The Philosophy of Habermas

Andrew Edgar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317489108
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

This comprehensive introduction to the thought of Jurgen Habermas covers the full range of his ideas from his early work on student politics to his recent work on communicative action, ethics and law. Andrew Edgar examines Habermas' key texts in chronological order, revealing the developments, shifts and turns in Habermas' thinking as he refines his basic insights and incorporates new sources and ideas. Some of the themes discussed include Habermas' early reshaping of Marxist theory and practice, his characterization of critical theory, his conception of universal pragmatics, his theories of communicative action and discourse ethics, and his defence of the project of modernity. Edgar offers much more than a schematic run through of Habermas' big ideas. He deals in detail with Habermas' arguments in order to demonstrate how he weaves together multiple strands of thought, and he usefully situates Habermas' ideas within the contexts of the history of German philosophy, the history of sociology, and within contemporary debates in both continental and analytic philosophy. By engaging with some of Habermas' key critics and contrasting his views with the ideas of contemporaries, Edgar is able to give a clear sense of Habermas' place and importance in contemporary philosophy and social theory.

Chapter 1 The Marxist heritage

DOI: 10.4324/9781315710495-1

Introduction

Habermas’s creativity, alongside the breadth and contemporary relevance of his work, was already evident by the end of the 1960s. Between 1953, when he wrote his first significant academic article (reviewing Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics), and 1970, when the second edition of The Logic of the Social Sciences was published, Habermas matured from a student of what he has himself called a narrowly German philosophy (AS: 80) to the acknowledged inheritor of the Frankfurt tradition of Western Marxism, which is to say, of German critical theory. By 1970 his work was based as profoundly upon an engagement with Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy, American pragmatism and American and European sociology as it was with the more German traditions of Marxism, psychoanalysis and hermeneutics. Recognizing the strengths of earlier generations of Marxist theorists, while attempting to correct such perceived weaknesses as their understanding of political practice and over-reliance on Hegelian dialectics, Habermas sought to develop a renewed critical theory that would be appropriate to the unique problems and opportunities of late-twentieth-century capitalism. This theory would, in turn, be entwined with his substantive commentaries on the condition of liberal democracy, social policy and the welfare state, on science and technology, and on education. That this period marked no more than the first stage of Habermas’s intellectual development, for he was only just beginning to articulate the theory of communicative action that would become the bedrock of his work throughout the next 30 years, is but further testimony to the dynamic and self-critical character of his thought.

Born in 1929, the son of the director of the local Chamber of Commerce, Habermas grew up in Gummersbach (a provincial town some 30 kilometres east of Düsseldorf), during the rise of Nazism. Indeed, he had the unenviable experience of belonging to the Hitler Youth. He has described the events associated with the end of the Second World War as determining his political views (AS: 77). The liberation of Germany, and the subsequent publicity surrounding the Nuremberg trials, brought to consciousness, for the first time, the fact that the Germans “had been living under a politically criminal system … at the time we had the impression of a normality which afterwards proved to be an illusion. For us to see suddenly that those people were criminals …” (AS: 78).

He soon began to read the Marxist and Leninist material that was being published in East Germany, and was available in the Communist bookshop in Gummersbach, as well as previously banned material that was being republished by Rowohlt (AS: 45). Yet he admits to his disappointment over the development of Germany, in terms of both the political opportunities that were foregone in the formation of the post-war governments and in the consolidation of the division of East and West Germany, and in the ambiguous relationship that Germany had with its Nazi past.

