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On Social Identity
by Jiirgen Habermas
The question: Can Complex Societies Form a Rational Identity?
already indicates how I wish to use the term 'identity.' A society does not
just have an identity ascribed to it in the trivial sense an object does, which
can be identified by various observers as being the same 'thing,' although
they may apprehend and describe it in different ways. In a certain sense a
society achieves or, let me say, produces its identity; and it is by virtue of its
own efforts that it does not lose it. To speak, moreover, of the 'rational'
identity of society reveals that the concept has a normative content. The use
of the term is premissed on the assumption that a society may fail to find its
'proper' or its 'true' identity. Hegel speaks of a 'false identity' when the
unity of a social world which is disintegrating into its component parts can
be preserved only by force. Whether we could still speak in the same way
today is at least doubtful.
I shall, nonetheless, refer repeatedly to Hegel since Hegel's philosophy is
essentially designed to solve the question I am concerned with. To delineate
the problem of collective identity I intend to discuss, let me begin with a
brief historical account.
We can trace the relation of ego and group identity through four stages
of social evolution. In the archaic societies whose structure was determined
by kinship ties there emerge mythical world images. Here the social
relationships of the family and the tribe can serve as the interpretative
schema according to which the mythical image forms analogies between all
the natural and cultural phenomena. Nothing is so different as not to exist
in universal interdependence; everything depends upon everything else in an
evident manner. By its systematic inquiry into all the possibilities of
analogical comparisons of nature and culture (mythical) thought constructs
a vast hall of mirrors in which the image of man and the world endlessly
reflect each other and in which it is, through the prism of the relations
between nature and culture, always dispersed to be again reconstituted.
The mythical world image assigns a meaningful place to every perceptible
element; in so doing it absorbs the insecurities threatening a society which,
due to its under-developed productive forces, is barely able to bring its
environment under control. Almost every contingency can be dealt with
through the medium of interpretation: it can be 'interpreted away.' The
mythical world comprehends all its entities as analogues, men are
substances in the same way as are stones, plants, animals, and gods. Thus,
the tribe is not a reality which stands out in contrast to its individual
members or to nature. One is tempted to compare the individual's identity
Telos, Spring 1974 1974:91-103
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in archaic society to the natural identity of the child, which Hegel has
characterized as the immediate and hence non-spiritual, the merely
natural unity of the individual with his species and with the world as such.
At this stage there cannot arise problems of identity. The condition for this
is the differentiation between individuality, particularity and universality
which we can first observe in the world of the polytheistic religions of the
early civilizations.
In the state, the kingdom or the city-state the early civilizations dispose of
a form of centralized political organization which requires legitimation and
must hence be assimilated into the religious narratives and secured by
ritual.
The gods of the polytheistic religions assume human shape; they are
conceived as actively and sometimes arbitrarily controlling specific realms
of life and as themselves being subjected to the necessity of an abstract
destiny. The beginning desacralization of the natural environment and the
fact that the political institutions for the first time get a certain autonomy
relative to the cosmic order point to the emergence of a sphere of
contingencies, in which the individual can no longer deal with the fortuitous
by interpreting it away, but in which he must learn to bring contingency
under control by his own actions. New forms of religious action and thereby
patterns of interaction between gods and men are formed: prayer, sacrifice
and worship. These indicate the process of a self emerging from the
universal complex of the given order of substances and forces and the
forming of self-identity. Since at this stage the adherence to religion and
cult still coincides in a particularistic manner with the respective
community, a clear-cut group identity becomes possible. The concrete
community can be distinguished as the particular from the universality of
the cosmic order on the one side and from the singular individuals on the
other, without endangering the identity-preserving coherence of a world
centered in the polity. That is why Hegel exalts the mature form of Greek
polytheism as religion in which a free political morality finds exemplary
expression. In Athens the individual seems to have found an identity which
allows him to feel at one with the life process of the Polis as a free person:
Athene is the City of Athens and at the same time the spirit of its people,
not an external, protective spirit, but a vital spirit actually alive in the
people, immanent to the individual, who is represented by Pallas in his
essential features.
