Revisiting Guerreiro Ramos’s New Science of Organizations

through Habermasian lenses: A critical tribute*

Christina W. Andrews
Abstract

Adopting the work of Jürgen Habermas as a critical reference, this paper

examines the ideas exposed in the New Science of Organizations, the last
and most important work of Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, the renowned Brazilian
P.A. scholar. Guerreiro Ramos’s organizational theory has much in common
with the ideas of critical theorists from the Frankfurt School , including
Habermas. However, as is discussed in the paper, Guerreiro Ramos’s
attachment to transcendental phenomenology and to the concept of substantive
reason imposes fatal limitations to his critical theoretical project. It is argued
that Habermas’s philosophical standpoint overcomes the theoretical limitations
that emerge from the philosophy of consciousness. Finally, the paper suggests
that Habermas’s critical theory  for reaching beyond New Public
Management positivism and Postmodern skepticism  offers a feasible
alternative for research in Public Administration.

Introduction

Few Brazilian intellectuals were able to obtain international recognition for

relevant contributions in the area of the Humanities in the 20th century. Alberto
Guerreiro Ramos (1915-1982), a rare combination of public servant, political activist,
and globe-trotting academic, belongs to this select group where also stands Paulo
Freire1. Today, almost 20 years after the publication of Guerreiro Ramos’s last and
more important work, The New Science of Organizations: A Reconceptualization of the
Wealth of Nations (1984; from now on to be referred as NSO), the themes he brought to
the fore of the debates on the theory (or “science”) of organizations continue to be
central. To Public Administration academics, these themes are particularly relevant,
for the field is emerging slowly from the domination exercised by the New Public
Management (NPM) agenda. When the first edition of NSO was released in 1981, the
“revolution” in the Public Sector initiated by the former Prime Minister of Britain,
Margaret Thatcher, was just beginning. Shortly, many other governments would
implement reforms mirrored on the British model2, spreading NPM prescriptions all
over the world.
Guerreiro Ramos was one of the first intellectuals from within our field to
denounce the abusive application of Economics to human affairs and in the theory of
organizations, in particular. His warnings sound today as an anticipation of New
Public Management’s failure in fulfilling its promises. Why was the market unable to
“fix” deficiencies in governmental organizations? What was wrong with the NPM
model? It seemed to be so “rational”? Guerreiro Ramos knew how to reply to these
questions. He clearly saw that the centrality acquired by market mechanisms in
contemporary societies was pernicious to the well-being of humanity. In The New
Science of Organizations, Guerreiro Ramos began to develop a theory that he expected
would contribute to freeing human beings from the strait-jacket imposed by the
glorification of the market. Unfortunately, he died prematurely in 1982, unable to
conclude the theoretical project he outlined.

* Published in Administrative Theory & Praxis, v. 22, n. 2, pp. 246-272, 2000.

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 The purpose of this article is to pay an intellectual tribute to Guerreiro Ramos by
revisiting the themes he raised in NSO which have gained a renewed interest in the
field of Public Administration. As will be discussed in detail in the following sections,
Guerreiro Ramos had many affinities with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the
main one being the strong criticism of instrumental rationality (or “formal rationality”,
according to Weber and Guerreiro Ramos). He envisioned a theoretical framework
that breaks with the supremacy of formal rationality, opening space for the concept of
“substantive reason” in order to reestablish a proper balance in social systems.
Guerreiro Ramos was closer to the arguments of critical theorists than to those of
postmodern theorists. He did not declare the death of reason, but wished to overcome
the limitations of formal rationality. This brings us to Jürgen Habermas, whose
arguments are used in this paper as a challenge to Guerreiro Ramos’s approach on
reason and rationality.
Habermas, in his most important (two volume) book, The Theory of Communicative
Action (1984, 1987a) develops a detailed and systematic discussion of rationality in
modern societies3. The main goal of his theoretical project is to overcome the
limitations of instrumental rationality that had dominated modern society.
Habermas’s solution for the pitfalls of instrumental rationality is radically different
than that proposed by Guerreiro Ramos. While the latter argues that substantive
rationality should be the concept to balance the excesses of instrumental rationality, the
former proposes that this role should be attributed to “communicative rationality”.
Therefore, there is a fundamental difference between the approaches of the two
theorists. This paper will argue that Habermas’s theoretical solution is the one that
succeeds in overcoming the limitations imposed by instrumental rationality. For this
reason, this tribute to Guerreiro Ramos will be a critical one, though maintaining
respect and recognition for his intellectual contribution. In addition, this paper will
highlight the importance of Habermas’s ideas to the critical theory branch in the field
of Public Administration (see Box, 1995; Zanetti & Carr, 1997).
The next five sections are organized as follows. In section 2, Guerreiro Ramos’s
interpretation of contemporary social theories is discussed, especially his criticism of
Habermas’s “sociomorphic” social theory. It will be pointed out that this criticism is
due to the different concepts of reason that each theorist adopts, which emerges from
their philosophical outlooks. In section 3, the views of the two theorists on
individuality and society are presented, in order to show that Habermas’s theory is not
as “sociomorphic” as Guerreiro Ramos affirms it to be. Section 4 is dedicated to
present Habermas’s criticism of the “pure theory” approach in to the social sciences,
which has played a fundamental role in Guerreiro Ramos’s theoretical approach.
Section 5 presents Guerreiro Ramos’s proposal of a “paraeconomic paradigm” for a
new social order, which emphasizes planning by the State. The argument here is that
State planning demands legitimacy. The substantive reason concept, embraced by
Guerreiro Ramos, fails to give a proper account of the demand for legitimacy. On the
other hand, Habermas’s communicative action concept is grounded on legitimacy,
therefore being more appropriate to deal with State planning. Finally, section 6
discusses the prospects of applying Habermas’s critical theory as a reference for
research in the field of Public Administration. It is argued that Habermas’s critical
theory is a feasible, though challenging, option for P.A. research.

Reason and the critique of social theories

Guerreiro Ramos’s critique of formal rationality has a clear affinity with the
critique of instrumental rationality put forward by critical theorists of the Frankfurt

