I
n this chapter I will present a comprehensive overview of Habermas’s mature conception of critical social theory. This serves a twofold purpose: first, a gen-eral understanding of Habermas’s conception of critical social theory is key for my later inquiry into his theory of social evolution, since the theory of social evolu-tion is an integral part of any adequate critical social theory (or so I will argue). Sec-ond, I want to emphasize the fundamental role that the theory of social evolution plays in Habermas’s theory. This is important because this role is often overlooked or underemphasized in the secondary literature on Habermas. One reason for this, I believe, is that the focus of Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action (TCA I and II) is a bit confusing, and the rather unique organization of the book con-tributes to this confusion. Although the project of clarifying the normative founda-tions of critical social theory was a primary theoretical concern of Habermas’s for two decades, I am here interested only in his mature statements that were devel-oped throughout the 1970s and were systematized in his magnum opus, The The-ory of Communicative Action, originally published in 1981. During this period his approach to the reconstruction of the normative foundations of critical social the-ory was explicitly guided by Horkheimer’s original concept of a critical thethe-ory of society. In Horkheimer’s early writings he found the intention of an interdiscipli-nary research program that utilizes the resources and methods of both sociopolitical philosophy and the empirical social sciences. Thus, it is worthwhile to keep in mind that Habermas does not claim to be constructing a completed theoretical statement of critical social theory. He attempts to construct a comprehensive, and open—hence, not totalizing—critical theory of society; he intends to be only programmat-ically elucidating the outlines of a critical social theory, the contents of which are intended to be further clarified and analyzed at both the theoretical and empirical levels. The programmatic framework itself is intended to be tested, clarified, and re-vised based on the results of further empirical research that is itself guided by the theoretical framework. In this respect, Habermas adopts Horkheimer’s concept of
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a critical theory that is fallible. Habermas asserts that he is not providing a tran-scendental justification for critical theory, but that the ultimate validity of this par-ticular conception rests on further empirical research that serves to illuminate various aspects.
Before discussing the details of Habermas’s particular conception of critical social theory, it will be useful to begin with a sketch of its general contours in order to provide a general sense of the theoretical and conceptual terrain. Habermas’s conception of critical social theory consists of two theoretical dimensions or frameworks: the synchronic and the diachronic. Both frameworks are necessary to adequately ground the normative claims of critical social theory. On this view, so-ciety in general can be viewed as being structured in both the horizontal, or syn-chronic, dimension and the vertical, or diasyn-chronic, dimension. For a critical social theory to justify its normative claims, it would need to provide an account of its normative grounding in each of these dimensions. Only by attending to both of these dimensions can critical theory ground its descriptive and prescriptive claims.
The synchronic framework provides a horizontal structural explanation of so-ciety, relying especially on a theory of communicative action which reconstructs the universal features of language use that are intuitively known by all competent speakers. Habermas’s theory of communicative action postulates an idealizing component universally presupposed in grammatically structured speech, and this idealizing component provides a grounding for part of the normative orientation for critical theory. The normative orientation derives from the gap between the idealizing presuppositions implicit in language use and a comparison of these ide-alizing presuppositions with concrete discursive practices. The theory of commu-nicative action is intended to explain the intuitive, pragmatic know-how of fully competent speakers. But Hegel impressed upon us the need to give an account of the historical character of consciousness. For this reason, the theory of commu-nicative action needs to be complemented by an explanation of how these struc-tures or competencies can change in the course of history.
Thus, the theory of communicative action needs to be complemented by a diachronic framework that explains the historical development of these universal features of language use. The theory of social evolution functions as this di-achronic framework by explaining both the reproduction of society and how struc-tures of consciousness undergo change. As we will see below, Habermas postulates that the structures of consciousness that determine the horizons of knowledge change according to a developmental logic, and that all societies share that same formal developmental logic of social change. Thus, the theory of social evolution involves a reconstruction of the universal stages of social development, and it in-terprets these stages as stages of a sociocultural learning process. It further distin-guishes between the logic of development and the dynamics of development, so that while the logic of development is universal, the actual historical paths taken by societies are uniquely determined by contingent conditions.
