Darrow Schecter-The Critique of Instrumental Reason From Weber to Habermas-Bloomsbury Academic...

The Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas

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The Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas

Darrow Schecter

2010

Th e Continuum International Publishing Group Inc80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

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Copyright © Darrow Schecter, 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

ISBN: 978-0-8264-8771-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataSchecter, Darrow. Th e critique of instrumental reason from Weber to Habermas / by Darrow Schecter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-8771-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8264-8771-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Political science–Philosophy. 2. Instrumentalism (Philosophy) 3. Reason. 4. Weber, Max, 1864–1920. 5. Habermas, J?rgen. I. Title.

JA71.S2793 2010 320.01–dc22 2009033600

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, IndiaPrinted in the United States of America

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For Chris Malcolm


Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1 From Reason to Rationalization: Th e Emergence of the Weberian Paradigm 6

2 Th e Revolutionary Critique of Instrumental Reason: Lukács and Benjamin 43

3 Horkheimer, Adorno and Critical Th eory 78

4 Th e Ontological and Republican Critiques: Heidegger and Arendt 114

5 Reason, Th inking and the Critique of Everyday Life 150

6 From Rationalization to Communicative Action: Th e Emergence of the Habermasian Paradigm 186

Conclusion: On Post-Liberal Autonomy and Post-Capitalist Legitimacy 223

Bibliography 235Index 247


ix

Acknowledgements

Th e critique of instrumental reason has a long and complicated history that I would not have been able to investigate without the help of students, colleagues and friends. Many of the students are or have been under-graduates and postgraduates at the University of Sussex, such as Tom Akehurst, Arianna Bove, Alasdair Davies, Matt Dawson, Francis Graham-Dixon, Claire Edwards, Verena Erlenbusch, Erik Empson, Matt Freeman, James Furner, Alasdair Kemp, Peter Kolarz, Angelos Koutsourakis, Charles Masquelier, David Mieres, Teodor Mladenov, Dave Murphy, Simon Mussell, Chris O’Kane, Th eo Papaioannou, Jorge Ollero Peran, Faure Perez, Miguel Rivera Quinones and many others. I’d especially like to thank the students in my Modernism seminar in the spring of 2009. Chris Malcolm and Michael Tisdell’s irreverent intelligence have been a great infl uence and a source of inspiration.

Some Sussex colleagues such as Paul Betts, Roberta Piazza, Céline Surprenant, Christian Wiese, Beryl Williams and especially Gerhard Wolf have been very supportive of the project in a direct or indirect way. Others include the faculty teaching on the Sussex MA in Social and Political Th ought, and especially Andrew Chitty, Gordon Finlayson, Kathryn Macvarish, Luke Martell and Daniel Steuer. I’d also like to thank a number of colleagues at other universities for their advice, including Sam Ashenden, David M. Berry, Miquel Caminal, Heiko Feldner, Joe Femia, Peter Ives, Eric Jacobson, Russell Keat, Jeremy Lester, Raul Digon Martin, Mark McNally, Joan Anton Mellon, Drew Milne, Giles Moss, William Outhwaite, Jaroslav Skupník, Sam Th omas, Alex Th omson, and especially Fabio Vighi and Chris Wyatt. Chris Th ornhill’s work and friendship continue to be one of my central reference points.

Th e help of friends has also been indispensable. A number of the ideas in this book have been developed in conversation with Fernand Avila, Julia Behrens, Declan Carey, Joan Contreras Castro, Costantino Ciervo, Jean Demerliac, Yolanda Diez, Irene Estrada Hernandez, Lasy Lawless,

Manuela Lintl, Volker Lorek, Franco and Giuliana Mistretta, Matthew Minns, Stewart Mitchell, Giorgio Moro, Mand Ryaïra, Jarret Schecter and Imke Schmincke. Th anks Francis and Diana – there is a lot more to come.

Many thanks go to Marie-Claire Antoine, who makes working with Continuum a pleasure.

x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1

Introduction

Th is book analyses the critique of instrumental reason developed in the writings of a number of key political and social theorists from Max Weber to Jürgen Habermas. In a parallel vein which is less straightforwardly exegetical and more exploratory, the book also examines the various possible ways of institutionalizing instrumental reason as regulatory law in modern liberal democratic states, on the one hand, and distinct models of post-traditional legitimacy, on the other. It thus interrogates the epistemo-logical and political assumptions underlying what one may very broadly designate as the liberal democratic understanding of the relation between instrumental reason, formal law and negative liberty.1 At the same time, the study raises questions about the theoretical plausibility of an anticipated reconciliation between non-instrumental reason and post-state-juridical legitimacy. Th e particular use made of concepts such as instrumental reason, non-instrumental reason, post-traditional, post-state-juridical, life-world, and so on will be made clear in due course. By way of introduction it might simply be noted that the dialectic of legality (ostensibly universal reason) and legitimacy (particular needs and values) has been articulated within a markedly national context from the time of the American and French Revolutions to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. One is perhaps well advised to follow Habermas in thinking that the nation-based institu-tional profi le of this dialectic is likely to alter quite substantially as a result of the ongoing processes captured by the terms post-Fordism and globali-zation. Th e point is that practices of legality and legitimacy will almost certainly change with the continued evolution of what Habermas refers to as the post-national constellation.2 Bearing this in mind, the book tries to stimulate debate about what legitimacy might mean in theory and in practice in the near future. Th ose debates will almost certainly be informed

2 INSTRUMENTAL REASON FROM WEBER TO HABERMAS

by diff erent conceptions of reason. In the course of subsequent chapters it will become clear that one can think of reason in a number of ways. Instru-mental, communicative, political and aesthetic-mimetic forms of reason are the main ones considered here.

Th e critique of instrumental reason is oft en associated with Weber, Lukács and the critical theory of the fi rst generation of the Frankfurt School. Many readers are likely to link the critique with philosophical, aesthetic and sociological theory rather than with notions of political authority or the dialectic of legality and legitimacy. Yet ever since Plato’s Republic (c.390 BC), the possibility of rational political authority based on knowledge rather than power or aggregation of interests has exercised the imagination of philosophers, legal theorists and activists. It seems clear that in the absence of divine authority, rational law and non-rational force are likely to be coterminous. One therefore quickly sees the extent to which the idea of rational authority is utopian. What becomes, then, of the Enlightenment and modernist projects of founding a rational alternative to government based primarily on arbitrary command, tradition and the functional requirements for order? If in a modern context legality is usually associated with reason and individual liberty, legitimacy is more oft en aligned with issues related to authority, values and collective needs. In the fi rst instance one is normally referring to the institutionalization of private property, rights of assembly, and freedom of expression in the media and public sphere. In the second instance the emphasis is more likely to be placed on the various problems connected with guaranteeing national security as well as considerations about how to balance economic growth with acceptable levels of welfare provision. Th e chapters to follow suggest that in contrast to this dichotomized understanding, legality and legitimacy each have individual as well as collective dimensions. It is therefore mis-leading to separate them categorically into individual, normative-rational legality with an epistemological valence, and collective, non-normative functionalist legitimacy which is primarily concerned with territorial security, national unity and welfare entitlements. Th is may be likened to an instance of reifi ed juridical categorizing rather than juridical thought. While the distinction between reifi ed categorization and thought will attain clarity in the text, for the moment it will suffi ce to say that the separation in question presupposes that the egoistic individual is rational and reliable, whereas the nation is a potentially volatile collective subject whose needs can be arbitrarily defi ned by what the political leadership of a given coun-try happens to perceive as imminent internal and external threats.

Th e term reifi cation points to a parallel of some consequence for the argument developed in this book. Th roughout the book it is explained why

Introduction 3

the rigid separation of subject and object can be analysed as an epistemo-logical shortcoming concerned with unsatisfactory mediations between knower and known.3 To the extent that categories like subject or object become fi xed, and mediations can be shown to be demonstrably fl awed, one can say that the knowledge-yielding mediation processes in question are not suffi ciently rational. Formulated slightly diff erently with direct reference to the current study, the processes can be critiqued as instrumen-tally rational. Th e result of largely failed mediation on the basis of primarily instrumental reason is rather inadequate forms of knowledge. Th e parallel just alluded to is that the rigid separation of legality and legitimacy can be analysed as a juridical problem which is also concerned with less than satisfactory mediations. In this parallel instance it is the mediation between individual freedom and collective authority. Th e results of such failures are many-sided and diffi cult to summarize in a few introductory sentences – they will be explored in detail in what follows. By way of prelude one can say that the failure adequately to mediate freedom and authority is oft en oppressive legality, fairly one-dimensional freedom, and demagogic pop-ulism. Instrumental reason in the mediation of knower and known thus fi nds its juridical and political equivalent in the practice of instrumental legitimacy in the mediation of individual and state. Before this study can begin it must be stated how the critique of instrumental reason is related to the critique of instrumental legitimacy, and it must also be made clearer what is meant by instrumental legitimacy in this context.

It is oft en argued with varying degrees of rigour and plausibility that the critique of instrumental reason in the writings of Weber, Georg Lukács, T. W. A. Adorno and some of the other thinkers considered here has lost the political relevance it may have once had. Th is is because the critique is allegedly too general, too eschatological or simply more concerned with aesthetic reason than the political realities of power and contingency. It will be seen in the fi nal chapter that Habermas advances the most sophis-ticated line of argument in support of this conclusion. In addition to its exegetical aims, the book attempts to rescue the critique of instrumental reason from the charge of political obscurity levelled by Habermas and many others. It proposes to do this by re-articulating the critique of instru-mental reason as a critique of instrumental legitimacy. Th e latter can be understood as a mode of legitimacy which is not rationally legitimate in the epistemological sense related to mediation processes. It is on the con-trary functionally legitimate because it provides more or less stable frameworks for what are implicitly or explicitly taken to be inviolable liber-ties enshrined in modern civil/private law. Th ese are liberties connected in the main with private property and negative liberty more generally.


Habermas’ theory of communicative action is of fundamental impor-tance in this regard, and thus occupies a central position in the overall argument. He intuits that if there is no non-instrumentally rational dimen-sion to legitimacy, then one is likely to have legality without any real legitimacy as such. In his estimation communicative action in the life-world provides the non-instrumentally rational dimension of legitimacy that modern states require in order to institutionalize democracy without relying on more traditional, pre-rational modes of order. Th is amounts to the claim that since the revolutions associated with the Enlightenment, reason has become institutionalized in ways that are not merely instru-mental. Although these processes occur at diff erent rates and to diff erent degrees depending on the state in question, one caveat applies to all states: the non-instrumentally rational dimension cannot possibly become the basis of legitimate law. In the fi rst case (legality bereft of non-instrumen-tally rational legitimacy, that is, purely functional legitimacy), one would be confronted with a potentially destabilizing normative defi cit. In the second case (legitimacy as an end in itself, emancipated from instrumental means), one would be at loggerheads with supposedly inevitable sociological realities. Habermas suggests that while the normative defi cit is particularly salient in the variant of systems theory defended by Niklas Luhmann, the sociological defi cit is irreparable in the reformulated idealism of T. W. A. Adorno and other fi rst generation Frankfurt School philosophers. Yet how-ever much the theory of communicative action seeks to situate itself beyond the impasses of systems theory and Adorno’s version of critical theory, there is theoretical and empirical evidence to suggest that Habermas off ers ambiguous responses to some of the epistemological and political prob-lems raised by the theories of self-referential systems and negative dialectics. It is hoped that an exploration of some of those ambiguities will off er ways of reconfi guring the relation between reason, legality, legitimacy and free-dom understood and enacted as the greatest possible transcendence of individual and collective necessity. Th ese preliminary refl ections introduce the claim that an adequate theory of politics and society cannot dispense with this reconfi guration. Readers are invited to judge whether or not the claim is substantiated by the chapters that follow.

Endnotes

1. For a discussion of the diff erences between negative and positive liberty and their respective political implications, see Sir Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958), reprinted in Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (eds), Isaiah Berlin; Th e Proper Study of

Introduction 5

Mankind, London, Pimlico, 1998, pp. 191–242. Th e essay is Berlin’s inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Th eory at Oxford University, delivered on 31 October 1958, and originally published by Clarendon Press in the same year.

2. Habermas, Die postnationale Konstellation: Politische Essays (Th e Post-National Constellation), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1999.

3. Th e frameworks establishing the respective roles of knower and known are of course of central importance in any debate on epistemology. Th ey are diff erent, in other words, depending on whether humanity as subject knows nature as object, as in the natural sciences, or if it is some humanity that understands other humanity, as in the human/herme-neutic sciences and fi elds of inquiry. Th ese issues will be taken up at all relevant junctures.

6

1From Reason to Rationalization:

The Emergence of the Weberian Paradigm

Th e emergence of the Weberian paradigm can be studied in the shift from theoretical accounts of reason, natural law and autonomy in Enlighten-ment philosophers like Rousseau and Kant, to diagnoses of industrial rationalization and explanations of social stratifi cation, power and contin-gency in sociologists like Marx, Durkheim, Simmel and Weber. Th is marks an important evolution, since ideas and practices of reason are at least in theory subversive of the arbitrary power relations characteristic of pre-modern feudal and ecclesiastical hierarchies, and, it was thought by many looking to the future from the perspective of 1789, also potentially subversive of many other hierarchies existing in early modern society as well. Th is had been at any rate an implicit claim of the Enlightenment philosophes in France and their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Th at is to say that however short-lived and speculative, reason enjoyed a utopian moment during the period where the legitimacy of regal government came under attack by scientists, philosophers, the progressive sections of the nobility, journalists and essayists, merchants, and other participants in the fl edgling public spheres of Europe and North America. It seemed to many that the people were in the process of emerging as the protagonist of a new political order in which they seemed to be becoming active and free citizens engaged in public debate instead of being merely obedient and passive subjects. Th is is the period culminating in the American and French Revolutions and the birth of the modern nation-state, also referred to at times as the age of bourgeois revolutions.1

In contrast with the Enlightenment vision of potential symmetry between reason, individual liberty and collective democratic autonomy

The Emergence of the Weberian Paradigm 7

(sovereignty), ideas and practices of rationalization off er a much more sober series of refl ections on the possibilities of human freedom under conditions of systemic diff erentiation between economic, political, admin-istrative, scientifi c, religious, artistic, and the like, spheres, on the one hand, and entrenched social stratifi cation and elusive power, on the other. It is therefore possible to see two distinct moments within political modernity. Th e fi rst is centred on the ascension of the ideal of reason and the possibi-lity of active citizen participation in public life as an alternative to passive submission to authoritarian and unaccountable authority. It is a moment in which philosophy seems to provide clear theoretical orientations for ascer-taining the conditions of theoretical knowledge, and in which politics and the state indicate clear guidelines for practice. In very broad terms it is possible to say that as far as thinking and institutions are concerned, philosophy and the state appear to ‘take over’ from religion and the church to a signifi cant extent. While the state seems to emerge as the centre and fulcrum of politics in the fi rst moment, its integrity is challenged by the rise of society and phenomena connected with industrialization and urbaniza-tion in the second. Th at is to say that the second moment of political modernity is marked by the rise of functional diff erentiation and steadily increasing social complexity, accompanied in theoretical terms by the increasing implausibility of an all-encompassing, rational overview of state and society that is required to make more than a highly fragmented knowledge of reality possible. Th e corollary is what Durkheim refers to as anomie and the widely perceived feeling across classes and other social divisions that the meaning of political and social action had become more diffi cult to ascertain in industrial society than it had been in the past, when religion and determinate codes of honour provided a stable framework for most people. Th e second moment can be seen as coterminous with the ‘rationalization of reason’ and the increasing doubtfulness of philosophy’s ability to mediate between theory and practice (anticipating the rise of phenomenology and existentialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centu-ries). It can also be seen as the premonitory symptoms of the crisis of legal anthropology positing humanity as rational and self-legislating that is registered in the writings of thinkers as diff erent as Benjamin, Heidegger and Schmitt. To this extent the second moment is still an actual moment related to contemporary phenomena such as the gradual undermining of the integrity of the national space of liberal and republican politics by global socio-economic forces. It will be seen in this chapter that the transi-tion from philosophical approaches to reason and autonomy to sociological approaches to diff erentiation and stratifi cation is indicative of a political


transition from modern forms of republican humanism which are confi -dent about the rational mediation of theory and practice, towards a sceptical and at times even apocalyptic vision of the impossibility of autonomy, except perhaps in commercial terms, with the corollary that only minimal levels of political accountability are possible.2

In this light the belief that the people of modern nation-states might become the protagonists of their own history seems to recede before a more pessimistic assessment that roughly runs as follows: in the course of the evolution of modern societies, subjects become citizens, it is true, but only as long as the number of citizens participating in public life is restricted to professionals and enlightened nobility, that is, as long as the number can be restricted to the protagonists of the ‘heroic period’ of the bourgeois public sphere alluded to above. According to the theory of rationalization fi rst systematically expounded by Weber and analysed in this chapter, how-ever, this is necessarily a very brief period. With the gradual enfranchising of all European male humanity in the period 1848–1918, and thereaft er of female humanity at diff erent rates depending on the country in question, the movement from subjects to citizens takes an unexpected turn. As an heir of the Enlightenment and a fi rm believer in the emancipatory power of reason, the young Marx predicts a trajectory from oppressed feudal sub-jects to politically emancipated citizens, and from there, in the wake of 1789, to humanly emancipated species-beings who realize their best quali-ties in creative, self-affi rming labour liberated from capital and the wage system. In theoretical terms the turn comes as Weber remarks that what one witnesses is indeed a transition from subjects to citizens, but that this transition is then followed by the emergence of volatile and manipulated masses susceptible to various forms of authoritarian populism of the right and left . Weber’s argument is all the more remarkable if one bears in mind that it is developed before Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922 and Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933.3 In charting this theoretical and historical evo-lution from Kant to Weber it will be helpful to say a few words in this fi rst chapter about the contribution to social and political theory made by three of the key fi gures separating them in chronological terms, that is, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. But before doing this it is already possible to identify some of the central questions which will structure the argument developed in Th e Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas. How might it be argued that the possibility of genuinely democratic legitimacy depends on there being non-instrumentally rational forms of legitimacy, and what is meant by non-instrumental in relation to reason and legiti-macy? Are there any plausible alternatives to a legal form of legitimacy,


given that extra-legal forms of legitimacy tend to be authoritarian, popu-list, theological, or, as in the case of anarchism, small-scale and fl eeting? Can one envisage forms of legitimacy based to a large extent on knowledge (and not, in the fi rst instance, power or some conception of unifi ed sover-eignty), or has this possibility been defi nitively subverted in ways that are illustrated by systems theory and bio-politics? Is the prevalence of instrumental over other forms of rationality in modern industrial societies indicative of the epistemological and political failure, at least to date, to fi nd ways beyond dogmatism and relativism? If so, could there be a path beyond dogmatism/relativism, to be sought in theory and practice which is individual and plural at the same time, rather than one-sidedly atomistic, as in the premises and practice of liberal democracy, or one-sidedly collec-tivist, as in the case of state socialism?4

Impasses in the Kantian System and the Responses of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche

In a number of ways it is possible to regard Kant as a philosophical anthropologist interested in the essential properties of humanity that enable it to legislate a particular form of political liberty which is qualita-tively diff erent from the mechanical freedom governing the motion of falling bodies, and diff erent too from the predatory freedom prevailing among animals. His view that political freedom is rational and human rather than mechanical, predatory and pre-rational is already suggested in his philosophical writings on epistemology, in which he attempts to solve some of the impasses reached in the debates between rationalists (dog-matic in theory, and therefore likely to be authoritarian in practice) and empiricists (relativist in theory, and thus implying passivity in practice).5 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2 volumes, published in 1781), combined with the Critique of Practical Reason (1787) and the Critique of Judgement (1790) represent a turning point in epistemological inquiry and a water-shed in social and political thought. In his intervention in the debates between rationalists such as Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and empiricists such as Berkeley, Locke, Hume, Kant is determined to fi nd a way out of the epistemological impasse created by a one-sided approach to the question of knowledge focused either on the foundation of knowledge internal to the mind, as in the case of rationalism, or on the object of knowledge exter-nal to the mind, as in empiricism. Th e insoluble problems reached by these diametrically opposed approaches lead Kant to say that the question as to whether knowledge is to be sought in the human mind or in external nature is falsely posed, as is the question as to whether humanity has knowledge


or merely unfounded opinions. For Kant the real question is, under what conditions is knowledge possible? In his epistemological and political enquiries this methodological compromise can be regarded as a conces-sion to the argument that unconditional knowledge is metaphy sical knowledge of essences, and hence inaccessible to human reason, and that unconditional freedom is therefore unfortunately a fantasy. Kant submits that the problem is that there is no such thing as pure, unmediated reason that is accessible to humanity, and, in a related vein, there is no immediate relation between theory and practice that is not simply arbitrary and there-fore voluntarist/irrational. While all human knowledge is mediated by conceptual form, all human freedom is mediated by the political form set by law, and, by extension, the state. Th e implication is that the ends of rational action are mediated by what in principle should be neutral means, so that the means respect universal individual autonomy rather than pre-scribing a dogmatic version of what is good for all. But if the means are neutral, which suggests that they are not necessarily rational, what guaran-tee is there that the ends will be rational? Th is is one of the central epistemological, legal and political problems of idealism bequeathed to historical sociology in Germany and well beyond. In anticipation of some of the issues to be raised during the course of this book, it might be remarked at this early stage that many epistemological post- metaphysicians from Kant to the present join political liberals in arguing that in the face of the limits to reason and freedom just cited, reason must confi ne itself to legislation that defi nes and when necessary redefi nes the socio-economic and political terms of mutual non-interference. Th e implication is that only negative liberty is suffi ciently rational liberty. Th is seems to follow from the idea that if the citizens of a secular state can only defi nitely agree on what they do not want, then rational law has necessarily to be formal law that can only forbid. If law tries to prescribe in a positive vein it thus lapses into epistemological and political dogmatism. Before proceeding, it is worth noting that it would be erroneous to construe the relations obtaining between ostensibly neutral means, formal freedom, instrumental reason and modern liberal juridical subjectivity as accidental. Subsequent chapters will explain that taken together, they form a constellation of interests, forces and values with a number of implications for the critique of instrumental legitimacy.6

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant stipulates that the condition of possible knowledge is the existence of a transcendental subject that is more receptive to experience than an isolated rationalist foundation, and less arbitrary than an empiricist ‘collector’ of random sense impressions.


Against both schools he quips that concepts without intuitions are empty (rationalism), and that intuitions without concepts are blind (empiricism). Th ere will be much more to say about the relation between the emergence of modern subjectivity and the rise of instrumental reason in the course of this chapter and the chapters to follow. For the moment it will suffi ce to say that when the Kantian epistemological subject refl exively unifi es itself with reason, it cannot grasp the objects in themselves independently of the mediation of conceptual form. But it is nonetheless ‘entitled’ to formal knowledge of the objects which present themselves to the understanding of the subject in time and space, where the understanding is structured by the 12 categories, that is, plurality, possibility, unity, causality, necessity, sub-stance, reality, negation, limitation, totality, reciprocity and inherence.7 Th at is to say that if the rationalist epistemological foundation of knowledge is hermetically detached from experience, and the empiricist individual is ‘lost’ in the midst of it without any really stable orientation, the Kantian subject enjoys a kind a synthetic and porous relation with experience, which stops or is ‘blocked off ’ by the limits of reason and the limits of conceptual knowledge. For Kant experience is the basis of knowledge, but there must also be an a priori dimension to knowledge that makes more than random experience possible. While the rationalists posit a dualistic separation of humanity and nature based on what they take to be the primacy of the human mind in all epistemological questions, and the empiricists posit the unity of humanity and nature based on the identity of mind and matter, Kant insists that humanity is both separate from nature and part of nature at the same time. Th is means that for Kant, and for Hegel and Marx to follow, the relation between humanity and nature is mediated rather than dualistic or identitarian, since humanity and nature exist in a fi eld of dialectical tension in which they are neither separated nor fused. Hegel and Marx retain the idea that the relation between humanity and nature is dialectical, while suggesting in diff erent ways that Kant errs in assigning permanent and ahistorical validity to the two forms of sensible intuition (time and space) and the 12 categories of the understanding.8

It is Hegel’s implicit claim in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and other works that Kant’s philosophy is not dialectical enough precisely because it is not historical enough. Kant pushes epistemological inquiry and political theory beyond the stagnant impasses reached by rationalists and empiricists, which he does by reintroducing a modest kind of dialectics into philosophy which had largely disappeared since the gradual decline of Greek philosophy aft er the passing of the ancient world. But from Hegel’s perspective (and for thinkers like Lukács and Benjamin considered in Chapter 2) it is not enough to


regard the relation between humanity and nature as mediated. Th e relation is dialectical in a specifi cally historical sense which Hegel attempts to explain as follows: while Kant successfully demonstrates that all objectivity is mediated by human subjectivity, the more pertinent point that Kant ignores is that human-ity is always a transformed humanity whose subjectivity is mediated by historical and social objectivity, that is, by institutions like the family, civil society, the state, and so on. Th ese institutions are concepts which become real as practice; they accompany Geist (mind, spirit) as its self-discovery unfolds in stages which are the stages of world history. In other words, these concepts assume objective form as living institutions at precise junctures in the historical process. Th ese institutions are the phenomenological forms in which Geist realizes its substantial freedom. Crucial for Hegel in this regard is that it is not suffi ciently philosophical to contrast free and unfree or true or false in some absolute sense. Th is is because freedom is not a thing but rather a relation. Freedom is achieved in a struggle in which unfreedom is overcome, which for Hegel means that freedom bears unfreedom within it as a moment of free-dom’s own development. Th e same can be said of true/false, is/ought, subject/object and, of more direct importance for this study, rationality/irrationality.9

For Hegel it is mistaken to juxtapose the phenomenal world of formally knowable objects with the noumenal world of things in themselves. It is imprecise because the knowledge process is characterized by the media-tion of diff erence rather than the demarcation of absolute limits such as those supposedly separating mind (internal) and nature (external). Every idea and institution that is real (or actual to use Hegel’s term) has become historically real by absorbing what is historically real in the ideas and insti-tutions it has come to replace. What exists on this basis must itself be absorbed and replaced by truer ideas and freer institutions which them-selves eventually become subject to philosophical critique and historical change, which for Hegel is why knowledge and history are intertwined processes which unfold in stages. Since humanity is not a perfect vehicle for this realization, spirit has to push humanity to create, negate and recre-ate new institutional forms which are more adequate to this task. Interesting in this regard is the notion that spirit is not a human faculty or possession, but rather something that articulates itself through humanity. On this account spirit is somewhat akin to the reconciliation of all apparent anti-theses during the course of a journey. Although superior to humanity, Hegelian spirit needs human history as the form for the gradual resolution of the confl icts characterizing an antithetical, contradictory reality which is spirit’s estrangement from itself. In this context existing socio-historical form is always imperfect, but it is constantly being raised to the level of


perfection despite its own limitations at any particular juncture. What Hegel refers to as the cunning of reason is spirit’s liberty to make history seem opaque to its participants at times, when in fact spirit is simply adjusting its movements to the reluctance or inability of humanity to move with it. Humanity eventually comes round, however, even if this entails suff ering, confl ict and war. Hence within the Hegelian system as a whole, psychology and anthropology provide the bases of subjective spirit, while art, philosophy and religion are the fi elds of inquiry for the study of abso-lute spirit. Th e theory of socio-historical objective form or objective spirit is outlined in the Philosophy of Right as a theory of Sittlichkeit, that is, of ethical life.

Th e point about the objectivity of form, in contrast with the metaphysics of essence, is related to the point made above about the emergence of mod-ern subjectivity and instrumental reason signalled by Kant’s critical philosophy. Albeit in very diff erent ways, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche set out to undermine the Kantian dichotomy between what is (sein) and what ought to be (sollen). Th is is achieved by relativizing truth in history (Hegel, Marx) or by relativizing truth in the Dionysian chaos of life and the metaphorical ambiguity of language (Nietzsche). Th e idea that one might relativize truth in history leaves a number of thinkers considered in this study with a recurring sense of doubt, especially when the historical process seems to go so far off course (atomic and chemical warfare, geno-cide, etc.) that the notion of the cunning of reason fails to provide adequate grounds to establish the rationality of the real. Hence it might be argued that the historicism of Hegel and Marx as well as Nietzsche’s genealogy are bold but ultimately unsatisfactory responses to the problems of Kantian epistemology and legal anthropology. Th is raises the question of subjecti-vity anew.

For historicists and genealogists the distinction between what is and what ought to be is made redundant by the immanent rationality of the actual/real; the abolition of what remains of a priori metaphysics in Kant’s anthropological account of the modalities of human reason is achieved by a subject that unites theory and practice to such an extent that existing institutions embody reason, however imperfectly in its initial phases of development. Kant sets the stage for Hegel’s veritable apotheosis of the subject, which in Hegel’s philosophy of history and spirit is also presented as the apotheosis of reason.10 Hegel suggests that form, both conceptual and socio-historical, mediates between individual human subjects and existing historical objectivity in ways that are not external or neutral with regard to consciousness, but are in fact helping modern individuals gain


insight into the structure of individual and collective freedom. In other words, Kant has to introduce dialectics to resolve the impasses of the rationalist-empiricists debates. Hegel in his turn has to introduce histori-cized dialectics to resolve the impasses in the Kantian system. Hegel is thus determined to show how it is possible to move from formal knowledge, negative freedom based on the greatest possible non-infringement, and the temporal and cognitive priority of theory over practice, on the one hand, to substantive knowledge, positive freedom based in the state, and the dialec-tical unity of theory and practice, on the other. It is not that form and experience are neutral tools or pre-rational means which provide access to objective content and rational ends. For Hegel thought and experience are themselves rational, though they are rational in qualitatively diff erent ways, depending on the historical epoch in question. Th e example of the relation between legality and legitimacy implicitly off ered in the Philosophy of Right provides a good example.11

For Hegel dichotomies such as form-content, subject-object and consciousness-nature are only thinkable in terms of a higher other that enables the individual terms in question to be thought of as distinct but complexly articulated moments of a totality that is slowly becoming aware of its mediated unity with everything and everyone. Th is totality is a sub-ject which is in the process of realizing, as it comes to know itself in a series of stages, that there is nothing external to it.12 In simple abstract terms, A and non-A are in some real sense unifi ed at a level of spirit that is the condition of the distinction itself. Th e dichotomy between subject (thesis) and object (antithesis) is resolved in a higher synthesis, which in turn becomes a new thesis opposed by a new antithesis, and the process carries on in a movement which is driven by contradiction, confl ict and continual but ultimately rational change. If one looks at the relation between legality and legitimacy as one of form and content, he suggests, it is clear that legal-ity is the form of a legitimate state in the extended sense, that is, it is the form of the institutions which make a specifi c institution like the govern-ment in a more restricted sense possible. But the law will always be opposed as an impediment to real legitimacy unless the citizens of the state realize that law is itself a legitimate means, that there is no legitimacy or legitimate ends without law.13 Th at is to say that the now famous remark in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right that what is actual (sometimes translated as real) is rational and what is rational is actual fi nds its counterpart in the suggestion that the legal (form, procedure) is legitimate and the legitimate (content, freedom) is legal. Th ere is no, nor can there be (contrary to what Kant implies) a contradiction between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’.


Th is is a merely apparent confl ict between form and content that Geist makes rational use of in order to translate its theoretical, potentially sub-stantial freedom into actual, historical freedom. In the course of human history Geist overcomes the dichotomy between is and ought in the proc-ess of realizing its essence by adopting, rejecting and subsequently adopting new forms of freedom realized in continually evolving institutions until the theoretical form of freedom is no longer at odds with its practical con-tent.14 Th is means that the point concerning legality and legitimacy can also be made in relation to democracy and freedom. It could be argued that democracy is the objective, institutional form that freedom assumes under the conditions of modernity. But this is imprecise, since democracy is more than mere form or only a means – it is the practice of freedom itself and as such an end. Hence Hegel has no diffi culty arguing in the Philosophy of Right that there is no need to fetishize universal suff rage, as most democrats do, since it is really in their practical existence as members of agricultural, business and civil service Stände (estates) that individuals have concrete, active subjectivity and freedom. Citizens achieve meaning-ful representation as members of these corporate bodies engaged in collective consultation with law-makers. Atomized, self-seeking individu-als who regard their relation with the state as antagonistic and contractual are not free in any meaningful sense for Hegel. Th ere is indeed scope for contractual and strategic action in civil society, but civil society and its contractual modalities cannot be the basis of the state. A contract does not off er a substantively rational basis for political authority, since what one contracts into today one can contract out of tomorrow. Hence pre-state level corporations such as guilds are important supraindividual instances of collec-tive decision-making, but they degenerate into bureaucratic castes if they attempt to usurp state authority. Moreover, a valid contract presupposes a state that makes contract valid in the fi rst place. Th is implies that the social contract thinkers are wrong to suppose that contract could ever serve as the basis of the state. Contract is an essential component of the institutionalization of modern freedom, since modern individuals are only instrumentally rational in the means they employ to pursue their daily ends. But instrumental reason can only exist in a subordinate relation to substantive reason in a genuinely rational state. Hence for Hegel the modern state is the practice of a rational ideal, it is an ideal become real, or, as he puts it in paragraph 257, ‘the state is the actuality of the ethical idea’, and, as he says in paragraph 260, ‘Th e state is the actuality of concrete freedom.’15

Th e distant origins of the contemporary crisis of the nation-state in the era of globalization, including the forms of reason and institutional


practices investing it with legitimacy, can be found in Marx and Nietzsche’s very diff erent critiques of Hegel’s concept of objective form and substantive reason. It is in fact the ideas of Marx and Nietzsche that prompt Weber to argue that rather than being the actuality of the ethical ideal, the state is really the monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given territory. At fi rst glance, Hegel seems to overcome the dichotomies and impasses in Kant’s critical philosophy. But he is only able to do this to the extent that reason becomes immanent in the institutions of the modern state and in the course of world history, that is, by bringing idealism to a point of no return. Aft er the Philosophy of Right, idealism looks like a metaphysical apology for the existing order. Th is would seem to confront people with the choice of either passively waiting and watching history unfold, or interven-ing to accelerate the process of making history fully rational through decisive action. To Hegel’s critics, this does not look like a convincing move beyond relativism and dogmatism. In their eyes Hegel opposes the limits on knowledge and freedom implied in Kant’s formalism by relativizing truth in history and by implicitly celebrating the actual as the already rational. So while he rejects a voluntarist interpretation of his ideas, Hegel nonetheless provokes a voluntarist reaction to them. Th is is clear in the writings of those who, like the young Marx, declare that philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, while the point is to change it, and in the polemics of those who, like Nietzsche, defend the life-affi rming will to power as an alternative to the futile search for the Kantian ‘thing in itself ’ and Hegel’s historical justifi cation of waiting for the thing to fi nally reveal itself, in all probability that is, when the owl of Minerva eventually spreads its wings.16

In comparison with Kant and Hegel, Marx says very little about reason or the diff erent possible forms of reason (pure, practical, aesthetic, etc.). He follows Hegel in one decisive respect, which is to regard history as a rational process in which humanity becomes increasingly conscious of its objective capacities vis-à-vis nature. Th is will prompt Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) to suggest that Marx contributes to the problem of instrumental reason in that like Kant, Marx regards human autonomy to be dependent on its ability either to detach itself from natural spontaneity and unpredictability, or to exploit nature for the satisfaction of human needs. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, when humanity forgets that it is part of nature, it is condemned to experience the ‘revenge’ of nature on society: institutions become oppressive, bureaucratic and irrational. Th ese issues, including the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer as well as Habermas’ subsequent rupture with it, will be addressed in Chapters 3


and 6 of this book. At this stage in the discussion of the emergence of the Weberian diagnosis of instrumental reason it will suffi ce to note that reason has a somewhat ambiguous status in Marx. Th is is in large part explainable in terms of the evident reality that aft er Hegel there was little to do except marvel at the rationality of the real, or translate immanent reason into revolutionary practice with no further hesitation.17

In Marx there are two related senses in which reason is implied. Th ese usages break with the Kantian notion of reason as the basis of individual autonomy and law. Th ough they also signal a shift away from Hegel’s the-ory of Geist and the corresponding idea that the state is the actuality of the ethical idea, they nonetheless bear the marks of their Hegelian origins. First, Marx accepts Hegel’s notion that history unfolds rationally in stages marked by contradictions, confl icts, resolution of confl ict and new contra-dictions. Second, he retains and modifi es the notion that there is always a discrepancy between human freedom and the forms of human society in which freedom is institutionalized. Th e discrepancy between freedom and objective form is not the irreducible diff erence between some formal, abstract formulation of an ahistorical standard of reason which inevitably fi nds every historical present to be insuffi ciently rational. In this case the claims of reason would amount to moralistic condemnations of the real and would demarcate an undialectical and defi nitive fi xing of the a priori limits of knowledge and freedom. For Marx the rational is real, as Hegel indicates, and reality is marked by the constant struggle between the subjective forces (individual and collective agency) and objective forms (social structure) which traverse it. But for Marx the key to agency is the mode of production and the organization of the labour process. Revolu-tions serve to adjust the relation between subjective agency and objective form by ‘expanding’ the latter to suit the steadily increasing power of the former to transform nature in accordance with human needs and creati vity. Here the links with Hegel are clear. Human labour power can be likened to a subject that needs objective forms to institutionalize its freedom. In epistemological and historical terms there is no possible retreating behind epistemological terrain already staked out by Kant here: the ques-tion is not about whether the subjective factor or the objective factor is the source or object of knowledge – it is the relation between subjective and objective that constitutes the real as a mediated totality of distinct but not isolated moments. In terms of the dynamism of a phenomenology of constantly changing forms, the real is to be evaluated in terms of quantity turning into quality, and not in absolute or reifi ed terms such as true/false or rational/irrational.18


Like Hegel and Marx, Nietzsche detects a confl ict between human freedom and the forms of human society in which freedom is institutional-ized, and like them he also regards agency to be a function of the relation between humanity and nature, in which humanity is part of nature but not reducible to it. But for Nietzsche there is no evidence that the mediation of humanity and nature is inherently rational in the sense in which Hegel and Marx might understand that term, and there is also no evidence that the forms of mediation are ultimately conducive to freedom in the long-run, that is, for Nietzsche there can be and there oft en is decline in history. Decline very oft en sets in when culture strays too far from the extra-moral forces of life which appear in society in the guises of inequality and hierar-chy. Whereas for Hegel and Marx objective form performs a contradictory function in history in that it both impedes the unfolding of subjectivity and spurs it to creative action and development, Nietzsche identifi es a fundamental problem with subjectivity itself, which in his social theory also turns out to be an unveiled attack on Kantian and Hegelian accounts of reason, law, history and the state. Kant asks, under what conditions is knowl-edge is possible? He concludes that the condition is the existence of a subject that has objective knowledge of the phenomena that present themselves to the subject’s understanding in time and space. While Hegel attempts to project philosophy beyond its Kantian limits by positing the existence of an historical subjectivity which is moving towards absolute knowledge and freedom, Nietzsche asks, how much truth can a human being stand? He concludes that the answer varies tremendously from person to person, and, what is more, depending on the culture in question, reason can become an eff ective tool in the project to condemn the extra-moral truths of life as bad, immoral, unjust, undemocratic, and so on. Th e philosopher of the will to power believes that some human subjects are capable of developing aristocratic values which enable the affi rmative forces in them to assume a knowledge-enhancing form in which life, as something which is not merely a human attribute and which creates a diff erent eff ect in each human, is able continually to renew itself, change, and test its own boundaries. Th e aristo-cratic individual thus enables life to become far more vital than brute natural life, through the mediation of extra-human creativity that has liber-ated itself from the fear of nature that drives ordinary humans into society, cuts them off from the praxis of terrestrial knowledge, and induces social conformity. Th e romantic dimension of Nietzsche’s argument is that think-ing and knowledge are concerned with inner force, self-transformation and individual creation and not, in the fi rst instance, classifying, registering and ordering or, for that matter, dialectics.19


Th e beauty which is achieved in such creations is an expression of individual aesthetic values which are oft en incommensurable with the values of other creators. But for Nietzsche, this tragic incommensurability is oft en an indication of the vitality required continually to recreate oneself individually and collectively as a culture. In healthy cultures, the questions raised by issues of form/content and means/ends push individual subjects to redefi ne the conditions of their existence as well as the sense and ends of their action. In these rare cases human agency tends to reject the restric-tions on life and culture implied by existing ways of being (all too) human in society. If so, agency strives towards the protean forms characteristic of the superhuman or, as Nietzsche alludes to it in Th us Spoke Zarathustra (1883), the superman. Hence if there is freedom, it is not God-given, jurid-ical or productive in an economic sense, nor is it equally ‘distributed’ in the ways that formal freedom can be. It consists in the desire and will of a very unusual subject to establish an agonistic relation with subjectivity itself and to entertain an active relation with life which results in the theoretical-practical elaboration of unique values and knowledge. Hence values, knowledge and art are closely interrelated. Th e condition of knowledge is not a study pack of innate faculties which is handed out to everyone by God at the mythical beginning of human school life, aft er which humans continually are tested – and judged – to see if they are making good use of their course materials. According to this conception, God is comparable to a great schoolmaster who unites pedagogical discipline and state authority in His person, and who demands obedience and solemn respect in return for His generosity. To speak in terms more appropriate to this study than anything Nietzsche directly says himself, individuals who believe in God are incapable of anything other than instrumental thought and passive behaviour which is directed to pleasing authority and passing ludicrous tests. People renounce their own, autonomous and plural ends for heter-onomous ends chosen for them. In the specifi c case of modern industrial societies governed by Christian religious values, the consequence is that genuinely individual ends become increasingly rare. As subjectivity shriv-els into strategic self-defence against external threats and illusory hopes of individual redemption, there are merely more or less successful means of attaining the same end for all individuals – salvation – of which wealth and security are the secular versions. Taking his cue from Nietzsche, Weber is able to show that the internalization of the aspiration to freedom and salva-tion helps consolidate the bases of a social order based on the privatization of experience (and the corresponding obsolescence of republican politics) in three decisive areas. Negative liberty, private accumulation and money


become the key instances regulating the lives of individuals for whom there is no value distinction to be made between survival and life. It is the reduction of life to survival that blurs and eventually eliminates the distinction between the means to living and living itself.20

Th e condition of non-instrumental knowledge is the joyous intuition of innocence from the burdens of original sin and the norms of standardized performance implied by the institutionalization of linear conceptions of time. Nietzsche seems to regard original sin and linear time as perfect complements to the stable epistemological subject emerging from Kant’s philosophy. For Nietzsche this is a pygmy subject which recoils in horror before the chaos of the external world, and shrinks in despair at the spectacle of its steadily diminishing units of time. It is a transcendental ego that rejects the challenges of terrestrial philosophy by fl eeing into the religious worship of another, better world, while also seeking safe refuge in monotonous, time-consuming labour for the sake of another, better future.21 Aft er all that sacrifi ce – the unenviable but inevitable fate of all those who suff er from original sin – this exemplary specimen of bad faith wants compensation for what it gives of itself in the guise of pious devotion and effi cient work. Unsurprisingly, it is appalled by the uncer-tainty and meagreness of the reward. Since this is a passive subject that cannot really give or create, it reacts by condemning or isolating forms of life that exceed subjectivity in the self-transformative project involved in thinking terrestrially and inventing fully terrestrial values. It is central to Nietzsche’s thinking that the victory of passive and reactive forces over active and affi rmative ones is a victory of metaphysical longing for a world of certainty and safety, the manifest absence of which leads to a condemna-tion of this-worldly beauty and knowledge. It is a condemnation on the part of a decadent humanity which has come to resent its helplessness vis-à-vis nature and culture. As a consequence, it seeks punishment and revenge against the life within it and around it, which in fact is the very force that needs to be liberated if decadence and nihilism are going to be overcome. Th e hallmark of slave morality throughout the ages is to want to manipulate the fact that humanity is part of nature but not reducible to it as an excuse to deny nature, reject individual singularity and renounce per-sonal strength. Hence in a number of respects slave morality implies a psychological disposition of the individual towards self-infl icted punish-ment. In many of his writings Nietzsche implies that modern humanity is particularly susceptible to denying the natural life within it. It seems prone to react to natural inequality and the disparity of individual values by affi rm-ing natural equality in law and institutionalizing democratic value-sharing


in culture. In diff erent ways Dilthey, Simmel and Weber attempt to trans-pose Nietzsche’s psychological insights into more systematic sociological theory.22

In summary of this section, and before moving on to historical socio-logy, it is clear that Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche off er various ways of resolving the antinomies in Kant’s philosophy. Th e critiques signal the lim-its of subjectivity and knowledge when these key concepts are pursued along exclusively philosophical lines. Th e challenge for philosophy, which is taken up with particular verve by Nietzsche, is to become multidiscipli-nary without becoming arbitrary or eclectic. Hegel’s theory of history and objective form/spirit, Marx’s theory of political economy, and Nietzsche’s genealogical theory of values and domination amount to a many-sided challenge to Kant’s attempt to rescue philosophical enquiry from the problems of empiricism and rationalism within a rigorously epistemologi-cal framework. Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche present traditional philosophy with a set of challenges, many of which are taken up by the thinkers examined in Chapters 2–6. Th e fi rst point is that philosophy has to take up the issues raised by history, political economy and psychology, in which case it ceases to be philosophical in the ways that it had been until Hegel, or ignore these paths of enquiry and become narrowly academic and irrelevant.23 It is a challenge that questions the role of philosophical con-ceptions of reason in epistemology and politics, and simultaneously affi rms the rationality of the actual. Th is implies two things. First, it implies that it is not possible in absolute terms to measure the rationality of existing society against a theory of reason developed as a philosophical, trans-historical abstraction. History is the context within which all considerations of reason have or lack sense. Second, it radicalizes and decentres the Kantian notion that some of the conditions of knowledge, such as space and time, are to a certain extent external to the subject (although they are also pure, subjective intuitions for Kant).24

To place the conditions of knowledge outside of the epistemological subject is to raise important issues about the quality of human knowledge and freedom, and to question the plausibility of freedom conceived of as rational individual autonomy within a national state understood as the centre or the source of collective political authority. It has been seen so far that these problems are analysed diff erently by Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. If the conditions of knowledge are to be located to a certain extent outside of the subject in Hegel and Marx, the relation between the subjective and objective moment of knowledge nonetheless remains historical and dialec-tical. Th is idea is expressed in the ways that the concepts of Aufh ebung and


synthesis are developed in the writings of these thinkers. Central to the idea of knowledge and praxis in Hegel and the young Marx is that at some point in its journey towards self-discovery, subject (as Geist or as labour power in the widest sense) is able to re-appropriate what has become objectifi ed outside of and alienated from it. Hence for Hegel and Marx the-ory and practice can be mediated in a rational way that simultaneously gives a sense to history. Here the links between reason, re-appropriation, humanism, action and historical progress are clear. In Nietzsche (life), and even more so in Weber (life, history and society), the factual externality of the conditions of knowledge is no longer conceived of dialectically as a relation between subjectivity and objectivity. Th e movement from Marx to Weber can be interpreted as a movement from subject-object dialectics in the young Marx, to subject(s)-social relations in the mature Marx and Weber. In the course of this theoretical and historical movement, roughly corresponding the period from 1848–1918, the moment of synthesis between subject and object becomes elusive, and the notion of some gen-eral sense of action becomes tenuous and oblique. It is at this juncture that reason starts to look more like an instrumental and strategic means than a substantive end.25

Th us the study of what Hannah Arendt refers to as the rise of the social, and the implicit impossibility of a subjective re-appropriation of a plurality of dispersed institutions and diff erentiated codes, is initiated by Marx. Th ere is a discernible transition from Hegel’s political version of the ration-ality of the real, which for Hegel is emblematically represented by the authority of the state in the Philosophy of Right, to Marx’s social version of the rationality of the real in the Grundrisse, which for Marx can be under-stood as a series of social relations and processes that do not culminate in the state or any other foundation or centre, and which, by extension, are not easily re-appropriated or represented without a substantial remainder, so to speak. Seen in these terms, and contrary to what Marx himself sug-gests in the Communist Manifesto and what Lenin and Lukács say about Marx as a political thinker, Marx’s analysis seems to cast doubt on the capacity of a political party to distil and represent the totality of social rela-tions within its organizational and leadership structures. On the basis of this reading of the Grundrisse and Capital, and at the risk of making Marx sound a little bit too much like Michel Foucault for just a moment, it is pos-sible to say that the coherence of political theory, and along with it the raison d’être of political parties and even of the nation-state form of politi-cal legitimacy full stop, has been substantially undermined. Th ey have been undermined by the transfer of authority from the state to non-transparent


and unaccountable networks of power in society. At that point traditional political philosophy loses its points of contact with social reality. In a now famous passage in Between Past and Future (1954), Arendt has put the matter thus:

Our tradition of political thought had its defi nite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less defi nite end in the theories of Karl Marx. Th e beginning was made when, in Th e Republic’s allegory of the cave, Plato described the sphere of human aff airs – all that belongs to the living together of men in a common world – in terms of darkness, confusion, and deception which those aspiring to true being must turn away from and abandon if they want to discover the clear sky of eternal ideas. Th e end came with Marx’s declaration that philosophy and its truth are located not outside the aff airs of men and their common world but precisely in them, and can be ‘realized’ only in the sphere of living together, which he called ‘society’.26

In Arendt’s terms, Marx is a live witness to the demise of an ancient tra-dition that culminates in Kant and fi nally with Hegel. At the start of this chapter it is seen that for Kant there is no absolute knowledge of essences because of the reality of mediating form. Th e political corollary of this epistemological position is that there can also be no absolute freedom in which theory and practice are fused. In Kant’s philosophy this leads to the subordination of metaphysical knowledge to formal knowledge, and the corresponding subordination of life, being and practice to consciousness, law and theory. Needless to say, the reduction of knowledge to its formal dimension, like the reduction of practice to the conditions of possible prac-tice, raises questions about the possibility of reason that is not reduced to its instrumental instantiation. In very diff erent ways, Marx and Nietzsche attempt to reverse the priority of theory over practice. Th is sets them apart from Hegel, who believes in the dialectical mediation of life, being and practice with consciousness, law and theory in historical reason, as opposed to the abstract and formal reason defended by Kant.27 Th e end of any cred-ible grand mediation between these terms, ushered in by Marx’s critique of Hegel’s theory of the state and Nietzsche’s critique of modern conscious-ness, marks a crisis of the idea of legitimate law as the primary mediating instance between a stable epistemological subject capable of defi ning the limits of objective knowledge, on the one hand, and a rational state capable of defi ning the limits of freedom, on the other. It will be seen in the next


section that Weber’s sociology registers the shift from Kantian reason of Enlightenment inspiration to modernist rationalization, which is com-pounded by the parallel shift from the rational state of Hegel’s political philosophy to the legal-rational domination pervading industrial society. In the latter, legitimate authority is replaced by techniques of legitimation. In response to the call for a revolution of social relations to address this crisis of state, Weber responds that social relations can be analysed and understood, but not consciously changed without causing more disen-chantment and even more bureaucracy than that which already exists in a world dominated by instrumental reason.

The Rise of Historical Sociology in the Light of the Crises of Legitimate Law and the Rational State

Weber reads Nietzsche’s critique of modernity and Marx’s analysis of capitalism with critical sympathy. But he also attempts to move beyond their respective analyses in order to provide a more nuanced and more sociological account of subjectivity and social action than is possible within the frameworks off ered by Nietzsche’s psychology and Marx’s notion of class interest. Weber’s project is infl uenced by Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911) historical sociology, Max Scheler’s (1874–1928) anthro pology, and especially the philosophical sociology developed by Georg Simmel (1858–1918) in the Philosophy of Money (1900) and other writings. While in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant attempts to provide a critique of meta-physics that nonetheless saves objectivity from relativism, Dilthey argues that the critique of metaphysics must go beyond the critique of pure reason by off ering a critique of historical reason as well. Dilthey wants to enlist certain elements of Hegel’s theory of objective form and Nietzsche’s account of individual psychology in the project to provide the human sciences with a foundation and status independent from the methodologies of traditional philosophy and the natural sciences. If Kant can claim that the condition of knowledge is an epistemological subject, Dilthey anticipates Weber by argu-ing that the conditions of understanding are psychological, intersubjective and interpretative. In contrast to Kant’s and especially Hegel’s project to trace the modalities through which structured experience (Erfahrung) is converted into systematic knowledge, Dilthey seizes on the epistemologi-cal importance of slightly less structured and more discontinuous experience (Erlebnis). In Dilthey’s usage Erlebnis is closer to Nietzschean vitality than it is to the idealist concept of experience. Th e subtle distinction is employed by Dilthey to emphasize that the relation between past and


future – and with it tradition and memory – becomes uncertain in an epoch characterized by rapid industrialization and the failure of the philo-sophical ideal of reason to materialize in historical practice in the way Hegel had predicted.28

In his confrontation with Hume’s scepticism, Kant makes causality a category of the understanding, such that it becomes a faculty of the human mind. Th is corresponds to his notion that objects and events are not simply given in time and space. Th ey must be thought by a stable epistemological subject, in other words, a fundamental condition of rational knowledge is that objects and events have to orient themselves towards human understanding. Dilthey suggests that Kant’s view of knowledge and causality is largely taken from the scientifi c epistemologies of Galileo, Newton and Bacon. Hence while Kant is correct in his debate with empiri-cism to shift the explanation of external causality to an internal plane of mental energy, Kant restricts the life of the mind to an almost mechanical set of predictable functions which rests on a dogmatic separation of con-sciousness and external world. According to this interpretation, Kant seems to vacillate between empiricism and rationalism instead of moving beyond their respective problems. Dilthey’s critique of historical reason attempts to do two things with regard to Kant’s theory of the relation between knowl-edge and experience. First, it attempts to show why the Kantian model is too close to that of the natural sciences to be applicable to human sciences like history. Th e human sciences require a diff erent methodology capable of formulating knowledge for areas of life in which interpretation and empathy are more appropriate than classifi cation or categorization. Sec-ond, while relying on Hegel’s theory of objective form to some extent, Dilthey breaks with Hegelian subject-object dialectics in favour of a less ambitious epistemological programme. He wants to be able to explain the actions of people in particular historical contexts embedded in specifi c institutions which vary from culture to culture. For Dilthey, Kant is a philo-sophical idealist who speaks of consciousness and knowledge, when in fact one must speak in terms of the contents of consciousness, where the latter are bound to vary according to historical circumstances. Moreover, and in anticipation of themes that emerge in Heidegger and Arendt, the historical world is a mental and physical reality that does not respect rigid distinc-tions between mind and world. Hegel succeeds in breaking down this barrier, it is true, but only by identifying thought and being. Dilthey seeks to take the Hegelian insight that all subjectivity is mediated by socio-historical objectivity and to prise it away from Hegel’s idealist framework. Th e task is to move beyond idealism without falling prey to positivism.


Th is is best accomplished by studying the dynamic (not straightforwardly dialectical) relation between life, historical consciousness and institutions. Dilthey maintains that if in idealism inquiry proceeds from intuitions to concepts to systematic knowledge in a subject, in the human sciences inquiry proceeds from Erlebnis to cultural expression to understanding. Understanding is refi ned not by a subject’s re-appropriation of its own individual and collective alienated essences, but by interpreting and reinter-preting one’s own and other people’s words, gestures, creations and actions. One of the important implications is that cultural forms cannot be re-appropriated as if they were alienated essences because they are themselves real and not mere appearances behind which, so to speak, one fi nds some-thing more real. While the reality of form is implicit in Dilthey’s historicism, it is absolutely central to the philosophical sociology of Georg Simmel.29

What distinguishes Simmel’s theory of form from others is his view that there can be objective social form without transcendental idealist (Kant, Hegel), humanist (Feuerbach) or even materialist (Marx, Lukács) subjec-tivity. Whereas almost all previous philosophy and social theory regards objectivity to be a necessary corollary of subjectivity (and vice versa), Simmel takes the reality of mediation beyond dialectics and foundations. Th at is to say that for Kant form, in the guise of space and time and the 12 categories, mediates between subjectivity and objectivity, and is more real than either of those terms when taken in isolation. Hence Kant relies on a transcendental subject that is subsequently humanized by Feuerbach, historicized by Dilthey and materialized by thinkers in the Marxist tradi-tion in terms of labour as a supposed instance of universal subjectivity. Simmel insists on the reality of conceptual and institutional form, while leaving subjectivity open as a plural, contingent, and not necessarily rational or otherwise normative possibility. For Simmel form persists inde-pendently of human essence conceived in either transcendental, humanist, class, or, to update his analysis, communicative terms. Th e way that money functions in modern industrial societies provides a good illustration of what he means. In the Philosophy of Money Simmel explains that money, which originally functions as a means of exchange, develops into more than a mere means. Th is is due to the various interactive exchanges (Wechselwirkungen) that money sets in motion. In Simmel’s usage, the term Wechselwirkung connotes a dynamism which is further removed from historicized dialectical reason than Hegel and even Dilthey are willing to accept. Th is is explained below.

Money facilitates a separation between individual, status and land. In modern society, in contrast to feudal-aristocratic society, land ownership


is no longer directly related to the person whose status is determined by their rank in a naturalized hierarchical order. In theory, the feudal system is based on a fi xed hierarchy in which land ownership, personal status and rank-specifi c privilege are bound together in an order legitimized by customs, laws and tradition which are thought to have an ultimately divine origin above and a natural order on earth. An economy based on the exchange of money and the circulation of capital, commodities and labour power introduces elements of dynamism and instability into this system. But just as dynamism and instability are not simply by-products of eco-nomic changes, economic changes are not simply reducible to increased social and geographical mobility. In a system where labour power is commanded to hand over the products of the labour process, as in state socialism, or limited to the exchange of those products for other products, as in barter, the sense of the transaction is transparent. Simmel suggests that in economies characterized by a signifi cant degree of direct appro-priation and/or exchange, actors satisfy a specifi c need with a specifi c crop, animal, tool, service, and so on. Th e materials and processes governing production are known and understood to a considerable extent by the pro-ducers and consumers involved in exchange. In this case the particularity of a product and its conditions of existence (location, cost, materials used) are clear. By contrast, when money is exchanged for commodities, a much more fl uid need is satisfi ed (or in fact stimulated) by a product whose con-ditions of existence and origins are to a large extent unknown or ignored. For example, if a cow is exchanged for water, a determinate need presuma-bly is satisfi ed by a determinate off er in a relatively equal way for both partners. If money is exchanged for a car, the buyer has the choice of invest-ing the object with a wide range of signifi cations. It might be a means of transport. But it could also be a source of autonomy, a symbol of per-sonal style, a means of attracting other people, and so on. It is here that the explanatory power of social form and interactive exchange comes into play.30

To argue that the introduction of money in the place of barter directly results in social mobility and political demands for parliamentary institu-tions would be to espouse a positivist version of historical materialism with which Simmel would have had little sympathy. Simmel’s attempt to enrich Marx’s historical materialism focuses on the processes and institutions regulating acts of trade as specifi c instances of the exchange of values. Whereas Nietzsche employs the term value in psychological and aesthetic terms, and Dilthey uses it in the manner of an anthropologist attempting to defi ne cultural and historical specifi city, Simmel maintains that the


result of trade is neither simply a use-value nor an exchange value in Marxist terms, but rather a social value. Th is social value is a third element created by the two trading partners which neither could foresee, and which breaks the bounds of subject-object and humanity-nature dialectics. Th e parallel between the reality of social form in Simmel and Marx’s concept of alienation stops precisely at that point where Simmel suggests that any re-appropriation of alienated labour power is not feasible, since it is impos-sible to re-appropriate form as if were human essence. Form exists as value objectifi ed in economic as well as in non-economic institutions such as the family, manners, competition, fashion, and in an exemplary way in money. Money ‘denaturalizes’ the instances of personalized domination prevalent in feudal-aristocratic society, though without in any way eliminating domination. Money privatizes experience and functionalizes domination: in the place of direct oppression, power is mediated by exchange in the extended sense of values expressed in the will to communicate and subju-gate, the need to survive, the ambition to set oneself apart from others while at the same time fi nding viable modes of integration and community, and so on. Simmel studies money as a social phenomenon in order to show that mediation is multidirectional and relational, and that power in mod-ern societies is refractory and pluridimensional.31

It has been seen that aft er Descartes attempts to give knowledge a fi rm foundation with the cogito, Kant and Hegel shift the epistemological locus from the rationalist foundation of knowledge to idealist subjectivity. If for Hegel one should not contrast true and false because truth contains moments of falsity and conversely, he is also confi dent that in the course of its voyage of self-discovery, subject as spirit progressively eliminates the traces of falsity in truth by progressively eliminating everything that is external to subject. However historicized and dialectical, idealist method-ology makes subject the measure of reality. Th us while Hegel’s philosophy seems to be infi nitely more elastic and historical than Descartes’ and even Kant’s, Simmel takes the decentring process even further. He suggests that reality is best understood as a social reality of values and institutional forms, and that it is not concentrated in the manner of a metaphysical pres-ence such as Subject, State or History. It is dispersed in historically changing constellations of subject, object, humanity, nature, reason, instinct and other factors. Th is means that although Dilthey is correct to argue that the human sciences require a qualitatively diff erent foundation than tradi-tional philosophy and the natural sciences, sociology requires a far more revolutionary epistemology than even Dilthey imagines, that is, and in


clear anticipation of Heidegger, one that dispenses with foundations itself without dispensing with knowledge.32

Hence Simmel agrees with the mature Marx that capitalism is character-ized by the existence of distinct social classes, each with its respective milieu or habitus, and that these diff erences cast doubt on any notion of universal human subjectivity in labour or some other essentially defi ning praxis. But he rejects the notion that one class directly oppresses another in any intelligible way. Th e problem with the base-superstructure metaphor, like the notion of history as class struggle, is that both imply a model of society in which a small number of people confront a large number of people in an arena of struggle over the same thing that is mediated by the state. Th is framework of analysis is locked in a dualist logic that neglects the third element created by the buyers of labour power and sellers of labour power that neither could foresee, and it makes the corresponding error of misunderstanding the denaturalization process as one of simple humanization, as if there is a sliding scale or continuum between the purely natural and the consummately human. It is not just that humanity is part of nature but not reducible to it. Th ere is more in the world than just the natural and the human, and that qualitative more is form which is not reducible to either natural or human essence, or some compromise com-posite that balances their relative proportions. Simmel’s insights pose immense challenges to established notions of values and interests, and raise questions about the very possibility of representing values and interests without completely distorting their social reality. For a political leader like Lenin, for example, communism and smashing the state are the virtually identical goals of the workers’ movement for emancipation. On this account the state is a distributor of homogeneous power units that distributes them unequally, or, alternatively, it appears to be the armed force three quarters of the way to the top of a power pyramid, where it protects the people above from the people below. In this case it is particularly clear how crude sociological epistemologies can lead to authoritarian political representa-tion. Following Nietzsche, Simmel regards values to be present in institutions in ways that cannot be seized, smashed, or even reproduced in an artifi cially detached political sphere. Values can be revalued and institu-tions can be reformed, though not necessarily as a result of an explicit project to do so, since those projects are also aff ected and modifi ed by other projects with diff erent functional eff ects. Hence for the sociologist no less than for the activist, it is important to be able to understand and interpret social action instead of just classifying it in terms of hermetic categories


and rigidly schematic notions of interest. Simmel off ers a great deal in terms of the critique of daily life, and will thus fi gure as an important theorist in Chapter 5.33

Although Simmel’s notion that there is more in the world than just the natural and the human has ontological implications that are taken up by thinkers like Heidegger, Weber is more concerned with interpretative soci-ology and what it implies in terms of the relation between values, rationality, social action and the state. On the basis of his readings of Marx, Nietzsche and Simmel, Weber is compelled thoroughly to revise the Hegelian notion of the state as mind objectifi ed. In Politics as a Vocation (1919), written almost 100 years aft er the Philosophy of Right, Weber maintains that the state is the institution or set of institutions with a monopoly on the legiti-mate use of force within a given territory. Whereas Marx rejects the modern state as an inadequate institution for the realization of democracy, Weber suggests that the evolution of political centralization in Western Europe and North America represents an inexorable process (akin to Tocqueville’s democratization thesis) which we can perhaps study and understand, but which we are relatively powerless to change. All three thinkers seek materi-alist and institutional reasons to explain why the modern state is beset with authoritarian tendencies which become manifest in times of crisis.34 In analysing the revolt of the Paris Commune in the spring of 1871, Marx remarks that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes. In making this assess-ment Marx is convinced that neither the state nor existing forms of law are objectifi ed forms of humanity’s labouring or creative essence. Weber’s analysis of law and the state complements Marx’s to the extent that in his theory of legal-rational domination, Weber implies that there is a core of violence at the centre of law. He reaches this conclusion by attempting to defi ne the state as something distinct from politics. In Politics as a Vocation he argues that politics can assume the widest variety of possible forms, such that one can say that politics are involved in a union’s conduct of a strike, or in a company’s strategy to increase the number of its customers, and so on. But while politics in the sense of rationalized strategic action can be said to be part of virtually all social action in modern industrial societies, the state is a very specifi c set of institutions with a determinate set of means at its disposal. If politics in this decidedly non-republican sense covers so many spheres of social action, and it can be pursued through a variety of ways, the state is simply that set of institutions which have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given geographical territory. Weber approvingly cites Trotsky’s comment at Brest-Litovsk that


all states are founded on violence, from which Weber concludes that if politics is ultimately a struggle for power which assumes changing social forms over time, the post-1789 state in Europe and North America is the result of a specifi cally modern and Western rationalization process culminating in the legitimation of force through legal norms.35

Weber comes to this conclusion by way of a genealogical study of diff er-ent forms of domination, of which the state is the most recent and most perfected expression. His analysis is indebted to Nietzsche, who in the Genealogy of Morals (1887) explains that the will to power embodied in diff erent concepts and institutions can be discovered by conducting a path of investigation analogous to that of ‘looking behind’ the terms good and evil. In contrast to Kant’s claim that humanity can transcend mechanical and predatory forms of freedom by enacting a rational form of freedom stipulating legal norms applicable to all citizens in equal measure, Nietzsche thinks that predatory instincts and values prevail, however mediated they may be by culture and society. Th is means that transcendence is possible for a small minority which imposes its way of life on the rest of society. If the imposition of values is clearly visible in religious conceptions of good and bad, it is also visible, on closer inspection, in ostensibly more universal and rational notions such as justice, freedom and democracy. Th e link between Nietzsche and Weber comes sharply into focus when one consid-ers that in modern industrial societies with ostensibly democratic states, power is exercised in the name of the sovereign people. In contrast to pre-modern societies in which religious, military, aristocratic and political élites openly rule in more or less transparently hierarchical states, the mod-ern state ushers in an instance of minority rule in the name of a democratic majority. Weber interprets Nietzsche in a sociological vein to mean that in the period leading up to and following the French Revolution, a socio-economic and political-aristocratic hierarchy based on the values of rank, privilege and honour gives way to a new hierarchy based on the values of self-discipline, self-control, renunciation of luxury, hard work, predictabi-lity and calculation.36

Th is view of distinctly modern forms of domination is present in Weber’s refl ections on Protestantism, capitalism, bureaucracy, the state and the plebiscitary tendencies of parliamentary democracy in the age of mass political parties. He suggests that the rationalization process in the West culminates in strategically rational religion, contractually rational exchange and hierarchically rational command. It is a form of rationalization that manages to decouple reason from critique to such an extent that the ideal of substantively rational legitimacy becomes increasingly chimerical.


