Hauke Brunkhorst The Habermas Handbook

THE
HABERMAS
HANDBOOK
NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY
Amy Allen, General Editor
New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts
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Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara

The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory,
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Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee
The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara
Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero
Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser
Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth
States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens
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Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism, James Ingram
Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Axel Honneth
Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary, Chiara Bottici
Alienation, Rahel Jaeggi
The Power of Tolerance: A Debate, Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, edited by Luca Di Blasi
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Radical History and the Politics of Art, Gabriel Rockhill
The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel, Robyn Marasco
A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique, Anita Chari
The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Amy Allen
Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality,
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What Is a People?, Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman,
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Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism,
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Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Enzo Traverso
Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later: The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics,
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THE
HABERMAS
HANDBOOK
EDITED BY
HAUKE BRUNKHORST,
REGINA KREIDE, AND
CRISTINA LAFONT
Columbia University Press

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Names: Brunkhorst, Hauke, editor. | Kreide, Regina, editor. |
Lafont, Cristina, 1963– editor.
Title: The Habermas handbook / edited by
Hauke Brunkhorst, Regina Kreide, and Cristina Lafont.
Other titles: Habermas-Handbuch.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2017. |
Series: New directions in critical theory |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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ISBN 9780231535885 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231166423 (cloth : alk. paper)
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C ON T EN T S
Preface xi
PART I. INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY 1

HAUKE BRUNKHORST AND STEFAN MÜLLER-DOOHM
PART II. CONTEXTS
1. The Philosophy of History, Anthropology, and Marxism 27

AX EL H O N N E TH
2. The Frankfurt School and Social Theory 31

AX EL H O N N E TH
3. Constitutional Law 36
W I LLI AM E. SC HE UE RM AN
4. Pragmatism and Ultimate Justification 43

M AT T H I AS K E TTN E R
5. Hermeneutics and the Linguistic Turn 49

CRISTINA LAFONT
6. Speech Acts 58
P ET ER N I ES E N
vi Contents
7. Psychoanalysis 64
J O EL W H I TE BOOK
8. Postmetaphysical Thinking 71
K EN N ET H BAY N E S
9. Kant 75
I N G EB O R G M AUS
10. Cognitive Psychology 92

G ER T R U D NUN N E R -WI N KL E R
11. The Epitome of Technocratic Consciousness 98

M AR C ELO NE VE S
12. Evolutionary Theories 105

K LAU S ED ER
13. Power Discourses 111

AN D R EAS NI E D E R BE R GE R
14. Juridical Discourses 117

K LAU S G Ü NTHE R
15. The Theory of Democracy 122

R AI N ER SC HM AL Z- BRUN S
16. Moral and Ethical Discourses: The Distinction

in General 133
GEORG LOHMANN
17. The Constitutionalization of International Law 143

J EAN L. C OHE N
18. European Constitutionalization 153

CHRISTIAN JOERGES
19. The Theory of Justice 162

REGINA KREIDE
20. Deconstruction 170

T H O M AS K H URAN A
21. Poststructuralism 177

AM Y ALLEN
22. Feminism 183

AM Y R . B AE HR
23. Neopragmatism 188

RICHARD J. BERNSTEIN
Contents vii
24. Jewish Philosophy 196

MICHA BRUMLIK
25. Monotheism 207

FELMON DAVIS
PART III. TEXTS
26. Schelling, Marx, and the Philosophy of History: Das Absolute und die
Geschichte: Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken (The Absolute
and History: On the Ambiguity in Schelling’s Thought, 1954) 219
M AN F R ED F RAN K
27. The Theory of the Public Sphere: The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere (1962) 245
N AN C Y F R ASE R
28. Technology and Reification: “Technology and Science as

‘Ideology’ ” (1968) 256
ROBIN CELIKATES AND RAHEL JAEGGI
29. Critique of Knowledge as Social Theory: Knowledge and

Human Interests (1968) 271
W I LLI AM R E HG
30. Communicative Rationality: Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer

Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Preparatory Remarks for
a Theory of Communicative Action, 1971) 288
CRISTINA LAFONT
31. Late Capitalism and Legitimation: Legitimation Crisis (1973) 306

F R AN K N U LLM E I E R
32. History and Evolution: Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen

Materialismus (1976) 325
T H O M AS M C C ARTHY
33. Aporias of Cultural Modernity: “Modernity—an Unfinished

Project” (1980) 334
CHRISTOPH MENKE
34. Stand-In and Interpreter: “Philosophy as Stand-In and

Interpreter” (1981) 349
HAUKE BRUNKHORST
35. The Theory of Society: The Theory of Communicative Action (1981):

A Classic of Social Theory 360
DAVID STRECKER
viii Contents
36. The Discourse Theory of Morality: “Discourse Ethics—Notes on a

Program of Philosophical Justification” (1983) 383
RAINER FORST
37. Defense of Modernity: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

(1985): Modernity as Rationalization and the Critique of
Instrumental Reason 394
SEYLA B EN HABI B
38. Democracy, Law, and Society: Between Facts and Norms (1992):
Points of Reference: The Emergence of Political Philosophy from
Theoretical Philosophy 417
CHRISTOPH MÖLLERS
39. Europe, European Constitution: “Why Europe Needs

a Constitution” (2001) 432
AN D R EW ARATO
40. Religion, Metaphysics, Freedom: “Faith and Knowledge” (2001) 444

H ELG E H Ø I BRAATE N
41. Human Nature and Genetic Manipulation: The Future of

Human Nature (2001) 461
THOMAS M. SCHMIDT
42. The Constitutionalization of International Law and Politics:

“Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have
a Chance?” (2004) 474
JAM ES B O H M AN
PART IV. CONCEPTS
43. Cognitive Interests 489

W I LLI AM R E HG
44. Colonization 494

M AT T I AS I S E R
45. Communicative Action 499

CRISTINA LAFONT
46. Communicative Anthropology 504

DIRK JÖRKE
47. Conservatism 507

M I C H A B R UM L I K
Contents ix
48. Constitutions and Constitutional Patriotism 513

R AI N ER N I C KE L
49. Cosmopolitan Condition 517

K EN N ET H B AY N E S
50. Counterfactual Presuppositions 520

AN D R EAS KOL L E R
51. Deliberation 528

N I C O LE D EI T E L HOFF
52. Discourse 533

K LAU S G Ü N THE R
53. Discourse Ethics 538

RAINER FORST
54. Equality 541

K EN N ET H B AY N E S
55. European Citizenship 544

CHRISTIAN JOERGES
56. Evolution 549

M AR C ELO NE VE S
57. Historical Materialism 554

M AR T I N H ARTM AN N
58. Human Rights and Human Rights 558

REGINA KREIDE
59. Ideology 562

M AR T I N SAA R
60. Intellectuals 565

RENÉ GABRIËLS
61. Late Capitalism 571

F R AN K N U LLM E I E R
62. Learning Processes 577

G ER T R U D N UN N E R -WI N KL E R
63. Legal Wars Versus Legitimate Wars 581

AN N A G EI S
64. Legality, Legitimacy, and Legitimation 586

R AI N ER N I C KE L
x Contents
65. Mass Culture and Cultural Criticism 590

G ER T R U D KOC H
66. Postmetaphysical Thinking 594

GEORG LOHMANN
67. Power 598

M AT T I AS I S E R
68. Pragmatic Turn 602

ALI M . R I Z VI
69. Public Sphere 605

PAT R I Z I A N AN Z
70. Radical Reformism 610

HAUKE BRUNKHORST
71. Rational Reconstruction 614

M AT T I AS I S E R
72. Rationality and Rationalization 619

HAUKE BRUNKHORST
73. Social Pathology 623

M AR T I N H A RTM AN N
74. Society 627

H AR T M U T ROSA
75. System and Lifeworld 632

M AR C ELO NE VE S
Appendix: Chronology 637

Bibliography 641
List of Contributors 649
Index 653
P REFACE
J
ürgen Habermas’s contributions to the theory of society, politics,
and legal and social philosophy represent one of the most widely
read bodies of work in the twentieth century. His work has gener-
ated, in addition to heated polemics, rejection, and criticism—which occasion-
ally took unproductive paths, including neoconservative surveillance efforts
in the 1970s that went so far as to affirm ties between the theory of communi-
cative action and bomb-throwing terrorists—a current of criticism that has
refined opposing positions (especially among other variants of systems theory
in Germany and France). Various approaches have taken up Habermas’s work
and developed it. Since the 1970s, ongoing discussions have occurred on an
ever-broader scale, often adding further depth to his reflections.
As occurred for Hegel and Luhmann, left and right wings have already
emerged among Habermas’s readers. Lateral and sometimes parallel connec-
tions play early writings out against later ones; other efforts address only recent
texts and have long abandoned the author’s points of departure in Schelling,
Heidegger, Marx, and even the social sciences. That said, when discussing a
thinker who publishes roughly an essay a month, all commentary is necessarily
provisional. At least half of Habermas’s writings take stock of current research
and new fields of inquiry and, in so doing, modify his own theory. Observa-
tions to be made depend on the positions and responses offered by an author
who—like Talcott Parsons or Richard Rorty—is engaged in a continuous pro-
cess of critique and response, polemic and discussion, with alternate programs
of theory and research.
xii Preface
The volume at hand is addressed, in equal measure, to the scholarly com-

munity and to a broader public interested in politics and philosophy. Haber-
mas remains as relevant as ever both in the academy and as a diagnostician of
contemporary events, and he continues to be the focus of controversies and
debates that he often initiates. In this regard, this book strikes only a provisional
balance, yet it offers more, too: the works Habermas has already published—as
well as the reception they have met with on a global scale, which is all but impos-
sible to survey—stand as an epochal achievement that bears on and has influ-
enced politics, law, social sciences, psychology, and public life. The task, then,
is to present this body of work to the public in all its complexity yet in a readily
comprehensible manner. A handbook along the lines of the present volume
provides an appropriate medium. At the same time, the editors mean for it to
intervene in ongoing debates as part of a work in progress conducted by count-
less others, too.
To this end, a brief intellectual biography provides the theoretical context
for key studies, relevant authors, debates, and contemporary points of reference.
It is followed by an extensive account of individual works, monographs, and
essays that have commanded particular notice, in order to provide an over-
view of key assumptions and important claims as well as of the reception they
have met with across the disciplines and the ways they have been developed in
other contexts. A concluding section consists of shorter essays that elaborate
central concepts of Habermas’s work as a whole.
As a rule, standard English translations are used; when a date is provided,
it refers to subsequent, expanded editions. For the most part, essays from col-
lected volumes of the author’s work are indicated by the title of the book, not
the title of the article. The bibliography includes, in addition to information
about English translations, the publication date for the German originals.
Many people have contributed to this wide-ranging volume. Great thanks
are owed to Semhar Marcos, Marieke Kupers, and, especially, Sophie Wulk, for
checking texts thoroughly. Erik Butler is hereby thanked for ably translating
the German contributions into English. With characteristic professionalism,
Nikolaus Gramm took on final editing and provided important feedback on
content and organization. Carlos Pereira Di Salvo provided translation assis-
tance with the back matter and proofread the book.
Last but certainly not least, a special thanks to Columbia University Press,
particularly Amy Allen, editor of the series New Directions in Critical Theory,
and her colleagues Wendy Lochner and Christine Dunbar. While answering
countless questions and offering their expertise to help the book achieve its
final form, they gave us complete freedom to shape matters of content.
PART I
INTELLECTUAL
BIOGRAPHY
HAUKE BRUNKHORST AND STEFAN MÜLLER-DOOHM
B
etween the ages of ten and sixteen, Jürgen Habermas was just old
enough to experience, in conscious manner, World War II and its
aftermath: first, Germany’s victories and conquest of all of
Europe, then, the country’s unconditional surrender and the Nuremberg Tri-
als. In August 1939—under orders from the Führer—Joachim von Ribbentrop,
Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Jodl, Arthur
Seyß-Inquart, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg, Wilhelm Keitel, Julius Streicher,
Fritz Sauckel, and others had carried out the attack and despoilment of Poland,
where they erected camps for forced labor and extermination. Millions of
human beings were deported, enslaved, and murdered. Over the next five
years, the same operation occurred throughout Europe, especially in the east.
In October 1945, the organizers were put on trial; one year later, they were
hanged. The generation that had joined the Hitler Youth during the war and
even served as Flakhelfer (antiaircraft auxiliaries) or participated in the Volkss-
turm at the end—including later intellectual figures such as Niklas Luhmann,
Hermann Lübbe, Ralf Dahrendorf, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ulrich
Wehler, Odo Marquard, Alexander Kluge, the brothers Hans and Wolfgang
Mommsen, and Günter Grass, as well as politicians including Helmut
Kohl and Johannes Rau (all of whom were approximately the same age as
Habermas)—experienced their primary and secondary socialization (child-
hood and school years, puberty and adolescence) under the National Socialist
regime; their tertiary socialization (that is, the prolongation of youth that
2 Intellectual Biography
occurs during university study) occurred in an occupied Germany divided

between the Allied Powers.
The rupture that took place after 1945 profoundly shaped members of this
generation: the Reich collapsed, yet the state was preserved because of the
vehement—and successful—efforts of conservative German jurists. When
events of the Nazi years were brought to light, Habermas once said in an inter-
view, it was clear that he and his contemporaries had lived under a regime that
was criminal through and through. Now, however, there existed the newly
founded German Federal Republic in the western part of the erstwhile Reich;
it switched out almost all institutions of government in a few years and took
the place of a regime that, in a world that has never lacked atrocities or crimes
of state, was perhaps the worst of all time. Now, there existed a parliamen-
tary democracy tailored to the West, without an army or the death penalty
(Müller-Doohm 2014).
Even if they comported themselves differently and expressed different
opinions about the past, intellectuals such as Habermas, Enzensberger, Lübbe,
Dahrendorf, Kluge, and Luhmann hardly had a chance—in the transition
from the authoritarianism of the 1930s to the kindly paternalism of the 1950s,
the move from a state ruled by National Socialists to one governed by Christian
Democrats—to repress, deny, or even come to terms with German fascism.
They had to live with it. Nor could they simply carry on as before (as far too
many parties in government, education, and industry were able to do). They
had no past to continue. They might, like Habermas or Enzensberger, criticize
others’ repression of history (especially in the so-called Verdrängungsantikom-
munismus of the 1950s, which forgot the past to fight communism) as the
aftereffect of the Nazi regime, yet they were shocked again and again by the
continuity between “then” and “now.” For example, the case of Habermas’s
teacher in Bonn, Oskar Becker, made it clear that a highly esteemed professor
might have a dubious political past.
Alternatively, one might overlook or tacitly justify collaboration between
scholars and Nazi authorities by following the motto “Don’t ask, don’t tell”
and observing “communicative silence” (kommunikatives Beschweigen) on the
“brown” portions of professors’ biographies. One could view the employment
of instructors from the Nazi era as a catastrophe of “social hygiene” (Haber-
mas) or consider it a morally problematic and “asymmetrical” operation that,
all the same, was necessary for maintaining social order (Lübbe). Finally, one
might compare—in markedly disengaged terms—the functional equivalency
of the Nazi regime, however hated it was, and the subsequent rule of the occu-
piers. Luhmann observed that he was beaten by a German superior when
he was a Flakhelfer and then by the English soldiers who took him prisoner.
He added laconically—if without the intention of neoconservatives—that
Intellectual Biography 3
“personnel” and “contents” had changed but functions and roles remained the
same. This sociological insight, which represented a theoretical gain for Luh-
mann, necessarily appeared to be a “bad abstraction” (in Hegelian terminol-
ogy) to Habermas, his foremost intellectual opponent in later years; at any
rate, it exemplifies what Habermas, in his debate with Luhmann at the begin-
ning of the 1970s, called the “epitome of technocratic consciousness.”
The change that occurred in 1945 marked intellectual figures belonging to
the generation of Wehler, Habermas, Enzensberger, Luhmann, Kluge, Grass,
and Dahrendorf personally and politically, and it left an imprint on their
writings. One can see the traces in almost every sentence that Habermas has
written. In one way or another, the personal experience of fascism—and, even
more, the shock of liberation—is always there. The intellectual aggression that
Habermas has displayed, time and again, comes from his abiding concern
for the weal of political culture in the Federal Republic, which he means to
defend. This is also the case for Luhmann. Even though he was much less
engaged politically, he avoided, as much as Habermas did, the many thinkers
around Carl Schmitt; in Luhmann’s works, the twelve years from 1933 to 1945
form a constant presence. Just as Habermas replaced Martin Heidegger (with
whose thought his studies began) with Charles Sanders Peirce, Luhmann dis-
tanced himself from Arnold Gehlen and certain other German intellectuals
when he took up the works of Talcott Parsons. Whether they said so or not—
and whether they wished to do so or not—the sixteen-year-olds of 1945 could
hardly, after the fact, perceive the year of 1945 as anything other than the “new
beginning” that Hannah Arendt announced—abruptly yet full of hope—at
the end of her grim book on totalitarianism.
A few exceptions notwithstanding, the vehemently polemical debates that
distinguished this generation’s relationship to its teachers did not concern
relativizing a war of aggression or questioning the legitimacy of decisions at
Nuremberg so much as explaining “National Socialist” or “fascist” (the very
terminology is contested) horror—whether it was at all comparable to other
forms of totalitarianism (in particular, to Stalinism). It is no coincidence that
the idea of a “causal nexus” between the revolution in Russia and Hitler’s
crimes, which later gave rise to the Historikerstreit in the 1980s, came from the
generation immediately preceding the war, whose ideas were then taken up by
younger, neoconservative historians.
For the most part, members of the war generation and parties belonging to
the generation before the war, whose tertiary socialization coincided with the
period of Nazism (or who, indeed, engaged actively for the cause in 1933),
balked at the ideas of egalitarianism, freedom, and political autonomy that
now penetrated Germany from the West. Contempt for liberalism and democ-
racy remained. Intellectuals such as Heidegger, Schmitt, Hans Freyer, Ernst
Jünger, and Gehlen belonged to the first group. Habermas’s teacher, the Bonn
philosopher Erich Rothacker (who even published an essay on the importance
of philosophy for the war effort in 1944), Helmut Schelsky, Ernst Forsthoff,
and Joachim Ritter belonged to the second—a generation that was politically
and professionally active in the “Third Reich.” In either case, eloquent silence,
repression, and denial predominated. Carl Schmitt even displayed malicious
defiance and open anti-Semitism in the self-justification he presented in a col-
lection of aphorisms right after the war; still today, the work counts as holy to
his students and apologists. Schmitt acted as if he had always warned of the
demise of the Nazi state, even though he only “discovered” an unambiguous
formulation of this position after the war had ended. In 1963, he added a fore-
word to The Concept of the Political; thereby, he took aim at the Federal Repub-
lic and not at the “Third Reich.”
The only parties belonging to these two generations who could not repress
or deny anything had been illegal resistance fighters like Wolfgang Abend-
roth, who, after his cover was blown in 1937, was imprisoned before being
sent to join the notorious Strafdivision 999 for the remainder of the Nazi
period. Alternatively, they numbered among the few liberal opponents of the
Hitler regime who stayed in the country and did not go underground—for
example, Karl Jaspers. There were also individuals such as Hannah Arendt,
Leo Strauss, Thomas Mann, Karl Löwith, Franz Neumann, Hans Kelsen,
Ernst Fraenkel, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, who had to leave not
just Germany but Europe. Finally, a few escaped from concentration camps—
like Eugen Kogon, in 1945. During the war or immediately afterward, these
individuals authored books that, to this day, remain the most important works
on National Socialism and the epoch of fascism: Neumann’s Behemoth (which
he wrote secretly in Germany in the 1930s), Fraenkel’s Doppelstaat, Arendt’s
Origins of Totalitarianism, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlighten-
ment, and Kogon’s SS-Staat. However, given the public sphere in Adenauer’s
republic—which, despite the occasional emergence of voices of opposition,
stood under hegemonic control and was hermetically sealed—their views
could not be heard until the 1960s. Adenauer, the erstwhile centrist opponent
of Nazism, adopted a strategy of communicative silence whose stakes were
made plain when he knowingly surrounded himself with figures from the
regime such as Heinrich Globke, the coauthor of the Nuremberg Laws.
The opposite occurred among members of the generation following Haber-
mas, Luhmann, Dahrendorf, Grass, Lübbe, and Mommsen—that is, among
the student revolutionaries of 1968. Born after (or at) the end of Hitler’s Reich,
theirs was the first generation to be shaped by the Federal Republic and the
West, by Europe and America—that is, by an upbringing that had become
more liberal. They did not view the events of National Socialism in terms of
their own biographies; whatever parts of their parents’ lives were connected
to the regime preceded their birth. They knew about National Socialism only
from newspapers, books, films, and anecdotes. The Spiegel affair and the Aus-
chwitz trial provided the key experiences of their political awakening.
Through these events, National Socialism turned into a present past; at the
same time, it remained an unattainable past present as far as personal biog-
raphy was concerned, for it could not be brought to bear on their own lives
other than by accounts from witnesses, history, literature, art, and acts of
imagination.
Such a mediated presence of history facilitated the perception of the latent
fascism in everyday life in the Federal Republic as well as in the imperialism of
Germany’s western neighbors—especially during the Vietnam War. The state
of affairs also promoted immoderate exaggeration: the copying of left-wing
radicals and communists of the Weimar Era (an act that only seemed to be
revolutionary); the tendency to confuse enduring Nazi sympathies in a coun-
try governed by Christian Democrats with overt, fascist rule; and the overly
hasty equation of imperialistic military engagement with the purposes of
American democracy as a whole. Most fatefully, it encouraged actionistic
efforts to make latent fascism manifest through calculated provocation and
experiments in violence (as in the case of Rudi Dutschke), so that the public
might see what radicals knew was lurking beneath the surface.
While still a student—one year before submitting his dissertation—Haber-
mas published an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (July 1953)
entitled “Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken: Zur Veröffentlichung von
Vorlesungen aus dem Jahre 1935” (“Thinking with Heidegger Against Hei-
degger: On the Publication of His Lectures from 1935”). Here, Habermas not
only took Heidegger to task for his involvement in National Socialism but took
issue with his thought, as well. Heidegger had republished a lecture from the
1930s without any commentary; for the sake of his own reputation and renown,
however, he touched up remarks concerning the “inner truth and greatness
of this movement”—which referred to National Socialism, of course. In the
process, he also added a parenthetical remark to “this movement”: “(namely . . .
the encounter between technology on a planetary scale and modern man).”
Yet Heidegger had explicitly taken issue with technology only after the war;
now, his amended text would appear, to readers familiar with his earlier
writings, to provide an early indication of his distance from the Nazi regime
(cf. Texte, 76).
In the 1950s, Heidegger’s main work of the 1920s, Being and Time, shaped
German philosophy as a whole. Significantly, Heidegger’s abiding respect for
National Socialism did not occasion controversy; rather, it was Habermas’s
critique of his person and work that was considered scandalous because it vio-
lated the commonsensical agreement to observe communicative silence. Phil-
osophical minds were shocked and dismayed not so much by the fact that
Habermas recommended thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger but that

he justified doing so in political terms.
In the following years, Habermas moved further to the left. His involve-
ment with two figures who had been persecuted by the Nazis—Adorno (at
whose Institute for Social Research he studied and practiced sociology)
and, a little later, Abendroth (under whom he wrote his Habilitation)—
made Habermas, the left-wing Heideggerian, into a neo-Marxist, even if
he did not adhere to orthodoxy and revised many of its tenets. Still today,
idiosyncratic Marxism forms a key component of his work; much of Haber-
mas’s thought cannot be properly understood without a thorough knowl-
edge of Marx and Marxist literature—especially an understanding of the
cultural conditions and tremendous intellectual upheaval that occurred in
the times between Hegel and his heir. Even though Kant has come to play a
greater and more fundamental role in Habermas’s thought, Marx remains
essential (see chapter 1).
Habermas’s work differs from that of his contemporaries—both sociolo-
gists like Luhmann and philosophers like John Rawls (chapter 19)—inasmuch
as it combines normative claims with empirical theory. Marx had replaced
Hegelian Spirit with the concept of social interaction; this reorientation sepa-
rated modern critical thought from that of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Habermas’s project preserves this dialectical synthesis—and adds
to it elements derived from critical theory in its New York exile (Horkheimer,
Adorno, Marcuse, Löwenthal).
Habermas accepts that the foundation of philosophy is reason, which he
understands in terms of language and discourse; his interest, however, is to
elaborate a theory of society and social relations. This approach is based on
the idea—already anticipated by the Austrian Marxist Max Adler—of trans-
forming epistemological critique into social theory. It would be wrong to
understand Habermas merely as a philosopher who justifies social observa-
tions by way of rational argument or appeals to the ethics of discourse; equally,
it would be mistaken to view him only as a social scientist and sociologist.
Even though Habermas has always sought to defend his project with the
appropriate disciplinary language, he is not a philosopher and a sociologist.
Rather, he has created a truly interdisciplinary theory of society by working as
a professional sociologist (from 1956 through 1959, and again from 1964
through 1982) and as a professional philosopher (1961 through 1971 and 1983
through 1994).
The concept of society occupies the center of Habermas’s work. The intro-
duction to Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) sums up his program: “A
radical critique of knowledge” is possible “only as social theory” (Knowledge,
58). With The Theory of Communicative Action, which appeared fifteen years
later, the project of justifying social theory epistemologically—and, conversely,
grounding epistemology in social theory—was completed (see chapters 28, 29,

and 45).
Habermas’s relationship to the broad array of philosophical and social-scien-
tific programs of theory and research is dialogical and predatory at once. The
thinker boards an academic discourse, appropriates its terminology, engages in
combat with colleagues in the field until they accept him and quote him, but
then, at the very moment his interlocutors seek common ground, he abandons
ship in order to integrate what he has acquired into his own theoretical project,
leaving the specialists shaking their heads. In such productive eclecticism,
Habermas’s work may be likened perhaps most of all to that of the great Ameri-
can sociologist Talcott Parsons.
Habermas develops large swaths of his own theory through the immanent
critique of works by other authors. In The Theory of Communicative Action,
which he wrote while directing the Max Planck Institute at Starnberg and pub-
lished before beginning his second tenure in Frankfurt (1981), Habermas engages
with the classics of sociology, phenomenological theories of action, function-
alistic systems theory, the philosophy of speech acts (Austin, Searle), and empir-
ical and hermeneutic theories of rationality. By summarizing, reconstructing,
and critiquing works from these fields, he sought, time and again, to find what
would hold up to his own theses. Unlike Luhmann—whose work proceeds
much more constructively and tends to obscure its sources—Habermas lives
entirely from ongoing communication and exchange with others, alternately
integrating and excluding foreign material. This is especially true of the proj-
ects that are most important for his version of critical theory: the Frankfurt
School and functionalistic systems theory. Habermas’s disagreement with
Luhmann—with whom, in 1971, he conducted a widely publicized and much-
discussed feud (documented in the volume Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozi-
altechnologie? [Social theory or social technology?])—connects his work with
the turn toward communication in social theory and marks the thinker’s dis-
tance from the first generation of the Frankfurt School.
Despite his immanent critique of the (supposedly) defeatist conception of
reason displayed by critical theorists such as Horkheimer and Adorno,
Habermas—in a program that he understands in terms of engaged philosoph-
ical enlightenment—has participated in the continuity of the intellectual tra-
dition they inaugurated. Habermas has adhered to the maxim of dialecticians,
according to which the significance of critical theory involves thinking against
one’s own position—that is, one should neither dogmatize nor “musealize”
insights but rather expand them systematically on the basis of new historical
phenomena and experiences. Habermas assumed the inheritance of critical
theory, meaning to transform it along the lines of a linguistic and pragmatic
turn (cf. chapter 5)—to the dismay of all who cannot imagine such an enter-
prise as anything other than the analysis of false consciousness. Indeed,
Habermas has freed Adorno’s “negative dialectics” from the paralysis of thor-
oughgoing negativity and transformed the latter’s project into a theory of soci-
ety that both is postmetaphysical and possesses normative content.
Habermas’s proximity to Adorno becomes clear, above all, in his approach
to moral points of view. This approach is animated by the “negative idea of
abolishing discrimination and harm” (Inclusion, xxxvi)—even though Haber-
mas rejects Horkheimer and Adorno’s gloomy philosophy of history (see
chapter 70). Habermas dismisses the previous generation’s conception of uto-
pia: a state wherein mankind has been freed from all constraints. In taking
distance from his own early thesis of “communication free of domination”
(herrschaftsfreie Kommunikation), Habermas has also come to reject Adorno’s
negativism. Totality is neither the True (Hegel) nor the Untrue (Adorno);
rather, its substance depends on coincidental circumstances that are variable
and on the results of our practical activities. In matters of thought and the
world, truth and falsehood represent practical concerns (a point on which
Habermas agrees with Heidegger, pragmatists, and the early Marx).
Habermas’s examination of critical theory has occurred in an entirely
dialectical spirit. Horkheimer and Adorno always stressed that their social-
theoretical reflections were to be situated historically—that a “seed of time”
(Zeitkern) formed part of their truth. Accordingly, it is only logical for
Habermas to understand his version of critical theory as a “theory of society
which has renounced all the certainty of a philosophy of history without hav-
ing renounced its claims to have a critical edge” (Habermas 1991, 260). Here,
the indeterminate utopia of a wholly different world gives way to a notion of
intersubjective understanding meant to enable agreement when and where
the better argument prevails. In this way—by presenting critique as a method
of resolving contested claims by argument and subjecting their validity to
verification—Habermas can repair the absence of a normative foundation in
critical theory, which otherwise is guided primarily by moral intuitions.
Such praxis-oriented reorganization has led to intellectual connections
that extend far into the political mainstream—that is, into the platforms and
activities of both the main parties in the Federal Republic, from which Haber-
mas has otherwise held his distance. (At any rate, he has always expressed
reservations and offered ironic commentary on their initiatives and policies;
consider, for example, his venomous endorsement of Gerhard Schröder before
the 1998 elections.) In addition—and especially in recent years—the rework-
ing of critical theory has led to numerous attempts to put Habermas (along-
side Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, among others) in the
service of radical social critique that need not endorse social democracy or
parliamentarianism (see chapters 11 and 20).
In his many diagnoses of contemporary ills and numerous intellectual
interventions, Habermas is concerned with philosophical norms, sociological
theory, and the reflexive self-description of the society in which we live. For
decades, he has, time and again, provided the Federal Republic with keywords
marking sites of political debate and conflict. Thus, Habermas has combined
the antifascist consensus (a phrase coined for the period before 1945) with a
phrase from when the Federal Republic was founded in 1949: constitutional
patriotism. This terminology, which came from the “conservative liberal” Dolf
Sternberger, he has reinterpreted along the lines of a postnational constellation
(thus the title of a book from 1992); in the 1980s, the idea circulated to great
effect (see chapter 48).
The notion of the public sphere stems from the late 1950s (chapter 27). This
concept, which combines theory and critique, lies at the core of Habermas’s
intellectual enterprise. His Habilitation, in which he first elaborated the
notion, critiqued the depoliticization of 1950s society. This period—after the
constant mobilization of the preceding years—was characterized by powerful
media conglomerates that dominated public life, on the one hand, and, on
the other, by the social conformism of a populace that the expanding welfare
state had pacified and atomized (and not just in Germany). One consequence
of the gentle and democratic Gleichschaltung engineered by the Christian
Democratic government occurred when, in the Spiegel affair, the state cur-
tailed freedom of the press; another example may be seen in the active and
passive resistance that occurred when National Socialists began to be tried in
German courts. To be sure, countermovements arose, but they were slight
compared to the call for a repoliticization of public life that provided the slogan
for the student movement in the following decade.
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere exercised great influ-
ence on budding student radicals. This book—a combination of acute social
critique and academic jargon from the fields of sociology and political
science—fit well into the milieu of smoky gatherings of the Sozialistischer
Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student League, SDS). (Haber-
mas was part of the organization’s founding generation—and a member of its
Förderverein [friends’ association]—after it split from the Social Democrats.)
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere articulates the central
demand of the revolutionaries of 1968: the creation of deliberative space in all
bodies and organizations where matters of general concern are presently
decided in processes closed to public supervision and participation. Democ-
racy should be a shared undertaking and not just a feature of the political
system—a matter left to parties, parliaments, and executive committees. Soci-
ety as a whole and the groupings that constitute it (e.g., unions) should take
part in political life.
Since then—that is, after efforts in the 1970s (some of which were success-
ful, others less so)—the hope that democracy might be renewed through
public spaces within organizations has vanished, but the core idea that
democracy/democratic legitimation concerns society as a whole and not just

the political class and parliamentary organs has remained. In today’s global
society—whose dimensions could scarcely have been anticipated in the 1950s
or 1960s—the idea has only gained in currency and urgency.
In the late 1960s, public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) was a key term for parties
opposed to the progressive dedemocratization that was occurring through the
“establishment” and consumerism. At the same time, however, Habermas
rejected student leaders’ call for the transformation of all social relations, and
he qualified the effort as “a revolution in appearance only” (Scheinrevolution).
Habermas never believed that the complete elimination of late capitalism—of
which students from Berlin to Berkeley dreamed—was possible; indeed, he
saw a methodical (if not substantive) affinity with Italian fascism in their
actionism.
Yet despite the sharp tone one can hear in references to “left-wing fascism”
and “Scheinrevolution” (which, of course, gave rise to vehement objections),
Habermas’s criticism of the student movement—unlike the belated self-reproach
of its erstwhile adherents today—represented critique from within. Habermas
did not object to the Marxism of student leaders; instead, he faulted them for
falling back onto the orthodox theories of class and value, which had been
valid for the nineteenth century, at best. Using the language of Marx, he criti-
cized the “utopian socialism” of Rudi Dutschke and the voluntaristic acts he
advocated, which sought to make the latent violence of the system manifest
through preemptive acts of violence. Although Habermas labeled activities of
this kind “left-wing fascism,” he qualified his use of the phrase in numerous
interviews and position statements. Later, he admitted that he had underesti-
mated the innovative potential of imaginative, nonviolent acts of disruption;
he could recognize their merit as protest—that they had substantially repoliti-
cized the public sphere—only after the fact.
In lectures and essays, Habermas analyzed and tried to assess the chances
for success of the newfangled, spontaneous, and—for the first time—global
political movement, which had its main seats in Berlin, Paris, New York, and
Berkeley (where he was teaching when the movement was at its peak). At the
end of the 1960s, he attended meetings and gatherings of student radicals—
especially in Frankfurt—where he engaged in debate more often than his
academic colleagues (Kraushaar 1998). Today, it seems one can explain how
students (“Hitler’s children”) identified their own revolt with uprisings in the
so-called Third World in terms of a pathological projection resulting from the
contamination of their ideas by the collective, neoliberalist consciousness.
Habermas, however, already had an alternate interpretation, which is certainly
more accurate.
For Habermas, it was a matter of new moral sensibilities that had been
made possible by the permissive upbringing/education of the 1950s and 1960s
as well as the prolonged attendance of school and extended adolescence. He

observed: “Personal identification with people in the Third World who are
starving, wretched, and dependent speaks for the power of moral imagination,
it is moreover a necessary impulse for investigating causal connections between
repression here and repression in underdeveloped lands” (Rational Society,
183). For this reason, he rejected overly harsh criticism of the students’ supposed
utopianism (which he, too, had voiced—at first). After all, students wanted “to
employ technologically available means to satisfy needs articulated without
force”—and, in the process, to free themselves from a repressive and (at least
partially) unnecessary demand for achievement/success (what, in German, is
called the Leistungsprinzip). On this point, Habermas agreed with Marcuse
(Rational Society, 183; cf. Rational Society, 90ff.); at the same time, he saw no
reason “to abandon the basis of legitimation provided by our constitution”
(183) by changing the institutional framework of late-capitalist society or
democratizing it comprehensively.
Maintaining equal distance from the technocratic reformism of the “Great
Coalition” of the Social and Christian Democrats, on the one hand, and the
starry-eyed romanticism of student radicals (above all, that of his contempo-
rary Hans Magnus Enzensberger), Habermas responded to the question
“Reform or Revolution?”—which Spiegel submitted to German intellectuals in
1968—by advocating a program of radical reform. That is, Habermas affirmed
that the ways and means offered by constitutional democracy were sufficient
to reconfigure social relations in a revolutionary manner. When the Social
Democrats came to power—and announced, with Willy Brandt’s slogan,
“Mehr Demokratie wagen! [Risk More Democracy!]”—it seemed the day had
come for the radical reform that Habermas had long endorsed.
The leaden 1970s quickly dashed such hopes. Now, Habermas—whom neo-
conservative opponents denounced as the spiritual father of terrorism—saw
“another republic” emerging, and he feared it would no longer be free and
democratic. He refused to publish anything more in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung and considered having his political essays appear in comparable (and,
at the time, significantly more liberal) journals in Italy and France. Habermas
was especially disappointed and embittered when Ernst Albrecht, the Chris-
tian Democratic Ministerpräsident of Lower Saxony, demanded that a group
of left-wing professors sign a statement affirming the principles of the Federal
Republic (the so-called freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung, FdGO). The
initiative stood out among other ignominious reactions to terrorism—which
government officials and the Springer publishing concern magnified into a
crisis of state, even though it never represented a greater danger than everyday
violent crime—because parties suspected of left-wing tendencies were already
forbidden from holding office. (Ironically, this measure had been initiated
under Willy Brandt, a Social Democrat; needless to say, the Bonn republic
survived the artificial state of emergency—just as, a decade later, democracy

survived even Germany’s reunification.)
Another catchword of the 1960s was late capitalism. Like crisis—a term
that also gained currency at the time—it was not Habermas’s invention. How-
ever, Habermas took it up, reinterpreted it, and gave it an original spin when
he addressed the late-capitalist legitimation crisis (German: Legitimation-
sprobleme im Spätkapitalismus). Habermas’s book of the same name (German,
1973; English, 1975), which summarized his earlier positions and developed
their implications in a new context, found a broad—indeed, an international—
readership (see chapter 31). It was published at the same time as another suc-
cessful title, Claus Offe’s Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates (Struc-
tural problems of the capitalist state). Both works struck a nerve among Social
Democrats, who had finally come to power with the election of Brandt and
now harbored great hopes—which, as noted, were disappointed soon enough.
It seems that the flexibility and elasticity of late capitalism confounds all
projects of reform. On the one hand, the economy appears to be under control
and, indeed, to assure abundant prosperity (a state that, in turn, permits a
halfway equitable distribution of wealth—even if it needs to be won in pro-
tracted class struggles and only extends to the victors of history). Habermas’s
argument is that, at the same time, other crises—especially problems of moti-
vation and rationality—undermine the structures from which the social order
under late capitalism derives its justification.
The concept of legitimation crisis demonstrates the political relevancy of
theories that describe—and explain—new phenomena in a scientific manner.
Habermas’s thesis accounted for how and why the social-democratic program
had failed in West Germany and states throughout the northwestern corner of
the globe. This book (which employed the vocabulary of systems theory for
the first time on a larger scale) assessed the insolubility of problems of gover-
nance—the impossibility of uniting “structurally inherent system-imperatives
that are contradictory” (Legitimation Crisis, 2). Economic reasons underlie the
crisis, but its symptoms manifest themselves above all in the political and
sociocultural spheres.
The complementary notions of legitimation crisis and motivation crisis
name phenomena that are distinct from purely economic problems yet still
belong to the sphere of material reproduction; the terms refer to problems that
arise when economic factors compel the state to adopt (restrictive) policies
promoting order. When governmental strategies fail, a crisis of rationality
results. Against traditional Marxist diagnoses—and taking up his own earlier
engagement with Marx’s theory of value in Theory and Practice (1963)—
Habermas seeks to show that, in the late-capitalist societies that have taken
the place of classical, liberal capitalism (that is, in political orders where the
state intervenes economically to social ends), class struggle has transformed
into class compromise: political criteria determine how the gross national
product is distributed.
Under normal circumstances, the economically induced crises of late capi-
talism can be minimized (even if, in the tumult of globalization, the safe-
guards afforded by traditional forms of the state are becoming fewer and
fewer). Even when the worst is averted,
contradictory steering imperatives that assert themselves in the pressure for

capital realization . . . produce a series of other crisis tendencies. The continu-
ing tendency toward disturbance of capitalist growth can be administra-
tively processed and transferred, by stages, through the political and into the
socio-political system. I am of the opinion that the contradiction of social-
ized production for particular ends thereby directly takes on again a political
form—naturally not that of political class warfare.
(Legitimation Crisis, 40)
Habermas does not exclude the possibility that legitimation crises will
escalate—and that, consequently, societies will grow less democratic in seek-
ing to avoid needing to justify their existence with reasons anchored in state
constitutions. Crises of legitimation menace the integrity of society, which
depends on the renewal of reliable structures of intersubjectivity providing
justified and credible norms. When disruptions of norms occur, crises of
motivation may result: tradition ceases to “hold” and assure societal integra-
tion when its fundaments stop being believable (as occurred, for example,
when the ideology of “achievement”/“success” [Leistung] broke down in the
1960s).
Habermas has pointedly rejected all strategies of compensation of the
technocratic or neoconservative varieties, which seek to engineer legitima-
tion, credibility, and meaning by artificial means: “there is no administrative
production of meaning” (Legitimation Crisis, 70), he affirms. Instead, he
emphasizes that enlisting norms to produce societal integration will likely
occasion resistance: “Only if motives for action no longer operated through
norms requiring justification, and if personality systems no longer had to find
their unity in identity-securing interpretive systems, could the acceptance of
decisions without reasons become routine, that is, could the readiness to
conform . . . be produced to any desired degree” (Legitimation Crisis, 44). For
Habermas, technocratic expediency of this kind is both improbable and
undesirable.
Instead, he affirms that a real social value may be found in the normative
potential of democracy—a matter that political and economic actors must
consider when pursuing their interests. In Habermas’s eyes, progressive
democratization remains the only way to avoid the systemic dangers within
democracy and the pressures of hegemonic class structures that weigh upon it.
(Just because class conflict has been neutralized and institutionalized does
not mean that it has disappeared.) The well-known words of John Dewey—
that the only therapy for the ills of democracy is “more democracy”—express
the political stakes of Habermas’s theorem. Only an egalitarian democracy
nourished by the communicative power of the “untamable” and “anarchic”
public sphere (see Between Facts and Norms) can control the dynamics of
power and money—which always pose the risk of crisis—without destroying
the productivity they unleash.
The Theory of Communicative Action (which appeared in German in 1981)
fleshes out the matter of problems of legitimation, revising earlier ideas and
defining them with greater precision. At the same time, however, the base
assumption of an irreconcilable polarity between capitalism and democracy
does not change. Habermas remains convinced that only a strong democracy,
constantly renewed and enlarged by social struggles “from below,” can check
the dangers of capitalist expansion:
Between capitalism and democracy there is an indissoluble tension; in them

two opposed principles of societal integration compete for primacy. If we look
at the self-understanding expressed in the basic principles of democratic con-
stitutions, modern societies assert the primacy of a lifeworld in relation to the
subsystems separated out of its institutional orders.
(Communicative Action, 2:345)
What is more, the tension between capitalism and democracy—which is dan-

gerous and productive in equal measure—yields a deadly antagonism to the
extent that the steering media of money and power take hold of and “colonize”
practices of communication in the everyday lifeworld.
The balance between the three principal media of societal integration achieved
over the course of modernity is being jeopardized because markets and
administrative power are displacing social solidarity—i.e. the coordination
of action through values, norms, and language use oriented to reaching
understanding—from ever more domains of social life.
(Naturalism, 111)
Political resistance must be mobilized against such colonization—and this

can only occur within the discursive public sphere.
Only through the public mobilization of communicative power—which for
Habermas (as for Hannah Arendt) is not an academic matter so much as a
public concern whose material potential involves avenging violence (a notion
that is often misunderstood, needless to say)—is it possible to protect civil
society against economic imperatives and autonomous state organs. Consen-

sual decisions—which are achieved through engaged discussion and the
mobilization of communicative power—provide a standard for controlling
both the economic and the political systems. Habermas dispenses with the
utopian idea that the economic sphere might be democratized from within—
i.e., that participation and self-determination might steer its course. Yet at the
same time, he holds—with Marx, in his later writings—that activity of this
kind is necessary. Through democratic self-determination, “the systemic
imperatives of an interventionist state apparatus and those of an economic
system” may be held “in check,” and this task “is formulated in defensive
terms. Yet, this defensive resteering will not be able to succeed without a radi-
cal and broadly effective democratization” (Habermas 1991, 261). In complex
societies, it is necessary for the normative status of a realm of freedom to trump
the domination exercised by power and money.
Today, the epochal dynamics of globalization and economic deregulation
lend further urgency to the call for democratization. Parallel to the expansion
of capitalism into a worldwide system and “following the collapse of the bipo-
lar power constellation” (i.e., the dichotomy of East-West), democracy runs
the risk of occupying a (permanently) defensive position within what Haber-
mas has called the “postnational constellation” (Naturalism, 312, 327). Like the
one that preceded it, this constellation involves system crises that the admin-
istrative organs of the state manage; when such control is removed, the crises
return in greater force (just as situations of social conflict have reemerged
even though social democrats engineered wealth redistribution from top to
bottom). For this reason, “the conception of a world society under private law”
that “deflates . . . claims for legitimation” merits renewed discussion and cri-
tique (Naturalism, 345).
In his writings of the last two decades on global capitalism, law, and
politics, Habermas has advocated “global domestic politics without a world
government—or, alternatively, “world society without a world government”
(Naturalism, 319). Above all, the tasks of a supranational world organization
should center on peace, human rights, and the environment. The primary
focus ought to concern “[overcoming] the extreme disparities in wealth within
the stratified world society, [reversing] ecological imbalances, and [averting]
collective threats, on the one hand, while endeavoring to promote an intercul-
tural discourse on, and recognition of, the equal rights of the main world civi-
lizations, on the other” (Naturalism, 333). As the most important institution of
domestic world politics, the United Nations would be measured by democratic
criteria of legitimation. After all, “neither deliberation nor the public sphere is
inherently limited by national borders” (Habermas 2007, 436). Today, the idea of
a deliberative democracy (developed in Between Facts and Norms [see chapters
38 and 40]) plays a key role in discussions about globalization. Occasionally, this
is misunderstood as an elitist compensation for the massive lack of democracy

in the world—a matter of simply creating (more) forums of discussion that
will prepare and accompany actual decision making. However, Habermas has
always insisted that the deliberative procedures of resolving problems within an
inclusive public sphere can only amount to actual democracy when they are
structurally linked to egalitarian processes of decision (which need not be par-
liamentary in form).
In the 1970s, concepts that had remained largely abstract—even to
Habermas—began to receive attention (e.g., communication and discourse).
When large-scale reforms were implemented in Germany, Habermas’s ideas
entered into broad circulation, especially in the educational system. The concept
of emancipatory cognitive interest (emanzipatorisches Erkenntnisinteresse)—
pioneered by Habermas and his friend Karl-Otto Apel (eight years his senior
and a classmate during his studies)—had already exercised a strong influence
on student radicals’ critique of science and the university system in the 1960s.
Although Habermas held that his views had been largely misunderstood, his
ideas were important for others’ diagnoses of the times. What is more—despite
the fact that it originated in a different theoretical context—Habermas’s
notion of “discourse” connected with French poststructuralism (especially the
writings of Michel Foucault).
Although Habermas has always rejected voluntarist theory and praxis (a
hallmark of his French contemporaries), his view of discourse offers a way to
examine the complexities and internal differentiations of knowledge from a
critical perspective (see chapter 20). For him, “discourse” has an explicitly
political meaning, albeit one that stands in the service of reform. In his new
introduction to Theory and Practice (which originally appeared in 1963),
Habermas addressed the “institutionalization of practical discourse” in an
effort to distance himself from the neo-Leninist voluntarism of Maoist orga-
nizations he observed in the 1970s.
At around the same time, specialists in the field of education took up his
terms of “discourse” and “domination-free communication” (herrschaftsfreie
Kommunikation); numerous books were published on the subject—written by
pedagogues seeking to resolve disputes through dialogue and by therapists
who wished to change the atmosphere and interpersonal dynamics in corpo-
rate settings. Notwithstanding the broad attention they received, Habermas’s
ideas were misunderstood inasmuch as they were held to be concrete prescrip-
tions. Instead of offering instructions, his theory of communication identifies
different ideal conditions—truth, truthfulness, normative rightness, and logi-
cal consistency—that must be observed and imputed to every speech act,
whether we want to do so or not (see chapters 5, 30, 40, 42, 47). This is a matter
of theory, not legislating standards. (In contrast to Habermas’s actual pur-
pose, much of the literature invoking his ideas considered them to be
programmatic—and sought to apply them in educational, therapeutic, and

business settings as if they constituted positive law or represented “facts” of
natural science.)
A reflexive theory such as Habermas’s includes itself within the field of
inquiry; the point is to identify conditions that make processes of emancipation
possible—not to dictate modes of interaction. Habermas’s purposes concern
the logic of social praxis and emancipatory instruction; as such, his theory
cannot simply be deployed as if it were a doctrine of virtue (Tugendlehre), a set
of good advice, a series of imperatives and maxims, or so many strategies of
instrumental reason. His analyses address, above all, the qualities of the presup-
positions underlying speech acts, which make arguments possible. They do not
set objectives that can be planned and achieved through rational action. Haber-
mas is not concerned with the communicative means and techniques that might
emancipate one from domination; rather, he explores the conditions of possibil-
ity for communication—which, because they do not boil down to instrumen-
tally rational programs, must necessarily defy the goal-oriented thinking of
pedagogues, therapists, and corporate supervisors.
In the last part of Habermas’s two-volume Theory of Communicative Action
(his most important work, which appeared at the beginning of the 1980s)
stands the diagnostic formula: colonization of the lifeworld (see chapter 44).
This diagnosis—which is a matter of some political import—represents the
functional equivalent of older, Marxist terminology combining theoretical
explanations with praxis-oriented interpretations of the world. The phrase is
meant to substitute for—and, at the same time, actualize—terms like “exploi-
tation” (whose semantic contours were dissolved by the welfare state) and
“alienation” (which lost its political force at the latest when it was adopted as a
part of theological discourse in Protestant academies). Here, both conceptual
fields are joined in a single expression. This also explains why Habermas
employs the dramatic imagery of “colonial masters” who “make their way . . .
from the outside . . . and force . . . assimilation” (Communicative Action, 2:355).
The new colonial masters—unlike the old ones—are completely imper-
sonal, and their orders represent “the imperatives of autonomous subsystems”
(Communicative Action, 2:354): technoscientific civilization, law and juridifi-
cation, money and capital, and administrative and social power. They no
longer invade distant tribal societies abroad; rather, they penetrate the com-
municative infrastructure of the lifeworld familiar to us in everyday existence.
This social lifeworld is not an archaic or premodern community like what one
would have found in Africa, America, or Australia two, three, or four hundred
years ago; rather, it is a rationalized, modern environment that is internally
differentiated to a high degree. All the same—and like older forms of social
organization—this modern environment relies on forms of communication
and consensus formation, which cannot be replaced by statistics, court
decisions, or administrative measures without triggering life-threatening cri-

ses and pathologies.
System imperatives dispossess the lifeworld of its communicative substance
(Marx would have spoken of expropriation), which they then exploit and give
back to the lifeworld in reified form—after assimilating all forms of commu-
nicative agreement and conflict to the ways that law, power, and the market
resolve problems. One recent example of colonization of this sort is found in
university reforms that have occurred on the business model—reforms that,
although enacted legally, go against the will of those who study and work in
institutions of higher learning by cutting off scholarly exchange, research, and
instruction from their source in communicative life and assimilating them to
the logic governing the flow of money and products. Habermas’s theory of
colonization can be readily reconciled with Foucault’s brand of diagnostic
poststructuralism (even though, instead of proceeding genealogically, Haber-
mas takes up the Marxist and neo-Marxist critique of reification). Even a
quick glance at a modular, goal-oriented syllabus reveals that monetary coloni-
zation gives university education the form of a commodity (Adorno) and, at
the same time, produces a new disciplinary subject (Foucault). The Critique of
Political Economy (Marx) and The Critique of Instrumental Reason (Hork-
heimer) yields The Critique of Functionalistic Reason—hence the subtitle of
the second volume of Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action.
It would miss the point of Habermas’s colonization diagnosis to understand
it in purely strategic terms (on the model, say, of locating engine difficulties in a
car or determining where, precisely, a broken limb is fractured). Diagnoses of
social pathologies combine awareness that a communicative context has been
ruptured with strategic options. Therefore, it is not experts so much as the
parties affected who recognize the situation in the first place. What the young
Hegel (1976) wrote of the mind—“A mended sock is better than a torn one. Not
so with self-consciousness” (4)—applies here: the tear in subjective self-con-
sciousness also represents the disruption of social communication; at the same
time, it is not simply a mistake, for it reveals a social truth that has lain hidden
until now (which may yet promote growth beyond standing borders). In con-
trast, “the sound mind whose soundness is what ails it” (Adorno 1981, 300)
remains undivided in homey harmony until it is too late—and a child takes
up arms.
Diagnosing a social pathology is similar to the determinations of
psychoanalysis—a comparison Habermas already made in Knowledge and
Human Interests (1968). Diagnosing social pathologies has the strategic purpose
of fencing in, controlling, steering, and bridling political and economic power as
well as positive law. However, it is citizens who must erect the barriers in ques-
tion. Only based on consensus, for example, can the instrument (or medium) of
positive law—which is precisely what constitutes the modern republic—be
democratically legitimate. In the process of democratic legitimation, public will

formation—which involves decisions that are subject to change and modifica-
tion (i.e., positive law)—are combined with invariable (nicht manipulierbar)
claims to truth, such as occur in practical discourses (chapter 38).
Democratic legitimation—as Habermas has sought to demonstrate in his
philosophy of law—functions only to the extent that it is removed from the
strategic intentions of self-interested actors and, through the changes intro-
duced by positive law, enacts the “unforced force of the better argument”
(Habermas 1971, 137). Law that has been posited democratically—Habermas
argues in Between Facts and Norms—ensures that the positive fact of legisla-
tion and its discursively produced validity coincide. A democracy that sought
only to balance and coordinate interests of a strategic and instrumental nature
(i.e., the kind discussed by Schumpeter, Weber, Popper, and Luhmann—which
Habermas has derisively called “post-truth democracy”) “would no longer be
a democracy” at all (Naturalism, 144).
As the consequences of increasing globalization assumed ever-clearer
dimensions—and after the end of the Kohl era in Germany (now that, for
the first time, government was shifting toward a “Red-Green” coalition)—
Habermas returned, with increased frequency, to diagnosing the times with
a view to countering “enlightened perplexity.” In the spring of 1998, at the
invitation of the American University in Cairo, he offered reflections on
totalitarian features of the age in a talk entitled “Learning from Catastro-
phe? A Retrospective Diagnosis of the Short Twentieth Century.” A few
months later, he offered a further analysis of the present at the cultural
forum organized by the Social Democrats; on the balcony of the Willy
Brandt House, Habermas signaled the destruction of liberal political culture
produced by social insecurity, disintegration, and exclusion, poverty, and
related factors. He observed that the emergence of a transnational world-
economic system endangers the very conditions that made compromise
possible within the welfare state.
Habermas advocated a form of modernization that differed from
Schröder’s governmental program: a plan based on social justice, within an
economic order that seeks more than simply to establish global markets.
European democracy, he argued, should prefigure a civil society extending
beyond national borders. While Habermas greeted the new Red-Green
coalition, he did so only after voicing numerous reservations and words of
caution—offering qualifications of and ironic commentary on all the govern-
ment programs. It was difficult to tell whether he was for or against the par-
ties now in power, which had traditionally formed the opposition. Ultimately,
his endorsement echoed ambivalence: only because Habermas rejected Kohl
and twenty years of his party’s policies could he now speak of “a democratic
sensibility . . . [taking] root” (Time, 3).
The same year, Habermas intervened in the growing debate about bioethics
for the first time. In two newspaper articles, he criticized genetic manipula-
tion as a “presumption” that led to “subjugation.” Clones, he wrote, seem like
the slaves of their makers (Süddeutsche Zeitung, January 17, 1998; Die Zeit,
February 19, 1998). More than anything else, Habermas sought to defend the
autonomy of the subject—a condition that obtains only when one has a free
relationship to one’s natural existence (as cannot be the case for an artificially
produced, “enslaved” being). Displaying open horror at “genetically manufactured
chimeras,” Habermas spoke of the “history of the species” (Gattungsge-
schichte)—thereby employing terminology he had abandoned in the 1970s.
Although it was no longer a suitable carrier for critical theory, he maintained
that the concept was valid for limit cases—when, as occurs with genetic
manipulation, “the ethical self-understanding of language-using agents is at
stake in its entirety” (Future, 11).
In the fall of 2001, Habermas published The Future of Human Nature: On
the Way to Liberal Eugenics? This book, which addresses the reification of
human nature through biotechnical intervention, is sparing in ethical pre-
scriptions; instead, the author relates his deontological moral philosophy, by
way of Kierkegaard, to the (negatively) good—thereby reconnecting with
anthropological considerations he had abandoned in his “linguistic turn” dur-
ing the 1970s.
In his renewed engagement with politics and public matters, Habermas
also addressed the war in Kosovo, when—under a Red-Green government, no
less—the Bundeswehr was deployed for the first time in the history of the Fed-
eral Republic. Despite lingering doubts, Habermas defended the govern-
ment’s decision to intervene in a front-page article for Die Zeit. Even though
the use of military force (and especially without a mandate from the United
Nations) seemed questionable to him, he held that it was occurring for the
legitimate purpose of asserting human rights; therefore, it served the long-
term goal of securing the “cosmopolitan law of a society of world citizens”
(Time, 21). The fact that Habermas appealed to the creation of a new legal order
when justifying military engagement (to say nothing of the fact that military
action violated the law as it stood) prompted a great deal of criticism—which
also came from parties who generally shared his political views.
Indeed, Habermas’s argument declaring NATO to be the international
police force of the future was problematic, for international law did not pro-
vide for any such function. (This is why Christian Tomuschat, for example,
spoke out against international law when he endorsed NATO’s intervention.)
Whereas the military operation—which the international community
accepted, for the most part—might have marked a shift toward international
law centered on human rights going beyond the UN Charter, nothing of the
kind in fact occurred. In 2002, Habermas was prompted to revise his position
when the broad international consensus that would have been necessary to
support the second Iraq War was not forthcoming—and, moreover, after the
manipulations of the U.S. State Department before the Kosovo War had come
to light (to say nothing of “collateral damages” that subsequently occurred).
In the spring of 2001, Habermas traveled for the first time to China—a
country that had long fascinated him. At Tsinghua University (Beijing) and
Fudan University (Shanghai), he lectured before audiences numbering in the
thousands. “I was counting on conversations among academics. Now, I found
myself suddenly speaking in giant halls. Everything is much more political
than I thought” (Die Weltwoche, April 26, 2001), he reflected. Over two weeks,
Habermas addressed globalization, the postnational constellation, and human
rights, taking part in exchanges at academies, the Party Institute for Higher
Education, and informal gatherings. Many of his works had been translated
into Chinese, which meant that his interlocutors were thoroughly informed
about Western philosophy. Habermas’s thesis that human rights are para-
mount—surpassing even the sovereignty of state governments—proved contro-
versial. (At the same time, he affirmed—with a skeptical look to the West—that
human rights should not be used as a political weapon.)
When Habermas returned, the media reported that the philosopher and
sociologist was to receive one of the greatest honors in Germany: the Peace
Prize of the German Book Trade. This distinction is reserved for a party “who
has accompanied the Federal Republic of Germany in both a critical and an
engaged fashion . . . and is considered by an international readership to be the
decisive German philosopher of the age.” When the prize was bestowed at St.
Paul’s Church (Frankfurt) on October 14, 2001, the audience of some thousand
people included numerous political figures: the German president, chancellor,
foreign minister, minister for economic affairs, chief justice of the Federal
Constitutional Court, and Kulturstaatsminister were all in attendance.
Habermas’s acceptance speech, which appeared in all major newspapers
the following day, took the recent attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.,
as the occasion to reflect on modernity and secularization. Right away,
Habermas announced the basic concerns underlying his remarks. On Septem-
ber 11, “the tension between secular society and religion exploded in an entirely
different way” (Terror, 179). Habermas called upon his listeners to keep events
in perspective and enjoined them to consider the course that secular society
had followed in Europe and the United States. Like Jacques Derrida—who, just a
few days earlier, had been awarded the Adorno Prize at the same location—
Habermas drew attention to the fact that this mad and criminal act might con-
tain elements of justified criticism concerning the instrumental rationality that
prevails in the West.
Since the 1990s, Habermas’s interests and political positions have focused
increasingly on international politics and law. One of his books, The Divided
West, addresses the lines of division and partisanship that are emerging
within the global public sphere and polarizing all lands and groups within
them.
Habermas’s enduring presence as the author of both academic works and
essays certainly represents an uncommon level of self-discipline; at the same
time, it is a sign of his canny sense of publicity and politics. Habermas does
not just devise theories of discursive reason; he also knows how to engage in
effective discursive practice. Besides presenting reasoned arguments, Haber-
mas is a masterful polemicist—a skill he has employed, time and again, to
stimulate political debate in Germany by awakening its citizenry from self-
righteous slumber. Habermas presents oppositional viewpoints, and he risks
daring hypotheses. At the same time, he practices politics within the standing
order and with an extremely realistic sense of power relations (which would be
for naught, of course, if he lacked strong arguments).
From the 1950s until the present day, Habermas has repeatedly entered the
political fray as a public intellectual. In the process, he has come to exercise a
degree of influence that is not inconsiderable. “Influence”—unlike the purely
instrumental media of administrative power and money—operates by means
of arguments (whether good or bad), and it exercises hegemonic—or, in Haber-
mas’s case, counterhegemonic—attraction. As Habermas writes:
What we need is to practice a little more solidarity: without that, intelligent

action will remain permanently foundationless and inconsequential. Such
practice, certainly, requires rational institutions; it needs rules and communi-
cative forms that don’t morally overtax the citizens but rather exact the virtue
of an orientation toward the common good in small change. If there is any
small remnant of utopia that I’ve preserved, then it is surely the idea that
democracy—and the public struggle for its best form—is capable of hacking
through the Gordian knots of otherwise insoluble problems.
(Past, 96)
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1981. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. “Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommunika-
tiven Kompetenz.” In Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie, by Jürgen Haber-
mas and Niklas Luhmann, 101–141. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1991. “A Reply.” Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones. In Communicative Action:
Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and
Hans Joas, 214–264. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
——. 2007. “Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik: eine Replik.”

In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth,
406–459. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1976. “Aphorisms from the Wastebook.” Trans. Susanne
Klein. Independent Journal of Philosophy 3:1–6.
Kraushaar, Wolfgang. 1998. Die Frankfurter Schule und die Studentenbewegung: Von der
Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946–1995. 3 vols. Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins.
Müller-Doohm, Stefan. 2014. Jürgen Habermas: Eine Biographie. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
PART II
CONTEXTS
1
THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY,
ANTHROPOLOGY, AND
MARXISM
A XEL HONNETH
I
t would be nearly impossible to describe the concerns Habermas
articulates and addresses in his theory without referring to the three
intellectual traditions named above. All his innovations—indeed, the
motivational bases for his project as a whole—are so strongly shaped by
the philosophy of history, philosophical anthropology, and Marxism that even
the attenuated presence of these traditions in his later writings cannot conceal
how much, in changed form, they have always determined his work. The fol-
lowing brief sketch will provide a kind of archeology of Habermas’s social phi-
losophy in its mature phase and make plain the theoretical elements that form
the core of his thought.
If one digs for the deepest-lying and most fundamental intellectual stratum
of Habermas’s thought, one strikes the bedrock of philosophical anthropol-
ogy. At the first stage of his career, Habermas (whose studies in Bonn con-
cluded in 1954 with a dissertation supervised by Erich Rothacker) received a
significant impetus from Arnold Gehlen’s anthropological theory of action
(Gehlen 1988) and from Martin Heidegger’s Daseinsanalyse (Heidegger 1962).
Although these thinkers’ projects—which were enormously influential at
midcentury—stand at odds in many respects, they share the assumption that
human beings essentially create their own lifeworld/existence by means of
practical operations enabling them to master deep-seated constraints imposed
by the process of social reproduction. From Gehlen Habermas took the model
of human action within a natural environment, the idea of distinguishing
28 Contexts
between different forms of behavior in this setting, and, above all, the meth-
odological task of empirical verification.
Heidegger’s Being and Time, in turn, gave Habermas the idea that the his-
torical development of forms of action (such as Gehlen identifies) can be
viewed in a critical light—when, that is, one considers the original/originary
constitution of human Dasein. The effort to combine these intellectual
projects—the anthropological theory of action and the diagnostic criticism
of the same—yielded the essay “Dialektik der Rationalisierung” (“Dialectic of
Rationalization,” 1954), which articulated concerns that would distinguish
Habermas’s critical social theory at a later stage. Here, in his diagnosis of alien-
ation, Habermas elucidates the negative effects that technological progress
leaves in the social lifeworld inasmuch as it promotes orientations focused on
“making available” (Verfügbarmachen); in this process, the material world of
things, instead of being experienced by the senses, vanishes from the horizon
of experience (Habermas 1954).
Habermas’s early diagnosis of the times (Zeitdiagnose) amalgamates philo-
sophical anthropology and existential analysis. Following Gehlen, Habermas
considers the optimization of instrumental action by technological means the
defining feature of human history; as a result—and here he takes up Heidegger’s
reflections—alienation mounts, and our lifeworld undergoes progressive deob-
jectification (Entgegenständlichung). At the same time, Habermas’s view
of highly developed modern societies holds that this imperfect state of
affairs stems from one-sided, technical/instrumental rationalization—a
condition that entails social anomie and pathological relations to life as it is
given.
When—to his great dismay—Habermas learned the extent of Heidegger’s
ideological entanglement with National Socialism, he distanced himself from
the philosophy that had inspired this early essay (Profiles, 53–60) and dropped
the normative framework of Daseinsanalyse he had found in Being and Time.
Habermas kept the anthropological theory of action, however. In the follow-
ing years, it assumed greater importance as he generalized its theoretical
implications and expanded his empirical focus (Kultur und Kritik). In broad,
architectonic terms, Habermas devised an empirical philosophy of history
oriented on German idealism.
Habermas’s dissertation—albeit in peripheral fashion—addresses Marx’s
adaptation of Schelling’s idea of a “contraction” of God to suit his own, mate-
rialist project: faulty and corrupted social relations in the present day can be
interpreted as a “fall of Man” in a secular sense; this condition, Marx avers, is
to be replaced by a project of emancipation in which humanity, by uniting as
producers, liberates itself from the domination of matter (Theory and Prac-
tice). Habermas never incorporated into his own theoretical framework
Marx’s call to negate or sublate, through revolution, the “natural” necessities
The Philosophy of History, Anthropology, and Marxism 29
that bedevil human life. However, Marx’s idea that we can assure ourselves of
the faultiness or pathology of our current condition by reflecting on the
entanglements for which mankind is responsible proved sufficiently convinc-
ing that Habermas assigned it a productive role in his own project.
Habermas’s early writings adopt historical figures of philosophical thought
insofar as they establish a norm against which modern, instrumental action
orientations may be diagnosed and critically assessed. Instead of invoking an
originary, authentic mode of relating to the world (à la Heidegger), critical
theory should reflect on the shortcomings of the human species as such—
especially insofar as instrumental attitudes have produced forms of domina-
tion and problems of communication in the present.
Habermas soon recognized that this approach—which draws on the his-
tory of philosophy but is ultimately modeled on psychoanalysis—rests on the
fiction that the human species is something like a subject conceived as a
collective entity, which can reflect on the infelicities of its evolution through
the ages (Kultur und Kritik). Therefore, in his debate with Niklas Luhmann in
the early 1970s, he replaced the scheme he had used with the less speculative
notion that development in human societies occurs by rationalizing—along
lines that can be theoretically reconstructed—different types of action, labor,
and communication. All the same, Habermas found himself obliged to retain
aspects of the conception of evolutionary progress that he had learned from
the philosophy of history; after all, the theory of communicative reason is sup-
posed to be an organ of critique, which articulates claims to reason and does
so on the basis of structures that have developed through rational progress.
Of the three intellectual traditions that inform Habermas’s early writings,
only the last has survived the author’s revisions, expansions, and reconfigura-
tions without significant alteration. While Habermas has held fast to aspects
of Gehlen’s anthropological theory—especially the notion that action and
knowledge derive from the same source—he has substantially reworked his
views along the lines of pragmatism and speech-act theory. Similarly, Habermas
has replaced the philosophy of history with an empirical theory of evolution/
development based on the works of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. Only
a few core tenets of Marxism have retained their central position in Haber-
mas’s thought.
Although he critiqued aspects of Marx’s thought in his early works, Haber-
mas made his own the idea that social pathology in modern society must, in
some way, relate to market pressures to increase profit and revenue. The dynamic
that “Dialectic of Rationalization” already understands in terms of instru-
mental attitudes—a phenomenon Habermas later called the “colonization of
the lifeworld”—occurs when calculations of economic interest contaminate
discrete spheres of social activity. As much as Habermas, in subsequent addi-
tions to his theory, has reformulated and qualified—by way of empirical
30 Contexts
research and linguistic analysis—the intellectual traditions that shaped his

original ideas (philosophical anthropology, the philosophy of history, and
Marxism), he has never abandoned the Marxist thesis that the economic forces
that determine social action have become autonomous and therefore represent
a problem; still today, this insight represents a vital component of his social
theory.
References
Gehlen, Arnold. [1940] 1988. Man: His Nature and Place in the World. Trans. Clare
McMillan and Karl Pillemer. New York: Columbia University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1954. “Die Dialektik der Rationalisierung.” Merkur 8, no. 78: 701–724.
Heidegger, Martin. [1927] 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Rob-
inson. New York: Harper.
2
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND
SOCIAL THEORY
A XEL HONNETH
I
n 1950, when the Institute for Social Research reopened in Frankfurt,
its activities resumed without a direct connection to the way the orga-
nization had operated in the 1930s and 1940s. There was no continuity
between the sociological studies that were now being conducted and the
philosophical, cultural, and critical projects that Horkheimer, Adorno, and
Marcuse (who remained in the United States) were continuing to pursue.
Henceforth, critical theory ceased to be a “school” of unified endeavor, at least
in terms of method.
Despite their differences, the three representatives of the “original” insti-
tute (who shared a background in, and assumptions about, the philosophy of
history) interpreted historical development as a process of technological ratio-
nalization culminating in the closed system of domination that beset contem-
porary society. Another project—which initially went unrecognized as a new
beginning—distanced itself from the historicophilosophical premises that
underlay this diagnosis. Although Jürgen Habermas served as Adorno’s assis-
tant in Frankfurt, he had little in common, in terms of training and orienta-
tion, with traditional critical theory. Ultimately, he would incorporate the
perspectives of philosophical anthropology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, and
linguistics into his project. But already in the 1950s, Habermas’s work included
elements of theories that members of the older generation surrounding Adorno
and Horkheimer had always held at arm’s length—which, indeed, they viewed
with hostility.
Gradually, it became clear that Habermas’s works, although they came
from a different perspective, shared the goals of critical theory and, as such,
renewed the project in a manner one should take seriously. Even though it had
occurred at the margins of the Institute for Social Research, a concern with
intersubjectivity had been voiced early on. Now, in Habermas’s writings, the
matter attained self-awareness: a distinct theoretical framework within which
to view society and social relations stood at the ready.
At the basis of Habermas’s innovations lies the insight that intersubjective
structures inform social action. Habermas found his way to the conceptual
32 Contexts
core of his theory by engaging with Wittgenstein’s philosophical analyses of

language, from which he learned that the medium of linguistic communica-
tion “always already” connects subjects with one another. Human existence is
distinguished by intersubjectivity anchored in language; therefore, linguistic
interaction between subjects represents a fundamental and necessary precon-
dition for the reproduction of the structures constituting society and ways of
life within it.
Habermas added theoretical weight to this thesis when he made it the point
of departure for his engagement with the traditions of social philosophy and
sociology. This occurred in his critique of modern social philosophy’s ten-
dency to reduce intersubjective praxis to the matter of arriving at technically
appropriate decisions (Theory and Practice). The same gesture was repeated
when he took exception to functionalist conceptions of the social sciences.
The task of social reproduction, Habermas observed, is always determined by
the normative self-understanding of subjects whose relations are mediated by
communication—that is, the “functions” necessary for life are impossible to
locate outside of the concrete contexts in which social existence takes place
(Logic, 74ff.).
Ultimately, these considerations led Habermas to critique Marxism, whose
conception of history he supplemented with a theory of action: if human exis-
tence is determined by linguistic communication, then social reproduction
cannot be reduced to labor to the extent that Marx proposed; instead, one
must examine the praxis of linguistically mediated interaction alongside
the transformation of nature (Naturbearbeitung) as a fundamental factor
in the historical evolution of societies (Knowledge, chaps. 1, 2, and 3). Thereby,
Habermas implicitly distanced himself from the basic historical assumptions
that had framed traditional critical theory (Wellmer 1977, McCarthy 1981,
Honneth 1982, Brunkhorst 1983). Unlike Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse,
Habermas no longer sought to explain human life in society in terms of the
ever-expanding conquest of nature; instead, he pointed out that collectives
secure their material existence—from their inception—by assuring communi-
cative agreement. Human beings can only develop articulated personal identi-
ties by “growing into” a social group constituted by intersubjectivity and then
operating within the “world” to which they belong. Therefore, the precondi-
tion for survival is damaged when the process of communication experiences
interruption: communication is just as fundamental as mastering nature
through joint efforts.
Linguistic communication provides the medium through which individu-
als assure themselves that their actions and values are shared, and assurance
that this is the case is necessary for mastering the task of material reproduc-
tion. The philosophy of history—which serves as the frame of reference for
critical theory in its original conception—abstracts from this dimension of
The Frankfurt School and Social Theory 33
social interaction; for this reason, Habermas’s predecessors succumbed to illu-

sions of functionalism à la Marx (and considered social phenomena only in
relation to the transformation of nature). Habermas took a decisive step
toward his own theory of society—and, in the process, toward a new under-
standing of critical theory—when he identified work and interaction as differ-
ent types of rationality/rationalization. He did so, in immediate terms, by
taking issue with Marcuse’s critique of technology; in a broader perspective,
Max Weber’s concept of rationality provided the theoretical framework for his
reflections (Rational Society, 81–82).
In his critique of Marx, Habermas considers the modes of action he identi-
fies both as models for specific forms of activity and as the means by which
particular forms of knowledge are acquired; it is possible, he concludes, to
assign to both the fundamental dimensions of social reproduction—“work”
and “interaction”—a distinctive epistemological form and, for this reason, a
particular mode of “rationality” as well. On this point, Weber’s concept of
rationalization proves too narrow: just as one can posit specific forms of ratio-
nalization for instrumental activities and technical knowledge, it must be
possible to show that separate possibilities of rationalization exist for commu-
nicative praxis, on the one hand, and the knowledge embedded within it, on
the other. Habermas summarizes the general thesis that follows from his cri-
tique of Weber in terms borrowed from systems theory. Whereas the species
(Gattung) continues to exist by accumulating technical and strategic knowl-
edge in subsystems of action occurring through instrumental reason (i.e.,
work within society [gesellschaftliche Arbeit] and political administration), it
evolves inasmuch as it liberates itself from constraints that restrict communi-
cation within the institutional framework that reproduces the norms effecting
social integration (Rational Society, esp. 124ff.).
From this conception of society—which holds that systems of action orga-
nized by instrumental reason occupy a position distinct from the sphere of
everyday communicative praxis and that particular forms of rationalization
obtain in both social realms—follow all the theoretical modifications Haber-
mas undertook in the course of the 1970s. His universal pragmatism elucidates
the linguistic infrastructure of communicative action (“What Is Universal
Pragmatics?” in Pragmatics, 1–20). The theory of development/evolution clari-
fies the logic according to which social knowledge is constituted (that is, ratio-
nalized along twin lines) (Rekonstruktion). Finally, a modified conception of
systems theory accounts for the mechanisms through which social spheres of
action come to be organized in instrumentalized form (Habermas 1971).
Although Habermas’s theoretical efforts extend in many different direc-
tions, they meet up inasmuch as they seek to provide a foundation for the critical
examination of society, a foundation anchored in the theory of communica-
tion. In this way, Habermas has sought to demonstrate that the rationality of
34 Contexts
communicative action provides a basic condition of social development (and

that Adorno and Horkheimer’s diagnosis of the tendencies of instrumental
reification are one-sided inasmuch as they concern only one aspect of the
phenomenon).
Habermas’s program assumed systematic form when he published The The-
ory of Communicative Action (1985 [1981]; see Bernstein 1985; Honneth 1991, esp.
chap. 9). This work in two volumes—which brings together the results of the
author’s varied research projects—presents the rationality of communicative
action within the framework of speech-act theory. In addition, it reviews the
history of sociology from Weber to Parsons, synthesizing scholarship into a
comprehensive theory of society. Finally, on the basis of the innovative theo-
retical standpoint that results, The Theory of Communicative Action offers a
critical diagnosis of the present day.
Since The Theory of Communicative Action, the concept of communicative
rationality has occupied, in Habermasian theory, the same key position that
the notion of instrumental rationality holds in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Just
as Adorno and Horkheimer developed their ideas by examining the form of
rationality governing the human conquest of nature, Habermas elaborated—
on the basis of the potential for rationality within communicative action—the
dynamics of a historical process that has led to the present moment of crisis.
His fundamental insight is that the speech acts through which individual
actions are coordinated contain culturally invariable claims to validity, which
emerge gradually and in differentiated form over the course of processes of
rationalization. The knowledge that obtains in the lifeworld—whose horizon
encompasses the whole of communicative action—produces a cognitive atti-
tude, according to which subjects relate to their environment only in terms of
“success” (unter Erfolgsgesichtspunkten).
Habermas considers this strategic orientation, which is historically deter-
mined, to provide the social condition for the emergence of systemically
organized spheres of action: when subjects learn to act only with a view to suc-
cess, it is possible to coordinate social actions through nonverbal media such
as money and power (Communicative Action, 2:258ff.). The spheres of action
that acquire autonomous status pursuant to the institutionalization of these
steering media are economic production and political administration. From
now on, the economic system and the realm of governmental activity possess
integrity independent of communicative understanding: in modern societies,
they operate as systems that are unregulated with respect to those spheres of
action that are still organized in a communicative fashion (i.e., where the sym-
bolic reproduction of social life proceeds as before).
On the basis of the historical disjunction between “system” and “lifeworld,”
Habermas introduces the two-tiered conception of society that completes his
theoretical edifice. Here, the process of communicative interaction continues
The Frankfurt School and Social Theory 35
to represent the fundamental mechanism of reproduction in modern societ-

ies. At the same time, however, the existence of such norm-free spheres of
action is presented as the product of a historical development—a matter to be
discerned only by a systems-theoretical analysis. The key insight afforded by
the sociological theory of modernity concerns the entanglement (Verschrän-
kung) of communication and system: every analysis of the processes of
interaction through which societies reproduce themselves with respect to
the lifeworld must be supplemented by a systems analysis examining modes
of material reproduction.
From this dualistic construction Habermas ultimately derives the frame-
work for his critical assessment of the present day and its ills. In so doing, he
seeks to interpret the “process of Enlightenment” in a way that avoids the res-
ignation to which Adorno and Horkheimer were driven. It is no longer the
existence of instrumental reason organizing the whole of social life that repre-
sents a crisis. Rather, the problem concerns its penetration into realms of soci-
ety constituted by processes of communicative understanding. Herein lies the
pathology that Habermas diagnoses in modernity.
References
Bernstein, Richard J. 1985. Habermas and Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Brunkhorst, Hauke. 1983. “Paradigmenkern und Theoriedynamik der Kritischen Theorie
der Gesellschaft.” Soziale Welt 34:22–36.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. “Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Niklas Luhmann: Systemtheorie
oder kritische Theorie der Gesellschaft.” In Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnol-
ogie, by Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, 142–290. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Honneth, Axel. 1982. “Von Adorno zu Habermas. Der Gestaltwandel kritischer Gesell-
schaftstheorie.” In Sozialforschung als Kritik, ed. Wolfgang Bonß and Axel Honneth,
——. 1991. The Critique of Power. Trans. Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
McCarthy, Thomas. 1981. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
Wellmer, Albrecht. 1977. “Kommunikation und Emanzipation. Überlegungen zur sprach-
analytischen Wende der Kritischen Theorie.” In Theorien des Historischen Materialis-
mus, ed. Axel Honneth and Urs Jaeggi, 465–500. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
3
CONSTITUTIONAL LAW
WILLIAM E. SCHEUERMAN
W
hen reminiscing about his student days in Frankfurt during
the 1950s, Habermas has occasionally mentioned Hork-
heimer’s worries that he and other young leftist students
would get hold of old copies of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, safely locked
away in the cellar of the Institute for Social Research apparently in order to
repress the memory of its radical past. Although the young Habermas had
already read Marx, Lukács, Bloch, and Dialectic of Enlightenment before com-
ing to Frankfurt, he admits he initially had little knowledge of the interdisci-
plinary Hegelian-Marxist research program that the institute had brilliantly
pioneered in the 1930s (Dews 1986, 94–95). Although his assistantship under
Adorno quickly altered this surprising state of affairs, at least some credit for
initiating Habermas into the rich tradition of interwar and especially Ger-
man-Jewish leftist thought should go to the jurist and political scientist Wolf-
gang Abendroth (1906–1985), long the Federal Republic’s only Marxist tenured
professor and whom Habermas in an appreciative 1966 Die Zeit essay dubbed
the “Partisanenprofessor” (Habermas 1966). The label was well chosen: the
left-socialist Abendroth had been active in the anti-Nazi underground, fought
among antifascist partisans, and spent his entire life deeply involved in left-
wing political movements and parties.
Those familiar with Habermas’s biography already know the sad tale of
Horkheimer’s hostility to the young Habermas and how Habermas was driven
to leave Frankfurt and pursue his Habilitation—the path-breaking Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962)—under Abendroth’s guidance at
Marburg. What sometimes gets lost in the story, however, is Abendroth’s rela-
tively significant intellectual and political impact on the young Habermas.
In 1950s West Germany Abendroth represented a rare link not only to a
Marxist political tradition that Nazism had nearly extinguished but also to the
vibrant intellectual culture of left-wing Weimar jurisprudence and political
theory (Dietrich and Perels 1976; Balzer, Bock, and Schöler 2001). A student of
the socialist jurists Hugo Sinzheimer and Hermann Heller, Abendroth’s great-
est intellectual and political achievement in Adenauer’s Germany was to sal-
vage the original interpretation of the idea of a “social Rechtsstaat,” which
Heller (and, though sometimes forgotten, also the young Franz L. Neumann)
Constitutional Law 37
had desperately advocated in Weimar’s waning days. In his much-discussed

“Zum Begriff des demokratischen und sozialen Rechtstaates im Grundgesetz
der Bundesrepublik Deutschland” (1954), Abendroth defended the original
Weimar understanding of the idea of a “social Rechtsstaat” as an opening for
democratic socialism (Abendroth 1967). In opposition to conservative follow-
ers of Schmitt, for example Ernst Forsthoff, Abendroth refused to permit Arti-
cle 20 of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) to be interpreted as a rigid codification
of the economic and social status quo and thus as little more than a constitu-
tional basis for limited interventionist correctives to a fundamentally capital-
ist economy. With the emergence of massive concentrations of economic
power threatening “formal” democracy, in conjunction with the collapse of
the classical liberal state/society divide, only a far-reaching democratization of
both state and economy could realize the original humanistic ideals of the
unfinished liberal and democratic revolutions. Although Abendroth admitted
that Article 20 entailed no express decision in favor of a democratic socialist
future, he insisted—prompting angry catcalls from the right-wing detractors
who dominated German law faculties in the 1950s—that it not only allowed for
a socialist Federal Republic but in fact immediately required wide-ranging
egalitarian social reforms that would likely propel West Germany in a left-
leaning direction.
Anyone familiar with the concluding programmatic sections of Structural
Transformation will immediately recognize parallels to Abendroth’s agenda.
Like Abendroth, the young Marxist Habermas relied on a grand narrative
about capitalist transformation to help buttress a radical reading of the idea of
a “social Rechtsstaat,” interpreted as requiring democratization of a “neo-
feudal” institutional configuration that had emerged in the context of orga-
nized capitalism and the collapse of the classical liberal state/society divide
(Structural Transformation, 222–235). Although somewhat more cautiously
than Abendroth, Habermas pushed for a reform agenda possessing impecca-
ble democratic-socialist credentials. Even Habermas’s own creative insight—
that new forms of critical publicity would need to be institutionalized effec-
tively in the context of the novel modes of decision making and interest
mediation that had come to dominate the postliberal political universe—could
be legitimately interpreted as a theoretical extension of Abendroth’s overall
vision. Not surprisingly, in his “Problem der innerparteilichen und innerver-
bandlichen Demokratie in der Bundesrepublik” (1964), Abendroth enthusias-
tically praised Habermas’s ideas, seeing in them a normative enrichment of
his own proposals (Abendroth 1967, 273, 281ff.).
More generally, Abendroth probably helped acquaint Habermas with—or
at least provided him with professional and intellectual space to interrogate—
broader leftist currents in 1920s and 1930s political theory and jurisprudence.
To be sure, Habermas’s writings always evinced greater appreciation than
38 Contexts
those of either Abendroth or his Weimar leftist forebears for normative politi-
cal theory and especially the normative foundations of democracy. Yet his
far-reaching debts to leftist Weimar political and legal thought in Structural
Transformation and even more so in “Zum Begriff der politischen Beteili-
gung,” the lengthy introduction to Student und Politik (1961), remain indisput-
able. Especially in the latter, Habermas updated a core thesis that Neumann
and Ernst Fraenkel (both also Sinzheimer students) had formulated in the
1930s: with the transition from competitive to monopoly or organized capital-
ism, the classical rule of law and especially the central place of the general
legal norm necessarily found itself under attack. Citing extensively from the
mostly Jewish émigrés, including Otto Kirchheimer, whom Abendroth later
described as “the most gifted and most intelligent” of the Weimar socialist
jurists (Dietrich and Perels 1976, 146), now based in the United States, Haber-
mas reiterated an argument that directly echoed their most radical writings:
organized capitalism was resulting in parliamentary decay, administrative as
well as judicial discretion, and increasingly authoritarian forms of political
domination. Directly taking up Heller’s central claim from Rechtstaat oder
Diktatur? (1930), Habermas similarly prophesized that either decisive steps
toward social democratization would have to be taken, or fledgling liberal
democracies like Germany faced nothing less than the terrifying prospect of a
resurgence of political authoritarianism. Here as well, he endorsed Abend-
roth’s view—directly influenced by the Weimar debates—that social-demo-
cratic state intervention could preserve the normative kernel of the rule of law
by guaranteeing social rights as well as relatively predictable forms of state
economic activity in accord with regularized procedures.
No wonder that an increasingly cautious and even conservative Hork-
heimer was so hostile to this and other writings by the young Habermas: they
must have brought back painful memories of 1930s Germany, for him a trau-
matic period in his view apparently best left buried deep in his psyche—and in
the institute basement.
Habermas has on many subsequent occasions praised Abendroth’s political
and intellectual integrity while gradually but unambiguously distancing him-
self from the reformist Marxist vision of democratic socialism his Marburg
teacher always defended. Apt appreciation for the fact that ours is necessarily
a functionally differentiated society, Habermas has argued, proves inconso-
nant with holistic models of a planned democratic-socialist economy in which
the rightful autonomy of market mechanisms necessarily must be neglected.
Traditional socialists like Abendroth succumbed to a naïve view of bureau-
cratic state intervention and failed to grapple sufficiently with the necessary
limitations of the legal medium and the perils of juridification (Verrechtli-
chung). In his magnum opus in political and legal theory, Between Facts and
Norms, debates in Weimar political and legal theory make a peripheral
appearance, with Habermas openly criticizing interpretations of the rule of

law having as their centerpiece the generality of the legal norm. Referring
expressly to Student und Politik, Habermas now apparently sees in it little
more than a peccadillo: in his view, its reformulation of 1920s and 1930s Hege-
lian and Weberian-Marxism was shaped inordinately by a tendentious view of
the generality of the legal norm deriving from Carl Schmitt and his 1928 Con-
stitutional Theory and then imported into left-wing German legal discourse
by Neumann and others (Facts, 563–564).
Despite the theoretical distance from Abendroth, his influence remains
palpable. Habermas continues to defend an interpretation of the “social
Rechtsstaat” as calling for what he now dubs the “reflexive” reform of the
social-welfare state (Facts, 388–446). Although rather weak on concrete details,
this model interprets the unfulfilled project of the social-welfare state as
necessitating substantially more ambitious measures than mere regulatory
correctives to contemporary capitalism. In short: Habermas has never made
his peace with the social and economic status quo or with a model of the
welfare state as offering nothing more than paternalistic public services
(Daseinsvorsorge). Its theoretical contours have obviously changed over the
decades, yet the original demand for a far-reaching democratization of society
has by no means vanished either, even though Habermas tends to highlight
the difficult challenges posed by social complexity and functional differentia-
tion to conventional left-wing programmatic ideas. The systematic attempt in
Between Facts and Norms to draw integral links between and among radical
democratization, the rule of law, and a “reflexive” welfare state also arguably
contains significant remnants of Abendroth’s original critical response to
Schmittians who sharply juxtaposed the rule of law to the welfare state.
When leftist critics lament a lack of radicalism in Habermas’s recent writ-
ings, what they in fact are addressing is the demise of a plausible model of
democratic socialism along the lines once advocated by Abendroth. There can
be no question that Habermas’s skepticism remains justified, however. His
own caution about the possible contours of a fundamental alternative to the
political and economic status quo, at the very least, gives expression to genu-
ine dilemmas facing the democratic left today.
In another fashion as well, Habermas remains directly indebted to Abend-
roth and the jurists of the interwar left whose memory Abendroth helped
preserve in postwar Germany. The target of much of his political and legal
thinking remains Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), Germany’s premier twentieth-
century right-wing legal thinker and, at least for a few years, the eager “crown
jurist of the Third Reich.” Abendroth, as noted, waged intellectual and politi-
cal battle with Schmitt’s students in the context of debates about the “social
Rechtsstaat” in 1950s West Germany. A generation earlier, Neumann and
Kirchheimer, the Weimar leftist lawyers and then first-generation political
40 Contexts
and legal theorists of the Institute for Social Research, also focused their theo-
retical and political ire on Schmitt and his disciples. Habermas’s writings sim-
ilarly reveal an impressive familiarity with Schmitt’s far-flung writings, along
with deep political and moral revulsion (“The Horrors of Autonomy,” in New
Conservatism, 128–139). On one reading of Neumann and Kirchheimer, they
attempted to proffer a social-democratic rejoinder to both Schmitt’s normative
dismissal of modern democracy and the rule of law and also to his empirical
diagnosis that “normativistic” legality inexorably must decay under contem-
porary political and social traditions (Scheuerman 1994). Interestingly, Haber-
mas has pursued a parallel strategy of attack, repeatedly criticizing Schmitt
and at times envisioning his own theorizing as best capable of providing the
requisite antipode to the dangerous temptations of Schmitt’s decisionism.
Opposition to Schmitt runs like a red thread throughout his political and legal
theorizing: Schmitt is a key target not only in Habermas’s early political writ-
ings but also in his latest discussions of globalization and the prospects of
postnational democratization. As Habermas revealingly noted in a 1984 inter-
view with Peter Dews and Perry Anderson, “I was critical of decisionism from
the very beginning—from the minute when I read Schmitt, for instance”
(Dews 1986, 194).
Although in fact deeply critical of Schmitt even at the outset of his career,
Habermas’s early political writings occasionally marshaled Schmitt and his dis-
ciples (e.g., Forsthoff and Werner Weber) in order to document worrisome
empirical trends—for example, the decay of deliberative parliamentarism—
which Habermas, in contradistinction to Schmitt, hoped to counter. In these first
jousts with Schmitt, Habermas—directly echoing Neumann and Kirchheimer—
seems to have interpreted Schmitt’s troublesome authoritarian political and
programmatic preferences as reifying disturbing real-life empirical trends
(Structural Transformation, 205). When Structural Transformation thus out-
lined the ominous prospects of an executive-dominated plebiscitarian regime
in which uncoerced debate, the rule of law, and parliamentary rule had been
jettisoned for manufactured publics, legal arbitrariness, and acclamation
mobilized from above, Habermas’s description of its main components mir-
rored Schmitt’s defense of mass-based authoritarianism. By way of countering
a decisionist model of law and politics, Habermas early on turned to precisely
that feature of classical liberalism which Schmitt had scorned: whereas
Schmitt had denounced the liberal bourgeoisie as a mere “talking class” whose
impulses were harmlessly apolitical at best and dangerously anarchistic and
power dissolving at worst, Habermas proposed a deliberative conception of
political legitimacy that hinted at the possibility of a fundamental transforma-
tion of the modern state and perhaps even the dissolution of “the political” as
conventionally understood. Pace Schmitt, power and law could be reduced to
ratio, if properly interpreted in a deliberative fashion. When combined with
radical social-democratic reforms, liberal bourgeois society’s most important

gift to modernity could thereby be preserved. Venues for effective critical pub-
licity and deliberative will formation, in opposition both to Schmitt’s norma-
tive wishes and his dreary empirical diagnosis, could be guaranteed.
Habermas’s lifelong quest to sketch out a defensible deliberative model of
politics and law, grounded in a rigorous theory of communicative action, can
be plausibly interpreted at least in part as an attempt to discredit Schmitt’s
political existentialism and antirationalism. When criticizing technocracy in
“Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’ ” (Rational Society, 81–122), Habermas
thus identified parallels with Shmitt in Hermann Lübbe’s updated version of a
politics of the “pure decision,” while in Legitimation Crisis (1975 [1973]), Niklas
Luhmann was interpreted unsympathetically as a closeted follower of Schmitt
and his decisionistic legal theory. The critical strategy in these texts was not so
much that of “guilt by association” but rather an implicit acknowledgment of
Schmitt’s broad intellectual and political appeal and thus the necessity of
countering even relatively moderate reformulations of his ideas. Not surpris-
ingly, Habermas’s most impressive analyses of Schmitt are probably found in
Between Facts and Norms, where he moved beyond stock criticisms of deci-
sionism to tackle Schmitt’s specific contributions to political and legal schol-
arship. Here Habermas defended the right of courts to engage in constitutional
review in part by responding to Schmitt’s Weimar-era polemics against Hans
Kelsen’s defense of constitutional courts. He also countered Schmitt’s influen-
tial account of parliamentary decay in part by appealing to a theory of delib-
erative civil society: even if modern legislatures are by no means freewheeling
deliberative bodies, they operate in conjunction with a civil society in which
deliberation and debate, at least occasionally, remain vibrant.
In the last decade or so, Schmitt has made frequent appearances as a target
of Habermas’s emerging defense of global governance. The rather ambivalent
record of “humanitarian military intervention” in the former Yugoslavia and
in the Middle East has undoubtedly helped gain a second intellectual life for
Schmitt’s critique of so-called discriminatory wars, according to which liberal
states typically mask their fundamental brutality and imperialistic intentions
under the hypocritical mantle of humanitarian rhetoric and liberal interna-
tional law. Even for leftist critics of NATO military intervention in Yugoslavia,
for example, or the first UN-endorsed Gulf War, Schmitt now exercises a
certain amount of drawing power, as is readily apparent from the pages of the
New Left Review and countless left-leaning academic journals around the
world. With this development in mind, Habermas in The Divided West and
elsewhere has taken it upon himself to remind Schmitt’s latest fans of the trou-
blesome fact that the critique of discriminatory war rests on an untenable
vitalistic and existentialist “concept of the political.” Schmitt and those now
influenced by him also conveniently miss that interstate relations have been
42 Contexts
undergoing an ambitious process of juridication: amid the ongoing legaliza-

tion of interstate affairs, Schmitt’s anxieties about a “moralization” of warfare
are both misleading and overstated. Even more ambitiously, Habermas has
joined forces with Schmitt’s most impressive nemesis in international political
theory: Habermas is now busily reformulating Immanuel Kant’s cosmopoli-
tan vision of a global constitutionalization of law without a world state. With
great acumen, he is defending a pacific yet nonstatist variety of cosmopolitan
global governance—in other words, Carl Schmitt’s worst nightmare (Divided
West, 188–193).
References
Abendroth, Wolfgang. 1967. Antagonistische Gesellschaft und politische Demokratie. Auf-

sätze zur politischen Soziologie. Neuwied: Luchterhand.
Balzer, Friedrich-Martin, Hans Manfred Bock, and Uli Schöler, eds. 2001. Wolfgang
Abendroth: Wissenschaftlicher Politiker. Bio-Biographische Beiträge. Opladen: Leske +
Budrich.
Dews, Peter, ed. 1986. Habermas: Autonomy and Solidarity—Interviews with Jürgen Haber-
mas. London: Verso.
Dietrich, Barbara, and Joachim Perels, eds. 1991. Wolfgang Abendroth: Ein Leben in der
Arbeiterbewegung. Gespräche. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1966. “Partisanenprofessor im Lande der Mitläufer. Der Marburger
Ordinarius Wolfgang Abendroth wird am 2. Mai sechzig Jahre alt.” Die Zeit (April 29,
1966).
Habermas, Jürgen, et al. 1961. Student und Politik: eine soziologische Untersuchung zum
politischen Bewusstsein Frankfurter Studenten. Neuwied: Luchterhand.
Heller, Hermann. 1930. Rechtsstaat oder Diktatur? Tübingen: Mohr.
Scheuerman, William E. 1994. Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School
and the Rule of Law. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Schmitt, Carl. 1928. Die Verfassungslehre. München: Duncker & Humblot.
4
PRAGMATISM AND ULTIMATE
JUSTIFICATION
MAT THIAS KET TNER
J
ürgen Habermas’s intellectual itinerary can hardly be understood
without considering its critical and constructive interplay with
the thought of Karl-Otto Apel—interactions between the two
theorists have often marked significant turning points in Habermas’s project.
Without the theoretical-architectonic alternatives that Apel’s reflections open,
it would be impossible to evaluate the philosophical course Habermas has
steered. Apel and Habermas are united by a lifelong professional friendship,
which began when they studied together in Bonn in the early 1950s; since then,
the liberating encounter with American pragmatism—of which Apel was
one of the first German translators (1967, 1970)—has strengthened their ties.
Although it is a simplification, it is not false to compare the differences
between Apel and Habermas—and they have grown larger since the mid-
1980s (Apel 1988, 103–153) and now run deep (Apel 1998, 24–27, 649–838)—with
the two different strains of American pragmatism represented by Charles
Sanders Peirce, on the one hand, and John Dewey, on the other.
Apel’s Transformation der Philosophie (1973) continues figures of thought
that have characterized transcendental projects since Kant: the effort to
uncover, through philosophical reflection, the “necessary conditions of possi-
bility” for rationality; in a further step, Apel renews Peirce’s realist conception
of semantics in the context of the linguistic turn. What connects Peirce with
Apel at the deepest level is the conviction that regulative ideas hold value for a
postmetaphysical, sense-critical philosophy and the insistence that philosoph-
ical argumentation should encompass forms of argument whose specific
validity claims are not subject to revision through progress made in the
empirical sciences. The keywords “ultimate justification” (Letztbegründung)
and “a priori of discourse” (Diskursapriori)—which relate, in dialectical fash-
ion, both to an ideal community of communication and to the real one here
and now (Apel 1998, 598–607)—name central aspects of Apel’s “transcenden-
tal pragmatics of language” (1998, 9–32). In contrast, Dewey, Rorty, and Haber-
mas wish to eliminate transcendentalism and affirm continuity between
44 Contexts
philosophy and the empirical study of culture/society against the backdrop of

reconstructive naturalism.
The philosophical consequences of Apel and Habermas’s pragmatism,
then, are altogether different. One can say, with only slight exaggeration, that
Apel considers it both possible and necessary to establish rationally definitive
justifications (Letztbegründungen) for validity claims of principled philosoph-
ical thoughts, whereas Habermas deems doing so neither possible nor neces-
sary. This fundamental disagreement has, in recent years, prompted Apel to
think “with Habermas against Habermas” time and again. In the following, I
will describe Apel’s most important reservations concerning Habermasian
“universal pragmatics,” all of which derive from this point. For reasons of
space, how Habermas has responded cannot be discussed here (see Habermas
2002).
How, in summary fashion, can one define the phrase “ultimate justification”?
Needless to say, the words sound ominous—and not just in a postmodern con-
text. The idea of a reflexive, ultimate justification is central to transcendental
pragmatics (Kuhlmann 1993, Böhler 2002). It means that the intellectual pre-
conditions necessary for raising a validity-challenging question cannot them-
selves be questioned—if, indeed, such preconditions exist at all. Such insight
stems from the self-understanding of rational persons who, being engaged in
the practice of argumentation here and now, reflect on how they must conceive
of themselves, and likewise of anyone else who is actually or could potentially
be participating in their discourse, as a generic practical subject (Diskursteilneh-
mer; see Niquet 1999). By performing appropriate argumentative acts, partici-
pants in discourse can test whatever claims to intersubjective, generalizable
validity someone makes concerning propositional content by pitting the
respective claims against purportedly good reasons we have for criticizing,
defending, or justifying them. Apel operationalizes Kant’s demand for the “self-
consistency of reason” as a test for avoiding performative self-contradiction in
making universal validity claims from within the practice of argumentative
discourse.
Like Apel, Habermas—ever since his engagement with speech-act theory
and his discovery of the double structure of performance and proposition—
has granted that there are intellectual-conceptual presuppositions of argu-
mentation that cannot be circumvented in or through argumentation; were
this not so, what the speaker meant would be contradicted by what he or she
did (on “performative self-contradiction,” see Kettner 1993). However, for
Apel—and not for Habermas—the nexus of normative presuppositions of
argumentative discourse that are not rationally possible in another form (that
is, noncontingent) contains ultimate constraints on validity claims for state-
ments with a normative status (e.g., normative moral judgments) as well
as ultimate constraints on validity claims for statements of theoretical
Pragmatism and Ultimate Justification 45
philosophy that aspire to the status of objectivity (e.g., philosophical seman-

tics, ontology, philosophy of mind; see Raz 1999).
The first point has consequences for discourse ethics and the normative
basis of critical social theory (Kettner 1996); the second is significant for the
philosophical theory of reason—for example, as a metacritique of attempted
radical critiques of reason that ignore the strictures of performative self-
consistency (Selbsteinholbarkeit) (Apel 1994b, Hellesnes 2007). According to
Apel, Habermas can eschew strictly reflexive transcendental arguments only
at the price of inconsistency. Although his theory of communicative action
describes a moral process of rationalization, it cannot justify its criterion for
evaluating progress—that is, Habermas’s postconventional morality of dis-
course ethics (Apel 1998a, esp. 680–693) remains unjustified. Therefore, Apel
maintains, Habermas undercuts the aim of critical theory to provide an
empirically rich, metaphysically sober, yet not value-neutral reconstruction of
sociocultural evolution. Instead, the Habermasian project of reconstruction is
but one of many merely immanent critiques of the status quo.
It would be preferable, Apel continues, to situate the claims of critical the-
ory within an emancipatory ethics of responsibility secured by an “ultimate
justification.” Against the attempt to ground important critical evaluative stan-
dards, Habermas has objected that skeptics, nihilists, and others could simply
bypass discourse and its intrinsic normative commitments (the consensualist
conception of justice in his discourse ethics; see Justification and Application).
Apel finds Habermas’s reservations mistaken or at best irrelevant: irrelevant,
since one can de facto ignore rational commitments of any kind; mistaken,
since, if the distancing is intended for skeptical or other reasons, it already
represents an argumentative move within discourse and therefore presup-
poses recognition of its constitutive norms.
In excluding the matter of ultimate justification from the context of justifi-
cation of critical social theory, Habermas must—at a price that Apel considers
excessive—promote, in quasi-Hegelian fashion, the ethics of the lifeworld to a
position where it stands as the paramount source of moral normativity. In the
process—and whether he wants to or not—Habermas transfigures the inner
fissures, belatedness, and conventionality inherent in the lifeworld into a har-
monious arrangement. Apel diagnoses conservatism in Habermas’s pseudo-
Wittgensteinian pose of reliance on the lifeworld and a self-denial of critical
theory, most notably in Habermas’s dictum that “everyday moral intuitions do
not require elucidation by philosophers.”
Habermas’s attempt to fit the discourse-reflexive approach to the issue of
ultimate justification entails even more massive problems. This is evident
when he claims primacy in a number of ways, in The Theory of Communicative
Action, for language use oriented toward understanding, whereas language use
oriented toward success (e.g., “strategic” use) is deemed “parasitic.” According
46 Contexts
to Apel, with only sociological methods on board, such claims admit proof only
superficially, and they founder entirely with respect to cases of openly strategic
action, where language is used without even the pretense of being oriented on
reaching a common understanding. That strategic use is parasitic on the com-
municative use of language can only be demonstrated in and relative to a theo-
retical framework that Habermas’s universal pragmatics cannot provide, i.e.,
the framework of a philosophical theory of different types of rationality that
would also elucidate the relations of interdependency, as well as mutual sup-
port, that hold between these types. Apel maintains that it is only within the
context of argumentative discourse that we can prove, by reflecting on discur-
sive practice from within, that purely strategic bargaining is derivative, since it
depends, in this context, on communication aimed at reaching consensus
about validity claims (Apel 1998b, 701–726, esp. 723–724; Apel 1994a).
A third set of objections that Apel, thinking “with Habermas against
Habermas,” presents is directed against Habermas’s theory of discourse as
it concerns democracy and law in Between Facts and Norms (Apel 1998c,
727–838, esp. 738). If Habermas both wishes to account, in historical terms, for
how the process of normative differentiation yields a universalist morality of
justice, the ethics of the good life for individuals and groups, and positive law
founded in democracy and also wishes to reconstruct and justify this process,
which encompasses manifold discourses and spheres—up to and including
the model of a deliberatively democratic constitutional state as a process of
progressive rationalization across various normative fields—then he would
have to work out justifications of standards of justification that can only be
elaborated by recourse to a discourse principle that must have morally norma-
tive content and unassailable rational credentials. However, the discourse
principle Habermas comes up with in Between Facts and Norms—“Just those
action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as
participants in rational discourses” (Facts, 107)—is supposed to have so scant a
normative content—pure impartiality—that Habermas proclaims its “neutral-
ity” vis-à-vis the indifference between moral normativity and juridical-legal
normativity. In other words, it has no determinate moral content. But once
outsourced, such content cannot be reintroduced into the construction of the
theory without a petitio principii. The architectonics of ramifications that
Habermas introduces in Between Facts and Norms lacks a normatively inte-
grating apex and is thus susceptible to collapse (Apel 1998c, 735–742; Kettner
2002).
The alternative Apel proposes is a theoretical framework of an “ethics of
responsibility that relates to history” (geschichtsbezogene Verantwortungs-
ethik) (Apel 1998c, 759–837; see also Apel 1988). The basic moral norm of this
framework involves the “demand to solve all morally relevant conflicts of
Pragmatism and Ultimate Justification 47
interest through practical discourses about claims to validity, and without

