1. Habermas is the last thinker to be considered in this course. However, I do not want to therefore give the impression that he represents the last word in contemporary theorisation of modernity. He has been chosen because he and Foucault are the two most influential continental thinkers over the last thirty years. Habermas is still very much alive and internationally prominent. In 2005 he was awarded the Kyoto prize for his contribution to philosophy and letters. Born in Düsseldorf in 1929, he come from a middle class family and his father was a local public servant; he grew up during the period of National Socialism and the Second World War. He entered a largely unreformed university system in the late forties and wrote a dissertation on Schelling. He became Adorno's assistant in the early fifties. Despite his good relation with Adorno, Horkheimer thought him too radical. Ironically he latter assumed Horkheimer's chair when the latter retired in the early sixties. Despite a predominantly academic existence, Habermas has always been a very engaged, leftist intellectual keen to enter public debate over contemporary political and cultural issues. Beginning with issues like educational reform and the political role of student protest in the sixties, he was also a key protagonist in many later politico-cultural debates like the historians debate in the late eighties. He wrote critically about the rapid German reunification, the resurgence of anti-foreign neo-Nazism in the early nineties and more recently entered contemporary debates over the European Union, terrorism and the war in Iraq. This public profile is very much in conformity with his understanding of critical theory as a practically motivated cultural self-reflection. He believed that Horkheimer and Adorno had retreated so far into traditional philosophical speculation after the Dialectic of Enlightenment that they detached themselves from a practical engagement with the contradictions of post-war German society. Habermas is a member of a generation that had to learn the historical lessons of the German slide into National Socialist totalitarianism and rebuild the institutions of a liberal democratic society in the post-second World War period.
2. Habermas’ project is very ambitious and he is both a very systematic thinker and also quite eclectic in regard to sources. His systematic intention must be clearly understood in his terms as a fallible synthesis of philosophy and the social sciences. He is also especially conscious of his relation to the philosophical and sociological tradition. He uses analysis of earlier thinkers as creative building blocks in his own system, in very Hegelian fashion taking over their "partial truths" and pointing to the inadequacies that force him to go beyond them and borrow insights from others. By saying something about his early preoccupations and his relation to his great theoretical predecessors Marx, Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno we get some sense of the comprehensiveness of this project and the constitutive elements of his theory of modernity. His work can be viewed at least in part, as a massive pincer movement: as immanent critique of both liberal democratic modernity and of the Marxian Left.
3. In his magnum opus The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) Habermas addresses the problem of rationality and present an alternative account. Habermas acknowledges that from the outset philosophy had been concerned to reflect upon reason and tried to explain the whole in terms of reason. However, in modern times this traditional philosophical quest had become problematic. Since Kant philosophy had developed critical self-awareness. Without unmediated access to the whole or being, philosophy had been compelled to direct its attention to the formal conditions of rationality. This focus on the knowing subject was compounded by the multiple 19th century insights of historicism, Marxism, psycho-analysis and cultural anthropology which revealed that the multiple conditionedness of knowing. Without an ontology of being, philosophy loses the self-sufficiency that had once underwritten its claim to be queen of the sciences. It cannot even sustain its Kantian role by constructing a transcendental account of consciousness in general and acting as the judge of reason and arbiter of culture. Nevertheless, Habermas wants to view it as a guardian of rationality in so far as it acts as an interpreter and translator between the everyday world and the specialised spheres of cultural modernity. Reason here is not the substantive concept but a formal or procedural notion. Habermas finds the roots of this procedural concept in everyday communication and its social practices of justification. This everyday communication makes validity claims that transcend the specific conversational context. Speakers make dialogical claims seeking agreement and expect to give reasons if challenged. These reasons compel the interlocutor into "yes" "no" responses. Habermas sees here an element of unconditionality that makes a validity claim different from mere de facto acceptance. Thus he finds in everyday communication the roots of the traditional critical enterprise of philosophy that might still sustain its claim to be the guardian of rationality.
