demands for any form of constitutionalization that would assign it the reduced role of serving only in an advisory capacity (i.e., offering regulatory suggestions subject to reversal); European constitutionalism grants it little more than room for “legwork” (Time).

Neuralgic Points of Constitutionalism The “social state” has emerged as a stumbling block for European constitutionalization. In the most current redaction of documents, the matter has been neglected: politicians and political scientists promise “gentle” alternatives, and the citizens of “Old Europe” express their displeasure when asked directly. The European Court of Justice has not seized the initiative in this seeming dead-end. In a series of cases involving conflicts of interest between “New European” wishes to enter the market and “Old European” concerns about social protection, the rulings of the court have set European primary and secondary rights above national employment law—emphasizing that the right to strike remains protected. The details of such case law are extraordinarily complicated (see Joerges and Rödl 2009), but the operative principles are very simple: (1) the precedence of primary rights encompasses national employment laws, even when it stands in conflict with them; (2) the immediate effect of civil liberties means that not just member states but also unions must observe them; (3) despite the limited number of spheres of European jurisdiction, the incipient European social model takes precedence over

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national law; and (4) the limited compass of European secondary law (that is, its restricted sphere of precedence) is supposed to take the sense of fundamental liberties into account. It may not be immediately apparent how these provisions, formulated as they are in legalese, bear on constitutional matters. In fact, however, their relevance is dramatic, for here the European Court of Justice has elevated its position to that of pouvoir constituant in the European Union. In so doing, it radicalizes the ordoliberal decoupling of the economic from the social constitution—which according to the theory of social market economy, are “interdependent”—by assigning supremacy to the former. The German Federal Constitutional Court has opposed such measures in its determinative rulings—but European legislators cannot follow this lead. Is critiquing the revocation of the social state hopelessly quixotic? Should one expect that preserving the national responsibilities of Old Europe will lead to compensatory developments in the emergent international order? Is Habermas not right when he criticizes attempts made by the Social Democrats to “intercept [auffangen], within the framework of the nation-state, the risks that economic globalization entails for the labor market and systems of social security”? “Couldn’t this goal be better achieved by harmonizing the corresponding policies within the larger economic territory of Europe, or at least within the Eurozone?” (Faltering, 105). The uncertainties posed by these matters cannot be overcome. At the same time, it is clear that the lines of argument the European Court of Justice has offered do not hold up to criticism. As protests by unions across Europe have shown, it is likely that such judgments will ultimately undermine the court’s authority. The discourse theory of law, as a consequence of the recent developments sketched above, has been pushed into a new, oppositional role. According to the position Habermas has articulated, the social state counts as a constitutive element of democracy; democracy without the rule of law (Rechtstaatlichkeit) qualifies as unthinkable; institutionalizing economic freedoms and economic rationality is no substitute for democracy. What, then, does Habermas call for in a European constitution? His 1991 essay already offered a response—which he expanded later (Time, 113ff.): Constitutional democracies can assure, less and less, that those affected by their politics and policies will be integrated into international processes of decision making. The notion of selflegislation—which holds that those at whom laws are directed should also be  able to understand themselves as the authors of legislation (Time, 113)— demands “the inclusion of the other.” Habermas offers cogent normative reasons for a European constitution. Unfortunately, the prospects for a happy outcome to the process of constitutionalization are proving ever more unlikely.

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References Abendroth, Wolfgang. 1954. “Begriff und Wesen des sozialen Rechtsstaates, Diskussionsbeitrag.” Veröffentlichungen der Vereinigung der Deutschen Staatsrechtslehrer 12:85–91. Forsthoff, Ernst. 1954. “Begriff und Wesen des sozialen Rechtstaates.” Veröffentlichungen der Vereinigung der Deutschen Staatsrechtslehrer 12:8–35. Habermas, Jürgen. 1995. “On the Internal Relation Between the Rule of Law and Democracy.” European Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 1: 12–20. Ipsen, Hans Peter. 1972. Europarecht. Tübingen: Mohr. Joerges, Christian. 2007. “Integration Through De-Legislation? An Irritated Heckler.” European Governance Papers (EUROGOV) no. N-07-03. http://www.connex-network .org /eurogov/pdf/egp-newgov-N-07–03.pdf. Joerges, Christian, and Florian Rödl. 2009. “Informal Politics, Formalised Law, and the ‘Social Deficit’ of European Integration: Reflections After the Judgments of the ECJ in Viking and Laval.” European Law Journal 15, no. 1: 1–19. Judt, Tony. 2006. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin. Keiser, Thorsten. 2005. “Europeanization as a Challenge to Legal History.” German Law Journal 6, no. 2: 473–481. Manow, Philip. 2001. “Ordoliberalismus als ökonomische Ordnungstheologie.” Leviathan 29, no. 2: 179–198. Mestmäcker, Ernst-Joachim. 1973. “Power, Law, and Economic Constitution.” German Economic Review 11, no. 3: 177–198. Sabel, Charles F., and Jonathan Zeitlin. 2008. “Learning from Difference: The New Architecture of Experimentalist Governance in the European Union.” European Law Journal 14, no. 3: 271–327. Weiler, Joseph H. H. 1994. “Fin-de-siècle Europe.” In Europe After Maastricht: An Ever Closer Union?, ed. Renaud Dehousse, 203–214. Munich: Law Books in Europe.

19 THE THEORY OF JUSTICE REGINA KREIDE

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or Nietzsche and Sloterdijk, justice is the enemy of freedom. Justice restricts freedom, which they both understand—notwithstanding other differences of opinion—in terms of what affords the greatest possible space for action. For Jürgen Habermas, on the other hand, freedom can only be understood insofar as it is afforded by justice. Without just processes that permit us to determine freedom’s extent and limits, there exists only arbitrary freedom for individuals—but no freedom in the proper sense (freedom for all). Habermas explores this basic moral intuition in his notion of procedural justice (Verfahrensgerechtigkeit). The matter is not set forward in a single volume; instead, it forms a normative leitmotif that recurs throughout his theoretical writings on morality, legal philosophy, and political theory. Two domains, while distinct, are closely connected: on the one hand, that of “moral justice,” which is elaborated in reference to moral theories in the Kantian tradition; on the other, the matter of “political justice,” which he explores above all in terms of legal philosophy. In the latter context, questions arise about justice in a transnational dimension—a matter addressed by the author’s political-theoretical writings on the constitutionalization of international law.

Moral Justice With the publication of “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification” (Moral Consciousness, 43–115), Habermas began to develop systematically a concept of justice within the framework of his moral theory. Like other Kantian theories of justice, Habermas’s view starts with the fundamental assumption that practical reason can derive its principles from its own substance. The “moral standpoint” permitting moral conflicts of action to be judged impartially, then, is not a matter of ultimate justified morality, moral realism, natural law, or the sagacity of the “philosopher-king.” Instead, impartiality is guaranteed by rules and procedures that produce just principles— that is, ones grounded in ethical procedure.

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Kant already established the procedural interpretation of justice through the Categorical Imperative. If one does not hold that the Categorical Imperative simply offers a maxim for conduct but rather that it provides a philosophical justification, as well, then valid maxims for action may serve the purposes of general legislation (Kant 2012; see also chapter 9 in this volume). The procedural nature of justice is articulated in two ways: first, in the demand for autonomy—that is, individual freedom to act according to “self-given laws”; and second, in the expectation that a general consensus regarding appropriate forms of action will result. These basic moral assumptions are stressed even more—albeit with different points of emphasis—by the contemporary theories of justice in the Kantian tradition with which Habermas engages (Justification, 29ff.). John Rawls (1971)—a figure of singular influence for twentieth-century theories of justice—justifies the principle and foundation along the lines of contract theory. Accordingly, he holds that parties making a contract—whose orientation follows the model of private law (Privatrecht)—arrive at their decisions in an “original position,” exercising equal freedom of choice and following their own interests. Through the so-called veil of ignorance (which means that one cannot know the outcome of interactions or their bearing on one’s future social status), parties must successively adopt the perspectives of all others who are involved: after all, once the “veil” is “lifted,” one may find oneself in a socially disadvantaged position. For this reason, even rational egoists are forced to adopt moral positions. However, Habermas identifies an element of residual voluntarism in Rawls inasmuch as parties entering a contract (who possess the “understanding of subjects of private law”) lack “insight” extending beyond simple calculations of self-interest—to say nothing of concerns regarding whether their decisions are right or wrong (Justification, 34). The matter of moral-practical insight, then, is left to the theorist to discover (Habermas 1996, 179). According to Habermas, Thomas Scanlon has solved this problem by revising the Kantian contract model in a decisive manner. Scanlon replaces the Kantian law of ethics—which everyone can accept on the basis of practical rational insight—with individuals’ wish to justify their actions in a way that will prove convincing to anyone who might possibly be affected by them. This occurs on the basis of reasons “no one could reasonably reject” (Scanlon 1982, 110; 1998). Rearranged along these lines, Rawls’s conception of practical reason ceases to be monologic in nature, since it is no longer sufficient to evaluate what seems to admit general agreement from the viewpoint of someone else— such a view, after all, amounts to my own perspective, which has been projected onto another. Scanlon holds that everyone must arrive at a judgment, from his or her own perspective, about what forms of action cannot

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rationally meet with rejection from anyone in the circle of parties potentially affected. The process demands justified agreement from all the individuals concerned. Instead of a view of justice that is “thrust” upon others, parties must—at least virtually—imagine an intersubjective consensus that others can accept as just (Justification, 51). It is no accident that Scanlon—like Habermas—invokes George Herbert Mead’s (1934) theory of symbolic interaction. The notion that a party engaged in an exchange takes on the perspective of his or her counterpart is not meant to enhance the contractual model but to serve as an alternative way of viewing matters (Moral Consciousness; Justification, 49; Theory of Communicative Action, 2:141–142). Lawrence Kohlberg (1981)—whose writings hold great significance for Habermas’s theoretical grounding of “just principles” and conception of moral action along the lines of developmental psychology—explains morality as a matter of ideational role playing. Given the simple change of perspective involving alter and ego—whereby both parties, in the event of a moral conflict, empathize with the other and, by turns, recognize their counterpart’s expectations, interests, and value orientations—it follows that the process of universalization must logically extend to all possible perspectives. Habermas, however, considers the danger of “emotivistic one-sidedness” unavoidable. When this occurs, the intuitive view of an individual’s situation supplants the properly intersubjective perspective permitting one to discern whether actions are right or wrong—which is necessary if these actions are to be reconsidered and modified. Therefore, he presents discourse ethics as an “alternative” (Justification, 69) based on the justification of norms. The latter are just when they are produced by “reflexive” discourse—that is, when the very procedures that afford just principles are evaluated in terms of the exchange of roles providing the conditions of argument. In the early 1980s, Carol Gilligan (1982) critiqued Kohlberg’s thesis that six developmental levels—deemed increasingly universal in scope—underlie moral judgments. In particular, she took issue with the one-sided view that such judgments are based on “reason” alone; because he had disregarded other forms of knowledge and ways of managing moral conflicts, Gilligan argued, Kohlberg neglected care—that is, engagement with others, consideration for the uniqueness of individuals, and thinking about relations of closeness and intimacy between human beings. Kohlberg recognized the importance of these objections and responded by trying to derive justice from benevolence (Kohlberg et al. 1986). He failed to do so convincingly, however, inasmuch as he maintained that individual perspectives only seem incompatible with matters of justice at first glance—“care,” he argued, in fact represents an aspect of “justice” (see chapter 10 in this volume). Gilligan’s reflections have prompted Habermas to introduce solidarity as the “other side” of justice (Justification, 70ff.). Any deontological theory of

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justice must fulfill two demands: equal treatment for all and respect for individual dignity, on the one hand, and the preservation of intersubjective relations of mutual recognition, on the other. Seyla Benhabib formulates the demands of the discourse-theoretical conception of justice by introducing points of reference that correspond to the distinction between justice and solidarity: on the one hand, the “generalized other” (a category that induces us to recognize every individual as a being with equal rights and duties) and, on the other, the “concrete other” (a category that makes us see the other in his or her individual completeness—that is, as someone who has a particular biography and a unique emotional/affective constitution) (Benhabib 1995, 182ff.; cf. Wingert 1993, for the distinction between respect that is “just” and respect cased on “solidarity”). According to Benhabib, only when both standpoints are adopted and connected together may “epistemological blindness” (1995, 182) concerning the good life—and therefore injustice—be avoided (see chapter 36 in this volume). In all these theories, the discursive model of justice still refers to the reciprocal and general justification of norms by all parties potentially affected. At the same time, it undoes—e.g., in the work of Rawls—the rigid separation between justice and the good life. Habermas addresses the matter in his works of legal philosophy and political theory (Facts, 447ff.; Inclusion, 253ff.).

Political Justice In Habermas’s philosophy of law, procedural justice changes appearance without losing its core, normative dimension. Whereas his moral theory concerns the moral justification of procedures grounding just principles, Habermas’s legal philosophy develops principles, in the context of political justification, that lay the foundations for a community of law (Rechtsgemeinschaft). (On the distinction between morality, law, and politics, see Forst 2002.) In terms of morality, the process concerns the hypothetical community of all human beings, who agree on moral and procedural principles that regulate their life together. A just procedure is secured by a political community of law as it exists among citizens who have agreed on morally justified principles and now seek to establish just institutions. The latter include constitutional rights and human rights as well as rules about social justice and respect for distinct forms of culture. Habermas’s efforts to ground a system of rights have taken equal distance both from liberal theories that grant precedence to classical civil liberties (Freiheitsrechte) and from republican theories emphasizing rights of participation in political processes and decisions. The complementary relationship between individual (subjective) liberties and popular sovereignty, and

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between law and politics, is crucial to Habermas’s conception of “political” justice—a view he has developed in exchanges with Klaus Günther and Ingeborg Maus, among others. The democratic genesis of legal principles—and not a legal principle given a priori—guarantees that constitutional rights and laws will be just (Maus 1992). Subjective freedom, in turn, permits one to “get out” (aussteigen) of processes of communicative action and to withdraw into a private condition, free of the “burden” of free communicative exchange(s) (Günther 1992; see chapter 14 in this volume). This point makes the connection between “moral” and “political” forms of justice particularly clear. In terms of logic, the former precedes the latter (Forst 1999, 151): principles grounded in morality “govern” processes of legislation (Rechtssetzung); the legislative process combines an array of pragmatic, moral, and juridical discourses with negotiations that, while presenting different kinds of relation internally, ultimately lead to well-founded agreements. In justificatory discourse, moral arguments trump others (Habermas 1996a, 1612): just procedures produce results that, because they can be universalized, are also just. The relationship between justice and politics is also the focus of an exchange between Rawls and Habermas that appeared in the Journal of Philosophy in 1995. Prompted by an awareness of the plurality of cultures and worldviews, Rawls had stressed—ever since the Dewey Lectures at Columbia University (Rawls 1993)—the political nature of his theory of justice. Now, Rawls tested his ideas—founded on the model of contracts—to see whether they could find acceptance in a pluralistic society. For this to occur, he affirmed that it must be shown, by way of public discussion, that “justice as fairness” can yield an “overlapping consensus” (Rawls 1993, §3, 144ff.). Rawls pictures a citizenry— one that is not “virtual” but altogether real—that has to decide whether his theory holds, and he admits the openness of the outcome (65). Habermas, however, has maintained that this amounts to a false understanding of a truly “political” theory of justice: citizens cannot convince themselves of its validity before arriving at a consensus—which Rawls already presumes to exist. Clearly, a connection between the validity of the theory and evaluation of the same under pluralistic conditions is lacking. For this reason, Habermas concludes that Rawls has given up on the possibility of linking justice to political freedom. Unlike older, “substantial” conceptions of justice founded on notions of “the good life” or “the common good,” modern legal systems hold that justice and freedom are interrelated and interdependent: a just political order is in place when individual liberty has been achieved democratically—as is the case, one might add, when solidarity prevails among legal subjects (Brunkhorst 2005).

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Global Justice Global problems—e.g., worldwide poverty and the fact that entire swaths of the population lack access to work, education, and legal representation—have raised the question whether “justice” represents a normative measure extending beyond the borders of the nation-state. Rawls (2001) limits his recommendations for international social justice to a “duty to help” foreign peoples provided they are prepared to develop into “well-ordered” societies (453); Thomas Nagel (2005), on the other hand, maintains that justice cannot prevail between states or their citizens as long as no transnational sovereign wields the power to make them fulfill such duties. Adopting a universalistic perspective, Peter Singer (1972) calls for a general, “positive” obligation to assist others. Just as it would be morally wrong not to save a drowning child we might encounter on a walk, we make ourselves guilty by not regularly donating to relief efforts. Habermas’s project of “global domestic politics” presents a twofold understanding of supranational justice. On the one hand, the project rests upon the minimalistic premise that the goal of global domestic politics, above all else, involves securing peace; hereby, justice is restricted to avoiding war and guaranteeing human rights and civil liberties (Divided West, 161–166). On the other hand, the project harbors the comparatively “utopian” ambition of a global government organization that would steer domestic world politics in keeping with the principles of universal justice; such principles would find expression in a world organization and its charter (Habermas 2007, 450). Thereby, Habermas draws a line dividing, on the one hand, the clearly defined tasks assuring justice on a supranational level (above all, the preservation of peace) and, on the other, various transnational matters “of a political nature” (e.g., setting up economic regulations and measures for environmental protection, promoting the arts, and establishing social-political standards; see chapter 17 in this volume). Read along “minimalistic” lines, negative duties—i.e., curtailing “wars of aggression, genocide, and other crimes against humanity”—provide the basis for the administration of justice by international courts and for political decisions made by the United Nations (Divided West, 164). Here, no room exists for, e.g., fighting poverty on a supranational level; such matters must involve a transnational agenda, which is an item of political negotiation. However, it is also possible to read Habermas in more ambitious terms. On this view, the United Nations provides the normative framework for world politics in general—including political decisions on the transnational level. Tasks are divided between two spheres according to functional demands that must be fulfilled by economic organizations (e.g., the World Trade Organization), but

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they are not determined in advance (Naturalism, 345). A separation that preceded the discursive process—whether in terms of morality or politics—would be incompatible with the demand for procedural justice. According to many theorists, there is much that speaks for the second reading. At least three arguments may be adduced to support it. In the first place, one can see—in terms of the actual consequences that follow from politics—that more human beings die each year of preventable diseases caused by poverty than are killed in wars. This is reason enough to promote the issue to a supranational level of engagement (Pogge 2002, Kreide 2007). Second, the poverty that exists across the globe is not the fault of those affected; at least in some measure, it results from economic, financial, and political practices that benefit some and put others in desperate situations (O’Neill 2000, Caney 2005). Finally, a response to the question—“What is a matter of justice and what is best left to political negotiations?”—should “follow the internal logic of moral discourse” (Lafont 2009). Matters of justice are not “political” inasmuch as compromises can never provide a satisfactory answer to the questions they raise. For these reasons—and especially given the crisis of globalization—the task of determining the relationship between justice, freedom, and politics beyond the borders of the nation-state has only become more urgent; indeed, it has hardly begun.

References Benhabib, Seyla. 1995. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2005. Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community. Trans. Jeffrey Flynn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Caney, Simon. 2005. Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forst, Rainer. 1999. “Die Rechtfertigung der Gerechtigkeit. Rawls’ Politischer Liberalismus und Habermas’ Diskurstheorie in der Diskussion.” In Das Recht der Republik, ed. Hauke Brunkhorst and Peter Niesen, 105–169. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2002. Contexts of Justice: Political Philosophy Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Günther, Klaus. 1992. “Die Freiheit der Stellungnahme als politisches Grundrecht – eine Skizze.” Theoretische Grundlagen der Rechtspolitik: Beiheft zum Archiv für Rechtsund Sozialphilosophie 54, ed. Peter Koller, Csaba Varga, and Ota Weinberger, 59–72. Franz Steiner Verlag. Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. “Versöhnung durch öffentlichen Vernunftgebrauch.” In Zur Idee des politischen Liberalismus, ed. Wilfried Hinsch, 169–195. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1996. “Reply to Symposium Participants, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.” Cardozo Law Review 17, no. 4–5: 1477–1559.

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——. 2007. “Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik: eine Replik.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit. Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 406–460. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kant, Immanuel. 2012. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1981. Essays on Moral Development. Vol.1: The Philosophy of Moral Development. Vol. 2: The Psychology of Moral Development. New York: Harper & Row. Kohlberg, Lawrence, Dwight R. Boyd, and Charles Levine. 1986. “Die Wiederkehr der sechsten Stufe.” In Bestimmung der Moral, ed. Wolfgang Edelstein and Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, 205–240. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kreide, Regina. 2007. “Neglected Injustice: Poverty as a Violation of Social Autonomy.” In Freedom from Poverty: Who Owes What to the Very Poor, ed. Thomas Pogge, 155–183. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lafont, Cristina. 2008. “Alternative Visions of a New Global Order: What Should Cosmopolitans Hope for?” Ethics and Global Politics 1, no. 1–2: 41–60. Maus, Ingeborg. 1992. Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Ed. Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nagel, Thomas. 2005. “The Problem of Global Justice.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no. 2: 113–147. O’Neill, Onora. 2000. “Transnational Economic Justice.” In Bounds of Justice, 115–142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pogge, Thomas. 2002. World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms. Cambridge: Polity. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press ——. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. ——. 1995. “Political Liberalism: Reply to Habermas.” Journal of Philosophy 92, no. 3: 132–180. ——. 2001. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Scanlon, Thomas. 1982. “Contractualism and Utilitarianism.” In Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Bernard Williams and Amartya Sen, 103–110. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap. Singer, Peter. 1972. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3: 229–243. Wingert, Lutz. 1993. Gemeinsinn und Moral: Gründzüge einer intersubjektivistischen Moralkonzeption. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

20 DECONSTRUCTION THOMAS KHURANA

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abermas’s exchange with Jacques Derrida is situated within the debate about modernity and postmodernity (see chapters 33 and 37). When he was awarded the Adorno Prize in 1980, Habermas defended the “unfinished project of modernity” in his acceptance speech; the opponents of modernity he identified included—in addition to old conservatives and neoconservatives of the recognizable variety—a group of “Young Conservatives,” among whom he numbered Michel Foucault and Derrida (“Modernity,” 53). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) devotes two chapters to Derrida, in which Habermas details, at greater length, what prompted this judgment. In his estimation, Derrida’s philosophy represents a radicalized critique of reason (Vernunftkritik), which amounts to an inadequate response to the diremptions and dualisms of modernity. This account—as well as the debate in Germany, France, and the United States that followed—was marked by polemical intensity and political vehemence; the effect on institutional and theoretical-political lines of allegiance was far-reaching. Following a chance meeting in Evanston (1996) and an exchange in Frankfurt (2000), the two philosophers began to refer to each other’s works more openly. The changed relationship found expression in a joint publication (Habermas and Derrida 2004) and a shared call for debate (see Thomassen 2006, 207ff.). Despite the new tone, however, the substantial differences between their philosophical positions by no means vanished. There is good reason to doubt whether Habermas, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, portrayed Derrida’s writings accurately and whether he situated them in the appropriate cultural and political contexts. Instead of tracing, point for point, the specific problems within Habermas’s account and the critical responses they elicited, it is more illuminating to remain at a certain remove from the debate. This will allow us to identify the common points of departure that Habermas’s and Derrida’s projects share and to indicate the way in which they challenge each other in systematically fruitful ways.

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Universal Pragmatics and the Ultratranscendental Analysis of “Writing” Derrida’s structural analysis of meaning—an approach he developed by engaging critically with Husserl’s phenomenology, Saussure’s structuralism, and Austin’s speech-act theory—challenges the project of a universal pragmatics in Habermas’s sense both in terms of methodology and in terms of its substantial claims. Derrida’s works have completed the philosophical turn from consciousness to language—a turn that, in Habermas’s estimation, represents the decisive methodological precondition for responding to the aporias of modern self-understanding (Discourse, 161). In Derrida’s philosophy, it is not the transcendental subject but the process of meaning—understood as “writing” in a generalized sense—upon which analysis should focus. However, the way that Derrida characterizes this process differs fundamentally from the perspective that Habermas adopts. All the same, it is worth remarking that, in terms of method, the two philosophers’ approaches lie closer to each other than Habermas seems to think—especially when he accuses deconstruction of displacing the critique of reason into the field of rhetoric and therefore engaging in stylistic criticism instead of analysis in the proper sense (Discourse, 188ff.). Just as Habermas presents his universal pragmatics as a continuation of transcendental analysis (Vorstudien, 379ff.), Derrida presents his investigations as exercises in “ultratranscendental” analysis. Both authors reject the notion of a transcendental subject and examine the structural preconditions of what they take to be a social processuality. In addition, they agree in according the conditions they analyze a merely “quasi-transcendental” status insofar as one cannot examine them by nonempirical means. Derrida, however, as he pursues his quasi- or ultratranscendental analysis, does not aim for the validity claims that, in Habermas’s view, arise in every instance of communication. Instead, Derrida tries to uncover basic, structural conditions of signification that generate paradoxical effects—and, ultimately, raise questions about whether the validity claims specified by universal pragmatics can ever be fulfilled. As Derrida put matters in a well-known formulation, such structural conditions (e.g., the differentiality and iterability of signifying operations) both represent the “conditions of possibility” for meaning and the “conditions of impurity” of its purity (1996, 82; 1988, 43). For this reason, all acts of signification, according to Derrida, are precarious and unstable in essence; this “fact” lends Derrida’s analyses an aporetic or “heterological” character (Gasché 1986). Contra certain critics, such a perspective does not necessarily preclude the explanation of stable orders of meaning within the everyday lifeworld of modernity or its autonomous systems; rather, Derrida simply emphasizes that, for a balance of any kind to be struck, it is necessary that structural

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instability be checked or concealed. At the same time, it is certain that deconstruction questions the idealizations that are inherent in the validity claims Habermas sees at work in all communicative actions (understandability, truth, truthfulness, and normative rightness). By Derrida’s account, the phenomenon of meaning is such that these validity claims are rendered highly problematic. As he views it, we need something other than mere awareness of fallibility to account for it. Habermas has countered the attack by suggesting that deconstruction remains wedded here to the metaphysics it critiques, merely expressing a skepticism that is the flipside of a metaphysical understanding of the constitutive ideals of communication. From Derrida’s perspective, on the other hand, Habermas—despite his differences with Karl-Otto Apel—appears to be trapped within a metaphysical understanding of communication and committed to ideas in the Kantian sense. These fundamental tensions between the thought of Derrida and Habermas are related to their different conceptions of the role of the subject and the nature of intersubjective relations, the status of the aesthetic in their projects, and the “emancipatory” potential of communicative practices (or lack thereof).

Subjectivity, Intersubjectivity, Alterity Habermas and Derrida disagree on how to overcome the subject-centered paradigm of philosophy, and they differ on the conception of sociality this in turn entails. Habermas suspects Derrida of still being attached to the model of subjective philosophy (inasmuch as he has simply renewed, in more radical form, Heidegger’s philosophy of origins)—and, at the same time, of having overshot the mark insofar as he abandons criticism when he posits the “subjectless” nature of processes of meaning (Discourse, 180–181; Postmetaphysical, 206ff.). Derrida, on the other hand, harbors suspicion that Habermas’s intersubjective conception of the Social is still dominated by an idealized notion of the communicative community—a model that simply repeats, on a larger scale, the idea of self-transparency operative within the philosophy of the subject; in his eyes, Habermas’s view ultimately heralds the end of communication for this reason (Wellmer 2007, 190–191). The mutual doubts sketched above reveal a difference between the ways the two philosophers assess the structure and teleology of social phenomena. For Habermas, the goal of signification/communication is understanding (Verständigung) and—even more importantly—agreement (Einverständnis); that is, Habermas conceives social relations in symmetrical terms. Derrida, on the other hand, holds that dissymmetrical relations structure the social sphere; for him, sociality means being dependent on, and being affected by, others who

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can never become entirely transparent—and, as others, necessarily elude our grasp. If anything like a “telos” of social relations exists for Derrida, it does not concern reaching mutual agreement; instead, it requires modes of relation that acknowledge the otherness, intransparency, and nonsymmetry that inform sociality (Critchley 2000). It is possible that Derrida’s emphasis of asymmetry and intransparency as irreducible structural elements of the Social led Habermas to conclude that his interlocutor’s understanding of the process of meaning ultimately amounted to “only a mystification of palpable social pathologies” (Discourse, 181). However, such an assessment seems overhasty inasmuch as Derrida, in his later writings, does not locate asymmetry and intransparency in phenomena that count as pathological but finds them in familiar ethical relations—for example, friendship, hospitality, and forgiveness (which, he maintains, account for and acknowledge structural asymmetry in particular ways).

Status of the Aesthetic Because deconstruction operates as a certain mode of reading the philosophical tradition, and because Derrida has devoted a great deal of attention to works of literature, Habermas has accused him of seeking to level the genre distinction between philosophy and literature (Discourse, 161ff.; Postmetaphysical, 205ff.): a philosophy-turned-literature loses its original cognitive potential just as much as a literary analysis that is taken to be a substantial critique of metaphysics. Richard Rorty has also characterized Derrida’s project as a new “form of writing” that transcends the established distinction between literature and philosophy; unlike Habermas, however, he does not consider such “philosophical literature” dangerous. Indeed, Rorty (1995) views Derrida’s project and Habermas’s pragmatics to be complementary inasmuch as the latter endeavor, which addresses problems within public discourse, is enriched by Derrida’s ironic perspective, which offers a new vocabulary and provides new ways of seeing. Derrida, for his part, emphatically denied that he wished to obliterate genre distinctions or to leave argumentative philosophy behind (Derrida 1986, 1995, 1996, 1988). Instead, he affirmed that his project was to launch a practical investigation as to what may or may not count as a philosophical argument, and he maintained that his interest was to show how the border between philosophy and literature is problematic in a very specific way. All the same, one is justified in wondering to what extent aesthetic practices are accorded a privileged status in disclosing deconstructive insights. Derrida has highlighted literature’s particular capacity to formalize relations, and he emphasized that

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literature affords a different way to view the structure of meaning, relations between self and other, and ethical and political matters (all of which “pure” philosophy addresses in reductive terms). The question arises, then, whether the “deconstructibility” of philosophical concepts and linguistic practices ultimately depends on our capacity to aestheticize them and turn them into literature. Especially in Germany, the matter has raised questions about points of contact between Derrida and Adorno. Even if it remains debatable whether Derrida considers the aesthetic to provide an “instance of exclusive knowledge [Erkenntnis]” (Menke 1991, 289), it is certain that he grants aesthetic forms a unique power to represent, elaborate, and question other discursive practices. In the framework Derrida sets up, the literary medium “exposes” established norms and validity claims to a special kind of “critique” that stands in tension with the type of critical examination and assessment exerted by a philosophical metadiscourse.

Emancipatory Potential Introducing an exchange between Derrida and Habermas (2000), Simon Critchley has pointed out that the former’s “Force of Law” (1992) refers—in a way that is surprisingly direct for many readers—to the “classical ideal of emancipation.” Critchley asks whether Derrida and Habermas do not, in fact, stand closer to each other than either party seems to realize. Both their projects are indebted to democracy and take up the “idea” of justice. Critchley finds passages in their works that document—at least as far as the “emancipatory” dimension of communicative practice is concerned—how their positions challenge each other in a productive way. Indeed, Derrida’s conception of justice has offered the point of departure for constructive criticism of Habermas’s own ideas on the subject (Honneth 1994, Menke 2004). Another promising field of inquiry involves Derrida’s notions of “democracy to come” and “autoimmunity” as they relate to Habermas’s notion of deliberative democracy (Critchley 2000, Derrida 2005). In further examinations of how Derrida’s project of deconstruction may stimulate critical social theory, it will prove necessary to ask questions already posed apropos of the relationship between universal pragmatics and grammatology. What is the nature of the “ideas” that orient our practices according to these projects? On what kind of structural conditions are our communicative practices founded? Derrida has continued to qualify the discursive infrastructures underlying our signifying practices as aporetic—thereby pointing to the ethical challenges they imply. Habermas has never made such a gesture. Moreover, Derrida repeatedly stressed that figures such as “justice”—figures that Critchley (in a Habermasian turn of phrase) has called “context-transcending

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idealizations”—cannot be understood in terms of regulative ideas (Derrida 1992, 25–26; 2005, 183); rather, they orient our practices in a different way that is urgent and open-ended at once. Even though Habermas has come to qualify the theoretical status of (his own) idealizations in increasingly modest terms, and even though he has explicitly distanced himself from the idea that the ideal communicative situation may ever be realized, one still has the impression that the ideas guiding his reflections possess a special status, which differs from the way the points of orientation function that Derrida qualified as both necessary and “impossible.” Therefore, it seems that the exact nature—whether aporetic or not—of communication (as well as the conceptual framework brought to bear on it) represents a point of divergence between Habermas and Derrida that is just as profound as it is insistent; the contours and consequences of this division await further investigation.

References Critchley, Simon. 2000. “Remarks on Derrida and Habermas.” Constellations 7:455–465. Derrida, Jacques. 1986. Memoirs for Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press. ——. 1988. Limited Inc. Trans. Gerald Graff, Jeffrey Mehlman, and Samuel Weber. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. ——. 1992. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’ ” In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, 3–67. New York: Routledge. ——. 1995. “Is There a Philosophical Language?” In Points . . . : Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, 216–227. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. ——. 1996. “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism.” In Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe, 77–88. London: Routledge. ——. 2005. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques, and Michael Wetzel. 1987. “Erwiderungen” and “Antwort an Apel.” Zeitmitschrift 3:76–85. Gasché, Rodolphe. 1986. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Habermas, Jürgen, and Jacques Derrida. 2004. Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Honneth, Axel. 1994. “Das Andere der Gerechtigkei: Habermas und die ethische Herausforderung der Postmoderne.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42:195–220. Menke, Christoph. 1991. Die Souveränität der Kunst. Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2004. Spiegelungen der Gleichheit. Politische Philosophie nach Adorno und Derrida. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Rorty, Richard. 1995. “Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 194, no. 4: 437–459.

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Thomassen, Lasse, ed. 2006. The Derrida-Habermas Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [This volume contains central contributions to the debate and an extensive bibliography.] Wellmer, Albrecht. 1985. Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne. Vernunftkritik nach Adorno. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2007. “Der Streit um die Wahrheit. Pragmatismus ohne regulative Ideen.” In Wie Worte Sinn machen: Aufsätze zur Sprachphilosophie, 180–207. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

21 POSTSTRUCTURALISM AMY ALLEN

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abermas’s critical engagement with postmodernism not only generated a great deal of attention in the 1980s and 1990s, but it has also laid down the gauntlet for a new generation of critical theorists who may now take on the task of rethinking Habermas’s stark opposition between pro-Enlightenment modernity and counter-Enlightenment postmodernity. Habermas’s critique of postmodernism goes hand in hand with his staunch defense of the normative content of modernity. Both are most forcefully articulated in his 1985 book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Although Habermas’s interpretations of particular thinkers in this book are at times questionable, the book’s overall thesis remains compelling. Habermas argues that both the philosophical discourse of modernity and its counterdiscourses remain mired in a problematic philosophy of subjectivity that must be left behind if the normative potential of modernity is to be realized. Habermas’s theory of communicative action breaks out of the philosophy of subjectivity and thus allows us to see how the promise of Enlightenment modernity might be fulfilled, despite the pervasive pathologies generated by capitalist modernization. Why was Habermas so concerned with using his two-sided historical account of the gains and losses characteristic of modernity to put postmodernism in its place? He rightly saw the growing influence of postmodernism in social and political theory in the mid-1980s, a trend that has continued unabated over the last twenty years. Habermas was concerned about this trend for two reasons. First, he worried that postmodernism, like the positivist social science he had criticized earlier in his career, leads to a form of value skepticism that undermines normative social criticism (see Moral Consciousness, 43–115). Second, he believed that postmodernism is simply antimodernism in disguise and that, as such, it is a new kind of conservatism masquerading as radical social critique (see “Modernity”). The term “postmodernism” can refer to a dizzying array of thinkers and styles of thought; it is perhaps best used, as Habermas tends to use it, to refer to a broad current of thought. The focus in what follows will be on Habermas’s critical engagements with two thinkers who fall within that broad current: Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Foucault will be taken as the primary representative of poststructuralism (though even this label is somewhat

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problematic), while Derrida is self-identified as the leading proponent of deconstruction. The focus on these two thinkers is justified not because they may be taken to stand in for the whole of what is referred to by the term “postmodern.” Rather, the justification for this focus is twofold: first, that Habermas had the most substantial critical engagement with the work of these two “postmodern” thinkers and, second, that these critical engagements have been the most productive, inspiring subsequent work in critical theory that seeks to rethink Habermas’s relationship to his “postmodern” interlocutors. The core of Habermas’s critique of Foucault is spelled out in the two lectures devoted to Foucault in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. After tracing the development of Foucault’s thought from his early, archaeological phase to his middle-period genealogies of power/knowledge relations, Habermas raises three major criticisms of the mature Foucault, the second of which is further subdivided into three parts. First, Habermas criticizes Foucault’s ambiguous use of the concept of power, which is employed simultaneously as an empirical and a transcendental concept, resulting in a paradoxical critical positivism. Second, Habermas charges Foucauldian genealogy with reductionism, of three types: in reducing meaning to power, genealogy ends up mired in presentism; in reducing truth and validity to power, genealogy is stuck in relativism; and in reducing normativity to power, genealogy is left with a problematic cryptonormativism. Third, Habermas complains that because Foucauldian genealogy “deals with an object domain from which the theory of power has erased all traces of communicative actions entangled in lifeworld contexts” (Discourse, 286), his analysis of power is unsociological, in two senses. It cannot explain how social order is possible in the first place, since the possibility of social order depends on some nonstrategic forms of interaction. Nor can it explain how the individual and society relate to each other, since it views individuals as copies mechanically punched out by disciplinary power relations rather than as the autonomous products of a process of individuation through socialization. In the background of all of these criticisms of Foucault is the charge that he, like Nietzsche and Heidegger before him, engages in a total or abstract rather than a determinate negation of the Enlightenment project. Habermas based his critical reading of Foucault in his lectures on modernity on Foucault’s early and middle-period works, up to and including the first volume of his History of Sexuality, published in 1976. His lectures did not encompass Foucault’s late work on ethical practices of the self in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality, nor did they take into account his late essays on Kant and the Enlightenment project. (Nor could they, since much of that work wasn’t published until after Habermas had completed the lectures on which his book was based.) In a subsequent essay, when Habermas did respond to some of Foucault’s later work, he saw

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Foucault’s embrace of a certain understanding of the Kantian Enlightenment project as standing in stark contradiction to his earlier work. Moreover, he suggested that it was the productive yet ultimately unsustainable contradiction in Foucault’s work between his critical analysis of power and his unmasking of the will to truth that led him, “in this last of his texts, back into a sphere of influence he had tried to blast open, that of the philosophical discourse of modernity” (New Conservatism, 179). It is possible, however, contra Habermas, to read even the early and middleperiod Foucault as a thinker who aims to transform the Kantian Enlightenment project from within, by exploring the historically and socially specific, hence contingent, conditions of possibility for subjectivity and agency in late Western modernity (Allen 2008). This is, in fact, how Foucault presents his own philosophical oeuvre in such essays as “What Is Enlightenment?” This reading complicates considerably Habermas’s interpretation of Foucault as an antimodern young conservative who sets out to negate abstractly the Enlightenment project only to find himself unwittingly drawn back into its orbit. It is also possible to challenge Habermas’s portrayal of Foucault’s genealogical analysis of the subject as a mechanically punched-out copy (Allen 2008). Indeed, challenging this reading is particularly important in light of Foucault’s late work on practices of the self, which presuppose a degree of autonomy and deliberate self-transformation that would seem impossible if Habermas’s reading of Foucault’s middle-period work is correct. The fuller picture of Foucault’s account of the self that emerges from his late work is that of a self who engages in practices of self-formation and self-discipline, though these do not take place outside of power relations. Although Foucault did not give a fully satisfactory account of how his late work on self-constituting, ethical practices and his earlier genealogy of the normalized, disciplined subject are compatible, the existence of the former once again problematizes Habermas’s account of the latter. It is also possible to rethink the normative stance of Foucault’s critique, by uncovering an implicit norm of freedom at work in Foucault’s texts (Oksala 2005). This reading calls into question Habermas’s charge that Foucault reduces normativity to power relations. Each of these reinterpretations makes it possible to challenge the received view of the Foucault-Habermas debate, according to which Foucault and Habermas offer diametrically opposed approaches to critical theory (Hoy and McCarthy 1994). On the basis of these sorts of reinterpretations, some critical theorists have recently begun to develop approaches inspired by both Habermas and Foucault (Allen 2008, Biebricher 2005, Saar 2007). Habermas’s critique of Derridean deconstruction, like his critique of Foucauldian genealogy, centers on the charge of a totalizing or abstract negation of Enlightenment rationality. Indeed, Habermas maintains that deconstruction is Derrida’s answer to a problem encountered by the totalizing

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self-critique of reason. Because this critique must use the tools of reason, it is open to the charge of performative contradiction; that is to say, the totalizing critique of reason relies for its performance on the very rational tools that it rejects in its substantive critique. As Habermas sees it, Derrida attempts to escape this problem by turning the standard philosophical primacy of logic over rhetoric on its head. With this move, the standard of evaluation for the critique of reason becomes rhetorical success, not logical consistency, and the charge of performative contradiction misses the mark. This point is related to what Habermas takes to be Derrida’s broader aim, namely, to dissolve the genre distinction between philosophy and literature. Habermas objects to both the reversal of the primacy of logic over rhetoric and the leveling of the genre distinction between philosophy and literature. Instead, he argues for a division of labor between philosophy and literary criticism, in which it is acknowledged that both philosophy and literary criticism “have a family resemblance to literature—and to this extent to one another as well—in their rhetorical achievements. But their family relationship stops right there, for in each of these enterprises the tools of rhetoric are subordinated to the discipline of a distinct form of argumentation” (Discourse, 209–210). Habermas also connects Derrida’s elision of the distinction between literature and philosophy with a conflation of the distinction between communicative uses of language and fictional discourse. Fictional discourse is world disclosive; it involves the playful, poetic creation of new worlds by means of linguistic innovation. Although Habermas acknowledges that these poetic elements are present in ordinary linguistic communication, they do not predominate in such contexts. Instead, language in everyday contexts of communication is predominantly made up of the illocutionary binding force of utterances that serves to coordinate social interaction. As Habermas sees it, the poetic, worlddisclosive function is not the only nor the primary function of language. To claim that it is primary, as both Derrida and Heidegger do, is to neglect the way we use language to solve problems, to coordinate our interactions by reaching understanding about things in the objective, intersubjective, or subjective worlds. For Habermas, this is tantamount to denying the rational potential inherent in linguistic communication. Hence, in the end, Habermas maintains that Derrida’s attempt to escape the performative contradiction of the totalizing self-critique of reason by asserting the primacy of rhetoric over logic and world disclosure over communication “dulls the sword of the critique of reason itself” (Discourse, 210). Habermas’s critique of Derrida, like his critique of Foucault, is predicated on presenting Derrida as an antimodern, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Kantian thinker who rejects reason in favor of its rhetorical and poetic Other. Yet, as with Foucault, it is possible to read Derrida as a philosopher who is self-consciously transforming Kantian critical philosophy from within, hence, as one

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who embraces rather than rejects the mantle of Enlightenment modernity. On this reading, Derrida’s aim is not to collapse distinctions between rhetoric and logic or literature and philosophy. Rather, it is, as Christopher Norris puts it, to “press . . . certain Kantian antinomies to the point where they demand a form of analysis undreamt of in the mainstream tradition” (Norris, in “Modernity,” 101), in particular, antinomies that concern the conditions of possibility of linguistic meaning and representation. This reading of Derrida complicates Habermas’s portrayal of him as an antimodern young conservative. Further complicating Habermas’s critique is the fact that it is based entirely on Derrida’s early work, up to and including his exchange with the analytic philosopher of language John Searle, published in the book Limited, Inc (Derrida 1988). As such, it does not take into account the explicit turn toward ethical and political concerns that occupied Derrida from the 1990s onward. This is a pity, because in that ethical and political work, a good deal more common ground emerges between Derrida and Habermas than is evident in Habermas’s lectures. In his explicitly ethical and political writings, Derrida draws on Levinas to articulate our infinite ethical responsibility toward the Other (Derrida 1996), he gestures toward a justice to come that is both impossible and necessary (Derrida 1992), and he embraces our inheritance of an inherently open, contestable, and self-critical form of democracy (Derrida 2004). All of these moves bring Derrida’s work into closer contact with Habermas’s central concerns, in ways that merit further consideration by critical theorists. Their common adherence to the spirit if not the letter of the Kantian philosophical tradition is evident in their jointly signed plea for European solidarity in the face of the war in Iraq (Habermas and Derrida 2003). If Habermas, Foucault, and Derrida can all be productively understood as transforming the Kantian Enlightenment project from within, albeit in different ways, then their disagreements look less like a war between entrenched philosophical camps and more like a family quarrel. This quarrel will be resolved only when we are no longer held captive by the picture of Habermas as the promodern, pro-Enlightenment, progressive hero and Foucault and Derrida as the antimodern, counter-Enlightenment, young conservative villains. As that picture loses its ability to captivate us, productive new visions of a simultaneously deconstructive and reconstructive critical theory will begin to emerge.

References Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Biebricher, Thomas. 2005. Selbstkritik der Moderne: Habermas und Foucault im Vergleich. Frankfurt: Campus.

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Borradori, Giovanna. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited Inc. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. ——. 1992. “The Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority.” In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, 3–67. New York: Routledge. ——. 1996. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2004. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. ——. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. ——. 1985. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. ——. 1986. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3: The Care of the Self. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. ——. 1997. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, 303–319. New York: The New Press. Habermas, Jürgen, and Jacques Derrida. 2003. “February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe.” Constellations 10, no. 3: 291–297. Hoy, David, and Thomas McCarthy. 1994. Critical Theory. London: Blackwell. Oksala, Johanna. 2005. Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saar, Martin. 2007. Genealogie als Kritik: Geschichte und Theorie des Subjekts nach Nietzsche und Foucault. Frankfurt: Campus.

22 FEMINISM AMY R. BAEHR

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eminist theory is critical theory. It seeks to liberate women from the conditions that deprive, oppress, and disadvantage them. It does this by explaining and criticizing those conditions and by suggesting emancipatory alternatives. Recently, feminist theorists have sought resources for feminist theory in the work of Jürgen Habermas. Some note Habermas’s personal commitment to justice for women (Fraser 1989, 7; Fleming 1997, 7; Johnson 2006, 156). But many point to insufficient attention to gender in his work overall and find it lacking well-developed theories of gender oppression and gender justice. It is debated whether his discourse theory of democracy, morality, and law nonetheless may be used to illuminate the conditions that deprive, oppress, and disadvantage women and to guide reflection concerning emancipatory alternatives. The feminist literature on this subject is extensive. Given space constraints, this entry mentions only major issues and several important texts. Feminist responses to The Theory of Communicative Action focus on its failure to illuminate the gender-oppressive character of the lifeworld. While Communicative Action emphasizes the socially integrated character of the family, it pays scant attention to the fact that the family in late capitalism is integrated by norms prescribing oppressive gender roles, roles that extend to the public realm, the economy, and the state. And while Communicative Action emphasizes the threat of system colonization of family life, it fails to explore the extent to which families are commonly sites of a gendered economic exchange “of services, labor, cash and sex—and frequently sites of [gendered exploitation,] coercion and violence” (Fraser 1989, 120; see Allen 2008, 99; Benhabib 1986, 252; Cohen 1995, 71). Some feminists attribute this failure to highlight the gender-oppressive character of the lifeworld to the understanding of power in Communicative Action, arguing that “Habermas lacks any theory of power operative within the modern lifeworld other than that of system intrusions” (“Modernity,” 240). Some argue that gender should be understood as a distinct form of power at work in the lifeworld, one with profound influence on the systems (Allen 2008; Cohen 1995, 70; Fraser 1989, 121). Once gender is recognized as a form of power, system colonization remains a concern: it can reinforce oppressive

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gender norms (Fraser 1989, 133) and rob civil society of resources necessary for their dismantling (Cohen 1995, 72). Nonetheless, juridification of family life can have emancipatory effects—consider the protection of women’s rights in the family and material support from the welfare state (Fleming 1997, 86). Thus from a feminist point of view, decolonization is far from a fully adequate response to gender oppression (Fraser 1989, 134–135). What is needed is a more comprehensive account of power, a subtler account of juridification, and an account of how gender-oppressive lifeworld norms are to be undermined. Acknowledging inadequate attention to gender in The Theory of Communicative Action, some feminists emphasize Habermas’s claim that modernity promises progressive democratization of the lifeworld (Benhabib 1992, 81; Cohen 1995, 58; Johnson 2006, 155). Insofar as the women’s movement is a form of democratic practice—expanding access to discursive resources, publicly thematizing and contesting oppressive lifeworld norms, and creating new, nonpatriarchal norms, as well as the associations necessary to bring such norms to bear on the systems—the women’s movement may be understood as the “culmination of the logic of modernity” (Benhabib 1989, 110). To be sure, The Theory of Communicative Action describes the women’s movement as, to a significant degree, a failure of modernization, a defensive reaction against colonization intent on preserving particular identities, norms, and alternative values (Allen 2008, 158; Benhabib 1986, 252; Cohen 1995, 60–64). Some argue that this appraisal of the women’s movement is consistent with Habermas’s early understanding of public deliberation in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. While the women’s movement seeks to thematize publicly social inequalities and their effect on public deliberation, public deliberation in Structural Transformation requires the bracketing of social inequalities. While the women’s movement seeks to thematize publicly women’s particular needs and interests, public deliberation in Structural Transformation must focus on generalizable interests. While the women’s movement seeks to thematize publicly issues conventionally understood as private—the domestic division of labor, sexual violence, gender identity— Structural Transformation reiterates a traditional public-private distinction. While the women’s movement develops its own diverse counterpublics, the public sphere in Structural Transformation is homogeneous and singular. And while the women’s movement seeks to bring women’s identities, bodies, and rhetorical styles into public, Structural Transformation uncritically accepts the model of the Western public sphere and its male political subjectivity (Fraser 1997, 69–98; Dean 1996; Landes 1995, 98; Young 1990, 96–121). Indeed, some feminist historians argue, far from hastening the dissolution of gender, modernity introduced the very understanding of gender difference as hierarchy with which we now contend (“Modernity,” 242; see also Klinger 2000). According to that understanding, men are suited for participation in a

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public realm in which citizens’ freedom and equality may be redeemed, while women are the natural inhabitants of a private realm of dependency, intimacy, and family (Maihofer 1990, 354). Thus women cannot be included in the public realm as women, but only to the extent that they conform to a standard of male political subjectivity. The alternative, to petition for inclusion as women, risks reifying a subordinating understanding of gender difference. To avoid this “dilemma of difference” (Minow 1990), some feminists suggest that what is needed is a fundamentally different understanding of citizenship and democracy (Landes 1996, 307). If this understanding is to avoid the dilemma of difference, it must allow for nonhierarchical gender difference (Maihofer 1990, 352). Some find inspiration for such a reconceptualization of citizenship in Habermas’s discourse ethics (Benhabib 1992, 9; Fraser 1989, 182; 1997, 79; Young 1990, 34). Practical discourses include all those potentially affected by a norm and “open one’s eyes to the ‘difference,’ that is, the peculiarity and the inalienable otherness of a second person” (Habermas 1990, 112). Some argue that practical discourse makes possible the thematization of difference, social inequality, and power necessary for undermining masculine standards. Indeed, some argue, a public/private distinction does not precede but is determined within discourse (Benhabib 1992, 110–111). But some reject Habermas’s claim that the aim of discourse should be consensus about the common good, because, they argue, such an aim obscures the salience of differences. Instead, the aim should be the thematization of difference itself and a keeping of the conversation going (Benhabib 1992, 38). A public sphere focused on the thematization of difference is best understood as “heterogeneous” (Young 1990, 116ff.) and plural—including multiple and “counter-publics” (Fraser 1997, 80ff.). Some argue that public deliberation must not privilege rational argumentation but welcome other styles of discourse— used by the women’s movement—for example, storytelling, rhetoric, and expressive and “embodied aspects of speech” (Young 1990, 118; see also Lara 1998; cf. Benhabib 1996, 83; and Johnson 2006, 160–162). Some hold that even such reconceptualized public deliberation will not be purged of power (Dean 1996). If the power of gender is present at the start— because gendering precedes discourse—then we should not expect public discourse to be gender’s antidote (Allen 2000, 56). A truly emancipatory feminist politics will include a politics of the self, afforded by a comprehensive account of power that illuminates how gender is acquired and functions (Allen 2008, 19). Habermas dedicates significant attention to the dilemma of difference in Between Facts and Norms (425). He identifies it as a failure of democracy and recognizes the women’s movement’s work toward a solution as “a practical appropriation of the critical normativity dormant in liberal democratic”

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institutions (Johnson 2006, 156). On Habermas’s view, a dilemma of difference will ensue if those affected by a norm do not participate meaningfully in its public deliberation—“because only women themselves can clarify the ‘relevant aspects’ that define equality and inequality for a given matter” (Facts, 420). Democratic participation guards against juridification that reinforces and enforces oppressive and disadvantaging identities, and it promotes women’s personal and political autonomy (Cohen 1995, 74; see also Benhabib 1992, 113). Between Facts and Norms recognizes that the public/private distinction must be discursively determined because, as Habermas explains, “the boundaries of private autonomy” must be drawn such that “it sufficiently qualifies private persons for their role of citizen” (Facts, 417). And in Between Facts and Norms, public deliberation includes the activities of diverse publics, such as feminist and alternative publics (Facts, 307, 374) concerned to clarify needs, identities, and power relations (Johnson 2006, 156). But Between Facts and Norms is not a detailed guide to how gender exclusion from public deliberation currently works. Nor does it criticize particular gender-oppressive norms or suggest emancipatory alternatives (Facts, 426). On a Habermasian view, these are the tasks of open-ended and fallible public discourse itself and of advocatory discourse of the kind provided by feminists. But, insofar as discourse theory suggests that the social order is legitimate only if those subject to it are its authors, some argue it provides a normative foundation for a feminist politics dedicated to women’s inclusion and the progressive democratization of society. (Many hold that feminist politics requires a normative foundation [Allen 2000, 59; Benhabib 1992, 9; Klinger 1998, 245; Pauer-Studer 1993, 43; for criticism, see Butler 1994].) That is, while Habermas’s discourse theory might not explain exactly how exclusion works or which norms are illegitimate and which legitimate, it does explain why women’s exclusion is objectionable, and it motivates the search for strategies of inclusion.

References Allen, Amy. 2000. “Reconstruction or Deconstruction: A Reply to Johanna Meehan.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 26, no. 3: 53–60. ——. 2008. The Politics of Ourselves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 1986. Critique, Norm, and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press. ——. 1995. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge. ——. 1996. “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy.” In Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib, 67–94. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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Butler, Judith. 1994. “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism.’ ” In Feminist Contentions, ed. Seyla Benhabib et al., 35–57. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Jean L. 1995. “Critical Social Theory and Feminist Critiques: The Debate with Jürgen Habermas.” In Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, ed. Johanna Meehan, 57–90. New York: Routledge. Dean, Jodi. 1996. “Civil Society: Beyond the Public Sphere.” In The Handbook of Critical Theory, ed. David Rasmussen, 220–242. Oxford: Blackwell. Fleming, Marie. 1997. Emancipation and Illusion: Rationality and Gender in Habermas’s Theory of Modernity. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. New York: Routledge. Habermas, Jürgen, and Torben Hviid Nielsen. 1990. “Jürgen Habermas, Morality, Society, and Ethics.” Acta Sociologica 33, no. 2: 93–114. Johnson, Pauline. 2006. Habermas: Rescuing the Public Sphere. New York: Routledge. Klinger, Claudia. 1998. “Feministische Philosophie als Dekonstruktion und Kritische Theorie.” In Kurskorrekturen: Feminismus zwischen Kritischer Theorie und Postmoderne, ed. Gudrun Alexi Knapp, 242–256. Frankfurt: Campus. ——. 2000. “Die Ordnung der Geschlechter und die Ambivalenz der Moderne.” In Das Geschlecht der Zukunft: Zwischen Frauenemanzipation und Geschlechtervielfalt, ed. Sybille Becker et al., 29–63. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Landes, Joan. 1995. “The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconstruction.” In Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, ed. Johanna Meehan, 91–117. New York: Routledge. Lara, Maria Pía. 1998. Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere. Berkeley: University of California Press. Maihofer, Andrea. 1990. “Gleichheit nur für Gleiche?” In Differenz und Gleichheit: Menschenrechte haben (k)ein Geschlecht, ed. Ute Gerhard et al., 338–350. Frankfurt: Ulrike Helmer. Minow, Martha. Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Pauer-Studer, Herlinde. 1993. “Moraltheorie und Geschlechterdifferenz.” In Jenseits der Geschlechtermoral, ed. Herta Nagl-Docekal and Herlinde Pauer-Studer, 33–68. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch. Young, Iris. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

23 NEOPRAGMATISM RICHARD J. BERNSTEIN

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or over forty years Habermas has taken inspiration from and been deeply influenced by the classical American pragmatists, especially Charles S. Peirce, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. He has appropriated, reconstructed, and integrated many of the primary themes of these thinkers into his own comprehensive philosophic perspective: a radical critique of Cartesianism and the philosophy of consciousness; a focus on the primacy of social practices and action in understanding everyday life (the lifeworld); a thoroughgoing fallibilism that encompasses both knowledge of the world and moral reasoning; a development of an intersubjective dialogical understanding of action and rationality; and a commitment to radical democracy based on participation, equality, and the reciprocal give-and-take of citizens. He also shares with the classical pragmatists a naturalistic orientation. Human beings are endowed with a biological endowment and a cultural way of life that have a natural origin that can, in principle, be explained by evolutionary theory. This is a naturalism that takes account of evolutionary development and holds that human learning processes are continuous with prior evolutionary learning processes. Habermas calls this “weak naturalism,” but it might more aptly be called “robust naturalism” because it is opposed to the varieties of reductive naturalism. In the past few decades he has engaged in vigorous exchanges with Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Robert Brandom, who identify themselves as working in a pragmatic tradition. Habermas now characterizes himself as a “Kantian pragmatist.” In his debates and exchanges with Rorty, Putnam, and Brandom, he has revised and refined his own distinctive “Kantian pragmatism.” The pragmatic movement, from its earliest days, has always been involved in conflict and disagreement. The disagreements among contemporary pragmatists are no less sharp and consequential than those of the classical American pragmatists. Peirce began his philosophic career by seeking—in Habermas’s expression—to “detranscendentalize” Kant (Peirce appropriated the term “pragmatic” from Kant). According to Rorty, however, pragmatism begins with James and Dewey, who repudiate Kant and the Kantian elements in Peirce’s philosophy. Yet for Rorty’s fellow pragmatist Hilary Putnam, Kant is  the great hero. Putnam argues that pragmatism’s contribution to our

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understanding of inquiry, belief, and knowledge consists of variations on Kantian themes. In this respect there is a close affinity between Putnam and Habermas. We can delineate the main features of Habermas’s Kantian pragmatism by following what he endorses and rejects in Rorty, Putnam, and Brandom.

Richard Rorty Habermas’s sharpest disagreement is with Rorty and his neopragmatic contextualism. He is sympathetic with Rorty’s critique of epistemological foundationalism and his insistence that philosophic problems have been transformed by the linguistic turn. There is no way in which we can understand conceptual knowledge apart from the way in which concepts function in language. He is also sympathetic with Rorty’s critique of epistemological and semantic forms of “representationalism” insofar as they treat knowledge and language as a “mirror of nature.” But he vigorously argues against Rorty’s contextualism. He thinks that Rorty cannot escape from the performative contradiction of a self-refuting relativism. Habermas criticizes the way in which Rorty seeks to dismiss or trivialize such ideas as context-independent unconditional truth, objectivity, universal validity claims, and the role of argumentation in disputes about moral norms. Habermas defends the unavoidableness of making universal validity claims in communicative interactions. Although Habermas seeks to detranscendentalize Kant in a pragmatic fashion, he defends what he takes to be at the core of the transcendental project—the search for the presumably universal unavoidable conditions that must be fulfilled in our communicative interactions. Another way of characterizing a key difference between Habermas and Rorty is by focusing on their radically different responses to “realist intuitions.” Habermas seeks to vindicate these intuitions by showing that we must presuppose that there is an objective world that is independent of us (a world that is the same for all human beings) and constrains what we can know. Rorty recommends that we should simply abandon these “realist intuitions.” He tells us that “the world is well lost”; we never get  “beyond” playing off different vocabularies—different descriptions and redescriptions—against one another. The only constraints upon us are the conversational constraints of our fellow human beings. When it comes to justification, we can appeal only to the standards and criteria accepted by our peers. In this sense justification is “sociological.” Rorty allows for a “cautionary” use of “true,” but this serves only as an expression of our willingness to change our mind if circumstances alter. This cautionary use of “true” reminds us that our best justifications may fail to persuade the audience we are addressing. So we may need to come up with new justifications for new audiences.

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This has happened many times in the past, and there is no reason to believe that it will not happen in the future. Despite Habermas’s sharp criticism of Rorty, his lively encounter with Rorty has provided him with the occasion for rethinking and revising his own pragmatic theory of truth. He now concedes that an epistemic discursivetheoretical theory of truth is not sufficient to account for “unconditional truth.” One cannot characterize the meaning of truth from an exclusively epistemic perspective where we specify the formal-pragmatic ideal conditions for justifying claims about what is true. Even if we could get over the difficulties of specifying what precisely we mean by “ideal conditions,” a justification even under “ideal conditions” may still turn out to be false. And for Habermas “truth” is something that a proposition “cannot lose.” Truth, unlike justification, is unconditional. The question that Habermas seeks to answer is: “How can we reconcile the assumption that there is a world existing independently of our descriptions of it and that is the same for all observers with the linguistic insight that we have no direct, linguistically unmediated access to ‘brute’ reality?” (Truth, 2). Habermas develops a pragmatic theory of truth that shows how truth is a “justification-transcendent concept.” Truth refers to conditions that must be met by reality itself. Habermas’s revised theory of truth represents a return to the classical pragmatist context of everyday lifeworld actions and practices. Pragmatism makes us aware that in everyday practices, we cannot suspend claims to truth in principle. Everyday routines and communications work on the basis of behavioral certainties that we take for granted. But when our behavioral expectations are frustrated or when we encounter resistances, then our practical certainties become problematic. We no longer “naïvely” accept what we have taken for granted. There is a transition from action to discourse. In this transition what was initially taken as practically certain now becomes problematic; we have to evaluate its truth by the appeal to reasons—by argumentation. Truth can neither be explained solely by reference to the practical certainties of everyday actions nor solely by reference to the argumentative procedures of discourse. Habermas’s pragmatic conception of truth is “Janusfaced”: one face is turned to the lifeworld of action, where we rely on “practical certainties,” and the other face is turned toward discourse, where argumentation prevails. Habermas claims that this revised pragmatic theory of truth does justice to our “realist intuitions.” It enables us to make sense of the formal-pragmatic presupposition that there is an objective world independent of us but about which we can make true claims. The nonepistemic concept of truth that is implicit in the lifeworld of action provides a justification-transcendent point of reference for discursively thematized truth claims. The goal of these justifications is to discover a truth that exceeds all justifications. When our naïvely accepted convictions about truth become problematized,

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we engage in argumentative discourse to justify them. Truth is unconditional, but our claims about what is true are, in principle, always conditional and fallible. Habermas’s new pragmatic theory of truth relates the lifeworld of everyday actions with its practical certainties to discourse, where the appeal to good reasons and argumentation prevails.

Hilary Putnam Concerning epistemological realism, Habermas is in basic agreement with Putnam. Indeed, Habermas draws upon Putnam’s analyses of “internal realism” and “reference” to explain his own version of pragmatic realism. He is also sympathetic with Putnam’s critique of Rorty’s contextualism. In defending realism against Rorty, Putnam and Habermas are allies. Putnam’s internal realism shows us how we can reconcile the assumption that there is a world existing independently of our descriptions with the insight of the linguistic turn, namely, that we have no linguistically unmediated access to a “brute” reality. Putnam’s epistemological realism shows how we can avoid and “transcend” Rorty’s contextualism. For all these reasons, Habermas considers Putnam to be a fellow Kantian pragmatist. But Habermas does have a major disagreement with Putnam concerning the distinctions of theoretical and practical reason, ethics and morality, values and norms. For Habermas (following Kant), there is a strong distinction between theoretical and practical reason. Theoretical reason is primarily concerned with truth, whereas practical (moral) reason is primarily concerned with rightness. In his theory of communicative action, Habermas argues that there are three different types of validity claim—truth, rightness, and truthfulness. We must not confuse or blur the distinctions among these different validity claims. The type of validity we seek when we are attempting to know the objective world (truth) is not the same as the validity we seek to establish when we attempt to justify universal moral norms (rightness). In his discourse ethics, which might better be called a discourse theory of morality, Habermas also makes a sharp distinction between morality and ethics. Morality, or, more precisely, practical moral discourse, is concerned with universal moral norms that have binding power on us. Of course, our knowledge of these norms is fallible and subject to learning processes over time. But the claim that there are such binding unconditional moral norms is fundamental for Habermas. “Ethics,” as Habermas uses this term, is particularistic and context dependent. Ethics refers to those values and the conceptions of the good life integral to my personal outlook or to the groups with which I identify. Ethics is always oriented to the first-person singular or plural—my or our ethical orientation. There is an irreducible plurality of conceptions of the “good life,” but there is only one single universal

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morality. The recognition of the worthiness of a moral norm can only be justified by all those affected in their role as participants in a practical moral discourse. So unlike theoretical judgments that are justified by an appeal to an objective world independent of us, practical moral judgments can be justified only by their acceptance of participants in a practical discourse. In short, Habermas wants to combine epistemological realism with moral constructivism. He rejects moral realism. Putnam challenges this entire set of distinctions, which are so vital for Habermas. Putnam doesn’t think there is a sharp distinction between morality and ethics; he argues for the entanglement of value and fact in all domains; he thinks that we can speak of moral truths and objectivity in the same way in which we speak about truth and objectivity in scientific inquiry. Consequently, he rejects a sharp distinction between theoretical and practical reason. So where Habermas (in the spirit of Kant) draws a set of sharp distinctions, Putnam (in the spirit of Dewey) argues that there are differences of degree. Habermas argues that Putnam would be a more consistent Kantian pragmatist if he fully appreciated Kant’s deontological insights about morality and recognized that there is a danger in “ontologizing” our moral knowledge. Habermas concedes that there is a role for speaking about “truth” and “objectivity” in regard to moral discourse but that we must realize that “truth” and “objectivity” play very different roles in theoretical discourse and practical moral discourse. We must resist the temptation to “ontologize” moral knowledge. Habermas claims that there is a deep tension in Putnam’s version of pragmatism and his “blurring” of the distinction between norms and values—a tension that results from the way in which Putnam wants to integrate epistemological realism with an Aristotelian-Deweyan conception of ethics and eudaimonia—human flourishing. Putnam would be a more consistent Kantian pragmatist if he relied more on another pragmatist, George Herbert Mead, rather than on Aristotle and Dewey. Mead developed a pragmatic Kantian constructivist account of the moral point of view by showing how an inclusive We-perspective can be approximated by mutual perspective taking. To appreciate why Habermas opposes the varieties of moral realism and strongly advocates a form of moral constructivism, we need to appeal to a deeper and broader perspective. Habermas has always identified with the project of modernity that was initiated by Kant. With Kant we come to realize that there is no higher moral authority than our own practical reason. A proper account of the role of practical reason enables us to justify the universal and binding character of moral norms. The communicative turn in philosophy underscores that practical moral reason is dialogical, not monological— that moral norms can be justified only by participants in a practical discourse. The justification of moral norms sets a task (Aufgabe) of what is to be done in order to approximate a society in which these norms are concretely realized. A

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constructivist orientation is required in order to provide the normative foundation for a critical theory of society.

Robert Brandom Habermas is deeply sympathetic with Brandom’s valiant attempt to take our realistic intuitions seriously and to give an account of truth and objectivity that is not open to the objections of contextualism and relativism. He praises Brandom’s Making It Explicit as a milestone in theoretical philosophy that succeeds in describing convincingly the practices in which reason and the autonomy of subjects capable of speech and action are expressed. Consequently, Brandom makes a major contribution to articulating and defending a strong pragmatism—one that works out an innovative connection of formal normative pragmatics with inferential semantics. What worries Habermas is Brandom’s neo-Hegelianism. “In the end, Brandom is able to do justice to the intuitions underlying epistemological realism only at the price of a conceptual realism that obliterates the distinction between the intersubjectively shared lifeworld and the objective world. This assimilation of the objectivity of experience to the intersubjectivity of communication is reminiscent of an infamous Hegelian move” (Truth, 8). Habermas’s Kantian pragmatism is intended to be a via media between Rorty’s pragmatic contextualism and Brandom’s pragmatic neo-Hegelianism. Although Habermas greatly admires the sophistication, rigor, and comprehensiveness of Brandom’s pragmatic neo-Hegelianism, his unease focuses on three interrelated issues. First, despite Brandom’s attempt to take account of “realistic” intuitions and to give an adequate account of truth and objectivity, Habermas doesn’t think that a conceptual realism can provide a fully adequate account of unconditional truth. Brandom approaches these issues from the perspective of our conceptual normative social practices. Built into these practices is the idea of an objective world. Habermas doesn’t dispute this claim but thinks that this is not sufficient to account adequately for a strong (ontological) sense in which we presuppose an objective world independent of us. The same reasoning that initially led Habermas to criticize his own epistemic approach to truth and objectivity motivates his critique of Brandom. A pragmatic theory of truth and objectivity cannot be limited to the epistemic (conceptual) aspects of truth; it must also be tied to the nonepistemic (ontological) aspects of truth and objectivity. Second, Habermas thinks that Brandom begins with the premise that is typically the starting point of most analytic philosophers, namely, that the proposition or assertion is paradigmatic for linguistic analysis. But to do so distorts what is involved in communicative action. Although the representational and

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communicative functions of language mutually presuppose each other, they are distinct and equiprimordial. Habermas claims that Brandom has an “objectivist” conception of communication that highlights the observer’s perspective as a third person. Consequently, Brandom distorts the second-person perspective that is quintessential for understanding how participants encounter one another when engaged in communicative action. Third, he criticizes Brandom—in a manner reminiscent of his criticism of Putnam—for tending toward a monism that levels the distinction between facts and norms. Although Brandom’s philosophical motivations are different from those of Putnam, nevertheless Brandom’s conceptual realism also blurs the important Kantian distinction between theoretical and practical reason. Norms can be described as “facts” from an observer’s (third-person) perspective, but they can only be justified from the participant’s (second-person) perspective.

Habermas’s Kantian Pragmatism We can now more fully appreciate what is distinctive about Habermas’s Kantian pragmatism. Like Rorty, Putnam, and Brandom, Habermas asserts that pragmatism has been transformed by the linguistic turn. The linguistic turn enables us to escape from aporias of “mentalism” that dominated much of philosophy from the time of Descartes through the end of the nineteenth century. In this respect, the linguistic turn initiated a progressive paradigm shift. But the linguistic turn brings its own set of problems. If we concede that our knowledge of the world is always mediated by language and that we never have direct cognitive contact with a “brute” reality, then how are we to avoid a form of linguistic idealism or a contextualism that fails to do justice to our realistic intuitions—to our sense that there is a world independent of us and about which we can make true claims? Furthermore, how can we escape from the snares of a linguistic relativism that fails to do justice to the recognition that there are binding universal moral norms that transcend any local context? Habermas argues that the way to answer these difficult questions is by articulating and defending Kantian pragmatism. Habermas’s Kantianism is far removed from the “historical” Kant, but he appropriates what he takes to be the core insight of Kant’s transcendental project—to reconstruct the formalpragmatic conditions for speech and action. He rejects Kant’s transcendental idealism in favor of a pragmatism that does full justice to our realist intuitions in a postmetaphysical manner. In developing a pragmatic theory of truth he turns to what was the starting point for the classical American pragmatists— the everyday world of action with its practical certainties. Truth is a Janusfaced concept that relates action to discourse. Habermas also argues that we

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can preserve the Kantian insight about binding universal moral norms and integrate this with a communicative theory that demands that such norms can be justified only through the discursive practices of all those participants affected by these norms. He combines pragmatic epistemological realism with moral constructivism. He follows out the Kantian theme of preserving the distinction between theoretical and practical reason (and philosophy). And he resists the attempts by Rorty, Putnam, and Brandom to blur or level the distinction between theoretical and practical reason—whether it is done in the name of contextualism (Rorty), moral realism (Putnam), or conceptual realism (Brandom). Standing back and looking at the development of Habermas’s thinking over the past fifty years, one can view it as elaborating an increasingly sophisticated critical Kantian pragmatic orientation—one that incorporates many of the best insights of the classical American pragmatic thinkers and their successors. In the best pragmatic spirit Habermas has both learned from and criticized these thinkers in working out his own distinctive pragmatic orientation.

References Brandom, Robert B. 1994. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ——. 2000. Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Putnam, Hilary. 1990. Realism with a Human Face. Ed. James Conant. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ——. 1994. Words and Life. Ed. James Conant. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ——. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

24 JEWISH PHILOSOPHY MICHA BRUMLIK

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ngagement with Jewish philosophy and exchanges with Jewish philosophers have played an important role in Habermas’s thought from his earliest writings. As early as 1961, Habermas published the essay “Der deutsche Idealismus der jüdischen Philosophie” (The German idealism of Jewish philosophy); two studies on Hannah Arendt followed, joined by essays on Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. The existential motivation for these writings, one may surmise, was the responsibility that Habermas assumed for the war crimes Germany had perpetrated in his youth. In philosophical terms, Habermas’s interest in Jewish intellectual traditions came from his study of German idealism; a further essay based on his dissertation—“Dialektischer Materialismus im Übergang zum Materialismus— Geschichtsphilosophische Folgerungen aus Schellings Idee einer Contraction Gottes” (Dialectical materialism’s transition to materialism—consequences of Schelling’s idea of the contraction of God for the philosophy of history) (1963)— explored late-medieval Jewish mysticism. Early in his career, Habermas became convinced that encounters between Jewish philosophy and German idealism had brought forth “the ferment of . . . critical utopia” (Profiles, 42) evident in modern thought. Such ferment finds expression (among other places) in the last aphorism of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia: “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption” (2006, 247). Jewish philosophy has played a role for Habermas’s project in other ways, too. Thus, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Habermas discusses Jacques Derrida as the most radical exponent of “postmodern” thinking—a Heideggerian who had tempered the “philosophy of origins” with Jewish ethics (Discourse, 161–184); precisely this combination of different intellectual traditions had long interested Habermas for his own projects—and continues to do so, today.

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism (published in 1918, after the author’s death) unites Kantian philosophy and Jewish tradition. This

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work—which provides a key point of reference for Habermas in “The German Idealism of Jewish Philosophy”—elaborates an ethics of shared humanity (Mitmenschlichkeit) informed by the critical method of the eighteenthcentury philosopher of Enlightenment (Brumlik 2001, 11–28). Performing a new, Kantian reading of the biblical prophets, Cohen offers a theory of social justice and international jurisprudence; as he observes, the Hebrew Bible valorizes popular solidarity (Volksgenossenschaft), hospitality, rights for foreigners (Fremdengesetzgebungen), and the covenant between God and all human beings (Brumlik 2002). Scholars have long overlooked the fact that Cohen developed a philosophy of intersubjectivity years before Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber—who are commonly credited with this achievement. (That said, Rosenzweig and Buber theorize intersubjectivity on the basis of language— not by way of the universalistic ethics found in scriptural sources.) For Cohen, human reason that has been schooled in suffering and compassion recognizes that one must rely on others: there are responsibilities surpassing one’s own interests and demands that one must fulfill. Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism both relies on and completes Kant’s formal ethics. Whereas Kant had discussed judgment in theoretical terms, Cohen treats matters in a “concrete” fashion, arguing that the motivating function performed by maxims on an individual level is exercised by religion in the intersubjective life that occurs at the level of human society. At the root of such motivation stands pity (Mitleid), which “must be stripped of the passivity of a reaction” and find recognition “as a whole and full activity in itself. . . . Reaction, as a reciprocal effect, aims toward a goal. This goal is the community, in which the fellowman [Mitmensch] originates” (Cohen 1995, 219).

Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) Cohen’s intellectual heir and antipode, Franz Rosenzweig belongs to the school of existential philosophy (Existenzphilosophie) that emerged during and after the First World War. Instead of reflecting on the isolation of individual consciousness and its (paltry) achievements, this school focuses on the fact that humans, who constitute themselves through language, are intersubjective beings—and mortal ones, at that. Incorporating the author’s exemplary knowledge of German idealism (especially of Hegel and Schelling), The Star of Redemption (2005 [1917]) presents a theory of the Jews as a people that lives outside of geography and history, knows neither war nor a profane tongue, and observes only the continuous now of the liturgical year and pious procreation (blutmäßiges Fortzeugen). According to Rosenzweig’s conception, the Jews occupy the place that Christians—who relate to the world in a fundamentally historical way, even though they claim to be redeemed—must strive to achieve.

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Needless to say, Rosenzweig’s theory of Judaism was disproven by historical events of the twentieth century. The author at least sensed as much when, in his late works, he addressed Zionism. Two years before his death, Rosenzweig wrote in a letter that the movement would not just achieve the renewal of a genuinely prophetic relationship to one’s own community, but also play a role in the realization of the Jewish Idea: just as social democracy—even if it is not “religiously socialistic” but “atheistic”—is more important for achieving the Kingdom of God through the Church than are clerics (even the few who are truly devout), and just as [social democracy] is certainly more important than the vast mass of half- or wholly indifferent laity, so it stands with Zionism and the Synagogue. (Rosenzweig 1964, 227)

Habermas’s interest in the Jewish roots of core elements of German idealism— which he identified in Schelling’s works—also prompted him to turn his attention to the writings of Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch.

Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) Habermas is indebted to Scholem, Benjamin’s lifelong friend, for key elements of his early philosophy of history, later reflections on the matters of recognition and reconciliation, and his recent discussions of religion. Scholem’s incomparable philological achievement is to have systematically organized, along historical and critical lines, the mystical literature of the late-medieval Cabbala. His studies enabled Habermas to arrive at a new understanding of aspects of German idealism that, in his estimation, derive from Jewish writings (albeit by way of Christian pietism). According to the teachings of Isaac Luria, Creation is a process whereby God withdraws into Himself (Scholem 1970); Scholem considers this to mean that God is also exiled within Himself. Therefore, the mode of existence for the world— from the beginning and forever more—is a matter of divine substance “coming home” or, alternatively, “being brought back” to its source. Mankind, in the cabbalistic perspective, must be ready and willing to recapture and return the godly sparks that have been scattered in the Deity’s exile; this process of healing Creation (which has always been “broken”) is known as Tikkun olam. Cabbalism lends messianic thinking a surprising turn: it is no longer God’s responsibility to save humanity; instead, mankind has the task of saving God—and with Him, Creation (Scholem 1995, 244ff.). With this inflection, mysticism is able to account for the entanglements and snares of worldly existence and historical contingency.

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On occasion, Scholem abandoned his philological duties and discussed the positive contents of mystical tradition as contributions to the philosophy of history and epistemology (e.g., “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms” [Scholem 1970]). Thereby, he explained what it would mean to salvage the (divine) substance of humanity; Habermas writes: “Among modern societies, only those who can bring essential elements of their religious tradition, which points beyond the merely human, into the sphere of the profane will be able to save the substance of the human as well” (Profiles, 210). Precisely this endeavor—derived from mysticism and biblical messianism—interests Habermas in the works of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) At the end of his life, Walter Benjamin—whom Hannah Arendt called “the most peculiar Marxist ever produced by this movement, which God knows has had its full share of oddities” (1970, 163)—wrote his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” This brief text incorporates theological intuitions, Marxist insights, and acute awareness of modernity’s apocalyptic demise into a negativistic philosophy of history: the sole “way out” that remains for humanity, in Benjamin’s estimation, is offered by the possibility—however remote—of a messianic revolution on the part of the oppressed and for the sake of their dead. Thereby, Benjamin expands the moral universe as it currently exists by deemphasizing the moment and extolling the completeness of the past and the future, to which the present stands opposed. His doctrine of historical injustice and “anamnetic solidarity” (Peukert 1980) holds historiographical consequences. “Empathy for the victor,” Benjamin observes, “invariably benefits the rulers” (1969, 256). For all that, his view of history—which is often misunderstood by readers—does not hold that circumstances will improve (or that they may be improved) progressively. Instead, Benjamin offers his reflections to counter a perspective that considers time to represent, as it were, an “empty form” of events. Benjamin opposes such schematism with an existential theory of temporalization (Zeitigung) and moments of fulfillment—a conception of “living time” that spans the generations as a continuum. Benjamin presents his true concern—a matter his pedagogical writings and works on the philosophy of history simply detail, so to speak—in his 1922 essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities. This text ends with the following words: “only for the hopeless ones have we been given hope” (1996, 356). In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the turn toward futurity—which, as a time of fulfillment, undoes all pessimism about worldly affairs—culminates in the doctrine of the messianic “now” (Jetztzeit). “This does not imply . . . that for the Jews

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the future [turns] into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time [is] the . . . gate through which the Messiah might enter” (1969, 261). All the same, Habermas—who shares Scholem’s view—has criticized Benjamin for the fact that he “could not bring himself to make the messianic theory of experience serviceable for historical materialism” (Profiles, 150).

Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) Ernst Bloch—whom Habermas has called “a Marxist Schelling”—attempted to do precisely that. Habermas considers him the heir to the mystical tradition in a philosophical framework: “The Jewish element within Marxism makes for a particular sensitivity toward perspectives once looked after by the Cabbala and mysticism” (Profiles, 69). In three ways that seem, at first glance, to extend in different directions, Bloch considers Judaism to represent a partially realized hope that only found completion in what he calls “Christ-belief” (Christusglauben). The first concerns the evolution of Bloch’s own, heretical Christology; the others involve popular (völkisch) and racist anti-Semitism, as well as the political utopia of Zionism (Bloch 1976, 708–709). Underlying them all is the idea that Judaism, inasmuch as it represents (indeed, foreshadows) life lived in righteousness and a state of fulfillment, offers a model for everyday existence in present, historical time—a means of discerning glimmers of hope, all else notwithstanding. Bloch’s view of Judaism, which draws on motifs of German idealism, is idiosyncratic. Insofar as Bloch understands Judaism to promise an enduring and fulfilled present, his approach to the philosophy of history (Geschichtsphilosophie)—if not to the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie)—may be considered Christian in more than a figural sense. Jesus, Bloch affirms in The Spirit of Utopia, was God’s migrant soul (die Seelenwanderung Gottes)—the divine substance as “posited” by desiring human souls. Both God and Son, then, represent the quintessence of a particular kind of mystical atheism: “The subjects are the only things that cannot be extinguished in any external or upper darkness, and that the Savior lives and wants to come again: this is then as now irrefutably vouchsafed to us” (2000, 160). For Bloch, the Heavens and the Earth do not stand at the beginning of the world. Rather—and in keeping with cabbalistic doctrines—Man (der Mensch) came first. In and through Man, a renewing, liberated cosmos emerged (and emerges). Ultimately, this picture of the cosmos admits no distinction between the Creator and Creation. In Bloch’s theurgic philosophy, God is not at the beginning but at the end. However, this God—who occupies and incarnates the position of finality—is nothing/no one but Man/Mankind in a state of completion.

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By positing theology as a process, by maintaining—like many mystics— that God reveals Himself in human life, and, finally, by invoking biblical prophecies that promise a new Heaven and Earth, Bloch rejects the notion of God as the liberator of Israel and the author of the world. He opposes a vision of a coming, future God to the worldview of orthodox religion and, in so doing, articulates a position that stands as far from the tenets of rabbinical Judaism as it ultimately does from those of mystical/cabbalistic Judaism (which—all speculation notwithstanding—holds God and Creator ultimately to be one and the same).

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) In his early studies on Kierkegaard and in his collaboration with Paul Tillich, Adorno addressed theological matters, which were also familiar to him through Walter Benjamin and his writings. However, he did not take them up explicitly before 1935. Adorno articulated his position in a letter to Max Horkheimer (which he wrote in response to the latter’s objection to Henri Bergson, whose philosophy failed to discuss death in a satisfactory fashion): It is remarkable how entirely the consequences of your “atheism” (which I believe less, the more it is elaborated: for when it is explained, its metaphysical power increases) match those stemming from my own theological intentions, which—as unwelcome as they may be to you, arrive at the same conclusions as your reflections; I could, after all, affirm that the aim of salvaging what is  hopeless represents the central effort of all I undertake—and need say nothing more. (Gumnior and Ringguth 1973, 84–85)

Adorno’s philosophy of history and aesthetics, understanding of Enlightenment, and negative dialectics draw on the tension between restorative-utopian messianism, on the one hand, and critique of the world as it now exists, on the other. Adorno undertakes these projects for the sake of redemptive truth—a process that, while promising to halt historical decline, is rendered inoperative by the “graven images” that obscure it. In Dialectic of Enlightenment—especially “Elements of Anti-Semitism”— Horkheimer and Adorno examine the relationship between Judaism and Christianity from the perspective of the philosophy of history and defend the asceticism of the Jewish conception of the Deity against the “regressive” traits they discern in the humanized, Christian God. They hold, like Rosenzweig, that the essence of Jewish belief lies in reconciliatory anamnesis through ritual—which offers worshippers the prospect of witnessing the Eternal renew

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itself and intervene in the temporal world against the ruses of fallen/fettered nature (human and otherwise). The guarantee for such remembrance is the prohibition of idolatry, which preserves the notion of redemption by forbidding that salvation itself be depicted (or even imagined). Only when the austerity of iconoclastic doctrine prevents the thought of salvation from being betrayed to the present or to the future (which is commonly—and erroneously—conceived as a prolongation of the present) does the possibility of redemptive remembrance for the victims of history exist. Only then does the notion of “redeeming those without hope” possess meaning. Accordingly, Dialectic of Enlightenment describes the ban on graven images as “the prohibition on invoking falsity as God, the finite as the infinite, the lie as truth. The pledge of salvation lies in the rejection of any faith which claims to depict it, knowledge in the denunciation of illusion. . . . The right of the image is rescued in the faithful observance of its prohibition” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2007, 17–18). The final aphorism of Minima Moralia (already quoted in part, above) surely offers Adorno’s most complete formulation of messianism. Adorno (2006) makes his pronouncement in terms of an upswing (konjunktivistisch), as it were: The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. (247)

These lines are penetrated by the certainty that the very ability to distinguish between good and evil depends on the capacity to picture another, better world—even if one can never know whether it will become reality. This power to envision something else and to identify its meaning points to what Adorno calls “transcendence”; it leaves behind a glimmer (Schein), which, ultimately, goes back to the will of human beings not to content themselves with the dreariness of calamitous (unheilvoll) immanence. Here, the bodily capacity for suffering and the ability to recall experiences of injustice occupy a terrain that, traditionally, was administered by theology. By invoking corporeal pain, Adorno (2007) offers a synthesis of sensualist materialism taken to its logical end and the insight that arises from commemoration:

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Grayness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbor the concept of different colors, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative whole. The traces always come from the past, and our hopes from their counterpart, from that which was or is doomed; such an interpretation may very well fit the last line of Benjamin’s text on Elective Affinities: “For the sake of the hopeless only are we given hope.” (377–378)

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Arendt’s distinction between labor, work, and action plays a central role in Habermas’s critique of orthodox Marxism (elaborated in Knowledge and Human Interests, in particular). At first, it does not seem that she is important to Habermas as a Jewish thinker, specifically. Arendt did not understand herself in these terms in any conventional way; Habermas, for his part, mentions how Judaism factors into Arendt’s political critique of power and totalitarianism only in passing (Profiles, 171ff.). All the same, Arendt always took an interest in Jewish traditions and often found them in surprising places (Arendt 1976a). Over the course of her professional life, she reflected on the fate of the Jewish people while also pursuing her systematic, philosophical studies. In political terms, it was clear to Arendt that she could only ever speak in the name of the Jews (Pilling 1996, 91–92). Three of her main works—a study on Rahel Varnhagen addressing assimilation from a critical perspective (1981 [1933]), The Origins of Totalitarianism (1986 [1951]), and the highly controversial series of articles that appeared as Eichmann in Jerusalem (1981 [1964])—address Judaism and Jewishness; on this basis, Arendt developed an existential political philosophy for twentieth-century humanity. The fact that Arendt approached the problems confronting Jewish life with theoretical tools shaped more by classical antiquity and German existential philosophy than by the traditions of Judaism is less a matter of historical irony than of the paradoxical situation in which all Jews have found themselves since emancipation, inasmuch as they feel obligated to bring Judaism into step with the times (auf die Höhe ihrer Zeit). While she offers critical remarks on Jewish assimilationism’s chauvinism as well as on educated Jewry’s flight to humanism, she also observes, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that Zionism never denied the objective reality of “the Jewish question”; indeed, “the fact that certain . . . phenomena did not come out as sharply in German and Austrian Jews, may be partly due to the strong hold of the Zionist movement on Jewish intellectuals in these countries” (1973, 79n).

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At the same time, Arendt subjects the Zionist project of state building (after 1941, at the latest), which she considers to represent a pact with imperialism, to harsh critique (1976b, 127–128). It follows from her analyses that both aspects of Jewish assimilation—the role of exemplary victimhood under totalitarianism, on the one hand, and the hubristic sense of election that occurs in Zionism—ultimately express a defining contradiction of her people; this unsolved riddle motivated Arendt’s work across her entire life.

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) Habermas encountered a way of understanding Judaism that differed as much from neo-Kantianism as it did from materialist philosophy—a perspective wholly foreign to him at first—in the works of Jacques Derrida, the foremost thinker of deconstruction. Early on, Habermas recognized that Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism (and the metaphysics of presence it entails) was based on a Jewish tradition of setting the written word above “spirit” as it is articulated in speech. At the same time, he faulted Derrida for succumbing to the Heideggerian philosophy of origins—even though, in the final analysis, his memory of the messianic component of Jewish mysticism saves him from the fatal political consequences of this association (Discourse, 182–184). Derrida came to terms with his own Judaism late in life, after elaborating a singular body of work that is difficult to survey in its manifold ramifications. All the same, early in his career, he published essays on Edmond Jabès and Emmanuel Levinas (1978a, 1978b [1967]). Moreover, the typesetting and arrangement of the text in Glas (1990 [1974]) follows the design of the Talmud. In 1991, Derrida discussed Cohen and Rosenzweig at length in the essay “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German” (1991). Likewise, in a self-portrait he coauthored with Geoffrey Bennington (1991), Derrida discussed his Judaism at length. This book was followed by a thoroughgoing encounter with Benjamin in “Force of Law” (1992). In 2007, Judeities: Questions of Jacques Derrida was published (Cohen and Zagury-Orly 2007 [2003]). Derrida’s contribution to the anthology—entitled “Abraham: The Other” (2007)—reflects on messianity without messianism, combining the notion of “democracy to come” with a traditionally Jewish conception of the Godhead in terms of place/ location. Habermas’s contribution to the volume—“How to Answer the Ethical Question?” (2007)—grants that Derrida’s thought, notwithstanding its proximity to Heidegger, is more theological than pre-Socratic, more Jewish than Greek. Ultimately, Derrida’s relationship to the works of Levinas prompts Habermas to recognize how he differs from Heidegger. This insight leads him to ask, in conclusion, whether a further, normative conception of the kind of

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ethics that Derrida articulates is possible. That said, a discussion of Levinas is conspicuously absent from Habermas’s writings. In 1996, Habermas published a collection of essays on political philosophy, none of which so much as mentions Levinas; ironically, the volume is called The Inclusion of the Other.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 2006. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. London: Verso. ——. 2007. Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 2007. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ——. 1976a. Die verborgene Tradition. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1976b. “Der Zionismus aus heutiger Sicht.” In Die verborgene Tradition, 127–168. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1995. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt Brace. ——. 1997. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken. ——. 1996. Selected Writings. Vol. 1: 1913–1926. Ed. Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap. Bernstein, Richard, J. 1996. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Bloch, Ernst. 1995. The Principle of Hope. 3 vols. Trans. Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 2000. The Spirit of Utopia. Trans. Anthony Nassar. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Brumlik, Micha. 2001. Vernunft und Offenbarung: Religionsphilosophische Versuche. Berlin: Philo. ——. 2002. “Der Mensch als Mitmensch. Intersubjektivität bei Hermann Cohen.” In Rationalität der Religion und Kritik der Kultur: Hermann Cohen und Ernst Cassirer, ed. Hermann Deuser and Michael Moxter, 69–83. Würzburg: Echter. Cohen, Hermann. 1995. Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism. Trans. Simon Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohen, Joseph, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds. 2007. Judeities: Questions of Jacques Derrida. Trans. Bettina Bergo and Michal B. Smith. New York: Fordham University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978a. “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book.” In Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 77–96. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 1978b. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” In Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 97–192. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 1990. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey Jr., and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ——. 1991. “Interpretation at War: Kant, the Jew, the German.” Trans. Moshe Ron. New Literary History 22, no. 1: 39–95.

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——. 1992. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’ ” In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Carlson. London: Routledge. ——. 2007. “Abraham, the Other.” In Judeities: Questions of Jacques Derrida, ed. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, trans. Bettina Bergo and Michal B. Smith, 1–35. New York: Fordham University Press. Derrida, Jacques, and Geoffrey Bennington. 1999. Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gumnior, Helmut, and Rudolf Ringguth. 1973. Max Horkheimer. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Habermas, Jürgen. 2007. “How to Answer the Ethical Question.” In Judeities: Questions of Jacques Derrida, ed. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, trans. Bettina Bergo and Michal B. Smith, 142–154. New York: Fordham University Press. Peukert, Helmut. 1980. Wissenschaftstheorie, Handlungstheorie, Theologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Pilling, Iris. 1996. Denken und Handeln als Jüdin: Hannah Arendts politische Theorie vor 1950. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Rosenzweig, Franz. 1964. Die Schrift: Aufsätze, Übertragungen und Briefe. Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. ——. 2005. The Star of Redemption. Trans. Barbara E. Galli. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Scholem, Gershom. 1970. “Schöpfung aus Nichts und Selbstverschränkung Gottes.” In Über einige Grundbegriffe des Judentums, 53–89. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1995. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken.

25 MONOTHEISM FELMON DAVIS

Context and Motivations Habermas’s engagement with religion and monotheism has been long and deep, extending from his doctoral work on Schelling to occasional work on the religious motifs in Benjamin, Horkheimer, Scholem, and others, work he has undertaken with great sensitivity. In his masterful synthesis The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), he considered religion mostly in its function as promoting “solidarity,” leaving open the possibility that the “domain of the sacred” might be replaced by a secular morality and culture (2:92). But from the publication of his 1988 collection of papers Postmetaphysical Thinking to his recent work, the 2005 volume Between Naturalism and Religion, he has become emphatic that religious language may well express something that—at least for now—resists “the explanatory force of philosophical language” (Postmetaphysical, 51). Consequently, as far as this remains the case, he calls for a “postsecular society” in which religious citizens reconcile their “truth” with the pluralism of beliefs in modern society; the secular, meanwhile, are to learn from the insights of religious experience. Thus religious and secular engage in a cooperative process of truth finding. Habermas (2008) has recently made clear that by “secularization” he does not mean the replacement of religion but rather its displacement from its positions of political and legal power, with the consequent privatization of religious practice. Still, he acknowledges that unexpectedly (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 393), in spite of the ongoing world-historical process of secularization, religion does not seem to be disappearing. Quite the contrary: religious practice is growing even in Europe and is also assuming new forms. Habermas refuses to reject this persistence or resurgence of religious belief as simply an irrational phenomenon; instead, he urges that religious belief says something that must be taken seriously. Religious belief, specifically certain forms of monotheism and particularly of Christianity, is possibly an expression of reason; thus he lays emphasis on the “cognitive content”—the truth content—of religious belief. In addition, normative reason is in crisis; it is threatened by a torrential rationalism that Habermas calls the “derailment of modernity” (Entgleisung

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der Moderne), which threatens the very economy of normative reason (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 371) and against which he looks to religious belief and experience to counteract the “entropy of the scarce resource of meaning” (Future, 114). The roots of normative reason in the lifeworld are threatened by the increasing predominance of the ideology of the global market and by new developments in science, particularly in the fields of biogenetics, where increasingly the “luck” of nature is shunted aside in favor of whimsical, consumerdriven control of the genetic endowment of human beings; and in neuroscience, where the questioning of the existence of free agency threatens the very idea of political deliberation and choice. Habermas turns to religious belief for a possible regeneration of the springs of secular normative reason. Monotheism may contain “semantic potentials” from which secular reason may learn and that can offer citizens, both believers and nonbelievers, worthy and compelling ideals of life and community within the liberal-democratic state.

Faith and Knowledge Habermas finds inspiration in Kant for his own dialectical project of a demarcation (Grenzziehung) between religious belief and knowledge combined with a rational appropriation (Aneignung) of religious content; he finds in Kant the “incomparable model for any attempt at rational appropriation of religious content” (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 378); important relevant works are the Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant 2001) and Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Kant 1998), among others. In particular: (a) Kant clearly separates what we can know from what is a matter for faith, and in the moral domain, Kant insists that the content of moral law is wholly independent of any assumptions about God or religious “revelation” (“The Boundary Between Faith and Knowledge: On the Reception and Contemporary Relevance of Kant’s Philosophy of Religion,” in Naturalism, 209–247). Similarly, Habermas claims that the basic principles of morality rest on unavoidable presuppositions of communicative reason that are not derived from individually or culturally variable “ethical” notions of the “Good” or from ideas about God. (b) Although Kant left little room for dogmatic beliefs such as the Resurrection or the Incarnation (Naturalism, 230), he also attempted a kind of “translation” of some dogmas of positive religion into the discourse of reason. For example, the doctrine of “Grace” can be understood as expressing an imperative to moral engagement. Kant’s project of finding in religious belief a rational core, “of conceiving the essentially practical contents of the Christian

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tradition in such a way that these could perdure before the forum of reason” (Habermas 1992, 227), anticipates Habermas’s own idea of a “saving translation” of the “cognitive content” of monotheism into secular language. However, Habermas rejects Kant’s attempt to provide a rational argument for eschatological and salvational doctrines of Christianity. Kant had argued that principles of reason justify a rational faith (Vernunftglaube) on the grounds that moral agents must care what the consequences of their collective action are, and, indeed, they have a moral duty to act “in concert with others” to realize a world combining moral ideals and the highest good. The law of unintended consequences thwarts the practical realization of such a world, but “ought” implies “can,” so it is only rational to believe that there is a being who is capable of drawing this longed-for world out of the crooked paths (krumme Wege) of human history (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 224, 376). Habermas maintains that the idea of a “rational faith” (Vernunftglaube) violates the appropriate demarcation (Grenzziehung) separating reason and faith. Practical reason can offer encouragement and ward off defeatism, but it cannot console with promises of salvation (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 395). The exegetical cavils raised by some theologians about Habermas’s reading of Kant go to important issues of philosophical and religious substance. Christian Danz (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 9–32) fears Habermas’s demarcation thesis fails to preserve the integrity of religion; it is precisely the kind of “transformation of religion into philosophy” (31) that Habermas resisted in Kant, where philosophy can appropriate whatever is rational in religion without remainder. For Langthaler, the eschatological and salvational elements of religion are rationally grounded hope, whereas Habermas accuses Kant of infidelity to his own demarcation between reason and faith. Nagl-Docekal, on the other hand, contends that according to Kantian theory reason can generate insights on its own, insights that, according to Habermas, Kant rightly claims are intrinsically religious. For instance, she maintains that the idea of an “ethical commonwealth” (ethisches Gemeinwesen) is available to reason without assistance from religious metaphors of a “Kingdom of God” (Gottesreich) or “Reign of God” (Gottesherrschaft) (379). Against this Habermas denies that this religious idea is equivalent to the properly Kantian moral ideal of a “Kingdom of Ends” (Reich der Zwecke) or the political ideal of a republican order. Perhaps more importantly, Habermas contends that Nagl-Docekal puts philosophy in the role of dictating to religious communities how they must comport themselves in modern pluralistic society.

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Postmetaphysical Thinking An epistemology appropriate for the modern condition is “antimetaphysical,” rejecting ideas of apodictic foundations for epistemic and moral claims and appeals to intuitions of truths about the “nature” of the world or “essentialist” or “teleological” determinations of the character of human beings. Truth is not the object of a “view from nowhere,” existing outside human discourse and argument. It also rejects a notion of truth as a liberating or salvific identity with or contemplation of being: “Being” is not identical with the “Good.” Note that religions typically involve “metaphysical” worldviews. Instead, an antimetaphysical epistemology espouses a “fallibilism” about all knowledge claims: all claims are subject to ongoing revision and even refutation. This is not skepticism: it does not deny the possibility of hic et nunc knowledge, though it does reject absolute knowledge. Truth is the limit of a “transcendence from within,” a horizon consisting in a never-actual final agreement of inquiry that serves as a regulative norm for the actually existing practices of inquiry. Habermas calls this posture “postmetaphysical thinking.” This “fallibilism” leads Habermas to maintain that it is a priori possible that the “cognitive substance” of the world religions “has not yet been exhausted” (Naturalism, 142). Philosophy cannot penetrate or encompass, let alone lay the foundation for, the “thicket of the lifeworld”; it can attend to “a reason that is already operating in everyday communicative practice” (Postmetaphysical, 50) in the sources of aesthetic experience, in the rich complexity of the moral life, and in the depths of transcendent revelation (Naturalism, 242). So philosophy can attend to, extract, and illuminate those contents of religious belief and experience that meet the standards of “rational justification” (begründende Rede), that is, of rational argumentation (as outlined, for instance, in Truth), on the basis of which those contents can be considered justified true belief. It makes sense to mine religion for its “differentiated possibilities of expression and . . . sensitivities,” for what makes a life meaningful or misshapen, for human ideals and human infamy, for social pathology, for nuances of moral experience (Habermas and Ratzinger 2006, 43; Habermas 1992, 229). The events of 9/11 are a reminder that secular speech may need but also mishandles nuances distinguishing “moral evil” (das Böse) from “morally bad” (schlecht) (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 389).

Radical Naturalism Habermas maintains that beliefs incompatible with natural science are not acceptable but that, at the same time, natural science is not the only source

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of valid knowledge. Accordingly, it does not make sense to reject religious beliefs on the grounds that they do not fit a scientific Weltbild or models of scientific or experimental reasoning. “Radical naturalism” (see “Religion in the Public Sphere,” in Naturalism, 141) also poses a danger to secular normative reason. When the human mind is understood only in the extensionalist terms of physics, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory, human existence is desocialized and “depersonalized” (Future, 106). For instance, the neurosciences are sometimes falsely believed to undermine the reality of “free will” (Naturalism, 147–148; see Libet 2000, Singer 2004a, 2004b), which, if true, would also undermine the basis for moral, legal, and other evaluative judgments.

Methodological Atheism While philosophy should not simply reject religious revelation, it also cannot adopt revelation and its “certainties” and consolations. Revelation is for philosophy a “cognitively unacceptable imposition,” and the attempt to forge a “religious philosophy” is anathema (Naturalism, 242–243). What it can do is decipher those contents of religion “which can be translated into a form of discourse decoupled from the ratcheting effect of truths of revelation” (Naturalism, 245). The proper stance of secular philosophy and reason is “methodological atheism,” which does not commit to either theism or atheism as metaphysical positions but only as at best fallibilistic hypotheses for which evidence can be adduced and that may in the course of things be rendered more or less plausible. To some it is not clear why fallibilism implies the posture etsi deus non daretur. Fallibilists are not required to work as if atoms did not exist, so why must they work as if God did not exist? Philip Clayton (2005) argues the position should instead be “methodological agnosticism,” accusing Habermas of the a priori rejection of religious discourse “before the experts on science and metaphysics have even arrived at the table”; after all, in the longer run theism may turn out to be the more plausible view (21). Similarly, Maeve Cooke argues that fallibilism, properly understood, must allow that the nonreligious person could become rationally persuaded of the truth of religious beliefs (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 359); she argues that “postmetaphysical thinking” is not necessarily antimetaphysical; rather it is necessarily antiauthoritarian, antidogmatic.

Natural Theology “Natural theology” treats religious claims as rationally justifiable hypotheses. Habermas’s “methodological atheism” rejects the possibility of justifying theism.

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Natural theology, he argues, involves a kind of category mistake, since the existence of a being in whose love one’s existence is grounded is not provable. In his reply to Raberger he speaks of a confusion in “language-games,” in Wittgenstein’s sense (Habermas, in Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 404). The error arises from confusing the logic of assertion making with the logic of moral prescription. In more material terms: the “God of the philosophers” is not the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”; belief in the objective existence of a “creator-god” (Schöpfergott) is different from faith in a “savior god” (Erlösergott) who makes a covenant with its creatures (see Habermas’s [2001] essay on Metz). Nonetheless, it seems that establishing the objective existence of an allpowerful, all-knowing being with admirable virtues would go a long way to supporting the rationality of “faith.” (For current work on “natural theology,” see, among others, Alston 1991, Plantinga 2000, Wolterstorff 1975, and the physicist Polkinghorne 1998).

Habermas Versus Ratzinger The recent encounter between Habermas and then-cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) provoked sensationalist headlines, some decrying Habermas’s “abandonment” of atheism, some welcoming his “embrace” of Christianity. Indeed, the two were in broad agreement that normative reason is threatened by an ideology of the global market and by controversial applications of biogenetics. They agreed about scientistic perversions of Enlightenment reason, and they concurred on the desirability of interfaith dialogue (see Habermas’s [2001] reception of Metz’s theme of the polyzentrische Weltkirche). This comity moved Thomas Assheuer (2004) to remark, “with such concessions it was hard to make out what the contending parties thought was left to dispute.” And subsequently Habermas noted in their dialogue tentative agreement that modern reason is postmetaphysical thinking: “Joseph Ratzinger also thinks that the ‘End of Metaphysics’ has rendered the philosophical basis of Christianity problematic” (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 394), while Ratzinger is reported to have expressed pleasure that Habermas, “the philosopher considered in the world of the German language as the purest secularist,” agrees that the secular must attend to wisdom found in religious tradition (Ratzinger and Galli della Loggia 2004). However, Ratzinger (2005) in fact reverses the “axiom of the Enlightenment” to “veluti si Deus daretur”: “In this way, no one is limited in his freedom, but all our affairs find the support and criterion of which they are in urgent need.” Ratzinger maintains precisely the “essentialist” metaphysics rejected by Habermas. For instance, he writes about human rights “that man qua man, thanks simply to the membership in the species ‘man,’ is the subject

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of rights and that his being bears within itself values and norms that must be discovered—but not invented” (Habermas and Ratzinger 2006, 71). The relationship between Habermas and Ratzinger can be better described as detente than accommodation.

Saving Translation Habermas believes there is insight that has so far been best articulated in monotheistic religious belief, and thus the philosophical task is to extract the profane meaning of religious speech (see Time). This requires “translating” the rational content of religious belief into the “sphere of discursive justification” (Universum begründender Rede), into secular concepts and arguments rationally compelling to everyone, for in philosophy, as in politics, “only secular reasons count.” The controversy about “liberal eugenics” (Future, 16–74, 113–115) may serve to illustrate the logic of this process of translation. When parents grow and select embryos according to their fancy or self-serving ideals (as opposed to interventions meant to address disease), the heretofore fundamental distinction between what one may tamper with and what is “not at our disposal” (unverfügbar) is lost, and the autonomy of the child is seriously impaired, since someone else has decided for it how it will be. Now, autonomy is basic to our “species-ethical self-understanding,” but there is no argument that shows that we logically must continue in this—just as there is no logically compelling answer to the question “Why be moral?” But we are still responsive to the attitudes and “archaic emotions”—for instance, revulsion at the idea of “chimeras”—that arise from the present scheme of self-understanding, and Habermas thinks it is important to find cogent ways to articulate and marshal them to resist what he fears is becoming a thoughtless slide into consumer-driven genetic manipulation, which implicitly undermines our capacity to see ourselves as authors of our own individual life histories. The resonance of the religious image of creator/creature may serve to “rescue” and articulate these attitudes, which are lost to instrumental rationalism. In this image the freedom of the creature is preserved, for not only does God’s love require the free reciprocation of the creature, but God’s status as creator highlights the necessary parity of one created person with another. Analogously, one person’s whims may not determine a peer’s genetic fate. The biblical image of our “God-likeness” can appeal even to the “religiously unmusical.” Habermas’s “translation program” has met with some unease among theologians. For instance, Raberger bristles at the idea that religious language is on hold until the “epistemically superior language of philosophy” catches up with

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it (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 249). It is worth noting that Habermas thinks religious language utterly fails to settle the questions raised by genetic manipulation, since religious discourse remains confined to the “certainties” of the respective religious communities. In fact, the arguments Habermas presents in his book on “liberal eugenics” are plausible wholly without any religious reference. In other words, religious language’s expressive power plays no direct role in justifying policy choices; essentially it only offers a vocabulary for “thicker” descriptions of moral and ethical experience. It would seem the secular individuals are wholly at liberty to seek elsewhere, in literature and film for instance, for nuanced expressions of the shape of our humanity (Menschsein), especially if they are wary of other connotations of monotheistic religious language they may find unappealing.

References Alston, William P. 1991. Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Assheuer, Thomas. 2004. “Auf dem Gipfel der Freundlichkeiten.” http://www.zeit.de/2004 /05/Ratzinger_2fHaberm. Clayton, Philip. 2005. “The Contemporary Science-and-Religion Discussion.” In Scientific Explanation and Religious Belief: Science and Religion in Philosophical and Public Discourse, ed. Michael Parker and Thomas Schmidt. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. “Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in This World.” In Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology, ed. Don S. Browning and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, 226–256. New York: Crossroad. ——. 2001. The Liberating Power of Symbols: Philosophical Essays. Trans. Peter Dews. Cambridge: Polity. ——. 2008. “A ‘Postsecular’ Society—What Does That Mean?” http://www.resetdoc .org /story/00000000926. Habermas, Jürgen, and Joseph Ratzinger. 2006. The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion. San Francisco: Ignatius. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Trans. Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2001. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langthaler, Rudolf, and Herta Nagl-Docekal, eds. 2007. Glauben und Wissen: Ein Symposium mit Jürgen Habermas. Vienna: Oldenbourg. Libet, Benjamin: 2000. “Do We Have Free Will?” In The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will, ed. Benjamin Libet, Anthony Freeman, and Keith Sutherland. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Plantinga, Alvin. 2000. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Polkinghorne, John. 1998. Belief in God in an Age of Science. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Ratzinger, Joseph. 2005. “Christianity: The Religion According to Reason.” https://zenit .org /articles/cardinal-ratzinger-on-europe-s-crisis-of-culture-part-4/.

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Ratzinger, Joseph, and Ernesto Galli della Loggia. 2004. “Dialogo su storia, politica e religione.” https://it.zenit.org /articles/dialogo-su-storia-politica-e-religione/. Singer, Wolf. 2004a. “Keiner kann anders sein, als er ist. Verschaltungen legen uns fest: Wir sollten aufhören, von Freiheit zu reden.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (January 8, 2004). ——. 2004b. “Selbsterfahrung und neurobiologische Fremdbeschreibung.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 52, no. 2: 235–256. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1975. “God Everlasting.” In God and the Good: Essays in Honor of Henry Stob, ed. Clifton J. Orlebeke and Lewis B. Smedes. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans.

PART III TEXTS

26 SCHELLING, MARX, AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY Das Absolute und die Geschichte: Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken (The Absolute and History: On the Ambiguity in Schelling’s Thought, 1954) MANFRED FRANK

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hen, in the mid-1950s, new interest for Schelling’s philosophy arose—especially its middle and late phases—Jürgen Habermas stood at the forefront; he was the youngest (and the first) scholar to base his interpretation on “contradictoriness” (Zwiespältigkeit). A year later, Karl Jaspers followed his lead and published Grösse und Verhängnis (Greatness and disaster); this book held that Schelling had anticipated the central ambivalence of Heideggerian philosophy—more specifically, “the transition from greatness to [empty] gesture, from truth to absurdity, from clear communication to magic” (Jaspers 1955, 7; cf. Profiles, 45–52). Around the same time, Georg Lukács declared that the “course of irrationalism” leading to Hitler had originated in the works of Schelling—a revolutionary in youth and a reactionary in old age (Lukács 1954; for a discussion that incorporates Heidegger’s lectures on metaphysics from 1941, see Köhler 1999). In 1955, Walter Schulz averred that Schelling’s late philosophy had not abandoned or overcome German idealism but rather “completed” it. Like Habermas before him, Schulz held that Schelling’s “existential turn” (existenzphilosophische Wende) pointed to the writings of Kierkegaard, Marx, and Heidegger. (Also like Habermas, Schulz examined the double nature of Schelling’s philosophy, which, by turns, completes metaphysics, displays retrograde tendencies, and anticipates, in an astonishing manner, postmetaphysical modernity—which would not be thinkable in the same way without him.) Habermas wrote his dissertation under Erich Rothacker and Oskar Becker at Bonn, where it received the distinction of opus egregium. His study and

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Lukács’s project differ most noticeably in the ways they attempt to resolve contradictory elements within Schelling’s philosophy at its late stage. The criticism and commentary Habermas provides are more “redemptive” (rettend) (Benjamin) than “corrective” (bewusstmachend) (see Habermas 1972). Inasmuch as it dispenses with theological discourse, Habermas’s approach resembles that of Ernst Bloch, who (unlike Adorno) detected the seeds of truth within the false, affirmed the rights of Utopia over the Actual, and observed that Schelling had demonstrated a “surplus of philosophy” compared to Hegel (his friend in Tübingen and Jena). That said, when writing his dissertation, Habermas could more readily have guessed Bloch’s thoughts on Schelling than known them directly—with the exception of Subject-Object, from 1949 (quoted in the essay on Schelling: Habermas 1971a, 222–223, 227n137; Bloch 1962; 1972; 1985; 1972, 292ff.; 2000, 63ff.). Habermas goes so far as to place Schelling—even when his philosophy fails—above Hegel: the former’s “historical materialism” led deeper than the latter’s “dialectical idealism” ever could. Habermas faults Hegel—his deep sense of history notwithstanding—for never “having oriented himself on the historical existence of mankind [der Mensch],” as Schelling had done (Absolute, 7). For this reason, he declares—in a rather Heideggerian tone—“the understanding of history is more substantive [wesentlicher] in Schelling than in Hegel” (12). In this context, it is not surprising that Habermas would soon refer to Bloch as the “Marxist Schelling”—and even identify with his project to a certain extent (Profiles, 61–78). Habermas never published his dissertation (which, at 425 pages, was not  small). “Dialektischer Idealismus im Übergang zum Materialismus— Geschichtsphilosophische Folgerungen aus Schellings Idee einer Contraction Gottes” (Dialectical idealism’s transition to materialism—consequences of Schelling’s idea of the contraction of God for the philosophy of history”), in Theory and Practice (1963), made elements of the dissertation public for the first time. With this essay, Habermas abandoned the obscurity of academic chambers for the light of day and drew bold perspectives for the Marxist philosophy of history—which, he observed, could learn much from Schelling’s The Ages of the World. To be sure, this later essay—which incorporates matters discussed in the third part of the dissertation—places an emphasis on Schelling’s first version of The Ages of the World (1811). According to Schelling’s biographer Xavier Tilliette (2004, 269), scholars have “blown [this text] out of proportion” (zu sehr aufgebauscht). However, Das Absolute und die Geschichte does not focus on this work alone; it also provides a comprehensive and learned interpretation of the development of Schelling’s philosophy as a whole. Habermas’s dissertation has three sections. The first, “Freedom and Reality,” is composed of two parts. It begins with early and later (1829–1850)

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critiques by Hegel that were occasioned—in ways that remain unclear—by Schelling’s late philosophy. A comprehensive examination of Schelling’s late philosophy follows under the rubric “The Absolute and History.” The second section of the dissertation, “The Absolute and the Finite,” examines Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature, on the one hand, and his Philosophy of Identity, on the other. This part reconstructs Schelling’s philosophy from its beginnings up to the mature “Identity System” presented in Aphorisms on Natural Philosophy (1795–1806). The third and largest part of the dissertation addresses The Ages of the World, which was elaborated in different versions from 1809 to 1821 (with an emphasis, as indicated above, on the first version, from 1811). This final section is divided in four: “I. On the Absolute Identity to Historical Life,” “II. Analytics of the Human Spirit,” “III. The Temporal Constitution of the Finite and Absolute Spirit,” and “IV. The Ages of the World and Their Failure.” All in all, the dissertation contains thirty-four numbered sections. Three aspects of Habermas’s study are immediately evident. First, he divides Schelling’s philosophy into three epochs, in all of which one and the same matter is at issue: the relationship of the Absolute to reality and especially to the historical world. In none of these phases does Schelling manage to provide an answer that is free of ambiguity (whereby the first draft of The Ages of the World, from 1811, dares the most and fails most spectacularly). Second, Habermas examines Schelling’s late philosophy in light of the decline of, and modification to, Hegelian philosophy—that is, against the backdrop of the “revolutionary rupture” in nineteenth-century thought that Karl Löwith (1964) would diagnose ten years later (cf. Profiles, 79ff.). In the process—and one year before Schulz’s classic 1955 study Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (The fulfillment of German idealism in Schelling’s late philosophy)—Habermas examines Schelling’s existentialist objection to Hegel’s panlogism; in so doing, he identifies a negative relation to Kierkegaard and a positive one to Marx (Absolute, §3, §5). It is clear why Habermas devoted so much attention to Hegel and his influence: Hegel’s works stand at the beginning and the end of the intellectual movement that has gone down in history as “dialectical materialism.” No project—next to Marx’s—has had a comparable impact on the modern world. Ever since Hegel’s heyday, however—and over the course of more than a century of influence, which witnessed considerable changes to the institutional organization of intellectual and social reality—World Spirit took leave of the Master and gave rise to numerous declarations that his idealism was now obsolete. At the same time, this (supposed) fact has assured that Hegel’s works have been taken up again and again—for example, by Marx (both in youth and maturity), by student radicals in the 1960s and 1970s, and in courses offered by the leading lights of academic philosophy. All the while, the standard of argument that Hegel provided has never been undercut—even when

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readers distance themselves or adopt a “heretical” stance. Here—at the “zero hour” of the materialist critique of idealism, offering a critique of Hegel’s dialectics that possesses truly earthshaking dimensions—Schelling’s late philosophy lies at the ready. For the most part, Schelling’s late philosophy went unpublished; his lectures were recorded by students in Erlangen, Munich, and Berlin. We know that—to the dismay of the philosopher himself—clandestine copies were smuggled (at high prices) as far as France and Russia, where they had an incendiary effect even on revolutionaries (among others, Prosper Enfantin, Pierre Leroux, and Mikhail Bakunin; see the documents collected in Frank and Kurz 1975, 431–466; Schelling 2003, 14ff., 554ff.; Müller 1963; 1969]). Heinrich Heine and Moses Hess have attested that Schelling—whose thought seems so apolitical at first glance—met with keen interest among radicals in particular. Heine wrote of the “social importance of [Schelling’s] philosophy” (1997, 3, 628), and Hess even made so bold as to declare that the “French philosophy of society” (die französische Sozialphilosophie) he observed in Paris was analogous— “indeed, essentially identical”—to Schelling’s philosophy of nature; Schelling had provided “a speculative basis to the new religion of St. Simon for restoring former belief” (Hess 1961, 200–201, 288). Habermas completes the picture by relating Schelling—carefully and with due respect—to the Neoplatonist and mystical traditions represented by Jakob Böhme and the “Swabian Fathers,” especially Friedrich Christoph Oetinger. Habermas mentions appreciatively Böhme’s “tenacious zeal”—how “he holds fast to the finitude of things, the existence [Positivität] of evil, and the freedom of man to choose” (Absolute, 2). Oetinger, in turn, receives praise for defending the dynamism and productivity (“self-movement”) of Nature against the mechanistic and atomized perspective of the modern sciences (Absolute, 130ff., 136ff.). Cabbalistic tradition—especially the thought of Isaac Luria—also features in Habermas’s early work, where it is described in terms that resemble Bloch’s conception of utopia (Profiles, 21ff.). The following provides a sketch of Habermas’s dissertation as a whole. Attention then turns to the points of emphasis that make it distinct from other Schelling scholarship. A matter of particular interest is the way—and the historical moment at which—Habermas locates the influence of Schelling’s late philosophy. Discussion concludes with the consequences this holds for  the philosophy of history—which Habermas elaborates in the essay on Schelling in Theory and Practice while carving out a distinct position for his own brand of critical theory in relation to Marx. Habermas’s dialogue with Schelling, which begins in the dissertation, continues uninterrupted until Knowledge and Human Interests and “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism.”

