doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.12058 The Persistence of Normative Questions in Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action James Gordon Finlayson From the beginning, The Theory of Communicative Action (TCA) labored over the difficulty of answering the criticism that it fails in its aim of “justifying the normative premises of his projected social theory.” 1 What makes that criticism potentially so devastating is that this is one of the avowed central aims of the book, which, Habermas states on the first page, is “not a metatheory but the beginning of a social theory that is concerned to validate its own critical standards.” 2 Here, I re-examine TCA in the light of this criticism. In my view neither Habermas, nor his commentators, have managed satisfactorily to answer it, in spite of numerous different attempts to do so. That said, it is not unanswerable. On the contrary, I believe that the criticism, as it has been widely construed, rests on a mistaken assumption about the kind of critical social theory TCA purports to be. I argue that a modified version of the criticism, shorn of this mistaken assumption, and more in tune with the complex of analyses, arguments, and conjectures Habermas actually puts forward in TCA, still applies. I end by suggesting the shape that a satisfactory response to the criticism would have to take. 1. Theory of Communicative Action and Frankfurt School Critical Theory Habermas’s remarks on the first page suggest strongly that the first volume of TCA should be read backwards. It suggests that the theory of modernity and the account of rationalization (section II) together with the Intermediate Reflections (section III) are best understood in the light of the diagnosis and criticism Habermas makes of Frankfurt School critical theory – particularly of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s Negative Dialectic – in section IV. Recall the following passage: From the beginning, critical theory labored over the difficulty of giving an account of its own normative foundations. 3 Habermas confronts the Critical Theory of his former mentors and teachers with a serious problem and is not content to find fault with it while offering nothing in its place. Instead, he offers a critical social theory that does not suffer from that same problem, since, he claims, it contains within it an ‘account of its own normative foundations.’ So on the backwards reading of TCA, sections II and III of Volume 1 are to be understood as providing an “an account of the normative foundations” of the social theory, which is set out in Volume 2, and as validating its critical standards. No doubt one of Habermas’s aims in TCA was to settle accounts with first generation Frankfurt School critical social theory by making salient the main advantages of his new approach. For example, according to Habermas, Adorno and Horkheimer construe reason in an undifferentiated manner because they are captivated by the limitations of the philosophy of consciousness that recognized only two perspectives, that of “an objective reason that had fallen irreparably into ruin” and a subjective reason that had been “absolutized in the service of self-preservation.” 4 Thus, he argues, they can only understand the process of social rationalization as the reifying force of an “instrumental reason that has gone wild” in the Constellations Volume 20, No 4, 2013. C 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Transcript
doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.12058
The Persistence of Normative Questions in Habermas’sTheory of Communicative Action
James Gordon Finlayson
From the beginning, The Theory of Communicative Action (TCA) labored over the difficultyof answering the criticism that it fails in its aim of “justifying the normative premises of hisprojected social theory.”1 What makes that criticism potentially so devastating is that thisis one of the avowed central aims of the book, which, Habermas states on the first page,is “not a metatheory but the beginning of a social theory that is concerned to validate itsown critical standards.”2 Here, I re-examine TCA in the light of this criticism. In my viewneither Habermas, nor his commentators, have managed satisfactorily to answer it, in spiteof numerous different attempts to do so. That said, it is not unanswerable. On the contrary,I believe that the criticism, as it has been widely construed, rests on a mistaken assumptionabout the kind of critical social theory TCA purports to be. I argue that a modified versionof the criticism, shorn of this mistaken assumption, and more in tune with the complex ofanalyses, arguments, and conjectures Habermas actually puts forward in TCA, still applies. Iend by suggesting the shape that a satisfactory response to the criticism would have to take.
1. Theory of Communicative Action and Frankfurt School Critical Theory
Habermas’s remarks on the first page suggest strongly that the first volume of TCA should beread backwards. It suggests that the theory of modernity and the account of rationalization(section II) together with the Intermediate Reflections (section III) are best understood in thelight of the diagnosis and criticism Habermas makes of Frankfurt School critical theory –particularly of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s NegativeDialectic – in section IV. Recall the following passage:
From the beginning, critical theory labored over the difficulty of giving an account of itsown normative foundations.3
Habermas confronts the Critical Theory of his former mentors and teachers with a seriousproblem and is not content to find fault with it while offering nothing in its place. Instead, heoffers a critical social theory that does not suffer from that same problem, since, he claims,it contains within it an ‘account of its own normative foundations.’ So on the backwardsreading of TCA, sections II and III of Volume 1 are to be understood as providing an “anaccount of the normative foundations” of the social theory, which is set out in Volume 2, andas validating its critical standards.
