Public
Deliberation Over Positivist Decisionism and Technocracy
The
essays in Towards
a Rational Society (German
1968 and 1969, English 1970) and Theory
and Practice (German
1971, English 1973b) were written on the heels of Structural
Transformation.
They were written amidst the “postivism
dispute”
in Germany about the relation between the natural and social
sciences. The (somewhat inaccurately labeled) “positivist” side
of this debate took scientific inquiry as the sole paradigm of
knowledge and generally thought of the social sciences as analogous
to the natural sciences. Following Adorno, Habermas argued against a
positivistic understanding of the social sciences.
For
Habermas, positivism is comprised of three claims: (1) knowledge
consists of causal explanations cast in terms of basic laws or
principles (for example, laws of nature), (2) knowledge passively
reflects or mirrors independently existing natural facts, (3)
knowledge is about what is,
not what ought
to be.
He calls these claims scientism, objectivism, and value-neutrality.
He said each can be pernicious, especially in the social scientific
realm. Scientism fosters the view that only causal and empirically
verifiable hypotheses can count as true knowledge. Objectivism seems
to falsely naturalize the world by ignoring how lived experiences,
human subjectivity, and interests can structure the object domain
that gets identified as relevant or worthy of study. Lastly,
value-neutrality misleads us into thinking that the role of knowledge
is purely descriptive and technical. Values or preferences are seen
as separate from knowledge and, as such, wholly subjective “givens”
lying beyond rational justification. In turn, knowledge is seen as a
tool for efficiently controlling the environment so as to realize
whatever values an agent happens to hold. Ironically, this fails to
see the tacit value commitments already inscribed in this general
paradigm of knowledge.
Habermas’
critique makes sense given his place in Frankfurt Critical Theory.
Despite differences with the first generation, he shares the
decidedly non-neutral commitments to human emancipation,
interdisciplinarity, and self-reflexive theory. Like Horkheimer and
Adorno, Habermas worried the prior ascendancy of positivism had left
influences on our conceptualizations of knowledge and social inquiry
that were hard for even reflective positivists to leave behind.
Indeed, he critiques Karl R. Popper’s account of inquiry and
knowledge even though it rejects what Habermas calls objectivism. In
opposition to a positivist picture of knowledge merely mirroring the
world, Habermas holds the Frankfurt School’s
Hegelian-Marxist-inspired conception of a dialectical relation
between knowledge and world. Finally, like his Frankfurt School
contemporaries, Habermas was concerned that positivism had left
subtle yet pernicious impacts on politics.
In
early writings Habermas is especially critical of two related trends,
decisionism and technocracy, that stem from a positivistic
understanding of political science and practice. Decisionism starts
from the assumption that there is no such thing as the public
interest, but rather a clash of inherently subjective values that do
not (even in principle) admit of rational persuasion or agreement. It
follows that political elites must either simply decide between
competing values or base policy on their aggregation. Either way,
political value preferences are taken as brute or static facts; there
is no sense in which reasoned argumentation and persuasion could
genuinely transform such preferences or lead people to a new
understanding of their values. Technocracy builds from this point by
emphasizing the “objective necessities” (Sachzwänge)
supposedly involved in a political system—economic growth, social
stability, national security—and highlighting the increasing
ability of policy experts to advise political leaders about
strategies for optimally realizing these goals. The worry with this
approach is that questions about what
specific type of
growth, stability, and security we seek (and why) are removed from
debate by definitional fiat. In decisionism, political legitimacy
flows from periodic expressions of acclamation or disapproval at the
way leaders have manifested predefined values. In technocracy,
legitimacy supposedly flows from the ability of politicians to find
and follow expert advice so as to attain fixed outcomes pre-defined
by “objective necessities.” Both models render the potentially
transformative effects of public deliberation superfluous. Legitimacy
is seen as flowing from either certain outcomes or periodic
expressions of aggregate preference.
Habermas
thinks both models are extremely problematic accounts of democratic
political practice and legitimacy. While Structural
Transformation only
gestured at how the normative potential of the public sphere could be
reinvigorated in contemporary circumstances, this theme received
increasing attention in works such as Legitimation
Crisis (German
1973, English 1975), Theory
of Communicative Action,
and Between
Facts and Norms (German
1992, English 1996). An account of democratic legitimacy that combats
decisionism and technocracy is an enduring concern. Indeed, despite
championing the European Union he has continued to critique
technocracy by criticizing the way in which it has arisen and is
currently structured (2008, 2009, 2012, 2014).
From
Philosophical Anthropology to a Theory of Social Evolution
Knowledge
and Human Interests (German
1968, English 1971) and Communication
and the Evolution of Society (German
1976, English 1979) are two early attempts at a new systematic
framework for Critical Theory. The approaches he uses are akin to the
tradition of “philosophical anthropology” in the German social
theory of the early 1900s that grew out of phenomenology—a
tradition that is quite different from contemporary
anthropology. Knowledge
and Human Interests sought
to overcome positivist epistemology that saw knowledge as simply
discerning static facts, and to give a plausible account of the
dialectical relation between knowledge (theory) and world (practice).
