Contents
Translator’s Introduction
Preface
PART I A Social-Scientific Concept of Crisis
Chapter 1 System and Life-World
Chapter 2 Some Constituents of Social Systems
Chapter 3 Illustration of Social Principles of Organization
Chapter 4 System Crisis Elucidated Through the Example of the Liberal-Capitalist Crisis Cycle
PART II Crisis Tendencies in Advanced Capitalism
Chapter 1 A Descriptive Model of Advanced Capitalism
Chapter 2 Problems Resulting from Advanced-Capitalist Growth
Chapter 3 A Classification of Possible Crisis Tendencies
Chapter 4 Theorems of Economic Crisis
Chapter 5 Theorems of Rationality Crisis
Chapter 6 Theorems of Legitimation Crisis
Chapter 7 Theorems of Motivation Crisis
Chapter 8 A Backward Glance
PART III On the Logic of Legitimation Problems
Chapter 1 Max Weber’s Concept of Legitimation
Chapter 2 The Relation of Practical Questions to Truth
Chapter 3 The Model of the Suppression of Generalizable Interests
Chapter 4 The End of the Individual?
Chapter 5 Complexity and Democracy
Chapter 6 Partiality for Reason
Notes
Index
German text: Copyright © 1973 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main
Introduction and English translation: Copyright © 1976
Heinemann Educational Books
Legitimation Crisis was first published under the title
Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus in 1973 by Suhrkamp Verlag
First published in Great Britain by Heinemann Educational Books 1976
Reprinted 1979, 1980, 1984
First published in 1988 by Polity Press
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Jürgen Habermas is the most influential thinker in Germany today. Picking up where Adorno left off in his exchange with Popper, he became the central figure in the Positivismusstreit that dominated German philosophy and sociology in the sixties.1 Through his detailed criticism of positivist epistemology and methodology and his careful, undogmatic articulation of insights drawn from an immense knowledge of the German philosophical and sociological traditions, he made a lasting contribution to the critical reception of Anglo-American empiricism into German thought. To have brought Kant, Fichte, and Hegel into contact with Wittgenstein, Popper, and Peirce, to have fashioned a language in which Marx, Dilthey, and Freud as well as Dewey, Mead, and Parsons can all have their say, is grounds enough for a claim to intellectual distinction. In recent years, however, Habermas has gone much further in his systematizing efforts. His debate with Gadamer provided a demonstration of the relevance of hermeneutics to social theory.2 His debate with Luhmann comprises one of the most exhaustive and detailed examinations of the systems-theoretic approach to social inquiry.3 His formulation of the theory of communicative competence developed the relevance of linguistics and linguistic philosophy to the philosophical foundations of social theory.4 In short, Habermas has shown himself to be possessed of an astonishing range of interests and competence; and he has succeeded in formulating and developing a unified, systematic perspective in which all this knowledge has its place. Thus, as seasoned an observer of Western intellectual life as George Lichtheim could remark of him in 1969 (that is, before the publication of much of his important work):
The baffling thing about Habermas is that, at an age when most of his colleagues have painfully established control over one comer of the field, he has made himself master of the whole, in depth and breadth alike. There is no corner-cutting, no facile evasion of difficulties or spurious enunciation of conclusions unsupported by research: whether he is refuting Popper, dissecting the pragmatism of Charles Peirce, delving into the medieval antecedents of Schelling’s metaphysics, or bringing Marxist sociology up to date, there is always the same uncanny mastery of the sources, joined to an enviable talent for clarifying intricate logical puzzles. He seems to have been born with a faculty for digesting the toughest kind of material and then refashioning it into orderly wholes. Hegel, whom he resembles at least in his appetite for encyclopaedic knowledge, possessed this capacity in the highest degree, but he was cursed with an abominable style and a perverse fondness for obscurity, whereas Habermas writes as clearly and precisely as any empiricist.5
Readers should be forewarned that this last remark is an exaggeration. Habermas can be quite difficult to read, and the present volume is a case in point. It makes unusual demands on the reader, assuming some familiarity with a wide range of disciplines (from economics to ethics), authors (from Kant to Parsons), and approaches (from systems theory to phenomenology). As stated in the author’s preface, the intention of the book is a “clarification of very general structures of hypotheses” relating to the dynamics and development of contemporary capitalism. Habermas’ aim is no less than that of surveying most of the important literature on advanced capitalist society and organizing it around a continuous line of argument. However, it is extremely important that the reader take Habermas at his word on the status of the argument—it is meant as a preparatory clarification of the enormously complex issues involved, preparatory, that is, to the empirical research required for their further resolution. The argument makes no claim to finality; certain important questions are left open; and there are numerous indications of the precise points in the argument that call for as-yet-unavailable empirical data. Lest these cautions be taken as a subtle strategy for avoiding criticism, readers should be informed that much of the empirical research in question is already underway at the Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung der Lebensbedingungen der wissenschaftlich-technischen Welt.6