He says of his own university education (between 1949 and 1954, principally at Gottingham and Bonn) that it was provincial. The approach to teaching resembled that of the 1920s. On one level, this meant that the developments made in philosophy and sociology during the 1930s and 1940s were largely neglected. This weakness only began to be remedied with the return of major figures, such as Max Horkheimer and Helmut Plessner, from exile in the mid-1950s (AS: 45). On another level, significant numbers of university staff in the late 1940s and early 1950s were those who had been in place during the Nazi period, and had more or less actively conformed to the demands of the Nazi regime. It was in this environment that the publication in 1953 of Introduction to Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger, who had retained the chair of philosophy at the University of Freiburg throughout the Nazi period, posed a fundamental challenge for Habermas. The Introduction to Metaphysics was the text of a lecture given in 1935. That Heidegger could reproduce an original reference to the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi movement, and crucially do so without comment or revision, was indicative for Habermas of a continuing reluctance to confront Nazism that was characteristic of post-war Germany. In addition, Habermas judged that Heidegger’s political stance was implied by his philosophy and that the uncritical propagation of this philosophy threatened to inculcate the post-war generation of students into the same values that had originally permitted the rise of Nazism (Habermas 1981b: 65–72). Although describing himself as “terribly naive”, Habermas was disturbed by the need to recognize the interdependence of one’s political and philosophical confessions (AS: 80). In effect, he was beginning to articulate the fundamental seriousness and responsibility of his mature philosophy. It is not sufficient for a philosophy to be good, or even great, merely as philosophy. It must also, in some sense, be politically right. The task of articulating exactly what this sense might be, and thus what the relationship between intellectual effort and political involvement is, has been crucial to Habermas throughout his career.

In 1954 Habermas submitted to the University of Bonn his doctoral dissertation on the early-nineteenth-century German Idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling. Although Habermas acknowledges that the dissertation was broadly Heideggerian in approach, it did serve to bring him into contact with the work of the young Marx, not least through Karl Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche (AS: 147).

Around this time, which is to say the mid-1950s, Habermas began to read a number of the core texts in what is typically known as Western Marxism. The term “Western Marxism” was used by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty to characterize the broadly humanistic strain of Marxism that has been articulated in western Europe, in contrast to the Leninism and Stalinism of the Soviet Union and the Maoist approach of China. At the root of this tradition stands History and Class Consciousness, which the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács published in 1923. Habermas first read this in 1953. He described it as a “marvellous book” that excited him, no doubt due to its interpretation of Marx in terms of the heritage of the German Idealist philosophy of Kant, Schelling and Hegel, and its overwhelming commitment to political emancipation from oppression and exploitation (AS: 188). Yet he still felt that it was a largely historical document with its social theory, based on the existence of traditional classes and the possibility of building revolutionary class consciousness, no longer having relevance to the present. It was Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (published in 1944), along with the writings of other Western Marxists such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, that convinced him that Marx could still be utilized in theorizing contemporary society (AS: 98). Whereas Lukács dealt with a capitalism that was in overt crisis, Habermas notes that Horkheimer’s approach, especially, appeared to be of more contemporary relevance, precisely because it focused on the problem of the continuing stability of capitalism. Marx could thus be read as a contemporary, rather than as a purely historical figure. This conviction was further reinforced by reading the Marxist economics of Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran (AS: 148). Yet alongside such left-wing theory, Habermas was also reading, and commenting favourably upon, the conservative cultural theories of Arnold Gehlen and Helmut Schelsky. In 1956, thanks in large part to a lecture series co-organized by Horkheimer, he began a serious engagement with Sigmund Freud. Again, the importance of such an engagement lay in reading Freud as a contemporary.

In 1954 Habermas published “The Dialectic of Rationalisation”, a substantial essay that already begins to prefigure his later work, and thereby indicates something of the theoretical problems that he would address to the Western Marxists (see Wiggershaus 1994: 540–41). The essay deals with the way in which society and social problems are construed mechanistically, which is to say, as issues that can be resolved through technological reasoning, akin to that used in engineering. This raises a fundamental question as to the nature of social rationality and social progress that Habermas pursues throughout his career. As an issue in sociology this has its roots in Max Weber’s account from the first decades of the twentieth century of what has come to be known as the “iron cage of bureaucracy”. Weber argues that while impersonal and technocratically conceived bureaucratic administrations are necessary for the effective running of any substantial modern organization, bureaucracy tends to become increasingly anti-democratic and resistant to change, as crucial political decisions are deferred to the expertise of social administrators, and as the resources for public debate and criticism wither. If, on the one hand, Habermas therefore addresses the confrontation of the human subject with constraining bureaucratic structures, on the other he addresses the alienation of the human being as producer – confronted by equally constraining economic processes – but does so in order to explore the role that consumption plays in compensating for the impoverishment of this industrial experience. Here his analysis echoes both that of Horkheimer and Adorno (not least in their analysis of the culture industry (see § “Responding to the First Generation Frankfurt School”, p. 238)), and more conservative cultural critics, such as Gehlen and Schelsky. Crucially, Habermas is therefore bringing together orthodox Marxist themes, and here particularly that of alienation, with a recognition of the significant challenge that the increased affluence of the working classes poses to orthodox Marxism.