No doubt one of Habermas’s aims in TCA was to settle accounts with first generationFrankfurt School critical social theory by making salient the main advantages of his newapproach. For example, according to Habermas, Adorno and Horkheimer construe reason inan undifferentiated manner because they are captivated by the limitations of the philosophyof consciousness that recognized only two perspectives, that of “an objective reason thathad fallen irreparably into ruin” and a subjective reason that had been “absolutized in theservice of self-preservation.”4 Thus, he argues, they can only understand the process of socialrationalization as the reifying force of an “instrumental reason that has gone wild” in the
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pursuit of the ever more efficient mastery of external nature and as the hidden hand behindsocial domination.5
By contrast, his theory, which is based on a paradigm of intersubjective communication,distinguishes between instrumental reason and communicative reason, the latter of which“cannot be subsumed without resistance under a blind self-preservation.”6 TCA thus con-strues reason and social rationalization in a more differentiated way.7 In Habermas’s theorythe reifying effects of social rationalization are understood not in the wholesale and undiffer-entiated manner of his predecessors, but as a more localized phenomenon, arising from thecircumstance “that an unleashed functionalist reason of systems maintenance disregards andoverrides the claim to reason ingrained in communicative sociation.”8 Furthermore, Haber-mas rests his social theory on a substantial premise (reminiscent of Hegel) that Horkheimerand Adorno both disavow: namely that we “already have before us – in fragmentary and ex-isting form, to be sure – the existing forms of a reason that has to rely on being symbolicallyembodied and historically situated.”9 This affords Habermas the possibility of mounting animmanent social criticism which, in the Marxian manner, “is critical both of contemporarysocial sciences and of the social reality that they are supposed to grasp” and which criticizes“the reality of developed societies inasmuch as they do not make full use of the learningpotential culturally available to them.”10
2. The Challenge of Schnadelbach and Taylor
Yet according to Herbert Schnadelbach, none of these advantages of TCA over the criticaltheory that preceded it bear out Habermas’s main claim to have validated the normative stan-dards of critical social theory. Why is that? Well, according to Schnadelbach, the problem liesin the way in which Habermas construes the nature and task of critical social theory, namelyas a rational reconstruction of what he (Habermas) calls the “communicative infrastructureof largely rationalized lifeworlds.”11 TCA will only succeed in effecting such a clarification,Schnadelbach argues, if it does not stop short at reconstruction, for rational reconstructionalone will not enable it “to move to the level of critique, for it could nevertheless refrain frompassing judgment.”12 Schnadelbach’s point, put more simply, is that nothing in Habermas’stheory of communicative action justifies the social theorist’s making the normative criticaljudgment that society ought not to be thus and so, or that it ought to be other than it is, or thatit is bad and should be changed, but that just such a judgment is required if a social theoryis to be properly critical.
It is not only Schnadelbach who makes the claim that Habermas’s social theory is not agenuinely critical one. Many Marxist critics join in this refrain; though, as is widely known,Marxists have their own difficulties in explaining the normative grounds of their criticaltheories.13 In the same volume, Charles Taylor draws more or less the same conclusionas Schnadelbach. Taylor claims that although Habermas shows that “the aim of achievingdomination-free understanding” is “structurally implied by the logic of discourse” this im-plication is not sufficient for a genuinely critical theory. The social critic must be able toshow in addition why we value rational understanding so highly “that it should be preferredto all other purposes.”14 That would require a kind of strong evaluation that could only beachieved by a more ethically substantial theory like Taylor’s own.
2.1 Although the objection is a prima facie simple challenge to the claim Habermas makeson the opening page, I take it that the considerations that motivate this challenge are morecomplex and controversial. These underlying considerations can be better understood in the
light of what is known as Hume’s law, namely the robust conjecture that one cannot validlyinfer any genuine moral or ethical use of ‘ought’ from any set of theoretical premises thatdo not already contain any: in brief, one cannot derive ‘ought’ from ‘is.’ The objection thentakes the form of a dilemma: either TCA fulfils its aim of providing a genuinely critical theoryof society whose claims take the form of a substantial normative judgment that society oughtnot to be as it is, and ought to be changed and so forth. In this case, it is in violationof Hume’s law. Or the arguments in TCA respect Hume’s law, in which case it fallsshort of being a genuinely critical theory of society, because it provides no warrant forthe kind of substantial normative judgment that a genuinely critical theory would re-quire. (Note that this challenge need not rely on a razor sharp distinction between thenormative ‘ought’ and the descriptive ‘is;’ it just challenges the theory to demonstratenormative premises thick enough to ground the normative conclusions. What it deniesis that the theorist can configure richly normative conclusions by somehow combin-ing weakly normative considerations, as if it were like baking a cake, where somethingtasty and delicious can be made by combining ingredients none of which are tasty anddelicious.)
What makes the aptness of this objection particularly difficult to assess is that TCAcomprises a whole panoply of different lines of argument and analysis, none of which canbe characterized as merely descriptive as opposed to normative. In Volume 1, for example,beside the historical reconstructions of the account of rationalization in Weber, and in Marxisttheory from Lukacs to Adorno, there is the typology of action, the rational reconstruction ofcommunicative action, the theory of the validity basis of meaning (and understanding), andthe thesis that communicative action is prior to instrumental and strategic action. In Volume2, in addition to the reconstructions of Mead, Durkheim, and Parsons, there is a socialontology that distinguishes between the lifeworld and the system, a functional analysis oftheir differing roles in regard of integration and social reproduction, and an account ofmodernization which forms the backdrop for the thesis of the uncoupling of system andlifeworld, which culminates in the thesis of the colonization of the lifeworld by the system.Where in Volume 1 Habermas argues that instrumental and strategic actions, to the extent thatthey are successful, are parasitic on communicative action (and discourse), and the attemptto reach rational consensus on the basis of validity claims, so in Volume 2 he maintainsthat the sub-systems of the economy and the state, governed respectively by the steeringmedia of money and power, are themselves embedded in and functionally dependent onthe lifeworld. This means that if the system – in the form of the capitalist economy orthe state bureaucracy (or both) – expands and spills out into the formerly unmarketizedor unbureaucratized lifeworld domains – it uses up the very normative resource on whichit depends for its own success, namely the give and take of reasons in communication anddiscourse. In other words, where social rationalization takes the form of colonization, it leadsto self-destabilization and self-stultification. Furthermore, it is argued, this process gives risenot only to crises in the system – economic and political crises – but also to a variety ofsocial pathologies on the different levels of culture, society and person.15
Faced with the theoretical complexity and ambition of TCA, Hume’s law looks like a ratherclunky tool of appraisal. However, all that Schnadelbach and Taylor need to show, if theircriticism is to hit the mark, is that none of these various theories warrant the kind of normativejudgment that any critical theory worth its salt must yield. I believe that Schnadelbach andTaylor are on to something, but that their criticism needs further elaboration. They need notjust to assert that it is the case, but to show why it is the case, that none of these varioustheories, analyses, and arguments, provide the requisite normative grounds.
