PRINCIPLE AND PREJUDICE: BURKE, KANT AND HABERMAS ON THE CONDITIONS OF PRACTICAL REASON Louis Hunt1

Abstract: This paper examines the role of practical reason in connecting moral principles and historical traditions. It looks first at Habermas attempt to construct a model of communicative reason that can bridge the gap between the justification of moral principles and their application in practice. The paper then turns to an older debate between Burke and Kant on the relation between theory and practice in the French Revolution. It argues that Burkes account of practical reason as dependent on the cultivation of moral sentiments within a specific historical tradition is superior to the efforts of both Kant and Habermas to incorporate a moral dimension within reason itself.

Introduction This paper examines the role of practical reason in connecting universal moral principles with particular historical traditions. It looks at two different episodes in the history of modern social and political thought in which the problematic relation between moral universalism and historical particularism figures prominently. It first examines the argument of Jrgen Habermas that the legitimacy of the modern state requires developing institutions that effectively embody universal principles of justice. Habermas articulates his account of the legitimating role of moral principles in the modern state against the backdrop of the rise in Germany and elsewhere in Europe of new forms of ethnic nationalism. This resurgent nationalism locates the source of social and political solidarity not in the acceptance of universal principles of justice but in attachment to particular cultural and historical traditions. Habermas responds to the challenge of this new historical particularism, with its vehement rejection of the moral universalism of the Enlightenment, by developing an account of the normative character of reason that attempts to accommodate historical and social conditions. Habermas notion of communicative reason is an attempt to develop a conception of practical reason that can answer the traditionalist critique of the abstract rationalism of the Enlightenment without abandoning its moral and political aims. To get a clearer sense of what the alternatives are in this debate, the second part of the paper turns to an older, and largely unexplored, controversy between Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant on the relation between moral theory and political practice at the time of the French Revolution. This discussion takes as its main texts Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France, which was first published in 1790 during the early stages of the French
James Madison College, Michigan State University, 317 S. Case Hall, East Lansing MI 488251205, USA. Email: hunt@msu.edu
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HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXIII. No. 1. Spring 2002

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Revolution, and Kants essay On the Common Saying: This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice, which first appeared in 1793, the year of the Jacobin Reign of Terror in France.2 Burkes Reflections is a classic indictment of the danger of relying on abstract theory for guidance in political life, and a spirited defence of the need to root political practice in the soil of a particular historical tradition. Kants less well known, but equally important, Theory and Practice rejects the Burkean appeal to historical precedent and tradition as a source of moral and political guidance and defends instead the primacy of moral principles over political practice. A consideration of the controversy between Burke and Kant helps to clarify our understanding of the obstacles confronting Habermas attempt to mediate between the opposing claims of moral universalism and historical particularism. It suggests that Habermas is able to achieve such mediation only at the price of minimizing both the normative demands of moral universalism and the human need for roots in a particular historical community. Habermas on Critical Theory and Social Solidarity Habermas account of the role of universal moral principles in legitimating the modern social and political order should be seen in the context of recent political developments in Germany and the rest of Europe. In particular, Habermas strong defence of moral universalism, and his highly critical stance towards the postmodern critique of Enlightenment rationalism, must be understood in part as a response to the reemergence in Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, of the idea of history as a source of national identity.3 Before turning to an examination of the philosophical basis of his discourse ethics, it is helpful to look briefly at the political context in which Habermas developed his ideas. In the mid-1980s there was an impassioned public debate in West Germany about the appropriate attitude the German people should take towards their problematic history. In the Historikerstreit, as this debate came to be called, a number of prominent West German historians argued that forty years after the end of the Second World War it was time to put the experience of Nazi rule and the Holocaust in a broader historical context and recognize that German history was not exhausted by these terrible events. Some of these historians argued for a relativization of the experience of Nazi tyranny and genocide in
2 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis, 1987). Immanuel Kant, On the Common Saying: This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice, in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge, 2nd edn., 1991), pp. 6192. 3 For his views on postmodernism, see Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1993). The idea of history as a source of national identity has long been part of German historiography. There is a good account of this topic in Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT, 1983).

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BURKE, KANT & HABERMAS PRACTICAL REASON 119 the light of the horrors of twentieth-century politics generally. In their view, it was a mistake to treat the experience of Nazi genocide in isolation from the rest of modern history, as if it were a wholly unprecedented occurrence. The Nazi genocide should be understood in its historical context, especially that of the prior experience of Stalinist tyranny and mass murder in the Soviet Union.4 Apart from the apologetic tendency of such revisionist history with its implication that the crimes of the Nazis are somehow mitigated by being shown to have had historical precedents there is a side to this debate that deserves serious consideration. Underlying much of the debate was a question that continues to haunt educators in Germany: How does one teach young people in Germany about their past? How does one enable them to understand the moral enormity of the Nazi period without also burdening them with an intolerable feeling of guilt at being German? Part of the problem is that Germany does not seem to have what one might call a usable past a past that can effectively counterbalance the experience of Nazism. The crimes of National Socialism cast their shadows back over the last two centuries of German history, tainting everything with the suspicion of having prepared the ground for Auschwitz. One way of understanding the Historikerstreit is to see it as an attempt to supply Germans with such a usable past. As one of the major figures in this debate, the historian Michael Strmer, wrote: In a land without history, whoever fills memory, coins the concepts, and interprets the past, wins the future.5 In the view, however, of Jrgen Habermas, who was one of the main contributors to the Historikerstreit, this lack of a strong national identity, this distance from and suspicion in the face of the claims of historical traditions which Strmer and others deplored as a threat to social cohesion was an important and praiseworthy feature of post-war West German society. In Habermas view, the experience of Nazism and the Holocaust had rendered untenable the primal anthropological trust on which the transmission of historical traditions depended.
Tradition means . . . that we unproblematically continue what others began and have taught us. We usually imagine that, were we to meet these forebears face to face, they would not completely deceive us . . . In my view, it was precisely this basis of trust that was destroyed before the gas chambers . . . The monstrous occurred, without interrupting the steady respiration of everyday life. Ever since a self-conscious life has no longer been possible without suspicion of those continuities that are sustained unquestioningly, and which seek to draw their validity from their unquestionability.6
4 The major documents of the Historikerstreit are collected in Historikerstreit: die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigket der Nationalsozialistische Judenvernichtung, ed. Ernst Reinhard Piper (Munich, 1987). 5 Michael Strmer, Geschichte in geschichtslosem Land, Historikerstreit, p. 36. 6 Jrgen Habermas, The Limits of Neo-Historicism, in J. Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity (London, 1992), p. 238.