4. But in this new configuration philosophy cannot work alone and must work in harness with the reconstructive social sciences. What is required was a new relationship between philosophy and science where philosophy employs the sciences to test its hypothetical universality claims. His works can often be viewed as exercises in “reconstruction”: philosophical claims are tempered by the epistemic demands of science while the results of the latter are interpreted for their everyday significance. Amongst the specialist sciences the one most favourably deposed to the problem of rationality was sociology. Other social sciences like political economy and political science had found it easy to abstract out some specific subsystem or aspect of the societal whole and transform it into its exclusive scientific object, However sociology had to deal with the residual problems. Sociology became the science of crisis: it dealt with the problems of fractured social integration in the era of great historical transition from the traditional community to the new bourgeois society.
5. Habermas devoted his first major work to the diagnosis of the crisis of the bourgeois public sphere. On its first appearance in 1962 this may have looked like an Adornoian influenced work of cultural critique that fitted into the thesis of the “fully administered society”. However, the difference of perspective is evident from the outset as Habermas clearly takes the ideology of the bourgeois public sphere much more seriously than did the first generation of the Frankfurt School. He takes the ideology of the bourgeois public sphere seriously than the first generation of the Frankfurt School ever did. Habermas sets out to reveal the historical origins and normative functionality of the notion of the public sphere in bourgeois social reality and political thought. This notion departs from the division of the bourgeois between public and private, between the bearer of liberal freedoms and the citizen or l'homme. The bourgeois public sphere emerged in opposition to the Absolutist State as an intermediary between state and society in which bourgeois citizens could freely articulate and discuss their views on public issues. Beginning with the discussion of culture it quickly turned into a forum for the discussion of the great political questions of the day. As access to this sphere was at least notionally open-ended, the private individual entered it simply as l'homme obliged to conform to certain standards of rationality and the better argument. While Habermas never for a moment doubts the counter-factuality of this idealisation, he wants to underline its practical significance. In its classical phase this idea of the public sphere corresponded to the reality of a competitive market economy and a relatively homogenous class of small private entrepreneurs with interest in this forum of publicity. Furthermore, the public sphere rendered political domination legitimate by providing an arena in which the views of private individuals could circulate and be filtered into a powerful public opinion. This was a crucial link in the nascent institutions of bourgeois democracy. Private individuals had a forum where they could informally exercise their political judgement in shaping the laws they would have to obey. This classical model begins to fragment under the pressures of modern dynamism in the course of the last century. The public sphere lost its go-between function mediating between private and public, state and society. The increased interlocking integration between state and society with economic rationalisation and technological development saw this mediating function pass out of the hands of the public sphere and into those stemming from the private sphere like corporate associations, lobbies, parties and unions. Big players in both the private sphere and government public agencies used their resources to invade and manipulate the public sphere increasingly orientated to mass media in their own interests. Publicity remains but it no longer primarily serves rational public consensus but only public relations, to display conflicts of interest and affirm compromises and deals worked out behind closed doors. It is no longer the guaranteed linkage between a rational critical public debate and the democratic legislature. Having charted the demise of the bourgeois public sphere, however, Habermas refuses to call it a sham. Even after these structural transformations the original idea of the public sphere remains a crucial normative idea to the modern understanding of modern democratic constitutionalism. The task remains to further democratise those private and public agencies that now dominate the public sphere.