strategic practices of violence” (Apel 1998c, 754). The undeniable intersubjec-
tive validity of this norm can be demonstrated by strict reflection on normative
presuppositions inherent in and constitutive of the practice of argumenta-
tive discourse. This basic moral norm stands in a critical tension to the social
status quo, not as an otherworldly utopia but in the sense of a regulative ideal.
What Apel architectonically calls “Part B of discourse ethics” involves neces-
sary reflection on the conditions—some of which are favorable (e.g., the culture
of human rights) and some of which are not (e.g., constraints of the economic
system)—for gradually realizing the foundational norm of discourse ethics in
the world today (see esp. Apel 2001).
This high-flying theoretical framework permits Apel to offer some very
realistic objections to Habermas’s alignment of, and tendency to equate, the
principles of law and democracy. Among others, the following: It is impossi-
ble, Apel maintains, to expunge historical contingency and abstract from the
fact that in today’s world, popular sovereignty is organized in the form of mul-
tiple autonomous systems that realize the imperatives of their systemic self-
preservation in and through the medium of political power, notwithstanding
the existence of governance structures that operate by free and equal citizens
building consensus in many of these systems. This condition of systemic dom-
ination will persist for as long as a global legal order for all citizens of the
world remains a utopia. At the same time, Apel observes that the principle of
law is universalist and possesses an inherently global reach, at least inasmuch
as one considers its discursive articulations from the perspective of human
rights (Apel 1998c, 820–821).
Unlike Habermas, Apel understands human rights to represent a polynor-
mative universal that occupies a position between positive law and universal-
istic morality. And the discourse principle, the way Apel construes it, operates
not only within the principle of democracy and that of law but also on a level
of justificatory thought that is deeper than both.
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——. 1970. Charles Sanders Peirce, Schriften, Bd. II: Vom Pragmatismus zum Pragmatizis-
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——. 1973. Transformation der Philosophie. 2 vols. Vol. 1: Sprachanalytik, Semiotik, Herme-
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——. 1988. Diskurs und Verantwortung. Das Problem des Übergangs zur postkonventionel-
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——. 1998. Auseinandersetzungen in Erprobung des transzendentalpragmatischen Ansatzes.
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——. 1998a. “Normative Begründung der ‘Kritischen Theorie’ durch Rekurs auf
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5
HERMENEUTICS AND
THE LINGUISTIC TURN
CRISTINA L AFONT
I
n the foreword to the second edition of On the Logic of the Social Sci-
ences, Habermas writes that the incorporation of hermeneutics into
his project during the 1960s played a key role in transforming critical
theory from an enterprise based on the philosophy of the subject into one
founded on communication. This undertaking culminated in his main work,
The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). Although Habermas indicates
that his encounter with analytic philosophy (see chapters 6 and 30 in this vol-
ume) is also of central importance, in examining his turn toward the philoso-
phy of language it is necessary to take a closer look at the fraught role that
Heidegger’s philosophy played in this development.
The best-known biographical fact about Habermas’s “broken” relationship
with Heidegger is the article he published in July 1953 in the Frankfurter Allge-
meine Zeitung, “Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken: Zur Veröffentlichung
von Vorlesungen aus dem Jahre 1935” (“Thinking with Heidegger Against Hei-
degger: On the Publication of His Lectures from 1935”). Here, Habermas criti-
cized Heidegger for publishing lectures in which he had spoken of the “inner
truth and greatness” of the Nazi movement without further commentary or
expressions of regret—to say nothing of apology—about his involvement in
the Nazi regime.
Besides directing a personal reproach at Heidegger, Habermas examined
how his moral failure related to the structure of his philosophy. This is a ques-
tion that Habermas has confronted and answered in slightly different ways
in several publications over the past four decades (Profiles, 53–60; Discourse,
131–160; Texte und Kontexte, 49–83). In all these discussions, Habermas main-
tains that Heidegger’s path to his famous “turn” (Kehre) is better explained by
external factors related to Heidegger’s political involvement with Nazism than
by the internal development of his philosophical project as originally con-
ceived in Being and Time. This diagnosis makes Habermas’s strongly critical
attitude toward Heidegger’s late philosophy compatible with another element
of his evaluation of Heidegger that has equally remained constant, namely, his
claim that Being and Time is the “most significant philosophical event since
50 Contexts
Hegel’s Phenomenology” (Profiles, 55). Even though Habermas does not always
make it clear why, precisely, he esteems Being and Time so highly, it is plain
that the self-imposed task of “thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger”
would be meaningless without such a positive underlying assessment of his
predecessor. The comparatively simpler alternatives of thinking against Hei-
degger rather than with him or leaving his philosophy by the wayside would
seem more appropriate.
Certainly, the meaningfulness of the task Habermas sets himself can be
understood in a purely historical light. By the 1950s, Heidegger’s main work
had achieved a position of incomparable influence both in Germany and
abroad; indeed, its influence only grew over the following decades. What is
more, the influence of Being and Time on Habermas’s philosophical develop-
ment is unmistakable. Habermas has observed on multiple occasions that he
was “a Heideggerian through and through” until 1953 (Dews 1986, 194). Even a
cursory glance at Habermas’s dissertation on Schelling confirms this state-
ment. These historical and biographical details notwithstanding, it is more
interesting to address the systematic question of the nature and extent of the
internal relationship between Heidegger’s and Habermas’s philosophy. Taking
Habermas’s self-imposed task as a guide, I will identify first the most signifi-
cant overlapping elements of both approaches. Once it becomes clear how far
Habermas’s “thinking with Heidegger” goes, it will be possible to address, in a
second step, the question of how far his “thinking against Heidegger” suc-
ceeded. Needless to say, with such philosophically complex approaches as Hei-
degger’s and Habermas’s it would be hopeless to aim at a complete account of
their interconnections. Thus I am going to focus exclusively on some core ele-
ments that, in my opinion, are particularly significant to the extent that they
have directly influenced the development of Habermas’s own approach.
If one situates Heidegger’s and Habermas’s approaches in the context of the
philosophical programs they aimed to continue and transform, the crucial
element they share is the attempt to articulate an alternative to the philosophical
paradigm of mentalism (what Heidegger calls the “subject-object model” and
Habermas the “philosophy of consciousness”). This is the explicit objective of
Heidegger’s hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology in Being and
Time; the same idea guides Habermas’s realignment of critical theory toward
language in The Theory of Communicative Action.
To overcome the subject-object model that underpins traditional philoso-
phy, Being and Time transforms hermeneutics from a method for interpreting
authoritative texts (mainly sacred or legal ones) to a way of understanding
human beings as such. Heidegger’s hermeneutics offers a radically new con-
ception of humanity’s unique status: to be human is not primarily to be a
rational animal but first and foremost to be a self-interpreting animal, in
Charles Taylor’s (1985) terms. Precisely because human beings are nothing but
Hermeneutics and the Linguistic Turn 51
interpretation all the way down, the activity of interpreting a meaningful text
offers the most appropriate model for understanding any human experience
whatsoever.
This change of perspective amounts to a major break with traditional phi-
losophy, which had been guided, for the most part, by a diametrically opposed
impulse to model human experience on our perception of physical objects. Hei-
degger confronts this attempt with two major objections. First, he argues that
by trying to model human experience on the basis of categories taken from a
domain of objects radically different from human beings (i.e., physical objects),
traditional philosophy provides an entirely distorted account of human
identity. To show this, Heidegger articulates an alternative, hermeneutic
model that makes it possible to understand human beings as essentially self-
interpreting creatures. Second, Heidegger argues that by focusing on percep-
tion as the private experience of an isolated subject, the subject-object model
incorporates a methodological individualism (even solipsism) that entirely
distorts human experience (giving rise to nothing but philosophical pseudo-
problems such as the need to prove the existence of the external world).
Heidegger offers an account of our experience that makes it possible to
understand human beings as inhabiting a symbolically structured world in
which everything they encounter is already understood as something. As a
consequence, the central feature of Heidegger’s hermeneutic turn lies in the
introduction of a new notion of world. After the hermeneutic turn, the world
is no longer the totality of entities but a totality of significance, a web of meanings
that structures Dasein’s understanding of itself and of everything that can
show up within the world (Lafont 2000, 2005). Following Heidegger, Hans-
Georg Gadamer, in Truth and Method, significantly expanded this model of a
linguistically articulated and intersubjectively shared lifeworld that enables
mutual understanding. As Habermas aptly put it, Gadamer “[urbanized] the
Heideggerian province” (Profiles, 189).
Habermas’s appropriation of hermeneutic concepts played a key role in his
split with the paradigm of mentalism. He blames this model for the gravest
shortcomings of the works by the first generation of critical theorists. As
Habermas observed in an interview with Peter Dews, his predecessors’ theo-
retical systems left “no room” for “ideas of the lifeworld or of life forms”; con-
sequently, those who came before him “were not prompted to look into the
no-man’s-land of everyday life” (Dews 1986, 196). This is also why the writings
of first-generation critical theorists provide no sustained engagement with
linguistic communication as the mechanism for reproducing the structures of
the lifeworld. In On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967), Habermas already
observed the superiority of the hermeneutic conception of language over the
phenomenology of the lifeworld articulated by A. Schütz from a Husserlian
point of view and over the “positivist analysis of language” that at the time he
52 Contexts
saw exemplified by the early and later Wittgenstein. Whereas the latter con-
ceptions share an instrumental view of language as a mere tool for communi-
cation, the hermeneutic conception articulates a constitutive view of language
as world disclosing. According to Habermas, the crucial methodological dif-
ference between these conceptions is that the Husserlian and positivist
approaches rely on the possibility of adopting an observer or external perspec-
tive from which language can be objectified (i.e., become the object of analy-
sis), whereas hermeneutics recognizes the impossibility of adopting such a
perspective. In “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality,” Habermas (1990)
describes the issue as follows: “Hermeneutics has taught us that we are always
a participant as long as we move within the natural language and that we can-
not step outside the role of a reflective partner” (254). At the same time, how-
ever, Habermas is well aware of the difficulty this claim poses for any attempt
to combine the internal perspective of a participant in a linguistically articu-
lated lifeworld with the external perspective of a social critic that the project of
a critical theory requires. It is precisely this methodological difficulty that
motivates Habermas’s criticism of the hermeneutic claim to universality,
which is the main target of his article as a whole. We can distinguish two
slightly different problems involved in this methodological issue, problems he
had already identified in this article and has continued to elaborate in the fol-
lowing decades. One is descriptive, the other normative.
At the descriptive level, there is an unavoidable explanatory limitation
built into the hermeneutic approach, since speakers, as participants in a
shared cultural lifeworld, do not have access to the type of external empirical
knowledge that the reconstructive sciences provide. Hermeneutic self-reflec-
tion, as Habermas (1990) indicates, “throws light on experiences a subject
makes while exercising his communicative competence, but it cannot explain
this competence itself” (249). This explanatory deficit is not only obvious
with regard to the reconstructive sciences that Habermas discusses in this
context, such as linguistics and developmental psychology. It is equally the
case with regard to most of the causal knowledge provided by the empirical
sciences, including the social sciences. In particular, as Habermas will argue
in his Theory of Communicative Action, systemic mechanisms that affect the
lifeworld from the outside are inaccessible from the participants’ perspective.
Access to them requires that the social theorist adopt an external perspective,
as articulated in the broad tradition of functionalism by authors such as
Marx, Parsons, or Luhmann. From this point of view, Habermas’s criticism
of hermeneutics’s structural blindness toward the material (social and eco-
nomic) circumstances of the reproduction of the lifeworld echoes the main
arguments against Heidegger’s approach that members of the first generation
of critical theory, most notably Marcuse, had already articulated in the 1930s
(McCarthy 1991, 83–96).
Now, it is one thing to recognize the need to integrate the functionalist and
hermeneutic perspectives in social theory. It is quite another to provide a con-
vincing account of society as constituted by both self-sufficient systems and
the lifeworld. This difficult question, however, need not be explored here, for it
concerns that part of critical theory least related to hermeneutics. Let us
instead turn to a different normative difficulty resulting from Habermas’s
attempt to integrate hermeneutics and critical theory.
While the limited explanatory potential of hermeneutics makes it plain
why critical theory needs to incorporate empirical knowledge from the social
sciences, the same cannot be said concerning the normative limits that herme-
neutics imposes on the critical aims of the social theorist. Recognizing that “as
long as we move within the natural language we are always participants and
we cannot step outside the role of a reflective partner” poses a normative chal-
lenge to the authority claimed by the theorist to criticize the prevalent societal
understanding as ideological. Gadamer made this point in his famous debate
with Habermas (see Gadamer 1986a; 1990a, 147–158; 1990b, 273–297; as well as
Habermas 1990, 245–272) when he observed that in adopting an external
perspective the social theorist engaged in the critique of ideologies breaks
the symmetrical dialogue among participants and, in so doing, can only
impose her own views about the good society under the presumption of a
knowledge monopoly or a privileged access to truth. Thus, the critical theorist
becomes a “social technocrat” in disguise (Gadamer 1990b, 274–275). In a criti-
cal theory with these characteristics, the emancipatory interest of the critical
theorist simply collapses into the technical interest of a “social engineer” who
prescribes without listening. In sharp contrast to this conception, Gadamer
argues, the hermeneutic perspective of a symmetrical dialogue oriented
toward understanding prohibits its participants from ascribing to themselves
a superior insight into the “delusions” of other participants that would elimi-
nate the need for the validation of their own views through dialogue. Seen
from this perspective, the normative limitation of the hermeneutic approach
poses a real challenge to the aspirations of critical theory. Any departures
from the symmetrical conditions of dialogue among equal participants auto-
matically raises questions concerning the legitimacy of the theorist’s criti-
cisms as well as her right to impose her conception of the good society upon
others.
To avoid giving up the possibility of social critique, Habermas confronts
this challenge with two main strategies, which together constitute the original
core of his distinctive approach to critical theory. The first concerns the idea
that lies at the heart of hermeneutics, namely, the view of language as constitu-
tive of the lifeworld. Habermas’s conception of communication cannot be
described in detail here (see chapter 30), but let me briefly indicate what I
consider to be the main break with the hermeneutic approach. The main
54 Contexts
innovation of the Habermasian approach lies in its ability to incorporate

externalism in an account of linguistic communication (Lafont 1999,
227–274).
From the hermeneutic perspective, a shared linguistic world disclosure, or,
in Gadamer’s terminology, a common tradition, is the precondition for any
understanding or agreement that speakers may bring about in conversation.
Once this is accepted, however, it becomes unclear how speakers can ever
question or revise such a factually shared world disclosure or how they can
communicate with those who do not share it. Our linguistic world disclosure
seems unrevisable from within and inaccessible from without. In order to
avoid these counterintuitive consequences, Habermas rejects the hermeneutic
claim that understanding is only possible on the basis of a factual agreement
among speakers with a shared linguistic world disclosure. Instead, Habermas
claims that understanding depends on a “counterfactual agreement” that all
speakers share just in virtue of their communicative competence. This agree-
ment is based on formal presuppositions and thus does not depend on shared
content or a shared world disclosure among participants in a conversation.
According to Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality, speakers
who want to reach an agreement about something in the world have to presup-
pose the truth of what they are saying, the normative rightness of the interac-
tion they are establishing with the hearer through their speech acts, and the
sincerity or truthfulness of their speech acts. Complementary to these three
validity claims (truth, normative rightness, and sincerity), speakers must also
share the notion of a single objective world that is identical for all possible
observers. As Habermas points out in The Theory of Communicative Action,
“actors who raise validity claims have to avoid materially prejudicing the rela-
tion between language and reality, between the medium of communication
and that about which something is being communicated” (1:50). Only in this
way is it possible for “the contents of a linguistic worldview” to become
“detached from the assumed world-order itself” (1:50–51). Obviously, if par-
ticipants in communication are to evaluate whether things are the way they
think they are or are as someone else believes, they cannot at the same time
dogmatically identify their own beliefs with the way the world is. This is why
communication oriented toward understanding requires that the participants
distinguish, however counterfactually, between everyone’s (incompatible)
beliefs and the assumed world order itself. Put in Habermas’s own terms, they
have to form “a reflective concept of world.” The formal presupposition of a
single objective world is just a consequence of the universal claim to validity
built into the speakers’ speech acts. It is just an expression of the communica-
tive constraint that makes rational criticism and mutual learning possible,
namely, that from two opposed claims only one can be right. Thus the formal
notion of world and the three universal validity claims build a system of
coordinates that guides the interpretative efforts of the participants in com-

munication toward a common understanding, despite their differences in
beliefs or worldviews. This formal framework allows speakers to assume that
they are referring to the same things even when their interpretations differ
(Truth, 27–28). As a consequence, they can adopt the externalist attitude nec-
essary for disagreement and criticism without ever having to leave their shared
communicative situation.
Inasmuch as such an externalist perspective is equally accessible to all par-
ticipants in communication, Habermas can reject Gadamer’s objection that
the critical theorist, in order to carry out her critique, has to break the sym-
metry of communication oriented toward understanding and become a social
technocrat in disguise. Habermas makes the point as follows: “In thematizing
what the participants merely presuppose and assuming a reflective attitude to
the interpretandum, one does not place oneself outside the communication
context under investigation; one deepens and radicalizes it in a way that is in
principle open to all participants” (Communicative Action, 1:130).
In this remark we can identify the second strategy that Habermas has fol-
lowed to confront the hermeneutic challenge. By identifying the possibility of
adopting an externalist perspective as a structural element of any communi-
cation oriented toward understanding, Habermas can reject the charge of
paternalism that Gadamer raised against his approach to critical theory back
in the 1970s. At the same time, however, it becomes clear that this strategy is
based on the acceptance of the criterion of legitimacy that underlies the
charge, namely, that the ultimate criterion of validation of any criticism or
proposal for social change is the actual dialogue among all participants
involved. Thus, no matter how superior the empirical and theoretical knowl-
edge of the critical theorist may be, she must situate herself as a discourse
participant among equals to validate her criticisms and proposals through
actual dialogue. As Habermas stresses in Between Facts and Norms, “in dis-
courses of justification there are in principle only participants” (172). This is
indeed the most distinctive element of Habermas’s approach to critical the-
ory. As he sees it, the critical theorist is not supposed to base her criticisms of
current societies on her particular conception of the good society but is sup-
posed to leave space for the citizens themselves to determine and develop
their different collective and individual life projects (Facts, 82ff.). To that
extent, critical inquiry does not seek to achieve specific ends but to bring
about those social conditions in which its insights and proposals might be
validated or falsified by citizens themselves. This decidedly democratic turn
of critical theory makes it possible to justify the claim that the evaluations
on which the theorist’s criticisms are based do not illegitimately constrain
the space of citizens’ political self-determination and thus do not amount
to a tendentious attempt to advance the critics’ own political preferences
56 Contexts
concerning the good society under the aegis of their self-proclaimed epis-
temic authority.
With this proposal, critical theory definitively breaks with the paternalistic
tendencies of the Marxist tradition and emphasizes the normative importance
of citizens’ political self-determination. In so doing, however, it does not give
in to the hermeneutic temptation to cede to the participants and their tradi-
tions the only say about the significance of the social practices they engage in.
The theoretical reconstruction of the communicative and social conditions
under which any political proposals could be validated or falsified by citizens
themselves provides the critical theorist with a powerful criterion for measuring
current social conditions and criticizing those responsible for the perpetua-
tion of injustices. At the same time, insight into the validity of such a criterion
does not derive from any privileged access to truth on the side of the critical
theorist but is anchored in the communicative practices that the discourse
participants already share. Consequently, this kind of criticism is not only
open to all participants but is also publicly addressed to them.
It remains an open question whether the Habermasian approach to critical
theory can succeed in its goals and thus offer a solid basis for a fruitful research
program. The scope of the theory of communicative rationality on which it is
based is breathtaking, so it is too early to say whether future research will vali-
date or undermine the numerous claims on which the success of the whole
approach depends. All the same, it is incontestable that Habermas offers a
genuinely critical alternative to the hermeneutic approach.
References
Dews, Peter, ed. 1986. Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas. London:
Verso.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2011. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshall. London: Continuum.
——. 1986. Hermeneutik II. Gesammelte Werke 2. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
——. 1986a. “Rhetorik, Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik. Metakritische Erörterungen zu
Wahrheit und Methode.” In Hermeneutik II. Gesammelte Werke 2, 232–250. Tübingen:
Niemeyer.
——. 1990a. “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem.” In The Hermeneutic Tradi-
tion: From Ast to Ricoeur, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, 147–158. Albany:
SUNY Press.
——. 1990b. “Reply to My Critics.” In The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur, ed.
Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, 273–297. Albany: SUNY Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality.” In The Hermeneutic
Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, 245–272.
Albany: SUNY Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
New York: Harper.
Lafont, Cristina. 1999. The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy. Trans. José Medina.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
——. 2000. Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure. Trans. Graham Harman. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
——. 2005. “Heidegger’s Hermeneutics.” In A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert Dreyfus
and Mark Wrathall, 265–284. Oxford: Blackwell.
McCarthy, Thomas. 1991. Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in
Contemporary Critical Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1985. “Self-Interpreting Animals.” In Human Agency and Language: Philo-
sophical Papers, 1:45–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6
SPEECH ACTS
PETER NIESEN
S
ystematic philosophical engagement with speech acts began
when John Langshaw Austin corrected his original conception of
performative utterances. Previously, Austin had maintained that
philosophy of language had overvalued the declarative aspect of linguistic
utterances and underestimated the acts one can perform/convey in making
them. Whereas he initially held that constative utterances (which can be true
or false) may be distinguished from performative utterances (which meet with
success or failure but are neither true nor false), he found himself forced to
admit, in the final installment of his William James Lectures, that some per-
formative utterances claim to be true or false and that some constative utter-
ances can prove unsuccessful (Austin 1962). A warning about conditions that
do not hold proves false; similarly, a factual account involving the current
king of France must fail because such a person does not exist. Austin distin-
guishes two kinds of possible miscarriages: when no successful utterance is
performed (e.g., when one tries to give orders but lacks authority), and when a
speech act is successful but defective (e.g., when one makes a promise that one
does not intend to keep). Finally, no lexical or grammatical markers exist that
might permit one to differentiate between constative and performative utter-
ances. For these reasons, in the second part of How to Do Things with Words,
Austin replaces the distinction between performative and constative utterances
with a distinction between different types of performatives—to which he now
assigns constative speech acts.
Austin now holds that one says something (locutionary act) and, at the
same time, does something by saying it (illocutionary act). Locutionary and
illocutionary acts cannot be performed separately, but their relationship may
vary: what one says can remain the same while the force of illocution (the role
of the utterance) changes—and vice versa. However, Austin’s conception of
the locutionary act did not survive intact, either. In addition to partial—
phonetic and lexical (“phatic”)—components, the locutionary act was to
include “rhetic” elements, i.e., expressions that possess a linguistic meaning.
John Searle (1968, 407) has objected to Austin that indicators belonging to the
illocutionary act—for instance, verbs like “order” and “assert”—also possess
linguistic meaning. Invoking Frege, Searle introduces the more abstract dis-
tinction between propositional and illocutionary acts. He now distinguishes
Speech Acts 59
between the “contents” of a proposition and its force or the role it plays (illocu-
tion) but no longer between what is said and what is done. In addition to their
illocutionary forces, Austin and Searle note the perlocutionary effects of
speech acts—for example, the fact that one can make someone afraid or happy
by saying “pass the salt.” As effects of verbal actions, perlocutions do not directly
form part of communication, whereas this is always the case with illocutionary
acts/successes.
According to Austin, one difference between illocutionary aspects of
speech and perlocutionary effects lies in the fact that the latter cannot be
included in communicative action on the basis of convention. For example,
the speech act “I hereby convince you. . .” does not exist. In contrast, for Aus-
tin and Searle, illocutionary acts depend on convention. The conventionality
of illocutionary acts has social, grammatical, and semantic dimensions. Insti-
tutional speech acts—which Austin often uses as examples—presuppose
established social practices. If I claim to christen a ship or order a person to do
something, I need to occupy a certain social position; otherwise the condi-
tions for success will not be fulfilled. Another aspect of conventionality comes
into play when Austin and Searle affirm that it is always possible to determine
the force of an utterance by the choice of words. I can promise that I will
leave the country by employing a performative verb: “I promise that I will leave
the country.” Linguistic convention entails the overt (or, at least, the poten-
tially open) quality of illocutionary roles, but the same does not hold for perlo-
cutionary effects. By employing suitable indicators of force, the speaker makes
clear what kind of illocutionary act is occurring in the utterance. On the basis
of the grammatical conventions observed, the performance of illocutionary
acts (assuming, that is, that the utterance is understood) occurs at the speaker’s
command. A third dimension of conventionality involves the rules governing
linguistic meaning, which extend both to illocutionary and to perlocutionary
elements of speech. Austin and Searle maintain that linguistic action is based
on invoking the literal meaning of expressions in “serious and genuine” utter-
ances and that the nonstandard employment of linguistic expressions is “para-
sitic” and derives from standard usage (on which their significance ultimately
depends).
Yet not all speech acts fulfill the requirements of explicit, serious, or genu-
ine literal utterances. Austin qualifies, for example, ironic, monologic, drama-
turgical, and poetic speech as nonstandard uses of language. Jacques Derrida
(1985) has ironically commented on the “parasitic” quality attributed to nonlit-
eral uses of speech and affirmed that the “iterability” of linguistic signs—
which stay the same even as contexts vary—forms the core of linguistic behavior.
Searle (1977, 205) has rejected such criticism: “There could not, for example, be
promises made by actors in a play if there were not the possibility of promises
made in real life.” Searle does not address whether the possibility of drama-
turgical (insincere, ironic, etc.) usage is not, in the same sense, a necessary
60 Contexts
condition for the existence of genuine promises in real life. Even if the comple-
mentarity of standard and deviant usage did not hold, the critic of linguistic
conventionalism could rightly observe that the possibility of deviant usage
always accompanies standard usage. The existence of conventional verbal
indicators of force, for example, entails that they can be exploited in inauthentic
speech (Davidson 1982). Even if serious and literal utterances rely on convention,
the seriousness and literalness of linguistic usage itself cannot be signaled by
convention.
Peter Strawson (1964) has sketched a continuum extending from linguistic
actions that are entirely conventional to those that are not conventional at all.
He replaces the purely conventionalistic theory of meaning with one that
combines Austin’s rule-based semantics and H. P. Grice’s nominalistic notion
of “speaker meaning” (see, also, Searle 1969). Grice holds that a person, in
order to mean something by an utterance, must intend at least three things:
(1) that he or she seeks a certain reaction on the part of the listener, (2) that this
intention be recognized, and (3) that the recognition of the intention give the
hearer a reason to display the intended reaction (Grice 1976). Space prohibits
discussion of the research that has expanded on—and contested—this notion
(see Avramides 1989), but it is distinctive of Grice’s program to disregard con-
ventionality and, by focusing on achieving a reaction instead, equate the illo-
cutionary and perlocutionary aspects of linguistic actions.
The question remains whether the terminological distinction between illo-
cution and perlocution can be retained if we label a particular kind of effect an
illocutionary, but not a perlocutionary, success (that is, when the meaning of
an utterance is understood but its intended effect does not obtain [Hornsby
2006])—or if, instead, one should consider illocutionary acts a special kind of
perlocution, namely, one reached by an openly declared intention (Meggle
1997). Conventionalist approaches continue to claim completeness, if only to
maintain a meaningful distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary
acts (Alston 2000).
Habermas has taken up speech-act theory for reasons stemming from the
philosophy of language and the theory of rationality. With regard to the
former, speech-act theory helps us avoid an impoverished conception of
meaning. Traditional semantic theory, favoring the analysis of propositional
contents, dispenses with examining the aspect of force and assimilates the sig-
nificance of all utterances to that of statements. Speech-act theory gives
Habermas a way to discern the “seat of rationality” in the illocutionary com-
ponent of utterances (Postmetaphysical, 74); that is, a way to correct individu-
alistic and teleological abstractions made by theories of action and the means
to uncover an alternate mode of reasoning in linguistic communication.
In his critique of semantic abstractions, Habermas finds a point of orienta-
tion in Karl Bühler’s taxonomy of linguistic functions, which distinguishes
between communication concerning states of affairs in the world, the
Speech Acts 61
production of interpersonal relations, and the expression of intentions or

experiences (Bühler 1934; Postmetaphysical, 57). Accordingly, Habermas dis-
tinguishes between declarative, regulative, and expressive uses of language,
and he employs this classification to replace those of Austin and Searle, which
were established by induction. Habermas emphasizes that, in principle, all
instances of linguistic action can be examined in terms of all three functions—
the conveying of a proposition, the creation of an intersubjective relation,
and the articulation of intentions; at the same time, he maintains that one of
the three dimensions stands in the foreground or “becomes thematic” in every
speech act.
The innovation of his approach lies in assigning different kinds of validity
claims to the three dimensions of meaning. That is, Habermas assesses claims of
propositional truth, normative correctness, and expressive (or artistic) authen-
ticity; these claims all trigger different types of reasoning in order to be
“redeemed.” By applying claims of validity and acceptability to analyses of lin-
guistic action, Habermas is able to combine theories of meaning and rationality—
a matter expressed in the famous formula: “We understand a speech act when
we know what makes it acceptable” (Communicative Action, 1:297).
In Habermas’s pragmatic theory of meaning, validity claims perform two
functions. They indicate the unavoidable obligations taken on by the speaker—
which classical speech-act theory describes as commitment (Searle 1969) or,
alternatively, as responsibility (Alston 2000). Utterances “count as” something
for which the speaker is ultimately answerable. Validity claims generalize the
role that was played by the notion of “truth” in classical semantics—that is,
the equation of what linguistic expressions mean with the conditions under
which they hold true: if a speech act is “valid,” then matters stand as expressed.
The bridge Habermas strikes between the way utterances are understood
and the conditions under which they prove acceptable also enlarges his con-
ception of illocution. A successful speech act achieves illocutionary goals in
the narrower sense insofar as it is understood—and in the extended sense, in
that the hearer accepts it. While Habermas agrees with Austin, Strawson, and
Searle about illocutionary success in the narrow sense, as determined by what a
speaker can anticipate under normal circumstances, he holds that illocution-
ary success involves precisely what the speaker cannot foresee (whether, that
is, the hearer will accept the statement).
Habermas also goes beyond classical conceptions of speech acts in the rela-
tion he sees between the aims of reaching understanding/comprehension and
those of reaching agreement. The key difference concerning communication,
on the one hand, and communication with a strategic motivation, on the
other, is whether the speaker is pursuing illocutionary goals (i.e., the under-
standing and acceptance of utterances he or she makes) only in a conditional
manner with respect to reasons and objections that can be made to the valid-
ity claims at issue. Linguistic action seeking understanding and agreement
62 Contexts
counts as the original mode, whereas strategic speech acts have a derivative
status (Communicative Action, 1:316).
Habermas adopts Austin and Searle’s thesis of “parasitism” for undeclared
strategic utterances—when a hidden goal can be achieved only if a quite dif-
ferent illocutionary objective is accomplished. Openly strategic speech acts
such as threats, bargaining, and (some) commands prove more difficult to
assess: they do not seem to focus on freely reaching agreement at all inasmuch
as they owe their acceptability exclusively to the status of the speaker and are
meant to be accepted independently of possible objections to the normative cor-
rectness of what they propose. However, such “simple exhortations” are also
comprehensible to hearers we do not credit with high-level linguistic compe-
tence involving reasoned agreement (Habermas 1991, 291n56); understanding
openly strategic speech acts cannot be a purely derivative matter, then. For
this reason, Habermas considers “simple exhortations” to represent limit
cases. In recent works, he has responded to the problem and elaborated a new
distinction within the theory of communicative action: between communica-
tive action in a weak sense, which includes speech acts that rely solely on sta-
tus and authorization, and communicative action in the strong sense, which
rests on an intersubjectively shared foundation (Truth, 107).
Another aspect of Habermas’s “original mode” thesis is that he defends,
with Austin and Searle and against Derrida and Davidson, the primacy of lit-
eral meaning over nonstandard uses of expressions. The norm that one is to
use words in a commonly accepted way is thus akin to the three validity commit-
ments. Unlike Searle, however, he stresses that it is false—“counterfactual”—
under normal circumstances to assume that speakers and hearers will use and
understand expressions in a consistent fashion over time. The ability to appre-
hend literal meaning, as Habermas views it, does not represent a condition suf-
ficient for actual comprehension. The question, then, is why Habermas should
take it to be a necessary condition, in contrast to Davidson, who cites misstate-
ments and jokes to illustrate that, in some cases, literal meaning is neither
sufficient nor necessary to understand an utterance (Davidson 1986).
Although Habermas sides with conventionalists against intentionalists, he
presents arguments taken from his more comprehensive conception of rea-
son in so doing. In a Gricean sense, the rationality of linguistic action must
be limited to the pursuit of individual aims. To be sure, the category of
“weakly” communicative action that Habermas introduces includes Gricean
“meaning” as the attempt to have a hearer understand an illocution as com-
municative action, not strategic action. The basic phenomenon characteriz-
ing linguistic communication as such remains the fact that illocutionary
goals (in the broader sense) can be realized only inasmuch as the validity claims
they imply are not contested (which is necessary for “strong” communicative
action).
Speech Acts 63
The illocutionary force of an utterance must be asserted without reserve,

yet such directness corresponds to the qualified pursuit of further goals in
communicative action: if the validity claims are rejected for legitimate reasons,
then the speaker is rationally bound to retract his or her claim(s). Compared
to the classical conception of speech acts, then, the theory of communicative
action pursues a more ambitious account of linguistic normativity. That said,
one should counter the frequent criticism that Habermas holds to an exces-
sively normative conception of linguistic action by distinguishing linguistic
normativity from other kinds of normativity. Habermas has repeatedly
stressed that standards of meaning and validity are neither morally obligatory
nor in any other sense prescriptive (Naturalism, 78).
References
Alston, William P. 2000. Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press.
Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Avramides, Anita. 1989. Meaning and Mind: An Examination of a Gricean Account of Lan-
guage. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Bühler, Karl. 1934. Sprachtheorie. Jena: Gustav Fischer.
Davidson, Donald. 1982. “Communication and Convention.” In Inquiries Into Truth and
Interpretation, 265–280. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——. 1986. “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs.” In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on
the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore, 433–446. Oxford: Blackwell.
Derrida, Jacques. 1985. “Signature Event Context.” In Margins of Philosophy, 308–330. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Grice, H. Paul. 1957. “Meaning.” Philosophical Review 66, no. 3: 377–388.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. “A Reply.” In Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s
The Theory of Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, 214–264.
Hornsby, Jennifer. 2006. “Speech Acts and Performatives.” In Oxford Handbook of Philoso-
phy of Language, ed. Ernest LePore and Barry C. Smith, 893–909. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Meggle, Georg. 1997. “Theorien der Kommunikation – Eine Einführung.” In Kommunika-
tionstheorien – Theorien der Kommunikation, ed. Geert-Lueke Lueken, 14–40. Leipzig:
Universitätsverlag.
Searle, John. 1968. “Austin on Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts.” Philosophical Review
77, no. 4: 405–424.
——. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——. 1977. “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida.” Glyph 1:198–208.
Strawson, Peter F. 1964. “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts.” Philosophical Review
73, no 4: 439–460.
7
PSYCHOANALYSIS
JOEL WHITEBOOK
T
he way Horkheimer and Adorno formulated the dialectic of
enlightenment left only two options: political resignation or uto-
pianism. Herbert Marcuse took the second and tried to break out
of the seemingly implacable logic of Horkheimer and Adorno’s position inso-
far as it was formulated in psychoanalytic terms (Habermas 1985, 74ff.). Where
the utopian idea of a nonrepressive society had only been advanced as a the-
oretical possibility in Eros and Civilization, by the late sixties, Marcuse,
under the influence of the New Left, was advocating it as a concrete political
program.
Habermas, on the other hand, a self-proclaimed radical reformer who
rejected both political quietism and the idea of revolution, chose a different
strategy. He challenged the underlying assumptions of Horkheimer and
Adorno’s construction and thus freed himself from having to choose between
two equally unacceptable alternatives. His debate with Freud in Knowledge
and Human Interests represents, among other things, a contestation of the
psychoanalytic presuppositions of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
When Horkheimer and Adorno formulate the dialectic of enlighten-
ment with the help of Freud—they also draw on Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and
Weber—they make the assumption that the formation of the self is always
self-defeating and violent. They arrive at this position by applying the general
law of equivalence—that is, everything that happens has to be paid for—to the
development of the self, where it assumes the form of “the introversion of
sacrifice” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 55). Mythical cultures, they argue,
attempted to influence the course of human and natural events by offering
sacrifices to the gods, hoping the deities would reciprocate and intervene on
their behalf. Odysseus, whom they see as the prototype of the modern bour-
geois man, thought he could emancipate himself from the prerational and
preindividuated world of myth and escape the law of equivalence through
renunciation. Rather than sacrificing a piece of the external world, he would
sacrifice a part of his inner nature, of himself. He figured that by bringing the
formlessness of his internal nature under the control of a unified ego, that is,
by repressing his unconscious-instinctual life, he could outwit the law of
equivalence and survive the numerous dangers—which represent the various
Psychoanalysis 65
regressive temptations of the archaic world—that awaited him on his journey

home.
But there is a flaw in Odysseus’s strategy, and it becomes the “germ cell” out
of which the dialectic of enlightenment unfolds. Though not directed out-
wardly, the renunciation of inner nature that “man celebrates on himself” is
no less a sacrificial act than the immolation of the hindquarter of an ox (Hork-
heimer and Adorno 1972, 54). And as such, it remains subject to the law of
equivalence. A price must therefore be paid for Odysseus’s survival—that is,
for victory over the dangers posed by internal and external nature—and it
is the reification of the self. To the extent that the ego distances itself from its
archaic prehistory and unconscious-instinctual life, it loses its mimetic rela-
tion to the world and becomes reified. But there is also a perverse sense in
which mimesis is preserved in the process. For an objectified self mimics the
reified world it has objectified.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s assumption that the process they described in
Dialectic of Enlightenment constitutes the only path to ego formation led them
to elevate the autocratic ego into the ego as such. For them, the integration of
the self is inherently violent: “Men had to do fearful things to themselves
before the self, the identical purposive, and virile nature of man was formed,
and something of that recurs in every childhood” (34; see also Castoriadis
1987, 300–301). Furthermore, to preserve its unity, its identity, the ego must
continuously and vigilantly maintain its boundaries on two fronts, against
outer nature and inner nature, including the nature-like demands of the
superego, alike (Freud 1961, chap. 5). The goal of the Enlightenment was the
emancipation of humankind from fear and immaturity and the promotion of
its fulfillment through the development of reason and the mastery of nature.
But as Horkheimer and Adorno present it, the whole process of ego formation,
and hence the project of enlightenment, is self-vitiating. Because it involves
the progressive reification of the self, the formation of the self systematically
destroys the conditions for achieving the goal of a successful life.
After World War II, Adorno continued to pursue the psychoanalytic prob-
lematic spelled out in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Because of his proposition
that the whole is the untrue, which prohibited him from indulging in positive
speculation, Adorno could only use psychoanalysis for critical ends. He
argued that any attempt at envisioning a “more human existence” would nec-
essarily amount to “ideology,” that is, “false reconciliation within an unrecog-
nized world” (Adorno 1968, 83, 86). There was, however, one place where, as
Wellmer has observed, Adorno disregarded his concerns about false reconcilia-
tion and prohibitions against positive speculation, namely, in his aesthetic the-
ory. There he claimed that new forms of less repressive synthesis—consisting
in a nonreified relation between particular and universal, part and whole—
had already been achieved in exemplary works of advanced art, especially
66 Contexts
Schoenberg’s music and Beckett’s theater. Indeed, he went so far as to suggest

that the sort of aesthetic integration displayed in these works might prefigure
a postreified mode of social synthesis, which could possibly be realized in a
future society.
But, perhaps because of a lingering Marxian prejudice against psychology,
Adorno never allowed himself the same speculative liberty with respect to the
synthesis of the self. That is, he never attempted to extrapolate possibilities for
new, less repressive forms of self-integration from the “nonviolent together-
ness of the manifold” he thought he perceived in advanced works of art
(Wellmer 1991a, 1991b; Whitebook 1995, 152–163). This is unfortunate, because
by challenging the assumption that the integration of the self is necessarily
violent, he might have found a way out of the dialectic of enlightenment.
Habermas argued that, in general, Horkheimer and Adorno’s impasse
resulted from their theoretical monism, that is, their attempt to conceptualize
historical and individual development only along one dimension, namely,
instrumental rationality (see Communicative Action, vol. 1, part 4; Philosophi-
cal Discourse, chap. 5). He countered their monism—and this was his decisive
move against them—by introducing the second dimension of communicative
rationality. Although his theory of communicative rationality has assumed
many versions and has softened over his long and remarkably productive
career, Habermas has retained his basic intuitions about communication with
remarkable tenacity. He has repeatedly argued that the aporia not only of the
Frankfurt School but also of contemporary philosophy as a whole can only be
resolved by adopting the standpoint of communicative reason.
In general, Habermas had the right desideratum, for, unlike Adorno, he
was willing to adumbrate a positive conception of the self. But the very thing
he used to reformulate psychoanalysis, namely, his theory of communication,
also caused him to move away from psychoanalysis. And in leaving Freud
behind and embracing the cognitive psychology of Piaget and Kohlberg, he
deprived himself of the means to achieve his desideratum adequately.
In line with his broader program, Habermas brought a linguistic analysis
to bear on psychoanalysis, which he thought was an instance of a successful
human science—albeit one that had not understood itself properly precisely
because it had lacked a robust theory of language. He reinterpreted the
psychoanalytic theory of false consciousness—which sought to explain
dreams, neurotic symptoms, parapraxes, and cultural illusions—as a theory
of “systematically distorted communication” (for a programmatic statement,
see Habermas 1970). To do this, he had to show that the self is formed through
communication and, moreover, how it hides from itself through language.
But this way of putting things involved a serious problem, one that proved
to be of enormous import for the development of Habermas’s career. Logically,
the very notion of systematically distorted communication seems to require
Psychoanalysis 67
an idea of undistorted communication to make sense of it. Because of

Habermas’s opposition to the philosophy of consciousness, the extent of his
Cartesianism is not easily recognized. Yet despite his rejection of first phi-
losophy, Habermas, like Descartes, takes radical skepticism as the nemesis
that must be defeated—something a postmetaphysical philosopher should
know is impossible. Whereas, for Descartes, the evil genius’s trickery takes the
form of systematically distorted perception, for Habermas it manifests itself in
systematically distorted communication. And just as the specter of systematic
and totalized distortion led Descartes to search for an Archimedean point in
consciousness to overcome it, so Habermas, to defeat his linguistic trickster,
tries to find his Archimedean point in an ideal speech situation.
The idea of undistorted communication was the “germ cell” that Haber-
mas’s increasing movement away from the Feuerbachian materialism of Freud
and toward the transcendentalism of Kant grew out of. Indeed, the Kantian
quest for theoretical and normative foundations for critical theory—albeit
without recourse to an “ultimate justification”—which came to dominate
Habermas’s thinking, directly conflicted with his stated goal of retaining the
Feuerbachian materialism of the early Frankfurt School. And nowhere is this
conflict more visible than in his encounter with Freud in Knowledge and
Human Interests.
What Habermas gives in his discussion of clinical phenomena, he takes
back in his linguistic reformulation of metapsychology. Like Paul Ricoeur in
Freud and Philosophy, Habermas wants to avoid abstract epistemology.
He therefore undertakes a transcendental analysis of psychoanalytic phenom-
ena to determine its essential features. And ubiquitous in analytic practice is
resistance. Both analyst and analysand, as Habermas observes, encounter a
force that opposes them in their effort to gain insight and understanding. He
acknowledges, moreover, that resistance is more than a purely cognitive (or
linguistic) phenomenon, recognizing that it is useless simply to present
patients with the cognitive content of their repressed ideas without having
addressed the force that is repressing them and then having worked it through.
To do so, as Freud (1957) wryly notes, would have “as much influence on the
symptoms of nervous illness as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of fam-
ine has upon hunger” (225).
Habermas grants that the existence of resistance—and the necessity of
exerting effort to counter it—requires the positing of “forcelike,” which is to
say “naturelike” (naturwüchsig), phenomena functioning in the human
psyche. And, he acknowledges, a purely hermeneutical approach is not suffi-
cient to apprehend or engage these forces. Even if we assume that the goal of
psychoanalysis is ultimately hermeneutical—and this is debatable—technique
(which is more than interpretation) must be used to remove the objectified
blockages to insight in order to achieve understanding. Clinical experience,
68 Contexts
Habermas notes, demands that psychoanalysis unite “linguistic analysis with

the psychological investigation of causal connections” (Knowledge, 271). Indeed,
these considerations lead him to soften his charge of scientism against Freud
and admit that the latter’s scientific self-understanding was not “entirely
unfounded” (Knowledge, 214). At roughly the same time—and out of similar
theoretical motives—Paul Ricoeur (1970) argued that because the psyche
objectifies itself to hide from itself, Freud’s “objectivism” and “naturalism” are
“well-grounded” (434).
But after having offered an accurate account of clinical experience, force-
like phenomena do not enter into Habermas’s “metapsychological” account of
repression—which is the original source of the resistance. Instead he puts
forth a purely hermeneutical analysis. His thesis is that repression is an intra-
linguistic process, namely, of “excommunication.” When children feel that
their “need interpretations” (wishes) are too dangerous to express in public,
they “degrammaticize” (repress) the forbidden thoughts—that is, remove them
from the logic of ordinary language communication (secondary processes)—
and banish them to the unconscious. The unconscious is thus understood as
the realm that contains all the delinguistified (primary process) ideas.
If repression consists in degrammaticization, Habermas reasons, then the
job of analysis is to reverse the process by regrammaticizing the forbidden
ideas and bringing them back into the public web of intersubjective communi-
cation (secondary processes). On this account, there are no forcelike extralin-
guistic phenomena obstructing the translation of a delinguistified idea into a
linguistified one. The closest Habermas comes is the notion of “the causality
of fate,” which he borrows from the young Hegel. However, he never satisfac-
torily explicates the forcefulness of that force—which, one senses, must be
connected with another instance of forcefulness that requires further expla-
nation, namely, “the unforced force of a better argument.”
Habermas’s linguistifying program compels him to reject as “unsatisfac-
tory” a cardinal tenet of Freudian psychoanalysis, namely, the existence of a
nonlinguistic unconscious (Knowledge, 241). Although degrammaticized, the
Habermasian unconscious is still linguistic in that it can be regrammaticized.
By rejecting the existence of a nonlinguistic unconscious, Habermas lessens
the alterity of the subject’s inner foreign territory. Qua linguistic, the uncon-
scious is in principle homogeneous with consciousness.
The rejection of a prelinguistic unconscious has an undesired theoretical
consequence for Habermas. Despite his supposed refutation of “the herme-
neutic claim to universality,” he in fact ends up advancing a form of linguistic
monism (Habermas 1980, 190). With the linguistification of the unconscious, we
are “always already” in the sphere of language, with no external nonlinguistic
phenomena acting on it. Gadamer, who was no maven of psychoanalysis,
recognized this and argued that Habermas’s rejection of a nonlinguistic
Psychoanalysis 69
unconscious entailed the affirmation of the hermeneutical claim to universal-

ity (Gadamer 1976, 41).
Throughout his career Habermas has clung to the notion that, with regard
to the human subject, it is language all the way down. One has the impression
that Habermas believes that the defense of this thesis—which entails the
claim that the self is social all the way down—is necessary for maintaining the
possibility of a progressive political program. But if the denial of the extent of
the presocial and antisocial, that is, the irrational dimension of human nature,
is required to maintain hope, then that hope must have been somewhat shaky
to begin with.
Habermas’s discussion of Foucault’s theory of madness is instructive. He
objects to the French philosopher’s thesis that—because it stood for Reason’s
excommunication of its Other—the “great confinement” of the mad in the
sixteenth century constituted the founding act of modern rationality. Haber-
mas grants that this may be true for a narrow scientistic subject-centered form
of rationality. But German idealism, he argues, in fact pursues the sort of
dialogue between Reason and its split-off Other that Foucault calls for—a dia-
logue that would lead to the creation of richer, broader, and more flexible
synthetic achievements. Moreover, where the German idealists could not ful-
fill this program because they remained stuck within the framework of first
philosophy, Habermas claims he can achieve it with his theory of communica-
tive rationality (Philosophical Discourse, 412; Whitebook 2005).
But Habermas makes things too easy for himself and thereby deprives him-
self of a richer result. The degree of the alterity of the Other determines two
things: how difficult communication with the Alter will be and how much
growth can result from an encounter with it. That is, while diminished alterity
makes for easier dialogue, it also results in the diminished potential for growth.
With respect to psychoanalysis and the desideratum of a less violent synthesis
of the self, the denial of a prelinguistic unconscious reduces the extent of the
split in the subject and the magnitude of the integrative task that confronts the
ego. And, to the same degree, it also diminishes the ego’s potential for growth.
What Derrida said about the “dialogue with unreason” in Foucault can
also be said of the self’s encounter with its interior Other in Habermas. The
whole process is “interior to logos” (Derrida 1978, 38). A linguistic unconscious
is logos’s pseudo-Other, and it never contacts its real Other in any significant
sense. Finally, it is telling that, although Habermas calls for the linguistifica-
tion of inner nature, he never entertains the idea of the instinctualization of
the ego (Habermas 1979, 93).
70 Contexts
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1968. “Sociology and Psychology (Part II).” Trans. Irving N.
Wohlfarth. New Left Review 47:79–97.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Trans. Kathleen Blamey.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “Cogito and the History of Madness.” In Writing and Difference,
trans. Alan Bass, 36–76. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Freud, Sigmund. [1910] 1957. “Wild Analysis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy-
chological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 11:219–227. London: Hogarth.
——. [1923] 1961. “The Ego and the Id.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychologi-
cal Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 19:1–66, London: Hogarth.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1976. “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection.” In
Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge, 44–58. Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1970. “Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence.” In Recent
Sociology, No. 2: Patterns of Human Communication, ed. Hans Peter Dreitzel, 115–148.
New York: Macmillan.
——. 1979. “Moral Development and Ego Identity.” In Communication and the Evolution of
Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 69–94. Boston: Beacon.
——. 1980. “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality.” In Contemporary Hermeneutics:
Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy, and Critique, ed. Josef Bleicher, 181–211. Boston:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
——. 1985. “Psychic Thermidor and the Rebirth of Rebellious Subjectivity.” In Habermas
and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein, 67–77. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John
Cumming. New York: Continuum.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Wellmer, Albrecht. 1991a. “Truth, Semblance and Reconciliation.” In The Persistence of
Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley,
1–35. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
——. 1991b. “The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism.” In The Persistence of
Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley,
Whitebook, Joel. 1995. Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical The-
ory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
——. 2005. “Against Interiority: Foucault’s Struggle with Psychoanalysis.” In The Cam-
bridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, 312–347. New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
8
POSTMETAPHYSICAL THINKING
KENNETH BAYNES
H
abermas’s endorsement of what he calls “postmetaphysical
thinking” can easily be misleading. It is not intended as a rejec-
tion of the sort of inquiry pursued, for example, in the more
recent revival of “analytic metaphysics” associated primarily with David Lewis
and the “Australian metaphysicians.” Rather, at least in the first instance, it is
directed against both the tradition of metaphysical thought that reached a cul-
mination in the philosophy of Hegel and German idealism and in the vari-
ous—and, ultimately, for Habermas, still “metaphysical”—attempts to escape
that tradition in the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. The charge
that these latter thinkers remain metaphysical is likely to be controversial.
However, it should be recalled that Heidegger read Nietzsche as the last of the
great metaphysicians and also that Derrida claimed that Heidegger had not
sufficiently broken with the “metaphysics of presence.” As a rejection of these
forms of philosophical reflection, the call for “postmetaphysical thinking” is
another way of formulating Habermas’s attempt to move beyond the “philoso-
phy of the subject,” or Bewusstseinsphilosophie, in a manner that would be
more decisive than what he considers to be the failed attempts of much recent
continental philosophy. It is thus also consistent with his earlier arguments
presented in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that Nietzsche and his
“postmodern” successors remained ensnared in the philosophy of the subject
despite their own intention: In their efforts to overcome the deficits of the phi-
losophy of the subject, these thinkers either relinquished too much (sacrific-
ing, for example, the achievements of modern reason) or continued to regard
philosophy as a privileged form of inquiry that yielded insight distinct from
the empirical sciences. Or they did both (roughly, Habermas’s controversial
interpretation of Heidegger).
In Postmetaphysical Thinking, Habermas does, however, also take issue
with the return of metaphysics found in the post-Kantian metaphysics of
Dieter Henrich. In fact, the career-long engagement of these thinkers with
each other’s positions presents a concise and fascinating way of formulat-
ing Habermas’s reservations about the continuation of metaphysical thinking.
In a series of works, Henrich has repeatedly sought to show the indispens-
able need for a philosophical clarification of the structure and role of
72 Contexts
self-consciousness. As he argued in an influential essay on Fichte (Henrich

1966), if an unending regress is to be avoided, there must be a (nonobjectivat-
ing) self-relation and self-knowledge prior to any (epistemic) relation between
self and object. For Habermas, by contrast, Henrich’s attempt to provide a
central, even foundational, role for the philosophy of the subject fails to appre-
ciate the significant achievements in philosophy, pragmatics, and action the-
ory that support his own call for a paradigm shift. Whatever insights such
philosophical inquiry might offer a phenomenological clarification of self-
consciousness, it is neither likely nor desirable that it will be able to fulfill
the ambitious claims Henrich sets for it (see Postmetaphysical, 10–27). On the
other hand, Henrich has charged that Habermas’s “paradigm shift” from self-
consciousness to communicative action is less radical than it appears and only
gains its initial plausibility by sweeping unavoidable traditional metaphysical
issues under the rug (see Henrich 1982). Indeed, the exchange between these
two theorists touches upon many pressing philosophical questions, such as
the relationship between philosophy and naturalism, the place of philosophy
in a modern and pluralist world, and the relationship between philosophy and
the other sciences (including the social sciences). It is fair to conclude, how-
ever, that Habermas advocates a much less ambitious, more modest role for
philosophy than that held by many philosophers.
Given the wide range of thinkers Habermas identifies as metaphysical, it is
therefore appropriate to ask what it is that Habermas finds so objectionable in
“metaphysical thinking” and what prospects there are for making a radical
break with it. Further, at least the suspicion must be addressed that Haber-
mas’s characterization of metaphysics (now in the pejorative sense) is so broad
that it would include almost all philosophical inquiry. How, in other words,
does he propose to shun metaphysics (as he understands it) without dismiss-
ing philosophical reflection altogether?
By metaphysical thinking Habermas means, most generally, the tradition
of classical metaphysics from Plato through the medieval period, the “philoso-
phy of the subject” that arose in response to the emergence of science as a
competing form of knowledge, the critique of this form of metaphysics in
twentieth-century continental thought, and some more recent attempts to
continue the “philosophy of the subject” (again, as represented by Dieter Hen-
rich). What these forms of thinking share in common, beginning especially
with the “philosophy of the subject,” is the view that there is a form of inquiry
and knowledge proper to philosophy that is, on the one hand, quite distinct
from that found in the natural and social sciences and, on the other, one that
can nonetheless yield a special and authoritative insight into questions con-
cerning both the meaning of life and how the world, in the broadest sense,
“hangs together.” What Habermas denies in his call for postmetaphysical
thinking is that this remains a plausible and coherent task for philosophy
Postmetaphysical Thinking 73
today. However, if this description is not to be so broad as to include poten-

tially all philosophical inquiry, it must be made more precise. Habermas does
not claim that there are no tasks left for philosophy—indeed, this would
preclude the roles he assigns to philosophy as the “guardian of reason” and as
cultural interpretation (“Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter,” in Moral
Consciousness, 1–20). Rather, what he questions more specifically is whether
there is a form of knowledge—either in the sense of (strong) transcendental
inquiry or in a new form of thinking, such as Heidegger’s Andenken—that
yields a special and authoritative insight into the world or the meaning of life.
For Habermas, by contrast, in a world distinguished by the “fact of reasonable
pluralism” (Rawls) and a rationality that has turned increasingly procedural
and nonsubstantive, philosophy must relinquish this larger ambition, which it
once shared with religion. In this regard, two forms of metaphysical thinking
are for him especially paradigmatic: again, first, the tradition of the philoso-
phy of the subject or “philosophy of reflection,” in which the knowing subject,
through a special reflective turn or gaze, acquires knowledge that is more
basic than, and indeed even foundational for, the warrant or justification of
other forms of knowledge; and, second, the form of “fundamental ontology”
advocated by Heidegger and his successors that, in contrast to the knowledge
of beings reserved for the empirical sciences, would yield a special kind of
knowledge into the question of the meaning of Being. What Habermas objects
to in particular is the way in which both of these forms of inquiry isolate
themselves from any sort of challenge from the empirical sciences broadly
understood.
This interpretation of what Habermas means by metaphysical thinking
is supported by his own alternative sketch of the task of philosophy, which
he aligns either with the so-called reconstructive sciences that attempt to make
explicit the practical knowledge of competent speakers and actors, on the one
hand, and the more broadly interpretive or hermeneutic role of philosophy as
an interpreter of culture, on the other (see Moral Consciousness, 1–20). In each
of these roles, the knowledge yielded by philosophical inquiry is fallible, open
to criticism from the sciences, and always dependent on prior social practices.
First, as a “guardian of rationality,” philosophy picks up and elaborates aspects
of a (now largely procedural) conception of rationality as it emerges in various
domains of inquiry (including the philosophy of language and pragmatics,
action theory and moral psychology, and legal and political theory). However, in
contrast to earlier models, philosophy is not an exclusively “a priori” discipline;
though it still attempts to identify something like “conditions of possibility” that
are constitutive for various human competences and social practices, it does not
cut itself off from the insights of other empirical sciences and looks to them for
confirmation of its fallible claims. Second, in its role as an interpreter, it
attempts to mediate between various forms of expert knowledge, on the one
74 Contexts
hand, and the more mundane self-understandings and social practices that
constitute the everyday lifeworld. In neither case, however, does philosophy
possess a unique methodology or claim a special source of authority distinct
from other disciplines or even from that of a self-reflective citizen (see Truth,
277–292). Thus, though it must relinquish the privileged position that meta-
physics once claimed for itself, philosophy nonetheless retains an important if
nonexclusive role in capturing and making explicit its own time in thought.
References
Dews, Peter, ed. 1999. Habermas: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.

Henrich, Dieter. 1966. “Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht.” In Subjektivität und Metaphysik:
Festschrift für Wolfgang Cramer. Frankfurt: Klostermann.
——. 1982. Fluchtlinien: Philosophische Essays. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
9
K ANT
INGEBORG MAUS
H
abermas’s thorough engagement with the works of Kant is evident
in every aspect of his philosophy. The following discusses this
engagement with respect to moral philosophy; the theory of law
and democracy, including the theory of international law; and epistemology.
Moral Philosophy
Habermas has the avowed intention of (re)formulating Kant’s moral phi-

losophy in terms of discourse theory (Justification, 3). This implies shifting
focus away from the philosophy of consciousness, which concentrates on the
individual subject, and toward an intersubjective theory. Habermas’s corre-
sponding ethics of discourse replaces Kant’s Categorical Imperative with a
process of moral argumentation that gives everyone a procedure for him- or
herself to test maxims for conduct: practical moral discourse cannot occur
monologically. It requires multiple participants, prompted by a conflict within
the lifeworld—whereby maxims for conduct hitherto followed without reflec-
tion now prove controversial—to work out a common method of testing these
maxims (Justification, 8). Although Habermas disregards Kant’s different
articulations of the Categorical Imperative and concentrates on the idea
underlying them all (Moral Consciousness, 63), one can recognize two versions
of the Categorical Imperative in two principles of his theory of discourse.
Habermas’s “principle of discourse ethics (D)” holds that only those norms
can claim validity that meet with agreement among all involved in practical
discourse (Moral Consciousness, 66; Justification, 7). This can be read as a dis-
course-theoretical translation of Kant’s (2012) monologic test: “that my maxim
should hold as a universal law” (18). Moreover, Habermas’s “principle of uni-
versalization (U)” provides a rule of argumentation according to which the
validity of norms depends on whether “all affected can accept the conse-
quences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have
for the satisfaction of the interests of each” (Justification, 32; emphasis added;
cf. Moral Consciousness, 66). One may view this as a reformulation of another
version of the Categorical Imperative, one that ultimately seeks the formal
76 Contexts
mediation between material purposes. Kant explains the instruction: “act that
you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other,
always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” From this recogni-
tion of every person as an “end in itself,” Kant deduces the demand “to further
the ends of others” and to contribute to “the happiness of others” (2012, 52;
emphasis added).
The comparison above leaves open whether identity obtains between Kant’s
notion of everyone’s “ends” and “everyone’s interests” as articulated by Haber-
mas. Either way, the point is to refute the claim—made by Reinhard Brandt
(2002, 55–56)—that a “salto mortale” into the sphere of pure freedom separates
Kant’s moral philosophy from the perspectival weighing of interests that
occurs in Habermas’s discourse ethics. While one may agree with another
thesis advanced by the same critic—that Habermas’s “discourse-theoretical
way of reading” the Categorical Imperative (first version) misses Kant’s inten-
tion inasmuch as it expects everyone “to occupy the perspective of all others,
in order to evaluate whether a norm could be desired from the view of any one
of them” (Brandt 2002, 54; regarding Habermas’s Inclusion of the Other)—it is
not possible to agree with Brandt’s mode of reading “intelligibility.” Kant’s for-
mulation admits an interpretation compatible with the self-deception of nar-
row-minded egoists: each individual has to ask whether he or she would wish
that the maxim of his of her own actions—a maxim elevated to the generality of
law—should be used against him or her. Conversely, the formulation of the Cat-
egorical Imperative that incorporates material purposes in general—those of
anyone else at all—is doubtlessly altruistic and requires changes of moral
perspective. (On the reflexivity of the relationship between moral principle
and happiness in Kant, see Maus 1992, 265, 267ff.)
On the whole, Habermas agrees with Kant’s moral philosophy to such an
extent that he applies “Hegel’s objections Kant” to his own discourse ethics
and analyzes them in great detail (Justification). Above all, this involves
Hegel’s criticism of the formalism of the Categorical Imperative, the objec-
tively given “primacy of morality over the ethical life,” and, finally, the “impo-
tence of the mere ought” (Ohnmacht des blossen Sollens). In responding to the
criticism Hegel aims at Kant, Habermas refutes misunderstandings that
impede the reception of discourse theory even today. Hegel’s critique of for-
malism holds that the Categorical Imperative is ensnared in tautology insofar
as every determinate maxim corresponds to the pure indeterminacy of the
abstract principle of generalization. As Habermas shows, this objection is
invalid because formal evaluation does not demand logical or semantic con-
sistency. Instead, it involves assessing the generalizability of the will with
respect to the generalizability of a maxim into law; at the same time, the tested
“contents” of maxims are actual standards of behavior (Justification, 9). Both
Kant 77
the Categorical Imperative and practical discourse derive such positive con-
tent from the “lifeworld” (Justification, 9; Moral Consciousness, 106).
Habermas criticizes Hegel’s “primacy of the ethical life over morality”—an
argument directed against Kant’s “abstractions” (Maus 1992, 267ff.)—for
declaring habitual and institutionalized modes of behavior within the “life-
world,” which he identifies with the ethical life, to be normative. If they are
viewed in this way, they can no longer be criticized on the reflexive level of
cognitive morality (Moral Consciousness, 107–108). At the same time, however,
Habermas manages to derive meaning from Hegel’s argument inasmuch as it
serves to clarify the field of application for ethics in the Kantian tradition:
they concern only what norms of conduct should accomplish—not what val-
ues are to be deemed preferable.
Habermas does not respond to the “impotence of the mere ought” by reject-
ing Hegel’s objection. Instead, he answers by pointing out how he has modi-
fied Kant’s moral philosophy. By undercutting Kant’s dualism between ideas
given a priori and empirical praxis, Habermas negates the specific difficulty
inherent in this kind of moral philosophy. Kant was able to present freedom
(as the precondition for moral action) only as a possibility, not as a reality;
therefore, he ultimately invokes the simple “fact” of (moral) reason (Kant 2012,
62). Habermas reformulates the problem along the lines of the philosophy of
language: he refers to the idealizing excessive self-demands settled at the heart
of the everyday praxis of linguistic communication (Facts). Thereby, Kant’s
opposition between being and ought is mediated in the factual force of coun-
terfactual presuppositions (Justification, 81) that every speaker is forced to
make because he or she must observe the pragmatic and linguistic demand for
reciprocal recognition among all interlocutors. At the same time, these pre-
suppositions remain standing as normative criteria. Even if the linguistic
coordination of social action that occurs could never be “ideal,” counterfac-
tual presuppositions prevent language from being abused and used to repres-
sive ends.
Theory of Law and Democracy
The very fact that Habermas presents his most fully articulated theory of
democracy—Between Facts and Norms—as the core of his legal philosophy
attests to his agreement with Kant in the highest degree. Habermas’s early
engagement with Kant addressed, above all, the principle of the “public
sphere” (Structural Transformation, 89–90); subsequent works retained this
orientation in the conceptions of critical public space, deliberative politics,
and structures of civil society they presented. Between Facts and Norms is the
78 Contexts
first book to describe, in reference to Kant, (1) the reciprocal relations between
democracy and law and (2) a distinction earlier works did not address: the dif-
ference between law and morality. Habermas translates Kant’s ideals into an
exceedingly complex form of discourse theory—and, in so doing, he modifies
the way he understands his own project (Facts, 118–119). Finally, (3) Habermas’s
reasons for a “logical genesis of rights,” which implies the “equiprimordial” sta-
tus of rights to freedom and popular sovereignty, develop a conception that is
one of the reformulated elements of Kant’s theory. (The latter are discussed
subsequently, in describing Kant’s principles of a democratic constitution.
Kant’s very special constructions are mentioned later, in a comparison
between Habermas and Kant.) In this context—and before taking up Kant’s
theory of democracy—we should observe that Habermas does not commit a
common error concerning Kant’s view of systems of governmental authority
(and the demands placed on them), namely, that they are to be endured “pro-
visionally” until the united people is the only legislator and sovereign (Kant
1996, §52 [111–113].)
The deep connection between the radical principle of popular sovereignty
and constitutionality is evident in the fact that Kant avoids the word “democ-
racy.” In the eighteenth century, this term referred to ancient democracy,
which knew no division of powers. This is why Kant uses “republic” to refer to
his strong conception of a democracy, which is distinguished by the strict
division of power between legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Only
the lawgiver wields sovereignty, while the executive and judiciary act “in con-
formity to law” and “in accordance with the law” (Kant 1996, §45 [90–91]).
When Kant affirms that “legislative power . . . can only belong to the unified
will of the people,” he establishes a connection between popular sovereignty
and constitutional government in which the division of powers not only limits
popular sovereignty but also—and above all—provides the condition of its
possibility. Because “the people” (directly or through representation [Kant
1991, 76]) only wield legislative power yet wield it all, they are not authorized to
perform individual acts of government and judicial decisions. However, the fact
that individual determinations of the government and the judiciary are bound
to general rules (this dependence is even formulated in terms of the logic of
subsumption: Kant 1996, §45 [90–91]) means that state apparatuses are subor-
dinate to the will of the people, all the same: the state’s monopoly on force
(Gewalt) can be employed only according to directives given by the social base.
Such a division of power matches the form of government established by
Locke and Rousseau and has characterized the parliamentarianism of Eng-
land and continental Europe since the nineteenth century. It is the opposite of
the structure foreseen by the American constitution, which—because it dis-
tributes legislative sovereignty between the legislative, executive, and judi-
ciary (by presidential veto and judicial review) along lines foreseen by
Kant 79
Montesquieu—does not democratize state power but “constitutionalizes” it. In

establishing the grounds for privileged legislation by a sovereign people, Kant
proceduralizes the popular will in the legislative process; this informs the
structure of laws: “insofar as each decides the same thing for all and all for
each,” a precondition exists to avoid unjust laws (Kant 1996, §46 [91–92]).
Whereas the executive and judiciary make particular or singular decisions
respectively, the threefold generality of democratic law—participation in
establishing it, in applying it, and in its contents—corresponds to a principle
analogous, but not identical, to those of evaluation in Kant’s method of moral
verification. The monologic test of generalization provided by the Categorical
Imperative (first version) refers only to the generality of a fictive law—the
form of law as such (Kant 2012, 18); in factual existence, however, the demo-
cratic law of right is predicated on evaluation by all actual participants, impos-
ing the law on themselves. This (implied) measure to avoid willfulness would
not obtain in executive or judicial decisions made by a democratic sovereign.
Kant’s further demand of the law that “precision analogous to that of mathe-
matics” hold for determinations of content (Kant 1996, §E [25–26]) is also
directed against arbitrariness on the part of the executive and the judiciary.
A matter easily mistaken for pedantic nitpicking in fact provides the crite-
rion for realizing popular sovereignty: the subjection of state apparatuses
to the legislative will of the people, whose specifications deny leeway (Spiel-
raum) to the decision-making instances. In making this demand, Kant desig-
nates the neuralgic point where, still today, one may gauge the extent to which
democracy exists. Even if it proves impossible to fulfill Kant’s radical demand
that the law be applied according to the logic of subsumption, it remains decisive
whether decisions made by the state apparatus at least respect the wording of the
law. (According to this criterion, constitutional states and democracies do not
exist today: the juristic methods of interpretation and indeterminate definitions
incorporated into laws since the twentieth century displace the determination of
the contents of laws into the situation of their application.)
Kant’s opposition between law and ethics—insofar as it does not concern
the level of grounds (see below) but the determination of their respective
modes of functioning—attaches great importance to the criterion of determi-
nate legal content inasmuch as law differs fundamentally from ethical norms,
whose application in individual cases is distinguished by “leeway” (Spielraum)
(Kant 1996, §E [25–26]). Kant’s vehement pronouncement against any and all
attempts to undermine, by way of ethics, the subordination of political power
to law can be explained by conditions he posits affirming that the demands of
law—unlike those of ethics—do not concern human motives but only external
actions and that, whereas the number of ethical obligations is great, only few
of them can ever be codified in legal language (152–154), that is, made a matter
of external constraint rather than self-control. Were this to occur, it would
80 Contexts
explode all the borders the state places on citizens through legal structures:
the state’s claim only to require external conformity of individuals would
expand into the right to punish beliefs, the re-ethicization of the law would
increase the areas subject to control, and the multiplication of laws that
would occur by legislating ethical obligations would negate the freedom of
all citizens. If, for example, one compares a typical legal formulation involv-
ing, for example, defamation with the indeterminately broad ethical norm
“Thou shalt not lie,” it is clear that shifting from legal norms to ethical ones
would delimit the power of the state in such a way that open terror would
result (cf. Maus 1992, 308–328). A frequent misunderstanding of Kant’s call for
the “agreement between politics and morality” (Kant 1991, 125) occurs only
because of the language Kant employs when affirming that morality super-
sedes ethics and law. In fact, his position could not be clearer: “Politics can
easily be reconciled with morality in the former sense (i.e., as ethics), for both
demand that men should give up their rights to their rules. But when it comes
to morality in its second sense (i.e., as the theory of right), which requires that
politics should actively defer to it, politics finds it advisable not to enter into
any contract at all” (130).
While Kant affirms the interconnection between rights of freedom and
popular sovereignty, he makes a pointed distinction between “natural law,”
“which rests upon manifold a priori principles,” and positive law, which stems
from the will of the legislator. The sole “inborn right” (angeborenes Recht—the
eighteenth-century term for “human right”) that he names is “freedom”; this
principle already implies “equality” in exercising freedom in general and free-
dom of speech (Niesen 2005) in particular (Kant 1996, §44 [89–90]). Kant
again mentions “inborn” rights as “inseparable” legal attributes of “citizens of
the state” (that is, members of a society who have united in order to legislate)—
modified as “freedom,” “equality,” and (economic) “independence” (§46 [91–92]).
Because some secondary literature makes the latter the key of its understanding
of Kant’s theory of democracy as a whole, a side remark is warranted. Kant holds
that only “independent citizens” should have voting rights as “active citizens.”
Although this distinction is scandalous, it is a variant of the principle of inclu-
sion/exclusion that occurs everywhere in the eighteenth century (including in
the writings of the “radical democrat” Rousseau—e.g., Constitutional Project for
Corsica), and it should not be confused with democratic popular sovereignty,
which is its opposite. Ironically, in today’s democracies—where the right to vote
extends to so many formerly disenfranchised groups—the principle of popular
sovereignty (which constitutions continue to invoke) has no substance inas-
much as elections influence legislative agendas, but laws, which are more and
more deformalized in actual fact, prove nonbinding for the instances of appli-
cation. The self-programming that occurs in state apparatuses produces a
populace that enjoys equality only as “passive citizens.”
Kant 81
Regarding the relationship between rights to freedom and popular sover-

eignty, Kant calls the first “a priori principles” as the foundation of every legal
condition (Kant 1991, 74; cf. 1996, §55 [115–116]) and at the same time qualifies
them as the result of the “highest authority” of the sovereign legislative people,
from which all rights of individuals must be derived (Kant 1996, §51 [110–111]).
This twofold determination—which holds that rights to freedom are
simultaneously the precondition for and the result of popular sovereignty—
implies the “positivization of natural law” (as Habermas remarks in regard to
instituting a constitution during the French Revolution [cf. Theory and Prac-
tice, 45ff.]). This means that the equivocal character of the rights to freedom,
being statutory law and extrapositive law at the same time, is not in question.
Analogously, Kant applies this equivocal character to specific asymmetries of
the principle of popular sovereignty. The first involves the subjection of all
citizens to the state’s monopoly on force (which lies in the hands of the execu-
tive and judiciary), and the second the subjection of state apparatuses to the
legislative sovereignty of the people. It follows from the nature of rights to
freedom, which antedate the state, that its apparatuses can bring no extraposi-
tive legal argument to bear against individuals: appealing to extrapositive law
is a privilege of those who are not political functionaries but “merely” human
beings (citizens). Only the latter may demand their extrapositive rights in free
speech and concretize them as positive rights by legislative procedure.
In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas works out a system of rights in
which the elements of Kant’s theory discussed above can be found. The latter
stand in such a narrow context that a separate representation would be inade-
quate. Habermas presents them already on the level of grounds (Begründung).
Like Kant (2012, 62ff.), he assumes that modern philosophy can no longer
presume the existence of objectively given entities and must therefore employ
“circular” grounds. Habermas’s explication of a logical genesis of rights in a
“circular process” (Facts, 122) also presumes that the principle of discourse
(which until this point was a principle of morality)—as a “neutral” one with
respect to law and morality—refers to norms of action in general and that the
principle of democracy is tailored to legal norms (Facts, 104, 118). The circular
process negates the hierarchy between natural law and positive legislation so
that rights to freedom and popular sovereignty are “equiprimordial” (127). As
a “logical” genesis, the “circular process” begins when the principle of dis-
course is applied to the subjective right to action (that is, to the form of law as
such), and it ends in the institutionalization of democratic legislation—
through which, “retroactively,” the rights of subjective freedom arise (127). As
in the works of Kant, then, rights to freedom are introduced as both the pre-
condition for and the result of democratic legislation—whereby Habermas
observes that these rights, as conditions for the possibility of legislative sover-
eignty, cannot restrict it (127). Habermas’s circular grounding is immune to
82 Contexts
objections that fault it either for a conception of rights analogous to natural

law or, conversely, for the absence of a catalog of normatively “correct” funda-
mental rights; on the other hand, it guards against excessive (“wild”) or
restricted popular sovereignty. The “fundamental rights” of free, subjective
action introduced by the circular process at first do not occupy a position
superior to the “fundamental rights” of political autonomy that follow because
they refer only to “categories of rights” and as actual rights emerge only “from
politically autonomous elaboration” (Facts, 122–123). Habermas’s minimalistic
scheme for grounding rights avoids the determinations of both material natu-
ral law and “expertocratic” determinations of justice (which could undermine
the democratic process) and appeals only to the form of legality as such—that
is, to the “language” that must necessarily be spoken in procedures that con-
cretize the rights.
Prima facie, Habermas seems to agree with Kant (almost) completely on
the level of grounds, too. In the eighteenth century, the democratic theory of
natural law was circular, as well. The point of entry into the circle occurred
through “inborn” rights, in which Rousseau—like Kant—viewed the neces-
sary foundation for the democratic structure of legislation; in turn, this struc-
ture should protect—and continually concretize—the Rights of Man (cf. Maus
1995, 523n71). These “inborn” rights were also not something “given”; instead,
they derived from a theoretical postulate: only within the hypothetical con-
struct of the state of nature—that is, abstracting from all factually existent
relations of force in political society and hierarchies—could “freedom” and
“equality” possess a counterfactual grounding. (However, there are also dif-
ferences that exist between the perspectives of philosophy of the subject and
discourse theory; other ones are caused by Habermas’s specific reading of
Kant, which underestimates the significance of the latter’s project for his the-
ory of discourse—above all, with respect to the separation between law and
morals [Maus 1995, 539ff.; cf. Brandt 2002, 57–58].)
The rights to freedom that Habermas considers “equiprimordial” with pop-
ular sovereignty are not the same as those that Kant affirmed. From the incep-
tion, Kant understood “freedom” and “equality”—“inborn, inalienable rights
necessarily belonging to humanity”—both as general rights to exercise free-
dom privately (Kant 1991, 74) and as principles that condition the democratic
structure of law itself by making private arbitrariness compatible within soci-
ety and guaranteeing, at the same time, participation in the process of demo-
cratic legislation (Kant 1991, 99; 1996, §46)—without being superordinate to
the latter (which Habermas incorrectly denies in Between Facts and Norms
[93]). Kant clearly distinguishes between freedom as “legal autonomy” and
moral autonomy (Kant 1991, 99–100n; see also Kant 1996, §46). For him, free-
dom is “the competence not to obey any external laws except those to which I
have been able to give my assent” (Kant 1991, 99–100n). The rights to freedom
Kant 83
that Kant upholds, then, represent the rights of private autonomy and political
autonomy in one; private freedom to act is secured through participation in
legislation. In this way, the rights of freedom and popular sovereignty are—as
Habermas puts it—“pre-understood.”
In contrast to Kant, Habermas considers that equal, subjective rights to act
occupy a position of structural opposition to the right of political autonomy
and that a much more complex theoretical framework is required to bring
them into agreement. He qualifies the difference between rights to private
autonomy and political autonomy in discourse-theoretical terms: the first
group “delivers” one from the “obligation of communicative freedom” to take a
position on validity claims that are raised intersubjectively, whereas the second
guarantees “entitlements to the public use of communicative freedom” (Facts,
119–120, 127). This opposition yields the “paradox” that intersubjectively deter-
mined rights must also be guaranteed by the legal form invested by subjective
freedom (130–131). To bridge this contradiction within the legal institutionaliza-
tion of strategic and communicative action, Habermas elaborates discursive for-
mations (157ff.) that ground the communicative rationality of parliamentary
procedures and, ultimately, the “legitimacy of law” (102).
Habermas rightly contests Kant’s mediation of rights to freedom and popu-
lar sovereignty because it is not based on discourse; however, he unfairly
denies that Kant’s mediation as such, because it makes no distinction between
law and morality, entails subordinating the democratic legislator to morally
substantive norms (Facts, 105–109). Readers of Kant disagree—as far as the
level of grounds is concerned—whether he derives the principle of law from
that of morality. It is worth noting that—already in the “introductions” and
“divisions” at the beginning of The Metaphysics of Morals—Kant discusses the
separation of law and morality over the course of thirty-one pages; this
fact, however, is obscured by terminology that differs from vocabulary in use
today: in contradistinction to natural laws, Kant calls “moral” all “laws of
freedom” that provide the object of practical philosophy—which he then
divides into “juridical” and “ethical” ones (Kant 1996, 14). Kant, therefore,
treats “morality” as an umbrella term covering law and ethics when he speaks
of the ability (Vermögen) to bind others—that is, “the concept of law” (Begriff
des Rechts) can be developed because the “moral imperative” commands obli-
gation (347). In other words, with respect to law and ethics, Kant’s conception
of morality is “neutral”—like Habermas’s revised principle of discourse.
That said, one should take issue with Habermas when he affirms not only
that Kant’s “merely” “inborn” right to equal freedom but also the multiplicity
of concrete laws existing in the state of nature (which Kant calls “private
rights” [cf. Maus 1992, 148ff.]) possess a moral foundation that the democratic
legislator need only positivize (Facts, 104ff.). To do so would mean voiding
Kant’s principle of popular sovereignty. Rather: according to Kant, in
84 Contexts
opposition to “inborn” freedom, the “mine and yours” that exists in the state
of nature is merely an “acquired” right, and its acquisition—qua pure act of
force—occurs in a manner so unencumbered by morals that Kant accords it
only “provisional” validity (Kant 1996, §15 [51ff.]) (a point where he differs
from Locke). No “commandment”—just a “permissive law” of reason (16, 41;
see the fundamental remarks in Brandt 1982, 233ff.)—demands that rights that
obtain in the state of nature hold until the “public” (öffentlich) democratic leg-
islation of civil society recognizes them as permanent, whereby “the will of the
legislator” is “irreproachable” (Kant 1996, §48 [93]).
Only the theoretical premise of “private rights” in a “legal postulate” of
practical reason holds that the “external usable” should belong to someone in
general (§1 [37ff.]). This relationship between property at all and the need to
assure its legal foundation corresponds, approximately, to two formulations
guaranteeing rights of possession in the German constitution (Grundgesetz):
the first holds that “property” is “guaranteed”; the second reads: “their content
[!] and limits shall be defined by the laws” (article 14, paragraph 1). Here,
Habermas’s “circular process” of legal genesis is repeated both in terms of the
relationship between rights that the constitution concretizes and in their (sub-
sequent) elaboration in positive law.
Theory of International Law
Habermas’s engagement with Kant’s theory of international law has occurred

at a critical distance, for the most part. Observing that the globalization of
many social subspheres has made it difficult for nation-states to regulate them
(which often means that they prove impossible to regulate at all), Habermas
elaborates principles of domestic world politics in order to theorize a “consti-
tutionalization of international law.” In so doing, his political position of the
“world citizen” enters into the philosophical controversy—albeit not to strate-
gic ends, as was typical of the reading of Kant over the last two centuries (Eberl
2008). Whereas many theorists have directly invoked Kant’s theory of interna-
tional law (Kant 1996, §53ff.; Kant 1991, 87–92, 93–130) to suit their own politi-
cal objectives, as dictated by context, Habermas—by situating his reading in
contemporary debates—makes it clear where he differs with Kant.
The prevalent reading of “Perpetual Peace” in our day finds in it a source of
legitimation for international politics that—in anticipation of a worldwide
system—disregards the UN Charter and demands the immediate implemen-
tation (even by force) of equal human rights in all societies across the globe.
Accordingly, Kant’s text is strategically exploited to advocate a global state and
to support military intervention. Habermas’s reading goes in a different direc-
tion. Drawing attention to the “historical distance of two hundred years,”
Kant 85
Habermas first declared key parts of “Perpetual Peace” to be obsolete—above

all because it gives up the idea of a global state, as he remarked accurately—
and pejoratively—in Inclusion of the Other (165ff.). Subsequently, Habermas
grew convinced of the prevailing Anglo-American view (Divided West,
125n24), namely, that Kant’s text ultimately provides its grounds. At the same
time, Habermas advocated a world constitution without a global state; the
change of perspective gave rise to the specific complexities of Habermas’s later
readings of Kant in the context of his own project of “constitutionalizing
international law” (Divided West, 106ff.).
In “Perpetual Peace” itself, the connection between rights to freedom and
popular sovereignty—a matter that will be familiar from Kant’s conception of
domestic (innerstaatlich) democracy—is augmented by the additional element
of peace; this constellation presumes the optimization, on all sides, of these
principles. In this spirit, Kant affirms that “securing peace” provides the
“entire final end of the doctrine of right” (Kant 1996, 123) and that the progres-
sive “republicanization”—that is, democratization—of all states represents the
crucial precondition of peace. At the same time, this process does not repre-
sent a means to a (final) end, for democratic organization—in keeping with
the design of the social contract, which gives it form and substance—is an end
in itself (Kant 1991, 73–74; cf. Maus 1992, 43ff., 54–55). The means by which
world peace is to be brought about must suit this purpose. The demand articu-
lated in the First Definitive Article—that “the Civil Constitution of Every
State shall be Republican” (Kant 1991, 99)—is compatible with the peace-pro-
moting nature of a state organized in this way insofar as it is the citizens them-
selves (who must, after all, bear the burdens of armed conflict) who decide
about war or peace; in the absence of modern mass media, they naturally pre-
fer the second option. (The republic’s end-in-itself is already evident in Kant’s
detailed account of the principles of its constitution.)
Kant’s advocacy of a federation essentially rests on this precondition. His
decision, which the Second Definitive Article justifies, is anticipated by two of
the Preliminary Articles, where Kant indicates the basis for securing peace in
the first place. By the same token, the Preliminary Articles elaborate the con-
nection between the “social contract” and democratic organization, on the
one hand, and the relationship between domestic and international aspects of
democratic self-determination (that is, popular sovereignty and state sover-
eignty), on the other. Preliminary Articles 2 and 5 (Kant 1991, 94, 95) exclude
the possibility of an “independent state” being “acquired” peaceably under
private law through another state or that a state may “forcibly interfere with
the constitution and government of another.” The same rationale applies in
either case: the state “is” the people, a society of human beings who have
united into a community of citizens according to the “idea of an original con-
tract” (99–100).
86 Contexts
The acquisition of a state does not injure it as such; rather, it offends the
state as a “moral person” (in contemporary usage: as a juridical person), that
is, the state as an association of citizens. In such a case, the latter are demoted
to “things” and deprived of their right, as citizens, to self-determination (as
occurred, in Kant’s day, when Genoa sold Corsica to France). Likewise, in the
case of “forcible interference” (for the purpose of changing a bad constitution
or when a constitution is threatened by internal separatist movements), this
“scandal” “make[s] the autonomy of all states insecure” by involving the viola-
tion of “the rights of an independent people which is merely struggling with its
internal ills” (Kant 1991, 96; emphasis added). It follows directly from these
formulations that state sovereignty deserves international recognition because
it is the external aspect of domestic popular sovereignty. This normative qual-
ification of state sovereignty by popular sovereignty provides the basis for
Kant’s rejection of a world republic that melts all states together. Admittedly,
the grounding in the “idea” of the original contract (which, for Kant, involves
free and equal individuals and already contains the structure of democratic
legislation) leaves open the question of what to do with regard to the internal
state structures actually in place—a matter that can be explored only after
interpretation of the extremely controversial Second Definitive Article (Kant
1991, 102ff.).
Some readers interpret Kant’s decision against a world republic—and for
the “negative surrogate” of a federation—as a provisional compromise with
international law and its practice as it stood in his day; his objective, then, is to
work—by secret, as it were—toward a world republic, after all. Against such a
view stands the argument that Kant’s objections to a world republic are exclu-
sively normative in nature (on the following, see Maus 2006). The disputed
passage in “Perpetual Peace” reads:
There is only one rational way in which states coexisting with other states can
emerge from the lawless condition of pure warfare. Just like individual men,
they must renounce their savage and lawless freedom, adapt themselves to
public coercive laws, and thus form an international state (civitas gentium),
which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the peoples of
the earth. But since this is not the will of the nations, according to their pres-
ent conception of international right (so that they reject in hypothesi what is
true in thesi), the positive idea of a world republic cannot be realized. If all is
not to be lost, this can at best find a negative substitute in the shape of an
enduring and gradually expanding federation likely to prevent war.
(Kant 1991, 105; emphasis added)
Kant’s central declaration—that the peoples of the earth “reject” the interna-
tional state “in hypothesi” even though it “is true in thesi”—should not be
Kant 87
understood in reference to factually extant attitudes or in the sense of giving

up “theory” for the sake of empirical “practice.”
Because Kant derives the categorical obligation to seek eternal peace only
from the fact that the impossibility of this goal cannot be proven, judgments
concerning the means to this end are necessarily “hypothetical” (Kant 1991,
88ff.). Thereby, the philosopher justifies the view of the “peoples of this earth”
“in hypothesi,” and he presents it as the result of a process of evaluation that, as
a matter of “determinative power of judgment” (bestimmende Urteilskraft),
has been transferred from theoretical philosophy to the philosophy of peace.
In this process, Kant’s “political principles”—which make it possible to compare
both models of peace (Kant 1996, 95–98)—function in a manner analogous to
the transcendental schemata of theoretical philosophy, which govern the sub-
sumption of an object under a pure conception of mind (for example, a plate
under the notion of a circle).
Thereby, it emerges that, of the two inherently “reasonable” models of
peace—the world republic and the federation of states—only the latter corre-
sponds to all the normative criteria of peace when one considers its realization
in “hypothetical” terms; the world republic, on the other hand, would vio-
late this idea, were it realized. In turn, Kant defines these normative criteria
in terms of the continuum of peace, rights to freedom, and democratic
autonomy—which exclude the “churchyard peace” of a world republic. In a
state spanning the globe—for reasons of dimension alone—democratic legis-
lation could not be organized nor laws implemented; consequently, a state of
anarchic despotism affording neither freedom nor peace would result (Kant
1991, 90; 1996, 96). A federation, in contrast, would preserve the domestic con-
nection between democratic freedom and peace; therefore, Kant concludes, a
global federation of individual states would recognize state sovereignty as
popular sovereignty.
According to Kant, then, the “idea” of the original contract can only be
realized in individual states; at the same time, however, it must be achieved
asymptotically—through historical development. Therefore, state sovereignty
is merely the condition of the possibility of popular sovereignty. Given that the
vast majority of states are still far from achieving democratic freedom, and in
view of the normative directive that even a democracy may not be introduced
against the will of the people (Kant 1996, 112), Kant develops, in an interna-
tional perspective, the “permissive law” (Erlaubnisgesetz) of reason. It tolerates
unjust constitutions for as long as they cannot be changed without producing
the risk of society collapsing back into a “state of nature” without any law or
constitution at all (Kant 1991, 97 and n.; cf. 82). This permissive law serves the
purposes of peace and self-determination of citizens alike, taking into account
the time required by independently occurring processes of learning within
different societies on their way to democracy.
88 Contexts
The project for “cosmopolitan right” (Weltbürgerrecht) in the Third Defini-

tive Article has such a specific status in Habermas’s late reading of Kant that it
can be discussed only now in this context.
Kant’s supposed advocacy of a world republic is, as mentioned, significant
for Habermas’s new perspective of interpretation, now in a critical tendency
(Maus 2007, 358ff.). On the one hand, Habermas considers Kant an early theo-
rist of cosmopolitan constitutionalism; on the other hand, he derives the con-
stitution he envisions by abstracting it from its (Kantian) foundation in the
world republic. Habermas’s particular way of reading Kant as the advocate of
a world republic relates to the aforementioned “cosmopolitan right” through
which he—according to Habermas—transforms it from law-between-states
into rights of individuals “as members of a politically constituted [!] world
society” (Naturalism, 314). Therefore, Kant could not have conceived such a
global constitution, which corresponds to the individual rights of “world citi-
zens,” in the absence of a “world republic” (314).
In his own project of “constitutionalizing international law,” Habermas
deems Kant’s “cosmopolitan condition” to be “so abstract . . . that it is not the
same thing as the world republic and cannot be dismissed as utopian” (315). At
the same time, this act of abstraction—like the matter of renouncing a world
republic—matches Kant’s own intentions more than anticipated. The only
passage in which Kant evaluates cosmopolitan right in the context of “a uni-
versal state of mankind” (Kant 1991, 87) does not discuss a state but only
human beings. The matter only seems paradoxical, for the latter are not citi-
zens of such a state; rather, they should be viewed as such. At issue stand the
rights of human beings—depending on the perspective and role of each indi-
vidual, such rights can possess civil, international, and cosmopolitan
dimensions.
For this reason, Kant speaks only of every legal constitution, “as far as . . .
persons [!] are concerned” (Kant 1991, 98n), and not of constitutions that
organize political communities irrespective of size. The “cosmopolitan right”
elaborated in the Third Definitive Article (105ff.) holds to the same level of
abstraction. This right concerns “general hospitality” when borders are
crossed—a matter that presumes the existence of borders. The goal Kant sets
with regard to reciprocity of intercourse—above all, between representatives
of “our part of the world” and oppressed and exploited regions, whose rela-
tions stand to be ameliorated by means of “public law” that moves “gradually”
toward a “cosmopolitan constitution” (106)—does not go beyond a legal con-
stitution “as far as . . . persons are concerned” (98n). Rather, it argues a “neces-
sary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right,
transforming it into a universal right of humanity” (108).
Kant’s “cosmopolitan right”—even if it were “written”—would not be a
matter of supranational but of transnational law. Although Habermas’s
Kant 89
view—that Kant cannot imagine a world constitution without a state—is cor-

rect in principle, the agreement exists only in the negative. Kant rejects, after
all, the American constitution, which establishes a state as a model for secur-
ing world peace (Kant 1996, 123). For the latter, Kant insists on a contractual
federation between sovereign states.
Habermas’s own project for a global constitution approaches Kant’s. The
“multilevel federal system” (Naturalism, 315) that he discusses displays, by his
own estimation, the traits of a federation (335). A reformed worldwide organi-
zation would address only the matters of securing peace and human rights at
the top; “global domestic politics,” on the other hand, would be reserved for
continental regimes consisting of federated nation-states (Divided West, 118ff.).
Of course, the “constitution”—into which the provisions of the UN Charter
would be transformed—would assign the politics of human rights to the world
organization in a way that separated them from democratic and constitutional
processes; therefore, it would stand diametrically opposed to both Kant’s and
Habermas’s own conception of a domestic constitution. For this reason,
Habermas calls for “embedding” (the) global politics (of the United Nations)
into the worldwide public sphere (Naturalism, 342), whereas the legitimacy of
domestic world politics would involve the resources of legitimation available
in nation-states (Divided West, 139).
Epistemology
Although the consequences of the “linguistic turn” for Habermasian episte-

mology cannot be discussed here, it is worth noting that Habermas employs
pragmatism, which deflates Kant’s approach (Naturalism, 7). Kant’s transcen-
dental philosophy, which already discounts unmediated access to objects of
knowledge and concentrates on the conditions of its possibility, proclaims a
“revolution” of the way of thinking (Kant 1998, 107). Knowledge no longer
complies with the object; in contrast, the object complies with the condition of
the cognitive faculty (25).
Kant responded to the famous question of his transcendental philosophy—
“How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” (59)—by affirming that
objectively valid knowledge is achieved only on the basis of principles that
precede all experience and constitute it in the first place: subjects cannot rec-
ognize “things in themselves” but only objects synthesized from diffuse per-
ceptions by way of a priori forms of intuition and a priori concepts of mind. By
tracing the recognizable world of appearances to operations of the subject,
Kant liberated the latter from both the superior force of the reified objectivity
of premodern thought and from the claims to positive truth of precritical,
“dogmatic” metaphysics. In so doing, of course, he saw fit to present himself as
90 Contexts
the strict expert on matters of properly employing the cognitive faculty

alone—precisely this claim of mastery is what Habermas’s discourse theory
“democratizes” (Moral Consciousness, 12).
Habermas does not reformulate epistemology in terms of principles of rea-
son held to be uniquely correct and anterior to experience in general but in
terms of elements of discourse that “already” occur in all intersubjective com-
munication about the world of objects—elements “built into” the pragmatic
components of speech. Participants in discourse mutually—and reciprocally—
impute things to one another, both on the level of grammar and in the idiom
they share; this requires that a shared universe of objects (Naturalism, 32)—
“a world ‘identical for all’ ” (32)—be grounded and established. Following
Hilary Putnam—because “everything is real that can be represented in true
statements”—Habermas opts for “internal realism” (35).
But the question arises whether Kant’s dualism between the “things in
themselves” and the “world of phenomena” reemerges when Habermas affirms
(with Peirce) that the “world,” which we understand “as the totality of objects”
(that we can “run into”), should not be confused with “reality,” which “can be
represented in true statements” (33; emphasis added). The difference between
the two epistemological positions seems to concern the “democratization”
posited by discourse theory. However, the “internal realism” this presumes is
even less realistic than Kant’s “transcendental idealism.” Kant derives “phe-
nomena” from the mental representations that “things in themselves” (which
cannot be known) bring about through their influence on the apperceiving
subject’s senses (Kant 2004, 69–70); the “internal” reality of objects discussed
by discourse theory, however, is exclusively caused by the linguistic communi-
cation that occurs between subjects.
All the same, Habermas observes critically (Communicative Action, 1:387),
Kant’s philosophy of consciousness is antiquated inasmuch as it remains tied
to the paradigm of a subject processing both itself and the objects of percep-
tion. The relationship Kant posits between subject and object—a relationship
he conceives without communicative mediation, which “produces” the object
to be known in the first place—originated in a social (and historical) context
where the working transformation of external nature was so dominant that
it determined even the way philosophy conceived of connections between
concepts and things. The “effort and exertion of the concept”—as Adorno put
it—“was unmetaphorical.”
In contrast, Habermas’s theoretical distinction between “work” and “interac-
tion” (Rational Society, 91ff.) permits a more complex version of epistemology—
one fitted to a social context in which “interaction” has become so dominant that
even direct contact with objects (which, for Kant, occurred through the subject’s
“sensorium”) only takes place in “communicated” form. On the whole, then,
Habermas’s engagement with Kant may be understood as the transformation
Kant 91
of a philosophy of consciousness based on “work” into a philosophy of the

modern-day communicating society (Kommunikationsgesellschaft).
References
Brandt, Reinhard. 1982. “Das Erlaubnisgesetz, oder: Vernunft und Geschichte in Kants
Rechtslehre.” In Rechtsphilosophie der Aufklärung, ed. Reinhard Brandt, 233–285. Ber-
lin: de Gruyter.
——. 2002. “Habermas und Kant.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 50, no. 1: 53–68.
Eberl, Oliver. 2008. Demokratie und Frieden: Kants Friedensschrift in den Kontroversen der
Gegenwart. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Kant, Immanuel. 1991. Political Writings. Trans. Hans S. Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
——. 1996. The Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
——. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
——. 2004. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics: That Will Be Able to Come Forward as
Science. Trans. Gary Hatfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——. 2012. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge:
Maus, Ingeborg. 1992. Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie. Rechts- und demokratietheo-
retische Überlegungen im Anschluss an Kant. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1995. “Freiheitsrechte und Volkssouveränität. Zu Jürgen Habermas’s Rekonstruktion
des Systems der Rechte.” Rechtstheorie 35, no. 4: 507–562.
——. 2006. “Kant’s Reasons Against a Global State: Popular Sovereignty as a Principle of
International Law.” In Kant’s Perpetual Peace: New Interpretative Essays, ed. Luigi
Caranti, 35–54. Rome: LUISS University Press.
——. 2007. “Verfassung oder Vertrag: Zur Verrechtlichung globaler Politik.” In Anarchie
der kommunikativen Freiheit. Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen
Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 350–382. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Niesen, Peter. 2005. Kants Theorie der Redefreiheit. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
10
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
GERTRUD NUNNER-WINKLER
B
ehaviorism understands cognitive learning as a cumulative pro-
cess of forming associations based on the perception of contin-
gencies, and normative learning as a process of adopting desired
modes of behavior in response to punishment and reward (that is, as a pro-
cess of conditioning). From a psychoanalytic perspective, development is a
matter of constructing mental patterns on the basis of the relationships
experienced in early childhood. Norms are observed because the child
wishes to avoid pangs of conscience (i.e., the revenge of the superego, which
internalizes the fear of castration); alternatively, this occurs because the
structure of biological needs has undergone change in response to the child’s
fear of losing the affection of others. Both these theoretical traditions rely on
a functionalistic understanding of truth, present a conventionalist conception
of correctness, and acknowledge only instrumentalist motivations for devel-
opment. Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, in contrast, hold that the
development of cognitive and moral capacities of judgment progresses because
of the subject’s intrinsic interest in the truth and the universal justifiability of
moral norms.
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
For Piaget (1963), cognition is neither a copy of reality nor simply a mental
construction. Instead, it is determined by the competencies that a subject has
already developed, which, seeking to grasp reality in a manner that is increas-
ingly accurate, undergo further evolution. In this perspective, mental structures
emerge in keeping with a developmental logic: the process occurs in a universal,
irreversible sequence of stages; each is a structured whole, and they build on
one another as a matter of logical necessity; it is impossible for intermediate
phases to be skipped. This progression tends, increasingly, toward generaliza-
tion, abstraction, and adequation to reality. The motor of development lies in
active engagement with the environment: the child identifies contradictions
and seeks to resolve them on a higher cognitive level. In other words, thinking
evolves in the measure that actions are interiorized.
Cognitive Psychology 93
Cognitive development begins with the sensomotoric stage (zero to two

years): schemata of action are constructed and coordinated, and initial repre-
sentations of causality and space are acquired. In the preoperational stage
(two to seven), symbolic thinking begins. At the same time, however, the child
is still inclined toward animistic, artificial, and finalistic explanations of
nature; it cannot yet consider multiple dimensions of reality simultaneously or
understand hierarchical classification schemes. The concrete operational
stage (seven to twelve) overcomes these difficulties. In the formal opera-
tional stage (from twelve on), thought grows reflexive for the first time. The
maturing child can operate on operations—that is, it can reflect not only on
concrete things but also on thoughts; it can draw conclusions from data and
seek out, in systematic fashion, the necessary information it lacks. The child’s
newly acquired capacity for hypothetical thinking discloses the concept of
chance—now, it realizes that circumstances given in fact are the contingent
realization of far more numerous possible outcomes.
The Development of the Capacity for Moral Judgment
Piaget (1962) identifies two stages of moral development. In the child’s initial,
heteronomous understanding of the world, authorities establish norms, and
violations are to be punished. When the stage of autonomy is achieved, the
child recognizes that norms hold on the basis of agreements, and it observes
them for reasons of contractually established self-obligation. According to
Kohlberg’s (1984) revised developmental model, moral consciousness unfolds
in six steps, whereby—as is the case for Piaget—the understanding of the
validity of norms and the motives for following them correspond. In the pre-
conventional stage (until the age of ten or eleven), children believe that norms
are valid because they are set by authorities and either involve sanctions
(level 1) or open, mutually advantageous possibilities of exchange (level 2). On
the conventional level—which is the characteristic stage of operation for most
adults—norms are valid either because they are factually prevalent in the sub-
ject’s own group (level 3) or because they prevail in society as a whole (level 4);
one observes such rules in order to achieve social acceptance or to avoid pangs
of conscience. In the postconventional stage (which few adults achieve), insight
into universal acceptability provides the foundation of morality. Norms are
founded on contractual agreement (level 5) or through universal principles
such as equality and respect for personal dignity (level 6); they are observed to
honor an agreement or because of a voluntary commitment to principles the
subject recognizes as valid.
For various reasons, higher stages count as “better”: they increasingly inte-
grate relevant considerations—positive and negative consequences, loyalties,
94 Contexts
the observance of law and contracts, and universal justifiability. The process
of evolution extends the range of perspectives considered; it leads from ego,
over the dyad, the small social unit and society, until the subject adopts a per-
spective that takes all reasonable beings into account. Increasing expansion of
role-taking abilities provides the structural basis for the development of moral
competence. Subjects in fact prefer higher-level arguments.
Piaget and Kohlberg employed the method of the hermeneutic-recon-
structive interview in their studies. Subjects explained the solutions they
developed to the various cognitive tasks and moral dilemmas they were pre-
sented with; subsequently, they justified their decisions when the inter-
viewer raised objections. In this way, researchers were able to reconstruct
and understand examinees’ points of view. By raising objections, interview-
ers could distinguish between opinions that had been casually adopted, on
the one hand, and firmly anchored convictions, on the other; this permitted
them to evaluate subjects’ levels of competence even when their performance
was hampered by fatigue, disinterest, and the like. Stage assignment is based
not on the content of answers but on the structure of justification set
forward.
The Premises of Piaget and Kohlberg’s Theory
Anthropological View
For both behaviorist and psychoanalytic approaches, the child is a passive

object. It receives formative impressions early on (through explicit educational
efforts or through attachment experience), and its actions find orientation pri-
marily in outer and inner (that is, internalized) sanctions. The cognitive
approach, on the other hand, holds that human beings actively strive—and,
according to Klaus Riegel’s concept of “post-formal levels” and Kohlberg’s
“level 7,” they do so their entire lives—to improve the capacity for knowledge
and judgment.
Developmental Logic
A constitutive element of the approach is the idea that cognitive and moral
competence universally follows an immanent logic of developmental
improvement. The motor of this process is provided by the experience of
contradiction—conflicts between action schemes so far developed and new
experiences and between judgments from one’s own perspective and that of
others; in addition, development occurs through pragmatic efforts to resolve

instances of incommensurability that have been identified—i.e., when the sub-
ject revises and modifies his or her thought structures in order to achieve inte-
gration on a higher level.
Research Methods
According to positivistic conceptions of scientific inquiry, only the identical

wording of questions and answers grant the equivalence of stimuli and reac-
tions. By proceeding in this manner, however, researchers determine the
meaning of the questions posed, which they—mistakenly—take to be objec-
tively given. In reconstructive interviews, on the other hand—i.e., the method
employed by Piaget and Kohlberg—researchers try to apprehend the views of
subjects. In the exchange of arguments, investigators and subjects establish an
egalitarian relation. Because comprehension is the object of study, the sub-
jects’ claims concerning the truth or rightness of their judgments are taken
seriously, even when they are mistaken or their considerations remain “stuck”
at low levels of development.
Bracketing Content
In focusing on the universal development of formal structures of thought and

judgment, Piaget and Kohlberg disregard the positive “contents” of what is said.
More recent studies (in the fields of information processing, the novice-expert
paradigm, and intuitive psychology) have demonstrated—and in detail—the
significance of content-learning processes that occur differentially. Likewise,
empirical studies have shown that the influence of convictions that vary
between cultures and sociohistorical circumstances is important for the forma-
tion of moral judgments.
Habermas and the Cognitive Approach
Especially during his tenure at the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, Haber-
mas recognized the importance of developmental cognitive psychology. Basic
points of theoretical and strategic agreement with his own project stimulated
him greatly, and he employed the empirical findings of this field of study
extensively to lend support to the core tenets of his own theory. Below are
some points of overlap.
96 Contexts
Theory of Socialization
Already in his Frankfurt lectures, Habermas expanded his analyses of societal

structures by incorporating questions of socialization. Contra the stimulus-
response model of behaviorism and the assumptions of functionalist role
theory (which focuses on conformity), he stressed that varying degrees of
freedom allow actors to display more or less autonomy when faced with the
repressiveness, rigidity, and internalization requirements that obtain in a
given system of roles. At the time, Habermas formulated his conception of ego
identity and requisite ego strength in the psychoanalytic terminology of ego
psychology. At Starnberg, he incorporated the developmental dynamics of a
self-sufficient, intrinsic concern for truth and justice in subjects, which cogni-
tivist approaches have shown to obtain both in theoretical terms and through
empirical research.
Morality
Equally, Habermas’s understanding of morality was influenced by his encoun-

ter with cognitivist research. Its findings—that subjects, in developing moral
competence, learn to distance themselves from conventional norms and prove
capable of resolving conflicts in view of the potential consent of a more inclu-
sive sphere of parties who might be affected—afforded Habermas an empirical
guarantee for the core assumptions of his communicative action theory:
understanding and justifiable agreement.
Developmental Logic
The progressive emergence of rational argumentation observed in the process

of ontogeny assumed a position of key theoretical/strategic importance at
Starnberg, where research groups transferred and applied the concept to other
fields—e.g., the evolution of the sciences and of worldviews, the understanding
of democracy and of the legal system. Habermas described social formations as
a sequence of learning steps following the model of developmental logic.
Basic Epistemological Convictions
The foundational assumptions implicit in the developmental approach and

hermeneutic-reconstructive methodology correspond to the theory of three
worlds presented by Habermas’s conception of communicative action. Here,
the objective world (the sum total of conditions that exist, will exist, or will
be brought about), the social world (the sum total of valid norms, opinions,
and motivations), and the subjective world (the sum total of personal experi-
ences) are brought together, and the subject capable of language, action, and
reflection is deemed competent to take a rationally motivated stand on valid-
ity claims raised in any and all of these spheres—the realms of truth, right-
ness, and authenticity. Actions can now be coordinated by agreement that
occurs through cooperative interpretation, and they are complemented by
validity claims concerning the universal justifiability of moral norms.
Bracketing Content
Several modern moral philosophers (among others, Martha Nussbaum, Bernard

Gert, and John Rawls) have sought to derive a basic set of positively determined
norms from the fundamental conditions of human existence and social coop-
eration. Habermas, however—and on this point, he follows the structuralists,
who only sought to analyze formal ways that judgments are founded—merely
tries to determine the process whereby norms are grounded/justified. In his
view, when conditions of uncoerced (herrschaftsfrei) discourse obtain, the
universal validity of agreed-upon norms is secure. In a postmetaphysical age,
however, the material contents of these norms are no longer determinable.
References
Gibbs, John C. 2003. Moral Development and Reality: Beyond the Theories of Kohlberg and
Hoffman. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE.
Hopf, Christel, and Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, eds. 2007. Frühe Bindungen und moralische
Entwicklung. Weinheim: Beltz.
Inhelder, Bärbel, and Jean Piaget. 1958. The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to
Adolescence. New York: Basic Books.
Killen, Melanie, and Judith Smetana. 2006. Handbook of Moral Development. Mahwah,
N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1981. Essays on Moral Development. Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Moral
Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
——. 1984. Essays on Moral Development. Vol. 2: The Psychology of Moral Development. San
Francisco: Harper & Row.
Oerter, Rolf, and Leo Montada. 2008. Entwicklungspsychologie. Weinheim: Psychologie
Verlags Union.
Piaget, Jean. 1962. The Moral Judgment of the Child. New York: Collier.
——. 1963. The Origins of Intelligence in Children. New York: Norton.
Turiel, Ellot. 1983. The Development of Social Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
11
THE EPITOME OF
TECHNOCRATIC
CONSCIOUSNESS
MARCELO NEVES
T
he debate between Habermas and Luhmann goes back to the
end of the 1960s—a time of extreme “ideological” confrontation
in the fields of social science and philosophy. Matters became
especially intense upon the publication of Theorie der Gesellschaft oder
Sozialtechnologie—Was leistet die Systemforschung? (Social theory or social
technology—what does systems research accomplish?; Habermas and Luh-
mann 1971). This book occasioned heated discussion and, in almost no time
at all, two supplementary volumes. Over the years, the matter has grown
more complex inasmuch as Habermas has tempered his earlier criticism on
a few points—or, at the very least, relativized it.
From the outset, Habermas recognized the social-theoretical and philo-
sophical significance of Luhmann’s systems theory. In this context, the fol-
lowing quotation is revealing:
Luhmann combines the tradition of critical social theory going back to

Marx . . . with an interest in analyzing society as a whole; this prompts him to
elaborate a theory of social development (like the project of Historical Mate-
rialism), as well as a theory of social structure (like Political Economy). More-
over, Luhmann shares with Marx—and this separates him definitively from
Parsons—the notion that theory and practice form a unit, as well as the con-
comitant idea that the species (Gattung)—or, as the case may be, “society”—is
a self-constituting entity.
(Habermas 1971, 142–143)
Despite the words of appreciation, Habermas did not integrate the systems-
theoretical view of society into his own project. As he put it, “systems theory
shares the plane of theoretical reflection [Theoriebildung] with critical social
theory, but it pursues an opposing strategy” (143). At this early stage, Haber-
mas held that Luhmann’s project represented a mode of “sociotechnically
The Epitome of Technocratic Consciousness 99
oriented analysis” that sought to dispense with discourse on practical concerns

in social life (144).
Consequently, Habermas offered the dramatic pronouncement that sys-
tems theory affords very little room for actual reflection: “This theory repre-
sents, so to speak, the epitome of technocratic consciousness, which, from its
inception, defines questions, which today count as practical, as technical mat-
ters and thereby permits them to be withdrawn from unforced public discus-
sion” (145). This judgment—together with the critical discussion that followed
(a view already reflected in the title of the book in which Habermas presented
his views)—met with widespread agreement. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s,
Habermas’s determination gave discussants a simplified way to understand
systems theory, and it set the mood and terms of debate in Germany and
abroad. Luhmann was counted as an advocate of “technocratic domination”
(technokratische Herrschaft), and Habermas was considered to be its most
foremost critic.
Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, this oversimplified contrast was
questioned more and more. Even adherents of Habermas’s discourse theory
(see Günther 1995; Brunkhorst 1997; 2001, esp. 626; 2005, 88ff.) expressed their
doubts. In response, Habermas assigned systems theory a central role in his
main sociological work, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). Here,
Luhmann’s analytical categories play a role that is not technocratic in the least.
Instead, they serve in an explanatory and critical capacity. Indeed, in this new
framework, systems theory performs the function that the first generation of
the Frankfurt School reserved for Marxian categories of analysis. In The The-
ory of Communicative Action, Habermas does not understand systems theory
in reference to what admits of change only though strategic and instrumental
intervention—i.e., what he previously faulted Luhmann for (over)emphasiz-
ing. Now, systems theory enables him to analyze conditions that can be
changed only by sacrificing the complexity and productivity of modern
society—forces that, because of their inherent dynamism, endanger the social
and communicative cohesion of life (Lebenszusammenhang). All the same,
Habermas continues to maintain what he affirmed in 1976: that Luhmannian
“system-rationality” (Systemrationalität) represents “instrumental reason
transferred and applied to self-regulating systems” (Rekonstruktion, 261).
As late as 1988, Habermas referred to his rival’s theory as the “ingenious
continuation of a tradition” in which “the cognitive-instrumental one-sided-
ness of cultural and societal rationalization” finds its fullest expression (Dis-
course, 384). Time and again, Habermas has presented systems theory as a
model for how one can understand modern society essentially—and even
exclusively—in terms of instrumental organization. Such a view was and is
incorrect, however, for Luhmann holds that instrumental models are only
“deployed [eingesetzt] when the problems to be resolved have acquired
100 Contexts
specific structures—that is, when complexity has already been largely

absorbed” (Luhmann 1973, 156; see also Luhmann 1983, 223; 1971, 294). In this
context, it is worth remarking that systems theory has taken spheres of com-
munication such as love and religion very seriously (Luhmann 1984, 1998,
2013). Here, the symbolic and expressive dimensions are relevant; one cannot
claim, then, that Luhmann views modern life and social phenomena only in
terms of instrumental reason.
To understand how Habermas understood systems theory as the “epitome
of technocratic consciousness”—or, as he also put it, “one-sided cultural and
social rationalization in terms of cognitive instrumentalism”—it is important
to note the stress he placed, at the beginning of the 1980s, on the connection
between systems theory and decisionistic proceduralism. This distinction
goes back to Max Weber and Carl Schmitt. Habermas identified a close rela-
tionship between the former’s concept of legitimation (which derives from a
“belief in legality” [Legalitätsglaube]) (Weber 1978, 2003), the latter’s strictly
political understanding of legitimation (Schmitt 2004, 2008), and Luhmann’s
(1983) notion of “legitimation by procedure.” In response to the question—
“How can a form of domination whose legality is based on law viewed purely
in decisionistic terms . . . be legitimated at all?”—these three thinkers all
answer: “through procedure” (Communicative Action, 1:265).
Habermas’s criticism is not altogether convincing. In the first place, one
should not put Weber in Schmitt’s company (despite the skepticism they share
about the degree to which practical matters admit rationalization). Although
Weber equates legitimacy and belief in legality, he would hardly have been
sympathetic to Schmitt’s conception of politics, which puts “legality” in strong
“opposition to legitimacy” (Schmitt 2004, 6–7). Unlike Schmitt—whose deci-
sionistic conception of constitutionality maintains that law is subordinate to
politics (Schmitt 2008, esp. 76)—Luhmann stresses the horizontal differentia-
tion that obtains between the two. Indeed, he considers it the defining trait
of modern constitutional democracy: from his perspective, the constitution is
the structural coupling of both these social systems in equal measure and
through reciprocal interpenetration (wechselseitige Durchdringung) (Luhmann
1990a).
Moreover, in the 1960s, Luhmann distanced himself from Weber’s conception
of legitimacy and criticized him (hardly his favorite author) for “understand-
ing legitimacy to refer only to the effectiveness of rule [Herrschaft]” (Luhmann
1965, 140). That is, Luhmann critiqued his forebear’s conception of legitimacy
for being “simply a consequence of his factual belief in the principle of legiti-
mation” (144). Unlike both Weber and Schmitt, Luhmann (1983) argued that
legitimation by procedure implies the “transformation of expectations” (esp.
33ff., 119, 171, 199, 252); for this reason, it involves “presumed [unterstellt]
consensus” about the binding quality of norms and decisions (1983, 122; 1985,
201; 1981, 133)—that is, institutionalization. In his later works, Luhmann once
again distanced himself from Weber and Schmitt and presented legitimation as
the “contingency formula” of political systems. From an internal perspective,
this means that “no politics would be necessary without the possibility that
legitimation will be required” to justify decisions. In external terms, it means
“there would be no problems of legitimation if an out-differentiated [ausdif-
ferenziert] political system did not exist” (2000b, 126).
In the 1990s, Habermas did not change much in his critical appraisal of
Luhmann. In his own theory, he continued to discuss the latter’s ideas in rela-
tion to the opposition between systemic and intersubjective (democratic)
autonomy. Although Habermas connected the concept of constitutional gov-
ernment to the idea of legal autonomy, he justified autonomy in terms of
morality—thereby setting his conception apart from Luhmann’s law as auto-
poiesis (see above all Facts, 49–55; and Habermas 1988, 251–259). Law, for
Habermas, does not represent a self-steering and self-legitimating functional
system, as it does for Luhmann; instead, it requires procedural justification.
Especially in his discussions of Weber, Habermas had already expressed
reservation on this point: “The particular accomplishment of the positiviza-
tion of the legal order consists in displacing problems of justification, that is, in
relieving the technical administration of the law of such problems over broad
expanses—but not in doing away with them” (Communicative Action, 1:261; cf.
Communicative Action, 2:304). Now, he formulated his opposition to the
positivity of autonomous systems—a matter that Luhmann emphasizes—in
stronger terms:
A legal system does not acquire autonomy on its own. It is autonomous only
to the extent that the legal procedures institutionalized for legislation and for
the administration of justice guarantee impartial judgment and provide the
channels through which practical reason gains entrance into law and politics.
There can be no autonomous law without the realization of democracy.
(Habermas 1988, 279; see Habermas 1987, 16, for a similar view
formulated in terms of ethics instead of morality)
Habermas’s demand that law be rationally justified is an attempt to avoid con-

fusion between morality and law. For all that, it does not mean that the law
depends only on the lifeworld. Rather, it constitutes a sphere that mediates
between system and lifeworld.
Here, Habermas sets himself apart from Luhmann’s position in two
regards. First, he defines systematicity as a component of the process whereby
law is politically instrumentalized; for this reason, systemic dimensions stand
opposed to autonomy. Second, he indicates that law possesses (or should pos-
sess) a moral foundation; according to the Luhmannian paradigm, however,
102 Contexts
this amounts to negating the autonomy of the legal system. In other words, as
Habermas views matters, the autonomy of law—which stands opposite to
(administrative) power and the economy—depends on the emergence of uni-
versalistic, postconventional morality. For Luhmann, in contrast, the legal
system possesses autonomy to the extent that it is immune to the immediate
constraints of political power and other systemic media (or codes) and to the
extent that laws are neutral with respect to morality (which is socially repro-
duced in a diffuse and fragmentary fashion through the binary code, esteem/
disesteem, that applies to persons).
According to Luhmann,
today, discursive/reasonable forms of clarifying acceptable—or, as the case

may be, unacceptable—value positions remain stuck in the realm of personal
experience. The central precondition for practical philosophy—the idea that,
by way of debating what one calls “values,” one may come closer to [real]
action—can no longer be maintained; this is no longer tenable under the
contemporary conditions of a world far richer in possibility.
(1981, 389n33)
Habermas, on the other hand, holds that procedural legitimation means

juridical principles and that rules may be critiqued (and improved) by all-
encompassing discursive rationality—which incorporates legal questions (of
consistency), pragmatic questions (of goals and the appropriate means to
achieve them), ethicopolitical questions (of values), moral questions (of jus-
tice), and, finally, questions concerning fair compromises (Facts, 139ff.).
Needless to say, this view changes the thrust of the debate: for Habermas,
systemic dimensions shrink and come to include only the political and eco-
nomic instrumentality of law; its autonomy relative to the media of money and
power follows from the way it is justified by discursive rationality—in other
words, by procedural reason. Within this framework, the concept of “system”
(in contrast to “lifeworld”) is defined very narrowly, and it refers only to social
realms reproduced through the media of money and (administrative) power.
In this context, one should also note that if Habermas occasionally speaks of
“institutional systems” (Institutionssysteme)—e.g., education, health care,
religion, or law—the “system” in question does not stand opposed to the “life-
world.” In such cases, Habermas’s (narrow) definition of system is not at issue.
Rather, he has in mind institutions that are based on (and in) the lifeworld.
Here, the law acts as an instance that effects “transformation” (Facts, 56, 81,
176) by functioning “as a hinge between system and lifeworld” (56).
Debate about the function, autonomy, and justifiability of law and the dem-
ocratic constitutional state culminated in a conference held at the Benjamin
N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, New York, on September 20
and 21, 1992. Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms provided the focus of dis-
cussion (see Habermas et al. 1996). At this meeting, Luhmann finally took up
the matter of Marxism, which Habermas had often challenged him to address.
With a measure of irony (especially in reference to Facts, 46), Luhmann now
affirmed that he— Luhmann—stood closer to critical theory of the truly
Marxian variety, which focuses on factual conflicts in society. Habermas, he
observed, seeks only (ideal) consensus (Luhmann 1996, 899).
This prompted Habermas to abandon, once and for all, his earlier criticism
(that systems theory represents “the epitome of technocratic consciousness”)
and to acknowledge that he had “always learned” from his “long-lasting dis-
cussion” with Luhmann. Without a trace of irony—albeit with an element of
poison in his praise—Habermas called Luhmann “the true philosopher” (1998,
448). With these words, he pointed out that Luhmann—at least in his later
writings—had, to some degree, given up a scientific perspective and fallen
back on the metaphysical premises of classical philosophy. Now, his earlier
criticism of his rival no longer held. The following year—in 1997—Luhmann
expressed a deeper level of agreement with Habermas apropos of the book
they had coauthored decades earlier: “The irony of the title was that neither
author wished to stand up for social technology, but we differed on what a
theory of society ought to be” (Luhmann 2012, 1:xi).
References
Brunkhorst, Hauke. 1997. “Abschied von Alteuropa: Die Gefährdung der Moderne und der
Gleichmut des Betrachters: Niklas Luhmanns ‘Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft.’ ” Die Zeit
(June 13, 1997): 50.
——. 2001. “Globale Solidarität: Inklusionsprobleme der modernen Gesellschaft.” In Die
Öffentlichkeit der Vernunft und die Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit: Festschrift für Jürgen
Habermas, ed. Lutz Wingert and Klaus Günther, 605–626. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 2005. Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community. Trans. Jeffrey
Flynn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Günther, Klaus. 1995. “Vom Zeitkern des Rechts.” Rechtshistorisches Journal 14:13–35.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. “Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie? Eine Ausein-
andersetzung mit Niklas Luhmann.” In Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie
– Was leistet die Systemforschung? by Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, 142–290.
——. 1987. “Wie ist Legitimität durch Legalität möglich?” Kritische Justiz 20:1–16.
——. 1988. Law and Morality. Trans. Kenneth Baynes. Salt Lake City: University of Utah
Press.
——. 1998. “Reply to Symposium Participants, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.” In
Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges, ed. Michael Rosenfeld and
Andrew Arato, 381–452. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Habermas, Jürgen, et al. 1996. “Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges.”
Cardozo Law Review 17, no. 4–5: 1477–1558.
104 Contexts
Habermas, Jürgen, and Niklas Luhmann. 1971. Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnol-
ogie – Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas, ed. 1991. Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Haber-
mas’s Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones.
Luhmann, Niklas. 1965. Grundrechte als Institution: Ein Beitrag zur politischen Soziologie.
Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
——. 1971. “Systemtheoretische Argumentationen: Eine Entgegnung auf Jürgen Haber-
mas.” In Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforsc-
hung? by Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, 291–405. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1973. Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität: Über die Funktion von Zwecken in sozialen
Systemen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1981. Ausdifferenzierung des Rechts. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1983. Legitimation durch Verfahren. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1984. Religious Dogmatics and the Evolution of Societies. Trans. Peter Beyer. New
York: Edwin Mellen.
——. 1985. A Sociological Theory of Law. Trans. Elizabeth King-Utz and Martin Albrow.
London: Routledge.
——. 1990a. “Verfassung als evolutionäre Errungenschaft.” Rechtshistorisches Journal
9:176–220.
——. 1990b. Paradigm lost: Über die ethische Reflexion der Moral − Rede anläßlich der Ver-
leihung des Hegel-Preises 1989, mit einer Laudatio von Robert Spaemann. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
——. 1996. “Quod Omnes Tangit: Remarks on Jürgen Habermas’s Legal Theory.” Cardozo
Law Review 17, no. 4–5: 883–899.
——. 1998. Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris
L. Jones. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
——. 2000. Die Politik der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 2012. Theory of Society, vol. 1. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
——. 2013. A Systems Theory of Religion. Trans. David Brenner and Adrian Hermann. Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Müller-Doohm, Stefan, ed. 2000. Das Interesse der Vernunft: Rückblicke auf das Werk von
Jürgen Habermas seit “Erkenntnis und Interesse.” Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Neves, Marcelo. 2000. Zwischen Themis und Leviathan: Eine Schwierige Beziehung – Eine
Rekonstruktion des demokratischen Rechtsstaats in Auseinandersetzung mit Luhmann
und Habermas. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Schmitt, Carl. 2004. Legality and Legitimacy. Trans. Jeffrey Seitzer. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press.
——. 2008. Constitutional Theory. Trans. Jeffrey Seitzer. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press.
Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther
Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press.
——. 2003. “The Three Pure Types of Legitimate Rule.” In The Essential Weber: A Reader,
ed. Sam Whimster, 133–145. London: Routledge.
12
EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES
KL AUS EDER
T
he theory of social evolution plays a key role in the foundation of
Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Since Marx, the
evolutionary perspective has struggled with the fact that the posi-
tion the observer occupies must necessarily be, at the same time, the endpoint
of the process in question—and therefore a point of teleological narrowness
restricting the scope of social theory. Over time, this problem has lost none
of its actuality for projects that seek to address processes of societal develop-
ment. Durkheim, for example, was wedded to the model of phase-specific pro-
gression as much as, more recently, Parsons, Luhmann, and Habermas have
been. Moreover—beyond the specific details of historical developments as
they occur in spatially and temporally distinct societies (e.g., Germany, pre-
Columbian Mexico, or Papua New Guinea)—evolutionary theory permits one
to establish a general concept of society. As Habermas views it, the matter
involves the social bond tying human beings and their capacities to one
another (whether constructively or destructively) in processes of linguistically
mediated communication.
Two problems arise when one seeks to provide theoretical grounding to
this perspective on society (alternatively, this perspective on the evolution of
society). The first concerns the danger of homogenizing distinct historical
forms of social evolution by declaring the existence of a single evolutionary
path for societal development. Above all, it involves causal explanations,
which must account for the numerous variants and many constellations to be
considered. The second problem, which stands independent of the first,
concerns differences between human and nonhuman forms of social evolu-
tion. This is not a matter of determining causality but of theorizing the consti-
tution of the “object” to be examined.
Since its earliest formulation, the idea of social evolution has represented a
scandal inasmuch as it views the process of social evolution among humans in
relation to biological theories and associates causal assumptions with the
mechanisms at work. Sociobiological approaches to the matter suggest that,
“in the final instance,” one should view sociality in biological terms. Although
reservations are warranted, such assumptions do not, in principle, lack an
empirical foundation. Indeed, social evolution—understood as changes that
106 Contexts
occur in social relations—is a phenomenon one may observe in other species.