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In Habermas view, the historians in Germany who longed for a usable past were appealing to a concept of tradition, and a related model of social solidarity, which was incompatible with the conditions of modern life. In a discussion of this question in an interview on Life-Forms, Morality and the Task of the Philosopher, Habermas briefly entertains the notion that a traditional culture whose mores were at odds with our modern conception of universal human rights might after all be defensible, so long as it were genuinely self-sustaining. (He uses the stock example of the ritual burning of widows in India and raises the question of whether the British were perhaps wrong to interfere with this custom.) Habermas quickly goes on to argue, however, that [t]here could be no analogy to this example today, because there are no such traditional cultures left after three hundred years of capitalism.7 According to Habermas, there is no longer any alternative to universalistic value orientations in a world characterized by increasing global economic interdependence and the growth of world-wide communication networks.8 In this sense, Habermas regards the appeal to historical continuity as futile. By the time a particular historical tradition has become sufficiently aware of itself, sufficiently self-conscious, to feel threatened by criticism, it is already too late to save it. In the modern world, the proponents of historical tradition will always be in the unenviable position of defending a lost cause. In rejecting the search for a usable past in Germany, Habermas argues that the only kind of national identity or patriotism that is still possible for Germans after Auschwitz is what he calls, following the German political scientist Dolf Sternberger, constitutional patriotism. This is a form of political allegiance rooted not in the specific historical traditions of a nation but in universal conceptions of justice, democracy and human rights. Habermas connects the idea of constitutional patriotism with what he calls a post-traditional or post-conventional identity a notion he borrows from the developmental psychology of Kohlberg and Piaget. Habermas means by these terms the capacity of the individual to evaluate his beliefs and attitudes, not only on the basis of the traditional or conventional norms of his society, but also from an impartial (and implicitly universal) standpoint. The capacity to take a distanced and critical stance towards the traditions of ones society, far from undermining social solidarity, is a necessary precondition for the development of a constitutional patriotism as the only satisfactory basis for such solidarity in the modern world.9
Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, p. 204. Ibid., p. 240. 9 On the concepts of constitutional patriotism and post-traditional identity, see Jrgen Habermas, Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity: The Federal Republics Orientation to the West, in J. Habermas, The New Conservatism (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp. 24867. Also Jrgen Habermas, Citizenship and National Identity, in J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 491515.
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BURKE, KANT & HABERMAS PRACTICAL REASON 121 Habermas defence of the modern project of replacing traditional allegiances with a rational attachment to universal moral norms is not, however, entirely free of misgivings. In his reflections on the role of critical social theory in the modern world, Habermas articulates both the emancipatory promise and the potential moral threat inherent in the Enlightenment project of social and political reform. On the one hand, in the face of contemporary scepticism about the very idea of progress, Habermas argues that the desire for emancipation from oppressive social and political institutions is not merely the product of our current historical circumstances but an intrinsic feature of the human situation.
I cannot imagine any seriously critical social theory without an internal link to something like an emancipatory interest . . . This is not just a contingent value-postulate: that people want to get rid of certain sufferings. No, it is something so profoundly ingrained in the structure of human societies . . . so intimately built into the reproduction of human life that I dont think it can be regarded as just a subjective attitude.10

Critical social theory is both possible and necessary if human beings are to be capable of arriving by rational deliberation at independent norms of moral and political conduct. Habermas draws a clear distinction between the universal and necessary validity that attaches to genuine moral norms and the brutely factual acceptance of particular social conventions and historical traditions. Unlike mere conventions, which bind, so to speak, in a groundless fashion by custom alone, moral norms derive their validity from the claim to rest on good reasons.11 Habermas defence of a cognitivist and universalistic moral theory lends crucial support to his belief that the Enlightenment project of moral and social reform should be completed rather than jettisoned as some of its postmodern critics have suggested. On the other hand, Habermas is concerned to correct the pathologies inherent in a one-sided technocratic view of the Enlightenment as the triumph of a purely instrumental conception of reason over customary morality and religious belief. In his view, the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment is justified only if it makes possible a social and political order that supports the moral dignity of ordinary human beings. He recognizes, however, that the process of emancipation from tradition in the modern world has often had the effect of liberating human beings from traditional moral and religious restraints on their acquisitive and self-regarding passions, without supplying them with any compensatory source of moral orientation. Moreover, the very character of critical social theory tends to exacerbate this problem.
A social theory can do nothing to overcome the fundamental perils of human existence . . . It could even be said that a consciousness of the radical
Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, pp. 1934. Jrgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (Cambridge, MA, 1993), p. 151.
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absence of consolation is fostered in the first place by theories which inform us about the stages of social formation . . . The problem is one which faces all modern societies once the religious traditions that point beyond the purely human realm have largely lost their former authority.12

Critical social theory is a double-edged sword insofar as it tends to disenchant, in Max Webers phrase, all social conventions and historical traditions, including those that serve to provide moral orientation to ordinary human beings when faced with the fundamental perils of human existence. If Habermas moral universalism lends support to his hopes for social and political reforms, his awareness of the role of at least some historical traditions in sustaining ordinary moral decency leads him to worry about the disruptive effects associated with such reforms. This tension in Habermas account of critical social theory reflects a more general dilemma inherent in the very conditions of modern social and political life. On the one hand, the self-consciously pluralistic character of modern life renders suspect any direct appeal to social conventions or historical traditions as a source of moral and political legitimacy. As Habermas notes: Under modern conditions of life none of the various rival traditions can claim prima facie general validity any longer.13 On the other hand, the emancipation of modern human beings from the tutelage of such conventions and traditions has not been accompanied by any rational consensus about the moral norms that ought to govern the social and political order. Habermas must show not only that we can arrive at such moral norms but also that they can function as effective standards of moral and political practice. Justification and Application in Habermas Discourse Ethics The self-conscious pluralism of modern social and political life undermines not only the authority of unquestioned traditions but also the normative role of reason in guiding practice. As Habermas remarks, the modern conception of practical reason as a subjective capacity has the disadvantage of detaching practical reason from its anchors in cultural forms of life and sociopolitical orders.14 Unlike the Aristotelian notion of practical reason, which was, in Habermas view, closely tied to the accepted social and political norms of the Greek polis, the modern conception of practical reason is not embedded in a specific historical and cultural framework. The modern conception of practical reason has the distinct advantage, however, that practical reason . . . [is] related to the freedom of the human being as a private subject who . . . [can] also assume the roles of member of civil society and citizen, both national and global.15 This modern individualistic conception of practical
12 13 14 15

Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, pp. 601. Habermas, Justification and Application, p. 151. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 1. Ibid.