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The Late Schelling and His Times Habermas was the first scholar—and the only critical theorist—to explore Schelling’s work in light of how Hegel’s oeuvre was received (i.e., critiqued). This occurs in the first half of the first section, which concludes that Schelling’s late work marks the beginning of the “revolutionary break” that Löwith diagnosed in the nineteenth century. Habermas shows no interest in Christological connections or those involving—in the broadest sense—the “history of ideas” (as is the case for Horst Fuhrmans, the great scholar of Schelling’s midcareer and late work). Instead, Habermas is interested in the philosophy of history in terms of politics. To this end, he sketches the reception and critique of Hegel on the part of the Young Hegelians and late German idealists and then the readings of Kierkegaard and Marx (which proved incomparably influential). This overview is followed, in the second half of the first section, by a discussion of the essential points of Schelling’s “late philosophy” itself— which Habermas, like others, considers to have begun in 1827, when Schelling was called to Munich. Schelling originally presented what is now known as Introduction to Positive Philosophy under the title System der Weltalter (System of the ages of the world). The work, which was first published by Ernst von Lasaulx in 1990, provided the basis for lectures first in Munich and then, beginning in 1841, in Berlin. In 1972, a revised and much more elaborate version from the academic year 1832–1833 was published by Horst Fuhrmans in a compilation of posthumous lecture copies entitled Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie (The grounding of positive philosophy). These important editions were not available to Habermas, who relied on excerpts published by Schelling’s son Karl Friedrich August with Johann Friedrich Cotta in Stuttgart (1856–1861). Needless to say, despite the editor’s best intentions, the writings—which were redacted to accommodate paternal interests—hardly meet modern standards of philology or scholarship. (When not otherwise indicated, the following quotes from the same edition that Habermas employs: Schelling [1856–1861]. Valuable originals, which cannot be replaced even by copies, were lost when Munich was bombed in 1944. The best overview of Schelling’s lectures late in life is found in Fuhrmans’s introduction [Schelling 1972].) Schelling’s most dutiful pupil, Maximilian II—who ascended the throne in Bavaria before the philosopher’s death—saw to it that a pious formula stood on his tombstone in Bad Ragaz: “To the foremost thinker of Germany” (Dem ersten Denker Deutschlands). Contemporaries in no way shared this view. The general consensus was that Schelling “had outlived himself” (on the following, see Frank in Schelling 1993, 11ff.). The Old Hegelians—who considered Berlin to be firmly in their possession as a citadel of Spirit (Geist)—had reacted with

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mockery in 1841, when Frederick William IV (who had just come to power) summoned Schelling to the university there. The king hoped—and these are the words of the monarch himself—that the philosopher would uproot “the dragon-seed of Hegelian pantheism” and prevent “the legal dissolution of domestic order” (see Max Lenz in Schelling 1993, 477ff.). Frederick William’s decision prompted derision because Schelling was held to have received a “princely burial” at Hegel’s hands thirty years earlier. Since then, he had offered the educated world nothing of import. Schelling was lying “as if in the grave of oblivion; all truly living philosophers had turned to Hegel, who now ruled.” Pronouncements on the Hegelian Left were even stronger. Already in 1827, Heine claimed to have seen Schelling, the erstwhile “luminary,” entangled in the snares of Munich Catholics grouped around Joseph Görres, Ignaz von Döllinger, and Franz von Baader (on how this assessment is mistaken, see Frank 1992, 361–395). “Like a poor little monk,” Schelling tottered about, mumbling mystical stuff and cursing Hegel, “who had supplanted him” (Heine 1997, 3, 633, 433–434). Friedrich Engels attended Schelling’s colloquium on the “Philosophy of Revelation” in 1841–1842. He countered what he heard with polemics, warning Schelling not to dishonor Hegel’s legacy and exhorting the faithful to dedicate themselves to the “Battle of Nations” (Völkerschlacht) being waged against the rival philosopher (Marx and Engels 1956–1990, sup. vol. 1, 221). When the lectures began, Engels had written in Telegraph für Deutschland: “If you ask anyone here in Berlin who has even the slightest idea of the power of Spirit about the battleground where dominion over German public opinion in matters of politics and religion—that is, over Germany herself—is being fought, he will tell you that it is the university, and more specifically: Auditorium 6, where Schelling holds his lectures” (Schelling 1993, 535). Karl Marx asked none other than Ludwig Feuerbach to compose a critical “portrait” (Charakteristik) of Schelling. Alluding to the philosopher’s notvery-influential appointment to the position of State Council (Staatsrat), Marx called Schelling the “thirty-eighth member of the Federation” (38tes Bundesmitglied). In Marx’s view, the whole police apparatus of Germany—as well as organs of censorship—“stand at [Schelling’s] disposal”; consequently, “an attack on Schelling is indirectly an attack on the political order as a whole, and especially the Prussian establishment” (Schelling 1993, 567–568). Why did Marx appeal to Feuerbach, of all people? “You are,” he explained, “the very man for this because you are the inverse of Schelling [der umgekehrte Schelling]. The . . . upstanding thought of Schelling’s youth . . . which remained a boyhood dream for him, has become truth and reality for you—a grave and manly matter.” These words are ambiguous—as Feuerbach no doubt realized, for he declined the invitation. Marx does not condemn Schelling outright. Instead, he faults him for having betrayed the romantic philosophy of his

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younger years, according to which Nature precedes Spirit. This notion, Marx concedes, is “the merit of our enemy” (das Gute von unserm Gegner) (Schelling 1993, 568). Among contemporaries, judgments were similarly divided. Despite misgivings about his anti-Hegelianism, Arnold Ruge—the head of the Hegelian Left—considered Schelling “politically and religiously liberal [freisinnig]” (Schelling 1993, 499–500) after meeting him in Karlsbad. Ruge negotiated for the right to publish Schelling’s Munich lectures and flirted with the idea that reality should not be declared reasonable in the Hegelian sense until this state had been achieved through reasonable action. “Nothing world-changing lies within logic,” Schelling had proclaimed (1856–1861, 1.10:153). Indeed, he had affirmed that “there is nothing to be done” with the crowning principle of logic and reason in Hegelian philosophy, the “Idea” or “Absolute Spirit” (2.1:565). Against Hegel, Schelling claimed that the science of reason leads beyond its own limits, which forces it to turn back; such a reversal, however, does not proceed from thought in his estimation. Instead, force of a practical kind is necessary: “there is nothing practical in thinking; concepts are merely contemplative and concern only necessity; here, in contrast, it is a matter of what lies beyond necessity: something willed and intended” (2.1:565; cf. Habermas 1971a, 212). “True dialectics occurs only in the realm of freedom; it alone has the power to solve all riddles” (Schelling 1993, 168). In Paris, the “romantic socialist” Pierre Leroux gave Schelling’s philosophy a warm welcome. Leroux even translated the first part of the Berlin lectures into French. In Schelling’s religious turn—where others saw the philosopher renouncing the thought of his youth—he detected a deeper meaning, namely, that a philosophical project that recognizes nothing above itself is forced, sooner or later—as one can see in the case of Hegel—to make peace with the world as it stands. Mikhail Bakunin, who studied under Schelling in Berlin, awaited his lectures “with unimaginable impatience”: “In the course of the summer, I have read much by him and found therein such an immeasurable depth of life, of creative thought, that I am convinced he will still reveal, even now, great profundities [viel Tiefsinniges]” (Schelling 1993, 539). Bakunin, who would later embrace anarchism, was probably pleased by Schelling’s merciless polemic against the state as a “scourge of God”—a “curse” weighing upon mankind that needed to be “negated” (aufgehoben) (Schelling 1856–1861, 2.1:534ff.; on Bakunin and Schelling, cf. Frank 2007, text 12). He certainly applauded Schelling for overcoming Hegel’s purely conceptual philosophy through “real and bloody contradictions” (Bakunin 1935, 68; Schelling 1993, 38, 79). Another auditor—Søren Kierkegaard—kept notes (Schelling 1993, 391–467) and paid due attention. Initially enthused by the way Schelling cracked open the Hegelian armor of abstraction (“when he spoke the word ‘actuality,’ in relation to philosophy, the fruit of thought jumped for joy

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within me [=my womb], as in Elizabeth”), he soon grew confused and disappointed; ultimately, it yielded disgust: “Schelling prates on without end” (Schelling 1993, 530ff.). Much of the preceding is recounted in the first section of part 1 of Das Absolute und die Geschichte. Habermas displays appreciation for the way Marx integrated, into Feuerbach’s naturalism, a conception of action situated in the historical world (Absolute, 79ff.). Thereby, he introduces considerations elaborated more fully in subsequent publications (Habermas 1971c, 387–463; Knowledge, 25–70; Society and Politics, 114–141). Habermas argues that Marx, because of his unconditional reliance on the iron course of the Hegelian dialectic, treats emancipatory action “like a child” and makes it subject to philosophical “coercion.” For this reason—among others—“Hegel and Marx, who are of a single mind in the matter,” make themselves guilty of “falling back to a level beneath Kantian critique” (which relates objective circumstances both to conditions of possibility and to the way that reflection occurs). According to Habermas, Marx reduced what Fichte had called Tathandlung (literally, “deed-action”) to an instrumental matter—which he later termed “a real element [wirklicher Teil] of natural history.” Although Marx christened his project with a Kantian name—“critique”—he failed to explain it in a manner consistent with the ontological foundations of his own theory. For this reason, Habermas concludes, he ultimately had to reinforce his normative objection to reifying human labor by means of the “rigid melody” (Felsenmelodie) of Hegelian dialectics (Marx and Engels 1956–1990, sup. vol. 1, 8–9). Marx understood reflection in terms of “the self-production of the species”; the “naturalism” this involves both stems from, and is limited by, the empirical sciences. Marx came to understand dialectics as a law of nature and, in the process, to attach undue significance to “positivism” (Knowledge, 58–59, 87–88). As a result, dialectics—which Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin only naturalized further— ceased to be founded on the free actions of a subject; henceforth, the dialectical process (realdialektischer Prozeß) was thought to occur through the anonymous workings of “natural facts” (Absolute, 80–81). It should be clear, then, that Habermas pays close attention to the turn in Schelling’s thought after Philosophical Investigations Into the Essence of Human Freedom (Absolute, 239ff.; cf. the comparison to the ways Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel conceive freedom in §28, 303ff.). Traditionally—that is, for Spinoza and Leibniz but also for Schelling’s earlier “Identity System” (e.g., Schelling 1956–1961, 1.6:538–539, §302; 1.7:384)—“free” refers to a being (in principle, one that is unchanging) able to develop its essence unimpeded from without. This, of course, amounts to the freedom of Spinoza’s stone, which is happy to fall in keeping with the laws of its nature. In contrast, Philosophical Investigations Into the Essence of Human Freedom declares: “the essence of man is fundamentally his own act” (Schelling 2007, 50). Human essence, then, does not

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determine action; it arises from it. The essence of man/mankind stems from “the concrete act of self-positing [reales Selbstsetzen], a primal and fundamental willing [Ur- und Grundwollen] that makes itself into something and is the ground of all ways of being [Wesenheit]” (50–51; translation slightly modified). No dialectical constraint governs this relationship, as must occur according to the Hegelian formula: “freedom is insight into the necessary course of the general” (Hegel 1968–1971, 7, 294, §145; 10, 303, §484; cf. Hegel 1952, 428, 436; Absolute, 310–311). Instead, the essence that determines action ex anankes (as the traditional philosophical idiom puts it) is a matter of projection (Entwurf ). For Schelling, freedom does not dissolve into boundless abstraction. On the contrary, it is the hallmark of our finitude (Absolute, 313ff.). Nor does Schelling admit a primordial, Platonic decision that sets the course for subsequent action. Rather, “we demand of man . . . that he overcome his character” (Schelling, 1946, 93–94; Absolute, 315). Schelling arrives at this bold declaration by displacing essence—what a thing or quality is, its quidditas—into a position of absolute dependency; indeed, he holds that essence occupies a position of permanent belatedness relative to its own existence (Dassheit, quodditas). As Habermas remarks at various points (e.g., Absolute, 243), Sartre’s insight that existence precedes essence (e.g., Sartre 1991, 385) was already central to Schelling’s philosophy of the deed. Schelling affirms that existence precedes essence with regard to selfconsciousness (1993, 110). Indeed, essence is “what exceeds Being” (das Überseiende)—a positive determination that has persisted beyond raw Being (das blinde Sein) and left behind only a past or an “outdated” (überholtes) being. Projecting its essence, the subject stands outside itself and ek-sists, as Schelling puts it in an etymological phrasing (167). The subject abandons naked Being “as something that has been overcome and is now past” (169–170). Through its freedom to act, the agent is “liberated from the inviolable necessity [ananke] of Being” (164). “Mankind [der Mensch] must tear itself free from its being in order to begin to be freely [um ein freies Sein anzufangen]. . . . To liberate oneself from oneself is the task of all education [Bildung]. Those [die Menschen] . . . who do not leave themselves behind remain powerless [unvermögend]” (170; on the “temporal constitution” of the Spirit, cf. Absolute, 319ff.).

The Failure of Schelling’s Late Philosophy The second part of the first section addresses “The Absolute and History in Schelling’s Late Philosophy (1827–54).” Habermas takes on the theme of time— a matter central to (the) critique(s) of metaphysics performed by Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. (Along with the “linguistic turn”—which occurred almost

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simultaneously—time has offered the mightiest weapon against reality-denying hinterworlds.) More than any other thinker of the Sattelzeit (Reinhart Koselleck), it was Schelling who steered the course of philosophy toward finitude. In the process, he revised his own eternity-obsessed metaphysics—and, of course, the metaphysics of Hegel (to say nothing of the tradition following Plato and, more recently, the subject philosophy of Descartes and his heirs). Schelling calls his project “negative philosophy.” The name is apt because such philosophy says, of the sole theme of metaphysics (“being as Being”), only what it is not: Spirit (Geist). Schelling puts matters even more clearly when he declares that metaphysics—especially its Hegelian articulation— suffers from the “infinite lack of being” (unendlicher Mangel an Seyn) (Schelling 1856–1861, 2.2:49; Schelling 1972, 439); after all, metaphysics has reduced true Being to what it is not: namely, to Spirit, which is not identical to itself by definition. In contrast, philosophy is “positive” when it acknowledges the pure that (das reine Daß)—the “actus purus” (Schelling 1856–1861, 2.1:586)—of existence (in the Kantian sense) as the “absolute position” of a thesis without conceptual determination and anterior to all consciousness, which can only be known after the fact (a posteriori). Consciousness, then, has its real grounding (Realgrund) in Being to which it relates as that which it is not (in relation/ comparison to Being); conversely, consciousness helps Being enter the phenomenal realm (dem Sein zum Erscheinen verhilft)—that is, consciousness provides the ideal grounding (Idealgrund) for Being. A philosophy adequate to this radical insight—which overcomes idealism—would deserve to be called an “existential system” (Existentialsystem); Hegel wrongfully claimed this title when he based his Logic on Being, which he understood only as the most elementary component of a rational system (Schelling 1993, 125). It bears repeating: Schelling was the only thinker of classical German philosophy to take Kant’s thesis on Being and its implications seriously. Thought—into which Hegel would like to sublate Being—is simply the projection of possibilities (Potenzen, or, in Greek, dynámeis); nothing actual (kein Wirkliches) can result from them without being circular. The Platonic me on could not possibly provide the grounds for anything that exists unless it already existed itself; in such a case, however, existence would have to precede the very grounds of existence. “It is not,” Schelling affirms, “because there is Thinking that there is Being; rather, because there is Being, there is Thinking” (1856–1861, 2.3:161n1). Feuerbach reworks the statement as follows: “Thought comes from Being, but Being does not come from Thought” (1970, 258, nr. 4). “If we want anything at all outside of thinking, we must begin with Being [Seyn] as it stands absolutely independent of all thinking, which precedes all thinking. Hegelian philosophy understands nothing of such Being; it has no place for this concept” (Schelling 1856–1861, 2.3:164). Marx’s famous statement—in a sociopolitical

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context, of course—that consciousness does not determine being but rather that being determines consciousness, is rooted here. Decades later, Lenin’s philosophical notebooks still recorded declarations by Schelling (e.g., “Concepts as such exist  .  .  . nowhere but in consciousness and are therefore, objectively speaking, posterior to Nature, not anterior to it” [Schelling 1856–1861, 1.10:140; Planty-Bonjour 1974, 61–62]). Habermas considers Schelling’s distinction between purely rational philosophy and positive philosophy to be “ambiguous” (zweideutig) (Absolute, §9). On the one hand, he holds that Schelling seeks to separate historical actuality, once and for all, from metaphysics and to base human action on a freedom that does not realize its essence so much as create it in the first place. At the same time, however, he holds that Schelling’s position represents a “stopgap” inasmuch as it is “erected on the ruins of The Ages of the World” and has “abandoned the real issue [eigentliches Anliegen]” (Absolute, 10). That is, Habermas maintains that Schelling failed to draw radical—i.e., postmetaphysical—consequences from his insight into the fact that positive (i.e., real) relations are irreducible to negative ones. The “fallacy” of the ontological proof of God—which Kant disproved, decades earlier, through his thesis on Being—applies only too well for Schelling in his old age (Absolute, 118; cf. Habermas 1971a, 209–210). Ultimately, theology and restored metaphysics emerged victorious, annulling the emancipatory tendencies of the first version of The Ages of the World. Once and only once (in 1811) did Schelling—along the lines of Lurianic cabbalism—consider that God had withdrawn, returned to His primal state of concentrated potency, and left the world in a state of complete autonomy. In his late philosophy, Schelling restores reason to its former position of “knowing completely the essential connection between all that exists” (Erkenntnis des Wesenszusammenhangs alles Existierenden) (Habermas 1971a, 207)—albeit while imposing restrictions on reason’s claims to validity. “The project of positive philosophy would have needed to be ratified by giving up negative philosophy,” Habermas (1971a, 211–212) observes. Schelling, then, paved the way for the “existentialist” overcoming of idealism—even if he did not follow through on the initial consequences he drew. All the same, he does not merit the criticism reserved for Kierkegaard: “At no point did Schelling renounce the claims of the concept, at no point did he—unlike Kierkegaard—set a limit to knowledge through belief” (Absolute, 115).

The Philosophy of Nature and Identity This is the theme of the second part of Das Absolute und die Geschichte, which addresses matters in chronological succession: Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature (1774–1800) and his Philosophy of Identity (1801–1806). Once again,

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Habermas focuses on Schelling’s efforts to affirm the preeminence of Nature over Spirit—a difficult task within the framework of idealist discourse. Herein lies Schelling’s unique contribution to classical German philosophy—“the upstanding thought of [his] youth.” To be sure: in the “absolute Identity System” (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.4:113), such a hierarchy is leveled inasmuch as Nature and Spirit are equated with each other. Yet even at this stage Schelling’s thought leaves no room for doubt that the terms’ “absolute identity” takes precedence and, because it is both ontologically and epistemologically “independent,” is irreducible to them (1.4:117, §6; 16, supplement 1 to §15; cf. 1.6:147, 163–164). Schelling understands the identity of Nature and Spirit positively— in Kantian terms, as “being unconditionally posited” (unbedingtes Gesetztseyn) (1.4:117n1). In discussing the priority of Nature (Absolute, 160, 164)—which Schelling calls the “transcendental past” of Spirit (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.1:380ff., 1.4:84– 85, 1.10:93–94)—Habermas reworks Heidegger’s “situatedness” (Befindlichkeit) into the apt designation of “carriedness” (Getragenheit) (Absolute, 163ff.). This thought, he claims, is what constitutes “Schelling’s ‘realism’ ” (160). Whereas Fichte’s philosophy of the deed prioritizes the orientation of human endeavor toward the future, Schelling asserts that every undertaking opening upon the future is itself already “projected” (jeder zukunftsöffnende Entwurf [ist] schon “entworfen”)—that is, it is based on a natural fundament that, at the same time, is also situated within human history. Schelling lends a socialphilosophical turn to this notion: the subject remains isolated and empty until self-knowledge is sent its way through the “recognition” of fellow subjects (161–162). Here, one may see agreement between Schelling (who articulated a theory of mutual recognition well before Hegel) and Habermas’s own thought (especially the article on George Herbert Mead in Postmetaphysical Thinking)—to say nothing of the fact that Schelling took the field, around 1800, for a universal legal order and “league of nations” (Völkerbund). At the same time, Habermas holds that Schelling’s philosophy builds excessively on the “ahistorical grounds of historical existence [Seinsweise]” (164). (Interestingly, in Knowledge and Human Interests [43ff.], he directs the same criticism at Marx, who radicalizes Kant’s extratemporal transcendental synthesis under the names of “work” and “relations of production,” which stand for the socioinstitutional framework in which forces of production operate; at the same time, however, he continues to view them as a continuation of natural history.) Schelling emphasizes the productivity of Nature, which must not be obscured by the particular forms it creates (Absolute, 140–141, 154–155); he derives this insight from Oetinger’s antimechanistic philosophy of life (Absolute, 122–138). This point meets with Habermas’s approval, especially inasmuch

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as it holds sociopolitical (Marxist) implications. Here, in germinal form, lies another line of reasoning that Habermas will develop in his discussion of the cognitive psychology of Jean Piaget and his student Lawrence Kohlberg—a matter of great importance for him in “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism” and Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. In cognitive psychology, Habermas finds confirmation that reason is the product of a natural history that has produced itself; even translated into the pared-down language of developmental theory, the matter does not lose its speculative component or simply reduce reason to purely natural processes. (This line of thinking is also present in Habermas’s recent engagement with neuroscience [Naturalism].) Habermas applies the pejorative designation “static” (Absolute, 177) to the Philosophy of Identity to set it apart from the Philosophy of Nature, which is dynamic. We already know the reason for his disapproval: in the Identity System, the dialectical movement of Schelling’s earlier ideas “freezes.” After 1802 (in, e.g., Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie or Bruno, or, On the Natural and Divine Principle in Things), Schelling duly tries—albeit in vain—to figure out how to leap from the rarefied heights of the Absolute into the material dimension of History, i.e., the “realm of Freedom” (Schelling 1993, 168). As we have seen, he can do so only by reinterpreting freedom as something that does not fulfill essence but creates it instead. Habermas analyzes this switch, which occurs in an unexpected movement of the dialectic, in exemplary fashion. The more Schelling seeks to hold separate the world of phenomena (which occupies the sphere of causality/time) and the Absolute, the more the Absolute asserts itself ex negativo as the focus of phenomenological attention. The way Schelling formulates the law of finitude—already in 1804 (Würzburger System) and, more still, in Aphorisms on Natural Philosophy (1806)—paves the way for the theme of time in The Ages of the World (Frank 1992, 322ff.). In brief, Schelling holds that what is finite/ temporal has no independent (absolute) being; that is, it has no being per se, but only in (relation to) something else, which in turn lacks being and must find it in a third term—and so on, ad infinitum (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.6:195– 196; cf. 1.4:130–131, 343–344, 397). Such, according to Schelling, are the qualities of time and causality as the constituent elements of finitude. However, this view of finitude is wholly absent in the way Schelling formulates the foundations of the “Absolute System of Identity” (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.4:113). “Nothing,” he affirms time and again, “is finite viewed in itself” (e.g., 1.4:119, §14, passim; Absolute, 183). Thereby, the philosopher forgets to add that there is nothing that can be intuited in an unmediated fashion. After 1802, Schelling’s compensatory formulation reads, “what is finite in and of itself” (ein Endliches an und für sich) (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.4:381; Absolute, 187ff.).

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In Philosophy and Religion (1804), the matter becomes urgent, and Schelling introduces the notion of a “falling away” of the finite from the Absolute. Schelling defines this act of separation or extraction of the finite from the Whole (das All) in terms of sin. The most concise and penetrating formulation occurs in his Wurzburg System: The ground of finitude, in our view, involves the fact that things not-being-inGod are not anything in particular; since by their nature [ihrem Wesen nach] or in themselves, they are only in God, finitude can also be expressed as a falling away—a defectio—from God or the Whole. The freedom of being liberated from necessity—that is, the particularity of life separated from the Whole—is nothing, and it can only intuit images of its own nothingness. To apprehend what is immediately posited through the idea of the Whole as nothing [das Nichts] as if it were the reality of the things [themselves]—[that is, to overvalue] their nothingness [eine Nichtigkeit an ihnen]—this is sin. The life of our senses is nothing but the perpetual expression of our not-being-inGod, according to particularity.  .  . . The original evil, therefore, consists in man [der Mensch] wanting to be something for himself. (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.6:552, 561)

Absoluteness and relativity stand in stark opposition, for the “Absolute” is defined as “quod est omnibus relationibus absolutum.” Nothing is but the Absolute, and outside the Absolute is nothing. Therefore, the Absolute must also incorporate within itself what it itself is not: its own relativity. Thus, there emerges the formula (which Hegel took up and developed) of Identity’s selfidentity with Difference. Inasmuch as this opposition is only conceptual, it remains virtual (potentiâ). Only when one aspect emerges as distinct from another in actual fact does true separation emerge—and with it, time. However, unity (although destroyed in fact) persists in essence (wesentlich) (cf. Absolute, 198, §15, 180ff.; 323ff.). For this reason, the basic formula of time is that it marks a separation of a particular kind, namely, a separation that reunites (Sartre 1943, 177)—or, in Schelling’s words, a constant “calling back of the infinite concept from its infinite flight” (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.4:119). “Temporal is everything whose reality [=actuality] is exceeded by its essence, or in whose essence more is contained than it can hold in reality” (Zeitlich ist . . . alles, dessen Wirklichkeit [=Aktualität] von dem Wesen übertroffen wird, oder in dessen Wesen mehr enthalten ist, als es der Wirklichkeit nach fassen kann) (1.2:364). If Habermas finds fault with Schelling’s Philosophy of Identity for not achieving what it promises (Absolute, 187), he does so because it cannot explain the autonomy of the finite—especially in human reality. Habermas maintains that a process of “de-realization” (Entwirklichung) (198, §17) has occurred in

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the name of Identity without relation. In so doing, however, he fails to see that finitude has assumed a central position in Schelling’s thought in another way: its principle has “come loose” (Entgleiten) inasmuch as the Absolute is now transcendent. Dieter Henrich once suggested, in a lecture at Heidelberg, that the three systematic articulations of German idealism (Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling) be understood as variations on a core idea: that there is something unconditional that must be thought in the I (es sei ein Unbedingtes im Ich zu denken). Schelling, then, accented the formula as follows: What is unconditional in the I must be thought as such. The quest for the unconditional ultimately makes Schelling suspicious of the very idea of an “Identity System.” On the one hand, in a grand-scale vision inspired by Spinoza, he forges Spirit and Nature into one (in a fashion that mind-body theories today should still take into consideration). At the same time, however, he fears that Nature—in the “night of Identity” (Schelling 1856– 1861, 1.2:403) that occurs when Spirit englobes it—might disappear as something endowed with an independent existence. Therefore, in Philosophy and Religion (1804)—which marks a turning point in his thought (Absolute, 198ff.)— the Absolute reduplicates itself through “another Absolute” (Schelling 1856– 1861, 1.4:31ff.); this second Absolute carries the germ of “falling away” within it as soon as it tears out of the womb of absolute unity and ascends, in the idealism of the absolute I, the summit of blindness (1.4:38ff.). In The Essence of Human Freedom (1809), it is a dark “unground” or “primal ground”— a “will” (which Schelling also called the “real activity” preceding “ideal activity”)—that underlies consciousness. All consciousness, Schelling avers, is based on this primal terrain—or else represents a secondary, derivative phenomenon. At the core of this foundation, however, lies a germinal falling away. In The Ages of the World, Schelling also speaks of “Being” (Sein) as the foundation of “being” (Seiendes): once more, he holds that a withdrawal (“contraction”) of God—or, conversely—a tearing away of the I as it “pursues” its fall—occasions catastrophe. All the same, Schelling never managed, despite his many efforts, to find the “reality principle” that is truly independent of the Ideal. As Feuerbach wrote mean-spiritedly to Christian Kapp (February 18, 1842): “the scoundrel in Berlin seeks, yet he cannot find it, for he has no heart in his body” (Feuerbach 1964, 13:132).

The Ages of the World: “Consequences of Schelling’s Idea of the Contraction of God for the Philosophy of History” At least once—if only tentatively—Schelling succeeded in emancipating history from the Absolute: in the first plan for The Ages of the World (1811). As we

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have seen, Habermas considers this to have been anticipated by the new conception of freedom Schelling presented in The Essence of Human Freedom (1809) and the Stuttgart Private Lectures (1810); additionally, one can find indications in Aphorisms on Natural Philosophy and in the new introduction to the World Soul (both from 1806), where Habermas remarks on the decisive influence of Böhme on Schelling’s thought (Absolute, §18). The new orientation, Habermas writes, makes “the separation between eternal nature and phenomenal nature obsolete”; the potencies (Potenzen) effect “finitude qua temporalization” (Verendlichung qua Verzeitlichung). This shift prepares the “turn” that Schelling (publicly) made in The Essence of Human Freedom (1809). Matter as it actually exists takes on—at least in part—the qualities of the Absolute: gravity is multiplicity in unity, and light unity in multiplicity—as well as, at the same time, the “invisible bond” uniting both terms (Absolute, 208, 213, 218; Schelling 1856–1861, 1.7:224). As Habermas remarks, such a notion stands in “glaring” (schillernd) opposition to the fixation on eternity that Schelling would observe later on (Absolute, 217ff.). In this context, it is worth mentioning a matter that has still not received due attention from scholars (see Frank 1992, 218–219, 251ff.). Already in his discussion of Schelling’s natural philosophy, Habermas noted a strange conversion of the principles at work. Schelling had always posited a primary, unconscious, and “real activity extending into the infinite” (reelle, ins Unendliche gehende Tätigkeit), which is made commensurate to consciousness by an “unrestrictable, limiting, and ideal activity” (unbegrenzbare limitative, ideelle Tätigkeit). After 1809/1810, the philosopher privileged attractive or contractive activity—i.e., gravity—as the real force; against it works expansive, diffusive activity—light or love—as the ideal force (Absolute, 155, 168–170, 249ff.). At the same time, the real principle—“gravity,” in physical terms—continues to form “the basis” for the dynamic he elaborates. This basic activity does not await reflection (that is, interruption) through the limitation that is its complement; rather, it is itself marked by closedness, contraction, and separation, and it needs to be led by Love (ideal, expansive, and effusive activity) in order to open itself. Schelling also calls the latter operation “egoity” (Egoität) or “selfness.” Now, there occurs a second conversion. Earlier, Schelling still considered Fichte’s I-hood (Ichheit) to provide the goal of nature (Naturprozess)—which, as he wrote in 1796, is nothing other than “the history of self-consciousness” (1.1:380–383). In his new conception, however, Ichheit appears as a potentiality in God yet independent from God (Absolute, 249ff.). As an entity independent of God, I-hood seems rebellious—evil, even. It ponders its falling away from God and thereby tears the whole of Nature down with it, into sin:

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This entire relationship of Man to Nature, namely that it has become entirely external to him, obviously cannot be seen [explained?] otherwise than by assuming that Man has preferred his particular, individual consciousness to the place within universal consciousness that was conceived for him. He should, in fact, assume and affirm the position of the universal subject. The very fact that Man no longer appears as this subject, that Nature is foreign to him, is proof that Man has abandoned the position of the universal subject that was conceived for him and preferred an individual existence [Sein]. Since then, Nature is merely something external, it is a Whole stripped of its ultimate consciousness [ein seines letzten Bewusstseins beraubtes Ganzes]; it is an akephalon, something lacking its head. (Schelling 1972, 471)

Schelling calls for a “re-elevation” (Wiedererhöhung/Wiedererhebung) of degraded Nature, a “spiritual palingenesis or resurrection of the material” (geistige Palingenese oder Wiederauferstehung des Materiellen) (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.8:463; 2.2:578; 1946, 1:32–33; 1856–1861, 1.2:578). There can be no question: Marx’s utopia of the “true resurrection of nature—the naturalism of man and the humanism of nature” originates here (Habermas 1971a, 215; Knowledge, 28). To be sure, both Schelling and Marx derive their ideas from mysticism and cabbalistic theology. The question remains, however, from where what derives from the Absolute can gain the “autonomy” it needs for the free deed of falling away. An initial response holds that what is finite stems from “a root independent of God” (Absolute, 251). A second is the simple fact that it can do so because a relationship of cause and effect preserves the symmetry between the Absolute and the Finite: begetting (die Zeugung) (231ff.). Earlier on—for example, in 1806—Schelling had spoken of the “self-revelation of God.” Here, the reflex— the other of God, that in which He reveals Himself—is equal and even (ebenbürtig) to the divine revelator, for “God can only be revealed [offenbar werden] in what is like Him, in free beings that act from within [aus sich selbst]” (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.7:347). Might the speech Habermas delivered at St. Paul’s Church (Frankfurt) after September 11 be viewed in this context? On this occasion, Habermas affirmed that “Man’s creation in the image of God” represents an intrinsic truth of religion, and he weighed the far-reaching consequences of this insight for social integration (Glaube, 47). The same knowledge, Habermas observed, might also be achieved by rational means; all the same, religion deserves to be acknowledged as a transcendent source of enduring inspiration. The view Habermas presented here is similar in kind to that of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in the eighteenth century. Lessing held that human reason experiences a

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“new impulse” through divine “revelation” (1908, 35, 37) and is thereby spurred to conceive what it could not imagine on its own. This is a matter with which Schelling also engaged intensively. Quoting the sixth section of Lessing’s Education of the Human Race, Schelling writes in The Philosophy of Mythology: “reason, without that guiding, numinous force [jenes Leitende, jenes numen],” cannot “afford its own authentication [Beglaubigung]”; “left to its own devices” as a system incapable of justifying its final ends by immanent means, it “loses itself in complete meaninglessness” (Schelling 1856–1861, 2.1:239, 43, 61–62; cf. 2.2:241ff., 187; for commentary, see Frank 2008, text 1). It would be interesting to know what Habermas had to say on the matter. Once again, the ambiguity within Schelling’s philosophy is evident. His system cannot conceive of emancipating the natural-historical world from the Absolute without at the same time branding it with the stigma of evil and guilt. The use of freedom—understood as arbitrariness (Willkürfreiheit)—is also the abuse of freedom (Absolute, 273–274). We can now finish the picture of Das Absolute und die Geschichte in a few broad strokes (needless to say, Habermas’s study retraces the winding—and often crisscrossing—paths of Schelling’s thought in painstaking detail). The most tangible result of Schelling’s profound reflections on finitude is his remarkably elaborate and modern doctrine of time (Absolute, 319ff.). Habermas recognized the import and structure of this aspect of Schelling’s philosophy well before other modern readers (a full two years before Wolfgang Wieland, for example). The most important feature of The Ages of the World for Habermas is the notion that God puts an end to the playful contest of forces—the “rotating activity” (rotatorischer Umtrieb) (Absolute, 359ff.) of egoity and love, of restrictive contraction and expansive affirmation—through a decision (Entschluss). Here, Schelling is following the mystical conception of wisdom (Sophia)—a matter Habermas discusses in Das Absolute und die Geschichte and “Dialectical Idealism’s Transition to Materialism” with remarkable erudition. (The dissertation focuses on the model provided by Jakob Böhme, whereas the essay concentrates on cabbalistic tradition, especially the thought of Isaac Luria.) In the act of decision, creative nature (die zeugende Natur)—now for the first time denominated “God the Father”—abandons a position of indifference and permits Love to free itself from the bonds of I-hood; this decision occurs through God’s act of ecstatic kenosis (Selbstentäußerung). Free and unconstrained, He bows to the spirit of Love, which occurs inasmuch as He concentrates (“contracts”) Himself into a state of primal potency, out of which the  begetting of independent Nature—with Man at its summit—becomes possible. Habermas summarizes the consequences as follows: the unity of God breaks apart into a historical entity, to be conceived in analogy to freely acting

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mankind; this being has, in enacting its decision, shed its divinity and permitted itself “to be engulfed [verschlingen] by history” (Habermas 1971a, 202), on the one hand, while, on the other, preserving a suprahistorical form that retains (only) the appearance of oneness (Absolute, 372–373, 391). Henceforth, the fate of Nature lies in the hands of the Son. As Habermas remarks, Schelling—in a note that went unpublished in his lifetime—went so far as to declare that eternity was, in fact, projected from a position of finitude: Before Eternity, therefore, Time stands as an independent principle [selbständiges Principium]; if we wish to speak precisely, we must say that Eternity is not of itself, that it is only through Time; that, therefore, Time, according to reality [der Wirklichkeit nach], is before Eternity; that, in this sense—and not as is commonly thought—Time is not posited by Eternity; rather, and on the contrary, Eternity is the child of Time. (Schelling 1946, 3:229–230)

Already in the second version of The Ages of the World, Schelling sought to steer another course: because the band of cosmic forces is indissoluble— because it is grounded in the essence of the Absolute—it does not come undone in the Son. This line of reasoning, however, merely pulls the “emergency brake” of speculation in order to deny a process without which the Absolute itself cannot be conceived (Absolute, 373): the maneuver saves God’s absoluteness but gives up on His existence in history (380; cf. Habermas 1971a, 202ff.).

Marx and Schelling In “Dialectical Idealism’s Transition to Materialism,” Habermas takes up the themes of his dissertation again. This time he does not seek to analyze Schelling’s failure. Instead, he tries to determine the implications it holds for his own intellectual project, which is increasingly oriented on Marx’s philosophy of history. This second look at Schelling’s Ages of the World is redemptive: utopian à la Bloch. To be sure, “Schelling is no political thinker” (Habermas 1971a, 172). All the same, Habermas remarks that Schelling presented three projects for a theory of political order over the course of his life (174ff.; Frank and Kurz 1975, 32ff.; Hollerbach, in Frank and Kurz, 307–325). In the first project (for example, The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism), the state—as a mechanistic legal order (“a machine”)—stands opposed to freedom; “therefore, it should cease to be” (Habermas 1971a, 110). Here—as Wieland (1956, 261ff.) observes, Schelling anticipates the Marxian utopia of the state’s demise. According to Schelling’s second political vision (presented in his New Deduction of Natural

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Law and System of Transcendental Idealism), what is “holiest” within Man— namely, law (Recht)—must be defended from the anarchic conflict of competing, individual freedoms through an order that, while modeled on Nature, is in fact a “second nature” (System of Transcendental Idealism, 159): the bourgeois legal order as conceived by Rousseau, the French Revolution, and Kant. Schelling’s third model—which he elaborated in the context of his Philosophy of Identity (and presented at the end of the tenth lecture On the Method of Academic Study and in the conclusion to his Wurzburg System)—considers striking an “organic” (i.e., a nonmechanistic) balance between the interests of the individual and the general; this perspective will be familiar to readers from Hegel’s philosophy of law. Ultimately, however—after the Stuttgart Private Lectures—the first, “anarchistic” model carried the day. Even if it found expression in conservative affirmations of monarchy, the altogether biting language likely fueled Schelling’s firebrand pupil Bakunin (Frank 2007, text 12; cf. Habermas’s quotation of Schelling’s late comments on the state in Theorie und Praxis, 213). The most conspicuous element of Schelling’s thought—and the point where he demonstrates the greatest distance from the projects of his fellow travelers on the road of philosophical idealism—concerns the negation of the state. Habermas considers the matter to be deeply connected with that of an “absolute, real [wirklich] beginning”—a process that, because it defies his power of conception, Hegel (1952, 26) polemically denounces. “What is ultimately true,” Schelling wrote a year before the publication of Phenomenology of Spirit, “must also have been true at the very beginning” (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.7:73). In The Ages of the World, Schelling—with echoes of Solomon’s lament (Habermas 1971a, 182)—describes the circle without issue of the (Hegelian) Concept, which is closed upon itself. Here, Habermas adds to his reflections a variant of mysticism, to whose legacy “the early Marx and the speculative minds in the Marxist tradition (Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno) [found] themselves attracted” (Knowledge, 33): the medieval Zohar, in general terms, and the later thought of Isaac Luria (Habermas 1971b, 284–285). The relevance of this tradition to Schelling is evident in “three topoi”: first, the notion of a natural ground (Grund) that is within God but inaccessible to Him; second, the idea of egoity, through which God can “contract” Himself and return to the state of primal potency (Zimzum); and finally, the view that primal Man (Adam Kadmon) “fell away” from the divine order and tore Creation along with him. Before fallen Man, the process of history extends— “uninterruptedly, and at every moment, making past and future arise simultaneously” (Habermas 1971a, 207): time, as Friedrich Schlegel affirmed, is nothing but “eternity out of joint”; “nor,” for that matter, “is eternity the negation of all time” (Schlegel 1958, 10:550). Accordingly, Schelling warns

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against sloppy idealism, which holds that “an entirely pure concept of eternity” exists “free of admixtures of notions of time” (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.8:259–260). “The experience of our world’s corruption” makes him sympathetic to cabbalistic tradition. First, however, a “real [wirklich] beginning” to the process must be determined. Schelling finds it in the power of contraction: “All development presumes envelopment. . . . The beginning lies in attraction [Alle Entwickelung setzt Einwickelung voraus. . . . In der Anziehung liegt der Anfang]” (Schelling 1946, 1:23). This is a “methodologically materialistic” point of departure: it makes what is natural and “lower” the necessary basis for what is higher—if only in terms of being and not dignity. (“Priority stands in inverse relation to superiority,” Habermas comments [1971a, 189; see Schelling 1946, 1:25–26].) The rest of Schelling’s system we know from the dissertation. God makes the world begin in that He—mythically speaking—ends the “virtuality” of articulation that occurs in the uneventful activity (Umtrieb) of forces by drawing back to primordial potentiality; thereby, He separates the present from the past, into which He withdraws. The process of Nature begins, and its summit is crowned by Incarnation (Menschwerdung)—now, the critical threshold of theogony has been achieved. Mankind (der Mensch) can come to a “halt” in the order of forces as it stands, or it can break it apart through action of its own—tearing the divine bond (the Platonic desmos Schelling discusses in his commentary of Timaeus [1794]). This bond is “essential” (wesentlich) within God—and indissoluble—but this is not the case for Man/Mankind. If, then, God ruptures the bond through a renewed contraction, He reverses the order of things, corrupting them and Himself—and subjecting them and Himself to “naturality” (Naturalität); henceforth, Nature (which should exist only to be overcome through the principle of the Ideal) becomes His master. The process of Nature no longer pursues the aim of Love; now, Love is beholden to the commandments of the material age—“anger” and “evil” (Habermas 1971a, 192–193). In falling away, Man has brought a “curse” upon Nature. Through his deed, Nature has grown “alienated from the divine Self.” It is worth noting, in this context, that Schelling here—and elsewhere—employs the expression “alienation” (Entfremdung) (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.2:212; Schelling 1993, 206). Marx— whom Habermas also presents in Knowledge and Human Interests as a methodological (or epistemological) materialist and not a metaphysical one—describes the “material age” as a time when the “essential forces” (Wesenskräfte) of Man, which are ideal by nature, are repressed by materiality but not neutralized (Frank 1992, 319ff.). To put things in Schelling’s terms, matter is not the “wherefore” (das Worumwillen) of the process of history—that is, “what should be” (das Seynsollende). It is not dignitate prius; rather, it asserts its primacy only on the level of actuality (der Wirklichkeit nach). Instead of inaugurating a higher

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form of existence, Mankind has succumbed (verfallen) to the power of Nature; now it pursues only the material reproduction of its naked being: “preserving the external basis of life,” it offers solely “the image of having sunk to fighting for existence” (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.7:460, 462). Only by employing outside forces can it hope, in the long run, to bring what is external to it under control again (373). Social labor, through which humanity regulates its metabolic exchange with nature, was conceived as the means to a higher end (“the realm of freedom” [Reich der Freiheit], as Schelling and Marx call it); in its alienated condition, however, it degrades into a purely material end, in service only to this fallen world. To be sure: for Schelling (as for Marx), conceptual necessity does not automatically entail anything. In withdrawing from the world, God delegated the achievement of higher ends to free, human action; He has shown mankind the goal but not “necessitated” it (Habermas 1971a, 194–195). Mankind (der Mensch) not only experiences, in encountering Nature, a Hegelian self-encounter with Spirit; it also meets with traces of an older history, the reality of which remains only halfway available. The redemption of fallen nature—a conceptual truth (Begriffswahrheit) for Hegel—need not occur successfully. If we contemplate our environment (what Marx calls “objective nature”) and social reality as a whole (“subjective nature”), everything induces us to a pessimistic interpretation of this kind (Schelling 1972, 470ff.; Marx 1993b). By adopting such a perspective, Habermas sets himself in opposition to Hegel (like Marx, whose dialectical materialism holds that conceptual coercion or causal necessity produces “false unity” of the Spirit/“realm of freedom”). “In Schelling’s Logic, had he written such a work, Book III would have remained subordinate to Book II—the concept would be subordinate to essence” (Habermas 1971a, 195). Habermas considers the historical world to be founded on human action. Thereby he invokes both Marx and Schelling. According to the former, mankind makes its history, but under circumstances that are given—i.e., which it does not choose (Marx 1913a, 9). Schelling would endorse this view—even to the point of affirming the project of methodological materialism. However, Schelling in his late stage sees the crisis of “pure” philosophy as lying not just in the inconceivability of existence but also in the fact that the consequences of action cannot be rationally foreseen (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.10:153; 2.1:565; Habermas 1971a, 212ff.). Moreover, he holds that abstract theory/pure contemplation does not negate the need for action (Handlungszwang). Hegel’s absolute knowledge represents a dead end; with and from it “nothing is to be done” (ist nichts anzufangen): “Giving up action is impossible [lässt sich nicht durchsetzen]; actions must occur. But as soon as active life takes place again, actuality asserts its rights, the ideal (passive) God is no longer enough, and despair returns, as before” (Schelling 1856–1861, 2.1:559–560).

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However, it is God who determines the goal of human action; He has passed on His claim to existence to a regulative idea that “floats” (vorschwebt) before mankind’s undertakings and provisionally appears as the “realm of freedom.” The first concern, then, is to overcome the blunt (herb) pressure of the State and Law—which both Schelling and Marx understand in terms of “a foreign, merely factual force” (Gewalt), something that is, “so to speak, woven into and engraved into human will [dem menschlichen Willen gleichsam Eingewebtes und Eingestochenes]” (Schelling 1856–1861, 2.1:534ff.), and an “external unity” in which essential, human forces are oppressed by the pressures of natural fact. Schelling and Marx hold that Man—and not Nature—is to be blamed for corruption. Both consider that the natural order has been disorganized by a kind of egoism. Both see the domination of the “material age” not as a metaphysical necessity but as the consequence of historical action. “Marx, too, was led by the same idea of overcoming materialism, which involves demoting matter that has been wrongfully elevated to the status of Being back to a basic position [zur Basis des Seienden]” (Habermas 1971a, 217). Both thinkers orient their projects on “resurrecting” nature that is fallen, on renewing mankind’s essential unity (Wesenseinheit) with Nature. To be sure, Schelling devises a theogony, and Marx pursues economic analysis (215–216); despite his avowed sympathy for the “inner” will to overcome the state, Schelling denounces revolution as a crime (Schelling 1856–1861, 2.1:547ff.), and Marx counts on nothing so much as revolution inasmuch as only action “from outside” can have an effect on what has degenerated into externality (Habermas 1971a, 218). All the same, Habermas observes, Marx lends a concrete dimension to Schelling’s vague talk of “pushing back” matter into a position subordinate to higher life. The realm of necessity will yield to that of freedom when socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power. . . . But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. (Marx 1993a, 959)

Habermas (1971a) identifies a further victory of Schelling over Hegel that he passes on to Marx (219ff.). For Hegel, labor—in which mankind exteriorizes itself (sich entäußert)—possesses a thoroughly positive meaning; moreover, Hegel holds that “through a ruse of reason” (Hegel 1969–1971, 6, 452–453) mankind’s subjective ends ultimately provide the means for the dialectic to assert its autonomous teleology—a matter he also views in entirely positive terms.

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Hegel associated no risk with human exteriorization (Frank 1992, 313ff.). Schelling, however, based his distrust of a fetishized dialectic of reality (Realdialektik) on precisely this point. Marx, in turn, characterized Hegel’s Logic as “the money of the Spirit” and the “alienated spirit of the world, which understands itself [only] abstractly” (Marx 1993b, 137ff.); although Hegel grasped the dialectic of capitalism, he did so uncritically: instead of critiquing the subordination of essential, human forces to their material basis, Hegel ontologized them. Schelling’s protest against the totalization of dialectics—and with it, the ontologization of the “material age”—may count as a likeminded critique of Hegel’s view of alienation as a logical process. Habermas (1971a) observes, “Materialism is not an ontological principle, but rather the historical indication of a social condition under which mankind has not yet succeeded in sublating the violence [Gewalt] it has experienced from without by means of its inner resources [das Innere]” (223). All the same, Habermas concludes with a sigh—a lament that may well survive Marx’s project to emancipate laboring humanity. Habermas wonders “whether what mankind has in mind to do with nature might not remain foreign and external to it, if a critically reflective praxis does not make a rationally governed process of life the basis of society—that is, the basis of ‘matter’ as it is defined in Schelling’s philosophy of The Ages of the World” (223).

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——. 1974. Weltalter-Fragmente. Ed. Klaus Grotzsch. Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: FrommannHolzboog. ——. 1992. System der Weltalter. Münchener Vorlesung 1827–1828 in der Nachschrift von Ernst von Lasaulx. Frankfurt: Klostermann. ——. 1993. Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42. Ed. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1994. Timaeus. Ed. Hartmut Buchner. Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: FrommannHolzboog. ——. 1997. System of Transcendental Idealism [1800]. Trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ——. 2007. Philosophical Investigations Into the Essence of Human Freedom. Trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany: SUNY Press. ——. 2008. Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology. Trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger. Albany: SUNY Press. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1958. Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke. Ed. Ernst Behler. Paderborn: Schöningh. Schulz, Walter. 1955. Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings. Stuttgart: Neske. Tilliette, Xavier. 2004. Schelling. Biographie. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Wieland, Wolfgang. 1956. Schellings Lehre von der Zeit. Heidelberg: Winter. Wüstehube, Axel. 1989. Das Denken aus dem Grund: Zur Bedeutung der Spätphilosophie Schellings für die Ontologie Ernst Blochs. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.

27 THE THEORY OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) NANCY FRASER

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he public sphere is the most influential of Jürgen Habermas’s signature concepts. Unlike “communicative action,” “discourse ethics,” and “the colonization of the lifeworld,” which are discussed principally by specialists, this concept has become a major focus of work in fields ranging from history, law, politics, and sociology to literature, philosophy, gender studies, and media studies. Designating a central institution of modern society, one that previously lacked a name, Habermas’s concept of the public sphere enjoys a status akin to that of a scientific discovery. Widely used throughout the humanities and social sciences, even by those who do not share his larger perspective, the expression figures today not only in scholarly discourse but also in broader, extra-academic discussions in—where else?— the public sphere. In Habermas’s usage, “the public sphere” designates a discursive arena in modern societies where “private persons” discuss matters of common concern. Distinct both from the state and from the market but situated, rather, in the “lifeworld,” this arena is ideally the site of free, unrestricted, rational communication. A vehicle for unmasking domination, “publicity” is supposed to constitute a medium for scrutinizing the actions of state officials and the operation of private powers, holding the first accountable and encouraging them to rein in the second. While the ideal of the public sphere bears little resemblance to actually existing arenas of manipulated pseudopublicity, it affords a normative yardstick for criticizing the latter. In general, then, this concept supplies a rubric for evaluating the legitimacy and efficacy of what passes for “public opinion” in modern societies. To appreciate both the significance and the utility of this concept, it is necessary to reconstruct the process of its theoretical development. Key moments in this process include: (1) Habermas’s initial formulation of the category of the public sphere in his 1962 Habilitationsschrift, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere); (2) Oskar

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Negt and Alexander Kluge’s rejoinder in their 1972 book Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung (Public Sphere and Experience, Negt and Kluge 1993); (3) the critical responses of Anglophone theorists and historians in the 1992 volume Habermas and the Public Sphere (Calhoun 1992); (4) Habermas’s revision of the concept in that volume and in his 1989 book Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms); and (5) recent work on “transnational public spheres.” Let us consider them one by one.

Categorization of the Public Sphere The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is Habermas’s most historical work, a fact that may explain its enduring popularity. Subtitled An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, it presents the theory of the public sphere largely through the medium of history. In effect, the category is unfolded in two analytically distinct but mutually entwined registers, one historicalempirical, the other critical-normative. In the historical register, Habermas sketches the rise and fall of the public sphere from the perspective of a still incomplete process of democratization. He locates the emergence of its modern guise in Europe and North America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Reversing the previous feudal type of “representative publicity,” in which rulers conspicuously displayed their power and wealth, the new “bourgeois” publics were composed of private persons who gathered in salons and coffee houses to discuss matters of “common concern,” especially the organization of the newly privatized market economy. Mediated by the new print journalism, their discussions created a counterweight to absolutist states, which they sought to hold accountable via publicity. At first, public-sphere accountability meant requiring that information about state functioning be made known so as to be subject to critical scrutiny and answerable to “public opinion.” Later, it meant transmitting the discursively generated “general interest” of “bourgeois society” to the state via legally guaranteed rights of free speech, free press, free assembly, and eventually through the parliamentary institutions of representative government. In these “bourgeois” incarnations, the public sphere assumed a relatively sharp separation of “society” from the state. But that precondition, deemed necessary to ensure the exclusion of “private interests,” eroded as the working classes gained access to the public sphere and as “the social question” came to the fore. As society became polarized by class struggle, the public fragmented into a mass of competing interest groups. Street demonstrations and back-room brokered compromises among private interests replaced reasoned public debate about the common good. Finally, with the emergence of “welfare-state

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mass democracy” in the twentieth century, society and state became mutually intertwined. Publicity in the sense of critical scrutiny of the state gave way to public relations, mass-mediated staged displays, and the manufacture and manipulation of public opinion. Writing in the early 1960s, Habermas concluded that the public sphere had been “refeudalized.” In its historical register, then, Habermas recounted the career of the public sphere as a Verfallsgeschichte, a history of decay. In the normative register, by contrast, he stressed the idea’s critical force and emancipatory potential. Here the public sphere was associated with a highly demanding type of communication—rational, inclusive, unrestricted. In principle open to all, modern publics of private persons were supposed to generate public opinion in the strong sense of a rationally warranted consensus about the common good. Such opinion merited the title “public” only when it survived the unrestricted exchange of arguments in a communicative process in which all who were potentially affected could participate as peers. By bracketing inequalities of status and excluding merely private interests, such discussion would ensure that the “unforced force” of the better argument would alone prevail. Linked, accordingly, to norms of inclusiveness, unrestrictedness, and rationality, the public sphere was not only a historical institution but also a counterfactual ideal that served to reveal the democratic deficits of existing societies. In general, then, Structural Transformation posed a sharp contrast between the deformed pseudopublicity of contemporary society and a normative ideal whose emancipatory promise Habermas wished to redeem. But the book offered little concrete guidance for envisioning a “postbourgeois” mode of publicity for contemporary societies. From the start, accordingly, it provoked unease, along with admiration, in many readers.

Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Reply The earliest sustained response was Negt and Kluge’s 1972 Public Sphere and Experience, which challenged both the historical and normative propositions of Structural Transformation. Subtitled Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, this intervention took issue with Habermas’s equation of modern democratic publicity with its bourgeois variant. Anticipating later Anglophone arguments, the authors claimed to excavate another, nonbourgeois form of publicity. Where Habermas saw only the detritus of decayed bourgeois publicity, they espied the half-hidden outlines of a “proletarian public sphere,” which reflected the organization and experience of socialized production. For Negt and Kluge, accordingly, the history of the public sphere could only be adequately grasped as a dialectic of two competing publicities, unequally empowered but mutually constituting. Likewise, the

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authors anticipated at least one later criticism of the normative dimension of Habermas’s conception. Rejecting what they saw as the latter’s excessive emphasis on rational argument, they conceived the public sphere as a “horizon” within which “social experience” (Erfahrung) is organized. In a society stratified by class, moreover, the public sphere could be useful for workers only if its experiential horizon reflected the “proletarian context of living” (Lebenszusammenhang). The struggle for publicity, accordingly, was less a matter of rational argument than a contest over forms of experience—structures of feeling, modes of perception, evaluative dispositions. (Later discussions of the affective dimensions of publicity include Young 1987 and Nash and Bell 2007.) Unlike Habermas, then, Negt and Kluge proposed a way of redeeming the emancipatory promise of the public sphere—via culturally radical and aesthetically transformative class struggle.

Critical Responses of Anglophone Theorists and Historians Still largely unknown outside Germany (the English translation of Public Sphere and Experience did not appear until 1993), Negt and Kluge’s arguments found some echoes two decades later in the Anglophone reception of Structural Transformation. Following its belated 1989 publication in English translation, that work was the subject of an influential volume, Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun (1992). Collecting essays by historians, philosophers, and scholars of literature and media, including myself, this volume, too, took issue both with Habermas’s historiography and with his normative conception of the public sphere. In the historical register, contributors such as Geoff Eley, Mary Ryan, and Michael Warner contended that Habermas had idealized the bourgeois public sphere (Eley 1992; Ryan 1990, 1992; Warner 1992; see also Warner 1990, 2002). Too influenced by the latter’s own claim to afford universal access, Structural Transformation failed, in their view, to appreciate the full implications of the class- and gender-specific character of bourgeois publicity. Thus, the work neglected to consider the possibility that the bourgeois public was constitutively, as opposed to contingently, exclusionary—a possibility implying that the full participation of workers and women required not simply the extension but the deep transformation of the public sphere. (For the debate about “contingent” versus “constitutive” exclusion, see Baker 1992, Landes 1988; for further discussions of gender and the public sphere, see Fraser 1992b, Gole 1997, Rendall 1999.) Then, too, the historians claimed that Structural Transformation truncated the full historical spectrum of modern European and American publicities. Too credulous of the bourgeois public’s claim to be the public, Habermas had overlooked women’s and workers’ counterpublics, which housed more robust, contestatory modes of public participation (for analogous

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arguments concerning race and the public sphere, see Brooks-Higginbotham 1993, Black Public Sphere Collective 1995). Proposing revisionist historiographies of public life, some of these contributors probed the relation of Habermas’s conception to Gramscian hegemony, while others considered whether it privileged relatively disembodied modes of public presence (for hegemony, see Eley 1992; for embodiment versus disembodiment, see Warner 1992, Young 1987). The historians’ discussions resonated, too, with the political-theoretical arguments of other contributors to the Calhoun volume. Seyla Benhabib criticized substantialist conceptions of publicity that assumed an already given, essential definition of which matters were inherently public and which were intrinsically private. Crediting Habermas with the makings of a better proceduralist alternative, she proposed to cast publicity exclusively in processual terms, as a distinctive communicative stance that could be assumed with respect to any issue, depending on the circumstances (Benhabib 1992). My own contribution examined and found wanting some constitutive assumptions underpinning the “liberal conception of the bourgeois public sphere.” Rejecting the assumption that interlocutors in a public sphere can bracket asymmetries of power and deliberate “as if” they were peers, when in fact they are not, I defended the formation of subaltern counterpublics in stratified societies. Distinguishing, too, the “weak publics” of civil society, which generate public opinion but not binding laws, from the “strong publics” within the state, whose deliberations issue in sovereign decisions, I advocated institutional arrangements that, in overcoming the sharp separation of society and state, could enhance the latter’s accountability to the former (Fraser 1992a). In hindsight, it now appears that the Anglophone critics raised doubts of two different sorts about the view of publicity presented in Structural Transformation. On the one hand, they suggested that Habermas had underestimated the effects of structural inequalities in depriving some who are nominally members of the public of the capacity to participate on a par with others, as full partners in public debate. On the other hand, they suggested that he had failed to register the full range of structural forces that block the flow of public opinion from society to the state and thereby deprive it of political muscle. Dissatisfied on both counts, the critics challenged Structural Transformation’s account of the legitimacy and the efficacy of public opinion. The effect was to suggest the need to revise the Habermasian conception of the public sphere. (Habermas [1992] conceded some of these points in his response.)

Revisions That is precisely what Habermas was already proceeding to do. His 1989 book Between Facts and Norms offered (among other things) a substantially revised

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account of the public sphere. Resituating the latter in the context of a “Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy,” that work seemed to respond the historians’ point about the plurality of modern publicities. No longer suggesting a single “sphere,” Habermas wrote here of a decentered network of multiple, overlapping communicative spaces. Then, too, the book sought to address the legitimacy and efficacy critiques of the political philosophers. Stressing the “co-implication of private and public autonomy,” Habermas valorized the role of emancipatory social movements, such as second-wave feminism, in promoting democracy by pursuing equality, and vice versa (Facts, 420–423). By thus acknowledging the mutual dependence of social position and political voice, he grappled here with previously neglected aspects of the legitimacy deficits of public opinion in democratic states. In addition, Between Facts and Norms was centrally concerned with the problem of efficacy. Theorizing law as the proper vehicle for translating “communicative power” into administrative power, the work distinguished an “official,” democratic circulation of power, in which weak publics influence strong publics, which in turn control administrative state apparatuses, from an “unofficial,” undemocratic one, in which private social powers and entrenched bureaucratic interests control lawmakers and manipulate public opinion. Acknowledging that the unofficial circulation usually prevails, Habermas here provided a fuller account of the efficacy deficits of public opinion in democratic states (Facts, 360–363). Not all readers were fully satisfied with the result. In William E. Scheuerman’s (1999) reading, for example, Habermas oscillated inconsistently between two antithetical stances: on the one hand, a “realistic,” resigned, objectively conservative view that accepts the grave legitimacy and efficacy deficits of public opinion in really existing democratic states; on the other, a radicaldemocratic view that is still committed to overcoming them. Like other readers, Scheuerman worried that Between Facts and Norms represented a step back from the emancipatory aspirations of Structural Transformation.

Recent Work on “Transnational Public Spheres” On another front, meanwhile, other sorts of controversies were brewing. Reflecting the new salience of “globalization,” scholars in media and cultural studies increasingly began to write in the 1990s of “transnational public spheres,” “diasporic public spheres,” “Islamist public spheres,” and even an emerging “global public sphere” (see, for example, Bowen 2004; Guidry, Kennedy, and Zald 2000; Mules 1998; Olesen 2005; Stichweh 2003; Tololyan 1996; Volkmer 2003; Werbner 2004). Documenting the existence of discursive arenas that overflow the bounds of nations and states, their work served to disclose a

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hitherto unnoticed feature of the Habermasian conception. From Structural Transformation to Between Facts and Norms, public-sphere theory had tacitly correlated publics with bounded political communities. Informed by a Westphalian political imaginary, the theory had implicitly cast the addressee of public opinion as a sovereign territorial state capable of steering a national economy in the general interest of the national citizenry. As a result, the formation of public opinion was tacitly conceived as a process conducted in a national language through national media and supported by a national communications infrastructure. In effect, then, the ideal of the public sphere served as a benchmark for identifying and critiquing the democratic deficits of Westphalian states. Habermas was by no means alone in assuming the Westphalian frame. Most critiques of his theory, including those discussed above, were also suffused with Westphalian presuppositions. For the critics, too, the concept of the public sphere formed part of a deliberative-democratic ideal for territorially bounded polities (for a fuller argument, see Fraser 2007; see also the replies to this essay in the same issue of Theory, Culture & Society). By the mid-1990s, however, the Westphalian framing of public-sphere theory ceased to seem plausible. Whether the issue is global warming or immigration, women’s rights or the terms of trade, unemployment or “the war against terrorism,” current mobilizations of public opinion seldom stop at the borders of territorial states. In many cases, the interlocutors do not constitute a demos or political citizenry. Often, too, their communications are neither addressed to a Westphalian state nor relayed through national media. Frequently, moreover, the problems debated are inherently transterritorial and can neither be located within Westphalian space nor resolved by a Westphalian state. In such cases, current formations of public opinion scarcely respect the parameters of the Westphalian frame. Thus, assumptions that previously went without saying in public-sphere theory seemed now to cry out for critique and revision. The nonalignment of public spheres with states raises difficulties of two different kinds. One problem arises when transnational administrative powers outstrip the communicative power of transnational civil society, leading to a deficit of democratic legitimacy. This is the case today in the European Union, in Habermas’s view, given the absence of a European public sphere that could hold accountable European administrative and legislative powers. At the global level, in contrast, the converse appears to be true. There, existing transnational publics are not matched by comparable administrative and legislative public powers, which leads to the second problem: a deficit of political efficacy. Habermas discussed a dramatic example of this latter sort of deficit in the worldwide antiwar demonstrations of February 15, 2003, which mobilized an enormous body of transnational public opinion against the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq. Although this outpouring of opinion could not have

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been more forceful or clear, it lacked an addressee capable of restraining George W. Bush and so, in a sense, remained powerless. In recent years, these two problems have inspired a raft of new scholarly work on the transnationalization of publicity. Once again, historians have entered the fray, now to debate whether or not transnational publicity is new. Scholars in the “yes” camp associate the phenomenon with late-twentiethcentury globalization. Claiming that the modern interstate system previously channeled most political debate into state-centered discursive arenas, they maintain that the Westphalian frame was appropriate for theorizing public spheres until very recently (see the contributions to the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society [2007]; see also Ferguson and Jones 2002, Held et. al. 1999, Sassen 2006). Scholars in the “no” camp insist, in contrast, that publicity has been transnational at least since the origins of the interstate system in the seventeenth century. Citing Enlightenment visions of an international “republic of letters” and cross-national movements such as abolitionism and socialism, not to mention world religions and modern imperialism, this camp contends that the Westphalian frame has always been ideological, obscuring the inherently unbounded character of public spheres (see the essays in Boli and Thomas 1999). Meanwhile, political philosophers, too, ponder the implications of transnational publicity. One debate concerns the fate of democracy in an era when publics do not match up with states. Habermas has broached this issue in essays in The Postnational Constellation (58–112) and The Divided West (115– 193). Noting the absence of a global public sphere, which could help foster global solidarity, he has suggested that efforts to promote postnational democracy are best directed for the foreseeable future at the regional level. Other theorists have invoked the transnationalization of public communication to establish the possibility of a wider, “cosmopolitan” democracy. This latter camp divides again into those, like James Bohman and Hauke Brunkhorst, who place the brunt of the democratizing burden on transnational publicity itself, and those, like David Held and me, who insist as well on the need for new transnational public powers (Abizadeh 2005; Bohman 1998, 1997; Brunkhorst 2005; Fraser 1992a; Held 1995, 2004; Nash and Bell 2007; for a feminist perspective, see also Lara 2003). Additional discussions concern the media and infrastructure of public communication in the current era. One problem is the impact of changes in the ownership structure and political economy of media (McChesney 1999, 2001). Another arises in contexts where those potentially affected in a given matter do not speak the same language (Adrey 2005, Alexander 2003, König 1999, Patten 2001, Payrow Shabani 2004, Phillipson 2003, Van Parijs 2000, Wilkinson 2004). Still another arises when the potential interlocutors do not share a culture or history (Calhoun 2002, Husband 1996, James 1999). Finally,

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profound questions arise about the effects of the relative decline of print, the new salience of visuality, the advent of the Internet, and the emergence of communications technologies that permit virtually instantaneous real-time communication across vast distances (Berdal 2004, Cammaerts and van Audenhove 2005, Dahlgren 2005, Papacharissi 2002). None of these debates is likely to be fully resolved any time soon. Thus, it is safe to predict that discussions of public-sphere theory and history will continue to proliferate. This most influential of Habermasian concepts seems destined to remain the focus of lively contention for a long time to come. This is as exactly as it should be, moreover, in an age when public communication is undergoing a “structural transformation” that is at least as momentous and profound as when it was first uncovered by Jürgen Habermas in 1962.

References Abizadeh, Arash. 2005. “Does Collective Identity Presuppose an Other? On the Alleged Incoherence of Global Solidarity.” American Political Science Review 90:45–60. Adrey, Jean-Bernard. 2005. “Minority Language Rights Before and After the 2004 EU Enlargement: The Copenhagen Criteria in the Baltic States.” Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development 26, no. 5: 453–468. Alexander, Neville. 2003. “Language Policy, Symbolic Power, and the Democratic Responsibility of the Post-Apartheid University.” Pretexts: Literary & Cultural Studies 12, no. 2: 179–190. Baker, Keith Michael. 1992. “Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas.” In Calhoun 1992, 181–211. Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas.” In Calhoun 1992, 73–98. Berdal, Simon R.  B. 2004. Public Deliberation on the Web: A Habermasian Inquiry Into Online Discourse. Ph.D. thesis, University of Oslo. Black Public Sphere Collective. 1995. The Black Public Sphere. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bohman, James. 1997. “The Public Spheres of the World Citizen.” In Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, ed. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 1998. “The Globalization of the Public Sphere: Cosmopolitan Publicity and the Problem of Cultural Pluralism.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 24, nos. 2–3: 199–216. Boli, John, and John Thomas, eds. 1999. Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations Since 1875. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Bowen, John R. 2004. “Beyond Migration: Islam as a Transnational Public Space.” Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies 30, no. 5: 879–894. Brooks-Higginbotham, Evelyn. 1993. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2005. Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community. Trans. Jeffrey Flynn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Calhoun, Craig, ed. 1992. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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——. 2002. “Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Sphere.” Public Culture 14, no. 1: 147–171. Cammaerts, Bart, and Leo van Audenhove. 2005. “Online Political Debate, Unbounded Citizenship, and the Problematic Nature of a Transnational Public Sphere.” Political Communication 22, no. 2: 179–196. Dahlgren, Peter. 2005. “The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation.” Political Communication 22, no. 2: 147–162. Eley, Geoff. 1992. “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century.” In Calhoun 1992, 289–339. Ferguson, Yale H., and Barry Jones, eds. 2002. Political Space: Frontiers of Change and Governance in a Globalizing World. Albany: SUNY Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1992a. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In Calhoun 1992, 109–142. ——. 1992b. “Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas.” Critical Inquiry 18:595–612. ——. 2007. “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Postwestphalian World.” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 4: 7–30. Gole, Nilufer. 1997. “The Gendered Nature of the Public Sphere.” Public Culture 10, no. 1: 61–80. Guidry, John A., Michael D. Kennedy, and Mayer N. Zald, eds. 2000. Globalizations and Social Movements: Culture, Power, and the Transnational Public Sphere. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere.” In Calhoun 1992, 412– 461. Held, David. 1995. “Democracy and the New International Order.” In Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order, ed. Daniele Archibugi and David Held, 9–37. Cambridge: Polity. ——. 2004. Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus. Cambridge: Polity. Held, David, et al., eds. 1999. Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Husband, Charles. 1996. “The Right to Be Understood: Conceiving the Multiethnic Public Sphere.” Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences 9, no. 2: 205–215. James, Michael Rabinder. 1999. “Tribal Sovereignty and the Intercultural Public Sphere.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 25, no. 5: 57–86. König, Matthias, 1999. “Cultural Diversity and Language Policy.” International Social Science Journal 51, no. 161: 401–408. Landes, Joan. 1988. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Lara, Maria Pía. 2003. “Globalizing Women’s Rights: Building a Public Sphere.” In Recognition, Responsibility, and Rights: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory. Feminist Reconstructions, ed. Robin N. Fiore and Hilde Lindemann Nelson, 181–193. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield. McChesney, Robert W. 1999. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communications Politics in Dubious Times. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ——. 2001. “Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism.” Monthly Review 50, no. 10: 1–19. Mules, Warwick. 1998. “Media Publics and the Transnational Public Sphere.” Critical Arts Journal 12, no. 1–2: 24–44.

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Nash, Kate, and Vikki Bell. 2007. “The Politics of Framing: An Interview with Nancy Fraser.” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 4: 73–86. Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. 1993. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Olesen, Thomas. 2005. “Transnational Publics: New Spaces of Social Movement Activism and the Problem of Global Long-Sightedness.” Current Sociology 53, no. 3: 419–440. Papacharissi, Zizi. 2002. “The Virtual Sphere: The Internet as a Public Sphere.” New Media & Society 4, no. 1: 9–36. Patten, Alan. 2001. “Political Theory and Language Policy.” Political Theory 29, no. 5: 691– 715. Payrow Shabani, Omid A. 2004. “Language Policy and Diverse Societies: Constitutional Patriotism and Minority Language Rights.” Constellations 11, no. 2: 193–216. Phillipson, Robert. 2003. English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy. New York: Routledge. Rendall, Jane. 1999. “Women and the Public Sphere.” Gender & History 11, no. 3: 475–489. Ryan, Mary P. 1990. Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880. Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press. ——. 1992. “Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America.” In Calhoun 1992, 259–288. Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Scheuerman, William E. 1999. “Between Radicalism and Resignation: Democratic Theory in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms.” In Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter Dews, 153–177. Oxford: Blackwell. Stichweh, Rudolf. 2003. “The Genesis of a Global Public Sphere.” Development 46, no. 1: 26–29. Theory, Culture, and Society 24, no. 4 (2007). Special issue on “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere.” Tololyan, Khachig. 1996. “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment.” Diaspora 5, no. 1: 3–36. Van Parijs, Philippe. 2000. “The Ground Floor of the World: On the Socioeconomic Consequences of Linguistic Globalization.” International Political Science Review 21, no. 2: 217–233. Volkmer, Ingrid. 2003. “The Global Network Society and the Global Public Sphere.” Development 46, no. 1: 9–16. Warner, Michael. 1990. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ——. 1992. “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject.” In Calhoun 1992, 377–401. ——. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone. Werbner, Pnina. 2004. “Theorising Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain.” Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies 30, no. 5: 895–911. Wilkinson, Kenton T. 2004. “Language Difference and Communication Policy in the Information Age.” Information Society 20, no. 3: 217–229. Young, Iris Marion. 1987. “Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory.” In Feminism as Critique, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, 56–76. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

28 TECHNOLOGY AND REIFICATION “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’ ” (1968) ROBIN CELIK ATES AND RAHEL JAEGGI

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he concept of reification plays a central role in Marxist and postMarxist theories of society—and especially in critical theory— inasmuch as it offers a way to diagnose various social pathologies (Brunkhorst 1998, Grondin 1988, Dahms 1998). Unlike the notion of “objectification” (Vergegenständlichung), to which no value judgment is customarily attached, the term “reification” (Verdinglichung) is most often employed to critical ends. The first of two aspects of its critical use refers to perceiving and treating someone or a relationship between people as a thing. Whether this happens intentionally or not, it involves a double error: reification represents a kind of misrecognition that is morally, cognitively, and politically problematic. At the same time, and this is the second aspect, viewed “objectively,” reified phenomena can assume a “thingly” (dinghaft) quality in actual fact—for example, when social relations escape the control of social actors. (On some difficulties pertaining to the concept, see Pitkin 1987, Jaeggi 1998/1999, Stahl 2005, Hartle 2008.) For Marx and the social theorists who follow his lead, the effects of capitalist relations of production—especially as expressed by the “commodity fetish”—stand behind the diagnosis of reification. The theoretical role of the concept changes fundamentally in Habermas’s works. Here, reference to capitalist forms of socialization is preserved, but the connection is not as direct. For Habermas—who engages with various theoretical traditions—reification plays a role in five distinct contexts. It appears (1) in his early works of cultural criticism, (2) in his discussion of the ideological dimensions of technology and science, (3) apropos of the debate concerning positivism and in his critique of the naturalist conception of knowledge (naturalistisches Erkenntnisideal), (4) when he diagnoses social pathologies originating in the “colonization of the lifeworld” through systemic imperatives, and (5) in reference to the ethical issues arising from modern genetic technology and its effects on human self-understanding. In all of these contexts, the connection between technology, instrumental reason (or, alternatively, functionalist reason), and reification is key. To start with, “technology” (Technik) involves the use of

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practical instruments (tools, equipment, machines, etc.) to achieve objectives, methodical procedures (in German, also Technologien) that aim to achieve optimal regulation of their use (e.g., shift planning in factories), and, finally, the forms of knowledge/professional expertise that are necessary for such regulation to occur (Theory and Practice, 114ff.). The third point already indicates the “deep” connection between technology and science. Critical theory examines the social preconditions and effects of technological and scientific progress inasmuch as such progress expands and enhances the various forms of functionalist reason (i.e., reason that aims for technical mastery). Whereas one would expect scientific-technological progress to enhance the human potential for self-determination and, in the process, to make a more rational organization of social relations possible, in actual fact, it seems the opposite is the case. Technicization and scientification develop a dynamism of their own (which Habermas discusses in his early writings in terms of “practical necessity” [Sachzwang]); increasingly, they escape the control of those affected, who, as a result, experience the changes that occur in their lifeworld as a loss of freedom and as alienation. The antidemocratic tendencies of technocracy go hand in hand with the onedimensionality of existence under the domination of instrumental reason. It is precisely this systematic connection between the forms of scientific-technological progress that characterize capitalist societies, on the one hand, and structurally defective forms of social rationality (and corresponding social pathologies), on the other, that stands at issue in the complex of “technology and reification.”

Sources and Influences For Habermas’s discussion of the connection between technology and reification, the considerations of Marx, Max Weber, and Georg Lukács are especially important. However, there are other sources and influences that one should bear in mind. In the background stands the Aristotelian distinction between praxis and techne (Theory and Practice, 2, 20) and the Hegelian distinction between work and interaction (see esp. Theory and Practice, 142ff.). Marx’s analyses of reified labor and the fetishized character of the commodity under capitalist conditions bear directly on Habermas’s theory. These reflections lead to the diagnosis of sociostructural indifference: the organization of the social world—particularly of the relations of production that structure it—seems to be a matter independent from, and wholly indifferent to, the will and normative claims of social actors (Lohmann 1991, 214–215, 243). Marx speaks explicitly of “reification” especially in relation to the “mystification of capitalist modes of production,” which leads to “the reification of social relations”:

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“the bewitched, distorted and upside down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters and mere things” (Marx 1993, 969). For Marx, the connection to commodity fetishism is fundamental; hereby, the “definite social relation between men  .  .  . assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx 1992, 165). Under such conditions, what appears as a thing is “not a thing, but a social relationship between persons mediated by things” (932). For Marx, reification is both an (inter)subjective and an objective phenomenon—a category mistake and a pernicious tendency within (social) reality in one. Weber’s reflections play a decisive role for Habermas—as they do for twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western Marxism as a whole. According to Weber, processes of rationalization (that is, the expansion of calculating attitudes aiming for efficiency in all spheres of life) and the differentiation and autonomization of formerly unified spheres of value (morality, law, economy, and science, in particular) entail “disenchantment”: the sense that both freedom and meaning have been lost. The “iron cage” of modern bureaucracy and capitalism, from which “the spirit has fled,” confronts humankind as a foreign power; this is the specifically occidental form of reification (Weber 2002, 121–122, translation modified; cf. Communicative Action, 1:157ff.; Dahms 1998). In a way that has had some influence on Habermas, this view is taken up by Lukács (1972); connecting Weber’s perspective with Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, he affirmed that reification assimilates social relations between human beings to relations between things, which come to appear as a “second nature”: foreign powers that cannot be influenced by individual or collective action. To the extent that exchange value achieves autonomy, abstract generality and calculability pervade the whole of capitalist society. Thereby, the everyday conditions of life are transformed, as well (Communicative Action, 1:186ff.). The atomization and commodifying standardization of labor that modern technology entails makes it impossible for subjects to experience individuality or view themselves as agents; an alienated and objectifying relationship to self and world is the result. Positivist and empiricist conceptions of science also produce a reifying effect inasmuch as their talk of “facts” conceals the historicity and changeability of social reality and conceptions of “nature.” Given the all-encompassing nature of Lukács’s diagnosis, a question arises: from what standpoint is this diagnosis made? What, moreover, is the normative standard that guides Lukács’s critique (Lohmann 1983, Dannemann 1987)? In order to diagnose social pathologies—the “broken” or disrupted dimensions of one’s self-relation, life in community, and society’s relationship to nature—one needs to postulate models of undistorted (that is, nonreified) socialization.

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Especially in Habermas’s early works of cultural criticism (1970), the influence of Heidegger is unmistakable. The latter’s diagnosis concerns an undue privileging of “presence-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit) above “readiness-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit)—primarily in reference to ontology and the lifeworld. Heidegger’s critique extends to practices of reducing, reifying, calculating, and dominating the world, whereby, in a process of technological autonomization, means become ends (e.g., Heidegger 1982). Habermas (1971) also takes up and expands Arnold Gehlen’s thesis that humankind’s organic weakness  and relative lack of instincts necessitate techniques and technologies that unburden, augment, and complete its constitutional inadequacies—as well as Gehlen’s view that a “superstructure” in which science, technology, and industry are merged has come, increasingly, to escape the control of individuals (e.g., Gehlen 2007). Inasmuch as Habermas seeks to continue the project of critical theory, engagement with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is key. Under the rubric of “The Culture Industry,” this work extends the diagnosis of reification to the whole of culture: here, the authors aver, everything has been commodified, without remainder. On another level of reflection, the theory applies to the administered world in its entirety. Horkheimer and Adorno observe that reason and instrumental rationality have largely fused: reification, the mastery of nature, human self-control, and the domination of humans by other humans are one. Given the totalizing scope of this diagnosis, Horkheimer and Adorno no longer place any hope in social emancipation. Escape can occur only through “intellect,” whose “true concern is a negation of reification”; for this reason, critical theory must maintain distance from positivism in all its forms (Horkheimer and Adorno 2007, xvii). For all that, Habermas’s discussion of reification begins with the analyses offered by Herbert Marcuse, who holds that it is not the one-sided use of technology so much as technology itself that represents “methodical, scientific, calculated and calculating control” (Marcuse 1968, 168). If alienation and reification are to be overcome, it is necessary to interrupt the logic of technical/technological progress and pursue political emancipation. Even though, in principle, scientific-technical progress makes it possible to satisfy material needs in a comprehensive way and to dismantle structures of surplus repression, in fact it is fatefully joined with modern technologies of domination (Herrschaftstechniken). Indeed, progress depends on these measures, and subjects—because of the one-dimensional schemes of thought and experience imposed on them— no longer even apprehend what they experience as repression (Marcuse 1991; cf. Feenberg 2002, chap. 3).

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Themes and Theses Critique of Pauperism Even Habermas’s early works of cultural criticism (which are hardly read today) address the connection between technology and reification, as well as its corollary, alienation. “Die Dialektik der Rationalisierung” (Dialectics of rationalization, 1954) employs the term “pauperism” to refer to the all-pervasive changes to everyday life conditions that accompany “machine culture”— which involves symptoms of impoverishment (which is not primarily material) in both the working world and the spheres of leisure and consumption (Habermas 1970, 8). “Our world is filled by the rhythm of machines” (9), reads the diagnosis. Entirely in keeping with the “classic” understanding of reification, Habermas holds that processes of autonomization have detached the effects of activity from those who perform it: “the more perfect it becomes, the more the machine escapes the control of the one who made it and for whom it was made; it grows autonomous [verselbständigt sich] and erects both visible and invisible barriers between humanity and the objective world [Mensch und Ding]” (9). Thereby, Habermas advances the claim that technology should not be understood simply as a neutral medium that does not affect the goals for which it is employed. Unlike cultural critics of the preceding generation, however, he insists—even in his early writings—that “Luddism [Maschinenstürmerei], of whatever kind and origin it may be, misrecognizes technology” (24). Although he expresses skepticism, Habermas entertains the possibility that one might “disinfect, so to speak, technological progress from pauperism” (9). The careful solution he proposes anticipates elements of his later work. Discussing production (in concrete terms: modern industry and the alienated-pauperized forces of human labor within it), he distinguishes between different modes of rationalization: on the one hand, technical and economic rationalization and, on the other—and in opposition to it—a movement of social rationalization that, instead of obeying the rule of “progressive organization,” involves “excluding [ausgrenzen] certain spheres from organization” (17). The point, of course, is that Habermas—who follows the findings of the contemporary sociology of labor—still assumes that the limits of a purely technological or economic rationalization also manifest themselves in the sphere of economy and production. In his early diagnoses, Habermas maintains that pauperism occurs not just in production but also in the realm of consumption (which, one might assume, would compensate for the deficiencies experienced in the world of work, properly speaking). Expressly referring to Heidegger, he laments a loss

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of connection to material reality: “the things go missing—we lose them— where they degenerate into a ‘standing reserve’ [Bestand] to be employed at will” (24). The elevated level of consumption one observes in advanced industrial society only worsens the qualitative impoverishment of lived experience. Performing a compensatory function, consumption represents so many “retouches [Retuschen] that essentially follow from determinate inadequacies” (17). Production and consumption of mass-manufactured products amount to twin forms of pauperism that mutually reinforce each other (25). If the situation calls for “moderating the tempo of consumption” (28), it is questionable whether the immanent project that Habermas announces—“to locate the critical point in production and consumption, where technological progress becomes irrational” (30)—can, in fact, be achieved. The connection between technology and reification in the early writings— which were not included in the collections of essays that Habermas subsequently published—are important not only because they show Heidegger’s influence and Habermas’s own proximity to philosophical anthropology. Rather, it is significant that, already at this inaugural stage, Habermas— although he describes phenomena in the same terms as other cultural critics— attempts to avoid drawing the same pessimistic conclusions. If Habermas’s later efforts focus on overcoming the all-encompassing consequences of the Marxist diagnosis of reification (as articulated by Lukács, above all), it is no coincidence that the reflections he offers in “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’ ” are devoted to Marcuse—a “Heideggerian Marxist.”

Technology-Science-Ideology Before the engagement with Marcuse, Habermas made political “scientification” the object of reflection. Theory and Practice discusses tendencies whereby democratic self-determination comes to be replaced by technocratic administration. In the essays collected in this volume, Habermas primarily takes issue with the simplistic notion that practical matters, inasmuch as they defy technical rationalization, can only be resolved in decisionistic fashion (see esp. Theory and Practice, chap. 7). In this context, he offers considerations of the “practical consequences of scientific-technological progress,” which he seeks to distance from the optimistic, liberal view of technology as a means of unburdening humanity (and a controlled means, at that); equally, he seeks to qualify overly grim assessments by cultural critics and the overenthusiastic fanfares of technocrats (Habermas 1971; on this phase of his work see also McCarthy 1981, chap. 1).

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In 1968—at the same time that Knowledge and Human Interests situated the philosopher’s conception of critical theory in relation to the framework(s) provided by positivism and psychoanalysis—Habermas published “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’ ” his most thorough discussion of reification. Here, he contests Marcuse’s core argument, that “the liberating force of technology” has itself become a “fetter of liberation” and led to the “instrumentalization of man” (Marcuse 1991, 159); in addition, he takes issue with Marcuse’s underlying assumption that “scientific-technical progress” performs a “double function . . . as a productive force,” on the one hand, and as “ideology,” on the other (Rational Society, 90). The quotation marks of the title already indicate that Habermas does not mean simply to affirm Marcuse’s Marxian analysis (see chapter 59 in this volume). Taking up Weber’s theorem of “rationalization,” Habermas begins by diagnosing the implementation of instrumental reason in various social spheres: technology and science have penetrated society and subjected it to fundamental changes (Rational Society, 82). At the same time, however, it is not technology per se, which, indeed, is indispensable for the material reproduction of the species, so much as the universal claims attending the forms it has assumed in the modern world—that is, the reduction of praxis to technology and of reason to instrumental reason—that pose a problem (Theorie und Praxis, 346ff.). Habermas observes that Marcuse, because of his totalizing diagnosis, gives up on rationality as the standard for critical intervention; he is wrong to do so inasmuch as only a “specifically limited” form of rationality (Rational Society, 82) is operative in the conditions he incriminates. In a second step, Habermas rejects Marcuse’s call for “qualitatively different” technology and “an alternative New Science,” since technology and science entertain an intimate (intern) relationship with instrumental action and cannot be exchanged for something else (87). Instead, Habermas affirms, one must, on a fundamental level of theoretical reflection, understand “symbolic interaction in distinction to purposive-rational action” (92). Doing so entails a new interpretation of Weber’s distinction between work and interaction—between instrumental and communicative action, that is—whereby the former occurs along technical/technological rules and the latter follows valid norms (94). Here, Habermas introduces the distinction—which proves fundamental for his theory in its later stages—between system and lifeworld. In systems, it is instrumental action that predominates, which means that rationalization emerges as the enhancement of efficiency and the augmentation of administrative power. In the lifeworld, on the other hand, symbolically mediated interaction is fundamental; here, “rationalization” refers to achieving and extending communication that is free from relations of domination (98). Habermas presents capitalist modes of production as the motor for continuously enlarging the subsystems of instrumental action (96). This process

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entails a new form of legitimation that, while presented as scientific in nature, is in fact ideology inasmuch as it denies its political aspirations (101). Against this background, Habermas identifies two tendencies of development: “an increase in state intervention in order to secure the system’s stability, and a growing interdependence of research and technology, which has turned the sciences into a leading productive force” (104). Because of these developments, the state can no longer be viewed simply as a superstructural phenomenon (101). Politics and economy, the state and civil society, merge just as indissolubly as do technology, science, and administration. This fusion makes it necessary that the classical “bourgeois ideology of achievement” (Leistungsideologie) be complemented—and completed—through “government action designed to compensate,” which, on the one hand, secures mass loyalty by providing services of social welfare but, on the other hand, threatens to reduce politics to a matter of the “solution of technical problems” (103). On the basis of this theoretical distinction, Habermas turns to the “scientization of technology” (104), i.e., the expanding interest in exploiting technical knowledge to political ends and the debate about technocracy that this involves. As in Theory and Practice, the argument turns against the reduction of politics—which, originally, is a matter of praxis—to a form of social engineering that dispenses with public discourse. Habermas discusses the “technocracy-thesis” advanced by Helmut Schelsky (1965) (among others) in relation to practical constraints, the ascendancy of professional experts, the reduction of democratic processes of decision making, the domination of the administrative and executive classes, and the repression of communicative reason through instrumental action; on this basis, he speaks of the comprehensive “self-reification of men [der Menschen]” (Rational Society, 106). At the same time, Habermas does not treat technocratic consciousness simply as ideology in the classical sense, for it is more than mere ideology. Social actors incorporate the “reified models of the sciences”—whose “ideological nucleus” is “the elimination of the distinction between the practical and the technical”—into their self-understanding (113). Thereby, humankind’s interest in communicative forms of socialization and individuation is damaged (111, 113; cf. Knowledge). In order to critique these developments, Habermas distinguishes between “two concepts of rationalization” (Rational Society, 118)—the one referring to the level of the system, the other to that of the lifeworld. Unlike Weber, Habermas does not hold that rationalization is to be equated with instrumental reason. Capitalism cannot be understood as comprehensive rationalization; rather, it entails selective rationalization. In conclusion, Habermas takes a stand against obscuring the distinction between technical and practical questions and urges us to confront a question that can only be resolved in public discourse: “how we would like to live” (120).

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In other writings from the same period, Habermas argues, on the basis of the considerations above, that democracy is incompatible with the seemingly natural (naturwüchsig) fact that technological progress is not subject to reflection and rational control (which, in turn, has a recursive effect on lived praxis) (60). The technocratic model presupposes “an immanent necessity of technical progress, which owes its appearance of being an independent, self-regulating process only to the way in which social interests operate in it”; moreover, it presumes “a continuum of rationality in the treatment of technical and practical problems, which cannot in fact exist” (64). The “integration of technical knowledge and the hermeneutical process of arriving at self-understanding” (74) can only be achieved in discourses that are free from domination. If this does not succeed, the danger arises, under “late-capitalist” conditions, that “symptoms of reification” (eine Symptomatik der Verdinglichung) will develop—a matter that not only concerns objective features of system integration but also produces a sociocultural and motivational legitimation crisis in the public (Communicative Action, 2:351; cf. Legitimation; see chapters 31 and 75 in this volume).

Critique of Positivism In keeping with his project of critiquing both society and science (Communicative Action, 2:374–375)—i.e., addressing “the reification and functionalization of forms of life and interaction, as well as of the objectivistic self-understanding of science and technology” (Postmetaphysical, 34)—Habermas engages with forms of thought that he attributes to positivism, which express technocracy on a theoretical level by obscuring connections between scientific knowledge and practical interest. He identifies three cognitive interests (Erkenntnisinteressen) founded in modes of socialization (work, language, and power [Herrschaft]) that correspond to—and are reflected in—three types of scientific knowledge: technical interest in the empirical-analytical sciences (which provide prognostic knowledge that aims for technical utility and organizes reified processes), practical interest in the historical-hermeneutic sciences (which seek, by way of interpretation, to expand possibilities of communication [Verständigung]), and emancipatory interest in the critical sciences (which aim to initiate—and maintain—processes of self-reflection to achieve freedom from natural [naturwüchsig] constraints) (Rational Society, 86–87; Knowledge; McCarthy 1981, chap. 2; see chapters 7, 29, and 55 in this volume). This critique of positivism—as the one-sided generalization of a particular model of knowledge that exemplifies reification—is complemented by a critique of hermeneutics, which simply turns a blind eye to the phenomenon. “An objective meaning-comprehending theory must also account for that

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moment of reification which the objectifying procedures exclusively have in mind” (Habermas 1976, 139); only in this way do those “conditions for the possibility of systematically distorted communication” become visible, which constitute the primary point of reference for critical theory as Habermas conceives it after the communicative turn (Habermas 1990, 267).

System and Lifeworld Habermas completes such a turn in The Theory of Communicative Action. Here, he abandons technology in the narrower sense and articulates, in a more systematic fashion, how to move beyond a totalizing conception of reification. The means to this end are provided by the distinction between system and lifeworld, on the one hand, and the thesis of the lifeworld’s “colonization,” on the other. In The Theory of Communicative Action, “reified and fragmented everyday consciousness” takes the place of ideology and false consciousness, and the problem of reification is reformulated as the problem of systemically induced pathologies (Bohman 1986). The basis for this new orientation is Habermas’s two-level conception of society, according to which the social order must be viewed both as a lifeworld and as a system (see chapter 35 in this volume, as well as Celikates and Pollmann 2006). Now Habermas no longer understands “reification” as an effect produced by an alienating organization of labor but rather as a “pathological deformation of the communicative infrastructure of the lifeworld” (Communicative Action, 2:375; cf. 2:303, 332ff.; see chapter 73 in this volume) that stems from systemic incursions. Thereby, reification manifests itself as one-sided cognitive-instrumental rationality that leaves no room for the communicative rationality of social actors and, indeed, “prejudices” their relation to both the world and the self (Communicative Action, 1:355; hence the subtitle of volume 2: A Critique of Functionalist Reason). In the process, it is not just consciousness that is reified but the lifeworld itself. At the same time, Habermas calls for a nuanced perspective that considers that it is not the uncoupling of media-steered subsystems [which are indispensable for societies after attaining a certain degree of complexity] and of their organizational forms from the lifeworld that leads to the one-sided rationalization or reification of everyday communicative practice, but only the penetration of forms of economic and administrative rationality into areas of action that resist being converted over to the media of money and power because they are specialized in cultural transmission, social integration, and child rearing,

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and remain dependent on mutual understanding as a mechanism for coordinating action. (Communicative Action, 2:330)

In the long run, these processes of reification mean that the continued existence of the systems themselves becomes doubtful, inasmuch as they can function only if the lifeworld remains intact. In the meantime, actors are made to rely exclusively on their use of instrumental reason: In place of “false consciousness” we have today a “fragmented consciousness” that blocks enlightenment by the mechanism of reification. It is only with this that the conditions for a colonization of the lifeworld are met. When stripped of their ideological veils, the imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation upon it. (Communicative Action 2:355; cf. 2:153; see chapter 44 in this volume)

Systemically induced pathologies concern the three realms of the lifeworld: cultural reproduction, social integration, and individual socialization (Communicative Action, 2:143). Inasmuch as everyday praxis is “invaded” by juridification, monetization, and bureaucratization, communicative relations become reified (2:342), which holds a twofold effect: “The lifeworld is assimilated to juridified, formally organized domains of action and simultaneously cut off from the influx of an intact cultural tradition. In the deformations of everyday practice, symptoms of rigidification combine with symptoms of desolation” (2:327). Habermas brings these twin diagnoses together in the concept of a “form of understanding” (Verständigungsform) (2:187ff.) he borrows from Lukács. The latter views the principle of “reification” as a “form of thought”—or, as the case may be, as a “form of objectivity” (Denk- bzw. Gegenständlichkeitsform)—which the imperatives of capitalist production impose on subjects’ relationships to themselves, to others, and to nature. In analogous terms, Habermas speaks of a predominant form of interaction that results from a compromise “between the general structures of communicative action and reproductive constraints unavailable as themes within a given lifeworld” (2:187). The border between system and lifeworld, then, where the fragile compromises that have been achieved risk falling apart, is where social critique begins—as well as the site where social and political movements of emancipation first occur. All the same, the question arises whether Habermas, inasmuch as he adopts the language of systems theory, does not accept the reification of social relations that from an alternative—more institution-centered—perspective would already appear as the pathological uncoupling of institutions from

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the lifeworld (McCarthy 1981, 580ff.). In this sense, Habermas’s conception of reification that he sketched in his early writings—and developed in his analysis of the ambivalence of scientific-technical progress—goes further than the way he understands the same matter in The Theory of Communicative Action (which limits itself to defending functionally necessary resources within the lifeworld).

Reification and Human Nature Now, however—in recent reflections on technologies of genetic engineering (one of the newest manifestations of technical-scientific progress)—it seems that Habermas has once again taken up aspects of his earlier diagnoses of the times as well as the premises of philosophical anthropology. When the human genome can be manipulated, the problem of (self-)reification—the danger of instrumentalizing and objectifying both the other and one’s own, embodied self—arises in an altogether fundamental way. Even if it cannot yet be achieved, the possibility of planned and purposeful intervention in the genetic code of human beings seems to present a “new type of intervention”—a modification of the contingencies that previously defied change, which promises to affect the ways we understand ourselves as “responsibly acting persons” (Future, 75). The danger emerges of “disposing” of persons as if they were things; because of the clear asymmetry between manipulator and manipulated, this amounts to a form of domination and entails the loss of freedom. According to Habermas, the reifying and commodifying “quality control” of embryos is accompanied by a change in “the cultural perception of antenatal human life” (20). The dominance of cost-benefit analysis and the use of genetic material lead to an “instrumentalization [Technisierung] of human nature initiating a change in the ethical self-understanding of the species” (42). This gives rise to the question “whether the instrumentalization of human nature changes the ethical self-understanding of the species in such a way that we may no longer see ourselves as ethically free and morally equal beings guided by norms and reasons” (40–41).

Reception and Controversies Habermas’s analysis of the relationship between technology and reification has been taken up and criticized on many occasions—even though, since the early 1980s at the latest, debates have focused on his distinction between system and lifeworld.

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Systems theory—which Habermas critiqued as a means of social engineering before integrating it into his two-level theory of society—has faulted his critical orientation (despite its thoroughgoing sociotheoretical nuance and embeddedness in specific contexts) for confusing rationality and reification. Before his death, Niklas Luhmann objected to what he deemed an excessively narrow conception of technology: the “opposition drawn between technology and humanity,” he argued, entails “a technology aversion, a characterization of technology as a necessary evil”; this, he maintained, both fails to do justice to the interpenetration (Vermischung) of nature and technology and fails to recognize that technology essentially means “ functioning simplification”—i.e., “the successful reduction of complexity” (Luhmann 2012, 1:315, 317). Other critics have held that Habermas—inasmuch as he now grants that technology is essentially neutral—has abandoned the critical potential of the position put forth by Marcuse (Feenberg 1999, 2002). The oft-voiced criticism of the distinction between system and lifeworld as an example of reification (McCarthy 1981, 580ff.; Honneth 2008, chap. 9; Fraser 1994, chap. 6) also implies that his diagnosis of reification is one-sided. According to this argument, Habermas’s theoretical framework permits one to understand the dysfunctional incursion of systemic processes on the lifeworld, but it does not explain the systemic interaction between the spheres of labor and economy. This threatens to occlude what Habermas himself stressed at the end of the 1960s: it is only through the democratic control of state and economic systems that one can counter the reifying tendencies of scientific and technological progress. Finally, a third kind of critique has been initiated by Axel Honneth’s (1993) theory of recognition. Here, reification is not traced back to the forms of socialization and rationality that are specific to capitalism (i.e., the line of argument following Marx and Lukács that Habermas adopted in the early and middle stages of his career); instead, it concerns morally questionable practices of dehumanizing other persons—the matter of denying others prior recognition and respect. In this perspective, what formerly represented the concept’s principal dimension—the reification of social relations and their connection with technology—moves to the background. Today, under changed circumstances, the question must be reformulated, as Habermas has remarked apropos of bioethical debates. The matter of how to cope with technological-scientific progress is no less urgent now than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Current debates about biotechnological and biopolitical manipulation, neuroscience, the comprehensive commodification and commercialization of the lifeworld, and widespread feelings of passivity and powerlessness in view of material constraints imposed from without all attest to the actuality of Habermas’s diagnosis and critique of reification (for another perspective, see Bewes 2002). For all that, both the

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fundamental dimensions of Habermas’s diagnosis and critique—the instrumentalization of persons, on the one hand, and the naturalization and autonomization of social relations, on the other—await theoretical and empirical development. The same holds for the sociophilosophical engagement with technology—which, somewhere between emancipation and reification, seems to be marked by fundamental ambivalence (Feenberg 2002). Habermas’s analysis of the connections between technology and reification offers a prime example of how social criticism operates: seemingly natural social relations, which appear to exist independently of social actions performed by subjects, are revealed to be historical and therefore changeable. At the same time, Habermas has shown that there are structural reasons why individual initiatives or a change of consciousness cannot remove the pathologies that the situation entails. For this reason, a project of critical theory for which the analysis and critique of reification holds meaning—as is the case for Habermas’s early and middle periods, in particular—must not only combine philosophical reflection and empirical social research; in addition, it must address substantial questions of ethics, anthropology, and rationality (the importance of which has been reaffirmed in Habermas’s recent work). The concept of reification expresses the experience that in certain forms of social pathology the loss of freedom and meaning, as well as disempowerment and indifference, are inextricably linked. As Habermas has stressed throughout his works, the ethical and political questions prompted by these phenomena place us before the question of how we understand ourselves and how we wish to live.

References Bewes, Timothy. 2002. Reification: or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Bohman, James. 1986. “Formal Pragmatics and Social Criticism.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 12, no. 4: 332–352. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 1998. “Paradigm-Core and Theory-Dynamics in Critical Social Theory.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 24, no. 6: 67–110. Celikates, Robin, and Arnd Pollmann. 2006. “Baustellen der Vernunft: 25 Jahre Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns.” WestEnd 3, no. 2: 97–113. Dahms, Harry. 1998. “Beyond the Carousel of Reification: Critical Social Theory After Lukács, Adorno, and Habermas.” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 18: 3–62. Dannemann, Rüdiger. 1987. Das Prinzip Verdinglichung. Frankfurt: Sendler. Feenberg, Andrew. 1999. Questioning Technology. London: Routledge. ——. 2002. Transforming Technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gehlen, Arnold. 2007. Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter. Frankfurt: Klostermann.

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Grondin, Jean. 1988. “Reification from Lukács to Habermas.” In Lukács Today, ed. Tom Rockmore, 86–107. Boston: Dordrecht. Habermas, Jürgen. 1970. Arbeit, Erkenntnis, Fortschritt. Pirate ed. Amsterdam. ——. 1971. “Praktische Folgen des wissenschaftlich-technischen Fortschritts.” In Theorie und Praxis, 336–358. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1976. “The Analytical Theory of Science and Dialectics.” In The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, by Theodor W. Adorno et al., trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby, 131–169. London: Heinemann Educational Books. ——. 1990. “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality.” In The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, 245–272. Albany: SUNY Press. Hartle, Johan Fredrik. 2008. “Verdinglichung.” In Handbuch der Politischen Philosophie und Sozialphilosophie, ed. Stefan Gosepath et al., 1407–1410. Berlin: de Gruyter. Heidegger, Martin. 1982. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Trans. William Levitt. New York: Harper. Henning, Christoph. 2007. “Verdinglichung als Schlüsselbegriff Kritischer Theorie.” Berliner Debatte Initial 18, no. 6: 98–114. Honneth, Axel. 1993. The Critique of Power: Reflective States in a Critical Social Theory. Trans. Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 2008. Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. Ed. Martin Jay. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2007. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Jaeggi, Rahel. 1998/1999. “Verdinglichung—ein aktueller Begriff?” Jahrbuch der Internationalen Georg-Lukács-Gesellschaft 3: 68–72. Lohmann, Georg. 1983. “Authentisches und verdinglichtes Leben.” Philosophische Rundschau 30, no. 3–4: 253–271. ——. 1991. Indifferenz und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt. Luhmann, Niklas. 2012. Theory of Society. Trans. Rhodes Barrett. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1972. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1968. “Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber.” In Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, 151–170. Boston: Beacon. ——. 1991. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon. Marx, Karl. 1992. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin. ——. 1993. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 3. Trans. David Fernbach. New York: Penguin. McCarthy, Thomas. 1981 The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Pitkin, Hannah. 1987. “Rethinking Reification.” Theory and Society 16, no. 2: 263–293. Schelsky, Helmut. 1965. Auf der Suche nach Wirklichkeit. Düsseldorf: Diederichs. Stahl, Titus. 2005. Verdinglichung. Zur Rekonstruktion eines sozialphilosophischen Konzepts. Unpublished manuscript. Frankfurt. Weber, Max. 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Peter Baehr. New York: Penguin.

29 CRITIQUE OF KNOWLEDGE AS SOCIAL THEORY Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) WILLIAM REHG

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ver his long and productive career, Jürgen Habermas has pursued an overriding interest in critical social-political theory. For Habermas, as for other Frankfurt School critical theorists, social-political critique requires interdisciplinary social analysis and thus depends on engagement with the social and cultural sciences. In the 1960s, Habermas approached such engagement as a problem for methodological and epistemological reflection, that is, a matter of critique of knowledge (Erkenntniskritik): critical social theory had to establish itself as a respectable, distinct form of knowledge, in large measure through a methodological critique of the then-dominant positivist philosophy of science and historicist hermeneutics. Conversely, critique of knowledge could contribute to critical theory, and thereby serve the aims of social emancipation, only in the form of social theory. But this framework soon proved inadequate. By the early 1970s Habermas had taken the linguistic-pragmatic turn: thenceforth he would approach social critique through a theory of communicative action and the critique of knowledge through argumentation theory. Of the three book-length monographs Habermas published in the 1960s, two directly addressed questions of knowledge: On the Logic of the Social Sciences and Knowledge and Human Interests (the other monograph was his 1962 Habilitationsschrift, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; for an exhaustive bibliography of Habermas’s works up to 1981, see McCarthy 1981; Müller-Doohm 2000 provides a selected bibliography of his works up to 1999).

The Positivism Dispute As Habermas understood the philosophical situation in the 1960s, epistemology in the Kantian sense of a critical reflection on knowledge had been supplanted by a positivist understanding of the natural and social sciences; in the

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hermeneutically conditioned humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), historicism dominated: a contemplative approach to the study of history that denied the role played by the interpreter’s point of view in understanding the past. I start with the critique of positivism that Habermas developed in the context of the positivism dispute, which was set off by a politely muted exchange in 1961 between Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno over the “logic of the social sciences” (see Adorno et al. 1976). Interestingly, both thinkers claimed to take a “critical” approach. However, Popper’s critical rationalism restricted critique to the revision of scientific hypotheses in light of empirical testing, whereas Adorno’s dialectical social science stood ready to criticize its object, society, inasmuch as existing social relations often concealed real contradictions behind a veil of ideology. Thus a dialectical social theory adequate to its object could not be tested simply by comparison with social facts. In subsequent articles commenting on their exchange, Habermas (1976a, 1976b) sharpened the opposition between Popper and Adorno. Like most philosophers of science before Kuhn, Popper understands the rationality of scientific inquiry in terms of the “hypothetico-deductive method,” according to which one tests lawlike hypotheses by logically deducing the observable consequences one should expect under controlled experimental conditions if the hypothesis is true; failure to observe these consequences falsifies the hypothesis, thus calling for its revision. Habermas basically accepts this view of hypothesis testing in the natural sciences and some forms of social-scientific research, which he labels “empirical-analytic,” in recognition of their heavy dependence on logico-mathematical analysis and empirical testing. But he does not think Popper goes far enough, in at least two ways, both of which have to do with the pragmatics of scientific research. First, like scientists themselves, Popper fails to notice how the empirical-analytical sciences are rooted in a “technical cognitive interest,” i.e., a “practical cognitive interest in the mastery of objective processes” (Habermas 1976a, 157, 158). Habermas links this interest with “social labor,” the material processes by which human beings cooperatively sustain their existence through the technological domination of nature (154). The idea of “interest” here refers not to the motivation of scientists but to a deep structure of empirical-analytical inquiry, where controlled experimentation has become a constitutive condition of knowledge: scientists can satisfy their curiosity about nature only through the mastery of the external world, either inside the laboratory or in field research. Consequently, we know external nature by successfully working on it, intervening in its processes—a mode of engagement that characterizes both social labor and empirical-analytical research. Thus the technical cognitive interest is geared toward successful “feedback-monitored” instrumental action (see chapter 43 in this volume).

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Second, Popper does not adequately address the communicative side of inquiry. Popper was aware that basic statements do not, strictly speaking, follow self-evidently or deductively from sense experiences; he thus held that the science community simply decides, in the light of repeatable observations, to accept such statements, which thereby acquire the status of conventions for further inquiry. Picking up on Popper’s account, Habermas points out that scientific inquiry depends on a preunderstanding, a background consensus not only on the basic statements themselves but also on descriptive vocabulary and its use, methods of measurement and testing, and standards of adequacy. However, by regarding this preunderstanding as simply an “irrational” decision, Popper fails to notice the hermeneutic and argumentative aspects of the empirical-analytic sciences, the fact that their pursuit of knowledge depends on a prior process of critical discussion in which members of the community reach a mutual understanding by resolving disagreements about the vocabulary and standards of experimentation (Habermas 1976b, 199, 210–215). Because Popper does not reflect on these pragmatic conditions for scientific research, he naïvely regards scientific statements as capable of representing a mind-independent reality. Dubbing this naïve representationalist view an “objectivistic illusion,” Habermas accuses Popper of “a deep-seated positivistic prejudice” (199, 203). His critique of logical positivism notwithstanding, Popper shares with positivists a common refusal to reflect on the subjective conditions of knowledge. In that regard, positivism represents a decisive break with the philosophy of reflection in Kant and German idealism (Technik, 146ff.). As a result, positivism falls prey to objectivism and the naïve “copy theory of truth” that goes with it (Abbildtheorie der Wahrheit) (Knowledge, 69). (To be sure, in this broad sense objectivism also characterizes classical Greek and medieval views of knowledge as representation of an independent cosmic order. But unlike contemporary positivism, the classical view operated with a notion of being that made the cosmos a directly moral order: facts had not yet been severed from values; see Habermas 1966.) Habermas finds the mature positivist form of objectivism in Ernst Mach’s doctrine of elements. In order to expurgate the traditional metaphysical distinction between appearance and essence from his philosophy of science, Mach resorted to an “ontology of facts,” according to which “facts are all there is. Facts in the emphatic sense are sensations hypostatized as building blocks of the physical world and of consciousness” (Knowledge, 85). Subsequent developments in positivism notwithstanding, the heirs of Mach still operate “with the image of a self-subsistent world of facts structured in a law-like manner,” and they assume the aim of science is simply to describe this mind-independent world of facts (Knowledge, 69)—thereby forgetting that the human subject constitutes knowledge within a framework of cognitive interests.

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In pointing to the hermeneutic and dialogical aspects of inquiry, Habermas undercuts the positivist understanding of science and thereby opens up the space for the hermeneutic sciences: interpretive sociology, history, and the like. These he distinguishes from normative-analytic social sciences (e.g., economics, which relies heavily on mathematical modeling) and empiricalanalytic approaches (e.g., behavioral psychology). In his 1967 survey of the social sciences (Logic, chaps. 1–4), Habermas finds that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics goes farther in its methodological awareness than the two competing interpretive approaches, sociolinguistics (Wittgenstein, Winch) and phenomenology (e.g., Schütz), because Gadamer grasps the hermeneutic character of all symbolically mediated interaction as situated in a historical tradition and open to plural horizons of meaning. However, Gadamer underestimates the critical potential of hermeneutic reflection on received traditions, which always bear both insight and domination (see Logic, 143–170; Habermas 1990a, 1990b). What Habermas seeks, then, is a social theory that integrates rigorous empirical testing, hermeneutic sensitivity, and social critique (see Geuss 1981). The path to such a theory, he believes, leads through critique of knowledge, a kind of reflection that involves the “critical dissolution . . . of the objectivistic self-understanding of the sciences” (Knowledge, 212). Conversely, an adequate critique of knowledge must take the form of social theory. Stimulated by input from Karl-Otto Apel, Habermas takes up this task in Knowledge and Human Interests, a systematic attempt to recover the movement of reflection by articulating the knowledge-constitutive interests (erkenntnisleitendes Interesse) that positivism had repressed (cf. Apel 1971; Habermas 1966; 2000, 18).

Knowledge and Human Interests I: A Story of Decline In his early critique of positivist objectivism, Habermas adopted an “oldfashioned course”: he trusted in the “power of self-reflection” (1976b, 199). He has in mind not simply philosophical reflection in the general sense but, more precisely, the kind of reflection that came into its own with German idealism (see Swindal 1999, Roberts 1992, Kortian 1980). Kant was the first to take Enlightenment epistemology to the level of transcendental reflection, in which the subject grasps the conditions of possibility of knowledge and agency. As a critique of the limits of knowledge, transcendental reflection purports to uncover the ground of objectivity in the synthetic achievements of the knowing subject, whereby one “gathers the elements for knowledge, and unites them to form a certain content.” In virtue of the a priori forms of intuition and categories of understanding, this synthesis grounds the universal validity of empirical judgments that unite the manifold of particular

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representations under general conceptual contents (Kant 1998, 210–211 [A77–78/B103–104]). In the first three chapters of Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas traces the gradual emasculation of reflection from Hegel through Marx. As critique of knowledge, epistemological reflection had robust ambitions in Kant, who claimed it could set the boundaries of possible knowledge, legitimate the objectivity of the natural sciences, and criticize dogmatic metaphysics (i.e., late-scholastic and early-modern forms of objectivism). Hegel radicalized the Kantian critique of knowledge by turning it on itself: critique cannot get started without arbitrarily presupposing that its own claim to knowledge is unproblematic. To escape this circle, Hegel recast epistemology as phenomenology, a retracing of the history of successive stages of reflection that lead up to the standpoint of absolute knowledge, where mind knows itself as one with its objects. But as Habermas points out, phenomenological reflection cannot support a claim to absolute knowledge; Hegel could reach the absolute only because his phenomenology ambiguously presupposed it from the start in a philosophy of identity, for which nature and other objects of knowledge are merely externalized mind. From that point of view, the natural and human sciences could only appear as limited moments along the path to the authentic science of mind. The actual progress of the sciences soon displayed the emptiness of Hegel’s pretensions, thereby laying down the “foundation-stone of positivism” (Knowledge, 24). In Marx’s critical theory Habermas sees a fateful missed opportunity along the road to positivism, for “only Marx could have contested its victory” (24). Because Marx rejected Hegel’s philosophy of identity, he could take the difference between nature and mind seriously. Nature does not disappear as a mere externalized posit of absolute mind; rather, as a result of a natural development, human intelligence presupposes nature. Instead of a phenomenology of mind, Marx offers a history of the human species as it grapples with, gradually understands, and changes a nature other than itself. Consequently, Marx, unlike Hegel, can take the natural sciences seriously. Viewed as a philosophy of reflection that analyzes the subject’s self-conscious appropriation of its objects, Marx’s approach takes a materialist turn. Whereas for Hegel reflection climaxed in the philosopher’s absolute knowledge, the realization that nature is mere externalized mind, for Marx reflection involves a real material process in which human beings overcome their alienation from nature not merely as an object of thought but as the object of the labor process. Labor involves a material process of appropriation—or “synthesis,” to put it in Kantian terms—in which human beings develop their “species powers” through their growing scientific understanding of nature and its technological mastery. But labor is also social and historical: the human species can appropriate nature through labor only by overcoming the modes of

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social alienation that separate subjects from one another (worker versus capitalist) and from their own essential powers (which are split off as the alien powers of capital). The problem in Marx arises at just this point, however. As an overarching category, the idea of labor, or production, commits him to a vocabulary of instrumental action. To be sure, he understands the “mode of production” to include both base and superstructure, the forces of production and their institutional framework. But Habermas regards that move as a “terminological dodge” (Ausflucht) that masks the inadequate character of the production paradigm, which obscures the discursive nature of reflection (Knowledge, 328n14). Rather, reflection is more appropriately located in Marx’s dialectical analysis of class struggle, understood as a “process of reflection writ large” (Knowledge, 60). Such reflection remains linked with production inasmuch as technical progress exposes the disproportionate and exploitative institutional demands on labor, thereby sparking a revolutionary consciousness in the working class. Nonetheless, class struggle and reconciliation lie at the level of interaction rather than labor. Marx, however, viewed the entire process of overcoming alienation in terms of production and placed his critical theory on a par with natural science, thereby obscuring the differences between labor and interaction, on the one hand, and empirical and critical-reflective modes of knowledge, on the other.

Knowledge and Human Interests II: The Technical and Practical Interests With the German idealist tradition of reflection at a dead end, Habermas looks elsewhere for allies against objectivism, specifically to the pragmatism of Charles S. Peirce and the hermeneutic theory of Wilhelm Dilthey (Knowledge, chaps. 5–8). In Peirce, Habermas finds an account of the empirical-analytic sciences that goes beyond Popper at the two points noted above. First, Peirce’s logic of inquiry does not stop with the formal analysis of hypothesis testing but rather places scientific knowledge in the context of an ongoing communal process of interpretation, argument, and revision. This framework allows Peirce to develop an alternative to the objectivistic idea of truth as correspondence with a mind-independent reality. As the ultimate object of the scientific process, “truth” is the content of “an uncompelled and permanent consensus” at which scientists would arrive were they able to carry inquiry to its conclusion. “Reality,” as “the sum of those states of fact about which we can obtain final opinions,” has a status akin to a transcendental correlate of inquiry, albeit without invoking a transcendental consciousness in Kant’s sense (Knowledge, 95).

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Second, Peirce’s account of scientific progress links science with the technical cognitive interest that positivism ignores. Here Habermas draws a connection between Peirce’s pragmatic account of belief and his analysis of inference. From the standpoint of human action, true beliefs “define the realm of future behavior that the actor has under control” (Knowledge, 120). As the most successful method of “fixing belief,” modern science relies on modes of inference that link empirical concepts with conditional predictions of observable events. What it means for statements to be valid, or for concepts to have determinate content, “is determined with reference to possible technical control of the connection of empirical variables” (Knowledge, 121). Thus knowledge, on Peirce’s account, is inherently linked with the human interest in the control of nature. Dilthey picks up on the communal aspect of science. Insofar as the natural sciences depend on communicative processes, they involve hermeneutic competences that members rely on but normally do not articulate as such in their practice of inquiry. Dilthey sees that the Geisteswissenschaften distinguish themselves from the natural sciences precisely because they take such competences as their object domain. More precisely, as “hermeneutic sciences,” the Geisteswissenschaften are grounded in the everyday use of ordinary language for stabilizing intersubjective understanding. In contrast to the empiricalanalytic sciences, which attempt to move from particular facts to universal laws, the hermeneutic sciences attempt to use general categories to understand what is singular and unique: the historical past, other cultures, a life history, texts, and the like. How can this happen? Understanding the singular and unique is possible because ordinary language is reflexive, self-interpreting, and dialogically structured. In everyday communication, that is, individuals have three elementary sources (or “forms”) of understanding at their disposal: what each of them says, how they behave, and the accompanying nonverbal expressions. Each dimension of expression provides a context and crosscheck for the interpretation of the other two. In understanding one another, we move in a self-correcting “hermeneutic circle” until the various expressive resources fit meaningfully into an integrated whole. A similar circular movement characterizes the efforts of scholars when they seek to understand a text by integrating textual clues and available historical accounts into a coherent interpretation of the whole text in context. The hermeneutic sciences, then, bring methodical discipline to features of everyday interaction, and in this sense they are on a par with the empiricalanalytic sciences, which elevate everyday instrumental action to experimental method. And just as human survival depends on successful intervention into nature, so also “the survival of societal individuals” depends on reliable mutual understanding (Knowledge, 173). Consequently, just as the object of the empirical-analytic sciences is constituted by a technical cognitive interest, so

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the object of the cultural sciences is constituted by a “practical cognitive interest” in the narrower sense of “practical” specific to human interaction. As it turns out, however, neither Peirce nor Dilthey fully grasped the significance of their analyses. Peirce did not consistently hold to the framework of the logic of inquiry but imported ontological elements that took him in the direction of objectivism. Dilthey saw the relation of the cultural sciences to everyday life as a threat to their scientific character, thus revealing his ultimately objectivistic view of scientific knowledge, according to which the interpreter must free herself of any subjective interferences in understanding the other. In fact, the interpreter cannot avoid bringing her own biases into the process of understanding. Consequently, interpretation must also involve a process of reflection that grasps both interpreter and interpreted together.

Knowledge and Human Interests III: Reflection as the Unity of Knowledge and Interest The lingering objectivism in Dilthey and Peirce reveals their failure to grasp fully their analyses as initiatives in the self-reflection of the sciences. In his chapters on those two thinkers, Habermas tries to carry through that selfreflection more consistently in the form of a critical philosophical analysis that grasps the object of scientific knowledge together with the knowing subject, which is understood not as a transcendental ego or absolute mind but as the community of investigators whose procedures are cognitive expressions of basic interests in labor and interaction, on which the human species depends for its survival and cultural self-development. Habermas insists that these interests are not heteronomous to reason: rather, reason inheres in cognitive interests. In reflecting on such interests, then, one grasps the unity of knowledge (reason) and interest, freeing oneself from the objectivistic illusion of knowledge as the disinterested contemplation of a mind-independent reality. As a form of knowledge that frees one from false consciousness, philosophical self-reflection realizes the “emancipatory cognitive interest.” In the final four chapters of Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas develops the idea of self-reflection, beginning with Kant’s problematic attempt to link theoretical knowledge to practical interest and Fichte’s accomplishment of that feat, albeit within an idealist framework. Habermas’s critical social theory, however, needs more than philosophical critique. For a suitable model, he first looks to Freudian psychology as the only example of a science that incorporates methodical self-reflection. Psychoanalysis involves a form of hermeneutic interpretation, but unlike the cultural sciences, it strives to interpret “not only the meaning of a possibly distorted text [the patient’s behavior and speech], but the meaning of the text distortion

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itself ” (Knowledge, 220). Understood in terms of communicative action, the patient’s communication contains elements that have been split off from publicly accessible meaning and have fallen into a private semantics that neither the patient nor the analyst can directly understand. The analytic situation thus involves a cooperative process of recollection that decodes the patient’s private symbol system and restores to the patient a lost portion of her life history. This restoration cannot be had simply by the analyst’s conveying information to the patient; rather, it is essentially self-reflective, for it depends on the patient’s interest in self-knowledge and willingness to take responsibility for her illness, such that “the ego of the patient recognize[s] itself in its other, represented by its illness, as in its own alienated self and identify[ies] with it” (Knowledge, 235–236). In his more theoretical work, Freud did not consistently hold to the communicative, hermeneutic dynamics that characterize the analytic situation. To develop a more consistent account, Habermas draws on studies by Alfred Lorenzer (1970a, 1970b) in an effort to reconstruct Freudian psychology as a self-reflective form of scientific knowledge that relies on a set of “metapsychological” categories. Like the hypotheses of the empirical-analytic sciences, these categories have a general character and are open to a kind of corroboration (or falsification). Because they lie at the metatheoretical level, however, they cannot be tested—confirmed or falsified—by direct confrontation with experimental observations. Rather, metapsychological categories provide the framework for a “general interpretation,” a narrative structure that anticipates individual psychic development as a conflicted communicative process involving ego, id, superego, defense mechanisms, etc. Unlike interpretations in the cultural sciences, elements of a general interpretation are not corrected through the backand-forth movement between part and whole. Rather, they guide the analyst’s “interpretive suggestions” in the psychoanalytic situation, and they are “corroborated” insofar as “the patient adopts them and tells his own story with their aid,” thereby filling out general categories with determinate content (Knowledge, 260). However, given the possibilities for self-deception, such corroboration remains ambiguous in the short run: “Only the context of the self-formative process as a whole has confirming and falsifying power” (Knowledge, 269). In the final chapter of Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas attempts to correct the deficits in Marx by extending the psychoanalytic model of critical science to the level of critical social theory (cf. Marcuse 1966). In fact, Freud was well aware that his individual psychology pointed toward broader questions of social theory, for individual normalcy is measured by the conventional standards of existing social institutions, which might themselves be pathological in comparison with other cultures. Such considerations motivated Freud’s theory of civilization. Habermas notes that Freud’s account converges

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with Marx’s in that both distinguish labor and interaction as two dimensions of human development. Unlike Marx, however, Freud does not give explanatory priority to the organization of labor. Rather, he embeds the labor process in institutionalized forms of interaction that are rooted in family dynamics and structured for the general repression of instinctual impulses. This repression is accomplished not only through compulsory social norms but also through traditional rationalizations of authority and various psychological mechanisms such as substitute-gratifications that redirect instinctual needs. The key to social critique lies in Freud’s distinction between delusions, which are mere fantasies, and illusions: religious narratives, social ideals and values, art, and so on. Illusions harbor utopian elements that need not be delusional. Ideals of happiness, for example, may be largely unrealized in a society, but that does not make them mere fantasies, for technical advances might someday put them within reach of all. Thus Freud’s model allows for a form of critique of ideology (Ideologiekritik) similar to Marx’s, namely, a critique that targets rationalizations of institutional repressions that have become unnecessary in light of what is technically possible. Because the lower classes are subject to greater renunciations, “it is they who first critically turn the utopian content of tradition against the established civilization” (Knowledge, 280; on ideology critique, see Geuss 1981). However, Freud’s model has this advantage over Marx’s: unlike the latter, he recognizes ideology as a form of distorted communication. Moreover, his model implies a soberer view of ideology critique as a trial-and-error process whose success is not guaranteed by a philosophy of history. Habermas’s remarks on a Freudian model of critical social theory remain sketchy at best. But three considerations stand out. First, his primary concern is to set forth the idea of such a critical theory as a self-reflective, methodical science distinct from both the empirical and cultural sciences, thereby securing the epistemic credentials of social critique from positivist and historicist misunderstanding. Second, as a form of self-reflection, social critique rests on a knowledge-constitutive interest in emancipation. In both the psychoanalytic process and ideology critique, the desire to overcome pathology shows that “the interest inherent in the pressure of suffering is also immediately an interest in emancipation; and reflection is the only possible dynamic through which it realizes itself ” (Knowledge, 288). Third, like the technical and practical interests, the emancipatory interest refers to an “interest in self-preservation” that cannot be reduced to natural needs, for it cannot be understood apart from the cultural expressions that interpret it in relation to ideas of the good life (288). Habermas thus concludes Knowledge and Human Interests with a critique of Nietzsche, who attempted just such a reduction.