This circumstance means that the theory of social evolution offers an analytical
tool enabling one to identify breaks and discontinuities within the evolution
of communicative relations—points that determine the particular paths social
phenomena follow in the course of development. Social evolution that occurs
through linguistically mediated communication, then, represents one course
among others. Paradoxically, a “full” theory of social evolution would also
account for the evolution of social theory.
Habermas’s project can be understood in this way, too, and contrasted with
competing projects in terms of the particular aspects of social evolution that
make the course it follows possible. As a rule, the sociologists who have ven-
tured upon this theoretical terrain have offered rather general and vague
assumptions about what, precisely, constitutes the field of communicatively
regulated social relations. Luhmann, for example, held that the ability to say
“no” represents a determining factor for the evolution of societies; Marx, in
contrast, used “labor” to define the field of investigation—a concept he associ-
ated with a very particular model of socialization and social evolution.
Habermas, however, bases his view of social evolution—and here lies the
significance of his thought—in a genuine theory of social relations: the theory
of communicative action. Sociality is built into the formal conditions of
understanding and agreement, he affirms. Consequently—as a theory of the
way “the Social” is constructed through linguistically mediated exchange—
Habermas holds that it unfolds as the “delivery” (Entbindung) of communica-
tion in social evolution. Language offers the key to understanding the means
by which relations between human beings are established, within which larger-
scale social phenomena emerge and evolve.
The point is not unproblematic, for the particularity of human society is
thereby tied to the assumption that communicatively regulated social rela-
tions mark a threshold leading upward from a lower condition of sociality (or
even nonsociality). Communicative action permits the Social to develop
beyond what nature can provide. Accordingly, social evolution—mediated
through linguistic exchange—becomes the “royal road” and leaves other paths
behind. In such a perspective, evolution necessarily represents change for the
better.
This presupposition forms the core of the theory of communicative action
insofar as it is held to be superordinate to, if not a phenomenon encompassing,
all other forms of social activity. Consequently, the field of objects available to
analysis is restricted to actions that display this particular (evolutionary) qual-
ity. Habermas considers only those forms of the Social that involve the critical
capacity of human beings: public discourse, science, education, and (in part)
religion. Other spheres, which follow this model of action only conditionally—
e.g., family structures, markets, economics, and labor—are held to belong to
Evolutionary Theories 107
the “system environment” or, alternatively, to that part of the “lifeworld”

which has not yet been verbalized.
At the same time, Habermas’s narrow view of what comprises the Social
possesses strength inasmuch as it makes it clear how the evolution of the
Social cannot be meaningfully conceived if one does not pay due attention to
the modalities of linguistically mediated understanding and agreement. Dis-
cursive events have real effects, and debates that occur in the public sphere
represent a medium of human social evolution with manifold aspects. Indeed,
Habermas affirms as much—and at a central point in his theory—when he
discusses the verbalization of the Sacred. Social evolution means releasing the
linguistic component within the Sacred and freeing up its rationalizing
potency. This need not mean that it dissolves into discourse. On the contrary:
it can reflexively assure and strengthen elements of mutual recognition within
the Sacred. In this way, too, the evolution of the Social concerns—and in deci-
sive fashion, at that—the normative dimension of cognitive reflexivity.
The formulation above reinterprets Habermasian theory insofar as it does
not presume that social evolution is the last stage of general evolution occur-
ring only through linguistically mediated communication. The idea of “devel-
opment by stages,” which holds that the social development of communicative
structures represents a continuation of what obtains in a precommunicative
world, is not necessarily tied to the program of evolutionary theory. For one can
readily see that social development through communicative understanding
constitutes a particular process that runs parallel to other processes of social
evolution. Social relations do not emerge though the medium of linguistic
communication alone; they are also constituted through other media. The
Social can be produced in many ways (as is emphasized, for example, by Bruno
Latour and actor-network theory). No pure form of the Social exists that one
might privilege to explain its evolution in its varied and (necessarily) contin-
gent aspects. This exceptional quality does not vanish when one identifies
particular mechanisms that explain its distorted and repressive aspects;
indeed, such an approach entails the autoimmunization of evolutionary the-
ory. In contrast, communications theory makes it possible to determine the
specific dynamics at work in processes of social evolution.
Habermas has sought to define this particularity on three points: by break-
ing with Marx, by elaborating Parsons’s theory in light of Weber’s fundamental
reflections, and, finally, by means of critiquing—and incorporating—aspects
of Luhmann’s systems theory. In his engagement with Marx, Habermas
above all means to limit the concept of “labor” and, instead, understand the
social sphere in terms of communicative relations. His strategy is to address
only what is “authentically social”—i.e., communicative activities. Only those
actions that meet the implicit requirement of mutual recognition may be con-
sidered to effect social evolution. Labor, as defined by Marx, involves forms of
108 Contexts
sociality that fail to achieve this objective; thereby, it produces—and

reproduces—an illusory explanation that must answer for the real consequences
of Marx’s own theoretical project. Inasmuch as he limits himself to “intersubjec-
tive communication,” Habermas brackets labor as a mode of social and com-
municative relations; thereby, he overlooks the fact that, inasmuch as labor
forges relations, social evolution also takes place (and in a different way than
communicative action, in its “strong” conception, can account for).
Following Weber and Parsons, Habermas considers the particular role of
communicative action in social evolution to concern “rational structures.”
Weber already assigned the complex of rationality (Rationalitätskomplex) a
central position in his account of universal history, and he affirmed the key
importance of rational structures in his efforts to explain historical change in
human societies. In this perspective, evolution is a process of rationalization
that opens the way to understanding the internal dynamics of world history.
Parsons broadened Weber’s perspective and presented antiquity as the cradle
of reason (a view that Shmuel Eisenstadt later formulated in more radical
terms with his thesis of the Axial Age)—in this light, one can see both prehis-
tory and history itself as the self-realization of reasonable, socialized man-
kind. (That said, the underlying assumptions are subject to debate to the
extent that the general, historical validity of these rational structures may be
deemed a matter of Western prejudice.)
Habermas’s engagement with Luhmann has led to a theoretical division of
labor. On one side stands the social evolution of reason, which makes an
emphatic conception of society possible (Habermas); on the other stands an
ensemble of evolving systems that produce the Social through schemes of
functional self-organization (Luhmann). These two models for the produc-
tion of sociality contain an idea that has resonated more and more strongly in
recent debates: that the Social evolves along parallel lines and through pro-
cesses that connect and disconnect at various points. Even though the opera-
tive concept of society often grows fuzzy in the process, it remains clear
enough so long as “society” (Gesellschaft) is taken to refer to that form of the
Social by means of which we assure ourselves of mutual recognition in shared
existence. The coexistence of two social forms—which Habermas designates
“system” and “lifeworld”—is theoretically determined first in terms of evolu-
tion, then in terms of contingency: if systems penetrate the lifeworld, prob-
lems result; if the lifeworld penetrates systems, the same is presumably the
case. (The matter might be explained more clearly, to be sure.)
However, the “strong” conception of normativity remains problematic in
Habermas’s understanding of social evolution. No one would contest that nor-
mativity represents a mode of social development for his theory of communi-
cative action. However, the fact that it possesses an exclusive status in this
process gives rise to suspicions that Habermas has fallen back upon a form of
Evolutionary Theories 109
(secret) teleology that he does not declare openly—namely, the idea that
Reason achieves progressive realization through the process of social evolu-
tion. This Hegelian remainder in Habermas’s theory can be resolved—and
dissolved—if one considers that the social evolution of reason (i.e., sociality
constituted through “reasonableness” [Vernünftigkeit]) forms a dimension
that is impossible to circumvent—a thorn in the flesh of the Social, as it were,
which subjects its other parts to the demand for justification.
Finally, the status of evolutionary theory is problematic from a historical-
empirical perspective—that is, one that concerns how social evolution relates
to the actual development of historical societies. When one incorporates
communicative socialization into the evolutionary process, it makes many—
contradictory—options available. Marx had already surmised that social evo-
lution takes place not just through forces and relations of production but
through the state and ideology, as well—and that the interaction of multiple
factors determines the concrete forms that societies assume in the course of
history. This intuition suggests that one should qualify social evolution in
three (or four) regards: the aspect of the Social that results from forces of pro-
duction, the part that derives from relations of production, and, finally, the
component produced by the state and ideology. The way that social evolution
occurs, then, would be a matter of combinations and links between different
processes. At the same time, one would no longer be able to assign the func-
tion of guidance or orientation—to say nothing of teleology—to any one of
these formative dimensions. One may privilege social evolution in the medium
of reason and investigate to what extent this particular mode of development,
grounded in communications theory, produces causal effects in historical
processes—observing, in so doing, the constellations where its effect are more
pronounced. However, this does not offer a theoretical “guarantee” of causal-
ity. Ultimately, then, Habermas’s view of social evolution amounts to a partial
theory. Specifically, it reveals a factor in the couplings and uncouplings of
social processes that is conceived in terms of communications theory and
historical development: the part played by structures of rationality (Rational-
strukturen) in the evolution of other social (e.g., technological and bureau-
cratic) structures. Habermas’s perspective offers more than Marxism inasmuch
as its arguments run counter to reductionistic ways of assessing ideas and
ideologies (e.g., through the lens of relations of production).
Viewed in this light, Habermas’s theory of social evolution is compatible with
the notion that multiple historical developments are possible (including—and
especially—the idea of “modernity”); moreover, it can be adapted to questions
concerning the particularities of modernity in space and time (that is, it
addresses the matter of “multiple modernities”). Modernity—in the Haberma-
sian sense of a “project”—then, would represent a particular form of the
Social, which emerges (or emerged) in particular locations and at particular
110 Contexts
times as a culture of universalism and, in the process, introduced those struc-

tures of rationality to the world that already fascinated Weber so greatly.
Finally, Habermas’s theory of cultural evolution permits one to discern an
ideal form of communicative socialization, which can connect with other
forms of the Social, degrade into ideology, or shrink together into a utopia.
Such, then, would be History. Society, from this perspective, would refer to a
form of ideal coexistence—one that Habermas’s theory of social evolution
grounded in communicative action analyzes more clearly than the explana-
tory schemes offered by Weber, Parsons, and Luhmann.
References
Eder, Klaus. 2004. “Kulturelle Evolution und Epochenschwellen: Richtungsbestimmungen

und Periodisierungen kultureller Entwicklungen.” In Handbuch der Kulturwissen-
schaften. Bd. 3 Grundlagen und Schlüsselbegriffe, ed. Friedrich Jaeger and Burkhard
Liebsch, 417–430. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Luhmann, Niklas. 1976. “Evolution und Geschichte.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 2, no. 3:
284–309.
——. 1978. “Geschichte als Prozess und die Theorie soziokultureller Evolution.” In Histo-
rische Prozesse, ed. Karl-Georg Faber and Christian Meier, 413–440. München: DTV.
——. 1992. “The Direction of Social Evolution.” In Social Change and Modernity, ed. Hans
Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, 279–293. Berkeley: University of California Press.
——. 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Parsons, Talcott. 1991. The Social System. London: Routledge.
13
POWER DISCOURSES
ANDREAS NIEDERBERGER
T
he topic of power—and especially power that is exercised in an
illegitimate, oppressive, or violent manner—stands at the center
of many articulations of critical theory (Honneth 1993). Habermas’s
work occupies a special place in the tradition, for it conceives power—or, as
the case may be, the ways it is produced and functions—as a matter bearing
(and in necessary fashion, at that) on the constitution of both theory and soci-
ety; indeed, it may even be seen to express freedom. As a consequence, the
critique of power and the role of this critique in critical theory must also
change in Habermas’s view. Above all, Habermas arrives at his conclusions by
engaging with the writings of Talcott Parsons and Hannah Arendt on power.
Their reflections permit him to counter Michel Foucault’s conception of dis-
course and power while incorporating more convincing aspects of the latter’s
approach into his own theory (see chapter 67).
Parsons’s Systems-Theoretical Concept of Power
Power occupies a central position in Parsons’s (1967) political sociology, where

it represents the general medium for declaring and achieving collective goals.
Power is necessary so that collectively binding conditions for action will
hold; as a medium, moreover, it provides a standard for evaluating individual
actions and their results (or goals). Parsons’s (systems-theoretical) perspective
on power differs from Max Weber’s (1980, 28) definition in two respects. The
latter holds that power represents the capacity to make another party act
according to one’s own will. For Parsons, power does not represent a resource
that stands directly at the disposal of social actors. Instead, in political activity
agents seek to acquire or produce power; only then can they exercise influence
on other social actors and their (possible) actions.
Power, in Weber’s view, is a medium insofar as it marks a relationship
between agents; only in instances of concrete use (Zugriff ) does it influence
other parties. Even in such cases, however, power never “materializes” com-
pletely as an individual resource—for example, in the “power” wielded by a
ruler. The conditions enabling the medium to determine relations between
112 Contexts
actors remain inaccessible to those who (supposedly) possess power. Because

it is a symbolic medium, power depends on what is attributed to it and what is
expected of it; to be effective, power must be recognized by those at whose
actions its codifications are directed.
At the same time—and this is the second point—power does not represent
a general symbolic medium. It possesses this status only as part of a specific
social subsystem. The function of this subsystem is to recognize, set, and
implement goals—goals that, further internal differentiations notwithstand-
ing, make different social realms into a society in the first place and determine
the relationship between this particular society and others. Since power serves
to achieve collective aims (which are meant to be valid for all), it depends,
in order to fulfill the symbolic demands that constitute it, on modes of legiti-
mation that make it clear that shared objectives—and not merely those of
individuals—are at issue.
Conceiving power along these lines (which, moreover, correspond to the
operations of the generalized medium of money in the economic sphere)
enables Habermas to describe how social actions are coordinated in systems
opposed to communicative coordination in the sphere of the lifeworld (Com-
municative Action, 2:199–203). On a large-scale, systemic level, actions are
directed toward gaining power that makes it possible to exercise it; alterna-
tively, they seek to avoid the sanctions that follow when “empowered” instances
are not observed. Within this framework, it is possible to understand how
conditions are reproduced guaranteeing that general structures and rules
expected will in fact be binding—that is, structures and rules that apply
independent of contingent motivations and communicatively reached
agreements.
Such a view, however, cannot explain why systems are steered through the
medium of power. The functionalist perspective is insufficient for providing
recognition of the symbolic medium Parsons considers necessary. Habermas
rejects Parsons’s explanation of recognition and retains only the observation
that power should not be thought to have obtained legitimacy on the basis of
direct agreement between the parties affected.
Because it cannot be legitimated in terms of function alone, Habermas
argues that power is predicated on a consensus that arises by linguistic means
(Communicative Action, 2:276). At the same time—and given the complexity
of modern states (that is, the identity-in-difference that constitutes them)—
the fact that consensus would need to be achieved/renewed constantly means
it would never emerge in actual practice. For in order to stand—and remain
standing—social actors must (be able to) pursue actions that prove successful
in terms of the power relations that prevail without being directly motivated
to form a consensus. Social actors experience power as the claims—which are
underwritten by force in a limit case—that authorities (Machthaber) will
Power Discourses 113
make if their rule is contested. Accordingly, when a government/administra-

tion is in place, the matter of forming a consensus only bears indirectly on the
power that exists in a society.
Arendt’s Communicative Conception of Power
To explain how consensus formation is relevant all the same, Habermas takes
up Arendt’s distinction between power and violence (Profiles, 171–188). Arendt
affirms, in a modern context, the Aristotelian notion that politics is to be held
strictly separate from the social sphere (or, as the case may be, from the eco-
nomic sphere). According to this view, politics is the pure constitution of free-
dom—that is, political disagreement should not express class struggle, for in
such a case, social actors remain “stuck” to their contingent socioeconomic
interests and fail to employ their truly human and political capacity for new
beginnings.
When freedom is achieved, Arendt maintains, actors can join together and
act in agreement with others; as a consequence, power originates among all
parties involved and, at the same time, transcends them. This power involves
actors being mutually (wechselseitig) bound to a collective project, which
affords them the ability—paradigmatically expressed in revolutions—to
establish law (Recht setzen) and found institutions. At the same time—inas-
much as power closely depends on (continued) human praxis and consensus
production—it can dissolve at any point, thereby imperiling the existence of
law and its institutions (Arendt 1970, 36ff.).
For Habermas, it is only when power is conceived in this way that one can
understand why consensus formation represents an indispensable foundation
of its existence. Arendt’s considerations make it clear that arrangements (Ein-
richtungen)—whose factual effectiveness is often explained in reference to an
external instance of power—themselves express constituent (gründend) power
(Facts, 147). Consequently, at least some legal principles and entitlements—to
say nothing of institutions—must be understood as having been produced by
communicative power and therefore being “founded” by it. Law, then, is not
merely a demand to be asserted by force (Gewalt); rather, it is because poten-
tial/power for agreement exists that law can be constituted and claim validity
in the first place.
At the same time, however, the communicative perspective only permits one
to discern how power is produced. It cannot explain how power functions
within governmental/administrative structures or the ways these structures
relate to individual actors. Power can only endure through organizations that do
not require that their foundational practice be repeatedly reactualized
(Communicative Action, 2:271). Consequently, the requirement that power, as a
114 Contexts
symbolic medium, be acknowledged cannot be fulfilled by perpetuating the

practice(s) by which power is produced within the system of action it steers.
For this reason, Between Facts and Norms views law as a medium connect-
ing communicative power and administrative power (Facts, 147). Agreement
that occurs in unforced and free praxis must be articulated and concretized in
the form of law if it is to yield communicative power; correspondingly, agents
of the state must show that they are bound to, and authorized by, the law if
their decrees and policies are to fulfill expectations of legitimacy—that is, if
the state is to wield administrative power. In the system of action through
which government and administration “exercise power,” the lawfulness of
such activity provides sufficient proof that recognition is due. The need to jus-
tify decisive instances within this system is greater than it is in the economic
system. At the same time, however, it has clear limits; therefore, the need for
communicative understanding, which is potentially limitless, does not under-
mine either the efficiency or complexity of standing operations.
Foucault and the Problematic Effects of Power
Such a “deproblematization”—i.e., the notion that power is produced

through unforced communication and depends on consensus as a matter of
principle—is open to criticism of various kinds. Habermas anticipates one
particular objection and offers a response. According to this line of criti-
cism, the distinction between power and violence is not descriptive but
normative in nature, which raises a question: what guarantees that power is
actually a matter of forging (vermitteln) a connection between communicative
power and administrative power? For Habermas, the answer lies in the consti-
tutional state, which, qua organization, assures that administrative power is
bound to communicative power—an arrangement that makes “social power”
irrelevant (Facts, 148).
A second line of criticism, which concerns a more fundamental level of
reflection, holds that Habermas’s notion of “communicative power” presents
conditions for understanding (or, as the case may be, agreement/true insight)
that involve problematic asymmetries/forms of discipline. According to this
view, the power wielded by governmental/administrative institutions—even if
it derives entirely from communicative agreement—relies on practices that
produce one set of options while eliminating others. Such a view is articulated
most forcefully by Michel Foucault, whose works pose a particular challenge
to Habermas because they continue the project of critical theory in a way that
differs from Habermas’s own efforts.
Foucault shares Habermas’s assumption that—at least in the modern
world—power must be produced through communication and also, ultimately,
Power Discourses 115
preserved by this same means. However, his theory of discourse holds that this
does not mean that power is therefore bound to the rationalizing effects of
communicative agreement; instead, power may be exercised in an particularly
concerted fashion inasmuch as its effects are only felt indirectly—because, that
is, they occur through the process of communication itself (Foucault 1972).
Determining how relations are shaped—or, alternatively, what form collective
goals should assume—requires the application of standards and procedures
concerning what should be considered—or adjusted—in communicative prac-
tice. When externally or transcendently justified instances of power are absent,
then, communication opens the way for structures and systems of control to be
imposed by stealth.
According to Habermas, Foucauldian theory considers Power, writ large, to
provide the transcendental concept for understanding history in its entirety. It
explains the integration and coordination that occur in societies solely in
terms of achieving the control, selection, and exclusion of social actors’
options; in the modern world, this can only be assured when actors (presum-
ably) “discipline” themselves—as Foucault puts it—by means of communicative
understanding (Discourse, 261–265). Habermas grants that Foucault’s revised
conception of the critique of ideology is interesting and lends a new dimension
to the question of how the social sciences and humanities in fact represent
forms of (repressive) social technology. However, such a conception of power
does not confront Habermas’s version of critical theory with an insurmount-
able difficulty, for Foucault cannot explain the status of his own reflections
without contradiction. Power cannot at once be the necessary and problematic
effect of truth-oriented discourse; at the same time, the theory that presents
matters as Foucault does itself raises a claim to truth (Discourse, 266–293).
All the same, Habermas holds that Foucault is right to point out that “dep-
roblematizing” power—even partially—means one must be alert to the com-
municative conditions whereby it is produced—and especially to strategies of
political deliberation that exclude or stigmatize dissenting opinions and con-
tributions whose irrelevancy or inadmissibility has not yet been demonstrated
(Unübersichtlichkeit, 126–131). In offering a two-tiered conception of power,
Habermas affirms that communication is open to contingency precisely to the
extent that it reduces elements of arbitrariness in systems of administrative
and political action (Niederberger 2007, 199–213).
References
Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. “The Discourse on Language.” In The Archeology of Knowledge,
trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, 215–237. New York: Pantheon.
116 Contexts
Honneth, Axel. 1993. The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory.
Trans. Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Kelly, Michael, ed. 1994. Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate.
Niederberger, Andreas. 2007. Kontingenz und Vernunft: Grundlagen einer Theorie kommu-
nikativen Handelns im Anschluss an Habermas und Merleau-Ponty. Freiburg: Alber.
Parsons, Talcott. 1967. “On the Concept of Political Power.” In Sociological Theory and
Modern Society, 297–354. New York: Free Press.
14
JURIDICAL DISCOURSES
KL AUS GÜNTHER
A
mong the controversies of jurisprudence that gripped the Fed-
eral Republic of Germany in its early days, one of the most press-
ing concerned the “social and constitutional state” (sozialer
Rechtsstaat). In the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) (1949), one reads the pithy com-
mandment (article 28, paragraph 1): “The constitutional order in the Länder
must conform to the principles of a republican, democratic, and social state
governed by the rule of law, within the meaning of this Basic Law.” In similar
fashion, article 20, paragraph 1 affirms that the Federal Republic of Germany
is “a democratic and social federal state.” Debate concerning the meaning and
function of the adjective “social” has not occurred only in an academic con-
text; behind such exchanges stands a disagreement—which goes back to the
time before the foundation of the Federal Republic and has set the course of its
development—about the country’s economic order and the distribution of
property that underlies it.
In the early days of the Federal Republic, the matter went beyond the legal
and constitutional question whether the new state order should accept prop-
erty relations as they stood and the economic power relations this arrange-
ment had produced—whether, that is, the state should and simply order them
by means of formal rules about property, contracts, and competition or
whether, conversely, the state was authorized and obligated, on a constitu-
tional basis, to alter property relations through acts of intervention with a
legal foundation (e.g., through efforts to redistribute wealth, achieve social
justice, or establish participatory rights in matters of business). The issue that
prompted political activity of nearly every kind in the founding years of the
Federal Republic was whether—and to what extent—the capitalist economic
system and relations of private property had been responsible, at least in part,
for the collapse of civilization under National Socialism and during the Sec-
ond World War. Even if the Economic Miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) and the
Cold War gave rise to measures seeking distance from the planned economy
and collectivization now in place in the German Democratic Republic—which
meant that the question ceased to be posed as insistently—disagreement about
the meaning and function of the “social-state” provision echoed a fundamen-
tal dilemma.
118 Contexts
In 1954, at the meeting of the Staatsrechtslehrervereinigung (Association of

Teachers of Constitutional Law), Ernst Forsthoff tried to demote the matter of
the social state to a mere suggestion made to governmental administration
(Forsthoff 1968). Wolfgang Abendroth, on the other hand, interpreted the pro-
vision as a constitutional obligation: democratic legislators should transform
property relations (Abendroth 1968). In numerous rulings, the Federal Consti-
tutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) understood the adjective “social” to
apply to rights of political participation; over time, these decisions defined the
character of the Federal Republic as a social and constitutional state. In this
way, it was gradually established that, without a social balance checking
advantages that are individually acquired and legally determined within a lib-
eral order of property and economy, it would be impossible for all citizens to
hold the same basic rights to freedom and the same political rights of partici-
pation in democratic opinion formation. The influence of this drawn-out pro-
cess on politics and law is evident, among other places, in Habermas’s essays
“Natural Law and Revolution” (Theory and Practice, 82–120) and “Paradigms
of Law” (Facts, 388–446).
At the same time, the slow and tentative emergence of the social and consti-
tutional state gave rise to new problems, not just the question whether this
compromise would be able to attenuate problems of legitimation and motiva-
tion under late capitalism (cf. Legitimation Crisis) but, above all, the question
of the relationship between this form of government—which had been estab-
lished primarily through case law (Rechtsprechung) and administrative
decision—and democracy. Moreover, by interpreting basic rights as objective
norms, the Federal Constitutional Court had erected an order that both
inhered in and transcended the constitution—an order that could, by turns,
spur democratic legislators to action or restrict them (in matters ranging
from, e.g., participation in workplace decisions to time limits imposed on abor-
tion). Whereas it was possible to view the progressive extension of rights and
the broadening of democratic participation as evidence of postconventional
moral consciousness (according to which the legal order as a whole requires
justification and is subject to critique [Rekonstruktion, 20–27]), the “pushes”
that occurred with the mounting juridification of everyday life made plain the
factual absence of democracy (Kübler 1985; Facts, 427–446). According to
Rudolf Wiethölter, the deficits of bourgeois-liberal law (Max Weber) within the
social state could only be remedied through a proceduralization of the legal
category (Wiethölter 1989; cf. Habermas 1990, 51–64; Facts, 427–446).
Legal theorists were still treating these problems as matters of applied law
and juridical interpretation with the categories supplied by hermeneutics (to
which they added sociological reflections on the consequences of judges’ deci-
sions) when Robert Alexy’s (1989) groundbreaking dissertation (Göttingen,
1978) presented a way to connect methods of juridical justification and
Juridical Discourses 119
interpretation, on the one hand, and international discussions of analytical

ethics and theories of argument, on the other. This study made an important
contribution to Habermas’s theory of rational discourse inasmuch as Alexy
formulated, explained, and justified the rules and forms of general, practical
interaction in a way that made it easier to clarify how rational justification of
normative propositions is possible (see, among other works, Habermas 1988,
97–104 [not included in the English edition of Postmetaphysical Thinking]).
Alexy presented juridical argumentation as a special case of general practical
discourse. Hereby, practical argumentation is limited by relevant laws and
specific codes governing procedure; this permits participants to pursue their
own interests strategically instead of debating with one another whether a
claim of practical “rightness” holds or can be achieved.
The unique position occupied by juridical argumentation determines its
structure. The juridical syllogism—the justification of a concrete legal instruc-
tion (Gebot) in terms of propositions with features concretized in general
rules—follows the pattern of logical inference and justifies arguments inter-
nally. In turn, individual components of the syllogism require external justifi-
cation—for example, through rules of legal interpretation, church dogma, or
relevant precedents, which may then be qualified in terms of general practical
discourse (on such instances of elaboration and nuance, see Alexy 1995).
Because even a universalistic justification of practical norms still does not
guarantee that they will be applied impartially—individual cases cannot be
anticipated—a “discourse of application” (Anwendungsdiskurs) must comple-
ment the practical discourse that provides their rational justification (Günther
1989, 1993; critiqued by Alexy 1995, 52–70; for a critical account of the discur-
sive theory of juridical argumentation and an elaboration of discursive legiti-
mation in terms of the principle of formal equality, see Lieber 2007, 235–304).
Both Alexy’s view of juridical argumentation as a special case within the
practice of rational discourse and the effort undertaken by Habermas and his
collaborators in Starnberg to connect the evolution of law and subjective
moral development with reflexive, universalistic, and procedural morality
presumed—at least implicitly—the subordination of positive law to postcon-
ventional morality (see the critical résumé in Frankenberg and Rödel 1981,
9–31). This enterprise conflicted both with the legal realities of the social and
democratic state—which focus on consequences for society as a whole—and
with positivistic ways of understanding case law and jurisprudence. Interna-
tionally, legal positivism—in forms inherited from Hans Kelsen (above all,
by H. L. A. Hart at Oxford and his students—e.g., Joseph Raz and Neil
MacCormick)—dominated the way jurists understood the field. The new
perspective also competed with many other currents of thought within the
tradition of legal realism. The “Critical Legal Studies Movement,” which began
at Harvard, advanced the position that unavoidable, immanent contradictions
120 Contexts
exist within the law when society is marked by economic polarities; such con-
tradictions, which are “resolved” on the basis of unvoiced political orientations
in the courts, are to be made explicit and subjected to critique (see, for exam-
ple, the works of David Trubek, Jerry Frug, and Duncan Kennedy).
In this context, Ronald Dworkin contested legal positivism’s claim that law
is independent of morality. He based his objection on two points. The positiv-
istic view holds that the normative order of law admits only all-or-nothing
decisions—so that, in difficult cases that do not admit determination accord-
ing to a valid rule of law, the judge is authorized to make the law on his or her
own qua political decision. Against this position, Dworkin observed that,
even in such cases, judges make decisions according to normatively justified
measures—and they do so by appealing to principles whose weight differs
depending on the case at hand (which, moreover, are conditioned both by
other applicable principles and by political objectives). His second point con-
cerns the positivistic thesis that laws do not derive their validity from moral
norms but from a system of primary and secondary rules, whose validity is
ultimately determined by a basic standard or rule of recognition. Dworkin
countered such claims by affirming that judges, in difficult cases, justify their
decisions through arguments from principle. Moreover, he contended, judges
do not choose these principles arbitrarily; rather, they justify them from a
moral standpoint because this gives them the best means to offer a coherent
interpretation of all the normative elements of the legal system (constitution,
precedents, common law, etc.) as well as the moral principles underlying their
decisions (Dworkin 1978, chaps. 2–4). In other words, the judge is measured
(and measures him- or herself) on the ideal of a Hercules capable of taking all
relevant considerations into account. Only because of the justificatory need that
arises from a moral demand do subjective (basic) rights “trump” the political
objectives that are pursued through legal norms (Dworkin 1985, 158ff.); only as a
consequence of the moral obligation to arrive at the best possible interpretation
do judges bow to the regulative idea of seeking the “one right answer” to a diffi-
cult case (Dworkin 1978, 448ff.; Dworkin 1986, 119ff.). In anticipation of the
charge that he was seeing matters through “rose-tinted glasses,” Dworkin
declared that his perspective does not conceal contradictions—rather, it is only
possible to uncover and critique the contradictions that invariably arise if one
demands the best possible justification for rulings (Dworkin 1986, 271ff.).
Taking up Dworkin’s distinction between rules and principles, Alexy
(2002) developed a theory of the form of basic rights (Grundrechtsform), which
asserts that legal decisions must be optimized; in so doing, he provided a
rational basis for assessing conflicts that occur between equally fundamental
rights. Alexy’s thesis concerning the mode of argument in exceptional cases,
his perspective on evaluating basic rights that stand in conflict, his reflections
on the “discourse of application,” Dworkin’s theory of coherent interpretation,
Juridical Discourses 121
and the writings of the “Critical Legal Studies Movement” offer points of ref-
erence for Habermas’s own theory concerning legal indeterminacy and the
rationality of case law (Facts, 238–286). In particular, the position Dworkin
assigns to judicature prompted Habermas to take a stand on the relationship
between democracy and justice—above all, with regard to the Federal Consti-
tutional Court and its authority to reject decisions made by democratic legis-
lators (Facts, 287–328; Dworkin, Habermas, and Günther 1997).
References
Abendroth, Wolfgang. 1968. “Zum Begriff des demokratischen und sozialen Rechtsstaates
im Grundgesetz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.” In Rechtsstaatlichkeit und
Sozialstaatlichkeit, ed. Ernst Forsthoff, 114–144. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft.
Alexy, Robert. 1989. A Theory of Legal Argumentation: The Theory of Rational Discourse as
Theory of Legal Justification. Trans. Ruth Adler and Neil MacCormick. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
——. 1995. Recht, Vernunft, Diskurs. Studien zur Rechtsphilosophie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 2002. A Theory of Constitutional Rights. Trans. Julian Rivers. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Dworkin, Ronald. 1978. Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
——. 1985. A Matter of Principle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
——. 1986. Law’s Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Dworkin, Ronald, Jürgen Habermas, and Klaus Günther. 1997. “Regiert das Recht die
Politik?” In Philosophie heute, ed. Ulrich Boehm, 150–176. Frankfurt: Campus.
Frankenberg, Günter, and Ulrich Rödel. 1981. Von der Volkssouveränität zum Minderheit-
enschutz. Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt.
Forsthoff, Ernst. 1968. “Begriff und Wesen des sozialen Rechtsstaates.” In Rechtsstaatlich-
keit und Sozialstaatlichkeit, ed. Ernst Forsthoff, 165–200. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft.
Günther, Klaus. 1989. “Ein normativer Begriff der Kohärenz für eine Theorie der jurist-
ischen Argumentation.” Rechtstheorie 20:163–190.
——. 1993. The Sense of Appropriateness: Application Discourses in Morality and Law.
Trans. John Farrell. Albany: SUNY Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. Die nachholende Revolution: Kleine politische Schriften VII.
——. 1988. Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Kübler, Friedrich, ed. 1985. Verrechtlichung von Wirtschaft, Arbeit und sozialer Solidarität.
Lieber, Tobias. 2007. Diskursive Vernunft und formelle Gleichheit. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Wiethölter, Rudolf. 1989. “Proceduralization of the Category of Law.” In Critical Legal
Thought: An American-German Debate, ed. Christian Joerges and David M. Trubek,
501–510. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
15
THE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY
RAINER SCHMALZ-BRUNS
A
look at the 1958 introduction to Student und Politik—“Zum
Begriff der politischen Beteiligung” (On the concept of political
participation)—makes plain that Habermas chose, early on, to
pursue his research on democracy in conjunction with a discussion of
German constitutional law. More than twenty years later, the first pages of
The Theory of Communicative Action confirmed—in the context of political
science—that his decision involved the theory of rationality as a matter of
principle. Considerations of this kind have remained key throughout the
philosopher’s career; at least in terms of theoretical strategy, Habermas has
consistently explored the interconnection (Verzahnung) between democratic
participation and a certain conception of the law (Facts, 437ff.).
Habermas has analyzed political participation and the conditions under
which it can be achieved in terms of structural changes that occurred as the
liberal, constitutional state transformed, first, into a social-welfare state
(Legitimation, 52ff.; Structural Transformation, 222ff.) and then into a “security
state” focused on “overcoming situations of collective endangerment” (Facts,
433–434). The same concerns are evident in his main work of democratic
theory, Between Facts and Norms (1992). More recently, they have shaped his
reflections on “domestic world politics without world government” (which
Habermas has elaborated in close consideration of changes to international
law).
Habermas’s theory of democracy analyzes shifts in the relationship between
state and society. It moves, in a normative fashion, between considerations of
how social forces are politically mobilized to form public opinion and a public
will, on the one hand, and, on the other, examining the need for a “certain
autonomy within the political sphere” (Kultur und Kritik, 54; see also Logic).
His thought is decisively shaped by engagement (which began early on) with
Weimar constitutional doctrine (Staatsrechtslehre)—the works of authors
such as Hermann Heller, Otto Kirchheimer, Franz Neumann, and even Carl
Schmitt (see chapter 3). At the same time, Habermas has always made it clear
that a critical perspective on the constitutional doctrine of the Federal Repub-
lic holds special significance for his project. Above all, this means the writings
of Wolfgang Abendroth and Helmut Ridder. In the early 1950s (when he
The Theory of Democracy 123
studied with Ridder in Frankfurt), Habermas had already felt their influence.
It is evident throughout his works—and especially in The Structural Transfor-
mation of the Public Sphere (1961). Since the beginning of the 1970s, Ingeborg
Maus has drawn from the same tradition. Beginning in the mid-1980s, her
ideas have flowed back into Habermas’s works on democracy and law, inspir-
ing him to employ Kant’s legal theory to radically democratic ends.
Finally, Habermas has taken up the reflections of Joshua Cohen to add
nuance to his deliberative model of democratic politics—incorporating a dis-
cursive conception of law and a communicative understanding of society into
his theory. While he uses Cohen’s works sparingly, they are of great impor-
tance inasmuch as they permit him to renew the question that has proven
decisive ever since The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: the
relationship between state and society (or, alternatively, between public poli-
tics and spaces that exist within institutional frameworks).
The Constitutional State and Democracy: Intellectual

Sightlines in Habermas’s Theory
In “Zum Begriff der politischen Beteiligung,” Habermas formulated his

understanding of democracy in a phrase that has been often quoted. In direct
reference to Neumann’s studies, his programmatic declaration—which holds
to this day—affirms that democracy is not a form of government among
others:
Rather, its essence consists of the fact that it enacts far-reaching social changes
that increase the freedom of human beings—and, ultimately, can perhaps
create them in the first place. Democracy works upon mankind’s self-deter-
mination, and only when the former is real [wirklich] is the latter true [wahr].
Political participation, then, is identical to self-determination.
(Kultur und Kritik, 11)
Without a doubt, these words underlie the radicalism that has led Habermas
to envision reform beyond national borders. In hindsight, however, his con-
viction that democracy ratifies processes of social development seems overly
optimistic—even excessive. Now, greater restraint is evident in his writings.
After engaging with systems theory, basic aspects of his view of society—
which The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) articulates in terms of the
distinction between “system” and “lifeworld”—underwent a change.
All the same—despite the varying contexts in which they have been made
and different points of emphasis—Habermas’s statements on democracy are
conceived along the same strategic lines. The position presented in “Zum
124 Contexts
Begriff der politischen Beteiligung” (which, in turn, found systematic exposi-

tion in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) holds that the insti-
tutional “fantasy” necessary for democratic development is not limited by
(more or less rigid) linguistic prescriptions concerning parliamentary debate
and legislation. Instead, the proceduralistic medium of discursive opinion and
will formation offers a means to integrate democratic claims, in ways adapted
to specific institutional settings, into transformations taking place in the
structures of state and society. As Habermas observes in Between Facts and
Norms, such a view avoids “overly concrete” models for achieving law and
democracy (Facts, 437).
Needless to say, Habermas faces the task of articulating and explaining,
from a more abstract perspective, how inclusive opinion and will formation is
to be institutionalized. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
already affirmed that one must identify, in the conditions necessary for
reasonable public discourse, two fundamental elements in the way the consti-
tutional state conceives law: the claim to offer equality to all, on the one hand,
and the claim of being “right” (that is, of possessing “justice-guaranteeing
truth” [Structural Transformation, 225]), on the other. In other words, it is
a matter of “the institutionalization of various discourses . . . that . . . open
up possibilities of access to . . . corresponding sorts of reasons” (Facts, 438)
so that citizens have the ability to shape the positive content of law and
administration.
The close connection between the idea of the constitutional state and the
way(s) it promotes democratic self-determination is evident in two aspects of
Habermas’s reflections. The first concerns the evolution of the constitutional
state in terms of legitimacy and legality. The second involves the relationship
between state and society.
The first point continues discussions of the social state from the 1950s
and early 1960s. Here, Habermas—in Structural Transformation of the Pub-
lic Sphere and in the essay “Natural Law and Revolution” (in Theory and
Practice)—establishes how the constitutional state first emerged; at the same
time, it addresses how to overcome the fact “that constitutional principles . . .
are insufficiently institutionalized” (Facts, 436). Habermas’s underlying belief
is that legality can found legitimacy only insofar as one manages to preserve
the “moral core” (Habermas 1988, 227) of formal bourgeois law while produc-
ing, through procedure, abstract universal law (229, 275); in this process, the
inherent tension between the “indisponibility and the instrumentality of
the law” (268) holds even when the executive intervenes in politics.
Second, Habermas’s democratic theory is marked by the way that the rela-
tionship between state and society is constituted. The matter involves changes
in how public space functions, as well as institutional connections between
opinion and will formation in civil society and within the political system.
Habermas avoids all hints of affect-laden statism (a spirit that has long irri-
tated him, especially in Carl Schmitt’s works) when he notes, with program-
matic intent, that the “secularization of the spiritual bases of governmental
authority, by now long under way, suffers from a deficit” that is to be “met”—i.e.,
remedied—“by more extensive democratization” (Facts, 443–444). At the same
time, he notes that capitalist society—especially inasmuch as it runs the risk of
“refeudalization” (Structural Transformation, 195) through the market—can
only provide a sociologically plausible point of reference for democratic evolu-
tion if it can guarantee, in its organizational form, the demands that follow from
the principle of the public sphere; inasmuch as this situation obtains, opinion
and will formation that is both “oriented to the state” (staatsbezogen) (Struc-
tural Transformation, 209) and oriented “in terms of the common welfare”
(198) legitimates the structures in place.
With these considerations in mind, Habermas focuses on structural trans-
formation in democracy in response to (external) change—particularly in the
sphere of administration, which grows increasingly burdened by steering
tasks (Facts, 440). In keeping with the “reciprocal interpenetration [Durch-
dringung] of state and society,” functional losses in both institutionalized and
noninstitutionalized public spaces—as well as the attendant strengthening of
administration, on the one hand, and the increased role played by political
parties and associations, on the other—must be remedied by new forms of
democratic participation (Structural Transformation, 197).
Helmut Ridder: The Social State and Democracy;

the “Therapeutic” Self-Definition of the Basic Law
Habermas eschews “anarchistic” perspectives that, in seeking to remedy the

lack of democracy in the contemporary world, affirm that society consists of
horizontally arranged networks of voluntary associations; these positions
appeal to participants’ readiness to seek consensus and to coordinate responses
to problems through group efforts (Facts, 481). Habermas’s objections involve
functional considerations inasmuch as such strategies must necessarily
founder simply because of the need for steering and organization in modern
societies (481). His reasons are also normative inasmuch as the positions he
criticizes would restrict the space of private life—a matter deeply anchored
in the liberal tradition of “individual liberties” (Ridder 1960, 25–26) he val-
ues. Finally, efforts of this kind could occur only if they pervaded society in
general—which would annul individual liberty and amount to the “totalitar-
ian absorption [Einsaugung] of the state into society” (Ridder 1960, 15).
The standard Habermas establishes for the theory of democracy—which
rejects the notion of a “society autonomously determining itself through the
126 Contexts
state without coercion” (Ridder 1960, 15) as utopian—makes the many points
of contact and overlap between his thinking and that of Ridder especially
clear. Habermas and Ridder share views not just on diagnostic and analytical
questions but also on the conceptual frameworks in which these matters are
situated.
Ridder’s (1960) program reads as follows: “Free political society encompasses
the organs of the state—which, in keeping with the state’s commandment of
democracy, are obligated to be public—in order, in a permanent process of
public opinion and will formation, to guarantee freedom by acting as a correc-
tive to the governmental exercise of power” (14). To this end, Ridder incorpo-
rates three considerations into his theory of democracy. First of all, he rejects
the “sociological positivism” of postwar German Staatsrechtslehre—the efforts
of Ernst Forsthoff and Werner Weber (among others), who, in opposition to
constitutional law and constitutional reality as it stood, sought to reestablish a
conception of the constitution that included juridical norms (Normbestände).
Their views, Ridder believed, served the conservatives’ “restless” search for
power deriving from statehood itself (1975, 15). In contrast, he insisted that
democratic and constitutional rule could not admit “more state” than what
the constitution provides normatively and in writing (17).
In so doing—and this is the second point—Ridder offered a “therapeutic”
understanding of the constitution (which he first developed in debates about
the “social state” during the 1950s and 1960s). This view enabled him to
identify another dimension of government extending beyond social services
and external relations between citizens. The very idea of liberal (freiheitlich)
democracy, he argued, demands that the social state influence the inner struc-
ture of “collective actors” (businesses, associations, unions, parties) in a way
that assures democratic equality. His call for the normative architecture of the
Grundgesetz to be interpreted as encompassing state and society derived from
a particular connection—which he affirmed early on—between the right to
express opinions freely, on the one hand, and “public reason,” on the other.
The notion of public reason holds that expressions of opinion are not bound to
the guiding, ethical ideas of Truth or Reason (as classical conceptions of free-
dom of opinion had maintained) and seeks to “protect the free formation of
public opinion—that is, to protect the individual parties among whom it
arises” (Ridder 1954, 265).
Such are the outer lineaments of Ridder’s conception of democracy—a pic-
ture he drew by linking, in systematic fashion, the legal and social provisions
of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. For all that, Ridder
evinced a relatively agnostic attitude toward the actual model of democracy
that had resulted. He insisted that the Grundgesetz does not prescribe that the
political system be founded on “any one of the competing conceptions of dem-
ocratic order” (1979, 11); rather, it provides for “freedom to express and ratify
the will of the popular majority, to legal effect” (10–11). For this reason, norma-
tive barriers to the development of democracy exist wherever “illiberal”
majority rule threatens to bypass the procedural guarantees that stem from
interaction between political (governmental) institutions and public (social)
processes of opinion and will formation (1960, 12).
Inasmuch as it occupies a space beyond this frontier, Ridder maintained,
the constitution can at best provide normative regulations that make it possible
for democratic will formation to influence—reflexively and in a “therapeutic”
manner—the conditions under which public autonomy is exercised. The very
structure of democracy blurs the boundaries separating state and society,
then. This is why liberal democracy is not a form of government among oth-
ers; it englobes the relationship between state and society as well as those
structural elements within society that are relevant to its continued operation
(1960, 13).
Ridder’s interpretation of the Grundgesetz—which, as we have noted, sought
to counter the conservatism of Weimar-era conceptions of government (partic-
ularly, arguments advanced by Carl Schmitt and his students)—embedded
democratic progress within the constitutional state. In his early writings, Haber-
mas was able to build effortlessly on the foundation Ridder had secured. One
sees as much in his many references to Ridder’s works (e.g., “Freedom of Opin-
ion” [1954] and “The Status of Unions in Constitutional Law” [1960], in Struc-
tural Transformation). As a student in the early 1950s, Habermas had attended
Ridder’s lectures in Frankfurt; even if one does not speculate about the extent
of their personal contact, direct influence during the late 1950s and early
1960s can be concretely demonstrated. Over time, Habermas struck out in a
related but new direction. That said, Between Facts and Norms only mentions
Ridder once—in rather summary form, and in a footnote (Facts, 544).
Ingeborg Maus: Rational Law and the Transition from

Substance to Procedure
Habermas has charted a new course by engaging with the works of Ingeborg
Maus. Her Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie (Elucidation of the theory of
democracy, 1992) draws on considerations that are not unlike Ridder’s. At the
same time—and much more decisively than Ridder—Maus derives her theory
of the democratic state and constitutionality (as well as inner connections
between the constitutional state and democracy) from fundamental distinc-
tions made by Kant.
Maus’s thought has progressed in three distinct stages. At the same time,
these stages—which are represented by Bürgerliche Rechtstheorie und Faschis-
mus (Bourgeois legal theory and fascism, 1976), Rechtstheorie und Politische
128 Contexts
Theorie im Industriekapitalismus (Legal theory and political theory in indus-

trial capitalism, 1986), and, finally, Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie—
seek the answer to a single question:
How—under the conditions of advanced industrial society (with all the devel-
opments this entails), up through organized capitalism in the late twentieth
century and the new forms of trans- and supranational regulation that mark
the twenty-first century—is it possible for democratic self-determination and
individual liberties guaranteed by the rule of law [Rechtsstaatlichkeit] to exist
at all?
(Niesen and Eberl 2006, 12)
Throughout her studies, Maus employs the notion—rooted in the Enlight-

enment and the French Revolution—of “democratic legal positivism”
(demokratische Gesetzgebungspositivismus) as the means to counter both the
bourgeois legal theory of Weimar Germany (that is, the “tradition of indepen-
dent, reified conceptions of law” that work “against democratic processes of
will formation” [Maus 1986, 7]) and “fundamentalist legal critique . . . that
considers every form of juridification to amount to the destruction of autono-
mous social organizations and participatory democracy” (7).
Time and again, Maus identifies Carl Schmitt as the godfather of the latter
movement within legal theory—a school of thought that undermines the
practical dimensions of legality, on the one hand, and, on the other, tears
apart the core relation between the rule of law, popular sovereignty, and indi-
vidual autonomy. Schmitt’s predilection for deformalizing law and declaring
political institutions to be autonomous (and, therefore, independent of the
normative claims of democratic self-determination [see Maus 1986, 278 and
passim]) yields a paradigmatic theory of “constitutive legal acts” (Maus 1976,
81ff.) that Maus contests. Ultimately, the perspective displays “fascination for
all that is not organized, not institutionalized, and not established—fascina-
tion for whatever is irregular [das Irreguläre schlechthin]—hypostasizes intel-
lectual quantities and substance”; this, in turn, feeds the claims “of an elite
that considers itself free to make formative and unprecedented decisions”
(Maus 1986, 85).
Maus seeks to counter this development within bourgeois jurisprudence.
Her comprehensive essay “Entwicklung und Funktionswandel der Theorie
des bürgerlichen Rechtsstaats” (The development and structural change of
the theory of the bourgeois constitutional state) (Maus 1996, 11–82) begins
with Kant’s understanding of constitutional government as democracy and
incorporates theoretical debates up to Luhmann. Maus identifies relevant
aspects of the secularization that occurred when the liberal state gave way to a
democratic and social form of government. This and other studies (which
incorporate the perspectives of Kirchheimer, Neumann, Heller, Habermas,

Abendroth, and Ridder) are concerned with how the state can exist under the
rule of law, given the changes in social structure that followed upon industri-
alization. Because these changes have concentrated economic, social, and
administrative power, Maus concludes that fundamental rights guaranteeing
equality and freedom can only be preserved if the principles underlying them
prove capable of influencing the way various sectors of society are constituted
(Maus 1976, 61ff.).
Maus (1992) invokes Kant to secure the fundaments necessary for establish-
ing a paradigm at whose core she—like Habermas—sees a combination of
both legally institutionalized and noninstitutionalized forms of popular sov-
ereignty united in reciprocal mediation. At the same time, however, she seeks
an instance that can claim general validity on a purely formal level by guaran-
teeing procedural conditions that secure freedom and equality. This abstract
formulation acquires definition in light of three further distinctions—which
ultimately put her “attempt to reconstruct, under the social conditions given
today, the essential intent [Intentionen] of the principle of popular sover-
eignty” (Maus 1992, 224) in a tense relation to Habermas’s ideas.
First, Maus’s answer to the question—“How can the will [Willkür] of the
democratic legislator, which has been declared autonomous by the theory of
sovereignty, be combined with the normative provisions of natural law?”
(Maus 1992, 161)—involves temporal and normative processes of differentia-
tion bearing on matters of content and procedure. Second, she articulates the
further demand (which follows from the distinction between self-legislation
and self-government) that the task of setting norms (Normierung der Norm-
setzung) remain the responsibility of the legislative center (i.e., the parliament)
and not be delegated to peripheral instances (225). Finally, Maus calls for cau-
tion, lest the claim to universality made by legislators rest upon the wrong
kind of reasons. She points out the dangers involved by way of the distinction
between law and morality: legal decisions should not be legitimated by direct
appeal to moral principles, because doing so (and here her words take aim at
the practices of German Federal Constitutional Court) promotes decisionism
on the part of decision-making institutions (171)—i.e., the suspension of legal
limits, which amounts to the “negation of restrictions placed on governmental
regulation” (309).
Joshua Cohen: The Model of Deliberative Politics
Maus energetically opposes all efforts to constitutionalize international law

that might curtail the sovereignty of states—for state sovereignty, she argues,
potentially represents popular sovereignty as well (Maus 2007, 366). Her
130 Contexts
arguments have elicited equally strong objections from Habermas (Habermas

2007, 442). Retrospectively, as it were, their exchanges have made two basic
traits of the latter’s theory of democracy clear.
Habermas discounts conceptions of democracy that consider it a form of
social self-organization mediating between various societal elements along
“horizontal lines” at the base (Facts, 481). Instead, he places his hope in pro-
cesses of opinion and will formation occurring though the “parliamentary
complex” (448), which institutionalizes and “domesticates” them. Habermas’s
next step explores the interplay between this realm and the noninstitutional-
ized opinion formation that occurs in the public sphere and in civil society—
an exchange that takes place through procedural law, which provides filters of
legitimation for the political processes of governmental administration (484).
At the same time, however, Habermas urges epistemic restraint with respect
to state power—if not social power. In this way (albeit with less method-
ological rigor), he is able to focus matters of democratization on changes of
structure and place that occur in politics—and to call for “institutional
imagination” (484).
Ultimately, both considerations derive from the fact that, in Habermas’s
view, the need for political shaping and steering that arises from the complex-
ity of social relations can no longer be mediated socially, even on a primary
level. Conversely, the communicative infrastructure of a “society that is delib-
eratively steered as a whole and is thus politically constituted” (305) is overtaxed
because—as Habermas notes (somewhat unclearly)—“democratic procedure is
embedded in contexts it cannot itself regulate” (305). With that—and also
through the absence of statements on the relationship between advisory
practices and informal processes of opinion formation (372)—Habermas
adjusts, once more, the framework within which Cohen’s (1987, 1988, 1989)
understanding of deliberative politics can, in his opinion, be seen to hold. The
demanding conditions of discursive, decision-oriented counsel upon which
Cohen’s notion of democratic legitimacy focuses should be understood only as
a complement to the core political structure as a distinct social system. To be
sure, in making this qualification, Habermas also allows that, in a heuristic
capacity, it may stimulate “institutional imagination” in a productive man-
ner—as Cohen intends for it to do.
Subsequent publications have described what this means in systematic
terms: first, a “politics of association” (Cohen and Rogers 1995) and, second,
“directly deliberative polyarchy” (Cohen and Sabel 1997). Thereby, Cohen
follows the same intuitions that guided Maus, affirming that, when actual-
ized, the principle of popular sovereignty extends in two directions: on the one
hand, toward forms of decentralized self-legislation and, on the other, toward a
vertical division of will formation on multiple levels. Cohen’s model of delib-
erative polyarchy begins with a decentralized perspective; his reflections on
the politics of association are intended to promote, across the social spectrum,
conditions favoring will formation through discourse, politically meaningful
equality, fairness in wealth distribution, and civic consciousness (Cohen and
Rogers 1995, 34ff.).
In the framework Cohen elaborates, the significance of democratic group
politics involves, above all, the fact that attention—especially in mass-mediated
public space—can be condensed, concentrated, and stabilized so quickly that
it may increase the visibility and influence of unrepresented or underrepre-
sented groups; the resulting “schools of democracy” ultimately contribute to
the formation of civic consciousness (42ff.). The core idea is not that these
effects will occur on their own, given the world of social organization and the
many-layered asymmetries it hosts. Rather, the matter calls for a purposeful
politics of association with four dimensions: promoting and supporting asso-
ciations, structuring processes of will formation within them, adapting their
structure to those of the political system, and, finally, putting networks
between them in place (48ff.).
The question remains open, to what extent such an egalitarian politics of
group formation—unfolding on many different levels of the political process—
is actually capable of realizing the promises that Cohen and Rogers attach to
it: agenda setting, formulating a political program, and implementing it (55ff.).
Likewise, it remains an open matter why Habermas has, for the most part,
declined to expand his model of deliberative politics—at least a little—in this
direction (especially since it seems to confirm his reservations concerning the
unjustified splitting of deliberative politics into a “structure shaping the total-
ity of society” [Facts, 305]). Perhaps, however, he is following an impulse
behind his discussions of the constitutional state in the 1950s and 1960s—the
belief, namely, that the claims of public and private autonomy are both to be
protected. Habermas’s theory of democracy values the normative substance of
processes of differentiation, which blocks efforts to level the difference between
society and state in the name of democracy.
References
Cohen, Joshua. 1989. “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.” In The Good Polity: Nor-
mative Analysis of the State, ed. Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit, 17–34. Oxford: Black-
well.
——. 1997. “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.” In Deliberative Democracy: Essays
on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg, 67–91. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.
——. 1998. “Can Egalitarianism Survive Internationalization?” In Internationale
Wirtschaft, nationale Demokratie: Herausforderungen für die Demokratietheorie, ed.
Wolfgang Streeck, 175–194. Frankfurt: Campus.
132 Contexts
Cohen, Joshua, and Joel Rogers. 1995. Associations and Democracy. London: Verso.
Cohen, Joshua, and Charles Sabel. 1997. “Directly Deliberative Polyarchy.” European Law
Journal 3, no. 4: 313–342.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1988. “Law and Morality.” Trans. Kenneth Baynes. The Tanner Lectures
on Human Values. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
——. 2007. “Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik: eine Replik.” In
Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internatio-
nalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 406–459. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Maus, Ingeborg. 1976. Bürgerliche Rechtstheorie und Faschismus: Zur sozialen Funktion
und aktuellen Wirkung der Theorie Carl Schmitts. München: Fink.
——. 1986. Rechtstheorie und politische Theorie im Industriekapitalismus. München: Fink.
——. 1992. Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 2007. “Verfassung oder Vertrag: Zur Verrechtlichung globaler Politik.” In Anarchie
der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen
Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 350–382. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Niesen, Peter, and Oliver Eberl. 2006. “Demokratischer Positivismus: Habermas/Maus.” In
Neue Theorien des Rechts, ed. Sonja Buckel, Ralph Christensen, and Andreas Fischer-
Lescano, 3–28. Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius.
Ridder, Helmut. 1954. “Meinungsfreiheit.” In Die Grundrechte: Handbuch der Theorie und
Praxis der Grundrechte, ed. Franz L. Neumann, Hans Carl Nipperdey, and Ulrich
Scheuner, 2:243–290. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot.
——. 1960. Zur verfassungsrechtlichen Stellung der Gewerkschaften. Stuttgart: Fischer.
——. 1968. “Ex oblivione malum: Randnoten zum deutschen Partisanenprogreß.” In
Gesellschaft, Recht und Politik: Wolfgang Abendroth zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Heinz
Maus, 305–332. Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand.
——. 1975. Die soziale Ordnung des Grundgesetzes: Leitfaden zu den Grundrechten einer
demokratischen Verfassung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.
——. 1979. “Der Demokratiebegriff des Grundgesetzes.” In Zur Ideologie der “streitbaren
Demokratie,” Argument Studienheft 32, ed. Helmut Ridder, 10–20. Berlin: Argument.
16
MORAL AND ETHICAL
DISCOURSES
The Distinction in General
GEORG LOHMANN
F
rom the beginning, Jürgen Habermas has elaborated his theory of
discursive ethics by engaging with Hegel’s critique of Kant. He
shares both these philosophers’ view that morality, under the con-
ditions of modernity, can no longer be understood—as had been the case for
Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas—by way of all-encompassing prescriptions
concerning the “good” or “happy” life (eudaimonia, summum bonum).
Kant distinguishes between questions involving happiness (which may be
answered in a way that varies from individual to individual) and questions
about what is unconditionally Good in a moral sense (which admits only
responses that are valid in general terms). In like fashion—albeit on a different
conceptual basis—Habermas makes a distinction between moral and ethical
issues. For him, moral discourses raise the question, from an impartial per-
spective, of “what is equally good for all”—that is, what represents a matter of
unconditional duty. Ethical discourses, on the other hand, concern “what is
good for me/us.” “Ethics”—as the phrase “discursive ethics” makes clear—no
longer refers to the “science of morality” (Wissenschaft der Moral); rather, it
has the new, specific meaning of a doctrine concerning individual and/or col-
lective forms of life that deserve to be called “good” on the basis of reflective
evaluation.
Habermas limits moral discourses to matters of interpersonal justice and
solidarity. Ethical discourses, on the other hand, address questions of the
good life in view of the plurality of values (that is, the fact that human existence
and action can assume many different forms). Habermas follows Kant in mak-
ing the difference hinge on the unconditional and universal claim to justifica-
tion that moral duties imply. At the same time, however, he admits there are
ways to conceptualize the connection between morality and ethics that differ
from the notion of the “highest good” his forebear endorses (see chapter 9).
As occurs throughout his writings, Habermas presents his own ideas by
engaging with the writings of both classical and contemporary authors. In a
134 Contexts
first step, he discusses the criticisms that Hegel directed at Kant. His next
move is to elaborate the distinction between morality and ethics by taking up
the findings of developmental psychology and sociology—in particular, the
works of George Herbert Mead, Émile Durkheim, and Lawrence Kohlberg; on
this basis, Habermas elaborates his own comprehensive theory of rationality.
Finally, he makes the finer points of his insights clear by contrasting his views
with those of contemporaries, subjecting the theoretical edifice he has con-
structed to metaethical revision. It remains to be seen whether the incorpora-
tion of bioethics will occasion further modifications in Habermas’s theory.
Hegel’s Critique of Kant and the Distinction Between

Morality and Ethics
Habermas tests his distinction between moral and ethical discourses by seeing
whether they stand up to “Hegel’s objections to Kant” (Justification, 1ff.). Hegel
sets his own conception of mediating and foundational ethics (Sittlichkeit)
against both the “abstract universalism of justice” found in Kant’s notion of
autonomy and against the “concrete particularism of the common good”
advocated by the tradition following Aristotle and Aquinas. In particular,
Hegel opposes the empty formalism, abstract universalism, “impotence of the
ought,” and “moral terror” (Gesinnungsterror) of Kantian ethics. In his discur-
sive ethics, Habermas seeks to preserve the Kantian separation of morals
from ethics while, at the same time, reformulating the mediating functions
that Hegel’s Sittlichkeit performs (without, however, granting it positive
substance).
To counter Hegel’s charge of formalism, Habermas affirms that the princi-
ple of moral universalizability, although a schematic notion, is neither empty
nor tautological. Instead—and as Kant had already observed—it verifies, but
does not generate, the moral contents of the maxims (or norms) that govern
action. Habermas recognizes that Hegel’s objection to Kant’s morality of
respect (Achtungsmoral) is more substantive. Verification of maxims, which
occurs regularly in day-to-day existence, entails abstraction—that is, the
separation between moral norms (which can be universalized) and value
declarations (which have an ethical meaning that relates to one “good life” in
particular). This implies the loss of concreteness and meaning (Inhaltlichkeit)
and therefore reveals the arbitrariness and irrelevancy of abstract morality.
Against this view, Habermas declares that universal and formal norms, once
they are verified by discursive ethics, do in fact possess positive moral content,
which then performs the ethical mediation outlined in Hegel’s system, albeit
in a “weak” capacity.
Moral and Ethical Discourses: The Distinction in General 135
Because individuals only achieve individualization through intersubjective

relations of recognition (Postmetaphysical, 170ff.), the integrity of their being
can be protected only through “interweaving relations of respect that are
necessary for life” (ein lebensnotwendiges Geflecht reziproker Anerkennungs-
verhältnisse). Universal norms verified by discourse assure that the same
consideration will be shown to the interests of all and their individual liber-
ties; that is, universal norms honor demands of justice and solidarity. More-
over, they protect the intersubjective relations of recognition to which subjects
owe their individuality in the first place and, thus, “the social bond that unites
humanity as a whole” (Justification, 130). In this respect, Habermas’s discourse
ethics goes beyond Kant, reconstructing “the concrete totality of . . . existen-
tial orientations within which the limited role, but also the existential signifi-
cance, of morality first becomes comprehensible” (Justification, 70). Human
rights represent a particularly noteworthy example (Justification, 91).
The way Habermas responds to the objection he imagines Hegel making to
his own project is significant inasmuch as it raises the question of how his
(implicitly) universalistic conception of justice fits with assessments of the
“good life” in intellectual terms. Habermas asks “whether any concept of jus-
tice can claim universal validity” independent of “a particular idea of the good
life” (Justification, 121); in so doing, he anticipates a point often raised by his
critics. For now, it is enough to note that moral principles “relate to damaged
life in the negative” instead of referring “to the good life affirmatively” (121;
translation modified).
Habermas responds to Hegel’s objection to abstract universalism by affirm-
ing that discourse ethics does not disregard or repress concrete and particular
ways of life; nor does it neglect the consequences of actions. At the same time,
the matter requires that one distinguish, in terms clearer than Kant’s, between
questions of justification and matters of application (Justification, 35–36).
Here, Habermas seeks to counter the claim that universal norms always
require “situated” judgment. He observes that topoi of general and “impartial
application” exist, which permit moral and ethical lines of argument to be
distinguished in practical cases. (On this subject, he refers to a relevant study
by Klaus Günther [1988].)
Still more important for the distinction between morals and ethics is
Hegel’s objection to the “impotence of the ought” because universalistic
morality that fails to determine what the good life means must remain of no
consequence. Ancient virtue ethics, conceptions of morality that follow Hume,
and Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit all begin with the problem of motivation, so
to speak—that is, they subordinate matters of justification to the forces and
circumstances that actually give rise to moral actions. Habermas offers three
ways to “solve” the problem of motivation in universal morality, all of which
136 Contexts
concern the impulses underlying lived ethics in different ways—without,

for all that, giving up the distinction between ethics and morality.
Kant insists on the autonomy of reason and finds, in the moral wellspring
of respect (Achtung), a motivating instance that reason effects on itself. Wary
of such idealism, Habermas avers that the moral insights achieved in discourse
“do not of themselves lead to autonomous actions” (Justification, 14; emphasis
added); at the same time, however, he grants that they provide motivation in
the narrow sense. The “weak force” of “good (epistemic) reasons” is evident in
moral sensations—especially the stirrings of a “bad conscience” that are felt
when we act against better judgment (Inclusion, 35–36; Wellmer 1986). Of
course, if one pursues this line of thought, it becomes clear that impartial and
rational reasons do not produce the effect in question; rather, it occurs inas-
much as one views impartial reasons as if they were one’s own—an operation
that means they have been integrated into a personal conception of the proper
way of living and acting (Justification, 14; Korsgaard 1996).
Habermas anticipates an objection to the position he articulates—namely,
the view that “insight is compatible with weakness of will. Without the support
of complementary processes of socialization and structures of identity” (Justi-
fication, 33; emphasis added), moral judgment remains contingent and must
therefore be supported externally. Much earlier—in 1961—Habermas had
addressed the matter of such favorable conditions (in social life) when discuss-
ing assumptions of historical progress that were articulated in Scottish moral
philosophy: “The sociology of the Scottish thinkers could confine itself to
an interplay with the political public sphere that was ready to ‘meet it halfway’
in order to give individual action an orientation, in furthering practically—in
the narrow sense—the historical process” (Theory and Practice, 78). Ever since,
Habermas has “distributed” progressive assumptions about proper actions
between social evolution and the moral-political public spheres that “meet it
halfway.” Likewise, he has stressed that formal and procedural discourses rely
on favorable social circumstances in order to be effective in other contexts; in
some measure, unexpressed hope derived from the philosophy of history has
always been present in his thought (Lohmann 1998).
Since factors like the preceding—“weak force” and the happy event of
“meeting halfway”—are too uncertain and vague, Habermas recognizes the
necessity of supplementing morality with law/rights. “The validity of moral
commands is subject to the condition that they are universally adhered to as
the basis for a general practice” (Justification, 34). First in a debate with
Thomas McCarthy (1991; Justification, 88ff.), then with more nuance (Facts,
104ff.; Inclusion, 256ff.), Habermas sees mandatory laws as guaranteeing
the rationality of following moral judgments; needless to say, laws provide
other kinds of motivation, too (which are, admittedly, external to moral
decision).
Finally, Habermas responds to Hegel’s charge of “moral terror” by means of

his own moderate philosophy of history, which denies—in pragmatic fashion
and less forcefully than Kant—that any “prior telos” (Justification, 12) exists
for the course of human events. Habermas’s view is comparatively negative (in
the Benjaminian sense) in that it “sublates” the wrongs of the past while deny-
ing that moral theory possesses “substantive content” (Justification, 90).
Rationalizations and Aspects of Practical Reason
Habermas’s distinction between moral discourses and ethical ones, then, is

not to be understood as sharply and simply as often occurs. At the same time,
it has proven sufficiently provocative to occasion lengthy critiques, discus-
sions, and responses. Reading Mead and Durkheim (Communicative Action
[1981]), Habermas derived the “basic assumptions of a communicative ethics”
from sociology and evolutionary theory. This permitted him to identify the
difference between formal justifications of moral norms through the “universe of
discourse” (Communicative Action, 2:94–95), on the one hand, and the “clini-
cal” matter of empirically assessing individual and/or collective forms of life
(Communicative Action, 2:109ff.), on the other. In the Howison Lectures
Habermas delivered at Berkeley in 1988 (published as “Remarks on Dis-
course Ethics”), he articulated the finer points of the distinction; now, “the
good” and “the just”—complemented and “completed” by “purposiveness”
(Zweckmäßigkeit)—counted as markers of a postmetaphysical version of prac-
tical reason. The lecture gave rise to numerous responses, both critical and
appreciative (see Justification, 19–112). Although space prohibits discussion of
individual aspects of the debates, the following indicates the relevant authors
and positions.
Elaborations, Explanations, Critique
Habermas elaborates his understanding of ethical questions about the good

life (see Steinfath 1998) by taking up Charles Taylor’s (1985) notion of “strong
evaluations.” This means that, in “ethical-existential discourses,” the affected
parties must rely on “intersubjective” communication—which all can follow—
concerning “the prior telos of a consciously pursued way of life” (Justification,
12). Taylor himself (1997) and Rainer Forst (2001) have continued inquiry along
the same lines. Forst has shown that “the space of ethical justification is three-
dimensional”—that is, “subjective, intersubjective, and objective perspectives
are combined in acts of evaluation” (Forst 2001, 349ff.)—even if, at the same
time, the “subjective view” retains “priority.” Seyla Benhabib (1993) and
138 Contexts
Alasdair MacIntyre (1990; cf. Forst 2001) have critiqued this view for amount-
ing to the “privatization of the good.” Habermas avoids such charges by
affirming that questions concerning the good life (“what is good for me or us”)
must be evaluated in a context-specific manner; the issue must always be
examined in terms of what is shared (gemeinschaftlich), even if what is morally
right eludes determination in this way (Wingert 1993, 131ff.).
Moral discourses require that people “distance themselves from the life
histories and forms of life in which they actually find themselves” (Justifica-
tion, 12). That is to say: the fact that moral norms possess cognitive value—as
Habermas has affirmed (Truth, 33ff.)—means that it is necessary to occupy an
impartial standpoint that “explodes” the “subjectivity of the individual par-
ticipant’s perspective” (Justification, 12). At the same time, moral impartiality
is not—as Habermas observes, contra Thomas Nagel (1986)—the “external
standpoint” of an observer (Justification, 180–181). Nor, for that matter, is
impartiality assured when—as Ernst Tugendhat (1993, 287ff.) has argued
(along lines that are ultimately egocentric)—“an uninvolved party [ein Unbe-
teiligter] weighs the goods and harms that are at stake for any individual”
(Inclusion, 274; translation slightly modified).
Instead of following his contemporaries on these points, Habermas sees
parallels between his own view and John Rawls’s complicated, constructivist
notion of “reflective equilibrium” (Justification, 25ff.), which confirms the
conception of impartiality central to discourse ethics: a process (Verfahren)
occurring between affected parties. At the same time, Habermas criticizes
Rawls for holding that one need only conclude a “contract” following instru-
mental purposes, instead of acting on the basis of “moral insight” (Justifica-
tion, 25ff.). For this reason, he endorses Thomas Scanlon’s (1982) critique of
Rawls, which holds that “principles and rules can only meet with general
agreement, if all parties may be convinced that each of them could express
personal assent from his or her own perspective” (Habermas 1991, 58).
Habermas finds support for his position in the fact that Lawrence Kohlberg
assigns the “moral point of view” to level 6 of judgment formation, the “post-
conventional” stage (Kohlberg 1986, 220–221; see also chapter 10 of this vol-
ume); here, Kohlberg takes up Mead’s notion of abstract role playing, which
involves reciprocal changes of perspective between interlocutors. Even if
Habermas ultimately takes issue with Kohlberg’s attempt to combine univer-
sal justice and benevolence (Justification, 78ff.), nevertheless (and like Karl-
Otto Apel) he holds that the “discourse-ethical alternative” of impartiality
represents a process of judgment formation involving all parties in reciprocal
relations (Justification, 114ff.; Truth, 243ff.; Lohmann 2001).
Habermas has held fast to this definition of the moral standpoint guaran-
teeing that “what should be done” can redeem (einlösen) the cognitive and
universal demands that it makes. He defends his understanding of what is
morally right—in terms analogous to the way he understands truth—against

the positions advanced by contemporary moral philosophers (see Truth).
Although space does not permit discussion of the matter here, one should note
that he has never stopped affirming the universal and unconditional claims of
moral duty—that is to say, the priority, posited by Kant, of the Just over the
Good.
Habermas has also discussed the priority of the Just over the Good in terms
of political ethics—that is, in the context of the debate between communitari-
anism and liberalism. Habermas sides with others in the Kantian tradition
(Rawls 1971, Dworkin 1984, Nagel 1986, Apel 1988). From this position, he
critiques opposing views that affirm that the Good has priority over the Just
(e.g., MacIntyre 1985, Sandel 1982, Walzer 1983, Nussbaum 1986, Spaemann
1989, Taylor 1989; for an attempt to strike a balance, see Seel 1993). At the same
time—and especially in his discussions of Rawls’s (1995) political liberalism
(Justification, 25ff.; Inclusion, 49–102)—Habermas has made it clear that,
although he agrees with the latter’s proceduralist and constructivist approach
(to say nothing of the stress he places on justice), he cannot endorse the way it
is grounded. In particular, Rawls’s theorem of “overlapping consensus” earns
his criticism because of the way it qualifies the superiority of modern, “reason-
able world interpretations” over those of premodern (or non-Western) societ-
ies, which (so the argument goes) fail to “transcend the social and historical
context of [their] particular form[s] of life” (Justification, 24).
Throughout such exchanges, Habermas’s persistent defense of the auton-
omy of abstract moral discourse has prompted him to reject all attempts to
ground moral universalism in an ethical framework. This applies to Taylor’s
(1989) moral universalism in terms of a modern ethics of goods (Güterethik)
(Justification, 69ff.), MacIntyre’s (1988) antirelativistic theory of untranslat-
ability (Justification, 102ff.), and Richard Rorty’s contextual pragmatism
(Truth, 96ff.). Habermas also rejects efforts to interpret cognitive aspects of
universal morality in terms of realism (Truth); nor does he believe it possible
to subvert the difference between values and norms by way of the “dense ethi-
cal vocabulary” afforded by “moral facts” (Putnam 2002; Truth, 213ff.).
General Ethics of the Good Life?
If, in these discussions, Habermas has sought to defend the foundational dis-
tinction between moral and ethical discourses, his recent engagement with
the challenges posed by developments in the modern biological sciences sug-
gests a change in the way he understands ethical discourse. Ernst Tugendhat
(1984) already tried to develop a formal concept of the good life that held up
to the justificatory demands of Kantian morality. Habermas, too, spoke of
140 Contexts
general “characteristics of ‘the’ good life” (Justification, 123). Although he

stresses, in an intellectual exchange with Martin Seel, that “formal determina-
tion of the good” amounts to paternalism and/or tautology (Seel 1995; Inclu-
sion, 22–23), Habermas nevertheless takes up considerations offered by
Tugendhat and Seel when he declares: “the good at the core of the right
reminds us that moral consciousness depends on a particular self-understand-
ing of moral persons who recognize that they belong to the moral commu-
nity” (Inclusion, 29).
The challenges of bioethics and the threat of “liberal eugenics” have
prompted Habermas to articulate this implicitly ethical quantum with greater
clarity, and in two regards. First, he has renewed the Kierkegaardian discourse
of responsibility for one’s own life (Biographie)—a matter addressed in earlier
works (Communicative Action, 2:141; Justification, 66). In a remarkable inter-
pretation, Habermas has recently shown how Kierkegaard, by way of the
formal concept of “being-able-to-be-oneself ” (Future, 5ff.), arrived at a post-
metaphysical and negativistic conception of the unmisspent life. Whoever is
the “responsible author” of his own existence is determined only with respect
to the measure in which he fails himself; because concrete matters are not at
issue, this mode of being is compatible with the unconditional demand of
autonomy in moral discourse. At the same time, the moral agent depends on
something other, which transcends him: for Kierkegaard, this means God;
for Habermas, it is the “transsubjective . . . power of the intersubjective”
(Future, 11).
This point leads to the second criterion Habermas uses to determine, in
formal terms, a “good life” in human community that is also adequate to the
conditions of universal morality. Once more, he takes up the “social bond”
(Justification, 18) in which morality must be “embedded”—a context he calls
“species ethics” (Future, 80ff.). Here, the “unavailability [Unverfügbarkeit] of
the biological foundations of personal identity” (Future, 27; translation slightly
modified) pertaining to morality gives rise to “an intersubjectively shared
‘we’-perspective” that makes possible “value orientations which can be gener-
alized” (Future, 55).
The fact that “an assessment of morality as a whole” stands at issue does not
mean, for Habermas, that it is “itself . . . a moral issue”; rather, it is “an ethical
one, a judgment which is part of the ethics of the species” (Future, 73; Lohm-
ann 2004). Species ethics makes plain the imperative that communicative
theory places at the heart of everyday action: that, inasmuch as we understand
ourselves as moral beings, we cannot do otherwise than entertain an evalua-
tive and constitutive relation to intersubjective conditions of morality apply-
ing to humanity as a whole.
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17
THE CONSTITUTIONALIZATION
OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
JEAN L. COHEN
S
ince the mid-1990s Habermas has been articulating a project for a
future world order involving the “further constitutionalization
of international law.” Wed to the Kantian (1991) conception of
cosmopolitanism, his goal is nonetheless to show that a global legal system
with binding hard law, coupled to a politically constituted world society that is
neither a world state nor a loose confederation of states, is conceptually con-
ceivable. The cosmopolitan multilayered global political system he proposes
would consist not only of individuals (world citizens) but also of states that
would nonetheless not be relegated to mere parts of an overarching hierarchi-
cal superstate. The project is to bind global, regional, and national power to
law to facilitate the peaceful resolution of disputes, while protecting individ-
ual freedom through human rights.
Thus, like other eminent critics of institutional cosmopolitanism (Rawls
1999, Nagel 2005, Walzer 1992) who reject a world republic as the wrong model,
Habermas seeks to develop a “feasible utopia” for the global political system of
world society. Unlike Rawls, he insists that membership in the supranational
political organization of that society be inclusive of all states rather than an
association restricted to liberal and decent societies. Unlike Nagel, who
restricts the circumstances of distributive and procedural justice to the nation-
state, he argues that transnational forms of governance already replacing the
regulatory state entail the requisite degree of coercion and impact on people’s
lives to perpetrate injustice, so they are a suitable referent for a global domestic
politics. Unlike Walzer, Habermas rejects the unmediated moralization of a
global rights-based politics that goes with the revival of just-war discourse.
For Habermas, international law matters but should be transformed into
cosmopolitan law regulating both states and world citizens. A cosmopolitan
condition that does not involve the erection of a world state requires the fur-
ther constitutionalization of international law.
Habermas argues that the concept of a binding legal system and constitu-
tion can be applied to postnational, nonstate orders. Yet under the influence of
Hauke Brunkhorst (2005), Bardo Fassbender (1998), and Klaus Günther (2001),
144 Contexts
he weds the Kantian conception of a cosmopolitan condition to a Kelsenian

monist conception of a global constitution. The tensions and ambiguities in
his project can be traced to this fateful conceptual framework.
The Cosmopolitan Condition
The revival of cosmopolitan discourse and the project of constitutionalization

are Habermas’s response to a diagnosis of crisis of the international state
system, of the irrelevance of the old discourse and metaprinciple of national
sovereignty, and of increasingly anachronistic conceptions of multilateral
institutions as mere treaty organizations. It is also meant as an alternative to
the two most alarming contemporary projects: an American-dominated neo-
imperial world order invoking human rights and security to remoralize poli-
tics at the expense of the existing constraints of international law and the
revival of sheer (balance of) power politics by new great powers willing to flex
their muscle and eager to become twenty-first-century “Großräume,” as exem-
plified by Russia’s recent foray into Georgia, unrestrained by multilateral
organizations or international law.
Kant is the starting point of Habermas’s theoretical reflections and the
impetus behind his effort to find a “third conceptual path” that adapts cosmo-
politan intent to contemporary conditions. Accordingly, a cosmopolitan con-
dition is a legal (and moral) condition in which law serves as a framework
within which peace can be connected with freedom. There is a “conceptual
connection” between a freedom-guaranteeing and peace-securing legal
order, and the cosmopolitan extension of a condition of civil liberty first
established within the constitutional state is a command of practical reason
for Kant as well as for Habermas. The latter reminds us that Kant grounded
every legal order from the original right that attaches to each person qua
human being: “Every individual has a right to equal liberties under universal
laws” (Inclusion, 180). This “grounding” of human rights in a moral right,
however, does not obviate the necessity of a legal order that first constitutes
the basic human rights. A cosmopolitan condition involves the creation of such
law-governed relations regulating the constitution of a community of states
and individuals.
Kantian universalism stipulates that all human beings are the bearers of
rights, and all modern legal orders must have an “essentially individualistic”
character. “The point of cosmopolitan law is . . . that it bypasses the collective
subjects of international law and directly establishes the legal status of the
individual subjects by granting them unmediated membership in the associa-
tion of free and equal world citizens” (Inclusion, 181; for Kant, then, a cosmo-
politan legal order would have direct effect and supremacy and construct
The Constitutionalization of International Law 145
individuals as bearers of actionable subjective rights). Habermas will add to

this “unmediated” “not exclusive”—states are also members of the global
political system. The moral justification of this cosmopolitan condition is
monist, although membership in the politically constituted world society is
dualist (collective and individual) and its structure, multilayered (with supra-,
trans-, and national levels).
There’s another impetus behind Habermas’s project of constitutionaliza-
tion: the need to counter the arguments of Schmittians, who equate the idea of
a human rights–based cosmopolitanism, “just-war” discourse, and the demo-
tion of sovereignty to a bundle of conditional prerogatives to an unmediated
and dangerous moralization of international law and politics that risks under-
mining the unity of states, legally pacified domestic constitutional orders, and
realistic foreign policy. Habermas’s answer is that while it is possible to justify
human rights exclusively from the universal (cosmopolitan) moral point of
view, they have a juridical character nonetheless. Basic individual rights are
concrete legal entitlements and thus belong structurally to a positive and
coercive freedom-guaranteeing legal order that founds actionable individual
legal claims. At present, international human rights only have a weak force in
international law and, despite important developments, still await institution-
alization within the framework of a cosmopolitan order that is only now
beginning to take shape. If we take the step from an international law of states
to a cosmopolitan law of individuals, the charge of moralization of politics can
be parried. Basic human rights would have to be legally guaranteed at the
global level and the consequences of their violation specified. This is part of
the task of the “further constitutionalization” of international law.
Constitution and Constitutionalization Beyond the State
Habermas thus attempts to wed cosmopolitan morality not to a world state

but to a cosmopolitan legal condition appropriate for a dualistic world society
composed of individuals and states and organized into a “multilayered” global
political system. Apparently, he shares Kant’s view that a world state would
entail despotism, and, presumably, he also wants to avoid the violence it would
take to get there. Given the fact that states still control the means of force
and cling to their (however diminished) sovereignty, under present conditions
the path (and the likely outcome) would be an imperial one.
What concept of constitution is adequate to the job, and why accord states
such a key role in the global political system? On sound realist grounds,
Habermas contends that states will in the foreseeable future remain the most
important actors in the global political system, if not the only ones. But there
are also normative reasons for according the state a key role in a global
146 Contexts
political system regulated by cosmopolitan law. Only within states can we

attain full congruence between the subject and the author of the law, for only
within states are there administrative mechanisms able coercively to ensure
equal inclusion of citizens in the legislative process, which in turn ensures
impartiality regarding the institutionalization of their equal liberties (Inclu-
sion, 141).
Although state building and constitutionalism have often gone hand in
hand in modern history, Habermas distinguishes conceptually between the
concepts of constitution and state, arguing that the nation-state is not the only
form of political order amenable to constitutionalization (Inclusion, 131).
His point is a double one: First, that constitutionalization of international
law need not follow the same path as that of the modern state. Second, the
constitution of the global political system needn’t take the same form. So,
what concept of constitution is appropriate for nonstate global orders consist-
ing of individuals and states?
The normatively demanding concept of constitution just invoked, that is,
the endpoint of the process of constitutionalization of the modern state, is an
ideal one that suits the kind of comprehensive domination, control of force,
and jurisdiction specific to the modern state. It is, however, in Habermas’s
view, inapplicable to the postnational global order. It would be a mistake to
construe the constitutionalization of international law as a continuation of the
development of the constitutional state at the global level. The latter involves a
shift on the international level from a nonhierarchical association of collective
actors (states) involved in a legal community based on the principle of sover-
eign equality (international society) to the supra- and transnational organiza-
tions of a cosmopolitan order regulating a dualistic international community
composed of states and individuals. In light of their nonstate character—
supranational organizations do not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of
force, lack the tax-based administrative and military apparatus of the modern
state, and are functionally delimited rather than comprehensive structures of
domination—there is no need to insist that their constitutionalization con-
forms to the demanding type of republican constitution both Kant and Rous-
seau had in mind and on which Habermas’s ideal model is based.
Instead, following the lead of Hauke Brunkhorst and Christoph Möllers,
Habermas suggests that the path of constitutionalization for politically orga-
nized world society is more analogous to the trajectory of premodern legal
orders characteristic of the Ständestaat (corporative state) as reformulated in
the liberal version of constitutionalization found within the English rule of
law and the German Rechtsstaat traditions. Constitutional limitation of domi-
nation through the division of governmental authority and securing of group
rights—the premodern formula—was reinterpreted in the individualistic
terms of modern law and human rights in English liberalism and in German
constitutionalism on the basis of a functional division of powers (between leg-

islation, administration, and adjudication). Accordingly, the “liberal” type of
constitutionalization involves the division and legal regulation of existing
power relations, as distinct from republican revolutionary constitutionalism
that overturns established powers, founds a new political authority grounded
in the rational will of the united citizenry, and precludes any residue of state
power behind the law, which remains untouched. It is the former rather than
the latter that is appropriate to the supranational level.
The analogy does seem strong between the Ständestaat and the constitu-
tional charters of international organizations like the United Nations and the
European Union, both of which contain and balance autonomous political
powers and affirm basic privileges of member states (legal standing, noninter-
vention, cultural integrity, etc.). If the dual reference to collective and individ-
ual actors is made explicit in the further constitutionalization of international
law, then the analogy with liberal constitutionalism could seem appropriate. A
supranational constitution would regulate the interplay of collective actors
with the goal of establishing mutual restrictions on their power; they would
direct the exercise of power governed by treaties into channels that conform
with human rights, and they would leave the task of applying and develop-
ing law to courts without being exposed directly to democratic inputs and
controls.
This is the model of constitution that would allegedly be appropriate to the
multilayered structure of a politically constituted global community. How-
ever, despite the superficial analogy, the model of the Ständestaat is not appo-
site to modern constitutional discourse because it did not entail the bringing
of autonomous powers under law. Instead it remained a bargaining arrange-
ment between autonomous powers in which the stronger party stood to win
and in which the unequal privileges (“rights”) of each estate were maintained
in a constellation of force. The Ständestaat was an “order” that did not involve
a state, but neither did it involve anything resembling a modern constitution
in the formal or material sense. It is unclear how the elite bargains in that con-
text set limits to political domination.
What Habermas understands as liberal constitutionalism did involve the
development of constitutionalism and a modern conception of subjective
individual rights. But liberal constitutionalism also requires strong states,
their internal separation of powers notwithstanding. Indeed, the liberal ver-
sion of constitutionalism is secretly statist because it presupposes a strong
“third-party enforcer” to manage the shift from estate privileges to individual
rights, to ensure the impartial granting of equal liberties along with the Glei-
chschaltung of the autonomous power bases of the Stände (corporate groups)
into a unified egalitarian, sovereign, individualistic legal and political order.
Thus neither of these two orders and no combination thereof provides an
148 Contexts
appropriate model for a global constitution linked to a nonstate political order

that tames power by bringing it under law and dividing it. The problem is this:
If major powers remain the masters of the constitution, as they do in the
Ständestaat’s contractual strategic arrangements, then one has not created a
cosmopolitan condition or a constitution in Habermas’s sense. But if, as per
the liberal model, a shift from the (contractual) international law of states to a
cosmopolitan (constitutional) law of individuals is to occur, then the question
of enforcement becomes central, as does the legitimacy of enforcement power
accrued at the center. It does not help to insist that the dual reference to collec-
tive and individual actors marks a “fundamental conceptual distinction”
between the “thoroughly individualistic” legal order of a federal world republic
and the politically constituted world society (Inclusion, 135). For in the liberal
model there would be no autonomous states within the state. It is unclear to
what degree a Gleichschaltung of autonomous sovereign states should occur
and in favor of what sort of global power.
Habermas himself raised the disturbing question as to what would prevent
a “liberal” constitution beyond the state from being anything more than a
hegemonic legal façade. His concern stemmed from the deviation from his
own ideal concept of a constitution (the republican one), which turns on the
coequivalence of human rights, popular sovereignty, and democratic legiti-
macy. The liberal model of constitutionalization breaks the direct link between
the rule of law and democratic legitimacy and dissolves the congruence
between the subjects and authors of the law.
Habermas answers in several steps. First, he insists that the channels of
democratic legitimation between supranational constitutions and the demo-
cratic constitutional state must not be severed. On the substantive level, he
argues that the normative content of basic rights, legal principles, and crimi-
nal codes that are developed in the charters of supranational organizations
evolved from learning processes tried and tested in constitutions of the repub-
lican type within democratic nation-states. In this respect, the constitutional-
ization of international law retains a derivative status because it depends on
“advances” from those states. Because states remain the key players and the
final arbiters (as they alone retain military forces), they can provide indirect
legitimation for the liberal constitution of the global political system even
though they now have to share this arena with other entities. Second, Haber-
mas maintains that since the supranational level of the global political system
would not entail a state but “only” a functional organization restricted to the
tasks of securing peace and protecting human rights, it would not need the
same high threshold of legitimacy that comprehensive coercive legal orders of
states require. “Luckily,” the clear negative duties of a universalistic morality
of justice—the duty not to engage in wars of aggression and not to violate basic
human rights—are already consonant common cultural dispositions around
the world and thus inform our contemporary global political culture. Back-
ing by a supportive and vigilant global civil public sphere would also help.
Accordingly, the global political constitutional order has neither the same
sort of legitimacy needs nor the same requirements of solidarity as the demo-
cratic nation-state.
The Institutional Model
This brings us to the debates around the institutional model of the global
political system. Habermas imagines a tripartite structure consisting of a
global, a transnational, and a national level that would be the referent of “lib-
eral” constitutionalization. On the supranational level, the political system
would be organized into a “suitably reformed” world organization based on
universal membership that includes all states and individuals (qua citizens of
the world) but that is restricted to the functions of securing peace and promot-
ing human rights in an “effective, nonselective” fashion. On the transnational
level, the allegedly more political issue of devising a global domestic politics
addressing economic matters is ascribed to continental regimes on the model
of the European Union and/or twenty-first-century great powers such as the
United States, China, Russia, India, etc. Political plurality and international
relations would continue to exist on this level, although recourse to war and
violations of human rights would be precluded. On the national level, states
would continue to exist, retaining their monopoly of force, making this avail-
able when needed to implement human rights and policy decisions of the
other levels and generating the crucial resource of indirect legitimacy for the
supranational level. But they would no longer be sovereign.
This seems like a sober and feasible utopia. However, when framed in terms
of the creation of a cosmopolitan condition, it appears ambiguous and has
generated a series of critiques. As Scheuerman (2008) and Walker (2005) point
out, deep disagreements about which human rights should become hard law
and enforceable on the global level make the argument about the nonpolitical
nature of rights and the lower threshold of legitimacy for the supranational
level unconvincing. Even if there is a general consensus over their function—
legalized human rights in the global political system would determine the
threshold of tolerance below which some kind of forceful intervention is
deemed appropriate—which rights rise to this level is a highly contentious
issue.
Advocates of a more ambitious cosmopolitan reading, such as Lafont
(2008), challenge the specific assignment of competences to the different units
of the system. The claim is that leaving socioeconomic issues (global domestic
politics) to the logic of regional compromises screens out issues of global
150 Contexts
economic injustice and blocks legitimate claims to distributive justice. Accord-

ing to Lafont, cosmopolitan principles require that bargaining among regional
powers be conducted against a background of a global system that prevents
compromises from generating economic injustice for other individuals. In
view of the tight connection between justice and human rights, it is incum-
bent upon the global political institution to guarantee the socioeconomic con-
ditions necessary to achieve the human-rights goals of the charter and to
frame the scope of basic human-rights provisions in these terms.
Others, for example Schmalz-Bruns (2007), question whether it is possible
to reconcile the Kantian cosmopolitan starting point with the insistence on
retaining the kinds of attachments, solidarities, and legitimacy-generating
forms of democratic participation that have been achieved only on the level of
the nation-state. Although it is conceivable that solidarities and “constitu-
tional patriotism” could emerge on the regional level, these would still be
particular vis-à-vis wider cosmopolitan obligations. The dualistic member-
ship of the global political system creates contradictory imperatives for
citizens. It is unclear how the perspective of nationally or regionally based citi-
zenship could be reconciled with that of the world citizen, especially if the
former may legitimately be oriented by and demand governments to pursue
national or regional self-interest in lieu of the universal standards of global
justice (cosmopolitan morality) that should orient the world citizen.
The Model Revised
Habermas recently revised his model in a more cosmopolitan direction in

response to these criticisms. He openly asserts his commitment to Kelsenian
legal monism, ascribing supremacy to the global political constitution over the
domestic legal orders of member states now construed as subordinate parts of
a hierarchically structured single legal system. This finds its political analogue
in a world organization that not only represents the unity of the global legal
system but also embodies the international community of states and citizens
in its reformed central instance: a representative and legislative General
Assembly. The latter has two key functions: devising appropriate standards of
justice to guide transnational negotiation systems and a legislative role
restricted to elaborating the meaning of human rights; conflict is confined to
interpretation of the constitutional charter.
It is worth noting the shift in the conception of constitution and constitu-
tionalization that accompanies these revisions. It seems that Habermas has
embraced a version of the republican conception, for we are now told that the
juridification of world politics is a matter of founding, involving two catego-
ries of founding subjects: constitutional states and individual world citizens.
Partly because the decision-making competences of the global governance

institutions would intervene deeply into the social relations of member states,
they could not be legitimated by a mere treaty. Hence, the need to convene a
constituent assembly to draft a charter that could become a cosmopolitan
constitution: this could begin as an international treaty, but it would have to
be ratified via referenda and enacted in the name of citizens of the world,
echoing the formula of the European draft constitution. The product of this
constituting process would be a monistic constitutional political organization
whose legal order is in a hierarchical relationship with its member states’ con-
stitutions. Indeed, the political constitution of member states would have to
conform to the constitutional principles of the world organization.
Habermas still insists that those subjects (states) who already control the
legitimate means of violence will have to be among the key actors in the con-
stitutionalization process. He also cautions that the “monistic constitutional
political order” that is constituted should not lead to a “mediatization” of the
world of states by the authority of a world republic that ignores the “fund of
trust” accumulated in the domestic sphere, the associated loyalty of citizens,
or the distinctive national character of states and forms of life. On the other
hand, the latter must also not weaken the effectiveness and binding imple-
mentation of supra- and transnational decisions. Yet he concludes by stating
that the meaning of sovereignty has already shifted in the cosmopolitan
monist direction anticipated by Hans Kelsen. Accordingly, when relevant,
states would function as the organs of the international community, and the
legal validity of state constitutions would now clearly derive from the hierar-
chical sources in the monistic legal order, i.e., from the constitution of the
world organization.
This resolves the ambiguities of the model in ways that make it more inter-
nally consistent and cosmopolitan yet also less feasible. It is now even more
difficult to differentiate the constitutionalization process and its product from
the making of a decentered federal world republic. But all of his insights and
arguments against such a model remain valid. We are thus left with a concep-
tion of constitutionalization that is hard to defend.
References
Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2005. Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community.
Trans. Jeffrey Flynn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Fassbender, Bardo. 1998. “The United Nations Charter as Constitution of the International
Community.” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 36, no. 3: 529–619.
Günther, Klaus. 2001. “Rechtspluralismus und universaler Code der Legalität: Globalisier-
ung als rechtstheoretisches Problem.” In Die Öffentlichkeit der Vernunft und die Ver-
nunft der Öffentlichkeit, ed. Lutz Wingert and Klaus Günther, 539–567. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
152 Contexts
Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy”
and “Remarks on Legitimation Through Human Rights.” In The Post-National Constel-
lation, trans. Max Pensky, 58–129. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
——. 2006. “Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?” In
The Divided West, trans. Ciaran Cronin, 115–210. Cambridge: Polity.
——. 2007. Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik: eine Replik.”
In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth,
——. 2008. “The Constitutionalization of International Law and the Legitimation Prob-
lems of a Constitution for World Society.” Constellations 14, no. 4: 444–455.
Kant, Immanuel. 1991. “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.” In Political Writings,
trans. Hans S. Reiss, 93–130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lafont, Cristina. 2008. “Alternative Visions of a New Global Order: What Should Cosmo-
politans Hope For?” Ethics and Global Politics 1, no. 1–2: 41–60.
Nagel, Thomas. 2005. “The Problem of Global Justice.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no.
2: 113–147.
Rawls, John. 1999. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Scheuerman, William. 2008. “Global Governance Without Global Government? Haber-
mas on Postnational Democracy.” Political Theory 36, no. 1: 133–151.
Schmalz-Bruns, Rainer. 2007. “An den Grenzen der Entstaatlichung: Bemerkungen zu Jür-
gen Habermas’ Modell einer ‘Weltinnenpolitik ohne Weltregierung.’ ” In Anarchie der
kommmunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Poli-
tik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 269–293. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Walker, Neil. 2005. “Making a World of Difference? Habermas, Cosmopolitanism, and the
Constitutionalization of International Law.” European University Institute Working
Paper Law no. 2005/17.
Walzer, Michael. 1992. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustra-
tions. New York: Basic Books.
18
EUROPEAN
CONSTITUTIONALIZATION
CHRISTIAN JOERGES
F
or years now—across the continent, in all languages and lands—
talk has been animated: Europe must determine what state it finds
itself in, whether its legal system may be understood as a constitu-
tional order, whether it can—indeed, should—be democratic, what democracy
in a European union means, and what the chances of this really occurring are.
The constitutionalization of Europe involves both the analysis of actual pro-
cesses that make the phenomenon itself comprehensible and a normative frame-
work offering tools of measurement—and specifying conditions necessary—for
determining whether the emergent configurations “deserve recognition.” Yet
analytical and empirical questions are empty—and normative and institu-
tional ones are blind—if they do not relate to one another. The notion of “con-
stitutionalization” concerns this very connection: It names both the form and
the formation of Europe. It holds to what the constitutions of democratic
nation-states have achieved or promised and, at the same time, seeks to
acknowledge the fact that the circumstances framing European unification
are constantly changing. It is impossible to reach back to a blueprint, and so
constitutionalization must be understood as an ongoing process.
Since 1991, Habermas has offered transnational and transdisciplinary
points of orientation for approaching the phenomenon. Two concerns inform
his contributions: on the one hand, an altogether passionate advocacy of the
European project and, on the other, worries about the accomplishments of
democratic states to date. His concerns have come to be shared by scholars
across the academic spectrum—and especially by the political scientists and
legal theorists who dominate the field of European studies. At the same time,
however, the effect of Habermas’s interventions has remained singularly limited
to day-to-day academic activities. This circumstance relates to the twofold
orientation of Habermas’s goals. In his works theorizing legal discourse,
Habermas (1995) has penetratingly analyzed the inner connection (Zusammen-
hang) between the state under the rule of law (Rechtsstaat) and democracy—a
matter that remains inaccessible both to political scientists who observe the
causal and empirical conventions of their field and to jurists who focus on
154 Contexts
technical interpretations of authoritative texts and offer conceptually coherent

but ultimately formalistic legal doctrines (Faltering).
Specialists who honor disciplinary divides cannot appreciate Habermas’s
contributions, which are both critical and constructive. Their import becomes
clear only when one juxtaposes the questions and evaluative criteria Haber-
mas draws from his theory of legal discourse, on the one hand, and the intel-
lectual models that prevail in European constitutionalism, on the other. The
points of contrast can be illustrated in three domains of inquiry: first, ways of
“dealing with” the past; second, the European model of social welfare; and
third, the transition to “new modes of governance.” Ultimately, the spectrum
marks the neuralgic points within European constitutionalism.
Working Through the Past
The democratic constitutional state did not fall from the sky. The history of
the institution is important because it determines the possibilities open to
us—the tasks we must complete. Habermas has shown as much on the exam-
ple of Germany (e.g., Facts, 109ff., 541ff.). At present, there exists no corre-
sponding reconstruction of the European project as a whole—how it came to
be. All the same, no textbook or Sunday sermon fails to remind one of the
catastrophes and errors of the past—especially in Germany. The oft-quoted
diagnosis by Joseph H. H. Weiler (1994), that the primary concerns of Europe
are securing peace, overcoming discrimination, and increasing prosperity,
involves motivations that are high-minded and trivial at once. Such state-
ments pass over in silence the troubling legacy of the Holocaust, which defines
European identity—in negative terms—to this day, as well as the conflicts of
postwar Europe, the role played by decolonization in the reorientation of the
political map, and the current strategic interests of individual states (Judt
2006). The expansion of the European project to the east has likewise increased
the dimensions of historical factors and deepened points of socioeconomic
divergence.
It is misleading to represent the process of integration occurring in Euro-
pean law simply as a constant, institutional progression that always manages
to overcome obstacles—which, now that Soviet domination has collapsed, will
achieve a happy ending in a ratified constitution. Moreover, there is certainly
nothing more mistaken than the notion that Europe can assemble its legal
code from the bricks left over from the past, which legal historians have now
brought to light (Keiser 2005).
Habermas’s views do not fit into the rosy picture painted by (some of)
his contemporaries. His remarks concerning the historical significance
of European unification address the most sensitive points of European
European Constitutionalization 155
constitutionalization. Most recently, this occurred in the “Steinmeier Speech”

of November 7, 2007. Here, Habermas observed that the “smoldering conflict
over the future of Europe”—which continues behind the façade of everyday
politics—“gains . . . explosiveness from . . . conflicts of interest rooted . . . in the
divergent developmental paths of the nation-states and in diverse national his-
torical memories” (Faltering, 83). Prior to this, he had issued the same call to
the European public after the American invasion of Iraq on May 31, 2003
(Divided West, 39–48): here, too, Europeans were united by the burdens they
shared.
But how should debates about European constitutionalization treat the
continent’s history—or, better, its histories? What could the Convention on
the Future of Europe (2001) even have accomplished in the brief time it had to
work on its mandate? The convention did not observe silence about the past
but embellished it instead. The self-portrait offered in the preamble of the
Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, invoked, above all, the cul-
tural greatness of the continent. It made no mention of murdered Jews (whose
memory Habermas and Derrida have called to mind). Nor did anything of the
like occur when, later—at the instigation of Poland—the Intergovernmental
Conference incorporated the “bitter experiences” of a “henceforth united
Europe” into the preamble: even this small addition fell victim to thoroughgo-
ing efforts made in the Treaty of Lisbon (signed on December 13, 2007) to
avoid any and all symbolic gestures.
Is it possible to imagine another way for Europe to engage with its past?
Could Europe possibly derive legitimacy from confronting its history/
histories in ways that do not simply endorse an all-encompassing “contract for
a European constitution” and diplomatic efforts to realize—or, as the case
may be, save—the project? Germans should not insinuate anything of the
kind, Habermas tells his countrymen and -women; the way he does so, how-
ever, urges them to do precisely this (e.g., Time, 38).
The European Social Model
Even if their practical relevancy is difficult to gauge, preambles reveal a great

deal about constitutional politics. Matters are different when decisions relat-
ing to the economic and social order are at issue. Tellingly, the first great con-
troversy of constitutional politics that occurred in the early days of the Federal
Republic—which produced effects felt still today—concerned this very rela-
tionship. The positions articulated by Ernst Forsthoff and Wolfgang Abend-
roth at the conference of Staatsrechtslehrer in 1954 are still relevant. Forsthoff
argued that provisions of social welfare (Sozialstaatlichkeit) do not occupy the
same level of constitutional significance as those of law (Rechststaatlichkeit).
156 Contexts
Administration and taxation are matters of the first order, this pupil of Carl
Schmitt maintained. In contrast, Abendroth (taking up the arguments of
Hermann Heller) averred that Sozialstaatlichkeit was now a legal principle
according to the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) and therefore a matter incumbent
on legislators to address.
The debate was witnessed by a school of thought the battling academics
failed to notice—which would soon take the lead and become uncommonly
influential, first in the Federal Republic of Germany and then throughout
Europe, through the model of the “social market economy.” Like the positions
of Forsthoff and Abendroth, the “third way” this party proposed had also
been prepared under the Weimar Republic—by a group of economists and
jurists who were equally skeptical about laissez-faire liberalism and efforts to
shape and steer the economy by political means. They had declared the order-
ing of the economy to be the task of a strong state; with the help of forceful
legal prescriptions, the government would “bring out” and reinforce the inher-
ent stability of private economic activity (Manow 2001). On this view, “the
economic order and the constitution of the state” were connected on a deep
level. Both conditioned the other mutually—and therefore demanded political
recognition while, at the same time, providing the legal guidelines for political
decision making to observe.
Habermas sided with Heller and Abendroth. The positions he articulated
(especially in Structural Transformation, 229ff.) were taken up during debates
about reform in the Federal Republic—particularly by student radicals around
1968. Habermas’s way from here to the discourse theory of law elaborated in
Between Facts and Norms was long, but—at least as far as the principle of the
social state was concerned—it led in a straight line. His theory has preserved
the tradition of the social state established by Heller. Heller had already seen
clearly what Abendroth soon elaborated in detail—the fact that social justice
within the framework of the state cannot be “derived” or simply “imposed”;
instead, it must achieve legitimacy through democratic political processes,
which in turn require legal guarantees. The same insight has prompted
Habermas to proceduralize the category of laws and rights. The matter is
fundamentally compatible with constitutionalization that does not depend
on parliamentary legislation but instead counts on positive justification in
other forums and processes (even though, as Habermas admits, it functions
only to the extent that such processes deserve recognition).
For quite some time, European politics remained unaffected by these
debates. Significantly, however, German jurisprudence proved particularly
sensitive to the tension between, on the one hand, the call for democracy on
the national level and, on the other, the project of European unification.
Indeed, Germans led the effort to “immunize” the European government
against the demands of democracy. The exemplary attempt to do so occurred
when Hans Peter Ipsen (1972) sought to qualify communities merely as