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BURKE, KANT & HABERMAS PRACTICAL REASON 123 reason contains an implicit dimension of moral universality that transcends in principle the boundaries of ones particular political community. The freedom of the individual as a private subject is distinct from his public role as a citizen of a particular state. The modern notion of practical reason as a subjective capacity of the individual is intrinsically more cosmopolitan and universalistic than its classical Aristotelian predecessor. Habermas distinction between the Aristotelian and the modern conception of practical reason draws on his earlier debate with Hans-Georg Gadamers hermeneutical account of practical reason.16 In Truth and Method, Gadamer criticizes the view, which he regards as distinctive of the Enlightenment, that reason and tradition are simply opposed to one another. He argues that opposing reason and tradition so starkly fails to account for the historical rootedness of human understanding and ascribes to critical reason a radical autonomy from prejudice that is incompatible with the conditions of human finitude.17 Moreover, this opposition obscures the possibility that tradition itself may be the bearer of truths deserving rational acceptance and recognition. Most crucially, to conceptualize reason and tradition solely in adversarial terms is, in Gadamers view, to subvert the conditions that make practical reason possible. Following Aristotle, Gadamer argues that practical reason is not a matter of applying abstract moral principles to particular practical dilemmas but of articulating the knowledge of the concrete situation implicit in the actions of successful moral and political practitioners. Modifying Aristotle in the light of Heideggers analysis of the historicity of human existence, Gadamer argues that such practical knowledge is always rooted in and made possible by the beliefs and practices of a given historical tradition. In his debate with Gadamer, Habermas does not take issue with the view that one always engages in reflection on moral and political matters from within a specific historical standpoint. He does not mean to resurrect the Kantian idea of a transcendental ego, unmoored from historical and social context. He rejects, however, the view that practical reasoning cannot or should not attempt to transcend its historical context and appeal to universal moral and practical principles. In the first place, for reasons already mentioned, Habermas agrees with the Enlightenment philosophs that suspicion is the right attitude towards the claims of tradition. For Habermas, Gadamers attitude towards tradition betrays the same nostalgic longing for historical
16 The HabermasGadamer debate has been the subject of considerable discussion in the scholarly literature on both thinkers. For a good overview of the original debate from a Habermasian standpoint, see Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jrgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA, 1984), pp. 16993. A more nuanced account of Gadamers position can be found in Ingrid Scheibler, Gadamer: Between Heidegger and Habermas (Lanham, MD, 2000), pp. 970. See also Richard Bersteins Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Philadelphia, PA, 1991) for an assessment of the philosophic implications of this debate. 17 Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 2nd revised edn., 1993), pp. 27785.

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continuity with the past later evinced by the conservative historians in the Historikerstreit. In the second place, Habermas argues against Gadamer that moral and political criticism of tradition which Gadamer, of course, does not mean to exclude does require the possibility of formulating genuinely universal moral standards. In Habermas view, Gadamers historicized Aristotelianism cannot supply any independent criteria for distinguishing between the defensible and indefensible features of a particular tradition. Like Kant, Habermas insists on the need for some form of higher normative tribunal that stands above the mores of a particular historical tradition and political culture. In Habermas view, Gadamers Aristotelian model of practical reason is ill-suited for addressing the problems of moral and political judgment in the modern world. The greater complexity of the modern state, its division into a number of partially independent spheres and the consequent proliferation of social roles, requires the development of morally reflective individuals who are capable of justifying their beliefs and actions in terms of universal moral norms rather than particular social customs or mores. This complexity also facilitates the development of such capacity for independent moral reflection, insofar as it tends to detach the individual from traditional cultural, ethnic and religious allegiances. At the same time, however, Habermas notes that the complexity of modern social and political life also hinders the effective application of such universal moral norms. The modern social and political order has taken on a life of its own that is increasingly unresponsive to the moral concerns of individuals. The rise of modern individualism, which makes such moral reflection possible, has been accompanied by both the development of the anonymous power of the market economy and a vast increase in the size and complexity of the government bureaucracy. The greater moral freedom of the individual in the modern world is thus shadowed by a growing sense of his own powerlessness in the face of modern economic and political conditions. Habermas presents his own attempt to bridge the gap been moral theory and practice the gap between justification and application, as he puts it as a response to the earlier failures of the great nineteenth-century thinkers Hegel and Marx to overcome the limitations of the liberal individualist tradition. Habermas argues that the philosophies of history of both men can best be understood as ultimately futile attempts to answer the problem of the practical insufficiency of individual reason in the modern state by substituting a macro-subject (the world spirit or the proletariat) for the individual subjects of liberal social contract theory. The cunning of reason in history and the class struggle were supposed to accomplish what the reason of the individual was unable to do bridge the gap between theory and practice. But, as Habermas notes, the philosophy of history can only glean from historical processes the reason it has already put into them with the help of teleological

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BURKE, KANT & HABERMAS PRACTICAL REASON 125 concepts.18 The dilemmas inherent in the modern individualistic conception of practical reason cannot be solved, but only displaced, by appealing to a collective subject of history. Habermas proposes to resolve these dilemmas in his discourse ethics by dropping the subject-centred conception of reason that is common, he believes, to both the liberal social contract tradition and its HegelianMarxist critics, for a communicative conception of reason based on an ideal of linguistic interaction between a plurality of subjects.19 In doing so, however, Habermas abandons the idea that reason itself can supply any substantive orientation for managing practical tasks.20 The conception of communicative reason, which Habermas puts forward as the successor to practical reason, articulates the linguistic and pragmatic presuppositions on the basis of which one can deliberate with others about practical matters, but it does not itself provide any concrete answer to the question of how one should act.
[Communicative reason] has normative import only in the broader sense that a communicatively acting subject must accept pragmatic counterfactual presuppositions. He must make certain idealizations for example, ascribe identical meanings to linguistic expressions, make context-transcending validity claims for his utterances, or regard his addressees as accountable subjects.21