2
School. NSO dedicates a considerable space to present the critical assessment of
rationality that was central in the works of Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas. It is
Habermas, however, that attracts most of Guerreiro Ramos’s attention  as well as his
most caustic comments.
Guerreiro Ramos makes clear that he has several theoretical affinities with
Habermas. As is Habermas, Guerreiro Ramos is emphatically critical of the narrowing
of the concept of reason within modern societies. In the introduction of NSO ,
Guerreiro Ramos announces one of the main theses to be defended in the book. His
intention is to show that the concept of reason has been distorted by the modern
market society in order to adapt it to its interests. Habermas offers an almost identical
thesis in The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987a). According to Habermas, the
problem with modern society is not its excessive rationalization, but the adoption of a
too narrow concept of reason. Instrumental reason has become dangerously dominant
and the continuation of the Enlightenment project will require the enlargement of the
concept of reason, in order to include communicative reason. Therefore, it can be seen
that the fundamental difference between Guerreiro Ramos and Habermas is the
concept of reason that each one chooses to adopt as an alternative to instrumental
reason. Ramos adopts, from Weber, the concept of substantive reason, while
Habermas introduces the concept of communicative reason. This difference is central
to the discussion developed in this paper . It should be emphasized, however, that
both theorists put rationality at the core of their theoretical projects.
In presenting Habermas’s ideas, Guerreiro Ramos highlights themes central to
the German theorist: a) the notion of knowledge and interest; b) the reexamination of
Marxist theory; c) the political and psychological consequences of the domination of
instrumental reason in modern societies; and d) the role of communication in a “critical
integrative social theory”. This later theme will become one of the targets of Guerreiro
Ramos’s critique of Habermas. The many affinities between them not withstanding,
Guerreiro Ramos is emphatic in his criticism. According to Guerreiro Ramos,
Habermas’s theoretical framework is “cumbersome, eclectic and rather sociomorphic”
(NSO, p. 20).
Habermas’s argument about knowledge and cognitive interests “is less original
than it appears [...]” (NSO, p. 20), argues Guerreiro Ramos. In addition, Habermas
would be “supporting a motivational type of psychology which rules out the role of
reason in the human psyche” (NSO, p.20). These comments are not totally
inappropriate, but Guerreiro Ramos appears somewhat unfair to Habermas. For one
thing, Habermas is not in “the business of originality”. His writings are typically a
detailed discussion and critique of the work of social theorists and philosophers that
have preceded him; this is why few concepts can be attributed to Habermas’s
“invention”. This characteristic can be considered a constructive quality rather than a
flaw. Habermas shows an amazing capacity to articulate  in a sharp, coherent, and
systematic way  a profusion of different theoretical perspectives4. Finally, Guerreiro
Ramos exaggerates when he argues that Habermas does not attribute any role for
reason in the human psyche. The very fact that Habermas has relied on Freud’s
insights5 to develop his theoretical framework is an indication that he attributes
importance to the individual psyche. However, one can understand Guerreiro Ramos's
criticism of Habermas in the light of their very different philosophical affiliations.
Consistent with the project of transcendental phenomenology, Guerreiro Ramos
locates his theoretical position in subject-centered reason. This becomes clear in the
following passage:

3
 Rationality in the substantive sense can never be a definitive attribute of society. It
is directly apprehended in the human consciousness, not by social mediation.[...]
In Plato and Aristotle there is an indissoluble dualism between reason and society,
which itself constitutes the precondition of freedom. Any sociomorphic solution
of this dualism would therefore entail a deformation of human existence.” (NSO,
p. 17)
It seems that Guerreiro Ramos has taken a very particular interpretation of
classical political theory. Aristotle (1952) thought that only participation in the polis 
that is, the political society  allowed citizens to realize themselves in their human
capacities. He argued that, though community life had originated from the need to
assure the survival of the human species, it was only through the polis that it would be
possible to live the good life. In addition,  and this is important in our discussion 
according to Aristotle (1952), it is not subject-centered reason that is regarded as the
distinctively human feature, as Guerreiro Ramos seems to believe, but language. It is
through the use of language that human beings become able to make use of phronesis
(practical rationality), the exercise of the prudent comprehension of the situation
(Taylor, 1995). Phronesis, therefore, is the virtue that permits the actualization of the
common good of the polis. Moreover, phronesis is reason that is practiced collectively.
Nevertheless, Guerreiro Ramos insists that “the very idea of a social science, predicated
on the assumption that the individual is fundamentally a social being and that his
virtues are to be assessed by criteria socially given, was inconceivable to Aristotle and
the classical theorists in general” (NSO, p. 28-29).
The transcendental approach to reason that thoroughly permeates NSO’s
argumentation, instead of sustaining the critique of instrumental reason, turns out to
be a liability to Guerreiro Ramos’s critical project. Even Kant was careful to avoid such
an extreme, monological, concept of reason. Kant thought that the free debate between
citizens was an accurate image for reason and did not believe that there was one
unique “edifice of reason” that could be created by a solitary builder, as did Descartes
(O’Neill, 1997). Guerreiro Ramos seems to be unaware of the consequences of
grounding his theoretical endeavor in subject-centered reason and rejects the notion
that society shapes individuality. The centrality that Guerreiro Ramos attributes to
substantive reason in his theory leads him to criticize current social theories because
they have chosen to attribute centrality to society. According to Guerreiro Ramos, a
scientific social theory should not be attached to society’s praxis. The problem with
both mainstream and critical theorists  argues Guerreiro Ramos  is that they take
society’s praxis as the reference for their theories: the latter, to “today’s praxis of
advanced industrial society” and the former, to “tomorrows’s praxis of the enlightened
masses” (p. 31). Guerreiro Ramos does not have a reactionary approach to politics, as
one could suspect due to his rejection of praxis. In his view, successful political
deliberation depends on substantive reason, but political deliberation itself is not
reason. He seems unable to accept the concept of practical rationality, which is central
to Habermas's work.
Because Guerreiro Ramos does not attribute a legitimate role to practical
rationality in social theory, he fails to see that the central problem for modern social
sciences lies in the conflict between the practical and nomological features inherent in
their origin. Habermas, in his essay The Classical Doctrine of Politics in Relation to Social
Philosophy (1973a)6, develops, step by step, an argumentation that reveals this conflict
in its full dimension. Habermas argues that, in classical antiquity, praktikè  that is,
practical (deliberative) knowledge  and theoretikè  that is, theoretical knowledge 
were considered two different branches of knowledge. Ethics and politics belonged to
praktikè, while to theoretikè belonged mathematics, astronomy, biology, botany, as well

4
as metaphysics (Sinclair, 1977). Therefore, in classical philosophy, politics was guided
by practical rationality, achieving its maximum expression in phronesis., while theoretikè
consisted of observation and contemplation. Theoretikè, therefore, was at the origin of
modern science, which holds up to modern times the characteristic feature of
providing law-like descriptions of nature. According to classical philosophy, theoretikè
could be exercised in solitude. Pure theory, therefore, was pure contemplation and
corresponded to the highest exercise of theoretical knowledge. In contrast, praktikè,
through politics and ethics, remained dependent on practical rationality, for it was not
possible to make prudent political deliberations in an individualized manner.
Habermas (1973a) sees in Hobbes the determinant break from classical political
theory by establishing a “civil science”, which approaches the meaning given to the
modern term “political science” (see Sorell, 1996). Hobbes, inspired by the blooming
modern natural science of his time that had just discovered the experimental method,
committed himself to transforming politics into a “science”. The experimental method
had a fundamental consequence in the development of all sciences: the criteria for
scientific validation becomes the capacity to reproduce nature by means of adequate
techniques. Hobbes was not interested in finding law-like trends in the political
process, but in applying theory to control the social order with the precision and
certainty of the experimental method. The “technique” that Hobbes offered was a
positive legal system derived from Natural Law that eliminated the mediation of
politics in its legitimation. “Law became the epitome of positive ordinances, which
individuals imposed upon each other by contract; and justice now designated no more
than respect for the validity of these contracts” (Habermas, 1973a, p. 62). Thus, the
move from politics to “civil science” meant the triumph of a theory expurgated of
practical rationality.
Guerreiro Ramos also believes that Hobbes was determinant in the distortion of
the social sciences, but to him the problem lies in Hobbes’s rejection of common sense
reason. Habermas argues that modern political science, in particular, and the social
sciences in general, are in trouble for having ignored their dependence on practical
rationality that was at the core of classical political theory. In contrast, Guerreiro
Ramos argues that the crisis of the social sciences is due to Hobbes’s move from
substantive to instrumental reason: “The moment the human being is reduced to a
reckoning creature, it is impossible for him to distinguish between vice and virtue.
Society, then becomes his only preceptor and, not surprisingly, pain is equated with
evil and pleasure with the good.” (p. 29).