Habermas’ main claim was that the knowledge of scientific and
social progress is tacitly guided by three types of “knowledge
constitutive interests”—technical, practical, and
emancipatory—that are “anthropologically deep-seated” in the
human species.
Knowledge
and Human Interests tries
to recover and develop alternative models of the relation between
theory and practice. The approach is historical and reconstructive in
that it interprets the attempts of prior theorists as part of a
trajectory that Habermas wants to extend. He reviews prior
reformulations of Kant’s “transcendental synthesis” (the
form-legislating activity making objective experience possible) and
his “transcendental unity of apperception” (the unity of the
subject having such experience). He also tries to articulate the way
in which Hegel relocated such synthesis in the historical development
of human subjectivity (absolute
spirit)
and how Marx relocated it in the material use of tools and techniques
(embodied
labor).
Habermas wants to add to such a trajectory by rehabilitating their
shared insight that the constitution of experience is not generated
by transcendental operations but by the worldly natural activities of
the human species. Yet he wants to do this in a way that avoids the
mistakes of Marx and Hegel as well. He tries to do this by building
on his interpretation of Hegel, which was already concisely captured
by his essay Science
and Technology as Ideology (German
1968, included in English 1970).
In
that essay he responded to Herbert Marcuse’s claim that the
technical reason of science inherently embodies
domination. According to Marcuse, under late capitalism the technical
reason of science functions ideologically to collapse intersubjective
practical questions about how we want to live together into technical
questions about how to control the world to get what we want.
Habermas shares Marcuse’s concerns, as his criticism of technocracy
makes clear. Yet he thinks this dynamic is contingent because,
taken as an emergent collective project, humankind constitutes how
the world shows up in experience through its worldly activity. More
specifically, Habermas identifies two irreducibly distinct and
dialectically related modes of human self-formation, “labor” and
“interaction.” Whereas labor is an action type that aims at
technical control to achieve success, interaction is an action type
that aims at mutual understandings embodied in consensual norms.
Marcuse’s claim (and his remedy of a “new science”) would only
stand if the “interaction” of intersubjective collective
political choice—including the question of how we use
technology—was somehow subsumed or rendered superfluous by the
“labor” of technological progress in controlling the external
world. But, given Habermas’ views in this period, this is
impossible. Interaction and labor seem to be pitched as irreducible
and invariant categories of human experience. Neither can be dropped
nor can one be subsumed in the other—even if their relation becomes
unbalanced.
}In Knowledge
and Human Interests,
this division between labor and interaction is recast as the
technical and practical interests of humankind. The technical
interest is in the material
reproduction of
the species through labor on nature. Humans use tools and
technologies to manage nature for material accommodation. The
practical interest is in the social
reproduction of
human communities through intersubjective norms of culture and
communication. Human social life requires members who can understand
each other, share expectations, and achieve cooperation. In a sense,
these interests are the “most fundamental.” Moreover, the
knowledge that flows from them is supposed to slowly accrue over time
in the enduring institutions of society: theoretical knowledge driven
by the technical interest in controlling nature accrues in the
“empirical-analytic” sciences, and normative knowledge driven by
the practical interest in mutual understandings accrues in the
interpretive “historical-hermeneutic” sciences.
But,
going beyond Science
and Technology as Ideology,
in Knowledge
and Human InterestsHabermas
adds a third “emancipatory” human interest in freedom and
autonomy. The labor of material reproduction and the interaction
norms of social reproduction require, in a weak sense, psychosocial
mechanisms to repress or deny basic drives and impulses that would
destroy material and social reproduction. For instance, labor
requires delayed gratification and social interaction requires
internalized notions of obligation, reciprocity, shame, guilt, and so
forth. Unfortunately, psychosocial mechanisms of control are often
used far more than they need to be to secure material and social
reproduction. Indeed, perverse incentives to rely on such mechanisms
may even arise: if the burdens and benefits of material and social
reproduction processes become unfairly distributed across groups and
solidified over time, then those in power may find psychosocial
mechanisms useful. If women are falsely taught there are natural laws
of gender relations such that the dominant patterns of marriage and
domestic work that consistently disadvantage them are the best they
can hope for, this is an ideological mechanism
of social control. It is the limitation of freedom and autonomy for
no purpose other than domination, and it “functions” through
systematically distorted communication.