Communicative reason constrains the results of practical deliberation only in the sense that it establishes the semantic and pragmatic ground rules for any form of reasonable discourse. The advantage of this argument is that it locates a universal and context-transcending dimension in language itself as an everyday medium of communication and social coordination. The disadvantage is that the normative character of communicative reason is too broad to serve as a direct guide to action. The norms of social interaction that follow from the idealizing presuppositions of ordinary communication are necessarily very general, and are summed up in the following formal principle of universalization: Only those norms may claim to be valid that could meet with the consent of all affected in their role as participants in a practical discourse.22 Moreover, not only are the norms presupposed by the exercise of communicative reason very general, but they are also weak in the sense of
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 2. See Jrgen Habermas, An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative Reason versus Subject-Centered Reason, in J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1987), pp. 294326. 20 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 5. 21 Habermas, Justification and Application, p. 81. For a concise account of the steps leading to the idea of communicative rationality, see Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, pp. 917. 22 Jrgen Habermas, Morality and Ethical Life: Does Hegels Critique of Kant Apply to Discourse Ethics?, in J. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 197.
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lacking the power to motivate the will directly. In Habermas words, such norms bind the will but do not bend it . . . they lack the impulsive force of empirical motives.23 Communicative reason discloses the presuppositions of valid moral argumentation but can neither obligate one to engage in moral argumentation nor motivate one to act on moral insights.24 Moral insight requires the support of complementary social and political institutions in order to be effective in practice. In rejecting the central thesis of Kants moral theory that pure practical reason can determine the will independently of empirical motives, Habermas is compelled to provide an account of the social and political institutions that can supply an affective basis for a universalistic morality. As Habermas notes in a discussion of Hegels critique of Kantian morality, any universalistic morality is dependent upon a form of life that meets it halfway.25 The affective basis of a universalistic morality can be developed only with the support of appropriate forms of socialization and education. While the theoretical justification of moral norms requires the capacity to detach oneself from the specific institutions and practices of a particular social and political order, the practical application of such norms relies on psychological propensities that must be fostered by these very institutions and practices. It is possible to combine the opposing conditions of justification and application only if the institutions and practices of ones society already embody universal principles to a sufficient extent. Moral norms can thus be genuinely effective only under the conditions of what Habermas calls a post-conventional society. This is a society in which the unreflective authority of tradition has been supplanted by the reflective acceptance of impartial legal norms as the principal source of social and political order. In Habermas view, the conditions for the emergence of a post-conventional social and political order have already been achieved to a significant degree in the modern Rechtsstaat or constitutional state. Where the rule of law has been established as a prominent feature of the political culture of a society positive law and post-conventional morality complement each other and together overlay traditional ethical life.26 The citizens of a fully fledged modern constitutional state derive their sense of communal solidarity not from an attachment to its particular historical traditions but from the legal and moral reciprocity developed in the course of public deliberation about the shape of its fundamental laws and institutions. Insofar as the citizens of a modern constitutional state genuinely succeed in internalizing the principles that support the constitutional order (as they must do if they are to develop a postconventional identity), they can be regarded as free and equal participants in a
23 24 25 26

Habermas, Justification and Application, p. 41. Ibid., p. 33. Habermas, Morality and Ethical Life, p. 207. Habermas, Justification and Application, p. 155.

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BURKE, KANT & HABERMAS PRACTICAL REASON 127 common discourse about justice rather than as the mere inheritors of a particular historical tradition. It is important to remember, however, that the citizens of a modern constitutional state are the inheritors of a particular historical tradition, insofar as they are the beneficiaries of a centuries-long struggle to realize these universal principles of justice in institutional form. For Habermas, moral universalism is not a fact of reason, in Kants sense, not a timeless moral truth, but a historical result. Without ascribing this result to the dictates of a predetermined historical teleology, Habermas nonetheless argues that the last two or three centuries have witnessed the emergence . . . of a directed trend toward the realization of basic rights. This positive historical judgment about the prospects for the realization of human rights in the modern world is a crucial component of Habermas argument, since, as we have seen, his defence of moral universalism depends crucially on the existence of appropriate social and political institutions. In this respect, Habermas partially agrees with the well-known Hegelian criticism of the failure of Kantian moral theory to provide an adequate account of the social and political conditions of individual moral autonomy. Habermas argues that his discourse ethics can answer this Hegelian objection because it reformulates Kants metaphysical and subjective concept of moral autonomy in non-metaphysical and intersubjective terms. Like Hegel, Habermas argues that the moral autonomy of the individual can be realized only in a concrete social and political order. Unlike Hegel, however, for whom the realization of universal human rights in the institutions of the modern state was the necessary culmination of the unfolding of reason in history, Habermas intimations about the gradual embodiment of moral principles in concrete forms of life remain tentative and subject to historical contingency.27 Faced with the rise of new forms of ethnic nationalism in postCommunist Europe, Habermas can only appeal to the weak motivating force of good reasons in support of the fragile institutions of constitutional democracy that make possible a life in accordance with these reasons.28 Habermas model of communicative reason is thus exposed to criticism from two camps. To postmodern defenders of the perspectival and historically rooted character of human thought, Habermas appeal to the universal norms allegedly underlying any effort at communication appears merely to reflect his dependence on a specific (and now outmoded) historical tradition. For such critics, Habermas claim that the modern Rechtstaat represents a postconventional form of social and political order in which universal moral and political norms have replaced particularistic traditions is specious. The moral intuitions that underpin Habermas discourse ethics are themselves no more
27 28

Ibid. Ibid., p. 53.

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than the contingent moral conventions of a particular political culture.29 To more robust defenders of moral universalism (and there are still some about), Habermas reformulation of Kants categorical imperative as a procedural method for public moral and political deliberation achieves universality only at the price of weakening the normative force of practical reason. By rejecting the central claim of Kants moral philosophy that practical reason can move the will to act independently of empirical motives, Habermas makes the effectiveness of practical reason dependent on the historical development of supporting moral and political institutions. In the absence of a plausible philosophy of history that establishes the necessity of such historical development, Habermas account of the conjunction between moral universalism and the institutions of the modern state appears to be no more than an (increasingly) disputable empirical hypothesis. His discourse ethics is able to bridge the gap between historical traditions and moral universalism only by seriously underestimating the claims of both. Burke and Kant on Theory and Practice in the French Revolution The problematic relationship between moral universalism and historical particularism is central to the controversy between Burke and Kant on the French Revolution. Burkes Reflections is a critical examination of the origins and probable course of the French Revolution that traces its descent into despotism to the pernicious influence of what Burke calls political metaphysics, i.e. to the political ideas of the radical French Enlightenment and its inheritor and critic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kants Theory and Practice was written in part to combat the growing influence of Burkes Reflections which had been translated into German by Kants former student Friedrich Gentz, the future secretary of Metternich on the conservative opponents of the French Revolution in Kants native Prussia. Kant wrote this essay under the watchful eye of the Prussian censor and was thus careful to avoid any direct reference to Burke or his work. There is, however, a clear allusion to Burke in the Preface to Theory and Practice. Kant refers to a certain worthy gentleman who admonishes academic theorists to stop meddling in politics and return to their classroom with a phrase from Vergils Aeneid (referring to Aeolus, Roman god of the winds): Let him lord it there in his own court! This is the very passage from the Aeneid with which Burke in the Reflections consigned the political metaphysicians of the French Revolution to their classrooms.30 Kant,
29 Cf. Richard Rorty, Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity, in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard Berstein (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 16175. 30 Burke, Reflections, p. 51; Kant, Theory and Practice, p. 63. Paul Wittchen first noted this allusion to Burke in Kant und Burke, Historische Zeitschrift, XCIII (1904), p. 25. Frederick Beiser also emphasizes the importance of Burke as a target of Kants polemic in The Politics of Kants Critical Philosophy, in Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 39. For an unpersuasive