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Such an elaboration might take the following form.First, the assumption is that the kind of judgment that the critical social theorist has to be
able to make is of a moral nature, in the broadest sense of moral, where it is taken to coveralso what Habermas would designate as ethical, or ethical-political, judgments. The salientfeature of moral and of ethical/ethical-political judgments that applies here is that they give usfirst personal practical reasons. Various moral theorists agree that moral reasons are reasonsthat moral agents give to themselves (or to each other) and which address them in the firstperson. For example, Christine Korsgaard argues that this is why a theory that successfullyexplains “why somebody does the right thing – in a way that is adequate from a third-personperspective – could nevertheless fail to justify the action from the agent’s own, first personperspective, and so fail to support its normative claims.”16 Habermas himself is of the viewthat the moral standpoint is one of first person plural deliberation, so the same basic pointholds: namely, that the practical reasons licensed by moral norms are first personal. It alsoholds of what Habermas calls ‘ethical’ or ‘ethical-political’ discourses, whereby participantsin discourse address the question of what is the good life for me or for us.17 So we can takeit that by Habermas’s own lights, and on some other influential accounts also, normativejudgments, that is moral (in the broadest sense) and ethical judgments, give us first personalpractical reasons for action.18
Second, implicit in their objection is the – I think correct – view that all the varioustheories that Habermas puts into play in The Theory of Communicative Action – from therational reconstruction of communicative action in Volume 1 to the functionalist analysis ofthe relation of the lifeworld to the system, and the diagnosis of social pathologies offered inVolume 2 – are what I will call ‘sideways-on’ theories. By this I mean simply that the theoryis disengaged from the ends of the practice (or actions) it gives an account of and from theperspective of the practitioners. Often talk of ‘sideways-on’ view refers to natural-scientific,causal explanations, in particular reductionist theories. These are one kind of sideways-onview, but not the only one. I submit that any theory of a sufficiently abstract and generalnature can be sideways-on. What characterizes all sideways-on theories is that they evinceepistemic reasons or justifications, which are consistent with their aims as theory, or, inHabermas’s terms, they make validity claims to truth. What no sideways-on theory willevince are reasons that address agents in the first person, and tell us why I or you or weshould do x or y, or cease to do x or y: they are not thus engaged.
As we have seen, TCA advances a whole gamut of different kinds of argument. Here it isnot a question of gauging the correctness or incorrectness of any of these; the point is that allof them remain sideways-on theories of the social, and for that very reason cannot issue in thekind of substantial evaluative judgment that a properly critical social theory would require.For example, Habermas stops short of making the evaluative judgment that the lifeworld isa common good that should be preserved, and that its colonization is pathology that shouldbe prevented. Such a judgment can only be made from the ethical-political point of view ofthose communicative agents whose lifeworld it is that is thus threatened, and whose commongood is at stake.
We can illustrate the above point with a best case scenario ‘argument.’ Of all the argumentsadumbrated above, the diagnosis of social pathologies offered in Volume 2, (a synopsis ofwhich is offered in Fig. 22) looks to be normatively the richest argument. Yet even here, thetheories put forward in IV, 1, C at best amount to an explanation for why social agents cometo experience anomie, alienation, loss of motivation etc. and for why they act as they do. Butthat falls well short of providing a practical reason to social agents for why they should altersociety such that these effects do not occur. If this component of Habermas’s theory falls
shy of the kind of substantive normative judgment, which, according to Schnadelbach andTaylor, a properly critical social theory must make, so do all the others.
3. Answering the Challenge
3.1. Habermas’s Original Reply
In his ‘Reply’ to Schnadelbach’s original objection, Habermas makes two different moves.First, he reiterates his position that to understand a reason adequately is to evaluate it, in thesense that it is either to be accepted as a good reason, or rejected as not good enough.19 Hissecond response is to assert (contra Karl-Otto Apel and Karl Buhler) that transcendental-pragmatic arguments can and indeed ought to forgo ultimate foundations, i.e. that they neednot and should not take the form of a foundationalist justification.20
To my mind neither of these responses addresses the challenge squarely. Habermas mightbe right about what a good reason is, and what it is to understand one, and he might alsobe correct to claim that transcendental-pragmatic argumentation can and should do withoutultimate foundations, but these are different issues, and neither rescues the argument of TCAfrom the above dilemma.
Schnadelbach may be partly to blame here for having thrown Habermas off course, for hesummarizes his objection somewhat misleadingly as follows: “Critical unconditionality with-out foundationalism – this is the aim Habermas has set himself; doubts are in order whetherhe has achieved it.”21 Schnadelbach should have realized that the question of what kind ofjustification Habermas’s social theory may deploy – foundationalist or non-foundationalist– is a side issue. The real point of dispute can be formulated quite independently of the ques-tions of what it is to understand a reason, and of whether or not a foundationalist justification,or some other variety of justification, is required. It is simply that Habermas’s arguments donot evince the conclusions of a properly critical theory, namely that the colonization of thelifeworld ought to be prevented.
3.2.1 Honneth’s Solution: Discourse Ethics as the Ground of Critical TheoryFaced with the simple, but potentially devastating criticism, that TCA fails to justify its ownnormative standards, and thus fails in its main aim, several of Habermas’s supporters haveintervened on his behalf. Axel Honneth in his early work, for example, takes the view thatit is with “communicative ethics” — i.e. with a moral theory — that “Habermas . . . hasattempted to justify the normative claims of a critical social theory.”22 Seyla Benhabib makesa similar claim in Critique, Norm and Utopia.23 Their way of construing Discourse Ethicsas an answer to the problem of the normative foundations of critical social theory becamevery influential in the 1980s and 90s.24
On Honneth’s understanding of the problem, what is needed in order to justify the nor-mative conclusions of critical theory – the ‘ought’ claims it needs to make if it is to beproperly critical – is a normative moral theory. The implication of this view is that althoughHabermas’s rational reconstruction of the communicative infrastructure of rationalized soci-eties in TCA is not normatively rich enough on its own to validate the critical standards of hiscritical social theory, it can be supplemented and enriched by the analysis of moral discoursethat the program of Discourse Ethics provides. The two taken together are sufficient to supplythe normative grounds of his critical social theory.
