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Habermas, Jürgen (1929–)
H Habermas, Ju¨rgen (1929–) William Outhwaite, Newcastle University, Tyne and Wear, UK Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract The philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas (1929–), remains deeply influenced by his teenage experiences under and immediately after the Nazi regime. As he has said, the theme of democracy and rational communication runs like a red thread through his work. His critical theory of society is in many ways a continuation of the earlier critical theory developed in the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung.
Habermas site: www.habermasforum.dk/. Jürgen Habermas, born in 1929 and brought up in the small northwest German town of Gummersbach, remains deeply influenced by his teenage experiences under and immediately after the Nazi regime. As he has said, the theme of democracy and communication runs like a red thread through his work. His critical theory of society is in many ways a continuation of the earlier critical theory developed in the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung until 1933, then in exile and again from 1950 in Frankfurt. Unlike the experience of these ‘permanent exiles’ (Jay, 1985), Habermas’s life has been relatively tranquil. He studied in Göttingen, Zürich, and Bonn, where he was drawn into the first of many interventions as a public intellectual by the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s republication without comment, in 1953, of an article of 1935, which included a complimentary reference to the Nazi movement. Invited by Theodor W. Adorno to work as his assistant at the Institut für Sozialforschung, he participated in a survey of student political opinion and began work on his habilitation thesis on the public sphere. Driven out of the Institute by Max Horkheimer, for whom he was too radical, he completed this work at Marburg with the Marxist political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth. After teaching for a time at Heidelberg, he took up Horkheimer’s chair in philosophy and sociology at Frankfurt in 1964. An active supporter but increasingly severe critic of the student movement of the late 1960s, he left Frankfurt in 1971 for a 10-year period as codirector of a research institute in Starnberg, where he completed his Theory of Communicative Action (1981). After 12 years back in Frankfurt, he retired in 1994 to Starnberg, where he has continued an astonishingly productive program of writing and worldwide lecturing. Two of the main ways in which Habermas’s work differs from the earlier critical theory of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse are a more distanced attitude to Marxism and a closer engagement with contemporary sociological research. Philosophy, in Habermas’s conception, serves as a ‘placeholder and interpreter’ for the social sciences: it can raise issues for
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further analysis by the social sciences and it can generalize and reflect on their results (Habermas, [1981]1983).
Methodology: Reconstructive Science Habermas’s methodological critique of positivism in social science went along with his criticism of technocratic politics in the early 1960s, initially in his contribution to the ‘positivism dispute’ (Adorno [1969]1976), and then in major works of the late 1960s. Here, Habermas developed an approach that rejected positivism for its reduction of epistemology to methodology and its failure to appreciate the differences between the natural and social sciences. At the same time, he criticized what he called the ‘hermeneutic claim to universality’ and argued that understanding (Verstehen) needed to be complemented by causal explanation in a model of ‘emancipatory’ social science exemplified by Freudian psychoanalysis and the (originally Marxist) critique of ideology. Theories of this kind combined the two methods in an attempt to identify causal obstacles to the understanding of personal and social problems, which a purely interpretive approach could not capture. However, as he wrote later in a new preface to this work, the problem of Verstehen remains important because mere observation does not give access to a ‘symbolically structured reality’ and because “a participant’s understanding is not as easy to monitor as an observer’s perception” (Habermas, 1982a: 549). Habermas’s critique of positivism went along with a cautious appropriation of elements of the Marxist tradition – the theory of ideology in particular. Critical theory’s response to what Habermas, following Horkheimer, calls ‘traditional theory’ parallels Marx’s critique of idealist philosophy (Habermas, [1968] 1986: 212). In the 1970s, Habermas came to feel that this epistemological approach, a model of knowledge grounded in ‘cognitive interests’ (in prediction and control, as in positivist conceptions of natural science, in understanding, as in hermeneutics,
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and in ‘emancipation’ from unnecessary and unwanted constraints) was too rigid to capture the diversity of social science. He turned instead to seek an alternative foundation for critical social science in an analysis of human communication and, more broadly, ‘communicative action.’ When we make statements about states of affairs in the world, about our feelings or about what we consider right, we commit ourselves to offering grounds for these utterances to someone who might disagree. In this sense, our speech acts, if they are more than just orders or attempts to manipulate others, are oriented toward possible agreement. Communicative action in this sense is distinguished from, and prior to, ‘strategic action,’ as conceptualized in economic and rational choice approaches, ‘normatively regulated action,’ as theorized by Talcott Parsons and other functionalist sociologists, and ‘dramaturgical action’ as in Erving Goffman’s ‘presentation of self in everyday life.’ For Habermas, the teleological and strategic, the normative and the dramaturgical model are ‘one sided’ or ‘simplistic’: “Only the communicative model of action presupposes language as a medium of uncurtailed communication .” (Habermas, 1987a: 142).