Habermas
posits a human interest in using self-reflection and insight to
combat ideologically veiled, superfluous social domination so as to
realize freedom and autonomy. While there is no clearly
institutionalized set of sciences where the knowledge spurred on by
such an interest would accrue, Habermas points to Marx’s critique
of ideology and Freud’s psychoanalytic dissolution of repression as
demonstrating a cognitive viewpoint that focuses on neither
(efficient) work nor (legitimate) interaction but (free) identity
formation liberated from internalized systematically distorted
communication. Here Habermas takes his lead from Kant’s idea that
reason aims to emancipate itself from “self-incurred tutelage,”
and tries to forge a link between theory (reason) and practice (in
the sense of self-realization) through using critical reflection on
self and society to unveil and dissolve internalized oppressive power
structures that betray one’s own true interests.
Knowledge
and Human Interests was
envisioned as a preface for two other books that would jointly
challenge the separation of theory and practice. However, the project
was never finished. On the one hand, Habermas felt that vibrant
critiques of positivism in the philosophy of science made the rest of
the project superfluous. On the other, the work encountered heavy
criticism. For starters, Habermas seems to pitch work and interaction
as real action
types. But, if we account for how work is communicatively structured,
interaction is teleologically ordered, and how historical notions of
work and interaction structure one’s sense of freedom, then it is
clear these can be at best idealizations. Moreover, as even
sympathetic interpreters noted, his account of an emancipatory
interest seemed to blur together reflection on “general
presuppositions and conditions of valid knowledge and action” with
“reflection on the specific formative history of a particular
individual or group” (Giddens, McCarthy, 95). Lastly, his
stipulation of knowledge-constitutive interests seemed to reproduce
the sort of foundationalism he wished to avoid.
Given
such criticism, it may seem surprising that Communication
and the Evolution of Societyreconstructs
Marx’s historical materialism as a theory of social evolution. This
sounds foundationalist and deterministically teleological. These
impressions are misleading. Around this time Habermas began
presenting his work as a “research program” with tentative and
fallible claims evaluable by theoretical discourses. Moreover, while
he speaks of evolution, he uses the term differently than
19th century philosophies of history (Hegel, Marx, Spencer) or
later Darwinian accounts. His “social evolution” is neither a
merely path-dependent accumulative directionality nor a progressive,
strongly teleological realization of an ideal goal. Instead, he
envisions a society’s latent potentials as tending to unfold
according to an immanent developmental logic similar to the
developmental logic cognitive-developmental psychologists claim
maturing people normally follow. Lastly, Habermas’ theory of social
evolution avoids worries about determinism by distinguishing between
the logic and
the mechanisms of
development such that evolution is neither inevitable, linear,
irreversible, nor continuous. A brief sketch of his theory follows.
Habermas
characterizes human society as a system that integrates material
production (work) and normative socialization (interaction) processes
through linguistically coordinated action. This is qualitatively
different from the static and transitive status hierarchy systems of
even other “social” animals. In various human epochs the
linguistic coordination of these processes crystalizes around
different “organizational principles” that are the “institutional
nucleus” of social integration. In the most basic societies kinship
structures play this role by (to take just one possible
configuration) dividing labor and specifying socialization
responsibilities through sex-based roles and norms. Habermas claims
this organizational principle was replaced by political order in
traditional societies and the economy in liberal capitalist
societies. Social evolution in general and the particular movements
from one “nucleus” to the next stem from learning in material and
social reproduction.
Understood
as ideal types, work and interaction mark out different ways of
relating to the world. On the one hand, in material production one
mainly adopts an instrumental perspective that tries to control an
object in conformity to one’s will. In this orientation, learning
is gauged by success in controlling the world and the resultant
knowledge is cognitive-technical. On the other, in social
reproduction one mainly adopts a communicative perspective that tries
to coordinate actions and expectations through consensually agreed
upon normative standards. In this orientation learning is gauged by
mutual understanding and the resultant knowledge is moral-practical.
Each learning process follows its own logic. But, since the processes
are integrated in the same social system, advances in either type of
knowledge can yield internal tensions or incongruities. These cannot
be suppressed by force or ideology for long, and eventually need to
be solved by more learning or innovation. If these internal tensions
are too great, they induce a crisis requiring an entirely new
“institutional nucleus.”
For
Habermas, the slow social learning in history is the sedimentation of
iterated processes of individual learning that accumulates in social
institutions. While there is no unified macro-subject that learns,
social evolution is also not mere happenstance plus inertia. It is
the indirect outcome of individual learning processes, and such
processes unfold with a developmental logic or deep structure of
learning: “the fundamental mechanism for social evolution in
general is to be found in an automatic inability not to learn. Not
learning but not-learning is
the phenomenon that calls for explanation” (LC, 15; also see Rapic
2014, 68). Habermas posits a universal developmental logic that tends
to guide individual learning and maturation in technical-instrumental
and moral-practical knowledge. He discerns this logic in the
complementary research of Jean Piaget in cognitive development and
Lawrence Kohlberg in the development of moral judgment. As social and
individual learning are linked, such underlying logic has slowly
created homologies—similarities in sequence and form—between:
(i.) individual ego-development and group identity, (ii.) individual
ego-development and world-perspectives, and (iii.) the individual
ego-development of moral judgment and the structures of law and
morality (Owen 2002, 132). Habermas pays more attention to the last
homology and later writings focus on Kohlberg, so it is instructive
to focus there (1990b).
