1. A crucial moment of Habermas’ paradigm shift in The Theory of Communicative Action is the movement away from the purposive instrumental model of rationality to that of communicative action drawing on the work of Mead, Durkheim and Parsons. The gist of this argument is that so-called primitive societies are normatively integrated under the authority of the sacred. In the course of social evolution, society undergoes processes of functional differentiation whereby some spheres of social action get hived off into specialized subsystems that are relieved of normative integration by adopting their own steering media. At the same time, the processes of cultural rationalisation referred to a bit earlier have a profound impact within the sphere of communicative action itself. These gradually weaken the hold of the sacred and tradition; they imposing their own post-conventional morality and normative integration, where practices, norms and institutional arrangements are detached from taken-for-granted normative contexts and negotiated through discursive processes orientated to mutual understanding. As Habermas argues, the institutions of bourgeois liberal democracy (civil society, the public sphere and the formal parliamentary institutions) are not a superstructural façade concealing the full integrated economic and political control of the bourgeois but a two-way channel of power and influence transmission between the lifeworld and organized functional systems like the economy and bureaucracy. That Habermas would want to theoretically elaborate this intuitive appreciation of cultural rationalization is not surprising. One of his biggest criticisms of Weber was that his positivist reading of the law confounded legality with legitimacy. Thus Weber ignored the way in which the law is a crucial mechanism for the institutonalisation of post-conventional communicative interaction. His exclusive focus was on ethical rationalisation in the shape of an individual calling so compatible with the capitalist spirit. But Habermas underlines the point that this ethical calling was confined to an elite. This spirit could not be generalized without the development of a system of compulsory norms. Without legal regulation capitalist economic relations are unthinkable. Furthermore, to the extent that Weber theorized the law, he viewed it as the embodiment of the cognitive, instrumental rationality of the economy and state. For Habermas, this view too easily detaches the legal from forms of moral practical rationality tied to legitimacy. Weber should have viewed the law as an order of life correlated with the normative value of rightness anchored in democratic will-formation and moral practical rationalisation. Already implicit in this critique of Weber is a view of bourgeois law and political institutions that take completely seriously its own normative claims as a product of cultural rationalisation. Taking seriously these normative claims does not mean that Habermas is prepared to evaluate the law at its own self-assessment. He is especially interested in registering the pervasive tension between facticity and validity in the law: the law as both compulsory and legitimate. However, it does mean connecting the law to the democratic processes that provide it with legitimation in liberal democratic societies.
2. Habermas' own initial theory of modernity is born from a critique of the Western Marxist theory of reification. But Habermas no longer uses the language of alienation but describes what he calls the pathologies of modernity. He identifies two types of these pathologies: the colonisation of the lifeworld by the mechanism of functional subsystems and the cultural impoverishment of the lifeworld According to Habermas, modernity is characterised by processes that increasingly rationalise the lifeworld. The notion of the lifeworld taken over from phenomenology refers to the taken-for-granted, common intersubjective meanings, norms and rules that underpin an individual’s interpretation of experience. However, Habermas wants to make this notion useful for social theory. This requires that it be emended so as to incorporate the structural elements of the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld. He identifies three structural elements--culture, society and person -- which form the nodal points of cultural reproduction in terms of cultural knowledge, social integration and socialisation. This means that the lifeworld includes all those non-symbolic aspects of life like family, informal social interaction and civil society. Reproduction involves the constant assimilation of new experience to the continuity of the past in a way that irons out dissonances, fuses horizons and incorporates innovation and cognitive advances. Habermas views the lifeworld as the centre of modern decentred society (a society broke up into specialised functional subsystems) in the sense that it is out of collision and working through of the differences between lifeworlds that a diffuse common consciousness emerges.
