© 2009 The Philosophical Forum, Inc.

DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION:

THE FOUCAULT/HABERMAS DEBATE RECONSIDERED

AMY ALLEN

The Foucault/Habermas debate was a nonevent. The reasons for this were both
personal––Foucault’s untimely death––and philosophical––Foucault and Haber-
mas’s apparent inability to agree on a topic for debate.1 Whatever the reason, no
formal exchange of ideas between Foucault and Habermas ever occurred; instead,
what is commonly known as the Foucault/Habermas debate is largely a product of
the secondary literature on these two thinkers.2 Moreover, the way the debate has
gone so far, Habermas and his defenders have seemed to have the upper hand, for
two reasons.3 First, whereas Foucault only mentioned Habermas’s work in passing
in a handful of interviews and essays, Habermas actually offered a sustained
critical reading of Foucault’s work.4 Thus, to a great extent, Habermas has been

An earlier—and shorter—version of this paper was presented at the American Philosophical Associa-
tion, Central Division, in 2005. Thanks to David S. Owen for his insightful comments on that occasion.
Thanks also to Colin Koopman for his feedback on a more recent draft.
1
For Foucault’s version of the story, see Michel Foucault, “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,”
Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1994) 124–25; for Habermas’s version, see Jürgen Habermas, “Taking Aim at the Heart
of the Present,” Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) 150.
2
See, for example, Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social
Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); David Hoy and Thomas McCarthy,
Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Michael Kelly, ed., Critique and Power: Recasting the
Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); and David Owen and Samantha
Ashenden, eds, Foucault contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Criti-
cal Theory (London: Sage, 1999).
3
On this point, see Owen and Ashenden (1999): 1–2.
4
For Habermas on Foucault, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity:
Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) lectures 9 and 10; and
Habermas (1994). For Foucault on Habermas, see Foucault (1994); Michel Foucault, “The Art of
Telling the Truth,” Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael
Kelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) 139–48; Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of Concern for the Self
as a Practice of Freedom,” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault,

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 AMY ALLEN

able to set the terms of the debate, and many of the contributions to the debate
from Foucault’s side have consisted of efforts to defend him against Habermas’s
critique.5 The second and no doubt related reason is that both Habermas and the
Habermasians have tended to be much more interested in engaging with Fou-
cault’s work than the Foucaultians have been in engaging with Habermas’s.6
Ladelle McWhorter’s complaint that of all of the misguided criticisms of Fou-
cault she has read, the “most boring, irritating, and seemingly irrelevant of all
were Habermas’s tortured and contorted critiques [. . .], which became only mar-
ginally more intelligible when reiterated by his American followers,”7 though
unfair, expresses an all-too-common if not often explicitly articulated senti-
ment among Foucaultians: namely, that Habermas’s work is so boring and
irritating (so German?) that it is beneath discussion. These two factors have
led the Foucault/Habermas debate to a peculiar impasse: The Habermasians seem
to think they have won, while the Foucaultians act as if they were not even
playing.
It is a principal aim of this essay to reinvigorate this deadlocked debate.
However, one might wonder why this is worth doing at all. After all, who cares
about the outcome of this debate, other than a handful of partisan Foucaultians and
Habermasians? Why bother rehashing yet again the minutiae of Habermas and
Foucault’s respective philosophical positions? What, if anything, is at stake here
that is of general philosophical interest? The answer to this last question is: a great
deal. Habermas and Foucault can be understood as contemporary representatives
of opposing traditions of thought in social and political philosophy.8 Habermas’s
focus on the rationality inherent in our social practices and political institutions, a
rationality that for him is rooted in their communicative structure, places him in
the long and illustrious tradition of political thought stretching back through Kant
to Plato. Foucault’s emphasis on power, by contrast, traces its lineage back

vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997) 281–301; and Michel Foucault, “Space,
Knowledge, Power,” Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 3, ed. Paul Rabinow (New
York: The New Press, 2000) 349–64.
5
Owen and Ashenden’s edited volume Foucault contra Habermas exemplifies this trend. As the
editors note in their introduction, the purpose of the volume is to offer “a critical response to
Habermas’s position from the perspective of Foucault’s practice” and thus “to reanimate the engage-
ment by providing a Foucauldian rejoinder to the practitioners of [Habermasian] critique [. . .]”
(Owen and Ashenden [1999]: 2).
6
The Owen/Ashenden volume is a welcome exception to this general rule.
7
Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999) xvi.
8
See Bent Flyvbjerg, “Ideal Theory, Real Rationality: Habermas versus Foucault and Nietzsche.”
Paper for the Political Studies Association Conference, The Challenge for Democracy in the 21st
Century, London School of Economics, 2000. Available online at: http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/
IdealTheory.pdf, accessed on July 24, 2006.

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 DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

through Nietzsche and Machiavelli to Thrasymachus.9 Indeed, as Bent Flyvbjerg

notes, the respective projects of Habermas and Foucault highlight an “essential
tension” in thinking about politics and society: the tension between “consensus and
conflict, ideals and reality,” or, to put it more broadly still, between rationality
and power.10 Flyvbjerg is right, I think, to call this tension an essential one. Social
and political theory cannot afford to give up entirely on the admittedly impossible
ideal of a rational organization of social and political life, nor can it afford to turn
a blind eye to the complex and insidious workings of power. Thus, unlike the
Rawls/Habermas debate, where the differences, though significant, are more meta-
theoretical rather than substantive, the Foucault/Habermas debate centers on a
substantive tension that lies at the very heart of social and political theorizing.
Unfortunately, however, the existing literature on the Foucault/Habermas
debate has not, for the most part, brought out these core issues in a productive or
fruitful way. As I have already indicated, the majority of this literature either
articulates the by now standard Habermasian criticisms of Foucault—charges of
performative contradiction or normative confusion11—or offers defenses against
these criticisms on Foucault’s behalf. A much smaller portion addresses the task
of developing a Foucaultian critique of Habermas.12 A still smaller portion takes on
the much more difficult but ultimately more productive task of integrating the
respective insights of Habermas and Foucault, often because commentators
assume, wrongly, that Habermas and Foucault are, as Flyvbjerg puts it, “so
profoundly different that it would be futile to envision any sort of theoretical or
metatheoretical perspective within which these differences could be integrated
into a common framework.”13 Contra Flyvbjerg, I maintain that there is more basis
for a middle ground, at least on certain issues, between Habermas and Foucault

9
One can also trace Foucault’s lineage through Kant, although Foucault’s reading of Kant is quite
different from Habermas’s. Exploring their shared Kantian background is a useful way of articu-
lating a middle ground in their debate, but it is not one that I will pursue here. For a reappraisal of
Habermas’s critique of Foucault in light of Foucault’s relationship to Kant, see Amy Allen,
“Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal,” Constellations 10: 2 (2003): 180–98, and
Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory
(New York: Columbia UP, 2008) ch. 2.
10
Flyvbjerg (2000): 1.
11
The first to make the charge of normative confusion is actually not Habermas, but Fraser. See Nancy
Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minne-
apolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) ch. 1. Habermas takes up this criticism in Habermas (1987): lecture
10.
12
By far, the best example of this approach to the debate is James Tully, “To Think and Act
Differently: Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas’s Theory,” Foucault contra Hab-
ermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory, ed. David Owen and
Samantha Ashenden (London: Sage, 1999) 90–142.
13
Flyvbjerg (2000): 1–2.