Kohlberg’s
research on how children typically develop moral judgment yielded a
schema of three levels (pre-conventional, conventional, and
post-conventional) and six stages (punishment-obedience,
instrumental-hedonism/relativism, “good-boy-nice-girl”,
legalistic social-contract/law-and-order, universal ethical
principles). Two stages correspond to each level. Habermas follows
Kohlberg’s three levels in claiming we can retrospectively discern
pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional phases through
which societies have historically developed. Just as normal
individuals who progress from child to adult pass through levels
where different types of reasons are taken to be acceptable for
action and judgment, so too we can retrospectively look at the
development of social integration mechanisms in societies as having
been achieved in progressive phases where legal and moral
institutions were structured by underlying organizational principles.
Habermas
slightly diverges from the six stages of Kohlberg’s schema by
proposing a schema of neolithic societies, archaic civilizations,
developed civilizations, and early modern societies. Neolithic
societies organized interaction via kinship and mythical worldviews.
They also resolved conflicts via feuds appealing to an authority to
mediate disputes in a pre-conventional way to restore the status quo.
Archaic civilizations organized interaction via hierarchies beyond
kinship and tailored mythical worldviews backing such hierarchies.
Conflicts started to be resolved via mediation appealing to an
authority relying on more abstract ideas of justice—punishment
instead of retaliation, assessment of intentions, and so forth.
Developed civilizations still organized interaction conventionally,
but adopted a rationalized worldview with post-conventional moral
elements. This allowed conflicts to be mediated by a type of law
that, while rooted in a community’s (conventional) moral framework,
was separable from the authority administering it. Finally, with
early modern societies, we find certain domains of interaction are
post-conventionally structured. Moreover, a sharper divide between
morality and legality emerges such that conflicts can be legally
regulated without presupposing shared morality or needing to rely on
the cohering force of mythical worldviews backing hierarchies
(McCarthy 1978, 252).
Obviously,
this sketch is rather vague and needs further elaboration. This is
especially true in light of the ways a superficial reading (that
takes social evolution as strictly parallel rather than homologous to
individual development) lends itself to unsavory developmentalist
narratives. Yet, apart from a few later writings, Habermas has not
returned to his theory of social evolution in a systematic way.
Several secondary authors have tried to fill in the details (Rockmore
1989, Owen 2002, Brunkhorst 2014, Rapic 2014). Nevertheless, Habermas
still endorses the contours of his theory of social evolution: these
ideas show up in Theory
of Communicative Action and
his later writings on the nature and development of legality and
democratic legitimacy bear a loose connection to this early work
(especially the final homology above) insofar as they are tailored
for specifically post-conventional societies. Yet, before turning to
his democratic theory, we must tackle the hugely important
intervening body of work concerning his communicative turn and its
articulation in his Theory
of Communicative Action.
The Linguistic Turn into the Theory of Communicative Action
Habermas’
engagement with speech act theory and hermeneutics in the late 1960s
and 70s started a linguistic turn that came to full fruition
in Theory
of Communicative Action.
This turn makes sense after both Knowledge
and Human Interests and Communication
and the Evolution of Society.
He came to see the knowledge-constitutive interests of the former as
illicitly relying on assumptions in the philosophy of consciousness
and Kantian transcendentalism, while the reconstructed phases of
social learning and evolution in the latter can seem far too
naturalistic or foundationalist. In contrast, a focus on
communicative structures let him form his own pragmatic theory of
meaning, rationality, and social integration based in reconstructions
of the competencies and normative presuppositions underlying
communication. This approach is transcendental and naturalistic but
only weakly so. Far from an account of ultimate foundations, his
approach takes itself to be a post-metaphysical methodology for
philosophical and social scientific research into practical reason.
From the start of his linguistic turn until well after Theory
of Communicative Action this
approach underwent revisions. In what follows, only a broad outline
of this trajectory is given.
Habermas
has cited his 1971 Gauss lectures at Princeton (German publication
1984b, English publication 2001) as the first clear expression of the
linguistic turn, but it was also evident in On
the Logic of the Social Sciences (German
1967, English 1988a). His first truly systematic foray in
Anglo-American philosophy of language came with What
is Universal Pragmatics? (German
1976b, included in English 1979). His ideas were then revised further
in Theory
of Communicative Action.