Honneth’s interpretation is a prima facie plausible route for defenders of Habermas totake in the face of Schnadelbach’s challenge and has the advantage of accounting for the
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considerable weight that Habermas gives to the program of Discourse Ethics, on which hewrote a fair amount in the immediate aftermath of TCA. Discourse Ethics is also very closelyentwined with the theory of communicative action in as much as it consists in a rationalreconstruction of moral discourse: essentially what it does is to provide a more fine-grainedaccount of what it is for a communicative agent to discursively redeem (or make good) avalidity-claim to rightness.25 As such it can be seen as a development of the “IntermediateReflections on Social Action, Purposive Activity and Communication” in Volume 1 of TCA.
The trouble is that several fatal difficulties beset this interpretation. Let us deal with eachin turn.
3.2.1 The Program of the Justification of the Moral Principle and the Failure of theDerivation of (U)One way of looking at Honneth’s interpretation is to construe it as the claim that DiscourseEthics – the program for the justification of the moral principle (U) – can, if successful, makethat principle (or some other variant of it) available for the normative aims of the criticaltheory of society, and thus make available the moral premises that the latter requires.
The first difficulty standing in the way of this interpretation concerns the success of Dis-course Ethics as a philosophical justification of the moral standpoint. Discourse as Habermasunderstands it, is a program of philosophical justification of the moral principle (U).26 ByHabermas’s lights, the moral principle (U) is the central moral principle, but not the under-lying normative ground of morality (moral discourse). Rather (U) is derived from two morefundamental, and non-moral, premises.
(1) the normative, (but non-moral) preconditions of argumentation in general27
(2) a ‘weak idea of normative justification’ or ‘the conception of normative justificationin general as expressed in (D).’28
(D) is the principle of discourse, and although its precise status has undergone some importantchanges, Habermas’s settled view is that (D) spells out a necessary condition of the validityof action-norms in general – that is political, legal and moral norms.29
Let us assume that Habermas is right about the status of (1) and (2) and keep at arm’slength the objection leveled by critics like Benhabib and Charles Larmore that principle (D)is already a substantial principle, freighted with moral content.30 It is a striking fact thatneither Habermas nor any of his followers have ever actually managed to derive (U) formallyor as he says “immanently” from these premises, although Habermas continues to maintainthat such a formal or “immanent” derivation is possible.31 This assertion, however, is open todoubt. For one thing, the best way to show that (U) can be derived immanently (or formally)from those two premises would be actually to derive it.32 The fact that no one has done sosuccessfully is some indication that it cannot be done. This may not be clinching, since, asmany commentators have pointed out, perhaps a weaker form of the justification of (U) willdo the job. Yet, not much progress has been made here. Scholars in the field have shownthat Habermas gradually backs away from the claim that Discourse Ethics stands and fallswith the derivation of (U), and hence that the moral principle can be given a transcendental-pragmatic justification.33 His latest considered position seems to be that only one premise(premise 1 – the rules of argumentation) can strictly speaking be given a transcendental-pragmatic justification. A transcendental-pragmatic justification proceeds by way of demon-strating that the denial of any of the rules of argumentation involves a performative self-contradiction. To my knowledge no one has actually succeeded in carrying out such ajustification of the rules of discourse. Adopting Falstaff’s wise maxim that discretion is the
better part of valor, Habermas contents himself with asserting that it can be done. Until it is,however, even the claim that premise 1 can be given a transcendental-justification is moot,and a rather large question mark hangs over the program of Discourse Ethics.
There is a further, less tractable difficulty haunting the derivation or justification ofprinciple (U) that Habermas continues to maintain is available, which is that to derive (U)– the moral principle – from (1) and (2) – assuming these to be non-moral premises, orpremises at least whose normative status is not that of genuine moral ‘oughts’ – would itselfappear to fall foul of Hume’s law. Skeptical readers who believe that Hume’s law – in oneform or another – is a more robust conjecture than the idea that (U) can be formally derivedfrom, or justified by, premises (1) and (2), will rightly think that Habermas is unwise to takesuch a large theoretical hostage to fortune. If so, it follows that Honneth et. al. are equallyunwise to assume that including Discourse Ethics together with Habermas’s social theoryas set out in Theory of Communicative Action, will help solve the problem of the normativegrounds of his critical social theory; for in truth, as we have seen, it just introduces anotherversion of the same problem further upstream.
3.2.2 (U) is not a substantial moral norm.Of course, Honneth’s solution may have legs even if no argument establishing principle(U) of the transcendental-pragmatic kind, and no argument to (U) from non-moral premisescan be found. For one thing, Habermas himself hedges his bets and claims that, absent aformal derivation, (U) can be derived by abduction or inference to the best explanation.34
Alternatively, as Benhabib argued, maybe a derivation can be had, but it would requiresupplementary, normatively more robust premises, although in that case of course thesepremises would require justification.35
However, there is another, quite different problem with Honneth’s solution, which is thatby Habermas’s own lights, (U) is not a substantial moral norm. On Habermas’s view, principle(U) is a rational reconstruction of the real practice of moral discourse, by which participantsin moral discourse confer validity on candidate moral norms by reaching rationally motivatedagreement. (U) is a rational reconstruction of the practice of moral argumentation in general.It is not a first order moral norm resulting from an actual instance of successful moraldiscourse, but a second order principle that captures the practice by which actual moralnorms are selected. As such (U), properly derived or not, is not the kind of substantialprinciple that could enrich the normative premises of Habermas critical social theory. Henceit is not apt to provide the missing normative grounds of Habermas’s social theory, if theseare understood to be substantial moral reasons.36 In other words, Discourse Ethics is also asideways-on theory, albeit a theory of morality.37 That is, to put it in Habermas’s terms, it is atheory that makes validity claims to truth, namely about whether morality is as the theory says,about the nature and function of moral argumentation etc. As a sideways-on theory it licensestheoretical conclusions about what moral discourse is like, and how it functions; it does notwarrant substantial moral or ethical-political judgments of the social world. Thus the theoryof Discourse Ethics cannot make good the normative deficit of Habermas’s critical socialtheory any more than could the theory of communicative action, of which it forms a part.