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BURKE, KANT & HABERMAS PRACTICAL REASON 129 in opposition to Burke, proposes to defend the moral philosopher from the criticisms of the practising politician that he is a mere pedant who, unfitted for practical affairs, merely stands in the way of their experienced wisdom.31 Kant rejects the appeal to historical tradition as a way of determining the legitimacy of a proposed moral or political reform. To appeal to historical precedent as the test of a proposed reform is not to avoid the abstractions of theory but to condemn a new and untried theory in the light of the defects of a previous theory. What the Burkean defender of tradition regards as a permanent feature of the human condition may well prove to be nothing more than the impermanent result of a bad theory.32 Moral and political progress is possible only if one does not let historical experience have the last word. Burkes defence of tradition is not, however, merely a blind sanctioning of the status quo. To understand Burkes defence of the moral and political role of tradition, we must see it in the context of his critique of the French Revolution. Burke regarded the French Revolution as an event of world-shaking proportions, a kind of watershed in human history, because he saw in it the advent of a new sort of politics: the politics of ideological conflict. As he wrote in his Thoughts on French Affairs:
The present Revolution in France seems to me . . . to bear little resemblance or analogy to any of those which have been brought about in Europe, upon principles merely political. It is a Revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma. It has a much greater resemblance to those changes which have been made upon religious grounds . . . The last revolution of doctrine and theory, which has happened in Europe, is the Reformation.33

The crucial fact about the French Revolution, in Burkes view, was that it was based not merely on political quarrels local to France but on ideas (such as equality, liberty and fraternity) that claimed to be universal in application. This is clear from the very wording of the title of his work: Not Reflections on the French Revolution, but Reflections on the Revolution in France. For Burke, the French Revolution was a universal event with a local habitation and name. Like the Protestant Reformation, which divided Europe into warring religious camps, the French Revolution divided people in every country in Europe into partisans for and against the principles of the revolution. Moreover, the more radical of the French Revolutionaries thought of themselves as making a decisive break with historical traditions for the sake of a new, purely rational political order. In their eyes, the institutions of the past
attempt to downplay the significance of this allusion, see Dieter Henrich, On the Meaning of Rational Action in the State, in Kant and Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner and William J. Booth (New Haven, CT, 1993), p. 114 n.7. 31 Kant, Theory and Practice, p. 3. 32 Ibid. 33 Edmund Burke, Thoughts on French Affairs, in E. Burke, Further Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis, IN, 1992), p. 208.

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were hopelessly corrupt and the slate had to be wiped clean before a new society could be built. It was this ambition to remake society from scratch that most disturbed Burke about the French Revolution. He saw this ambition as the fundamental error of revolutionary politics. In the Reflections he admonishes the French in the following terms:
You chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital.34

This economic metaphor of the institutions and mores of ones society as a kind of inherited capital an inheritance that the French Revolutionaries have foolishly squandered recurs in another passage from the Reflections, where Burke speaks of what is most distinctive about the English sensibility:
. . . in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings, that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices . . . We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations.35

Burkes critique of the French Revolution is thus a defence of the politics of prejudice. But what does Burke mean here by prejudice? We often contrast prejudice with reason: a prejudiced person is one who is either incapable or unwilling to submit his views and preferences to rational evaluation. It is important to note, then, that Burke does not mean to oppose prejudice to reason as such, but merely to the reason of the isolated individual, the individual who claims to be wholly detached from the traditions of his society.36 By prejudice Burke here means the stock of common beliefs of a society a stock that is always more extensive than any single individual can encompass. In Burkes view, the long-standing prejudices of a people like the English, far from being simply a testament to the persistence of irrationality in human affairs, are the repository of a great deal of practical wisdom. They are the precipitate of centuries of moral and political experience. By contrast, the reason
Burke, Reflections, p. 31. Ibid., p. 76. 36 Burkes account of the positive role of prejudice in practical judgment is strikingly similar to that of Gadamer, although the political implications are more pointed in the case of Burke. Gadamer is most concerned with showing the limitations of the Cartesian model of reason as total freedom from presuppositions. For Burke, the essence of Jacobinism was the attempt . . . to eradicate prejudice out of the minds of men, and the cure for Jacobinism was the recognition of the latent wisdom of prejudice. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 2788; Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke (Chicago, 195878), Vol. VIII, p. 129.
34 35

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BURKE, KANT & HABERMAS PRACTICAL REASON 131 of an individual person is an inherently limited and fallible instrument that cannot claim to be authoritative in its own right. Burkes defence of prejudice rests on his acceptance of the view, derived from the great theorists of the passions in the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith, that reason can be effective only in proper conjunction with the imagination and the passions.37 Like Hume and Smith, Burke is concerned to refute on both moral and psychological grounds the Hobbesian view that human beings are driven solely by self-interest and the fear of death. In Burkes view, this Hobbesian psychology leads to a conception of the political community as a mechanism devoid of public affections, in which laws are to be supported only by their own terrors and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations or can spare to them from his own private interests.38 The radical Jacobin project of reconstituting political society on a purely rational foundation appears to be both chimerical and symptomatic of an impoverished and reductive understanding of human life. It is in this light that Burkes defence of prejudice and the pleasing illusions of pre-Revolutionary society must be understood. Reason by itself is incapable of moving human beings to any positive action. But reason in the service of a purely materialistic conception of the ends of human life threatens the moral beliefs and habits that support a decent social and political order. In Burkes view, the Enlightenment hope that the deliberate calculation of collective benefits will eventually supplant the irrational attachments of prejudice is profoundly misguided: that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of taking their place. The emancipation of individual reason from common prejudice is simply a prelude to its enslavement to the individuals baser needs. In the hands of its radical proponents, reason has proved to be an effective tool not so much for elevating human beings above their narrow prejudices as for stripping them of their humanity by exposing their underlying animal nature. In Burkes notorious pronouncement: On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order.39
37 Burkes debt to the empiricist analysis of the passions is most evident in his early essay on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). For an overview of the place of Burkes thought in the British empiricist tradition, see James Conniff, The Useful Cobbler (Syracuse, NY, 1994), pp. 1951. There are some interesting reflections on the relation between the moral and political views of Hume, Smith and Burke in David Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Humes Political Thought (Oxford, 1981). In a letter to Smith on The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Burke praises the work not only for its powerful reasoning but also for its elegant painting of the manners and passions (Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E.C. Mossner and I.S. Ross (Indianapolis, IN, 1987), pp. 467). 38 Burke, Reflections, p. 68. 39 Ibid., p. 67.