Individual versus society

Habermas sees the relation between individual and society as being one of
interdependency. In The Theory of Communicative Action (1984), Habermas develops
this argument starting from Piaget’s cognitive theory to show that the development of
the modern sense of individuality has emerged from the gradual demarcation between
the subject and the external world. As the growing child develops, it learns to separate
itself from the objects in the world and, simultaneously, from other individuals.
Habermas (1984) sees this process as having also occurred in the development of
humanity. The modern worldview replaced the mythic and religious-metaphysical
worldviews and this move had fundamental consequences in society’s explicative and
normative functions. On the one hand, by displacing the mythic worldview, modern
science became responsible for the explanation of an objectified world. On the other,
religion lost its original function of providing rules of moral behavior. As a

5
consequence, norms of social conduct in the modern age had to rely increasingly on
linguistically mediated mutual understanding for their validation. Social norms had
to be rationally justified as society became more and more secularized. The process of
rationalization of society and the consequent emergence of separated spheres of values,
as Weber had pointed out, resulted in the differentiation of the lifeworld7 in two ways.
First, the economic subsystem (money) and the administrative subsystem (power) were
detached from the lifeworld and acquired a quasi-autonomous status. Second, the
lifeworld itself became differentiated into three structural components (Habermas,
1984, 1987a). McCarthy (1984) presents a synthesis of this argument worth quoting in
length:
[...] to the different structural components of the lifeworld (culture, society,
personality) there correspond reproduction processes (cultural reproduction,
social integration, socialization) based on the different aspects of communicative
action (understanding, coordination, sociation), which are rooted in structural
components of speech acts (propositional, illocutionary, expressive). These
structural correspondences permit communicative action to perform its different
functions and to serve as a suitable medium for the symbolic interaction
reproduction of the lifeworld. When these functions are interfered with, there
arise disturbances in the reproduction process and corresponding crisis
manifestations: loss of meaning, withdraw of legitimation, confusion of
orientations, anomie, destabilization of collective identities, alienation,
psychopathologies, breakdowns in tradition, withdraw of motivation . (p. xxvii)
Communicative action, as Habermas (1984, p. 294) defined it, is a “type of
interaction in which all participants harmonize their individual plans of action with
one another and thus pursue their illocutionary aims without reservation “. It is
important to emphasize that Habermas (1984) is speaking of action coordination through
communication, and not of communication per se. As goes his argument, the
reproduction, that is, the continuation as well as the renewal of tradition, of the
structural components of the lifeworld depends on communicative action, thus not
only communication is regarded fundamental, but action as well. Communicative
action works by means of “universal pragmatics” that can be defined as follows. To
every validity claim presented by a speaker, each hearer must react with “yes” or “no”
according to each one of the three spheres of validation that emerge from the structural
components of the lifeworld: truth, rightness and sincerity. In other words, each one of
the structural components has corresponding validating criteria. Culture is
reproduced by means of validation (or refutation) of statements regarding the truth of
knowledge that must deal with the objective world. For instance, some scientific
theories that apply to the objective world are validated, while others are refuted, in a
continuous process. The structural component corresponding to society must be
reproduced through the validation of norms of conduct in interpersonal relations, a
process that attributes legitimacy to the ethical dimension of society. Finally, the
individual personality is reproduced through the acquisition of “generalized
competences for action” (Habermas, 1987, p. 141). In this process, individuals reveal
themselves to others through validity claims that are posed to them in terms of the
sincerity of expressive utterances.
Habermas sees socialization as part of the formative process of the individual
personality, for it permits individual life stories to enter into harmony with collective
forms of life. The role of education, be it within the family and community, or in
formal educational institutions, is to provide the competences for action. This view of
individuality contrasts with the view adopted by Guerreiro Ramos. According to his
view, the individual is the holder of substantive reason and society is the entity that

6
perverts it. If one takes Guerreiro Ramos’s point-of-view, individuality appears to be
an a priori condition in the psyche of human beings, struggling to affirm itself vis-à-vis
society. Jung (1971/1981), speaking from a very different perspective than Habermas,
argues that individuation corresponds to a differentiation process of the individual ego
from the collective unconscious. Jung considered transference, that is, the unconscious
projection upon the therapist or other persons, to be a fundamental stage in the process
of individuation. Therefore, not even from the psychological point-of-view can
individuality be regarded as coming into being independently from the social world.
Despite Guerreiro Ramos’s criticism, Habermas has given a prominent role for the
individual in his theoretical framework. For one thing, in grounding his theory in
language, Habermas was also giving a central role to the individual who speaks,
listens, and acts. In addition, expressive utterances have in Habermas’s theory a status
equivalent to that of positive and normative utterances. In this sense, contrary to what
Guerreiro Ramos has argued, Habermas's theory cannot be regarded as
“sociomorphic”.

Habermas’s critique of the “pure theory” alternative

In the essay, Knowledge and Human Interest: a General Perspective (1971), Habermas
criticizes the Husserlian alternative to positivism. According to Habermas, to counter-
attack the positivist illusion that an objectified social world could be grasped directly
and its facts described in law-like connections, Husserl proposed a return to pure
theory as conceptualized in classical philosophy. With this, Husserl believed that
knowledge could be freed from any human interest and revealed in its pure form.
Habermas (1971) attacks Husserl’s position with an argument developed in three
stages. First, he criticizes the social sciences for having succumbed to an illusory
positivism that fails to realize that the “objects of scientific analysis are constituted a
priori in the self-evidence of our primary lifeworld” (Habermas, 1971, p. 304). Second,
he rejects Husserl’s notion that the social sciences need to free themselves from
practical interests. Finally, Habermas argues that, even in its classical form, pure
theory remains connected with the practical world and thus cannot claim to be free
from interests.
Habermas (1971) challenges Husserl’s assumption that phenomenology is able to
grasp norms of action with practical intent by means of subjective introspection.
Transcendental phenomenology cannot apply “laws of pure reason” to the realm of
practical reason. According to Habermas, Husserl falls into this mistake because he
shares with positivism the same ontological assumption, that is, the separation
between consciousness and the external world. Habermas argues that the concept of
pure theory in classical philosophy had an interest that Husserl has not taken into
consideration. Pure theory, through the contemplation of the cosmos, established the
separation of the individual from the mysterious and magical understanding of the
world. Thanks to philosophy, humanity was able to free itself from an overwhelming
nature that represented a permanent threat to its survival, a process that  as noted
above  yielded and stabilized the notion of personal identity. Therefore, pure theory
represents an interest, though concealed, in emancipation from nature. This first step
toward emancipation established the ontological assumption that both positivism and
Transcendental phenomenology now share and that has become a limitation to the self-
comprehension of social sciences. In addition, pure theory, in its classical form, had
another feature that is not present in Husserl’s philosophy. “Theory in the sense of the
classical tradition only had an impact on life because it was thought to have discovered
in the cosmic order an ideal world structure, including the prototype of the order of the