“administrative units of functional integration” (Zweckverbände funktionaler
Integration) that fulfill technocratic tasks. In contrast, ordoliberalism—the
school of thought that held sway in private and economic law—held that
“Europe” would provide the opportunity to bring about a nonpolitical eco-
nomic constitution internationally, a project that had failed to be achieved on
the level of individual states (Mestmäcker 1973). In some respects, these views
represented German exceptions (Sonderwege), but both sides got on well
enough within the edifice of legal doctrine that, after 1961, had assumed the
form of the “constitutional charter” of the European Court of Justice. (That is,
they had no problems with its “direct effects”: basic economic freedoms, the
priority of European law, and the fact that the European Court of Justice itself
played a privileged role in matters of legal interpretation.)
The fact that the Treaty of Rome (1957) inaugurated European institution-
alization as a project of economic integration by dissolving the constitutional
provisions for work and social services of member states did not prove bother-
some for some time. German perspectives on the issue focused on abstract
definitions. “Integration through law” by way of the European Court of Justice
seemed to be of no concern in political terms; on a practical level—during the
“golden age” of the nation-state—there were no immediate signs of danger
for social protections, either. The situation changed fundamentally, however,
once the process of economic integration had moved forward. Calls to
strengthen the “social dimension” of Europe were heard, above all, prior to the
Maastricht Treaty (1992), which led to increased jurisdiction over economic
and employment law through the so-called social protocol, with its “agree-
ment on social policy.”
In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas examines law in the democratic
state from the perspective of discourse theory. This framework provides no
indication of “what the constitution of Europe is supposed to be.” At the same
time, the theory places demands on the legitimacy of political rule—standards
that may not simply be disregarded in the name of “Europe.” This is how I
read Habermas’s call for a European constitution in general and for preserv-
ing the “European social model” in particular. The connection between and
interdependency of democracy and the state of rule under law entails the obli-
gation to construct spaces for political action that do not deprive the citizens
of Europe of a voice in matters of social justice.
Habermas has often intervened in debates on the related issue of challenges
posed by open European markets and increasing globalization. For example,
he observes:
To the extent that Europeans wish to counterbalance the undesirable social

consequences of growing distributive inequities and seek a certain reregulation
158 Contexts
of the global economy, they must take an interest in the power to shape insti-
tutions and outcomes which would accrue to a politically effective European
Union within the circle of global players.
(Time, 96)
Pronouncements of this kind do not really match the mounting interest in

European social and employment politics. Unlike Habermas, European con-
stitutionalists treat the social implications of integration pragmatically—as
matters of managerial decision. The elimination of the social deficit produced
by the European project is not understood to provide a constitutive precondi-
tion for securing democracy in the union. Instead, constitutionalists applaud
incremental progress (or what appears as such). This holds especially for pro-
visions in the Lisbon Treaty that call for “a highly competitive market econ-
omy,” a “charter of rights,” and an “open method of coordination” where
employment and social issues are concerned.
For all that, Europe by no means has the necessary conditions for a social
democracy at the ready. And so—posthumously, unnoticed by legislators, and
behind the backs of the continent’s citizenry—Forsthoff has gained the upper
hand against Heller. In this respect, French voters were not mistaken in voting
against the proposed Constitution of the European Union.
Transition to “New Modes of Governance”
Bad prospects for success would not provide sufficient grounds to abandon
experiments in “new modes of governance.” In terms of constitutional politics,
however, such new methods—and particularly the “open method of coordina-
tion”—have occasioned concern that, if the social state is not preserved, the
rule of law may be imperiled.
Even so, compelling reasons exist to turn away from the “community
method” of governance. Tellingly, forms of coordinated action first emerged
in the sphere of agricultural politics, which is strongly communitarized. As
regulatory practices extended into the spheres of worker, environmental, and
consumer protection—a process that accompanied the development of domes-
tic markets—the need for an active “political administration” increased dra-
matically. The advisory structure that emerged in the context of agricultural
policy flourished as “comitology” in many fields of regulatory politics. Soon,
many “European agencies” that had little legal power but great capacity for
practical intervention had joined in. The “open method of coordination” ini-
tially conceived for the social sector was transferred to, and implemented in,
more and more spheres. In point of fact, this form of rule can now be restrained
only with difficulty by legal means. This difficulty involves both the new
“governance arrangements” that solidify connections between national and
European actors and the influence of experts of every kind, who now count as
indispensable in even the slightest matters.
Since irreversible developments in political arenas of great significance are
at issue, the legal problematic of how they relate to the agenda of European
constitutionalism should be considered a high priority. The core question, in
constitutional terms, is whether one may see, in “new modes of governance,” a
kind of “democratic experimentalism” that dissolves legal categories into
communication (for this perspective, see, above all, Sabel and Zeitlin 2008) or
whether law can react constructively to the fact that traditional modes of
steering are being replaced by new forms of procedure (Joerges 2007). In the
meanwhile, European political practice has come to be shaped by institutions
that observe processes of decision making in a precise way but at the same
time—inasmuch as they privilege expert opinion—disregard both regional
differences and the public sphere within civil society. This holds especially for
newer agencies, even though European comitology also resists demands for
any form of constitutionalization that would assign it the reduced role of serv-
ing only in an advisory capacity (i.e., offering regulatory suggestions subject to
reversal); European constitutionalism grants it little more than room for “leg-
work” (Time).
Neuralgic Points of Constitutionalism
The “social state” has emerged as a stumbling block for European constitu-
tionalization. In the most current redaction of documents, the matter has
been neglected: politicians and political scientists promise “gentle” alterna-
tives, and the citizens of “Old Europe” express their displeasure when asked
directly. The European Court of Justice has not seized the initiative in this
seeming dead-end. In a series of cases involving conflicts of interest between
“New European” wishes to enter the market and “Old European” concerns
about social protection, the rulings of the court have set European primary
and secondary rights above national employment law—emphasizing that the
right to strike remains protected. The details of such case law are extraordi-
narily complicated (see Joerges and Rödl 2009), but the operative principles
are very simple: (1) the precedence of primary rights encompasses national
employment laws, even when it stands in conflict with them; (2) the immedi-
ate effect of civil liberties means that not just member states but also unions
must observe them; (3) despite the limited number of spheres of European
jurisdiction, the incipient European social model takes precedence over
160 Contexts
national law; and (4) the limited compass of European secondary law (that is,
its restricted sphere of precedence) is supposed to take the sense of fundamen-
tal liberties into account.
It may not be immediately apparent how these provisions, formulated as
they are in legalese, bear on constitutional matters. In fact, however, their rel-
evance is dramatic, for here the European Court of Justice has elevated its
position to that of pouvoir constituant in the European Union. In so doing, it
radicalizes the ordoliberal decoupling of the economic from the social con-
stitution—which according to the theory of social market economy, are
“interdependent”—by assigning supremacy to the former. The German Fed-
eral Constitutional Court has opposed such measures in its determinative
rulings—but European legislators cannot follow this lead.
Is critiquing the revocation of the social state hopelessly quixotic? Should
one expect that preserving the national responsibilities of Old Europe will
lead to compensatory developments in the emergent international order? Is
Habermas not right when he criticizes attempts made by the Social Democrats
to “intercept [auffangen], within the framework of the nation-state, the
risks that economic globalization entails for the labor market and systems of
social security”? “Couldn’t this goal be better achieved by harmonizing the
corresponding policies within the larger economic territory of Europe, or at
least within the Eurozone?” (Faltering, 105). The uncertainties posed by these
matters cannot be overcome. At the same time, it is clear that the lines of argu-
ment the European Court of Justice has offered do not hold up to criticism. As
protests by unions across Europe have shown, it is likely that such judgments
will ultimately undermine the court’s authority.
The discourse theory of law, as a consequence of the recent developments
sketched above, has been pushed into a new, oppositional role. According to
the position Habermas has articulated, the social state counts as a constitutive
element of democracy; democracy without the rule of law (Rechtstaatlichkeit)
qualifies as unthinkable; institutionalizing economic freedoms and economic
rationality is no substitute for democracy. What, then, does Habermas call for
in a European constitution? His 1991 essay already offered a response—which
he expanded later (Time, 113ff.): Constitutional democracies can assure,
less and less, that those affected by their politics and policies will be inte-
grated into international processes of decision making. The notion of self-
legislation—which holds that those at whom laws are directed should also
be able to understand themselves as the authors of legislation (Time, 113)—
demands “the inclusion of the other.” Habermas offers cogent normative
reasons for a European constitution. Unfortunately, the prospects for a happy
outcome to the process of constitutionalization are proving ever more
unlikely.
References
Abendroth, Wolfgang. 1954. “Begriff und Wesen des sozialen Rechtsstaates, Diskussions-
beitrag.” Veröffentlichungen der Vereinigung der Deutschen Staatsrechtslehrer 12:85–91.
Forsthoff, Ernst. 1954. “Begriff und Wesen des sozialen Rechtstaates.” Veröffentlichungen
der Vereinigung der Deutschen Staatsrechtslehrer 12:8–35.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1995. “On the Internal Relation Between the Rule of Law and Democ-
racy.” European Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 1: 12–20.
Ipsen, Hans Peter. 1972. Europarecht. Tübingen: Mohr.
Joerges, Christian. 2007. “Integration Through De-Legislation? An Irritated Heckler.”
European Governance Papers (EUROGOV) no. N-07-03. http://www.connex-network
.org /eurogov/pdf/egp-newgov-N-07–03.pdf.
Joerges, Christian, and Florian Rödl. 2009. “Informal Politics, Formalised Law, and the
‘Social Deficit’ of European Integration: Reflections After the Judgments of the ECJ in
Viking and Laval.” European Law Journal 15, no. 1: 1–19.
Judt, Tony. 2006. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin.
Keiser, Thorsten. 2005. “Europeanization as a Challenge to Legal History.” German Law
Journal 6, no. 2: 473–481.
Manow, Philip. 2001. “Ordoliberalismus als ökonomische Ordnungstheologie.” Leviathan
29, no. 2: 179–198.
Mestmäcker, Ernst-Joachim. 1973. “Power, Law, and Economic Constitution.” German Eco-
nomic Review 11, no. 3: 177–198.
Sabel, Charles F., and Jonathan Zeitlin. 2008. “Learning from Difference: The New Archi-
tecture of Experimentalist Governance in the European Union.” European Law Journal
14, no. 3: 271–327.
Weiler, Joseph H. H. 1994. “Fin-de-siècle Europe.” In Europe After Maastricht: An Ever
Closer Union?, ed. Renaud Dehousse, 203–214. Munich: Law Books in Europe.
19
THE THEORY OF JUSTICE
REGINA KREIDE
F
or Nietzsche and Sloterdijk, justice is the enemy of freedom.
Justice restricts freedom, which they both understand—notwith-
standing other differences of opinion—in terms of what affords
the greatest possible space for action. For Jürgen Habermas, on the other hand,
freedom can only be understood insofar as it is afforded by justice. Without
just processes that permit us to determine freedom’s extent and limits, there
exists only arbitrary freedom for individuals—but no freedom in the proper
sense (freedom for all).
Habermas explores this basic moral intuition in his notion of procedural
justice (Verfahrensgerechtigkeit). The matter is not set forward in a single vol-
ume; instead, it forms a normative leitmotif that recurs throughout his theo-
retical writings on morality, legal philosophy, and political theory. Two
domains, while distinct, are closely connected: on the one hand, that of “moral
justice,” which is elaborated in reference to moral theories in the Kantian tra-
dition; on the other, the matter of “political justice,” which he explores above
all in terms of legal philosophy. In the latter context, questions arise about
justice in a transnational dimension—a matter addressed by the author’s
political-theoretical writings on the constitutionalization of international law.
Moral Justice
With the publication of “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophi-

cal Justification” (Moral Consciousness, 43–115), Habermas began to develop
systematically a concept of justice within the framework of his moral theory.
Like other Kantian theories of justice, Habermas’s view starts with the funda-
mental assumption that practical reason can derive its principles from its own
substance. The “moral standpoint” permitting moral conflicts of action to be
judged impartially, then, is not a matter of ultimate justified morality, moral
realism, natural law, or the sagacity of the “philosopher-king.” Instead, impar-
tiality is guaranteed by rules and procedures that produce just principles—
that is, ones grounded in ethical procedure.
The Theory of Justice 163
Kant already established the procedural interpretation of justice through

the Categorical Imperative. If one does not hold that the Categorical Impera-
tive simply offers a maxim for conduct but rather that it provides a philosophi-
cal justification, as well, then valid maxims for action may serve the purposes
of general legislation (Kant 2012; see also chapter 9 in this volume). The proce-
dural nature of justice is articulated in two ways: first, in the demand for
autonomy—that is, individual freedom to act according to “self-given laws”;
and second, in the expectation that a general consensus regarding appropriate
forms of action will result. These basic moral assumptions are stressed even
more—albeit with different points of emphasis—by the contemporary theo-
ries of justice in the Kantian tradition with which Habermas engages (Justifi-
cation, 29ff.).
John Rawls (1971)—a figure of singular influence for twentieth-century
theories of justice—justifies the principle and foundation along the lines of
contract theory. Accordingly, he holds that parties making a contract—whose
orientation follows the model of private law (Privatrecht)—arrive at their deci-
sions in an “original position,” exercising equal freedom of choice and follow-
ing their own interests. Through the so-called veil of ignorance (which means
that one cannot know the outcome of interactions or their bearing on one’s
future social status), parties must successively adopt the perspectives of all
others who are involved: after all, once the “veil” is “lifted,” one may find one-
self in a socially disadvantaged position. For this reason, even rational egoists
are forced to adopt moral positions. However, Habermas identifies an element
of residual voluntarism in Rawls inasmuch as parties entering a contract (who
possess the “understanding of subjects of private law”) lack “insight” extend-
ing beyond simple calculations of self-interest—to say nothing of concerns
regarding whether their decisions are right or wrong (Justification, 34). The
matter of moral-practical insight, then, is left to the theorist to discover
(Habermas 1996, 179).
According to Habermas, Thomas Scanlon has solved this problem by revis-
ing the Kantian contract model in a decisive manner. Scanlon replaces the
Kantian law of ethics—which everyone can accept on the basis of practical
rational insight—with individuals’ wish to justify their actions in a way that
will prove convincing to anyone who might possibly be affected by them. This
occurs on the basis of reasons “no one could reasonably reject” (Scanlon 1982,
110; 1998). Rearranged along these lines, Rawls’s conception of practical reason
ceases to be monologic in nature, since it is no longer sufficient to evaluate
what seems to admit general agreement from the viewpoint of someone else—
such a view, after all, amounts to my own perspective, which has been
projected onto another. Scanlon holds that everyone must arrive at a judg-
ment, from his or her own perspective, about what forms of action cannot
164 Contexts
rationally meet with rejection from anyone in the circle of parties potentially
affected. The process demands justified agreement from all the individuals
concerned. Instead of a view of justice that is “thrust” upon others, parties
must—at least virtually—imagine an intersubjective consensus that others
can accept as just (Justification, 51).
It is no accident that Scanlon—like Habermas—invokes George Herbert
Mead’s (1934) theory of symbolic interaction. The notion that a party engaged
in an exchange takes on the perspective of his or her counterpart is not meant
to enhance the contractual model but to serve as an alternative way of viewing
matters (Moral Consciousness; Justification, 49; Theory of Communicative
Action, 2:141–142). Lawrence Kohlberg (1981)—whose writings hold great sig-
nificance for Habermas’s theoretical grounding of “just principles” and con-
ception of moral action along the lines of developmental psychology—explains
morality as a matter of ideational role playing. Given the simple change of
perspective involving alter and ego—whereby both parties, in the event of a
moral conflict, empathize with the other and, by turns, recognize their coun-
terpart’s expectations, interests, and value orientations—it follows that the
process of universalization must logically extend to all possible perspectives.
Habermas, however, considers the danger of “emotivistic one-sidedness”
unavoidable. When this occurs, the intuitive view of an individual’s situation
supplants the properly intersubjective perspective permitting one to discern
whether actions are right or wrong—which is necessary if these actions are to
be reconsidered and modified. Therefore, he presents discourse ethics as an
“alternative” (Justification, 69) based on the justification of norms. The latter
are just when they are produced by “reflexive” discourse—that is, when the
very procedures that afford just principles are evaluated in terms of the
exchange of roles providing the conditions of argument.
In the early 1980s, Carol Gilligan (1982) critiqued Kohlberg’s thesis that six
developmental levels—deemed increasingly universal in scope—underlie
moral judgments. In particular, she took issue with the one-sided view that
such judgments are based on “reason” alone; because he had disregarded other
forms of knowledge and ways of managing moral conflicts, Gilligan argued,
Kohlberg neglected care—that is, engagement with others, consideration for
the uniqueness of individuals, and thinking about relations of closeness and
intimacy between human beings. Kohlberg recognized the importance of
these objections and responded by trying to derive justice from benevolence
(Kohlberg et al. 1986). He failed to do so convincingly, however, inasmuch as
he maintained that individual perspectives only seem incompatible with mat-
ters of justice at first glance—“care,” he argued, in fact represents an aspect of
“justice” (see chapter 10 in this volume).
Gilligan’s reflections have prompted Habermas to introduce solidarity as
the “other side” of justice (Justification, 70ff.). Any deontological theory of
justice must fulfill two demands: equal treatment for all and respect for indi-
vidual dignity, on the one hand, and the preservation of intersubjective rela-
tions of mutual recognition, on the other. Seyla Benhabib formulates the
demands of the discourse-theoretical conception of justice by introducing
points of reference that correspond to the distinction between justice and soli-
darity: on the one hand, the “generalized other” (a category that induces us to
recognize every individual as a being with equal rights and duties) and, on the
other, the “concrete other” (a category that makes us see the other in his or her
individual completeness—that is, as someone who has a particular biography
and a unique emotional/affective constitution) (Benhabib 1995, 182ff.; cf.
Wingert 1993, for the distinction between respect that is “just” and respect
cased on “solidarity”).
According to Benhabib, only when both standpoints are adopted and con-
nected together may “epistemological blindness” (1995, 182) concerning the
good life—and therefore injustice—be avoided (see chapter 36 in this volume).
In all these theories, the discursive model of justice still refers to the reciprocal
and general justification of norms by all parties potentially affected. At the
same time, it undoes—e.g., in the work of Rawls—the rigid separation between
justice and the good life. Habermas addresses the matter in his works of legal
philosophy and political theory (Facts, 447ff.; Inclusion, 253ff.).
Political Justice
In Habermas’s philosophy of law, procedural justice changes appearance with-

out losing its core, normative dimension. Whereas his moral theory concerns
the moral justification of procedures grounding just principles, Habermas’s
legal philosophy develops principles, in the context of political justification,
that lay the foundations for a community of law (Rechtsgemeinschaft). (On the
distinction between morality, law, and politics, see Forst 2002.) In terms of
morality, the process concerns the hypothetical community of all human
beings, who agree on moral and procedural principles that regulate their life
together. A just procedure is secured by a political community of law as it
exists among citizens who have agreed on morally justified principles and
now seek to establish just institutions. The latter include constitutional rights
and human rights as well as rules about social justice and respect for distinct
forms of culture.
Habermas’s efforts to ground a system of rights have taken equal distance
both from liberal theories that grant precedence to classical civil liberties
(Freiheitsrechte) and from republican theories emphasizing rights of partici-
pation in political processes and decisions. The complementary relation-
ship between individual (subjective) liberties and popular sovereignty, and
166 Contexts
between law and politics, is crucial to Habermas’s conception of “political”

justice—a view he has developed in exchanges with Klaus Günther and Inge-
borg Maus, among others. The democratic genesis of legal principles—and not
a legal principle given a priori—guarantees that constitutional rights and laws
will be just (Maus 1992). Subjective freedom, in turn, permits one to “get out”
(aussteigen) of processes of communicative action and to withdraw into a pri-
vate condition, free of the “burden” of free communicative exchange(s) (Gün-
ther 1992; see chapter 14 in this volume).
This point makes the connection between “moral” and “political” forms of
justice particularly clear. In terms of logic, the former precedes the latter (Forst
1999, 151): principles grounded in morality “govern” processes of legislation
(Rechtssetzung); the legislative process combines an array of pragmatic, moral,
and juridical discourses with negotiations that, while presenting different
kinds of relation internally, ultimately lead to well-founded agreements. In
justificatory discourse, moral arguments trump others (Habermas 1996a,
1612): just procedures produce results that, because they can be universalized,
are also just.
The relationship between justice and politics is also the focus of an exchange
between Rawls and Habermas that appeared in the Journal of Philosophy in
1995. Prompted by an awareness of the plurality of cultures and worldviews,
Rawls had stressed—ever since the Dewey Lectures at Columbia University
(Rawls 1993)—the political nature of his theory of justice. Now, Rawls tested
his ideas—founded on the model of contracts—to see whether they could find
acceptance in a pluralistic society. For this to occur, he affirmed that it must
be shown, by way of public discussion, that “justice as fairness” can yield an
“overlapping consensus” (Rawls 1993, §3, 144ff.). Rawls pictures a citizenry—
one that is not “virtual” but altogether real—that has to decide whether his
theory holds, and he admits the openness of the outcome (65).
Habermas, however, has maintained that this amounts to a false under-
standing of a truly “political” theory of justice: citizens cannot convince
themselves of its validity before arriving at a consensus—which Rawls already
presumes to exist. Clearly, a connection between the validity of the theory and
evaluation of the same under pluralistic conditions is lacking. For this reason,
Habermas concludes that Rawls has given up on the possibility of linking jus-
tice to political freedom. Unlike older, “substantial” conceptions of justice
founded on notions of “the good life” or “the common good,” modern legal
systems hold that justice and freedom are interrelated and interdependent: a
just political order is in place when individual liberty has been achieved
democratically—as is the case, one might add, when solidarity prevails among
legal subjects (Brunkhorst 2005).
Global Justice
Global problems—e.g., worldwide poverty and the fact that entire swaths of
the population lack access to work, education, and legal representation—have
raised the question whether “justice” represents a normative measure extending
beyond the borders of the nation-state. Rawls (2001) limits his recommenda-
tions for international social justice to a “duty to help” foreign peoples
provided they are prepared to develop into “well-ordered” societies (453);
Thomas Nagel (2005), on the other hand, maintains that justice cannot prevail
between states or their citizens as long as no transnational sovereign wields
the power to make them fulfill such duties. Adopting a universalistic perspec-
tive, Peter Singer (1972) calls for a general, “positive” obligation to assist others.
Just as it would be morally wrong not to save a drowning child we might
encounter on a walk, we make ourselves guilty by not regularly donating to
relief efforts.
Habermas’s project of “global domestic politics” presents a twofold under-
standing of supranational justice. On the one hand, the project rests upon the
minimalistic premise that the goal of global domestic politics, above all else,
involves securing peace; hereby, justice is restricted to avoiding war and guar-
anteeing human rights and civil liberties (Divided West, 161–166). On the other
hand, the project harbors the comparatively “utopian” ambition of a global
government organization that would steer domestic world politics in keeping
with the principles of universal justice; such principles would find expression
in a world organization and its charter (Habermas 2007, 450). Thereby, Haber-
mas draws a line dividing, on the one hand, the clearly defined tasks assuring
justice on a supranational level (above all, the preservation of peace) and, on
the other, various transnational matters “of a political nature” (e.g., setting up
economic regulations and measures for environmental protection, promoting
the arts, and establishing social-political standards; see chapter 17 in this
volume).
Read along “minimalistic” lines, negative duties—i.e., curtailing “wars of
aggression, genocide, and other crimes against humanity”—provide the basis
for the administration of justice by international courts and for political deci-
sions made by the United Nations (Divided West, 164). Here, no room exists
for, e.g., fighting poverty on a supranational level; such matters must involve a
transnational agenda, which is an item of political negotiation. However, it
is also possible to read Habermas in more ambitious terms. On this view,
the United Nations provides the normative framework for world politics in
general—including political decisions on the transnational level. Tasks are
divided between two spheres according to functional demands that must be
fulfilled by economic organizations (e.g., the World Trade Organization), but
168 Contexts
they are not determined in advance (Naturalism, 345). A separation that pre-
ceded the discursive process—whether in terms of morality or politics—would
be incompatible with the demand for procedural justice.
According to many theorists, there is much that speaks for the second read-
ing. At least three arguments may be adduced to support it. In the first place,
one can see—in terms of the actual consequences that follow from politics—that
more human beings die each year of preventable diseases caused by poverty
than are killed in wars. This is reason enough to promote the issue to a suprana-
tional level of engagement (Pogge 2002, Kreide 2007). Second, the poverty
that exists across the globe is not the fault of those affected; at least in some
measure, it results from economic, financial, and political practices that
benefit some and put others in desperate situations (O’Neill 2000, Caney
2005). Finally, a response to the question—“What is a matter of justice and
what is best left to political negotiations?”—should “follow the internal logic
of moral discourse” (Lafont 2009). Matters of justice are not “political” inas-
much as compromises can never provide a satisfactory answer to the ques-
tions they raise.
For these reasons—and especially given the crisis of globalization—the
task of determining the relationship between justice, freedom, and politics
beyond the borders of the nation-state has only become more urgent; indeed,
it has hardly begun.
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Forst, Rainer. 1999. “Die Rechtfertigung der Gerechtigkeit. Rawls’ Politischer Liberalismus
und Habermas’ Diskurstheorie in der Diskussion.” In Das Recht der Republik, ed.
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und Sozialphilosophie 54, ed. Peter Koller, Csaba Varga, and Ota Weinberger, 59–72.
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alkonzeption. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
20
DECONSTRUCTION
THOMAS KHURANA
H
abermas’s exchange with Jacques Derrida is situated within the
debate about modernity and postmodernity (see chapters 33 and
37). When he was awarded the Adorno Prize in 1980, Habermas
defended the “unfinished project of modernity” in his acceptance speech; the
opponents of modernity he identified included—in addition to old conserva-
tives and neoconservatives of the recognizable variety—a group of “Young
Conservatives,” among whom he numbered Michel Foucault and Derrida
(“Modernity,” 53). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) devotes
two chapters to Derrida, in which Habermas details, at greater length,
what prompted this judgment. In his estimation, Derrida’s philosophy rep-
resents a radicalized critique of reason (Vernunftkritik), which amounts to
an inadequate response to the diremptions and dualisms of modernity. This
account—as well as the debate in Germany, France, and the United States
that followed—was marked by polemical intensity and political vehemence;
the effect on institutional and theoretical-political lines of allegiance was
far-reaching.
Following a chance meeting in Evanston (1996) and an exchange in Frank-
furt (2000), the two philosophers began to refer to each other’s works more
openly. The changed relationship found expression in a joint publication
(Habermas and Derrida 2004) and a shared call for debate (see Thomassen
2006, 207ff.). Despite the new tone, however, the substantial differences between
their philosophical positions by no means vanished.
There is good reason to doubt whether Habermas, in The Philosophical Dis-
course of Modernity, portrayed Derrida’s writings accurately and whether he
situated them in the appropriate cultural and political contexts. Instead of
tracing, point for point, the specific problems within Habermas’s account and
the critical responses they elicited, it is more illuminating to remain at a
certain remove from the debate. This will allow us to identify the common
points of departure that Habermas’s and Derrida’s projects share and to indi-
cate the way in which they challenge each other in systematically fruitful
ways.
Deconstruction 171
Universal Pragmatics and the Ultratranscendental

Analysis of “Writing”
Derrida’s structural analysis of meaning—an approach he developed by

engaging critically with Husserl’s phenomenology, Saussure’s structuralism,
and Austin’s speech-act theory—challenges the project of a universal prag-
matics in Habermas’s sense both in terms of methodology and in terms of its
substantial claims. Derrida’s works have completed the philosophical turn
from consciousness to language—a turn that, in Habermas’s estimation, rep-
resents the decisive methodological precondition for responding to the apo-
rias of modern self-understanding (Discourse, 161). In Derrida’s philosophy, it
is not the transcendental subject but the process of meaning—understood as
“writing” in a generalized sense—upon which analysis should focus. However,
the way that Derrida characterizes this process differs fundamentally from the
perspective that Habermas adopts. All the same, it is worth remarking that, in
terms of method, the two philosophers’ approaches lie closer to each other
than Habermas seems to think—especially when he accuses deconstruction of
displacing the critique of reason into the field of rhetoric and therefore engag-
ing in stylistic criticism instead of analysis in the proper sense (Discourse,
188ff.). Just as Habermas presents his universal pragmatics as a continuation of
transcendental analysis (Vorstudien, 379ff.), Derrida presents his investiga-
tions as exercises in “ultratranscendental” analysis. Both authors reject the
notion of a transcendental subject and examine the structural preconditions
of what they take to be a social processuality. In addition, they agree in accord-
ing the conditions they analyze a merely “quasi-transcendental” status insofar
as one cannot examine them by nonempirical means.
Derrida, however, as he pursues his quasi- or ultratranscendental analysis,
does not aim for the validity claims that, in Habermas’s view, arise in every
instance of communication. Instead, Derrida tries to uncover basic, structural
conditions of signification that generate paradoxical effects—and, ultimately,
raise questions about whether the validity claims specified by universal
pragmatics can ever be fulfilled. As Derrida put matters in a well-known for-
mulation, such structural conditions (e.g., the differentiality and iterability of
signifying operations) both represent the “conditions of possibility” for mean-
ing and the “conditions of impurity” of its purity (1996, 82; 1988, 43). For this
reason, all acts of signification, according to Derrida, are precarious and
unstable in essence; this “fact” lends Derrida’s analyses an aporetic or “hetero-
logical” character (Gasché 1986).
Contra certain critics, such a perspective does not necessarily preclude the
explanation of stable orders of meaning within the everyday lifeworld of
modernity or its autonomous systems; rather, Derrida simply emphasizes
that, for a balance of any kind to be struck, it is necessary that structural
172 Contexts
instability be checked or concealed. At the same time, it is certain that decon-

struction questions the idealizations that are inherent in the validity claims
Habermas sees at work in all communicative actions (understandability, truth,
truthfulness, and normative rightness). By Derrida’s account, the phenome-
non of meaning is such that these validity claims are rendered highly prob-
lematic. As he views it, we need something other than mere awareness of fal-
libility to account for it. Habermas has countered the attack by suggesting that
deconstruction remains wedded here to the metaphysics it critiques, merely
expressing a skepticism that is the flipside of a metaphysical understanding of
the constitutive ideals of communication. From Derrida’s perspective, on the
other hand, Habermas—despite his differences with Karl-Otto Apel—appears
to be trapped within a metaphysical understanding of communication and
committed to ideas in the Kantian sense.
These fundamental tensions between the thought of Derrida and Haber-
mas are related to their different conceptions of the role of the subject and the
nature of intersubjective relations, the status of the aesthetic in their projects,
and the “emancipatory” potential of communicative practices (or lack thereof).
Subjectivity, Intersubjectivity, Alterity
Habermas and Derrida disagree on how to overcome the subject-centered par-

adigm of philosophy, and they differ on the conception of sociality this in turn
entails. Habermas suspects Derrida of still being attached to the model of sub-
jective philosophy (inasmuch as he has simply renewed, in more radical form,
Heidegger’s philosophy of origins)—and, at the same time, of having overshot
the mark insofar as he abandons criticism when he posits the “subjectless”
nature of processes of meaning (Discourse, 180–181; Postmetaphysical, 206ff.).
Derrida, on the other hand, harbors suspicion that Habermas’s intersubjective
conception of the Social is still dominated by an idealized notion of the com-
municative community—a model that simply repeats, on a larger scale, the
idea of self-transparency operative within the philosophy of the subject; in his
eyes, Habermas’s view ultimately heralds the end of communication for this
reason (Wellmer 2007, 190–191).
The mutual doubts sketched above reveal a difference between the ways the
two philosophers assess the structure and teleology of social phenomena. For
Habermas, the goal of signification/communication is understanding (Ver-
ständigung) and—even more importantly—agreement (Einverständnis); that is,
Habermas conceives social relations in symmetrical terms. Derrida, on the
other hand, holds that dissymmetrical relations structure the social sphere; for
him, sociality means being dependent on, and being affected by, others who
Deconstruction 173
can never become entirely transparent—and, as others, necessarily elude our

grasp. If anything like a “telos” of social relations exists for Derrida, it does not
concern reaching mutual agreement; instead, it requires modes of relation that
acknowledge the otherness, intransparency, and nonsymmetry that inform
sociality (Critchley 2000).
It is possible that Derrida’s emphasis of asymmetry and intransparency as
irreducible structural elements of the Social led Habermas to conclude that his
interlocutor’s understanding of the process of meaning ultimately amounted
to “only a mystification of palpable social pathologies” (Discourse, 181). How-
ever, such an assessment seems overhasty inasmuch as Derrida, in his later
writings, does not locate asymmetry and intransparency in phenomena that
count as pathological but finds them in familiar ethical relations—for exam-
ple, friendship, hospitality, and forgiveness (which, he maintains, account for
and acknowledge structural asymmetry in particular ways).
Status of the Aesthetic
Because deconstruction operates as a certain mode of reading the philosophical

tradition, and because Derrida has devoted a great deal of attention to works of
literature, Habermas has accused him of seeking to level the genre distinction
between philosophy and literature (Discourse, 161ff.; Postmetaphysical, 205ff.): a
philosophy-turned-literature loses its original cognitive potential just as much
as a literary analysis that is taken to be a substantial critique of metaphysics.
Richard Rorty has also characterized Derrida’s project as a new “form of
writing” that transcends the established distinction between literature and
philosophy; unlike Habermas, however, he does not consider such “philosoph-
ical literature” dangerous. Indeed, Rorty (1995) views Derrida’s project and
Habermas’s pragmatics to be complementary inasmuch as the latter endeavor,
which addresses problems within public discourse, is enriched by Derrida’s
ironic perspective, which offers a new vocabulary and provides new ways of
seeing.
Derrida, for his part, emphatically denied that he wished to obliterate genre
distinctions or to leave argumentative philosophy behind (Derrida 1986, 1995,
1996, 1988). Instead, he affirmed that his project was to launch a practical
investigation as to what may or may not count as a philosophical argument,
and he maintained that his interest was to show how the border between phi-
losophy and literature is problematic in a very specific way. All the same, one
is justified in wondering to what extent aesthetic practices are accorded a priv-
ileged status in disclosing deconstructive insights. Derrida has highlighted
literature’s particular capacity to formalize relations, and he emphasized that
174 Contexts
literature affords a different way to view the structure of meaning, relations

between self and other, and ethical and political matters (all of which “pure”
philosophy addresses in reductive terms). The question arises, then, whether
the “deconstructibility” of philosophical concepts and linguistic practices
ultimately depends on our capacity to aestheticize them and turn them into
literature.
Especially in Germany, the matter has raised questions about points of con-
tact between Derrida and Adorno. Even if it remains debatable whether Der-
rida considers the aesthetic to provide an “instance of exclusive knowledge
[Erkenntnis]” (Menke 1991, 289), it is certain that he grants aesthetic forms a
unique power to represent, elaborate, and question other discursive practices.
In the framework Derrida sets up, the literary medium “exposes” established
norms and validity claims to a special kind of “critique” that stands in tension
with the type of critical examination and assessment exerted by a philosophi-
cal metadiscourse.
Emancipatory Potential
Introducing an exchange between Derrida and Habermas (2000), Simon Critch-

ley has pointed out that the former’s “Force of Law” (1992) refers—in a way that
is surprisingly direct for many readers—to the “classical ideal of emancipation.”
Critchley asks whether Derrida and Habermas do not, in fact, stand closer to
each other than either party seems to realize. Both their projects are indebted to
democracy and take up the “idea” of justice. Critchley finds passages in their
works that document—at least as far as the “emancipatory” dimension of com-
municative practice is concerned—how their positions challenge each other in a
productive way. Indeed, Derrida’s conception of justice has offered the point of
departure for constructive criticism of Habermas’s own ideas on the subject
(Honneth 1994, Menke 2004). Another promising field of inquiry involves Der-
rida’s notions of “democracy to come” and “autoimmunity” as they relate to
Habermas’s notion of deliberative democracy (Critchley 2000, Derrida 2005).
In further examinations of how Derrida’s project of deconstruction may
stimulate critical social theory, it will prove necessary to ask questions already
posed apropos of the relationship between universal pragmatics and gramma-
tology. What is the nature of the “ideas” that orient our practices according to
these projects? On what kind of structural conditions are our communicative
practices founded? Derrida has continued to qualify the discursive infra-
structures underlying our signifying practices as aporetic—thereby pointing
to the ethical challenges they imply. Habermas has never made such a gesture.
Moreover, Derrida repeatedly stressed that figures such as “justice”—figures that
Critchley (in a Habermasian turn of phrase) has called “context-transcending
Deconstruction 175
idealizations”—cannot be understood in terms of regulative ideas (Derrida

1992, 25–26; 2005, 183); rather, they orient our practices in a different way that
is urgent and open-ended at once.
Even though Habermas has come to qualify the theoretical status of (his
own) idealizations in increasingly modest terms, and even though he has
explicitly distanced himself from the idea that the ideal communicative situa-
tion may ever be realized, one still has the impression that the ideas guiding
his reflections possess a special status, which differs from the way the points
of orientation function that Derrida qualified as both necessary and “impos-
sible.” Therefore, it seems that the exact nature—whether aporetic or not—of
communication (as well as the conceptual framework brought to bear on it)
represents a point of divergence between Habermas and Derrida that is just as
profound as it is insistent; the contours and consequences of this division
await further investigation.
References
Critchley, Simon. 2000. “Remarks on Derrida and Habermas.” Constellations 7:455–465.

Derrida, Jacques. 1986. Memoirs for Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler,
and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press.
——. 1988. Limited Inc. Trans. Gerald Graff, Jeffrey Mehlman, and Samuel Weber. Evan-
ston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
——. 1992. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’ ” In Deconstruction and
the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carl-
son, 3–67. New York: Routledge.
——. 1995. “Is There a Philosophical Language?” In Points . . . : Interviews 1974–1994, ed.
Elisabeth Weber, 216–227. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
——. 1996. “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism.” In Deconstruction and Prag-
matism, ed. Chantal Mouffe, 77–88. London: Routledge.
——. 2005. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques, and Michael Wetzel. 1987. “Erwiderungen” and “Antwort an Apel.” Zeit-
mitschrift 3:76–85.
Gasché, Rodolphe. 1986. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen, and Jacques Derrida. 2004. Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Honneth, Axel. 1994. “Das Andere der Gerechtigkei: Habermas und die ethische Heraus-
forderung der Postmoderne.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42:195–220.
Menke, Christoph. 1991. Die Souveränität der Kunst. Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno
und Derrida. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 2004. Spiegelungen der Gleichheit. Politische Philosophie nach Adorno und Derrida.
Rorty, Richard. 1995. “Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy.” Revue Inter-
nationale de Philosophie 194, no. 4: 437–459.
176 Contexts
Thomassen, Lasse, ed. 2006. The Derrida-Habermas Reader. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press. [This volume contains central contributions to the debate and an extensive
bibliography.]
Wellmer, Albrecht. 1985. Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne. Vernunftkritik nach
Adorno. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 2007. “Der Streit um die Wahrheit. Pragmatismus ohne regulative Ideen.” In Wie
Worte Sinn machen: Aufsätze zur Sprachphilosophie, 180–207. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
21
POSTSTRUCTURALISM
AMY ALLEN
H
abermas’s critical engagement with postmodernism not only
generated a great deal of attention in the 1980s and 1990s, but it
has also laid down the gauntlet for a new generation of critical
theorists who may now take on the task of rethinking Habermas’s stark oppo-
sition between pro-Enlightenment modernity and counter-Enlightenment
postmodernity. Habermas’s critique of postmodernism goes hand in hand
with his staunch defense of the normative content of modernity. Both are most
forcefully articulated in his 1985 book The Philosophical Discourse of Moder-
nity. Although Habermas’s interpretations of particular thinkers in this book
are at times questionable, the book’s overall thesis remains compelling. Haber-
mas argues that both the philosophical discourse of modernity and its coun-
terdiscourses remain mired in a problematic philosophy of subjectivity that
must be left behind if the normative potential of modernity is to be realized.
Habermas’s theory of communicative action breaks out of the philosophy of
subjectivity and thus allows us to see how the promise of Enlightenment
modernity might be fulfilled, despite the pervasive pathologies generated by
capitalist modernization. Why was Habermas so concerned with using his
two-sided historical account of the gains and losses characteristic of moder-
nity to put postmodernism in its place? He rightly saw the growing influence
of postmodernism in social and political theory in the mid-1980s, a trend that
has continued unabated over the last twenty years. Habermas was concerned
about this trend for two reasons. First, he worried that postmodernism, like
the positivist social science he had criticized earlier in his career, leads to a
form of value skepticism that undermines normative social criticism (see
Moral Consciousness, 43–115). Second, he believed that postmodernism is sim-
ply antimodernism in disguise and that, as such, it is a new kind of conserva-
tism masquerading as radical social critique (see “Modernity”).
The term “postmodernism” can refer to a dizzying array of thinkers and
styles of thought; it is perhaps best used, as Habermas tends to use it, to refer
to a broad current of thought. The focus in what follows will be on Habermas’s
critical engagements with two thinkers who fall within that broad current:
Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Foucault will be taken as the primary
representative of poststructuralism (though even this label is somewhat
178 Contexts
problematic), while Derrida is self-identified as the leading proponent of

deconstruction. The focus on these two thinkers is justified not because they
may be taken to stand in for the whole of what is referred to by the term “post-
modern.” Rather, the justification for this focus is twofold: first, that Habermas
had the most substantial critical engagement with the work of these two “post-
modern” thinkers and, second, that these critical engagements have been the
most productive, inspiring subsequent work in critical theory that seeks to
rethink Habermas’s relationship to his “postmodern” interlocutors.
The core of Habermas’s critique of Foucault is spelled out in the two lec-
tures devoted to Foucault in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. After
tracing the development of Foucault’s thought from his early, archaeological
phase to his middle-period genealogies of power/knowledge relations, Haber-
mas raises three major criticisms of the mature Foucault, the second of which
is further subdivided into three parts. First, Habermas criticizes Foucault’s
ambiguous use of the concept of power, which is employed simultaneously as
an empirical and a transcendental concept, resulting in a paradoxical critical
positivism. Second, Habermas charges Foucauldian genealogy with reduc-
tionism, of three types: in reducing meaning to power, genealogy ends up
mired in presentism; in reducing truth and validity to power, genealogy is
stuck in relativism; and in reducing normativity to power, genealogy is left
with a problematic cryptonormativism. Third, Habermas complains that
because Foucauldian genealogy “deals with an object domain from which the
theory of power has erased all traces of communicative actions entangled in
lifeworld contexts” (Discourse, 286), his analysis of power is unsociological, in
two senses. It cannot explain how social order is possible in the first place,
since the possibility of social order depends on some nonstrategic forms of
interaction. Nor can it explain how the individual and society relate to each
other, since it views individuals as copies mechanically punched out by disci-
plinary power relations rather than as the autonomous products of a process
of individuation through socialization.
In the background of all of these criticisms of Foucault is the charge that he,
like Nietzsche and Heidegger before him, engages in a total or abstract rather
than a determinate negation of the Enlightenment project. Habermas based
his critical reading of Foucault in his lectures on modernity on Foucault’s
early and middle-period works, up to and including the first volume of his
History of Sexuality, published in 1976. His lectures did not encompass Fou-
cault’s late work on ethical practices of the self in The Use of Pleasure and The
Care of the Self, volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality, nor did they take
into account his late essays on Kant and the Enlightenment project. (Nor
could they, since much of that work wasn’t published until after Habermas
had completed the lectures on which his book was based.) In a subsequent
essay, when Habermas did respond to some of Foucault’s later work, he saw
Poststructuralism 179
Foucault’s embrace of a certain understanding of the Kantian Enlightenment

project as standing in stark contradiction to his earlier work. Moreover, he
suggested that it was the productive yet ultimately unsustainable contradic-
tion in Foucault’s work between his critical analysis of power and his unmask-
ing of the will to truth that led him, “in this last of his texts, back into a sphere
of influence he had tried to blast open, that of the philosophical discourse of
modernity” (New Conservatism, 179).
It is possible, however, contra Habermas, to read even the early and middle-
period Foucault as a thinker who aims to transform the Kantian Enlightenment
project from within, by exploring the historically and socially specific, hence
contingent, conditions of possibility for subjectivity and agency in late West-
ern modernity (Allen 2008). This is, in fact, how Foucault presents his own
philosophical oeuvre in such essays as “What Is Enlightenment?” This reading
complicates considerably Habermas’s interpretation of Foucault as an anti-
modern young conservative who sets out to negate abstractly the Enlighten-
ment project only to find himself unwittingly drawn back into its orbit. It is
also possible to challenge Habermas’s portrayal of Foucault’s genealogical
analysis of the subject as a mechanically punched-out copy (Allen 2008).
Indeed, challenging this reading is particularly important in light of Foucault’s
late work on practices of the self, which presuppose a degree of autonomy and
deliberate self-transformation that would seem impossible if Habermas’s read-
ing of Foucault’s middle-period work is correct. The fuller picture of Fou-
cault’s account of the self that emerges from his late work is that of a self who
engages in practices of self-formation and self-discipline, though these do not
take place outside of power relations. Although Foucault did not give a fully
satisfactory account of how his late work on self-constituting, ethical practices
and his earlier genealogy of the normalized, disciplined subject are compati-
ble, the existence of the former once again problematizes Habermas’s account
of the latter. It is also possible to rethink the normative stance of Foucault’s
critique, by uncovering an implicit norm of freedom at work in Foucault’s
texts (Oksala 2005). This reading calls into question Habermas’s charge that
Foucault reduces normativity to power relations. Each of these reinterpreta-
tions makes it possible to challenge the received view of the Foucault-Haber-
mas debate, according to which Foucault and Habermas offer diametrically
opposed approaches to critical theory (Hoy and McCarthy 1994). On the basis
of these sorts of reinterpretations, some critical theorists have recently begun
to develop approaches inspired by both Habermas and Foucault (Allen 2008,
Biebricher 2005, Saar 2007).
Habermas’s critique of Derridean deconstruction, like his critique of Fou-
cauldian genealogy, centers on the charge of a totalizing or abstract nega-
tion of Enlightenment rationality. Indeed, Habermas maintains that decon-
struction is Derrida’s answer to a problem encountered by the totalizing
180 Contexts
self-critique of reason. Because this critique must use the tools of reason, it is
open to the charge of performative contradiction; that is to say, the totalizing
critique of reason relies for its performance on the very rational tools that it
rejects in its substantive critique. As Habermas sees it, Derrida attempts to
escape this problem by turning the standard philosophical primacy of logic
over rhetoric on its head. With this move, the standard of evaluation for the
critique of reason becomes rhetorical success, not logical consistency, and
the charge of performative contradiction misses the mark. This point is related
to what Habermas takes to be Derrida’s broader aim, namely, to dissolve the
genre distinction between philosophy and literature. Habermas objects to
both the reversal of the primacy of logic over rhetoric and the leveling of the
genre distinction between philosophy and literature. Instead, he argues for a
division of labor between philosophy and literary criticism, in which it is
acknowledged that both philosophy and literary criticism “have a family
resemblance to literature—and to this extent to one another as well—in their
rhetorical achievements. But their family relationship stops right there, for in
each of these enterprises the tools of rhetoric are subordinated to the disci-
pline of a distinct form of argumentation” (Discourse, 209–210).
Habermas also connects Derrida’s elision of the distinction between literature
and philosophy with a conflation of the distinction between communicative
uses of language and fictional discourse. Fictional discourse is world disclo-
sive; it involves the playful, poetic creation of new worlds by means of linguis-
tic innovation. Although Habermas acknowledges that these poetic elements
are present in ordinary linguistic communication, they do not predominate in
such contexts. Instead, language in everyday contexts of communication is
predominantly made up of the illocutionary binding force of utterances that
serves to coordinate social interaction. As Habermas sees it, the poetic, world-
disclosive function is not the only nor the primary function of language. To
claim that it is primary, as both Derrida and Heidegger do, is to neglect the
way we use language to solve problems, to coordinate our interactions by reach-
ing understanding about things in the objective, intersubjective, or subjective
worlds. For Habermas, this is tantamount to denying the rational potential
inherent in linguistic communication. Hence, in the end, Habermas main-
tains that Derrida’s attempt to escape the performative contradiction of the
totalizing self-critique of reason by asserting the primacy of rhetoric over logic
and world disclosure over communication “dulls the sword of the critique of
reason itself” (Discourse, 210).
Habermas’s critique of Derrida, like his critique of Foucault, is predicated
on presenting Derrida as an antimodern, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Kantian
thinker who rejects reason in favor of its rhetorical and poetic Other. Yet, as
with Foucault, it is possible to read Derrida as a philosopher who is self-con-
sciously transforming Kantian critical philosophy from within, hence, as one
Poststructuralism 181
who embraces rather than rejects the mantle of Enlightenment modernity. On

this reading, Derrida’s aim is not to collapse distinctions between rhetoric and
logic or literature and philosophy. Rather, it is, as Christopher Norris puts it,
to “press . . . certain Kantian antinomies to the point where they demand a
form of analysis undreamt of in the mainstream tradition” (Norris, in “Moder-
nity,” 101), in particular, antinomies that concern the conditions of possibility
of linguistic meaning and representation. This reading of Derrida complicates
Habermas’s portrayal of him as an antimodern young conservative. Further
complicating Habermas’s critique is the fact that it is based entirely on Derri-
da’s early work, up to and including his exchange with the analytic philoso-
pher of language John Searle, published in the book Limited, Inc (Derrida
1988). As such, it does not take into account the explicit turn toward ethical
and political concerns that occupied Derrida from the 1990s onward. This is a
pity, because in that ethical and political work, a good deal more common
ground emerges between Derrida and Habermas than is evident in Haber-
mas’s lectures. In his explicitly ethical and political writings, Derrida draws
on Levinas to articulate our infinite ethical responsibility toward the Other
(Derrida 1996), he gestures toward a justice to come that is both impossible
and necessary (Derrida 1992), and he embraces our inheritance of an inher-
ently open, contestable, and self-critical form of democracy (Derrida 2004).
All of these moves bring Derrida’s work into closer contact with Habermas’s
central concerns, in ways that merit further consideration by critical theorists.
Their common adherence to the spirit if not the letter of the Kantian philo-
sophical tradition is evident in their jointly signed plea for European solidarity
in the face of the war in Iraq (Habermas and Derrida 2003).
If Habermas, Foucault, and Derrida can all be productively understood as
transforming the Kantian Enlightenment project from within, albeit in differ-
ent ways, then their disagreements look less like a war between entrenched phil-
osophical camps and more like a family quarrel. This quarrel will be resolved
only when we are no longer held captive by the picture of Habermas as the pro-
modern, pro-Enlightenment, progressive hero and Foucault and Derrida as the
antimodern, counter-Enlightenment, young conservative villains. As that pic-
ture loses its ability to captivate us, productive new visions of a simultaneously
deconstructive and reconstructive critical theory will begin to emerge.
References
Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contempo-
rary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Biebricher, Thomas. 2005. Selbstkritik der Moderne: Habermas und Foucault im Vergleich.
Frankfurt: Campus.
182 Contexts
Borradori, Giovanna. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Haber-
mas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited Inc. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
——. 1992. “The Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority.” In Deconstruction
and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray
Carlson, 3–67. New York: Routledge.
——. 1996. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
——. 2004. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheri-
dan. New York: Vintage.
——. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New
York: Vintage.
——. 1985. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. New
York: Vintage.
——. 1986. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3: The Care of the Self. Trans. Robert Hurley. New
York: Vintage.
——. 1997. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 1: Eth-
ics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, 303–319. New York: The New Press.
Habermas, Jürgen, and Jacques Derrida. 2003. “February 15, or What Binds Europeans
Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe.” Con-
stellations 10, no. 3: 291–297.
Hoy, David, and Thomas McCarthy. 1994. Critical Theory. London: Blackwell.
Oksala, Johanna. 2005. Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Saar, Martin. 2007. Genealogie als Kritik: Geschichte und Theorie des Subjekts nach
Nietzsche und Foucault. Frankfurt: Campus.
22
FEMINISM
AMY R. BAEHR
F
eminist theory is critical theory. It seeks to liberate women from
the conditions that deprive, oppress, and disadvantage them. It
does this by explaining and criticizing those conditions and by
suggesting emancipatory alternatives. Recently, feminist theorists have sought
resources for feminist theory in the work of Jürgen Habermas. Some note
Habermas’s personal commitment to justice for women (Fraser 1989, 7; Flem-
ing 1997, 7; Johnson 2006, 156). But many point to insufficient attention to gen-
der in his work overall and find it lacking well-developed theories of gender
oppression and gender justice. It is debated whether his discourse theory of
democracy, morality, and law nonetheless may be used to illuminate the con-
ditions that deprive, oppress, and disadvantage women and to guide reflection
concerning emancipatory alternatives. The feminist literature on this subject
is extensive. Given space constraints, this entry mentions only major issues
and several important texts.
Feminist responses to The Theory of Communicative Action focus on its
failure to illuminate the gender-oppressive character of the lifeworld. While
Communicative Action emphasizes the socially integrated character of the
family, it pays scant attention to the fact that the family in late capitalism is
integrated by norms prescribing oppressive gender roles, roles that extend to
the public realm, the economy, and the state. And while Communicative
Action emphasizes the threat of system colonization of family life, it fails to
explore the extent to which families are commonly sites of a gendered economic
exchange “of services, labor, cash and sex—and frequently sites of [gendered
exploitation,] coercion and violence” (Fraser 1989, 120; see Allen 2008, 99; Ben-
habib 1986, 252; Cohen 1995, 71).
Some feminists attribute this failure to highlight the gender-oppressive
character of the lifeworld to the understanding of power in Communicative
Action, arguing that “Habermas lacks any theory of power operative within
the modern lifeworld other than that of system intrusions” (“Modernity,”
240). Some argue that gender should be understood as a distinct form of power
at work in the lifeworld, one with profound influence on the systems (Allen
2008; Cohen 1995, 70; Fraser 1989, 121). Once gender is recognized as a form of
power, system colonization remains a concern: it can reinforce oppressive
184 Contexts
gender norms (Fraser 1989, 133) and rob civil society of resources necessary for
their dismantling (Cohen 1995, 72). Nonetheless, juridification of family life
can have emancipatory effects—consider the protection of women’s rights in
the family and material support from the welfare state (Fleming 1997, 86).
Thus from a feminist point of view, decolonization is far from a fully adequate
response to gender oppression (Fraser 1989, 134–135). What is needed is a more
comprehensive account of power, a subtler account of juridification, and an
account of how gender-oppressive lifeworld norms are to be undermined.
Acknowledging inadequate attention to gender in The Theory of Communi-
cative Action, some feminists emphasize Habermas’s claim that modernity
promises progressive democratization of the lifeworld (Benhabib 1992, 81;
Cohen 1995, 58; Johnson 2006, 155). Insofar as the women’s movement is a form
of democratic practice—expanding access to discursive resources, publicly
thematizing and contesting oppressive lifeworld norms, and creating new,
nonpatriarchal norms, as well as the associations necessary to bring such
norms to bear on the systems—the women’s movement may be understood as
the “culmination of the logic of modernity” (Benhabib 1989, 110).
To be sure, The Theory of Communicative Action describes the women’s
movement as, to a significant degree, a failure of modernization, a defensive
reaction against colonization intent on preserving particular identities,
norms, and alternative values (Allen 2008, 158; Benhabib 1986, 252; Cohen
1995, 60–64). Some argue that this appraisal of the women’s movement is con-
sistent with Habermas’s early understanding of public deliberation in The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. While the women’s movement
seeks to thematize publicly social inequalities and their effect on public delib-
eration, public deliberation in Structural Transformation requires the bracket-
ing of social inequalities. While the women’s movement seeks to thematize
publicly women’s particular needs and interests, public deliberation in Struc-
tural Transformation must focus on generalizable interests. While the wom-
en’s movement seeks to thematize publicly issues conventionally understood
as private—the domestic division of labor, sexual violence, gender identity—
Structural Transformation reiterates a traditional public-private distinction.
While the women’s movement develops its own diverse counterpublics, the
public sphere in Structural Transformation is homogeneous and singular. And
while the women’s movement seeks to bring women’s identities, bodies, and
rhetorical styles into public, Structural Transformation uncritically accepts the
model of the Western public sphere and its male political subjectivity (Fraser
1997, 69–98; Dean 1996; Landes 1995, 98; Young 1990, 96–121).
Indeed, some feminist historians argue, far from hastening the dissolution
of gender, modernity introduced the very understanding of gender difference
as hierarchy with which we now contend (“Modernity,” 242; see also Klinger
2000). According to that understanding, men are suited for participation in a
Feminism 185
public realm in which citizens’ freedom and equality may be redeemed, while
women are the natural inhabitants of a private realm of dependency, intimacy,
and family (Maihofer 1990, 354). Thus women cannot be included in the public
realm as women, but only to the extent that they conform to a standard of
male political subjectivity. The alternative, to petition for inclusion as women,
risks reifying a subordinating understanding of gender difference. To avoid
this “dilemma of difference” (Minow 1990), some feminists suggest that what
is needed is a fundamentally different understanding of citizenship and
democracy (Landes 1996, 307). If this understanding is to avoid the dilemma
of difference, it must allow for nonhierarchical gender difference (Maihofer
1990, 352).
Some find inspiration for such a reconceptualization of citizenship in
Habermas’s discourse ethics (Benhabib 1992, 9; Fraser 1989, 182; 1997, 79;
Young 1990, 34). Practical discourses include all those potentially affected by a
norm and “open one’s eyes to the ‘difference,’ that is, the peculiarity and the
inalienable otherness of a second person” (Habermas 1990, 112). Some argue
that practical discourse makes possible the thematization of difference, social
inequality, and power necessary for undermining masculine standards.
Indeed, some argue, a public/private distinction does not precede but is deter-
mined within discourse (Benhabib 1992, 110–111).
But some reject Habermas’s claim that the aim of discourse should be con-
sensus about the common good, because, they argue, such an aim obscures
the salience of differences. Instead, the aim should be the thematization of
difference itself and a keeping of the conversation going (Benhabib 1992, 38). A
public sphere focused on the thematization of difference is best understood
as “heterogeneous” (Young 1990, 116ff.) and plural—including multiple and
“counter-publics” (Fraser 1997, 80ff.). Some argue that public deliberation must
not privilege rational argumentation but welcome other styles of discourse—
used by the women’s movement—for example, storytelling, rhetoric, and expres-
sive and “embodied aspects of speech” (Young 1990, 118; see also Lara 1998; cf.
Benhabib 1996, 83; and Johnson 2006, 160–162).
Some hold that even such reconceptualized public deliberation will not be
purged of power (Dean 1996). If the power of gender is present at the start—
because gendering precedes discourse—then we should not expect public
discourse to be gender’s antidote (Allen 2000, 56). A truly emancipatory fem-
inist politics will include a politics of the self, afforded by a comprehensive
account of power that illuminates how gender is acquired and functions
(Allen 2008, 19).
Habermas dedicates significant attention to the dilemma of difference in
Between Facts and Norms (425). He identifies it as a failure of democracy and
recognizes the women’s movement’s work toward a solution as “a practical
appropriation of the critical normativity dormant in liberal democratic”
186 Contexts
institutions (Johnson 2006, 156). On Habermas’s view, a dilemma of difference

will ensue if those affected by a norm do not participate meaningfully in its
public deliberation—“because only women themselves can clarify the ‘rele-
vant aspects’ that define equality and inequality for a given matter” (Facts,
420). Democratic participation guards against juridification that reinforces
and enforces oppressive and disadvantaging identities, and it promotes wom-
en’s personal and political autonomy (Cohen 1995, 74; see also Benhabib 1992,
113). Between Facts and Norms recognizes that the public/private distinction
must be discursively determined because, as Habermas explains, “the bound-
aries of private autonomy” must be drawn such that “it sufficiently qualifies
private persons for their role of citizen” (Facts, 417). And in Between Facts and
Norms, public deliberation includes the activities of diverse publics, such as
feminist and alternative publics (Facts, 307, 374) concerned to clarify needs,
identities, and power relations (Johnson 2006, 156).
But Between Facts and Norms is not a detailed guide to how gender exclu-
sion from public deliberation currently works. Nor does it criticize particular
gender-oppressive norms or suggest emancipatory alternatives (Facts, 426).
On a Habermasian view, these are the tasks of open-ended and fallible public
discourse itself and of advocatory discourse of the kind provided by feminists.
But, insofar as discourse theory suggests that the social order is legitimate
only if those subject to it are its authors, some argue it provides a normative
foundation for a feminist politics dedicated to women’s inclusion and the pro-
gressive democratization of society. (Many hold that feminist politics requires
a normative foundation [Allen 2000, 59; Benhabib 1992, 9; Klinger 1998, 245;
Pauer-Studer 1993, 43; for criticism, see Butler 1994].) That is, while Haber-
mas’s discourse theory might not explain exactly how exclusion works or
which norms are illegitimate and which legitimate, it does explain why wom-
en’s exclusion is objectionable, and it motivates the search for strategies of
inclusion.
References
Allen, Amy. 2000. “Reconstruction or Deconstruction: A Reply to Johanna Meehan.” Phi-

losophy and Social Criticism 26, no. 3: 53–60.
——. 2008. The Politics of Ourselves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Criti-
cal Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Benhabib, Seyla. 1986. Critique, Norm, and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press.
——. 1995. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary
Ethics. New York: Routledge.
——. 1996. “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy.” In Democracy and
Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib, 67–94. Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Feminism 187
Butler, Judith. 1994. “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmod-
ernism.’ ” In Feminist Contentions, ed. Seyla Benhabib et al., 35–57. New York: Rout-
ledge.
Cohen, Jean L. 1995. “Critical Social Theory and Feminist Critiques: The Debate with Jür-
gen Habermas.” In Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, ed.
Johanna Meehan, 57–90. New York: Routledge.
Dean, Jodi. 1996. “Civil Society: Beyond the Public Sphere.” In The Handbook of Critical
Theory, ed. David Rasmussen, 220–242. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fleming, Marie. 1997. Emancipation and Illusion: Rationality and Gender in Habermas’s
Theory of Modernity. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary
Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. New
York: Routledge.
Habermas, Jürgen, and Torben Hviid Nielsen. 1990. “Jürgen Habermas, Morality, Society,
and Ethics.” Acta Sociologica 33, no. 2: 93–114.
Johnson, Pauline. 2006. Habermas: Rescuing the Public Sphere. New York: Routledge.
Klinger, Claudia. 1998. “Feministische Philosophie als Dekonstruktion und Kritische The-
orie.” In Kurskorrekturen: Feminismus zwischen Kritischer Theorie und Postmoderne,
ed. Gudrun Alexi Knapp, 242–256. Frankfurt: Campus.
——. 2000. “Die Ordnung der Geschlechter und die Ambivalenz der Moderne.” In Das
Geschlecht der Zukunft: Zwischen Frauenemanzipation und Geschlechtervielfalt, ed.
Sybille Becker et al., 29–63. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Landes, Joan. 1995. “The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconstruction.” In
Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, ed. Johanna Meehan,
91–117. New York: Routledge.
Lara, Maria Pía. 1998. Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Maihofer, Andrea. 1990. “Gleichheit nur für Gleiche?” In Differenz und Gleichheit: Men-
schenrechte haben (k)ein Geschlecht, ed. Ute Gerhard et al., 338–350. Frankfurt: Ulrike
Helmer.
Minow, Martha. Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Pauer-Studer, Herlinde. 1993. “Moraltheorie und Geschlechterdifferenz.” In Jenseits der
Geschlechtermoral, ed. Herta Nagl-Docekal and Herlinde Pauer-Studer, 33–68. Frank-
furt: Fischer Taschenbuch.
Young, Iris. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
23
NEOPRAGMATISM
RICHARD J. BERNSTEIN
F
or over forty years Habermas has taken inspiration from and been
deeply influenced by the classical American pragmatists, espe-
cially Charles S. Peirce, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead.
He has appropriated, reconstructed, and integrated many of the primary
themes of these thinkers into his own comprehensive philosophic perspective:
a radical critique of Cartesianism and the philosophy of consciousness; a focus
on the primacy of social practices and action in understanding everyday life
(the lifeworld); a thoroughgoing fallibilism that encompasses both knowledge
of the world and moral reasoning; a development of an intersubjective dialogi-
cal understanding of action and rationality; and a commitment to radical
democracy based on participation, equality, and the reciprocal give-and-take
of citizens. He also shares with the classical pragmatists a naturalistic orienta-
tion. Human beings are endowed with a biological endowment and a cultural
way of life that have a natural origin that can, in principle, be explained by
evolutionary theory. This is a naturalism that takes account of evolutionary
development and holds that human learning processes are continuous with
prior evolutionary learning processes. Habermas calls this “weak naturalism,”
but it might more aptly be called “robust naturalism” because it is opposed to
the varieties of reductive naturalism. In the past few decades he has engaged in
vigorous exchanges with Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Robert Bran-
dom, who identify themselves as working in a pragmatic tradition. Habermas
now characterizes himself as a “Kantian pragmatist.” In his debates and
exchanges with Rorty, Putnam, and Brandom, he has revised and refined his
own distinctive “Kantian pragmatism.”
The pragmatic movement, from its earliest days, has always been involved
in conflict and disagreement. The disagreements among contemporary prag-
matists are no less sharp and consequential than those of the classical American
pragmatists. Peirce began his philosophic career by seeking—in Habermas’s
expression—to “detranscendentalize” Kant (Peirce appropriated the term
“pragmatic” from Kant). According to Rorty, however, pragmatism begins
with James and Dewey, who repudiate Kant and the Kantian elements in
Peirce’s philosophy. Yet for Rorty’s fellow pragmatist Hilary Putnam, Kant
is the great hero. Putnam argues that pragmatism’s contribution to our
Neopragmatism 189
understanding of inquiry, belief, and knowledge consists of variations on Kan-

tian themes. In this respect there is a close affinity between Putnam and
Habermas. We can delineate the main features of Habermas’s Kantian prag-
matism by following what he endorses and rejects in Rorty, Putnam, and
Brandom.
Richard Rorty
Habermas’s sharpest disagreement is with Rorty and his neopragmatic con-

textualism. He is sympathetic with Rorty’s critique of epistemological founda-
tionalism and his insistence that philosophic problems have been transformed
by the linguistic turn. There is no way in which we can understand conceptual
knowledge apart from the way in which concepts function in language. He is
also sympathetic with Rorty’s critique of epistemological and semantic forms
of “representationalism” insofar as they treat knowledge and language as a
“mirror of nature.” But he vigorously argues against Rorty’s contextualism. He
thinks that Rorty cannot escape from the performative contradiction of a
self-refuting relativism. Habermas criticizes the way in which Rorty seeks to
dismiss or trivialize such ideas as context-independent unconditional truth,
objectivity, universal validity claims, and the role of argumentation in disputes
about moral norms. Habermas defends the unavoidableness of making uni-
versal validity claims in communicative interactions. Although Habermas
seeks to detranscendentalize Kant in a pragmatic fashion, he defends what he
takes to be at the core of the transcendental project—the search for the pre-
sumably universal unavoidable conditions that must be fulfilled in our
communicative interactions. Another way of characterizing a key difference
between Habermas and Rorty is by focusing on their radically different
responses to “realist intuitions.” Habermas seeks to vindicate these intuitions
by showing that we must presuppose that there is an objective world that is
independent of us (a world that is the same for all human beings) and con-
strains what we can know. Rorty recommends that we should simply abandon
these “realist intuitions.” He tells us that “the world is well lost”; we never
get “beyond” playing off different vocabularies—different descriptions and
redescriptions—against one another. The only constraints upon us are the
conversational constraints of our fellow human beings. When it comes to jus-
tification, we can appeal only to the standards and criteria accepted by our
peers. In this sense justification is “sociological.” Rorty allows for a “caution-
ary” use of “true,” but this serves only as an expression of our willingness to
change our mind if circumstances alter. This cautionary use of “true” reminds
us that our best justifications may fail to persuade the audience we are address-
ing. So we may need to come up with new justifications for new audiences.
190 Contexts
This has happened many times in the past, and there is no reason to believe
that it will not happen in the future.
Despite Habermas’s sharp criticism of Rorty, his lively encounter with
Rorty has provided him with the occasion for rethinking and revising his own
pragmatic theory of truth. He now concedes that an epistemic discursive-
theoretical theory of truth is not sufficient to account for “unconditional
truth.” One cannot characterize the meaning of truth from an exclusively epis-
temic perspective where we specify the formal-pragmatic ideal conditions for
justifying claims about what is true. Even if we could get over the difficulties
of specifying what precisely we mean by “ideal conditions,” a justification
even under “ideal conditions” may still turn out to be false. And for Habermas
“truth” is something that a proposition “cannot lose.” Truth, unlike justifica-
tion, is unconditional. The question that Habermas seeks to answer is: “How
can we reconcile the assumption that there is a world existing independently
of our descriptions of it and that is the same for all observers with the linguis-
tic insight that we have no direct, linguistically unmediated access to ‘brute’
reality?” (Truth, 2). Habermas develops a pragmatic theory of truth that shows
how truth is a “justification-transcendent concept.” Truth refers to conditions
that must be met by reality itself. Habermas’s revised theory of truth repre-
sents a return to the classical pragmatist context of everyday lifeworld actions
and practices.
Pragmatism makes us aware that in everyday practices, we cannot suspend
claims to truth in principle. Everyday routines and communications work on
the basis of behavioral certainties that we take for granted. But when our
behavioral expectations are frustrated or when we encounter resistances, then
our practical certainties become problematic. We no longer “naïvely” accept
what we have taken for granted. There is a transition from action to discourse.
In this transition what was initially taken as practically certain now becomes
problematic; we have to evaluate its truth by the appeal to reasons—by argu-
mentation. Truth can neither be explained solely by reference to the practical
certainties of everyday actions nor solely by reference to the argumentative
procedures of discourse. Habermas’s pragmatic conception of truth is “Janus-
faced”: one face is turned to the lifeworld of action, where we rely on “practical
certainties,” and the other face is turned toward discourse, where argumenta-
tion prevails. Habermas claims that this revised pragmatic theory of truth
does justice to our “realist intuitions.” It enables us to make sense of the for-
mal-pragmatic presupposition that there is an objective world independent of
us but about which we can make true claims. The nonepistemic concept of
truth that is implicit in the lifeworld of action provides a justification-tran-
scendent point of reference for discursively thematized truth claims. The goal
of these justifications is to discover a truth that exceeds all justifications.
When our naïvely accepted convictions about truth become problematized,
Neopragmatism 191
we engage in argumentative discourse to justify them. Truth is unconditional,

but our claims about what is true are, in principle, always conditional and
fallible. Habermas’s new pragmatic theory of truth relates the lifeworld of
everyday actions with its practical certainties to discourse, where the appeal to
good reasons and argumentation prevails.
Hilary Putnam
Concerning epistemological realism, Habermas is in basic agreement with

Putnam. Indeed, Habermas draws upon Putnam’s analyses of “internal real-
ism” and “reference” to explain his own version of pragmatic realism. He is
also sympathetic with Putnam’s critique of Rorty’s contextualism. In defend-
ing realism against Rorty, Putnam and Habermas are allies. Putnam’s internal
realism shows us how we can reconcile the assumption that there is a world
existing independently of our descriptions with the insight of the linguistic
turn, namely, that we have no linguistically unmediated access to a “brute”
reality. Putnam’s epistemological realism shows how we can avoid and
“transcend” Rorty’s contextualism. For all these reasons, Habermas consid-
ers Putnam to be a fellow Kantian pragmatist. But Habermas does have a
major disagreement with Putnam concerning the distinctions of theoretical
and practical reason, ethics and morality, values and norms. For Habermas
(following Kant), there is a strong distinction between theoretical and practi-
cal reason. Theoretical reason is primarily concerned with truth, whereas
practical (moral) reason is primarily concerned with rightness. In his theory of
communicative action, Habermas argues that there are three different types of
validity claim—truth, rightness, and truthfulness. We must not confuse or
blur the distinctions among these different validity claims. The type of valid-
ity we seek when we are attempting to know the objective world (truth) is not
the same as the validity we seek to establish when we attempt to justify univer-
sal moral norms (rightness). In his discourse ethics, which might better be
called a discourse theory of morality, Habermas also makes a sharp distinc-
tion between morality and ethics. Morality, or, more precisely, practical moral
discourse, is concerned with universal moral norms that have binding power
on us. Of course, our knowledge of these norms is fallible and subject to learn-
ing processes over time. But the claim that there are such binding uncondi-
tional moral norms is fundamental for Habermas. “Ethics,” as Habermas uses
this term, is particularistic and context dependent. Ethics refers to those val-
ues and the conceptions of the good life integral to my personal outlook or to
the groups with which I identify. Ethics is always oriented to the first-person
singular or plural—my or our ethical orientation. There is an irreducible plu-
rality of conceptions of the “good life,” but there is only one single universal
192 Contexts
morality. The recognition of the worthiness of a moral norm can only be justi-
fied by all those affected in their role as participants in a practical moral dis-
course. So unlike theoretical judgments that are justified by an appeal to an
objective world independent of us, practical moral judgments can be justified
only by their acceptance of participants in a practical discourse. In short,
Habermas wants to combine epistemological realism with moral constructiv-
ism. He rejects moral realism.
Putnam challenges this entire set of distinctions, which are so vital for
Habermas. Putnam doesn’t think there is a sharp distinction between moral-
ity and ethics; he argues for the entanglement of value and fact in all domains;
he thinks that we can speak of moral truths and objectivity in the same way in
which we speak about truth and objectivity in scientific inquiry. Consequently,
he rejects a sharp distinction between theoretical and practical reason. So
where Habermas (in the spirit of Kant) draws a set of sharp distinctions, Put-
nam (in the spirit of Dewey) argues that there are differences of degree. Haber-
mas argues that Putnam would be a more consistent Kantian pragmatist if he
fully appreciated Kant’s deontological insights about morality and recognized
that there is a danger in “ontologizing” our moral knowledge. Habermas con-
cedes that there is a role for speaking about “truth” and “objectivity” in regard
to moral discourse but that we must realize that “truth” and “objectivity” play
very different roles in theoretical discourse and practical moral discourse. We
must resist the temptation to “ontologize” moral knowledge. Habermas claims
that there is a deep tension in Putnam’s version of pragmatism and his “blur-
ring” of the distinction between norms and values—a tension that results
from the way in which Putnam wants to integrate epistemological realism
with an Aristotelian-Deweyan conception of ethics and eudaimonia—human
flourishing. Putnam would be a more consistent Kantian pragmatist if he
relied more on another pragmatist, George Herbert Mead, rather than on
Aristotle and Dewey. Mead developed a pragmatic Kantian constructivist
account of the moral point of view by showing how an inclusive We-perspec-
tive can be approximated by mutual perspective taking.
To appreciate why Habermas opposes the varieties of moral realism and
strongly advocates a form of moral constructivism, we need to appeal to a
deeper and broader perspective. Habermas has always identified with the
project of modernity that was initiated by Kant. With Kant we come to realize
that there is no higher moral authority than our own practical reason. A
proper account of the role of practical reason enables us to justify the universal
and binding character of moral norms. The communicative turn in philoso-
phy underscores that practical moral reason is dialogical, not monological—
that moral norms can be justified only by participants in a practical discourse.
The justification of moral norms sets a task (Aufgabe) of what is to be done in
order to approximate a society in which these norms are concretely realized. A
Neopragmatism 193
constructivist orientation is required in order to provide the normative foun-

dation for a critical theory of society.
Robert Brandom
Habermas is deeply sympathetic with Brandom’s valiant attempt to take our

realistic intuitions seriously and to give an account of truth and objectivity
that is not open to the objections of contextualism and relativism. He praises
Brandom’s Making It Explicit as a milestone in theoretical philosophy that
succeeds in describing convincingly the practices in which reason and the
autonomy of subjects capable of speech and action are expressed. Conse-
quently, Brandom makes a major contribution to articulating and defending a
strong pragmatism—one that works out an innovative connection of formal
normative pragmatics with inferential semantics. What worries Habermas is
Brandom’s neo-Hegelianism. “In the end, Brandom is able to do justice to the
intuitions underlying epistemological realism only at the price of a conceptual
realism that obliterates the distinction between the intersubjectively shared
lifeworld and the objective world. This assimilation of the objectivity of expe-
rience to the intersubjectivity of communication is reminiscent of an infa-
mous Hegelian move” (Truth, 8). Habermas’s Kantian pragmatism is intended
to be a via media between Rorty’s pragmatic contextualism and Brandom’s
pragmatic neo-Hegelianism.
Although Habermas greatly admires the sophistication, rigor, and compre-
hensiveness of Brandom’s pragmatic neo-Hegelianism, his unease focuses on
three interrelated issues. First, despite Brandom’s attempt to take account of
“realistic” intuitions and to give an adequate account of truth and objectivity,
Habermas doesn’t think that a conceptual realism can provide a fully ade-
quate account of unconditional truth. Brandom approaches these issues from
the perspective of our conceptual normative social practices. Built into these
practices is the idea of an objective world. Habermas doesn’t dispute this claim
but thinks that this is not sufficient to account adequately for a strong (onto-
logical) sense in which we presuppose an objective world independent of us.
The same reasoning that initially led Habermas to criticize his own epistemic
approach to truth and objectivity motivates his critique of Brandom. A prag-
matic theory of truth and objectivity cannot be limited to the epistemic (con-
ceptual) aspects of truth; it must also be tied to the nonepistemic (ontological)
aspects of truth and objectivity.
Second, Habermas thinks that Brandom begins with the premise that is typi-
cally the starting point of most analytic philosophers, namely, that the proposi-
tion or assertion is paradigmatic for linguistic analysis. But to do so distorts
what is involved in communicative action. Although the representational and
194 Contexts
communicative functions of language mutually presuppose each other, they are

distinct and equiprimordial. Habermas claims that Brandom has an “objectiv-
ist” conception of communication that highlights the observer’s perspective as a
third person. Consequently, Brandom distorts the second-person perspective
that is quintessential for understanding how participants encounter one another
when engaged in communicative action.
Third, he criticizes Brandom—in a manner reminiscent of his criticism of
Putnam—for tending toward a monism that levels the distinction between
facts and norms. Although Brandom’s philosophical motivations are different
from those of Putnam, nevertheless Brandom’s conceptual realism also blurs
the important Kantian distinction between theoretical and practical reason.
Norms can be described as “facts” from an observer’s (third-person) perspec-
tive, but they can only be justified from the participant’s (second-person)
perspective.
Habermas’s Kantian Pragmatism
We can now more fully appreciate what is distinctive about Habermas’s Kan-
tian pragmatism. Like Rorty, Putnam, and Brandom, Habermas asserts that
pragmatism has been transformed by the linguistic turn. The linguistic turn
enables us to escape from aporias of “mentalism” that dominated much of phi-
losophy from the time of Descartes through the end of the nineteenth century.
In this respect, the linguistic turn initiated a progressive paradigm shift. But
the linguistic turn brings its own set of problems. If we concede that our
knowledge of the world is always mediated by language and that we never have
direct cognitive contact with a “brute” reality, then how are we to avoid a form
of linguistic idealism or a contextualism that fails to do justice to our realistic
intuitions—to our sense that there is a world independent of us and about
which we can make true claims? Furthermore, how can we escape from the
snares of a linguistic relativism that fails to do justice to the recognition that
there are binding universal moral norms that transcend any local context?
Habermas argues that the way to answer these difficult questions is by articu-
lating and defending Kantian pragmatism. Habermas’s Kantianism is far
removed from the “historical” Kant, but he appropriates what he takes to be
the core insight of Kant’s transcendental project—to reconstruct the formal-
pragmatic conditions for speech and action. He rejects Kant’s transcendental
idealism in favor of a pragmatism that does full justice to our realist intuitions
in a postmetaphysical manner. In developing a pragmatic theory of truth he
turns to what was the starting point for the classical American pragmatists—
the everyday world of action with its practical certainties. Truth is a Janus-
faced concept that relates action to discourse. Habermas also argues that we
Neopragmatism 195
can preserve the Kantian insight about binding universal moral norms and
integrate this with a communicative theory that demands that such norms
can be justified only through the discursive practices of all those participants
affected by these norms. He combines pragmatic epistemological realism with
moral constructivism. He follows out the Kantian theme of preserving the
distinction between theoretical and practical reason (and philosophy). And he
resists the attempts by Rorty, Putnam, and Brandom to blur or level the dis-
tinction between theoretical and practical reason—whether it is done in the
name of contextualism (Rorty), moral realism (Putnam), or conceptual real-
ism (Brandom).
Standing back and looking at the development of Habermas’s thinking over
the past fifty years, one can view it as elaborating an increasingly sophisti-
cated critical Kantian pragmatic orientation—one that incorporates many of
the best insights of the classical American pragmatic thinkers and their suc-
cessors. In the best pragmatic spirit Habermas has both learned from and
criticized these thinkers in working out his own distinctive pragmatic
orientation.
References
Brandom, Robert B. 1994. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive

Commitment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
——. 2000. Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Putnam, Hilary. 1990. Realism with a Human Face. Ed. James Conant. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
——. 1994. Words and Life. Ed. James Conant. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
——. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
24
JEWISH PHILOSOPHY
MICHA BRUMLIK
E
ngagement with Jewish philosophy and exchanges with Jewish
philosophers have played an important role in Habermas’s
thought from his earliest writings. As early as 1961, Habermas
published the essay “Der deutsche Idealismus der jüdischen Philosophie” (The
German idealism of Jewish philosophy); two studies on Hannah Arendt fol-
lowed, joined by essays on Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. The exis-
tential motivation for these writings, one may surmise, was the responsibility
that Habermas assumed for the war crimes Germany had perpetrated in his
youth. In philosophical terms, Habermas’s interest in Jewish intellectual tradi-
tions came from his study of German idealism; a further essay based on his
dissertation—“Dialektischer Materialismus im Übergang zum Materialismus—
Geschichtsphilosophische Folgerungen aus Schellings Idee einer Contraction
Gottes” (Dialectical materialism’s transition to materialism—consequences of
Schelling’s idea of the contraction of God for the philosophy of history) (1963)—
explored late-medieval Jewish mysticism.
Early in his career, Habermas became convinced that encounters between
Jewish philosophy and German idealism had brought forth “the ferment of . . .
critical utopia” (Profiles, 42) evident in modern thought. Such ferment finds
expression (among other places) in the last aphorism of Theodor Adorno’s
Minima Moralia: “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in
face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present
themselves from the standpoint of redemption” (2006, 247). Jewish philosophy
has played a role for Habermas’s project in other ways, too. Thus, in The Philo-
sophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Habermas discusses Jacques Derrida as
the most radical exponent of “postmodern” thinking—a Heideggerian who had
tempered the “philosophy of origins” with Jewish ethics (Discourse, 161–184);
precisely this combination of different intellectual traditions had long interested
Habermas for his own projects—and continues to do so, today.
Hermann Cohen (1842–1918)
Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism (published in 1918, after

the author’s death) unites Kantian philosophy and Jewish tradition. This
Jewish Philosophy 197
work—which provides a key point of reference for Habermas in “The German

Idealism of Jewish Philosophy”—elaborates an ethics of shared humanity
(Mitmenschlichkeit) informed by the critical method of the eighteenth-
century philosopher of Enlightenment (Brumlik 2001, 11–28). Performing a
new, Kantian reading of the biblical prophets, Cohen offers a theory of social
justice and international jurisprudence; as he observes, the Hebrew Bible valo-
rizes popular solidarity (Volksgenossenschaft), hospitality, rights for foreigners
(Fremdengesetzgebungen), and the covenant between God and all human
beings (Brumlik 2002). Scholars have long overlooked the fact that Cohen
developed a philosophy of intersubjectivity years before Franz Rosenzweig and
Martin Buber—who are commonly credited with this achievement. (That said,
Rosenzweig and Buber theorize intersubjectivity on the basis of language—
not by way of the universalistic ethics found in scriptural sources.)
For Cohen, human reason that has been schooled in suffering and com-
passion recognizes that one must rely on others: there are responsibilities
surpassing one’s own interests and demands that one must fulfill. Religion of
Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism both relies on and completes Kant’s for-
mal ethics. Whereas Kant had discussed judgment in theoretical terms, Cohen
treats matters in a “concrete” fashion, arguing that the motivating function
performed by maxims on an individual level is exercised by religion in the
intersubjective life that occurs at the level of human society. At the root of
such motivation stands pity (Mitleid), which “must be stripped of the passivity
of a reaction” and find recognition “as a whole and full activity in itself. . . .
Reaction, as a reciprocal effect, aims toward a goal. This goal is the commu-
nity, in which the fellowman [Mitmensch] originates” (Cohen 1995, 219).
Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929)
Cohen’s intellectual heir and antipode, Franz Rosenzweig belongs to the

school of existential philosophy (Existenzphilosophie) that emerged during
and after the First World War. Instead of reflecting on the isolation of indi-
vidual consciousness and its (paltry) achievements, this school focuses on the
fact that humans, who constitute themselves through language, are intersub-
jective beings—and mortal ones, at that.
Incorporating the author’s exemplary knowledge of German idealism
(especially of Hegel and Schelling), The Star of Redemption (2005 [1917]) pres-
ents a theory of the Jews as a people that lives outside of geography and
history, knows neither war nor a profane tongue, and observes only the con-
tinuous now of the liturgical year and pious procreation (blutmäßiges Fortz-
eugen). According to Rosenzweig’s conception, the Jews occupy the place that
Christians—who relate to the world in a fundamentally historical way, even
though they claim to be redeemed—must strive to achieve.
198 Contexts
Needless to say, Rosenzweig’s theory of Judaism was disproven by historical

events of the twentieth century. The author at least sensed as much when, in
his late works, he addressed Zionism. Two years before his death, Rosenzweig
wrote in a letter that the movement would not just achieve the renewal of
a genuinely prophetic relationship to one’s own community, but also play a

role in the realization of the Jewish Idea: just as social democracy—even if it is
not “religiously socialistic” but “atheistic”—is more important for achieving
the Kingdom of God through the Church than are clerics (even the few who
are truly devout), and just as [social democracy] is certainly more important
than the vast mass of half- or wholly indifferent laity, so it stands with Zion-
ism and the Synagogue.
(Rosenzweig 1964, 227)
Habermas’s interest in the Jewish roots of core elements of German idealism—

which he identified in Schelling’s works—also prompted him to turn his
attention to the writings of Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst
Bloch.
Gershom Scholem (1897–1982)
Habermas is indebted to Scholem, Benjamin’s lifelong friend, for key elements

of his early philosophy of history, later reflections on the matters of recogni-
tion and reconciliation, and his recent discussions of religion. Scholem’s
incomparable philological achievement is to have systematically organized,
along historical and critical lines, the mystical literature of the late-medieval
Cabbala. His studies enabled Habermas to arrive at a new understanding of
aspects of German idealism that, in his estimation, derive from Jewish writ-
ings (albeit by way of Christian pietism).
According to the teachings of Isaac Luria, Creation is a process whereby God
withdraws into Himself (Scholem 1970); Scholem considers this to mean that God
is also exiled within Himself. Therefore, the mode of existence for the world—
from the beginning and forever more—is a matter of divine substance “coming
home” or, alternatively, “being brought back” to its source. Mankind, in the cab-
balistic perspective, must be ready and willing to recapture and return the godly
sparks that have been scattered in the Deity’s exile; this process of healing Cre-
ation (which has always been “broken”) is known as Tikkun olam. Cabbalism
lends messianic thinking a surprising turn: it is no longer God’s responsibility to
save humanity; instead, mankind has the task of saving God—and with Him,
Creation (Scholem 1995, 244ff.). With this inflection, mysticism is able to account
for the entanglements and snares of worldly existence and historical contingency.
On occasion, Scholem abandoned his philological duties and discussed the

positive contents of mystical tradition as contributions to the philosophy of
history and epistemology (e.g., “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms” [Scholem 1970]).
Thereby, he explained what it would mean to salvage the (divine) substance of
humanity; Habermas writes: “Among modern societies, only those who can
bring essential elements of their religious tradition, which points beyond the
merely human, into the sphere of the profane will be able to save the substance
of the human as well” (Profiles, 210). Precisely this endeavor—derived from
mysticism and biblical messianism—interests Habermas in the works of Wal-
ter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
At the end of his life, Walter Benjamin—whom Hannah Arendt called “the
most peculiar Marxist ever produced by this movement, which God knows
has had its full share of oddities” (1970, 163)—wrote his “Theses on the Philos-
ophy of History.” This brief text incorporates theological intuitions, Marxist
insights, and acute awareness of modernity’s apocalyptic demise into a nega-
tivistic philosophy of history: the sole “way out” that remains for humanity, in
Benjamin’s estimation, is offered by the possibility—however remote—of a
messianic revolution on the part of the oppressed and for the sake of their
dead.
Thereby, Benjamin expands the moral universe as it currently exists by
deemphasizing the moment and extolling the completeness of the past and the
future, to which the present stands opposed. His doctrine of historical injus-
tice and “anamnetic solidarity” (Peukert 1980) holds historiographical conse-
quences. “Empathy for the victor,” Benjamin observes, “invariably benefits the
rulers” (1969, 256). For all that, his view of history—which is often misunder-
stood by readers—does not hold that circumstances will improve (or that they
may be improved) progressively. Instead, Benjamin offers his reflections to
counter a perspective that considers time to represent, as it were, an “empty
form” of events. Benjamin opposes such schematism with an existential the-
ory of temporalization (Zeitigung) and moments of fulfillment—a conception
of “living time” that spans the generations as a continuum.
Benjamin presents his true concern—a matter his pedagogical writings and
works on the philosophy of history simply detail, so to speak—in his 1922 essay
on Goethe’s Elective Affinities. This text ends with the following words: “only
for the hopeless ones have we been given hope” (1996, 356). In “Theses on the
Philosophy of History,” the turn toward futurity—which, as a time of fulfill-
ment, undoes all pessimism about worldly affairs—culminates in the doctrine
of the messianic “now” (Jetztzeit). “This does not imply . . . that for the Jews
200 Contexts
the future [turns] into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time
[is] the . . . gate through which the Messiah might enter” (1969, 261).
All the same, Habermas—who shares Scholem’s view—has criticized Ben-
jamin for the fact that he “could not bring himself to make the messianic the-
ory of experience serviceable for historical materialism” (Profiles, 150).
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977)
Ernst Bloch—whom Habermas has called “a Marxist Schelling”—attempted

to do precisely that. Habermas considers him the heir to the mystical tradition
in a philosophical framework: “The Jewish element within Marxism makes for
a particular sensitivity toward perspectives once looked after by the Cabbala
and mysticism” (Profiles, 69).
In three ways that seem, at first glance, to extend in different directions,
Bloch considers Judaism to represent a partially realized hope that only found
completion in what he calls “Christ-belief” (Christusglauben). The first con-
cerns the evolution of Bloch’s own, heretical Christology; the others involve
popular (völkisch) and racist anti-Semitism, as well as the political utopia of
Zionism (Bloch 1976, 708–709). Underlying them all is the idea that Judaism,
inasmuch as it represents (indeed, foreshadows) life lived in righteousness and
a state of fulfillment, offers a model for everyday existence in present, histori-
cal time—a means of discerning glimmers of hope, all else notwithstanding.
Bloch’s view of Judaism, which draws on motifs of German idealism, is
idiosyncratic. Insofar as Bloch understands Judaism to promise an enduring
and fulfilled present, his approach to the philosophy of history (Geschichtsphi-
losophie)—if not to the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie)—may be consid-
ered Christian in more than a figural sense. Jesus, Bloch affirms in The Spirit
of Utopia, was God’s migrant soul (die Seelenwanderung Gottes)—the divine
substance as “posited” by desiring human souls. Both God and Son, then, rep-
resent the quintessence of a particular kind of mystical atheism: “The subjects
are the only things that cannot be extinguished in any external or upper dark-
ness, and that the Savior lives and wants to come again: this is then as now
irrefutably vouchsafed to us” (2000, 160).
For Bloch, the Heavens and the Earth do not stand at the beginning of the
world. Rather—and in keeping with cabbalistic doctrines—Man (der Mensch)
came first. In and through Man, a renewing, liberated cosmos emerged (and
emerges). Ultimately, this picture of the cosmos admits no distinction between
the Creator and Creation. In Bloch’s theurgic philosophy, God is not at the
beginning but at the end. However, this God—who occupies and incarnates
the position of finality—is nothing/no one but Man/Mankind in a state of
completion.
By positing theology as a process, by maintaining—like many mystics—

that God reveals Himself in human life, and, finally, by invoking biblical
prophecies that promise a new Heaven and Earth, Bloch rejects the notion of
God as the liberator of Israel and the author of the world. He opposes a vision
of a coming, future God to the worldview of orthodox religion and, in so
doing, articulates a position that stands as far from the tenets of rabbinical
Judaism as it ultimately does from those of mystical/cabbalistic Judaism
(which—all speculation notwithstanding—holds God and Creator ultimately
to be one and the same).
Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969)
In his early studies on Kierkegaard and in his collaboration with Paul Tillich,
Adorno addressed theological matters, which were also familiar to him
through Walter Benjamin and his writings. However, he did not take them up
explicitly before 1935. Adorno articulated his position in a letter to Max Hork-
heimer (which he wrote in response to the latter’s objection to Henri Bergson,
whose philosophy failed to discuss death in a satisfactory fashion):
It is remarkable how entirely the consequences of your “atheism” (which I

believe less, the more it is elaborated: for when it is explained, its metaphysical
power increases) match those stemming from my own theological intentions,
which—as unwelcome as they may be to you, arrive at the same conclusions
as your reflections; I could, after all, affirm that the aim of salvaging what
is hopeless represents the central effort of all I undertake—and need say
nothing more.
(Gumnior and Ringguth 1973, 84–85)
Adorno’s philosophy of history and aesthetics, understanding of Enlight-

enment, and negative dialectics draw on the tension between restorative-utopian
messianism, on the one hand, and critique of the world as it now exists, on the
other. Adorno undertakes these projects for the sake of redemptive truth—a
process that, while promising to halt historical decline, is rendered inopera-
tive by the “graven images” that obscure it.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment—especially “Elements of Anti-Semitism”—
Horkheimer and Adorno examine the relationship between Judaism and
Christianity from the perspective of the philosophy of history and defend the
asceticism of the Jewish conception of the Deity against the “regressive” traits
they discern in the humanized, Christian God. They hold, like Rosenzweig,
that the essence of Jewish belief lies in reconciliatory anamnesis through
ritual—which offers worshippers the prospect of witnessing the Eternal renew
202 Contexts
itself and intervene in the temporal world against the ruses of fallen/fettered
nature (human and otherwise). The guarantee for such remembrance is the
prohibition of idolatry, which preserves the notion of redemption by forbid-
ding that salvation itself be depicted (or even imagined).
Only when the austerity of iconoclastic doctrine prevents the thought
of salvation from being betrayed to the present or to the future (which is
commonly—and erroneously—conceived as a prolongation of the present)
does the possibility of redemptive remembrance for the victims of history
exist. Only then does the notion of “redeeming those without hope” possess
meaning. Accordingly, Dialectic of Enlightenment describes the ban on graven
images as “the prohibition on invoking falsity as God, the finite as the infinite,
the lie as truth. The pledge of salvation lies in the rejection of any faith which
claims to depict it, knowledge in the denunciation of illusion. . . . The right of
the image is rescued in the faithful observance of its prohibition” (Adorno and
Horkheimer 2007, 17–18).
The final aphorism of Minima Moralia (already quoted in part, above)
surely offers Adorno’s most complete formulation of messianism. Adorno
(2006) makes his pronouncement in terms of an upswing (konjunktivistisch),
as it were:
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is

the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves
from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on
the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspec-
tives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be,
with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day
in the messianic light.
(247)
These lines are penetrated by the certainty that the very ability to distinguish
between good and evil depends on the capacity to picture another, better
world—even if one can never know whether it will become reality.
This power to envision something else and to identify its meaning points
to what Adorno calls “transcendence”; it leaves behind a glimmer (Schein),
which, ultimately, goes back to the will of human beings not to content
themselves with the dreariness of calamitous (unheilvoll) immanence.
Here, the bodily capacity for suffering and the ability to recall experiences
of injustice occupy a terrain that, traditionally, was administered by theol-
ogy. By invoking corporeal pain, Adorno (2007) offers a synthesis of sensu-
alist materialism taken to its logical end and the insight that arises from
commemoration:
Grayness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbor the con-
cept of different colors, scattered traces of which are not absent from the nega-
tive whole. The traces always come from the past, and our hopes from their
counterpart, from that which was or is doomed; such an interpretation may
very well fit the last line of Benjamin’s text on Elective Affinities: “For the sake
of the hopeless only are we given hope.”
(377–378)
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
Arendt’s distinction between labor, work, and action plays a central role in
Habermas’s critique of orthodox Marxism (elaborated in Knowledge and
Human Interests, in particular). At first, it does not seem that she is important
to Habermas as a Jewish thinker, specifically. Arendt did not understand her-
self in these terms in any conventional way; Habermas, for his part, mentions
how Judaism factors into Arendt’s political critique of power and totalitarian-
ism only in passing (Profiles, 171ff.).
All the same, Arendt always took an interest in Jewish traditions and often
found them in surprising places (Arendt 1976a). Over the course of her profes-
sional life, she reflected on the fate of the Jewish people while also pursuing her
systematic, philosophical studies. In political terms, it was clear to Arendt that
she could only ever speak in the name of the Jews (Pilling 1996, 91–92). Three of
her main works—a study on Rahel Varnhagen addressing assimilation from a
critical perspective (1981 [1933]), The Origins of Totalitarianism (1986 [1951]), and
the highly controversial series of articles that appeared as Eichmann in Jerusa-
lem (1981 [1964])—address Judaism and Jewishness; on this basis, Arendt devel-
oped an existential political philosophy for twentieth-century humanity.
The fact that Arendt approached the problems confronting Jewish life with
theoretical tools shaped more by classical antiquity and German existential
philosophy than by the traditions of Judaism is less a matter of historical irony
than of the paradoxical situation in which all Jews have found themselves
since emancipation, inasmuch as they feel obligated to bring Judaism into step
with the times (auf die Höhe ihrer Zeit). While she offers critical remarks on
Jewish assimilationism’s chauvinism as well as on educated Jewry’s flight to
humanism, she also observes, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that Zionism
never denied the objective reality of “the Jewish question”; indeed, “the fact
that certain . . . phenomena did not come out as sharply in German and Aus-
trian Jews, may be partly due to the strong hold of the Zionist movement on
Jewish intellectuals in these countries” (1973, 79n).
204 Contexts
At the same time, Arendt subjects the Zionist project of state building (after
1941, at the latest), which she considers to represent a pact with imperialism, to
harsh critique (1976b, 127–128). It follows from her analyses that both aspects
of Jewish assimilation—the role of exemplary victimhood under totalitarian-
ism, on the one hand, and the hubristic sense of election that occurs in
Zionism—ultimately express a defining contradiction of her people; this
unsolved riddle motivated Arendt’s work across her entire life.
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)
Habermas encountered a way of understanding Judaism that differed as much

from neo-Kantianism as it did from materialist philosophy—a perspective
wholly foreign to him at first—in the works of Jacques Derrida, the foremost
thinker of deconstruction. Early on, Habermas recognized that Derrida’s cri-
tique of phonocentrism (and the metaphysics of presence it entails) was based
on a Jewish tradition of setting the written word above “spirit” as it is articu-
lated in speech. At the same time, he faulted Derrida for succumbing to the
Heideggerian philosophy of origins—even though, in the final analysis, his
memory of the messianic component of Jewish mysticism saves him from the
fatal political consequences of this association (Discourse, 182–184).
Derrida came to terms with his own Judaism late in life, after elaborating a
singular body of work that is difficult to survey in its manifold ramifications.
All the same, early in his career, he published essays on Edmond Jabès and
Emmanuel Levinas (1978a, 1978b [1967]). Moreover, the typesetting and arrange-
ment of the text in Glas (1990 [1974]) follows the design of the Talmud. In
1991, Derrida discussed Cohen and Rosenzweig at length in the essay “Interpre-
tations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German” (1991). Likewise, in a self-portrait
he coauthored with Geoffrey Bennington (1991), Derrida discussed his Judaism
at length. This book was followed by a thoroughgoing encounter with Benja-
min in “Force of Law” (1992). In 2007, Judeities: Questions of Jacques Derrida
was published (Cohen and Zagury-Orly 2007 [2003]). Derrida’s contribution
to the anthology—entitled “Abraham: The Other” (2007)—reflects on messi-
anity without messianism, combining the notion of “democracy to come”
with a traditionally Jewish conception of the Godhead in terms of place/
location.
Habermas’s contribution to the volume—“How to Answer the Ethical
Question?” (2007)—grants that Derrida’s thought, notwithstanding its prox-
imity to Heidegger, is more theological than pre-Socratic, more Jewish than
Greek. Ultimately, Derrida’s relationship to the works of Levinas prompts
Habermas to recognize how he differs from Heidegger. This insight leads him
to ask, in conclusion, whether a further, normative conception of the kind of
ethics that Derrida articulates is possible. That said, a discussion of Levinas is

conspicuously absent from Habermas’s writings. In 1996, Habermas published
a collection of essays on political philosophy, none of which so much as men-
tions Levinas; ironically, the volume is called The Inclusion of the Other.
References
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Edmund Jephcott. London: Verso.
——. 2007. Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum.
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Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
——. 1976a. Die verborgene Tradition. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1976b. “Der Zionismus aus heutiger Sicht.” In Die verborgene Tradition, 127–168.
——. 1995. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt Brace.
——. 1997. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. Balti-
more, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.
——. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin.
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Bloch, Ernst. 1995. The Principle of Hope. 3 vols. Trans. Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice,
and Paul Knight. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
——. 2000. The Spirit of Utopia. Trans. Anthony Nassar. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univer-
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——. 2002. “Der Mensch als Mitmensch. Intersubjektivität bei Hermann Cohen.” In Ratio-
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25
MONOTHEISM
FELMON DAVIS
Context and Motivations
Habermas’s engagement with religion and monotheism has been long and
deep, extending from his doctoral work on Schelling to occasional work on
the religious motifs in Benjamin, Horkheimer, Scholem, and others, work he
has undertaken with great sensitivity. In his masterful synthesis The Theory of
Communicative Action (1981), he considered religion mostly in its function as
promoting “solidarity,” leaving open the possibility that the “domain of the
sacred” might be replaced by a secular morality and culture (2:92).
But from the publication of his 1988 collection of papers Postmetaphysical
Thinking to his recent work, the 2005 volume Between Naturalism and Reli-
gion, he has become emphatic that religious language may well express some-
thing that—at least for now—resists “the explanatory force of philosophical
language” (Postmetaphysical, 51). Consequently, as far as this remains the case,
he calls for a “postsecular society” in which religious citizens reconcile their
“truth” with the pluralism of beliefs in modern society; the secular, mean-
while, are to learn from the insights of religious experience. Thus religious
and secular engage in a cooperative process of truth finding.
Habermas (2008) has recently made clear that by “secularization” he does
not mean the replacement of religion but rather its displacement from its posi-
tions of political and legal power, with the consequent privatization of reli-
gious practice. Still, he acknowledges that unexpectedly (Langthaler and
Nagl-Docekal 2007, 393), in spite of the ongoing world-historical process of
secularization, religion does not seem to be disappearing. Quite the contrary:
religious practice is growing even in Europe and is also assuming new forms.
Habermas refuses to reject this persistence or resurgence of religious belief
as simply an irrational phenomenon; instead, he urges that religious belief says
something that must be taken seriously. Religious belief, specifically certain
forms of monotheism and particularly of Christianity, is possibly an expres-
sion of reason; thus he lays emphasis on the “cognitive content”—the truth
content—of religious belief.
In addition, normative reason is in crisis; it is threatened by a torrential
rationalism that Habermas calls the “derailment of modernity” (Entgleisung
208 Contexts
der Moderne), which threatens the very economy of normative reason (Lang-
thaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 371) and against which he looks to religious belief
and experience to counteract the “entropy of the scarce resource of meaning”
(Future, 114). The roots of normative reason in the lifeworld are threatened by
the increasing predominance of the ideology of the global market and by new
developments in science, particularly in the fields of biogenetics, where increas-
ingly the “luck” of nature is shunted aside in favor of whimsical, consumer-
driven control of the genetic endowment of human beings; and in neuroscience,
where the questioning of the existence of free agency threatens the very idea of
political deliberation and choice.
Habermas turns to religious belief for a possible regeneration of the springs
of secular normative reason. Monotheism may contain “semantic potentials”
from which secular reason may learn and that can offer citizens, both believ-
ers and nonbelievers, worthy and compelling ideals of life and community
within the liberal-democratic state.
Faith and Knowledge
Habermas finds inspiration in Kant for his own dialectical project of a demar-
cation (Grenzziehung) between religious belief and knowledge combined with
a rational appropriation (Aneignung) of religious content; he finds in Kant the
“incomparable model for any attempt at rational appropriation of religious
content” (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 378); important relevant works
are the Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant 2001) and Religion Within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason (Kant 1998), among others. In particular:
(a) Kant clearly separates what we can know from what is a matter for faith,
and in the moral domain, Kant insists that the content of moral law is wholly
independent of any assumptions about God or religious “revelation” (“The
Boundary Between Faith and Knowledge: On the Reception and Contempo-
rary Relevance of Kant’s Philosophy of Religion,” in Naturalism, 209–247).
Similarly, Habermas claims that the basic principles of morality rest on
unavoidable presuppositions of communicative reason that are not derived
from individually or culturally variable “ethical” notions of the “Good” or
from ideas about God.
(b) Although Kant left little room for dogmatic beliefs such as the Resurrec-
tion or the Incarnation (Naturalism, 230), he also attempted a kind of “transla-
tion” of some dogmas of positive religion into the discourse of reason. For
example, the doctrine of “Grace” can be understood as expressing an impera-
tive to moral engagement. Kant’s project of finding in religious belief a ratio-
nal core, “of conceiving the essentially practical contents of the Christian
Monotheism 209
tradition in such a way that these could perdure before the forum of reason”
(Habermas 1992, 227), anticipates Habermas’s own idea of a “saving transla-
tion” of the “cognitive content” of monotheism into secular language.
However, Habermas rejects Kant’s attempt to provide a rational argument

for eschatological and salvational doctrines of Christianity. Kant had argued
that principles of reason justify a rational faith (Vernunftglaube) on the
grounds that moral agents must care what the consequences of their collective
action are, and, indeed, they have a moral duty to act “in concert with others”
to realize a world combining moral ideals and the highest good. The law of
unintended consequences thwarts the practical realization of such a world,
but “ought” implies “can,” so it is only rational to believe that there is a being
who is capable of drawing this longed-for world out of the crooked paths
(krumme Wege) of human history (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 224,
376). Habermas maintains that the idea of a “rational faith” (Vernunftglaube)
violates the appropriate demarcation (Grenzziehung) separating reason and
faith. Practical reason can offer encouragement and ward off defeatism, but it
cannot console with promises of salvation (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal
2007, 395).
The exegetical cavils raised by some theologians about Habermas’s reading
of Kant go to important issues of philosophical and religious substance. Chris-
tian Danz (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 9–32) fears Habermas’s demar-
cation thesis fails to preserve the integrity of religion; it is precisely the kind of
“transformation of religion into philosophy” (31) that Habermas resisted in
Kant, where philosophy can appropriate whatever is rational in religion with-
out remainder. For Langthaler, the eschatological and salvational elements of
religion are rationally grounded hope, whereas Habermas accuses Kant of
infidelity to his own demarcation between reason and faith. Nagl-Docekal, on
the other hand, contends that according to Kantian theory reason can gener-
ate insights on its own, insights that, according to Habermas, Kant rightly
claims are intrinsically religious. For instance, she maintains that the idea of
an “ethical commonwealth” (ethisches Gemeinwesen) is available to reason
without assistance from religious metaphors of a “Kingdom of God” (Gottes-
reich) or “Reign of God” (Gottesherrschaft) (379). Against this Habermas
denies that this religious idea is equivalent to the properly Kantian moral ideal
of a “Kingdom of Ends” (Reich der Zwecke) or the political ideal of a republican
order. Perhaps more importantly, Habermas contends that Nagl-Docekal puts
philosophy in the role of dictating to religious communities how they must
comport themselves in modern pluralistic society.
210 Contexts
Postmetaphysical Thinking
An epistemology appropriate for the modern condition is “antimetaphysical,”

rejecting ideas of apodictic foundations for epistemic and moral claims and
appeals to intuitions of truths about the “nature” of the world or “essentialist”
or “teleological” determinations of the character of human beings. Truth is
not the object of a “view from nowhere,” existing outside human discourse
and argument. It also rejects a notion of truth as a liberating or salvific iden-
tity with or contemplation of being: “Being” is not identical with the “Good.”
Note that religions typically involve “metaphysical” worldviews.
Instead, an antimetaphysical epistemology espouses a “fallibilism” about
all knowledge claims: all claims are subject to ongoing revision and even
refutation. This is not skepticism: it does not deny the possibility of hic et
nunc knowledge, though it does reject absolute knowledge. Truth is the limit
of a “transcendence from within,” a horizon consisting in a never-actual
final agreement of inquiry that serves as a regulative norm for the actually
existing practices of inquiry. Habermas calls this posture “postmetaphysical
thinking.”
This “fallibilism” leads Habermas to maintain that it is a priori possible
that the “cognitive substance” of the world religions “has not yet been
exhausted” (Naturalism, 142). Philosophy cannot penetrate or encompass, let
alone lay the foundation for, the “thicket of the lifeworld”; it can attend to “a
reason that is already operating in everyday communicative practice” (Post-
metaphysical, 50) in the sources of aesthetic experience, in the rich complexity
of the moral life, and in the depths of transcendent revelation (Naturalism,
242). So philosophy can attend to, extract, and illuminate those contents of
religious belief and experience that meet the standards of “rational justifica-
tion” (begründende Rede), that is, of rational argumentation (as outlined, for
instance, in Truth), on the basis of which those contents can be considered
justified true belief. It makes sense to mine religion for its “differentiated pos-
sibilities of expression and . . . sensitivities,” for what makes a life meaningful
or misshapen, for human ideals and human infamy, for social pathology, for
nuances of moral experience (Habermas and Ratzinger 2006, 43; Habermas
1992, 229). The events of 9/11 are a reminder that secular speech may need but
also mishandles nuances distinguishing “moral evil” (das Böse) from “morally
bad” (schlecht) (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 389).
Radical Naturalism
Habermas maintains that beliefs incompatible with natural science are not
acceptable but that, at the same time, natural science is not the only source
Monotheism 211
of valid knowledge. Accordingly, it does not make sense to reject religious beliefs
on the grounds that they do not fit a scientific Weltbild or models of scientific or
experimental reasoning. “Radical naturalism” (see “Religion in the Public
Sphere,” in Naturalism, 141) also poses a danger to secular normative reason.
When the human mind is understood only in the extensionalist terms of phys-
ics, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory, human existence is desocialized and
“depersonalized” (Future, 106). For instance, the neurosciences are sometimes
falsely believed to undermine the reality of “free will” (Naturalism, 147–148; see
Libet 2000, Singer 2004a, 2004b), which, if true, would also undermine the basis
for moral, legal, and other evaluative judgments.
Methodological Atheism
While philosophy should not simply reject religious revelation, it also cannot
adopt revelation and its “certainties” and consolations. Revelation is for philoso-
phy a “cognitively unacceptable imposition,” and the attempt to forge a “reli-
gious philosophy” is anathema (Naturalism, 242–243). What it can do is decipher
those contents of religion “which can be translated into a form of discourse
decoupled from the ratcheting effect of truths of revelation” (Naturalism, 245).
The proper stance of secular philosophy and reason is “methodological athe-
ism,” which does not commit to either theism or atheism as metaphysical posi-
tions but only as at best fallibilistic hypotheses for which evidence can be adduced
and that may in the course of things be rendered more or less plausible.
To some it is not clear why fallibilism implies the posture etsi deus non
daretur. Fallibilists are not required to work as if atoms did not exist, so why
must they work as if God did not exist? Philip Clayton (2005) argues the posi-
tion should instead be “methodological agnosticism,” accusing Habermas of
the a priori rejection of religious discourse “before the experts on science and
metaphysics have even arrived at the table”; after all, in the longer run theism
may turn out to be the more plausible view (21). Similarly, Maeve Cooke argues
that fallibilism, properly understood, must allow that the nonreligious person
could become rationally persuaded of the truth of religious beliefs (Langthaler
and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 359); she argues that “postmetaphysical thinking” is
not necessarily antimetaphysical; rather it is necessarily antiauthoritarian,
antidogmatic.
Natural Theology
“Natural theology” treats religious claims as rationally justifiable hypotheses.

