Habermas: The Key Concepts
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Habermas: The Key Concepts

Andrew Edgar

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Habermas: The Key Concepts

Andrew Edgar

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About This Book

An independently minded champion of 'the project of modernity' in a supposedly post-modern age, Jurgen Habermas (1929- ) is one of the most widely influential thinkers of our times.

An easy-to-use A-Z guide to a body of work that spans philosophy, sociology, politics, law and cultural theory, Habermas: The Key Concepts explores Habermas' writings on:

  • capitalism
  • genetics
  • law
  • neo-conservatism
  • universal pragmatics.

Fully cross-referenced with extensive suggestions for further reading, this is an essential reference guide to one of the most important social theorists of the last century.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2006
ISBN
9781134410651

HABERMAS

The Key Concepts

ACTION

The intentional and meaningful activity of a person. Habermas, following the sociologist Max Weber, distinguishes ‘action’ from ‘behaviour’ (Habermas 2001c: 4–6). Behaviour is the involuntary or causally determined activity of the person, such as a reflex response to an external stimulus (for example, flinching) or the on-going processes of the body (for example, heartbeat), as opposed to the activities that the person intends to perform, and that will have some meaning for them and the people around them. Weber gives the example of a bicycle accident. The accident itself is unintentional, and therefore mere behaviour. The responses to the accident, such as accusations of carelessness, apologies, threats and so on, are action (Habermas 1984a: 279). It is action (and not behaviour) that sociology studies. Hence, Habermas's understanding of action is better encapsulated in the phrase ‘social action’. Precisely because action is meaningful, it presupposes that the person who performs the action is a social being typically in so far as they will share a language with other people, and in addition that most actions are carried out in response to other persons. Habermas therefore offers a typology of different social actions, including most importantly the distinction between communicative and strategic action (Habermas 1979a: 208–10).

ADMINISTRATIVE POWER

The power of the state to enact and enforce law. ‘Administrative power’ is a concept introduced by Habermas in his more recent work on law, in order to explore the relationship between public opinion (which he calls communicative power) and the formulation and enactment of laws by the state (Habermas 1996: 463–90). Administrative power encapsulates the real controlling force that the actions of the state, in the creation and enforcement of laws, as well as in the promulgation of specific social, welfare and other government policies, will have upon the lives and actions of its citizens. Habermas's concern is that the administrative structures of state tend to run according to their own intrinsic momentum. Within the state administration, the law is treated instrumentally, which is to say that the law is regarded as a means to the realisation of ends that are strictly external to law itself. Legal theory focuses upon the most consistent formulation and effective enforcement of the law, while the values and ends that it is supposed to protect are taken for granted. In summary, decisions and innovations in the law are made primarily so as to be consistent with the existing structure of the law. This focus on internal consistency tends to inhibit any capacity to acknowledge the real values and opinions of ordinary citizens, and thus to meet people's real needs. In Habermas's technical terminology, the state is a system (and power is the non-symbolic medium through which it is guided and organised). As such, it is at odds with the lifeworld through which ordinary people give meaning to their world and formulate their opinions and values. In his later writings on law Habermas sets himself the task of exploring how social institutions in the lifeworld can be reformed, in order to impose pressure upon the administrative and legal systems, and thus to transform the public opinion that is formulated within the lifeworld into a communicative power that will influence the administrative power of the state. In a just society, the administrative power of the state will thus be grounded in the opinions, values and interests of citizens who are subject to administrative power.

ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

The approach to philosophy favoured in English-speaking countries. While it may be broadly characterised by a dominant interest in logic and language, it is perhaps more clearly characterised in terms of its contrast to what is known as Continental philosophy (that is, the philosophical schools that have been dominant in France, Germany and Italy in the twentieth century). Indeed, it is here that analytic philosophy's significance lies for Habermas's work. Habermas was educated very much in the traditions of German — and thus Continental — philosophy, and in particular in the work of Martin Heidegger and subsequently the neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School (see Habermas 1992a). Habermas might then have been expected to remain within this tradition. His openness to ideas and approaches from analytic philosophy, alongside his willingness to combine the analytic and Continental traditions, became a hallmark of his thinking.
In terms of their development, the analytic and Continental traditions split after Immanuel Kant, which is to say that both traditions draw significantly on Kant and his predecessors, such as Descartes, the British empiricists (Locke, Hume and Berkeley) and the rationalists (Leibniz and Spinoza). Within Germany, the immediate response to Kant was provided by Idealists, such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and the young Hegelians, who understood philosophy as a pursuit of absolute truth (see Habermas 1971a: 1–63, and 1988a: 1–82). While German Idealism, and especially Hegel, had an influence on English-language philosophy in the nineteenth century, and indeed into the twentieth century (with philosophers such as F. H. Bradley and R. G. Collingwood), analytic philosophy may in large part be characterised by its opposition to Hegel. Grand projects that strove to uncover absolute truth through pure thought are dismissed as more or less nonsensical metaphysics (see post-metaphysical thinking). In part this may be seen as a recognition of the role that the natural sciences had come to play, with increasing importance, in generating reliable knowledge. The analytic philosopher therefore seeks to restrict the aspirations of philosophy. Its task becomes one of analysing the foundations of scientific method, logic and mathematics, and the nature of language. The first great analytic philosopher is Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), and his investigations into the nature of meaning become paradigm examples of the approach of analytic philosophy. The early work of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) on mathematics, language and logic becomes an archetype of analytic discipline, relying as it does on an analytical and logical rigour derived from Leibniz and a recognition of the importance of empirical evidence and experience derived from the British empiricists.
Habermas's engagement with positivism may be seen as an early attempt to establish a dialogue between the Continental and analytic traditions (Habermas 1976c and 1976d). The key issue in the so-called ‘positivist dispute’ was the applicability of the positivist understanding of natural science to the social sciences. While Habermas was opposed to positivist interpretations of social science, he was more sympathetic than many of the older generation of German philosophers (such as Herbert Marcuse). Positivism, or at least its more pure analytic version, logical positivism, was a product of the early years of the twentieth century. It is, however, the analytic philosophers who come to prominence after the second world war who are most relevant to Habermas. In particular, the work of such people as the later Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin on the philosophy of language is all important. This work brings about a transformation (a ‘linguistic-turn’) in analytic philosophy, as the fundamental importance of everyday language in constituting our understanding of the world and ourselves is recognised. It is to this philosophy that Habermas turns in order to remedy the weaknesses he sees in both Continental philosophy and social theory (Habermas 1988b: 117–43). Crucially it is Austin's theory of speech acts (and its later development by John Searle) that is fundamental to Habermas's universal pragmatics. In the theory of speech acts, Austin recognises that language is not just or even primarily used to convey information. This had been an assumption of earlier analytic philosophers like Frege and Russell. Austin argues that we use language to perform actions. By uttering the appropriate words in the appropriate situation I can give orders or make promises, I can baptise infants and marry couples. Such a philosophy of language has important implications for social theory, for it suggests the role that language use might play in creating and maintaining social relationships.
In his mature work, Habermas refers as readily to a range of analytic philosophers, such as Strawson, Grice and Davidson, as he does to Continental philosophers. Most recently he has perhaps consolidated this fusion of analytic and Continental traditions through his engagement with the work of the American philosopher Robert Brandom (Habermas 2003a: 131–73).