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 AMY ALLEN

than is commonly acknowledged. However, in order to demonstrate this, it will not

suffice simply to assert the complementarity of their philosophical positions.
Integrating the insights of these two thinkers will of necessity involve modifying
or recasting their views, perhaps in substantial ways.
This is not to say that it is possible to bring together into one overarching
framework all of the insights of these two prolific and wide-ranging thinkers. Even
if this were possible, such a task would most definitely be beyond the scope of a
single essay. Thus, my focus in what follows will be on one strand––but it is
arguably the central strand––of the Foucault/Habermas debate: their respective
accounts of subjectivation. My aim is to lay the groundwork for an account of
subjectivation that draws on the conceptual insights that are to be found on both
sides of the Foucault/Habermas debate, modifying and recasting their views as
necessary. In order to accomplish this goal, I begin with a fascinating yet mostly
overlooked moment in the Foucault/Habermas debate: Habermas’s metaethical
defense of discourse ethics against moral skepticism. This may seem like a strange
place from which to begin a reconsideration of the Foucault/Habermas debate.
After all, Habermas devotes very little space in his lengthy defense of discourse
ethics to explicit discussion of Foucault. And yet, at the end of the debate that he
stages with the moral skeptic in his seminal essay “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a
Program of Philosophical Justification,” he makes it clear that he takes Foucault to
be paradigmatic of the most extreme and consistent form of skepticism that he has
been arguing against.14 Taking up this vantage point on the Foucault/Habermas
debate is productive for several reasons. First, it reveals that Habermas’s defense
of discourse ethics rests, in the end, on the plausibility of his intersubjective
account of subjectivation. Second, although one might object that framing the
debate in terms of the opposition between discourse ethics and moral skepticism
plays too much into Habermas’s hands, once again allowing him to set the terms
of the debate, I shall argue that framing the issue in this way enables us to pose in
the most forceful possible way the challenge that Foucault’s work presents to the
Habermasian position. Finally, shifting the focus of discussion away from Fou-
cault and Habermas’s respective views on normative justification and toward their
respective accounts of subjectivation makes it possible to move the Foucault/
Habermas debate to new and more productive terrain by developing an account of
subjectivation that draws on the insights of each.
This article consists of four parts. I begin, in section one, by considering briefly
whether or not Habermas is justified in associating Foucault with moral skepti-
cism. In section two, I reconstruct Habermas’s argument against moral skepticism

14
Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” Moral
Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) 99.

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 DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

in the necessary detail. I argue that, in the end, the success or failure of Haber-
mas’s metaethical argument against moral skepticism depends upon his intersub-
jective account of subjectivation. In section three, I turn to a discussion of that
account and contrast it briefly with Foucault’s alternative account of subjection. I
argue that both Habermas and Foucault offer a one-sided analysis of subjectiva-
tion; Habermas stresses its communicative, rational, intersubjective aspects and
Foucault emphasizes its power-ladenness. In contrast to each of them, I argue that
subjectivation necessarily entails both communicative rationality and power rela-
tionships. In the concluding section, I consider the implications of my compara-
tive argument for both Foucault and Habermas’s broader philosophical projects.
With respect to Foucault, I argue that acknowledging the role that communicative
rationality plays in the process of subjection would require him to expand his
conception of the social. There are hints in Foucault’s late work that he was
willing to move in this direction, but they remain seriously underdeveloped. With
respect to Habermas, I argue that acknowledging the role that power plays in
socialization would make it difficult for him to maintain a sharp distinction
between power and validity claims, a distinction that he takes to be fundamental
for his normative philosophical framework. Accepting this feature of socialization
would thus require him to be much more self-critical about the status of his own
normative idealizations and to recast his project in a more contextualist and
pragmatic way.

I. FOUCAULT AND MORAL SKEPTICISM

Habermas’s claim that Foucault is representative of the most consistent and

extreme form of moral skepticism raises the complicated question of whether or
not Foucault was a skeptic, about morality or anything else, and, if so, what sort
of skeptic he was.15 This question is made more complicated by the fact that there
are many different varieties of moral skepticism, and Habermas never offers a
precise definition of what he means by the term.16 On the face of it, however,

15
For a characterization of Foucault as a skeptic, not just about moral norms but about knowledge
claims more generally, see John Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New
York: Columbia UP, 1985). By contrast, Gary Gutting argues that Foucault is not a universal skeptic
or relativist with respect to truth, but he seems to concede that Foucault is some sort of a normative
skeptic, in the sense that he views all norms as historically contingent constraints on human
freedom; see Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1989) 273–85.
16
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, for example, delineates five distinct varieties of moral skepticism. See
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Moral Skepticism and Justification,” Moral Knowledge? New Readings
in Moral Epistemology, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons (New York: Oxford UP,
1996) 6–8.

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 AMY ALLEN

Habermas certainly seems safe in calling Foucault a moral skeptic. After all,
Foucault’s genealogical method often involves analyzing the ways in which moral
norms are rooted in and bound up with contingent and historically specific power/
knowledge relations, thus, calling into question or problematizing the presumed
validity of those norms. For instance, in the following passage, Foucault employs
this strategy with respect to the norm of popular sovereignty:

[The theory of sovereignty] made it possible to superimpose on the mechanism of discipline a

system of right that concealed its mechanisms and erased the element of domination and the
techniques of domination involved in discipline [. . .]. In other words, juridical systems, no matter
whether they were theories or codes, allowed the democratization of sovereignty, and the estab-
lishment of a public right articulated with collective sovereignty, at the very same time when, to the
extent that, and because the democratization of sovereignty was heavily ballasted by the mecha-
nisms of disciplinary coercion.17

Obviously, much more would have to be said here about how Foucault backs up
this claim in order to determine its plausibility, but that is not my concern here.
Instead, I want to highlight Foucault’s methodological move. His strategy is to
claim that the norm of popular sovereignty can be shown to be grounded in
“mechanisms of disciplinary coercion” that have been concealed by the system of
right that seeks to justify this norm (and other related norms). Moreover, even if
Foucault never makes the blanket claim that there can be no non-contingent,
universal norms, one certainly get the distinct impression in reading through
Foucault’s work as a whole that he believes that all of our most deeply cherished
moral and political norms can be subjected to the genealogist’s withering gaze and
thus can be seen to be rooted in contingent power/knowledge relations. This would
suggest that Foucault believes that no universal moral norms are or can be
justified, inasmuch as all such norms can be shown via genealogical analysis to
be bound up with contingent power/knowledge relations that problematize their
claim to universal validity.18
However, the situation is a bit more complicated than it appears at first glance.
If one were so inclined, one might defend Foucault against the charge of moral
skepticism by arguing that he does believe that some norms can be justified, so
long as those are understood to be local, provisional, and contextual rather than

17
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans.
David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003) 37.
18
Extreme moral skepticism would thus seem to be incompatible with a normative critique of power
relations; Foucault’s putative attempt to hold both of these commitments is what leads to the charge
of normative confusion. Foucault could potentially overcome this objection by claiming that
although his critique of power relations is indeed a normative one, it does not appeal to any
universal moral norms. I consider this strategy below.

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 DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

universal. On this interpretation, he does not hold the radical skeptical view that no
moral norms are or can be justified; instead, his skeptical critique is aimed only at
attempts to claim that any norm can be valid at all times, in all places, for all
persons.19 Evidence for this reading can be found in some of Foucault’s comments
on the role of intellectuals in public political culture. Foucault argues that the
intellectual should no longer be thought of as the “master of truth and justice” or
as “the spokesman of the universal.”20 Intellectuals should be thought of as “spe-
cific” rather than “universal”; rather than attempting to construct universal theo-
retical frameworks or utopian ideals, they should confine their work to pointing
out the contingency of historical formations and the specific problems that are
endemic to them.21 Here, Foucault suggests that the status of the universal intel-
lectual was always illusory because the truths and normative judgments that such
intellectuals offered were not, indeed, could not be held true or valid universally.
Foucault’s reason for this claim is that he regards truth as inseparable from,
though not reducible to, power; as he famously puts it, echoing Nietzsche, “[t]ruth
is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of
constraint.”22 I assume that what Foucault says here about truth would apply,
mutatis mutandis, to moral judgments as well. The intellectual is not (and cannot
be) the bearer or prophet of universal norms or moral “truths,” for given the
unavoidable rootedness of norms and truths in contingent social practices and
power/knowledge relations, any claim to the universality of moral norms is open
to question. At the very least, one might argue that Foucault’s point here shifts the
burden of proof back to Habermas, who is charged with demonstrating that his
proposed norms are indeed universally valid despite the historical contingencies in
which they are rooted.
On this line of interpretation, Foucault’s own ethical works would be seen as his
attempt to spell out a more local and provisional set of norms, which he groups
around a variety of concepts in his late work, including care of the self, aesthetics
of existence, and parrhesia.23 There is no doubt some sense in which Foucault

19
James Tully seems to have something like this view in mind when he writes: “Foucault’s enlight-
enment attitude is a ‘specific’ scepticism (against the claims of a specific limit), not the universal
scepticism Habermas argues against in his mock dialogues” (Tully [1999]: 120).
20
Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980) 126.
21
On this point, see Michel Foucault, “What Is Called Punishing?” Power: The Essential Works of
Michel Foucault, vol. 3, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 2000) 384.
22
Foucault (1980): 131.
23
See, for example, Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985); The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1986); Paul Rabinow, ed., Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth:
The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 1 (New York: The New Press, 1997); and Michel
Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2001).