Habermas’s “methodological atheism” rejects the possibility of justifying theism.
212 Contexts
Natural theology, he argues, involves a kind of category mistake, since the

existence of a being in whose love one’s existence is grounded is not provable.
In his reply to Raberger he speaks of a confusion in “language-games,” in
Wittgenstein’s sense (Habermas, in Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 404).
The error arises from confusing the logic of assertion making with the logic of
moral prescription. In more material terms: the “God of the philosophers” is
not the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”; belief in the objective existence of
a “creator-god” (Schöpfergott) is different from faith in a “savior god” (Erlöser-
gott) who makes a covenant with its creatures (see Habermas’s [2001] essay on
Metz). Nonetheless, it seems that establishing the objective existence of an all-
powerful, all-knowing being with admirable virtues would go a long way to
supporting the rationality of “faith.” (For current work on “natural theology,”
see, among others, Alston 1991, Plantinga 2000, Wolterstorff 1975, and the
physicist Polkinghorne 1998).
Habermas Versus Ratzinger
The recent encounter between Habermas and then-cardinal Ratzinger (later

Pope Benedict XVI) provoked sensationalist headlines, some decrying Haber-
mas’s “abandonment” of atheism, some welcoming his “embrace” of Christi-
anity. Indeed, the two were in broad agreement that normative reason is
threatened by an ideology of the global market and by controversial applica-
tions of biogenetics. They agreed about scientistic perversions of Enlighten-
ment reason, and they concurred on the desirability of interfaith dialogue (see
Habermas’s [2001] reception of Metz’s theme of the polyzentrische Weltkirche).
This comity moved Thomas Assheuer (2004) to remark, “with such conces-
sions it was hard to make out what the contending parties thought was left to
dispute.” And subsequently Habermas noted in their dialogue tentative agree-
ment that modern reason is postmetaphysical thinking: “Joseph Ratzinger
also thinks that the ‘End of Metaphysics’ has rendered the philosophical basis
of Christianity problematic” (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 394), while
Ratzinger is reported to have expressed pleasure that Habermas, “the philoso-
pher considered in the world of the German language as the purest secularist,”
agrees that the secular must attend to wisdom found in religious tradition
(Ratzinger and Galli della Loggia 2004).
However, Ratzinger (2005) in fact reverses the “axiom of the Enlighten-
ment” to “veluti si Deus daretur”: “In this way, no one is limited in his free-
dom, but all our affairs find the support and criterion of which they are in
urgent need.” Ratzinger maintains precisely the “essentialist” metaphysics
rejected by Habermas. For instance, he writes about human rights “that man
qua man, thanks simply to the membership in the species ‘man,’ is the subject
Monotheism 213
of rights and that his being bears within itself values and norms that must be
discovered—but not invented” (Habermas and Ratzinger 2006, 71). The rela-
tionship between Habermas and Ratzinger can be better described as detente
than accommodation.
Saving Translation
Habermas believes there is insight that has so far been best articulated in
monotheistic religious belief, and thus the philosophical task is to extract the
profane meaning of religious speech (see Time). This requires “translating” the
rational content of religious belief into the “sphere of discursive justification”
(Universum begründender Rede), into secular concepts and arguments ratio-
nally compelling to everyone, for in philosophy, as in politics, “only secular
reasons count.”
The controversy about “liberal eugenics” (Future, 16–74, 113–115) may serve
to illustrate the logic of this process of translation. When parents grow and
select embryos according to their fancy or self-serving ideals (as opposed to
interventions meant to address disease), the heretofore fundamental distinction
between what one may tamper with and what is “not at our disposal” (unver-
fügbar) is lost, and the autonomy of the child is seriously impaired, since
someone else has decided for it how it will be. Now, autonomy is basic to our
“species-ethical self-understanding,” but there is no argument that shows that we
logically must continue in this—just as there is no logically compelling answer to
the question “Why be moral?” But we are still responsive to the attitudes and
“archaic emotions”—for instance, revulsion at the idea of “chimeras”—that arise
from the present scheme of self-understanding, and Habermas thinks it is impor-
tant to find cogent ways to articulate and marshal them to resist what he fears is
becoming a thoughtless slide into consumer-driven genetic manipulation, which
implicitly undermines our capacity to see ourselves as authors of our own indi-
vidual life histories.
The resonance of the religious image of creator/creature may serve to “res-
cue” and articulate these attitudes, which are lost to instrumental rationalism.
In this image the freedom of the creature is preserved, for not only does God’s
love require the free reciprocation of the creature, but God’s status as cre-
ator highlights the necessary parity of one created person with another.
Analogously, one person’s whims may not determine a peer’s genetic fate.
The biblical image of our “God-likeness” can appeal even to the “religiously
unmusical.”
Habermas’s “translation program” has met with some unease among theo-
logians. For instance, Raberger bristles at the idea that religious language is on
hold until the “epistemically superior language of philosophy” catches up with
214 Contexts
it (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 249). It is worth noting that Habermas

thinks religious language utterly fails to settle the questions raised by genetic
manipulation, since religious discourse remains confined to the “certainties”
of the respective religious communities. In fact, the arguments Habermas
presents in his book on “liberal eugenics” are plausible wholly without any
religious reference. In other words, religious language’s expressive power plays
no direct role in justifying policy choices; essentially it only offers a vocabulary
for “thicker” descriptions of moral and ethical experience. It would seem the
secular individuals are wholly at liberty to seek elsewhere, in literature and
film for instance, for nuanced expressions of the shape of our humanity (Mensch-
sein), especially if they are wary of other connotations of monotheistic reli-
gious language they may find unappealing.
References
Alston, William P. 1991. Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Assheuer, Thomas. 2004. “Auf dem Gipfel der Freundlichkeiten.” http://www.zeit.de/2004
/05/Ratzinger_2fHaberm.
Clayton, Philip. 2005. “The Contemporary Science-and-Religion Discussion.” In Scientific
Explanation and Religious Belief: Science and Religion in Philosophical and Public Dis-
course, ed. Michael Parker and Thomas Schmidt. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. “Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in This World.” In
Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology, ed. Don S. Browning and Francis Schüssler
Fiorenza, 226–256. New York: Crossroad.
——. 2001. The Liberating Power of Symbols: Philosophical Essays. Trans. Peter Dews.
Cambridge: Polity.
——. 2008. “A ‘Postsecular’ Society—What Does That Mean?” http://www.resetdoc .org
/story/00000000926.
Habermas, Jürgen, and Joseph Ratzinger. 2006. The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason
and Religion. San Francisco: Ignatius.
Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Trans. Allen Wood.
——. 2001. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews.
Langthaler, Rudolf, and Herta Nagl-Docekal, eds. 2007. Glauben und Wissen: Ein Sympo-
sium mit Jürgen Habermas. Vienna: Oldenbourg.
Libet, Benjamin: 2000. “Do We Have Free Will?” In The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuro-
science of Free Will, ed. Benjamin Libet, Anthony Freeman, and Keith Sutherland.
Exeter: Imprint Academic.
Plantinga, Alvin. 2000. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Polkinghorne, John. 1998. Belief in God in an Age of Science. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Ratzinger, Joseph. 2005. “Christianity: The Religion According to Reason.” https://zenit
.org /articles/cardinal-ratzinger-on-europe-s-crisis-of-culture-part-4/.
Monotheism 215
Ratzinger, Joseph, and Ernesto Galli della Loggia. 2004. “Dialogo su storia, politica e reli-
gione.” https://it.zenit.org /articles/dialogo-su-storia-politica-e-religione/.
Singer, Wolf. 2004a. “Keiner kann anders sein, als er ist. Verschaltungen legen uns fest:
Wir sollten aufhören, von Freiheit zu reden.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (January
8, 2004).
——. 2004b. “Selbsterfahrung und neurobiologische Fremdbeschreibung.” Deutsche
Zeitschrift für Philosophie 52, no. 2: 235–256.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1975. “God Everlasting.” In God and the Good: Essays in Honor of
Henry Stob, ed. Clifton J. Orlebeke and Lewis B. Smedes. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerd-
mans.
PART III
TEXTS
26
SCHELLING, MARX, AND THE
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Das Absolute und die Geschichte: Von der Zwiespältigkeit in
Schellings Denken (The Absolute and History: On the Ambiguity
in Schelling’s Thought, 1954)
MANFRED FRANK
W
hen, in the mid-1950s, new interest for Schelling’s philosophy
arose—especially its middle and late phases—Jürgen Haber-
mas stood at the forefront; he was the youngest (and the first)
scholar to base his interpretation on “contradictoriness” (Zwiespältigkeit). A
year later, Karl Jaspers followed his lead and published Grösse und Verhängnis
(Greatness and disaster); this book held that Schelling had anticipated the cen-
tral ambivalence of Heideggerian philosophy—more specifically, “the transi-
tion from greatness to [empty] gesture, from truth to absurdity, from clear
communication to magic” (Jaspers 1955, 7; cf. Profiles, 45–52). Around the same
time, Georg Lukács declared that the “course of irrationalism” leading to Hit-
ler had originated in the works of Schelling—a revolutionary in youth and a
reactionary in old age (Lukács 1954; for a discussion that incorporates Hei-
degger’s lectures on metaphysics from 1941, see Köhler 1999). In 1955, Walter
Schulz averred that Schelling’s late philosophy had not abandoned or over-
come German idealism but rather “completed” it. Like Habermas before him,
Schulz held that Schelling’s “existential turn” (existenzphilosophische Wende)
pointed to the writings of Kierkegaard, Marx, and Heidegger. (Also like
Habermas, Schulz examined the double nature of Schelling’s philosophy,
which, by turns, completes metaphysics, displays retrograde tendencies, and
anticipates, in an astonishing manner, postmetaphysical modernity—which
would not be thinkable in the same way without him.)
Habermas wrote his dissertation under Erich Rothacker and Oskar Becker
at Bonn, where it received the distinction of opus egregium. His study and
220 Texts
Lukács’s project differ most noticeably in the ways they attempt to resolve con-
tradictory elements within Schelling’s philosophy at its late stage. The criti-
cism and commentary Habermas provides are more “redemptive” (rettend)
(Benjamin) than “corrective” (bewusstmachend) (see Habermas 1972). Inas-
much as it dispenses with theological discourse, Habermas’s approach resem-
bles that of Ernst Bloch, who (unlike Adorno) detected the seeds of truth
within the false, affirmed the rights of Utopia over the Actual, and observed
that Schelling had demonstrated a “surplus of philosophy” compared to Hegel
(his friend in Tübingen and Jena). That said, when writing his dissertation,
Habermas could more readily have guessed Bloch’s thoughts on Schelling
than known them directly—with the exception of Subject-Object, from 1949
(quoted in the essay on Schelling: Habermas 1971a, 222–223, 227n137; Bloch
1962; 1972; 1985; 1972, 292ff.; 2000, 63ff.).
Habermas goes so far as to place Schelling—even when his philosophy
fails—above Hegel: the former’s “historical materialism” led deeper than the
latter’s “dialectical idealism” ever could. Habermas faults Hegel—his deep
sense of history notwithstanding—for never “having oriented himself on the
historical existence of mankind [der Mensch],” as Schelling had done (Abso-
lute, 7). For this reason, he declares—in a rather Heideggerian tone—“the
understanding of history is more substantive [wesentlicher] in Schelling than
in Hegel” (12). In this context, it is not surprising that Habermas would soon
refer to Bloch as the “Marxist Schelling”—and even identify with his project
to a certain extent (Profiles, 61–78).
Habermas never published his dissertation (which, at 425 pages, was
not small). “Dialektischer Idealismus im Übergang zum Materialismus—
Geschichtsphilosophische Folgerungen aus Schellings Idee einer Contraction
Gottes” (Dialectical idealism’s transition to materialism—consequences of
Schelling’s idea of the contraction of God for the philosophy of history”), in
Theory and Practice (1963), made elements of the dissertation public for the
first time. With this essay, Habermas abandoned the obscurity of academic
chambers for the light of day and drew bold perspectives for the Marxist phi-
losophy of history—which, he observed, could learn much from Schelling’s
The Ages of the World.
To be sure, this later essay—which incorporates matters discussed in the
third part of the dissertation—places an emphasis on Schelling’s first version
of The Ages of the World (1811). According to Schelling’s biographer Xavier
Tilliette (2004, 269), scholars have “blown [this text] out of proportion” (zu
sehr aufgebauscht). However, Das Absolute und die Geschichte does not focus
on this work alone; it also provides a comprehensive and learned interpreta-
tion of the development of Schelling’s philosophy as a whole.
Habermas’s dissertation has three sections. The first, “Freedom and Real-
ity,” is composed of two parts. It begins with early and later (1829–1850)
The Absolute and History 221
critiques by Hegel that were occasioned—in ways that remain unclear—by

Schelling’s late philosophy. A comprehensive examination of Schelling’s late
philosophy follows under the rubric “The Absolute and History.” The second
section of the dissertation, “The Absolute and the Finite,” examines Schelling’s
Philosophy of Nature, on the one hand, and his Philosophy of Identity, on the
other. This part reconstructs Schelling’s philosophy from its beginnings up to
the mature “Identity System” presented in Aphorisms on Natural Philosophy
(1795–1806). The third and largest part of the dissertation addresses The Ages
of the World, which was elaborated in different versions from 1809 to 1821
(with an emphasis, as indicated above, on the first version, from 1811). This
final section is divided in four: “I. On the Absolute Identity to Historical Life,”
“II. Analytics of the Human Spirit,” “III. The Temporal Constitution of the
Finite and Absolute Spirit,” and “IV. The Ages of the World and Their Failure.”
All in all, the dissertation contains thirty-four numbered sections.
Three aspects of Habermas’s study are immediately evident. First, he divides
Schelling’s philosophy into three epochs, in all of which one and the same mat-
ter is at issue: the relationship of the Absolute to reality and especially to the
historical world. In none of these phases does Schelling manage to provide an
answer that is free of ambiguity (whereby the first draft of The Ages of the World,
from 1811, dares the most and fails most spectacularly).
Second, Habermas examines Schelling’s late philosophy in light of the
decline of, and modification to, Hegelian philosophy—that is, against the
backdrop of the “revolutionary rupture” in nineteenth-century thought that
Karl Löwith (1964) would diagnose ten years later (cf. Profiles, 79ff.). In the
process—and one year before Schulz’s classic 1955 study Die Vollendung des
deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (The fulfillment of Ger-
man idealism in Schelling’s late philosophy)—Habermas examines Schelling’s
existentialist objection to Hegel’s panlogism; in so doing, he identifies a nega-
tive relation to Kierkegaard and a positive one to Marx (Absolute, §3, §5).
It is clear why Habermas devoted so much attention to Hegel and his influ-
ence: Hegel’s works stand at the beginning and the end of the intellectual
movement that has gone down in history as “dialectical materialism.” No
project—next to Marx’s—has had a comparable impact on the modern world.
Ever since Hegel’s heyday, however—and over the course of more than a cen-
tury of influence, which witnessed considerable changes to the institutional
organization of intellectual and social reality—World Spirit took leave of the
Master and gave rise to numerous declarations that his idealism was now
obsolete. At the same time, this (supposed) fact has assured that Hegel’s works
have been taken up again and again—for example, by Marx (both in youth
and maturity), by student radicals in the 1960s and 1970s, and in courses
offered by the leading lights of academic philosophy. All the while, the stan-
dard of argument that Hegel provided has never been undercut—even when
222 Texts
readers distance themselves or adopt a “heretical” stance. Here—at the “zero

hour” of the materialist critique of idealism, offering a critique of Hegel’s dia-
lectics that possesses truly earthshaking dimensions—Schelling’s late philoso-
phy lies at the ready.
For the most part, Schelling’s late philosophy went unpublished; his lec-
tures were recorded by students in Erlangen, Munich, and Berlin. We know
that—to the dismay of the philosopher himself—clandestine copies were
smuggled (at high prices) as far as France and Russia, where they had an incen-
diary effect even on revolutionaries (among others, Prosper Enfantin, Pierre
Leroux, and Mikhail Bakunin; see the documents collected in Frank and Kurz
1975, 431–466; Schelling 2003, 14ff., 554ff.; Müller 1963; 1969]). Heinrich Heine
and Moses Hess have attested that Schelling—whose thought seems so apoliti-
cal at first glance—met with keen interest among radicals in particular. Heine
wrote of the “social importance of [Schelling’s] philosophy” (1997, 3, 628), and
Hess even made so bold as to declare that the “French philosophy of society”
(die französische Sozialphilosophie) he observed in Paris was analogous—
“indeed, essentially identical”—to Schelling’s philosophy of nature; Schelling
had provided “a speculative basis to the new religion of St. Simon for restoring
former belief” (Hess 1961, 200–201, 288).
Habermas completes the picture by relating Schelling—carefully and with
due respect—to the Neoplatonist and mystical traditions represented by Jakob
Böhme and the “Swabian Fathers,” especially Friedrich Christoph Oetinger.
Habermas mentions appreciatively Böhme’s “tenacious zeal”—how “he holds
fast to the finitude of things, the existence [Positivität] of evil, and the freedom
of man to choose” (Absolute, 2). Oetinger, in turn, receives praise for defend-
ing the dynamism and productivity (“self-movement”) of Nature against the
mechanistic and atomized perspective of the modern sciences (Absolute, 130ff.,
136ff.). Cabbalistic tradition—especially the thought of Isaac Luria—also fea-
tures in Habermas’s early work, where it is described in terms that resemble
Bloch’s conception of utopia (Profiles, 21ff.).
The following provides a sketch of Habermas’s dissertation as a whole.
Attention then turns to the points of emphasis that make it distinct from other
Schelling scholarship. A matter of particular interest is the way—and the
historical moment at which—Habermas locates the influence of Schelling’s
late philosophy. Discussion concludes with the consequences this holds
for the philosophy of history—which Habermas elaborates in the essay on
Schelling in Theory and Practice while carving out a distinct position for his
own brand of critical theory in relation to Marx. Habermas’s dialogue with
Schelling, which begins in the dissertation, continues uninterrupted until
Knowledge and Human Interests and “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical
Materialism.”
The Late Schelling and His Times
Habermas was the first scholar—and the only critical theorist—to explore
Schelling’s work in light of how Hegel’s oeuvre was received (i.e., critiqued).
This occurs in the first half of the first section, which concludes that Schelling’s
late work marks the beginning of the “revolutionary break” that Löwith diag-
nosed in the nineteenth century. Habermas shows no interest in Christologi-
cal connections or those involving—in the broadest sense—the “history of
ideas” (as is the case for Horst Fuhrmans, the great scholar of Schelling’s mid-
career and late work). Instead, Habermas is interested in the philosophy of
history in terms of politics. To this end, he sketches the reception and critique
of Hegel on the part of the Young Hegelians and late German idealists and
then the readings of Kierkegaard and Marx (which proved incomparably
influential). This overview is followed, in the second half of the first section, by
a discussion of the essential points of Schelling’s “late philosophy” itself—
which Habermas, like others, considers to have begun in 1827, when Schelling
was called to Munich.
Schelling originally presented what is now known as Introduction to Posi-
tive Philosophy under the title System der Weltalter (System of the ages of the
world). The work, which was first published by Ernst von Lasaulx in 1990,
provided the basis for lectures first in Munich and then, beginning in 1841,
in Berlin. In 1972, a revised and much more elaborate version from the aca-
demic year 1832–1833 was published by Horst Fuhrmans in a compilation of
posthumous lecture copies entitled Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie (The
grounding of positive philosophy). These important editions were not avail-
able to Habermas, who relied on excerpts published by Schelling’s son Karl
Friedrich August with Johann Friedrich Cotta in Stuttgart (1856–1861). Need-
less to say, despite the editor’s best intentions, the writings—which were
redacted to accommodate paternal interests—hardly meet modern standards
of philology or scholarship. (When not otherwise indicated, the following
quotes from the same edition that Habermas employs: Schelling [1856–1861].
Valuable originals, which cannot be replaced even by copies, were lost when
Munich was bombed in 1944. The best overview of Schelling’s lectures late in
life is found in Fuhrmans’s introduction [Schelling 1972].)
Schelling’s most dutiful pupil, Maximilian II—who ascended the throne in
Bavaria before the philosopher’s death—saw to it that a pious formula stood
on his tombstone in Bad Ragaz: “To the foremost thinker of Germany” (Dem
ersten Denker Deutschlands). Contemporaries in no way shared this view. The
general consensus was that Schelling “had outlived himself” (on the following,
see Frank in Schelling 1993, 11ff.). The Old Hegelians—who considered Berlin
to be firmly in their possession as a citadel of Spirit (Geist)—had reacted with
224 Texts
mockery in 1841, when Frederick William IV (who had just come to power)
summoned Schelling to the university there. The king hoped—and these are
the words of the monarch himself—that the philosopher would uproot “the
dragon-seed of Hegelian pantheism” and prevent “the legal dissolution of
domestic order” (see Max Lenz in Schelling 1993, 477ff.).
Frederick William’s decision prompted derision because Schelling was held
to have received a “princely burial” at Hegel’s hands thirty years earlier. Since
then, he had offered the educated world nothing of import. Schelling was
lying “as if in the grave of oblivion; all truly living philosophers had turned to
Hegel, who now ruled.” Pronouncements on the Hegelian Left were even stron-
ger. Already in 1827, Heine claimed to have seen Schelling, the erstwhile “lumi-
nary,” entangled in the snares of Munich Catholics grouped around Joseph
Görres, Ignaz von Döllinger, and Franz von Baader (on how this assessment is
mistaken, see Frank 1992, 361–395). “Like a poor little monk,” Schelling tot-
tered about, mumbling mystical stuff and cursing Hegel, “who had supplanted
him” (Heine 1997, 3, 633, 433–434).
Friedrich Engels attended Schelling’s colloquium on the “Philosophy of
Revelation” in 1841–1842. He countered what he heard with polemics, warning
Schelling not to dishonor Hegel’s legacy and exhorting the faithful to dedicate
themselves to the “Battle of Nations” (Völkerschlacht) being waged against the
rival philosopher (Marx and Engels 1956–1990, sup. vol. 1, 221). When the lec-
tures began, Engels had written in Telegraph für Deutschland: “If you ask any-
one here in Berlin who has even the slightest idea of the power of Spirit about
the battleground where dominion over German public opinion in matters of
politics and religion—that is, over Germany herself—is being fought, he will
tell you that it is the university, and more specifically: Auditorium 6, where
Schelling holds his lectures” (Schelling 1993, 535).
Karl Marx asked none other than Ludwig Feuerbach to compose a critical
“portrait” (Charakteristik) of Schelling. Alluding to the philosopher’s not-
very-influential appointment to the position of State Council (Staatsrat), Marx
called Schelling the “thirty-eighth member of the Federation” (38tes Bundes-
mitglied). In Marx’s view, the whole police apparatus of Germany—as well as
organs of censorship—“stand at [Schelling’s] disposal”; consequently, “an
attack on Schelling is indirectly an attack on the political order as a whole, and
especially the Prussian establishment” (Schelling 1993, 567–568).
Why did Marx appeal to Feuerbach, of all people? “You are,” he explained,
“the very man for this because you are the inverse of Schelling [der umgekehrte
Schelling]. The . . . upstanding thought of Schelling’s youth . . . which remained
a boyhood dream for him, has become truth and reality for you—a grave and
manly matter.” These words are ambiguous—as Feuerbach no doubt realized,
for he declined the invitation. Marx does not condemn Schelling outright.
Instead, he faults him for having betrayed the romantic philosophy of his
younger years, according to which Nature precedes Spirit. This notion, Marx
concedes, is “the merit of our enemy” (das Gute von unserm Gegner) (Schelling
1993, 568).
Among contemporaries, judgments were similarly divided. Despite mis-
givings about his anti-Hegelianism, Arnold Ruge—the head of the Hegelian
Left—considered Schelling “politically and religiously liberal [freisinnig]”
(Schelling 1993, 499–500) after meeting him in Karlsbad. Ruge negotiated for
the right to publish Schelling’s Munich lectures and flirted with the idea that
reality should not be declared reasonable in the Hegelian sense until this state
had been achieved through reasonable action. “Nothing world-changing lies
within logic,” Schelling had proclaimed (1856–1861, 1.10:153). Indeed, he had
affirmed that “there is nothing to be done” with the crowning principle of logic
and reason in Hegelian philosophy, the “Idea” or “Absolute Spirit” (2.1:565).
Against Hegel, Schelling claimed that the science of reason leads beyond its
own limits, which forces it to turn back; such a reversal, however, does not
proceed from thought in his estimation. Instead, force of a practical kind is
necessary: “there is nothing practical in thinking; concepts are merely con-
templative and concern only necessity; here, in contrast, it is a matter of what
lies beyond necessity: something willed and intended” (2.1:565; cf. Habermas
1971a, 212). “True dialectics occurs only in the realm of freedom; it alone has
the power to solve all riddles” (Schelling 1993, 168).
In Paris, the “romantic socialist” Pierre Leroux gave Schelling’s philosophy
a warm welcome. Leroux even translated the first part of the Berlin lectures
into French. In Schelling’s religious turn—where others saw the philosopher
renouncing the thought of his youth—he detected a deeper meaning, namely,
that a philosophical project that recognizes nothing above itself is forced,
sooner or later—as one can see in the case of Hegel—to make peace with the
world as it stands. Mikhail Bakunin, who studied under Schelling in Berlin,
awaited his lectures “with unimaginable impatience”: “In the course of the
summer, I have read much by him and found therein such an immeasurable
depth of life, of creative thought, that I am convinced he will still reveal, even
now, great profundities [viel Tiefsinniges]” (Schelling 1993, 539).
Bakunin, who would later embrace anarchism, was probably pleased by
Schelling’s merciless polemic against the state as a “scourge of God”—a “curse”
weighing upon mankind that needed to be “negated” (aufgehoben) (Schelling
1856–1861, 2.1:534ff.; on Bakunin and Schelling, cf. Frank 2007, text 12). He cer-
tainly applauded Schelling for overcoming Hegel’s purely conceptual philoso-
phy through “real and bloody contradictions” (Bakunin 1935, 68; Schelling
1993, 38, 79). Another auditor—Søren Kierkegaard—kept notes (Schelling 1993,
391–467) and paid due attention. Initially enthused by the way Schelling
cracked open the Hegelian armor of abstraction (“when he spoke the word
‘actuality,’ in relation to philosophy, the fruit of thought jumped for joy
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within me [=my womb], as in Elizabeth”), he soon grew confused and disap-

pointed; ultimately, it yielded disgust: “Schelling prates on without end”
(Schelling 1993, 530ff.).
Much of the preceding is recounted in the first section of part 1 of Das
Absolute und die Geschichte. Habermas displays appreciation for the way Marx
integrated, into Feuerbach’s naturalism, a conception of action situated in the
historical world (Absolute, 79ff.). Thereby, he introduces considerations elabo-
rated more fully in subsequent publications (Habermas 1971c, 387–463; Knowl-
edge, 25–70; Society and Politics, 114–141). Habermas argues that Marx, because
of his unconditional reliance on the iron course of the Hegelian dialectic,
treats emancipatory action “like a child” and makes it subject to philosophical
“coercion.” For this reason—among others—“Hegel and Marx, who are of a
single mind in the matter,” make themselves guilty of “falling back to a level
beneath Kantian critique” (which relates objective circumstances both to con-
ditions of possibility and to the way that reflection occurs).
According to Habermas, Marx reduced what Fichte had called Tathandlung
(literally, “deed-action”) to an instrumental matter—which he later termed “a
real element [wirklicher Teil] of natural history.” Although Marx christened
his project with a Kantian name—“critique”—he failed to explain it in a man-
ner consistent with the ontological foundations of his own theory. For this
reason, Habermas concludes, he ultimately had to reinforce his normative
objection to reifying human labor by means of the “rigid melody” (Felsenmel-
odie) of Hegelian dialectics (Marx and Engels 1956–1990, sup. vol. 1, 8–9). Marx
understood reflection in terms of “the self-production of the species”; the
“naturalism” this involves both stems from, and is limited by, the empirical sci-
ences. Marx came to understand dialectics as a law of nature and, in the pro-
cess, to attach undue significance to “positivism” (Knowledge, 58–59, 87–88). As
a result, dialectics—which Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin only naturalized further—
ceased to be founded on the free actions of a subject; henceforth, the dialectical
process (realdialektischer Prozeß) was thought to occur through the anonymous
workings of “natural facts” (Absolute, 80–81).
It should be clear, then, that Habermas pays close attention to the turn in
Schelling’s thought after Philosophical Investigations Into the Essence of Human
Freedom (Absolute, 239ff.; cf. the comparison to the ways Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel conceive freedom in §28, 303ff.). Traditionally—that is, for Spinoza
and Leibniz but also for Schelling’s earlier “Identity System” (e.g., Schelling
1956–1961, 1.6:538–539, §302; 1.7:384)—“free” refers to a being (in principle, one
that is unchanging) able to develop its essence unimpeded from without.
This, of course, amounts to the freedom of Spinoza’s stone, which is happy to
fall in keeping with the laws of its nature. In contrast, Philosophical Investiga-
tions Into the Essence of Human Freedom declares: “the essence of man is fun-
damentally his own act” (Schelling 2007, 50). Human essence, then, does not
determine action; it arises from it. The essence of man/mankind stems from
“the concrete act of self-positing [reales Selbstsetzen], a primal and funda-
mental willing [Ur- und Grundwollen] that makes itself into something and is
the ground of all ways of being [Wesenheit]” (50–51; translation slightly mod-
ified). No dialectical constraint governs this relationship, as must occur
according to the Hegelian formula: “freedom is insight into the necessary
course of the general” (Hegel 1968–1971, 7, 294, §145; 10, 303, §484; cf. Hegel
1952, 428, 436; Absolute, 310–311). Instead, the essence that determines action
ex anankes (as the traditional philosophical idiom puts it) is a matter of pro-
jection (Entwurf ).
For Schelling, freedom does not dissolve into boundless abstraction. On
the contrary, it is the hallmark of our finitude (Absolute, 313ff.). Nor does
Schelling admit a primordial, Platonic decision that sets the course for subse-
quent action. Rather, “we demand of man . . . that he overcome his character”
(Schelling, 1946, 93–94; Absolute, 315). Schelling arrives at this bold declaration
by displacing essence—what a thing or quality is, its quidditas—into a posi-
tion of absolute dependency; indeed, he holds that essence occupies a position
of permanent belatedness relative to its own existence (Dassheit, quodditas).
As Habermas remarks at various points (e.g., Absolute, 243), Sartre’s insight
that existence precedes essence (e.g., Sartre 1991, 385) was already central to
Schelling’s philosophy of the deed.
Schelling affirms that existence precedes essence with regard to self-
consciousness (1993, 110). Indeed, essence is “what exceeds Being” (das
Überseiende)—a positive determination that has persisted beyond raw Being
(das blinde Sein) and left behind only a past or an “outdated” (überholtes)
being. Projecting its essence, the subject stands outside itself and ek-sists, as
Schelling puts it in an etymological phrasing (167). The subject abandons
naked Being “as something that has been overcome and is now past” (169–170).
Through its freedom to act, the agent is “liberated from the inviolable neces-
sity [ananke] of Being” (164). “Mankind [der Mensch] must tear itself free from
its being in order to begin to be freely [um ein freies Sein anzufangen]. . . . To
liberate oneself from oneself is the task of all education [Bildung]. Those [die
Menschen] . . . who do not leave themselves behind remain powerless [unver-
mögend]” (170; on the “temporal constitution” of the Spirit, cf. Absolute, 319ff.).
The Failure of Schelling’s Late Philosophy
The second part of the first section addresses “The Absolute and History in
Schelling’s Late Philosophy (1827–54).” Habermas takes on the theme of time—
a matter central to (the) critique(s) of metaphysics performed by Husserl, Hei-
degger, and Sartre. (Along with the “linguistic turn”—which occurred almost
228 Texts
simultaneously—time has offered the mightiest weapon against reality-deny-

ing hinterworlds.) More than any other thinker of the Sattelzeit (Reinhart
Koselleck), it was Schelling who steered the course of philosophy toward fini-
tude. In the process, he revised his own eternity-obsessed metaphysics—and,
of course, the metaphysics of Hegel (to say nothing of the tradition following
Plato and, more recently, the subject philosophy of Descartes and his heirs).
Schelling calls his project “negative philosophy.” The name is apt because
such philosophy says, of the sole theme of metaphysics (“being as Being”),
only what it is not: Spirit (Geist). Schelling puts matters even more clearly
when he declares that metaphysics—especially its Hegelian articulation—
suffers from the “infinite lack of being” (unendlicher Mangel an Seyn) (Schelling
1856–1861, 2.2:49; Schelling 1972, 439); after all, metaphysics has reduced true
Being to what it is not: namely, to Spirit, which is not identical to itself by defi-
nition. In contrast, philosophy is “positive” when it acknowledges the pure
that (das reine Daß)—the “actus purus” (Schelling 1856–1861, 2.1:586)—of exis-
tence (in the Kantian sense) as the “absolute position” of a thesis without
conceptual determination and anterior to all consciousness, which can only
be known after the fact (a posteriori). Consciousness, then, has its real grounding
(Realgrund) in Being to which it relates as that which it is not (in relation/
comparison to Being); conversely, consciousness helps Being enter the phe-
nomenal realm (dem Sein zum Erscheinen verhilft)—that is, consciousness
provides the ideal grounding (Idealgrund) for Being. A philosophy adequate
to this radical insight—which overcomes idealism—would deserve to be called
an “existential system” (Existentialsystem); Hegel wrongfully claimed this title
when he based his Logic on Being, which he understood only as the most ele-
mentary component of a rational system (Schelling 1993, 125).
It bears repeating: Schelling was the only thinker of classical German
philosophy to take Kant’s thesis on Being and its implications seriously.
Thought—into which Hegel would like to sublate Being—is simply the pro-
jection of possibilities (Potenzen, or, in Greek, dynámeis); nothing actual (kein
Wirkliches) can result from them without being circular. The Platonic me on
could not possibly provide the grounds for anything that exists unless it
already existed itself; in such a case, however, existence would have to precede
the very grounds of existence.
“It is not,” Schelling affirms, “because there is Thinking that there is Being;
rather, because there is Being, there is Thinking” (1856–1861, 2.3:161n1). Feuer-
bach reworks the statement as follows: “Thought comes from Being, but Being
does not come from Thought” (1970, 258, nr. 4). “If we want anything at all
outside of thinking, we must begin with Being [Seyn] as it stands absolutely
independent of all thinking, which precedes all thinking. Hegelian philoso-
phy understands nothing of such Being; it has no place for this concept”
(Schelling 1856–1861, 2.3:164). Marx’s famous statement—in a sociopolitical
context, of course—that consciousness does not determine being but rather

that being determines consciousness, is rooted here. Decades later, Lenin’s
philosophical notebooks still recorded declarations by Schelling (e.g., “Concepts
as such exist . . . nowhere but in consciousness and are therefore, objectively
speaking, posterior to Nature, not anterior to it” [Schelling 1856–1861, 1.10:140;
Planty-Bonjour 1974, 61–62]).
Habermas considers Schelling’s distinction between purely rational philoso-
phy and positive philosophy to be “ambiguous” (zweideutig) (Absolute, §9). On
the one hand, he holds that Schelling seeks to separate historical actuality, once
and for all, from metaphysics and to base human action on a freedom that does
not realize its essence so much as create it in the first place. At the same time,
however, he holds that Schelling’s position represents a “stopgap” inasmuch as
it is “erected on the ruins of The Ages of the World” and has “abandoned the
real issue [eigentliches Anliegen]” (Absolute, 10). That is, Habermas maintains
that Schelling failed to draw radical—i.e., postmetaphysical—consequences
from his insight into the fact that positive (i.e., real) relations are irreducible to
negative ones. The “fallacy” of the ontological proof of God—which Kant dis-
proved, decades earlier, through his thesis on Being—applies only too well for
Schelling in his old age (Absolute, 118; cf. Habermas 1971a, 209–210). Ulti-
mately, theology and restored metaphysics emerged victorious, annulling the
emancipatory tendencies of the first version of The Ages of the World.
Once and only once (in 1811) did Schelling—along the lines of Lurianic
cabbalism—consider that God had withdrawn, returned to His primal state of
concentrated potency, and left the world in a state of complete autonomy. In
his late philosophy, Schelling restores reason to its former position of “know-
ing completely the essential connection between all that exists” (Erkenntnis
des Wesenszusammenhangs alles Existierenden) (Habermas 1971a, 207)—albeit
while imposing restrictions on reason’s claims to validity.
“The project of positive philosophy would have needed to be ratified by giv-
ing up negative philosophy,” Habermas (1971a, 211–212) observes. Schelling,
then, paved the way for the “existentialist” overcoming of idealism—even if
he did not follow through on the initial consequences he drew. All the same,
he does not merit the criticism reserved for Kierkegaard: “At no point did
Schelling renounce the claims of the concept, at no point did he—unlike
Kierkegaard—set a limit to knowledge through belief” (Absolute, 115).
The Philosophy of Nature and Identity
This is the theme of the second part of Das Absolute und die Geschichte, which
addresses matters in chronological succession: Schelling’s Philosophy of
Nature (1774–1800) and his Philosophy of Identity (1801–1806). Once again,
230 Texts
Habermas focuses on Schelling’s efforts to affirm the preeminence of Nature

over Spirit—a difficult task within the framework of idealist discourse. Herein
lies Schelling’s unique contribution to classical German philosophy—“the
upstanding thought of [his] youth.” To be sure: in the “absolute Identity Sys-
tem” (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.4:113), such a hierarchy is leveled inasmuch as
Nature and Spirit are equated with each other. Yet even at this stage Schelling’s
thought leaves no room for doubt that the terms’ “absolute identity” takes
precedence and, because it is both ontologically and epistemologically “inde-
pendent,” is irreducible to them (1.4:117, §6; 16, supplement 1 to §15; cf. 1.6:147,
163–164). Schelling understands the identity of Nature and Spirit positively—
in Kantian terms, as “being unconditionally posited” (unbedingtes Gesetzt-
seyn) (1.4:117n1).
In discussing the priority of Nature (Absolute, 160, 164)—which Schelling
calls the “transcendental past” of Spirit (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.1:380ff., 1.4:84–
85, 1.10:93–94)—Habermas reworks Heidegger’s “situatedness” (Befindlichkeit)
into the apt designation of “carriedness” (Getragenheit) (Absolute, 163ff.). This
thought, he claims, is what constitutes “Schelling’s ‘realism’ ” (160). Whereas
Fichte’s philosophy of the deed prioritizes the orientation of human endeavor
toward the future, Schelling asserts that every undertaking opening upon
the future is itself already “projected” (jeder zukunftsöffnende Entwurf [ist]
schon “entworfen”)—that is, it is based on a natural fundament that, at the
same time, is also situated within human history. Schelling lends a social-
philosophical turn to this notion: the subject remains isolated and empty
until self-knowledge is sent its way through the “recognition” of fellow sub-
jects (161–162).
Here, one may see agreement between Schelling (who articulated a theory
of mutual recognition well before Hegel) and Habermas’s own thought
(especially the article on George Herbert Mead in Postmetaphysical Think-
ing)—to say nothing of the fact that Schelling took the field, around 1800, for
a universal legal order and “league of nations” (Völkerbund). At the same
time, Habermas holds that Schelling’s philosophy builds excessively on the
“ahistorical grounds of historical existence [Seinsweise]” (164). (Interest-
ingly, in Knowledge and Human Interests [43ff.], he directs the same criticism
at Marx, who radicalizes Kant’s extratemporal transcendental synthesis
under the names of “work” and “relations of production,” which stand for the
socioinstitutional framework in which forces of production operate; at the
same time, however, he continues to view them as a continuation of natural
history.)
Schelling emphasizes the productivity of Nature, which must not be
obscured by the particular forms it creates (Absolute, 140–141, 154–155); he
derives this insight from Oetinger’s antimechanistic philosophy of life (Abso-
lute, 122–138). This point meets with Habermas’s approval, especially inasmuch
as it holds sociopolitical (Marxist) implications. Here, in germinal form, lies

another line of reasoning that Habermas will develop in his discussion of the
cognitive psychology of Jean Piaget and his student Lawrence Kohlberg—a
matter of great importance for him in “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical
Materialism” and Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. In cogni-
tive psychology, Habermas finds confirmation that reason is the product of a
natural history that has produced itself; even translated into the pared-down
language of developmental theory, the matter does not lose its speculative
component or simply reduce reason to purely natural processes. (This line of
thinking is also present in Habermas’s recent engagement with neuroscience
[Naturalism].)
Habermas applies the pejorative designation “static” (Absolute, 177) to the
Philosophy of Identity to set it apart from the Philosophy of Nature, which is
dynamic. We already know the reason for his disapproval: in the Identity Sys-
tem, the dialectical movement of Schelling’s earlier ideas “freezes.” After 1802
(in, e.g., Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie or Bruno, or,
On the Natural and Divine Principle in Things), Schelling duly tries—albeit in
vain—to figure out how to leap from the rarefied heights of the Absolute into
the material dimension of History, i.e., the “realm of Freedom” (Schelling 1993,
168). As we have seen, he can do so only by reinterpreting freedom as some-
thing that does not fulfill essence but creates it instead.
Habermas analyzes this switch, which occurs in an unexpected movement
of the dialectic, in exemplary fashion. The more Schelling seeks to hold sepa-
rate the world of phenomena (which occupies the sphere of causality/time)
and the Absolute, the more the Absolute asserts itself ex negativo as the focus
of phenomenological attention. The way Schelling formulates the law of fini-
tude—already in 1804 (Würzburger System) and, more still, in Aphorisms on
Natural Philosophy (1806)—paves the way for the theme of time in The Ages of
the World (Frank 1992, 322ff.). In brief, Schelling holds that what is finite/
temporal has no independent (absolute) being; that is, it has no being per se,
but only in (relation to) something else, which in turn lacks being and must
find it in a third term—and so on, ad infinitum (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.6:195–
196; cf. 1.4:130–131, 343–344, 397).
Such, according to Schelling, are the qualities of time and causality as the
constituent elements of finitude. However, this view of finitude is wholly
absent in the way Schelling formulates the foundations of the “Absolute Sys-
tem of Identity” (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.4:113). “Nothing,” he affirms time and
again, “is finite viewed in itself” (e.g., 1.4:119, §14, passim; Absolute, 183).
Thereby, the philosopher forgets to add that there is nothing that can be intuited
in an unmediated fashion. After 1802, Schelling’s compensatory formulation
reads, “what is finite in and of itself” (ein Endliches an und für sich) (Schelling
1856–1861, 1.4:381; Absolute, 187ff.).
232 Texts
In Philosophy and Religion (1804), the matter becomes urgent, and Schelling
introduces the notion of a “falling away” of the finite from the Absolute.
Schelling defines this act of separation or extraction of the finite from the
Whole (das All) in terms of sin. The most concise and penetrating formulation
occurs in his Wurzburg System:
The ground of finitude, in our view, involves the fact that things not-being-in-
God are not anything in particular; since by their nature [ihrem Wesen nach]
or in themselves, they are only in God, finitude can also be expressed as a
falling away—a defectio—from God or the Whole. The freedom of being lib-
erated from necessity—that is, the particularity of life separated from the
Whole—is nothing, and it can only intuit images of its own nothingness. To
apprehend what is immediately posited through the idea of the Whole as
nothing [das Nichts] as if it were the reality of the things [themselves]—[that
is, to overvalue] their nothingness [eine Nichtigkeit an ihnen]—this is sin. The
life of our senses is nothing but the perpetual expression of our not-being-in-
God, according to particularity. . . . The original evil, therefore, consists in
man [der Mensch] wanting to be something for himself.
(Schelling 1856–1861, 1.6:552, 561)
Absoluteness and relativity stand in stark opposition, for the “Absolute”

is defined as “quod est omnibus relationibus absolutum.” Nothing is but the
Absolute, and outside the Absolute is nothing. Therefore, the Absolute must
also incorporate within itself what it itself is not: its own relativity. Thus, there
emerges the formula (which Hegel took up and developed) of Identity’s self-
identity with Difference. Inasmuch as this opposition is only conceptual, it
remains virtual (potentiâ). Only when one aspect emerges as distinct from
another in actual fact does true separation emerge—and with it, time. How-
ever, unity (although destroyed in fact) persists in essence (wesentlich) (cf.
Absolute, 198, §15, 180ff.; 323ff.). For this reason, the basic formula of time is
that it marks a separation of a particular kind, namely, a separation that
reunites (Sartre 1943, 177)—or, in Schelling’s words, a constant “calling back of
the infinite concept from its infinite flight” (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.4:119).
“Temporal is everything whose reality [=actuality] is exceeded by its essence,
or in whose essence more is contained than it can hold in reality” (Zeitlich
ist . . . alles, dessen Wirklichkeit [=Aktualität] von dem Wesen übertroffen wird,
oder in dessen Wesen mehr enthalten ist, als es der Wirklichkeit nach fassen
kann) (1.2:364).
If Habermas finds fault with Schelling’s Philosophy of Identity for not
achieving what it promises (Absolute, 187), he does so because it cannot explain
the autonomy of the finite—especially in human reality. Habermas maintains
that a process of “de-realization” (Entwirklichung) (198, §17) has occurred in
the name of Identity without relation. In so doing, however, he fails to see that
finitude has assumed a central position in Schelling’s thought in another way:
its principle has “come loose” (Entgleiten) inasmuch as the Absolute is now
transcendent. Dieter Henrich once suggested, in a lecture at Heidelberg, that
the three systematic articulations of German idealism (Hegel, Fichte, and
Schelling) be understood as variations on a core idea: that there is something
unconditional that must be thought in the I (es sei ein Unbedingtes im Ich zu
denken). Schelling, then, accented the formula as follows: What is uncondi-
tional in the I must be thought as such.
The quest for the unconditional ultimately makes Schelling suspicious of
the very idea of an “Identity System.” On the one hand, in a grand-scale vision
inspired by Spinoza, he forges Spirit and Nature into one (in a fashion that
mind-body theories today should still take into consideration). At the same
time, however, he fears that Nature—in the “night of Identity” (Schelling 1856–
1861, 1.2:403) that occurs when Spirit englobes it—might disappear as some-
thing endowed with an independent existence. Therefore, in Philosophy and
Religion (1804)—which marks a turning point in his thought (Absolute, 198ff.)—
the Absolute reduplicates itself through “another Absolute” (Schelling 1856–
1861, 1.4:31ff.); this second Absolute carries the germ of “falling away” within it
as soon as it tears out of the womb of absolute unity and ascends, in the idealism
of the absolute I, the summit of blindness (1.4:38ff.).
In The Essence of Human Freedom (1809), it is a dark “unground” or “primal
ground”— a “will” (which Schelling also called the “real activity” preceding
“ideal activity”)—that underlies consciousness. All consciousness, Schelling
avers, is based on this primal terrain—or else represents a secondary, derivative
phenomenon. At the core of this foundation, however, lies a germinal falling
away. In The Ages of the World, Schelling also speaks of “Being” (Sein) as the
foundation of “being” (Seiendes): once more, he holds that a withdrawal (“con-
traction”) of God—or, conversely—a tearing away of the I as it “pursues” its
fall—occasions catastrophe.
All the same, Schelling never managed, despite his many efforts, to find the
“reality principle” that is truly independent of the Ideal. As Feuerbach wrote
mean-spiritedly to Christian Kapp (February 18, 1842): “the scoundrel in Ber-
lin seeks, yet he cannot find it, for he has no heart in his body” (Feuerbach
1964, 13:132).
The Ages of the World: “Consequences of Schelling’s Idea of

the Contraction of God for the Philosophy of History”
At least once—if only tentatively—Schelling succeeded in emancipating his-

tory from the Absolute: in the first plan for The Ages of the World (1811). As we
234 Texts
have seen, Habermas considers this to have been anticipated by the new con-
ception of freedom Schelling presented in The Essence of Human Freedom
(1809) and the Stuttgart Private Lectures (1810); additionally, one can find indi-
cations in Aphorisms on Natural Philosophy and in the new introduction to
the World Soul (both from 1806), where Habermas remarks on the decisive
influence of Böhme on Schelling’s thought (Absolute, §18). The new orienta-
tion, Habermas writes, makes “the separation between eternal nature and
phenomenal nature obsolete”; the potencies (Potenzen) effect “finitude qua
temporalization” (Verendlichung qua Verzeitlichung). This shift prepares the
“turn” that Schelling (publicly) made in The Essence of Human Freedom (1809).
Matter as it actually exists takes on—at least in part—the qualities of the
Absolute: gravity is multiplicity in unity, and light unity in multiplicity—as
well as, at the same time, the “invisible bond” uniting both terms (Absolute,
208, 213, 218; Schelling 1856–1861, 1.7:224). As Habermas remarks, such a notion
stands in “glaring” (schillernd) opposition to the fixation on eternity that
Schelling would observe later on (Absolute, 217ff.).
In this context, it is worth mentioning a matter that has still not received
due attention from scholars (see Frank 1992, 218–219, 251ff.). Already in his
discussion of Schelling’s natural philosophy, Habermas noted a strange conver-
sion of the principles at work. Schelling had always posited a primary, uncon-
scious, and “real activity extending into the infinite” (reelle, ins Unendliche
gehende Tätigkeit), which is made commensurate to consciousness by an “unre-
strictable, limiting, and ideal activity” (unbegrenzbare limitative, ideelle Tätig-
keit). After 1809/1810, the philosopher privileged attractive or contractive
activity—i.e., gravity—as the real force; against it works expansive, diffusive
activity—light or love—as the ideal force (Absolute, 155, 168–170, 249ff.). At the
same time, the real principle—“gravity,” in physical terms—continues to form
“the basis” for the dynamic he elaborates.
This basic activity does not await reflection (that is, interruption) through
the limitation that is its complement; rather, it is itself marked by closedness,
contraction, and separation, and it needs to be led by Love (ideal, expansive,
and effusive activity) in order to open itself. Schelling also calls the latter
operation “egoity” (Egoität) or “selfness.” Now, there occurs a second conver-
sion. Earlier, Schelling still considered Fichte’s I-hood (Ichheit) to provide the
goal of nature (Naturprozess)—which, as he wrote in 1796, is nothing other
than “the history of self-consciousness” (1.1:380–383). In his new conception,
however, Ichheit appears as a potentiality in God yet independent from God
(Absolute, 249ff.).
As an entity independent of God, I-hood seems rebellious—evil, even. It
ponders its falling away from God and thereby tears the whole of Nature down
with it, into sin:
This entire relationship of Man to Nature, namely that it has become entirely
external to him, obviously cannot be seen [explained?] otherwise than by
assuming that Man has preferred his particular, individual consciousness to
the place within universal consciousness that was conceived for him. He
should, in fact, assume and affirm the position of the universal subject. The
very fact that Man no longer appears as this subject, that Nature is foreign to
him, is proof that Man has abandoned the position of the universal subject
that was conceived for him and preferred an individual existence [Sein]. Since
then, Nature is merely something external, it is a Whole stripped of its ulti-
mate consciousness [ein seines letzten Bewusstseins beraubtes Ganzes]; it is an
akephalon, something lacking its head.
(Schelling 1972, 471)
Schelling calls for a “re-elevation” (Wiedererhöhung/Wiedererhebung) of

degraded Nature, a “spiritual palingenesis or resurrection of the material”
(geistige Palingenese oder Wiederauferstehung des Materiellen) (Schelling
1856–1861, 1.8:463; 2.2:578; 1946, 1:32–33; 1856–1861, 1.2:578). There can be no
question: Marx’s utopia of the “true resurrection of nature—the naturalism of
man and the humanism of nature” originates here (Habermas 1971a, 215;
Knowledge, 28). To be sure, both Schelling and Marx derive their ideas from
mysticism and cabbalistic theology.
The question remains, however, from where what derives from the Abso-
lute can gain the “autonomy” it needs for the free deed of falling away. An
initial response holds that what is finite stems from “a root independent of
God” (Absolute, 251). A second is the simple fact that it can do so because a
relationship of cause and effect preserves the symmetry between the Absolute
and the Finite: begetting (die Zeugung) (231ff.). Earlier on—for example, in
1806—Schelling had spoken of the “self-revelation of God.” Here, the reflex—
the other of God, that in which He reveals Himself—is equal and even (eben-
bürtig) to the divine revelator, for “God can only be revealed [offenbar
werden] in what is like Him, in free beings that act from within [aus sich
selbst]” (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.7:347).
Might the speech Habermas delivered at St. Paul’s Church (Frankfurt) after
September 11 be viewed in this context? On this occasion, Habermas affirmed
that “Man’s creation in the image of God” represents an intrinsic truth of reli-
gion, and he weighed the far-reaching consequences of this insight for social
integration (Glaube, 47). The same knowledge, Habermas observed, might
also be achieved by rational means; all the same, religion deserves to be
acknowledged as a transcendent source of enduring inspiration. The view
Habermas presented here is similar in kind to that of Gotthold Ephraim Less-
ing, in the eighteenth century. Lessing held that human reason experiences a
236 Texts
“new impulse” through divine “revelation” (1908, 35, 37) and is thereby spurred
to conceive what it could not imagine on its own. This is a matter with which
Schelling also engaged intensively. Quoting the sixth section of Lessing’s
Education of the Human Race, Schelling writes in The Philosophy of Mythol-
ogy: “reason, without that guiding, numinous force [jenes Leitende, jenes
numen],” cannot “afford its own authentication [Beglaubigung]”; “left to its
own devices” as a system incapable of justifying its final ends by immanent
means, it “loses itself in complete meaninglessness” (Schelling 1856–1861,
2.1:239, 43, 61–62; cf. 2.2:241ff., 187; for commentary, see Frank 2008, text 1). It
would be interesting to know what Habermas had to say on the matter.
Once again, the ambiguity within Schelling’s philosophy is evident. His
system cannot conceive of emancipating the natural-historical world from the
Absolute without at the same time branding it with the stigma of evil and
guilt. The use of freedom—understood as arbitrariness (Willkürfreiheit)—is
also the abuse of freedom (Absolute, 273–274).
We can now finish the picture of Das Absolute und die Geschichte in a few
broad strokes (needless to say, Habermas’s study retraces the winding—and
often crisscrossing—paths of Schelling’s thought in painstaking detail). The
most tangible result of Schelling’s profound reflections on finitude is his
remarkably elaborate and modern doctrine of time (Absolute, 319ff.). Haber-
mas recognized the import and structure of this aspect of Schelling’s philoso-
phy well before other modern readers (a full two years before Wolfgang
Wieland, for example). The most important feature of The Ages of the World
for Habermas is the notion that God puts an end to the playful contest of
forces—the “rotating activity” (rotatorischer Umtrieb) (Absolute, 359ff.) of ego-
ity and love, of restrictive contraction and expansive affirmation—through a
decision (Entschluss).
Here, Schelling is following the mystical conception of wisdom (Sophia)—a
matter Habermas discusses in Das Absolute und die Geschichte and “Dialecti-
cal Idealism’s Transition to Materialism” with remarkable erudition. (The dis-
sertation focuses on the model provided by Jakob Böhme, whereas the essay
concentrates on cabbalistic tradition, especially the thought of Isaac Luria.) In
the act of decision, creative nature (die zeugende Natur)—now for the first
time denominated “God the Father”—abandons a position of indifference and
permits Love to free itself from the bonds of I-hood; this decision occurs
through God’s act of ecstatic kenosis (Selbstentäußerung). Free and uncon-
strained, He bows to the spirit of Love, which occurs inasmuch as He concen-
trates (“contracts”) Himself into a state of primal potency, out of which
the begetting of independent Nature—with Man at its summit—becomes
possible.
Habermas summarizes the consequences as follows: the unity of God
breaks apart into a historical entity, to be conceived in analogy to freely acting
mankind; this being has, in enacting its decision, shed its divinity and permit-
ted itself “to be engulfed [verschlingen] by history” (Habermas 1971a, 202), on
the one hand, while, on the other, preserving a suprahistorical form that
retains (only) the appearance of oneness (Absolute, 372–373, 391). Henceforth,
the fate of Nature lies in the hands of the Son. As Habermas remarks,
Schelling—in a note that went unpublished in his lifetime—went so far as to
declare that eternity was, in fact, projected from a position of finitude:
Before Eternity, therefore, Time stands as an independent principle [selbstän-

diges Principium]; if we wish to speak precisely, we must say that Eternity is
not of itself, that it is only through Time; that, therefore, Time, according to
reality [der Wirklichkeit nach], is before Eternity; that, in this sense—and not
as is commonly thought—Time is not posited by Eternity; rather, and on the
contrary, Eternity is the child of Time.
(Schelling 1946, 3:229–230)
Already in the second version of The Ages of the World, Schelling sought to
steer another course: because the band of cosmic forces is indissoluble—
because it is grounded in the essence of the Absolute—it does not come undone
in the Son. This line of reasoning, however, merely pulls the “emergency
brake” of speculation in order to deny a process without which the Absolute
itself cannot be conceived (Absolute, 373): the maneuver saves God’s absolute-
ness but gives up on His existence in history (380; cf. Habermas 1971a, 202ff.).
Marx and Schelling
In “Dialectical Idealism’s Transition to Materialism,” Habermas takes up the

themes of his dissertation again. This time he does not seek to analyze
Schelling’s failure. Instead, he tries to determine the implications it holds for
his own intellectual project, which is increasingly oriented on Marx’s philoso-
phy of history. This second look at Schelling’s Ages of the World is redemptive:
utopian à la Bloch.
To be sure, “Schelling is no political thinker” (Habermas 1971a, 172). All the
same, Habermas remarks that Schelling presented three projects for a theory
of political order over the course of his life (174ff.; Frank and Kurz 1975, 32ff.;
Hollerbach, in Frank and Kurz, 307–325). In the first project (for example, The
Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism), the state—as a mechanistic
legal order (“a machine”)—stands opposed to freedom; “therefore, it should
cease to be” (Habermas 1971a, 110). Here—as Wieland (1956, 261ff.) observes,
Schelling anticipates the Marxian utopia of the state’s demise. According to
Schelling’s second political vision (presented in his New Deduction of Natural
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Law and System of Transcendental Idealism), what is “holiest” within Man—

namely, law (Recht)—must be defended from the anarchic conflict of compet-
ing, individual freedoms through an order that, while modeled on Nature, is
in fact a “second nature” (System of Transcendental Idealism, 159): the bour-
geois legal order as conceived by Rousseau, the French Revolution, and Kant.
Schelling’s third model—which he elaborated in the context of his Philosophy
of Identity (and presented at the end of the tenth lecture On the Method of
Academic Study and in the conclusion to his Wurzburg System)—considers
striking an “organic” (i.e., a nonmechanistic) balance between the interests of
the individual and the general; this perspective will be familiar to readers
from Hegel’s philosophy of law.
Ultimately, however—after the Stuttgart Private Lectures—the first, “anar-
chistic” model carried the day. Even if it found expression in conservative
affirmations of monarchy, the altogether biting language likely fueled
Schelling’s firebrand pupil Bakunin (Frank 2007, text 12; cf. Habermas’s quo-
tation of Schelling’s late comments on the state in Theorie und Praxis, 213).
The most conspicuous element of Schelling’s thought—and the point where
he demonstrates the greatest distance from the projects of his fellow travelers
on the road of philosophical idealism—concerns the negation of the state.
Habermas considers the matter to be deeply connected with that of an “abso-
lute, real [wirklich] beginning”—a process that, because it defies his power of
conception, Hegel (1952, 26) polemically denounces. “What is ultimately true,”
Schelling wrote a year before the publication of Phenomenology of Spirit, “must
also have been true at the very beginning” (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.7:73). In The
Ages of the World, Schelling—with echoes of Solomon’s lament (Habermas
1971a, 182)—describes the circle without issue of the (Hegelian) Concept,
which is closed upon itself. Here, Habermas adds to his reflections a variant of
mysticism, to whose legacy “the early Marx and the speculative minds in the
Marxist tradition (Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor
W. Adorno) [found] themselves attracted” (Knowledge, 33): the medieval
Zohar, in general terms, and the later thought of Isaac Luria (Habermas 1971b,
284–285).
The relevance of this tradition to Schelling is evident in “three topoi”: first,
the notion of a natural ground (Grund) that is within God but inaccessible to
Him; second, the idea of egoity, through which God can “contract” Himself
and return to the state of primal potency (Zimzum); and finally, the view
that primal Man (Adam Kadmon) “fell away” from the divine order and tore
Creation along with him. Before fallen Man, the process of history extends—
“uninterruptedly, and at every moment, making past and future arise
simultaneously” (Habermas 1971a, 207): time, as Friedrich Schlegel affirmed,
is nothing but “eternity out of joint”; “nor,” for that matter, “is eternity the
negation of all time” (Schlegel 1958, 10:550). Accordingly, Schelling warns
against sloppy idealism, which holds that “an entirely pure concept of eter-
nity” exists “free of admixtures of notions of time” (Schelling 1856–1861,
1.8:259–260). “The experience of our world’s corruption” makes him sympa-
thetic to cabbalistic tradition.
First, however, a “real [wirklich] beginning” to the process must be deter-
mined. Schelling finds it in the power of contraction: “All development pre-
sumes envelopment. . . . The beginning lies in attraction [Alle Entwickelung
setzt Einwickelung voraus. . . . In der Anziehung liegt der Anfang]” (Schelling
1946, 1:23). This is a “methodologically materialistic” point of departure: it
makes what is natural and “lower” the necessary basis for what is higher—if
only in terms of being and not dignity. (“Priority stands in inverse relation to
superiority,” Habermas comments [1971a, 189; see Schelling 1946, 1:25–26].)
The rest of Schelling’s system we know from the dissertation. God makes
the world begin in that He—mythically speaking—ends the “virtuality” of
articulation that occurs in the uneventful activity (Umtrieb) of forces by draw-
ing back to primordial potentiality; thereby, He separates the present from the
past, into which He withdraws. The process of Nature begins, and its summit
is crowned by Incarnation (Menschwerdung)—now, the critical threshold of
theogony has been achieved. Mankind (der Mensch) can come to a “halt” in
the order of forces as it stands, or it can break it apart through action of its
own—tearing the divine bond (the Platonic desmos Schelling discusses in his
commentary of Timaeus [1794]). This bond is “essential” (wesentlich) within
God—and indissoluble—but this is not the case for Man/Mankind. If, then,
God ruptures the bond through a renewed contraction, He reverses the order
of things, corrupting them and Himself—and subjecting them and Himself to
“naturality” (Naturalität); henceforth, Nature (which should exist only to be
overcome through the principle of the Ideal) becomes His master. The process
of Nature no longer pursues the aim of Love; now, Love is beholden to the
commandments of the material age—“anger” and “evil” (Habermas 1971a,
192–193).
In falling away, Man has brought a “curse” upon Nature. Through his deed,
Nature has grown “alienated from the divine Self.” It is worth noting, in this
context, that Schelling here—and elsewhere—employs the expression “alien-
ation” (Entfremdung) (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.2:212; Schelling 1993, 206). Marx—
whom Habermas also presents in Knowledge and Human Interests as a method-
ological (or epistemological) materialist and not a metaphysical one—describes
the “material age” as a time when the “essential forces” (Wesenskräfte) of Man,
which are ideal by nature, are repressed by materiality but not neutralized
(Frank 1992, 319ff.). To put things in Schelling’s terms, matter is not the “where-
fore” (das Worumwillen) of the process of history—that is, “what should be”
(das Seynsollende). It is not dignitate prius; rather, it asserts its primacy only on
the level of actuality (der Wirklichkeit nach). Instead of inaugurating a higher
240 Texts
form of existence, Mankind has succumbed (verfallen) to the power of Nature;

now it pursues only the material reproduction of its naked being: “preserving
the external basis of life,” it offers solely “the image of having sunk to fighting
for existence” (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.7:460, 462). Only by employing outside
forces can it hope, in the long run, to bring what is external to it under control
again (373). Social labor, through which humanity regulates its metabolic
exchange with nature, was conceived as the means to a higher end (“the realm
of freedom” [Reich der Freiheit], as Schelling and Marx call it); in its alienated
condition, however, it degrades into a purely material end, in service only to
this fallen world.
To be sure: for Schelling (as for Marx), conceptual necessity does not auto-
matically entail anything. In withdrawing from the world, God delegated the
achievement of higher ends to free, human action; He has shown mankind the
goal but not “necessitated” it (Habermas 1971a, 194–195). Mankind (der Mensch)
not only experiences, in encountering Nature, a Hegelian self-encounter with
Spirit; it also meets with traces of an older history, the reality of which remains
only halfway available. The redemption of fallen nature—a conceptual truth
(Begriffswahrheit) for Hegel—need not occur successfully. If we contemplate
our environment (what Marx calls “objective nature”) and social reality as a
whole (“subjective nature”), everything induces us to a pessimistic interpre-
tation of this kind (Schelling 1972, 470ff.; Marx 1993b). By adopting such a
perspective, Habermas sets himself in opposition to Hegel (like Marx, whose
dialectical materialism holds that conceptual coercion or causal necessity
produces “false unity” of the Spirit/“realm of freedom”). “In Schelling’s
Logic, had he written such a work, Book III would have remained subordi-
nate to Book II—the concept would be subordinate to essence” (Habermas
1971a, 195).
Habermas considers the historical world to be founded on human action.
Thereby he invokes both Marx and Schelling. According to the former, man-
kind makes its history, but under circumstances that are given—i.e., which it
does not choose (Marx 1913a, 9). Schelling would endorse this view—even to
the point of affirming the project of methodological materialism. However,
Schelling in his late stage sees the crisis of “pure” philosophy as lying not just
in the inconceivability of existence but also in the fact that the consequences
of action cannot be rationally foreseen (Schelling 1856–1861, 1.10:153; 2.1:565;
Habermas 1971a, 212ff.). Moreover, he holds that abstract theory/pure contem-
plation does not negate the need for action (Handlungszwang). Hegel’s absolute
knowledge represents a dead end; with and from it “nothing is to be done” (ist
nichts anzufangen): “Giving up action is impossible [lässt sich nicht durchsetzen];
actions must occur. But as soon as active life takes place again, actuality asserts
its rights, the ideal (passive) God is no longer enough, and despair returns, as
before” (Schelling 1856–1861, 2.1:559–560).
However, it is God who determines the goal of human action; He has passed
on His claim to existence to a regulative idea that “floats” (vorschwebt) before
mankind’s undertakings and provisionally appears as the “realm of freedom.”
The first concern, then, is to overcome the blunt (herb) pressure of the State
and Law—which both Schelling and Marx understand in terms of “a foreign,
merely factual force” (Gewalt), something that is, “so to speak, woven into and
engraved into human will [dem menschlichen Willen gleichsam Eingewebtes
und Eingestochenes]” (Schelling 1856–1861, 2.1:534ff.), and an “external unity”
in which essential, human forces are oppressed by the pressures of natural
fact.
Schelling and Marx hold that Man—and not Nature—is to be blamed for
corruption. Both consider that the natural order has been disorganized by a
kind of egoism. Both see the domination of the “material age” not as a meta-
physical necessity but as the consequence of historical action. “Marx, too, was
led by the same idea of overcoming materialism, which involves demoting
matter that has been wrongfully elevated to the status of Being back to a basic
position [zur Basis des Seienden]” (Habermas 1971a, 217). Both thinkers orient
their projects on “resurrecting” nature that is fallen, on renewing mankind’s
essential unity (Wesenseinheit) with Nature. To be sure, Schelling devises a
theogony, and Marx pursues economic analysis (215–216); despite his avowed
sympathy for the “inner” will to overcome the state, Schelling denounces rev-
olution as a crime (Schelling 1856–1861, 2.1:547ff.), and Marx counts on noth-
ing so much as revolution inasmuch as only action “from outside” can have an
effect on what has degenerated into externality (Habermas 1971a, 218).
All the same, Habermas observes, Marx lends a concrete dimension to
Schelling’s vague talk of “pushing back” matter into a position subordinate to
higher life. The realm of necessity will yield to that of freedom when
socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with
nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of
being dominated by it as a blind power. . . . But this always remains a realm of
necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an
end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of
necessity as its basis.
(Marx 1993a, 959)
Habermas (1971a) identifies a further victory of Schelling over Hegel that he

passes on to Marx (219ff.). For Hegel, labor—in which mankind exteriorizes
itself (sich entäußert)—possesses a thoroughly positive meaning; moreover,
Hegel holds that “through a ruse of reason” (Hegel 1969–1971, 6, 452–453) man-
kind’s subjective ends ultimately provide the means for the dialectic to assert
its autonomous teleology—a matter he also views in entirely positive terms.
242 Texts
Hegel associated no risk with human exteriorization (Frank 1992, 313ff.).

Schelling, however, based his distrust of a fetishized dialectic of reality (Real-
dialektik) on precisely this point. Marx, in turn, characterized Hegel’s Logic as
“the money of the Spirit” and the “alienated spirit of the world, which under-
stands itself [only] abstractly” (Marx 1993b, 137ff.); although Hegel grasped the
dialectic of capitalism, he did so uncritically: instead of critiquing the subor-
dination of essential, human forces to their material basis, Hegel ontologized
them. Schelling’s protest against the totalization of dialectics—and with it, the
ontologization of the “material age”—may count as a likeminded critique of
Hegel’s view of alienation as a logical process. Habermas (1971a) observes,
“Materialism is not an ontological principle, but rather the historical indication
of a social condition under which mankind has not yet succeeded in sublating
the violence [Gewalt] it has experienced from without by means of its inner
resources [das Innere]” (223).
All the same, Habermas concludes with a sigh—a lament that may well sur-
vive Marx’s project to emancipate laboring humanity. Habermas wonders
“whether what mankind has in mind to do with nature might not remain for-
eign and external to it, if a critically reflective praxis does not make a ratio-
nally governed process of life the basis of society—that is, the basis of ‘matter’
as it is defined in Schelling’s philosophy of The Ages of the World” (223).
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27
THE THEORY OF THE PUBLIC
SPHERE
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962)
NANCY FRASER
T
he public sphere is the most influential of Jürgen Habermas’s sig-
nature concepts. Unlike “communicative action,” “discourse eth-
ics,” and “the colonization of the lifeworld,” which are discussed
principally by specialists, this concept has become a major focus of work in
fields ranging from history, law, politics, and sociology to literature, philoso-
phy, gender studies, and media studies. Designating a central institution of
modern society, one that previously lacked a name, Habermas’s concept of the
public sphere enjoys a status akin to that of a scientific discovery. Widely used
throughout the humanities and social sciences, even by those who do not
share his larger perspective, the expression figures today not only in scholarly
discourse but also in broader, extra-academic discussions in—where else?—
the public sphere.
In Habermas’s usage, “the public sphere” designates a discursive arena in
modern societies where “private persons” discuss matters of common con-
cern. Distinct both from the state and from the market but situated, rather, in
the “lifeworld,” this arena is ideally the site of free, unrestricted, rational com-
munication. A vehicle for unmasking domination, “publicity” is supposed to
constitute a medium for scrutinizing the actions of state officials and the
operation of private powers, holding the first accountable and encouraging
them to rein in the second. While the ideal of the public sphere bears little
resemblance to actually existing arenas of manipulated pseudopublicity, it
affords a normative yardstick for criticizing the latter. In general, then, this
concept supplies a rubric for evaluating the legitimacy and efficacy of what
passes for “public opinion” in modern societies.
To appreciate both the significance and the utility of this concept, it is nec-
essary to reconstruct the process of its theoretical development. Key moments
in this process include: (1) Habermas’s initial formulation of the category of
the public sphere in his 1962 Habilitationsschrift, Strukturwandel der
Öffentlichkeit (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere); (2) Oskar
246 Texts
Negt and Alexander Kluge’s rejoinder in their 1972 book Öffentlichkeit und
Erfahrung (Public Sphere and Experience, Negt and Kluge 1993); (3) the critical
responses of Anglophone theorists and historians in the 1992 volume Haber-
mas and the Public Sphere (Calhoun 1992); (4) Habermas’s revision of the con-
cept in that volume and in his 1989 book Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts
and Norms); and (5) recent work on “transnational public spheres.” Let us con-
sider them one by one.
Categorization of the Public Sphere
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is Habermas’s most histori-

cal work, a fact that may explain its enduring popularity. Subtitled An Inquiry
Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, it presents the theory of the public sphere
largely through the medium of history. In effect, the category is unfolded in
two analytically distinct but mutually entwined registers, one historical-
empirical, the other critical-normative.
In the historical register, Habermas sketches the rise and fall of the public
sphere from the perspective of a still incomplete process of democratization.
He locates the emergence of its modern guise in Europe and North America in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Reversing the previous feu-
dal type of “representative publicity,” in which rulers conspicuously displayed
their power and wealth, the new “bourgeois” publics were composed of private
persons who gathered in salons and coffee houses to discuss matters of “com-
mon concern,” especially the organization of the newly privatized market
economy. Mediated by the new print journalism, their discussions created a
counterweight to absolutist states, which they sought to hold accountable via
publicity.
At first, public-sphere accountability meant requiring that information
about state functioning be made known so as to be subject to critical scrutiny
and answerable to “public opinion.” Later, it meant transmitting the discur-
sively generated “general interest” of “bourgeois society” to the state via legally
guaranteed rights of free speech, free press, free assembly, and eventually
through the parliamentary institutions of representative government. In these
“bourgeois” incarnations, the public sphere assumed a relatively sharp separa-
tion of “society” from the state. But that precondition, deemed necessary to
ensure the exclusion of “private interests,” eroded as the working classes
gained access to the public sphere and as “the social question” came to the
fore. As society became polarized by class struggle, the public fragmented into
a mass of competing interest groups. Street demonstrations and back-room
brokered compromises among private interests replaced reasoned public
debate about the common good. Finally, with the emergence of “welfare-state
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 247
mass democracy” in the twentieth century, society and state became mutually
intertwined. Publicity in the sense of critical scrutiny of the state gave way to
public relations, mass-mediated staged displays, and the manufacture and
manipulation of public opinion. Writing in the early 1960s, Habermas con-
cluded that the public sphere had been “refeudalized.”
In its historical register, then, Habermas recounted the career of the public
sphere as a Verfallsgeschichte, a history of decay. In the normative register,
by contrast, he stressed the idea’s critical force and emancipatory potential.
Here the public sphere was associated with a highly demanding type of
communication—rational, inclusive, unrestricted. In principle open to all,
modern publics of private persons were supposed to generate public opinion
in the strong sense of a rationally warranted consensus about the common
good. Such opinion merited the title “public” only when it survived the unre-
stricted exchange of arguments in a communicative process in which all who
were potentially affected could participate as peers. By bracketing inequalities
of status and excluding merely private interests, such discussion would ensure
that the “unforced force” of the better argument would alone prevail. Linked,
accordingly, to norms of inclusiveness, unrestrictedness, and rationality, the
public sphere was not only a historical institution but also a counterfactual
ideal that served to reveal the democratic deficits of existing societies.
In general, then, Structural Transformation posed a sharp contrast between
the deformed pseudopublicity of contemporary society and a normative ideal
whose emancipatory promise Habermas wished to redeem. But the book
offered little concrete guidance for envisioning a “postbourgeois” mode of
publicity for contemporary societies. From the start, accordingly, it provoked
unease, along with admiration, in many readers.
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Reply
The earliest sustained response was Negt and Kluge’s 1972 Public Sphere and
Experience, which challenged both the historical and normative propositions
of Structural Transformation. Subtitled Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois
and Proletarian Public Sphere, this intervention took issue with Habermas’s
equation of modern democratic publicity with its bourgeois variant. Antici-
pating later Anglophone arguments, the authors claimed to excavate another,
nonbourgeois form of publicity. Where Habermas saw only the detritus of
decayed bourgeois publicity, they espied the half-hidden outlines of a “prole-
tarian public sphere,” which reflected the organization and experience of
socialized production. For Negt and Kluge, accordingly, the history of the
public sphere could only be adequately grasped as a dialectic of two competing
publicities, unequally empowered but mutually constituting. Likewise, the
248 Texts
authors anticipated at least one later criticism of the normative dimension of

Habermas’s conception. Rejecting what they saw as the latter’s excessive
emphasis on rational argument, they conceived the public sphere as a “hori-
zon” within which “social experience” (Erfahrung) is organized. In a society
stratified by class, moreover, the public sphere could be useful for workers
only if its experiential horizon reflected the “proletarian context of living”
(Lebenszusammenhang). The struggle for publicity, accordingly, was less a
matter of rational argument than a contest over forms of experience—struc-
tures of feeling, modes of perception, evaluative dispositions. (Later discus-
sions of the affective dimensions of publicity include Young 1987 and Nash and
Bell 2007.) Unlike Habermas, then, Negt and Kluge proposed a way of redeem-
ing the emancipatory promise of the public sphere—via culturally radical and
aesthetically transformative class struggle.
Critical Responses of Anglophone Theorists and Historians
Still largely unknown outside Germany (the English translation of Public

Sphere and Experience did not appear until 1993), Negt and Kluge’s arguments
found some echoes two decades later in the Anglophone reception of Struc-
tural Transformation. Following its belated 1989 publication in English trans-
lation, that work was the subject of an influential volume, Habermas and the
Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun (1992). Collecting essays by historians,
philosophers, and scholars of literature and media, including myself, this
volume, too, took issue both with Habermas’s historiography and with his
normative conception of the public sphere.
In the historical register, contributors such as Geoff Eley, Mary Ryan, and
Michael Warner contended that Habermas had idealized the bourgeois public
sphere (Eley 1992; Ryan 1990, 1992; Warner 1992; see also Warner 1990, 2002).
Too influenced by the latter’s own claim to afford universal access, Structural
Transformation failed, in their view, to appreciate the full implications of
the class- and gender-specific character of bourgeois publicity. Thus, the work
neglected to consider the possibility that the bourgeois public was constitu-
tively, as opposed to contingently, exclusionary—a possibility implying that the
full participation of workers and women required not simply the extension but
the deep transformation of the public sphere. (For the debate about “contin-
gent” versus “constitutive” exclusion, see Baker 1992, Landes 1988; for further
discussions of gender and the public sphere, see Fraser 1992b, Gole 1997, Ren-
dall 1999.) Then, too, the historians claimed that Structural Transformation
truncated the full historical spectrum of modern European and American
publicities. Too credulous of the bourgeois public’s claim to be the public,
Habermas had overlooked women’s and workers’ counterpublics, which
housed more robust, contestatory modes of public participation (for analogous
arguments concerning race and the public sphere, see Brooks-Higginbotham

1993, Black Public Sphere Collective 1995). Proposing revisionist historiogra-
phies of public life, some of these contributors probed the relation of Haber-
mas’s conception to Gramscian hegemony, while others considered whether it
privileged relatively disembodied modes of public presence (for hegemony, see
Eley 1992; for embodiment versus disembodiment, see Warner 1992, Young
1987).
The historians’ discussions resonated, too, with the political-theoretical
arguments of other contributors to the Calhoun volume. Seyla Benhabib criti-
cized substantialist conceptions of publicity that assumed an already given,
essential definition of which matters were inherently public and which were
intrinsically private. Crediting Habermas with the makings of a better proce-
duralist alternative, she proposed to cast publicity exclusively in processual
terms, as a distinctive communicative stance that could be assumed with
respect to any issue, depending on the circumstances (Benhabib 1992). My own
contribution examined and found wanting some constitutive assumptions
underpinning the “liberal conception of the bourgeois public sphere.” Reject-
ing the assumption that interlocutors in a public sphere can bracket asymme-
tries of power and deliberate “as if” they were peers, when in fact they are not, I
defended the formation of subaltern counterpublics in stratified societies.
Distinguishing, too, the “weak publics” of civil society, which generate public
opinion but not binding laws, from the “strong publics” within the state,
whose deliberations issue in sovereign decisions, I advocated institutional
arrangements that, in overcoming the sharp separation of society and state,
could enhance the latter’s accountability to the former (Fraser 1992a).
In hindsight, it now appears that the Anglophone critics raised doubts of
two different sorts about the view of publicity presented in Structural Trans-
formation. On the one hand, they suggested that Habermas had underestimated
the effects of structural inequalities in depriving some who are nominally mem-
bers of the public of the capacity to participate on a par with others, as full
partners in public debate. On the other hand, they suggested that he had failed
to register the full range of structural forces that block the flow of public opin-
ion from society to the state and thereby deprive it of political muscle. Dissat-
isfied on both counts, the critics challenged Structural Transformation’s
account of the legitimacy and the efficacy of public opinion. The effect was to
suggest the need to revise the Habermasian conception of the public sphere.
(Habermas [1992] conceded some of these points in his response.)
Revisions
That is precisely what Habermas was already proceeding to do. His 1989 book
Between Facts and Norms offered (among other things) a substantially revised
250 Texts
account of the public sphere. Resituating the latter in the context of a “Dis-
course Theory of Law and Democracy,” that work seemed to respond the his-
torians’ point about the plurality of modern publicities. No longer suggesting
a single “sphere,” Habermas wrote here of a decentered network of multiple,
overlapping communicative spaces. Then, too, the book sought to address
the legitimacy and efficacy critiques of the political philosophers. Stressing the
“co-implication of private and public autonomy,” Habermas valorized the role
of emancipatory social movements, such as second-wave feminism, in pro-
moting democracy by pursuing equality, and vice versa (Facts, 420–423). By
thus acknowledging the mutual dependence of social position and political
voice, he grappled here with previously neglected aspects of the legitimacy
deficits of public opinion in democratic states.
In addition, Between Facts and Norms was centrally concerned with the
problem of efficacy. Theorizing law as the proper vehicle for translating “com-
municative power” into administrative power, the work distinguished an
“official,” democratic circulation of power, in which weak publics influence
strong publics, which in turn control administrative state apparatuses, from
an “unofficial,” undemocratic one, in which private social powers and
entrenched bureaucratic interests control lawmakers and manipulate public
opinion. Acknowledging that the unofficial circulation usually prevails,
Habermas here provided a fuller account of the efficacy deficits of public
opinion in democratic states (Facts, 360–363).
Not all readers were fully satisfied with the result. In William E. Scheuer-
man’s (1999) reading, for example, Habermas oscillated inconsistently between
two antithetical stances: on the one hand, a “realistic,” resigned, objectively
conservative view that accepts the grave legitimacy and efficacy deficits of
public opinion in really existing democratic states; on the other, a radical-
democratic view that is still committed to overcoming them. Like other read-
ers, Scheuerman worried that Between Facts and Norms represented a step
back from the emancipatory aspirations of Structural Transformation.
Recent Work on “Transnational Public Spheres”
On another front, meanwhile, other sorts of controversies were brewing.

Reflecting the new salience of “globalization,” scholars in media and cultural
studies increasingly began to write in the 1990s of “transnational public
spheres,” “diasporic public spheres,” “Islamist public spheres,” and even an
emerging “global public sphere” (see, for example, Bowen 2004; Guidry, Kennedy,
and Zald 2000; Mules 1998; Olesen 2005; Stichweh 2003; Tololyan 1996; Volk-
mer 2003; Werbner 2004). Documenting the existence of discursive arenas
that overflow the bounds of nations and states, their work served to disclose a
hitherto unnoticed feature of the Habermasian conception. From Structural

Transformation to Between Facts and Norms, public-sphere theory had tacitly
correlated publics with bounded political communities. Informed by a West-
phalian political imaginary, the theory had implicitly cast the addressee of
public opinion as a sovereign territorial state capable of steering a national
economy in the general interest of the national citizenry. As a result, the for-
mation of public opinion was tacitly conceived as a process conducted in a
national language through national media and supported by a national com-
munications infrastructure. In effect, then, the ideal of the public sphere
served as a benchmark for identifying and critiquing the democratic deficits of
Westphalian states. Habermas was by no means alone in assuming the West-
phalian frame. Most critiques of his theory, including those discussed above,
were also suffused with Westphalian presuppositions. For the critics, too, the
concept of the public sphere formed part of a deliberative-democratic ideal for
territorially bounded polities (for a fuller argument, see Fraser 2007; see also
the replies to this essay in the same issue of Theory, Culture & Society).
By the mid-1990s, however, the Westphalian framing of public-sphere the-
ory ceased to seem plausible. Whether the issue is global warming or immi-
gration, women’s rights or the terms of trade, unemployment or “the war
against terrorism,” current mobilizations of public opinion seldom stop at the
borders of territorial states. In many cases, the interlocutors do not constitute
a demos or political citizenry. Often, too, their communications are neither
addressed to a Westphalian state nor relayed through national media. Fre-
quently, moreover, the problems debated are inherently transterritorial and
can neither be located within Westphalian space nor resolved by a Westpha-
lian state. In such cases, current formations of public opinion scarcely respect
the parameters of the Westphalian frame. Thus, assumptions that previously
went without saying in public-sphere theory seemed now to cry out for cri-
tique and revision.
The nonalignment of public spheres with states raises difficulties of two
different kinds. One problem arises when transnational administrative pow-
ers outstrip the communicative power of transnational civil society, leading to
a deficit of democratic legitimacy. This is the case today in the European
Union, in Habermas’s view, given the absence of a European public sphere that
could hold accountable European administrative and legislative powers. At
the global level, in contrast, the converse appears to be true. There, existing
transnational publics are not matched by comparable administrative and leg-
islative public powers, which leads to the second problem: a deficit of political
efficacy. Habermas discussed a dramatic example of this latter sort of deficit
in the worldwide antiwar demonstrations of February 15, 2003, which mobi-
lized an enormous body of transnational public opinion against the impend-
ing U.S. invasion of Iraq. Although this outpouring of opinion could not have
252 Texts
been more forceful or clear, it lacked an addressee capable of restraining

George W. Bush and so, in a sense, remained powerless.
In recent years, these two problems have inspired a raft of new scholarly
work on the transnationalization of publicity. Once again, historians have
entered the fray, now to debate whether or not transnational publicity is new.
Scholars in the “yes” camp associate the phenomenon with late-twentieth-
century globalization. Claiming that the modern interstate system previously
channeled most political debate into state-centered discursive arenas, they
maintain that the Westphalian frame was appropriate for theorizing public
spheres until very recently (see the contributions to the special issue of Theory,
Culture & Society [2007]; see also Ferguson and Jones 2002, Held et. al. 1999,
Sassen 2006). Scholars in the “no” camp insist, in contrast, that publicity has
been transnational at least since the origins of the interstate system in the
seventeenth century. Citing Enlightenment visions of an international
“republic of letters” and cross-national movements such as abolitionism and
socialism, not to mention world religions and modern imperialism, this camp
contends that the Westphalian frame has always been ideological, obscuring
the inherently unbounded character of public spheres (see the essays in Boli
and Thomas 1999).
Meanwhile, political philosophers, too, ponder the implications of transna-
tional publicity. One debate concerns the fate of democracy in an era when
publics do not match up with states. Habermas has broached this issue in
essays in The Postnational Constellation (58–112) and The Divided West (115–
193). Noting the absence of a global public sphere, which could help foster
global solidarity, he has suggested that efforts to promote postnational democ-
racy are best directed for the foreseeable future at the regional level. Other
theorists have invoked the transnationalization of public communication to
establish the possibility of a wider, “cosmopolitan” democracy. This latter
camp divides again into those, like James Bohman and Hauke Brunkhorst,
who place the brunt of the democratizing burden on transnational publicity
itself, and those, like David Held and me, who insist as well on the need for
new transnational public powers (Abizadeh 2005; Bohman 1998, 1997; Brunk-
horst 2005; Fraser 1992a; Held 1995, 2004; Nash and Bell 2007; for a feminist
perspective, see also Lara 2003).
Additional discussions concern the media and infrastructure of public
communication in the current era. One problem is the impact of changes in
the ownership structure and political economy of media (McChesney 1999,
2001). Another arises in contexts where those potentially affected in a given
matter do not speak the same language (Adrey 2005, Alexander 2003, König
1999, Patten 2001, Payrow Shabani 2004, Phillipson 2003, Van Parijs 2000,
Wilkinson 2004). Still another arises when the potential interlocutors do not
share a culture or history (Calhoun 2002, Husband 1996, James 1999). Finally,
profound questions arise about the effects of the relative decline of print, the
new salience of visuality, the advent of the Internet, and the emergence of
communications technologies that permit virtually instantaneous real-time
communication across vast distances (Berdal 2004, Cammaerts and van
Audenhove 2005, Dahlgren 2005, Papacharissi 2002).
None of these debates is likely to be fully resolved any time soon. Thus, it is
safe to predict that discussions of public-sphere theory and history will con-
tinue to proliferate. This most influential of Habermasian concepts seems des-
tined to remain the focus of lively contention for a long time to come. This is
as exactly as it should be, moreover, in an age when public communication is
undergoing a “structural transformation” that is at least as momentous and
profound as when it was first uncovered by Jürgen Habermas in 1962.
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28
TECHNOLOGY AND REIFICATION
“Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’ ” (1968)
ROBIN CELIK ATES AND RAHEL JAEGGI
T
he concept of reification plays a central role in Marxist and post-
Marxist theories of society—and especially in critical theory—
inasmuch as it offers a way to diagnose various social pathologies
(Brunkhorst 1998, Grondin 1988, Dahms 1998).
Unlike the notion of “objectification” (Vergegenständlichung), to which no
value judgment is customarily attached, the term “reification” (Verdingli-
chung) is most often employed to critical ends. The first of two aspects of its
critical use refers to perceiving and treating someone or a relationship between
people as a thing. Whether this happens intentionally or not, it involves a dou-
ble error: reification represents a kind of misrecognition that is morally, cogni-
tively, and politically problematic. At the same time, and this is the second
aspect, viewed “objectively,” reified phenomena can assume a “thingly” (dinghaft)
quality in actual fact—for example, when social relations escape the control of
social actors. (On some difficulties pertaining to the concept, see Pitkin 1987,
Jaeggi 1998/1999, Stahl 2005, Hartle 2008.)
For Marx and the social theorists who follow his lead, the effects of capital-
ist relations of production—especially as expressed by the “commodity
fetish”—stand behind the diagnosis of reification. The theoretical role of the
concept changes fundamentally in Habermas’s works. Here, reference to capi-
talist forms of socialization is preserved, but the connection is not as direct.
For Habermas—who engages with various theoretical traditions—reifica-
tion plays a role in five distinct contexts. It appears (1) in his early works of
cultural criticism, (2) in his discussion of the ideological dimensions of tech-
nology and science, (3) apropos of the debate concerning positivism and in his
critique of the naturalist conception of knowledge (naturalistisches Erkenntni-
sideal), (4) when he diagnoses social pathologies originating in the “coloniza-
tion of the lifeworld” through systemic imperatives, and (5) in reference to the
ethical issues arising from modern genetic technology and its effects on
human self-understanding. In all of these contexts, the connection between
technology, instrumental reason (or, alternatively, functionalist reason), and
reification is key. To start with, “technology” (Technik) involves the use of
“Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’ ” 257
practical instruments (tools, equipment, machines, etc.) to achieve objectives,

methodical procedures (in German, also Technologien) that aim to achieve
optimal regulation of their use (e.g., shift planning in factories), and, finally,
the forms of knowledge/professional expertise that are necessary for such reg-
ulation to occur (Theory and Practice, 114ff.). The third point already indicates
the “deep” connection between technology and science.
Critical theory examines the social preconditions and effects of techno-
logical and scientific progress inasmuch as such progress expands and
enhances the various forms of functionalist reason (i.e., reason that aims
for technical mastery). Whereas one would expect scientific-technological
progress to enhance the human potential for self-determination and, in the
process, to make a more rational organization of social relations possible, in
actual fact, it seems the opposite is the case. Technicization and scientifica-
tion develop a dynamism of their own (which Habermas discusses in his
early writings in terms of “practical necessity” [Sachzwang]); increasingly,
they escape the control of those affected, who, as a result, experience the
changes that occur in their lifeworld as a loss of freedom and as alienation.
The antidemocratic tendencies of technocracy go hand in hand with the one-
dimensionality of existence under the domination of instrumental reason. It
is precisely this systematic connection between the forms of scientific-tech-
nological progress that characterize capitalist societies, on the one hand, and
structurally defective forms of social rationality (and corresponding social
pathologies), on the other, that stands at issue in the complex of “technology
and reification.”
Sources and Influences
For Habermas’s discussion of the connection between technology and reifica-

tion, the considerations of Marx, Max Weber, and Georg Lukács are especially
important. However, there are other sources and influences that one should
bear in mind. In the background stands the Aristotelian distinction between
praxis and techne (Theory and Practice, 2, 20) and the Hegelian distinction
between work and interaction (see esp. Theory and Practice, 142ff.).
Marx’s analyses of reified labor and the fetishized character of the com-
modity under capitalist conditions bear directly on Habermas’s theory. These
reflections lead to the diagnosis of sociostructural indifference: the organiza-
tion of the social world—particularly of the relations of production that struc-
ture it—seems to be a matter independent from, and wholly indifferent to, the
will and normative claims of social actors (Lohmann 1991, 214–215, 243). Marx
speaks explicitly of “reification” especially in relation to the “mystification of
capitalist modes of production,” which leads to “the reification of social relations”:
258 Texts
“the bewitched, distorted and upside down world haunted by Monsieur le

Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters and
mere things” (Marx 1993, 969). For Marx, the connection to commodity fetish-
ism is fundamental; hereby, the “definite social relation between men . . .
assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx 1992, 165).
Under such conditions, what appears as a thing is “not a thing, but a social
relationship between persons mediated by things” (932). For Marx, reification
is both an (inter)subjective and an objective phenomenon—a category mistake
and a pernicious tendency within (social) reality in one.
Weber’s reflections play a decisive role for Habermas—as they do for twen-
tieth- and twenty-first-century Western Marxism as a whole. According to
Weber, processes of rationalization (that is, the expansion of calculating
attitudes aiming for efficiency in all spheres of life) and the differentiation and
autonomization of formerly unified spheres of value (morality, law, economy,
and science, in particular) entail “disenchantment”: the sense that both free-
dom and meaning have been lost. The “iron cage” of modern bureaucracy and
capitalism, from which “the spirit has fled,” confronts humankind as a foreign
power; this is the specifically occidental form of reification (Weber 2002,
121–122, translation modified; cf. Communicative Action, 1:157ff.; Dahms 1998).
In a way that has had some influence on Habermas, this view is taken up by
Lukács (1972); connecting Weber’s perspective with Marx’s analysis of com-
modity fetishism, he affirmed that reification assimilates social relations
between human beings to relations between things, which come to appear as a
“second nature”: foreign powers that cannot be influenced by individual or
collective action.
To the extent that exchange value achieves autonomy, abstract generality
and calculability pervade the whole of capitalist society. Thereby, the everyday
conditions of life are transformed, as well (Communicative Action, 1:186ff.).
The atomization and commodifying standardization of labor that modern
technology entails makes it impossible for subjects to experience individuality
or view themselves as agents; an alienated and objectifying relationship to self
and world is the result. Positivist and empiricist conceptions of science also
produce a reifying effect inasmuch as their talk of “facts” conceals the histo-
ricity and changeability of social reality and conceptions of “nature.” Given
the all-encompassing nature of Lukács’s diagnosis, a question arises: from
what standpoint is this diagnosis made? What, moreover, is the normative
standard that guides Lukács’s critique (Lohmann 1983, Dannemann 1987)? In
order to diagnose social pathologies—the “broken” or disrupted dimen-
sions of one’s self-relation, life in community, and society’s relationship to
nature—one needs to postulate models of undistorted (that is, nonreified)
socialization.
Especially in Habermas’s early works of cultural criticism (1970), the influ-

ence of Heidegger is unmistakable. The latter’s diagnosis concerns an undue
privileging of “presence-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit) above “readiness-to-hand”
(Zuhandenheit)—primarily in reference to ontology and the lifeworld. Hei-
degger’s critique extends to practices of reducing, reifying, calculating, and
dominating the world, whereby, in a process of technological autonomiza-
tion, means become ends (e.g., Heidegger 1982). Habermas (1971) also takes
up and expands Arnold Gehlen’s thesis that humankind’s organic weak-
ness and relative lack of instincts necessitate techniques and technologies
that unburden, augment, and complete its constitutional inadequacies—as
well as Gehlen’s view that a “superstructure” in which science, technology,
and industry are merged has come, increasingly, to escape the control of indi-
viduals (e.g., Gehlen 2007).
Inasmuch as Habermas seeks to continue the project of critical theory,
engagement with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is key.
Under the rubric of “The Culture Industry,” this work extends the diagnosis of
reification to the whole of culture: here, the authors aver, everything has been
commodified, without remainder. On another level of reflection, the theory
applies to the administered world in its entirety. Horkheimer and Adorno
observe that reason and instrumental rationality have largely fused: reification,
the mastery of nature, human self-control, and the domination of humans by
other humans are one. Given the totalizing scope of this diagnosis, Hork-
heimer and Adorno no longer place any hope in social emancipation. Escape
can occur only through “intellect,” whose “true concern is a negation of reifi-
cation”; for this reason, critical theory must maintain distance from positivism
in all its forms (Horkheimer and Adorno 2007, xvii).
For all that, Habermas’s discussion of reification begins with the analyses
offered by Herbert Marcuse, who holds that it is not the one-sided use of
technology so much as technology itself that represents “methodical, scien-
tific, calculated and calculating control” (Marcuse 1968, 168). If alienation and
reification are to be overcome, it is necessary to interrupt the logic of techni-
cal/technological progress and pursue political emancipation. Even though, in
principle, scientific-technical progress makes it possible to satisfy material needs
in a comprehensive way and to dismantle structures of surplus repression, in
fact it is fatefully joined with modern technologies of domination (Herrschafts-
techniken). Indeed, progress depends on these measures, and subjects—because
of the one-dimensional schemes of thought and experience imposed on them—
no longer even apprehend what they experience as repression (Marcuse 1991; cf.
Feenberg 2002, chap. 3).
260 Texts
Themes and Theses
Critique of Pauperism
Even Habermas’s early works of cultural criticism (which are hardly read
today) address the connection between technology and reification, as well as
its corollary, alienation. “Die Dialektik der Rationalisierung” (Dialectics of
rationalization, 1954) employs the term “pauperism” to refer to the all-perva-
sive changes to everyday life conditions that accompany “machine culture”—
which involves symptoms of impoverishment (which is not primarily mate-
rial) in both the working world and the spheres of leisure and consumption
(Habermas 1970, 8). “Our world is filled by the rhythm of machines” (9), reads
the diagnosis. Entirely in keeping with the “classic” understanding of reifica-
tion, Habermas holds that processes of autonomization have detached the
effects of activity from those who perform it: “the more perfect it becomes, the
more the machine escapes the control of the one who made it and for whom it
was made; it grows autonomous [verselbständigt sich] and erects both visible
and invisible barriers between humanity and the objective world [Mensch und
Ding]” (9).
Thereby, Habermas advances the claim that technology should not be
understood simply as a neutral medium that does not affect the goals for
which it is employed. Unlike cultural critics of the preceding generation,
however, he insists—even in his early writings—that “Luddism [Maschinen-
stürmerei], of whatever kind and origin it may be, misrecognizes technology”
(24). Although he expresses skepticism, Habermas entertains the possibility
that one might “disinfect, so to speak, technological progress from pauper-
ism” (9). The careful solution he proposes anticipates elements of his later
work. Discussing production (in concrete terms: modern industry and the
alienated-pauperized forces of human labor within it), he distinguishes
between different modes of rationalization: on the one hand, technical and
economic rationalization and, on the other—and in opposition to it—a
movement of social rationalization that, instead of obeying the rule of “pro-
gressive organization,” involves “excluding [ausgrenzen] certain spheres
from organization” (17). The point, of course, is that Habermas—who fol-
lows the findings of the contemporary sociology of labor—still assumes that
the limits of a purely technological or economic rationalization also mani-
fest themselves in the sphere of economy and production.
In his early diagnoses, Habermas maintains that pauperism occurs not
just in production but also in the realm of consumption (which, one might
assume, would compensate for the deficiencies experienced in the world of
work, properly speaking). Expressly referring to Heidegger, he laments a loss
of connection to material reality: “the things go missing—we lose them—

where they degenerate into a ‘standing reserve’ [Bestand] to be employed at
will” (24). The elevated level of consumption one observes in advanced
industrial society only worsens the qualitative impoverishment of lived
experience. Performing a compensatory function, consumption represents
so many “retouches [Retuschen] that essentially follow from determinate
inadequacies” (17). Production and consumption of mass-manufactured
products amount to twin forms of pauperism that mutually reinforce each
other (25).
If the situation calls for “moderating the tempo of consumption” (28), it is
questionable whether the immanent project that Habermas announces—“to
locate the critical point in production and consumption, where technological
progress becomes irrational” (30)—can, in fact, be achieved.
The connection between technology and reification in the early writings—
which were not included in the collections of essays that Habermas subse-
quently published—are important not only because they show Heidegger’s
influence and Habermas’s own proximity to philosophical anthropology.
Rather, it is significant that, already at this inaugural stage, Habermas—
although he describes phenomena in the same terms as other cultural critics—
attempts to avoid drawing the same pessimistic conclusions. If Habermas’s
later efforts focus on overcoming the all-encompassing consequences of the
Marxist diagnosis of reification (as articulated by Lukács, above all), it is no
coincidence that the reflections he offers in “Technology and Science as ‘Ideol-
ogy’ ” are devoted to Marcuse—a “Heideggerian Marxist.”
Technology-Science-Ideology
Before the engagement with Marcuse, Habermas made political “scientifica-

tion” the object of reflection. Theory and Practice discusses tendencies whereby
democratic self-determination comes to be replaced by technocratic adminis-
tration. In the essays collected in this volume, Habermas primarily takes issue
with the simplistic notion that practical matters, inasmuch as they defy tech-
nical rationalization, can only be resolved in decisionistic fashion (see esp.
Theory and Practice, chap. 7). In this context, he offers considerations of the
“practical consequences of scientific-technological progress,” which he seeks
to distance from the optimistic, liberal view of technology as a means of
unburdening humanity (and a controlled means, at that); equally, he seeks to
qualify overly grim assessments by cultural critics and the overenthusiastic
fanfares of technocrats (Habermas 1971; on this phase of his work see also
McCarthy 1981, chap. 1).
262 Texts
In 1968—at the same time that Knowledge and Human Interests situated the
philosopher’s conception of critical theory in relation to the framework(s) pro-
vided by positivism and psychoanalysis—Habermas published “Technology
and Science as ‘Ideology,’ ” his most thorough discussion of reification. Here,
he contests Marcuse’s core argument, that “the liberating force of technology”
has itself become a “fetter of liberation” and led to the “instrumentalization of
man” (Marcuse 1991, 159); in addition, he takes issue with Marcuse’s underlying
assumption that “scientific-technical progress” performs a “double function . . .
as a productive force,” on the one hand, and as “ideology,” on the other (Ratio-
nal Society, 90). The quotation marks of the title already indicate that Haber-
mas does not mean simply to affirm Marcuse’s Marxian analysis (see chapter
59 in this volume).
Taking up Weber’s theorem of “rationalization,” Habermas begins by diag-
nosing the implementation of instrumental reason in various social spheres:
technology and science have penetrated society and subjected it to fundamental
changes (Rational Society, 82). At the same time, however, it is not technology
per se, which, indeed, is indispensable for the material reproduction of the
species, so much as the universal claims attending the forms it has assumed in
the modern world—that is, the reduction of praxis to technology and of rea-
son to instrumental reason—that pose a problem (Theorie und Praxis, 346ff.).
Habermas observes that Marcuse, because of his totalizing diagnosis, gives
up on rationality as the standard for critical intervention; he is wrong to do so
inasmuch as only a “specifically limited” form of rationality (Rational Society,
82) is operative in the conditions he incriminates. In a second step, Habermas
rejects Marcuse’s call for “qualitatively different” technology and “an alterna-
tive New Science,” since technology and science entertain an intimate (intern)
relationship with instrumental action and cannot be exchanged for something
else (87). Instead, Habermas affirms, one must, on a fundamental level of
theoretical reflection, understand “symbolic interaction in distinction to purpo-
sive-rational action” (92). Doing so entails a new interpretation of Weber’s dis-
tinction between work and interaction—between instrumental and communica-
tive action, that is—whereby the former occurs along technical/technological
rules and the latter follows valid norms (94).
Here, Habermas introduces the distinction—which proves fundamental
for his theory in its later stages—between system and lifeworld. In systems, it is
instrumental action that predominates, which means that rationalization
emerges as the enhancement of efficiency and the augmentation of adminis-
trative power. In the lifeworld, on the other hand, symbolically mediated
interaction is fundamental; here, “rationalization” refers to achieving and
extending communication that is free from relations of domination (98).
Habermas presents capitalist modes of production as the motor for continu-
ously enlarging the subsystems of instrumental action (96). This process
entails a new form of legitimation that, while presented as scientific in nature,

is in fact ideology inasmuch as it denies its political aspirations (101).
Against this background, Habermas identifies two tendencies of develop-
ment: “an increase in state intervention in order to secure the system’s stabil-
ity, and a growing interdependence of research and technology, which has
turned the sciences into a leading productive force” (104). Because of these
developments, the state can no longer be viewed simply as a superstructural
phenomenon (101). Politics and economy, the state and civil society, merge just
as indissolubly as do technology, science, and administration. This fusion
makes it necessary that the classical “bourgeois ideology of achievement”
(Leistungsideologie) be complemented—and completed—through “govern-
ment action designed to compensate,” which, on the one hand, secures mass
loyalty by providing services of social welfare but, on the other hand, threat-
ens to reduce politics to a matter of the “solution of technical problems” (103).
On the basis of this theoretical distinction, Habermas turns to the “sci-
entization of technology” (104), i.e., the expanding interest in exploiting
technical knowledge to political ends and the debate about technocracy
that this involves. As in Theory and Practice, the argument turns against
the reduction of politics—which, originally, is a matter of praxis—to a form
of social engineering that dispenses with public discourse. Habermas
discusses the “technocracy-thesis” advanced by Helmut Schelsky (1965)
(among others) in relation to practical constraints, the ascendancy of pro-
fessional experts, the reduction of democratic processes of decision mak-
ing, the domination of the administrative and executive classes, and the
repression of communicative reason through instrumental action; on this
basis, he speaks of the comprehensive “self-reification of men [der Menschen]”
(Rational Society, 106).
At the same time, Habermas does not treat technocratic consciousness sim-
ply as ideology in the classical sense, for it is more than mere ideology. Social
actors incorporate the “reified models of the sciences”—whose “ideological
nucleus” is “the elimination of the distinction between the practical and the
technical”—into their self-understanding (113). Thereby, humankind’s interest
in communicative forms of socialization and individuation is damaged (111,
113; cf. Knowledge). In order to critique these developments, Habermas distin-
guishes between “two concepts of rationalization” (Rational Society, 118)—the
one referring to the level of the system, the other to that of the lifeworld.
Unlike Weber, Habermas does not hold that rationalization is to be equated
with instrumental reason. Capitalism cannot be understood as comprehensive
rationalization; rather, it entails selective rationalization. In conclusion,
Habermas takes a stand against obscuring the distinction between technical
and practical questions and urges us to confront a question that can only be
resolved in public discourse: “how we would like to live” (120).
264 Texts
In other writings from the same period, Habermas argues, on the basis of
the considerations above, that democracy is incompatible with the seemingly
natural (naturwüchsig) fact that technological progress is not subject to reflec-
tion and rational control (which, in turn, has a recursive effect on lived praxis)
(60). The technocratic model presupposes “an immanent necessity of techni-
cal progress, which owes its appearance of being an independent, self-regulat-
ing process only to the way in which social interests operate in it”; moreover, it
presumes “a continuum of rationality in the treatment of technical and practi-
cal problems, which cannot in fact exist” (64). The “integration of technical
knowledge and the hermeneutical process of arriving at self-understanding”
(74) can only be achieved in discourses that are free from domination. If
this does not succeed, the danger arises, under “late-capitalist” conditions,
that “symptoms of reification” (eine Symptomatik der Verdinglichung) will
develop—a matter that not only concerns objective features of system integra-
tion but also produces a sociocultural and motivational legitimation crisis in
the public (Communicative Action, 2:351; cf. Legitimation; see chapters 31 and
75 in this volume).
Critique of Positivism
In keeping with his project of critiquing both society and science (Communica-
tive Action, 2:374–375)—i.e., addressing “the reification and functionalization
of forms of life and interaction, as well as of the objectivistic self-understanding
of science and technology” (Postmetaphysical, 34)—Habermas engages with
forms of thought that he attributes to positivism, which express technocracy
on a theoretical level by obscuring connections between scientific knowledge
and practical interest. He identifies three cognitive interests (Erkenntnisin-
teressen) founded in modes of socialization (work, language, and power
[Herrschaft]) that correspond to—and are reflected in—three types of scien-
tific knowledge: technical interest in the empirical-analytical sciences (which
provide prognostic knowledge that aims for technical utility and organizes
reified processes), practical interest in the historical-hermeneutic sciences (which
seek, by way of interpretation, to expand possibilities of communication [Ver-
ständigung]), and emancipatory interest in the critical sciences (which aim to
initiate—and maintain—processes of self-reflection to achieve freedom from
natural [naturwüchsig] constraints) (Rational Society, 86–87; Knowledge;
McCarthy 1981, chap. 2; see chapters 7, 29, and 55 in this volume).
This critique of positivism—as the one-sided generalization of a particular
model of knowledge that exemplifies reification—is complemented by a cri-
tique of hermeneutics, which simply turns a blind eye to the phenomenon.
“An objective meaning-comprehending theory must also account for that
moment of reification which the objectifying procedures exclusively have in

mind” (Habermas 1976, 139); only in this way do those “conditions for the
possibility of systematically distorted communication” become visible, which
constitute the primary point of reference for critical theory as Habermas con-
ceives it after the communicative turn (Habermas 1990, 267).
System and Lifeworld
Habermas completes such a turn in The Theory of Communicative Action.