While the development of his ideas throughout this period is an
important exegetical task, for present purposes the broad way he
takes up speech act theory is what is important: he accepts the
division in linguistics between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. He
considers each division to be reconstructing the tacit system of
rules used by competent speakers to recognize the well-formed-ness
(syntax), meaningfulness (semantics), and success (pragmatics) of
speech. His main interpretive twist is that the theories of
truth-conditional propositional meaning often associated with
philosophical projects regarding language only locate part of
the meaning of speech. Thus, he moves away from meaning based on the
correspondence theory of truth and gives an account of the unique
pragmatic validity behind the meaning of speech.
While
his linguistic turn is sometimes cast as a break with prior theory,
his interpretive approach actually coheres quite well with his early
critique of positivism. He has always rejected the idea that language
simply states things about the world. Instead of merely analyzing
propositions that either do (true) or do not (false) obtain in the
world, he is interested in the full range of ways people uselanguage.
He claims that, instead of focusing on sentences, a complete theory
of language would focus on contextual utterances as
the most basic unit of meaning. Thus, he developed a formal
pragmatics (called “universal pragmatics” in early work).
Building on the work of Karl Bühler, he conceives of the pragmatic
use of language in context as embedding sentences in relations
between speaker, hearer, and the world. This embedding helps to
intersubjectively stabilize such relations. Habermas claims that, in
uttering a speech act speakers mean something
(express subjective intentions), do something
(interact with or appeal to a hearer) and say something
(cognitively represent the world). While truth-conditional theories
of meaning focus on cognitive representations of the world, Habermas
prioritizes the pragmatics of
speech acts over the semantic or syntactical analysis of sentences.
What is done through
speech is taken to be what is most basic for meaning.
During
his linguistic turn Habermas appropriated several ideas from John
Searle. Even though Searle has not always fully agreed with such
appropriations, two of them are useful points of orientation (Searle
2010, 62). Habermas adopts Searle’s idea of the constitutive rules
underlying language: just like the rules of a game define what counts
as a legitimate move or status, so too there is an implicit
rule-governed structure to the use of language by competent speakers.
He also adopts Searle’s view, built on JL Austin’s work, that
speech has a double structure of both propositional content and
illocutionary force. For instance, the propositional content of “it
is snowy in Chicago” is a representation of the world. But the same
content can be used in different illocutionary modes: as a warning to
drive carefully, as a plea to delay travel, as a question or answer
in a larger conversation, and so on. Moreover, beyond such
illocutionary force, all speech acts also have derivative
perlocutionary effects that, unlike illocution,
are not internally connected
to the meaning of what is said. A warning about snow may elicit
annoyance or gratitude, but such responses are contextually inferred
and not necessarily connected to either the propositional content or
the warning itself.
These
ideas about the structure of speech highlight a few key points.
First, Habermas takes perlocutionary success (for example, eliciting
gratitude) to be parasitic on illocutionary force (for example, the
speech is perceived as a warning, not a plea). Attaining success with
others by realizing one’s intention in the world is secondary to
achieving an understanding with them. For example, even when lying,
the lie only works by first coming to a false understanding that what
is being said is true. Second, he identifies three modes of
communication—cognitive, interactive, and expressive—that depend
on whether a speaker’s main illocutionary intention is to raise a
truth claim of propositional content, a claim of rightness for an
act, or a claim of sincerity about psychological states. Third, he
identifies corresponding speech act types—constatives, regulatives,
and expressives—that, seen from the perspective of a competent
language user, contain immanent obligations to redeem the
aforementioned claims by respectively providing grounds, articulating
justifications, or proving sincerity and trustworthiness.
In
short, Habermas thinks there are general presuppositions of
communicative competence and possible understanding that underlie
speech and which require speakers to take responsibility for the
“fit” between an utterance and inner, outer, and social worlds.
For any speech act oriented towards mutual understanding, there is a
presumed fit of sincerity to
the speaker’s inner world, truth to
the outer world, and rightness to
what is inter-subjectively done in the social world. Naturally, these
presumptions are defeasible. Yet, the point is that speakers who want
to reach an agreement have to presuppose sincerity,
truth and rightness so as to be able to mutually accept something as
a fact, valid norm, or subjectively held experience.
For
Habermas these elements form the “validity basis of speech.” He
claims that, by uttering a speech act, a speaker is seen as also
potentially raising three “validity claims”: sincerity for what
is expressed, rightness for what is done, and truth for what is said
or presupposed. Depending on the speech act type, one claim often
predominates (for example, constatives raise a validity claim of
truth) and, more often than not, speech rests on undisturbed
background agreements about facts, norms, and experiences. Moreover,
minor disagreement can be quickly resolved through clarifying
meaning, reminding others of facts, asking about preexisting
commitments, highlighting situational features, and so on. Habermas
sometimes refers to such minor communicative repairs as “everyday
speech.” But when disagreement persists we may need to transition
to what Habermas calls “discourse”: a particular mode of
communication in which a hearer asks for reasons that would back up a
speaker’s validity claim. In discourse the validity claims that are
always immanent within speech become explicit.