Th e implication is that there can be no other reason than instrumental reason, and in any case little hope that reason might be meaningful in terms of emancipation. Weber elaborates this idea with his theory of legal-rational legitimation, which he distinguishes from charismatic and traditional legitimation of power. Charismatic authority is typically exercised by people with unusual oratory ability and special qualities that set them apart from other people. Charismatic authority fi gures are oft en poets, prophets, seers, medicine men and other people with extraordinary abilities that enable them to convince others that they, the charismatic, are the legitimate wielders of authority because they can see into the past, predict the future, bring about miracles and produce other wonders that are unfathomable to ‘ordinary’ people. Traditional authority is usually wielded by elder states-men or other leaders of a political community who, through age and experience, seem to embody the traditions, customs and values of a nation. Th ey are people who seem to have a direct link to the past which entitles them to assume the role of wise men capable of prudent counsel. By com-parison, Weber argues that legal-rational authority is a specifi cally modern and Western phenomenon evident in religion, the economy, culture and the state. Th e rationalization of the state, as opposed to the rational state conjured up in the writings of the mature Hegel, is a state whose legitimacy is not based on a substantive concept of freedom or emancipation. It is based instead on the mere fact that state regulations and statutes are codifi ed in law rather than embodied in charismatic or traditional fi gures of authority. Weber’s redefi nition of the state contra Hegel refl ects the idea that in the period from 1789 to 1918, a subtle yet dramatic shift occurs in the very notion of what reason is.37

In this period reason becomes increasingly diffi cult to disentangle from the strategies employed in the power struggles of diff erent social groups and classes in which the existence of winners and losers inevitably under-mines any universal connotation that previously had been attached to reason. Th is phenomenon does not really appear where fi xed, quasi-natural hierarchies defi ne the sense and scope of social action. Hence power is not eradicated in the genealogical movement from charismatic to traditional to legal-rational forms of authority and domination. Instead, the objective forms in which power is exercised change. Th is is the seemingly inevitable outcome of the erosion of diff erentiated rights and privileges of pre-state political institutions such as guilds and churches, with the result that going into the twentieth century, all people are eventually forced, at diff erent rates depending on the country in question, to be the members of the same mass electorate under the principle of majority rule. For Weber it is signifi cant


that unlike the absolute monarchies entrusted with the task of preventing the warring religious and aristocratic factions within a given territory from destroying each other and undermining the state, modern legal-rational authority must secure leadership changes through an electoral mechanism. In Politics as a Vocation he remarks that if one considers the gradual wid-ening of the franchise in the years from 1848 to World War I, one notes an evolution from a highly restricted and élite electorate to a mass electorate. Th is evolution brings with it the danger of what Weber refers to as Caesarism, which combines the most insidious characteristics of charismatic with legal-rational authority. In his estimation the modern state needs both of these modes of legitimation (as distinct from rational legitimacy, which seems increasingly remote and utopian) in order to guar-antee propitious conditions for economic growth and capital accumulation. Otherwise, it runs the risk of becoming the colony of another state with no real autonomy. Th e modern state is thus compelled to produce political leaders with a direct, largely plebiscitary appeal to the masses refl ecting the fact the diff erentiated rights and privileges of pre-state political institutions such as guilds and churches have been destroyed. In various speeches and writings Weber nonetheless expresses the hope that in addition to fulfi lling their function as forums for the negotiation of confl icting private interests, parliaments might evolve towards training grounds for producing charis-matic leaders capable of articulating a range of distinctly political values diff erent in kind from the precepts of private morality, and separate from cultural values as well.38

In accordance with this analysis, the evolution towards mass electorates has to be analysed in conjunction with the general rationalization and diff erentiation processes separating the tools of production from the work-ers who use them, the transfer of citizen responsibility for defence to the full-time staff of the professional standing army, the separation of the means of public administration from the elected representatives of the public, and so on. Weber expresses particular concern about this last ten-dency and the bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies accompanying it. Weber follows the broad lines of Marx’s analysis in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and the Civil War in France (1871) by affi rming that the legislature of a capitalist society cannot function as an adequate vehicle for the representation of society’s views on questions of solidarity, freedom and autonomy. On the contrary, legislatures must for the most part content themselves with controlling executive power in key areas of public administration. In Weber’s analysis, the undermining of the legisla-ture and political accountability refl ects both a shift in the composition of


the electorate, as well as the diminishing importance of the public sphere as a mediating instance between the state and the individual citizen. He sees this as the historical result of the transformation of the former political clubs of the public sphere into mass parties. Th e clubs were largely comprised of the nobility, gentry and educated élites of the bourgeoisie. For this decidedly unrepresentative segment of European society, politics was a part-time activity performed in attention to whatever other economic and cultural interests it happened to cultivate. Weber holds that the progressive extension of the franchise results in the professionalization of the clubs as well as their evolution towards the modern mass political parties that have contested elections under conditions of universal manhood suff rage in Europe and North America since the fi rst decade of the twentieth century. In this process, politics becomes a full-time profession for a simultaneously smaller and more representative segment of the population than the nobil-ity and bourgeois élites who preceded them.39

For Kant the public sphere mediates between economically independent private citizens and public authority in a way that infuses legislation with ethical and rational content, thus ensuring that a critical space be main-tained between economic processes and public authority. Whether or not this somewhat idealized view ever corresponded to historical reality, by the time of World War I, at any rate, the public sphere had been transformed into an arena for the electoral competition of mass parties, whose exclusive function became that of attracting votes and gaining power. Th is means that the critical distance between the citizen and organized political power had been eroded to a considerable extent. In terms of the marginalization of substantive rationality concerning freedom and other political ends by rationalized strategic action, the electoral competition for votes can be analysed as a means for control of the executive of the modern state and its steadily growing number of paid offi ces. Offi ce of this kind could provide a stable career for the party activist, that is, for a person who no longer originated from the gentry, urban bourgeoisie or landed aristocracy. Weber observes that this process of degentrifying is most accelerated in the country that has no gentry to begin with – the United States – where the so-called party boss represents a direct analogy to the boss of an economi-cally competitive fi rm. But if these tendencies had assumed startling proportions in North America, Weber has little doubt that the same phe-nomena are eventually bound to face European states as well. Given that the parties have no other goal than the conquest of offi ce, to wit, power, political success begins to look like a version of economic success which is politicized in plebiscitary elections with little actual political or value content.


Th is scenario marks a drastic departure from the Kantian theory of the public sphere taken up by the early Habermas and a radical departure from Hegel’s theory of the state as well. Perhaps more importantly for the argu-ments in subsequent chapters, it is a development which prepares the ground for a critique of instrumental reason which combines a critique of parliamentary law and democracy, Enlightenment conceptions of reason and human nature, and the separation of theory and practice in an over-arching critique of bourgeois law and metaphysics. It is the rejection of the apocalyptic dimension of this critique that inspires the theory of commu-nicative action formulated by the later Habermas.40

If economic activity is by defi nition circumscribed by largely instru-mental and value-indiff erent criteria, the assimilation of politics to modes of economic conduct has obvious implications. According to Weber’s sociologically mediated Nietzschean analysis, in the transition from feu-dalism to industrial-democratic modernity, the energies of self-discipline, self-control and renunciation have been transformed into socio-economic values institutionalized in hard work (capitalism), predictability (instru-mental reason) and calculation (freedom as contract). Th is marginalizes political values such as courage and conviction, which get relegated to Hollywood fi lms and what Horkheimer and Adorno refer to as the culture industry. It also contributes to the confl ation of questions about freedom and autonomy with technical problems related to economic growth and technical progress. Since economic growth and technical development are centrally concerned with the means to create conditions for accumulation in modern capitalist economies, the political implications are clear. To put the matter in Weberian-Marxist terms, one might say that a technocratic élite is entrusted with devising the socio-economic and cultural strategies needed to make the hierarchical commands required for capital accumula-tion appear necessary or at least acceptable to the labour force. Th is becomes the basis of modern legitimation. Yet from a perspective oriented more towards Simmel, it can be argued that this theory suff ers from a sociologi-cal defi cit which ignores systemic diff erentiation, the nuances of interactive exchange, contingency and the complexity of social action. Which of these views is more reliable?

If one briefl y returns to Kant’s three models of freedom mentioned at the outset of this chapter in the light of this discussion of freedom, autonomy and reason, it seems clear that human and political freedom require a qualitatively diff erent time and space than the mechanical and predatory time and space needed to sustain rationalized models of accu-mulation and growth. Th ere are many possible responses to this dilemma


linked with the emergence of the Weberian paradigm of rationalization, but two main lines of argument can be discerned which will inform the analyses to follow in subsequent chapters. Th e fi rst is to subordinate mechanical and predatory freedom to political freedom in the name of political values and some vision of what one for the moment might call political, non-linear time (time not preformed by the systemic imperatives of the economy). Th e second is to say that however appealing this fi rst alternative may sound, it is incompatible with the modern realities of sys-temic complexity, functional diff erentiation and the inexorable triumph of rationalization over reason. Th is concludes this opening chapter by return-ing to the point of departure. Th e fi rst line of argument turns on the possibility of active citizen participation in public life and an active role in the formulation of law as the mediation between theory and practice. Th e second is informed by a rather more pessimistic interpretation of the rise of functional diff erentiation and the increasing detachment of social proc-esses from legal political accountability and control. In very broad lines one can see that in very diff erent ways theorists such as Hegel, Lukács, Benjamin, Heidegger, Arendt, and others broadly subscribe to the fi rst line, while others such as Luhmann subscribe to the second. Weber’s theory of charisma and Habermas’ theory of communication stake out somewhat ambiguous intermediate positions which defi ne the starting-point and the conclusion of this book. Although they acknowledge the reality of systemic diff erentiation and social complexity, both thinkers also accept that genu-ine legitimacy requires more than political institutions based on procedural regularity supported by socio-economic policies oriented towards eco-nomic growth and fair distribution. It has been observed that Weber hopes that charismatic leadership might be able to infuse politics with values capable of off setting the overall tendency towards rationalization in mod-ern societies. It will be seen that Habermas suggests that communication in the life-world and civil society provide the political system with ethical and cognitive inputs which give legislation a normative dimension beyond mere interest aggregation.

Endnotes

1. One of the most original and infl uential theoretical and historical studies of this period is provided by Jürgen Habermas in Strukturwandel der Öff entlichkeit (Th e Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, fi rst published by Luchterhand in 1962), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1990, chapters 3–4.

2. Th e point about commercial freedom and the relation between commerce and liberty is important and somewhat complicated by the fact that the idea of a commercial society of


free, independent contracting private individuals implies something signifi cantly diff erent in socio-economic and political terms than a democratic society of collectively autono-mous, collectively self-legislating public citizens. While the fi rst implies adherence to liberal theory and practice, the second off ers a republican answer to the question of the conditions of liberty. It is also signifi cant that nowhere was the analysis of the conditions of freedom in a commercial society more brilliant than in Britain and particularly in Scotland, that is, in a highly unique context where the conditions for an industrial revolution and, according to many criteria, a successfully functioning commercial society, were already in place. It is also worth noting that British scepticism about the possibility of non-authoritarian and non-dogmatic authority is refl ected in the fact that the most important empiricists in the rationalist-empiricist debates forming the background to Kant’s thinking (see next section) are English or Scottish. From the time of those debates to the present, for the thinkers in a commercial society such as Britain, the problem of instrumental reason never posed the great intellectual and political dilemmas concerning the bases of legitimate authority that it did for thinkers and politicians on the European continent.

3. For a number of illuminating commentaries on Weber’s analysis of this phenomenon, see the essays collected in Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley (eds), Th e Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1994.

4. Th e idea that a legitimate form of law reconciles collective, plural humanity and external nature in the labour process while reconciling each individual, unique instance of humanity and internal nature in the creation of aesthetic values is argued by the current author in Beyond Hegemony: Towards a New Philosophy of Political Legitimacy, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2005. Th e book attempts to show why thinking about a legiti-mate form of law, as opposed to a legal form of legitimacy, off ers a way of reconceptualizing the relation between plurality and individuality beyond the one-sidedness of the many variants of liberal democracy, social democracy and state socialism.

5. Rationalist and empiricist arguments are certainly more complex than is suggested above, but for reasons of space it is necessary to simplify the matter for the time being.

6. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Th e Critique of Pure Reason, 2 volumes, 1781), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1968, pp. 45–62; and Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Th e Critique of Practical Reason, 1787), Stuttgart, Reclam, 1961, pp. 117–34.

7. Readers interested in the basic contours of Kant’s theory of knowledge and experi-ence should consult Roger Scruton, Past Masters: Kant, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982; and Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995. Th ose with a bit more time to delve into Kant’s arguments about the objectivity of conceptual form against the claims of metaphysical essence can consult Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983; and Robert B. Pippin, Kant’s Th eory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1982.

8. Th e notion of the blocking off of reason plays an important role in Adorno and Heidegger’s respective interpretations of Kant and metaphysics. Th e issues raised by their readings of Kant will be discussed in Chapters 3 and 4.

9. Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Th e Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807), Stuttgart, Reclam, 1987, pp. 551–67 (fi nal chapter on absolute knowledge).


10. Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Th e Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807), pp. 20–1, (paragraphs 17 and 18 of the Preface in any English edition), where he declares that reality must be grasped as subject, not only as substance. He explains further that the epistemo-logical project should be thought of as a circle (subject’s rediscovery of itself in a series of stages in which it alienates and re-appropriates its diverse forms and moments of develop-ment), rather than as a line that abruptly reaches a pinnacle.

11. Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Th e Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807), pp. 30–43; and Georg Lukács, Der junge Hegel (Th e Young Hegel, 1948), volume II, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, pp. 747–8, 815, 822.

12. Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Th e Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807), p. 22, (paragraph 20 of the Preface in any standard English edition), where he confi dently asserts that ‘Th e True is the whole’.

13. It is of course clear to anarchists that there are other ways of viewing this matter. For an excellent survey of the most important arguments for extra-juridical liberty see Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, London, Collins, 1992.

14. Hegel, Die Philosophie des Rechts (Th e Philosophy of Right, 1821), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1986, p. 24 (p. 10 in the T. M. Knox edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1952). Adorno’s critique of this view will be examined in Chapter 3.

15. Hegel, Die Philosophie des Rechts (Th e Philosophy of Right, 1821), pp. 398, 406.16. Hegel, Die Philosophie des Rechts (Th e Philosophy of Right, 1821), p. 28 (penultimate

paragraph of the Preface, p. 13 of the Knox edition). In addition to Marx and Nietzsche one could cite a third possible response to Hegel in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, for whom interiority and ethics are an alternative to Hegel’s notion of the inexorable unfolding of rea-son and freedom in history. For an analysis of these three thinkers in relation to Hegel, see Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche (From Marx to Nietzsche), Zurich, Europa Verlag, 1941.

17. Th is determination to translate theory into practice has contributed, along with the famous thesis 11 on Feuerbach (‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however, is to change it’), to the notion that soon aft er his early writings Marx adopts an anti-philosophical epistemology in which the importance of theory is dissolved by practical necessities and historical laws.

18. Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Th e Grundrisse, 1857), Frankfurt and Vienna, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1972, pp. 537, 943–5; and Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Th e Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807), p. 16, (paragraph 11 of the Preface in any standard English edition), where he says ‘Spirit is never at rest, but always engaged in moving forward. But just as the fi rst breath drawn by a child aft er its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth – there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born – so likewise Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of the previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by apparently isolated symptoms.’

19. It is in this context that Nietzsche can be seen as key fi gure in the movement referred to as Lebensphilosophie, or life-philosophy. Hence the young Marx distinguishes between political emancipation, which he associates with the French Revolution and the signifi cant but insuffi cient liberation from aristocratic-feudal social relations, from a more complete


human emancipation, which liberates humanity’s productive-creative essence from capital-ist social relations. In clear anticipation of Foucault (Chapter 6), Nietzsche seems to be less interested in human emancipation than he is in liberating life from the ‘all too human’. Hence in Th us Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche quips that ‘man is a beast that must be over-come’. He develops this thesis into a theory of revolution as self-overcoming rather than revolution as re-appropriation of human essence. See the third section of the prologue to Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (Th us Spoke Zarathustra, 1883), Munich, Goldmann, 1957, p. 11.

20. Even if he does not employ the term instrumental in relation to reason in any systematic way, Nietzsche’s analysis clearly points in the direction of Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1906). See Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister (Human, All too Human, 1877), Munich, Goldmann, 1960, pp. 221–5 (aphorisms 262–70).

21. It is likely that Heidegger’s (Chapter 4) discussion of inauthenticity in Being and Time (1927) is indebted to Nietzsche’s critique of religion and utilitarianism.

22. Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra (Th us Spoke Zarathustra, 1883), pp. 116–20; and Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations, 1873–76), Stuttgart, Alfred Kröner, 1955, pp. 603–22. For a thorough discussion of Nietzsche’s ideas on liberation, decadence, nihilism, the will to power and self-transformation, see Gianni Vattimo, Il soggetto e la maschera: Nietzsche e il problema della liberazione, Milan, Bompiani, second edition, 1999; Karl Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen, Hamburg, Felix Meiner, 1986; and Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche, Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Prince-ton, Princeton University Press, 1974.

23. Th is is the twin problem that Adorno discerns to varying degrees in the philoso-phies of thinkers like Bergson (1859–1941), and especially Husserl (1859–1938), who try to reground philosophical enquiry. See Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie: Studien über Husserl und die phänomenologischen Antinomien (translated in English as Against Epistemology, written during 1934–37 and published for the fi rst time in 1956), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1990. Although Habermas eventually parts company with Adorno on a number of key issues, he nonetheless shares many of his doubts about the project of trying to redeem the integrity of traditional philosophy in the light of the critiques of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, and, indeed, the theory of communicative action and post-metaphysical think-ing can be seen as a tacit point of agreement with Adorno on this point.

24. Th ere is admittedly a certain amount of ambiguity on Kant’s part here, since it might be asked, how can space and time be external to the individual, and yet also be subjective intuitions? Kant cannot make space and time purely subjective without falling back on rationalist and empiricist arguments he seeks to overcome. Kant seems to be ‘hedging his bets’ to some extent by referring to space and time as pure, a priori intuitions, which of course raises the question: how can something be both a priori and intuitive (to say nothing of the constant notion of ‘pure’ forms)? For elucidatory commentary, see Sebastian Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, London, Routledge, 1999, pp. 65 and 70–85.

25. Weber, Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation, 1919), in Johannes Winckelmann (ed.), Gesammelte politische Schrift en (Collected Political Writings), second edition, Tubingen,


J. C. B. Mohr, 1988, pp. 532–4. In this essay Weber analyses the transformation of the nineteenth-century élite political clubs into the mass political parties of the twentieth cen-tury, as well as the implications of this shift in terms of the public sphere and the possibilities of a rational mediation of private interests and political authority. Th e analysis prefi gures the main themes in Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Th ese issues are also discussed in Wolfgang Schluchter, Th e Rise of Western Rationalism: Th e Rise of Max Weber’s Developmental History, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981; in John Burrow, Th e Crisis of Reason: European Th ought, 1848–1914, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000; and in H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: Th e Reorientation of European Social Th ought, 1890–1930, New York, Vintage Books, 1977.

26. Hannah Arendt, ‘Tradition and the Modern Age’, in Between Past and Present, London, Penguin, 1954, p. 17. Th e extremely interesting historical question as to whether, where and for how long state authority in practice was anything that remotely approxi-mated the ideal of a rational state in philosophical terms has to be left out of consideration for reasons of space. What is central here is the notion that however subtle it may sound, there is a signifi cant theoretical and practical diff erence between the legitimate rational state, and the rationalized state whose legitimacy has been ‘hollowed out’ by social relations and processes that have detached themselves from political accountability to a considerable extent. See Chapter 4 to follow.

27. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966) explores some of these issues from the vantage point of philosophy, though Adorno’s particular way of philosophizing is ‘post- philosophical’ in many respects. For two excellent introductions which address this issue, see Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge, Polity, 1998; and Alex Th omson, Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed, London, Continuum, 2006.

28. Manfred Riedel, Introduction to Dilthey, Der Aufb au der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaft en (Th e Construction of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, 1910), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1981, p. 26. Although the words Erfahrung and Erlebnis have the same dictionary defi nition as experience, Dilthey usually uses the term Erlebnis in the sense suggested above.

29. Dilthey, Der Aufb au der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaft en (Th e Construction of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, 1910), pp. 159–63.

30. Georg Simmel, Die Philosophie des Geldes (Th e Philosophy of Money, 1900), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1989, pp. 27–34; and ‘Die Arbeitsteilung als Ursache für das Auseinandertreten der subjektiven and der objektiven Kultur’ (‘Th e Division of Labour as the Cause for the Divergence of Objective and Subjective Culture’, 1900), now in Heinz-Jürgen Dahme and Otthein Rammstedt (eds), Georg Simmel: Schrift en zur Soziologie, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1983, pp. 107–11.

31. Simmel, Die Philosophie des Geldes (Th e Philosophy of Money, 1900), pp. 29–32, and ‘Die Arbeitsteilung als Ursache für das Auseinandertreten der subjektiven and der objek-tiven Kultur’ (‘Th e Division of Labour as the Cause for the Divergence of Objective and Subjective Culture’, 1900), 109–10.

32. Simmel, Die Philosophie des Geldes (Th e Philosophy of Money, 1900), pp. 209–10; Soziologie (Sociology, 1908), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1992, pp. 723, 765–6. For two excellent


expositions of Simmel’s ideas on these matters, see David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Th eories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1986; and Ralph M. Leck, Georg Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology: Th e Birth of Modernity, 1880–1920, Amherst, Humanity Books, 2000.

33. Simmel, Die Philosophie des Geldes (Th e Philosophy of Money, 1900), pp. 428, 449–51; Soziologie (Sociology, 1908), 665, 831–2. Two of the many questions emerging from Simmel’s analysis of the denaturalization of power and social relations in modern society might be formulated as follows: might it be possible to denaturalize sexist, racist and imperialist discourses of supposedly natural roles and supposedly natural inferiority/superiority, without tying this deconstruction to the functionalizing of power through money? Might denaturalization serve as the possible basis of an emancipation from linear, that is, suppos-edly natural time? Although Heidegger, Benjamin and Arendt do not oft en directly refer to Simmel in their writings, many of the questions they address are fi rst raised by his sociology.

34. Although none of these thinkers lived to see fascism, their works anticipate the potential of an authoritarian transition from liberal democracy to mass democracy. Th is is particularly striking in Democracy in America (1835), Th e Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Politics as a Vocation (1919).

35. Weber, Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation, 1919), pp. 505–7.36. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887), Munich,

Goldmann, 1983, part 2, section 12, pp. 64–5; and the section on the origins of the rational-ized state in Weber, Staatssoziologie (Sociology of State), Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1966, pp. 17–26.

37. Weber, Soziologie der Herrschaft (Sociology of Domination), in Johannes Winckelmann (ed.), Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society, published posthumously in 1921 and 1922 on the basis of the editing of Marianne Weber), Tubingen, J. C. B. Mohr, 1972, pp. 541–50. Th e introduction to the Sociology of Domination in Economy and Society is found in chapter 9 of part II.

38. Weber, Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation, 1919), pp. 508–10. In Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society, 1921), Weber suggests that in the modern world, states have no alternative to orientating their respective economies towards growth and competi-tion: ‘Th e objectifi cation of the economy on the basis of market relations follows its own objective tendencies. Failure to adhere to these tendencies results in economic failure, and in the long-term, economic disaster’ (p. 353). Weber’s hope in the possibility of responsible political charisma seems rather forlorn when measured against Mussolini’s rise to power, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the advent of National Socialism in Germany, and so on. As regards the international pressure to conform to the institutionalized strictures of instrumental reason or fall hopelessly behind, episodes like the fi rst government of François Mitterand in 1981 and its very short-lived experiment in socialist economic reform are revealing. Aft er provoking a run on the Franc and capital fl ight, Mitterand quickly adopted a more conventional capitalist fi nancial policy, in all likelihood for fear of the possibility of economic disaster and the obvious political consequences mentioned by Weber.

39. Weber, Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation, 1919), pp. 510–13.


40. Weber, Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation, 1919), pp. 513–23. Kant’s theory of the public sphere is developed in Was ist Aufl ärung? (What is Enlightenment?, 1783) and Über den Gemeinspruch: Es mag in der Th eorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis (On the Common Saying: Th is May Apply in Th eory, but It Does Not Apply in Practice, 1788), in Schrift en zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik I, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, also contained in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970.

43

2The Revolutionary Critique of

Instrumental Reason: Lukács and Benjamin

In the previous chapter it was seen that taken together, the sociologies of Weber and Simmel off er a wide-reaching, if somewhat ambivalent and reluctant challenge to the Enlightenment concept of reason and the Hegelian account of the state as the modern embodiment of the World-Spirit. Weber charts a discernible sociological shift away from institutionalized political reason, embodied in the state, to industrial rationalization, embodied in economy and society. He indicates that the evolution from reason to ratio-nalization gives rise to the need to redefi ne the state from mind objectifi ed in Hegel, to a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given terri-tory. In Simmel’s sociology, one sees a move away from monocausal and foundational theories of social action to theories highlighting the reality of contingency, plural causality, interactive reciprocal exchange and the objec-tivity of social form. In this chapter it will be shown how Georg Lukács (1885–1971) and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) respond to the crises of reason and the democratic-parliamentary state registered in the work of Weber and Simmel, which also become evident with the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, and how they radicalize Dilthey’s account of the specifi city of historical explanation and the irreducibility of historical time to natural scientifi c, linear time.

Th e cultural affi nities linking Dilthey, Weber and Simmel with Lukács and Benjamin are illustrated in an obvious way by the fact that Lukács studied with Weber in Heidelberg and attended Dilthey’s lectures in Berlin, and also by the fact that both Lukács and Benjamin attended Simmel’s


lectures in Berlin. But there are deeper affi nities related to the cataclysmic impact of World War I and the evident reality, across the generational divide separating the fi rst three from the younger radicals, that the transition to modernity in Germany and other parts of central Europe was going to be far more diffi cult than it was in Great Britain, France and the United States. In fact, Lukács and Benjamin did not begin their careers as political militants. Th ey were initially more centrally concerned with the impact of industrialization and democratization on tradition and culture. Aft er grappling with the diagnoses of Simmel and Weber, they were forced to the conclusion that the looming collapse of the liberal democratic order symbolized by the war was not likely to be patched up with more liberal democracy, and that it was far more likely that there was either going to be radical change or brutal political reaction.1 It was at this point that they began to read Marx and especially Simmel as thinkers capable of explain-ing why it is pointless to try to ‘save’ culture from the economy, since the economy, culture and the state have to be taken as distinct moments of a dialectically mediated and nonetheless decentred totality. It is really the author of the Philosophy of Money who shows that the dynamics of modern forms of money-based exchange and Wechselwirkung make it highly prob-lematic to separate the mode of production categorically from either the mode of consumption or the mode of artistic and cultural reception. To a fertile political imagination, Simmel’s work suggests that if one cannot iso-late the economic base of society from its legal, political and artistic superstructure, it is also politically disastrous to analyse the economy in terms of its autonomous laws. As will be seen in the second part of this chapter, Benjamin was especially impressed by Simmel’s notion that recip-rocal interactive exchanges structure the relation between commodity production, architectural innovation and changes in fashion in ways that are neither monocausal or arbitrary and accidental.2

Lukács and Benjamin came to see that some form of democracy is the inevitable consequence of industrialization. Th e most urgent question in the years immediately following World War I became the following: would it be a liberal democracy with limited, formal participation of citizens in representative institutions and minimal rights for workers, or an authori-tarian pseudo-democracy based on the coerced integration of the working masses into the political machinery of the state, as was later to be the case to diff ering degrees in Fascist Italy, National Socialist Germany and Franco’s Spain? Or would it be a real democracy based on self-government institu-tionalized in workers’ councils and other organs of genuine democratic accountability? Given that a liberal democratic solution seemed improbable

Revolutionary Critique: Lukács and Benjamin 45

in central Europe, and that the forces of reaction were likely to be well-organized and armed, Lukács and Benjamin conclude that only a revolution can avert a catastrophe, that is, something more fundamental than a systemic crisis, and in the process lay the groundwork for a new culture capable of regenerating human creativity in the era of industrial produc-tion and democratic government. Beginning with an analysis of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness (1923), this chapter focuses on their respective transitions from existential cultural criticism to revolutionary politics and a Marxist critique of instrumental reason.

Georg Lukács from Lebensphilosophie and Simmel to Lenin and Revolution

In Th e Soul and the Forms (1911) and the Th eory of the Novel (written in 1916, published in 1920), Lukács advances a thesis evidently derived from the sociological analyses of Simmel and Weber, which is that the problems of modern art must be resolved in socio-historical and political rather than aesthetic terms. He analyses the evolution of literary form from the heroic epic and epos to the novel, and concludes that while in previous social formations art, life, society and meaning were interwoven in an organic whole, the modern era is characterized by the fragmentation of experience and pervasive disenchantment with the world. Apart from the brilliance of Søren Kierkegaard’s (1813–55) existential philosophy, however, this fragmentation had been met with the equally unsatisfactory solutions of relativist mysticism and dogmatic positivism. It was this belief that informed his subsequent defence of realism as an art form and his consistent rejec-tion of modernist aesthetics in all its varieties.3 Lukács contrasts Homer’s world and the place of the individual within it with modern bourgeois civilization. In ancient Greece, he submits, there is a mediated unity of humanity and nature which pervades all aspects of culture. Th is spontane-ity is registered in Homer’s poetry, where the collective and individual dimensions of existence are harmonized in a concrete totality in which there is no major discrepancy between the historical process and the sense of everyday life. By contrast, the modern novel attests to the increasing diffi culty of a rational mediation between individual freedom and collec-tive needs, which for Lukács means that individual freedom becomes focused on the internal, psychological projections of individual desires at the same time that objective institutional expressions of communal exist-ence such as the state seem distant and estranged from its participants. In terms reminiscent of Simmel’s (1900) essay on the drift ing apart of objective and subjective culture, Lukács regards the appearance of the novel


as symptomatic of a diminution of the reality-content of experience and the related attenuation of the individual’s understanding of the mediations between culture, state, economy and history, that is, mediations which make experience meaningful and cognitively valid. Following on from Simmel’s analysis of the modalities through which money privatizes experience and depersonalizes and denaturalizes domination, in the Th eory of the Novel Lukács suggests that the privatization of experience is accompanied by a shift from historical and philosophical explanation characteristic of thinkers like Hegel and Marx, to the historicized psychol-ogy of Dilthey and the impressionistic intuitionism of modern novelists such as Proust and Joyce.4

In Lukács’ estimation, this shift is clearly dangerous because of what he holds to be the historically proven tendency for obscurantist art to further the cause of irrational, authoritarian politics. But in the years following the publication of Th e Soul and the Forms and the Th eory of the Novel, he becomes convinced that it is also revealing of an unprecedented political possibility off ered by the eventual arrival of a social formation in which all traces of personalized, quasi-natural modes of domination have been replaced by thoroughly historical, denaturalized social relations. Th ese are social relations mired in bureaucratized hierarchy, as Weber’s analysis of legal-rational domination shows. But the depersonalization of domination creates a situation where for the fi rst time ever, these are increasingly transparent relations which are slowly but inexorably being ‘purifi ed’ of the last residues of naturalist mythology and hierarchy, as a radical reading of Simmel probably suggested to him. On this reading, caste and more recently class structures can be seen as residues of pre-social formations characterized by naturally ordained hierarchies legitimated by ultimately philosophically or theologically metaphysical ideologies. Th e appearance of thoroughly socialized orders in industrial societies creates a situation where social relations become fully knowable, and indeed, correctly known by a subject whose self-knowledge is potentially synonymous with objec-tive knowledge of the entirety of mediations constituting socio-historical reality. Hence it will be seen below that Lukács insists on the primacy of historical over psychological and anthropological explanation, in an attempt to demonstrate that existing forms of consciousness and state are not timeless products of a static human nature destined to be produced and reproduced in the manner of the ever recurring seasons of the year. He suggests that literature has always taught people how to be human, and that great literature does this in particularly brilliant and original ways that illu-minate the specifi c epistemological and political potential of determinate


historical epochs. Th e task of literature in the aft ermath of World War I must become the explicitly political and realist task of showing why the potential for a fully rational and humanized society, that is, a society liber-ated from natural scarcity and personalized forms of domination such as those exercised by emperors, clerics and kings, is exponentially increased in the era of industrialization and democracy. Writers such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy take decisive steps in this direction. But in the years following World War I and the Russian Revolution, it is really the appearance of workers’ councils in Budapest, Berlin, Vienna, Munich and elsewhere that signalled the coming of a fully humanized society of free individuals. Indeed, the revolution seemed to herald the advent of altogether new modes of industrial organization, artistic production and aesthetic recep-tion. When these hopes were dashed by the triumph of political reaction, Lukács felt compelled to examine what appeared to be the tenacity of rei-fi ed consciousness in even the most revolutionary situations. A very brief look at the council movements and Lukács’ participation in them will thus serve as an appropriate introduction to the critique of reifi cation and instrumental reason developed in History and Class Consciousness.5

At the turn of the century and in the period leading up to World War I, Hungarian society was in many ways still characterized by feudal institu-tions and political traditions. Th e War resulted in a generational and political confl ict between those who, like Weber and Simmel, regarded it as the duty of all German citizens to support the nation’s war aims, and those such as Benjamin, Lukács and Ernst Bloch (1885–1977, author of the Prin-ciple of Hope, 3 volumes, 1955–59) who saw the confl ict as the unequivocal product of monopolies and imperialism, waged in large measure in order to facilitate the transition to a new capitalist order in Europe and North America. Lukács left Budapest for Berlin in 1909, studied with Weber in Heidelberg during the years 1912–17, whereupon he returned to Budapest in order to be an anti-war intellectual and activist. He read Marx’s early works as well as Rosa Luxemburg’s (1870–1919) writings on the general strike and other topics, and was a member of the Social Science Society. His dissatisfaction with the reformist orientation of the Society led him to break away and co-found the Free School for Human Sciences, with the avowed aim of steering clear of any attempt to popularize knowledge in return for political infl uence on Hungarian social democracy. Th e group remained largely cut off from the mainstream intellectual circles which supported the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’s war eff orts, and isolated too from the Hungarian workers’ movement. Circumstances changed, however, with the Russian Revolution of October 1917, and the collapse of the


Austro-Hungarian monarchy that followed in 1918. At this point Lukács began to evolve from a literary theorist to a radical philosophical idealist with syndicalist leanings on questions of ethics, workers’ democracy and spontaneous strikes.6

On 16 November 1918 Hungary declared its separation from Austria and proclaimed its independence as a democratic republic. Th is event was preceded by the spontaneous rise and spread of workers’ councils that had proliferated in factories and workshops since June, and was followed by the founding of the Hungarian Communist Party (HCP) in November of that year, lead by Béla Kun. Th e HCP openly declared its intention to follow the Bolsheviks by combining fi rm communist party leadership with workplace democracy institutionalized in workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ councils. Th is obviously put tremendous strain on the newly founded republic. Th e growing infl uence of the Party led to a polarization of the Hungarian political situation, pitting the government and its social democratic allies against the communists and their allies in the councils. Workers, peasants and the radical bourgeois intelligentsia began making demands for a decisive break with the past and the construction of a new social order. Th ese tensions increased during the course of 1919, as demonstrations and strikes proliferated. Th e Hungarian government seemed very much subor-dinate to the demands of the victorious Entente, which wanted to divide the new country according to French, English and American interests. Th e government attempted to prove that it was in control of the situation by arresting the HCP leadership, a move which backfi red and contributed to a precipitous loss of popular support among the liberal and petit bourgeoi-sie. Th e Hungarian Social Democratic Party (HSDP) seized the initiative by proposing a coalition government with Kun’s communists. Kun elabo-rated a document of joint principles for the two parties which were clearly inspired by the October Revolution in Russia, and which were adopted by the Social Democrats in the hope that they could regain their infl uence among the workers and peasants. In March 1919 Karolyi’s liberal demo-cratic government resigned and was replaced by a council republic led by Béla Kun.7

Lukács joined the HCP in December 1918, despite the fact that as late as November 1918 his syndicalist commitment to workers’ self-government inspired a critical stance towards the Russian Revolution and his initial characterization of it as authoritarian and undemocratic. Th is scepticism was reciprocated by Party members, who regarded him as somewhat of a mad Hegelian rather than a Marxist revolutionary. He gave lectures at the University of Budapest about revolutionary ethics, and contributed to the


editing of the journal Internationale. In 1919 he wrote a series of articles published together under the title Tactics and Ethics, in which he looks at three main issues: the relation between communism and ethics, the rela-tion between party and class, and, what was to become the central topic of History and Class Consciousness, the role of class consciousness in the revo-lution. Th e publication of Tactics and Ethics thus accompanied Lukács’ practical experience as minister of culture in the short-lived Hungarian Council Republic, which lasted from 21 March to 2 August 1919. As might be expected, the new republic proclaimed its adherence to the principles of Marxism and its allegiance to the traditions of workers’ control established by the Paris Commune and the Russian Soviets. Hopes for a Hungarian Revolution based on council democracy were fuelled by council move-ments in Germany and Austria in 1919, all three of which seemed to indicate that the Russian Revolution would not remain an isolated event. But in reality the objective historical and subjective cultural conditions for revolution were not particularly favourable in any of the three countries in question. In the fi rst instance it would have been necessary for the council republics to develop military capacity to withstand an eventual interven-tion on the part of the victorious Entente powers, and this was in no way possible. In the specifi c case of Hungary, political tensions and ideological diff erences between socialists and communists also contributed to the undermining of any radical alternative to parliamentary democracy.8

Th e collapse of the Hungarian council republic resulted in a critique of council republicanism on the part of the Th ird Communist International, also known as the Comintern, founded in Moscow in March 1919. In 1920 the Comintern leadership also issued its (in)famous declaration of 21 points stipulating the conditions of membership in the international communist movement, fi rst among which was adherence to the principles of democratic centralism, that is, Bolshevik-style party organization. In eff ect, the real authority of the Th ird International, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), was offi cially proclaiming its intention to sub-ordinate council democracy to party direction in all countries where councils and communist parties coexisted. Shortly thereaft er Lenin wrote Left -Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, which reiterated the superi-ority of Bolshevik organization over syndicalist, anarchist and council communist understandings of the revolution. At this stage Lukács and many Hungarian council communists were not in agreement with these positions.9 In September 1919 Lukács fl ed from Budapest to Vienna. Th e new centre-right Hungarian government issued a warrant for his arrest one month later, which was rescinded as a result of an open letter signed


by Th omas Mann and a number of other prominent central European intellectuals.

In the wake of the collapse of the Hungarian Revolution and the failure of council movements in Italy and most notably in Germany in March 1921, Lukács began working on the collection of essays that were to become History and Class Consciousness. Th e most renowned essay of the group is undoubtedly ‘Reifi cation and Proletarian Consciousness’, which was to become a key text of Western Marxism and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Yet there are recurrent themes which link that seminal piece with others included in History and Class Consciousness, such as ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’, and ‘Class Consciousness’. At the centre of Lukács’ refl ections is the conviction that the defeat of the council republics was not so much a product of unfavourable sociological conditions or mistaken strategic alliances which isolated the working class. Th e real obstacle to revolution was the absence of revolutionary class consciousness and its principal cause – capitalist relations of production and the reifi ed forms of consciousness that capitalism engenders among all those involved in the production process. Hence it is the task of the vanguard of the work-ing class to show how everyday consciousness and reformist politics can be transcended by historical-political consciousness and revolutionary politics. For Lukács, Hegelian dialectics and Marxist political economy explain how this can be achieved.

Just as Hegel indicates how it is possible to discern the moment of truth in apparent falsity and the moment of falsity in what seems to be empiri-cally true, Lukács regards the transition from everyday to historical consciousness as an instance of Aufh ebung of quantity into quality. Th e advent of socialized human relations, only partially inaugurated by capital-ist forms of industrialization, provides the key condition for the realization of this transition. Hence from a certain moment in the development of modern capitalism onwards, the conditions of knowledge become socio-historical rather than remaining naturally static. In a parallel movement, the conditions of transcendence develop along palpably political and immanent lines. Th e importance of becoming and the idea of quantity-quality transformation will be explained in greater detail below. But it is worth stressing here that the kind of vanguard Lukács has in mind in 1919–23, that is, prior to his abjuration (under duress) of the positions staked out in History and Class Consciousness, is in no way detached from the working class in the manner of a clandestine, insurrectional- conspiratorial organization that may have been appropriate for Russia in 1917. His thesis is that capitalist social relations engender reifi ed forms of


consciousness among everyone involved in the production process – capitalists and workers in production, men and women in consumption. Economy, culture and the state must therefore be taken as distinct moments of a decentred and nonetheless dialectically mediated totality. Lukács suggests that the vanguard has only to lay bare the structure of reality that is already central to everyone’s daily social experience in a manner analogous to the way that Kant tries to do this in pristine epistemological terms. Th e actuality of the revolution – its objective possibility – is consti-tuted by the catastrophic permeation of capital into all areas of life and experience, thus making systemic adjustments and social democratic reformism obsolete. Instead of having to monopolize the revolution, in this situation the vanguard can simply spark it off . By agreeing to retract his theoretical position and acknowledge its inadequacies, Lukács really had either to evolve towards a more messianic, spontaneous revolutionary position like the one adopted by Benjamin, which dispenses with the van-guard altogether, or to embrace the Marxist-Leninist view, which embraces the leading role of the party.10

History and Class Consciousness builds on Marx’s analyses of commod-ity fetishism, reifi cation and alienation in Capital and other writings. But in contrast to Marx, who proceeds from Hegel and Feuerbach to historical materialism, Lukács moves from Marx back to Hegel’s subject-object dialectics in order to analyse reifi cation as an epistemological problem which can no longer be solved philosophically, that is, as an absolutely fun-damental problem about knowledge which requires a practical political solution because the moment for its theoretical resolution as a knowledge problem has been made redundant by history.11 Many commentators, including classical political philosophers such as Rousseau, analyse the various ways in which socio-economic inequality and political democracy are incompatible. Lukács explains that aft er revolutionizing consciousness and political forms in the transition from feudal-agrarianism to capitalism, capitalist production relations in their turn become impediments to the further development of humanity’s productive forces. Th ese relations become barriers to historicized, political reason and a more fully rational mediation between humanity and nature in the labour process and in the knowledge process more generally. Th e analogy with Kant is once again pertinent. Time is reifi ed and reason made instrumental when the transi-tion from natural, linear time to historical time is blocked. Reifi cation thus blocks the transition from individual, natural reason and experience to collective, political reason.12 But Lukács follows Marx in insisting that humankind does not ask itself questions for which the objective conditions


required to answer them are not present. Lukács argues that the conditions for the revolutionary praxis of unblocking are fulfi lled with the appearance of the proletariat. Th at is to say that the proletariat is both the essential condition of non-instrumental, political reason, and an impediment to the realization of that form of reason. Its epistemological-political task is to abolish itself by realizing its essence in a new social form – classless com-munism.13 Lukács off ers a series of very original ideas about time, reason and history, and in so doing provides a philosophical contribution to criti-cal knowledge without which Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) and a number of other key philosophical tracts of the twentieth century, inclu-ding Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966), may never have come to fruition. Moreover, Lukács sketches a critique of metaphysics which had a major impact on Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) and other phenomenological philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80).14 Th e following analysis will focus on Lukács’ critique of reifi ed consciousness, reifi ed time and instrumental reason, all of which are related to a more general critique of metaphysics in his work.15

In History and Class Consciousness Lukács links the epistemological project of overcoming metaphysical dualisms with the political project of revolutionizing reifi ed social relations. In the previous chapter it was seen that Kantian philosophy marks a decisive step on this road, since Kant introduces a dialectical element into epistemology which supersedes the inadequacies of the rationalist dualism between humanity and nature and the empiricist identity between humanity and nature. Kant does this by demonstrating that the correct theoretical question is not whether reality is to be sought in an unshakeable mental foundation separated from nature, or in passive unity with causally determined nature. It is to be sought instead by posing the question how nature as an object of knowledge is possible, that is, by asking under what conditions knowledge is possible. Th e key condition is neither a rationalist foundation nor a random gatherer of sense impressions, but instead a subject that has formal knowledge of phenom-ena as they present themselves to the 12 categories of the subject’s understanding in time and space. As far as Lukács is concerned, Kant seems sure that there can be no pure, unmediated objectivity, since all objectivity is mediated by human subjectivity in the guise of the 12 categories and time and space, and by extension, he is confi dent that there can be no unmedi-ated unity between citizens and the state or between theory and practice that is not authoritarian. In Kant the epistemological reality positing the limits to human knowledge fi nds a signifi cant complement in the political reality that freedom can only be rational if it is formal and juridical, lest,


that is, it becomes arbitrary and irrational. Although this discovery consti-tutes a great leap forward vis-á-vis his philosophical predecessors, Kant’s epistemology and political thought remain trapped in a series of dualisms (phenomenon/thing in itself, subject/object, ethics/politics, theory/prac-tice, etc.) which Lukács, following Hegel, sets out to deconstruct and overcome in the essay ‘Reifi cation and Proletarian Consciousness’.16

Lukács’ starting-point is that the transformation of labour power into commodities through the wage system creates a reifi ed consciousness in producers and consumers alike, that is, what Simmel describes in sociolo-gical terms as the drift ing apart of subjective and objective culture. Th ere are two major consequences that follow. Th e fi rst is the spread of instru-mental rationality to virtually all areas of social life, that is, what Weber analyses in terms of rationalization and disenchantment, and in any case, its spread well beyond a determinate sphere that might be demarcated from others as the economy. Th e second is that reifi cation induces produc-ers and consumers to misconstrue fl uid social relations between people as natural relations between things with an autonomous life of their own. Lukács’ argument can be summed up as follows: the revolutionary charac-ter of this historically unique situation is that the seemingly insurmountable barrier between the knowable phenomenon and the noumenal thing in itself ceases to be natural-anthropological, timeless and metaphysical; for the fi rst time in the epistemological medium of history, the barrier reveals itself to be a relation dependent on the mode of production and the forms of consciousness corresponding to it. Th at is, the barrier may seem insur-mountable as long as it is apprehended as a thing by a ‘generic human’ in abstraction from political and socio-economic class relations, and the object of cognition is apprehended within a temporal medium deemed natural and linear rather than historical and political. Within the medium of non-historical time, mechanical modes of cognition which isolate and reify the objects of cognition appear to be the most rational and rigorously scientifi c. As a corollary, the most rational and freedom-enhancing forms of government are those which allow citizens, understood as isolated, indi-vidual units, to pursue their private aims with the least possible interference from other isolated private units in the manner of objects on a frictionless plane or bodies falling to the earth unimpeded by anything other than gravity. Freedom is regarded in negative terms as protection from external interference, and reason is the instrumental tool needed to secure that pro-tection. On this account, the legitimate state is really only there to enforce the invariable laws guiding the autonomous movements of the isolated units constituting the citizenry.


Th e fi rst stage towards revolution is initiated when the object of cogni-tion ceases to be apprehended as a thing and is grasped instead as a relation that can be transformed by the active knowledge of producers in their practical-transformative labour as workers. Th e second stage sets in as it becomes clear that it is now possible to revolutionize socio-political rela-tions among people who, up until that historical juncture, had understood and lived these relations as if they were governed by external mechanical causality. In that moment the space between people need no longer be a barrier between them, freedom need no longer be conceived in negative terms as protection, and reason fi nds an institutional form for its realiza-tion as knowledge. In Lukács’ estimation, and in a mode of argument deliberately based on Hegel’s account of the successive phenomenological forms consciousness assumes on its way from brute nature to self-con-sciousness and reason, the complete denaturalization of human relations is the necessary, essential condition for the advent of a truly humanized, post-metaphysical society with post-metaphysical epistemology and politically rational freedom. Humanity has suff ered as a result of the alienation and reifi cation wrought by industrial capitalism, but it is industrial capitalism that delivers the fulfi lment of the essential condition for freedom.17

Following Simmel, Lukács’ maintains that modern forms of money-based economy perform this denaturalizing function. Yet Simmel indicates that social form does indeed acquire a real existence of its own that endeav-ours to secure the condition of its own functions. Th is is one of the many results of reciprocal interactive exchanges. Social form, emblematically rep-resented by money, mediates between trading partners in a way that is more than a sum of their respective inputs, and never reducible to their individ-ual essences. By relocating the synthetic mediation of humanity and nature in individual and group exchange instead of anchoring it in individual, natural consciousness (Kant) or in collective labour power (Marx), Simmel decentres epistemological inquiry in a way that points beyond liberal dem-ocratic metaphysics and its antinomies in an even more decisive fashion than Marxism. Yet from Lukács’ perspective, to the extent that the mono-lithic subject of thinking becomes displaced into a many-sided participant in work, exchange and consumption, the potential political gain of denatu-ralization is off set. Th is is because Simmel reduces rational agency to the stabilizing requirements of social function. He may well except unusual cases of individual artistic creativity from this tendency, but, Lukács argues, Simmel is unduly dismissive of the possibility of collective agency.18 For Simmel, who comes very close in this instance to Marx’s notion that under capitalism citizens become bearers of socio-economic relations, this doubt


about collective agency is underpinned by what he sees as the deepening discrepancy between objective and subjective culture. Th is is a develop-ment that Benjamin understands in theological terms as profanization as much as in Marxist terms as fetishism and alienation, as will be seen. Sim-mel implicitly refutes the argument for collective subjectivity as a return to a pre-sociological understanding of agency and a simultaneously mistaken understanding of knowledge based on timeless categories (subject-object, humanity, nature, reason, etc.), that is, two sides of the same outmoded coin.19

In any case it is clear to Lukács that liberal democratic notions of auton-omy have been undermined in practice by the actual functioning of the capitalist economy. Th is signals the imminent collapse of the bourgeois order and suggests that Hegel and Marx, whose thought bears a minor sociological defi cit, have to be rounded out and completed by Simmel, who in turn needs a Hegelian-Marxist correction due to the historical defi cit in his philosophical sociology.20 Re-articulating Hegel and Marx with Simmel in mind, Lukács submits that the dualism between knowing subject and known world can be overcome at the precise historical junction when a collective social subject appears that knows the objective world that it creates through its own labour power. At this point theory and knowledge are no longer separate from practice and the known. By uniting theory and practice, formal knowledge and ahistorical consciousness are transcended. Th e gulf between subjective and objective culture, which reaches cata-strophic proportions in the course of capitalist industrialization, can fi nally be bridged. Th e abolition of metaphysical epistemological dualisms is accomplished in the same stroke as the abolition of reifi ed, largely func-tional social relations in which the separation of the means of production from the producers is the real cause of imperfect knowledge and fl awed forms of negative-individual, formal-juridical freedom. In History and Class Consciousness, the collective subject alluded to is the proletariat rather than the party or the party leadership. By 1924 Lukács was forced to retract his position and endorse the vanguard model, which he does in somewhat sycophantic terms in his brief book Lenin, where he identifi es the thought of the Bolshevik leader as the most advanced theoretical articulation of dialectical materialism.21

In concluding this fi rst section of Chapter 2, it is perhaps worth stressing that Lukács’ critique of metaphysics is not exactly or not only a critique of the traditional, idealist ‘philosophy of consciousness’, as this term is some-times used by theorists such as Habermas and Ernst Tugendhat. As has been seen so far, there are several dimensions to Lukács’ argument, including his


theory of historical and social denaturalization and the related notion of the possible transition from linear, temporal quantity to historical, political-rational quality. His case for the reality of collective experience is decidedly not psychological; he wants to show that in the proletariat collective con-sciousness is potentially objective consciousness and not simply a social democratic, prehistorical and psychological disposition to solidarity that can be dissipated by a change in mood or a rise in salary. Th e diff erence between objective consciousness and a vague inclination to help and redis-tribute is an epistemological one corroborating the point made at the outset of this discussion: following Hegel, Lukács regards dialectics as the struc-ture of socio-historical reality itself, and not as an instrumental or neutral method that is cut off from reality and then ‘applied’ to the real in order to know it. Th is is why he analyses reifi cation as an epistemological problem which can no longer be solved in purely philosophical terms. It requires a practical political solution because the moment for its theoretical resolution has been eclipsed by history, just as, by analogy, it is no longer possible to solve the problems of modern art in purely aesthetic terms. One cannot hope to ‘restore’ the cognitive content of reason any more than one can ‘salvage’ or bring back the meaning of traditional aesthetic experience aft er the demise of religion. Th is explains why the revolution dialectically embraces epistemology, aesthetics and politics, and, going to the root of the matter, there is nothing short of communism that can accomplish this non-restorative revolution. Since, from 1914–1918 onwards, the heroic period of the bourgeoisie belongs to the historical past, any attempt to patch up tradition on these fronts is only going to be far more mechanical and authoritarian in practice than it was when the bourgeoisie was in its ascend-ancy. For Lukács, this confronts humanity with a stark alternative: benign or less benign forms of fascism, on the one hand, or radical political change, on the other.22

If metaphysical thinking has a hand in reducing historical time to natu-ral time, it also misconstrues the relation between thinking and being as static. All of these problems amount to diff erent ways of reducing objective reality to an individualist anthropological psychology that cannot really think the medium of history as something fundamentally other than the gradual evolution of all of immature humankind towards the maturity of liberal democratic conceptions of reason, freedom and politics. According to the terms set out by such thinking, a bourgeois is simply a proletarian with money, and a proletarian is a bourgeois without money, so that politics is more or less exhausted in fi nding expedient solutions to govern their life together in society in a way that is also ‘fair’ to all concerned.


Since everybody has pretty much the same aspirations and problems, the right combination of coordinating merit and luck should provide the solutions. But for Lukács and Benjamin there will never be an expedient solution to this problem that is also a fair solution in reality, any more than there will be an instrumentally rational solution to the problem which does not actually perpetuate the problem in new guises. Benjamin attempts to explain why in On the Critique of Violence (1921) and other writings.

Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence and Paris Passages

Th e critique of instrumental reason and language that runs throughout Benjamin’s work is guided by Simmel’s understanding of pluridirectional causality, and is informed by Lukács’ notion that the heroic period of the bourgeoisie belongs to the historical past. Benjamin is also broadly in agreement with Lukács that any attempt to patch up tradition in the wake of industrialization can only result in more authoritarian political and social forms than those ushered in by the bourgeoisie in the period of its ascendancy.23 For Benjamin this means that given the correct interpreta-tion of historical time, and the appropriate language for its explication, it becomes possible to see and understand the ruins of bourgeois civilization before they actually become ruins. If this happens, it may be possible to convert the historical process, marked by the recurrent catastrophe of war and exploitation, into redemptive revolution.24 Hence for Benjamin there is an intimate relation between instrumental reason, linear time, commodity fetishism, fashion and instrumental legitimacy. Central to his overall project is the attempt to show that although these phenomena are all related, they are not by-products of the mode of production in any monocausal or eco-nomically mechanical way. Th ey relate to each other in the manner of the various parts of a constellation, such that each element is unthinkable or illegible without the other, and yet, each phenomenon is a discrete monad that relates to the others in a non-deterministic and non-accidental way. Th is constitutes a very original innovation of Simmel’s notion of the interactive exchange. Like Lukács, Benjamin feels compelled to understand the consequences of industrialization for culture, and, like the author of History and Class Consciousness, he realizes that there is no plausible return to traditional societies or the forms of order that enabled authoritative works of art to emerge in them. For Lukács and Benjamin, the crisis of the authority of art is part of a more general crisis of authority in modern industrial societies, and attests to the objective possibility of revolution. From Benjamin’s perspective, one cannot hope to save past art from the


onslaught of capitalism and ‘progress’ by preserving it as artefacts in muse-ums, since this only serves to trivialize the truth content of art and turn it into Kitsch. As ambitious as it may sound, Benjamin’s version of going to the root of the matter is the following: instead of trying to save past art, one has to save the past itself, for to forsake the past means sacrifi cing present generations to a future that never arrives. Th is suggests that Benjamin’s radicalization of Dilthey is more radical than even Lukács’, since Benjamin seems to be saying that the past is not simply ‘gone’, for if it was, so too would the future be gone in the sense that it would be already written and determined. Another way of making this point is by stressing that the truth does not cease to be true when the actual moment of truth enters the past, any more than injustice terminates with the termination of the life of the exploited and oppressed. Th us justice must be concerned with something more than ‘mere life’.25 To this extent he argues that the dichotomies true/false (in an ahistorical, timeless present) and past/present (linear contin-uum) are misleading, because the real key to accurate history writing and an understanding of justice is the awareness that one falsifi es the truth by falsifying the past and vice versa. He reckons that the truth is awaiting redemption in a divine moment that breaks the past-present-future con-tinuum, lest the truthful be confused with the victorious, and justice be mistaken for expedience or some version of payment in kind. Hence the extent to which language can be an appropriate medium of truth is a fun-damental problem for Benjamin, as is the hermeneutic circle concerning the validity of knowledge, especially as this applies to history.

In its most basic formulation, the problem of the hermeneutic circle can be stated as follows: how can one recognize a new increment in knowledge as knowledge without already knowing what knowledge is, that is, how does one know what knowledge is without presuming prior knowledge of knowledge? Th is epistemological problem has important ramifi cations in the light of Hegel and Dilthey’s distinction between time and history, and the latter’s insistence on the specifi city of the methodology of the human sciences and the role of interpretation within them. If there is knowledge in history it must surely have to do with interpreting and understanding historical events beyond chronological sequence, and it must entail a theory of causality that is diff erent than the causal models appropriate in the natural sciences with their modalities of external observation and planned control of variables. Benjamin intuits that in historical terms, the possibility of truth depends upon what he refers to as its ‘recognizability’, which in turn depends upon the discovery of a medium in which distinc-tions such as those between history/time, justice/payment in kind and


reason/rationalization have sense or could make sense. It is his fi rm con-viction that the appropriate medium is a form of religious experience in which the distinctions between hope/wishful thinking, progress/redemp-tion, revelation/logical proof, crisis/catastrophe, and so on are visible to a collective consciousness that has suddenly been awakened from the epistemological equivalent of the torpor of a long dream. Unlike Hegel, Marx and Lukács, therefore, his version of the transformation of quantity into quality is that of dreaming into waking. He seeks to show the truth in allegorical images striving to illuminate absolute historical singularity of places and events, rather than in terms of linguistic signs which can be substituted for each other without loss of meaning. Hence Benjamin sug-gests that while his theological messianism is actually materialist and concrete, reactionary thinking is idealist, mythological and apologetic of violence.26

In order to convert recurrent catastrophe into redemptive revolution, he submits, one must fi rst perform a systematic deconstruction of mytho-logical thinking and mythological violence in all its guises, especially in relation to those instances and institutions where myth proposes itself as secular and anti-mythological, such as in the capitalist economy and the bourgeois legal system. Such deconstruction prepares the ground for revolution in that it places humanity in a position to experience what Benjamin refers to as a profane illumination, that is, a kind of radicalizing, semi-secular epiphany, in which mythology in all its forms is exposed for what it is.27 Inherent in his conception of myth is the idea that the mytho-logical presents itself as a rational answer to natural, legal and historical violence in a way that denies, forgets or conceals its own violent origins. Th is fundamental denial structures consciousness and institutions in such a way that the violent moment of foundation continually re-surfaces in unforeseen places and in unpredictable ways in the manner of a symptom whose cause is forgotten, buried, or, in even more explicitly Freudian terms, repressed. Benjamin holds that what is repressed never disappears completely, nor does it die a natural death – it either transforms itself in potentially infi nite variations, in the manner of totem and myth, or it is confronted and abolished. Th is is why violence and catastrophe remain the norm until the actual relations between symptom and cause, means and ends, legality and legitimacy, and empty time and redemptive time are fi nally understood and assigned their proper places and names. In his later writings, such as Th e Paris Arcades Project (1927–40) and the Th eses on the Philosophy of History (1940), Benjamin construes this kind of enlightened understanding as the correct reception by the masses of a dialectical image


that the historical materialist philosopher creates out of the ruins and fragments of the past.28

In On the Tasks of the Coming Philosophy (1918) and the Critique of Violence (1921), he outlines the contours of understanding by way of a deconstruction of traditional metaphysical epistemology and of the mythi-cal violence underpinning legal forms of legitimacy. In so far, it can be said that in the course of the 1920s and 1930s he moves from a conceptual to a mimetic-visual epistemology in which concepts are supplemented and in some cases replaced with images that Benjamin sometimes refers to as Denkbilder (thought-images). Th ese are images that attempt to decongeal forms of knowledge about the past that have been frozen by forms of language and consciousness which suff er from the drift ing apart of objec-tive and subjective culture. Th e dialectical image fl ashes into the desecrated space where objects and objective reality have become separated from the subjects that name them. Th e term desecration is used to indicate the way in which Benjamin gives Simmel’s philosophy a messianic twist by reinter-preting the problem Simmel diagnoses. According to Benjamin, capitalist commodity production and fetishism do more than reify consciousness and separate the realities of the production process from the fantasy of consumers. Th ey destroy the ultimately theological unity of naming author-ity and named thing, that is, they sever, albeit temporarily, humanity’s union with divinity. Th e rest of this chapter will thus explore the movement in Benjamin’s thought from conceptual critique to mimetic-visual critique, beginning with the Critique of Violence. It will be seen that he adds a temporal dimension to the praxis of mimesis which enables him to attribute an epistemological valence to messianic time and a theological solution to the hermeneutic circle.29

In the Critique of Violence Benjamin maintains that the origins of legal violence are not explicable in terms of the discourses of natural and positive law. Th e mythological violence inherent in legal forms of legitimacy is only comprehensible when contrasted with the divine justice inherent in a legiti-mate form of law. Divine justice is pure justice free from the contradictions of means/ends and form/content which beset legal forms of legitimacy in their natural law and positive law variants. While natural law stipulates that non-rational means (legitimated violence) are justifi ed in the enforcement of rational and just ends, positive law implies that rational means (consist-ently neutral procedure) are really also a rational end, regardless of the ends that rational means may have to serve. If in the fi rst case just ends are mis-construed as an end in itself (forgetting the means), in the second case just means are misconstrued as an end in itself (ignoring the ends). Phrased in


slightly diff erent terms, natural law implicitly concedes that potentially barbarous means is the price for just ends; positive law implicitly concedes that potentially barbarous ends (there can be no guarantee about the results of rational procedure divorced from substantive rationality) is the price for just means. Benjamin hopes to show that just ends without just means are as mythical and violent as just means without just ends. He makes this point in an altogether diff erent way with regard to mimesis, as will be seen below.30

For now the main point is that in juridical-political terms there is a dangerously contingent, or in Benjamin’s terms catastrophic ‘blind spot’ that sanctions violence in the name of either just ends or just means. In juridical-theological terms the blind spot is analogous to the desecrated space where objects and objective reality have become separated from the subjects that name them. When this happens it becomes possible to do arbitrary things in the name of law, justice and truth that have nothing to do with their real meanings. Th e application of just, rational means for the attainment of just, rational ends, that is, a legitimate form of law and justice beyond punishment, is sacrifi ced to the apparent necessity of a politically expedient combination of natural law and positive law that subjugates sub-stantive reason and truthful justice to authoritarian order and ahistorical myth. Th e point is that while the problems connected with the hermeneutic circle seem to be academic and philosophical, they actually touch upon an urgent issue of everyday life: how can justice be served without already knowing what justice is, bearing in mind that one will never know what justice is if one relies on ostensibly neutral means to arrive at something that is demonstrably not neutral, that is, justice? Th e coerced reconciliation of (1) means (2) legal form and (3) name, on the one hand, with (1) ends (2) legitimate content and (3) thing, on the other, is the real origin of violence that is transfi gured into rationalized legality and diff erent forms of fetishism. However secular and contemporary they may appear to be, these forms of rationality and totem are as ancient and instrumentally rational as most human institutions since Babel.31

In a similar vein it can be said that liberal democracy is the institutional form (means) for realizing political freedom (end). Its champions hasten to add that formal, representative democracy is far more than a mere means, since the democratic process is itself a rational and just end because free elections, freedom of expression and assembly and so on are ends in them-selves. Th e analogy with natural and positive law is clear: rational means (consistently neutral procedure corresponds to free elections and freedom of press and assembly) are really also a rational end. Th us in the democratic


process the legal means of formal freedoms serve the legitimate ends of substantive freedom understood as the collective self-government of the nation: free elections and public debate produce elected governments with a mandate to rule a free people. Benjamin’s question is: why, then, are the police, secret intelligence agencies, the army, and a state monopoly on the use of force necessary? Do the free people of the nation need protection from the unfree people, that is, from the enemies within? Why are there strikes, and what is their legal status? Th e phenomenon that Benjamin uncovers is that a legal form of legitimacy serves as a suitable institutional framework for the protection and promotion of private socio-economic interests such as those bound up with private property and capital. Th is becomes apparent when the right of workers to strike clashes with the pre-rogatives of capital to command what is produced, how it is to be produced, whether products and services are to be sold on international or national markets, and so on. Beyond the changing electoral fortunes of political parties and successive governments, the nation may well achieve a measure of unity in the state. But in sometimes more and sometimes less subtle ways, capital defi nes the needs of the nation on the basis of private decisions, many of which are irrational, arbitrary, and, in the last analysis, violent. In theory, legality and legitimacy are united in the democratic process. In practice, they are separated into normative-rational and non-normative functionalist components corresponding to the sleight of hand which simultaneously fuses and separates natural and positive law. On the one hand there is the egoistic citizen as an individual, rational, juridical subject. On the other hand there is the unifi ed nation as a potentially irrational, collective entity whose needs can be arbitrarily defi ned by the supposed requirements of the situation, such as in cases where governments identify what they deem to be internal and external threats. Hence the state of excep-tion, in which the ‘normal’ functioning of laws and rights is suspended, is already implicitly declared by the conceptual and at times actual separation of the liberal democratic form of the state and its national-populist content. In the state of exception the masses, who seem to be an enraged mob and are portrayed as such by the mainstream media, can be sent to prison for striking or sent to war to die for the state, while the representatives of capital, who in fact in allegorical terms are the real mob, can assume the ‘rational’ task of restoring order and adjusting the legal system in accordance with the new relations of force in society and international relations that helped produce the strike or war. It is in this context that Benjamin speaks of law-making and law-preserving violence, both of which are trapped in the means and ends problems characteristic of legal forms of legitimacy.32


Th e legal and political blind spots referred to above can be traced back to the epistemological and theological problems raised by the hermeneutic circle. A central problem is illustrated by the observation that liberal democratic epistemology proceeds from a starting-point which is also a conclusion. Th is can be explained as follows: liberal democratic Enlighten-ment requires that reason indicate the boundaries of legitimate state intervention in people’s lives. More importantly, it requires that the claims of reason and legitimacy stop with the delineation of those coordinates. Th ese are epistemological and political limits beyond which reason becomes irrational and states become illegitimate. Political legitimacy that acknowl-edges the limits of reason and limits itself to legitimate intervention and enforcement of a form of law that is itself neutral (means) with regard to competing conceptions of legitimacy is the indispensable precondition for the freedom of all (ends), and indeed, without this neutrality it would not be a guarantee of freedom for all. Hence liberals know what the precondi-tions of liberty are for all of rational humanity from a perspective that is already emancipated from illegitimate political intrusion into the naturally legitimate private sphere of interpersonal interaction and economic and social exchange. Th is is a sphere that is perhaps better captured by the term ‘society’ in a global world than the term ‘nation’. But the question remains: if liberals know what the preconditions of liberty are for all of rational human-ity from a perspective that is already emancipated from illegitimate political intrusion, what is to be done with irrational and unhealthy humanity? Foucault makes a decisive intervention here, as will be seen in Chapter 5.

