The Theory of Communicative Action: Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society

Contents

Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society

Translator’s Introduction

Author’s Preface

I. Introduction: Approaches to the Problem of Rationality

1. “Rationality”—A Preliminary Specification

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

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

4. The Problem of Understanding Meaning in the Social Sciences

II. Max Weber’s Theory of Rationalization

1. Occidental Rationalism

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

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

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

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

IV. From Lukacs to Adorno, Rationalization as Reification

1. Max Weber in the Tradition of Western Marxism

2. The Critique of Instrumental Reason

Notes

Index

For Ute Habermas-Wesselhoeft

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

First published in paperback 1986.

Reprinted 1991, 1995, 1997, 2004

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Translator’s Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

I

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

But the history of ideas is full of surprises; and twentieth-century philosophy bore witness to the continued power of the Cartesian model, in a variety of forms—from Edmund Husserl’s openly Cartesian phenomenology to the Cartesianism lying just below the surface of logical empiricism. More recently, however, the critique of this model has been vigorously renewed. Thus we are said to be living in a “post-Heideggerian,” “post-Wittgensteinian,” “poststructuralist” age. The spirit has once again been desublimated. Subjectivity has been shown to be “infiltrated with the world” in such a way that “otherness is carried to the very heart of selfhood.”² This “twilight of subjectivity” is not merely an intraphilosophic affair, a reminder to philosophers that they are not after all the high priests of culture.³ It is the theoretical center of the stream of antimodernist thought I mentioned at the outset; thus it has implications that go well beyond the confines of academic philosophy. The critique of “rootless rationalism” goes hand in hand with an unmasking of the anthropocentric, egoistic, possessive, and domineering aspects of Western individualism; together they frequently serve as a prologue to the rejection of central concepts of European humanism. We cannot ignore the question of whether, in the absence of an archimedean point outside the world, anything can be salvaged from these emphatic concepts and the universalist claims connected with them. And if the subject is desublimated, can we really expect much more from general social “theory” than a historicist contemplation of the variety of forms of life in the musée imaginaire of the past; or a hermeneutic dialogue with other cultures and epochs about the common concerns of human life; or, perhaps, a genealogical unmasking of any pretense to universal validity?

Habermas’s response to the decline of the paradigm of consciousness is an explicit shift to the paradigm of language—not to language as a syntactic or semantic system, but to language-in-use or speech. Thus he develops the categorial framework and normative foundations of his social theory in the form of a general theory of communicative action. “If we assume that the human species maintains itself through the socially coordinated activities of its members and that this coordination is established through communication—and in certain spheres of life, through communication aimed at reaching agreement—then the reproduction of the species also requires satisfying the conditions of a rationality inherent in communicative action” (1:397).

In the atomistic perspective of much of modern thought, the subject stands over against a world of objects to which it has two basic relations: representation and action. Accordingly, the type of rationality associated with this model is the “cognitive-instrumental” rationality of a subject capable of gaining knowledge about a contingent environment and putting it to effective use in intelligently adapting to and manipulating that environment. By stressing the fact that the goal-directed actions of different individuals are socially coordinated, Habermas shifts our attention to the broader context of individual purposive actions, to the structures of social interaction in which teleological actions are located.

The communicative model of action does not equate action with communication. Language is a means of communication which serves mutual understanding, whereas actors, in coming to an understanding with one another so as to coordinate their actions, pursue their particular aims… Concepts of social action are distinguished by how they specify this coordination among the goal-directed actions of different participants—as the interlacing of egocentric calculations of utility, as a socially integrating consensus about norms and values instilled through cultural tradition and socialization, or as reaching understanding in the sense of a cooperative process of interpretation…The interpretive accomplishments on which cooperative processes [of situation definition] are based represent the mechanism for coordinating action; communicative action is not exhausted by the act of reaching understanding…(1:101)

This shift of attention from the teleological to the communicative dimension of social action makes an analysis of language, as the basic medium of communication, essential to laying the foundations of social theory. Drawing on linguistics and the philosophy of language, as well as on cognitive developmental psychology, Habermas sets forth (especially in Chapters I and III) the basic ideas of his theory of communicative competence. As this was developed in earlier writings and has already been widely discussed,⁴ we can limit ourselves here to the aspects that are directly relevant to the theory of social action.