1
Thus Hegel calls the people of Greece the most human
people, although he remarks that here the infinite subjectivity of man, the
absolute right of the individual
himself
has not as yet been realized, so at
this stage takes place what is in essence slavery.
2
It is only the major universal religions, of which Judaism and Christianity
1.
G.W .F. Hegel,
Forlesungen zur Philosophie der Religion,
II, p. 126.
2. Ibid.
p. 128 f.
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ON SOCIAL IDENTITY / 93
are perhaps the most rationally structured, which raise a general or
universalistic claim to validity. The one, the other-worldly, all-knowing and
wholly just and gracious God of Christendom leads to the forming of an
ego-identity severed from all concrete roles and norm s. This T can know
itself as a completely individuated being. The idea of the immortal soul in
the face of God opens up the path to the idea of freedom according to
which the individual has infinite wo rth .
3
Here the carrier of the religious
system is no longer the state or the polis but the community of believers to
which potentially all men belong; for the commands of God are universal.
To be sure, the highly developed civilizations are class societies with
extreme inequalities in the distribution of power and wealth. On the one
side, therefore, the political system needs legitimation to a high degree. On
the other, the potential of monotheistic religions to provide universalistic
justifications is not designed to satisfy that particularistic demand for
legitimation. At this stage the religious meaning systems and the political
imperatives of self-maintenance become structurally incompatible. Hence a
counter-factual and yet illuminating nexus must be formed between the
legitimacy potential of universal religions and the existing political order.
This is the function of ideology. Ideology functions as the counterweight to
the structural dissimilarity between collective identity tied to the concrete
state and ego identities formed within the framework of the universalistic
associations. This problem of identity inheres to all the developed
civilizations; yet it does not definitely come to consciousness before the
modern era because until then a series of mediating mechanisms had been
operative. Of these I shall mention only some:
In the first place, while it is true, that those structures emerging with
the monotheistic religions made possible the forming of a not merely
conventional, but of a highly individualistic ego-identity; nonetheless earlier
identity formations and conventional consciousness remained widespread,
as can be seen from the fact that all the monotheistic religions incorporate
symbols and practices of a pagan, that is of a mythical or magic origin.
Further, in the universal religions a distinction is made between the
members of the community of believers and its addressees still held in the
sway of pagan beliefs. Temporary demarcations established against external
enemies can therefore be justified by the missionary function.
Finally, and above all, it was possible to put to use the dualism of divine
transcendence and an almost wholly secular world. To preserve a
sacramental dimension to the ruler or to his office was enough to legitimize
the secularized realm of civil law and politics with its profane exercise of
power. In the western civilizations the two-empires-doctrine was to become
the foundation of an however tension-charged but long-lasting coalition
between the Church and the worldly regime.
With the modern era, that is, with the fourth stage (that Hegel saw
3.
G.W .F. Hegel, Encyclopedia, par. 482.
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himself confronted with) these and other mediating mechanisms had
evidently become ineffective:
With Protestantism many of the previously assimilated pre-Christian
elements are discarded; this in turn reinforces the demand for strongly
universalistic commitments and the corresponding individualistic ego
structures.
As the Catholic Church split up into several confessions and a
multiplicity of denominations, the membership of the individual in a
community of believers lost not only its exclusiveness but also its rigid
institutional ties. The principle of tolerance and of the voluntary nature of
religious association finally won general acceptance.
Last, it must be recognized that lately there has taken place a significant
shift in the direction of theological currents giving a radical this-worldly
interpretation to the message of salvation and tending to obliterate the
traditional dualism; God has come to signify little more than a structure of
communication which compels the participants to rise above the
contingency of a merely external existence on the basis of mutual
recognition of each other's identity.