The concept of communicative action refers to the interaction of at least two subjects capable of speech and action who establish interpersonal relations (whether by verbal or by extra-verbal means). The actors seek to reach an understanding about the action situation and their plans of action in order to coordinate their actions by way of agreement. (Habermas, 1987a: 86)
The theory of communicative action is not ‘a continuation of the theory of knowledge by other means’ (Habermas, 1987a: xxxix) but a ‘reconstructive science,’ which, like linguistics, explicates the rules and principle underlying our everyday speech and action (Habermas, 1987a: 18–19). As he said in an interview,
I never say that people want to act communicatively, but that they have to. When parents bring up their children, when the living appropriate the transmitted wisdom of preceding generations, when individuals and groups cooperate, [.] they all have to act communicatively. There are elementary social functions that can only be satisfied by means of communicative action. (Habermas, 1994: 111)
Habermas presented this model in his major work in 1981, through a detailed discussion of the history of social thought and methodology and a reflection on the history of Western modernity. Very briefly, the Enlightenment meant rational and critical reflection on tradition, but societal rationalization also brought with it the decoupling of economic and administrative systems from rational scrutiny, with markets and state bureaucracies following their own logics. Habermas had addressed these questions in his early book, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), which examined the emergence in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe of a critical public, reading newspapers and discussing current issues in coffee houses and salons. This was based on “post-traditional legal and moral representations” (Habermas, 1987b: 166).
Max Weber continually points to the paradoxes of rationalization, such as the irrationality of a work ethic pursued to extremes, whereas Habermas poses the more precise question of an ‘imbalanced’ rationalization process, in which “the capitalist economy and modern administration expand at the expense of other domains of life that are structurally disposed to moral-practical and expressive forms of rationality and squeeze them into forms of economic or administrative rationality” (Habermas, 1987b: 183). Here, Habermas refers to Marx and more precisely to Georg Lukács’ concept of reification (Verdinglichung), which blends Weber’s rationalization with Marx’s concept of alienation or estrangement. The theoretical framework, then, is that of Western Marxism, in particular the early critical theory of Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, and others. But where Max Weber, as he sees it, conceives rationalization in cognitive and individualistic terms and Adorno and Horkheimer lapse into an abstract, pessimistic, and ultimately unpromising critique of instrumental reason, Habermas grounds his critique of capitalism in a theory of communication. The specific pathologies of modernity are above all the reduction of the possibilities of communicative action through the ‘colonization of the lifeworld.’ The counterfactual question then became whether we could have had the first form of rationalization without the second; the practical question whether we can reestablish democratic control over these processes. He ended the book with a statement of what he saw as the task of a critical theory of society: “explaining those pathologies of modernity that other approaches pass right by for methodological reasons” (Habermas, 1987b: 378). Here he reformulated some of his earlier analyses of crisis tendencies in advanced capitalist societies. There he had argued that crises of capitalist reproduction were increasingly displaced into rationality crises in state policy, legitimation crises, and crises of individual motivation. He restates this theme in the Theory of Communicative Action: that the “new conflicts” are located less “in domains of material reproduction” and rather “in domains of cultural reproduction, social integration and socialization”(Habermas, 1987b: 349). The basic categories of Habermas’s theory are, then, those of a broadly conceived sociological theory of action, which, however, also incorporates social historical and systemtheoretical, as well as structuralist elements. Although he borrows some concepts from Talcott Parsons (Holmwood, 2009) and often mentions Niklas Luhmann, his conception is closer to those of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens (Outhwaite, 2015). What Habermas (1987b: 553) stresses is that system theories and theories of action ‘isolate and overgeneralize’ aspects of modernity (system and lifeworld, respectively). When, here and elsewhere, he emphasizes the role of language, he does not intend to reduce “social action to the interpretive accomplishments of participants in communication . assimilating action to speech, interaction to conversation” (Habermas, 1987a: 143). This is rather the way in which action is ‘coordinated.’ The one-sidedness of the other action models can also be illustrated sociologically. I can act strategically but do not, I think, always do so; I can act thoroughly dramaturgically, for
Habermas, Ju¨rgen (1929–) example, by ‘power dressing,’ or not bother; I can orient myself to norms or ignore them, like tourists who behave as they would at home. The reference above to mechanisms of action coordination (Habermas, 1987a: 143) shows that Habermas is going beyond a narrowly conceived theory of action. An alternative form of action coordination is through markets and bureaucratic power.
Social Change: Rationalization, Increased Complexity, and the Colonization of the Lifeworld Habermas borrows the concept of the lifeworld from phenomenological philosophy (Husserl) and its sociological adaptation by Alfred Schütz. But for Habermas it has a rather different meaning: the realm of informal social interaction, the informal coordination of action by language and, more broadly, by communicative (and also strategic) action. Relations between friends and family members are usually regulated informally rather than by monetary or legal transactions. Habermas welcomes the explicit formulation and reflexive examination of norms in modernity, and sees the coordination of action through money and markets as a necessary increase in complexity that goes along with societal development. These formal media of nonlinguistic interaction, (I can buy a paper from a machine as well as from a friendly newsagent) only become problematic for Habermas when they intrude damagingly into the normative organization of the lifeworld, leading individuals to think of their whole lives in categories appropriate to the work process (Iser, 2009: 329). Habermas has from time to time distanced himself from this model of colonization, but he would probably still endorse the principle he formulated in relation to the beginnings of the process of social differentiation: money and power “need to be institutionally and motivationally anchored in the lifeworld” (Habermas, [1981]1987b: 342). In 1981, the concept of juridification (‘Verrechtlichung’) had pejorative connotations, whereas with the development of his theory of law in the following decade it appears in a more positive (or, as some have suggested, uncritical) light.