It was thus as someone who had already begun to school himself in Marxist theory, and who had developed a reputation as a critic of Heidegger and a culture critic, that in 1956 Habermas joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research – home of the so-called Frankfurt School of German critical theory – as Adorno’s research assistant. Having been founded in 1924 with the purpose of pursuing multi-disciplinary work in Marxist social science, the institute was forced into exile, ultimately in New York, during the Nazi period. The Institute had been re-established in Frankfurt in 1949 with the return of Horkheimer, its director since 1931, and Adorno. During the 1950s Adorno established his reputation as the institute’s leading theorist, with a profound influence on philosophy, social and cultural theory, and musicology. Herbert Marcuse, who had been a member of the institute, and whose existentialist Marxism Habermas initially found highly attractive, remained in America (AS: 189–90).

It was in this environment, encouraging work both on Marxist social theory and the multidisciplinary and empirical study of contemporary society, that Habermas would begin his first major works: an empirical study of political consciousness among university students, Student und Politik; an historical account of the development of democratic debate in bourgeois society, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; and the essays collected in Theory and Practice. These works seek to articulate the experience and history of contemporary (or “late”) capitalism, and develop an appropriate “theory of society conceived with a practical intention” (TP: 1).¹

Late capitalism

The capitalist state

Habermas introduces his 1960 essay “Between Philosophy and Science” (1976f) with four characteristics of contemporary society that Marxism must confront (TP: 195–8). First, he suggests that the all-important metaphor of base and superstructure that many Marxists have developed from a chance remark by Marx (Marx 1975a: 425) is thrown into question by the working of the modern state, in so far as it is at once a welfare state, and has the function of managing the economy. For Marx, the economic base is characterized through the relationship of the forces of production (i.e. the technology used in production) and the relations of production (i.e. the traditional, legal and contractual relationships that exist between the producers of goods and the politically dominant owners of the means used in production). The superstructure consists of non-economic social institutions, including law, religion, education, culture and the family. The base–superstructure metaphor suggests that the economy determines the nature and development of the rest of the society in a manner akin to the way in which the size and depth of the foundations of a building determine what may be constructed upon them. Specifically, the level of technological development delimits the degree of sophistication that can be realized in the state, legal system and civil and cultural life. If the state is understood as part of the superstructure, then it functions primarily to promote the economic and political interests of the dominant class. It is, in Marx’s phrase, “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (Marx & Engels 1973: 69).

For Habermas, the modern state has an autonomy unimagined by Marx. Here Weber’s account of bureaucracy becomes a necessary complement to Marx’s analysis. Modern industrial development requires complex administration, not merely within individual capitalist enterprises, but also in the state’s management of the economy as a whole. The state therefore no longer simply reacts to the demands of the economy, setting the fiscal and legal framework within which individual entrepreneurs operate. Nor does it simply pursue the naked interests of the dominant class. Rather, the state actively structures the economy and intervenes as a major producer and consumer of economic goods. The simple causality of base and superstructure is thus thrown into question, as the state exerts its own influence over economic developments. Class tensions are mitigated, not least through the establishing of a welfare state and redistributive taxation. The inherent tendencies of the free-market capitalism that Marx witnessed are forestalled. In effect, as Horkheimer and Adorno recognize, but Lukács does not, capitalism is stabilized, able to manage the crises to which, according to Marx’s analysis, it should succumb. It is therefore unrealistic to expect the imminent breakdown of capitalism as it had been predicted by Marx, for example, through the immiseration of the proletariat (TP: 236ff.).

