Jurgen Habermas

Fall 2016

Habermas is often considered to be the last member of the Frankfurt School.

He was Adorno’s assistant from 1956-1959.

Aside from a 10 year hiatus at the Max Plank Institute in Starnberg, he taught at the Frankfurt
school from 1964 until his retirement in 1996.

Inspired by both Weber and Marx, Habermas subscribed to a radical-democratic critique of

contemporary capitalism.

Both Weber’s rationalism thesis and his elaboration of the different types of rational action
are central to Habermas.

While his work has undergone many phases and transformations, a common thread is the
critique of capitalism and instrumental reason.

As we have seen, Adorno and Horkheimer saw enlightenment as having led to a dead end of
control and oppression.

Habermas has continued this critique, but has also attempted to salvage the Enlightenment
project by defining ‘reason’ in new ways.

The Public Sphere:

For Habermas, the Enlightenment has been sustained by quite distinctive institutional
forms. Their novelty had inspired his first major work, The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere, which attempted to explain the socio-historical emergence, during the 17th
and 18th centuries, of a middle-class public opinion, relatively independent of the absolute
monarchy.

This ‘bourgeois public sphere’, was ‘the sphere of private people come together as a public’, a
public made of formally free and equal, rational individuals.

These bourgeois would-be citizens, Habermas wrote, ‘soon claimed the public sphere...against
the public authorities themselves...The medium of political confrontation was peculiar and
without historical precedent: people’s use of their reason’ (Habermas, 1989, p. 27.).
The key institutions included the salons in France, the learned and literary societies in Germany
and the coffee houses in England.

Habermas traced the historical evolution of the institutions of public opinion through to
their apparent decline in the modern social-welfare state, where state and society penetrate
each other, thus producing an apparent ‘refeudalization’ (p 232) of society.

The collapse of the liberal public sphere has made room for staged and manipulative publicity
of the kind registered by Adorno and Horkheimer, he observed, but the state still clings to the
mandate of a critical public sphere (p.232).

The problem for Habermas therefore became not the whole-sale refusal enacted by the first
generation of critical theorists, but rather how to create new forms of critical public opinion
within the institutional contexts already established by an increasingly ‘organized’
capitalism.

In Legitimation crisis, Habermas distinguished between society viewed as ‘system’ and as ‘life-
world’.

The first (the system) referred to the sphere of the economy and the state, of money and
power, which functions through the logic of instrumental reason; the second (the life-world)
referred to the world of everyday experience, social discourse and cultural values, science,
politics and art.

Habermas believed that in the life-world a realm of ‘undistorted communication’ between free
and equal citizens could establish values able to counteract the dominative tendencies of the
system.

But the life-world is increasingly subject to ‘colonisation’ by the system, which threatens
radically to reduce the possibilities for collective, communicative action.

This led him to a concern with how late capitalist societies are legitimated and with the crisis
tendencies inherent within them. He argued that economic crises were increasingly ‘resolved’
through politicisation and that this process itself foregrounded problems of legitimacy and
hence the political effects of culture.

In this context, art became for Habermas merely one institutional order among others.

Following Weber, he viewed cultural modernity as characterized by ‘the separation of the

substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous
spheres...science, morality and art’ (Habermas, 1985, p. 9.).

Capitalist societies have never been able to provide adequate motivation for their individual
actors, he argued, without resorting to more traditional forms of religious belief, but these have
become decreasingly effective over time (Habermas, 1975 pp. 77-8). When religion had been
largely system-supportive, art and aesthetics are less obviously suited to this function.

Increasingly autonomous from both economics and politics, ‘bourgeois’ art collects together the
human needs that cannot be met by either, which thus become ‘explosive ingredients built into
the bourgeois ideology’ (p. 78).

Avant-garde art in particular ‘strengthens the divergence between the values offered by the
socio-cultural system and those demanded by the political and economic systems’ (p. 86).

With the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Habermas was over-
impressed by the immediate impact of the counter-culture of the 1960’s.

Returning to the problem in 1980, and rehearsing some of the themes outlined in Burger’s
Theory of the Avant-Garde (Burger, 1984), he would come to the rather different conclusion
that the historical avant-garde’s attempt to force a reconciliation between art and life, by
destroying the autonomy of art, had been doomed to failure. “A reified everyday praxis can
be cured”, he wrote, ‘only by creating unconstrained interaction of the cognitive with the
moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive elements. Reification cannot be overcome by
forcing just one of those highly stylized cultural spheres to open up and become more
accessible” (Habermas, 1985, pp. 11-12).

As with Burger, Habermas’ final judgement on avant-garde is much less sanguine that is
Adorno’s.

Communicative Action:

Habermas emphasised the essential ambiguity of modernity: the historical need for
emancipation from the rigid social structures of pre-rational tradition on the one hand, the
‘colonisation of the life-world’ by instrumental reason on the other.

For Habermas, reason is immanent within sociality, and especially within language; through the
structure of language, he wrote, ‘autonomy and responsibility are posited for us. Our first
sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus’
(Habermas, 1971, p. 314).

This notion of unimpeded communication provided him with criteria by which to critique
existing social reality and elaborate the utopian possibilities for real social change. The end
result was the magisterial two-volume theory of communicative action (Habermas, 1984, 1987a).

Habermas’ early work had sought to secure the emancipatory potential in Enlightenment
reason from Adornian cultural pessimism. Increasingly, however, the irrationalist threat
appeared to emanate from his own one-time mentors (1987). Through sympathetic to the
postmodern ‘new social movements’ (1981), he would remain deeply suspicious of
postmodern theoretical relativism. Hence the dismissive comment on Foucault and Derrida:
“On the basis of modernist attitudes they justify an irreconcilable antimodernism’ (Habermas
1985, p. 14).

He also became increasingly concerned with how to reconcile the utopian ideal of free,
rational communicative interaction with the degraded reality of contemporary modern
society. This might explain his growing interest in the law, the interface between the normative
claims of the life-world and the imperatives of state and market systems. This returned him to the
problem of legitimation: laws cannot be self-legitimating because of their inherent rationality, as
Weber had supposed (Habermas, 1988, p. 219); their validity must flow from their moral and
political dimensions, their ability to guarantee and reflect the will of people, as this is generated
in intersubjective communicative action. In other words: “there can be no autonomous law
without the realization of democracy” (p. 279).

Habermas later writings have become increasingly political in tenor, dealing by turn with
immediately German problems, such as those posed by reunification, and with more generally
European problems, such as the relationship between the European Union and globalising
capitalism (1994, 1998).

He has continued to argue that “there are alternatives’ to the privatisation of the social
threatened by the peculiar combination of corporate globalization and ideological individualism.

Confronted by the individualism of the so-called ‘Berlin generation’, he is insistent on the need
for ‘a language capable of skewing the phenomena of the hour as mercilessly as Adorno did in
the early days of the Federal Republic’ (1998a, p 11).

In The Postnational Constellation, Habermas has even called for the reconstitution of the welfare
state at a supranational level, precisely as a counterweight to the globalisation of the economic
system (2001).

Habermas has thus continued the work of critique initiated by the first generation of critical
theorists, even if this has become increasingly a matter of commentary and polemic rather than
social theory in the grand fashion.

One can conclude that for Habermas, the disciplinary habits of sociology tend to pose a recurrent
threat to the claims of particularity.