The Democratic Constitutional State In its developed form, Habermas’s critical theory of modern society is no longer framed as a philosophy of history, as in the early 1960s (Theory and Practice), or in epistemological terms (Knowledge and Human Interests), but on the basis of a reconstruction of the implicit rules of communicative action. This yields not only a social theory but also a ‘discourse ethic’ or, more precisely, a discursive foundation for morality, in which to say something is right is to say that all those affected could come to a rational agreement about its rightness. This in turn leads to a theory of law and democracy. Discourse ethics, based on the same reconstructive principles of universal pragmatics as the theory of communicative action, is also reconstructive in that, rather than prescribing a basic moral principle in abstract terms, it derives it from our daily communicative behavior. “The universalization principle can be understood [.] as a reconstruction of the everyday
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intuitions underlying the impartial judgement of moral conflicts of action” (Habermas, 1990: 127). It “stands or falls with two assumptions: (a) that normative claims to validity have cognitive meaning and can be treated like claims to truth and (b) that the justification of norms and commands requires that a real discourse be carried out and therefore cannot occur in a strictly monological form, i.e. in the form of a hypothetical process of argumentation occurring in the individual mind” (Habermas, 1990: 68). As Thomas McCarthy (1978: 326) put it, “The emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradiction to be a universal law to what all can will in agreement to be a universal norm.” Habermas’s moral principle, like the Kantian principle to which McCarthy alluded, is a formal one: the content comes from human communities. The basis for Habermas is what he calls the discourse principle: “Just those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourses” (Habermas, 1996: 107). Habermas draws a distinction between fundamental moral issues and ethical ones, where local conventions play a bigger part. (This is of course somewhat problematic: abortion, for example, may be treated as a moral issue, but abortion legislation was notably more liberal in communist East Germany, where almost all Christians were Protestants, than in West Germany, with a Catholic majority.) The discourse principle can also form the basis for legal norms, where again ethical and pragmatic considerations play a role. This yields, for Habermas, a very close connection between law and democracy: under modern conditions, legal principles can only be justified by democratic procedures. The last sentence of the ‘Tanner Lectures’ of 1986, in which Habermas first presented this theory, reads: “No autonomous law without the realization of democracy” (Habermas, 1986: 279). In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas (1996: xlii) repeats this claim, that “in a sphere of fully secularized politics the Rechtsstaat cannot be achieved and preserved without radical democracy.” This aspect of Habermas’s thought might seem a departure from social science toward normative questions of moral and political philosophy, but Habermas ([1992]1996: xl; 5-8) would resist this suggestion, stressing the parallels between legal and social theory. As he often does, Habermas presents his conception of democracy as a synthesis between two conflicting alternatives: Discourse theory’s ‘deliberative’ model of democracy incorporates elements both of the liberal conception of politics as the mediation of private interests and of the republican conception of a self-organizing ethical community (Habermas, [1992] 1996: 296). Solidarity, a very important concept for Habermas (Dews, 1992), is a driving force of this model of democracy and “. can also hold its own, in the medium of law, against the two other mechanisms of social integration: money and administrative power” (Habermas, [1992]1996: 299). The critical response to Between Facts and Norms has focused on three issues. First, his optimistic conception of law, which has particularly disappointed readers associated with ‘critical legal studies.’ Second, and relatedly, his scaled-down expectations about the prospects for socialism. In his reflections on the anticommunist revolutions of 1989, Habermas, who had always condemned the state socialist dictatorships, declared (Habermas, [1990]1992) that he no longer saw a state-
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controlled economy as realistic and that he now understood socialism as ‘radical democracy’ (Scheuerman, 1999). The third question concerns the way Habermas framed his account of the constitutional state in relation to the national state and failed to address the implications of globalization, which had become a major focus of attention since early in the 1990s. David Held, Mary Kaldor, and others were already developing conceptions of ‘cosmopolitan democracy,’ which Habermas was quick to embrace. In a postscript to his interview volume The Past as Future (Habermas, [1991]1994), he referred to Paul Kennedy’s criticism of the national state: “For some problems, it is too large to operate effectively; for others, it is too small” (Kennedy, 1993: 131). By 1996, he was asking ‘Has the nation-state a future?’; and in The Postnational Constellation, he poses the question (Habermas, 2001: 90) “whether political communities can form a collective identity beyond national borders, and thus whether they can meet the legitimacy conditions for a postnational democracy.” Since then, Habermas has been centrally concerned with the prospects of the European Union, speaking eloquently for federalism, though now with increasing pessimism. “Executive federalism” threatens to develop into “intergovernmental rule by the European Council,” in which “the first transnational democracy would be transformed into an arrangement for exercising a kind of post-democratic, bureaucratic rule. The alternative is to continue the democratic juridification [Verrechtlichung] of the European Union in a consistent way” (Habermas, [2011]2012: 52–53). Habermas’s conception of ‘postnational’ democracy includes a recognition of the persistence of ‘still nationally shaped life projects’; the post-, preface indicates persistence as well as transformation. In the EU context, this means that people “must learn to distinguish between the role of a member of a ‘European people’ and that of a ‘citizen of the Union’” (Habermas, [2011]2012: 29), with this idea of a double mandate as a German or Briton and as a European serving as a guide to further constitutional innovations. Another area of Habermas’s recent work is shaped around what he admits is the controversial concept of a postsecular society (Habermas, 2001a; 2001b; [2005]2008; Habermas and Ratzinger, 2005). Habermas does not mean by this that the Enlightenment critique of religion has run out of steam and that religion is back after all. It is rather that modernization has led to a secularized and ideologically plural society in which religions have to ‘reflexively’ confront other belief systems (Habermas, 2001a: 176f.). Since 2001, Habermas has addressed questions of religious fundamentalism and returned to the theme of multiculturalism that he had analyzed in The Inclusion of the Other (1996), notably in essays on religious tolerance in Between Naturalism and Religion; see also Joas, 2005; Anderson, 2007. (His discussion with Cardinal Ratzinger attracted additional publicity when Ratzinger became Pope; Habermas has stressed that he has not himself become religious.) The term naturalism refers to a further theme of Habermas’s recent work (Habermas, 2003): the implications of new biomedical techniques (genetic engineering, cloning, etc.) for what he calls ‘liberal eugenics’ and more broadly for our ideas of human identity – issues that had of course also
attracted the attention of religious leaders (Habermas (2001b: 9; 2005: 7)). All this raises again the question whether Habermas should be seen more as a philosopher than a sociologist, as his old friend Ralf Dahrendorf suggested. It is probably more useful to see him mediating between philosophy and sociology, just as, in philosophical terms, he moves between Kantian and Hegelian impulses, notably in his ethical philosophy, and in political terms between liberalism, especially in relation to human rights, and socialism.