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 AMY ALLEN

thinks that we should engage in practices of self-fashioning or fearless speech, but

these norms have value for us only given our contingent historical situation and
the particular sorts of power/knowledge relations against which we are struggling.
Foucault never claims universal validity for such norms. It is an open question, I
think, how well Foucault’s ethical works defend even the local and provisional
value of living one’s life as work of art. For our purposes, however, this can remain
an open question, for even granting Foucault the ability to justify provisional and
local norms, this position nonetheless leaves him endorsing what Habermas would
legitimately see as a form, though perhaps a more limited form, of moral skepti-
cism. Although it may well be true that Foucault thinks that local norms are the
best we can hope for and maybe also all that we need, from Habermas’s perspec-
tive, this stance is enough to call Foucault a moral skeptic, since Habermas
specifically links the justification of moral norms with their universalizability.
Indeed, Habermas maintains that we might “call moral only those norms that are
strictly universalizable, i.e., those that are invariable over historical time and
across social groups.”24 Thus, someone who is skeptical of the possibility of the
universal validity of moral norms, as Foucault is, would remain a moral skeptic for
the purposes of Habermas’s argument, even if this seems, all things considered, a
rather mild form of skepticism.25

II. DISCOURSE ETHICS VS. MORAL SKEPTICISM

I will present Habermas’s defense of discourse ethics against the moral skep-
tic’s attack in five stages.26 The skeptic’s opening move is to attack moral cogni-
tivism, pointing to the repeated failure of cognitivists to explain satisfactorily what
it might mean for moral beliefs or judgments to be candidates for truth. Although

24
Habermas (1990): 111, n. 41.
25
Indeed, when Foucault was asked in a 1984 interview if he is a skeptical thinker, he responded:
“Absolutely.” See Michel Foucault, “The Return of Morality,” Michel Foucault: Politics, Philoso-
phy, Culture, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988) 254.
26
Actually, in Habermas’s text, there are seven stages to the debate. I skip over the first stage, which
concerns the skeptic’s denial of the phenomenology of moral experience. In response, Habermas
suggests that the realm of moral phenomena can only be denied when we take up a third-person
observer’s perspective on everyday life and interactions; once we take up a first-person participant’s
perspective, it is impossible to deny the existence and relevance of these phenomena. This stage of
the argument is relevant for the Foucault/Habermas debate quite generally, inasmuch as it links up
with Habermas’s criticisms of Foucault’s methodology, which Habermas claims remains stubbornly
attached to the observer’s perspective and denies the usefulness of more hermeneutic, participant-
centered approaches. However, it is less relevant for the major issues under consideration here, so
I shall leave further discussion of it aside. For the sake of space, I have condensed Habermas’s
fourth and fifth stages into a single step.

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 DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

Habermas does not deny the flaws in earlier attempts to defend cognitivism, he
maintains that the alternative—an embrace of ethical subjectivism which neces-
sarily, on his view, collapses into skepticism—“deprive[s] the sphere of everyday
moral intuitions of its significance.”27 Moreover, he argues that cognitivism can be
successfully defended if we give up the strong claim that normative claims are
truth candidates and instead adopt the weaker position that normative claims
are analogous to truth claims.28 Habermas notes a prima facie analogy between
truth claims––claims about what the objective world is like––and normative right-
ness claims––claims about how the intersubjective world should be ordered: Truth
claims are to facts as normative claims are to legitimately ordered interpersonal
relations.29 Thus, just as we appeal to facts as reasons for asserting truth claims, we
appeal to legitimately ordered interpersonal relations as reasons for our normative
judgments. Habermas suggests that this strategy of thinking of normative claims
as analogous to though not types of truth claims offers the best way of salvaging
discourse ethics’ commitment to moral cognitivism from the skeptic’s opening
challenge.30
The skeptic, however, responds by questioning Habermas’s assumption that
normative claims are based on reasons. If this were true, then wouldn’t we expect
reasonable people to reach agreement on moral issues? The overwhelming evi-
dence to the contrary thus emboldens the skeptic to ask whether normative claims
are based on reasons after all. In other words, the skeptic appeals to what Haber-
mas calls the “pluralism of ultimate value orientations” as evidence that even
Habermas’s relatively weak version of cognitivism is flawed.31 In response to this
second stage of skeptical argument, Habermas offers a theory of moral argumen-
tation that explains how normative rightness claims can be redeemed in practical
discourse and thus how a reasoned agreement on normative questions can be
achieved. The key component of this theory is the principle of universalization
(U). In order to be valid, a norm must fulfill (U), which Habermas states as
follows:

27
Habermas (1990): 55.
28
Ibid: 56.
29
He also acknowledges that there are certain disanalogies between truth and rightness claims; these
he discusses in Habermas (1990): 60–61. The disanalogies are not as important for our purposes as
is the analogy.
30
Recently, Habermas has modified his conception of truth, but not his account of moral rightness, nor
his contention that there is an analogy between the two. See Jürgen Habermas, Truth and Justifi-
cation, trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).
31
Habermas (1990): 76.

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 AMY ALLEN

(U) All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be
anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests (and these consequences are preferred
to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation).32

(U) serves as a bridging principle between particular values, interests, and com-
mitments, on the one hand, and generalizable norms, on the other. In this way, it
plays a role in practical discourse similar to that played by the principle of
induction in theoretical discourse.33
The skeptic, however, is unimpressed by the appeal to (U). She replies that (U)
seems to be nothing more than “a hasty generalization of moral intuitions peculiar
to our own Western culture.”34 As a result, rather than being a universal principle
rooted in the structure of moral argumentation, (U) seems to be a substantive
normative principle requiring independent justification. At best, (U) is merely
contingent; at worst, it is ethnocentric. Habermas responds to this third stage
of skeptical attack with his well-known transcendental-pragmatic argument,
designed to show that (U) is a necessary and unavoidable presupposition of any
moral argument, including the skeptic’s own argument against the cognitivist. The
aim of this argument is to establish that (U) is, as Habermas puts it, an “inescap-
able presupposition of [an] irreplaceable discourse and in that sense universal.”35

32
Ibid: 65. Habermas’s more recent formulation of (U) is this: “A norm is valid when the foreseeable
consequences and side effects of its general observance for the interests and value-orientations of
each individual could be jointly accepted by all concerned without coercion” (Jürgen Habermas,
The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, trans. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Greiff
[Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998] 42).
33
Habermas distinguishes (U), the general principle of moral argumentation, from the discourse
principle (D): “Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval
of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse” (Habermas [1990]: 66). In
his original account of the relationship between these two principles, Habermas claims that (D)
presupposes (U); that is, it presupposes that norms can be justified. Habermas’s strategy is first to
defend (U), then to make the transition to discourse ethics properly. More recently, Habermas has
revised his account of the relationship between (U) and (D); he now argues that (U) is derived from
(D), rather than vice versa. See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a
Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) 109;
and Habermas (1998): 41–43. For helpful discussion of the relationship between (U) and (D), see
Kenneth Baynes, “Democracy and the Rechtstaat: Habermas’s Faktizität und Geltung,” The Cam-
bridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 201–32;
and Cristina Lafont, The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy, trans. José Medina (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1999), ch. 7. In any case, Habermas still maintains that (U) is the principle that
governs moral discourses. As I am more interested in his defense of (U), in particular against the
skeptical charge that (U) is ethnocentric, I shall leave aside further discussion of (D) and of the
complicated relationship between the two principles.
34
Habermas (1990): 76.
35
Ibid: 84, emphasis mine.