3. Increasingly in modernity the actions, interpretations and practices of individuals are detached from these taken-for-granted normative contexts and submitted to examination, critique and negotiation oriented towards mutual understanding. In other words, modernity sees the demise of tradition and its displacement by processes of communicative interaction where meaning is not "given" but arrived at through processes orientated to mutual understanding. According to Habermas the process of cultural rationalisation plays a vital role here insofar as it allows us to progressively distinguish and clarify our experience. The modern subject is potentially able to discriminate in terms of the formal world concepts between the various sorts of validity claim (truth, rightness and authenticity) and such claims can be redeemed through dialogue and discourse orientated to mutual understanding. As ever more domains of social life underwent this displacement of tradition by processes orientated to understanding, the medium of communication became overburdened. When the task of social integration depends less on tradition and more on the interpretive capacities of individuals and their greater commitment to the negotiation of agreements, there are great risks of disagreement and increasing pressure to create relief mechanisms, to reduce the possibility of breakdowns.
4. Relief mechanisms take two essential forms. One involves the condensation of communicative action in the sense that communicative action is not replaced but simply made more dense and abstract. An example of this would be the mass media where communicative processes are released from the provincialism of local contexts and a broader arena of public discussion emerges. A good example of this is the development of the modern newspaper. This sort of condensation has ambiguous consequences. On the one hand, it hierarchises issues, increases the prerogative of experts and removes knowledge from everyday communicative practices. On the other, it removes local restrictions on the horizon of possible understanding and opens them to alternative perspectives. The second form of relief mechanism involves the complete replacement of communicative interaction by the steering mechanisms of money and power that uncouple action coordination from language and the lifeworld and submit it to quasi-automatic functional subsystems. Habermas has in mind here the economic and administrative systems that provide the basis for a functional co-ordination of action beyond the lifeworld. They bypass the individual’s own interpretative acts and self-responsibility with the creation of almost norm-free systemic structures (of course this autonomy from the lifeworld and normative constraints is only relative as they remain linked with everyday communicative practice through basic legal institutions like private law and election).
5. Unlike Marx, who tended to view the automaticity of the market in terms of the reification of the world of commodities that dominated living labor, Habermas does not view the uncoupling of the subsystems from the lifeworld as intrinsically problematic. It does not automatically signify the subjugation of the lifeworld to the imperatives of the functional systems. Thus the emphasis is on differentiation rather than fragmentation or alienation. On the contrary, it may liberate agents from time consuming tasks of co-ordination and promote various efficiencies. The institutions that anchor the economic and administrative subsystems in the lifeworld like civil and public law and political representation ideally offer a reciprocal two-way channel for influence between the lifeworld and the organised functional systems. However, at this point while sometimes Habermas talked of inflexible lifeworld structures withdrawing motivation and legitimacy, the colonisation thesis suggested mainly that it was the communicatively structured domains of the private and public lifeworld that are most under threat from the dynamism of the functional economic and administrative systems. This may seem like Habermas' concession to the power of the Marxian argument that domination arises from differential economic power. Yet Habermas is not convinced that class conflict is the only explanation for the subsumption of the lifeworld under the system. Having taken on the legacy of Weber, he draws our attention to the role played by the state and the bureaucracy in advancing this process. Habermas offers here a model of the two subsystems that compensate for the weaknesses in each other. Both market and state intervene in the lifeworld in order to pacify potential conflict and political alienation. The citizen is transformed into a client of the bureaucracies. Rights are passive and the modern citizen has been reduced to the negative function of voting. Thereby some of the possibilities for political participation opened up by the rationalisation of the lifeworld have been significantly neutralised. While these strategies have been largely successful, Habermas believes that colonisation of the lifeworld beyond a certain threshhold is likely to provoke resistance. The emergence of new social movements in the last twenty years--ecology, feminist, alternative lifestyles, gay liberation and movements for local autonomy--whose demands go beyond the compensations of the welfare state to defending and restoring endangered forms of life is, for Habermas, an empirical index of this protest potential.