Critiques and Continuations One of the most striking features of Habermas’s work is his engagement with a vast range of specialized fields, so it is notable that he had something of a blind spot in relation to postmodern theory and to major contemporary figures such as Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida; also to Pierre Bourdieu and perhaps even Niklas Luhmann, despite his substantial exchange with him published in 1971. Others have pointed to affinities between these approaches and Habermas’s. A more serious line of criticism suggests that Habermas’s theories are structurally blind to certain perspectives. Feminist critics, for example (Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Amy Allen, Diana Coole), have pointed to patriarchal assumptions behind his models of the public sphere and politics, and to the fact that modernity may even have reinforced the exploitation and exclusion of women. In other areas of social theory, many critics have suggested that he takes too much from Talcott Parsons, notably his system theory and his stress on norms. Anthony Giddens pointed to this: “it is an error to suppose that communicative action can be examined solely on the level of norms” (Giddens, 1982a: 157–158; see also Giddens, 1982b). Hans Joas (1991) referred more broadly to an ‘unhappy marriage’ of hermeneutics and functionalism and Thomas McCarthy (1991) to the ‘seducements of system theory.’ More recently, John Holmwood has criticized his acceptance of Parsons’ assumption “that a general theoretical framework is a necessary precondition for social enquiry and that it can be grounded in terms of a generalized problem of social order” (Holmwood, 2009: 70). Other critics argue that Habermas has abandoned too much of Marx, again ascribing too much independence to moral and legal principles that Marx saw as ideological. What is clear is that from an early stage in his work, Habermas, partly influenced by Max Weber and early critical theory and partly by system theory, developed an analysis of societal modernization which was quite far from orthodox Marxism (Habermas, 1971: 98). On the other hand, Habermas stressed in an interview in 1984 that . from the outset my theoretical interests have been consistently determined by those philosophical and socio-theoretical problems which arise out of the movement of thought from Kant through to Marx. My intentions were given their stamp by Western Marxism in the mid-fifties, through a coming-to-terms with Lukács, Korsch and Bloch, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and of course with
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Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse. Everything else which I have made my own has only acquired its significance in connection with the project of a renewal of the theory of society grounded in this tradition.
Habermas is not offering an alternative to such a broad theory as historical materialism, but rather a theoretical framework that can be applied (as he does himself in outline) to historical processes such as the development of Western modernity. In other words, the theory of communicative action can only be part of a critical theory of society. What Habermas formulates is a logic of development from processes of mutual understanding in the lifeworld all the way to the democratic constitutional state, but the forms of these developments and countermovements require further exploration. Habermas’s concept of modernity is of course contentious, as Anthony Giddens (1982b: 335) noted in an early review. Since then, postcolonial critics have fundamentally problematized the concept of modernity (Bhambra, 2007; G.R. et al., 2010; see also Wagner, 2012). Habermas, like Max Weber, may seem too fixated on the ‘European miracle,’ but Klaus Eder (2009: 66–68) has defended his evolutionary conception of modernity as a process of communicative sociation and a universalistic culture that happened to emerge at particular times and places. Postcolonial critics might still want to suggest that Habermas and others overemphasize the endogenous character of European and North American modernity. A Habermasian approach has been carried forward by what can be called a third generation of critical theorists, notably Axel Honneth and Seyla Benhabib. Honneth, who took up Habermas’ chair in Frankfurt on his retirement in 1996 and followed Helmut Dubiel as Director of the Institute for Social Research, has developed a theory focusing on concrete struggles for recognition driven not just by exploitation but by broader experiences of ‘disrespect’ and based on “empirically effective forms of morality to which critical theory can connect” (Honneth, 2000: 110). This feeds into conceptions of social pathology and a revival of the notion of ‘diagnoses of the times.’ Honneth is in a sense returning to an earlier focus of critical theory on social movements. In a similar way, Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and others in the United States have developed the links between critical theory and feminist theory. Benhabib (2004, 2006) has more recently turned in particular to questions of migration, ethnicity, and citizenship in Europe, arguing that structures developed to address cultural pluralism and minority rights are, “quite compatible with a universalist deliberative democracy model” (Benhabib, 2002:19). The development of theories of deliberative democracy by John Dryzek and others is a further important continuation of Habermasian theory.
See also: Action, Theories of Social; Capitalism; Critical Theory; Democracy, History of; Frankfurt School: Institute for Social Research; Logical Positivism and Logical Empiricism; Marxism in Contemporary Sociology; Modernity; Nationalism, Sociology of; Positivism, Sociological; Sociological Theory.