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The common prejudices of a nation are superior to the reason of the individual, not only because they are the repository of the practical wisdom of previous generations, but because such prejudices engage the mind more effectively than do rational precepts alone. Reason by itself is not sufficient to guide the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue. The practical decisions of life are better met by relying on settled prejudice than on rational calculation. In Burkes words: Prejudice renders a mans virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.40 This conception of the role of prejudice in practical judgment and character formation is strikingly similar in some ways to Aristotles account of the nature of prudence or practical wisdom. Like Aristotelian prudence, Burkean prejudice involves the capacity to act appropriately and reliably in the particular and varied circumstances of practical life. Where Burke differs from Aristotle is in placing the locus of such practical wisdom not in the individual human being of exemplary prudence, but in the historical traditions of a people. In Burkes view, prudence is not so much the direct attribute of the individual statesman as a reflected quality of the historical tradition of which he is the caretaker.41 The task of the statesman is thus principally conservative. His goal should be to preserve as much as possible the continuity of the traditions of the community to which he belongs. Of course, Burke does not mean to exclude the possibility of political change. On the contrary: A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.42 But Burke thought it the duty of a prudent statesman to cloak even the most radical departures from the constitutional order in the guise of a return to the ancient fundamental principles of our government.43 The indispensable role of prejudice in moral and political judgment requires preserving at least the semblance of historical continuity even in times of revolutionary upheaval. Kants disagreement with Burke (and his German followers) concerns both the moral legitimacy and the political efficacy of the appeal to prejudice and tradition in the modern period. It is important to see where the crux of this dispute lies. Kant does not take issue with Burkes argument that rational principles alone are insufficient to provide guidance in moral and political matters. Like Burke and Aristotle, Kant recognizes that moral and political practice is not merely a matter of following certain abstract rules of conduct, for such rules are empty unless they can be applied to particular cases. Kants term for this activity of relating general principles to particular cases is judgment, Urteilskraft. In the Preface to Theory and Practice, Kant notes that the act of
Ibid., pp. 767. My emphasis. Again, the similarity to Gadamers historicist reading of Aristotles notion of prudence is striking. 42 Burke, Reflections, p. 19. 43 Ibid., p. 22.
40 41

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BURKE, KANT & HABERMAS PRACTICAL REASON 133 judging cannot itself be governed by rules, since this would require an infinite regress of meta-rules to account for the application of each previous rule. The gap between theory and practice cannot be bridged by theory alone but requires the informed judgment of individual practitioners.44 While Kant thus agrees with Burke on the need for practical judgment, the conclusion he derives from this point is the opposite of Burkes. Burke took the need for practical judgment to be evidence of the irrelevance, or even the positive harm, of abstract principles in moral and political life. Kant, on the contrary, takes the need for practical judgment to be evidence of the illegitimacy of judging theories solely in terms of their practical implementation. A doctor who lacked practical judgment would certainly be of much less help in delivering a baby than would a practiced midwife, but that as such is no reflection on the science of medicine. The fault here lies not with the theory but with the person using it. To take another example of Kants: an artilleryman who criticizes the mathematical theory of ballistics . . . since experience in applying it gives results quite different from those predicted theoretically simply reveals thereby his ignorance of the need to supplement the theory of ballistics with a theory of air resistance in order to arrive at the correct empirical results. In this case, what is needed is more, not less, theory.45 The gap between theory and practice, which practical judgment fills, means that it is possible for an accomplished practitioner in a particular field to do relatively well in the absence of much theoretical knowledge, and for a competent theoretician to be a practical bungler, but it does not permit the honest practitioner to scorn advances in theoretical comprehension that can aid his practice. In Kants words, no-one can pretend to be practically versed in a branch of knowledge and yet treat theory with scorn, without exposing the fact that he is an ignoramus in his subject.46 The objection may be raised, however, that Kants examples of the relation between theory and practice are all taken from the applied sciences such as agriculture, economics, medicine and applied physics. Whether or not Burke would agree with Kants account of the role of theory in the development of
Kant, Political Writings, pp. 61 ff. The prevalent misconception that Kantian morality is excessively rule-bound and ignores the need for moral judgment derives from taking Kants Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals as the final word in his moral philosophy. The emphasis in that work on the role of maxims and the Categorical Imperative gives a one-sided picture of Kants moral concerns. As Kant emphasizes, the purpose of the Groundwork is not to provide a complete moral philosophy but to seek out and establish the supreme principle of morality (Immanuel Kant, Akademie-Textausgabe (Berlin, 1968), Vol. IV, p. 392). Even in the Groundwork Kant notes that morality requires anthropology, i.e. a knowledge of human nature, in order to be applied to human beings (ibid., p. 412). For a treatment of the topic of moral judgment in Kant, see Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, 1993). 45 Kant, Political Writings, p. 62. 46 Ibid.
44

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such scientific and technical knowledge, he would certainly question the relevance of such examples to moral and political judgment. Kant himself acknowledges that there is a problem with his initial choice of examples when he notes that
. . . a theory which concerns objects of perception is quite different from one in which such objects are represented only through concepts, as with objects of mathematics and of philosophy. The latter objects can perhaps quite legitimately be thought of by reason, yet it may be impossible for them to be given. They may merely exist as empty ideas which either cannot be used at all in practice or only with some practical disadvantages.47