At its own level, however, that of a dialectical consideration of hypotheses relating to the dynamics of organized capitalism, the argument does make a claim to correctness. To follow the twistings and turnings of this argument, to appreciate the force of points often made in the form of summaries of broad areas of research or in the form of a new direction for an ongoing discussion, requires a great deal of readers. If they are able to meet these demands, they will be appropriately rewarded. Into the great, unformed mass of social and philosophical literature on the character and prospects of contemporary Western society a systematic order is introduced; hypotheses are examined, criticized, revised, and reinterpreted; resolutions of outstanding issues are proposed and unresolved issues stated with admirable clarity with an indication of the information needed to resolve them.
In addition to the general difficulties attendant on the vastness of the literature involved, the intricacy of the line of argument sustained throughout the book, and its tentative, open character at several points, there are three further aspects that may prove troublesome to the Anglo-American reader. First, Habermas examines at some length a variety of theories of economic crisis that have emerged from the Marxist tradition. His discussion, while clear enough in itself, does presuppose some familiarity with the basic ideas of this tradition. This is, perhaps, less of a problem today than in the past. In England and America, there is a growing interest in Marxist economic and political theory. Many of the classic works have been translated, and a number of new studies have recently appeared. For the rest, the reader will find references to the most important literature in the text.
A second—and extremely important—aspect of Habermas’ argument is his discussion of systems theory. From his perspective, this includes not only the narrowly cybernetic approaches to society, but functionalist and structural-functionalist approaches as well. His principal targets here are clearly Parsons and Luhmann. Anglo-American readers may be expected to have some acquaintance with the work of the former as well as with the basic categories and methods of socio-cybernetics. The work of Niklas Luhmann, the leading German systems-theorist, is, however, largely unavailable in English. A prolific writer, Luhmann has radicalized the functionalist approach and applied it to a vast number of areas (including law, economics, government, education, and science), concepts (including power, money and influence as well as knowledge and action) and even—reflexively—to systems theory itself. Even though his terminology is often less than transparent, his ideas should have a familiar ring to anyone acquainted with other variants of the systems approach.
Finally, at critical points in his argument Habermas draws on ideas developed in his own theory of communicative competence, with which the average reader can hardly be expected to be familiar. It is this need which I hope partially to fill in the remainder of this introduction. And I shall do so by considering how Habermas’ theory responds to two complexes of problems left unresolved by the critical theory of the earlier Frankfurt School.
I. The cleavage between fact and value, description and evaluation, science and criticism, which Hume articulated and the empiricist tradition in philosophy and social inquiry has raised to the status of a first principle, is clearly incompatible with the idea of a critical theory of society. One of the defining characteristics of critical social theory is precisely its attempt to overcome the empirical/normative split and the separation of theory from practice that follows from it. At the level of philosophical foundations, this requires a reconceptualization of the notion of theoretical truth and the establishment of an intimate relation between truth and freedom. Such a reconceptualization was attempted by the earlier Frankfurt School—especially by Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse—in essays published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.7
In his Tseitschrift essays Horkheimer develops a type of dialectical critique of ideology that refers every thought back to the historical situation in which it arose, to the real context of interests behind it. But critique, says Horkheimer, must be distinguished from scepticism. In making this distinction he appeals to Hegel’s concept of concrete negation. In recognizing the dependence and limitedness of any finite truth or isolated perspective, that is, in rejecting its claim to unlimited truth, Hegel does not simply dismiss it out of hand. Instead, he finds for this kind of knowledge—limited, one-sided, isolated—its place in the total system of truth. Thus critique, in the Hegelian sense, does not result in mere negation, in the simple assurance that all determinate knowledge is transitory and worthless, in a word, in a relativism that exhausts itself in the negative enterprise of exhibiting the limitedness—for example, the social and historical context-boundedness—of given theories.