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Abstract The philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas (1929–), remains deeply influenced by his teenage experiences under and immediately after the Nazi regime. As he has said, the theme of democracy and rational communication runs like a red thread through his work. His critical theory of society is in many ways a continuation of the earlier critical theory developed in the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung.
Habermas site: www.habermasforum.dk/. Jürgen Habermas, born in 1929 and brought up in the small northwest German town of Gummersbach, remains deeply influenced by his teenage experiences under and immediately after the Nazi regime. As he has said, the theme of democracy and communication runs like a red thread through his work. His critical theory of society is in many ways a continuation of the earlier critical theory developed in the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung until 1933, then in exile and again from 1950 in Frankfurt. Unlike the experience of these ‘permanent exiles’ (Jay, 1985), Habermas’s life has been relatively tranquil. He studied in Göttingen, Zürich, and Bonn, where he was drawn into the first of many interventions as a public intellectual by the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s republication without comment, in 1953, of an article of 1935, which included a complimentary reference to the Nazi movement. Invited by Theodor W. Adorno to work as his assistant at the Institut für Sozialforschung, he participated in a survey of student political opinion and began work on his habilitation thesis on the public sphere. Driven out of the Institute by Max Horkheimer, for whom he was too radical, he completed this work at Marburg with the Marxist political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth. After teaching for a time at Heidelberg, he took up Horkheimer’s chair in philosophy and sociology at Frankfurt in 1964. An active supporter but increasingly severe critic of the student movement of the late 1960s, he left Frankfurt in 1971 for a 10-year period as codirector of a research institute in Starnberg, where he completed his Theory of Communicative Action (1981). After 12 years back in Frankfurt, he retired in 1994 to Starnberg, where he has continued an astonishingly productive program of writing and worldwide lecturing. Two of the main ways in which Habermas’s work differs from the earlier critical theory of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse are a more distanced attitude to Marxism and a closer engagement with contemporary sociological research. Philosophy, in Habermas’s conception, serves as a ‘placeholder and interpreter’ for the social sciences: it can raise issues for
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further analysis by the social sciences and it can generalize and reflect on their results (Habermas, [1981]1983).
Methodology: Reconstructive Science Habermas’s methodological critique of positivism in social science went along with his criticism of technocratic politics in the early 1960s, initially in his contribution to the ‘positivism dispute’ (Adorno [1969]1976), and then in major works of the late 1960s. Here, Habermas developed an approach that rejected positivism for its reduction of epistemology to methodology and its failure to appreciate the differences between the natural and social sciences. At the same time, he criticized what he called the ‘hermeneutic claim to universality’ and argued that understanding (Verstehen) needed to be complemented by causal explanation in a model of ‘emancipatory’ social science exemplified by Freudian psychoanalysis and the (originally Marxist) critique of ideology. Theories of this kind combined the two methods in an attempt to identify causal obstacles to the understanding of personal and social problems, which a purely interpretive approach could not capture. However, as he wrote later in a new preface to this work, the problem of Verstehen remains important because mere observation does not give access to a ‘symbolically structured reality’ and because “a participant’s understanding is not as easy to monitor as an observer’s perception” (Habermas, 1982a: 549). Habermas’s critique of positivism went along with a cautious appropriation of elements of the Marxist tradition – the theory of ideology in particular. Critical theory’s response to what Habermas, following Horkheimer, calls ‘traditional theory’ parallels Marx’s critique of idealist philosophy (Habermas, [1968] 1986: 212). In the 1970s, Habermas came to feel that this epistemological approach, a model of knowledge grounded in ‘cognitive interests’ (in prediction and control, as in positivist conceptions of natural science, in understanding, as in hermeneutics,
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and in ‘emancipation’ from unnecessary and unwanted constraints) was too rigid to capture the diversity of social science. He turned instead to seek an alternative foundation for critical social science in an analysis of human communication and, more broadly, ‘communicative action.’ When we make statements about states of affairs in the world, about our feelings or about what we consider right, we commit ourselves to offering grounds for these utterances to someone who might disagree. In this sense, our speech acts, if they are more than just orders or attempts to manipulate others, are oriented toward possible agreement. Communicative action in this sense is distinguished from, and prior to, ‘strategic action,’ as conceptualized in economic and rational choice approaches, ‘normatively regulated action,’ as theorized by Talcott Parsons and other functionalist sociologists, and ‘dramaturgical action’ as in Erving Goffman’s ‘presentation of self in everyday life.’ For Habermas, the teleological and strategic, the normative and the dramaturgical model are ‘one sided’ or ‘simplistic’: “Only the communicative model of action presupposes language as a medium of uncurtailed communication .” (Habermas, 1987a: 142).