7
human world” (Habermas, 1971, p. 306). Therefore, cosmology served not only as a
model for the organization of the natural world, but also as the recipient of a projection
or transference of the social order. This process connected pure theory to a normative
and educational purpose that was later to be expurgated from Transcendental
phenomenology and from the empirical sciences. As a result, the tension generated by
the “value free” problematic that Weber (1947/1964) rendered explicit in the social
sciences, is even more present to the extent it is ignored. In a previous essay,
Habermas already identified this limitation inherited by the social sciences:
This points to a dialectical relation that has only become fully clear with the
development of the social sciences of our day: to the degree to which politics is
scientifically rationalized, and praxis is instructed theoretically by technical
recommendation, there is a growth of that residual complex of problems, in the
face of which the analysis of the experimental sciences must confess its
incompetence. (Habermas, 1973a, p. 46).
Choosing the alternative of pure theory in order to avoid the pitfalls of
positivism, neither solves the tension generated by the normative deficit nor eliminates
the underlying interests. Interests cannot be eliminated because they are intrinsically
connected to humanity’s natural history. Habermas (1971) identifies three possible
forms of knowledge and cognitive interests, each one corresponding to one of the three
forms of social organization that are present in the modern society: work, language, and
power. The empirical-analytical sciences, and their corresponding technical interests,
emerged alongside the organization of work. The historical-hermeneutic sciences bear
a practical interest directed at a mutual understanding that reaches beyond immediate
lifeworlds in order to expand learning processes across generations; this was made
possible by the use of language. Finally, because power relations play a fundamental
role in social organization, the interest in emancipation characterizes critical science.
Habermas (1971) emphasizes, however, that knowledge does not regard self-
preservation as its only goal. “Taken by itself, this thesis [on the connection between
knowledge and humanity’s natural history] could lead to the misunderstanding that
reason is an organ of adaptation for men just as claws and teeth are for animals”(p.
312). Though knowledge has, indeed, a fundamental role in self-preservation, it goes
beyond this purpose. Because humanity’s emancipation represented a break with
nature (though still remaining immersed in), it has created culture, implying a
transcendence from mere self-preservation.
Transcendental phenomenology, as positivism, does not account for the need to
preserve practical rationality in the social sciences. The deliberative process has to be
incorporated to the structure of the social sciences if it is to avoid the intrinsic
limitation of the positivistic approach. As mentioned above, Guerreiro Ramos
considers the deliberative process an exercise of substantive reason and does not
recognize a role for practical rationality. Guerreiro Ramos could not see that Habermas
(1973a) had unveiled that the problem with modern social sciences lies on the practical
deficit since Hobbes’s break with classical political theory. Thus, Guerreiro Ramos was
also unable to understand the theoretical alternative proposed by Habermas: the
dialectical approach.
“The only method that, at least as far as the name was concerned, was practiced
both in theoretical as well as in practical philosophy, was the art of disputation 
dialectics” (Habermas, 1973a, p. 79). In its original meaning, argues Habermas (1973a),
dialectics was a form of propaedeutics. Aristotle practiced it in the introductory
teaching of the natural sciences and as a resource in political rhetoric. In its former use,
dialectics had only an educational purpose and was not considered a substitute for

8
rigorous analysis. In the latter use, however, it was an exercise of reflective judgement
that aimed at orienting action. According to Habermas (1973a), it was Hegel who
broke the “division of labor” to which dialectics was confined by classical philosophy,
establishing the methodological superiority of it in face of the analytic method of
investigation. Through dialectics, science could reflect upon itself, furnishing scientific
progress through self-criticism. Moreover, by providing a dialectical understanding of
history, Hegel reestablished the connection between theory and practice. By
interpreting history dialectically, Hegel made it possible to think of the everyday
praxis of individuals as beyond the confines of the lifeworld. Habermas, however, has
a different understanding of social evolution through dialectics than that of Hegel.
Hegelian dialectics views humanity, through history, evolving towards the “Absolute
Spirit”, but Habermas does not subscribe to this metaphysical goal. In his theoretical
framework, it is towards autonomy and responsibility that humanity is dialectically
emancipating itself. Communicative action, based on unconstrained communication
seeking mutual understanding, orients humanity towards emancipation. On the one
hand, action relies on practical rationality; on the other, the dialectical approach of the
process of emancipation adds the theoretical understanding which can be continuously
renewed by praxis.
One should be cautious regarding the argument of unconstrained
communication in Habermas’s theoretical framework, which has been a source of
frequent misunder-standings. Habermas (1971, p. 314) is careful enough to warn
readers: “The ontological illusion of pure theory [...] promotes the fiction that Socratic
dialogue is possible everywhere and at any time.[...] It is pure theory, wanting to
derive everything from itself, that succumbs to unacknowledged external conditions
and becomes ideological”. Therefore, what Habermas (1987a, p. 2) has defined as a
utopian “ideal communication community” cannot be established at will under any
circumstance. It is obvious that in contemporary societies, power and ideology distort
communication and impair mutual understanding. Moreover, Habermas’s utopia
should not be understood as an ideal state that lies ahead on humanity’s destiny, as in
Hegel’s “Absolute Spirit” idea. As Cohn (1993) observed, what Habermas has
proposed is an ex ante utopia, a condition that is always present at every utterance.
The human interest in autonomy and responsibility is not mere fancy, for it is
apprehended a priori. What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature
we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy and responsibility are
poised for us. Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of
universal and unconstrained consensus. Taken together, autonomy and
responsibility constitute the only Idea that we posses a priori in the sense of the
philosophical tradition. (Habermas, 1971, p. 314)
Emancipation is attained dialectically by means of the tension generated between
a distorted communication situation and the potential of unconstrained mutual
understanding implied in language. Habermas’s linguistic utopia is a philosophical
standpoint from which it becomes possible to criticize the status quo and to promote
emancipation. It should be emphasized that, by grounding his argument on the use of
language, Habermas tried to avoid the “objectivism” of Hegel’s philosophy of history,
that is, the attribution of “meaning” to historical developments that are independent
from praxis (Dews, 1986). Since his earlier writings, Habermas was concerned with the
determinism that was present in the philosophy of history and rejected the notion that
emancipation is established as a “given”. A philosophy “with practical orientation”,
therefore, has to keep open to the possibility that the outcome of action can either be
emancipation or a regressive move to oppressive conditions.