Returning to the key issues in this chapter, it is from the (supposedly) already emancipated position that the diff erence between the practice of legitimate law enforcement and the illegitimate abuse of law is ascertaina-ble. Yet Benjamin indicates that exchange, especially of labour power for money, is really in many instances a case of threat and theft legitimated by contract and exempted from rational political and juridical critique on the grounds that such critique would in eff ect transgress the injunction to remain neutral with regard to competing conceptions of legitimacy. Th is would constitute an intolerable infringement of something more funda-mental than any mere means – freedom – and thus cannot be permitted. In this context liberal neutrality, democratic universality and procedural justice enter into a symmetrical relation with negative liberty, natural law and positive law. To return to the point made in relation to Simmel at the outset of this second section, these phenomena are all related in a non-deterministic and yet non-accidental way in the manner of a constellation, and decidedly not as superstructures explainable solely in terms of the


mode of production. Th is informs Benjamin’s belief that there is no way to reform this system or make it work for more just or more rational ends: a specifi c kind of rationality pervades the entire constellation in ways that make it impervious to critique and insusceptible to structural change. He suggests further that the blind spots that some sociologists and reform-ist politicians may attempt to explain in terms of contingency, complexity and progress are really reminders of the mythological origins (and contin-ued functioning) of a profane rather than a truly secular system. Analogous to the idea that a half-truth is in some ways more misleading than a lie, he believes that the introduction of fl awed and merely partial forms of reason can be more mythological than the unabashedly mythical. What many readers may fi nd unacceptable is his suggestion that a truly secular system is impossible, such that the choice, if one can call it that, is really between truthful, messianic revolution, and a profanized, eternal return of the same in new guises. Needless to say he thinks the latter is unacceptable in the almost literal sense that it will fi nish in ruins at some point.33

Benjamin hints that just procedures will produce just results, but only if just results already exist in the form of procedures that are demonstrably just. Justice cannot be manufactured as an automatic by-product of juridi-cal procedures that are neutral and universal in form rather than content. His point is that until the procedures are just ends in themselves, justice will be an instance of codifi ed legal violence analysed by Weber as legal-rational domination and exemplifi ed by the fate of Joseph K. in Kafk a’s Th e Trial (1915). At the time of the writing of the Critique of Violence Benjamin resolves the tension between legality/legitimacy and means/ends with recourse to the notion of divine justice. Th e later works attempt to create dialectical images in the hope that the masses might awake from their commodity production induced sleep-walking trance, and fi ght against the capitalist mob and against social democratic conceptions of linear time and progress. One of the explanations as to why the popular masses can seem violent while the real mob can appear lawful and reason-able is because in the desecrated world of high capitalism epitomized by nineteenth-century Paris, language has been debased to such an extent that it becomes virtually impossible to ‘say the truth’ with language and lingui-stic concepts. Law, labour power, art and language have been reduced to a mere means, such that ends in themselves like the truth, justice, freedom and legitimacy can no longer be adequately expressed with words. In Benjamin’s formulation it is not that the economic system determines the legal system, or that each system is somehow insulated from the other. Economics, politics, law and culture are all symptomatic of a phenomenon which since Marx and Simmel is most visible in economic terms but


which, as shown in the Arcades Project and in Baudelaire’s poetry, is also comprehensible in architectural and literary terms.34

Simmel notes that the sociological and semiological distance between words and the things they represent is not natural or neutral, since it is a metaphorical distance mediated by history, tradition, and forms of law and exchange. Th is fi gurative distance becomes more remote and tenuous with the secularization of tradition and the systematic intensifi cation of indus-try and the division of labour. For Benjamin, the objectivity of objects becomes increasingly unrecognizable to individual subjects who, in the transition from traditional mythology to modern mythology, project their will and fantasy upon the commodities they buy in their search for auton-omy. Th e linguistic mediation between words and objects assumes the form of an instrumental mediation geared towards the satisfaction of individual whims rather than an act of communication in which the object is able to express something fundamental about its origins and history to an episte-mologically receptive knower. Th e degradation of language through commodifi cation undermines the uniqueness of events and places while destroying the singularity of objects. Th e object is reduced to the status of a tool in the self-assertion of the subject in their struggle for survival and happiness, and as such, can only bring temporary and incomplete satisfac-tion, thus producing frustrations and illusions that drive the process on further. Benjamin’s oeuvre is a constant interrogation of this condition and its dangers and possibilities. On the one hand, the divorce between words and things prepares the grounds for domination and worse. As seen in the analysis of Weber’s Politics as a Vocation in the previous chapter, the reduc-tion of reality to the will of the subject becomes acutely dangerous if politics is organized as a competition between collective wills in which electoral tri-umph confers the right to govern on the basis of a largely arbitrary version of legitimacy, and to decide the modalities of states of exception suspending normal legal measures. On the other hand, the destruction of the uniqueness of the object is also synonymous with the end of what Benjamin refers to as its aura, and aura, he observes in relation to works of art, serves to preserve myth and domination justifi ed in the name of tradition. Industrial moder-nity is potentially revolutionary in that it heralds the arrival of an epoch in which tradition has lost its authority to preserve humanity’s relation with the divine. From that moment on, hierarchy becomes superfl uous.35

Benjamin’s project to decongeal forms of knowledge about the past as well as his notion that the dialectical image fl ashes into the desecrated space where objects and objective reality have become separated from their real names indicates that he does not regard thinking as the innate faculty of every rational individual. It is also clear to him that reason is not simply


part of the defi nition of what it means to be human. Th inking can happen when the fl ash alluded to is picked up or received by the thinker, and as such, it comes from outside of the thinker rather than from the protected space harboured in the inner citadel of consciousness.36 If the subject makes contact with that external, and in Dilthey’s sense, shocking instance of experience, the subject is ‘reminded’ of something forgotten, repressed, or for the most part ignored, and that something is by no means part of an irretrievable past. Hence for Benjamin the condition of knowledge is not a subject, nor is thinking the process in which the subject re-appropriates the alienated forms of its thought and action. Th inking can occur when moments of truth in the living past intersect with those in the historical present, and are then distilled in images that bear within them past, present, subjective and objective dimensions in the manner of a diachronic-synchronic mimetic collage that has more in common with a Wechselwirkung and the surrealist notion of objective chance than it does with Hegelian or even Marxist dialectics.37 Mimetic knowledge occurs as an event in an epis-temological fi eld that extends beyond subject-object relations when such thinking joins these moments and dimensions, thus redeeming thought and its object from their reduction to a linguistic sign which can be substi-tuted with another linguistic sign or concept. In that moment knowledge becomes visible and palpable in a way that breaks through the encrustations of symbolic thinking which represents things and relations in mythological terms still steeped in hierarchy and aura, instead of knowing them in rational terms made possible by production liberated from the commodity form. Th e object, phenomenon, or event that is known is suddenly there, in and for itself, because the means of knowing and the known end have been reu-nited in God’s perfect language. Hence Benjamin understands genuine knowledge as a kind of catharsis which transcends symbolic representation in art, language and politics. Th e epistemological-aesthetic problem of form and content is overcome in a revolutionary-messianic constellation in lieu of a Hegelian Aufh ebung. A quick word on mimesis in this context may help illustrate how Benjamin thinks about questions of art and epistemology in conjunction with questions about politics and theology.38

According to a somewhat traditional conception of art as mimesis, art is the veritably magic praxis in which colours, sounds, lines and words that one can see and hear (form, means) but in a more fundamental sense are not really or completely there (because the choice of form is in some senses contingent and in any case infi nitely modifi able), are necessary in order to let something appear that cannot be seen or heard in an unmediated way, but is really there (truth content, ends). Th is appears to be a paradox


somewhat analogous to the democratic process being both a means and an end, where form is held to be both accidental and necessary, refl ected too in the blind spots negotiating the vacillations between natural and positive law. One could say that in aesthetic mimesis one is witnessing a rational miracle akin to Michelangelo’s ability to make humanity see something that cannot be seen (the fl esh) by way of something that can be seen (the body). Once again by way of analogy, legitimacy corresponds to the fl esh and legality corresponds to the body, such that substantive freedom con-sists in liberating rational legitimacy, truth and ends from mythological legality, falsity and instrumental means. Benjamin thinks this can be done beyond the sublimation of truth in art characteristic of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Th e more pertinent point is perhaps that the truthful moment of sublimation has passed with the passing of the aura of art and the corresponding collapse of the authority of tradition. Th e passing of the truthful moment of sublimation in art is paralleled by the decline of legiti-mate law in politics and the reduction of truth to symbol in thought. Th ese symptoms are all indicative of the fact that the mediations between nature, humanity and divinity have become instrumental to such a degree that, paraphrasing Hölderlin, action must be guided by the insight that where there is great danger, there is also hope.39 Th e way to hasten the modernist revolution is to pursue paradox and contradiction rather than accepting inconclusive idealist solutions based on distinctions like means/ends, form/content and phenomena/noumena. He intimates that such distinc-tions are arbitrary and based on impoverished forms of profane experience which ultimately serve the mythological ends of legal forms of legitimacy. Th e best way to understand these ends is to learn the visual, metahistorical language that allows one to see them appear as ruins before they actually collapse. Th is brings us to a few concluding words about the themes of Th e Paris Arcades Project and the Th eses on the Philosophy of History.40

For Benjamin, pursuing paradox and contradiction entails conducting research which leads to the uncovering of a constellation parallel to the ruinous one constituted by liberal neutrality, ostensibly democratic univer-sality, procedural justice, negative liberty, natural law and positive law. One cannot get from one to the other via the pursuit of typical notions of progress or increased standards of living. It occurs, if at all, in a breakthrough or leap from quantity to quality that has nothing to do with the technocratic management of economic growth for growth’s sake. Indeed, if economic growth or political order become ends in themselves, any means necessary to attain them become good (or at least pragmatically acceptable – so much for neutrality). Th e leap in question can be understood as follows: the


aesthetic praxis of visual mimesis which enables humanity to see some-thing that cannot be seen by way of something that can be seen is intensifi ed into a messianic praxis of temporal mimesis which enables humanity to convert legal, contractual relations back to classless, legitimate relations while at the same time converting dormant, commodifi ed consciousness into awakened, lucid, consciousness. Th is awakening can also be under-stood as a movement from forgetting into cross-generational remembering and transmission of past experiences from the currently dead (humanity’s ancestors) to the not yet fully living (contemporary humanity). Both groups could be redeemed and united in the revolution Benjamin has in mind.41 If this is to happen it will arrive in what Benjamin refers to as a now of recog-nizability or Nowtime (Jetztzeit) which breaks the past-present-future continuum. His overarching utopian vision of revolution is complemented by the more modest, preparatory tasks of translation, reading what has never been written, and imitating what has no original, that is, revealing what cannot be seen through that which can be seen.42

Freud and the surrealists indicate the path of research, since they show that it is indeed possible to read a dream, that is, something that has never been written. But there is more to the dream, in that like hope, it trans-gresses the historical continuum. If hope looks to the future through the lens of a real past experience, the dream can make sense of the past while imagining the future in a more real than ‘imaginary’ way. In Th e Paris Arcades Project Benjamin cites Jules Michelet’s (1798–1874) notion that ‘each epoch dreams the following one’. Interpreting the statement as a his-torical materialist, Benjamin takes Michelet to mean that (1) humankind only sets itself tasks for which the requisite material conditions are already at hand, and (2) humankind always fi nds itself in a situation where its crea-tive and productive capacities are repressed by existing institutions, in the absence of which humans dream into the future about possible solutions. Repression does not eliminate these capacities, but forces them instead to assume grotesque, even ‘phantasmagorical’ political and architectural contours, such as the covered passages that sprung up in Paris in the sec-ond and third decades of the nineteenth century. He holds that the passage is like an archetypal structure-to-become-ruin in which the course of history is condensed into an unconsciously dreamt denial of reality. Th at denial assumes architectural and experiential form as wishful thinking and fetishized fantasy writ large, that is, written in a symbolic language of commodities and money that can be read and understood although it has not been written in any literal sense. It has to be read as a series of images that seek visibility in the way that human creative and productive energies


seek rational political, juridical and aesthetic institutions beyond the dream world of covered passages and mythological violence.43

While the Arcades Project develops a phenomenology of the architecture, economy and moeurs of the dream world of commodifi ed production and consumption over the course of some 1,350 pages, Benjamin’s Th eses on the Philosophy of History off er a concise theological-political fragment on the subject of waking and remembering in some 10 pages.44 Here he demon-strates that the past has almost always been considered as a ‘then’ towards which historians have stormed as if in conquest of an inaccessible fortress. Th e historical materialist revolutionary has to subvert this methodology so that the then can be grasped in quantity-quality terms as a dialectical shift or turning over. Earlier in this section it is suggested that the dichotomies true/false and past/present are misleading, because the real key to accurate history writing is the awareness that one falsifi es the truth of the present by falsifying the past. In the Th eses Benjamin maintains that the dichotomy waking/dormant must be replaced by a consideration of the relations between waking/past and dormant/present: he deconstructs traditional binaries and recouples their constituent terms in constellations rather than binaries. He thus contrasts the profane constellation constituted by liberal neutrality, commodity production, punitive justice, negative liberty, dormant consciousness, wishful thinking and linear time with creative production, divine justice, waking consciousness and messianic time. Remembering is very close, in his usage, to rediscovering, and to returning to a prelinguistic period of mimetic understanding in which similarities between discrete entities are generated without recourse to homogenizing symbols. What is to be discovered, he submits, is a primal fi rst past of classlessness and non-instrumental communication. Th e memory of this time is deposited in the memory of successive generations in the manner of an archive.45

Th e opening up of this archive depends on a dialectical standstill in the historical continuum which, if heeded, forsakes the idea of progress in the name of a liberated humanity beyond past-present-future schemata. For Benjamin capitalism – understood in comprehensive terms as an economy, culture and civilization – will not abolish itself or simply be aufgehoben. Hence its transcendence cannot be awaited or negotiated into practice – it must be enacted as a leap. Th is leap may materialize when the past and present enter into what Benjamin refers to as a now of recognizability. Th ey then present themselves from the messianic perspective, that is, from the perspective of the revolution, such that certain fragments of the past intersect those of this moment, so that the events of the past become as photographic negatives awaiting the light of the present to attain full


visibility. Full visibility produces a shock of a qualitatively diff erent kind, and humanity awakens to embrace its classless origins.46

Th e possible objections to this vision are obviously too numerous to discuss here. But in the spirit of note 16 below regarding Lukács, it might be replied that if Benjamin is radical beyond all plausibility, his impact and originality is clear. He also manages to ask important questions concerning the boundaries of the mythical and the rational. It has been suggested at various points in these fi rst two chapters that Simmel introduces an aes-thetic dimension to sociological inquiry that is subsequently expanded by Lukács and especially by Benjamin. Many are likely to object that aesthet-ics is one thing, and sociology another, and politics is something else again. Th is may well be true in some senses. But one is also free to ask if this objection is not also an argument, however indirect and sophisticated, for order in the name of order, that is, for the perpetuation of the conditions of existence of a naturally legitimate private sphere of interpersonal interac-tion and economic and social exchange which is miraculously exempted from ‘illegitimate’ political intrusion. Subsequent chapters attempt to pro-vide some tentative answers.

Endnotes

1. It was actually Antonio Gramsci who said in May 1920 that ‘Th e actual phase of the class struggle will either result in a revolution, or it will provoke a tremendous reaction on the part of the propertied classes.’ As it turned out Gramsci was right, at least about Italy, where Mussolini came to power in October 1922 in the infamous March on Rome. Lukács and Benjamin intuited that a similar dynamic was at work in Germany, Austria and Hun-gary. See Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo, 1919–1920 (New Order), Turin, Einaudi, 1975, p. 158.

2. Klaus Lichtblau, Georg Simmel, Frankfurt and New York, Campus, 1997, pp. 18, 23–4. Simmel’s sociological importance as well as his infl uence on Lukács and Benjamin is diffi -cult to overstate, as will become apparent at various stages in this chapter. In this context it might be mentioned that Simmel’s conception of the mode of consumption is more com-plex and nuanced than the Marxist notion of the sphere of circulation. While the latter tends to ignore cultural and other non-economic factors shaping the mode of production, the former attempts to illustrate the dynamic interaction between production, consump-tion, culture, social structure and social action.

3. For a look at Lukács’ debates on the cultural politics of modernism versus realism, see the discussions reprinted in Rodney Livingstone, Perry Anderson and Francis Mulhern (eds), Aesthetics and Politics: Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Th eodor Adorno, London and New York, Verso, 1977. Th e volume contains a valuable Aft er-word by Frederic Jameson.

4. Simmel, ‘Die Arbeitsteilung als Ursache für das Auseinandertreten der subjektiven and der objektiven Kultur’ (‘Th e Division of Labour as the Cause for the Divergence of


Objective and Subjective Culture’, 1900), in Dahme and Ramstedt (eds), Georg Simmel: Schrift en zur Sociologie; Lukács, Die Seele und die Formen: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der grossen Epik (Th e Soul and the Forms), Berlin, Egon Fleischel & Co., 1911, pp. 25–32); and Lukács, Die Th eorie des Romans (Th eory of the Novel, written in 1916, published in 1920), Munich, DTV, 1994, 1962 Foreword and pp. 31–2. Lukács adamantly exempts Th omas Mann (1875–1955) from his list of irrational modernists, since Mann openly represents the confl ict between Lebensphilosophie and creative vitality with the decaying forms of bourgeois civilization. Although a modernist, for Lukács Mann is also part of the great realist tradition including writers such as Balzac and Tolstoy. See his Th omas Mann, Berlin, Aufb au Verlag (1948), 1953, pp. 80–4.

5. Lukács, Die Th eorie des Romans (Th eory of the Novel), pp. 121–4; Jörg Kammler, Politische Th eorie von Georg Lukács, Darmstadt and Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1974, pp. 17–36.

6. Th is mixture of philosophical idealism and syndicalism was not uncommon among Lukács’ colleagues in the Free School for Human Sciences, which included such prominent intellectuals as the economic historian Karl Polanyi, the syndicalist Erwin Szabó, the art his-torian Arnold Hauser, the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the composers Zoltan Kodály and Béla Bartók. Th ese thinkers met in the famous Sunday Circle discussions (modelled on Weber’s pre-war Sunday meetings in Heidelberg) in Budapest in 1917–18, which took up various aspects of art, religion, philosophy and politics. Although Lukács would leave the group and adopt a more Hegelian-Marxist and eventually Marxist-Leninist political stance, his experiences in the Sunday Circle oriented his later positions as the Minister of Culture in the communist government of Béla Kun in 1919. See Günther K. Lehmann, ‘Asthetik im Streben nach Vollendung’, the Aft erword to volume 2 of Lukács, Eigenart des Äesthetischen (Th e Particularity of the Aesthetic, 1963) Berlin and Weimar, Aufb au Verlag, 1981, pp. 846–53; Fritz J. Raddatz, Lukács in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1972, pp. 34–8; and Werner Jung, Georg Lukács, Stuttgart, J. B. Metzler, 1989, pp. 60–2.

7. Wilhelm Böhm, Im Kreuzfeuer zweier Revolutionen, Munich, Marcan-Block, 1924, p. 287; Rudolf L. Tökes, Béla Kun and the Soviet Republic: Th e Origins and Role of the Com-munist Party in the Revolution of 1918–1919, London, Penguin, 1967, pp. 106–17.

8. Lukács, Taktik und Ethik (Tactics and Ethics, 1919), Darmstadt and Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1967, p. 14; Hans Hautmann, Die verlorene Räterepublik, Vienna, Junius, 1971, pp. 133–5; Antonia Grunenberg, Bürger und Revolutionär: Georg Lukács 1918–1928, Cologne and Frankfurt, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1976, pp. 52–65.

9. Lenin, Left -Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder (1921), Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1977. István Mészáros suggests that Lukács’ exaggeration of the revolutionary potential of the council in his life and thought prior to History and Class Consciousness can be explained in terms of a persistent determination to allow philosophical conceptions of the good to get the better of his political judgement. See his article ‘Lukács’ Concept of the Dialectic’, in G. H. R. Parkinson (ed.), Georg Lukács: Th e Man, His Work and His Ideas, New York, Vintage, 1970, pp. 75–82.

10. Lukács, ‘Was ist orthodoxer Marxismus?’ (‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’), in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein: Studien über marxistische Dialektik (History and Class Consciousness, 1923), Amsterdam, Verlag De Munter, 1967, pp. 18–23. One may ask


how it is possible that capitalism is both the cause of reifi ed consciousness and also the condition of revolutionary change. Lukács’ solution is sketched in the text in the discussion to follow.

11. To this extent Lukács’ approach can be compared to that of Adorno in Negative Dia-lectics as well as that of a peripheral but very original member of the Frankfurt School, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, in Soziologische Th eorie der Erkenntnis (A Sociological Th eory of Knowl-edge), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1985. In the fi rst sentence of Negative Dialectics Adorno remarks that ‘Philosophy which once seemed redundant remains alive because the moment for its realisation was missed’ (p. 15). Unlike Lukács and especially Benjamin, who believes that the irreducibility of historical time to natural time makes that moment recoverable in a political revolution, Adorno suggests that the truth content of the lost moment can be dis-tilled in art and philosophy. Hence Adorno is more cautious about any redemptive political revolution which transforms past injustices into revolutionary energies for the historical present. Th ese issues will be explored in the next chapter.

12. Lukács, ‘Die Verdinglichung und das Bewusstsein des Proletariats’ (‘Reifi cation and Proletarian Consciousness’), in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness), p. 101.

13. Lukács reiterates this argument in rather shriller terms in Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Th e Destruction of Reason, 1954), Darmstadt and Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1962.

14. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique (Adventures of the Dialectic), Paris, Gallimard, 1955, chapters 1–2; and George Lichtheim, Lukács, London, Fomtana Collins, 1970, chapter 4.

15. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: Th e Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984, chapters 1–2 and 7–8.

16. Lukács, ‘Die Verdinglichung und das Bewusstsein des Proletariats’ (‘Reifi cation and Proletarian Consciousness’), in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness), pp. 218–20. Th is argument is constructed in a far more systematic manner and in far greater detail in the second volume of Th e Young Hegel (1948), where Lukács analyses the philosophies of Fichte and Schelling as key fi gures in the movement from Kantian transcendental idealism to Hegel’s objective idealism, a transition which paves the way for Marx’s dialectical materialism. See Lukács, Der junge Hegel, volume 2, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, pp. 384–93, 727–35. It is not irrelevant in this context to note that Lukács’ account of the shift from everyday consciousness to revolutionary consciousness is also developed with more coherence in a much longer, more scholarly work than History and Class Consciousness. It is really in Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen (Th e Particularity of the Aesthetic, 1963) where these refl ections are outlined in suffi cient detail. Hence when read-ing History and Class Consciousness today it must be remembered that it is a relatively brief and very experimental work, written in the almost immediate aft ermath of the Russian October and the failure of the communist revolution to spread to Central and Western Europe. He raises a great many questions that he only treats with rigour at a later stage of his intellectual and political development. Th e book surely has many problems and inconsist-encies, but there can be no doubting its originality and impact.

17. Lukács, ‘Die Verdinglichung und das Bewusstsein des Proletariats’ (‘Reifi cation and Proletarian Consciousness’), in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness), pp. 122–3.


18. Simmel, Die Philosophie des Geldes (Th e Philosophy of Money), pp. 34–8; Soziologie (Sociology), pp. 56–8. It is probably for this reason that Lukács implies that despite his post-metaphysical methodology, Simmel remains an epistemological and political Kantian, albeit with an acute sociological sensitivity. Yet in his haste to derive an account of post-bourgeois collective experience and praxis from the ruins of individual bourgeois experience, Lukács misses some of the other possible conclusions to be drawn from Simmel’s decon-struction of metaphysics, that is, he misses some of the post-anthropological implications of this critique that are found in subsequent sociological theory, most notably in the systems theory that emerges in the work of Niklas Luhmann (1928–98). See Luhmann, ‘Die Paradoxie der Form’, in Oliver Jahraus (ed.), Niklas Luhmann: Aufsätze und Reden, Stuttgart, Leipzig, 2001, pp. 243–61. On the link between Simmel and Luhmann, see the essays included in Jeff Kintzelé and Peter Schneider (eds), Georg Simmels Philosophie des Geldes, Frankfurt, Anton Hain, 1933, part II.

19. Lukács, ‘Die Verdinglichung und das Bewusstsein des Proletariats’ (‘Reifi cation and Proletarian Consciousness’), in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness), pp. 94–6.

20. Lukács, ‘Die Verdinglichung und das Bewusstsein des Proletariats’ (‘Reifi cation and Proletarian Consciousness’), in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness), pp. 104–7. Some of Lukács’ critics regard this as a fl ight into utopian versions of the philosophy of history as an alternative to accepting the pessimistic implica-tions of political defeat and the tragic dimension of Simmel’s sociology. See Grunenberg, Bürger und Revolutionär: Georg Lukács, 1918–1928, p. 190.

21. Lukács, ‘Die Verdinglichung und das Bewusstsein des Proletariats’ (‘Reifi cation and Proletarian Consciousness’), in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness), pp. 106–8. Lukács, Lenin, included in the Frühschrift en II, Darmstadt and Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1968, p. 575.

22. Lukács, ‘Die Verdinglichung und das Bewusstsein des Proletariats’ (‘Reifi cation and Proletarian Consciousness’), in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness), pp. 193–5, 204–5, 211–12. On the philosophy of consciousness and its critique, see Ernst Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung: Sprachanalytische Interpretationen (Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1979, chapters 3, 13 and 14; and Jürgen Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze (Post-Metaphysical Th ought), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1988.

23. Hence however much Lukács may choose to revile Nietzsche in Th e Destruction of Reason (1954) and his other works, and however Benjamin may, for the most part, omit explicit reference to him, there is a clear ‘lebensphilosophische’ notion of decay and possible renewal in both of their writings that is mediated by their respective receptions of Weber and Simmel.

24. To this extent it can be argued that he is looking for redemption from history rather than a Hegelian redemption in history. See Norbert Bolz and Willen von Reijen, Walter Benjamin, Frankfurt and New York, Campus, 1991, p. 15.

25. Benjamin, ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ (‘On the Critique of Violence’, 1921, now contained in the English volume Refl ections), in Angelus Novus, pp. 64–5.

26. Benjamin, ‘Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen’ (‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, 1916, contained in the English


Volume Refl ections, New York, Schocken, 1976), in Angelus Novus, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1988, pp. 9–26; and Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Th e Origins of German Tragic Drama, written shortly aft er ‘On Language’ essay, rejected as a Post-Doctoral thesis in 1925, and fi nally published in 1928), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1978, pp. 138–67. For a very clear elucidation of Benjamin’s ideas on language and allegory, see Eric Jacobson, Metaphys-ics of the Profane: Th e Political Th eology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, New York, Columbia University Press, 2003; and Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: Th e Colour of Experience, London, Routledge, 1998.

27. Benjamin, ‘Surrealismus: Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelli-genz’ (‘Surrealism’, 1929), in Angelus Novus, p. 202, available in English in Refl ections.

28. Although he expresses this idea most dramatically in the Th eses on the Philosophy of History, it is also implicit in Th e Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) and in his writings on Baudelaire. Th e fact that he uses the term ‘the masses’ is indicative of his view that the crisis of the authority of art in modern societies is intimately bound up with the political crisis of authority accompanying the dissolution of social classes, as the denaturalization process enters its fi nal stages. While in Lukács’ thought complete denatu-ralization eventually results in a situation where it is clear to all that humanity is nothing other than an ensemble of social relations, and that capitalist social relations are exploitative and can be revolutionized, in Benjamin it prepares the ground for the end of aura and the profane illumination that must accompany it – given the right image. Baudelaire is of particular interest for Benjamin in that his poetry is appropriate for an age where attention spans wane, even and especially among traditional poetry readers (elites), and the masses are an omnipresent feature of urban life. See Benjamin, Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (Baudelaire, 1937–39, a part of Th e Paris Arcades Project), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1974, pp. 103–4, 111, 114–20.

29. Benjamin, ‘Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen’ (‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, 1916), in Angelus Novus, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1988, pp. 12–13; Benjamin, ‘Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie’ (‘On the Tasks of the Coming Philosophy’, 1918, contained in the English volume Refl ections), in Angelus Novus, pp. 32–3; Günter Hartung, ‘Mythos’, in Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (eds), Benjamins Begriff e (2 vols), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2000, volume 2, pp. 566–8.

30. Hence if one follows Carl Schmitt’s dictum that the exception proves the rule, seemingly exceptional cases lend some weight to Benjamin’s argument. If with regard to the French Revolution it can be argued that non-rational means are justifi ed in the enforcement of rational and just ends, in National Socialist legislation it is fairly clear that rational procedure can be employed for highly irrational ends. See Schmitt, Politische Th eologie (Political Th eology, 1922), Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1996, pp. 20–3; and Der Begriff des Politischen (Th e Concept of the Political, 1932), Berlin Duncker & Humblot, 1996, pp. 55–6. On the parallels and affi nities between Schmitt and Benjamin, see Susanne Heil, Gefährliche Beziehungen: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, Stuttgart, J. B. Metzler, 1996, and the work of Giorgio Agamben, all of whose writings on this topic have been translated into English.

31. Benjamin, ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ (‘On the Critique of Violence’, 1921), in Angelus Novus, pp. 42–6. Th at the contingent blind spot is usually dealt with in some expedient


fashion is discussed in a completely diff erent context by Luhmann, who recounts an Arabian story about a father’s testament and the allocation of his camels to his sons. In Luhmann’s version, the problem of contingency is solved by a well-meaning judge who is willing to donate one of his own camels in view of the fact that at the time of the father’s death, 11 camels instead of 12 were available for distribution to the 3 sons. See Luhmann, ‘Die Rückgabe des zwölft en Kamels’, in Gunther Teubner (ed.), Die Rückgabe des zwölft en Kamels: Niklas Luhmann in der Diskussion über Gerechtigkeit, Stuttgart, Lucius & Lucious, 2000, pp. 3–60. Th e intervention of such a well-meaning judge would most certainly have seemed unlikely to Benjamin, who witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise to power of National Socialism. Indeed, it is diffi cult to imagine a more diff erent ‘solution’ to this problem than Benjamin’s in the Critique of Violence, in which divine justice unexpectedly appears. For a sympathetic but critical analysis of Benjamin’s position, see Jacques Derrida, Force de loi: le fondement mystique de l’autorité, Paris, Galilée, 1994, availa-ble in English in Drucilla Cornell (ed.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, London, Routledge, 1992.

32. Benjamin, ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ (‘On the Critique of Violence’, 1921), in Angelus Novus, pp. 46–8, p. 53.

33. Benjamin, ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ (‘On the Critique of Violence’, 1921), in Angelus Novus, pp. 50–3; and Benjamin, ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ (‘Th eses on the Philo sophy of History’, 1940, in Illuminations), in Illuminationen, pp. 256–7. Aft er the restructurations of capitalism achieved by Keynesian reform and welfare state planning, the injunction to remain neutral with regard to competing conceptions of legitimacy has been somewhat re-articulated, given that the necessity to intervene in the economy and introduce limited planning was a frank admission that consistently liberal forms of neutrality could obviously no longer be maintained aft er 1929. Since the post-World War II crisis of the wel-fare state and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is now more likely to be argued that any attempt to coordinate production and consumption through planning would violate the systemic integrity of economic and political systems in the name of a set of implausible and impracti-cable norms that blatantly contravene the facts of social scientifi c and juridical inquiry.

34. Benjamin, ‘Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts’ (‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, now in Illuminations), in Illuminationen, pp. 171, 175, 183–4.

35. Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (‘Th e Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 1935, now contained in the English volume Illuminations, New York, Schocken, 1976), in Illuminationen, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1974, pp. 143–5.

36. To this extent Benjamin anticipates a number of ideas developed more systemati-cally by Heidegger and Foucault. See Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? (What does Th inking Mean?, 1952), Stuttgart, Reclam, 1992, pp. 31, 39, 50–4; and Foucault, La pensée du dehors (Th e Th ought from Outside, originally published in number 229 of the review Critique in 1966) Paris, Fata Morgana, 1986, pp. 9–14.

37. Benjamin, ‘Surrealismus’ (‘Surrealism’), in Angelus Novus, p. 203. In addition to his reception of surrealism, Benjamin is infl uenced in this conception of the relation between memory and knowledge by his interpretation of Proust’s distinction, inspired by the philo-sopher Bergson (1859–1941), between voluntary memory, which recalls events in terms of


chronological linearity, and involuntary memory, which is capable of restoring the recollec-tion of hopes and fears on the basis of a fl ash triggered by a completely unexpected sight, sound, smell or thought. See Benjamin, Baudelaire, (reprinted as ‘On some Th emes in Baudelaire’ in Illuminations), pp. 105–6, where he discusses Proust’s famous example of the Madeleine biscuits. See also Josef Fürnkäs, Surrealismus als Erkenntnis: Walter Benjamin, Weimarer Einbahnstrasse und Pariser Passagen, Stuttgart, J. B. Metzler, 1988, pp. 128–30; Peter Bürger, Der franzöische Surrealismus, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1996, p. 201; and Peter Collier, ‘Surrealist City Narrative: Breton and Aragon’, in Edward Timms and David Kelley (eds), Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1985, pp. 214–30.

38. Benjamin, ‘Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen’ (‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, 1916), in Angelus Novus, pp. 17–21; Benjamin, ‘Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie’ (‘On the Tasks of the Coming Philosophy’, 1918,), in Angelus Novus, pp. 37–9; Benjamin, ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ (‘On the Critique of Violence’, 1921), in Angelus Novus, pp. 60–6; and Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (‘Th e Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 1935), in Illuminationen, pp. 167–9.

39. Benjamin, ‘Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich Hölderlin’ (‘Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin’, 1915), in Illuminationen, pp. 21–41. It is relevant that the word Rettung used by Hölderlin as ‘Das Rettende’ (‘Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch’) can mean rescue, salvation and hope depending on the context. Benjamin distinguishes between hope and wishful thinking on the grounds that while hope is based on a real experience of solidarity that has been transmitted across generations, wishful thinking is based on the illusion that a commodity or some other reifi ed commercial product might somehow improve one’s life. See Heinrich Kaulen, ‘Rettung’ in Opitz and Wizisla (eds), Benjamins Begriff e, volume 2, pp. 619–64.

40. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Th e Origins of German Tragic Drama, 1928), pp. 155–6. Das Passagen-Werk (Th e Paris Arcades Project, 1927–40, 2 vol-umes, published posthumously), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, volume 1, pp. 542, 548–9, 1983, and volume 2, pp. 666–73; ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ (‘Th eses on the Philosophy of History’, 1940), in Illuminationen, pp. 253–9. As previously indicated in these notes, all essays contained in Illuminationen and Angelus Novus are available in English in Illuminations and Refl ections. Th e extremely brief reference to the Arcades Project and the Th eses here is due to the already huge exegetical material on these writings in German, English and other lan-guages. Th is has made the somewhat atypical consideration of Benjamin in this chapter possible.

41. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk (Th e Paris Arcades Project), volume 1, pp. 600–8.42. Benjamin, ‘Über das mimetische Vermögen (‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, 1933’), in

Angelus Novus, pp. 96–9; and ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ (‘Th eses on the Philosophy of History’, 1940), in Illuminationen, pp. 258–9. See too his ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ (‘Th e Task of the Translator’, 1923), in Illuminationen, pp. 50–62. ‘Th e task of the Translator’ raises a number of interesting questions including the possibility of a translation that is better than its original. In a manner analogous to Hegel, who suggests that the distinction


between true and false is only possible on the basis of a higher unity that makes the distinc-tion possible, Benjamin intimates that translation is only possible on the basis of a divine language that allows a plurality of profane languages to coexist and be translated into one another.

43. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk (Th e Paris Arcades Project), volume 1, pp. 46–59, and volume 2, p. 1239.

44. Th e Th eses comprise 11 pages in Illuminationen, which also happens to contain a 1-page piece with the title ‘Th eologisch-politisches Fragment’ (‘Th eological-Political Fragment’, 1921), which is not part of the Th eses, but nonetheless renders a very apt descrip-tion of their content.

45. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk (Th e Paris Arcades Project), volume 1, pp. 133, 493, 515, and volume 2, pp. 674–5, 969; ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ (‘Th eses on the Philo sophy of History’, 1940), in Illuminationen, pp. 258–9.

46. ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ (‘Th eses on the Philosophy of History’, 1940), in Illuminationen, pp. 256–61. For elucidatory commentary on Th e Paris Arcades Project, see Rolf Tiedemann, Dialektik im Standstill (Dialectics at a Standstill, translated into English), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1983, pp. 9–41; and Susan Buck-Morss, Th e Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1989.

78

3Horkheimer, Adorno and Critical Theory

It was seen in Chapter 2 that Simmel’s sociology and Marx’s political economy have a substantial impact on Lukács and Benjamin, and inform their respective projects to overcome instrumental reason, reifi cation and alienation. Although the theorists discussed in this chapter are less directly concerned with Simmel, they grapple with the implications of his denatu-ralization thesis, and, it will be shown, despair of some of its implications. In particularly sharp contrast with Lukács, for whom the substitution of social relations for quasi-natural relations of hierarchy fulfi ls the essential condition for knowing society as well as transforming it, Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and T. W. Adorno (1903–1969) regard the denaturalization of human relations as a condition for the possible arrival of a totally admin-istered society. Th is is a society organized according to the dictates of instrumental reason and the prerogatives of managerial experts in the name of economic growth and technological progress. Th e processes which pro-duce growth and progress detach themselves from possible political critique and become absolute ends in themselves, that is, they become the bases of what one can analyse as instrumental legitimacy. On this reading Soviet communism merely exacerbates the bureaucratic tendencies prevailing in capitalist societies preprogrammed for economic expansion, and can pro-vide no feasible solutions. Th ey thus revisit Weber’s rationalization thesis, and, from Habermas’ perspective, develop it in a decidedly one-sided and overly pessimistic direction. Habermas’ critique of Horkheimer and Adorno forms the starting-point for his own project to outline a theory of non-instrumental reason which moves critical theory beyond the impasses reached by its founders, and will be considered in detail in Chapter 6.1

Horkheimer and Adorno reckon that if nature signifi es scarcity, unac-countable power and the possibility of sudden death, that is, arbitrary fate,

Horkheimer, Adorno and Critical Theory 79

it also implies individual spontaneity, sensual cognition and genuine life beyond mere survival, that is, freedom. In a line of theorizing that clearly has as much in common with Nietzsche and Freud as it does with Hegel and Marx, the founders of critical theory suggest that ‘successful’ attempts to eradicate nature as fate will almost certainly also eliminate nature as freedom. Th us Hegel’s dialectic of subject (humanity) and object (nature) and his notion of Geist have to be re-evaluated, especially in the light of some of the events of the twentieth century such as the advent of fascism, Stalinism, Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Th at re-evaluation indicates that the idealist dialectic of humanity and nature must cede to a more constella-tional complex of dialectical relations, and indeed, as the term constellational suggests, the theoretical impetus in this direction comes from Simmel via Benjamin. Hence one of the main exegetical lines pursued in Th e Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas runs from Adorno’s systematization of Benjamin’s thought looked at in this chapter, to Haber-mas’ attempt to re-articulate the bases of a critical theory of knowledge and society beyond Adorno’s negative dialectics. By the end of Chapter 6 it will be possible to reach some conclusions about the relations between instru-mental reason and instrumental legitimacy on the basis of the analyses of the thinkers looked at in the various chapters of this book.

In the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) Horkheimer and Adorno submit that once transposed onto the plane of history and society, the dialectic of nature as fate and nature as freedom becomes one of changing forms of emancipation off set by protean modes of domination which is not likely to culminate in perfect knowledge and free institutions. It is rather a negative dialectic which indicates that each collective human emancipa-tion from natural scarcity through production and technological innovation also initiates a suppression of individual natural diff erence and spontaneity through the bureaucratic command and repressive order needed to propel the productive machine that supposedly emancipates. As a result, over time fear of nature is transformed into historically and juridically mediated socio-economic and political fear. As Nietzsche, Weber and Freud predict, fear is not transcended in industrial-democratic society. It is institutional-ized in social mechanisms which subtly confl ate the following: (1) the reality principle with a fairly arbitrary set of performance principles that serve the interests of power by appearing self-evidently democratic and (2) what is seemingly effi cient within the framework off ered by these per-formance principles with what is rational and conducive to autonomy.2

During the discussion to follow it will be seen that for Adorno, this act of confl ation is part of a larger process of identifying objects and


individuals that are non-identical, thus making an epistemological error about the relation between humanity and nature which reappears in the form of oppressive social relations. Th ese relations become all the more predictable and one-dimensional as the underlying logic and mechanisms of identifi cation and confl ation seem increasingly to dictate the single strategy necessary in order to increase growth. Technical management tends to narrow the scope of and even eliminate politics, so that there is no possibility to formulate a distinct set of alternatives that can be considered and evaluated by an informed citizenry. Th e process unfolds in a sinuous way, where the hollowing out of democracy by fear and conformism is not spectacularly visible until it is too late to save it. Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that the eventual arrival of the dictator is actually more of a detail than a central aspect of the process.3 Hence critical theory attempts to the-orize the historical events of the twentieth century alluded to above in terms of institutionalized identity thinking rather than in journalistic or empirical terms as an analysis of the personalities of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and others, or who may have voted for them and why. For now what should be borne in mind is that as the mastery of nature progresses, and the individual instances of nature in humanity are herded together into increasingly ‘eff ective’ units in the battle against scarcity and fate, the mech-anisms of social integration become so entrenched and pervasive that original thought fi nds itself increasingly at odds with social reality, and as such, appears to be hopelessly utopian or simply mad. Th is becomes strik-ingly clear in the cases of Lukács and especially Benjamin, despite their attempts to theorize the social by incorporating various aspects of Marx, Simmel and Weber into their literary-philosophical work. Horkheimer and Adorno urge readers to interrogate the historical, juridical and political conditions and relations that make non-conformist thinking seem utopian, rather than to judge such thought against the empirical fact of its isolation.4 In their eyes this requires a transition from traditional to critical theory. Th is is theory that includes Marx without excluding Nietzsche and Freud, and criticizes idealism without relegating it to the history of obsolete meta-physics. But it is more than theory in any typical sense, and indeed, wants to be empirically and sociologically relevant without becoming empirical sociology.

Th e discussion in Chapter 2 indicates that if enlightened philosophy appears to off er practical solutions to human problems in the movement of theory from Kant and Hegel to Marx, it enters a crisis phase in the early 1920s. By 1945 it seems to Horkheimer and Adorno that conceptual thought, including a great deal of the traditional epistemology rejected by


Lukács and Benjamin, is actually just another dimension of humanity’s defensive reaction to the heteronomous forces which have threatened human survival for so many centuries. Industrialization ‘tackles’ a number of these forces by transforming external nature in order to satisfy basic human needs, thus overcoming the threat of scarcity to a signifi cant extent. Th is opens up the hope of real freedom, but does so in a way that subju-gates nature in individual humanity, and so closes hope down again just as it has been glimpsed.5 Th e implication is that humanity is enmeshed in a spiral of successively more complex and pyrrhic victories against itself. Given the immensity of the problems raised by this approach one might ask: where does the critique of instrumental reason go from here, and how might it theorize the social in terms that are not conformist and positivist, on the one hand, and not aesthetic and eschatological, on the other? Whereas Habermas advocates a move to communicative reason and post-metaphysical thinking, Adorno outlines a way of thinking that is par-adoxically metatheoretical and anti-theoretical at the same time, that is, thought which exhibits ‘solidarity with metaphysics in the moment of its demise’. Part of what this means for him is that the idealism of Kant and Hegel cannot be casually dismissed or blithely repackaged.6

Hegel remains a key fi gure in that he historicizes the dialectic and thereby shows that the knowledge process is mediated by socio-economic, legal and political relations; it is not, in other words, exhausted in subject-object relations or abstract logic. Hegel off ers a dialectics of movement, contradiction and antagonism. It is not ideological in the precise sense that it registers the confl ictual moment of thought and the correspondingly antagonistic character of social relations in emerging industrial democra-cies. Moreover, Hegel’s early works refl ect on the intertwining of thought and reality rather than making a series of strategic arguments or ahistorical moral postulates. Th e thought process outlined in the Phenomenology is particularly resistant to reifi cation, and gives partial indications as to what thinking and knowledge might be like in a post-reifi ed social world. Th ese are of course aspects of philosophical idealism which impress Marx, Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci and, in a qualifi ed sense that will become clear in Chapter 4, Heidegger. But critical theory emerges in the 1930s and 1940s, when it was no longer possible to adopt an Hegelian position on the role of reason in history, and also no longer possible to rely on Marxism alone to explain politics and society.7 In the 1960s Adorno outlines the contours of a fragmentary, at times aphoristic philosophy that distinguishes without separating categorically (1) the external natural world, (2) humanity as an instance of nature that is not reducible to nature and (3) an epistemological


moment not susceptible to subjective re-appropriation through philosoph-ical systems or in creative individual and collective work. For Adorno that third instance is not Simmel’s social form or Heidegger’s being, though in all three cases there is a discernible project to deconstruct metaphysics and its corollary, humanist anthropology. In Adorno’s work it is a material epis-temological impulse that eludes categorization, and which has yet to be realized in institutions, save in the most fl eeting of instances. Perhaps somewhat analogous to musical composition, it is intellectual without being reducible to conceptual thought, and can be likened to the trace of mimetic reason that has not been rationalized by socially mediated fear. It imagines and hopes for (rather than fantasizes about) a form of society where the impulse, which is diff erent in each person, can develop into sen-sual-intellectual knowledge. Such knowledge, institutionalized in that kind of society, would be an end in itself and tantamount to freedom rather than successful adherence to and realization of heteronomous performance principles. Hence critical theory emerges as paradoxical thought that illuminates the reality of a reconciled world that is both part of the past and nonetheless yet to come. Th is has prompted comparisons between the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and theology, since the implication is that there is no real freedom and non-instrumental knowledge without a social form devoid of domination and command of individual human natures, and that the conditions for the existence of that society are really only discernible in terms of their manifest absence. It is a society that exists in Benjamin’s messianic time rather than in profane history. Adorno clarifi es Benjamin’s point by suggesting that if rigorous thought is rational but not reducible to institutionalized reason, there is hope that the reality of messianic time can be rescued from the linear and exclusionary catego-ries of profane history, such as uncritically accepted versions of progress which become myths of progress.8

A fundamental condition necessary for this hermeneutical reconceptu-alization of time, however, is not a historicized or otherwise conceived transcendental subject, or even a decentred subject conceived of as possi-bility rather than as presence. It is the institutionalization of refl exive thought about thinking which does not measure the non-reality of mani-fest absence in terms of the sole reality of what presently exists, or, put diff erently, it is the institutionalization of mediated non-identity. Th is point about mediated non-identity will be returned to in the second section of this chapter. For now it might be mentioned that there is a clear analogy between the project of detaching ideas about what thinking might be from the theoretical and practical re-appropriations of imperious


epistemological subjects, and that of establishing the reality of what is no longer/not yet actual. If the thought of the imperious epistemological subject is ultimately governed by the traumatic memory of the precarious-ness of human existence under conditions of material scarcity, its daily life is governed by historically and juridically mediated socio-economic and political fear. Whatever else technological innovations may suggest to the casual observer, such a subject thinks badly and lives passively. It is a sub-ject confronted with problems that go well beyond Lukács’ proposed technique of simply re-appropriating a reifi ed world, since it is the authori-tarian strategy of re-appropriation which suppresses the mediated non-identical and oppresses genuine diff erence. Moreover, the more privi-leged people within such an order do not fare substantially better than the others since, in Adorno’s terms, there is no way to lead an individual good life in the midst of general falsity. Th is indicates his view that social mobil-ity is as problematic as democratization and progress as long as the underlying problems of experience and subjectivity in industrial societies are not addressed.9 Chapter 3 charts the course of critical theory’s many-sided defence of such thought and impulse, which can be characterized as a journey from early optimism, through the eschatology of Th e Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia (1951), to the mature position articu-lated in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics of 1966.

The Emergence of Critical Theory

Critical theory originates with Max Horkheimer’s attempt to lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary study of society which eschews the pitfalls of idealism and positivism. In its initial conception under his super-vision, it seeks to combine political economy, social philosophy, social research and historical materialism in order to analyse the various proc-esses in and through which the relation between humanity and nature is mediated in history and social institutions. Th e fact that these institutions have converted natural power into social power does not exclude the possibility of freer institutions, if, that is, the mediating processes can be reconfi gured as ends in themselves, that is, as non-instrumental knowl-edge. Th us instead of escaping the dilemma of means and ends through Benjamin’s notion of divine violence, the young Horkheimer envisages an eventually just mediation process, so that he, like Adorno, remains open to a dialogue with Hegel.10 It is the young Horkheimer’s conviction that the-ory which simply describes social relations at face value, for example, by focusing on phenomena such as what people buy and how they vote, is as


inadequate as confl ating chronology and history: it is lacking both in epistemological depth and in emancipatory potential. Th e fi rst, somewhat desultory statement of critical theory and its aims, is formulated in his essay ‘Traditional and Critical Th eory’ of 1937. As the title suggests, the essay outlines a series of methodological propositions for the transition from a theory that is apologetic of existing social relations, and therefore misconstrues them, to one which is critical of society, and therefore sets out to know it correctly while fundamentally changing it. Th us from its incep-tion critical theory is oriented towards the relation between knowledge and praxis, the mediated unity of which can be summed up in the word emancipation, that is, emancipation from ignorance as a theoretical condi-tion, and emancipation from natural and socio-political dependence as a practical project. Kant’s separation of theory and practice has the virtue of interrogating the conditions of knowledge and freedom in abstraction from the fl awed functioning of existing institutions, which confers on his analysis the analytical rigour missing in face value empirical accounts. Within the terms of his critical philosophy, however, Kant’s thought suff ers from a sociological defi cit in that he is compelled to affi rm the precedence of theory over practice as a consequence of the ability to abstract from what actually exists. Hegel’s reconciliation of theory and practice in the institutions of objective spirit has the virtue of sociological relevance, though it acquires this by having to affi rm the rationality of the actual. Critical theory seeks to retain Kant’s scientifi c-philosophical interrogation of conditions of validity, which suspends the need to embrace the actual as rational. It strives at the same time to shed light on the rationality of another reality without having to affi rm what is presently actual, that is, it attempts to illuminate the rationality of the ‘yet to become actual’ and the ‘actuality of the discarded’, without having prematurely to separate (Kant) or reconcile (Hegel) theory and practice. From a contemporary perspective sympathetic to the aims of critical theory considered here, one might say that separation, from Kant to Rawls, tends to get mired in speculative refl ections about the right conditions of legitimacy, while reconciliation, from Hegel to Habermas, is coerced reconciliation that legitimates what actually exists before there is non-antagonistic legitimacy. From a contem-porary perspective which is more doubtful about the continuing relevance of Horkheimer and Adorno, it might be asked if the transition from prema-ture legitimation to timely reconciliation and real legitimacy ever really arrives. Th e end of the present chapter and the conclusion of this book attempt to shed light on some of these issues.


Horkheimer’s early work and optimism must be understood against the background of the Russian Revolution and the initial hopes it aroused, and the experimental climate of the Weimar Republic (1918–33) generally. Failed revolutions in Budapest, Berlin, Munich and in Italy following World War I looked like merely momentary setbacks in a period which one could still describe in Lukács’ terms as being marked by ‘the actuality of the Revo-lution’. Avant-garde movements in the arts such as dada and surrealism were making political demands that art be translated into life, thus sound-ing the distant echoes of Situationism and the upheavals of 1968.11 Th e period is also marked by the foundation of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, which sought to draw out the theoretical and practical implications of the upheavals of the early 1920s. In 1923 in the Hotel Geraberg near Weimar, Felix Weil and Karl Korsch organized a week-long seminar on Marxism and the workers’ movement attended among others by Lukács and Friedrich Pollock. Th e seminar sparked the interest of those who, like Weil and fellow radical K. A. Gerlach, sought to defend the possi-bilities for social research outside of the frameworks off ered by KPD (German Communist Party) orthodoxy and university academics. On the basis of their private fortunes Weil and Gerlach were able to set up a research institute with broad affi liation to the University of Frankfurt. Weil would have liked Korsch or Lukács to run the institute, but knew too that as active communists and members of the Comintern, they would have aroused the suspicion of the University of Frankfurt authorities. Th e lead-ership of the institute was taken over by Carl Grünberg who, on 22 June 1924, inaugurated what was soon aft er to become known as the Institute for Social Research, whose fi rst members included Pollock, Karl Wittfogel, Leo Löwenthal and Henryk Grossman. A number of those who would later join, such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and Habermas, subsequently became famous as the chief repre-sentatives of the Frankfurt School of critical theory and main contributors to the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research). At the time of its founding the Institute was roughly modelled on the then recently established Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, and much like the latter, sup-ported work on political economy, the history of the workers’ movement and critical sociology. Grünberg suff ered a stroke in 1928, which made the appointment of a new director necessary. A succession crisis ensued which was fi nally resolved when Horkheimer took over in 1931.12

In his inaugural lecture Horkheimer stresses what was to become a recurrent theme in his and Adorno’s versions of critical theory. He suggests


that far from being a purely philosophical matter, the elaboration of a methodology bearing in mind the distinction between emancipatory reason and instrumental rationality requires an interdisciplinary approach. Th e point about reason follows from the more general precept that philo-sophy aft er Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche can only maintain its relevance by articulating its concerns in conjunction with juridical, historical, eco-nomic, political, aesthetic and social questions, lest it become isolated and academic in the worst sense.13 A couple of years later, in ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’ (1933), Horkheimer draws on Dilthey’s incipient post- metaphysics in order to claim that materialism must be re-articulated as historical inquiry and social theory beyond the confi nes of subject-object dialectics. While the subject component of the dialectical couplet inevita-bly gets stuck in the problems of subjective idealism (debates on human psychology and the structure of consciousness that are relatively arbitrary and in any case impossible to adjudicate), the object component tends towards positivist objectivism rather than genuine objectivity. Hence attempts simply to ‘recycle’ Hegel and Marx aft er Lenin and Stalin are inev-itably going to fail. He intimates that dialectics needs to be reconstructed so that critical, non-conformist thought can become realigned with social reality without recourse to the supposed rationality of the actual, the cun-ning of history, or the alleged inevitability of capitalist crisis and proletarian revolution. Th is aim is elaborated in more detail in ‘Traditional and Criti-cal Th eory’.14

Written during one of the darkest periods of modern European history, with Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin fi rmly in power and the Spanish Repub-lic under siege by Franco’s forces, the piece off ers a series of scattered refl ections rather than a coherent statement illuminating the diff erence alluded to in the title. With few exceptions Horkheimer explains what critical theory is not rather than elaborating what it is in positive terms.15 But ‘Traditional and Critical Th eory’ contains in nuce a number of impor-tant themes developed in subsequent years, such as the notion of the structural transformations of the public sphere and legal systems looked at in Chapter 6, as well as the manifest problems inherent in the notion of proposing proletarian collective subjectivity and communism as the obvious and logical answer to the problems raised by bourgeois individu-alist subjectivity and capitalism.16

Th is was not such an easy argument to make during the period in question, when it may have seemed plausible to many that liberal democ-racy inevitably gravitates towards fascism, and that the only alternative to fascist collectivism is thus some form of socialist collectivism. From the


perspective of early critical theory, the Marxism of theorists like Lukács represents a kind of transition from traditional to critical theory rather than the realization of the latter. Marxism is important in that it raises crucial questions about reifi cation, consciousness and knowledge while also stipulating the conditions required for a mode of production that enables the overcoming of scarcity fi nally to shed the caste and class char-acter that has characterized all known economic systems throughout the ages prior to libertarian communism. But with the automatic designation of the proletariat as ‘saviour’, it falls back on a traditional, albeit collectiv-ized notion of subjectivity. In the Stalinist case, for example, the proletariat destroys its enemies; here theory and practice remain caught in archaic, punitive conceptions of justice. Th e inability dialectically to transcend the contradictions of capitalist society, and the concomitant inability to move beyond punitive justice, attest to the reality that a critical theory of society relies on Hegel (dialectics) and Nietzsche (affi rmation rather than Ressenti-ment) as much as it does on Marx (a new relation with external nature). Yet it is also clear to its founders that critical theory cannot possibly hope to overcome the problems of mechanical explanation simply by combining assorted theorists’ and philosophers’ various insights, since the answer to the problems of academic specialization is not sloppy eclecticism. Eclecticism generally off ers little more than an informal idealism in which increased quantity does not manage to become new quality, and as such, remains well within the parameters of traditional theory. In order to move beyond traditional theory, Dilthey’s insistence on the diff erence between the natural sciences and human sciences has to be enriched with historical materialism without transforming the latter into an apology for party power or for the class interests of a universal class, whatever the latter term might designate in actual social terms. In ‘Traditional and Critical Th eory’ this entails thinking history without overreliance on the notion of history as being made by a collective subject (bourgeois humanity, the proletariat, etc.), and yet, retaining the notion that historical objectivity in institutions and classes is mediated by some form of subjectivity in consciousness and experience.17

Horkheimer attempts to theorize transformations in state and society in conjunction with transitions in the structure of reason and knowledge. He seeks to do this outside of the base-superstructure paradigm, due to its highly questionable model of causality, though without relinquishing the idea of causal explanation altogether. As stated above, a part of what this entails is elaborating further the distinction between the natural sciences and the human sciences, but not to stop at that basic distinction. In terms


of their relation with society, the natural sciences as well as the human sciences can be seen as instances of traditional theory which for the most part do not interrogate the socio-economic conditions that structure the production of knowledge, or what those conditions do to the content of that knowledge.18 In some ways reminiscent of the systems theory devel-oped by Niklas Luhmann in the 1960s–90s (looked at in Chapter 6 in relation to Habermas), critical theory insists on the inseparability of the knowledge process from the historical process and the reproduction of social relations. To the extent that the latter continue to be characterized by class exploitation and bureaucratic hierarchy, the resulting knowledge has to be considered fl awed in epistemological terms, and ideologically apolo-getic in political terms. Luhmann’s response is to argue that this is precisely why knowledge is generated by social systems rather than autonomous subjects. He submits that such knowledge is best understood as more or less successful means of coping with social complexity and natural contin-gency rather than the institutionalization of ends in themselves such as reason and autonomy, lest one become embroiled in ultimately unresolva-ble questions about where non-instrumental reason might eventually come from. It is fair to conjecture that Horkheimer and Adorno probably would have regarded Luhmann’s solution as a capitulation to positivism, and in any case, as a defensive retreat from the project of Enlightenment. Th ey suggest that if this project is somehow to be relaunched, the issues of sub-jectivity, experience and knowledge must be reconsidered in opposition to liberal democratic and Marxist accounts of human essence, neither of which, as it turns out, is particularly eff ective in preventing the rise of fascism and Stalinism. Th e point, however, is not to demonize the dicta-tors, nor to glorify would-be potential saviour-subjects. It is rather to see how demonization and glorifi cation are part of the same fl awed subjective methodology which restricts the scope of reason to a tool that can be manipulated in any number of arbitrary ways.19

In order to provide the initial impetus for the move from traditional to critical theory, Horkheimer re-examines the issue of subjectivity in the light of the transition from liberal democracy to authoritarian fascist democracy. Whereas the legal theorist Carl Schmitt became famous in the early 1920s among other things for explaining why one does not under-stand the juridical rule if one does not understand the extra-juridical bases of the exception to the rule, Horkheimer makes the parallel point that there is no correct understanding of society in so-called normal times without a proper analysis of socio-political transition periods.20 Drawing on the work of Institute member Franz Neumann, he analyses the erosion of liberal democratic legality in relation to the appearance of monopoly capitalism.


Whereas liberal democratic explanations of the transition usually have little more to off er than an appeal to return to ‘good common sense’ against the power of demagogues, orthodox Marxists tend to see an automatic correspondence between monopoly power and intensifi ed class disenfranchisement. Both are examples of traditional theory that cannot grasp history as a parallel series of contradictory and plural processes in which constellations of forces and interests form and dissolve in ways that are neither random nor monocausal. While liberals tend to adopt an idealist individualistic standpoint by refusing to see more at work in his-tory than the realization of a generic concept of progress that is found severely wanting when it comes to explaining authoritarian transitions, Marxists oft en opt for simple monocausal explanations which explain every superstructural phenomenon in terms of a change in the economic base. However diff erent they might seem, progress and the base function are all-embracing explanatory categories. As Neumann observes, however, the relation between capital and labour is never direct, but is instead mediated by forms of law and state that undergo changes as humanity’s productive capacity evolves. On this account law is not a simple index of class power, but says something instead about the intersections between forms of experience, property relations, constitutional traditions, national cultural particularities and diff erent possible versions of institutionalized reason.21

Aft er the promising if somewhat obscure start signalled by ‘Traditional and Critical Th eory’, however, by the beginning of the 1940s Horkheimer seems convinced that the prospect of anything more substantively rational than instrumental reason had been lost, or, at any rate, removed from the horizon of real historical experience. Th is pessimism is captured in ‘Rea-son and Self-Preservation’ (1942), which can be regarded as a preparatory study to the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Th e leitmotiv of ‘Reason and Self- Preservation’ is that whatever reason might be in a non-antagonistic, reconciled society, in modern industrial society it is a tool in the struggle for individual and group survival, and remains so even aft er the battle for survival has been won in objective terms. Hence by 1942 the theory of tran-sition alluded to above in relation to Neumann becomes a theory of a missed or absent transition in two senses that indirectly have to do with liberty and legitimacy. Although Horkheimer rarely discusses the issue of legitimacy directly, his (and especially Adorno’s) theories are consistently relevant to the project of reconceptualizing the concept in conjunction with updating the critique of instrumental reason, as will be seen presently.

First, in this stage of his thinking Horkheimer broadly follows Kant by reckoning that if there is human liberty in any meaningful sense, it is


a more rational freedom than the mechanical freedom (propulsion) of falling bodies and the predatory freedom (instinct) of animals. Propulsion and instinct indicate strictly limited forms of freedom and relations with nature which are governed to a considerable extent by necessity. Th e human capacity to transcend necessity in its mechanical and predatory variants is thwarted, however, if the struggle for survival is itself not transformed, in the course of its completion, into a struggle to overcome individual human nature in the Nietzschean sense of self-overcoming later taken up by Foucault (Chapter 5). Th e shift in emphasis and approach to freedom cannot happen if, in its relation with external nature, humanity is divided into antagonistic classes and groups, such that in the course of the battle against scarcity, natural necessity is converted into social power and bureaucratic hierarchy. Th is is the case in Western civilization, at least until now, where the moment of possible self-overcoming announced by Nietzsche and taken up to varying degrees by the left -modernist avant-garde art movements of the fi rst decades of the twentieth century is reversed into a protracted, repetitive process of self-preservation. Th e transforma-tion of life and the creation of new values and knowledge is suppressed for the sake of the preservation of what Benjamin refers to as ‘mere life’, and marginalized by what Marx analyses as the self-legitimating power exercised by the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’. Hence early critical theory intuits a development of great contemporary relevance. In the absence of a revaluation of values and knowledge, the socio-economic institutions presiding over the processes of self-preservation will eventu-ally secrete ideological arguments against self-preservation itself. Th at is, it is easily foreseeable that it will be alleged that people living too long must be considered too expensive for the effi cient functioning of the system of individual and collective reproduction. In short, such longevity clashes with the imperatives of the specifi c form of growth required by the capital-ist mode of production.22

Horkheimer maintains that it is important to understand the dynamics of this blocked quantity-quality passage, for it shows why Hegelian dialec-tics need to be reformulated, especially in the light of the authoritarian turn of the Russian Revolution and the rise of fascism. In stark contrast to Marx’s Hegelian dialectic, according to which capitalism automatically produces the conditions for its own transcendence, Horkheimer observes the undermining of reason’s capacity to indicate the practical steps neces-sary for self-overcoming in terms other than those which reproduce and continually reimpose the epistemological and political strictures of self-preservation. Self-preservation may be achieved at successively higher


levels of growth and technological innovation, or it may falter as the result of economic crisis, but self-preservation must remain the goal of produc-tion within this state-form. As seen in Chapters 1 and 2, the concept state-form implies the legal and political framework of a mode of produc-tion and not simply ‘the economy’ taken in positivist isolation from social and cultural factors. Th e point is that the institutions responsible for the continued functioning of juridical neutrality, negative liberty and formal legality must reject all legal and practical political conditions of self- transformation that are incompatible with capitalist models of growth as impracticable violations of liberty and irrational demands for the realiza-tion of a substantive vision of legitimacy. As Weber observes, in the course of industrialization reason is decoupled from critique and adjusted, now in legal-rational rather than in traditional form, to the mechanical and predatory modalities appropriate to the struggle for survival. For Horkheimer this means that the struggle for survival is in large measure won in terms of what is objectively possible, but the transcendence of necessity in a more political and sociological sense is infi nitely postponed. He intimates that necessity becomes a kind of in-built structural determi-nant of a system that is exempted from rational critique aiming at the Aufh ebung of the system. Th is is because reason itself has been enlisted in the struggle to defeat what this particular form of institutionalized reason actually reinforces – heteronomy and dependence. What sounds illogical or paradoxical, that is, that reason is enlisted to defeat reason, is in reality symptomatic of the fact that the mediations between humanity and nature in the capitalist industrial system may be irrational, but it is nonetheless not permitted to say so. Th ere is no offi cial ban against arguing this: the supposed limits of reason and freedom dictate it. Th e result is that the transition from mechanical and predatory freedom to political freedom and individual self-overcoming hovers as a possibility that is omnipresent but impossible to realize. Within the structural dynamic of systemic expansion, this transforms a promising reality into a threatening reality which eff ectively prevents individual subjects from confronting the real causes of the non-realization of an objective possi bility. As indicated earlier in this chapter, irrationality intensifi es to the extent that the underlying logic seems increasingly to dictate the single strategy necessary in order to increase growth. Th us one witnesses elective affi nities between the proc-esses which tighten the net of social integration, reduce the alternative paths of ‘feasible’ economic development, and suppress individual human nature, on the one hand, with those that engender socially and juridically mediated fear, on the other.23


Th e second missed transition is that from national legitimacy as the mythological unity of common ethnicity and identical origins that is drummed up in diff erent ways over the ages in order to organize the crusade against scarcity, on the one hand, to rational legitimacy that acknowledges the overcoming of scarcity as a precondition of positive freedom and self-overcoming, on the other. It is a missed transition closely bound up with a particular form of reason’s incapacity to indicate a path towards the practical transcendence of scarcity which does not reproduce the rhythms of self-preservation (negative freedom) under duress. As economic growth and the practical application of technical discoveries become ends in themselves and the bases of legitimacy, the nation emerges as the saviour of a common past and future because of its ostensible ability to organize the collective eff ort to survive. It seems to be empowered to do this on the basis of spontaneously transmitted cultural resources which guarantee consensus and unity in the face of international competition for resources and the threat of external military aggression. But as Simmel indicates, by 1900 the cultural spontaneity alluded to has been in large measure taken over by the anonymous and functional spontaneity of money, and as Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer suggest, the nation-state is legally equipped to dispense with liberal democratic versions of law to perform emergency galvanizing functions when and where it is deemed to be necessary, as in times of economic instability, political crisis and security threats. Th at is, where it is possible to enlist reason to defeat reason it is surely possible to employ legality to dismantle the law – a theoretical para-dox becomes a practical tautology. But rather than this being a piece of elitist intellectual peevishness, as it may sometimes seem, Horkheimer and Adorno are really making a stringent dialectical point about the relations between knowledge and society.24

With roots in the past and ambitions for the future, the nation suspends linearity in ways that appear to have been credible and really experienced for large numbers of people since 1789. Th is is a patently ideological tran-scendence, however, since it is usually steeped in racism and militarism. Although Horkheimer does not discuss the issue in such terms, the impli-cation is that whereas legitimacy could become a principle of individual, sensuous-cognitive knowledge (once the project to overcome scarcity has been brought to fruition without homogenizing people), under the pres-sures of the capital-driven growth economy it consistently reverts to a homogenizing principle of nationalist functional order, harnessed in the face of potentially unlimited uncertainties, looming contingencies and possible threats. In the preface to the Dialectic of the Enlightenment,


Horkheimer and Adorno mention that their book was written as the end of the National Socialist regime became apparent, while the contours of the mass society of the post-World War II period, already foreshadowed to some extent by Nazism, slowly became discernible despite all the ashes and ruins that needed to be cleared in 1944–45. Hence by the time of its demise, fascism could be analysed as a transitional phenomenon which, despite its particular barbarity, represents continuity with previous forms of authori-tarian transition and correspondingly blocked instances of libertarian transition. In making this argument Horkheimer and Adorno do not so much abandon Marxism as enrich it with a hermeneutic of non-linear time inspired by Benjamin. Th e base and superstructure model is defi nitively discarded in favour of a plurality of loosely articulated parallel concepts capable of illuminating unsuspected affi nities, that is, such as those uniting negative conceptions of freedom, repressive politics, reason institutional-ized as survival strategy, and authoritarian populist practices of legitimacy. Th ey thus seek to re-articulate paradoxes instead of ordering the respective truth content of each paradox within a conceptual hierarchy that implicitly upholds the social hierarchy that produces dubious conceptual-practical hierarchies to begin with. As will become clear in the next section, negative dialectics can be seen as an instance of critical theory in practice which aspires to think in terms of parallel affi nities and constellations against the conformist tendencies of eclectic intellectual history and standardized academic philosophy.25

Traditional humanist history writing may seek to bracket off the fascist period as a nasty parenthesis in an otherwise peaceful and progressive evolution towards a modern, liberal democratic order. Following Benjamin, the Dialectic of Enlightenment off ers an alternative view of the historical process. But whereas Benjamin writes in a messianic vein about the omni-present possibility of a revolutionary deblocking, Horkheimer and Adorno’s book suggests that the basis of libertarian happiness in the present is its absence rather than its potential. On this account what is real and discerni-ble is not necessarily immediately possible, but nonetheless real rather than imaginary. Th is argument is elaborated in their co-authored book, which regards fascism, like capitalism, as only the most recent chapters in a far more ancient story about instrumental reason.