The two frameworks are related such that the universal formal-pragmatic structure of speech that grounds the rationality inherent in communication
grad-ually becomes realized in social institutions and practices in the course of histori-cal development. From both the synchronic and diachronic frameworks, then, the normative orientation of critical theory can be justified both universally (that is, cross-culturally) and genetically (that is, historically).
Formal Pragmatics
The element of Habermas’s critical social theory that has received the most critical attention by social and political philosophers is the theory of the formal pragmatics of language. As I mentioned above, the intent of The Theory of Com-municative Action is perhaps a bit ambiguous, or at least multivalent. In this work Habermas’s stated intent is to develop a first-order, well-grounded critical social theory: it is the “beginning of a social theory concerned to validate its own crit-ical standards” (TCA I, xli). However, his focus, as the title suggests, is on devel-opment of a theory of communicative action, which I have shown is only one dimension, or element, of the critical theory of society. The theory of social evo-lution, which constitutes the second dimension, or element, plays a more im-plicit role in this book. Its details are largely assumed, and as such it is not substantially developed beyond the theoretical statements found in Communica-tion and EvoluCommunica-tion of Society (CES). Presumably it is this fact that has misled readers into interpreting the theory of communicative action (in its aspect as formal pragmatics) as the critical theory of society in its entirety, thereby ne-glecting to give the theory of social evolution its due. It is my intent in this study to correct this bias.
The theory of communicative action expresses the linguistic turn Habermas has given to his conception of critical social theory, in which he argues for a turn from the Cartesian conception of the subject, with its monological, subject-cen-tered understanding of the knowing and acting subject, to a communicative, and hence intersubjective, conception of the knowing and acting subject. The theory of communicative action is not intended to be a metatheory about the methodol-ogy of social theory, but a substantive critical social theory (TCA I, xli). More-over, the theory of communicative action is not merely an exercise in conceptual analysis, for it is conceived with the explicit intent to “make possible a conceptu-alization of the social-life context that is tailored to the paradoxes of modernity”
(TCA I, xlii). The paradoxes of modernity that the theory of communicative ac-tion is intended in part to interpret are perhaps best expressed by Horkheimer and Adorno in the introduction to their Dialectic of Enlightenment, where they had “set [themselves] nothing less than the discovery of why [humankind], in-stead of entering into a truly human condition is sinking into a new kind of bar-barism.”1A few paragraphs later they explain this striking claim in Hegelian terms: “The dilemma that faced us in our work proved to be the first phenome-non for investigation: the self-destruction of the Enlightenment. We are wholly convinced—and therein lies our petitio principii—that social freedom is insepara-ble from enlightened thought. Nevertheless, we believe that we have just as
clearly recognized that the notion of this very way of thinking, no less than the actual historic forms—the social institutions—with which it is interwoven, al-ready contains the seed of the reversal universally apparent today.”2So the prob-lem that Habermas inherits from the Frankfurt School is the paradox between the increased technical rationality of the modern period, which seemingly should lead to a decrease in unnecessary domination since rationalization implies a greater conscious control over social reproduction, and the increased irrationality of social relations and historical events, which in fact result in an increase in un-necessary domination. The object of investigation, then, is the history of the pre-sent, or more specifically, the rationalization of modern society and the paradoxes involved in this process.