Here, he abandons technology in the narrower sense and articulates, in a more
systematic fashion, how to move beyond a totalizing conception of reification.
The means to this end are provided by the distinction between system and
lifeworld, on the one hand, and the thesis of the lifeworld’s “colonization,” on
the other.
In The Theory of Communicative Action, “reified and fragmented every-
day consciousness” takes the place of ideology and false consciousness, and
the problem of reification is reformulated as the problem of systemically
induced pathologies (Bohman 1986). The basis for this new orientation is
Habermas’s two-level conception of society, according to which the social
order must be viewed both as a lifeworld and as a system (see chapter 35 in
this volume, as well as Celikates and Pollmann 2006). Now Habermas no
longer understands “reification” as an effect produced by an alienating orga-
nization of labor but rather as a “pathological deformation of the communi-
cative infrastructure of the lifeworld” (Communicative Action, 2:375; cf.
2:303, 332ff.; see chapter 73 in this volume) that stems from systemic incur-
sions. Thereby, reification manifests itself as one-sided cognitive-instru-
mental rationality that leaves no room for the communicative rationality of
social actors and, indeed, “prejudices” their relation to both the world and
the self (Communicative Action, 1:355; hence the subtitle of volume 2: A Cri-
tique of Functionalist Reason).
In the process, it is not just consciousness that is reified but the lifeworld
itself. At the same time, Habermas calls for a nuanced perspective that consid-
ers that
it is not the uncoupling of media-steered subsystems [which are indispensable

for societies after attaining a certain degree of complexity] and of their orga-
nizational forms from the lifeworld that leads to the one-sided rationalization
or reification of everyday communicative practice, but only the penetration of
forms of economic and administrative rationality into areas of action that
resist being converted over to the media of money and power because they are
specialized in cultural transmission, social integration, and child rearing,
266 Texts
and remain dependent on mutual understanding as a mechanism for coordi-

nating action.
In the long run, these processes of reification mean that the continued exis-
tence of the systems themselves becomes doubtful, inasmuch as they can
function only if the lifeworld remains intact. In the meantime, actors are made
to rely exclusively on their use of instrumental reason:
In place of “false consciousness” we have today a “fragmented consciousness”

that blocks enlightenment by the mechanism of reification. It is only with this
that the conditions for a colonization of the lifeworld are met. When stripped
of their ideological veils, the imperatives of autonomous subsystems make
their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial masters coming
into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation upon it.
(Communicative Action 2:355; cf. 2:153; see chapter 44 in this volume)
Systemically induced pathologies concern the three realms of the lifeworld:

cultural reproduction, social integration, and individual socialization (Com-
municative Action, 2:143).
Inasmuch as everyday praxis is “invaded” by juridification, monetization,
and bureaucratization, communicative relations become reified (2:342), which
holds a twofold effect: “The lifeworld is assimilated to juridified, formally
organized domains of action and simultaneously cut off from the influx of an
intact cultural tradition. In the deformations of everyday practice, symptoms
of rigidification combine with symptoms of desolation” (2:327). Habermas
brings these twin diagnoses together in the concept of a “form of understand-
ing” (Verständigungsform) (2:187ff.) he borrows from Lukács. The latter views
the principle of “reification” as a “form of thought”—or, as the case may be,
as a “form of objectivity” (Denk- bzw. Gegenständlichkeitsform)—which the
imperatives of capitalist production impose on subjects’ relationships to them-
selves, to others, and to nature. In analogous terms, Habermas speaks of a
predominant form of interaction that results from a compromise “between the
general structures of communicative action and reproductive constraints
unavailable as themes within a given lifeworld” (2:187).
The border between system and lifeworld, then, where the fragile compro-
mises that have been achieved risk falling apart, is where social critique
begins—as well as the site where social and political movements of emancipa-
tion first occur. All the same, the question arises whether Habermas, inasmuch
as he adopts the language of systems theory, does not accept the reification of
social relations that from an alternative—more institution-centered—perspec-
tive would already appear as the pathological uncoupling of institutions from
the lifeworld (McCarthy 1981, 580ff.). In this sense, Habermas’s conception of

reification that he sketched in his early writings—and developed in his analysis
of the ambivalence of scientific-technical progress—goes further than the way
he understands the same matter in The Theory of Communicative Action
(which limits itself to defending functionally necessary resources within the
lifeworld).
Reification and Human Nature
Now, however—in recent reflections on technologies of genetic engineering

(one of the newest manifestations of technical-scientific progress)—it seems
that Habermas has once again taken up aspects of his earlier diagnoses of the
times as well as the premises of philosophical anthropology. When the human
genome can be manipulated, the problem of (self-)reification—the danger of
instrumentalizing and objectifying both the other and one’s own, embodied
self—arises in an altogether fundamental way.
Even if it cannot yet be achieved, the possibility of planned and purposeful
intervention in the genetic code of human beings seems to present a “new type
of intervention”—a modification of the contingencies that previously defied
change, which promises to affect the ways we understand ourselves as “respon-
sibly acting persons” (Future, 75). The danger emerges of “disposing” of persons
as if they were things; because of the clear asymmetry between manipulator and
manipulated, this amounts to a form of domination and entails the loss of
freedom.
According to Habermas, the reifying and commodifying “quality control”
of embryos is accompanied by a change in “the cultural perception of antena-
tal human life” (20). The dominance of cost-benefit analysis and the use of
genetic material lead to an “instrumentalization [Technisierung] of human
nature initiating a change in the ethical self-understanding of the species”
(42). This gives rise to the question “whether the instrumentalization of
human nature changes the ethical self-understanding of the species in such a
way that we may no longer see ourselves as ethically free and morally equal
beings guided by norms and reasons” (40–41).
Reception and Controversies
Habermas’s analysis of the relationship between technology and reification

has been taken up and criticized on many occasions—even though, since the
early 1980s at the latest, debates have focused on his distinction between sys-
tem and lifeworld.
268 Texts
Systems theory—which Habermas critiqued as a means of social engineer-

ing before integrating it into his two-level theory of society—has faulted his
critical orientation (despite its thoroughgoing sociotheoretical nuance and
embeddedness in specific contexts) for confusing rationality and reification.
Before his death, Niklas Luhmann objected to what he deemed an excessively
narrow conception of technology: the “opposition drawn between technology
and humanity,” he argued, entails “a technology aversion, a characterization
of technology as a necessary evil”; this, he maintained, both fails to do justice
to the interpenetration (Vermischung) of nature and technology and fails to
recognize that technology essentially means “ functioning simplification”—i.e.,
“the successful reduction of complexity” (Luhmann 2012, 1:315, 317).
Other critics have held that Habermas—inasmuch as he now grants that
technology is essentially neutral—has abandoned the critical potential of the
position put forth by Marcuse (Feenberg 1999, 2002). The oft-voiced criticism
of the distinction between system and lifeworld as an example of reification
(McCarthy 1981, 580ff.; Honneth 2008, chap. 9; Fraser 1994, chap. 6) also
implies that his diagnosis of reification is one-sided. According to this argu-
ment, Habermas’s theoretical framework permits one to understand the dys-
functional incursion of systemic processes on the lifeworld, but it does not
explain the systemic interaction between the spheres of labor and economy.
This threatens to occlude what Habermas himself stressed at the end of the
1960s: it is only through the democratic control of state and economic systems
that one can counter the reifying tendencies of scientific and technological
progress.
Finally, a third kind of critique has been initiated by Axel Honneth’s (1993)
theory of recognition. Here, reification is not traced back to the forms of
socialization and rationality that are specific to capitalism (i.e., the line of
argument following Marx and Lukács that Habermas adopted in the early and
middle stages of his career); instead, it concerns morally questionable practices
of dehumanizing other persons—the matter of denying others prior recogni-
tion and respect. In this perspective, what formerly represented the concept’s
principal dimension—the reification of social relations and their connection
with technology—moves to the background. Today, under changed circum-
stances, the question must be reformulated, as Habermas has remarked apro-
pos of bioethical debates.
The matter of how to cope with technological-scientific progress is no less
urgent now than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Current debates about biotech-
nological and biopolitical manipulation, neuroscience, the comprehensive
commodification and commercialization of the lifeworld, and widespread
feelings of passivity and powerlessness in view of material constraints imposed
from without all attest to the actuality of Habermas’s diagnosis and critique of
reification (for another perspective, see Bewes 2002). For all that, both the
fundamental dimensions of Habermas’s diagnosis and critique—the instru-

mentalization of persons, on the one hand, and the naturalization and autono-
mization of social relations, on the other—await theoretical and empirical
development. The same holds for the sociophilosophical engagement with
technology—which, somewhere between emancipation and reification, seems
to be marked by fundamental ambivalence (Feenberg 2002).
Habermas’s analysis of the connections between technology and reifica-
tion offers a prime example of how social criticism operates: seemingly nat-
ural social relations, which appear to exist independently of social actions
performed by subjects, are revealed to be historical and therefore change-
able. At the same time, Habermas has shown that there are structural rea-
sons why individual initiatives or a change of consciousness cannot remove
the pathologies that the situation entails. For this reason, a project of critical
theory for which the analysis and critique of reification holds meaning—as
is the case for Habermas’s early and middle periods, in particular—must not
only combine philosophical reflection and empirical social research; in
addition, it must address substantial questions of ethics, anthropology, and
rationality (the importance of which has been reaffirmed in Habermas’s
recent work).
The concept of reification expresses the experience that in certain forms of
social pathology the loss of freedom and meaning, as well as disempowerment
and indifference, are inextricably linked. As Habermas has stressed through-
out his works, the ethical and political questions prompted by these phenom-
ena place us before the question of how we understand ourselves and how we
wish to live.
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New York: Penguin.
29
CRITIQUE OF KNOWLEDGE
AS SOCIAL THEORY
Knowledge and Human Interests (1968)
WILLIAM REHG
O
ver his long and productive career, Jürgen Habermas has pur-
sued an overriding interest in critical social-political theory. For
Habermas, as for other Frankfurt School critical theorists,
social-political critique requires interdisciplinary social analysis and thus
depends on engagement with the social and cultural sciences. In the 1960s,
Habermas approached such engagement as a problem for methodological and
epistemological reflection, that is, a matter of critique of knowledge (Erkennt-
niskritik): critical social theory had to establish itself as a respectable, distinct
form of knowledge, in large measure through a methodological critique of the
then-dominant positivist philosophy of science and historicist hermeneutics.
Conversely, critique of knowledge could contribute to critical theory, and
thereby serve the aims of social emancipation, only in the form of social the-
ory. But this framework soon proved inadequate. By the early 1970s Habermas
had taken the linguistic-pragmatic turn: thenceforth he would approach social
critique through a theory of communicative action and the critique of knowl-
edge through argumentation theory.
Of the three book-length monographs Habermas published in the 1960s,
two directly addressed questions of knowledge: On the Logic of the Social Sci-
ences and Knowledge and Human Interests (the other monograph was his 1962
Habilitationsschrift, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; for an
exhaustive bibliography of Habermas’s works up to 1981, see McCarthy 1981;
Müller-Doohm 2000 provides a selected bibliography of his works up to 1999).
The Positivism Dispute
As Habermas understood the philosophical situation in the 1960s, epistemol-

ogy in the Kantian sense of a critical reflection on knowledge had been sup-
planted by a positivist understanding of the natural and social sciences; in the
272 Texts
hermeneutically conditioned humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), historicism

dominated: a contemplative approach to the study of history that denied the
role played by the interpreter’s point of view in understanding the past. I start
with the critique of positivism that Habermas developed in the context of the
positivism dispute, which was set off by a politely muted exchange in 1961
between Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno over the “logic of the social sci-
ences” (see Adorno et al. 1976). Interestingly, both thinkers claimed to take a
“critical” approach. However, Popper’s critical rationalism restricted critique
to the revision of scientific hypotheses in light of empirical testing, whereas
Adorno’s dialectical social science stood ready to criticize its object, society,
inasmuch as existing social relations often concealed real contradictions
behind a veil of ideology. Thus a dialectical social theory adequate to its object
could not be tested simply by comparison with social facts. In subsequent arti-
cles commenting on their exchange, Habermas (1976a, 1976b) sharpened the
opposition between Popper and Adorno.
Like most philosophers of science before Kuhn, Popper understands the
rationality of scientific inquiry in terms of the “hypothetico-deductive
method,” according to which one tests lawlike hypotheses by logically deducing
the observable consequences one should expect under controlled experimental
conditions if the hypothesis is true; failure to observe these consequences falsi-
fies the hypothesis, thus calling for its revision. Habermas basically accepts
this view of hypothesis testing in the natural sciences and some forms of
social-scientific research, which he labels “empirical-analytic,” in recognition
of their heavy dependence on logico-mathematical analysis and empirical
testing. But he does not think Popper goes far enough, in at least two ways,
both of which have to do with the pragmatics of scientific research.
First, like scientists themselves, Popper fails to notice how the empirical-ana-
lytical sciences are rooted in a “technical cognitive interest,” i.e., a “practical
cognitive interest in the mastery of objective processes” (Habermas 1976a, 157,
158). Habermas links this interest with “social labor,” the material processes by
which human beings cooperatively sustain their existence through the tech-
nological domination of nature (154). The idea of “interest” here refers not to
the motivation of scientists but to a deep structure of empirical-analytical
inquiry, where controlled experimentation has become a constitutive condi-
tion of knowledge: scientists can satisfy their curiosity about nature only
through the mastery of the external world, either inside the laboratory or in
field research. Consequently, we know external nature by successfully working
on it, intervening in its processes—a mode of engagement that characterizes
both social labor and empirical-analytical research. Thus the technical cogni-
tive interest is geared toward successful “feedback-monitored” instrumental
action (see chapter 43 in this volume).
Knowledge and Human Interests 273
Second, Popper does not adequately address the communicative side of

inquiry. Popper was aware that basic statements do not, strictly speaking, fol-
low self-evidently or deductively from sense experiences; he thus held that the
science community simply decides, in the light of repeatable observations, to
accept such statements, which thereby acquire the status of conventions for
further inquiry. Picking up on Popper’s account, Habermas points out that
scientific inquiry depends on a preunderstanding, a background consensus
not only on the basic statements themselves but also on descriptive vocabulary
and its use, methods of measurement and testing, and standards of adequacy.
However, by regarding this preunderstanding as simply an “irrational” deci-
sion, Popper fails to notice the hermeneutic and argumentative aspects of the
empirical-analytic sciences, the fact that their pursuit of knowledge depends
on a prior process of critical discussion in which members of the community
reach a mutual understanding by resolving disagreements about the vocabu-
lary and standards of experimentation (Habermas 1976b, 199, 210–215).
Because Popper does not reflect on these pragmatic conditions for scien-
tific research, he naïvely regards scientific statements as capable of represent-
ing a mind-independent reality. Dubbing this naïve representationalist view
an “objectivistic illusion,” Habermas accuses Popper of “a deep-seated positiv-
istic prejudice” (199, 203). His critique of logical positivism notwithstanding,
Popper shares with positivists a common refusal to reflect on the subjective
conditions of knowledge. In that regard, positivism represents a decisive break
with the philosophy of reflection in Kant and German idealism (Technik,
146ff.). As a result, positivism falls prey to objectivism and the naïve “copy
theory of truth” that goes with it (Abbildtheorie der Wahrheit) (Knowledge,
69). (To be sure, in this broad sense objectivism also characterizes classical
Greek and medieval views of knowledge as representation of an independent
cosmic order. But unlike contemporary positivism, the classical view operated
with a notion of being that made the cosmos a directly moral order: facts had
not yet been severed from values; see Habermas 1966.) Habermas finds the
mature positivist form of objectivism in Ernst Mach’s doctrine of elements. In
order to expurgate the traditional metaphysical distinction between appear-
ance and essence from his philosophy of science, Mach resorted to an “ontol-
ogy of facts,” according to which “facts are all there is. Facts in the emphatic
sense are sensations hypostatized as building blocks of the physical world and
of consciousness” (Knowledge, 85). Subsequent developments in positivism
notwithstanding, the heirs of Mach still operate “with the image of a self-sub-
sistent world of facts structured in a law-like manner,” and they assume the
aim of science is simply to describe this mind-independent world of facts
(Knowledge, 69)—thereby forgetting that the human subject constitutes
knowledge within a framework of cognitive interests.
274 Texts
In pointing to the hermeneutic and dialogical aspects of inquiry, Habermas

undercuts the positivist understanding of science and thereby opens up the
space for the hermeneutic sciences: interpretive sociology, history, and the
like. These he distinguishes from normative-analytic social sciences (e.g.,
economics, which relies heavily on mathematical modeling) and empirical-
analytic approaches (e.g., behavioral psychology). In his 1967 survey of the
social sciences (Logic, chaps. 1–4), Habermas finds that Hans-Georg Gadam-
er’s hermeneutics goes farther in its methodological awareness than the two
competing interpretive approaches, sociolinguistics (Wittgenstein, Winch)
and phenomenology (e.g., Schütz), because Gadamer grasps the hermeneutic
character of all symbolically mediated interaction as situated in a historical
tradition and open to plural horizons of meaning. However, Gadamer under-
estimates the critical potential of hermeneutic reflection on received tradi-
tions, which always bear both insight and domination (see Logic, 143–170;
Habermas 1990a, 1990b).
What Habermas seeks, then, is a social theory that integrates rigorous
empirical testing, hermeneutic sensitivity, and social critique (see Geuss 1981).
The path to such a theory, he believes, leads through critique of knowledge, a
kind of reflection that involves the “critical dissolution . . . of the objectivistic
self-understanding of the sciences” (Knowledge, 212). Conversely, an adequate
critique of knowledge must take the form of social theory. Stimulated by input
from Karl-Otto Apel, Habermas takes up this task in Knowledge and Human
Interests, a systematic attempt to recover the movement of reflection by articu-
lating the knowledge-constitutive interests (erkenntnisleitendes Interesse) that
positivism had repressed (cf. Apel 1971; Habermas 1966; 2000, 18).
Knowledge and Human Interests I: A Story of Decline
In his early critique of positivist objectivism, Habermas adopted an “old-

fashioned course”: he trusted in the “power of self-reflection” (1976b, 199). He
has in mind not simply philosophical reflection in the general sense but, more
precisely, the kind of reflection that came into its own with German idealism
(see Swindal 1999, Roberts 1992, Kortian 1980). Kant was the first to take
Enlightenment epistemology to the level of transcendental reflection, in
which the subject grasps the conditions of possibility of knowledge and
agency. As a critique of the limits of knowledge, transcendental reflection
purports to uncover the ground of objectivity in the synthetic achievements
of the knowing subject, whereby one “gathers the elements for knowledge,
and unites them to form a certain content.” In virtue of the a priori forms of
intuition and categories of understanding, this synthesis grounds the univer-
sal validity of empirical judgments that unite the manifold of particular
representations under general conceptual contents (Kant 1998, 210–211

[A77–78/B103–104]).
In the first three chapters of Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas
traces the gradual emasculation of reflection from Hegel through Marx. As
critique of knowledge, epistemological reflection had robust ambitions in
Kant, who claimed it could set the boundaries of possible knowledge, legiti-
mate the objectivity of the natural sciences, and criticize dogmatic metaphysics
(i.e., late-scholastic and early-modern forms of objectivism). Hegel radicalized
the Kantian critique of knowledge by turning it on itself: critique cannot get
started without arbitrarily presupposing that its own claim to knowledge is
unproblematic. To escape this circle, Hegel recast epistemology as phenome-
nology, a retracing of the history of successive stages of reflection that lead up
to the standpoint of absolute knowledge, where mind knows itself as one with
its objects. But as Habermas points out, phenomenological reflection cannot
support a claim to absolute knowledge; Hegel could reach the absolute only
because his phenomenology ambiguously presupposed it from the start in a
philosophy of identity, for which nature and other objects of knowledge are
merely externalized mind. From that point of view, the natural and human
sciences could only appear as limited moments along the path to the authentic
science of mind. The actual progress of the sciences soon displayed the empti-
ness of Hegel’s pretensions, thereby laying down the “foundation-stone of
positivism” (Knowledge, 24).
In Marx’s critical theory Habermas sees a fateful missed opportunity along
the road to positivism, for “only Marx could have contested its victory” (24).
Because Marx rejected Hegel’s philosophy of identity, he could take the differ-
ence between nature and mind seriously. Nature does not disappear as a mere
externalized posit of absolute mind; rather, as a result of a natural develop-
ment, human intelligence presupposes nature. Instead of a phenomenology of
mind, Marx offers a history of the human species as it grapples with, gradually
understands, and changes a nature other than itself. Consequently, Marx,
unlike Hegel, can take the natural sciences seriously.
Viewed as a philosophy of reflection that analyzes the subject’s self-con-
scious appropriation of its objects, Marx’s approach takes a materialist turn.
Whereas for Hegel reflection climaxed in the philosopher’s absolute knowl-
edge, the realization that nature is mere externalized mind, for Marx reflection
involves a real material process in which human beings overcome their alien-
ation from nature not merely as an object of thought but as the object of the
labor process. Labor involves a material process of appropriation—or “synthe-
sis,” to put it in Kantian terms—in which human beings develop their “species
powers” through their growing scientific understanding of nature and its
technological mastery. But labor is also social and historical: the human spe-
cies can appropriate nature through labor only by overcoming the modes of
276 Texts
social alienation that separate subjects from one another (worker versus capi-
talist) and from their own essential powers (which are split off as the alien
powers of capital).
The problem in Marx arises at just this point, however. As an overarching
category, the idea of labor, or production, commits him to a vocabulary of
instrumental action. To be sure, he understands the “mode of production” to
include both base and superstructure, the forces of production and their insti-
tutional framework. But Habermas regards that move as a “terminological
dodge” (Ausflucht) that masks the inadequate character of the production
paradigm, which obscures the discursive nature of reflection (Knowledge,
328n14). Rather, reflection is more appropriately located in Marx’s dialectical
analysis of class struggle, understood as a “process of reflection writ large”
(Knowledge, 60). Such reflection remains linked with production inasmuch as
technical progress exposes the disproportionate and exploitative institutional
demands on labor, thereby sparking a revolutionary consciousness in the
working class. Nonetheless, class struggle and reconciliation lie at the level of
interaction rather than labor. Marx, however, viewed the entire process of
overcoming alienation in terms of production and placed his critical theory on
a par with natural science, thereby obscuring the differences between labor
and interaction, on the one hand, and empirical and critical-reflective modes
of knowledge, on the other.
Knowledge and Human Interests II: The Technical

and Practical Interests
With the German idealist tradition of reflection at a dead end, Habermas

looks elsewhere for allies against objectivism, specifically to the pragmatism
of Charles S. Peirce and the hermeneutic theory of Wilhelm Dilthey (Knowledge,
chaps. 5–8). In Peirce, Habermas finds an account of the empirical-analytic sci-
ences that goes beyond Popper at the two points noted above. First, Peirce’s
logic of inquiry does not stop with the formal analysis of hypothesis testing
but rather places scientific knowledge in the context of an ongoing communal
process of interpretation, argument, and revision. This framework allows
Peirce to develop an alternative to the objectivistic idea of truth as correspon-
dence with a mind-independent reality. As the ultimate object of the scientific
process, “truth” is the content of “an uncompelled and permanent consensus” at
which scientists would arrive were they able to carry inquiry to its conclusion.
“Reality,” as “the sum of those states of fact about which we can obtain final
opinions,” has a status akin to a transcendental correlate of inquiry, albeit with-
out invoking a transcendental consciousness in Kant’s sense (Knowledge, 95).
Second, Peirce’s account of scientific progress links science with the technical
cognitive interest that positivism ignores. Here Habermas draws a connection
between Peirce’s pragmatic account of belief and his analysis of inference.
From the standpoint of human action, true beliefs “define the realm of future
behavior that the actor has under control” (Knowledge, 120). As the most suc-
cessful method of “fixing belief,” modern science relies on modes of inference
that link empirical concepts with conditional predictions of observable events.
What it means for statements to be valid, or for concepts to have determinate
content, “is determined with reference to possible technical control of the con-
nection of empirical variables” (Knowledge, 121). Thus knowledge, on Peirce’s
account, is inherently linked with the human interest in the control of nature.
Dilthey picks up on the communal aspect of science. Insofar as the natural
sciences depend on communicative processes, they involve hermeneutic com-
petences that members rely on but normally do not articulate as such in their
practice of inquiry. Dilthey sees that the Geisteswissenschaften distinguish
themselves from the natural sciences precisely because they take such compe-
tences as their object domain. More precisely, as “hermeneutic sciences,” the
Geisteswissenschaften are grounded in the everyday use of ordinary language
for stabilizing intersubjective understanding. In contrast to the empirical-
analytic sciences, which attempt to move from particular facts to universal
laws, the hermeneutic sciences attempt to use general categories to understand
what is singular and unique: the historical past, other cultures, a life history,
texts, and the like. How can this happen? Understanding the singular and
unique is possible because ordinary language is reflexive, self-interpreting,
and dialogically structured. In everyday communication, that is, individuals
have three elementary sources (or “forms”) of understanding at their disposal:
what each of them says, how they behave, and the accompanying nonverbal
expressions. Each dimension of expression provides a context and crosscheck
for the interpretation of the other two. In understanding one another, we move
in a self-correcting “hermeneutic circle” until the various expressive resources
fit meaningfully into an integrated whole. A similar circular movement
characterizes the efforts of scholars when they seek to understand a text by
integrating textual clues and available historical accounts into a coherent
interpretation of the whole text in context.
The hermeneutic sciences, then, bring methodical discipline to features of
everyday interaction, and in this sense they are on a par with the empirical-
analytic sciences, which elevate everyday instrumental action to experimental
method. And just as human survival depends on successful intervention into
nature, so also “the survival of societal individuals” depends on reliable
mutual understanding (Knowledge, 173). Consequently, just as the object of the
empirical-analytic sciences is constituted by a technical cognitive interest, so
278 Texts
the object of the cultural sciences is constituted by a “practical cognitive inter-

est” in the narrower sense of “practical” specific to human interaction.
As it turns out, however, neither Peirce nor Dilthey fully grasped the sig-
nificance of their analyses. Peirce did not consistently hold to the framework
of the logic of inquiry but imported ontological elements that took him in the
direction of objectivism. Dilthey saw the relation of the cultural sciences to
everyday life as a threat to their scientific character, thus revealing his ulti-
mately objectivistic view of scientific knowledge, according to which the
interpreter must free herself of any subjective interferences in understanding
the other. In fact, the interpreter cannot avoid bringing her own biases into
the process of understanding. Consequently, interpretation must also involve
a process of reflection that grasps both interpreter and interpreted together.
Knowledge and Human Interests III: Reflection as

the Unity of Knowledge and Interest
The lingering objectivism in Dilthey and Peirce reveals their failure to grasp
fully their analyses as initiatives in the self-reflection of the sciences. In his
chapters on those two thinkers, Habermas tries to carry through that self-
reflection more consistently in the form of a critical philosophical analysis
that grasps the object of scientific knowledge together with the knowing sub-
ject, which is understood not as a transcendental ego or absolute mind but as
the community of investigators whose procedures are cognitive expressions of
basic interests in labor and interaction, on which the human species depends
for its survival and cultural self-development. Habermas insists that these
interests are not heteronomous to reason: rather, reason inheres in cognitive
interests. In reflecting on such interests, then, one grasps the unity of knowl-
edge (reason) and interest, freeing oneself from the objectivistic illusion of
knowledge as the disinterested contemplation of a mind-independent reality.
As a form of knowledge that frees one from false consciousness, philosophical
self-reflection realizes the “emancipatory cognitive interest.” In the final four
chapters of Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas develops the idea of
self-reflection, beginning with Kant’s problematic attempt to link theoretical
knowledge to practical interest and Fichte’s accomplishment of that feat, albeit
within an idealist framework.
Habermas’s critical social theory, however, needs more than philosophical
critique. For a suitable model, he first looks to Freudian psychology as the only
example of a science that incorporates methodical self-reflection. Psychoanal-
ysis involves a form of hermeneutic interpretation, but unlike the cultural sci-
ences, it strives to interpret “not only the meaning of a possibly distorted text
[the patient’s behavior and speech], but the meaning of the text distortion
itself ” (Knowledge, 220). Understood in terms of communicative action, the

patient’s communication contains elements that have been split off from pub-
licly accessible meaning and have fallen into a private semantics that neither
the patient nor the analyst can directly understand. The analytic situation
thus involves a cooperative process of recollection that decodes the patient’s
private symbol system and restores to the patient a lost portion of her life his-
tory. This restoration cannot be had simply by the analyst’s conveying infor-
mation to the patient; rather, it is essentially self-reflective, for it depends on
the patient’s interest in self-knowledge and willingness to take responsibility
for her illness, such that “the ego of the patient recognize[s] itself in its other,
represented by its illness, as in its own alienated self and identify[ies] with it”
(Knowledge, 235–236).
In his more theoretical work, Freud did not consistently hold to the com-
municative, hermeneutic dynamics that characterize the analytic situation. To
develop a more consistent account, Habermas draws on studies by Alfred
Lorenzer (1970a, 1970b) in an effort to reconstruct Freudian psychology as a
self-reflective form of scientific knowledge that relies on a set of “metapsycho-
logical” categories. Like the hypotheses of the empirical-analytic sciences, these
categories have a general character and are open to a kind of corroboration (or
falsification). Because they lie at the metatheoretical level, however, they cannot
be tested—confirmed or falsified—by direct confrontation with experimental
observations. Rather, metapsychological categories provide the framework for
a “general interpretation,” a narrative structure that anticipates individual
psychic development as a conflicted communicative process involving ego, id,
superego, defense mechanisms, etc. Unlike interpretations in the cultural sci-
ences, elements of a general interpretation are not corrected through the back-
and-forth movement between part and whole. Rather, they guide the analyst’s
“interpretive suggestions” in the psychoanalytic situation, and they are “cor-
roborated” insofar as “the patient adopts them and tells his own story with
their aid,” thereby filling out general categories with determinate content
(Knowledge, 260). However, given the possibilities for self-deception, such
corroboration remains ambiguous in the short run: “Only the context of the
self-formative process as a whole has confirming and falsifying power”
(Knowledge, 269).
In the final chapter of Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas attempts
to correct the deficits in Marx by extending the psychoanalytic model of criti-
cal science to the level of critical social theory (cf. Marcuse 1966). In fact, Freud
was well aware that his individual psychology pointed toward broader ques-
tions of social theory, for individual normalcy is measured by the conventional
standards of existing social institutions, which might themselves be patho-
logical in comparison with other cultures. Such considerations motivated
Freud’s theory of civilization. Habermas notes that Freud’s account converges
280 Texts
with Marx’s in that both distinguish labor and interaction as two dimen-
sions of human development. Unlike Marx, however, Freud does not give
explanatory priority to the organization of labor. Rather, he embeds the
labor process in institutionalized forms of interaction that are rooted in
family dynamics and structured for the general repression of instinctual
impulses. This repression is accomplished not only through compulsory
social norms but also through traditional rationalizations of authority and
various psychological mechanisms such as substitute-gratifications that
redirect instinctual needs.
The key to social critique lies in Freud’s distinction between delusions,
which are mere fantasies, and illusions: religious narratives, social ideals and
values, art, and so on. Illusions harbor utopian elements that need not be delu-
sional. Ideals of happiness, for example, may be largely unrealized in a society,
but that does not make them mere fantasies, for technical advances might
someday put them within reach of all. Thus Freud’s model allows for a form of
critique of ideology (Ideologiekritik) similar to Marx’s, namely, a critique that
targets rationalizations of institutional repressions that have become unneces-
sary in light of what is technically possible. Because the lower classes are sub-
ject to greater renunciations, “it is they who first critically turn the utopian
content of tradition against the established civilization” (Knowledge, 280; on
ideology critique, see Geuss 1981). However, Freud’s model has this advantage
over Marx’s: unlike the latter, he recognizes ideology as a form of distorted
communication. Moreover, his model implies a soberer view of ideology cri-
tique as a trial-and-error process whose success is not guaranteed by a phi-
losophy of history.
Habermas’s remarks on a Freudian model of critical social theory remain
sketchy at best. But three considerations stand out. First, his primary con-
cern is to set forth the idea of such a critical theory as a self-reflective,
methodical science distinct from both the empirical and cultural sciences,
thereby securing the epistemic credentials of social critique from positivist
and historicist misunderstanding. Second, as a form of self-reflection, social
critique rests on a knowledge-constitutive interest in emancipation. In both
the psychoanalytic process and ideology critique, the desire to overcome
pathology shows that “the interest inherent in the pressure of suffering is
also immediately an interest in emancipation; and reflection is the only pos-
sible dynamic through which it realizes itself ” (Knowledge, 288). Third, like
the technical and practical interests, the emancipatory interest refers to an
“interest in self-preservation” that cannot be reduced to natural needs, for it
cannot be understood apart from the cultural expressions that interpret it in
relation to ideas of the good life (288). Habermas thus concludes Knowledge
and Human Interests with a critique of Nietzsche, who attempted just such a
reduction.
Aftermath: Objections and Revisions
Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests received wide critical comment.

(For a selection of important essays, see Apel et al. 1971; Lobkowicz et al. 1972;
Dallmayr 1974; for helpful overviews, see Dallmayr 1972; McCarthy 1981, 64ff.,
also Habermas 1973a. For further references, see the appendix in Knowledge, 2nd
ed., 301ff.) The most important criticisms of the idea of critique of knowledge
involve (1) Habermas’s conception of natural-scientific knowledge, (2) the “quasi-
transcendental” status of cognitive interests, (3) ambiguities and problems con-
nected specifically with the emancipatory interest, and (4) his tendency to speak
of the human species as a self-constituting macrosubject. Habermas’s answers to
these problems set him on the path to the philosophy of language. I treat each in
turn.
Some formulations in Knowledge and Human Interests (e.g., 121–122, 195–
196) linked the meaning of the validity of scientific statements with instru-
mental success. This seemed to commit Habermas to an instrumentalist account
of natural science: the antirealist view that scientific theories and statements
do not represent nature as such but rather serve as tools for prediction and
control of natural events (see Albert 1971, 56; Ballestrem and McCarthy 1972,
53–54; Hesse 1980). In reply, Habermas (Knowledge, 2nd ed., 374–375) insisted
that his “transcendental pragmatism” does not make instrumental success
into a sufficient condition of the truth of scientific statements. Drawing on
Apel’s reading of Peirce, he further clarified his position by invoking a distinc-
tion not found in Knowledge and Human Interests, namely, between the consti-
tutive conditions of objects of experience, or objective “meaning-constitution,”
on the one hand, and the conditions of the validity of statements, that is, the
conditions for redeeming truth claims, on the other. Whereas the “objectivity”
of our experience of things and events is constituted by our capacity for suc-
cessfully intervening in nature, “truth” is something we claim for propositions
through acts of assertion and justify in discourses through argumentative rea-
soning (Knowledge, 2nd ed., 360–361). By tying truth to argumentation, Haber-
mas took a crucial step toward a linguistic approach.
Other criticisms suggested that Habermas had imbibed the positivist bias
in favor of physics as paradigmatic for empirical inquiry. A view of scientific
knowledge as grounded in a technical interest in control may be plausible for
chemistry and physics, but does it suffice for biological sciences (e.g., primatol-
ogy) that deal with species capable of goal-directed action and communication
(Keat 1981, 87–93)? Keat also raised a question about knowledge-constitutive
interests (78–87): if cognitive interests constitute the objects of inquiry, then
on what basis can Habermas preclude a hermeneutics of nature as noncognitive
(as he does in his critique of Marcuse; see Habermas 1968)? Such criticisms
on Habermas’s part seem to imply an independent access to distinct object
282 Texts
domains, which then serves as a standpoint that grounds his critique of knowl-
edge prior to the interest-based constitution of objects. Keat’s question points
to deeper difficulties in the transcendental aspects of Habermas’s analysis,
which we take up next.
Habermas’s idea of cognitive interests occupies an ambiguous no-man’s
land between naturalism and idealism. Not surprisingly, he caught fire on
both sides (see Dallmayr 1972, 213ff). Some attacked his position as overly
speculative and “theological” (Albert 1971, 54–56). Others accused him of nat-
uralism: by attempting to transpose Kant’s transcendental subject onto the
human species as subject to historically invariant deep-seated interests,
Habermas introduced an “objectivistic nature-ontology” and thus “absolutized”
nature, contrary to the historical orientation of critical theory (Theunissen 1969,
13, 23). This objection points to a deep problem in Habermas’s construction: he
regards cognitive interests as both constitutive of the objects of experience—
including nature—and as emergent from the natural prehistory of the species,
thus open to empirical investigation (i.e., by evolutionary biology, anthropol-
ogy). There are at least two ambiguous ideas here. On the one hand, nature is
both a constituted object and the ground of species-constitutive capacities (see
McCarthy 1981, 110ff.). On the other hand, because cognitive interests have a
natural basis and operate in history, they appear as empirical objects poten-
tially open to critique, yet as a priori transcendental structures, they ground
such critique (Bubner 1971, 185–187; cf. Habermas 1966, 295).
Habermas’s response to this nest of problems involved a number of innova-
tive moves. First, he explained that claims about the natural evolution of cogni-
tive interests do not have the strictly empirical status of the empirical-analytic
sciences but rather lie at the level of reflection (Habermas 1973, 21–22). This
response suggests that such claims operate as part of a general critical theory
of sociocultural development—a theory that eventually took the form of a
developmental model of social evolution (see Rekonstruktion). Second, in
response to Theunissen, Habermas attempted to hold on to both the contin-
gencies of history and invariant transcendental structures. But rather than
appeal to deep-seated interests as anthropological constants, he took recourse
in the idea of truth and its connection with discourse. The species can repro-
duce itself in its sociohistorical practices only “though the medium of that
most unnatural idea, truth, which necessarily begins with the counterfactual
assumption that universal agreement is possible” (Knowledge, 2nd ed., 380). As
counterfactual, the ideas of truth and coercion-free consensus transcend the
contingencies of history; nonetheless they have a real (historical) effect on
human practices (Habermas 1985).
In response to Bubner, Habermas (Knowledge, 2nd ed., 371–373) distin-
guished particular (individualistic) interests from “generalizable” interests and
cognitive interests. Generalizable interests are not simply given as empirical
facts or posited by sheer decision but are to some extent formed (gebildet)
through consensual processes of rational will formation in practical discourses.
Such interests are thus objects of moral-practical knowledge. Cognitive inter-
ests, on the other hand, are universal interests one “encounters” by rationally
reconstructing the conditions of possible objectivity that undergird fundamen-
tal types of problems that every social system must solve. Thus “reconstructive
science” is the mode of inquiry adequate to knowledge-constitutive interests.
With these moves, Habermas began to shift the normative ballast of his
critical theory from the idea of cognitive interests to idealizations that govern
rational discourse and consensus. To be sure, discursive idealizations had
been operative all along, inasmuch as all inquiry depends on processes of
mutual understanding oriented toward rational consensus. Thus the technical
and practical interests depend for their realization on the emancipatory inter-
est in establishing conditions of communication free of domination, which
first make rational consensus possible. However, Habermas’s new distinction
between objectivity and truth goes hand in hand with a much sharper distinc-
tion between discourse and “life-practice,” i.e., communicative action (Haber-
mas 1973, 16ff.; Knowledge, 2nd ed., 362–363). In discourse, the pressures of
everyday action are put aside for the sake of assessing truth claims (or claims
to normative validity); here the only permissible “force” is that of the better
argument. With the distinction between discourse and action, Habermas con-
siderably loosens the tight connection between knowledge and interests.
Although he still speaks of cognitive interests in the early 1970s, they have in
fact lost their original point of uniting theory and practice by “interlocking”
(Verschränkung) forms of knowledge with the fundamental interests of human
life (Knowledge, 212). With the linguistic turn, the transcendental basis for
social critique henceforth lies not in cognitive interests but rather in the ideal-
izations that participants presuppose in discourse.
Habermas’s notion of an emancipatory interest proved especially problem-
atic. Aside from the question of its status—which Habermas (Knowledge, 2nd
ed., 371) explained was derivative—the two main issues for critique of knowl-
edge turned on the association of this interest with self-reflection and with a
psychoanalytic model for social critique.
As various critics pointed out and as Habermas acknowledged (McCarthy
1981, 94ff.; Knowledge, 2nd ed., 377ff.), the attempt to bring historical material-
ism into a (broadly neo-Kantian) transcendental framework conflated two
different types of reflection: philosophical reflection on the invariant struc-
tures of objective knowledge, on the one hand, and the critical analysis of dis-
torted forms of communication in psychoanalysis and ideology critique, on
the other. Whereas the former attempts to articulate universal deep structures
of human action and experience, the latter targets forms of false consciousness
that afflict particular persons and societies, with their unique life histories
284 Texts
and cultural traditions. Given the moves described above, Habermas had a
ready solution to this equivocation, namely, to distinguish philosophical
reflection as “rational reconstruction” from “critique.” He could also relate the
two: because critique targets distorted communication, it depends on the
reconstructive sciences that articulate the communicative ideals against which
critics can identify the distortions that support false consciousness.
The second main problem concerned the appropriateness of the Freudian
model for ideology critique (see Gadamer 1971, Giegel 1971). In both psycho-
analysis and ideology critique the conditions for a dialogue between equals do
not obtain, because the “enlightened” psychoanalyst/critic and “unenlight-
ened” patient/oppressor are not symmetrically situated. However, situations
calling for ideology critique normally lack features of the psychoanalytic rela-
tionship (its voluntariness, professional codes, etc.) that help maintain its
effectiveness and preserve it from the dangers of manipulation. On the one
hand, groups that benefit from domination usually resist the critic; on the
other hand, what preserves the critic from pushing particular interests under
the guise of universal interests?
In contemporary terms, these questions concern the social critic’s self-
proclaimed expertise vis-à-vis target groups. The problem is a difficult one
for Habermas, given his rejection of the Marxist philosophy of history that
had supplied the Communist Party with its special brand of expertise. In
response, he reformulates the theory-practice relationship as that between dis-
course and action. Specifically, he distinguishes three phases or “functions” in
the connection between theory and practice (Habermas 1973, 32ff.): the develop-
ment of critical theories in scientific discourses, the enlightenment of groups
that experience or are concerned about the oppressive effects of domination,
and the choice of strategies and tactics for actual political struggle. However,
this problem subsequently became less acute once Habermas moved away from
a Freudian/Marxist model focused on ideology critique (Habermas 2000, 14–15).
The fourth problem did not emerge until later: in the heyday of neo-Marxist
theorizing, talk of the human species as a macrosubject could still pass without
notice. Moreover, Habermas’s starting point in the philosophy of reflection
made such talk appear reasonable: in the philosophical tradition, “reflection”
in the sense of self-knowledge was typically regarded as an act of a human (or
divine) subject. But once the idea of reflection is disambiguated and replaced,
in effect, by two distinct types of communicative relationships (theoretical
discourse in reconstructive science, “therapeutic” interventions in critique),
and once the normative weight shifts from cognitive interests to discourse, a
species-subject of enlightenment proves to be a useless relic (Habermas 2000,
13). Moreover, the idea of a macrosubject of species constitution cannot do jus-
tice to the pluralism of cultures and variety of social life forms and their dif-
ferent paths of development. A more intersubjective model is required.
Postscript: Critique of Knowledge After the

Linguistic-Pragmatic Turn
In turning to the philosophy of language, Habermas shifted the focus of his

critical theory from epistemological and methodological questions to the
substance of social theory. Specifically, he took up sociological theories of
action with a view toward questions of social order and cultural evolution
(Habermas 2004; Rekonstruktion; see also chapter 35 in this volume). In
this new framework, social order rests ultimately on forms of communica-
tive action, by which actors coordinate their actions on the basis of mutu-
ally acceptable validity claims that are inherently open to potential criti-
cism and justification in argumentative discourses. Consequently, critique
of knowledge now takes the form of a theory of argumentation, whose criti-
cal employment presupposes an analysis of collective learning processes
(Owen 2002).
In hindsight one can see that some of the criticisms of Knowledge and
Human Interests were provoked by Habermas’s talk of cognitive interests as
“constitutive” conditions of knowledge, an idiom that suggests an overly
strong transcendental model (see Power 1993). Having rejected the philosophy
of reflection, Habermas can now characterize his position as “weakly” tran-
scendental, in the sense that his reconstructive analyses rest not on a constitu-
tive transcendental logic but on a fallible hermeneutic explication of shared
competences and normative presuppositions that enable actors to engage in
familiar practices of discourse and inquiry—through which alone we are
capable of learning about and representing the world. But that approach allows
for a “weak naturalism” precisely because pragmatic conditions of learning,
unlike Kant’s intelligible subject, are located in the world, in everyday practices
of communication and action (Truth, 1–50; see chapter 30 in this volume).
Although his claims remain ambitious and controversial, Habermas’s new
approach opens up a promising middle path between realism and idealism,
objectivism and relativism, which had proved so elusive in Knowledge and
Human Interests.
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30
COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALIT Y
Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie des kommunikativen
Handelns (Preparatory Remarks for a Theory of Communicative
Action, 1971)
CRISTINA L AFONT
I
n the 1970s, Habermas’s efforts to ground a critical theory of society
underwent a “linguistic turn”; henceforth linguistic communication
stood at the center of his project. Although some of his earlier writ-
ings from the 1960s had demonstrated an interest in linguistic analysis (e.g.,
On the Logic of the Social Sciences), the central methodological shift took shape
in the 1970s. As a consequence of this shift, the formal-pragmatic analysis of
communication was no longer to be understood as a metatheory seeking to
provide a “language-theoretic foundation of the social sciences” (Communica-
tive Action, 1:xxxix); instead, it provided the core element of a theory of ratio-
nality in its own right. The principal objective of the project is to extract a
concept of communicative rationality from the unavoidable normative pre-
suppositions of the everyday communicative praxis of reaching mutual under-
standing (Verständigung).
Habermas locates a particular form of rationality in the communicative
use of language, which offers a solution to two fundamental tasks that, in his
estimation, earlier articulations of critical theory had failed to accomplish:
the task of overcoming the narrow concept of instrumental rationality domi-
nant in the social sciences and that of providing a convincing answer to the
basic question of all social theory: how social order is possible. Retrospec-
tively, one must add that the conception of communicative rationality in fact
forms the backbone not just of Habermas’s theory of society but also of his
moral, legal, and political theories as well as his theory of modernity and
social evolution.
Habermas elaborated his conception of communicative rationality in many
different writings. The ground plan took shape in various essays written in the
1970s, most of which are contained in the volume Vorstudien und Ergänzun-
gen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. On the basis secured there,
Habermas developed the ideas of The Theory of Communicative Action, his
main work; subsequently, he refined and improved his findings in his Truth
Preparatory Remarks for a Theory of Communicative Action 289
and Justification (1999). The English translations of his most important essays
are available in On the Pragmatics of Communication (1998). As a first approxi-
mation, it is helpful first to determine the scope of Habermas’s conception of
communicative rationality.
Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality is not supposed to provide
an overarching conception of rationality. As he has made clear in more recent
publications (e.g., Truth), reason—as it is embodied in the communicative
structure of speech—represents only one of three structures of rationality, and
these structures are not reducible to the others. The other two are epistemic
rationality, which is embodied in the propositional structure of knowledge,
and instrumental rationality, which is embodied in the teleological structure
of action.
At the same time, however, discursive rationality—which arises from com-
municative reason—integrates these three core structures:
The structure of discourse establishes an interrelation among the entwined

structures of rationality (the structures of knowledge, action, and speech) by,
in a sense, bringing together the propositional, teleological, and communi-
cative roots. According to such a model of intermeshed core structures, dis-
cursive rationality owes its special position not to its foundational but to its
integrative role.
(Pragmatics, 309)
The model of a general theory of rationality sketched here rests on two impor-
tant assumptions that require a detailed justification. First of all, one must
show that a connection in fact exists between the rational structures of knowl-
edge, action, and speech, on the one hand, and the procedural rationality
inherent in practices of justification (i.e., discursive rationality), on the other.
Second, it must be shown that the rationality inherent in communicative prac-
tices is a genuine universal structure of rationality that cannot be reduced to
instrumental rationality.
It is not difficult to show that a connection exists between the rational
structures of knowledge, action, and speech, on the one hand, and discursive
practices, on the other. After all, we consider others rational to the extent that
they are capable, when challenged, of justifying what they believe, do, and say
by providing reasons. Rationality understood as accountability (Zurechnungs-
fähigkeit) is closely tied, therefore, to the capacity to engage in argumentative
practices—that is, practices of critiquing and justifying problematic claims
by providing reasons and arguments. Habermas designates this kind of activ-
ity “discourse,” and he employs the term “discursive rationality” to refer spe-
cifically to the sum total of competencies a speaker must have acquired in
order to participate in the special, reflexive form of communication that is
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argumentation. Habermas explains the internal relation between rationality

and intersubjective justification as follows:
Whoever shares views that turn out to be false is not eo ipso irrational. Some-
one is irrational if she puts forward her opinions dogmatically, clinging to
them although she sees that she cannot justify them. In order to qualify a
belief as rational, it is enough that it can be held to be true on the basis of good
reasons in the relevant context of justification, i.e., that it is rationally
acceptable.
(Pragmatics, 312)
Compared to this relatively straightforward answer to the first question, the

response to the second—which concerns justifying communicative reason
as a universal form of rationality—is significantly more complicated. Here, it
is no longer enough to present a systematic account of the idealized assump-
tions upon which a peculiar and optional form of communication—argumen-
tation or “discourse”—relies.
To address this second question, then, two steps are necessary. First, it must
be shown that the mode of rational justification operative in discourse is
unavoidably anchored in the insurmountable praxis of everyday communica-
tion. Second, it must also be demonstrated that communicative rationality is a
genuine form of rationality that cannot be reduced to instrumental rational-
ity. The formal-pragmatic analysis of communication that Habermas develops
seeks to defend these two central claims of his conception of communicative
rationality.
The Program of Formal Pragmatics
The aim of formal pragmatics is to identify and explicate the universal and
unavoidable presuppositions that underlie the communicative competence of
speakers and make mutual understanding possible. This is why Habermas
chose the term “universal pragmatics” when he first delineated it in his pro-
grammatic essay “What Is Universal Pragmatics?” (Pragmatics, 21–104). In
order to distinguish his theory from the “transcendental-pragmatic” approach
of his colleague Karl-Otto Apel (see chapter 4 in this volume), however, Haber-
mas quickly switches to the term “formal pragmatics”; this change in name
also underscores the theory’s kinship with formal semantics.
The basic idea here is that not just language but also speech—that is, the
use of sentences in utterances—admits of formal philosophical analysis and
thus must not be relegated merely to empirical analysis of particular situa-
tions of use, as is done in sociolinguistics, for example. For a comprehensive
philosophical account of human communication, it is necessary that formal

semantics be complemented by formal pragmatics. Whereas the former inves-
tigates propositional content in order to provide an account of what is said in a
speech act, the latter examines the force of speech acts in order to understand
the interpersonal relations that are established in communication.
Habermas believes that the philosophical significance of the second mode
of investigation reaches far beyond its intrinsic value in helping us understand
human communication. Formal-pragmatic analysis holds far-reaching con-
sequences for the theoretical understanding of action, reason, morality, and
society. This is made especially clear when one examines the different
demands that competency in language, communication, and action respec-
tively place on a speaker.
As we have seen, the basic assumption underlying Habermas’s formal-
pragmatic program is that human communication is governed by a specific
form of rationality—communicative rationality—which is irreducible to instru-
mental rationality. Whereas the linguistic competence of speakers concerns the
ability to understand grammatically well-formed expressions of a language,
communicative competency involves at least the ability to employ linguistic
expressions in order to reach an understanding with someone about something
in the world—or, as Habermas puts it, to engage in “communicative action”
(see chapter 47 in this volume). Such communicative ability differs fundamen-
tally from the capacity to act instrumentally or strategically in order to reach
extracommunicative goals, and it cannot be reduced to these capacities. In sup-
port of his thesis, Habermas draws from the theory of speech acts developed by
J. L. Austin (1975) and John Searle (1969, 1979, 1983; see chapter 6 in this vol-
ume). Unlike them, however, he does not seek to offer a comprehensive account
for all the rules that govern the use of specific types of speech acts, as important
as this task may be. Rather, his analysis of speech acts is solely concerned with
identifying the necessary rational presuppositions that make mutual under-
standing possible.
One identifies such presuppositions by reflecting on the difference between
the conditions for merely producing a grammatically correct sentence, on the
one hand, and those for employing it in a situation of possible understanding,
on the other. Habermas explains this difference in terms of the relations to
reality in which a sentence is embedded through the act of utterance. As soon
as a sentence is uttered in a communicative context, it is placed in relation to a
certain state of affairs, a certain speaker’s intention, and a determinate inter-
personal relation. Thereby, the statement is subject to validity claims that, as a
nonsituated sentence—a purely grammatical formation—it could not (and
would not need to) fulfill.
Accordingly, in order to understand each others’ speech acts, interlocu-
tors must, in the first place, be able to share the knowledge implicit in the
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propositional content of the speech act, and hence they must assess the truth
claim of the utterance. Second, they must be able to share the normative pre-
suppositions inherent in the interpersonal relation established through the
illocutionary act (i.e., they must assess the rightness claim inherent in it), and,
third, they must also assess the sincerity with which the speech act is uttered.
Thus, truth, rightness, and sincerity are three universal validity claims that
speakers (implicitly or explicitly) raise with their speech acts, according to
whether they refer to something in the objective world (as the sum total of
entities about which true statements are possible), something in the social
world (as the sum total of legitimately regulated interpersonal relations), or
something in their particular subjective world (as the sum total of experiences
to which one has privileged access). These three dimensions of validity, which
Habermas designates as the “validity basis of speech,” are the heuristic “keys”
that speakers employ when trying to understand one another’s speech acts.
Habermas’s basic idea involves generalizing the conception of meaning as
truth conditions, which is characteristic of formal semantics. According to
this conception, we understand the propositional content of an assertion when
we know its truth conditions—that is, when we know what would be the case
if it were true. If one broadens this perspective with a view to theorizing both
the propositional content and the force of the different speech acts that can be
performed with it, one arrives at Habermas’s conception, according to which
we understand a speech act when we know what makes it acceptable. Building
on Michael Dummett’s efforts (1975, 1976) to explain meaning in terms of
assertability conditions, Habermas advances the claim that, in order to under-
stand the meaning of a speech act, it is necessary to know the kind of reasons
a speaker might adduce to redeem the validity claims it raises.
This, in turn, means that an orientation toward the possible validity of
utterances is a necessary component of linguistic understanding. Reasons
cannot be identified as such unless speakers adopt the “internal” perspective
of evaluating their quality as reasons and, in so doing, adopt a rationally moti-
vated yes/no position with respect to them (Communicative Action, 1:70–71).
Affirming this internal connection between meaning and validity represents
the decisive step for justifying both the universality of communicative ratio-
nality and its irreducibility to instrumental rationality.
Over the years, Habermas has offered many different perspectives and
arguments in support of the latter thesis, the details of which cannot be
discussed here. The basic idea, however, can be summarized as follows: if,
as argued above, the meaning of a speech act is given by its acceptability
conditions, and if grasping acceptability conditions demands that one
adopts an evaluative stance toward the validity of the reasons that can
be adduced to justify the speech act, then communicative success cannot be
explained on the basis of instrumental rationality alone. Instead, the suc-

cess of communication depends on a generalized trust in the accountability
of speakers, i.e., on their being prepared to vouch for their respective speech
acts. Among other things, this requires readiness to redeem, if necessary,
the validity claims that they raise with their speech acts with the help of
good reasons—and, moreover, readiness to assume the obligations that fol-
low from the recognition of validity claims that have been successfully
redeemed and that are relevant for the consequent interaction. Without such
general trust, speech acts could not acquire any determinate meaning. As
Habermas observes, speech acts such as commands, promises, or assertions
would have no meaning if accepting a command or uttering a promise did
not entail any obligation to execute them or if accepting an assertion did not
entail believing it and directing one’s behavior accordingly (Pragmatics, 223).
Since a generalized instrumental or strategic attitude toward communication
would undermine the trust of interlocutors in their mutual accountability, it
would render their speech acts meaningless. If this view is accurate, the instru-
mental/strategic use of language is necessarily parasitic with respect to the
communicative use of language (i.e., the use of language that is oriented toward
reaching understanding), without which no enduring communicative praxis is
possible (Communicative Action, 1:288).
Because these two uses of language are mutually incompatible, the rational-
ity contained in communicative practices cannot be reduced to instrumental
rationality. Therefore, communicative rationality is an indispensable compo-
nent of a general theory of rationality.
The close connection between meaning and validity also accounts for the
universality of communicative rationality. Communicative understanding
occurs through the intersubjective recognition of the validity claims that par-
ticipants in communication raise through their speech acts. Thus, as Haber-
mas explains,
communication can continue undisturbed only so long as participants

suppose that the validity claims of truth, sincerity, and rightness they recipro-
cally raise with their speech acts are justified. However, as soon as the presup-
position that certain validity claims are satisfied (or could be redeemed) is
suspended, communicative action cannot be continued. One is then basically
confronted with the alternatives of switching to strategic action, breaking off
communication altogether, or recommencing action oriented to reaching
understanding at a different level, the level of argumentative speech for pur-
poses of discursively examining the problematic validity claims, which are
now regarded as hypothetical.
(Pragmatics, 23–24)
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Since, as we have seen, neither the first nor the second alternative provides a
sufficient basis for enduring communicative praxis, the availability of argu-
mentative practices or “discourses” for repairing the disagreements that inevi-
tably arise among interlocutors is a necessary condition for maintaining such
praxis. Therefore, communicative rationality is just as universal and insur-
mountable for humans as is communication itself. It represents, as Habermas
puts it, “a voice of reason that cannot be silenced in everyday communicative
praxis, whether we want to or not” (Habermas 1991, 243–244).
Communication and Discourse
If enduring communicative practices essentially depend on a general trust

that speakers can, if necessary, provide good reasons for the validity claims
their speech acts raise, the ability to participate in practices of argumentation
or “discourses” must also form an essential part of their communicative com-
petence. As already noted, the three universal validity claims (truth, rightness,
and sincerity) and the three formal world concepts (the objective, social, and
subjective worlds) are the commonly presupposed system of coordinates that
permit interlocutors to reach agreement on what they may treat as a fact, a
valid norm, or a subjective experience (Communicative Action, 1:25–26). As
long as this agreement holds, speakers can exchange information about the
world with their respective speech acts. However, as soon as a speaker chal-
lenges the tacit agreement successfully, routine communication is inter-
rupted. Now, communication can only continue on a reflective level in which
the specific context of action is suspended, so that interlocutors can adopt a
hypothetical attitude toward the problematic validity claims and, following
the “unforced force of the better argument,” try to reach agreement on the
basis of good reasons.
The specific cognitive purpose of generating convictions that underlies
argumentative practices or “discourses” imposes strict constraints on their
conditions of success. These constraints can be made explicit in the form of a
reconstruction of the necessary presuppositions and procedural rules governing
such practices. Borrowing from the Aristotelian distinction between logic,
dialectic, and rhetoric, Habermas distinguishes presuppositions for argumen-
tation on three levels. On the logical level of products, they consist of logical
and semantic consistency requirements for generating sound arguments (for
example, speakers may not contradict themselves, different speakers may not
use the same expressions with different meanings, and so on). On the dialecti-
cal level of procedures, the relevant presuppositions are those that make it
possible for the best arguments to prevail (e.g., adopting a hypothetical atti-
tude with respect to the validity claims at issue, recognizing the sincerity and
accountability of all participants in discourse). Finally, on the rhetorical level

of the process of argumentation, the relevant presuppositions are those that
make a rationally motivated agreement possible; this concerns pragmatic fea-
tures of the praxis of argumentation such as equal standing (symmetry)
among all participants, equal opportunities of participation, absence of exter-
nal coercion and deception, openness to criticism, and so on.
In early articulations of his model, Habermas qualified the presuppositions
named above as features of “an ideal speech situation.” Later, he came to
distance himself more and more from this formulation, inasmuch as the ter-
minology may give rise to the erroneous view that such presuppositions are
constitutive merely of an ideal praxis (or even of a way of life to be realized in
the future [cf. Vorstudien, 181]) and are not, instead, unavoidably operative in
actual argumentative practices. According to Habermas, their status as
unavoidable presuppositions of actual practices of justification is based on
conceptual reasons. Since the purpose of every instance of justification is to
convince those who have requested it, this must occur under conditions that
make it possible to tell how genuinely convincing the arguments and reasons
provided actually are (and that means, of course, under conditions free of
coercion, deception, and exclusion). In the absence of such conditions, the
practice in question is something other than a process of argumentation or
justification. Discourse participants must presuppose that proper conditions
obtain in sufficient measure in their actual practices for their argumentative
intentions to make any sense at all. Taking up Apel’s approach, Habermas
contends that the necessity and unavoidability of the pragmatic presupposi-
tions for argumentation can be demonstrated by analyzing the performative
self-contradictions in which one becomes entangled in the attempt of negating
any one of them (see Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action). Perfor-
mative self-contradiction occurs whenever the propositional meaning of an
utterance contradicts its pragmatic meaning. One such example would be the
claim “I hereby doubt that I exist.” Since existing is a necessary condition for
doubting, in making such a claim, what I am saying contradicts what I am
doing. Similarly, Habermas argues, given the fact that lack of coercion and
exclusion are necessary conditions for the formation of genuine convictions, a
performative self-contradiction would occur if one were to make the following
statement: “Having excluded persons A, B, C, . . . from the discussion by
silencing them or by foisting our interpretation on them, we were able to con-
vince ourselves that the norm N is justified” (Moral Consciousness, 91).
The attempt to reconstruct the intuitive knowledge inherent in the com-
municative competence of speakers immediately raises the methodological
question about the status of this knowledge. Are the unavoidable presuppo-
sitions for communication and argumentation that a formal-pragmatic
analysis reveals transcendental conditions in the strict Kantian sense (that is,
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necessary and universal conditions of experience)? Against Apel’s project of

“transcendental pragmatics”—even though it inspired him initially—Haber-
mas has always insisted that the presuppositions for communication and
argumentation possess only a “weakly transcendental” status. Time and again,
he has rejected Apel’s standpoint that this kind of philosophical analysis
affords a priori insights that provide an ultimate foundation of knowledge
(see chapter 4 in this volume).
According to Habermas, the pragmatic rules that enable competent speak-
ers to participate in practices of reaching mutual understanding represent
“presumably general, but only de facto uncircumventable [unhintergehbar]
conditions that must be fulfilled in order for certain fundamental practices to
arise—that is, such practices for which no thinkable functional equivalent in
our socio-cultural forms of life exist” (Naturalism, 24). Therefore, these
conditions
are similar to transcendental conditions to the extent that we cannot avoid

making certain universal presuppositions when using language in order to
reach understanding. On the other hand, they are not transcendental in the
strict sense for (a) we can also act otherwise, in a non-communicative manner
and (b) the ineluctability of these idealized presuppositions does not entail
their factual satisfaction.
(Habermas 1991, 228–229)
The weakly transcendental status Habermas ascribes to normative presup-

positions of communication is also responsible for two distinctive features of
his conception of critical theory. On the one hand, to the extent that these
normative presuppositions, while unavoidably presupposed in our communi-
cative practices, may actually fail to be satisfied, they provide a critical yardstick
for evaluating our existing practices. Moreover, since this critical standard is
anchored in our actual practices, it is intuitively available to all participants in
communication. This permits Habermas to counter the objection that the
critical theorist is arbitrarily or paternalistically imposing a standard from
without: its validity can, in principle, be confirmed or rejected by the partici-
pants themselves. Habermas makes the point as follows:
The same structures that make it possible to reach an understanding also pro-
vide for the possibility of a reflective self-control of this process. It is this
potential for critique built into communicative action itself that the social sci-
entist, by entering into the contexts of everyday action as a virtual partici-
pant, can systematically exploit and bring into play outside these contexts
and against their particularity.
(Communicative Action, 1:121; emphasis added)
Additionally, by ascribing only a “weakly transcendental” status to the pre-

suppositions of communicative action, Habermas can reject the strict “apri-
orism” of traditional transcendental philosophy and underscore the fallible
status of the type of knowledge that a reconstruction of competencies pro-
vides. In this way, he rejects the (supposedly) categorical difference between
philosophy and other reconstructive sciences such as generative linguistics or
developmental psychology.
All the same, Habermas does not draw the conclusion that denying phi-
losophy’s privileged (and infallible) access to truth means that one must aban-
don philosophical analysis. On the contrary, the conclusion he draws is that
nothing prevents philosophy from participating in scientific cooperation with
other forms of knowledge; indeed, according to Habermas, philosophy can
play a key mediating role between systems of knowledge that are encapsulated
within cultures of expertise, on the one hand, and the intuitive “background
knowledge” of the lifeworld, on the other (see chapter 34 in this volume).
Communicative Rationality and Social Theory
According to the formal-pragmatic approach, reason is situated within every-

day communicative practices of reaching mutual understanding that grant
the presupposition of yielding reasonable results. Habermas’s procedural con-
ception of communicative rationality holds that the more the rational accept-
ability of our convictions depends on the rationality of our argumentation
procedures, the less it can rely on any substantive content that is a priori
precluded from being problematized. Given the unavoidable openness of com-
municative practices oriented toward mutual understanding—i.e., an under-
standing that depends on the explicit, unforced assent of participants—only
the formal conditions of argumentative procedures can be considered neces-
sary for reaching rationally acceptable outcomes. The insight behind this pro-
cedural approach to rationality is that our convictions are rational not so
much because they derive from a system of infallible beliefs that provide an
“ultimate foundation of knowledge” (Apel); rather, they are rational because
they result from an open, self-correcting process that allows for permanent
revision on the basis on new insights (and therefore promises to yield reason-
able results).
Habermas’s procedural conception of communicative rationality offers an
interesting and complex basis for explaining the possibility of social order. On
the one hand, linguistic understanding provides a powerful mechanism for
action coordination that makes social integration possible. Communicative
understanding allows social actors to coordinate their actions on the basis of
validity claims that are deemed mutually acceptable and can be criticized or
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justified by means of argument. The assurance interlocutors (implicitly) offer

one another—that they could, if necessary, redeem the validity claims they
raise with their speech acts by providing convincing reasons—unleashes a
rationally motivating force that has socially integrative effects. The general
trust in the mutual accountability of interlocutors that is generated in pro-
cesses of consensus formation makes action coordination and thus social
order possible.
At the same time, however, since communicative understanding is struc-
turally dependent on the permanent possibility of disagreement and criticism,
it has a built-in potential for problematization that jeopardizes the possibility
of social order. In light of the potentially high costs of dissent, communicative
action can, at first, seem more a disruptive than a promising mechanism for
explaining the possibility of social order (Pragmatics, 236–237). However,
Habermas does not consider this a real obstacle to his project. In fact, in The
Theory of Communicative Action, he exploits the explanatory potential of
both the disruptive and the productive aspects of communicative rationality
for his theory of social evolution. Insofar as it is reasonable to accept that no
functional equivalent exists for everyday communicative practices of reaching
understanding—either as regards socialization or in terms of the reproduc-
tion of the lifeworld—the disruptive potential that lies within communicative
practices can help explain the rationalization of the lifeworld that character-
izes modern societies. Such rationalization can be understood as a process
whereby the reproduction of the lifeworld comes to depend less and less on a
normatively ascribed agreement held to be immune to criticism and more and
more on a communicative agreement to be reached by the interlocutors them-
selves. The increased risk of dissent involved in this historical development
explains, in turn, the need in modern societies for developing strategies that
either circumscribe the communicative mechanism or give this mechanism
unhindered play.
An example of the latter strategy is the institutionalization of specialized
discourses—e.g., modern science, law, autonomous art—in which the validity
of different aspects of the cultural system of knowledge is permanently thema-
tized and discussed. An example of the former strategy is the development of
steering mechanisms (such as power and money) that make action coordination
possible without having to rely on mutual understanding. These alternative
mechanisms of action coordination help preserve social order by reducing the
risk of dissent (see chapter 35 in this volume).
In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas follows a similar strategy in his
interesting account of modern positive law. According to this account, posi-
tive law is a system of rules that both binds together and assigns different
tasks to the two strategies for dealing with the risk of dissent found in com-
municative action, that is, the strategies of circumscribing the communicative
mechanism and of giving this mechanism unhindered play. On the one hand,
positive law limits the risk of dissent by assigning to sanctions the role formerly
played by convictions; in this way, it leaves the motives for rule compliance
open while enforcing observance. On the other hand, the modern legal system
must—in keeping with its own claims of legitimation and justification—stand
open to critical testing and potential contradiction in ongoing discourses and
transform the risks this entails into the productive force of presumptively ratio-
nal processes of political-opinion and will formation (see chapter 38 in this
volume).
Communicative Rationality and Moral Theory
Communicative reason, as such, is not a form of practical reason, for it encom-

passes the whole spectrum of validity claims—that is, in addition to the claim
of normative rightness, the claims of propositional truth and subjective sincer-
ity. According to Habermas, communicative reason makes an orientation
toward validity claims possible; unlike the classical conception of practical rea-
son, however, it does not constitute a direct source of norms of conduct (Facts,
4–5). All the same, its importance for the theory of morality is undiminished.
An important feature of Habermas’s procedural conception of communi-
cative rationality is the fact that the necessary conditions for achieving ratio-
nal results through practices of argumentation are neutral with respect to
“content” (i.e., questions) to which justificatory practices can meaningfully be
applied. Indeed, the formal-pragmatic approach is motivated by the need to
distinguish between a procedural conception of rational acceptability, on the
one hand, and, on the other, the various substantive criteria of justification
that are employed in specific instances of argumentation. Whereas the latter
are contextual (given the different kinds of questions at issue) and vary over
time (as a consequence of cognitive learning processes), the former can be
characterized in purely formal terms—i.e., through a reconstruction of
unavoidable presuppositions of argumentative practices, which are culturally
invariable. It is in this sense that our concept of rational acceptability is at bot-
tom procedural. If we can only discern the correctness of our convictions on
the basis of assessing how convincing the reasons in their support are, and if
no criteria of justification can in principle be exempted from questioning,
then it follows that we can only infer how convincing our reasons are from the
actual results of a rational process of argumentation—that is, a process occur-
ring under the conditions of an “ideal speech situation” (free of coercion,
deception, exclusion, etc.) (Naturalism, 49–50).
Thanks to such neutrality with regard to content, the formal-pragmatic
project opens the possibility of theorizing rationality in terms that reach far
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beyond the narrow limits of instrumental rationality, covering not only ques-
tions of truth or effectiveness but also all other questions that participants in
communication are willing and able to debate by adducing reasons in order to
reach agreement on contested validity claims. In keeping with his analysis of
the three validity claims that comprise communicative action—truth, norma-
tive rightness, and sincerity—Habermas elaborates a typology of discourses in
which every validity claim can be evaluated hypothetically and either con-
tested or justified. Although, over the years, Habermas has made small modi-
fications in how he assigns validity claims to specific forms of argumentation
(Vorstudien, Theory of Communicative Action, etc.), the essential traits of the
picture have remained the same.
Whereas it is impossible for a speaker to redeem the claim of sincerity in
his or her subjective utterances by means of argument—sincerity can only be
evaluated in terms of the consistency between a speaker’s intentions and sub-
sequent actions—claims about the truth of empirical propositions or claims
concerning the normative rightness of social relations can be redeemed in dis-
course. Such claims can be tested in theoretical or practical discourses, respec-
tively. From a procedural point of view, both discourses are subject to the same
normative presuppositions, even though they differ with respect to the spe-
cific rules of argumentation appropriate for each of them. Whereas discourses
about the truth of empirical propositions are guided by the principle of induc-
tion, practical discourses about the rightness of social norms follow a principle
of universalization (see chapter 36 in this volume).
In line with the formal-pragmatic approach, Habermas’s account of practical
and theoretical discourses does not aim to provide substantive criteria sufficient
to generate true beliefs or right norms in argumentative discourses; instead, it
aims to clarify the conditions under which those criteria (arguments, forms of
reasoning, and so on) alone can achieve justificatory force. The aim, thereby,
is to show how the same general, discursive conditions for rational acceptabil-
ity impose restrictions on the possible answers to both theoretical and practi-
cal questions. This is the key argumentative step in the attempt to undermine
a positivist understanding of rationality that denies that practical questions
can have genuinely rational answers.
Inasmuch as interlocutors treat practical questions concerning the right-
ness of social norms as cognitive questions, and inasmuch as the discourse-
theoretical account of the notion of rational acceptability holds, the discursive
conditions for rational acceptability analyzed in the theory of communica-
tive rationality represent necessary conditions for the validity of our claims
about the rightness of social norms just as much as they do for the validity of
any other claims to justified knowledge. Here, the implications of the theory
of communicative rationality for Habermas’s conception of morality are evi-
dent: insofar as the discourse-theoretic account of rational acceptability is not
motivated by moral reasons, it can provide an independent justification to dis-

course ethics. That is, because the demands of rational acceptability contained
within the theory of communicative rationality do not rest on moral but on
cognitive reason, the formal features of rationally acceptable procedures of
argumentation are neutral with respect to the questions at issue. Consequently,
by relying on these formal features, discourse ethics does not presuppose a
particular moral outlook. At the same time, however, these formal-pragmatic
features do impose constraints on the answers to moral questions that may
be considered rationally acceptable. This is their moral impact: taking into
account the unavoidable normative presuppositions of argumentation, it is
possible to understand why the practice of justifying moral norms (under his-
torical conditions of a given plurality of moral codes) has influenced the evo-
lution of our moral views toward a principled egalitarian morality.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Habermas pursued a decidedly “antirealist” argu-
mentative strategy in order to support the strong analogy between claims to
truth and claims to rightness postulated by his formal pragmatics. According
to this strategy, the unconditional and context-transcendent meaning of both
validity claims, truth and normative rightness, can be explained in terms of
the epistemic notion of “idealized rational acceptability.” This line of reason-
ing led him to advance a so-called consensus theory of truth, which holds that
“the truth of a proposition [means] the promise to seek reasonable consensus
about what has been said” (Vorstudien, 137). In the 1990s, Habermas retracted
this conception of truth (Truth, 161–162) and admitted that truth is “a justifica-
tion-transcendent concept that cannot be made to coincide with the concept
of ideal warranted assertability. Rather it refers to the truth conditions that
must, as it were, be met by reality itself” (Truth, 247–248). Today, Habermas
endorses an approach that he calls “pragmatic epistemological realism”
regarding truth claims that can be tested and justified in empirical-theoretical
discourse (see Truth). This approach aims to account for the realist intuitions
that result from our practical engagement with the objective world without
falling back upon a metaphysical realism that assumes a direct correspon-
dence, unfiltered by rational argument(s), between a privileged class of utter-
ances and the way the world is.
All the same—now as then—Habermas continues to endorse an antirealist
strategy concerning moral claims by defining normative rightness in terms of
his notion of idealized rational acceptability:
Ideally warranted assertability is what we mean by moral validity. . . . A

norm’s ideal warranted assertability—unlike that of a justification-transcen-
dent claim to truth—does not refer beyond the boundaries of discourse to
something that might “exist” independently of having been determined to be
worthy of recognition. The justification-immanence of “rightness” is based on
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a semantic argument: Since the “validity” of a norm consists in that it would

be accepted, that is, recognized as valid, under ideal conditions of justifica-
tion, “rightness” is an epistemic concept.
(Truth, 258)
The consequences of the break Habermas posits here between claims to truth
and claims to rightness for a defense of the formal-pragmatic theory of
meaning—the central piece of his theory of communicative rationality—
have not yet been elaborated.
Communicative Reason and Political Theory
During the 1990s, Habermas began to expand and develop his discourse-the-
oretical understanding of communicative reason in the context of legal and
political theory. The process culminated in Between Facts and Norms. Subse-
quently, a much more complicated and nuanced understanding of claims to
rightness has been operative within Habermas’s formal pragmatics; this has
also led him to draw subtler distinctions within his broad conception of nor-
mative rightness in order to account for the highly variable dimensions of
validity in social norms (moral, legal, or ethical-political validity, legitimacy,
etc.).
In this context, Habermas has also found it necessary to establish a clearer
distinction between the moral principle of universalization (U) and the dis-
course principle (D). Moreover, he has introduced a new principle—the prin-
ciple of democracy—underlying the procedure of legitimate legislation. It
holds that “only those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the
assent [Zustimmung] of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in
turn has been legally constituted” (Facts, 110). This principle articulates the
extent to which the procedural concept of communicative rationality directly
undergirds a normative model of deliberative democracy: the normative
presuppositions of argumentative practices (that is, symmetrical relations
between participants, equal opportunities for participation, inclusion, free-
dom from coercion and deception, openness to criticism, and so on) indicate
the conditions that must be fulfilled so that public-deliberative processes of
opinion and will formation in democratic states can confer legitimacy to politi-
cal decisions (inasmuch as observance of the former justifies the presumption
that the latter are reasonable). Here, one can clearly see the advantages of the
procedural conception of communicative rationality, for the formal-pragmatic
preconditions that are necessary to uphold practices of argumentation can be
recognized as reasonable by all democratic citizens, notwithstanding the sub-
stantive disagreements that unavoidably emerge in pluralistic societies. It is
also evident why Habermas’s discourse model has proved so productive not
only in discussions about normative theories of democracy but also in empiri-
cal studies of political deliberation in contemporary democratic societies that
aim at issuing practical recommendations for the improvement of existing
political institutions.
In contrast to substantive normative assumptions, formal-pragmatic con-
ditions of public deliberation are not only less contentious; they are also easier
to track empirically in the context of analyzing the normative quality of actual
processes of political deliberation (such as parliamentary debates or interna-
tional negotiations). An interesting empirical application of the procedural
conception of discursive rationality is found in the “discourse quality index”
compiled by Steiner, Bächtiger, Spörndli, and Steenbergen (2004). An over-
view of the fruitfulness of the model for empirical political science is provided
by the contributions to special volume 40 of Acta Politica (2005) and in Haber-
mas’s recent book Europe: The Faltering Project. Finally, a rewarding discus-
sion of how communicative rationality can be used to analyze international
politics can be found in Niesen and Herborth (2007).
Inasmuch as the conception of communicative reason stands at the heart of

Habermas’s theoretical project, it has been at the center of both attention and
controversy from the very beginning. From a substantive point of view, two
main currents of criticism are in evidence. On the one hand, many readers
have taken issue with the fact that Habermas locates the seat of rationality—
away from the thinking and acting subject—in intersubjective structures of
linguistic communication (Henrich 1987, 1992; Schnädelbach 1992). Other crit-
ics have expressed misgivings inasmuch as they consider that this shift equates
rationality and the ability to justify convictions and actions by argument—
that is, they hold that Habermas has overintellectualized reason (Schnädel-
bach 1992; Habermas offers an extensive response in Pragmatics, 307–342).
From a methodological point of view, Habermas’s efforts to affirm both the
universal and necessary character of the presuppositions that are operative in
communicative reason and the fallible (a posteriori) status of the knowledge
that makes those presuppositions explicit has elicited criticism from philo-
sophical camps that are diametrically opposed. Some (e.g., Apel 1992; Kuhl-
mann 1984; see chapter 4 in this volume) hold that the universal and necessary
status of those presuppositions can only be meaningfully affirmed if one
acknowledges the transcendental status of philosophical claims to knowledge
(which provides the basis for a “ultimate foundation”). Conversely, there are
those (e.g., Rorty 1994) for whom recognizing the fallible nature of human
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knowledge implies that all context-transcendent claims to universality and

necessity should be abandoned.
In recent decades, the program of formal pragmatics at the core of Haber-
mas’s conception of communicative rationality has been at the center of
numerous discussions and controversies. In response, Habermas has expanded
and added nuance to his theory. The most important discussions concern
technical aspects of speech acts (e.g., the difficulties posed by so-called perlo-
cutions, threats, or even simple imperatives; cf. Skjei 1985; Tugendhat 1985;
Zimmermann 1985; for some responses, see Pragmatics, 215–256, 307–342), the
details of the formal-pragmatic theory of meaning (Wellmer 1992; Lafont 1999;
Heath 1995, 2001), and the specific features of the discourse theory of truth
(McCarthy 1973; Hesse 1980; Wellmer 1986; Lafont 1994, 1999). Truth and Justi-
fication provides Habermas’s most up-to-date response to these critiques.
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31
LATE CAPITALISM AND
LEGITIMATION
Legitimation Crisis (1973)
FRANK NULLMEIER
L
egitimation Crisis presents the plan—or, as Habermas puts it, the
“argumentation sketch” (Legitimation, 33)—for a comprehensive
theory of society, indicating the framework of investigations
he will pursue up to The Theory of Communicative Action.
Legitimation Crisis began as the research program for projects at the Max
Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg,
where he assumed the directorship with Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker in
1971. The book both draws on the work of researchers there (especially Claus
Offe, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, Rainer Döbert, and Klaus Eder) and synthe-
sizes theoretical elements from the author’s earlier writings. Finally, in the
wake of student protest movements, it engages with recent political develop-
ments and is, in particular, motivated by engagement with Marxian crisis
theory, on the one hand, and efforts to take distance from Niklas Luhmann’s
systems theory, on the other.
“Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’ ” (1968), in which Habermas
engaged with the works of Herbert Marcuse, had already addressed possible
tendencies of capitalist development. Here, Habermas offered a perspective
that differed from Marxist approaches on two fundamental points: “capitalist
society has changed to the point where two key categories of Marxian theory,
namely class struggle and ideology, can no longer be employed as they stand”
(Rational Society, 107). At the same time, he held fast to the assumption of the
crisis proneness (Krisenhaftigkeit) of capitalism and to the possibility of over-
coming this form of society—even if he provided no concept of another
“socialist” society, as he had in his 1968 lecture “Bedingungen für eine
Revolutionierung spätkapitalistischer Gesellschaften” (Conditions for revolu-
tionizing late-capitalist societies; Kultur und Kritik, 70–86). Against the thesis,
widespread in the 1960s, that social conflicts and economic problems could be
resolved by means of the social-welfare state and Keynesianism, Habermas
stressed that capitalism is inherently prone to crisis.
Legitimation Crisis 307
“Exkurs über Grundannahmen des Historischen Materialismus” (Excur-

sus on the fundamental assumptions of historical materialism; Habermas and
Luhmann 1971, 285–290) and the introduction to a new edition of Theory and
Practice (1971) named the decisive aspect of Habermas’s understanding of
crisis: the “chronic need for legitimation developing today” (Theory and Prac-
tice, 5). Legitimation Crisis, in turn, replaces “ideology” with the concept of
“legitimation” as the conceptual core of a crisis theory intended to dismantle
the assumptions of orthodox Marxist thought. Neither the fall of profit rates
nor the struggle of the working class—nor, even, the economic failure of the
capitalist state—are matters that Habermas addresses when determining the
limits of the current social system. Proneness to crisis does not stem from
the fact that ideologies that represent a pendant to economic development can
be employed to manipulative ends; instead, the matter concerns the internal
logic of modes of legitimation—i.e., when motivating factors that enhance the
functioning of the social system are not readily available.
Habermas’s other basic line of argument concerns Luhmann’s systems the-
ory in general and his work Legitimation durch Verfahren (Legitimation
through procedure; Luhmann 1969) in particular. Ultimately, the intensive
debate between the two thinkers in Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtech-
nologie? (1971) leads Habermas to adopt, in Legitimation Crisis, the analytical
categories of systems theory, especially in reflections that occur on a macroso-
ciological level. (Here, Habermas also refers to the works of Talcott Parsons.)
At the same time, the study firmly rejects elements of systems theory founded
on philosophical assumptions and microsociological analyses that declare
social integration to be a matter of imperatives to overcome complexity (and,
for this reason, to offer viable substitutes for normative structures).
Legitimation Crisis is divided into three parts. In the first, Habermas eluci-
dates his conception of crisis and provides a basic theory of social evolution
that is directed against objectivistic-economic understandings of the subject.
The second part evaluates hypotheses concerning late capitalism’s tendency
toward crisis; instead of economic or governmental steering problems, the crucial
factor is maintaining and “procuring” legitimation (Zufuhr an Legitimation). The
final part of the book assesses—and, ultimately, rejects—the possibility of dis-
pensing with sophisticated (anspruchsvoll) rational legitimation, and it affirms
the connection between discourse theory and social theory.
The Notion of Crisis and Social Theory
In his introductory reflections on the concept of crisis—which begin with the

medical understanding of the term—Habermas articulates a central theoreti-
cal position: crisis is not a purely objective process; rather, it is a condition of
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powerlessness (Ohnmacht) involving the subject in his or her entirety. “We . . .

associate with crises the idea of an objective force that deprives a subject of
some part of his normal sovereignty” (Legitimation, 1). Resolving a crisis, then,
amounts to a form of liberation. Habermas grants the concept a normative
meaning, and he develops his ideas on the basis of systems theory, which itself
lacks a normative dimension: in systems theory, crises are defined as distur-
bances of integration (Legitimation, 7)—i.e., as situations that arise when
problems of maintenance (Bestandserhaltung) cannot be resolved by means of
structural possibilities within the social system.
The altogether objectivistic conception of crisis in systems theory founders
on the fact that elements of a system necessary for its preservation cannot be
distinguished from those that can be changed without the system losing its
coherence and identity. For this reason, Habermas calls for a conception of cri-
sis that focuses on social integration: “only when members of a society experi-
ence structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their
social identity threatened can we speak of crises” (Legitimation, 3). Distur-
bances of system integration only endanger continued existence when the basis
of social integration—the normative structures of a society—stands at risk.
Therefore, Habermas maintains, the theory of crisis must determine what sys-
temic steering problems produce effects that threaten social integration.
Habermas’s theoretical framework is governed by the distinction between
system integration and social integration (which, in later works, becomes the
distinction between “system” and “lifeworld”). At the same time, the author
attaches due significance to an asymmetry that assigns social integration the
key role in community life and addresses the factual interplay between social
integration and system integration. On a theoretical level, Habermas seeks to
synthesize the partial views afforded by various traditions in the social
sciences. Accordingly, he understands social integration in terms such as
“institution,” “socialization,” “action,” “norms,” “values,” and “lifeworld” (cf.,
among others, Berger and Luckmann 1966). He examines system integration,
on the other hand, in terms of “self-regulation,” “overcoming complexity,”
“steering,” and “contingency.” Only in Parsons’s writings are both perspectives
combined, through his famous four-part AGIL scheme of validity—Adaptation,
Goal Attainment, Integration, Latency (Legitimation, 5).
In seeking to address both system integration and social integration,
Habermas takes up an approach that had otherwise lost most of its influence
by the early 1970s. In more immediate terms, Legitimation Crisis works with a
model developed by Claus Offe, which recognizes three functional systems:
the economic system, the political-administrative system, and the sociocul-
tural system. There are three corresponding dimensions of social evolution:
the dynamic fields of forces in production, system autonomy (power), and
normative structures. It is necessary to adopt such an evolutionary perspective
if one is to differentiate between, on the one hand, structural changes that

represent variations within a social formation that continues to exist and, on
the other, changes that ultimately lead to change in the social structure itself.
Marx’s theory of society also addresses the matter. Habermas, however,
affirms that cultural values (i.e., the matter of social integration) constitute
the core of social formations; to this end, he elaborates his notion of the “orga-
nizational principle.”
Organizational principles—as highly abstract structures of regulation—
determine a society’s capacity to learn without losing its identity (i.e., its “level
of development”); they establish room for variation in three dimensions:
forces of production, steering capacity, and identity-founding interpretive sys-
tems. The idea of the “organizational principle” at the theoretical heart of
social evolution is based on the assumption that social systems all have at least
three universal properties (Legitimation Crisis, 8–9).
First, production, which occurs through exchanges with external nature,
and socialization, which involves the appropriation of inner nature, constitute
the two essential relations between the social system and the environment. By
means of new knowledge that is technologically useful (verwertbar), control
over external nature is increased; through the nuanced interpretation of situa-
tions of need (Bedürfnislagen), human experience yields universalistic norms
and self-reflexive values, which make it possible to heighten the socialized
component of subjective interiority. Both production and socialization follow
particular schemes of developmental logic—patterns that can be reconstructed
rationally and theoretically—because they occur in the medium of verifiable
(wahrheitsfähig) utterances (production) and justifiable (rechtfertigungsbedürftig)
norms (socialization).
It is widely accepted that scientific-technological progress qualifies as a
purposeful and irreversible process that may be reconstructed by rational
means. On the other hand, Habermas’s claim that normative structures obey
an internal logic is novel. This thesis must come to terms with the fact that
normative structures cannot be instrumentalized at will by the operative sys-
tem, for they do not represent a “superstructure” that is given form by those in
power; rather, normative structures are autonomous—i.e., they potentially
resist change. Habermas’s theory, then, rejects the narrow Marxian view that
the progress of forces of production must ultimately overturn relations of pro-
duction; in its place now stand two social elements that perform an “explosive”
function: forces of production—as before—and, in addition, normative
structures.
All the same, a fundamental asymmetry obtains between the factors of
change that Habermas identifies. Whereas forces of production expand the
autonomy of the system (Systemautonomie), developments occurring in nor-
mative structures can check this autonomy. Moreover, it is clear that the
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political system’s evolutionary dimension depends only on changes occurring

in normative structures, science, technology, and economy. Unlike the spheres
of production and socialization, politics obeys no inner logic (Eigenlogik);
therefore, it possesses no capacity to evolve on its own. The theory presented
in Legitimation Crisis grants politics no intrinsic, revolutionary dynamism.
Second, the goal values (Sollwerte) of a society change on the basis of forces
of production and system autonomy; at the same time, however, such varia-
tion is limited by the developmental logic internal to normative structures,
which admit no economic influence. Therefore, the development of norms
may promote the development of the system as a whole but also, potentially,
constitute an obstacle. The enhancement of forces of production may also
trigger change within normative structures; in such a case, however, their sub-
sequent development follows a logic of its own, with the consequence that new
legitimation claims come to limit and tax the autonomy of the social system.
According to Habermas, precisely this occurs in late capitalism. Normative
structures obstruct the perpetuation of the standing social system. Through
their internal dynamics of development, normative structures stand in the
way of the system’s expansion of power (Machtentfaltung). Whereas the Marx-
ist model views relations of production negatively—as a superstructure that
blocks the free development of forces of production—Habermas considers the
normative structures that have taken their place (in theoretical terms) as a
positive and desirable check on the otherwise uncontrolled forces of technol-
ogy and economy.
Finally, a given society’s level of development and capacity for learning are
measured in terms of whether a distinction is made between theoretical-tech-
nical questions, on the one hand, and practical questions, on the other—and
the extent to which these spheres admit processes of learning. The fundamen-
tal “automatic inability not to learn” (Legitimation, 15) constitutes the core of
human reason (Vernünftigkeit). Hereby—and almost in passing—Habermas
indicates the fundamental basis both for his theory of rationality and of his
theory of human society.
Liberal Capitalism and Late Capitalism
Following upon these three universalia, Legitimation Crisis presents a basic

sketch of the evolutionary theory of social formations (Legitimation, 17–24)—
later elaborated in greater detail in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Mate-
rialismus. Habermas distinguishes between pre-high-cultural, high-cultural,
and postmodern social formations (although the third is merely posited as a
possibility). The differences (Ausdifferenzierungen) between societies occupy-
ing a high level of culture—which are all class societies—are determined as
follows: after traditional forms of social organization come modern ones, which
may be capitalist or postcapitalist (i.e., “state socialist” [staatssozialistisch]). For
Habermas’s theory of crisis, only the distinction—internal to capitalist social
formations—between liberal capitalism and organized capitalism is important.
Habermas’s reflections on other social formations serve only—hence the title of
this section—to “illustrate social principles of organization.”
Before achieving the status of “high culture,” human communities are
structured primarily by distinctions of age and sex as well as by systems of
kinship that, as totalizing institutions, afford both system and social integra-
tion. Because they lack a productive dimension, these classless societies harbor
no internal contradictions that might overtax the organizational principle.
Here, crisis can be occasioned only by external events (ecological changes, war,
conquest, etc.). The next level of evolution occurs when traditional societies are
structured by class in an openly political way. The state—as a bureaucratic
authority apparatus (Herrschaftsapparat)—takes the place of kinship as the
institutional core of the system, and economic relations are regulated by politi-
cal power. In addition, functions of social integration grow distinct from those
of system integration when sacral-religious and secular (political-legal) instances
of power emerge.
This evolution enables considerable increases of system autonomy; at the
same time, however, the augmented productivity creates a class structure that
tends toward instability. The danger arises that religious conceptions of the
world will contradict the exploitative relations between classes as they actually
obtain. Thus, crises occur in traditional societies of this kind as the result of
internal contradictions. They begin as steering problems, which necessitate
heightened repression in order to secure the basis of production. Legitimation
issues then arise, which entail class struggles that will (potentially) overturn
the standing social order. Legitimation crises can occur in traditional societ-
ies, as well.
This situation does not hold—and here is the rub for Habermas—for the
liberal-capitalistic form assumed by modern societies. Whereas, in traditional
societies, political decisions regulate and dominate economic activity, liberal
capitalism (according to Habermas) separates economics and politics. The
sphere in which autonomous agents exchange goods free of state control
involves inequalities that take the form of depoliticized class relations inas-
much as they are matters of private law and not governmental concerns (Legit-
imation Crisis, 20).
Here, no political legitimation crisis can exist in Habermas’s view: the mar-
ket legitimates itself by maintaining (relative) parity in the exchange of equiv-
alent values; for this reason, politics and the state do not intervene.
“Apolitical” economic relations keep the state free from burdens of legiti-
mation (Legitimation, 22). Even if the proletariat remains orderly and obedient
312 Texts
largely because of (external) repression and (internalized) fatalism, the bour-

geois ideals of the market prevail, and the ruling class does not rule politically.
At the same time, since the economy constitutes the organizational principle
of society, problems of economic steering—without the mediating effects of
factors of social integration—pose the question whether the social formation
will continue to exist. Because it is centered on the market/economy, this
social form risks systemic crisis when the process of accumulation is inter-
rupted; traditional societies, on the other hand—inasmuch as they are struc-
tured by openly political classes—experience crises of identity when problems
of legitimation and class struggles emerge (Legitimation, 23).
Economic crises occur quite frequently under liberal capitalism—and per-
manent awareness of this fact on the part of the bourgeoisie stands opposed
to revolutionary hopes among workers. Marxist theory holds that, because
the state does not intervene, divergent class interests meet up directly: eco-
nomic crisis and class struggle form an analytical unit, and class actions fol-
low from economic matters. This view is precisely what Habermas contests.
He maintains that class struggles in liberal capitalism are apolitical because
they are not directed against the state. This argument, while highly problem-
atic, is central to his conclusion that a theory of class struggle may not stand
at the heart of a theory of the present: “It is precisely this sociological retrans-
lation of an economic analysis that proceeds immanently that gives rise to
difficulties in the altered conditions of organized capitalism” (Legitimation,
30–31).
According to the model presented in Legitimation Crisis, late capitalism is
distinct from liberal capitalism in two respects. For one, the concentration of
capital and the organization of markets (including—and especially—labor
markets) mark the end of the competitive stage of capitalism. Secondly, dys-
functional consequences of the market are neutralized by comprehensive state
intervention (Legitimation, 33) (without, however, autonomous private invest-
ment being replaced by political planning). At the same time, such govern-
mental intervention in, and politicization of, capitalism entails the collapse of
the ideology underlying “just” exchanges in the market, and it therefore pro-
duces the political need for legitimation. The matter can only be “resolved” by
political initiatives that preserve the operative system while offering compen-
sation in the form of money, security, and leisure time (what Habermas calls
the “welfare-state substitute program” [Legitimation, 37]) and through efforts
to depoliticize society further by making it merely a “formal” (instead of a
“material”) democracy; hereby, citizens possess “the status of passive citizens
with only the right to withhold acclamation” (Legitimation, 37).
Under late capitalism, every effort is made to keep class struggle at bay. In
order to pacify refractory workers’ movements and parties, fundamental
changes are admitted in the form of social programs, wage laws, and, finally,
price regulations; these concessions, however, are made outside immediate

zones of conflict, with the understanding that a permanent state of crisis in
fact obtains. As a result, the social coherence/identity of classes—to say noth-
ing of “class consciousness”—dissolves (Legitimation, 39–41); the crisis ten-
dencies of late capitalism do not emerge in the course of politicized class
struggles. The potential for change—and here Habermas comments on the
revival of Marxist revolutionary efforts at the time he was writing his book—
must be sought beyond the working class.
Habermas maintains that the potential for social transformation depends
on system-specific phenomena of crisis. Under the rubric of “Problems Result-
ing from Advanced-Capitalist Growth,” he introduces three crisis tendencies
that are not system specific—including the disturbance of ecological balance
that occurs through population growth under conditions of limited resources
and pollution.
Apart from this remarkably prescient incorporation of environmental fac-
tors into social theory (Legitimation, 41–43), his reflections focus on system-
specific crisis phenomena under late capitalism.
According to Habermas, there are three social subsystems—the “economic”
system, the “administrative” (alternatively, “political”) system, and the
“legitimation” (or “sociocultural”) system—where crisis tendencies manifest
themselves. By way of analyzing sources of input and output within these
systems, the author arrives at a typology with four possible instances of crisis
(economic, rationality, legitimation, and motivation crises). Crises of economy
and rationality represent forms of systemic disintegration (system crisis), and cri-
ses of legitimation and motivation put social integration into question (identity
crisis). Habermas also toys with the arrangement of the four systems (Legitima-
tion, 45), aligning the legitimation system with social integration—a theoretical
construction that anticipates the division of the lifeworld into private and public
spheres in The Theory of Communicative Action (2:349).
Crisis Tendencies
One must not mistake Habermas’s purposes in the section that follows the
four possible crisis types (Legitimation, 50–91): here, he tests hypotheses and
crisis scenarios to see whether they possess sufficient logical-argumentative
force to diagnose not only variations that occur on a case-by-case basis but
also a crisis that late-capitalist society cannot overcome because of limits
inherent in its very principle of organization. Beginning with the assumption
that at least one of these four possible types of crisis must arise so that one may
be justified in speaking of late capitalism at all (Legitimation, 49), Habermas
arrives at the conclusions below.
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Of the four tendencies, only one can become a crisis of the social form as a
whole: that of legitimation. The other tendencies toward crisis may be inter-
cepted: through political intervention, economic crisis tendencies are displaced
into the administrative sphere, and from there into the sociocultural system. In
the course of this “solution,” however, the political system expands—that is, it
extends toward the sociocultural system. (In Habermas’s later works, this line
of argument is taken up with the thesis of the “colonization of the lifeworld.”)
In the course of capitalist development, the political system has not only moved
its borders into the economic system but also displaced the sociocultural sys-
tem. To the extent that organizational rationality expands, cultural traditions
(Überlieferungen) are undermined and deprived of vigor: “the residue of tradi-
tion must . . . escape the administrative grasp, for traditions important for legit-
imation cannot be regenerated administratively” (Legitimation, 47).
Under late capitalism, economic crisis tendencies do not imperil society,
however. Habermas rejects the idea that the law of value still holds—i.e., the
view that economic crisis expresses the tendency of profit rates to fall and
the argument that the state represents the “executive organ” of the law of value
(Legitimation Crisis, 51). Against the thesis of continuity (affirmed, for exam-
ple, by Elmar Altvater and Ernest Mandel), Habermas breaks with purely eco-
nomic logic and argues in terms of political effects that occur on the level of
relations of production as a whole. For him, capitalist structures are shaped by
the logic of economic processes and by political countersteering through
social programs (Konjunktursteuerung und Sozialstaat) (Legitimation Crisis,
53–55). Given the existence of an articulated educational system and a fully
developed research sector, for example, there are now social realms that can
no longer be understood solely in terms of the logic of exchange. (This argu-
ment against the law of value played a much larger role in Habermas’s writings
of the 1960s.)
When crisis tendencies are intercepted economically, the central problem-
atic may be sought in the political sphere. Political crisis tendencies occur in
two forms: as output crises (insufficient administrative steering ability/ratio-
nality crises) or as input crises (insufficient mass loyalty/legitimation crises).
Contra theories of state planning inspired by Marx, however, Habermas does not
consider this circumstance to represent a crisis of rationality (Legitimation, 46ff.).
Neither the thesis that the state unconsciously follows economic law nor the the-
sis that the state is, by nature, the agent of monopoly capitalism—nor theories
that strike a balance between these two positions—can demonstrate that it must
necessarily fail in efforts to right economic imbalances.
Although the state is not in the position to anticipate the problems that fol-
low on its actions, and although these actions occur by stages, the outcome of
administrative steering efforts ultimately involves resolving tension between
the goal of maintaining the capitalist structure as a whole, the interests of
particular economic “factions,” and, finally, the interests of different groups

within the general population (Legitimation, 67). Economic laws cannot set
the course for governmental activity, because the state itself has determined
what sectors are to be administered, developed its own planning capacity on
the basis of the class compromises of the welfare system, and put steering
mechanisms in place.
Habermas rejects Offe’s view (1972) that oppositional elements come to be
increasingly integrated into the system as a matter of necessity (Legitimation,
66ff.). Unlike commercial enterprises—which, because of competition, are
clearly limited in duration and have the manifest purpose of securing profits—
the state has no readily identifiable limits to its existence or goals (especially
when irrational decisions are at issue or the social spheres it administers have
become disorganized). In other words, Habermas grants the state a remark-
ably high degree of steering capacity.
At the same time, Habermas assumes that long-term planning is, in gen-
eral, extremely problematic for complex societies. Therefore, he offers reflec-
tions on the inherent limitations of administrative action (whereby he refers
to the works of Fritz W. Scharpf; Legitimation, 65). This does not, however,
mean that he affirms the internal logic (Eigenlogik) of the political-adminis-
trative system. The state exists between the spheres of economy and culture,
which obey their respective schemes of logic; as a flexible agent of steering and
survival, it is tied to both, but it possesses no structure with a potential for
resistance (keine Strukturbildung mit Widerstandskraft)—i.e., no logic—of its
own. For this reason, the output of the political-administrative system cannot
pose a problem; this can only occur on the other end, where input is concerned:
the procurement (Beschaffung) of legitimation for the political measures it
takes. In organized capitalism, class domination is repoliticized (Legitimation,
59). The limits imposed on further economic development and the autonomy
of governmental steering are determined by the legitimation the state has at its
disposal. The state encounters risk only when fundamental (prinzipiell) doubt
arises concerning the norms that guide administrative action. That said, the
administrative and legitimation system (once more, note that the political
system in fact consists of two separate systems) may also be divided between
instrumental and symbolic measures (an observation that Habermas owes to
Murray Edelman). One is only justified in positing a legitimation crisis,
according to Habermas, if there exists a systematic limit to manipulation—
that is, a limit placed on the administrative production of motivations, mean-
ing, and norms.
Contra contemporary views that state manipulation is potentially unlim-
ited, Habermas insists on the willfulness (Eigensinn) of the cultural system
in imposing limits on administrative power. “The procurement of legitima-
tion is self-defeating as soon as the mode of procurement is seen through”
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(Legitimation, 70). Moreover, he observes, expanding governmental activity

(Staatstätigkeit) entails a disproportionate increase in the need for legitima-
tion (Legitimation, 68). This must occur because the new tasks performed by
the state displace the border of the political system with respect to the cultural
system. To be able to absorb economic crises through rationalization, the state
must intervene, with mounting force, in cultural traditions (Bestände). (This
observation anticipates the “colonization thesis” presented in The Theory of
Communicative Action.)
Culture—understood, initially, as cultural tradition—enters the equation
inasmuch as it appears to be the object of political planning and, for this rea-
son, seems changeable. The new awareness of cultural contingency uninten-
tionally produces unsettling effects, which can only be stabilized by means of
discourse. Discursive arenas offer space for collective efforts of justification
(and for evaluating justifications). A crisis of legitimation occurs inasmuch as
meaning is a scarce resource that cannot simply be provided at will in the
desired quantity and quality when the need for legitimation within the politi-
cal system grows (Legitimation, 97ff.). Crisis necessarily takes place because
the cultural system insists on founding norms (Normenbegründung) and
justification in universal terms (Legitimation, 89) and because it provides output
that is incompatible with politics (i.e., motivations that do not “match” system
requirements). “The definitive limits” consist of “inflexible normative struc-
tures that no longer provide the economic-political system with ideological
resources, but instead confront it with exorbitant demands” (Legitimation, 93).
Accordingly, “motivation crisis” (Legitimation, 75ff.) means, for Habermas,
that output from the cultural system proves increasingly dysfunctional for the
state and economy. “Motivation crisis” and “legitimation crisis” refer to points
of incompatibility that are, respectively, thematized “from the opposite side”
(motivation: output of the sociocultural system; legitimation: input of the
political-administrative system). Until this historical juncture, the operative
sociocultural output was based on private matters of family and civic status
(career, domesticity, leisure time, consumption, etc.—incidentally, the precondi-
tions for a depoliticized public sphere). Under late capitalism, however, such
functional aspects of the cultural system are systematically undermined, and
nothing equivalent takes their place, inasmuch as the developmental logic of
normative structures offers no form of learning suited to late capitalism in
particular. Already under liberal capitalism, an adequate basis for motivation
could only be achieved by combining bourgeois ideologies (private property,
individualism, utilitarianism, etc.) with precapitalist traditions—especially
religious ones (Legitimation, 77–78).
Without systematically pursuing the problems of legitimation under late
capitalism, Habermas offers a conception of crisis that stands indepen-
dent of specific social considerations; therefore, it deserves to be called
“anthropological.” This view explores communicative needs of a fundamental

kind—the quest for meaningful and comforting responses to the fundamental
risks of life—which arise from the ultimately inadequate patterns of interpre-
tation and motivation operative in culture. Beyond this, Habermas concen-
trates on the processes whereby precapitalist and bourgeois traditions erode
under organized capitalism: prebourgeois traditions are destroyed by scien-
tific rationalization, the plurality of values, and the fact that ethical attitudes
rooted in religious understandings of the world now yield to subjective moral-
ity (Legitimation, 77).
The bourgeois ideology of success/achievement founders when social ascent
no longer depends on the market in its “pure” form but rather on scholastic
distinction and, at the same time, the new form of “success orientation” (Leis-
tungsorientierung) uncouples academic merit from professional accomplish-
ment. Intrinsic motivations for achievement shrink, and extrinsic ones fail
to hold, inasmuch as no “reserve army” threatens industry (qua unemploy-
ment). In view of the large number of persons who are not actively integrated
into the process of production (on this point, Habermas takes up an argument
presented by Offe), the ideology of exchange value ceases to prove generally
valid.
Such reflections make it especially clear when Legitimation Crisis was writ-
ten. Since then—and especially in the 1990s, which witnessed the renewed
dominance of money and markets and a marked orientation to exchange
value (as well as high unemployment rates), it has been made plain that cul-
tural developments in fact follow a much less linear course—and take a longer
time—than Habermas first supposed.
For all that, the strongest argument that a motivation crisis lies in store fol-
lows from Habermas’s thesis that normative structures form a cultural barrier
that is marked by irreversibility—i.e., that normative structures obey an inter-
nal logic (Legitimation, 84) that is rendered inoperative only when they fall
beneath the cultural level they have achieved (as occurred, for example, under
fascism). The three main components of modern culture—scientism, postauratic
art, and universalistic morality—perform this kind of barrier function. They
prevent withdrawal into purely private existence inasmuch as they continu-
ously offer instances of critique, heighten the divide between culture and poli-
tics by bringing forth phenomena of mass culture and counterculture, and
subordinate the validity of norms to universal justifiability in discourse
(Legitimation, 86–92).
By the beginning of the 1970s, Habermas notes, communicative ethics and
art had already proved decisive for the socialization of young people (Legiti-
mation, 91–92). Given new and abstractly universalistic structures of morality,
withdrawal and protest represented the sole modes of response that were
appropriate for impositions occurring through politics and the economy.
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The youthful movement of protest cannot be explained in terms of economic

privation, Habermas observes.
Instead, it expresses the collision of systemic demands and new norma-
tive structures. With this in mind, Habermas situates the politics of the
1960s at a key juncture of his theoretical edifice. The protests demonstrate
that a new level of moral learning has been achieved; they are the carriers of
motivations that can no longer be integrated within the political order. For
this reason, they deprive politics as it stands of legitimation. In this sense,
the notion of legitimation crisis also represents the attempt to interpret and
explain events of the author’s day (even though Habermas, in so doing,
rejected the self-understanding of radicals—who viewed their actions in
terms of class struggle).
Doing Without Legitimation and Justification?
The third section of Legitimation Crisis, “On the Logic of Legitimation Prob-
lems,” seeks to dispel a final doubt: Might it be possible to do without instances
of legitimation—for example, by changing the socialization of citizens in such
a way that their actions are not tied to norms requiring justification? Here, the
optimism Habermas demonstrates toward youthful protesters who demand
moral universalism gives way to skepticism about whether, in the future, legit-
imacy will still be thought to depend on the truth, and whether politics will
continue to be viewed as a matter requiring rationally demonstrable justification.
The reflections of Niklas Luhmann, in particular, prompt these concerns. Against
the latter’s purely empirical theory, which focuses on securing acceptance and
obedience (Folgebereitschaft)—matters that require no justification—Habermas
affirms two core assumptions that must hold for his crisis theory to prove
valid (Legitimation, 96). First: motivations are not primarily—much less
altogether—determined by emotions and desires; in essence, they depend on
interiorizing symbolic structures of expectation (i.e., norms). Obedience of
political authority—as Max Weber already demonstrated—does not depend
only on fear, opportunism, or the eventualities of punishment and reward; it
is also a matter of believing in the legitimacy of power as it is constituted and
of recognizing its validity.
Habermas agrees with Weber on this point. However, he takes leave of him
on a second item. Whereas Weber retains an empirical bearing, Habermas
stresses that factually valid norms can turn out to be correct or not—that is,
they refer to something that is either true or false. In his later writings (e.g.,
Rekonstruktion), he elaborates the idea—at which he only hints here—that
there are stages of moral consciousness (as Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg
have claimed in the context of developmental psychology). Legitimation Crisis
concentrates simply on demonstrating that the truth provides a touchstone at

all—a matter of central importance to Habermas’s political theory.
Weber’s notion of rational authority has occasioned debate about the
relationship between truth and legitimation. From an empirical perspective
(e.g., that of Luhmann, who continues the reflections of Carl Schmitt in this
regard), belief in legality is to be understood in strictly psychological terms;
conversely, a perspective stressing rational motivation asks how the statutes
that legal procedures follow are justified (Legitimation, 98ff.). To take up these
two strands of discussion and to develop an explicitly normative theory of
legitimacy, Habermas shifts from the field of sociology to that of philosophy
(Legitimation, 102–117). Here, he rejects empirical theories of morality.
Views following the tradition of Hume consider moral controversies to be
undecidable by means of argument (mit Gründen) and understand norms
merely as the product of contractual agreements. Such a perspective—which
holds that norms represent the expression of empirical will—cannot explain
why the parties involved, given the changes of interest that invariably occur
between them, consider a contract made in the past to be still binding. For this
reason, Habermas holds that the model of parties signing a contract must be
replaced by the model of a communicative community that is not based on
acts of will (which ultimately prove irrational) but, instead, on the rationally
motivated recognition of others.
At the same time, however, normative validity claims cannot be redeemed
by way of deductive arguments. The process of deduction fails insofar as what
stands at the beginning of the chain of justification (Begründungskette) must
constitute a value of the highest order. Yet given the plurality of values in the
world, this cardinal point can only rest on an irrational value determination.
Referring to his essay “Wahrheitstheorien” (Theories of truth, 1970) and
taking up the arguments of Charles Sanders Peirce and Stephen Toulmin,
Habermas offers “substantial arguments” as an alternate mode of justification
(Legitimation, 107). Hereby, pragmatic units—i.e., speech acts—combine to
yield a logical discourse with specific contours. It is not the logic of conclu-
sions but the logic of communicative action—more precisely, a form of com-
munication unburdened by action—that provides the basis for redeeming
validity claims.
Habermas adds the well-known postulate that discourse must occur under
conditions free from constraint, save “the force of the better argument”; more-
over, the exchange must be equally accessible to all interested parties, and it
has to be motivated by one thing only: the joint effort to determine the truth
(or, as the case may be, what is correct). If, under these conditions, consensus
emerges, then it may count as the expression of a reasonable will (Legitima-
tion, 101). The plurality of value orientations is not pushed aside or denied;
rather, on the basis of its specific constitution, discourse may be trusted to
320 Texts
distinguish between particular values (which do not admit agreement) and

those that can be generalized (i.e., ones that facilitate agreement).
Habermas counters a potential objection to his project by appealing to the
future task of “universal pragmatics.” The objection at issue concerns the
remainder of decisionism that his theory may be thought to contain—after all,
a willed resolution is necessary to enter discourse. This is not, in fact, the case,
Habermas avers, for everyday structures of intersubjectivity already contain
the expectation that validity claims will be redeemed in discourse. The foun-
dational norms of reasonable speech are present as necessary presuppositions
in interactions of every kind; the transcendental nature of colloquial language
prevents one from fleeing the (potential) demand that validity claims be
redeemed by means of argument (Legitimation, 105).
As a corollary, Habermas elaborates a three-level theory of legitimation
that also makes space for political compromise as a valid option. The highest
degree of legitimacy belongs to regulations that are supported by norms
admitting the generalization that can arise from rational consensus in discur-
sive procedure.
Regulations that are not based on norms admitting generalization still
express normative force; such compromises are altogether legitimate if a bal-
ance of power between the interested parties holds and nothing admitting
generalization is at issue. If these conditions are not fulfilled, however, a false
compromise (Scheinkompromiss) obtains. (Besides false compromises, of
course, all norms that are not based on agreement and only pretend to admit
generalization are illegitimate—in particular, ideologies [Legitimation, 113].)
Habermas’s conception of discourse offers the possibility to perform
ideological critique in a new way: namely, by analyzing how interests that
admit generalization—and could be counterfactually identified in a rational
exchange—come to be repressed (Legitimation, 112–117). Given the difficulty
of assessing concurrent and competing interests, Habermas’s critical social
theory can only make recommendations “in a representatively simulated dis-
course between groups that are differentiated (or could be non-arbitrarily dif-
ferentiated) from one another by articulated, or at least virtual, opposition of
interests” (Legitimation, 117). Such advocatory discourses remain hypothetical,
however. In no case can one diagnose repressed interests if empirical verifica-
tion is not possible and if only anthropological considerations and/or criteria
from the philosophy of history are employed.
Contra the “unmasking” model based on (supposedly) objective class inter-
ests, Habermas holds that critical theory’s political interventions must pro-
ceed cautiously and offer analyses that always remain hypothetical. All the
same, his model presumes that normative justification represents a structural
feature of modern societies and that the matter bears great weight.
Toward the end of Legitimation Crisis (117–129), the text takes on a dark
tone. All the arguments presented until this point are brought together, and
Habermas entertains the possibility that actions might be viewed without
imputing normativity to their underlying motivations. This reflection is
prompted by the fact that, in modernity— i.e., after the secularization of sci-
entific knowledge, which has dispelled a “comforting” interpretation of the
world—the binding force of morality has been reduced to basic norms guaran-
teeing reasonable speech. Morality is no longer able—at least to its former
extent—to stabilize identity formations; it is inherently “powerless” (Legitima-
tion, 127). Habermas finds confirmation that justification might ultimately be
done away with in the cynicism of late-bourgeois consciousness following
Nietzschean nihilism, in the thesis of the end of the individual (from Hork-
heimer and Adorno up to Gehlen and Schelsky), in understandings of democ-
racy that amount to theories for (selecting) an elite (e.g., Schumpeter), and in
parts of the student movement that have abandoned praxis in favor of projects
of self-realization—or simple self-indulgence.
Ultimately, however, Habermas considers it far from decided that these ten-
dencies will prevail. At the end of Legitimation Crisis, he identifies the negative
utopia of motivation being procured through the abandonment of normative
models; once more, he makes Luhmann’s systems theory the central point of
reference for his own reflections. Giving up social integration through norms
as the pillar of sociological theory and focusing instead on issues of self-stabili-
zation and overcoming complexity—as Luhmann does—means renouncing
the sole point of reference for organizing society along the lines of reason. In
political terms, this methodological shift signifies that theory has replaced
democratic participation with self-legitimating processes of administration.
Ultimately, then, Habermas rejects efforts to restrict reason to instrumen-
tal rationality—or, as is the case in Luhmann’s writings, to systems rationality
(whereby “rationality” means nothing but subordinating oneself to a “funda-
mentally opportunistic life-process” [Legitimation, 141]). He holds fast to his
project of establishing a concept of practice centered on will formation
through discourse based on reason—knowing, all the while, that critical the-
ory of this kind, inasmuch as it relies on practical rationality, can also founder
on bad circumstances (schlechte Realität).
Theoretical Development and Reception
Now, the further development of Habermas’s views of the 1970s is evident in

light of The Theory of Communicative Action, which replaced the concept of
“legitimation crisis” with the notion of the “colonization of the lifeworld” as
322 Texts
a way to diagnose the times and as a programmatic formulation of the author’s

critical project. The switch, however, was already anticipated in Legitimation
Crisis. In the foreword, Habermas presented the book as a step toward treating
the material issues of contemporary society that “—as I hope to show soon—
can be clarified within the framework of a theory of communicative compe-
tence” (Legitimation, xxv).
Before achieving this goal, Habermas presented lectures on his concept of
legitimation crisis (in Rome, 1973, and at the conference of political scientists
in Duisburg, 1975, where he debated Wilhelm Hennis); these talks were pub-
lished in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (1976). At the end
of the decade, Habermas gave up the idea of overcoming the capitalist social
system—and, in so doing, the conception of crisis that he had developed to
this end. Since then, matters of political legitimation have continued to be
important, but Habermas has stopped speaking of a legitimation crisis as a
means of questioning the system as a whole.
The chapter “Marx and the Thesis of Inner Colonization” in the second
volume of The Theory of Communicative Action takes up the line of argument
developed in Legitimation Crisis, which holds that economic and administrative
steering imperatives have penetrated the sociocultural system. “Colonization”
has replaced “crisis” in Habermas’s theory of pathologies of the lifeworld: “But
when steering crises—that is, perceived disturbances of material reproduction—
are successfully intercepted by having recourse to lifeworld resources, patholo-
gies arise in the lifeworld” (Communicative Action, 2: 385).
In the 1970s, Legitimation Crisis received broad scholarly attention; reac-
tions were for the most part critical, although they did acknowledge the
comprehensive nature of the social theory that the author had elaborated.
Among conservative intellectuals and in certain parts of the media, Haber-
mas, his book, and, indeed, the Frankfurt School as a whole received blame
for supposedly having contributed to problems of legitimation; Habermas
was even charged with evincing sympathy for terrorists. It was only when
Habermas received the Adorno Prize in 1980—and the Christian Democratic
mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Frankfurt called for an end to irresponsible
accusations—that calm prevailed in some measure (Wiggershaus 2004, 109).
Within the field of political science, Habermas’s theory of crisis also weath-
ered criticism, especially from a Marxist perspective. For the most part, objec-
tions adopted the position articulated by Claus Offe (1972)—even though
he, too, in developing a “theory of political crisis” like Habermas, was faulted for
having abandoned key Marxian insights, which were replaced by the consider-
ations and theorems of systems theory (see, among other works, the contribu-
tions in Ebbighausen 1976; Blanke, Jürgens, and Kastendiek 1975). Habermas’s
view that a political and administrative transformation of the capitalist process
(Kapitalprozess) had occurred offered the central point of debate. Moreover,
the author’s integration of systems theory into his critical theory of society
and the binary opposition between social integration and system integra-
tion occasioned broad disagreement (which was not limited to Marxist
political theorists [Peters 1993, 311]). When The Theory of Communicative
Action appeared—which concentrated on the opposition between “system”
and “lifeworld”—exchanges became even more heated (Honneth 1991).
In 1975, a translation of Legitimation Crisis appeared in the United States. It
was prepared by Thomas McCarthy, whose own book, The Critical Theory of
Jürgen Habermas (1978; published in German two years later), offered, in the
final chapter, an extensive discussion of problems of legitimation under late
capitalism. This study was responsible for the first wave of Habermas recep-
tion in English-speaking lands—which was soon followed by scholarly engage-
ment with The Theory of Communicative Action (see Thompson and Held
1982, Benhabib 1986, White 1995).
McCarthy held that capitalist legitimation problems express the embar-
rassment that no organized social movement has emerged as an effective vehi-
cle of critique. For this reason, he observed, Habermas “is forced to remain at
the level of pointing out broad crisis tendencies.” “His critique retains an
anonymous character” inasmuch as it is not addressed to any particular social
actor (McCarthy 1980, 385–386).
Now, at the beginning of a new century, questions have again arisen about
the nature of theory that seeks to be critical of society and about groups that
might undertake social protest in an efficacious manner. Axel Honneth’s
incorporation of Habermasian theory into his reflections on “recognition”
(Anerkennung), for example, has attempted to revitalize the notion of legiti-
mation crisis in a manner that relates more explicitly to matters of subjectivity
and identity (Iser 2008, 147). In addition, the notions of “paradox” and “paradoxi-
cal contradiction” (Hartmann 2005) have provided a means of understanding,
in theoretical terms, movements that are critical of society. However, as Offe
has remarked (2005, 269), these efforts focus on phenomena that are less struc-
tural (strukturbedingt) in nature than “essentially contingent.” On this basis,
then, it seems impossible to identify subjective experiences that might provide
the basis for critical, democratic movements (Iser 2005).
Since the end of the 1970s, the notion of crisis has come to seem almost
banal and has lost its “theoretical and political acuteness (Schärfe)” (Beck 1992,
189). In general, it now refers to a situation that does not necessarily represent
a systemic danger. A crisis of legitimation—however one views the analytic
and critical operations that the concept affords—did not occur in actual fact
after the publication of Habermas’s book (e.g., Peters 1993, 218). However, fol-
lowing the economic and financial disaster on a global scale in 2008–2009,
the diagnosis presented in Legitimation Crisis has again achieved currency—
even if (or perhaps precisely because) it is evident, and in massive terms, that
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Habermas’s central argument about the “interception” and “cushioning” of

economic crises by political means does not hold.
References
Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans. Mark Ritter. London:
Sage.
Benhabib, Seyla. 1986. Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical
Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise
in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1966.
Blanke, Bernhard, Ulrich Jürgens, and Hans Kastendiek, eds. 1975. Kritik der politischen
Wissenschaft. Analysen von Politik und Ökonomie in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft.
Frankfurt: Campus.
Ebbighausen, Rolf, ed. 1976. Bürgerlicher Staat und politische Legitimation. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
Geis, Anna, and David Strecker, eds. 2005. Blockaden staatlicher Politik: Sozialwissen-
schaftliche Analysen im Anschluss an Claus Offe. Frankfurt: Campus.
——. 1975. Legitimation Crisis. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon.
ogie – Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hartmann, Martin. 2005. “Paradoxien des ‘neuen’ Kapitalismus.” In Geis and Strecker
2005, 199–212.
Iser, Matthias. 2005. “Krise und Kritik – mehr als ein Anachronismus?” In Geis and
Strecker 2005, 185–198.
——. 2008. Empörung und Fortschritt. Grundlagen einer kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft.
Frankfurt: Campus.
Luhmann, Niklas. 1969. Legitimation durch Verfahren. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1969.
McCarthy, Thomas. 1978. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.
Offe, Claus. 1972. Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. “Rote Fäden und lose Enden. Anmerkungen zu einer Mega-Agenda.” In Geis and
Strecker 2005, 245–277.
Peters, Bernhard. 1993. Die Integration moderner Gesellschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Thompson, John B., and David Held, eds. 1982. Habermas: Critical Debates. London:
Macmillan.
White, Stephen K., ed. 1995. The Cambridge Companion to Habermas. Cambridge:
Wiggershaus, Rolf. 2004. Jürgen Habermas. Reinbek: Rowohlt.
32
HISTORY AND EVOLUTION
Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (1976)
THOMAS MCCARTHY
T
he essays collected in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Mate-
rialismus (1976), all written in the mid-1970s, represent a major
juncture in Habermas’s thought. They brought his reflections on
historical materialism since the 1950s together with his work in the early 1970s
on the theory of communicative action, on one side, and with the results of his
recent exchange with Niklas Luhmann concerning social-systems theory, on
the other side. Together they introduced the research program that would
soon lead to The Theory of Communicative Action (1985 [1981]).
From Philosophy of History to Systematically