10
 DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

Habermas argues that in order to engage in argumentation at all, speakers must

presuppose that all participants understand the argument to be a cooperative
search for the truth and are motivated to agree or disagree solely on the basis of the
unforced force of the better argument.36 The presuppositions themselves stipulate
that everyone who stands to make a relevant contribution is included in the
discourse, that everyone is able to participate equally in the raising and question-
ing of validity claims, and that all participants are free of internal and external
coercion in the evaluation of such validity claims.37 Establishing these rules38 as
unavoidable presuppositions of any argument whatsoever, rather than merely
contingent conventions of Western forms of reasoning, involves demonstrating
that any violation of one of these rules leads the speaker into a performative
contradiction.39 Having established that these rules are unavoidable presupposi-
tions of argumentation, Habermas next claims that (U) can be derived from them.
Thus, if we grant that these presuppositions are necessary and universal, then (U)
must be necessary and universal as well.40 If this is the case, then the skeptic
himself, simply by engaging in an argument with the cognitivist in which he
attempts to deny (U), “must inevitably subscribe to certain tacit presuppositions
of argumentation that are incompatible with the propositional content of his
objection.”41 The skeptic thus falls into a performative contradiction and defeats
himself.
Both the defense of Habermas’s claim that the violation of any of the rules of
argument leads to a performative contradiction and the derivation of (U) from
those rules are complex tasks. I shall not pursue either, however, because even if
we grant that Habermas’s transcendental-pragmatic argument goes through, the

36
See ibid: 88–89.
37
Ibid: 89. For a slightly expanded list of argumentative presuppositions, see Habermas (1998): 44.
38
By calling these presuppositions “rules,” however, Habermas does not mean to imply that in order
to count as a discourse, the conversation in question must actually conform completely to these
rules. The presuppositions of argument are idealizing assumptions that are implicitly adopted and
intuitively known and that must be assumed to be approximated in order for us to enter into
argumentation at all. In other words, these are “idealizing assumptions that everyone who seriously
engages in argumentation must make as a matter of fact” ( Jürgen Habermas, “Remarks on Dis-
course Ethics,” Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran Cronin
[Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994] 50). However, given their status as idealizations, Habermas acknowl-
edges that they have to be counterfactually imputed as governing in actual discourses, even though,
in such actual discourses, we will always have to settle for approximations.
39
See Habermas (1990): 90–91.
40
See ibid: 92–93. Habermas does not actually carry out the derivation of (U) from the rules of
argumentation; he only indicates that he thinks such a derivation is possible and suggests the
direction the argument might take. For a clear and concise attempt to derive (U), see William Rehg,
Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas (Berkeley: U of California P,
1994) ch. 3.
41
Habermas (1990): 82.

11
 AMY ALLEN

skeptic has a fourth line of attack. The skeptic can avoid performative contradic-
tion and thus potentially defeat the transcendental-pragmatic argument simply by
refusing to engage in discourse. Habermas describes such a skeptic as follows:

The consistent skeptic will deprive the transcendental pragmatist of a basis for his argument. He
may, for example, take the attitude of an ethnologist vis-à-vis his own culture, shaking his head over
philosophical argumentation as though he were witnessing the unintelligible rites of a strange tribe.
Nietzsche perfected this way of looking at philosophical matters, and Foucault has now rehabili-
tated it.42

Habermas’s initial response to the consistent skeptic is to insist that argumentation

is an integral part of our shared form of sociocultural life; as a result, truly
consistent skepticism demands the nearly impossible task of cutting oneself off
completely from the community of beings who argue. The skeptic “cannot, even
indirectly, deny that he moves in a shared sociocultural form of life, that he grew
up in a web of communicative action, and that he reproduces his life in that web.”43
Thus, truly consistent skepticism is inconceivable; it is at best an abstract possi-
bility, and not even a coherent one at that. As Habermas puts it, “the radical
skeptic’s refusal to argue is an empty gesture. No matter how consistent a dropout
he may be, he cannot drop out of the communicative practice of everyday life, to
the presuppositions of which he remains bound. And these in turn are at least
partly identical with the presuppositions of argumentation as such.”44
But there is something a bit too quick about the move that Habermas makes
here. It is true that the presuppositions of the communicative practice of every-
day life are partly identical with the presuppositions of argumentation, but the
qualification is significant. For instance, elsewhere Habermas makes it clear
that he views “argumentative speech as a special case––in fact, a privileged
derivative––of action oriented toward reaching understanding,” that is, of com-
municative action in general.45 Argumentation is a reflective and more highly
evolved form of communicative action, a form that emerges phylogenetically with
the modern age and ontogenetically with the attainment of a post-conventional ego
identity. Thus, argumentation and communicative action are not coextensive; the
former is a particular (though in Habermas’s view, a privileged) form of the latter.
This means that although it is indeed the case that by rejecting communicative
action, the skeptic also necessarily rejects argumentation, too, it is not the case that

42
Ibid: 99.
43
Ibid: 100.
44
Ibid: 100–01.
45
Jürgen Habermas, “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action,” Moral Consciousness and
Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1990) 130.

12
 DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

by rejecting argumentation, he also necessarily rejects communicative action.

Thus, it is not obvious that the skeptic could not opt out of argumentation without
opting out of communicative action in general. The plausibility of Habermas’s
argument here relies heavily on his theory of modernity, specifically, the claim
that argumentation is a key feature of modern societies, such that the skeptic
who is situated in such a society does not have the option of rejecting it
while still embracing some other form of communicative interaction.46 Obviously,
there is not sufficient space to delve into Habermas’s complex and wide-ranging
theory of modernity here; suffice it to say that it involves certain claims
about social evolution and cultural learning processes––in short, claims
about historical progress––that a Foucaultian skeptic would no doubt want to
question.
Suppose, however, that the Foucaultian skeptic does not take up this line of
criticism. Suppose instead that she just bites the bullet, grants Habermas for the
sake of the argument on Habermas’s theory of modernity, and announces that she
is nonetheless happy to opt out of both argumentation in particular and commu-
nicative interaction in general. In Habermas’s terminology, the only possible
mode of interaction that would be left open to the skeptic would be strategic.
Habermas’s response to this final skeptical move is to insist that “the contexts of
communicative action represent an order for which there is no substitute.”47 In
point of fact, the very idea that one can choose between acting communicatively
and acting strategically exists, according to Habermas, only in the abstract; as he
puts it, “it exists only for someone who takes the contingent perspective of an
individual actor.”48 In reality, Habermas claims,

The symbolic structures of every lifeworld are reproduced through three processes: cultural tradi-
tion, social integration, and socialization. As I have shown elsewhere, these processes operate only
in the medium of action oriented toward reaching understanding. There is no other, equivalent
medium in which these functions can be fulfilled. Individuals acquire and sustain their identities by
appropriating traditions, belonging to social groups, and taking part in socializing interactions. That
is why they, as individuals, have a choice between communicative and strategic action only in an
abstract sense, i.e., in individual cases. They do not have the option of a long-term absence from
contexts of action oriented toward reaching an understanding. That would mean regressing to the
monadic isolation of strategic action, or schizophrenia and suicide. In the long run such absence is
self-destructive.49

46
Habermas seems to acknowledge this point when he claims that his “justification strategy” for (U)
“must be supplemented with genealogical arguments drawing on premises of modernization theory,
if (U) is to be rendered plausible” (Habermas [1998]: 45).
47
Habermas (1990): 101–02.
48
Ibid: 102.
49
Ibid, emphasis added.

13
 AMY ALLEN

In short, Habermas’s response to this line of argument is that it puts the skeptic
into a hopeless position, leads her to “an existential dead end.”50
Foucault seems to have been painted into an unpleasant corner here. To be sure,
this corner could have been avoided if we had challenged certain of Habermas’s
argumentative moves along the way. For instance, we could have questioned
Habermas’s claim that the consistent skeptic must opt out of discourse and
communicative action altogether by challenging, on Foucault’s behalf, Haber-
mas’s characterization of argumentative discourse. I have refrained from raising
these sorts of challenges not because I want to allow Habermas once again to set
the terms of the debate, but because it seems to me that following Habermas’s
debate with the moral skeptic to its conclusion leads us to a very interesting point:
namely, the point at which it becomes clear that what is ultimately at stake in the
debate between the Habermasian discourse ethicist and the Foucaultian moral
skeptic is the coherence of the self. The question now becomes whether Habermas
is correct in maintaining that the coherence of the self is secured “only in the
medium of action oriented toward reaching understanding.” In order to address
this question, we will have to take a closer look at Habermas and Foucault’s
accounts of the self.