From Dialectics at a Standstill to Negative Dialectics

In their book Horkheimer and Adorno examine the simultaneous homog-enization and isolation of individuals in the industrial-democratic era,


which is part of a more general irony: Enlightenment, which presents itself as the secular modern movement par excellence, becomes secular mythol-ogy in the course of its unfolding, that is, something more insidious than the straightforwardly mythological. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment the relation between reason and self-preservation diagnosed by Horkheimer in 1942 is seen through the lens of Benjamin’s analysis of law and myth in ‘On the Critique of Violence’ and other writings. Th is enables Horkheimer and Adorno to trace the reign of instrumental reason to a time well before the Industrial Revolution, that is, to an epoch at least as far back as Odysseus’ struggle to resist the song of the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey. From that moment on subjectivity is reduced to strategies for self-preservation (individualism), and objectivity is reduced to subjective objectifi cation of nature and objects (reifi cation).26 It might be said that if Marx off ers a polit-ical economy of reifi cation based on alienated labour, the Dialectic of Enlightenment outlines a genealogy of reifi cation based on alienated nature. While Marx clearly regards the re-appropriation of alienated labour as the condition of a humanized world oriented towards emancipation, Horkheimer and Adorno regard such re-appropriation as the condition of a subjectivized world oriented towards manipulation and distortion. On this reading the commodifi ed version of objectifi cation prevalent in capitalism simply takes over from the successive forms of religious objecti-fi cation which dominated consciousness and society prior to the advent of industrial production. Unlike in times of religious consciousness, however, where humanity still has external reference points in God and nature, in the industrial era subjective objectifi cation is elevated to the organizing principle and measure of all reality. It is central to Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument that the subjectifi cation of reality does not make the social and historical world more intelligible to human subjects. On the contrary, the more human subjects invest things and relations with their own fears, and, in a commodity economy, manipulated desires, the less they are able to recognize their own thoughts and impulses in the institutions that govern their lives. Under these conditions they become the plaything of alien forces and acutely susceptible to the appeals of dictators. However, just as critical theory attempts to theorize the historical events of the twentieth century in terms of institutionalized identity thinking rather than in journalistic or empirical terms as an analysis of the personalities of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, it also seeks to explain the reality of dictators in terms of objective spirit rather than individual psychology. Hence the question is: how does the quest for enlightened autonomy and freedom backfi re into the reality of radical heteronomy and domination?


Th e analysis of Odysseus attempts to illustrate why the transition to a humanized world that is sensitive to need and fosters creativity is repeat-edly missed because the species never really abandons its initial sense of shock and fear in the face of natural scarcity and arbitrariness. In principle, a given level in the development of the productive forces should make a shift from rationalized quantity to rational quality objectively possible. In practice, however, humanity only gains some measure of autonomy from natural caprice by neglecting its mimetic faculty in favour of increas-ingly advanced forms of rationalization. Th is is catastrophic for Horkheimer and Adorno, since it is mimesis of nature that reconciles humanity and nature. Th e key to freedom and legitimacy is reconciliation based on each indivi dual’s unique mimetic relation with nature rather than emancipation from nature based on a generic concept of formal reason which degener-ates in actual practice into what they refer to as ratio, that is, instrumental rationality institutionalized in legal universality prior to the realization of the socio-economic conditions that could make a more than ideological practice of universality possible in everyday life. At least in theory, in mimesis every person has the chance to overcome their dependence on nature, in their own way, without subjugating the nature in them. Th e implication is that freedom is not a natural right nor an acquired privilege, but rather the result of a rational mediation between humanity and nature that respects the simultaneously collective and individual dimensions of non-instrumental mediation. Institutionalized instrumental rationality, by contrast, isolates as it homogenizes; it juridifi es without redeeming the juridico-political promise to transcend mechanical and predatory free-dom. It thus produces a grotesque excess of standardized thinking and widespread social control which is accepted by most people in ways that look like spontaneous democratic consensus. In the twentieth century this occurs fi rst as tragedy, then as farce: the racist authoritarian militarism of fascism is followed by the benign authoritarianism implicit in the indus-trial production of cultural goods, that is, what Horkheimer and Adorno refer to as ‘the culture industry’.27

Th e Enlightenment exaltation of human powers over nature culminates in Marx’s exhortation that humanity re-appropriates its alienated essence from God, the state and capital. In his eyes the aim of the revolution is not a party dictatorship, but rather the humanization of the world through emancipated forms of labour that create a society where humans recognize their best qualities in the relations they collectively shape with other humans, and where they recognize their aesthetic values in the objects that surround them. If for Kant humanity creates the epistemological


conditions of its autonomy in consciousness by ordering the chaos of nature in concepts and categories, for Marx it creates the political condi-tions of its autonomy by ordering the chaos of nature through labour and collective social action. If queried on the subject, Marx might be inclined to say that Kant’s Enlightenment thinking is in many ways correct once liberated from its liberal framework just as, in a parallel vein, productive abundance is desirable once liberated from its exploitative framework. But by the time one reaches the twentieth century, Horkheimer and Adorno submit, the synthesis between humanity and nature that in theory is per-formed by Kant’s concepts and then by Marx’s social labour is taken over in successive stages in practice by competing fi rms and thereaft er by monop-olies, that is, by money and capital. Th at synthesis is inevitably ideological and potentially totalitarian. Th e implication is that whatever inalienable legal rights they may have according to the constitutions of modern nation-states, individuals become completely fungible and useful only insofar as they can keep the wheels of the corporate world and the culture industry turning. Th is condition makes them dispensable or worse, as Adorno argues later in Negative Dialectics. Th e general line of refl ection that unites the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia with Negative Dialectics is that where humans have become fungible they can be herded into con-centration camps shortly thereaft er. Just as it is sometimes the case that the hollowing out of democracy by fear and conformism is not obvious until it is too late to save democratic institutions, and the transition from liberal to authoritarian democracy happens in countless but barely visible ways, the concentration camp may seem to appear out of nowhere, but it does not. If Benjamin indicates how it may be possible to see ruins before the build-ings in question have actually been destroyed, Adorno suggests that one can perceive the conditions for the possibility of the camp in seemingly banal aspects of commodifi ed mass culture and even in the apparently harmless methodological fl aws of well-intentioned and in many respects brilliant philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, not to mention Lukács and Heidegger.28

One of the aims of Negative Dialectics is to subject Kant, Hegel and Heidegger to a rigorous analytical critique. In the discussions of these thinkers developed in the book Adorno does not speculate about the possible political consequences of philosophical positions. He attempts instead to examine the relation between fl awed forms of thought and oppressive social structure, bearing in mind that any supposed unmedi-ated link between these would amount to little more than an untenable form of recycled idealism. Th e critique of Kant, Hegel and Heidegger serves


as a framework for developing his own ideas on the possibility of a kind of post-idealism which does not abandon idealism’s original goal of outlining the bases of human freedom. Adorno combines his ideas on mimesis, reconciliation and the critique of instrumental reason, and arrives at a theory of mediated non-identity. He formulates the idea in opposition to two distinct and dominant ways of philosophizing from the Enlightenment to his present. In the fi rst instance his thought engages with the postulated mediated unity between humanity and nature found in Kant and Hegel. In the second he investigates the problems with what he takes to be Heidegger’s unmediated non-identity of humanity and being. Negative Dialectics thus interrogates the conditions under which mediation and non-identity might coexist in a non-oppressive constellation, bearing in mind that an easy synthesis of Kant and Hegel on mediation and Heidegger on non-identity would be insuffi ciently dialectical. Th is allows Adorno to bring together concerns that go back to his earliest discussions with Horkheimer in the 1920s, and to articulate these ideas in the light of the sustained critique of ideology and technological society that accompanies his work into the 1960s. In order to trace briefl y this trajectory and elucidate Adorno’s position in Negative Dialectics, it will be necessary to provide a few addi-tional words about the idealism of Kant and Hegel. While the remainder of this chapter will focus on Adorno’s concept of mediated non-identity, Heidegger’s thought will be analysed in the next chapter. Although oft en juxtaposed as implacable philosophical and political enemies, each in their own way agrees that instrumental reason is a theoretical and political obstacle to real thinking.29

In his essay on Lukács titled ‘Erpresste Versöhnung’, usually translated in English as ‘Reconciliation under Duress’, Adorno criticizes Lukács’ attempt to identify the conditions of a reconciled world as already being present in the collective subjectivity of the modern industrial proletariat. Although Adorno does not use the term ‘reconciliation under duress’ in his book Hegel: Th ree Studies of 1963, it is probably fair to say that Adorno regards Hegel’s theory of the modern state as one of many instances where a phi-losopher unwittingly serves the interests of power by identifying the conditions of a reconciled world as already being present. In Hegel’s case it is of course not the presence of the modern industrial proletariat, but rather the institutions of the modern state that testify to the rationality of the real. In the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right Hegel explains that in its historically evolving relations with nature, humanity moves from unmedi-ated unity with nature (in a hypothetical distant past) to mediated disunity, marked by confl ict and mutual misunderstanding, and from there to


mediated unity with nature. Th e fi nal result of this rational process is the reconciliation (not identity) of humanity and nature, subject and object, and the reconciliation of individuals and the state. In time, Hegel suggests, collective (European) humanity is able to apprehend reality as a rational process, and the individual members of (European) humanity are able to accept the modern state as the condition of a rational will. Hence Hegel maintains that there is an intimate relation between what one might call the state’s reconciling rationality and its legitimacy.30

From Adorno’s perspective, and however much he endorses Marx’s analysis of capitalism, it is clear to him that Lukács’ Marxist theory of the unity of theory and practice in the proletariat constitutes a signifi cant regress with respect to Hegel. Th is is because Hegel already moves philoso-phy and social theory beyond the subjectivism of Lukács (collective subjectivity of the proletariat) and Heidegger (collective subjectivity and destiny of Das Volk31) by demonstrating that all subjectivity is mediated by law and the other objectivations of spirit that assume institutional form in the family, civil society and the state. Hegel’s theory of the mediated unity of humanity and nature takes shape as a series of interrogations concern-ing what he considers to be the insuffi ciently dialectical character of Kant’s critical philosophy. As seen in Chapter 1, Kant insists that there can be no pure, unmediated objectivity, since all objectivity is mediated by human subjectivity in the guise of the two forms of sensible intuition (time and space) and the 12 categories of the understanding. At the same time, Kant maintains, there can be no pure, unmediated unity between citizens and the state that is not metaphysical and authoritarian. Hegel counters that political authority need not be either Kantian and formal, on the one hand, or metaphysical and authoritarian, on the other. For Hegel, Kant’s great achievement is that he shows that all objectivity is mediated by subjectivity. But Hegel takes this dialectical argument considerably further by demon-strating that all subjectivity is historically created, superseded and recreated as a result of the developing conditions of objectivity as these assume changing forms in ever new socio-economic and political institutions. Th e latter produce qualitatively new, more perfectly knowing subjects at every stage of the historical process and its inexorable march towards more perfect forms of knowledge and freedom. Hence Hegel wishes to over-come the epistemological limits of Kantianism, according to which mediated unity stops with the barrier between the phenomena and the things in themselves, while also overcoming the political limits of Kantian-ism, according to which mediated unity is formal and narrowly juridical, that is, it is a tenuous unity that cannot really reconcile citizens and the


state. Hegel sets out to do this in the Philosophy of Right, in which he develops a theory of mediated unity based on his conceptions of ethical life and objective spirit.

In Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Th eory, and some of his lectures, Adorno intimates that although Hegel’s critique of Kant is convincing in a number of ways, it is nonetheless the case that Hegel’s mediated unity turns out to be, in the thoroughly administered society of late capitalism and ubiqui-tous exchange of falsely measured equivalents, mediated identity, that is, institutionalized identity thinking. For Adorno, real freedom lies with the institutionalization of mediated non-identity rather than with the institu-tionalization of mediated unity. Th e term mediated non-identity refers to anticipated forms of reconciliation between humanity/nature and citizens/state that are no longer achieved under duress, as they are in diff erent ways and to varying extents in Kant, Hegel, Lukács and Heidegger. Adorno’s reconciliation would be achieved instead through mediating instances – including the right kind of law – that recognize that each person is an instance of human, historicized nature, or rather, that there is no human nature as such, but as many human natures as there are human beings.32 An epistemologically and politically legitimate political order would somehow have to respect this pluralism without breaking down into chaos. But it would be genuinely plural and no longer based on multiple varieties of the same manufacturing brands or the electoral tactics of competing parties in their bid for offi cially recognized power. Adorno suggests that contrary to the pluralism and institutionalized freedom which Hegel claims to be the hallmark of the modern state, what one really is confronted with in advanced industrial democracies is a competitive, antagonistic variety of the same commodities and parties rather than authentic diff erence.33

Adorno’s idea of mediated non-identity as reconciliation can be contrasted with Hegel’s notion of nationally rooted ethical life and recogni-tion that is radicalized in completely diff erent directions by Lukács and Heidegger. Th is somewhat subtle but decisive diff erence between histori-cized dialectics/ontology and negative dialectics is indicative of their related yet distinct approaches to theorizing epistemological questions in conjunction with socio-economic, ethical and political questions. Th is point also clarifi es the observation that whereas Marx off ers a political economy of reifi cation based on alienated labour, Adorno outlines a gene-alogy of reifi cation based on alienated nature. What distinguishes Adorno’s alienated nature from a romantic notion of natural origins or a liberal theory of natural rights is his consistent reminder that he is analysing the history of the changing forms of human alienation from nature. If Marx’s


solution to the problem focuses on the re-appropriation of alienated essence, Adorno intimates that reifi cation is as much about forgetting certain histories as it is about exploitation and projection. Following Benjamin, Adorno seeks to recover what is real but not actual (non-punitive justice, non-instrumental reason) rather than to reclaim what is actual but not directly visible (species being, surplus value). As such Adorno is more attuned than Marx and other theorists to the epistemological and political problems posed by linear conceptions of time, and less inclined to explain social relations in terms of false consciousness.34

Corresponding to the diff erence between nationally rooted historicized dialectics and negative dialectics is the fact that while Hegel writes in collective terms focusing on law, the state and reason, Adorno speaks more in post-liberal individual terms focusing on aesthetics and knowledge. Nonetheless, it can be argued that Hegel’s state and Adorno’s aesthetic utopia both describe a form of reconciliation that might be characterized as legitimate and realized on the basis of thought and experience, rather than merely hegemonic and legitimized through lawful order. For both thinkers, legitimacy contains a marked rational and epistemological dimen-sion that goes well beyond the usual categories of interest aggregation and power sharing. But while Hegel stresses the importance of recognition through individual struggle, as in the now famous pages in the Phenome-nology on the master/slave dialectic, or recognition through national self-affi rmation, as in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Adorno is more interested in the rational content of aesthetic and other forms of indi-vidual experience, and in the ways in which experience and knowledge explode the epistemological boundaries of concepts and the hierarchical social boundaries of antagonistically constituted subjectivity.35

If for Hegel reason becomes objectively realized in institutions when people recognize something of themselves in the seemingly opposed wills of other people, that is, through love, property, and various instances of collective deliberation, negative dialectics is far more sceptical about the extent to which more than non-instrumental reason actually permeates existing institutions. As a methodology negative dialectics evokes a form of reason that at present is only discernible in terms of its manifest absence from actually existing institutions. Th is might be described in terms of an affi rmative impulse that illuminates unsuspected ways of living and know-ing rather than a defensive strategy derivative of struggles for survival or the imperious affi rmation of collective autonomy, that is, of sovereignty. Th e point here is that however much Hegel moves epistemology and social theory beyond Kant without making some of the errors evident in Lukács,


Hegel’s philosophy remains indebted to the logic of capitalist forms of exchange and antagonistic forms of recognition. Th is should not be sur-prising, Adorno submits, since Hegel and Kant are ultimately bourgeois philosophers who say something true about a world that is false. Th eir thinking off ers a non-apologetic conceptualization of life and knowledge in an era in which the bourgeoisie revolutionizes the mode of production while overturning existing modes of consciousness.36

Th is raises two questions. Why exactly, for Adorno, does mediated unity in practice tend not to resemble Hegel’s harmonious vision of pluralistic diversity within elastic unity in the modern state, but tends instead to take institutional shape as mediated identity, that is, as coerced reconciliation and forced integration of individual natures in the name of economic effi ciency and authoritarian order? And why does Adorno nonetheless wish to retain the reliance on dialectics and the mediations characteristic of idealism instead of opting for some notion of pre-theoretical, ‘authentic’ knowledge? To the fi rst question there is an obvious and less obvious answer. Th e obvious answer to the fi rst question is that Hegel’s theory about the rationality of objective spirit is very convincing until history runs off course, so to speak, and indeed, the events of the twentieth century com-pelled Adorno, Arendt (next chapter) and many others to refl ect on the ways in which history had obviously ceased ‘automatically’ to produce richer forms of knowledge and freedom, and, in a parallel development, Enlightenment reason had evolved towards industrial and technological rationalization. From Adorno’s standpoint, the twentieth century world is not a rational world of enlightened, rational individuals, nor is it a world of legitimate, democratic states. It is rather a world in which individuals perish in concentration camps according to a rationalized plan that reduces them to Exemplare (specimens or samples). Th at is, in the disenchanted, rationalized world – as opposed to the rational world – the victims are not really individual human beings. Th ey are more like commodifi ed samples or generic types condemned to removal and elimination. In his Notes on Beckett’s Endgame he presents a more nuanced analysis of this phenome-non than the one off ered in Negative Dialectics, though he comes to basically similar conclusions.37

Adorno of course does not accuse Hegel of complicity in genocide. But he does have a serious objection, which is part of the less obvious answer to the fi rst question above. Although Hegel points the way beyond the voluntarist subjectivism of thinkers like Fichte, Lukács and Heidegger, he is nonetheless a philosopher of coerced reconciliation and an advocate, in the Phenomenology (paragraphs 20 and 23, to name but two of many


examples) and elsewhere, of the notion that the whole is real, and that subject (rather than Aristotle and Spinoza’s substance) is the absolute.38 Th at is, a partial explanation as to why pluralist mediated unity in theory leads to authoritarian, mediated identity in practice can be located in Hegel’s idealist version of identity thinking, which posits the ultimate identity of A and non-A. Th is is another example of a philosopher using the dialectical method to say something true about a world that is unrec-onciled, antagonistic and false precisely because historically realized dialectics help engender social processes that suppress rather than preserve what is not identical to conceptual thought – at least to date. What one detects in Adorno’s late thinking is an unusual confl uence of the philo-sophical ideas of Kant and the sociological ideas of Lukács, that is, the ideas of thinkers he is usually very critical of, against Hegel’s affi rmation of the actual as the already existing rational. In positing a discrepancy between the phenomena and the things in themselves, Kant concedes that there are limits to conceptual thought which can only be overcome by epistemologi-cal (theory) and juridical (practice) violence. Despite the many problems with his account of collective subjectivity, Lukács has the great merit of indicating why the discrepancy in question has much to do with class structure and the division of labour. Another way of saying this is that the Kantian barrier between the phenomena and the things in themselves is social and historical rather than natural and inevitable. Th e same socio-economic and historical critique of the ‘natural’ limits of knowledge also applies to the idea of ‘natural’ inequality and foreordained hierarchy.39 Adorno suggests that our relationships with nature and objects, and, by extension, between theory and practice, could be radically modifi ed by combining the insights of Kant and Lukács without forcibly collectivizing the eff ort to get to the things in themselves, or precipitating into decision-ist, ‘direct’ action. Th is is a question of constellational dialectics and rational mediations rather than a project aiming at the realization of some form of unmediated and ultimately coerced unity, or, for that matter, what amounts to something similar in more recognizably political terms, some form of extra-legal legitimacy such as National Socialism or Stalinism.

Th e problems with coerced unity and extra-legal legitimacy do not signal the inevitable victory of the liberal forms of legitimacy upheld by Kant (and by extension, Rawls). If this was the case, there would be little to distinguish Adorno’s thought from the liberal democratic humanism that collapsed in the face of National Socialism and Stalinism. But the problems with extra-legal legitimacy do indeed signal that caution and care are required in the critique of liberal democratic legal form, just as, it might be


added, a certain degree of nuance is required in the critique of traditional aesthetic form. Th e task of negative dialectics is to somehow rescue the moment of truth in the non-identical, that is, what is both indicated by as well as excluded by the general concept, and thus illuminate something about a world that is not true and also not false in any categorically unme-diated sense, but what one might call a ‘reconciled reality in absence’. Th e institutionalization of this moment of sensuous, mimetic reconciliation, however diffi cult and even utopian, off ers the key to a possible transition from damaged life (scarcity and unaccountable power as arbitrary fate) to genuine life (individual spontaneity and non-ideological freedom) that is mentioned at the outset of this chapter. What might institutionalization mean in this context, if not the legally mediated reconciliation of humanity and nature? Th is could be the key to salvaging Benjamin’s critique of violence without endorsing his messianic eschatology, and at the same time initiating the transition from premature legitimation to timely reconcilia-tion and real legitimacy.40

Th is leads to the second question raised above concerning the reasons why Adorno wants to retain mediations and dialectics despite his misgi-vings about Hegel’s objective idealism, which affi rms the actual as rational, and Kant’s formal idealism, which to many readers appears to defend a narrowly juridical conception of human essence that never discloses what that essence might be.41 Hegel and Kant are practitioners of thinking as mastery, which for Adorno is a defi ning feature of antagonistic subjectivity. Th e institutional corollaries of antagonistic subjectivity are oppressive states based on the idea of naturally national unity which is likely to foment racism not because people are naturally racist or stupid, but rather because, in terms reminiscent of Hegel’s objective spirit, they have been juridically constituted and socialized as such. On a negative dialectical reading, legally sanctioned racism and other forms of oppression can be analysed as the result of fl awed mediations between humanity and nature. Th ese are instances of instrumental mediation that perpetuate scarcity ethics and individual and collective self-preservation against the objective possibility of post-scarcity ethics and self-overcoming. It is therefore plausible to argue that Adorno retains mediations and dialectics, and, by extension, some kind of legal framework – however radically reformed beyond liberal democracy and state socialism – because he sees that post-scarcity ethics and self-overcoming are not matters of wilful self-assertion or existential commitment, but require the appropriate juridical organization for their realization. Once this has been demonstrated with analytical rigour, the analytical rigour underpinning the constellation of juridical neutrality,


negative liberty, formal law and instrumental reason looks decidedly less analytical. On the basis of this somewhat unorthodox interpretation of critical theory, it is possible to study the actual functioning of punitive and regulatory forms of law in practice, and observe these epistemologically and sociologically fl awed mediations at work as they marginalize and exploit at the same time that they homogenize and integrate without real consensus or agreement.

As will be suggested below by way of conclusion to this chapter and then seen in detail in Chapter 6, this point about agreement and consensus is a key aspect of Habermas’ critique of instrumental reason and his own post-idealist theory of communication. While Kant maintains that the mediated unity of subject/object and citizen/state is achieved in conscious-ness and law, Hegel sees the mediated unity of these in ethical life and Geist. Marx of course regards these syntheses to be operative in the labour proc-ess. However botched and authoritarian it is under capitalism, Marx argues, capitalism nonetheless represents a decisive step beyond feudal-agrarian society on the way to libertarian communism. In Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Th eory, and other writings, Adorno elaborates a method for analysing the non-reconciliation of humanity and nature in existing insti-tutions, while hinting, with care and nuance, at what genuine reconciliation might look like on the basis of a reconciled reality in absence. He wants to retain Kant and Hegel’s emphasis on mediations and dialectics, while jetti-soning the models of consciousness and antagonistic subjectivity that the idealists bequeath, albeit in very diff erent ways, to Marx, Lukács and Heidegger. Although extremely sceptical about existing forms of knowl-edge, and highly sensitive to the links between fl awed forms of knowledge and oppressive social structure, Adorno does not want to give up on knowledge and positive freedom, nor does he want to put his faith in the intervention of some form of blood-sparing, divine justice. Instead, he remains committed to critical theory’s original aims which are, in an extended and qualifi ed sense, also part of the aims of the Enlightenment. If Kant asks, ‘under what conditions is knowledge possible?’, Adorno asks, ‘under what conditions is non-instrumental reason possible?’42

Th e tentative beginnings of an answer can be found by reading Kant and Hegel together through the prism of negative dialectics. Th is is done by combining the Hegelian notion of Aufh ebung with the Kantian question just raised. Non-instrumental reason is possible in a society in which antagonistic subjectivity and reason as strategy have been aufgehoben in the realized transition from instrumental to substantive reason, or, in keeping with the methodology of the Phenomenology, in the transition


from quantity to quality. Contrary to what Hegel, Lukács and others sug-gest, however, history will not automatically produce that transition, nor will it mechanically beget a collective subject that can. Kant’s emphasis on the reality of the forms of human knowledge is as important to the project as Hegel’s emphasis on institutions. Adorno breaks with the idealists in that he attempts to move beyond anything resembling a traditional epistemo-logical subject. He does this in an eff ort to envisage forms of community based on mediated non-identity distinct from the mediated unity of the idealists and Marxists and distinct too from what he considers to be the non-mediated non-identity espoused by the theorists of fundamental ontology and existentialism. In Negative Dialectics he remarks that utopia is perhaps best conceived of as a knowledge utopia in which it is paradoxi-cally possible to make use of concepts to attain access to non-conceptual, sensuous, mimetic knowledge.43 Th e discussion in the previous pages of this chapter indicates that there is a juridical-political corollary to this utopian epistemological principle, which is not discussed in any detail by Adorno, but is implicit in much of what he says. It is the idea of legitimacy institutionalized as realized knowledge rather than as the organizing principle of a rule-based, rationalized functional order. In this context knowledge is spontaneous, cerebral-sensuous (in accordance with Nietzsche and Foucault’s vision of the emerging post-human against the entrenched self-preservation refl exes of the all too human), individual as well as collective (like legality and legitimacy), and informal yet systematic (like Adorno’s philosophy generally).

Knowledge of this kind is unthinkable in abstraction from politics and the societies in which humans live and think. Th is is one reason why Adorno’s thinking is social and political – at least by implication – despite his own emphasis on philosophy and aesthetics. His critics might claim that like Horkheimer and Benjamin, Adorno is a philosopher without political relevance, or that what is remotely relevant, that is, the idea of mediated non-identity as a form of non-instrumental communication, is aufgehoben in Habermas’ theories of communicative action and discourse ethics. Indeed, for many observers Habermas probably appears to be the ideal choice beyond Hegel’s historical reason, which, it may be demon-strated, has a critical defi cit, and Adorno’s aesthetic reason, which undoubtedly has a practical defi cit. It is also plausible to say that with his ideas on communicative action, universal speech pragmatics and the life-world/system distinction, Habermas has concrete proposals on how to institutionalize the communicative dimension of mediated non-identity: as long as there is mediation there is the possibility of communicative


knowledge, and as long as what is communicated is non-identical and diff erent from person to person, all standpoints are included in a radically democratic way. Habermas insists that under these conditions consensus and agreement with signifi cant epistemological content can have a decisive impact on the formulation of legitimate law. Th ese issues will be taken up in Chapter 6 and the conclusion of this book. Without wishing to antici-pate those arguments in any detail here, it might be mentioned that to situate Habermas in a political space beyond the normative abstraction of Kant and Rawls, on the one hand, and outside of the implicit non-norma-tivity of Hegel and Luhmann, on the other, has become a widely accepted standard position for the considerable number of mainstream theorists seeking a position free from moral abstraction and normative silence. Hence a concluding remark on Adorno and the isolation of critical thought referred to in the opening pages of this chapter is in order.

It might be asked if Adorno’s concepts of reality in absence and mediated non-identity amount to anything more than a hermeneutical transposition of the idea of the Kantian noumenon and Hegel’s mediated unity. Accord-ing to this line of criticism it could be argued that in opposition to juridical reason and metaphysical legality, Adorno off ers aesthetic knowledge and metaphysical legitimacy, and that metaphysical legitimacy is only better than extra-legal legitimacy, that is, coerced reconciliation, in the sense that it is not demonstrably complicit with authoritarian regimes. Th e price for this innocence is of course isolation and a large degree of political irrele-vance.44 Th ere are a number of things to say about this. Th e fi rst is Benjamin’s point that legal forms of legitimacy such as liberal democracy are mired in coerced reconciliation to a far greater degree than is generally acknowl-edged by liberal democratic states, to say nothing of their police, army, security and intelligence apparatuses and the staggering costs required to maintain their operations. Th e second is that Adorno continually stresses the epistemological primacy of the object, the sensuality of cognition and the historicity of nature. In other words, he is fully aware of the limits of idealism, and his philosophy gropes for and reaches out to the post-metaphysical. Dialectical post-metaphysical thought acknowledges and acts on what one might call the reality of mediation and form against the brutality and banality of realized essence. Th e critique of liberalism that endorses realized essence or eventually falls back on oppressive formalism tends to legitimate what it sets out to critique. Th ere is more than a little political relevance to the idea implicit in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno that a legitimate form of law would be distinctly more postmetaphysical and more enlightened than the (apparently dwindling) varieties of legal legitimacy.


Endnotes

1. Habermas, Th eorie des kommunikativen Handelns (I): Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaft liche Rationalisierung (Th e Th eory of Communicative Action), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1981, chapters 1–4; and Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Th e Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1985, chapter 5.

2. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufk lärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Th e Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York, Social Studies Association, 1944), Frankfurt, Fischer, 1995, pp. 21–3. Here as elsewhere, Horkheimer and Adorno follow Benjamin, for whom progress is an ideological concept, and ‘every document of culture is also a document of barbarism’. See Benjamin, ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ (‘Th eses on the Philosophy of History’), in Illuminationen, theses 7, 11 and 13. Th e link between Benjamin and Adorno is particularly clear if one compares Benjamin’s ‘Th eses’ with the closing pages of Adorno’s Minima Moralia, in which Adorno elaborates his nine ‘Th eses against Occultism’. See Adorno, Minima Moralia: Refl exionen aus dem bechädigten Leben (Minima Moralia, 1951, written during and immediately aft er World War II), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1997, pp. 321–9.

3. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufk lärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Th e Dialectic of Enlightenment), pp. 139–42. Th is is one of the few places where they note the similarity between their approach and that of Tocqueville (1805–59), author of Democracy in America (1835).

4. Readers of the previous chapter will judge whether or not the theses sketched in ‘Th e Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ off er a more promising line of enquiry than Lukács’ steadfast defense of realism. Critics of both thinkers are likely to insist that one does not properly theorize the social by ‘sociologizing’ (avant-garde or traditional) literary paradigms, and that while uncompromising originality is important in aesthetics, it is dogmatic and authoritarian in politics. To this it might be replied that a political reality governed by the institutionalization of instrumental reason and arbitrary performance principles is neither liberal nor democratic, that is, that it is dogmatic and authoritarian in its own way. Th is issue will be taken up in Chapter 6.

5. Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 122–4. Th ere will be more to say about hope later on in the chapter, since, following Benjamin, hope is real and distinct from wishful thinking and, according to Benjamin and Adorno, what is real cannot be extinguished no matter how remote and tenuous its basis in the present seems to have become.

6. Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken (Post-Metaphysical Th inking), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1992, pp. 232–3; Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics), p. 400; and Adorno, Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1959 Lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, edited by Rolf Tiedeman), Suhrkamp, 1995, pp. 305–21. For an insightful review of those lectures which puts a number of Adorno’s most important ideas on idealism in perspective, see Chris Th ornhill, ‘Adorno Reading Kant’, in Studies in Social and Political Th ought, 12 (2006), pp. 98–110.

7. Critical theory can be understood in a number of ways and embraces many distinct theoretical currents. Th is chapter will focus on the critical theory elaborated by the fi rst generation of Frankfurt School theorists, and within the Frankfurt School, on Horkheimer and especially Adorno. Readers interested in a more general account of critical theory which


nonetheless maintains the Frankfurt School as focus should see David Held, Introduction to Critical Th eory: Horkheimer to Habermas, London, Hutchinson, 1980; Raymond Geuss, Th e Idea of a Critical Th eory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981; Joan Always, Critical Th eory and Political Possibilities: Conceptions of Emancipatory Politics in the Works of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas, Boston, Greenwood Press, 1995; Diana Coole, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism, London, Routledge, 2000; and Darrow Schecter, Th e History of the Left from Marx to the Present: Th eoretical Perspectives, New York and London, Continuum, 2007, chapter 3.

8. Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 333–4. Th is raises a crucial point in the overall argu-ment concerning the relation between hope as a materialist and dialectical principle, on the one hand, and the critiques of instrumental reason, instrumental legitimacy and linear time, on the other, which will be taken up in the conclusion. Th e expository chapters of this book which lead up to that discussion bring in aspects of the concluding argument where possi-ble and relevant without, it is hoped, unnecessary distortion of theorists’ ideas.

9. See Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 42, where he remarks that ‘Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen’ (last line of aphorism 18).

10. Horkheimer, ‘Philosophie als Kulturkritik’ (1960), in Werner Brede (ed.), Max Horkheimer: Sozialphilosophische Studien, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1972, pp. 90–108; and Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel: Aspekte Erfahrungsgehalt Skoteinos, oder Wie zu lesen sei (Th ree Studies of Hegel), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1963.

11. Lukács, Lenin, pp. 523, 580–1; and Jérome Duwa, 1968, année surréaliste: Cuba, Prague, Paris, Paris, l’imec, 2008. For those unfamiliar with the main aims of the movement, Situationism can be described as the attempt to merge left -modernist avant-garde aesthetics with Marxism beyond social democracy and Marxist-Leninism. For a brief history of the movement see Schecter, Th e History of the Left from Marx to the Present, chapter 5.

12. Rolf Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule: Geschichte, theoretische Entwicklung, politische Bedeutung (Th e Frankfurt School, available from the MIT Press in English transla-tion), Munich, DTV, 1988, pp. 25–51. Wiggershaus’ book is a great source of historical information and theoretical analysis.

13. Horkheimer, ‘Die gegenwärtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts für Sozialforschung’ (‘Th e Contemporary Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research’, 1931), in Werner Brede (ed.), Max Horkheimer: Sozialphilosophische Studien, pp. 33–46; Willen van Reijen, Horkheimer zur Einführung, Hamburg, Junius, 1982, p. 11; and Alfred Schmidt, ‘Frühe Dokumente der kritischen Th eorie’, in Kritische Th eorie, Humanismus, Aufk lärung: Philosophische Arbeiten, 1969–1979, Stuttgart, Reclam, 1981, pp. 21–3.

14. Horkheimer, ‘Materialismus und Metaphysik’ (‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, 1933) originally in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, now in Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (eds), Traditionelle und kritische Th eorie: Fünf Aufsätze, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1995, pp. 7–42.

15. An exception to this general tendency appears when Horkheimer explains that critical theory attempts to emancipate humanity from natural scarcity without condemning it to social slavery, and that the most promising areas of research for this project are not to be sought in positivism, idealism or other instances of traditional theory. See ‘Traditionelle


und Kritische Th eorie’ (‘Traditional and Critical Th eory’, 1937), in Traditionelle und kritische Th eorie: Fünf Aufsätze, pp. 247–8.

16. Although Horkheimer does not make explicit reference to Franz Neumann in the essay, it is clear that his refl ections on the transition from rational law to rationalized decrees is infl uenced by the work of Franz Neumann, author of ‘Der Funktionswandel des Gesetzes im Recht der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft ’ (‘Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society’, 1937), in Herbert Marcuse (ed.), Franz Neumann, Demokratischer und autoritärer Staat, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1986, pp. 31–81. Th is is particularly evident on pages 251–2 of Horkheimer’s piece.

17. ‘Traditionelle und Kritische Th eorie’ (‘Traditional and Critical Th eory’, 1937), in Traditionelle und kritische Th eorie: Fünf Aufsätze, p. 259. Hence in contrast to Heidegger (Chapter 4), who distinguishes between the ontic subject of history and the ontological Dasein of historicity, and Adorno, who insists on the primacy of the object, Horkheimer tries to reconceptualize subjectivity. Over time Horkheimer became increasingly sceptical about the role of Marxism in this project, and turned instead to Schopenhauer.

18. In addition to the infl uence of Dilthey one senses the impact of Karl Mannheim’s (1893–1947) sociology of knowledge on the formulation of this argument. Th ere can be little doubt that some of Mannheim’s main ideas guided the protagonists of early critical theory in their attempts to analyse the social bases of knowledge. See Rolf Wiggershaus, Die Franfurter Schule, pp. 251–3.

19. Luhmann, Soziale Systeme (Social Systems), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1984, chapters 5, 11–12; Horkheimer, ‘Traditionelle und Kritische Th eorie’ (‘Traditional and Critical Th eory’, 1937), in Traditionelle und kritische Th eorie: Fünf Aufsätze, pp. 208–14. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie: Studien über Husserl und die phänomenologischen Antino-mien (Against Epistemology, written in 1934–37 as visiting professor in Oxford), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1970, chapter 4.

20. Carl Schmitt, Politische Th eologie (Political Th eology, 1922), Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1996, p. 3.

21. Neumann, ‘Der Funktionswandel des Gesetzes im Recht der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft ’ (‘Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society’, 1937), pp. 39–45; and ‘Zum Begriff der politischen Freiheit’ (‘On the Concept of Political Freedom’, 1953), pp. 107–13, in Herbert Marcuse (ed.), Franz Neumann, Demokratischer und autoritärer Staat; and Horkheimer, ‘Traditionelle und Kritische Th eorie’ (‘Traditional and Critical Th eory’, 1937), pp. 247–8. For a comprehensive account of the role of legal theory within early critical theory, see William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: Th e Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1994.

22. Horkheimer, ‘Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung’ (‘Reason and Self-Preservation’, 1942), in Traditionelle und kritische Th eorie, pp. 273–7; Benjamin, ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’ (‘On the Critique of Violence’, 1921), in Angelus Novus, p. 65. It will be seen in Chapter 6 why Habermas contests and eventually abandons Horkheimer’s thesis and rejects Foucault’s anal-yses. He does this by claiming that modern societies develop diff erentiated learning capacities in which the technical, cognitive and emancipatory dimensions of learning and adaptation must be distinguished. Hence for the author of the Th eory of Communicative Action and the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, the discrepancy between consistent levels of


technological innovation and erratic levels of political freedom can be addressed as a life-world/system problem related to communication defi cits. He sees this as the most fruit-ful way to rescue the project of Enlightenment from diff erent strands of Nietzscheanism, which he equates with irrationalism and/or renegade versions of the philosophy of consciousness.

23. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), pp. 353–7; and Horkheimer, ‘Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung’ (‘Reason and Self-Preservation’, 1942), in Traditionelle und kritische Th eorie, pp. 282, 287. It is striking how relevant this analysis con-tinues to be in a post-Cold War world. Th e end of the war seemed to open up the possibility of more fl exible socio-economic and political arrangements than those ostensibly required in the face of military confl ict. Yet with the onslaught of neo-liberal global capitalism, the range of possible alternatives seems to have narrowed considerably rather than expanded.

24. It is a point that clearly situates them much closer to Kafk a and Benjamin than to Spengler and Schmitt. See the chapters on Spengler and Kafk a in Adorno, Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Prisms), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1976, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Horkheimer, ‘Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung’ (‘Reason and Self-Preservation’, 1942), in Traditionelle und kritische Th eorie, pp. 280–3 and 295–301; Adorno, Neumann, ‘Der Funktionswandel des Gesetzes im Recht der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft ’ (‘Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society’, 1937), pp. 39–45; Kirchheimer, ‘Bermerkungen zu Carl Schmitts Legalität und Legitimität’ (‘Remarks on Carl Schmitt’s Legality and Legitimacy’, 1933) as well as ‘Strukturwandel des politischen Kompromisses’ (‘Th e Struc-tural Transformation of Political Compromise’, 1941), in Wolfgang Luthardt (ed.), Otto Kirchheimer: Von der Weimarer Republik zum Faschismus: Die Aufl ösung der demokratischen Rechtsordnung (Otto Kirchheimer: From the Weimar Republic to Fascism), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1976, pp. 113–51 and 213–45. Th ese and other essays by Neumann and Kirchheimer are contained in William S. Scheuerman (ed.), Th e Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays by Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, Berkeley, University of Califor-nia Press, 1996. For an analysis of the links between the dismantling of legal norms and the so-called war on terror, see Verena Erlenbusch, ‘A Biopolitical Investigation of Terrorism: Foucault and Beyond’, D. Phil. at the University of Sussex, forthcoming.

25. Horkheimer, ‘Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung’ (‘Reason and Self-Preservation’, 1942), in Traditionelle und kritische Th eorie, pp. 280–3, 295–301; and Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufk lärung (Th e Dialectic of Enlightenment), pp. 1–7. While the ‘Reason and Self-Preservation’ essay is contained in the German edition of Traditional and Critical Th e-ory cited in this chapter, part I of Horkheimer, Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft (On the Critique of Instrumental Reason), Frankfurt, Fischer, 1985, contains essays written on the basis of lectures given at Columbia University in New York in 1944. Th e writings in this companion volume round out Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason in the period leading up to the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

26. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufk lärung (Th e Dialectic of Enlightenment), second excursus; and Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 321–3.

27. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufk lärung (Th e Dialectic of Enlightenment), pp. 36–9, 64–5, 128–76, 233–7; Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 122–4, 197. Th e ambiguity of


these books’ central argument is captured in this apparent standoff between the possibility of utopian legitimacy (Minima Moralia, pp. 120–34; Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 233–7) and the real human need to employ some form of instrumental rationality in order not to be completely dependent on external nature. Habermas argues that the scope of instrumen-tal rationality can be confi ned to an extent that, leaving aside the utopianism, at least provides a stable framework for liberal democratic legitimacy. Th at argument will be evalu-ated in Chapter 6.

28. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufk lärung (Th e Dialectic of Enlightenment), pp. 94–6, 132, 149–74; Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 88–9, 120–32, 321–34; Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics), pp. 354–8. Much of this would admittedly seem extreme were it not for some of the actual facts and events of twentieth-century history, the prelude to which is analysed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

29. A correct assessment of the contrasts and parallels between the thought of Adorno and Heidegger is not easy due to the fact that despite Adorno’s sustained critique of Heidegger in Ontologie und Dialektik (Ontology and Dialectics, lectures from 1960–61, Suhrkamp, 2002) and Negative Dialectics, and the more shrill tones invoked against him in Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (Th e Jargon of Authenticity, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1964), there are some real convergences in their respective critiques of instrumental reason and modern industrial society. Not a great deal has been said about these convergences in the English literature on Adorno’s critical theory and Heidegger’s ontology. English readers will fi nd some very useful information on the subject of their similarities and diff erences in the forthcoming translation of Stefan Müller-Doohm’s Adorno: Eine Biographie (Adorno: A Biography, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2003). Th ere are also very good discussions in Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge, Polity, 1998; and Alex Th omson: Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed, Continuum, 2006.

30. Adorno, ‘Erpresste Versöhnung’ (‘Reconciliation under Duress’, 1958), in Noten zur Literatur (Notes on Literature), sixth edition, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1981, pp. 251–80; and Drei Studien zu Hegel (Hegel: Th ree Studies), pp. 102–4. It might be mentioned in this con-text that Adorno does not criticize Hegel for his Euro-centrism, and indeed, it could be plausibly maintained that Adorno shares a number of these prejudices.

31. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1993, paragraph 74, pp. 382–7. Th ere is a fair amount of controversy as to whether the notion of a (clearly nationalist) Schicksalsgemeinschaft (‘community of fate’) evoked in Being and Time and the writings up until the late 1920s is later abandoned aft er the ontological Kehre (turn) of Heidegger’s writings of the late 1930s and the post-World War II period. Th e latter writings acknowledge Being and Time to be an incomplete fragment and a failure to reground metaphysical transcendence by way of an analysis of Dasein’s being in the world. Th e consequence he draws from this failure is the radical incongruity between existential humanist positions and ontological realities. On this basis it might be argued that he abjures his belief in nationalist politics or any politics steeped in the will to power (see Chapter 4).

32. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics), pp. 303–7. Th ere are clear parallels between these pages on Kant and Hegel in Negative Dialectics and the analysis off ered on page 203 of Ästhetische Th eorie (Aesthetic Th eory, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1970, available in


English from Continuum), where Adorno talks about the relation between aesthetic reason and utopia. See too pages 333–5 and 396–7 of that work, as well as J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, chapter 7; and Deborah Cook, ‘From the Actual to the Possible: Nonidentity Th inking’, in Constellations, 12 (2005), pp. 21–2.

33. One might incline to the view that this is a fairly crass form of ‘sociologized idealism’ rather than sociological analysis per se. Yet if one considers the contemporary political landscape in Europe and North America, where all the mainstream parties currently con-verge with more or less similar plans to manage a growth-oriented economy with slightly diff ering ideas on very modest levels of redistribution, it is clear that however rudimentary, Adorno’s sociological vision is not without some resonance.

34. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics), pp. 303–7; and Adorno, ‘Gesellschaft ’ (‘Society’, 1965), in Soziologische Schrift en I (Sociological Writings I), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1972, pp. 9–19. Hence it is not precise to say that Adorno is a philosopher of consciousness as such. It is perhaps more accurate to say that he is a theorist of aesthetics and society interested in the (possibly utopian) conditions under which non-antagonistic knowledge and non-instrumental reason might be operative in practice rather than merely discernible in absence. Th e prefi xes ‘non’ in the text with reference to justice and reason can be understood in negative dialectical terms as a hermeneutic of absent mediations, and can be compared with Heidegger’s affi rmation of Nichts (nothingness) as a hermeneutic of abso-lute origins. Th ese epistemological positions point towards potential juridical and political implications that are revealing in terms of Adorno and Heidegger’s respective political projects.

35. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, delivered in 1822–23 and 1830–31), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1986 in its entirety, and especially part 4; and Adorno, Ästhetische Th eorie (Aesthetic Th eory), pp. 201–2. See too Deborah Cook, ‘Adorno, Ideology and Ideology Critique’, in Philosophy and Social Criticism, 27 (2001), pp. 2–5, 10–12.

36. Adorno, Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik (Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 1965–66), pp. 25–32, 227–37; and Adorno, Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 1959), pp. 307–20, 411.

37. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics), p. 355; and Adorno, ‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen’ (‘Notes on Beckett’s Endgame’), in Noten zur Literatur (Notes on Literature), pp. 281–321.

38. Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Th e Philosophy of Spirit, 1807), pp. 20–5; Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics), pp. 311–14; Adorno, Philosophische Termi-nologie (Philosophical Terminology, lectures in the years 1962–63), volume II, pp. 126–9; and Adorno, Ästhetische Th eorie (Aesthetic Th eory), pp. 523–33.

39. In his lectures, books and essays Adorno stresses that this tendency to naturalize epistemological limits as well as socio-economic and juridical hierarchies is foreshadowed by Kant’s reduction of sensible intuition to the passive registering of time and space and the mechanical operations of the categories. For a very illuminating discussion of this issue see Jarvis, Adorno, pp. 179–84 and 203–11.


40. Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Th e Philosophy of Spirit, 1807), p. 19; Adorno, chapter 1 of Adorno, Eingriff e: Neun kritische Modelle (Interventions, 1963), Frankfurt Suhrkamp, 1963; and Adorno, ‘Zu Subjekt und Objekt’ (‘On Subject and Object’) and ‘Marginalien zu Th eorie und Praxis’ (Marginal Notes on Th eory and Practice’), in Stichworte: Krtitische Modelle II (Key Terms II), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1969, available in English in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds), Th e Frankfurt School Reader, London, Continuum, 1982. Readers of German will fi nd a great deal of interesting material on the possibility of institutionalizing reconciliation (as opposed to recognition) from the stand-point of Adorno and critical theory in Iring Fetscher and Alfred Schmidt (eds), Emanzipation als Versöhnung: Zu Adornos Kritik der Warentausch-Gesellschaft and Perspektiven der Trans-formation, Ljubljana, Neue Kritik, 2002.

41. For a discussion of this issue in Kant, Simmel and Freud, see Darrow Schecter, ‘Liberalisms and the Limits of Knowledge and Freedom: On the Epistemological and Social Bases of Negative Liberty’, in the History of European Ideas, 33 (2007), pp. 195–211.

42. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics), pp. 311–24; Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik (Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 1965–66), p. 41; and Jan Weyand, Adorno’s kritische Th eorie des Subjekts, Lüneburg, Zu Klampen, 2001, pp. 57–61. Th e further question which he does not ask, but which will be of great interest in the discussion of Habermas in Chapter 6, is the following: how might non-instrumental reason reform exist-ing forms of legal rationality, and what are the implications in terms of the possibility of a theory and practice of non-instrumental legitimacy?

43. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics), p. 21.44. Similarly dismissive remarks might be made in reference to Derrida’s idea of

a politics of friendship. For a convincing demonstration of the political relevance of such a politics and of deconstruction generally, see Alex Th omson, Deconstruction and Democracy: Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, London, Continuum, 2005. Alex Th omson has also written an excellent introduction to Adorno titled Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed, London, Continuum, 2006.

114

4The Ontological and Republican Critiques:

Heidegger and Arendt

It was suggested in the discussion of Hegel and Adorno towards the end of the previous chapter that there is a theoretical affi nity between socio-historical dialectics and the juridical structure of the modern state, which is perhaps most confi dently expressed in the Philosophy of Right, and that this affi nity is related to the possibility of knowledge-bearing mediation in philosophy as well as rational representation in politics. Th is can be elabo-rated as follows: dialectics proceeds according to the principle that the relation between humanity and nature is neither one of complete identity nor of absolute separation. If it was based on identity, knowledge would be redundant, since there would be nothing external to humanity to know; if it was based on separation, knowledge would be impossible, since there would be no way to mediate between humanity (knower) and nature (known) in order to establish a sound foundation for knowledge. Th e com-plication, as Hegel and Adorno signal, is that humanity is part of nature while not reducible to it. Th is implies that there are limits to what knowl-edge can know, as Kant had already indicated. But it also implies that there is a great deal at stake in epistemological and political terms, depending on how these limits are explained. As regards epistemology, it makes a great diff erence if the limits are explained as permanent shortfalls in a human faculty oft en referred to as consciousness or the understanding, or if the limits are explained in socio-economic and historical terms as having much more to do with the division of labour and power relations in society, as Lukács argues. As regards politics, the term mediated unity indicates that if there was identity between citizens and the state, government and repre-sentation would be redundant, since there would be nothing external to the

Ontological Critiques: Heidegger and Arendt 115

citizenry to represent. If there was complete separation between citizens and the state, government and representation would be impossible, since government would exist on its own without society, that is, there would not really be a state or government of anything. In sum one might say that for many dialectical thinkers, law and the state mediate between knowledge as abstract philosophy/theory, on the one hand, and freedom as concrete politics/practice, on the other. Comparing Kant and Lukács, for example, it becomes clear that there are clear affi nities between the limits of knowl-edge and the necessity of negative freedom in the former. For the latter the theoretical limits of knowledge can be overcome at the same time that a more substantive, positive form of liberty is potentially realized in com-munism. Although these thinkers diverge on many issues, they share fundamental assumptions about the mediating possibilities of reason and the emancipatory potential of humanism.

In Chapter 3 it is seen that Adorno argues that the real, if only fl eetingly actual relation that obtains between humanity and nature in epistemology, art and politics is mediated non-identity rather than as mediated unity. Medi-ated non-identity is hence a position at the outer fringe of dialectical and juridical thinking, and is, as a corollary, uncertain about the status of human-ism and reason. By contrast, in the course of his evolution as a thinker, Martin Heidegger arrives at the conclusion that any and all attempts to explain reality as a relation between humanity and nature – to whatever degree the human and the natural are argued to be mediated by law, labour, history or society – are metaphysical. Th e implications are wide-ranging in epistemological, juridical and political terms. In a sense Heidegger off ers a non-dialectical response to the phenomena diagnosed in the Marxist critiques of instrumen-tal reason, alienation, mass society and reifi cation. It is a response which he at times articulates as the possibility of proximity to origins and authentic exist-ence. He suggests that the project to alter the structure of mediations should be jettisoned for a project that he reckons is closer to the beginning of philos-ophy and at the same time nearer to what may be coming in its place. Th is chapter explores Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics and the cri-tique of instrumental reason it implies, and looks too at Hannah Arendt’s attempts to make Heidegger’s critiques of metaphysics and instrumental rea-son fruitful for a new understanding and practice of politics.

From Philosophy, Epistemology and Objectivity to Thinking and Ontology

Heidegger submits that modern epistemology from Descartes to Kant abandons the Greek and to a lesser extent medieval concern with being, in


order to focus on the conditions of the possibility of objective knowledge.1 However diff erent the approach may be, depending on the philosopher in question, the answer to this question about objectivity is bound up with the existence of a reliable subject of knowledge and a foundation one might designate as subjectivity. Hence subjectivity, rather than being or substance, acts as the foundation of reason, objectivity, and what can be known. Th is tendency reaches a pinnacle in Hegel’s discovery of a subject that is also an object, that is, a subject for whom knowledge is self-knowledge, the corol-lary of which is the ultimate identity of A and non-A. Th ere will be more to say about this identity below, since Heidegger is keen to point out that in Hegel’s idealism, absolute knowledge is founded on the metalogical unity of identity and diff erence. One of Heidegger’s central arguments is that meta-physical knowledge emerges on the basis of the assumption of a fundamental (mediated or not) unity that makes subsequent forms of diff erence possi-ble.2 Th ese diff erences are then arranged in various kinds of classifi catory schemes and academic disciplines which tend to obscure the initial assump-tion of fundamental unity and to leave it unquestioned. By contrast, thinking is theory-praxis that thinks the ontological non-identity of identity and diff erence, that is, thinking happens or can happen as a result of a funda-mental diff erence between being (Sein) and beings (Seienden) that makes understanding possible. In other words, if unity makes knowledge and objectivity possible, diff erence allows understanding to emerge. Part of his argument is that while one can attain knowledge and objectivity without really thinking, there is no understanding without thought. He insists that one must therefore distinguish between the objectivity that is made possi-ble by the operations of a subject, where the term operations denotes something somewhat arbitrary and instrumental, and the understanding that can occur if the series of initial assumptions about unity can be sus-pended or, to use a term closer to the later Heidegger’s project of Destruktion, deconstructed.3

Within a metaphysical framework knowledge is. For Heidegger beings are, too, in the sense that they exist, but their being is not exhausted in their beingness as things, nature and humanity. Th e fi rst in a series of further paradoxes raised by this approach is that being does not be, as such. Th e beingness of beings is given by being, such that being gives or renders possible rather than ‘is’. Th is is expressed in the German es gibt (‘it gives’), which corresponds to, but is slightly diff erent from the French il y a and the English ‘there is’.4 Heidegger’s line of deconstructive questioning leads him to argue that the place of humanity in the understanding of being is misunderstood if humanity is thought of as a subject that knows an object,


where that object either is, and is known within its phenomenological limits (because it cannot be known in its essence as a thing in itself), or simply does not exist and cannot be known at all. Th e reasons why will become clear below. For now one might say that the error typical of meta-physical thinking is to misconstrue humanity as an object-knowing subject within a mediated subject-object totality, which leads to the parallel error of considering ‘nothing’ to be non-existent precisely because it is not an object (the condition of non-existence is in this case satisfi ed as a result of it being ‘no-thing’). Consequently, Heidegger maintains, breaking out of metaphysics entails moving beyond the dialectics of subjectivity and objec-tivity, which in turn demands questioning the roles of humanity, history and reason as the primary instances mediating the subjective and objective dimensions of reality. Humanity and reason can only play this imperious epistemological role if reality is exhausted in humanity-nature and subject-object relations, that is, at the exclusion of being from consideration. Heidegger regards a great deal of what is usually referred to as reason as manipulative and ultimately metaphysical in the precise sense that it relates to the ‘meta’ of the physical rather than the ‘extra’ of the physical. He views metaphysical (non-)thinking as a tautological operation that in a fi rst step assumes the unity of presence, and in a second step magnifi es the presence of presence instead of explaining it or remembering that presence was not always present in the way it happens to be present now. Moreover, it is non-thinking that cannot think of the now of the present as fundamentally diff erent from the past now of yesterday and the future now of tomorrow. It is inherent in such calculation that it can only conceive of truth as presence and what Heidegger designates as ready to hand or present to hand usefulness.5

Consequently, metaphysics thinks the metaphysical as a greater physi-cal, as the metasubject of subjectivity, much in a manner analogous to the way in which the Christian tradition in the West thinks the divine as the suprahuman, and, in a related vein, has a tendency to regard what is bigger (cathedrals, skyscrapers) as somehow more real and important than what is smaller, and therefore also somehow closer to what is transcendent.6 Th is line of argument does not explain the origins and conditions of existence of the metaphysical. By contrast, ontological thinking is paradoxical rather than tautological. Th is distinction between tautological humanist meta-physics and ontological paradoxical understanding may become clearer with a few explanatory words on Hegel, Heidegger and Adorno. Aft er that it will be possible to develop the issues just raised by way of introduction in a bit more detail.7


Heidegger asserts that although Hegel’s idealism is metaphysical, his philosophy does have the virtue of not making humanity the subject of absolute knowledge. Geist operates the mediated unity of humanity and nature in absolute knowledge, and Geist, in knowing itself, eventually knows (in the course of history) that there is not anything outside of itself to know (Hegel’s Geist understands that there is nothing to know in the unusual positive sense alluded to above). Marx and especially Lukács attempt to overturn Hegel’s idealist epistemology by making Hegel’s subject of absolute knowledge and the state into a revolutionary subject of productive knowledge and human society. Th us if Fichte and Schelling expand on the subjective dimension of the Hegelian dialectic, Marx and Lukács try to develop the objective dimension. In so doing, the latter seek to respond to Hegel with materialism and a more resolutely immanent approach to epistemology than Hegel seems able to provide. Th e phe-nomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), which is of fundamental importance for understanding Heidegger, endeavours to establish the bases of a non-Marxist immanence intended to lead from the unknowable ‘thing in itself ’ to the things as they show themselves to human consciousness.8

For Husserl it is not as if there is a form behind which an essence is concealed, or that there is an appearance behind which the thing in itself is hiding. Th e forms and appearances of objects are the essential characteris-tics of those things; what really matters is the way they appear to us and the way they have meaning for us. Instead of asking whether a thing is there or not there, or if it is in the mind of a subject or in nature as an object, Husserl examines how the thing is there in its immediate givenness. Heidegger’s originality consists among other things in being able to see the implications of Husserl’s project to overcome the separation of knowing from what is known, and to think about the potential consequences in con-junction with an acute hermeneutical sensitivity to meaning. Th e fact that it is philosophically untenable to separate knower and known informs Heidegger’s understanding of the hermeneutic circle, and provides him with what he considers to be non-reifi ed evidence for the claim that pre-theoretical knowledge is an ontological reality with precedence over juridical anthropology’s supposition of the primacy of theory over prac-tice. If as humans we have pre-theoretical knowledge, we do not have to ask how we know if something represents an increment in knowledge without already knowing what knowledge is. By extension, we do not need theory or law to frame our understanding of politics or practice. Heidegger, some-what like Lukács, seeks to radicalize Hegel’s idealist overcoming of logical dichotomies such as presence/absence, subject/object, being/nothingness,


and perhaps most importantly for Heidegger, identity/diff erence. In other words for Heidegger, Hegel is really the fi rst post-Platonic thinker to (re)discover that nothing is something and that knowledge is not exhausted in a reifi ed relation between humanity and nature that grinds to a halt before the ‘thing in itself ’ and nothing. For Adorno, somewhat like Heidegger, the task of thinking aft er Hegel is not so much the materialist inversion of consummated idealism, since simply to inverse what is fl awed is an insuffi ciently dialectical response to the fl aw at hand. It consists instead in the possibility of thinking without positing an historically engendered mediated identity between humanity and nature. To summarize a complex issue for the sake of brevity, it could be said that whereas Adorno articu-lates hermeneutical concerns in relation to dialectics, Heidegger articulates phenomenological concerns in relation to hermeneutics. Th is may be one reason why their philosophies seem sometimes practically to converge, and at other times radically to diverge.9

Hegel, as what one might call a ‘strong’ juridical thinker in the sense alluded to at the start of this chapter, relies on dialectics and mediations to show how a subject knows an object. Th e mediated unity of subject and the object in knowledge is not possible without Geist, and the state, rather than the law in Kant’s more restricted sense, is the condition of an individual rational will. Adorno, as what one could call a ‘weak’ juridical thinker, relies on negative dialectics to do this. For the latter the mediated non-identity of subject and object is not even potentially knowable without thinking the priority of the object against the background of anticipated reconciliation in epistemology and politics. By comparison, one could describe Heidegger as an anti-juridical thinker of legitimacy who, at least at the juncture marked by Being and Time, modifi es the customary usage of concepts such as care, authenticity and Angst to explain how Dasein, as distinct from a traditional epistemological subject, understands an event, where the under-standing of the event and the event itself are not possible without being.10 Th is chapter is not directly concerned with an Adorno-Heidegger compar-ison as such. It is nonetheless illuminating for a discussion of Heidegger and Arendt to point out that the critique of identity thinking initiated by Heidegger and Adorno, which is an integral dimension of their respective critiques of instrumental reason, is far from exhausted as far as political implications go. Heidegger distinguishes between epistemological subjects knowing objects without thinking the being of their beingness, and Dasein thinking that diff erence ontologically. Adorno insists that there is a diff erence between thinking and more or less successful modes of adapta-tion to social norms and structures. Th at diff erence is also a historical and


libertarian diff erence for Adorno that is not thinkable in isolation from the repressive socio-economic, political and juridical institutions which make the diff erence between thought and mere adaptation apparent, just as they implicitly point to the diff erence between formal legality and lived legiti-macy. Despite Adorno’s objections to Hegel discussed at the end of the previous chapter, Adorno remains a theorist of objective spirit who sees that it is undialectical to separate the political potential of present institu-tions from their currently repressive character, which is part of the reason why the diffi culties of acceding to legitimate ethical life are not solved with an extra dose of ahistorical, abstract morality. Th e utopian but nonetheless sociologically grounded task is to analyse how such potential is under-mined by authoritarian legal intervention (in the sense of re-forming things in order to manipulate them and make them stay the same, as exemplifi ed by the use of public money to bail out the banks in October 2008 and thereaft er), without giving up on the potential of libertarian juridical form. To do the latter is to retreat into isolation and various forms of passive con-solation. Th us to close this parenthesis until the conclusion of this book, one could say that post-identity thinking tends to be post-nation-state-juridical thinking. It raises the possibility of social-juridical thinking and reality beyond the boundaries of the nation-state within which state-jurid-ical, foundational thought is articulated and legislated.11 Th e later Heidegger and Adorno can be seen as harbingers of post-national thinking which is not blithe cosmopolitanism compatible with global capitalism and disci-plinary governance. Th e analysis leading up to this stage of the argument in this book indicates that state-juridical thought never really gets beyond the antagonistic dialectics of individual negative liberty and collective pop-ulist-functional legitimacy. If the discussion at the end of the previous chapter is convincing, it should be clear that it does not manage to do this even in its most sophisticated and complex articulation in the writings of Hegel. At least by implication, it may be argued, social-juridical thought stands in opposition to the authoritarian foundation of centralized power, and tends to deconstruct identity in the philosophical as well as in the more commonly used sociological usage of the term.12

Heidegger’s point is that contrary to what much idealist epistemological theory implies, the philosophical and practical task of humanity is not to know phenomena in time and space by using the fi xed categories of the understanding in order to unify itself refl exively with reason. It is rather to understand them as they really are in the being of their beingness, which is to understand them in their particularity and temporality. Uniqueness in this sense is particularly evident in works of art.13 If knowledge of objects is


allowed to take epistemological and political precedence over the understanding of events, then reason, in the guises of science, logic and philosophy, simply becomes a tool in the mastery of humanity over things, nature, and by extension, of humanity itself. Although understanding beyond reason is facilitated by the fact that what understands and what is understood are neither separate nor the same but rather in the world together, as Husserl observes, understanding can also go astray if it ignores the reality that being makes understanding possible in the fi rst place. If humanity posits itself as an object-knowing subject, it ends up positing the object in a way that forgets that they are both in the world together, and that the world is the condition of the phenomenological appearance of subjects and objects. When this happens understanding gets shipwrecked, so to speak, at the level of beings in their thingness (als Seiendes), or if one prefers, at the level of the metaphysical, and forgets to think the historical and absolute particularity of beings in their individual being (Sein). Under-standing that is open to the event of historical being and particularity of space then degenerates into classifi catory knowledge fi xed in linear time without regard for the uniqueness of place, that is, it takes an epistemologi-cal step behind theoretical territory already staked out by Dilthey.14

In this case the event of being is either misunderstood or simply over-looked, such that there is nothing to distinguish one place from another apart from the size of its population. In modern industrial societies, forget-fulness of being (Seinsvergessenheit) is visible in the marked tendency to ‘employ’ metaphysical epistemology in the service of technological ‘solu-tions’ to the ‘problems’ accompanying human life. By forgetting being, metaphysics as civilization, as distinct from mere epistemology, devolves epistemological, political and cultural priority to the collectivized human subject that mistakes the projections of subjectivity for objectivity. Objec-tivity is then taken for truth.15 For Heidegger, truth is not a property of traditional epistemological subjects or even of Dasein, however, but of being only. Th is matter is complicated by the fact that the afore-mentioned their in relation to nature, ordinary objects and works of art is qualitatively diff erent than the their of Dasein, though this diff erence must be thought ontologically as a dimension of being and not as an essential trait of human-ity. In what follows it will be shown why Heidegger rejects subjectivity in favour of Dasein, and explained in further detail why, in the wake of the qualifi ed failure of Being and Time, he rejects metaphysics and philosophy in favour of what he calls thinking. Th ere is not enough space to enter into an exegetical discussion of Being and Time in this chapter. Th is work has already been undertaken by Th eodore Kisiel and a great many others.16


It is nonetheless important for the argument here to note that the impasses reached in Being and Time prepare the way for Heidegger’s later attempts to deconstruct forms of knowledge that emerge on the basis of the assump-tion of a unity that makes subsequent forms of diff erence and prematurely assumed transcendence possible. It is his hope that in the process of this deconstruction, a clearing is opened up that illuminates the ontological non-identity of identity and diff erence that makes understanding possible. Arendt’s critique of sovereign power and the confusion of politics with the fabrication of authoritarian collective wills is barely conceivable without this Heideggerian background.

