Habermas

A Critical Introduction

William Outhwaite

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745643281, 9780745643274
• eBook ISBN: 9780745655048
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This new edition of a well-regarded book provides a concise and exceptionally clear introduction to Habermas's work, from his early writings on the public sphere, through his work on law and the state, to his more recent discussion of science, religion and contemporary Europe. Outhwaite examines all of Habermas's major works and steers a steady course through the many debates to which they have given rise.
A major feature of the book is that it provides a detailed critical analysis of Habermas's most important work, The Theory of Communicative Action. As well as looking at Habermas's appraisal of figures such as Foucault and Derrida, the book also examines his resolute defence of the Enlightenment project, his work on law and democracy and its implications for the important topic of European integration.

This book quickly became established as an authoritative guide to Habermas's work, and this updated new edition will be an invaluable critical introduction for students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities, especially sociology, politics, philosophy and social theory.

1

The Roots of Habermas’s Thought

Habermas combines a deep grounding in the philosophical tradition with a remarkable openness to a wide variety of contemporary philosophical and social theories.¹ Entire books could be written about the respective influences of Kant and Hegel, Marx and Weber, Parsons and Piaget, pragmatism and so on. The most important source is, however, without question the broad Marxist tradition which also inspired the original Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.

The history of Marxist thought in the twentieth century is in large part a process for which the pejorative term is revisionism, involving the abandonment or relegation of certain Marxian principles, the incorporation of, or at least engagement with, non-Marxist theories such as those of Kant, Nietzsche or Freud and a tendency to pay more attention to superstructural processes, whether political, ideological or more particularly artistic, than to the so-called ‘base’.²

The Hungarian Marxist György Lukács can be seen as a crucial figure in this development: one channel at least through which German idealism, with important modifications by the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel, was transmuted into ‘critical theory’. This term is used in two main ways: first, to refer to a tradition beginning with Simmel and Lukács; second, more narrowly, to refer to the work of some of the writers associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. (The term ‘Frankfurt School’, which tends to be used interchangeably with ‘critical theory’ in the English-speaking world, was used in West Germany to refer to the Institute after its re-establishment in 1950.)

The history of the Institute, and its relationship to the Marxist tradition, have been thoroughly discussed in a variety of books, and it has become clear that Habermas’s relationship to Frankfurt critical theory was rather less immediate than is often assumed.³ Max Horkheimer, the Director of the Institute, seems not to have been at all concerned to establish a continuity with its pre-war interdisciplinary Marxist research; indeed he kept the back numbers of the Institute’s Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung locked away in a cellar.⁴ His interests, like those of Theodor Adorno, had become increasingly philosophical, and their critique of instrumental reason, expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), suggested a considerable scepticism about empirical social research. In intellectual terms, Habermas is closer to the Institute’s earlier programme, with its emphasis on the interdisciplinary appropriation of material drawn from various social sciences.

But, if Habermas was dissatisfied with the form of Adorno and Horkheimer’s thought from Dialectic of Enlightenment onwards, he shared their substantive preoccupation with the way in which enlightenment, in the form of instrumental rationality, turns from a means of liberation into a new source of enslavement: ‘Already at that time [the late 1950s] my problem was a theory of modernity, a theory of the pathology of modernity, from the viewpoint of the realization – the deformed realization – of reason in history.’⁵

In Habermas’s early work this preoccupation took three forms. First, a working-through of the classical philosophical texts: Marx and Weber, but also Kant, Fichte and Hegel – not to mention the Greeks. Second, a preoccupation with technology and the attempt to construct a ‘left’ alternative to the technological determinism arising in part from Heidegger and in post-war Germany from Arnold Gehlen and Helmut Schelsky. Third, and relatedly, a concern with the conditions of rational political discussion or, more grandiosely, practical reason, in the conditions of modern technocratic democracy. The first of these themes predominates in Theory and Practice; the second can be found in Habermas’s early journalism and in Technology and Science as Ideology; the third theme occurs in both these works, but is first addressed in Student und Politik and Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