This point is a familiar one to readers of Kant: reason goes astray if it is allowed to follow its own lead, without attending to the conditions of possible experience, which include the necessary relation of our concepts to the material supplied by the senses. Philosophers are especially subject to the temptation of constructing a house of cards out of ideas that, although logically consistent with one another, have no possible empirical application. But Kant does not conclude from this point that moral philosophy (and political philosophy insofar as it involves the concept of duty or obligation) must take its guidance from experience. On the contrary, it is precisely here that Kant insists the most strongly on the primacy of theory to practice, for to recognize a course of action as a duty or obligation is to imply that it is possible to engage in that course of action. In Kants words, it would not be a duty to strive after a certain effect of our will if this effect were impossible in experience (whether we envisage the experience as complete or as progressively approximating to completion).48 The concept of duty is unique in that it implies the empirical realizability of the actions that it enjoins. Moreover, the test of such empirical realizability cannot be previous experience, since, as we have already noted, such experience may simply signal the failure of previous theory to employ genuine ideas in the process of legislation. The proper relation of reason to experience in Kants practical philosophy is the opposite of that which holds in his theoretical philosophy. While the argument of the Critique of Pure Reason is directed against the pretensions of rationalist metaphysicians to arrive at knowledge of reality without the mediation of empirical conditions, the argument of the Critique of Practical Reason is directed against the view of empiricist philosophers, like Burke, that reason can be practically effective only insofar as it is empirically conditioned.49 The political consequences of Kants position are worth noting. In his view, the mistake of the French Revolutionaries was not, as Burke thought, that they
Ibid. Ibid. 49 Cf. Dieter Henrich, Ethics of Autonomy, The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kants Philosophy, ed. Richard Velkley (Cambridge, MA, 1994), pp. 934.
47 48

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BURKE, KANT & HABERMAS PRACTICAL REASON 135 were too principled, but that they were not principled enough. They acted on the basis not of the formal principle of right [Recht], but of the empirical end of happiness. Kant defines the formal principle of right as the restriction of each individuals freedom so that it harmonizes with the freedom of everyone else and public right as the distinctive quality of the external laws which make this constant harmony possible.50 Kant contrasts this formal definition of public right in terms of the legal coordination of independent free agents with the idea of happiness as a goal at which all human beings by nature necessarily aim (although there is no single end that all human beings acknowledge as constituting happiness). The revolutionary, according to Kant, justifies his violent overthrow of the legal order in terms of the welfare of the people, i.e. in terms of furthering their happiness. He ignores the formal and certain character of right for the sake of the empirical and uncertain end of happiness. But, in destroying the legal order, he thereby destroys the only framework within which individuals can safely pursue their happiness as they see fit. The revolutionary turns out to be the mirror image of the paternalistic despot, who justifies the denial of fundamental rights to the people on the grounds that they are incapable of looking out for their own happiness. In Kants words,
The sovereign wants to make the people happy as he thinks best, and thus becomes a despot, while the people are unwilling to give up their universal human desire to seek happiness in their own way, and thus become rebels. If they had first of all asked what is lawful (in terms of a priori certainty, which no empiricist can upset), the idea of a social contract would retain its authority . . . as a rational principle for judging any lawful public constitution whatsoever.51

Kant proves to be more adamant than Burke in denying the right of a people to revolt against an oppressive, but legally constituted, government. He argues that revolution is absolutely prohibited, even in cases where the ruler has violated the original contract by authorizing the government to act tyrannically.52 In Kants view, there can be no middle ground between legitimacy and illegitimacy. To follow the natural-law tradition and formulate an empirical criterion for the subjects justified use of force against his superiors (for example, in terms of the length and severity of the injustices suffered by a people) is to make all lawful constitutions insecure and produce a state of complete lawlessness (status naturalis) where all rights cease to be effectual.53
Kant, Political Writings, p. 73. Ibid., p. 83 52 Ibid., p. 81. 53 Ibid., p. 82. Kant refers here to the views of Gottfried Achenwall (171972), whose work Ius naturae in usum auditorum was used by Kant as a textbook for his lectures on natural law.
50 51

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The only legitimate recourse for the subject of an oppressive power is the freedom of the pen. While denying the right of the subject to overthrow his ruler by force, Kant insists on the right of the subject to arrive at his own judgments on the measures taken by the ruler and to express these judgments publicly. In Kants view, just as the people must be shown that civil freedom requires the existence of coercive laws and a sovereign power strong enough to enforce them, so rulers must in turn be persuaded that they have nothing to fear from permitting their subjects to discuss freely and openly the justice of their actions. This right of publicity, as Kant calls it, cannot be guaranteed by anything other than the respect that the ruler has for public opinion. Kants strategy for addressing the political crisis inaugurated by the French Revolution thus differs fundamentally from Burkes. While Kant agrees with Burke in repudiating the methods of the French Revolutionaries, he is much more sympathetic than Burke was to their ultimate aims. In Theory and Practice, Kant makes every effort to disassociate the universal principles of the Enlightenment from the bloody deeds of the French Revolution. Taking direct issue with Burkes analysis of the causes of the revolution, Kant argues that the revolutionaries committed their worst excesses not because they were guided by abstract and universal principles, but because they neglected such principles for the sake of the delusory goal of directly furthering the happiness of the people. Kant suggests that, if the revolutionaries had been truer to their ideals, they would have been more patient with the slow pace of political reform, and less ready to resort to violence. Moreover, unlike Burke, who argued that abstract ideas have no place in politics and called for the clear separation of political power from intellectual accomplishment, Kant praises the philosophic Frederick the Great for telling his subjects: Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!54 Kant places his own hopes for political reform neither in revolutionary violence nor in pious traditionalism, but in the gradual spread of public enlightenment under the protection of a benevolent despot. Reason, Tradition and the Nature of Practical Judgment Kant characterizes the modern period as an age of criticism. In such an age, Burkes appeal to traditional prejudices, far from serving to legitimate moral and political institutions, can only awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination.55 Kants fundamental criticism of the Burkean position is that it fails to recognize the self-critical character of modern moral and political life. Habermas views are in accord with this
54 Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? , Political Writings, pp. 55, 59. 55 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York, 1965), Preface to the First Edition, p. 9.