Habermas argues that our ability to communicate has a universal core—basic structures and fundamental rules that all subjects master in learning to speak a language. Communicative competence is not just a matter of being able to produce grammatical sentences. In speaking we relate to the world about us, to other subjects, to our own intentions, feelings, and desires. In each of these dimensions we are constantly making claims, even if usually only implicitly, concerning the validity of what we are saying, implying, or presupposing—claims, for instance, regarding the truth of what we say in relation to the objective world; or claims concerning the rightness, appropriateness, or legitimacy of our speech acts in relation to the shared values and norms of our social lifeworld; or claims to sincerity or authenticity in regard to the manifest expressions of our intentions and feelings. Naturally, claims of these sorts can be contested and criticized, defended and revised. There are any number of ways of settling disputed claims—for example, by appeal to authority, to tradition or to brute force. One way, the giving of reasons-for and reasons-against has traditionally been regarded as fundamental to the idea of rationality. And it is, in fact, to the experience of achieving mutual understanding in communication that is free from coercion that Habermas looks in developing his idea of rationality.

The key to his notion of reaching understanding (Verständigung) is the possibility of using reasons or grounds to gain intersubjective recognition for criticizable validity claims.⁵ This possibility exists in each of the three dimensions mentioned above. It is not only claims to propositional truth and to the effectiveness of means for attaining ends that can be criticized and defended with reasons; the claim that an action is right or appropriate in relation to a certain normative context, or that such a context deserves to be recognized as legitimate, can also be discussed in this way; as can the claim that an utterance is a sincere or authentic expression of one’s own subjective experiences. That is, in each of these dimensions it is possible to reach agreement about disputed claims by way of argument and insight and without recourse to force other than that of reasons or grounds. In each dimension there exists a “reflective medium” for dealing with problematic validity claims—that is, modes of argumentation or critique that enable us to thematize contested validity claims and to attempt to vindicate or criticize them. “The rationality proper to the communicative practice of everyday life points to the practice of argumentation as a court of appeal that makes it possible to continue communicative action with other means when disagreement can no longer be headed off by everyday routines and yet is not to be settled by the direct or strategic use of force” (1:17–18).

Because validity claims can be criticized, there is a possibility of identifying and correcting mistakes, that is, of learning from them. If this is carried through at a reflective level, forms of argumentation take shape which may be transmitted and developed within a cultural tradition and even embodied in specific cultural institutions. Thus, for instance, the scientific enterprise, the legal system, and the institutions for producing, disseminating, and criticizing art represent enduring possibilities of hypothetically examining the truth of statements, the rightness of actions and norms, or the authenticity of expressions, and of productively assimilating our negative experiences in these dimensions. Through this connection with cultural traditions and social institutions the concept of communicative action becomes serviceable for social theory.

At the same time, the turn to the sociocultural matrix of individual action orientations brings Habermas face to face with the cultural and historical variability of lifeworld structures. If the variety of worldviews and forms of life entails an irreducible plurality of standards of rationality, then the concept of communicative rationality could not claim universal significance and a theory of society constructed upon it would be limited from the start to a particular perspective. Habermas deals with this problem from a number of different angles. In section 2 of Chapter I he highlights the types of structural differences in question through a comparison of “mythical and modern ways of understanding the world.” Then, in a careful reconstruction of the recent rationality debates among English anthropologists and philosophers, he argues that the case for relativism is by no means conclusive. In the end, the claim that the concept of communicative rationality has universal significance can be decided only by the empirical-theoretical fruitfulness of the research programs based on it—in different domains from the construction of a formal pragmatics of language and the reconstruction of the ontogenesis of communicative competence to the development of theories of anthropogenesis and social evolution.⁶

This last line of inquiry is one of Habermas’s principal preoccupations in the present work, particularly in the form of the question, whether and in what respects modernization can be viewed as rationalization. This question has dominated concept and theory formation in modern sociology: “Sociology arose as the theory of bourgeois society; to it fell the task of explaining the course of the capitalist modernization of traditional societies and its anomic side effects. This problem…was the reference point from which sociology worked up its foundations as well. On a metatheoretical level, it chose basic concepts [of action theory] that were tailored to the growth of rationality in the modern lifeworld…On a methodological level, the problem of gaining access to the object domain of symbolic objects through understanding (Verstehen) was dealt with accordingly: Understanding rational action orientations became the reference point for understanding all action orientations… Finally, [these concerns] were connected with the empirical question, whether and in what respects the modernization of society can be described from the standpoint of cultural and societal rationalization” (1:5-6).