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Aftermath: Objections and Revisions Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests received wide critical comment. (For a selection of important essays, see Apel et al. 1971; Lobkowicz et al. 1972; Dallmayr 1974; for helpful overviews, see Dallmayr 1972; McCarthy 1981, 64ff., also Habermas 1973a. For further references, see the appendix in Knowledge, 2nd ed., 301ff.) The most important criticisms of the idea of critique of knowledge involve (1) Habermas’s conception of natural-scientific knowledge, (2) the “quasitranscendental” status of cognitive interests, (3) ambiguities and problems connected specifically with the emancipatory interest, and (4) his tendency to speak of the human species as a self-constituting macrosubject. Habermas’s answers to these problems set him on the path to the philosophy of language. I treat each in turn. Some formulations in Knowledge and Human Interests (e.g., 121–122, 195– 196) linked the meaning of the validity of scientific statements with instrumental success. This seemed to commit Habermas to an instrumentalist account of natural science: the antirealist view that scientific theories and statements do not represent nature as such but rather serve as tools for prediction and control of natural events (see Albert 1971, 56; Ballestrem and McCarthy 1972, 53–54; Hesse 1980). In reply, Habermas (Knowledge, 2nd ed., 374–375) insisted that his “transcendental pragmatism” does not make instrumental success into a sufficient condition of the truth of scientific statements. Drawing on Apel’s reading of Peirce, he further clarified his position by invoking a distinction not found in Knowledge and Human Interests, namely, between the constitutive conditions of objects of experience, or objective “meaning-constitution,” on the one hand, and the conditions of the validity of statements, that is, the conditions for redeeming truth claims, on the other. Whereas the “objectivity” of our experience of things and events is constituted by our capacity for successfully intervening in nature, “truth” is something we claim for propositions through acts of assertion and justify in discourses through argumentative reasoning (Knowledge, 2nd ed., 360–361). By tying truth to argumentation, Habermas took a crucial step toward a linguistic approach. Other criticisms suggested that Habermas had imbibed the positivist bias in favor of physics as paradigmatic for empirical inquiry. A view of scientific knowledge as grounded in a technical interest in control may be plausible for chemistry and physics, but does it suffice for biological sciences (e.g., primatology) that deal with species capable of goal-directed action and communication (Keat 1981, 87–93)? Keat also raised a question about knowledge-constitutive interests (78–87): if cognitive interests constitute the objects of inquiry, then on what basis can Habermas preclude a hermeneutics of nature as noncognitive (as he does in his critique of Marcuse; see Habermas 1968)? Such criticisms on Habermas’s part seem to imply an independent access to distinct object

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domains, which then serves as a standpoint that grounds his critique of knowledge prior to the interest-based constitution of objects. Keat’s question points to deeper difficulties in the transcendental aspects of Habermas’s analysis, which we take up next. Habermas’s idea of cognitive interests occupies an ambiguous no-man’s land between naturalism and idealism. Not surprisingly, he caught fire on both sides (see Dallmayr 1972, 213ff). Some attacked his position as overly speculative and “theological” (Albert 1971, 54–56). Others accused him of naturalism: by attempting to transpose Kant’s transcendental subject onto the human species as subject to historically invariant deep-seated interests, Habermas introduced an “objectivistic nature-ontology” and thus “absolutized” nature, contrary to the historical orientation of critical theory (Theunissen 1969, 13, 23). This objection points to a deep problem in Habermas’s construction: he regards cognitive interests as both constitutive of the objects of experience— including nature—and as emergent from the natural prehistory of the species, thus open to empirical investigation (i.e., by evolutionary biology, anthropology). There are at least two ambiguous ideas here. On the one hand, nature is both a constituted object and the ground of species-constitutive capacities (see McCarthy 1981, 110ff.). On the other hand, because cognitive interests have a natural basis and operate in history, they appear as empirical objects potentially open to critique, yet as a priori transcendental structures, they ground such critique (Bubner 1971, 185–187; cf. Habermas 1966, 295). Habermas’s response to this nest of problems involved a number of innovative moves. First, he explained that claims about the natural evolution of cognitive interests do not have the strictly empirical status of the empirical-analytic sciences but rather lie at the level of reflection (Habermas 1973, 21–22). This response suggests that such claims operate as part of a general critical theory of sociocultural development—a theory that eventually took the form of a developmental model of social evolution (see Rekonstruktion). Second, in response to Theunissen, Habermas attempted to hold on to both the contingencies of history and invariant transcendental structures. But rather than appeal to deep-seated interests as anthropological constants, he took recourse in the idea of truth and its connection with discourse. The species can reproduce itself in its sociohistorical practices only “though the medium of that most unnatural idea, truth, which necessarily begins with the counterfactual assumption that universal agreement is possible” (Knowledge, 2nd ed., 380). As counterfactual, the ideas of truth and coercion-free consensus transcend the contingencies of history; nonetheless they have a real (historical) effect on human practices (Habermas 1985). In response to Bubner, Habermas (Knowledge, 2nd ed., 371–373) distinguished particular (individualistic) interests from “generalizable” interests and cognitive interests. Generalizable interests are not simply given as empirical

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facts or posited by sheer decision but are to some extent formed (gebildet) through consensual processes of rational will formation in practical discourses. Such interests are thus objects of moral-practical knowledge. Cognitive interests, on the other hand, are universal interests one “encounters” by rationally reconstructing the conditions of possible objectivity that undergird fundamental types of problems that every social system must solve. Thus “reconstructive science” is the mode of inquiry adequate to knowledge-constitutive interests. With these moves, Habermas began to shift the normative ballast of his critical theory from the idea of cognitive interests to idealizations that govern rational discourse and consensus. To be sure, discursive idealizations had been operative all along, inasmuch as all inquiry depends on processes of mutual understanding oriented toward rational consensus. Thus the technical and practical interests depend for their realization on the emancipatory interest in establishing conditions of communication free of domination, which first make rational consensus possible. However, Habermas’s new distinction between objectivity and truth goes hand in hand with a much sharper distinction between discourse and “life-practice,” i.e., communicative action (Habermas 1973, 16ff.; Knowledge, 2nd ed., 362–363). In discourse, the pressures of everyday action are put aside for the sake of assessing truth claims (or claims to normative validity); here the only permissible “force” is that of the better argument. With the distinction between discourse and action, Habermas considerably loosens the tight connection between knowledge and interests. Although he still speaks of cognitive interests in the early 1970s, they have in fact lost their original point of uniting theory and practice by “interlocking” (Verschränkung) forms of knowledge with the fundamental interests of human life (Knowledge, 212). With the linguistic turn, the transcendental basis for social critique henceforth lies not in cognitive interests but rather in the idealizations that participants presuppose in discourse. Habermas’s notion of an emancipatory interest proved especially problematic. Aside from the question of its status—which Habermas (Knowledge, 2nd ed., 371) explained was derivative—the two main issues for critique of knowledge turned on the association of this interest with self-reflection and with a psychoanalytic model for social critique. As various critics pointed out and as Habermas acknowledged (McCarthy 1981, 94ff.; Knowledge, 2nd ed., 377ff.), the attempt to bring historical materialism into a (broadly neo-Kantian) transcendental framework conflated two different types of reflection: philosophical reflection on the invariant structures of objective knowledge, on the one hand, and the critical analysis of distorted forms of communication in psychoanalysis and ideology critique, on the other. Whereas the former attempts to articulate universal deep structures of human action and experience, the latter targets forms of false consciousness that afflict particular persons and societies, with their unique life histories

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and cultural traditions. Given the moves described above, Habermas had a ready solution to this equivocation, namely, to distinguish philosophical reflection as “rational reconstruction” from “critique.” He could also relate the two: because critique targets distorted communication, it depends on the reconstructive sciences that articulate the communicative ideals against which critics can identify the distortions that support false consciousness. The second main problem concerned the appropriateness of the Freudian model for ideology critique (see Gadamer 1971, Giegel 1971). In both psychoanalysis and ideology critique the conditions for a dialogue between equals do not obtain, because the “enlightened” psychoanalyst/critic and “unenlightened” patient/oppressor are not symmetrically situated. However, situations calling for ideology critique normally lack features of the psychoanalytic relationship (its voluntariness, professional codes, etc.) that help maintain its effectiveness and preserve it from the dangers of manipulation. On the one hand, groups that benefit from domination usually resist the critic; on the other hand, what preserves the critic from pushing particular interests under the guise of universal interests? In contemporary terms, these questions concern the social critic’s selfproclaimed expertise vis-à-vis target groups. The problem is a difficult one for Habermas, given his rejection of the Marxist philosophy of history that had  supplied the Communist Party with its special brand of expertise. In response, he reformulates the theory-practice relationship as that between discourse and action. Specifically, he distinguishes three phases or “functions” in the connection between theory and practice (Habermas 1973, 32ff.): the development of critical theories in scientific discourses, the enlightenment of groups that experience or are concerned about the oppressive effects of domination, and the choice of strategies and tactics for actual political struggle. However, this problem subsequently became less acute once Habermas moved away from a Freudian/Marxist model focused on ideology critique (Habermas 2000, 14–15). The fourth problem did not emerge until later: in the heyday of neo-Marxist theorizing, talk of the human species as a macrosubject could still pass without notice. Moreover, Habermas’s starting point in the philosophy of reflection made such talk appear reasonable: in the philosophical tradition, “reflection” in the sense of self-knowledge was typically regarded as an act of a human (or divine) subject. But once the idea of reflection is disambiguated and replaced, in effect, by two distinct types of communicative relationships (theoretical discourse in reconstructive science, “therapeutic” interventions in critique), and once the normative weight shifts from cognitive interests to discourse, a species-subject of enlightenment proves to be a useless relic (Habermas 2000, 13). Moreover, the idea of a macrosubject of species constitution cannot do justice to the pluralism of cultures and variety of social life forms and their different paths of development. A more intersubjective model is required.

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Postscript: Critique of Knowledge After the Linguistic-Pragmatic Turn In turning to the philosophy of language, Habermas shifted the focus of his critical theory from epistemological and methodological questions to the substance of social theory. Specifically, he took up sociological theories of action with a view toward questions of social order and cultural evolution (Habermas 2004; Rekonstruktion; see also chapter 35 in this volume). In this new framework, social order rests ultimately on forms of communicative action, by which actors coordinate their actions on the basis of mutually acceptable validity claims that are inherently open to potential criticism and justification in argumentative discourses. Consequently, critique of knowledge now takes the form of a theory of argumentation, whose critical employment presupposes an analysis of collective learning processes (Owen 2002). In hindsight one can see that some of the criticisms of Knowledge and Human Interests were provoked by Habermas’s talk of cognitive interests as “constitutive” conditions of knowledge, an idiom that suggests an overly strong transcendental model (see Power 1993). Having rejected the philosophy of reflection, Habermas can now characterize his position as “weakly” transcendental, in the sense that his reconstructive analyses rest not on a constitutive transcendental logic but on a fallible hermeneutic explication of shared competences and normative presuppositions that enable actors to engage in familiar practices of discourse and inquiry—through which alone we are capable of learning about and representing the world. But that approach allows for a “weak naturalism” precisely because pragmatic conditions of learning, unlike Kant’s intelligible subject, are located in the world, in everyday practices of communication and action (Truth, 1–50; see chapter 30 in this volume). Although his claims remain ambitious and controversial, Habermas’s new approach opens up a promising middle path between realism and idealism, objectivism and relativism, which had proved so elusive in Knowledge and Human Interests.

References Adorno, Theodor W., et al. 1976. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby. London: Heinemann Educational Books. Albert, Hans. 1971. “Kritische Rationalität und politische Theologie.” In Ein Plädoyer für kritischen Rationalismus, 45–75. München: Piper. Apel, Karl-Otto. 1971. “Szientistik, Hermeneutik, Ideologiekritik. Entwurf einer Wissenschaftslehre in erkenntnisanthropologischer Sicht.” In Apel et al. 1971, 7–44. Apel, Karl-Otto, et al. 1971. Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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Ballestrem, Karl Graf, and Thomas A. McCarthy. 1972. “Thesen zur Begründung einer kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft.” Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 3, no. 1: 49–62. Bubner, Rüdiger. 1971. “Was ist kritische Theorie?” In Apel et al. 1971, 160–209. Dallmayr, Winfried R. 1972. “Critical Theory Criticized: Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests.” In Lobkowicz et al. 1972, 211–229. Dallmayr, Winfried R., ed. 1974. Materialien zu Habermas’ “Erkenntnis und Interesse.” Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1971. “Replik.” In Apel et al. 1971, 283–317. Geuss, Raymond. 1981. The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giegel, Hans Joachim. 1971. “Reflexion und Emanzipation.” In Apel et al. 1971, 244–282. Habermas, Jürgen. 1966. “Knowledge and Interest.” Inquiry 9, no. 1–4: 285–300. ——. 1971. “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology.’ ” In Towards a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, 81–122. London: Heinemann Educational Books. ——. 1973. “Introduction: Some Difficulties in the Attempt to Link Theory and Praxis.” In Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel, 1–40. Boston: Beacon. ——. 1976a. “The Analytical Theory of Science and Dialectics.” In Adorno et al. 1976, 131–169. ——. 1976b. “A Positivistically Bisected Rationalism.” In Adorno et al. 1976, 198–225. ——. 1985. “Wahrheitstheorien.” In Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 127–183. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1990a. “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method.” In The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, 213–244. Albany: SUNY Press. ——. 1990b. “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality.” In The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, 245–272. Albany: SUNY Press. ——. 2000. “Nach dreißig Jahren: Bemerkungen zu Erkenntnis und Interesse.” In MüllerDoohm 2000, 12–20. ——. 2004. “Reflections on the Linguistic Foundations of Sociology.” In On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Barbara Fultner, 1–104. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hesse, Mary. 1980. “Habermas’s Consensus Theory of Truth.” In Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science, 206–231. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keat, Russell. 1981. The Politics of Social Theory: Habermas, Freud, and the Critique of Positivism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kortian, Garbis. 1980. Metacritique: The Philosophical Argument of Jürgen Habermas. Trans. J. Raffan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lobkowicz, Nikolaus, et al. 1972. “Review Symposium on Habermas.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 2, no. 1: 193–270. Lorenzer, Alfred. 1970a. Kritik des psychoanalytischen Symbolbegriffs. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1970b. Sprachzerstörung und Rekonstruktion. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Marcuse, Herbert. 1966. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud. Boston: Beacon.

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McCarthy, Thomas. 1981. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Müller-Doohm, Stefan, ed. 2002. Das Interesse der Vernunft. Rückblicke auf das Werk von Jürgen Habermas seit “Erkenntnis und Interesse.” Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Owen, David S. 2002. Between Reason and History: Habermas and the Idea of Progress. Albany: SUNY Press. Power, Michael. 1993. “Habermas and Transcendental Arguments: A Reappraisal.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 23, no. 1: 26–49. Rehg, William. 2009. Cogent Science in Context: The Science Wars, Argumentation Theory, and Habermas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Roberts, Julian. 1992. The Logic of Reflection: German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Swindal, James. 1999. Reflection Revisited: Jürgen Habermas’s Discursive Theory of Truth. New York: Fordham University Press. Theunissen, Michael. 1969. Gesellschaft und Geschichte: Zur Kritik der kritischen Theorie. Berlin: de Gruyter.

30 COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALIT Y Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Preparatory Remarks for a Theory of Communicative Action, 1971) CRISTINA L AFONT

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n the 1970s, Habermas’s efforts to ground a critical theory of society underwent a “linguistic turn”; henceforth linguistic communication stood at the center of his project. Although some of his earlier writings from the 1960s had demonstrated an interest in linguistic analysis (e.g., On the Logic of the Social Sciences), the central methodological shift took shape in the 1970s. As a consequence of this shift, the formal-pragmatic analysis of communication was no longer to be understood as a metatheory seeking to provide a “language-theoretic foundation of the social sciences” (Communicative Action, 1:xxxix); instead, it provided the core element of a theory of rationality in its own right. The principal objective of the project is to extract a concept of communicative rationality from the unavoidable normative presuppositions of the everyday communicative praxis of reaching mutual understanding (Verständigung). Habermas locates a particular form of rationality in the communicative use of language, which offers a solution to two fundamental tasks that, in his estimation, earlier articulations of critical theory had failed to accomplish: the task of overcoming the narrow concept of instrumental rationality dominant in the social sciences and that of providing a convincing answer to the basic question of all social theory: how social order is possible. Retrospectively, one must add that the conception of communicative rationality in fact forms the backbone not just of Habermas’s theory of society but also of his moral, legal, and political theories as well as his theory of modernity and social evolution. Habermas elaborated his conception of communicative rationality in many different writings. The ground plan took shape in various essays written in the 1970s, most of which are contained in the volume Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. On the basis secured there, Habermas developed the ideas of The Theory of Communicative Action, his main work; subsequently, he refined and improved his findings in his Truth

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and Justification (1999). The English translations of his most important essays are available in On the Pragmatics of Communication (1998). As a first approximation, it is helpful first to determine the scope of Habermas’s conception of communicative rationality. Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality is not supposed to provide an overarching conception of rationality. As he has made clear in more recent publications (e.g., Truth), reason—as it is embodied in the communicative structure of speech—represents only one of three structures of rationality, and these structures are not reducible to the others. The other two are epistemic rationality, which is embodied in the propositional structure of knowledge, and instrumental rationality, which is embodied in the teleological structure of action. At the same time, however, discursive rationality—which arises from communicative reason—integrates these three core structures: The structure of discourse establishes an interrelation among the entwined structures of rationality (the structures of knowledge, action, and speech) by, in a sense, bringing together the propositional, teleological, and communicative roots. According to such a model of intermeshed core structures, discursive rationality owes its special position not to its foundational but to its integrative role. (Pragmatics, 309)

The model of a general theory of rationality sketched here rests on two important assumptions that require a detailed justification. First of all, one must show that a connection in fact exists between the rational structures of knowledge, action, and speech, on the one hand, and the procedural rationality inherent in practices of justification (i.e., discursive rationality), on the other. Second, it must be shown that the rationality inherent in communicative practices is a genuine universal structure of rationality that cannot be reduced to instrumental rationality. It is not difficult to show that a connection exists between the rational structures of knowledge, action, and speech, on the one hand, and discursive practices, on the other. After all, we consider others rational to the extent that they are capable, when challenged, of justifying what they believe, do, and say by providing reasons. Rationality understood as accountability (Zurechnungsfähigkeit) is closely tied, therefore, to the capacity to engage in argumentative practices—that is, practices of critiquing and justifying problematic claims by providing reasons and arguments. Habermas designates this kind of activity “discourse,” and he employs the term “discursive rationality” to refer specifically to the sum total of competencies a speaker must have acquired in order to participate in the special, reflexive form of communication that is

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argumentation. Habermas explains the internal relation between rationality and intersubjective justification as follows: Whoever shares views that turn out to be false is not eo ipso irrational. Someone is irrational if she puts forward her opinions dogmatically, clinging to them although she sees that she cannot justify them. In order to qualify a belief as rational, it is enough that it can be held to be true on the basis of good reasons in the relevant context of justification, i.e., that it is rationally acceptable. (Pragmatics, 312)

Compared to this relatively straightforward answer to the first question, the response to the second—which concerns justifying communicative reason as a universal form of rationality—is significantly more complicated. Here, it is no longer enough to present a systematic account of the idealized assumptions upon which a peculiar and optional form of communication—argumentation or “discourse”—relies. To address this second question, then, two steps are necessary. First, it must be shown that the mode of rational justification operative in discourse is unavoidably anchored in the insurmountable praxis of everyday communication. Second, it must also be demonstrated that communicative rationality is a genuine form of rationality that cannot be reduced to instrumental rationality. The formal-pragmatic analysis of communication that Habermas develops seeks to defend these two central claims of his conception of communicative rationality.

The Program of Formal Pragmatics The aim of formal pragmatics is to identify and explicate the universal and unavoidable presuppositions that underlie the communicative competence of speakers and make mutual understanding possible. This is why Habermas chose the term “universal pragmatics” when he first delineated it in his programmatic essay “What Is Universal Pragmatics?” (Pragmatics, 21–104). In order to distinguish his theory from the “transcendental-pragmatic” approach of his colleague Karl-Otto Apel (see chapter 4 in this volume), however, Habermas quickly switches to the term “formal pragmatics”; this change in name also underscores the theory’s kinship with formal semantics. The basic idea here is that not just language but also speech—that is, the use of sentences in utterances—admits of formal philosophical analysis and thus must not be relegated merely to empirical analysis of particular situations of use, as is done in sociolinguistics, for example. For a comprehensive

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philosophical account of human communication, it is necessary that formal semantics be complemented by formal pragmatics. Whereas the former investigates propositional content in order to provide an account of what is said in a speech act, the latter examines the force of speech acts in order to understand the interpersonal relations that are established in communication. Habermas believes that the philosophical significance of the second mode of investigation reaches far beyond its intrinsic value in helping us understand human communication. Formal-pragmatic analysis holds far-reaching consequences for the theoretical understanding of action, reason, morality, and society. This is made especially clear when one examines the different demands that competency in language, communication, and action respectively place on a speaker. As we have seen, the basic assumption underlying Habermas’s formalpragmatic program is that human communication is governed by a specific form of rationality—communicative rationality—which is irreducible to instrumental rationality. Whereas the linguistic competence of speakers concerns the ability to understand grammatically well-formed expressions of a language, communicative competency involves at least the ability to employ linguistic expressions in order to reach an understanding with someone about something in the world—or, as Habermas puts it, to engage in “communicative action” (see chapter 47 in this volume). Such communicative ability differs fundamentally from the capacity to act instrumentally or strategically in order to reach extracommunicative goals, and it cannot be reduced to these capacities. In support of his thesis, Habermas draws from the theory of speech acts developed by J. L. Austin (1975) and John Searle (1969, 1979, 1983; see chapter 6 in this volume). Unlike them, however, he does not seek to offer a comprehensive account for all the rules that govern the use of specific types of speech acts, as important as this task may be. Rather, his analysis of speech acts is solely concerned with identifying the necessary rational presuppositions that make mutual understanding possible. One identifies such presuppositions by reflecting on the difference between the conditions for merely producing a grammatically correct sentence, on the one hand, and those for employing it in a situation of possible understanding, on the other. Habermas explains this difference in terms of the relations to reality in which a sentence is embedded through the act of utterance. As soon as a sentence is uttered in a communicative context, it is placed in relation to a certain state of affairs, a certain speaker’s intention, and a determinate interpersonal relation. Thereby, the statement is subject to validity claims that, as a nonsituated sentence—a purely grammatical formation—it could not (and would not need to) fulfill. Accordingly, in order to understand each others’ speech acts, interlocutors must, in the first place, be able to share the knowledge implicit in the

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propositional content of the speech act, and hence they must assess the truth claim of the utterance. Second, they must be able to share the normative presuppositions inherent in the interpersonal relation established through the illocutionary act (i.e., they must assess the rightness claim inherent in it), and, third, they must also assess the sincerity with which the speech act is uttered. Thus, truth, rightness, and sincerity are three universal validity claims that speakers (implicitly or explicitly) raise with their speech acts, according to whether they refer to something in the objective world (as the sum total of entities about which true statements are possible), something in the social world (as the sum total of legitimately regulated interpersonal relations), or something in their particular subjective world (as the sum total of experiences to which one has privileged access). These three dimensions of validity, which Habermas designates as the “validity basis of speech,” are the heuristic “keys” that speakers employ when trying to understand one another’s speech acts. Habermas’s basic idea involves generalizing the conception of meaning as truth conditions, which is characteristic of formal semantics. According to this conception, we understand the propositional content of an assertion when we know its truth conditions—that is, when we know what would be the case if it were true. If one broadens this perspective with a view to theorizing both the propositional content and the force of the different speech acts that can be performed with it, one arrives at Habermas’s conception, according to which we understand a speech act when we know what makes it acceptable. Building on Michael Dummett’s efforts (1975, 1976) to explain meaning in terms of assertability conditions, Habermas advances the claim that, in order to understand the meaning of a speech act, it is necessary to know the kind of reasons a speaker might adduce to redeem the validity claims it raises. This, in turn, means that an orientation toward the possible validity of utterances is a necessary component of linguistic understanding. Reasons cannot be identified as such unless speakers adopt the “internal” perspective of evaluating their quality as reasons and, in so doing, adopt a rationally motivated yes/no position with respect to them (Communicative Action, 1:70–71). Affirming this internal connection between meaning and validity represents the decisive step for justifying both the universality of communicative rationality and its irreducibility to instrumental rationality. Over the years, Habermas has offered many different perspectives and arguments in support of the latter thesis, the details of which cannot be discussed here. The basic idea, however, can be summarized as follows: if, as argued above, the meaning of a speech act is given by its acceptability conditions, and if grasping acceptability conditions demands that one adopts an evaluative stance toward the validity of the reasons that can be adduced to justify the speech act, then communicative success cannot be

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explained on the basis of instrumental rationality alone. Instead, the success of communication depends on a generalized trust in the accountability of speakers, i.e., on their being prepared to vouch for their respective speech acts. Among other things, this requires readiness to redeem, if necessary, the validity claims that they raise with their speech acts with the help of good reasons—and, moreover, readiness to assume the obligations that follow from the recognition of validity claims that have been successfully redeemed and that are relevant for the consequent interaction. Without such general trust, speech acts could not acquire any determinate meaning. As Habermas observes, speech acts such as commands, promises, or assertions would have no meaning if accepting a command or uttering a promise did not entail any obligation to execute them or if accepting an assertion did not entail believing it and directing one’s behavior accordingly (Pragmatics, 223). Since a generalized instrumental or strategic attitude toward communication would undermine the trust of interlocutors in their mutual accountability, it would render their speech acts meaningless. If this view is accurate, the instrumental/strategic use of language is necessarily parasitic with respect to the communicative use of language (i.e., the use of language that is oriented toward reaching understanding), without which no enduring communicative praxis is possible (Communicative Action, 1:288). Because these two uses of language are mutually incompatible, the rationality contained in communicative practices cannot be reduced to instrumental rationality. Therefore, communicative rationality is an indispensable component of a general theory of rationality. The close connection between meaning and validity also accounts for the universality of communicative rationality. Communicative understanding occurs through the intersubjective recognition of the validity claims that participants in communication raise through their speech acts. Thus, as Habermas explains, communication can continue undisturbed only so long as participants suppose that the validity claims of truth, sincerity, and rightness they reciprocally raise with their speech acts are justified. However, as soon as the presupposition that certain validity claims are satisfied (or could be redeemed) is suspended, communicative action cannot be continued. One is then basically confronted with the alternatives of switching to strategic action, breaking off communication altogether, or recommencing action oriented to reaching understanding at a different level, the level of argumentative speech for purposes of discursively examining the problematic validity claims, which are now regarded as hypothetical. (Pragmatics, 23–24)

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Since, as we have seen, neither the first nor the second alternative provides a sufficient basis for enduring communicative praxis, the availability of argumentative practices or “discourses” for repairing the disagreements that inevitably arise among interlocutors is a necessary condition for maintaining such praxis. Therefore, communicative rationality is just as universal and insurmountable for humans as is communication itself. It represents, as Habermas puts it, “a voice of reason that cannot be silenced in everyday communicative praxis, whether we want to or not” (Habermas 1991, 243–244).

Communication and Discourse If enduring communicative practices essentially depend on a general trust that speakers can, if necessary, provide good reasons for the validity claims their speech acts raise, the ability to participate in practices of argumentation or “discourses” must also form an essential part of their communicative competence. As already noted, the three universal validity claims (truth, rightness, and sincerity) and the three formal world concepts (the objective, social, and subjective worlds) are the commonly presupposed system of coordinates that permit interlocutors to reach agreement on what they may treat as a fact, a valid norm, or a subjective experience (Communicative Action, 1:25–26). As long as this agreement holds, speakers can exchange information about the world with their respective speech acts. However, as soon as a speaker challenges the tacit agreement successfully, routine communication is interrupted. Now, communication can only continue on a reflective level in which the specific context of action is suspended, so that interlocutors can adopt a hypothetical attitude toward the problematic validity claims and, following the “unforced force of the better argument,” try to reach agreement on the basis of good reasons. The specific cognitive purpose of generating convictions that underlies argumentative practices or “discourses” imposes strict constraints on their conditions of success. These constraints can be made explicit in the form of a reconstruction of the necessary presuppositions and procedural rules governing such practices. Borrowing from the Aristotelian distinction between logic, dialectic, and rhetoric, Habermas distinguishes presuppositions for argumentation on three levels. On the logical level of products, they consist of logical and semantic consistency requirements for generating sound arguments (for example, speakers may not contradict themselves, different speakers may not use the same expressions with different meanings, and so on). On the dialectical level of procedures, the relevant presuppositions are those that make it possible for the best arguments to prevail (e.g., adopting a hypothetical attitude with respect to the validity claims at issue, recognizing the sincerity and

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accountability of all participants in discourse). Finally, on the rhetorical level of the process of argumentation, the relevant presuppositions are those that make a rationally motivated agreement possible; this concerns pragmatic features of the praxis of argumentation such as equal standing (symmetry) among all participants, equal opportunities of participation, absence of external coercion and deception, openness to criticism, and so on. In early articulations of his model, Habermas qualified the presuppositions named above as features of “an ideal speech situation.” Later, he came to distance himself more and more from this formulation, inasmuch as the terminology may give rise to the erroneous view that such presuppositions are constitutive merely of an ideal praxis (or even of a way of life to be realized in the future [cf. Vorstudien, 181]) and are not, instead, unavoidably operative in actual argumentative practices. According to Habermas, their status as unavoidable presuppositions of actual practices of justification is based on conceptual reasons. Since the purpose of every instance of justification is to convince those who have requested it, this must occur under conditions that make it possible to tell how genuinely convincing the arguments and reasons provided actually are (and that means, of course, under conditions free of coercion, deception, and exclusion). In the absence of such conditions, the practice in question is something other than a process of argumentation or justification. Discourse participants must presuppose that proper conditions obtain in sufficient measure in their actual practices for their argumentative intentions to make any sense at all. Taking up Apel’s approach, Habermas contends that the necessity and unavoidability of the pragmatic presuppositions for argumentation can be demonstrated by analyzing the performative self-contradictions in which one becomes entangled in the attempt of negating any one of them (see Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action). Performative self-contradiction occurs whenever the propositional meaning of an utterance contradicts its pragmatic meaning. One such example would be the claim “I hereby doubt that I exist.” Since existing is a necessary condition for doubting, in making such a claim, what I am saying contradicts what I am doing. Similarly, Habermas argues, given the fact that lack of coercion and exclusion are necessary conditions for the formation of genuine convictions, a performative self-contradiction would occur if one were to make the following statement: “Having excluded persons A, B, C, .  . . from the discussion by silencing them or by foisting our interpretation on them, we were able to convince ourselves that the norm N is justified” (Moral Consciousness, 91). The attempt to reconstruct the intuitive knowledge inherent in the communicative competence of speakers immediately raises the methodological question about the status of this knowledge. Are the unavoidable presuppositions for communication and argumentation that a formal-pragmatic analysis reveals transcendental conditions in the strict Kantian sense (that is,

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necessary and universal conditions of experience)? Against Apel’s project of “transcendental pragmatics”—even though it inspired him initially—Habermas has always insisted that the presuppositions for communication and argumentation possess only a “weakly transcendental” status. Time and again, he has rejected Apel’s standpoint that this kind of philosophical analysis affords a priori insights that provide an ultimate foundation of knowledge (see chapter 4 in this volume). According to Habermas, the pragmatic rules that enable competent speakers to participate in practices of reaching mutual understanding represent “presumably general, but only de facto uncircumventable [unhintergehbar] conditions that must be fulfilled in order for certain fundamental practices to arise—that is, such practices for which no thinkable functional equivalent in our socio-cultural forms of life exist” (Naturalism, 24). Therefore, these conditions are similar to transcendental conditions to the extent that we cannot avoid making certain universal presuppositions when using language in order to reach understanding. On the other hand, they are not transcendental in the strict sense for (a) we can also act otherwise, in a non-communicative manner and (b) the ineluctability of these idealized presuppositions does not entail their factual satisfaction. (Habermas 1991, 228–229)

The weakly transcendental status Habermas ascribes to normative presuppositions of communication is also responsible for two distinctive features of his conception of critical theory. On the one hand, to the extent that these normative presuppositions, while unavoidably presupposed in our communicative practices, may actually fail to be satisfied, they provide a critical yardstick for evaluating our existing practices. Moreover, since this critical standard is anchored in our actual practices, it is intuitively available to all participants in communication. This permits Habermas to counter the objection that the critical theorist is arbitrarily or paternalistically imposing a standard from without: its validity can, in principle, be confirmed or rejected by the participants themselves. Habermas makes the point as follows: The same structures that make it possible to reach an understanding also provide for the possibility of a reflective self-control of this process. It is this potential for critique built into communicative action itself that the social scientist, by entering into the contexts of everyday action as a virtual participant, can systematically exploit and bring into play outside these contexts and against their particularity. (Communicative Action, 1:121; emphasis added)

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Additionally, by ascribing only a “weakly transcendental” status to the presuppositions of communicative action, Habermas can reject the strict “apriorism” of traditional transcendental philosophy and underscore the fallible status of the type of knowledge that a reconstruction of competencies provides. In this way, he rejects the (supposedly) categorical difference between philosophy and other reconstructive sciences such as generative linguistics or developmental psychology. All the same, Habermas does not draw the conclusion that denying philosophy’s privileged (and infallible) access to truth means that one must abandon philosophical analysis. On the contrary, the conclusion he draws is that nothing prevents philosophy from participating in scientific cooperation with other forms of knowledge; indeed, according to Habermas, philosophy can play a key mediating role between systems of knowledge that are encapsulated within cultures of expertise, on the one hand, and the intuitive “background knowledge” of the lifeworld, on the other (see chapter 34 in this volume).

Communicative Rationality and Social Theory According to the formal-pragmatic approach, reason is situated within everyday communicative practices of reaching mutual understanding that grant the presupposition of yielding reasonable results. Habermas’s procedural conception of communicative rationality holds that the more the rational acceptability of our convictions depends on the rationality of our argumentation procedures, the less it can rely on any substantive content that is a priori precluded from being problematized. Given the unavoidable openness of communicative practices oriented toward mutual understanding—i.e., an understanding that depends on the explicit, unforced assent of participants—only the formal conditions of argumentative procedures can be considered necessary for reaching rationally acceptable outcomes. The insight behind this procedural approach to rationality is that our convictions are rational not so much because they derive from a system of infallible beliefs that provide an “ultimate foundation of knowledge” (Apel); rather, they are rational because they result from an open, self-correcting process that allows for permanent revision on the basis on new insights (and therefore promises to yield reasonable results). Habermas’s procedural conception of communicative rationality offers an interesting and complex basis for explaining the possibility of social order. On the one hand, linguistic understanding provides a powerful mechanism for action coordination that makes social integration possible. Communicative understanding allows social actors to coordinate their actions on the basis of validity claims that are deemed mutually acceptable and can be criticized or

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justified by means of argument. The assurance interlocutors (implicitly) offer one another—that they could, if necessary, redeem the validity claims they raise with their speech acts by providing convincing reasons—unleashes a rationally motivating force that has socially integrative effects. The general trust in the mutual accountability of interlocutors that is generated in processes of consensus formation makes action coordination and thus social order possible. At the same time, however, since communicative understanding is structurally dependent on the permanent possibility of disagreement and criticism, it has a built-in potential for problematization that jeopardizes the possibility of social order. In light of the potentially high costs of dissent, communicative action can, at first, seem more a disruptive than a promising mechanism for explaining the possibility of social order (Pragmatics, 236–237). However, Habermas does not consider this a real obstacle to his project. In fact, in The Theory of Communicative Action, he exploits the explanatory potential of both the disruptive and the productive aspects of communicative rationality for his theory of social evolution. Insofar as it is reasonable to accept that no functional equivalent exists for everyday communicative practices of reaching understanding—either as regards socialization or in terms of the reproduction of the lifeworld—the disruptive potential that lies within communicative practices can help explain the rationalization of the lifeworld that characterizes modern societies. Such rationalization can be understood as a process whereby the reproduction of the lifeworld comes to depend less and less on a normatively ascribed agreement held to be immune to criticism and more and more on a communicative agreement to be reached by the interlocutors themselves. The increased risk of dissent involved in this historical development explains, in turn, the need in modern societies for developing strategies that either circumscribe the communicative mechanism or give this mechanism unhindered play. An example of the latter strategy is the institutionalization of specialized discourses—e.g., modern science, law, autonomous art—in which the validity of different aspects of the cultural system of knowledge is permanently thematized and discussed. An example of the former strategy is the development of steering mechanisms (such as power and money) that make action coordination possible without having to rely on mutual understanding. These alternative mechanisms of action coordination help preserve social order by reducing the risk of dissent (see chapter 35 in this volume). In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas follows a similar strategy in his interesting account of modern positive law. According to this account, positive law is a system of rules that both binds together and assigns different tasks to the two strategies for dealing with the risk of dissent found in communicative action, that is, the strategies of circumscribing the communicative

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mechanism and of giving this mechanism unhindered play. On the one hand, positive law limits the risk of dissent by assigning to sanctions the role formerly played by convictions; in this way, it leaves the motives for rule compliance open while enforcing observance. On the other hand, the modern legal system must—in keeping with its own claims of legitimation and justification—stand open to critical testing and potential contradiction in ongoing discourses and transform the risks this entails into the productive force of presumptively rational processes of political-opinion and will formation (see chapter 38 in this volume).

Communicative Rationality and Moral Theory Communicative reason, as such, is not a form of practical reason, for it encompasses the whole spectrum of validity claims—that is, in addition to the claim of normative rightness, the claims of propositional truth and subjective sincerity. According to Habermas, communicative reason makes an orientation toward validity claims possible; unlike the classical conception of practical reason, however, it does not constitute a direct source of norms of conduct (Facts, 4–5). All the same, its importance for the theory of morality is undiminished. An important feature of Habermas’s procedural conception of communicative rationality is the fact that the necessary conditions for achieving rational results through practices of argumentation are neutral with respect to “content” (i.e., questions) to which justificatory practices can meaningfully be applied. Indeed, the formal-pragmatic approach is motivated by the need to distinguish between a procedural conception of rational acceptability, on the one hand, and, on the other, the various substantive criteria of justification that are employed in specific instances of argumentation. Whereas the latter are contextual (given the different kinds of questions at issue) and vary over time (as a consequence of cognitive learning processes), the former can be characterized in purely formal terms—i.e., through a reconstruction of unavoidable presuppositions of argumentative practices, which are culturally invariable. It is in this sense that our concept of rational acceptability is at bottom procedural. If we can only discern the correctness of our convictions on the basis of assessing how convincing the reasons in their support are, and if no criteria of justification can in principle be exempted from questioning, then it follows that we can only infer how convincing our reasons are from the actual results of a rational process of argumentation—that is, a process occurring under the conditions of an “ideal speech situation” (free of coercion, deception, exclusion, etc.) (Naturalism, 49–50). Thanks to such neutrality with regard to content, the formal-pragmatic project opens the possibility of theorizing rationality in terms that reach far

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beyond the narrow limits of instrumental rationality, covering not only questions of truth or effectiveness but also all other questions that participants in communication are willing and able to debate by adducing reasons in order to reach agreement on contested validity claims. In keeping with his analysis of the three validity claims that comprise communicative action—truth, normative rightness, and sincerity—Habermas elaborates a typology of discourses in which every validity claim can be evaluated hypothetically and either contested or justified. Although, over the years, Habermas has made small modifications in how he assigns validity claims to specific forms of argumentation (Vorstudien, Theory of Communicative Action, etc.), the essential traits of the picture have remained the same. Whereas it is impossible for a speaker to redeem the claim of sincerity in his or her subjective utterances by means of argument—sincerity can only be evaluated in terms of the consistency between a speaker’s intentions and subsequent actions—claims about the truth of empirical propositions or claims concerning the normative rightness of social relations can be redeemed in discourse. Such claims can be tested in theoretical or practical discourses, respectively. From a procedural point of view, both discourses are subject to the same normative presuppositions, even though they differ with respect to the specific rules of argumentation appropriate for each of them. Whereas discourses about the truth of empirical propositions are guided by the principle of induction, practical discourses about the rightness of social norms follow a principle of universalization (see chapter 36 in this volume). In line with the formal-pragmatic approach, Habermas’s account of practical and theoretical discourses does not aim to provide substantive criteria sufficient to generate true beliefs or right norms in argumentative discourses; instead, it aims to clarify the conditions under which those criteria (arguments, forms of reasoning, and so on) alone can achieve justificatory force. The aim, thereby, is to show how the same general, discursive conditions for rational acceptability impose restrictions on the possible answers to both theoretical and practical questions. This is the key argumentative step in the attempt to undermine a positivist understanding of rationality that denies that practical questions can have genuinely rational answers. Inasmuch as interlocutors treat practical questions concerning the rightness of social norms as cognitive questions, and inasmuch as the discoursetheoretical account of the notion of rational acceptability holds, the discursive conditions for rational acceptability analyzed in the theory of communicative rationality represent necessary conditions for the validity of our claims about the rightness of social norms just as much as they do for the validity of any other claims to justified knowledge. Here, the implications of the theory of communicative rationality for Habermas’s conception of morality are evident: insofar as the discourse-theoretic account of rational acceptability is not

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motivated by moral reasons, it can provide an independent justification to discourse ethics. That is, because the demands of rational acceptability contained within the theory of communicative rationality do not rest on moral but on cognitive reason, the formal features of rationally acceptable procedures of argumentation are neutral with respect to the questions at issue. Consequently, by relying on these formal features, discourse ethics does not presuppose a particular moral outlook. At the same time, however, these formal-pragmatic features do impose constraints on the answers to moral questions that may be considered rationally acceptable. This is their moral impact: taking into account the unavoidable normative presuppositions of argumentation, it is possible to understand why the practice of justifying moral norms (under historical conditions of a given plurality of moral codes) has influenced the evolution of our moral views toward a principled egalitarian morality. In the 1970s and 1980s, Habermas pursued a decidedly “antirealist” argumentative strategy in order to support the strong analogy between claims to truth and claims to rightness postulated by his formal pragmatics. According to this strategy, the unconditional and context-transcendent meaning of both validity claims, truth and normative rightness, can be explained in terms of the epistemic notion of “idealized rational acceptability.” This line of reasoning led him to advance a so-called consensus theory of truth, which holds that “the truth of a proposition [means] the promise to seek reasonable consensus about what has been said” (Vorstudien, 137). In the 1990s, Habermas retracted this conception of truth (Truth, 161–162) and admitted that truth is “a justification-transcendent concept that cannot be made to coincide with the concept of ideal warranted assertability. Rather it refers to the truth conditions that must, as it were, be met by reality itself” (Truth, 247–248). Today, Habermas endorses an approach that he calls “pragmatic epistemological realism” regarding truth claims that can be tested and justified in empirical-theoretical discourse (see Truth). This approach aims to account for the realist intuitions that result from our practical engagement with the objective world without falling back upon a metaphysical realism that assumes a direct correspondence, unfiltered by rational argument(s), between a privileged class of utterances and the way the world is. All the same—now as then—Habermas continues to endorse an antirealist strategy concerning moral claims by defining normative rightness in terms of his notion of idealized rational acceptability: Ideally warranted assertability is what we mean by moral validity. .  . . A norm’s ideal warranted assertability—unlike that of a justification-transcendent claim to truth—does not refer beyond the boundaries of discourse to something that might “exist” independently of having been determined to be worthy of recognition. The justification-immanence of “rightness” is based on

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a semantic argument: Since the “validity” of a norm consists in that it would be accepted, that is, recognized as valid, under ideal conditions of justification, “rightness” is an epistemic concept. (Truth, 258)

The consequences of the break Habermas posits here between claims to truth and claims to rightness for a defense of the formal-pragmatic theory of meaning—the central piece of his theory of communicative rationality— have not yet been elaborated.

Communicative Reason and Political Theory During the 1990s, Habermas began to expand and develop his discourse-theoretical understanding of communicative reason in the context of legal and political theory. The process culminated in Between Facts and Norms. Subsequently, a much more complicated and nuanced understanding of claims to rightness has been operative within Habermas’s formal pragmatics; this has also led him to draw subtler distinctions within his broad conception of normative rightness in order to account for the highly variable dimensions of validity in social norms (moral, legal, or ethical-political validity, legitimacy, etc.). In this context, Habermas has also found it necessary to establish a clearer distinction between the moral principle of universalization (U) and the discourse principle (D). Moreover, he has introduced a new principle—the principle of democracy—underlying the procedure of legitimate legislation. It holds that “only those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent [Zustimmung] of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn has been legally constituted” (Facts, 110). This principle articulates the extent to which the procedural concept of communicative rationality directly undergirds a normative model of deliberative democracy: the normative presuppositions of argumentative practices (that is, symmetrical relations between participants, equal opportunities for participation, inclusion, freedom from coercion and deception, openness to criticism, and so on) indicate the conditions that must be fulfilled so that public-deliberative processes of opinion and will formation in democratic states can confer legitimacy to political decisions (inasmuch as observance of the former justifies the presumption that the latter are reasonable). Here, one can clearly see the advantages of the procedural conception of communicative rationality, for the formal-pragmatic preconditions that are necessary to uphold practices of argumentation can be recognized as reasonable by all democratic citizens, notwithstanding the substantive disagreements that unavoidably emerge in pluralistic societies. It is

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also evident why Habermas’s discourse model has proved so productive not only in discussions about normative theories of democracy but also in empirical studies of political deliberation in contemporary democratic societies that aim at issuing practical recommendations for the improvement of existing political institutions. In contrast to substantive normative assumptions, formal-pragmatic conditions of public deliberation are not only less contentious; they are also easier to track empirically in the context of analyzing the normative quality of actual processes of political deliberation (such as parliamentary debates or international negotiations). An interesting empirical application of the procedural conception of discursive rationality is found in the “discourse quality index” compiled by Steiner, Bächtiger, Spörndli, and Steenbergen (2004). An overview of the fruitfulness of the model for empirical political science is provided by the contributions to special volume 40 of Acta Politica (2005) and in Habermas’s recent book Europe: The Faltering Project. Finally, a rewarding discussion of how communicative rationality can be used to analyze international politics can be found in Niesen and Herborth (2007).

Reception and Controversies Inasmuch as the conception of communicative reason stands at the heart of Habermas’s theoretical project, it has been at the center of both attention and controversy from the very beginning. From a substantive point of view, two main currents of criticism are in evidence. On the one hand, many readers have taken issue with the fact that Habermas locates the seat of rationality— away from the thinking and acting subject—in intersubjective structures of linguistic communication (Henrich 1987, 1992; Schnädelbach 1992). Other critics have expressed misgivings inasmuch as they consider that this shift equates rationality and the ability to justify convictions and actions by argument— that is, they hold that Habermas has overintellectualized reason (Schnädelbach 1992; Habermas offers an extensive response in Pragmatics, 307–342). From a methodological point of view, Habermas’s efforts to affirm both the universal and necessary character of the presuppositions that are operative in communicative reason and the fallible (a posteriori) status of the knowledge that makes those presuppositions explicit has elicited criticism from philosophical camps that are diametrically opposed. Some (e.g., Apel 1992; Kuhlmann 1984; see chapter 4 in this volume) hold that the universal and necessary status of those presuppositions can only be meaningfully affirmed if one acknowledges the transcendental status of philosophical claims to knowledge (which provides the basis for a “ultimate foundation”). Conversely, there are those (e.g., Rorty 1994) for whom recognizing the fallible nature of human

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knowledge implies that all context-transcendent claims to universality and necessity should be abandoned. In recent decades, the program of formal pragmatics at the core of Habermas’s conception of communicative rationality has been at the center of numerous discussions and controversies. In response, Habermas has expanded and added nuance to his theory. The most important discussions concern technical aspects of speech acts (e.g., the difficulties posed by so-called perlocutions, threats, or even simple imperatives; cf. Skjei 1985; Tugendhat 1985; Zimmermann 1985; for some responses, see Pragmatics, 215–256, 307–342), the details of the formal-pragmatic theory of meaning (Wellmer 1992; Lafont 1999; Heath 1995, 2001), and the specific features of the discourse theory of truth (McCarthy 1973; Hesse 1980; Wellmer 1986; Lafont 1994, 1999). Truth and Justification provides Habermas’s most up-to-date response to these critiques.

References Apel, Karl-Otto. 1976. “Sprechakttheorie und transzendentale Sprachpragmatik zur Frage ethischer Normen.” Sprachpragmatik und Philosophie, 10–173. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1992. “Normative Begründung der ‘Kritischen Theorie’ durch Rekurs auf lebensweltliche Sittlichkeit? Ein transzendental-pragmatisch orientierter Versuch, mit Habermas gegen Habermas zu denken.” In Zwischenbetrachtungen: Im Prozeß der Aufklärung, ed. Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, et al., 15–65. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Austin, John L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Dummett, Michael. 1975. “What Is a Theory of Meaning?” In Mind and Language, ed. Samuel Guttenplan, 97–138. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——. 1976. “What is a Theory of Meaning? (II).” In Truth and Meaning, ed. Gareth Evans and John McDowell, 67–137. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. “A Reply.” In Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones, 214–264. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen, and Niklas Luhmann. 1971. Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Heath, Joe. 1995. “Threats, Promises, and Communicative Action.” European Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 3: 225–241. ——. 2001. Communicative Action and Rational Choice. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Henrich, Dieter. 1987. “Was ist Metaphysik – was Moderne? Thesen gegen Jürgen Habermas.” In Konzepte: Essays zur Philosophie in der Zeit, 11–43. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1992. “Die Anfänge der Theorie des Subjekts (1789).” In Zwischenbetrachtungen: Im Prozeß der Aufklärung, ed. Axel Honneth et al., 106–170. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hesse, Mary. 1980. “Habermas’s Consensus Theory of Truth.” In Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science, 206–231. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Honneth, Axel, et al., eds. 1992. Zwischenbetrachtungen: Im Prozeß der Aufklärung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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Kuhlmann, Wolfgang. 1984. Reflexive Letztbegründung: Untersuchungen zur Transzendentalpragmatik. Freiburg: Alber. Lafont, Cristina. 1994. “Spannungen im Wahrheitsbegriff.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42, no. 6: 1007–1024. ——. 1999. The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy. Trans. Jose Medina. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. McCarthy, Thomas. 1973. “A Theory of Communicative Competence.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 3, no. 4: 135–156. Niesen, Peter, and Benjamin Herborth, eds. 2007. Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Rorty, Richard. 1994. “Sind Aussagen universelle Geltungsansprüche?” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42, no. 6: 975–988. Schnädelbach, Herbert. 1992. Zur Rehabilitierung des animal rationale. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Searle, J. Speech Acts. 1969. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 1979. Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 1983. Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skjei, Erling. 1985. “A Comment on Performative, Subject, and Proposition in Habermas’s Theory of Communication.” Inquiry 28, no. 1: 87–122. Steiner, Jürg, et al., eds. 2004. Deliberative Politics in Action: Analysing Parliamentary Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tugendhat, Ernst. 1985. “J. Habermas on Communicative Action.” In Social Action, ed. Gottfried Seebass and Raimo Tuomela, 179–186. Dordrecht: Springer. Wellmer, Albrecht. 1986. Ethik und Dialog. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1992. “What Is a Pragmatic Theory of Meaning?” In Zwischenbetrachtungen: Im Prozeß der Aufklärung, ed. Axel Honneth et al., 318–372. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Zimmermann, Rolf. 1985. Utopie—Rationalität—Politik. Freiburg i.Br.: Alber.

31 LATE CAPITALISM AND LEGITIMATION Legitimation Crisis (1973) FRANK NULLMEIER

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egitimation Crisis presents the plan—or, as Habermas puts it, the “argumentation sketch” (Legitimation, 33)—for a comprehensive theory of society, indicating the framework of investigations he will pursue up to The Theory of Communicative Action. Legitimation Crisis began as the research program for projects at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg, where he assumed the directorship with Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker in 1971. The book both draws on the work of researchers there (especially Claus Offe, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, Rainer Döbert, and Klaus Eder) and synthesizes theoretical elements from the author’s earlier writings. Finally, in the wake of student protest movements, it engages with recent political developments and is, in particular, motivated by engagement with Marxian crisis theory, on the one hand, and efforts to take distance from Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, on the other. “Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’ ” (1968), in which Habermas engaged with the works of Herbert Marcuse, had already addressed possible tendencies of capitalist development. Here, Habermas offered a perspective that differed from Marxist approaches on two fundamental points: “capitalist society has changed to the point where two key categories of Marxian theory, namely class struggle and ideology, can no longer be employed as they stand” (Rational Society, 107). At the same time, he held fast to the assumption of the crisis proneness (Krisenhaftigkeit) of capitalism and to the possibility of overcoming this form of society—even if he provided no concept of another “socialist” society, as he had in his 1968 lecture “Bedingungen für eine Revolutionierung spätkapitalistischer Gesellschaften” (Conditions for revolutionizing late-capitalist societies; Kultur und Kritik, 70–86). Against the thesis, widespread in the 1960s, that social conflicts and economic problems could be resolved by means of the social-welfare state and Keynesianism, Habermas stressed that capitalism is inherently prone to crisis.

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“Exkurs über Grundannahmen des Historischen Materialismus” (Excursus on the fundamental assumptions of historical materialism; Habermas and Luhmann 1971, 285–290) and the introduction to a new edition of Theory and Practice (1971) named the decisive aspect of Habermas’s understanding of crisis: the “chronic need for legitimation developing today” (Theory and Practice, 5). Legitimation Crisis, in turn, replaces “ideology” with the concept of “legitimation” as the conceptual core of a crisis theory intended to dismantle the assumptions of orthodox Marxist thought. Neither the fall of profit rates nor the struggle of the working class—nor, even, the economic failure of the capitalist state—are matters that Habermas addresses when determining the limits of the current social system. Proneness to crisis does not stem from the fact that ideologies that represent a pendant to economic development can be employed to manipulative ends; instead, the matter concerns the internal logic of modes of legitimation—i.e., when motivating factors that enhance the functioning of the social system are not readily available. Habermas’s other basic line of argument concerns Luhmann’s systems theory in general and his work Legitimation durch Verfahren (Legitimation through procedure; Luhmann 1969) in particular. Ultimately, the intensive debate between the two thinkers in Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie? (1971) leads Habermas to adopt, in Legitimation Crisis, the analytical categories of systems theory, especially in reflections that occur on a macrosociological level. (Here, Habermas also refers to the works of Talcott Parsons.) At the same time, the study firmly rejects elements of systems theory founded on philosophical assumptions and microsociological analyses that declare social integration to be a matter of imperatives to overcome complexity (and, for this reason, to offer viable substitutes for normative structures). Legitimation Crisis is divided into three parts. In the first, Habermas elucidates his conception of crisis and provides a basic theory of social evolution that is directed against objectivistic-economic understandings of the subject. The second part evaluates hypotheses concerning late capitalism’s tendency toward crisis; instead of economic or governmental steering problems, the crucial factor is maintaining and “procuring” legitimation (Zufuhr an Legitimation). The final part of the book assesses—and, ultimately, rejects—the possibility of dispensing with sophisticated (anspruchsvoll) rational legitimation, and it affirms the connection between discourse theory and social theory.

The Notion of Crisis and Social Theory In his introductory reflections on the concept of crisis—which begin with the medical understanding of the term—Habermas articulates a central theoretical position: crisis is not a purely objective process; rather, it is a condition of

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powerlessness (Ohnmacht) involving the subject in his or her entirety. “We . . . associate with crises the idea of an objective force that deprives a subject of some part of his normal sovereignty” (Legitimation, 1). Resolving a crisis, then, amounts to a form of liberation. Habermas grants the concept a normative meaning, and he develops his ideas on the basis of systems theory, which itself lacks a normative dimension: in systems theory, crises are defined as disturbances of integration (Legitimation, 7)—i.e., as situations that arise when problems of maintenance (Bestandserhaltung) cannot be resolved by means of structural possibilities within the social system. The altogether objectivistic conception of crisis in systems theory founders on the fact that elements of a system necessary for its preservation cannot be distinguished from those that can be changed without the system losing its coherence and identity. For this reason, Habermas calls for a conception of crisis that focuses on social integration: “only when members of a society experience structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak of crises” (Legitimation, 3). Disturbances of system integration only endanger continued existence when the basis of social integration—the normative structures of a society—stands at risk. Therefore, Habermas maintains, the theory of crisis must determine what systemic steering problems produce effects that threaten social integration. Habermas’s theoretical framework is governed by the distinction between system integration and social integration (which, in later works, becomes the distinction between “system” and “lifeworld”). At the same time, the author attaches due significance to an asymmetry that assigns social integration the key role in community life and addresses the factual interplay between social integration and system integration. On a theoretical level, Habermas seeks to synthesize the partial views afforded by various traditions in the social sciences. Accordingly, he understands social integration in terms such as “institution,” “socialization,” “action,” “norms,” “values,” and “lifeworld” (cf., among others, Berger and Luckmann 1966). He examines system integration, on the other hand, in terms of “self-regulation,” “overcoming complexity,” “steering,” and “contingency.” Only in Parsons’s writings are both perspectives combined, through his famous four-part AGIL scheme of validity—Adaptation, Goal Attainment, Integration, Latency (Legitimation, 5). In seeking to address both system integration and social integration, Habermas takes up an approach that had otherwise lost most of its influence by the early 1970s. In more immediate terms, Legitimation Crisis works with a model developed by Claus Offe, which recognizes three functional systems: the economic system, the political-administrative system, and the sociocultural system. There are three corresponding dimensions of social evolution: the dynamic fields of forces in production, system autonomy (power), and normative structures. It is necessary to adopt such an evolutionary perspective

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if one is to differentiate between, on the one hand, structural changes that represent variations within a social formation that continues to exist and, on the other, changes that ultimately lead to change in the social structure itself. Marx’s theory of society also addresses the matter. Habermas, however, affirms that cultural values (i.e., the matter of social integration) constitute the core of social formations; to this end, he elaborates his notion of the “organizational principle.” Organizational principles—as highly abstract structures of regulation— determine a society’s capacity to learn without losing its identity (i.e., its “level of development”); they establish room for variation in three dimensions: forces of production, steering capacity, and identity-founding interpretive systems. The idea of the “organizational principle” at the theoretical heart of social evolution is based on the assumption that social systems all have at least three universal properties (Legitimation Crisis, 8–9). First, production, which occurs through exchanges with external nature, and socialization, which involves the appropriation of inner nature, constitute the two essential relations between the social system and the environment. By means of new knowledge that is technologically useful (verwertbar), control over external nature is increased; through the nuanced interpretation of situations of need (Bedürfnislagen), human experience yields universalistic norms and self-reflexive values, which make it possible to heighten the socialized component of subjective interiority. Both production and socialization follow particular schemes of developmental logic—patterns that can be reconstructed rationally and theoretically—because they occur in the medium of verifiable (wahrheitsfähig) utterances (production) and justifiable (rechtfertigungsbedürftig) norms (socialization). It is widely accepted that scientific-technological progress qualifies as a purposeful and irreversible process that may be reconstructed by rational means. On the other hand, Habermas’s claim that normative structures obey an internal logic is novel. This thesis must come to terms with the fact that normative structures cannot be instrumentalized at will by the operative system, for they do not represent a “superstructure” that is given form by those in power; rather, normative structures are autonomous—i.e., they potentially resist change. Habermas’s theory, then, rejects the narrow Marxian view that the progress of forces of production must ultimately overturn relations of production; in its place now stand two social elements that perform an “explosive” function: forces of production—as before—and, in addition, normative structures. All the same, a fundamental asymmetry obtains between the factors of change that Habermas identifies. Whereas forces of production expand the autonomy of the system (Systemautonomie), developments occurring in normative structures can check this autonomy. Moreover, it is clear that the

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political system’s evolutionary dimension depends only on changes occurring in normative structures, science, technology, and economy. Unlike the spheres of production and socialization, politics obeys no inner logic (Eigenlogik); therefore, it possesses no capacity to evolve on its own. The theory presented in Legitimation Crisis grants politics no intrinsic, revolutionary dynamism. Second, the goal values (Sollwerte) of a society change on the basis of forces of production and system autonomy; at the same time, however, such variation is limited by the developmental logic internal to normative structures, which admit no economic influence. Therefore, the development of norms may promote the development of the system as a whole but also, potentially, constitute an obstacle. The enhancement of forces of production may also trigger change within normative structures; in such a case, however, their subsequent development follows a logic of its own, with the consequence that new legitimation claims come to limit and tax the autonomy of the social system. According to Habermas, precisely this occurs in late capitalism. Normative structures obstruct the perpetuation of the standing social system. Through their internal dynamics of development, normative structures stand in the way of the system’s expansion of power (Machtentfaltung). Whereas the Marxist model views relations of production negatively—as a superstructure that blocks the free development of forces of production—Habermas considers the normative structures that have taken their place (in theoretical terms) as a positive and desirable check on the otherwise uncontrolled forces of technology and economy. Finally, a given society’s level of development and capacity for learning are measured in terms of whether a distinction is made between theoretical-technical questions, on the one hand, and practical questions, on the other—and the extent to which these spheres admit processes of learning. The fundamental “automatic inability not to learn” (Legitimation, 15) constitutes the core of human reason (Vernünftigkeit). Hereby—and almost in passing—Habermas indicates the fundamental basis both for his theory of rationality and of his theory of human society.

Liberal Capitalism and Late Capitalism Following upon these three universalia, Legitimation Crisis presents a basic sketch of the evolutionary theory of social formations (Legitimation, 17–24)— later elaborated in greater detail in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Habermas distinguishes between pre-high-cultural, high-cultural, and postmodern social formations (although the third is merely posited as a possibility). The differences (Ausdifferenzierungen) between societies occupying a high level of culture—which are all class societies—are determined as

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follows: after traditional forms of social organization come modern ones, which may be capitalist or postcapitalist (i.e., “state socialist” [staatssozialistisch]). For Habermas’s theory of crisis, only the distinction—internal to capitalist social formations—between liberal capitalism and organized capitalism is important. Habermas’s reflections on other social formations serve only—hence the title of this section—to “illustrate social principles of organization.” Before achieving the status of “high culture,” human communities are structured primarily by distinctions of age and sex as well as by systems of kinship that, as totalizing institutions, afford both system and social integration. Because they lack a productive dimension, these classless societies harbor no internal contradictions that might overtax the organizational principle. Here, crisis can be occasioned only by external events (ecological changes, war, conquest, etc.). The next level of evolution occurs when traditional societies are structured by class in an openly political way. The state—as a bureaucratic authority apparatus (Herrschaftsapparat)—takes the place of kinship as the institutional core of the system, and economic relations are regulated by political power. In addition, functions of social integration grow distinct from those of system integration when sacral-religious and secular (political-legal) instances of power emerge. This evolution enables considerable increases of system autonomy; at the same time, however, the augmented productivity creates a class structure that tends toward instability. The danger arises that religious conceptions of the world will contradict the exploitative relations between classes as they actually obtain. Thus, crises occur in traditional societies of this kind as the result of internal contradictions. They begin as steering problems, which necessitate heightened repression in order to secure the basis of production. Legitimation issues then arise, which entail class struggles that will (potentially) overturn the standing social order. Legitimation crises can occur in traditional societies, as well. This situation does not hold—and here is the rub for Habermas—for the liberal-capitalistic form assumed by modern societies. Whereas, in traditional societies, political decisions regulate and dominate economic activity, liberal capitalism (according to Habermas) separates economics and politics. The sphere in which autonomous agents exchange goods free of state control involves inequalities that take the form of depoliticized class relations inasmuch as they are matters of private law and not governmental concerns (Legitimation Crisis, 20). Here, no political legitimation crisis can exist in Habermas’s view: the market legitimates itself by maintaining (relative) parity in the exchange of equivalent values; for this reason, politics and the state do not intervene. “Apolitical” economic relations keep the state free from burdens of legitimation (Legitimation, 22). Even if the proletariat remains orderly and obedient

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largely because of (external) repression and (internalized) fatalism, the bourgeois ideals of the market prevail, and the ruling class does not rule politically. At the same time, since the economy constitutes the organizational principle of society, problems of economic steering—without the mediating effects of factors of social integration—pose the question whether the social formation will continue to exist. Because it is centered on the market/economy, this social form risks systemic crisis when the process of accumulation is interrupted; traditional societies, on the other hand—inasmuch as they are structured by openly political classes—experience crises of identity when problems of legitimation and class struggles emerge (Legitimation, 23). Economic crises occur quite frequently under liberal capitalism—and permanent awareness of this fact on the part of the bourgeoisie stands opposed to revolutionary hopes among workers. Marxist theory holds that, because the state does not intervene, divergent class interests meet up directly: economic crisis and class struggle form an analytical unit, and class actions follow from economic matters. This view is precisely what Habermas contests. He maintains that class struggles in liberal capitalism are apolitical because they are not directed against the state. This argument, while highly problematic, is central to his conclusion that a theory of class struggle may not stand at the heart of a theory of the present: “It is precisely this sociological retranslation of an economic analysis that proceeds immanently that gives rise to difficulties in the altered conditions of organized capitalism” (Legitimation, 30–31). According to the model presented in Legitimation Crisis, late capitalism is distinct from liberal capitalism in two respects. For one, the concentration of capital and the organization of markets (including—and especially—labor markets) mark the end of the competitive stage of capitalism. Secondly, dysfunctional consequences of the market are neutralized by comprehensive state intervention (Legitimation, 33) (without, however, autonomous private investment being replaced by political planning). At the same time, such governmental intervention in, and politicization of, capitalism entails the collapse of the ideology underlying “just” exchanges in the market, and it therefore produces the political need for legitimation. The matter can only be “resolved” by political initiatives that preserve the operative system while offering compensation in the form of money, security, and leisure time (what Habermas calls the “welfare-state substitute program” [Legitimation, 37]) and through efforts to depoliticize society further by making it merely a “formal” (instead of a “material”) democracy; hereby, citizens possess “the status of passive citizens with only the right to withhold acclamation” (Legitimation, 37). Under late capitalism, every effort is made to keep class struggle at bay. In order to pacify refractory workers’ movements and parties, fundamental changes are admitted in the form of social programs, wage laws, and, finally,

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price regulations; these concessions, however, are made outside immediate zones of conflict, with the understanding that a permanent state of crisis in fact obtains. As a result, the social coherence/identity of classes—to say nothing of “class consciousness”—dissolves (Legitimation, 39–41); the crisis tendencies of late capitalism do not emerge in the course of politicized class struggles. The potential for change—and here Habermas comments on the revival of Marxist revolutionary efforts at the time he was writing his book— must be sought beyond the working class. Habermas maintains that the potential for social transformation depends on system-specific phenomena of crisis. Under the rubric of “Problems Resulting from Advanced-Capitalist Growth,” he introduces three crisis tendencies that are not system specific—including the disturbance of ecological balance that occurs through population growth under conditions of limited resources and pollution. Apart from this remarkably prescient incorporation of environmental factors into social theory (Legitimation, 41–43), his reflections focus on systemspecific crisis phenomena under late capitalism. According to Habermas, there are three social subsystems—the “economic” system, the “administrative” (alternatively, “political”) system, and the “legitimation” (or “sociocultural”) system—where crisis tendencies manifest themselves. By way of analyzing sources of input and output within these systems, the author arrives at a typology with four possible instances of crisis (economic, rationality, legitimation, and motivation crises). Crises of economy and rationality represent forms of systemic disintegration (system crisis), and crises of legitimation and motivation put social integration into question (identity crisis). Habermas also toys with the arrangement of the four systems (Legitimation, 45), aligning the legitimation system with social integration—a theoretical construction that anticipates the division of the lifeworld into private and public spheres in The Theory of Communicative Action (2:349).

Crisis Tendencies One must not mistake Habermas’s purposes in the section that follows the four possible crisis types (Legitimation, 50–91): here, he tests hypotheses and crisis scenarios to see whether they possess sufficient logical-argumentative force to diagnose not only variations that occur on a case-by-case basis but also a crisis that late-capitalist society cannot overcome because of limits inherent in its very principle of organization. Beginning with the assumption that at least one of these four possible types of crisis must arise so that one may be justified in speaking of late capitalism at all (Legitimation, 49), Habermas arrives at the conclusions below.

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Of the four tendencies, only one can become a crisis of the social form as a whole: that of legitimation. The other tendencies toward crisis may be intercepted: through political intervention, economic crisis tendencies are displaced into the administrative sphere, and from there into the sociocultural system. In the course of this “solution,” however, the political system expands—that is, it extends toward the sociocultural system. (In Habermas’s later works, this line of argument is taken up with the thesis of the “colonization of the lifeworld.”) In the course of capitalist development, the political system has not only moved its borders into the economic system but also displaced the sociocultural system. To the extent that organizational rationality expands, cultural traditions (Überlieferungen) are undermined and deprived of vigor: “the residue of tradition must . . . escape the administrative grasp, for traditions important for legitimation cannot be regenerated administratively” (Legitimation, 47). Under late capitalism, economic crisis tendencies do not imperil society, however. Habermas rejects the idea that the law of value still holds—i.e., the view that economic crisis expresses the tendency of profit rates to fall and the argument that the state represents the “executive organ” of the law of value (Legitimation Crisis, 51). Against the thesis of continuity (affirmed, for example, by Elmar Altvater and Ernest Mandel), Habermas breaks with purely economic logic and argues in terms of political effects that occur on the level of relations of production as a whole. For him, capitalist structures are shaped by the logic of economic processes and by political countersteering through social programs (Konjunktursteuerung und Sozialstaat) (Legitimation Crisis, 53–55). Given the existence of an articulated educational system and a fully developed research sector, for example, there are now social realms that can no longer be understood solely in terms of the logic of exchange. (This argument against the law of value played a much larger role in Habermas’s writings of the 1960s.) When crisis tendencies are intercepted economically, the central problematic may be sought in the political sphere. Political crisis tendencies occur in two forms: as output crises (insufficient administrative steering ability/rationality crises) or as input crises (insufficient mass loyalty/legitimation crises). Contra theories of state planning inspired by Marx, however, Habermas does not consider this circumstance to represent a crisis of rationality (Legitimation, 46ff.). Neither the thesis that the state unconsciously follows economic law nor the thesis that the state is, by nature, the agent of monopoly capitalism—nor theories that strike a balance between these two positions—can demonstrate that it must necessarily fail in efforts to right economic imbalances. Although the state is not in the position to anticipate the problems that follow on its actions, and although these actions occur by stages, the outcome of administrative steering efforts ultimately involves resolving tension between the goal of maintaining the capitalist structure as a whole, the interests of

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particular economic “factions,” and, finally, the interests of different groups within the general population (Legitimation, 67). Economic laws cannot set the course for governmental activity, because the state itself has determined what sectors are to be administered, developed its own planning capacity on the basis of the class compromises of the welfare system, and put steering mechanisms in place. Habermas rejects Offe’s view (1972) that oppositional elements come to be increasingly integrated into the system as a matter of necessity (Legitimation, 66ff.). Unlike commercial enterprises—which, because of competition, are clearly limited in duration and have the manifest purpose of securing profits— the state has no readily identifiable limits to its existence or goals (especially when irrational decisions are at issue or the social spheres it administers have become disorganized). In other words, Habermas grants the state a remarkably high degree of steering capacity. At the same time, Habermas assumes that long-term planning is, in general, extremely problematic for complex societies. Therefore, he offers reflections on the inherent limitations of administrative action (whereby he refers to the works of Fritz W. Scharpf; Legitimation, 65). This does not, however, mean that he affirms the internal logic (Eigenlogik) of the political-administrative system. The state exists between the spheres of economy and culture, which obey their respective schemes of logic; as a flexible agent of steering and survival, it is tied to both, but it possesses no structure with a potential for resistance (keine Strukturbildung mit Widerstandskraft)—i.e., no logic—of its own. For this reason, the output of the political-administrative system cannot pose a problem; this can only occur on the other end, where input is concerned: the procurement (Beschaffung) of legitimation for the political measures it takes. In organized capitalism, class domination is repoliticized (Legitimation, 59). The limits imposed on further economic development and the autonomy of governmental steering are determined by the legitimation the state has at its disposal. The state encounters risk only when fundamental (prinzipiell) doubt arises concerning the norms that guide administrative action. That said, the administrative and legitimation system (once more, note that the political system in fact consists of two separate systems) may also be divided between instrumental and symbolic measures (an observation that Habermas owes to Murray Edelman). One is only justified in positing a legitimation crisis, according to Habermas, if there exists a systematic limit to manipulation— that is, a limit placed on the administrative production of motivations, meaning, and norms. Contra contemporary views that state manipulation is potentially unlimited, Habermas insists on the willfulness (Eigensinn) of the cultural system in imposing limits on administrative power. “The procurement of legitimation is self-defeating as soon as the mode of procurement is seen through”

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(Legitimation, 70). Moreover, he observes, expanding governmental activity (Staatstätigkeit) entails a disproportionate increase in the need for legitimation (Legitimation, 68). This must occur because the new tasks performed by the state displace the border of the political system with respect to the cultural system. To be able to absorb economic crises through rationalization, the state must intervene, with mounting force, in cultural traditions (Bestände). (This observation anticipates the “colonization thesis” presented in The Theory of Communicative Action.) Culture—understood, initially, as cultural tradition—enters the equation inasmuch as it appears to be the object of political planning and, for this reason, seems changeable. The new awareness of cultural contingency unintentionally produces unsettling effects, which can only be stabilized by means of discourse. Discursive arenas offer space for collective efforts of justification (and for evaluating justifications). A crisis of legitimation occurs inasmuch as meaning is a scarce resource that cannot simply be provided at will in the desired quantity and quality when the need for legitimation within the political system grows (Legitimation, 97ff.). Crisis necessarily takes place because the cultural system insists on founding norms (Normenbegründung) and justification in universal terms (Legitimation, 89) and because it provides output that is incompatible with politics (i.e., motivations that do not “match” system requirements). “The definitive limits” consist of “inflexible normative structures that no longer provide the economic-political system with ideological resources, but instead confront it with exorbitant demands” (Legitimation, 93). Accordingly, “motivation crisis” (Legitimation, 75ff.) means, for Habermas, that output from the cultural system proves increasingly dysfunctional for the state and economy. “Motivation crisis” and “legitimation crisis” refer to points of incompatibility that are, respectively, thematized “from the opposite side” (motivation: output of the sociocultural system; legitimation: input of the political-administrative system). Until this historical juncture, the operative sociocultural output was based on private matters of family and civic status (career, domesticity, leisure time, consumption, etc.—incidentally, the preconditions for a depoliticized public sphere). Under late capitalism, however, such functional aspects of the cultural system are systematically undermined, and nothing equivalent takes their place, inasmuch as the developmental logic of normative structures offers no form of learning suited to late capitalism in particular. Already under liberal capitalism, an adequate basis for motivation could only be achieved by combining bourgeois ideologies (private property, individualism, utilitarianism, etc.) with precapitalist traditions—especially religious ones (Legitimation, 77–78). Without systematically pursuing the problems of legitimation under late capitalism, Habermas offers a conception of crisis that stands independent  of specific social considerations; therefore, it deserves to be called

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“anthropological.” This view explores communicative needs of a fundamental kind—the quest for meaningful and comforting responses to the fundamental risks of life—which arise from the ultimately inadequate patterns of interpretation and motivation operative in culture. Beyond this, Habermas concentrates on the processes whereby precapitalist and bourgeois traditions erode under organized capitalism: prebourgeois traditions are destroyed by scientific rationalization, the plurality of values, and the fact that ethical attitudes rooted in religious understandings of the world now yield to subjective morality (Legitimation, 77). The bourgeois ideology of success/achievement founders when social ascent no longer depends on the market in its “pure” form but rather on scholastic distinction and, at the same time, the new form of “success orientation” (Leistungsorientierung) uncouples academic merit from professional accomplishment. Intrinsic motivations for achievement shrink, and extrinsic ones fail to hold, inasmuch as no “reserve army” threatens industry (qua unemployment). In view of the large number of persons who are not actively integrated into the process of production (on this point, Habermas takes up an argument presented by Offe), the ideology of exchange value ceases to prove generally valid. Such reflections make it especially clear when Legitimation Crisis was written. Since then—and especially in the 1990s, which witnessed the renewed dominance of money and markets and a marked orientation to exchange value (as well as high unemployment rates), it has been made plain that cultural developments in fact follow a much less linear course—and take a longer time—than Habermas first supposed. For all that, the strongest argument that a motivation crisis lies in store follows from Habermas’s thesis that normative structures form a cultural barrier that is marked by irreversibility—i.e., that normative structures obey an internal logic (Legitimation, 84) that is rendered inoperative only when they fall beneath the cultural level they have achieved (as occurred, for example, under fascism). The three main components of modern culture—scientism, postauratic art, and universalistic morality—perform this kind of barrier function. They prevent withdrawal into purely private existence inasmuch as they continuously offer instances of critique, heighten the divide between culture and politics by bringing forth phenomena of mass culture and counterculture, and subordinate the validity of norms to universal justifiability in discourse (Legitimation, 86–92). By the beginning of the 1970s, Habermas notes, communicative ethics and art had already proved decisive for the socialization of young people (Legitimation, 91–92). Given new and abstractly universalistic structures of morality, withdrawal and protest represented the sole modes of response that were appropriate for impositions occurring through politics and the economy.

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The youthful movement of protest cannot be explained in terms of economic privation, Habermas observes. Instead, it expresses the collision of systemic demands and new normative structures. With this in mind, Habermas situates the politics of the 1960s at a key juncture of his theoretical edifice. The protests demonstrate that a new level of moral learning has been achieved; they are the carriers of motivations that can no longer be integrated within the political order. For this reason, they deprive politics as it stands of legitimation. In this sense, the notion of legitimation crisis also represents the attempt to interpret and explain events of the author’s day (even though Habermas, in so doing, rejected the self-understanding of radicals—who viewed their actions in terms of class struggle).

Doing Without Legitimation and Justification? The third section of Legitimation Crisis, “On the Logic of Legitimation Problems,” seeks to dispel a final doubt: Might it be possible to do without instances of legitimation—for example, by changing the socialization of citizens in such a way that their actions are not tied to norms requiring justification? Here, the optimism Habermas demonstrates toward youthful protesters who demand moral universalism gives way to skepticism about whether, in the future, legitimacy will still be thought to depend on the truth, and whether politics will continue to be viewed as a matter requiring rationally demonstrable justification. The reflections of Niklas Luhmann, in particular, prompt these concerns. Against the latter’s purely empirical theory, which focuses on securing acceptance and obedience (Folgebereitschaft)—matters that require no justification—Habermas affirms two core assumptions that must hold for his crisis theory to prove valid (Legitimation, 96). First: motivations are not primarily—much less altogether—determined by emotions and desires; in essence, they depend on interiorizing symbolic structures of expectation (i.e., norms). Obedience of political authority—as Max Weber already demonstrated—does not depend only on fear, opportunism, or the eventualities of punishment and reward; it is also a matter of believing in the legitimacy of power as it is constituted and of recognizing its validity. Habermas agrees with Weber on this point. However, he takes leave of him on a second item. Whereas Weber retains an empirical bearing, Habermas stresses that factually valid norms can turn out to be correct or not—that is, they refer to something that is either true or false. In his later writings (e.g., Rekonstruktion), he elaborates the idea—at which he only hints here—that there are stages of moral consciousness (as Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg have claimed in the context of developmental psychology). Legitimation Crisis

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concentrates simply on demonstrating that the truth provides a touchstone at all—a matter of central importance to Habermas’s political theory. Weber’s notion of rational authority has occasioned debate about the relationship between truth and legitimation. From an empirical perspective (e.g., that of Luhmann, who continues the reflections of Carl Schmitt in this regard), belief in legality is to be understood in strictly psychological terms; conversely, a perspective stressing rational motivation asks how the statutes that legal procedures follow are justified (Legitimation, 98ff.). To take up these two strands of discussion and to develop an explicitly normative theory of legitimacy, Habermas shifts from the field of sociology to that of philosophy (Legitimation, 102–117). Here, he rejects empirical theories of morality. Views following the tradition of Hume consider moral controversies to be undecidable by means of argument (mit Gründen) and understand norms merely as the product of contractual agreements. Such a perspective—which holds that norms represent the expression of empirical will—cannot explain why the parties involved, given the changes of interest that invariably occur between them, consider a contract made in the past to be still binding. For this reason, Habermas holds that the model of parties signing a contract must be replaced by the model of a communicative community that is not based on acts of will (which ultimately prove irrational) but, instead, on the rationally motivated recognition of others. At the same time, however, normative validity claims cannot be redeemed by way of deductive arguments. The process of deduction fails insofar as what stands at the beginning of the chain of justification (Begründungskette) must constitute a value of the highest order. Yet given the plurality of values in the world, this cardinal point can only rest on an irrational value determination. Referring to his essay “Wahrheitstheorien” (Theories of truth, 1970) and taking up the arguments of Charles Sanders Peirce and Stephen Toulmin, Habermas offers “substantial arguments” as an alternate mode of justification (Legitimation, 107). Hereby, pragmatic units—i.e., speech acts—combine to yield a logical discourse with specific contours. It is not the logic of conclusions but the logic of communicative action—more precisely, a form of communication unburdened by action—that provides the basis for redeeming validity claims. Habermas adds the well-known postulate that discourse must occur under conditions free from constraint, save “the force of the better argument”; moreover, the exchange must be equally accessible to all interested parties, and it has to be motivated by one thing only: the joint effort to determine the truth (or, as the case may be, what is correct). If, under these conditions, consensus emerges, then it may count as the expression of a reasonable will (Legitimation, 101). The plurality of value orientations is not pushed aside or denied; rather, on the basis of its specific constitution, discourse may be trusted to

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distinguish between particular values (which do not admit agreement) and those that can be generalized (i.e., ones that facilitate agreement). Habermas counters a potential objection to his project by appealing to the future task of “universal pragmatics.” The objection at issue concerns the remainder of decisionism that his theory may be thought to contain—after all, a willed resolution is necessary to enter discourse. This is not, in fact, the case, Habermas avers, for everyday structures of intersubjectivity already contain the expectation that validity claims will be redeemed in discourse. The foundational norms of reasonable speech are present as necessary presuppositions in interactions of every kind; the transcendental nature of colloquial language prevents one from fleeing the (potential) demand that validity claims be redeemed by means of argument (Legitimation, 105). As a corollary, Habermas elaborates a three-level theory of legitimation that also makes space for political compromise as a valid option. The highest degree of legitimacy belongs to regulations that are supported by norms admitting the generalization that can arise from rational consensus in discursive procedure. Regulations that are not based on norms admitting generalization still express normative force; such compromises are altogether legitimate if a balance of power between the interested parties holds and nothing admitting generalization is at issue. If these conditions are not fulfilled, however, a false compromise (Scheinkompromiss) obtains. (Besides false compromises, of course, all norms that are not based on agreement and only pretend to admit generalization are illegitimate—in particular, ideologies [Legitimation, 113].) Habermas’s conception of discourse offers the possibility to perform ideological critique in a new way: namely, by analyzing how interests that admit generalization—and could be counterfactually identified in a rational exchange—come to be repressed (Legitimation, 112–117). Given the difficulty of assessing concurrent and competing interests, Habermas’s critical social theory can only make recommendations “in a representatively simulated discourse between groups that are differentiated (or could be non-arbitrarily differentiated) from one another by articulated, or at least virtual, opposition of interests” (Legitimation, 117). Such advocatory discourses remain hypothetical, however. In no case can one diagnose repressed interests if empirical verification is not possible and if only anthropological considerations and/or criteria from the philosophy of history are employed. Contra the “unmasking” model based on (supposedly) objective class interests, Habermas holds that critical theory’s political interventions must proceed cautiously and offer analyses that always remain hypothetical. All the same, his model presumes that normative justification represents a structural feature of modern societies and that the matter bears great weight.

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Toward the end of Legitimation Crisis (117–129), the text takes on a dark tone. All the arguments presented until this point are brought together, and Habermas entertains the possibility that actions might be viewed without imputing normativity to their underlying motivations. This reflection is prompted by the fact that, in modernity— i.e., after the secularization of scientific knowledge, which has dispelled a “comforting” interpretation of the world—the binding force of morality has been reduced to basic norms guaranteeing reasonable speech. Morality is no longer able—at least to its former extent—to stabilize identity formations; it is inherently “powerless” (Legitimation, 127). Habermas finds confirmation that justification might ultimately be done away with in the cynicism of late-bourgeois consciousness following Nietzschean nihilism, in the thesis of the end of the individual (from Horkheimer and Adorno up to Gehlen and Schelsky), in understandings of democracy that amount to theories for (selecting) an elite (e.g., Schumpeter), and in parts of the student movement that have abandoned praxis in favor of projects of self-realization—or simple self-indulgence. Ultimately, however, Habermas considers it far from decided that these tendencies will prevail. At the end of Legitimation Crisis, he identifies the negative utopia of motivation being procured through the abandonment of normative models; once more, he makes Luhmann’s systems theory the central point of reference for his own reflections. Giving up social integration through norms as the pillar of sociological theory and focusing instead on issues of self-stabilization and overcoming complexity—as Luhmann does—means renouncing the sole point of reference for organizing society along the lines of reason. In political terms, this methodological shift signifies that theory has replaced democratic participation with self-legitimating processes of administration. Ultimately, then, Habermas rejects efforts to restrict reason to instrumental rationality—or, as is the case in Luhmann’s writings, to systems rationality (whereby “rationality” means nothing but subordinating oneself to a “fundamentally opportunistic life-process” [Legitimation, 141]). He holds fast to his project of establishing a concept of practice centered on will formation through discourse based on reason—knowing, all the while, that critical theory of this kind, inasmuch as it relies on practical rationality, can also founder on bad circumstances (schlechte Realität).

Theoretical Development and Reception Now, the further development of Habermas’s views of the 1970s is evident in light of The Theory of Communicative Action, which replaced the concept of “legitimation crisis” with the notion of the “colonization of the lifeworld” as

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a way to diagnose the times and as a programmatic formulation of the author’s critical project. The switch, however, was already anticipated in Legitimation Crisis. In the foreword, Habermas presented the book as a step toward treating the material issues of contemporary society that “—as I hope to show soon— can be clarified within the framework of a theory of communicative competence” (Legitimation, xxv). Before achieving this goal, Habermas presented lectures on his concept of legitimation crisis (in Rome, 1973, and at the conference of political scientists in Duisburg, 1975, where he debated Wilhelm Hennis); these talks were published in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (1976). At the end of the decade, Habermas gave up the idea of overcoming the capitalist social system—and, in so doing, the conception of crisis that he had developed to this end. Since then, matters of political legitimation have continued to be important, but Habermas has stopped speaking of a legitimation crisis as a means of questioning the system as a whole. The chapter “Marx and the Thesis of Inner Colonization” in the second volume of The Theory of Communicative Action takes up the line of argument developed in Legitimation Crisis, which holds that economic and administrative steering imperatives have penetrated the sociocultural system. “Colonization” has replaced “crisis” in Habermas’s theory of pathologies of the lifeworld: “But when steering crises—that is, perceived disturbances of material reproduction— are successfully intercepted by having recourse to lifeworld resources, pathologies arise in the lifeworld” (Communicative Action, 2: 385). In the 1970s, Legitimation Crisis received broad scholarly attention; reactions were for the most part critical, although they did acknowledge the comprehensive nature of the social theory that the author had elaborated. Among conservative intellectuals and in certain parts of the media, Habermas, his book, and, indeed, the Frankfurt School as a whole received blame for supposedly having contributed to problems of legitimation; Habermas was even charged with evincing sympathy for terrorists. It was only when Habermas received the Adorno Prize in 1980—and the Christian Democratic mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Frankfurt called for an end to irresponsible accusations—that calm prevailed in some measure (Wiggershaus 2004, 109). Within the field of political science, Habermas’s theory of crisis also weathered criticism, especially from a Marxist perspective. For the most part, objections adopted the position articulated by Claus Offe (1972)—even though he, too, in developing a “theory of political crisis” like Habermas, was faulted for having abandoned key Marxian insights, which were replaced by the considerations and theorems of systems theory (see, among other works, the contributions in Ebbighausen 1976; Blanke, Jürgens, and Kastendiek 1975). Habermas’s view that a political and administrative transformation of the capitalist process (Kapitalprozess) had occurred offered the central point of debate. Moreover,

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the author’s integration of systems theory into his critical theory of society and the binary opposition between social integration and system integration occasioned broad disagreement (which was not limited to Marxist political theorists [Peters 1993, 311]). When The Theory of Communicative Action appeared—which concentrated on the opposition between “system” and “lifeworld”—exchanges became even more heated (Honneth 1991). In 1975, a translation of Legitimation Crisis appeared in the United States. It was prepared by Thomas McCarthy, whose own book, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (1978; published in German two years later), offered, in the final chapter, an extensive discussion of problems of legitimation under late capitalism. This study was responsible for the first wave of Habermas reception in English-speaking lands—which was soon followed by scholarly engagement with The Theory of Communicative Action (see Thompson and Held 1982, Benhabib 1986, White 1995). McCarthy held that capitalist legitimation problems express the embarrassment that no organized social movement has emerged as an effective vehicle of critique. For this reason, he observed, Habermas “is forced to remain at the level of pointing out broad crisis tendencies.” “His critique retains an anonymous character” inasmuch as it is not addressed to any particular social actor (McCarthy 1980, 385–386). Now, at the beginning of a new century, questions have again arisen about the nature of theory that seeks to be critical of society and about groups that might undertake social protest in an efficacious manner. Axel Honneth’s incorporation of Habermasian theory into his reflections on “recognition” (Anerkennung), for example, has attempted to revitalize the notion of legitimation crisis in a manner that relates more explicitly to matters of subjectivity and identity (Iser 2008, 147). In addition, the notions of “paradox” and “paradoxical contradiction” (Hartmann 2005) have provided a means of understanding, in theoretical terms, movements that are critical of society. However, as Offe has remarked (2005, 269), these efforts focus on phenomena that are less structural (strukturbedingt) in nature than “essentially contingent.” On this basis, then, it seems impossible to identify subjective experiences that might provide the basis for critical, democratic movements (Iser 2005). Since the end of the 1970s, the notion of crisis has come to seem almost banal and has lost its “theoretical and political acuteness (Schärfe)” (Beck 1992, 189). In general, it now refers to a situation that does not necessarily represent a systemic danger. A crisis of legitimation—however one views the analytic and critical operations that the concept affords—did not occur in actual fact after the publication of Habermas’s book (e.g., Peters 1993, 218). However, following the economic and financial disaster on a global scale in 2008–2009, the diagnosis presented in Legitimation Crisis has again achieved currency— even if (or perhaps precisely because) it is evident, and in massive terms, that

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Habermas’s central argument about the “interception” and “cushioning” of economic crises by political means does not hold.

References Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans. Mark Ritter. London: Sage. Benhabib, Seyla. 1986. Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1966. Blanke, Bernhard, Ulrich Jürgens, and Hans Kastendiek, eds. 1975. Kritik der politischen Wissenschaft. Analysen von Politik und Ökonomie in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Campus. Ebbighausen, Rolf, ed. 1976. Bürgerlicher Staat und politische Legitimation. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Geis, Anna, and David Strecker, eds. 2005. Blockaden staatlicher Politik: Sozialwissenschaftliche Analysen im Anschluss an Claus Offe. Frankfurt: Campus. ——. 1975. Legitimation Crisis. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon. Habermas, Jürgen, and Niklas Luhmann. 1971. Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hartmann, Martin. 2005. “Paradoxien des ‘neuen’ Kapitalismus.” In Geis and Strecker 2005, 199–212. Honneth, Axel. 1991. The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory. Trans. Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Iser, Matthias. 2005. “Krise und Kritik – mehr als ein Anachronismus?” In Geis and Strecker 2005, 185–198. ——. 2008. Empörung und Fortschritt. Grundlagen einer kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Campus. Luhmann, Niklas. 1969. Legitimation durch Verfahren. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1969. McCarthy, Thomas. 1978. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Offe, Claus. 1972. Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. “Rote Fäden und lose Enden. Anmerkungen zu einer Mega-Agenda.” In Geis and Strecker 2005, 245–277. Peters, Bernhard. 1993. Die Integration moderner Gesellschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Thompson, John B., and David Held, eds. 1982. Habermas: Critical Debates. London: Macmillan. White, Stephen K., ed. 1995. The Cambridge Companion to Habermas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiggershaus, Rolf. 2004. Jürgen Habermas. Reinbek: Rowohlt.

32 HISTORY AND EVOLUTION Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (1976) THOMAS MCCARTHY

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he essays collected in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (1976), all written in the mid-1970s, represent a major juncture in Habermas’s thought. They brought his reflections on historical materialism since the 1950s together with his work in the early 1970s on the theory of communicative action, on one side, and with the results of his recent exchange with Niklas Luhmann concerning social-systems theory, on the other side. Together they introduced the research program that would soon lead to The Theory of Communicative Action (1985 [1981]).

From Philosophy of History to Systematically Generalized History In his “Literaturbericht zur philosophischen Diskussion um Marx und den Marxismus” (1971 [1957]; not translated into English) and several essays written in the early 1960s and collected in Theory and Practice (1988 [1963]), Habermas took issue with “orthodox” Marxism on a number of basic points (see chapter 1 in this volume). In particular, he rejected its scientistic self-understanding and its objectivistic account of the relation of theory to practice, defending instead a conception of critical social theory as “empirical philosophy of history with practical intent.” The end of history, he argued, was not a matter for metaphysical hypostatization or social-scientific prediction but for practical-political projection: it was a goal that collective actors, in the knowledge of objective conditions, could undertake to bring about. The idea of comprehending society as a historically developing whole for the sake of enlightening political consciousness and reflexively guiding political practice was given a stronger theoretical elaboration later in the 1960s, particularly in Habermas’s On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1988 [1967]) and Knowledge and Human Interests (1972 [1968]). In the former, the main line of his attack against the neopositivist assimilation of social to natural science ran through a lengthy discussion of the nature and role of interpretive

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understanding in social inquiry. He argued that any methodology that abstracted from the prior symbolic formation of social reality—the intersubjective meanings constitutive of the sociocultural settings in which socialized individuals interacted—was doomed to failure. At the same time, he rejected the interpretivist assimilation of social inquiry to the explication of meaning. Cultural tradition had to be viewed in relation to the objective context comprising the systems of social labor and political domination, so that subjective meanings could be examined in relation to objective, often latent, meanings and thereby scrutinized for ideological content. Thus critical theory had to incorporate interpretive understanding into a broader framework that made it possible to grasp the empirical conditions under which cultural traditions historically changed. In On the Logic of the Social Sciences, this general interpretive framework was characterized as a historical analysis of social systems, in the tradition of historical materialism, but revised to take account of advances in socialscientific functionalism, particularly Talcott Parsons’s theory of social systems. At the same time, functionalism itself had to be stripped of its scientistic self-misunderstanding and to be made aware of its ineliminable historical, hermeneutical, and practical moments. This would mean understanding itself not as a general theory of the empirical-analytic sort but as a general interpretation of the formative process of the human species, from the perspective of a practically projected future free of domination. In On the Logic of the Social Sciences, the logic of such general interpretations was also elucidated in connection with psychoanalysis, which also allowed for a dual perspective on subjective and objective, often unconscious, meaning and thus for a critique of distorted communication. Moreover, it provided a model for the analysis of causal relations that were of a symbolic nature and thus could be dissolved by the power of reflection. In Knowledge and Human Interests, that model was further elaborated in a lengthy discussion of Freud’s methodology. Habermas characterized psychoanalysis as a “depth hermeneutics” of systematically distorted communication, which, in contrast to normal hermeneutics, relied upon theoretical assumptions. In specific, psychoanalytic interpretation drew upon a “systematically generalized history” of psychodynamic development, which was used as a “narrative foil” to reconstruct individual life histories, in which subjects could recognize the roots of their self-misunderstandings. Treating this model as a clue to the methodology of historical materialism, Habermas conceived of the latter as a “systematically” or “theoretically” generalized interpretive framework, which offered a dual—action-theoretic and system-theoretic—perspective on the history of the species and made it possible to uncover the social roots of ideologically distorted communication. In his ensuing debate with Gadamer, Habermas repeatedly emphasized this reliance upon a theoretically generalized

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interpretive framework to distance critical theory from what he took to be the historicist and relativist implications of sociohistorical hermeneutics (Apel et al. 1971).

The Theory of Social Systems By the start of the 1970s, Habermas had begun to move in an even more robust theoretical direction, which was signaled by his systematic work on theories of language and of ontogenetic development as well as by his intensified efforts to get clear on the nature and limits of social-systems theory: both “Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommunikativen Kompetenz” (see chapter 30 in this volume) and Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie? appeared in 1971 (Habermas and Luhmann 1971). The new research program called for a general theory of linguistic communication, in the form of a universal pragmatics (see chapter 47 in this volume); which was to serve as the basis for a theory of individual development, in the form of a general account of the acquisition, in stages, of communicative or interactive competence; and building on both of these, a theory of social evolution, which Habermas conceived as an action-theoretic and system-theoretic reconstruction of historical materialism. Though Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus contained one essay on the development of ego identity and moral consciousness, this article will focus on social evolution, which is also the main focus of Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Parsons’s structural functionalism interested Habermas as an attempt to incorporate the action frame of reference into a theory of the social system as a complex of functionally differentiated subsystems. But he criticized Parsons for ultimately subordinating the action-theoretic to the system-theoretic perspective, especially after he had appropriated ideas from biocybernetics into his theory of social evolution and thereby short-circuited the hermeneutic and critical moments of social inquiry. Parsons’s later work led to a revolt on the action-theoretic front, in the form of a variety of radically interpretive approaches to social inquiry, from phenomenology and ethnomethodology to social interactionism, linguistic analysis, and hermeneutics. In the present context, however, it is the reaction on the other, system-theoretic front, that is of immediate interest: the resolution of the tensions in Parsons’s dualistic approach by a more radical and more consistent subordination of the theory of social action to the demands of social-systems theory. The exemplar of this approach was Niklas Luhmann, with whom Habermas began an exchange in the early 1970s (Habermas and Luhmann 1971), which continued until the latter’s death in 1999 (see chapter 11 in this volume). On this front, the research program outlined in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus

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may be viewed as a systematic effort to counter the purely system-theoretic approach to social evolution that was sketched by Luhmann in “Evolution und Geschichte” (1976) by an approach that combined functionalist analysis with an independent theory of social action, which Habermas summarized in his response to Luhmann, “Geschichte und Evolution” (Rekonstruktion, 200–259). In his view, this was essential to preserving the critical dimension of social theory, as the neoevolutionist naturalism of social-systems theory reduced normative structures to functionally interdependent moments of a social system geared to survival in a complex environment (see chapters 12 and 56 in this volume). This resulted, in Habermas’s view, in an accentuated form of the sort of normative skepticism to which Weber had given classic expression; legitimacy was replaced by the belief in legitimacy, and social inquiry was redirected to the mechanisms that produced it, the functional equivalents that could substitute for it, and the like (see chapter 64 in this volume).

The Reconstruction of Historical Materialism In his lengthy, systematic introduction to Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus, “Historischer Materialismus und die Entwicklung normativer Strukturen” (9–48), as well as in the four essays composing part 3, particularly the title essay (144–199), Habermas set out his approach to reconstructing historical materialism. It turned on the thesis that developments in the sphere of social integration do not simply follow upon developments in the sphere of material production but have their own independent logic. In working out that logic, Habermas’s strategy was to make structural comparisons with the developmental logics worked out for ontogenetic processes, that is, to look for “homologous structures of consciousness” in the histories of the individual and the species. He suggested three domains of comparison: rationality structures in ego development and in the evolution of worldviews, the development of ego identity and of collective identity, and the development of moral consciousness and the evolution of moral and religious representations. In Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus, the focus was on the last of these, and in particular on the evolution of morality and law, for that was regarded as the key to the evolution of forms of social integration. A new element in Habermas’s approach to historical materialism in the 1970s was the genetic structuralism elaborated by Jean Piaget and others (see chapter 10 in this volume), which made it possible to understand cognitive development as the stagewise acquisition of basic competences. He was particularly interested in the normative component of this research program as it was elaborated by Lawrence Kohlberg and others, especially in their

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account of the development of moral consciousness. This strand of cognitive developmental psychology, he argued, provided the key to the logic of the development of normative structures. Human beings “learn not only in the dimension of technically useful knowledge, which is decisive in the development of productive forces, but also in the dimension of moral-practical consciousness, which is decisive for structures of interaction” (Rekonstruktion, 162–163). Social evolution could thus be represented as a bidimensional learning process, the stages of which could be described structurally and ordered according to a developmental logic, that is, in an irreversible sequence of discrete and increasingly complex and encompassing stages, in which the later stages presupposed and built upon the earlier (see chapter 62 in this volume). The bidimensionality meant that rationalization processes in the sphere of communicative interaction were neither identical to nor a direct consequence of rationalization processes in the sphere of productive forces. In historical fact, he argued, it had been learning in the former dimension that had served as the “pacemaker” of social evolution by enabling the resolution of crisis-provoking system problems and the emergence of new institutions (Rekonstruktion, 35). The great developments that led to the rise of the first civilizations or to the rise of capitalism, for instance, did not follow upon but rather resulted in noteworthy developments of productive forces, which were conditioned upon the development of new forms of social integration and new institutional frameworks. So the central social-evolutionary question was: how did new forms of social integration come about? In the title essay, Habermas offered an explanatory sketch for the evolution of law and morality, which drew freely upon the work of his associates Rainer Döbert (1973) and especially Klaus Eder (1973, 1976). The sketch both analytically distinguished and empirically connected action-theoretic analysis, in its competence-development form, and elements of functionalist systems theory. In particular, the logic of the development of normative structures, which merely demarcated the logical space within which increasingly complex structural forms could take shape, was distinguished from the actual dynamics of development, which depended upon contingent conditions and empirical learning processes. On this model, social evolution consists not in the institutionalization of specific values, as in Parsons, but in “the institutional embodiment of structures of rationality,” which make learning at new levels possible. In the literal sense of the term, only individuals learn, but the learning abilities and accomplishments of individuals are a resource that can be drawn upon in the formation of new social structures. As the results of individual learning processes find their way into cultural tradition, they serve as a kind of cognitive potential that can be exploited by social movements, when unsolvable system problems require a transformation of the basic form of social integration. That is

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to say, latently available rationality structures may be transposed into social practice by social movements, so that they eventually receive an institutional embodiment (Rekonstruktion, 118). To be sure, whether and how problems arise that overload the structurally limited adaptive capacity of a society is a contingent matter; whether the necessary but not yet institutionalized structures of rationality (practical and technical) are available, whether social movements arise to meet this challenge by drawing on this potential, and whether the institutions that emerge can be stabilized also depend on contingent circumstances (Rekonstruktion, 123). Nonetheless, the course of development that results from the institutionalization of new rationality structures itself has the form of a social learning process. As noted, social learning depends on individual learning, which in the theory of social evolution plays a role loosely analogous to that played by mutation in the theory of biological evolution; the results of learning can be preserved and passed on as elements of a tradition. But there is one overriding flaw in that analogy: the ontogenesis of structures of consciousness is not a matter of chance variation but is itself a directional process (Rekonstruktion, 188). And it is precisely this that is missing from system-theoretical accounts of social evolution. They may be useful for identifying and analyzing problems that overload the structurally limited adaptive capacity of a society or for understanding why certain structural developments make the resolution of these problems possible, but they cannot adequately explain how those structural transformations come about. Moreover, the directional criteria of progress typically invoked by neoevolutionary functionalists—e.g., increases in system complexity or in steering capacity—are also inadequate in the absence of any inner logic of development.

History and Evolution Notwithstanding Habermas’s explicit attempt in the late 1960s to mitigate the radically situational character of purely interpretive approaches to social inquiry by constructing a general interpretive framework for historically oriented functional analysis, the internal relation of critical theory to a practically projected end of history blocked any attempt to equate it with pure theory. His account of “the self-formative process of the species” was intrinsically practical; however, “systematically generalized,” it remained an “action orienting self-understanding.” By contrast, in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus Habermas understands the social-evolutionary hypotheses he advances as theoretical statements in the strict sense: they are to be tested in theoretical discourse (Rekonstruktion, 246). Reconstructive theories claim a universal validity that is independent of a historico-hermeneutic

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standpoint: “For the development of a competence . . . there is only one correct theory” (Rekonstruktion, 217). This raised the question of whether Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus marked the abandonment of the internal unity of theory and practice that Habermas had seen as the hallmark of critical theory since the 1950s. Addressing this worry, he noted that critical theory does not exhaust itself in the construction of a theory of social evolution, i.e., a reconstruction of historical materialism; its ultimate aim is a historically oriented analysis of contemporary society, with a practical intent, i.e., a reconstruction of the critique of capitalist society. Unlike the retrospective explanation of past developments, the analysis of contemporary society has an “immediately practical reference,” for its “diagnosis of the present” adopts the practically projected standpoint of structural possibilities that are not yet realized (Rekonstruktion, 250). In short, while the construction of social-evolutionary accounts of past transformations is fundamentally a theoretical task, the diagnosis of contemporary problems has the form of a prospective retrospective from vantage points opened up by a practical interest in the future. In the essay “Geschichte und Evolution,” Habermas emphasizes the theoretical character of his account of social evolution and thus, in effect, its displacement of the historico-hermeneutical moment in his earlier reconstructions of historical materialism. He explicitly distinguishes the theory of social evolution from the philosophy of history as well as from a universal history of the species; unlike this theory, historical writing of any sort remains bound to a narrative framework and thus to a particular hermeneutical standpoint. He also distinguishes it from a systematically generalized history; that is to say, historical materialism is no longer regarded as a general interpretive or narrative framework, for even that is inevitably tied to a practical standpoint. The explanations offered by the theory of social evolution, he insists, “cannot be brought into narrative form. In the framework of development theory, these transitions have to be thought of as abstract transitions to new levels of learning” (Rekonstruktion, 244–245). This strict separation raises a number of questions. It is not obvious that elements of an evolutionary explanation— i.e., the specification of system problems and relevant empirical conditions, structural descriptions of the “before” and “after,” an account of social movements that are the agents of change and of the establishment and stabilization of new institutional forms, and the like—could not figure in a “theoretically generalized history” of, say, the transition to liberal capitalism in early modern Europe. Habermas points out that the many historians who draw on the social sciences typically refer to factors other than actors and their actions, e.g., to institutions; to economic, political, and legal systems; and to cultural patterns. Moreover, his schema of explanation does refer to social groups as the “bearers” of new ideas and practices and as the “agents” of social transformation. In any

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case, it seems that a proposed evolutionary explanation of a given epochal transition—as distinct from an abstract and generalized developmental logic— could not simply take its place alongside competing historical explanations; it would have to claim, against them, to be the correct explanation.

Reception The essays collected in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus were explicitly characterized as introducing a new research program. That program was brought to its theoretical culmination a few years later, with the appearance of The Theory of Communicative Action (1985 [1981]), which dominated the discussion of Habermas’s approach to the theory of social change thereafter. In the intervening years, there were a number of reviews of Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (e.g., Keane 1977, Held 1978) as well as some discussion of his reconstruction of historical materialism (e.g., Assoun and Raulet 1978, Honneth and Jaeggi 1980) and of his theory of social evolution (e.g., McCarthy 1989, app. 3; Schmid 1982). But there was nothing that approached the intense, detailed discussion of The Theory of Communicative Action (see chapter 35 in this volume). After the publication and reception of The Theory of Communicative Action (Honneth and Joas 1991), the theory of social evolution remained in the background of Habermas’s work, often referred to but not further developed in any essential respects. This changed only after the turn of the century, with Habermas’s growing involvement in the contemporary debates concerning religion and modernity, which eventually led him to revisit the logic of the development of worldviews, particularly of the major world religions that have shaped civilization (see chapter 40 in this volume).

References Apel, Karl-Otto, et al. 1971. Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Assoun, Paul Laurent, and Gérard Raulet. 1978. Marxisme et théorie critique. Paris: Payot. Döbert, Rainer. 1973. Systemtheorie und die Entwicklung religiöser Deutungssysteme: Zur Logik des sozialwissenschaftlichen Funktionalismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Eder, Klaus, ed. 1973. Entstehung von Klassengesellschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1976. Die Entstehung staatlich organisierter Gesellschaften: Ein Beitrag zu einer Theorie sozialer Evolution. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. “Literaturbericht zur philosophischen Diskussion um Marx und den Marxismus.” In Theorie und Praxis, 387–464. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Held, David. 1978. “Extended Review [of Habermas’s Legitimation Crisis and Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus].” Sociological Review 26:183–194.

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Honneth, Axel, and Urs Jaeggi, eds. 1980. Arbeit, Handlung, Normativität: Theorien des Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas, eds. 1991. Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. Jeremy Gaines. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Keane, John. 1977. “On Turning Theory Against Itself: Review of Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus by Jürgen Habermas.” Theory and Society 4:561–572. Luhmann, Niklas. 1976. “Evolution und Geschichte.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft 2:284–309. McCarthy, Thomas. 1989. “Anhang.” In Kritik der Verständigungsverhältnisse. Zur Theorie von Jürgen Habermas, trans. Max Looser, 501–616. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Schmid, Michael. 1982. “Habermas’s Theory of Social Evolution.” In Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John Thompson and David Held, 162–180. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

33 APORIAS OF CULTURAL MODERNIT Y “Modernity—an Unfinished Project” (1980) CHRISTOPH MENKE

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n 1980, Habermas enjoyed the distinction of being the first recipient of the Adorno Prize. On the anniversary of Adorno’s birthday, he delivered his acceptance speech in St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt: “Modernity—an Unfinished Project.” This speech vigorously attacked an array of heterogeneous positions that, in the speaker’s estimation, all had abandoned the emancipatory ideas of modernity. Habermas’s name for these projects as a whole was “postmodern.” In pronouncing this judgment, Habermas took himself to be following a fundamental intention of Adorno himself, who had “unreservedly . . . subscribe[d] to the spirit of modernity” (“Modernity,” 38). Habermas’s speech, in other words, sought to address “the question concerning the current attitude with respect to modernity” (38). According to Habermas, answering this question amounts to providing a response, in the present, to the older question: “What is Enlightenment?” Enlightenment, he affirmed, is the “project of modernity.” However, in this day and age, it is no longer enough simply to repeat Kant’s (1991) injunction a priori to think courageously for oneself. Rather, one must understand the “aporias” (“Modernity,” 44) that have beset efforts to translate this call into action over the last two hundred years. Instead of “unreservedly” subscribing to the spirit of modernity, then, Habermas’s speech was animated by another impulse that Adorno followed: to pursue the project of Enlightenment, one must, first of all, consider its “dialectic”—that is to say, its “aporias.” The project of Enlightenment must become self-reflective. Given this intention, it may, in retrospect, seem surprising how many polemics Habermas’s speech occasioned—above all, in the poststructuralist, neo-avant-garde, and “Alternative Left” (Linksalternative) camps (see Kraushaar et al. 1980). The biggest reason for the discord was that Habermas accused these groups—which he labeled “Young Conservative” (“Modernity,” 53)— of simply giving up the idea of Enlightenment: in their efforts to come to terms with the “aporias” of modernity, he saw only counter-Enlightenment

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tendencies and projects. Since then, the charge has affected the reception of Habermas’s own work much more than that of his rivals. An account of polemical exchanges following Habermas’s speech would offer great insight into the history of theory in the 1980s and 1990s. The discussion at hand, however, is concerned above all with the argumentative structure of Habermas’s considerations and the problems that attend them. Habermas’s speech upon receiving the Adorno Prize, its brevity notwithstanding, presents a sophisticated theoretical program—the blueprint for his major works of the next two decades. In “Modernity—an Unfinished Project,” Habermas presents his argument in three stages: a brief summary of the conditions (which, in fact, cannot be surveyed in their entirety) in which the question of modernity is situated; an equally concise rejection of the neoconservative interpretation of this situation, which Habermas details by way of the distinction between “social” and “cultural” modernity; and, finally, a discussion, in the main part of the speech, of the “aporias” of cultural modernity. On this basis, Habermas suggests how the project of Enlightenment may be reformulated.

The Aging of Modernity Habermas addresses the question of modernity in light of certain fundamental changes that have occurred since the middle of the twentieth century. In many different ways, he announces that the social model—variously designated as “classical,” “high,” or “inaugural” modernity—no longer obtains; for some time, it has been in the process of being replaced by a new phase, for which the names are just as varied. This diagnosis concerns all domains of society. Habermas discusses matters in terms of economy (the end of industrial monopoly capitalism); technology (the rise of digital information technology); state institutions such as law, administration, and education (which are gripped by debates concerning hierarchy, bureaucracy, centralization, and network structures); and culture (where “rationalistic” schemes of science, morality, and art have yielded to “contextualistic” models). Max Weber’s conception of modern society as an arrangement of autonomous, rationalized spheres—each obeying its own, inner logic—has lost the power to convince both in normative and in descriptive terms (Bonacker and Reckwitz 2007). Habermas seeks to renew the question of modernity and to provide a response in light of present-day circumstances, yet he does not simply recall how debate arose in the first place in order, then, to revise received ideas in a critical fashion. In his view, the challenge posed by the question involves the fact that the dominant rhetoric of critical discussion changed fundamentally

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over the course of the 1960s and the 1970s (Habermas 1981, cf. Brunkhorst 1987). Whereas in the 1960s debate about modern social change concerned the possibility of continuing—indeed, radicalizing—the emancipatory promises made by modernity in its inaugural form, since the 1970s, the question has been the extent to which such change provides the opportunity to break with totalitarian tendencies in the logic of modernity. Two items, then, have undergone alteration: the concept of modernity itself and, thereby, the expectations and concepts with which social transformations in the present day are to be viewed. The zeitgeist, according to Habermas, thinks that the economic, technological, administrative, and cultural changes of the present herald the end of modernity. In the Adorno Prize speech, Habermas demonstrates how his interpretive strategy permits one to understand the field of the arts. He begins by recalling the fact that the expression “modern” has always referred to the present as what is new—i.e., different from what is old (“Modernity,” 40). At the same time, modernity does not concern novelty for its own sake. Rather, its innovations are motivated by the claim to “authenticity”—that is, the aim to do things right for the first time by breaking with received practices. The new represents the emergence of what is true, which can only manifest itself in rupture with historical tradition. Benjamin’s concept of the Jetztzeit valorizes this orientation, as does Octavio Paz’s view that modernism—“as a self-negating movement”—is driven by “a ‘yearning for true presence’ ” (“Modernity,” 40). Habermas adopts the perspective of Peter Bürger (1984) (and Paz, too) when he reflects on the “mentality of aesthetic modernity”: “Does it indicate the demise of modernity? Does the post-avant-garde imply a transition to postmodernity?” (42). Or is it the case that now we are witnesses to a post-avant-garde modernity—and, analogously, to postmonopolistic, postbureaucratic, posthierarchical, and postrationalist modernity?

The Crisis of Societal Modernization The neoconservative view of the end of the avant-garde (Bell 1991) holds that this movement, although it exhausted itself in artistic terms, generated a socially destructive force that continues to operate today: “The avant-garde has supposedly penetrated the values of everyday life and thus infected the lifeworld with the modernist mentality” (“Modernity,” 42). In this way, neoconservatism explains the disintegrative phenomena of consumerism, egotism, narcissism, and individualism in present-day society. Habermas observes that such a critique occurs by halves: modernity should be combated and surpassed in cultural terms; economically, technologically, and politically,

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however, it ought to be affirmed and defended. In Germany, the school around Joachim Ritter formulated the task in theoretical terms by distinguishing between society and culture, whereby the latter compensates for the deficiencies of the former instead of criticizing them. This project can only work, however, if culture remains traditional and offers surrogates for lost metaphysical meaning (53–54). The avant-gardes, from a neoconservative perspective, threaten the structures of compensation in modern societies and, for this reason, destabilize them as a whole. According to Habermas, the neoconservative interpretation seeks the reason for the disintegrative processes it diagnoses (and against which “neopopulist protests” of the present are directed) in the wrong place. Because neoconservatives do not (wish to) see the destructive logic of “social modernization which, under pressure from the imperatives of economic growth and state administration, intervenes further and further into the ecology of developed forms of social life, [i.e.,] into the communicative infrastructure of the historical lifeworlds” (44), they declare cultural modernization itself to be the culprit. In other words, neoconservatives “project . . . the causes which they have left shrouded in obscurity on to an intrinsically subversive culture and its representatives” (44). Of course, a neoconservative might respond by reformulating—and radicalizing—matters by declaring that processes of cultural modernization are just as destructive as processes of social modernization. Habermas concedes that such a response is not easy to refute: “apart from the problematic social consequences of social modernization, it is true that certain reasons for doubt or despair concerning the project of modernity also arise from the internal perspective of cultural development.” Cultural modernity, he admits, “generates its own aporias” (44).

The Aporias of Cultural Modernity and Their Elucidation The main portion of the speech (44–53) develops a concept of cultural modernity that not only rejects the neoconservative position (i.e., the view that cultural modernity causes social disintegration) but also advances a counterargument: cultural modernity, Habermas affirms, can develop a convincing solution to its own aporias. Although this “solution” is not supposed to replace the task of steering “the process of social modernization . . . into other noncapitalist directions” (53), it can be understood to demonstrate (vormachen) in its own sphere—chiefly, that of culture and the arts—what a change of course might look like. By Habermas’s account, modernization involves “separation”/“differentiation” (Ausdifferenzierung) (45–46). The “project of modernity” concerns a fundamental

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transformation of the traditional understanding of reason. Now, reason is no longer understood in terms of substance—that is, as the capacity for insight into the standing order of the world. Rather, it represents a matter of procedure—the ability to generate reasonable/rational structures (arguments, theories, institutions, etc.). The procedures in question are domain specific: because “traditional problems . . . can now be treated in each case as questions of knowledge, justice, or taste respectively, there arises in the modern period a differentiation of the value spheres of science and knowledge, of morality, and of art” (45). Habermas understands the modern process of differentiation in terms of the theory of reason: because it is a process of rationalization, it entails the acquisition of knowledge. This, however, generates an entirely new problem, for “the distance between . . . expert cultures and the general public” increases thereby (45). The problem is not new because such a distance did not exist in cultures of earlier times; what is new is the fact that the distance has come to represent a problem. As something obtained procedurally, differentiated knowledge—and what it means—is, as a matter of principle, not accessible to all. Such is the aporia of cultural modernity: the differentiated form of reason that it has produced is to be exercised by all, yet it makes this impossible to do: now, “the autonomous logic of the differentiated value spheres” also signifies “their detachment from the current of tradition, which continues to flow on in a quasi-natural fashion in the hermeneutic medium of everyday life” (46). Therefore, the simple call for (and of) “Enlightenment”—that one employ one’s own reason and “dare to know”—now proves inadequate. Enlightenment must solve a problem that is not habitual but structural in nature. The aporia in the foundational structure of cultural modernity has forced the project of Enlightenment to adopt a self-contradictory program. “The relentless development” of differentiated forms of reason—“all in accord with their own logic”—has meant “releasing the cognitive potentials accumulated in the process from their esoteric high forms and attempting to apply them in the sphere of praxis, that is, to encourage the rational organization of social relations” (45). Here, a look at modern art is important for Habermas’s argument. Modern art, he maintains, is not affected by precisely the same aporia as other spheres of culture: although it is considered autonomous, it is supposed to change life, as well (47–49). Moreover, this particular field of culture has experimented with radical strategies of “sublating” (aufheben) the gap that has emerged between forms that display stubborn autonomy, on the one hand, and the lifeworld, on the other. For Habermas, the prime example of “false sublation” is the “surrealist rebellion,” which attempted to redeem “a rationalized everyday life . . . from the rigidity of cultural impoverishment by violently forcing open one cultural domain, in this case art, and establishing some connection with one of the specialized complexes of knowledge. Such an approach would only substitute one form of one-sidedness and abstraction with another” (49). The

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“false sublation” of the divide between autonomous art and the lifeworld was destined to fail, however—just as efforts to transform the lifeworld through morality or science (49–50) have been in vain. All the same, Habermas maintains that a look at art proves instructive about how not to resolve the Enlightenment problem of differentiated culture splitting off from the lifeworld. Examination of art, moreover, teaches how the Enlightenment can, in fact, solve the problems it has produced: not by trying to change the lifeworld from the position of expert culture but rather through the “interplay” of different normative considerations, which are treated in specialized fashion by various expert cultures. The project of Enlightenment involves overcoming the gap between expert cultures and the lifeworld inasmuch as the claims of both spheres are preserved simultaneously: the (experts’) claim to specialization in matters of culture, on the one hand, and the (lifeworld’s) claim to “unconstrained interplay between the cognitive, the moral-practical, and the aesthetic-expressive dimensions” (“Modernity,” 50; cf. Seel 1991), on the other. How—indeed, the fact that—this solution can be coherently conceived is evident, according to Habermas, in the function that “criticism” performs with respect to art. Art criticism not only educates lay people but also teaches them to relate “aesthetic experiences to problems in their own lives”—that is, to appreciate and understand the “exploratory, life-orientating power” of the great works (as Peter Weiss demonstrated in The Aesthetics of Resistance) (“Modernity,” 52). Criticism is Enlightenment that occurs through the appropriation of “expert culture . . . from the perspective of the lifeworld”—a “differentiated reconnection of modern culture with an everyday sphere of praxis that is dependent on a living heritage and yet is impoverished by mere traditionalism” (52). Habermas’s conception of Enlightenment has two levels, then: the first concerns the differentiation, by way of rationalization, of forms of knowledge from the lifeworld; the second involves mediating points of reconnection between separate (differentiated) spheres and the lifeworld. Conversely, Habermas considers those positions to be “conservative” (or counter-Enlightenment) if they do not perform one or both of these functions. Habermas distinguishes three such positions: “Young Conservative” aesthetes, “Old Conservative” traditionalists, and “New Conservative” separatists (53–54). Young Conservatives pursue the one-sided aestheticization of the lifeworld, Old Conservatives contest the rational achievements of sociocultural differentiation, and New Conservatives abandon the idea of reconnecting with anything at all.

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Problems and Controversies After Habermas’s speech was published, especially the thinkers who had been labeled “Young Conservatives” rejected being characterized as enemies of Enlightenment (see Foucault 1984, Kamper 1987). Debate concerning Habermas’s understanding of postmodern and poststructuralist positions—which only became more pronounced with the appearance of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity—achieved vast dimensions, above all in the United States (e.g., Passerin d’Entrèves and Benhabib 1996). The following does not address matters of disputed interpretation but focuses on four objective (sachlich) dimensions of what Habermas said—the points that gave rise to heated controversy.

Modernity and Rationalism It is central to the way Habermas characterizes “postmodern” views that they all, in his estimation, dispense with the Enlightenment idea (and ideal) of selfdetermination through reason. (The following omits discussion of whether this label is appropriate. Habermas also calls positions “postmodern” that apply this name to themselves. Where the text follows Habermas’s use of the term, “postmodern” is written with quotation marks [i.e., “positions that Habermas calls ‘postmodern’ ”]. When the term occurs without quotation marks, I am referring to positions that explicitly refer to themselves in this way.) Habermas finds evidence in the critique of “rationalism” that these positions perform, whereby “rationalism” refers to a specifically modern mode of totalization that takes the form of a “metanarrative” (Lyotard 1984). Whereas (first-level) narratives are irreducibly manifold and inconclusive, metanarratives attempt to integrate different language games into a whole by determining what makes them rational according to a uniform model. One such model affirms that those processes are rational that transparently apply a process defined by rules—or, in the ideal case, by a method. Depending on one’s philosophical preferences, logic, the natural sciences, law, administration, or technology may serve as “patterns” in which a totalizing unity emerges. Habermas holds that the “postmodern” perspective equates modernity and rationalism. Against this view, Jean-François Lyotard insisted that postmodernity—the postmodernity of the sublime, which he opposed to postmodern “slackening”—should be understood as a radicalization of the critique of rationalistic models that is immanent in modernity. As much has been confirmed by Andreas Huyssen’s retrospective account of the beginning of postmodernism in North American literature in the 1960s (and the essay writing and theory that accompanied it; for an exemplary discussion, see

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Fiedler 1988b): this movement, precisely in its critique of a rationalistic “version of modernism,” also viewed itself as a radicalization of modernity/modernism (Huyssen 1986, 188). Hal Foster’s (1983) notion of a “postmodernism of resistance” continues in this vein. Albrecht Wellmer (1985) has expanded the connection into a “dialectic of modernity and postmodernity,” which demonstrates that the critique of rationalism that motivates postmodernism can be understood as part of the tradition of modernist autocritique (49–58). The writings of Adorno exemplify this position when, in The Philosophy of New Music (2006), he not only defends—by juxtaposing Schoenberg and Stravinsky—the musical avantgarde against charges of “regression” but also, and in the same gesture, presents the rationalist tendencies within the avant-garde (as represented by Schoenberg) as the point where modernism switches from liberation to domination. The “postmodern” critique of modern rationalism cannot be understood as antimodern per se—especially since Habermas’s own theory of modernity puts a critique of rationalism (which he understands as a pathological form of differentiation) front and center. The disagreement between Habermas and “postmodern” theorists, then, does not hinge on the “if” but on the “how” of critiquing rationalism in modernity. In this debate, it is not a matter of whether rationalism represents a form of modernity; both sides say as much, in different ways. Rather, what is at issue is Habermas’s contention that the critique of modern rationalism is possible and justified only if it is understood as “Enlightenment” (in the sense discussed above). This conception of Enlightenment has two aspects: the interpretation of modern differentiation in terms of rationalization and the prospect of rationally overcoming pathological forms of modern differentiation. These concerns constitute the objective core of Habermas’s speech and the ensuing debate.

Differentiation as Rationalization The first level of Habermas’s notion of Enlightenment involves understanding modernity—both socially and culturally—as the differentiation (Ausdifferenzierung) of spheres that follow their own logic and, in turn, understanding this differentiation as rationalization. Thereby, “differentiation” has a double meaning (“Modernity,” 45–46): on the one hand, it means that social and cultural spheres emerge that are focused on a single function or consideration of validity; on the other, it means that autonomous (eigensinnig) spheres of society and culture not only operate independently of one another but also, as a group, operate at a remove from the “lifeworld,” in which the elements that lie at the basis of individual spheres are combined in practical activity.