6. Thus Habermas departs from the notion of the “crisis” of the bourgeois public sphere. In a similar way, it is the interest of classical sociology in the problem of the whole that allows him to also incorporate his critical reflections on Marx. He critiqued the Marxian understanding of history and its underlying paradigm of work. Marx had conceived history as an emancipatory process of human self-constitution through labor. Social labor acts as a constant revolutionising force enhancing productive forces and creating a reservoir of new capacities, needs, skills and aspirations; it functions as the decisive learning process whereby human subjects simultaneously renew and transform both themselves and their material conditions in such a way as to open up ever new possibilities. Work served Marx as a model for conceiving the self-constitution of the species and as the fundamental dimension in which human progress accrues. Habermas raises a whole range of empirical objections to Marx's optimistic historical scenario that we don't have time to go into now. But his critique is not confined to empirical objections. More fundamentally, he also raises basic theoretical problems with this emancipatory account of history. Marx had simply equated the development of the productive forces with the workers cause of social emancipation. This simple identification involved a confusion of two historical dialectics or rationalising processes each of which had its own tempo, trajectory and logic. The first was the rationalisation of purposive-rational action. This concerned all those learning processes concerned with the growing mastery of nature and instrumental control. These need to be distinguished from rationalisation at the level of communicative interaction. Habermas views this later form of rationalisation as another form of learning process that takes place on the level of social interaction, consensual regulation and moral insight. Rationalisation in the domain of communication removes restrictions on self-reflection and domination free communication; it enhances the possibilities of socio-political emancipation. Marx's mistake had been to identify the progress in this with the expansion of the productive forces. This overly hasty assimilation of communicative progress to instrumental progress accounts for a normative deficit in Marx's outlook. He failed to give full weight to democracy and its institutional underpinnings as an independent learning process in the domain of social interaction. Marx had not felt required to independently account for progress in this communicative domain. He had simply derived the emancipatory values and norms from the evolution of social labor. However, the historical process of human self-creation is marked not only by the discovery of new technologies and strategies of pushing back the limits of nature but also new stages of cultural reflection, new modes of social interaction and social integration. These issue in sublimated institutional oppression, dispelling conventional dogma and more unconstrained communication. Habermas does not deny the inter-dependence between these two forms of rationalisation but he argues that the problem solving logic of purposive-rational progress can trigger but cannot bring about an overthrow the relations of production. He even suggests that the communicative learning processes are the pacemaker of social evolution insofar as they establish new forms of social integration and very often make possible the introduction of new productive forces. On the basis of this critique Habermas calls for a paradigm shift to what he called the paradigm of communicative interaction. Habermas has also specifically drawn attention to the inherent problems of a critical theory that viewed praxis as an indispensable moment of its own realisation. For Marx, the negation of philosophy through its realisation meant that Marxist intellectuals joined a social movement and attempted a direct unity of theory and praxis. However, the consequences of this were generally not promising: too often it has led only to theoretical dogmatism (theory closing itself off to new scientific objections) or moral rigorism (the idea that only the activist is morally worthy). But perhaps there are also deep reasons for these failures in certain metaphysical residues with the Marxist project. Habermas suggests that despite its emphatic claim for immanence, Marx’s critical theory had not completely broken with the totalising thrust of metaphysics. It simply transferred the teleological figures of the classical metaphysics of nature onto the history as a whole. The survival of the claim to totality in modern philosophy of history from Hegel to Marx fails to meet the fallibilist self-understanding of knowledge characteristic of contemporary knowledge. Habermas also argues that the idea of the proletariat as a macro subject of history fails to fully take into account that the only basis on which the divergent beliefs and conflicting intentions of different individuals even within a class can be integrated is inter-subjective processes of communication and deliberation that implies democratic opinion and will formation.
7. The promise of a paradigm shift was made good with The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). As we have already seen, this work addresses itself to the question of a contemporary account of rationality. It is at this point that Habermas takes over the legacy of Max Weber. For Habermas, Weber is the great embodiment of this principal sociological interest in the question of rationality. Habermas in fact argues that there are two notions of rationalisation in Weber: cultural and societal rationalisation. However, using a strategy similar to the one already evident in his critique of Marx, Habermas maintains that Weber unconsciously allows this second concept of rationalisation to completely dominant his understanding of the historical process of rationalisation as a whole. As a result, his understanding of history, like Marx, is distorted by a one-sided concentration on capitalist rationalisation as a triumph of purposive-instrumental reason. For Habermas, the difference between Marx and Weber on this point is vital. Marx had identified the rationalisation of purposive-rational action and rationalisation of the systems of communicative interaction in a single idea of the expansion of the productive forces. Weber's great virtue was that he allowed us to understand this other aspect of rationalisation as a process of cultural rationalisation in his account of the rationalisation of the great world religions. Habermas brings these two together under the notion of the rationalisation as communicative action.