But, of course, Horkheimer cannot simply rely on Hegel to ground the notion of a materialist critique. Insofar as the dialectical method in Hegel is part of an idealist system, it must be reconceived.
In the reflection on his own system Hegel forgets a very definite part of experience. The view that his system is the completion of truth conceals from him the significance of the time-bound interest which influences the individual dialectical presentations as regards the direction of thought, the choice of material and the use of names and words, and which turns his attention from the fact that his conscioos and unconscious partiality vis-à-vis the questions of life must necessarily become operative as constitutive elements of his philosophy (PW 242/43).
Thus Horkheimer undertakes to radicalize Hegel’s already radically historical approach. (1) He gives up the theologically. motivated belief that progress—whatever it might be—is in any way guaranteed. The progress of history depends on the decisions and actions of historical subjects. (2) He distances himself from the conception of a universal history in the strict, that is, Hegelian, sense. Thought, rooted as it is in actual history, can never survey the whole of history as a pre-given totality. Rather it owes its most general categories to the movement of history itself. Finally (3) he accepts the consequences of this context-boundedness for critical theory itself.8
The question can then be raised: to what concept of truth, if not to Hegel’s, can critical theory appeal in legitimating its own standpoint. Horkheimer describes critical theory as a theory of the contemporary epoch that is guided by an interest in the future, that is, by an interest in the realization of a truly rational society in which men make their own history with will and consciousness. This description gives rise to a related question: in what way can the interest in the future that guides critical theory be distinguished from particularistic interests concealed behind ideological theories? This question obviously must be answered if critical theory itself is to be free from the suspicion of ideology it applies to other theories. How does the conception of freedom on which it relies insure that critical theory too is not just another time-bound (say post-Enlight-enment), culture-bound (say secularized bourgeois), and perhaps even “class”-bound (say alienated intellectual) standpoint? I believe a careful reading of the Zeitschrift essays will show that Horkheimer and his colleagues at the Institut für Sozialforschung more or less simply take up the notion of the coincidence of reason and freedom directly or indirectly (that is, through Marx) from Hegel without sufficiently attending to the reworking of philosophical foundations that a rejection of Hegel’s idealism entails. For example, when the question arises in “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Horkheimer writes: “The viewpoints which critical theory draws from historical analysis as the goals of human activity, especially the idea of a reasonable organization of society that will meet the needs of the whole community, are immanent in human work, but are not correctly grasped by individuals or by the common mind” (p. 213). To anyone familiar with the Dialectic of Enlightenment this interpretation of human labor will seem anything but obvious.9 The point is not which interpretation of work is more correct—work as an anticipation of human freedom or work as introducing essential distortions into man’s relationship with nature and with his fellow men (or, to mention another venerable interpretation, work as a necessary evil). The more fundamental question is how does one decide which interpretation is correct and which are ideological distortions.
Another direction taken by Horkheimer (and Marcuse) is to find desire for a rational organization of life and a realization of genuine freedom in the various expressions of culture, in art, religion, and philosophy. But, conversely, these cultural expressions also function in sanctioning the established order of things. This double character of “affirmative culture”—its sanctioning of and protest against existing conditions—requires, therefore, on the part of the critical theorist, an ability to differentiate in his interpretations between regressive and progressive moments.10 This, according to both Horkheimer and Marcuse, he can do only on the basis of his interest in the future. “A certain concern is also required if these tendencies are to be perceived or expressed” (TCT, p. 213). But now we have moved in a circle, since it was precisely the legitimacy of this interest, its universal and non-ideological character, that we wished to ground.
For the rest, we have numerous suggestive remarks but rather too little philosophical elaboration of how, in a materialist theory of history, the idealist convergence of reason and freedom might be grounded. In one place Horkheimer says: “Thought does not spin such a possibility out of itself but rather becomes aware of its own proper function” (TCT, p. 212). This sounds promising. But what is required, and what is lacking in the Zeitschrift essays, is a philosophical elucidation of thought on materialist presuppositions, which, while overcoming Hegel’s idealism, does not fall below the level of insight he achieved.