These trends characterize a development in which what is left of universal
religions is but the core of universalistic moral systems, and this in greater
proportion, the more transparent the infrastructure of monotheistic belief
systems has become. Hegel had clearly seen the initial phase of this
development as well as its consequence: the inevitable cleavage between
ego-identity derived from universalistic structures and collective identity
bound up with a particular community. For on the basis of universalistic
norms no particular entity possessing an identity-forming power (such as
the family, the tribe, the city, state or nation) can set up bounds to
demarcate itself from alien groups. Rather, the 'own' group is here replaced
by the category of 'the other,' who is no longer conceived as an outsider
because of his non-membership, but becomes for the ego two things in one:
absolutely identical and absolutely different, the closest, and the most
distant, both in one person. Accordingly, citizenship or national identity
would have to be enlarged to become a cosmopolitan or universal identity.
Yet can this design of a new identity be conceived without contradiction?
The whole of mankind is an abstraction, it is not just another group which
on a global scale could form its identity, similarly as did tribes or states,
until such a time as mankind were again to coalesce into a particular entity,
let us say, in defence against other populations in outer space. But what else
except the whole of mankind or a world society can take the place of an
all-embracing collective identity from which individualistic ego identities
could be formed? If this place is not filled, universalistic morality, in the
same way as the ego structures consistent with it, would remain a mere
postulate in that they could be actualized only occasionally and this within
the private sphere, without substantially grounding social life.
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I hold this problem of identity to have been the actual impetus to
Hegelian philosophy and it is precisely because he gave the impulse to
reflection upon these questions that Hegel remains a contemporary thinker.
Hegel evidently conceived the alienation of the subject from society as
related to the subject's alienation from nature. There is, to be exact, a
threefold diremption of the modern T : from external nature, from society
and from internal nature; these diremptions signalize the context in which
Hegel himself s w the motive force of philosophy: The need for philosophy
arises when the unifying power has disappeared from the life of man, when
the contradictions have lost their living interrelation and interdependence
and assumed an independent form. Perhaps the following consideration
may serve to advance our understand ing of the fundamental problem
Hegel's philosophy sought to answer.
Monotheism, especially Christianity, was the last system of ideas which
provided a unifying interpretation acknowledged by more or less all the
members of the community. However, once it was confronted with the rival
claims of science and profane morality, Christianity could no longer satisfy
this demand. Here, then, philosophy must step in its place. Yet even if with
the conceptual means at its disposal, philosophy were able to substitute for
the unifying power of the universal religions, the problem itself remains
unsolved. For, as we have see, monotheism already had been an expression
of the opposition between universalistic ego structures on the one side and
the particularistic identity of the state on the other. This opposition resides
both in the fact that the state is the organizational form of a class society,
the unequalitarian character of which cannot find universalistic
justification, and in the fact that precisely this organizational form opposes
sovereign states to one another in the struggle for existence, which again is
not reconcilable with universalistic principles. If, then, philosophy is to
accomplish the task of unification it must prove capable of passing even
beyond religion's claim to a unificatory interpretation; that means
philosophy, in Hegel's design, had to reconstitute the unity which so far
only the myth has been able to provide. This explains why Hegel, again and
again, returned to the example of the morality embodied in the Polis; for it
is here within Greek polytheism that in Hegel's opinion the individual could
find an identity of self that was in harmony with the identity of the
city-state. Stated in these terms, philosophy must create anew the same
integration of the individual beings with their particular political
community within the horizon of a universal cosmic order, as was effected
by the myth. (The concrete unity of the universal, the particular and the
individual.) This time, however, it must accomplish this task under the
extreme conditions meanwhile posited by the modern ideas of the freedom
and of the complete individuality of the human subject.
This, however, signifies that the modern problem of identity, namely the
problem of the diremption of the T from society, cannot be solved unless
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the absolute identity of the T or of the mind with the whole of natu re is
rendered comprehensible. What must be made intelligible is that the world
of nature and the world of history are held together by a unifying power
which in unfolding itself produces these diremptions, which it can also
overcome.