Student und Politik is based on an empirical study carried out in 1957 on a sample of Frankfurt students: Habermas was responsible for the theoretical introduction on the concept of political participation and the sections on the students’ ‘political habitus’ and ‘image of society’. Habermas argues, in a move which may seem obvious but is actually not so common in the literature on participation, that this should not be considered as a value in itself but related to the conditions in which it occurs. His account of the contemporary situation in West Germany and related state-forms prefigures that given in his later book on the public sphere. With the partial resolution of the ‘social question’ in a welfare state with a fully democratic franchise, and with the decline of open class antagonism, the contradiction ‘has changed its form: it now appears as the depoliticization of the masses coinciding with the progressive politicization [in the sense of party political and parliamentary incorporation] of society itself’.⁶ This society ‘increasingly functionalizes its citizens for various public purposes, but it privatizes them in their consciousness’.⁷ It is thus not surprising that a large proportion of students, even those who consider themselves to be ‘good citizens’, are relatively distanced from politics.

The results of the survey caused a certain amount of public anxiety, in a country with a tendency to pull up its newly planted democracy to see how it was growing. The analysis of the limitations of German democracy, however, seems to have had a more lasting influence on the political consciousness of students and other radicals.

The public sphere

The same is true of Habermas’s first major book, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), translated after a long delay as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In this book, Habermas applies, at much greater length, to the concept of public opinion the kind of analysis which he had earlier given of political participation.

‘Public opinion’ takes on a different meaning depending on whether it is brought into play as a critical authority in connection with the normative mandate that the exercise of political and social power be subject to publicity or as the object to be molded in connection with a staged display of, and manipulative propagation of, publicity in the service of persons and institutions, consumer goods, and programs.⁸

Habermas’s strategy is to relate the concept of public opinion back to its historical roots in the idea of public sphere or public domain (Öffentlichkeit) in the hope of ‘attaining a systematic comprehension of our own society from the perspective of one of its central categories’ (p. 5). The literate bourgeois public (Öffentlichkeit again) of the eighteenth century, which had cut its teeth in literary discussion, took on a political role in the evaluation of contemporary affairs and, in particular, state policy. The clubs, salons and coffee-houses (there were 3000 of the latter in London in the early 1700s) supported by the growing and increasingly free press formed a critical forum, in which gentlemen independent of the court and other political institutions could get together on a basis of relative equality and discuss the great events of the day.

Among the causes of this development was a shift in the relationship between state and society which prefigures the later one described in Student und Politik. With the growth of trade and industry, state policy came to have an importance for the growing bourgeoisie which it had not had in a society of small-scale household production and retailing; hence the enormous growth in the newspaper market. In addition to any independent desire for greater democratic influence, people needed to know what the state was doing or failing to do and to influence it as far as they could. Habermas’s explanation of this process may be a rather materialist one, but the ideal of rational, informed discussion of public policy is one which runs like a red thread through the whole of his later work.⁹

Of course, Habermas admits, the idealized concept of public opinion as it was incorporated into constitutional theory was not at all fully realized; he notes, somewhat casually, the limitations of class and gender (pp. 85ff) and the tendencies to commercialization in the press (pp. 181ff). The second of these processes forms part of what Habermas calls the transformation of the public sphere – a shift from publicity in the abstract sense of what Gorbachev called glasnost, openness, to the modern sense of the term in journalism, advertising and politics (p. 140). In addition to these trends, there is the expansion of the state’s role as it develops into a welfare state, and the growth of large private concerns with a ‘quasi-political character’ (p. 148). Private law, especially in relation to property rights, is transformed as it necessarily becomes relevant to public law, in, for example, labour law or the law of tenancy, or in increasingly frequent contracts between the public authorities and private individuals or corporations. This blurring of the distinction between public and private law corresponds to a changed relationship between state and society (see e.g. pp. 151, 231).