6. It is clear that Habermas’ model of modernity, like Foucault’s, has been heavily influenced by the changed character and agenda of political protest in the last two decades. For Habermas, the welfare-state mass democracy is an arrangement that rendered latent the class conflicts still built into the capitalist economic system. However, the intricacies of this mutally supportive dual subsystem of market and political bureaucracy has greatly increased system complexity and compelled not only an extension in the reach of the formally organised domains of action but also an increase in their internal density (concentration, centralisation). Thus colonisation of the lifeworld assumes such forms as the increasing juridification of the public dimension of social life and the increasing commodification of its private dimension. As examples of the former, we might cite the extension of legal regulation into new territory like family law or race discrimination while in the latter category we could mention the commercialization of a whole range of services formerly embedded in the structures of the lifeworld like child care. Habermas maintains it is an open question how far these tendencies could extend. He clearly doubts that they could usurp the integrative function of the lifeworld as a whole. As mentioned, the spheres of social life integrated via mechanisms of communicative interaction are resistive to integration by system mechanisms. The spheres of the lifeworld, which depend for their reproduction upon action orientated to understanding will become pathologised "in some way or other" when uncoupled from communicative action and subjected to mechanisms of system integration.
7. The second form of pathology noted by Habermas concerns the cultural impoverishment of the lifeworld. We have already seen that Habermas takes over from Weber the idea of cultural rationalisation. He does not view this process as some momentary historical phase that will be overcome by a reunification of culture. On the contrary, it represents the cultural engine of the processes of communicative interaction orientated to mutual understanding, a vital moment of historical learning processes. However, it is also the bearer of potential ambiguities. Corresponding to the differentiation of the value spheres we see the institutionalisation of science, moral and legal theory and art as specialist domains of experts linked to professional knowledges. This process of professionalisation of culture creates a gradually widening distance between the so-called expert cultures of the specialists and the general public. Habermas' contention is that the learning processes involved in this sort of cultural specialisation do not automatically flow back into everyday communicative practice. The blockage of this cultural flow leads to the drying up of vital traditions and the impoverishment of everyday practice. Thus it appears that the uncoupling of economic and administrative subsystems from the lifeworld that we have seen associated with material reproduction have their corollary in the cultural domain with the uncoupling of expert cultures. Habermas does not provide an elaborated argument for the linkage between these two processes although he clearly believes that colonization of the life world by the functional imperatives of the economy and administration only accentuates cultural specialization. For example, cultural developments in science, legal theory and art are now very much enmeshed in economic and bureaucratic systems in ways that condition key aspects of their evolution. For him the only solution is that social modernization be steered in a different direction that sets limits to the internal dynamics and to the imperatives of the semi-autonomous economic and political subsystems.
8. Habermas argues that this blockage of cultural infusion into everyday life is accompanied in late capitalist society by a fragmentation of consciousness that is the functional equivalent of ideology. He accepts the "end of ideology" thesis that globalising interpretations of the whole have collapsed under the pressure of rationalisation. Ideologies relied on the fact that some categories of belief remained immune from problemisation. However, the extension of the processes of communicative action and rational scrutiny to all aspects of social existence means that ideology has nowhere to hide and can no longer evade skepticism. But this does not mean that modern societies have all of a sudden become fully transparent. It is not the case that the conflict between social integration by communicative processes in the lifeworld and system integration by functional mechanisms has been acknowledged. This is because the de-centered functionality of modern societies prevents interpretations of the whole coming into existence. However, Habermas would reject the view that society has become so de-centered that it no longer constitutes a whole. Rather he would argue that everyday knowledge remains diffuse and below the level of articulation that meets the validity standards of cultural modernity. Thus everyday consciousness is unable to grasp the whole and remains fragmented. This problem is clearly compounded by the uncoupling of expert cultures from the lifeworld because this means that theoretically articulated knowledge does not flow back into the everyday in a way that would counteract the fragmentation of consciousness.