Habermas attempts to accomplish this through a linguistic reformulation of the philosophical foundations of historical materialism. In his discussion of Hegel’s Jena Philosophy of Mind, in his critique of science and technology as the modern ideology, as well as in Knowledge and Human Interests, language is characterized as a universal medium (along with work and domination) in which the social life of the human species unfolds.11 The socio-cultural form of life is bound to systems of symbolically mediated interaction. Furthermore, recent developments in linguistics and linguistic philosophy have made it clear that “today the problem of language has replaced the traditional problem of consciousness.” 12 On the other hand, contemporary analysis as well as idealism and hermeneutics have misconceived the unique structure of communication in ordinary language. An adequate conception can be developed, Habermas argues, only in terms of a universal pragmatics that exhibits the normative basis of all communication and explains the possibility of systematically distorted communication. In the next few pages I shall attempt to bring together some of the main ideas of his theory of communicative competence: the relation between communicative action or interaction and discourse, the consensus theory of truth, and the supposition of the ideal speech situation.13
According to Habermas, a smoothly functioning language game rests on a background consensus formed from the mutual recognition of at least four different types of validity claims [Geltungsan sprüche] that are involved in the exchange of speech acts: claims that the utterance is understandable, that its propositional content is true, and that the speaker is sincere in uttering it, and that it is right or appropriate for the speaker to be performing the speech act. In normal interaction, these implicitly raised validity claims are naively accepted. But it is possible for situations to arise in which one or more of them becomes problematic in a fundamental way. In such cases—that is, when the background consensus is fundamentally called into question—specific forms of problem resolution are required to remove the disturbance and restore the original, or a new, background consensus. Different forms are needed for each type of claim. But the validity of problematic truth claims or of problematic norms can be redeemed discursively and only discursively, that is by entering into a discourse whose sole purpose is to judge the truth of the problematic opinion or the correctness of the problematic norm. In the first case we have what Habermas calls a theoretic discourse; in the second, a practical discourse.
The speech situation of discourse represents a break with the normal context of interaction in that, ideally, it requires a “suspension of the constraints of action,” a putting out of play of all motives except that of a willingness to come to an understanding, and a “bracketing of validity claims”—that is, a willingness to suspend judgment as to the existence of certain states of affairs (that may or may not exist) and as to the rightness of certain norms (that may or may not be correct). On the other hand, the normal context of interaction does contain an implicit reference to discourse. Insofar as interaction involves regarding the other as subject, it involves supposing that he knows what he is doing and why he is doing it; there is an assumption that he intentionally holds the beliefs he does and intentionally follows the norms he does, and that he is capable of discursively justifying them if the need should arise.
Habermas argues that this supposition of accountability, this expectation that the other could account for his behavior in the same way that (we are convinced) we could account for ours, is a normal feature of functioning language games. At the same time he is well aware that the assumption is usually counterfactual, that the exception is the rule in human history.
We know that institutionalized actions do not as a rule fit this model of pure communicative action, although we cannot avoid counterfactually proceeding as if the models were really the case—on this unavoidable fiction rests the humanity of intercourse among men who are still men.14
That this assumption is counterfactual and that it nevertheless persists as an expectation can, according to Habermas, he explained in a theory of systematically distorted communication.
But if this is the case, how can the counterfactual expectations be stabilized? This can be achieved only through legitimation of the ruling systems of norms and through the anchoring of the belief in legitimacy in systematic barriers to will-forming communication. The claim that our norms can be grounded is redeemed through legitimizing world-views. The validity of these world-views is in turn secured in a communication structure that excludes discursive will-formatíon … the barriers to communication which make a fiction precisely of the reciprocal imputation of accountability, support at the same time the belief in legitimacy that sustains the fiction and prevents its being found out. That is the paradoxical achievement of ideologies, whose individual prototype is the neurotic disturbance.15
The recognition of the ideality or counterfactual character of the expectation of discursive justifiability for beliefs and norms reflects clearly on the situation of discourse as well. In the light of the possibility of systematic distortion, how can a discursively realized agreement be distinguished from the mere appearance of discursively founded agreement? Which, that is, are the criteria of a “true” as opposed to a “false” consensus? If there are no reliable criteria, then Habermas’ recourse to the theory of communication will have left him with many of the same problems as, I have argued, attend earlier versions of critical theory.