I must confine myself to this loose reference to the strategy Hegel chose
for solving the problem of identity. Hegel has undertaken the attempt of
producing for modern consciousness a system of knowledge guaranteeing
identity in a similar manner as 'the concrete science' of mythical thought
must long ago have created for archaic consciousness. In principle Hegel is
able to locate all the phenomena within the process of the self-mediation of
the absolute spirit so that each can illuminate the point at which the
modern T finds its place; the structure which renders comprehensible both
nature and history in their essential manifoldedness is at the same time the
structure in which the T can find and preserve its identity. To render
comprehensible or to understand means: to eradicate all contingencies
which threaten the identity of the T , for it is through the very acts of
understanding th at the T identifies itself with the spirit which Hegel says
that it in itself produces the annihilation of what is night and noth ing
and renders futile that which is futility .
4
This universal self-movement of the absolute spirit is made intelligible
precisely by the state, notwithstanding its particularity, in that the state is
the embodiment and the realization of the ethical idea. Modern society has
found its rational identity in the sovereign constitutional state and it is the
task of philosophy to show this identity to be rational.
Approaching Hegel more from the outside, I shall indicate some of the
difficulties this thesis is confronted with in the light of contemporary
experience.
It is beyond my scope here to trace in any detail the immanent difficulties
of the Hegelian construction especially in his Ph ilosophy of R ight. Let me
instead mention four arguments against the assertion that the modern state
continues to be the plane within which societies form their identity.
1) If the presupposition that the modern state develops a rational identity
within the form of the constitutional state were correct, the interests of the
whole would have to manifest themselves in the institutions of the state and
be realized in particular ends. In so far as this unity is absent, no thing is
real, though it may exist. A bad state is one which merely exists. A sick
body also exists, bu t it has no reality. Yet, ever since Marx 's critique of the
Hegelian philosophy of the state it has been argued time and again that the
bourgeois constitutional state not only in its Hegelian derivation, i.e., in the
form of the status-stratified constitutional monarchy {Stiindestaat , but even
in its liberal mass democratic cast is no 'real' state (in the emphatic sense of
4. Encyclopedia, op.cit.. par. 396.
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Hegel's logic), but one which 'merely exists.' As long as the society exhibits
class structures the organization of the state must give effect to particular
interests, privileging them vis
vis universal interests. However much the
capitalistic economic system may have developed and undergone change
within the frame of competitive democracy, one fundam ental state of things
has remained unchanged: The social priorities by no means express the
generalizable interests of the total population; they are mainly the result of
unintended consequences of decentralized private decisions. A similar
situation obtains in the states of bureaucratic socialism where the power of
disposition over the means of production rests with a political elite.
2) Even if the sovereignty of the state were not internally restricted by the
class structure and undermined by economically imposed limitations of
planning capacities, the sovereignty of the national state has in any event
become an anachronism.
Hegel could still take his departure from the contemporary system of the
European powers and, as opposed to this reality, treat the projective unity
of international law merely as an abstract idea of morality. Only the state
that is sovereign in its relations to other states, and Hegel calls this the
absolute power on earth,
5
can achieve the degree of autonomy which
enables society to form its identity within its framework.
And even today, within the new horizon created for a global society by
the worldwide network of communications, no supra-state form of
organization capable of exercising statelike authority has come into being.
This might, at first sight, be taken as a confirmation of Hegel's view. Yet,
the inexistence of a world state alone does not allow the conclusion that the
sovereignty of the national state is continual. The range of the sovereignty
of national states is limited by at least three factors: First, by the develop-
ment of modern weapons technology which has made the avoidance of
major war the imperative for the survival at least of the superpowers;
second, by the supra-state organization of the multinational corporations
with their control over internationalized capital and labor (only seventeen
countries have a budget that exceeds the annual turn-over of General
Motors); and third, by the moral instance of a world public opinion whose
frontiers run across the boundaries of states.
3) While the second argument raises the question whether the reality of
an as yet nascent world society is consonant with an identity tied to national
territories, the third argument leads to the question whether it is under
present conditions at all possible to form a world identity. Identity problems
can present themselves meaningfully only for as long as societies are as a
whole integrated into a symbolic life world.
It was in the course of the development of capitalism that the economy
broke out of the limits set by household production, and in general, out of
the boundaries of normative regulation. The private sphere of 'bourgeois
5.