Heidegger proceeds by arguing that the main thing that a subject can know is an objectifi ed extension of itself, which is not really knowledge as much as it is psychological insight into the workings of the self and the modalities of sensual and intellectual cognition, that is, of rational con-sciousness. Reason can be very useful in classifying the fi ndings of such research, and indeed, in the 1946 Letter on Humanism Heidegger says that one can regard the subject, without a great deal of consequence, as either homo humanus or as animal rationale.17 He at times suggests that while reason turned inwards furnishes the bases of psychological knowledge, reason directed externally gives us mastery of the things around us. Hence it is no accident that the civilization that sets great store by psy-chology and therapy is also one which strives for ever increasing levels of technical innovation and control. In institutional and cultural terms, the combined eff ect of psychological introspection and external projection towards military and scientifi c conquest results in a technologized version of the will to power that threatens the planet with war and ulti-mately with destruction. But in view of its situation of being ‘thrown into the world’ (geworfen, Geworfenheit), the subject may come to understand itself in non-foundational terms as Dasein and open itself to the possibil-ity of letting being be (even though being does not ‘be’ in any straightforward sense of the ‘is’ of presence). Such understanding is nei-ther psychological nor technological or even rational. He develops these ideas on technology and psychology in a more systematic manner aft er Being and Time, however.18

In Being and Time Heidegger broadly follows the mainstream of Western philosophy by positing three distinct moments or levels of reality. Th ese can be broadly denoted as need, existence and transcendence, which Heidegger adapts to his own philosophy up to 1927 with the notions of thing-being (das Seiende), ‘being there’ (Dasein, his anwer to subjectivity) and being (das Sein). As Oliver Jahraus observes, the argument in Being


and Time appears to founder in those moments in the text where Heidegger suggests that contrary to what may have been his original intentions when he set out to write the book, one cannot demonstrate that it is possible, by way of the intermediary of Dasein, to posit the mediated unity of humanity and being.19 He sets out to show that the ontological question of being is an even more fundamental question than the question concerning the mediated unity of humanity and nature.20 Th at particular, pre-ontological (what Heidegger sometimes refers to as ontic) knowledge of the objectivity of objects is demonstrated in German idealism. Idealism off ers a rigorous argument in this regard if one bears in mind that the validity of the argu-ment is also greatly limited by the fact that (1) such knowledge is objective knowledge known by an object-knowing subject, that is, it is in some crucial sense tautological, (2) mediated unity stops at the barrier of the thing in itself for Kant and (3) the key for an ontological bursting of the nature-humanity paradigm is provided by Hegel’s discovery that nothing is something that is not ‘a thing.21

At various junctures of his analytical argument he indicates an aware-ness of the possibility that the transcendence of Dasein in das Sein is based on their presupposed unity, that is, it is based on the notion that being ‘is’. Th e confi rmation of this possibility as reality would challenge the anti-juridical thrust of the exposition, since if das Sein represents the universally mediated transcendence of individual Dasein, it must do so in a manner that is truly universal and valid for everybody. Yet for Heidegger this would amount to a relapse from ontological Dasein to metaphysical subjectivity and natural rights: if one presupposes that being ‘is’, one remains trapped within the parameters defi ned by tautology (1), which stipulates that objec-tive knowledge is known by an object-knowing subject, and defi ned as well by tautology (2), which presupposes a dialectical and rational subject-object unity that can be represented in epistemological terms as objectivity, and which can be represented in political terms as the mediated unity of citizens and the state via democratic government and rational law.22 Th is reiterates the point made at the outset of this chapter concerning the theo-retical affi nity between socio-historical dialectics and the juridical structure of the modern state. Heidegger eff ectively deconstructs the metaphysical foundations of subject and state when articulated as pillars of a legal form of legitimacy. Th is is why there are various possible political readings of Heidegger, but no plausible liberal democratic one. Moreover, he feels com-pelled to develop the deconstructive line of argument in a direction that takes him away from philosophy towards Seinsdenken, which one might translate as the thinking of being. Th is move constitutes the defi nitive


abandoning of metaphysics and the thereby initiated Kehre or fundamental ontological turn in his work.

In positing a movement from das Seiende to das Sein via Dasein, one implicitly accepts an upward trajectory from need and existence to tran-scendence, where the upward movement of the trajectory assumes the starting-point of necessity that is subsequently overcome through the right means or an automatic mechanism. In the fi ft h chapter of the second section of Being and Time, Heidegger intimates that it is not analytically rigorous enough to proceed according to the assumption that freedom presupposes necessity, and to deduce supposedly ascending forms of free-dom in relation to necessity such as mechanical (need/necessity, family), predatory (existence, civil society) and humanist-political (transcendence, state). Dasein, as distinct from traditional subjectivity, is itself already transcendence. But it is not a liberal democratic legal transcendence founded on natural rights or supposedly innate capacities which are then used to make major economic and political assumptions. Dasein is already transcendence for reasons related to the being together in the world of knower and known in a phenomenological-hermeneutical rather than ide-alist-metaphysical sense.23 It is observed in the section on Benjamin in Chapter 2 that the liberal democratic (non-)answer to the phenomenon of the hermeneutic circle is to argue that liberals know what the precondi-tions of liberty are for all of humanity from a perspective that is already emancipated from illegitimate political intrusion into a naturally legitimate private sphere of interpersonal interaction and socio-economic exchange, and that it is from this supposedly already emancipated position that the diff erence between legitimate law enforcement and illegitimate abuse of law is discernible. Th is is the liberty of a subject that knows the precondi-tions of liberty from the perspective of the necessity of protection from intrusion. Heidegger might be inclined to see this form of fl awed herme-neutics as the political corollary to the epistemological tendency to deduce diff erences from an underlying unity. Like the meta (rather than the extra) of the metaphysical, this particular kind of liberty is based on metasubjec-tive or metapersonal rather than authentic liberty from necessity, or what Arendt calls genuinely political liberty. For her such liberty is pluralist and entails a supraindividual and yet not collectivized dimension, as will be seen in the second half of this chapter. It fi rst remains to explain the diff er-ence in the two senses of already above.24

Like other political conceptions which seek to ground legitimacy in knowledge rather than on the basis of mere obedience or tradition, the liberal democratic model needs some kind of response to the temporal


dimension of political obligation. It has to establish when the founding of the state took place, and why it did so under conditions that should earn its universal recognition as valid. In so far it is compelled to confront the inappropriateness of a linear concept of time for the purpose of explaining the grounds of legitimacy and obligation, since that moment is theoretical rather than historical. Hence it somehow has to concede the inadequacy of a linear-temporal account while maintaining the priority of theoretical/hypothetical over historical-temporal explanation. However concealed in its premises and implied consequences, therefore, the liberal democratic model of legal legitimacy is underpinned by a political hermeneutic of time. Yet because it is committed to thinking diff erence on the basis of underlying unity, it cannot break out of the strictures of linearity. It tends, on the contrary, to posit (1) a natural time before political time, which it variously does in terms of birth and the state of nature or original posi-tion, followed by (2) the admittedly fi ctitious and unanimous agreeing to the so-called social contract, followed in turn by (3) the return of a natural time aft er political time (death). Th ere is thus time before time and time aft er time. One could say that this is a tautological non-explanation of time. Th e model posits a homogeneous time of theoretically identical units rather than a political or historical time of rupture and actual new begin-nings, or, in Simmel’s terms, it posits a model of time that has not been denaturalized. If time is understood as a series of identical units stored in a metaphorical hourglass, the past becomes accessible by turning the hourglass over to reverse the fl ow of units. According to the postulate that there is time before time and time aft er time, the past is an earlier version of the present that becomes smaller as we move away from it, and the future is the present to come that gets bigger as it approaches. Th e model cannot dispense with either the hourglass that holds all the units together, or the homogeneity of the units within. Knowledge is acquired by an implicitly natural subject regarding natural objects in a time and space that is neutral. Th is is therefore a subject with natural rights exercised in a way compatible with the natural rights of all other citizens. It enjoys this liberty within the territory of a state which exacts impartial justice while enforcing neutrality with regard to diff erent conceptions of the good. Th e gravity that assures the smooth fl ow of units fi nds its economic counter-part in the market that spontaneously coordinates supply and demand. In other words, everything follows sequentially and naturally. Subjects are free because they are born free, that is, they are and become free because they are already free – they have natural rights and they are entitled to them at the same time. It can now be shown why Dasein is already in the


world in a much diff erent sense than the liberal democratic subject is already free.

Heidegger suggests that rather than trying to know time in terms of units measured by a subject that observes their fl ow from an imaginary position outside of the hourglass, which among other things assumes the temporal as well as spatial priority of theory, Dasein can understand time as an event in which it is involved. Th is is related to the together in the worldness of knower and known, though not as the logical or sequential consequence of a premise. It has more to do with the openness and plural simultaneity of the event of being as well as Dasein’s particular ways of being in the world. Th ese ways are better understood in terms of care (Sorge), anxiety (Angst) and resolution (Entschlossenheit), than in terms of fi xed categories of the understanding such as causality, unity, plurality, necessity, possibility, and so on. Dasein’s understanding of its death is of key importance in this context, and constitutes a fundamental part of the argument expounded in Being and Time. It is here that Heidegger begins to draw out the implications of paradoxical ontological thinking in opposi-tion to what he takes to be the philosophical tradition’s reliance on notions of totality, logical contradiction and mediated identity. Th ese are aspects of his work that receive more extensive exposition in the period following Being and Time and the abandonment of his original project to demon-strate the mediated unity of humanity and being by way of the intermediary of Dasein.25

It is an empirical fact that nothing is absolutely certain until it actually happens. Yet there is also extra-factual reality that is not necessarily fi ction or determinism in the usual senses. Such reality is also not necessarily artistic, though of course art oft en does allow the non-factual real to be experienced. Dasein understands or at least has the possibility of under-standing the extra-factual reality that its death, like its birth, is a moment in the history of being rather than merely an element in a sequential series or a product of nature or industry. Contrary to the factual notion that nothing is absolutely certain until it occurs, Dasein understands that its death will happen. In a way one could almost say that authentic Dasein understands that it already has happened according to the paradoxical explanation that although time moves inexorably forward just as the seasons predictably change, it is always also the same moment.26 In the fi rst case time is heading in a unidirectional manner towards an inevitable result viewed from the fi ctitious external point of the hourglass observer. Th e factual result can only be known and classifi ed aft er it has occurred. Th is can be likened to the emergence from the state of nature on the basis of a spontaneous and


unanimous decision which then becomes a fi xed point of reference in extra-historical time. In the second case time is a plural event in which Dasein is really already ‘da’ (there). Hence in many of his works following Being and Time, Heidegger reserves a privileged position for Dasein, though it is no longer that of the intermediary between das Seiende and das Sein. Dasein is not a moment of partial transcendence on the way to full tran-scendence, which would in eff ect suggest that it is an individual subject that creates an object that it then knows, or a collective subject that manufac-tures a state that it then adheres to. Such a subject seems to have power, but is more oft en than not dazzled by its own objects and political artifi ces. Heidegger maintains that Dasein’s transcendence is not power, as such, but its possibility of proximity to what is both furthest and nearest – being as it is understood in birth, death, poetry and politics, and being in a more abso-lute sense as well.27

If Dasein could be seen as a step beyond beings and an equidistant step below being, one would be entitled to make similar observations suggest-ing that noise represents an intermediary position between silence and speech (what would one say about music?), or that ‘something’ represents an analogous position between ‘nothing’ and ‘everything’. Such (non-) thought is intimately bound up with a world-view which ascends from Hell to earth and from there to outer space and God, so that dwelling on the moon would somehow be closer to paradisiacal heaven than life on earth. It is also bound up with activity that continually coordinates human sub-jects and instrumental goals by way of more or less appropriate means, that is, like setting about reaching Venus shortly aft er arriving on the moon. In other words, for example, if I want to be a professor I have to publish books and articles. If I want to do this quickly, it has to be in the best journals. If I want to attain prestige, the books have to be reviewed by the most famous academics. Once I’ve published ten books I can start planning production of the next ten, and so on. Th ere is a great deal of ‘I’ and a great deal of ‘have to’ involved in such bustling, which can fairly easily be converted into the goals of an ideologically constructed ‘we’. In other words, this kind of bullying, whether as religion or industry, eventually culminates in ques-tions such as ‘who is right here, who is fastest, who gets the most votes?’ It marginalizes those who seem to be wrong, slower and less popular. It is implicitly anti-pluralist and indicative of a dogmatic and militaristic men-tality. Against such behaviour and activity, in which the point of origin becomes increasingly distant as the fi rst goal is reached and then discarded for the next, Heidegger insists that the beginning lies before us, and it is its nearness that authentic Dasein seeks to preserve. On this account truth is


not the same thing as the success involved in choosing the right means to attain goals. Truth is the event of openness or unconcealedness that he variously designates with the Greek aletheia and the German Unverborgen-heit. Humanity as Dasein rather than as subject has the privileged position of understanding itself as that particular ontic being among other natural and manufactured ontic beings which can remove the obstacles that obscure being in a more fundamental, ontological sense. Hence in the Letter on Humanism he says that humanity is not the Herr or master of being, but its Hirte or shepherd.28

Heidegger’s rejection of dialectics enables him to argue that there can be an essence of truth without formal foundations, and that there can be access to the truth without mediation. Hence while for Adorno truth is approached in the mediated non-identity of humanity and nature (recon-ciliation), for Heidegger truth is approached in the unconcealedness of being (aletheia). Th is diff erence may be in part explainable in terms of their diff erent interpretations of Kant’s thing in itself and the limits of knowl-edge, which is touched upon in the previous chapter, and cannot be discussed in any detail here.29 It may nonetheless be mentioned in passing that in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant affi rms that the condition of the possibility of experience is at the same time the condition of the possibility of objects of experience, which is related to his insistence that the objects of experience direct themselves towards our understanding. Heidegger gives Kant’s argument a hermeneutical twist by declaring that the question about being is at the same time the question of the meaning of being. He intimates that the critique of metaphysics stipulates that the meaning of being is not mediated by reason or some other concept of form. Its mean-ing is ‘da’, revealed, disclosed to Dasein, and then gone again for a time. Instead of arguing that objectivity and knowledge presuppose a subject in the guise of an ‘I think’ that accompanies the thought of every human con-sciousness, Heidegger maintains that meaning presupposes truth. Th us he seems to suggest that Dasein asks the question about the meaning of truth instead of asking the question of truth directly. It cannot ask the meaning of truth directly for reasons that are not analogous either to a subject’s inability to grasp the thing in itself or to the mediation of the truth content of knowledge by the forms knowledge takes. Heidegger’s truth is somehow there and then not there, a bit like Angst and Sorge or, if one prefers, it is near and far, somewhat like death. In any case it is completely misunder-stood as the juxtaposition of a thing that is by being present and nothing that is not by being absent, and indeed, he would probably want to insist that misunderstanding and reifying imply distinct ways of thinking about


these phenomena. Heidegger’s truth is always there as possibility, but never there as presence. If one were to ask what politics is beyond redistribution and voting, as Hannah Arendt does, one might be on the trail of the trace of something very similar to Heidegger’s understanding of the relation between language, truth and being.

Thinking beyond Political Philosophy

In an interview given to Der Spiegel in September 1966, Heidegger explains the background to his involvement in National Socialist politics and his acceptance of an appointment to the vice presidency of Freiburg University with offi cial NSDAP approval in April 1933. Th e interview contains numerous disclaimers and qualifi cations on his part about the ambiguity and implications of some of the statements he made in the years leading up to and following 1933–34.30 He mentions that many of the things he said in 1933 were representative of views he no longer espoused as early as a year or so later, when he began to understand the true nature of the regime.31 He notes that in any case, his explicit nationalism of 1933–34 lost relevance some time ago since, he explains, the real content of the nation and the life of its people has been replaced by the far more anonymous and depoet-icized reality of society. In this context society can be interpreted as something distinctly separate from the community of fate conjured up in paragraph 74 of Being and Time, and distinct too from authentic modes of individual Dasein. Heidegger’s notion of society is implicitly world society in abstraction from what he takes to be the particularities of national his-tory and the specifi city of place. It is in this functionalized and rationalized order that Das Man lives in forgetfulness of being and in ignorance of the ontological reality of extra-natural origins.32 While Hannah Arendt’s devel-opment as an original thinker clearly owes a great deal to Heidegger for reasons which will become clear below, it is also fair to say that the critique of inauthentic social behaviour, in contrast to authentically political action, is spelled out in its most articulate form in Arendt’s Th e Human Condition of 1958. While Heidegger bemoans the depoeticized existence of humanity in modern industrial society, Arendt off ers a critique of its depoliticized public sphere, and the pervasive instrumental rationality tending to colo-nize it from all sides. In contrast to some of Heidegger’s more apocalyptic visions of the future, and his suggestion that the German people should reduce their dependency on technology and rediscover Hölderlin, Arendt urges her readers to rediscover the republican traditions of the ancient and modern world, from Aristotle and Jeff erson to the decentralized council


democracy which fl ourished in Budapest during the upheavals of 1956. Hence in her estimation non-instrumental politics is always possible, even in the apparently most rationalized and functional socio-economic orders. She believes that the realization of this possibility depends on the reinven-tion of a form of praxis that she calls action. Th e reasons why become clear if one bears in mind the main lines of Heidegger’s philosophy and its obvi-ous impact on the author of Th e Human Condition.

Earlier in this chapter it is remarked that in Being and Time Heidegger accepts that there are three distinct moments or levels of reality which can be broadly denoted as need, existence and transcendence, and that he adapts these moments to his own philosophy (up to 1927) with the notions of thing-being, being there and being. It is also seen that he then implicitly calls his own line of thinking into question by showing that it is not analyti-cally plausible to proceed according to the assumption that freedom presupposes necessity, and to then deduce supposedly ascending forms of freedom in relation to necessity such as mechanical, predatory and humanist-political freedom. Th is neat model is thrown into disarray by the discovery that Dasein is already transcendence. Th is means that transcend-ence does not culminate at a fi xed point ‘above’ called being, which is known by a stable epistemological foundation ‘below’ called subject, and that being does not ‘be’ in any straightforward sense, because it is some-thing other than itself.33 While Heidegger’s thinking evolves towards an implicitly anti-juridical, explicitly post-humanist ontology, Arendt attempts to recuperate a humanist notion of freedom and transcendence from Heidegger’s ontological critique of subjectivity and foundational thinking. She retains and develops Heidegger’s concept of the world by way of a re-evaluation of the need-existence-transcendence trajectory. Arendt modifi es the categories thing-being, being there and being, and argues that the human condition is fundamentally structured by the distinct realities per-taining to labour, work and action. While the possibilities opened up by labour and to a lesser extent work are severely limited by life and the neces-sities of production and reproduction, action unfolds in the world without prior determination, and with very uncertain outcomes. She thus gives Dasein and Geworfenheit a distinctly political valence, and then re-articu-lates these concepts in relation to the transcendence of necessity in the public sphere. Moreover, she off ers good arguments illustrating why one cannot really think the banality of evil and totalitarianism, that is, so-called exceptional conditions, without understanding how they spring from badly conceived and practised instances of labour, work and (lack of) action. Th at is, the exceptions spring from daily life and political existence, not


from hallucinogenic nightmare scenarios that one will never understand, and which one would do better to forget.34

Just as Dasein is already transcendence which need not be understood in terms of necessary presuppositions or qualifying conditions for Heidegger, for Arendt the event of action is an omnipresent possibility whenever humans are together in the world. If Dasein is not merely or essentially an object-knowing subject as such, Arendt’s corollary is that whether con-ceived of as a subject or as Dasein, humanity is not an object-creating tool-maker, or to update the point, humanity is not a useful contributor to the service economy. Th is vital function is undoubtedly a constituent part of the human condition. Th e capacity to make tools is nonetheless by no means the defi ning feature of what it means to be human. Although rational in an instrumental sense, tool-making can be accomplished without think-ing or action, and indeed, is an intrinsic part of animal survival. She suggests that the proclivity to single out this function as the essence of humanity as well as the basis of human freedom constitutes the discernible point where liberal democratic and Marxist arguments tend to coincide in uncanny ways that may not have been transparent to Marx or his followers in the twentieth century. Th is is worth refl ecting upon, she insists, since these are the poles that have marked out the virtual entirety of political interest representation from the French Revolution to the present.35 Th e crux of the matter for her is that with its emphasis on unbridled production and mate-rial abundance as the condition of a generically liberated humanity, Marxist freedom is that of a tool-creating humanity that culminates in its actual non-freedom continually to reproduce by defi nition what it already is, as a species, albeit with ever new and increasingly sophisticated means. Common to liberal and Marxist views is the notion that production overcomes natural necessity, the corollary of which is a negative view of liberty rooted in one’s private right to hunt, fi sh and criticize without the burden of scarcity. Th is paraphrasing of a much cited passage from the German Ideology may seem simplistic as a commentary on Marx. For Arendt it is nonetheless the case that one of the recurring images in Marx’s scattered comments on post-capitalist society is that of social relations that have been emancipated from the state, and by extension, from politics (and the desirability of communication as well, Habermas might add). In theory the state shall wither away, and as a result of this transformation of quantity into quality, politics increasingly becomes the ‘administration of things’.36

To the criticism that Marxist freedom is that of a tool-creating humanity that culminates in its capacity to reproduce itself with increasingly


sophisticated means, Marx’s followers might respond that the humaniza-tion of nature through work liberated from social oppression not only eliminates scarcity and makes freedom a real historical possibility. Th e species itself changes, as it develops new, more enriched needs, which are in turn satisfi ed and re-articulated at increasingly greater levels of sophistica-tion and creativity. Th us Marx’s followers are likely to say that in response to this criticism, Marx would probably invoke dialectics and history.37 But like Daseinsphilosophie up to Being and Time, this notion of upward spiralling automatic mutual adjustment between humanity, nature, labour power, changing human needs and history is far too neat. Arendt is gener-ally sceptical about historical materialism, which she regards as schematically dialectical, narrowly materialist and not particularly historical. Th e real problem, however, is the anti-political bias of the theory, which links Marxism with what at fi rst glance seems to be its most direct and implaca-ble opponent, and mitigates its ability adequately to think something found in both nature and history – contingency. It will be seen that she tries to develop a way of thinking contingency rather than dismissing it as accident or bracketing it out as not appropriate for whatever happens to be one’s preferred model of historical explanation. She suggests that if humanity cannot think transition phases and contingency politically, it will not be able to understand limit case phenomena such as the banality of evil and totalitarianism beyond the banality of bad luck and some notion of getting back on track aft er an unfortunate accident. Th is is no way to make sense of National Socialism, Stalinism or Eichmann. Moreover, if humanity cannot think particularity politically, rather than in terms of statistically generated sociological categories such as class, gender, race, and so on, it will not be able to think or enact genuine forms of pluralism.38 She suggests that if the explanation of action is sought by reliance on a sociological category that predefi nes its trajectory beforehand, action is misconstrued as motive and interest, and these, she insists, do not vary tremendously from person to person. In her estimation Marxism and liberalism do not manage to think contingency or plurality. Th eir failure to think the modali-ties of the human condition in key everyday instances such as labour, work and action prevent them from grasping what is at stake in limit cases.39

Like Heidegger’s notion that philosophy as metaphysics has served to obscure philosophy as thinking, and that the latter is something that is both more ancient and further in the future than we now perhaps realize, Arendt’s critique of Marxism and liberalism aims to show that we are still learning to think the political even though we have had politics in a more ordinary sense since there have been people on the earth settling disputes


and ratifying decisions through voting and compromising. To think politi-cally in Arendt’s terms means understanding phenomena such as labour, work, action, sovereignty, totalitarianism, the banality of evil, revolution and judgement in the public sphere. While liberal democrats accept the need for wage labour and private property as the necessary means to stimulate the competition that in theory overcomes necessity by way of markets that coordinate supply and demand, Marx’s twentieth century fol-lowers seek to overcome necessity with central planning which in theory makes the free development of each the condition of the free development of all. In both cases one witnesses a technological colonization of political thinking. Th is is oft en done by employing a qualifying condition concern-ing knowledge or freedom, which is then used to ground a conception of transcendence that is determined in advance of practice. One can ask how objective knowledge is possible, and then derive any number of character-istics defi ning the foundations of an object-knowing subject. Th e question of knowledge is eff ectively subverted by the sleight of hand employed in shift ing the focus of enquiry to the conditions of subjectivity. Once the conditions of subjectivity have been established it is relatively easy to defi ne the content of knowledge as objectivity, and thereby avoid the question concerning what knowledge is, independently of subjectivity. Knowledge as objectivity becomes part of the subset of defi nitions of subjectivity as well as an anthropological conception of human essence formulated outside of history in a void protected from contingency and freedom. By analogy, one can ask under what conditions citizens are free and author-ity legitimate, and on this basis ask a series of further questions about the conditions of necessity-negating freedom. In so doing one skirts the ques-tion concerning the phenomenon of political freedom, and, perhaps more serious for Arendt, an instrumental approach to the phenomenon results. She suggests that this way of thinking has defi nite implications for free-dom, epistemology and rights. Freedom becomes a tautological by-product of what one needs to do in order to achieve freedom, much in the way that the condition of objectivity is an object-knowing subject. Citizens have natural rights (by defi nition) while being entitled to them at the same time (by liberal democratic law).40

Arendt’s point is that however diff erent in terms of premises concerning means and ends, both liberal democratic and ostensibly Marxist schools manage to postpone the thinking of freedom by making its advent contin-gent on the solution of a problem for which the remedying means are indefi nitely refi ned and improved. Hence it is no accident that liberal democratic negative liberty degenerates for the most part into the private


liberties of home improvement, upward mobility and consumerism, while communist positive liberty degenerates in most cases into authoritarian egalitarianism. Th inking the political event of freedom itself gets buried under a mass of secondary considerations to the point that the continual displacement of freedom is not even understood as a displacement, or is simply forgotten. To think the event, however, is to know thought as action, that is, it is to transcend the subject-object, theory-practice divide, and to break too with a model of political epistemology based on ‘making’ and manufacture. Since the event is open-ended it is known by an agonistic community of observers in the public sphere. What emerges is an ongoing knowledge that assumes changing form in relation to the articulation of the observers’ contrasting judgements about the quality of the event in question. Th is is where her defence of pluralism and particularity of per-spective (as opposed to motive, interest or identity) comes sharply into focus: without genuine pluralism there cannot be meaningful distinctions between electorates and mobs, political discourses and demagoguery, homogenization and equality, or, most crucially, between democracy and populism. Th e event is not made in a laboratory, university, factory or workshop by a single labouring subject or a supposedly collectivized work-ing subject that magnifi es and amasses individual subjective traits. Th e only suitable evaluative criteria appropriate to the manufacturing model are developed by the manufacturers themselves, that is, by the experts who decide if the result of the making process has been a success or failure. A hasty assessment of Arendt’s idea of politics can easily lead to the conclu-sion that it is fundamentally elitist because of the superiority she confers to action over work and labour. Yet the thrust of her thinking is directed against the usurpation of politics and political knowledge by political parties and other organized bodies of experts.41

In her view, Marx fundamentally misconstrues an ontological political reality by situating transcendence within the sphere of possibilities created by the mediation of humanity and nature in work, since these possibilities are always governed by means-ends considerations that circumscribe the task at hand. Th is is not signifi cantly altered by abolishing private prop-erty and changing the relations of production. Since Marx makes the transformation of nature into the principal political condition of human freedom, she maintains, he does not have an ontological theory of freedom so much as he has an ontic theory of necessity. As such Marx can neither think of freedom beyond production and reproduction, nor can he think of it beyond technological questions of means and ends. It is not so much that he is a poor social theorist. His thinking registers a real historical


development of the utmost danger for the possibility of action. Marx is a theorist of society and the rise of ‘the social’, which Arendt categorically contrasts with her Aristotelian-republican notion of ‘the political’. It is in this context that she makes the statement (quoted more extensively in Chapter 1) that ‘Our tradition of political thought had its defi nite begin-nings in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe that it came to a no less defi nite end in the theories of Karl Marx.’42

While Heidegger acknowledges the imminent end of tradition in philosophy and actually seeks to hasten its demise with his project of Destruktion aft er Being and Time, Arendt alludes to a parallel development in the history of political thought. Developing the parallel further, one could say that traditional metaphysics is to ontological thought what social behaviour is to political action, bearing in mind that although philosophy has to some extent almost always been about metaphysics until Heidegger and Adorno, the rise of the social is a comparatively recent phenomenon. But this leaves Arendt in a somewhat tricky position. Heidegger sadly admits that society has replaced the people, and he has no hankering for a return to philosophical tradition, not, at any rate, aft er the Kehre. Arendt by contrast would seem to be compelled to long in vain for an impossible return to the Aristotelian polis in a spirit which simply rejects the reality of society in favour of the pristinely political relations characteristic of the eudemonic good life. But on Arendt’s account what Aristotle signifi es is as near as it is far, and is not gone in any defi nitive sense. According to Arendt’s politicization of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysical civilization, the cor-ollary of the discovery that humanity is still learning philosophically to think is that it is also still learning, in the twentieth century and beyond, politically to act. Hence the rediscovery of Aristotle is a civic matter for contemporaries and future generations of citizens rather than an academic exercise on the part of intellectual historians. Learning politically to act does not entail scouring the great texts of political philosophy and trying to fi nd some sort of application for them in completely changed socio-economic and historical circumstances. Th e far more pertinent exercise is to develop an understanding of the multiple causes and implications of the fact that ‘It has been in the nature of our political tradition of political thought to be highly selective and to exclude from articulate conceptuali-zation a great variety of political experiences, among which we need not be surprised to fi nd some of an even elementary nature.’43

What Arendt has in mind are experiences such as keeping promises, forgiving wrongs, displaying courage for its own sake and other instances of world-preserving action that are closely bound up with contingency.


She purposely does not include experiences linked with life-sustaining social activities such as labour, work and the defence of fi xed social identities which, although useful in the struggle for survival, reveal rela-tively little about the architecture of the space between citizens in their political capacity to judge the quality of events as non-identical equals. Th e distinguishing characteristic of world-preserving action is that it is incom-patible with rule and cannot be represented precisely because it sets an uncontrollable dynamic in motion, the outcome of which is unpredictable, and therefore defi es administrative and instrumental manipulation by parties of the left , centre or right. What Arendt designates as action cannot, in other words, be represented because it is not a thing that can be aggre-gated with other similar things, where the process of aggregation serves the functional requirement of producing a list of interests and tasks that need attending to in the manner of the various chores governing the ongoing life of a giant household, and indeed, she implies that society’s politics are the politics of the household writ large, that is, non-political politics. Th e dis-tinguishing character of these experiences is thus that they are pretty much the same for most people because they spring from the necessities of life and the life-cycle, and do not originate from active freedom. Th is is the reason why they can be represented across the left -right divide without a great degree of distortion, and a good starting-point as well for explaining why and how the parties tend increasingly to resemble each other in terms of structure and tactics. Th e necessities in question oft en include food, shelter, transport and health. Animals and many plants require many of the same provisions, and as such, many of the most coveted positions in the household society are really glorifi ed animal functions that have been invested with highly infl ated status. Th is goes hand in hand with the subtle but palpable ways in which social status, which can only fl ourish on the basis of the passive emulation that consolidates hierarchies, tends to marginalize real political diff erence. People at the top of social hierarchies undeniably have more money and power than their fellow citizens. Arendt consistently acknowledges this. Yet like Adorno in Minima Moralia, she refuses to concede that the successful people are also the most free. In very diff erent ways both thinkers comment on the fact that the inability to see the diff erence is evidence of the reality that we have great diffi culty of thinking about freedom in ways not deeply dependent on the exercise of the will to power in pursuit of a predictable and narrow range of fairly infantile rewards. Arendt signals that a properly political debate on this issue rarely gets off the ground – except in revolutions – because to many it seems that the acquisition of money, status and power is synonymous with


freedom. Th e problem is compounded by the evident reality that political parties of all stripes have every interest in maintaining this conception of the political as the dominant one. Arendt tries to get readers to think about this situation and its implications for freedom and legitimacy, rather than simply to ascribe it to human nature or some related extra-historical drive that makes humans clothed versions of nut-gatherers, with the only real diff erence among them consisting in the banal truth that some are better and faster than others. Th e gigantic mistake of seeking freedom in the extended household is that it is by defi nition a sphere that makes life possi-ble but is not itself a political or even a quintessentially human sphere shaped by speech and action.44

Th e extended household is on the contrary shaped by good or bad planning, and the various degrees of violence necessary to eliminate con-tingency and plurality in the service of smooth functioning and effi ciency. It is a realm where projects that do not either succeed or fail are largely superfl uous, and so, unsurprisingly, are banished for the most part to playing fi elds, cinemas, detective novels and comics. Social humanity may be delighted to have a continually wider choice of exotic food, more luxuri-ous shelter, more rapid transport and ever increasing levels of longevity when the household model is functioning well. But to confuse this sense of prosperous well-being with freedom is an error in political judgement typ-ical of the inhabitants of a society of isolated individuals who formulate their assessments of public events on the basis of a comparative inventory of private fortunes. Th e degree of error becomes clear when the economic motor of the model ceases to function well, and there are no available criteria, external to profi t-oriented production, with which an assessment of reality can be made. In a manner altogether diff erent to Horkheimer and Adorno but in important respects complementary to their approach, Arendt analyses the various processes through which reason is reduced to its instrumental dimension, and democracy is imperceptibly but inexorably hollowed out. Although the undermining of democracy is far more obvious in the case of National Socialism and Stalinism, that is, in one-party states, the latter can be seen as grotesque deviations from the multi-party populist model which has become standard aft er the defeat of what one might designate as offi cial or paradigm totalitarianism. Th e fact that the political defi cit of the populist model is less drastic than its dis-credited rivals does not alter the fact that the defi cit continues to loom as a source of potential authoritarian experimentation, especially in times of socio-economic crisis and collapse of the public sphere. She suggests that this danger will remain until political thought and action subvert the


hegemonic model that produces the deviations in question. Key for Arendt in this context is the point concerning isolation, which is closely connected with the power of bureaucracies, as well as the point about the reality principle, which is related to the endeavour to develop evaluative criteria which are not internal to a self-validating, zero-sum logic of growth/recession. Th is requires a brief word of explanation.45

In her refl ections on National Socialism and Stalinism she makes the point that in stark contrast to what many observers may say about the sub-ject, the totalitarian societies of the twentieth century did not suff er from an excess of, but rather from a lack of politics. Th is lack is not explainable without carefully considering the notion of democracy as the institutional-ized rule of the general will of the people, and the notion of sovereignty as the unitary foundation and expression of that will to reaffi rm the unity of the nation in the institutions of the state. It is also important to keep in mind that the diff erence between the one-party states and the multi-party parliamentary systems is one of degree rather than kind, that is, there is nothing inherently pluralist or essentially democratic about a parliamen-tary system. She observes that there is a conspicuous lack of action in societies in which political legitimacy is largely a function of representing interests linked to socially mediated life-sustaining experiences that do not vary tremendously from one person to the next. Whether in one-party or multi-party systems, parties and bureaucracies perform this task of interest representation with greater or lesser degrees of effi ciency. Arendt analyses the processes through which legitimacy based on represented sameness actually isolates and divides people rather than uniting them in solidarity and civic activism. While one might be inclined to associate life and the life-cycle with vital energy, she warns, attempts to make life and work func-tions the basis of politics actually lead to conformity and passivity. Depoliticization is thus not a matter of citizen apathy or a supposed natural preference for private life and the joys of consumerism. It is a structural feature of a system in which the simultaneous and mutual visibility of citizens characteristic of action situations is closed down by the hierarchies and divisions needed to master natural processes in what has become a collectivized drive for growth and prosperity. To Arendt’s mind there is no fundamental confl ict, at least as far as industrial rationalization goes, between state socialist collectivization and private managerial capitalism. Th is is related to her point that people cannot really distinguish themselves on the basis of vital functions ultimately linked to the household, which can be systematically represented by parties and interest groups, and then administered by various government agencies and ministries. People can


perhaps better multiply and refi ne their needs in the capitalist version, but this does not alter the simple fact that they do not transcend them through enhanced status and purchasing power. Th is complements the point about self-overcoming made in the previous chapter: the more citizens resemble one another, the more they are likely to be isolated and susceptible to manipulation and threats. Th at is, similarity and homogeneity may seem to produce social peace in the guise of a ‘national socialism’, as the NSDAP defi ned its movement, but they can actually be devastating for the perspec-tival pluralism which sharpens political judgement and sustains freedom. Homogenizing tendencies reach catastrophic dimensions in pseudo-events like the Nuremberg rallies where, despite all appearances, isolation between people is almost total in Arendt’s original reworking of the term totalitar-ian. Th ese are the origins of fear, mass society, one-party states, the cult of personality and bureaucratic tyranny. In other words, these origins are not to be sought in the nasty personalities and cunning of a Hitler or a Stalin, or in the alleged existential crises of modern industrial humanity.46

Th us on Arendt’s reading, totalitarianism is the most obviously patho-logical and spectacularly failed attempt to institutionalize diff erence on the basis of an underlying unity. In conjunction with themes discussed in the fi rst part of this chapter, one could say that it is politically staged meta-physics. Unity can present itself in various populist guises, such as that of the nation, naturally united with itself as a community of fate, in a constant war with the enemy within, or as the homogeneity of a classless society, where diff erences in money and property are denounced as betrayal (and then practiced by the party leadership). Yet the politically staged meta-physics of totalitarianism also raises questions about the metaphysical content of less visibly totalitarian systems where politics is also eclipsed by bureaucratic, technological and managerial imperatives linked to large-scale household maintenance. Th ese questions can be approached by comparing one-party with multi-party regimes, if one does not lose sight of the fact that although each has its own particular ways of promoting conformity and populism to the detriment of political equality and democ-racy, they nonetheless resemble each other to a far greater degree than is generally understood or acknowledged.

In Leninist terms, class interest posits a direct chain of representation from class to party and from there to the state. Social class assumes collective organizational form in the party, and the party leads a politico-military conquest of power, which it can do by eff ectively using unions and councils on the way if expedient. Stalinism takes the afore-mentioned logic a step further by establishing a form of legitimacy based on a chain


of representation which goes from class-party-state to party leader, so that the diff erences that are allowed to achieve visibility are fi rmly articulated around a basic unity rooted in acceptance of the leader’s will and leadership of the party. Th e leader, in turn, provides what is necessary for life with the help of the planning bureaucracy. Together, leaders and planners attend to all of the key social spheres, from housing, transport, medical care, employment and employment assurance, to education, child care and care for the elderly.47 In multi-party regimes power ascends from the will of the people, in abstraction from class distinctions and the division of labour, to a prime minister or president who has to show that ‘they can relate’ to the people and demonstrate a congruity between pop-ular needs and those above at the top. Th is is why professional politicians go on electoral tour and wear hard-hats for the miners, other hats for their other possible constituents, and so on. While the necessities of life are provided for by the leader and planning bureaucracy in one-party states, it is the carefully managed economy that does so in the multi-party states (some might say not so carefully in light of recent events). Since both systems are ultimately variants on the household model, however, the leadership cliques in each assume familial responsibilities at the top that produce in the citizenry an uneasy mixture of outward adulation and inner fear/distrust. Th e stability of the multi-party system depends upon producing leaders who the people can identify with as their people, that is, politicians who incarnate the fundamental unity, via representative institutions, of society at the diff erent levels of the social hierarchy.48

In a manner somewhat reminiscent of Benjamin, Arendt contrasts diff erent constellations of concepts and elective affi nities. Her social constellation is stabilized by the life-cycle, labour and work; within it, metaphysical unity and manufactured hierarchy tend to be reinforced by the exercise of contractual liberties and competition for largely standard-ized rewards. Success is generally pursued in public in the guises of money and status, and demanded in private as satisfaction and intimacy. New beginnings are possible with the introduction of successive models of growth (production) and enhanced possibilities of choice (consumption). Successful and unsuccessful alike strive for happiness. Th e latter are deserv-ing of a certain amount of help if they have worked hard despite their lack of talent. Th ey are entitled to an appropriate combination of pity, therapy and welfare if they have had personal problems. Aft er the toils of life, a good person fi nds their rightful place with God for eternity. In her political constellation, action carried out for its own sake is plural and open-ended; it illuminates the space of appearances between non-identical equals in the


public sphere in a way that allows each to distinguish themselves as members of the world rather than in terms of their function in life. Since what is functional is replaceable and by defi nition not unique, functional processes are expedited privately with minimal levels of shame or pride. Hence political distinction is not based on success, talent or other skills that are relatively easy to aggregate and represent. People distinguish themselves by keeping the space of appearances open, which cannot be done on the basis of a plan, market or any other technical means in which a predictable result is achieved, and functional equilibrium is reached. Political plurality and openness happen or may happen, as an event, but the creation of spaces is also contingent, and so they can be closed down again. Arendt’s political world should not be understood as a utopia in the form of a product that has been made to last for human happiness. Instead of eternity in heaven, individuals become immortalized in worldly memory where, instead of liv-ing on, they perpetuate openness and agonistic diff erence in their absence. In contrast to the social constellation, where new beginnings are planned and introduced by experts with ostensibly innovative production models and consumption off ers, it is revolution, and other less spectacular instances of world-preserving action, which initiate a new dynamic in politics. While these two constellations are somewhat overdrawn to make the point, the Benjamin-Arendt caveat remains: there is no continuum of progressive points that leads from quantity to quality or from the extended household to the polis. If it does happen, collective transcendence of necessity and individual self-overcoming will be enacted as a leap from contingent possi-bility to political event, that is, something citizens can understand without knowing.

In Arendt’s estimation, the new beginnings off ered by modern revolu-tions are closely linked with the sudden opening up of the public sphere and political spaces of appearance, rather than with the transfer of power that accompanies the upheaval in question. Th e ambiguous legacy of what, in On Revolution (1963), she refers to as the lost revolutionary tradition is that these spaces tend to shut down again once the transfer of power is completed and the administrative imperatives linked to life and the life-cycle, institutionalized as the social, become congealed in hierarchies and routines. Action thrives in the writing of constitutions, the institutionaliz-ing of council democracy and the gift of solidarity that characterizes modern revolutionary situations from 1776, 1789, 1905 and 1917 to 1956. She suggests that the closing down of public spaces is the inevitable conse-quence of a party’s success in being able to seize power. Whether one is looking at the Jacobins, Bolsheviks or the CPSU, vanguards take advantage


of revolutionary situations in which a constellation of class and other social forces ceases for a moment to be congealed in an oppressive order. Th e rean-imation of the political elements of this ossifi ed apparatus renders visible the degree to which previously entrenched power relations and hierarchies were senseless and arbitrary. Th us, however fl eetingly, the revolution, as a thoroughly epistemological moment, realizes the political equivalent of an adjustment of things and their proper names and relations.49

Th e revolutionary legacy is ambiguous in the sense that this readjust-ment can only be temporary, lest it become a principle of domination and an institutionalized ideology. Drawing Heidegger and Arendt together, one might say that when this happens, thinking and action are colonized by society’s anonymous but pervasive rules. Arendt signals that although one should never ignore or underestimate the admittedly important diff erences between one-party and multi-party regimes, they tend to have more in common with each other than we may realize. Th is is because they display tendencies found for the most part in the social rather than in the political constellation sketched above. Th is argument has compelling contemporary relevance beyond the Cold War context in which it was elaborated and for the most part misunderstood.

Endnotes

1. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), pp. 89–102 (paragraphs 19–22).2. Th at instance of mediated unity is oft en conceived in the Hegelian, Hegelian Marxist/

Western Marxist and critical theory traditions as a mediated totality. See Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: Th e Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984. Chapters 7 and 8 on Marcuse, Lukács and Adorno off er valuable insights into the diff erences between Hegelian Marxism and Heidegger’s ontology. Jay observes that just as Adorno is doubtful about the positive dialectics of Hegel and Lukács, the author of Negative Dialectics is sceptical about the continued plausibility of the concept of totality.

3. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (What is Metaphysics?, 1929), in Wegmarken (Signposts, Collected Works, volume 9), Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 1976, pp. 114–15; and Vom Wesen des Grundes (On the Essence of Grounding, 1929), also contained in Weg-marken (Signposts), pp. 126–8, 152–7. Th ese two essays of 1929 represent an important moment in the movement of Heidegger’s thinking. While in the fi rst he discusses the problem of nothing, in the second he confronts the ontological diff erence between being and beings.

4. He also notes this in the German word Geschick (fate), which seems to contain within it the notion of ‘sending’ (schicken), thus expressing the idea that being sends things and humans into the world where they appear and are understood, misunderstood or ignored. Th e implication is that even birth is not a natural event but a Seinsereignis, that is, an event


of being. It is probably fair to say that this view had an impact on Arendt’s understanding of the possibilities created by a new life in what one might call the event of ‘the natal’, which she tries politically to redefi ne against the idea of the naturalness of phenomena such as race and nation. See Arendt, Th e Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958, pp. 8–9. It will be argued in the second part of this chapter that it is this capacity to think seemingly natural phenomena in political terms that enables Arendt to shed new light on phenomena such as historical transitions and contingency.

5. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), section 1, chapter 3, paragraph 22.6. One should be careful before dismissing Christian theology as anthropomorphic

religious humanism, which it certainly is not in some of the writings of Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth. For a useful introduction, see James Brown, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Buber & Barth, New York, Collier, 1955.

7. Heidegger, Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung (Hegel’s Concept of Experience, 1943), in Holzwege, Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 1994, pp. 132–3. From Heidegger’s perspec-tive, the profundity of Hegel is among other things to have grasped that nothing is in fact something despite its no-thingness, which Hegel expresses with the idea of the negation of the negation and other concepts. Th at is, Hegel is a phenomenologist. Th e problem is that Hegel develops his ideas within a framework based on the will and self-consciousness, both of which remain trapped in the confi nes of subjectivity. Hence whatever else one may think of Heidegger, he develops the critique of the philosophy of consciousness into a critique of metaphysics quite some time before Habermas develops the critique of the phi-losophy of consciousness into a theory of communicative action (Th eory of Communicative Action, 2 volumes, 1981) and a theory of post-metaphysical thought (Post-Metaphysical Th inking, 1988).

8. While Heidegger’s project to think beyond subjective idealism and objective materi-alism would not have come to fruition without Husserl’s phenomenology, it is safe to say that the existential philosophies of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are also fundamental. Reasons of space will prevent any lengthy discussion of their respective infl uences, but it is important to note that Heidegger understands his work as ontological and not existential, since the latter remains humanist and metaphysical. Th is is one reason why Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism seems to be rather dismissive of Sartre’s humanist and existential Marxism. Th e discussion in this chapter will return to this text of 1946, which is key for understanding Heidegger’s thinking aft er Being and Time. In his two-volume study of Nietzsche, Heidegger insists that contrary to conventional wisdom, Hegel does not repre-sent the end of idealist metaphysics, since Nietzsche continues to think metaphysically. Nietzsche remains within paradigms established by Kant and Schopenhauer in that he champions the aesthetic and power-enhancing will of the subject as the ultimate foundation of individual epistemology and collective culture. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, volume I (based on lectures given in the years 1936–40), Stuttgart, Neske, 1998, pp. 5, 32, 517–19; and volume II, pp. 13–15, 25, 197–8, 313, 377–8, 422. By the time of these lectures Heidegger had aban-doned his own quest to refound metaphysics in Being and Time, and turned to what he refers to as the destruction of the metaphysical heritage that he sees running right through-out Western philosophy since the pre-Socratics. It is not oft en disputed that this project of


destruction is of major signifi cance for Derrida’s notion of deconstruction. Readers interested in this link are advised to consult Alex Th omson, Deconstruction and Democracy: Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, London, Continuum, 2005, part IV.

9. Husserl, Die Phänomenologische Methode: Ausgewählte Texte I, Stuttgart, Reclam, 1985, pp. 98–105, 131–48; Paul Ricoeur, ‘Husserl’, in Eduard Bréhier (ed.), Histoire de la philo sophie allemande, Paris, Vrin, 1967, pp. 183–96; Heidegger, ‘Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriff s’ (‘Prologue to the History of Concepts of Time’, 1925), in Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, volume 20, 1979, pp. 29–33. In addition to praising Husserl for moving beyond epistemology, he singles out Dilthey as one of the fi rst to recognize the anti-metaphysical implications of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900). Heidegger claims that Husserl subsequently retreats to conventional epistemology in the guise of transcen-dental phenomenology in the Cartesian Meditations of 1931.

10. I am indebted to my friend Teodor Mladenov for this insight as well as his advice carefully to read paragraph 58 of Being and Time. Th is discussion of Hegel, Adorno and Heidegger indicates how much continued political relevance there is in epistemological debates, however mediated that relevance might be.

11. Th is interpretation may seem implausible to those who are familiar with both Heidegger’s and Adorno’s scathing remarks about society and what they in their own ways take to be its conformist modes of behaviour. It is nonetheless of great interest that their respective philosophies tend to deconstruct identity and foundations in a way that implic-itly questions the idea of a state-political centre of authority empowered to legislate and regulate the lives of its social constituents.

12. Hence the Heidegger invoked here as a post-state-juridical thinker of post-identity is not the author of the infamous paragraph 74 of Being and Time which celebrates national Dasein as a community of fate. It is the Heidegger of the Brief über den Humanismus (Letter on Humanism, 1946) who observes that humanity is not the master of beings but the shepherd of being. See Heidegger, Brief über den Humanismus, in Wegmarken (Signposts, Collected Works, volume 9), Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 1976, pp. 340–2; and the author of Zu Ernst Jünger, II (On Ernst Jünger, II, 1940), in Günther Figal (ed.), Heidegger Lesebuch (A Heidegger Reader), Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 1977, p. 225; and espe-cially the Heidegger of Was heisst Denken? (What does Th inking Mean?, 1952), Stuttgart, Reclam, 1992, pp. 54–6.

13. Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Th e Origins of the Work of Art, 1935/36), in Holzwege, p. 55.

14. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), section 2, chapter 5, paragraph 77; and Edward S. Casey, Th e Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, California, University of Berkeley Press, 1998, chapter 11.

15. It is mentioned at the outset of this chapter that Heidegger off ers a non-dialectical response to the phenomena diagnosed in the Marxist critiques of instrumental reason, alienation, mass society and reifi cation. Another way of stating this is that he off ers a diag-nosis of metaphysics as civilization, and not just epistemology, in a manner akin to Lukács’ notion of capitalism as civilization, beyond mere economy. Th is obvious divergence of perspective is much less radical if one considers the role that the critique of instrumental reason plays in both analyses. It will be seen in Chapter 6 that though Habermas retains a


version of the critique of instrumental reason, he rejects what he takes to be the one-sided and insuffi ciently sociological dimension in the critiques of Heidegger and Lukács. Unsur-prisingly, his critique of instrumental reason is more cautious and guarded than either of theirs.

16. Th eodore Kisiel, Th e Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993. Jean Wahl’s work stands out among the many interpreters of Heidegger. See his Introduction à la pensée de Heidegger (Introduction to Heidegger’s Th ought, based on lectures given at the Sorbonne in 1946), Paris, Librairie Générale Française, 1998.

17. Heidegger, Brief über den Humanismus (Letter on Humanism, 1946), in Wegmarken (Signposts, Collected Works, volume 9), p. 342.

18. See note 26 below on Heidegger’s two-volume study of Nietzsche (1936–40), as well as Die Frage nach der Technik (On the Question of Technology, 1953), in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Collected Works, volume 7), Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 2000, p. 7, where Heidegger says that the essence of technology is not technological, that is, that it really has more to do with a deliberate or simply unrefl ectively accepted way of obscuring ontological questions with technological projects that substitute business/busyness for understanding.

19. Oliver Jahraus, Martin Heidegger: Eine Einführung, Stuttgart, Reclam, 2004, pp. 74–5, 109.

20. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), section 1, chapter 1 (paragraphs 1–4) and section 2, chapter 6 in its entirety.

21. Heidegger develops this line of thinking in more detail two years aft er Being and Time in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1929), Frankfurt, Vittorio Klostermann, 1991, section 4. It might be argued that it is really Simmel who prepares this ground, as is suggested in chapters 1–2.

22. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), section 2, chapter 2, paragraph 58, and section 2, chapter 5, paragraphs 72–6.

23. Heidegger suggests that the legal form of legitimacy in question is in eff ect the pseudo-liberty of ‘the man’ (‘Das Man’) and its timorousness before what he calls ‘the they’. See Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), section 1, chapters 2–5, paragraphs 12–32 and section 2, chapter 2, paragraphs 54–60.

24. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), section 1, chapter 5, paragraphs 35–8.

25. It has been suggested that Heidegger abandons this project on the basis of his conviction, worked out in the pages of Being and Time, that the only way to deduce the existence of das Sein by way of the intermediary of Dasein is through identity and implicitly juridical philosophy that he comes to reject as anthropological, tautological and metaphysi-cal. Hence be breaks with the supposition that one can derive the terms of political obligation from the supposition that the citizen and the state are mediated by the same rational substance – legal rationality and representation. On the diffi cult question of his political allegiances in the 1930s one might say that with this break, the way was open to libertarian as well as authoritarian positions well outside of the liberal democratic framework. One might argue further that due to the anti-foundational implications, Heidegger’s thought is most plausible as a libertarian response to metaphysics, as Derrida seems to suggest, and


least plausible as the philosophical justifi cation of an authoritarian central state and rascist ideology. Th ere is no doubt that his ideas can be interpreted in a number of possible political directions, as Arendt’s work shows.

26. Nietzsche intuited as much, which is why his notion of the eternal return is in some ways more important than the idea of the death of God or the superman. See Karl Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen (Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Return, 1935), Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986, chapters 5–6. But for Heidegger, Nietzsche does not really overcome the metaphysics of linearity as much as he juxtaposes it with his notion of the eternal circular recurrence, which according to Heidegger is Nietzsche’s way of exalting human creativity and ataraxy. See the second volume of Heidegger’s Nietzsche as well as Löwith’s convincing objections to Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche in the appendix of Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Return. Readers of Italian interested in an equally convincing defence of Nietzsche’s originality and incipient post-metaphysics will fi nd interest in Marco Vozza’s excellent book, Esistenza e interpretazi-one: Nietzsche oltre Heidegger, Rome, Donzelli, 2001.

27. Almost all of the most important works aft er Being and Time are lectures that were published during Heidegger’s lifetime or aft er his death in 1976. In addition to the famous Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), these include What is Metaphysics (1929), On the Essence of Grounding (1929), On the Essence of Truth (1930), Introduction to Meta-physics (1935), Letter on Humanism (1946), What does Th inking Mean? (1952), On the Question of Technology (1953), and many more. Most good edited collections contain the afore-mentioned and others from the 1930s to 1970s.

28. Heidegger, Brief über den Humanismus (Letter on Humanism, 1946), in Wegmarken (Signposts), p. 342. It is in this essay that he also famously states that language is the ‘house of being’ (p. 313), and that thinking acts, to the extent that thinking thinks (p. 313).

29. Adorno and Heidegger’s respective interpretations of Kant would provide an excellent way of shedding light on the parallels and divergences in their thinking. It might indeed be argued that the lectures which constitute the bases of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics are indispensable to an understanding of the ideas of the theorists of negative dialectics and fundamental ontology.

30. Relatively early on in the discussion, the interviewer quotes Heidegger as saying in his vice-presidential acceptance speech in Freiburg that ‘Neither theorems nor ideas consti-tute the rules of your being. Th e Führer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law.’ Aft er asking him to explain the statement, Heidegger corrects the interviewer by pointing out that he says this in a local Freiburg student newspaper and not in his offi cial acceptance speech! Th e interview is reprinted in full in Figal (ed.), Heidegger Lesebuch, pp. 345–70.

31. Yet towards the end of Einführung in die Metaphysik, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1987, p. 152 (Introduction to Metaphysics, 1935), Heidegger mentions that despite the philo-sophical coarseness of its offi cial rhetoric, the National Socialist movement possesses ‘inner truth and greatness’. Th e point of the previous note and this one is not that Heidegger was really a National Socialist despite his disclaimers to the contrary, or that his philosophy is fascist at the core, whatever else he and his defenders may say. One should also bear in mind


that his philosophical and political views change considerably during the late 1930s and the post-World War II period. A central strand in the overall argument in this book concerns the reality of form and mediation, as well as a critique of what one may call ideological attempts directly to project beyond illegitimate (inauthentic in this case) form to legitimate essence, that is, some notion of truth as immediate, unveiled essence, in comparison to which even mainstream liberal democratic views appear rigorous and tolerant. If immanent essentialism off ers a response to metaphysics and instrumental reason, it is a very problem-atic response at best, and one which serves to reinforce the point that however fl awed, a legal form of legitimacy is still much better than any of the known alternatives. It is hoped that the argument here is strengthened if it can be shown that such undertakings are theo-retically problematic and politically authoritarian by implication, or simply banal. If this is indeed the case, it may also be possible to show, as critical theory attempts to do, why there is more than an accidental relation between a theoretically solid argument and the feasibi-lity of political libertarianism.

32. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), section 1, chapter 4, paragraphs 25–7. See also note 4 above.

33. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘L’être, l’étant selon Derrida’, in the Magazine Littéraire, Hors-série n. 9 (March–April 2006), pp. 96–7. Th is is part of the reason why, aft er the ‘ontological turn’ in his work, Heidegger oft en writes the word Sein and then places a cross through it.

34. In her thinking labour is more or less synonymous with toil and anything done as a result of sheer necessity. Work transcends necessity to some extent, especially in artistic work, where the artist has a vast choice of means. But even art is governed by instrumental considerations about the coordination of ends and means, and as such, is still limited by necessity to a certain extent. It is only in the political sphere, in conjunction with others who occupy standpoints distinct from one’s own (at any particular historical juncture, since these are constantly changing), that individuals transcend necessity and distinguish them-selves from one another in a way that also sheds light on the world they inhabit together. Even the most spontaneous artist has control over the stages of their work and its likely outcome. Actors in the public sphere do not, and so are dependent on each other in a way that undermines hierarchies and dubious notions of merit. See Arendt, Th e Human Condi-tion, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958, parts I–V.

35. Many of her critics take issue with her insistence that while the American Revolu-tion was really a republican movement, the French Revolution failed in many ways because it got side-tracked by demands for social equality that eventually led to a bureaucratic and administrative usurpation of the republican content of the event. See her essay ‘200 Jahre amerikanische Revolution’ (‘Th e American Revolution: 200 Years on’, 1975), in Marie Luise Knott (ed.), Hannah Arendt zur Zeit: politische Essays, Berlin, Rotbuch Verlag, pp. 161–78. It is clear to Arendt that the promise of the American Revolution is perhaps most poi-gnantly captured in the constitutional patriotism of people like Jeff erson and Madison, and that there was a real risk in her day that this political vision of freedom might be eclipsed by bureaucratic abuse and political corruption in the United States.

36. Arendt, Th e Human Condition, parts III and IV. It was well worth adding that this stance did not make Arendt an apologist of inequality or capitalism. See, for example,


her remarks in ‘Th oughts on Politics and Revolution’ (1970, p. 213), where she says, ‘What protects us in the so-called “capitalist” countries of the West is not capitalism, but a legal system that prevents the daydreams of big-business management of trespassing into the private sphere of its employees from coming true.’ Th e essay is published in Crises of the Republic (dedicated to Mary McCarthy), New York, Harcourt Brace, 1972, pp. 199–233.

37. Th is interpretation and defense of his work is off ered in Alfred Schmidt, Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx (Marx’s Concept of Nature), Frankfurt, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1962; and Helmut Reichelt, Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriff s bei Karl Marx (On the Logical Structure of Marx’s Concept of Capital), Frankfurt, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1970.

38. Th e banality of evil is a term Arendt uses in connection with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, and refers to the fact that in many respects modern perpe-trators of genocide tend to be routine functionaries rather then demonic fi gures of unspeakable evil. Th e related point is that the evil committed is not immediately obvious. It is rather the result of many people in many places doing jobs which, when considered in isolation, are not extraordinarily awful. She shows that if one cannot think contingency or plurality politically, one is unlikely to understand the specifi city of an historical event such as the Holocaust. Th is is another consequence of not being able adequately to think the human condition in a more general sense, with the result that it becomes impossible to see how the marginalization of action, the power of bureaucracy, and the anonymous and effi cient planning of murder are related phenomena in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. See Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York, Penguin, 1993.

39. Arendt, Th e Human Condition, p. 206, ‘Th e Concept of History: Ancient and Modern’, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Th ought, New York, Penguin, 1954, pp. 58–63; and Th orsten Bonacker, ‘Die Kontingenz politischen Handelns: Adorno, Arendt und die Legitimationsprobleme in der politischen Gesellschaft ’, in Dirk Auer, Lars Rensmann and Julia Schulze Wessel (eds), Arendt und Adorno, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2003, pp. 286–310. Th e question as to whether genealogical and bio-political accounts of contingency and particularity fare better than Marxist and liberal accounts will be taken up in the next chapter.

40. Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’, in Between Past and Future, pp. 146–9, 152–7.41. Arendt, Th e Human Condition, part V, Love and St. Augustine (1929), edited by

Joanna Vecchiarelli and Judith Chelius Clark, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 65–76; and ‘What is Freedom?’, in Between Past and Future, pp. 151–6.

42. Arendt, ‘Tradition and the Modern World’, in Between Past and Future, p. 17.43. Arendt, Th e Human Condition, p. 220.44. Arendt, Th e Human Condition, pp. 58–72; and On Revolution, chapter 6.45. Arendt, On Revolution, New York, Viking Press, 1963, chapters 2–3; and Jeff rey C.

Isaac, Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992, chapter 7.

46. Arendt, Th e Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1951, part III.


47. Arendt, Th e Origins of Totalitarianism, part III; and Th e Human Condition, pp. 38–49.

48. Arendt, Th e Human Condition, pp. 160–7, 220–30; ‘Th oughts on Politics and Revo-lution’ in Crises of the Republic, pp. 214–27; and Lars Rensmann, ‘Das Besondere im Allgemeinen: Totale Herrschaft und Nachkriegsgesellschaft in den politisch-theoretischen Narrativen von Arendt and Adorno’, in Auer, Rensmann and Schulze Wessel (eds), Arendt und Adorno, pp. 154–70.

49. Arendt, Th e Human Condition, chapter 3; On Revolution, chapter 6; and D. Schecter, Sovereign States or Political Communities?, chapter 3. In this context one sees once again the parallels with Benjamin’s ideas on the relationship between naming, revolution and truth. For Arendt’s interpretation of Benjamin, see her Men in Dark Times, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1955, chapter 8.

150

5Reason, Thinking and the Critique

of Everyday Life

Developing Heidegger and Arendt’s philosophical and republican critiques of metaphysics in a more explicitly sociological direction, it might be argued that socio-economic and political power suppress diff erences between things, places and people in the name of supposedly natural unity, classifi catory knowledge, systemic imperatives and hierarchical order. It follows that reason that does not rigorously analyse the validity of this knowledge, where unduly schematic, or challenge the supposed necessity of such order, where oppressive, is signifi cantly complicit with the exercise of power. Th is would seem to make the delineation of systemic structures versus non-systemic spontaneity a key concern with important implica-tions for any examination of the reproduction of institutional rigidity and the study of oppression more generally. But the matter is not so straightfor-ward, and the problems with this insuffi ciently sociological approach will become clear in the course of the discussion to follow.