III. TWO RIVAL VERSIONS OF SUBJECTIVATION:

INDIVIDUATION THROUGH SOCIALIZATION VS. SUBJECTION

As I will use it here, the term “subjectivation” refers to the process by which
neonates are transformed into competent subjects who have the capacity to think,
deliberate, and act. Both Foucault and Habermas are interested in this process––
indeed, their accounts of this process are arguably crucial to their respective
philosophical projects––but they understand it differently. Foucault’s use of the
term “subjection” underscores what he takes to be the ambivalent nature of
subjectivation. As Foucault sees it, in the modern era, individuals become subjects
by being subjected to the forces of disciplinary power and normalization. By
contrast, Habermas’s term “individuation through socialization” suggests a more
benign process whereby autonomous individuals are socialized into a com-
municatively (thus, rationally) structured lifeworld. In this way, each of these
accounts captures an important part of the truth about subjectivation, but only a
part; each is too one-sided to tell the full story. However, their differences not-
withstanding, these accounts also have more in common than has been previously
recognized; as a result, a fruitful integration of the insights of these two accounts
is possible, even though developing such an integrated perspective will necessitate
modifying or recasting certain aspects of their views.

50
Ibid.

14
 DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

Drawing on work in cognitive, developmental, and social psychology, Haber-

mas offers a thoroughly intersubjective account of the self which traces the
formation of the self through processes of socialization that are rooted in the
lifeworld. According to Habermas, the self has an intersubjective core because it
is generated communicatively, “on the path from without to within.”51 Habermas’s
account of cognitive and linguistic development draws heavily on the work of
G. H. Mead, according to whom an individual’s sense of herself as a subject, a
self-conscious being, an “I,” first emerges in interactions with an other for whom
she is a “me.”52 This is the general picture that Habermas has in mind when he says
that:

The self [. . .] is dependent upon recognition by addressees because it generates itself as a response
to the demands of an other in the first place [. . .]. The ego, which seems to me to be given in my
self-consciousness as what is purely my own, cannot be maintained by me solely through my own
power, as it were for me alone––it does not “belong” to me. Rather, this ego always retains an
intersubjective core because the process of individuation from which it emerges runs through the
network of linguistically mediated interactions.53

Thus, self-consciousness is dependent upon the recognition of others, specifically,

their “recognition of my claim to uniqueness and irreplaceability.”54
The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of moral development. It is because others
attribute ethical accountability to me that I gradually transform myself into an
accountable moral agent. Following Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, Haber-
mas breaks down the development of moral agency into pre-conventional, con-
ventional, and post-conventional stages. These stages are distinguished by greater
and greater degrees of reflexivity, abstraction, and generalization, with particular
emphasis placed by Habermas on reflexivity: “[T]he simple behavioral expecta-
tion of the first level becomes reflexive at the next level––expectations can be
reciprocally expected; and the reflexive behavioral expectation of the second level
again becomes reflexive at the third level––norms can be normed.”55 It is this
greater degree of reflexivity that explains how Habermas can view individuals as

51
Jürgen Habermas, “Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of
Subjectivity,” Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) 177.
52
For an insightful critique of Habermas’s reading of Mead, see Peter Dews, “Communicative
Paradigms and the Question of Subjectivity: Habermas, Mead and Lacan,” Habermas: A Critical
Reader, ed. Dews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 87–117.
53
Habermas (1992): 169–70.
54
Ibid: 186.
55
Jürgen Habermas, “Moral Development and Ego Identity,” Communication and the Evolution of
Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979) 86.

15
 AMY ALLEN

produced through but not determined by socialization. As he puts it, “identity is

produced through socialization, that is, through the fact that the growing child first
of all integrates into a specific social system by appropriating symbolic generali-
ties; it is later secured and developed through individuation, that is, precisely
through a growing independence in relation to social systems.”56
For Habermas, then, the subject is produced through but not determined by
socialization processes, and such processes take place in the medium of commu-
nicative action. Foucault, for his part, would agree, I think, that the individual is
formed “on the path from without to within”; his disagreement with Habermas
would be over how to characterize the “without” (and, thus, the resulting
“within”). For Foucault, the “without,” the social relations within which and by
which subjects are constituted, is structured by relations of power, where power is
understood in basically strategic, rather than communicative, terms.57 Foucault
quite infamously suggested that the individual subject is an effect of these omni-
present, strategic power relations. As he put it,

[I]t is [. . .] a mistake to think of the individual as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom or
some multiple, inert matter to which power is applied, or which is struck by a power that
subordinates or destroys individuals. In actual fact, one of the first effects of power that it allows
bodies, gestures, discourses, and desires to be identified and constituted as something individual.
The individual is not, in other words, power’s opposite number; the individual is one of power’s first
effects.58

Foucault’s genealogical works of the 1970s aim to show that disciplinary, nor-
malizing relations of power form, for us, the “without” from which the “within”
of the modern subject is constituted.
At first glance, then, it looks as if Habermas and Foucault offer diametrically
opposed accounts of subjectivation. Although both of them understand subjecti-
vation as a social process, Habermas views it as a rationally and communicatively
mediated process of socialization, grounded in reciprocal relations of mutual
recognition. Relations of power seem to play no role whatsoever in Habermas’s
account.59 Foucault, by contrast, understands subjectivation as a process of sub-
jection to normalizing, disciplinary (strategic) power. Moreover, his claim that

56
Ibid: 74.
57
For the characterization of power as strategic, see Foucault (1997); and Michel Foucault, “After-
word: The Subject and Power,” Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed.,
ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) 208–26.
58
Foucault (2003): 29–30.
59
For a critique of Habermas along these lines, see Hans-Herbert Kögler, “The Self-Empowered
Subject: Habermas, Foucault, and Hermeneutic Reflexivity,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 22
(1996): 13–44.

16
 DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

power is omnipresent seems to rule out in advance any possible role for non-
strategic, communicative relations in this process.60
However, things are not quite so simple as all that. For one thing, although he
emphasizes the role that communicative action plays in socialization processes, in
some of his early writings, Habermas also acknowledges the important––indeed,
necessary––role that power plays in this process in the form of asymmetrical
power relations between parents (and other authority figures) and children. Fol-
lowing Freud and Mead, Habermas regards the internalization of structures of
authority as a necessary feature of the process of subjectivation and the develop-
ment of moral autonomy. As Habermas puts it:

[T]he task of passing to the conventional stage of interaction consists in reworking the imperative
arbitrary will of a dominant figure of this kind [i.e., a parent] into the authority of a suprapersonal
will detached from this specific person [. . .]. [P]articular behavior patterns become detached from
the context-bound intentions and speech acts of specific individuals and take on the external form
of social norms to the extent that the sanctions associated with them are internalized [. . .], that is,
to the extent that they are assimilated into the personality of the growing child and thus made
independent of the sanctioning power of concrete reference persons.61

The growing child undergoes a transformation from a dependence on a wholly

external authority (usually a parent) through an internalization of that authority
relation to an ability to reflect internally on social norms, relationships, and
expectations, and assess their validity. Habermas suggests that this internalization
of authority is necessitated by the lack of a common instinctual repertoire that
might perform a similar action-coordinating function for non-linguistic beings.
For us, “this void is [. . .] filled by normatively generalized behavioral expecta-
tions, which take the place of instinctual regulation; however, these norms need
to be anchored within the acting subject through more or less internalized social
controls.”62 The internalization of social controls is thus a necessary––though not
a sufficient––condition for both adherence to and reflection upon moral norms;
thus, it is a necessary condition for the achievement of individual autonomy. This
point reveals once again, though in a different way, the crucial link between
Habermas’s discourse ethics and his account of subjectivation; discourse ethics is
“dependent on a form of life that meets it halfway. There has to be a modicum of
congruence between morality and the practices of socialization and education.

60
For the claim that power is omnipresent, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1:
An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978) 93. For an insightful discussion of
this claim, see Richard Lynch, “Is Power All There Is? Michel Foucault and the ‘Omnipresence’ of
Power Relations,” Philosophy Today 42 (1998): 65–70.
61
Habermas (1990): 153–54.
62
Habermas (1992): 179.