Habermas wants to argue that this is no historical accident, that any sociology that aspires to a general theory of society has to confront the rationality problematic on all three levels. His own contributions on the meta- or action-theoretical level can be found here in Chapters I and III; they issue in a theory of communicative action that is further developed in Chapters V (Mead and Durkheim) and VI (Lifeworld and System) of Volume 2, and is elaborated and shaded throughout the book. The methodology of Sinnverstehen and its relation to the rationality of action is the explicit theme of section 4 of Chapter I; it is the implicit theme of the discussion of the internal relation between meaning and validity in Chapter III; and it turns up repeatedly in the reconstruction of classical approaches to social inquiry. Finally, the question of how to comprehend modernity, and in particular the capitalist modernization of society, dominates the work as a whole. It is the axis around which the discussions of Weber and Western Marxism turn in this volume, the motivation behind the lifeworld/system discussion in Volume 2, and the central theme of the concluding chapter, in which the different lines of argument converge on a theory of modernity. I shall consider his treatment of this last question in part II below; but for now, there are several additional aspects of his views on metatheory and methodology that should be mentioned.

In section 3 of Chapter I Habermas examines four influential concepts of social action—teleological, normatively regulated, dramaturgical, and communicative action—with an eye to their presuppositions and implications regarding rationality. He argues that only the last of these fully incorporates language as a medium for reaching understanding in the negotiation of common definitions of situations: “A definition of the situation establishes an order… A situation definition by another party that prima facie diverges from one’s own presents a problem of a peculiar sort; for in cooperative processes of interpretation no participant has a monopoly on correct interpretation. For both parties the interpretive task consists in incorporating the other’s interpretation of the situation into one’s own in such a way that…the divergent situation definitions can be brought to coincide sufficiently” (1:100). In section 4 of the same chapter Habermas goes on to develop his principal point concerning the logic of Verstehen. In the model of communicative action, social actors are themselves outfitted with the same interpretive capacities as social-scientific interpreters; thus the latter cannot claim for themselves the status of neutral, extramundane observers in their definitions of actors’ situations. They are, whether consciously or not, virtual participants whose only plausible claim to objectivity derives from the reflective quality of their participation. But this reflexivity is in principle open to the actual participants as well; it does not exempt the social scientist from having to take a position—however reflective and however implicit—on the validity claims relevant to the definition of the situation.

In order to understand an utterance in the paradigm case of a speech act oriented to reaching understanding, the interpreter has to be familiar with the conditions of its validity; he has to know under what conditions the validity claim linked with it is acceptable or would have to be acknowledged by a hearer. But where could the interpreter obtain this knowledge if not from the context of the observed communication or from comparable contexts?… Thus the interpreter cannot become clear about the semantic content of an expression independently of the action contexts in which participants react to the expression with a “yes” or “no” or an abstention. And he does not understand these yes/no positions if he cannot make clear to himself the implicit reasons that move the participants to take the positions they do… But if, in order to understand an expression, the interpreter must bring to mind the reasons with which a speaker would, if necessary and under suitable conditions, defend its validity, he is himself drawn into the process of assessing validity claims. For reasons are of such a nature that they cannot be described in the attitude of a third person… One can understand reasons only to the extent that one understands why they are or are not sound (1:115-16).

This very strong claim, which supports the methodological thesis that “communicative action requires an interpretation that is rational in approach,” is grounded at another level in Chapter III. There Habermas attempts to expand the truth-conditional approach to semantics into a general theory of the internal relationships between meaning and validity. This involves shifting the level of analysis from semantics to pragmatics, extending the concept of validity to include types of claims other than truth, identifying the validity conditions for the different types of claims, and establishing that, in these other cases as well, the meaning of an utterance is inherently connected with the conditions for redeeming the validity claims raised by it. If these methodological and language-theoretical arguments for the inseparability of meaning, intelligibility, and understanding from validity, rationality, and assessment could be sustained, Habermas would have gone a long way toward setting the foundations of a critical social theory.