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Differentiation is rationalization because the validity claims that have “always already” been raised in the lifeworld are isolated, problematized, and treated in specialized procedures. Referring to differentiation as rationalization serves both the purpose of explanation and that of justification. Because (or, alternatively, to the extent that) the differentiation of autonomous spheres occurs rationally, it is justified. This is a first, necessary step in the project of Enlightenment, and it is why modern differentiation—even if it leads to unwelcome strategies of rationalization—must not be reversed. Reversing it would mean losing what one has gained in terms of reason (Rationalitätsgewinne). In the philosophical debates surrounding Habermas’s conception of modernity, a first set of objections has sought to replace the two-level model of lifeworld and differentiated value spheres with concepts on a level plane. These “flat” notions can be elaborated from the perspective of both the lifeworld and the value spheres. Hermeneutic theoretical models consider that every attempt to differentiate procedures that guarantee normative obligation on their own must fail from the start. Normative obligation—and with it, knowledge (whether theoretical or practical)—exists only to the extent that it derives from practices in the lifeworld. According to this view, the idea of differentiated—and therefore autonomous—value spheres is ideology, pure and simple. Only one level exists: that of the lifeworld (Boehner 1982). Postmodern theoretical models raze Habermas’s two levels from the other side: a construction on twin planes—the level of the “lifeworld” and that of the “differentiated spheres”—is replaced by a flat surface, where multiple discourses, all of which are irreducible to the others, teem in competition. In this view, (the) difference(s) between spheres, discourses, and modes of articulation cannot be conceived as deriving from a previously extant unity (that is, from the lifeworld); instead, there exists a never-ending plurality that cannot be circumvented. Whereas hermeneutic theories believe they can make “the resources of the lifeworld count as matters that are ultimately reliable” (Henrich 1987, 19)—and, in so doing, put stock in unity that is given without mediation—postmodern theories begin with an unavoidable multiplicity of discourses and language games. This plurality cannot be summed up by “metanarratives”—a rubric that includes Habermas’s tripartite conception of differentiation (science, morality/ law, art) borrowed from Kant and Weber. Such a scheme simply represents yet another modern metanarrative (Rorty 1985, 167–168). Instead, postmodern theories posit the “conflict” of multiple discourses; the “sublime” rupture with unity of all kinds cannot be overcome—at best, local and limited strategies allow it to be (partially) mastered (Lyotard 1989).

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However, both the views opposed to Habermas’s split-level model show no understanding of differentiation ([Aus-]differenzierung). The hermeneutic model lacks this perspective because its point of departure is the “givenness” of unified practices in the lifeworld, which is never broken and admits discrete (ausdifferenziert) processes only as illusory, self-destructive phenomena. The postmodern model comes up short because it begins—with just as much certainty—with the “givenness” of plural, heterogeneous discourses (whose origins it cannot account for). Both these perspectives differ from deconstructive models, which agree with Habermas’s theory insofar as they reconstruct the necessary emergence of differentiated rational procedures for processing particular considerations of validity. These procedures issue from practices in the lifeworld but achieve autonomy: the reason for rationalization, then, is the crisis immanent in the lifeworld (Derrida 1989). Deconstruction diagnoses the same condition as Habermas, but it describes it in different terms: not as the occurrence of “problems” demanding a rational solution but as an ambivalent process of transgression (Überschreitung), which manifests itself both in its “endless” claim to truth and by triggering a play of signs that takes place “without a center” (Derrida 1972). In a deconstructive perspective, procedures for assuring obligation (Verbindlichkeit)—as occurs in law or science—can be understood as efforts to control this logic of aggressive expansion beyond the forms of knowledge in the lifeworld. (Even though such efforts—inasmuch as they originate in practices of the lifeworld—must necessarily fail.) Deconstructive theories do not advocate irrationality (“Modernity,” 53); rather, they offer an alternate genealogy of rationality (Gasché 1988). Habermas calls all three perspectives that stand opposed to his theory “postmodern” because they do not consider the differentiation he identifies to involve the process of rationalization—much less justify it in this capacity (Dumm 1988, 212–213; Jay 1985, 137–139). Although they offer different kinds of argument, the three models arrive at the same (unsatisfactory) result: their discussions of differentiated spheres fail to consider the “appropriation” of potential rationality (Rationalitätspotentiale)—a matter of necessity according to Habermas’s conception of Enlightenment.

Postmodern Architecture and the Problem of Autonomy Habermas justifies the differentiation of spheres in modernity by understanding them as the result of rationalization. At the same time, however, he describes the present state of differentiated, rationalized modernity as aporetic. Habermas defines the condition with two theses. First, the rational

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potentials of differentiated spheres have grown increasingly estranged from the lifeworld. Second, it is impossible to overcome this estrangement (or alienation) by directly translating rational potentials back into the lifeworld. This description of the current aporia of cultural modernity in fact stands much closer to “postmodern” positions than Habermas’s polemics in the Adorno Speech would suggest. This is especially true for the form that postmodernity/postmodernism has assumed in architecture and architectural theory. In an essay that appeared two years after the speech in Frankfurt—“Modern and Postmodern Architecture”—Habermas held fast to the crisis diagnosis he had pronounced, observing that the postmodern “opposition to modernity takes up the unsolved problems that have discredited [ins Zwielicht gerückt] modern architecture” (1988b, 120). Habermas’s agreement with the postmodern assessment of the present obviously concerns the second thesis of his aporia diagnosis, which expressly addresses the avant-gardes. Like the postmodernists, Habermas views avantgardes as the artistic pendant to modern rationalism: just as rationalists wish to reform the lifeworld directly on the model of (differentiated) science or law, the avant-gardes seek to do the same on the model of autonomous, experimental, and transgressive art. The avant-gardes pursue the destruction of the lifeworld by colonizing it from the position of art. (Of course, this attempted remedy for modern differentiation has not succeeded.) Yet Habermas’s skepticism about avant-garde “solutions” is not meant to be “postmodern” itself. This descriptor also applies to his account of the problem to be solved—i.e., to the way Habermas represents the avant-garde in the first place. Habermas’s first thesis—that the basic problem of modern art is that its aesthetically autonomous meaning (Eigensinn) is devoid of significance from the perspective of the lifeworld and therefore can no longer be integrated within it—corresponds to the central objection that postmodern architectural theory has leveled at the modernism of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. Only superficially do postmodern objections take aim at the forms/styles of modernism. The postmodern position holds that modernist form, which is programmed for unity, must be replaced by multiplicity—the plurality of styles (see Welsch 1988a, chap. 4). Robert Venturi’s programmatic declaration of “complexity and contradiction” (2002 [1966], chap. 2) seeks to set postmodern architecture—which is purposefully ambiguous—apart from the monolithic (gewaltsam) form of modernist structures. Even where postmodernists describe such plurality as “historistic” and “eclectic” (Jencks 1978, 127–132), the critique of illusory simplification (which produces unity by sacrificing heterogeneity) is always in evidence. However, the fundamental impulse behind the postmodern critique of modernism has another source—and a different objective.

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Charles Jencks’s (1978) definition of postmodern architecture holds that it should “speak on at least two levels” at once—that is, both “to other architects and a concerned minority who care about specifically architectural meanings, and to the public at large, or the local inhabitants, who care about other issues concerned with comfort, traditional building and a way of life” (6). Contra all that one hears about “function,” architectural modernism (to say nothing of urban modernism) systematically neglected this second, formal level of architectonic meaning—when, indeed, it did not repress it altogether. The basic concern of postmodernism, in contrast, is to free construction and design from their systemic concretizations (Verselbständigungen) and to understand them as “life form” (Jencks 1978). Modernism is elitist, and postmodernism populist, for the latter is concerned with architectural forms that take their semantic and linguistic aspects seriously by cultivating a symbolic and narrative dimension that is to be understood by a public in a specific historical and cultural situation (Venturi, Brown, and Izenour 1994, part 2; Klotz 1985, part 4). Therefore, postmodernism’s fundamental objection to modernism does not concern its formal solutions but rather the social site it determines for what it builds—that is, its claim of artistic autonomy. The repression of plurality and heterogeneity on a formal level is just one of many other consequences. This is the same problem that Habermas places at the center of his diagnosis of the cultural aporias of modernity. The question is: How can art speak in a way that is comprehensible in the lifeworld? In other words, Habermas shares the postmodern idea that art must recapture its understandability after modern(ist) autonomization. Art must break the “silence” (Wallenstein 2008) with which modernist forms took leave of the public’s expectations for meaning. All the same, the question arises—which Habermas asks contra postmodern notions—whether this can occur without giving up the modern(ist) claim of autonomy (Habermas 1988, 116–117; Wellmer 1985, 122–128). Habermas diagnoses the current aporias of cultural modernity in the same way that postmodernists do. At the same time, he wants to retain key elements of the modern(ist) perspective to solve the problems at issue. That is what the concept of Enlightenment stands for: Habermas’s conception of Enlightenment seeks to avoid the extremes—both modern autonomization to the point of enigmatic foreignness as well as postmodern negation of foreignness through popularization—in order to mediate logically between their justified claims: autonomy and understandability. Advocates from both camps consider this project impossible to realize. From the perspective of aesthetic autonomy, the postmodern demand for comprehensibility within the lifeworld—which Habermas shares—already contests the “sovereignty” of art (Menke 1991). From a postmodern perspective, the call for comprehensibility within the lifeworld cannot be redeemed if

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the idea of artistic autonomy itself is not surrendered: “Relativity instead of autonomy!” (Klotz 1985, 423).

Prospect: Art and Society Why, when receiving the Adorno Prize, did Habermas discuss the aporias of cultural modernity—indeed, more narrowly still, the aporias of aesthetic modernity? How does this relate to the matter of turning “the process of social modernization  .  .  . into other non-capitalist directions” (“Modernity,” 53)? What is the relationship between aesthetic/cultural Enlightenment and political/social transformation? The answer—as Habermas indicates in his speech—is that cultural modernity and social modernity face structurally homologous problems. Accordingly, a solution to the aporias of cultural modernity may provide a model for solving the contradictions one encounters in social modernization. Habermas’s account of how the “reconnection of modern culture with an everyday sphere of praxis . . . dependent on . . . living heritage” (52) can occur in the realm of art illustrates a more general conception of Enlightenment that applies not just to other spheres of culture but also to the rationalized social systems that have “separated off” from the lifeworld (i.e., law, administration, and economy). Cultural and social problems are homologous: in either case, it is a matter of transformation—under duress—of practices in the lifeworld by means of procedures and systems of action that have emerged as differentiated spheres in the course of rationalizing processes. This conception of Enlightenment—which Habermas develops to resolve the aporias of cultural modernity—may also be understood to offer a model for how “the process of social modernization can . . . be turned into other non-capitalist directions” (53). Homology obtains between social problems, aporias, and contradictions, on the one hand, and, on the other, their solutions, which follow the logic of cultural Enlightenment and social transformation. When Habermas extols the “exploratory, life-orientating power which can emanate from the encounter with a great painting” (52), he identifies another closely related matter. Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance—from which Habermas takes the example—discusses young communist workers standing before, and talking about, the Altar of Pergamon in Berlin. These young people were not just “appropriating” a discrete artistic meaning that corresponded to social change in structural terms; instead, the Enlightenment they experienced by way of the aesthetic was to lead the way to social transformation. Here, homology—i.e., a relation that unfolds on a single plane—did not obtain between art and society; rather, a reflexive relation emerged. Art is a medium of social transformation: in the first place, because society appears differently in the medium of art; second, because

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society undergoes a change when it is experienced otherwise, i.e., in an aesthetic dimension. Without retaining—at least in this minimalistic, “weak” sense—the idea of the avant-garde function of the arts, Habermas cannot meaningfully reflect on aesthetic Enlightenment. Habermas’s Adorno Speech affirms two things, then. First, that, still today—and contra the postmodern call for popularity/populism, understandability, and “social relevancy”—one must hold to the difference of culture in relation to social modernization (Jameson 1991). Second, that—against postmodern critiques of the avant-gardes as violent incursions (Übergriffe)—one should hold fast to the power of the aesthetic (Rancière 2002).

References Adorno, Theodor W. 2006. Philosophy of New Music. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bell, Daniel. 1978. Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Bonacker, Thorsten, and Andreas Reckwitz, eds. 2007. Kulturen der Moderne. Frankfurt: Campus. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 1987. Der Intellektuelle im Land der Mandarine. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Bürger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 1989. Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction. Trans. John P. Leavey Jr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Dumm, Thomas L. 1988. “The Politics of Post-Modern Aesthetics: Habermas Contra Foucault.” Political Theory 16:209–228. Fiedler, Leslie. 1988. “Überquert die Grenze, schließt den Graben!” In Welsch et al. 1988, 57–74. Foster, Hal, ed. 1983. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: New Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 32–50. New York: Pantheon. Gasché, Rodolphe. 1988. “Postmodernism and Rationality.” Journal of Philosophy 85, no. 10: 528–538. Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. “Einleitung zum Band 1000 der Edition Suhrkamp.” In Kleine Politische Schriften I–IV, 411–441. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1988. “Moderne und postmoderne Architektur.” In Welsch et al. 1988, 110–120. Henrich, Dieter. 1987. “Was ist Metaphysik – was Moderne? Zwölf Thesen gegen Jürgen Habermas.” In Konzepte. Essays zur Philosophie in der Zeit, 11–43. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Huyssen, Andreas. 1986. “Mapping the Postmodern.” In After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, 179–221. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Jay, Martin. 1985. “Habermas and Modernism.” In Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein, 125–139. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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Jencks, Charles. 1978. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli. Kamper, Dietmar. 1987. “Aufklärung – was sonst? Eine dreifache Polemik gegen ihre Verteidiger.” In Die unvollendete Vernunft: Moderne vs. Postmoderne, ed. Dietmar Kamper and Willem van Reijen, 37–45. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kant, Immanuel. 1991. “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ ” In Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, 54–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klotz, Heinrich. 1985. Moderne und Postmoderne. Architektur der Gegenwart 1960–1980. Braunschweig: Vieweg + Teubner. Kraushaar, Wolfgang, et al. 1980. “Vier Jungkonservative beim Projektleiter der Moderne.” Tageszeitung 3 (October 21, 1980). Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brain Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——. 1989. Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Menke, Christoph. 1991. Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Passerin d’Entrèves, Maurizio, and Seyla Benhabib, eds. 1996. Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2002. “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes.” New Left Review 14:133–151. Rorty, Richard. 1985. “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity.” In Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein, 161–175. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Seel, Martin. 1991. “The Two Meanings of ‘Communicative’ Rationality: Remarks on Habermas’s Critique of a Plural Concept of Reason.” In Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, trans. Jeremy Gaines, 36–48. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Venturi, Robert. 2002. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Venturi, Robert, Denise S. Brown, and Steven Izenour. 1994. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Wallenstein, Sven-Olov. 2008. The Silences of Mies. Stockholm: Axl. Wellmer, Albrecht. 1985. Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne: Vernunftkritik nach Adorno. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Welsch, Wolfgang. 1988. Unsere postmoderne Moderne. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH, 1988. Welsch, Wolfgang, et al., eds. 1988. Wege aus der Moderne: Schlüsseltexte der PostmoderneDiskussion. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH.

34 STAND-IN AND INTERPRETER “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter” (1981) HAUKE BRUNKHORST

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n 1981, the Hegel Conference in Stuttgart addressed the “Hamlet debate” of German philosophy: “Kant or Hegel?” The highpoint of the event occurred when the avant-garde of American pragmatism took the stage. Richard Rorty (1983), whose groundbreaking critique of philosophical idealism Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) had just been translated into German, made a brief introduction. Willard V. O. Quine (1983), who followed him, took apart the myth of autonomous reference—demolishing the notion that the statements in which we offer our reflections hold independently of the theoretical framework in which we make them (412–413). Donald Davidson (1983) then presented his holistic theory, according to which no truth may hold without, at the same time, implicating the entirety of our linguistic praxis (423–438). The three speakers affirmed Hegel’s unqualified triumph. Kantian dualism had been negated and elevated to a newfound unity, where continuity obtained between semantics and knowledge of the world (Bedeutungs- und Weltwissen). Once more, the Whole was the True, even if “the Supreme Lord of the world [i.e., Hegelian philosophy] swims unproven in his own blood” (Heine 1964, 250). Finally, Hilary Putnam (1983), the last speaker on the panel, showed that, whereas our linguistically constituted forms of life cannot be observed—much less directed—from an Archimedean standpoint external to them, theoretical critique and practical transcendence are possible from within. Yet again, Hegel emerged victorious. He did so not just in positive terms (in der Sache) but also with respect to the dialectical method of determinate negation—the erstwhile archenemy of analytic philosophy. A further dualism—theory and practice—that had prompted Kant to engage in Aristotelian evasions (“judgment”) was eliminated and replaced by a continuum along the lines of John Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy. However, this time, too, the price for Hegel was high, for his own method had been turned against him: if Hegel had managed to present his forebear’s notion of critique as a mode of progress for scientific/philosophical thought, practical self-transcendence (praktische Selbsttranszendenz) was precisely what

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he had always objected to and warned of. When Hegel’s student Marx (Henrich 1971, 187–208) took up the idea of practical self-transcendence, he did not conquer the halls of the university, but he did make history on a larger scale— affirming the idea of a world-changing praxis that, from a position within the true Whole, turns against it and reveals it to be false. If one duly applies Hegel’s method and dispenses with the end (Abbruch) of reflection that occurs when one reaches a speculative conclusion, the Real is no longer the Reasonable. The nightmare of idealism comes true: Reason finds itself “in the midst of the ‘manure’ [mitten im ‘Dünger’] of contradictions” (Marx 1968, 80)—put there by Hegel’s own philosophy, which has been forced to break with its own system inasmuch as reality (Wirkliches) has been recognized as bad reality (schlecht erkannt). Reason no longer (as in Hegel’s philosophy) guarantees and transfigures reality; instead—and in a manner comparable only to “womankind” (das Weibliche) in Hegel’s system—it stands, through the process of dialectical reversal, to become “an internal enemy” of the “community” (Gemeinwesen) (Hegel 1977, 475). That evening, Habermas delivered “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter,” which effortlessly connected with these lines of argument. The lecture provides a—if not the—key to his work as a whole. Habermas observes that academic philosophy, in keeping with the poststructuralist zeitgeist, has been shifting from the “Master Thinkers” Kant, Hegel, and Marx to the equally masterful Nietzsche (Moral Consciousness, 1). Even though he does not support his contemporaries’ occasional apologetics for the latter thinker, Habermas concedes that the point of agreement between poststructuralism, deconstruction, and pragmatism—which follows from the Nietzschean critique of the element of domination (Herrschaftscharakter) in Kantian foundationalism (which proves formalist and divisive)—is justified all too well (5).

Master Thinker Kant In a historically unprecedented critique of the metaphysical tradition from Parmenides to Christian Wolff, Kant had demanded of philosophy what the French revolutionaries sought from the ancien régime in political terms: egalitarian formalism of law (from which all citizens stand at an equal remove [Sièyes]), on the one hand, and the dialectical integration of divided powers and sovereignty into a republican (democratic) constitution, on the other. In a wholly analogous gesture, Kant placed limits on the sovereignty of philosophy as the (supposed) guarantor of Truth and declared for it the legislative role of pouvoir constituant: now, philosophy was to be formalized. Theoretical philosophy should follow Nature, moral philosophy Reason, and legal philosophy the (will of the) People.

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Henceforth, Kant declared, philosophy would not seek to know the legislative workings of Nature itself, which remain shrouded by the veil of (human) ignorance. Indeed, it had always been presumptuous to hold that philosophy might have access to the innermost will and knowledge of the Supreme Legislator—the Idea as it really exists. Alongside the new “king”—whether People, Reason, or Nature—philosophy, which had been reduced to matters of form and function, no longer had a place. Relieved of the burdens of substantial and formal sovereignty (and situated on the “left” of the parliamentary arrangement of faculties, immediately adjacent to the Jacobins [Kant 1992]), it should content itself with executive supervision of the sciences and, in addition, be the “appointed judge” (Kant 2008, 16 [B XIII]) of culture. The judge of the constitutional court (Verfassungsrichter), as it were, philosophy should provide, on the basis of proof by procedure, at least a hypothetical understanding of legal conditions (die Gesetzeslage) and impose firm limits on speculation. Although Kant dethroned the philosopher-king once and for all, he established “philosophy . . . as the highest court of appeal vis-à-vis the sciences and culture as a whole” (Moral Consciousness, 3), to compensate for what had been lost in terms of pure cognition (Erkenntnis). By granting such judiciary power—and notwithstanding his critique of “master-thinking” and the “overlordly [vornehm] tone” he adopted (Kant 1977)—Kant charged philosophy with another, undue burden. As Habermas puts it: “Kantian philosophy differentiates what Weber was to call the ‘value spheres of culture’ (science and technology, law, and morality, art and art criticism), while at the same time legitimating them within their respective limits. Thus Kantian philosophy poses as the highest court of appeal vis-à-vis the sciences and culture as a whole” (Moral Consciousness, 2–3; cf. Kant 2008, 569 [B 799]). Kant also imputes too much to philosophy by equipping it with the legal authority of synthetic knowledge a priori, for the executive role of assigning individual sciences their place establishes absolute limits for what can be experienced (unübersteigbare Grenzen des Erfahrbaren). At the very hour of his fall, the transcendental philosopher rises again as a master thinker. Yet indignities lie in store: “[Philosophy] wants to clarify the foundations of the sciences once and for all, defining the limits of what can and cannot be experienced. This is tantamount to an act of ushering the sciences to their proper place. It seems philosophy is overburdened by playing the role of usher” (Moral Consciousness, 2; translation modified). According to Habermas, the basis of this twofold overburdening lies in the idea of knowledge a priori, which Kant retains—all formalism and nuance notwithstanding. Even the formalized and differentiated “foundationalism” of Reason can be grounded only inasmuch as “cognition before cognition” occurs; thereby, philosophy “sets up a domain between itself and the sciences” and

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becomes guilty of “arrogating authority to itself” (2). This kind of “ultimate justification” (Apel) amounts to ideology—the false consciousness of transcendental deduction, which is not constituted by the “judgment ‘I think,’ to which all our thoughts relate as predicates” (Kant 2008, liii [B 131]) but rather by a historically determined power relation (Herrschaftsverhältnis) to which Lukács and Adorno objected so strongly. By invoking philosophical foundationalism’s “authoritative function” (Herrschaftsfunktion), Habermas takes up a central motif of neo-Marxist ideological critique. In equal measure, his reflections meet up with those of Foucault/poststructuralism, Derrida/deconstruction, and Dewey/neopragmatism (see chapters 21 and 23 in this volume). For all that, however, Habermas does not wish to replace the goal-oriented idea of critique with Foucauldian genealogy (which is indiscriminate in application), with Derridean deconstruction (which sets no limits to self-reflection), or with Rorty’s criterion-free praxis for improving the world. Like these thinkers, Habermas believes that epistemic foundationalism should dispense with the remainders of “master thinking” (i.e., the roles of the philosophically privileged “usher” and “judge”); this would involve doing away with the imperious qualities (Herrschaftscharakter) of philosophy. (It does not, however, amount to discarding its power and/ or influence.) Yet unlike his contemporaries, Habermas holds fast to philosophy’s role as the guardian of procedural rationality (Moral Consciousness, 4)— and, in this, he agrees with Kant. All the same, modern culture requires a supreme judge as little as modern democracy needs constitutional jurisprudence (Verfassungsgerichtsbarkeit) that declares binding values and orientations, pits extrapositive law against positive law, interprets basic rights that should be reserved for parliamentary debate, dictates disputed legislation, and/or seeks to acquire authority surpassing that of the democratic legislature over the people (whose organ, after all, it is supposed to be). Habermas’s critique of undemocratic foundationalism in constitutional jurisprudence—which he presents in Between Facts and Norms (1998 [1992]; see chapter 38 in this volume)—follows the same line of argument that he provides in critiquing Kant’s philosophical foundationalism. As he does with respect to philosophy and science, Habermas rejects all the claims that “master thinking” of the juridical variety might impose on a democratic and constitutional state. Constitutional jurisprudence should remain limited to the activities of a permanently standing parliamentary committee that is responsible for overseeing norms only in formal terms. In keeping with the role he assigns to philosophy, Habermas turns the suprademocratic and supralegal instance interpreting constitutionality as a whole into the guardian of the rational legal procedure, an organ to be legitimated— and limited—through democracy (Facts, 238ff.).

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The Democratization of Philosophy In his Stuttgart lecture, Habermas developed the idea of democratizing philosophy in two steps. The first step, which is entirely in line with Marx, determines the social contents (der gesellschaftliche Gehalt) of Kant’s conception of reason; because Reason has “undergone differentiation to the point where . . . unity is merely formal” (Moral Consciousness, 2), Habermas discards his forebear’s foundationalist justification. The “movement of the concept” (Hegel) leading from Plato to Kant does not represent the autonomous, autoaffecting action of Spirit; instead, Habermas affirms, it occurs thanks to an evolutionary process of social and cultural differentiation. In the course of this process, the three aspects of Reason (Vernunftmomente) identified by Kant “crystallize out”: “modern science,” “positive law and post-traditional ethics” (prinzipiengeleitete Profanethik), and “autonomous art and institutionalized art-criticism.” Habermas’s very terminology translates matters into the language of sociology—which, he avers, does not require “instructions” from the Critique of Pure Reason or “supplements” from philosophy (17). By Habermas’s account, autonomous—but philosophically instructive— “processes of disembodiment” (Ausgliederungsprozesse) lead “the sciences [to] disgorge more and more elements” anchored in metaphysical worldviews (i.e., in “religion”); in so doing, however, they come to renounce “their former claim to being able to interpret nature and history as one whole” (17). Any justification required for these operations, they have already produced themselves. Like the sciences, the realms of morality/law and art/art criticism undergo differentiation through social reality and come to be justified on their own terms. “The situation of culture as a whole is no different from the situation of science as a whole” (17). Habermas’s historical-materialist perspective, which combines the theory of communications and sociology (see Rekonstruktion), reveals Reason as social reason (Vernunft der Gesellschaft). The achievement of transcendental philosophy does not concern the ultimate (Kant)—or even the penultimate (Popper)—justification (Begründung) of science and culture; instead—and viewed from a retrospective, postfoundational standpoint—it involves an initial formulation of a “theory of modernity” that, while fallible, still possesses normative substance (16; on the problems this entails, see chapter 33 in this volume). Habermas’s second step combines this reinterpretation of Kantian reason with a metanarrative that, as one of many possibilities—none of which can be justified a priori in a philosophically cogent manner—must allow truth claims to compete with one another. Rorty’s metanarrative of the history of philosophy tells how reason, after exercising the function of discerning and declaring the truth, has transformed into “cultivated knowledge” that makes no claims

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about truth (wahrheitsfreies Bildungswissen). As an alternative, Habermas sketches an account—soon expanded in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (see chapter 37 in this volume)—of philosophical democratization as a dialectical process of learning. In this perspective, reason is “forced”—in the sense of developmental logic (see chapters 10, 12, 32, 56, and 62 in this volume)— to engage in self-rationalization, which requires cooperation with science and culture on egalitarian terms. Habermas’s metanarrative about the fate of Reason under modern conditions follows the simple but useful Hegelian scheme: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, arranged in a sequence of arguments. In the first stage, Kant’s ultimate justification of transcendental philosophy—Thesis (T1)—encounters opposition from Hegel’s Antithesis (A1), which holds that the dialectical ascent of Spirit (dialektische Selbstaufstufung des Geistes) involves Subject and Object repeatedly reversing their positions. Hegel halts this process inasmuch as his philosophy ultimately declares the arrival of “absolute knowledge”—that is, he “detranscendentalizes” Kant’s foundationalism only by “outbidding” it (nur um den Preis seiner Überbietung). But since philosophy does not stop with Hegel, in the stages that follow, it frees itself from the antinomy of either underbidding or overbidding Kant by performing a series of radicalized self-critiques. Hereby, Thesis T1 (Kant) and Antithesis A1 (Hegel) achieve a higher state of unity—in a movement of “reflecting abstraction” (Kesselring 1984)—and yield Thesis T2 (T1/A1). Whether this occurs along the lines of constructivism (Lorenzen) and negativism (Popper, Adorno), on the one hand, or along the lines of pragmatism (Peirce) and hermeneutics (Dilthey), on the other—synthesis takes place. Both transcendental reason and dialectical reason are unconditionally socialized (vergesellschaft) and provincialized (provinzialisiert) without, however, being forced to give up their universalistic claims to self-transcendence. Marx’s formulation applies: philosophy is not abandoned but sublated and brought to full realization (Moral Consciousness, 11). The next stage—Antithesis A2—occurs in a number of variants: when philosophy renounces its claim to truth, it can do so as a matter of therapy (Wittgenstein), heroism (Bataille, Heidegger), or safeguarding (Gadamer). Now, critique—which has shaped philosophical discourse from Kant to Adorno—turns into something else: training (Abrichtung), gesture and dialogue, Destruktion, deconstruction, or combat (Kampf ). Whereas Marx “sublated” philosophy in terms of revolutionary praxis, according to Habermas, Rorty has said his “goodbyes” by turning it into cultivated knowledge that is devoid of truth. Rorty’s vision unites “philosophy as a whole” in “therapeutic relief, heroic overcoming, and hermeneutic reawakening. It combines the inconspicuously subversive force of leisure with an elitist notion of creative linguistic imagination and with the wisdom of the ages” (14).

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By way of further reflexive abstraction, Thesis T2 (Marx) and Antithesis A2 (Rorty) ultimately lead to Thesis T3 (T2[T1/A1]/A2), which is Habermas’s own position. Now, philosophy undergoes a double transformation. It is internalized by science and culture in order to make their latent potentials for selftranscendence manifest. It can either succeed or fail in so doing, and it must compete with other “seductive” discourses, in full knowledge that it is prone to possible error (Quine). All the “old-European” hierarchies have become egalitarian and reversible relations.

Stand-In and Interpreter With respect to the sciences, philosophy—which formerly served as the detached “usher” (Platzanweiser) assigning roles—has become an internal “stand-in” (Platzhalter) that endorses strong hypotheses and “empirical theories with pronounced universalistic claims.” As much is evident in the largescale, revolutionary research programs (Lakatos 1974) that proliferated in the social and “human” sciences over the course of the twentieth century—e.g., the projects of Freud, Durkheim, Mead, Weber, Piaget, and Chomsky. “Each inserted a genuinely philosophical idea like a detonator into a particular context of research” (Moral Consciousness, 15). These research programs did not “dissolve” philosophy into science without remainder; instead, philosophy became scientific inasmuch as science became philosophical. Alluding to a famous formulation of the young Marx—who spoke of philosophy achieving “realization” when reality became philosophical—Habermas, contra Quine, explains the “scientification of philosophy” as the “philosophization of the sciences of man” (Philosophischwerden der Humanwissenschaften) (15). This is one of the many Marxist motifs that recur throughout Habermas’s work, from the dissertation until today; recently, Habermas has taken it up again—against Rorty and a broad range of liberals who draw on elements of philosophical realism, voluntarism, and postmodernism—in observing that a post-truth democracy would no longer be a democracy at all (Naturalism, 144–145); democracy, too, must grow philosophical from time to time, lest it perish of empty formalism. For this reason alone, postfoundationalist philosophy is not exhausted by its “stand-in” function. Indeed, philosophy must affirm the validity of its claims to truth by offering interpretations that relate to our social world in its entirety. Its role is (1) to translate (vermitteln) the esoteric contents of expert discourses from within; this occurs in subversive “countermovements” (18) to specialization (for example, by changing theoretical vocabularies into aesthetic ones, theorizing ethical and juridical discourses, uncovering the

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practical implications of research programs, and politicizing art). In addition, the interpretive role involves (2) externalizing expert discourses and building bridges to everyday praxis. In its interpretive capacity, philosophy should expose expert knowledge to the communicative forces of public dispute (Streit) and bifurcation (Entzweiung). As one site of interpretation among many, philosophy (or, alternatively, expertise that has grown philosophical) must seek to open public opinion to the influx (Zustrom) of knowledge—which necessarily arrives only in fragmentary, rising form—by initiating discussions, offering polemics, provoking disagreement, agitating, campaigning, and so on. Whether this ultimately occurs for better or for worse, the task—and especially in an intellectual capacity (see chapter 60 in this volume)—is to make “petrified conditions . . . dance by singing to them their own melody” (Marx 1977, 134). The spectrum of interpretive activities ranges from modest exercises in scientific journalism to deployments of the “weapon of criticism” (Marx) in struggles for epistemic hegemony—up to (and including) the violation of standing rules for moral reasons. The role of interpreter combines ideological criticism—which “uncovers, in what seems to be in the general interest, what is particular to those in power” (Habermas 1972, 212)—with redemptive criticism, which seeks to “blast . . . a past charged with now-time . . . out of the continuum of history” (Benjamin 2003, 395) in order to disclose “the source of those semantic potentials that we need to interpret the world in the light of our needs” (Habermas 1972, 217). Philosophy’s doubly negativistic role as interpreter involves, on the one hand, morally motivated ideological critique directed against the false appearance of the General and, on the other, ethically and aesthetically motivated redemptive criticism of the misspent life. In so doing, however, it does not go so far as to affirm what proper awareness of “totality” (Lukács) or “the good life” (Aristotle) (see chapter 16 in this volume) might be. Instead, the matter concerns the “un-misspent” life (Adorno). This, too, is a Hegelian discovery employed to non-Hegelian ends: double negation is not the same as affirmation on the mathematical model (i.e., “minus times minus equals plus”). On this point, Habermas agrees with Foucault and, even more, with Derrida: the best-functioning mechanism of everyday life in a parliamentary democracy, even under conditions of optimal social-democratic progress, can pale and become semantically desolate when “improving” the “reproduction of life” yields “meaningless emancipation” (Habermas 1972, 219). The new roles of stand-in and interpreter have bid farewell to the conception of a sovereign philosophy; the latter no longer performs authoritative functions (Herrschaftsfunktionen). At the same time, however, these new roles have not replaced those formerly in place with the “Cloud Cuckoo Land” of pure agreement (Verständigung)—as has been wrongly (and, most often,

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maliciously) alleged, time and again, of the ideal, goal, and program underlying Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Instead, Habermas maintains that only the better argument may exert “force.” This occurs when a social actor agrees on the basis of his or her own insight—indeed, it happens constantly for any and all social actors. Herein lies the power of Reason in History—when, as Walter Benjamin put it, a “sphere of human agreement that is wholly inaccessible to violence” emerges: “the proper sphere of ‘coming to an understanding,’ language” (Benjamin 1996, 245; quoted—with approbation—in Habermas 1972, 221). All the same, “discourses are islands in the sea of praxis” (Habermas 1982). The roles of stand-in and interpreter—like the communicative power that makes the “philosophization” of science and mass culture possible in the first place (see chapter 65 in this volume)—involve matters of practice through and through. Research programs, communities of inquiry, and points of agreement in the public sphere are all contaminated by power—be it communicative, social, or administrative (see chapters 67 and 13 in this volume)—that is, they are all caught up in struggles for influence and dominance. Benjamin’s warning, which Habermas (1972, 221) quotes, applies: “Pessimism all along the line. Absolutely. Mistrust . . . three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in I. G. Farben and the peaceful perfection of the air force” (Benjamin 2005, 217). Unlike the media of money and administrative power, influence and communicative power—the spheres where philosophy operates as a stand-in and as an interpreter, respectively—are doubly coded. Communicative power degenerates into the ideology of hegemonic power when its protective reserve of arguments (argumentative Deckungsreserve) melts away. It is altogether without resource when, faced with flagrant injustice and brutal repression, it cannot make recourse to the material reserve of “avenging violence” (rächende Gewalt) (Habermas 1982; cf. Communicative Action, 2:187). That is, communicative power—as the “unforced force of the better argument”—is a protective reserve that cannot be made binding in order to unburden the actor of the risk or “danger” (Arendt) involved in all action. (This, too, is a point of difference between postmetaphysical and “master” thinking.) All forms of power (Macht) are “covered” by different forms of violence (Gewalt)—or, to take up Luhmann’s terminology, they are bound, by symbiotic mechanisms, to the movement of bodies (durch symbiotische Mechanismen an das Bewegen von Körpern gebunden) (Luhmann 1974). For this reason, Habermas does not place power and violence in opposition, as Arendt does. Rather, he contrasts communicative power, on the one hand, and administrative power, on the other. Whereas the protective reserve of social power involves, e.g., boycotting, strikes, and lockouts, the protective reserve of administrative power consists of police and military deployments; the ultimate resource of

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communicative power, in turn, lies in avenging violence, which occurs in acts of insurrection or revolution.

Kant or Hegel? As we have seen, Habermas’s 1981 lecture draws on Hegelian motifs throughout, both in terms of method and matter. As to the former: “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter” does without transcendental deduction of any kind; instead, it employs—and advocates—the supple instruments of immanent critique: determinate negation and reflective abstraction. As to the object of reflection, the lecture incorporates all the dualisms of Kant’s philosophy— philosophy and science, theory and practice, thinking and society, and rationality and evolution—and it seeks to mediate between them by establishing a continuum of concrete action(s). At the same time, Habermas—thinking, like Marx and Adorno, “with Hegel against Hegel”—holds fast to the most important elements of Kantian critique inasmuch as what exists and its “proper movement” (das Bestehende selbst und dessen Eigenbewegung) offer the means to renew the project of radical, normative universalism. As occurs in the long-term intellectual movement leading from Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling to Rorty, Luhmann, and Foucault, the conditions for the possibility of strong theories (the “philosophization of science”) and of totalizing interpretations (totalitätsbezogene Interpretationen) (social critique, analyses of history, and diagnoses of contemporary ills) have been detranscendentalized; now, they concern matters of discursive and communicative practice. However, the thinkers part ways on the issue of what makes such conditions possible. Here, Habermas offers Kant as a “hypothesis.” By combining Kant and Hegel with Marx (and, at a further remove, with Kierkegaard and Heidegger), he consolidates the inheritance of Kantian universalism by placing it at the foundation—and not at the head—of political praxis. Thereby, Habermas affirms that, in the thoroughly contingent historical and social “conditions” of communicative action, there lies something “unconditional” (Moral Consciousness, 18). That, in a word, is his whole theory.

References Benjamin, Walter. 1996. Selected Writings. Vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ——. 2003. Selected Writings. Vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ——. 2005. Selected Writings. Vol. 2, Part 1: 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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Davidson, Donald. 1983. “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge.” In Henrich 1983, 423–438. Habermas, Jürgen. 1972. “Bewusstmachende oder rettende Kritik—Die Aktualität Walter Benjamins.” In Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamins, 173–224. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1982. “A Reply to my Critics.” In Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B. Thompson and David Held, 219–283. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.  V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heine, Heinrich. 1964. “Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland.” In Sämtliche Werke, 9:153–285. Munich: Kindler. Henrich, Dieter. 1971. Hegel im Kontext. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——, ed. 1983. Kant oder Hegel? Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Kant, Immanuel. 1977. “Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie.” In Werke, 6:377–397. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1992. The Conflict of the Faculties. Trans. Mary J. Gregor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ——. 2008. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Marcus Weigelt. New York: Penguin. Kesselring, Thomas. 1981. Entwicklung und Widerspruch. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1984. Die Produktivität der Antinomie: Hegels Dialektik im Lichte der genetischen Erkenntnistheorie und der formalen Logik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lakatos, Imre. 1974. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1974. “Symbiotische Mechanismen.” In Gewaltverhältnisse und die Ohnmacht der Kritik, ed. Klaus Horn et al., 107–131. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1975. Macht. Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius. Marx, Karl. 1968. Theorien über den Mehrwert. Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. ——. 1977. Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right.” Ed. Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, Hilary. 1983. “Was ist Epistemologie?” In Henrich 1983, 439–448. Quine, Willard V. O. 1983. “Gegenstand und Beobachtung.” In Henrich 1983, 412–422. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ——. 1983. “Zur Einführung.” In Henrich 1983, 408–411.

35 THE THEORY OF SOCIET Y The Theory of Communicative Action (1981): A Classic of Social Theory DAVID STRECKER

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ey to the social philosophy of Jürgen Habermas is his deeply held conviction that social evolution represents a history of progress in principle while at the same time—and as a matter of actual fact— being the cause of grave social ills. His project is shaped, then, by an awareness of suffering and crisis—matters that do not even occur to neoconservative and neoliberal modernizers, entranced as they are by technical and economic development. Simultaneously, he maintains critical distance from parties who, when faced with the catastrophes that modernity has produced, take flight for archaic utopias. In fleshing out this conviction that a single process has generated both emancipatory and pathological traits, Habermas’s central idea concerns the fact that the different progressive potentials of modernization have not all been realized in equal measure over the course of history; hence, social evolution is to be understood as a process of one-sided rationalization. Habermas’s project, then, consists in substantiating two propositions: First, that social modernization releases a comprehensive potential for reason (Vernunftpotential) and, second, that these rational potentials are employed only in part and thereby become distorted and produce destructive effects. According to this conception, the path leading out of traditional conditions of dependency has not secured personal autonomy and social solidarity; instead, old constraints on liberty have been replaced by new forms of “immaturity” (Unmündigkeit), which arise from a structural compulsion to adopt technicalinstrumental orientations toward oneself and the world. The Theory of Communicative Action (cf. Vorstudien and Postmetaphysical) is the result of more than two decades of efforts to explicate this intuition in the terms of social theory. Habermas’s monumental magnum opus spans two volumes, some 1,200 printed pages, and incorporates numerous and diverse sociological and philosophical approaches. In all this, what remains crucial to Habermas is the tradition of Western Marxism that he first worked through systematically in the 1950s: “Everything I have incorporated [Alles, was ich mir . . . angeeignet habe] owes its significance to the

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project of social theory renewed along the lines of this tradition” (Unübersichtlichkeit, 216). As soon as it was published (1981), The Theory of Communicative Action was recognized as a modern classic of social theory. Indeed, before it had even appeared in print, the arguments became the object of academic debates and occasioned heated international exchanges. Today, three-and-a-half decades later, the social-theoretical reflections that Habermas presented have become entrenched in the canon of sociological theory; the basic concepts outlined in the book are familiar to generations of students and a broad public alike. The author enjoys a degree of celebrity practically unmatched by contemporary philosophers. For all that, only some elements of The Theory of Communicative Action form a vigorous component of current debates. Above all, Habermas’s philosophical considerations have retained their vitality; his sociological theorems, on the other hand, have survived more as keywords than as positive knowledge. In fact, in current discussions on social theory, The Theory of Communicative Action is absent. One is more likely to find—in addition to omnipresent diagnoses of the times (Zeitdiagnosen)—discussions of “rational choice,” network analysis, Anthony Giddens’s notion of structuration, Pierre Bourdieu’s logic of practice, or (in some settings) Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. And as one can gather from debates on discourse analysis and governmentality, far more energy is derived from the works of Michel Foucault than from Habermas’s social theory. At least in part, this state of affairs is attributable to the programmatic nature of The Theory of Communicative Action. Its high level of abstraction has certainly contributed to Habermas’s aims remaining, for the most part, unrealized in empirical terms. What is more, social theory is not terribly popular these days. Given the heightened complexity of social systems in the twenty-first century, hardly anyone feels confident enough to reflect on phenomena comprehensively, i.e., in their “totality,” and to account for the “big picture.” The difficulty is only compounded by the fact that the concept of “society” has, historically, been linked to the organization of the nationstate—a connection that makes it now seem obsolete. Today, the theory of society (Gesellschaftstheorie) has, to a large extent, given way to social theory (Sozialtheorie), which contents itself with outlining the conceptual framework for empirical research but, in so doing, gives up on explaining discrete social phenomena in terms of overall context. For all that, the relative lack of attention currently paid to The Theory of Communicative Action cannot be adequately explained by the work’s distance from empirical research or prevailing attitudes of theoretical modesty. The hulking nature of the project has led Habermas to focus on, clarify, and add to discrete aspects of his theory (Unübersichtlichkeit, 178ff.; cf. Iser and Strecker

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2009); the effect has been to distract from the core feature of his social theory. It is thanks to just this feature, however, that Habermas’s theory ultimately proves superior to rival endeavors.

The Theory of Communicative Action The Theory of Rationality: The Concept of Communicative Rationality In order to show that the potential for rationality has developed “one-sidedly” in the course of social modernization, Habermas requires a conception of reason (Vernunftbegriff) that goes beyond purely instrumental rationality (see chapter 72 in this volume). Since the notion of instrumental reason only allows for judging means in light of determinate objectives, a diagnosis like Habermas’s, according to which it is unreasonable—and not just worthy of critique in some regard— to judge social development solely by economic standards of measurement, has to assume that it is not just means that may prove more or less rational but also the ends to which they are employed. In explicating such a broader notion of rationality, Habermas does not confine himself to arguing that moral convictions are subject to rational justification, too; rather, his primary interest is in how such a broad notion of reason is socially anchored and effects social evolution. By reconstructing invariable social structures (i.e., ones that do not depend on any one culture in particular), he aims to show how one can identify a multidimensional conception of reason that goes beyond its purely instrumental moments. Habermas finds such a potential for reason (Vernunftpotential) in the structure of human language (see chapters 30, 57, and 64 in this volume), where it is already socially operative (and implicitly recognized) inasmuch as everyday interactions presume its existence and efficacy. Habermas’s point of departure for developing his argument is the widely held belief that the meaning of a sentence is understood when one knows what makes it true—i.e., when one knows its conditions of validity. Habermas then lends a pragmatic turn to this connection between meaning and validity (see chapter 68 in this volume) by arguing that knowledge about the conditions under which a statement is true also means knowing how the statement may be justified and what kind of reasons may be adduced to criticize it. With the tools provided by formal pragmatics—the science of the structures governing language use in general—Habermas seeks proof that conditions of validity obtain not only for the “what” but also for the “how” of a given utterance. Accordingly, he holds that linguistic communication (Verständigung) is  based on speech acts’ connection to validity claims: whoever declares

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something to be something to someone raises the claim, in so doing, that the conditions for the utterance to prove valid have been fulfilled. Needless to say, a speaker may also seek to deceive his or her interlocutor. However, such cases of strategic, “success-oriented” language use still depend on language use that is “understanding oriented” (in this instance, on the fact that the listener presumes that the speaker means the statement honestly); therefore, the connection between speech acts and validity claims holds. These claims—which connect utterances with reasons that are to be judged suprasubjectively— make it possible to ascribe rationality to utterances. The rationality (Vernunft) inherent in human language (and in linguistic praxis) involves social actors exchanging reasons, criticisms, and justificatory obligations. In order to arrive at a multidimensional understanding of rationality, Habermas observes that utterances may be contested—and defended— in three different respects. A listener may reject a statement because he or she believes that its propositional contents do not hold, that the speaker is raising an illegitimate assertion, or that he or she does not mean what he or she is saying. Accordingly, Habermas distinguishes between validity claims to (propositional) truth, to (normative) rightness, and to (expressive) truthfulness. If speakers are to be able to communicate in all these respects—that is, on the basis of suprasubjective reasons—then what they refer to must be identical. The matter is relatively unproblematic where our knowledge of facts is concerned, for we presume a shared world of existing “things.” In addition to this objective world, however, according to Habermas’s analysis speakers make further presuppositions of a general nature concerning a social world of legitimate interpersonal relations, on the one hand, and, on the other, a subjective world of experiences (to which each individual has privileged access). Speakers are able to communicate about the truth of objective conditions; in like fashion, they can also communicate about the legitimacy or rightness of norms and the truthfulness of expressions. The reason is that speakers make reference to three worlds with their utterances; hence every utterance raises three validity claims. Thereby, the formal system of reference (which corresponds to the grammatical structure of language, with its distinction between first, second, and third persons) forms the basis for a three-dimensional conception of rationality that is not limited to questions of truth in the narrow sense but also encompasses the realms of normative rightness and expressive truthfulness. Habermas’s conception of communicative reason and the ways he justifies it have been critiqued in every way. In fact, the theory of rationality is that element of The Theory of Communicative Action that continues to be debated most frequently. All the important objections were already raised early on. In principle, discussion concerns whether Habermas has succeeded in grounding the normative bases for a theory that not only describes and explains

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society but also offers generally sharable standards for critiquing its operations. One camp, which rejects Habermas’s sociological project as a whole, doubts that it is possible at all, by reconstructing social structures, to identify a form of rationality (and to ground normative obligations) that is unobstructed by empirical contingencies and, therefore, holds unconditionally (Schnädelbach 1991). Whereas Habermas (Naturalism, 101) maintains that every other method transcends the realm of reasonable, intersubjectively comprehensible, postmetaphysical argumentation (see chapters 8 and 66 in this volume), transcendental philosophers and other advocates of universalistic positions insist that justification must be grounded in a philosophical analysis of the concept of reason (Apel 1989). A second line of objection focuses on the pragmatic turn through which Habermas makes the connection between meaning and validity. In order to understand the meaning of a linguistic utterance, the argument goes, one need not adopt an evaluative position at all (Tugendhat 1985, Zimmermann 1985). Therefore, no constitutive connection exists between understanding (Verstehen) and communication (Verständigung); for this reason, they conclude, speakers have not “always already” (at least implicitly and counterfactually) entered into context-transcendent obligations of justification (Cooke 1994). Like the first objection, this argument has, to date, led more to entrenchment on both sides than to proposals taking the debate beyond the established positions. Habermas (1991, 252), for example, has spoken of a “counterintuitive mode of reading” on the part of his critics and declared his intention to “insist” (beharren) on his views. Numerous potential objections were already addressed in The Theory of Communicative Action. Disagreement persists, above all, about Habermas’s assertion that more than one kind of validity claim exists and that normative and expressive issues admit rational elucidation in a similar way to questions of truth. Accordingly, since publishing the book, Habermas has attempted to lend additional clarity to the different types of discourse it outlines. While the validity claim to truthfulness and the realm of aesthetics have remained largely unexplored, Habermas has somewhat lessened the formalism of his approach to moral issues (in Justification), and he has modified his theory of truth (in Truth). Nothing in the three-dimensional concept of procedural reason has fundamentally changed, however. Surprisingly, neither Habermas nor his critics have addressed, in any detail, the relationship between the three dimensions of rationality or the problem of how speech acts can always be problematized in light of any one of them (Seel 1991); however, it is just this ability to change and switch effortlessly and without constraint between these different moments of reason that is at the core of Habermas’s social philosophy.

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The Theory of Action: The Concept of Communicative Action To justify the intuition that social evolution unfolds as one-sided rationalization, Habermas, obviously, cannot limit his inquiry to practices of speech. Because social structures arise from contexts of (inter)action, he introduces— as the second component of The Theory of Communicative Action—a sociological perspective intended to demonstrate that communicative reason pervades human activity (Handlungspraxis) in general. Social actors themselves must necessarily impute rationality to the interactions and exchanges in which they engage. Traditionally, sociology has conceived human action too narrowly to grasp its rational aspects in their entirety. As much is evident in the conventional conceptions of action, which take actors’ relations to the world into account only selectively. Thus, the dominant notions of teleological and strategic action restrict analysis to an actor’s reference to the objective world: this framework permits for the rationality of opinions and actions to be judged in terms of their truth and effectiveness. The more demanding concept of norm-regulated action additionally allows us to assess the legitimacy of motivations, actions, and norms, for it considers how actors relate to both the objective and the social worlds. That said, however, such a perspective remains blind to the rationality of wishes and feelings because it offers no way to conceptualize actors’ relations to the subjective world. The concept of dramaturgical action is tailored to this aspect of action by distinguishing between an inner and an outer world. But it does not operate with the distinction between the objective and the social world, on which rests the actors’ ability to differentiate between facts and values. Yet, under modern conditions, Habermas argues, social actors have developed a decentered understanding of self and world and take up relations to all three worlds: the objective, the social, and the subjective. For this reason, he continues, teleological, norm-regulated, and dramaturgic action represent one-sided forms (Vereinseitigungen) or borderline cases of communicative action, which encompass relations to all three worlds and, therefore, all rationalizable aspects of action (see chapter 45 in this volume). Against received ideas, Habermas also chooses interaction as the point of departure for his theory. The concepts of teleological, norm-regulated, and dramaturgical action—as well as Max Weber’s typology of action (which distinguishes between affectual, value-rational, and instrumental action)—all make the individual social actor the point of departure and reference. Habermas, on the other hand, focuses on the mechanism for coordinating action—that is, the ways and means that actions connect with one another. In conjunction with Weber’s reflections, he distinguishes between the coordination of action that occurs on the basis of shared interests, on the one

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hand, and the coordination of action occurring through normative agreement, on the other. Accordingly, he identifies two types of action. In Habermas’s terminology, interaction between success-oriented actors is strategic action, and interaction between understanding-oriented actors is communicative action. In the first case, the coordination of action is based on constraint, asymmetries of power, or the coincidental agreement of egocentric calculations of success; in the second case, however, it is based on an agreement between partners about the situation at hand, which they interpret in reference to the formal system of the three worlds. Unlike strategic action—which occurs on the basis of empirical motivation inasmuch as actors orient themselves to the advantages and disadvantages of their options—communicative action derives its binding force, i.e., the coordination of action, intrinsically from the actors’ rational motivations. This is because communication (Verständigung) about a situation culminates in agreement (Einverständnis) between those involved when they accept the validity claims raised in the course of interpreting their circumstances. This does not mean that communicative action requires disinterested social actors. After all, to act is to pursue objectives. However, the mechanism whereby actions are coordinated remains unaffected by this consideration. Parties acting communicatively pursue their own goals on the basis of an understanding of their situation, which is shared with regard to the truth of the relevant facts, the normative rightness of social relations that come into play, and the truthfulness of those involved. Further, it is important not to equate communicative action with speaking. To begin with, language may be employed not just to communicative ends but also to achieve success in a strategic capacity. (That said, Habermas considers such use of language to derive from use that is understanding oriented; strategic action, in his view, entertains a “parasitic” relation to communicative action, the original mode of action.) What is more, consensus need not occur in explicit fashion; to a great extent, social actors follow routines and understand one another nonverbally. Only when there is disagreement about the situation at hand is an open process of communication called for. This reflexive form of communicative action is what Habermas calls discourse (see chapter 53 in this volume). The concept of communicative action has not only given rise to misunderstandings but also to serious objections. Some critics have rejected Habermas’s position that strategic action possesses only a derivative status relative to communicative action. Numerous authors have argued that—if nothing else— Habermas has failed in his attempt to justify this derivative relation by arguing that understanding-oriented language use is superordinate to success-oriented use. Discussion has specifically focused on the speech-act theoretical distinction between the content, the mode, and the effect of an

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utterance and the relationship between these three—locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary—components of speech acts (see chapter 6 in this volume; cf. Culler 1985, Greve 1999, Skjei 1985, Habermas 1985). These criticisms, however, usually do not take into account Habermas’s sociotheoretical intention in distinguishing between the two types of action. The distinction relates to the question whether force or the interests of egocentrically oriented actors are sufficient to produce social order—as, for example, the advocates of “rational choice” maintain (following Thomas Hobbes)—or whether the stability of society depends on the fact that its members believe the standing order to be legitimate. Habermas, who follows Weber on this point, maintains the latter. At the same time, however, he goes beyond Weber in affirming that such belief depends on structures of linguistic communication that allow distinction between acceptance that is merely factual and justified agreement. Therefore—and contra suggestions coming from the field of international relations (where his typology has been employed to elucidate the difference between arguing and bargaining as distinct modes of negotiation [see Niesen and Herborth 2007])—Habermas (2007, 423–424) insists that norm-regulated action is a borderline case of communicative action and does not constitute a separate type. In any event, the theoretical position that the reproduction of the social order depends on more than strategic action—i.e., that it involves processes of understanding a communicative action—is a matter distinct from the action-theoretical issue of which type of action derives from the other. Of greater significance is the problem of how to distinguish between the two types of action, strategic and communicative. It is crucial to Habermas’s argument that these are, in fact, two different types of action and not merely analytically distinguishable aspects of action. In order to make this distinction, Habermas introduces two different criteria. The relationship between these two criteria is in need of clarification. On the one hand, communicative action and strategic action are distinguished with reference to the two different mechanisms by which action is coordinated (shared understanding versus force or overlapping interests). On the other, the orientations of the respective actors (understanding oriented versus success oriented) are taken to be decisive. However, both criteria only overlap when the parties involved in an interaction have identical orientations. Furthermore, it has also been observed that Habermas’s (Truth) belated distinction between a “weak” notion of communication focused on understanding (Verständigung) and a strong conception focused on agreement (Einverständnis) blurs its border with strategic action (Schluchter 2007). The matter is problematic insofar as communicative action can only function as a “carrier” of communicative rationality when both types of action can be unambiguously distinguished. If elements of communication and strategy are, in fact, interwoven (as, among others, Bourdieu

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and Foucault have argued), and if “convincing” and “persuading” cannot be rigorously distinguished (as Rorty has observed on multiple occasions), then the validity basis of speech—i.e., its context-transcending force, which allows one to articulate potentially universalistic claims—must remain limited or distorted (McCarthy 1991a).

The Theory of Society: Lifeworld and System Although Habermas develops his theory of society on the basis of social action, he does not believe that societal relations can be adequately understood by action-theoretical means alone (see chapter 59 in this volume). For one, “society” has always been a resource for action. Moreover, the evolution of social structures follows its own logic, which cannot be boiled down to discrete, individual actions (and certainly not to the intentions of those who perform them). Therefore, a theory of action must incorporate explicitly sociotheoretical concepts. To this end, Habermas introduces the notion of the “lifeworld” as the sociotheoretical counterpart to the concept of communicative action. The concept of lifeworld provides the key for understanding the structure and developmental logic of society. At an initial level of reflection, it stands for the concept of society as a whole. Habermas then derives a first conceptual specification from the tradition of phenomenology in which the term “lifeworld” refers, first of all, to the context-forming horizon of meanings in a given situation. Here, “society” functions as a resource inasmuch as it provides the unthematized “background knowledge” of action. Hereby, of course, the term “knowledge” is imprecise insofar as the lifeworld is experienced as what is simply given and self-evident. Only when meanings become problematic do they turn into objects of conscious insight (Erkenntnis); in this process, however, they cease to be components of the lifeworld and become something “in the world.” In a next step, Habermas defines the structure of the lifeworld more precisely by arguing—in the course of discussing various traditions of social theory—that interaction draws on further social resources apart from meanings, namely, solidarities and capacities (or skills). Corresponding to this tripartite scheme of resources—meaning (knowledge), solidarities (group memberships), and capacities (ego strength)—Habermas identifies three components of the lifeworld: culture, society, and personality. (Rather confusingly, he employs the term “society” in two ways: on the one hand, in a comprehensive sense and, on the other, as an element of the lifeworld.) The three components of the lifeworld offer the social resources that actors draw on when interacting and that are themselves reproduced through communicative action.

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As it reproduces, the lifeworld changes. In early societies, myths secured the agreement that made it possible to coordinate action. The ritual practices through which these societies reproduced were based on communicative action; however, rooted in the sacred, their central institutions were immune from questioning. It was only when worldviews came to be understood as interpretations (that is, as something that could be criticized)—and only to the extent that the formal reference system of the three worlds emerged (whereby the three types of validity claim became distinct, so that, for example, the existence or truth and the legitimacy or rightness of phenomena could be judged independently of each other)—that communicative action was free to develop its potential for rationality. Habermas calls this process the “linguistification of the sacred”: taboos and traditions lose their imperative force, and social realms become increasingly dependent on members of society autonomously accepting—or rejecting—the validity claims offered by tradition. This process of rationalization is triggered by external circumstances—by the fact, namely, that given their action-orienting conceptualizations social actors fail, in actual praxis, to realize their objectives (e.g., a rain dance). In this process, changes do not occur arbitrarily, for they are governed by the logic of communication (die Logik der Verständigung). In structural terms, this transformation takes the form, on the one hand, of a differentiation that occurs between elements of the lifeworld (which, in early societies, are still for the most part interwoven) and, on the other, of a formalization of culture, society, and personality (i.e., the scientification of knowledge, the universalization and proceduralization of law and morality, and the individualization of the subject). Habermas conceptualizes this process of social evolution along distinct stages of sociocultural development (see chapters 12, 32, and 74 in this volume). This perspective is supposed to show that the modern understanding of self and world—in contrast to the traditional viewpoint—is not just different but also more reasonable. To this end, Habermas transfers the central assumptions of developmental psychology from ontogeny to phylogeny (see chapters 10, 65, and 72 in this volume). This operation is theoretically tenuous both in view of doubts concerning the stage model of developmental psychology (Gilligan 1982; cf. McCarthy 1982, Giddens 1985) and in view of the question whether—given the historical multiplicity of courses of social development— the concept of modernity should perhaps be abandoned and replaced by the notion of “multiple modernities” (Eisenstadt 2000). Although increased rationality and heightened autonomy entail a greater risk of dissent, Habermas maintains that the process of modernization does not merely increase the danger that coordinated action will fail—simultaneously, it produces a remedy for such risk. Differentiation between the objective

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and the social world—as well as the corresponding differentiation between the validity claims of truth and rightness—generates a type of action that is not dependent on legitimation. Only at this historical stage can success-oriented action disembed itself from understanding-oriented action, can strategic action develop independently of communicative action, i.e., as a distinct type. Moreover, the process of rationalization has produced an instrument—modern formal law (Formalrecht)—that makes it possible to shift the reproduction of specific social realms from social integration based on communicative action to the alternative mechanism of system integration, which is compatible with strategic action. The mechanism of system integration, in contrast to that of social integration, is not based on coordinating partners’ intentions but on the functional integration of the results of their actions. Thereby, the shift from social to systemic integration relieves actors of the demands of understanding (Verständigung), i.e., of every interaction depending on those involved reaching a shared understanding of their situation. In this context, the function of modern law is to anchor administrative power as well as money within the society component of the lifeworld. This is possible through the legal constitution of hierarchies (office-bound authorizations to issue directives), on the one hand, and the legal institutionalization of the right to property and freedom of contract, on the other. The social institutionalization of these “delinguistified” media of communication, which permit the coordination of success-oriented actions, established the preconditions for the development of the modern administrative state and the capitalist economic system. Freed from the demand for understanding (Verständigung), the realms of material social reproduction uncouple themselves from the lifeworld, which in turn yields the private and public spheres; henceforth, the lifeworld encompasses only the symbolic reproduction of society. Accordingly, Habermas describes social development as a two-step process of differentiation. First, the components of the lifeworld disentangle; then, the subsystems “economy” and “state” disconnect themselves from the lifeworld (see chapter 49 in this volume). Whereas the symbolic reproduction of society necessarily relies on communicative action—meaning, solidarities, and skills cannot be prescribed but must instead emerge on the basis of agreement (Einverständnis)—administrative and economic functions can, in principle, be easily and efficiently performed through systematic mechanisms (which replace the need for understanding [Verständigung]). Habermas, then, does not consider the administrative state or the market economy problematic per se. No aspect of Habermas’s writings has drawn sharper attacks than his appropriation of systems-theoretical concepts. Behind the attacks stands the assumption that systems theory is incapable of offering social criticism (Misgeld 1985). Such suspicion is surprising in view of the fact that the Marxian

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perspective represents a combination of action and systems theory similar to what one finds in The Theory of Communicative Action (Brunkhorst 1983), which defines society, in general terms, as a “systematically stabilized complex of actions of socially integrated groups” (Communicative Action, 2:233). All the same, a difference exists inasmuch as Habermas employs the two theoretical vocabularies in reference to modern societies not only analytically but also assigns these vocabularies to different realms of society. Even the analytical distinction he makes—according to which symbolic reproduction can be grasped more fully in terms of action theory and material reproduction in terms of systems theory—has not gone unchallenged. Thus, it has been proposed that a more nuanced action-theoretical approach would better grasp the relationship between unintended side effects of action and the autonomization (Verselbständigung) of social structures (Joas 1991). What, however, has been viewed as the true betrayal of the tradition of critical theory—which, after all, Habermas has explicitly claimed to renew (see chapter 2 in this volume)—is the fact that, for those societies where the system and lifeworld have uncoupled, he assigns an “essentialist” meaning to the distinction between system integration and social integration (Habermas 1991, 254). This does not mean that actors in economic and administrative contexts adopt exclusively objectivating attitudes or that they act in purely strategic fashion. After all, Habermas defines the categories of system and lifeworld not in terms of the difference between strategic and communicative action but in terms of the difference between social integration and system integration. Even though such a tendency does exist in the systemically integrated spheres of modern society, communicative action certainly occurs in the operations of economy and state. However, because these realms are legally constituted, communicative rationality is deprived of its foundation, and partners in interaction can always adopt strategic attitudes when conflict arises: superiors need not justify themselves, and buyers and sellers can keep their motives to themselves—either way, administration and the market continue to function. It is in precisely this sense, then, that administration and markets form realms of “norm-free sociality” (Communicative Action, 2:307). Furthermore, Habermas’s distinction between system and lifeworld obtains an essentialist meaning also insofar as he abandons the Marxian project of overcoming the differentiation of the economy and state from the lifeworld (e.g., through council democracy and planned economies). At the core of these objections lies Habermas’s contention that the systemic integration of state and economy is not only efficient but also unproblematic (McCarthy 1991b). Moreover, the question arises whether the tools of systems theory do not lead to an overly “harmonistic” conception of the realms of material reproduction—whether, that is, systems theory does not lack the means to identify the crisis tendencies that provide the focus of Marxian analysis (Berger 1991).

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Habermas’s distinction between system and lifeworld, it has been claimed, not only immunizes economy and state against critique but also paints an idealized picture of the lifeworld that emphasizes communication, understanding, and consensus while masking dissent, power, and violence (Honneth 1993; Luhmann 2000, 54). In particular, feminist scholars have put the matter in concrete terms (see chapter 22 in this volume). Thus, Nancy Fraser (1995) has emphasized that The Theory of Communicative Action conceals the unpaid work that is traditionally performed by women within the family—for example, raising children. Accordingly, she “calls for theoretical tools that enable one to identify the mechanisms on which patriarchal rule is founded, whether in the family unit or within the official economy. To this end, one needs concepts that identify forms of power besides those that are formalized in administrative structures” (Cohen 1995). Such critiques, however, overlook the fact that Habermas (1991; Between Facts and Norms) has offered a way to conceptualize social power that is based on unequal resources—even if he has done so in a more detailed fashion only in his later writings (see chapters 13 and 67 in this volume). Indeed, he assumes that phenomena of domination and repression are the norm, both in the contexts of the lifeworld and of the systems. Yet why does The Theory of Communicative Action hardly pay attention to such repressive structures? Habermas obviously considers other aspects of modern societies to be of greater importance for a critical theory of society. Why is this the case?

Diagnosis of the Times: Colonization of the Lifeworld Although he breaks with the traditional Marxist critique of capitalism and the state, Habermas does not claim that social development occurs harmoniously and free of conflict. Rather, he has long argued that modernization represents a pathological process of one-sided rationalization. Indeed, The Theory of Communicative Action pursues the goal of identifying specifically modern social ills. To this end, Habermas explicitly aligns himself with Marxism inasmuch as he seeks to update Lukács’s analysis of reification and the project of critical theory as conceived by Horkheimer and Adorno. Equally, he holds fast to the notion that it is capitalism and the state apparatus that trigger contemporary phenomena of reification. How can the uncoupling of system and lifeworld count, on the one hand, as unproblematic and be interpreted in terms of evolutionary progress while, on the other hand, it is this very process that produces the pathologies of modern societies? For Habermas, two different scenarios are possible, in principle. Which of these prevails, to him, depends on whether law—through which the systems are anchored in the lifeworld—functions to “subject system

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maintenance to the normative restrictions of the lifeworld” or, alternatively, whether it turns into the Trojan Horse through which the economic-administrative complex succeeds in “[subordinating] the lifeworld to the systemic constraints of material reproduction and thereby ‘mediatizing’ it” (Communicative Action, 2:185–186). According to Habermas, the second scenario predominates. His name for this state of affairs is “colonization of the lifeworld” (see chapter 44 in this volume). Hereby, the private and public spheres (which represent the institutional orders of the lifeworld) are subjected to media foreign to their structure: “money” and “administrative power.” The processes of monetization and bureaucratization are evident inasmuch as private parties become consumers of what the market offers, and citizens the clients of services provided by the welfare state; autonomy is damaged, and pathological phenomena such as identity crises and alienation occur (see chapter 73 in this volume). Habermas elaborates this view in conjunction with Weber’s pessimistic assessment of modernization as a process that necessarily entails the loss of freedom and the loss of meaning. This is the basis for a common reading, according to which The Theory of Communicative Action presents a double diagnosis of pathology: on the one hand, the colonization of the lifeworld, whereby freedom is damaged, and, on the other, the desiccation of meaning resources (cf., e.g., Celikates and Pollmann 2006, Cooke 1994, Kneer 1990, Strecker and Schaal 2015). However, this line of interpretation underestimates the complexity of Habermas’s colonization thesis, and it cannot explain its key position in the theoretical framework that he constructs. Given the relative lack of attention that Habermas pays to other problems—for example, the aforementioned phenomena of domination and “classic” issues such as income distribution, social inequality, and poverty—the matter warrants explanation. The colonization thesis has its roots, first of all, in the dynamics of the rationalization of the lifeworld: its elements undergo differentiation, the ways the world is understood become decentered, and worldviews come to be formalized. This process of rationalization makes it possible for societies to achieve a higher measure of complexity—which then culminates, under modern conditions, in the uncoupling of the systems and the lifeworld. Set free from the lifeworld, the systemically integrated realms then develop an “irresistible internal dynamic” (Communicative Action, 2:327). To explain this dynamic, Habermas takes up the theory of late capitalism developed by Claus Offe (1972, 1973; cf. Legitimation Crisis; see chapters 31 and 61 in this volume). Offe’s core idea is that the postliberal epoch of capitalism has not overcome the crisis-proneness inherent in the process of accumulation; at the same time, however, this tendency toward crisis has ceased to manifest itself in a way that immediately concerns economic matters. Because of governmental

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intervention and policies that seek to counter cycles of boom and bust, crisis has been displaced into the political realm. Under the influence of Keynesianism— which became the official program of the German Federal Republic in the 1960s (when comprehensive steering [Globalsteuerung] was introduced) and, indeed, dominated policies in the industrialized West up to the oil crisis—it was widely assumed that economic crises could be effectively cushioned by political measures. In this context, according to the theory of late capitalism, standards of living came to be understood as dependent upon the decisions of state actors; considering the “indissoluble tension” (Communicative Action, 2:345) between capitalism and democracy, this politicization of living standards poses a threat to state actors who have to fear the withdrawal of legitimacy, i.e., the loss of political support, if state intervention into the economy stops short of overcoming the injustice of capitalist appropriation. The political response, Habermas observes, involves increasingly detailed programs for administering society. The intuition that politics might actually succeed thereby—a notion that seems strange today but that still had an empirical point of reference when The Theory of Communicative Action was written (insofar as governmental planning schemes had become encompassing to an extent almost incomprehensible today)—provides the background for his colonization thesis: the idea, à la Adorno, of a thoroughly administered world, in which only success in terms of money and power mean anything. Entirely in keeping with Marxist tradition, Habermas locates the reason for the colonization of the lifeworld in the insurmountable crisis dynamic inherent in capitalism. But unlike Marx, he believes—because state and society have become intertwined—that this dynamic no longer produces direct effects. Instead, it does so in mediated form: through acts of political intervention. The Theory of Communicative Action describes the process by examining the juridification by the welfare state, which it critiques from the left. Hereby, Habermas analyzes how the welfare state eliminates the explosive potential of economic crises by curtailing extreme forms of misery (such as were typical of capitalism in the stage of industrialization) through transfer payments and similar measures. Because such social policy operates through administrative classifications of persons and living circumstances, it transforms the recipients of social services into objects of paternalistic measures. Moreover, insofar as the compensation provided by the welfare state takes the form of payments, bureaucratization promotes monetizing tendencies. These measures, in turn (and in contrast, according to Habermas, to their effects in economic and administrative contexts), impair the lifeworld in that they promote objectivating attitudes in matters of personal identity, group membership, and solidarity, as well as meaningful orientations; by the same token, they repress expressive orientations (i.e., attitudes that would enable the

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disadvantaged to interpret the situation on their own terms) as well as normative orientations (i.e., the grounds for arguments about a fair regulation of society). However, the structural pressure exercised by delinguistified media of communication to adopt objectivating attitudes—which Habermas calls the “technicization [Technisierung] of the lifeworld”—concerns more than the phenomena to which the term “colonization” is applied: it already comes into play with the decoupling of the state and the market from the lifeworld. Yet Habermas claims that reifying colonization does not occur as soon as money and administrative power are uncoupled; rather, it happens when they reach beyond the borders of the economy and the state. His argument rests on equating two different conceptualizations of the distinction between system and lifeworld. On the one hand, Habermas explains the matter in terms of the distinction between material and symbolic social reproduction; on the other, he does so through the contrast between different social realms: economy and state versus the private and public spheres. Equating these two conceptualizations of system and lifeworld is implausible (Fraser 1995), however. As mentioned, the private sphere is in no way free of aspects of material reproduction. Moreover, economic and administrative realms of action touch on processes of symbolic reproduction. Hardly anything in modern societies determines the orientations, solidarities, and identities of individuals more strongly than professional situations. Unlike social realms (economy and administration as well as the private and the public), the functions of material and symbolic reproduction can only be separated analytically. Consequently, Habermas’s thesis—that the formation of the market and the state as institutions is unproblematic (at least in principle) and that the mere penetration of money and administrative power into the private and public spheres generates pathologies—cannot hold (Kneer 1990). All the same, Habermas’s argument that modernization need not occur pathologically—i.e., that technicization of the lifeworld does not represent colonization in every instance—retains its validity, notwithstanding untenable substantive claims (e.g., the claim that the juridification of the welfare state damages the symbolic reproduction of society whereas the institutionalized practice of wage labor does not). Phenomena of colonization stand at the center of The Theory of Communicative Action because they represent a specific type of social problem. Habermas does not go into illegitimate forms of social power (e.g., patriarchal family structures), because he assumes that those involved can discern these forms of distorted communication and problematize them on their own. This is not possible in the case of colonization, however (Kneer 1990). The delinguistified media of money and power do not simply distort communication—they displace it entirely. Therefore, they eliminate, from the inception, all efforts that might be made to clarify, through

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discourse, disputed aspects of interactive contexts (Iser 2008). It follows that critiquing phenomena of colonization—which is not the same as critiquing strategic action or instrumental rationality but rather addresses matters of functionalist reason—requires a social-theoretical framework. The theme of displaced communication and the accompanying danger that social imperatives will be followed without motivation, it should be added, are recurrent motifs in Habermas’s writings, which extend from his critique of the “technocracy” thesis (see chapter 28 in this volume), through his debate with Luhmann (see chapter 11), up to his intervention on the cloning of human life (see chapter 58). Weber’s thesis on the loss of meaning proves decisive for the way Habermas grounds the categorical distinction between distorted and displaced communication. Just as the growth dynamics of the systems facilitates the (potentially problematic) technicization of the lifeworld, the dynamic of rationalization has the potential to impoverish the lifeworld in cultural terms. The structural reason for this threat involves the fact that the scientization of the three spheres of rationality results in the institutional separation of expert cultures from everyday communication. Cultural impoverishment is manifested in the desolation of resources of meaning and in the fragmentation of everyday consciousness, which—because it cannot (re)connect with currently valid knowledge—proves incapable of producing appropriate interpretations of social contexts as a whole. As a result, the technicization of the lifeworld expands ceaselessly because it has become impossible to discern when objectifying attitudes are appropriate and in which cases they must be restricted: It is only with this that the conditions for a colonization of the lifeworld are met. When stripped of their ideological veils, the imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation upon it. The diffused perspectives of the local culture cannot be sufficiently coordinated to permit the play of the metropolis and the world market to be grasped from the periphery. (Communicative Action, 2:355)

For all that, however, cultural impoverishment of the lifeworld need not automatically occur. According to Habermas, a vigorous public sphere (see chapter 69 in this volume) may avert this development, for it reconnects expert cultures to everyday communication. In this context, Habermas also grants philosophy a decisive role (see chapter 34), for it is capable of enriching the public sphere by translating expert knowledge back into familiar terms and offering interpretations both of the process of rationalization and of the

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problems of technicization and the cultural impoverishment of the lifeworld. Thus, philosophy may interpret the protest that occurs in new social movements as a form of defensive struggle against the colonization of the lifeworld (for critical commentary, see Cohen 1995); in so doing, it contributes to a better understanding of social ills: As far as philosophy is concerned, it might do well to refurbish its link with the totality by taking on the role of interpreter on behalf of the lifeworld. It might then be able to help set in motion the interplay between the cognitiveinstrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive dimensions that has come to a standstill today like a tangled mobile. (Moral Consciousness, 18–19)

Of course, the reflections offered by philosophy represent only further voices among others in public discourse. It is excessive to assume that the members of society are, as a matter of principle, unable to develop a proper understanding of colonization phenomena on their own. In this light, the question whether (or to what extent) the educational system should be coupled with economic interests—an issue Habermas considers representative of the conflicts concerning the colonization of the lifeworld—may be viewed as a struggle for reasonable educational goals and undistorted contexts of interaction and communication. In this context, arguments of all kinds should be voiced, and no single category ought to prevail for structural reasons alone. Yet there hardly exists the danger that communication will be displaced entirely, resulting in an incapacity to qualify objectifying orientations by bringing normative and expressive attitudes into play. What is more, realms that are constituted as systems do not repress the mechanism of understanding (Verständigungsmechanismus) entirely: although communicative action is restricted in the workings of the state and economy (insofar as actors can escape obligations of justification), these systems are anchored in the lifeworld through law and therefore admit modification through democratic processes. The law, then, need not degenerate into the gate through which system imperatives invade the lifeworld; it can also be used as an instrument for exercising democratic influence on the spheres of economy and administration. As a complement to the diagnosis of the times presented in The Theory of Communicative Action—which concerns the current condition (Ist-Zustand) of Western industrial societies—Between Facts and Norms, Habermas’s main work of legal and democratic theory, has discussed what the ideal state (SollZustand) would look like. Hence, the primary difference between both these works concerns their opposite perspectives on the relationship between system and lifeworld (Strecker and Schaal 2015).

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To be sure, the changes in Habermas’s conception of law have entailed important modifications to his overall theory. For one, Habermas now maintains that the guarantee of basic rights with regard to the constitution of the public sphere is sufficient to guard against the dystopia of a context of total delusion and that it moreover assures “a potential for self-transformation” (Facts, 374; see chapter 70 in this volume). With respect to this modification, the thesis about the special status of colonization in relation to other social ills cannot be maintained. Thus, the last orthodox remnant is relinquished that connected Habermas’s works (if only in rudimentary fashion) with the notion that a sociocritical avant-garde should “show the way” to the masses. Second, whereas The Theory of Communicative Action held that social-welfare programs, inasmuch as they understand social law in paternalistic terms, necessarily have colonizing effects and are therefore to be viewed as inherently ambivalent (i.e., because they assure and impair freedom at the same time), Between Facts and Norms has eliminated the dichotomy between classical, formal law and regulative, social law by introducing the category of reflective law and presenting a theory of deliberative democracy; these additions are intended to show how the law can empower parties affected by administrative decisions to take influence on the same regulations that, according to Habermas’s earlier work, held them at the state’s mercy (see chapter 3 in this volume). Thus, the model presented in Between Facts and Norms does not replace the diagnosis offered in The Theory of Communicative Action; instead, it outlines the therapy against colonization (Strecker 2009)—i.e., against tendencies of bureaucratization and monetization that, possibly, are now more dominant than ever (Celikates and Pollmann 2006). At the same time, it is worth noting that even when The Theory of Communicative Action was published—as is certainly the case today, notwithstanding the resurgence of “deficit spending”—a theory of late capitalism inspired by Keynes could not adequately explain phenomena of colonization. Such an approach can grasp neither the paternalistic programs of “compassionate conservatism” nor the “stimulus politics” (Aktivierungspolitik) of workfare programs that attend economic deregulation. What is more, the theory fails to explain why the legitimation crises that had been predicted did not, for the most part, occur—even though political measures have hardly managed to cushion economic crises (which have, if anything, achieved new dimensions).

Social Theory Today If many elements of The Theory of Communicative Action are hardly present in current debates, its fundamental principle of construction plays no role at all.

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Precisely this feature, however, points the way out of the dead ends to which the approaches that are now dominant have led (for an extensive discussion of the following, see Strecker 2012). Habermas’s social theory also stands in the tradition of western Marxism inasmuch as it proposes to enlighten members of society about ills of which they are not even aware. The tradition of ideology critique, in seeking to raise consciousness about power relations that have not been identified as such, developed a conception of theory along the lines of a perspectival dualism. Hereby, the observer of social phenomena adopts an objectivating attitude and, from this standpoint, offers hypotheses about social mechanisms that prevent actors (e.g., through false consciousness) from arriving at an undistorted, authentic, and autonomous understanding of social conditions and problems. However, unlike what orthodox Marxism and its notions of an avant-garde affirm, the matter of whether these hypotheses are accurate depends on those social participants concerned with recognizing them as correct from their performative perspective. Only in breaking with the perspective of a participant can one lift the veil of reification, but the observer’s perspective allows only for hypotheses and is qualified by the participant’s perspective, which remains primary. Ideology critique of the “classic” variety founders on the matter of indicating the conditions (conventionally designated as “revolutionary”) under which members of society can pronounce an undistorted assessment of observers’ hypotheses. The Theory of Communicative Action solves the problem by shifting the focus from the philosophy of consciousness to the philosophy of language and by transforming the critique of ideology into a critique of conditions of communication (Verständigungsverhältnisse): thereby, the idea of society as a self-enlightening—but potentially blinded—collective subject is replaced by a conception of discursive and democratic procedures (based on communicative rationality) that makes it possible for members of society to clarify their needs and demands as a plural entity of diverse individuals. Yet Habermas still maintained, in The Theory of Communicative Action, that his theory was both obligated and able to determine phenomena of reification beyond doubt—a residual element of orthodoxy going back to the notion that social theorists possess a higher degree of insight. In subsequent writings, he came to reject this position unequivocally. Now, Habermas views the distinction between the perspectives of the participant and the observer, which aims at opening systematically distorted or veiled power relations to critique, strictly in methodological terms. He rejects the possibility of assigning different kinds of actors to any one perspective—even if the social theorist undoubtedly has an important role in the democratic public sphere, in principle, every person makes use of both perspectives. No one has made perspectival dualism the central principle of social theory more than Habermas. Yet such a view plays no decisive role in the current

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array of social-theoretical projects. At one end of the spectrum stand positions exemplified by Luhmann (1997), who totalizes the observer’s perspective; the problem here is that it is impossible to answer—or even conceptualize—the questions that members of society invariably ask one another (which, needless to say, also structure what they expect in terms of sociotheoretical “enlightenment”). The other end of the spectrum is occupied by positions that recognize only the participant’s perspective—e.g., Axel Honneth’s efforts to renew critical theory (1996); here, it remains undecided how to account for the reification phenomena that result from the autonomization of social processes—i.e., those that “happen behind the backs” or “go over the heads” of social actors (and which are the focus of critical theory in its traditional form). It remains to be seen whether this approach—which has been developed primarily in a philosophical context—will be enriched by suitable sociological tools of analysis, as has once been indicated (Hartmann 2002); these need not be provided by systems theory (as is the case for Habermas), but some kind of functional equivalent will prove necessary. Between these extremes stands a conception that, at first glance, reveals many points of similarity with Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Bourdieu (1992) also distinguishes between the perspectives of participant and observer (which, by his account, have structured the development of sociology as a whole), and he makes the difference between them his point of theoretical departure. Bourdieu also develops a social theory that focuses on uncovering power relations that have not yet been identified as such. However, instead of holding the two perspectives separate and attempting to mediate between them, he elaborates an “alternative” that supposedly transcends them both. This “logic of practice,” however, makes both perspectives collapse into the other— with the result that neither of them receives its due. On the one hand—with arguments derived from the sociology of knowledge—Bourdieu devalues the insights of the social-scientist observer, whose standpoint he assimilates to the one occupied by participants. On the other hand, when seeking to account for the participant perspective, he possesses no vocabulary beyond the objectifying terminology developed for the observer perspective—in this respect, the participant is equated with the observer. Although the notion of communicative action hardly features in current debate on the matter, then, Habermas’s model still offers the greatest prospects for renewing the enterprise of social theory.

References Apel, Karl-Otto. 1989. “Normative Begründung der ‘Kritischen Theorie’ durch Rekurs auf lebensweltliche Gewißheit? Ein transzendentalpragmatisch orientierter Versuch, mit

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Habermas gegen Habermas zu denken.” In Zwischenbetrachtungen: Im Prozeß der Aufklärung, edited by Axel Honneth et al., 15–65. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Berger, Johannes. 1991. “The Linguistification of the Sacred and the Delinguistification of the Economy.” In Honneth and Joas 1991, 165–180. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 1983. “Paradigmakern und Theoriendynamik der Kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft.” Soziale Welt 34, no. 1: 22–56. Celikates, Robin, and Arnd Pollmann. 2006. “Baustellen der Vernunft. 25 Jahre Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns – Zur Gegenwart eines Paradigmenwechsels.” WestEnd 3, no. 2: 97–113. Cohen, Jean L. 1995. “Critical Social Theory and Feminist Critiques: The Debate with Jürgen Habermas.” In Feminists Read Habermas, ed. Johanna Meehan, 57–90. London: Routledge. Cooke, Maeve. 1994. Language and Reason. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Culler, Jonathan. 1985. “Communicative Competence and Normative Force.” New German Critique 35:133–144. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2000. “Multiple Modernities.” Daedalus 129:1–29. Fraser, Nancy. 1995. “What’s Critical About Critical Theory?” In Feminists Read Habermas, ed. Johanna Meehan, 21–55. London: Routledge. Giddens, Anthony. 1985. “Reason Without Revolution? Habermas’s ‘Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns.’ ” In Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein, 95–121. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Greve, Jens. 1999. “Sprache, Kommunikation und Strategie in der Theorie von Jürgen Habermas.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 51, no. 2: 232–259. Habermas, Jürgen. 1985. “Reply to Skjei.” Inquiry 28, no. 1: 105–113. ——. 1991. “A Reply.” In Honneth and Joas 1991, 214–264. ——. 2007. “Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik: eine Replik.” In Niesen and Herborth 2007, 406–459. Hartmann, Martin. 2002. “Widersprüche, Ambivalenzen, Paradoxien: Begriffliche Wandlungen in der neueren Gesellschaftstheorie.” In Befreiung aus der Mündigkeit, ed. Axel Honneth, 221–251. Frankfurt: Campus. Honneth, Axel. 1993. The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in Critical Social Theory. Trans. Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press. ——. 1996. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Trans. Joel Anderson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas, eds. 1991. Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Iser, Mattias. 2008. Empörung und Fortschritt. Frankfurt: Campus. Iser, Mattias, and David Strecker. 2009. Jürgen Habermas zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Joas, Hans. 1991. “The Unhappy Marriage of Hermeneutics and Functionalism.” In Honneth and Joas 1991, 97–118. Kneer, Georg. 1990. Die Pathologien der Moderne. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Luhmann, Niklas. 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. 2 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2000. Die Politik der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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McCarthy, Thomas. 1982. “Rationality and Relativism. Habermas’s ‘Overcoming’ of Hermeneutics.” In Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B. Thompson and David Held, 57–78. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 1991a. Ideals and Illusions: Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Critical Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 1991b. “Complexity and Democracy: Or the Seducements of Systems Theory.” In Honneth and Joas 1991, 119–139. Misgeld, Dieter. 1985. “Critical Hermeneutics Versus Neoparsonianism? A Critique of the Distinction Between System and Lifeworld in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (Vol. II).” New German Critique 35:55–82. Niesen, Peter, and Benjamin Herborth, eds. 2007. Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Offe, Claus. 1972. Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972. ——. 1973. “ ‘Krisen des Krisenmanagement’: Elemente einer politischen Krisentheorie.” In Herrschaft und Krise, ed. Martin Jänicke, 197–223. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Schluchter, Wolfgang. 2007. Grundlegungen der Soziologie Bd. II. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Schnädelbach, Herbert. 1991. “The Transformation of Critical Theory.” In Honneth and Joas 1991, 7–22. Seel, Martin. 1991. “The Two Meanings of ‘Communicative’ Rationality: Remarks on Habermas’s Critique of a Plural Concept of Reason.” In Honneth and Joas 1991, 36–48. Skjei, Erling. 1985. “A Comment on Performative, Subject, and Proposition in Habermas’ Theory of Communication.” Inquiry 28, no. 1: 87–105. Strecker, David. 2009. “Warum deliberative Demokratie?” In Das Staatsverständnis von Jürgen Habermas, ed. Gary S. Schaal, 59–80. Baden-Baden: Nomos. ——. 2012. Logik der Macht. Weilerswist: Velbrueck. Strecker, David, and Gary S. Schaal. 2015. “Die politische Theorie der Deliberation.” In Politische Theorien der Gegenwart II, ed. André Brodocz and Gary S. Schaal, 100–168. Opladen: UTB. Tugendhat, Ernst. 1985. “Habermas on Communicative Action.” In Social Action, ed. Gottfried Seebaß and Raimo Tuomela, 179–186. Dordrecht: Springer. Zimmermann, Rolf. 1985. Utopie – Rationalität – Politik. Freiburg: Alber.

36 THE DISCOURSE THEORY OF MORALIT Y “Discourse Ethics—Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification” (1983) RAINER FORST

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iscourse Ethics—Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” which was written on the occasion of Karl-Otto Apel’s sixtieth birthday and subsequently appeared in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, offers a programmatic and comprehensive account of Habermas’s approach to discourse ethics. The text synthesizes a number of the author’s writings since the early 1970s and provides the point of departure for a range of further discussions and revisions of the discourse theory of morality. Although Habermas developed this theory together with Apel, here he also discusses key points on which his view differs from Apel’s transcendental pragmatics. Before proceeding, a few clarifying conceptual remarks are in order: “Discourse ethics” stands for a theory of morality in the Kantian tradition. Its most important feature, however, is that it replaces the reflective evaluation of moral maxims in light of the Categorical Imperative with a process of argumentatively redeeming validity claims about moral norms in practical discourse. Methodologically, transcendental Kantian self-reflection of practical reason yields to the pragmatic reconstruction of the normative implications of communicative rationality.

The Development of the Theory Discourse ethics can be located in the context of Habermas’s philosophy of language (or his theory of different validity claims), his theory of development of “postconventional” moral consciousness (in the wake of Lawrence Kohlberg), and his philosophy of law and democracy (in which practical discourses play a central role). Yet the project originated in Habermas’s reflections on epistemology and sociology—specifically, in his reflections on theories of

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truth, on the one hand, and his analysis of legitimation problems under late capitalism, on the other. In “Wahrheitstheorien” (Theories of truth, 1972), Habermas offered his first sustained analysis—along the lines of universal pragmatics—of the different validity claims of comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness, and rightness (Vorstudien, 138). Here, he argued that claims to moral rightness are to be redeemed in practical discourse such that general prescriptions (Sollsätze) can be appropriately justified (146). Under conditions assessed in terms of an ideal speech situation (which is defined by the absence of factors distorting communication), it should be possible for free and equal discourse participants to seek forms of consensus that, in turn, can rationally motivate the observance of norms (176–177). In Legitimation Crisis (1973), the idea of rational—i.e., discursively justified—compliance is meant both to explain crises of legitimation and to perform ideology critique. The process of social transformation gives rise to post-traditional expectations of legitimacy, and these point to practical discourses for which few possibilities and places exist under late capitalism— either in terms of institutional structures or in the realm of socially prevailing justifications. In order to critique ideologies that mistakenly assume the generalizability of interests and that, in so doing, legitimate existing relations, Habermas requires a “capacity of practical questions for truth” (Legitimation, 101ff.) according to the sole principle “in which practical reason expresses itself”—the principle of “universalization” (108). The procedural idea of rational argumentation in practical discourses serves as a critical foil for distinguishing “justifiable norms . . . from norms that merely stabilize relations of force” (111). In developing his argument, Habermas refers to Apel’s (1980) idea of the “a priori of the communication community” and to the constructivist approaches of Paul Lorenzen and Oswald Schwemmer (Legitimation, 109ff.). Both these projects explain how the validity of moral norms is based on a situation of communication or discussion (Beratung) that generates the capacity for generalization through discourse. Lorenzen (1969) calls this the principle of “transsubjectivity.” Apel, on the other hand, locates it in a dialectic that unfolds between “real” and “ideal” communication communities: For anyone who engages in argument automatically presupposes two things: first, a real communication community whose member he has become through a process of socialization, and second, an ideal communication community that would basically be capable of adequately understanding the meaning of his arguments and judging their truth in a definitive manner. (Apel 1980, 280)

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The latter is the decisive a priori, which, inasmuch as it is “the elimination of all socially determined asymmetries of interpersonal dialogue” (283), transcends society as it stands and entails corresponding ethical duties. Habermas’s Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (1976) considers the formation of postconventional morality, which leads to communicative ethics from an ontogenetic and a phylogenetic perspective. In both these respects, Habermas traces the formation of corresponding attitudes and identities through processes of personal and cultural development, paying especially close attention to the modes of rationalization that enable social actors to regulate conflicts through communication and consensus (Rekonstruktion, 34). Kohlberg’s developmental psychology of moral consciousness offers Habermas the means to interpret the highest stage of principle-oriented reflection in terms of discourse (84–85). Finally, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) brings together the various strands of theory that Habermas elaborated in the 1970s, culminating in a theory of communicative rationality and the differentiation of the dimensions of validity (or alternative modes of relating to the world) that characterize modernity—even in its inner contradictions. The study remains focused throughout on questions of social theory, where practical discourses come up chiefly as a reflective mode of communicative action oriented to understanding (Communicative Action, 2:92ff.). Discrete considerations of moral philosophy are not examined in this context; this is what Habermas addresses in the 1983 article on discourse ethics.

The Program of Philosophical Justification The work is divided into three parts, which are devoted to the phenomenology of morality, the universal-pragmatic program of justification, and the critical engagement with Apel’s transcendental pragmatics, respectively. Habermas situates his project in the tradition of Kantian, cognitivist ethics, which holds on to the claim that practical questions are capable of truth and, more specifically, seeks to see such questions answered through a process of impartial argumentation that takes place among free and equal autonomous subjects. In Habermas’s estimation, John Rawls’s theory of justice exemplifies this perspective (as do the projects of Apel and Lorenzen). All the same, he does not take up the matter by analyzing communicative-practical reason along the lines of formal pragmatics. Instead, his point of departure is Peter Strawson’s discussion of moral reactions. Strawson explains how moral reproaches—which can only be examined from the perspective of participants—bring the parties involved into a situation of justification that points to the cognitive content of morality (Moral Consciousness, 49). Here, the

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language game of morality can be understood only inasmuch as one presupposes that a moral reproach is justifiable and that the individual who has done wrong could have discerned and should have observed the reasons articulated. Even in the most personal realm of moral relations and conflicts, then, the “superpersonal” or, better, “interpersonal” aspect of moral norms—that is, their discursive justifiability—becomes evident. Being “supposed” to do something (etwas tun “sollen”) means having “good” or “binding” reasons for a certain course of action. The space of morality is a space of reasons—which, according to Habermas, speaks against emotivist or decisionist approaches. At the same time, Habermas stresses that normative statements cannot be taken as descriptive statements. “Truth capacity” (Wahrheitsfähigkeit) means something different in each case. Thus, when referring to practical norms, he prefers to speak of validity claims that are “analogous to truth” (56). But what form does justification of this kind of norm assume? Here, it is helpful to distinguish between two questions of justification (Wingert 1993, part 3; Forst 2012, chap. 1). On the one hand—and this consideration is of central importance—there is the question of how to justify moral norms in terms of the claim(s) to validity they make. On the other hand, there is also the question of how the very principles underlying this justification— i.e., the principle of universalization (or, alternatively, of discourse)—must or can be justified, which Habermas addresses in his discussion of Apel. Regarding the first question of justification, Habermas proposes to begin with a reconstruction of “the logic of moral argumentation” (Moral Consciousness, 57) and, in so doing, to analyze practical validity claims that are always already raised in communicative action. Moral norms take the form of universal, unconditional “ought” sentences (e.g., “One ought not to kill anybody”). Unlike factual claims, they do not record a social fact (e.g., “Human beings observe the norm that no one should kill anyone”); rather, they raise the claim of being rationally justifiable to reasonable people at any time. They are, in other words, “worthy of recognition.” These considerations set the course for Habermas’s proceduralistic and deontological theory of morality. Moral norms are to be justified rationally—in such a way that those norms are excluded that “could not meet with the qualified assent of all who are or might be affected by it” (Moral Consciousness, 63). Accordingly, he reformulates the Kantian Categorical Imperative. Although the capacity for generality is still at issue, it does not concern subjective maxims that are reflexively evaluated; instead, it concerns norms, which are (or should be) the object of practical discourse(s). Moreover, the reflexive model of “exchanging roles” no longer proves sufficient. Rather, what is important for a morally valid norm is that “all affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the

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satisfaction of everyone’s interest (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation)” (65). This is the principle of universalization (U), which Habermas introduces as a rule of argumentation for practical discourses. In contrast to Rawls, for example, who seeks to justify norms on the basis of an “original position,” which obliges parties to be impartial inasmuch as they are unaware of their personal and social advantages/disadvantages (Rawls 2005), Habermas stresses the discursive character of morality. In so doing, however, he also insists on the dialectical relation between an ideal situation of discourse and discourses as they actually occur. As much as the latter are necessary for consensus or for the incorporation of all relevant perspectives, an ideal criterion of “acceptability” inhabits claims to moral rightness, and it can be fully redeemed only under conditions of real generality and undistorted communication. In contrast to a semantic reduction of the dimension of validity, Habermas insists on the pragmatic aspect of the justification of norms, i.e., that they are generated by way of acceptable reasoned arguments (Moral Consciousness, 71). He understands justification as a communicative practice whereby practical discourses do not arrive at compromise between competing interests—as it occurs in empiricist understandings of morality—but at shared (or shareable) grounds (Begründungen). While the cognitivist and proceduralistic aspects of Habermas’s theory therefore refer to each other, its deontological quality follows from a reflection on the object domain (Gegenstandsbereich) of morality. Following in the Kantian tradition, the theory entertains a narrow concept of morality that limits itself to norms of right (or just) action and does not address questions of the “good life” in the same way. To elucidate this point, Habermas employs the terminological distinction between “morality” and “ethics,” or, more precisely, between moral norms and ethical values (since philosophical reflection on morality is conventionally called “ethics”). What stands at issue in the first place is only the strict, categorical validity of moral norms that are reciprocally and generally binding and claimable, while ethical values raise a different claim to validity—one that is redeemed more with reference to specific ways of life and individual biographies. (Habermas’s writings on discourse ethics do not analyze this point in further detail.) The principle of universalization (U) performs, according to Habermas, “razor-sharp cuts . . . between the good and the just” (104); in this context, the term justice must be understood in the sense of moral rightness—not in terms of political or social justice. Postconventional morality, as Habermas sketches it (following Kohlberg), is characterized by the fact that, while it is indeed located within a communicative lifeworld, it generates its binding force in a critical and reflexive way and

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not from traditions or a particular way of life. Accordingly, discourse ethics entails the idea of “differentiation within the practical”: Moral questions can in principle be decided rationally, i.e. in terms of justice or the generalizability of interest. Evaluative questions present themselves at the most general level as issues of the good life (or of self-realization); they are accessible to rational discussion only within the unproblematic horizon of a concrete historical form of life or the conduct of an individual life. (108)

Habermas introduced the principle of universalization as a principle of moral argumentation. On this basis, he proposes the principle of discourse ethics (D), which stipulates that “only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse” (93). But what justifies the principle itself? More precisely: What validity and binding force does it have? Habermas takes up this question by engaging with Apel’s transcendental pragmatics. Apel (1980, 1988) holds that the “ultimate justification” of discourse ethics is afforded by transcendental reflection on the fact that the norms of discourse and argumentation—to which thinking and speaking beings are always already bound—cannot be circumvented. Contesting this state of affairs would amount to a performative self-contradiction. Habermas, in contrast, is skeptical when it comes to equating rules of argumentation and moral norms; even if one derives the principles (U) and (D) in a transcendental-pragmatic way, this does not imply that they have the status of moral norms (94, see also Wellmer 1991). Such, he maintains, can only be justified in practical discourses. As he observes in a later work, one should distinguish between the “‘must’ in the sense of weak transcendental necessitation” and “the prescriptive ‘must’ of a rule of action” (Justification, 81). Habermas objects to Apel on another methodological point when he affirms that the “hypothetical reconstruction” of pragmatic presuppositions of rules of argumentation can only have the status of a fallible reconstruction and not of a transcendental self-reflection in the classical sense (Moral Consciousness, 97). A reconstruction like this must rely on assistance from the (positive) social sciences; philosophy cannot provide “ultimate justification.” However, this relativization of the strong claim to justification does not imply a relativization of the claim that the reconstruction of the discourse principle extends beyond cultural borders and accordingly specifies a general structure of morality. Although cognitivist claims to moral validity originate under specific historical and social conditions, one cannot draw the conclusion of moral relativism: that they hold only for certain cultures. Habermas’s

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emphasis on the reconstructive approach still affirms that “no alternative” exists for analyzing our communicative practice (97).

Reception and Controversies Habermas’s conception of discourse ethics has received far-reaching attention. In short order, the theory was discussed as a prominent, contemporary account in the Kantian tradition alongside the work of John Rawls. At the same time, a number of criticisms have been formulated, which have prompted Habermas to clarify and develop his position: the problem of the relationship between the justification of norms and their application, the abstract perspective on morality, the relation between ethics and morality, the constructivist character of the theory, and the normative status of the discourse principle. Justification and Application (1991) and subsequent works have responded to these and further criticisms in comprehensive fashion. Albrecht Wellmer (1991) has argued that discourse ethics conflates questions of morality and democratic legitimation (148, 158). Morality does not concern the general justification of norms but concerns justified ways of acting that are to be determined in specific situations (201ff.). Whereas Wellmer understands moral discourses primarily as “discourses of application,” Habermas (Justification, 30ff.) follows Klaus Günther’s (1993) distinction between discourses of justification and discourses of application. On this view, the latter cannot replace the former, but they are still necessary to apply abstract norms to particular circumstances from the point of view of appropriateness. The principle (U), however, remains central to the dimension of moral justification. In the 1980s, Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of psychological development (1981), to which Habermas refers, became the object of criticism. Carol Gilligan (1982), for example, sought to demonstrate the extent to which the construction of six stages of development of moral consciousness (culminating in the highest stage of postconventional, universalistic justification of norms) not only has a gender bias but also fails to account for the particularity of moral experiences and judgments. In particular, she claims the aspect of “care” for the other does not receive due consideration. These objections occasioned a broad debate in the fields of moral psychology and philosophy, and it included questions about discourse ethics. Under the light of the ethics of care, as well as other critiques of abstract Kantian universalism (influenced, for example, by Levinas, Derrida, or Lyotard), the discourse-ethical approach does not do justice to the particularities, uniquenesses, and differences among persons, nor does it seem able to account for the quality and particularity of

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social connections between people. This would put it at odds with perspectives as diverse as theories of difference and communitarianism. In response, various efforts were made to affirm the perspective of the “concrete other” in contrast to acknowledging only a “generalized other” (to employ the phrasing of Seyla Benhabib [1992], who borrowed the terms from George Herbert Mead). Accordingly, “interactive universalism” held that the other should be acknowledged and included both as an equal party and as someone who is different and unique. Lutz Wingert (1993) has analyzed the moral point of view of discourse ethics in terms of a twofold respect: the other is to be respected (geachtet) both as an irreplaceable individual (unvertretbarer Einzelner) and, at the same time, as a member who enjoys equal rights (gleichberechtigter Angehöriger) in a communicative form of life (179). Axel Honneth (2007), in turn, has stressed the “communicative virtue” of perceiving and considering the other as a unique being. To do so, he maintains, one must go beyond the perspective of equal treatment and adopt a form of care (Fürsorge) that is not bound to considerations of symmetry and reciprocity—a stance that entertains a tense relation with Kantian conceptions of morality. Habermas (1990), on the other hand, has sought to incorporate points of criticism by affirming that solidarity, as the “other” of justice, should stand at the side of equal treatment (244). But he considers these as “two aspects of the same thing”: “Justice concerns the equal freedoms of unique and self-determining individuals, while solidarity concerns the welfare of consociates who are intimately linked in an intersubjectively shared form of life” (244). Because this conception of solidarity is not tied to particular forms of belonging, Habermas views it as a component of postconventional morality. According to him, it is a specific merit of discourse ethics to accentuate discursively individual perspectives—and this not in a way that is merely abstract (Inclusion, 33ff.). The distinction between ethical values and moral norms has given rise to much debate (Forst 2012, chap. 3). Of course, this distinction applies not only to discourse ethics but also—in one form or another—to all deontological conceptions of morality, while the procedural notion of separating the two spheres is characteristic for discourse ethics. That said, the notion of “two spheres” requires nuance, as it does not mean distinguishing them on the basis of value ontology. The distinction between values and norms is dynamic in nature, and it remains always the object of discourse—including those discourses in which it remains controversial whether an ethical or moral response is called for (e.g., debates about the normative status of embryos and “optimizing” genetic interventions in human nature [see Future]). The most important points of reference are, on the one hand, what is good “for me” (or, as the case may be, “for us”)—which does not need to be asserted in general terms—and, on the other hand, what is “just” (or “binding”) “for

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all”—which follows its own mode of validity (Justification). The first point does not mean that ethical questions cannot be answered rationally or that they are “purely subjective” or “private” in nature; rather, it means that moral obligation must be justified in strictly reciprocal and general terms. Hilary Putnam (2002) has criticized the epistemic component of this distinction, which (he believes) denies cognitive validity to ethical values; this would fail to do justice to both religious value orientations and “thick” ethical judgments. In response, Habermas (2003) has pointed to the fact that ethical values are inherently bound to context; nevertheless, they do possess cognitive content, albeit in a different way than holds for moral norms. According to Martin Seel (1995), deontological conceptions of morality presuppose an idea of the good as they seek to afford—to all individuals and in equal measure—the possibility of living properly. For that purpose a formal theory of the “good life”—or, alternatively, the “succeeding life”—is required. This view, however, seems to presume the perspective of an objective ethical theory that antecedes discourse—a possibility Habermas denies (Inclusion, 21ff.). Whatever idea of the good might reciprocally be claimable must prove itself in moral discourse among free and equal persons—an important implication of a conception of moral autonomy along Kantian lines. Finally, the distinction between ethics and morality concerns the matter of moral motivation. It seems that ethical considerations of “what is good for me” prove decisive not just when it comes to observing moral norms but also when it comes to taking up the moral point of view. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain how abstract considerations can be translated into subjective motives (Tugendhat 1984, Williams 1981). On this point, Habermas’s position is ambivalent. On the one hand, he objects to an ethical justification of moral motivation (Justification, 46–47); at the same time, however, he grants to moral insights only “the weak motivating force of good reasons” (33): “The moral principle performs the role of a rule of argumentation only for justifying moral judgments and as such can neither obligate one to engage in moral argumentation nor motivate one to act on moral insights” (33). Consequently, morality requires the “support of complementary processes of socialization and structures of identity” (33), which promote postconventional attitudes and inspire trust that moral action may, in fact, be reasonably expected (zumutbar). In this sense, Habermas’s notion of a “communicative form of life” includes both ethical and moral motives; its inherent ambivalence is evident, for example, when Habermas writes that affirming the truth capacity of practical questions involves the “self-understanding of subjects acting communicatively” and “is intertwined with ethical motives” (Truth, 274). Debates on discourse ethics frequently revolve around the way that moral norms lay claim to validity or, alternatively, to truth—especially in their difference from truth claims made in the realm of theoretical reason. On the

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latter point, Habermas has retreated from a pure consensus theory of truth (Truth and Justification). He has stressed, however, the constructivist character of discourse ethics in contesting the perspective of “moral realism,” which holds that “generalizable interests” precede discourse (Lafont 1998). According to Habermas, the world of moral norms is produced discursively; only in discourses do generalizable interests emerge. His adherence to the requirement that a “correct answer” for moral questions exists does not mean that there are truths awaiting discovery. Rather, it is a matter of constructing norms “that could be accepted for good reasons by everyone affected from the inclusive perspective of equally taking into consideration the evident claims of all persons” (Truth, 261). Hence, an element of counterfactual ideality—i.e., of acceptability under ideal conditions—applies to the concept of validity. For this reason, practical discourses—as they actually occur—may always be deemed imperfect. In turn, the “incomplete” state can only be made evident in discourse, since no privileged epistemic mode of access to “moral truths” exists. Thus, the construction of moral norms does not occur in a space that is itself free of norms. Instead it presupposes the discourse principle and the status of free and equal persons as participants in discourse with (what one can call) a right to justification. But what do these presuppositions mean—especially in normative terms? Habermas continues to evince skepticism about Apel’s objection (1988) that his reconstruction of the discourse principle underdetermines its transcendental and deontological foundation and that therefore an “ultimate justification” is necessary (Naturalism, 77ff.). Moreover, in Between Facts and Norms (1992) he defines the discourse principle—which holds that “just those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourses”—on a level of abstraction that is “neutral with respect to morality and law” (Facts, 107). In this way, the principle is granted “normative content” even though it is not binding in the way moral norms are. Habermas stresses that communicative reason cannot be understood along the lines of the Kantian understanding of practical reason—i.e., as a “source of prescriptions” (Facts, 4; cf. Communicative Action). This, ultimately, marks his greatest departure from Kant, for whom the Categorical Imperative—as a “moral law” (Sittengesetz)—binds the autonomous will. At the same time, it poses the question—which is central for a deontological conception of morality—of how the principle of moral justification can be obligatory if it depends on motives that it cannot produce itself. The program of discourse ethics, then, harbors a gap of justification (Begründungslücke) that extends between the “‘must’ of a weak transcendental necessity” and the “prescriptive ‘must’ of a rule of action” (Facts, 4), and this raises the question whether it is necessary to emphasize discursive reason more as practical reason in order

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to ground a duty to discursive justification (without making recourse to an “ultimate justification”) (Forst 2012, 43ff.). These points, to which other issues could easily be added (especially bioethical matters [see Future]), show what discussions the original approach to discourse ethics occasioned and what further developments emerged. However, they also indicate that the process is not yet complete; here, too, the theory proves its productive capacity.

References Apel, Karl-Otto. 1980. “The A Priori of the Communication Community and the Foundations of Ethics: The Problem of a Rational Justification of Ethics in the Scientific Age.” In Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. Glyn Adley and David Frisby, 225– 300. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——. 1988. Diskurs und Verantwortung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1998. Auseinandersetzungen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge. Forst, Rainer. 2012. The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice. Trans. Jeffrey Flynn. New York: Columbia University Press. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Günther, Klaus. 1993. The Sense of Appropriateness: Application Discourses in Morality and Law. Trans. John Farrell. Albany: SUNY Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. “Justice and Solidarity: On the Discussion Concerning Stage 6.” In The Moral Domain, trans. Shierry W. Nicholsen and Thomas E. Wren, 224–251. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 2003. “Norms and Values: On Hilary Putnam’s Kantian Pragmatism.” In Truth and Justification, trans. Barbara Fultner, 213–236. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Honneth, Axel. 2007. Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Cambridge: Polity. Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1981. The Philosophy of Moral Development. New York: Harper & Row. Lafont, Cristina. 1988. “Pluralism and Universalism in Discourse Ethics.” In A Matter of Discourse, ed. Amos Nascimento, 55–78. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lorenzen, Paul. 1969. Normative Logic and Ethics. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut. Putnam, Hilary. 2002. “Values and Norms.” In The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays, 111–134. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Rawls, John. 2005. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Seel, Martin. 1995. Versuch über die Form des Glücks. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Tugendhat, Ernst. 1984. Probleme der Ethik. Stuttgart: Reclam. Wellmer, Albrecht. 1991. “Ethics and Dialogue: Elements of Moral Judgment in Kant and Discourse Ethics.” In The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley, 113–231. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Williams, Bernard. 1981. Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wingert, Lutz. 1993. Gemeinsinn und Moral. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

37 DEFENSE OF MODERNIT Y The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985): Modernity as Rationalization and the Critique of Instrumental Reason SE YL A BENHABIB

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ince Max Weber’s well-known theory that characterized the fate of modern societies in terms of the concept of “rationalization,” the relationship between the project of occidental rationalism and the structural problems and contradictions of modern capitalist societies has preoccupied thinkers of the Frankfurt School. The early Frankfurt School’s critique of “instrumental reason” continues the legacy of Weberian-Marxism (Lukács 1971 [1923], Löwith 1993, Merleau-Ponty 1968). They combined Weber’s theses about societal modernization with Marx’s analysis of the commodity form and predicted that in the major institutions of modern societies, such as the state, public and private bureaucracies, the capitalist firm, courts, the army, and the schools, “rationalized” modes of relationship and behavior would spread. Rationalization and the commodity form involved the segmentation of complex tasks, relationships, and issues (Sachverhalte) into fragments of equal and fungible units that would be governed by calculable and formal rules and procedures that in turn would be interchangeable, predictable, and hence “indifferent” to material qualities. Just as the commodity form reduced all material objects and human relationships to formal equivalencies that could be exchanged in the marketplace for money, so too rationalization abstracted from the personality of the individuals involved in positions of authority and made them into faceless bureaucrats and taskmasters. As is well known, for Weber these processes of rationalization were highly equivocal: they did not result in the augmentation of freedom or of meaning. Quite to the contrary, societal rationalization produced a loss of freedom, and “narrow specialists without mind, pleasure-seekers without heart; in its conceit, this nothingness imagines it has climbed to a level of humanity never before attained” (Weber 2002 [1905], 124). Rationalization, however, did not only apply to processes of societal modernization. Rationalization also meant the loss of magic; the rise of differentiation among value spheres such as science, jurisprudence, ethics, aesthetics, and theology; the increase of formalism and systematization; and

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the growth of axiomatic disciplinary procedures. Weber’s assessment of these processes was equally ambivalent: in his view, they only led to the further fragmentation of value; ironically, modern rationalism could not justify the commitment to reason as a way of life. In fact, the more rationalized these spheres became, the more difficult it was to justify why one would opt for one value system as opposed to another in guiding one’s life conduct (Lebensführung). Weber, rather, saw the “many gods of old, without their magic and therefore in the form of impersonal forces, rise up from their graves, strive for power over our lives and begin once more their eternal struggle among themselves” (1989 [1919], 23). Cultural rationalization resulted in deadly value struggles, growing incommensurability, and a loss of meaning. After the demise of socialist movements in Europe in the 1920s, the failure of the working classes to prevent the rise of fascism, and the emergence of “state-capitalistic” or “monopoly-capitalistic” structures in fascist Europe as well as the post-Depression United States (1929), Frankfurt School theorists— Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Friedrich Pollock—considered Weber’s “societal modernization” thesis to be irrefutable. Societal resistance was defeated and the contradictions of the capitalist economy smoothed over through the economic intervention of states into processes of distribution and circulation that nevertheless still sought to protect the private-profit principle in the functioning of markets. Despite their agreement with Weber about the loss of freedom in capitalist societies, the early Frankfurt School theorists nonetheless believed that Weber was wrong about cultural rationalism and that an alternative to the formalistic and fragmented forms of rationality was conceivable. The “critique of instrumental reason” conceived of this alternative not as a return to a vision of substantive reason that would reintegrate the differentiated value spheres but rather as a form of critical rationality that would evoke the unredeemed promise of the Enlightenment: that critical thought, human freedom, and a just society were inexorably linked. Increasingly, however, and particularly in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer, this promise of the Enlightenment took the form of an aporia. As they became convinced that rationalization entailed a loss of freedom through the increased domination of technology over human beings and nature, they argued that the very structure of Western rationality, i.e., the demands of a concept-based formal structure of reasoning that had governed Western thought since Plato’s philosophy, itself served as an instrument of domination. With these well-known theses of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which located the tendencies toward domination over nature and of human beings in the early history of the formation of reason in the West in the service of “self-preservation” (Selbsterhaltung), the link between occidental rationalism, modernity, and the project of an emancipated society was hopelessly lost (Benhabib 1986).

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Farewell to the Philosophy of the Subject In his chapter on the Dialectic of Enlightenment, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas takes aim at this work and reminds his readers that the discourse of modernity/postmodernity prevalent in the 1980s revived some of both the themes and problems of the Dialectic of Enlightenment: Thus, in respect to science, morality, and art, the argument follows the same figure: Already the separation of cultural domains, the collapse of the substantive reason still incorporated in religion and metaphysics, so greatly disempowers the moments of reason (as isolated and robbed of their coherence) that they regress to a rationality in the service of self-preservation gone wild. In cultural modernity, reason gets definitively stripped of its validity claim and assimilated to sheer power. . . . If one reduces the critique of instrumental reason to this core, it becomes clear just why the Dialectic of Enlightenment has to oversimplify its image of modernity so astoundingly. Cultural modernity’s specific dignity is constituted by what Max Weber called the differentiation of value spheres in accord with their own logics. (Discourse, 112)

As this passage makes clear, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985; English translation 1990) must be read against the background of Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, published four years earlier, in which he had undertaken a fundamental paradigm change of early critical theory’s account of modernity and rationalization. In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas engaged in a comprehensive rereading of the tradition of Western Marxism from Lukács to Adorno and Horkheimer (Communicative Action, vol. 1, chap. 4; vol. 2, chap. 8), such as to subject Weber’s influential theses of loss of freedom and loss of meaning to a thorough critique. His aim was no less than the radical reorientation of the whole project of a critical theory of society away from the critique of instrumental reason, which he saw as still beholden to the philosophy of the subject. Whether we viewed the subject of modernity in terms of its capacity for self-consciousness and reflection, as modern philosophy from Descartes to Hegel and from Locke to Hume was wont to do, or whether we conceived of this subject in terms of the paradigm of production and labor, as the Marxists proposed, the result was the same: the subject remained monologically conceived, and the uniqueness of the formation of human self-consciousness through linguistically mediated interaction was neglected. The decentering of the subject could only take place with the realization that subject formation

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resulted from the communicative socialization of human beings through the medium of interactions oriented toward reaching understanding. Reason, Habermas argued, is not only reflective but communicative; the subject of reason becomes capable of reflection only as a consequence of socialization in processes of communication oriented to validity claims. The core of reason is not rationalization but reason giving, that is, the ever-fallible, revisable, and contestable exchanges with other subjects with whom we must come to some kind of agreement regarding the contested validity claims of truth (Wahrheit), correctness (Richtigkeit), and sincerity (Wahrhaftigkeit). Registering a validity claim is not the expression of a contingent will; and responding affirmatively to a validity claim is not merely an empirically motivated decision. . . . Validity claims are internally connected with reasons and grounds. To this extent, the conditions for the acceptability of directions can be found in the illocutionary meaning of the speech act itself; they do not need to be completed by additional conditions of sanction. (Communicative Action, 1:301–302)

This shift away from the paradigm of the philosophy of the subject, Habermas believes, results in a theory of modernity as rationalization quite distinct from that of Max Weber’s. If we view reason as a contingent and fallibilistic communicative process of reason giving, then we see that the Dialectic of Enlightenment does not do justice to the rational content of cultural modernity that was captured in bourgeois ideals (and also instrumentalized along with them). I am thinking here of the specific theoretical dynamic that continually pushes the sciences, and even the self-reflection of the sciences, beyond merely engendering technically useful knowledge; I am referring, further, to the universalistic foundations of law and morality that have also been incorporated (in however distorted or incomplete a fashion) into the institutions of constitutional government, into the forms of democratic will formation, and into the individualist patterns of identity formation; I have in mind, finally, the productivity and explosive power of basic aesthetic experiences. (Discourse, 113).

In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas confronts a novel form of skepticism directed toward these claims, which radically questions the emancipatory potential of modern societies. In strange and unexpected ways, these new philosophies defy the paradigm shift from the philosophy of the subject to communicative reason and appear at first sight as a revival, almost a  revindication, of the theses of Max Weber and the first generation of the

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Frankfurt School. The “postmodern skepticism” toward the metanarratives of modernity, announced by Jean-François Lyotard, leaves no alternative for rational life conduct other than the Weberian-Nietzschean struggle of gods and demons. Michel Foucault’s account of the genesis of modern subjectivity in and through the media of increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of governmentality goes even further than Weber in threatening the very possibility of an autonomous subject of modernity, which Weber still could take for granted. In fact, very much like Adorno and Horkheimer, Michel Foucault sees power and domination to be imbricated with the history of subject formation in the West in such fashion that the psychic structures of the modern self are unthinkable without recalling the history of repressions it has been subjected to. And in Derrida’s critique of Western phallogocentrism we hear echoes of that famous sentence from Dialectic of Enlightenment: “From the formalism of mythical names and statutes, which, indifferent like nature, seek to rule over human beings and history, emerges nominalism, the prototype of bourgeois thinking. Self-preserving guile lives on the argument between word and thing” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 47). Derrida uncovers the logic of identitarian thinking upon which such phallogocentrism rests. Since every attempt at such uncovering, however, must itself use the very medium of reason, Derrida initiates a wholly novel mode of reading, one in which the aporetic, the unthinkable, the unknowable, and the blind spots of the text move to the center of analysis via deconstruction. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is both a diagnosis of the times (Zeitdiagnose), of the mood of contemporary societies in the late 1980s, which was then captured by the terms “postmodernity” and “poststructuralism,” and a critical rereading of the blind alleys of modern philosophy that were created in the wake of Hegel and Nietzsche by the still-unquestioned allegiance to the philosophy of the subject. Habermas imposes a strong interpretive grid on thinkers as diverse as Derrida and Bataille, Foucault and Heidegger, Schiller and Castoriadis. The result of this “strong reading” has been continuous and sustained controversy over the correctness and fruitfulness of many of his interpretations. By “strong reading” I mean one in which the immanent critique of the thinkers involved is ultimately designed to show that the difficulties in their thought result from their subscribing to the philosophy of the subject and from their rejecting the communicative turn of reason. Habermas sees Hegel and Nietzsche as the two poles of the problem of modern subjectivity. Hegel characterized modernity as a process of “diremption” (Entzweiung) in his early writings. He attempts to overcome this condition in his mature writings by showing how civil society and the state after the French Revolution can do justice to the claims of the legal subject of rights and to the demands of individual moral conscience. Equipped with these new legal and moral freedoms, the individual can now find his place in a differentiated

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structure of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit), which overcomes the unity but also the naïveté of the Greek polis, which Hegel had idealized in his early writings. Modernity and rationality are intrinsically linked in Hegel’s work, for the modern state is also a rational structure insofar as it is based upon the recognition of subjective freedoms. As is well known, not only this quietistic reconciliation with the modern state, which in Hegel’s presentation still missed all the elements of universal suffrage and a modern parliament, but also Hegel’s more general metaphysics concerning the unity of “essence and existence” (Wesen und Existenz) in “actuality” (Wirklichkeit) fail in view of the strivings of the modern subject. “Hegel inaugurated the discourse of modernity; the Young Hegelians permanently established it” (Discourse, 53). Yet the really radical challenge to the discourse of modernity issues not from Feuerbach or Marx but from Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the first to give expression to that decided irreconcilability between self and society, the individual and the state. Bourgeois modernity needs to be confronted with a more radical gesture than that of revolutionizing the ownership of the means of production. First, the bourgeois Christian civilization must be uncovered in terms of its origins, which lie in the revolt of the slaves against a natural aristocracy. With this revolt, which leads from Socrates to Jesus, also starts the discourse of equality, of conscience and of the need to keep promises. The subject of modernity is formed in and through centuries of repression of instincts and the formation of guilt and bad conscience. The philosopher, as a genealogist and as a physiologist, first tries to understand the sickness of civilization. With Nietzsche’s entrance into the discourse of modernity, the argument shifts, from the ground up. . . . Three times this attempt to tailor the concept of reason to the program of an intrinsic dialectic of enlightenment miscarried. In the context of this constellation, Nietzsche had no choice but to submit subject-centered reason yet again to an immanent critique—or to give up the program entirely. Nietzsche opts for the second alternative: He renounces a renewed revision of the concept of reason and bids farewell to the dialectic of enlightenment. (Discourse, 85–86)

The gesture of the physiologist and genealogist who examines the malaise of the subject of reason returns in the work of Michel Foucault. In Heidegger’s reconstruction of the history of Western metaphysics in terms of a selfdestructive subjectivity unable to grasp its own ontological grounding, Nietzsche’s critique of the modern lives on as well. But there is also another moment in Nietzsche’s work, namely, the turn to art and to the aesthetic as a medium for healing the wounds of modernity. Through poetry, through music, through art, a new subjectivity can at least be intimated. In Thus Spoke

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Zarathustra, Nietzsche creates a quasi-mythical and quasi-prophetic figure to show how a new man, “ein Übermensch,” can emerge to overcome the stench of modern bourgeois civilization. This gesture of overcoming modernity through an aesthetic that defies everydayness and radicalizes the claims of poetic subjectivity is echoed in the work of Georges Bataille and that of the surrealists as well as in the contemporary discourse of some postmodernists. My concern here will not be with whether Habermas has interpreted Hegel and Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, Derrida, Bataille, and many others correctly; although always provocative, at times his readings become overly schematic because of the overall conceptual strategy of the work (see, in particular, the essays by Dallmayr, Norris, Hoy, and Schmidt in Passerin d’Entreves and Benhabib 1996). Rather, I would like to focus on some thematic issues in Habermas’s encounter with the philosophical discourse of modernity/postmodernity that, in turn, point to problems in the paradigm of communicative reason itself and with which the critical social theory of the present has to be concerned over and beyond this particular encounter of the mid-1980s. I  will gather these under four headings: the ethical political significance of modernity/postmodernity and poststructuralism, the problem with the performative, power and the subject, and the role of the aesthetic.