9
 Nevertheless, emancipation is a concrete possibility because it has happened
before and this sustains hopes that it is objectively possible. Though emancipation
from nature is the most conspicuous example, it is possible  putting pessimism aside
for a moment  to see many other situations where humanity has risen above
oppressive situations. All over the world, slavery is now legally banished. This is not
the same as saying that slavery does not exist anymore. In Brazil, for instance, cases of
slavery have been recently reported in the media. However, the institutionalization of
the illegality of slavery can be considered a firm step towards an emancipation towards
emancipation even though the practice of slavery has not totally disappeared. The
same can be said of the social status of women and minorities in advanced capitalistic
societies: it is not as good as it should be, but it is not as bad as it used to be. Neither of
the examples mentioned here came into being without the action of those concerned. If
action had not been taken, the history of human emancipation would have been
different.
Guerreiro Ramos’s proposed alternative to formal reason falls into the trap of
idealism. It is attached to Transcendental phenomenology, to its illusion of pure theory
and, thus, it is unable to incorporate practical knowledge in its framework. Without
the understanding provided by dialectical methodology, substantive reason becomes
the only reference that can possibly orient action. The fact Guerreiro Ramos grounds
his theoretical project in substantive reason is highly problematic. First, the notion that
substantive reason carries a priori “goodness”, which is implicit throughout NOS, is
misleading. Weber (1964, p. 185) himself considered the concept of substantive
rationality “full of difficulties”, and pointed out that there is “an indefinite number of
possible standards of value which are rational in this sense”. Weber (1964, pp. 185-186)
mentions that actions “in the interest of a hierarchy of class distinctions or in the
furtherance of the power of a political unit, particularly by war” lie within the concept
of substantive rationality. Therefore, Weber (1947/1964) did not attribute to
substantive reason the benevolence that seems to permeate Guerreiro Ramos’s notion
of the concept. Second, this a priori notion of substantive reason “freezes” the process
of knowledge renewal essential for emancipation. Knowledge directed towards
emancipation is accumulated through social learning and is not an a priori state. Of
course, Guerreiro Ramos had no intention of adopting a conservative theory. Quite the
contrary. His criticism of the status quo, as mentioned in the introduction, has been one
of the most radical in the field so far. However, it is necessary to go into the
consequences of Guerreiro Ramos’s philosophical approach to show that these are not
consistent with his radical intentions.
Before we proceed to the next section, some comments on Habermas’s approach
to empirical research should be mentioned, for it has a fundamental connection to his
approach to critical theory.
At the same time that Habermas (1973a) criticizes the elimination of practical
rationality from modern political science, he also points out that the emergence of
social sciences implied the emergence of a new scientific object: “the complex of
interrelationships of social life” (p. 46). As Habermas (1973a, p. 79) has argued,
“methodological rigor [...] is the irreversible achievement of modern science”.
Therefore, it is not possible anymore to retrocede to a pre-scientific state in order to
reestablish the connection between theory and practice. In The Theory of Communicative
Action (1987a, p. 374), Habermas, departing from his discussion of Parson’s system
theory, elaborates the concept of “methodological objectification” of the lifeworld.
Habermas (1987a) argues that critical theory has to shift the perspective from that of
the participant to that of the observer in order to identify the negative effects of the
quasi-autonomous subsystems of money and power on the reproduction of the

10
components of the lifeworld. Without this “methodological objectification”, the
colonization of the lifeworld by the economic and administrative subsystems would
disappear into an all-encompassing hermeneutic understanding of society, and theory
would lose its critical potential. It should be noted, though, that “methodological
objectification” is an heuristic device that does not render irrelevant the spheres of
validity other than the objective world. In order to avoid the “empiricist
abridgement”, Habermas argues that the aspects pertinent to the social world and the
subjective world should complement the aspects related to the objective world. As
social research focuses in any one of the three structural components of the lifeworld 
culture, society or personality  it has to bring the other two components back into
play. “Thus, nonobjectivist approaches to research within the human sciences bring
viewpoints of moral and aesthetic critique to bear  without threatening the primacy
of questions of truth; only in this way is critical social theory made possible.”
(Habermas, 1987a, p. 398)

The tasks of a new organizational theory

It is not until the second half of NSO that specific themes related to the proposal
of a new organizational theory are presented. As already mentioned in the
introduction, Guerreiro Ramos had no intention of presenting a detailed outline of a
new theory. “This book is nothing more than a preliminary statement of the new
science of organizations. It simply sets a research agenda. Much is yet to be done to
Transform the New Science into a tool for social reconstruction” (NSO ,p. 169).
Guerreiro Ramos’s discussion of the tasks of a new organizational theory indicate the
path that he had planned to develop into a complete theoretical model.
Guerreiro Ramos sees that a substantive approach to organizational theory
would consist of two basic tasks. First, organizational theory would have to be explicit
regarding the epistemological assumptions carried in its framework; the perspectives
from which the internal and external environments are to be interpreted should
become explicit. Second, the new science should overcome the limitations of current
organizational theories regarding: a) the concept of rationality adopted; b) the lack of
distinction between economic and non-economic organizations; c) the lack of
comprehension of the importance of symbolic interactions; and d) a mechanistic
concept of human labor.
According to Guerreiro Ramos, the concept of rationality that underlines
organizational theory has hardly changed since Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Organizational theories that are grounded in formal rationality can, at best, be applied
to economic organizations, but are unable to be an adequate environment for personal
actualization. Guerreiro Ramos is critical of “humanist” organizational theories that
believe that personal actualization can be accomplished within organizations seeking
economic goals. The reason for this mistake, argues Guerreiro Ramos, is that these
theories take formal rationality as their reference. Therefore, even critics of the
approach defended by Simon  such as Christopher Argyris  end up taking the
concept of instrumental rationality for granted. The task is not to drop formal
rationality, but to complement it by substantive rationality, insists Guerreiro Ramos.
This leads to the next limitation: the lack of distinction between the different types of
organizations by current theories. In this regard, Guerreiro Ramos recognizes the
important role of economic organizations, but argues that economic production should
be guided by ethical principles, including the care for the natural environment. In
presenting his point of view regarding the control of the economy by society, Guerreiro