In any case, because the object domain of social inquiry is symbolically prestructured, antecedently constituted by the interpretive activities of its members, the social scientist can gain access to social objects only via Sinnverstehen or interpretive understanding—be these “objects” social actions themselves, their sedimentations in texts, traditions, cultural artifacts and the like, or such organized configurations as institutions, systems, and structures. On the other hand, social reality is not exhausted by the ideas embodied in it; and these ideas change in response to forces and factors that cannot be explained in terms of inner logic. It is with this duality in mind that Weber, for instance, adopted his two-sided approach to the study of modernization: “from above,” that is, with a view to the ideas embodied in cultural value spheres, in personality structures, and in social institutions; and “from below,” with a view to the empirical factors that condition this embodiment—such as the interests and conflicts of interest of relevant social groups, the organization of authority and the struggle for political power, the process and problems of economic reproduction, and so on.

Habermas is also interested in developing an approach to social research that combines “internalist” and “externalist” perspectives. This methodological concern is in fact one of the central motifs of the lifeworld/system discussion that occupies so much of Volume 2. We shall be considering that discussion below; at present it is important to note that the internalist side of Habermas’s two-level approach turns essentially on the related notions of developmental logic and learning process. As he did earlier in Communication and the Evolution of Society, he argues here that changes in social structure cannot be comprehended solely from the outside, in terms of external, contingent factors; there are features of social evolution that must be understood as advances in different types of “knowledge.” While learning processes “have to be explained with the help of empirical mechanisms,” they are “conceived at the same time as problem solutions” that can be internally reconstructed, that is, “insightfully recapitulated from the perspective of participants” (1:66-67). It is, in fact, this combination of conceptual and empirical analysis that distinguishes the disciplines which now lay claim to the heritage of philosophy as a theory of rationality.

Philosophical thought that has surrendered the relation to totality loses its self-sufficiency. The goal of formally analyzing the conditions of rationality can be connected neither with ontological hopes… nor with transcendental-philosophical hopes. All attempts at discovering ultimate foundations, in which the intentions of First Philosophy live on, have broken down. In this situation, the way is opening up to a new constellation of philosophy and the sciences. As can be seen [for example] in the history and philosophy of science, formal explications of the conditions of rationality and empirical analysis of the embodiment and historical development of rationality structures mesh in a peculiar way. Theories of modern empirical science… make a normative and universalist claim… that can be tested against the evidence of counterexamples; and it can hold up in the end only if reconstructive theory proves itself capable of distilling out internal aspects of the history of science and, in conjunction with empirical analysis, systematically explaining the actual, narratively documented history of science… Cognitive developmental psychology provides [another] example of this. In the tradition of Piaget, cognitive development in the narrower sense, as well as socio-cognitive and moral development, are conceptualized as internally reconstructible sequences of stages of competences (1:2-3).⁷

Such rationally reconstructive enterprises serve Habermas as models for the type of cooperation between conceptual and empirical analysis that is required to develop an adequate theory of society. Combining the “philosophical” with the “scientific,” they eschew the apriorism of traditional philosophy and advance proposals that, however universal their claims, retain the hypothetical character of conjectures open to empirical refutation. It is thus that he seeks to renew the original program of critical theory (developed in the 1930s), which Horkheimer envisioned as a form of critical social research integrating philosophy and the various human sciences in an “interdisciplinary materialism.”⁸ As we shall soon see, Habermas’s relation to critical theory as it developed in the 1940s, epitomized by Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, is decidedly more ambivalent.