17
 AMY ALLEN

The latter must promote the requisite internalization of superego controls and the
abstractness of ego identities.”63
All of which suggests that, although communicative action plays a crucial
role in subjectivation for Habermas, the internalization of power relations and
social controls also plays an important, indeed, given certain facts about the
human condition, anthropologically unavoidable, role as well. So it is not that
Habermas denies that power plays a role in subjectivation, it is just that he is
completely sanguine about that role, for at least two reasons. First, he assumes
that the social controls that have to be internalized are rational and the authority
of the parents who enforce them is legitimate; thus, they are unobjectionable
from a normative point of view. Second, he assumes that the outcome of this
process is the capacity for autonomy, a capacity that allows the individual
subject to reflect critically on and assess the validity of the norms, relationships,
practices, institutions, and so forth, into and through which the individual has
been socialized. I will return to these two points momentarily. For now, I would
simply like to note that although Habermas emphasizes the role that communi-
cative action plays in socialization processes, he is nevertheless committed to
the belief that communicative action is necessary but not sufficient for social-
ization. It may be true, as Habermas puts it, that socialization processes “operate
only in the medium of action oriented toward reaching understanding” (my
emphasis), but this does not mean that they operate in a medium structured by
communicative action alone. Socialization requires exercises of power that are
non-reciprocal, and that rest on actual (though not necessarily physical) force,
not just the unforced force of rational insight or the better argument. As any
parent knows, the force of rational insight is powerless in the face of an intran-
sigent and willful toddler. Try as one may to reason with her about why she
should eat her peas or go to bed or brush her teeth or even hold your hand in
a parking lot, often it is necessary to resort to strategic interaction (whether that
takes the form of threatening negative sanctions or offering positive induce-
ments) in order to get her to comply. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it in a
famous passage from The Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Humanity had to inflict
terrible injuries on itself before the self––the identical, purpose-directed, mas-
culine character of human beings––was created, and something of this process
is repeated in every childhood.”64

63
Jürgen Habermas, “Morality and Ethical Life: Does Hegel’s Critique of Kant Apply to Discourse
Ethics?” Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry
Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) 207.
64
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,
trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002) 26.

18
 DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

It is here that Habermas’s use of the term “authority” is crucial because it

implies that the power relation that the growing child must internalize in order
to become autonomous is both rational and legitimate. However, even if we
grant Habermas this point, the child is incapable of seeing it as rational and
legitimate until it has taken up the moral point of view, which it can only do by
internalizing the power relation. Indeed, Habermas has acknowledged this:
“[F]or the growing child this question [of whether a norm is valid] has already
been given an affirmative answer before it can pose itself to him as a ques-
tion.”65 The crucial point for Habermas is that “the social control exercised via
norms that are valid for specific groups is not based on repression alone.”66 This
way of putting it suggests that Habermas is willing to admit that the social
control that is made possible by the internalization of structures of authority is
at least partly based in repression. The key point is that such internalization and
the autonomy to which it gives rise is not based solely in repression, else it
“could not obligate the actors to obey but only force them into submissive-
ness.”67 However, the question remains, how is the child ever to be in a position
to assess the legitimacy of these structures of power/authority, given that he or
she first has to internalize them in order to be capable of assessing their
legitimacy?68
Habermas might respond here by appealing to the distinction between the
internal motivating force of reasons and the force of external sanctions; the
developmental achievement of the autonomous, post-conventional self yields pre-
cisely the capacity to be motivated by the former rather than merely by the latter.69
As he puts it: “We do not adhere to recognized norms from a sense of duty because
they are imposed upon us by the threat of sanctions but because we give them to
ourselves.”70 However, this way of putting it overlooks the fact that, as Habermas
himself has acknowledged, we are only able to become the sort of beings who are
capable of feeling obligated or motivated by reasons in the first place because
of the internalization of structures of authority, a result that is accomplished
primarily through the mechanisms of parental discipline and the educational

65
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A
Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987) 39.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid: 45.
68
For an insightful discussion of this point, see Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in
Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997).
69
This is what ultimately distinguishes Habermas’s view from Mead’s, who had a somewhat darker
view of the implications of this internalization process. For an interesting critical comparison of
Habermas and Mead on this point, see Dews (1999).
70
Habermas (1994): 42. For helpful discussion of this point, see Rehg (1994): 23–24.

19
 AMY ALLEN

system.71 Given that this is the case, the worry is that the distinction between
external force and internal force (which is, after all, internalized before the child
is in a position to make this very distinction) does not cut much ice.
The worry here is a Foucaultian one, but it should not be confused with the
irrationalist claim that the demands of rationality and autonomy are per se perni-
cious, that they are nothing more than domination, that they are, as Foucault once
put it, “the enemy that should be eliminated.”72 Foucault did worry that our modern
form of rationality is dangerous, a worry that led him to wonder: “What is this
Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and what
are its dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to
practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers?”73
But he also believed that the awareness of these intrinsic dangers is perfectly
compatible with an acceptance of the necessity, indeed “indispensability” of such
forms of rationality.74 What specifically is the danger that Foucault believes to be
intrinsic to rationality? Foucault offers as an example the link between the ratio-
nality of social Darwinism and the legitimization of Nazi racism. “This was, of
course,” he goes on to acknowledge, “an irrationality, but an irrationality that was

71
At this point, one might be tempted to object that this critique of Habermas is guilty of committing
the genetic fallacy, and to insist that the origins of our capacity for autonomy are simply not relevant
for our assessment of that capacity. For a classic formulation of this objection in the context of the
Foucault/Habermas debate, see Fraser (1989): 35–54. This objection is often a conversation stopper,
but it is not at all obvious to me that it should be. In the first place, not all genetic arguments are
fallacious, and, in this case, I would argue that this genetic argument is not obviously fallacious. To
assume that it is fallacious is to assume that the early stages of childhood development are like a
ladder that we discard after we have ascended it. Against this assumption, one could cite Freud’s
contention that “in the realm of the mind [. . .], what is primitive is so commonly preserved
alongside of the transformed version which has arisen from it that it is unnecessary to give instances
as evidence” (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey [New York:
W.W. Norton and Co., 1961] 16). Moreover, as much of the literature on personal autonomy shows
(see, for example, John Christman, “Autonomy and Personal History,” Canadian Journal of Phi-
losophy 21 [1991]: 1–24; and Alfred Mele, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy
[Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995]), genetic or historical considerations of how someone came to be
“autonomous” are often relevant to our assessments of whether that person is genuinely autono-
mous. I discuss these issues more fully in Allen, “The Entanglement of Power and Validity: Foucault
and Critical Theory,” in Timothy O’Leary and Christopher Falzon (eds), Foucault and Philosophy
(London: Blackwell, forthcoming). For another helpful response on Foucault’s behalf to the genetic
fallacy objection, see James Wong, “Sapere Aude: Critical Ontology and the Case of Child Devel-
opment,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 37 (2004): 863–82.
72
Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, Power,” Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol.
3, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 2000) 358. Interestingly enough, this comment
comes in response to a question about Habermas’s critique of postmodernism.
73
Ibid.
74
Ibid.

20
 DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

at the same time, after all, a certain form of rationality.”75 The example suggests
that the danger Foucault has in mind is that, because forms of rationality are
historically contingent and rooted in human practices, they can be and indeed
often are connected in subtle and insidious ways with power/knowledge rela-
tions.76 But the imprimatur of rationality can serve to obscure that very connection,
and it is the function of critique to shed light on such connections.
So Habermas’s account of subjectivation is much more complicated than it
appears at first. Habermas acknowledges a crucial role for power in the process of
subjectivation, and this acknowledgement opens his account up to the Foucaultian
line of criticism that I have articulated. Foucault’s account of subjectivation is also
more complicated than it appears at first. Many critics have assumed, wrongly, that
Foucault thinks that the subject is merely epiphenomenal, or that it does not really
exist, or, at the very least, that it lacks the capacities for thought, deliberation, and
action that have been traditionally associated with it.77 Habermas himself claims
that, “from [Foucault’s] perspective, socialized individuals can only be perceived
as exemplars, as standardized products of some discourse formation––as

75
Ibid.
76
One might object at this point that, given the normative confusions in his work, Foucault is not able
to make normative distinctions between different kinds of power relations; thus, labeling some sorts
of power relations “pernicious” on Foucault’s behalf might seem unjustified, insofar as such a
judgment seems to rely on a normative conception of social relations that Foucault’s work does not
provide. It is undeniably true that Foucault never offers a normative conception of subjectivation or
of social relations and that he has a tendency to use the word power to cover an overly broad range
of phenomenon (which he himself admits; see Foucault [1997]: 299). However, it is also the case
if we understand Foucault to be a moral skeptic––rather than a moral nihilist or an immoralist––then
there would be nothing inconsistent or contradictory about him offering normative distinctions
between different kinds of power relations––or about others doing so on his behalf. Indeed, in some
of his late work, Foucault does distinguish between power, which is not per se pernicious, objec-
tionable, or bad, and domination, which, in his view, is. The key to the distinction is that power
relations are reversible and unstable, whereas in relations of domination, the free flow of power is
restricted and some individuals or groups are unable to exercise it (see Foucault [1997]: 283).
Although there are certainly questions that one could raise about this distinction (and I discuss some
of these in Allen, The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity [Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1999] ch. 2), it does, I think, provide a compelling response to the foregoing
objection. Moreover, this discussion highlights that what is crucially at stake in the debate between
Foucault and Habermas is not the substantive content of Habermas’s normative conceptions of
subjectivation and of social relations but the strongly universalistic, context-transcendent status that
he tends to claim for them. I shall return to this issue later.
77
See, for example, Linda Alcoff, “Feminist Politics and Foucault: The Limits to a Collaboration,”
Crises in Continental Philosophy, ed. Arlene Dallery and Charles Scott (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
1990) 69–86; Habermas (1987): lectures 9 and 10; Honneth (1991); and McCarthy, Ideals and
Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1991).