Modernity/Postmodernity and Poststructuralism A terminological clarification is needed first: rather than “postmodernity” and “postmodernism,” I will use the terms “modernity/postmodernity” and “modernism/postmodernism.” This terminology is intended to indicate the difficulty and artificiality of making a clear demarcation between the modern and the postmodern. Many of the sensibilities associated with postmodernism can already be found in the high modernism of Adorno’s aesthetic theory as  well as in the literature of Bertolt Brecht, Eugène Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett (see Wellmer 1991). The work that captured this sensibility most vividly was Jean-François Lyotard’s 1984 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. For Lyotard, postmodernism is characterized by a certain incredulity toward metanarratives, and Habermas’s work is a prime example of the false modernist belief in metanarratives. With his theory of communicative action and the rejection of the paradigm of the subject, Habermas is offering but one more metanarrative, one more discourse of legitimation, to be placed alongside the story of Spirit becoming aware of itself in history (Hegel) or the story of the emancipation of man through labor (Marx). Lyotard (1984) writes: “I use the term ‘modern’ to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind, making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the

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dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutic of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth” (xxiii). Habermas has not directly engaged with Lyotard’s theses; however, Richard Rorty and Richard Bernstein have spelled out the implications of Lyotard’s position for Habermas’s work. In a well-known essay, Richard Rorty (1991) states this very clearly: So we find French critics of Habermas ready to abandon liberal politics in order to avoid universalistic philosophy, and Habermas trying to hang on to universalistic philosophy, with all its problems, in order to support liberal politics. . . . But Habermas thinks that if we drop the idea of “the better argument” as opposed to “the argument which convinces a given audience at a given time,” we shall only have a “context-dependent sort of social criticism.” (165)

Of course, Rorty believes that only context-dependent criticism is valid and that this is really all we need. Habermas’s program of a strong justification of the normative core of reason through an account of communicative action is not necessary to defend the universalistic ideals of bourgeois democracy. “So whereas Habermas compliments ‘bourgeois ideals’ by reference to the ‘elements of reason’ contained in them, it would be better just to compliment those untheoretical sorts of narrative discourse which make up the political speech of the Western democracies. It would be better to be frankly ethnocentric” (168). Within the context of Anglo-American discussions, perhaps more so than in the European one, Rorty’s Lyotard-inspired critique of Habermas focused on the problem of justification of the universalistic ideals of liberal democracies. Rorty sided with Lyotard: all we needed were the “petits recits,” the small narratives of our own Western cultural legacy, our ethnocentric bias, to accomplish this task. We need not universalize to other contexts and cultures, because in doing so, he argues, we would only be continuing the imperialistic and colonizing politics of the Western Enlightenment. Already in the early 1980s there were echoes in these formulations of what became known in the last decades of the twentieth century as the “critique of post-colonial reason” (see here Rorty’s well-known essay “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism” [1983] and Spivak 1988, 1999). When we compare this Lyotard-Rorty argument about the metanarratives of modernity with Foucault’s and Derrida’s contributions, it becomes clear that they do not share this point of view at all. The poststructuralist critique of reason and the postmodern rejection of metanarratives are not the same. Even the term poststructuralism is a misnomer here because all it refers to is a complex set of assumptions about the status of the linguistic sign and the cognizing and acting subject shared widely by many French thinkers in the wake of the

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language philosophy of Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss (Descombes 1980). The subject of knowledge is replaced by a system of structures, oppositions, and differences that, to be intelligible, need not be viewed as products of a living subjectivity at all (Benhabib 1984; 1992, 209ff.). In this vein, Foucault very much produces a new metanarrative of modernity in terms of an archaeology of the modern disciplines of man and the modern subject. His is not a narrative of emancipation but one of repression, not one of freedom but of the ever-increasing power of governmentality and the diminution of freedom. Where Lyotard and Foucault agree, however, is that philosophy is no longer a master discipline of legitimation. Philosophy is displaced by a form of the sociology of knowledge (Lyotard) or by archaeology and genealogy (Foucault). Matters are even more complicated with Derrida and the critique of metanarratives. Ironically, Habermas at times argues in the vein of Lyotard and against Heidegger and Derrida, that they are the ones who move in the horizon of metanarratives. Heidegger’s Destruktion of the history of metaphysics in the name of a forgotten history of Being, which conceives of Being (Sein) only as beings (Seiendes), levels everything in its path. Heidegger sees in the destructive and totalitarian essence of the modern age nothing but the raising of modern subjectivity to an absolute standard (Discourse, 133). Habermas writes: In modernity’s total forgetfulness of Being, the negativity of the abandonment by Being is no longer even felt. This explains the central significance of an anamnesis of the history of Being which now discloses itself as the destruction of the self-forgetfulness of metaphysics.  .  .  . Heidegger cannot, however, understand the destruction of the history of metaphysics as unmasking critique, or the overcoming of metaphysics as a final act of disclosure. . . . Thus, the thinking that uses the ontological difference as a guide must claim a cognitive competence beyond self-reflection, beyond discursive thought. (Discourse, 135–136)

In Habermas’s view, much like Heidegger, the early Derrida as well “takes into consideration ‘the Occident in its entirety’ and confronts it with its ‘other,’ which announces itself in ‘radical upheavals’—economically and politically (that is, manifestly) by new constellations between Europe and the Third World, metaphysically by the end of anthropocentric thought” (Discourse, 161). Whereas Lyotard and Rorty use the critique of metanarratives to deflate the universalistic claims of Western liberalism, Habermas sees the early Derrida’s appropriation of Heidegger’s metanarrative of the self-destruction of modern subjectivity as resulting in a reversal of the constellation between the West and the Third World. One can conclude that while there is no consensus

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among the major thinkers of the modern/postmodern constellation as to whether the critique of modern reason needs to be practiced in the form of a farewell to metanarratives, this epistemological and methodological question is irretrievably linked to an ethicopolitical gesture of pointing beyond Eurocentrism and “bourgeois liberalism.” There is significant convergence among Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault (but not Rorty) that deflating and demystifying the universalist claims of Western rationality is necessary in order to let emerge the alterity of those others whom such reason marginalizes, punishes, exploits, and even exterminates. Lyotard sees the epistemic commitment to les petits recits as leading one to embrace the thought of “primitive peoples,” women, and others. (There is great confusion in Lyotard’s characterization of narrative knowledge, which is sometimes offered as an alternative to modern scientific knowledge; at other times it is described as premodern forms of thought that are historically lost [Lyotard 1984, 19]. The following statement reveals some of the confusions: The scientist “classifies them as belonging to a different mentality: savage, primitive, underdeveloped, backward, alienated, composed of opinions, customs, authority, prejudice, ignorance, ideology. Narratives are fables, myths, legends, fit only for women and children” [27]. Although this may seem like a gesture of solidarity with the oppressed, the ethicopolitical attitude that would follow from such a characterization of “narrative knowledge” is the standpoint of the curator of an ethnological museum but not that of a true conversation partner. See Benhabib [1992, 233ff.]). Foucault retrieves the memory of the psychically ill and the deviant, of the prisoner and the hermaphrodite. And Derrida in his famous essay “The Ends of Man,” (1972 [1968]) gestures in the spirit of the Maoism of 1968 toward the encirclement of the first world by the third, of the town by the country. The “epistemologies of postmodernism” and the critique of Eurocentric universalism go hand in hand (Benhabib 1992). In confronting modernism/postmodernism, Habermas faces a difficult challenge: he has to show that the exclusion of the other is an aberration rather than a fulfillment of modern Western rationality and that the demands of the excluded can be adequately addressed by the practices of a discursively grounded ethical universalism and democratic theory. This question has continued to preoccupy him well beyond The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, and he has returned to it in subsequent works, such as Postmetaphysical Thinking (1994 [1988]) and The Inclusion of the Other (2000 [1996]). Toward the end of the twentieth century, “struggles for recognition” have become a major theme in critical social theory. Habermas has tried to show that communicative reason can do justice to the deep varieties of cultural life forms and that the liberal-constitutional state that honors the integrity of the legal subject can also protect differences among such life forms (Inclusion).

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The Debate Over the Performative The second major issue in Habermas’s encounter with Derrida concerns the philosophy of language. Martin Jay (1992) has named the debate over the “performative” the dividing moment between critical theory and poststructuralism (261–279). This debate refers in the first place to the heated exchanges between John Searle and Jacques Derrida over John Austin’s philosophy of language, an exchange in which Habermas sides with Searle and against Derrida. Furthermore, the dispute around the performative leads directly from the confrontation in the 1980s between critical theory and poststructuralism to the heated exchanges among critical and poststructuralist feminist theorists of the 1990s (Benhabib et al. 1995). Put in a nutshell, the issue is whether what was designated by John Austin as the performative power of speech acts characterizes speech as a whole, as Derrida maintains, or whether by distinguishing between “felicitous” and “infelicitous” speech Austin himself reverts to the myth of “ordinary” versus “parasitical” uses of speech. Derrida asks: Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a “coded” or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way as “citation”? Not that citationality in this case is of the same sort as in a theatrical play, a philosophical reference, or the recitation of a poem. That is why there is a relative specificity, as Austin says, “a relative purity” of performatives. But this relative purity does not emerge in opposition to citationality or iterability.  .  . . Given the structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content. . . . The “non-serious,” the oratio obliqua will no longer be able to be excluded, as Austin wished, from “ordinary language.” (Derrida 1977, 191–192)

This has led Habermas to remark: In this argument, Derrida obviously already presupposes what he wants to prove: that any convention which permits the repetition of exemplary actions possesses from the outset not only a symbolic, but also a fictional character. But it must first be shown that the conventions of a game are ultimately indistinguishable from norms of action.  .  .  . Derrida makes no attempt to “deconstruct” this distinctive functional mode of ordinary speech with communicative action. In the illocutionary binding force of linguistic utterances, Austin discovered a mechanism for coordinating action that places normal

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speech, as part of everyday practice, under constraints different from those of fictional discourse, simulation, and interior monologue. (Discourse, 195–196; emphasis added)

As this long quote makes clear, Habermas sees Derrida’s reading of Austin as being potentially a subversion of the “illocutionary binding force of linguistic utterances,” which in his view are a “mechanism for coordinating action.” But let us be clear that it is not Austin who attributes this force to illocutionary speech acts but rather Habermas, who, through his theory of communicative action, has translated the illocutionary power of speech acts into the capacity of speakers and hearers to coordinate their actions through orientation to validity claims. The illocutionary power of speech is the potential of all speakers of a language to orient their actions to one another through understanding validity claims. Insofar as Derrida claims that every performative is already a “performance” and that there is no distinction between the use of speech on a stage and its everyday deployment, he is not only misinterpreting Austin but subverting the very theory of communicative action. So there is a great deal at stake in the proper interpretation of “performativity.” There are many other dimensions in this complex debate, such as citability, iterability, the intentionality of speech acts, and whether Derrida has confused type with token in his comments on Austin. But Derrida’s rejection of Austin’s distinction between the ordinary and “parasitic” uses of speech leads, in the words of Christopher Norris (1996), to the following: It is the main fault of Derrida’s work, as Habermas reads it, that he has failed to observe these essential distinctions and thus overgeneralized the poetic (rhetorical) function of language to a point where it commands the whole field of communicative action. The result is to deprive thinking of that critical force which depends on a proper separation of realms. (103)

Derrida “levels” the distinctions between philosophy and literature, discourse and rhetoric (Discourse, 185ff.): “This aestheticizing of language, which is purchased with the twofold denial of the proper senses of normal and poetic discourse, also explains Derrida’s insensitivity toward the tension-filled polarity between the poetic-world-disclosive function of language and its prosaic, innerwordly functions” (Discourse, 205). Derrida never forgave Searle and Habermas for their criticism, as his rather ironic and embittered response in Limited Inc. makes clear (see Derrida 1977a, 1977b, 1988). There was no more dialogue about this matter throughout the 1980s. It was up to subtle commentators such as Christopher Norris (1996), Richard Bernstein (1985), David Hoy (1996), and Christoph Menke (1998) to

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show that the lines of this confrontation had been drawn too harshly and that it was possible, even desirable, to “split the differences” (Hoy 1996, 124–147). Yet it was not until the fateful month of September 2001, when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked and both Habermas and Derrida happened to find themselves in New York, that the ice melted and some kind of a dialogue on politics and philosophy was resumed (Borradori 2003). In the early 1990s the concept of the performative migrated from the shores of philosophies of language and into the center of gender theory and the politics of identity movements. Judith Butler’s influential work Gender Trouble (1990) was at the center of this transformation. The concept of the performative now came to mean that processes of identity formation occurred in and through the iterative reenactment of gender roles. Identities, including psychosexual identities, were “constructed” in and through iterative performances. Butler quoted Nietzsche: there was no doer behind the deed, no self behind the act. The self was first constituted or constructed in and through socialization processes. Butler’s purpose in using performativity in this context was to show that gender-identity formation resulted from sociopsychic process of construction and did not correspond to any deep psychosomatic reality. As Simone de Beauvoir had said, “one is not born but becomes a woman,” and performativity was the process through which gender, whether as man/woman, gay/straight, emerged. From Derrida, Butler appropriated the centrality of “iterations,” whose effects could not be controlled by predictable psychosocial contexts, and from Foucault she overtook the theses that the formation of the subject was always also a process of subjugation. There was no “subject” as such, only historically and socioculturally varying processes of subjectivation and subject formation. Although at first sight it may be hard to reconstruct the path that leads from the debate surrounding illocutionary speech acts in Austin to Derrida’s concept of performativity as performance and to Butler’s theory of gender as performativity, there is one central assumption interwoven into all these moves. Whereas for Habermas speech acts can function as performative only insofar as “the illocutionary binding force of linguistic utterances [as] a mechanism for coordinating action” can be preserved, for Derrida, as well as for Foucault and Butler, this presupposes that the subject and his or her intentions are present and manifest in every speech act. Try as much as he may, they argue, Habermas cannot give up the myth of the intentional subject of action and speech—in Nietzsche’s words, “the doer behind the deed.” When asked how, then, speech acts fulfill their illocutionary functions at all, there would hardly be any answer. In Derrida’s case, the focus is not on how speech enables and enframes social life but rather on speech as a form of arche-writing, which is infinitely iterable and can be read and reread by an infinite number of

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others in a process that belongs to the mysterious iterability or citability of language. For Foucault and Butler, social action is simply the medium through which power relations are enacted. Illocutionary speech effects are for them simply power effects. The concept of the performative is now coupled to an inflationary use of the concept of “power.”

Power and the Subject Whereas the Derrida-Habermas encounter led nowhere for a decade and a half, until it was resumed more in virtue of the force of historical events than by the internal logic of the dialogue itself, the same is not true of the encounter with Michel Foucault. Shortly before his untimely death Foucault gave an interview in which he recognized the affinity of his project as a whole to the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Foucault’s theory of power moved on the more familiar terrain of a theory of society and a theory of modernity. According to Habermas, Foucault’s work falls into two broad phases: his early studies, which came to an end with The Order of Things (1970 [1966]) and which were concerned with “the historical a priori of the understanding of Being” of modern sciences (Discourse, 258), and his second phase, which moves from a critical history of the modern human sciences to a theory of power. This development is necessitated because of certain internal difficulties in Foucault’s early structuralist theories, among them the most important being the lack of a mechanism for explaining transitions from one “episteme” to another. In Foucault’s constructions, such transitions became “des événements,” natural events motivated by no logic internal to the epistemes themselves. The transition from an archaeology of knowledge to a genealogy of power was made possible, in Habermas’s view, by Foucault’s reception of Nietzsche’s ideas in the 1970s. “Genealogical historiography can only take over the role of a critique of reason qua antiscience if it escapes from the horizon of just those historically oriented sciences of men whose hollow humanism Foucault wants to unmask in his theory of power” (Discourse, 249). The genealogical method brings with it certain requirements: history must not be written as if the meaning of the past is simply to enable the present; rather, the present must be seen to be the fully contingent result of a series of dislocations and displacements. Furthermore, this new historical method does not aim at hermeneutic understanding but at the clarification of a “context of effective history” (Discourse, 250). The element imbricated in all these processes is power. In Foucault’s genealogy “power” is initially a synonym for this purely structuralist activity; it takes the same place that “différance” does in Derrida. But

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this power constitutive of discourse is supposed to be a power of transcendental generativity and of empirical self-assertion simultaneously. Like Heidegger, Foucault also undertakes a fusion of opposed meanings. (Discourse, 256)

In Discipline and Punish (1977 [1975]), for example, Foucault gives an empirical account of the development of disciplinary technologies, which at the same time, and in conjunction with techniques of surveillance and control, come to constitute their objects as objects of manipulation and control. Habermas’s close reading of Foucault attempts to show that this doubled strategy, which analyzes the genealogy of structures of power while at the same time showing the constitution of the subject of power, is full of mistaken aporias and that ultimately Foucault’s theory of power is “presentist,” “relativist,” and “cryptonormative” (Discourse, 276, 282). Despite these harsh words, one cannot but sense that insofar as Foucault reorients philosophy toward a critical study of cultural and social processes, Habermas feels a certain affinity to his project. As opposed to the Heideggerian construction of modernity in terms of a one-sided history of the metaphysics of power, Foucault provides a conception of power that has empirical force (McCarthy 1991, 43ff.). Nevertheless, Foucault’s “empirical insights and normative confusions” (Fraser) are much too intermingled, and his own standpoint as a social critic is much too self-contradictory. Foucault’s social theory of power lacks the socially integrative dimension of language and is unable to explain how “socialization” also enables an “individuating effect” (Discourse, 287). The discourse of the performativity of power only hides these deep problems, which need to be addressed by a critical social theory. Unlike the abruptly ended dialogue des sourds between Derrida and Habermas, the exchange with Foucault was a productive one. Almost immediately after the publication of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity a series of important commentaries appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1985 Axel Honneth published The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (English ed. 1991), and Nancy Fraser’s early essay “Michel Foucault: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions” was included in a 1989 collection Unruly Practices, which was dedicated to examining the interrelationship between gender, power, and discourse in contemporary societies. The challenge for both authors was to integrate aspects of Foucault’s theory of power into a critical understanding of contemporary society, without dispensing with social struggles and the role of subjectivity in resisting power and by doing justice to the significance of normative considerations both for social actors and the social critic. The encounter with Foucault left significant marks on the critical theory of the present, and the task of integrating a communications-theoretic perspective of socialization and individuation with a complex

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analysis of power relations adequate to contemporary society remains an attractive and important project (Kelly 1994).

The Role of the Aesthetic Dimension Upon receiving the Adorno Prize of the city of Frankfurt, Habermas held a lecture called “Modernity: An Unfinished Project.” This lecture provided the original impetus for the longer book of 1985. In Habermas’s 1980 lecture the aesthetic dimension of modernity/postmodernity, or, as may be more precisely expressed, the interconnectedness of aesthetic sensibilities with political positionings, was stronger and more pointed. Habermas distinguished the antimodernism of the “Young Conservatives” from the premodernism of the “Old Conservatives” and postmodernism of the “New Conservatives.” The young conservatives are those who, in the spirit of Nietzsche, encourage the revelation of a decentered subjectivity; they wish to break the barriers between art and everyday life through subversive acts of imagination and selfexperience. Foucault, Derrida, and Bataille are young conservatives in this sense. The old conservatives are distrustful of aesthetic modernism; they distrust the differentiation of value spheres diagnosed by Weber and advocate some reintegration of reason with a sense of objective ethics and the demands of the natural world. Habermas classifies Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Robert Spaemann under this category. The new conservatives take an affirmative attitude toward the achievements of modernity, as long as it promotes capitalist growth, technological advancement, and rational administration. But politically, they are against the moral and ethical overburdening of politics with extraneous demands and see no dispensation from democracy in solving the problems of modernity. An elitist politics, whether of aesthetes or strong leaders, is preferred. Habermas names the early Wittgenstein, middle-period Carl Schmitt, and Gottfried Benn as belonging to this group. Despite these pointed and polemical characterizations, Habermas acknowledges the impetus behind the experience of aesthetic modernism: the experience of a decentered subjectivity no longer anchored to traditional life forms and left loose on the shoals of modernity, the transcendence of the spatiotemporal disciplinary structures of everyday life through defiant artworks, the rupturing of routinized perceptions and the dialectic of shock and revelation. The autonomy of the aesthetic realm has a transfiguring effect on other rationalized realms of existence. Yet in advanced modern societies, the autonomization of art also implies the growth of a culture of experts and interpreters and an increasing distance

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between the transformative power of art and the lay people. The rigidity and cultural impoverishment of the rationalized everyday cannot be overcome through the gestures of an aesthetic avant-garde. What is needed is the interpenetration in the praxis of everyday life of cognitive interpretations, moral expectations, and affective-aesthetic expressions and evaluations. Here we reach an ambiguity in Habermas’s conceptualization of this “third” domain. Distinguished from the theoretical and practical uses of reason is the aesthetic-evaluative dimension. But this domain refers not only to one value sphere, to one cognitive function among others; the “aesthetic-evaluative” dimension also has the metafunction of setting the tone for the interpenetration and coexistence of all three domains. This sphere is referred to sometimes as the “aesthetic-expressive” and sometimes as the “aesthetic-evaluative.” Its object domain is not clearly delineable in the same fashion as that of the others: affects and emotions, aesthetic and therapeutic judgments as well as ethical concerns find their place here. Just as Kant’s Critique of Judgment suggests a need to reconsider the place of reflective and determinative judgment in Kant’s moral as well as theoretical philosophy, for Habermas too, this third domain opens up a set of problems about the integration and interaction of the theoretical, moral, and evaluative uses of reason. (The first thinker to draw our attention to the problem of judgment in Kant as it affected his ethics and political philosophy was Hannah Arendt [1982].) In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, this problem resurfaces with respect to what Habermas calls the “world-disclosing function of language” in contradistinction to its “communicative” and “action-coordinating” functions. In a crucial passage toward the end of the work, Habermas writes that language discloses the horizon of meaning within which knowing and acting subjects interpret states of affairs, that is, encounter things and people and have experiences in dealing with them. The world-disclosing function of language is conceived on analogy with the generative accomplishments of transcendental consciousness. . . . The linguistic world view is a concrete and historical a priori. (Discourse, 319)

Habermas is here discussing Castoriadis as well as Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. His crucial objection to this view of language is that the transformation of historical worldviews, the passage from one world-disclosive framework and the emergence of another, seem to be completely independent from the everyday praxis of language speakers and their concrete experiences. “Any interaction between world-disclosing language and learning processes in the world is excluded” (Discourse, 319).

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This objection is powerful and repeats Habermas’s claim that Foucault needed to turn to a theory of power because his early theory was quite incapable of explaining the transitions from one episteme to another in the absence of the activity of historical agents. Yet there may be another dimension to the “world-disclosive” function of language. James Bohman (1996) states it clearly: First, he [Habermas] makes world-disclosure one of the “functions” of language; and second, he tries to tame it philosophically by confining it to the delimited cultural domain of art and aesthetic experience. . . . The problem is that Habermas’s deeper concessions do not sufficiently enrich his philosophy of language in ways they might. . . . Rather than link disclosure to art, it has to do with meaning, that is with conditions for making true utterances and statements rather than with truth itself. Once a clearer demarcation and connection between validity and disclosure is established, Habermas has nothing to lose in simply accepting some of those broader implications which he fears for the theory of meaning. (198)

Chief among these implications is that some other uses of language, such as in poetry, in fiction, and in theater, which Austin classified as “parasitic” upon the “normal” use of language, may be closer to a second-order and reflective use in which some constraints of literal use are suspended and reflectively modified by competent speakers. This capacity for “suspending constraints” (Bohman 1996, 208) is very much like the capacity to integrate within the praxis of everyday life cognitive interpretations, with moral expectations, and affective- aesthetic expressions and evaluations. What is assumed in each case is a certain creativity, a fluidity, a loosening of hardened patterns and structures, a capacity to see new configurations and to undo blockages. Disclosure then concerns the rhetorical effect of introducing new perspectives and assumptions into the background set of common knowledge, so that the audience of the utterance comes to acquire a new interpretive framework to modify the rigidities of the old one. Should these assumptions be sufficiently in conflict with entrenched existing ones, the whole common world, and not just the initial problem or interpretation must be repaired or altered. (Bohman 1996, 209)

This alteration or repair of perspectives and frameworks need not be viewed diachronically as the succession of one world-disclosing picture after another. Such alteration and repair can take place synchronically in processes of everyday communication: therapeutic praxis is a mode of teaching the

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individual a new mode of considering his or her own history via the loosening of blockages and of traumatic experiences. Processes of distorted communication that suffer through the absence of perspectival shifts, through the incapacity to take the standpoint of the other, or through the inability to find new vocabularies and new forms of expression need these forms of alteration and repair as well. Art, through the transfiguration of the commonplace (Arthur Danto), at its best helps us achieve some of this, as do forms of therapy, dance, theater, music, opera, and literature. Thus, the communicative and worlddisclosive functions of language may need each other more—and are certainly more interdependent—than Habermas’s threefold scheme of the theoretical, practical, and the aesthetic-expressive uses of reason would lead us to believe. Here too the encounter with postmodernism opens up new venues and inspires future work in critical theory (see Wellmer 1991; J. Bernstein 1989a, 1989b; Seel 1985).

Conclusion Habermas’s encounter with modern/postmodern thought is one of the most sustained attempts in the philosophy of the twentieth century by a thinker rooted in a different tradition to engage in immanent critique and conversation with those of another. Habermas’s remarkable capacities as an immanent critic, a careful and generous, even if contentious reader, were all on display here. His interlocutors, for example, Derrida and Foucault, were incapable of returning the compliment—whether this was because of their temperament, psychology, or philosophical style, or a mixture of all three. But an entire generation of new critical theorists carried the fruits of this encounter in new directions by extending it into a new theory of social power (Honneth and Fraser), into feminism (Benhabib, Butler, Fraser, and Allen), into new venues in the philosophy of science and language (McCarthy, Bohman), into aesthetics (Wellmer, Menke, Seel, and J. Bernstein), and into new venues in democratic theory (R. Bernstein, Brunkhorst, Benhabib, McCarthy). The dominant cultural and political mood of the later 1980s was one of fragmentation, decentration, and an emphasis on the irreconcilability of differences—characterized by that much misused and misunderstood word “difference.” But this constellation did not last long. The beginning of the 1990s brought the civil war in Yugoslavia to Europe, and suddenly the language of “difference” started to sound hollow: what were the differences that we ought to promote, further, and defend? And which forms of difference resulted in deadly confrontations with otherness? Wasn’t the language of difference a vocabulary of hypertolerance or hyperliberalism? What were the institutional preconditions—moral, legal, and ethical—for letting the

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otherness of the other be? Normative philosophy now returned with a vengeance: a theory of power alone could not help us answer these questions at all. The modern/postmodern constellation that emphasized fragmentation and confrontation between the First and Third World in particular was now confronted with the phenomenon of globalization. The “clash of civilizations” was taking place against the background of increasing socioeconomic, transportational, and communicational integration; of increased and intensified contact among nations, cultures, and peoples. Today the insights and intuitions of the postmodernism of the 1980s have flown into the critical theories of postcolonial anthropology and history, which attempt to consider the encounter with otherness in the context of a fragmented but nevertheless global world (Spivak 1988, 1999; Appadurai 1996; Chakrabarty 2000). The philosophical discourse of, and about, modernity is now a global discourse; it is no longer confined to the European continent but takes place among intellectuals from many parts of the world who are themselves children of that potent and ambivalent legacy of Western rationalism. It is a tribute to the power of Habermas’s theory that he has shown us the way to think the legacy of the Enlightenment in a new world.

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38 DEMOCRACY, LAW, AND SOCIET Y Between Facts and Norms (1992): Points of Reference: The Emergence of Political Philosophy from Theoretical Philosophy CHRISTOPH MÖLLERS

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abermas’s legal theory must be understood as part of a much larger project that combines theoretical and practical philosophy in an uncommonly thorough way for the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Habermas (in Truth) has lamented the fact that, in a landscape increasingly distinguished by the division of academic labor, the two perspectives have grown more and more separate (for an expressly different view, see Rawls 2005, 372ff.). At the same time, his writings have proved that this need not be the case. Habermas was interested in matters of political theory from the first, even if he came to address them in systematic fashion only late in his career (a matter to be distinguished from commentary he has long offered on current events). Although the subject of democracy surfaced in his writings early on (Habermas et al. 1961), Habermas was concerned less with how to establish institutions endowed with legitimacy than with freeing citizens to employ the resources afforded by democratic society in order to pursue authentic selfdetermination. That is, Habermas’s early work did not discuss democracy in a legal-theoretical context. A first point of reference for Habermas’s political theory is materialist social theory. This perspective permits him to understand social analysis, prima philosophia, and democratic legal theory as elements of a unified project. In this light, it is clear how the position Habermas articulated in the debate on positivism—his refusal to admit either “apolitical” criteria of truth or empirical falsifications à la Karl Popper—has continued in his later works, including Between Facts and Norms. Materialist social theory demands that systematic questions be addressed historically. Accordingly, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere investigates how the social structure underlying public spaces of critical engagement represents the precondition for democratic self-legislation. In a manner characteristic of the times, the first edition of the book (1962) evinced

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considerable pessimism and skepticism about the possibility of democratic representation (which, indeed, it viewed as a phenomenon of decline, given the dominance of mass media under capitalism). However, by the time that a new edition appeared in 1990—at the very latest—the gloomy outlook had yielded to a milder interpretation. Henceforth, the institutions of the constitutional and democratic state were seen to promote legitimate government; especially with regard to the public sphere, a comparably positive ending was in sight (Facts, 329ff.). (This shift can be explained both by changes in Habermas’s theory and by positive developments in German public space since the 1960s.) A further characteristic of Habermas’s early phase—and a matter related to his project of producing a unified theory—is the effort to identify the political relevancy of social realms that have split off and achieved autonomy, e.g., the natural sciences and technology. From the first, Habermas made it clear that no sphere of society is immune to problems of legitimation. Here, his concerns meet up with those of American pragmatism, which, in questioning the categorical distinction between facts and norms, casts doubt on the separation between theories of truth and theories of legitimation (Truth). Habermas’s engagement with these issues was formulated in systematic terms in The Theory of Communicative Action. At the same time—at least implicitly—this work established a framework that has proven important for the author’s political theory inasmuch as it defines the nature of communicative action and, in so doing, describes the relationship between the system and the lifeworld, which constitute a dynamic unit. Habermas’s understanding of democracy forms part of a comprehensive theory of a society that operates under the conditions of differentiation described by Talcott Parsons (Facts, 73ff.; cf. Luhmann 2004). More important than individual elements, however, is the overall context for Habermas’s view that political legitimation occurs through deliberative procedure. Here, the point of reference is provided by philosophical reflections on truth, which Habermas has translated, by way of discourse theory, into a theory of moral action; his understanding of law and democracy, that is, follows from his conception of truth and morality. Finally, Habermas’s discussion of postmodernism (Discourse) is relevant to his political theory. By challenging French critiques of rationality, Habermas has secured the epistemological foundations of his own view. Without the possibility of justifying norms, Habermas maintains, no form of government/ rule can be legitimate. Whichever side one takes in this debate, one must grant that Habermas’s objections are confirmed ex negativo inasmuch as postmodern French philosophy has mustered no comparably valuable contribution to institutional political theory. (Thus, for Foucault, political engagement and

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theoretical engagement are unrelated activities—and Derrida simply holds to a conception of justice that represents an aporetic and negative form of idealism.)

The More Immediate Context: Political Theory At the beginning of the 1990s, Habermas defined where he stood in the field of political theory. His position duly continues his previous theoretical reflections—especially his longstanding opposition to scientistic “positivism,” on the one hand, and conservative institutionalism, on the other. The decisive context for the theory of democracy presented in Between Facts and Norms is the debate between liberalism and communitarianism in the United States. Characteristically, Habermas articulates his own position by engaging with the works of others, defining his standpoint as the systematic “middle ground” between other schools of thought. In this book, he does so especially by engaging with liberalism of the Rawlsian variety, on the one hand, and, on the other, the communitarian views offered by authors such as Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel. The middle position Habermas stakes out for himself takes distance from the liberal presupposition of stable individual preferences, which must simply be integrated into democratic will formation. (This critique of liberal empiricism—which treats democratic will formation as a matter of aggregation and views individual voices as “facts”—can easily apply to positivism, as well.) Equally, Habermas objects to views that directly assign legitimating value to traditions and conventions—views, that is, that reify real (or putative) forms of cultural identity; here, too, his early critiques of institutionalized thinking are affirmed. Especially in this context, it is clear that Habermas’s political theory is democratic in an emphatic and double sense. For one, it recognizes no political legitimation outside of democratic procedure. For another—and as a true theory of authentically democratic will formation—it rejects reducing legitimation to a matter of “adding up” individual opinions. Beyond what it yields in immediate terms, this methodology holds a broader significance for political theory. In subsequent works, Habermas’s location of a mediating position between communitarianism and liberalism yields his important systematic thesis concerning the equiprimordiality of private and public autonomy. (After all, liberal theories routinely view individual freedom as the primary point of reference, whereas communitarian theories begin with group formations [Vergemeinschaftung].)

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Legitimation and Institution: On the Critical Potential of Theory In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas names Immanuel Kant as the source (Gewährsmann) of his theoretical reflections. However, he neither employs Kant’s markedly individualist view of norms, nor does he make use of his theory of political institutions (which, in fact, is largely absent from his works). On these matters, Habermas proceeds differently. With his thesis of equiprimordiality, he accords public autonomy a greater role than Kant. Moreover, he addresses the institutional design of the democratic and constitutional state in terms that are much more concrete. When he invokes Kant, then, Habermas is concerned, above all, with the uncompromising normativity of his forebear’s theoretical position. From the outset, Habermas has opposed all institutional essentialism (Selbstzweckhaftigkeit)—the positions of, e.g., conservative authors such as Arnold Gehlen and Ernst Forsthoff. On this point, his stance combines with a conception of reason that, even when it encounters practical cognitive limits, in no way admits normative exceptions. The point of such an approach—which, perhaps, also marks its most precarious feature—concerns the extent to which, and in what way, it is possible to incorporate factual historical and political developments. It is easy to see, in The Theory of Communicative Action, the role played by the empirical observation of intersubjective communicative action. Between Facts and Norms, however, produces a different impression: the work seems to deviate from the Kantianism Habermas claims to endorse. From an exterior, political perspective, the critical claims of Habermas’s theory—whether this involves invoking “first-generation” critical theory in The Theory of Communicative Action or the mildly benevolent assessment of Western constitutional democracy in Between Facts and Norms (a matter also in evidence in the foreword to the new edition of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere)—have clearly been relativized. This is all the more apparent inasmuch as a change in method has occurred, as well: the more normative Habermas’s approach is, the more moderate its results prove in terms of social and institutional critique (Facts); conversely, the more his approach incorporates empiricism, the clearer its critical potential seems to be (Communicative Action). Reading Between Facts and Norms from this perspective, it is evident that Habermas’s line of argument is less concerned with proving, in axiomatic fashion, where political order comes from (on the model of Kant’s demonstration of the separation of powers [Gewaltenteilung] [Kant 1996, §45–46]) than with examining standing institutions against the background of a theory of discourse oriented on political processes. In a certain measure, Between Facts and Norms “submits” its theoretical program for review by the democratic and constitutional state. At the same time, however, the tension “between facts and norms” is addressed on a case-by-case basis—especially through the

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critical analysis of constitutional adjudication (Verfassungsgerichtsbarkeit). Consequently, in the method employed—especially as regards the triadic style of its argumentation, which elaborates a position between other theoretical standpoints—the book foregrounds its debt to Hegel. (To be sure, this means Hegel as a philosopher of freedom, whom Habermas has defended—for his theoretical perspective on the French Revolution—against Joachim Ritter [cf. Theory], and not the Hegel who theorized ethical life [Sittlichkeit] as an objective phenomenon.)

Law and Rights Law (Recht) came to play an independent role only late in Habermas’s writings. In The Theory of Communicative Action, it is briefly discussed as a form of strategic discourse—that is, as a means of concealing validity claims in instrumental fashion. At this point, Habermas’s view was still strongly indebted to Max Weber’s notion that the law represents a formalizing tool of means-end (zweckrational) organization—even though, unlike Weber, Habermas addressed the matter in terms of communicative action and, in so doing, sought to justify a conception of rationality that is more comprehensive and normatively substantive. In the course of the 1980s, Habermas modified his critical—but ultimately disinterested—perspective. Between Facts and Norms presents his new understanding of the topic, which is informed by the works of legal theorists who have incorporated the author’s theories of discourse and communicative action into their own works. Above all, Robert Alexy (1989, 2002) and Klaus Günther (1993) have helped Habermas develop a new perspective on the law, which permits the normative standards of his theory to be inscribed in juridical discourse in a much more fundamental way. In particular, Alexy’s “special case thesis” (Sonderfallthese) (Alexy 1989, 211ff.)—which understands juristic discourse to represent a special instance of general practical discourse—permits Habermas’s discoursetheoretical mechanisms for justifying validity claims to be integrated into the interpretation of the law. Now juristic arguments no longer function only on the side of the system imperatives of the legal order; instead, they represent a special form of justificatory discourse. On this basis, the status of the law changes in Habermas’s work to a certain degree, shifting from the side of the system toward communicative action—at the very least, it operates at the border between them. Henceforth, law is to be viewed as a “medium for transforming communicative power into administrative power” (Facts, 169). This development in Habermas’s theory is not surprising in terms of the  overall design of discourse theory. Conditions of discourse are very similar to those of legally organized procedure. The structure of discursive

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procedure—in which all parties affected are given the opportunity to speak, every decision must be made plausible by means of arguments demonstrating that what has been said has also received consideration, and both the validity claims presented and decisions concerning them are subject to evaluation on a generalizable scale (which, for its part, is the product of the same kind of process)—closely resembles fair practices in court. What is more, the distinction between discourses that apply law and those that establish it (Rechtsanwendungs- und Rechtssetzungsdiskurse) (Günther 1993) adds a further element to the connection between legal form and discourse theory. The discourse of legal application reads discourse theory into court practices. When applied, positive law (gesetztes Recht) is subject to a procedure that must be adequate to discourse-theoretical standards. This model permits Habermas to offer a systematically justified answer to different questions of theory and practice in legal and democratic theory. The discourse of legal application enables theory to do without the problematic instance of “the power of judgment” (Urteilskraft) when analyzing the application of rules (Regelanwendung). Kant, in affirming that a rule cannot define its own application, had appealed to “a common sense” (Gemeinsinn) (Kant 2001, §21) that shapes decisions. Such a position is incompatible with Habermas’s ideas. The discourse of legal application does not mean that administration and courts cease to be bound by democratic legislation; indeed, the very opposite is the case: being bound to law is central to their possessing legitimacy in the first place. All the same, one may ask to what extent theory can, in fact, account for the actual achievements of legality (Rechtsform)—or whether, instead, it does not miss precisely what constitutes legality as such (den Eigensinn dieser Form) (Lieber 2007). That is: if no categorical difference exists between the articulation (Setzung) and application (Anwendung) of the law—inasmuch as both are subject to the same procedural logic—then it is not entirely clear why the formal “binding effect” (Bindungswirkung) of law is necessary. In principle, all questions—including those that democratic law is supposed to have already settled—can be taken up again in discourse. The distinction between legislative and juridical procedures—to wit: the received combination of courts being bound by law, on the one hand, and, at the same time, being independent— ultimately remains obscure. Discourses of legal application must orient themselves on the general criteria of discourse theory. Court procedure, then, functions no differently than legislative procedure—if on a different scale. This means, however, that the promise of formal equality, which is key for a positive legal order—which, indeed, constitutes the defining feature of law (der eigentliche Eigenwert des Rechts)—is pushed aside. A similar objection may be formulated with respect to Habermas’s theory of basic rights (Grundrechte). Basic rights may be morally justifiable (Forst

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2012), but they must also be enacted by legislation. In Habermas’s view, they function as “unsaturated placeholders” (Facts, 126). Basic rights “must be interpreted and given concrete shape by a political legislature in response to changing circumstances” (125; this point is articulated even more clearly in Maus 1995). It is not possible, then, that the guarantee of basic rights through interpretation in constitutional law—which can also be directed against democratic legislation—should be justified in this way. Accordingly, Between Facts and Norms (238ff.) discusses constitutional adjudication in a particularly critical fashion. (Thereby, Habermas has imported the American debate about the legitimation of constitutional adjudication to Germany—a pioneering achievement that is rarely remarked on.) Also in this context, the question arises: what is left of “basic law” as a category if it cannot develop an interpretive meaning of its own (Eigensinn) that— at least on an exceptional basis—may turn against democratic legislation? Most democratic constitutions formulate this aspect of basic laws in relatively straightforward terms (notwithstanding justified criticism to be made of the all-too-frequent presumption of constitutional courts); the effects do not seem to promote democratic politics—as Habermas hopes will occur when constitutional adjudication is restricted. For this reason, one may ask whether it would not be more in keeping with his overall project if Habermas worked only with the concept of subjective rights guaranteed by democratic law—and gave up the notion of basic rights that have been secured constitutionally (verfassungsunmittelbares Grundrecht) (Lieber 2007, 197). After all, privileging the democratic elaboration of subjective rights over the juridical verification of basic rights may be seen to cast doubt on the thesis that private and public autonomy are “equiprimordial.” Here, too, the specific sense of legality (der Eigensinn der Rechtsform) remains uncertain in its relation to political procedures of legitimation. The strictly public approach to the interpretation of basic law that Habermas ultimately favors contradicts, in a certain measure, the way he conceives the constitutionalization of an international order (where he seems to accord precedence to foundational principles).

The Theory of Democracy Equiprimordiality of Private and Public Autonomy The systematic point of departure underlying Habermas’s theory of democratic government—the equiprimordiality of private and public autonomy—is inspired by Kant. (“Equiprimordiality,” in turn, seems to be an expression taken from Schelling.) As Habermas views matters, private freedom and

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public participation in democratic government are equally important. They do not stand opposed or prove mutually exclusive but rather must be brought into alignment in such a way that each part reinforces the other. This idea is already present in Kant’s doctrine of right (Rechtslehre), which—with its unified conception of freedom (the “sole human right”)—makes no distinction between private and public liberties. In Habermas’s view, public and private autonomy presuppose each other. Without the opportunity for political participation, meaningful self-determination cannot occur. At the same time, it is only inasmuch as private self-determination is possible that political will formation can take place. The complementary relation finds institutional expression in the reciprocal strengthening of individual rights and democratic voting procedures. In this way, Habermas is able to reconstruct the basis of legitimation for democratic and constitutional states not in terms of hierarchy but as a “circle” of discourse (see the elegant account in Gerstenberg 1997), in which the three powers of government operate with equal rights (gleichberechtigter Arbeitszusammenhang) (Möllers 2008). Constitutionality (Rechtsstaatlichkeit) and democracy, then, do not stand in opposition; rather, they condition and reinforce each other reciprocally (Inclusion, 253ff.). At the same time, Habermas’s view of the task of the law—and especially of basic rights—need not be understood as a necessary consequence of his thesis of equiprimordiality, which not only affords many other (and many more concrete) possibilities for institutional connection but also permits him to situate his theory between liberalism and communitarianism. The permanent movement and proceduralism inscribed in this model excludes all efforts to substantialize legitimation (a point that has also given rise to criticism [Pfordten 2000]). Inasmuch as Habermas has arrived at his conception of democracy by way of theorizing truth and moral justification, he attaches a special value to the justifiability of political decisions. According to his notion of deliberation by democracy, legitimation exists to the extent that there are equal opportunities for participants to introduce their own validity claims to processes of decision making. A discourse that generates legitimation obtains only when rules of discourse are observed and reasoned arguments admitting generalization are employed. (This is not necessarily to be understood as a moral duty to act in a particular way [as has been claimed; cf. Forst 2012]; rather, it represents the cognitive description of a normative context that remains external.) Habermas places his model in opposition to a voluntaristic conception of democracy that understands democratic legitimation as the mere balancing (Abgleichung) of unchanging interests and preferences (which, as such, is easily critiqued along economic lines). He also objects to models of collective will that attach a determinative force to cultural identity. In Habermas’s theoretical framework, matters of this kind belong to the realm of ethical

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particularity, which is entitled to a certain measure of protection but cannot introduce its worldview into democratic discourse without further ado. (At any rate, it cannot do so without offering a mediating justification.) Finally, Habermas’s perspective clearly differs from the “expertocratic” notions that often operate under the cover of “deliberative democracy.” Especially in the field of international relations, there is a pronounced tendency to make the call for reasoned argument the basis of a view in which “dialogue between experts” founds democratic legitimation; here, the unjustified appeal to Habermasian theory is astonishingly widespread (as a monitory example, see Slaughter 2004, 203ff.). The need for procedure should not amount to replacing democratic decision making with debate—and certainly not with debate that is not equally accessible to all (on the relationship between deliberation and democracy, see Lafont 2006). All the same, the question arises whether the fact that Habermas’s conception of democracy ultimately derives from his theory of truth does not expect too much of democratic institutions and assign them tasks that are too great— while, at the same time, paying too little attention to the legitimation potential of freely willed participation that occurs without justification (ohne Begründungsleistung). A thought experiment: an election, which is decided following a deliberative debate, is repeated because a technical error has happened; now— even though there would have been time for another debate (which is a matter in the general interest)—the revote leads to a different result; does the second vote lack legitimation? In other words: one should ask whether the capacity for providing and accepting reasoned arguments and the cognitive use of justifications to arrive at—and develop—an understanding of one’s own (and others’) positions might well be indispensable in the process of democratic will formation but, all the same, whether such an exchange is not, in fact, less than what may reasonably be expected to occur. Do public debates in the media and in parliaments really involve trading reasoned arguments—and thereby constitute a normative requirement—or do they instead represent a cognitive “weighing” of different positions that are simply presented to the public before decisions are made (Rawls 2005, 385ff.)? Such a “strong” conception of politics—which holds that politics is independent of reason—is just as foreign to Habermas’s theory as the view that continuous disagreement would prove productive (Engländer 2002, 157ff.). In Habermas’s view, duties of justification (Begründungsleistungen) should not be built into the public-political order (Freiheitsordnung) as legal obligations. Doing so would manifestly damage the potential for freely expressing opinions and harm possibilities for democratic participation inasmuch as every instance when judgment occurred—with sanctions—about what can be admitted as a “good reason” to public discourse (and should not, instead, be dismissed as a mere proclamation of one’s personal worldview—or even a

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simple insult) would harm democratic equality. Although self-determination requires that one be able to justify oneself, protecting self-determination means that it must not always be necessary to do so. Here, too—at the border between moral obligation and legal sanction—the specifically egalitarian significance of legality (Rechtsform) is evident.

Communicative Power, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere If law entails the transformation of communicative power into administrative power, then the former represents an important resource for democracy. Taking up Hannah Arendt’s (1970) reflections, Habermas recognizes that social power factors into processes of communication through the open and communal formation of opinion(s). Only if communication of this kind develops can a democratic public sphere exist (Facts, 118ff., 359ff.). This means—and here the concept of “civil society” enters the equation (Cohen and Arato 1992)—that society divides into manifold, asymmetrical associations within and between which communication takes place. In practical terms, a pure “face-to-face” exchange without mediation—the atomized individual, on the one hand, and a democratic collective, on the other—is impossible. In normative terms, too, such a direct opposition would not be desirable. Experiences rooted in the lifeworld can be “made ready” (aufbereitet) for the democratic process only through the structures of civil society. However, the communication that occurs in civil society is subject to other forms of logic, too—in particular, to the logic of the market. A double threat to free communication (which Habermas posits in his thesis of equiprimordiality) is readily apparent when one considers the media. Private autonomy can create a media market that pays attention to events on the basis of economic criteria alone. Thereby, although the state makes public spaces possible, it also makes them dependent on the very political institutions the public sphere is supposed to regulate.

Religion in the Democratic Constitutional State Habermas—largely in agreement with Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde’s (2007, 43) observation that the “neutral” and secular state rests on a foundation it cannot itself guarantee—seems to assign religion a twofold role in the democratic state. On the one hand, as a collective enterprise (Gemeinwesen) that endorses no particular worldview, the state should hold itself out of all religious affairs—just as, conversely, religious claims are not supposed to be “fed into” democratic processes of will formation without further ado. At the same

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time, however, religion factors into the genesis of the democratic and constitutional state. Its positive contribution concerns the cultural underpinning of democratic legal orders and the willingness of society members to accept institutional arrangements that are, in fact, secular (Naturalism, 99ff.). In this respect, the call for religious neutrality follows logically from Habermas’s model of deliberative democracy and from his distinction between morality and ethics: moral commandments are not just relevant to democratic will formation—they constitute it in the first place; ethical imperatives, on the other hand, are exempt from the justification that the democratic process requires. They may be constitutionally (grundrechtlich) protected, but they are not supposed to provide an independent contribution to democratic discourse. To be sure, religion affords especially fruitful terrain for investigating how “good reasons” may be derived from deliberations that engage with a foreign worldview. Here, Habermas draws clear borders—for example, when he declares that democratic parties may not invoke religion in their platforms (Naturalism, 114ff.). The question remains, however, whether the openness of democratic will formation would not be endangered were this in fact to occur.

Citizenship and Constitutional Patriotism Even before Between Facts and Norms, Habermas took up “constitutional patriotism”—a concept Dolf Sternberger had developed apropos of the thirtieth anniversary of the German Grundgesetz (Sternberger 1990; see chapter 48 in this volume). Sternberger, a liberal conservative, sought to develop a concept of patriotism—that is, of affective investment (Anhänglichkeit) in a political order—that would hold independent of the nation-state (in more concrete terms: in view of the division of Germany into East and West). Invoking historical forms of patriotism that preceded the political unification of Germany, Sternberger elaborated a notion of civic pride that does not relate to national identity but to the constitutional order—in this case, to the “Basic Law.” In adopting this concept (Naturalism, 106), Habermas affirmed that a democratic and constitutional state expresses the reciprocal respect (Achtung) of the citizens who have enacted the constitution and henceforth govern themselves with its help. Affective investment in the constitution represents the emotional aspect of such respect—that is, the very concept of the democratic constitution implies it. In a sense, then, all citizens are “republicans by reason” (Vernunftrepublikaner). This model excludes a “strong” conception of patriotism based solely on national qualities (such as, among others, some communitarians endorse); at any rate, identities that have emerged historically possess no inherent value (Eigenwert) that would permit one to dispense with further

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justification. (Were this the case, invoking such qualities would potentially curtail the freedom of others who do not possess them.) Habermas’s relativization of collective identities also means that the concept of citizenship must be reexamined (Facts, 495ff.). After all, a democratic community cannot close itself off to other parties’ requests to be granted civil rights simply by invoking tradition, cultural identity, or ethnicity. Insofar as such parties are governed (unterworfen) by the rules of the democratic community, excluding them is a risky proposition. Moreover, refugees and stateless individuals have a claim to recognition; they, too, must not be excluded without reason. Inasmuch as the democratic state is open to others, the spaces of communication within it stand open as well. Under democracy, identities prove to be formations capable of transformation; consequently, public spheres in democracy may begin to orient themselves beyond borders and to form a transnational space of discourse (Postnational, 51ff., 102ff.). The nationstate must undergo republicanization (Inclusion, 134ff.)—a matter that leads to the problem of constituting democracy beyond national frontiers.

Democracy Beyond the State Europe In keeping with his mistrust of all instrumental claims, Habermas cannot simply tie the mechanisms of legitimation that he has developed to any single institution—and certainly not to the nation-state. In an important discussion with Dieter Grimm (Grimm 1995) about a united Europe’s capacity for democracy, Habermas has explored possible developments in European integration and observed that the form assumed by government represents a necessary condition for democratic legitimation (Inclusion, 157ff.). Thereby, however, the emergence of an international public sphere—that is, of a space of discourse within which political decisions on a European scale can be discussed and regulated—need not be founded on specific conditions (e.g., a shared language). On the contrary: the institutional process of integration can influence the social evolution of Europe as a whole and even improve the social bases for a European democracy—especially the emergence of a party system (Postnational, 102ff.). Therefore, although Habermas holds that no legitimation of rule can exist without democratic procedure, European democracy does not depend on any theoretical (staatstheoretisch) standards of social “homogeneity” (Inclusion, 134ff.). Calls for state sovereignty and social homogeneity—which have been made in the name of democratic principles both in political discussions and in the rulings of the German Federal Constitutional Court

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(Bundesverfassungsgericht) (Kirchhof 1993)—do not hold up to Habermas’s standards for deliberative democracy. Whereas a democratic public sphere requires certain conditions to operate, political communication may occur through the channels afforded by different media. Therefore, the dangers that Habermas identifies in Europeanization (which are the same as the risks he discerns in globalization) do not concern the institutional loss of national statehood so much as the uneven (ungleichzeitig) development of private and public autonomy on an international level. Freedom for private, transnational interests has been achieved more quickly than the internationalization of democratic politics. While this state of affairs has promoted a neoliberal outlook—especially where economic policies are at issue—it has occurred at the expense of concerns for social welfare (sozialstaatliche Anliegen). Habermas holds that the solution involves the further democratization of European and international politics: “expanding Europe’s political capacity for action has to happen simultaneously with the expansion of the basis of legitimation of European institutions” (Postnational, 99f.). (See chapter 39 in this volume.)

Constitutionalization of International Law According to Habermas (see chapter 17 in this volume), it is important for European political identity to take distance from the foreign policy of the United States, particularly with regard to international law. Nowhere is the antagonism between facts and norms more evident than in the ordering of international affairs. In reflecting on the constitutionalization of international law, Habermas explicitly takes up Kant (Divided West, 113ff.). After considering the possibility of “aggressively democratic” international law based on autonomous (selbstbestimmte) and nonindependent (nicht selbstbestimmte) states, he rejects this option. The open politicization of international law it would entail strikes him as incompatible with the mutual respect that should prevail between members of the community of states (Staatengemeinschaft). Although the constitutionalization of international law places its hopes in the recognition and incremental empowerment of individuals—which finds expression in international institutions protecting human rights and the International Criminal Court—this also means that violations of human rights may be used to justify (military) interventions. Constitutionalization, he maintains, remains a matter of legally respecting the right to self-determination. On this point, Habermas’s distrust for nationalism of any kind yields to a comparably large trust—on the level of individual states—in legally established practices. He has also come to view the role of human rights—which,

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in international law, must do without formalization through egalitarian procedures of legislation—in more and more positive terms (Brunkhorst 2005; see chapter 58 in this volume). Institutionally, Habermas wishes to see Kant’s cosmopolitan project realized through a reformed United Nations that is bound to constitutional rules and not subject to national interests as well as through the establishment of regional structures for decision making; here, European integration should show the way to the rest of the world.

References Alexy, Robert. 1989. A Theory of Legal Argumentation: The Theory of Rational Discourse as Theory of Legal Justification. Trans. Ruth Adler and Neil MacCormick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——. 2002. A Theory of Constitutional Rights. Trans. Julian Rivers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harvest. Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang. 2007. “Die Entstehung des Staates als Vorgang der Säkularisierung.” In Der säkularisierte Staat, 43–72. Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2005. Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community Trans. Jeffrey Flynn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Cohen, Jean, and Andrew Arato. 1992. Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Engländer, Armin. 2002. Diskurs als Rechtsquelle? Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Forst, Rainer. 2002. Contexts of Justice: Political Philosophy Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism. Trans. John M. Farrell. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 2012. The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice. Trans. Jeffrey Flynn. New York: Columbia University Press. Gerstenberg, Oliver. 1997. Bürgerrechte und deliberative Demokratie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. Grimm, Dieter. 1995. “Braucht Europa eine Verfassung?” Juristenzeitung 50, no. 12: 581–632. Günther, Klaus. 1993. The Sense of Appropriateness: Application Discourses in Morality and Law. Trans. John Farrell. Albany: SUNY Press. Habermas, Jürgen, et al., eds. 1961. Student und Politik: Eine soziologische Untersuchung zum politischen Bewußtsein Frankfurter Studenten. Neuwied: Luchterhand. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. The Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2001. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirchhof, Paul. 1993. “Europäische Einigung und der Verfassungsstaat der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.” In Europa als politische Idee und rechtliche Form, ed. Josef Isensee, 63–101. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Lafont, Cristina. 2006. “Is the Ideal of a Deliberative Democracy Coherent?” In Deliberative Democracy and Its Discontents, ed. Samantha Besson and José Luis Marti, 3–25. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Lieber, Tobias. 2007. Diskursive Vernunft und formelle Gleichheit. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Luhmann, Niklas. 2004. Law as a Social System. Trans. Klaus A. Ziegert. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maus, Ingeborg. 1995. “Freiheitsrechte und Volkssouveränität.” Rechtstheorie 26, no. 4: 293. Möllers, Christoph. 2013. The Three Branches: A Comparative Model of Separation of Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pfordten, Dietmar von der. 2000. “Rechtsethische Rechtfertigung – material oder prozedural?” In Verantwortung zwischen materialer und prozeduraler Zurechnung, ed. Lorenz Schulz, 17–44. Stuttgart: Steiner. Rawls, John. 2005. “A Reply to Habermas.” In Political Liberalism, exp. ed., 372–433. New York: Columbia University Press. Slaughter, Anne-Marie. 2004. The New World Order. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Sternberger, Dolf. 1990. “Verfassungspatriotismus [1979].” In Schriften, 10:13–16. Frankfurt: Insel.

39 EUROPE, EUROPEAN CONSTITUTION “Why Europe Needs a Constitution” (2001) ANDREW ARATO

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urope and its constitution are important for Habermas for both theoretical and political reasons. Modern constitutions that include fundamental rights, each developed under specific national circumstances, represent key and even indispensable moments of bringing the particular and the universal under a single denominator; hence the concept of constitutional patriotism was developed as the center of an “ethics” that can both motivate and satisfy universal norms. The preconditions were right, namely, a liberal democratic constitution and a political culture capable of recognizing its own highest aspirations in that normative order. In spite of occasional optimism, Habermas was apparently never fully convinced that the German tradition could see itself in this way. His turn to Europe is best explained not so much as a search for a substitute as an attempt to find a more hospitable context for the development of a genuine civic identity also in Germany (Habermas 1991; A Berlin Republic, 161–182; Time, 89–110; Postnational; Faltering, 69–106, 138–183).

Europe and the German Unification The crucial set of events that accelerated this move toward Europe was the unification of Germany in 1990 and its aftermath. For Habermas, this seriously raised the possibility of a re-descent into traditional nationalism. At that time, he believed that there was also a great chance for establishing the foundations of a broader and deeper constitutional patriotism but that the constitutional moment called for by Article 146 of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) had been inexcusably wasted. Therefore, the preservation and perhaps development of the elements of liberal and republican political identities compatible with a multicultural and federal German and a multinational European polity would have to be guaranteed in less direct and more complex ways. His solid

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political sense seemed to convince him of the need for states to remain the primary units of even the ideal or projected cosmopolitan order. Given the dramatic inequality of states, this called for mediations, by intermediate entities, working in both directions. The European Union could be the model, to an extent, as it already was “constituted,” and, even more, as it could be “reconstituted” or refounded. As he recently put it, (strong) regional integrations are needed to empower (the) weak states as well as to enable the relatively successful operation of a world society with few coercive means at its disposal. With respect to Germany, transposing the republican heritage of the nation-state to a reconstructed European Union, as a state recognizing the equality of other states under law, could once and for all block the way to the renewal of nationalism. The same turn to Europe could also lead to far more effective policies, since there were other convincing political considerations at stake. The model of social solidarity (refined as one of economic, political, and cultural inclusion) established by the classical West European welfare states survives, though shaken by the developmental crisis of that social form, the integration of the East, the overly long ideological hegemony of neoliberalism, and, most recently, the explosive issues of immigration in supposedly nonimmigration countries. Habermas rightly sees even more serious dangers coming to this model, which is based on redistribution within a market rationality (that he wishes to conserve), by a form of globalization that rests on deregulation and the exploitation of cheap labor. Social democracy cannot be continued in however a reflexively reconstructed form within the limits of any one state. Left politics will now have to be regionally based and should take the form of extending the achievements of the democratic welfare state beyond its original nation-state limits, both for the sake of justice and because of the fundamental interests of those who today still enjoy its entitlements. That will require a Europe-wide or at least “harmonized” social policy as well as a common tax structure to support it. Note that Habermas has been careful to identify the European project he favors (and articulates therefore mainly on the formal constitutional level) only as the necessary precondition of a new social democracy, one that other political tendencies could and should also support on different grounds. The achievement of international security and peace is the most important of these.

Europe Within a New International Order According to Habermas, only a new international order could provide pacified and legally regulated relations among states. The internal pacification of the European space has already been the great achievement of European integration. Today, neither U.S. imperial dominance (as we see after Iraq) nor the

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equilibrium of armed regions (Großräume) (as will be evident after Georgia) can be relied on to guarantee even the status quo that has for an extended period provided peace and relative prosperity within the region. The only European answer to the new threats (local and asymmetric war, terrorism, ethnic cleansing and genocide, explosive movements of populations, ecological disasters) is to extend the type of political and legal institutions that have been successful in keeping peace and security in Europe to other areas of the world, through multiplying autonomous regions and integrating them in reformed international institutions. This is what he calls transforming classical international law into some sort of cosmopolitan order. As a serious agent in such a development (becoming perhaps another democratic pole in the world order), Europe must be capable of sustained and more unified external action. In order to play the roles allotted, Europeans will have to invent new institutions or at least apply old institutional solutions in innovative ways: given the diversity of states, the federalist formulas of the past are not desirable, but the primarily economy-driven, apolitical, functional method of integration and its uneasy confinement in what is ultimately a treaty organization is no longer adequate. Habermas seems to have abandoned his early (e.g., in a 1996 response to Grimm) adherence to a federalist model on the German example. Even before Joschka Fischer’s famous 2000 speech (which Habermas probably inspired, though it was probably also influenced by Carl Schmitt’s idea of the Bund), Habermas seems to have adopted the model of a third formation, between confederation and federal state. This was uneasily called a “state of nation-states” (in one translation, for an English audience: “federation of nation-states”) as against Fischer’s more clear “federation” (Föderation, contrasted to confederation and federal state), as the best way to describe the regime that Europe could develop to serve both the interest of unity and the integrity of its nation-states. Unfortunately, he never quite committed himself to a clear formula here, perhaps because of his desire to stay clear of Schmitt’s Bund concept, with its insistence on homogeneity among units, even though that concept could and should have been reinterpreted in liberal-democratic terms. His lack of clarity extended to the present as well as the projected future. The issue is not fully explored, but Habermas seems to imply that the present structure is a hybrid of a confederation created by treaties and a federation produced by informal processes. It is left to Brunkhorst to argue more explicitly that precisely this mixed status is the source of the democracy deficit of the whole. It would have been important for Habermas to see the present as an unstable hybrid with serious legitimacy problems, in order to formulate the right answer to go beyond it. Thus, much more importantly, as to the future, he seems to be oscillating between treating the goal as a Bund, or a federation, and the idea of a new hybrid between Bund and federal state as indicated by both the (rather federalist) concept of a “state of nation-states” and the (incoherent or,

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again, federalist) idea of Europe as somehow a “confederation” (Brunkhorst 2004, or his English translator) or federation of both nation-states and citizens.

Popular Sovereignty in Europe It is not surprising that Habermas turns to constitutional theory and the project of European constitution making as the vehicles for making the case for greater integration and to address the democracy deficit. Recovering a dimension of the philosophy of praxis, he once rightly noted that while something like a political culture develops, constitutions can be the object of will and conscious action. While not a major participant in the German constitutional debate in 1990 (which came before his work in legal theory), he expressed his disappointment concerning the manipulative and legally dubious avoidance of what Article 146 mandated. His analysis of the legal and political problems of the highly accelerated democratic process in Germany is still relevant, even though his own proposal, centering on a referendum, was unclear, and even given that certain amendments (in the unification treaty) to the Preamble, to Article 23 (eliminated), and to Article 146 neutralized the object of his worst fear, namely, that the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) was being left open to invite future annexations. It seems very likely that not only his turn to Europe but also his interest in constitution making dates to this experience. Unfortunately, it also linked him to the classical European model of sovereign democratic constitution making, with popular sovereignty interpreted in terms of referenda, understood as the meaning of a “free decision by the German people.” This occurred through an unfortunately common but textually and even doctrinally by no means the only possible (cf. Murswiek 1978; Grimm 1991a, 1991b, 2004, 2005) interpretation of Article 146, which could have been satisfied, e.g., by using a newly elected constitutional assembly, deciding under high consensus requirements, and/or ratifying conventions on the level of the states, American style, or perhaps other democratic formulas. Justified or not, his subsequent attachment to this one particular device as an alternative to governmental decision seems to be based less on his own theory of “popular sovereignty as procedure” than on the intensity of the conviction of the losing side concerning what would have been the right road for Germany in 1990. What he and probably others tended to miss, however, was the priority of a governmental type of decision concerning the procedures and rules of a referendum that always allows several choices strongly influencing the outcome, even in Germany at that time, where voting could have been organized in at least three or four very distinct ways (the Länder, single individuals, by two states, or by one state—the GDR voting alone, as Grimm suggested, before an Article 23 adhesion, and then the two together electing a constituent assembly,

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with or without ratifying referenda, again by states or by individuals), and the role of political power in making these types of choices. Thus the question of how that power could be made legitimate could not even be raised and was in fact occluded by the rhetorics focusing on referenda. That omission was to become serious when Habermas applied what he learned to Europe. In the European case, he actively joined the discussion concerning constitution making, and he has had a very strong influence on the views of some participants. Interestingly, Habermas himself started out in the debates by holding a middle position, which rightly reflected the intermediate type of regime he seemed to advocate for Europe. But that middle position eroded as he set his sights on a Europe that was a federation not only of states but also of citizens. Unlike some legal theorists in the tradition of Kelsen, he very rightly believed that the procedure and process of actual (rather than merely imputed) constitution making mattered for legitimacy, but against some of his own followers he at first did not identify the right process with a fundamentally deliberative or even a fully democratic procedure that would replace the states by individual citizens as the only relevant agents. Indeed, the notion of a federation of nation-states would require only an outcome where the states are brought under the constitution with an amendment rule involving qualified majorities. To create such a constitution (like the American regime up to 1860), only preexisting states (ready to make what is originally a constitutional treaty) but not an already formed people or common citizenry is required. Yet, with the failure of the German constitution-making process (if not its result) and perhaps also misunderstood American examples in mind (which involved no referenda in the European sense), as well as to counter some untenable objections concerning the supposed impossibility of a European constitution, Habermas has come to insist on a popular as distinguished from a governmental role, complementing or even somehow commencing the intergovernmental process. This distinction between people and mere government, contrary to his stress on procedure and his countless earlier warnings against an embodiment model of popular sovereignty, tended to fill the empty place of the king (Claude Lefort) with the majority will in a referendum. Admittedly, instead of seeing the referendum as the expression of the European civic people, Habermas wished to see the method as the beginning of constructing that subject in a Europe-wide debate. After dismissing the red herring of the preexisting homogenous people, he introduces his now famous circular process, where the voluntaristically constructed civic people, whose solidarity does not stop at national boundaries, would be a result of, among other things, the constitution and even the constituent process. The idea and the logic would be unobjectionable if Habermas were proposing a constitution in which all the major political offices of the overarching unit would be derivable from the votes of the same citizens. Having renounced the federal state,

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he is in no position to do this, and he instead counts on political culture, civil society, and a set of publics really open to one another eventually to give substance to the idea of a European people with transborder solidarities. But since these three domains would lead at best to interpenetrating pluralities based on neither equality nor unity—and in any case are going to lag far behind the constitution—his virtuous circle (on which the self-fulfilling prophecy is to be based) is too small. Its burden, and the beginning of the general civic learning process of equal citizens, is to be almost entirely borne by the Europe-wide referendum, to which, to solve the problem, he more recently added the direct election of a (presumably weak) European president. When that last step is taken, the deliberative democrat, in search of a short cut, is in danger of becoming a plebiscitary one. His recent appeal to the European “silent majority” indeed recalls bad examples under American presidentialism. But he vastly underestimates what it would take to establish a regime based in part on plebiscitary legitimacy, even if the structural changes involved were limited. Habermas unfortunately never engaged the systematic discussion concerning the meaning of having a constitution and therefore never clarified whether Europe already has one that needs a fundamental reform or has only a treaty (or even an “imposed charter”) and therefore needs to be constitutionally refounded. The latter, with or without a political revolution, could easily be interpreted as a legally revolutionary act. Accompanied by strong concepts of popular sovereignty, that is how Hauke Brunkhorst and the ARENA group, save Habermas, now interpret the situation. And although he agrees with Brunkhorst that the Treaty of Lisbon is only a bureaucratically driven reform, Habermas does not intend to go so far even when he in fact adopts a proposal in which the idea of popular sovereignty plays such a large role and calls for a referendum that would, as will be seen, break the framework of the intergovernmental process. He is a very reluctant revolutionary. Yet it is unclear, given his relatively unambitious constitutional program, why he is becoming a revolutionary at all and, even more, whether such a revolution “without a revolution” (so unlike Germany in 1990, with the “self-limiting revolution” in the East) could possibly succeed. The contrasting attitudes to the Constitutional Treaty that failed to be ratified in 2005 and the Lisbon Treaty, now also in some trouble, demonstrate the problem. It is quite unclear why the latter is described as having been produced by the most bureaucratic procedure so far, when the former, routinely called by Habermas a “constitution,” has earned his strong support, at least before it failed. Certainly neither one nor the other was the work of any European people, nor was it the product of a primarily participatory process. Neither could be seen as the final version that European institutions should take, especially as neither would have brought the masters of the treaties under the constitution in a genuinely “constitutional” amendment rule based

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on majorities of some kind (Grimm 1991a, 1991b, 2004, 2005). If the admittedly new convention method, with all its initial weaknesses and later deformations by the convention president, Giscard d’Estaing, did distinguish the making of the Constitutional Treaty from mere intergovernmentalism, then it was still the major part of the process that led to the hardly different substance of the Lisbon Treaty. But neither constituent process could be seen as beginning the circular process of citizen production. While the Constitutional Treaty comes closer to a constitution in the formal sense, by uniting all the treaties in a single document, neither treaty satisfied Habermas’s new minimum goals, for example, a harmonized taxation policy, a common foreign policy (in spite of different names for the head of foreign affairs), and a directly elected European president, nor, especially, his earlier goals, such as reducing the Council to a second chamber, genuine parliamentarianism, and the Commission as a more or less differentiated executive branch. It is clear, however, that the option for referenda was greatly reduced by the architects of the Lisbon Treaty, to one country precisely, and perhaps this may be what Habermas is thinking of as bureaucratic, a funny term for parliamentary democracy. The Constitutional Treaty at least was supposed to involve several (nine or ten) national referenda, even if its makers did not have the courage or more likely the power to enact (separate) European referenda on the same day, as some wished. What he has therefore learned from the French and Dutch referenda is not (as others, cf. Dehousse 2006) the inadequacy of this device in complex constitutional matters as the instrument of democracy but that those who wanted to stress the role of referenda even more were right all along. He came to think that it is futile to expect the peoples of ten or especially twenty-seven individual states, voting separately, according to different rules, all to vote positively in referenda on behalf of a Europe that has not been (and cannot be) mobilized on behalf of a common constitutional goal. Referenda remain the key, but their rules must be changed in order to favor the particular result he desires.

Critical Reception To me, Habermas’s positive view of referenda as they are practiced today, even when formally freed of their Bonapartist heritage, as particularly democratic instruments remains inexplicable, especially for the theorist of deliberative democracy. Granted, the instrument has been procedurally cleaned up in postwar European practice, starting with the exemplary making of the Constitution of the Fourth French Republic. (Shortly afterward, early during the Fifth Republic, it was seriously abused by de Gaulle.) Nevertheless, the instrument remains singularly unwieldy for deciding complex constitutional questions, where whole documents can get rejected over heterogeneous

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opposition to very few, separate symbolic items, and it remains dramatically open to political manipulation on both sides. At most it should be regarded as a minor, complementary technique in a genuinely parliamentary democracy. Why are referenda more democratic than parliamentary representation? Why do they express the popular will any more clearly than the vote of representatives? How are we to choose among different rules for referenda? By metareferenda? And similarly, how are referenda to be accomplished in countries like Germany, where they are constitutionally excluded or greatly limited? Unless we want to order unconstitutional referenda, as did General de Gaulle in 1962, only subsequently legalized, we first have to have “governmental” constitutional change: that is, accept, quite illogically, governments in the national foundational role but not in the European one. Finally, if proposing unlikely scenarios, why not at least Fishkin’s and Ackerman’s deliberative polling, which Habermas himself relies on to test (I think not entirely plausibly) the popular sentiment of a European “silent majority” on greater integration (Fishkin and Luskin 2005)? Finally, after the experience of democratic transitions from 1989 in Poland to 1996 in South Africa, we should understand better how to unite democratic legitimacy and constitution making or even how to organize societal discussion concerning constitutions without referenda or plebiscites. When referenda were first introduced by Habermas, the reason seemed to have been normative. Europe-wide referenda, or the political discussions around them, were supposed to be part of the circular process that will produce European citizens. But now the reasoning has shifted in part to a different, more political, even strategic level. Accordingly, “the governments” have failed. And though the French and the Dutch “people” (i.e., all kinds of unlikely coalitions that agreed on nothing positive) voted against a “constitution” that Habermas believed was at least a good start, after the fact we should now think that they were right. And it would be all too easy to agree because the Convention really was not very political (the banishing of voting in favor of something weird called consensus) nor very courageous (especially in expanding democracy and bringing the states, the so-called masters of the constitution, fully under law), and its product was not really very good or consistent and was further diminished by the subsequent Intergovernmental Conference (IGC). Had a Europe-wide referendum been held on the same day, would that have compensated for these flaws? That would have supposedly initiated the beginning of the already noted circular process of citizenship building. This is what Habermas earlier stressed. Yet such a procedure also might have contributed to the success of the thing. This is Habermas’s newer claim, if an implicit one. The Constitutional Treaty accordingly failed because it was not democratic enough; if it had been, it might have succeeded. And undoubtedly a referendum in all countries on the same day could have avoided the false politicization that occurred in France and the Netherlands, and so we cannot tell what would have happened on a “referendum day” even if in that

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case the countries still voted separately, as the failed plans of 2002–2003 would have it. Habermas, however, would like really to make sure. Thus he is now (both before and after the new Irish No) calling for a more radical version, one where both the citizens of Europe and individual countries would be counted but where simple majorities of each would decide. This greater radicality, without a Convention behind him, does not exactly promise success. Indeed, on the strategic level, it is all too easy to predict that what he is proposing cannot possibly happen. His proposal now involves, substantively, a plan for the harmonization (or integration) of European social and taxation policy (the details presumably to be worked out), the popular election of a European president (presumably uniting the two presidencies of the Council and the Commission) in Europe-wide voting (rules unspecified, as usual, though they would greatly matter!), and the establishment of the office of a European foreign minister (powers with respect to Council of Ministers and their voting rules unspecified). So far so good, and it is perhaps not his task to formulate precise proposals. But Habermas is strangely unaware of the literature on the perils of plebiscitary presidentialism from Tocqueville and Marx to Linz and Stepan, and most Europeans in any case are rightly attached to parliamentary government. It is a more obvious problem that Habermas is asking the heads of government to agree unanimously on a new proposal that goes well beyond the Lisbon Treaty, which they could barely agree on in the first place. But the greatest difficulty with all this has to do with the fact that the procedure for achieving what is still only a minimum program would be a Europe-wide referendum, according to a new and unified electoral law (that would first have to be passed unanimously!), held on the same day as the European elections, where a (simple!) majority of states and a (simple!) majority of all voters would have to approve the plan, binding only the states who voted for it. There is a dimension of this argument that should be taken seriously. If the scheme could be realized, the result would be a two-track Europe where only the core would be under the new arrangement, but with easy entry to newcomers from the periphery. Intended as a transitional solution when first proposed by Fischer in 2000, a two-track or two-speed reform may have perhaps become unavoidable at some point, since unfortunately the great expansion of the European Union occurred before the major institutional questions were solved. The proposal allows the film to be rerun, and the error corrected, without excluding anyone from the European Union as a whole. Only it is a matter of the power of the relevant core states whether such a proposal is practicable and not of an ultrademocratic decision, where the legitimacy of the arrangements would come in part from “European” voters who will not be included in that core. Why would indeed an Intergovernmental Conference, where a number of states would be opposed to the scheme, accept a referendum that might lead to

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a two-track solution? Habermas admittedly has in mind the European Council, which unlike the IGC is an organ of the European Union. But substantively it is the same body as an IGC, and it is invited to carry out a coup d’état against itself in the latter capacity. The hurdle of unanimity in any case would still be there. There would also be a decided lack of interest of many governments, especially of smaller states, in ceding the constituent power to some other entity dependent on the weight of sheer numbers, one that does not have the power or the political vehicles to take that role and that, indeed arguably, according to Habermas, does not yet exist. After all, there is no European revolution taking place, led by elites speaking in the name of that future people to support what would be a revolutionary legal act. The legal device is indeed all too transparent. The choice for the procedure of a single-day referendum with all its potential trappings by its very nature favors the outcome. Georg Jellinek would have identified the initial choice as the real moment of the constitutional break. On the part of governments opposed to the plan, the time to stop it would be at the beginning, not during the referenda. Later, after the referendum has been called, they may only have the choice of remaining on the periphery; earlier they can defeat the whole two-track plan and preserve equality among the states of the European Union. Before the Irish vote, Habermas hoped to overcome the built-in limits with the threat of a German-Latin (French, Italian, Spanish) use of the enhanced cooperation provision of the Treaty of Nice, to establish, de facto (by a treaty of four), the two-track structure that others could join. He knew, of course, that he had no ready takers on the part of the relevant governments at the time, but why such a threat should work at all is unclear. The referendum in question would only help organize the states in an inner core, in potentially a far greater number than using the mechanism of enhanced cooperation, and in addition it would add the legitimacy of the voice of an amorphous European majority to support it. That majority would be guaranteed if the candidates for the inner core were mostly large states. Why should those opposed to any such two-track Europe risk a much larger integration in the core? Would not a smaller, more peripheral one that could not marginalize them be preferable? They might take the risk only if the union of the four were to be a lot more federally organized than the plan for the twenty-seven; no one could possibly wish for a new superstate (a new Prussia) in their midst. The powerpolitical threat would have to be raised quite high in order to work, but then the same fears (now of German or German-French dominance of a smaller superstate) may start working for the smaller partners in the projected enhanced cooperation. So, two tracks established through enhanced cooperation will not work as an overly grandiose project, and therefore it won’t work as any kind of threat. In any case, after the Irish No, the idea was again altered. Now the failure of the governmental or bureaucratic process supposedly requires the procedure

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Habermas strongly recommends. The implicit threat is once again only the predicted future failure of functioning. But then why link the procedure to a substantive scheme that is neither on the table, on the one hand, nor really is structurally significant enough (both a foreign minister and a weak elected president could be absorbed in the current hybrid structure, even if perhaps destabilizing it further because of the new element of plebiscitary legitimacy) to justify a radically new mode of ratification? If the argument is from realism (because otherwise even a minimum cannot be accomplished), then link the new procedure to the passing of the Lisbon Treaty itself. Why try to put a different, even if partially overlapping, scheme on the table? And if the goal is really to serve the utopian goal of a more perfect union by means that can be designed, would it not have been better to focus on structural constitutionalization, on what it takes to create a more consistent “federation of nation-states” structure? As against a confederation, a federation should bring the states, previously the masters of the constitution, under the constitution, where any one state would be bound by the decisions of the rest in the relevant area of jurisdiction. This would above all require changing the amendment rule, which could have the added benefit of making future changes both more democratic and participatory and more easy to achieve. And in such a context, the threat of a two-track structure through enhanced cooperation might work much better. Through a new treaty, four or five states could create a more flexible body that could repeatedly decide further constitutional changes through qualified double majorities, unless, to cut this option off, the European Union as a whole adopted such a rule for itself. There would then be no limit to how strong such a federation within the federation (or rather within the hybrid) could become, except its own qualified majority. In such a case, states opposed to both far greater integration and a two-track union would have greater incentives to accept a “revision of the revision,” since by influencing the majorities it would take to change the constitution in the future they could retain their role in change, a role that would be lost if a twotrack structure were created unilaterally by a core. Thus if the threat Habermas has in mind is ever going to be used, it would be a pity to blow it because of democratic expectations that are hopeless shortcuts to European citizenship anyway, rather than focusing on the really important target, a consistent structure of the European Union capable of legitimately changing itself, instead of the informal self-alteration processes now relied on that are inevitably more remote from publicity and participation. At the moment, since the relevant states are not ready for enhanced cooperation, the Lisbon Treaty should be passed, and, given its vast support all over Europe—as well as the probable consequences of its failure—even forced through. Instead of seeing it as a product of merely bureaucratic compromise, Habermas should understand it as in some indirect sense a product also of his

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own efforts, and especially of the Convention for the Future of Europe, which represented a disruption in if not a break with the intergovernmental status quo. And we should all see it as yet another step through which a more perfect and hopefully more democratic Union of Europe can be built, in a process that is still in its early stages. There is, in any case, no finalité for constitutions.

References Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2004. “Polity Without a State: European Constitutionalism Between Evolution and Revolution.” In Eriksen, Fossum, and Menéndez 2004, 88–106. Dehousse, Renaud. 2006. “The Unmaking of a Constitution: Lessons from the European Referenda.” Constellations 13, no. 2: 151–164. Eriksen, Erik Oddvar, John Erik Fossum, and Agustín José Menéndez, eds. 2004. Developing a Constitution for Europe. London: Routledge. Fischer, Joschka. 2000. Vom Staatenverbund zur Föderation: Gedanken über die Finalität der europäischen Integration. (Rede in der Humboldt-Universität in Berlin am 12. Mai 2000). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Fishkin, James K., and Robert C. Luskin. 2005. “Experimenting with a Democratic Ideal: Deliberative Polling and Public Opinion.” Acta Politica 40:284–298. Grimm, Dieter. 1991a. “Zwischen Anschluß und Neukonstitution: Wie aus dem Grundgesetz eine Verfassung für das geeinte Deutschland werden kann?” In Guggenberger and Stein 1991, 119–129. ——. 1991b. “Das Risiko Demokratie: Ein Plädoyer für eininen neuen Parlamentarischen Rat.” In Guggenberger and Stein 1991, 261–269. ——. 2004. “Treaty or Constitution? The Legal Basis of the European Union After Maastricht.” In Eriksen, Fossum, Menéndez 2004, 69–87. ——. 2005. “Integration by Constitution.” International Journal of Constitutional Law 3, nos. 2/3: 193–208. Guggenberger, Bernd, and Tine Stein. 1991. Die Verfassungsdiskussion im Jahr der deutschen Einheit. Munich: Hanser. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. “Yet Again: German Identity: A Unified Nation of Angry DMBurghers?” New German Critique 52:84–101. ——. 1997. “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure.” In Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg, 35–66. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 2007. “What Europe Needs Now. Interview with Jürgen Habermas.” Signandsight .com (March 23, 2007), http://www.signandsight.com/features/1265.html. ——. 2008. “And the Wheels Stopped Turning.” Spiegel Online International (June 18, 2008), http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,560549,00.html. Murswiek, Dietrich. 1978. Die verfassunggebende Gewalt nach dem Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

40 RELIGION, METAPHYSICS, FREEDOM “Faith and Knowledge” (2001) HELGE HØIBRA ATEN

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ürgen Habermas understands his thinking as postmetaphysical (see his eponymous book). The fact that he does not understand his thinking simply to be postreligious—even though he has referred to himself as “tone deaf” in matters of faith—met with interest long before his debate with the future Pope Benedict XVI (Habermas and Ratzinger 2006; Naturalism). Discussion began with Habermas’s speech “Faith and Knowledge,” which he held when he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2001 (Future, Zeitdiagnosen; see Reder and Schmidt 2008, Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007; on themes not addressed here, see especially Absolute, Theory and Practice, and Texte).

A Postsecular Society? The phrase “postsecular society” invites misunderstanding: instead of concerning the end of all religion as a consequence of Enlightenment, it can be understood to involve the return of presecular religion after the end of modernity. Habermas has spoken of the “theological self-understanding of the great world religions,” which represent “the most cumbersome element [das sperrigste Element] of the past” extending into modernity (Reder and Schmidt 2008, 27). Philosophy, he continues, should remain agnostic and not offer a defense (Apologie) for religious belief—“At best, philosophy circumscribes the opaque core of religious experience when it reflects on the specific character of religious language and on the meaning of faith” (Naturalism, 143). The core of religion remains “profoundly alien” to discursive thinking (143). However, inasmuch as Habermas warns of the possibility of “ ‘uncontrolled’ [entgleisend] secularization of society as a whole” and criticizes the limitations of “secular consciousness” (Naturalism, 102, 112, 241, 263ff., 309), one may be tempted to ask whether philosophy’s “circumscription” does not ultimately genuflect before the “opaque

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core”—that is, whether it does not amount to a credo quia absurdum without belief protesting against the nihilism of modernity. Such a view would be mistaken. When Habermas delivered these remarks, he was taking issue with two models of secularization: on the one hand, an interpretation that considers secularization to represent an illegitimate expropriation of religion through worldliness and, on the other, an overly optimistic view of human progress, according to which “religious ways of thinking and forms of life are replaced by rational, at any rate superior, equivalents” (Future, 104). That Habermas does not owe his concerns about the “derailing” effects of secularization to the first model is clear from the demands he places on religious citizens in culturally modern societies. His expectations are secular in three ways: first, religious citizens should display epistemic openness to other religions and worldviews—i.e., they should not shy away from cognitive dissonance (Future, 104; Naturalism, 135ff.); second, they should recognize the “authority of ‘natural’ reason”—notwithstanding the “fallible results” of “institutionalized science”; and third, they should recognize the “principles of universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality” that underlie the modern constitutional state (Reder and Schmidt 2008, 27; Naturalism, 136). Habermas has spoken of the “transformation of religious consciousness” that has occurred in Western culture “since the Reformation and the Enlightenment” (Naturalism, 136). This reflexive turn has often been called the “secularization of religion”—and applauded. Does he agree? Yes. Even if he speaks of “secularization in . . . postsecular societies” (Future, 103), Habermas defends “secularized” religion as religion. As he views matters, “secularized” religion continues to be religion in essence, and it must (be able to) stay this way—i.e., it should remain precisely what is opaque to agnostic ways of thinking. Habermas seeks to overcome an attitude that understands religious traditions and communities as “archaic relics of premodern societies persisting into the present”—an attitude that considers “freedom of religion only as the cultural equivalent of the conservation of species threatened with extinction” (Naturalism, 138). Nonreligious citizens should also observe epistemic openness. “Religious traditions have a special power to articulate moral intuitions, especially with regard to sensitive forms of communal life” (Naturalism, 131; translation slightly modified), Habermas affirms. In this light, his perspective becomes clear. “Secularization has the function less of a filter that eliminates the contents of tradition than that of a transformer that changes the current of tradition” (Reder and Schmidt 2008, 30). Habermas holds that the “current” of presecular tradition has been transformed but that self-reflective secular modernity has not simply discarded the past. Secular modernity is also postsecular insofar as what is cumbersome in tradition (das Sperrige der Tradition) has entered the flow of communicative action and discourse—and not as a burden but as an opportunity.

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“Secularization that does not annihilate operates as translation,” Habermas observes in “Faith and Knowledge” (Future, 114; translation modified). In order to avoid promoting the destructive potential of uncontrolled secularization, he demands of philosophy that it “[conduct] its work on its religious heritage with more sensitivity than heretofore” (Time, 164). The matter concerns “redemptive” translations, as Habermas puts it in Benjaminian terms (see Profiles)—i.e., activity that transforms “original religious meanings” but does not “deflate” or “exhaust” them (Naturalism, 110). In “Faith and Knowledge,” Habermas employs the example of genetic technology (which he explores at greater length elsewhere in The Future of Human Nature). He expresses his unease as follows: “Would not the first human being to determine, at his own discretion, the natural essence of another human being at the same time destroy the equal freedoms that exist among persons of equal birth in order to ensure their difference?” (Future, 115).

“In the Image of God” as Equal Dignity: Freedom and Autonomy Habermas begins “Faith and Knowledge” by acknowledging the religious notion that humanity has been fashioned in the divine image—the idea that God created mankind to be like Him, as free beings. The redemptive act that Habermas envisions translates being-in-the-image-of-God “into the idea of the equal and unconditional dignity of all human beings” (Naturalism, 110). In such a translation, two modern ideas are evident: the one liberal, the other Kantian. The aim of the first is to secure an order of equal liberties or spaces of freedom (Freiheitsspielräume): the individual is to have as much freedom as proves compatible with the same space for others. The individual must accept restrictions on his or her liberties to ensure the possibility of freedom for all—a general order of liberty for all equally born individuals (Ebenbürtige). Now, this general order may also be understood independent of morality. Kant did as much when he observed that a “people of devils” could also found a state insofar as they possessed understanding. Simply for reasons of prudence (aus Klugheitsgründen), we may grant one another spaces of freedom without mutual respect. In such a case, one recognizes that the Other represents a potential danger to one’s own liberty and works to avoid this eventuality by means of a contract for securing equal spaces of freedom (Freiräume). When Habermas speaks of the equal dignity of all human beings, he seeks to go beyond such a purely conditional arrangement. For even if order were established in such a way that all enjoyed the same liberty in actual fact, general respect for human dignity would not underlie it; rather, one would only consider the Other inasmuch as one sought to preserve one’s own freedom and security.

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Kant, on the other hand, posits an arrangement in which all human beings have an inalienable inner dignity that goes beyond the relative value of any “price.” All are to be viewed as “ends in themselves” (Zwecke an sich)—free beings that can set their own purposes and are therefore capable of selfdetermination. In this context, he speaks of “freedom of choice” (Willkürfreiheit), but he already knows what Habermas stresses: that the choice of purposes and means occurs against the backdrop of possible reasons and motivations. And not just that: Kant extends general freedom of choice into an order of general autonomy. Ultimately, then, he affirms that human dignity means the “dignity of a rational being that obeys no law other than that which at the same time it itself gives” (Kant 2012, 46). The matter exceeds mere self-discovery and determination inasmuch as it involves the ability to subordinate oneself to transindividual moral law on the basis of rational insight. Kant pictures a moral order in which autonomous beings respect one another in their self-legislating dignity. No human being should be demoted to a mere means for others; at the same time, however, no human being should be sacrificed on the altruistic altar of an order deemed eternal. When Habermas speaks of the redemptive “translation of the theological doctrine of creation in God’s image into the idea of the equal and unconditional dignity of all human beings” (Naturalism, 110), this Kantian reflection proves decisive. Accordingly, Habermas asks whether the first human being who determines, at his own discretion, the natural essence of another human being at the same time destroys the equal freedoms that exist among persons of equal birth in order to secure their difference. All the same, one might ask: where does this leave the one true God who created mankind—the Almighty, who alone existed before Creation? Should one not trust in this God more than in human beings? In a certain sense, Habermas responds in the affirmative, speaking simply of God “who is love” and “creates, with Adam and Eve, free creatures who are like him” (Future, 114). He emphasizes that one does not need to believe “in order to understand what is meant with ‘in the likeness of God’ [Ebenbildlichkeit]. One knows that there can be no love without recognition of the self in the other, nor freedom without mutual recognition” (114). But why, then, do we need the idea of God at all—why does this idea still say something to “those who are tone-deaf to religious connotations” (114)? All of God’s “prior” love notwithstanding, Habermas conceives the relationship between God and Man on the model of mutual respect and recognition (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 401). If God really is free and decides to create an autonomous human being, this means that He always treats the human being as an end (Zweck) and not just as a means; in other words, “man” can freely determine the particular difference that he is due. Yet at the same

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time, the “expansion of freedom into autonomy”—as “a secularizing-redemptive deconstruction of articles of faith [Glaubenswahrheiten]”—means translating the “authority of divine commandments” into “the unconditional validity of moral duties.” Hereby, autonomy does not go missing; instead, “the echo” of divine gravity (“das Echo” des göttlichen Ernstes) is present in human action. This is also evident, Habermas observes, in the fact that Kant does away with “the traditional representation of divine origin [Gotteskindschaft]” (Future, 114) when he affirms that the human being—as a free entity that binds itself morally—does not need “the idea of another Being above him” (Future, 127; cf. Kant 1968, VIII, 649). But does this not lead to the idea that Man is born equal to God? Does it not simply make God a human being?

The Separation Between Creator and Creation Habermas responds in the negative (see chapter 41 in this volume). His concern lies precisely in “the absolute difference between Creator and Creature.” God, who is Creator and Redeemer in one, does not need “to abide by the laws of nature like a technician, or by the rules of a code like a biologist or computer scientist” (Future, 115). God does not need to “tinker” (basteln) with humanity: “From the very beginning, the voice of God calling into life communicates within a morally sensitive universe. Therefore God may ‘determine’ man in the sense of enabling and, at the same time, obliging him to be free” (Future, 115). If, however, a human being begins to toy with the natural constitution (Sosein) of another—even to make this party better—he not only puts the difference between Creator and Creature in question but also his own autonomy (and in favor of a sovereign will [Willkür], at that). For all that, he does not become God. Habermas maintains that the “aggressive conflict between anthropocentric and theocentric understandings of self and world is yesterday’s battle” (Naturalism, 211)—at least in the European West. Now, however, danger emerges on an “intrahuman” front. Until this point, the natural (naturwüchsig) structure of ways of living has assured the “indisponibility” (Unverfügbarkeit) of human nature, even if practices of “egalitarian and individualistic universalism” have eroded it (211). The inheritance of the good Creator God is threatened by “injury to the communicative constitution of our form of living, which reaches down to its deepest moral dimensions [bis in moralische Tiefenschichten hinein]” (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 401). Magnus Striet, a theologian, has pictured the process culminating in human beings of the future as playthings of “preceding generations” (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 272). Habermas does not conceive this genetic engineer on the model of a God who loves human beings as ends in themselves—nor even as one who

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presumes “at least counterfactually a consent of the concerned other” (Future, 115). Rather, he has in mind a dystopian outcome to social evolution, which he—despite his critiques of Horkheimer and Adorno—has never excluded (and which also plays a role in his debate with Niklas Luhmann [see Legitimation, 134ff.]). Now, secular modernity—whose lifeworld has both been made possible and colonized by systems (money and administrative power)—is threatened by “derailing” secularism. Does Habermas, independent of the social critique he pursues, conceive the human being—unlike God, who is good—as evil? No. However, he does observe: “The unrestrained way in which this biblical heritage is once more dealt with today shows that we still lack an adequate concept for the semantic difference between what is morally wrong and what is profoundly evil” (Future, 110). The person who toys with constructing a genetically superior human being is at risk of slipping into the maelstrom of uncontrolled secularism. Habermas’s “antidote” involves a good God of Creation who demands of mankind that it decide between a Nietzschean self-experiment beyond good and evil, on the one hand, and establishing an ethics of responsibility toward the order of Creation, on the other. On a metalevel, Habermas combines this alternative with the uncontrolled course (Selbstlauf) of capitalism as it is legitimated through philosophies of scientistic naturalism and free choice (Willkürfreiheit), on the one hand, and, on the other, by the possibility of political decision making with outcomes that would still, of course, be open. In turn, he qualifies this opposition inasmuch as the complexity of the issues and the inevitability of further developments make such a dramatic “either/or” impossible and increase the moral weight associated with choosing the “lesser” evil. The situation leads to an unsettling conclusion: we must foresee the continued existence of reasonable disagreement when faced with the “existential question” of “how we are to understand ourselves as members of a species [Gattungswesen]” (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 402–403; see Naturalism, 138; Reder and Schmidt 2008, 34). Such is Habermas’s argument—even though he explicitly declares that his agnostic philosophy of communicative reason cannot be asked to penetrate the “opaque core” of religion (Naturalism, 143). Striet, on the other hand—as a Christian—demands of an honest theology that it address the question of why an omnipotent Deity has permitted mankind to undo the borders that have guaranteed, until now, a shared field of morality (Langthaler and NaglDocekal 2007, 274–275). As the advocate of agnostic philosophy, Habermas— who speaks of “the glowing embers rekindled time and again by the issue of theodicy” (Future, 113)—does not address the matter.

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The Linguistification of the Sacred In chapter 5 of volume 1 of The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas presents his model for how cultural modernity emerges by way of the linguistification of the sacred. Using the work of Durkheim for a thought experiment, he pictures an archaic society that rests on norms admitting no room for criticism. Here, actions occur solely in the context of worship, and all speech is ceremonial; as a result, a feeling of community pervades existence. Social norms count as holy. To be sure, one may deviate from them, for otherwise they would be unidentifiable. (If a norm is to hold, it must be possible to identify—and accuse—instances of nonobservance.) Space for criticism exists only in a limited sense: failure to realize norms is subject to censure, but it is impossible to object to norms as norms. Habermas focuses on archaic societies that are not yet constituted as states and posits the absence of a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical violence. Intentionally assuming such “unrealistic” conditions, Habermas observes that society as a whole is “sacred”—i.e., no profane realms exist within it. In this context, all deviations from the norm are acts of sacrilege: something that “cannot be” yet happens all the same—and can be identified as such. To employ the language of metaphysics (even though it does not exist at this stage of development): the holy order of norms is, whereas sacrilege is not—it is nothing/nothingness (das Nichts). As mentioned, it is presumed that norms cannot be criticized as norms, for they are holy. However, because they cannot be objected to, norms also cannot be justified. Their validity is secured through actions and symbols, but it is not rationally founded. Let us recall that no monopoly of physical power exists in this type of society. If deviations occur, then the entire sacred order threatens to disappear into nothing/nothingness. No defenses exist: first, there are no effective modes for policing behavior, and, second, no norms—however holy—can be justified. Therefore, “moral panic” erupts when infractions occur. Because the “nothing” of nonobservance/violation cannot/must not exist, incursions against norms must be made never to have happened.

Metaphysics This model of archaic societies offers parallels to classical metaphysics. Parmenides holds that only Being is—after all, nothing/nothingness is not. Accepting multiplicity, coming-to-be, ceasing-to-be, or change of any sort— even moving from one location to another—means thinking that nothing/ nothingness exists. (For example, a table is not the floor: it is “not-the-floor.”) According to this view, only the One is—a filled sphere of Being, as it were:

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unchanging, immobile, and unitary, without the holes of nothing/nothingness. Outside, there is also no nothing: the Sphere is all-that-is. Needless to say, Parmenides offers a more complex view than this in his philosophical poem. The point for the purposes at hand, however, is that he inaugurates the tradition of metaphysics by seeking to master the relationship between unity and multiplicity (see Postmetaphysical, 124ff.). Parmenides’s difficult notion of the Sphere of Being forms the intellectual core of the longlived Greek doctrine of a full cosmos arranged concentrically with the earth at the geometrical middle (though not representing the metaphysical center). In this picture, the world harbors a perfection of the second order, as it were: a continuous ladder of things—later called “the great chain of being” or the “layered cosmos” (Stufenkosmos)—which extends from the most imperfect and void (nichtig) entity up to what is absolutely perfect. Such progression does not represent evolution but rather eternal order constituted from on high—which Plotinus later described as emanating from a single, transcendent source. The One and Same, which admits no differences, is already perfect, but it acquires a second perfection through the manifold divisions and subdivisions that emanate from it. Significantly, this model makes it possible to reconcile equality (for example, that of free citizens) with inequality (the status of slaves), thereby assuring—in comparative perspective— “secondary perfection” in a comparative order of ascent from the less to the more perfect. One may view Parmenides’s Sphere of Being in analogy to Habermas’s hypothetical “holy community.” A difference exists, however: if, contra Parmenides, someone were to consider that nothing/nothingness is, in fact, something, this party would be “punished”—that is, disproven—only by means of argument. On the one hand, it would seem that if an error of thought were to occur and be left uncorrected just once, then the entirety of the Sphere of Being would vanish into the abyss of nothing/nothingness. Yet this very argument (whose validity we assume here for the sake of argument) works only as an argument—it exposes an error of thought. A free, discursive space (diskursiver Freiraum) has been opened up, where punishment occurs only by way of refutation. It is not as if the argument eradicated catastrophic “holes” in Being in expiation for human error; instead, a hypothetical possibility of thought (that a multiplicity or change may be said to be) is rejected by referring to the consequences it would hold if true (the destruction of world and thought). At this early stage of cultural/intellectual/social development, free space for thought is slight, to be sure, and thinking moves only to arrive, once more, at the only possible truth: that the One is. Habermas observes, to be sure, that the movement of metaphysical thinking—like efforts to eradicate sacrilege in a ritual setting—expresses fear: “Negation, which opposed the many to the one as Parmenides opposed nonbeing to being, is also negation in the sense of a

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defense against deep-seated fears of death and frailty, of isolation and separation, of opposition and contradiction, of surprise and novelty” (Postmetaphysical, 120). All the same, the matter concerns insight that occurs through reasoned arguments (Gründe). In contrast, thinking in archaic, ritualized societies does not, in fact, possess the unity that the thought experiment of a purely sacred community brings forth. In a mythical worldview, a great array of different kinds of information exists, and this information is ordered in terms of analogies and contrasts that lend the world meaning but, at the same time, express fear that humanity stands defenseless before a universe that it does not control; hereby, the world is explained through invisible forces that, though conceived in analogy to human beings, are immeasurably superior to them (Communicative Action, 1:47–49).

Theoria Greek theoria raises itself to a position above these forces (Übermächte). In an act of “powerful abstraction” that achieves “an extramundane point of reference, a distancing perspective” (Postmetaphysical, 118), it takes Being (das Seiende) as a whole into view. Thereby, contemplation is understood as intuitive unification with the Whole. Because this view also takes in what eternally is (das ewig Seiende), it occurs free from fear and offers “reflexive self-reassurance” (Postmetaphysical, 119). As early as 1965, Habermas conceived of theoria not just as a means of averting mortal terror but also as a process of liberation; he wrote of banishing “interiorized demons in the realm of the soul”: the “purely theoretical perspective, which promises the purgation of precisely these affects, obtains a new meaning: now, disinterested contemplation [Anschauung] clearly means emancipation” (Technik, 154–155, cf. Postmetaphysical, 120). Needless to say, such an element of reflexive self-reassurance and emancipation is precisely what is missing in the model of the sacred in archaic societies. Here, only ecstatic transport through the sacred (Außersichsein im Heiligen) occurs. All the same, a parallel exists even under primitive conditions: inasmuch as a free space of discourse is achieved (however briefly), it is possible to gain insight into the reasons (Gründe) underlying the world as a whole—a matter that involves the possibility of reaching consensus through discourse. In turn, this perspective offers “the model for all concepts of validity, especially for the idea of truth” (Communicative Action, 2:71). For even when “obscurely” felt (72), a “semantics of the sacred” is at hand, which describes something that “exceeds” (übersteigt) (72) reality—an anticipation (Vorform) of theoria in the feeling of what it means to think sub specie aeternitatis (71). The validity of norms under conditions where the sacred does not admit criticism implies

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conceptualizing “supratemporal impersonality” in the form of “idealized agreement” (72). Such a shared view of how the sacred is valid involves something that is authoritative and distancing but that also, and at the same time, makes it possible—“outside” ourselves and within the dimension of holiness—for us to be a “we.” How does the idea of Truth emerge from the notion of sacred norms that are immune to criticism? One can, as detailed above, point to the contrast between moral panic when confronted with sacrilege, on the one hand, and the calm weighing of arguments pro and contra, on the other. Habermas, however—and here he agrees with Durkheim, too—identifies a “borrowing” relationship: the “harmony of minds” that occurs in the experience of the sacred is complemented by a notion of “harmony with the nature of things” (72). This entails a fundamental transformation. Now, knowledge (Erkenntnis) is no longer guaranteed by the moral authority of the sacred: “the concept of truth combines the objectivity of experience with a claim to the intersubjective validity of a corresponding descriptive statement, the idea of the correspondence of sentences to facts with the concept of an idealized consensus” (72). The force of sacred consensus—which is compelling and fearsome, on the one hand, yet “fulfilling” and embracing, on the other—fades from view and yields to a discursive space where claims to validity that admit criticism may be voiced. Accordingly, idealized consensus is no longer just felt; rather, it is achieved (or to be achieved) by discursive means. Yet does this analysis hold for ancient theoria? We have already described it as a free space for the calm evaluation of arguments, but we have not discussed the matter of arguments supported by experience. Is this not, in fact, already modern science? Greek theoria did not involve only philosophical considerations on the structure of the cosmos. It also collected, systematically, empirical facts and mathematical aptitudes and combined them in astronomical calculations. Theoria was, in part, an empirical science, though it did not pursue technological intervention. It was contemplation. If, in addition, it was conceived as an intuitive unification (Vereinigung) with the world, its quasi-descriptive orientation seems not to have been affected. Even though intuitive unification with the universe ultimately means adopting a transcendent perspective beyond all that is merely sensible (sinnlich), the experience is not just mystical and religious but argumentative, as well. The matter concerns an “epistemic ego . . . which can give itself over to the contemplation of what is, freed from affects, lifeworld interests, prejudices, and the like” (1:213). At the same time, the unified world of this theoretical cosmology was not just the immortally eternal and true world but also the good world. Ens et verum et bonum convertuntur. It was also the beautifully ordered world—the crown jewel of a hierarchically arranged, unified cosmos. Seeming multiplicity

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was not viewed as an argument against its unity. On the contrary: if the world (as it appears to mortals) were only true—that is, if it existed in a way that could be described adequately in purely descriptive statements—it would not be real but rather void (nichtig). Ultimately, the epistemic subject of theoria was less concerned with the difference between being and nothingness (Sein und Nichts) than with the difference between what is and what should be (Sein und Sollen).

Metaphysics and Religion: High-Cultural Worldviews Of course, the epistemic moment of contemplation and the holistically rounded mode of validity did not influence the Greek world alone. Habermas is interested, in general terms, in the transition from archaic societies to high cultures—which includes the emergence of the great world religions. The way Augustine’s thought was shaped by Neoplatonic philosophy is well known; the parallel between the Christian notion of the almighty Deity who loves mankind and becomes human Himself out of love for Creation, on the one hand, and Plotinus’s conception of overflowing Oneness, on the other, became historically influential. Habermas speaks of “mythical worldviews” (Communicative Action, 1:44ff.) that emerged in postarchaic, high-cultural societies, assumed the form of knowledge, and served the cosmological legitimation of social hierarchies. Massive increases of inequality occurred—indeed, “barbaric injustice” (2:189). However, Habermas does not mean simply to indict developments that compare unfavorably with more egalitarian, archaic conditions. Innovative experiences of freedom and equality in theoria and the equal freedom of citizens took place. Yet the Aristotelian theory of natural slavery exists in the same framework. There is not yet the universal idea of free and equal individuals in the modern sense, which Habermas conceives as the secularized translation of the “image of God.” What made this idea possible? Habermas’s model for the genesis of modernity holds that the linguistification of the sacred first establishes only “ritually protected normative consensus” (2:70). The further course of development leads from the “authority of the sacred . . . to the binding force of . . . validity claims that can be redeemed only in discourse” (93–94). Does linguistification preserve the sacred? Habermas speaks of the rational structure of linguistification (69), which moves toward a universalistic understanding of “moral agreement” that “was always intended”—namely, “the generality of the underlying interest” (81). Following Durkheim, he describes social evolution as the transformation of collective consciousness, whereby moral obligation is not dissolved but made more humane and rational, based on individual accountability. The process therefore presumes individual accountability. Durkheim speaks of a “cult of the

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individual” (85)—without, however, abandoning the view that morality has a sacred foundation (49ff.). Habermas, in turn, specifies morality that has been “set communicatively aflow and developed into a discourse ethics” as the site where the archaic core of normativity is freed to unfold rationally. He, too, holds that “something of the penetrating power of primordial sacred powers still attaches to morality” (92).

The Differentiation of World Concepts and Validity Claims The model of linguistification includes a theory of how formal concepts of the world and validity claims undergo differentiation. Habermas distinguishes between the objective world as “the totality of all entities about which true statements are possible,” the social world as “the totality of legitimately regulated interpersonal relations,” and the subjective world as the “totality of the experiences of the speaker to which he has privileged access” (1:100). This tripartite scheme breaks with the substantializing and unified conception of the cosmos and with the holistic conditions of validity that are operative in the metaphysics and religions of high cultures. The distinction between the objective and social worlds runs parallel to Hume’s distinction between is and ought; a corresponding difference now holds between truth and normative rightness as validity claims and between institutions (above all, natural science and technology, on the one hand, and law, on the other). The notion of the objective world becomes necessary especially inasmuch as modern natural science breaks through as a distinct sphere, which demotes the “cosmos” to a field of objects that are available to “the nomological sciences” (Postmetaphysical, 131)—i.e., the array of experiences that can be grasped theoretically but only in a descriptive manner, à la Hume. The concept of the social world, in turn, concerns what should be. Without breaking with Kant, Habermas is able to speak of the social world—and not just the moral one—in terms of law because the evaluation of maxims of action through the Categorical Imperative always presupposes the possibility of reflection on the conditions for moral identity through community (Vergemeinschaftung). What is typical of immorality is that one makes an exception for oneself. These concepts of the world are complemented by the formal notion of a “subjective world,” a world of experiences, wishes, feelings, and interests—a world not just of the ego but also of the Freudian id (Communicative Action, 2:99, 389), the realm of the individual. In this context, Habermas speaks of the validity claim of truthfulness (Aufrichtigkeit; see Communicative Action, 1:23). It is very important for Kant that the individual find and determine the “self” in the open spaces that the Categorical Imperative makes available, even

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though his sharp distinction between the intelligible and the empirical world does not allow for an adequate understanding of individuality/individuation, according to Habermas (Postmetaphysical, 158–159). Ever since Kierkegaard, individuation has been viewed as the critical-paradoxical assumption of a particular “life history” for which one must (be able to) answer (166). Yet when Habermas discusses the “claim to individuality” (170ff.), he does not view individuality as the property of the subject (Eigentum des Einzelnen). For him, the subjective and social worlds meet up and merge because the individual’s claim to individuality is constitutively dependent on recognition through others, who raise claims of the same kind (170ff.). One cannot be an authentic individual for oneself alone: the idea can only arise in the social world in the first place. The claim can be measured only on the basis of the critical view that others have on the consistency of intentions and actions. By fusing the notions of a social and a subjective world, Habermas arrives at his conception of a freedom for all subjects—a freedom-in-common inasmuch as mutual recognition occurs, yet one different from person to person. This, in his view, represents a secularized form of the idea of existence in the divine image. Kant had translated his insight into the unconditional nature of moral norms into methodological rigorism—as if it were the case, for example, that the Categorical Imperative could never conflict with the commandment not to lie. Underlying this position is a vision of a world of categorical imperatives admitting no contradiction—a kind of quasi-cosmos of the moral law “within me,” to which Kant, at the end of Critique of Practical Reason, adds the heavens “above me” (without thereby reintroducing the physical cosmos—for it is only the law of morality that offers reassurance of self). Habermas’s reworking of Kantian ethics in terms of communicative action and discourse takes leave of this vision. His theory no longer conceives ethics in terms of the individual subject but rather focuses on communication as it actually occurs—whereby the validity claim of normative rightness still represents a kind of “transcendence from within” (Facts, 17ff.). Now Kant’s moral world is understood more deeply as a social world, which—as such—is set “communicatively aflow.” Habermas’s purposes are clear—and especially in a political sense: to radicalize the theory of democracy and of the constitutional democratic state.

Communication Out of Control? Yet if we take communication as it actually occurs in modern democratic societies: might a danger of secular derailment not lie precisely in such a “flow” (Verflüssigung)? Even if Habermas believes neither in the theory of natural law

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nor in legal positivism but instead wants to consider both within the framework of a theory of communicative reason (see Facts), is communicative “flow” enough to halt the danger of a complete positivization of human nature? How is the morally sacred—whose penetrating power Habermas invokes—to be saved by means of linguistification? Habermas’s first step is to understand society in phenomenological terms— as a cooperative undertaking. Of course, society also contains conflicts and potential for further conflict. All the same, however, communicative-cooperative action takes place without problems for the most part, even if misunderstandings and disagreements can happen. If truly stubborn disagreements arise in communicative action and yield long-lasting conflicts, one may opt for a discursive “timeout” as a drastic measure (Rosskur) (Høibraaten 2001), whereby only factual information and convincing arguments stand at issue. If, then, a solution is found—either in whole or in part—cooperative action may be renewed. If this does not occur, parties typically are formed—which may prove either productive or destructive for society. In the event of enduring conflicts that do not become all-encompassing, the possibility exists for negotiations containing discursive elements (diskursiv aufgemischte Verhandlungen); inasmuch as there is consensus on fair standards of procedure, sanctions may then be used (Facts). In modernity, the cosmos came to be conceived as a field of objects for the nomological sciences because this permitted “the matter at hand” to be grasped more readily (präziser). The universe was now held to be equal to the “objective world” of objects that are available for manipulation through control of natural laws. Truth, as practiced under such conditions, does not preclude profound modifications—as is made clear by experiments with the genetic foundations of sociocultural ways of life that, hitherto, were “naturally grown” (naturwüchsig). In the discourse of the natural sciences, the linguistification of the sacred has led to its dissolution (Auflösung), even though the binding force of criticizable validity claims remains operative. Are matters any different in the normative discourses of morality and law—or in sciences where normative discourses accompany theoreticalempirical ones? When the idea of mankind created in the image of God is translated into the normative postulate of equal rights, permanent free-flowing communication determines its meaning. The idea is no longer guaranteed by a sacred-authoritative instance. In a certain measure, then, one can imagine how mankind might change itself genetically in a legitimate way—which of course does not include the possible case Habermas mentions, when a person alters genetic material “without even presupposing, at least counterfactually, a consent of the concerned other” (Future, 115). Now, humanity as a whole is concerned. All human beings would need to be able to give their consent—and it would be rather paradoxical to exclude future generations from decisions.

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However, since it cannot even be expected that all people now living would agree, it is necessary to imagine a global consensus about procedures that would lead—after lengthy discourses with many opportunities for revision—to a majority decision. Let us assume that such a process is legitimately conceivable. Would this not dissolve the Sacred in the normative field, too, if the decision favored an order that threatened to rob a portion of humanity of its autonomy?

The Image of Salvation Perhaps, then, one may understand Habermas’s reflections on religion in the following historical perspective as a theological “abbreviation”: mankind is both a discursive entity and a potentially endangered one—as is the “transcendence from within” that lends language transsubjective but not absolute power (Faltering, 28; cf. Postmetaphysical, 103–104). For postmetaphysical thinking, the idea of God ultimately remains opaque, yet at the same time, it offers a critical image of salvation. God is all-powerful—the burning core at which, according to Habermas, the question of theodicy is reignited time and again, even for agnostics. All the same—and seeking to move beyond the primal sources of the sacred and to approach theology—let us ask: When did God become all-powerful? Not in the Old Testament, for that would mean reading it through the concepts of metaphysics. As Christian philosophers emerged, they accepted the “invitation” to assume the divine standpoint of theoria. Over time, however— and especially after the anti-Aristotelian measures undertaken by the Bishop of Paris in 1277—the idea was taken seriously that God had created the world (and with it mankind) out of nothing at all. The philosophical consequence was nominalism: what exists (besides God) are individual things, including individual humans, and the individual therefore exists directly unto God (reichsunmittelbar) without intermediary metaphysical layers (Postmetaphysical, 29–30, 122–123). Thereby, God became inconceivably powerful (Høibraaten 2007, Oakley 1984). The impersonal God of ancient philosophers had had little to do with Evil; this also is why the “God’s-eye view” of theoria had been so appealing (schön). Although St. Augustine had already admitted the possibility that God permitted Evil, the doctrine of Original Sin marginalized the effect of the argument. Now, however, the thought experiment expanding God’s power was conducted in a radical manner. If, as Hans Blumenberg has claimed, the legitimacy of modernity is to be understood as human self-assertion against late-medieval theological absolutism, this interpretation—even if it were true

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for modernity—presumes a (productive) misunderstanding of what nominalist thinking was in fact seeking. To think of God possibly as an evil deus mutabilissimus—if one is not simply to conceive Him as a capricious and rather weak tyrannical human within time, that is—means having to impose limits on an unbounded Being both within and beyond space and time. The late-medieval thinker John Mirecourt (Blumenberg 1985, 195) made such a contribution by employing what was later to be called the Kantian idea that “Ought implies Can”: he argued that even if God were able to produce sinful effects directly in human beings, so to speak, conversely he would not be able to coproduce moral accountability for this sin in the “victim” of the “implantations.” But if one expands the omnipotence of God even to this extent and, all the same, holds that He has entered a covenant with mankind, what would a step like this mean in the history of thought? Nominalism reflected on God so radically that it abandoned the theoria position of philosophy. However, belief in the goodness of God remained. The nominalists were unable to assure themselves of an unlimitedly almighty and good God by means of thought alone. This was not thought of as evil on the part of God, however, but attributed to the powerlessness of human thought with respect to unfathomable divine power. Habermas’s postmetaphysical thinking “eschews the rationalist presumption that it can itself decide which aspects of religious doctrines are rational and which irrational” (Naturalism, 143). It observes an abyssal gulf between its own position and the opaque core of religious experience, yet its attitude is neither hostile nor diffident, for the religions of the world belong—like metaphysics—to the history and genealogy of Reason (Naturalism, 6–7, 140). No logical chain leads from the penetrating moral power of primal, sacred forces and the theoretically postulated holiness of an impersonal cosmos to a tyrannically capricious and omnipotent God. Rather, the Deity’s almightiness is expressed as follows: “From the very beginning, the voice of God calling into life communicates within a morally sensitive universe” (140). When Habermas affirms that religious traditions represent an especially forceful way of articulating human life in community, “which appear[s] to have remained more vitally present than metaphysics” (Naturalism, 142; translation slightly modified), he is speaking of this personal God. As Kierkegaard, to whom Habermas has paid due attention from his dissertation onward, once wrote: “That is what cannot be grasped: Omnipotence can not only bring forth the most stately, the world in its visible totality; it can also create the most delicate of all things, a creature independent of it” (Kierkegaard 2003, 113, qtd. in Kodalle 1988, 99).

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References Blumenberg, Hans. 1985. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Trans. Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2007. “Religion in the Public Sphere.” European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1: 1–25. Habermas, Jürgen, and Joseph Ratzinger. 2006. The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Høibraaten, Helge. 2001. “Kommunikative und sanktionsgestützte Macht bei Jürgen Habermas, mit einem Seitenblick auf Hannah Arendt.” In The Angel of History Is Looking Back, ed. Bernd Neumann et al., 153–194. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. ——. 2007. “Post-Metaphysical Thought, Religion, and Secular Society.” In The Holberg Prize Seminar 2005. Holberg Prize Laureate Professor Jürgen Habermas: “Religion in the Public Sphere,” ed. Holberg Prize Seminar, 52–63. Bergen: University of Bergen. http:// w w w .holberg prisen .no /images /materiel l /2005_ sy mposiu m _ habermas .pd f #nameddest=habermas. Kant, Immanuel. 2012. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 2003. The Soul of Kierkegaard: Selections from His Journals. Trans. Alexander Dru. New York: Dover. Kodalle, Klaus M. 1998. Die Eroberung des Nutzlosen. Kritik des Wunschdenkens und der Zweckrationalität im Anschluß an Kierkegaard. Paderborn: Schöningh. Langthaler, Joseph, and Hertha Nagl-Docekal, eds. 2007. Glauben und Wissen. Ein Symposium mit Jürgen Habermas. Vienna: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag. Oakley, Francis. 1984. Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Reder, Michael, and Josef Schmidt, eds. 2008. “Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt.” Eine Diskussion mit Jürgen Habermas. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

41 HUMAN NATURE AND GENETIC MANIPULATION The Future of Human Nature (2001) THOMAS M. SCHMIDT

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epending on one’s temperament and sensibilities, progress in the biological sciences occasions enthusiasm or misgivings. Either way, these advances have prompted calls—which are only growing in number—for points of normative orientation. Genetic technology and biotechnology have not only given rise to philosophical reactions along the lines of applied ethics (e.g., disputes about appropriate standards and codes of regulation). In addition, discussions concerning stem-cell research and changes to human genetic material have brought into focus a basic anthropological question about “the future of human nature.” As Habermas views things, the fundamental provocation represented by preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and embryonic-stem-cell research concerns the fact that the universal morality of reason—which has hitherto offered a reliable standard for normative conflicts in pluralistic societies—must now be placed in a new and differentiated relation to ethical notions about the right life of the human species. It would be mistaken, then, to understand Habermas’s The Future of Human Nature as if it were just another one of his politically influential opinion pieces commenting on current debates. This view, while not unjustified, underestimates the significant revisions of, and changes to, the theory of discourse that Habermas undertakes in the essay. Here, he broadens the relationship between morality and ethics—the theory of what is just and doctrines of what is good—which runs throughout his philosophy as a whole. In consideration of the anthropological challenges catalyzed by new biosciences (and associated ideologies), Habermas addresses, in decisive fashion, the speciesethical framework for a discursive theory of morality and law. In a certain measure, he discusses the “weak” metaphysical preconditions for postmetaphysical morality. Habermas does not revisit—much less revise—the basic points of his theory; rather, he reconstructs their conceptual preconditions at a deeper level. The revolution occurring in the biosciences makes it necessary, in particular, to reexamine and justify the distinction between “the good life”

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and universal moral perspectives of equal respect that are valid for all. The self-understanding of the human species as a whole stands at issue. Accordingly, Habermas combines concrete matters of application and diagnoses of the times with philosophical questions of principle that concern the basic concepts underlying the overall design of discourse theory. To account for—and honor—this complex web of arguments, the first part of this article retraces the steps by which Habermas, in the main section of The Future of Human Nature, arrives at his position on genetic technology and PGD and justifies it philosophically (“On the Way to a Liberal Eugenics?”). The second part (“The Debate on the Ethical Self-Understanding of the Species”) examines two of the most substantive objections to The Future of Human Nature in conjunction with Habermas’s responses to them. (Thereby I principally—but not exclusively—refer to objections collected in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie [e.g., Honneth 2002], as well as to Habermas’s response, which is found in the “Postscript” added to the essay from the fourth edition on.) The third and last part (“Postmetaphysical Answers to the Question: What Is the ‘Good Life’? The Discourse Theory of Morality and Species Ethics”) explores how these arguments are situated within the larger context of Habermas’s philosophy; here, reference is made, above all, to the general considerations the author presents in the first chapter of the book, “Are There Postmetaphysical Answers to the Question: What Is the ‘Good Life’?” (Future, 1–15).