11
Ramos is much in accordance with Habermas’s argument. Similarly to Habermas’s
approach, Guerreiro Ramos also sees the differentiation of the economic system from
society (lifeworld) as an historical event. This differentiation is at the origin of the
social and psychological pathologies observed in contemporary societies.
This affinity with Habermas’s perspective is also clear regarding another aspect
of Guerreiro Ramos’s theoretical outline. Guerreiro Ramos regards as a deficiency of
current organizational theories the fact that they have not given adequate
consideration to symbolic interactions. In Guerreiro Ramos’s view, market ideology
has replaced symbolic interactions as the criteria for social organization, which is
reflected in current organizational theories. Habermas has made this problem central
to his argument. The economic and administrative subsystems have become a threat to
the reproduction of the lifeworld because, being “delinguisticated” systems, they
invade (“colonize”) the spheres pertinent to the structural components of the lifeworld.
Habermas, therefore, sees not only the economic subsystem, but the administrative
subsystem as well as the source of present social ailments. According to Habermas, the
negative interference of the administrative subsystem in the reproduction of the
lifeworld follows from the adoption of a positive legal system:
If one studies the paradoxical structure of juridification in such areas as the family,
the schools, social-welfare policy, and the like, the meaning of the demands that
regularly result from these analyses is easy to decipher. The point is to protect
areas of life that are functionally dependent on social integration through values,
norms, and consensus formation, to preserve them form falling prey to the
systemic imperatives of economic and administrative subsystems growing with
the dynamics of their own, and to defend them from becoming converted over,
through the steering medium of the law, to a principle of sociation that is, for
them, dysfunctional. (Habermas, 1987a, pp. 372-373)
Therefore, both Habermas and Guerreiro Ramos see that the preservation of
appropriate spaces for symbolic interactions is fundamental to maintaining social
health and individual well being. However, while Habermas sees sociation as
fundamental to the process of individuation, Guerreiro Ramos remains attached to the
notion that sociation interferes negatively with individual expression. Once again,
Guerreiro Ramos’s philosophical outlook brings problematic aspects to his theoretical
endeavor, for it neglects the dynamics between sociation and organizations.
Organizations are the site of sociation which takes place through symbolic interactions.
Therefore, organizations and sociation are very much connected. Were Guerreiro
Ramos engaged in the “anti-organization” front, his approach to organizations would
be similar to a radical criticism similar to that of Ivan Illich (1972), who advocates an
anti-organization approach to education. However, Guerreiro Ramos regards
organizations  those based on substantive rationality, to be sure  as fundamental
tools to the promotion of personal actualization.
The last task that Guerreiro Ramos assigns to a new science of organizations is the
dismissal of the “mechanistic” concept of work. The extensive discussion that
Guerreiro Ramos undertakes on this topic shows that it would have been central to his
further theoretical developments. The triumph of work as a criteria to measure
individual worth, argues Guerreiro Ramos, should be dismissed, for industrial
societies have shown to have overcome the problem of material scarcity. Guerreiro
Ramos distinguishes “work” from “activity”. The former term corresponds to what
Arendt (1995) described as the doings of the animal-laborans and the latter corresponds
the activities directed towards personal actualization. Guerreiro Ramos's overall view
seems to be that human beings would obtain personal actualization only through
emancipation from work, which has been a human ambition since Aristotle. Aristotle

12
(1952) thought that slaves were necessary because work was incompatible with
engagement in the affairs of the polis. For Aristotle, liberation from work for everyone,
though desirable, was impossible. Guerreiro Ramos argues that Aristotle’s assumption
of an everlasting scarcity was wrong and that modern society has finally realized that
liberation from work is possible. However, Guerreiro Ramos seems not to notice that
private property is what matters for liberation from work, not the technical aspect of
material production. In a somewhat naïve view, Guerreiro Ramos seems to believe
that emancipation from work can be achieved by enlightened policy makers. Were
policy makers guided by substantive reason, social policies could be developed in
order to promote a radical change in the current distributive pattern of wealth.
Despite these limitations in Guerreiro Ramos’s reasoning, it should be noted that
he introduces a theme that is of crucial importance: the relation between theory at the
level of the organization and theory at the level of society. He recognizes that premises
embodied in social sciences are carried into organizational theories, and sustains that
organizations should be understood as part of the web that constitutes society. In turn,
society can also be interpreted through its institutions, among them formal
organizations. This dialectic relation between society and organizations has been a
theme of Habermas’s writings as well, specially in his books Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere (1991) and Between Facts and Norms (1998). Most organizational
theories are focused inwardly and give little consideration to the society that surrounds
formal organizations. Guerreiro Ramos breaks with this tradition both by discussing
social theories at length and by presenting an outline of a theoretical model which
takes into consideration the importance of social arrangements. In Guerreiro Ramos’s
model, however, society is mostly seen as the realm of the economy and not of politics.
At the core of Guerreiro Ramos’s theoretical framework is what he calls “social
systems delimitation”. By rejecting the notion that the market should coordinate
human affairs, Guerreiro Ramos presents his “para-economic paradigm”, a
multidimensional proto-model in which the market is only one among other activities
that individuals can be engaged. Figure 1 reproduces the graphic representation of
Guerreiro Ramos’s “para-economic paradigm”. In this proto-model, there are
enclaves reserved for personal actualization, which can take place in small groups (the
social system “Phenonomy”) or in communities of regular size (the social system
“Isonomy”)8. The market (the social system “Economy”) is present, but it is not the
only enclave where human activity can take place. If an activity has a predominant
economic character, then it is more likely to be oriented by formal norms and
operational prescriptions, leaving little room for personal actualization. In contrast,
within the enclaves where personal actualization can take place, norms are flexible and
individuals have a larger scope for personal choice. Administrative procedures are
typical of economic activities and, “ [t]he more human action is considered
administrative, the less it is an expression of personal actualization” (NSO, p. 125). For
this reason, Guerreiro Ramos regards the economy as one of the four extreme cases in
social systems, the other three being “Anomy”, “Mob”, and “Isolate”.

(Figure 1 about here)

In Guerreiro Ramos’s model, “Anomie” and “Mob” correspond to the two

extreme cases of absence of norms; the former has an individual orientation while the
latter has a community orientation. Therefore, in the “Anomy” system the “outsiders”
would be those who are living at the margins of society and are unable to direct their
lives towards personal goals. Within the “Mob” system are groups that, in a collective
manner, reject social norms and live marginally. Guerreiro Ramos does not provide

13
examples of typical members of this system, but one can imagine that gangs of
criminals may be one9. Finally, Guerreiro Ramos sees that the “Isolate” individual
takes as orientation in life a single rule that s/he follows without any questioning. The
caricature of the typical bureaucrat could be an example for the isolated individual,
though Guerreiro Ramos prefers to mention cases of paranoia as the typical example of
this system.
Though Guerreiro Ramos’s model is consistent with much of his argumentation,
the major deficiency in it is the absence of the role of politics, that is, of practical
rationality. Guerreiro Ramos does not mention whether the relations within and
between the six social systems should be mediated by politics. Much like Plato in the
Republic, Guerreiro Ramos believes that appropriate social institutions are the products
of a substantive rationality embodied by the State:
The multicentric society is a deliberate undertaking. It implies design and
implementation of a new kind of state empowered to formulate and enforce
allocative policies supportive not only of market-oriented pursuits, but of social
settings suited for personal actualization, convivial relationships, and community
activities of citizens as well. Such a society also requires the initiatives of citizens,
who are stepping out of the market-centered society at their own responsibility
and risk. (NSO, p. 135-136).
Despite Guerreiro Ramos’s criticism of socialist societies, he seems to be
recommending the same recipe that resulted in the debacle of socialism in the USSR
and Eastern European countries. State planning in Guerreiro Ramos’s framework
appears as a deus ex machina that would come about to correct social ailments.
However, Habermas  as other exponents of the Frankfurt School  cannot be fooled
by this alternative due to the hard lessons that emerged from Stalinist states. In
Habermas’s (1987a) theoretical framework, capitalist societies and bureaucratic-
socialist societies are doomed to crisis due to the effects of the quasi-autonomous
subsystems of economy and power. In capitalist societies, the market takes the lead as
the steering media, while in the bureaucratic-socialist societies, the administrative
system has the leading steering function; both systems result in social crisis, for they
are not communicatively mediated. Because the economy and the State administration
are interdependent, the crisis generated by one subsystem tends to be transferred to the
other subsystem. In advanced capitalist societies, the effects of economic crisis 
unemployment, health problems and so forth  are to be “solved” by the Welfare
State. However, because private profits are jeopardized by taxes, policies of State
interventionism and “the market’s self-healing powers” end up alternating with one
another. In similar manner, the effects of the crisis in the bureaucratic-socialist
societies are to be absorbed by the economic system. As a consequence, “policy
oscillates hopelessly between increased central planning and decentralization, between
orienting economic programs toward investment and toward consumption”
(Habermas, 1987a, p. 385). But there is an additional burden that impacts the
bureaucratic-socialist societies, which is not present in the case of the capitalist societies
steered by money:
The fact that power can be exercised at a societal level only as organized power
throws light on the different evolutionary paths of the two media, money and
power. Long before it had system-building effects, money was already a
circulating media under primitive conditions. By contrast, before power was
differentiated out under the modern conditions of legal domination and rational
administration as a medium that could circulate within limits, it appeared in the
form of an authority of office tied to certain persons and positions. Unlike money,
therefore, power is not “by nature” a circulating medium. [...] This brings us to a