Clearly,
Habermas uses “validity” in an odd way. The notion of validity is
most often used in formal logic where it refers to the preservation
of truth when inferentially moving from one proposition to another in
an argument. This is not how Habermas uses the term. What then does
he mean by validity? It is instructive to look at the assumptions
behind his theory of meaning. When his model of meaning emphasizes
what language does over
what it merely says or means the
operative assumption is that the primary
function of
speech is to arrive at mutual understandings enabling conflict-free
interaction. Moreover, at least with respect to claims of truth and
rightness, he assumes genuine and stable understandings arise out of
the give and take of reasons.
Claims of truth and rightness are paradigmatically cognitive in
that they admit of justification through reasons offered in
discourse. What Habermas means by validity then is a close structural
relationship between the give and take of reasons and either
achieving an understanding or (more strongly) a consensus that allows
for conflict-free interaction. This yields an “acceptability
theory” of meaning where the acceptance of norms is always open to
further debate and refinement through better reasons.
As
we cannot know in advance what reasons will bear on a given issue,
only robust and open discourses license us to take the (provisional)
consensuses we do achieve as valid. Habermas therefore formulates
formal and counterfactual conditions—the “pragmatic
presuppositions” of speech and the “ideal speech situation”—that
describe and set standards for the type of reason-giving that mutual
understandings must pass through before we can regard them as valid
(on these formal conditions and how understanding and consensus may
differ see below and section 4). At the same time, we never start
this give-and-take of reasons from scratch. People are born into
cultures operating on background understandings that are embodied in
inherited norms of action. Borrowing from Husserl and others,
Habermas calls this stock of understandings the “lifeworld.”
The
lifeworld is an important if somewhat slippery idea in Habermas’
work. One way to understand his particular interpretation of it is
through the lens of his debate with Gadamer. Broadly speaking,
Habermas agrees with the view of language held by Gadamer and
hermeneutics generally: language is not simply a tool to convey
information, its most basic form is dialogic use in
context, and it has an inbuilt aim of understanding. On such a view,
objectivity is not just correspondence to an independent world but
instead something that is ascribed to mutual understandings (about
the world, relations to others, and oneself) intersubjectively
achieved in communication. Moreover, communication has an underlying
structure that makes understandings possible in the first place.
Meaning is therefore in some sense parasitic on this background
structure.
On
this much Gadamer and Habermas agree. But Gadamer takes all this to
mean that explicit understanding and misunderstanding are only
possible due to a taken-for-granted understanding of cultural
belonging and socialization into a natural language. Habermas agrees
that culture and socialization are important, but is worried that
Gadamer’s take on the background structures that form the
“conditions of possibility” for meaning yields a relativistic
“absolutization of tradition.” On Habermas’ interpretation the
lifeworld encompasses the sort of belonging and socialization
referred to by Gadamer, but it works with and is underpinned by
certain deep structures of communication itself. For Habermas,
the complementarity between
the lifeworld and a particular manifestation of these deep structures
in discourse and “communicative action” (below) is what lets one
interrogate and progressively revise parts of the background stock of
inherited understandings and validity claims, thereby avoiding either
relativism or the dogmatic veneration of tradition.
For
Habermas the lifeworld is a reservoir of taken-for-granted practices,
roles, social meanings, and norms that constitutes a shared horizon
of understanding and possible interactions. The lifeworld is a
largely implicit “know-how” that is holistically structured and
unavailable (in its entirety) to conscious reflective control. We
pick it up by being socialized into the shared meaning patterns and
personality structures made available by the social institutions of
our culture: kinship, education, religion, civil society, and so on.
The lifeworld sets out norms that structure our daily interactions.
We don’t usually talk about the norms we use to regulate our
behavior. We simply assume they stand on good reasons and deploy them
intuitively.
But
what if someone willfully breaks or explicitly rejects a norm? This
calls for discourse to explain and repair the breach or alter the
norm. As a micro-level example: if someone breaks a promise then they
will be asked to justify their behavior with good reasons or
apologize. Such communication is also called for when norms suffer
more serious breakdowns: one may question the reasons behind norms
and whether they remain valid, or run into a new and complex
situation where it is unclear which norms, how, to what extent, and
if they apply. Regardless of how serious the norm breach or breakdown
is, we need to engage in discourse to repair, refine, and replenish
shared norms that let us avoid conflict, stabilize expectations, and
harmonize interests. Discourse is the legitimate
modern mechanism to repair the lifeworld; it embodies what Habermas
calls “communicative action.”