These paradoxes of modernity have consequences for both social theory and philosophy, as Habermas shows in the introduction to The Theory of Communica-tive Action (1–142). He argues there that rationality is internally related to social theory at three distinct levels (TCA I, xlii).3At the metatheoretical level of the proper understanding of social theory as such, social theory encounters the ques-tion of the raques-tionality implicaques-tions of its concepts of acques-tion. At the methodological level, social theory cannot avoid questions of the rationality implications of the unavoidable interpretive access to its object-domain. And at the empirical-theo-retical level, social theory encounters the question of the meaning of the interpre-tation of the modernization of societies as rationalization (if it can be considered so at all). Thus, he argues that “any sociology that claims to be a theory of society has to face the problem of rationality simultaneously on the metatheoretical, methodological, and empirical levels” (TCA I, 7). In addition, Habermas argues that traditionally the question of rationality is addressed in the domain of philosophical thought. But within the past several decades the results of the empirical sciences and the self-critical attitude of philosophy have contributed to the lack of confi-dence in totalizing, a priori knowledge. However, philosophy remains interested in the formal conditions of rationality—despite the restriction of discourse to spe-cialized spheres, for example, logic, science, language, ethics, and aesthetics (TCA I, 2). Under these conditions, then, the theory of argumentation becomes espe-cially important, for “to it falls the task of reconstructing the formal-pragmatic presuppositions and conditions of an explicitly rational behavior” (TCA I, 2).
Habermas concludes that in addition to social theory, postmetaphysical philoso-phy is also converging towards a theory of rationality.
Thus the concept of rationality and what it means to be judged rational need to be analyzed if we are to gain any understanding of the paradox of modernity.
What do we mean when we say that X is rational? Habermas gives as first approx-imation the following. The subject of this statement can be either a person, or a symbolic expression that embodies knowledge (TCA I, 8). But what does “is ra-tional” refer to? To begin, we typically think that something’s being rational has some relation to knowledge, and Habermas claims that “the close relation between knowledge and rationality suggests that the rationality of an expression depends on the reliability of the knowledge embodied by it” (TCA I, 8). Rational
asser-tions, Habermas argues, gain their rational status by being well grounded, and the well-groundedness of assertions is judged by the giving of reasons in their support.
Thus, only through the social practice of argumentation are assertions rationally justified. In order to understand this social practice, then, it is necessary to analyze social action in general.
Communicative Action
Habermas begins his analysis of social action by defining action in general as
“the realization of an action plan based on an interpretation of the situation”
(RCA, 152; cf. TCA I, 96). An agent copes with a given situation through first in-terpreting that situation, and then, based on that interpretative accomplishment, acting so as to realize a plan. With this concept of action, Habermas rejects the conflation of actions with mere bodily movements: Actions and bodily movements and operations occur concurrently, but bodily movements are actions insofar as they are an element of the agent’s interaction with the world (TCA I, 96–97).
Bodily movements can be considered actions only in the derivative sense of being embedded in an agent’s interaction with the world—for instance, in play or teach-ing practices actions can acquire independent status, but only by virtue of their being a part of an agent’s interaction with the world. Furthermore, with this con-cept of action Habermas recognizes that all actions have a generally teleological, or purposive, structure, such that “[t]he actor achieves his aim or brings about a desired state by choosing and making suitable use of means promising success in a given situation” (RCA, 154). This means simply that any action is an intervention of one or more agents in the world to achieve some end: “With his actions the agent changes something in the world” (TCA I, 96). Thus, Habermas understands action as an intentional act that is aimed at bringing about some end.
Analysis of the social order requires an understanding of the coordinating mechanisms and influences between individual social agents: “The question in so-cial theory of what makes soso-cial order possible has a counterpart in action theory:
How can (at least two) participants in interaction coordinate their plans in such a way that alter is in a position to link his actions to ego’s without a conflict arising, or at least without the risk that the interaction will be broken off?” (MCCA, 133).
To begin, then, social action can be initially defined as the coordination of the ac-tions of two or more agents in the accomplishment of a common plan of action.
Habermas distinguishes two fundamental mechanisms of coordinating social actions: consent and influence (RCA, 151–154). Consent coordinates social actions when there is an agreement between all of the relevant agents as to the interpreta-tion of the situainterpreta-tion. With this common knowledge in hand, the agents can pursue their common action plan. The action-coordinating function of consent is achieved through the intersubjectively valid understanding of the situation. The intersubjec-tive validity of this common knowledge is what generates the reciprocal binding force between the participating agents. In order for José and Shanina to successfully accomplish a plan of action—the repair of their broken down tandem bicycle—they
first need to come to an agreement regarding their interpretation of the situation at hand—the flat tire that is preventing their continuation. Agreement on this inter-pretation of the situation reciprocally binds José and Shanina together in achieving their common action plan. By contrast, influence coordinates social actions through the inducement of an understanding of the situation in at least one of the agents.