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BURKE, KANT & HABERMAS PRACTICAL REASON 137 Kantian formulation of the problem facing any appeal to tradition in the modern world. He criticizes his opponents in the Historikerstreit precisely for relying on a conception of historical continuity that is incompatible with such reflective self-criticism. The arguments of both Kant and Habermas suggest that the Burkean appeal to tradition is necessarily self-defeating under the conditions of modern social and political life. It is certainly true that the particular political institutions defended by Burke in the Reflections a mixed regime consisting of a landed aristocracy, an established Church hierarchy with substantial property holdings, and a hereditary monarchy are now as dead as the dodo. Moreover, it is undeniable that the tone of the Reflections often betrays a melancholy awareness of coming too late on the scene: the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.56 Burkes argument in the Reflections, however, is not simply an exercise in ineffectual nostalgia. On the contrary, Burke presents a powerful case for a new kind of post-revolutionary politics, in which the prudent statesman, having learned from the catastrophic events of the French Revolution the danger of relying on abstract and universal principles in moral and political affairs, deliberately embraces and defends the particular historical traditions of his nation. Burke is a peculiarly self-conscious and reflective conservative. A closer examination of his rhetoric in the Reflections reveals that he was very much aware of the self-critical character of modern political life to which Kant and Habermas call attention. His appeals to tradition are always hedged by an awareness of the constructed character of these traditions and of the need for political imagination to sustain them. As Burke writes in a typical passage:
We have derived no small benefit from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.57

In the same passage, Burke speaks, in deliberately paradoxical terms, of a choice of inheritance, implying that the acceptance of historical traditions is never simply passive or uncritical. Just as Kant admits the need for practical judgment and sensitivity to historical context in the application of moral and political norms, Burke acknowledges that the continuation of a tradition is invariably selective and involves a critical break with some elements of the past. For Burke, the historical continuity of the past with the present is not a gift but an achievement. The dispute between Burke and Kant on the relation between theory and practice does not turn therefore on the need for contextual judgment in the application of moral and political principles, but rather on the question of the
56 57

Burke, Reflections, p. 66. Ibid., p. 30. My emphasis.

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necessary conditions for such practical judgment. In Burkes view, the attempt to emancipate oneself completely from the conventions and traditions of ones society in order to attain an independent critical standpoint from which to exercise such judgment is ultimately self-destructive, since there is no Archimedean point that can support such independence from historical tradition. We need to foster and protect the conventions and traditions of our society precisely in order to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature.58 Burkes defence of tradition is rooted not in an unreflective piety towards the past, but in a disillusioned recognition of the human need for illusions. Kant, on the other hand, is more optimistic about the ultimate prospects for moral and political reform, because he believes his moral philosophy provides an independent standard of moral judgment that does not require such conventional support. As Kant tells us in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the morally good will shines like a jewel by its own light as something which has full value in itself.59 Emancipation from the customs and traditions of ones society is justified, in Kants view, so long as it is guided by the polestar of the moral dignity of man. In judging the debate between Burke and Kant it should be kept in mind that they are both post-Enlightenment thinkers. Their dispute rests on a common awareness of the disenchantment of traditional sources of authority in the modern world. Moreover, they agree in ascribing the primary cause of such disenchantment to the instrumental and materialistic character of modern natural and political science. Despite their agreement as to the nature of the problem, however, they propose as solutions two quite different models of practical judgment. Kants proposed solution to the problem involves nothing less than a complete revision of the modern conception of reason. The modern instrumental conception of reason is deficient because it is unable to supply an intrinsic end or goal for human life. Instrumental reason is at the mercy of whatever contingent ends the desires and passions imposed on the individual. In Humes well-known formulation: Reason is, and ought only to be a slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.60 Moreover, the lack of any intrinsic end or goal of human life means that the pursuit of the ends established by the desires and passions has no intelligible limits. In Kants view, the unintended consequence of the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment is the enslavement of human beings to their own ever-expanding passions. 61 It is possible to avoid this
58 Ibid., p. 67. For an insightful account of the scepticism underlying Burkes defence of tradition, see Michael Mosher, The Skeptics Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, Political Theory, 19 (3) (1991), pp. 391418. 59 Kant, Akademie-Textausgabe, Vol. IV, p. 394. 60 David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford, 2000), p. 266. 61 Cf. Richard Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason (Chicago, 1989), pp. 4460.

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BURKE, KANT & HABERMAS PRACTICAL REASON 139 consequence only if reason (at least in its moral employment) can be shown to generate ends independently of empirical motives. The concept of the autonomy of pure practical reason as the capacity of the moral will to act on such ends is thus not a dispensable metaphysical appendage to Kants moral intuitions (as Habermas takes it to be), but is rather a necessary component in Kants account of the self-legitimation of the modern social and political order. Unlike Kant, Burke has no quarrel with the view that reason depends for its practical efficacy on the assistance of the lower faculties of the imagination and the passions. In opposition to the calculating and individualistic rationalism of the Enlightenment philosophs, however, Burke argues that the dependence of reason on the passions requires that the reason of the individual be grounded in the common life of a particular historical community. Because reason is unavoidably an instrument of the passions, it is crucial to provide the passions themselves with moral direction, and this can be accomplished only by moral habituation within the confines of an established political community. Burkes proposed solution to the emancipation of instrumental reason in the modern period is to engage in a rhetorical defence (which is always also a reconstruction) of the threatened common traditions of his society. While acknowledging that the innovative spirit of modern science has seriously damaged the continuity of moral and political traditions in the modern state, Burke sees no alternative but to attempt a partial restoration of such traditions by means of self-conscious political rhetoric. The issues that Burke, Kant and Habermas raise are central to an understanding of our contemporary moral and political dilemmas. We have neither a rationally defensible account of tradition nor a morally effective conception of practical reason. The instrumental conception of reason bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment is both corrosive of traditional sources of authority and incapable of providing autonomous moral and political guidance. Kants attempt to develop an account of reason that accords better with our experience of moral freedom addresses this lack of moral guidance, but founders on his untenable metaphysical dualism. Habermas attempt to ground a Kantian conception of practical reason in a non-metaphysical account of the pragmatic presuppositions of rational discourse avoids reliance on a noumenal self, but only at the price of weakening drastically the normative authority of practical reason. Moreover, in his laudable desire to repudiate the virulent nationalism of the recent German past, Habermas fails to address adequately the human need for particular communal and historical identity. His discourse ethics founders on an overestimation of the capacity and willingness of human beings to act on the basis of abstract principles of right, and a consequent underestimation of the role of habit, prejudice and tradition in guiding the lives of ordinary human beings.

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In the end, Burkes account of the positive role of tradition and prejudice in guiding moral and political judgment may prove to be more resilient than its critics have supposed. Stripped of its merely nostalgic elements, Burkes argument that reason depends for its moral and political efficacy on the prior cultivation of the passions and sentiments is more plausible psychologically than the elaborate attempts of Kant and Habermas to incorporate moral norms into the concept of reason itself. Burkes frank recognition that reason is primarily an instrument of the passions points to the indispensability in the formation of practical judgment of an education addressed to our sentiments as well as our reason. Unlike Kant and Habermas, Burke does not make the mistake of burdening the frail reed of human reason with tasks it is unable to carry out alone. Louis Hunt MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

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