The concept of communicative action refers to the interaction of at least two subjects capable of speech and action who establish interpersonal relations (whether by verbal or by extra-verbal means). The actors seek to reach an understanding about the action situation and their plans of action in order to coordinate their actions by way of agreement. (Habermas, 1987a: 86)
The theory of communicative action is not ‘a continuation of the theory of knowledge by other means’ (Habermas, 1987a: xxxix) but a ‘reconstructive science,’ which, like linguistics, explicates the rules and principle underlying our everyday speech and action (Habermas, 1987a: 18–19). As he said in an interview,
I never say that people want to act communicatively, but that they have to. When parents bring up their children, when the living appropriate the transmitted wisdom of preceding generations, when individuals and groups cooperate, [.] they all have to act communicatively. There are elementary social functions that can only be satisfied by means of communicative action. (Habermas, 1994: 111)
Habermas presented this model in his major work in 1981, through a detailed discussion of the history of social thought and methodology and a reflection on the history of Western modernity. Very briefly, the Enlightenment meant rational and critical reflection on tradition, but societal rationalization also brought with it the decoupling of economic and administrative systems from rational scrutiny, with markets and state bureaucracies following their own logics. Habermas had addressed these questions in his early book, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), which examined the emergence in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe of a critical public, reading newspapers and discussing current issues in coffee houses and salons. This was based on “post-traditional legal and moral representations” (Habermas, 1987b: 166).
Max Weber continually points to the paradoxes of rationalization, such as the irrationality of a work ethic pursued to extremes, whereas Habermas poses the more precise question of an ‘imbalanced’ rationalization process, in which “the capitalist economy and modern administration expand at the expense of other domains of life that are structurally disposed to moral-practical and expressive forms of rationality and squeeze them into forms of economic or administrative rationality” (Habermas, 1987b: 183). Here, Habermas refers to Marx and more precisely to Georg Lukács’ concept of reification (Verdinglichung), which blends Weber’s rationalization with Marx’s concept of alienation or estrangement. The theoretical framework, then, is that of Western Marxism, in particular the early critical theory of Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, and others. But where Max Weber, as he sees it, conceives rationalization in cognitive and individualistic terms and Adorno and Horkheimer lapse into an abstract, pessimistic, and ultimately unpromising critique of instrumental reason, Habermas grounds his critique of capitalism in a theory of communication. The specific pathologies of modernity are above all the reduction of the possibilities of communicative action through the ‘colonization of the lifeworld.’ The counterfactual question then became whether we could have had the first form of rationalization without the second; the practical question whether we can reestablish democratic control over these processes. He ended the book with a statement of what he saw as the task of a critical theory of society: “explaining those pathologies of modernity that other approaches pass right by for methodological reasons” (Habermas, 1987b: 378). Here he reformulated some of his earlier analyses of crisis tendencies in advanced capitalist societies. There he had argued that crises of capitalist reproduction were increasingly displaced into rationality crises in state policy, legitimation crises, and crises of individual motivation. He restates this theme in the Theory of Communicative Action: that the “new conflicts” are located less “in domains of material reproduction” and rather “in domains of cultural reproduction, social integration and socialization”(Habermas, 1987b: 349). The basic categories of Habermas’s theory are, then, those of a broadly conceived sociological theory of action, which, however, also incorporates social historical and systemtheoretical, as well as structuralist elements. Although he borrows some concepts from Talcott Parsons (Holmwood, 2009) and often mentions Niklas Luhmann, his conception is closer to those of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens (Outhwaite, 2015). What Habermas (1987b: 553) stresses is that system theories and theories of action ‘isolate and overgeneralize’ aspects of modernity (system and lifeworld, respectively). When, here and elsewhere, he emphasizes the role of language, he does not intend to reduce “social action to the interpretive accomplishments of participants in communication . assimilating action to speech, interaction to conversation” (Habermas, 1987a: 143). This is rather the way in which action is ‘coordinated.’ The one-sidedness of the other action models can also be illustrated sociologically. I can act strategically but do not, I think, always do so; I can act thoroughly dramaturgically, for
Habermas, Ju¨rgen (1929–) example, by ‘power dressing,’ or not bother; I can orient myself to norms or ignore them, like tourists who behave as they would at home. The reference above to mechanisms of action coordination (Habermas, 1987a: 143) shows that Habermas is going beyond a narrowly conceived theory of action. An alternative form of action coordination is through markets and bureaucratic power.
Social Change: Rationalization, Increased Complexity, and the Colonization of the Lifeworld Habermas borrows the concept of the lifeworld from phenomenological philosophy (Husserl) and its sociological adaptation by Alfred Schütz. But for Habermas it has a rather different meaning: the realm of informal social interaction, the informal coordination of action by language and, more broadly, by communicative (and also strategic) action. Relations between friends and family members are usually regulated informally rather than by monetary or legal transactions. Habermas welcomes the explicit formulation and reflexive examination of norms in modernity, and sees the coordination of action through money and markets as a necessary increase in complexity that goes along with societal development. These formal media of nonlinguistic interaction, (I can buy a paper from a machine as well as from a friendly newsagent) only become problematic for Habermas when they intrude damagingly into the normative organization of the lifeworld, leading individuals to think of their whole lives in categories appropriate to the work process (Iser, 2009: 329). Habermas has from time to time distanced himself from this model of colonization, but he would probably still endorse the principle he formulated in relation to the beginnings of the process of social differentiation: money and power “need to be institutionally and motivationally anchored in the lifeworld” (Habermas, [1981]1987b: 342). In 1981, the concept of juridification (‘Verrechtlichung’) had pejorative connotations, whereas with the development of his theory of law in the following decade it appears in a more positive (or, as some have suggested, uncritical) light.