Suppose two agents find themselves in a situation requiring coordination of their actions. A common interpretation of the situation can be achieved if one agent in-duces an opinion of the situation in the other (for example, through a lie). However, this common interpretation lacks the mutually binding and bonding effects consti-tutive of the interpretation achieved through consent. While the coordination of action may be successful, the common situation interpretation lacks the intersub-jective validity that generates mutual obligations. From the perspective of the agent, the mechanisms of consent and influence are mutually exclusive means of coordi-nating actions.
Reflecting this distinction between action coordinating mechanisms, Haber-mas distinguishes between action orientations: actions oriented to success and ac-tions oriented to reaching understanding. But, what does it mean to say that actors adopt certain orientations of action? From the perspective of the participant in so-cial action, action orientations represent the two possible choices for coordinating action with other participants. In contexts of social action, the agent intuitively chooses between an orientation towards success and an orientation towards reach-ing understandreach-ing. However, from a third-person perspective, these two orienta-tions, which now appear as action structures, can only be separated analytically (RCA, 173–175). The distinction between purposive and communicative action is only an analytic one because every given action involves elements of both. Action orientations are distinguished according to which of the two aspects is dominant.
Communicative actions, which are oriented towards reaching understanding, nev-ertheless possess an underlying purposive structure, and teleological actions, which are oriented towards success, nevertheless rely on interpretive understanding of the action situation: “In strategic interactions, communicative means too are employed in the sense of a consequence-oriented use of language; here consent formation through the use of language does not function as a mechanism for coordinating action, as it does in communicative action. In communicative action the partici-pants in interaction carry out their action plans under the condition of an agree-ment reached communicatively, while the coordinated actions themselves retain the character of purposive activity. Purposive activity forms just as much a compo-nent of consent-oriented action as of success-oriented action; in both cases the actions imply interventions in the objective world (RCA, 174).”4
Moreover, actions oriented to success can be further distinguished into social and nonsocial actions, and accordingly, there are two types of action that are ori-ented towards success: instrumental action and strategic action (TCA I, 285). An instrumental action is an action in a nonsocial action situation, is oriented to suc-cess, and utilizes technical rules to maximize the efficiency of its interventions in the action situation. Examples of such an action might include the hammering of
a nail in the course of building a house, or Robinson Crusoe building a hut. In each case the object being affected is an inanimate object. In contrast, strategic ac-tions, which are oriented towards success, aim at the manipulation of other per-sons. Thus, a strategic action is an action in a social action situation, is oriented to success, and utilizes rules of rational choice to maximize the efficiency of influenc-ing the decisions of another. Examples include promisinfluenc-ing a fifteen percent across-the-board tax cut, which you know will be disastrous for the common good, just so you can be elected president, or commanding “Hands up!” to someone you want to rob. In these cases the fundamental aim is to manipulate another to conform to your wishes. Both instrumental and strategic actions are forms of teleological or purposive action that aim at success; they are simply different forms with respect to the type of object that is being affected.5
a nail in the course of building a house, or Robinson Crusoe building a hut. In each case the object being affected is an inanimate object. In contrast, strategic ac-tions, which are oriented towards success, aim at the manipulation of other per-sons. Thus, a strategic action is an action in a social action situation, is oriented to success, and utilizes rules of rational choice to maximize the efficiency of influenc-ing the decisions of another. Examples include promisinfluenc-ing a fifteen percent across-the-board tax cut, which you know will be disastrous for the common good, just so you can be elected president, or commanding “Hands up!” to someone you want to rob. In these cases the fundamental aim is to manipulate another to conform to your wishes. Both instrumental and strategic actions are forms of teleological or purposive action that aim at success; they are simply different forms with respect to the type of object that is being affected.5