Determining the status of the terms rigorous and spontaneous in this context is an important endeavour, given that many of the diverse argu-ments against instrumental reason adduced by the thinkers looked at in preceding chapters are likely to be dismissed by mainstream thinkers and opinion as perhaps poetic but politically irrelevant at best, and as down-right irresponsible and undemocratic at worst.1 Th e mainstream response is thus oft en that however powerfully suggestive the objections might be in lyrical terms, they are ultimately not very stringent. Th e not always so explicit corollary is that non-systemic thinking and knowledge might have its place in the private sphere among lovers, friends, family and individual consumers, but has little cognitive or political signifi cance. One of the aims

Reason, Thinking and Critique of Everyday Life 151

of the present study is to challenge the assumptions of mainstream thinking on several fronts. Part of what this entails is showing that there is more to contingency than mere chance, and that spontaneity is not exhausted in natural refl ex or vital instinct. Hence if for Arendt a major concern is to think contingency as politics in ontological terms, Foucault attempts to think spontaneity as resistance in sociological and linguistic terms.2 If expe-rience and its interpretation is a fundamental mainspring of knowledge and thought, then the possibility of new, unpredictable and even limit experi-ences must have a correspondingly important part in any assessment of the relation between the organization of individual experience as subjectivity, and the construction of a subjectively mediated objective world as reality.3

Th is raises a number of questions which, although not taken up directly, are relevant to the issues raised in the course of this chapter. Why, fi rst, do radical critiques of liberal democracy and capitalism almost invariably seem to rely on existential, ontological or aesthetic criteria, that is, why are they apparently unable to refute liberal democracy – a political doctrine – on the same political grounds that liberal democracy correctly uses to critique absolutism, fascism and other ideologies? Why, second, do these critiques appear equally incapable of producing economic arguments against the economic system that seems to work better than all the others? Th ese two questions raise the larger question of how to criticize a system of thought and institutional practice without reproducing its basic assumptions, however skewed and reformulated, on the one hand, or displacing critique outside of the parameters of what can be considered rigorous, on the other. But is it really the case that radical critiques of liberal democracy and capitalism are unable to refute liberalism and capitalism on respectively political and economic grounds, or is it more of an indication of the hege-monic position of liberal democracy and capitalism that together, they succeed in reducing alternative political positions to what are for the most part taken to be deviations from reason and ‘common sense’? In a related vein, one may ask why, aft er the end of the Cold War (1945–89) and the removal of the threat of a nuclear war between the so-called superpowers, humanity has not witnessed a proliferation of political and socio-economic experimentation. On the contrary, it would appear that the number of ‘feasible’ alternative models has narrowed to one or perhaps two. Th e fi rst decades of the post-World War II period are characterized by a great diversity in political organization and aspiration. Th ese range from state socialism (former Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea), Euro- communism (Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese parties), democratic socialism (Yugoslav market socialism), social democracy, social democratic


corporatism (Scandinavia and to a certain extent former West Germany), liberal democracy, authoritarian populism (French Front National, Bavarian CSU, Italian Lega Nord) and fascism (Spain until 1975, Portugal under Salazar, Italian MSI, rule of the colonels in Greece). Does one explain the end of Euro-communism and the markedly centrist evolution of social democracy and corporatism as part of a post-Cold War, post-ideological consensus tantamount to Fukuyama’s famous end of history? Or has liberal democracy managed to impose itself as system without alternatives, that is, as a veritably total system rather than one political alternative among others that citizens may or may not choose to practise? It is inherent in a poten-tially total system that it tends subtly to contrast a pervasively diff used ‘common sense’ with what appears to be dogmatic truth claims and extrem-ist or utopian gestures, such that the answers to the political issues in question are established before meaningful inquiry or debate can even take place. Spontaneous thought can then be simultaneously marginalized as non-thought (relegated to the obscurity of private opinion) and/or inte-grated and applauded as already existing (freedom of choice in most of its current manifestations). For example, it ‘makes no sense’ to ask if the obvi-ously unstable growth-oriented economy is really necessary – we simply must fi nd ways to reinvigorate it at all costs. Th e only serious question then becomes how, and not if this is to be achieved.4

It is a central task of the critique of daily life to explore how these conversions and integrations are achieved without resorting to conspiracy theories or notions of structural determination and other fl awed accounts of history and society. Th is chapter off ers a series of refl ections on the possibilities for spontaneous, extra-systemic knowledge which is nonethe-less not arbitrary or merely anecdotal. A few cursory remarks on Marx and Simmel provide a good introduction to the discussion.5 Despite the fact that some of what follows on these two thinkers is already well known and to a certain extent has been touched upon in Chapters 1 and 2, it is none-theless helpful to give the critique of everyday life a preliminary grounding in social theory. If one does not bear this sociological background in mind, it is diffi cult to see what the critique can contribute to an understanding of power, knowledge and unorthodox accounts of reason and thinking.6 While Marx addresses the democratic defi cit in modern industrial socie-ties, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School addresses the lack of genuine liberalism and pluralism in liberal democracies, it may be none-theless maintained that a coherent synthesis of Marx and the Frankfurt School pointing the way towards a theoretical and eventually practical reconciliation of post-liberal autonomy, pluralism and democracy does not


begin to take shape until Simmel’s sociological reading of Marx. In what follows, Marx, Simmel and Foucault are analysed with an eye towards developing a critique of everyday life with important implications for the critiques of instrumental reason and instrumental legitimacy. It is hoped that this provides a more fruitful line of argument than sketching yet another summary of the main ideas of the paradigm thinkers of everyday life such as Schütz, de Certeau, Kracauer, Castoriadis and Lefebvre. It is left to readers to see what they think.7

Marx and the Tentative Beginnings of the Critique of Everyday Life

Marx sets out by exploring the distinct models of economy and polity implied by the diff erences between the political emancipation from feudalism achieved in the French Revolution, on the one hand, and the more comprehensive form of human emancipation he thinks is going to accompany the next revolution in Europe, on the other. He starts by look-ing at how Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of religion might be developed in relation to both the democratic-parliamentary state and the modern capitalist economy. Feuerbach suggests that in religion, and especially Christianity, humanity tends to project its best qualities and capacities (creating, loving, knowing, forgiving, etc.) onto a deity. Th e consequence is that the realization of those qualities in the real interactions structuring daily life is made impossible, and, further, that these qualities come back to humanity in an institutional form that the collective human mind for the most part ceases to recognize as the product of its own social action. In other words, by the time humanity’s best qualities and values have come back to humanity in the rituals and hierarchies of organized religion, their originally secular character is obscured by a kind of mysterious rival power that seems to have either fully natural or other-worldly and divine origins. Enlisting Hegel’s dialectical method for his own purposes, Marx suggests that whether understood as fully natural or other-worldly, this power is sustained by failing to remember that all objective structures such as institutions are mediated by subjective factors such as conscious-ness and social action. Th is means that in phenomenological appearance, the human qualities in question shed the imprints of their juridical, his-torical, political and socio-economic origins and development. Secular humanist creativity and knowledge are then marginalized by the ritualiz-ing of faith, conformity and obedience to what appears to be legitimate, and in any case inevitable, hierarchy. Following Feuerbach’s analysis it would seem that the problem of human emancipation is centrally about


the critique of religion and the intrusion of religious authority into what should really be earthly and political matters. Aft er initially concurring with this general assessment, the Marx of 1843–44 sees that Feuerbach’s transformative method needs to be applied to other spheres of intellectual and sensual praxis in which human values, energies and capacities come back to them in forms they cease to recognize as their own. Hence in Marx’s hands, Feuerbach’s critique of religion and the church evolves into a critique of democratic ideology and the state. As will be seen presently, this does not entail a rejection of democracy. It entails instead the demand to convert ideology into actual practices, much in the way that Feuerbach’s abolition of religion would be achieved by realizing in human relations what had been mistaken as the attributes of a divine being. Marx reckons that the epochal signifi cance of Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel and religion is not that it represents an innovation in the history of ideas confi rming Feuerbach’s originality as a thinker. It is rather that his ideas register the socio-economic and political reality that for the fi rst time in human history, the objective institutional bifurcation between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought to be’, perpetuated throughout the ages by material scarcity, loses its objectivity. Th is implies that the realization of humanity’s best qualities ceases to be a matter of religion and other forms of wishful thinking and escapism, and becomes instead a concrete materialist problem concerning the revolution of everyday life.8

In Marx’s estimation, the fi rst consequence of the widespread accept-ance of the state in the Hegelian sense as an instance of mind objectifi ed in institutions is a bifurcation between the individual as a private, labour-ing self, on the one hand, and the institutions of estranged (and therefore authoritarian) government, on the other. Th is alienation is no less power-ful and mesmerizing than that achieved by the separation of human potential from the realities of ecclesiastical order, and the practical suppression of the former by the dogmatic truth claims and obscurantist authority of the latter. Hence for Marx the task of the next revolution is to make democracy as self-government a reality by overcoming the rift between the private self of civil society and the abstract citizen of the state theorized (and justifi ed) by Hegel in the Philosophy of Right. In gen-eral terms this implies directing the same criteria of one-person one-vote won through political emancipation to the economy of civil society, that is, to the structure of the labour process, so that formal, political democ-racy can cede place to substantive, social democracy. In other words, suff rage whose fi eld of applicability is not extended to the labour process – the crucial instance of mediation between humanity and nature – cannot


really be considered democratic suff rage. Th is is due to the obvious fact that the demos is not authorized to participate in the key decisions that structure the daily life of its individual members as producers, consumers and citizens.9 As in the case of the religious domination exercised by the church, exclusion from active engagement in the workings of political authority results in the mani pulation of human relations, and, in most cases, widespread passivity and conformity.10

If translated into explicitly sociological analysis (rather than understood in terms of psychological dispositions), passivity means increasingly exploited workers consuming increasingly uniform products under condi-tions of eff ective political exclusion from more than symbolic participation. Applying Feuerbach’s critique of religion to the political domain, Marx suggests that to the extent that political adjectives such as rationally deliberative, universal, legitimate, and so on become attributes of the state, democracy as the self-government of the citizens becomes ideological and chimerical, and, crucially, that this mystifi cation is not recognized as such due to the discrepancies between subjective experience and the contours of objective institutional form, that is, what he calls alienation. As a result of the socio-economic and juridical processes through which the state assumes an ostensibly universal legal form, civil society becomes the site of contractually mediated aggression, unfair competition, egotism, fraud and the exercise of arbitrary power. Th e practical realization of the universal and socially democratic qualities required for self-government in polity and industry is eff ectively prevented by their concentration (and therefore distortion) in the formally democratic (legislature, judiciary) and repres-sive (executive) institutions of government. Substantive, social democracy is dismissed by mainstream parties and politicians as a vision lacking in rigour in the sense used at the outset of this chapter; it is easily written off by ‘experts’ as a kind of fantasy that only utopian dreamers are likely to take seriously. An intrinsic dimension of the critique of everyday life aft er Marx is the notion that it is not simply the talents and energies of the working classes that are appropriated by the forces of capital. Th e critique is directed against a series of broader, more comprehensive mechanisms of appropria-tion in which language, dreams and other forms of expression and experience are manipulated by experts, controlled by institutions, repre-sented by parties and classifi ed in epistemological discourses. Hence the critique is informed by the insight that what is imposed is also that which excludes. It is an insight that links Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony and common sense with the surrealist denunciation of the daily routine and Foucault’s critique of bio-power.11


Eff ective exclusion from active decision-making seems to confi rm the experts’ position in many people’s minds: the eff ectively internalized reality principle of subordination places severe limits on what is considered possible, and these limits are in turn reinforced by the real and symbolic maintenance of arbitrary boundaries and the enforcement of objectively unnecessary sanctions against sensual knowledge and experience detached from competency criteria. While Gramsci provides a political analysis of these processes, Bourdieu examines them as sociological and cultural phenomena.12 To the extent that the vicious circle of repression and dimin-ishing expectations is perpetuated, aggression, unfair competition, egotism and the exercise of arbitrary power are elevated to the status of rational action. Th e parallel to Marx’s quip in his critique of Hegel that the constitu-tion rules without really ruling is that decidedly undemocratic private law in civil society rules while in theory being subordinated to the offi cially proclaimed democratic institutions of government. In sum, religious servility and political disenfranchisement contribute to the problem of frustrated potential and distorted perception of reality.13

In the course of the further development of his thinking aft er 1843, Marx quickly perceives that the problem of frustrated potential and distorted perception of reality is compounded by the fact that in the labour process, production and consumption are regulated by exchanges through which humanity’s inability to recognize its own religious and political creations fi nds its socio-economic counterpart in wage labour and com-modity production. Th is can be explained as follows: in comparison with the relation between serf and lord obtaining in feudalism, the relation between capitalist and worker seems to be free from direct domination. Indeed, Marx welcomes the transition from feudal-agrarian to modern industrial society as the gigantic step forward for humanity which is pre-paring the ground for the subsequent exit from the historical stage of the capitalist and worker, and their replacement by truly autonomous indivi-duals. In his estimation, the (re)unifi cation of intellectual planning and sensuous activity will engender a new form of subjectivity having little in common with the antagonistic competence and domination-based pseudo-subjectivity of the lords, serfs, capitalists and workers of what Marx sometimes refers to as humanity’s prehistory.14 In modern industrial society, in contrast to feudal arrangements, no worker is compelled to work for any specifi c capitalist. What is more, the capitalist commands the labour time of the worker only and not, as was oft en the case under feudalism, the entirety of serf ’s person. But Weber and Simmel note that this transition, while potentially revolutionary, is also characterized by the fact that the


personalized, natural hierarchy of feudalism cedes place to a much more subtle form of domination precisely because direct force is now largely absent – except in crisis periods. Th e general implication is that hegemony does not issue from the point of production to then give rise to all other forms of social confl ict, nor is the workplace the key factor in the mono-causal explanation of superstructural phenomena. Hegemony is religious, political, cultural, aesthetic and economic. It is rooted in experience and does not culminate, so to speak, in any fi xed point. It is not rooted in nature, as the nation is usually held to be, and correspondingly does not culminate in law, the state or any other pinnacle of a metaphorical power pyramid. Th is is why hegemony needs continually to be re-established, and also the reason why the historic bloc of forces that maintains a given hegemony can be subverted.15

In very schematic terms required in order to get to the point, Marx maintains that the worker provides the capitalist with a contractually agreed number of labour power hours per week or month. Th e workforce is not engaged in the production of goods and services designed directly to satisfy workers’ needs for creativity or to satisfy consumers’ immediate need for products, as had once been the case, albeit in archaic forms of socio-economic and political organization, when these things were bartered or when guilds regulated production. Th e critique of instrumental reason encounters the critique of everyday life for the fi rst time with Marx’s analysis of the modalities through which workers produce items which in turn will be sold, that is, commodities.16 Commodities embody institution-alized instrumental reason in that they are by defi nition not produced for their own sake. Once the commodity enters into circulation it acquires a life of its own and the capacity to become what one might call ‘a means in itself ’. Commodities are socially produced and privately appropriated in ways that increase the dependency of the worker on an estranged relation with the means of production and heteronomous investment that Marx designates with the term capital. In return for the intelligence, imagination and great diversity of inputs into the labour process made by each worker in his or her own way, they all receive a homogenous unit of remuneration in the form of wages. Since capitalism is a dynamic system in which enter-prises are either increasing their profi ts or struggling in decline, the capitalist class of people who buy and command the energies of labour power cannot pay the class of people who sell their labour what the latter are worth according to what would be a fair wage and an exchange of actual equivalents (hours and labour power for a monetary equivalent to the con-tribution to the production of the commodity). Marx maintains that a


surplus must be extracted that enables the buyers of labour power to adver-tise, repair old and buy new equipment, and take on new members of staff in a competitive market environment in which fi rms are either going forwards or reeling backwards. As stated, Marx characterizes the particular form of indirect dependence of the sellers of labour power on the class who buy it as a capitalist form of dependence, as distinct, that is, from a myriad of other possible modes of dependence. Anticipating Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, Marx maintains that power and oppression are exercised through the mediating instances of law, politics, culture and ideology that enable one class to buy the labour power of another through contracts and labour markets, to extract a surplus in the process, and to rely on gover-nments to pass laws which instantiate an acceptable compromise between capital and labour which in subtle ways privilege the former. Correspond-ing to the modalities of negative liberty, the acceptability of this compromise is usually based on the absence of direct force: labour power is exchanged for wages in what both parties agree is a fair or at least the fairest possible exchange of equivalents.17

A number of dynamics structure the relations between capital and labour. First, one class thinks about and plans the most effi cient possible use of the labour power it buys. Th e latter, in turn, obeys and carries out the tasks they have agreed to do in return for their wages. Th is suggests that the separation of humanity and divinity entrenched in religious authority, which is compounded by the schism between self and govern-ment in the political sphere, is completed in fi gurative terms with the socio-economic alienation of the thinking brain from the working hand, that is, with the division of labour, a phenomenon which for Marx is closely connected with capital and class. Marx is alive not only to the fact that socially created wealth is privately appropriated. He also sees that capital must somehow reduce the role of labour to that of a passive executor and nonetheless expand the forces of production, that is, something it cannot do with the help of merely passive executors. At some point capital and labour have to become partners by abolishing private property in the means of production and by socializing investment, or labour must be replaced by industrial and cybernetic machinery.18 Second, the buyers, and to a much more intensifi ed extent, the sellers of labour power cease to recognize their diverse energies, ideas and imagination in the wages they receive or the commodities they buy. Production organized to reproduce the capital-labour relation as a means in itself instead of expressing worker creativity or satisfying consumer demand creates dependence between the buyers and sellers of labour power in obvious ways which are exacerbated


by the more subtle forms of dependence on commodities on the part of consumers on both sides of the class divide. Commodities circulate in search of buyers, and in the process acquire strange properties that enable them to promise friendship, love, adventure, risk and other experiences – perhaps most fundamentally trust – which for the young Marx issue from human relations.19

At the risk of belabouring the triadic point about religion, politics and labour, the experiences are packaged and resold to their own creators in ways which are much more standardized and predictable than they were in their spontaneous, extra-systemic form. Marx suggests that these intellec-tual-sensual experiences are also far more reliable sources of cognition prior to their systemic subordination to the heteronomous forces com-manding production according to instrumental criteria. It may be objected that this claim is impossible to prove on the grounds that whatever may have been productively possible in a moment temporally antecedent to commodity production becomes for all intents and purposes a lost, or at best, speculative moment in the course of the reproduction of capital-labour relations. It may be objected further that to stipulate the worker’s hypothetical rights to labour power that has not been distorted, in a man-ner of speaking, by external forces, is to invoke a utopian conception of natural rights and autonomy that simply cannot be reconciled with the demands of the right of private property and capital to determine how and in what quantities commodities are produced for which markets. Th ese objections would be diffi cult to meet in any traditional state, since the rights of the powerful to command are simply part of what is dictated by nature, tradition and the requirements of order. But they can be met accord-ing to the very same criteria invoked to defend a legal form of legitimacy that is meant to be democratic and not only liberal. Th e legitimacy of libe-ral democratic citizenship is based on what has to be the non- negotiable, and by extension, non-instrumental capacity of citizens to make the laws according to which they choose to live. Th at implies that they are not compelled to submit to laws that are imposed on them by extra-political forces, and the latter, such as those of capital, are in fact politically illegiti-mate, and should really be illegal. A liberal form of legitimacy thus has to face the juridical objection that there is nothing particularly utopian about the right of labour to seek to institutionalize autonomous conditions of production, any more than it is self-evident that capital has a natural right to buy and command labour power. It also has to face the practical problem alluded to above, to wit, that capital must somehow reduce the role of labour to that of a passive executor and nonetheless enlist the help of the


workforce in order to expand the forces of production. Th is cannot be accomplished unless expansion is to be synonymous with standardization and homogenization – doing everything necessary to produce the same commodities at lower cost – rather than innovation and better quality. It is clear that the term quality in this context implies an aesthetic dimension denoting uniqueness and particularity. But uniqueness and particularity are misconstrued if understood in terms of prepolitical natural rights or the supposed aesthetic integrity of authentic creation. Particularity asserts itself as spontaneity and resistance that is not external to, but is on the contrary enmeshed in power relations. Hence the aesthetic dimension of the critique of daily life is not a kind of extra-dialectical by-product of the critique of political economy, any more than art is a more or less accidental eff ect of the economic structure of society. Th e dialectic of humanity and nature underpinning Marx’s critique of political economy itself needs revision for reasons which will be spelled out more explicitly below in rela-tion to subsequent Marxist notions of social agency and historical causality.

Th e central epistemological link in this context is that between sponta-neity and uniqueness, thus reiterating the point made at the outset of this chapter: systemic power suppresses diff erences between things, places and people in the service of classifi catory half-truths and order-enforcing hierarchy. Th is raises the question about the possibility of alternative, freedom- and knowledge-enhancing forms of power. In Capital Marx describes the processes through which experiences connected with the labour process are transformed into commodities and resold to their creators as part of what he calls the fetishism of commodities. Just as work-ers are not compelled to work for any particular fi rm, they are not legally compelled to buy any particular car, holiday or television. Th e dynamic can be summed as follows: while the mode of production (capital, class, division of labour, wage labour, exploitation) transforms individual and collective labour power into commodities which are bought and sold on the market, the mode of consumption (ritualized passivity, fetishism, reifi -cation, coerced integration) transforms individual and collective needs into commodities that must be bought and sold in order to guarantee the smooth functioning of the mode of production.20 Th e point is that the exclusion brought about by religious intimidation, political oppression and wage labour is accompanied by coerced integration. It is this paradoxical dynamic that warrants the description of the contradictory mechanisms involved as a plurality of systems, which is not to say that the mechanisms in question function mechanically. Th e systems, which incorporate civil society and government into a more comprehensive, decentred ensemble


sometimes referred to as the state, and more recently referred to as govern-ance, accomplish the exploitation of workers and simultaneous integration of consumers and citizens not despite, but because of the overlapping patterns that marginalize and integrate the same person at distinct, non-linear times or junctures of their lives. Th is makes the precise delineation of systemic structures versus extra-systemic spontaneity an extremely diffi cult if not impossible task if, that is, spontaneous, non-ideological knowledge is taken to be the privileged birth right of a unifi ed subject con-fronting an objective external reality that it can transform through re-appropriation. It is here where the Marxist dialectic is in need of revi-sion. Marx is admittedly much stronger in relation to the dynamics of exploitation and marginalization than he is in relation to the processes of integration, which partly explains why he is not really a theorist of social action. It is also one of the reasons why Lukács and Lenin, for whom the unifi ed subject fi rst appears in idealist guise as Hegel’s Geist, followed by spirit’s material incarnation in the revolutionary proletariat, are able to portray Marx as the theorist of compact collective subjectivity and praxis. Whether analysed as the subject-object of history or as the party-political vanguard, these accounts of the relation between subjectivity and knowl-edge are of undeniable historical interest, but have little theoretical or practical import today.21 Convincing critiques of daily life retain key aspects of Marx’s analysis of political economy and instrumental reason, while deconstructing the rather mechanical account of subjectivity that Marx passes on to his followers. Th is is why it is so important to consider Simmel and Foucault’s contributions.

From the Critique of Alienation to Sociological Theory

If one is allowed to suppose for a moment that monarchical and ecclesiasti-cal authority did not have the centralized administrative means of the early modern state at its disposal, and that the mechanisms of integration in traditional society were relatively weak and therefore easy to analyse, this changes by the time the power of capital and the state are so closely inter-twined that it becomes futile to try to locate any particular social subject that is external to the productive system and potentially disruptive of its operations. It is at this juncture that the Philosophy of Money serves as an important complement to the theses expounded in Capital. In general terms, however, it is fair to say that the critique of daily life that follows from Simmel’s analysis of money builds on the Marxist critiques of reli-gion, politics and political economy. From that point the ground is prepared


for wider explorations of subjects like language, dreams, knowledge, bio-power, urban geography and other phenomena that are not easily categorized as either systemic or extra-systemic, or as pertaining to the base and not the superstructure. For Simmel the most signifi cant aspect of money is not so much that some people have more money than others. Money disseminates unspoken and largely unwritten ambiguities about the way things are made, where and how they are made, and about the social relations that the things in question presuppose and reinforce. To anticipate the discussion of Foucault which follows these remarks on Simmel, one might say that although unspoken and unwritten, these half-lies are in a real and fi gurative sense visible.22

Th e other salient dimension of money is that it disperses the feudal unity of individual destiny, position at birth and obligatory belonging to a territorially defi ned unit of space. Th e dissolution of this unity breaks the authoritarian bond between lords and serfs. Money thus facilitates a partial liberation from direct oppression which is highly ambiguous precisely because it is partial. Simmel indicates that one class does not possess the means directly to oppress another class as if, that is, the classes were engaged in a tug of war waged on a vertical axis, stacked in favour of the better positioned minority. If this were so, the workers could perhaps seize the state, occupy and take over language and use it for their own purposes, and smash money. Simmel indicates why the state, language and money do not function in ways that would make such smashing and re-appropriation possible. His intent is not to defend capitalism as such, and indeed, during his lifetime he consistently adopted social democratic political allegiances. But like Foucault, he is also convinced that post-liberal autonomy is best served by sociological analysis that refl ects the intricacies of stratifi cation and the complex relation between knowledge and power.23 While money facilitates a transition from barter and initially acts as a means of exchange, it becomes far more than a mere means as the denaturalization of social relations unfolds. Hence money says more about the strength or weakness of the social bond prevailing in a particular society at a specifi c juncture than it does about exploitation, especially if the latter is misconstrued as strength, as in the tug of war example. Money tends to separate production processes from exchange and consumption processes, thus attesting to a palpable change in the structure of the social bond vis-à-vis other models of society. In commodity production objects lose their particularity, and, in a parallel development, places lose their specifi city, as evident in pheno-mena to appear well aft er Simmel’s period, such as shopping malls, supermarkets and other spaces that could almost literally be anywhere.


Another way of saying this is that commodifi ed objects and interchangea-ble places lose their objectivity and distinctiveness, thus eff ectuating a kind of Hegelian inversion from quality back to quantity. Under these condi-tions it is possible to substitute the name of one thing for another or change the name of a place according to a whimsical decree. As the discussion in Chapter 2 indicates, Benjamin intuits that the problem diagnosed by Simmel requires a Marxist intervention, but it must be a Marxist interven-tion of a very unusual kind. If the core of the revolution of everyday life is truth, justice, awakening, remembering and genuine self-government rather than systemic power, revenge, ideology and superfi cially democra-tized populism, then the revolution will have to restore the proper relation between people, places and things and the names that really distinguish them.24

Th e discussion in this section of the present chapter is more centrally concerned with Simmel’s analysis of the ways in which money is able to function like an elastic form rendering possible, from the individual’s perspective, the investment of an object with an almost infi nite range of subjective meanings and values. Th e subjectivization of value goes together with the privatization of experience, such that personal satisfaction (which must be continually satisfi ed anew, dovetailing the processes in which capital must continually expand, and the modes of production and con-sumption mutually adjusted) becomes the ultimate standard of quality. Yet the criteria making a meaningful appreciation of quality become increasingly diffi cult to discern due to this privatization of experience and the corresponding metamorphosis of the social bond. Th at is to say that the pervasiveness of money-based relations decreases the capacity of isolated individuals to make reliable judgements about the quality or the depth of their relationships with other people, places and things. Th is helps explain why capitalism, in those periods when it seems to function well, seems to suff use society with a sense of individual freedom and consumer choice. Th is somewhat giddy sensation is intensifi ed by the gradual erosion of any direct relation between the possession of money on the one hand, and determinate types of personality on the other. In modern societies money can be inherited, or earned by people who in previous social formations were dependent on lords or patrons, or accumulated by successful athletes, gamblers, the self-made nouveau riche, and so on. What interests Simmel are the various processes of interactive exchange (Wechselwirkungen) which make the social bond so volatile and dynamic that it seems improb-able that there can be any general theory of history, modernity, money, subjectivity or even of society. Th is is not to say that society is governed by


a set of completely arbitrary interactions. Hence he eschews idealist, materialist and positivist monocausal explanation, but does not embrace relativism. What happens in daily life is not simply the conversion of living labour power into accumulated labour power that oppresses the workers, nor is it a random series of events with no relation between them. Th is more nuanced assessment corresponds to his view that it is no longer possible to speak in Hegelian or dogmatic Marxist terms about the media-tion of humanity and nature in straightforward subject-object dialectics, in which subject and object are unifi ed in a higher entity which supersedes them both, that is, in the synthetic unity that Hegelian philosophers characterize with the term Aufh ebung. What is observable instead, Simmel submits, is a kind of montage dialectic, so to speak, in which discrete spatio-temporal moments of the subject, the object, nature, history and society become simultaneously visible. Th ese distinct and yet related elements form an epistemological constellation of multicausal and multi-directional determinations or tendencies. Hence in anticipation of some of the key tenets of systems theory, the entity that knows, so to speak, is not an unmediated epistemological subject with knowledge and control over a monolithic object. Th is deconstruction of subject-object dialectics prefi g-ures the work of Heidegger, Foucault and Luhmann, while also providing further evidence for the thesis that undivided individual and collective subjects do not really exist and therefore cannot simply re-appropriate objects as if the latter were alienated essences waiting to be reabsorbed. Moreover, as the term montage implies, there is an aesthetic dimension to this method of sociological explanation that needs a word of elaboration. But it is worth noting straightaway that although the deconstruction of the imperious individual and collective subject signals the end of credible attempts to constitute seamless autonomy by blocking out external social and historical phenomena, this deconstruction is not necessarily synony-mous with an abrupt end to the project of post-liberal autonomy full stop. Th is will become clearer in the discussion of Foucault to follow.25

Simmel attempts to take an apparently isolated phenomenon, such as sport, fashion, urban existence, competition, manners, and so on, and to analyse it in all its ramifi cations in an eff ort to reveal something about it by exposing its form, rather than attempting directly to present its content or essence. He proceeds from the smallest, seemingly most unrelated details of social life, and then develops hypotheses suggesting how certain social facts and phenomena are distinct and nonetheless related. Simmel does not try to deduce fashion changes, or the succession of one art movement by another, or the professionalization of sport, and so on, from changes in


‘the economy’, or ‘spirit’, nor does he regard changes in the diff erent spheres as being unrelated. Th us Benjamin and Lukács follow him in trying to analyse culture embedded in the economy, rather than looking at the way that the economy might seem to produce diverse socio-cultural orientations. With the example of fashion, for example, Simmel hopes to illustrate how economy and culture are in the widest sense phenomena related to social rather than biological or evolutionary metabolism, that is, in the sense of a fi gurative economy of extra-normative social energy which requires both social distance and proximity in order to fi nd a stable institutional form. For Simmel fashion is always the fashion of diff erent social classes and groups. In any epoch in which the dominant classes have enormous amounts of wealth compared to the rest of society, changes in fashion are relatively slow in getting underway and attaining visibility. In this social formation, articles of exceptional clothing are extremely expensive and quite conspicuously the privilege of a select few. Nonetheless, that small group is usually also keen to ensure that less wealthy groups can at least glimpse the more expensive objects. Th is sus-tains a continually renegotiated equilibrium between social proximity and distance refl ecting the fact that power can only continue to be social power if, in the case of fashion, it is admired. In epochs where the popular classes are able to secure relatively higher levels of income than their predecessors, Simmel notes, fashion changes much more rapidly. At one level elite fash-ion suddenly seems accessible to all; at another level it is now changing much too quickly to be genuinely distributed across social classes.26 Some-thing analogous can be argued in relation to higher education in the United Kingdom today. On the one hand, in comparison with the immediate post-World War II period, a much higher percentage of school leavers go to university, suggesting a thorough democratization of social relations. Due to the manner in which this has been accomplished (general push towards humanities with relatively little consideration given to technical training and professional apprenticeships), on the other hand, an undergraduate degree is unlikely to distinguish one young person from another in terms of qualifi cations and skills. Th is oft en means that upon leaving university, they have to do badly paid, repetitive jobs, or go on to do a masters degree. Since there is very little public funding for MAs, it is oft en the case that only confi dent students from more wealthy backgrounds can continue their education to enhance their career prospects. In the fashion and education examples there is a dynamic at work which implies both real democratization as well as eff ective restructuring of pre-existing hierar-chies as opposed to their dismantling. As in a vast array of similar domains,


changes in fashion and the provision of higher education are developing according to an interactive exchange logic which is neither random nor monocausal. Simmel maintains that the phenomenon of organized compe-tition illustrates another case in point.

Competition in any fi eld, whether economic or cultural, creates a mone-tary or status hierarchy. Th e successful and less successful are separated by the outcomes of the competition, yet the competition also integrates all participants at the same time that it distinguishes them. Th e less successful tend to admire the more successful. Th e more successful, in turn, require this admiration in a sociologically mediated way that has more to do with the changing dynamics adjusting and readjusting social equilibrium than with psychological notions of projection or envy. Th at is, Simmel is keen to distinguish his philosophical sociology from social psychology and all types of naturalism and evolutionism, of which there are also historical materialist variants. He examines society as an ensemble of simultaneously unfolding processes, and yet, he is open to the ever-present possibility of new social forms, the institutionalization of new values, and in short, of new human beings engaged in a radically transformed daily life. Th is sug-gests that the false choice between autonomy and heteronomy can be reconceptualized in terms of diff erent possible forms of post-liberal auton-omy and new confi gurations of the legality/legitimacy dialectic.27

Simmel borrows certain elements from Kant’s critical philosophy, and in particular, the notion of the objectivity of epistemological form, which he extends to the objectivity of the form (rather than essence) of society. But at the same time Simmel discards the Kantian transcendental subject and its synthetic unity of consciousness. Whereas Dilthey is crucial in challenging the transcendental knowing subject with a reminder of the subject’s historical contingency, Simmel shows why this contingency is decidedly more many-sided than even Dilthey supposes. Not only is it the case that social individuals are products of history; they are also the spon-taneous and variable points of nexus in processes of exchange and potentially new modes of socialization. Where Kant invokes the transcen-dental subject, Simmel responds with the worldly and vital subject of Nietzsche. Where Nietzsche absolutizes the will to power, Simmel responds with Marx. In those instances in which Marx calls for a collective re-appro-priation of alienated labour, Simmel makes a convincing case for the objectivity of social form and the rejection of all notions of human essence – whether labouring, political or communicative – implied by his ideas on the plural causality of interactive reciprocal exchange processes. Hence Simmel indicates that there is a signifi cant degree of spontaneity in the


reproduction of social systems and institutions, and a great deal of systemic structure involved in what may look like the spontaneous inter-action of social actors. Th e implication is that any easy juxtaposition of system and spontaneity is theoretically defi cient, and should really cede place to a more montage-like appreciation of paradox, simultaneity, and the synchronic coexistence of spontaneous actor and established system. Otherwise one is engaging in the futile attempt to rehabilitate pre-social, pristine anthropological essences untainted by reciprocally interactive exchange processes. Th is suggests that innovative resistance to systemic oppression cannot be based on a tug of war model of social stratifi cation or an individual versus systems model of knowledge.28

Th e Philosophy of Money, Simmel’s great contribution to social theory, appeared in 1900, the same year as Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. While there can be no doubt that Freud’s work has had much wider resonance and impact, they are both path-breakers in the deconstruction of transcen-dental consciousness, unifi ed social subjects and apparently monolithic types of authority. Th e implication that emerges from Freud and especially from Simmel’s work is that one does not learn about subjectivity and knowledge by directly analysing subjectivity and knowledge. One gets fi gu-ratively nearer to such phenomena, in a manner of speaking, by studying the changing modalities of language, dreams, urban experience, architec-ture, fashion and exchange. Th is is not to say that subjects are passive eff ects of systemic (language, law) and non-systemic (dreams, fashion) signifi ers. But if Simmel is correct, it will be fruitful to study the grammatical and institutional forms in which subjectivity and knowledge are articulated, which is not the same thing as studying the subject and imputing a wide range of psychological dispositions, political capacities and socio-economic interests to it.29 Th is plural but rigorous epistemological position is consistent with Simmel’s philosophical-aesthetic sociology. It is possible to illustrate the point with the oft made observation that one does not grasp space and time by trying to pinpoint and hold them under a microscope, that is, it is the study of movement that reveals something potentially much more signifi cant about space and time in this regard. Similarly, a sculpture composed of glass, metal, wood, and so on may reveal something more important about spatial dimensions than it does about the materials glass, metal and wood.

By extension, it may be helpful to observe the forms in which reason is institutionalized instead of trying to make it an essential anthropological property since, aft er the discussion in the previous chapter, it seems clear that by making reason part of the defi nition of the human, reason becomes


little more than instrumental reason, that is, a faculty for coordinating means and ends. Th is is one of the problems with defi ning reason in terms of the actions of an inherently rational individual or naturally rational collective subject. In the case of the individual, whatever they do is rational and successful or rational and failed, up to a certain limit, aft er which individual action can be branded as irrational or pathological. Similarly, the same can be said of whatever the collective decides to do, whether it be going to war, organizing an embargo or decreasing taxes for the wealthy citizens who supposedly need incentives to keep their investments in the country: the contingent is not thought as much as it is simply elevated to the status of the necessary. Th e obvious corollary is that because the ends of action are already predetermined by absolute necessity (survival), means-rationality will inevitably be the considered the only available kind.30

Hence one can say that the critique of instrumental reason in its many guises is a critique of metaphysics, traditional subjectivity, linear time and the particular kind of knowledge appropriate for the maintenance of negative liberty. What is less clear but perhaps more interesting is that it is also a critique of existing forms of law and the assumptions underpinning legal forms of legitimacy. Th is is because legitimacy is posited as a natural/automatic by-product of liberal democratic law, where the latter is assumed to be the emanation of a territorially defi ned group of people that gives itself laws. Th is is something the people can do because of its sovereignty as a nation. Th e epistemological tautology discussed in the previous chapter is complemented by the political tautology suggested by the axiom that legal universality (or objectivity/impartiality if one prefers) is secured by a people that gives itself laws.31 Th e notion that the people gives itself laws in its own state is as imprecise as the idea that it gives itself language. Of course the English speak English, the Germans speak German, and so on, but not for natural reasons; otherwise one would have to accept the non-explanatory explanation that ‘they speak English because they are English – that is their language’. To this it might be added that not only English or German is spoken in those countries and, moreover, the only way to argue that an English person’s legal rights within England are more legitimate than another person’s living there is on the grounds that they are somehow naturally, that is, racially so.32 Simmel’s theory of denaturaliza-tion complements his theory of objective form in that taken together, they highlight the implausibility of making existing law the basis of rational legitimacy in anything other than an instrumentally rational sense. Does this suggest that it is perhaps time to give up on legitimacy as anything


other than a functionalist concept with much relevance for stability, but with minimal relevance for knowledge, freedom and plurality? Or is the point rather that one does not learn about the various kinds of possible reason by enumerating them and then evaluating them according to criteria of logical consistency or fi elds of application? Or is it that one gets fi guratively nearer to what reason might be by looking at how qualitatively diff erent forms of legitimacy set the parameters for distinct models of reason, thinking and social action?

Th e possible paths beyond liberal democratic autonomous subjectivity and instrumental reason would seem to disappear from sight at that point on the theoretical horizon where no readily available post-metaphysical subjectivity appears, and where conceptual vision is clouded further by the fact that any strict separation of system and extra-systemic epistemological spontaneity is apparently untenable. In the light of these diffi culties the task of critical theoretical research is clearly not that of jettisoning the subject for structure or for system, nor that of redefi ning the subject on the basis of apparently new essences. It is moreover fatalist to accept that whatever else one may say in a speculative vein, in real daily life reason is tantamount to more or less successful modes of adaptation to existing institutions. To capitulate to prevailing common sense and academic conformism in this way is tantamount to abandoning any critical edge the critique of daily life may have. It is the ongoing constitution of that reality that must be looked at anew, guided by Simmel’s notion that reality is a social reality shaped by a series of parallel processes and multidirectional tendencies. If the dynamic shaping those processes can be understood, it may be possible to rethink certain basic assumptions about reason, subjectivity and knowledge. His montage method indicates how to discern the thoughtful moment in reason rather than juxtaposing reason and thinking, and indeed, if it is possible to make a qualifi ed distinction between reason and thinking, as Heidegger and Foucault do, it may also be possible to revisit the complex relation between the critique of everyday life and legitimacy.

Resisting Discourse and Thinking the Spaces between the Visible and the Discursive

Without referring to him directly, Foucault shares Simmel’s view that power is misconceived when construed in terms of homogenous units that are distributed unequally from a centre – rooted in the people’s state and expressed in their laws – which protects a small number of powerful people from a much larger number of relatively powerless people, while simultaneously protecting them all from foreign invasion and the threat of


the potential enemy within. To say that the powerful have and wield power is as unsatisfactory in explanatory terms as the proposition that the exploi ters exploit the exploited, or that the defi ning characteristic of legal-ity is the law. Th is tends to confi rm the afore-mentioned hypothesis that one does not learn about juridical, linguistic and socio-economic phenom-ena by attempting to study them directly from the perspective of a supposedly ‘subjugated’ subject somewhere outside the system/oppressed by the system, on the one hand, or an equally implausible ‘ruling’ subject at the heart of the system and manipulating it for its own purposes, on the other. Since some kind of montage methodology is preferable, one might begin by examining the evolution of penal law, studying the rules of gram-mar and researching the history of exchange processes (what can be read), while simultaneously observing the dynamics of prison revolts, watching the changing face of psychiatric wards and recording the rhythms of plant closures (what can be seen). Th e discrepancy between the readable and the visible in relation to thinking is one of Foucault’s key concerns, and will provide the focus for the discussion below.33

Foucault explicitly refers to Marx as the fi rst theorist to distinguish between an unsatisfactory notion of homogeneous, continuous power, on the one hand, and the distinct forms of discontinuous power exercised in qualitatively diff erent ways at the workplace, through property ownership, in the school system, in the prisons, and so on, on the other.34 One of the many implications is that one should be wary of the usage of general terms like freedom, justice, natural rights and even spontaneity. Foucault is there-fore far more likely to speak of resistance than of spontaneity as such, and to speak of the histories of knowledge, pleasure, private life, madness, medicine, law, and so on rather than the encyclopaedic history made by a universal subject. He is therefore less interested in a history of private life than he is in the conditions under which an individual’s relation to the self can be constituted as privacy. It is in writing histories that one discerns moments of transitions between diff erent kinds of truth regime with dif-ferent kinds of possibilities for creating spaces of freedom. Moreover, given that the power of the psychiatrist or medical doctor is based on specifi c discourses of knowledge which are not the same as those invoked in the workplace or school, Foucault fi nds it more accurate to study the formation of discrete powers rather than power in general.35 Hence while Simmel is a thinker of post-metaphysical materialism, Foucault is a genealogical theo-rist of transitions, such as what he regards to be the transition from the juridifi cation to the medicalization of reason. Whereas the juridifi cation of reason is closely connected with the project of training and disciplining


citizens, the medicalization of reason is more centrally concerned with the bio-political attempt to regulate and calibrate the lives of populations. While these are important to Foucault, his primary interest is what one might call the conversion of the everyday knowledge of specifi c individuals into systemic epistemologies or epistèmes, especially as this phenomenon fi gures into a more global study of the relation between truth, power and knowledge.36 Since this conversion process is discontinuous and capillary, however, it should not be construed as the expropriation of subjective experience which should be restored to a unifi ed subject in the name of justice or rights. On the contrary, Foucault regards the exercise of power and the formalization of knowledge to be intimately bound up with the constitution of living individuals as subjects of knowledge, that is, as citizens and populations about whom knowledge is systematically constructed. Th is approach indicates that the deconstruction of foundations and centres requires a parallel deconstruction of subjects and all of their supposedly innate qualities, including law-giving reason in the state-juridical sense introduced in the fi rst part of the previous chapter.37

Foucault explains that subjects are not born subjects so much as they become them. In the course of becoming subjects they are classifi ed in innumerable ways which contribute to their social integration, even if they are simultaneously marginalized in many cases. Th is is a theoretical advance of considerable import if one considers that marginalization and integra-tion cease to be juxtaposed in the manner of a logical contradiction to be overcome in a ‘higher synthesis’. In other words, these seemingly contradic-tory tendencies do not result in unsolvable contradictions unless power and knowledge are neatly separated, and power is misunderstood as homogenous, continuous and emanating from a single central source. Th is raises a related point of central importance for this study and its tentative conclusions. Since power does not emanate from a single source, legitimate authority must also be diff use and plural, that is, it must fi nd a post-state-juridical form in order to be genuinely legitimate. Th ere is a clear parallel between Simmel’s contribution to the study of daily life through the assimilation of aesthetic modes of analysis and the sociological dimen-sion of Foucault’s writings on literature and painting.38 Both thinkers off er a comprehensive account of the dynamics of social process that might ena-ble each individual to forge their own values and develop an ethics and aesthetic of self-creation in ways that do not compel the individual to succumb to the false choice of trying in vain either to withdraw from society or passively to react to society’s demands. Common to their respec-tive projects is the delineation, however inchoate, of the broad contours of


what one might call post-liberal autonomy. Th ere can be no doubt about the importance of these ideas, especially in a historical period in which liberal democracy and social democracy are in what may be a terminal crisis, and state socialism is discredited.39

Foucault observes that power in society, like a line on certain excep-tional canvasses, does not necessarily move in one direction that penetrates into depth. Th e line may have two or more contradictory directions at the same time, such that it constantly moves (paradoxically without moving) and changes its function and valence in the process. In the daily experi-ences of painting and looking at canvasses, and in the constitution of and resistance to power as well, it is thus important to explore the surface and palpable texture of the phenomenon in question, rather than trying to ‘look behind’ physical realities for metaphysical ones. If it is misleading to construe power in terms of unequally distributed homogenous units, there is also a problem in considering power as the invisible core behind the visible exterior of a power edifi ce. It is in this sense that Gilles Deleuze describes Foucault as a genealogist and archivist, as well as a new kind of cartographer.40

A close examination indicates that the surface is not an undiff erentiated, exterior appearance in the manner of the edifi ce just alluded to. Th e imme-diately visible appearance seems to unite what is seen with its linguistically mediated concept. Th is is an instance where power is exercised, resisted and transformed within fl uid networks. Th ere is no notion in Foucault that power is wielded according to the model of a subject or determinate social class exercising power over an object or another fi xed social class. He notes that power produces an imposing image of harmony and congruity between seeing and thinking by way of language, thus prompting a comparison between Foucault’s analyses of the processes through which individuals become socially integrated subjects, and Adorno’s notion of coerced recon-ciliation. Moreover, the surface as pluridimensional map, in contrast with the appearance as veil, presents various moments of rupture and disconti-nuity between the visible and the conceptual that have affi nities with Adorno’s idea of mediated non-identity. Th is is not to say that for Adorno or Foucault the conceptual is somehow more real than the visible, which would be a retreat behind the epistemological terrain staked out by Heidegger. Foucault consistently questions the various powers and instances of knowledge apparently uniting visible, institutional form with conceptual, discursive meaning in ways indicative both of the complexity of power as well as the possibilities of thought and resistance. In one of his


lectures at the Collège de France during 1978–79, now published together with other lectures from that academic year with the title Th e Birth of Bio-Politics, he maintains that:

What is at stake in all of this research about madness, illness, delin-quency, and sexuality, as well as everything else I have been talking about today, is to show how the coupling of a series of practices with a truth regime forms an operative knowledge-power system (dispositif) which eff ectively inscribes in the real something that does not exist, and which subjects the real to a series of criteria stipulating what is true and what is false, whereby these criteria are taken to be legitimate. It is that moment which does not exist as real and which is not generally considered relevant to the legitimacy of a regime of true and false, it is that moment in things that engages me at the moment. It marks the birth of the asymmetrical bi-polarity of politics and eco-nomics, that is, of that politics and economics which are neither things that exist nor are errors, illusions or ideologies. It has to do with something which does not exist and which is nonetheless inscribed within the real, and which has great relevance for a truth regime which makes distinctions between truth and falsity.

Th is constant questioning may confi rm Paul Veyne’s observation that none of the various labels (structuralist, post-structuralist, 1968 thought, post-modern, etc.) attributed to Foucault are entirely fi tting, and that he is in many ways quite simply a rigorous philosophical sceptic.41 Like Nietzsche, therefore, he does not condemn power or contrast power with truth and knowledge. He is interested in the processes through which subjects become subjects, the truth becomes the truth, and the changing conditions under which this happens, which in the fi rst instance is the discrepancy between the visible and the readable. Th ere is nothing natural, inevitable, ontologi-cal or objective about this diff erence. Yet as the quotation above illustrates, it is also not a matter of false consciousness, ideological veils, or the conscious manipulation of some by others. In attempting to explain the dynamics of power-knowledge Foucault opens up the non-visible that is also the non-hidden. Th is opening up and disruption of the spaces com-posing the social surface is an act of analytical-practical resistance and the key to an anticipated political pluralism understood as genuinely diff erent ways of being beyond the duplication of more or less ‘acceptable’ subordi-nate subject positions in relation to the dominant subject. Otherwise it is


tempting to fetishize the latter in its phenomenal appearance as the middle-class white heterosexual man, as if he has the most power units on loan from the state. Ostensibly dominant as well as subordinate subject positions are constructed in institutional and conceptual fi elds where the play and the battle between the visible and the discursive is enacted from a multiplicity of sites. Th is playful and oft entimes also bitter confrontation helps engender the norms around which dominant and subordinate subject positions are articulated, and integration processes are organized and reorganized. Taking their lead from Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari hint that the possible forms of post-liberal autonomy and democracy of the future are not likely to depend on the sovereign centre or majority will that helps construct a unifi ed dominant subject as well as the minorities that are defi ned in terms of it and tolerated to a greater or lesser extent. Post-liberal autonomy and democracy are likely to be more contin-gent on minorities in an extra-numerical sense who consistently and unexpectedly undermine majority norms. Without these acts of subver-sion, genuine diff erence is dispelled, as practically all manifestations of disparate, ‘peripheral’ life look like inferior or distorted versions of the unifi ed dominance at the ‘centre’. Hence in contrast with its most formulaic defi nition as majority rule, for Deleuze and Guattari the democracy to come is centrally about the production and proliferation of minority non-norms that break down the integration versus marginalization schema, thereby undermining traditional work routines, individual identities and social roles.42

Th ere is a subtle but important clash implied by the diff erence between the liberal democratic standard of being accepted to the extent that one is tolerated, and Foucault’s Nietzschean conception of agonism taken up by Deleuze, Guattari and other theorists of daily life. Th at is, in the liberal democratic imagination it is the metaphysical founding presence of sover-eign unity that acts as the enabling condition permitting physical absence and political diff erence to coexist within the greater unity, or, if one likes, to be tolerated inside its boundaries, which also implies that tolerance is by no means unconditional.43 Indeed, the conditions under which toleration is tolerable are continually constituted and reconstituted in ways that raise important questions about the possibilities of representation, about which there will be more to say by way of conclusion to this chapter. In Foucault’s work the pluralist project is pursued by abandoning both the Hegelian idea of conceptual reality and Marxist notions of the ruling class, in favour of the study of language, and more specifi cally, what he refers to as énoncés articulated together in epistemological discourses. Hence a brief word


about his ideas on language will be helpful for an understanding of his notion of discourse, resistance and thinking.44

It has just been remarked that marginalization and integration cease to be juxtaposed in the manner of a logical contradiction to be overcome in a higher conceptual synthesis once power and knowledge are no longer neatly separated, and power ceases to be misunderstood as homogenous, continuous, and emanating from a single central source. Th is innovation illuminates some of the inadequacies inherent in any presumed antithetical relation between spontaneity and system, which, on closer inspection, is really an only slight modifi cation of humanity/subject versus nature/object distinctions, that is, dichotomies that Lukács attempts to overcome within the subject-object framework from the perspective of a radicalized collec-tive subject. Th at project fails for reasons which have been touched upon in the discussion explaining why montage dialectics are preferable to positive dialectics. Foucault suggests that if there is ‘a system’ or ensemble of systems, the task is somehow to think systemic functioning outside of the perspective of the subject dominated by or in charge of the so-called sys-tem. Critical thinking can deconstruct the visible harmony between casual seeing and instrumental reasoning that is produced in everyday language and much scientifi c discourse as well. However, one must also bear in mind that language is not exhausted in its verbal form, and one must remember that verbal and non-verbal resistance to linguistically mediated harmony is perhaps far more prevalent than is generally acknowledged.45 Foucault sug-gests that it may be more promising in epistemological and political terms for the subject to emancipate language from existing forms of subjectivity, instead of trying to realize its own emancipation directly by expressing some kind of inner self by way of existing language. In Raymond Roussel (1963) he intimates that the power of the system, if it can be put thus, is that it creates a non-natural surface articulating existence and language together by way of the subject, so that language becomes a bearer of truths about the subject. If a more speculative remark about positive freedom is allowed at this juncture, one might venture to say that if a potentially self-overcoming subject can change the truths of language about the traditional metaphysi-cal subject, a theory of anticipated legitimacy may be able to deconstruct existing legal truths about citizens. Th is is suggested by an unorthodox but careful reading of the Foucauldian argument that in contrast with mono-lithic appearances, surfaces are characterized by strata and folds that can infl ect power to create new truths, desires and forms of experience.46

Th e emphasis on creation above underscores Foucault’s insistence that power does not simply repress, punish and forbid. Instead of being founded


on the idea of mutual non-infringement, liberal democratic regimes encourage, cajole, compel and command people to work, play, rest, write, reproduce and even see in ways that have the apparent neutrality of nega-tive liberty as well as the apparent objectivity of medicine and science. Sight is a domain of key importance, for it would seem to be one of the most natural and timeless of the capacities of the human subject. Yet Foucault explains that the visible is not a natural given but is in fact deployed, so that it is not fanciful to say that the visible is neither transparent nor hidden. Like power, knowledge moves back and forth along the multiple surfaces coupling the non-discursive visual, such as an institution like a hospital, to the discursive non-visual, such as a health law. It is in this sense Foucault writes about knowledge-power and the transition from the juridifi cation to the medicalization of reason. Th e law is an énoncé that does not have a sta-ble point of origin in a law-giving subject that then recognizes its law-making power in the legitimate authority of the institution that has been legislated into practice. In this particular example, there is a marked discrepancy between the power of the doctor to practise according to what is taken to be his or her knowledge, and the rights of the citizens to make their own laws, including those, in this case, pertaining to health and medicine. Foucault’s énoncé is a scientifi c proposition of ostensible fact based on what is taken to be rigorous research within a modern academic discipline such as psychiatry, paediatrics, ethnography, criminology, psychology, medicine, economics, geography, medicine and law. An ensemble of énon-cés can be articulated together into a discourse that produces truths that are lived, experienced, seen and known by the participants in institutions. Th e systemic harmony between the discursively true and the visibly known can be interrupted by thought and resistance that clog, alter and redirect the transversal (not vertical or horizontal) circuits between énoncés and institutions. On this account power is capillary and multiple while truth, like knowledge, is double. Th e creation of the truth of a truth regime is doubled, and susceptible to further and more intense multiplication rather than divided, and awaiting re-articulation as mediated unity. It will be explained why this is not a pedantic distinction.47

If the discursive dimension of a legalized truth is captured in an énoncé, the truth is nonetheless not enacted as legitimate practice until the judge, psychiatrist, teacher, doctor or offi cer makes an offi cial pronouncement/decision. Th e fi rst corollary is that the law is not the legal manifestation of legality, but rather, and in frontal opposition to the claims of legal positi-vism, it is a protean network of propositions and prohibitions presupposing non-legal and extra-legal factors that are ensconced within the law as the conditions of its possibility. Once it has been shown that the prelegal and


extra-legal dimensions of the law constitute the conditions of the possi-bility of legality, one can go on to explore the ways in which there are extra-scientifi c factors that condition the mode of scientifi c research, extra-medicinal factors that condition standards of health and normal behaviour, as well as extra-economic criteria that infl uence the policies and institutions which induce people to make very specifi c claims about what should be considered economically rational, effi cient and productive. Th e second, bio-political corollary is that the possibility of a credible categori-cal diff erence between openly punitive institutions which threaten, such as the prison, and ostensibly more consensual ones such as the hospital and school, which heal and educate, becomes doubtful. Th is is not to say that a generic form of power circulates in wild and unpredictable ways. Foucault suggests that system and spontaneity, surveillance and punishment, legal and extra-legal, and so on are intertwined, with the implication that each particular set of junctures and interstices that simultaneously join and separate discourses and institutions is marked by its own rapidly changing dynamics and political charge. If one examines the functioning of the relations between penal law and the prison, one notes that although the prison is in principle subordinate to the law, the prison also has the neces-sary means to organize and administer its internal aff airs. Th e specifi c kind of autonomy that the prison enjoys in relation to penal law is not relative, absolute, or even what is sometimes referred to as determination in the last instance, which implies that there is no continuum to unite the law with its apparent object of jurisdiction. Power endeavours to create that continuum in ways that are susceptible to being challenged from a variety of points along the intersecting lines uniting and separating discourses and institutions. Th at is, power’s ability to create is the basis for thinking in a non-speculative manner that new forms of creative power can emerge. In this context it might be added in a parallel vein that the distance from the prelegal and extra-legal to the law is not relative or absolute, just as there is no continuum to unite the word pipe and the object pipe. Th e problem, as Foucault recognizes in his essay on Magritte, is not the dispar-ity but rather the similarity between linguistic sign and visual image. Th is micro problem is magnifi ed on a grand scale in the relations between dis-courses and institutions.48 Foucault intuits that where one is confronted with what seems like a continuum, that is, such as that which supposedly transforms legal quantity into legitimate quality, one is also likely to fi nd a political metasubject with a stable epistemological centre. Working as a sceptic, his studies of knowledge, power and language call the existence of these entities into question without doubting their real eff ects, that is, their reality in everyday life.49


But it might be objected at this point that to speak of minorities in an extra-numerical sense or power that is not directly exercised by subjects is tantamount to changing the meaning of words and things. It can be replied that to change and create in this way is part of the critique of everyday life in general, and is central to Foucault’s eff ort to follow Nietzsche in thinking beyond good and evil in particular. Th is is perhaps an appropriate place to conclude the chapter, since it draws together the three central critiques which run through all of the preceding chapters of the book – the critiques of traditional subjectivity and metaphysics as central to a comprehensive critique of instrumental reason.

Th e validity of categorical distinctions separating (good) consensual institutions and (bad) punitive ones depends on the presence of a meta-physical higher other, that is, some centre to unite them and make their relative diff erentiation possible. It is a validity that relies on the model of the divided truth awaiting reunifi cation, rather than the map of the double truth, which opens up the possibility of a new pluralism. Th e divided truth implicitly distinguishes between the rational institutions enjoyed by the good, law-abiding majority, and the unfortunate but necessary institu-tions needed to control and eventually eliminate the bad, irrational, law-subverting minority or minorities. Th at is, a law-subverting majority is impossible within this framework, since it would be tantamount to the rea-lity of a qualitatively diff erent state and mode of governance than the one in which majorities are by defi nition on the side of already existing populist and potentially authoritarian democracy. Th is phenomenon is connected with the diffi culty looked at in Chapter 2 of identifying the real mob. An already existing people’s state gives institutional expression to the mediated unity of the people that makes rational (re)presentation through law and government possible. Once one interrogates the modalities of the media-tions, however, one notes that presumed unity can and historically has eff ectively meant (re)imposed unity and staggering rationality defi cits. It is possible that the problem with mediated unity, like the problem with exist-ing national-popular law, is one of origins. Th is chapter endeavours to show that there are no post-metaphysical origins or foundational centres, and no non-ideological national borders.50

Endnotes

1. If one had the space of an entire book to dedicate to the study of spontaneity and the critique of everyday life it would be possible to preface the sociological analysis of the topic with a detailed examination of Kant’s third critique of reason, that is, the Critique of


Judgement (1990). Following the somewhat rigid distinctions informing the critiques of pure (1781, 1787) and practical (1788) reason, he comes to the view that there are forms of knowledge that resist simple categorization as either arbitrarily subjective or objectively valid. For example, knowledge derived from aesthetic experience is subjective as well as objective, and bound up with a very specifi c rather than a supposedly timeless moment of experience. See Manfred Riedel, Urteilskraft und Vernunft : Kants ursprüngliche Fragestel-lung, Frankfurt, 1989. Bearing in mind that Foucault’s early and late work is infl uenced by Kant, one wonders to what extent Foucault’s notion of knowledge-power, instead of knowl-edge versus power, results from his grappling with Kant’s critical philosophy. See the second section of this chapter.

2. It is clear that whether explicitly, as in the case of Arendt or implicitly, as in the case of Foucault, both thinkers are indebted to Heidegger’s work on ontology and indeed, Foucault links his refl ections on knowledge and power with an attempt to write what he calls an ontology of the present.

3. Th ere are many methodological problems connected with the analysis of the every-day, and it is even questionable if ‘the sociology of everyday life’ is an appropriate term for the study of the tremendous range of subjective, objective, historical, socio-economic and ontological phenomena that help shape the organization of experience into subjectivity. For a sociological perspective on some of the main issues, see Melvin Pollner, Mundane Reason, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987; and Michael Lynch, Scientifi c Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and the Social Studies of Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, especially chapter 7. A concise and still very infl uential overview is off ered by Peter Berger and Th omas Luckmann in Th e Social Construction of Reality, New York, Doubleday, 1966. Much of the theoretical impetus for these and many other accounts of daily life come from the pioneering work of Alfred Schütz. For an overview of his work see Michael Natanson (ed.), Alfred Schütz: Th e Problem of Social Reality, Collected Papers I, Th e Hague, Martinus Nijhoff , 1962, pp. 3–47.

4. In a related vein one wonders why it seems to be the case that a given district of a town or city seems to become lifeless as soon as its shops close for the evening or week-end. Th e phenomenon oft en produces the impression that life withdraws or at least retreats to the private sphere once commerce concludes. Th is can occur when a particular form of econ-omy is able not only to elevate its status to the only viable economic system, but becomes the decisive measure of reality in a much more general sense. For an analysis see Henri Lefebvre, La révolution urbaine (Th e Urban Revolution), Paris, Anthropos, 1970; and Lefebvre’s La pensée marxiste et la ville (Marxist Th ought and the City), Paris, Anthropos, 1972.

5. Little if anything has been written on the ways in which Simmel’s sociology antici-pates the critique of anthropological metaphysics developed by Heidegger (previous chapter) and Luhmann (next chapter). For an introduction to some of the issues involved, see Chris Th ornhill, ‘Systems Th eory and Legal Th eory: Luhmann, Heidegger and the False Ends of Metaphysics’, in Radical Philosophy, 116 (2002), pp. 7–20.

6. One is thus entitled to question the approaches to the critique of everyday life gener-ally adopted by mainstream theorists of media studies and cultural studies, many of which bracket out the critique of political economy as a somehow unrelated matter.


7. For a basic but solid guide to several of the most important dimensions of the critique of everyday life, see Tony Bennett and Diane Watson (eds), Understanding Everyday Life, Oxford, Blackwell, 2002. Th eir edited collection provides introductory information about Atget (1857–1927), Breton (1896–1966), Aragon (1897–1982) and others which for reasons of space will be left out of the account off ered in this chapter.

8. Schecter, Th e History of the Left from Marx to the Present, chapters 1 and 5.9. Th is is a recurrent theme in Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune, explored in great

detail by Henri Lefebvre (1901–99) in his own book on the subject, La Commune de Paris (Th e Paris Commune), Paris, Gallimard, 1966. Lefebvre’s portrayal of the Commune as a radically democratic fête is taken up by Kristin Ross in Th e Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Commune, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988; and by Gerald Raunig in Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, Los Angeles, Semiotext(e), 2007, chapter 3. Th e most articulate theorization of a pluralist and democratic socialist harmonization of producer, consumer and citizen relations is achieved in G. D. H. Cole’s Guild Socialism Re-Stated (London, Leonard Parsons, 1920). For a brilliant exposition of Cole’s main ideas and a convincing argument demonstrating how their implications lead well beyond Rawls’ ideas on justice and political liberalism, see Chris Wyatt, Th e Diff erence Principle Beyond Rawls, London, Continuum, 2008. For a very original account explaining why consumers are rarely the passive dupes of advertising that they are oft en made out to be, see Michel de Certeau (1925–86), L’invention du quotidien, I: arts de faire, and L’invention du quotidien, II: habiter, cuisiner (Th e Practice of Daily Life, 1980), Paris, Gallimard, 1990, of which the fi nal pages of volume I are of particular signifi -cance for the themes in this chapter. Here de Certeau maintains that there is an irreducible diff erence between systemic codes and the spontaneous social action of individuals engaged in their daily lives. He remarks that if technocratic planning does succeed in parcelling social spaces and fragmenting experience, it can only do so at a relatively superfi cial level, leaving individuals free to invent the sense of their ‘vie quotidienne’. For two informative books that take up Lefebvre, de Certeau and a number of other thinkers relevant to the critique of daily life and instrumental reason, see John Roberts, Philosophizing the Everyday, London, Pluto, 2006; and Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life, London, Routledge, 2000.

10. As seen in the previous chapter, Arendt’s response to the problem is that modern democracies need to be infused with a dose of republican political virtue, and that this project gets bogged down if undue attention to social inequality is allowed to impede the emergence of what she famously designates as action. Some of her criticisms of Marxism and liberalism are not without analytical and political relevance. Yet it is clear that she wants to reanimate the classical public sphere, and clear too that there are a number of serious questions concerning the historical and sociological feasibility of such a project. Th eorists of everyday life tend to be sympathetic to her critique of liberalism and Marxism. But they also tend to be sociologically more sophisticated and aware of the fact that the public sphere in the sense understood by Kant and Habermas imploded with the rise of mass society, as Horkheimer and Adorno are well aware. For an analysis of the problem with Kant and Habermas in this regard which anticipates the discussion in the concluding chapter of the


present book, see Darrow Schecter, ‘Liberalism and the limits of Legal Legitimacy: Kant and Habermas’, in King’s College Law Journal, 16 (2005), pp. 99–119. It will be seen below that for the theorists considered in this chapter, the task of rejuvenating the classical politi-cal public sphere is abandoned in favour of a more nuanced and pluralist analysis of the possibilities of new forms of urban existence, aesthetic expression and epistemological experimentation. Instead of proposing the public sphere as an alternative to the mediating role performed in liberal democracies by the party system, theorists of everyday life are interested in re-articulating the relation between experience, knowledge and legitimacy. A number of their writings contain an implicit subversion of the national-populist under-standing of this relation, whereby the will of the people is continually broken down into parties and subsequently recomposed on the basis of sovereign unity. Th at is, they challenge the tautology implied by the idea that democracy as monolithic sovereignty presupposes as well as creates the unity of ‘the people’.

11. Socialisme ou Barbarie co-founder Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–97) indicates that the ideal of autonomy needs to be rethought with this more comprehensive critique of appropriated experience in mind. Th e state-socialist example prompts Castoriadis to argue that the abolition of private property can only become a real step on the way to individual and social autonomy if accompanied by the dismantling of the division of labour and a more general deconstruction of the division between experts and non-experts. Otherwise, the problem of exploitation is displaced rather than solved, and becomes a problem of technocratic and bureaucratic domination. For Castoriadis this rethinking entails challeng-ing existing reality principles in a plural sense that suggests that the capital/labour relation is just one of several sites of social struggle that can inhibit or on the contrary develop what he calls the social imaginary, which is a collective capacity to envisage alternative futures. A powerful synthesis of Marxism, sociology, psychoanalysis and history is achieved in his L’institution imaginaire de la société (Th e Imaginary Institution of Society), Paris, Seuil, 1975.

12. Bourdieu’s (1930–2004) studies of the fi eld, habitus, cultural capital and symbolic power off er key contributions in this regard. For an introduction to his oeuvre see his Choses dites (Th ings Said), Paris, Minuit, 1987; and the collection of essays gathered by Craig Calhoun (ed.), Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, Cambridge, Polity, 1993; as well as Derek Robbins, Th e Work of Pierre Bourdieu, Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1991. Needless to say, Marx’s infl uence on Gramsci and Bourdieu is diffi cult to overestimate.

13. Michel Henry, Marx I: une philosophie de la réalité (Marx: A Philosophy of Reality), Paris, Gallimard, 1976, pp. 103, 373, 469.