14
 more important difference: power not only needs to be backed like money (e.g., by
gold or means of enforcement); it not only needs to be legally normed like money
(e.g., in the form of property rights or official positions); power needs an
additional basis of confidence, namely, legitimation. (Habermas, 1987a, p. 270).
This difference between advanced capitalist and bureaucratic-socialist societies
may be an explanation why the latter proved to be fatally vulnerable to systemic crisis,
while the former, despite its crisis, has survived, as the collapse of the socialist system
in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe show. Because power needs legitimation, it
requires “more demanding normative anchoring” (Habermas, 1987a, p. 271). The
collective goals that are set by the planning authority, therefore, have to be legitimated
by means of the endorsement from those affected. Because legitimation cannot be
compensated by the other sub-system  that is, by the economy , the only possible
compensation is through a linguistically mediated agreement on collective goals.
Now it is possible to fully understand why Guerreiro Ramos’s choice of
grounding his theoretical project on substantive reason is misleading. It is not a true
alternative for the pitfalls of formal reason in organizational theory because it ends up
falling into a built-in limitation. Rational planning, be it considered under the
assumption of maximizing behavior attached to instrumental reason or under the
assumption of a benevolent nature implicit in substantive reason, has to be
communicatively legitimated. Guerreiro Ramos was aware that the concept of reason
needed to be expanded, but was unable to understand that substantive reason has the
same basic limitation as formal reason. The fundamental problem with organizational
theories  as with the social theories that underline them  is their lack of
consideration of the role of communicative action in the legitimation of power.

Concluding Remarks: Critical theory and Public Administration

The critical intention of Guerreiro Ramos’s theoretical project finds on its way the
same difficulty that the first generation of the Frankfurt School critical theorists have
encountered, that is, the limitation embodied in subject-centered reason. Adorno and
Horkheimer, in not finding a way out of instrumental rationality, adopted a
“methodological pessimism” (Matos, 1989). These two founders of critical theory saw
modern society in a hopeless situation. The “historical subject” had vanished and the
curse of History would not necessarily lead to the progress of humanity. Therefore,
“reason” had failed as tool to emancipation. Guerreiro Ramos, however, took an
optimistic approach to reason, attributing positive qualities to substantive rationality
and expecting that humanity will become “reasonable”, willing to design and
implement the organizations that individuals need to attain personal actualization.
Therefore, his theoretical project falls into idealism.
Habermas takes a different route than the ones chosen by Adorno and
Horkheimer , on one side, and Guerreiro Ramos, on the other. According to Habermas
(1981/1984), early critical theory found itself in a dead-end because it was tied to the
philosophy of consciousness. Only by breaking with the supremacy of subject-
centered reason  and by taking up communicative action  critical theory could be
redeemed from pessimism without falling back into idealism. In his own words,
Habermas (1984) declares:

[...] I want to maintain that the program of early critical theory foundered not on
this or that contingent circumstance, but from the exhaustion of the paradigm of
the philosophy of consciousness. I shall argue that a change of paradigm to the
theory of communication makes it possible to return to the undertaking that was

15
 interrupted with the critique of instrumental reason; and this will permit us to
take up once again the since neglected tasks of a critical theory of society. (p. 386)
Habermas, therefore, made the “linguistic turn”. However, his theoretical
approach is different from the one that emerges from the radical critics of reason, who
also made “the turn”10. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987b), Habermas
lays down the arguments that establish his distance from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and
French post-structuralism. Though sharing with radical critics the assumption that the
philosophy of consciousness has exhausted itself and that reason is immersed in social
and historical contexts, Habermas does not adhere to the absolute skepticism that
characterizes postmodern theorists. Meaning, argues Habermas, is not an arbitrary by-
product of language; it is the outcome of a social learning process which comes about
as individuals coordinate their actions with one another through communication. It is
language that allows the transmission of knowledge across generations and provides
the medium for critique of power structures. The point that Habermas wants to make
 and which has been frequently misunderstood by his critics  is that the
illocutionary content of validity claims is contextually and historically bounded, but
“universal pragmatics”, that is, the process that involves the presentation and critique of
validity claims, is “transcendental”. In summary: “universal pragmatics” is valid in
any context or historical period because it is ingrained in language itself.
Consequently, meaning cannot be disconnected from validity claims of truth, rightness
and sincerity.
This takes us to the tasks of theory in Public Administration. Stivers (1999)
argued that the dilemma faced by P.A. theorists is in having to choose between the
“Scylla of postmodernism” and the “Charybdis of public management”. If we look at
the majority of the current literature on P.A. theory, this seems to be indeed the
dilemma. It is my understanding, however, that P.A. theorists are neither restricted to
the behaviorism underlining New Public Management nor to the skepticism that
emerges from postmodern approaches. The discussion presented here on the ideas of
Guerreiro Ramos and Habermas is intended to demonstrate that critical theory is a
serious alternative.
As it was argued, Guerreiro Ramos’s approach, in grounding his theoretical
project in the concept of substantive reason, remains idealistic and, thus, unable to
sustain a critique of society. His approach, however, has the merit of attempting to
make a link between organizations and society. Postmodern approaches, in contrast,
because of their emphasis on contexts, the assumption of fragmentation, and a disbelief
in collective action, remain limited to the context of “discourse” within public
organizations, without being able give proper account for the relationship between
organizations and society at large. On the other extreme, represented by the New
Public Management model, the theoretical assumption provided by Public Choice
theory reduces action, both within organizations and society, to individualistic
maximizing behavior. Finally, Habermas’s theory of communicative action, going
beyond the link between organizations and society attempted by Guerreiro Ramos,
integrates the concepts of lifeworld and society into one conceptual framework11. In
Habermas’s theory, the role of symbolic interactions is preserved at the same time that
the systemic aspects of society  namely, the economic and administrative subsystems
 are “methodologically objectified”, providing an adequate viewpoint for a critique
of modes of domination within society. In addition, now in agreement with
postmodern approaches, Habermas overcame idealism (i.e., Guerreiro Ramos’s
approach) and pessimism (i.e., early critical theory approach) by shifting from the
philosophy of consciousness to the philosophy of language. A schematic summary of

16
the main characteristics of the four theoretical approaches briefly discussed here are
presented in Figure 2.