On the Way to a Liberal Eugenics? Habermas begins by observing that medical-biotechnological advances in PGD and stem-cell research have confused fundamental moral feelings and intuitions. For this reason, he understands his essay as an experiment in the literal sense—namely, as an exercise of discursive clarification that seeks to calm emotions of perturbation and fear provoked by biotechnological progress. Such sensations of unsettlement derive from the impression that the distinctions—which, until now, have counted as firm and unchanging—“between the nature that we ‘are’ and the organic endowment we ‘give’ to ourselves” (Future, 12) are no longer clear. A common reaction involves efforts to moralize human nature. Typically, interventions into genetic arrangements are qualified as taboo, and a connection is affirmed between moral integrity and the natural indisponibility (Unverfügbarkeit) of personhood. In reflecting on the current debate “about new regulatory needs” (24), Habermas also considers “the question of the meaning, for our own life prospects and for our self-understanding as moral beings, of the proposition that the genetic foundations of our existence should not be disposed over” (22). At the same time, however, he holds that it is a

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matter of determining the precise nature of the relationship between the inaccessibility of human nature as such and the inviolability of persons. Habermas seeks to give the principle of personal inviolability a meaning that is different from, and independent of, the principle of natural indisponibility. In so doing, Habermas takes issue with the utilitarian view that reduces inviolability to technical matters. According to this position, all that can be done should occur on the basis of individual preferences. This not only means combating genetically conditioned handicaps and illnesses but also heightening human potential—including doping and technologically induced “enhancement”; ultimately, it aims for a “transhuman” “self-transformation of the species” (42). However, such a perspective fails to account for the taboo-like validity of the inviolability of personhood, which affirms the principle of inalienable human dignity. Moreover, it cannot explain, in terms of ethics, the strong feelings of aversion—the sensation of disgust when faced with what seems to be an obscenity—that is triggered by the “chimeric” beings that result when the borders between species are purposefully transgressed. At the same time, Habermas remarks that the opposite, “metaphysical” strategy of grounding personal inviolability in unchanging characteristics of human nature is insufficient. For one, this view underestimates, in technical and pragmatic terms, the plasticity of human nature, which is, in fact, a reality. Accordingly, it proceeds in a politically naïve manner inasmuch as it presumes that the advances of bioscience—which are already operative—might yet be “tamed.” Moreover, this line of argument exhibits epistemological weakness inasmuch as it fails to consider that all substantive ideas about necessary, natural qualities of human beings vary according to the metaphysical ideas one holds about personhood—a matter that ultimately differs depending on the contingencies of worldview under conditions of pluralism. Therefore, Habermas maintains, preserving an autonomous sense of moral respect for personal inviolability must be uncoupled from the notion that (human) nature is inaccessible. It is not possible to derive such a sense from the subjective will of individuals, nor from predetermined, objective, and (supposedly) essential features of “mankind” as a whole. The call for the “moralization of nature” must be understood correctly. Habermas holds that one should reject efforts that engage in “dubious resanctification” (25; translation slightly modified). This means projects that seek to reenchant nature by erecting artificial taboos on the basis of archaic moral feelings of revulsion that occur in the presence of “chimeras created by genetic engineering”—sensations that, restored to “second-order” taboos through reflection, would then perform a functional role in stabilizing human self-understanding. Instead, Habermas affirms that the borders marking personal inviolability articulate conditions under which we may continue “to see ourselves as the authors of our own life histories, and to recognize one another as autonomous

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persons” (25). They are not to be understood as an expression of the premodern project of magically moralizing nature but rather should guarantee “the conditions under which the practical self-understanding of modernity may be preserved” (26). The “moralization of nature,” then, must be understood in the sense of modernity becoming self-reflective. In other words, “understanding the biological foundations of personal identity as something not to be disposed over” (27) can only be justified in a derivative or mediated fashion. The integrity of the moral person is not directly founded in the biological constitution (Ausstattung) of human individuals, even though interventions in this natural substrate change the self-understanding of moral persons and their relation to others in dramatic ways. From a liberal perspective, this dramatic viewpoint hardly seems self-evident. For advocates of liberal eugenics, “new reproductive technologies as well as substitute organs and medically assisted suicide are seen as increasing individual autonomy” (27; translation slightly modified). Accordingly, advocates of liberal eugenics want to leave the decision about genetic constitution to parents and other responsible parties. In a free and democratic polity, the argument goes, decisions about the natural (i.e., genetic) constitution of children must fall under the authority of parents, just as decisions about social and cultural matters—religion, education, diet, etc.—do. According to Habermas, however, advocates of liberal eugenics make it “too easy” on themselves. They overlook the fact that genetic intervention holds far-reaching moral consequences insofar as the familiar and “trusted” basis of moral judgment and action is cast into doubt. Shifting the “line between chance and choice” . . . makes us aware of the interrelations between our self-understanding as moral beings and the anthropological background of an ethics of the species. Whether or not we may see ourselves as the responsible authors of our own life history and recognize each other as persons of “equal birth” . . . is also dependent on how we see ourselves anthropologically as members of the species. (28–29)

Thereby, the further course of argument is set: to clarify in what way and in what precise sense our moral self-understanding depends on species-ethical preconditions. A main point of interest concerns the fundamental categorical changes that new technologies of genetic reproduction have produced. Above all, the matter involves the breakdown of terminological borders between what is “grown” (Gewachsenes) and what has been “made” (Gemachtes)—i.e., the difference between organism (Lebewesen) and artifact (Karafyllis 2003). The negation of the border between what has “become” naturally and what has been technologically produced holds consequences for the logic of

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interpersonal exchange, which is different where genetic programming and natural reproduction are involved. Interventions into genetic material (Erbgut) that are undertaken with the aim of changing traits positively can no longer be understood to express a “logic of healing”—i.e., as therapeutic support for the internal dynamics (Eigendynamik) and self-development of natural organisms. Rather, genetically programmed individuals are the objects of technological intervention. In the case of negative eugenics, such interventions serve to avert damages, risks, and disadvantages that may be viewed as “general ills.” In such instances, then, one may reasonably presume belated agreement on the part of those affected. In the case of positive eugenics, however, changes in qualities (Merkmalsveränderungen) result from the subjective preferences of parents, who wish to have children with particular features and/or talents. Accordingly, the communicative situation that obtains in positive eugenics is wholly different. Here, the parents decide “only looking to their own preferences, as if disposing over an object” (Future, 51). For this reason, Habermas maintains that one must clearly see—and name—the differences that hold between technological changes of genetic disposition (Anlagen) and the pedagogical shaping (Prägung) of attitudes and patterns of behavior. Advocates of liberal eugenics claim that “there is no great difference between eugenics and education” (49); denying this difference represents an argument “to justify the inclusion of the parents’ eugenic freedom to improve the genetic makeup of their children in the scope of parental discretion which is guaranteed anyway” (49). Needless to say, Habermas is fully aware that parents and educators already make far-reaching decisions about newborn and growing children. However, these decisions are, in fact, elective (advokatorisch) and reversible. Because parents and other responsible parties count on the (later) assent of the parties affected, they implicitly consider—at least in logical terms—the possibility that their decisions will be rejected. The matter of consent as a condition of validity for elective actions logically presumes the chance that those affected will be able to say “no.” In turn, this potential presumes the irreplaceable (unvertretbar) individuality of all participants in discourse. According to Habermas, the conditions of the ability-tobe-oneself—manifest in the ability to say “no”—also include “that the person be at home, so to speak, in her own body” (57). The embodied situatedness (leibliche Positionalität) of the individual, as determined by nature, represents the precondition for the discursive affirmation of selfhood through negation. Habermas elaborates his anthropological thesis by drawing on Hannah Arendt’s notion of “natality.” This concept refers to the natural fact of birth as an “irreducible origin” (unverfügbarer Anfang) (58) that conditions the selfunderstanding of responsible social actors. Birth represents the irreducible point of differentiation “between what we are and what happens to us” (60). When birth occurs “naturally,” the parents establish only the starting point

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for the natural and cultural history of the child; it is left to him or her to decide what he or she will integrate into life subsequently—what he or she interprets as an expression of his or her own self-conscious identity. Therefore, it is the indisponibility of natural history that makes the process of socialization into something to be shaped and not merely experienced (erlitten). The dialectical aspect of the irreducible difference between natural destiny, on the one hand, and the process of socialization, on the other—whereby it is also presumed that natural disposition continues into individual social history—is what makes it possible to see every decision and every action as a “new beginning.” However, when genetic programming occurs, this border becomes blurry, for the technician has already intervened in the natural constitution (Naturausstattung) of the individual—as otherwise only parents and other responsible parties do in the course of socialization/education (Erziehung). Yet does the concept of natality really impose convincing “moral limits” on eugenics? Why should a “eugenically programmed” individual not make qualities his or her own that were afforded by engineering in the same way that he or she accepts natural features such as sex, height, eye color, etc.? Until now, such traits have been just as unavailable to and unalterable by individuals by “natural” means as those that genetic engineering will create in the future. The key difference, according to Habermas, lies in the fact that programming—unlike interactive processes of education—does not treat the child as “a second person” (62); instead, he or she remains an object “in the third person.” Genetic intervention opens “no communicative scope for the projected child to be addressed as a second person and to be involved in a communication process. From the adolescent’s perspective, an instrumental determination cannot be revised by a ‘critical reappraisal’ ” (62)—unlike a pathogenic socialization process. For this reason, genetic modifications represent an egregious restriction of personal autonomy; the subject is deprived of authorship over his or her own life, and at the same time—because of the enduring asymmetry between subject and object in the process of programming—the preconditions for “the equal respect which every person in his quality as a person is entitled to” (56) have been abandoned. At best, a genetic engineer “may interpret  .  .  . this intention,” but it is impossible to “revise or undo” it (64). Between the party responsible for programming and the person who is programmed, irreducible intersubjective asymmetry prevails inasmuch as they cannot exchange their social roles. An entirely new kind of social relation results, which “jeopardizes a precondition for the moral self-understanding of autonomous actors” (63). But why should one not think that such missing interpersonal reciprocity might be regulated or compensated for by means of democratically legitimated procedures—as occurs, for example, with problems of distributive justice associated with genetic technology and modern reproductive medicine? In

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fact, righting the symmetry disturbed by genetic manipulation would, it seems, overburden the procedural rationality of the constitutional state. The political consensus required for regulation of this kind would necessarily be “either too strong or too weak” (66). Although one can imagine consensus about the general ills to be avoided through negative eugenics, determining the collective benefit that would define the generally binding goals of positive eugenics would restrict the ethical autonomy of citizens excessively—here, the agreement required would be “too strong.” Conversely, the consensus necessary would be “too weak” if one considered only the formal right of citizens to define, for themselves, the goals of eugenic interventions with respect to their (future) offspring. For this would not free parents of the responsibility they assumed by irreversibly intervening in the natural basis of their children’s selfinterpretation and thereby changing the fundamental structure of their social relationships. Consequently, Habermas arrives at the skeptical conclusion that the practices of positive and enhancing eugenics “cannot be ‘normalized’ in a legitimate way” in “a democratically constituted pluralistic society where every citizen has an equal right to an autonomous conduct of life” (66). With that, the last step of the argument in the main part of The Future of Human Nature returns from philosophical matters of principle to the concrete issue of normatively regulating PGD and stem-cell research in a manner appropriate to a democratically constituted society. On precisely this point, the way Habermas views the relationship between applied ethics, on the one hand, and reflection on moral foundations, on the other, has been criticized from varying positions. While some critics hold that he overshoots the real problems of regulation by being too metaethical, others consider that his efforts to avoid a metaphysically restrained species ethics do not go far enough. In either case, Habermas’s thesis that genetic manipulation puts “our self-understanding as a species” in question represents the core of the debate. Whereas this position strikes advocates of liberal eugenics as overly—and unjustifiably—dramatic, parties who hold to a metaphysical conception of human nature fault Habermas for only going “halfway” with his notion of species ethics.

The Debate on the Ethical Self-Understanding of the Species The Future of Human Nature has been discussed in two settings, above all. In autumn 2001, the arguments presented in the work were discussed at the conference “Law, Philosophy, and Social Theory,” which Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel organized at the New York University School of Law. The first volume (2002) of Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie honored The Future of Human Nature by making it the focus of discussions by Robert Spaemann,

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Ludwig Siep, and Dieter Birnbacher. Habermas’s response to both events was, in turn, published in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie (Habermas 2002). Apart from a few new formulations, it is identical to the “Postscript” added to the book in the fourth, expanded (German) edition (2002). Habermas presents his response as a clarification—not a revision—of his original intuitions and arguments. He first addresses the pronounced differences between the juristic and philosophical cultures of the United States and Germany. “For the pragmatically minded Americans,” he observes, “these new practices, while intensifying familiar problems of distributive justice, don’t generate any fundamentally new problems of their own” (Future, 75–76); this position, in his estimation, both represents “a still-unbroken trust in scientific and technological development” (76) and expresses a tradition of philosophical liberalism (shaped more by Locke than by Kant) that “foregrounds the protection of the individual legal person’s freedom of choice against the state” (76). Against the backdrop of such a liberal culture, “it virtually goes without saying that decisions should not be submitted to any regulation by the state, but rather should be left to the parents” (76). Habermas grants that “parents’ rights to make eugenic decisions” (77) need not directly conflict with the well-being of the child or with his or her liberties (Freiheitsrechte). At the same time, however, adverse effects may occur, in mediated fashion, with respect to affected parties’ understanding of personal autonomy inasmuch as they cease to consider themselves the sovereign authors of their own lives and thereby cease to be able to view themselves as autonomous moral agents. Habermas holds that changes occurring through liberal eugenics could, above all, transform the moral self-understanding of those concerned. Thereby, he stresses, once more, his fear that two essential preconditions for moral action and judgment—the fundamental equality of parties in interactions and the individual autonomy of the moral subject—may be threatened by liberal eugenics. As he views matters, the consequences of liberal eugenics do not concern particular liberties so much as the ways that people are able to understand themselves as enjoying rights at all. Following this restatement of the main arguments already presented in The Future of Human Nature, Habermas addresses four groups of objections to the position he has articulated. The first set concerns the connection between “the practices of an improving eugenics and the ‘alien determination’ [Fremdbestimmung], even if always indirect, of a future person” (79–80). Above all, Thomas Nagel and Thomas McCarthy have offered objections along these lines. A second kind of objection—raised especially by Ronald Dworkin (2000)—involves cases one can easily imagine, when partial modification of characteristics leaves the moral identity of the person intact and does not necessarily damage it. The third set of objections—e.g., those offered by Robert Spaemann—takes issue with the fundamental assumptions underlying a postmetaphysical theory of

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morality; here, the call for a stronger ontological basis for species ethics is voiced. Fourth and last, Ludwig Siep and others have objected that Habermas’s arguments from moral principle contribute little to the normative regulation of the problems prompted by PGD and embryonic-stem-cell research. In the framework of exchanges during “Law, Philosophy, and Social Theory,” Nagel and McCarthy declared that it is “counterintuitive” (Future, 80) to maintain that genetic programming represents a more dramatic interference with human self-determination than do the biological contingencies of “natural” inheritance. One may doubt whether “a young person [would] struggle with manipulated genetic predispositions in the same way as with naturally acquired ones” (82). In response, Habermas has clarified his position and argued that alien determination disturbs the moral agency of a person only “if we assume that the child’s genetic constitution, chosen from among other alternatives, actually reduces the range of her future life choices” (85). It is precisely this eventuality that we cannot foresee. Our “knowledge remains fallible”; therefore, it “may be applied only in the form of clinical suggestions for somebody whom the advisor already knows as an individuated being. . . . A person who potentially stands to benefit from such a decision must always preserve the ability to say no” (90). These remarks are also meant to offer a response to Dworkin, who has objected that Habermas’s argument about alien determination runs dry inasmuch as it is only certain characteristics—and not the morally relevant identity of the person as a whole—that are determined by genetic interventions. Habermas counters by affirming, once more, that his argument about alien determination derives its main force from the fact “that a genetic designer, acting according to his own preferences, assumes an irrevocable role in determining the contours of the life history and identity of another person, while remaining unable to assume even her counterfactual assent” (87). Do these reservations—which involve matters of principle—about the potential moral consequences of positive eugenics offer suitable criteria for drawing “any meaningful conclusions concerning the current decisions on PGD and applied embryo research” (95)? Were one to protect embryonic life by degrees (as Siep and other representatives of the German National Ethics Council [Nationaler Ethikrat] propose), these points of hesitancy would, at best, amount to “ ‘slippery-slope’- arguments” (Dammbruchargumente) (95). The force of such lines of reasoning depends, as a rule, on the dimensions of harm occurring in a worst-case scenario. Most important, however, is the question whether the measures criticized—in this case, the admissibility of PGD and stem-cell research—are really to be viewed as steps in this direction. Clearly, such a view is controversial. Habermas himself refers to Dworkin, McCarthy, and Nagel (among others), who do not consider future eugenic practices to damage the principles of autonomous moral reason. Yet parties

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who reject this kind of practice as a matter of principle may respond that one cannot know, at present, precisely what effects permitting PGD and stem-cell research will have. At any rate, new biological technologies need not entail the erosion of autonomy and the demise of moral equality. All the same, changes in moral outlook can be produced by eugenic practices. Habermas warns of potentially serious consequences. In his eyes, this is not alarmism but rather anticipates the outcome of a possible course of development that may serve as a means to judge present-day events inasmuch as it alerts one to the change of attitudes that are happening, at least in the long term, to the ways we have understood ourselves until now as a species of reasonable and moral beings. With that, Habermas places his thesis that new biological technologies put the normative self-understanding of the human species into question at the core of discussion. This, in turn, relates to the matter of how one should view The Future of Human Nature in terms of Habermas’s project as a whole.

Postmetaphysical Answers to the Question: What Is the “Good Life”? The Discourse Theory of Morality and Species Ethics The progress of the biosciences raises the species-ethical question of how we want to understand our human/humane culture as a whole. The ethical questions Habermas raises are, as a matter of principle, to be distinguished from moral questions of justice and equal respect inasmuch as they concern life that has been deemed “good” and “well spent” (gelungen). Modernity, Habermas observes, is an epoch in which the “doctrines of the good life and of a just society” (Future, 2) have been differentiated—an age when substantive conceptions about the “right” life and the “right” way of living occur in the plural and are, moreover, accepted (indeed, welcomed) in the plural. Moral attitudes, however—that is, the will to orient oneself on what is just inasmuch as it is equally good for all—depend on motivational preconditions that follow from divided values (and the ways of living and formative processes they make possible). The question of motivation—Why be moral at all?—cannot find a cogent response in a procedural theory that explicates matters from a moral standpoint (that is, from an impartial observation of interests). Such a perspective may offer reasonable arguments that promote insight into what is equally good for all, but it cannot bind the will to such insight(s). For this to occur, moral knowledge must be embedded within an ethical self-understanding that provides motivation. Over and above this general embedding of cognitive morality within ethical self-understanding, advances in the biosciences require one to understand the relationship between morality and ethics in a more radical sense.

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Biotechnological progress “make[s] a public discourse on the right understanding of cultural forms of life in general an urgent matter” (15). According to Habermas, questions about the proper understanding of a given form of living are to be called “ethical” because they do not address how we are supposed to decide when faced with a moral problem—rather, they address how we wish to understand ourselves existentially. “The good” does not concern a moral “ought” (das moralische Gesollte) but what is willed (das Gewollte)—a form of “un-misspent,” successful life on the part of the human species as a whole. In the context of species ethics, then, the question of the good life means asking about the general human self-understanding in which the moral way of life shared by all reasonable persons is embedded. Thereby, Habermas holds fast to “the restraint that postmetaphysical thinking exercises regarding binding positions on substantive questions of the good or the un-misspent life” (vii). He also reaffirms the guiding principle of discourse theory—i.e., that the only arguments to possess moral cogency are those of a secular character, which, on this basis, “may reasonably be expected to meet with a rather general acceptance” in “a society with a pluralistic outlook” (40). Accordingly, it is not a matter of negating the “priority of the just over the good” (40), for this precedence founds a general morality of reason declaring all persons to possess equal human rights. Although such a moral perspective relies on intuitive agreement about what “really” constitutes a human life form, the ethical self-understanding it entails does not declare that moral rights are possessed by all persons because they belong to the species. Instead, this general claim is based in a moral experience that can, in principle, be shared by all autonomous persons. To the extent that it can be shared by all—that is, by all addressees of moral duties and subjects of human rights—the experience possesses a universal character and provides the basis for the validity of universal norms. Under postmetaphysical conditions, then, a precarious balance obtains between the notion of human rights along the lines of a universalistic morality of reason, on the one hand, and general, strongly felt intuitions about the defining qualities of human nature, on the other. It hinges on the fact that, notwithstanding the ethical embeddedness of our notions concerning the essential traits of human personhood, the cognitive precedence of the just over the good is preserved. Therefore—like Rawls’s freestanding conception of justice—the postmetaphysical morality of reason may be “inserted” as a “module” into ethical contexts. To the extent that it operates independently, its logic of validity remains distinct from ethical projects of the good life. At the same time, this conception of morality provides the critical measure for particular/individual ethics; a universalistic morality of reason is not compatible with every ethical context.

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As far as the species-ethical embedding of morality is concerned, then, a form of ethics must be found that can be combined with the postmetaphysical procedures of moral reason. Surprisingly, Habermas argues that Kierkegaard offers a model for the postmetaphysical ethics—the articulation of human self-understanding—that he seeks. Kierkegaard provides a suitable point of departure for postmetaphysical species ethics because he “was the first philosopher who answered the basic ethical question regarding the success or failure of one’s own life with a postmetaphysical concept of ‘being-able-to-beoneself’ ” (5). In this regard, Kierkegaard may be viewed as the precursor of the existentialist thinking of Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre. In the modern world, the socialized individual can no longer find a ready answer to the question of “the good life” in nature and tradition. “The good” is nothing given (nichts Vorgegebenes) but rather a task (Aufgabe) that the individual him- or herself must fulfill as a matter of free, subjective choice. Kierkegaard is the first to have presented a formal conception of the good life—one that does not tie existence to determinate contents but rather views matters in terms of the authentic “ability-to-be-oneself.” Clearly, Habermas is interested in Kierkegaard’s concept of being-able-tobe-oneself above all else. The concept forms the hinge between an existentialist and individualist ethos of authenticity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the universalistic morality of reason based on egalitarian respect embedded in species ethics. Being-able-to-be-oneself refers to qualities that define the specific nature of the human species and those who belong to it. It involves two conditions that positive eugenics would systematically undermine: authorship of one’s own life and the principle of symmetrical relations with all other members of the species. At the same time, one should note that although Kierkegaard’s concept of being-able-to-be-oneself may be understood in formal terms, the notion has a religious determination. That is, Kierkegaard locates the “ultimate justification” for “being-able-to-be-oneself” not in the individual but in God. Under secular conditions of cultural pluralism—as Habermas has long argued—a general self-understanding of the entire species about how to beable-to-be-oneself cannot be based on religion. The indisponibility and unconditionality of human nature—which make it possible for the individual to be-able-to-be-him/herself in the first place—can, in his estimation, also be conceived in a purely world-immanent fashion following the “linguistic turn.” “In the forms of communication through which we reach an understanding with one another about something in the world and about ourselves, we encounter a transcending power” (10). Here, Habermas posits a strict, “innerworldly transcendence” (Facts, 17–27) that occurs through an intersubjectively shared language and a way of life that is experienced as subjective and incommunicable. Thus, it seems, discourse theory can justify a “weakly

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proceduralist reading” of unconditionality—a mode of reading that both admits error and resists skepticism. “The ‘right’ ethical self-understanding is neither revealed nor ‘given’ in some other way. It can only be won in a common endeavor. From this perspective, what makes our being-ourselves possible appears more as a transsubjective power than an absolute one” (Future, 11). Habermas’s reflections on a postmetaphysical conception of the “good life” for the human species go back to a lecture he presented, in abbreviated form, in the Neue Rundschau in September 2000. Since the first edition of The Future of Human Nature, these remarks have preceded the main text as an introduction—in a certain sense, to provide the context for the arguments that follow. Habermas also discussed the question of how postmetaphysical thinking may at once be critical and appreciative (aneignend) of religious tradition in “Faith and Knowledge”—the address he held when awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (that is, independent of the events of September 11, 2001). In all these contexts, he has sought to maintain a clear separation between his own postmetaphysical position and two alternatives he rejects: on the one hand, the perspective of scientistic naturalism, which finds technological expression in certain trends of bioscientific development, and, on the other, metaphysical and religious doctrines that wish to declare a particular conception of the good life the universally binding basis of values. Scientistic naturalism and metaphysical doctrines of natural law both call for a conception of nature that is too strong in normative terms. Postmetaphysical thinking, as Habermas understands it, does not derive normative ideas from what human nature “is”—whether such determinations result from progressivism that embraces technology or from conservatism that views culture pessimistically—but from those human activities in which rational persons (can) account for their convictions and practices. After the publication of The Future of Human Nature, Habermas has pursued the goal of demonstrating the superiority of this discourse-theoretical justification of law, democracy, and morality over false alternatives in other writings—above all, in the studies collected in Between Naturalism and Religion.

References Dworkin, Ronald. 2000. “Playing God: Genes, Clones, and Luck.” In Sovereign Virtue. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2002. “Replik auf Einwände.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 50, no. 2: 283–298. Honneth, Axel. 2002. “Symposium zu: Jürgen Habermas: Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 50, no. 1: 105–126. Karafyllis, Nicole C., ed. 2003. Biofakte: Versuch über den Menschen zwischen Artefakt und Lebewesen. Paderborn: Westedeutscher Verlag.

42 THE CONSTITUTIONALIZATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AND POLITICS “Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?” (2004) JAMES BOHMAN

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rom 1999 onward, Habermas has significantly shifted the focus of his political philosophy from questions of democracy and legitimacy within the nation-state to the burgeoning international political domain. In his first such move to international politics, in the mid1990s, Habermas embraced the “Kantian project” of “Perpetual Peace” and interpreted it as requiring cosmopolitan democracy. In his second phase, in the late 1990s, Habermas began to see difficulties with any attempt to transfer democratic ideals directly to the international system and argued for a more limited conception of a fair negotiating system that cannot in principle attain full democratic legitimacy. In his third phase, beginning in 2005 and continuing to the present, Habermas advocates the “constitutionalization of international law” and moves toward a theory of a multilevel world society characterized by states, “world domestic politics,” and supranational institutions concerned solely with human rights. Habermas’s shift toward international and cosmopolitan political theory occurred as social scientists and philosophers began to see globalization as a transformative process that would greatly change the nature of politics. In particular, many began to see globalization as challenging the assumption that independent and sovereign states are the primary units of political analysis and the carriers of democracy. Indeed, states now seem both too big and too small: too big to generate the loyalty and legitimacy needed for the democratic ideal and too small to solve a myriad of global social problems, from global capital flows to global warming. Powerful multinational corporations now evade state power, even as international financial institutions increasingly dictate the terms of cooperation to weak states. In the interest of promoting

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free markets and trade, states now voluntarily delegate their powers to international bodies and private authorities. Antiglobalization protesters challenge such neoliberal policies often in the name of local control and democracy. What unites these diverse phenomena is a shift to forms of political authority that are no longer necessarily accountable to a measure of popular influence and control—one of the necessary but not sufficient conditions for any form of democracy. In his essay “Kant’s Perpetual Peace with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight” (Inclusion, 165–202), Habermas was optimistic about the prospects for a global political order as the continuation of the form of democracy based on human rights typical of nation-states. In a properly reformed United Nations, democratization could be accomplished by organizing its institutions so as to reproduce parliamentary democracy at the global scale, with the General Assembly as a legislative branch, various world and international courts, and the Security Council as its executive. Habermas soon came to see that the extension of democracy beyond the state as the basis for the legitimacy of the cosmopolitan order could not be achieved so easily, especially given the specific conception of democracy that he developed in Between Facts and Norms. Habermas thus rejects cosmopolitan democracy and concludes that the modern conception of democracy, where citizens are the authors and subjects of the law, cannot be extended beyond a delimited political community of free and equal citizens. Democracy on the nation-state model connects three central ideas: that the proper political community is a bounded one, that it possesses ultimate political authority, and that this authority enables political autonomy, so that the members of the demos may freely choose the conditions of their own association and legislate for themselves. The normative core of this conception of democracy is the conception of freedom articulated in the third condition: that the subject of the constraints of law is free precisely in being the author of the laws. In the absence of this demos, global parliamentary democracy is a nonstarter. The argument here might be seen as a continuation of Habermas’s understanding of the need for “decentering” democracy under the conditions of pluralism and complexity. If this applies to the modern state, then it would seem that cosmopolitan democracy would take this trend even further. Yet, when discussing “postnational” legitimacy, Habermas clearly makes self-determination by a singular demos the fundamental normative core of the democratic ideal, however unattainable it is in the absence of a delimited demos. In the face of these problems with existing political categories, Habermas has consistently argued that they can best be understood and dealt with in the context of “the Kantian project” of creating a “cosmopolitan condition,” that is, as the extension of the rule of law and institutionalization of peace and freedom beyond the state. Kant already saw the possibility of the emergence of

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a global public sphere, in which human-rights violations “in one part of the world will be felt everywhere” (Kant 2002, 107–108). While such an emerging global public provides a necessary condition for a political order beyond the state, it does not identify the central concern of the Kantian project: in Habermas’s terms, it is the constitutionalization of international law. “Constitutionalization” here refers to the transformation of existing power relations through law. In the case of cosmopolitan law, it is the transformation of the law of states into a condition in which individuals as bearers of human rights are the legal subjects of international law. In the last decade, Habermas has come to distinguish the Kantian project of transforming international law into cosmopolitan law from issues of democracy and democratic legitimacy. Instead, Habermas suggests a “multilevel political world society,” where functions are distributed across the national, transnational, and supranational levels. Rather than constitute the global demos that makes itself the author and subject of the law, constitutionalization is now about the mutual limitation of the exercise of power at various levels, including the power of democratic states, which are nonetheless the source of legitimacy through popular and public accountability. This is what Habermas now calls “global domestic politics”; he leaves to formal and legal global institutions the exclusive task of promoting human rights and human security. The question shifts from “How and in what institutional form can democracy be realized beyond the state?” to “If not democracy, what form or forms of legitimacy are adequate to a multilevel and pluralist world society?” In his development of a more consistent and feasible Kantian project, Habermas has offered three different versions: an initial interpretation, developed in terms of an ideal of cosmopolitan democracy; a second version, in which democracy is argued to be at home only in the nation-state, leaving only a system of fair bargaining and negotiation at the international level; and, finally, a Kantian account of a multilevel political world society in which the constitutionalization of international law is the main aim.

The Kantian Project I: Cosmopolitan Democracy To understand Habermas’s distinctive position in the debate about a potential cosmopolitan political order, it would be useful to examine the main options for political legitimacy. The current discussion can be reconstructed on four main axes: political or social, institutional or noninstitutional, democratic or nondemocratic, and transnational or cosmopolitan. In this early phase, Habermas takes a position that is political, institutional, democratic, and cosmopolitan; he is thus in close proximity to David Held. Various

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theories of this sort are informed by background assumptions about the nature and scope of the cosmopolitan order: whether it is moral to the extent that it is concerned with all individuals and their life opportunities, social to the extent that it makes associations and institutions central, and political to the extent that it focuses on specifically legal and political institutions, including citizenship. Habermas’s position in this debate is moderate. It is not as minimal as Rawls’s law of peoples, which denies the need for any strong international legal or political order at all, much less a democratic one. Nor is it a strongly democratic position, such as David Held’s version of cosmopolitan order. However, both Held and Habermas share a common emphasis on the emergence of international public law as central to a just global political order. Habermas rejects Held’s parliamentary account of constitutionalization to the extent that it does not account for a pluralist and multilevel world polity: its hierarchy of various laws and sovereignties implicitly accepts that there must be some ultimate democratic justification for the exercise of political power. When considering the problems facing a postnational polity, democracy could very well play a role in legitimation, but it need not apply at all levels; in fact, there are different forms of legitimation at each distinct level of a pluralist world society: the national, the transnational, and the supranational. Each has its own distinctive form of legitimation, which may be democratic to some degree or another but only requires democracy at the national and subnational levels. These debates in many respects mirror Kant’s own development, from the idea of the constitutionalization of international law in a world republic to a more dispersed and pluralistic conception of an ever-expanding federation of states in which the plurality of legal orders is preserved. The first is modeled on the idea of a social contract and is seen as the continuation of constitutionalization processes begun in states. But this assumes a continuous process and a unitary form of institutionalization across levels. The second attempts, if  unsuccessfully, to formulate the alternative of a pluralist world society in which each person nonetheless has the moral and political statuses that we now call human rights. Habermas continues the second version of the Kantian project. This presents its own set of difficulties, including explaining how political legitimacy can develop in an environment in which democracy plays at best an indirect role. While some pluralists might weaken this role for democracy even further (for example, Anne-Marie Slaughter), others might seek to expand the role of democracy beyond the level of states to the extent that democracy can be transformed beyond the demos form of the nationstate. Habermas’s own solution articulates a third option: the emergence of a “global domestic politics” based on the emergence not of policy networks but of shared deliberation among representatives of national democracies.

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The Kantian Project II: From Democracy to Negotiation In the second version of his Kantian project, Habermas introduces governance as opposed to democratic government, so that his view is social, institutional, nondemocratic, and transnational. To understand these changes, it would be best to locate his current position in relation to the range of theories that have developed since his first discussion of Kantian cosmopolitan law. As a defender of the Kantian project, Habermas cannot be a minimalist about political institutions above nation-states, as are, for example, Rawls or Buchanan. If there is any role for political legitimacy, it is in the service of a list of basic rights; however, the institutional and political bases of such an order leave the bases for accountability unexplored. If stronger notions such as Held’s cosmopolitan democracy fail, what is the alternative? By accepting that democracy just consists in self-legislation, that the people are both authors and subjects of the law, “postnational” legitimacy must have some other source. In both The Postnational Constellation and more recent essays on the European Union, Habermas seeks to accommodate wider institutional pluralism in the Kantian project. Still, he cannot have it both ways. When considering various disaggregated and distributed forms of transnational political order, he describes them in nondemocratic terms, as “negotiating systems” governed by fair bargaining. The conception of democracy is restricted even more, since Habermas requires that any putative “postnational democracy” acquire some shared and therefore particular political identity, without which, he contends, we are left with mere “moral” rather than “civic” solidarity. According to Habermas, even if such a political community is based on the universal principles of a democratic constitution, “it still forms a collective identity, in the sense that it interprets and realizes these principles in light of its history and in the context of its own particular form of life” (Postnational, 107). This context is absent in the postnational polity. Without such a common ethical basis, he argues that institutions beyond the state must look to a “less demanding basis for legitimacy in the organizational forms of an international negotiation system” (Postnational, 109), the deliberative processes of which will be accessible to various publics and to organizations in international civil society. In this postnational version of the Kantian project, regional organizations such as the European Union function so as to provide higher-level political integration when necessary. This less demanding standard of legitimacy does not include the capacity to deliberate about the terms governing the political authority of the negotiation system itself. Habermas’s position here is certainly transnational but ultimately nondemocratic, primarily because it restricts its overly robust conception of deliberative democracy to the level of the nation-state. Thus, stronger criteria for democracy are not applied outside

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the nation-state, where governance is only indirectly democratic and left to negotiations and policy networks. Such negotiation systems do not yet achieve the level of “domestic world politics,” since they are not yet linked to a multilevel and functionally distributed political world society. The participants in such negotiation systems are not citizens but states, with all of their particular interests. Within his multilevel system of global governance, Held, by contrast, does not solve this problem directly by appeal to the legislative acts of the global parliament alone but rather by making the global political framework itself the subject of the popular will and consent. Once legitimated, this political subject emerges within a “common structure for political action” that enables individuals and groups to pursue their individual and collective projects. The framework itself functions as a would-be sovereign rather than a distributed process of will formation, since sovereignty is now “an attribute of democratic public law.” In order to reconstitute the community as sovereign, Held (1995) argues that the demoi must ultimately submit to the will of the global demos: “cosmopolitan law demands the subordination of regional, national and local sovereignties to an overarching legal framework” (234). In order to be overarching, the framework must instantiate a hierarchy of authority. In order to be democratic, the common framework will have to pass through the collective will and reason of its citizens, thereby recreating at the global level the contractual moment of a determinate “people” granting one another their mutual rights. In willing the general framework, the exact character of the rights and obligations that the common structure of political action necessarily entails cannot be fully determined. At the same time, however, in order to be enforceable, these rights and duties must be specified in some way by an authoritative institution possessing the competence to do so, and thus it must act both legislatively and judicially. The dilemma can be put this way: if global institutions act judicially, it seems undemocratic, yet if they act legislatively, they have no special democratic status over other more fully legitimate and politically constituted legislative wills. Held’s demand for democratic control over “the overarching general legal framework” creates a fundamental continuity between democracy within and beyond the nation-state. But it does so at a high price. First, it makes secondorder questions about the framework somehow different than first-order ones, matters to be settled impartially that somehow rise above the fray of everyday democratic conflicts. Higher-level international politics are thus adjudicative rather than deliberative. Although Held more recently in The Global Covenant (2004) emphasizes multilevel and polycentric governance as necessary in the short and medium term much more than global parliamentary institutions, he still employs the same conception of cosmopolitan self-legislation as

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fundamental to a long-term global democratic order. In a word, in a period when even democracy in the state is disaggregated and decentered, the cosmopolitan conception of democracy is not sufficiently transformed and thus risks increasing rather than decreasing the problems of domination through juridification. While Habermas now clearly rejects the idea that democracy, even in a modified form, should be the organizing principle of all constitutionalization, he still has not provided an alternative to cosmopolitan democracy that can provide a sufficiently robust basis for its political legitimacy, even for its juridical institutions that enforce human rights. Otherwise, it cannot legitimate its use of political power in institutions that are only indirectly democratic. Mere assent to the global basic structure is not sufficient, since the indirect legitimation by already existing democracies leaves unanswered the mechanisms of popular control or access to political influence at the postnational level. The functional differentiation of tasks does not relieve the problem of legitimacy, and this problem has no easy solution, since the decision-making procedures of many of the institutions within a multilevel world society are not democratic. Moreover, any solution is made more difficult because international law is not jurisgenerative in the same way as domestic law. For Habermas, this means that the Kantian project of constitutionalization is complementary but not analogous to constitutionalization within states. Much to the detriment of their theories of global politics, Held and other cosmopolitan democrats continue to hold on to this false constitutional analogy. But there is still another possibility: even if disanalogous yet complementary, as Habermas asserts that it is, the global political order does not exclude the possibility of a democracy that is different in kind, of demoi rather than a demos.

The Kantian Project III: Constitutionalizing International Law Without Democracy Habermas has undertaken a third attempt to develop a systematic version of the Kantian cosmopolitan project in a multilevel “politically constituted world society.” The version represents a synthesis of the best of the earlier versions with a new focus on the fundamental aim of transforming international law and its legal subject. In such a multilevel order, states have an important role to play: they are “the most important actors and final arbiters” precisely because they have solved the problem of legitimate power by means of connecting law to the achievement of freedom. Even so, these normative resources of states are no longer adequate to the task of solving the many problems created by globalization, including various risks created by cross-border transactions and the migration of peoples. At least two further levels of institutions are necessary to solve the many problems that states do not have the resources to

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deal with, even with the ability to exercise legitimate power. Beyond the state are the transnational and supranational levels, and in both cases processes of institutionalization have already occurred. Habermas considers the “supranational level” to be exhausted by those executive and judicial aspects of the United Nations that make it a fully inclusive “world organization.” The core institutional achievements of the United Nations as a model of supranational institutionalization are executive and juridical: the Security Council and various world courts, including the International Criminal Court, both of which must be strengthened and also detached from the many other functional organizations of the current United Nations. These selectively strengthened world organizations would limit themselves to two tasks and two tasks alone: securing the peace and promoting and implementing human rights. Habermas continues to place all other global political issues at the transnational level in a system of fair negotiation among the relevant actors and stakeholders, including regional regimes such as the European Union. The purpose of these institutions, which will be functionally distributed according to problems and functions, will be to create “global domestic policy” (Weltinnenpolitik), making this structure genuinely transnational and no longer solely concerned with matters of international foreign policy. Habermas foresees that states will then also become further integrated horizontally into various networks and regimes that will produce such policies and remain open to the influence and deliberation of publics from below. Hence, it is the transnational level that generates a “pluralist” and multilevel world society, in which governance is dispersed across networks that incorporate states, state actors, and emerging forms of civil society but also takes on the burden of a global domestic policy, including issues of development. With these distinctions between the national, transnational, and supranational levels, it is clear that the burdens of legitimation are spread throughout the system via the division of labor. Legitimacy at the national level is democratic and ethical, dependent on the implementation of procedures that create a demos and allow for the development of a public political culture. At the transnational level, legitimacy is fundamentally a matter of politics and negotiation, so that the complex agreements and policies can be seen to be open to the influence of all affected and also seen as effective in solving particular problems. But the supranational level takes up and transforms what Habermas calls “the classical agenda of international law,” that of promoting peace, security, and freedom. But this means that on this proposal there must be a very strong distinction between law and politics: the development of international law “follows the intrinsic logic of an explication and extension of human rights.” Thus, Habermas argues, “the issues the world organization faces tend to be more of a legal than a political kind” (Naturalism, 343). Consistent with his view of law and democracy in his earlier works, law and politics

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necessarily part ways without established democratic practice, rather than being unified in the democratic states and its ideals of popular sovereignty and democratic procedures. In the absence of such an order, the supranational level is primarily concerned with “the enforcement of established law” and “takes precedence over the constructive task of legislation and policy making” (Divided West, 174). That human rights are taken to be settled issues and thus need only the institutional means for their enforcement results in requirements of legitimacy that are in fact lower than in the case where transnational negotiation produces decisions that “demand a higher degree of legitimation and hence more effectively institutionalized forms of citizen participation” (174). Habermas thinks that this difference in the requirements of legitimacy means that the jury is still out on international politics. However, given the “modest agenda” of supranational institutions, it seems more likely that they will be able to accomplish their juridical task and implement human rights as “negative duties associated with a universalistic morality of justice” (Divided West, 143). This legitimacy will be enhanced by the periodic emergence of cosmopolitan solidarity in the reactions of the global public to grave violations of human rights. Despite this appeal to specific functions at the transnational and supranational level, both of which lessen demands of legitimacy as compared to nation-states, Habermas now argues that “the viability of any form of democracy, including the democratic state, depends on the success of [the Kantian] project” of a political constitution of a world society (Naturalism, 313). By this he means that the further viability of democracy depends on extending the original scope of constitutionalization, that is, to the project of extending “the pacifying function of law” to the global level, even as it “remains conceptually intertwined with the function of a legal condition that citizens see as legitimately promoting freedom” (313). This may seem once again to support cosmopolitan democracy, but the argument here is much more modest. Constitutionalization beyond the state is the only feasible means by which the international system will enhance rather than detract from democratic forms of governance. This is because constitutionalized supranational institutions back human-rights claims with force and thus are able to secure the structural basis for democratic legitimacy at any level. This is not to say that the form of the constitution would be the same at all levels but only that the specific role of the constitutionalization of international law is to secure rather than to constitute freedom, as constitutions do for democratic self-legislation. This shift raises a basic question: what sort of democracy is this kind of constitution supposed to establish? As we saw in Habermas’s rejection of both stronger versions of cosmopolitan democracy, it is just this conception that guided his account of democracy as jurisgenerative in Between Facts and Norms. For this reason, Habermas argued against any notion of democracy

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beyond the state or regional organizations of states in The Postnational Constellation, still holding out the hope that the European Union could give itself a constitution that would make for a European demos and European public. Habermas has now again modified his position, arguing that the constitutional order that needs to be created beyond the state would not be republican in the sense that the self-legislating demos constitutes legally generated power; rather, the constitutional tradition here is “liberal” rather than republican and democratic. Accordingly, the constitution does not so much constitute authority as it constrains power, by directing it into legal channels. Much as Bellamy (2008) and other contemporary republicans discuss modern constitutions as based on sharing power, Habermas argues that the constitutionalization of international law does not produce the identity of the rulers and the ruled. Instead, a republican (or “liberal,” in Habermas’s terms) constitution ensures the “conceptual independence of three elements, namely the constitution, the powers of the state and citizenship” (Naturalism, 316). On such an account of constitutional order, the functions of the state are disaggregated into formal and informal international organizations that lack the characteristics of the state and do not legitimate their power by appealing to the will of citizens. If the success of this new emerging constitutionalization is to “explain the viability of democracy in any form, including the state,” as Habermas claims, it does so only if extant normative conceptions of democracy are no longer univocal across the various levels of world society. On this view, democracy no longer creates its own conditions of realization. If this version of a multilevel, politically organized world society is not to be less than the sum of its parts, how could institutional legitimacy be secured? If democracy is not feasible beyond the national level, where does legitimacy come from? Only two possibilities remain: the source of legitimacy must be either transnational or supranational. The first horn of the dilemma quickly runs into the inherent normative weaknesses of global domestic politics. Embracing this horn, neoliberalism emerges via this deficit of legitimation, leaving the management of global markets to managers and executives and issues of political legitimacy and redistribution entirely to states. Rather than representative institutions, legal pluralists such as Anne-Marie Slaughter (2004) see the disaggregating of state sovereignty as presenting the opportunity to replace old vertical power–based dependencies with horizontal interactions and functional interconnections in policy networks, which de facto already make many binding decisions. The problem is that these networks are not all that different, since participants in such multilateral global regulatory processes are delegates of the executive branch of their own state. As defended by Teubner (2004) and other legal pluralists, the attempt to give a greater transnational role to private law suffers even greater deficits in accountability. More formal transnational organizations are limited in other ways, lacking

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the authority to amend or formulate new legal norms. On the other hand, supranational organizations are organized solely around universal negative duties related to human rights and their enforcement as the justificatory bases of their decisions. While recent developments in the United Nations have called for a more expansive conception of security to include global redistribution, such an agenda cannot be fulfilled by the United Nations, because it is currently structured in such a way as to be unable to engage in the constructive tasks of global politics and bargaining. In fact, Habermas emphatically rejects such political functions for supranational institutions, since they would overburden and potentially delegitimize them from their appropriate tasks of constitutionalizing human rights. The aim of this division of labor is to shore up the legitimacy of the supranational level by tying it exclusively to human rights and their enforcement. Does reconstructing this argument about a legitimation deficit as a dilemma help in identifying a possible way to escape the problem? Democracy is needed for expanding the notion of security underlying supranational institutions, on the one hand, and for underwriting redistributive features of global domestic policy, on the other hand. But the form of democracy that would make this possible is not available at either level. So is there a way out? As Habermas sees it, the only solution available under conditions that will hold for the foreseeable future is to institute a division of institutional labor that would produce the necessary forms of legitimacy across the institutional system as a whole without relying on only one form of legitimacy. Does the distinction of various levels solve the problem? It does so not simply by having each level produce its own form of legitimacy. Instead, legitimacy at each level is regarded as mutually reinforcing. Consider the Kantian problem of why law is the solution to the problem of peace: peace is attainable only if the goals of the international system and of the republican states are mutually reinforcing, and for this purpose constitutionalization moves the state away from the self-defeating attempt to secure nondomination at home through domination abroad. Such mutually enhancing relationships can be found elsewhere in politically organized world society as well. The establishment of the International Criminal Court means that the diffuse global public sphere is given “an authoritative voice” when it is stirred by moral reactions to political crimes and unjust regimes (Naturalism, 342). At a more structural level, publics of citizens and their elected representatives within democratic states provide a basis for accountability for global domestic politics. They might, for example, put global warming more forcefully on the political agenda. At the same time, Habermas argues that these forms of legitimacy should not be overextended, as when human-rights institutions were to be used to promote the alleviation of poverty as a human right. While recognizing that

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the expansion of security beyond its current boundaries is inevitable, Habermas thinks that such an achievement would not be a matter of legal enforcement but of creating a coordinated agreement at the transnational level. Critics such as Lafont (2008), Scheuerman (2008), and Flynn (2009) demand a more direct application of human-rights law to issues of severe poverty and deprivation and argue that Habermas’s concerns with overburdened supranational institutions leads instead to deficits in the legitimation of human-rights institutions themselves. Even if we accept this division of institutional labor, it is still the case that human-rights interventions have inevitable political dimensions, as Thomas Risse and Sikkink (1999) and others have pointed out, including persuasion and dialogue leading to sustainable domestic change. Habermas thinks that the instrument of human rights should not be the basis for any such claims that are matters of global domestic policy. Instead, such an agenda would work against, rather than mutually support, an effective and negotiated solution to the problem of global poverty. We cannot expect an “uninterrupted chain of legitimation” that runs from nation-states to the world organization. Not only do gaps remain, but the form of legitimation is discontinuous across levels. With this multilevel account Habermas moves away from his initial understanding of constitutionalizing the cosmopolitan condition. The role of the constitution of a pluralist world society is not to make individuals the authors and subjects of law, where all legitimate power comes from the will of the people; rather, the constitution of the pluralist world society, Habermas says, is “liberal,” in that its goal is to set limits on power in creating a rule of law that can, by “juridification,” normatively shape “existing power relations” (Divided West, 138), regardless of their democratic origins, and direct the exercise of political power into legal channels. Contrary to Habermas, however, such a constitution is not merely liberal but also deeply republican. Because it emphasizes mutual limitation at the level of the institutional division of labor, it relies heavily on the idea of representation across levels: representation in a democratic state, through which one is a principal within a negotiation system and an individual subject of cosmopolitan law. Even with this multilevel system, it is not clear that the protections afforded at the supranational level will be sufficient for the genuine aim of constitutionalization: that every individual is the subject of international law. One persistent global problem is the lack of basic freedoms and statuses for millions of politically unrepresented people, many of whom are living illegally as migrants or squatters. Human rights cannot be constitutionalized merely as liberal rights or limited only to rights that prevent violence and gross violations of human rights, such as crimes against humanity (regardless of whether democracy can be extended beyond the state). The simple existence of millions of people who live daily without freedom and status ought to represent a clear violation of the rule of law and

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demonstrate the need for republican political demands at all levels. It is thus not merely juridical institutions but also necessarily institutionalized political orders across levels that only together could ensure the right to have rights. This task is now more complicated, since this “right to rights” requires that all have multiple memberships, as citizens of states, members of global publics, and individual subjects of international law.

References Bellamy, Richard. 2008. “Republicanism, Democracy, and Constitutionalism.” In Republicanism and Political Theory, ed. Cécile Laborde and John Maynor, 159–189. London: Blackwell. Flynn, Jeffrey. 2009. “Human Rights, Transnational Solidarity, and Duties to the Global Poor.” Constellations 16, no. 1: 59–77. Held, David. 1995. Democracy and the Global Order. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. ——. 2004. The Global Covenant. Cambridge: Polity. Kant, Immanuel. 2002. Political Writings. Trans. H.  B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lafont, Cristina. 2008. “Alternate Visions of a New Global Order: What Should Cosmopolitans Hope For?” Ethics & Global Politics 1, no. 1–2: 1–20. Risse, Thomas, and Kathryn Sikkink. 1999. “The Socialization of Human Rights Norms Into Domestic Practices.” In The Power of Human Rights, ed. Thomas Risse et al., 1–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheuerman, William. 2008. “Global Governance Without Global Government? Habermas on Postnational Democracy.” Political Theory 36, no. 1: 133–151. Slaughter, Anne-Marie. 2004. A New World Order. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Teubner, Gunther. 2004. “Societal Constitutionalism: Alternatives to State-Centered Constitutional Theory.” In Constitutionalism and Transnational Governance, ed. Christian Joerges et al., 3–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART IV CONCEPTS

43 COGNITIVE INTERESTS WILLIAM REHG

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abermas’s concept of “cognitive interests” lies at the center of his Knowledge and Human Interests (1972 [1968]). That work represents the culmination of his early efforts to ground critical social theory in a critique of knowledge (Erkenntniskritik), an approach he abandoned when he made the linguistic-pragmatic turn in the 1970s (see chapter 29 in this volume). With input from Karl-Otto Apel (1971), Habermas developed the idea of cognitive interests in hopes of reconstituting the philosophy of reflection, which had reached its apex in German idealism. Specifically, Habermas wanted to revive the critical, emancipatory aims of reflection in a way that was open to sociological and historical research. For that task, he looked to a systematic framework that had a sufficiently transcendental character to ground critique yet that did not rest on the accomplishments of a transcendental ego or the history of absolute mind, which in effect removed critique from the input of the methodical sciences. The solution lay in critical reflection on the conditions of possible knowledge in the empirical and cultural sciences. These two forms of scientific inquiry, Habermas argued, rest on two deep-seated human interests that predetermine what counts as knowledge in their respective domains of inquiry. The reflective grasp of these two interests depends in turn on an emancipatory cognitive interest, which Habermas linked with philosophy, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis and ideology critique, on the other. Consider first the empirical sciences, or, as Habermas dubbed them, the “empirical-analytic” sciences (natural sciences and forms of social-scientific

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research tied to hypothesis testing). For his understanding of methodology in the empirical sciences, Habermas relied on C. S. Peirce and Karl Popper: scientific claims count as reliable knowledge only insofar as they issue from processes of controlled experimentation in which general (lawlike) hypotheses are tested against empirical observation. Thus epistemic access to objective reality depends on the actual technical control of external events (controlled laboratory interventions, field observations, etc.), and acquired knowledge correlates with the possible control of objects in the relevant domain, where “control” refers not only to technological applications but, more generally, to reliable prediction of future events (and presumably to accurate retrodiction of past events). Thus inquiry in these sciences brings methodical discipline to a more basic human capacity, namely, our ability to intervene successfully in nature—in a word, “social labor.” Because species reproduction depends on our capacity for social labor, Habermas links labor with a fundamental human interest in the technical control of nature. As governing human activity, this interest is practical in a broad sense; because it involves knowledge of natural processes, an ability to forecast the course of events and consequences of causal interventions, the interest is also cognitive. More precisely, we have to do with a “knowledge-constitutive” (erkenntnisleitend) interest that sets the conditions on a specific mode of access to possible objects of knowledge. To distinguish it from the interest that grounds the cultural sciences (which is practical in a narrower sense reminiscent of Aristotle’s praxis), Habermas dubbed this labor-based interest the “technical cognitive interest.” Habermas’s understanding of the cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) relied mainly on Dilthey and Gadamer. Historiography, cultural anthropology, religious studies, comparative literature, ethnography, and other interpretive forms of sociology are inherently hermeneutic, oriented toward the interpretation of discourse and human forms of life. Their object domains are always already symbolically mediated, permeated by meaning and intertwined with ordinary language. To understand a given text (or individual biography, culture, tradition, etc.) therefore, one must enter into the form of life or individual life history in which it is situated; one then moves back and forth between one’s initial sense of the text as a whole and the interpretation of its parts, allowing each side to correct one’s understanding of the other until parts and whole cohere. The point of departure is the interpreter’s own background or “horizon” of preunderstandings. The hermeneutic process thus unfolds as a kind of dialogue between interpreter and interpretandum, leading to what Gadamer calls a “fusion of horizons.” It follows from the above that the cultural sciences employ the same kinds of hermeneutic competences that social actors rely on in everyday interaction. Following Dilthey, Habermas roots such competences in ordinary language. As a resource for mutual understanding, linguistic ability involves not merely

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the mastery of a lexicon and syntax but also the ability to integrate linguistic expressions with actions and nonverbal accompaniments of speech in a manner appropriate to the context. As a dialogical ability to understand one’s own and others’ speech and action for the sake of stable social cooperation, these communicative competences are of fundamental importance for both individual socialization and ongoing social reproduction. Thus, in a manner analogous to the empirical sciences, the cultural sciences are also grounded in a deep-seated human interest, namely, the “practical cognitive interest” in overcoming interpersonal disruptions and reaching mutual understanding for the sake of stable intersubjective relations. To call this a knowledge-constitutive interest means that reality can appear as an object of possible knowledge in the cultural sciences only insofar as scholars engage in the kind of hermeneutic processes that are necessary for any mutually intelligible intersubjectivity at all and in which human beings must take an interest if they are to understand themselves as social actors. Before moving on, we should avoid some possible misunderstandings that could arise with the notion of “knowledge-constitutive interest.” First, this idea refers neither to the motives of individual scientists nor to a priori structures of a transcendental ego but to transcendental conditions of collective human development. More precisely, cognitive interests are “basic orientations” that are presupposed by social labor and interaction as two dimensions in which the human species reproduces itself not merely biologically but through a sociocultural learning process, what Habermas calls “self-formation” or “self-constitution” (Knowledge, 196, 195). These basic orientations are built into the social-material practices that structure forms of inquiry in the natural and human sciences, which have now become an essential element in sociocultural development. Second, in linking knowledge with “interests” Habermas does not intend “a naturalistic reduction of transcendental-logical categories to empirical ones” (196). Because cognitive interests structure the ways in which we grasp objects of empirical inquiry, an adequate understanding of such interests must always include the human subject, which is to say: such understanding must involve self-reflection. Habermas now associates his position with a “weak naturalism”: although one may postulate a continuity between the natural evolution of the species and cultural development, the latter unfolds in a linguistic, reflective medium that precludes its reduction to merely natural processes that work independently of culture and could be fully explained by the empirical sciences. The reference to reflection brings us to the third cognitive interest. Habermas associates reflection first of all with the critique of knowledge (Erkenntniskritik), specifically with the philosophical analysis of the sciences as rational modes of inquiry that contribute to the self-formation of the human species. Giving Fichte a social-materialist turn, Habermas holds that such reflection,

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as a process that makes explicit the conditions of inquiry, involves an emancipatory self-reflection of the sciences. In the movement of self-reflection, the inquiring subject grasps the objects of inquiry in relation to the subject’s interest in knowledge. One thereby frees oneself from the error of objectivism, which naïvely assumes a contemplative, value-free ideal of pure theory. Self-reflection thus presupposes an interest in emancipatory self-knowledge, the “emancipatory cognitive interest.” This interest, Habermas asserts, is the interest in which reason itself inheres, for it is the interest reason takes in freeing itself from error and understanding itself as simultaneously cognitive and practical. In a move that was soon recognized as problematic, Habermas applied the term “self-reflection” not only to the philosophical analysis of invariant structures of human inquiry but also to Freudian psychoanalysis and ideology critique, which target individual subjects and particular societies. In psychoanalysis Habermas discerned the one clear example of a methodical form of inquiry that fundamentally depended on self-reflection, for in the psychoanalytic situation, analyst and patient work together toward an insight by which the patient reappropriates aspects of herself and her life history that have been “split off ” as an alien “other,” whose modes of communication are cloaked in an opaque private semantics and drive pathological forms of behavior. Successful analysis thus requires on the part of the patient an interest in self-knowledge, a “passion for critique” that sees through and frees her from pathological self-misunderstanding—in short, an emancipatory cognitive interest. As a methodical form of inquiry, Freudian psychology shares the hermeneutic orientation of the cultural sciences, but rather than gradually refining interpretations through dialogue, it submits them to a unique form of testing, namely, the patient’s own reflective self-application. To get at ideology critique as a self-reflective science, Habermas developed Freud’s theory of civilization in light of Marx. Freud understands the development of culture as a process of institution- and family-mediated repression of basic psychic instincts. The instruments of repression include compulsory social norms, religious worldviews, and social ideals and values—the “illusions” of civilization that rationalize existing authority by removing it from critique and reconciling human beings with renunciations of instinctual satisfactions. Although all members of society are subject to such repression, the lower classes feel its effects more acutely. Consequently, as technical progress advances and as opportunities for need satisfaction expand, established forms of repression appear unnecessary, particularly to the lower classes. The space thereby opens up for ideology critique. Although Habermas’s account is sketchy, such critique does not reject worldviews and norms tout court but rather calls for the realization of their utopian content, which appears feasible insofar as the existing means of social control have become obsolete, an unnecessary “surplus repression.” For example, as modernity developed,

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religious ideals of equality before God were translated into demands for the abolition of slavery, equal citizenship, etc. As with psychoanalysis, so also ideology critique depends on an emancipatory cognitive interest. In some passages, Habermas seems to regard this third interest as equally fundamental as the other two, claiming that social reproduction takes place through labor, interaction, and power. But, in fact, that position is not easily maintained, and he eventually clarified his view, giving the emancipatory interest a derivative status: it comes into play in situations of institutionalized domination masked by forms of distorted communication.

Reference Apel, Karl-Otto. 1971. “Szientistik, Hermeneutik, Ideologiekritik. Entwurf einer Wissenschaftslehre in erkenntnisanthropologischer Sicht.” In Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik, by Karl-Otto Apel et al., 7–44. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971.

44 COLONIZATION MAT TIAS ISER

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abermas’s early writings already contain the leitmotif that finds full expression in his thesis of colonization. From the beginning, Habermas has been concerned with social pathologies and political blind spots that result when instrumental orientations—embodied, above all, in the structures of capitalism—distort and even repress practical reason (or, as he came to put it later, communicative reason). As early as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas portrays the interventions of the welfare state as a reaction to the functional deficiencies of the economic order under capitalism. The means-end rationality that shapes economy and state undermines the conditions necessary for human discourse oriented toward achieving understanding about values and norms—an activity that became socially relevant for the first time in bourgeois public spheres, e.g., literary salons. This concern continues in his critical discussion of the technocracy thesis in his writings during the 1960s. Borrowing from systems theory (at first in a loose fashion—which changed subsequently), Habermas addresses the dominance of “subsystems of purposive-rational action” (Rational Society, 94) inasmuch as they prove necessary to guarantee the material reproduction of society through work. In his view, these systems should remain “embedded” in the normatively regulated institutional framework of society. Not until the final section of The Theory of Communicative Action can the reader find the polished version of this diagnosis of the times. Habermas’s thesis of a “colonization of the lifeworld” is not only meant to actualize the Marxian critique of reification. It is also intended to disprove the counterEnlightenment notion that modern pathologies are caused by the process of rationalization itself (Communicative Action, 2:143; Discourse). Habermas argues that pathologies arise when the functionalist rationality (i.e., not just the instrumental rationality) embodied in systems of governmental bureaucracy and of the economy gain the upper hand. Within these systems, actions are not coordinated by means of communicative action (indeed, they are no longer coordinated even by strategic action) but are steered, instead, through the “delinguistified media” (155) of money and administrative power, which stabilize “functional interconnections that are not intended by them” (150).

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Habermas maintains that, in principle, such “delinguistification” is legitimate because its efficacy affords advantages for everyone. At the same time, however, it must be hedged in by democratic legislation, for the mechanisms of systems always pose the risk of developing a life of their own. When this occurs, they threaten the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld—that is, they endanger the transmission of meaning (culture), the preservation of relationships of solidarity (society), and the socialization of individuals with a strong sense of self (personality). In so doing, these systems undermine the communicative bases of the same lifeworld from which they have emerged (and on which they still depend). Habermas, then, views the (rationalized) lifeworld— which he supposes to be free of the ills particular to modernity—in opposition to an external “cause” represented by the two systems. In keeping with the two subsystems—monetization through the economy and bureaucratization through the state—colonization of the lifeworld occurs along two lines. Because the economic system coordinates actions by means of money exchanged in the market (as its central mechanism), labor is also necessarily rewarded with money. Unlike (traditional) Marxists, Habermas does not believe that a deficient relationship between the active subject and what he or she produces restricts the process of symbolic reproduction—which he considers to be of central importance—because he does not assign labor an identityconstituting role. Indeed, in the sphere of material reproduction, ways of thinking and acting oriented toward utility are not just appropriate but also necessary. To be sure, this process influences the lifeworld, which becomes technologized or “mediatized.” However, Habermas only identifies a problem when delinguistified media encroach on the spheres of the lifeworld (which is normatively organized) and damage it to an extent that symbolic reproduction suffers: when individuals begin to view their entire lives in light of the categories they are used to from work, their self-perception and modes of thinking and communicating grow deficient. When reason becomes onesided in this fashion, loss of meaning, anomie, and psychopathologies follow in the social lifeworld. Moreover, the spread of a lifestyle focused purely on consumption (385ff.) does not just entail an ossified and impoverished selfunderstanding; it also means that the abilities and qualities necessary to analyze and solve political problems are lost. The same problematic holds for colonization that occurs through bureaucracy. It is not the worker—as Marx held—who performs an emancipatory role but the citizen (Bürger), who, as the author of legal regulations, is supposed to determine the constitution of the economic sphere. However, because law is also the medium through which the welfare state—which is compelled to act in response to economic crises—intervenes in citizens’ private lives, it is not just the corpus of law that grows as governmental tasks increase in number and scope but also the size of the administrative apparatus. In view of this

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juridification, Habermas draws attention to the way the bureaucracy implements policies and to the fact that social assistance is provided in monetary form. Such paternalism on the part of the welfare state supposedly changes active citizens into passive clients (356). Governmental agencies and courts come to treat those affected simply as objects; because of overly generalized norms and a lack of competency, they no longer address specific situations in a sufficiently sensitive manner (372). This process of reification becomes possible in the first place—and subsequently persists, unrecognized—through the cultural impoverishment of the lifeworld. As a consequence of the differentiation that occurs between the spheres of science, law/morality, and art, expert cultures have emerged that can no longer relate to one another productively. Moreover, an increasing gap emerges between expert cultures and the everyday world of citizens. Thus, there is no adequate understanding of modernity and of the connection between the different aspects of reason it embodies. As a corollary to the “muteness” that results from such a fragmentation of everyday consciousness, the stream of arguments that is necessary for the construction of meaning, legitimation, and identity runs dry. This means that “fragmented” consciousness comes to occupy the theoretical place of “false” consciousness (which, according to Habermas, becomes ever more improbable in a rationalized lifeworld). Habermas hereby continues the “classical” critique of ideology by other means (Strecker 2009, part 3). If a fragmented consciousness prohibits subjects from seeing through the process of colonization, then the progressive technologization of the lifeworld destroys the very communicative potentials that alone might enable an overarching perspective to be renewed. Like a tribal society that does not know how to oppose the invasion of colonial masters (because the latter’s power is incomprehensible to archaic ways of thinking), fragmented everyday consciousness is helplessly exposed to the reifying force of system imperatives (Communicative Action, 2:325). Consequently, the task of critical social theory involves making transparent the reasons for self-produced dangers and thereby to create the cognitive preconditions to counter these threats practically. When he was writing at the beginning of the 1980s, Habermas had in mind, above all, the new social movements that, despite the pacification of class struggle engineered by the welfare state, allegedly demonstrated a keen sense for the ways that political problems were repressed by “objective constraints.” Between Facts and Norms assesses the situation somewhat more optimistically. Here, Habermas argues that the disempowering effects of law may be prevented—at least potentially—through increased citizen participation in the creation and application of laws. Whereas The Theory of Communicative Action

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presented the matter of juridification in fundamentally ambivalent terms, Between Facts and Norms blames its “dark” aspects on a deficient understanding of law—namely, one that follows the legal paradigm of the welfare state and not a procedural model (Facts, 427ff.). Habermas illustrates this by discussing problems associated with securing equal rights for women (409ff.; Inclusion, 209). In so doing, he shifts from criticizing juridification as the delinguistification of social relations (and, as a corollary, the freedom of no longer needing to justify oneself) to criticizing distorted procedures of legislation and overly general legal determinations (for a fuller discussion, see Iser 2008, 122ff.). Habermas has been criticized for not making the distinction between mediatization and colonization sufficiently clear (Kneer 1990, 123–186). Above all, however, he has been faulted for basing the idea of colonization on the dichotomy between system and lifeworld—and therefore becoming uncritical with regard to certain social spheres (Honneth and Joas 1991). On the one hand—the argument goes—economic and political orders can no longer be criticized for being the result of (potentially illegitimate) struggles between social groups (e.g., Honneth 1993); on the other hand—it has been maintained— the lifeworld no longer belongs to the purview of critical theory: inasmuch as it is supposed to be rational, it excludes ideological deformations. Critics believe that Habermas mistakenly transforms an analytical distinction into two fundamentally different fields of investigation—which makes it difficult to thematize, in an adequate manner, matters such as gender equality. After all, women are subject to discriminatory practices not just in the economic sphere but also in the private realm of the family. This means that the distinction between “system” and “lifeworld” simply and uncritically reflects the distinction between wage labor and domestic work (Fraser 1989, 173ff.). Habermas has responded to these objections by noting that his colonization thesis is not supposed to address all social ills; rather, he means for it to expose those phenomena of reification that elude criticism most stubbornly. He has not explicitly updated his views since he first elaborated them. On a subliminal level, however, the colonization thesis remains present in his writings on globalization. Here, Habermas warns of the ever-increasing sway of economic forces over powerless (national) politics. He also criticizes political measures that seek to make citizens “fit” for the employment market by encouraging them to understand themselves as independent and responsible “entrepreneurs of their own labor force” (Arbeitskraftunternehmer) or as socalled I-corporations (Ich-AGs). Such ideological notions contribute to the further economization of the lifeworld (Transition, 82). Even today, then, the colonization thesis continues to be stimulating—especially for those who wish to reformulate the critique of reification in a way better suited to the present (e.g., Celikates and Pollmann 2006, 110–111).

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References Celikates, Robin, and Arnd Pollmann. 2006. “Baustellen der Vernunft: 25 Jahre Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns.” Westend 3, no. 2: 97–113. Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Honneth, Axel. 1993. The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory. Trans. Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas, eds. 1991. Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Iser, Mattias. 2008. Empörung und Fortschritt: Grundlagen einer kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Campus. Kneer, Georg. 1990. Die Pathologien der Moderne: Zur Zeitdiagnose in der “Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns” von Jürgen Habermas. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Strecker, David. 2009. Logik der Macht. Zum Ort der Kritik zwischen Theorie und Praxis. Weilerswist: Velbrueck.

45 COMMUNICATIVE ACTION CRISTINA L AFONT

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ommunicative action” is the central concept of Habermas’s oeuvre. The term does not refer simply to actions that require communication or instances of communication that perform actions. Instead, its key feature is that participants attempt to coordinate their different action plans on the basis of an understanding that has been mutually achieved. In the technical sense, “communicative action” refers only to those linguistically mediated interactions in which the “use of language oriented to reaching understanding” assumes a “coordinating role” (Truth, 110). Given that communicative action represents only one kind of social action among others, it is important to bear in mind why Habermas considers it so significant. Despite the many qualifications, elaborations, and corrections he has introduced to his project over time, Habermas has left his basic conception of communicative action largely unchanged. According to this view, what distinguishes linguistic processes of reaching understanding is that their success depends on the respective beliefs of all participants, and beliefs cannot be coerced (for example, through violence or deception). Instead, they depend on the unforced, rationally motivated agreement among all participants. For this reason, communicative action represents a particular kind of social action that cannot be reduced to strategic action (within the framework of which deception or force are feasible means for achieving goals of action). Two central assumptions of Habermas’s theory of communicative action follow from this idea. The first states that communication cannot be explained in terms of purely strategic action. Rather, communicative practices rely on a form of rationality that is embodied in communicative action and incompatible with the instrumental rationality operative in strategic action. The second fundamental assumption underlying Habermas’s theory states that linguistic understanding through communicative action offers a means of action coordination that has no functional equivalent. For these reasons, a sociological theory of action that neglects the concept of communicative action and employs only the concept of strategic action cannot explain how social order is possible in the first place. The first assumption plays a central role in Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality (see chapter 30 in this volume); the

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second stands at the center of his theory of society (see chapter 35 in this volume).

Communicative Versus Strategic Action In order to grasp properly the exact meaning of the concept of “communicative action,” it is helpful to contrast it with the notion of “strategic action”— i.e., to take a more sustained look at Habermas’s thesis that communicative action cannot be explained on the model of instrumental rationality that is used to explain strategic action (Communicative Action, 1:101ff.; Pragmatics, 220ff.). According to Habermas, interpersonal communication displays a tripartite structure: one / communicates with someone / about something. In other words, communication is a process that involves knowledge along at least three dimensions, namely, the speaker, the hearer, and the world. When a statement is made in a communicative situation, it relates to (1) a certain state of affairs, (2) a certain speaker intention, and (3) a certain interpersonal relation. It is thereby placed under validity claims that it need not and cannot fulfill as a nonsituated sentence, i.e., as a purely grammatical formation. If the aim of communication is to acquire information by means of speech acts, then participants must be able to share the knowledge conveyed along these three dimensions. Thus, in order to understand one another’s speech acts, interlocutors must be able to share the knowledge implicit in the propositional content of the speech act, and hence they must assess the truth claim of the utterance. They must share the normative presuppositions inherent in the interpersonal relation established through the illocutionary act (i.e., they must assess the rightness claim inherent in it), and they must also assess the sincerity with which the speech act is uttered. Truth, rightness, and sincerity are the three universal validity claims that speakers (implicitly or explicitly) raise with their speech acts and that they must be prepared to justify by offering reasons if challenged by the hearer. Communication succeeds when the hearer is convinced of the claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity that the performance of the speech act raises—i.e., when she or he accepts the “offering” involved in the speech act. However, as already indicated, convictions cannot be forced (i.e., they cannot be brought about through violence or deception). They depend on the rationally motivating force of reasons. Consequently, speech acts can gain binding force only inasmuch as the speaker, in raising a validity claim, issues a credible warranty that he would be able to redeem this claim with the right sorts of reasons, if required. Conversely, if the hearer acknowledges the speaker’s validity claim and thereby accepts the offering made in the speech act, it means that she or he, in turn, has taken on that portion of the obligations

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relevant to the sequelae of interaction that result from the semantic content of the utterance (Pragmatics, 223–224). Of course, the normative presuppositions that enable intersubjective understanding can turn out to be wrong in any individual case and at any point in time. However, if participants could not, in principle, rely on the intralinguistic guarantees and obligations relevant to their exchanges, communicative practices would have no sense at all, since speech acts would fail to acquire any meaning. Without a generalized trust on their mutual accountability, participants in communication would not be able to acquire any information out of one another’s speech acts. As Habermas argues, if accepting a command or making a promise did not imply any obligation to carry them out, or if accepting an assertion did not imply believing it and directing one’s behavior accordingly, speech acts such as commands, promises, or assertions would have no meaning whatsoever. To the extent that a generalized instrumental or strategic attitude toward communication would undermine the general trust of speakers on their mutual accountability, it would render their speech acts meaningless. If this view is accurate, then the instrumental/strategic use of language is parasitic on the communicative use, i.e., the use of language oriented toward reaching understanding, without which an enduring communicative practice is not possible at all (Communicative Action, 1:288; Truth, 86ff.). The rationality embodied in communicative action is a specific form of intersubjective accountability (Pragmatics, 94) and is therefore irreducible to the instrumental rationality embodied in strategic action.

Two Kinds of Communicative Action However, even if one accepts that communicative action is guided by a kind of rationality that is incompatible with the instrumental rationality operative in strategic action, a question remains: How strong must the concept of understanding that is constitutive for communicative action be, in order to explain the possibility of communication? From its inception, this question has stood at the center of critical debates on the concept of “communicative action.” Linguistic “understanding” is a highly ambiguous concept. Its meaning ranges from the minimal sense, whereby speaker and hearer comprehend a grammatically correct sentence in identical fashion, all the way to a maximal sense, whereby speaker and hearer both agree on what is said for exactly the same reasons. It is quite uncontroversial that the minimalist sense of linguistic understanding is insufficient to explain intersubjective communication. If the aim of communication is to acquire information from the speech acts of others, it is not enough that participants understand the grammatical meaning of their utterances. They must also be able in principle to accept what has been

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said, and this in turn requires that they adopt an evaluative stance toward the validity of what is said. However, even if this is accepted, it remains an open question which (and how many) dimensions of validity are necessarily and unavoidably involved in communicative processes. By Habermas’s formalpragmatic account, communication takes the form of a triangulation between speaker, hearer, and world. Therefore, successful communication depends on the ability of participants to reach an understanding alongside the three dimensions of interaction. They must reach an understanding on the sincerity of the speaker’s communicative intentions, on the truth of the beliefs about the objective world conveyed in what is said, and on the normative rightness of the interpersonal relationships that they undertake with their speech acts. But even if the success of communication involves participants’ understanding in all three dimensions, there is a clear asymmetry between the kind of understanding that is possible regarding the truth of propositional contents, on the one hand, and the rightness of the interpersonal relationship offered by the speech act, on the other. Under the presupposition of a single objective world, the fact that participants agree on the truth of the propositional contents of speech acts can only be understood in the “strong” sense of an agreement based on the same reasons. That is, if a listener accepts the truth claim contained in the speaker’s statement “p,” this can only mean that she or he considers “p” as true as the other party does. However, so long as the listener does not agree with the reasons the speaker adduces in support of “p,” the discursive redeemability of the validity claim in question remains up in the air. This is resolved only when an agreement based on the same reasons has been achieved; until then, the listener simply does not have sufficient reason to share the beliefs of the speaker. The matter is different where the rightness of the interpersonal relation offered through the speech acts is concerned. In cases of “naked” imperatives, one-sided announcements, or insults (for example, “sit down,” “I will leave tomorrow,” or “you’re a pig”), it is highly counterintuitive to assume that the speaker wishes to bring about “consensus” of any kind—that is, that she or he aims for reaching understanding in the strong sense of an agreement about the normative rightness of the speech act in question. Of course, the speaker must still aim for successful linguistic communication in the sense of the hearer’s rational “assent,” if the utterance of the speech act is to be meaningful at all. Yet the success of such communicative intentions depends only on the recognition of validity claims such as “truth” and “sincerity” and not on an agreement on the rightness of the interpersonal relationship that has been offered. An announcement or a threat can be understood to aim for the rational assent of the hearer only in the weak sense that the speaker’s reasons give her or him no cause to doubt the seriousness of the speaker’s intention or the feasibility of the declared action. But even if the hearer accepts the reasons of

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the speaker as rational in this sense, this does not mean that she or he has to make these reasons her or his own. Consequently, different actors can have different reasons for recognizing the rightness of the same verbal action; after all, they find themselves in different situations and have different preferences, which may all be equally legitimate. For example, the fact that a hearer agrees completely that the speaker has the best reasons in the world to move to China or to study medicine in no way entails that she or he (or anyone else) should also move to China or study medicine. The distinction between actor-relative and actor-independent reasons that is relevant here—and which has no equivalent regarding the truth of utterances—makes it necessary to differentiate between a “strong” and a “weak” sense of understanding with respect to the kinds of interpersonal relations to which participants may aim with their speech acts. In order to account for these differences, Habermas has introduced a distinction between a strong and a weak sense of communicative action (Pragmatics, 326ff). In weak communicative action, participants orient themselves only toward claims to truth and sincerity, whereas in strong communicative action, they also consider intersubjectively recognized claims to rightness concerning the norms and values that are supposed to justify the actions at issue. This important revision of the concept of communicative action raises the question: To what extent can the status of normative rightness (a key thesis of Habermas’s conception of formal pragmatics) as a necessary condition for understanding any speech act whatsoever, comparable to truth and sincerity, still be defended? The question whether this view still holds is likely to determine future debates on the concept of communicative action.

46 COMMUNICATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY DIRK JÖRKE

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abermas’s engagement with the questions posed by anthropology began during his university studies—when he evinced skepticism about efforts to determine the unchanging qualities of human nature. He presented his reflections in an encyclopedia article (1958) that received broad attention at the time. According to Otfried Höffe (1992), this piece is responsible for the hegemony of “postanthropological thinking” that prevailed in the “human sciences” until the 1990s (7). In keeping with the conventions of the genre, the first part of Habermas’s encyclopedia entry provides an introductory overview of the history and essential concepts of anthropological thought; the second part, however, offers decidedly critical remarks on anthropological projects in philosophy. From Habermas’s perspective, it is impossible to determine the essence of human nature, for human beings are woven into history. It is simply a “fact that mankind [der Mensch] has a history and only becomes what it is through history. This is an unsettling matter for an anthropology interested in the ‘nature’ of man and in what is common to all human beings at all times” (Kultur und Kritik, 107). At the same time, Habermas did not object to philosophical anthropology just by insisting on the historical and social nature of mankind. He also pointed out the perspectival limitations of different anthropological approaches. Epistemological interests that are socially determined focus researchers’ attention in specific ways. Accordingly, a sociological clarification of anthropology is in order. As Habermas views things here, anthropology that seeks to justify (or even establish) norms and institutions amounts to a conservative-restorative endeavor, both in terms of form and content. In other words, such an approach conceals political objectives. In the works of Arnold Gehlen—at the latest—philosophical anthropology led to “dogmatism with political consequences, which is all the more dangerous for taking the form of objective [wertfrei] science” (Kultur und Kritik, 108). Against the backdrop of this fundamental critique of anthropological thinking, then, it is surprising that Habermas—only a few years later—undertook

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his own effort to justify norms in terms of human universalia. This occurred in his project of epistemological anthropology (Erkenntnisanthropologie). In his inaugural address at the university in Frankfurt and in subsequent publications, Habermas sought to demonstrate an inherent interest in emancipation (Mündigkeit) by epistemological-anthropological means (mit erkenntnisanthropologischen Mitteln). In so doing, he began with the assumption that ways of acting (Handlungsweisen) that are fundamental for human beings and the epistemological interests that result from them transcend cultures: “The achievements of transcendental subjectivity have their basis in the natural history of the human species” (Knowledge, 314). Accordingly—he maintained— three anthropologically anchored interests may be demonstrated. In addition to the principles of work and interaction, on the one hand, and the empiricalanalytical and hermeneutic sciences that correspond to them, on the other, Habermas affirmed that there exists an interest in critique—with which specific sciences/forms of knowledge are associated. The human species, he averred, not only needs instrumental and symbolic interaction but also demonstrates (epistemological) interest in emancipation. To be sure, Habermas took on considerable burdens of proof in advancing this thesis, which required two kinds of demonstration. First, he had to name the sciences that exercise an inherently critical function. Psychoanalysis offered him the paradigmatic example for such a critical science. Accordingly, Knowledge and Human Interests seeks to employ the psychoanalytic approach in order to diagnose pathological phenomena in complex societies. While this assessment may still prove acceptable, the question of how such interest in emancipation may be grounded in anthropology does not receive a response. In particular, Habermas fails to demonstrate that interest in emancipation possesses the same fundamental importance (Stellenwert) as instrumental and communicative action. It was likely this sticking point that led him to abandon, shortly after Knowledge and Human Interests was published, all talk of interest in emancipation based in the species. In the 1970s, Habermas steered an alternative course in order to found a critical theory of society by adopting the approach of “universal pragmatics.” Since then, anthropological motifs appear less frequently in his works— though they have not disappeared entirely. When Habermas elaborated his conception of discourse ethics based on Kant, he left anthropological considerations behind, for the most part. Here too, however, one may ask whether in Habermas’s deontological theory of morality—which discourse ethics claims to be, after all—there is not “an element of embarrassed [verschämt] anthropology” at work “to philosophical ends” (Honneth 2000, 104). Recently, in The Future of Human Nature, anthropological motifs have once again come to the fore in explicit fashion. According to Habermas, the

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possibility of positive eugenics—that is, of genetically engineered influences on the human phenotype—has not just exploded the borders of conventional conceptions about human nature; it also has exposed the preconditions for deontological conceptions of morality that have, until now, eluded discussion. This admission, in particular, makes The Future of Human Nature a remarkable text. The answer Habermas seeks to provide to the challenge posed by the biosciences is revealing, as well, for he affirms that a “species ethics” derived from anthropology is what gives morality—understood in deontological terms—a secular foundation in the first place. The Future of Human Nature possesses anthropological substance over and above the author’s discussion of species ethics. Habermas also takes up Helmuth Plessner’s distinction between “being” and “having” a body (“Leib sein” und “Körper haben”)—a distinction that is intended to mark a border that may not be violated by genetic manipulation (Future, 58). All the same, Habermas clarifies the specific relationship between the “guidepost of species ethics” (gattungsethischer Wegweiser) and the “morality of reason” embodied in discourse ethics (diskursethische Vernunftmoral) just as little as he accounts for the status of anthropological arguments in the framework of species ethics in general. On the one hand, it seems that he fears the consequences of truly justifying morality by reference to anthropology; on the other hand—and especially when faced with the challenges posed by genetic engineering—it appears that he cannot abandon such a project entirely.

References Habermas, Jürgen. 2000. “Nach dreißig Jahren. Bemerkungen zu Erkenntnis und Interesse.” In Das Interesse der Vernunft, ed. Stefan Müller-Doohm, 12–20. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Höffe, Otfried. 1992. “Wiederbelebung im Seiteneinstieg.” In Der Mensch – ein politisches Tier? Essays zur politischen Anthropologie, ed. Otfried Höffe, 5–13. Stuttgart: Reclam. Honneth, Axel. 2000. “Anerkennungsbeziehungen und Moral: Eine Diskussionsbemerkung zur anthropologischen Erweiterung der Diskursethik.” In Anthropologie, Ethik und Gesellschaft. Für Helmut Fahrenbach, ed. Reinhard Brunner and Peter Kelbel, 101–11. Frankfurt: Campus.

47 CONSERVATISM MICHA BRUMLIK

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onservative thinking in its various adumbrations has interested Jürgen Habermas since the very beginning of his sociological and philosophical efforts. In 1963, he authored the article “Kritische und konservative Aufgaben der Soziologie” (Critical and conservative tasks of sociology). Referring to Scottish moral philosophy—especially the works of David Hume—as a conservative element of sociology in its early stages, Habermas declared that conservatism “esteems tradition as the peaceful basis of ongoing development precisely because it does not question the naturalness [Naturwüchsigkeit] of progress.” From the beginning, Habermas’s dialectical encounters with conservatism of all stripes have worked on—and against—Hume’s declaration: “Liberty is the perfection of civil authority; but authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence” (Habermas 1971a, 293). Habermas summarizes the spirit of nascent sociology in words that might provide the motto for his own project: “The tradition of progress is to be protected against the premature demolition of socially useful authorities as much as it is to be critically secured against the blind affirmation of historically obsolete authorities” (294).

Philosophical Anthropology and Hegel’s Theory of the French Revolution Previous to this article, Habermas penned “Der Zerfall der Institutionen” (The decline of institutions)—a discussion of Arnold Gehlen and the theory of institutions presented in Urmensch und Spätkultur (Primal man and late culture). In this piece, Habermas accepts Gehlen’s (1956) anthropological views (also elaborated in the earlier work, Der Mensch [Gehlen 1988, original edition 1940]): humans are beings largely free of instinct, possessed of excess energy, and extroverted (weltoffen). Habermas lauds the author’s “clever, inventive, and exact derivation of what an institution is [kluge, erfindungsreiche und präzise Ableitung der Institution selbst]” (Habermas 1971b, 102). By affirming— contra Gehlen—the modern right to individuality and calling for a “balance

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between the institution and the individual” (106), he also draws the basic lines of his discussion of conservative thinking in works to follow. In terms of social theory and the philosophy of history, this position has required Habermas to confront Hegel’s systematic critique of Kant and his perspective on the revolution in France. Unlike Edmund Burke (who founded modern conservative thought), Hegel sought to make revolution the principle of his philosophy—or, to put it more precisely, to pursue “the revolutionizing of reality without legitimizing the revolutionaries themselves.” Hegel, that is, undertook the “magnificent attempt to understand the actualization of abstract Right as an objective process” (Theory and Practice, 126). The further course of Hegel’s political thinking, Habermas observes, reveals that the philosopher failed to understand how the rule of law provides the self-sustaining basis (selbsttragende Grundlage) for modern society. In the theory of ethics (Sittlichkeit) elaborated in Philosophy of Right, Hegel enlists the authority of the estates (ständische Authoritäten) to secure legality. Thereby, he blocks the realization of his own aims by calling for social and political conditions in which the principle of modern subjectivity—which is based on civil law—is cut in half by being excluded from the process of democratic legislation (116ff.).

The Internal Dynamics of Modern Societies Needless to say, the internal dynamics (Eigendynamik) of modern societies— which Hegel was the first to identify (when he distinguished subsystems of abstraction such as “law,” “science,” and “economy”)—do not entertain a harmonious relationship with the individualized forms assumed by modern intersubjectivity. Accordingly, Habermas’s theory of communicative action— which proceeds dialectically and critiques modern societies’ tendency to promote processes of “one-sidedness”—cannot do otherwise than to name realms that merit defense and preservation: The point is to protect areas of life that are functionally dependent on social integration through values, norms, and consensus formation, to preserve them from falling prey to the systemic imperatives of economic and administrative subsystems growing with dynamics of their own, and to defend them from becoming converted over, through the steering medium of law, to a principle of sociation that is, for them, dysfunctional. (Communicative Action, 2:372–373)

Habermas’s purposes, then, are conservative inasmuch as they offer resistance (which he justifies in functionalist terms) to the “colonization of the lifeworld.”

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He defines such colonization as follows: “When stripped of their ideological veils, the imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society— and force a process of assimilation upon it” (2:355). At the same time, new social movements emerge under these conditions. Because they represent potential instances of revitalized communication in the lifeworld, Habermas does not want to deny them his sympathy: The revaluation of the particular, the natural, the provincial, of social spaces that are small enough to be familiar, of decentralized forms of commerce and despecialized activities, of segmented pubs, simple interactions and dedifferentiated public spheres—all this is meant to foster the revitalization of possibilities for expression and communication that have been buried alive. Resistance to reformist interventions that turn into their opposite, because the means by which they are implemented run counter to the declared aims of social integration, also belongs in this context. (2:395)

Neoconservatism and Postmodernity This constellation—in which the rationalization of the lifeworld is no longer distinguished from the mounting complexity of the social system—has given rise to a new form of “Young Conservative” antimodernism. This position understands itself in contrast to another variant of conservatism, which defends postmodernity even though it “robs a modernity at variance with itself of its rational content and its perspectives on the future” (2:396). In either case, the central reservoir of arguments occurs in the American movement that calls itself “neoconservative” (Kristol 1995, Dorman 2001). Neoconservatism, Habermas observes, offered the presidency of Ronald Reagan more than a pragmatic justification inasmuch as it elaborated a theoretical perspective in which erstwhile members of the radical left who had been disappointed by the course of history came to agree with antidemocratic scholars and public figures of the interwar years in Germany. Indeed, German authors open-minded about technology but hostile to democracy (e.g., Joachim Ritter, Ernst Forsthoff, Arnold Gehlen, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger) articulated viewpoints that agree with those of former Trotskyists such as Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Daniel Bell on three essential points. The first point of overlap involves the systematic critique of intellectuals, who are alleged to violate, in systematic fashion, the borders between a kind

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of modernity that has achieved economic and political equilibrium, on the one hand, and, on the other, the hypertrophic fragmentation of the individual (Aufspreizung des Individuums)—which is only admissible in the realm of art (at best). This occurs, the argument goes, because intellectuals seek to obtain illegitimate advantages for themselves as a “new class” at the expense of productive elements of the general population. Second, neoconservatives declare that the extravagant claims of the past have been settled (erledigt) once and for all. With philosophical arguments, they dismiss (supposed) residues of humanism and humanitarianism that have failed to provide results and remain stuck in the positions of subject philosophy. In other fields—first and foremost in architecture but also in philosophy and literary criticism—this inheritance is deemed obsolete in light of postmodern/postmodernist cultural developments. Finally, neoconservatives do not consider social conflicts— which, however varied in kind, are matters of indisputable fact—in terms of class relations and uneven access to material and political resources; instead, they consider problems in society to express “intellectual and moral crisis” (New Conservatism, 44).

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Habermas lends systematic rigor to his rejection of neoconservatism—and of the postmodernism that, in his estimation, is of a piece with it—by elaborating a new framework for understanding modernity. The twelve lectures published as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) outline this project. In penetrating discussions of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Bataille, Foucault, and Luhmann, Habermas seeks to reconnect with the young Hegel’s philosophy of history. The task is to salvage the “normative content of modernity” (Discourse, 336) by combining thinking that is still centered on individual consciousness with a theory of intersubjectivity. In so doing, Habermas affirms that society, through the mediation of the public sphere, can entertain a reflexive relationship with—and take influence on—itself; moreover, he holds that this can occur in such a way that one may counter the resigned acceptance of autonomous subsystems in the technocratic state (Young Conservatism), in philosophy (deconstruction), and in the realm of aesthetics (postmodernism). “Self-organized public spheres must develop the prudent combination of power and intelligent self-restraint that is needed to sensitize the self-steering mechanisms of the state and the economy to the goal-oriented outcomes of radical democratic will formation” (365). For this to happen, however, the notion of societal self-reflection and self-transformation (which is based in subject philosophy) must change so that instead

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of “the model of society influencing itself, we have the model of boundary conflicts—which are held in check by the lifeworld—between the lifeworld and two subsystems that are superior to it in complexity and can be influenced by it” (365).

A Conservative Ethics of the Species Although altogether modest when compared to the sociocritical and revolutionary claims of early political modernity, Habermas’s ambition rests upon a single, radical condition that may not, under any circumstances, be abandoned. In his most recent publications—which now address matters of theology and religion—Habermas has taken up the anthropological matter of individuality, which, in his eyes, is not based only on language and communication but also on the absolute certainty of its own uniqueness. In his critique of liberal eugenics (which seeks to justify the use of embryos in research and even human cloning), Habermas has called for a species ethics that is no longer concerned merely with questions of generalizability and justice but also addresses a basic precondition of “the good” in positive terms. This involves elaborating a conception of personhood as something “grown” (Gewachsenes) and not “made” (Gemachtes)—that is, a matter of chance that is not attributable to the intentions of (other) human beings. Invoking Kant’s doctrine of virtue in the Metaphysics of Morals, Habermas affirms that planned interventions in the human genome contradict the postulate that man should always be a “purpose” to man (dass der Mensch dem Mensch jederzeit auch Zweck sein soll). Alterations of the genome threaten belief in human beings’ “ability-to-be-oneself”—that is, the notion that they may view themselves as “undivided authors of their own life histories” (Future, 72). Significantly, in defending the contingencies of creating new life through the genetic lottery of sexual intercourse—which he considers to guarantee existence possessed of human dignity—Habermas has sided with conservatives who wish to adhere to and preserve the past. He observes that “most of us”—even after the fall of religious and metaphysical worldviews—have become neither “cool cynics” nor “indifferent relativists”: “almost by reflex we [have] held—and [have] wanted to hold—to the binary code of moral judgments being right or wrong” (73). For Habermas, the “opposition raised today against a dreaded change in the identity of the species” (74)—which he also remarks in himself—can be justified on similar grounds. The conception of man rooted in the Bible (which the philosophy of Enlightenment—and Kant in particular—took up and affirmed) must be “protected against . . . premature demolition.”

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References Dorman, Joseph. 2001. Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words. Chicago: Free Press. Gehlen, Arnold. 1988. Man: His Nature and Place in the World. Trans. Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer. New York: Columbia University Press. ——. 1956. Urmensch und Spätkultur. Bonn: Athenäum. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971a. Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Studien. Rev. ed. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1971b. Philosophisch-politische Profile. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kristol, Irving. 1995. Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. Chicago: Free Press.

48 CONSTITUTIONS AND CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOTISM RAINER NICKEL

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onstitutionality received a central position and a positive definition only in Habermas’s later writings, specifically in the context of his legal theory. In his early discussion of legitimation problems under late capitalism, the author voiced suspicion that “bourgeois constitutions” (Legitimation, 101) harbor ideology, but the matter appeared to be of secondary importance for the task at hand. The Theory of Communicative Action hinted at a changed interest in structures of (constitutional) law. Finally, Between Facts and Norms—Habermas’s main work of legal theory— presented a kind of idealizing phenomenology of the democratic and constitutional state and affirmed the equiprimordiality of democracy and the legal system (Facts, 118–131). As described here, a constitution is more than an evolutionary achievement that serves to connect and divide law and politics— something that might disappear again after the divide between them has been made porous (Luhmann 1990). Now, Habermas contends, “constitution” refers to a necessary condition for the production of legitimate laws and rights. For all that, constitutionality must be spelled out in a democratic process. The five points Habermas enumerates in his system of rights (subjective rights to act [Handlungsfreiheiten], membership [Mitgliedschaftsstatus], claims to legal protection [Rechtsschutz], rights of political participation, and social rights) simply provide “unsaturated placeholders” whose contents cannot be abstractly determined beforehand but must rather be “filled” through processes of democratic will formation (Facts, 126). In theory, the democratic and constitutional state is oriented on universalistic constitutional principles; in actual fact, however, it receives an ethical (nota bene, not an ethnic) imprint inasmuch as every legal order “expresses a particular form of living and does not just reflect the universal contents of basic rights” (Habermas 1993, 167). Habermas—like Kant before him, whose republicanism provides the basis for the procedural theory of law and constitution—has been criticized for being too abstract and generalizing. His critics contend that he advocates an idealistic conception of constitutionality that has no temporal or spatial coordinates and, consequently, is rootless—that is, a bloodless abstraction that

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represses the fact that it depends on the shared convictions and communal feelings of citizens (see, e.g., Michelman 2001 and the tendentious critique in Isensee 2006, who denounces the author’s unpatriotic “left-wing cultural hegemony”). For the most part, such objections are based on the assumption that a constitution depends on prepositive conditions and not ones contained in the constitutional text itself—i.e., that it depends on what the document itself can neither generate nor guarantee (such as, for example, “the moral substance of the individual and the homogeneity of society” [Böckenförde 1976, 60]). However, even before the publication of Between Facts and Norms (1992)— and at the end stage of the Bonn Republic—Habermas put a term into circulation that both anticipated the basic traits of the concept of constitutionality he would soon elaborate and protected it against essentialist and nationalist objections. In 1987, in the wake of the Historikerstreit, Habermas took up the matter of “constitutional patriotism”—a phrase coined by the political scientist Dolf Sternberger (1979)—and introduced a semantic displacement that has proved rich in consequences. Sternberger sought to salvage patriotism as a variant of “love for one’s country” (Vaterlandsliebe) by understanding the constitution as expressing a national community of values and the state as an “association of friendship” (Freundschaftsverband). Habermas, in contrast, affirmed a postnational version of patriotism free of all reference to cultural values, shared destinies, and homogeneous populations—a concept that, moreover, required no doctrine of virtue à la Aristotle for support. To patriots who mourned a German nationalism unclouded by National Socialism, Habermas (1987) declared: “The only patriotism that does not alienate us from the West is constitutional patriotism. Unfortunately, an attachment to universalistic constitutional principles anchored in conviction was able to emerge in German national culture [in der Kulturnation der Deutschen] only after—and through—Auschwitz” (135). For Habermas, constitutional patriotism represents a historical learning process that leaves behind the nation-state of old as culture and state politics split off from each other (173). The new postnational state is not suited for ecstatic emotional attachment. As is well known, when Bundespräsident Gustav Heinemann was asked whether he loved Germany, he responded, “I do not love the state. I love my wife.” In the postnational constellation, “state patriotism” yields to pride in—and loyalty to—procedures of democratic will formation and the legal guarantees of the constitution, which promote “coexistence and communication between different forms of life possessed of equal rights” (173). Now, under the Berlin Republic, Habermas’s constitutional patriotism names consensus in a liberal public sphere that has had enough of nationalism. At the same time, Habermas’s understanding of the concept opens a new perspective on the postnational state: constitutional patriotism henceforth refers to a multicultural republic that has abandoned the idea of a community

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predating the state and possessed of a shared destiny and common cultural core. In discussing the arguments of Charles Taylor (1994)—which are shaped by communitarianism—Habermas (1994) has observed: In complex societies the citizenry as a whole can no longer be held together by a substantive consensus on values but only by a consensus on the procedures for the legitimate enactment of laws and the legitimate exercise of power. . . . The universalism of legal principles is reflected in a procedural consensus, which must be embedded in the context of a historically specific political culture through a kind of constitutional patriotism. (135)

Conservatives have mourned the absence of positive patriotism and derided multiculturalism as the battle cry of hegemonic, left-wing culture (see esp. Isensee 2006, 13). They have even charged Habermas’s proceduralist theory of law and constitutionality with undermining social unity (whose dissolution they deem imminent) by promoting excessively permissive multiculturalism (for an emphatic—and emphatically mistaken—account, see Ladeur and Augsberg 2007). Even if this is not the writers’ intention, such allegations confirm Habermas’s thesis that struggles for recognition never end in the democratic and constitutional state. The success of constitutional patriotism (and of Habermas’s expansion of the concept along the lines of social and legal theory) extends far beyond the borders of the Federal Republic of Germany. Especially in Spain and Canada—and in the United States, as well—the matter has received a great deal of attention (e.g., Michelman 2001, Müller 2007, Müller and Scheppele 2008). Habermas’s idea has offered—and continues to offer—a frequent point of reference for parties seeking to counter skepticism concerning the project of a European constitution (Lacroix 2002, Bellamy and Castiglione 2004). In the 1990s, Habermas already called for constitutionality to be considered independently of the nation-state. In his exchange with Dieter Grimm on the preconditions for, and the consequences of, a European constitution, he emphatically stressed that the burden of social integration “must not be shifted from the levels of political will formation to presumed prepolitical substrates.” There is no need for a homogeneous European “people” (whatever shape it might [be supposed to] take), because the requisite “social integration” will occur “in the legally abstract form of political participation . . . to secure the substantive status of citizenship in democratic ways” (Inclusion, 159). Habermas’s call for the constitutionalization of international law (Divided West) makes the connection to universal legal principles even more abstract. Yet debates about a European constitution have shown that the necessary “ethical impregnation”—that is, the elaboration of a legal system through

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democratic procedure—strikes a limit on a supranational level because a vigorous European public sphere (which would propel this process and set its course) only exists in part. Moreover, the condensation that has occurred in international law and has led to the emergence of a global sphere of legal thinking displays a socially integrative power that is even weaker than what public processes of communication (Verständigungsprozesse) afford at present. Therefore, despite Habermas’s efforts to describe the contours of a world legal constitution (see most recently Habermas 2008), a less hierarchical approach—one that regulates conflicts (Verfassungskonfliktrecht) and takes the manifold nature of local and regional constitutions seriously—seems to have better prospects for concretizing, in a way that admits justification, a global system of rights.

References Bellamy, Richard, and Dario Castiglione. 2004. “Lacroix’s European Constitutional Patriotism.” Political Studies 52:187–193. Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang. 1976. Staat, Gesellschaft, Freiheit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Grimm, Dieter. 1995. “Does Europe Need a Constitution?” European Law Journal 1, no. 3: 282–301. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. Eine Art Schadensabwicklung: Kleine Politische Schriften VI. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1994. “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State.” Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann, 107–148. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ——. 2008. “The Constitutionalisation of International Law and the Legitimation Problems of a Constitution for World Society.” Constellations 15:444–455. Isensee, Josef. 2006. “Plädoyer für eine Wiederkehr der Gemeinschaft – Verdrängung und Wiederentdeckung der Realität.” Die Politische Meinung: Monatsschrift der KonradAdenauer-Stiftung 440:6–14. Lacroix, Justine. 2002. “For a European Constitutional Patriotism.” Political Studies 50:944–958. Ladeur, Karl-Heinz, and Ino Augsberg. 2007. Toleranz, Religion, Recht. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Luhmann, Niklas. 1990. “Verfassung als evolutionäre Errungenschaft.” Rechtshistorisches Journal 9:176–220. Michelman, Frank I. 2001. “Morality, Identity, and ‘Constitutional Patriotism.’ ” Ratio Juris 14:253–271. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2007. Constitutional Patriotism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Müller, Jan-Werner, and Kim Lane Scheppele. 2008. “Symposium Constitutional Patriotism: An Introduction.” I–CON 6, no. 1: 67–71. Sternberger, Dolf. 1990. “Verfassungspatriotismus.” In Schriften, vol. 10. Frankfurt: Insel. Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann, 25–74. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

49 COSMOPOLITAN CONDITION KENNETH BAYNES

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n an essay (Habermas 1998) marking the two hundredth anniversary of Kant’s essay “Perpetual Peace,” Habermas returns to Kant’s call for a “cosmopolitan condition” (weltbürgerlicher Zustand) that would bring about a definitive end to the bellicose “state of nature” between nationstates. In this essay Habermas suggests that, in his contrast between a global constitutional order or “world republic” and a weaker voluntary federation among sovereign states, Kant was not as unambiguously in support of the latter as is generally assumed. On the one hand, the necessary cultural and social conditions for a legitimate world republic are lacking, and thus the dangers of a global despotism loom; yet, on the other hand, if states are to be subject to enforceable law and obligated by more than (largely impotent) moral norms, a loose federation will not suffice. Habermas’s initial response to this situation was his cautious support for calls for a “cosmopolitan democracy” that would include a reformed and strengthened United Nations (including a “world parliament”) (Inclusion, 186–187). Changes on the international scene since Kant’s time also provide this utopian vision a greater degree of both urgency and realism. The variety of phenomena that, taken together, have recently been grouped under the heading “globalization” raises important questions about the possibility of achieving democracy within the limited framework of the nation-state. The increased number and expanding influence of multinational corporations, growing international flows in labor and capital, expanding population migration, and large-scale ecological threats challenge in new ways the nation-state’s claim to legitimacy, even on the domestic front. In short, can the nation-state, given its apparently diminished capacity to act, maintain its legitimacy in the face of the growing demands of its citizenry? At the same time, the widening (if fragile) recognition of human rights, the more active role of the United Nations and other international organizations, and a developing global “civil society” (including worldwide communication media) make it meaningful at least to ask whether a “postnational constellation” is not emerging in which the locus of democratization is no longer centered exclusively on the territorial nation-state. In several other important essays published since Between Facts and Norms, Habermas has pursued this idea of a “cosmopolitan condition” in connection

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with the idea of “global governance without a world government” (e.g., Divided West). Indeed, there is much in his “two-track” model of democracy (with its distinction between “weak” and “strong” publics) that suggests why this might be so. On the one hand, there is no inherent reason why his idea of a weak public sphere cannot be interpreted in the context of a “global civil society,” and, on the other, there are also some reasons for extending his discursive account of strong publics—the formal institutions of decision making—in connection with the idea of a more multilayered and dispersed conception of sovereignty and the related idea of “subsidiarity.” As he now argues, we need to think more abstractly and imaginatively to allow for a distinction between “state” and “constitution” that Kant did not make (Divided West, 131). Similarly, his claim that there has been at most only a historical (not a necessary) convergence between the political demos and a relatively homogenous nation or people (Volk) also supports the claim that the former need not be limited to the traditional (territorial) idea of the nation-state. At the same time, Habermas has also modified his initial endorsement of a “world republic” and now prefers to speak of a “constitutionalization of international law without a world government” (Divided West, 146), and he distances himself from the views of some stronger cosmopolitans (Naturalism, 323). In these subsequent essays, Habermas advocates a “multilevel federal system” that distinguishes among three global actors according to their respective functional roles: a supranational political body limited to the maintenance of peace and protection of basic human rights (a reformed United Nations with a more modest mission); an intermediate level occupied by regional bodies devoted to a “global domestic politics,” including large-scale economic and environmental policies; and nation-states that have assumed a more limited sovereignty but continue to play the most important role on the global stage (Divided West, 176). In this context, Habermas has voiced support for strengthening the role of the United Nations (though now focused on the goal of peace and protecting human rights) and for creating an international criminal court with a mandate to prevent at least gross violations of human rights. At the same time, however, he is more cautious than some advocates of cosmopolitan democracy about the likelihood of achieving on a global scale the kind of “civic solidarity” (as a “solidarity among strangers”) that for him is a necessary condition for a robust deliberative politics. In this respect, he reflects a limited agreement with some of his more civic-republican critics such as Charles Taylor or Benjamin Barber. His own constructive proposal (in addition to his support for a European constitution) is for the development of what he calls “international negotiating systems” in which various players (including nation-states, regional governmental bodies, and nongovernmental organizations) would fulfill the role of a “strong public,” while citizens motivated by a cosmopolitan consciousness and active in various ways in a cosmopolitan civil society would

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constitute a “weak public.” As with the two-track model described at the level of the nation-state, the challenge again is for imaginative institutional design leading to a more responsive and accountable “strong public” than is possible today at the level of the nation-state alone. However, the basic structure of this proposal for cosmopolitan democracy remains the same: a dynamic division of labor between a free-wheeling public sphere that functions as a kind of “receptor” for identifying and thematizing social problems—and ensuring that they are placed on the political agenda—and the more formally organized (though multilayered and dispersed) strong publics responsible for “translating” publicly generated reasons into socially effective policies via accountable administrative bodies. This is certainly a highly abstract (and speculative) model of democracy, and many of its more specific institutional details are still missing. And, as some critics have noted, it is unclear how far it actually remains from other proposals for a more (state-like) global order (Niesen and Herborth 2007, Scheuerman 2008). Can a strengthened United Nations successfully protect even basic human rights without assuming some of the features of a traditional state, and, if not, how will it secure the increased demand for legitimacy? But, contrary to other critics, it is at least clear that Habermas’s model of a “cosmopolitan condition” is by no means simply an abdication to neoliberalism but an attempt to challenge it through proposals for a “realistic utopia.”

References Habermas, Jürgen. 1998. “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace: At Two Hundred Years’ Historical Remove.” In The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran P. Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, 165–202. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Niesen, Peter, and Benjamin Herborth, eds. 2007. Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Scheuerman, William. 2008. “Global Governance Without Global Government?” Political Theory 36, no. 1: 133–151.

50 COUNTERFACTUAL PRESUPPOSITIONS ANDREAS KOLLER

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he notion of unavoidable, idealizing presuppositions of a pragmatic nature that Habermas elaborates in his later works represents an effort to nuance—and, ultimately, to replace—the confusing concept of an “ideal speech situation” that he presented in the works of his middle period. Since Between Facts and Norms, Habermas has understood “counterfactual presuppositions”—or, alternatively, the “vocabulary of the as-if”—as “the nerve of my entire theoretical undertaking” (1998, 418). The social sciences in particular have paid little attention to this conceptual move, however. Accordingly, the matter represents one of the most misunderstood elements of Habermasian theory. Idealizing presuppositions do not inhabit language per se; rather, they represent an aspect of the communicative use of linguistic expressions (Truth, 83ff.). Although an exhaustive inventory of such presuppositions does not exist, Habermas names the four that are “most important” (Naturalism, 50): publicity and inclusiveness: the presupposition that no one who is able to make a relevant contribution be denied participation; communicative equality: the presupposition that all be afforded equal opportunity to present their views on a given matter; exclusion of deception and self-deception: the presupposition that participants mean what they say and, accordingly, raise validity claims admitting criticism in terms of truth, rightness, and/or truthfulness; and the unforced force of the better argument: the presupposition that “yes” or “no” stances be motivated only by the power of superior reasons to convince (and not by external or internal constraints)—i.e., that only what is said (and not who says it) plays a role (Inclusion, 44; Naturalism, 50). The last of these indicates the tripartite structure of argumentative practice. In competing to make the better “case,” participants in discourse refer to a third term, which is independent of them—that is, to the authority of reason (or, in other words, to the logic of justification). In contrast, strategic interaction—where participants’ preferences count as fixed and matters concern only the balancing of interests within the framework of a given constellation of power—lacks such reference to a third term (Habermas 2007, 415–416).

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Parties who engage in argumentation in earnest make idealizing presuppositions as a matter of course. This does not mean that they forget the counterfactual nature of these presuppositions while interacting—that is, participants are not absorbed entirely in the exchange. All that they know in an objective capacity—i.e., the knowledge they possess when they are not caught up in discourse—remains intuitively present when they are engaged. At the same time, however, such intuitive awareness of counterfactuality enters the equation only when inconsistencies are perceived that arouse suspicion about the “genuineness of an argumentative exchange” (dass hier überhaupt nicht argumentiert wird) (Naturalism, 51). The response to such perceived inconsistencies reveals the self-corrective mechanism at work: Once the participants start to doubt their “expectation that the relevant information and reasons get ‘put on the table’ and can influence the outcome,” they immediately seek to correct the situation according to those very idealizing presuppositions. They change the circle of the participants, expand the agenda or improve the information base, and so forth (51). If and when this self-corrective mechanism sets in is an empirical question, however. Alternatively, the participants may terminate the give and take of reasons or switch to a strategic approach and simply continue the practice by pretending that it matters. At the beginning of the 1980s, Habermas began to distance himself from his earlier view that an ideal speech situation represents a “prefiguration of a form of life” (Vorschein einer Lebensform), as he had previously put it (Justification and Application, 164; Habermas 1982, 261–262). By the end of the decade, he had abandoned the notion entirely. Between Facts and Norms (1992) clarifies the matter by making a central distinction between, on the one hand, idealizing presuppositions, which represent unavoidable pragmatic preconditions for discursive practice, and, on the other, the ideal communicative community, which offers a “methodological fiction” for understanding sociation strictly in terms of communication. In the interim (in Vorstudien and Communicative Action), Habermas had come to view the ideal speech situation as “somewhat too concrete a term for the set of general and unavoidable communicative presuppositions” that “a subject capable of speech and action must make every time he or she wishes to participate seriously in argumentation” (1985, 86). Now, he focused instead on the “intuitive knowledge” that “every competent speaker” has at his or her disposal (86). Accordingly, he critiqued the idea (first introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce and later taken up by Karl-Otto Apel) of an “ideal communication community,” and he also stepped away from his own remarks concerning ideal speech situations, which he now considered to exemplify the “ ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.’ These images are concretist, because they suggest a final condition that might be achieved in time, which cannot be what they are intended to suggest” (A Berlin Republic, 148). Despite such self-criticism,

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however, Habermas has stressed that he never elevated the idea of an unlimited communication community into an ideal that really exists. Even before Between Facts and Norms, he affirms, he hesitated “to call the communication community a regulative idea in the Kantian sense, because the notion of an ‘unavoidable idealizing presupposition of a pragmatic kind’ cannot be subsumed under the classical opposition between the ‘regulative’ and the ‘constitutive’ ” (Justification and Application, 164). Indeed, Habermas has gone beyond the Kantian dichotomy between regulative and constitutive ideas. If one views idealizing presuppositions as the “illicit objectivation of a regulative idea,” one’s perspective continues to be shaped by a false opposition. Yet at the same time, even though presuppositions are idealizing, we must make them matters of actual fact if we want to pursue a course of argument at all. In other words, idealizing presuppositions have empirical effects: “Every factually raised claim to validity . . . generates a new fact with the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses of its addressees” (Justification and Application, 165). Accordingly, Habermas considers that the Kantian “‘Doctrine of the Two Realms’ has been completely overcome. The structure of a use of language oriented toward reaching understanding demands idealizing suppositions on the part of the communicative actors; yet these notions function as social facts” (1991, 243). The course of development leading from the ideal speech situation to counterfactual presuppositions culminated in Between Facts and Norms. Here, Habermas—in reference to the works of Hauke Brunkhorst, on the one hand, and those of Bernhard Peters, on the other—clarifies a basic distinction. Counterfactual, idealizing presuppositions—which represent inevitable pragmatic requirements for discursive practice—are to be held separate from the methodological fiction of an ideal communicative community, which provides a model for pure, communicative sociation. “The idealizing presuppositions we always already have to adopt whenever we want to reach mutual understanding do not involve any kind of correspondence or comparison between idea and reality” (Brunkhorst 1993, 345, qtd. in Facts, 323). The notion of idealizing presuppositions, then, is a matter distinct from the “projection of ideals, in the light of which we can identify deviations”—and which can be “approximately realized” (Facts, 322–323). As already holds for Kant’s regulative idea (or, alternatively, its methodological elaboration as undertaken by, e.g., Weber), the issue involves approximation—which is precisely what idealizing presuppositions of “as-if” do not allow (Habermas 2007, 426). Drawing on Peters’s observations, Habermas reformulates regulative ideas in terms of methodological fiction. As models of an ideal, they provide a “foil to reveal [hervorheben] and describe empirical deviations from a fictive ideal condition—and in this way make certain traits of reality visible, through contrast” (Peters 1993, 240). The “idea of self-organization is projected onto

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society as a whole,” and the concept of an ideal communication community may be used “for a thought experiment” (Facts, 323ff.). “The essentialist misunderstanding is replaced by a methodological fiction in order to obtain a foil against which the substratum of unavoidable societal complexity becomes visible. In this harmless sense, the ideal communication community presents itself as a model of ‘pure’ communicative sociation” (323). The only means of self-organization available to such a “purely” communicative community is opinion and will formation through discourse. On this point, the notion of methodological fiction connects with Habermas’s reflections on the public sphere (see chapter 69 in this volume). In later works, the notion that the public sphere possesses unlimited epistemic (or, alternatively, self-corrective) capacity functions in this way. The concept of methodical fiction enables Habermas to present his “reservations regarding such an idealist misunderstanding of social integration, which some people incorrectly ascribe to me” (A Berlin Republic, 147–148). As indicated above, the matter is not to be confused with the notion of counterfactual presuppositions. Here, the general idea—the vocabulary of “as if” and the empirical effects associated with it—by no means belongs to Habermas alone. C. Wright Mills, for example, clearly pointed to this phenomenon decades earlier, in The Sociological Imagination. By “acting as if we were in a fully democratic society . . . we are attempting to remove the ‘as if.’ ” Practices of the “as if” can “help build a democratic polity” (Mills 2000, 189) in actual fact. In the works of his middle and late periods, Habermas has explored the circumstances under which this is not just possible but, indeed, unavoidable. Whenever we engage in a discourse oriented toward understanding, we necessarily make idealizing presuppositions along the four lines indicated above: we presume that “only the unforced force of the better argument” (Justification and Application, 163) motivates participants in discourse to adopt standpoints of “yes” or “no” (and not a constraint external to the matter at hand). Inasmuch as they are concretely operative, counterfactual presuppositions constitute (social) facts. Presuppositions, that is, prove effective in reality and counterfactual at the same time. They are immanent in communicative praxis and transcend it simultaneously (McCarthy 1994, 38–39). Habermas has also referred to this phenomenon as “transcendence from within” (Rizvi 2007). These and similar idealizing yet unavoidable presuppositions for actual communicative practices possess a normative content that carries the tension between the intelligible and the empirical into the sphere of appearances itself. Counterfactual presuppositions become social facts. This critical thorn sticks in the flesh of any social reality that has to reproduce itself via action oriented toward reaching understanding. (Postmetaphysical, 47)

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Accordingly, counterfactual presuppositions also form the basis for what Habermas calls “postmetaphysical thinking” (see chapter 26 in this volume). When asked why he employs the phrase “quasi-transcendental” in The Theory of Communicative Action—and whether this does not amount to an excessively weak conception of transcendental justification—Habermas is supposed to have responded: “The weakest is the best!” Habermas’s intellectual itinerary can, in this sense, be understood as the effort to arrive at the weakest possible version of transcendental philosophy. This recurrent feature of his thought is especially evident in the path of development leading from the notion of an ideal speech situation to that of inevitable counterfactual presuppositions. How effective these presuppositions prove in social life, whether they are embodied in our institutions in such a way that “reality becomes reasonable” (Hegel 1983, 51), and, finally, whether the developmental logic of reason manifests itself in the developmental dynamics of evolution (see chapter 56 in this volume)—and accordingly in the historical process (on the distinction, see Evolution, esp. 98, 120ff.)—remains wholly undecided. Habermas concedes that, in terms of empirical research practice, he has not developed the method of rational reconstruction (see chapter 71 in this volume)—which is a related matter—to an adequate degree (Habermas 2007, 425). All the same, he has stressed that a theoretical approach cannot simply be faulted for problems of investigative technique (Habermas 2007, 421–422). Accordingly, in recent years he has begun to devote increased attention to securing empirical evidence to demonstrate the factual effectiveness of counterfactual presuppositions (Habermas 2005, 2007; Faltering, 138–183). Especially in informal settings—or, alternatively, in everyday communicative practice (which is not very institutionalized)—a relatively high amount of interpretation is required to correlate, empirically, actors’ attitudes (Aktoreinstellungen) and the utterances they make/respond to. Change often occurs rapidly between understanding-oriented and strategic dispositions, and, as a result, the “script” is often mixed. It is not easy to determine what aspects of a given agreement derive from understanding-oriented dispositions and what is based on strategic interests. Inasmuch as actors’ attitudes cannot be directly observed and are revealed only in part through questioning, “costly” maieutic methods of investigation are required (Habermas 2007, 417, 421–422). Although it is not easy, in terms of method, to investigate actors’ dispositions and the corresponding modes of action in social life—that is, to examine the precise extent to which idealizing presuppositions prove effective in understanding-oriented exchanges—it counts as certain for Habermas that these presuppositions are repeatedly made and, to some degree, operative. This view is justified because “in everyday communicative practice, sociated individuals cannot avoid also employing everyday speech in a way that is oriented toward reaching understanding. . . . It’s really quite simple: whenever we

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mean what we say, we raise the claim that what is said is true, or right, or truthful. With this claim a small bit of ideality breaks into our everyday lives” (Past, 101–102). Of course, an individual may decide at any point to manipulate others or to act in a purely strategic fashion. However, it is impossible for everyone to do so all the time. Were this so, it would be impossible to lie, and, accordingly, the way language is currently understood would no longer hold. Equally, such matters as making-tradition-one’s-own (Traditionsaneignung)—socialization, that is—would become impossible. To be able to live in a world of total manipulation (or, alternatively, a world of purely strategic action), other concepts would be required. According to Habermas, the conceptual categories (Begriffsnetz) of language today are not compatible with this possibility (101–102). In contrast to what happens informally (or, alternatively, in weakly institutionalized, everyday practice), it is somewhat easier, in methodological terms, to grasp how communicative reason (see chapter 30 in this volume) operates in opinion and will formation occurring on the level of formally organized/ institutionalized procedures. Because formal conditions—in ways that vary from case to case—promote the uncoupling of modes of communication from actors’ attitudes/outlooks, it is possible, in Habermas’s estimation, to assess the factual effectiveness of counterfactual presuppositions without reference to the understanding orientation of individual participants (Habermas 2007, 417). Moreover, the facticity of norms (des Normativen) rests on counterfactual presuppositions (see chapter 50 in this volume). In contrast to philosophers such as John Rawls (for example), Habermas does not seek a normative theory that outlines—on a drawing board, as it were—the foundational norms for a (supposedly) well-ordered society. Pragmatically inevitable, idealizing presuppositions “have nothing to do with ideals that the solitary theorist sets up in opposition to reality; I am referring only to the normative contents that are encountered in practice” (Past, 102). Normative demands (das Normative) stick in the flesh of social reality in the form of counterfactual presuppositions, which act as a “critical thorn.” Habermas introduced the method of rational reconstruction in the afterword to the paperback edition of Knowledge and Human Interests (1973). Both here and in the retrospective discussion of the book thirty years later (Habermas 2000), he concedes that the conceptions of “knowledge” and “human interests” presented in the first edition (1968) confuse two different meanings of “self-reflection.” In fact, he observes, one should distinguish between critically resolving instances of self-deception—which also restrict the subject’s capacity for insight [Erkenntnisleistungen]—and making explicit the intuitive knowledge that enables our normal speaking, acting, and knowing

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in the first place. . . . Such analytical liberation from self-produced pseudoobjectivities clearly calls for a different method [Vorgehen] than the rational reconstruction of knowledge that is general but implicit. (Habermas 2000, 14)

This false course, Habermas explains, is why—in the first edition of Knowledge and Human Interests and throughout his early work as a whole—he held that ideological critique provides the central model for a theory of society. The reversal of perspective means, then, that by beginning to correct the erroneous assumption in his midcareer works, Habermas worked to establish a new basis for the critical theory of society—i.e., the rational reconstruction of counterfactual presuppositions as the critical thorn in the flesh of social reality. This research-intensive path may also explain the thematic (or, alternatively, disciplinary) change of focus that Habermas’s works have undergone. Especially in the social sciences in the English-speaking world, this change of focus has led some to conclude that Habermas has replaced the sociohistorical analysis of the public sphere (such as occurs in his early writings) with the analysis of language from a philosophical perspective. This statement rests on a twofold misunderstanding. For one, Habermas holds that it is not a matter of language analysis per se but of the reconstructive analysis of the communicative use of linguistic expressions (Truth, 83ff.). Second, the change in focus—from historical-sociological analysis of structure to reconstructive analysis—is a matter of empirical research orientation and is not fundamental in nature. Indeed, at the beginning of the 1980s, Habermas declared that he intended to write another study on structural change in the public sphere (1992a, 129–130). It is clear that time constraints rather than a change of principle is the reason this did not occur. Habermas has not abandoned the analysis of the public sphere in sociohistorical terms; rather, he has completed it by adopting the reconstructive approach—which follows from the necessity that “the normative foundations of the critical theory of society be laid at a deeper level” (1992b, 442). Habermas understands such analysis in terms of complementarity, not opposition. Despite the fact that his perspective has become increasingly clear regarding the “nerve” of his theoretical undertaking as a whole—and especially apropos of the shift from an ideal speech situation to pragmatically unavoidable, idealizing presuppositions—Habermas concedes that, following Between Facts and Norms, “there is still much work to be done in this area” (1998, 418).

References Brunkhorst, Hauke. 1993. “Zur Dialektik von realer und idealer Kommunikationsgemeinschaft.” In Transzendentalpragmatik: Ein Symposion für Karl-Otto Apel, ed. Andreas Dorschel et al., 342–358. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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Habermas, Jürgen. 1982. “A Reply to My Critics.” In Habermas—Critical Debates, ed. John B. Thompson and David Held, 219–283. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 1985. “A Philosophico-Political Profile.” New Left Review 151:75–105. ——. 1991. “A Reply.” In Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, 214–264. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 1992a. “Dialectics of Rationalization.” In Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas, ed. Peter Dews, 95–130. London: Verso. ——. 1992b. “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, 421–461. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——.1998. “Reply to Symposium Participants, Benjamin N. Cardozo School  of Law.” In Habermas on  Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges, ed. Michael Rosenfeld and Andrew Arato, 381–452. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 2000. “Nach dreißig Jahren: Bemerkungen zu ‘Erkenntnis und Interessse.’ ” In Das Interesse der Vernunft: Rückblicke auf das Werk von Jürgen Habermas seit “Erkenntnis und Interesse,” ed. Stefan Müller-Doohm, 12–20. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2005. “Concluding Comments on Empirical Approaches to Deliberative Politics.” Acta Politica 40, no. 3: 384–392. ——. 2007. “Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik: eine Replik.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 406–459. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1983. Philosophie des Rechts. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. McCarthy, Thomas. 1994. “Philosophy and Critical Theory: A Reprise.” In Critical Theory, ed. David Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, 5–100. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Mills, C. Wright. 2000. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Harcourt. Peters, Bernhard. 1993. “Intentionale und nichtintentionale Vergesellschaftung.” In Die Integration moderner Gesellschaften, 229–248. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Rizvi, Ali Muhammad. 2007. Habermas’ Conception of “Transcendence from Within”: An Interpretation. Ph.D. diss. La Trobe University. Bundoora, Victoria, Australia.