In his inaugural lecture of 28 June 1965, at Frankfurt University, Habermas proclaimed that his theory of knowledge and human interests remained faithful to the core of the classical tradition of philosophy, that is, to the “insight that the truth of statements is linked in the last analysis to the intention of the good and true life.” 16 His recent work on the consensus theory of truth can be seen as an attempt to make good on this claimed linkage. Once called into question, truth claims can be justified only discursively, through argumentation. “Experiences support the truth claim of assertions…. But a truth claim can be redeemed only through argumentation. A claim founded [fundiert] on experience is by no means a justified [begründet] claim.” 17 The elucidation of the notion of truth thus requires an analysis of the discursive justification of validity claims. Discursive justification is a normative concept. Were every contingently conceived agreement to be understood as a “consensus,” then the latter obviously could not serve as the criterion of truth. “Truth is not the fact that a consensus is realized, but rather that at all times and in any place, if we enter into a discourse a consensus can be realized under conditions that identify it as a justified consensus. Truth means ‘warranted assertability’ ” 18 The problem is then, under what conditions is a consensus a justified consensus?
If the criterion that serves to distinguish a true from a false consensus itself requires discursive justification we are moving in a circle; if not, we have transcended the consensus framework in establishing it. The only way out of this dilemma, according to Habermas, leads through a characterization of the “force of the better argument” entirely in terms of “formal properties of discourse”—that is, through an analysis of the notion of “providing rational grounds” 19 in terms of the formal (not in the usual syntactical or semantical senses, but in the pragmatic sense) properties of argumentation.
The very act of participating in a discourse, of attempting discursively to come to an agreement about the truth of a problematic statement or the correctness of a problematic norm, carries with it the supposition that a genuine agreement is possible. If we did not suppose that a justified consensus were possible and could in some way be distinguished from a false consensus, then the very meaning of discourse, indeed of speech, would be called into question. In attempting to come to a “rational” decision about such matters, we must suppose that the outcome of our discussion will be the result simply of the force of the better argument and not of accidental or systematic constraints on discussion. This absence of constraint, this exclusion of systematically distorted communication, Habermas argues, can be characterized formally, that is in terms of the pragmatic structure of communication. His thesis is that the structure is free from constraint only when for all participants there is a symmetrical distribution of chances to select and employ speech acts, when there is an effective equality of chances to assume dialogue roles. In particular, all participants must have the same chance to initiate and perpetuate discourse, to put forward, call into question, and give reasons for or against statements, explanations, interpretations, and justifications. Furthermore, they must have the same chance to express attitudes, feelings, intentions and the like, and to command, to oppose, to permit, and to forbid, etc. These last requirements refer directly to the organization of interaction, since the freeing of discourse from the constraints of action is only possible in the context of pure interaction. In other words, the conditions of the ideal speech situation must insure not only unlimited discussion but also discussion which is free from all constraints of domination, whether their source be conscious strategic behavior or communication barriers secured in ideology and neurosis. Thus, the conditions for ideal discourse are connected with conditions for an ideal form of life; they include linguistic conceptualizations of the traditional ideas of freedom and justice. “Truth,” therefore, cannot be analyzed independently of “freedom” and “justice.”
It is apparent that the conditions of actual speech are rarely, if ever, those of the ideal speech situation. But this does not of itself make illegitimate the ideal—that can be more or less adequately approximated in actual speech situations—which can serve as a guide for the institutionalization of discourse or the critique of systematically distorted communication. If in every discussion we assume that we are really discussing, that we can come to a genuine consensus, and that we are in a position to distinguish a genuirte from an illusory consensus; if, furthermore, the ideal speech situation represents those conditions under which a consensus is genuine or rationally motivated; and if, nevertheless, we cannot in any actual discussion empirically determine with certainty whether the conditions of the ideal speech situation do obtain, then:
the ideal speech situation is neither an empirical phenomenon nor simply a construct, but a reciprocal supposition [Unterstellung] unavoidable in discourse. This supposition can, but need not be, counterfactual; but even when counterfactual it is a fiction that is operatively effective in communication. I would therefore prefer to speak of an anticipation of an ideal speech situation…. This anticipation alone is the warrant that permits us to join to an actually attained consensus the claim of a rational consensus. At the same time it is a critical standard against which every actually realized consensus can be called into question and tested.20
Whether this anticipated form of communication, this anticipated form of life, is simply a delusion, or whether the empirical conditions for even its approximate attainment can be practically realized is a question that does not admit of an a priori answer. “The fundamental norms of rational speech that are built into universal pragmatics contain, from this point of view, a practical hypothesis.” 21
The theory of communicative competence is a sweeping attempt to reconceptualize the philosophical foundations of the theory-practice problematic. While rejecting a return to the ontological and epistemological views of classical philosophy, Habermas seeks (in opposition to positivism) to reformulate and defend some of its central theses: the inseparability of truth and goodness, of facts and values, of theory and practice. With these theses stands or falls the attempt to provide philosophical foundations for a critical theory of society, for a social theory designed with a practical intention: the self-emancipation of men from the constraints of unnecessary domination in all its forms. His argument is, simply, that the emancipated form of life that is the goal of critical theory is inherent in the notion of truth: it is anticipated in every act of communication.