Finally, not only is principle (U) not itself a substantial moral norm, the theory of DiscourseEthics itself does not yield any other substantial norms that could serve as the normativegrounds of critical social theory. Habermas likes to say that Discourse Ethics is ‘procedural’in that it leaves the determination of valid moral norms up to participants themselves –participants in real life moral discourses. To hold that Discourse Ethics might supply thesubstantive moral grounds or reasons that would support the normative aims of critical social
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theory is to conflate two different perspectives and tasks of justification: that of moral agentsand participants in moral discourses and that of the social theorist of morality.
3.2.3 Habermas’ Critical Social Theory is not Applied EthicsThese objections block Honneth’s solution to Schnadelbach’s challenge, the solution of an-nexing the program of Discourse Ethics to the theory of communicative action and therebyshoring up critical social theory with a normative moral theory in the basement. For, aswe have seen, neither principle (U), nor the broader program of Discourse Ethics (whethersuccessful or not), are capable of transmitting normative warrant to the claims of criticalsocial theory. And the problem is not that, although designed for this purpose, (U) is notup to this task: Habermas’s social theory does not even set out to criticize society in virtueof its degree of conformity to principle (U) or to any substantive moral principle. Indeed,Habermas denies that this is the proper task of social theory. He explicitly rebukes Rawlsfor thinking that the theorist can criticize society by first designing “the basic norms of awell-ordered society on the drafting table” and then checking society against it.38 Criticalsocial theory, in Habermas’s eyes, is not applied ethics, and cannot derive its normative res-ources from an antecedently worked out moral theory. In this regard, the solution toSchnadelbach’s challenge explicitly put forward by Honneth, and implicitly endorsed byBenhabib, conflicts with Habermas’s entire understanding of the nature and task of criticalsocial theory, and is not one to which he can have recourse.
3.2.4 Boltanski’s SolutionThere is another more sophisticated and more compelling strategy for answering the challengeof Schnadelbach and Taylor, a line of argument that one can find in Luc Boltanski, and thathas been taken up and refined by Robin Celikates and Titus Stahl.39 The strategy is to arguethat a critical theory of society has to adopt a perspective that interlocks with, and drawsupon, the normative reasons and grounds that are adduced by social agents in the course oftheir everyday experience of social reality. In short a critical social theory has to go to workon the ordinary first order criticisms (whether moral, ethical, ethical-political) of agents inthe lifeworld. This, Boltanski argues, would allow agents in the lifeworld to come to see,and to harness, the possibilities for changing social reality that are immanent in this realityitself.40
To an extent, this is indeed what TCA does, particularly in the crucial section VI ofvolume 2. There, Habermas diagnoses the tendencies to crisis and offers an etiology ofsocial pathologies that arise from the decoupling of the system from the lifeworld and fromthe tendency of the former to colonize the latter. In Section VI, Habermas provides verylittle in the way of explicit methodological reflection on his strategy. Elsewhere, however,he is more forthcoming and explicitly argues that the task of a critical social theory is tooffer its expert theories as relevant information, and, in doing so, assist agents and citizensparticipating in “the common business of political discourses among citizens” who areattempting to answer the question “what now?”41
This is, I think, an important observation and sets out a condition that any successfulcritical social theory must meet, and which therefore TCA must meet if it is to succeed in itstask of clarifying and explicating the “communicative infrastructure of largely rationalizedlifeworlds.”42 That said, this clarificatory and explicative task is the task of a theory of societythat remains in all its components a sideways-on theory. Therefore, even if this condition isfulfilled it will not rescue Habermas from the original objection leveled by Schnadelbachand Taylor. It is one thing to claim that a critical theory of society must provide a perspective
that interlocks with the perspective of ordinary social agents and with their moral, ethicaland ethical-political self-understanding, because these are the phenomena the theory is toclarify and explain. It is quite another to suggest that the social theorist can thereby groundhis or her own substantial normative criticisms of society in the ordinary criticisms of socialagents, and thus offer them good practical reasons for changing society. The interlockingperspective does not allow the social theorist to draw on the normative criticisms of ordinarysocial agents, in the sense that she can syphon these up and reissue them from the theoreticalperspective as practical reasons for social change.
4. A Criticism of Schnadelbach’s and Taylor’s Challenge
So far the dilemma that flows from Schnadelbach and Taylor’s original challenge has re-mained unanswered, and the potentially devastating objection that TCA fails in its mainavowed aim still stands. However, there is a way of disarming it. In order to do this, we mustdefuse the objection that, insofar as TCA refrains from passing a substantial normative – thatis broadly moral or ethical – political judgment – it is not a genuinely critical theory. Butwhy should one accept that the only way in which a social theory can be a genuinely criticalone, is that it is in a position to make a certain kind of normative assessment, namely anethical-political, or moral assessment of a form of life?
Criticism is not a uniform practice whose contours are sharply articulated, but a familyof related practices. The nature and function of criticism varies with the different objects ofcriticism – art criticism, philosophical criticism, moral criticism – and so does the variety ofnormativity that colors such criticism. Recall that Habermas claims that his social theory “iscritical both of contemporary social sciences and of the social reality that they are supposed tograsp.”43 In TCA Habermas criticizes the social theories of Lukacs, Horkheimer and Adornoamong others, insofar as he contests their comprehensiveness, their empirical justification,and their truth and coherence. It cannot be said that these are not genuine criticisms ofthose social theories, or that they are not critical enough, because they do not take form ofsubstantial normative judgments, but rather only bring to light inconsistencies, lacunae andother errors. That is precisely what a criticism of a social theory ought to do, and to the extentthat it does, such criticism is good enough.
True, this is not the aspect of Habermas’s social theory that is under question. What isbeing questioned it is its ability to criticize social reality. Nonetheless, the same point holds.For it is also the case that within a particular domain, for example, the domain of the criticismof society, criticisms can differ both in kind and in degree. There are many different waysin which social reality can be criticized. One way is to make the kind of strong evaluationor the substantial ethical-political judgment that Taylor and Schnadelbach look for and findwanting in Habermas, and that, according to Boltanski, social agents make in the course oftheir ordinary lives.