8. As we have seen, Weber's notion of rationalisation presupposes the idea of disenchantment. The myths and religious worldviews had ascribed to the world a unified and harmonious meaning. As culture loses its religious anchorage, it fragments into increasingly autonomous and competing spheres. These cultural spheres are culturally and institutionally grounded in their own practices and logics. Each sphere has its own cultural value --truth, goodness or rightness and beauty-- which is pursued through cultural activities orientated to the logic of the value in question. Weber recognises the emancipatory potential of this process of cultural rationalisation insofar as it dissolves traditional meaning and allows individuals to be more self-reflective about their world and to give shape and meaning to their own lives through creative effort and commitment to, and within, the rationalised value spheres. However, the emancipatory potential of this process is swamped in Weber’s analysis of modernity by the process of societal rationalisation. This form of rationalisation is largely associated with the expanded orbit and influence of purposive-instrumental rationality in the economic and political subsystems of modern society. Habermas views this subsumption of the theme of cultural rationalisation into that of societal rationalisation as a grave distortion in Weber's account of modern processes of rationalisation. In his view, Weber's account of cultural rationalisation supplies a fruitful theoretical framework for understanding the processes of communicative rationalisation that were missing from Marx’s emancipatory view of history. What may look like a process of fragmentation from the standpoint of the great religious worldviews, can also viewed as one of functional differentiation. The process of increased cultural differentiation into autonomous spheres with their own validity claims corresponds to the individual being able to distinguish their relations to three differentiated worlds-- the objective world of states of affairs, the social world of normatively regulated rules and the subjective world of privileged personal experiences. In the mythic and religious worldview, culture and nature are not differentiated and language and the world form a seamless continuum. Within these cultural worlds technical ineptitude and moral guilt, evil and harmful, good and healthy can be identical because they are all undifferentiated and interwoven. Only the process of cultural differentiation opens up the possibility of learning processes that challenge dogmas, encourage freer communication, deepen subjectivity and self-reflection and promote new consensual and non-traditional modes of social interaction. In fact, it is this ongoing process of cultural rationalisation as differentiation of the value spheres that leads to a more comprehensive concept of rationality that allows us to distinguish the differences between the types of rationality and initiates the open-ended procedures of critical questioning and redeeming validity claims in all of these cultural spheres.
9. This insight into a more comprehensive understanding of rationality was lost to Weber because his attention became fixated on the problem of societal rationalisation. Adorno and Horkheimer followed Weber down this road and found themselves in the cul de sacs of which I have already spoke in regard to the Dialectic of Enlightenment. They want to view the evolution of Western civilisation as the story of the historical unfolding of self-preservative instrumental reason. In Habermas' view they therefore were unable to appreciate the other side of the dialectic of enlightenment that he associates with the processes of cultural differentiation that have liberated the learning processes associated with communicative interaction. Adorno and Horkheimer's failure was preordained by their preference for the concept of instrumental reason as the key to understanding the civilisatory process. Their neglect of the bourgeois order as a fertile ground for democratic decision-making, universalistic notions of morality and law and individualist patterns of identity formation and aesthetic experience is nothing more than blindness to the processes of cultural rationalisation and its real institutional consequences. These represent the evolution of communicative reason and its advances in the differentiated spheres of science, morality-law and aesthetic expression. Habermas is no apologist for bourgeois society but he is concerned to overcome the undialectical tenor of the earlier Frankfurt School's identification of rationalisation with instrumental reason.