II

The Enlightenment’s belief in progress rested on an idea of reason modeled after Newtonian physics, which, with its reliable method and secure growth, was thought to provide a paradigm for knowledge in general. The impact of the advance of science on society as a whole was not envisioned in the first instance as an expansion of productive forces and a refinement of administrative techniques but in terms of its effect on the cultural context of life. In particular, the belief—for us, today, rather implausible—that progress in science was necessarily accompanied by progress in morality, was based not only on an assimilation of the logics of theoretical and practical questions but also on the historical experience of the powerful reverberations of early modern science in the spheres of religion, morals, and politics. The cultural rationalization emanating from the diffusion of scientific knowledge and its emancipatory effect on traditional habits of thought—the progressive eradication of inherited “superstitions, prejudices, errors”—formed the center of an encompassing rationalization of social life, which included a transformation of political and economic structures as well. The embodiment of reason in the political realm meant the establishment of a republican form of government with guarantees of civil liberties and an institutionally secured public sphere, so that political power could be rationalized through the medium of public discussion to reflect the general will and common interest. On the other hand, the embodiment of reason in the economic sphere meant the establishment of a social space for the free pursuit of one’s own self-interest, so far as it was compatible with a like pursuit by all other individuals. The global result of this would be a continuous increase in the general wealth of society and a growing equality of the shares falling to its individual members.

The first classical social theorist Habermas discusses in this book, Max Weber, directly challenged all these tenets of the Enlightenment faith in reason and progress in ways that remain relevant for us today. In his view, the rationality that defines modernity is at bottom a Zweckrationalität, a purposive or means/ends rationality, the inherent aim of which is the mastery of the world in the service of human interests. As a consequence, the growth and spread of reason does not, as Enlightenment thinkers supposed it would, furnish a new, nonillusory center of meaning to modern culture. It does, to be sure, gradually dissolve traditional superstitions, prejudices and errors; but this “disenchantment of the world,” as Weber calls it, does not replace traditional religious worldviews with anything that could fulfill the functions of, for instance, giving meaning and unity to life. Rather, the disenchanted world is stripped of all ethical meaning; it is devalued and objectified as the material and setting for purposive-rational pursuit of interests. The gain in control is paid for with a loss of meaning. And the control that we gain is itself value-neutral—an instrumental potential that can be harnessed from any one of an unlimited number of value perspectives. This subjectivization of “ultimate” ends means that the unity of the world has fallen to pieces. In place of the one God or the unitary ground of being, we have an irreducible plurality of competing, often irreconcilable values, and as Weber says, “over these gods and their struggles it is fate, and certainly not any “science,“ that holds sway” (1:246-47).

Because in the final analysis values cannot be rationally grounded but only chosen, there are at the core of life rationally unjustifiable commitments through which we give the disenchanted world meaning and unity. Correspondingly, the sphere of politics has to be understood as a sphere of decision and power and not of reason: Legitimacy is not a question of rational justification but of de facto acceptance of an order of authority by those subject to it;⁹ and law is not an expression of rational will but a product of enactment by duly constituted authorities according to established procedures. Weber’s views on economy and society are equally antithetical to Enlightenment hopes regarding the institutionalization of reason. The progress of societal rationalization was indeed well along by the end of the nineteenth century; but what this progress turned out to be, according to Weber, was the ascendency of purposive rationality, of technique and calculation, of organization and administration. The triumph of reason brings with it not a reign of freedom but the dominion of impersonal economic forces and bureaucratically organized administrations—a “vast and mighty cosmos” that “determines with irresistible force the lifestyles of all the individuals who are born into (it)” (1:247). Nor would the advent of socialism improve the situation; it would, says Weber, merely mean the final and complete victory of bureaucracy. The realization of reason that the eighteenth-century philosophers envisioned as a Kingdom of God on earth has turned out to be an “iron cage” in which we are henceforth condemned to live. Disenchantment and rationalization are irreversible, as are the loss of meaning and the loss of freedom that accompany them.