Communicative
action can be seen as a practical attitude or way of engaging others
that is highly consensual and that fully embodies the inbuilt aim of
speech: reaching a mutual understanding. In later writings Habermas
distinguishes weak and strong communicative action. The weak form is
an exchange of reasons aimed at mutual understanding. The strong form
is a practical attitude of engagement seeking fairly robust
cooperation based in consensus about the substantive content of a
shared enterprise. This allows solidarity to flourish. In either
form, communicative action is distinct from “strategic action,”
wherein socially interacting people aim to realize their own
individual goals by using others like tools or instruments (indeed,
he calls this type of action “instrumental” when it is solitary
or non-social). A key difference between strategic and communicative
action is that strategic actors have a fixed, non-negotiable
objective in mind when entering dialogue. The point of their
engagement is to appeal, induce, cajole, or compel others into
complying with what they think it takes to bring their objective
about. In contrast, communicatively acting parties seek a mutual
understanding that can serve as the basis for cooperation. In
principle, this involves openness to an altered understanding of
one’s interests and aims in the face of better reasons and
arguments.
The
contrast between communicative and strategic action is
tightly linked to the distinction between communicative and
purposive rationality.
Purposive rationality is when an actor adopts an orientation to the
world focused on cognitive knowledge about it, and uses that
knowledge to realize goals in the world. As noted, it has social
(strategic) and non-social (instrumental) variants. Communicative
rationality is when actors also account for their relation to one
another within the norm-guided social world they inhabit, and try to
coordinate action in a conflict free manner. On this model of
rationality, actors not only care about their own goals or following
the relevant norms others do, but also challenging and revising them
on the basis of new and better reasons.
Approaching
rationality after action orientations is not merely stylistic.
Habermas notes that while many theorists start with rationality and
then analyze action, the view of action that such an order of
analysis primes us to accept can tacitly smuggle in quasi-ontological
connotations about the possible relations actors can have amongst
themselves and to the world. Indeed, this mistake figures into
Habermas’ critique of Weber’s account of the progressive social
rationalization ushered in by modernity. Weber framed Western
rationalism in terms of “mastery of the world” and then naturally
assumed the rationalization of society simply meant increased
purposive rationality. As is apparent from Habermas’ account of
social learning, this is not the only way to understand the
“evolution” of societies or the species as a whole throughout
history. By expanding rationality beyond purposive rationality
Habermas is able to resist the Weberian conclusion that had been
attractive to Horkheimer and Adorno: that modernity’s increasing
“rationalization” yielded a world devoid of meaning, people
focused on control for their own individual ends, and that the spread
of enlightenment rationality went conceptually hand-and-glove with
domination. Habermas feels the notion of rationality in his Theory
of Communicative Action resists
such critiques.
The
contrast between communicative and strategic action mainly
concerns how an
action is pursued. Indeed, while these action orientations are
mutually exclusive when seen from an actor’s perspective, the same
goal can often be approached in either communicative or strategic
ways. For instance, in my rural town I may have a discussion with
neighbors whereby we determine we share an interest in having snow
cleared from our road, and that the best way to do this is by taking
turns clearing it. This could count as an instance of communicative
action. But, imagine a wealthy and powerful recluse who is
indifferent to his neighbors. He could just pay a snowplow to clear
the road up until his driveway. He could also use his power to
manipulate or threaten others to clear the snow for him (for example,
he could call the mayor and hint he may withhold a campaign donation
if the snow is not cleared). Strategic action is about eliciting,
inducing, or compelling behavior by others to realize one’s
individual goals. This differs from communicative action, which is
rooted in the give-and-take of reasons and the “unforced force”
of the best argument justifying an action norm.
Strategic
action and purposive rationality are not always undesirable. There
are many social domains where they are useful and expected. Indeed,
they are often needed because communicative action is very demanding
and modern societies are so complex that meeting these demands all
the time is impossible. Speakers engaged in communicative action must
offer justifications to achieve a sincerely held agreement that their
goals and the cooperation to achieve them are seen as good, right,
and true (see section 4). But, in complex and pluralistic modern
societies, such demands are often unrealistic. Modern social contexts
often lack opportunities for highly consensual discussion. This is
why Habermas thinks weak communicative action is likely sufficient
for low stakes domains where not all three types of validity claims
predominate, and why strategic interaction is well-suited for other
domains. For Habermas, modern societies require systematically
structured social domains that relax communicative demands yet still
achieve a modicum of societal integration.
Habermas
takes the institutional apparatus of the administrative state and the
capitalist market to be paradigmatic examples of social integration
via “systems” rather than through the lifeworld. For example, if
a state bureaucracy administers a benefit or service it takes itself
to be enacting prior decisions of the political realm. As such,
open-ended dialogue with a claimant makes no sense: someone either
does or does not qualify; a law either does or does not apply.
Similarly, in a clearly defined and regulated market actors know
where market boundaries lie and that everyone within the market is
strategically engaged. Each market actor seeks individual benefit. It
makes little sense to attempt an open-ended dialogue in a context
where one supposes all others are acting strategically for profit.