II. In the first of his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx proclaimed the necessity of going beyond both traditional materialism and idealism:
The chief defect of all previous materialism (including Feuerbach’s) is that the object, actuality, sensuousness is conceived only in the form of the object or perception, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence in opposition to materialism the active side was developed by idealism—but only abstractly since idealism naturally does not know actual, sensuous activity as such.22
In distinguishing his own, materialistically conceived, form of critique from the philosophical modes of critique developed by Hegel and the Left Hegelians, Marx interprets this “sensuous human activity,” this “practice,” as labor; material production becomes the basic paradigm for his analysis of human action. Of course, this tendency to reduce praxis to techné, to instrumental action, is offset somewhat by Marx’s conception of labor as social labor: the productive activity of man takes place in a symbolically mediated institutional setting; productive forces are applied to nature only within definite relations of production. Nevertheless, material production and social interaction are not viewed as two irreducible dimensions of human practice. Instead, the latter is incorporated into the former. Thus, for Marx, the reproduction of the human species takes place primarily in the dimension of the reproduction of the material conditions of life. In capitalist society, in particular, all social phenomena must ultimately be explained in terms of their material, that is, economic, basis. This reductivist line of thought is clearly expressed in the famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which corresponds definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.23
It is equally clear, however, that Marx’s own critique of political economy transcends the narrow categorial framework he articulated. His empirical analyses incorporate in an essential way the institutional framework, the structure of symbolic interaction and the role of cultural tradition. To this dimension belong the configurations of consciousness that Marx calls ideology, as well as their reflective critique—the formation of class consciousness and its expression in revolutionary practice. His theory is essentially a “critical” theory. It is at one and the same time an analysis of the crisis-ridden dynamics of the capitalist economy and a critique of ideology, an empirical theory and the critical consciousness of revolutionary practice. It becomes practical only by awakening class consciousness through initiating a process of self-understanding. On this reading—which is essentially that of Habermas—there is a basic unresolved tension in Marx between the reductivism of his categorial framework and the dialectical character of his concrete social inquiry.24
From the time of the Second International, this ambiguity was resolved in “official” Marxism by an almost exclusive focus on the reductivist, determinist side of Marx’s thought. Dialectical materialism became a general ontology of nature, history, and thought, enabling its practitioners to discover their laws of development. The discovery of the laws of motion of society and history would permit prediction and control of social processes. In this form, “DiaMat” could assume the ideological function of legitimating party politics and technocratic social management. Ideology, as a particular case of the general dependence of thought on matter, forfeited the internal relation to critique and revolution that it held for Marx. The critique of political economy, viewed as a deterministic science of the “iron laws” of the development and inevitable downfall of capitalism, could legitimate the sundering of “revolutionary practice” from the formation of class consciousness—in a variety of forms from “vanguard” activism to opportunistic quietism.
While presupposing the essential correctness of Marx’s critique of political economy, the early publications of the Frankfurt School already questioned the assumption that the internal development of capitalism would not only create the objective conditions for a classless society, but the subjective conditions for the self-emancipation of the proletariat as well. There was a recognized need to supply the “missing link” between Marx’s critique of political economy and his theory of revolution through systematically incorporating the socio-cultural dimension neglected by “mechanical” Marxism. Post-World War I capitalism was no longer liberal capitalism. The growth of the interventionist state, the progressive rationalization and bureaucratization of societal institutions, the increasing interdependence of science and technology, and the “reification” of consciousness were aspects of a new social formation whose analysis required a further development of Marx’s thought.