51 DELIBERATION NICOLE DEITELHOFF

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t its core, “deliberation” refers to processes of argumentation. From the normative perspective that Habermas adopts, deliberative procedures represent a mechanism of legitimate rule (Herrschaft). To be legitimate, such processes of discussion and debate should be public and afford all parties who might potentially be affected by decisions following from them the same opportunities to participate. Habermas first employed the expression “deliberative politics” in Between Facts and Norms (1992). Here, it stands at the center of his theory of democracy. In so doing, he adopted a political concept from a broad-scale American debate that had been prompted by his own discourse theory (Cohen 1989), which he now reimported into his own writings. Building on his notion of discourse, Habermas understands deliberative politics to refer to institutionalized discursive procedures of will formation and decision making within constitutional political systems. In his works of legal and democratic theory, Habermas does not discuss the foundation and conditions for the reproduction of social order(s) per se but rather the concrete matter of how one may conceive legitimate rule in modern societies. He remarks that, on the one hand, social spheres of action irrevocably move apart through the pressures of rationalization; on the other hand, the remainders of inherited ethics dissolve into a multiplicity of individual values and worldviews. Under these conditions, communicative action— which Habermas charges with affording social integration—faces obstacles both from within and without. From the inside, this occurs inasmuch as communal values and understandings diminish and are replaced by individualized perspectives; from the outside, it occurs when alternative steering mechanisms such as money and power penetrate—and shape—the lifeworld (see chapter 35 in this volume). Habermas offers a two-tiered response to this problem. The first involves supporting communicative action institutionally by embedding it in the law, and the second the radical proceduralization of legitimate rule. For if it no longer holds that decisions are based on shared—and substantive—values, matters of legitimation (Legitimationsleistungen) must henceforth be achieved by procedures that inspire confidence that their results are, in fact, reasonable

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(Inclusion, 264). This is where deliberative politics comes in, which immediately receives a democratic turn inasmuch as it is constituted by the connection between discourse and legal form: “the centerpiece of deliberative politics consists in a network of discourses and bargaining processes that is supposed to facilitate the rational solution of pragmatic, moral, and ethical questions— the very problems that accumulate with the failure of the functional, moral, or ethical integration of society elsewhere” (Facts, 320). In deliberative democracy, legitimate rule follows from opinion and will formation that occurs through rational discourses and—coupled to them— fair bargaining processes; for this reason, it is limited to negotiations that are fair (see chapter 72 in this volume). The results of exchanges receive legitimacy through two procedural qualities that are fused with each other: rationality and participation. Rationality is achieved because of the epistemic nature of exchanging arguments, which promotes reflection and, in so doing, creates and assures processes of learning. At the same time, deliberative procedures perform this function (Leistung) only when they are protected against alternative steering mechanisms like power and social influence—that is, they occur solely on the basis of arguments made by participants whose interpretations of the issue(s) converge (from which results emerge in turn). Moreover, procedures must be sufficiently public so that potentially affected parties may participate as equals and, free from constraint, contribute to the discursive exchange. Processes that are structured in this way require that participants examine (hinterfragen) their interests and, if need be, revise them, in order to assure that only considerations that have withstood all critical objections and therefore lie in the common interest of all enter the equation. Thereby, legitimate results depend on two factors: the deliberative nature of the procedure and its universal inclusiveness; these two together make certain that all concerned have been able to make their views known. Under the conditions of complex, individualized society—and given the pressures of time and contingency—it is inevitable that such ideal conditions can adequately impact actual processes of political decision making only if the procedures of opinion and will formation are institutionalized in a way that incorporates communicative reason. The objectivation, in positive law, of communicative reason through procedural norms of jurisprudence frees citizens from the substantial cognitive and motivational effort that determining the truth would otherwise demand—i.e., from processes of argumentation that are only informally regulated. Deliberative politics is not specialized in seeking the truth but in the combination of truth-functional (wahrheitsfunktional) discourses of problem solving and practical procedures of decision making. The conclusions cannot—or can only rarely—resolve conflicts of interest (which—if they are not insoluble—are at any rate recurrent); indeed, they often fail to produce

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consensus. All the same, and as a rule, they should (after fair negotiations) culminate in the (reversible) subordination of minoritarian interests to those of the majority; that is, they should yield democratic rule (which, for its part, is non-negotiable [unaufhebbar]). Habermas holds that the evolutionary achievement of democratic constitutions is to have institutionalized discourses coupled to procedures of egalitarian decision making in such a way that the justification afforded by discourse carries over to decisions; thereby, legitimation and acceptability extend far beyond a majority view based only on opinion and will (Facts, 168–193). To lend concrete, sociological dimensions to the connection between inclusive discourse and egalitarian decisions—between deliberation and rule (Herrschaft) (Facts, 308)—Habermas employs Bernhard Peter’s “sluice model” (e.g., Peters 2001), which is meant to explain how communicative power produced by deliberation transforms itself into administrative power (see chapter 67 in this volume). The sluice model specifies two spheres of deliberation that are closely connected via the legal system: on the one hand, public spaces structured by institutionalized procedures for decision making at the center of the political system (parliamentary bodies, courts, and administration), and, on the other, autonomous public spheres for informal opinion formation at the periphery of the political system, spheres that are constituted above all by organizations in civil society (Facts, 228–229). The latter exercise pressure on the center and push for demands to be translated into action. Only when interplay occurs between both spheres can a deliberative praxis of self-determination result that bears genuinely democratic traits: “Informal opinion-formation results in institutionalized election decisions and legislative decrees through which communicatively generated power is transformed into administratively utilizable power” (Inclusion, 249). The idealistic quality of Habermas’s theory is not just grounded in the interdependent relations between discourse and decision, on the one hand, and those between center and periphery, on the other; in addition, the communicative reason of ethical and moral discourses is transmitted (vermittelt) through the everyday routines of technical politics (technische Politik). In crises great and small—whenever communal matters are no longer simply administered but become public—communicative reason becomes a “weapon of criticism” (Facts, 357ff.). By the same token, however, should crises be systemically repressed and the public use of communicative reason effectively substituted by technocracy, held in a state of latency, and colonized (Communicative Action) by means of administrative power and economic exchange value, then the likelihood of legitimation crises increases. What, then, are the characteristics that distinguish Habermas’s concept of deliberation? For one, Habermas is not concerned with the content of deliberation or its results; he focuses solely on its procedural properties. It is only these

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properties that lend legitimacy to outcomes (Facts, 304). Second, Habermas’s model of deliberative socialization concerns only what occurs in a constitutional and democratic political system—not the steering of society as a whole (Facts, 302). Finally, its third feature involves the explicit connection between institutionalized procedures of deliberation and the informal, “free-floating” currents of communication that circulate in autonomous public spheres. Habermas has expanded his model of deliberative politics in response to criticism. If Between Facts and Norms identifies a central function in the epistemic character of deliberation (or, as the case may be, in the discursive arena where decisions are reached) (Facts, 305), later works view the matter in significantly more critical terms. This shift occurred as a result of the objection that prioritizing the epistemic character of deliberation set rationality against participation in terms that were too simple. The problems at issue are evident in the oft-quoted statement according to which deliberative procedures are less a matter of direct participation than they are to be understood as epistemic insofar as they derive legitimacy from the “general accessibility of a deliberative process whose structure grounds an expectation of rationally acceptable results” (Postnational, 110). The more the conception of procedural popular sovereignty proves radical, the more actual participation by citizens is neglected. The idea can only prove convincing if one is able to demonstrate that within a process of this kind, the essential arguments and perspectives of those it affects are, in fact, thematized. Accordingly, Habermas’s view has been contested by numerous authors who muster empirical arguments (e.g., Gerhards 1994). Others criticize the “ideologization” of deliberative democracy that has occurred among some of Habermas’s readers—a matter that involves uncoupling deliberation from egalitarian decisions, which in turn exalts technocratic politics (e.g., Brunkhorst 2007, 334). Habermas has accepted the criticism; more than before, he now relates the legitimacy of democratic procedure to two qualities: the epistemic matters of advising and decision making that are steered in deliberative fashion and, as an inseparable corollary, the equal participation of citizens—which is meant to assure that the addressees of laws can, at the same time, understand themselves as their authors (Naturalism, 104; Habermas 2007, 433–435).

References Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2007. “Zwischen transnationaler Klassenherrschaft und egalitärer Konstitutionalisierung. Europas zweite Chance.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 321–349. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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Cohen, Joshua. 1989. “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.” In The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State, ed. Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit, 17–34. Oxford: Blackwell. Gerhards, Jürgen. 1994. “Politische Öffentlichkeit: Ein system- und akteurstheoretischer Bestimmungsversuch.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 46, Sonderheft 34: 77–105. Habermas, Jürgen. 2007. “Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik: eine Replik.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 406–459. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Peters, Bernhard. 2001. “Deliberative Öffentlichkeit.” In Die Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit und die Öffentlichkeit der Vernunft, ed. Lutz Wingert and Klaus Günther, 655–677. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

52 DISCOURSE KL AUS GÜNTHER

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abermas’s notion of discourse—one of the key concepts in The Theory of Communicative Action—is subject to many misunderstandings; consequently, it is frequently debated and contested. This holds especially for the matter of “domination-free discourse” (herrschaftsfreier Diskurs). The standard misreading equates discourse with chatter—endless debates in academic seminars or committees under the “dictatorship of idle flesh” (Sitzfleisch) or, alternatively, harmonious handholding between parties kindly disposed to one another, wishing only well, readily seeking agreement at any cost, and fearful of any possible conflict. According to this interpretation, one should be oriented toward understanding and therefore ready for compromise, peaceable, and not quarrelsome. A further error holds that discourses do not lead to concrete action because of their endless duration: they seek to avoid action and defer decisions time and again; before arriving at any conclusion, one must engage in discourse—which, then, yields nothing definite, after all. Finally, it has been objected that Habermas does not conceive of discourse as a truly inclusive event: all who are not open to discussion or who do not wish to seek agreement are excluded—indeed, everyone, whether he or she wishes to do so, must exercise general suspicion about anything and everything and, at the same time, is exposed to an unyielding demand for justification. Because of his overly idealistic view that all parties affected must be able to agree with the results on the basis of rational motivation, discourses either cannot be realized under historical-existential conditions as they are given or can be realized only in part. In fact, discourse represents a special form of communication whereby participants react and respond to specific disturbances in their exchanges—a reflexive form of communicative action or a reflexive medium (Communicative Action, 1:24; McCarthy 1981, 291ff.; Schnädelbach 1977, 135ff.). In almost every communicative interaction there arise misunderstandings, irritations, errors, distortions, misinterpretations, and latent or manifest points of dissent; indeed, it may even be that incomprehension represents a condition of understanding itself (Wilhelm von Humboldt). At the same time, such disturbances have no crippling (gravierend) consequences and can be quickly resolved in most instances.

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Moreover, routines exist that help participants manage difficulties—spontaneous arrangements that are not subject to further questioning—because they stabilize social cooperation already in place and make new connections possible: this is the “pretheoretical knowledge” (Sebstverständlichekiten) (Communicative Action, 1:123) embedded in the lifeworld. Some of these routines are so effective that they split off (sich ausdifferenzieren) from everyday processes of communication and develop their own functional logic. In this way, for example, interminable and risk-filled negotiations about selling an object and the readiness of the recipient to offer payment occur in a routine that sets a price both parties tacitly accept, without negotiation. In simple cases of this sort, no verbal exchange is necessary: one points to the object and puts the money on the counter. When this kind of specialized and routinized communication does not function, established (eingespielt) repair mechanisms exist. In a worst-case scenario, matters may be remedied by the threat of sanctions—i.e., through institutionalized procedures for exercising force. For these reasons, it is necessary to thematize the disruption of communication only when, for reasons of latent or manifest dissent, it cannot be continued and a breakdown seems imminent. Finally, communication breakdown is not problematic in every instance—sometimes, parties have nothing further to say and part ways with a shrug of the shoulders, each leaving the others alone and finding an alternate modus vivendi. Of course, situations exist where one wishes—or needs—to cooperate, if only in one’s own self-interest, yet the disagreement between parties is substantive and concerns different plans and intentions in an immediate fashion. To overcome disagreement, then, participants may choose between different options: they may reach a compromise, persuade the opposing party, offer him or her the prospect of personal advantage, engage in manipulation, exercise gentle pressure by suggesting potential disadvantages, blackmail the other, or even threaten (or employ) violence. The party who uses any of these means views disagreement as an obstacle to his or her own plans/intentions and seeks a way to make the other—even against his or her will—submit to the first party’s own interests. That said, the prospects for achieving success by these means depends on the quality and quantity of available resources: rhetoric, wealth, violence, or simply one’s potential to conceal the truth. When this is the case, the other will cooperate for only so long as an asymmetrical power relation can be maintained. However, a kind of disagreement exists that cannot be overcome by these means: namely, when the truth of a statement or the bindingness (Verbindlichkeit) of a norm is controversial. Truth cannot be purchased, and willingness to observe laws can only be secured to a limited degree by the threat of force. (When compliance is achieved only through fear, it can last only as long as every infraction is punished effectively.) In this context, resources are not the

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only important thing. Insight counts, too—and it cannot be ordered, bought, or produced by manipulation. Insight (see Rehg 1994) is achieved by way of reasoned arguments that are both convincing and justified (überzeugende und rechtfertigende Gründe). If their compelling nature is not immediately evident, it is necessary that they display it in the course of critical evaluation—that is, by way of argumentation. Rational discourse “is the name for pursuing a course of insight by evaluating a series of reasons/arguments” (Wingert 2002, 352). Even though parties must “walk” this path alone, the road is public. Truth, whether theoretical or practical, does not merit its title if the reasons that justify it cannot be critically evaluated by everyone—that is, if the underlying reasons cannot be recognized by all who “run through” the series of arguments, and if parties involved may not express doubt and demand/offer reasons concerning the truth claim of a statement or the bindingness of a norm. “Discourse,” then, not only emerges from disagreement(s) in everyday communication; it also enables disagreement(s) to be made explicit in the first place. Indeed, discourse increases the risk of variance inasmuch as it affords all participants the opportunity to take a position of “yes” or “no” on any affirmation of truth or obligation. Seen in this light, those who raise objections are not “obstacles” for realizing plans and intentions but parties who can demand justification from others and offer it themselves; they have a “right to justification” and, as a corollary, owe the same to their interlocutors (Forst 2012). If there were such a thing as a “virtue” of participants in discourse, it would not involve compliance or readiness to compromise (much less striving to achieve it); instead, it would consist of a “passion” for dissent, the resolute refusal to agree to anything that cannot hold up to critical evaluation or cannot be subjected to it. At the same time, Habermas’s conception of discourse demands that every participant afford others the same right to take positions freely, and they must be able to do so without fear of being held in contempt, avoided, or otherwise sanctioned. This is what is meant by the “domination-free” aspect of discourse, which Habermas presumes counterfactually: that participants have, at their disposal, a criterion for distinguishing the better and worse modes of critical evaluation that occur in the public sphere. The rules of discourse (Alexy 1989, 187ff.; 1978) involve ways of making such inclusive and self-critical procedures possible. Passion for varying opinions is ignited by the cooperative search for truth. However, communicative action is also oriented on the goal of actual and potential participants achieving understanding (Verständigung); therefore, once disagreement reaches a certain pitch, parties are motivated to overcome it by discursive means, instead of accepting it as a fact (which can only be dealt with in a strategic fashion). The desire to arrive at an agreement

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(Einverständnis) that finds support in the insight(s) of individuals prompts them to acknowledge one another as persons who speak from personal conviction and, accordingly, will vouch for what they say. Thus, preserving the autonomy of speech and action systematically generates disagreement about all that does not fulfill (genügen) this ideal; at the same time, the process mobilizes arguments and counterarguments, which represent the sole means by which participants can reexamine and correct their views so that this same (individual) autonomy does not suffer damage. Inasmuch as interlocutors modify their convictions by acknowledging better arguments, discourses act as learning processes. Consensus, then, is always a form of dissent that has been overcome by means of reasoned argument—to wit: by means of reciprocal, public, and critical evaluation of statements at odds. The mode of discourse and the course it follows depend on what kind of claim is being contested, the way a given speaker seeks to bring about rationally motivated agreement on the part of his or her interlocutor, and the nature of the arguments/reasons with which the claim is voiced, contested, revised, and/or proved. Besides theoretical and practical forms of discourse (which focus, respectively, on truth and on moral truth), there exist ethical and political discourses, which concern the aptness (Angemessenheit) of forms of individual and collective self-understanding (Justification, 1–19). Moreover, practical discourses must constantly alternate between discourses of justification and application because, when justifying a norm, it is impossible to foresee all cases where it applies (Günther 1993). Because of its dynamic properties, which systematically generate (risks of) disagreement, discourse is “not an institution—it is a counter-institution, pure and simple” (Habermas 1971, 201). Here, the potential for “anarchic, unfettered communicative freedom” (Facts, 186) finds full expression. Of course, discourses can only achieve social effectiveness on a larger scale inasmuch as they are institutionalized. They “weave” the “thread” of inclusive, communicative self-reference and self-critique into institutions, which makes it possible— given limitations of time and other contingencies—to achieve organization, to generate authority (and authority for authority [Kompetenzen und KompetenzKompetenzen]), and to offer additional incentives for observing norms. For this reason, true discourse can only be achieved by way of democratically structured legislative procedure (Facts, 118ff.; Lieber 2007). At the same time, overall circumstances may favor discourses more or less; they rely on lifeworlds that “meet them halfway”—in which the social, cultural, and individual conditions for releasing the anarchic potential of communicative freedom have been given. Among other factors, this includes the public visibility (Honneth 2001) of individual parties who are recognized as autonomous as well as the performative force from which each individual draws the courage to take a free and public stance (Günther 1998).

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References Alexy, Robert. 1978. “Eine Theorie des praktischen Diskurses.” In Normenbegründung und Normendurchsetzung, ed. Willi Oelmüller, 22–58. Paderborn: Schöningh. ——. 1989. A Theory of Legal Argumentation: The Theory of Rational Discourse as Theory of Legal Justification. Trans. Ruth Adler and Neil MacCormick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forst, Rainer. 2012. Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice. Trans. Jeffrey Flynn. New York: Columbia University Press. Günther, Klaus. 1993. The Sense of Appropriateness: Application Discourses in Morality and Law. Trans. John Farrell. Albany: SUNY Press. ——. 1998. “Die Sprache der Verstummten: Gewalt und performative Entmachtung.” In Aufgeklärte Kriminalpolitik oder Kampf gegen das Böse?, ed. Klaus Lüderssen, 2:120– 146. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. “Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie? Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Niklas Luhmann.” In Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie?, 142–290. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Honneth, Axel. 2001. “Recognition: Invisibility: On the Epistemology of ‘Recognition.’ ” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 75, no. 1: 111–126. Lieber, Tobias. 2007. Diskursive Vernunft und formelle Gleichheit. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. McCarthy, Thomas. 1981. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Rehg, William.1994. Insight and Solidarity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schnädelbach, Herbert. 1977. Reflexion und Diskurs. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Wingert, Lutz. 2002. “Jürgen Habermas Faktizität und Geltung – Der Prozeß des Rechts in den Satzungen der Macht.” In Klassische Werke der Philosophie, ed. Reinhard Brandt and Thomas Sturm, 345–378. Leipzig: Reclam.

53 DISCOURSE ETHICS RAINER FORST

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he term “discourse ethics” refers to a conception of morality in the Kantian tradition, which Jürgen Habermas developed in conjunction with Karl-Otto Apel (1980, 1988). Its most important feature is its replacement of the reflective evaluation of moral maxims—in accordance with the prescriptions of the Categorical Imperative—with the argumentative redemption of the validity claims of moral norms in practical discourse. The transcendental self-reflection of practical reason à la Kant yields to the pragmatic reconstruction of the normative implications of communicative rationality (Naturalism, 24–76). This theory of morality offers numerous points of contact with Habermas’s philosophy of language (or, alternatively, with the theory of the different kinds of validity claims), with his theory of “postconventional” moral consciousness (in following with the work of Lawrence Kohlberg), with his theory of epistemology (concerning the capacity for truth of practical questions), and with his philosophy of law and democracy (in which practical discourses play a central role). The key works in which he develops his program are “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification” (Moral Consciousness, 43–115) and Justification and Application. In his characterization of discourse ethics, Habermas stresses its deontological, cognitivistic, formalist, and universalistic qualities (Justification, 49). That the theory is deontological means it endorses a narrow concept of morality, one limited to the norms of correct (or, as the case may be, just) action and not addressing questions of “the good life.” To this end, he makes a terminological distinction between “morality” and “ethics”—or, more precisely, between moral norms and ethical values (cf. Forst 2012, chap. 3). Habermas seeks to explain the strict and categorical validity of moral norms, which are reciprocally and generally binding and claimable; ethical values raise a different claim to validity, one that is to be redeemed in closer relation to particular forms of life and individual biographies. The principle of universalization (U), which substitutes for the Categorical Imperative, represents a rule of argumentation for justifying claims of moral validity. It specifies, as the condition for valid norms, that “the consequences

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and the side effects that its general observance can be expected to have for the satisfaction of each person affected must be such that all affected can accept them freely” (Moral Consciousness, 120). This principle, states Habermas, makes “razor-sharp cuts between  .  .  . the good and the just” (104), whereby justice is to be understood in the sense of moral rightness. According to the cognitivistic aspect of the approach, moral norms articulate a “truth-analogous claim to validity” (Justification, 49). This is the basis upon which they may be discussed in practical discourses on the (ideal) presupposition that a “correct” justification exists. Thereby, the essential criterion is their capacity for generalizability—or, as the case may be, their “ideal warranted acceptability” (Truth, 248). The constructivist character of moral norms is highlighted inasmuch as this acceptability is first produced through discourses, including processes of interpreting needs and interests and the reflection of the claims of other parties; accordingly, practical discourse means “generating a world of norms” that “deserves recognition” (Truth, 224). Discourse ethics is a formalist or proceduralist ethics in the sense that it restricts itself to specifying a procedure of moral argumentation based solely on principle, which holds that “only moral rules that could win the assent of all affected as participants in a practical discourse can claim validity” (Justification, 50). In contrast to Kant’s conception of moral law (Sittengesetz)—and also to Apel’s approach of “transcendental pragmatics”—Habermas grants the principle itself no moral or “ultimately justified” power of validity; rather, it possesses only the force of the “ ‘must’ in the sense of weak transcendental necessitation,” which does not correspond to the “prescriptive ‘must’ of a rule of action” (Justification, 81; cf. Wellmer 1991). The procedure of discourse ethics consists of generating norms, while the motivation for observing both procedure and compliance with those norms requires a basis in forms of life that “meet it halfway” (Truth, 100), i.e., in which postconventional conceptions of morality have evolved (so that insight into what is morally commanded finds support in the way “the good” is conceived) (275). Habermas’s discourse ethics maintains that moral norms present universalizing validity claims and that these claims must be redeemed accordingly. Thus the discourse principle claims to transcend culture and to articulate a correspondingly general structure of morality. In turn, the norms that are to be justified in practical discourse may substantially only ever anticipate general acceptability; in fact, they are subject to discursive evaluation at any time. Therefore, as much as discourse ethics stresses the necessity of the implementation of real practical discourse(s), it still incorporates an element of ideality into the process, which presumes a corresponding measure of moral sensitivity and imagination on the part of morally reflecting parties.

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References Apel, Karl-Otto. 1980. “The A Priori of the Communication Community and the Foundations of Ethics: The Problem of a Rational Justification of Ethics in the Scientific Age.” In Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. David Frisby, 225–300. London: Routledge. ——. 1988. Diskurs und Verantwortung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Forst, Rainer. 2012. The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice. Trans. Jeffrey Flynn. New York: Columbia University Press. Wellmer, Albrecht: 1991. “Ethics and Dialogue: Elements of Moral Judgment in Kant and Discourse Ethics.” In The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley, 113–231. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

54 EQUALIT Y KENNETH BAYNES

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lthough Habermas has rarely explicitly addressed the topic of equality, it is clearly an ideal that informs much of his thought. This is, of course, not surprising, since the idea of an association in which “the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all” is an ideal that informs the tradition of Western Marxism, of which Habermas is a central figure. It is, however, important to see the ways in which Habermas has learned from the deficiencies in Marxist thought and other treatments of equality. His own conception of “radical democracy,” for which the idea of the equal public and private autonomy of citizens is central, may not settle the debate concerning the proper “metric” of equality (welfare, resources, capabilities, etc.), but it does provide a rich and suggestive framework in which that debate might be pursued (see Baynes 2008). The ideal of equality operates at three distinct, though interconnected, levels in Habermas’s work. First, within the context of his theory of communicative action, and at its most basic level, a conception of equality lies at the core of his conception of communicative reason. With their utterances, speakers raise various claims about the validity of those utterances—to truth, rightness, and sincerity or authenticity—claims that a hearer is free to accept or reject with reasons. At least in the case of “institutionally unbound speech acts” (that is, speech acts whose illocutionary force or meaning does not depend upon specific institutional contexts, such as a judicial court), hearers are equally free to challenge the validity claims raised in them. This ideal of the basic equality of speaker and hearer with respect to the exchange of reasons concerning their action interpretations lies at the core of his model of communicative action—that is, his notion of the coordination of action through a process of communication (Verständigung). The fragile and fallible consensus that is established through the exchange of reasons—through the acceptance and/or contestation of the validity claims raised in speech—makes possible a rational coordination of action that is in turn dependent on this fundamental equality of speaker and hearer. One might call this first conception of equality “rational equality,” since it is an equality demanded by, and constitutive for, reason itself.

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Second, in a series of essays on the idea of a “discourse ethics,” Habermas has also argued that a basic notion of “moral equality” is best captured in its principle of universalization. “Principle U” states that a norm is morally justified if (and only if) the likely and foreseeable consequences that would follow from its general observance could be equally accepted by all affected (Moral Consciousness). This principle, he suggests, best captures the moral intuition of a “postconventional morality” that aims to show equal concern and respect for each individual—better, that is, than the current utilitarian and deontic alternatives—and he has recently referred to it as a norm of “egalitarian universalism” (Naturalism, 271–311). Habermas also argues that this principle can be logically derived from the pragmatic presuppositions of speech—that is, from the notion of “rational equality” just discussed—if combined with a relatively uncontroversial idea of the justification of norms. Were this derivation to succeed, it would provide a rational justification or grounding for a more demanding moral principle. However, as in Hegel’s critique of Kant, others have also argued that the egalitarianism of this principle remains rather formal and abstract and can only acquire a more determinate content in the context of specific social institutions. Habermas is sympathetic to this charge and suggests that moral discourses generally take place against the background of more specific ethical and political interpretations (Habermas 1986). This leads to the third conception of equality. Finally, a conception of equality is also found at the political level, in connection with his treatment of the “co-originality” of the public and private autonomy of citizens. A proper understanding of the freedom and equality of citizens—the understanding Habermas identifies with “radical democracy”— requires not only that citizens be guaranteed an equal scheme of basic liberties, as in Rawls. It also requires that citizens have an equally effective opportunity to exercise their “public autonomy”—that is, to participate in the processes that lead to the formation of the laws governing them. This view of the co-originality of public and private autonomy points to a more robust conception of political equality than the one generally found in liberal thought, though it is arguably close to Rawls’s notion of the “equal worth” of political liberty. It does not require that a political regime’s laws and policies have an equal effect on every citizen’s life opportunities, but it does require that the institutions and procedures through which laws and policies are enacted are “rational” in the sense that they could meet with the rational agreement of all affected. And it requires that there are equal and effective opportunities for all actually to participate in those institutions. As Habermas has recently argued, this understanding of political equality gives rise to a dialectic of “facticity and validity” that makes possible new forms of social learning and richer interpretations of the meaning of equal citizenship. In certain contexts, it also may allow for limited group rights as a means for an effective guarantee of the

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liberty and equality of each citizen (Naturalism, 271–311). As with the conception of moral equality, this conception of political equality also retains a distant but still significant connection with the “rational equality” of actors to take a yes/no position with respect to speech-act offers. A “rational” political order will be one that achieves a proper balance with respect to the public and private autonomy of citizens—and this is itself a political ideal that must be tested in connection with the ideals of the moral equality of individuals and the rational equality of social actors.

References Baynes, Kenneth. 2008. “Democratic Equality and Respect.” Theoria 55, no. 117: 1–25. Habermas, Jürgen. 1986. “Moralität und Sittlichkeit: Treffen Hegels Einwände gegen Kant auch auf die Diskursethik zu?” In Moralität und Sittlichkeit: Das Problem Hegels und die Diskursethik, ed. Wolfgang Kuhlmann, 16–37. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

55 EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP CHRISTIAN JOERGES

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he concept of citizenship spans many disciplines—without, for all that, necessarily connecting them. The following discusses the divergent understandings of the term in positive European law, on the one hand, and in the works of Jürgen Habermas, on the other. Two matters will be made clear: the conceptual anchoring of legal discourses in neoliberal visions and the sociocritical dimension of Habermas’s advocacy of the European project. Institutionalized Europe, both as it defines itself and in common academic parlance, is not a “state”; instead, it is simply a “union.” What does this mean for its citizens? European law supplies no shortage of answers. With the umbrella term of “Union,” the Treaty of Maastricht (1992) introduced “Union citizenship” among its provisions. Since then, its core component, freedom of movement (Freizügigkeit), has assumed dimensions that extend beyond the “market citizenship” originally envisioned—above all, when the European Court of Justice banned discrimination and affirmed fundamental European rights. How is this? The law continues to evolve in a thoroughly concrete manner—especially where the legal issues addressed by the European Court of Justice are concerned. Recently, it achieved particular notice when Austrian medical schools began to open their doors to German students who had not been admitted at home—and also when Great Britain was obligated to bear the costs of medical treatment abroad when—and because—patients sought to shorten the waiting times decreed by the National Health Service. Cases like these are legion, but they do not make it clear how, exactly, EU citizenship is developing. When it was first taken up, two far-reaching ideas were at play. On the one hand, states sought to promote the identity of Europe; on the other, they sought to transform—and enhance—the simple “market citizenship” already in place. It was assumed that both these matters were to be undertaken so that the economic community would also succeed as a polity. For all that, however, the relationship between ambition and achievement has remained fraught (Everson 1995). Signatories were unwilling to surrender the authority necessary to make social rights a reality; the array of provisions that, according to a discourse theory of law, are supposed to support the legitimate concretization of such objectives have not improved by much. Because

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rights of free movement impair demands for solidarity, the European system of rights has remained indebted to the neoliberal program. (The same holds for antidemocratic demands—provided they aim only for equal treatment [Somek 2009].) Anyone wishing not just to expose such dependencies but also to overcome them must seek alternative frames of reference for EU citizenship. Efforts of this kind certainly have been made in European constitutionalism (e.g., Weiler 1999, Schönberger 2005). At least in terms of method, they meet up with Habermas’s “constitutional patriotism” and with his defense of the constitutional achievements of the nation-state. Habermas contributed both these categories to the debate on Europe in his 1991 essay, in which he reconstructed the history of the concepts and their points of interdependency; one year later, against this backdrop, he discussed the challenges that the European constellation posed for his theories of democracy and law. The interdependency of both categories constitutes a key feature of his views on Europe; both in general and in a specifically European context, they have achieved independence as figures of discourse. Particular attention was paid to the idea of “constitutional patriotism.” When it was applied to Europe as a whole, it became a key term in debates on identity and EU citizenship (for a systematic discussion, see Müller 2007). Habermas made the concept—originally developed by Dolf Sternberger (1982, 1999)—an integral component of his theory of the constitutional state; he then introduced it into the discourse on European constitutionalism. The topos of constitutional patriotism, which refers to the specific historical context of the early Federal Republic, concerns Germany’s past and the country’s recivilization—the transformation of its political culture after the Second World War. Time and again—especially in his works on the situation in Europe— Habermas has stressed interconnections between historical and theoretical concepts (e.g., Postnational, 74ff.; Inclusion, 118ff.; Time, 138ff.; see chapter 49 in this volume). If one considers these connections, one must reject the objection that constitutional patriotism is too “thin,” in sociological terms, to identify the preconditions necessary for the integrity (Zusammenhalt) of modern societies— as well as the claim that it drily abstracts from the fact that citizens’ lives are embedded in real social, political, and cultural conditions. For Habermas, the nation-state—and especially Germany—represents an ambivalent achievement, and its past is problematic. If, ultimately, republicanism has prevailed— that is, the “nation of the state” (Staatsnation) has succeeded the “nation of the people” (Volksnation)—this has only occurred after “a painful process of abstraction through which local and dynastic loyalties were ultimately transformed into the self-consciousness of democratic citizens as belonging to one and the same nation” (Time, 101). The solidarity that has been established

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thereby—by artificial and altogether violent means—must not be pictured as a substance having existed previously, nor should it be afforded a normative value of its own. Instead, the democratic nation-state owes the normative dignity it possesses to the fact that its legal constitution enables citizens to view themselves as the authors of the laws that govern them. What distinguishes the idea of constitutional patriotism is that it has freed itself of substantive notions of identity—in this way, it acknowledges both multicultural conditions and the need for decision (Entscheidungsbedarf ) that modern societies must accept (Inclusion, 146). To be sure, the idea of constitutional patriotism cannot be transferred to the European plane without further ado. How, after all, can a framework for a European polity ever be defined if all European societies declare the forms they have assumed historically and culturally to be sacrosanct? Constitutional patriotism can only be understood in programmatic terms: the plurality of Europe is not to be transformed into homogeneity but should, instead, yield reciprocal relations of recognition. The matter involves taking up the felicitous formulation of Article I.8 of the Constitutional Treaty (which itself met an unhappy end), which affirms that the unity of Europe lies in its multiplicity (Inclusion, 146–147; Naturalism, 106). It may prove difficult to determine the practical chance of success for this outlook, but it is certainly greater than that of positions proclaiming unified legal conditions on a European scale. Equally, Habermas’s view is superior to efforts to pursue “identity politics” on the model of nation building. Constitutional patriotism represents a bridge leading to Europe. However, if one bears in mind that the aim is not to eliminate the multiplicity of Europe, then two difficult points of connection become evident. The first involves organizing processes of communication (Verständigungsprozesse) through which Europeans may achieve (wahrnehmen) their rights. This is not just a matter of weighing traditions against one another but of engaging with conflicting interests that are based on political and socioeconomic differences (which, indeed, have only become more pronounced as the process extends to the eastern half of the continent). To be sure, the idea of federalism has remained alive in the history of European integration—with which Habermas’s reflections also connect (Time, 101ff.). Such an arrangement would strengthen the power of political decision making, even if it is difficult to assess how a federation would respond to the complexities of internal conflicts. The second difficulty stems from the expectations that Habermas associates with more advanced integration. As he has observed on many occasions, Europe must conserve the great achievements of the European nation-state beyond its frontiers in a new form.  .  .  . What must be conserved are the standards of

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living, the opportunities for education and leisure, and the social space for personal self-realization which are necessary to ensure the fair value of individual liberty, and thereby make democratic participation possible. (Time, 90)

It hardly seems possible to object more strongly to the program of a transnational “private company” (Privatrechtsgesellschaft) inhabited by marketcitizens or to demand in more vigorous terms that the rights secured within nation-states be preserved in the postnational constellation. For Habermas, the welfare state (Sozialstaatlichkeit) is not just a constitutional option that arose through the contingencies of history in Western Europe. Instead, it is a condition for the integration of societies organized as nation-states—the reconciliation of capitalism and democracy and a matter of achieving “solidarity between strangers” (Inclusion, 138). Conditions do not favor a European constitution. Habermas expressed his clear and emphatic disappointment at the referendums against the constitutional treaty; after the return to intergovernmentality, he also criticized the way the politics of Europe have been pursued (Faltering). However, he did not abandon his advocacy of the European project but rather developed political and institutional recommendations that were meant to lead out from the dead end where things now stand. All the same, Habermas has hardly reflected on three developments that stand in the way of his project for reconstituting citizenship on a European scale: the proclamation of rights that have no chance of being achieved, whereby politicians gloss over social deficits in and between countries; the matter of “soft methods of government” that jeopardize European legality (Rechtsstaatlichkeit) without making the social entitlements (sozialstaatlicher Gewinn) they are supposed to afford even slightly probable; and the tendency of the Court of Justice of the European Union, in appealing to rights of economic freedom, to invalidate member states’ provisions for work and social conditions (die Arbeits- und Sozialverfassungen der Mitgliedstaaten)—in so doing, they pave the way for a transnational society of private (property) rights. This raises, once more, the question of how democratic citizenship is to survive. Before these gains deteriorate further through the process of Europeanization, it will be necessary to demand their recognition on the part of the European Union—which, now as ever, remains incompetent in matters of the social state. This is imperative in order to preserve the form of democracy that has achieved recognition in Old Europe and must yet become a real option in the New Europe under construction.

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References Everson, Michelle. 1995. “The Legacy of the Market Citizen.” In New Legal Dynamics of European Union, ed. Jo Shaw and Gillian More, 73–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2007. Constitutional Patriotism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Schönberger, Christoph. 2005. Unionsbürger: Europas föderales Bürgerrecht in vergleichender Sicht. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Somek, Alexander. 2009. “Idealisation, De-politicization and Economic Due Process: System Transition in the European Union.” In The Law/Politics Distinction in Contemporary Public Law Adjudication, ed. Bogdan Iancu, 137–167. Utrecht: Eleven. Sternberger, Dolf. 1999. “Verfassungspatriotismus: Rede bei der 25-Jahr-Feier der Akademie für Politische Bildung in Tutzing am 29.6.1982.” In Politische Reden 1945–1990, ed. Marie-Luise Recker, 702–719. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Weiler, Joseph H. H. 1999. “To Be a European Citizen: Eros and Civilisation.” In The Constitution of Europe: “Do the New Clothes Have an Emperor?” and Other Essays on European Integration, 324–355. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

56 EVOLUTION MARCELO NEVES

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ike Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann, Habermas holds that social evolution entails heightened system complexity (Communicative Action, 2:155ff.). Unlike his colleagues, however, he affirms that increases in social complexity are mediated by a “developmental logic” whose structure corresponds to the way moral consciousness evolves in stages (esp. Communicative Action, 2:174ff.; Evolution, 69–94, 95–129; Rekonstruktion, 129–143; Moral Consciousness). Contra Luhmann’s (1975, 2003) systems theory, Habermas argues that mounting complexity and the social differentiation that accompanies it depend on “learning mechanisms.” In this sense, his position is that differentiation can represent either “evolutionary processes” or stagnation (Rekonstruktion, 133–134, 230; Communicative Action, 2:175ff.). By the same token, he argues—contra Marxism—that what determines evolution does not lie in the “developmental dynamics” of forces of production but in the “developmental logic” of intersubjective and normatively oriented relations (Evolution, 118, 130–177; Rekonstruktion, 139–140). Progress in the technology of production and mounting systems complexity represent the conditions for social evolution, and the evolution of normative structures provides its basis. In elaborating the framework for his theory of communicative action and discourse ethics, Habermas reconstructs the model—formulated by Jean Piaget (1966) and developed by Lawrence Kohlberg (1976, 1981)—of ontogenetic (individual) development, which he transfers to the realm of phylogenetic (social) evolution (Moral Consciousness; Evolution, 69–94, 99ff.; Rekonstruktion, 133ff., 232–233; Communicative Action, 2:174ff.; Justification, 113–132). According to this model, there are three stages of moral development for individuals, and these stages each correspond to a different societal formation: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. As Habermas sees things, the process of cognitive and moral maturation relates closely to the “decentering of the young person’s understanding of the world” in three differentiated modes of relation to objective, social, and subjective phenomena (Moral Consciousness, 132ff., 168); equally, it relates to corresponding modes of action—strategic and communicative—and to the distinction between discourse and communicative action.

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Like ontogenetic development, phylogenetic evolution concerns three levels of moral consciousness in society: a preconventional one, a conventional one, and a postconventional one. For all that, Habermas does not equate ontogeny and phylogeny: Individual consciousness and cultural tradition can agree in their content without expressing the same structures of consciousness. . . . Not all individuals are equally representative of the developmental stage of their society. Thus in modern societies, law has a universalistic structure, although many members are not in a position to judge according to principles. Conversely, in archaic societies there were individuals who had mastered formal operations of thought, although the collectively shared mythological world-view corresponded to a lower stage of cognitive development. (Evolution, 102)

Moreover, Habermas emphasizes that collective moral consciousness holds only for adults; accordingly, “ontogenetically early stages of incomplete interaction” have no corollary in the oldest societies. From the beginning, social relations within the family have involved the complementary connection of generalized expectations of how members should act—the matter of “complete interaction” (Evolution, 102). Despite this qualification (and others), Habermas affirms that homologies obtain, and he draws a parallel between the two developmental models by positing analogies in “sequences of basic concepts and logical structures” (Evolution, 17ff., 97ff., 133ff.; Communicative Action, 2:174; Eder 1980); in so doing, he considers the analogy “between world views and the system of ego demarcations” especially relevant (Evolution, 104). When primate hordes made the transition to the Paleolithic Age—that is, “with the transformation of primitive systems of calls into grammatically regulated, propositionally differentiated speech”—“the sociocultural starting point [was] reached at which ritualized behavior changed into ritualized action” (Communicative Action, 2:191). Following this initial state, three social stages of moral development may be identified: archaic societies, high cultures (Hochkulturen), and modern society—which correspond, respectively, to the levels of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional development (Communicative Action, 2:174–178; Evolution, 104–106; Rekonstruktion, 135, 97ff.) Archaic societies are marked by the fact that they distinguish inadequately between the objective, social, and subjective worlds. Here, normative structures are interpreted in light of mythical images of nature. Actions are not evaluated in terms of the actor’s intentions but rather with respect to their results. The absence of a clear distinction between culture and nature, between normative and cognitive matters, and between individual and society expresses itself in

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rituals and myths. The melting together of different dimensions, which is evident in ritual praxis, is regulated and secured by the worldviews presented in myths. Mythical interpretations of the world confuse “internal meaning with external conditions” (Sachzusammenhänge); in this way, they are able to “protect ritual practice against rips in the fabric woven from communicative and purposive activity indistinguishably” (Communicative Action, 2:193). This implies that, on a profane level—even if a certain differentiation between goaland understanding-oriented attitudes already exists—claims to truth, truthfulness, and rightness still form a unit (2:194). This merging of the objective, social, and subjective world that is anchored in mythical worldviews confuses individual and collective actions; consequently, the individual affirms his or her identity only as a member of a group structured by kinship (family, clan, and/or tribe). The equation that occurs between individual life and group life—which finds practical expression in ritual and reflective expression in myth—connects with the model of preconventional morality. In addition, the fact that events and things are perceived as matters of immediate and binding self-evidence blocks the distinction between (individual) action and established conventions. In this context, it is impossible to conceive of deviant behavior as something that belongs to communal life; instead, deviations represent “attacks” on the group (which, ultimately, are attributed to external forces of nature). In “high cultures”—even in the realm of sacred action—the difference between objective, social, and subjective worlds is already operative. Internal relations of meaning and external, factual conditions are distinguished. Actions are no longer evaluated solely in terms of effects. At the same time, however—and even though a difference obtains between goal-oriented and understanding-oriented attitudes—the realm of the sacred is constituted by religious and metaphysical worldviews that, inasmuch as they are predicated on a holistic conception of validity, prove “resistant to every attempt to separate off the aspects of the true, the good, and the perfect” (2:194). Within this sphere, then, the unity of claims to truth, rightness, and truthfulness is assured. All the same, religious worldviews “are more or less dichotomous in structure; they set up a ‘world beyond’ and leave a demythologized ‘this world’ or a desocialized ‘world of appearances’ to a disenchanted everyday practice” (2:194). Consequently, the holistic conception of validity dissolves within the profane sphere of activity (2:194). In matters of communicative action, participants distinguish “between individual pragmatic basic attitudes”—that is, between outlooks that objectivate, conform to norms, and belong to the realm of expression. Thereby, differences between claims to truth, rightness, and truthfulness emerge. Society, which is now organized as a state with conventional legal institutions, demands that individuals observe and obey the legitimate

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order, and it is important that this (social) attitude be distinct from the (objectivating and expressive) attitudes displayed toward outer and inner nature (2:194). In this context, individual identity is not equated with that of the group. It has been differentiated from the collective and no longer depends on kinship relations but on a territorially bound organization whose unity is embodied by a leader figure (Rekonstruktion, 26). Only in this way does obedience—and, as a corollary, deviant behavior—become a clear conception operative in everyday life. “At this stage, communicative action can free itself from particularistic contexts, but it stays in the space marked out by solid traditional norms” (Communicative Action, 2:194). As a consequence of interpreting (argumentativer Umgang mit) (holy) texts, the differences between communicative action and discourse are now evident. However, contrasting validity claims are operative only in terms of action (auf der Handlungsebene)—in other words, “there are not yet forms of argumentation tailored to specific aspects of validity” (2:195). Standing institutions therefore remain incontestable, and discourses of truth and rightness still overlap. In early modernity, a specific validity claim—truth—emerges in science. At the same time, morality, law, and art—even though they constitute distinct value spheres—have not separated off from the realm of the sacred enough to offer unambiguously specific validity claims (2:195). That is: a thoroughgoing differentiation between discourses and their validity claims still has not occurred. However, inasmuch as the forms assumed by modern religiosity break with the dogma that places, in dichotomous and hierarchical fashion, a profane “this world” in opposition to the realm of transcendence—the world of phenomena to the world of absolute Being—“in domains of profane action, structures can take shape that are defined by an unrestricted differentiation of validity claims on the levels of action and argumentation” (2:195). Finally, not just science but art, morality, and law also split off from the realm of the sacred. The “secularization of bourgeois culture” entails sharp divisions between spheres of value, which henceforth develop autonomously— i.e., “according to the inner logics specific to the different validity claims” (2:196). Such desacralization makes it possible for critical discourses to emerge even in opposition to standing institutions insofar as “the hypothetical discussion of normative validity claims is [itself] institutionalized” (2:195). While institutionalized normativity splits off from metaphysical and religious worldviews, goal-oriented instrumentality (Zwecktätigkeit) now operates independently of normative contexts and comes into closer alignment with the system of science, from which it derives objective information for developing technologies, techniques, and strategies of action. Now, instrumental reason expresses itself, inasmuch as it has been freed from understanding-oriented

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activity, as an “ethically neutralized system of action” that fundamentally employs scientific and technological strategies (2:178, 196). Given the differentiation between, and autonomy of, spheres of validity— the conditions underlying the uncoupling of system and lifeworld (see chapter 75 in this volume)—Habermas offers a diagnosis of modernity that opposes both models of fragmentation and paradigms of ideological critique, for he places the rationality of a discourse that is not subordinate to system imperatives in reflexive relation to communicative (i.e., understanding-oriented) action. Ultimately, this diagnosis affirms—contra prevailing tendencies—that postconventional or, alternatively, universalistic morality characterizes modern society.

References Eder, Klaus. 1980. Die Entstehung staatlich organisierter Gesellschaften: Ein Beitrag zu einer Theorie sozialer Evolution. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1976. “Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach.” In Moral Development and Behavior: Theory, Research, and Social Issues, ed. Thomas Lickona, 31–53. New York: Holt McDougal. ——. 1981. “Appendix. The Six Stages of Moral Judgment.” In The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice, Essays on Moral Development 1, 409–412. New York: Harper & Row. Luhmann, Niklas. 1975. “Evolution und Geschichte.” In Soziologische Aufklärung 2: Aufsätze zur Theorie der Gesellschaft, 150–169. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1975. ——. 2003. Theory of Society. Vol. 1. Trans. Rhodes Barrett. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Piaget, Jean. 1966. The Moral Judgment of the Child. New York: Free Press.

57 HISTORICAL MATERIALISM MARTIN HARTMANN

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he theory of historical materialism developed by Marx and Engels understands social conditions as the result of a teleological historical process. The analysis of operative categories—forces of production, relations of production, and superstructure—permit the further course of history to be explained and even predicted. As outlined in Marx’s Grundrisse (Marx 1993), the model of historical materialism is as follows: Forces of production (i.e., the labor of persons who are active in production, the specialized knowledge that manages/directs their efforts, the tools employed, and instruments/instances of certification and coordination) give rise to institutions and mechanisms that determine who has access to the means of production and in what way (for example, who owns them) as well as how the wealth that has been produced socially is distributed (the relations of production). In turn, phenomena such as law and morality serve to justify particular relations of production; to the extent that the latter are deemed necessary, they possess an ideological character and become part of the superstructure. The model accounts for the dynamics of history by positing that the forces of production develop without the relations of production that correspond to them changing in kind; to the extent that this occurs, the relations of production “fetter” the forces of production, which can result in social revolutions that overturn relations of production as they have stood until this point. Especially in the 1970s, Habermas integrated the materialist model of historical evolution into his own writings; in so doing, he modified it. The essential feature of Habermas’s transformative theoretical reconstruction is the claim that “moral-practical consciousness” develops following the course of its “own logic” (Society and Politics, 127)—a process that is independent of the way forces of production evolve. Thereby, superstructure phenomena such as morality and law are freed of their dependency on material, economic processes and come, ultimately, to shed their ideological qualities (which legitimate only the relations of production as they stand). Having abandoned a key element of Marxist doctrine, Habermas now, in a further step, goes so far as to call “normative structures” the “pacemaker” of social evolution (Society and Politics, 190).

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This is the case, he argues, because advances in technological/instrumental knowledge—which occur “endogenously” as forces of production develop— can only be implemented when an institutional framework exists that permits one to secure, legally and morally, the (potentially) more efficient mode of work that they involve. Although roles based on class (group A uses tools/ machines, group B supervises them, group C owns the tools/machines) are necessary to optimize work processes, the arrangement can succeed only if a position of leadership (Herrschaftsposition) has been instituted—and acknowledged as legitimate—that has at its disposal the military and juridical means to settle conflicts that may emerge between classes. In other words: only to the extent that conflict resolution occurs through generally acknowledged legal norms (i.e., ones not tied to contingent power differentials) is it possible to transfer improvements of technical/instrumental knowledge (which have been obtained independently) in such a way that the enhancement of the forces of production can be said to “result” (Society and Politics, 126) from institutionalized changes in moral-practical consciousness. According to some readers, this perspective stands Marxian theory on its head (Tomberg 2003, 84). All the same, Habermas claims to hold fast to the model of historical materialism, for two reasons. Although he considers that normative structures follow an autonomous course of evolution in “logical” terms, he also views them—at least as they develop specifically under capitalism—as reactions to system problems that are “economically” conditioned (Society and Politics, 124). Therefore, the points where the moral-practical consciousness that has “condensed” in worldviews can augment the forces of production depend on the specific economic challenges for which solutions are necessary. “Culture,” according to Habermas, “remains a phenomenon of the superstructure” (124). Second, Habermas considers that interpretations of contemporary society and its possible transformations can only prove empirically accurate if one knows the challenges to which this society has reacted historically. This implies that all observations concerning present-day society must be checked against an “instructive theory of social evolution.” Habermas constructs such a model by combining elements of Marxist structuralism (Godelier 1977), sociological functionalism (Habermas and Luhmann 1971), and cognitive psychology (Piaget 1997). Thereby, the typical evolutionary scheme is as follows: At the level of the social base (which is structured exclusively in economic terms only under capitalism), problems emerge that can no longer be solved within the framework of the standing order. For example, a farming community may experience population growth that leads to a food shortage. Habermas’s name for such an event—whereby continued existence is threatened—is “system problem.” This type of situation calls for innovation both in terms of forces of production and in terms of social integration. Until this point, the knowledge operative in the forces of

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production (Produktivkraftwissen) and moral-practical knowledge have developed independently—for example, individual subjects have developed problem solutions in a creative way; although they enter collective structures of knowledge, they are actually enlisted only under the pressure of concrete economic challenges. When this occurs under the guidance of moral-practical knowledge to solve the threats to continued existence (Bestandsgefährdungen) at hand, societies have “learned” how to deal with a challenge and can, consequently, claim to have achieved a higher level of development. With this newly reconstructed conception of historical materialism, Habermas claims to have jettisoned the “philosophical ballast” of the critical theory of the 1930s (Communicative Action, 2:382). The more thinkers like Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse consider that the potential for reason inherited from bourgeois culture diminishes under the influence of totalizing bureaucracies and mounting economization, the smaller the chance becomes even to demonstrate such potential empirically (2:381). In contrast, Habermas’s theory of social evolution places its hopes—from the inception—in a higher level of abstraction inasmuch as it does not consider that the language of learning processes is tied to concrete historical events; what is more, its functionalist vocabulary permits one not to put the challenges and systemic problems these phenomena entail solely in economic terms. Even if the economic system—and the crises it produces—have guided, in a certain measure, the evolution of organized, Western capitalism, this is not the case for socialism; here, it is the incapacity of state apparatuses to fulfill a certain level of popular demand that generates crisis (2:383ff.). The category “lifeworld,” which is introduced in The Theory of Communicative Action, makes the analytical framework more complicated. All the same, Habermas continues to hold to the evolutionary model of society/societies and to the Marxist notions of “base” and “superstructure.” As he observes, impulses for social transformation—e.g., the differentiation of the economic system from the governmental/administrative system (Herrschaftssystem)— “emanate from the domain of material reproduction” (2:168). What is more, to the extent that economic and administrative imperatives come to penetrate the lifeworld (which has achieved differentiation solely on the basis of rationalization), Habermas identifies a further form of self-contradiction within capitalism, which he calls the “paradox of societal rationalization” (2:186). However, despite the continued references to its Marxian inheritance, Habermas’s reworking of historical materialism leaves many questions unanswered. On the one hand, it seems that capitalism, which has come to be accepted as a system of material reproduction without a viable alternative, has deprived the original theory of historical materialism of its teleological “bite” (i.e., the thesis of socialism as the end stage of social development). Yet at the same time, mounting economic inequalities in the national and international

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spheres (which can be empirically verified without great effort), the increased delegalization of how wars are conducted, and so on make the notion that progress must necessarily occur in human social evolution seem less and less persuasive. Indeed, Habermas can hardly say as much without drawing gloomy conclusions about contemporary society. The tension between normative consciousness as the “vanguard” of social evolution and the colonization of the lifeworld that prevails in actual fact is palpable. The further such colonization proceeds, the less it is clear how economically induced system crises may be absorbed by implementing (supposedly autonomous) processes of moral and legal learning (autonom erzielter Lernfortschritte der Moral und des Rechts) (Allen 2008). If the communicative potential of reason—which is easy enough to posit in the abstract—has no empirical site of application, Habermas’s theory threatens to deteriorate into reconstructive nostalgia.

References Allen, Amy. 2008. “Empowering the Lifeworld?” In The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, 96–122. New York: Columbia University Press. Godelier, Maurice. 1977. Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology. Trans. Robert Brain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen, and Niklas Luhmann. 1971. Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie: Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Marx, Karl. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin. Piaget, Jean. 1977. The Moral Judgment of the Child. Trans. Marjorie Gabain. New York: Free Press. Tomberg, Friedrich. 2003. Habermas und der Marxismus. Zur Aktualität einer Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.

58 HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS REGINA KREIDE

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he relationship between human rights and democracy is most often described in terms of tension (e.g., Gosepath 1998, 209ff.; Michelman 1999, 52–66; Wellmer 2000). Human rights impose on popular sovereignty moral prescriptions that restrict the freedom of choice and decision. Conversely, the results of democratic processes may run counter to the standing conceptions of human rights—and, as a result, undermine their observance. Jürgen Habermas’s deliberative conception of human rights—which holds equally distant from liberal and republican positions—integrates important aspects of both theories to justify human rights and democracy. On the one hand, this approach is directed against advocates of the liberal tradition, which as a rule focuses on “classic” human rights—that is, the precedence of subjective freedoms over rights of political participation. On the other hand, Habermas criticizes the tradition of republicanism going back to Arendt (and, ultimately, Aristotle), which grants rights of political participation—as an important component of “the good life”—precedence over individual freedoms. For both the liberal and the republican traditions, human rights and popular sovereignty compete with each other (Facts, 122). In contrast, Habermas’s deliberative theory seeks to show that the relationship is, in fact, complementary. In this context, one particular distinction is of central importance. Inasmuch as they are moral, human rights are justified norms of action, and they express demands that hold for all human beings. As basic rights (Grundrechte) or juridical rights they are enforceable constitutional rights; although they retain their universal validity claim, they can, de facto, only be demanded within a determinate legal community (Rechtsgemeinschaft) (Facts). The “interreferentiality” (Verweisungszusammenhang) between human rights and democracy is evident, for one, in the fact that juridical human rights represent—in the form of subjective rights—a necessary condition for the democratic process. That is, agreement between citizens about fair procedures of political participation presupposes that citizens recognize one another as

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free and equal. Rights to freedom such as the inviolability of persons and of the private sphere must be institutionally secured to make it possible for citizens to exercise their political rights in the first place (Günther 1994, Kreide 2016). At the same time, human rights are not just the precondition for democracy; they also depend on a fair democratic process in a normative sense. Only through democratic procedure is it possible for moral human rights to be thematized by citizens, interpreted, and endowed with the authority of enforcement—i.e., institutionalized. On this point, Habermas takes distance from the traditional distinction between natural law and positive law, which he does not consider convincing: if one adopted a conception of human rights in terms of natural law, the task of the legislator would be limited to “pouring” moral norms into the “mold” of positive law—which would occur without rights (and their “contents”) being granted publicly and reciprocally (Inclusion, 190). The internal connection between human rights and popular sovereignty—i.e., the counterfactual assumption that human rights and democracy presuppose and result from each other—lies, as Habermas puts it, “in the normative content of the very mode of exercising political autonomy” (Facts, 103). That said, Habermas considers that human rights are, in terms of their structure, not moral norms but rather “juridical by their very nature” (Inclusion, 190). Although they can be justified in the political process only by way of moral argument, this cannot occur independent of a democratic procedure. They rely on political procedures that are already established to achieve the status of human rights in the first place. For some, the assumption that human rights are juridical in nature and based on a fusion of legal form and the principle of discourse does not attach due significance to their moral dimensions (Michelman 1999). Human rights, the argument goes, are not rights that citizens of a state grant one another. Their defining feature is that they point beyond membership in one particular nation-state and, instead, are conceived in universalistic terms (Forst 1999). Conversely, others contend that human rights—because they are juridical by nature—connect with legislative instances and reach the “administered ears of professional politicians” (Brunkhorst 2005, 199). Precisely because of their ambivalent moral-legal nature, human rights are “stand-ins” for democratic legitimation that represents an “emergent public sphere” (199). The culture of human rights forms the common “normative denominator” upon which different legal cultures can reach agreement, even short of legislative elaboration and juristic concretion (Möllers 2001, 49). Moreover, for civil society—which already involves the “politics of appeal” (49) as a matter of necessity—the moral aspect of human rights is a trump for uncovering abuses and making them known. When addressed in legal terms, however, human rights are not just actionable constitutional rights—they also provide the

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building blocks for the new forms of transnational legality that were established, after 1945, within the framework of the United Nations. The procedural notion of human rights may also be a reason why Habermas does not justify social human rights in terms of their “inherent value” (eigener Wert) but only in relation to rights to freedom and political rights. Habermas’s rejection of a legal principle that would grant social rights constitutional status as human rights is based on the fact that the principle of discourse does not entail a principle of social law (soziales Rechtsprinzip) that would necessarily have to be a part of the procedure for justifying legality. “The system should contain precisely the rights citizens must confer on one another if they want to legitimately regulate their interactions . . . by means of positive law” (Facts, 122). Hereby, Habermas means, above all, rights that represent preconditions for legitimate legislation—i.e., for procedures that occur in terms of democratic principle (125–126). Such a proceduralist perspective on the justification of human rights considers social rights only as the precondition for citizens’ use of other rights. As a legal component of the procedure itself, they hold no significance (for a critical assessment, see Frankenberg 1996; for Habermas’s response, see Habermas 1996, 1542ff.; cf. Lohmann 1999). Although Between Facts and Norms connects the “equiprimordial” justification of human rights and democracy to the democratically constituted nation-state, Habermas in no way excludes the democratic legitimation that would be provided by a transnational constitution. The abstractness of the notion of constitutionality—to which the state and other social institutions are subjected—permits one to speak of a “social constitution” instead of a “state constitution” (Brunkhorst 2006, 112); such a constitution would provide the normative measure for all international legislation (Rechtsgebilde) in the political order of world society (Naturalism, 322ff.). For all that, Habermas does not advocate a world republic but rather a “world domestic policy without a world government” (Postnational, 110), carried by citizens, as well as the progressive constitutionalization of international law (see chapter 17 in this volume) on the basis of fundamental human rights. Here, the frame of normative reference is constituted by a deliberative theory of democracy that offers to transnational institutionalization the functional equivalents for decisionmaking processes that are democratically organized. Habermas has responded to numerous objections that have been raised in the context of international discourses on human rights (Postnational, 113–129). For many critics, human rights are a “Western” achievement and rest on a purely “occidental” conception of reason that is by no means shared everywhere in the world. Habermas responds to such skeptics by observing that even if the idea of (universalistic) reason first originated in “Western” societies, the practice of justification based on reason forms an integral component of communicative action, which in turn rests on the idea of reciprocal

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relations of communication. In the international discourse on human rights, participants of different cultural origins—inasmuch as they wish to agree on interpretations—must allow themselves to be guided by certain presuppositions (Postnational, 129). A key component of this process is that symmetrical relations obtain between participants—relations that are expressed by, e.g., mutual recognition, reciprocal exchanges of perspective, and shared readiness to see one’s own tradition from the perspective of the other. This backdrop makes it possible to critique one-sided readings and instances of political instrumentalization that undermine the normative preconditions that must be given to achieve reasonable agreement about standards of human rights.

References Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2005. Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community. Trans. Jeffrey Flynn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 2006. Habermas. Leipzig: Reclam. Forst, Rainer. 1999. “The Basic Right to Justification: Toward a Constructivist Conception of Human Rights.” Constellations 6, no. 1: 35–60. Frankenberg, Günter. 1996. “Why Care? The Trouble with Social Rights.” Cardozo Law Review (Special Issue: Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges, Part I and II), 17, no. 4–5: 1365–1390. Gosepath, Stefan. 1998. “Das Verhältnis von Demokratie und Menschenrecht.” In Demokratischer Experimentalismus, ed. Hauke Brunkhorst, 201–241. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Günther, Klaus. 1994. “Diskurstheorie des Rechts oder liberales Naturrecht in diskurstheoretischem Gewande?” Kritische Justiz 27, no. 4: 470–487. Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. “Reply to Symposium Participants, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.” Cardozo Law Review (Special Issue: Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges, Part I and II) 17, no. 4–5: 1477–1559. Kreide, Regina. 2016. “Between Morality and Law: In Defense of a Political Conception of Human Rights.” Journal of International Political Theory 12, no. 1: 10–25. Lohmann, Georg. 1999. “Soziale Rechte und die Grenzen des Sozialstaates.” In Politische Philosophie des Sozialstaates, ed. Wolfgang Kersting, 351–372. Weilerswist: Velbrueck. Michelman, Frank. 1999. “Bedürfen Menschenrechte demokratischer Legitimation?” In Recht auf Menschenrechte. Menschenrechte, Demokratie und internationale Politik, ed. Hauke Brunkhorst et al., 52–66. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Möllers, Christoph. 2001. “Globalisierte Jurisprudenz.” Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie Beiheft 79: 41–60. Wellmer, Albrecht. 2000. “Der Streit um Wahrheit. Pragmatismus ohne regulative Ideen.” Die Renaissance des Pragmatismus. Aktuelle Verflechtungen zwischen analytischer und kontinentaler Philosophie, ed. Mike Sandbothe, 253–270. Weilerswist: Velbrueck.

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n Habermas’s works, the concept of ideology displays multiple—and polyvalent—aspects. It features prominently as one of the central categories in his account of Marxism—above all, in his early discussions of the project of critical theory as it was first conceived. The matter continues to be of central importance in Habermas’s discussions of “late capitalism,” where he seeks to offer a political-sociological diagnosis of the times. However, in the course of the author’s turn to the theory of communication, which crucially revises his approach to critical social analysis, ideology offers a point of reference less and less; in late writings, the concept is invoked only rarely (cf. Habermas 2001, 2008). Habermas’s early essays on Marxism, political theory, and social philosophy (e.g., Theory and Practice) discuss the Marxist doctrine of ideology in terms of the history of bourgeois society. In his Habilitation, however, Habermas takes issue with the vulgar-Marxist reduction of bourgeois ideals to interests based purely on class (as Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse had done in the foundational texts of critical theory, written during the 1930s). He observes that the principle of the public sphere—which was only partially realized in bourgeois societies of the Enlightenment—harbored “ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology” (Structural Transformation, 88). In “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’ ” (1968), the quotation marks in the title are decisive: because of the successful rationalization and changed form of late-capitalist societies, the traditional conception of ideology can “no longer be employed as [it] stand[s]” (Society and Politics, 107). For Habermas, then, “ideology” is less a matter of “false consciousness” that a political class employs for strategic reasons (as Marcuse still held) than it is a matter of social life becoming depoliticized when the “reified models” (Society and Politics, 91) of scientific-technological knowledge gain the upper hand. “The legitimation system” (Legitimation, 36) of late capitalism experiences a severe crisis not least because “the residue of tradition” and “core components of the bourgeois ideology” (48) can no longer operate in a justificatory (apologetisch) way. Even the capitalist “ideology of achievement and success” (Leistungsideologie) (81), a cornerstone of capitalism’s legitimation, too openly contradicts the actual conditions of work and life in liberal societies.

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By engaging with the methodologies of psychoanalysis (Knowledge, 214– 300; Society and Politics, 111) and hermeneutics (Habermas 1990), Habermas reformulates ideological critique as an inquiry into the “conditions of systematically distorted communication” (1990, 265). He outlines the project on a grand scale in The Theory of Communicative Action, which is founded both in the philosophy of language and in social theory; here, after the systematic revision performed in “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism,” the concept of ideology no longer plays an explanatory role. The “ballast” of “subject philosophy and the philosophy of history that . . . serves as the foundation” for ideological and social critique in first-generation critical theory (Communicative Action, 2:382) is replaced by a theory of crises and problems in the lifeworld: here, understanding-oriented forms of communication (and forms of self-understanding) count as “pathological” when they have been distorted by strategic modes of interaction (and self-relation) (2:141–143, 318– 331, 367–373). In Habermas’s work, then, the field of ideology critique—that is, the effort to point out possible traces of power in knowledge and self-understanding— has been preserved, albeit in rather different terms. However, one may doubt what consequences his markedly rationalist (rationalitätstheoretisch) assumptions really hold for understanding the actual communicative capabilities of modern subjects. His analytical framework seems to exclude an understanding of deep-lying distortions that pervade entire vocabularies and perspectives and inscribe heteronomy into subjectivity itself. Moreover, it seems that subjects may even affectively attach themselves to harmful and epistemically deficient convictions—which translates into enduring problematic patterns of life. Habermas’s theory can hardly explain such operations, which would fall under a wide definition of the term ideology. This possibility of a radically problematic but self-willed self-misunderstanding can hardly be accounted for by way of the strict dichotomy between power and validity. Habermas’s philosophical optimism about communicative reason—which stands in marked contrast to the pessimism of older critical theory (Discourse, 106–130; Postmetaphysical, 28–56)—has a correlate, in his political theory, in his confidence in the power of pluralistic, democratic public spheres to guarantee rational decisions. The discourse-theoretical conception of democracy places an enormous systematic weight on “the higher-level intersubjectivity of communication processes” (Inclusion, 248) inasmuch as it holds that democratic politics “stand in an internal relation to the contexts of a rationalized lifeworld that meets it halfway” (252). At the same time, however, Habermas simply declares that modern forms of social life are reasonable to a considerable degree. The fact that the public sphere is to be understood as a “communication structure rooted in the lifeworld through the associational network of civil society” (Facts, 359) could also mean that all partisan stances and

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points of irreconcilable difference within the social now reappear in the political realm. Thus, it might be that democracy offers no way of escaping the everrecurring distortions and disruptions of political dynamics—and that, for this reason, democratic engagement itself is always “ideological” to a certain degree. The question remains, then, whether Habermas’s view that the “project of modernity” may yet succeed avoids addressing fundamental doubts about the freedom to be achieved through reasonable communication—indeed, whether Habermas is afraid that he cannot do so within the narrow confines of his theory. The growing marginalization, in critical discourse, of the very idea of ideology could itself be a symptom of a certain theoretical attitude that denies the very possibility of ideology—which might be “ideological” itself. Moreover, Habermas’s harsh rejection of totalizing conceptions of ideological critique—above all, those that follow from early critical theory and structuralist Marxism—has prevented him from engaging with newer theoretical articulations of subjectivity and ideology. In particular, such projects have been outlined by Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Çiäek (1994), who take up the works of Gramsci and Althusser, and by Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau (2005), and Judith Butler—with clear implications for the theory of “radical democracy.” One can assess the consequences of this missed opportunity in different ways. It is certain, however, that the failure to engage with these authors (and the distance from their positions that this implies) has obscured a key point of agreement: despite his departure from ideology critique in the classical sense, Habermas shares with these thinkers a fundamental frame of reference that remains indebted to Marx.

References Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. “Reflections on Communicative Pathology.” In On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action, 129–170. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ——. 2008. “Nach dem Bankrott.” Interview with Thomas Assheuer. Die Zeit 46. http:// www.zeit.de/2008/46/Habermas. ——. 1990. “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality.” In The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, 245–272. Albany: SUNY Press. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Çiäek, Slavoj, ed. 1994. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso.

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n the basis of certain normative convictions, the intellectual has a sense both for what is and for what could be different. In other words, he unites what Robert Musil (1996) called a “sense of reality” and a “sense of possibility.” However, not all intellectuals manage to strike a balance between the two: self-declared realists possess an unrestrained sense of reality, and unworldly idealists possess an excessive sense of possibility. Jürgen Habermas belongs among the very few philosophers and sociologists who, both in what they write about intellectuals and in their intellectual interventions, seek a point of equilibrium between the sense of reality and the sense of possibility—and, what is more, achieve it, for the most part. In Habermas’s (1987) view, intellectuals address the public and stage interventions “with rhetorically pointed arguments on behalf of injured rights and repressed truths, overdue innovations and delayed progress” (29). On the basis of universalistic values—especially democratic principles and human rights—the intellectual judges what can and must be changed in reality as it stands. In most cases, intellectuals as citizens put “their expertise to public use beyond the limits of their profession” (Faltering, 51) without being asked to do so. Of course, citizens who have no professional knowledge at the ready may raise a critical voice in the public sphere. However, because current debates tend to concern complex issues as well as normative questions that pose at least as many difficulties, it happens only rarely that laypeople succeed in taking positions that receive considerable media attention. Although they hold views on pressing normative issues (e.g., stem-cell research and assisted suicide), their voices are rarely heard in public debates, which are dominated by experts and politicians. For this reason, a serious tension exists between expertocracy and democracy. In Habermas’s view, a scientist possessing professional knowledge who articulates a position in a matter of public controversy performs a different role than a scientist who only intervenes in specialized debates among colleagues. Habermas makes an explicit distinction between the roles of intellectuals and scientists. Whereas the latter communicate with others in the field about how a certain aspect of reality is to be interpreted or explained, the former seek—and not just on the basis of their knowledge but also on the basis of

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their normative convictions—to influence processes of opinion and will formation. If one does not keep these two roles separate, one risks losing one’s scientific reputation. In his reflections on intellectuals and their role(s), Habermas has both prescriptive and descriptive purposes in mind. He not only sketches the ideal “type” of the intellectual; he also describes another type, which does not fulfill this ideal. The ideal intellectual is aware of the fallible nature of what she or he thinks and says and also possesses an intuitive sense for important topics. Both these qualities require certain virtues: a mistrustful sensitivity to damage to the normative infrastructure of the polity; the anxious anticipation of threats to the mental resources of the shared political form of life; the sense for what is lacking and “could be otherwise”; a spark of imagination in conceiving of alternatives; and a modicum of the courage required for polarizing, provoking, and pamphleteering. (Faltering, 55)

In Habermas’s estimation, the intellectual works as a kind of stand-in for the universalistic values that represent the normative contents of modernity itself—on the basis of which the status quo may be criticized. In Germany, this type of intellectual emerged only after 1945—and slowly, at that. Heinrich Heine—a radical advocate of Enlightenment—was a lonesome forerunner of this type; accordingly, he found himself driven into exile in France, and his works were so censored that they hardly influenced the German public sphere (which, at any rate, barely existed in his lifetime). Before 1945, the term “intellectual” was used primarily in a disparaging manner in Germany. For this reason, intellectuals themselves tended to call themselves “men of spirit” (Geistige) (Bering 1978). Between the world wars, there emerged—inasmuch as spirit and power now stood at odds—a type of intellectual that did not want to be viewed as such. This type breaks down into five categories (Habermas 1987, 33–34). The first includes apolitical writers and scholars who held that matters of spirit and power stand so far apart that politicizing the former expresses a will to power that betrays creativity and education. A second group, represented by, e.g., Max Weber, believed that professional politicians, whose authority derives from specialized knowledge, are impeded by the incompetence of men of spirit (and especially by philosophers and writers). Third, there were activists and expressionists who, on the basis of the access to intellectual life afforded by an elite education, viewed themselves as a political vanguard and claimed their own position of power within politics—a matter far removed from egalitarian ideals. Fourth—and in contrast to the latter—party intellectuals claimed no special position but subordinated themselves to the political apparatus because they considered any special status

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that might be afforded to intellectuals to represent class treason. Finally, intellectuals on the right denounced those who betrayed the “spirit of the people,” which they were supposed to represent—but not to criticize. In addition to intellectuals who do not want to be intellectuals at all, Habermas (1987) also discusses counterintellectuals (Gegenintellektuelle). This type is distinguished above all by the fact that it “presents the role of the intellectual, which has already been institutionalized, as a social pathology” (50). With intellectual tools, counterintellectuals such as Helmut Schelsky and Kurt Sontheimer contest the role of intellectuals in the public sphere and maintain that society would function better without them. Thus, counterintellectuals make intellectuals responsible for increasing the legitimation burdens of the government with their public critiques and for unnecessarily endangering social cohesion (Brunkhorst 1987, 133–157). In order to exercise true influence on opinion and will formation, “a responsive, alert, and informed public” (Faltering, 52) is required. In this context, Habermas asks what “the structural transformation of the public sphere”—which increasingly supersedes traditional media such as books, newspapers, and radio through newer ones like television and the Internet—means for intellectuals. While the Internet has added interactive elements to the scope of intellectual activity, it is also fragmented through “millions of ‘chat rooms’ scattered throughout the world and globally networked ‘issue publics’ ” (Faltering, 157–158). Through this fragmentation, the national and transnational public spheres undo the interactive potential of the Internet. What is needed in the age of the Internet is the centripetal power of the classical public sphere, which created conditions under which public opinions emerged from the multiplicity of positions occurring in a diffuse mass public. In the case of television, the dynamic is different. As a visual medium, television inevitably induces intellectuals not just to participate in a reasonable discourse (on talk shows and in cultural programs, for example) but also to cultivate a certain image. This combination of discourse and self-(re-)presentation breaks down the border between the roles of politicians and of intellectuals, and it equates the two—that is, it confuses political power based on images with influence that derives from intellectual discourse (Faltering, 54). Moreover, intellectual scope is threatened by the outgrowths of media power— i.e., through the ability of actors within the media to influence, in lopsided fashion, public opinion and will formation by selecting political themes tailored to specific interests. Despite the fragmentation of the public sphere that the Internet has created, the dedifferentiation of the roles of politicians and intellectuals, and the outgrowths of media power, Habermas sees possibilities for intellectuals to exercise influence. Even if their opponents act strategically and exploit their media power, they must—if they want to present their views effectively—adopt

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certain rules of the game: “They must contribute to the mobilization of important issues, concrete facts, and convincing arguments, which are in turn exposed to critical examination” (Faltering, 171). In the course of globalization a transnational public sphere emerged—even if its existence is very precarious as yet—which enables intellectuals to direct their critical attention beyond national borders and onto problems that affect many citizens worldwide (for example, global warming and the growing gap between the rich and the poor). Although not all intellectuals view themselves as cosmopolitans, a cosmopolitanization of intellectuals has occurred all the same, for they are inevitably tied both to the local or regional society and to world society. Engagement for the “world domestic politics” that Habermas envisages requires that intellectuals deal with at least two tasks: first, overcoming extreme economic disparities that exist in a stratified world society, reversing ecological imbalances, and averting collective endangerments; second, promoting intercultural understanding (Verständigung) with the aim of securing equality in exchanges between world civilizations (Naturalism, 338). At first glance, it seems that no conception of the intellectual stands as opposed to the one presented here as that of Michel Foucault. Indeed, it has often been suggested (Tully 1998, 116; Maes 2002, 223; Bühl 2003) that Habermas’s ideal type of intellectual corresponds to the “universal intellectual” that Foucault declared obsolete—i.e., a party in possession of the truth who, in the name of universal values, advocates for the rights of underprivileged and marginalized persons/groups. According to Foucault, this kind of intellectual was replaced after the Second World War when the “specific” intellectual emerged—that is, an expert who employs his or her knowledge in power struggles that occur within his or her own field (1984, 69). In a society penetrated by relations of power, the task of intellectuals is to establish a counterpower. In contrast to Sartre’s intellectual, “someone who meddles in what does not concern him,” specific intellectuals do not presume to offer judgments in the name of truth and justice. Foucault holds that the unreflective nature of universal intellectuals is evident in the mistaken belief that their own ideas of truth and justice have somehow remained uncontaminated by power struggles. Specific intellectuals, on the other hand, self-reflectively assume that their public interventions also represent a way of exercising power. In fact, Habermas’s concept of the intellectual in no way corresponds to Foucault’s universal intellectual. In the first place, Habermas’s discourse theory of truth declares it impossible for an intellectual to “possess” the truth; claims to truth do not prove valid on the basis of personal status but on the basis of discursive redeemability. Second, Habermas’s radically democratic views exclude that an intellectual may be an advocate (Fürsprecher) for others. Were she or he to assume this position, it would amount to endorsing the outdated notion of the philosopher equipped with a privileged insight who assumes

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the role of “usher” (Platzanweiser) for others. (Indeed, Sartre cannot be unambiguously designated as a universal intellectual [Brunkhorst 1990]; his ambivalent status is attributable to the fact that, on the one hand, he ascribes to intellectuals a privileged access to truth that recalls Plato’s philosopherking yet, on the other hand, assumes that every human being, as a creature condemned to freedom, should shape his or her life in autonomous fashion.) Foucault’s conception of the intellectual is problematic in two respects. First—as Habermas details in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity—the reasons to establish a counterpower remain obscure (Discourse, 275). That is, Foucault does not specify the moral norms on the basis of which intellectuals could justify the establishment of a counterpower. Second, Foucault levels the distinction between truth and power, and, as a result, both concepts lose a part of their critical force (Stachel). In his later writings, Foucault addressed this matter by calling for parrhesia: the candor and boldness to tell the truth to those who possess power and don’t want to hear it (Foucault 2011). Thereby, Foucault approaches Habermas’s ideal type of intellectual more closely than he would probably like—especially since he holds that parrhesia means criticizing the abuse of power (Eribon 1992). What is more, Habermas and Foucault both believe that critique involves the ability to detect possibilities for different social conditions. At the same time, however, Foucault would not subscribe to the distinction that Habermas has made between influence and power. According to this view, one should distinguish between having an influence on the public and exercising political power (Habermas 1987, 36): intellectuals act communicatively and not strategically, seek to affirm communicative rationality through the public use of reason, and do not wish to occupy a position of power within the political system. Although there are good reasons to critique the equation of influence and power, it would be mistaken to limit the public interventions of intellectuals to either one or the other. The difference between influence and power goes back to a categorical distinction between communicative and strategic action. Yet can it always be clearly determined whether a given intellectual intervention is understanding oriented or purpose oriented? Are having an influence and exercising power not simply two modes of intellectual engagement? Is it not a matter of degree more than one of categorical difference? In public debates, the communicative and strategic actions undertaken by intellectuals merge. This makes it difficult to separate influence from power. Moreover, opponents understand such engagement to promote understanding (Verständigung) more often than agreement (Einverständnis). They recognize “that the other, given his preferences, has good reasons for his position under certain circumstances—that is, reasons that are good for him; it does not follow, however, that one must make these reasons one’s own, given one’s own preferences” (Habermas 1999, 116–117). Habermas believes that in such instances

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of “weak” communicative action (i.e., understanding without agreement), communicative rationality fuses with instrumental rationality. Yet does this not mean that he is collapsing the border between influence and power? Ultimately, Habermas’s ideal type of intellectual resembles, in a certain measure, the way he conceives of the philosopher (Moral Consciousness, 1–20). If an intellectual, in exercising influence on the public, offers good reasons for his or her views, he or she represents a kind of stand-in for reason and embodies communicative rationality. Against the background of differentiated cultural spheres, intellectuals are also critical interpreters of scientific, moral, and aesthetic viewpoints (see chapter 34 in this volume). What this means in actual practice Habermas has demonstrated not just for the Bonn and Berlin republics but on an international stage, as well. Whether the debate involved the Historikerstreit, German reunification, the Iraq War, or the democratic deficits and austerity policies of the European Union, in each instance Habermas demonstrated the stakes of the public use of reason. As a sociologist, he has always been aware of the fact that he can fulfill his role as an intellectual only under certain social conditions. With that, the “sense of possibility” and the “sense of reality” strike a balance. This has prevented Habermas—in contrast to many other intellectuals—from displaying either a stubborn cynicism or an unworldly moralism.

References Bering, Dietz. 1978. Die Intellektuellen. Geschichte eines Schimpfwortes. Stuttgart: KlettCotta. Brunkhorst, Hauke.1987. Der Intellektuelle im Land der Mandarine. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1990. “Ohne Mandat—Sartres Theorie des Intellektuellen.” In Der entzauberte Intellektuelle, 99–125. Hamburg: Junius. Bühl, Achim. 2003. “Die Habermas-Foucault-Debatte neu gelesen.” Prokla 130:256–287. Eribon, Didier. 1992. Michel Foucault. Trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Truth and Power.” In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 51–75. New York: Pantheon. ——. 2011. The Government of Self and Others. Trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. Eine Art Schadensabwicklung: Kleine Politische Schriften VI. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 1999. Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung: Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Maes, Michael. 2002. Diskurs, Macht und Geschichte. Foucaults Analysetechniken und die historische Forschung. Frankfurt: Campus. Musil, Robert. 1996. The Man Without Qualities. Trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. New York: Vintage. Tully, James. 1998. “To Think and Act Differently. Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas’ Theory.” In Foucault Contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue Between Genealogy and Critical Theory, ed. Samantha Ashenden and David Owen, 90–142. London: Sage.

61 LATE CAPITALISM FRANK NULLMEIER

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abermas’s Legitimation Crisis (Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus [1973]) assigns the concept of “late capitalism” a position of central importance, which it has retained in his works as a whole. However, in presenting this sketch of a comprehensive theory of society, Habermas employs the term “late capitalism” only with restraint. More often, he refers to “state-regulated” or “organized capitalism.” And even when the chapter heading promises “A Descriptive Model of Advanced Capitalism,” what follows speaks primarily of “organized capitalism” (Legitimation, 33). Habermas’s references to “late capitalism” should be understood in light of the Sixteenth Conference of German Sociologists (Soziologentag) in Frankfurt (1968). To acknowledge Karl Marx’s 150th birthday and at the instigation of Theodor W. Adorno, the theme of the event was “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” In his opening remarks, Adorno called for Marxist categories to be preserved. Given the dominance (Vorherrschaft) of capitalist relations of production over forces of production, he argued, “industrial society” cannot prove central to analysis, for it refers only to technical aspects of social development. For all that, Adorno’s lecture did little to clarify the concept of “late capitalism,” in particular. Adorno presented points of contrast with “liberal capitalism” and advanced the thesis that state intervention should not be deemed an element foreign to its system. Instead, he argued, intervention is constitutive of capitalism: its telos (or, alternatively, the inevitability of its collapse) involves the transition to “rule [Herrschaft] independent of market mechanisms” (Adorno 1979, 368). Afterward, Habermas began to use the term “late capitalism” with greater frequency. Thus, in his discussion of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964)—which refers mainly to “advanced industrial societies”—he spoke of the “system of advanced capitalism [Spätkapitalismus]” (Rational Society, 133; cf. Habermas 1968, 12), and he entitled a 1968 lecture “Conditions for Revolutionizing Late-Capitalist Societies” (Kultur und Kritik, 70–86). In the foreword to a new edition of Theory and Practice that appeared around the same time, Habermas used the term as a matter of course and without any further explication.

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The phrase “late capitalism” was coined by Werner Sombart in Der moderne Kapitalismus. In the entirely revised second edition (1916–1927; the original work is dated 1902), Sombart divided capitalism into “early,” “high,” and “late” phases—whereby the last phase connotes decline. “Early capitalism” (a term that Habermas uses—as well as “high capitalism”—in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) refers to the development of commercial enterprises and market orders from the fourteenth century until the Industrial Revolution (c. 1760). High capitalism is defined as the unfolding and ultimate consolidation of capitalist production in the nineteenth century. “Late capitalism,” finally, refers to the rise of social politics and public enterprises, as well as to mounting state intervention in market cycles after 1914 (Pribram 1983, 226–227, 376–380). Except in isolation—e.g., a book by the Polish economist Natalie Moszkowska (1943)—the term found little use even among economists who foresaw a decline, or even the end, of capitalism (for example, Joseph A. Schumpeter). In contrast, terminology developed by Rudolf Hilferding (1910) achieved prominence. Hilferding analyzed processes of economic concentration and the domination of finance capital in terms of the replacement of “competitive capitalism” (Konkurrenzkapitalismus) by “monopoly capitalism” (Hilferding 1981). After the 1968 Soziologentag had renewed the idea of late capitalism in political and theoretical debates, Claus Offe’s effort to develop the concept fueled further discussion (“Spätkapitalismus—Versuch einer Begriffsbestimmung” [Late capitalism—an attempt at definition]; Offe 1972, 7–25). In Offe’s estimation, capitalism’s potential for adaption is “categorically exhausted” because no forms of state regulation exist in which “new mechanisms for the self-perpetuation of the capitalist system” may be combined with the system as it stands (24). All the same, should strategies of adaptation in fact be available, one might “employ the term ‘late capitalism’ in a sense that is not overly loose” (24). Thereby, Offe indicated that the term refers to a state of crisis: the modifier “late” stands for the possible end of capitalism—one that will not occur when class struggles escalate to revolution but rather when further potential for development runs dry. Habermas adopted this “crisis-theoretical” view—albeit with a different orientation—in Legitimation Crisis (1973). That said, the central opposition between “liberal capitalism” and “late capitalism” had already occurred in his 1968 discussion of Marcuse (Habermas 1968, 74). The two-phase theory of capitalism dates back even earlier and informs The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (original ed. 1962), which analyzes the transition from the public sphere of liberal societies to a public sphere under conditions where public and private realms are fused. Here—and in contrast to Legitimation Crisis—“late capitalism” refers to the point when liberal capitalism met its end, following the Great Depression of the 1870s (Structural Transformation,

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143ff.). In this work, Habermas interprets liberal capitalism entirely in terms of the market and competition, which requires the state (Staatlichkeit) only to secure the legal preconditions for exchange. It is not the state that stands at the institutional center under liberal capitalism; rather, the state serves only as a complementary organization for market transactions that regulate themselves. Late capitalism, in contrast, has a political constitution: relations of production are repoliticized, destructive forces of the market are restricted by government, and class conflicts are hedged in by the welfare state (Legitimation, 37, 54, 61, 74). Late capitalism is a form of political capitalism: state and market have entered such a close connection that neither can exist without the other. Late capitalism is distinguished by two phenomena in particular: markets are concentrated and organized, and the state intervenes extensively (Legitimation, 33–34). On a theoretical level, the concept of “late capitalism” rejects key categories of Marxist analysis inasmuch as the law of value is no longer admissible. Now, the state works against cyclical crises in order to stabilize the system as a whole (Blanke, Jürgens, and Kastendiek 1975, 392–393). Economic crises can be averted politically—the state is not just the executor (Vollzugsorgan) of the law of value (Legitimation, 45–46). Contra the thesis that this law still holds—a position argued by, e.g., Ernest Mandel (1975)—Habermas shifts attention from purely economic logic to the way that politics affects relations of production as a whole. In his estimation, capitalist structures are shaped both by economic process logic and by political countersteering. The late-capitalist state intervenes in the market economy in four ways (Legitimation, 51ff.): it creates favorable conditions through legislation, the protection of rights, and the guarantee of inner and outer security; moreover, it assures that the legal system operates in a fashion that complements the market. These governmental activities were already operative under liberal capitalism; now, however, they intensify. The innovative aspects of late capitalism involve state operations that address problems in the market that occur as a result of the economic system, on the one hand, and compensate for the consequences of dysfunction, on the other. In particular, the creation of welfare programs is meant to remedy such matters. New constellations of power emerge. With the development of the educational system and the research sector, realms that do not obey the logic of exchange value come into being, negotiations between large-scale organizations (Großverbände) determine the wage structure, and modern mass democracy makes demands that do not serve the interest of capital. Accordingly, one may no longer reduce politics to a superstructure phenomenon (Legitimation, 58ff.). Despite such increased flexibility, however, Habermas maintains that capitalism is headed for a crisis. As a matter of principle, the political system

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cannot fulfill the legitimation requirements that grow in response to state interventionism. Because modernization generates universalistic norms and discursively reflected motivations, which now count as the sole bases for a valid practical orientation, the political claims and demands of citizens cannot be met. Habermas considers the term “late capitalism” justified only because the legitimation crisis that he identifies derives from capitalist development as a matter of necessity (Legitimation, 49). For all that, however, Habermas’s interpretation of capitalism in terms of crisis became less dramatic in the works that followed Legitimation Crisis. Indeed, the American translation of the book makes no mention of “late capitalism” in the title. In the body of the work, Spätkapitalimus is rendered, for the most part, by the less “loaded” term “advanced capitalism.” (Although “late capitalism” does occur in isolation.) The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), in turn, drops the concept of legitimation crisis for a theory of the “pathologies of the lifeworld.” Here, Habermas contends, the thorough penetration of the lifeworld by external imperatives prevents the possibility of protest that might explode the system. Still, Habermas employs the term “late capitalism” in The Theory of Communicative Action—even though he abandons “liberal capitalism” (its opposing term in Legitimation Crisis) without introducing another term/concept to replace it. The Theory of Communicative Action addresses only “modern,” “developed,” or “organized” capitalism—whereby a distinction is made between “state capitalism” (the variant under communist regimes) and “private capitalism” (in the West). In systematic terms, late capitalism is distinguished by three elements: governmental intervention, mass democracy, and the welfare state (which is charged with “pacifying” class conflict) (Communicative Action, 2:332). Like Legitimation Crisis, The Theory of Communicative Action critiques orthodox Marxism. Given the extent of state intervention (even if it never assumes the dimensions of business investments), a theory of crisis that takes only economic matters into consideration is inadequate, for now crisis tendencies are displaced onto the administrative system. Marxist value theory cannot grasp the colonization of the lifeworld—especially the systemic endangerment of the public sphere (Communicative Action, 2:323ff.). Accordingly, in The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas reformulates late capitalism in terms of the system-lifeworld paradigm; even more clearly than before, he avoids attaching political significance to class struggles and conflicts involving the distribution of wealth. “Reification” that “does not . . . produce effects distributed in any class-specific manner” (Communicative Action, 2:332) now becomes the point of crystallization. Conflict flares up in “questions having to do with the grammar of forms of life” (2:392); in turn, responses aim to “dam in” the independence of the state and economy (Habermas remarks with a

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nod toward new social movements of the late 1970s). It does not follow that a legitimation crisis occurs for the capitalist system as a whole, however. A functional equivalent for bourgeois ideology emerges: fragmented everyday consciousness, which undermines the demands of cultural modernity, i.e., universalism and discursivity (2:330). Capitalism’s potential for adaptation has by no means been exhausted. “Late capitalism”—as Claus Offe (2006) put it recently—amounts to “a terminological mistake [Missgriff]” (194). Since the middle of the 1980s, Habermas has not used the term. Both in his central writings on political theory— Between Facts and Norms and The Inclusion of the Other—as well as in shorter essays, he has avoided the modifier “late” in discussing the economic realities of modern capitalism, which admit no alternative (even though they “require regulation”) (Habermas 2007, 428). Since there is no chance of “opting out,” the best one can do in the “new stage” of “politically unleashed” capitalism is to “tame,” “cushion,” or “politically shape” it (Time). Recent debates about appropriate interpretations of, and names for, capitalism as it now exists— “post-Fordism” and the “Schumpeterian competition state” in the terminology of the Regulation School (Jessop 2002), “capitalism of the financial market” (Windolf 2005), or “project-based capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2003)— have not, to date, led Habermas to revise the architecture of his theory, devote renewed attention to capitalism, or change his analytical vocabulary.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1979. “Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft? Einleitungsvortrag zum 16. Deutschen Soziologentag.” In Soziologische Schriften, 1:354–370. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Blanke, Bernhard, Ulrich Jürgens, and Hans Kastendiek. 1975. Kritik der Politischen Wissenschaft: Analysen von Politik und Ökonomie in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. 2 vols. Frankfurt: Campus. Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello. 2003. Der neue Geist des Kapitalismus. Konstanz: UVK. Habermas, Jürgen. 1968. “Zum Geleit.” Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse, 9–16. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2007. “Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik: eine Replik.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 406–459. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hilferding, Rudolf. 1981. Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, ed. Tom Bottomore. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jessop, Bob. 2002. The Future of the Capitalist State. Oxford: Polity. Mandel, Ernest. 1975. Late Capitalism. Trans. Joris De Bres. London: NLB. Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon. Moszkowska, Natalie.1943. Zur Dynamik des Spätkapitalismus. Zurich: Aufbruch.

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Offe, Claus. 1972. Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2006. “Erneute Lektüre: Die ‘Strukturprobleme’ nach 33 Jahren.” In Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates. Veränderte Neuausgabe, hrsg. und eingel. von Jens Borchert und Stephan Lessenich, 181–196. Frankfurt: Campus. Pribram, Karl. 1983. A History of Economic Reasoning. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sombart, Werner. 1987. Der moderne Kapitalismus: Historisch-systematische Darstellung des gesamteuropäischen Wirtschaftslebens von seinen Anfängen bis zur. Gegenwart. Munich: DTV. Windolf, Paul, ed. 2005. Finanzmarktkapitalismus: Analysen zum Wandel von Produktionsregimen. Sonderheft 45 der Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

62 LEARNING PROCESSES GERTRUD NUNNER-WINKLER

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nlike genetically determined changes that occur in the process of maturation, changes through learning result from experience. By definition, learning processes—because they occur over a longer period of time—are distinct from punctual instances of learning (“imprinting”). As Habermas defines them, they do not refer to the acquisition of motor skills (for example, swimming), simple cultural aptitudes (Kulturtechniken), or narrowly delimited systems of knowledge (for example, reading and writing or mathematical abilities). Instead, learning processes concern the formation of the (cognitive or moral) capacity of judgment. Unlike the learning mechanisms that behaviorism and psychoanalysis investigate—which involve classical and operant conditioning and the introjection or cultural transformation of biological need structures—what interests Habermas is not the passive adoption of given patterns of behavior or value orientations but subjects’ self-directed and consciously accessible mental constructions. At the same time, the focus does not fall on positive contents but on structures of judgment. For Habermas, “learning process” refers to a normative concept: on rational grounds, both actors and observers identify the new views as more adequate than those that preceded them. The approach derives from Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg’s developmental theory but was also transferred from an individual plane to a collective one. Two questions follow: What are the criteria for evaluating learning processes? And what is it that motivates them?

Individual Learning Processes The normative notion of developmental progress may be illustrated by increases in role-taking abilities. Younger children believe that the world is as they see it. Subsequently, they recognize that others see the world in a different manner—and eventually realize that people are capable of knowing about the differences between their own perspective and the views of others. During adolescence, maturing subjects learn to adopt the system perspective: now they no longer consider only the intentions of parties who are concretely

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involved in a given situation but also the functional demands of life in society. Finally, the “prior-to-society-perspective” at the highest level of development permits social arrangements as they actually occur to be questioned from the (hypothetical) perspective of all reasonable beings. It is incontestable that awareness of the way one’s own perceptions are bound to a particular standpoint makes it possible to achieve a view of the world that is more adequate to reality. What proves decisive for Habermas, however, is that this learning process plays a constitutive role in the development of a secular understanding of morality. Instead of being derived from what is simply given (the word of God, sacrosanct tradition, ideas of natural law, and so on), norms are now considered valid because all parties who are (potentially) affected could freely accept them because they lie in the rational interest of everyone. By this standard, solutions to moral dilemmas are appropriate to the extent that participants are capable of taking the roles of others— that is, validity increases the more inclusive the circle of parties whose interests actors can understand and take into consideration. Children develop their cognitive and sociocognitive abilities by engaging with the physical and social worlds. The process moves forward when resistance is experienced in the physical environment and contradiction occurs in social interactions (especially among others of the same age—including friends), as well as through discussion of dilemmas. The highest levels of development—i.e., formal-operational thinking and critical reflection on prevailing norms in terms of universalizability—are only achieved in complex societies and through a formal system of education. Here, learners systematically consider situations that are not, in fact, given; the experience of conflicting norms (in subsystems and subcultures within the larger society) compels subjects to seek universally justifiable solutions on a metalevel. In this sense, Habermas (1987) speaks of, e.g., “university learning processes” (universitäre Lernprozesse) that go beyond academic training and liberate subjects from “one-sidedness” (83) by familiarizing them with the “productive force of discursive conflict” (96); in addition—and here the matter passes over to the collective—such processes concern “cultural communication [Selbstverständigung] and public opinion-formation” (80).

Collective Learning Processes For Habermas, social evolution does not simply result from the variables of blind chance; it also always involves historical learning processes. Accordingly, he has reconstructed the transformation of the institutionalized form of conflict regulation (i.e., law) in a way that corresponds to how development occurs on an individual level (i.e., in terms of morality). The primitive

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(vorhochkulturell) orientation to the consequences of action and retribution is replaced, in archaic high cultures, by an orientation to intentions and punishment—which in turn leads to a system of administering justice justified first by tradition and then, in early modernity, by a formal code founded in natural law and by a principled private morality (Society and Politics, 134). Under these conditions, claims to universality conflict with public morality that is still tied to individual states—i.e., there is tension between the cosmopolitanism of “man” in general and the loyalties of citizens. To resolve the problem, a new learning process is required. It is necessary for “the dichotomy between inner- and outer morality to disappear, the opposition between morally and legally regulated realms to be relativized, and the validity of all norms to be tied to the discursive will-formation of all who might be potentially affected” (327). This requisite learning process seeks to continue the Kantian project (Naturalism, 314). Later legal forms are “better” insofar as growing numbers of human beings are granted more and more basic rights. In this way, simple restrictions on power are replaced, first, by the “rule of law” and then by the self-determination of democratic nation-states; finally—at least in theory—“cosmopolitan law as a law of individuals” (314) may be achieved. Civil and human rights— which initially were secured negatively, by limits on power—are “complete” when political, social, economic, and cultural rights are granted. Collective learning processes of this kind are motivated by a combination of intentional action and systemic growth (318). At earlier stages of development, one can find anticipations of evolution in select individuals’ capacities for learning, which translate into worldviews that social systems enlist when their steering capacities are overtaxed (Society and Politics, 131ff.). In the transition to a world society (which is now underway), social evolution begins with the institutionalization of a legal order (Rechtssetzung) that effects a change of consciousness among those to whom it is addressed. The matter involves a “constructive, self-referential, and circular learning process” (Naturalism, 321) propelled by discourses that proceed through the exchange of arguments, are inclusive and open, and occur free of external and internal constraints (Facts, 306). At the same time, the question arises—and not just on an international level but already on a national scale—whether public discourses oriented toward truth still exist in mass societies (Faltering). In Habermas’s view, the replacement of real interactions and the asymmetrical structure of mass media make discourse participants who pose questions and offer responses to one another into spectators and consumers—likewise, beliefs articulated on the basis of validity claims simply become opinions. Ultimately, the question can only be answered empirically—even though Habermas gives good reason to suppose that a public circulation of views that is as undirected (ungesteuert) as

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possible produces pressures of rationalization that improve the quality of political decisions. (That said, this holds only when it is certain that the independence of a self-regulating media system is tied both to the informed discourses of elites and to a receptive civil society.) Other authors who seek to explain collective learning processes focus attention on the experiences and struggles of the actors. To mention a few examples: it is claimed that the better treatment of slaves in ancient Israel was based on the “continuously present ‘counter-memory’ of the ‘Egyptian house of bondage’ ” (Brunkhorst 2000, 69); workers owe their increased rights of participating in material prosperity to massive uprisings (which were nourished by outrage at social inequalities made more acute by industrialization and identified as manmade [Moore 1978]) in the years following the First World War; women secured voting rights at the beginning of the twentieth century only through intensive protests—and under massive pressure by transnational organizations, domestic violence was defined as a violation of human rights only in the 1990s (Buckel 2008). These examples attest to normative progress, but they offer no guarantees. There are also “learning processes with a deadly outcome” (Kluge 1996). One may consider the painful termination of the “Starnberg Project”—which had an unusually discursive form of organization—as a case in point.

References Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2000. Einführung in die Geschichte politischer Ideen. Munich: Fink. Buckel, Sonja. 2008. “Feministische Erfolge im transnationalen Recht.” Leviathan 36, no. 1: 54–75. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. Eine Art Schadensabwicklung: Kleine Politische Schriften VI. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kluge, Alexander. 1996. Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome. Trans. Christopher Pavsek. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Moore, Barrington. 1978. Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt. New York: Random House.

63 LEGAL WARS VERSUS LEGITIMATE WARS ANNA GEIS

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s a public intellectual, Jürgen Habermas has, from the beginning of his career, taken stands on current events. His political observations have not avoided an especially touchy matter in liberal and democratic public spaces: the justification of military intervention. Since the end of the Cold War, Habermas has—in essays, newspaper pieces, and interviews—articulated positions on three wars involving Western states: the first Gulf War (1991), Kosovo (1999), and Iraq (2003). He has said little, in contrast, about ongoing activities in Afghanistan (Habermas 1991, 1999; Habermas and Derrida 2003; Divided West). Habermas prompted the strongest—and most critical—response in journalistic and academic circles when, in an article for Die Zeit, he defended military intervention in Kosovo, which occurred without a UN mandate, as an anticipation (Vorgriff ) of future cosmopolitanism; to this day, “Bestiality and Humanity” (Habermas 1999) remains an often-quoted point of reference. Even though the piece stresses that NATO’s self-empowerment (Selbstermächtigung) should not become the norm and includes numerous reservations, Habermas expresses an understanding for the “inevitability of a transitory paternalism.” In a time of transition, he declares, the dilemma of human-rights politics is that one is required “to act as though there were already a fully institutionalized global civil society, the very promotion of which is the intention of the action” (Habermas 1999, 270). Adopting a normative perspective on global politics, Habermas advocates the Kantian project of constitutionalizing international law—that is, the task of transforming, over the long term, the rights and legal systems of individual states into a cosmopolitan constitution (Divided West, 123, 149, 159; see chapter 17 in this volume). Even if Habermas rejects Kant’s advocacy of a world republic, the latter’s thoroughgoing juridification of international relations has provided the normative standard for Habermas’s political reflections on wars since 1990. At the same time, one may also discern a certain sobriety that has surfaced in his reflections on steps made toward constitutionalization—a view

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that has been expressed in his increasingly pointed critiques of the policies of the United States. Already during the first Gulf War, Habermas (1991) criticized the tendency of the sole Western superpower to make a justified “police action” into an “entirely normal war” for securing its own interests in the Near East. During the Kosovo War, Habermas articulated the differences between the ways Americans and (continental) Europeans view human-rights politics even more clearly. The latter, he observed, are inclined to promote the further juridification of international relations, whereas the former consider it their national mission as the world power to pursue human rights (Habermas 1999, 269). In the 2003 Iraq War, this normative disagreement culminated in the “divided West”—a development for which Habermas holds the United States largely responsible. Habermas considered the Gulf War and the Kosovo War—which proved central for the West in the 1990s—to be justified “police actions.” Despite his criticism of the way military operations were conducted and their unintended consequences, he declared that they promoted cosmopolitanism, at least in principle (Habermas 1991, 1999). In contrast, Habermas has condemned the so-called War on Terror decreed by the United States after 2001— including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—as “calamitous setbacks” for the project of constitutionalizing international relations (Divided West, 148; Terror): “Instead of the kind of international police operation we had hoped for during the war in Kosovo, we have, once again, old-fashioned wars, albeit conducted with state-of-the-art technology” (Divided West, 11). Habermas has not discussed his precise conception of what “war” means. However, his criticism of the “War on Terror” proclaimed by George W. Bush makes it clear that he links the concept of war to the use of force between states (Divided West, 97). Habermas considers it a “grave mistake”—both normatively and pragmatically—to speak of a “war” on terror, since this designation lends terrorists the status of war criminals, and, moreover, it is impossible to wage a war against a hardly graspable network (Divided West, 32, 98). Accordingly, in his philosophical writings on constitutionalization, Habermas has abandoned the concept of “war” and instead chosen to speak of “police actions.” In the long-term perspective of a global legal order, military confrontations are destined to assume “the character of police actions and operations of criminal justice” (Divided West, 123). This interpretation of military intervention as the use of “police force” is problematic insofar as international relations find themselves in a state of transition from classical international law to cosmopolitan conditions—the ambivalent nature of which is becoming clearer and clearer. The basic problem involves the enormous differences in power between the legitimating but relatively weak authority of the United Nations, on the one hand, and, on the

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other, the power of nation-states that are capable of military action—and pursue their own interests in “partisan” fashion (Habermas 1999, 270). In reality, the supranational capacities of the world organization—which, in Habermas’s conception, should not restrict its activities to securing peace and human rights—are underinstitutionalized and lack resources. This both harms the credibility of the United Nations and makes it possible for states that are ready to act to issue their own warrants—with the result that a “would-be police action  .  .  . becomes indistinguishable from a run-of-the-mill war” (Divided West, 20). Habermas has sharply condemned the Iraq War in 2003 as illegal. He holds that it represented an “obvious” and unprecedented violation of international law and that it occurred without justification (Divided West, 85). Moreover, the developments leading to the conflict amount to an about-face in international law inasmuch as the actions of the United States raise the question whether the juridification of international politics is to be replaced by an ethicization of world politics that intends to erect a global order on the basis of hegemonic liberalism (Divided West, 116). The Iraq War has prompted Habermas to emphasize that military actions must be strictly bound by international law; after all, provisions in the charter of the United Nations establishing procedures for identifying and punishing violations have represented a decisive step toward the constitutionalization of world politics: “Since then, we no longer have just and unjust wars, only legal or illegal ones, depending on whether they are justified or unjustified under international law” (Divided West, 102). In pronouncing this judgment, Habermas takes distance both from John Rawls and from Michael Walzer, who hold fast to the notion of the “just war.” Whereas Rawls (by Habermas’s account) wishes to leave decisions about enforcing international justice to a liberal elite of states, Walzer considers the matter to fall to the governments concerned—whether they are democratic or not (Divided West, 101). Walzer’s conception of a “just war” is problematic for Habermas above all because judgments are not tied to inclusive and impartial procedures for producing and applying norms—and it is only by this means that reciprocal exchanges of position and due consideration of mutual interests can occur (see chapters 51 and 53 in this volume). Because the criteria for determining “just wars” are essentially ethical and political in nature, their use demands prudence and a sense of justice on the part of nation-states (Divided West, 104). Here, Habermas’s positions on the wars in Iraq and Kosovo conflict on a few points. The engagement in Kosovo proved controversial especially in Germany because the United Nations had issued no explicit mandate and because the Bundeswehr was deployed in a combat mission (in the narrow sense) for the first time (e.g., Lutz 2000). Some advocates conceded that it was illegal— because there was no mandate—yet defended its moral legitimacy because it

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occurred to avert a humanitarian catastrophe; for this reason, they understood it in terms of the doctrine of a “just war” (see Mayer 1999). The engagement was accompanied by a strongly moralizing discourse; members of NATO—graciously including Turkey in the coalition of democratic and constitutional states—considered that they possessed sufficient legitimation to act. Habermas (1999) acknowledged this perspective in positive terms by interpreting it as an “anticipation”—and not a violation—of international law. In part, he has affirmed this view subsequently (Divided West, 35, 86). That is: in the case of the Kosovo War, Habermas abandoned strict adherence to the mandate of the UN Security Council—upon which he then insisted for the Iraq War. Ultimately, he makes the questionable point that intervention in Kosovo was justified by the “undisputed democratic and constitutional character of all the states participating in the vicarious military coalition” (Divided West, 29). It is worth noting, in this context, that Habermas also affirmed, apropos of the war in Iraq, that the democratic hegemon is bound to inclusive discursive procedures for epistemic reasons (Divided West, 185); in the case of Kosovo, however, he deemed exclusive deliberation among Western states to be adequate. Are the nineteen member states in NATO not subject to cognitive limitations? Habermas’s epistemic privileging of a group of democracies is unconvincing, especially inasmuch as it recalls recent efforts by American theorists of international law to privilege democracies politically, legally, and morally in global politics—a matter that contradicts Habermas’s Kantian objectives. Finally, beyond the wars in Kosovo and Iraq, it remains unclear how the difference between police force and military force is to be conceived in concrete terms—the role of troops remains strangely indistinct. Habermas has called for ius in bello to be expanded to include the right to intervene in a way that resembles the rights of domestic police forces, as well as for fine-tuned regulation of how military power is employed (Divided West, 100). Here, he considers that, e.g., “precision weapons” represent a favorable development (Divided West, 174). However, these brief hints do not make it clear how the effects and collateral damages of concrete deployments of (police) force could be lessened for civilians to any meaningful extent. The way Western powers conducted operations in Kosovo and Iraq (including the use of “precision weapons”) hardly permits one to expect that the protection of civilians on the opposing side might trump protection afforded to one’s own soldiers (see Shaw 2005). Habermas turns a blind eye to a key question in discussions of “just” wars: whether states ready to perform “police actions” would be prepared to accept sacrifices on their own side and take greater risks for the sake of sparing civilians (see Walzer 2004, 73–74).

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References Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. “Wider die Logik des Krieges.” Die Zeit (February 15, 1991). ——. 1999. “Bestiality and Humanity: A War on the Border Between Legality and Morality.” Constellations 6, no. 3: 263–272. Habermas, Jürgen, and Jacques Derrida. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Interview by Giovanna Borradori. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lutz, Dieter S., ed. 2000. Der Kosovo-Krieg: Rechtliche und rechtsethische Aspekte. BadenBaden: Nomos. Mayer, Peter. 1999. “War der Krieg der NATO gegen Jugoslawien moralisch gerechtfertigt?” Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen 6, no. 2: 287–321. Shaw, Martin. 2005. The New Western Way of War. London: Polity. Walzer, Michael. 2004. “The Politics of Rescue.” In Arguing About War, 67–84. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

64 LEGALIT Y, LEGITIMACY, AND LEGITIMATION RAINER NICKEL

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abermas first developed a positive conception of legitimacy at the beginning of the 1970s, when he took up Max Weber’s sociology of government (Herrschaftssoziologie) and the Marxist critique of capitalism (Legitimation; Rekonstruktion). Legitimacy, as he has defined it, means the “worthiness of recognition [Anerkennungswürdigkeit] of a political order” (Rekonstruktion, 271). Legitimation Crisis, which dates from this period, focuses on the production of meaning (and crises of meaning) within the capitalist system—when the administration can shoulder economic problems but can no longer account for its operations (Legitimation, 98). Weber’s (1978) analysis of the legitimacy of rational rule offers no way out of such a dilemma. In this perspective, legitimacy is an empirical phenomenon. As Habermas observes, Weber requires that only two conditions be fulfilled: “(a) the normative order must be established positively; and (b) those legally associated must believe in its legality, that is, in the formally correct procedure for the creation and application of laws” (Legitimation, 98). Habermas counters this conception with a notion that starts from the “truth-dependency of belief in legitimacy.” This means that the procedure of creating and applying laws “does not suffice” to generate legitimacy and that “grounds for the legitimating force of . . . formal procedure must be given” (98). Modern parliamentarianism and forms of political thinking oriented on popular sovereignty consider a positive conception of legitimacy backward (rückwärtsgewandt) because it permits legitimacy to oppose—and, indeed, even to trump—parliamentary legality in the name of a “higher” authority. Carl Schmitt—with his unrivalled eye for the obsolete—made this very point in Constitutional Theory (1928) by pitting legality (that is, the positivity of law) against legitimacy: legality, he argued, is only legitimate because it expresses a “political existence” that itself admits no justification. Political unity, as a given fact, “requires no justification via an ethical or juristic norm. Instead, it makes sense in terms of political existence. A norm would not at all be in a position to justify anything here” (Schmitt 2008, 136).

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Habermas rejects this view on the grounds that it is decisionistic (Legitimation, 99); likewise, he rejects Niklas Luhmann’s conception of procedure, which also assumes an arbitrary instance admitting no further justification (or, at any rate, one that operates independently of truth [cf. Luhmann 1975, 20–25]). The background of the issue is twofold. For one, it follows from the heated debate about the legitimacy of positive law that occurred in the political laboratory of Weimar Germany (especially in exchanges between Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, and Hermann Heller; see Dyzenhaus 1997). Second, the matter concerns the extent to which unjust rule may find legitimation. (In the foreword to the new edition of Legitimität durch Verfahren, Luhmann even found it necessary to defend himself against the charge that his theory made it possible to legitimize concentration camps [Luhmann 1975, 1–2].) Habermas does not oppose a doctrine of natural law or a system of ethical values (Wertethik) to decisionism, because these efforts to determine materialground norms have failed, in his estimation (Legitimation, 100). Rather, he appeals to discourse theory—that is, to the justification of norms of action through reasoned argument (101ff.). To this end, he introduces a concept of procedural legitimation (esp. Rekonstruktion, 277–279) resting on validity claims that admit criticism (Rekonstruktion, 329). For all that, however, he leaves the sociophilosophical notion of legitimation strangely undecided inasmuch as he suspects “written bourgeois constitutions” of ideology (Legitimation, 101) and locates the core reason for legitimation deficits in class structures (Rekonstruktion, 320). Likewise, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) fails to offer a “deeper” alternative to decisionism and/or the doctrine of natural law. Instead, the book problematizes the modern welfare state, whose social politics are tainted by ambivalence inasmuch as they assure freedom, on the one hand, while withdrawing it, on the other; indeed, its tendencies toward juridification entail the “colonization of the lifeworld” (Communicative Action, 2:322). In Between Facts and Norms (1992) Habermas presents the conditions of legitimation for late-capitalist rule by elaborating the conditions for producing legitimate law(s). “How Is Legitimacy Possible on the Basis of Legality?” (Habermas 1994, 541ff.; resp. Habermas 1988)—which he first delivered as part of the Tanner lecture series at Harvard University—marks a turning point. Here, Habermas addresses law itself and develops a procedural conception of legitimacy on the basis of the principle of discourse: The proceduralist understanding of law  .  .  . qualifies the preconditions of communication and conditions of procedure in democratic opinion and will formation as the sole source of legitimation. It is just as incompatible with the Platonic notion that positive law can derive its legitimacy from a higher law

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as it is with the overly empiricist denial of any legitimacy that reaches beyond the contingencies of legislative decisions. (Habermas 1994, 664)

To be sure, this postmetaphysical and procedural conception of law cannot do without legislation and rights for support; however, the latter are not preformed, as it were, by natural law but must instead be spelled out—as a system—through the process of self-legislation (Facts, 118ff.). Habermas holds that the constitutional state and democracy are linked internally and cannot be pitted against each other or viewed as independent entities. Accordingly, legitimacy cannot arise through an arbitrary form of legality but only through legislation that occurs in the framework of a democratic and constitutional state: “the conditions of legitimacy for democratic law must be sought in the rationality of the legislative process itself” (1988, 237). Because it is fused with the procedure of democratic legislation (and with a rational procedure in the courts), Habermas’s conception of law approaches the systems-theoretical conception of legitimation through procedure (even though systems theory lacks a conception of democracy of its own and recognizes normative efficacy only in strictly factual terms). Now, the critical view of the potentially destructive force of empowering the public sphere (Vermachtung der Öffentlichkeit) and the concomitant risks of reifying and colonizing social relations—which were central to his early writings—yields to an abstract model of legitimation that uncannily resembles that of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany (and that of the democratic and constitutional state more generally). However, if Habermas formulated a coherent conception of legitimation for the nation-state in Between Facts and Norms, its conditions for emergence have dissolved since then. What fits together perfectly in the context of the individual state does not translate into a postnational constellation. The wellordered, procedural concept of legitimation developed for the nation-state founders on the absent structures of a vigorous supra- or transnational global public sphere. Consequently, the constitutionalization of international law that Habermas has since proposed (Divided West, 113–193) enlists different parameters of legitimation than the democratic and constitutional state. Henceforth, the task of legitimating legal regulations is carried by a constitution of the “liberal” kind—which is to be connected with the legitimation structures of the nation-state in a way that Habermas has only roughly sketched out (Divided West, 139ff.). The viability of this approach to legitimation is questionable. The regulatory structures of world society, although largely independent (verselbständigt) on an executive level, have—at least until now—been “counterbalanced” only by a weakly formed global public sphere (Brunkhorst 2005); moreover, the

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parliaments of nation-states seem hopelessly overtaxed when confronted with the superior power of knowledge and decision that the executive wields (LübbeWolff 2009, Nickel 2009). In seeking the parameters of supra- and transnational juridification that fulfills the demands of substantive legitimation, Habermas’s procedural conception of legitimation must yet prove itself in the postnational constellation.

References Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2005. Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community. Trans. Jeffrey Flynn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Dyzenhaus, David. 1997. Legality and Legitimacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1988. “Law and Morality.” In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Sterling McMurrin, 8:217–250. Salt Lake City: Utah University Press. ——. 1994. Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats. 4th ed. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lübbe-Wolff, Gertrude. 2009. “Die Internationalisierung der Politik und die Machtverluste der Parlamente.” In Soziale Welt. Sonderheft: Demokratie in der Weltgesellschaft, ed. Hauke Brunkhorst, 127–142. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Luhmann, Niklas. 1975. Legitimation durch Verfahren. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Nickel, Rainer. 2009. “Verwaltungsrecht und Rechtsverwaltung in der Weltgesellschaft.” In Soziale Welt. Sonderheft: Demokratie in der Weltgesellschaft, ed. Hauke Brunkhorst, 143–158. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Schmitt, Carl. 2008. Constitutional Theory. Trans. Jeffrey Seitzer. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press.

65 MASS CULTURE AND CULTURAL CRITICISM GERTRUD KOCH

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abermas’s understanding of “mass culture” is indebted to Adorno. Accordingly, it does not refer to culture produced by the masses but rather to culture that is produced on a massive scale. Liberal, bourgeois culture is made by and for the bourgeoisie, yet this does not mean that consumers and producers are identical—rather, producers and consumers build a public sphere in a shared social stratum. Such a transformation of internal topology does not occur under the conditions of mass democracy, however. Mass culture addresses the masses only as consumers—and in the atomized form of private property, at that—without affording any liberal gratifications. Its anonymous mode of production makes mass culture into a medium that largely serves private property. In mass democracy, interests are administered by the welfare state, and they are no longer negotiated in the public sphere by parties possessed of equal property rights. Therefore, Habermas argues, the idealized and ideologically restricted model provided by bourgeois culture loses its foundation in mass democracy and the modern welfare state. A “structural transformation of the public sphere” occurs, which amounts to a kind of “refeudalization.” Organizations pursue their interests behind closed doors and, at the same time, “must assure themselves at least of plebiscitary assent in the population by developing displays of public relations [demonstrative Publizität]” (“Öffentlichkeit. Ein Lexikonartikel,” 1964, reprinted in Kultur und Kritik, 68; this volume collects essays situated between Structural Transformation and Communicative Action). The masses, then, neither transform into an active class—as Marx thought should occur—nor are they sovereign. They dissolve, so to speak, into an array of groups administered from outside (e.g., employees and taxpayers), whose consensus on individual administrative actions is sought only by plebiscite. Mass culture attests, in a certain measure, to the empty space that gapes between the participatory public spheres of earlier times and the public spheres not yet organized by mass democracy in the welfare state. This is the same gap into which the concept of “the masses” has itself disappeared.

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However, the dissolution of the masses into classes—or, as the case may be, into forms of organization provided by the welfare state—cannot lessen the impression that the term “mass” vanishes in a mounting tautology (tautologisch zum Verschwinden gebracht wird). The blank space is immediately surpassed inasmuch as the masses—in this (obsolete) model—can only be conceived as a kind of formless matter that requires shaping either into a class or along institutional lines. In both cases, the masses dissolve into the new forms. At the same time, the semantic surplus of the concept remains evident in composite notions such as “mass media,” “mass democracy,” “mass communication,” and so on. Habermas’s concept of the political public sphere addresses this problem. He follows, in a first step, the model of the aesthetically appreciative public (kunsträsonierendes Publikum)—that is, the matter is conceived in terms of internal participation. When discussing the development of modern society— in which social spheres close themselves off to the others—Habermas invokes Adorno once more: art achieves autonomy at the cost of growing more and more hermetic and detached (Ein- und Abkapselung); this makes critical distance from society possible in the first place. Mass culture, on the other hand, succumbs to economic and stabilizing modes of affirmation that secure domination. In The Theory of Communicative Action (which adopts a historical perspective), Habermas emphasizes the importance of a “differentiated assessment of the complex and contradictory character both of forms of integration in postliberal societies and of family socialization and mass culture” (2:381), in light of Walter Benjamin’s theoretical observations—and, moreover, with reference to views of mass communication derived from systems theory and sociology. In keeping with the division between “system” and “lifeworld,” Habermas also distinguishes different functions performed by the mass media. He does not classify the latter as “steering media” but views them, instead, as “generalized forms of communication” (Communicative Action, 2:390). In the shift from “mass culture” to “mass media,” a far-reaching semantic transformation takes place. The notion of “culture industry” that Adorno and Horkheimer introduced in Dialectic of Enlightenment—which seems to have formed the basis of Habermas’s initial understanding of “mass culture”—is rearranged, by way of a kind of theoretical “castling” (which represents a general paradigm shift) from the realm of system to that of communication. In this new framework, the sender/receiver model centered on domination (Herrschaft) gives way to a flexible and dynamically open net structure; conceived along these lines, the specific contexts of the lifeworld (e.g., regional particularities) prove irreducible, yet—at the same time—their horizon constitutes a kind of public sphere that expands perspectives in both spatial and temporal terms. A rigid, predetermined order no longer holds, then. Although the direction of “streams of communication” can be hierarchical and controlling, they offer

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“emancipatory potential” that prevents participants in the network from being “taken over” (gleichgeschaltet) by a single interest group. It follows that “mass media” are “ambivalent,” at the very least. That is, they are demonstrably open—both as a matter of principle and in a way that admits empirical demonstration. (For example, they admit minorities and social movements such as feminist and civil-rights groups.) However, “mass culture” does not exist at all, but only via mass media as their bearer. In comparison to writings from the 1960s, Habermas’s recent works refer more positively to the openness of the public sphere anchored in communication. Here, his reflections connect with Hannah Arendt’s political theory and conception of power (which Habermas calls “communicative power” to distinguish it from Talcott Parsons’s conception of power along administrative lines). Therefore—and now as then—the stubbornly blank space that “the masses” occupy remains opaque. In Habermas’s differentiated theory of mass-mediated communication, the masses disintegrate into groups formed and generated by the lifeworld. The promise of constantly expanding horizons has left room for a new definition, but it has remained unfilled. This fact may be related to the way Habermas connects “mass culture” with the matter of “cultural criticism.” As a rule, “mass culture” is discussed in terms of “cultural criticism” (whether the perspective is Marxist, conservative, or liberal), where it is held to destroy values (e.g., those of the bourgeois family or art)—or else it amounts to the affirmative celebration of everything by everyone. Habermas seeks a middle ground. Even when he posits an “emancipatory” or “critical” potential within “mass culture”—in the form of the public sphere, which emerges through “mass media”—he does not view the “masses” themselves as a critical instance; instead, they display this quality only inasmuch as individual groupings within them undergo (political) transformation. In this context, Between Facts and Norms has shifted the conceptual accent of “mass culture.” In so doing, it does not modify the distinctions made in The Theory of Communicative Action so much as it adduces validity claims made by art and religion. All same, the “sobriety of a secular, unreservedly egalitarian mass culture” (Facts, 490) that Habermas calls for remains affirmative insofar as it avoids the “negativity of modern art.” It is still the case that only when “the trivial” is broken through and the “radically indisponsible” (radikal Unverfügbaren) is brought to light that a potential for change exists. Habermas leaves the question open whether it is possible to conceive of a form of “mass culture” that might survive the confrontations this entails. Art’s critical potential for radical negation once more assumes the traits of an alternate concept (Gegenbegriff); the dialectical relationship between Enlightenment and emancipation through culture stands at issue, again. The question of mass culture also remains open because Habermas has, to date, offered no analysis that might be tested with any methodological rigor.