14. Marx, Preface and Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Beijing, Foreign Languages Press, 1976, pp. 3–4.

15. Gramsci deploys the notion of the historic bloc in implicit rejection of schematic versions of historical materialism and base-superstructure models. For a summary see Schecter, History of the Left from Marx to the Present, chapter 2.

16. Th is may seem like an odd claim to those who insist that the critique of daily life begins with Lefebvre’s Critique of Daily Life, volume 1, originally published by Grasset in 1947, L’arche in 1958, and then by Verso in 1991. In fact, however, it can be argued that the


critique is implicit in the writings of Marx, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, the surrealists, and very explicit in the writings and agitprop of the members of the Situationist International, and in particular in the writings and fi lms of Guy Debord (1931–94). See the excellent collection of excerpts from the writings of Kracauer, de Certeau, Lefebvre, Bourdieu, Debord, Trotsky and many others in Ben Highmore (ed.), Th e Everyday Life Reader, London, Routledge, 2002, as well as Highmore’s introduction to the volume. Th ere are also a number of very illuminating articles on everyday life from a more empirical perspective in volume 42 of Sociology (2008).

17. Marx, Lohnarbeit und Kapital (Wage-Labour and Capital, 1847), Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1998, pp. 18–21. Just as oppression is rarely exercised directly, except in crisis situations or under apartheid conditions, forms of resistance which concentrate on the most visible sites of power are likely to be ineff ective in challenging it.

18. Given that Keynesian solutions are unlikely to work in the twenty-fi rst century, it might be argued that this is precisely the quandary which the governments of advanced industrial states now face. Failing the abolition of private property in the means of produc-tion and socialization of investment, that is, some form of democratic socialism, labour will inevitably be seen as a brake on the profi table expansion of capital. What capital needs and what democracy demands are once again at loggerheads. In the meantime governments are playing for time rather than stating the issues clearly, but as Benjamin suggests, the problem will not die a natural death.

19. It will be seen in the next chapter that Luhmann has a very diff erent view of these phenomena.

20. Marx, Das Kapital (Capital, 1867), Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1998, volume 1, pp. 85–108.21. Th e same can be said of the idea of false consciousness, which is quite simply

a non-explanation as far as social action goes. Similarly, Althusser’s fi rst attempt to solve the problem of Marxist agency is to cancel it. Th us he infamously remarks that Marxism is a theory without a subject, which constitutes a wholly inadequate response to idealism and its Marxist variants. See Pour Marx (For Marx), Paris, Maspero, 1965.

22. Simmel explicitly states that he is not out to undermine Marx, but rather to provide historical materialism with a more solid foundation. See Simmel, Die Philosophie des Geldes (Th e Philosophy of Money), p. 13.

23. Simmel, Die Philosophie des Geldes (Th e Philosophy of Money), pp. 609–10, 644–5.

24. Benjamin, ‘Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen’ (‘On Language’), in Angelus Novus, pp. 9–11; and Sigrid Weigel, Entstellte Ähnlichkeit: Walter Benjamins theoretische Schreibweise, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1997, pp. 197–202. For a compre-hensive study of Benjamin’s views on language see Winfried Mennighaus, Walter Benjamin’s Th eorie der Sprachmagie, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1995; and Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane: Th e Political Th eology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, New York, Columbia University Press, 2003.

25. Simmel, Soziologie (Sociology), pp. 392–3. On the aesthetic dimension of Simmel’s sociology, see Hannes Böhringer, ‘Die “Philosophie des Geldes” als ästhetische Th eorie’, in Heinz-Jürgen Dahme and Otthein Rammstedt (eds), Georg Simmel und die Moderne, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1984, pp. 178–82; and Sibylle Hübner-Funk, ‘Die ästhetische


Konstituierung gesellschaft licher Erkenntnis am Beispiel der “Philosophie des Geldes”’, pp. 183–201 in the same volume; as well as Ralph M. Leck, Georg Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology, chapter 1.

26. Simmel, Schrift en zur Soziologie, pp. 131–9.27. Simmel, Schrift en zur Soziologie, pp. 173–93; and Paschen von Flotow, Geld,

Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft : Georg Simmels Philosophie des Geldes, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1995, pp. 116–54.

28. Th e possibility that social systems can generate knowledge independently of individual subjects will be touched on in the next chapter in the discussion of Habermas and Luhmann.

29. Simmel, ‘Die Philosophie der Mode’ (‘Th e Philosophy of Fashion’, 1905), in Gesamtausgabe, volume 10, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1995, pp. 35–7.

30. With these refl ections in mind it is possible to begin to shed some light on some of the questions posed at the outset of this chapter concerning the apparent incapacity of radical critiques of liberal democracy and capitalism to dispense with existential, ontologi-cal and aesthetic arguments. Th e liberal democratic system tends to insulate itself from critique by presenting its particular forms of freedom and necessity as freedom and neces-sity full stop. To the extent that this is achieved in a series of ongoing plural processes, systems, actions and decisions, politics and the law seem to have to adjust themselves to the demands of capitalist growth rather than the other way round. In illuminating how these tendencies coalesce, however, the critique of daily life, in its many varieties, fi nds ways of interrupting that coalescing, that is, it disaggregates and deconstructs.

31. It is not oft en analysed how the Marxist-Leninist chain of representation from people-class-party-party leader, which culminates in the cult of the personality and one-party dictatorship, is just one of many possible interpretations of the liberal democratic notion that a sovereign nation secures the autonomy of its demos by giving itself laws.

32. In the previous chapter it is explained why Arendt urges readers to understand Eichmann and the Holocaust politically as phenomena issuing from the so-called normal world of democratic politics rather than as products of a demonic world of monsters. Th e corollary implied by this discussion is that it is imperative to understand racism, sexism, exploitation and other phenomena in terms of legal forms of legitimacy and not as devia-tions from that mode of regulation.

33. Th is asymmetry can be broadly compared to Heidegger’s ontological diff erence and Derrida’s diff érance. For the purposes of this study, Foucault’s conception has the great advantage of being directly relevant to a sociological analysis of the relation between knowl-edge and power that does not get bogged down in the problems connected to the interpretation of texts.

34. Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, II, Paris, Gallimard, 2001, pp. 1005–6.35. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish), Paris, Gallimard, 1975,

pp. 26–32; and Paul Veyne, Michel Foucault: Sa pensée, sa personne, Paris, Albin Michel, 2008, pp. 135–7.

36. It is tempting in this context to think about Gramsci-Foucault syntheses, and to study the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism as a closing chapter in the broader his-tory charting the transition from juridical to medical reason. Th is would enable one to look


at the dynamics structuring changing forms of state and discourses of sovereignty in a way that includes political economy without a reductive overemphasis on the latter. Conversa-tions with Arianna Bove, Nick Butler and Verena Erlenbusch on these topics have increased my understanding of the issues involved.

37. Th us in Foucault’s estimation we are still only beginning to grasp the full implication of Nietzsche’s thought and the notion that God is dead. Th e real point about the death of God is the death of man as universal subject and anthropological essence. See Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’, in Dits et écrits I (pp. 592–607, written in 1967), Paris, Gallimard, 2001, p. 596.

38. Foucault’s studies of Roussel, Velazquez and Magritte are probably the best known of his aesthetic writings. It is nonetheless a biographical detail of more than passing interest that his friendships and intellectual exchanges with musicians such as Jean Barraqué and Pierre Boulez had an important role in the development of his ideas on language and knowledge. See the Magazine littéraire, 435 (2004), pp. 35–6.

39. Whether formulated as Lebensanschauung (vision of life) or l’herméneutique du sujet (hermeneutic of the subject, care of the self), there can be no doubt about the palpable infl uence exercised on both by Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of self-overcoming. What Simmel and Foucault add to Nietzsche’s intuitive genius is rigorous sociological, historical and linguistic analysis. See Simmel, Lebensanschauung (Vision of Life, 1918), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1986; and Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (Th e Archaeology of Knowl-edge), Paris, Gallimard, 1969; L’herméneutique du sujet (lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82), Paris, Gallimard, 2001; and Le courage de la vérité (Courage to tell the Truth, lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–84), Paris, Gallimard, 2009.

40. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Paris, Minuit, chapters 1–2. It might be observed in this context that like the line in the example, a dream can also ‘move’ in a number of contradic-tory directions at once. Th is means that the study of dreams, as the language of the unconscious, requires an imaginative geographical cartography. Foucault’s thoughts on the subject are collected in his lectures of 1973–74. See Le pouvoir psychiatrique (Psychiatric Power, lectures at the Collège de France in 1973–74), Paris, Gallimard, 2003. A number of Foucault’s followers take the psychoanalytic method of making the unreadable (dreams) readable, and detach the method from the clinical practice of resocializing individuals with putatively anti-social illnesses. Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and Félix Guattari (1930–92) show that this can be done in Capitalisme et Schizophrénie I: l’anti-Oedipe (Capitalism and Schizophrenia I: Anti Oedipus), Paris, Minuit, 1973; and Capitalisme et Schizophrénie II: Mille Plateaux (Capitalism and Schizophrenia II: A Th ousand Plateaus), Paris, Minuit, 1980.

41. Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique (Th e Birth of Bio-Politics, lectures at the Collège de France in 1978–79), Paris, Gallimard, 2004, p. 22; and Sécurité, territoire et popu-lation (Security, Territory and Population, lectures at the Collège de France in 1977–78), Paris, Gallimard, 2004, pp. 319–40; and Veyne, Michel Foucault, p. 9.

42. Deleuze, Foucault, pp. 131–41. See too Deleuze and Guattari, Kafk a: Pour une litté-rature mineure, Paris, Minuit, 1975, chapter 8; and Franco Berardi Bifo, Felix: Narrazione dell’incontro con il pensiero di Guattari, cartografi a visionaria del tempo chi viene, Rome, Luca Sossella, 2001, pp. 7–14, 111–36. According to this line of enquiry the question is: why


do we see ‘welfare mums’, and so on, in the ways we do? It is not so much the question: who is likely to become a welfare mother?

43. Th ere is no space to trace the emergence of this conception in the writings of Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau and other early theorists of the modern state. But it is worth noting that in these philosophical refl ections on the limits of toleration and the implications for minorities one can see a parallel with Arendt’s determination to think the Eichmann case politically rather than to criminalize Eichmann or regard National Socialism as a monster from another planet. For a comparison of their social and political theories, see Claire Edwards, ‘Foucault and Arendt: Beyond the Social/Political’, D.Phil. at the University of Sussex, forthcoming.

44. While Foucault’s most systematic treatise on this subject is L’archéologie du savoir (Th e Archaeology of Knowledge, Paris, Gallimard, 1969), his lectures at the Collège de France (cited in the preceding notes) in the 1970s and 1980s are a great source of information on his thinking in this regard.

45. Costantino Ciervo, Th e Perversion of Signs, Biel, Édition Clandestin, 2009, pp. 30–5; and Patrice Maniglier, La vie énigmatique des signes, Clamecy, Éditions Léo Scheer, 2006, part IV.

46. Foucault, Raymond Roussel, Paris, Gallimard, 1963, p. 203. While some interpreters lay great emphasis on Foucault’s analysis of power, some of his more subtle readers direct their attention to the ideas on resistance suggested by his historical research and implied by his actual interventions in French and international politics.

47. Th e higher education and fashion examples raised in the discussion on Simmel would seem to support the hypothesis that real democratization as well as eff ective restruc-turing of pre-existing hierarchies is simultaneously possible, and that these phenomena are related to the asymmetry between énoncé and discourse. Th ese developments are indicative of changes in social structure that may be regarded as enhancing and restricting freedom, so that it is misleading to speak of freedom in abstract terms in the way that some analytical philosophers and theorists do.

48. See Foucault, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’. (‘Th is is Not a Pipe’, in reference to Magritte’s painting of 1929, ‘Th e Betrayal of the Images’), in Regine Pranger, Der Verrat der Bilder: Foucault über Magritte, Freiburg im Breisgau, Rombach, 2001, pp. 8–39. Foucault’s text in this bilingual French-German edition is followed by an excellent essay in German by Pranger. Foucault’s essay on Magritte is available in English translation.

49. Foucault, ‘La vérité et les formes juridiques’ (‘Truth and juridical forms’, 1974), in Dits et écrits I, 1954–75, pp. 1406–1513; and ‘Où est la loi, que fait la loi?’ (‘Where is the Law, What Makes the Law’, 1972), included in a small collection of essays bearing the title of the main essay, La pensée du dehors (Th ought from the Outside, 1966), Paris, Fata Morgana, 2003, pp. 33–40.

50. Foucault, Raymond Roussel, pp. 61–3; and ‘Ni l’un, ni l’autre’ (‘Neither One or the Other’, 1966), included in La pensée du dehors, pp. 58–60.

186

6From Rationalization to Communicative

Action: The Emergence of the Habermasian Paradigm

Th e social and political thought of Jürgen Habermas can be seen as an attempt to reground social theory in light of the critique of instrumental reason developed by the thinkers examined in the previous chapters. His work represents a more moderate response to the phenomenon fi rst systematically analysed by Max Weber than those off ered by Lukács, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Heidegger, Arendt and Foucault. A more moderate response does not mean a less rigorous response in this case, such that it is fair to say that the Habermasian paradigm poses serious challenges to the thinkers looked at so far. Whether as prolifi c social theorist, university professor or engaged public person, Habermas insists that Weber’s concept of rationalization is too one-sided and therefore to a considerable extent obsolete. According to this interpretation the rationali-zation and disenchantment theses are part of the epistemological dead weight that the idealist tradition in Germany passes on to Marx and then Weber, though of course Habermas also sees a marked Nietzschean dimen-sion in Weber. Habermas maintains that Weber forfeits the potential explanatory capacity of his ideas on rationalization by seeing it at work everywhere, such that it becomes a kind of sociologically refracted cultural pessimism rather than sociology proper. One of his central claims is that many of the most damaging methodological problems in the work of Marx and Weber are integrated into the main body of ideas of the fi rst gene-ration of critical theorists, and that these problems can also be found, in diff erent guises, in the ontological, republican and post-structural critiques

The Emergence of the Habermasian Paradigm 187

of instrumental reason. Hence from early on in his theoretical trajectory he sets out to theorize action in the rigorously interactive and social terms demanded by the ‘linguistic turn’ of social and political referred to at the end of the fi rst volume of the Th eory of Communicative Action.1

His counter-thesis is that although instrumental reason does indeed shape some of the steering mechanisms operative in modern industrial societies – especially those processes propelled by money and power – these societies are also capable of generating, and indeed must generate forms of communicative rationality which enable them to deal with social complexity in ways that also facilitate integrative participation. Th at is, while instrumental rationality in practice tends to marginalize, exploit and coercively reconcile, communicative rationality enables the citizens of modern states to reach understandings on political principles and, more-over, these understandings are not strategic compromises reducible to the zero-sum adjudication of socio-economic confl icts. He thus seeks to estab-lish the reality of non-instrumental communication against what he regards to be the implicit irrationalism that post-structuralist thinkers like Foucault allegedly pick up from Nietzsche. At the same time, while striving to address the sociological defi cit in fi rst generation critical theory, he refuses to endorse the implicit post-normativity of systems theory advocates like Luhmann.2 As in the case of Foucault, the dialectic of mar-ginalization and integration ceases to be a contradiction. For Habermas this is not because of the dialectical reality of paradox, but rather because reason is not identical to itself. Somewhat like Geist, reason is internally diff erentiated, such that while some forms of institutionalized reason mar-ginalize, others integrate and reconcile on a non-coercive basis. Th e project of reconceptualizing reason takes Habermas from Kant and Arendt’s refl ec-tions on the public sphere to the sociology of Durkheim and Mead, and from there to universal pragmatics and the legal theory articulated in the Th eory of Communicative Action and in Between Facts and Norms (Faktizität und Geltung, 1992). Th is is an appropriate way to introduce the concluding chapter of this book, for if Weber’s theory of rationalization is radicalized and interpreted in very diff erent ways by all of the theorists looked at in Chapters 1–5, Habermas seeks to re-articulate what he calls ‘the unfi nished project of modernity’ by defending a signifi cantly modifi ed version of the Enlightenment concept of reason.

Th e Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas attempts to provide a helpful exegetical account of the emergence of the Weberian paradigm and its theoretical aft ermath in the writings of the thinkers dis-cussed. Th e more ambitious intent of the present book is to shed light on


the relations between the critique of a particular form of reason that one can broadly follow Weber in designating as instrumental, and the forms of legality and legitimacy associated with that specifi c instantiation of ration-ality. Habermas’ interpretation of Kant’s ideas on the public sphere off ers a good point of departure for the fi nal chapter, since it is here that he grap-ples with a central theoretical and practical political problem: how does one criticize liberal notions of universal legality and rational legitimacy, without embracing irrational and communitarian versions of legitimacy, on the one hand, or merely settling for redistributive measures to settle the problem of social order, relying mainly on administrative and technical reforms, on the other? Habermas is not a liberal, communitarian or social democrat in any straightforward sense. Hence his refl ections on this question mark an attempt to stake out original terrain of potentially great importance. Whereas Kant before him seeks to rescue epistemology from the dead-ends of empiricism and rationalism, Habermas is determined to rescue social scientifi c methodology from what he fi nds inadequate in fi rst generation critical theory, Marxism, and systems theory. Th is leads him to adopt a number of diff erent positions vis-à-vis liberalism depending on the book he is writing and the historical period in which it is written.3 He is at times critical of liberalism in so far as it sacrifi ces the possibility of rational legitimacy to the socio-economic needs of powerful private interests. But at other times he is unequivocally apologetic of liberal democracy to the extent that he sees it as the only possible institutional means capable of salvaging what remains truly revolutionary in liberal doctrine: it champi-ons the idea that government authority should be based on deliberation and discursively mediated consensus rather than tradition, more or less harmonious aggregation of interest, constituent sovereign power, or the expedient requirements of functional order. Hence his writings intimate that although one can criticize liberalism from a Marxist or assorted other standpoints, it is nonetheless ascendant liberalism’s original claims that must be made good in order to redeem the promise of Enlightenment and modernity. Hence a brief word about the political claims of liberalism will be useful in order to introduce the discussion of Habermas’ ideas on Kant, the public sphere and the life-world.4

Liberalism would seem to have a virtual theoretical monopoly on political reason, which it articulates in terms of legality and legitimacy. It is suggested in the previous chapter that bodies of thought which set out to critique liberalism oft en seem to be attacking reason altogether or, what amounts to something very similar from a liberal perspective, seem to demand the institutionalization of ‘higher’, more substantial forms of reason and solidarity, that is, forms of reason for whose implementation


the socio-economic, political and juridical conditions are not available. Hence from an enlightened liberal perspective, notions of a general will or the withering away of the state may be brilliant ideas, but the conditions for anything other than authoritarian and totalitarian versions of them are not realizable. Th ey are not bad ideas, as such, but impossible ideals which seek to go beyond what reason, which is limited in its claims and capacities, permits. For thinkers in the liberal tradition such as Kant, there is a clear distinction between the universal claims of reason formulated by ethically minded, private adult citizens, and positive legal public authority. For Kant, the private individual has a rational will with which he is capable of for-mulating self-legislative maxims indicating universal principles of morally irreproachable conduct. Th ese maxims touch upon private matters of conscience, and are thus not enforceable by public institutions. Positive laws are enforceable by the state because they regulate external behaviour rather than individual ethical choice. Many liberals aft er Kant suggest that when a person violates the law, s/he infringes someone else’s liberty in a way that is fundamentally asymmetrical to the neglect to perform an ethical duty. Th e former is punishable, whereas the latter is not. Th at is, lib-erals tend to maintain that if the positive laws of the state were to dictate the terms of individual ethical duty, individual liberty would quickly disap-pear. Th e consequence is that duty, individual morality and conscience cannot be immediately confl ated with government law and the demands of public order. Hence while liberals seem consistently to prioritize legality as the sole source of legitimacy (what Rawls refers to as the priority of the right before the good), it has just been seen that the liberal democratic legality/legitimacy dichotomy is also a legality/legality fusion to the extent that legal-ity is the sole source of legitimacy. Th is is a matter of ambiguity about which there will be more to say in relation to Between Facts and Norms in the second section of this chapter. For now it can be noted that the legality/legitimacy dichotomy-fusion is accompanied by a set of further dichoto-mies in liberal thought which include theory/practice, ethics/politics and private/public, that is, what Lukács derides as the ‘antinomies of bourgeois thought’.5 Th e elaboration of these distinctions serves the purpose of pre-venting the unifi cation of discrete spheres whose coerced reconciliation would inevitably lead to authoritarianism or paternalism in practice. Th e argument is that if the institutions of political authority in a given regime are applauded as ethical and political in equal measure, ethics would dis-solve as a theory with which one might critique existing policies.6

Kant sees that leaving matters as such is inadequate, for if ethics and politics are irremediably kept apart, the law is likely to be devoid of ethical-epistemological content, and the citizen has little in the way of compelling


motivation to obey the state. Th e parallel is the Hobbesian converse: once established, state authority need not be too concerned with citizens’ rights. Kant wants to refute Hobbes, though without, crucially, fusing the discrete terms characteristic of liberal democratic thought, and without unifying the actual spheres of social life that are only partially mediated in actual liberal democratic practice. Kant sees the possibility of a solution in a pub-lic sphere mediating between private and ethical individuals (internalized moral law), and the political authority of government (external regulatory law). It is the possibility of this mediation, initially inspired by his reading of Kant, which Habermas takes up in Th e Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Although the conclusions of that early work of socio-historical theory are cautious and some might even say quite pessimistic, Habermas never really abandons the claim that legitimate government in modern societies is underpinned by a non-instrumentally rational media-tion of private-individual interests and public-political authority. In his early writings he emphasizes that failing this rational mediation, one has something much more closely approximating Weberian rationalization than rational authority. In this chapter it will be seen that with the publica-tion of Between Facts and Norms in 1992, Habermas jettisons his early scepticism about the capacity of modern industrial societies continually to renew and update their normative bases. Normative renewal in this context means citizen capacity to reach consent and agreement about the laws they choose to govern their lives. Th is takes him from Kant and to a certain extent Arendt’s theory of the public sphere, to a theory of the life-world indebted to Husserl and sociological phenomenology, and from there to a qualifi ed celebration of the legal state.7

From the Public Sphere to the Life-World

Kant maintains that while individual private citizens are likely to be ignorant of public aff airs and political matters, the members of a public constituted by an independent assembly of citizens are capable of mutually enlightening themselves through informed discussion and critical debate. Two principles inform Kant’s ideas on a critical public mediating between morally autonomous individuals and the state. First, and foreshadowing Habermas’ notion of the ideal speech situation, the individuals comprising the public are endowed with a rational will which is independent of all empirically existing institutions and experience.8 In Kant’s formulation, in order for the will to be autonomous, it must constitute itself in abstraction from socio-economic and political macro-realities, and in abstraction from


emotions, impulses, drives, needs and other historically conditioned micro-realities as well. Kant’s point is that everyone has diff erent needs and a diff erent conception of happiness. Hence demands to satisfy claims made in the name of needs and happiness are non-rational and, by extension, extra-legal: states entrusted with satisfying such claims act beyond the scope of what is rationally possible and legally universal.9 Second, and fore-shadowing Habermas’ partial assimilation of some of the key tenets of systems theory in the Th eory of Communicative Action period, the critical reasoning and debate of an assembly of rational wills must take place in a sphere of freedom, that is, not in a workplace, laboratory or other context where a chain of command organized to solve technical tasks is more appropriate than an assembly of equals. Kant openly excludes women, chil-dren and salaried workers from the public sphere because of their supposed lack of autonomy. In his estimation they are emotionally and economically dependent, which means that if allowed to participate in public aff airs, they are likely to embrace a politics of irrational need rather than a juridical politics of freedom and rational cognition. If this happens, law is deprived of its epistemological dimension at the same time that the transcendence of natural and mechanical necessity is forfeited. Th e economically independ-ent, rational men in Kant’s public sphere are impartial ethical individuals who mediate between themselves and political authority by formulating principles in open arenas of the public sphere. Th ese discursively redeemed principles serve the purpose of confronting the representatives of political authority and positive law with ethically informed universal claims that legitimate authority cannot ignore. In principle these claims should require positivized, formal law to adjust its contents, thus reconciling order and substantive reason. Hobbes is therefore refuted in the same stroke that safe-guards individual autonomy and moral obligation.10

But what happens if public authority refuses to adjust the content of law-making to the truths of discursive rationality? Habermas, writing in the early 1970s and taking his cue from Kant, argues that a legitimacy crisis ensues. Th e claim intrinsic to Habermas’ attempt to update Kant is that in modern states it is not so much a crisis concerning the distribution of wealth, status, security or other phenomena which can be administratively or technically supplied. It is a crisis of the autonomy of reason and the epistemological integrity of law. When forms of law are out of step with the truth content of reason, law forfeits the cognitive dimension that separates modern law from more antiquated and arbitrary instances of Diktat, privilege and tradition. From the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment vantage point championed by liberalism, these forms of domination should


really be part of the past, and indeed, Kant believes that as the process of Enlightenment unfolds, substantive rationality and formal legality will harmonize to an increasingly greater extent, thus obviating the need for populist forms of legitimacy, civil disobedience and revolution. In ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, Kant intimates that where the law is underwritten by the cognitive content of reason, politics ceases to be the domain of power, privilege and ideological mendacity. In the discursively redeemed speech claims of rational, ethically oriented individuals in the public sphere, the promise of Enlightenment is redeemed, and, in consequence, humanity need not live in fear of the whims of despots any longer.11

Central to the argument developed in the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and subsequent works is that rather than representing a liberal utopia of political harmony secured under ideal conditions that never present themselves, Kant’s views on the public sphere refl ect a socio-logically grounded possibility exhibited, to diff ering degrees, by actual tendencies in early modern industrial societies. Habermas considers it to be historically documented that traditional ecclesiastical and aristocratic political authority was being challenged by theoretically sophisticated articulations of public opinion in coff ee houses, universities, newspapers, and the then gentry-dominated citizen associations preceding the emer-gence of modern political parties. In chapter 4, section 13 of the Structural Transformation, Habermas outlines Kant’s theory of the public sphere, noting that it is central to Kant’s argument that it is the task of the public sphere to harmonize the claims of morality and reason with those of law and politics.12 It is clear from the text that Habermas has much normative sympathy with the ideal of rational political legitimacy, and clear too that he has a fi rm scholarly conviction that, to paraphrase Marx, humanity only poses itself questions for which the solutions are immanently feasible. Th is is to say that in contrast to the abstract, ahistorical approach adopted by analytical philosophers such as Rawls, Habermas seeks to ground his normative claims sociologically, which he initially does with historical documentation and sociological theory. His later work supplements historical and sociological analysis with cognitive psychology, linguistics and legal theory.13

Th e major question raised in Th e Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is whether or not modern capitalist economies and extra-economic public spheres can peacefully coexist, or if, on the contrary, there is a marked tendency for the logic of commodity production to extend its jurisdiction into the cultural, political and aesthetic spheres of communication and


interpersonal understanding. Th is is a fairly important query, since the status of the normative bases of the state is at stake. Since the young Marx’s critique of Hegel’s theory of the modern state there has been much debate and real upheaval concerning the respective roles of economy and polity in the generation and resolution of social confl ict. While it is very improbable that the state is ‘nothing other than an executive committee for managing the aff airs of the entire bourgeoisie’, as Marx quips in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, it is also doubtful that the supposed political universality of citizenship, which in theory does not recognize diff erences of race, religion, class and other social factors, is not aff ected by patterns of prop-erty ownership or the systemic requirements of industrial production. Mainstream liberal theorists tend to insist on the autonomy of politics from economics (insisting too, to varying degrees, on the primacy of private-individual rights over public-political rights), while Marxists question the degree to which there can be real political autonomy from socio-economic realities. Like Arendt before him, therefore, Habermas suggests that both liberal and Marxist approaches are fl awed. He argues that in their legal institutions and public spheres, early modern societies have an historically unique capacity to generate discursive understanding of confl ict. Th e refl exivity induced by this reasoning makes the loci of confl ict transparent, and, under ideal conditions, susceptible to critique and reform, thus echoing the Kantian claim that revolution and civil disobedience should in principle become superfl uous. Central to the structural transformation thesis is the claim that this capacity is forfeited if the spheres and institu-tions necessary for consensus are undermined by systemic processes of a bureaucratic and technical stamp. Hence while the Structural Transforma-tion of the Public Sphere is neither liberal nor Marxist, it leans towards a modifi ed Marxist account of how the liberal dimension of liberal democ-racy can be undermined by capitalism.14 Th is contributes to the originality and unusualness of the book: a Kantian-Weberian-Marxist argument is deployed in order to critique the actual functioning of liberal democratic states as part of a defence of liberal ideals. Its author is committed to the postulate that rational agreement rather than bourgeois or working class power should be the basis of political legitimacy, and that modernity off ers an unprecedented and non-ideological possibility of converting that should into an is. To this extent one discerns not merely the infl uence of Kant, Weber and Marx. Habermas is also guided by Tocqueville’s intui-tion that some form of democracy is going to accompany the transition from feudal-agrarian to industrial society. Hence the real question is not democracy versus some other form of government. Habermas follows


Tocqueville in asking: will it be a liberal or a despotic form of democracy? Since both are conceivable and indeed possible, much is at stake depending on the robustness of the institutions mediating between private (commer-cial) and public (republican) forms of liberty. Tocqueville’s stress on the importance of corps intermédiares is echoed in some of Habermas’ refl ec-tions on the public sphere. Moreover, Hegel’s infl uence is evident in the immanent dialectical methodology which stipulates that the solutions to normative ‘ought questions’ (Sollen, later Geltung) are to be sought in the ‘is realities’ (Sein, later Faktizität), that is, already existing institutions off er the key to reconciling what can and what should be done.15

Th e thesis of structural transformations and transitions has a history within critical theory that needs brief attention in order fully to under-stand Habermas’ contribution to social and political theory and to appreciate what may be considered his departure from critical theory. In 1941 Institute for Social Research member Friedrich Pollock (1894–1970) attempted to theorize the transition from free market to late (sometimes also called state) capitalism, explaining that late capitalism introduces plan-ning to coordinate supply and demand, though without thereby becoming a system of production based on the satisfaction of human needs or the desire for creative work. State capitalism is thus not state socialism on the Soviet model, and certainly not libertarian socialism as Marx had envis-aged when discussing human as opposed to merely political emancipation. Late capitalism can be characterized instead as an attempt to anticipate and forestall demands for political control of the economy by stabilizing eco-nomic processes through managerial planning rather than democratic participation in key decisions about production and investment.16 Pollock’s ideas on the correlations between determinate stages in the evolution of capitalism and structural changes in forms of law and state are developed with great analytical precision by two legal theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research briefl y touched upon in Chapter 3, Otto Kirch-heimer (1905–65) and Franz Neumann (1900–54). In ‘Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise’, also of 1941, Kirchheimer shows that under late capitalism, the state executive is restructured so that it can per-form key planning functions neglected by the market but nonetheless necessary to ensure the predominance of market relations in the economy and, crucially, in the polity as well. Kirchheimer develops what one might call a juridical socialism which, like Pollock’s, parts with mechanical notions of base and superstructure, though without embracing the thesis that the political system and the economic system function independently in industrial society. Part of his argument, which anticipates the colonization


of the life-world thesis developed by Habermas in Legitimation Crisis, is that the political restructuring of capitalist social relations can occur because of a subjective factor related to class consciousness and culture, and an objective factor regarding systemic features of capitalist production. Whereas the subjective factor contributes to a stalemate in the class strug-gle which creates possibilities for authoritarian intervention in the economy and repressive apparatuses of the state, the objective factor results in over-production crises requiring Keynesian reform. Kirchheimer reckons that it is possible to safeguard the integrity of law as a barometer of human free-dom against the tendency for it to become a tool of class oppression when undermined by organized private interests. Th is however depends, from a specifi c moment in the democratization process set in motion by 1789 and 1848, on a transition from socially created wealth that is privately appropri-ated, to a new mode of production which ensures that the juridical mediation of humanity and nature fi rst sheds its class, and then eventually its bureaucratic character as well.17

Th e implementation of Keynesian stop-gap measures tends to expand the role of the state executive at the expense of the legislature. Th is helps undermine the democratic bases of the state, thus pointing the way to more or less authoritarian forms of corporatism. Th e key point made by Kirchheimer which is taken up by Habermas in the Structural Transforma-tion of the Public Sphere and then again in Legitimation Crisis is that the move from market to late capitalism is accompanied by the transition from the potential of rational and ethical law to the reality of government by command and decree. Th is development is of course most obvious in the transition from parliamentary democracy to fascism. But that very spectacular and visible collapse of the liberal dimension of liberal democ-racy points the way towards an ostensibly more benign phenomenon with related origins, which is the blurring of the public/private divisions in post-World War II consumer-welfare capitalism analysed by Arendt. While Arendt stresses the demise of politics in her Aristotelian-republican sense that this blurring brings in its wake, Kirchheimer points out the inevitable confl ict between the possible transition from socially created wealth that is privately appropriated to socially created wealth that is socially appropri-ated, on the one hand, and the thwarting of that democratic and pluralist possibility by various attempts to insulate the prerogatives of capital from legal-rational critique, on the other. What unites Arendt and Kirchheimer’s otherwise very diff erent standpoints is the observation that at fi rst glance fascist and authoritarian corporatism more generally seems to be the prob-lem of interwar Europe. Yet a closer look suggests that there is a more


fundamental clash between the imperatives of critical reason and those of capitalism which is not easily patched up by staging a return to forms of state which correspond to earlier, now outdated models of equilibrium between class structure, mode of production and mode of political com-promise. Historically stable liberal democratic states may well manage to manoeuvre past the authoritarian transition to a new mode of political compromise in the 1920s and 1930s, but the transition will eventually have to be made in some form, as the institutions of bourgeois ascendancy, such as the public sphere, evolve into those of bourgeois maturity and mass electorates. Hence in Kirchheimer’s view one must update Tocqueville’s question about democracy as follows: will it be a juridical socialist or a despotic form of democracy?18

Kirchheimer explains that in looking at the history of European states from 1848 to the National Socialist victory of 1933, one sees that steadily enhanced degrees of political enfranchisement are paralleled by very un even patterns of social enfranchisement and disenfranchisement. Politi-cal equality becomes a lever to pursue social equality, but this movement is halted to varying extents by private ownership of the means of production. Each state is faced with the choice of either socializing private socio-economic rights in order to secure democratic legitimacy, or of enforcing liberal legitimacy by curtailing and in some cases banning democratic rights of citizenship. If the latter choice is enacted, liberal democracy mutates into something palpably more authoritarian. In ‘Changes in the Function of Law in Modern Society’, published in the Journal for Social Research four years prior to Kirchheimer’s article, Neumann explores the modalities of political transformation in relation to changes in the capital-ist economy and industrial society, and suggests that the idea of law as an example of the collective rational will of the citizenry is bound up with a particular account of the origins and sources of secular authority, and that such accounts vary with national context. It is clear to him that the sources of authority evolve in history in conjunction with church-state relations, in a fi rst time, and in conjunction with capital-state relations, in a second. Th e confl icts ensuing from changing church-state and capital-state rela-tions are diff erent depending on a variety of historical and constitutional factors shaping the origins and development of each state’s path to indus-trialization, and the specifi c kind of democracy that it adopts. One of the lessons to be drawn from the history of the Weimar Republic is that democ-racy in anything more than a formal sense requires a signifi cant degree of pre-established social harmony and agreement about the rationality of fundamental institutions, such that it cannot be supposed that democracy


will produce such stability, that is, it is a political form of government that is dependent on a number of extra-governmental factors, as Montesquieu was well aware. Th e structure of markets, social classes and public/private mediations is of course key.19

Neumann shows that liberals too oft en assume that it is the role of the state to create a legal framework for the protection of private interests. Th e parallel assumption is that the play of private interests produces public liberty and democracy in the manner of an almost accidental by-product. For Neumann freedom and democracy are terms referring to the rights and real capacity of citizens to make collective decisions and to participate in public life as equals. Equality in this republican and deliberative sense is undermined by attempts to foil the logic of inclusive democratic enfran-chisement by re-forming economic and political processes so that capital is continually reallocated the privilege to control the labour process, albeit on new bases, in ways that are exempt from accountability. On this rather accurate reading it is ideological to separate questions of reason and legiti-macy from questions of freedom, political equality, democracy and economic organization. Neumann intimates that political legitimacy in modern societies can be secured by the discursive content of collective decisions made by an informed citizenry which is actively involved in the ongoing construction of representative institutions, in which case it is indeed possible to speak about rational political freedom. If by contrast legitimacy is pragmatically manipulated by charismatic leaders allied with powerful extra-parliamentary private interests, as in the Weimar case and well beyond, one is really talking about instrumental legitimacy. At the risk of some simplifi cation, one could say Neumann signals a clash between two very distinct notions of freedom. One conception demands that the state do little more than establish, and when necessary modify the frame-work regulating the competition of private interests. In this case the mediation of humanity and nature is driven by the logic of capital accumu-lation and profi t, and the modalities of natural and predatory freedom are preserved rather than cancelled. Th e other conception envisages collective decision-making and citizen participation. Here the mediation processes are more centrally reliant on communication and forms of agreement which also consider the plurality of needs and perspectives operative in modern societies. Th is raises a recurrent question in the writings of Kirchheimer and Neumann that Habermas has had to face throughout his career: are liberalism and liberal democracy inextricably bound up with the predominance of private interests over general interests in modern industrial societies, or might there be a way of uniting liberal, republican


and socialist tenets into a coherent alternative to liberalism, corporatist social democracy and state socialism? While Kirchheimer and Neumann are very clear as regards their respective positions in response, it will be seen that Habermas’ answer is considerably less clear.20

Habermas’ early work is quite markedly infl uenced by his readings of Arendt, Kirchheimer and Neumann and their variously formulated con-ception of republican action and juridical politics. It is marked too by Horkheimer and Adorno, for whom he worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Needless to say he is also very well acquainted with the German idealist tradition, Nietzsche and Freud, and the sociology of Marx, Durkheim and Weber as well. It is clear that the author of the Structural Transformation and Legitimation Crisis has much sympathy with the ideas of Arendt, Kirchheimer and Neumann, and what one might call their strong conception of politics and a positive conception of freedom. In his writings immediately aft er Legitimation Crisis, however, one detects a kind of Hegelian doubt about the possibility of eliminating instrumental rationality and institutionalized private inter-est from civil society. Th e allusion to Hegel is appropriate because like the author of the Philosophy of Right, Habermas begins to argue that what liberals, Marxists avant la lettre and political republicans in diff erent ways all overlook is that there is much more going on in civil society than sys-tematic exploitation and the contractually mediated pursuit of individual gain. Habermas at times confl ates public sphere, civil society and life-world, and at other times seems to suggest that they refer to distinct institutional realities.21 In any case he follows Hegel in general terms by maintaining that modern societies generate pre-government level forms of agreement and understanding that are not simply reducible to strategic compromise. But Habermas goes well beyond Hegel’s modest claims for the forms of reason operative in the public sphere and civil society by argu-ing that modern states cannot successfully cope with social diff erentiation and complexity without such interaction and the symbolic meanings they transmit and sustain.22 Hence a brief word about the role of interaction in the argument developed in Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) will serve as a good introduction to the discussion of the roles played by com-munication and the life-world in the Th eory of Communicative Action.

Along with Structural Transformation and Legitimation Crisis, Knowl-edge and Human Interests is a key work on the road to the Th eory of Communicative Action. In Knowledge and Human Interests Habermas introduces the distinction between labour and interaction, which prefi g-ures the distinction between system and life-world appearing in later works.


It is somewhat curious that he does not explicitly refer to Arendt or the distinction between labour, work and action developed in the Human Condition (1957). It will be recalled that Arendt regards action as the self-disclosure of individual citizens who appear in the public sphere as non-identical equals. Action for her is thus plural, open-ended, political and indicative of a specifi cally human capacity to transcend the more limited modes of freedom connected with labour and work. Labour and work are more circumscribed because they are more closely bound to life and the life-cycle with its inevitable beginning, unfolding and end. Th ere is on the contrary nothing inevitable about the outcomes of action. Th is is because action transpires in the world, where humans – rather than causally determined nature – are the originators of new beginnings. Central to her view of the world and the place of action within it is the view that each individual acts in a way that is unique. Transcendence of the processes governing the life-cycle is thus not predicated on or synonymous with material abundance or technological prowess, which is why the ancient Greeks understood the distinction between worldly political action and vital economic growth in agriculture. Hence Arendt and Habermas make important claims for what one might call subsystemic politics, or politics considered independently from the dynamics of money and power, bearing in mind that prior to Between Facts and Norms, Habermas is more likely to use the terms interaction and communication than politics as such.

While for Arendt politics creates spaces where uniqueness and singular-ity of perspective can be sustained in spontaneous and unpredictable ways that reveal fundamental aspects of the human condition, Habermas submits that the specifi cally human capacity exhibited in interaction and communication results in understanding and agreement. Th us although they agree on the fundamental importance of the human faculty of speech, Arendt’s emphasis on pluralist politics and open-ended deeds is somewhat distinct from Habermas’ stress on discursive consensus. Corresponding to this diff erence is Arendt’s generally disparaging view of society and social behaviour, which she construes as conformist for the most part, and Habermas’ attempt to develop a theory of social action and an account of societal evolution which he fi nds missing in liberalism, Weber and Marxism. If Arendt never strays too far from her version of Aristotelian republicanism, Habermas’ encounter with Anglo-American pragmatism and developmental psychology in Knowledge and Human Interests prompts him to seek paths beyond philosophical idealism, historical materialism and, it can be argued, away from the particular kind of critical theory


represented by the main ideas of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse.23 Although he never abandons the Kantian dimension of his thinking, which insists that substantive agreement constitute at least some essential part of legitimate authority, he supplements this political dimension with a socio-logical dimension oriented towards the explanation of social action in the life-world. Hence in the transition from Structural Transformation to Knowledge and Human Interests one can discern two shift s in emphasis. Th e fi rst is that from an ethically grounded notion of politics in the public sphere to a more sociologically grounded conception of interaction in the life-world; the second is the evolution from critical theory to communica-tive theory.

In making the distinction between labour and interaction in Knowledge and Human Interests Habermas broadly follows Arendt’s critique of the centrality of labour in Marx. For Arendt and Habermas the labour process represents a fundamental aspect of the mediation between humanity and nature as this is institutionalized in scientifi c research, modes of produc-tion, technological innovation and forms of property (and the therewith resulting dynamics of social power and bureaucratic domination). In Arendt’s estimation, the scope for political equality and Aristotelian-republican action in labour and work related activities is minimal for reasons that she derives in large measure from Heidegger’s distinction between ontic and ontological realities: work and labour are concerned with the manipulation of things according to means/ends processes which, under conditions of industrial production and technology fetishism, turn into ends in themselves. If for Heidegger this encourages forgetfulness of being, for Arendt it signals the degradation of politics and the public sphere at the expense of private, technical and social issues. Social issues are not really public and political in her estimation, so much as they are collectiv-ized private interests that manage to colonize the public sphere. Hence in her view it is fruitless to try to explain the absence of socialist revolution in terms of false consciousness, cultural hegemony, private control of the means of production, and so on, because work and labour are ontologically unsuited to what she calls action. Th at is, no matter how one chooses to organize production, it will always be governed by instrumental criteria deriving from the fact that in working and labouring humanity is still in close proximity to nature, mechanical causality and the battle with scarcity. It is therefore pointless to try to undermine the division of labour in a fi eld of endeavour that cannot function without it. Revolutions, in her view, are thus political rather than socio-economic and, according to her very unique utopianism, spontaneous rather than party led.24 In Knowledge and Human


Interests Habermas echoes this view by reminding readers that no matter how one organizes the labour process, it is not a sphere of dialogue, communication or mutual understanding. It is a sphere of technological transformation, instrumental rationality and, perhaps unfortunately, of command.25

Habermas’ interaction represents a sociological equivalent of Arendt’s action, though with the notable diff erence that interaction produces forms of non-technological knowledge and agreement rather than acts of irre-producible singularity. In making this argument Habermas follows Dilthey’s hermeneutic distinction between the human and natural sciences and C. S. Peirce’s (1839–1914) theory of pragmatic reason. Whereas Arendt refers to the ontological diff erence between labour, work and interaction, in Knowledge and Human Interests Habermas borrows Husserl’s use of the term transcendental to explain the categorical diff erence between the natu-ral sciences, which generate technical interests in accordance with the dictates of monologic reason and classifi catory knowledge, and the human sciences. Th e human sciences generate practical knowledge as well as emancipatory interests on the basis of hermeneutic knowledge and dia-logue that is not only oriented towards agreement, but in principle is receptive to radical otherness as well.26 Within this framework practical interest mediates between technical knowledge and emancipatory knowl-edge. It is in the context of these fundamental distinctions that Habermas defends the university as an institution capable of facilitating communica-tion between diff erent socio-economic and political spheres, which he suggests it does by furnishing the bases of critical social science and developing institutionalized modernist refl exivity more generally. Th is position constitutes a critique of Marx which, as in Structural Transforma-tion, also adopts certain aspects of a Marxist critique of liberal democracy. It is also an implicit critique of Adorno which nonetheless acknowledges the potential danger (as opposed to stifl ing omnipresence) of rampant instrumental reason. Hence in Knowledge and Human Interests one discerns the initial formulation of Habermas’ mature work. Th e apparently rigid dichotomies between political and human emancipation (Marx), private and public spheres (Arendt), as well as that between instrumental reason and mimetic reason (Adorno) are deconstructed. What emerges is the thesis that a third term with roots in the reality of everyday life in society – interaction – can and to varying extents does perform important mediating functions between technical, practical, communicative and emancipatory forms of knowledge and the discrete but ultimately con-nected interests pertaining to the form of knowledge in question.27


Yet the early Habermas does not depart so far from Kirchheimer and Neumann as to say that the mediation processes are always smooth. Indeed, as the latent crisis tendencies of industrial societies became more pronounced in the early 1970s (in some ways reminiscent of the situation at the time of this writing), he was compelled, however provisionally, to revise at least the emphasis of his argument. While continuing to insist on the diff erent logics obtaining in the natural and human sciences, he also becomes aware of the fact that he would be abandoning critical theory altogether by construing the relation between work and interaction as spontaneously self-regulating. Th is would have placed him rather close to the postulates of sociological positivism and systems theory. By extension, it would also place him close to the argument that political legitimation in modern societies can dispense with active citizen input, that is, that legiti-macy and stability are synonymous. In Legitimation Crisis the argument in Structural Transformation is slightly modifi ed to explain the dysfunctional dynamics unleashed by fl awed mediation processes. Th ese pathological processes become palpably visible when the life-world, which takes over the centrality enjoyed by the public sphere played in earlier books, is ‘colonized’ by technological and instrumental imperatives stemming from the capitalist economy and state bureaucracies. Th e argument developed in Legitimation Crisis is that colonization in the sense used here occurs when the channels between technical knowledge and hermeneutic knowledge become blocked. One may regard this as a sociologically informed modifi -cation of the Neumann-Kirchheimer thesis that law is transformed into decree if juridical institutions are hijacked by private economic concerns, in which case legal universality and general interests are hijacked by execu-tive fi at and particular interests. While technical knowledge is bound up with instrumental reason and power, which in institutional terms consti-tute what Habermas from the 1970s onwards refers to as the system (rather than merely work, as in Knowledge and Human Interests), hermeneutic knowledge is linked with communicative reason and understanding, which are fi rmly anchored in the life-world of speech, interaction and socializa-tion. He submits that it is the distinguishing feature of modern societies that instrumental and communicative reason can coexist and indeed must coexist if there is going to be anything like non-instrumental legitimacy. His claim is that there is evidence that they can coexist because science, industry and progress in a technological sense have placed external nature at the disposition of humanity. Th is means that from a determinate moment in the history of the unfolding of humanity’s productive forces, which one might locate with the scientifi c and industrial revolutions, it becomes


objectively possible to overcome institutionalized material scarcity, that is, poverty and entrenched stratifi cation. In a series of parallel but also distinct developments, and in anticipation of the argument developed in far more detail in the Th eory of Communicative Action, Habermas points out that the secularization of authority that accompanies the development of science and technology leads to changes in the relationship between humanity and inner, human nature. Habermas insists that these changes require an extensive revision of Weber’s rationalization thesis. Weber’s thesis needs correction because from a similarly determinate moment, which one might locate with the Enlightenment and modernity, it becomes objectively possible to overcome the ideological justifi cation of power rela-tions in favour of more transparent and therefore democratic ones. Th is marks a sharp departure from the line of thinking pursued by Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. As seen in Chapter 3, they reckon that mastery of external nature always also entails, to varying extents, the oppression of inner human nature.28

Against the founders of critical theory, Habermas counters that the possibilities of overcoming material scarcity and political oppression are objective on distinct grounds, and that these grounds are not clearly distin-guished by Marx, Weber or the fi rst generation of Frankfurt School philosophers. Whereas the technical progress in question can be obtained on the basis of instrumental reason, the interactive progress cannot. Science and rationalized religions such as Protestantism have eroded forms of political and cultural integration based on faith, tradition and ritual; this has indeed resulted in a certain amount of disenchantment and what Benjamin analyses in terms of the crisis of aura. But the norms governing social and political relations are now scrutinized and subjected to delibera-tion and debate in public fora.29 Th e central thesis of Legitimation Crisis is that the potential twofold capacity of humanity to adapt and adjust to external natural necessity and internal natural particularity can be forfeited. It is obscured when the instances of instrumental reason govern-ing the systemic processes leading to the mastery of scarcity detach themselves from the communicative reason that alone is capable of formu-lating norms, or, stated slightly diff erently and in apparent opposition to Luhmann, systems will not automatically steer themselves without con-scious political intervention, dialogue and eventual agreement over ends.30

According to the thesis developed in Legitimation Crisis, the problems connected with the colonization of the life-world and the transformation of law into decree are not immediately attributable to the phenomena of capital and class, nor are they directly attributable to social diff erentiation


and complexity. Th e problems in question are also not simply matters of contingency. Th ey issue from what Habermas calls the system. Within his explanatory framework this means that in theoretical terms they result from an excess of systemic reason over life-world reason. In practical terms it results in the mutation of parliamentary democracy into a form of government which is more suited to providing predictability and stability than democracy and liberty – corporatism. Th e corporatist by-passing of the legislature through extra-parliamentary agreements, combined with compensatory palliatives of the Welfare State, attest to the fact that in post-1968 North America and Western Europe, and especially in the Federal Republic of West Germany, pre-modern modes of political integration are no longer viable, and modern ones have not yet fully developed.31 In Habermas’ estimation, the modern industrial democracies of the post-World War II period are confronted with an extremely diffi cult but ultimately resolvable task. Th ey cannot simply decry the blurring of private and public and the concomitant rise of the social, nor can they attempt to subject the economy to democratic control. Th e fi rst pseudo-option ignores the facticity of society and social complexity; the second would be tanta-mount to authoritarian steering. Hence the communicative channels between life-world and system must be unblocked in order to act on the reality that collective learning and socialization can and to a considerable extent have in practice kept pace with technological innovation and indus-trial growth. Th e two-volume Th eory of Communicative Action (1981) constitutes his attempt to refute Weber’s rationalization thesis and simulta-neously move beyond the impasses he fi nds in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. He reckons this can be accomplished by showing in empirical and theoreti-cal terms why the transcendence of material scarcity as well as the overcoming of ideologically justifi ed power relations is a collective learn-ing process, and by demonstrating too that democracy is the institutional form of human collective learning.

From the Colonization of the Life-World to Radical Democracy in the Legal State

In the course of the trajectory from Structural Transformation and Legi-timation Crisis to the Th eory of Communicative Action, one detects a discernible shift in the reference points shaping the arguments put forth. While partial appropriations and critical responses to Kant, Weber, Arendt, Neumann and Kirchheimer discretely guide the early writings, assessments of the contributions to social theory made by Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), G. H. Mead (1863–1931), and the functionalism of Talcott Parsons


(1902–79, author of Th e Structure of Social Action, 1937) mark the evolu-tion of Habermas’ work during the period of the ‘linguistic turn’ and thereaft er.32 What Habermas sees as missing in Marxism, liberalism, Weberian sociology and fi rst generation critical theory he fi nds to a quali-fi ed extent in the writings of Durkheim, Mead, Parsons and other theorists largely ignored by the German thinkers shaping his early years as a theorist. Th at conspicuously missing element is a theory of the social that does not reduce social action to a series of refl ex responses to class confl ict, psychological drives or to unimportant fragments within more overarch-ing narratives of reason (Hegel) or rationalization (Weber) in history. In Durkheim’s refl ections on law, Habermas fi nds supporting evidence for his own thesis that language is more than a mere means in the functional mediation of cooperation and confl ict. Contrary to the theses developed by Foucault looked at in the previous chapter, Habermas is confi dent that linguistic communication holds the promise of truthful mediation and, as a consequence, eventual non-coerced agreement. Th e implication is that real non-coerced agreement – not the fi ctitious version reached behind a veil of ignorance in hermetic isolation from others – could in principle become one of the principal bases of legitimacy. If in the early writings agreement is secured in a political public sphere, by the time of Legitima-tion Crisis and the Th eory of Communicative Action, agreement is fi rmly anchored in the social life-world. Habermas updates his own ideas by shift ing his reference points from mainly German debates on Marxism, Kantianism and political republicanism, to more international debates on communicative rationality and sociological theory. One of the main themes running through the Th eory of Communicative Action is that it is possible to retain the heuristic value of the public sphere argument provided that its framing is substantially adjusted to suit the evident reality that the classical public sphere is irretrievably gone, and that the epistemological content of republicanism is therefore now to be sought in the practices of communi-cation in the life-world. Without discussing Arendt in any detail, Habermas implies that her political theory is both right and wrong. She correctly detects a non-instrumental dimension to politics that is threatened by technical and administrative processes in modern societies. But she in eff ect fetishizes politics by making it a timeless feature of the human condi-tion that can always be brought back to life in its pre-existing forms, such as those prevailing in the polis or the American Revolution. Th erefore although her thought does not share the pathos of the Dialectic of Enlight-enment, it is a similarly forlorn argument without a great deal of contemporary relevance. Th is is due to the fact that a substantial part of


what she refers to as politics has been absorbed into what Habermas, following Luhmann in both proximity and critical distance, designates as the system. Habermas positions himself between Arendt and Luhmann by suggesting that the system is not ubiquitous, and indeed, cannot function without the cultural understandings and the communicative reason that fl ourish in the life-world for reasons which will be explained. Th e point for the moment is that against both Arendt and the founders of critical theory, Habermas maintains that society can be conceived of as being comprised of the system and the life-world. In his estimation this is more nuanced and helpful in explanatory terms than insisting on the predomi-nance of the political or the social, or the prevalence of mimetic reason versus instrumental reason. Th us although Habermas is critical of Weber and criticizes his theory of social action, he also maintains that one cannot simply ignore the phenomena diagnosed by him: the political public sphere of ascendant liberalism has collapsed, and power-oriented political parties have occupied the space thereby vacated for the foreseeable future. Th is does not mean that full-blown systems theory must be embraced, however. For the author of the Th eory of Communicative Action, the non- instrumental dimension of reality that Arendt fi nds in politics and Adorno discerns in aesthetic reason now has fairly solid if diff used social bases, as Durkheim convincingly shows. Th e implication is that the mediation function of the former political public sphere has been replaced by systemic opera-tions, on the one hand, and a social public sphere, that is, the life-world, on the other.33

According to Habermas’ reading of Durkheim, law was once embedded in traditional and religions institutions. As political authority was gradu-ally secularized, legal institutions and juridical reasoning were decoupled from religion and tradition, and law emerged as a medium of communica-tion with its own norms. Aft er passing through the stage of being religiously embedded, legal norms became state-juridical in the early modern period examined in Structural Transformation. Since then they have evolved beyond their state-juridical instantiation, which means that they are now fi rmly anchored in society and the life-world.34 Th ese developments in the structure of legal reasoning and understanding correspond to the transi-tion from mechanical to organic solidarity charted in Durkheim’s sociology. Readers familiar with the broad outlines of his theory will know that for Durkheim, integration in traditional society results from rituals and cus-toms which do not allow individuals much social space for autonomous refl ection and development. Hence in a manner that may seem counter-intuitive when set against Tönnies’ (1855–1936) distinction between older


forms of Gemeinschaft (community) and modern Gesellschaft (society), Durkheim shows that solidarity in pre-modern political communities was for the most part mechanical. By contrast, modern societies allow individ-uals to develop at the same time that the societies secure the foundations of post-traditional sources of solidarity. Th is point is of central importance for Habermas, for it indicates to him that in a modern context the diff eren-tiation of individual and authority, institutionalized as the separation of personal morality and positive law, is compatible with and even promotes rational modes of integration, that is, it points to the thesis that diff erentia-tion need not be synonymous with fragmentation or the instances of domination usually associated with alienation. Durkheim’s claim in this regard would be very similar to Hegel’s argument in the Philosophy of Right were it not for the fact that in contrast to Hegel, who stresses the inte-grating capacity of the modern state, Durkheim stresses the integrating capacities of modern society. Moreover, and in contrast to Marx, Durkheim maintains that the interdependence caused by the division of labour in industrial society actually creates organic bonds of solidarity between morally autonomous people. As Durkheim sees it, the challenge is to some-how maintain and renew the sources of solidarity, lest the dynamics of autonomy take on dysfunctional dimensions.35

In the early 1980s Habermas combines Mead’s ideas on the interper-sonal character of communication which, due to its interactive dimension is always oriented towards understanding and agreement, with Durkheim’s concept of post-traditional integration, to arrive at his theory of communi-cative action. It is of particular interest to Habermas that when discussing the division of labour, Durkheim is not primarily providing an analysis of the movements of capital or the extraction of surplus value. On the basis of Durkheim’s work, Habermas is able to broaden and deepen the distinction between labour and interaction that he had already developed in Knowl-edge and Human Interests. Th is is because for Habermas, Durkheim’s division of labour is not centrally about property relations or even about production; the communication generated by interdependence of diff erent trades and the various branches of the economy creates channels that eff ectively mediate between the symbolic and material reproduction of the social order. Reading Durkheim and Mead in light of the relatively stabilized and to varying degrees corporatist socio-political arrangements of Western Europe in the 1970s, Habermas concludes that social integra-tion and system integration are propelled by diff erent rationalities and discrete institutional realities. Th e infl uence of Parsons, and by extension of Luhmann, comes into focus here, though it is worth noting both thinkers


are oft en criticized by Habermas for the action-theoretical and communi-cative-hermeneutical defi cit in their respective theories. Habermas suggests that while knowledge of the processes structuring systemic integration is best aggregated on the basis of the perspective of an external observer, knowledge of the processes securing social integration in the life-world is always produced by participants involved in those very dynamics. How-ever, the problem inherent in the functionalist and systems-theore tical approaches, as already signalled in Legitimation Crisis, is that they off er no remedies when system and life-world cease to communicate. Insofar they fail fully to learn from Durkheim’s observations about the secularization of authority and the rationalization, in a much more positive sense than the term is used by Weber, of personal moral judgement. Rationalized morality in this other sense is the post-religious, post-traditional secular morality without which the metaphorical fabric of modern societies unravels. Th e defects in functionalist and systems-theoretical analysis are of a diff erent order than those raised in the writings of the theorists of ubiquitous reifi -cation, the eclipse of reason and negative dialectics. Th ey are nonetheless an impediment to the development of theory capable of diagnosing urgent social problems and proposing rational solutions. In the eschatology of the fi rst group and the critical defi cit in the second, Habermas discerns distinct but related pitfalls in the various possible responses to the emergence of the Weberian paradigm.36

Habermas suggests that Weber is correct to regard rationalization as being bound up with increasing social complexity and what almost inevitably goes with it – systemic imperatives requiring calculated predict-ability in the fi elds of law, economy, administration, and beyond. But what Weber leaves out of consideration for the most part is that rationalization also opens up possibilities for the diff erentiation of individual personality and the transmission of cultural values on fully secular and humanist bases. According to the interpretation off ered in the Th eory of Communicative Action, Weber’s theory of social action is excessively centred on the means-oriented pursuit of goals, which is the unsurprising consequence of a methodological approach that describes itself as a Herrschaft ssoziologie (sociology of domination). Th e theoretical parallel to an impoverished account of social action is a one-sided approach to law which regards legal-ity as legal-rational legitimation of force.37 Functionalism and systems theory absorb what is generally correct in Weber. Th is includes his theses concerning complexity and diff erentiation as hallmarks of industrial society and the related claim that diff erentiation is accompanied by various instances of integration. But for Habermas they also tend to absorb what is


faulty in Weber, which they do in two ways. First, they replicate his diagno-sis of social action as the institutionalized competitive strategy of individuals, parties and states. Second, whereas Weber for the most part reduces legality to legal-rational legitimation, Parsons and Luhmann reduce legitimacy to what is necessary to produce social order. Th ey thereby make legitimacy a function of stability and equilibrium, and omit crucial consid-erations about what makes legitimacy legitimate beyond what is temporarily eff ective. For Habermas, legitimacy must be a function of communicative action understood as the progressive institutionalization of discursively redeemed norms. Th e normative defi cit alluded to can assume extreme forms in systems theory in particular, where social action is oft en dismissed as the corollary of what is held to be the dubious idea of a social actor naturally endowed with a predictable array of pre-social anthropological attributes (tool-making, speaking, politically engaged, etc.). On this account the social action is explained in terms of what social actors do, which is nothing other than what they already are by defi nition: they make tools, speak, take part in politics, and so on. From a systems-theoretical perspec-tive this is a non-explanation. From Habermas’ perspective, and despite his own emphasis on the need for social inquiry to be interpretative, Weber tends to absolutize the perspective of the external observer, so that quanti-tative categorization gets the better of qualitative understanding. Habermas insists that this methodological individualism is seemingly transformed but really only re-articulated in functionalism and systems theory, both of which reproduce the defect of exaggerating the role of external observation in sociological explanation.38

Th us for Habermas what one discerns in Weber and then again to varying degrees in the bearers of his theoretical legacy is great historical fi nesse which is off set by the tendency to produce sociological metanarra-tives about the twilight of the strong individual and the rationalization of all areas of existence. Th ese pernicious tendencies are perpetuated by Lukács and Horkheimer and Adorno in History and Class Consciousness and the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and reproduced in diff erent terminol-ogy by Parsons and Luhmann. Th e result is that at least as late as 1981, sociological theory has not been able successfully to update the insights of Durkheim or to integrate the contribution of Mead and other American and English pragmatists. In other words, Weber’s acuity as an historian and sociologist is relativized by the cultural pessimism he presumably inherits from Nietzsche which, in Habermas’ estimation, is thankfully absent in Durkheim and pragmatism.39 Durkheim indicates that the rationalization of morality does not simply exile humanity into a godless world that can


off er its isolated individual members and groups little else beyond material incentives and social stability bereft of all transcendent meaning. In Durkheim’s writings society is analysed as a moral fact that establishes the framework within which social action unfolds. Habermas elaborates Durkheim’s theses in the Th eory of Communicative Action, and contends that secularization and detraditionalization enable people to develop rational moral perspectives and independent individual identities in ways which are not adequately captured by concepts such as nihilism, disen-chantment, reifi cation, alienation, system, environment, and so on. Modern individuals are socialized in the life-world in processes which are plural, non-determined and subject to constant modifi cation and evolution. Speech and communication play a key role in complementing the non-verbal communication performed by money and the structures of administrative power. In short, one could say that non-verbal (technical) communication steers systemic functions in the state and economy towards stability; linguistic competence creates a framework for potentially domi-nation-free communication, and, by extension, emancipation. Technical communication guides humanity in its progressive mastery of external nature while adhering to the monological rules of natural science. Interac-tive and linguistic competence progress in a completely diff erent way because they are guided by hermeneutic inquiry and critical social science. Here it becomes clear that the thrust of Habermas’ theory of legitimacy takes a turn in relation to the thesis developed in Legitimation Crisis. In the earlier work of 1973 he off ers a strong statement about the omnipresent possibility of the colonization of the life-world at the hands of the system. By 1981 he modifi es this position by implying that when the life-world and system become decoupled, a crisis of communicative rationality ensues. Such crises cannot be resolved by systemic adjustments alone. Th at is because if it can be said that systems progress, life-worlds learn. Learning in this sense is non-instrumental, collective and interactive, and cannot be established according to the abstractions of an external observer. Legiti-macy, as opposed to legitimation, is therefore guaranteed by citizen participation in the life-world, which embraces all individuals despite whatever negative experiences they may have in their contacts with systemic realities. Th e claim that modern democracies cannot rely on social systems mutually to self-adjust is a central part of Habermas’ argument. In his estimation it follows that democratic states cannot be blithely confi dent about the capacity of government experts to correct communicative rationality crises. In crisis situations the channels between system and life-world must be reopened, and the impetus for this has to come from the


critique of daily life and its implications for policy.40 Th is argument is put forth in still more affi rmative terms in Habermas’ most recent major contribution to social and political theory, which is Between Facts and Norms of 1992.