In their major collaborative effort of the post-emigration years, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno clearly articulated the revision of the categorial framework of historical materialism that had been underway since Lukacs. For Marx, natural science was the paradigm of a mode of thinking that constantly proved its truth in practice; it was philosophy that had to be overcome. For Horkheimer and Adorno, it was the contrary: the critique of scientism was the precondition of restoring Marxist theory as critique. Philosophical idealism, in which the ideals of reason and freedom were kept alive—albeit in a distorted form—was replaced by positivistic materialism as the chief enemy of critical thought. The critique of instrumental reason became the fundamental task of critical social theory. For in creating the objective possibility of a truly free society, the progressive mastery of nature through science and technology simultaneously transformed the potential subjects of emancipation. The reification of consciousness was the price paid for the progressive liberation from material necessity. Technocratic consciousness, by eliminating the distinction between the technical and the practical, represented “the repression of ethics as such as a category of life.” 25 It could only be overcome, therefore, through a restoration of the dimension of the practical as such. For Horkheimer and Adorno (and Marcuse), human emancipation could be conceived only as a radical break with “instrumental” or “one-dimensional” thought.
In focusing on the process of rationalization and the attendant manifestations of instrumental rationality, they succeeded in restoring the socio-cultural component of dialectical social theory. But, especially in the post-emigration years, this success was accompanied by a marked weakening of the links to the critique of political economy. In the final analysis, the early Frankfurt School did not so much integrate the psychological, social, and cultural dimensions into Marxist political-economic thought as replace the latter with the former. In contrast to the central position that the category of labor occupied in Marx’s work, Horkheimer felt that “to make labor a transcendent category of human activity is an ascetic ideology.” 26 And Adorno is reported as saying that Marx wanted to turn the whole world into a giant workhouse.27 What began as a conscious attempt to supplement a previously too exclusive concern with the economic basis by means of analysis of the cultural superstructure ended in a version of pessimistic Kulturkritik.
In his reformulation of the basic assumptions of historical materialism, Habermas explicitly introduces a categorial distinction that he feels was implicit in Marx’s work: the distinction between labor and interaction.28 Marx’s concept of “sensuous human activity” is analyzed into two components that, while analytically distinguishable and mutually irreducible, are interdependent in actual social practice: instrumental or purposive-rational [zweckrationale] action and communicative action or social interaction. Social systems expand their control over outer nature with the help of forces of production. For this they require technically utilizable knowledge incorporating empirical assumptions with a claim to truth. “Inner nature” is adapted to society with the help of normative structures in which needs are interpreted and actions are prohibited, licensed or enjoined. This transpires in the medium of norms that have need of justification. According to Habermas, it is only on the basis of the distinction between work according to technical rules and interaction according to valid norms that we can reconstruct the development of the human species as a historical process of technological and—interdependently—institutional and cultural development. Political emancipation cannot be identified with technical progress. While rationalization in the dimension of instrumental action signifies the growth of productive forces and extension of technological control, rationalization in the dimension of social interaction signifies the extension of communication free from domination.
Habermas develops this distinction at a number of levels. At a “quasi-transcendental” level, the theory of cognitive [erkenntnisleitenden] interests distinguishes the technical interest in prediction and control of objectified processes from the practical interest in the maintenance of distortion-free communication.29 At a methodological level, Habermas argues for a logical distinction among empirical-analytic sciences that aim at technically exploitable nomological knowledge, historical-hermeneutic sciences that aim at the preservation and expansion of a mutual understanding capable of orienting action, and the critical sciences—such as psychoanalysis and critique of ideology—that aim at self-reflective emancipation from systematic distortions of communication.30 At the sociological level, subsystems of purposive-rational action are distinguished from the institutional framework in which they are embedded.31 And at the level of social evolution, the growth in productive forces and technological control is distinguished from the extension of communication free from domination.
In drawing these analytic distinctions, Habermas’ intention is clearly to overcome the reductivism of Marx’s categorial framework without “falling behind” Marx into the kind of left-Hegelianism, unscientific utopianism, pessimistic Kulturkritik,