The undeniable power of this analysis has, of course, often been harnessed for conservative purposes. What interests Habermas, however, is the immediate and profound impact it had on Western Marxism from Lukacs onwards. Writing in the early 1940s, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno surrendered, in effect, to the force of Weber’s diagnosis. The rise of fascism in Europe, with the complicity of some segments of the working class; the degeneration of socialism into Stalinism, with its bloody suppression of any dissent from party rule; and the apparently seamless integration of the American populace, including the working class, into what appeared to be a thoroughly commodified and totally administered society—left them, they felt, no realistic basis for hope. In analyzing this hopeless situation, Horkheimer and Adorno keyed in on a factor that Weber had singled out: the spread of formal, means/ends rationality, which they called instrumental reason. In doing so, they completely revised Marx’s positive evaluation of scientific-technological progress. What for him represented an unambiguously emancipatory potential, for them was the core of a domination generalized to all spheres of life. Subjects who, in Horkheimer’s words, “have to form themselves, body and soul, in relation to the technical apparatus” are no longer potential subjects of revolution (1:353). This was empirically borne out by the collapse of the revolutionary labor movement in all industrial societies and by the disappearance of the proletariat into the pores of consumer society. Thus the scientific-technological progress that Marx connected with the unleashing of productive forces and the overthrow of capitalism had for Horkheimer and Adorno the ironic effect of immobilizing the very subjective forces that were supposed to accomplish this overthrow. As Horkheimer put it, “All life today tends to be increasingly subjected to rationalization and planning …The individual’s self-preservation presupposes his adjustment to the requirements for the preservation of the system” (1:353). Given this pessimistic diagnosis, it is not surprising that they saw little hope of changing things. Critical theory became resignative, contemplative. It could, at best, disclose the unreason at the heart of what passes for reason, without offering any positive account of its own.

In Habermas’s view, the dead end in which critical theory thus found itself is by no means unavoidable. To avoid it requires, however, a fundamental shift of paradigm away from the philosophy of consciousness, in which the critique of rationalization as reification from Lukacs to Adorno remained rooted in spite of itself. There are two steps to this shift: first a move from the (monological) teleological concept of action to the concepts of communicative action and lifeworld; and second a joining of the lifeworld perspective to that of systems theory. In Chapter V, which opens Volume 2, Habermas approaches these tasks through a consideration of the work of George Herbert Mead and Emile Durkheim. In the former he finds the essential elements of a communications-theoretic reformulation of social-action theory; in the latter, the lineaments of a theory that links social integration with system integration.

There is no need here for a detailed summary of his splendid discussion of Mead. In essence, he uses the theory of communication developed in Volume 1 to reconstruct Mead’s account of the conceptual or logical genesis of self and society; and this reconstruction in turn makes that theory serviceable for sociological analysis. Along the way, one finds another twist in the critique of strictly individualistic models of social action. Habermas argues that individuation processes are simultaneously socialization processes (and conversely), that motivations and repertoires of behavior are symbolically restructured in the course of identity formation, that individual intentions and interests, desires and feelings are not essentially private but tied to language and culture and thus inherently susceptible of interpretation, discussion and change. At the end, one finds an attempt to explicate the ideas of freedom and reconciliation that Adorno alluded to without being able to elaborate in a categorial framework still tied to the philosophy of the subject. The explication draws heavily upon the theory of communicative rationality, particularly on the ideas of a rationally binding force that accrues to illocutionary acts by virtue of their internal connection with reasons, and the corresponding possibility of intersubjective recognition based on insight rather than on external force. Habermas maintains that this Utopian perspective is ingrained in the very conditions of the communicative sociation of individuals, is built into the linguistic medium of the reproduction of the species. He supports this thesis by reconstructing Mead’s notion of universal discourse. “Reconciliation” is fleshed out in terms of an inter-subjectivity based on mutual understanding and free recognition; “freedom” in terms of an identity that takes shape within the structures of such an intact intersubjectivity—sociation without repression.¹⁰ This approach aims to integrate the universalism of ethical notions of rational self-determination (e.g., Kant’s categorical imperative) with the particularism of psychological notions of self-realization.

The idea [of universal discourse] actually contains two Utopian projections… Imagine individuals being socialized as members of such an ideal community; they would be acquiring identities with two complementary aspects: the universal and the particular. On the one hand… they would learn to orient themselves within a universalistic framework, that is, to act autonomously [in Kant’s sense]; on the other hand, they would learn to use this autonomy—which makes them equal to every other morally acting subject—in order to develop themselves in their subjectivity and uniqueness. Mead ascribes both autonomy and the power of spontaneous self-development to persons who, as participants in universal discourse, free themselves from the fetters of habitual concrete forms of life. Membership in such an ideal community is, in Hegel’s terms, constitutive for both the I as universal and the I as individual (2:148).