An affluent proletariat

The second characteristic of contemporary society that Habermas suggests Marxism must confront, the increased affluence of the proletariat – where “proletariat” is to be understood not merely in its traditional form as a manual labouring class, but also in the form of the expanding middle class, for both classes survive only by selling their ability to labour – raises again the problem of consumption, and of what Habermas here calls “alienated leisure” (TP: 196). Increased affluence undermines what Marx called the crises of “realisation” (TP: 231–3). According to orthodox Marxist theory, exploitation occurs in capitalism through the appropriation of surplus value. Surplus value may be understood in terms of the costs of production and the revenue received by the capitalist. On the side of costs, the capitalist must pay wages to the labour force, but also cover the costs of replacing the raw materials and machinery used in production. On the other side, revenue is the value of the product when sold, that is, its exchange value. Surplus value is the difference between the costs and revenue, and represents that portion of the working day in which the labourer is effectively working unpaid, in the sense that the value of everything they produce during that period is appropriated by the capitalist. Marx argues that a crisis of realization would occur if the proletariat were to become so poor as to be unable to purchase the products of capitalism. Put simply, with technological advance, capitalist industry substitutes labour power with machinery. In Marx’s technical terminology, there will be a rise in the “organic composition” of capital. If capitalist exploitation operates through the accumulation of surplus value, then as the proportion of labour to capital declines, it will be necessary, in order to maintain existing levels of surplus value, for wage levels to be pushed downwards. In effect, with technological advance, the exploitable proportion of the capitalists’ total costs declines. The proletariat will thus face immiseration, and the capitalist system will become radically unstable (TP: 222–7). The very fact that the proletariat have not become poorer but, on the contrary, have enjoyed generally greater affluence, especially in the post-war period, suggests that the theory of the crisis of realization is redundant.

If intervention in the economy by an autonomous state mitigates the raw exploitation of nineteenth-century capitalism, it does not wholly remove it. Contemporary society still suffers from forms of exploitation that are characteristic of capitalism, albeit exploitation that is exercised more subtly than it was in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, despite the mitigating effect of state welfare provision the contemporary economic system remains capitalist precisely in so far as it is primarily geared not to meeting the genuine needs of the population, but rather to the realization of surplus value. Marx’s distinction between use value and exchange value is therefore still valid (TP: 234). Use value is the genuine utility that a consumer derives from a good. Exchange value is the economic value of the good in comparison to all other goods and services traded on the market. The realization of surplus value requires goods to have an exchange value. Real needs may therefore go unmet, simply because the satisfaction of them would be unprofitable. Indeed, in line with the suggestion of “alienated leisure” made in relation to his first characteristic of contemporary society, Habermas suggests (again following Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of the culture industry (see § “Horkheimer and Adorno”, p. 215)) that through the growth of the mass media and the advertising industry, the consumer’s very perception of need and use value may be subject to manipulation (TP: 234).

On the other hand, technological modes of thought, developed in the domination and manipulation of nature, and which thus contributed to the enormous expansion of industrial technology, are now applied, in the form of large-scale bureaucratic organization, to all aspects of economic, social and cultural life. Crucially, the welfare state itself becomes highly bureaucratic, and thus while ostensibly providing for otherwise unmet needs does so only by subjecting citizens to an exhaustive and at times dehumanizing administrative control. This suggests a nightmare vision, with roots in the novels of Franz Kafka, of a populace that is increasingly powerless in the face of sociotechnical administration and, more disturbingly still, may not even recognize its own subordination. People use their very capacity for free and responsible action to conform to the demands that economic and administrative systems place upon them. In a grim paradox, the style of which frankly owes a good deal to Adorno, Habermas states that those who are well integrated into society are “forced to obey … are allowed to do, in the consciousness of their freedom, what do they must” (TP: 196).

The third characteristic of contemporary capitalism that Habermas identifies concerns the relevance of the orthodox notion of the proletariat, and of “proletarian consciousness” (TP: 196). Marx had argued that the proletariat would become aware of its position as an oppressed class not least through the immiseration to which it would be inevitably subjected. Late capitalism has avoided any such crisis. Crucially, lack of political or economic power can no longer be associated with material deprivation or insecurity. Put crudely, the working class now has a good deal more to lose than its chains, and so any theory of revolutionary practice must look elsewhere for an agent of social change.

Finally, Habermas points to the challenge that the rise of Soviet Marxism poses. On one level the Soviet political doctrine represents the corruption of Marxism, from a theory of human emancipation to an administrative route to rapid industrialization. On a more profoun...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 The Marxist heritage
• 2 The public sphere
• 3 The idea of critical theory
• 4 Legitimation crisis
• 5 The theory of communicative action
• 6 Modernity
• 7 Law and democracy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index