Generalized History
In his “Literaturbericht zur philosophischen Diskussion um Marx und den

Marxismus” (1971 [1957]; not translated into English) and several essays writ-
ten in the early 1960s and collected in Theory and Practice (1988 [1963]), Haber-
mas took issue with “orthodox” Marxism on a number of basic points (see
chapter 1 in this volume). In particular, he rejected its scientistic self-under-
standing and its objectivistic account of the relation of theory to practice,
defending instead a conception of critical social theory as “empirical philosophy
of history with practical intent.” The end of history, he argued, was not a mat-
ter for metaphysical hypostatization or social-scientific prediction but for
practical-political projection: it was a goal that collective actors, in the knowl-
edge of objective conditions, could undertake to bring about.
The idea of comprehending society as a historically developing whole for
the sake of enlightening political consciousness and reflexively guiding politi-
cal practice was given a stronger theoretical elaboration later in the 1960s,
particularly in Habermas’s On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1988 [1967])
and Knowledge and Human Interests (1972 [1968]). In the former, the main
line of his attack against the neopositivist assimilation of social to natural
science ran through a lengthy discussion of the nature and role of interpretive
326 Texts
understanding in social inquiry. He argued that any methodology that

abstracted from the prior symbolic formation of social reality—the intersub-
jective meanings constitutive of the sociocultural settings in which socialized
individuals interacted—was doomed to failure. At the same time, he rejected
the interpretivist assimilation of social inquiry to the explication of meaning.
Cultural tradition had to be viewed in relation to the objective context com-
prising the systems of social labor and political domination, so that subjective
meanings could be examined in relation to objective, often latent, meanings
and thereby scrutinized for ideological content. Thus critical theory had to
incorporate interpretive understanding into a broader framework that made it
possible to grasp the empirical conditions under which cultural traditions his-
torically changed.
In On the Logic of the Social Sciences, this general interpretive framework
was characterized as a historical analysis of social systems, in the tradition
of historical materialism, but revised to take account of advances in social-
scientific functionalism, particularly Talcott Parsons’s theory of social sys-
tems. At the same time, functionalism itself had to be stripped of its scientistic
self-misunderstanding and to be made aware of its ineliminable historical,
hermeneutical, and practical moments. This would mean understanding itself
not as a general theory of the empirical-analytic sort but as a general interpre-
tation of the formative process of the human species, from the perspective of a
practically projected future free of domination.
In On the Logic of the Social Sciences, the logic of such general interpreta-
tions was also elucidated in connection with psychoanalysis, which also
allowed for a dual perspective on subjective and objective, often unconscious,
meaning and thus for a critique of distorted communication. Moreover, it pro-
vided a model for the analysis of causal relations that were of a symbolic nature
and thus could be dissolved by the power of reflection. In Knowledge and
Human Interests, that model was further elaborated in a lengthy discussion of
Freud’s methodology. Habermas characterized psychoanalysis as a “depth
hermeneutics” of systematically distorted communication, which, in contrast
to normal hermeneutics, relied upon theoretical assumptions. In specific,
psychoanalytic interpretation drew upon a “systematically generalized his-
tory” of psychodynamic development, which was used as a “narrative foil” to
reconstruct individual life histories, in which subjects could recognize the
roots of their self-misunderstandings. Treating this model as a clue to the
methodology of historical materialism, Habermas conceived of the latter as a
“systematically” or “theoretically” generalized interpretive framework, which
offered a dual—action-theoretic and system-theoretic—perspective on the
history of the species and made it possible to uncover the social roots of
ideologically distorted communication. In his ensuing debate with Gadamer,
Habermas repeatedly emphasized this reliance upon a theoretically generalized
Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus 327
interpretive framework to distance critical theory from what he took to be

the historicist and relativist implications of sociohistorical hermeneutics
(Apel et al. 1971).
The Theory of Social Systems
By the start of the 1970s, Habermas had begun to move in an even more robust
theoretical direction, which was signaled by his systematic work on theories of
language and of ontogenetic development as well as by his intensified efforts to
get clear on the nature and limits of social-systems theory: both “Vorberei-
tende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommunikativen Kompetenz” (see
chapter 30 in this volume) and Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie?
appeared in 1971 (Habermas and Luhmann 1971). The new research program
called for a general theory of linguistic communication, in the form of a univer-
sal pragmatics (see chapter 47 in this volume); which was to serve as the basis
for a theory of individual development, in the form of a general account of the
acquisition, in stages, of communicative or interactive competence; and build-
ing on both of these, a theory of social evolution, which Habermas conceived as
an action-theoretic and system-theoretic reconstruction of historical materi-
alism. Though Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus contained
one essay on the development of ego identity and moral consciousness, this
article will focus on social evolution, which is also the main focus of Zur
Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus.
Parsons’s structural functionalism interested Habermas as an attempt to
incorporate the action frame of reference into a theory of the social system as
a complex of functionally differentiated subsystems. But he criticized Parsons
for ultimately subordinating the action-theoretic to the system-theoretic per-
spective, especially after he had appropriated ideas from biocybernetics into
his theory of social evolution and thereby short-circuited the hermeneutic
and critical moments of social inquiry. Parsons’s later work led to a revolt on
the action-theoretic front, in the form of a variety of radically interpretive
approaches to social inquiry, from phenomenology and ethnomethodology to
social interactionism, linguistic analysis, and hermeneutics. In the present
context, however, it is the reaction on the other, system-theoretic front, that is
of immediate interest: the resolution of the tensions in Parsons’s dualistic
approach by a more radical and more consistent subordination of the theory
of social action to the demands of social-systems theory. The exemplar of this
approach was Niklas Luhmann, with whom Habermas began an exchange in
the early 1970s (Habermas and Luhmann 1971), which continued until the lat-
ter’s death in 1999 (see chapter 11 in this volume). On this front, the research
program outlined in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus
328 Texts
may be viewed as a systematic effort to counter the purely system-theoretic

approach to social evolution that was sketched by Luhmann in “Evolution
und Geschichte” (1976) by an approach that combined functionalist analysis
with an independent theory of social action, which Habermas summarized
in his response to Luhmann, “Geschichte und Evolution” (Rekonstruktion,
200–259). In his view, this was essential to preserving the critical dimension
of social theory, as the neoevolutionist naturalism of social-systems theory
reduced normative structures to functionally interdependent moments of a
social system geared to survival in a complex environment (see chapters 12
and 56 in this volume). This resulted, in Habermas’s view, in an accentuated
form of the sort of normative skepticism to which Weber had given classic
expression; legitimacy was replaced by the belief in legitimacy, and social
inquiry was redirected to the mechanisms that produced it, the functional
equivalents that could substitute for it, and the like (see chapter 64 in this
volume).
The Reconstruction of Historical Materialism
In his lengthy, systematic introduction to Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen

Materialismus, “Historischer Materialismus und die Entwicklung normativer
Strukturen” (9–48), as well as in the four essays composing part 3, particularly
the title essay (144–199), Habermas set out his approach to reconstructing
historical materialism. It turned on the thesis that developments in the sphere
of social integration do not simply follow upon developments in the sphere of
material production but have their own independent logic. In working out
that logic, Habermas’s strategy was to make structural comparisons with the
developmental logics worked out for ontogenetic processes, that is, to look for
“homologous structures of consciousness” in the histories of the individual
and the species. He suggested three domains of comparison: rationality struc-
tures in ego development and in the evolution of worldviews, the development
of ego identity and of collective identity, and the development of moral con-
sciousness and the evolution of moral and religious representations. In Zur
Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus, the focus was on the last of
these, and in particular on the evolution of morality and law, for that was
regarded as the key to the evolution of forms of social integration.
A new element in Habermas’s approach to historical materialism in the
1970s was the genetic structuralism elaborated by Jean Piaget and others
(see chapter 10 in this volume), which made it possible to understand cognitive
development as the stagewise acquisition of basic competences. He was par-
ticularly interested in the normative component of this research program
as it was elaborated by Lawrence Kohlberg and others, especially in their
account of the development of moral consciousness. This strand of cognitive

developmental psychology, he argued, provided the key to the logic of the devel-
opment of normative structures. Human beings “learn not only in the dimen-
sion of technically useful knowledge, which is decisive in the development of
productive forces, but also in the dimension of moral-practical consciousness,
which is decisive for structures of interaction” (Rekonstruktion, 162–163). Social
evolution could thus be represented as a bidimensional learning process, the
stages of which could be described structurally and ordered according to a
developmental logic, that is, in an irreversible sequence of discrete and increas-
ingly complex and encompassing stages, in which the later stages presupposed
and built upon the earlier (see chapter 62 in this volume). The bidimensionality
meant that rationalization processes in the sphere of communicative interaction
were neither identical to nor a direct consequence of rationalization processes
in the sphere of productive forces. In historical fact, he argued, it had been
learning in the former dimension that had served as the “pacemaker” of social
evolution by enabling the resolution of crisis-provoking system problems and
the emergence of new institutions (Rekonstruktion, 35). The great develop-
ments that led to the rise of the first civilizations or to the rise of capitalism,
for instance, did not follow upon but rather resulted in noteworthy develop-
ments of productive forces, which were conditioned upon the development of
new forms of social integration and new institutional frameworks. So the cen-
tral social-evolutionary question was: how did new forms of social integration
come about?
In the title essay, Habermas offered an explanatory sketch for the evolution
of law and morality, which drew freely upon the work of his associates Rainer
Döbert (1973) and especially Klaus Eder (1973, 1976). The sketch both analyti-
cally distinguished and empirically connected action-theoretic analysis, in its
competence-development form, and elements of functionalist systems theory.
In particular, the logic of the development of normative structures, which
merely demarcated the logical space within which increasingly complex struc-
tural forms could take shape, was distinguished from the actual dynamics of
development, which depended upon contingent conditions and empirical
learning processes.
On this model, social evolution consists not in the institutionalization of
specific values, as in Parsons, but in “the institutional embodiment of struc-
tures of rationality,” which make learning at new levels possible. In the literal
sense of the term, only individuals learn, but the learning abilities and accom-
plishments of individuals are a resource that can be drawn upon in the forma-
tion of new social structures. As the results of individual learning processes
find their way into cultural tradition, they serve as a kind of cognitive poten-
tial that can be exploited by social movements, when unsolvable system prob-
lems require a transformation of the basic form of social integration. That is
330 Texts
to say, latently available rationality structures may be transposed into social

practice by social movements, so that they eventually receive an institutional
embodiment (Rekonstruktion, 118). To be sure, whether and how problems
arise that overload the structurally limited adaptive capacity of a society is a
contingent matter; whether the necessary but not yet institutionalized struc-
tures of rationality (practical and technical) are available, whether social
movements arise to meet this challenge by drawing on this potential, and
whether the institutions that emerge can be stabilized also depend on contin-
gent circumstances (Rekonstruktion, 123). Nonetheless, the course of develop-
ment that results from the institutionalization of new rationality structures
itself has the form of a social learning process.
As noted, social learning depends on individual learning, which in the theory
of social evolution plays a role loosely analogous to that played by mutation in
the theory of biological evolution; the results of learning can be preserved and
passed on as elements of a tradition. But there is one overriding flaw in that
analogy: the ontogenesis of structures of consciousness is not a matter of
chance variation but is itself a directional process (Rekonstruktion, 188). And it
is precisely this that is missing from system-theoretical accounts of social
evolution. They may be useful for identifying and analyzing problems that
overload the structurally limited adaptive capacity of a society or for under-
standing why certain structural developments make the resolution of these
problems possible, but they cannot adequately explain how those structural
transformations come about. Moreover, the directional criteria of progress
typically invoked by neoevolutionary functionalists—e.g., increases in system
complexity or in steering capacity—are also inadequate in the absence of any
inner logic of development.
History and Evolution
Notwithstanding Habermas’s explicit attempt in the late 1960s to mitigate the

radically situational character of purely interpretive approaches to social
inquiry by constructing a general interpretive framework for historically
oriented functional analysis, the internal relation of critical theory to a prac-
tically projected end of history blocked any attempt to equate it with pure
theory. His account of “the self-formative process of the species” was intrinsi-
cally practical; however, “systematically generalized,” it remained an “action
orienting self-understanding.” By contrast, in Zur Rekonstruktion des Histo-
rischen Materialismus Habermas understands the social-evolutionary hypoth-
eses he advances as theoretical statements in the strict sense: they are to be
tested in theoretical discourse (Rekonstruktion, 246). Reconstructive theo-
ries claim a universal validity that is independent of a historico-hermeneutic
standpoint: “For the development of a competence . . . there is only one correct

theory” (Rekonstruktion, 217).
This raised the question of whether Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen
Materialismus marked the abandonment of the internal unity of theory and
practice that Habermas had seen as the hallmark of critical theory since the
1950s. Addressing this worry, he noted that critical theory does not exhaust
itself in the construction of a theory of social evolution, i.e., a reconstruction
of historical materialism; its ultimate aim is a historically oriented analysis of
contemporary society, with a practical intent, i.e., a reconstruction of the cri-
tique of capitalist society. Unlike the retrospective explanation of past devel-
opments, the analysis of contemporary society has an “immediately practical
reference,” for its “diagnosis of the present” adopts the practically projected
standpoint of structural possibilities that are not yet realized (Rekonstruktion,
250). In short, while the construction of social-evolutionary accounts of past
transformations is fundamentally a theoretical task, the diagnosis of contem-
porary problems has the form of a prospective retrospective from vantage
points opened up by a practical interest in the future.
In the essay “Geschichte und Evolution,” Habermas emphasizes the theo-
retical character of his account of social evolution and thus, in effect, its
displacement of the historico-hermeneutical moment in his earlier recon-
structions of historical materialism. He explicitly distinguishes the theory of
social evolution from the philosophy of history as well as from a universal
history of the species; unlike this theory, historical writing of any sort remains
bound to a narrative framework and thus to a particular hermeneutical stand-
point. He also distinguishes it from a systematically generalized history; that
is to say, historical materialism is no longer regarded as a general interpretive
or narrative framework, for even that is inevitably tied to a practical stand-
point. The explanations offered by the theory of social evolution, he insists,
“cannot be brought into narrative form. In the framework of development
theory, these transitions have to be thought of as abstract transitions to new
levels of learning” (Rekonstruktion, 244–245). This strict separation raises a num-
ber of questions. It is not obvious that elements of an evolutionary explanation—
i.e., the specification of system problems and relevant empirical conditions,
structural descriptions of the “before” and “after,” an account of social movements
that are the agents of change and of the establishment and stabilization of new
institutional forms, and the like—could not figure in a “theoretically general-
ized history” of, say, the transition to liberal capitalism in early modern
Europe. Habermas points out that the many historians who draw on the social
sciences typically refer to factors other than actors and their actions, e.g., to
institutions; to economic, political, and legal systems; and to cultural patterns.
Moreover, his schema of explanation does refer to social groups as the “bearers”
of new ideas and practices and as the “agents” of social transformation. In any
332 Texts
case, it seems that a proposed evolutionary explanation of a given epochal

transition—as distinct from an abstract and generalized developmental logic—
could not simply take its place alongside competing historical explanations; it
would have to claim, against them, to be the correct explanation.
Reception
The essays collected in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus

were explicitly characterized as introducing a new research program. That
program was brought to its theoretical culmination a few years later, with the
appearance of The Theory of Communicative Action (1985 [1981]), which domi-
nated the discussion of Habermas’s approach to the theory of social change
thereafter. In the intervening years, there were a number of reviews of Zur
Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (e.g., Keane 1977, Held 1978) as
well as some discussion of his reconstruction of historical materialism (e.g.,
Assoun and Raulet 1978, Honneth and Jaeggi 1980) and of his theory of social
evolution (e.g., McCarthy 1989, app. 3; Schmid 1982). But there was nothing
that approached the intense, detailed discussion of The Theory of Communica-
tive Action (see chapter 35 in this volume). After the publication and reception
of The Theory of Communicative Action (Honneth and Joas 1991), the theory of
social evolution remained in the background of Habermas’s work, often
referred to but not further developed in any essential respects. This changed
only after the turn of the century, with Habermas’s growing involvement in
the contemporary debates concerning religion and modernity, which eventu-
ally led him to revisit the logic of the development of worldviews, particularly
of the major world religions that have shaped civilization (see chapter 40 in
this volume).
References
Apel, Karl-Otto, et al. 1971. Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Assoun, Paul Laurent, and Gérard Raulet. 1978. Marxisme et théorie critique. Paris: Payot.
Döbert, Rainer. 1973. Systemtheorie und die Entwicklung religiöser Deutungssysteme: Zur
Logik des sozialwissenschaftlichen Funktionalismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Eder, Klaus, ed. 1973. Entstehung von Klassengesellschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1976. Die Entstehung staatlich organisierter Gesellschaften: Ein Beitrag zu einer Theo-
rie sozialer Evolution. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. “Literaturbericht zur philosophischen Diskussion um Marx und
den Marxismus.” In Theorie und Praxis, 387–464. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Held, David. 1978. “Extended Review [of Habermas’s Legitimation Crisis and Zur Rekon-
struktion des Historischen Materialismus].” Sociological Review 26:183–194.
Honneth, Axel, and Urs Jaeggi, eds. 1980. Arbeit, Handlung, Normativität: Theorien des
Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas, eds. 1991. Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Haber-
mas’s The Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. Jeremy Gaines. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.
Keane, John. 1977. “On Turning Theory Against Itself: Review of Zur Rekonstruktion des
Historischen Materialismus by Jürgen Habermas.” Theory and Society 4:561–572.
Luhmann, Niklas. 1976. “Evolution und Geschichte.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft.
Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft 2:284–309.
McCarthy, Thomas. 1989. “Anhang.” In Kritik der Verständigungsverhältnisse. Zur Theorie
von Jürgen Habermas, trans. Max Looser, 501–616. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Schmid, Michael. 1982. “Habermas’s Theory of Social Evolution.” In Habermas: Critical
Debates, ed. John Thompson and David Held, 162–180. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
33
APORIAS OF CULTURAL
MODERNIT Y
“Modernity—an Unfinished Project” (1980)
CHRISTOPH MENKE
I
n 1980, Habermas enjoyed the distinction of being the first recipient
of the Adorno Prize. On the anniversary of Adorno’s birthday, he
delivered his acceptance speech in St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt:
“Modernity—an Unfinished Project.” This speech vigorously attacked an
array of heterogeneous positions that, in the speaker’s estimation, all had
abandoned the emancipatory ideas of modernity. Habermas’s name for these
projects as a whole was “postmodern.” In pronouncing this judgment, Habermas
took himself to be following a fundamental intention of Adorno himself, who
had “unreservedly . . . subscribe[d] to the spirit of modernity” (“Modernity,”
38). Habermas’s speech, in other words, sought to address “the question con-
cerning the current attitude with respect to modernity” (38).
According to Habermas, answering this question amounts to providing a
response, in the present, to the older question: “What is Enlightenment?”
Enlightenment, he affirmed, is the “project of modernity.” However, in this
day and age, it is no longer enough simply to repeat Kant’s (1991) injunction a
priori to think courageously for oneself. Rather, one must understand the
“aporias” (“Modernity,” 44) that have beset efforts to translate this call into
action over the last two hundred years. Instead of “unreservedly” subscribing
to the spirit of modernity, then, Habermas’s speech was animated by another
impulse that Adorno followed: to pursue the project of Enlightenment, one
must, first of all, consider its “dialectic”—that is to say, its “aporias.” The proj-
ect of Enlightenment must become self-reflective.
Given this intention, it may, in retrospect, seem surprising how many
polemics Habermas’s speech occasioned—above all, in the poststructuralist,
neo-avant-garde, and “Alternative Left” (Linksalternative) camps (see Kraush-
aar et al. 1980). The biggest reason for the discord was that Habermas accused
these groups—which he labeled “Young Conservative” (“Modernity,” 53)—
of simply giving up the idea of Enlightenment: in their efforts to come to
terms with the “aporias” of modernity, he saw only counter-Enlightenment
“Modernity—an Unfinished Project” 335
tendencies and projects. Since then, the charge has affected the reception of
Habermas’s own work much more than that of his rivals. An account of
polemical exchanges following Habermas’s speech would offer great insight
into the history of theory in the 1980s and 1990s. The discussion at hand, how-
ever, is concerned above all with the argumentative structure of Habermas’s
considerations and the problems that attend them. Habermas’s speech upon
receiving the Adorno Prize, its brevity notwithstanding, presents a sophisti-
cated theoretical program—the blueprint for his major works of the next two
decades.
In “Modernity—an Unfinished Project,” Habermas presents his argument
in three stages: a brief summary of the conditions (which, in fact, cannot be
surveyed in their entirety) in which the question of modernity is situated; an
equally concise rejection of the neoconservative interpretation of this situa-
tion, which Habermas details by way of the distinction between “social” and
“cultural” modernity; and, finally, a discussion, in the main part of the speech,
of the “aporias” of cultural modernity. On this basis, Habermas suggests how
the project of Enlightenment may be reformulated.
The Aging of Modernity
Habermas addresses the question of modernity in light of certain funda-

mental changes that have occurred since the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury. In many different ways, he announces that the social model—variously
designated as “classical,” “high,” or “inaugural” modernity—no longer
obtains; for some time, it has been in the process of being replaced by a new
phase, for which the names are just as varied. This diagnosis concerns all
domains of society. Habermas discusses matters in terms of economy (the end
of industrial monopoly capitalism); technology (the rise of digital information
technology); state institutions such as law, administration, and education
(which are gripped by debates concerning hierarchy, bureaucracy, centraliza-
tion, and network structures); and culture (where “rationalistic” schemes of
science, morality, and art have yielded to “contextualistic” models). Max
Weber’s conception of modern society as an arrangement of autonomous,
rationalized spheres—each obeying its own, inner logic—has lost the power
to convince both in normative and in descriptive terms (Bonacker and Reck-
witz 2007).
Habermas seeks to renew the question of modernity and to provide a
response in light of present-day circumstances, yet he does not simply recall
how debate arose in the first place in order, then, to revise received ideas in a
critical fashion. In his view, the challenge posed by the question involves the
fact that the dominant rhetoric of critical discussion changed fundamentally
336 Texts
over the course of the 1960s and the 1970s (Habermas 1981, cf. Brunkhorst
1987). Whereas in the 1960s debate about modern social change concerned the
possibility of continuing—indeed, radicalizing—the emancipatory promises
made by modernity in its inaugural form, since the 1970s, the question has
been the extent to which such change provides the opportunity to break with
totalitarian tendencies in the logic of modernity. Two items, then, have under-
gone alteration: the concept of modernity itself and, thereby, the expectations
and concepts with which social transformations in the present day are to be
viewed. The zeitgeist, according to Habermas, thinks that the economic, tech-
nological, administrative, and cultural changes of the present herald the end
of modernity.
In the Adorno Prize speech, Habermas demonstrates how his interpretive
strategy permits one to understand the field of the arts. He begins by recalling
the fact that the expression “modern” has always referred to the present as
what is new—i.e., different from what is old (“Modernity,” 40). At the same
time, modernity does not concern novelty for its own sake. Rather, its innova-
tions are motivated by the claim to “authenticity”—that is, the aim to do things
right for the first time by breaking with received practices. The new repre-
sents the emergence of what is true, which can only manifest itself in rupture
with historical tradition. Benjamin’s concept of the Jetztzeit valorizes this
orientation, as does Octavio Paz’s view that modernism—“as a self-negating
movement”—is driven by “a ‘yearning for true presence’ ” (“Modernity,” 40).
Habermas adopts the perspective of Peter Bürger (1984) (and Paz, too) when he
reflects on the “mentality of aesthetic modernity”: “Does it indicate the demise
of modernity? Does the post-avant-garde imply a transition to postmoder-
nity?” (42). Or is it the case that now we are witnesses to a post-avant-garde
modernity—and, analogously, to postmonopolistic, postbureaucratic, posthi-
erarchical, and postrationalist modernity?
The Crisis of Societal Modernization
The neoconservative view of the end of the avant-garde (Bell 1991) holds that
this movement, although it exhausted itself in artistic terms, generated a
socially destructive force that continues to operate today: “The avant-garde
has supposedly penetrated the values of everyday life and thus infected the
lifeworld with the modernist mentality” (“Modernity,” 42). In this way, neo-
conservatism explains the disintegrative phenomena of consumerism, ego-
tism, narcissism, and individualism in present-day society. Habermas observes
that such a critique occurs by halves: modernity should be combated and sur-
passed in cultural terms; economically, technologically, and politically,
however, it ought to be affirmed and defended. In Germany, the school around

Joachim Ritter formulated the task in theoretical terms by distinguishing
between society and culture, whereby the latter compensates for the deficien-
cies of the former instead of criticizing them. This project can only work, how-
ever, if culture remains traditional and offers surrogates for lost metaphysical
meaning (53–54). The avant-gardes, from a neoconservative perspective,
threaten the structures of compensation in modern societies and, for this rea-
son, destabilize them as a whole.
According to Habermas, the neoconservative interpretation seeks the
reason for the disintegrative processes it diagnoses (and against which
“neopopulist protests” of the present are directed) in the wrong place. Because
neoconservatives do not (wish to) see the destructive logic of “social modern-
ization which, under pressure from the imperatives of economic growth and
state administration, intervenes further and further into the ecology of devel-
oped forms of social life, [i.e.,] into the communicative infrastructure of the
historical lifeworlds” (44), they declare cultural modernization itself to be the
culprit. In other words, neoconservatives “project . . . the causes which they
have left shrouded in obscurity on to an intrinsically subversive culture and its
representatives” (44). Of course, a neoconservative might respond by reformu-
lating—and radicalizing—matters by declaring that processes of cultural
modernization are just as destructive as processes of social modernization.
Habermas concedes that such a response is not easy to refute: “apart from the
problematic social consequences of social modernization, it is true that certain
reasons for doubt or despair concerning the project of modernity also arise
from the internal perspective of cultural development.” Cultural modernity, he
admits, “generates its own aporias” (44).
The Aporias of Cultural Modernity and Their Elucidation
The main portion of the speech (44–53) develops a concept of cultural moder-
nity that not only rejects the neoconservative position (i.e., the view that
cultural modernity causes social disintegration) but also advances a counter-
argument: cultural modernity, Habermas affirms, can develop a convincing
solution to its own aporias. Although this “solution” is not supposed to replace
the task of steering “the process of social modernization . . . into other non-
capitalist directions” (53), it can be understood to demonstrate (vormachen) in
its own sphere—chiefly, that of culture and the arts—what a change of course
might look like.
By Habermas’s account, modernization involves “separation”/“differentiation”
(Ausdifferenzierung) (45–46). The “project of modernity” concerns a fundamental
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transformation of the traditional understanding of reason. Now, reason is no

longer understood in terms of substance—that is, as the capacity for insight into
the standing order of the world. Rather, it represents a matter of procedure—the
ability to generate reasonable/rational structures (arguments, theories, institu-
tions, etc.). The procedures in question are domain specific: because “traditional
problems . . . can now be treated in each case as questions of knowledge, justice,
or taste respectively, there arises in the modern period a differentiation of the
value spheres of science and knowledge, of morality, and of art” (45).
Habermas understands the modern process of differentiation in terms of
the theory of reason: because it is a process of rationalization, it entails the
acquisition of knowledge. This, however, generates an entirely new problem,
for “the distance between . . . expert cultures and the general public” increases
thereby (45). The problem is not new because such a distance did not exist in
cultures of earlier times; what is new is the fact that the distance has come to
represent a problem. As something obtained procedurally, differentiated
knowledge—and what it means—is, as a matter of principle, not accessible to
all. Such is the aporia of cultural modernity: the differentiated form of reason
that it has produced is to be exercised by all, yet it makes this impossible to do:
now, “the autonomous logic of the differentiated value spheres” also signifies
“their detachment from the current of tradition, which continues to flow on in
a quasi-natural fashion in the hermeneutic medium of everyday life” (46).
Therefore, the simple call for (and of) “Enlightenment”—that one employ
one’s own reason and “dare to know”—now proves inadequate. Enlighten-
ment must solve a problem that is not habitual but structural in nature. The
aporia in the foundational structure of cultural modernity has forced the proj-
ect of Enlightenment to adopt a self-contradictory program. “The relentless
development” of differentiated forms of reason—“all in accord with their own
logic”—has meant “releasing the cognitive potentials accumulated in the process
from their esoteric high forms and attempting to apply them in the sphere of
praxis, that is, to encourage the rational organization of social relations” (45).
Here, a look at modern art is important for Habermas’s argument. Modern
art, he maintains, is not affected by precisely the same aporia as other spheres
of culture: although it is considered autonomous, it is supposed to change life,
as well (47–49). Moreover, this particular field of culture has experimented
with radical strategies of “sublating” (aufheben) the gap that has emerged
between forms that display stubborn autonomy, on the one hand, and the life-
world, on the other. For Habermas, the prime example of “false sublation” is
the “surrealist rebellion,” which attempted to redeem “a rationalized everyday
life . . . from the rigidity of cultural impoverishment by violently forcing open
one cultural domain, in this case art, and establishing some connection with
one of the specialized complexes of knowledge. Such an approach would only
substitute one form of one-sidedness and abstraction with another” (49). The
“false sublation” of the divide between autonomous art and the lifeworld
was destined to fail, however—just as efforts to transform the lifeworld through
morality or science (49–50) have been in vain.
All the same, Habermas maintains that a look at art proves instructive
about how not to resolve the Enlightenment problem of differentiated culture
splitting off from the lifeworld. Examination of art, moreover, teaches how
the Enlightenment can, in fact, solve the problems it has produced: not by try-
ing to change the lifeworld from the position of expert culture but rather
through the “interplay” of different normative considerations, which are treated
in specialized fashion by various expert cultures. The project of Enlighten-
ment involves overcoming the gap between expert cultures and the lifeworld
inasmuch as the claims of both spheres are preserved simultaneously: the
(experts’) claim to specialization in matters of culture, on the one hand, and
the (lifeworld’s) claim to “unconstrained interplay between the cognitive, the
moral-practical, and the aesthetic-expressive dimensions” (“Modernity,” 50;
cf. Seel 1991), on the other.
How—indeed, the fact that—this solution can be coherently conceived is
evident, according to Habermas, in the function that “criticism” performs with
respect to art. Art criticism not only educates lay people but also teaches them
to relate “aesthetic experiences to problems in their own lives”—that is, to
appreciate and understand the “exploratory, life-orientating power” of the
great works (as Peter Weiss demonstrated in The Aesthetics of Resistance)
(“Modernity,” 52). Criticism is Enlightenment that occurs through the appro-
priation of “expert culture . . . from the perspective of the lifeworld”—a “dif-
ferentiated reconnection of modern culture with an everyday sphere of praxis
that is dependent on a living heritage and yet is impoverished by mere tradi-
tionalism” (52).
Habermas’s conception of Enlightenment has two levels, then: the first
concerns the differentiation, by way of rationalization, of forms of knowl-
edge from the lifeworld; the second involves mediating points of reconnec-
tion between separate (differentiated) spheres and the lifeworld. Conversely,
Habermas considers those positions to be “conservative” (or counter-Enlight-
enment) if they do not perform one or both of these functions. Habermas
distinguishes three such positions: “Young Conservative” aesthetes, “Old
Conservative” traditionalists, and “New Conservative” separatists (53–54).
Young Conservatives pursue the one-sided aestheticization of the lifeworld,
Old Conservatives contest the rational achievements of sociocultural differen-
tiation, and New Conservatives abandon the idea of reconnecting with any-
thing at all.
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Problems and Controversies
After Habermas’s speech was published, especially the thinkers who had been
labeled “Young Conservatives” rejected being characterized as enemies of
Enlightenment (see Foucault 1984, Kamper 1987). Debate concerning Haber-
mas’s understanding of postmodern and poststructuralist positions—which
only became more pronounced with the appearance of The Philosophical Dis-
course of Modernity—achieved vast dimensions, above all in the United States
(e.g., Passerin d’Entrèves and Benhabib 1996). The following does not address
matters of disputed interpretation but focuses on four objective (sachlich)
dimensions of what Habermas said—the points that gave rise to heated
controversy.
Modernity and Rationalism
It is central to the way Habermas characterizes “postmodern” views that they

all, in his estimation, dispense with the Enlightenment idea (and ideal) of self-
determination through reason. (The following omits discussion of whether
this label is appropriate. Habermas also calls positions “postmodern” that
apply this name to themselves. Where the text follows Habermas’s use of the
term, “postmodern” is written with quotation marks [i.e., “positions that
Habermas calls ‘postmodern’ ”]. When the term occurs without quotation
marks, I am referring to positions that explicitly refer to themselves in this
way.) Habermas finds evidence in the critique of “rationalism” that these posi-
tions perform, whereby “rationalism” refers to a specifically modern mode of
totalization that takes the form of a “metanarrative” (Lyotard 1984). Whereas
(first-level) narratives are irreducibly manifold and inconclusive, metanarra-
tives attempt to integrate different language games into a whole by determin-
ing what makes them rational according to a uniform model. One such model
affirms that those processes are rational that transparently apply a process
defined by rules—or, in the ideal case, by a method. Depending on one’s phil-
osophical preferences, logic, the natural sciences, law, administration, or tech-
nology may serve as “patterns” in which a totalizing unity emerges.
Habermas holds that the “postmodern” perspective equates modernity
and rationalism. Against this view, Jean-François Lyotard insisted that
postmodernity—the postmodernity of the sublime, which he opposed to
postmodern “slackening”—should be understood as a radicalization of the
critique of rationalistic models that is immanent in modernity. As much has
been confirmed by Andreas Huyssen’s retrospective account of the beginning
of postmodernism in North American literature in the 1960s (and the essay
writing and theory that accompanied it; for an exemplary discussion, see
Fiedler 1988b): this movement, precisely in its critique of a rationalistic “version

of modernism,” also viewed itself as a radicalization of modernity/modernism
(Huyssen 1986, 188). Hal Foster’s (1983) notion of a “postmodernism of resistance”
continues in this vein.
Albrecht Wellmer (1985) has expanded the connection into a “dialectic of
modernity and postmodernity,” which demonstrates that the critique of
rationalism that motivates postmodernism can be understood as part of the
tradition of modernist autocritique (49–58). The writings of Adorno exem-
plify this position when, in The Philosophy of New Music (2006), he not only
defends—by juxtaposing Schoenberg and Stravinsky—the musical avant-
garde against charges of “regression” but also, and in the same gesture, pres-
ents the rationalist tendencies within the avant-garde (as represented by
Schoenberg) as the point where modernism switches from liberation to
domination.
The “postmodern” critique of modern rationalism cannot be understood as
antimodern per se—especially since Habermas’s own theory of modernity
puts a critique of rationalism (which he understands as a pathological form of
differentiation) front and center. The disagreement between Habermas and
“postmodern” theorists, then, does not hinge on the “if” but on the “how” of
critiquing rationalism in modernity. In this debate, it is not a matter of whether
rationalism represents a form of modernity; both sides say as much, in differ-
ent ways. Rather, what is at issue is Habermas’s contention that the critique of
modern rationalism is possible and justified only if it is understood as
“Enlightenment” (in the sense discussed above). This conception of Enlight-
enment has two aspects: the interpretation of modern differentiation in terms
of rationalization and the prospect of rationally overcoming pathological
forms of modern differentiation. These concerns constitute the objective core
of Habermas’s speech and the ensuing debate.
Differentiation as Rationalization
The first level of Habermas’s notion of Enlightenment involves understanding

modernity—both socially and culturally—as the differentiation (Ausdifferen-
zierung) of spheres that follow their own logic and, in turn, understanding
this differentiation as rationalization. Thereby, “differentiation” has a double
meaning (“Modernity,” 45–46): on the one hand, it means that social and cul-
tural spheres emerge that are focused on a single function or consideration of
validity; on the other, it means that autonomous (eigensinnig) spheres of soci-
ety and culture not only operate independently of one another but also, as a
group, operate at a remove from the “lifeworld,” in which the elements that lie
at the basis of individual spheres are combined in practical activity.
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Differentiation is rationalization because the validity claims that have

“always already” been raised in the lifeworld are isolated, problematized, and
treated in specialized procedures. Referring to differentiation as rationaliza-
tion serves both the purpose of explanation and that of justification. Because
(or, alternatively, to the extent that) the differentiation of autonomous
spheres occurs rationally, it is justified. This is a first, necessary step in the
project of Enlightenment, and it is why modern differentiation—even if it
leads to unwelcome strategies of rationalization—must not be reversed.
Reversing it would mean losing what one has gained in terms of reason
(Rationalitätsgewinne).
In the philosophical debates surrounding Habermas’s conception of
modernity, a first set of objections has sought to replace the two-level model of
lifeworld and differentiated value spheres with concepts on a level plane. These
“flat” notions can be elaborated from the perspective of both the lifeworld and
the value spheres.
Hermeneutic theoretical models consider that every attempt to differentiate
procedures that guarantee normative obligation on their own must fail from
the start. Normative obligation—and with it, knowledge (whether theoretical
or practical)—exists only to the extent that it derives from practices in the
lifeworld. According to this view, the idea of differentiated—and therefore
autonomous—value spheres is ideology, pure and simple. Only one level exists:
that of the lifeworld (Boehner 1982).
Postmodern theoretical models raze Habermas’s two levels from the other
side: a construction on twin planes—the level of the “lifeworld” and that of the
“differentiated spheres”—is replaced by a flat surface, where multiple dis-
courses, all of which are irreducible to the others, teem in competition. In this
view, (the) difference(s) between spheres, discourses, and modes of articula-
tion cannot be conceived as deriving from a previously extant unity (that is,
from the lifeworld); instead, there exists a never-ending plurality that cannot
be circumvented.
Whereas hermeneutic theories believe they can make “the resources of the
lifeworld count as matters that are ultimately reliable” (Henrich 1987, 19)—and,
in so doing, put stock in unity that is given without mediation—postmodern
theories begin with an unavoidable multiplicity of discourses and language
games. This plurality cannot be summed up by “metanarratives”—a rubric that
includes Habermas’s tripartite conception of differentiation (science, morality/
law, art) borrowed from Kant and Weber. Such a scheme simply represents yet
another modern metanarrative (Rorty 1985, 167–168). Instead, postmodern the-
ories posit the “conflict” of multiple discourses; the “sublime” rupture with
unity of all kinds cannot be overcome—at best, local and limited strategies
allow it to be (partially) mastered (Lyotard 1989).
However, both the views opposed to Habermas’s split-level model show no

understanding of differentiation ([Aus-]differenzierung). The hermeneutic
model lacks this perspective because its point of departure is the “givenness”
of unified practices in the lifeworld, which is never broken and admits dis-
crete (ausdifferenziert) processes only as illusory, self-destructive phenom-
ena. The postmodern model comes up short because it begins—with just as
much certainty—with the “givenness” of plural, heterogeneous discourses
(whose origins it cannot account for).
Both these perspectives differ from deconstructive models, which agree
with Habermas’s theory insofar as they reconstruct the necessary emergence
of differentiated rational procedures for processing particular considerations
of validity. These procedures issue from practices in the lifeworld but achieve
autonomy: the reason for rationalization, then, is the crisis immanent in the
lifeworld (Derrida 1989). Deconstruction diagnoses the same condition as
Habermas, but it describes it in different terms: not as the occurrence of “prob-
lems” demanding a rational solution but as an ambivalent process of trans-
gression (Überschreitung), which manifests itself both in its “endless” claim to
truth and by triggering a play of signs that takes place “without a center” (Der-
rida 1972). In a deconstructive perspective, procedures for assuring obligation
(Verbindlichkeit)—as occurs in law or science—can be understood as efforts to
control this logic of aggressive expansion beyond the forms of knowledge in
the lifeworld. (Even though such efforts—inasmuch as they originate in prac-
tices of the lifeworld—must necessarily fail.) Deconstructive theories do not
advocate irrationality (“Modernity,” 53); rather, they offer an alternate geneal-
ogy of rationality (Gasché 1988).
Habermas calls all three perspectives that stand opposed to his theory
“postmodern” because they do not consider the differentiation he identifies to
involve the process of rationalization—much less justify it in this capacity
(Dumm 1988, 212–213; Jay 1985, 137–139). Although they offer different kinds of
argument, the three models arrive at the same (unsatisfactory) result: their
discussions of differentiated spheres fail to consider the “appropriation” of
potential rationality (Rationalitätspotentiale)—a matter of necessity according
to Habermas’s conception of Enlightenment.
Postmodern Architecture and the Problem of Autonomy
Habermas justifies the differentiation of spheres in modernity by understand-

ing them as the result of rationalization. At the same time, however, he
describes the present state of differentiated, rationalized modernity as apo-
retic. Habermas defines the condition with two theses. First, the rational
344 Texts
potentials of differentiated spheres have grown increasingly estranged from

the lifeworld. Second, it is impossible to overcome this estrangement (or alien-
ation) by directly translating rational potentials back into the lifeworld. This
description of the current aporia of cultural modernity in fact stands much
closer to “postmodern” positions than Habermas’s polemics in the Adorno
Speech would suggest.
This is especially true for the form that postmodernity/postmodernism
has assumed in architecture and architectural theory. In an essay that
appeared two years after the speech in Frankfurt—“Modern and Postmodern
Architecture”—Habermas held fast to the crisis diagnosis he had pronounced,
observing that the postmodern “opposition to modernity takes up the unsolved
problems that have discredited [ins Zwielicht gerückt] modern architecture”
(1988b, 120).
Habermas’s agreement with the postmodern assessment of the present
obviously concerns the second thesis of his aporia diagnosis, which expressly
addresses the avant-gardes. Like the postmodernists, Habermas views avant-
gardes as the artistic pendant to modern rationalism: just as rationalists wish
to reform the lifeworld directly on the model of (differentiated) science or law,
the avant-gardes seek to do the same on the model of autonomous, experimental,
and transgressive art. The avant-gardes pursue the destruction of the lifeworld
by colonizing it from the position of art. (Of course, this attempted remedy for
modern differentiation has not succeeded.)
Yet Habermas’s skepticism about avant-garde “solutions” is not meant to be
“postmodern” itself. This descriptor also applies to his account of the problem
to be solved—i.e., to the way Habermas represents the avant-garde in the first
place. Habermas’s first thesis—that the basic problem of modern art is that its
aesthetically autonomous meaning (Eigensinn) is devoid of significance from
the perspective of the lifeworld and therefore can no longer be integrated
within it—corresponds to the central objection that postmodern architectural
theory has leveled at the modernism of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.
Only superficially do postmodern objections take aim at the forms/styles of
modernism. The postmodern position holds that modernist form, which is
programmed for unity, must be replaced by multiplicity—the plurality of
styles (see Welsch 1988a, chap. 4). Robert Venturi’s programmatic declaration
of “complexity and contradiction” (2002 [1966], chap. 2) seeks to set postmod-
ern architecture—which is purposefully ambiguous—apart from the mono-
lithic (gewaltsam) form of modernist structures. Even where postmodernists
describe such plurality as “historistic” and “eclectic” (Jencks 1978, 127–132), the
critique of illusory simplification (which produces unity by sacrificing hetero-
geneity) is always in evidence. However, the fundamental impulse behind the
postmodern critique of modernism has another source—and a different
objective.
Charles Jencks’s (1978) definition of postmodern architecture holds that it

should “speak on at least two levels” at once—that is, both “to other architects
and a concerned minority who care about specifically architectural meanings,
and to the public at large, or the local inhabitants, who care about other issues
concerned with comfort, traditional building and a way of life” (6). Contra all
that one hears about “function,” architectural modernism (to say nothing of
urban modernism) systematically neglected this second, formal level of archi-
tectonic meaning—when, indeed, it did not repress it altogether. The basic
concern of postmodernism, in contrast, is to free construction and design
from their systemic concretizations (Verselbständigungen) and to understand
them as “life form” (Jencks 1978).
Modernism is elitist, and postmodernism populist, for the latter is con-
cerned with architectural forms that take their semantic and linguistic aspects
seriously by cultivating a symbolic and narrative dimension that is to be
understood by a public in a specific historical and cultural situation (Venturi,
Brown, and Izenour 1994, part 2; Klotz 1985, part 4). Therefore, postmodernism’s
fundamental objection to modernism does not concern its formal solutions but
rather the social site it determines for what it builds—that is, its claim of artis-
tic autonomy. The repression of plurality and heterogeneity on a formal level is
just one of many other consequences. This is the same problem that Habermas
places at the center of his diagnosis of the cultural aporias of modernity. The
question is: How can art speak in a way that is comprehensible in the life-
world? In other words, Habermas shares the postmodern idea that art must
recapture its understandability after modern(ist) autonomization. Art must
break the “silence” (Wallenstein 2008) with which modernist forms took leave
of the public’s expectations for meaning.
All the same, the question arises—which Habermas asks contra postmod-
ern notions—whether this can occur without giving up the modern(ist) claim
of autonomy (Habermas 1988, 116–117; Wellmer 1985, 122–128). Habermas diag-
noses the current aporias of cultural modernity in the same way that post-
modernists do. At the same time, he wants to retain key elements of the
modern(ist) perspective to solve the problems at issue. That is what the con-
cept of Enlightenment stands for: Habermas’s conception of Enlightenment
seeks to avoid the extremes—both modern autonomization to the point of
enigmatic foreignness as well as postmodern negation of foreignness through
popularization—in order to mediate logically between their justified claims:
autonomy and understandability.
Advocates from both camps consider this project impossible to realize.
From the perspective of aesthetic autonomy, the postmodern demand for
comprehensibility within the lifeworld—which Habermas shares—already
contests the “sovereignty” of art (Menke 1991). From a postmodern perspec-
tive, the call for comprehensibility within the lifeworld cannot be redeemed if
346 Texts
the idea of artistic autonomy itself is not surrendered: “Relativity instead of

autonomy!” (Klotz 1985, 423).
Prospect: Art and Society
Why, when receiving the Adorno Prize, did Habermas discuss the aporias of
cultural modernity—indeed, more narrowly still, the aporias of aesthetic
modernity? How does this relate to the matter of turning “the process of social
modernization . . . into other non-capitalist directions” (“Modernity,” 53)?
What is the relationship between aesthetic/cultural Enlightenment and politi-
cal/social transformation?
The answer—as Habermas indicates in his speech—is that cultural moder-
nity and social modernity face structurally homologous problems. Accord-
ingly, a solution to the aporias of cultural modernity may provide a model for
solving the contradictions one encounters in social modernization. Haber-
mas’s account of how the “reconnection of modern culture with an everyday
sphere of praxis . . . dependent on . . . living heritage” (52) can occur in the
realm of art illustrates a more general conception of Enlightenment that
applies not just to other spheres of culture but also to the rationalized social
systems that have “separated off” from the lifeworld (i.e., law, administration,
and economy). Cultural and social problems are homologous: in either case, it
is a matter of transformation—under duress—of practices in the lifeworld by
means of procedures and systems of action that have emerged as differentiated
spheres in the course of rationalizing processes. This conception of Enlighten-
ment—which Habermas develops to resolve the aporias of cultural moder-
nity—may also be understood to offer a model for how “the process of social
modernization can . . . be turned into other non-capitalist directions” (53).
Homology obtains between social problems, aporias, and contradictions,
on the one hand, and, on the other, their solutions, which follow the logic of
cultural Enlightenment and social transformation. When Habermas extols
the “exploratory, life-orientating power which can emanate from the encounter
with a great painting” (52), he identifies another closely related matter. Weiss’s
Aesthetics of Resistance—from which Habermas takes the example—discusses
young communist workers standing before, and talking about, the Altar of Per-
gamon in Berlin. These young people were not just “appropriating” a discrete
artistic meaning that corresponded to social change in structural terms;
instead, the Enlightenment they experienced by way of the aesthetic was to lead
the way to social transformation. Here, homology—i.e., a relation that unfolds
on a single plane—did not obtain between art and society; rather, a reflexive
relation emerged. Art is a medium of social transformation: in the first place,
because society appears differently in the medium of art; second, because
society undergoes a change when it is experienced otherwise, i.e., in an aes-

thetic dimension. Without retaining—at least in this minimalistic, “weak”
sense—the idea of the avant-garde function of the arts, Habermas cannot
meaningfully reflect on aesthetic Enlightenment.
Habermas’s Adorno Speech affirms two things, then. First, that, still
today—and contra the postmodern call for popularity/populism, understand-
ability, and “social relevancy”—one must hold to the difference of culture in
relation to social modernization (Jameson 1991). Second, that—against post-
modern critiques of the avant-gardes as violent incursions (Übergriffe)—one
should hold fast to the power of the aesthetic (Rancière 2002).
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34
STAND-IN AND INTERPRETER
“Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter” (1981)
HAUKE BRUNKHORST
I
n 1981, the Hegel Conference in Stuttgart addressed the “Hamlet
debate” of German philosophy: “Kant or Hegel?” The highpoint of the
event occurred when the avant-garde of American pragmatism took
the stage. Richard Rorty (1983), whose groundbreaking critique of philosophi-
cal idealism Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) had just been trans-
lated into German, made a brief introduction. Willard V. O. Quine (1983), who
followed him, took apart the myth of autonomous reference—demolishing the
notion that the statements in which we offer our reflections hold indepen-
dently of the theoretical framework in which we make them (412–413). Don-
ald Davidson (1983) then presented his holistic theory, according to which
no truth may hold without, at the same time, implicating the entirety of our
linguistic praxis (423–438). The three speakers affirmed Hegel’s unqualified
triumph. Kantian dualism had been negated and elevated to a newfound
unity, where continuity obtained between semantics and knowledge of the
world (Bedeutungs- und Weltwissen). Once more, the Whole was the True,
even if “the Supreme Lord of the world [i.e., Hegelian philosophy] swims
unproven in his own blood” (Heine 1964, 250).
Finally, Hilary Putnam (1983), the last speaker on the panel, showed that,
whereas our linguistically constituted forms of life cannot be observed—much
less directed—from an Archimedean standpoint external to them, theoretical
critique and practical transcendence are possible from within. Yet again,
Hegel emerged victorious. He did so not just in positive terms (in der Sache)
but also with respect to the dialectical method of determinate negation—the
erstwhile archenemy of analytic philosophy. A further dualism—theory and
practice—that had prompted Kant to engage in Aristotelian evasions (“judg-
ment”) was eliminated and replaced by a continuum along the lines of John
Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy.
However, this time, too, the price for Hegel was high, for his own method
had been turned against him: if Hegel had managed to present his forebear’s
notion of critique as a mode of progress for scientific/philosophical thought,
practical self-transcendence (praktische Selbsttranszendenz) was precisely what
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he had always objected to and warned of. When Hegel’s student Marx (Hen-
rich 1971, 187–208) took up the idea of practical self-transcendence, he did not
conquer the halls of the university, but he did make history on a larger scale—
affirming the idea of a world-changing praxis that, from a position within the
true Whole, turns against it and reveals it to be false. If one duly applies Hegel’s
method and dispenses with the end (Abbruch) of reflection that occurs when
one reaches a speculative conclusion, the Real is no longer the Reasonable.
The nightmare of idealism comes true: Reason finds itself “in the midst of the
‘manure’ [mitten im ‘Dünger’] of contradictions” (Marx 1968, 80)—put there by
Hegel’s own philosophy, which has been forced to break with its own system
inasmuch as reality (Wirkliches) has been recognized as bad reality (schlecht
erkannt). Reason no longer (as in Hegel’s philosophy) guarantees and transfig-
ures reality; instead—and in a manner comparable only to “womankind” (das
Weibliche) in Hegel’s system—it stands, through the process of dialectical rever-
sal, to become “an internal enemy” of the “community” (Gemeinwesen) (Hegel
1977, 475).
That evening, Habermas delivered “Philosophy as Stand-In and Inter-
preter,” which effortlessly connected with these lines of argument. The lecture
provides a—if not the—key to his work as a whole. Habermas observes that
academic philosophy, in keeping with the poststructuralist zeitgeist, has been
shifting from the “Master Thinkers” Kant, Hegel, and Marx to the equally
masterful Nietzsche (Moral Consciousness, 1). Even though he does not support
his contemporaries’ occasional apologetics for the latter thinker, Habermas
concedes that the point of agreement between poststructuralism, deconstruc-
tion, and pragmatism—which follows from the Nietzschean critique of the
element of domination (Herrschaftscharakter) in Kantian foundationalism
(which proves formalist and divisive)—is justified all too well (5).
Master Thinker Kant
In a historically unprecedented critique of the metaphysical tradition from

Parmenides to Christian Wolff, Kant had demanded of philosophy what the
French revolutionaries sought from the ancien régime in political terms: egali-
tarian formalism of law (from which all citizens stand at an equal remove
[Sièyes]), on the one hand, and the dialectical integration of divided powers
and sovereignty into a republican (democratic) constitution, on the other. In a
wholly analogous gesture, Kant placed limits on the sovereignty of philosophy
as the (supposed) guarantor of Truth and declared for it the legislative role of
pouvoir constituant: now, philosophy was to be formalized. Theoretical phi-
losophy should follow Nature, moral philosophy Reason, and legal philosophy
the (will of the) People.
“Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter” 351
Henceforth, Kant declared, philosophy would not seek to know the legisla-
tive workings of Nature itself, which remain shrouded by the veil of (human)
ignorance. Indeed, it had always been presumptuous to hold that philosophy
might have access to the innermost will and knowledge of the Supreme Legis-
lator—the Idea as it really exists. Alongside the new “king”—whether People,
Reason, or Nature—philosophy, which had been reduced to matters of form
and function, no longer had a place. Relieved of the burdens of substantial
and formal sovereignty (and situated on the “left” of the parliamentary
arrangement of faculties, immediately adjacent to the Jacobins [Kant 1992]),
it should content itself with executive supervision of the sciences and, in
addition, be the “appointed judge” (Kant 2008, 16 [B XIII]) of culture. The
judge of the constitutional court (Verfassungsrichter), as it were, philosophy
should provide, on the basis of proof by procedure, at least a hypothetical
understanding of legal conditions (die Gesetzeslage) and impose firm limits
on speculation.
Although Kant dethroned the philosopher-king once and for all, he estab-
lished “philosophy . . . as the highest court of appeal vis-à-vis the sciences and
culture as a whole” (Moral Consciousness, 3), to compensate for what had been
lost in terms of pure cognition (Erkenntnis). By granting such judiciary
power—and notwithstanding his critique of “master-thinking” and the “over-
lordly [vornehm] tone” he adopted (Kant 1977)—Kant charged philosophy
with another, undue burden. As Habermas puts it: “Kantian philosophy dif-
ferentiates what Weber was to call the ‘value spheres of culture’ (science and
technology, law, and morality, art and art criticism), while at the same time
legitimating them within their respective limits. Thus Kantian philosophy
poses as the highest court of appeal vis-à-vis the sciences and culture as a
whole” (Moral Consciousness, 2–3; cf. Kant 2008, 569 [B 799]).
Kant also imputes too much to philosophy by equipping it with the legal
authority of synthetic knowledge a priori, for the executive role of assigning
individual sciences their place establishes absolute limits for what can be expe-
rienced (unübersteigbare Grenzen des Erfahrbaren). At the very hour of his fall,
the transcendental philosopher rises again as a master thinker. Yet indignities
lie in store: “[Philosophy] wants to clarify the foundations of the sciences once
and for all, defining the limits of what can and cannot be experienced. This is
tantamount to an act of ushering the sciences to their proper place. It seems
philosophy is overburdened by playing the role of usher” (Moral Conscious-
ness, 2; translation modified).
According to Habermas, the basis of this twofold overburdening lies in the
idea of knowledge a priori, which Kant retains—all formalism and nuance not-
withstanding. Even the formalized and differentiated “foundationalism” of
Reason can be grounded only inasmuch as “cognition before cognition” occurs;
thereby, philosophy “sets up a domain between itself and the sciences” and
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becomes guilty of “arrogating authority to itself” (2). This kind of “ultimate

justification” (Apel) amounts to ideology—the false consciousness of transcen-
dental deduction, which is not constituted by the “judgment ‘I think,’ to which
all our thoughts relate as predicates” (Kant 2008, liii [B 131]) but rather by a
historically determined power relation (Herrschaftsverhältnis) to which Lukács
and Adorno objected so strongly.
By invoking philosophical foundationalism’s “authoritative function”
(Herrschaftsfunktion), Habermas takes up a central motif of neo-Marxist
ideological critique. In equal measure, his reflections meet up with those of
Foucault/poststructuralism, Derrida/deconstruction, and Dewey/neopragma-
tism (see chapters 21 and 23 in this volume). For all that, however, Habermas
does not wish to replace the goal-oriented idea of critique with Foucauldian
genealogy (which is indiscriminate in application), with Derridean decon-
struction (which sets no limits to self-reflection), or with Rorty’s criterion-free
praxis for improving the world. Like these thinkers, Habermas believes that
epistemic foundationalism should dispense with the remainders of “master
thinking” (i.e., the roles of the philosophically privileged “usher” and “judge”);
this would involve doing away with the imperious qualities (Herrschaftschara-
kter) of philosophy. (It does not, however, amount to discarding its power and/
or influence.) Yet unlike his contemporaries, Habermas holds fast to philoso-
phy’s role as the guardian of procedural rationality (Moral Consciousness, 4)—
and, in this, he agrees with Kant.
All the same, modern culture requires a supreme judge as little as modern
democracy needs constitutional jurisprudence (Verfassungsgerichtsbarkeit)
that declares binding values and orientations, pits extrapositive law against
positive law, interprets basic rights that should be reserved for parliamentary
debate, dictates disputed legislation, and/or seeks to acquire authority sur-
passing that of the democratic legislature over the people (whose organ, after
all, it is supposed to be). Habermas’s critique of undemocratic foundational-
ism in constitutional jurisprudence—which he presents in Between Facts and
Norms (1998 [1992]; see chapter 38 in this volume)—follows the same line of
argument that he provides in critiquing Kant’s philosophical foundational-
ism. As he does with respect to philosophy and science, Habermas rejects all
the claims that “master thinking” of the juridical variety might impose on a
democratic and constitutional state. Constitutional jurisprudence should
remain limited to the activities of a permanently standing parliamentary
committee that is responsible for overseeing norms only in formal terms. In
keeping with the role he assigns to philosophy, Habermas turns the supra-
democratic and supralegal instance interpreting constitutionality as a whole
into the guardian of the rational legal procedure, an organ to be legitimated—
and limited—through democracy (Facts, 238ff.).
The Democratization of Philosophy
In his Stuttgart lecture, Habermas developed the idea of democratizing phi-

losophy in two steps. The first step, which is entirely in line with Marx, deter-
mines the social contents (der gesellschaftliche Gehalt) of Kant’s conception of
reason; because Reason has “undergone differentiation to the point where . . .
unity is merely formal” (Moral Consciousness, 2), Habermas discards his fore-
bear’s foundationalist justification. The “movement of the concept” (Hegel)
leading from Plato to Kant does not represent the autonomous, autoaffecting
action of Spirit; instead, Habermas affirms, it occurs thanks to an evolutionary
process of social and cultural differentiation. In the course of this process,
the three aspects of Reason (Vernunftmomente) identified by Kant “crys-
tallize out”: “modern science,” “positive law and post-traditional ethics”
(prinzipiengeleitete Profanethik), and “autonomous art and institutional-
ized art-criticism.” Habermas’s very terminology translates matters into
the language of sociology—which, he avers, does not require “instructions”
from the Critique of Pure Reason or “supplements” from philosophy (17).
By Habermas’s account, autonomous—but philosophically instructive—
“processes of disembodiment” (Ausgliederungsprozesse) lead “the sciences [to]
disgorge more and more elements” anchored in metaphysical worldviews (i.e.,
in “religion”); in so doing, however, they come to renounce “their former claim
to being able to interpret nature and history as one whole” (17). Any justifica-
tion required for these operations, they have already produced themselves.
Like the sciences, the realms of morality/law and art/art criticism undergo
differentiation through social reality and come to be justified on their own
terms. “The situation of culture as a whole is no different from the situation of
science as a whole” (17).
Habermas’s historical-materialist perspective, which combines the theory
of communications and sociology (see Rekonstruktion), reveals Reason as
social reason (Vernunft der Gesellschaft). The achievement of transcendental
philosophy does not concern the ultimate (Kant)—or even the penultimate
(Popper)—justification (Begründung) of science and culture; instead—and
viewed from a retrospective, postfoundational standpoint—it involves an ini-
tial formulation of a “theory of modernity” that, while fallible, still possesses nor-
mative substance (16; on the problems this entails, see chapter 33 in this volume).
Habermas’s second step combines this reinterpretation of Kantian reason
with a metanarrative that, as one of many possibilities—none of which can be
justified a priori in a philosophically cogent manner—must allow truth claims
to compete with one another. Rorty’s metanarrative of the history of philoso-
phy tells how reason, after exercising the function of discerning and declaring
the truth, has transformed into “cultivated knowledge” that makes no claims
354 Texts
about truth (wahrheitsfreies Bildungswissen). As an alternative, Habermas

sketches an account—soon expanded in The Philosophical Discourse of Moder-
nity (see chapter 37 in this volume)—of philosophical democratization as a
dialectical process of learning. In this perspective, reason is “forced”—in the
sense of developmental logic (see chapters 10, 12, 32, 56, and 62 in this volume)—
to engage in self-rationalization, which requires cooperation with science and
culture on egalitarian terms.
Habermas’s metanarrative about the fate of Reason under modern condi-
tions follows the simple but useful Hegelian scheme: thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis, arranged in a sequence of arguments. In the first stage, Kant’s ulti-
mate justification of transcendental philosophy—Thesis (T1)—encounters
opposition from Hegel’s Antithesis (A1), which holds that the dialectical ascent
of Spirit (dialektische Selbstaufstufung des Geistes) involves Subject and Object
repeatedly reversing their positions. Hegel halts this process inasmuch as his
philosophy ultimately declares the arrival of “absolute knowledge”—that is, he
“detranscendentalizes” Kant’s foundationalism only by “outbidding” it (nur um
den Preis seiner Überbietung). But since philosophy does not stop with Hegel, in
the stages that follow, it frees itself from the antinomy of either underbidding or
overbidding Kant by performing a series of radicalized self-critiques. Hereby,
Thesis T1 (Kant) and Antithesis A1 (Hegel) achieve a higher state of unity—in a
movement of “reflecting abstraction” (Kesselring 1984)—and yield Thesis T2
(T1/A1). Whether this occurs along the lines of constructivism (Lorenzen) and
negativism (Popper, Adorno), on the one hand, or along the lines of pragma-
tism (Peirce) and hermeneutics (Dilthey), on the other—synthesis takes
place. Both transcendental reason and dialectical reason are unconditionally
socialized (vergesellschaft) and provincialized (provinzialisiert) without, how-
ever, being forced to give up their universalistic claims to self-transcendence.
Marx’s formulation applies: philosophy is not abandoned but sublated and
brought to full realization (Moral Consciousness, 11).
The next stage—Antithesis A2—occurs in a number of variants: when
philosophy renounces its claim to truth, it can do so as a matter of therapy
(Wittgenstein), heroism (Bataille, Heidegger), or safeguarding (Gadamer).
Now, critique—which has shaped philosophical discourse from Kant to
Adorno—turns into something else: training (Abrichtung), gesture and dia-
logue, Destruktion, deconstruction, or combat (Kampf ). Whereas Marx “sub-
lated” philosophy in terms of revolutionary praxis, according to Habermas,
Rorty has said his “goodbyes” by turning it into cultivated knowledge that is
devoid of truth. Rorty’s vision unites “philosophy as a whole” in “therapeutic
relief, heroic overcoming, and hermeneutic reawakening. It combines the
inconspicuously subversive force of leisure with an elitist notion of creative
linguistic imagination and with the wisdom of the ages” (14).
By way of further reflexive abstraction, Thesis T2 (Marx) and Antithesis A2

(Rorty) ultimately lead to Thesis T3 (T2[T1/A1]/A2), which is Habermas’s own
position. Now, philosophy undergoes a double transformation. It is internal-
ized by science and culture in order to make their latent potentials for self-
transcendence manifest. It can either succeed or fail in so doing, and it must
compete with other “seductive” discourses, in full knowledge that it is prone
to possible error (Quine). All the “old-European” hierarchies have become
egalitarian and reversible relations.
Stand-In and Interpreter
With respect to the sciences, philosophy—which formerly served as the

detached “usher” (Platzanweiser) assigning roles—has become an internal
“stand-in” (Platzhalter) that endorses strong hypotheses and “empirical theo-
ries with pronounced universalistic claims.” As much is evident in the large-
scale, revolutionary research programs (Lakatos 1974) that proliferated in the
social and “human” sciences over the course of the twentieth century—e.g.,
the projects of Freud, Durkheim, Mead, Weber, Piaget, and Chomsky. “Each
inserted a genuinely philosophical idea like a detonator into a particular con-
text of research” (Moral Consciousness, 15). These research programs did not
“dissolve” philosophy into science without remainder; instead, philosophy
became scientific inasmuch as science became philosophical. Alluding to a
famous formulation of the young Marx—who spoke of philosophy achieving
“realization” when reality became philosophical—Habermas, contra Quine,
explains the “scientification of philosophy” as the “philosophization of the sci-
ences of man” (Philosophischwerden der Humanwissenschaften) (15).
This is one of the many Marxist motifs that recur throughout Habermas’s
work, from the dissertation until today; recently, Habermas has taken it up
again—against Rorty and a broad range of liberals who draw on elements of
philosophical realism, voluntarism, and postmodernism—in observing that a
post-truth democracy would no longer be a democracy at all (Naturalism,
144–145); democracy, too, must grow philosophical from time to time, lest it
perish of empty formalism.
For this reason alone, postfoundationalist philosophy is not exhausted by
its “stand-in” function. Indeed, philosophy must affirm the validity of its
claims to truth by offering interpretations that relate to our social world in its
entirety. Its role is (1) to translate (vermitteln) the esoteric contents of expert
discourses from within; this occurs in subversive “countermovements” (18)
to specialization (for example, by changing theoretical vocabularies into
aesthetic ones, theorizing ethical and juridical discourses, uncovering the
356 Texts
practical implications of research programs, and politicizing art). In addition,

the interpretive role involves (2) externalizing expert discourses and building
bridges to everyday praxis. In its interpretive capacity, philosophy should
expose expert knowledge to the communicative forces of public dispute (Streit)
and bifurcation (Entzweiung).
As one site of interpretation among many, philosophy (or, alternatively,
expertise that has grown philosophical) must seek to open public opinion to
the influx (Zustrom) of knowledge—which necessarily arrives only in frag-
mentary, rising form—by initiating discussions, offering polemics, provoking
disagreement, agitating, campaigning, and so on. Whether this ultimately
occurs for better or for worse, the task—and especially in an intellectual
capacity (see chapter 60 in this volume)—is to make “petrified conditions . . .
dance by singing to them their own melody” (Marx 1977, 134). The spectrum of
interpretive activities ranges from modest exercises in scientific journalism to
deployments of the “weapon of criticism” (Marx) in struggles for epistemic
hegemony—up to (and including) the violation of standing rules for moral
reasons. The role of interpreter combines ideological criticism—which
“uncovers, in what seems to be in the general interest, what is particular to
those in power” (Habermas 1972, 212)—with redemptive criticism, which seeks
to “blast . . . a past charged with now-time . . . out of the continuum of history”
(Benjamin 2003, 395) in order to disclose “the source of those semantic poten-
tials that we need to interpret the world in the light of our needs” (Habermas
1972, 217).
Philosophy’s doubly negativistic role as interpreter involves, on the one
hand, morally motivated ideological critique directed against the false appear-
ance of the General and, on the other, ethically and aesthetically motivated
redemptive criticism of the misspent life. In so doing, however, it does not go
so far as to affirm what proper awareness of “totality” (Lukács) or “the good
life” (Aristotle) (see chapter 16 in this volume) might be. Instead, the matter
concerns the “un-misspent” life (Adorno). This, too, is a Hegelian discovery
employed to non-Hegelian ends: double negation is not the same as affirma-
tion on the mathematical model (i.e., “minus times minus equals plus”). On
this point, Habermas agrees with Foucault and, even more, with Derrida: the
best-functioning mechanism of everyday life in a parliamentary democracy,
even under conditions of optimal social-democratic progress, can pale and
become semantically desolate when “improving” the “reproduction of life”
yields “meaningless emancipation” (Habermas 1972, 219).
The new roles of stand-in and interpreter have bid farewell to the concep-
tion of a sovereign philosophy; the latter no longer performs authoritative
functions (Herrschaftsfunktionen). At the same time, however, these new roles
have not replaced those formerly in place with the “Cloud Cuckoo Land” of
pure agreement (Verständigung)—as has been wrongly (and, most often,
maliciously) alleged, time and again, of the ideal, goal, and program underly-
ing Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Instead, Habermas main-
tains that only the better argument may exert “force.” This occurs when a
social actor agrees on the basis of his or her own insight—indeed, it happens
constantly for any and all social actors. Herein lies the power of Reason in
History—when, as Walter Benjamin put it, a “sphere of human agreement that
is wholly inaccessible to violence” emerges: “the proper sphere of ‘coming to an
understanding,’ language” (Benjamin 1996, 245; quoted—with approbation—in
Habermas 1972, 221).
All the same, “discourses are islands in the sea of praxis” (Habermas 1982).
The roles of stand-in and interpreter—like the communicative power that
makes the “philosophization” of science and mass culture possible in the first
place (see chapter 65 in this volume)—involve matters of practice through and
through. Research programs, communities of inquiry, and points of agree-
ment in the public sphere are all contaminated by power—be it communica-
tive, social, or administrative (see chapters 67 and 13 in this volume)—that is,
they are all caught up in struggles for influence and dominance. Benjamin’s
warning, which Habermas (1972, 221) quotes, applies: “Pessimism all along the
line. Absolutely. Mistrust . . . three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between
classes, between nations, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in
I. G. Farben and the peaceful perfection of the air force” (Benjamin 2005, 217).
Unlike the media of money and administrative power, influence and com-
municative power—the spheres where philosophy operates as a stand-in and
as an interpreter, respectively—are doubly coded. Communicative power
degenerates into the ideology of hegemonic power when its protective reserve
of arguments (argumentative Deckungsreserve) melts away. It is altogether
without resource when, faced with flagrant injustice and brutal repression, it
cannot make recourse to the material reserve of “avenging violence” (rächende
Gewalt) (Habermas 1982; cf. Communicative Action, 2:187). That is, communi-
cative power—as the “unforced force of the better argument”—is a protective
reserve that cannot be made binding in order to unburden the actor of the risk
or “danger” (Arendt) involved in all action. (This, too, is a point of difference
between postmetaphysical and “master” thinking.)
All forms of power (Macht) are “covered” by different forms of violence
(Gewalt)—or, to take up Luhmann’s terminology, they are bound, by symbiotic
mechanisms, to the movement of bodies (durch symbiotische Mechanismen an
das Bewegen von Körpern gebunden) (Luhmann 1974). For this reason, Haber-
mas does not place power and violence in opposition, as Arendt does. Rather,
he contrasts communicative power, on the one hand, and administrative
power, on the other. Whereas the protective reserve of social power involves,
e.g., boycotting, strikes, and lockouts, the protective reserve of administrative
power consists of police and military deployments; the ultimate resource of
358 Texts
communicative power, in turn, lies in avenging violence, which occurs in acts

of insurrection or revolution.
Kant or Hegel?
As we have seen, Habermas’s 1981 lecture draws on Hegelian motifs through-

out, both in terms of method and matter. As to the former: “Philosophy as
Stand-In and Interpreter” does without transcendental deduction of any kind;
instead, it employs—and advocates—the supple instruments of immanent cri-
tique: determinate negation and reflective abstraction. As to the object of
reflection, the lecture incorporates all the dualisms of Kant’s philosophy—
philosophy and science, theory and practice, thinking and society, and ratio-
nality and evolution—and it seeks to mediate between them by establishing a
continuum of concrete action(s). At the same time, Habermas—thinking, like
Marx and Adorno, “with Hegel against Hegel”—holds fast to the most impor-
tant elements of Kantian critique inasmuch as what exists and its “proper
movement” (das Bestehende selbst und dessen Eigenbewegung) offer the means
to renew the project of radical, normative universalism.
As occurs in the long-term intellectual movement leading from Fichte,
Hegel, and Schelling to Rorty, Luhmann, and Foucault, the conditions for the
possibility of strong theories (the “philosophization of science”) and of totalizing
interpretations (totalitätsbezogene Interpretationen) (social critique, analyses of
history, and diagnoses of contemporary ills) have been detranscendentalized;
now, they concern matters of discursive and communicative practice. However,
the thinkers part ways on the issue of what makes such conditions possible.
Here, Habermas offers Kant as a “hypothesis.” By combining Kant and Hegel
with Marx (and, at a further remove, with Kierkegaard and Heidegger), he
consolidates the inheritance of Kantian universalism by placing it at the foun-
dation—and not at the head—of political praxis. Thereby, Habermas affirms
that, in the thoroughly contingent historical and social “conditions” of com-
municative action, there lies something “unconditional” (Moral Conscious-
ness, 18). That, in a word, is his whole theory.
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——. 2003. Selected Writings. Vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard
Eiland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
——. 2005. Selected Writings. Vol. 2, Part 1: 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard
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423–438.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1972. “Bewusstmachende oder rettende Kritik—Die Aktualität Walter
Benjamins.” In Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamins, 173–224. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1982. “A Reply to my Critics.” In Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B. Thompson
and David Held, 219–283. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
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——, ed. 1983. Kant oder Hegel? Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
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phie.” In Werke, 6:377–397. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1992. The Conflict of the Faculties. Trans. Mary J. Gregor. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
——. 2008. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Marcus Weigelt. New York: Penguin.
Kesselring, Thomas. 1981. Entwicklung und Widerspruch. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1984. Die Produktivität der Antinomie: Hegels Dialektik im Lichte der genetischen
Erkenntnistheorie und der formalen Logik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
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Programmes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Luhmann, Niklas. 1974. “Symbiotische Mechanismen.” In Gewaltverhältnisse und die Ohn-
macht der Kritik, ed. Klaus Horn et al., 107–131. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1975. Macht. Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius.
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——. 1977. Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right.” Ed. Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Putnam, Hilary. 1983. “Was ist Epistemologie?” In Henrich 1983, 439–448.
Quine, Willard V. O. 1983. “Gegenstand und Beobachtung.” In Henrich 1983, 412–422.
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versity Press.
——. 1983. “Zur Einführung.” In Henrich 1983, 408–411.
35
THE THEORY OF SOCIET Y
The Theory of Communicative Action (1981): A Classic of
Social Theory
DAVID STRECKER
K
ey to the social philosophy of Jürgen Habermas is his deeply held
conviction that social evolution represents a history of progress in
principle while at the same time—and as a matter of actual fact—
being the cause of grave social ills. His project is shaped, then, by an awareness
of suffering and crisis—matters that do not even occur to neoconservative and
neoliberal modernizers, entranced as they are by technical and economic
development. Simultaneously, he maintains critical distance from parties
who, when faced with the catastrophes that modernity has produced, take
flight for archaic utopias. In fleshing out this conviction that a single process
has generated both emancipatory and pathological traits, Habermas’s central
idea concerns the fact that the different progressive potentials of modernization
have not all been realized in equal measure over the course of history; hence,
social evolution is to be understood as a process of one-sided rationalization.
Habermas’s project, then, consists in substantiating two propositions: First,
that social modernization releases a comprehensive potential for reason (Ver-
nunftpotential) and, second, that these rational potentials are employed only
in part and thereby become distorted and produce destructive effects. Accord-
ing to this conception, the path leading out of traditional conditions of depen-
dency has not secured personal autonomy and social solidarity; instead, old
constraints on liberty have been replaced by new forms of “immaturity”
(Unmündigkeit), which arise from a structural compulsion to adopt technical-
instrumental orientations toward oneself and the world.
The Theory of Communicative Action (cf. Vorstudien and Postmetaphysi-
cal) is the result of more than two decades of efforts to explicate this intu-
ition in the terms of social theory. Habermas’s monumental magnum opus
spans two volumes, some 1,200 printed pages, and incorporates numerous
and diverse sociological and philosophical approaches. In all this, what
remains crucial to Habermas is the tradition of Western Marxism that he
first worked through systematically in the 1950s: “Everything I have incor-
porated [Alles, was ich mir . . . angeeignet habe] owes its significance to the
The Theory of Communicative Action 361
project of social theory renewed along the lines of this tradition” (Unübersi-
chtlichkeit, 216).
As soon as it was published (1981), The Theory of Communicative Action
was recognized as a modern classic of social theory. Indeed, before it had even
appeared in print, the arguments became the object of academic debates and
occasioned heated international exchanges. Today, three-and-a-half decades
later, the social-theoretical reflections that Habermas presented have become
entrenched in the canon of sociological theory; the basic concepts outlined in
the book are familiar to generations of students and a broad public alike. The
author enjoys a degree of celebrity practically unmatched by contemporary
philosophers.
For all that, only some elements of The Theory of Communicative Action
form a vigorous component of current debates. Above all, Habermas’s philo-
sophical considerations have retained their vitality; his sociological theorems,
on the other hand, have survived more as keywords than as positive
knowledge. In fact, in current discussions on social theory, The Theory of
Communicative Action is absent. One is more likely to find—in addition to
omnipresent diagnoses of the times (Zeitdiagnosen)—discussions of “rational
choice,” network analysis, Anthony Giddens’s notion of structuration, Pierre
Bourdieu’s logic of practice, or (in some settings) Niklas Luhmann’s systems
theory. And as one can gather from debates on discourse analysis and govern-
mentality, far more energy is derived from the works of Michel Foucault than
from Habermas’s social theory.
At least in part, this state of affairs is attributable to the programmatic
nature of The Theory of Communicative Action. Its high level of abstraction
has certainly contributed to Habermas’s aims remaining, for the most part,
unrealized in empirical terms. What is more, social theory is not terribly pop-
ular these days. Given the heightened complexity of social systems in the
twenty-first century, hardly anyone feels confident enough to reflect on phe-
nomena comprehensively, i.e., in their “totality,” and to account for the “big
picture.” The difficulty is only compounded by the fact that the concept of
“society” has, historically, been linked to the organization of the nation-
state—a connection that makes it now seem obsolete. Today, the theory of
society (Gesellschaftstheorie) has, to a large extent, given way to social theory
(Sozialtheorie), which contents itself with outlining the conceptual framework
for empirical research but, in so doing, gives up on explaining discrete social
phenomena in terms of overall context.
For all that, the relative lack of attention currently paid to The Theory of
Communicative Action cannot be adequately explained by the work’s distance
from empirical research or prevailing attitudes of theoretical modesty. The
hulking nature of the project has led Habermas to focus on, clarify, and add to
discrete aspects of his theory (Unübersichtlichkeit, 178ff.; cf. Iser and Strecker
362 Texts
2009); the effect has been to distract from the core feature of his social theory.
It is thanks to just this feature, however, that Habermas’s theory ultimately
proves superior to rival endeavors.
The Theory of Communicative Action
The Theory of Rationality: The Concept of

Communicative Rationality
In order to show that the potential for rationality has developed “one-sidedly” in
the course of social modernization, Habermas requires a conception of reason
(Vernunftbegriff) that goes beyond purely instrumental rationality (see chapter
72 in this volume). Since the notion of instrumental reason only allows for judg-
ing means in light of determinate objectives, a diagnosis like Habermas’s, accord-
ing to which it is unreasonable—and not just worthy of critique in some regard—
to judge social development solely by economic standards of measurement, has to
assume that it is not just means that may prove more or less rational but also the
ends to which they are employed. In explicating such a broader notion of ratio-
nality, Habermas does not confine himself to arguing that moral convictions are
subject to rational justification, too; rather, his primary interest is in how such a
broad notion of reason is socially anchored and effects social evolution. By
reconstructing invariable social structures (i.e., ones that do not depend on any
one culture in particular), he aims to show how one can identify a multidimen-
sional conception of reason that goes beyond its purely instrumental moments.
Habermas finds such a potential for reason (Vernunftpotential) in the
structure of human language (see chapters 30, 57, and 64 in this volume),
where it is already socially operative (and implicitly recognized) inasmuch as
everyday interactions presume its existence and efficacy. Habermas’s point of
departure for developing his argument is the widely held belief that the mean-
ing of a sentence is understood when one knows what makes it true—i.e.,
when one knows its conditions of validity. Habermas then lends a pragmatic
turn to this connection between meaning and validity (see chapter 68 in this
volume) by arguing that knowledge about the conditions under which a state-
ment is true also means knowing how the statement may be justified and what
kind of reasons may be adduced to criticize it.
With the tools provided by formal pragmatics—the science of the struc-
tures governing language use in general—Habermas seeks proof that condi-
tions of validity obtain not only for the “what” but also for the “how” of a
given utterance.
Accordingly, he holds that linguistic communication (Verständigung)
is based on speech acts’ connection to validity claims: whoever declares
something to be something to someone raises the claim, in so doing, that the

conditions for the utterance to prove valid have been fulfilled. Needless to say,
a speaker may also seek to deceive his or her interlocutor. However, such cases
of strategic, “success-oriented” language use still depend on language use that
is “understanding oriented” (in this instance, on the fact that the listener
presumes that the speaker means the statement honestly); therefore, the con-
nection between speech acts and validity claims holds. These claims—which
connect utterances with reasons that are to be judged suprasubjectively—
make it possible to ascribe rationality to utterances.
The rationality (Vernunft) inherent in human language (and in linguistic
praxis) involves social actors exchanging reasons, criticisms, and justificatory
obligations. In order to arrive at a multidimensional understanding of ratio-
nality, Habermas observes that utterances may be contested—and defended—
in three different respects. A listener may reject a statement because he or she
believes that its propositional contents do not hold, that the speaker is raising
an illegitimate assertion, or that he or she does not mean what he or she is say-
ing. Accordingly, Habermas distinguishes between validity claims to (propo-
sitional) truth, to (normative) rightness, and to (expressive) truthfulness.
If speakers are to be able to communicate in all these respects—that is, on
the basis of suprasubjective reasons—then what they refer to must be identi-
cal. The matter is relatively unproblematic where our knowledge of facts is
concerned, for we presume a shared world of existing “things.” In addition to
this objective world, however, according to Habermas’s analysis speakers
make further presuppositions of a general nature concerning a social world of
legitimate interpersonal relations, on the one hand, and, on the other, a sub-
jective world of experiences (to which each individual has privileged access).
Speakers are able to communicate about the truth of objective conditions; in
like fashion, they can also communicate about the legitimacy or rightness of
norms and the truthfulness of expressions. The reason is that speakers make
reference to three worlds with their utterances; hence every utterance raises
three validity claims. Thereby, the formal system of reference (which corre-
sponds to the grammatical structure of language, with its distinction between
first, second, and third persons) forms the basis for a three-dimensional con-
ception of rationality that is not limited to questions of truth in the narrow
sense but also encompasses the realms of normative rightness and expressive
truthfulness.
Habermas’s conception of communicative reason and the ways he justifies
it have been critiqued in every way. In fact, the theory of rationality is that ele-
ment of The Theory of Communicative Action that continues to be debated
most frequently. All the important objections were already raised early on. In
principle, discussion concerns whether Habermas has succeeded in ground-
ing the normative bases for a theory that not only describes and explains
364 Texts
society but also offers generally sharable standards for critiquing its opera-
tions. One camp, which rejects Habermas’s sociological project as a whole,
doubts that it is possible at all, by reconstructing social structures, to identify
a form of rationality (and to ground normative obligations) that is unob-
structed by empirical contingencies and, therefore, holds unconditionally
(Schnädelbach 1991). Whereas Habermas (Naturalism, 101) maintains that
every other method transcends the realm of reasonable, intersubjectively
comprehensible, postmetaphysical argumentation (see chapters 8 and 66 in
this volume), transcendental philosophers and other advocates of universalis-
tic positions insist that justification must be grounded in a philosophical anal-
ysis of the concept of reason (Apel 1989). A second line of objection focuses on
the pragmatic turn through which Habermas makes the connection between
meaning and validity. In order to understand the meaning of a linguistic
utterance, the argument goes, one need not adopt an evaluative position at all
(Tugendhat 1985, Zimmermann 1985).
Therefore, no constitutive connection exists between understanding (Ver-
stehen) and communication (Verständigung); for this reason, they conclude,
speakers have not “always already” (at least implicitly and counterfactually)
entered into context-transcendent obligations of justification (Cooke 1994).
Like the first objection, this argument has, to date, led more to entrenchment
on both sides than to proposals taking the debate beyond the established posi-
tions. Habermas (1991, 252), for example, has spoken of a “counterintuitive
mode of reading” on the part of his critics and declared his intention to “insist”
(beharren) on his views.
Numerous potential objections were already addressed in The Theory of
Communicative Action. Disagreement persists, above all, about Habermas’s
assertion that more than one kind of validity claim exists and that normative
and expressive issues admit rational elucidation in a similar way to questions
of truth. Accordingly, since publishing the book, Habermas has attempted to
lend additional clarity to the different types of discourse it outlines.
While the validity claim to truthfulness and the realm of aesthetics have
remained largely unexplored, Habermas has somewhat lessened the formal-
ism of his approach to moral issues (in Justification), and he has modified his
theory of truth (in Truth). Nothing in the three-dimensional concept of proce-
dural reason has fundamentally changed, however. Surprisingly, neither
Habermas nor his critics have addressed, in any detail, the relationship
between the three dimensions of rationality or the problem of how speech acts
can always be problematized in light of any one of them (Seel 1991); however, it
is just this ability to change and switch effortlessly and without constraint
between these different moments of reason that is at the core of Habermas’s
social philosophy.
The Theory of Action: The Concept of Communicative Action
To justify the intuition that social evolution unfolds as one-sided rationaliza-

tion, Habermas, obviously, cannot limit his inquiry to practices of speech.
Because social structures arise from contexts of (inter)action, he introduces—
as the second component of The Theory of Communicative Action—a sociologi-
cal perspective intended to demonstrate that communicative reason pervades
human activity (Handlungspraxis) in general.
Social actors themselves must necessarily impute rationality to the interac-
tions and exchanges in which they engage. Traditionally, sociology has
conceived human action too narrowly to grasp its rational aspects in their
entirety. As much is evident in the conventional conceptions of action, which
take actors’ relations to the world into account only selectively. Thus, the dom-
inant notions of teleological and strategic action restrict analysis to an actor’s
reference to the objective world: this framework permits for the rationality of
opinions and actions to be judged in terms of their truth and effectiveness.
The more demanding concept of norm-regulated action additionally allows us
to assess the legitimacy of motivations, actions, and norms, for it considers
how actors relate to both the objective and the social worlds. That said, how-
ever, such a perspective remains blind to the rationality of wishes and feelings
because it offers no way to conceptualize actors’ relations to the subjective
world. The concept of dramaturgical action is tailored to this aspect of action
by distinguishing between an inner and an outer world. But it does not oper-
ate with the distinction between the objective and the social world, on which
rests the actors’ ability to differentiate between facts and values.
Yet, under modern conditions, Habermas argues, social actors have devel-
oped a decentered understanding of self and world and take up relations to all
three worlds: the objective, the social, and the subjective. For this reason, he
continues, teleological, norm-regulated, and dramaturgic action represent
one-sided forms (Vereinseitigungen) or borderline cases of communicative
action, which encompass relations to all three worlds and, therefore, all ratio-
nalizable aspects of action (see chapter 45 in this volume).
Against received ideas, Habermas also chooses interaction as the point of
departure for his theory. The concepts of teleological, norm-regulated, and
dramaturgical action—as well as Max Weber’s typology of action (which dis-
tinguishes between affectual, value-rational, and instrumental action)—all
make the individual social actor the point of departure and reference.
Habermas, on the other hand, focuses on the mechanism for coordinating
action—that is, the ways and means that actions connect with one another.
In conjunction with Weber’s reflections, he distinguishes between the coor-
dination of action that occurs on the basis of shared interests, on the one
366 Texts
hand, and the coordination of action occurring through normative agree-

ment, on the other. Accordingly, he identifies two types of action. In Haber-
mas’s terminology, interaction between success-oriented actors is strategic
action, and interaction between understanding-oriented actors is communi-
cative action. In the first case, the coordination of action is based on con-
straint, asymmetries of power, or the coincidental agreement of egocentric
calculations of success; in the second case, however, it is based on an agree-
ment between partners about the situation at hand, which they interpret in
reference to the formal system of the three worlds.
Unlike strategic action—which occurs on the basis of empirical motivation
inasmuch as actors orient themselves to the advantages and disadvantages of
their options—communicative action derives its binding force, i.e., the coor-
dination of action, intrinsically from the actors’ rational motivations. This is
because communication (Verständigung) about a situation culminates in
agreement (Einverständnis) between those involved when they accept the
validity claims raised in the course of interpreting their circumstances. This
does not mean that communicative action requires disinterested social actors.
After all, to act is to pursue objectives. However, the mechanism whereby
actions are coordinated remains unaffected by this consideration. Parties act-
ing communicatively pursue their own goals on the basis of an understanding
of their situation, which is shared with regard to the truth of the relevant facts,
the normative rightness of social relations that come into play, and the truth-
fulness of those involved.
Further, it is important not to equate communicative action with speaking.
To begin with, language may be employed not just to communicative ends but
also to achieve success in a strategic capacity. (That said, Habermas considers
such use of language to derive from use that is understanding oriented; strate-
gic action, in his view, entertains a “parasitic” relation to communicative
action, the original mode of action.) What is more, consensus need not occur
in explicit fashion; to a great extent, social actors follow routines and under-
stand one another nonverbally. Only when there is disagreement about the
situation at hand is an open process of communication called for. This reflex-
ive form of communicative action is what Habermas calls discourse (see chap-
ter 53 in this volume).
The concept of communicative action has not only given rise to misunder-
standings but also to serious objections. Some critics have rejected Habermas’s
position that strategic action possesses only a derivative status relative to com-
municative action. Numerous authors have argued that—if nothing else—
Habermas has failed in his attempt to justify this derivative relation by
arguing that understanding-oriented language use is superordinate to suc-
cess-oriented use. Discussion has specifically focused on the speech-act
theoretical distinction between the content, the mode, and the effect of an
utterance and the relationship between these three—locutionary, illocution-

ary, and perlocutionary—components of speech acts (see chapter 6 in this
volume; cf. Culler 1985, Greve 1999, Skjei 1985, Habermas 1985).
These criticisms, however, usually do not take into account Habermas’s
sociotheoretical intention in distinguishing between the two types of action.
The distinction relates to the question whether force or the interests of ego-
centrically oriented actors are sufficient to produce social order—as, for
example, the advocates of “rational choice” maintain (following Thomas
Hobbes)—or whether the stability of society depends on the fact that its mem-
bers believe the standing order to be legitimate. Habermas, who follows Weber
on this point, maintains the latter. At the same time, however, he goes beyond
Weber in affirming that such belief depends on structures of linguistic com-
munication that allow distinction between acceptance that is merely factual
and justified agreement. Therefore—and contra suggestions coming from
the field of international relations (where his typology has been employed to
elucidate the difference between arguing and bargaining as distinct modes
of negotiation [see Niesen and Herborth 2007])—Habermas (2007, 423–424)
insists that norm-regulated action is a borderline case of communicative
action and does not constitute a separate type. In any event, the theoretical
position that the reproduction of the social order depends on more than stra-
tegic action—i.e., that it involves processes of understanding a communicative
action—is a matter distinct from the action-theoretical issue of which type of
action derives from the other.
Of greater significance is the problem of how to distinguish between the
two types of action, strategic and communicative. It is crucial to Habermas’s
argument that these are, in fact, two different types of action and not merely
analytically distinguishable aspects of action. In order to make this distinc-
tion, Habermas introduces two different criteria. The relationship between
these two criteria is in need of clarification. On the one hand, communicative
action and strategic action are distinguished with reference to the two differ-
ent mechanisms by which action is coordinated (shared understanding versus
force or overlapping interests). On the other, the orientations of the respective
actors (understanding oriented versus success oriented) are taken to be deci-
sive. However, both criteria only overlap when the parties involved in an inter-
action have identical orientations. Furthermore, it has also been observed that
Habermas’s (Truth) belated distinction between a “weak” notion of communi-
cation focused on understanding (Verständigung) and a strong conception
focused on agreement (Einverständnis) blurs its border with strategic action
(Schluchter 2007). The matter is problematic insofar as communicative
action can only function as a “carrier” of communicative rationality when
both types of action can be unambiguously distinguished. If elements of com-
munication and strategy are, in fact, interwoven (as, among others, Bourdieu
368 Texts
and Foucault have argued), and if “convincing” and “persuading” cannot be

rigorously distinguished (as Rorty has observed on multiple occasions), then
the validity basis of speech—i.e., its context-transcending force, which allows
one to articulate potentially universalistic claims—must remain limited or
distorted (McCarthy 1991a).
The Theory of Society: Lifeworld and System
Although Habermas develops his theory of society on the basis of social

action, he does not believe that societal relations can be adequately under-
stood by action-theoretical means alone (see chapter 59 in this volume). For
one, “society” has always been a resource for action. Moreover, the evolution
of social structures follows its own logic, which cannot be boiled down to
discrete, individual actions (and certainly not to the intentions of those who
perform them). Therefore, a theory of action must incorporate explicitly socio-
theoretical concepts. To this end, Habermas introduces the notion of the “life-
world” as the sociotheoretical counterpart to the concept of communicative
action.
The concept of lifeworld provides the key for understanding the structure
and developmental logic of society. At an initial level of reflection, it stands for
the concept of society as a whole. Habermas then derives a first conceptual
specification from the tradition of phenomenology in which the term “life-
world” refers, first of all, to the context-forming horizon of meanings in a
given situation. Here, “society” functions as a resource inasmuch as it provides
the unthematized “background knowledge” of action. Hereby, of course, the
term “knowledge” is imprecise insofar as the lifeworld is experienced as what
is simply given and self-evident. Only when meanings become problematic do
they turn into objects of conscious insight (Erkenntnis); in this process, how-
ever, they cease to be components of the lifeworld and become something “in
the world.”
In a next step, Habermas defines the structure of the lifeworld more pre-
cisely by arguing—in the course of discussing various traditions of social
theory—that interaction draws on further social resources apart from meanings,
namely, solidarities and capacities (or skills). Corresponding to this tripartite
scheme of resources—meaning (knowledge), solidarities (group member-
ships), and capacities (ego strength)—Habermas identifies three components
of the lifeworld: culture, society, and personality. (Rather confusingly, he
employs the term “society” in two ways: on the one hand, in a comprehensive
sense and, on the other, as an element of the lifeworld.) The three components
of the lifeworld offer the social resources that actors draw on when interacting
and that are themselves reproduced through communicative action.
As it reproduces, the lifeworld changes. In early societies, myths secured

the agreement that made it possible to coordinate action. The ritual practices
through which these societies reproduced were based on communicative
action; however, rooted in the sacred, their central institutions were immune
from questioning. It was only when worldviews came to be understood as
interpretations (that is, as something that could be criticized)—and only to
the extent that the formal reference system of the three worlds emerged
(whereby the three types of validity claim became distinct, so that, for exam-
ple, the existence or truth and the legitimacy or rightness of phenomena could
be judged independently of each other)—that communicative action was
free to develop its potential for rationality. Habermas calls this process the
“linguistification of the sacred”: taboos and traditions lose their imperative
force, and social realms become increasingly dependent on members of soci-
ety autonomously accepting—or rejecting—the validity claims offered by
tradition.
This process of rationalization is triggered by external circumstances—by
the fact, namely, that given their action-orienting conceptualizations social
actors fail, in actual praxis, to realize their objectives (e.g., a rain dance). In
this process, changes do not occur arbitrarily, for they are governed by the
logic of communication (die Logik der Verständigung). In structural terms,
this transformation takes the form, on the one hand, of a differentiation that
occurs between elements of the lifeworld (which, in early societies, are still for
the most part interwoven) and, on the other, of a formalization of culture,
society, and personality (i.e., the scientification of knowledge, the universal-
ization and proceduralization of law and morality, and the individualization
of the subject).
Habermas conceptualizes this process of social evolution along distinct
stages of sociocultural development (see chapters 12, 32, and 74 in this vol-
ume). This perspective is supposed to show that the modern understanding of
self and world—in contrast to the traditional viewpoint—is not just different
but also more reasonable. To this end, Habermas transfers the central assump-
tions of developmental psychology from ontogeny to phylogeny (see chapters
10, 65, and 72 in this volume). This operation is theoretically tenuous both
in view of doubts concerning the stage model of developmental psychology
(Gilligan 1982; cf. McCarthy 1982, Giddens 1985) and in view of the question
whether—given the historical multiplicity of courses of social development—
the concept of modernity should perhaps be abandoned and replaced by the
notion of “multiple modernities” (Eisenstadt 2000).
Although increased rationality and heightened autonomy entail a greater
risk of dissent, Habermas maintains that the process of modernization does
not merely increase the danger that coordinated action will fail—simultane-
ously, it produces a remedy for such risk. Differentiation between the objective
370 Texts
and the social world—as well as the corresponding differentiation between the
validity claims of truth and rightness—generates a type of action that is not
dependent on legitimation. Only at this historical stage can success-oriented
action disembed itself from understanding-oriented action, can strategic
action develop independently of communicative action, i.e., as a distinct type.
Moreover, the process of rationalization has produced an instrument—mod-
ern formal law (Formalrecht)—that makes it possible to shift the reproduction
of specific social realms from social integration based on communicative
action to the alternative mechanism of system integration, which is compati-
ble with strategic action. The mechanism of system integration, in contrast to
that of social integration, is not based on coordinating partners’ intentions
but on the functional integration of the results of their actions. Thereby, the
shift from social to systemic integration relieves actors of the demands of
understanding (Verständigung), i.e., of every interaction depending on those
involved reaching a shared understanding of their situation. In this context,
the function of modern law is to anchor administrative power as well as money
within the society component of the lifeworld. This is possible through the
legal constitution of hierarchies (office-bound authorizations to issue direc-
tives), on the one hand, and the legal institutionalization of the right to prop-
erty and freedom of contract, on the other. The social institutionalization of
these “delinguistified” media of communication, which permit the coordination
of success-oriented actions, established the preconditions for the development of
the modern administrative state and the capitalist economic system. Freed
from the demand for understanding (Verständigung), the realms of material
social reproduction uncouple themselves from the lifeworld, which in turn
yields the private and public spheres; henceforth, the lifeworld encompasses
only the symbolic reproduction of society.
Accordingly, Habermas describes social development as a two-step process
of differentiation. First, the components of the lifeworld disentangle; then, the
subsystems “economy” and “state” disconnect themselves from the lifeworld
(see chapter 49 in this volume). Whereas the symbolic reproduction of society
necessarily relies on communicative action—meaning, solidarities, and skills
cannot be prescribed but must instead emerge on the basis of agreement (Ein-
verständnis)—administrative and economic functions can, in principle, be
easily and efficiently performed through systematic mechanisms (which
replace the need for understanding [Verständigung]). Habermas, then, does
not consider the administrative state or the market economy problematic
per se.
No aspect of Habermas’s writings has drawn sharper attacks than his
appropriation of systems-theoretical concepts. Behind the attacks stands the
assumption that systems theory is incapable of offering social criticism (Mis-
geld 1985). Such suspicion is surprising in view of the fact that the Marxian
perspective represents a combination of action and systems theory similar to

what one finds in The Theory of Communicative Action (Brunkhorst 1983),
which defines society, in general terms, as a “systematically stabilized complex
of actions of socially integrated groups” (Communicative Action, 2:233). All the
same, a difference exists inasmuch as Habermas employs the two theoretical
vocabularies in reference to modern societies not only analytically but also
assigns these vocabularies to different realms of society. Even the analytical
distinction he makes—according to which symbolic reproduction can be
grasped more fully in terms of action theory and material reproduction in
terms of systems theory—has not gone unchallenged. Thus, it has been pro-
posed that a more nuanced action-theoretical approach would better grasp the
relationship between unintended side effects of action and the autonomiza-
tion (Verselbständigung) of social structures (Joas 1991).
What, however, has been viewed as the true betrayal of the tradition of crit-
ical theory—which, after all, Habermas has explicitly claimed to renew (see
chapter 2 in this volume)—is the fact that, for those societies where the system
and lifeworld have uncoupled, he assigns an “essentialist” meaning to the dis-
tinction between system integration and social integration (Habermas 1991,
254). This does not mean that actors in economic and administrative contexts
adopt exclusively objectivating attitudes or that they act in purely strategic
fashion. After all, Habermas defines the categories of system and lifeworld not
in terms of the difference between strategic and communicative action but in
terms of the difference between social integration and system integration.
Even though such a tendency does exist in the systemically integrated spheres
of modern society, communicative action certainly occurs in the operations of
economy and state. However, because these realms are legally constituted,
communicative rationality is deprived of its foundation, and partners in inter-
action can always adopt strategic attitudes when conflict arises: superiors
need not justify themselves, and buyers and sellers can keep their motives to
themselves—either way, administration and the market continue to function.
It is in precisely this sense, then, that administration and markets form realms
of “norm-free sociality” (Communicative Action, 2:307). Furthermore, Habermas’s
distinction between system and lifeworld obtains an essentialist meaning also
insofar as he abandons the Marxian project of overcoming the differentiation
of the economy and state from the lifeworld (e.g., through council democracy
and planned economies). At the core of these objections lies Habermas’s con-
tention that the systemic integration of state and economy is not only efficient
but also unproblematic (McCarthy 1991b). Moreover, the question arises
whether the tools of systems theory do not lead to an overly “harmonistic”
conception of the realms of material reproduction—whether, that is, systems
theory does not lack the means to identify the crisis tendencies that provide
the focus of Marxian analysis (Berger 1991).
372 Texts
Habermas’s distinction between system and lifeworld, it has been claimed,

not only immunizes economy and state against critique but also paints an
idealized picture of the lifeworld that emphasizes communication, under-
standing, and consensus while masking dissent, power, and violence (Hon-
neth 1993; Luhmann 2000, 54). In particular, feminist scholars have put the
matter in concrete terms (see chapter 22 in this volume). Thus, Nancy Fraser
(1995) has emphasized that The Theory of Communicative Action conceals the
unpaid work that is traditionally performed by women within the family—for
example, raising children. Accordingly, she “calls for theoretical tools that
enable one to identify the mechanisms on which patriarchal rule is founded,
whether in the family unit or within the official economy. To this end, one
needs concepts that identify forms of power besides those that are formalized
in administrative structures” (Cohen 1995).
Such critiques, however, overlook the fact that Habermas (1991; Between
Facts and Norms) has offered a way to conceptualize social power that is based
on unequal resources—even if he has done so in a more detailed fashion only
in his later writings (see chapters 13 and 67 in this volume). Indeed, he assumes
that phenomena of domination and repression are the norm, both in the con-
texts of the lifeworld and of the systems. Yet why does The Theory of Commu-
nicative Action hardly pay attention to such repressive structures? Habermas
obviously considers other aspects of modern societies to be of greater impor-
tance for a critical theory of society. Why is this the case?
Diagnosis of the Times: Colonization of the Lifeworld
Although he breaks with the traditional Marxist critique of capitalism and the
state, Habermas does not claim that social development occurs harmoniously
and free of conflict. Rather, he has long argued that modernization represents
a pathological process of one-sided rationalization. Indeed, The Theory of
Communicative Action pursues the goal of identifying specifically modern
social ills. To this end, Habermas explicitly aligns himself with Marxism inas-
much as he seeks to update Lukács’s analysis of reification and the project of
critical theory as conceived by Horkheimer and Adorno. Equally, he holds fast
to the notion that it is capitalism and the state apparatus that trigger contem-
porary phenomena of reification.
How can the uncoupling of system and lifeworld count, on the one hand,
as unproblematic and be interpreted in terms of evolutionary progress while,
on the other hand, it is this very process that produces the pathologies of
modern societies? For Habermas, two different scenarios are possible, in
principle. Which of these prevails, to him, depends on whether law—through
which the systems are anchored in the lifeworld—functions to “subject system
maintenance to the normative restrictions of the lifeworld” or, alternatively,

whether it turns into the Trojan Horse through which the economic-adminis-
trative complex succeeds in “[subordinating] the lifeworld to the systemic con-
straints of material reproduction and thereby ‘mediatizing’ it” (Communicative
Action, 2:185–186). According to Habermas, the second scenario predominates.
His name for this state of affairs is “colonization of the lifeworld” (see chapter
44 in this volume). Hereby, the private and public spheres (which represent the
institutional orders of the lifeworld) are subjected to media foreign to their
structure: “money” and “administrative power.” The processes of monetiza-
tion and bureaucratization are evident inasmuch as private parties become
consumers of what the market offers, and citizens the clients of services pro-
vided by the welfare state; autonomy is damaged, and pathological phenom-
ena such as identity crises and alienation occur (see chapter 73 in this
volume).
Habermas elaborates this view in conjunction with Weber’s pessimistic
assessment of modernization as a process that necessarily entails the loss of
freedom and the loss of meaning. This is the basis for a common reading,
according to which The Theory of Communicative Action presents a double
diagnosis of pathology: on the one hand, the colonization of the lifeworld,
whereby freedom is damaged, and, on the other, the desiccation of meaning
resources (cf., e.g., Celikates and Pollmann 2006, Cooke 1994, Kneer 1990,
Strecker and Schaal 2015).
However, this line of interpretation underestimates the complexity of
Habermas’s colonization thesis, and it cannot explain its key position in the
theoretical framework that he constructs. Given the relative lack of attention
that Habermas pays to other problems—for example, the aforementioned phe-
nomena of domination and “classic” issues such as income distribution, social
inequality, and poverty—the matter warrants explanation.
The colonization thesis has its roots, first of all, in the dynamics of the
rationalization of the lifeworld: its elements undergo differentiation, the ways
the world is understood become decentered, and worldviews come to be for-
malized. This process of rationalization makes it possible for societies to
achieve a higher measure of complexity—which then culminates, under mod-
ern conditions, in the uncoupling of the systems and the lifeworld. Set free
from the lifeworld, the systemically integrated realms then develop an “irre-
sistible internal dynamic” (Communicative Action, 2:327). To explain this
dynamic, Habermas takes up the theory of late capitalism developed by Claus
Offe (1972, 1973; cf. Legitimation Crisis; see chapters 31 and 61 in this volume).
Offe’s core idea is that the postliberal epoch of capitalism has not over-
come the crisis-proneness inherent in the process of accumulation; at the
same time, however, this tendency toward crisis has ceased to manifest itself
in a way that immediately concerns economic matters. Because of governmental
374 Texts
intervention and policies that seek to counter cycles of boom and bust, crisis has
been displaced into the political realm. Under the influence of Keynesianism—
which became the official program of the German Federal Republic in the
1960s (when comprehensive steering [Globalsteuerung] was introduced) and,
indeed, dominated policies in the industrialized West up to the oil crisis—it
was widely assumed that economic crises could be effectively cushioned by
political measures. In this context, according to the theory of late capitalism,
standards of living came to be understood as dependent upon the decisions
of state actors; considering the “indissoluble tension” (Communicative
Action, 2:345) between capitalism and democracy, this politicization of liv-
ing standards poses a threat to state actors who have to fear the withdrawal
of legitimacy, i.e., the loss of political support, if state intervention into the
economy stops short of overcoming the injustice of capitalist appropriation.
The political response, Habermas observes, involves increasingly detailed
programs for administering society. The intuition that politics might actu-
ally succeed thereby—a notion that seems strange today but that still had an
empirical point of reference when The Theory of Communicative Action was
written (insofar as governmental planning schemes had become encompass-
ing to an extent almost incomprehensible today)—provides the background
for his colonization thesis: the idea, à la Adorno, of a thoroughly adminis-
tered world, in which only success in terms of money and power mean
anything.
Entirely in keeping with Marxist tradition, Habermas locates the reason for
the colonization of the lifeworld in the insurmountable crisis dynamic inher-
ent in capitalism. But unlike Marx, he believes—because state and society
have become intertwined—that this dynamic no longer produces direct
effects. Instead, it does so in mediated form: through acts of political interven-
tion. The Theory of Communicative Action describes the process by examining
the juridification by the welfare state, which it critiques from the left.
Hereby, Habermas analyzes how the welfare state eliminates the explosive
potential of economic crises by curtailing extreme forms of misery (such as
were typical of capitalism in the stage of industrialization) through transfer
payments and similar measures. Because such social policy operates through
administrative classifications of persons and living circumstances, it trans-
forms the recipients of social services into objects of paternalistic measures.
Moreover, insofar as the compensation provided by the welfare state takes the
form of payments, bureaucratization promotes monetizing tendencies. These
measures, in turn (and in contrast, according to Habermas, to their effects in
economic and administrative contexts), impair the lifeworld in that they
promote objectivating attitudes in matters of personal identity, group mem-
bership, and solidarity, as well as meaningful orientations; by the same token,
they repress expressive orientations (i.e., attitudes that would enable the
disadvantaged to interpret the situation on their own terms) as well as norma-

tive orientations (i.e., the grounds for arguments about a fair regulation of
society).
However, the structural pressure exercised by delinguistified media of
communication to adopt objectivating attitudes—which Habermas calls the
“technicization [Technisierung] of the lifeworld”—concerns more than the
phenomena to which the term “colonization” is applied: it already comes into
play with the decoupling of the state and the market from the lifeworld. Yet
Habermas claims that reifying colonization does not occur as soon as money
and administrative power are uncoupled; rather, it happens when they reach
beyond the borders of the economy and the state. His argument rests on equat-
ing two different conceptualizations of the distinction between system and
lifeworld. On the one hand, Habermas explains the matter in terms of the dis-
tinction between material and symbolic social reproduction; on the other, he
does so through the contrast between different social realms: economy and
state versus the private and public spheres.
Equating these two conceptualizations of system and lifeworld is implau-
sible (Fraser 1995), however. As mentioned, the private sphere is in no way free
of aspects of material reproduction. Moreover, economic and administrative
realms of action touch on processes of symbolic reproduction. Hardly any-
thing in modern societies determines the orientations, solidarities, and identi-
ties of individuals more strongly than professional situations. Unlike social
realms (economy and administration as well as the private and the public), the
functions of material and symbolic reproduction can only be separated ana-
lytically. Consequently, Habermas’s thesis—that the formation of the market
and the state as institutions is unproblematic (at least in principle) and that the
mere penetration of money and administrative power into the private and
public spheres generates pathologies—cannot hold (Kneer 1990).
All the same, Habermas’s argument that modernization need not occur
pathologically—i.e., that technicization of the lifeworld does not represent
colonization in every instance—retains its validity, notwithstanding unten-
able substantive claims (e.g., the claim that the juridification of the welfare
state damages the symbolic reproduction of society whereas the institutional-
ized practice of wage labor does not). Phenomena of colonization stand at the
center of The Theory of Communicative Action because they represent a spe-
cific type of social problem. Habermas does not go into illegitimate forms of
social power (e.g., patriarchal family structures), because he assumes that
those involved can discern these forms of distorted communication and prob-
lematize them on their own. This is not possible in the case of colonization,
however (Kneer 1990). The delinguistified media of money and power do not
simply distort communication—they displace it entirely. Therefore, they elim-
inate, from the inception, all efforts that might be made to clarify, through
376 Texts
discourse, disputed aspects of interactive contexts (Iser 2008). It follows that

critiquing phenomena of colonization—which is not the same as critiquing
strategic action or instrumental rationality but rather addresses matters of
functionalist reason—requires a social-theoretical framework. The theme of
displaced communication and the accompanying danger that social impera-
tives will be followed without motivation, it should be added, are recurrent
motifs in Habermas’s writings, which extend from his critique of the “tech-
nocracy” thesis (see chapter 28 in this volume), through his debate with Luh-
mann (see chapter 11), up to his intervention on the cloning of human life (see
chapter 58).
Weber’s thesis on the loss of meaning proves decisive for the way Haber-
mas grounds the categorical distinction between distorted and displaced
communication. Just as the growth dynamics of the systems facilitates the
(potentially problematic) technicization of the lifeworld, the dynamic of
rationalization has the potential to impoverish the lifeworld in cultural
terms. The structural reason for this threat involves the fact that the scienti-
zation of the three spheres of rationality results in the institutional separation
of expert cultures from everyday communication. Cultural impoverishment
is manifested in the desolation of resources of meaning and in the fragmenta-
tion of everyday consciousness, which—because it cannot (re)connect with
currently valid knowledge—proves incapable of producing appropriate inter-
pretations of social contexts as a whole. As a result, the technicization of the
lifeworld expands ceaselessly because it has become impossible to discern
when objectifying attitudes are appropriate and in which cases they must be
restricted:
It is only with this that the conditions for a colonization of the lifeworld are
met. When stripped of their ideological veils, the imperatives of autonomous
subsystems make their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial
masters coming into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation
upon it. The diffused perspectives of the local culture cannot be sufficiently
coordinated to permit the play of the metropolis and the world market to be
grasped from the periphery.
For all that, however, cultural impoverishment of the lifeworld need not
automatically occur. According to Habermas, a vigorous public sphere (see
chapter 69 in this volume) may avert this development, for it reconnects expert
cultures to everyday communication. In this context, Habermas also grants
philosophy a decisive role (see chapter 34), for it is capable of enriching the
public sphere by translating expert knowledge back into familiar terms and
offering interpretations both of the process of rationalization and of the
problems of technicization and the cultural impoverishment of the lifeworld.