Further reading: Martinich and Sosa 2001

CAPITALISM

A form of society, characterised typically by industrialisation and crucially by the use of market exchange to organise the distribution of goods and services. It is thus the form taken by contemporary first-world nations, and the economic form that is today globally dominant. A fundamental concern that runs throughout Habermas's work, from the 1950s to the present, is the generation of an adequate account of contemporary capitalism.
In an early essay, ‘Between Philosophy and Science: Marxism as Critique’, Habermas identifies four key features of contemporary capitalism (1976a: 195–8). In the twentieth century the role of the state has expanded through its intervention in the economy, and in its provision of social welfare; while there is still economic inequality, a relatively high standard of living is enjoyed by the majority of the population, and not just by the dominant classes; the revolutionary politics of the nineteenth century has been largely replaced by party politics due to the expansion of democracy and the right to vote, so that there is no longer a clearly identifiable revolutionary class; capitalism's understanding of itself, especially in the post-war period, is one that is generated largely through its opposition to other poli-tical systems, and in particular to Soviet-style Communism. In sum, contemporary capitalism is more stable than nineteenth-century capitalism. A managed economy no longer suffers the catastrophic lurches between boom and bust that characterised the nineteenth-century free market, and the relative material affluence of the majority of the population secures their continued commitment to the capitalist system.
Habermas explored the social history of capitalism in one of his first books, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989a), at least in terms of the development of political debate and the formation of political ideologies. In the mid-1960s his primary concern was with the role that science and technology play in contemporary capitalism, not merely in driving its economic expansion, but also in so far as models of natural scientific and technological thinking shape social planning, and begin to invade the everyday social activities and exchanges of ordinary people (see scientism) (1971b). Legitimation Crisis (1976b) is the first book-length study in which Habermas attempts to build a comprehensive model of contemporary capitalism. Here he moves away from the broadly neo-Marxist grounding of his early work, in order to use Niklaus Luhmann's systems theory as a key resource in making sense of, and criticising, capitalism. On one level, the study proceeds by treating capitalism as a social system, composed of four sub-systems: the economy; the administrative system of the state, that has the task of organising and stabilising the society as a whole; and the legitimation and cultural systems which, through educational and cultural institutions, generate meanings and values for members of the society. While Marxist models of society tended to see economic crises (such as loss of productivity or profitability, or mass unemployment) as having a direct and immediately destabilising impact upon the rest of society, Habermas's argument is that, in contemporary capitalism, a crisis within one sub-system can be at least partially absorbed by other sub-systems. Thus, for example, an economic crisis can now be prevented through the state's direct intervention in the economy, as both a producer and a consumer of goods and services. However, the state in turn requires support from the citizenry, which is to say that it requires legitimation. A failing economy may then still serve to undermine that support. The legitimation system therefore has, for Habermas, the increasingly difficult task of motivating citizens to support the state, and to give meaning to their lives. The reason that this task of legitimation is becoming increasingly difficult, Habermas believes, is that better-educated and thus better-informed and more sophisticated citizens will require rational justifications for the state's and the economy's actions, and will not be easily bought off with more material wealth, let alone mere political propaganda or rhetoric. The continuing history of youthful and popular protests against capitalism, from the students' movement of 1968, through ecological and nuclear disarmament protests in the 1970s and 1980s, to the mass protests at G8 summits and the anti-Gulf War protests in the 1990s and in the first decade of the new century, alongside a gradual decline in the proportion of the European population voting, and widespread public apathy and cynicism about organised politics, all bear witness to Habermas's point.
Thus, while he abandoned something of the simpler Marxist models of capitalism, Habermas continued to see capitalism as a social formation that is ridden by crises, and as being unstable in the long term. The very improvements that it offers to people's lives, in terms of better education, greater political emancipation and long-term material security, may provide the grounds for a widespread questioning of the values of capitalism and the continuing political and material inequalities that it sustains.
Habermas builds upon this analysis in The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1984a and 1987). While Legitimation Crisis began to explore the relationship between what Habermas calls the system and the lifeworld, which is to say between society experienced as a meaningless, almost natural force that constrains and directs the individual's actions, and society as a meaningful cultural realm, Habermas was ultimately unhappy with the analysis given. The Theory of Communicative Action makes the relationship between system and lifeworld central to its analysis and criticism of contemporary capitalism. Habermas borrows and develops two themes from the sociologist Max Weber: loss of meaning, and loss of freedom.
He is thus arguing, first, as he had done in Legitimation Crisis, that contemporary capitalism struggles to provide the cultural resources through which life in capitalism could be made meaningful and worthwhile. Here Habermas develops Weber's notion of the ‘disenchantment’ brought about by the increasing instrumental rationality of contemporary capitalism. Weber was arguing that the rational organisation of capitalism drains the meaning (and, translated literally, the magic) from social life (Weber 1946a: 148). Put in terms of system and lifeworld, it is the argument that the economic and especially the administrative systems, that work instrumentally and at best inhibit and at worst actively discourage the discussion of values, intrude into the organisation of our everyday lives, draining out of them the meaning that the lifeworld should provide. Thus for example, as a teacher, I must increasingly relate to my students as fee-paying and state-sponsored clients. The economic and administrative imperatives placed on a university mean that I have less time to spend with my students, but more precisely described goals and targets that I must fulfil in relationship to them. Thus, I increasingly cease to treat them as people with whom I can debate issues of philosophy and social theory. We cease to have time to explore the meaning of what it is to do philosophy. Instead, I treat them more instrumentally, to be manipulated and spoon-fed, in order to ensure that pre-given and unquestionable goals and targets are met. So, Habermas's contention is that in more and more of our social interaction we respond to each other instrumentally, anticipating each other's reactions and attempting to manipulate or exploit each other's behaviour as we would predict and manipulate the behaviour of a drinks vending machine. This is, at least in part, what Habermas has in mind by his notion of the colonisation of the lifeworld.
If this is the heart of the loss of meaning, then the loss of freedom is developed by Habermas from Weber's notion of the ‘iron cage of bureaucracy’ (Weber 1976: 181), or more graphically from Franz Kafka's images of modern life in The Castle or The Trial. Social systems, such as the administrative systems of government or commercial enterprises, develop, not necessarily in terms of the needs of their clients, but rather in terms of their own inherent logic. They thus come to confront the ordinary member of society as social forces that cannot be challenged, and that increasingly constrain their behaviour within certain, rigidly defined channels. For example, in order to apply for social security, and even in order to apply for a job, I must present myself in a certain way. This is not just a matter of dressing properly or having an appropriate accent; I must also have a national insurance number (and thus already be recognised within the state's administration), perhaps a formal record of my previous employment, income and social security payments.
While Habermas does then identify a series of pathologies that characterise contemporary society, including the failure of the culture system to generate sufficient meaning, the loss of guiding norms or values in society, and the problems at the level of individual psychology and personal development (Habermas 1987, p. 143), he does not paint as bleak a picture of contemporary capitalism as did the Frankfurt School thinker Theodor Adorno, who spoke of a ‘totally administered society’. Habermas refuses to accept that the capacity of ordinary people to debate and challenge can be wholly suppressed, and so he does continue to look for an emerging sources critical potential, and suggests that it may be found in the green movement and the identity politics of feminists, people of colour, and gay and lesbian groups (Habermas 1987: 391–6). In his most recent work in legal theory, he takes this further, by exploring the critical potential that exists in the formulation and application of laws in constitutional democracies.