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 AMY ALLEN

individual copies that are mechanically punched out.”78 Thus, Habermas seems to
assume that Foucault views the imposition of disciplinary power as both necessary
and sufficient for subjectivation, that he thinks of the subjected subject as nothing
more than the sum total of the disciplinary, normalizing relations of power that
constitute him/her.79
However, Foucault’s understanding of individuals as effects of power does not
necessitate viewing them as inert, incapable of action, or wholly determined by
outside forces. To the contrary, Foucault himself insists that “individuals do not
simply circulate in those networks [of power]; they are in a position to both submit
to and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power;
they are always also its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals.
It is not applied to them.”80 The process of subjectivation is, for Foucault, always
two-sided. The process of being subjected to power relations constitutes one as a
subject, but one is simultaneously enabled to be a subject in and through this
process. Moreover, although there is a sense in which Foucault does think that
normalizing, disciplinary power is necessary for creating the modern subject, he
also views the aim of his genealogies to be the exposure of what he calls “the
contemporary limits of the necessary,” that is, toward revealing as contingent
forms of constraint that are falsely presented as necessary.81 The role of disciplin-
ary power in the constitution of the modern subject is one such form of constraint.
Indeed, Foucault’s late interest in practices of the self in antiquity is precisely
motivated by a concern with asking “how [. . .] the growth of capabilities [can] be
disconnected from the intensification of power relations?”82 To be sure, it does
seem likely that Foucault would maintain that some sort of power relation is
necessary for subjectivation. This would seem to follow from his claim that there
is no outside to power, that power is omnipresent in social relations. Since
subjectivation is a social process, then it will necessarily be inflected with power
as well. In any case, this view does not distinguish him from Habermas, who also
acknowledges a necessary role for power in subjectivation, even if he does not
seem particularly worried about the implications of this role.
The crucial issue is whether or not Foucault holds the imposition of disciplinary
power to be sufficient for subjectivation. Does he view the subject as a mechani-
cally punched-out copy, as nothing more than the relations of power that constitute
it? Is he guilty of reducing subjectivity to domination? The answer to these

78
Habermas (1987): 293.
79
For similar critiques of Foucault, see McCarthy (1991): ch. 2; and Kögler (1996).
80
Foucault (2003): 29.
81
Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel
Foucault, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997) 313.
82
Ibid: 317.

22
 DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

questions is no. In fact, Foucault explicitly claims that power is “always a way of
acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being
capable of action.”83 Not only that, but Foucault does not deny the possibility of
non-strategic, communicative forms of interaction, nor does he deny that such
forms of interaction may play some role in subjectivation. Indeed, Foucault argues
that “it is [. . .] necessary to distinguish power relations from relationships of
communication which transmit information by means of a language, a system of
signs, or any other symbolic medium.”84 Power and communication do not consti-
tute two distinct domains of social life; rather, they are analytically distinct but
practically intertwined “types of relationship which in fact always overlap one
another, support one another reciprocally, and use each other mutually as means to
an end.”85 Interestingly, Foucault cites educational institutions––which play a
crucial role in the process of subjectivation––as examples of the intertwining of
these two distinct types of relationship. Such institutions make use of “a whole
ensemble of regulated communications (lessons, questions and answers, orders,
exhortations, coded signs of obedience, differentiation marks of the ‘value’ of each
person and of the levels of knowledge)” and of “a whole series of power processes
(enclosure, surveillance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy).”86
To be sure, these insights in Foucault’s late work about the nature of commu-
nicative relationships and their connections to power are quite underdeveloped;
perhaps had he lived long enough for the planned debate with Habermas to take
place, he would have developed them further. In any case, the important point for
the purposes of this discussion is that these insights are not, contrary to what is
often assumed, incompatible with the Foucaultian claim that there is no outside to
power.87
Each of these accounts highlights an important aspect of subjectivation. Haber-
mas emphasizes the role played by communicative rationality, while Foucault
highlights that of disciplinary power.Yet each account remains relatively one-sided.
Although Habermas acknowledges the role played by power in the internalization

83
Foucault (1983): 220. Of course, this quote comes from a relatively late essay, which raises the
vexed issue of the relationship between the middle Foucault account of power and the late Foucault
account of practices of the self. Many of Foucault’s critics have maintained that the “return” of the
subject in the late Foucault stands in contradiction to his earlier analysis of power. See, for example,
Peter Dews, “The Return of Subjectivity in the Late Foucault,” Radical Philosophy 51 (1989): 37–
41; Habermas (1994); and McCarthy (1991): ch. 2. For arguments to the contrary, see Allen, “The
Anti-Subjective Hypothesis: Michel Foucault and the Death of the Subject,” The Philosophical
Forum 31/2 (2000): 113–30.
84
Foucault (1983): 217.
85
Ibid: 218.
86
Ibid: 218–19. For a helpful discussion of this example, see Tully (1999): 136.
87
On this point, see Lynch (1998): 67.

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 AMY ALLEN

of structures of authority, he is overly sanguine about the implications of this role;

and although Foucault acknowledges that communicative relationships can and
do play a role in disciplinary institutions such as the educational system, these
relationships and their connections to disciplinary power remain underdeveloped.
Moreover, the one-sidedness of these accounts helps to explain certain persistent
features of the critical reception of their respective authors. Habermas’s relative
inattention to the power-ladenness of subjectivation arguably makes it difficult for
him to offer a satisfactory critical-theoretical account of some of the most pressing
social problems of our time, including sexism and racism, which are reproduced
and maintained, in large part, through the production of subordinating modes of
identity. Although Foucault’s work is widely believed to be more useful for this
task, his relative inattention to the communicative dimension of social relations
arguably undercuts his ability to satisfactorily theorize the possibilities for indi-
vidual and collective resistance to and transformation of the relations of domination
that his own work helps to expose. In this sense, these two accounts of subjectiva-
tion can be seen as complementary: Foucault’s account highlights the role that
disciplinary practices play in the formation of the autonomous self; Habermas’s
account emphasizes the ways in which the achievement of autonomy enables the
self to reflect critically on such disciplinary practices.88 However, simply asserting
their complementarity is not enough, for Foucault’s account of subjection seems to
call into question Habermas’s faith in the reflexive capacities of the subject, while
the plausibility of Habermas’s account of the development of autonomy seems to
rest on the denial that any significant consequences follow from the necessary role
that power plays in socialization processes. Thus, if the insights of these two
accounts are to be integrated, some of the fundamental commitments of these two
thinkers will have to be recast.

IV. CONCLUSION

I have already indicated the principal way in which Foucault’s account will
have to be recast in light of this discussion. In order to overcome the one-sided
emphasis on power in his account of subjectivation, Foucaultians would need to
develop some of the very underdeveloped ideas about communication, reciprocity,
and the distinction between power and domination that are mentioned in Fou-
cault’s late work and to think through how these ideas bear on the issue of
subjectivation. Doing so would not only completely undermine Habermas’s claim
that Foucault reduces subjectivation to the imposition of disciplinary power, it

88
For a similar claim, though one that is cast in terms of a contrast between contingent versus
universal aspects of subjectivity, see Tully (1999): 107–08.