Another way is to uncover conflicts and inconsistencies in a society and its self-conception.Habermas’s distinctive way of criticizing modern society in TCA is to uncover a certaintendency toward self-stultification and destabilization within rationalized lifeworlds, whererationalization takes the form of colonization, namely the marketization and bureaucratizationof social domains that were not hitherto organized along market or bureaucratic lines. He thenattempts to show how these processes give rise to a whole gamut of different pathologicaleffects at the different levels of culture, society and persons. This is far thicker than a meredescription of the way things are, but thinner than a substantial normative judgment of theway society ought to be.
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This brings into focus an important feature of Schnadelbach’s and Taylor’s challenge. Itlooked potentially so devastating because it claimed that Habermas failed in his aim of vin-dicating the critical standards of his own social theory, and because that is the central aim ofTCA. But in requiring it to make substantial normative judgments of the criticized society, theyassume that only one kind of normative criticism will do, and only with the help of this mis-taken assumption, can they reach the conclusion that TCA fails in the main task it sets itself.
How has this come to pass? I believe that Schnadelbach and Taylor have been misled bythe backwards reading of TCA into thinking that Habermas is attempting to solve the problemof normative foundations as he diagnoses it in the critical theory of his Frankfurt Schoolpredecessors by building normative grounds or an account of its normative foundations intosomething that resembles a Frankfurt School critical theory.44 However, I think that thiscannot be the case. True, Habermas does spend considerable time in TCA settling accountswith Adorno and Horkheimer, but the theory he actually puts forward, and the kind of socialcriticism it offers, is of a quite different and for all its complexity, of a much more modest kind.
Before we get to that, we should note that Habermas also has a more positive assessmentof the critical contributions of Horkheimer and Adorno. In Habermas’s eyes, the socialcriticisms of his Frankfurt School predecessors, mainly took the form of substantive criticalcontributions to the culture and politics of the Federal Republic of Germany by two of itsmost important citizens and public intellectuals. Their critical theory, in his view, was more ofa philosophically informed and articulated normative social criticism, than it was a criticallyarticulated social theory. Habermas himself continues this tradition of social and politicalcriticism in his voluminous writings in newspapers and journals, written in the main fornon-academic audiences, and which he understands as his contributions as a citizen of theFederal Republic of Germany, and of Europe, and of a unified Germany after 1990.
5. The Normative Question Reconsidered
Bearing in mind the more modest, but nevertheless appropriate, critical aims that TCA has as asideways-on theory of the social, we must still ask what the normative basis of this criticismis, and whether it is justified. I think the answer to this question is not straightforward,because the social theory Habermas actually advances in TCA contains a complex ensembleof interwoven normative conceptions, of various different kinds, the role of which is difficultto discern.
On the macro-level there are several clusters of ideas, which stand in need justification.The first of these are the developmental concepts, such as the notion that modernization canbe understood as a social learning process. If Habermas’s social theory is to be in a positionto criticize “the reality of developed societies inasmuch as they do not make full use of thelearning potential culturally available to them,” then he must provide a developed accountof the normative ideals of orthogenesis and pathogenesis on which his modernization theorydepends.45 Habermas’s theory of social evolution and his work on moral development makea start in this direction, but it remains at the level of an interesting though highly controversialhypothesis, resting on a difficult analogy with the accounts of individual cognitive learningprocesses provided by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg.46
The second cluster of macro-level ideas are the normative notions of proper functioning ornormal functioning that underlie the analysis and critique of society advanced in Volume 2.Of particular importance is the ideal of a balance between the lifeworld and the system.It is not enough to show that the colonization of the lifeworld gives rise to crises in theeconomic and political systems. What needs to be justified is the normative idea of the
proper functioning of a social system. The tendencies towards destabilization and self-stultification that Habermas diagnoses in his colonization thesis can only be demonstratedto be ‘deviations,’ or ‘pathologies,’ in the light of an ideal of an equilibrium between systemand lifeworld, whereby a sustainable ecology between the two spheres is maintained. Theseideals of orthogenesis and normal functioning are by no means self-evident, and one shouldnot doubt the difficulties that stand in the way of their justification.
Along with these macro-level notions, there is a whole table of normative and evaluativenotions that Habermas claims to be the ‘pathological’ effects of colonization at the levelsof culture, society, and person. These include at the level of culture, loss of meaning, andcollective identity; at the level of society, dwindling legitimation, and anomie; and at thelevel of persons, alienation and psychopathologies. The burden of justification with whichthese notions saddle TCA is considerable. Showing convincingly that such effects actuallyarise as a result of the colonization of the lifeworld does not suffice for Habermas’s criticalpurposes. As social criticism his theory requires that for each of these effects something likea threshold or range of normalcy be established, below which (or above which) the effect canbe demonstrated to be a ‘pathology’. It is here that Boltanski’s idea of the two interlockingperspectives is relevant. These pathologies must be theorized from the perspective of socialagents themselves, as effects which are demonstrably bad and or intolerable to them, theycannot simply be inferred from the sideways-on picture of society.
I am not suggesting that such justifications cannot be provided. Habermas has himselfin TCA and elsewhere, as in the examples we have just given, taken some steps in thisdirection. No doubt he could and would, as the genuinely interdisciplinary theorist that heis, incorporate the results of research carried out in other disciplines, such as philosophy,psychoanalysis and anthropology. Finally, some of the theories of Habermas’s successors,such as Axel Honneth’s work on recognition theory, and the attempt to put flesh on thebones of a slender anthropology by formulating the conditions that are minimally necessaryfor a good or successful life, might also prove fruitful for some of these justificatory tasks.My view is that TCA leaves many blanks that need to be filled in – both at the level of thesideways-on theory of society, and at the level of the self-understanding of social agents –before he can claim to have completed the task he claims to have discharged of justifying thenormative grounds of a social theory whose critical aim is to determine the social pathologicaleffects of colonization.