Both domains coordinate action, but not through robustly cooperative
and consensual communication that yields solidarity. Certainly, not
all large-scale and institutionalized interaction is strategic. Some
social domains like scientific collaboration or democratic politics
institutionalize reflexive processes of communicative action (see
section 5 on democratic theory). In such fora cooperation may yield
solidarity across the enterprise. Even so, the systems integration
like that found in bureaucracies or markets sharply differs from
integration through communicative action.
It
should be stressed that these are simply paradigmatic examples, and
that the same social domain can be institutionalized differently
across societies. It is therefore more useful to look at the
coordinative media that are typically used to interact with and steer
any given institutionalized system rather than positing a fictive
typology of clear social domains wherein it is assumed that either
strategic or communicative action takes place. Habermas identifies
three such media: speech, money, and power. Speech is the medium by
which understanding is achieved in communicative action, while money
and power are non-communicative media that coordinate action in
realms like state bureaucracies or markets. A medium may largely be
used in one social domain but that doesn’t mean it has no role in
others. While speech is certainly the main medium of healthy
democratic politics, this doesn’t mean money and power never play a
role.
This
all might seem to imply that there is no single correct way for
system and lifeworld to jointly achieve social integration. Indeed,
the complementarity between system and lifeworld laid out in Theory
of Communicative action
is broad enough to accommodate a wide range of institutional
pluralism with respect to the structure of markets, bureaucracies,
politics, scientific collaboration, and so on. But, the claim that
there is no “one size fits all template” for social integration
should not be taken as the claim that system and lifeworld have no
proper relationship. Socialization into a lifeworld precedes social
integration via systems. This is true historically and at the
individual level.
Moreover,
Habermas claims the lifeworld has conceptual priority
with respect to systems integration. His thinking runs as follows:
the lifeworld is the codified (yet revisable) stock of mutual
normative understandings available to any person for consensually
regulating social interaction; it is the reservoir of communicative
action. Systems integration represents carefully circumscribed realms
of instrumental and strategic action wherein we are released from the
full demands of communicative action. Yet the very definition and
limitation of these realms always depends on communicative action
regarding, for example, the types of markets or state administration
a community wants to have and why. Without being rooted in the mutual
understandings of the lifeworld, we would get untrammeled systems of
money and power disconnected from the intersubjectively vouchsafed
practical reason that Habermas thinks underpins all meaning. The
organizing principles of systems themselves would stop being
coherent. For instance, market competition makes sense against a
backdrop of normative principles like fairness, equal opportunity to
compete, rules against capitalizing on secret information, and so on.
But if markets were so “no-holds-barred” that these principles no
longer applied, then engaging in market activity would cease to make
sense. Similarly, if markets were so regulated that there was no
genuine risk or opportunity they would also start to loose coherence
as an enterprise. In both these skewed hypothetical scenarios the
system is rigged and thus, if there are functional alternatives, it
is not worth participating in. This is a variant of his early
anti-technocracy argument. Positing “objective necessities” like
economic growth, social stability, national security and then
circumventing communicative action veils disagreement on what
typeof
growth, stability, and security is important for a given community
and why. As such, systems designed to achieve these ends are primed
to loose coherence and legitimacy based in widely accepted
structuring principles.
Habermas
thinks the lifeworld self-replenishes through communicative action:
if we come to reject inherited mutual understandings embedded in our
normative practices, we can use communicative action to revise those
norms or make new ones. Mechanisms of systems integration depend on
this lifeworld backdrop for their coherence as enterprises achieving
a modicum of social integration. The trouble is that systems have
their own self-perpetuating logic that, if unchecked, will “colonize”
and destroy the lifeworld. This is a main thesis in Theory
of Communicative Action:
strategic action embodied in domains of systems integration must be
balanced by communicative action embodied in reflexive institutions
of communicative action such as democratic politics. If a society
fails to strike this balance, then systems integration will slowly
encroach on the lifeworld, absorb its functions, and paint itself as
necessary, immutable, and beyond human control. Current market and
state structures will take on a veneer of being natural or
inevitable, and those they govern will no longer have the shared
normative resources with which they could arrive at mutual
understandings about how they collectively want their institutions to
look like. According to Habermas, this will lead to a variety of
“social pathologies” at the micro level: anomie, alienation, lack
of social bonds, an inability to take responsibility, and social
instability.
In Theory
of Communicative Action Habermas
pins his hopes for resisting the colonization of the lifeworld on
appeals to invigorate and support new social movements at the
grassroots level, as they can directly draw upon the normative
resources of lifeworld. This model of democratic politics essentially
urges groups of engaged democratic citizens to shore up the
boundaries of the public sphere and civil society against encroaching
domains of systems integration such as the market and administrative
state. This is why his early political theory is often called a
“siege model” of democratic politics. As section 5 will show,
this model was heavily revised in Between
Facts and Norms.
Before turning to that work, we must flesh out discourse ethics—an
idea that figured into Theory
and Communicative Action but
which was only fully developed later.