To put this another way, Habermas is after a notion of ego identity that centers around the ability to realize oneself under conditions of communicatively shared intersubjectivity. The moment of universality requires that actors maintain a reflective relation to their own affective and practical natures, that is, that they act in a self-critical attitude.¹¹

For all its groundbreaking insights, Mead’s account of the genesis of behavior mediated by language and guided by norms suffers from several major deficiencies. He reconstructs the development of role behavior from the ontogenetic perspective of the growing child; particularly in his account of the transition to the final stage, he neglects the phylogenetic line of questioning, presupposing on the part of the adults the level of role behavior to be acquired by the child. The crucial mechanism in this transition then is the child’s “taking the attitude of the generalized other” toward itself. What remains inadequately accounted for is precisely the genesis of this generalized other. Habermas undertakes to complete the picture by exploiting the affinities with Durkheim’s idea of a collective consciousness that is constitutive for group identity. But even if Mead’s reconstructive account is filled out in this way, it can be only part of the explanation: developmental logic has to be supplemented by developmental dynamics. Mead does not give adequate consideration to the external factors that influence the actual course of development; he does not give the functional aspects equal play with the structural aspects; he generally neglects the constraints that issue from the material reproduction of society and reach right into the action orientations of sociated individuals. In attempting to make good this deficiency, Habermas looks first to Durkheim’s account of how the forms of social solidarity change with the division of labor and then to Talcott Parsons’ theory of the social system.

In his study of “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life” Durkheim suggests that the moral authority of social norms has its roots in the sacred. The oldest sacred symbols express a normative consensus that is established and regenerated in ritual practice. This ritually secured and symbolically mediated normative consensus is the archaic core of collective identity—in Mead’s terms, of the generalized other. Accordingly, the task of explaining the phylogenesis of the generalized other becomes that of providing an account of the structural transformation of that archaic fund of social solidarity formed in the medium of religious symbolism and interpreted in the semantics of the sacred. The guiding thread in Habermas’s account is “the linguistification of the sacred” (die Versprachlichung des Sakralen): “To the degree that the rationality potential ingrained in communicative action is set free, the archaic core of the normative dissolves and gives way to the rationalization of worldviews, the universalization of law and morality, and accelerated processes of individuation. It is upon this evolutionary trend that Mead bases his idealistic projection of a communicatively rationalized society” (2:74-75).

Taking Durkheim’s analysis of the shift from mechanical to organic solidarity as his point of departure, Habermas examines the process whereby social functions originally fulfilled by ritual practice and religious symbolism gradually shift to the domain of communicative action. This disenchantment means a growing sublimation of the spellbinding and terrifying power of the sacred (die bannende Kraft des Heiligen) into the rationally binding/bonding force of criticizable claims to validity (die bindinde Kraft kritisierbarer Geltungsansprüche). In virtue of this “communicative liquifaction” of the basic religious consensus, the structures of action oriented to reaching understanding become more and more effective in cultural reproduction, social integration, and personality formation. The authority of tradition is increasingly open to discursive questioning; the range of applicability of norms expands while the latitude for interpretation and the need for reasoned justification increases; the differentiation of individual identities grows, as does the sphere of personal autonomy. Consequently, the conditions of communicative rationality, of rationally motivated intersubjective recognition of norms, gain greater empirical significance for processes of societal reproduction. “The continuation of traditions, the maintenance of legitimate orders, and the continuity of the life histories of individual persons become more and more dependent on attitudes that point in problematic cases to yes/no positions on criticizable validity claims (2:164). As Habermas sums up, the linguistification of the sacred means a rationalization of the lifeworld.¹²

The idea of the lifeworld is introduced as a necessary complement to the concept of communicative action. It links that concept firmly to the concept of society; and by directing our attention to the “context-forming horizon” of social action, it takes us another step away from the subjectivistic biases of modern social theory. Moreover, it makes it possible to construe rationalization primarily as a transformation of implicitly known, taken-for-granted structures of the lifeworld rather than of explicitly known, conscious orientations of action.

Habermas announces his basic approach to the lifeworld theme in the introductory chapter of Volume 1; but it is only in Volume 2, in the second Zwischenbetrachtung