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On occasion, he has discussed works of art, but he has not devoted significant attention to phenomena of mass culture. Early on—if in isolation—Habermas mentioned films in journalistic pieces. His more recent articles, in contrast, focus mainly on the political consequences that arise from the progressive commodification and monopolization of both the public media and independent newspapers.

66 POSTMETAPHYSICAL THINKING GEORG LOHMANN

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or Habermas, “postmetaphysical thinking” (nachmetaphysisches Denken) refers to the only ways of pursuing philosophy still possible in today’s world. He employs the term in two senses: first, in a critical/negative capacity that is meant to counter the “return to metaphysics” he diagnoses; and second, as a positive designation for the philosophical thinking that can only occur after—and according to (nach)—metaphysics, i.e., thinking that does not abandon the claim to comprehensive rationality. In historical terms, postmetaphysical thinking belongs to the tradition of the Young Hegelians (Discourse, 53ff.; Postmetaphysical, 124). As a critical counterconcept opposed to metaphysics (which extends, in Habermas’s eyes, from Plato to Hegel), it turns against three aspects of the metaphysical tradition: “the theme of unity within the philosophy of origins,” “the equation of being with thought,” and “the redemptive significance of the contemplative life”; in brief, it opposes “identity thinking, the doctrine of ideas, and the strong concept of theory” (Postmetaphysical, 29). Habermas uses the term to describe numerous philosophical currents after Hegel. As the name for his own approach and style, postmetaphysical thinking defends—as a “stand-in”—the universal conception of rationality given in the communicative structures of the lifeworld (Postmetaphysical, 14). Habermas employed the term for the first time in his debate with Dieter Henrich (Habermas 1985; 1988, 267ff.). The latter, after taking a position in Munich (1981), sought “to renew the claim of metaphysics.” Sketching “rehabilitation attempts” of metaphysics and currents in twentieth-century philosophy that oppose them, Habermas describes Henrich’s interpretations of the “purposeful life” (bewusstes Leben) as the effort, founded in the theory of consciousness, to lend philosophy the power of metaphysics once more by “combining” self-description of the ideal life and a “conclusive” (abschließende) perspective that counters the naturalism of the sciences (Henrich 1982, 1987). The critical encounter with Henrich’s modern project of metaphysics prompted Habermas to articulate the “themes of postmetaphysical thinking” (Postmetaphysical, 28–56). Postmetaphysical thinking, he argues, responds to

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the convulsions that have been shaking metaphysics since the seventeenth century—upheavals that, “in the final analysis,” are “socially conditioned” (33). This occurs along new lines: through “procedural rationality,” “situating reason,” the “linguistic turn,” and the “deflation . . . of extraordinary events” (33). Needless to say, these general features of postmetaphysical thinking are not unproblematic; accordingly, Habermas seeks to defend his understanding of postmetaphysical thinking—which he elaborates from the perspective of communicative action—against competing projects. In contrast to metaphysics—which affirms the unity of thinking and the world—natural science and formalist approaches to morality and law focus on the “rationality . . . of [the] procedures” through which knowledge is gained, the distinction (Ausdifferenzierung) between examining nature and the mind (Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften), and the fallibilism of scientific theories (36ff.). For all that, Habermas argues, philosophy should neither assimilate itself to individual sciences nor stand in opposition to them. Habermas considers that reference to the communicative practice of everyday life makes postmetaphysical thinking (as he conceives it) possible. Through procedures of rationally reconstructing the intuitive knowledge of “competently speaking, acting, and judging subjects,” philosophy can retain its universalistic line of questioning (Fragestellung)—which concerns “the Whole”—while, at the same time, not laying claim “to a method, an object realm, or even just a style of intuition” (38). Conceived this way, postmetaphysical thinking—by performing the roles of stand-in and interpreter—remains critical both of the “common sense” of everyday practice and of immoderate (ausgreifend) claims advanced by individual sciences. The postmetaphysical ambition to situate reason motivated the Young Hegelians’ critique of idealism (Discourse, 53ff.). According to Habermas, however, the matter was pursued to better effect by the projects of historicism, Lebensphilosophie, and phenomenology, which detranscendentalized the basic concepts of Kantian transcendental philosophy (Postmetaphysical, 10ff.). It is only through the paradigm shift from the philosophy of consciousness to the philosophy of language (Habermas 2001), he maintains, that reason may now properly be situated in the communicative praxis of a shared lifeworld. At the same time, Habermas contends, the linguistic turn—which has enabled the philosophy of language to critique the philosophy of consciousness in any number of ways—requires modification along the lines of formal pragmatism. Only by doing so can one address the problem of individuality, which otherwise defies the philosophy of language. The “analysis of the universal presuppositions that must be fulfilled if participants in communication are to be able to come to an understanding with each other about something

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in the world” (Postmetaphysical, 46; cf. Truth) makes it clear that “all understanding is  .  .  . always simultaneously non-understanding” (Wilhelm von Humboldt). The formal-pragmatic conditions for linguistic understanding that he reconstructs are supposed to account for both “individuation” and “socialization” (Postmetaphysical, 149ff.). The fourth element of postmetaphysical thinking may be understood as a consequence of the preceding: a deflation of the everyday occurs when one refuses the “classical precedence of theory” over practice (Truth, 280ff.) and, in so doing, situates philosophy next to—and not above—the sciences. “Postmetaphysical thinking” that has an index in lifeworld praxis is meant to avert two dangers. First, it protects the critique of Western logocentrism from succumbing to defeatist skepticism about the power of reason. In addition, it guards against the danger of presuming to assign value to a given form of living. Because postmetaphysical philosophy “surrenders its extraordinary status” (Postmetaphysical, 51), it is able to provide critical mediation between the lifeworld and the sciences. At the same time, however, “it continues to coexist with religious practice” (51). In this respect, philosophy’s relationship with religion entails the obligation of performing “redemptive criticism” (Benjamin). As Habermas puts it, this is to occur by “translating” religious contents “into justifying discourses” (51). Postmetaphysical thinking has come to play an especially prominent role in the exchanges with religion that Habermas has pursued of late (Naturalism; Reder and Schmidt 2008; cf. Forum für Philosophie 1999). Because postmetaphysical philosophy no longer attaches transcendental meaning to nature and history, it attempts to compensate for the motivational deficits in practical solidarity that arise. This is to occur, as mentioned, through the redemptive “translation” of religious notions (Reder and Schmidt 2008, 30–31). For all that, Habermas has also affirmed that philosophy possesses sufficient resources of its own: against the dangers of postmodern defeatism and naturalism, which place too much stock in science, he puts his trust in calm (unaufgeregt) postmetaphysical reason (Discourse; Naturalism). These features of “postmetaphysical thinking” have received a fair amount of criticism—first, from Henrich himself (Henrich 1987) but also from others who, like him, doubt that the “non-descriptor” (Nicht-Titel) (Henrich) of “metaphysics” need be understood as Habermas proposes. Moreover, it has been argued, Habermas must make his own the very metaphysical assumptions he claims to do without (Langthaler 1997, Henrich 2007). However this may be, the self-critical effort to focus philosophy on the reconstruction of the reasonable potentials within a preexisting lifeworld, on the one hand, and to retain the universalistic claims of reason, on the other, represents a leitmotif of Habermas’s thinking in general—an undertaking that “proves effective by

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seeking the middle ground between bare existence and what is merely an ideal” (Theunissen 1981, 52).

References Forum für Philosophie Bad Homburg, ed. 1999. Nachmetaphysisches Denken und Religion. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Habermas, Jürgen. 1985. “Rückkehr zur Metaphysik – Eine Tendenz in der deutschen Philosophie?” Merkur 39, no. 439–440: 898–905. ——. 1988. Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2001. Kommunikatives Handeln und detranszendentalisierte Vernunft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Henrich, Daniel C. 2007. “Jürgen Habermas: Philosoph ohne metaphysische Rückendeckung?” Zeitschrift für Philosophie 55, no. 3: 389–402. Henrich, Dieter. 1982. Fluchtlinien. Frankfurt. ——. 1987. “Was ist Metaphysik—was Moderne?” In Konzepte: Essays zur Philosophie der Zeit, 11–43. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Langthaler, Rudolf. 1997. Nachmetaphysisches Denken? Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Reder, Michael, and Josef Schmidt, eds. 2008. “Ein Bewusstsein von dem, was fehlt”: Eine Diskussion mit Jürgen Habermas. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Theunissen, Michael. 1981. Kritische Theorie der Gesellschaft: Zwei Studien. Berlin: de Gruyter.

67 POWER MAT TIAS ISER

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he concept of power is of central importance for a critical theory of society. In academic discussions, however, “power” refers to different things. A distinction is often made between theories that focus on “power over” persons or groups and those that speak of “power to” do or achieve something. Habermas’s theory of society seeks both to clarify the connections between the most important—and traditionally competing— conceptions of power and to clarify their normative hierarchy. To this end, he distinguishes between communicative, administrative, and social power. With regard to the legitimacy of political processes, the task involves, above all, determining how the different forms of power influence one another. Habermas’s main concern is to counter the “illegitimate” “independence of social and administrative power vis-à-vis democratically generated communicative power” (Facts, 358). Given this effort of synthesis, one must ask, however, whether Habermas has presented a unified theory of power at all or if he has not, instead, subsumed entirely different phenomena under a single term. How, then, do his three conceptions of power relate to one another? Along the lines articulated by Hannah Arendt, albeit with significant modifications, Habermas understands “communicative power” as the motivating force of forceless consensus formation (Profiles, 171ff.; Facts, 147). Arendt stresses collective action in the sense of an increased “power to”; at the same time, she understands public speech to be an act that reveals one’s self to other subjects. Habermas, in contrast, emphasizes the cognitive aspect of communicative power (see also Canovan 1983). Communicative power does not merely concern the factual ability to act of a cooperating group (whose legitimacy is already guaranteed by having originated in a free association). Rather, Habermas observes the (weakly motivating) “power” afforded by discursive insight (Facts, 113). In keeping with the basic thought that underlies his theory of discourse as a whole, Habermas considers communicative power to represent the source of all legitimacy: all voices (and therefore all arguments) should be able to be heard. For this reason, Habermas—unlike Arendt—is not confident that communicative power will always occur spontaneously. Accordingly, he demands a twofold institutional guarantee. First, the public sphere based in civil society requires that certain basic rights obtain (and, moreover, that a vital political culture exist, to function as a sensorium for problem situations in everyday

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life and to offer a reservoir of convincing reasons). Second, the arguments articulated in the public sphere must pass through “sluices” (358)—that is, filters of rationalization—which secure that the solutions proposed really are in the interest of all affected. Communicative power, then, is constituted by an adequate interplay between informal and formal political public spheres. The parliament serves as the main example of the latter. The parliament is to be “challenged”—in positive fashion—by the reasonable arguments that are produced in public discussions; in no case may it be programmed by the social power of particular groups. In this way, Habermas maintains, the procedure of general, free, and equal elections guarantees that each citizen can exercise equal influence on the political composition of the legislative assembly. Moreover, in a parliament—in contrast to the public sphere—procedural standards can be established; for example, a prohibition may be declared on presenting religious arguments when it is clear that they cannot be shared by all. However, communicative power does not only require an institutional framework being safeguarded by the law. It also needs “administrative” power to provide it with the means of asserting itself. Modern societies, according to Habermas, must rely on the medium of law underwritten by the force of sanctions in order to provide a counterweight to the cognitive, motivational, and organizational deficits of morality. Especially where motivation is concerned, (democratically determined) laws must be implemented even against the wishes of potentially egoistic individuals—if necessary, by force (92). This represents “power over” citizens on the part of the state; at the same time, however, it makes possible—and promotes—the capacity for action of the entire collective; that is, it is also “power to.” It is not until this point that “power” comes into play in a specific sense— namely, as a “delinguistified medium of communication” that performs a steering function. Unlike the rational motivation that occurs through arguments, this medium of power proves effective because it integrates empirical motivations (Communicative Action, 2:178)—in particular, the desire to avoid punishment. On this basis, bureaucratic hierarchies of power can be established. At the same time, however, because orders only prove effective when they are backed by an authority—and because force only functions when used exceptionally—the medium of power evinces an internal relation to matters of validity, after all (McCarthy 1985). Administrative power, then, ultimately calls for a normative anchoring in communicative power, that is, in the (rational) consensus of citizens. The danger that administrative power will develop a life of its own must be countered not only through a vital civil society and public sphere but also through adherence to the law and the division of powers. Given that the law extends beyond the doors of legislative bodies, Habermas understands the division of powers not in institutional but in functional terms. Communicative power must be

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able to assert itself wherever the law—in the course of its (supposed) implementation or interpretation—is taken up and thereby “made.” Third, Habermas holds that “social” power involves the capacity to assert one’s own interests successfully, even against the will of other parties— whether it is persons or groups that do so (Facts, 357). This corresponds to the way Max Weber defines power. From the latter, however, Habermas also inherits a certain conceptual vagueness. The paradigmatic case of (illegitimate) “social power” concerns threats or promises made by a superior actor who seeks to realize empirical objectives. The matter is not as clear when influence derives from the reputation or prestige of a person. Is this a matter of social power at all? On the one hand, orientation on the behavior of the status bearer promises empirical advantages—for example, displays of favor. On the other hand, in the “advance” of trust with which the utterances of the influential party are met, linguistic communication occurs, as well. Consequently, the matter involves a special form of “communicative power” insofar as status bearers are held to possess superior understanding (Communicative Action, 2:177). When (social) prestige and influence are at issue, both goaloriented action and action oriented toward understanding are largely fused— a fact that is evident, paradigmatically, in the premodern institutions of chiefdom and priesthood (Facts, 138ff.). With the rationalization of the lifeworld, Habermas argues, empirical threat potentials and rationally recognizable reputations become more and more distinct from each other (Communicative Action, 2:275). At the same time, this analytical distinction comes to represent the border between illegitimate and legitimate social power. According to Habermas’s theory of democracy, the danger that social power will illegitimately influence the political process manifests itself especially in pressure groups, which informally influence the members of parliament and its committees, governmental bureaucracies, and/or the courts behind closed doors through promises or threats. Hereby, they circumvent the “circulation of power” that is regulated by the rule of law (Facts, 354ff.). For all that, however, not every form of social power is illegitimate, because it may also draw on support through rationally motivated acceptance—that is, validity claims implicitly raised by the “socially powerful” may (sometimes) be redeemed in discourse. All the same, relationships that are grounded in communication grow rigid if power hierarchies render it difficult to question political regulations. Therefore, already in Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas observes that “power of one class over another” (Knowledge, 48) represents social power. His early notion of an epistemological interest in emancipation is directed toward eliminating such unnecessary domination. Because his commentators often pay insufficient attention to this internal differentiation, Habermas has, time and again, been faulted for losing sight of phenomena of power within the lifeworld—which, it is claimed, he conceives

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in terms that are excessively harmonistic (e.g., Honneth 1993, 288, 329). According to this criticism, the colonization thesis considers power only inasmuch as it penetrates the lifeworld from the outside—Habermas, the argument goes, views the lifeworld only in terms of communicative action and holds it to be distinguished by an unqualified capacity and willingness for understanding. That fails to consider, however, that administrative power represents only one form of power. Although Habermas places it in the foreground of his diagnosis of the present, his conception of power is, in fact, more comprehensive. Otherwise, “all premodern societies would have to be described as powerfree” (Habermas 1991, 246). All the same, it remains unclear, on the whole, what connects the three forms of power over and above the set of relations discussed so far. For Habermas’s view—much more than for Arendt’s—the question arises why, in the case of communicative power, one should speak of “power” at all—and not, instead, of “collective insight” or “political autonomy.” Here, perhaps, power should be understood above all as “power to”—as an increase of the collective capacity for action. What is more, it is not clear how one should conceive of the relationship between social and communicative power in the modern— and supposedly rationalized—lifeworld. Ultimately, communicative power is supposed to enable actors to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of social and administrative power. In general, the latter prove legitimate when they promote the sources and structures of communicative power, as well as the objectives that it articulates, and they are illegitimate when they restrict and distort them (as happens only too frequently in social reality [Facts, 174ff.]). Habermas’s critique of power takes aim at precisely such cases. Thus, if something is depicted as “power,” this does not necessarily amount to a contestation of its legitimacy (see, also, Strecker 2009).

References Canovan, Margaret. 1983. “A Case of Distorted Communication. A Note on Habermas and Arendt.” Political Theory 11, no. 1: 105–116. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. “A Reply.” In Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones, 214–264. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Honneth, Axel. 1993. The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in Critical Social Theory. Trans. Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. McCarthy, Thomas. 1991. “Complexity and Democracy, or the Seducements of Systems Theory.” In Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones, 119–139. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Strecker, David. 2009. Logik der Macht: Zum Ort der Kritik zwischen Theorie und Praxis. Weilerswist: Velbrueck.

68 PRAGMATIC TURN ALI M. RIZ VI

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obert Brandom (2002) describes pragmatism “as a movement centered on the primacy of the practical” (40). This primacy of practice over theory is manifested in Habermas’s writings in two ways. First, it emerges in his lifelong insistence on the primacy of “know how” (what he often calls intuitive knowledge) over “know that.” This is a key Heideggerian distinction, which Habermas uses in his theoretical analyses, in his formal pragmatics, and in developing his social theory. Second, it is manifested in Habermas’s rejection of what he calls the “spectator model” of knowledge and his insistence that action has “cognitive” significance—in other words, that our way of acting is also our way of knowing the world. This is also derived from Heidegger’s notion of “being in the world.” Habermas has always been a pragmatist in the senses mentioned above, but after Knowledge and Human Interests he did not pay much attention to issues in theoretical philosophy; he wanted to amend this situation with his Truth and Justification. In Truth, Habermas went back to revive the “weak naturalism” he espoused in Knowledge, and in so doing he aimed to achieve two things. First, he wished to relate his theoretical enterprise both to his formal pragmatics and to his theory of communicative action. Second, he wanted to overcome certain impasses and aporias that his theories of communicative action and social evolution face. His renewed emphasis on pragmatic themes is of crucial importance to both these endeavors. In Knowledge, Habermas tried to marry Kantian transcendentalism with naturalism (in the broad sense of the term) by maintaining a distinction between “subjective/objective nature” and “nature in itself.” This, according to Habermas and his critics, led to an aporia similar to the one that Kant faced when making a distinction between “phenomenon” and “noumenon.” The aporia is this: in order to maintain the distinction between “subjective/objective nature” and “nature in itself,” it appears necessary to have a “glimpse behind the stage set by the human mind” (Truth, 22). But to do this would be to violate the basic assumption of postmetaphysics, which is something that Habermas wanted to avoid at any cost. In Truth, however, Habermas aims to show that the aforementioned aporia is not so much a result of attempting to marry a transcendental approach to naturalism but rather the result of a

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representationalism that must be abandoned in the wake of pragmatism. Representationalism conceives knowledge in terms of a two-way relation between subject and object, where access to what is beyond the object must be conceived in terms of a glimpse behind the constitution of the human mind. However, if knowledge is considered in pragmatic terms, and if we consequently abandon the representational model of knowledge and give action its cognitive due, we can transcend this aporia. Habermas claims that this requires the adoption of what he calls a “nonclassical” form of realism. In developing his formal pragmatics and theory of communicative action, Habermas initially tried to go beyond the representational model of knowledge, replacing the two-way model of representation with a three-way model in which an actor tries to reach an understanding with another actor about something in the world. Similarly, in his theory of communicative action, Habermas conceptualized objectivity as a condition of reaching an understanding between two or more interlocutors. However, this theory of objectivity is a far cry from our own realist intuitions about the world, and so Habermas’s renewed emphasis on pragmatism leads him to reconsider and deepen this model. The world is not only a condition of mutual understanding but is also something we encounter in pursuing actions. We experience the resistance of reality when our plans are frustrated; we experience its cooperation when we are able to fulfill our plans of action. The world that we experience in pursuing our material goals is beyond objectification (because objectification involves “mind” and not “being in the world” as such), and so we are able to get a “glimpse” into the existence and reality of a world beyond our “objectification,” albeit through our actions and not our minds. This world that is beyond the world of our objectification is nothing but “nature in itself.” Thus we gain access to “nature in itself,” in this model, not on the level of perceptions of mind but through “disclosures” of action. This in turn helps us overcome the aporia mentioned above, of having to “glimpse beyond the stage set by the human mind” without having to relinquish the distinction between subjective world, objective world, and nature in itself. The distinction is pertinent on the level of mind, but on the level of action we experience something that is beyond the distinctions that are made indispensable within the bounds of our mind and our language. Here, the world overwhelms us, in a way, and we experience its resistance or cooperation on an immediate, direct, and unmediated level. The resistance (or cooperation) of the world that we face at the pragmatic level must also feed back into our linguistic and mental apparatus. This suggests that our mental and linguistic apparatuses have also developed under the constraints of reality, even if the constraint is an indirect one. This suggests a way out of contextualism that haunts any serious version of transcendentalism and the linguistic turn. Habermas now claims that if our conceptual

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apparatus has developed under the constraints of reality, which has been shown to be a reality that resists us and is beyond the whims and caprice of our individual or communal desires, then we must take the continued viability of our conceptual repertoire as proof of their objectivity. This pulls the rug out from under the feet of any contextualism. However, this doesn’t entail a return to conceptual realism, as the constraint on our conceptual apparatus is an indirect one, and there is a certain distance between the constraints of reality and the workings of our language and our conceptual apparatus (Habermas calls it “half transcendence”). In this way, in Habermas’s later theoretical philosophy, pragmatism plays a crucial role in combining transcendentalism and naturalism, on the one hand, and realism and transcendentalism, on the other.

Reference Brandom, Robert. 2002. “Pragmatics and Pragmatisms.” In Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism, ed. James Conant and Ursula M. Zeglen, 40–58. London: Routledge.

69 PUBLIC SPHERE PATRIZIA NANZ

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he works of Jürgen Habermas have shaped the way the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) is understood in Germany and the AngloAmerican world. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1961) presented the key ideas that later were treated in systematic fashion in Between Facts and Norms (1992), Habermas’s main work of legal and democratic theory. The “public sphere” forms a space of reasoned communicative interaction—the principal means of arriving at collective understanding (Selbstverständigung). Under modern conditions, the public sphere of politics in the democratic community (Gemeinwesen) plays a central role in social integration. Public debates form the basis for legitimating political decisions. According to Habermas, such space serves as the normative measure for the critique of social reality and, at the same time, represents a medium of collective learning. The methodological correlate of the public sphere is philosophical analysis that keeps both social and cultural structures (and anomies) in view simultaneously.

Habermas’s Ideology-Critical Approach The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere seeks to separate the ideal form of the bourgeois public sphere from the historical context(s) in which it developed, socially, in Germany, England, and France over the course of the  eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until this time, the public sphere expanded in keeping with the politicization of social life—i.e., through the rise of the press and publishing guilds that struggled against censorship for freedom of opinion. The foundation for the bourgeois public sphere is the separation between state and society, i.e., the separation between public and private realms. After the bourgeois public sphere achieved its highest state of development in the late nineteenth century, however, these divisions came to be neutralized (aufgehoben) pursuant to the transformations introduced by the welfare state. Accordingly, the bourgeois public sphere began to dissolve. With the ascent of the culture industry, the “literary public sphere” (Structural Transformation, 245) declined. Now, the mass media could only produce a

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“virtual” public sphere (Scheinöffentlichkeit), for the public itself fell increasingly mute; like democratic politics, the critical public sphere became impoverished (verkümmert), at least in formal terms. Habermas published The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere during the Adenauer era—when the bourgeois public sphere, as a normative vision, offered an emancipatory promise for the repoliticization of public life. The new edition of the book that appeared in 1990, on the other hand, derived its actuality from the “delayed revolution” (nachholende Revolution) in Eastern Europe. Only then was the work translated into English; the debates it occasioned in the social sciences in North America were particularly vigorous. Habermas’s subsequent publications have taken up the intellectual motifs of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere time and again in further discussions of the theory of language and action, in the forms of rationality associated with it (the “public use of reason”), and in theoretical reflections on society, politics, and law.

The Concept of the Public Sphere in the Deliberative Theory of Democracy Habermas’s studies of the discursive public sphere have given rise to much debate on varying understandings of deliberative democracy—especially in German- and English-speaking countries. Habermas presents his model as the “third way” between liberal and radically deliberative models. In particular, the new edition of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere distances itself from the idea that a potential for social self-organization dwells within the political public sphere—that is, Habermas rejects the notion that society as a whole is to be steered via deliberation. What is more, he now incorporates mass-mediated public space (which displays a great range of internal complexities/differentiations) in his reflections; only in this way is it possible to guarantee the adequate inclusion of all citizens. In his theory of democracy—which is constructed along normative lines—the “political public sphere” represents the “embodiment [Inbegriff ] of those conditions of communication under which the discursive opinion- and will-formation of a public formed by citizens of the state can be constituted” (Habermas 1990, 38). Between Facts and Norms presents a conception of deliberative politics that operates “on two tracks.” Here, Habermas distinguishes between the political system (which is specialized in collectively binding decisions) and autonomous public space (which faces no pressures of decision). Thereby, he takes up Bernhard Peters’s (1993) sociological sluice model, which views political processes of communication and decision making in terms of an axis running between “center” and “periphery.” While the core realm of the political system

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consists of the parliamentary complex—government, administration, and the courts—the peripheral realm is formed by the infrastructure of civil society. Between these two poles extend complex network structures involving public administration and private organizations—interest groups, associations, and lobbyists. To varying degrees, they enter cooperative relations and have coordinating functions in the implementation (Umsetzung) of public functions. Moreover, there are found—in a certain measure at the outermost periphery— intermediary structures whose task involves less the implementation of policies that have already been decided than the identification and articulation of the problems to be addressed. The idea behind Peters’s model is that procedures and communicative conditions of democratic opinion and will formation form a conduit for the discursive rationalization of political decisions. Only in this way can it be prevented that the administrative or the social power of intermediary structures win the upper hand over the communicative power that is constituted by the parliamentary complex. Habermas gives Peters’s sociological sluice model a normative turn. The correlate of his discursive conception of democracy is the idea of popular sovereignty as communicatively produced power, which derives from the interaction between will formation as it is institutionalized by the constitutional state, on the one hand, and by the mobilized public sphere, on the other. Popular sovereignty has its basis in organized civil society, whose task is to “pass along” (weiterleiten) problematic social conditions to the political public sphere. In complex societies, however—and for purely practical reasons—it is not possible to tie all political decisions to the processes of opinion and will formation at the periphery. What proves decisive, instead, is that—in the event of conflict—decisions at the political center are “fed back” (rückgekoppelt) to public processes of opinion and will formation. “The health of a democracy can be gauged from the pulse of its professional public arena” (Naturalism, 22). At the same time, however, the danger exists that transregional dailies and weeklies, as a consequence of reorganization and economizing measures, will no longer prove adequate to their own journalistic standards and therefore will cease to fulfill their role as “lead media” (Leitmedien) in the realm of political communication. For this reason, the state must protect the public resource (Gut) of quality journalism from failure in the market (Faltering, 133).

The “Public Sphere” in More Recent Empirical Research Habermas’s reflections on the public sphere and politics have influenced two new fields of research in a decisive fashion: first, empirical investigations that verify the specific expectations placed on public deliberation (see, e.g., studies

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by Gerhards, Neidhardt, and Rucht 1998; Daele and Neidhardt 1996); and second, works of democratic theory that discuss transnational orders (e.g., the European Union, global governance). The latter address the question whether deliberative politics is also a suitable medium for the transferal of the legitimation potential found in nation-states onto international decision-making processes (see, e.g., the contributions in Niesen and Herborth 2007). Empirical findings have often given reason for skepticism, but they also suggest that a world public sphere is beginning to emerge—in the sense of global civil society. For example, NGOs employ media structures that are already in place. They make the politics of international bodies (e.g., the World Trade Organization) more transparent and at the same time establish a feedback loop (Rückkoppelung) between government representatives and those parts of civil society that are already mobilized in nation-states (Nanz and Steffek 2007). What is missing, however, is a European (or, alternatively, global) public sphere that would engage in continuous observation of, and commentary on, decision-making processes; likewise, the inclusion of citizens in such processes is still in its infancy (Kies and Nanz 2013). From The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere up to Between Facts and Norms, Habermas connected his understanding of the public sphere to the sovereign power of the nation-state. Now, however, it is difficult to imagine how public opinion can be an effective critical force in a “postnational constellation,” where personal and political interest and “membership” match up less and less (Fraser 2010, 95). The further course of events will depend, ultimately, on whether—against the backdrop of world society (im Horizont einer Weltgesellschaft)—the public spheres constituted by national media will “open up” and take notice of “foreign” issues and positions in such a way that transnational communication communities emerge. In the future, it will not be a matter of building a supranational (European or global) public sphere but rather of the “transnationalization of public spheres” (Faltering, 88) that register one another’s contributions to European or global affairs and translate political standpoints and controversies for domestic publics.

References Daele, Wolfgang van den, and Friedhelm Neidhardt, eds. 1996. Kommunikation und Entscheidung: Politische Funktionen öffentlicher Meinungsbildung und diskursiver Verfahren. WZB-Jahrbuch. Berlin: Sigma. Fraser, Nancy. 2010. “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World.” In Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, 76–99. New York: Columbia University Press. Gerhards, Jürgen. 1997. “Diskursive versus liberale Öffentlichkeit.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 49:1–34.

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Gerhards, Jürgen, Friedhelm Neidhardt, and Dieter Rucht, eds. 1998. Zwischen Palaver und Diskurs: Strukturen öffentlicher Meinungsbildung am Beispiel der deutschen Diskussion zur Abtreibung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Mit einem Vorwort zur Neuauflage. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kies, Raphael, and Patrizia Nanz, eds. 2013. Is Europe Listening to Us? Successes and Failures of EU Citizen Consultations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Nanz, Patrizia, and Jens Steffek. 2007. “Zivilgesellschaftliche Partizipation und die Demokratisierung internationalen Regierens.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 87–110. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Neidhardt, Friedhelm, ed. 1994. Öffentlichkeit, öffentliche Meinung und soziale Bewegungen (Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 34). Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Niesen, Peter, and Benjamin Herborth, eds. 2007. Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Peters, Bernhard. 1993. Die Integration moderner Gesellschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

70 RADICAL REFORMISM HAUKE BRUNKHORST

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ust as the label “the theory of communicative action” effectively covers all of Habermas’s work to date, the phrase “radical reformism” stands for the author’s view of political praxis—i.e., the practical implications of his theoretical reflections. In a lengthy introduction— written in the winter of 1969—to his first collection of essays, notes (Denkschriften), and contributions to debates on university reform and student protest, Habermas addressed the objectives, theoretical justifications, achievements, reactions, and origins (which were the same across the globe) of the first international movement of this kind. The piece ends with Lenin’s famous question: “What is to be done?” Ultimately, Habermas (1969) rejects the “categorical pairing of ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’ ” on the grounds that it fails to distinguish adequately between “alternative strategies for change” (49). Likewise—and in equal measure—he distances himself, polemically, from revolutionary actionism, on the one hand, and from mere reformism, on the other. Habermas objects to actionism because, in his estimation, it disregards the fact that—in countries like the Federal Republic of Germany, France, and the United States—it opposes a “system of institutions” that already embodies “past processes of emancipation” (however imperfectly it may do so). Institutions in place cannot—and must not—simply be “skipped over” or given up (43). Employing a Marxian vocabulary, Habermas condemns what he calls, by turns, “utopian socialism,” “left-wing fascism” (146), the “show business of revolutionary actors [Revolutionsdarsteller]” (50), and “revolution in appearance alone [Scheinrevolution]” (188). Habermas’s critique of “mere reformism”—which is indebted to Benjamin, Marcuse, and Adorno—is couched in similar terms. Such efforts, he maintains, are all too “sure of themselves as ends in themselves”; that is, “already today, they promise to maintain the status quo for tomorrow, without even knowing what it is.” This brand of reformism simply replaces blind and indeterminate negation with equally blind and indeterminate affirmation: Such preemptive affirmation folds back on the beginning [schlägt auf das Beginnen zurück] and ruins the necessary radicalism of thorough investigation and reasonable will. The charge of “social-democratism” [Sozialdemokratismus]— a term with a storied tradition—aptly names this kind of forward-directed

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counterinsurance [trifft daran das Moment vorwärtsgewandter Rückversicherung zu Recht]. (50)

“Revolution-in-appearance-alone” and “social-democratism” form two sides of the same coin. Whereas the actionistic protest of one side does not manage even to touch the ills it wishes to change, the reformism of the other has long since closed off any prospect of a world beyond the “independent [verselbständigt] administrative apparatuses of the authoritarian and alienated welfare state and the depoliticized public sphere” (43). Therefore, Habermas contends, political strategy that wishes to avoid affirmative reformism and, at the same time, does not wish to squander the potential for emancipation that is embodied in standing institutions must “implement and assert” (zur Geltung und zu “Willen und Bewusstsein” bringen) radical revolutionary praxis within the institutional framework of “social mass democracy and the liberal constitutional state” (43). All the same—that is, despite his criticism of the “poses” struck by the “revolutionary actors” of 1968—Habermas discerns elements of a genuine radicalism that is not a matter of imitation but represents, instead, an insight to be “taken seriously”: “political changes change nothing if the stakes—in addition to palpable ills to be remedied and averted—do not involve subtler liberations, improvements, and gratifications.” The radical reformism he calls for means “not abandoning this insight while still seeking to pursue political action” (50). This statement stands as a maxim behind almost all the political positions Habermas has assumed and all the interventions/declarations he has made over the years. The latter include the merciless critique he heaped on the Brandt government’s helpless reformism, his contributions to debates on terrorism and the Historikerstreit, and his advocacy of the project of European constitutionalization. Habermas considered the latter a textbook example of ill-conceived social democratism on the part of established parties and leadership cadres, which did not really want to admit democratic legitimation or control (Habermas 2007, 458–459). Habermas knows full well that when phrases such as “The Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe” appear in juridical documents, they are more than Goethe’s mere “noise and smoke” (Schall und Rauch). Taken at their word, they can “strike back” (see Müller 1997, 54) when the voting public remembers the historical “processes of emancipation” embodied in a real constitution and activates “a past charged with now-time” in order to explode “homogeneous and empty” (Benjamin 2003, 395) transnational bonapartism. Needless to say, this need not satisfy any of the social actors. However, a politics of “counterinsurance” in which “nothing is at stake” (Habermas 1969, 50) runs the risk of losing everything. The metaphors of communicative “flows” and “charges”—of the anarchy of communicative freedom and the untamable public sphere—which recur throughout Habermas’s writings harbor an element of radicalism that declares

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nothing immune—no sacrosanct article of the constitution and no institutional arrangement, however venerable—from the sole source of legitimation: the egalitarian self-determination of a freely communicating public. Even in its weakest form, this radicalism—without which all reform and “intelligent action” would remain “groundless and without consequences”—represents the driving motivation both for intellectual praxis and for academic theory. As Habermas puts it: “If there is any small remnant of utopia that I’ve preserved, then it is surely the idea that democracy—and the public struggle for its best form—is capable of hacking through the Gordian knots of otherwise insoluble problems” (Past, 96). That is an empirical thesis that today, if I view things correctly, hardly anyone still makes in earnest. It is not just doubted by parties who have, with banners waving, run over to join the “new elites.” All the same, it marks the border between the right and the left. On the “right” stand those who believe that solutions to global environmental problems, ethnic and religious racism, governmental and nongovernmental terrorism, world conflicts, drug criminality, the new slave trade, and current and coming economic crises can only be found outside the institutional framework of inclusive discussion (i.e., deliberation; see chapter 51 in this volume) and egalitarian decision making. For these parties, “low-intensity democracy” (Marks 2000) (i.e., democracy restricted to the nation-state and parliamentarianism) can at best promote more effective policies (and “better” elites) in the general terms that philosophical experts have determined. On the “left” stand those who—with Dewey, Rorty, and Habermas—believe that the ills of democracy may only be remedied with “more democracy” (Dewey) and that the aforementioned “altogether insoluble problems” can only be dealt with adequately through global and globalized democracy (if this is even possible). Inasmuch as such democracy is not, a priori, restricted to national and parliamentary frameworks and courses of action, it would serve—albeit with occasional difficulty and defeat—to dissolve any and all hegemonies formed by experts and philosophers, capitalists and professional politicians, and/or social and administrative power. (At the very least, it would threaten emergent hegemony with dissolution by “besieging” [Facts] its centers publicly.) As Habermas puts matters (in Marxist terms), the site of radical reformism in theory—and the point of intersection between theory and practice—occurs when the system experiences crisis. Crisis—which, he contends, can only be overcome through radical reformism—takes many forms. It appears in problems of democratic legitimation and of globalized capital as well as in pathologies of the desolated lifeworld and the depoliticized public sphere. As a matter of systemic necessity, these forms of crisis occur because of uncontrolled functional imperatives and rule that lacks legitimation (legitimationsferne Herrschaftsverhältnisse)—in a word, because of the repression and destruction

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of democratic self-determination. Such is the central empirical thesis of Habermas’s theory—which, ultimately, can be tested only by way of successful (or unsuccessful) “democratic experimentation.”

References Benjamin, Walter. 2003. Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1969. Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ——. 2007. “Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Marks, Susan. 2000. The Riddle of All Constitutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Müller, Friedrich. 1997. Wer ist das Volk? Eine Grundfrage der Demokratie: Elemente einer Verfassungstheorie VI. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

71 RATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION MAT TIAS ISER

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he method of rational reconstruction, at which Habermas arrived via two steps—ideology critique and philosophical anthropology— sets itself three tasks. First—and above all—it seeks to ground the normative standards for a critical theory of society (section 2). Second, it wants to demonstrate that social development from premodernity to modernity manifests an instance of progress—which it also intends to explain, at least in part (section 3). Finally, it tries to identify current potentials for resistance (section 4). Although Habermas has not realized this ambitious project in its entirety, the method of rational reconstruction—because of its combination of philosophy and the social sciences—continues to display a significant potential to stimulate discussion (section 5).

1 In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas derives the ideal of freedom from domination by way of ideology critique—that is, starting from the terms in which bourgeois society consciously understands itself. Soon, however, he realized that an immanent approach along these lines is inadequate for critical theory if an openly repressive society discards all pretense of legitimacy. When the National Socialist regime, for example, “cashed in” bourgeois ideals, it did so “cynically” (Habermas 1992, 441). Therefore, in later writings from the 1960s, he seeks to demonstrate that the normative criteria of his theory are anchored in human life at a much more fundamental level. In his Knowledge and Human Interests, by engaging critically with positivism, he develops the notion that instrumental reason represents a form of reflection for only one of three anthropologically deep-seated knowledgeconstitutive interests—namely, the technical interest. This interest is complemented by two further interests, namely, the practical and the emancipatory. These three interests are supposed to result from the functional demands of shared human life. Societies do not only need to transform their environment effectively in order to achieve material reproduction; they also require

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successful forms of symbolic reproduction, especially the transmission of traditions and the socialization of their members. Impulses must be shaped not only to provide the motivational energy for the instrumental transformation of nature but also to be compatible with the dominant societal norms. At the same time, Habermas argues, human life is inscribed with an interest that domination of some by others (or by norms) not grow beyond necessary measure—that is, that it not become irrational. The emancipatory interest, he continues, reflects on itself in the critical sciences. Here, self-reflection is supposed to lead to insight into, and liberation from, compulsions that otherwise remain uncomprehended—what psychoanalysis achieves for individuals, critical theory does for society.

2 In response to criticism, Habermas subsequently conceded that the idea of self-reflection by a society or even by the species as a whole—that is, of macrosubjects—neglects the fact that successful instances of communication between individual subjects must remain at the center of a critical theory of  society. Accordingly, his later writings distinguish much more clearly between, on the one hand, the rational reconstruction of universal (communicative) capacities and, on the other, self-reflection that occurs when historically obsolete relations of domination are criticized (Truth, 180–181, 198–199). Rational reconstruction is therefore supposed to articulate the implicit preconditions of communication in general—that is, its deep structure. Social critique performs the secondary task—against a foil provided by reconstruction—of revealing the deficits of communicative processes in concrete situations. Rational reconstruction is supposed to transform our “know how”—our knowledge of rules, which operates unreflexively—into explicit “know that.” Habermas’s main reference points for such a methodology are the universal grammar of Noam Chomsky, which has generative rules as its object, and Jean Piaget’s structuralist theory of development, which analyzes cognitive schemata. Enlisting the speech-act theory developed by J. L. Austin and John Searle, Habermas adopts the perspective of universal pragmatics, which investigates the general rules of language use. When performing a speech act, we do not, after all, just talk about states of affairs—we also do something: validity claims are raised with the implicit promise that speakers will be able—and will desire—to justify statements when faced with objections. Communicative action is binding because of this unspoken assumption. According to Habermas, then, we are in fact always already aware that, if our statements are problematized, we must engage in discourse that does not admit force or exclusion. On

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the basis of how validity claims are raised, Habermas arrives at the ideal of freedom from domination as the normative foundation for a critical social theory.

3 The method of rationally reconstructing impersonal systems of rules is supposed to hold equally for all concrete contexts. For this reason, Habermas believes that it provides the basis for theorizing the developmental logic at work in moral and political progress. In this context, it is important to distinguish this demanding conception of reconstruction from the rather more straightforward approach Habermas adopts in Communication and the Evolution of Society, where he “[takes] a theory apart and [puts] it back together again in a new form in order to attain more fully the goal it has set for itself” (Evolution, 95). At the same time, however, this “weak” conception of reconstruction draws on the strong one, according to which—as “world views, moral representations, and identity formations” (98) change—the three dimensions of reason (truth, rightness, and truthfulness) grow increasingly distinct. Thereby, Habermas contends, the central idea driving the project of universal pragmatics becomes clearer and clearer—namely, that all human regulations are based on the fragile consensus of those affected. Where morallearning processes are concerned, Habermas makes particular use of the theory of development presented by Lawrence Kohlberg. The latter applies the ontogenetic scheme of progressive stages to the phylogenesis of the human species. Accordingly, the transition from premodern to modern societies displays structural similarities to the maturation of adolescents when they adopt a critical attitude toward received ideas and practices (Moral Consciousness, 144). Taking up the works of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, Habermas also speaks of the “disenchantment” of traditional worldviews and the “delinguistification of the sacred,” respectively (Communicative Action, 2:77ff.). Finally—and in explicit contradistinction to the Marxist tradition—he affirms that learning processes do not occur only in the realm of instrumental reason but also in that of practical reason. Unlike this logic of rationalization, the dynamic of social progress that interests Habermas draws on the dialectical interrelation between labor (material reproduction) and interaction (symbolic reproduction). Unsolved system crises within the realm of material reproduction lead, in his view, to the insight that, for the forces of production to develop further, a new form of organizing labor is necessary. For this to occur, however, it must be possible to fall back on—and employ—innovations that have been made in the normative sphere of symbolic reproduction. In particular, two conditions must be fulfilled for

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an evolutionary step to take place: first, there must be “unresolved system problems that represent challenges”; second, “new levels of learning [must] have already been achieved in world views [but] . . . not yet incorporated into action systems” (Evolution, 121–122). On this model, the transition from tribal communities to societies organized as states—a process characteristic of archaic high cultures—means replacing one organizational principle with another. The passage from premodernity to modernity is similarly effected.

4 Although Habermas performs this analysis retrospectively and only in theory, he means for it to serve a prognostic function (McCarthy 1978, 302–303). System crises, he contends, do not primarily represent intrasystemic, purely economic phenomena. Rather, any given system is subject to “inner contingencies” (Communicative Action, 2:159) inasmuch as it relies on the dispositions/ outlooks of subjects—i.e., motivational sources that spring from the lifeworld. In turn, the kinds of motivation required vary historically—in keeping with the state of development that reason has achieved. Therefore, Habermas maintains, one may speak of a system crisis when subjective motivations no longer “fit” the dominant level of relations of production. This may be the case because in modernity motivations cannot simply be “created.” The reason for this lies in the invariant nature of the developmental logic. According to Habermas, the modern, postconventional form of symbolic reproduction does not only represent (moral) progress—it is also supposed to cut off the motivational energies that fuel capitalism. It follows from the rational reconstruction of universal competencies, then, that theory should be able to shed “prognostic” light on sites and sources of resistance in the world today. For this reason, Habermas identifies postconventional consciousness at work not just in the student revolts of the 1960s but also in the social movements of the 1980s.

5 To be sure, Habermas has presented this ambitious theoretical program merely in outline. Its empirical verification and concretization through scientific practice, which he called for, was never conducted. It has subsequently been doubted that the logic of moral development is in fact universal. This in turn has provoked critics to fault him for making normative critique dependent on empirical findings—a matter that would weaken its foundation instead of strengthening it. In response, however, one should note that the

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affirmation of unavoidable expectations remains empirically fallible and, moreover, that such a position is not meant to replace normative justification. Instead, the point is to combine philosophy and social theory in a fruitful manner. With such a reconstructive critique of society—which Axel Honneth has continued, in modified form, in his theory of recognition—Habermas inherits the left-Hegelian notion that practical reason does not exhaust itself in a mere ought but instead is already at work within social reality (Iser 2008).

References Habermas, Jürgen. 1993. “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, 421–461. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Iser, Mattias. 2008. Empörung und Fortschritt. Grundlagen einer kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Campus. McCarthy, Thomas. 1978. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

72 RATIONALIT Y AND RATIONALIZATION HAUKE BRUNKHORST

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n the introductory remarks to his early study Grundrechte als Institution (Basic rights as an institution), Niklas Luhmann (1965) observed that the task at hand was to replace the old-European “reason of perception” (Vernehmen) with the “reason of comparison” (Vergleich) (8). In so doing, he quoted the title of a book by Ernst Cassirer (to which he has referred on many other occasions, as well). The latter’s Substance and Function (2003 [1910]) addresses precisely this transition from substance, which may be “heard” or “seen” (vernehmbare Substanz), to function, which admits comparison (or, alternatively, represents functional equivalence). Although—to the best of my knowledge—Habermas has never directly referred to Luhmann’s observations here, his response to the project outlined in Grundrechte als Institution could only be: Right, but the reason of perception must not only be replaced by the observational reason of comparison; it must also—and before all else—be replaced by the participatory reason of understanding (Verständigung). It would be a mistake to understand Luhmann’s thesis in purely technocratic terms—i.e., as the opening (Erschließung) of the via moderna through a shrewd combination of observation and steering from without (Außensteuerung). Likewise, it would be a mistake to view the reason of understanding that Habermas endorses as a hermeneutic of dialogical cultures (Gesprächskulturen) that shows no interest in truth. Luhmann and Habermas made the communicative turn at the same time, even if they did so in very different ways (Brunkhorst 2006). For Luhmann, social evolution is triggered by an enormous concentration (Massierung) (Luhmann 1981, 48) of communicative negations (Negationsleistungen)—i.e., “double contingency” (doppelte Kontingenz). These operations promptly condense into complex social systems that, from this point on, can only be observed and described “through themselves”; moreover, they encompass the standpoint of the sociological observer, who occupies a position of the second order. With consequences that are, by definition, incalculable, social actors’ efforts at agreement (Einigungsversuche) constitute a form of communicative autonomy that is unprecedented in

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evolutionary terms. This immunizes individual actors and their social lifeworld against the unmediated effects (Durchgriff ) of system imperatives because it makes it possible to transform negation into critique—which means, in turn, that actors can “take credit for” (sich zurechnen) the consequences of their communicative action(s), at least counterfactually. The latter, “secondary” form of social evolution comes about through the contingent emergence of an indisponible (unverfügbaren) reference to truth (i.e., reference to validity), which makes social communications dependent on discursive justifications (Begründungsleistungen). For Habermas, understanding an utterance means knowing the reasons that assure its truth—or, in simpler terms: knowing what makes it true (see chapter 30 in this volume). Reference to the “giving and taking of reasons” (Brandom) in communicative dispute (Streit) is essential for Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. Here lies the difference between Luhmann and Habermas, whose theories both follow from the communicative turn in sociology. This also marks the point where Habermas differs from Foucault, whose writings also follow from the communicative (discursive) turn. Only because every speech act occurs in reference to universal (and unavoidable) truth claims is it possible for subjects not just to act “by choice” (willkürlich) (Luhmann) and “powerfully” (machtvoll) (Foucault) but arbitrarily and autonomously, as well. On this basis, they distinguish—in the further course of action—between true and false, between unforced forces of argumentation and the causal consequences of communicative operations, and between discursive knowledge and discourse power. What is more, Habermas contends, actors are capable of doing so in the midst of all-pervasive (social) evolution—i.e., ongoing developments of causality, functions, and power. Because Luhmann and Foucault contest this very possibility of communicative autonomy (not, nota bene, of subjectivity), they must content themselves with the reason of comparison. Alas, any reason that could make itself reasonable is fated to vanish in the realm of old-European “illusion” (Freud). All the same, Habermas’s project combines with theirs on a point Hegel (1970) articulated in a famous aphorism: “Reason without Understanding is nothing, yet Understanding is something without Reason. Understanding cannot be dispensed with [geschenkt werden]” (551). One need only replace solitary, reflexive “Reason” with “reason of communication” (Vernunft der Verständigung) and “Understanding” with reflexive, systemic “reason of comparison” (Vernunft des Vergleichs). As it stands with comparison and communication, so too does it stand with system and lifeworld (see chapter 75 in this volume): the system cannot be dispensed with (Nassehi 2006). The title Habermas proposed for his joint publication with Luhmann— Sozialtechnologie oder Theorie der Gesellschaft? (Habermas and Luhmann 1971)—can now be properly evaluated. Habermas needed to qualify his

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objection that Luhmann’s systems theory represents the “epitome of technocratic consciousness” (see chapter 11 in this volume) inasmuch as Luhmann also observed that technocracy does not, in fact, “work” and regularly proves counterproductive. Once one accepts as much, Luhmann contends, it becomes possible to entertain a more effective technical relationship with what is “present at hand” (vorhanden) (Heidegger) by leaving it be and trusting in the greater wisdom of evolution (or not). If understanding (Verstand) founds unreflected, technocratic consciousness, then the reason of comparison founds “negative technocratic” consciousness—or, alternatively, sociotechnological negativism. However, Habermas’s (1976) effort to integrate understanding that has grown reflexive (i.e., “negatively rational”) into a “rational” theory of society—and into a society that forms a reasonable identity for itself—does not content itself with this position. Habermas seeks to abandon the old-European conception of reason to which Luhmann holds (if in negative fashion—by repeating its features in an endless spiral of reflexive iterations). The “classical” conception of reason must be replaced by communicative rationality. This concept encompasses all aspects of rationality—including purely instrumental ones—and therefore avoids establishing a hierarchy of reason over understanding (which still echoes in Luhmann’s and Adorno’s conceptions of reason inasmuch as the distinction between reason and understanding is preserved). According to Habermas, reason may be fully democratized only in the “dry” (spröd) form of communicative rationality (see chapter 34 in this volume). On this point, Habermas draws on another intellectual turn, which twentieth-century sociology performed when Max Weber (1993) replaced the concept of (historical) reason with that of rationalization. (Admittedly, the transition was completed only when Talcott Parsons freed it from the historical corset of the history of society and incorporated it into the theory of social evolution.) In Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus, Habermas retraces the development and steers it in a neo-Marxist direction. The Theory of Communicative Action, in turn, reconstructs sociological rationalization in light of communicative rationality explicated in philosophical terms (vol. 1) and integrates it into a theory of society encompassing both system and lifeworld. On this basis, Habermas is able to understand the (neo-)Marxist concepts of alienation, reification, and commodification as the “colonization of the lifeworld” (see chapter 44 in this volume), which does not involve the “destruction of reason” (Lukács) in its entirety but rather the destruction of communicative rationality within the social lifeworld (a phenomenon expressed by crises and pathologies). With that, Habermas kills two birds with one stone: he jettisons the imperialism of reason that has been (rightly but problematically) critiqued by thinkers from Adorno to Derrida, from critical theory to postcolonial studies;

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at the same time, however, he avoids endorsing cultural criticism along the lines of the “Young,” “Old,” or “New” conservatism (see chapter 33 in this volume).

References Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2006. “Contemporary German Social Theory.” In Handbook of Contemporary European Social Theory, ed. Gerard Delanty, 51–68. London: Sage. Cassirer, Ernst. 2003. Substance and Function. Trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey. New York: Dover. Habermas, Jürgen. 1976. “Können komplexe Gesellschaften eine vernünftige Identität ausbilden?” In Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus, 92–126. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Habermas, Jürgen, and Niklas Luhmann. 1971. Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1970. Werke. Vol. 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, Niklas. 1965. Grundrechte als Institution. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. ——. 1981. “Subjektive Rechte. Zum Umbau des Rechtsbewußtseins für die moderne Gesellschaft.” In Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, vol. 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Nassehi, Armin. 2006. Der soziologische Diskurs der Moderne. Frankfurt. Weber, Max. 1993. The Sociology of Religion. Trans. Ephraim Fischoff. Boston: Beacon.

73 SOCIAL PATHOLOGY MARTIN HARTMANN

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he concept of pathology derives from ancient medicine, where it refers to the doctrine of kinds and causes of illness. According to Galen, the pathological is what deviates from “the normal course of nature” (Seidler 1989, 13). Discourse about social pathologies, in turn, stems from the metaphorical transferring of this medical concept onto societies— which are treated as if they were organisms that can be sick or healthy. Habermas’s reading of Freud, in Knowledge and Human Interests, is decisive for the conception of pathology in his works as a whole. For Freud, pathology is based on the linguistification or verbalization of unconscious processes (Whitebook 1995): (neurotic) symptoms the subject does not understand result when she or he proves unable (most commonly, in early childhood) to communicate needs and wishes directly (öffentlich) and, instead, introjects and “privatizes” the linguistic elements that symbolize them. From this point on, repressed impulses express themselves in the form of behavioral symptoms that remain incomprehensible to the subject and give rise to perceptions that she or he suffers from a “communication disturbance” within her- or himself (Knowledge, 228). At the same time, such inner communicative alienation does not prevent the subject from communicating with others; consequently, the “appearance of intersubjectivity” is unaffected (228). Because normal communication with others still occurs, the subject deceives her- or himself into not noticing how idiosyncratic the intentions are that find expression in her or his symptoms (“slips of the tongue and of the pen, misreading, bungled actions,” etc. [Knowledge, 219]). Only by working with a therapist is it possible to decode them. Such are the operative elements of Habermas’s conception of pathology. Pathologies represent internal communication disturbances that do not impede external communication; for the most part, their significance remains unavailable (undurchsichtig) to the subject, and they stem from the internalization of external pressure(s). For pathologies to be identified and countered, it is necessary that a therapist help the subject—on the basis of the symptoms in evidence—to break through internal communicative blockades. Überlegungen zur Kommunikationspathologie (Reflections on communicative pathology, 1974) relates these considerations to the theory of communicative validity claims that Habermas developed after Knowledge and Human

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Interests. Under pathological conditions, the claims of comprehensibility, truthfulness, and rightness that are associated with linguistic utterances experience “systematic” distortion inasmuch as interacting subjects break with them in a way that they fail even to notice. For example, a wife who declares affection for her husband when, in fact, she has long since despised him, breaks with the claim to truthfulness (Habermas 1974, reprinted in Vorstudien, 250). Communicative pathologies of this kind can only make themselves felt (zur Geltung kommen) because subjects also possess the means—in the form of communication that evinces no signs of disturbance—to conceal from others the conflicts that actually prevail (wishes, aggression, etc.). In a sense, then, “healthy” communication provides the precondition for the emergence of pathological forms of behavior and interaction. Pathological communication becomes “systematic” in contexts (Habermas has families in mind, above all) where the price of breaking a supposed consensus is deemed particularly great and where there are no “metacommunicative” patterns of exchange (Verständigung) that would help process the differences at issue (Vorstudien, 261). The Theory of Communicative Action lends the notion of pathology a socialtheoretical turn, dividing its articulations among different structural levels of the lifeworld. In Habermas’s view, the task of the lifeworld is to make resources of communication available. The latter transmit and renew knowledge (culture). They make legitimate (i.e., institutionalized) coordination of action possible, which produces social integration (society). Finally, through the process of socialization, they permit stable identities to be constituted (personality). Each resource/function (Leistung) in the lifeworld has a corresponding pathology. Pathologies make themselves felt when subjects do not employ knowledge to direct their actions (meaning loss), when they do not coordinate actions in consideration of communally accepted norms (anomie), and when they do not view one another as accountable (zurechnungsfähig) individuals (psychopathology) (Communicative Action, 2:140ff.). From a sociological perspective, pathology concerns matters of form and function; it does not involve individual psychology to any significant extent. In this framework, pathologies are gauged in relation to the reproduction and/or the self-preservation of the lifeworld. At the same time, Habermas still views the matter in terms of external problems whose pressures have been directed inward. Functional disturbances of society represent “crises”; they occur, for example, when citizens deny legitimacy to economic institutions and/or to the apparatuses of caregiving afforded by the welfare state because they do not adequately perform intended functions (i.e., lessening class conflict and securing general prosperity). However, when such crises are successfully displaced into the lifeworld (i.e., into “culture” and spheres where “personality” is constituted), this gives rise to pathological conditions: alienation and the destabilization of collective identities.

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In other words, crises of anomie are defused or avoided by incurring pathologies in the lifeworld—which may, consequently, be considered to result from efforts to overcome social crises by means of displacement (Communicative Action, 2:386). Habermas holds, then, that legal claims to financial-transfer operations in cases provided for by the social state (e.g., old age or illness) strengthen subject positions and therefore represent gains in freedom. At the same time, however, the same assurances have an individualizing effect that dissolves subsidiary forms of solidarity in their traditional form; consequently, intervention on the part of state bureaucracies into spheres of life that have hitherto been structured informally becomes more pronounced (Communicative Action, 2:368). What is more, the displacement of crises in the social system into the lifeworld produces pathological consequences when it replaces communicative mechanisms of coordination and legitimation with mediasteered forms of interaction, i.e., power and money; such substitutions make seeking consensus through communication superfluous. Here, too, Habermas’s conception of pathology involves a communication disturbance induced from outside. The “appearance” of continuous communication (which, in his early works, was deemed essential for pathological phenomena) no longer proves important. It is less the break or distortion of communication that now counts as pathological than the effects of such disturbances. It remains somewhat unclear, then, what mechanisms prevent subjects from remarking the pathologies that beset them (even with help of a therapeutic gaze). The withdrawal of freedom and the push for formalization that the colonization of the lifeworld entails can pass unnoticed only when subjects accept the compensations of the welfare state (which seek to avoid crisis) without becoming aware of the loss of communicative freedom that such measures entail. Thereby, however, the concept of pathology risks losing the subjective index that—if only in mediated fashion—still occurs in the form of symptoms that “impose themselves” on subjects individually. Just as vague is Habermas’s conception of alienation in The Theory of Communicative Action. Likewise, it is questionable whether system crises in society follow the logic of wealth distribution (Güterverteilung) as a rule—that, is, whether the threat of imbalance (i.e., when legitimation and motivation go missing) need to be averted by monetary compensation. What happens when the demands that citizens make of political institutions include the more immaterial issue of the “distribution of cultural and psychological life chances” (Honneth 1995, 217)? Were the logic of conflict to be extended along these lines, it might prove possible to identify socially induced pathologies that involve more than disturbances in the ability to communicate (Honneth 2007)—consequently, the notion of pathology would once again receive a dimension that can be described in psychological terms and addressed therapeutically. Moreover, one must ask whether it is enough

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to understand the political and economic colonization of the lifeworld only as the “ruthless exploitation” (Communicative Action, 2:386) of its resources. After all, other theories of society hold that capitalism does not simply destroy the cultural resources of the lifeworld but rather needs them to justify itself ethically (Boltanski and Chiapello 2003). On this view, the absence of manifest social anomie is not explained by the successful displacement of social conflicts into culture and personality but rather on the basis of the motivational attractiveness of capitalist logic. The contradictory and paradoxical effects that arise from this social and economic constellation can no longer be grasped adequately within the framework of lifeworld and system (Hartmann and Honneth 2006). Rather, the diagnosis of “pathology” holds when an empirically verifiable pressure that produces pain (Leidensdruck) coincides with the systematically produced inability to name the source of suffering as such.

References Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello. 2003. Der neue Geist des Kapitalismus. Konstanz: UVK. Hartmann, Martin, and Axel Honneth. 2006. “Paradoxes of Capitalism.” Constellations 13, no. 1: 41–58. Honneth, Axel. 1995. “Moral Consciousness and Class Domination: Some Problems in the Analysis of Hidden Morality.” In The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, 205–219. Albany: SUNY Press. ——. 2007. “Pathologies of the Social: Past and Present of Social Philosophy.” In Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, 3–48. Cambridge: Polity. Seidler, Eduard. 1989. “Pathologie.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter et al., 7:182–185. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Whitebook, Joel. 1995. Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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ociological concepts admit analysis along three lines of questioning (Rosa, Strecker, and Kottmann 2007): What is a society? That is, how and by what means does it constitute itself—what forms its basis or fundamental unity? (Synthesis). Through what processes and in what manner does society change? What factors serve as “motors” for transformation? Are there rules underlying its course of development? (Dynamis). Can the evolution of societies be steered, controlled—or, at very least, influenced by social actors? (Praxis). The conception of society elaborated in Habermas’s philosophical and sociological thinking—which finds its fullest articulation in The Theory of Communicative Action—can also be examined in terms of these questions.

Synthesis With the publication of this book, at the latest, Habermas introduced a fundamental change of theoretical orientation with respect to the way society is conceived—a “paradigm shift” for critical theory and Marxian projects in general. Marx and the so-called first generation of critical theorists (that is, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse) considered social relations of production and/or relations of exchange to constitute the basis of society and to determine its form. According to this perspective, the origin and form of society ultimately derive from the collective transformation (Bearbeitung) of raw (stofflich) nature. In keeping with the development of forces of production, the shape of society changes, as well (Dynamis). Habermas’s early works already critique, by implication, the one-sided reduction of society to purely economic matters. The criticism becomes explicit in The Theory of Communicative Action, where Habermas replaces economic factors with relations of communication—or, as the case may be, with relations of understanding (Verständigungsverhältnisse). In this conception, language, communication, and agreement provide the foundation for all processes of social formation and reproduction; only on this basis is a symbolically constituted lifeworld, divided into distinct spheres, in place—which

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also represents the precondition for the forms assumed by collective production and economic exchange. According to Habermas, it is not production but (linguistically or symbolically mediated) interaction that forms the basis for society as a whole. This shift from relations of production to relations of interaction has inspired other important representatives of critical theory—e.g., Habermas’s student Axel Honneth (1996). For Habermas, society consists first—and foremost—of the “fabric of everyday communicative practice,” which constitutes and reproduces both shared interpretations and a divided social reality: the lifeworld. From the internal perspective of the lifeworld, society is represented as a network of communicatively mediated cooperation.  .  .  . What binds sociated individuals to one another and secures the integration of society is a web of communicative actions that thrives only in the light of cultural traditions. . . . The lifeworld that members construct from common cultural traditions is coextensive with society. (Communicative Action, 2:148–149).

Although Habermas gives his view of society a foundation in the theory of action, this does not amount to individualism in terms of method. Society is not formed simply of individuals (or, as the case may be, of their actions and communication between them); the opposite is true, as well: individual identities are constituted by the communicative fabric of society—subjectivity and intersubjectivity are, in fact, “equiprimordial.” As a lifeworld, society thereby performs three essential functions: it produces meaning (“culture”); generates solidarity (“society” in the narrower sense of social integration); and, finally, generates ego strength, or capacity for action (“personality”). All the same, Habermas—influenced by Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, which he subjects to critical revision (Habermas and Luhmann 1974)—proves highly sensitive to the tendency of modern societies to promote systemic autonomy. Accordingly, he observes that the material reproduction of modern society follows its own logic—a matter largely independent of communication occurring in the lifeworld. Habermas discerns vigorous “systemic” arrangements of function (Funktionszusammenhänge) in state and economy; here, actions are not coordinated linguistically but through the steering media of power/law and money. According to Habermas, the enormous success that modern societies have achieved in scientific/technological and instrumental terms consists, in particular, of having freed the spheres (Funktionsbereiche) of material reproduction from the demands of (permanent) communicative understanding. This insight, in turn, has prompted him to distinguish between “system” and “lifeworld.” Whereas the latter, which is constituted and steered by means of

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communication, assures the symbolic reproduction of the society, the systems of the economy and the (administrative) state are coordinated by means of nonlinguistic steering media; they, for their part, assure material reproduction. System and lifeworld together form the unity of society. If, in the modern world, system functions have separated off from the lifeworld, achieved autonomy, and become independent entities, nevertheless they remain connected to, and embedded in, it; they form, as it were, stable structural “calcifications” (Verhärtungen) of the lifeworld. On this basis, Habermas ultimately defines societies as “systemically stabilized complexes of action of socially integrated groups” (Communicative Action, 2:152), and he advances “the heuristic proposal that we view society as an entity that, in the course of social evolution, gets differentiated both as a system and as a lifeworld” (2:152). At the same time, Habermas diagnoses the mounting threat that “colonization of the lifeworld” will occur through administrative regulation and economic pressures, which are immune to the processes of communication/ understanding that originate in the lifeworld (Kneer 1990). In contrast, Between Facts and Norms (1992) voices the hope that even the differentiated systems of economics and bureaucracy may yet—by means of democratic self-steering and legislation (that is, by way of law and politics)—be brought to communicate with the lifeworld.

Dynamis The “paradigm shift” Habermas engineers for determining the conceptual unity of society (Synthesis) also holds direct consequences for the ways the forces that produce change are analyzed (Dynamis). Marx identifies the motor of historical change in the uninterrupted growth of forces of production— which entails changes in relations of production and societal formations. Adorno and Horkheimer—as well as Lukács—take up this view and, in line with Max Weber’s theoretical reflections, present historical transformation as the progressive historical unfolding of instrumental reason. Habermas, however, considers this perspective on social rationalization to be one-sided and to occur “by halves” (halbiert). Accordingly, he identifies a second wellspring of social change that traditional sociology has overlooked—one whose potential is especially evident in modern societies. The matter concerns the fact that, in the culture and lifeworld of modernity (see chapter 75 in this volume), validity claims concerning what is (scientifically) true, what is (morally or politically) good or right, and what is (ethically or aesthetically) beautiful (schön) or authentic (wahrhaftig) are not only distinct—for this has always been observable in the different criteria applied to science, morality, and art—but, moreover, are set “communicatively aflow” (sich kommunikativ verflüssigen) (that

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is, they can be openly questioned by anyone and are subject to communicative justification). On this basis, Habermas discerns the unfolding of communicative reason. Modernization, then, does not just signify increasing instrumental or means-end reason. It also means that communicative rationalization expands in equal measure: the structures of the lifeworld may now be interrogated and negotiated with respect to the normative, evaluative, and factual validity claims they raise (even if, for the most part, such claims are implicit). According to the large-scale project outlined in The Theory of Communicative Action, the basis for this process of transformation ultimately lies within the immanent logic of language itself. Language—or, more precisely, speech acts (i.e., the communicative use of language)—automatically aims for communication (Verständigung)—or, as the case may be, for clarifying the validity claims operative in all utterances in order to achieve consensus. Because the normative, epistemic, and expressive structures of the lifeworld must always be reproduced in communication, they can, as a matter of principle, always be questioned; the potential need for justification pushes for change whenever acceptable reasons cannot be formulated. Thereby, Habermas identifies the logic of language—or, alternatively, of communication (Verständigung) itself—as a historically active, driving principle of transformation. At the same time, however, he recognizes that this immanent, dynamic power does not operate at all times and in all social formations: conditions of communication (Verständigungsverhältnisse) may be so distorted, “frozen,” or ideologically perverted that the communicative flow of validity claims becomes impossible (Strecker 2009). In no way, then, does Habermas postulate a necessary process of historical evolution. The further course of modernization depends on how both forms of rationalization—increases in technical-instrumental rationality, on the one hand, and the elaboration of communicative reason, on the other—relate to each other as they respectively evolve. If the tendencies of “one-sided,” systematically steered, instrumental (or means-end) rationalization become more pronounced, then the “project of modernity”—which aims for the unfolding of communicative reason—will be jeopardized (“Modernity”).

Praxis Because Habermas locates the core dynamic of social evolution in the logic of communication (Verständigung), he ultimately declares that the “project of modernity” itself is a matter of society steering itself democratically: where conditions of communication (Verständigungsverhältnisse) are not distorted by one-sided power distribution and the structures of the lifeworld are

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communicatively “aflow,” it is possible for social evolution to be controlled— and even steered—by means of “deliberative democracy.” Although Habermas has claimed (in, e.g., Knowledge and Human Interests) to have identified a quasi-anthropological desire for emancipation (or at least for uncovering and achieving liberation from unjustified claims of power), the process of social evolution cannot, in general, be steered or even influenced through intentions. This can occur only under very specific historical-cultural conditions that favor the collective unfolding of communicative reason. In words that recall Luhmann, he remarks: “Before a society can effectively intervene in its own course, it must first develop a subsystem that specializes in producing collectively binding decisions” (Postnational, 62–63). Today, the cultivation of communicative reason is especially threatened by the uncoupling of bureaucratic and capitalist system imperatives from validity claims based in the lifeworld—and their immunization against them; additionally, new ideologies—e.g., “neoconservatism”—pose a risk. All the same, Habermas holds fast to the possibility that self-steering may occur through law and politics (Facts); indeed, he considers that further social evolution depends on precisely this development: “The legal concept of self-legislation has to acquire a political dimension: it must be broadened to include the concept of a society capable of a democratic mode of self-direction and self-intervention. This is the only way that existing constitutions can be interpreted in terms of the reformist project of the realization of the ‘just’ or ‘well-ordered’ society” (Postnational, 60). In other words: “we will only be able to meet the challenges of globalization in a reasonable manner if the postnational constellation can successfully develop new forms for the democratic self-steering of society” (88).

References Habermas, Jürgen, and Niklas Luhmann. 1974. Gesellschaftstheorie oder Sozialtechnologie. Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Honneth, Axel. 1996. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Trans. Joel Anderson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Kneer, Georg. 1990. Die Pathologien der Moderne. Zur Zeitdiagnose in der ‘Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns’ von Jürgen Habermas. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Rosa, Hartmut, David Strecker, and Andrea Kottmann. 2007. Soziologische Theorien. Konstanz: UTB. Strecker, David. 2009. Logik der Macht. Zum Ort der Kritik zwischen Theorie und Praxis. Weilerswist: Velbrueck.

75 SYSTEM AND LIFEWORLD MARCELO NEVES

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he distinction between system and lifeworld stands at the center of The Theory of Communicative Action. Society is viewed neither in strictly systemic terms, nor is it understood exclusively in terms of the lifeworld. Habermas conceives it “simultaneously as a system and as a lifeworld” (Communicative Action, 2:120). Social evolution, in turn, is defined in terms of the differentiation that occurs between these two dimensions (2:152ff.). Habermas’s model presents the lifeworld “as the horizon within which communicative actions are ‘always already’ moving” (2:119). In other words, it is conceived as the “background for communicative action” (Vorstudien, 593) and represents a complementary concept to that of communicative action (Communicative Action, 2:119; Vorstudien, 546; for a critique, see Apel 1989). The lifeworld reproduces itself through communicative action, oriented on intersubjective understanding (Facts, 524n18). “Naturally,” this does not mean “that strategic interactions [cannot] emerge in the lifeworld” (524n18). When this occurs, however, the lifeworld “offers no shared consensus in advance, because strategic actors encounter normative contexts, as well as other participants, only as social facts”—that is, “its action-coordinating force” is “neutralized” (524n18). Accordingly, the lifeworld can be understood as the symbolic frame of reference for communicative action, even when its material substrate reproduces itself along instrumental lines (Vorstudien, 546; Communicative Action, 2:138ff.). Habermas does not share the culturalistic conception of lifeworld that goes back to Edmund Husserl (Husserl 1970; Berger and Luckmann 1967; Schütz and Luckmann 1974, 1989; Luckmann 1981; cf. also Luhmann 1975, 70–73), which he considers one sided (Communicative Action, 2:139ff.). Moreover, he considers the model Talcott Parsons (1966) inherits from Émile Durkheim (1984)—according to which the lifeworld merely assures (normative) societal integration—to be incomplete (Communicative Action, 2:139). Finally, Habermas rejects the tradition that follows George Herbert Mead (1967) and views the lifeworld in terms of the socialization of individuals (Communicative Action, 2:140). Instead, he argues that culture, society, and personality constitute the structural components of the lifeworld:

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I use the term culture for the stock of knowledge from which participants in communication supply themselves with interpretations as they come to an understanding about something in the world. I use the term society for the legitimate orders through which participants regulate their memberships in social groups and thereby secure solidarity. By personality I understand the competences that make a subject capable of speaking and acting, that put him in a position to take part in processes of reaching understanding and thereby to assert his own identity. (2:138)

The rationalization of the lifeworld is related to its structural differentiation (2:145). The three components of the lifeworld correspond, respectively, to cultural reproduction (the semantic dimension of meaning or content), social integration (the dimension of social space), and socialization (the dimension of historical time—succeeding generations) (2:138). Culture, society, and personality are not just subsystems of the “general system of action”—i.e., they do not represent environments for one another (2:155). Rather, they structure communicative action and, at the same time, reproduce themselves in this capacity. Communicative action serves tradition and the renewal of cultural knowledge by promoting understanding (Verständigung), social integration, solidarity (through the coordination of actions), and the formation of personal identities (through socialization) (2:137). Habermas does not equate the lifeworld with the world as the sum total of reference points for communicative actors (2:137, 120ff.; Moral Consciousness, 136ff.). “Communicative actors are always moving within the horizon of their lifeworld; they cannot step outside of it. As interpreters, they themselves belong to the lifeworld, along with their speech acts, but they cannot ‘refer to something in the lifeworld’ in the same way as they can to facts, norms, or experiences” (Communicative Action, 2:126; see also Communicative Action, 1:70ff.). Rather, the world emerges as a system of references for those who act communicatively (Moral Consciousness, 136). In the course of social evolution, the objective, social, and subjective worlds split off from one another (see chapter 56 in this volume). The objective world consists of the conditions and events about which statements are made that can prove true or false. The social world is formed by legitimately regulated intersubjective interactions, to which participants make reference with claims to (normative) rightness. Finally, when communicative actors express their experiences in the horizon of the lifeworld, they refer to their inner (subjective) world with claims to truthfulness (e.g., Communicative Action, 1:319ff.; Moral Consciousness, 136ff.; Vorstudien, 588–589, 137ff., 426–427, and 462ff.). “Thus, agreement in the communicative practice of everyday life rests simultaneously on intersubjectively

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shared propositional knowledge, on normative accord, and on mutual trust” (Moral Consciousness, 136). Beyond the differentiation between culture, society, and personality, the rationalization of the lifeworld implies decentering the understanding of the world (Weltverständnis) and making a distinction between validity claims. Symmetry obtains between the differentiation of the lifeworld and world references in Habermas’s theoretical scheme. Inasmuch as culture (knowledge supply), society (legitimate orders), and personality differentiate from one another, reference patterns to the objective, social, and subjective worlds grow equally distinct. One should note, however, that communicative action— through which the lifeworld reproduces itself—remains oriented on communication (Verständigung) in all three dimensions. “Thus, it is a rule of communicative action that when a hearer assents to a thematized validity claim, he acknowledges the other two implicitly raised validity claims as well—otherwise, he is supposed to make known his dissent” (Communicative Action, 2:121). Consensus does not obtain if the hearer accepts the truth of a statement but doubts the truthfulness of the speaker or the normative appropriateness of his or her utterance. Likewise, no consensus is achieved if the hearer agrees to the normative validity of an order but doubts the existence of the objective conditions for performing it—or does not believe that it was declared in earnest (2:121ff.). Finally, there is no consensus if the hearer believes in the truthfulness of the speaker but at the same time considers his or her statement false or his or her order not to be right. Habermas’s conception implies an overburdening for the communicative actors as they are required to search permanently for a consensual result in order to be “rational.” In this context especially, Habermas focuses on the “contribution of  .  .  . reproduction processes to maintaining the structural components of the lifeworld” as well as on “manifestations of crisis when reproduction processes are disturbed (pathologies)” (2:121, 141ff.; see also Vorstudien, 562ff.). Cultural reproduction involves schemes of interpretation that may be agreed upon (i.e., valid knowledge) within the realm of culture itself, elements that assure legitimation in society, and patterns of behavior (or, alternately, educational goals) that prove effective in terms of shaping personality. When crisis occurs, cultural reproduction fails with respect to the three structural components of the lifeworld—accordingly, loss of meaning, legitimation withdrawal, and/or a breakdown of orientation (or education) ensues. Social integration involves obligations in matters of culture (im Kulturzusammenhang), legitimately ordered interpersonal relations within society itself, and social belonging in terms of personality. In the event of crisis, social integration fails, and a collapse of collective identity, anomie, and alienation result. Socialization enables acts of interpretation (culture), provides

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motivation(s) for actions conforming to norms (society), and, finally, determines the construction of identity (personality). In situations of crisis, when socialization fails, it entails breaks in tradition, the withdrawal of motivation, and psychopathologies. Individual processes of reproduction—or, as the case may be, the crisis phenomena that correspond to them—“can be evaluated according to standards of the rationality of knowledge, the solidarity of members, and the responsibility of the adult personality” (Communicative Action, 2:141). In all cases, however, a state of crisis may be diagnosed only insofar as hindrances to possibilities of communicative, understanding-oriented action have arisen. Habermas understands crisis in terms of the interaction between system and lifeworld (Vorstudien, 565–566). Provisionally, one may define “system” as the self-regulated sphere where instrumental action is mediated. That said, the formulation is imprecise because, in Habermas’s model, the concepts of system and action are distinct, and one can only speak of system rationality in a figural sense: “changes of condition in a self-regulated system may be understood as quasi-actions—as if a subject’s capacity to act found expression hereby” (Rekonstruktion, 261). For all that, it is certain that Habermas views the system along the lines of purposive rationality and, consequently, understands it in terms of purposive-rational actions (e.g., Rational Society, 124–125; Communicative Action, 2:180, 183; Rekonstruktion, 261; Vorstudien, 578–579). The system can be defined as the ensemble (Zusammenhang) of instrumental actions that are mediated by money and power (“delinguistified media”) (Communicative Action, 2:154ff.). On the basis of this mediation, the intentions of actors incorporated in the “system network” are neutralized. Habermas’s conception of system is narrow; it is limited to the economy and “administrative power” (2:171ff., 344ff.). Science, religion, art, education, parts of law, and democratic politics occurring through discursive will formation (i.e., through communicative power) do not represent systems but rather reflexive institutional planes of the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld (2:151). The media of generalization that correspond to them are all constituted linguistically. Habermas’s notion of “the colonization of the lifeworld” (2:332ff.) is in keeping with his narrow conception of “system.” When colonization occurs, the self-regulated systems of economy and politics penetrate the lifeworld to destructive effect, disrupting its processes of reproduction and thereby endangering the integrity and continued existence of its constitutive elements. The colonization of the lifeworld connects directly to three of the aforementioned crisis phenomena: meaning loss, anomie, and personality disturbance (Vorstudien, 565) occur, and system integration—in a state of “malfunction”—exercises a destructive effect on cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization. In short: the lifeworld is rationalized by differentiation that occurs between structural components, on the one hand, and differentiation between world

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references (decentered understanding of the world) and corresponding validity claims, on the other. This rationalization cannot be separated from differences between types of action and differences between levels of action and discourse. The rationality of the lifeworld is also externally differentiated with respect to the system. The latter can, when it becomes more complex, further the former’s material reproduction and, in this way, contribute to the rationality of knowledge, solidarity between members of society, and the autonomy of persons. At the same time, however, systemic hypertrophy can penetrate the lifeworld and produce destructive consequences for culture, society, and personality—above all, in the form of “meaning loss,” anomie, and psychopathologies. In conclusion, Habermas links the rationality of the lifeworld to the possibility of creating situations where consensus may be achieved. However, the strict interpretation of the lifeworld in terms of communicative action diminishes the analytic efficacy of his approach for understanding the highly complex world society and democratic and constitutional states as they exist today.

References Apel, Karl-Otto. 1989. “Normative Begründung der ‘Kritischen Theorie’ durch Rekurs auf lebensweltliche Sittlichkeit? Ein transzendentalpragmatisch orientierter Versuch, mit Habermas gegen Habermas zu denken.” In Zwischenbetrachtungen im Prozeß der Aufklärung – Jürgen Habermas zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Axel Honneth et al., 15–65. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2006. Habermas. Leipzig: Reclam. Durkheim, Émile. 1984. The Division of Labor in Society. Trans. Lewis A. Coser. New York: Free Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Luckmann, Thomas. 1981. Life-world and Social Realities. London: Heinemann Educational. Luhmann, Niklas. 1975. Macht. Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius. Mead, George Herbert. 1967. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1966. Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus

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APPENDIX CHRONOLOGY

June 18, 1929 1949 1949–1954 1954 1954–1956 1955 1956–1959 1957–1959 1959–1961 1961 1961–1964 1964–1971

1968–1969

Born in Düsseldorf Final secondary-school examinations in Gummersbach University studies in philosophy, psychology, German literature and economics in Göttingen, Zürich, and Bonn Doctorate in Bonn under Erich Rothacker: The Absolute and History: On the Ambivalence in Schelling’s Thought Freelance journalist; assistantship from the German Research Foundation Married Ute Wesselhoeft (children: Tilmann [1956], Rebekka [1959], Judith [1967]) Research assistant at the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt Work on a study at the Institute for Social Research on “Student and Politics” German Research Foundation habilitation grant Habilitation, University of Marburg (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) Associate professor of philosophy, Heidelberg University Professor of philosophy and sociology, Goethe University Frankfurt; debate regarding hermeneutics, ideology critique, and positivism Debates in the student movement about reform and revolution, the political mandate of student associations, and the reform of higher education

638 Chronology

1970/1971 1971–1980 1974 1975–1982

1976 1977–1979

1980

1980 1980–1981 Since 1983 1985 1985–1987 1987 1989 Since 1989

Since 1994 1995 1995 1995/1996 Since 1996 1997 Since 1998 1999 Since 2000 2001 Since 2001

Debate with Niklas Luhmann about systems and social theory Director, Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Conditions of Life in the Scientific-Technical World, Starnberg Hegel Prize of the city of Stuttgart Honorary professor of philosophy, Goethe University Frankfurt; the University of Munich had earlier denied Habermas an honorary professorship Sigmund Freud Prize Dispute about terrorism, the state of emergency, and neoconservatism; Briefe zur Verteidigung der Republik (Letters in defense of the republic), edited by Freimut Duve, Heinrich Böll, and Klaus Staeck (1977) Adorno Award in Frankfurt; lecture on “Modernity: An Unfinished Project.” Since then, multifaceted debates on postmodernism, poststructuralism, and young conservatism Honorary doctorate, New School for Social Research, New York Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Sciences, Starnberg Professor of philosophy, Goethe University Frankfurt (emeritus since 1994) Geschwister Scholl Prize Historikerstreit Sonning Prize, Copenhagen Honorary doctorate, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Frequently at the New York University School of Law (as participant in the colloquium organized by Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel) Permanent visiting professor, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. Karl Jaspers Prize of the city of Heidelberg Honorary doctorate, Tel Aviv University Debates with Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls about law and democracy Multiple visits to China Honorary doctorate, Sorbonne University, Paris (St. DenisVincennes) Debates about cloning, autonomy, and genetic technology Theodor Heuss Prize Professor of global law, New York University School of Law Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Debate about religion in the public sphere; beginning of the ongoing debate about the divided West, “core Europe,” and the United States

Chronology 639

2003 2004

Since 2004 2005 2013 2015

Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences Kyoto Prize for Philosophy; debate with Cardinal Ratzinger over metaphysical differences and operative commonalities between the Catholic faith and postmetaphysical thinking Debate over naturalism and freedom Holberg Prize Erasmus Prize Kluge Prize

BIBL IOGR A P H Y

Abbreviations A Berlin Republic

A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany. Trans. Steven Rendall. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Absolute Das Absolute und die Geschichte: Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken. Unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Bonn, 1954. Communicative Action The Theory of Communicative Action. 2 vols. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon, 1984, 1987. Discourse The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. Divided West The Divided West. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Evolution Communication and the Evolution of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon, 1979. Facts Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Trans. William Rehg. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. Faltering Europe: The Faltering Project. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Future The Future of Human Nature: On the Way to Liberal Eugenics? Trans. Hella Beister, Max Pensky, and William Rehg. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Inclusion The Inclusion of the Other. Trans. Ciaran P. Cronin and Pablo De Greiff. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. Justification Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics. Trans. Ciaran P. Cronin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Knowledge Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon, 1971. Kultur und Kritik Kultur und Kritik: Verstreute Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973.

642

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Legitimation Crisis Logic “Modernity”

Moral Consciousness

Naturalism New Conservatism

Past Postmetaphysical Postnational Pragmatics Profiles Rational Society Rekonstruktion Society and Politics Structural Transformation Technik Terror

Texte Theory and Practice Time Truth Unübersichtlichkeit Vorstudien Zeitdiagnosen

Legitimation Crisis. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon, 1975. On the Logic of the Social Sciences. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson and Jerry A. Stark. Cambridge: Polity, 1988. “Modernity—an Unfinished Project.” In Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, edited by Maurizio Paserin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, 38–58. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. The Past as Future. Trans. Max Pensky. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays. Trans. William Mark Hohengarten. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Trans. Max Pensky. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. On the Pragmatics of Communication. Trans. Maeve Cooke. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. Philosophical-Political Profiles. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon, 1971. Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976. Jürgen Habermas on Society and Politics: A Reader. Trans. Steven Seidman. Boston: Beacon, 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. Technik und Wissenschaft als “Ideologie.” Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Interviews by Giovanna Borradori. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Texte und Kontexte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. Theory and Practice. Trans. John Viertel. Boston: Beacon, 1973. Time of Transitions. Trans. Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Truth and Justification. Trans. Barbara Fultner. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Kleine Politische Schriften V: Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985. Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984. Zeitdiagnosen: Zwölf Essays 1980–2001. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003.

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Primary Texts Das Absolute und die Geschichte: Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken. Unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Bonn, 1954. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. Originally published as Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1961. Reprinted with a new Afterword, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990. Theory and Practice. Trans. John Viertel. Boston: Beacon, 1973. Parts of this work were originally published as Theorie und Praxis. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968. Expanded edition with a new introduction, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971. Technik und Wissenschaft als “Ideologie.” Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968. Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon, 1971. Originally published as Erkenntnis und Interesse. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968. 2nd edition with a new afterword, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973. Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969. Reprinted in Kleine Politische Schriften I–IV, 1981. Translations of parts of this work in Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon, 1971. On the Logic of the Social Sciences. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jerry A. Stark. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. Originally published as Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften: Materialien. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Expanded edition, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982. “Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns.” In Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie, by Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, 101–141. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971. Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie. Coauthored with Niklas Luhmann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971. Philosophical-Political Profiles. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983. Originally published as Philosophisch-politische Profile. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971. Expanded editions, 1981 and 1987. The translation is based on the 1981 edition. Legitimation Crisis. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975. Originally published as Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973. Kultur und Kritik. Verstreute Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973. Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon, 1979. This volume includes the translations of four essays published in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976. Jürgen Habermas on Society and Politics: A Reader. Trans. Steven Seidman. Boston: Beacon, 1989. This volume includes the translations of some essays published in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976. Kleine Politische Schriften I–IV. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter.” Lecture at the Hegel Congress, 1981. Printed in Moral Consciousness, 1–20. Originally published as “Die Philosophie als Platzhalter und Interpret,” in Moralbewußtsein und kommunikatives Handeln, 9–28. The Theory of Communicative Action. 2 vols. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon, 1984, 1987. Originally published as Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. 2 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981.

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“Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification.” Printed in Moral Consciousness, 43–115. Originally published as “Diskursethik – Notizen zu einem Begründungsprogramm,” in Moralbewußtsein und kommunikatives Handeln, 53–126. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. Originally published as Moralbewußtsein und kommunikatives Handeln. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. Originally published as Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985. Kleine Politische Schriften V: Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985. Eine Art Schadensabwicklung: Kleine Politische Schriften VI. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987. Translations of parts of this work in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays. Trans. William Mark Hohengarten. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. Most of the essays in this work were originally published in Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988. On the Pragmatics of Communication. Trans. Maeve Cooke. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. This volume includes translations of nine essays published in German, among others in Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988. Die nachholende Revolution: Kleine politische Schriften VII. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990. “Modernity—an Unfinished Project.” In Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Paserin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, 38–58. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Originally published as “Die Moderne – Ein unvollendetes Projekt.” In Die Moderne – Ein unvollendetes Projekt: Philosophisch-politische Aufsätze 1977–1990. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990. Texte und Kontexte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. Translations of parts of this work in Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics. Trans. Ciaran P. Cronin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Trans. William Rehg. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. Originally published as Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992. Expanded edition with a new afterword, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994. The Past as Future. Trans. Max Pensky. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. Originally published as Vergangenheit als Zukunft: Das alte Deutschland im neuen Europa? Ein Gespräch mit Michael Halle. Zürich: Pendo, 1991; Munich: Piper, 1993. A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany. Trans. Steven Rendall. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997; Cambridge: Polity, 2015. Originally published as Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik: Kleine politische Schriften VIII. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995. The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Trans. Ciaran P. Cronin and Pablo De Greiff. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. Originally published as Die Einbeziehung des Anderen: Studien zur politischen Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996. The Liberating Power of Symbols. Trans. Peter Dews. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. Originally published as Vom sinnlichen Eindruck zum symbolischen Ausdruck. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997.

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The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Trans. Max Pensky. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. Originally published as Die postnationale Konstellation: Politische Essays. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998. Truth and Justification. Trans. Barbara Fultner. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Originally published as Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung: Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999; expanded edition, 2004. The translation is based on the 1999 edition but omits chapters 2 and 5. Time of Transitions. Trans. Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Originally published as Zeit der Übergänge: Kleine politische Schriften IX. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001. Glauben und Wissen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001. Kommunikatives Handeln und detranszendentalisierte Vernunft. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001. Reprinted in Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005. Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur: Auf dem Weg zu einer liberalen Eugenik? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001; expanded edition, 2002. Translations of parts of this work in The Future of Human Nature: On the Way to Liberal Eugenics? Trans. Hella Beister, Max Pensky, and William Rehg. Cambridge: Polity, 2003. Zeitdiagnosen: Zwölf Essays 1980–2001. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003. The Divided West. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Originally published as Der gespaltene Westen: Kleine politische Schriften X. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004. Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Originally published as Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005. Europe: The Faltering Project. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Originally published as Ach, Europa: Kleine Politische Schriften XI. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008. Philosophische Texte: Studienausgabe in fünf Bänden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009. The Crisis of the European Union: A Response. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Originally published as Zur Verfassung Europas: Ein Essay. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011. Postmetaphysical Thinking II. Cambridge: Polity, forthcoming. Originally published as Nachmetaphysiches Denken II: Aufsätze und Repliken. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012. The Lure of Technocracy. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2015. Originally published as Im Sog der Technokratie: Kleine politische Schriften XII. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013.

Selected Bibliography Bibliographies and Reference Works Aguirre Oraa, J. M. “Jürgen Habermas: Bibliografia de 1981–1990.” Scriptorum Victoriense 39, no. 1–2 (1992): 126–172. Douramanis, Demetrios. Mapping Habermas from German to English: A Bibliography of Primary Literature, 1952–1995. Sidney: Eurotext, 1995. Finlayson, Gordon. Habermas: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Görtzen, René. Jürgen Habermas: A Bibliography. In Reading Habermas, ed. David M. Rasmussen, 114–140. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. ——. Jürgen Habermas. Eine Bibliographie seiner Schriften und der Sekundärliteratur 1952–1981. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981.

646

Bibliography

“Habermas Bibliography.” http://www.habermasforum.dk. Ingram, David. Habermas: Introduction and Analysis. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010.

Introductions to and Comprehensive Monographs About Habermas’s Life and Work Brunkhorst, Hauke. Habermas. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006. Gripp, Helga. Jürgen Habermas. Munich: Schöningh, 1984. Horster, Detlef. Habermas: Zur Einführung. Rev. ed. Hamburg: Junius, 2001. ——. Jürgen Habermas. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1991. Iser, Mattias, and David Strecker. Jürgen Habermas: Zur Einführung. Rev. ed. Hamburg: Junius, 2016. McCarthy, Thomas. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978. Outhwaite, William. Habermas: A Critical Introduction. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pinzani, Alessandro. Jürgen Habermas. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007. Reese-Schäfer, Walter. Jürgen Habermas. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2001. Wiggershaus, Rolf: Jürgen Habermas. Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004.

Monographs on Individual Aspects of Habermas’s Work Baynes, Kenneth. The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, and Habermas. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992. Benhabib, Seyla. Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Bernstein, Richard, ed. Habermas and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 1985. Brunkhorst, Hauke. “Jürgen Habermas.” In Großes Werklexikon der Philosophie, ed. Franco Volpi, 1:603–610. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1999. Cooke, Maeve. Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Dallmayr, Winfried. Materialien zu Habermas’ “Erkenntnis und Interesse.” Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974. Heath, Joe. Communicative Action and Rational Choice. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. Holub, Robert C. Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 1991. Lafont, Cristina. The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Lieber, Tobias. Diskursive Vernunft und formelle Gleichheit: Zu Demokratie, Gewaltenteilung und Rechtsanwendung in der Rechtstheorie von Jürgen Habermas. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007. McCarthy, Thomas. Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. Neves, Marcelo. Zwischen Themis und Leviathan: Eine schwierige Beziehung: Eine Rekonstruktion des demokratischen Rechtsstaates in Auseinandersetzung mit Luhmann und Habermas. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2000. Rehg, William. Cogent Science in Context: The Science Wars, Argumentation Theory, and Habermas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008.

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——. Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Wellmer, Albrecht. Ethik und Dialog: Elemente des moralischen Urteils bei Kant und in der Diskursethik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986. Zurn, Christopher F. Deliberative Democracy and the Institution of Judicial Review. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Anthologies and Journal Special Issues Benhabib, Seyla, and Fred A. Dallmayr, eds. The Communicative Ethics Controversy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. “The Constitutionalization of International Law.” Special issue, Constellations 15, no. 4 (2008). With contributions by Jean L. Cohen, William E. Scheuerman, and Hauke Brunkhorst. Dews, Peter, ed. Habermas: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999. Herborth, Benjamin, and Peter Niesen, eds. Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2007. Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas, eds. Kommunikatives Handeln: Beiträge zu Jürgen Habermas’ “Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns.” Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986. Honneth, Axel, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, eds. Zwischenbetrachtungen: Im Prozeß der Aufklärung: Jürgen Habermas zum 60. Geburtstag. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. Langthaler, Rudolf, and Herta Nagl-Docekal, eds. Glauben und Wissen: Ein Symposium mit Jürgen Habermas. Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2006. Müller-Doohm, Stefan, ed. “Das Interesse der Vernunft”: Rückblicke auf das Werk von Jürgen Habermas seit “Erkenntnis und Interesse.” Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000. Nagl-Docekal, Herta: Viele Religionen – Eine Vernunft? Vienna: Böhlau, 2008. Passerin d’Entrèves, Maurizio, and Seyla Benhabib, eds. Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Outhwaite, William, ed. The Habermas Reader. Cambridge: Polity, 1996. Rasmussen, David, and James Swindal, eds. Jürgen Habermas. 4 vols. London: Sage, 2002. Rosenfeld, Michel, and Andrew Arato, eds. Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Schomberg, René von, and Kenneth Baynes, eds. Discourse and Democracy: Essays on Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. Skordas, Achilles, and Peer Zumbansen. “The Kantian Project of International Law: Engagements with Jürgen Habermas’ The Divided West.” Special issue, German Law Journal 10, no. 1 (2009). With contributions from Armin von Bogdandy, Sergio Dellavalle, Thomas Giegerich, and Regina Kreide. Thompson, John B., and David Held, eds. Habermas: Critical Debates. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982. White, Stephen, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Habermas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Wingert, Lutz, and Klaus Günther, eds. Die Öffentlichkeit der Vernunft und die Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit: Festschrift für Jürgen Habermas. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001.

C ON T RIBU T ORS

Andrew Arato is the Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor in Political and Social Theory at the New School for Social Research, New York. Amy Allen is the Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Amy R. Baehr is associate professor of philosophy at Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y. Kenneth Baynes is professor of philosophy and political science at Syracuse University, N.Y. Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University. Richard J. Bernstein is the Vera List Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. James Bohman is the Danforth Professor of Philosophy and Professor of International Studies at Saint Louis University. Micha Brumlik was professor of education at Goethe University Frankfurt until 2013 and is since then senior advisor at the Berlin-Brandenburg Center for Jewish Studies, Berlin. Hauke Brunkhorst is senior professor of sociology at the University of Flensburg. Jean L. Cohen is the Nell and Herbert Singer Professor of Political Theory and Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University, New York. Robin Celikates is associate professor of political and social philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Felmon J. Davis is associate professor of philosophy at Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. Nicole Deitelhoff is professor of international relations and theories of global orders at Goethe University Frankfurt.

650 List of Contributors

Klaus Eder is senior professor of sociology and comparative structural analysis at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Rainer Forst is professor of political theory and philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt. Nancy Fraser is the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research, New York. Manfred Frank is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen. René Gabriëls is a lecturer in philosophy at Maastricht University. Anna Geis is professor of international security policy and conflict research at Helmut Schmidt University/University of the German Federal Armed Forces. Klaus Günther is professor of legal theory, criminal law, and criminal procedure at Goethe University Frankfurt. Martin Hartmann is professor of philosophy at the University of Lucerne. Helge Høibraaten is professor emeritus of philosophy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. Axel Honneth is senior professor of social philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Jack C. Weinstein Professor for the Humanities at Columbia University, New York. Mattias Iser is associate professor of philosophy at the State University of New York, Binghamton. Rahel Jaeggi is professor of practical philosophy, philosophy of law, and social philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Christian Joerges is a co-director of the Centre of European Law and Politics at the University of Bremen and part-time professor of law and society at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin. Dirk Jörke is professor of political science at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Matthias Kettner is professor of philosophy at Witten/Herdecke University. Thomas Khurana is visiting professor of philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt. Gertrud Koch is professor of film studies at the Freie Universität of Berlin. Andreas Koller is a research fellow at the Social Science Research Council and at New York University. Regina Kreide is professor of political theory and the history of ideas at the University of Giessen. Cristina Lafont is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, Evanston. Georg Lohmann is emeritus professor of philosophy at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. Ingeborg Maus is emeritus professor of political theory and the history of ideas at Goethe University Frankfurt. Thomas McCarthy is emeritus professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, Evanston, and was the William H. Orrick Visiting Professor at Yale University. Christoph Menke is professor of philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt. Christoph Möllers is professor of public law and philosophy of law at the Humboldt University of Berlin and permanent fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin.

List of Contributors

651

Stefan Müller-Doohm is emeritus professor of sociology—specializing in theories of interaction and communication—at the University of Oldenburg. Patrizia Nanz is scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) and professor for transformative sustainability studies at the University of Potsdam. Marcelo Neves is professor of public law and legal theory at the University of Brasilia. Rainer Nickel is a lawyer with Stark and Kollegen solicitors in Frankfurt am Main and was research assistant at the Institute of Public Law at Goethe University Frankfurt. Andreas Niederberger is professor of philosophy at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Peter Niesen is professor of political theory at the University of Hamburg. Frank Nullmeier is professor of political science at the University of Bremen. Gertrud Nunner-Winkler was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Munich. William Rehg is professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University. Ali Rizvi is a tutor at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Hartmut Rosa is professor of general and theoretical sociology at University of Jena and director of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies in Erfurt. Martin Saar is professor of political science at Leipzig University. William E. Scheuerman is professor of political science and international studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Rainer Schmalz-Bruns is professor of political science at Leibniz Universität Hannover. Thomas Schmidt is professor of philosophy of religion at Goethe University Frankfurt. David Strecker is a junior fellow at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies in Erfurt. Joel Whitebook is the director of the psychoanalytic studies program at Columbia University, New York.

INDE X

Abendroth, Wolfgang: Marxism and, 36–39; social welfare and, 118, 155–156 Adenauer era, 4, 36, 606 Adorno, Theodor W., 6–8; Derrida and, 174; Habermas’s critique of, 31–35; Jewish philosophy and, 201–202; Late Capitalism or Industrial Society, 571; Popper and, 272; psychoanalysis and, 64–66. See also Dialectic of Enlightenment Alexy, Robert, 118–120, 421 alienation: colonization thesis and, 17; Hegel and, 242; technology and, 260 anthropology, 504–506; philosophical, 27–28, 267, 507, 614 Apel, Karl-Otto, 274, 538; discourse ethics and, 538–539; Peirce and, 281; transcendental pragmatics and, 296, 383–386, 388; ultimate justification and, 43–47 Aquinas, Thomas, 133–134 Arendt, Hannah, 4, 592; conception of power and, 113, 357, 592, 598; Jewish philosophy and, 203–204; natality and, 465 Aristotle, 133–134; virtue and, 514 Austin, John L., 58–62; Derrida and, 404–406

Bakunin, Mikhail, 225, 238 Bataille, Georges, 400 Bellamy, Richard, 483 Benhabib, Seyla: conception of justice, 165; public sphere and, 249 Benjamin, Walter, 357; Jewish philosophy and, 199–201; mass culture and, 591; reformism and, 610 Bernstein, Richard J., 401 Bloch, Ernst: Jewish philosophy and, 200–201; Schelling and, 220, 222 Blumenberg, Hans, 458 Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang, 426 Bohman, James, 411 Bourdieu, Pierre, 380 Brandom, Robert S., 193–195 Brunkhorst, Hauke: counterfactual presuppositions and, 522; transnational publicity and, 252; Treaty of Lisbon and, 437 Buber, Martin, 197 Bubner, Rüdiger, 282 Bühler, Karl, 60 Bürger, Peter, 336 Bush, George W., 252: invasion of Iraq and, 252; “War On Terror” and, 582 Butler, Judith, 406–407

654 Index

Chomsky, Noam, 615 Clayton, Philip, 211 cognitive interests, 489–493; emancipatory cognitive interest, 16, 278; Peirce and, 277; Popper and, 272; quasitranscendental status of, 281–285 Cohen, Hermann, 196–197, 204 Cohen, Joshua, 123, 129–131 colonization of the lifeworld, 17–18, 372–378, 494–498, 508–509; bureaucracy and, 495; juridification and, 587; Legitimation Crisis and, 321–322; Marxist theory and, 494, 574, 631; monetization and, 495; social pathologies and, 625–626; technologization and, 496 communicative action, 499–506; Brandom and, 193–194; Derrida and, 405; deconstruction and, 172; disagreement in, 535; discourse and, 283; disturbances in, 533; equality and, 541; law and, 166, 421; lifeworld and, 266, 368, 601, 620; normative rightness and, 456, 503; obstacles to, 528; one-sided forms of, 365; pragmatic turn and, 602–603; psychoanalysis and, 279; Putnam and, 191; self-consciousness and, 72; social evolution and, 33–34, 106, 108, 110, 549, 551–552; social pathologies and, 494; social reproduction and, 369; speech acts and, 59; strategic action and, 62, 83, 291, 366–367, 370–371, 500–501, 569; system and lifeworld and, 632–636; validity claims and, 63, 319, 385–386, 615 communicative turn, 192, 265, 619–620; reason and, 398. See also linguistic turn conservatism, 127, 473, 507–512; “compassionate,” 378; neo-, 336, 509–510, 631; “young,” “old” and “new,” 622 conservatives, 515; neo-, 2, 170, 337, 510; “New,” 339, 409; “Old,” 339, 409; “Young,” 170, 339–340, 409 constitution, 513–516; American, 78; constitutional patriotism and, 427, 514–515; cosmopolitan, 151, 581; federalism and, 442; European, 151, 155, 157–158, 160, 435–438, 483, 516, 518, 547; global, 146, 148, 150; Kant and, 78, 85–89, 146, 350, 478, 482, 513; Luhmann

and, 100; supranational, 143, 147–148; Ridder and, 126–127; transnational, 560; well-ordered society and, 631; world society and, 85, 482, 485 constitutional patriotism, 513–516; antifascist consensus and, 9; citizenship and, 427; cosmopolitanism and, 150; European Union and, 432, 545–546; multiculturalism and, 515; nationalism and, 514 Cooke, Maeve, 211 cosmopolitan condition, 88, 143–145, 148–149, 475, 485, 517–519, 582 cosmopolitan constitution, 88, 148, 151, 581 cosmopolitan democracy, 252, 474–476, 480, 482, 517–519 cosmopolitan global governance, 42 cosmopolitan law, 20, 145–146, 476, 478–479, 485, 579 cosmopolitan order, 144, 433–434, 477 cosmopolitan political system, 143 cosmopolitan right, 88 counterfactual presuppositions, 520–527; communicative praxis and, 523; “domination-free” discourse and, 535; factual effectiveness of, 523–525; ideal speech situation and, 520, 522, 524; normative demands and, 525; possibility of universal agreement as, 282; postmetaphysical thinking and, 524 cultural criticism, 259–260, 590–593; conservatism and, 622; mass culture and, 592 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 1–4 Davidson, Donald, 62, 349 deliberation, 528–532; formal-pragmatic conditions of, 303; human rights and, 558; political legitimation and, 418; political system and, 530; public sphere and, 251, 606; “sluice model” and, 530; The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and, 184–186 deliberative democracy: Between Facts and Norms and, 15, 302, 378, 424–425; Derrida and, 174; nation-state and, 478; religious neutrality and, 427; social evolution and, 631; social homogeneity and, 429

Index 655

deliberative politics, 528–529, 531; Joshua Cohen and, 129–131 Derrida, Jacques: deconstruction and, 170–175; Foucault and, 69; Heidegger and, 71; Jewish philosophy and, 204–205; parasitic uses of speech and, 59; phallogocentrism and, 398; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and, 401–410; poststructuralism and, 177–181 Dewey, John, 43, 188, 192 Dews, Peter, 40, 51 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer): Foucault and, 407; Jewish philosophy and, 201–202; modernity and, 395–398; psychoanalysis and, 64–65; “mass culture” and, 259, 591 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 276–278; Gadamer and, 490 discourse, 533–537; argumentative, 44, 46, 190–191, 285, 294, 300; ethical, 133–134, 137, 139, 355, 536; fictional, 180; juridical, 117–121, 166, 355, 421; legal, 153–154, 544; moral, 75, 133, 137–140, 192, 391, 542; moralizing, 584; practical, 47, 77, 185, 283, 300, 383–388, 392, 536, 539; public, 106, 124, 173, 186, 263, 377, 425, 471, 579; religious, 211, 214; scientific, 284; strategic, 421; theological, 17, 220; theoretical, 192, 284, 300, 330; truthoriented, 115, 579 discourse ethics, 383–393, 538–540; abstract universalism and, 135; anthropology and, 505–506; communicative rationality and, 301; evolution and, 549; feminism and, 185; foundational norm of, 47; justification and, 164; Kant and, 75–76; morality and, 133–134; principle of universalization and, 542; Putnam and, 191; Rawls and, 138; ultimate justification and, 45 Döbert, Rainer, 329 Dummett, Michael, 292 Durkheim, Émile: developmental sociology and, 105, 134; lifeworld and, 632; rationalization and, 616; social evolution and, 454 Dutschke, Rudi, 10

Dworkin, Ronald: juridical discourses and, 120–121; liberal eugenics and, 468–469 Eder, Klaus, 329 Engels, Friedrich, 224 equality, 541–543; communicative, 520; democratic, 126, 426; European Union and, 437, 441; feminism and, 185–186, 250; formal, 422; freedom and, 80, 82, 129, 454; moral, 470, 542; political, 131, 542; public sphere and, 124; rational, 541; states and, 146, 433; world domestic politics and, 568 European citizenship, 439, 442, 544–548 evolution, 549–553; biological, 330; historical, 32, 630; historical materialism and, 554–557; law and, 119; learning processes and, 578–579; Legitimation Crisis and, 308–309; Luhmann and theory of, 619–620; moral development and, 94, 119, 328; natural, 491; social integration and, 328; society and, 629–633; sociocultural, 45; theory of, 29, 105–110, 137, 188, 211; theory of society and, 360; Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus and, 327–332 Feuerbach, Ludwig: Marx and, 224, 226, 399; Schelling and, 228 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 230; Marx and, 226; Schelling and, 234 Fischer, Joschka, 434, 440 Flynn, Jeffrey, 485 Forst, Rainer, 137 Forsthoff, Ernst, 4; social state and, 118, 155–156 Foucault, Michel, 18; conception of the intellectual of, 568–569; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and, 178, 398–403; theory of madness of, 69; theory of power of, 114–115, 407–408 Fraenkel, Ernst, 4, 38 Fraser, Nancy, 372, 408 Freud, Sigmund: Knowledge and Human Interests and, 64, 67–68, 623; Marx and, 279–280, 492; methodology of, 326; theory of civilization of, 492

656 Index

Gadamer, Hans-Georg: debate with Habermas, 53, 55, 274; psychoanalysis and, 68 Gehlen, Arnold, 3–4; conservatism and, 420, 504, 507; “superstructure” and, 259; theory of action of, 27–29 Gilligan, Carol, 164, 389 Grice, H. Paul, 60 Grimm, Dieter, 428, 515 Günther, Klaus, 389, 421 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: French Revolution and, 507–508; Kant and, 76–77, 134–135, 349–350, 358; Marx and, 275; modern subjectivity and, 398–399; Schelling and, 220–228, 241–242 Heidegger, Martin, 5–6; Daseinsanalyse and, 27–28; Derrida and, 408; hermeneutics and, 49–51; National Socialism and, 28 Heine, Heinrich, 222, 224 Held, David, 476–480 Heller, Herrmann, 156 Henrich, Dieter: postmetaphysical thinking and, 71–72, 594, 596 historical materialism, 554–557; Piaget and, 328; psychoanalysis and, 326; Schelling and, 220; social evolution and, 331–332; systems theory and, 326–327 Hitler, Adolf, 3–4 Honneth, Axel: theory of recognition and, 268, 323 Horkheimer, Max, 7–8, 31; psychoanalysis and, 64–66. See also Dialectic of Enlightenment human rights, 558–561; Apel and, 47; cosmopolitan constitution and, 144–145, 148, 485; global political system and, 89, 149–150, 475–476; international law and, 84, 143, 429, 481–482; political justice and, 165; postmetaphysical thinking and, 471; sovereignty and, 21; supranational organizations and, 20, 484–485; United Nations and, 518; war and, 581–582 Hume, David: conservatism and, 507 Husserl, Edmund: lifeworld and, 632

ideology, 562–564; legitimation and, 307; technology and science as, 261–263; The Theory of Communicative Action and, 265 ideology critique: emancipatory cognitive interest and, 492–493; Foucault and, 115; Freud and, 280, 284; public sphere and, 605; rational reconstruction and, 614; The Theory of Communicative Action and, 379 intellectuals, 1–3, 565–570; conservative, 322; Jewish, 203; neoconservative, 509 James, William, 188 Jencks, Martin, 345 Kant, Immanuel: constitutionality and, 78–79, 128; cosmopolitan condition and, 144, 475–476, 517; Critique of Judgement, 410; freedom and, 446–447; Hegel and, 76–77, 134–135, 349–350, 358; international law and, 84–89; “master thinker,” 350–352; moral philosophy and, 75–77; normativity and, 420; popular sovereignty and, 81–83, 129; pragmatism and, 188, 192, 194; procedural interpretation of justice, 162; religious faith and, 208–209; transcendental philosophy, 89–90, 354; world state and, 145 Kelsen, Hans, 151 Kierkegaard, Søren, 140, 229, 459; postmetaphysical ethics and, 472 Kirchheimer, Otto, 38–40 Kluge, Alexander, 1–3; Negt and, 246–248 Kohlberg, Lawrence: Gilligan and, 164; Piaget and, 92–95, 549, 577; theory of moral development and, 138, 164; theory of psychological development and, 389. See also Piaget, Jean Lafont, Cristina, 149–150, 485 Langthaler, Rudolf, 209 late capitalism, 12–13, 571–576; colonization of the lifeworld and, 373, 378; crisis tendencies in, 313–314; cultural system and, 316; family and, 183; ideology and, 562; legitimation problems and, 323, 384, 513; liberal capitalism and, 310–313,

Index 657

572–574; reification and, 264; standards of living and, 374; state and, 118 learning processes, 577–580; behaviorism and, 92; cognitive interests and, 491; collective, 578–580; constitutional patriotism and, 514; deliberation and, 529; democratization of philosophy and, 354; discourse and, 536; European citizenry and, 437; individual, 577–578; Kohlberg and, 95, 616; naturalism and, 188; social evolution and, 329–330; supranationalism and, 148; theory of argumentation and, 285, 299; validity claims and, 191 legality, 422–423, 426, 586–589; “belief in legality,” 100, 124, 319; European, 547; human rights and, 560; legitimacy and, 586, 588; normativistic, 40; transnational, 560 legal wars vs. legimitate wars, 581–585 legitimacy, 586–589; communicative power and, 598; cosmopolitan condition and, 477–478, 480–481, 517, 519; deliberation and, 303, 529, 531; democratic, 130, 148, 474, 476, 482; domestic world politics and, 89; European consitutionalization and, 155–157, 436–437, 440–441; legality and, 124; normative theory of, 319–320; public opinion and, 245, 249–250; supranational politics and, 149, 475–478, 482–484; Weber on, 100, 328 legitimation, 586–589; Between Facts and Norms and, 423–425; democratic, 19, 611–612; European democracy and, 428–429; human rights and, 559; ideology and, 263, 562; “just war” and, 584; late capitalism and, 118, 312–313, 513; legitimation deficit, 483–485; legitimation crisis, 12–13, 264, 311, 314–316, 318, 321–323, 384, 418, 530, 574–575; Luhmann and, 100–102; procedural law and, 130; Schmitt and, 100; supranantional constitution and, 148, 477, 481, 560; three-leveled theory of, 320; Weber and, 100 Levinas, Emmanuel, 205 linguistic turn, 227, 603; Apel and, 43; critical theory of society and, 7, 283, 288; epistemology and, 89; human

nature and, 472; postmetaphysical thinking and, 595; pragmatism and, 194; Putnam and, 191; Rorty and, 189 linguistic-pragmatic turn, 271, 285, 489 Lorenzen, Paul, 384 Lorenzer, Alfred, 279 Luhmann, Niklas: debate with Habermas, 98–99, 307, 328; Flakhelfer generation and, 2–3; functional self-organization and, 108; legal system and, 101–102; legitimation and, 100, 587; Marxism and, 103; social evolution and, 549, 619–620; systems rationality and, 321; technocracy and, 41, 99, 268, 621 Lukács, Georg: reification and, 257–258, 372 Luria, Isaac, 198, 222, 238 Lyotard, Jean-François, 400–403 Mach, Ernst, 273 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 138–139 Marcuse, Herbert: critique of technology and, 33, 259, 262, 268; late capitalism and, 571–572; psychoanalysis and, 64; reformism and, 610 Marx, Karl, 6; emancipation of humanity and, 29; empirical sciences and, 226; Freud and, 279–280, 492; historical materialism and, 554; Knowledge and Human Interests and, 275–276; labor and, 32, 107; realization of philosophy and, 355; reification and, 256–258; Schelling and, 28, 224–225, 235, 237–242; theory of value and, 12 mass culture, 317, 357, 590–593; mass media and, 591–592 Maus, Ingeborg, 127–129 McCarthy, Thomas, 323, 469 Mead, George Herbert: developmental sociology and, 134; perspective taking and, 192; symbolic interaction and, 164 Mills, C. Wright, 523 Mirecourt, John, 459 Mouffe, Chantal, 564 Nagel, Thomas, 167, 468–469 Nagl-Docekal, Herta, 209

658 Index

National Socialism, 4–5, 117; German nationalism and, 514; Heidegger and, 28 Negt, Oskar, 246–248 Neumann, Franz L., 38–40, 123 Nietzsche, Friedrich: Knowledge and Human Interests and, 280; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and, 398–400, 510; postmetaphysical thinking and, 71 Offe, Claus, 12, 315, 572 Parmenides, 450–451 Parsons, Talcott: AGIL-scheme and, 308; concept of power and, 111–112, 592; social evolution and, 108, 621; theory of social systems and, 327 Peirce, Charles Sanders: empirical sciences and, 276–278, 490; neopragmatism and, 188; regulative ideas and, 43, 521 Peters, Bernhard: counterfactual presuppositions and, 522; sluice model and, 606–607 Piaget, Jean: cognitive psychology and, 92, 231; moral development and, 93–95, 318; ontogenetic development and, 549, 577, 615. See also Kohlberg, Lawrence Plato: classical metaphysics and, 72; philosopher-king and, 569 Plessner, Helmuth, 506 Popper, Karl, 272–273, 490 postmetaphysical thinking, 594–597; Adorno and, 8; Apel and, 43; counterfactual presuppositions and, 524; fallibilism and, 210; “good life” and, 470–473; Kierkegaard and, 140; lifeworld praxis and, 596; linguistic turn and, 595; methodical atheism and, 211; neopragmatism and, 194; philosophy of the subject and, 71–72; practical reason and, 137; procedural rationality and, 595; radical skepticism and, 67; Ratzinger and, 212; religion and, 444, 458–459, 596; Schelling and, 219, 229; situating reason and, 596; Young Hegelians and, 594 power, 598–601; administrative, 250, 357, 598–599; Arendt’s conception of, 113–114,

592, 598; colonization of the lifeworld and, 494, 601; communicative, 250, 357, 426, 598–599, 601; constitutionalization of, 79, 483, 485; divine, 458–459; division of powers, 78, 147, 350; Foucault’s conception of, 114–115, 178–179, 407–408; gender and, 183, 185; intellectuals and, 566, 568–569; money and administrative power, 102, 373–375; Parson’s conception of, 111–112, 592; public spheres and, 563, 567, 607; speech acts and, 404–405; social, 250, 372, 375, 598, 600; violence and, 357 pragmatic turn, 7, 362, 364, 602–604. See also linguistic-pragmatic turn public sphere, 9–10, 245, 605–608; categorization of, 246–247; colonization of the lifeworld and, 313, 370, 373, 375–376, 574, 588; communicative power and, 426, 598–599; constitutional patriotism and, 514; counterfactual presuppositions and, 523, 535; deliberation and, 530–531; European constitutionalization and, 159; fragmentation of, 567; global, 22, 89, 149, 250, 476, 484, 516, 588; historians on, 249; human rights and, 559; ideology and, 562; intellectuals and, 565, 567; Kant and, 77; late capitalism and, 572; mass culture and, 590–592; modernity and, 510; Negt and Kluge on, 247–248; radical reformism and, 611–612; rationality and, 563; social evolution and, 136; transnational, 250–252, 428, 516, 567–568, 588; weak vs. strong publics, 518–519; women’s movement and, 184 Putnam, Hilary: epistemological realism and, 191; ethical values and, 391; Kantian dualism and, 349; moral constructivism and, 192; Neopragmatism and, 188–189 Quine, Willard V. O., 349 radical reformism, 610–613 rationality, 619–622; communicative, 34, 66, 69, 288–294, 297–304, 362–364, 383, 385, 499, 538, 569–570, 620–621; critical,

Index 659

395; discursive, 102, 289, 303; economic, 160; functionalist, 494; instrumental, 21, 66, 259, 265, 291–293, 321, 376, 499–501, 570, 630; lifeworld and, 494, 636; Marcuse and, 262; moral judgments and, 136; practical, 321; procedural, 73, 352, 467, 595; scientific, 69, 272; social, 257; system rationality, 99, 321, 635; Weber’s concept of, 33; Western, 395, 403 rationalization, 619–622; communicative, 630; communicative interaction and, 329; cultural, 395; deliberation and, 528; Dialectic of Enlightenment and, 395; differentiation and, 338–339, 341–343; economic, 260; evolution and, 108; ideology and, 562; Kohlberg and, 385; law and, 370; lifeworld and, 262, 298, 343, 373, 376, 509, 600, 633–634, 636; modernity and, 396–397; one-sided, 28, 99–100, 360, 372; pathologies and, 494; productive forces and, 329; scientific, 317; self-rationalization of reason, 354; social, 260, 629; system and, 262; technical, 260–261; Weber’s concept of, 258, 262–263, 394, 621 rational reconstruction, 284, 524–526, 614–618, 627 Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benedict XVI), 212–213, 444 Rawls, John: basic liberties and, 542; just war and, 583; law of peoples and, 477; moral justice and, 163; “original position” and, 387; “overlapping consensus” and, 139; political justice and, 166–167; “reflective equilibrium” and, 138 Reagan, Ronald: neoconservatism and, 509 Ricœur, Paul: psychoanalysis and, 67–68 Ridder, Helmut: theory of democracy and, 125–127 Risse, Thomas, 485 Ritter, Joachim, 337, 421 Rogers, Joel, 131 Rorty, Richard, 349; deconstruction and, 173; neopragmatism and, 188–190; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and, 401 Rosenzweig, Franz, 197–198 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 82, 146, 238

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 227, 568 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 402 Scanlon, Thomas M., 138, 163–164 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph: The Ages of the World, 233–237; Jewish philosophy and, 196–198; late philosophy of, 223–229; Marx and, 237–242; philosophy of nature of, 229–231; philosophy of identity of, 231–232 Schelsky, Helmut, 263 Scheuerman, William E., 149, 250, 485 Schmitt, Carl: Bund concept and, 434; legality and, 39–42, 128, 586; Luhmann and, 100–101; National Socialism and, 3–4 Scholem, Gershom, 198–199 Searle, John R.: illocutionary speech acts and, 58–59, 61–62; performative speech acts and, 404–405 Seel, Martin, 140 Siep, Ludwig, 468–469 Sikkink, Kathryn, 485 Singer, Peter, 167 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 483 social pathology, 623–626; capitalist modernization and, 177; colonization of the lifeworld and, 18, 256, 266, 322, 373, 375, 494, 574; counterintellectuals and, 567; desiccation of meaning resources and, 373; Freud and, 623; instrumental reason and, 29, 35; deconstruction and, 173; reification and, 256, 258, 265, 269; religion and, 210 society, 627–631; archaic, 450; art and, 346; bourgeois, 41, 246, 562, 614; capitalist, 125, 258, 306, 331; contemporary, 31, 247, 322, 331, 408–409, 555, 557; cosmopolitan civil, 518; critical theory of, 193, 288, 323, 372, 396, 505, 526, 598, 614, 615; democratic, 417, 467, 523; democratization of, 39, 186; emancipated, 395; functionally differentiated, 38; global civil, 518, 581, 608; good, 53, 55, 56; human, 106, 197, 310; individualized, 529; industrial, 261, 571; international civil, 478; just, 395, 470; late-capitalist, 11, 313; Marxist theories of, 256, 309; members and, 377, 379, 380, 492;

660

Index

society (continued) modern, 29, 207, 245, 335, 371, 508, 550, 553, 591; multilevel world, 474, 476, 480–481; nonrepressive, 64; political, 82; politically constituted world society, 88, 143, 145, 146, 148, 480; postsecular, 207, 444; pluralist world society, 477, 485; pluralistic, 166, 209, 467; reproduction of, 370, 494; repressive, 614; secular, 21; state and, 37, 122–127, 131, 374, 605; stratified, 248; theory of, 6, 8, 33–34, 306, 361, 368, 407, 418, 500, 526, 621, 626; transnational, 251, 547; tribal, 496, 509; well-ordered, 525; world, 15, 433, 479, 482–484, 560, 568, 579, 588, 608, 636 Spaemann, Robert, 467–468 Sternberger, Dolf, 9, 427, 514. See also constitutional patriotism Strawson, Peter F., 60–61, 385 system vs. lifeworld, 34–35, 123, 262, 265–266, 323, 368–377, 632–636; evolution and, 108; expropriation and,

18; gender and, 183–184; hermeneutics and, 51–53; law and, 101–102; mass media and, 591; protest and, 574; reification and, 268. See also colonization of the lifeworld Taylor, Charles, 137, 515 Teubner, Gunther, 483 Tugendhat, Ernst, 139–140 Walker, Neil, 149 Walzer, Michael: just war and, 143, 583–584 Weber, Max: legitimacy and, 100–101, 318, 586; power and, 111; rationalization and, 33, 108, 262, 335, 394–395, 421, 621; reification and, 257–258; typology of action and, 365 Wellmer, Albrecht: discourse ethics and, 389; postmodernity and, 341 Wingert, Lutz, 390 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 32, 52