6. Critical Coda
Maeve Cooke has explored some of these difficulties I have raised. She has convincinglyshown, for example, that the idea of a balance between system and lifeworld that Habermaspresupposes cannot be justified on the basis of the idea of the unity of reason, construedas the harmonious interplay of the three rationality spheres. She has also claimed thatthe primary task of Habermas’s critical theory is to determine the pathological effects ofthe colonization process. However, Cooke and I differ fundamentally about what would benecessary to carry out this task. In her view, there is a utopian vision of a rationalized lifeworldprojected by the idealizations contained in the everyday practice of communicative action.This “normative promise,” sufficiently developed, would provide an adequate normativeground for Habermas’s critical social theory in TCA.47 She also claims that this notion isformal and modest, appropriate to the demands of a post-metaphysical theory, and adequateto the more modest version of critical social theory that Habermas actual puts forward inTCA.
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Cooke claims, on the one hand, that it is formal, and modest, and only apt to appraisethe way in which actual arguments are conducted. On the other hand, she allows that theseidealizations connect up to the moral principle, and states that they need to be supportedby some kind of conception of the good as well. So, on her view, the utopian vision endsup looking like a rather more substantial ideal of a democratic egalitarian society wherelegitimate orders are based on a shared concern with the right and the good. That seemsto me to inflate Habermas’s sideways on reconstructive theory into a rich conception ofthe good and right life, in the light of which critical theory can determine for agents whatis pathological and normal, which not only smudges Habermas’s quite strict distinctionbetween the perspective of social theory and that of social agents, but also faces all thevarious difficulties that beset what Rawls calls “comprehensive metaphysical doctrines.”48
As I see it, if Cooke is correct, and such a vision is really implied by the notion ofcommunicative rationality, Schnadelbach’s and Taylor’s objection should not even arise, forin that case, the notion of communicative rationality indeed furnishes adequate grounds forHabermas’s critical theory of society, even on the inflated and I think mistaken view thatthey have of it. For that reason, I side with Schnadelbach and Taylor, against Cooke, inthinking that nothing nearly so rich follows from the idea of communicative action alone.Even if it did, the specter of Hume’s law, and the dilemma it imposes, looms large. Certainly,the richer the utopian vision is, the more apt it would be to provide the normative groundsof Habermas’s critical social theory. At the same time, though, the more dubious it is toclaim that such a vision is implied by Habermas’s sideways-on rational reconstruction of thecommunicative and discursive practices of social agents.
Besides the question of how normatively rich this vision is, there is the question of whocan avail themselves of it. In my view, utopian visions of a rationalized society belong with,and should be theorized at the level of moral norms, ethical values and conceptions of thegood held by social agents. At best, they can serve social agents themselves in the course oftheir everyday communicative and moral practices, but for reasons I have given they are notavailable to the social theorist to deploy at the level of sideways-on theory.49
Conversely, if my argument holds, no part of the sideways-on theory, and a fortiori not theidea of communicative action, will be apt to serve as a criterion in relation to which the wholearray of alleged ‘pathologies’ – even if they can be reliably shown to be effects of the colo-nization process – can be demonstrated to be pathological. Rather, for each of these effects,the operative notion of ‘pathology’ will require its own independent justification and specifi-cation at the level of the self-understanding of social agents. It will also have to be tied in to thesideways-on picture by, say, being shown to be a determinate effect of colonization process.
To return to the opening page of Volume 1 from which we began, Habermas’s claim thatit presents “the beginning of a social theory that is concerned to validate its own criticalstandards” is not just false modesty, for Habermas’s book really only makes a start in thedirection of that methodological task. Famously, Habermas once argued that modernity is anunfinished project: the same is true of The Theory of Communicative Action.50
NOTES
1. Honneth and Joas, Communicative Action: Essays on Jurgen Habermas’s The Theory of Commu-nicative Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 3.
2. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action vol. I (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), xxxix(hereafter TCA I).
3. The passage continues: “since Horkheimer and Adorno made their turn to the critique of instru-mental reason in the early 1940s, this problem has become drastically apparent.” TCA I, 374.
4. TCA I, 377 & 389.5. TCA I, 398.6. TCA I, 398.7. In Habermas’s view the “social life-context reproduces itself both through the media-controlled
purposive-rational actions of its members and through the common will anchored in the communicativepractice of its members.” TCA I, 398.
8. TCA I, 399.9. TCA I, xli.10. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action vol. II (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), 374
(hereafter TCA II).11. TCA II, 375. Herbert Schnadelbach, “The Transformation of Critical Theory,” in Honneth and
Joas eds., Communicative Action, 21.12. Ibid.13. Stefan Breuer’s review is representative here. “Die Depotenzierung der kritischen Theorie,”
Leviathan 10, (1982): 132–146. See also in this context, Ethik und Marx : Moralkritik und normativeGrundlagen der Marxschen Theorie, ed., Emil Angern und Georg Lohmann (Konigstein/Ts. : Hain Verlagbei Athenaum, 1986).
14. Charles Taylor, “Language and Society,” in Honneth and Joas eds., Communicative Action, 31.15. See TCA II, 140–148.16. Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 14.17. See for example, Habermas, Justification and Application (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 49.18. Steven Darwall has argued against Kantian conceptions of the moral that are modelled entirely
on the first personal deliberative standpoint. He argues that there is something irreducibly second personalabout moral reasons. Steven Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability(Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009). My argument here is orthogonal to that debate. I holdjust that no sideways-on theory yields practical reasons for action whether these be properly speaking firstpersonal or second personal.
19. Habermas, “Reply,” in Honneth and Joas eds., Communicative Action, 229.20. Ibid, 230.21. Schnadelbach, “The Transformation of Critical Theory” in Honneth and Joas ed., Communicative
Action, 22.22. Axel Honneth, Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. K. Baynes
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 282.23. I take it that this position is contained in the overall argument of Critique, Norm, and Utopia.