G.W .F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, par. 331.
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TELOS
society' separated from the state as well as the family is primarily under the
control of the imperatives of the market, i.e., of systemic mechanisms and
not of norms of action and the value-orientations of the actors; that is why
for Hegel this sphere represents the 'loss of morality.'
Hegel, of course, was convinced that the economic system—'the system of
needs'—notwithstanding its internal conflicts, would
retain
its connection
with ethical life through the mediation of the legal system. Meanwhile,
however, as society has attained increasing complexity, the problems of co-
ordination and steering have won such predominance that the state is no
longer capable of guaranteeing systems integration by norms alone. Rather,
administrative action itself has come to be dependent upon steering
problems generated and defined primarily by the subsystems of economy,
technology and science, which have come to dominate the system
itself.
Social integration increasingly seems to get substituted by systems
integration. And the more this happens, the more identity problems become
obsolete.
4) The last argument is substantiated by an historical development which
does not fit into Hegel's conceptual scheme. In the last one hundred and
fifty years two formations of collective identity have come into being— the
nation and the party. The nationalist movements of the nineteenth century
can probably still be related to the patriotism which for Hegel too was a
constitutive moment of the rational identity of the constitutional state. But
the nation was only the foundation for a stable identity, and not from the
start incompatible with rational goals to the extent that it served the reali-
zation of the democratic state, i.e., the realization of a fundamentally uni-
versalistic program. Similarly, nationalism in the developing countries has
acquired substance only through its relation to the goals of social
revolution. In the absence of such universalistic infrastructures national
consciousness unfailingly regresses to renewed particularism; it then
signifies either a dangerous phenomenon of regression on the part of highly
developed societies, as in fascism, or, as in the case of Gaullism, a virtually
ineffective program.
Yet another historically important form of collective identity took shape,
largely under Marxist influence, within the European working-class
movement of the nineteenth and of the early twentieth century. Its vehicle is
the revolutionary party, whose role is determined by class struggle and the
global civil war. The communist party was designed to represent parti-
sanship for reason, that is for a universal rationality of social life which as
yet awaits realization. To put it in another way: The party can lay claim to
rationality to the extent that its actual practice is capable of bringing about
the conditions in which the party itself becomes superfluous. Yet, the lesson
of history is that since the October Revolution the communist parties which
have seized power did establish themselves permanently as highly bureau-
cratized statist parties, and that in those cases where they have not come to
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ON SOCIAL IDEN TITY / 99
power they have abandoned their revolutionary mission to integrate them-
selves into multi-party systems. These examples rather lend support to the
assumption that today the identity of a society no longer fits an organi-
zational framework—be it the national state or the para-state party.
Do the difficulties indicated imply that the question of whether and how
complex societies can form a rational identity is meaningless? I would say
that they should not make us discard the concepts of group and ego identity
themselves. True enough, these difficulties are sufficient reason to recognize
that an identity concept derived from the context of civilization, centered
around the state, and articulated as well as fixated in particular traditions
and world images has become outdated and thereby irrelevant. In con-
clusion, I shall outline the characteristics of a new identity which is at least
possible in complex societies and at the same time compatible with univer-
salistic ego structures. I shall discuss it from two perspectives:
1) The new identity of a society which extends beyond state boundaries
can neither be related to a specific territory nor rest upon any specific
organization. The distinguishing characteristic of this new identity can also
no longer be that of association or membership. Collective identity, and this
is the thesis I intend to advance, can today only be grounded in the
consciousness of universal and equal chances to participate in the kind of
communication processes by which identity formation becomes a
continuous learning process. Here the individual is no longer confronted by
collective identity as a traditional authority, as a fixed objectivity on the
basis of which self-identity can be built. Rather, individuals are the
participants in the shaping of the collective will underlying the design of a
common identity.
Admittedly, norm and value-forming communications do not always take
the precise form of discourse: they are not in all cases institutionalized, but
rather they are often diffuse and appear under a variety of definitions.