Interestingly, Habermas does not put much emphasis on the general process which he and others have come to call Verrechtlichung – the trend to legal regulation of private life in, for example, family law. The ‘hollowing out’ of the intimate sphere of the family, as outside influences on family members become stronger, with the growth of labour markets and social insurance, and developments in suburban architecture tending to open up the family house to public gaze, is discussed in language which anticipates the later theme, in The Theory of Communicative Action, of the ‘colonization’ of the lifeworld by the market economy and legal-bureaucratic regulation.

In Structural Transformation, however, Habermas focuses on the role of publicity and public opinion in these changed conditions. The principle of critical publicity gets watered down as it expands into wider and wider areas of modern life. The reading public, which had prefigured the political public, also prefigures the latter’s decline into ‘minorities of specialists who put their reason to use publicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical’ (p. 175). ‘Whereas the press could previously merely mediate the reasoning process of the private people who had come together in public, this reasoning is now, conversely, only formed by the mass media’ (p. 188). The same is true of the political process, split between a small number of party activists and a basically inactive mass electorate; public opinion ceases to be a source of critical judgement and checks, and becomes a social-psychological variable to be manipulated. The result is a ‘gap between the constitutional fiction of public opinion and the social-psychological dissolution of its concept’ (p. 244; cf. section 24, pp. 236–44).

The contradiction is obvious: a proliferation of the social conditions of private existence that are maintained and secured by public authority, and therefore ought to be clarified within the communication process of a politically autonomous public of citizens, that is, should be made a topic for public opinion. Although objectively greater demands are placed on this authority, it operates less as a public opinion giving a rational foundation to the exercise of political and social authority, the more it is generated for the purpose of an abstract vote that amounts to no more than an act of acclamation within a public sphere temporarily manufactured for show or manipulation. (p. 222)

Habermas writes at times of a dialectic of Öffentlichkeit, and it is not too far-fetched to see Structural Transformation as a social-scientific remake of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Just as the Enlightenment critique of myth turned into another myth, the principle of the bourgeois public sphere, the critical assessment of public policy in terms of rational discussion oriented to a concept of the public interest, turns into what Habermas calls a manipulated public sphere in which states and corporations use ‘publicity’ in the modern sense to secure for themselves a kind of plebiscitary acclamation. Habermas’s version, however, is both more carefully grounded in the results of historical, sociological and political scientific research, and also somewhat less pessimistic in its conclusions. If some of his younger readers drew the conclusion that there was nothing for it but to join the SDS, Habermas envisaged certain counter-tendencies to, and opportunities in, the process he described.

When the liberal constitutional state develops into a welfare state and thus massively extends the range of its activity, ‘the requirement of publicity is extended from the organs of the state to all organizations acting in relation to the state’ (p. 232). These organizations are thus opened up to scrutiny by, and dialogue with, a corresponding variety of interest groups which link together members of the public concerned with specific aspects of welfare state provision.

Although the bureaucratization of administration seems, as Max Weber had noted in relation to parliamentary politics, to remove the activity of specialists from rational control, it might yet be possible to create, by means of public communication within these organizations, ‘an appropriate relation between bureaucratic decision and quasi-parliamentary deliberation’ (p. 234). This cautious conclusion seems to point in two main directions: (1) the critique of technocratic ideology and (2) the attempt to work out an intellectual and practical basis for public discussion and effective control of public policy. The first theme points towards Habermas’s essays in Technology and Science as Ideology and the philosophical critique of positivism; the second theme finds its full development in The Theory of Communicative Action and in Between Facts and Norms.

Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit sparked off a considerable discussion in West Germany. One possible response for those who wholly accepted Habermas’s diagnosis of the disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere was to join the revolutionary stude...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Key Contemporary Thinkers Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Roots of Habermas’s Thought
• 2 Scientism in Theory and Practice
• 3 Communication and Discourse Ethics
• 4 Social Evolution and Legitimation
• 5 Rational Action and Societal Rationalization
• 6 The Colonization of the Lifeworld
• 7 The Theory of Communicative Action: An Assessment
• 8 Modernity and Philosophy
• 9 Law and the State
• 10 Two Kinds of ‘Post’
• Conclusion: Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory
• Bibliography
• Index