That book is, as its subtitle makes clear ‘a study in the foundations of critical theory’, and culminates in adiscussion of Discourse Ethics. (Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study in the Foundationsof Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 224–355. In claiming that Habermas’scommunicative ethics implies a vision of a political society, Benhabib implies that she agrees with Honneth’sview that it is with a communicative ethics that Habermas supports the normative conclusions of his criticaltheory (Ibid, 348). Indeed on pages 279–282 she more or less states this, although she denies rightly thatDiscourse Ethics is foundationalist. Moreover, the position she attributes to Habermas on this issue is similarto the one that she endorses herself, albeit that she introduces important modifications in the architectonicof communicative ethics.
24. That this idea is advanced by Honneth in Critique of Power, and by Benhabib in Critique, Norm,and Utopia, is good evidence of its being influential, since those two books were themselves very influential.
25. On the different ways in which Discourse Ethics has been construed see Konrad Ott, “Wiebegrundet man ein Diskursprinzip der Moral? Ein neuer Versuch zu >U< und >D<”, in his Vom Begrundenzum Handeln (Attempto Verlag, Tubingen GmbH, 1996), 12–51.
26. (U) states that: “a norm is valid if and only if the foreseeable consequences and side effects of itsgeneral observance for the interests and value-orientations of each individual could be freely accepted jointlyby all concerned.” Die Einbeziehung des Anderen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 60. (HereafterDEA.)
27. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 92.(Hereafter MCCA) More recently he formulates premise (1) as ‘the implicit content of the universalpreconditions of argumentation’ DEA, 61.
28. MCCA, 92 & 97. Habermas also claims that premise (2) consists in the participants’ knowl-edge of ‘what it means to discuss hypothetically whether norms of action should be adopted.’ MCCA,92 & 198.
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29. (D) states that: “only those norms can claim validity that could meet with the acceptance ofall concerned in practical discourse. DEA, 59. See also MCCA, 66. Clarifying his conception of a norm,Habermas writes, “I understand “action norms” as temporally, socially and substantively generalized be-havioural expectations.” Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Lawand Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 107. (Hereafter BFN)
30. Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia; Charles Larmore, “The Moral Basis of Political Liberal-ism,” Journal of Philosophy 96: 12 (1999): 599–625.
33. Ott, “Wie begrundet man ein Diskursprinzip der Moral? Ein neuer Versuch zu >U< und >D<”,12–51; Lumer, “Habermas’ Diskursethik,” 42–64.
34. DEA, 60.35. Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, 298–309.36. What applies to (U) here, applies in spades to (D) which by Habermas’s lights is not even a moral
procedural principle, but one that is supposed to be “neutral” or “initially indifferent vis a vis morality andlaw”. BFN, 107 & 121.
37. Note the comparison with Kant’s moral theory. Kant’s moral theory is not a sideways-on theoryof the moral because it does yield some substantial, action guiding moral reasons that tell one what oneought to do and ought not to do. The same is true of utilitarianism.
38. Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, ed., Peter Dews (London: Verso, 1986), 202; Habermas,The Past as Future, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 101.
39. Robin Celikates, Kritik als soziale Praxis. Gesellschaftliche Selbstverstandigung und kritischeTheorie (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2009). See also “From Critical Social Theory to a SocialTheory of Critique” Constellations 13:1 (2006): 21–40.
40. “Elles [les theories critiques] doivent aller a la rencontre de ces critique ordinaires comme si ellesen emanaient et ne faisaient que les devoiler a elles-memes, en amenant les acteurs a reconnaıtre ce qu’ilsconnaissaient deja, mais, en quelque sorte, sans le savoir, a realiser ce en quoi consiste la realite, et, parcette operation de mise en lumiere, a prendre leurs distance avec cette realite comme s’il etait possible d’ensortir – de s’en sortir –, de facon a envisage la possibilite d’actions destinees a la changer.” Luc Boltanski,De La Critique: Precis de sociologie de l’emancipation (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 21.
41. Habermas, “Noch einmal: Zum Verhaltnis von Theorie und Praxis” in Wahrheit und Recht-fertigung, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 319–34. See also Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity(London: Verso, 1992), 200–1, and “Themes in Post-Metaphysical Thinking” in Habermas, Postmetaphys-ical Thinking (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 28–57.
42. See note 11 above.43. TCA II, 374.44. Labelling Habermas a second-generation Frankfurt School encourages the same assumption as
the backwards reading of TCA, namely that Habermas is attempting to provide something resembling aFrankfurt School critical theory, which is capable of providing an account of its own normative foundations.The critical social theory that Habermas develops in TCA is theoretically unique and has no such ancestry.To that extent it might be more helpful to label him a first-generation Starnberg theorist.
45. TCA II, 374.46. See for example Hans-Peter Kruger, “Communicative Action or the Mode of Communication for
Society as a Whole,” in Honneth and Joas eds., Communicative Action, 140–164.47. “The concept of communicative rationality has a utopian content to the extent that it points
toward a vision of a rationalized lifeworld where cultural traditions would be reproduced through processesof intersubjective evaluations of validity claims, where legitimate orders would be dependent on critical andopen argumentative practices for establishing and justifying norms, and where individual identities wouldbe self-regulated through processes of critical reflection.” Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason. A Study ofHabermas’s Pragmatics (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997), 162.
48. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 243 & 253.49. The much thinner normative notions concerning the proper functioning of social systems, the
balance between lifeworld and system, and the orthogenesis of the modernization process, however, arerequired by, and can be properly part of, that sideways-on theory.
50. This article has benefitted from improvements I made in the light of comments received fromTimo Juetten, Maeve Cooke, Clava Brodsky, Huw Rees, Titus Stahl, and David Strecker.
James Gordon Finlayson is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussexand Director of the Centre for Social and Political Thought there. He has written widely onEuropean philosophy and Critical Theory. His most recent writings are on Adorno and thepromise of happiness (European Journal of Philosophy, 2012) and on feminist criticisms ofDiscourse Ethics (Dialogue, Politics and Gender, ed. Jude Browne, CUP 2013.)