Emanating from 'the base,' they penetrate into the pores of spheres of life
which are formally organized. In this sense, they are a sub-political process
operating below the threshold of political decision-making: nonetheless,
they affect the political system, albeit indirectly, through their impact on
the normative frame of political decisions. The current debate concerning
the 'quality of life' is an indication of transformations of public issues
effected, as it were, sub-cutaneously.
Such processes are observable also in the de-differentiation of previously
autonomous life spheres. Modern art provides a striking example. On the
one hand, modern art has become increasingly esoteric and recommends
itself as a non-scientific alternative to cognition; on the other, it has tended
to abandon the museums, the theaters, concert halls and libraries as if to
divest itself of the autonomy of art and in order to enter practical life, i.e.,
in order to enhance sensibility, to alter the routines of language, to
stimulate perception, and, yes, to become incorporated into paradigmatic
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life forms. Another example is both mental illness and crime. The former is
less and less conceived from the perspective of pathology, the latter from
that of traditional canons of morality. Other phenomena of this type point
to the weakening of state control over politics, illustrated by the weakening
made by planning administrations to enter into communication with those
potentially affected, or conversely, by the citizens' initiatives and the
activities of
civic
and community groups which in turn impose this conduct
upon the bureaucracies. This is at least a tendency towards the dissolution
of the autonomy that bureaucracy has come to assert over politics. The
concept of 'democratization' is not adequate to what is at issue here,
because, except in rare cases, the initiatives and movements referred to are
not likely to enlarge the scope for effective participation in political
decisions: they do, nonetheless, have the less evident but long-lasting effect
of altering the interpretations given to publicly recognized needs and wants.
When a municipal theater company, the members of a university, or the
members of church organization realize their demand for codetermination
this also has a political bearing. What is of interest here, however, is not the
shift in power, but rather a circumstance which tends to be obscured by the
connotations of participatory democracy: To refer to our examples, what I
have in mind is that the routines of play-acting, of academic training and of
religious consolation, i.e., of the normative contents and values embodied
by the norms of everyday life institutions, are thereby thematized and
rendered accessible to communication. This, however, relates to another
aspect of the problem.
2) The new identity of an as yet emergent global society cannot find arti-
culation in world images, although it must, of course, presuppose the
validity of universalistic moral systems. The latter, however, can be linked
with the basic norms of rational discourse. This in itself is a step in the
direction of a collective type of identity which, as I have indicated, is
grounded in the consciousness of universal' and equal opportunity to
participate in value and norm-forming learning processes. Such an identity
no longer requires fixed contents. Those interpretations which make man's
situation in today's world comprehensible are distinguished from the
traditional world images not so much in that they are more limited in scope,
but in that their status is open to counter-arguments and revisions at any
time.
In part, such interpretations are infused by the critical appropriations of
the tradition. In part, they can also be traced back to basic scientific ideas
which have lent themselves to popularization and which concern the
self-
understanding of
men:
Class struggle, the origin of the species and the sub-
conscious are three such basic words, stemming from theories which have
since the nineteenth century been assimilated by the vocabulary of popular
knowledge. Today, this is due also to popular syntheses of available scien-
tific data which are intentionally construed to serve the purpose of global
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ON SOCI L IDENTITY 101
interpretations: I have in mind, for instance, the image of man as provided
by ethnologists; e.g., Konrad Lorenz.
If one were to look for identity projections of a scientific origin, at the
present time one would discover at least three , let us call them, strategies of
interpretation. Global interpretations inspired by the systems-theory
approach contest the possibility and substance of identity formation at the
macro-social level: As a result of the growing complexities of developed
social systems identity problems are eclipsed by steering problems and
retain at best a parochial significance. Other interpretations drawing on
ethnology bring us back to a fixed and narrowly circumscribed identity set
up as a natural substratum: Identity problems, on these terms, spring from
misdevelopments within the process of civilization which over-demand the
endogenous capacities of personality systems. Finally, those interpretations
leading back to Marx and Hegel, of which my paper is an illustration, do
not in any direct way rely on the universal faculty of reason, bu t nonetheless
adhere to those universal and inevitable presuppositions which, however
counterfactually, are so much an inherent part of language, and thereby of
the sociocultural life form, that they establish a link between the process of
socialization and the imperatives for the formation of ego and group
identities.