The Democratic Constitutional State In its developed form, Habermas’s critical theory of modern society is no longer framed as a philosophy of history, as in the early 1960s (Theory and Practice), or in epistemological terms (Knowledge and Human Interests), but on the basis of a reconstruction of the implicit rules of communicative action. This yields not only a social theory but also a ‘discourse ethic’ or, more precisely, a discursive foundation for morality, in which to say something is right is to say that all those affected could come to a rational agreement about its rightness. This in turn leads to a theory of law and democracy. Discourse ethics, based on the same reconstructive principles of universal pragmatics as the theory of communicative action, is also reconstructive in that, rather than prescribing a basic moral principle in abstract terms, it derives it from our daily communicative behavior. “The universalization principle can be understood [.] as a reconstruction of the everyday
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intuitions underlying the impartial judgement of moral conflicts of action” (Habermas, 1990: 127). It “stands or falls with two assumptions: (a) that normative claims to validity have cognitive meaning and can be treated like claims to truth and (b) that the justification of norms and commands requires that a real discourse be carried out and therefore cannot occur in a strictly monological form, i.e. in the form of a hypothetical process of argumentation occurring in the individual mind” (Habermas, 1990: 68). As Thomas McCarthy (1978: 326) put it, “The emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradiction to be a universal law to what all can will in agreement to be a universal norm.” Habermas’s moral principle, like the Kantian principle to which McCarthy alluded, is a formal one: the content comes from human communities. The basis for Habermas is what he calls the discourse principle: “Just those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourses” (Habermas, 1996: 107). Habermas draws a distinction between fundamental moral issues and ethical ones, where local conventions play a bigger part. (This is of course somewhat problematic: abortion, for example, may be treated as a moral issue, but abortion legislation was notably more liberal in communist East Germany, where almost all Christians were Protestants, than in West Germany, with a Catholic majority.) The discourse principle can also form the basis for legal norms, where again ethical and pragmatic considerations play a role. This yields, for Habermas, a very close connection between law and democracy: under modern conditions, legal principles can only be justified by democratic procedures. The last sentence of the ‘Tanner Lectures’ of 1986, in which Habermas first presented this theory, reads: “No autonomous law without the realization of democracy” (Habermas, 1986: 279). In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas (1996: xlii) repeats this claim, that “in a sphere of fully secularized politics the Rechtsstaat cannot be achieved and preserved without radical democracy.” This aspect of Habermas’s thought might seem a departure from social science toward normative questions of moral and political philosophy, but Habermas ([1992]1996: xl; 5-8) would resist this suggestion, stressing the parallels between legal and social theory. As he often does, Habermas presents his conception of democracy as a synthesis between two conflicting alternatives: Discourse theory’s ‘deliberative’ model of democracy incorporates elements both of the liberal conception of politics as the mediation of private interests and of the republican conception of a self-organizing ethical community (Habermas, [1992] 1996: 296). Solidarity, a very important concept for Habermas (Dews, 1992), is a driving force of this model of democracy and “. can also hold its own, in the medium of law, against the two other mechanisms of social integration: money and administrative power” (Habermas, [1992]1996: 299). The critical response to Between Facts and Norms has focused on three issues. First, his optimistic conception of law, which has particularly disappointed readers associated with ‘critical legal studies.’ Second, and relatedly, his scaled-down expectations about the prospects for socialism. In his reflections on the anticommunist revolutions of 1989, Habermas, who had always condemned the state socialist dictatorships, declared (Habermas, [1990]1992) that he no longer saw a state-
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controlled economy as realistic and that he now understood socialism as ‘radical democracy’ (Scheuerman, 1999). The third question concerns the way Habermas framed his account of the constitutional state in relation to the national state and failed to address the implications of globalization, which had become a major focus of attention since early in the 1990s. David Held, Mary Kaldor, and others were already developing conceptions of ‘cosmopolitan democracy,’ which Habermas was quick to embrace. In a postscript to his interview volume The Past as Future (Habermas, [1991]1994), he referred to Paul Kennedy’s criticism of the national state: “For some problems, it is too large to operate effectively; for others, it is too small” (Kennedy, 1993: 131). By 1996, he was asking ‘Has the nation-state a future?’; and in The Postnational Constellation, he poses the question (Habermas, 2001: 90) “whether political communities can form a collective identity beyond national borders, and thus whether they can meet the legitimacy conditions for a postnational democracy.” Since then, Habermas has been centrally concerned with the prospects of the European Union, speaking eloquently for federalism, though now with increasing pessimism. “Executive federalism” threatens to develop into “intergovernmental rule by the European Council,” in which “the first transnational democracy would be transformed into an arrangement for exercising a kind of post-democratic, bureaucratic rule. The alternative is to continue the democratic juridification [Verrechtlichung] of the European Union in a consistent way” (Habermas, [2011]2012: 52–53). Habermas’s conception of ‘postnational’ democracy includes a recognition of the persistence of ‘still nationally shaped life projects’; the post-, preface indicates persistence as well as transformation. In the EU context, this means that people “must learn to distinguish between the role of a member of a ‘European people’ and that of a ‘citizen of the Union’” (Habermas, [2011]2012: 29), with this idea of a double mandate as a German or Briton and as a European serving as a guide to further constitutional innovations. Another area of Habermas’s recent work is shaped around what he admits is the controversial concept of a postsecular society (Habermas, 2001a; 2001b; [2005]2008; Habermas and Ratzinger, 2005). Habermas does not mean by this that the Enlightenment critique of religion has run out of steam and that religion is back after all. It is rather that modernization has led to a secularized and ideologically plural society in which religions have to ‘reflexively’ confront other belief systems (Habermas, 2001a: 176f.). Since 2001, Habermas has addressed questions of religious fundamentalism and returned to the theme of multiculturalism that he had analyzed in The Inclusion of the Other (1996), notably in essays on religious tolerance in Between Naturalism and Religion; see also Joas, 2005; Anderson, 2007. (His discussion with Cardinal Ratzinger attracted additional publicity when Ratzinger became Pope; Habermas has stressed that he has not himself become religious.) The term naturalism refers to a further theme of Habermas’s recent work (Habermas, 2003): the implications of new biomedical techniques (genetic engineering, cloning, etc.) for what he calls ‘liberal eugenics’ and more broadly for our ideas of human identity – issues that had of course also
attracted the attention of religious leaders (Habermas (2001b: 9; 2005: 7)). All this raises again the question whether Habermas should be seen more as a philosopher than a sociologist, as his old friend Ralf Dahrendorf suggested. It is probably more useful to see him mediating between philosophy and sociology, just as, in philosophical terms, he moves between Kantian and Hegelian impulses, notably in his ethical philosophy, and in political terms between liberalism, especially in relation to human rights, and socialism.