COGNITIVE INTERESTS

These are the preconditions that make knowledge possible. Cognitive (or knowledge-constitutive) interests are the conditions for survival of the human species that stimulate human beings to generate knowledge about the physical world, about the social world and about the exercise of political power. In order to flourish, it is in the interest of human beings to be able to control and reshape their physical environment, to communicate with each other and thereby to maintain society, and to live free of political oppression. In the pursuit of each of these interests, humans will inquire into, and thus generate knowledge about, the natural world, society and politics. This knowledge will in turn be linked to certain forms of action: the use of technology to control nature; improved communication and understanding; and political emancipation of the oppressed. The three interests thus serve to make possible and to shape the natural sciences, the social sciences and the emancipatory politics of critical theory.
Habermas formulated his theory of cognitive interests in the 1960s, and this represented his major contribution to the philosophy of science and the theory of knowledge (or epistemology) in that period. The theory is introduced in Habermas's inaugural address at Frankfurt University (1971a: 301–49), and given its fullest exposition in Knowledge and Human Interests (1971a). Self-critical comments on the theory are offered in the ‘Postscript’ to Knowledge and Human Interests (1971a: 351–86), the ‘Introduction’ to Theory and Practice (1976a: 1–40), and in one of his substantial responses to his critics (1982).
Habermas's argument is important because it challenges a presupposition that was widespread in many schools of philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century: that for a knowledge claim to be sound it had to be ‘pure’ in some sense, untainted by biases. At one level this is perfectly acceptable. A Nazi eugenic ‘science’, motivated by anti-Semitism and a belief in the superiority of the Aryan race, will not produce sound knowledge. The positivists thus argued that science should be cleansed of ‘the sewage of emotionality’ (Habermas 1976a: 265) and all contaminating value-orientations (such as anti-Semitism). For many philosophers of science, their task is then to articulate the rules or methods that good scientific inquiry should follow, on the assumption that such rules would serve to exclud...

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