(Figure 2 about here)

The ample possibilities of application of Habermas’s critical theory in Public

Administration also represent a great challenge to the empirical researcher. To start
with, our field suffers the pressure of the technical interest ingrained in the empirical-
analytical sciences. Public Administration academics are expected to perform “social
engineering” solutions to “fix” governmental organizations, often without questioning
the premises derived from broader social contexts. This limitation becomes even more
problematic if one considers that P.A. academics often act as consultants in
governmental organizations and participate in commissioned research projects. De
Vries (1998) has discussed the problems that commissioned research in Public
Administration impose to scientific work and to the researcher. According to De Vries
(1998), commissioned research has four basic characteristics: a) there are always two
parties involved (commissioning body and researcher); b) the primary goal of the
research is practical usage (functional use); c) data gathering hardly can be unbiased;
and d) research design is often limited from the outset (p. 2). These characteristics lead
to a problematic power relation involving the researcher and the commissioning body,
where the former runs the risk of losing his/her intellectual independence and
becoming devoid of critical self-reflection. For this reason, the critical theorist may
often have to drop consulting opportunities if these represent a threat to his/her
intellectual project.
Another difficulty that critical theory brings to empirical research refers to
methodology. Habermas leaves open to investigation the question of appropriate
methodological procedures for critical research. As observed in this paper, Habermas
(1973a) has indicated dialectics as the procedure that would be able to promote the
linkage between theory and practice, but this is a philosophical solution, not a strictly
methodological one. In the introduction of Theory and Practice (1973b), Habermas
argues that critical science methodology should avoid both the reductionism of
behavioral sciences  which assumes action as behavior  and the interpretation of
ideology as “tradition”, a pitfall of hermeneutics. However, the “nuts and bolts” of
methodological procedures, able to sort out the linkages between data observation and
interpretation, are not available to critical researchers yet. Action research, for
example, is not an answer to this problem. “The fashionable demand for a type of
‘action research’,” writes Habermas (1973b, p. 11)  “that is, to combine political
enlightenment with research, overlooks that uncontrolled modification of the field is
incompatible with the simultaneous gathering of data in that field, a condition that is
also valid for the social sciences.” Therefore, the critical researcher has to deal with the
complexity that the linkage between theory and practice, via the concept of society as
lifeworld and system, brings to research. In assuming this complexity, the researcher
becomes aware not only of the ontological illusion of positivism, but of the limitations
of interpretative methodologies as well. For the critical researcher it is not a matter of
choosing a side in the epistemological dispute, but of searching for procedures that are
consistent with the principles of critical theory and the type of inquiry at hand.
These difficulties, however, should be seen as a challenge to public
administration researchers rather than a burden. As Guerreiro Ramos has taught us,
only by going deeper into the epistemological and social implications of theory will
our field acquire the necessary force and direction. This move, in fact, would be the
appropriate tribute to Guerreiro Ramos’s legacy.

17
End Notes

1 Paulo Freire is certainly the most read Brazilian scholar. His landmark book, Pedagogy of the

Oppresed (1997), has been translated into several of languages and has been widely quoted by
critical theorist and phenomenologists.
2In Brazil, the NPM “fenezzi” reached its peak in the late 90’s. For a critical appraisal of the
Brazilian administrative reform, see Andrews & Kouzmin (1999).
3 Guerreiro Ramos quoted a few of Habermas' writings in NSO 3, but did not have a chance to
read the full argument presented in The Theory of Communicative Action. The German edition
was released in the same year NSO was released in the US (1981) and the English versions were
released only in 1984 (volume one) and 1987 (volume two).
4 About his work style, Habermas commented in an interview: “When I have found an
interesting flower or herb I try to figure out how it will fit together with others, whether it can
create a bouquet or pattern. This is constructive puzzle-work. I take over other theories. Why
not?” (Habermas, 1996, pp.128-127).
5 In Knowledge and Human Interest (1971), for instance, Habermas discusses Freud’s
Psychoanalytic theory in three essays. He will return to Freud in the second volume of The
Theory of Communicative Action (1987a).
6It should be noted that Guerreiro Ramos has quoted this essay in NOS. The quotation reads as
follows: Such flaws in Habermas’s theoretical endeavor are somewhat intriguing, if not
perplexing, because he seems to have a good grasp of classical political theory” (pp. 20-21)
7 The concept of lifeworld is usually understood in the general sense given by Phenomenology,

that is, the common stock of knowledge available to individuals in order to assign meaning to
the world, serving as an always present background to action. Habermas (1987a), however,
criticizes the one-sidedness of the lifeworld concepts used by Husserl and Schutz (too much
emphasis on cultural reproduction), as well as the concepts used by Parsons and Durkheim (too
much emphasis on social integration) and Mead (too much emphasis on individual
socialization). That is why Habermas (1987) proposes a three level structural approach to the
concept of lifeworld, that incorporates the three perspectives, in order to overcome the
limitations of the previous concepts.
8 According to Guerreiro Ramos, “Isonomy” has a community orientation, thus usually
corresponds to medium size organizations, such as NGO’s and mutual support organizations.
“Phenonomy”, on the other hand, has an individual orientation and is normally developed in
small groups or even by one individual. Examples of activities in this system are groups that
practice hobbies, studios of art and other groups developing creative activities.
9The fact that Guerreiro Ramos used the word “mob” indicates that he attributed a negative
connotation to the term. It remains an open question on what would be his approach to
popular revolts that lead to more democratic political systems (the French Revolution and the
American “Tea Tax Party” being too classical examples). The lack of a dialectical approach
makes Guerreiro Ramos’s model unable to account for the role of these revolts on emancipation.
10The “linguistic turn” seems to be acquiring a broad acceptance. Ostrom (1997), within the
New Institutionalism branch in Political Science, stresses the importance of language in political
interactions. In fact, language itself has been regarded as an “institution”.
11Regarding this integration, Habermas (1987a, pp. 151-152) wrote: “The fundamental problem
of social theory is how to connect in a satisfactory way the two conceptual strategies indicated
by the notions of ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’. [...] [W]e view society as an entity that, in the course
of social evolution, gets differentiated both as system and as lifeworld. Systemic evolution is
measured by the increase in a society’s steering capacity, whereas the state of development of a

18
symbolically structured lifeworld is indicated by the separation of culture, society, and
personality.”

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Figure 1. Guerreiro Ramos’s Paraeconomic Paradigm
Source: NSO, p. 122

Prescription
Community orientation

Individual orientation
Economy Isolate

Phenonomy
Isonomy

Mob Anomy
Normlessness

Figure 2. Theoretical approaches in Public Administration

NPM Guerreiro Ramos Habermas Postmodern

Favorite Hobbes, Locke Husserl Marx, Hegel, Foucault, Derrida,
philosophers Kant, Austin Lyotard

Theoretical Transcendental Frankfurt School’s Poststructuralism

Public Choice
affiliations phenomenology Critical Theory

Epistemology Positivism Pure theory Theory + practice Deconstruction

Orientation Individualism Self-fulfillment Communicative Fragmentation

action

Public ...efficient ... at the service of ...protected from ...seen as the site
organizations machines. substantive the economic and of discourse.
should be... reason. administrative
subsystems.

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