Such identity projections do not have the status of scientific theory,
rather they have the character of practical hypotheses, which can prove
successful or fail only when they have gained significant influence on how
the members of society understand themselves and how they comprehend
the world in which they are living. They are fallible in an extremely painful
way, if they further a false identity, they hurt in the same way as does the
course of a disease.
3) We have seen that a new identity cannot be retrospectively fixed to
traditional values, but neither can it just mean an orientation towards the
tasks of planning. The radical kind of future-orientedness which also enters
into the process of identity formation encounters its limits in the consti-
tutive elements of the new identity
itself.
For if we would look at our present
only in the light of alternative futures, where everything is placed at our
disposal, nothing like an identity could be formed. We have said that we see
the foundation for a new identity in the consciousness of universal and
equal opportunity to participate in value and norm-forming learning
processes. The consciousness itself cannot be a mere projection of the
future. The question then arises as to the credentials of our assumption that
universal communication structures can acquire the significance and the
effectiveness of a basis for identity. Apparently, this is not yet the case
today.
There is no simple answer to this question, yet I should like to conclude
with the following consideration. I shall take the example of curriculum
planning. Hitherto, new curricula could be prescribed without causing any
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disturbance. They gave rise to discussions among the experts, but as far as
students, parents, and the political public sphere were concerned, inno-
vations almost passed unnoticed. The sobering impact the natural sciences
had on educational humanism has today been followed by another shift
away from the humanistic creed, which has received its impulse from the
social sciences. Yet, this shift is no longer actualized in the medium of
tradition. Cultural tradition is highly selective and in this selectivity is at the
same time taken for granted. In countries with a centralized public school
system, like Western Germany, we therefore observe an interesting field
experiment. Roughly, the administrations must plan the curriculum without
a strong backing by tradition. In part, things that were culturally taken for
granted have been worn out and the traditional claims to validity have been
undermined, in part, the administrations cannot find in the traditional
canons the requisite niches within which to place changed or new functions
to which the school system must get adapted. So the planning of the curri-
culum is mainly based on the premise that orientations within a rich range
of options, can be entirely different. The school administration thus substi-
tutes one of the essential functions of tradition, i.e., to make a justifiable
selection of the mass of traditional contents.
Moreover (and here I draw on recent experiences in Germany), in this
attempt one typical thing happens: the administrative legitimacy is insuffi-
cient for the new task of making an argumentatively justifiable selection of
cultural options. The widespread and agitated reactions to new curricula
bring to consciousness that there is no administrative creation of cultural
legitimacy. Rather, cultural legitimacy presupposes value and norm-
forming communication of a type that has started among parents, teachers
and students and which underlies the demonstrations, citizens' initiatives,
and so on, which have increasingly brought these issues to the attention of
the general public. Here, the communicative structures of universal
practical discourse obtains because the formation of tradition has been
forced out if its natural conditions and because basic consensus on
value-systems can be reached only through the medium of general
discourses. In the absence of an undoubted tradition you have, in these
matters, to choose between violence and grass-root communication.
I should like to draw one lesson from this example for our purpose. The
limits of administrative interference with tradition and the compulsion to
communicative mobilization of tradition reveal that very structure around
which alone a new collective identity, if it ever comes into being, could
crystallize
itself.
Its form would be an identity, non-prejudiced in its content
and independent of particular organizational types, of the community of
those who engage in the discursive and experimental formation of an
identity-related knowledge on the basis of a critical appropriation of
tradition as well as of the inputs from science, philosophy and the arts.
8/16/2019 Jürgen Habermas - On Social Identity
13/13
ON SOCIAL IDENTITY / 103
The temporal structure of a future-oriented remem brance would more-
over allow the formation of universalistic ego structures on the basis of
partisanship for particular identity-projections; for every position can come
to agreement with the other positions it is confronted with in the present
precisely in its partisanship for a universality to be realized in the future.
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