Critiques and Continuations One of the most striking features of Habermas’s work is his engagement with a vast range of specialized fields, so it is notable that he had something of a blind spot in relation to postmodern theory and to major contemporary figures such as Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida; also to Pierre Bourdieu and perhaps even Niklas Luhmann, despite his substantial exchange with him published in 1971. Others have pointed to affinities between these approaches and Habermas’s. A more serious line of criticism suggests that Habermas’s theories are structurally blind to certain perspectives. Feminist critics, for example (Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Amy Allen, Diana Coole), have pointed to patriarchal assumptions behind his models of the public sphere and politics, and to the fact that modernity may even have reinforced the exploitation and exclusion of women. In other areas of social theory, many critics have suggested that he takes too much from Talcott Parsons, notably his system theory and his stress on norms. Anthony Giddens pointed to this: “it is an error to suppose that communicative action can be examined solely on the level of norms” (Giddens, 1982a: 157–158; see also Giddens, 1982b). Hans Joas (1991) referred more broadly to an ‘unhappy marriage’ of hermeneutics and functionalism and Thomas McCarthy (1991) to the ‘seducements of system theory.’ More recently, John Holmwood has criticized his acceptance of Parsons’ assumption “that a general theoretical framework is a necessary precondition for social enquiry and that it can be grounded in terms of a generalized problem of social order” (Holmwood, 2009: 70). Other critics argue that Habermas has abandoned too much of Marx, again ascribing too much independence to moral and legal principles that Marx saw as ideological. What is clear is that from an early stage in his work, Habermas, partly influenced by Max Weber and early critical theory and partly by system theory, developed an analysis of societal modernization which was quite far from orthodox Marxism (Habermas, 1971: 98). On the other hand, Habermas stressed in an interview in 1984 that . from the outset my theoretical interests have been consistently determined by those philosophical and socio-theoretical problems which arise out of the movement of thought from Kant through to Marx. My intentions were given their stamp by Western Marxism in the mid-fifties, through a coming-to-terms with Lukács, Korsch and Bloch, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and of course with
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Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse. Everything else which I have made my own has only acquired its significance in connection with the project of a renewal of the theory of society grounded in this tradition.
Habermas is not offering an alternative to such a broad theory as historical materialism, but rather a theoretical framework that can be applied (as he does himself in outline) to historical processes such as the development of Western modernity. In other words, the theory of communicative action can only be part of a critical theory of society. What Habermas formulates is a logic of development from processes of mutual understanding in the lifeworld all the way to the democratic constitutional state, but the forms of these developments and countermovements require further exploration. Habermas’s concept of modernity is of course contentious, as Anthony Giddens (1982b: 335) noted in an early review. Since then, postcolonial critics have fundamentally problematized the concept of modernity (Bhambra, 2007; G.R. et al., 2010; see also Wagner, 2012). Habermas, like Max Weber, may seem too fixated on the ‘European miracle,’ but Klaus Eder (2009: 66–68) has defended his evolutionary conception of modernity as a process of communicative sociation and a universalistic culture that happened to emerge at particular times and places. Postcolonial critics might still want to suggest that Habermas and others overemphasize the endogenous character of European and North American modernity. A Habermasian approach has been carried forward by what can be called a third generation of critical theorists, notably Axel Honneth and Seyla Benhabib. Honneth, who took up Habermas’ chair in Frankfurt on his retirement in 1996 and followed Helmut Dubiel as Director of the Institute for Social Research, has developed a theory focusing on concrete struggles for recognition driven not just by exploitation but by broader experiences of ‘disrespect’ and based on “empirically effective forms of morality to which critical theory can connect” (Honneth, 2000: 110). This feeds into conceptions of social pathology and a revival of the notion of ‘diagnoses of the times.’ Honneth is in a sense returning to an earlier focus of critical theory on social movements. In a similar way, Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and others in the United States have developed the links between critical theory and feminist theory. Benhabib (2004, 2006) has more recently turned in particular to questions of migration, ethnicity, and citizenship in Europe, arguing that structures developed to address cultural pluralism and minority rights are, “quite compatible with a universalist deliberative democracy model” (Benhabib, 2002:19). The development of theories of deliberative democracy by John Dryzek and others is a further important continuation of Habermasian theory.
See also: Action, Theories of Social; Capitalism; Critical Theory; Democracy, History of; Frankfurt School: Institute for Social Research; Logical Positivism and Logical Empiricism; Marxism in Contemporary Sociology; Modernity; Nationalism, Sociology of; Positivism, Sociological; Sociological Theory.
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