In Between Facts and Norms Habermas explicitly states that this-worldly transcendence is indeed possible, but contingent upon the realization of radical democracy.41 Yet radical democracy is not direct democracy, nor social democracy or juridical socialism. It appears to be a kind of republican democracy in which key areas of everyday life such as the economy are not subject to political control. Here one glimpses the political indeterminacy of the theory of communicative action, and the ambiguity of the Habermasian paradigm in more general terms. Commu-nicative action yields communicative infl uence on the system, but cannot exercise communicative power as such. At fi rst glance this looks like a refor-mulation of the Kantian dimension of the argument in the Structural Transformation. But Habermas claims that the democracy sustained by communicative action in the life-world is so radical as to contain an anarchistic dimension, that is, something which was presumably absent from the classical public sphere.42 In the then newly arrived post-Cold War political climate, he seems confi dent that the tendencies he had previously diagnosed in terms of colonization of the life-world and the decoupling of life-world and system can and in most cases are overcome by modern law. Th is indicates that however much some aspects of his work are situated at a critical distance from key liberal tenets, other aspects of his thinking seem unbothered by the evident reality that the theoretical distinction between legality and legitimacy oft en turns out to be a fusion of legality and legitimacy in the actual practice of liberal democratic legal states. But Habermas remains convinced that this very specifi c kind of legality is decidedly not a mere means for the exercise of legal-rational domination, or, in terms of the history of sociological theory, Durkheim prevails over Marx and Weber. Habermas updates Durkheim with Mead in order to argue that the mediation between the symbolic and material dimensions of the social order is achieved by communication, and communication, pace functionalism and systems theory, cannot dispense with social actors who recognize themselves as the authors of the laws that govern them. Th e explanation why law can accomplish the tasks Habermas credits it with is that the mediation between life-world and system is not merely a more recent version of the mediation of the private and public spheres.43 He suggests that if the private sphere was not completely abolished with the rise of the social, the concept of the ‘private sphere’ is nonetheless a


misleading term when used to describe the character of non-systemic communication and intimacy in a post-1989 world. Just as the contract presupposes a valid state that makes the contractual moment of agreement possible, which is one explanation why one cannot provide the grounds of political obligation via contract, communication presupposes a commu-nity of speakers who understand one another. Th is is why it is not necessary to use force or fraud in the mediation of private and public interests. However, Habermas cautions, it must nonetheless be borne in mind that communicative action has its limits – there can be no question of the life-world colonizing the system. Communication would inevitably turn into oppressive steering if the life-world were entrusted with organizing the mediation of humanity and external nature. Th is means that not only does Habermas not entertain the possibility of political control of the economy, but also insists that radical democracy must actually dispense with the very idea if, that is, communication and not steering is to remain the basis of legitimacy in post-traditional, democratic states. Communication may break, infl ect upon and rechannel power, but it may not become power. It follows that if communication becomes power, it is by defi nition lost, and political control of the economy would indeed bring about this structural transformation in his estimation. Hence he discounts the possibility that a libertarian or juridical form of socialism could organize the mediation of humanity and external nature in ways that would not end what Arendt calls politics and what he designates as communication and interaction.44 Th is would presumably result in the demise of the modernist individual human nature that emerges from the separation from law and morality. In Habermas’ opinion such juridical reform would in eff ect reverse the very learning process that has made radical democracy a possibility and a reality.45

Yet it is far from evident at the time of this writing how transcendence of necessity and radical democracy can dispense with some degree of transparency and accountability in matters of production and consump-tion. It may have appeared feasible amidst the euphoria of immediate post-Cold War Western Europe. It seems rather implausible now, when it has become even clearer than it was during the 1970s and 1980s that if industrial economies are fuelled by private investment in search of new markets, low labour costs and capital accumulation, overproduction crises tend to ensue. Overproduction crises tend, when engendered as one of the consequences of an economic dynamic propelled by the need constantly to re-establish the prerogatives of private owners to control production and make profi t, to require a thorough redeployment of investment. From


investment in the production of consumer goods and industrial equip-ment, there is a notable shift to investment in far more ethereal fi nancial services and various forms of fi nancial property. In recent years fi nancial property in the form of shares has become so diff use that salaried workers and even the long-term unemployed now routinely own credit cards and entitlements to future income. On closer inspection, these developments signal rising levels of debt and unemployment for ever broader sectors of the population of formally democratic states. Although there is no longer much discussion of the explanatory potential of the term ‘late capitalism’, it is certainly possible to characterize the current political situation as something roughly approximating ‘late democracy’. People are promised a future return on their investment, which can only be delivered if the man-agers of the fi rms in which people have shares outsource, lay workers off , and take other measures to keep share prices high. Th e aggregate result is that everyone must work longer, harder, and under demonstrably more precarious conditions of employment in return for the promise of future income that may or may not materialize. Hence what looks to be the current dialectic of political homogenization and socio-economic precari-ousness cannot be fully understood without an analysis of the ways in which overproduction, under the auspices of private ownership, tends to provoke a move from investment in production to speculative investment in fairly risky kinds of fi nancial property with correspondingly uncertain outcomes. If one analyses the history of the structural changes caused by the deregulation mania that beset advanced industrial economies in the 1980s and 1990s, it seems that a return to Keynesianism or to what in Germany was called the social market economy is increasing improbable. Th e general picture that emerges suggests rampant instability and potential volatility in socio-economic, political and cultural terms. Th ere is of course no space here for a detailed analysis, but it certainly looks much more like coerced integration rather than anything remotely resembling radical democracy with pockets of anarchic liberty.46

Reality inevitably outpaces theory and so it is not always entirely fair to confront theoretical claims with practical developments in the fi eld. Yet Habermas’ approach is also not without theoretical problems that might be mentioned by way of conclusion. It seems that from the time of the separation of work and interaction theorized in Knowledge and Human Interests, which evolved into the distinction between system and life-world in subsequent writings, Habermas was aware of the proximity between the theory of communicative action and certain features of systems theory. On the one hand he embraces the thesis that systemic diff erentiation and


increasing social complexity are not necessarily destabilizing because they also engender diverse modes of integration in the process of their unfold-ing. His sociological commitment to this thesis is nonetheless balanced by the simultaneously held normative commitment to the idea that crises of legitimacy will result if social systems detach themselves from social actors and citizen, which is why he insists on the co-instantiation of the system and life-world and the normative and political priority of the latter over the former. It can thus be said that he tempers the potential normative defi cits of the systems-theoretical approach with communicative and hermeneutical inputs. Th e latter, in turn, are presented in his theory as aspects of post-philosophy-of-consciousness humanism which can rise to the anti-humanist challenge of post-structuralism and systems theory. Th ere are however questions about the plausibility of the resulting paradigm. In the preceding pages it is suggested that in theoretical terms, the legality-legitimacy union represents an instance of pervasively coerced reconciliation through which the non-identical and the very possibility of institutionalized mediated non-identity is suppressed within the framework of Habermas’ original but somewhat unstable combination of systems theory, creeping legal positivism and residual, inconclusively post-idealist humanism. In his estimation, and despite recurrent systemic crises such as the one of 2008–09, the legitimacy of existing European and North American states is able to rely on the communicative, hermeneutic and humanist sources of meaningful social and political interaction evoked in the theory of communicative action. One is entitled to ask if this can be accomplished indefi nitely in the manner of a natural privilege. If capitalism will not die a natural death, perhaps the corollary is that there is no reason why liberal democracy should be guaranteed an indefi nitely prolonged life.47 Th is raises the question as to whether critical theory is analytically more eff ec-tive and politically less ideological if it enters into a dialogue with negative dialectics and systems theory that is less defensive and dismissive than the one taken up by Habermas.48

Habermas tends to suggest that if negative dialectics is really disen-chanted negative idealism, systems theory is cybernetic and metabiological in approach rather than properly sociological. Hence he maintains that although it was necessary to move social philosophical refl ection beyond idealism in all its forms, the result should not be a simultaneous abandon-ment of key anthropological categories such as language, communication and autonomy. Habermas correctly suspects that without these normative foundations, the state becomes a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and reason must be instrumental. Th is would amount to a last minute come-back by Weber against Durkheim and Mead. Th e theory of communicative


action adopts sociological perspectives on complexity, integration and dif-ferentiation, and combines these with selected bits of rather traditional political theory concerning agreement and understanding. Th e fact that developmental psychology and discourse ethics are also at times enlisted does not alter this conservative political orientation, even if Habermas chooses to call it radical. It thus seems fair to ask two questions. If one is going to retain some aspects of anthropological humanism in accordance with the implicit thesis that the legitimacy of the legal state is imperilled without them, why not re-elaborate them in directions that push normative assumptions to the limits reached by negative dialectics and systems theory, instead of trying to make them natural rights and thereby ignore the fact that late democracy is a reality and not a spectre haunting Europe? Does supplementing the life-world/system distinction with universal speech pragmatics and selected aspects of Parsons suffi ce to transcend the philoso-phy of consciousness? Luhmann notes that dichotomies such as subject/object and life-world/system can be conceptualized in terms of the reality of form rather than in terms of the illusion of form and the reality of essence. For him this means dispensing with subject/object and life-world/system in favour of inside/outside and system/environment. His point is that one can discern the rationality of systems in their contingent relations with their respective environments instead of speculating about the rationality and motives of actors. Stated slightly diff erently, one can observe that rationality is a property of systems rather than of actors. It follows that individual autonomy – at least at this historical juncture – has more to do with adjust-ing to uncertainty than it does with the realization of Aristotelian political or communicative essences. Th ere is no way to alter this without fi rst confronting it squarely. Luhmann intimates that communication takes place between social systems and not between systemic structures and life-world actors. In systems-theoretical terms there is no direct communication between individuals, political system and society, and, moreover, the channels of communication do not culminate in some metasocial institu-tion such as an updated version of the Hegelian state.49 Existing forms of legitimacy are therefore achieved in a series of precarious and highly contingent adjustments between systems and environments and not those between citizens and governments via a plurality of ultimately intercon-nected life-worlds. To repeat, if one favours an altogether diff erent praxis of legitimacy one must fi rst grapple with the plausibility of this approach and the juridical issues that it raises.50

Luhmann uses the term autopoiesis to describe the processes through which laws and rights operate on the basis that societies need them. Laws and rights are therefore the products of a juridical system which functions


as a series of closed, self-referential processes in conjunction with social systems of value (economy), truth (natural science), power (politics), intimacy (family), belief (churches), and so forth. Hence society can be analysed as an ensemble of systems which communicate through codes rather than a collective political centre or its individual counterpart – human speech. Th is argument is fi rst sketched in Social Systems (1984), and then elaborated in the two-volume Th e Society of Society (1997), in which Luhmann explains that social systems generate sense to the extent that they can defi ne their respective boundaries, reduce complexity and meet expec-tations to varying degrees. In his view it is thus more rigorous to speak of system rationality than value rationality or intersubjectivity and communi-cative action.51 Although there is no space here to provide a detailed exposition and critique of the systems-theoretical approach, some may regard it as more consistent than the theory of communicative action in terms of the deconstruction of what have become highly problematic assumptions about the nature of human communication, agency and polit-ical democracy. Habermas may wish to dismiss the conclusion that the end of idealism and the philosophy of consciousness may also signal the twi-light of the life-world and politically relevant social interaction, but from Luhmann’s perspective it is virtually irresistible. Systems theory eliminates assumptions about social action and the teleology of citizen agreement in those crucial instances of speech and understanding that the communica-tive action approach tries to safeguard in order to shore up the humanistic ideal of rational legitimacy. Yet one may now pose a third question. Why should there be non-instrumentally rational law, not to mention a ration-ally legitimate state in a broader sense, if there can be no political control of the economy? Th e analysis thus far points to the provisional conclusion that there cannot be a general theory of legitimacy as such. One can develop a theory of legitimacy as it relates to state socialism, late capitalism, juridi-cal socialism, and so on. Th is signals a diff erent approach to the ones variously employed by Hegel, Weber, Habermas and Luhmann.

Habermas and Luhmann agree that legitimacy is based on knowledge rather than merely more or less stable confi gurations of interest aggrega-tion and welfare distribution. Luhmann indicates that under existing socio-economic and legal arrangements, it is the tentative knowledge that systems have of each other through codes, and not the understandings people have with each other through speech. Hence for both thinkers what matters is the kind of knowledge that defi nes legitimate law. It may well be that in some regards the analytical triumphs of systems theory represent a rather pyrrhic victory over the problems of humanism that are strikingly


evident in the work of Habermas and other theorists. Just because the alternative to epistemological and political metaphysics is not the late democracy achieved by attempting constantly to recouple life-world and system under the directives of capital and the imposed necessity of growth for growth’s sake, it does not necessarily follow that the real alternative is systemic autopoiesis. Perhaps one possibility that has not yet been fully explored is that the theory of mediated non-identity off ers the tentative beginnings of a post-metaphysical response to the questions raised by the systems-theoretical critique of the theory of communicative action.

Endnotes

1. Th eorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (Th eory of Communicative Action), volume I, pp. 531–2. Habermas actually calls this development the communicative-theoretical turn of social and political theory (p. 531), which is now widely referred to in the English-speaking world as the linguistic turn. See too Habermas, Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Th eorie des kommunikativen Handels (Preliminary and Complementary Studies of the Th eory of Communicative Action, 1984), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1995, chapter 4. Interesting in the con-text of Habermas’ call for a move beyond Marx, Weber and the impasses of fi rst generation critical theory is what seems to be an almost total disregard for the work of Simmel.

2. Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung (Truth and Justifi cation), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1999, pp. 250–3; and Habermas, Kommunikatives Handeln und detranszendierte Vernunft (Communicative Action and Detranscendentalised Reason), Stuttgart, Reclam, 2001, pp. 8–10. Th e title of the second book is signifi cant in that it captures a central aspect of Habermas’ overall project: the ‘detranscendentalization’ of Kant and of reason generally can in theory provide the bases of a theory of this-worldly rationality against the claims of the philosophy of consciousness and metaphysics. It is not Hegelian reason in history, or the state as mind objectifi ed, as such. It is the reason embodied in the speech acts of partners in dialogue which, he suggests, is teleologically oriented towards mutual understanding and agreement.

3. Th e writings of Habermas (born in 1928) extend from the 1950s to the present, and cover a wide range of topics which, in addition to his theoretical works, include pedagogical issues concerned with the student movement in Germany and the constant debate over university reform there. For a comprehensive overview see the excerpts included in William Outhwaite (intro. and ed.), Th e Habermas Reader, Cambridge, Polity, 1996. Readers of German can consult the recently published Philosophische Texte in fi ve volumes (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2009), which comprise selections of his major writings on the following sub-jects: (1) the speech-theoretical foundation of sociology, (2) rationality and speech theory, (3) discourse ethics, (4) political theory and, of particular interest for the present book, (5) the critique of reason. Christian Schlüter provides a good summary of the contents of the fi ve volumes in the Frankfurter Rundschau, 14 June 2009, p. 35.

4. If one had to categorize his social and political thought in recognizable terms, one might say that Habermas combines a commitment to political liberalism with aspects of


critical theory, legal theory and communicative rationality. For two excellent introductions, see William Outhwaite, Habermas; A Critical Introduction, Cambridge, Polity, 1994, 2nd edn 2009; and Gordon Finlayson, Habermas: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005.

5. Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness, 1923), pp. 122–63.

6. Hans Albert, Traktat über kritische Vernunft (Treatise on Critical Reason, 1968), fi ft h edition, Tübingen, J. C. B. Mohr, 1991, pp. 35–50.

7. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öff entlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Th e Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, fi rst published by Luchterhand in 1962), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1990, pp. 180–95. Hence while it is Th e Th eory of Communicative Action (2 volumes, 1981) that announces the advent of the linguistic turn, Th e Structural Transformation, Legitimation Crisis and Th e Th eory of Communicative Action all express scepticism about the possible mediation of life-world knowledge and systemic steering. As will be seen, Between Facts and Norms attempts to provide arguments explaining how this mediation is in fact achieved to a satisfactory degree in the modern Rechtsstaat. To this extent the latter publication of 1992 can be likened to Habermas’ version of the Philosophy of Right. More critical readers might liken it to Th e End of History and the Last Man, in that in his Between Facts and Norms, Habermas implies that the modern liberal democratic legal state is the end station of political humanity’s journey to rational individual and collective autonomy.

8. Habermas, Philosophische Texte, volume 3, chapter 4; and Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Legitimation Crisis), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1973, part 3, chapter 1.

9. Kant’s ideas prefi gure those of Habermas here as well. In his critique of the welfare state Habermas suggests that the corporatist compromise between labour unions, govern-ment and business associations is a failed response to the tendency of capitalist economies to undermine the conditions of legal universality. Th e epistemological dimension of law is diluted to insulate the political system from demands for social equality that can really only be properly addressed by changing the law instead of ‘soft ening it’, so to speak, for soft ening the law undermines its capacity to set out rational grounds for political obligation. See Habermas, Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Legitimation Crisis), part 2, chapter 5. Claus Off e makes related observations about legality and the long-term prospects of the welfare state in ‘Rationalitätskriterien der Administration’, in Leviathan, 3 (1974), pp. 333–45.

10. Kant, ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufk lärung?’ (‘What is Enlightenment?’, 1783), in Wilhelm Weischedel (ed.), Immanuel Kant: Schrift en zur Anthropologie, Geschichts-philosophie, Politik und Pädogogik I, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1977, pp. 57–61. Relevant in this regard are the arguments that Kant puts forth in ‘Perpetual Peace’ and ‘On the Common Saying’. Th ese three and other important political essays are available in English in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970.

11. Kant, ‘Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Th eorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht in der Praxis’ (‘Th eory and Praxis’), in Wilhelm Weischedel (ed.), Immanuel Kant: Schrift en zur Anthropologie, pp. 129–30.


12. An issue that Habermas does not really address is that morality and reason also entail a natural right to private property for Kant. Th e possible explanations as to why Habermas does not touch upon this are addressed in this chapter.

13. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öff entlichkeit (Th e Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), pp. 178–95; Zur Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus (Th e Recon-struction of Historical Materialism), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1976, parts 2–3; and Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Th e Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1985, chapters 1 and 11.

14. Habermas, 1990 introduction to Strukturwandel der Öff entlichkeit (Th e Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), pp. 33–50, and pp. 195–209 in the text. Th e modifi ed Marxism in question is clearly informed by close readings of Weber and Adorno at this early stage of Habermas’ development as a thinker.

15. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öff entlichkeit (Th e Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), pp. 209–24. Although in the early to mid-1960s Habermas continues to rely on Marx, Weber and Adorno, one can already see some of the characteristic lines of his mature thought starting to emerge. He develops a critical stance towards the fi rst generation of Frankfurt School theorists in that he remains sceptical towards the negative theological tendency to glimpse the conditions of a reconciled world in terms of their manifest absence (a tendency sometimes discernible in Adorno), and is also hesitant to attribute automatic radical political subjectivity to exploited groups and classes (a tendency oft en found in Marcuse). He asserts that the task of completing the ongoing projects of Enlightenment and modernity turns on reconceptualizing reason without fully embracing or wholly ignoring the rationalization thesis, keeping in mind the evident reality that one cannot simply reinstitutionalize the bourgeois public sphere of early modernity under twentieth-century conditions of universal franchise and mass society.

16. Friedrich Pollock, ‘State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations’, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds), Th e Essential Frankfurt School Reader, London and New York, Continuum, 1982, pp. 71–2.

17. Otto Kirchheimer, ‘Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise’, in Arato and Gebhardt (eds), Th e Essential Frankfurt School Reader, pp. 52–7.

18. Otto Kirchheimer, ‘Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise’, in Arato and Gebhardt (eds), Th e Essential Frankfurt School Reader, pp. 54–6.

19. Neumann, ‘Der Funktionswandel des Gesetzes im Recht der bürgerlichen Gesell-schaft ’ (‘Th e Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society’, 1937), in Helge Pross (ed.), Franz Neumann: Demokratischer und autoritärer Staat, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1986, pp. 31–81. One wonders if Bush and Blair considered any of this before ‘bringing democracy’ to Iraq.

20. Neumann, ‘Der Funktionswandel des Gesetzes im Recht der bürgerlichen Gesell-schaft ’ (‘Th e Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society’), in Pross (ed.), Franz Neumann: Demokratischer und autoritärer Staat. Some of Neumann and Kirchheimer’s most important essays can be found in English in William E. Scheuerman (ed.), Th e Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays by Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, Berkeley, Univer-sity of California Press, 1996. For two very good overviews of their main political and juridical ideas, see Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception; and Chris Th ornhill,


Political Th eory in Modern Germany, Cambridge, Polity, 1999, chapter 3. Th e lack of clarity attributed to Habermas is not meant to suggest political opportunism on his part. He is constantly revising his views in answer to his critics and responding to changing socio-economic and political conditions as well, such as the reunifi cation of Germany during 1989–90.

21. At times Habermas seems to be saying that the life-world exists within civil society, while at other times it appears that life-world and civil society are more or less interchange-able terms for him. In the 1990 introduction to the German edition of Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere he states that in the Th eory of Communicative Action and subsequent works he analyses society as the dynamic unity of systems, propelled by money and power, and the life-world, which is maintained through communication. From the early 1990s on he favours the term civil society and the idea of plural public spheres rather than an overarching, unitary public sphere of the kind implied by the initial Kantian version adopted in the Structural Transformation. As will be seen, what is really at stake is the rationalization of the life-world which is not, he insists, to be confused with the Weberian notion of rationalization taken up by Lukács, Adorno, and others. See the intro-duction to Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öff entlichkeit (Th e Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), pp. 45–8.

22. Hegel is actually quite dismissive of the public sphere, which he demotes to the decidedly more pejorative status of public opinion in his mature writings. See Die Philoso-phie des Rechts (Th e Philosophy of Right, 1821), paragraph 315; and Schecter, Sovereign States or Political Communities?, pp. 31–9.

23. While Structural Transformation and Legitimation Crisis can be seen to share a number of the concerns and the methodology of the founders of critical theory, it is doubtful if the same can be said of Between Facts and Norms. Th e diffi culty of assessing Habermas’ relation to critical theory is compounded by the fact that there is no clear agreement as to what constitutes critical theory, and if critical theory should include decon-struction and post-structuralism. For a good introduction see Raymond Geuss, Th e Idea of a Critical Th eory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981.

24. Hence in Arendt’s view party leadership during the revolution quickly becomes party management aft er the seizure of power, that is, the end of the revolution. See On Revolution, part 3.

25. Arendt, Th e Human Condition, part 3; and Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Knowledge and Human Interests), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1968, chapter 12. Needless to say, Habermas’ argument did not fi nd much favour among the more radical student and politi-cal activists in Germany and elsewhere in the late 1960s, who were more interested in Lukács, Marcuse, Mao and Che. For the German context see Th ornhill, Political Th eory in Modern Germany, pp. 145–52.

26. Th e idea that dialogue opens up the possibility of non-instrumental knowledge that is also non-scientifi c in the sense of the natural sciences has become a topic of considerable importance in social and political thought. While Habermas’ contribution comes in the form of his notion of the ideal speech situation discussed in Legitimation Crisis and elsewhere in his oeuvre, the theme can be found in many other recent and contemporary


writers. For some of the most famous examples, see Michael Th eunissen, Das Andere: Stu-dien zur Soziologie der Gegenwart (Th e Other), Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1977; Emmanuel Levinas, Le temps et l’autre (Time and the Other), Paris, PUF, 1983; and Axel Honneth, Der Kampf um Anerkennung (Th e Struggle for Recognition), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1994. Th e communicative affi nities between the potential openness of dialogue and the epistemologi-cal dimensions of aesthetic experience are clearly discernible in the philosophies of Adorno and Derrida. See Christophe Menke, Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1991.

27. Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Knowledge and Human Interests), pp. 347–64.28. Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Legitimation Crisis), part 1, chapter 3.

Th is clear break from Horkheimer and Adorno is at the same time a less obvious break from Neumann and especially Kirchheimer, for whom the possibility of a transcendence of interactive oppression is contingent on juridical reform of capitalist forms of property and the division of labour.

29. Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Legitimation Crisis), part 3, chapter 2.30. Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Legitimation Crisis), pp. 133–9.31. Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Legitimation Crisis), part 1, chapter 5.32. Although Mead perhaps represents the chief pragmatist infl uence on the Th eory of

Communicative Action, the book is also clearly infl uenced by the writings of Peirce, William James (1842–1910), John Dewey (1859–1952) and J. L. Austin (1911–60). Some of these pragmatist infl uences are already discernible in Knowledge and Human Interests. In the Th eory of Communicative Action Habermas also cites the work of prominent ethnometho-dologists, phenomenologists, developmental psychologists and the contributions of other sociological traditions he feels are ignored by Lukács and the Frankfurt School.

33. Th eorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (Th eory of Communicative Action), volume II, chapter 6.

34. Th eorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (Th eory of Communicative Action), volume II, pp. 258–62.

35. Th eorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (Th eory of Communicative Action), volume II, pp. 80–5 and 118–22; Durkheim, De la division du travail social (Th e Division of Labour in Society, 1893), Paris, PUF, 1996, pp. 27–36; and Raymond Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique, Paris, Gallimard, 1967, pp. 329–30.

36. Th eorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (Th eory of Communicative Action), volume I, pp. 232, 335–56, 488, and volume II, pp. 20–3.

37. Th eorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (Th eory of Communicative Action), volume I, pp. 377–86. Habermas articulates a diametrically opposed theory of legality in Between Facts and Norms, as will be seen.

38. Th eorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (Th eory of Communicative Action), volume II, pp. 309–57 and pp. 390–4.

39. Th eorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (Th eory of Communicative Action), volume I, part IV.

40. Th eorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (Th eory of Communicative Action), volume II, pp. 440–62, 471–6, 480–91. Th ere are clearly defi nite points of convergence


between the critique of daily life analysed in the previous chapter and the theory of the life-world developed in Legitimation Crisis, the Th eory of Communicative Action and Between Facts and Norms. Although these points cannot be drawn out in any detail here, it might be noted in passing that it is the critique of instrumental reason that forms their common matrix, bearing in mind that for Habermas the critique of instrumental reason itself needs to be transformed into a critique of functional reason. Th is point will be addressed in the conclusion.

41. Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms), pp. 13, 19.42. Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms), p. 10.43. Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms), pp. 21, 49–52, 527.44. Hence the break with Arendt, except in terms of her praise of revolution, is not

quite as decisive as it may sometimes seem. Moreover, it would appear that Kirchheimer and Neumann’s views on bold legal action are retained, on the one hand, whereas the link they make between active juridical intervention and democratic socialism is severed, on the other.

45. Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms), pp. 361–4.46. Paddy Ireland, ‘Corporate Governance in the New Financial Capitalism’, unpub-

lished paper presented at the University of Sussex on 19 June 2009, pp. 16–18.47. See the Benjamin essays ‘Th e Critique of Violence’ and ‘Th eses on the Philosophy of

History’, in Angelus Novus and Illuminationen.48. Th is has not always been the case. In the early 1970s Habermas and Luhmann have

individually explained their respective approaches to social theory. If not exactly concilia-tory, the tone of the exchange seemed geared towards a possible convergence on key points. See Habermas and Luhmann, Th eorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforschung?, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1974. Given that this book was published very soon aft er Legitimation Crisis, it is possible that at this time Habermas was fairly sym-pathetic to a systems-theoretical analysis of late capitalist democratic states. As has been suggested in preceding pages, however, the Th eory of Communicative Action and Between Facts and Norms seem to reject any possible rapprochement. It is suggested in this chapter that despite this ostensible repudiation, Habermas nonetheless incorporates aspects of systems theory into his work.

49. Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft (Th e Politics of Society), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2002, chapter 6; and Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft (Th e Law of Society), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1993, chapter 9.

50. Luhmann, ‘Erkenntnis als Konstruktion’, in Oliver Jahraus (ed.), Niklas Luhmann: Aufsätze und Reden, pp. 237–8; and Luhmann, Soziale Systeme (Social Systems, 1984), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1987, chapters 5 and 11–12. For an excellent exegetical overview see Michael King and Chris Th ornhill, Niklas Luhmann’s Th eory of Politics and Law, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

51. Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Th e Society of Society), pp. 1016–36.

223

Conclusion: On Post-Liberal Autonomy and Post-Capitalist Legitimacy

Since the linguistic turn in social and political theory, many observers have become quick to dismiss the critique of instrumental reason as a defensive philosophical-aesthetic reaction against the processes in industrial society that Weber subsumes under the category of rationalization. According to this line of interpretation it is a sociologically ungrounded theory with rather few normative or empirical implications for the study of politics in the twenty-fi rst century. Th e preceding chapters have endeavoured to demonstrate that this is far from self-evidently the case. It is shown that the critique of instrumental reason is intrinsic to the critiques of negative freedom, linear time, identity thought, reifi cation (following on aft er Marx) and everyday life and that these, in their turn, continue to push the bound-aries of political thinking and experience. To conclude, the most promising approach to updating and re-articulating the critique is not by transform-ing it into a theory of communicative action that is normatively and sociologically inconclusive. Instead of burying the critique of instrumental reason, as the theory of communicative action sets out to do, it is time to re-articulate it as a critique of what in this book has been referred to as instrumental legitimacy.

Th e critique of instrumental reason is certainly in need of some re-elab-oration since its initial formulation in the writings of the thinkers considered here. Without denying the brilliance of a thinker such as Lukács, for exam-ple, there can be no doubt that his solution to the problem of rationalization is epistemologically and politically untenable. Th ere is no subject-object of history or a class which can understand the objective structure of social processes by understanding its fundamental interests, whatever these might be in theory. Moreover, despite the sustained attempt undertaken in this book to rehabilitate Adorno as social and political thinker of major con-temporary relevance, there are admittedly passages in Th e Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia which evoke an atmosphere of utter


political defeatism. Such ominous refl ection is likely to have had an impact on Habermas’ project to re-route the critique of instrumental reason beyond what he saw as its unduly pessimistic dead-ends and residual phil-osophical idealism. Similar remarks can be made about some of Arendt’s musings on the lost revolutionary tradition and her occasional lamenta-tion of the rise of the social. Marx, Simmel, Benjamin, Foucault and Luhmann persuasively argue that the social is the matrix of daily life and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future and indeed, Luhmann envisions the coming of what he refers to as a world society. But this does not mean that instrumental reason should be passively accepted as an integral part of the systemic dimension of modernity that is somehow counterbalanced by communication in the modern life-world, which is why the critique of instru-mental reason needs to be renewed and not abandoned.1

Chapters 2–4 indicate that the renewal in question can be advanced by developing the critique of identity thinking, which in the work of Heidegger and especially Adorno off ers more than just a critique of reifi cation, into a theory of post-state-juridical legitimacy. Th e theories of instrumental legiti-macy and post-state-juridical legitimacy have only been sketched in this book and are still in need of considerable elaboration. Th is complementary work could be done in a subsequent book which is less exegetical and more experimental. What can be said at this stage is that the theories are at present guided by the reality of form and the dynamics of constellational mediation rather than static categories, ahistorical essences and naturalistic fetishes.2 Hence the theories draw liberally on Simmel and Adorno’s sociological and philosophical writings, and seek to question the assumptions and sleights of hand underlying reigning dichotomies in liberal democratic thought and practice. Central among the latter are legality/legitimacy and negative/posi-tive liberty. Th e fi rst dichotomy presupposes and reinforces the notion that whatever rational qualities one might ascribe to legality, legitimacy is chiefl y a systemic concept devoid of all but the most basic functionalist epistemo-logical content or, more famously, it is nothing more substantively rational than the monopoly on the use of force within a given territory. It has been seen that to separate them into normative-rational and non-normative functionalist components presupposes that whereas the individual subject of negative liberty is a rational and juridically autonomous actor, the nation is a potentially irrational collective whose needs can be defi ned and manip-ulated by what necessity seems to dictate to the elected and numerous non-elected experts of political governance.3

Hence the legality/legitimacy dichotomy is also in some ways a volatile dichotomy-fusion. Although legality and legitimacy are separated into

Conclusion: On Autonomy and Legitimacy 225

normative and non-normative dimensions, the natural rights of free individuals are reunited with the needs of the sovereign nation in the state. Th e legitimacy of this particular state form is nevertheless instrumental because the reuniting is largely symbolic and coerced. Reunifi cation in this context means mediated unity and something quite distinct from Adorno’s notions of mediated non-identity and reconciliation. Within the institu-tional parameters established by a specifi cally liberal conception of legal legitimacy, minimally rational legitimacy is a means that can and has been replaced by other, more straightforwardly populist-oriented and authori-tarian means. Liberal democracy can demonstrably operate on the basis of a degraded concept of reason and an evidently regulatory practice of law, but it cannot dispense with the means of legitimating those practices and simultaneously confl ating legitimation and legitimacy. Under liberal dem-ocratic auspices legitimacy is a means for providing the most stable possible framework for the pursuit of the inviolable, universal, and yet somehow also neutral freedoms guaranteed by private law at the same time that legit-imacy is a monopoly on the use of force. Th is is the practical reality of the theoretical priority of theory over practice and the right before the good. Th is statement of the matter off ers a good starting-point for examining some of the issues raised by the positive and negative liberty dichotomy.

In Chapter 2 it is explained that within existing institutional arrange-ments it is not possible to apply just means for the attainment of just ends. Since there are no transcendent truths and supposedly only dogmatic and authoritarian versions of positive freedom, there can be no agreement on just ends that is not coerced agreement. Liberal democratic theory insists that this state of aff airs does not mean that there is no reason or justice, however. In a post-traditional world, reason and neutral procedure replace myth and arbitrary command in politics in a manner analogous to the way that science replaces superstition and magic in the relations between humanity and external nature. Hence in principle modern liberal demo-cratic states are not illegitimate states without rational liberty and justice. Th e question posed throughout this book is ‘what kind of reason is one talking about and how is it translated into practice?’ It may seem clear to many liberals that although there is no accessible substantive reason or practicable positive freedom, citizens can rationally and unanimously agree on what they do not want, and are therefore free to at least that extent. Another way of saying this is that although they cannot agree on ends in matters of justice and freedom, they can certainly agree on just means as long as the means and the ends are neutral in the sense that they are the same for all, and do not prescribe an overarching concept of the good


(which within this framework would be unnatural, and would have to be imposed). Th e political impossibility of unmediated freedom and justice emphasized in the fi rst sentence of this paragraph is bound up with the epistemological impossibility of unmediated knowledge. Reason mediates between humanity and nature, but only up to that point where inevitable boundaries place limits upon what is permitted, what is known and, by extension, what is politically acceptable bearing in mind the priority of maximum negative liberty. Th is is the crux, since political legitimacy is always instrumental and legally replaceable if unfavourably juxtaposed with the said priority: what is politically acceptable slips and slides in accordance with the room of manoeuvre granted as a result of the play of private inter-ests. Th e fact that share-holding allows citizens with moderate and low incomes to be involved in those games does not alter the fl ow of play.

Th e currently prevailing form of rational liberty demands the enforce-ment of agreement on what is not wanted and requires the enforcement of neutral means to prevent what is not wanted: the police acts in the interest of everybody, and nobody is allowed to sleep under the bridges at night. If agreement on these issues is unanimous, as the condition of it being consistently formal and not simply customary, why must it be enforced? More to the point: when was an agreement reached about not wanting to have secure pensions, not desiring multifaceted and challenging work, or not wanting to have political control of the economy in more general terms? Was it something everybody said to each other as they shook hands and left the state of nature, or was it agreed upon from behind the veil of ignorance? Retreat to the history of political thought on these questions has not been any more convincing than the fl ight to analytical academic abstraction. Instead of admitting that justice is in some ways utopian or that freedom is predicated on socio-economic and juridical conditions that have yet to be realized, liberal theory is content to say that ‘we’ cannot know what we would need to know about mediation processes in order for there to be non-instrumental mediation between humanity and nature in the guises of non-punitive justice or positive liberty. Fortunately ‘we’ nonethe-less know enough about human nature in order to know what humanity does not want, such that ‘we’ can rationally legislate in accordance with these negative preferences in mind. It seems convenient that the limits of knowledge and freedom stop with what is compatible with negative liberty and very modest levels of redistribution that become luxuries as soon as the capitalist economy falters. Here one sees that liberal ideology is not and cannot be consistently formal. On the contrary it includes a number of unshakeable premises about external nature, human nature, reason, society,


liberty, history and communication. Although these are oft en carefully silenced in offi cial political discourse about the necessity of economic growth and the real and potential dangers to internal security, they are audible, legible and visible in countless ways.4

Th is inconsistency is an evident practical reality in the legality/legitimacy dynamics (separation-fusion) at work in actually existing liberal democratic states. Moreover, the inconclusive break with mytholog-ical methodology provides empirical as well as theoretically compelling evidence for the systems-theoretical critique of communicative action looked at towards the end of Chapter 6. It seems that with the advent of capitalist forms of industrialization, reason must take the place of tradi-tion, but reason cannot stray beyond rational limits. Th e tautological character of this and other aspects of liberal democratic thought have already been discussed. For this conclusion it is worth noting that when reason is decoupled from critique in this way, the limits in question are then conferred with the status of self-fulfi lling prophecies and cease to be rigorously analytical concepts. At this historical juncture (summer 2009) it is obvious that perfectly non-instrumental reason is conditionally impos-sible because of the reality of mediation. It is also clear that completely non-instrumental legitimacy is currently improbable because of the ongo-ing necessity as well as the libertarian potential of legal form. Th ere will be just a bit more to say below about the latter in terms of the fi nal remarks about the possibility of a legitimate form of law. But the dialectics and con-ditions of this provisional impossibility and current necessity must be analysed without apology for existing socio-economic and political hierar-chies in order to know where the boundaries of the possible, probable and improbable are now positioned. Such post-mythological theoretical enquiry is not trivial and can be called research. As a result of such research it may become feasible to determine how the limits of freedom can be adjusted (if one is not free to adjust the limits of freedom, citizenship is a trap and one can be considered to be free in prison). Th is means that the variously possible modalities of mediation and institutionalization of form have to be studied and compared. Th e theoretical alternative is to carry on fi xing these limits in negative terms as spurious agreement on what is not wanted (rationalization in practice, analysed by Weber), or to fi x them in imagi-nary positive terms as communicative action (systemic domination in practice, observed by Luhmann).5

Th e theory of communicative action is incomparably richer in theoreti-cal insight and empirical relevance than analytical political theory or academic intellectual history. Th e theory makes a sustained attempt to


circumnavigate some of the obstacles appearing in the constellation of for-mal law, negative liberty, instrumental reason, linear time and neutral justice. In Knowledge and Human Interests and many subsequent works, Habermas elaborates Dilthey’s hermeneutical distinction between the natural sciences and the human sciences, and examines the respective epis-temological models that underpin them. Habermas suggests that reason mediates between humanity and nature, but it does so according to diff er-ent logics and under distinct constraints, depending on whether the fi eld of enquiry is science, history or politics.6 But the matter does not stop here. On the basis of Dilthey’s pioneering work one can distinguish between diff erent models of explanation and between the distinct temporalities that characterise natural scientifi c, social scientifi c and theological research. Previous chapters indicate that Lukács, Benjamin, Heidegger and Arendt each pursue the critique of linear time to very unique ends.7 Chapter 6 intimates that Habermas does not really focus on the possibility of qualita-tively plural times, nor does he elaborate the idea of temporal as opposed to merely spatial distance. Yet once one is prepared to introduce herme-neutic arguments into one’s conception of communication, it is not so easy to shut out what may be more awkward implications for liberal democracy. Fanciful as it may sound, some conception of temporal space is necessary in order to think distance beyond territorial, securitized, national distance which in eff ect tends either to assimilate or exclude extra-national diff er-ence. Qualitative distance is also important in order to think pluralism beyond Ford versus General Motors pluralism, and to think justice beyond redistribution predicated on the belief that everybody really must want the same thing, but is endowed with diff erential talents and starting-points (the latter can be broadly compared to the liberal democratic equivalent of false consciousness). If one does not have an understanding of temporal distance and diff erence, one is quickly confronted with the problems involved in conceiving the past as absence. If one assumes the past is a modality of absence, one is likely to believe that the past is equivalent to the absence of the present, such that reality is confl ated with presence in the present. If someone’s otherness is exhausted in their presence, however, it is an otherness they share with everybody else that is present, that is, it is an otherness that is ultimately negated or unfavourably judged in relation to what happen to be the dominant subject positions within a given con-stellation of political forces and interests.8

In the second section of Chapter 5 it is suggested that post-liberal autonomy and post-capitalist legitimacy are likely to be enacted by minori-ties who destabilize majority norms, and further, that without this


extra-numerical diff erence and temporal distance between minority and majority, genuine pluralist diff erence is frequently eff aced. Minorities are invited to join the majority and are administratively and legally aided to do so. Apart from the fact that this aid is unlikely to be indefi nite or uncondi-tional, another question arises. What happens to diff erence understood in philosophical and sociological terms as mediated non-identity? Th e short philosophical answer is that mediated non-identity is marginalized by mediated unity, and diff erence looks like an inferior or distorted example of the representatives of ostensibly unifi ed dominance at the foundational centre of the state. Th e sociological corollary is that the redundant worker looks like an inferior version of the successful businessman, much in the manner that the welfare mum appears to be the failed middle-class career mother who happens to be in a stable heterosexual relation. Within this fi eld of vision the worker and mum look like fi nancial burdens inevitably gravitating towards ill health and thereby becoming doubly burdensome. Th is is not dramatic exaggeration but merely a consequence related to having to choose between frantically improvised ‘new’ models of Ford and General Motors instead of introducing a diff erent mode of transport that really respects the range of consumer preference, the future of the environ-ment and the diverse needs of the public. Simmel’s analysis of the widening gap between subjective and objective culture provides the sociological dimension to an explanation that is oft en overly focused on capital accu-mulation and profi t. It is this drift ing apart that helps produce the phenomenological continuum between the (bad) unproductive redundant worker and (good) highly productive businessman, thereby obscuring other possible, less antagonistic ways for them to coexist beyond such falsely autonomous subject positions.9 Th e less obvious philosophical-sociological corollary is that contrary to conventional liberal democratic usage, autonomy is centrally concerned with pluralism and open possibi-lity rather than largely frustrated isolation and more or less successful adaptation. When autonomy is reconfi gured in these terms it is not fanciful to hope that legitimacy can become an active praxis of minority and individual self-overcoming rather than nation-based collective security or monopolies on the use of force.

Habermas concentrates instead on the relation between hermeneutic understanding and forms of agreement that are relevant to the life-world, on the one hand, and empirical science and forms of knowledge that are relevant to science and industry, on the other. His fi ndings lead him to conclude that the communicative reason needed for the formulation of norms is of a qualitatively diff erent order than the technical reason required


for the mastery of external nature. At fi rst glance this looks like an impor-tant step beyond negative liberty and the injunction to limit agreement to what is not wanted, and a step short of a relapse to pre-modern command. If realized, this would redeem the Enlightenment promise of replacing authoritarian order and arbitrary force with rational deliberation. But within the life-world/system framework, the interests of liberal democracy enjoy precedence over Enlightenment knowledge. Just as reason must take the place of tradition but may not stray beyond the limits of rationality, hermeneutics must hold instrumental reason at bay in very vague and unspecifi ed general terms, but must not question the limits of the mainly commercialized forms of pluralism accompanying commodity produc-tion. Hermeneutical enquiry is similarly not allowed to question the limits of punitive justice and negative liberty. Th e existence of the life-world is invoked and assigned the task of resisting colonization by the system, but the life-world cannot colonize the system. Th e parallel with Kant is striking. Kant invokes the thing in itself but cautions that it cannot be known, and deduces related limits to reason and freedom; Habermas is sure that the life-world exists, but seems to have equally certain, almost a priori knowledge that there are limits to what the life-world can change, and these limits are not up for political discussion or susceptible to juridi-cal reform.10 Th ere is much more systems-theoretical functionalism in this idea than he seems prepared to admit, and yet, there is not enough consist-ently formal systems theory in it to eliminate anthropological assumptions like those informing his particular version of the life-world. Although this is not the cynical positioning of limits and boundaries inherent in much of liberal democratic thought, he presents a framework in which the norma-tive commitment to the post-national constellation cannot mean much more than blithe cosmopolitanism that fails stringently to think distance beyond national distance. Th e result is that mediated non-identity is suppressed within the rather narrow limits of mediated unity. Th is raises a fi nal question for this study: can mediated non-identity be emancipated from the mediated unity underlying the diverse instances of coerced reconciliation institutionalized in state-juridical forms of authority?11

Th is project is not to be likened to the emancipation of an isolated pre-social individual from the uncertainties of a hypothetical state of nature. Nor is it akin to the realization of a supposedly existing essence or the re-appropriation of an equally implausible alienated essence. It is closer to Foucault’s notion that the subject can change the truths of language about the subject instead of trying directly to emancipate the subject with more money, power or social inclusion within existing institutions. If it is


possible to emancipate language from existing modes of subjectivity, it may well be possible to emancipate mediation from existing modes of incon-sistently formal, subjectively manipulated law. Selected passages in the preceding chapters propose that the mediated dimension of dialectical non-identity is also a juridical dimension, and that there is real scope for a decentred juridical intervention in the processes that mediate at present. In contrast to the institutional realities typical of legal forms of legitimacy, the mediated non-identity of humanity and nature is only a possibility at this historical juncture. Th e transition to a new mode of mediation has been introduced here as the anticipated forms of mediation suggested by post-state-juridical legitimacy, which one can understand for the moment in terms of legitimate forms of law. Such law mediates between nature and humanity without eff acing what is non-identical, instead of dichotomizing and recomposing doubtful unities that are then precariously stabilized by bureaucratic hierarchies.12 It is clear that the setting for law of this kind is some kind of world society, rather than ‘cosmopolitan’ global competition retaining the nation-state as its military and commercial centre and with the most powerful states making use of international fi nancial and intelli-gence organizations for steering and planning purposes. Th e enduring legacy of the modern state is ambiguous in this regard. In relation to its feudal predecessor it demands the decoupling of economics and politics in the justifi ed belief that if the same people are entrusted with economic organization and political power, corruption and oppression are the inevi-table consequences. But it is clear that this decoupling is still only partial, and that corruption and arbitrary decree remain the norm in many cases. Despite important kinds of enfranchisement and social inclusion, the balance is still tipped towards the privileged positions enjoyed by the executive at the expense of the legislature and the nation at the expense of the state. Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire continues to off er a very relevant analysis of the phenomena in question.

Legal forms of legitimacy tend to be based on the idea of a natural unity between the people of a given nation and their state, such that the people are free to give themselves laws within the confi nes of their national bound-aries. Th ese instances of mediation have been and continue to be authoritarian in ways that have been analysed in this book as a problem of tautological immediacy which is, by extension, a problem of legal form. It has also been seen why the liberal democratic response to oppressive immediacy is oppressive mediation in the guise of pervasive instrumental reason. As the currently hegemonic example of a legal form of legitimacy, liberal democracy has the great ideological advantage of being able to argue


that oppressive mediation and instrumental reason are at least more liber-tarian than oppressive immediacy and traditional myth. But such rationalized categorization makes the mistake of arguing and legislating as if all alternatives to oppressive mediation are exhausted in oppressive immediacy. It is hoped that the preceding pages have shown why this is not the case.

Endnotes

1. Luhmann, ‘Globalization or World Society: How to Conceive of Modern Society’, in the International Review of Sociology, 7 (1997), pp. 67–80; and William Outhwaite, Th e Future of Society, Oxford, Blackwell, 2006, chapter 1 and pp. 125–6.

2. More work needs to be done on the contrasts and compatibilities between the dialec-tic of nature as fate and nature as individual particularity and spontaneity in Adorno, on the one hand, and Simmel’s notions of denaturalization and social form, on the other. What is meant by naturalistic fetishism in this case is the foisting of eternal natural categories upon a rapidly changing social reality.

3. For an analysis of the dynamics of necessity fabrication see Mark Neocleous, Critique of Security, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

4. Training these faculties appropriately can build on the preliminary work that enables one to anticipate ruins before they become ruins. See Faure Perez, ‘Th e Secret to the Arcades Project’, unpublished MA thesis in Social and Political Th ought at the University of Sussex, 2009.

5. Dirk Baecker, Form und Formen der Kommunikation, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2007, chapters 1 and 3; and Wolfgang Schluchter, Th e Rise of Western Rationalism: Weber’s Developmental History, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981, chapter 5. Th e spuri-ous and the imaginary remain within the bounds of the mythological and can be transcended. Needless to say, post-mythological research of the kind described can be carried out in universities and research institutes, but it can also be pursued in the arts as well as in a wide variety of other contexts. Th is explains the emphasis on the relatedness of the critiques of instrumental reason, everyday life and legitimacy examined in Chapter 5. For an overview of some of the aesthetic issues involved, see Michael Sheridan, Everyday Life: Th eories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.

6. Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Knowledge and Human Interests), chapter 7.7. Heidegger’s views receive a bit less treatment than the others in this regard. See

his Nietzsche, volume 2, pp. 378–86; and Was heisst Denken? (What is Th inking?), pp. 62–3. Heidegger suggests that although one can measure time for scientifi c purposes, one thinks and understands events. Hence one can have a perfect chronological knowledge of dates and no understanding of history. See Oliver Jahraus, Heidegger, Stuttgart, Reclam, 2004, pp. 170–80.

8. One can illustrate this point by trying to ascertain what kind of reason underpins the phenomenon of missing another person in their absence only. Contrary to commonly held


views on the subject, the problem with missing another person exclusively in their absence may actually be the experience of time rather than the concept of space that it presupposes. One is likely to assimilate the other to one’s own need for company rather than communi-cating with the other in a way that would make missing that specifi c person a conceptual-sensual experience of the kind that illuminates why missing them is distinct from missing any other person, thing or place that is not immediately present. Th e point is that introducing hermeneutics opens up the possibility of non-instrumental reason and non-functional agreement, but it also unlocks other possibilities with immense political potential that are excluded from the theory of communicative action in its present varieties.

9. Hence there are a number of unexplored possibilities for enriching Marxist political economy with an analysis of the drift ing apart of subjective and objective culture, many of which have escaped the attention of fi rst-generation critical theory and communicative action theory as well. For one such approach focusing on fetishism, see Chris O’Kane’s doctoral work on Adorno, Benjamin, Debord and Lefebvre, University of Sussex D.Phil. in Social and Political Th ought, forthcoming.

10. Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms), pp. 364–7.11. In addition to mediated unity and mediated non-identity there is the possibility of

non-mediated non-identity discussed in relation to Heidegger. Although Heidegger is bracketed out of this conclusion for reasons of space, the questions he raises are discussed in Chapters 3–4.

12. Th ese doubtful unities can be seen as antagonistic subjectivities writ large. In response, future research may explore the relations between libertarian socialism, post-state-juridical legitimacy, weak law theory and what is sometimes referred to in Italy as il pensiero debole (weak thought). If fruitful, it may point to the rational path towards indivi-dual and collective self-overcoming beyond the stultifying impasses of negative versus positive liberty. Th is would facilitate the elaboration of a diff erent approach to thinking about just means and just ends.


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247

action 129, 130–1, 132, 134, 137–8, 140–1, 180n. 10, 199

world-preserving 135–6see also communicative action

active citizen participation 7, 8, 36Adorno, Th eodor see chapter 3

affi nities linking Hegel and 100, 114affi nities linking Heidegger and 111n. 29,

119–20break with Kant and Hegel 104–5post-idealism of 4, 96–7, 106on reifi cation 99–100

aesthetic mimesis 66–8aesthetic values 19‘An Answer to the Question: What is

Enlightenment?’ (Kant) 192antagonistic subjectivity 103, 104Arendt, Hannah see chapter 4

criticism of historical materialism 131–2

on depoliticization 138Aristotle

rediscovery of 135art

aura of 65, 67crisis of authority of 57–8, 74n. 28as mimesis 66–7

aura 65, 66, 67, 74n. 28, 203autonomy 35, 94–5

Marx on 16post-liberal 174, 228–9transition from philosophical

approaches of 7–8autopoiesis 215–16

Bacon, Francis 25Baudelaire, Charles 74n. 28

being 121, 122, 123, 124, 130, 142n. 4, 145n. 25

humanity and 128meaning of 128ontological question of 123

Being and Time (Heidegger) 52, 111n. 31, 119, 121–3, 124, 125, 129

Benjamin, Walter see chapter 2on aesthetic mimesis 66–8on capitalism 69on crisis of authority of art 57–8on knowledge 65–6on violence 59–64

Between Facts and Norms (Habermas) 187, 189, 211

Th e Birth of Bio-Politics (Foucault) 173Bloch, Ernst 47Bourdieu, Pierre 156bourgeoisie 56

age of bourgeoisie revolutions 6French Revolution 147n. 35Lukács’ and Benjamin’s notion of 57

Caesarism 33capital 157

labour and 89, 158–60needs of a nation and 62

Capital (Marx) 22, 51, 160capitalism

Benjamin on 69late capitalism 194, 213Marx on 104, 157–8radical critique of 151reifi ed consciousness and 50–1, 60,

72n. 10social classes and 29state capitalism 194

Index

248 INDEX

‘Changes in the Function of Law in Modern Society’ (Neumann) 196

‘Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise’ (Kirchheimer) 194

charismatic authority 32, 33, 36civil society 220n. 21

contractual modalities 15, 155class consciousness 50coerced integration 160–1, 213coerced unity 102–3, 106collective subjectivity 54–5, 86, 97,

98, 102commodities 157, 159, 160

fetishism 51, 55, 57, 60communicative action 4, 35, 36, 81, 104,

186–217, 227–8systems theory and 213–14

communicative reason 81, 202–3, 206, 229–30

constellational dialectics 57, 63–4, 69, 79, 102, 103–4, 140–2, 227–8

contingency 75n. 31, 132, 135–6, 148n. 38, 151

critical theory 2, 78–106, 107n. 7, 108n. 15Adorno’s 4, 99–104emergence of 81–2, 83–93Habermas’ critique of 203, 206

critique of everyday life 150–78, 179n. 3Marx’s 153–61Simmel’s 162–6, 171

critique of instrumental legitimacycritique of instrumental reason and 3–4,

168, 223–4Critique of Judgement (Kant) 9Critique of Practical Reason (Kant) 9Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 9, 10, 24,

128‘culture industry’ 95, 96

Dasein 121, 122, 123, 124, 145n. 25time and 126–7truth and 128understanding of its death 126

Deleuze, Gilles 172, 174denaturalization of social relations 28, 29,

41n. 33, 46, 54, 55–6, 74n. 28, 162, 168Denkbilder (thought-images) 60, 64, 65–6,

69, 76n. 37

Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno) 78, 92–3, 94, 96, 204, 209

Dilthey, Wilhelmaffi nities linking Lukács, Benjamin

and 43–4Benjamin’s radicalization of 58critique of Kant 24–5distinction between time and history 58

Durkheim, Emile 204, 205Habermas’ reading of 206–7, 209–10

Eighteenth Brumaire (Marx) 231emancipation 38n. 19, 84, 108n. 15

critique of religion and 153–4see also freedom

experiencecontingency and 135–6fragmentation of 45knowledge and 11

extra-legal legitimacy 102–3, 106

Feuerbach, Ludwig 26, 153Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 118formal law 10forms

reality of 26Simmel’s theory of 26–8

Foucault, Michel see chapter 5énoncé of 174–6on language 174–5on power 171, 172–7on spontaneity 151

Frankfurt School 78–106freedom 35–6, 130

democracy and 15Hegelian 12Horkheimer on 89–90institutionalization of 17–18Marxist 133Marxist, criticism of 131–2objective form and 17

Freud, Sigmund 68, 167functional diff erentiation 7, 36

Galileo Galilei 25Geist 12–13, 17, 104, 118, 119, 161

is/ought distinction and 15re-evaluation of 79

INDEX 249

genealogical theory of domination 21, 31, 32genealogical theory of transitions 170Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 31Gerlach, K. A. 85German Ideology (Marx and Engels) 131Gramsci, Antonio 70n. 1, 155, 156Grünberg, Carl 85Grundrisse (Marx) 22Guattari, Félix 174

Habermas, Jürgen see chapter 6critique of Horkheimer and Adorno 78critique of Parson and Luhmann

207–8critique of Weberian

rationalization 186, 203, 208–9on distinction between labour and

interaction 198–201, 207evolution of philosophy of 204–5,

219n. 15infl uences on 198on institutionalization of mediated

non-identity 105–6on legitimacy 209theoretical problems of 213–14works of 217n. 3

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm FriedrichAdorno’s affi nities with 100, 114Adorno’s critique of 96–7, 100–1critique of 118on humanity-nature relationship 11–12,

81, 114, 119on metaphysical dualisms 13–16Nietzsche’s critique of 18reconciliation of theory and practice 84re-evaluation of subject-object

dialectics of 79Hegel: Th ree Studies (Adorno) 97hegemony 157Heidegger, Martin see chapter 4

Adorno’s affi nities with 111n. 29, 119–20

Adorno’s critique of 96–7critique of metaphysics 115, 116–17critique on Hegel 118–19Destruktion of 116, 122, 123–4, 135on end of tradition in philosophy 135on knowledge 116, 122

political allegiances 129, 145n. 25, 146n. 30–1

on truth 127–9on understanding 120–1works of 146n. 27

hermeneutic circle, problem of 58Heidegger’s understanding of 118, 124solution to 60, 63–4, 124

historical materialism 27, 68–9, 86, 87Arendt’s critique of 131–2

historical sociology 24–30, 54History and Class Consciousness

(Lukács) 50, 51, 52, 72n. 16, 209Horkheimer, Max see chapter 3

conception of critical theory 83–9on nature as fate 78–9theory of transition 89–92

Th e Human Condition (Arendt) 129, 199humanity-nature relationship 17, 225–6,

228dialectical 11, 12Heidegger on 120–1mediated 11–12, 18, 45–6, 67, 83, 95,

97–9, 101, 104, 114–15, 119, 123reconciliation of 99–100, 103, 104

human sciencesdistinction between natural sciences

and 87–8, 201, 228specifi city of methodology of 25, 28–9, 58

Husserl, Edmund 144n. 9phenomenology of 118

idealism 26, 28, 123central epistemological problem of 10Hegelian 16, 81, 103, 116, 118

identity thinking 224Heidegger and Adorno

compared 119–20Institute for Social Research

(Frankfurt) 85, 194, 198institutionalization of mediated

non-identity 82, 99, 103, 105–6institutionalized identity thinking 80, 94, 99instrumental legitimacy 3, 57, 78, 197,

223, 224interaction 212

distinction between labour and 198–201, 207

250 INDEX

interactive reciprocal exchanges 26, 43, 44, 54, 57, 163

Interpretation of Dreams (Freud) 167interpretative sociology 30–5, 43

juridical socialism 194–5

Kant, ImmanuelAdorno’s critique of 96–7Dilthey’s readings on knowledge and

causality of 24–5on form 26Lukács’ readings of 52–3on political freedom 9on possible knowledge 9–11, 18, 52public sphere for 34, 190–2separation of theory and practice 84

Kierkegaard, Søren 45, 143n. 8Kirchheimer, Otto 92, 194–6knowledge 167

conditions of 65–6deconstruction of 116, 122externality of conditions of 21–2, 24–5,

39n. 24limits of 16, 18, 21, 23, 52–3, 102,

114–15memory and 76n. 37political authority and 2rationalist-empiricist impasse 9rationalist-empiricist impasse, Kantian

responses to 9–11spontaneous, cerebral-sensuous 105within metaphysical framework 116

Knowledge and Human Interests (Habermas) 16, 198–9, 201, 228

Korsch, Karl 85Kun, Béla 48, 71n. 6

languageas appropriate medium of truth 58–9,

205degradation of 65Foucault’s ideas on 174–5

Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Adorno) 100

Left -Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder (Lenin) 49

legalitydimensions of 2Foucault on 176–7Weberian 209

legality-legitimacy dichotomy 189, 211, 214, 224–5, 226–7

in democratic process 62as one of form and content 14–15

legal-rational legitimation theory 24, 32–3legislatures

power and accountability 33–4legitimacy

dimensions of 2as function of communicative

action 209–10Habermas on 214–17legal forms of 8–9, 60, 62, 67, 106, 168,

231–2liberal democratic model and 124–6, 159liberal form of 159–60theory and practice of 1–2

legitimate form of law 37n. 4, 60, 61–3, 227

legitimate law crisis of 23–4

Legitimation Crisis (Habermas) 195, 202, 203–4, 210

Lenin, Vladimir 29, 49, 55, 161Letter on Humanism (Heidegger) 122, 128,

143n. 8liberal democracy 44, 61–2, 106, 225

Arendt’s critique of 132–3Habermas on 188legitimacy and 124–6, 159preconditions of 63, 124private interests and 197–8radical critiques of 151transition to authoritarian

democracy 88, 96, 195–6life-world 1, 202, 206, 220n. 21, 229–30

colonization of 202, 203–4, 210decoupling of system and 210, 211

linear time 20, 57, 100liberal democratic model and 124–6

Luhmann, Niklas see chapter 6autopoiesis of 215–16on communication 215

INDEX 251

on knowledge 88on legality 209

Lukács, Georg see chapter 2Adorno’s critique of 97affi nities between Kant and 115contributions to critical knowledge 52on evolution of literary forms 45–7infl uences on Benjamin 57participation in council

movements 47–50Luxemborg, Rosa 47

Mann, Th omas 50, 71n. 4Marxism 86–7, 93

Arendt’s criticism of 131–2Marx, Karl

on aim of revolution 95Arendt’s critique of 22–3, 134–5on capitalism 104Feuerbach’s critique of religion

and 153–5on humanity-nature relationship 11

“Materialism and Metaphysics” (Horkheimer) 86

Mead, G. H. 204, 205, 207means and ends, just 60–4, 74n. 30,

225–6mechanical freedom 9, 31, 35–6

transition to political freedom 90–1mediated non-identity 82–3, 97, 99–100,

105, 115, 119, 128, 225, 229, 230–1

institutionalization of 82, 103, 105–6mediated unity 45–6, 84, 97–9, 101, 104,

114–15, 118, 119, 123mediation 3, 83, 202, 226, 231–2Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 52metaphysical dualisms

Benjamin on 67 Hegel on 14–15Heidegger’s overcoming of 118–19Lukács’ deconstruction of 53–6

metaphysicsDilthey’s critique of 24Heidegger’s critique of 115–16Lukács’ critique of 52–7

mimesis 60, 61, 66–8, 95

Minima Moralia (Adorno) 96, 136modern subjectivity

emergence of 11, 13money 19–20, 162–4

functions in modern societies 26–8montage dialectics 164, 169, 170, 175mythological violence 59–62, 64

national legitimacytransition to rational legitimacy 92

National SocialismArendt on 137–8Heidegger and 129, 146n. 30–1

nation-stateas actuality of ethical idea 15–16authoritarian tendencies in times of

crisis 30, 41n. 34capital and 62

natural law 60–2, 63–4, 67nature

as fate 78–9human nature 203, 212mimetic relation with 95see also humanity-nature relationship

need 122, 124, 130negative dialectics 93, 100, 103, 119, 214

distinction between historicized dialectics and 99–100

Negative Dialectics (Adorno) 52, 72n. 11, 96–7, 104, 105

negative liberty 1, 10, 19–20, 63–4, 67, 133–4, 168

Neumann, Franz 88, 89, 92, 109n. 16, 194on freedom and democracy 196–7

Newton, Isaac 25Nietzsche, Friedrich 73n. 23, 143n. 8

critique of Kant and Hegel 18on freedom 31Heideggerian critique of 146n. 26on subjectivity 18–21

non-instrumental rational legitimacy 4, 8–9

non-instrumental reason 1, 8–9, 104–5, 227

Habermas on 78Notes on Beckett’s Endgame (Adorno) 101nothing 117, 118, 119

252 INDEX

objective forms see socio-historic objective forms

On Revolution (Arendt) 141On the Critique of Violence (Benjamin) 60,

64, 94On the Tasks of the Coming Philosophy

(Benjamin) 60ontological thinking 117, 126overproduction crises 212–13

Th e Paris Arcades Project (Benjamin) 59, 67, 68–9

Paris Commune revolt (1871) 30Parsons, Talcott 204–5, 207–8, 209Peirce, C. S. 201phenomenology

Husserlian 118Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 11, 81, 97,

100, 101–2, 104philosophical sociology 24, 26–30, 43, 55philosophy

ability to mediate between theory and practice 7

challenges for 21Philosophy of Money (Simmel) 24, 26, 161,

167Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 13, 14, 16, 22,

97, 99Plato 23pluralism 139, 141, 148n. 38, 199, 228

Arendt’s defence of 134political clubs

transformation into political parties 34, 40n. 25

political freedom 35–6liberal democracy and 61–2rational and human view of 9transition from mechanical and

predatory freedom to 90–1political legitimacy 63, 138, 197political modernity 7political parties 34, 40n. 25

class interests and 139politics

household model 136–7, 139, 140one-party vs. multi-party system 138,

139–40

as profession 34–5state and 30–1

Politics as a Vocation (Weber) 30, 33, 65Pollock, Friedrich 85, 194positive law 60–2, 63–4, 67post-liberal autonomy 174, 228–9post-national constellation 1, 230post-national thinking 120post-state juridical legitimacy 1, 171,

224, 231post-state juridical thinking 120power

Foucault on 170, 172–8Foucault’s reading of Marxian 170legitimation of 32–3Simmel on 169–70state and 31–2

predatory freedom 9, 31, 35–6transition to political freedom 90–1

profane illumination 59, 74n. 28proletariat 52, 55, 56public sphere

as mediating instance between citizen and state 34–5, 190–2

mediation between private sphere and 211–12

revolutions and 141–2

quantity-quality transformation 17, 50–1, 59, 90, 95, 209

radical democracy 211, 212–13rationalization

shift from reason to 6–9, 24Weberian 8, 31–2, 35–6, 43, 186,

208–9rational state 15, 23–4, 32, 40n. 26, 216Raymond Roussel (Foucault) 175reason

shift to rationalization 6–9, 24, 32, 36, 43

“Reason and Self-Preservation” (Horkheimer) 89

“Reconciliation under Duress” (Adorno) 97

reifi cation 2–3, 51–2, 60, 94, 99–100Lukács’ critique of 52–7

INDEX 253

“Reifi cation and the Proletarian Consciousness” (Lukács) 51, 53

religionFeuerbach’s critique of 153

Th e Republic (Plato) 23revolution 45, 54, 56, 59

age of bourgeoisie revolutions 6American Revolution 147n. 35Arendt on 141–2Benjamin on 68class struggle and 70n. 1French Revolution 147n. 35Marxian aims of 95obstacles to 50Russian Revolution 47

Sartre, Jean-Paul 52Schelling, Friedrich 118Schmitt, Carl 88self-preservation 90–1, 103

reason and 94Simmel, Georg see chapter 5

affi nities linking Lukács, Benjamin and 43–4

on collective agency 54–5on economy and culture 165–6on form 26–8, 54impact on later theorists 78on power 169–70sociological importance of 70n. 2on spontaneity 166–7

situationism 85, 108n. 11Social Systems (Luhmann) 216social values 27–8, 29–30society

civil 15, 155, 220n. 21commercial 36n. 2conformist behaviour 80, 81, 96, 138–9,

144n. 11, 155Durkheim on 206–7, 209–10Marxian 23, 156–7money and 26–8totally administered 78

Th e Society of Society (Luhmann) 216socio-historic objective forms 12–14,

17–18, 24, 25–6, 43socio-political transitions 88–9

Th e Soul and the Forms (Lukács) 45, 46spirit see Geistspontaneity 150–1, 166–7Stalinism 139–40

Arendt on 137–8state capitalism 194Th e Structural Transformation of the

Public Sphere (Habermas) 190, 193, 195

structural transformation thesis 193–4subjectivity 21, 116, 167

Heideggerian rejection of 121, 122

Horkheimer on 88materialist 16–17Nietzsche on 18–21transcendental 11–16, 26, 28,

52–3Weber on 24

subject-object dialectics 2–3, 22deconstruction of 164Hegelian 14–15, 81Heideggerian critique of 116–17re-evaluation of Hegelian 79

subject-social relations 22–3systems theory 4, 205–8, 229–30

communicative action and 213–14Luhmann’s 215–16

Tactics and Ethics (Lukács) 49Th eory of Communicative Action

(Habermas) 187, 198, 204, 210Th eory of the Novel (Lukács) 45, 46Th eses on the Philosophy of History

(Benjamin) 59, 67, 69Th us Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 19Tocqueville, Alexis de 193–4Tönnies, Ferdinand 206–7totalitarianism 137–9“Traditional and Critical Th eory”

(Horkheimer) 84, 86, 87, 89traditional authority 32traditional theory

transition to critical theory 86–9transcendence 122, 124, 130truth

Foucault on 176

254 INDEX

truth (Cont’d)Heidegger on 127–9history and 13language as appropriate

medium of 58–9Tugendhat, Ernst 55

understanding 26, 116Heidegger on 120–1of subject in time and space 11, 24–5,

52, 98, 120

valuespsychological and aesthetic 18–20social 27–8, 29–30

Veyne, Paul 173

violencefounding of states and 30–1mythological 59–62, 64

Weber, Max 2affi nities linking Lukács, Benjamin

and 43–4critique of Hegelian state 16, 30Habermas’ critique of 186–7, 203,

208–9on legal-rational legitimation of

power 32–3on social relations 24on state 30–1

Weil, Felix 85will to power 31

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