24
 DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

would also make it possible to develop a more satisfactory Foucaultian account of

individual and collective resistance to modern disciplinary power. Given that
Foucault himself appeared to be moving in this direction in his late work, there are
resources within Foucault’s oeuvre for developing such an account. However,
putting those resources to work will require that we rethink the relationship
between the various periods of Foucault’s work, particularly the issue of the
compatibility between the early and middle Foucault, on the one hand, and his late
account of practices of the self, on the other. Although critics began castigating
Foucault for contradicting his earlier analyses of power almost immediately after
the publication of volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality, more recent
scholarship has argued that there is much more continuity to Foucault’s diverse
periods than has previously been thought.89
With respect to Habermas, overcoming the one-sided emphasis on commu-
nicative rationality in his account of subjectivation would require Habermas to
confront more directly the implications of the necessary and unavoidable role
that power plays in subjectivation processes. Although, as we have seen, Hab-
ermas does not deny this role, he does seem to deny that it has any significant
consequences for his account of autonomy. However, as Judith Butler has
recently argued, because power plays an unavoidable role in subjectivation, sub-
jects are vulnerable to becoming psychically attached to and invested in the
forms of subjectivity and identity that are subordinating.90 It is precisely this
dimension of subjectivation and the psychic cost of the subjugation that Hab-
ermas’s account glosses over. Moreover, because the child cannot distinguish
between subordinating and non-subordinating modes of attachment, and because
she will attach to painful and subordinating modes of identity rather than not
attach––for some form of attachment is necessary for psychic survival and
social existence––her psychic attachment to subordination may well precede and
inform the development of her capacity for autonomy. This is one way of filling
out a claim that Butler makes elsewhere: “[P]ower pervades the very conceptual
apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the
critic.”91
If power invades the conceptual apparatus of the subject who is attempting
to reflect critically on its nature and effects, however, then it will be difficult to
maintain the sharp distinction between power and validity that is so central to

89
See, for example Thomas Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 2: A Poststruc-
turalist Mapping of History (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005).
90
Butler (1997).
91
Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’,” Feminist
Contentions: A Philsophical Exchange, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and
Nancy Fraser (New York: Routledge, 1995) 39.

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 AMY ALLEN

Habermas’s normative-philosophical enterprise.92 Indeed, it sometimes seems as if

this is precisely why Habermas insists on downplaying the role the power plays in
socialization processes. However, the entanglement of power and validity only
poses a serious problem if one assumes that there are only two possible ways of
understanding the relationship between power and validity: either validity is
reduced to nothing more than power and autonomy to nothing more than disci-
plinary subjection––a position that Habermas rightly sees as normatively and
politically disastrous but wrongly imputes to Foucault––or validity is understood
as wholly distinct from and unsullied by power relations––in which case the purity
of pure reason slips in through the back door, a position that Habermas himself
aims to avoid.93 But there is a third, and better, possibility: to give up on the
demand for purity altogether. Doing so would mean that acknowledging the
unavoidable entanglement of validity and power, but without reducing the former
to the latter.94 Moreover, accepting this claim need not completely undermine the
foundation of Habermas’s normative philosophical project, though it does neces-
sitate interpreting it in a much more pragmatic and contextualist way than

92
Indeed, Habermas acknowledges this point in a roundabout sort of way in the context of his critique
of Nietzsche: he rejects Nietzsche’s account of bad conscience on the grounds that such an account
makes it impossible to maintain the distinction between power and validity. See Habermas (1987):
121–26.
93
See ibid: 322.
94
One might well wonder about the status of and basis for this claim that power and validity are
unavoidably entangled. Is this an empirically based generalization? Or an a priori claim based on
philosophical reflections about human social interaction? I would suggest that we might view it in
the same way that Habermas himself did in his early work: as an empirically grounded claim about
the quasi-transcendental anthropologically basic features of human sociocultural forms of life (see
Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro [Boston, MA: Beacon
Press, 1971]). The theory of cognitive interests offered in Habermas’s early work attempts to split
the difference between the empirical and the transcendental levels of analysis by uncovering a set
of anthropologically basic features of human social life that “have a transcendental function but
arise from actual structures of human life” (Habermas [1971]: 194). (There are interesting connec-
tions that could be made here between Habermas’s notion of cognitive interests and Foucault’s
account of the historical a priori in his early work; see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A. Sheridan-Smith [New York: Pantheon, 1970]. I
discuss these similarities in Allen, The Politics of Our Selves, chs. 3 and 6). In Knowledge and
Human Interests, Habermas himself viewed power (along with work and language or interaction) as
an anthropological given, as an ineradicable features of human social life; later, he famously
retracted this claim, and viewed power as an unnecessary and potentially eradicable deformation of
normatively structured communicative interaction. As I see it, this was a serious mistake. Unfor-
tunately, it seems to me that we have all the inductive evidence that we might possibly need to
motivate the conclusion that power is an ineradicable feature of human social interaction. Moreover,
even if we could imagine a form of sociocultural life that was completely purified of power
relations, such a form of life would arguably not be recognizably human.

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 DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

Habermas himself has tended to do.95 In particular, the status of the normative
idealizations––the norms of universal respect and egalitarian reciprocity that form
the core of the ideal speech situation96––that are central to Habermas’s
critical project would have to be recast. Recognizing the unavoidable
entanglement of power and validity necessitates acknowledging the historical
and social specificity of these idealizations, their rootedness in a particular
historical, social, and cultural context––namely, the context of late Western
modernity––which, in turn, requires viewing them as open to contestation and
revision.
In a sense, then, the outcome of this restaging of the debate between Foucault
and Habermas is a victory of sorts for the limited form of moral skepticism
sketched above. Recasting Habermas’s metatheoretical claims about the status of
his normative idealizations in a more contextualist and pragmatic way moves him
much further than he would care to move in the direction of a kind of skepticism
about the universalizability of those idealizations and, thus, about the context-
transcendent validity of the moral norms that can be justified by means of them.
However, such a move certainly need not result in a collapse into moral nihilism
or immoralism, as Habermas seems to fear. Foucaultian moral skepticism is
perfectly compatible, as I argued in section one above, with an acceptance of
substantive normative commitments, provided that these commitments are under-
stood as specific and local, as rooted in contingent social practices that are
connected with relations of power/knowledge. Such skepticism is even compatible
with the same kinds of substantive first-order normative commitments––to greater
political inclusiveness and openness and against, as Foucault once put it, non-
consensuality––that Habermas cherishes. All that is required, on Foucault’s view,
is that we view such commitments as inescapably rooted in a particular, histori-
cally, culturally, and socially specific context––the context of late Western moder-
nity.97 This, in turn, requires that we be much more cautious than Habermas has

95
For a convincing defense of such an interpretation of Habermas, see McCarthy in Hoy and
McCarthy (1994). One might well argue that Habermas himself has moved in this more pragmatic
and contextualist direction over the last decade or so. For an insightful discussion of these issues,
see Maeve Cooke, Re-presenting the Good Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
96
For this formulation of the norms that are fundamental to the ideal speech situation, see Seyla
Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics
(New York: Routledge, 1992).
97
Indeed, Habermas seems to commit himself to just such a view with his recognition of the inherent
situatedness or impurity of reason and its ideals. For discussion of this point, see McCarthy (1991):
ch. 2. In other words, whatever independent grounds one might have for objecting to this charac-
terization of the normative status of our ideals, Habermas himself seems committed to it. The
question then is whether such a commitment is compatible with his commitment to the context-
transcendence and universality of our fundamental normative commitments. As should be clear by
now, I think the answer to this question is no. If this is true, then the best way to take up the

27
 AMY ALLEN

tended to be about claiming a strongly universalistic or context-transcendent

status for these commitments.98 In a world in which Western moral and political
ideals of freedom and democracy continue to be so closely associated with the
morally bankrupt projects of colonialism and empire, however, such a shift might
seem less like a loss than a welcome––perhaps even long overdue––change for the
better.

Dartmouth College

Habermasian project is to reinterpret it in a more contextualist way than he himself has tended to do.
For prominent and productive examples of such ways of interpreting and taking up the Habermasian
critical project, see Benhabib (1992), Cooke (2006), and McCarthy (1991).
98
Though we might still understand them as context-transcending, that is, as aiming at transcendence
of context, even as we acknowledge that such transcendence is an impossible to achieve ideal. On
this point, see Cooke (2006), and McCarthy in Hoy and McCarthy (1994): ch. 3.

28