Thus, philosophy may interpret the protest that occurs in new social move-
ments as a form of defensive struggle against the colonization of the lifeworld
(for critical commentary, see Cohen 1995); in so doing, it contributes to a bet-
ter understanding of social ills:
As far as philosophy is concerned, it might do well to refurbish its link with

the totality by taking on the role of interpreter on behalf of the lifeworld. It
might then be able to help set in motion the interplay between the cognitive-
instrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive dimensions that has
come to a standstill today like a tangled mobile.
(Moral Consciousness, 18–19)
Of course, the reflections offered by philosophy represent only further

voices among others in public discourse. It is excessive to assume that the
members of society are, as a matter of principle, unable to develop a proper
understanding of colonization phenomena on their own. In this light, the
question whether (or to what extent) the educational system should be coupled
with economic interests—an issue Habermas considers representative of the
conflicts concerning the colonization of the lifeworld—may be viewed as a
struggle for reasonable educational goals and undistorted contexts of interac-
tion and communication. In this context, arguments of all kinds should be
voiced, and no single category ought to prevail for structural reasons alone.
Yet there hardly exists the danger that communication will be displaced
entirely, resulting in an incapacity to qualify objectifying orientations by
bringing normative and expressive attitudes into play.
What is more, realms that are constituted as systems do not repress the
mechanism of understanding (Verständigungsmechanismus) entirely: although
communicative action is restricted in the workings of the state and economy
(insofar as actors can escape obligations of justification), these systems are
anchored in the lifeworld through law and therefore admit modification
through democratic processes.
The law, then, need not degenerate into the gate through which system
imperatives invade the lifeworld; it can also be used as an instrument for exer-
cising democratic influence on the spheres of economy and administration.
As a complement to the diagnosis of the times presented in The Theory of
Communicative Action—which concerns the current condition (Ist-Zustand)
of Western industrial societies—Between Facts and Norms, Habermas’s main
work of legal and democratic theory, has discussed what the ideal state (Soll-
Zustand) would look like. Hence, the primary difference between both these
works concerns their opposite perspectives on the relationship between sys-
tem and lifeworld (Strecker and Schaal 2015).
378 Texts
To be sure, the changes in Habermas’s conception of law have entailed

important modifications to his overall theory. For one, Habermas now main-
tains that the guarantee of basic rights with regard to the constitution of the
public sphere is sufficient to guard against the dystopia of a context of total
delusion and that it moreover assures “a potential for self-transformation”
(Facts, 374; see chapter 70 in this volume). With respect to this modification,
the thesis about the special status of colonization in relation to other social ills
cannot be maintained. Thus, the last orthodox remnant is relinquished that
connected Habermas’s works (if only in rudimentary fashion) with the notion
that a sociocritical avant-garde should “show the way” to the masses. Sec-
ond, whereas The Theory of Communicative Action held that social-welfare
programs, inasmuch as they understand social law in paternalistic terms,
necessarily have colonizing effects and are therefore to be viewed as inherently
ambivalent (i.e., because they assure and impair freedom at the same time),
Between Facts and Norms has eliminated the dichotomy between classical,
formal law and regulative, social law by introducing the category of reflective
law and presenting a theory of deliberative democracy; these additions
are intended to show how the law can empower parties affected by adminis-
trative decisions to take influence on the same regulations that, according to
Habermas’s earlier work, held them at the state’s mercy (see chapter 3 in this
volume).
Thus, the model presented in Between Facts and Norms does not replace
the diagnosis offered in The Theory of Communicative Action; instead, it out-
lines the therapy against colonization (Strecker 2009)—i.e., against tendencies
of bureaucratization and monetization that, possibly, are now more dominant
than ever (Celikates and Pollmann 2006). At the same time, it is worth noting
that even when The Theory of Communicative Action was published—as is cer-
tainly the case today, notwithstanding the resurgence of “deficit spending”—a
theory of late capitalism inspired by Keynes could not adequately explain phe-
nomena of colonization. Such an approach can grasp neither the paternalistic
programs of “compassionate conservatism” nor the “stimulus politics” (Aktiv-
ierungspolitik) of workfare programs that attend economic deregulation. What
is more, the theory fails to explain why the legitimation crises that had been
predicted did not, for the most part, occur—even though political measures
have hardly managed to cushion economic crises (which have, if anything,
achieved new dimensions).
Social Theory Today
If many elements of The Theory of Communicative Action are hardly present in

current debates, its fundamental principle of construction plays no role at all.
Precisely this feature, however, points the way out of the dead ends to which
the approaches that are now dominant have led (for an extensive discussion of
the following, see Strecker 2012). Habermas’s social theory also stands in the
tradition of western Marxism inasmuch as it proposes to enlighten members
of society about ills of which they are not even aware. The tradition of ideology
critique, in seeking to raise consciousness about power relations that have not
been identified as such, developed a conception of theory along the lines of a
perspectival dualism. Hereby, the observer of social phenomena adopts an
objectivating attitude and, from this standpoint, offers hypotheses about
social mechanisms that prevent actors (e.g., through false consciousness) from
arriving at an undistorted, authentic, and autonomous understanding of
social conditions and problems. However, unlike what orthodox Marxism and
its notions of an avant-garde affirm, the matter of whether these hypotheses
are accurate depends on those social participants concerned with recognizing
them as correct from their performative perspective. Only in breaking with
the perspective of a participant can one lift the veil of reification, but the
observer’s perspective allows only for hypotheses and is qualified by the par-
ticipant’s perspective, which remains primary.
Ideology critique of the “classic” variety founders on the matter of indicat-
ing the conditions (conventionally designated as “revolutionary”) under which
members of society can pronounce an undistorted assessment of observers’
hypotheses. The Theory of Communicative Action solves the problem by
shifting the focus from the philosophy of consciousness to the philosophy of
language and by transforming the critique of ideology into a critique of condi-
tions of communication (Verständigungsverhältnisse): thereby, the idea of
society as a self-enlightening—but potentially blinded—collective subject is
replaced by a conception of discursive and democratic procedures (based on
communicative rationality) that makes it possible for members of society to
clarify their needs and demands as a plural entity of diverse individuals.
Yet Habermas still maintained, in The Theory of Communicative Action,
that his theory was both obligated and able to determine phenomena of reifi-
cation beyond doubt—a residual element of orthodoxy going back to the
notion that social theorists possess a higher degree of insight. In subsequent
writings, he came to reject this position unequivocally. Now, Habermas views
the distinction between the perspectives of the participant and the observer,
which aims at opening systematically distorted or veiled power relations to
critique, strictly in methodological terms. He rejects the possibility of assign-
ing different kinds of actors to any one perspective—even if the social theorist
undoubtedly has an important role in the democratic public sphere, in prin-
ciple, every person makes use of both perspectives.
No one has made perspectival dualism the central principle of social theory
more than Habermas. Yet such a view plays no decisive role in the current
380 Texts
array of social-theoretical projects. At one end of the spectrum stand positions

exemplified by Luhmann (1997), who totalizes the observer’s perspective; the
problem here is that it is impossible to answer—or even conceptualize—the
questions that members of society invariably ask one another (which, needless
to say, also structure what they expect in terms of sociotheoretical “enlighten-
ment”). The other end of the spectrum is occupied by positions that recognize
only the participant’s perspective—e.g., Axel Honneth’s efforts to renew criti-
cal theory (1996); here, it remains undecided how to account for the reification
phenomena that result from the autonomization of social processes—i.e.,
those that “happen behind the backs” or “go over the heads” of social actors
(and which are the focus of critical theory in its traditional form). It remains to
be seen whether this approach—which has been developed primarily in a phil-
osophical context—will be enriched by suitable sociological tools of analysis,
as has once been indicated (Hartmann 2002); these need not be provided by
systems theory (as is the case for Habermas), but some kind of functional
equivalent will prove necessary.
Between these extremes stands a conception that, at first glance, reveals
many points of similarity with Habermas’s theory of communicative action.
Bourdieu (1992) also distinguishes between the perspectives of participant and
observer (which, by his account, have structured the development of sociology
as a whole), and he makes the difference between them his point of theoretical
departure. Bourdieu also develops a social theory that focuses on uncovering
power relations that have not yet been identified as such. However, instead of
holding the two perspectives separate and attempting to mediate between
them, he elaborates an “alternative” that supposedly transcends them both. This
“logic of practice,” however, makes both perspectives collapse into the other—
with the result that neither of them receives its due. On the one hand—with
arguments derived from the sociology of knowledge—Bourdieu devalues the
insights of the social-scientist observer, whose standpoint he assimilates to the
one occupied by participants. On the other hand, when seeking to account for
the participant perspective, he possesses no vocabulary beyond the objectifying
terminology developed for the observer perspective—in this respect, the partici-
pant is equated with the observer. Although the notion of communicative action
hardly features in current debate on the matter, then, Habermas’s model still
offers the greatest prospects for renewing the enterprise of social theory.
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36
THE DISCOURSE THEORY OF
MORALIT Y
“Discourse Ethics—Notes on a Program of Philosophical
Justification” (1983)
RAINER FORST
D
iscourse Ethics—Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justifi-
cation,” which was written on the occasion of Karl-Otto Apel’s
sixtieth birthday and subsequently appeared in Moral Conscious-
ness and Communicative Action, offers a programmatic and comprehensive
account of Habermas’s approach to discourse ethics. The text synthesizes a
number of the author’s writings since the early 1970s and provides the point of
departure for a range of further discussions and revisions of the discourse
theory of morality. Although Habermas developed this theory together with
Apel, here he also discusses key points on which his view differs from Apel’s
transcendental pragmatics.
Before proceeding, a few clarifying conceptual remarks are in order: “Dis-
course ethics” stands for a theory of morality in the Kantian tradition. Its
most important feature, however, is that it replaces the reflective evaluation of
moral maxims in light of the Categorical Imperative with a process of
argumentatively redeeming validity claims about moral norms in practical
discourse. Methodologically, transcendental Kantian self-reflection of practi-
cal reason yields to the pragmatic reconstruction of the normative implica-
tions of communicative rationality.
The Development of the Theory
Discourse ethics can be located in the context of Habermas’s philosophy of

language (or his theory of different validity claims), his theory of development
of “postconventional” moral consciousness (in the wake of Lawrence Kohl-
berg), and his philosophy of law and democracy (in which practical discourses
play a central role). Yet the project originated in Habermas’s reflections on
epistemology and sociology—specifically, in his reflections on theories of
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truth, on the one hand, and his analysis of legitimation problems under late
capitalism, on the other.
In “Wahrheitstheorien” (Theories of truth, 1972), Habermas offered his
first sustained analysis—along the lines of universal pragmatics—of the dif-
ferent validity claims of comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness, and rightness
(Vorstudien, 138). Here, he argued that claims to moral rightness are to be
redeemed in practical discourse such that general prescriptions (Sollsätze) can
be appropriately justified (146). Under conditions assessed in terms of an ideal
speech situation (which is defined by the absence of factors distorting com-
munication), it should be possible for free and equal discourse participants to
seek forms of consensus that, in turn, can rationally motivate the observance
of norms (176–177).
In Legitimation Crisis (1973), the idea of rational—i.e., discursively
justified—compliance is meant both to explain crises of legitimation and to
perform ideology critique. The process of social transformation gives rise to
post-traditional expectations of legitimacy, and these point to practical dis-
courses for which few possibilities and places exist under late capitalism—
either in terms of institutional structures or in the realm of socially prevailing
justifications. In order to critique ideologies that mistakenly assume the gen-
eralizability of interests and that, in so doing, legitimate existing relations,
Habermas requires a “capacity of practical questions for truth” (Legitimation,
101ff.) according to the sole principle “in which practical reason expresses
itself”—the principle of “universalization” (108). The procedural idea of ratio-
nal argumentation in practical discourses serves as a critical foil for distin-
guishing “justifiable norms . . . from norms that merely stabilize relations of
force” (111).
In developing his argument, Habermas refers to Apel’s (1980) idea of the “a
priori of the communication community” and to the constructivist approaches
of Paul Lorenzen and Oswald Schwemmer (Legitimation, 109ff.). Both these
projects explain how the validity of moral norms is based on a situation of
communication or discussion (Beratung) that generates the capacity for gener-
alization through discourse. Lorenzen (1969) calls this the principle of “trans-
subjectivity.” Apel, on the other hand, locates it in a dialectic that unfolds
between “real” and “ideal” communication communities:
For anyone who engages in argument automatically presupposes two things:

first, a real communication community whose member he has become
through a process of socialization, and second, an ideal communication
community that would basically be capable of adequately understanding
the meaning of his arguments and judging their truth in a definitive
manner.
(Apel 1980, 280)
“Discourse Ethics—Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification” 385
The latter is the decisive a priori, which, inasmuch as it is “the elimination of

all socially determined asymmetries of interpersonal dialogue” (283), tran-
scends society as it stands and entails corresponding ethical duties.
Habermas’s Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (1976) con-
siders the formation of postconventional morality, which leads to communica-
tive ethics from an ontogenetic and a phylogenetic perspective. In both these
respects, Habermas traces the formation of corresponding attitudes and iden-
tities through processes of personal and cultural development, paying espe-
cially close attention to the modes of rationalization that enable social actors
to regulate conflicts through communication and consensus (Rekonstruktion,
34). Kohlberg’s developmental psychology of moral consciousness offers
Habermas the means to interpret the highest stage of principle-oriented
reflection in terms of discourse (84–85).
Finally, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) brings together the
various strands of theory that Habermas elaborated in the 1970s, culminating
in a theory of communicative rationality and the differentiation of the dimen-
sions of validity (or alternative modes of relating to the world) that character-
ize modernity—even in its inner contradictions. The study remains focused
throughout on questions of social theory, where practical discourses come up
chiefly as a reflective mode of communicative action oriented to understand-
ing (Communicative Action, 2:92ff.). Discrete considerations of moral philoso-
phy are not examined in this context; this is what Habermas addresses in the
1983 article on discourse ethics.
The Program of Philosophical Justification
The work is divided into three parts, which are devoted to the phenomenology
of morality, the universal-pragmatic program of justification, and the critical
engagement with Apel’s transcendental pragmatics, respectively.
Habermas situates his project in the tradition of Kantian, cognitivist ethics,
which holds on to the claim that practical questions are capable of truth and,
more specifically, seeks to see such questions answered through a process of
impartial argumentation that takes place among free and equal autonomous
subjects. In Habermas’s estimation, John Rawls’s theory of justice exemplifies
this perspective (as do the projects of Apel and Lorenzen). All the same, he
does not take up the matter by analyzing communicative-practical reason
along the lines of formal pragmatics. Instead, his point of departure is Peter
Strawson’s discussion of moral reactions. Strawson explains how moral
reproaches—which can only be examined from the perspective of partici-
pants—bring the parties involved into a situation of justification that points
to the cognitive content of morality (Moral Consciousness, 49). Here, the
386 Texts
language game of morality can be understood only inasmuch as one presup-

poses that a moral reproach is justifiable and that the individual who has done
wrong could have discerned and should have observed the reasons articulated.
Even in the most personal realm of moral relations and conflicts, then, the
“superpersonal” or, better, “interpersonal” aspect of moral norms—that is,
their discursive justifiability—becomes evident. Being “supposed” to do some-
thing (etwas tun “sollen”) means having “good” or “binding” reasons for a certain
course of action. The space of morality is a space of reasons—which, accord-
ing to Habermas, speaks against emotivist or decisionist approaches.
At the same time, Habermas stresses that normative statements cannot be
taken as descriptive statements. “Truth capacity” (Wahrheitsfähigkeit) means
something different in each case. Thus, when referring to practical norms, he
prefers to speak of validity claims that are “analogous to truth” (56). But what
form does justification of this kind of norm assume?
Here, it is helpful to distinguish between two questions of justification
(Wingert 1993, part 3; Forst 2012, chap. 1). On the one hand—and this consid-
eration is of central importance—there is the question of how to justify moral
norms in terms of the claim(s) to validity they make. On the other hand, there
is also the question of how the very principles underlying this justification—
i.e., the principle of universalization (or, alternatively, of discourse)—must or
can be justified, which Habermas addresses in his discussion of Apel.
Regarding the first question of justification, Habermas proposes to begin
with a reconstruction of “the logic of moral argumentation” (Moral Conscious-
ness, 57) and, in so doing, to analyze practical validity claims that are always
already raised in communicative action. Moral norms take the form of univer-
sal, unconditional “ought” sentences (e.g., “One ought not to kill anybody”).
Unlike factual claims, they do not record a social fact (e.g., “Human beings
observe the norm that no one should kill anyone”); rather, they raise the claim
of being rationally justifiable to reasonable people at any time. They are, in
other words, “worthy of recognition.”
These considerations set the course for Habermas’s proceduralistic and
deontological theory of morality. Moral norms are to be justified rationally—in
such a way that those norms are excluded that “could not meet with the quali-
fied assent of all who are or might be affected by it” (Moral Consciousness, 63).
Accordingly, he reformulates the Kantian Categorical Imperative. Although
the capacity for generality is still at issue, it does not concern subjective max-
ims that are reflexively evaluated; instead, it concerns norms, which are (or
should be) the object of practical discourse(s). Moreover, the reflexive model
of “exchanging roles” no longer proves sufficient. Rather, what is important
for a morally valid norm is that “all affected can accept the consequences and
the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the
satisfaction of everyone’s interest (and these consequences are preferred to

those of known alternative possibilities for regulation)” (65). This is the prin-
ciple of universalization (U), which Habermas introduces as a rule of argu-
mentation for practical discourses.
In contrast to Rawls, for example, who seeks to justify norms on the basis of
an “original position,” which obliges parties to be impartial inasmuch as they
are unaware of their personal and social advantages/disadvantages (Rawls
2005), Habermas stresses the discursive character of morality. In so doing,
however, he also insists on the dialectical relation between an ideal situation of
discourse and discourses as they actually occur. As much as the latter are nec-
essary for consensus or for the incorporation of all relevant perspectives, an
ideal criterion of “acceptability” inhabits claims to moral rightness, and it can
be fully redeemed only under conditions of real generality and undistorted
communication.
In contrast to a semantic reduction of the dimension of validity, Habermas
insists on the pragmatic aspect of the justification of norms, i.e., that they are
generated by way of acceptable reasoned arguments (Moral Consciousness, 71).
He understands justification as a communicative practice whereby practical
discourses do not arrive at compromise between competing interests—as it
occurs in empiricist understandings of morality—but at shared (or shareable)
grounds (Begründungen).
While the cognitivist and proceduralistic aspects of Habermas’s theory
therefore refer to each other, its deontological quality follows from a reflection
on the object domain (Gegenstandsbereich) of morality. Following in the Kan-
tian tradition, the theory entertains a narrow concept of morality that limits
itself to norms of right (or just) action and does not address questions of the
“good life” in the same way. To elucidate this point, Habermas employs the
terminological distinction between “morality” and “ethics,” or, more precisely,
between moral norms and ethical values (since philosophical reflection on
morality is conventionally called “ethics”). What stands at issue in the first
place is only the strict, categorical validity of moral norms that are recipro-
cally and generally binding and claimable, while ethical values raise a differ-
ent claim to validity—one that is redeemed more with reference to specific
ways of life and individual biographies. (Habermas’s writings on discourse
ethics do not analyze this point in further detail.) The principle of universal-
ization (U) performs, according to Habermas, “razor-sharp cuts . . . between
the good and the just” (104); in this context, the term justice must be under-
stood in the sense of moral rightness—not in terms of political or social justice.
Postconventional morality, as Habermas sketches it (following Kohlberg), is
characterized by the fact that, while it is indeed located within a communica-
tive lifeworld, it generates its binding force in a critical and reflexive way and
388 Texts
not from traditions or a particular way of life. Accordingly, discourse ethics

entails the idea of “differentiation within the practical”:
Moral questions can in principle be decided rationally, i.e. in terms of justice

or the generalizability of interest. Evaluative questions present themselves at
the most general level as issues of the good life (or of self-realization); they are
accessible to rational discussion only within the unproblematic horizon of a
concrete historical form of life or the conduct of an individual life.
(108)
Habermas introduced the principle of universalization as a principle of moral

argumentation. On this basis, he proposes the principle of discourse ethics
(D), which stipulates that “only those norms can claim to be valid that meet
(or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as partici-
pants in a practical discourse” (93). But what justifies the principle itself? More
precisely: What validity and binding force does it have?
Habermas takes up this question by engaging with Apel’s transcendental
pragmatics. Apel (1980, 1988) holds that the “ultimate justification” of dis-
course ethics is afforded by transcendental reflection on the fact that the
norms of discourse and argumentation—to which thinking and speaking
beings are always already bound—cannot be circumvented. Contesting this
state of affairs would amount to a performative self-contradiction. Habermas,
in contrast, is skeptical when it comes to equating rules of argumentation and
moral norms; even if one derives the principles (U) and (D) in a transcenden-
tal-pragmatic way, this does not imply that they have the status of moral
norms (94, see also Wellmer 1991). Such, he maintains, can only be justified in
practical discourses. As he observes in a later work, one should distinguish
between the “‘must’ in the sense of weak transcendental necessitation” and
“the prescriptive ‘must’ of a rule of action” (Justification, 81).
Habermas objects to Apel on another methodological point when he
affirms that the “hypothetical reconstruction” of pragmatic presuppositions
of rules of argumentation can only have the status of a fallible reconstruction
and not of a transcendental self-reflection in the classical sense (Moral Con-
sciousness, 97). A reconstruction like this must rely on assistance from the
(positive) social sciences; philosophy cannot provide “ultimate justification.”
However, this relativization of the strong claim to justification does not
imply a relativization of the claim that the reconstruction of the discourse
principle extends beyond cultural borders and accordingly specifies a general
structure of morality. Although cognitivist claims to moral validity originate
under specific historical and social conditions, one cannot draw the conclu-
sion of moral relativism: that they hold only for certain cultures. Habermas’s
emphasis on the reconstructive approach still affirms that “no alternative”

exists for analyzing our communicative practice (97).
Habermas’s conception of discourse ethics has received far-reaching atten-

tion. In short order, the theory was discussed as a prominent, contemporary
account in the Kantian tradition alongside the work of John Rawls. At the
same time, a number of criticisms have been formulated, which have prompted
Habermas to clarify and develop his position: the problem of the relationship
between the justification of norms and their application, the abstract perspec-
tive on morality, the relation between ethics and morality, the constructivist
character of the theory, and the normative status of the discourse principle.
Justification and Application (1991) and subsequent works have responded to
these and further criticisms in comprehensive fashion.
Albrecht Wellmer (1991) has argued that discourse ethics conflates ques-
tions of morality and democratic legitimation (148, 158). Morality does not
concern the general justification of norms but concerns justified ways of act-
ing that are to be determined in specific situations (201ff.). Whereas Wellmer
understands moral discourses primarily as “discourses of application,” Haber-
mas (Justification, 30ff.) follows Klaus Günther’s (1993) distinction between
discourses of justification and discourses of application. On this view, the lat-
ter cannot replace the former, but they are still necessary to apply abstract
norms to particular circumstances from the point of view of appropriateness.
The principle (U), however, remains central to the dimension of moral
justification.
In the 1980s, Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of psychological development
(1981), to which Habermas refers, became the object of criticism. Carol Gilli-
gan (1982), for example, sought to demonstrate the extent to which the con-
struction of six stages of development of moral consciousness (culminating in
the highest stage of postconventional, universalistic justification of norms)
not only has a gender bias but also fails to account for the particularity of
moral experiences and judgments. In particular, she claims the aspect of
“care” for the other does not receive due consideration. These objections occa-
sioned a broad debate in the fields of moral psychology and philosophy, and it
included questions about discourse ethics. Under the light of the ethics of
care, as well as other critiques of abstract Kantian universalism (influenced,
for example, by Levinas, Derrida, or Lyotard), the discourse-ethical approach
does not do justice to the particularities, uniquenesses, and differences among
persons, nor does it seem able to account for the quality and particularity of
390 Texts
social connections between people. This would put it at odds with perspec-
tives as diverse as theories of difference and communitarianism. In response,
various efforts were made to affirm the perspective of the “concrete other” in
contrast to acknowledging only a “generalized other” (to employ the phrasing
of Seyla Benhabib [1992], who borrowed the terms from George Herbert
Mead). Accordingly, “interactive universalism” held that the other should be
acknowledged and included both as an equal party and as someone who is dif-
ferent and unique. Lutz Wingert (1993) has analyzed the moral point of view of
discourse ethics in terms of a twofold respect: the other is to be respected
(geachtet) both as an irreplaceable individual (unvertretbarer Einzelner) and,
at the same time, as a member who enjoys equal rights (gleichberechtigter
Angehöriger) in a communicative form of life (179). Axel Honneth (2007), in
turn, has stressed the “communicative virtue” of perceiving and considering
the other as a unique being. To do so, he maintains, one must go beyond the
perspective of equal treatment and adopt a form of care (Fürsorge) that is not
bound to considerations of symmetry and reciprocity—a stance that enter-
tains a tense relation with Kantian conceptions of morality.
Habermas (1990), on the other hand, has sought to incorporate points of
criticism by affirming that solidarity, as the “other” of justice, should stand at
the side of equal treatment (244). But he considers these as “two aspects of the
same thing”: “Justice concerns the equal freedoms of unique and self-deter-
mining individuals, while solidarity concerns the welfare of consociates who
are intimately linked in an intersubjectively shared form of life” (244). Because
this conception of solidarity is not tied to particular forms of belonging,
Habermas views it as a component of postconventional morality. According to
him, it is a specific merit of discourse ethics to accentuate discursively indi-
vidual perspectives—and this not in a way that is merely abstract (Inclusion,
33ff.).
The distinction between ethical values and moral norms has given rise to
much debate (Forst 2012, chap. 3). Of course, this distinction applies not only
to discourse ethics but also—in one form or another—to all deontological
conceptions of morality, while the procedural notion of separating the two
spheres is characteristic for discourse ethics. That said, the notion of “two
spheres” requires nuance, as it does not mean distinguishing them on the
basis of value ontology. The distinction between values and norms is dynamic
in nature, and it remains always the object of discourse—including those dis-
courses in which it remains controversial whether an ethical or moral response
is called for (e.g., debates about the normative status of embryos and “optimiz-
ing” genetic interventions in human nature [see Future]).
The most important points of reference are, on the one hand, what is good
“for me” (or, as the case may be, “for us”)—which does not need to be asserted
in general terms—and, on the other hand, what is “just” (or “binding”) “for
all”—which follows its own mode of validity (Justification). The first point
does not mean that ethical questions cannot be answered rationally or that
they are “purely subjective” or “private” in nature; rather, it means that moral
obligation must be justified in strictly reciprocal and general terms. Hilary
Putnam (2002) has criticized the epistemic component of this distinction,
which (he believes) denies cognitive validity to ethical values; this would fail
to do justice to both religious value orientations and “thick” ethical judg-
ments. In response, Habermas (2003) has pointed to the fact that ethical val-
ues are inherently bound to context; nevertheless, they do possess cognitive
content, albeit in a different way than holds for moral norms.
According to Martin Seel (1995), deontological conceptions of morality pre-
suppose an idea of the good as they seek to afford—to all individuals and in
equal measure—the possibility of living properly. For that purpose a formal
theory of the “good life”—or, alternatively, the “succeeding life”—is required.
This view, however, seems to presume the perspective of an objective ethical
theory that antecedes discourse—a possibility Habermas denies (Inclusion,
21ff.). Whatever idea of the good might reciprocally be claimable must prove
itself in moral discourse among free and equal persons—an important impli-
cation of a conception of moral autonomy along Kantian lines.
Finally, the distinction between ethics and morality concerns the matter of
moral motivation. It seems that ethical considerations of “what is good for
me” prove decisive not just when it comes to observing moral norms but also
when it comes to taking up the moral point of view. Otherwise, it is difficult to
explain how abstract considerations can be translated into subjective motives
(Tugendhat 1984, Williams 1981). On this point, Habermas’s position is ambiv-
alent. On the one hand, he objects to an ethical justification of moral motiva-
tion (Justification, 46–47); at the same time, however, he grants to moral
insights only “the weak motivating force of good reasons” (33): “The moral
principle performs the role of a rule of argumentation only for justifying
moral judgments and as such can neither obligate one to engage in moral
argumentation nor motivate one to act on moral insights” (33). Consequently,
morality requires the “support of complementary processes of socialization
and structures of identity” (33), which promote postconventional attitudes and
inspire trust that moral action may, in fact, be reasonably expected (zumut-
bar). In this sense, Habermas’s notion of a “communicative form of life”
includes both ethical and moral motives; its inherent ambivalence is evident,
for example, when Habermas writes that affirming the truth capacity of practical
questions involves the “self-understanding of subjects acting communica-
tively” and “is intertwined with ethical motives” (Truth, 274).
Debates on discourse ethics frequently revolve around the way that moral
norms lay claim to validity or, alternatively, to truth—especially in their dif-
ference from truth claims made in the realm of theoretical reason. On the
392 Texts
latter point, Habermas has retreated from a pure consensus theory of truth
(Truth and Justification). He has stressed, however, the constructivist charac-
ter of discourse ethics in contesting the perspective of “moral realism,” which
holds that “generalizable interests” precede discourse (Lafont 1998). According
to Habermas, the world of moral norms is produced discursively; only in dis-
courses do generalizable interests emerge. His adherence to the requirement
that a “correct answer” for moral questions exists does not mean that there
are truths awaiting discovery. Rather, it is a matter of constructing norms
“that could be accepted for good reasons by everyone affected from the inclu-
sive perspective of equally taking into consideration the evident claims of all
persons” (Truth, 261). Hence, an element of counterfactual ideality—i.e., of
acceptability under ideal conditions—applies to the concept of validity. For
this reason, practical discourses—as they actually occur—may always be
deemed imperfect. In turn, the “incomplete” state can only be made evident
in discourse, since no privileged epistemic mode of access to “moral truths”
exists.
Thus, the construction of moral norms does not occur in a space that is itself
free of norms. Instead it presupposes the discourse principle and the status of
free and equal persons as participants in discourse with (what one can call) a
right to justification. But what do these presuppositions mean—especially in
normative terms? Habermas continues to evince skepticism about Apel’s objec-
tion (1988) that his reconstruction of the discourse principle underdetermines
its transcendental and deontological foundation and that therefore an “ulti-
mate justification” is necessary (Naturalism, 77ff.). Moreover, in Between Facts
and Norms (1992) he defines the discourse principle—which holds that “just
those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree
as participants in rational discourses”—on a level of abstraction that is “neu-
tral with respect to morality and law” (Facts, 107). In this way, the principle is
granted “normative content” even though it is not binding in the way moral
norms are. Habermas stresses that communicative reason cannot be under-
stood along the lines of the Kantian understanding of practical reason—i.e., as
a “source of prescriptions” (Facts, 4; cf. Communicative Action). This, ulti-
mately, marks his greatest departure from Kant, for whom the Categorical
Imperative—as a “moral law” (Sittengesetz)—binds the autonomous will. At
the same time, it poses the question—which is central for a deontological con-
ception of morality—of how the principle of moral justification can be obliga-
tory if it depends on motives that it cannot produce itself. The program of dis-
course ethics, then, harbors a gap of justification (Begründungslücke) that
extends between the “‘must’ of a weak transcendental necessity” and the “pre-
scriptive ‘must’ of a rule of action” (Facts, 4), and this raises the question whether
it is necessary to emphasize discursive reason more as practical reason in order
to ground a duty to discursive justification (without making recourse to an

“ultimate justification”) (Forst 2012, 43ff.).
These points, to which other issues could easily be added (especially bio-
ethical matters [see Future]), show what discussions the original approach to
discourse ethics occasioned and what further developments emerged. How-
ever, they also indicate that the process is not yet complete; here, too, the the-
ory proves its productive capacity.
References
Apel, Karl-Otto. 1980. “The A Priori of the Communication Community and the Founda-
tions of Ethics: The Problem of a Rational Justification of Ethics in the Scientific Age.”
In Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. Glyn Adley and David Frisby, 225–
300. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
——. 1988. Diskurs und Verantwortung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1998. Auseinandersetzungen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Con-
temporary Ethics. New York: Routledge.
Forst, Rainer. 2012. The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice.
Trans. Jeffrey Flynn. New York: Columbia University Press.
Günther, Klaus. 1993. The Sense of Appropriateness: Application Discourses in Morality and
Law. Trans. John Farrell. Albany: SUNY Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. “Justice and Solidarity: On the Discussion Concerning Stage 6.”
In The Moral Domain, trans. Shierry W. Nicholsen and Thomas E. Wren, 224–251.
——. 2003. “Norms and Values: On Hilary Putnam’s Kantian Pragmatism.” In Truth and
Justification, trans. Barbara Fultner, 213–236. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Honneth, Axel. 2007. Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Cam-
bridge: Polity.
Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1981. The Philosophy of Moral Development. New York: Harper
& Row.
Lafont, Cristina. 1988. “Pluralism and Universalism in Discourse Ethics.” In A Matter of
Discourse, ed. Amos Nascimento, 55–78. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Lorenzen, Paul. 1969. Normative Logic and Ethics. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut.
Putnam, Hilary. 2002. “Values and Norms.” In The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy
and Other Essays, 111–134. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, John. 2005. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Seel, Martin. 1995. Versuch über die Form des Glücks. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Tugendhat, Ernst. 1984. Probleme der Ethik. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Wellmer, Albrecht. 1991. “Ethics and Dialogue: Elements of Moral Judgment in Kant and
Discourse Ethics.” In The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and
Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley, 113–231. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Williams, Bernard. 1981. Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wingert, Lutz. 1993. Gemeinsinn und Moral. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
37
DEFENSE OF MODERNIT Y
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985): Modernity as
Rationalization and the Critique of Instrumental Reason
SE YL A BENHABIB
S
ince Max Weber’s well-known theory that characterized the fate
of modern societies in terms of the concept of “rationalization,”
the relationship between the project of occidental rationalism
and the structural problems and contradictions of modern capitalist societies
has preoccupied thinkers of the Frankfurt School. The early Frankfurt School’s
critique of “instrumental reason” continues the legacy of Weberian-Marxism
(Lukács 1971 [1923], Löwith 1993, Merleau-Ponty 1968). They combined Weber’s
theses about societal modernization with Marx’s analysis of the commodity
form and predicted that in the major institutions of modern societies, such as
the state, public and private bureaucracies, the capitalist firm, courts, the
army, and the schools, “rationalized” modes of relationship and behavior
would spread. Rationalization and the commodity form involved the segmen-
tation of complex tasks, relationships, and issues (Sachverhalte) into fragments
of equal and fungible units that would be governed by calculable and formal
rules and procedures that in turn would be interchangeable, predictable, and
hence “indifferent” to material qualities. Just as the commodity form reduced
all material objects and human relationships to formal equivalencies that could
be exchanged in the marketplace for money, so too rationalization abstracted
from the personality of the individuals involved in positions of authority and
made them into faceless bureaucrats and taskmasters. As is well known, for
Weber these processes of rationalization were highly equivocal: they did not
result in the augmentation of freedom or of meaning. Quite to the contrary,
societal rationalization produced a loss of freedom, and “narrow specialists
without mind, pleasure-seekers without heart; in its conceit, this nothingness
imagines it has climbed to a level of humanity never before attained” (Weber
2002 [1905], 124).
Rationalization, however, did not only apply to processes of societal
modernization. Rationalization also meant the loss of magic; the rise of
differentiation among value spheres such as science, jurisprudence, ethics,
aesthetics, and theology; the increase of formalism and systematization; and
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 395
the growth of axiomatic disciplinary procedures. Weber’s assessment of these

processes was equally ambivalent: in his view, they only led to the further
fragmentation of value; ironically, modern rationalism could not justify the
commitment to reason as a way of life. In fact, the more rationalized these
spheres became, the more difficult it was to justify why one would opt for one
value system as opposed to another in guiding one’s life conduct (Lebensfüh-
rung). Weber, rather, saw the “many gods of old, without their magic and
therefore in the form of impersonal forces, rise up from their graves, strive for
power over our lives and begin once more their eternal struggle among them-
selves” (1989 [1919], 23). Cultural rationalization resulted in deadly value strug-
gles, growing incommensurability, and a loss of meaning.
After the demise of socialist movements in Europe in the 1920s, the failure
of the working classes to prevent the rise of fascism, and the emergence of
“state-capitalistic” or “monopoly-capitalistic” structures in fascist Europe as
well as the post-Depression United States (1929), Frankfurt School theorists—
Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Friedrich
Pollock—considered Weber’s “societal modernization” thesis to be irrefutable.
Societal resistance was defeated and the contradictions of the capitalist
economy smoothed over through the economic intervention of states into pro-
cesses of distribution and circulation that nevertheless still sought to protect
the private-profit principle in the functioning of markets.
Despite their agreement with Weber about the loss of freedom in capitalist
societies, the early Frankfurt School theorists nonetheless believed that Weber
was wrong about cultural rationalism and that an alternative to the formalis-
tic and fragmented forms of rationality was conceivable. The “critique of
instrumental reason” conceived of this alternative not as a return to a vision of
substantive reason that would reintegrate the differentiated value spheres but
rather as a form of critical rationality that would evoke the unredeemed prom-
ise of the Enlightenment: that critical thought, human freedom, and a just
society were inexorably linked. Increasingly, however, and particularly in the
work of Adorno and Horkheimer, this promise of the Enlightenment took the
form of an aporia. As they became convinced that rationalization entailed a
loss of freedom through the increased domination of technology over human
beings and nature, they argued that the very structure of Western rationality,
i.e., the demands of a concept-based formal structure of reasoning that had
governed Western thought since Plato’s philosophy, itself served as an instru-
ment of domination. With these well-known theses of the Dialectic of Enlight-
enment, which located the tendencies toward domination over nature and of
human beings in the early history of the formation of reason in the West in the
service of “self-preservation” (Selbsterhaltung), the link between occidental
rationalism, modernity, and the project of an emancipated society was hope-
lessly lost (Benhabib 1986).
396 Texts
Farewell to the Philosophy of the Subject
In his chapter on the Dialectic of Enlightenment, “The Entwinement of Myth

and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,” in The Philo-
sophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas takes aim at this work and reminds
his readers that the discourse of modernity/postmodernity prevalent in the
1980s revived some of both the themes and problems of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment:
Thus, in respect to science, morality, and art, the argument follows the same
figure: Already the separation of cultural domains, the collapse of the sub-
stantive reason still incorporated in religion and metaphysics, so greatly dis-
empowers the moments of reason (as isolated and robbed of their coherence)
that they regress to a rationality in the service of self-preservation gone wild.
In cultural modernity, reason gets definitively stripped of its validity claim
and assimilated to sheer power. . . . If one reduces the critique of instrumental
reason to this core, it becomes clear just why the Dialectic of Enlightenment
has to oversimplify its image of modernity so astoundingly. Cultural moder-
nity’s specific dignity is constituted by what Max Weber called the differentia-
tion of value spheres in accord with their own logics.
(Discourse, 112)
As this passage makes clear, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985;

English translation 1990) must be read against the background of Habermas’s
The Theory of Communicative Action, published four years earlier, in which he
had undertaken a fundamental paradigm change of early critical theory’s
account of modernity and rationalization. In The Theory of Communicative
Action, Habermas engaged in a comprehensive rereading of the tradition of
Western Marxism from Lukács to Adorno and Horkheimer (Communicative
Action, vol. 1, chap. 4; vol. 2, chap. 8), such as to subject Weber’s influential
theses of loss of freedom and loss of meaning to a thorough critique. His aim
was no less than the radical reorientation of the whole project of a critical
theory of society away from the critique of instrumental reason, which he saw
as still beholden to the philosophy of the subject.
Whether we viewed the subject of modernity in terms of its capacity for
self-consciousness and reflection, as modern philosophy from Descartes to
Hegel and from Locke to Hume was wont to do, or whether we conceived of
this subject in terms of the paradigm of production and labor, as the Marxists
proposed, the result was the same: the subject remained monologically con-
ceived, and the uniqueness of the formation of human self-consciousness
through linguistically mediated interaction was neglected. The decentering of
the subject could only take place with the realization that subject formation
resulted from the communicative socialization of human beings through the

medium of interactions oriented toward reaching understanding. Reason,
Habermas argued, is not only reflective but communicative; the subject of rea-
son becomes capable of reflection only as a consequence of socialization in
processes of communication oriented to validity claims. The core of reason is
not rationalization but reason giving, that is, the ever-fallible, revisable, and
contestable exchanges with other subjects with whom we must come to some
kind of agreement regarding the contested validity claims of truth (Wahrheit),
correctness (Richtigkeit), and sincerity (Wahrhaftigkeit).
Registering a validity claim is not the expression of a contingent will; and

responding affirmatively to a validity claim is not merely an empirically moti-
vated decision. . . . Validity claims are internally connected with reasons and
grounds. To this extent, the conditions for the acceptability of directions can
be found in the illocutionary meaning of the speech act itself; they do not
need to be completed by additional conditions of sanction.
(Communicative Action, 1:301–302)
This shift away from the paradigm of the philosophy of the subject, Habermas
believes, results in a theory of modernity as rationalization quite distinct from
that of Max Weber’s. If we view reason as a contingent and fallibilistic com-
municative process of reason giving, then we see that
the Dialectic of Enlightenment does not do justice to the rational content of

cultural modernity that was captured in bourgeois ideals (and also instru-
mentalized along with them). I am thinking here of the specific theoretical
dynamic that continually pushes the sciences, and even the self-reflection of
the sciences, beyond merely engendering technically useful knowledge; I am
referring, further, to the universalistic foundations of law and morality that
have also been incorporated (in however distorted or incomplete a fashion)
into the institutions of constitutional government, into the forms of demo-
cratic will formation, and into the individualist patterns of identity forma-
tion; I have in mind, finally, the productivity and explosive power of basic
aesthetic experiences.
(Discourse, 113).
In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas confronts a novel

form of skepticism directed toward these claims, which radically questions the
emancipatory potential of modern societies. In strange and unexpected ways,
these new philosophies defy the paradigm shift from the philosophy of the
subject to communicative reason and appear at first sight as a revival, almost
a revindication, of the theses of Max Weber and the first generation of the
398 Texts
Frankfurt School. The “postmodern skepticism” toward the metanarratives of

modernity, announced by Jean-François Lyotard, leaves no alternative for
rational life conduct other than the Weberian-Nietzschean struggle of gods
and demons. Michel Foucault’s account of the genesis of modern subjectivity
in and through the media of increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of gov-
ernmentality goes even further than Weber in threatening the very possibility
of an autonomous subject of modernity, which Weber still could take for
granted. In fact, very much like Adorno and Horkheimer, Michel Foucault
sees power and domination to be imbricated with the history of subject forma-
tion in the West in such fashion that the psychic structures of the modern self
are unthinkable without recalling the history of repressions it has been sub-
jected to. And in Derrida’s critique of Western phallogocentrism we hear
echoes of that famous sentence from Dialectic of Enlightenment: “From the
formalism of mythical names and statutes, which, indifferent like nature, seek
to rule over human beings and history, emerges nominalism, the prototype of
bourgeois thinking. Self-preserving guile lives on the argument between word
and thing” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 47). Derrida uncovers the logic of
identitarian thinking upon which such phallogocentrism rests. Since every
attempt at such uncovering, however, must itself use the very medium of rea-
son, Derrida initiates a wholly novel mode of reading, one in which the apo-
retic, the unthinkable, the unknowable, and the blind spots of the text move to
the center of analysis via deconstruction.
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is both a diagnosis of the times
(Zeitdiagnose), of the mood of contemporary societies in the late 1980s, which
was then captured by the terms “postmodernity” and “poststructuralism,”
and a critical rereading of the blind alleys of modern philosophy that were cre-
ated in the wake of Hegel and Nietzsche by the still-unquestioned allegiance
to the philosophy of the subject. Habermas imposes a strong interpretive grid
on thinkers as diverse as Derrida and Bataille, Foucault and Heidegger, Schil-
ler and Castoriadis. The result of this “strong reading” has been continuous
and sustained controversy over the correctness and fruitfulness of many of his
interpretations. By “strong reading” I mean one in which the immanent cri-
tique of the thinkers involved is ultimately designed to show that the difficul-
ties in their thought result from their subscribing to the philosophy of the
subject and from their rejecting the communicative turn of reason.
Habermas sees Hegel and Nietzsche as the two poles of the problem of
modern subjectivity. Hegel characterized modernity as a process of “diremp-
tion” (Entzweiung) in his early writings. He attempts to overcome this condi-
tion in his mature writings by showing how civil society and the state after the
French Revolution can do justice to the claims of the legal subject of rights and
to the demands of individual moral conscience. Equipped with these new legal
and moral freedoms, the individual can now find his place in a differentiated
structure of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit), which overcomes the unity but also the
naïveté of the Greek polis, which Hegel had idealized in his early writings.
Modernity and rationality are intrinsically linked in Hegel’s work, for the
modern state is also a rational structure insofar as it is based upon the recog-
nition of subjective freedoms. As is well known, not only this quietistic recon-
ciliation with the modern state, which in Hegel’s presentation still missed all
the elements of universal suffrage and a modern parliament, but also Hegel’s
more general metaphysics concerning the unity of “essence and existence”
(Wesen und Existenz) in “actuality” (Wirklichkeit) fail in view of the strivings
of the modern subject. “Hegel inaugurated the discourse of modernity; the
Young Hegelians permanently established it” (Discourse, 53).
Yet the really radical challenge to the discourse of modernity issues not from
Feuerbach or Marx but from Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the first to give expression
to that decided irreconcilability between self and society, the individual and
the state. Bourgeois modernity needs to be confronted with a more radical
gesture than that of revolutionizing the ownership of the means of production.
First, the bourgeois Christian civilization must be uncovered in terms of its
origins, which lie in the revolt of the slaves against a natural aristocracy. With
this revolt, which leads from Socrates to Jesus, also starts the discourse of
equality, of conscience and of the need to keep promises. The subject of moder-
nity is formed in and through centuries of repression of instincts and the for-
mation of guilt and bad conscience. The philosopher, as a genealogist and as a
physiologist, first tries to understand the sickness of civilization.
With Nietzsche’s entrance into the discourse of modernity, the argument

shifts, from the ground up. . . . Three times this attempt to tailor the concept
of reason to the program of an intrinsic dialectic of enlightenment miscar-
ried. In the context of this constellation, Nietzsche had no choice but to sub-
mit subject-centered reason yet again to an immanent critique—or to give up
the program entirely. Nietzsche opts for the second alternative: He renounces
a renewed revision of the concept of reason and bids farewell to the dialectic of
enlightenment.
(Discourse, 85–86)
The gesture of the physiologist and genealogist who examines the malaise
of the subject of reason returns in the work of Michel Foucault. In Heidegger’s
reconstruction of the history of Western metaphysics in terms of a self-
destructive subjectivity unable to grasp its own ontological grounding,
Nietzsche’s critique of the modern lives on as well. But there is also another
moment in Nietzsche’s work, namely, the turn to art and to the aesthetic as
a medium for healing the wounds of modernity. Through poetry, through
music, through art, a new subjectivity can at least be intimated. In Thus Spoke
400 Texts
Zarathustra, Nietzsche creates a quasi-mythical and quasi-prophetic figure to

show how a new man, “ein Übermensch,” can emerge to overcome the stench
of modern bourgeois civilization. This gesture of overcoming modernity
through an aesthetic that defies everydayness and radicalizes the claims of
poetic subjectivity is echoed in the work of Georges Bataille and that of the
surrealists as well as in the contemporary discourse of some postmodernists.
My concern here will not be with whether Habermas has interpreted Hegel
and Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, Derrida, Bataille, and many others correctly;
although always provocative, at times his readings become overly schematic
because of the overall conceptual strategy of the work (see, in particular, the
essays by Dallmayr, Norris, Hoy, and Schmidt in Passerin d’Entreves and
Benhabib 1996). Rather, I would like to focus on some thematic issues in
Habermas’s encounter with the philosophical discourse of modernity/post-
modernity that, in turn, point to problems in the paradigm of communicative
reason itself and with which the critical social theory of the present has to
be concerned over and beyond this particular encounter of the mid-1980s.
I will gather these under four headings: the ethical political significance of
modernity/postmodernity and poststructuralism, the problem with the per-
formative, power and the subject, and the role of the aesthetic.
Modernity/Postmodernity and Poststructuralism
A terminological clarification is needed first: rather than “postmodernity”

and “postmodernism,” I will use the terms “modernity/postmodernity” and
“modernism/postmodernism.” This terminology is intended to indicate the
difficulty and artificiality of making a clear demarcation between the modern
and the postmodern. Many of the sensibilities associated with postmodernism
can already be found in the high modernism of Adorno’s aesthetic theory
as well as in the literature of Bertolt Brecht, Eugène Ionesco, and Samuel
Beckett (see Wellmer 1991).
The work that captured this sensibility most vividly was Jean-François
Lyotard’s 1984 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. For Lyotard,
postmodernism is characterized by a certain incredulity toward metanarra-
tives, and Habermas’s work is a prime example of the false modernist belief in
metanarratives. With his theory of communicative action and the rejection of
the paradigm of the subject, Habermas is offering but one more metanarrative,
one more discourse of legitimation, to be placed alongside the story of Spirit
becoming aware of itself in history (Hegel) or the story of the emancipation of
man through labor (Marx). Lyotard (1984) writes: “I use the term ‘modern’ to
designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse
of this kind, making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the
dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutic of meaning, the emancipation of the

rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth” (xxiii).
Habermas has not directly engaged with Lyotard’s theses; however, Richard
Rorty and Richard Bernstein have spelled out the implications of Lyotard’s
position for Habermas’s work. In a well-known essay, Richard Rorty (1991)
states this very clearly:
So we find French critics of Habermas ready to abandon liberal politics in

order to avoid universalistic philosophy, and Habermas trying to hang on to
universalistic philosophy, with all its problems, in order to support liberal
politics. . . . But Habermas thinks that if we drop the idea of “the better argu-
ment” as opposed to “the argument which convinces a given audience at a
given time,” we shall only have a “context-dependent sort of social criticism.”
(165)
Of course, Rorty believes that only context-dependent criticism is valid and

that this is really all we need. Habermas’s program of a strong justification of
the normative core of reason through an account of communicative action is
not necessary to defend the universalistic ideals of bourgeois democracy. “So
whereas Habermas compliments ‘bourgeois ideals’ by reference to the ‘ele-
ments of reason’ contained in them, it would be better just to compliment
those untheoretical sorts of narrative discourse which make up the political
speech of the Western democracies. It would be better to be frankly ethnocen-
tric” (168). Within the context of Anglo-American discussions, perhaps more
so than in the European one, Rorty’s Lyotard-inspired critique of Habermas
focused on the problem of justification of the universalistic ideals of liberal
democracies. Rorty sided with Lyotard: all we needed were the “petits recits,” the
small narratives of our own Western cultural legacy, our ethnocentric bias, to
accomplish this task. We need not universalize to other contexts and cultures,
because in doing so, he argues, we would only be continuing the imperialistic
and colonizing politics of the Western Enlightenment. Already in the early
1980s there were echoes in these formulations of what became known in the
last decades of the twentieth century as the “critique of post-colonial reason”
(see here Rorty’s well-known essay “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism”
[1983] and Spivak 1988, 1999).
When we compare this Lyotard-Rorty argument about the metanarratives
of modernity with Foucault’s and Derrida’s contributions, it becomes clear
that they do not share this point of view at all. The poststructuralist critique of
reason and the postmodern rejection of metanarratives are not the same. Even
the term poststructuralism is a misnomer here because all it refers to is a com-
plex set of assumptions about the status of the linguistic sign and the cognizing
and acting subject shared widely by many French thinkers in the wake of the
402 Texts
language philosophy of Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropology of Claude

Lévi-Strauss (Descombes 1980). The subject of knowledge is replaced by a
system of structures, oppositions, and differences that, to be intelligible, need
not be viewed as products of a living subjectivity at all (Benhabib 1984; 1992,
209ff.).
In this vein, Foucault very much produces a new metanarrative of moder-
nity in terms of an archaeology of the modern disciplines of man and the
modern subject. His is not a narrative of emancipation but one of repression,
not one of freedom but of the ever-increasing power of governmentality and
the diminution of freedom. Where Lyotard and Foucault agree, however, is
that philosophy is no longer a master discipline of legitimation. Philosophy is
displaced by a form of the sociology of knowledge (Lyotard) or by archaeology
and genealogy (Foucault).
Matters are even more complicated with Derrida and the critique of meta-
narratives. Ironically, Habermas at times argues in the vein of Lyotard and
against Heidegger and Derrida, that they are the ones who move in the horizon
of metanarratives. Heidegger’s Destruktion of the history of metaphysics in the
name of a forgotten history of Being, which conceives of Being (Sein) only as
beings (Seiendes), levels everything in its path. Heidegger sees in the destruc-
tive and totalitarian essence of the modern age nothing but the raising of mod-
ern subjectivity to an absolute standard (Discourse, 133). Habermas writes:
In modernity’s total forgetfulness of Being, the negativity of the abandon-

ment by Being is no longer even felt. This explains the central significance
of an anamnesis of the history of Being which now discloses itself as the
destruction of the self-forgetfulness of metaphysics. . . . Heidegger cannot,
however, understand the destruction of the history of metaphysics as unmask-
ing critique, or the overcoming of metaphysics as a final act of disclosure. . . .
Thus, the thinking that uses the ontological difference as a guide must claim a
cognitive competence beyond self-reflection, beyond discursive thought.
(Discourse, 135–136)
In Habermas’s view, much like Heidegger, the early Derrida as well “takes
into consideration ‘the Occident in its entirety’ and confronts it with its ‘other,’
which announces itself in ‘radical upheavals’—economically and politically
(that is, manifestly) by new constellations between Europe and the Third
World, metaphysically by the end of anthropocentric thought” (Discourse,
161). Whereas Lyotard and Rorty use the critique of metanarratives to deflate
the universalistic claims of Western liberalism, Habermas sees the early Der-
rida’s appropriation of Heidegger’s metanarrative of the self-destruction of
modern subjectivity as resulting in a reversal of the constellation between the
West and the Third World. One can conclude that while there is no consensus
among the major thinkers of the modern/postmodern constellation as to

whether the critique of modern reason needs to be practiced in the form of a
farewell to metanarratives, this epistemological and methodological question
is irretrievably linked to an ethicopolitical gesture of pointing beyond Euro-
centrism and “bourgeois liberalism.”
There is significant convergence among Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault
(but not Rorty) that deflating and demystifying the universalist claims of
Western rationality is necessary in order to let emerge the alterity of those
others whom such reason marginalizes, punishes, exploits, and even extermi-
nates. Lyotard sees the epistemic commitment to les petits recits as leading one
to embrace the thought of “primitive peoples,” women, and others.
(There is great confusion in Lyotard’s characterization of narrative knowl-
edge, which is sometimes offered as an alternative to modern scientific knowl-
edge; at other times it is described as premodern forms of thought that are
historically lost [Lyotard 1984, 19]. The following statement reveals some of the
confusions: The scientist “classifies them as belonging to a different mentality:
savage, primitive, underdeveloped, backward, alienated, composed of opinions,
customs, authority, prejudice, ignorance, ideology. Narratives are fables, myths,
legends, fit only for women and children” [27]. Although this may seem like a
gesture of solidarity with the oppressed, the ethicopolitical attitude that would
follow from such a characterization of “narrative knowledge” is the standpoint
of the curator of an ethnological museum but not that of a true conversation
partner. See Benhabib [1992, 233ff.]).
Foucault retrieves the memory of the psychically ill and the deviant, of the
prisoner and the hermaphrodite. And Derrida in his famous essay “The Ends
of Man,” (1972 [1968]) gestures in the spirit of the Maoism of 1968 toward the
encirclement of the first world by the third, of the town by the country. The
“epistemologies of postmodernism” and the critique of Eurocentric universal-
ism go hand in hand (Benhabib 1992).
In confronting modernism/postmodernism, Habermas faces a difficult
challenge: he has to show that the exclusion of the other is an aberration rather
than a fulfillment of modern Western rationality and that the demands of the
excluded can be adequately addressed by the practices of a discursively
grounded ethical universalism and democratic theory. This question has con-
tinued to preoccupy him well beyond The Philosophical Discourse of Moder-
nity, and he has returned to it in subsequent works, such as Postmetaphysical
Thinking (1994 [1988]) and The Inclusion of the Other (2000 [1996]). Toward the
end of the twentieth century, “struggles for recognition” have become a major
theme in critical social theory. Habermas has tried to show that communicative
reason can do justice to the deep varieties of cultural life forms and that the
liberal-constitutional state that honors the integrity of the legal subject can
also protect differences among such life forms (Inclusion).
404 Texts
The Debate Over the Performative
The second major issue in Habermas’s encounter with Derrida concerns the
philosophy of language. Martin Jay (1992) has named the debate over the “per-
formative” the dividing moment between critical theory and poststructural-
ism (261–279). This debate refers in the first place to the heated exchanges
between John Searle and Jacques Derrida over John Austin’s philosophy of
language, an exchange in which Habermas sides with Searle and against Der-
rida. Furthermore, the dispute around the performative leads directly from
the confrontation in the 1980s between critical theory and poststructuralism
to the heated exchanges among critical and poststructuralist feminist theo-
rists of the 1990s (Benhabib et al. 1995).
Put in a nutshell, the issue is whether what was designated by John Austin
as the performative power of speech acts characterizes speech as a whole, as
Derrida maintains, or whether by distinguishing between “felicitous” and
“infelicitous” speech Austin himself reverts to the myth of “ordinary” versus
“parasitical” uses of speech. Derrida asks:
Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a

“coded” or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in
order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as
conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way
as “citation”? Not that citationality in this case is of the same sort as in a the-
atrical play, a philosophical reference, or the recitation of a poem. That is why
there is a relative specificity, as Austin says, “a relative purity” of performa-
tives. But this relative purity does not emerge in opposition to citationality or
iterability. . . . Given the structure of iteration, the intention animating the
utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its
content. . . . The “non-serious,” the oratio obliqua will no longer be able to be
excluded, as Austin wished, from “ordinary language.”
(Derrida 1977, 191–192)
This has led Habermas to remark:
In this argument, Derrida obviously already presupposes what he wants to

prove: that any convention which permits the repetition of exemplary actions
possesses from the outset not only a symbolic, but also a fictional character.
But it must first be shown that the conventions of a game are ultimately
indistinguishable from norms of action. . . . Derrida makes no attempt to
“deconstruct” this distinctive functional mode of ordinary speech with com-
municative action. In the illocutionary binding force of linguistic utterances,
Austin discovered a mechanism for coordinating action that places normal
speech, as part of everyday practice, under constraints different from those of

fictional discourse, simulation, and interior monologue.
(Discourse, 195–196; emphasis added)
As this long quote makes clear, Habermas sees Derrida’s reading of Austin
as being potentially a subversion of the “illocutionary binding force of linguis-
tic utterances,” which in his view are a “mechanism for coordinating action.”
But let us be clear that it is not Austin who attributes this force to illocutionary
speech acts but rather Habermas, who, through his theory of communicative
action, has translated the illocutionary power of speech acts into the capacity
of speakers and hearers to coordinate their actions through orientation to
validity claims. The illocutionary power of speech is the potential of all speak-
ers of a language to orient their actions to one another through understanding
validity claims. Insofar as Derrida claims that every performative is already a
“performance” and that there is no distinction between the use of speech on a
stage and its everyday deployment, he is not only misinterpreting Austin
but subverting the very theory of communicative action. So there is a great
deal at stake in the proper interpretation of “performativity.”
There are many other dimensions in this complex debate, such as citability,
iterability, the intentionality of speech acts, and whether Derrida has confused
type with token in his comments on Austin. But Derrida’s rejection of Austin’s
distinction between the ordinary and “parasitic” uses of speech leads, in the
words of Christopher Norris (1996), to the following:
It is the main fault of Derrida’s work, as Habermas reads it, that he has failed
to observe these essential distinctions and thus overgeneralized the poetic
(rhetorical) function of language to a point where it commands the whole
field of communicative action. The result is to deprive thinking of that critical
force which depends on a proper separation of realms.
(103)
Derrida “levels” the distinctions between philosophy and literature, discourse

and rhetoric (Discourse, 185ff.): “This aestheticizing of language, which is pur-
chased with the twofold denial of the proper senses of normal and poetic dis-
course, also explains Derrida’s insensitivity toward the tension-filled polarity
between the poetic-world-disclosive function of language and its prosaic,
innerwordly functions” (Discourse, 205).
Derrida never forgave Searle and Habermas for their criticism, as his rather
ironic and embittered response in Limited Inc. makes clear (see Derrida 1977a,
1977b, 1988). There was no more dialogue about this matter throughout the
1980s. It was up to subtle commentators such as Christopher Norris (1996),
Richard Bernstein (1985), David Hoy (1996), and Christoph Menke (1998) to
406 Texts
show that the lines of this confrontation had been drawn too harshly and that
it was possible, even desirable, to “split the differences” (Hoy 1996, 124–147).
Yet it was not until the fateful month of September 2001, when the World
Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked and both Habermas and Derrida
happened to find themselves in New York, that the ice melted and some kind
of a dialogue on politics and philosophy was resumed (Borradori 2003).
In the early 1990s the concept of the performative migrated from the shores
of philosophies of language and into the center of gender theory and the poli-
tics of identity movements. Judith Butler’s influential work Gender Trouble
(1990) was at the center of this transformation. The concept of the performa-
tive now came to mean that processes of identity formation occurred in and
through the iterative reenactment of gender roles. Identities, including psy-
chosexual identities, were “constructed” in and through iterative perfor-
mances. Butler quoted Nietzsche: there was no doer behind the deed, no self
behind the act. The self was first constituted or constructed in and through
socialization processes.
Butler’s purpose in using performativity in this context was to show that
gender-identity formation resulted from sociopsychic process of construction
and did not correspond to any deep psychosomatic reality. As Simone de
Beauvoir had said, “one is not born but becomes a woman,” and performativity
was the process through which gender, whether as man/woman, gay/straight,
emerged. From Derrida, Butler appropriated the centrality of “iterations,”
whose effects could not be controlled by predictable psychosocial contexts,
and from Foucault she overtook the theses that the formation of the subject
was always also a process of subjugation. There was no “subject” as such, only
historically and socioculturally varying processes of subjectivation and sub-
ject formation.
Although at first sight it may be hard to reconstruct the path that leads
from the debate surrounding illocutionary speech acts in Austin to Derrida’s
concept of performativity as performance and to Butler’s theory of gender
as performativity, there is one central assumption interwoven into all these
moves. Whereas for Habermas speech acts can function as performative only
insofar as “the illocutionary binding force of linguistic utterances [as] a mech-
anism for coordinating action” can be preserved, for Derrida, as well as for
Foucault and Butler, this presupposes that the subject and his or her intentions
are present and manifest in every speech act. Try as much as he may, they
argue, Habermas cannot give up the myth of the intentional subject of action
and speech—in Nietzsche’s words, “the doer behind the deed.” When asked
how, then, speech acts fulfill their illocutionary functions at all, there would
hardly be any answer. In Derrida’s case, the focus is not on how speech enables
and enframes social life but rather on speech as a form of arche-writing, which
is infinitely iterable and can be read and reread by an infinite number of
others in a process that belongs to the mysterious iterability or citability of

language. For Foucault and Butler, social action is simply the medium through
which power relations are enacted. Illocutionary speech effects are for them
simply power effects. The concept of the performative is now coupled to an
inflationary use of the concept of “power.”
Power and the Subject
Whereas the Derrida-Habermas encounter led nowhere for a decade and a

half, until it was resumed more in virtue of the force of historical events than
by the internal logic of the dialogue itself, the same is not true of the encounter
with Michel Foucault. Shortly before his untimely death Foucault gave an
interview in which he recognized the affinity of his project as a whole to the
Dialectic of Enlightenment. Foucault’s theory of power moved on the more
familiar terrain of a theory of society and a theory of modernity.
According to Habermas, Foucault’s work falls into two broad phases: his
early studies, which came to an end with The Order of Things (1970 [1966]) and
which were concerned with “the historical a priori of the understanding of
Being” of modern sciences (Discourse, 258), and his second phase, which
moves from a critical history of the modern human sciences to a theory of
power. This development is necessitated because of certain internal difficulties
in Foucault’s early structuralist theories, among them the most important
being the lack of a mechanism for explaining transitions from one “episteme”
to another. In Foucault’s constructions, such transitions became “des événe-
ments,” natural events motivated by no logic internal to the epistemes themselves.
The transition from an archaeology of knowledge to a genealogy of power was
made possible, in Habermas’s view, by Foucault’s reception of Nietzsche’s
ideas in the 1970s. “Genealogical historiography can only take over the role of
a critique of reason qua antiscience if it escapes from the horizon of just those
historically oriented sciences of men whose hollow humanism Foucault wants
to unmask in his theory of power” (Discourse, 249).
The genealogical method brings with it certain requirements: history must
not be written as if the meaning of the past is simply to enable the present;
rather, the present must be seen to be the fully contingent result of a series of
dislocations and displacements. Furthermore, this new historical method
does not aim at hermeneutic understanding but at the clarification of a “con-
text of effective history” (Discourse, 250). The element imbricated in all these
processes is power.
In Foucault’s genealogy “power” is initially a synonym for this purely struc-

turalist activity; it takes the same place that “différance” does in Derrida. But
408 Texts
this power constitutive of discourse is supposed to be a power of transcenden-

tal generativity and of empirical self-assertion simultaneously. Like Hei-
degger, Foucault also undertakes a fusion of opposed meanings.
(Discourse, 256)
In Discipline and Punish (1977 [1975]), for example, Foucault gives an empirical
account of the development of disciplinary technologies, which at the same
time, and in conjunction with techniques of surveillance and control, come to
constitute their objects as objects of manipulation and control. Habermas’s
close reading of Foucault attempts to show that this doubled strategy, which
analyzes the genealogy of structures of power while at the same time showing
the constitution of the subject of power, is full of mistaken aporias and that
ultimately Foucault’s theory of power is “presentist,” “relativist,” and “crypto-
normative” (Discourse, 276, 282).
Despite these harsh words, one cannot but sense that insofar as Foucault
reorients philosophy toward a critical study of cultural and social processes,
Habermas feels a certain affinity to his project. As opposed to the Heideggerian
construction of modernity in terms of a one-sided history of the metaphysics
of power, Foucault provides a conception of power that has empirical force
(McCarthy 1991, 43ff.). Nevertheless, Foucault’s “empirical insights and nor-
mative confusions” (Fraser) are much too intermingled, and his own stand-
point as a social critic is much too self-contradictory. Foucault’s social theory
of power lacks the socially integrative dimension of language and is unable to
explain how “socialization” also enables an “individuating effect” (Discourse,
287). The discourse of the performativity of power only hides these deep prob-
lems, which need to be addressed by a critical social theory.
Unlike the abruptly ended dialogue des sourds between Derrida and Haber-
mas, the exchange with Foucault was a productive one. Almost immediately
after the publication of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity a series of
important commentaries appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1985 Axel
Honneth published The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social
Theory (English ed. 1991), and Nancy Fraser’s early essay “Michel Foucault:
Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions” was included in a 1989 collec-
tion Unruly Practices, which was dedicated to examining the interrelationship
between gender, power, and discourse in contemporary societies. The chal-
lenge for both authors was to integrate aspects of Foucault’s theory of power
into a critical understanding of contemporary society, without dispensing
with social struggles and the role of subjectivity in resisting power and by
doing justice to the significance of normative considerations both for social
actors and the social critic. The encounter with Foucault left significant marks
on the critical theory of the present, and the task of integrating a communica-
tions-theoretic perspective of socialization and individuation with a complex
analysis of power relations adequate to contemporary society remains an

attractive and important project (Kelly 1994).
The Role of the Aesthetic Dimension
Upon receiving the Adorno Prize of the city of Frankfurt, Habermas held a
lecture called “Modernity: An Unfinished Project.” This lecture provided the
original impetus for the longer book of 1985. In Habermas’s 1980 lecture the
aesthetic dimension of modernity/postmodernity, or, as may be more precisely
expressed, the interconnectedness of aesthetic sensibilities with political posi-
tionings, was stronger and more pointed. Habermas distinguished the anti-
modernism of the “Young Conservatives” from the premodernism of the “Old
Conservatives” and postmodernism of the “New Conservatives.”
The young conservatives are those who, in the spirit of Nietzsche, encour-
age the revelation of a decentered subjectivity; they wish to break the barriers
between art and everyday life through subversive acts of imagination and self-
experience. Foucault, Derrida, and Bataille are young conservatives in this
sense.
The old conservatives are distrustful of aesthetic modernism; they distrust
the differentiation of value spheres diagnosed by Weber and advocate some
reintegration of reason with a sense of objective ethics and the demands of the
natural world. Habermas classifies Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Robert Spae-
mann under this category.
The new conservatives take an affirmative attitude toward the achieve-
ments of modernity, as long as it promotes capitalist growth, technological
advancement, and rational administration. But politically, they are against the
moral and ethical overburdening of politics with extraneous demands and see
no dispensation from democracy in solving the problems of modernity. An
elitist politics, whether of aesthetes or strong leaders, is preferred. Habermas
names the early Wittgenstein, middle-period Carl Schmitt, and Gottfried
Benn as belonging to this group.
Despite these pointed and polemical characterizations, Habermas acknowl-
edges the impetus behind the experience of aesthetic modernism: the experi-
ence of a decentered subjectivity no longer anchored to traditional life forms
and left loose on the shoals of modernity, the transcendence of the spatiotem-
poral disciplinary structures of everyday life through defiant artworks, the
rupturing of routinized perceptions and the dialectic of shock and revelation.
The autonomy of the aesthetic realm has a transfiguring effect on other ratio-
nalized realms of existence.
Yet in advanced modern societies, the autonomization of art also implies
the growth of a culture of experts and interpreters and an increasing distance
410 Texts
between the transformative power of art and the lay people. The rigidity and
cultural impoverishment of the rationalized everyday cannot be overcome
through the gestures of an aesthetic avant-garde. What is needed is the inter-
penetration in the praxis of everyday life of cognitive interpretations, moral
expectations, and affective-aesthetic expressions and evaluations. Here we
reach an ambiguity in Habermas’s conceptualization of this “third” domain.
Distinguished from the theoretical and practical uses of reason is the aes-
thetic-evaluative dimension. But this domain refers not only to one value
sphere, to one cognitive function among others; the “aesthetic-evaluative”
dimension also has the metafunction of setting the tone for the interpenetra-
tion and coexistence of all three domains. This sphere is referred to sometimes
as the “aesthetic-expressive” and sometimes as the “aesthetic-evaluative.” Its
object domain is not clearly delineable in the same fashion as that of the oth-
ers: affects and emotions, aesthetic and therapeutic judgments as well as ethi-
cal concerns find their place here. Just as Kant’s Critique of Judgment suggests
a need to reconsider the place of reflective and determinative judgment in
Kant’s moral as well as theoretical philosophy, for Habermas too, this third
domain opens up a set of problems about the integration and interaction of
the theoretical, moral, and evaluative uses of reason. (The first thinker to
draw our attention to the problem of judgment in Kant as it affected his ethics
and political philosophy was Hannah Arendt [1982].)
In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, this problem resurfaces with
respect to what Habermas calls the “world-disclosing function of language” in
contradistinction to its “communicative” and “action-coordinating” func-
tions. In a crucial passage toward the end of the work, Habermas writes that
language discloses the horizon of meaning within which knowing and acting
subjects interpret states of affairs, that is, encounter things and people and
have experiences in dealing with them. The world-disclosing function of
language is conceived on analogy with the generative accomplishments of
transcendental consciousness. . . . The linguistic world view is a concrete and
historical a priori.
(Discourse, 319)
Habermas is here discussing Castoriadis as well as Heidegger, Derrida, and

Foucault. His crucial objection to this view of language is that the transforma-
tion of historical worldviews, the passage from one world-disclosive frame-
work and the emergence of another, seem to be completely independent from
the everyday praxis of language speakers and their concrete experiences. “Any
interaction between world-disclosing language and learning processes in the
world is excluded” (Discourse, 319).
This objection is powerful and repeats Habermas’s claim that Foucault

needed to turn to a theory of power because his early theory was quite inca-
pable of explaining the transitions from one episteme to another in the absence
of the activity of historical agents. Yet there may be another dimension to the
“world-disclosive” function of language. James Bohman (1996) states it clearly:
First, he [Habermas] makes world-disclosure one of the “functions” of lan-

guage; and second, he tries to tame it philosophically by confining it to the
delimited cultural domain of art and aesthetic experience. . . . The problem is
that Habermas’s deeper concessions do not sufficiently enrich his philosophy
of language in ways they might. . . . Rather than link disclosure to art, it has to
do with meaning, that is with conditions for making true utterances and
statements rather than with truth itself. Once a clearer demarcation and con-
nection between validity and disclosure is established, Habermas has nothing
to lose in simply accepting some of those broader implications which he fears
for the theory of meaning.
(198)
Chief among these implications is that some other uses of language, such as in
poetry, in fiction, and in theater, which Austin classified as “parasitic” upon
the “normal” use of language, may be closer to a second-order and reflective
use in which some constraints of literal use are suspended and reflectively
modified by competent speakers. This capacity for “suspending constraints”
(Bohman 1996, 208) is very much like the capacity to integrate within the praxis
of everyday life cognitive interpretations, with moral expectations, and
affective- aesthetic expressions and evaluations. What is assumed in each
case is a certain creativity, a fluidity, a loosening of hardened patterns and
structures, a capacity to see new configurations and to undo blockages.
Disclosure then concerns the rhetorical effect of introducing new perspectives

and assumptions into the background set of common knowledge, so that the
audience of the utterance comes to acquire a new interpretive framework to
modify the rigidities of the old one. Should these assumptions be sufficiently
in conflict with entrenched existing ones, the whole common world, and not
just the initial problem or interpretation must be repaired or altered.
(Bohman 1996, 209)
This alteration or repair of perspectives and frameworks need not be

viewed diachronically as the succession of one world-disclosing picture after
another. Such alteration and repair can take place synchronically in processes
of everyday communication: therapeutic praxis is a mode of teaching the
412 Texts
individual a new mode of considering his or her own history via the loosening
of blockages and of traumatic experiences. Processes of distorted communica-
tion that suffer through the absence of perspectival shifts, through the inca-
pacity to take the standpoint of the other, or through the inability to find new
vocabularies and new forms of expression need these forms of alteration and
repair as well. Art, through the transfiguration of the commonplace (Arthur
Danto), at its best helps us achieve some of this, as do forms of therapy, dance,
theater, music, opera, and literature. Thus, the communicative and world-
disclosive functions of language may need each other more—and are certainly
more interdependent—than Habermas’s threefold scheme of the theoretical,
practical, and the aesthetic-expressive uses of reason would lead us to believe.
Here too the encounter with postmodernism opens up new venues and
inspires future work in critical theory (see Wellmer 1991; J. Bernstein 1989a,
1989b; Seel 1985).
Conclusion
Habermas’s encounter with modern/postmodern thought is one of the most

sustained attempts in the philosophy of the twentieth century by a thinker
rooted in a different tradition to engage in immanent critique and conversa-
tion with those of another. Habermas’s remarkable capacities as an immanent
critic, a careful and generous, even if contentious reader, were all on display
here. His interlocutors, for example, Derrida and Foucault, were incapable of
returning the compliment—whether this was because of their temperament,
psychology, or philosophical style, or a mixture of all three. But an entire gen-
eration of new critical theorists carried the fruits of this encounter in new
directions by extending it into a new theory of social power (Honneth and
Fraser), into feminism (Benhabib, Butler, Fraser, and Allen), into new venues
in the philosophy of science and language (McCarthy, Bohman), into aesthet-
ics (Wellmer, Menke, Seel, and J. Bernstein), and into new venues in demo-
cratic theory (R. Bernstein, Brunkhorst, Benhabib, McCarthy).
The dominant cultural and political mood of the later 1980s was one of
fragmentation, decentration, and an emphasis on the irreconcilability of
differences—characterized by that much misused and misunderstood word
“difference.” But this constellation did not last long. The beginning of the
1990s brought the civil war in Yugoslavia to Europe, and suddenly the lan-
guage of “difference” started to sound hollow: what were the differences that
we ought to promote, further, and defend? And which forms of difference
resulted in deadly confrontations with otherness? Wasn’t the language of
difference a vocabulary of hypertolerance or hyperliberalism? What were
the institutional preconditions—moral, legal, and ethical—for letting the
otherness of the other be? Normative philosophy now returned with a ven-
geance: a theory of power alone could not help us answer these questions at all.
The modern/postmodern constellation that emphasized fragmentation
and confrontation between the First and Third World in particular was now
confronted with the phenomenon of globalization. The “clash of civilizations”
was taking place against the background of increasing socioeconomic, trans-
portational, and communicational integration; of increased and intensified
contact among nations, cultures, and peoples. Today the insights and intu-
itions of the postmodernism of the 1980s have flown into the critical theories
of postcolonial anthropology and history, which attempt to consider the
encounter with otherness in the context of a fragmented but nevertheless
global world (Spivak 1988, 1999; Appadurai 1996; Chakrabarty 2000). The
philosophical discourse of, and about, modernity is now a global discourse; it
is no longer confined to the European continent but takes place among intel-
lectuals from many parts of the world who are themselves children of that
potent and ambivalent legacy of Western rationalism. It is a tribute to the
power of Habermas’s theory that he has shown us the way to think the legacy
of the Enlightenment in a new world.
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38
DEMOCRACY, LAW, AND
SOCIET Y
Between Facts and Norms (1992): Points of Reference: The
Emergence of Political Philosophy from Theoretical Philosophy
CHRISTOPH MÖLLERS
H
abermas’s legal theory must be understood as part of a much
larger project that combines theoretical and practical philosophy
in an uncommonly thorough way for the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries. Habermas (in Truth) has lamented the fact that, in a landscape
increasingly distinguished by the division of academic labor, the two perspec-
tives have grown more and more separate (for an expressly different view, see
Rawls 2005, 372ff.). At the same time, his writings have proved that this need
not be the case. Habermas was interested in matters of political theory from
the first, even if he came to address them in systematic fashion only late in his
career (a matter to be distinguished from commentary he has long offered on
current events). Although the subject of democracy surfaced in his writings early
on (Habermas et al. 1961), Habermas was concerned less with how to establish
institutions endowed with legitimacy than with freeing citizens to employ the
resources afforded by democratic society in order to pursue authentic self-
determination. That is, Habermas’s early work did not discuss democracy in a
legal-theoretical context.
A first point of reference for Habermas’s political theory is materialist
social theory. This perspective permits him to understand social analysis,
prima philosophia, and democratic legal theory as elements of a unified proj-
ect. In this light, it is clear how the position Habermas articulated in the debate
on positivism—his refusal to admit either “apolitical” criteria of truth or
empirical falsifications à la Karl Popper—has continued in his later works,
including Between Facts and Norms. Materialist social theory demands that
systematic questions be addressed historically.
Accordingly, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere investi-
gates how the social structure underlying public spaces of critical engage-
ment represents the precondition for democratic self-legislation. In a manner
characteristic of the times, the first edition of the book (1962) evinced
418 Texts
considerable pessimism and skepticism about the possibility of democratic

representation (which, indeed, it viewed as a phenomenon of decline, given
the dominance of mass media under capitalism). However, by the time that a
new edition appeared in 1990—at the very latest—the gloomy outlook had
yielded to a milder interpretation. Henceforth, the institutions of the consti-
tutional and democratic state were seen to promote legitimate government;
especially with regard to the public sphere, a comparably positive ending was
in sight (Facts, 329ff.). (This shift can be explained both by changes in Haber-
mas’s theory and by positive developments in German public space since the
1960s.)
A further characteristic of Habermas’s early phase—and a matter related to
his project of producing a unified theory—is the effort to identify the political
relevancy of social realms that have split off and achieved autonomy, e.g., the
natural sciences and technology. From the first, Habermas made it clear that
no sphere of society is immune to problems of legitimation. Here, his concerns
meet up with those of American pragmatism, which, in questioning the cate-
gorical distinction between facts and norms, casts doubt on the separation
between theories of truth and theories of legitimation (Truth). Habermas’s
engagement with these issues was formulated in systematic terms in The The-
ory of Communicative Action. At the same time—at least implicitly—this work
established a framework that has proven important for the author’s political
theory inasmuch as it defines the nature of communicative action and, in so
doing, describes the relationship between the system and the lifeworld, which
constitute a dynamic unit.
Habermas’s understanding of democracy forms part of a comprehensive
theory of a society that operates under the conditions of differentiation
described by Talcott Parsons (Facts, 73ff.; cf. Luhmann 2004). More important
than individual elements, however, is the overall context for Habermas’s view
that political legitimation occurs through deliberative procedure. Here, the
point of reference is provided by philosophical reflections on truth, which
Habermas has translated, by way of discourse theory, into a theory of moral
action; his understanding of law and democracy, that is, follows from his con-
ception of truth and morality.
Finally, Habermas’s discussion of postmodernism (Discourse) is relevant to
his political theory. By challenging French critiques of rationality, Habermas
has secured the epistemological foundations of his own view. Without the
possibility of justifying norms, Habermas maintains, no form of government/
rule can be legitimate. Whichever side one takes in this debate, one must grant
that Habermas’s objections are confirmed ex negativo inasmuch as postmod-
ern French philosophy has mustered no comparably valuable contribution to
institutional political theory. (Thus, for Foucault, political engagement and
Between Facts and Norms 419
theoretical engagement are unrelated activities—and Derrida simply holds to

a conception of justice that represents an aporetic and negative form of
idealism.)
The More Immediate Context: Political Theory
At the beginning of the 1990s, Habermas defined where he stood in the field of
political theory. His position duly continues his previous theoretical reflec-
tions—especially his longstanding opposition to scientistic “positivism,” on
the one hand, and conservative institutionalism, on the other.
The decisive context for the theory of democracy presented in Between
Facts and Norms is the debate between liberalism and communitarianism
in the United States. Characteristically, Habermas articulates his own position
by engaging with the works of others, defining his standpoint as the system-
atic “middle ground” between other schools of thought. In this book, he does
so especially by engaging with liberalism of the Rawlsian variety, on the one
hand, and, on the other, the communitarian views offered by authors such as
Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel. The middle position
Habermas stakes out for himself takes distance from the liberal presupposi-
tion of stable individual preferences, which must simply be integrated into
democratic will formation. (This critique of liberal empiricism—which
treats democratic will formation as a matter of aggregation and views indi-
vidual voices as “facts”—can easily apply to positivism, as well.) Equally,
Habermas objects to views that directly assign legitimating value to tradi-
tions and conventions—views, that is, that reify real (or putative) forms of
cultural identity; here, too, his early critiques of institutionalized thinking
are affirmed.
Especially in this context, it is clear that Habermas’s political theory is
democratic in an emphatic and double sense. For one, it recognizes no politi-
cal legitimation outside of democratic procedure. For another—and as a true
theory of authentically democratic will formation—it rejects reducing legiti-
mation to a matter of “adding up” individual opinions. Beyond what it yields
in immediate terms, this methodology holds a broader significance for politi-
cal theory. In subsequent works, Habermas’s location of a mediating position
between communitarianism and liberalism yields his important systematic
thesis concerning the equiprimordiality of private and public autonomy.
(After all, liberal theories routinely view individual freedom as the primary
point of reference, whereas communitarian theories begin with group forma-
tions [Vergemeinschaftung].)
420 Texts
Legitimation and Institution: On the Critical Potential of Theory
In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas names Immanuel Kant as the source
(Gewährsmann) of his theoretical reflections. However, he neither employs
Kant’s markedly individualist view of norms, nor does he make use of his
theory of political institutions (which, in fact, is largely absent from his works).
On these matters, Habermas proceeds differently. With his thesis of equipri-
mordiality, he accords public autonomy a greater role than Kant. Moreover, he
addresses the institutional design of the democratic and constitutional state in
terms that are much more concrete. When he invokes Kant, then, Habermas is
concerned, above all, with the uncompromising normativity of his forebear’s
theoretical position. From the outset, Habermas has opposed all institutional
essentialism (Selbstzweckhaftigkeit)—the positions of, e.g., conservative authors
such as Arnold Gehlen and Ernst Forsthoff. On this point, his stance combines
with a conception of reason that, even when it encounters practical cognitive
limits, in no way admits normative exceptions.
The point of such an approach—which, perhaps, also marks its most pre-
carious feature—concerns the extent to which, and in what way, it is possible
to incorporate factual historical and political developments. It is easy to see, in
The Theory of Communicative Action, the role played by the empirical obser-
vation of intersubjective communicative action. Between Facts and Norms,
however, produces a different impression: the work seems to deviate from the
Kantianism Habermas claims to endorse. From an exterior, political perspec-
tive, the critical claims of Habermas’s theory—whether this involves invoking
“first-generation” critical theory in The Theory of Communicative Action or
the mildly benevolent assessment of Western constitutional democracy in
Between Facts and Norms (a matter also in evidence in the foreword to the new
edition of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere)—have clearly
been relativized. This is all the more apparent inasmuch as a change in method
has occurred, as well: the more normative Habermas’s approach is, the more
moderate its results prove in terms of social and institutional critique (Facts);
conversely, the more his approach incorporates empiricism, the clearer its crit-
ical potential seems to be (Communicative Action).
Reading Between Facts and Norms from this perspective, it is evident that
Habermas’s line of argument is less concerned with proving, in axiomatic
fashion, where political order comes from (on the model of Kant’s demonstra-
tion of the separation of powers [Gewaltenteilung] [Kant 1996, §45–46]) than
with examining standing institutions against the background of a theory of
discourse oriented on political processes. In a certain measure, Between Facts
and Norms “submits” its theoretical program for review by the democratic and
constitutional state. At the same time, however, the tension “between facts
and norms” is addressed on a case-by-case basis—especially through the
critical analysis of constitutional adjudication (Verfassungsgerichtsbarkeit).

Consequently, in the method employed—especially as regards the triadic style
of its argumentation, which elaborates a position between other theoretical
standpoints—the book foregrounds its debt to Hegel. (To be sure, this means
Hegel as a philosopher of freedom, whom Habermas has defended—for his
theoretical perspective on the French Revolution—against Joachim Ritter
[cf. Theory], and not the Hegel who theorized ethical life [Sittlichkeit] as an
objective phenomenon.)
Law and Rights
Law (Recht) came to play an independent role only late in Habermas’s writ-
ings. In The Theory of Communicative Action, it is briefly discussed as a form
of strategic discourse—that is, as a means of concealing validity claims in
instrumental fashion. At this point, Habermas’s view was still strongly
indebted to Max Weber’s notion that the law represents a formalizing tool of
means-end (zweckrational) organization—even though, unlike Weber, Haber-
mas addressed the matter in terms of communicative action and, in so doing,
sought to justify a conception of rationality that is more comprehensive and
normatively substantive. In the course of the 1980s, Habermas modified his
critical—but ultimately disinterested—perspective. Between Facts and Norms
presents his new understanding of the topic, which is informed by the works
of legal theorists who have incorporated the author’s theories of discourse and
communicative action into their own works.
Above all, Robert Alexy (1989, 2002) and Klaus Günther (1993) have helped
Habermas develop a new perspective on the law, which permits the normative
standards of his theory to be inscribed in juridical discourse in a much more
fundamental way. In particular, Alexy’s “special case thesis” (Sonderfallthese)
(Alexy 1989, 211ff.)—which understands juristic discourse to represent a spe-
cial instance of general practical discourse—permits Habermas’s discourse-
theoretical mechanisms for justifying validity claims to be integrated into the
interpretation of the law. Now juristic arguments no longer function only on
the side of the system imperatives of the legal order; instead, they represent a
special form of justificatory discourse. On this basis, the status of the law
changes in Habermas’s work to a certain degree, shifting from the side of the
system toward communicative action—at the very least, it operates at the bor-
der between them. Henceforth, law is to be viewed as a “medium for trans-
forming communicative power into administrative power” (Facts, 169).
This development in Habermas’s theory is not surprising in terms of
the overall design of discourse theory. Conditions of discourse are very
similar to those of legally organized procedure. The structure of discursive
422 Texts
procedure—in which all parties affected are given the opportunity to speak,
every decision must be made plausible by means of arguments demonstrating
that what has been said has also received consideration, and both the validity
claims presented and decisions concerning them are subject to evaluation on a
generalizable scale (which, for its part, is the product of the same kind of
process)—closely resembles fair practices in court.
What is more, the distinction between discourses that apply law and those
that establish it (Rechtsanwendungs- und Rechtssetzungsdiskurse) (Günther
1993) adds a further element to the connection between legal form and dis-
course theory. The discourse of legal application reads discourse theory into
court practices. When applied, positive law (gesetztes Recht) is subject to a
procedure that must be adequate to discourse-theoretical standards. This
model permits Habermas to offer a systematically justified answer to different
questions of theory and practice in legal and democratic theory. The discourse
of legal application enables theory to do without the problematic instance of
“the power of judgment” (Urteilskraft) when analyzing the application of rules
(Regelanwendung). Kant, in affirming that a rule cannot define its own appli-
cation, had appealed to “a common sense” (Gemeinsinn) (Kant 2001, §21) that
shapes decisions. Such a position is incompatible with Habermas’s ideas. The
discourse of legal application does not mean that administration and courts
cease to be bound by democratic legislation; indeed, the very opposite is the
case: being bound to law is central to their possessing legitimacy in the first
place.
All the same, one may ask to what extent theory can, in fact, account for the
actual achievements of legality (Rechtsform)—or whether, instead, it does not
miss precisely what constitutes legality as such (den Eigensinn dieser Form)
(Lieber 2007). That is: if no categorical difference exists between the articula-
tion (Setzung) and application (Anwendung) of the law—inasmuch as both are
subject to the same procedural logic—then it is not entirely clear why the for-
mal “binding effect” (Bindungswirkung) of law is necessary. In principle, all
questions—including those that democratic law is supposed to have already
settled—can be taken up again in discourse. The distinction between legisla-
tive and juridical procedures—to wit: the received combination of courts being
bound by law, on the one hand, and, at the same time, being independent—
ultimately remains obscure. Discourses of legal application must orient them-
selves on the general criteria of discourse theory. Court procedure, then, functions
no differently than legislative procedure—if on a different scale. This means,
however, that the promise of formal equality, which is key for a positive legal
order—which, indeed, constitutes the defining feature of law (der eigentliche
Eigenwert des Rechts)—is pushed aside.
A similar objection may be formulated with respect to Habermas’s theory
of basic rights (Grundrechte). Basic rights may be morally justifiable (Forst
2012), but they must also be enacted by legislation. In Habermas’s view, they
function as “unsaturated placeholders” (Facts, 126). Basic rights “must be
interpreted and given concrete shape by a political legislature in response to
changing circumstances” (125; this point is articulated even more clearly in
Maus 1995). It is not possible, then, that the guarantee of basic rights through
interpretation in constitutional law—which can also be directed against dem-
ocratic legislation—should be justified in this way. Accordingly, Between Facts
and Norms (238ff.) discusses constitutional adjudication in a particularly criti-
cal fashion. (Thereby, Habermas has imported the American debate about the
legitimation of constitutional adjudication to Germany—a pioneering achieve-
ment that is rarely remarked on.)
Also in this context, the question arises: what is left of “basic law” as a cat-
egory if it cannot develop an interpretive meaning of its own (Eigensinn) that—
at least on an exceptional basis—may turn against democratic legislation?
Most democratic constitutions formulate this aspect of basic laws in relatively
straightforward terms (notwithstanding justified criticism to be made of the
all-too-frequent presumption of constitutional courts); the effects do not seem
to promote democratic politics—as Habermas hopes will occur when consti-
tutional adjudication is restricted. For this reason, one may ask whether it
would not be more in keeping with his overall project if Habermas worked only
with the concept of subjective rights guaranteed by democratic law—and gave
up the notion of basic rights that have been secured constitutionally (verfassung-
sunmittelbares Grundrecht) (Lieber 2007, 197). After all, privileging the demo-
cratic elaboration of subjective rights over the juridical verification of basic
rights may be seen to cast doubt on the thesis that private and public autonomy
are “equiprimordial.”
Here, too, the specific sense of legality (der Eigensinn der Rechtsform)
remains uncertain in its relation to political procedures of legitimation. The
strictly public approach to the interpretation of basic law that Habermas
ultimately favors contradicts, in a certain measure, the way he conceives the
constitutionalization of an international order (where he seems to accord
precedence to foundational principles).
The Theory of Democracy
Equiprimordiality of Private and Public Autonomy
The systematic point of departure underlying Habermas’s theory of demo-

cratic government—the equiprimordiality of private and public autonomy—is
inspired by Kant. (“Equiprimordiality,” in turn, seems to be an expression
taken from Schelling.) As Habermas views matters, private freedom and
424 Texts
public participation in democratic government are equally important. They

do not stand opposed or prove mutually exclusive but rather must be brought
into alignment in such a way that each part reinforces the other. This idea is
already present in Kant’s doctrine of right (Rechtslehre), which—with its uni-
fied conception of freedom (the “sole human right”)—makes no distinction
between private and public liberties.
In Habermas’s view, public and private autonomy presuppose each other.
Without the opportunity for political participation, meaningful self-determi-
nation cannot occur. At the same time, it is only inasmuch as private
self-determination is possible that political will formation can take place. The
complementary relation finds institutional expression in the reciprocal
strengthening of individual rights and democratic voting procedures. In this
way, Habermas is able to reconstruct the basis of legitimation for democratic
and constitutional states not in terms of hierarchy but as a “circle” of discourse
(see the elegant account in Gerstenberg 1997), in which the three powers of
government operate with equal rights (gleichberechtigter Arbeitszusammen-
hang) (Möllers 2008). Constitutionality (Rechtsstaatlichkeit) and democracy,
then, do not stand in opposition; rather, they condition and reinforce each
other reciprocally (Inclusion, 253ff.). At the same time, Habermas’s view of the
task of the law—and especially of basic rights—need not be understood as a
necessary consequence of his thesis of equiprimordiality, which not only
affords many other (and many more concrete) possibilities for institutional
connection but also permits him to situate his theory between liberalism and
communitarianism. The permanent movement and proceduralism inscribed
in this model excludes all efforts to substantialize legitimation (a point that
has also given rise to criticism [Pfordten 2000]).
Inasmuch as Habermas has arrived at his conception of democracy by way
of theorizing truth and moral justification, he attaches a special value to the
justifiability of political decisions. According to his notion of deliberation by
democracy, legitimation exists to the extent that there are equal opportunities
for participants to introduce their own validity claims to processes of decision
making. A discourse that generates legitimation obtains only when rules of
discourse are observed and reasoned arguments admitting generalization are
employed. (This is not necessarily to be understood as a moral duty to act in a
particular way [as has been claimed; cf. Forst 2012]; rather, it represents the
cognitive description of a normative context that remains external.)
Habermas places his model in opposition to a voluntaristic conception of
democracy that understands democratic legitimation as the mere balancing
(Abgleichung) of unchanging interests and preferences (which, as such, is eas-
ily critiqued along economic lines). He also objects to models of collective
will that attach a determinative force to cultural identity. In Habermas’s theo-
retical framework, matters of this kind belong to the realm of ethical
particularity, which is entitled to a certain measure of protection but cannot

introduce its worldview into democratic discourse without further ado. (At
any rate, it cannot do so without offering a mediating justification.) Finally,
Habermas’s perspective clearly differs from the “expertocratic” notions that
often operate under the cover of “deliberative democracy.” Especially in the
field of international relations, there is a pronounced tendency to make the
call for reasoned argument the basis of a view in which “dialogue between
experts” founds democratic legitimation; here, the unjustified appeal to
Habermasian theory is astonishingly widespread (as a monitory example, see
Slaughter 2004, 203ff.). The need for procedure should not amount to replac-
ing democratic decision making with debate—and certainly not with debate
that is not equally accessible to all (on the relationship between deliberation
and democracy, see Lafont 2006).
All the same, the question arises whether the fact that Habermas’s concep-
tion of democracy ultimately derives from his theory of truth does not expect
too much of democratic institutions and assign them tasks that are too great—
while, at the same time, paying too little attention to the legitimation potential
of freely willed participation that occurs without justification (ohne Begründ-
ungsleistung). A thought experiment: an election, which is decided following a
deliberative debate, is repeated because a technical error has happened; now—
even though there would have been time for another debate (which is a matter
in the general interest)—the revote leads to a different result; does the second
vote lack legitimation? In other words: one should ask whether the capacity for
providing and accepting reasoned arguments and the cognitive use of justifi-
cations to arrive at—and develop—an understanding of one’s own (and oth-
ers’) positions might well be indispensable in the process of democratic will
formation but, all the same, whether such an exchange is not, in fact, less than
what may reasonably be expected to occur.
Do public debates in the media and in parliaments really involve trading
reasoned arguments—and thereby constitute a normative requirement—or do
they instead represent a cognitive “weighing” of different positions that are
simply presented to the public before decisions are made (Rawls 2005, 385ff.)?
Such a “strong” conception of politics—which holds that politics is independent
of reason—is just as foreign to Habermas’s theory as the view that continuous
disagreement would prove productive (Engländer 2002, 157ff.).
In Habermas’s view, duties of justification (Begründungsleistungen) should
not be built into the public-political order (Freiheitsordnung) as legal obliga-
tions. Doing so would manifestly damage the potential for freely expressing
opinions and harm possibilities for democratic participation inasmuch as
every instance when judgment occurred—with sanctions—about what can be
admitted as a “good reason” to public discourse (and should not, instead, be
dismissed as a mere proclamation of one’s personal worldview—or even a
426 Texts
simple insult) would harm democratic equality. Although self-determination

requires that one be able to justify oneself, protecting self-determination
means that it must not always be necessary to do so. Here, too—at the border
between moral obligation and legal sanction—the specifically egalitarian sig-
nificance of legality (Rechtsform) is evident.
Communicative Power, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere
If law entails the transformation of communicative power into administrative

power, then the former represents an important resource for democracy. Tak-
ing up Hannah Arendt’s (1970) reflections, Habermas recognizes that social
power factors into processes of communication through the open and com-
munal formation of opinion(s). Only if communication of this kind develops
can a democratic public sphere exist (Facts, 118ff., 359ff.). This means—and
here the concept of “civil society” enters the equation (Cohen and Arato
1992)—that society divides into manifold, asymmetrical associations within
and between which communication takes place.
In practical terms, a pure “face-to-face” exchange without mediation—the
atomized individual, on the one hand, and a democratic collective, on the
other—is impossible. In normative terms, too, such a direct opposition would
not be desirable. Experiences rooted in the lifeworld can be “made ready”
(aufbereitet) for the democratic process only through the structures of civil
society. However, the communication that occurs in civil society is subject to
other forms of logic, too—in particular, to the logic of the market. A double
threat to free communication (which Habermas posits in his thesis of equipri-
mordiality) is readily apparent when one considers the media. Private auton-
omy can create a media market that pays attention to events on the basis of
economic criteria alone. Thereby, although the state makes public spaces pos-
sible, it also makes them dependent on the very political institutions the pub-
lic sphere is supposed to regulate.
Religion in the Democratic Constitutional State
Habermas—largely in agreement with Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde’s (2007,

43) observation that the “neutral” and secular state rests on a foundation it
cannot itself guarantee—seems to assign religion a twofold role in the demo-
cratic state. On the one hand, as a collective enterprise (Gemeinwesen) that
endorses no particular worldview, the state should hold itself out of all reli-
gious affairs—just as, conversely, religious claims are not supposed to be “fed
into” democratic processes of will formation without further ado. At the same
time, however, religion factors into the genesis of the democratic and constitu-
tional state. Its positive contribution concerns the cultural underpinning of
democratic legal orders and the willingness of society members to accept
institutional arrangements that are, in fact, secular (Naturalism, 99ff.). In this
respect, the call for religious neutrality follows logically from Habermas’s
model of deliberative democracy and from his distinction between morality
and ethics: moral commandments are not just relevant to democratic will
formation—they constitute it in the first place; ethical imperatives, on the other
hand, are exempt from the justification that the democratic process requires.
They may be constitutionally (grundrechtlich) protected, but they are not sup-
posed to provide an independent contribution to democratic discourse.
To be sure, religion affords especially fruitful terrain for investigating how
“good reasons” may be derived from deliberations that engage with a foreign
worldview. Here, Habermas draws clear borders—for example, when he
declares that democratic parties may not invoke religion in their platforms
(Naturalism, 114ff.). The question remains, however, whether the openness of
democratic will formation would not be endangered were this in fact to occur.
Citizenship and Constitutional Patriotism
Even before Between Facts and Norms, Habermas took up “constitutional

patriotism”—a concept Dolf Sternberger had developed apropos of the thirti-
eth anniversary of the German Grundgesetz (Sternberger 1990; see chapter 48
in this volume). Sternberger, a liberal conservative, sought to develop a con-
cept of patriotism—that is, of affective investment (Anhänglichkeit) in a
political order—that would hold independent of the nation-state (in more
concrete terms: in view of the division of Germany into East and West).
Invoking historical forms of patriotism that preceded the political unifica-
tion of Germany, Sternberger elaborated a notion of civic pride that does not
relate to national identity but to the constitutional order—in this case, to the
“Basic Law.”
In adopting this concept (Naturalism, 106), Habermas affirmed that a dem-
ocratic and constitutional state expresses the reciprocal respect (Achtung) of
the citizens who have enacted the constitution and henceforth govern them-
selves with its help. Affective investment in the constitution represents the
emotional aspect of such respect—that is, the very concept of the democratic
constitution implies it. In a sense, then, all citizens are “republicans by reason”
(Vernunftrepublikaner). This model excludes a “strong” conception of patriotism
based solely on national qualities (such as, among others, some communitarians
endorse); at any rate, identities that have emerged historically possess no
inherent value (Eigenwert) that would permit one to dispense with further
428 Texts
justification. (Were this the case, invoking such qualities would potentially cur-
tail the freedom of others who do not possess them.)
Habermas’s relativization of collective identities also means that the con-
cept of citizenship must be reexamined (Facts, 495ff.). After all, a democratic
community cannot close itself off to other parties’ requests to be granted civil
rights simply by invoking tradition, cultural identity, or ethnicity. Insofar as
such parties are governed (unterworfen) by the rules of the democratic com-
munity, excluding them is a risky proposition. Moreover, refugees and state-
less individuals have a claim to recognition; they, too, must not be excluded
without reason. Inasmuch as the democratic state is open to others, the spaces
of communication within it stand open as well. Under democracy, identities
prove to be formations capable of transformation; consequently, public
spheres in democracy may begin to orient themselves beyond borders and to
form a transnational space of discourse (Postnational, 51ff., 102ff.). The nation-
state must undergo republicanization (Inclusion, 134ff.)—a matter that leads to
the problem of constituting democracy beyond national frontiers.
Democracy Beyond the State
Europe
In keeping with his mistrust of all instrumental claims, Habermas cannot

simply tie the mechanisms of legitimation that he has developed to any single
institution—and certainly not to the nation-state. In an important discussion
with Dieter Grimm (Grimm 1995) about a united Europe’s capacity for democ-
racy, Habermas has explored possible developments in European integration
and observed that the form assumed by government represents a necessary
condition for democratic legitimation (Inclusion, 157ff.). Thereby, however, the
emergence of an international public sphere—that is, of a space of discourse
within which political decisions on a European scale can be discussed and
regulated—need not be founded on specific conditions (e.g., a shared lan-
guage). On the contrary: the institutional process of integration can influence
the social evolution of Europe as a whole and even improve the social bases for
a European democracy—especially the emergence of a party system (Postna-
tional, 102ff.).
Therefore, although Habermas holds that no legitimation of rule can
exist without democratic procedure, European democracy does not depend
on any theoretical (staatstheoretisch) standards of social “homogeneity”
(Inclusion, 134ff.). Calls for state sovereignty and social homogeneity—which
have been made in the name of democratic principles both in political dis-
cussions and in the rulings of the German Federal Constitutional Court
(Bundesverfassungsgericht) (Kirchhof 1993)—do not hold up to Habermas’s

standards for deliberative democracy. Whereas a democratic public sphere
requires certain conditions to operate, political communication may occur
through the channels afforded by different media.
Therefore, the dangers that Habermas identifies in Europeanization (which
are the same as the risks he discerns in globalization) do not concern the insti-
tutional loss of national statehood so much as the uneven (ungleichzeitig)
development of private and public autonomy on an international level. Free-
dom for private, transnational interests has been achieved more quickly than
the internationalization of democratic politics. While this state of affairs
has promoted a neoliberal outlook—especially where economic policies are at
issue—it has occurred at the expense of concerns for social welfare (sozialsta-
atliche Anliegen). Habermas holds that the solution involves the further
democratization of European and international politics: “expanding Europe’s
political capacity for action has to happen simultaneously with the expansion
of the basis of legitimation of European institutions” (Postnational, 99f.). (See
chapter 39 in this volume.)
Constitutionalization of International Law
According to Habermas (see chapter 17 in this volume), it is important for

European political identity to take distance from the foreign policy of the
United States, particularly with regard to international law. Nowhere is the
antagonism between facts and norms more evident than in the ordering of
international affairs. In reflecting on the constitutionalization of international
law, Habermas explicitly takes up Kant (Divided West, 113ff.). After consider-
ing the possibility of “aggressively democratic” international law based on
autonomous (selbstbestimmte) and nonindependent (nicht selbstbestimmte)
states, he rejects this option. The open politicization of international law it
would entail strikes him as incompatible with the mutual respect that should
prevail between members of the community of states (Staatengemeinschaft).
Although the constitutionalization of international law places its hopes
in the recognition and incremental empowerment of individuals—which
finds expression in international institutions protecting human rights and
the International Criminal Court—this also means that violations of human
rights may be used to justify (military) interventions. Constitutionaliza-
tion, he maintains, remains a matter of legally respecting the right to
self-determination.
On this point, Habermas’s distrust for nationalism of any kind yields to a
comparably large trust—on the level of individual states—in legally estab-
lished practices. He has also come to view the role of human rights—which,
430 Texts
in international law, must do without formalization through egalitarian proce-

dures of legislation—in more and more positive terms (Brunkhorst 2005; see
chapter 58 in this volume). Institutionally, Habermas wishes to see Kant’s cos-
mopolitan project realized through a reformed United Nations that is bound
to constitutional rules and not subject to national interests as well as through
the establishment of regional structures for decision making; here, European
integration should show the way to the rest of the world.
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39
EUROPE, EUROPEAN
CONSTITUTION
“Why Europe Needs a Constitution” (2001)
ANDREW ARATO
E
urope and its constitution are important for Habermas for both
theoretical and political reasons. Modern constitutions that include
fundamental rights, each developed under specific national cir-
cumstances, represent key and even indispensable moments of bringing the
particular and the universal under a single denominator; hence the concept of
constitutional patriotism was developed as the center of an “ethics” that can
both motivate and satisfy universal norms. The preconditions were right,
namely, a liberal democratic constitution and a political culture capable of
recognizing its own highest aspirations in that normative order. In spite of
occasional optimism, Habermas was apparently never fully convinced that
the German tradition could see itself in this way. His turn to Europe is best
explained not so much as a search for a substitute as an attempt to find a more
hospitable context for the development of a genuine civic identity also in Ger-
many (Habermas 1991; A Berlin Republic, 161–182; Time, 89–110; Postnational;
Faltering, 69–106, 138–183).
Europe and the German Unification
The crucial set of events that accelerated this move toward Europe was the
unification of Germany in 1990 and its aftermath. For Habermas, this seri-
ously raised the possibility of a re-descent into traditional nationalism. At that
time, he believed that there was also a great chance for establishing the foun-
dations of a broader and deeper constitutional patriotism but that the consti-
tutional moment called for by Article 146 of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) had
been inexcusably wasted. Therefore, the preservation and perhaps develop-
ment of the elements of liberal and republican political identities compatible
with a multicultural and federal German and a multinational European polity
would have to be guaranteed in less direct and more complex ways. His solid
“Why Europe Needs a Constitution” 433
political sense seemed to convince him of the need for states to remain the
primary units of even the ideal or projected cosmopolitan order. Given the
dramatic inequality of states, this called for mediations, by intermediate enti-
ties, working in both directions. The European Union could be the model, to an
extent, as it already was “constituted,” and, even more, as it could be “reconsti-
tuted” or refounded. As he recently put it, (strong) regional integrations are
needed to empower (the) weak states as well as to enable the relatively successful
operation of a world society with few coercive means at its disposal. With respect
to Germany, transposing the republican heritage of the nation-state to a recon-
structed European Union, as a state recognizing the equality of other states
under law, could once and for all block the way to the renewal of nationalism.
The same turn to Europe could also lead to far more effective policies, since
there were other convincing political considerations at stake. The model of
social solidarity (refined as one of economic, political, and cultural inclusion)
established by the classical West European welfare states survives, though
shaken by the developmental crisis of that social form, the integration of the
East, the overly long ideological hegemony of neoliberalism, and, most
recently, the explosive issues of immigration in supposedly nonimmigration
countries. Habermas rightly sees even more serious dangers coming to this
model, which is based on redistribution within a market rationality (that he
wishes to conserve), by a form of globalization that rests on deregulation and
the exploitation of cheap labor. Social democracy cannot be continued in how-
ever a reflexively reconstructed form within the limits of any one state. Left
politics will now have to be regionally based and should take the form of
extending the achievements of the democratic welfare state beyond its original
nation-state limits, both for the sake of justice and because of the fundamental
interests of those who today still enjoy its entitlements. That will require a
Europe-wide or at least “harmonized” social policy as well as a common tax
structure to support it. Note that Habermas has been careful to identify the
European project he favors (and articulates therefore mainly on the formal
constitutional level) only as the necessary precondition of a new social democ-
racy, one that other political tendencies could and should also support on dif-
ferent grounds. The achievement of international security and peace is the
most important of these.
Europe Within a New International Order
According to Habermas, only a new international order could provide pacified

and legally regulated relations among states. The internal pacification of the
European space has already been the great achievement of European integra-
tion. Today, neither U.S. imperial dominance (as we see after Iraq) nor the
434 Texts
equilibrium of armed regions (Großräume) (as will be evident after Georgia)

can be relied on to guarantee even the status quo that has for an extended
period provided peace and relative prosperity within the region. The only
European answer to the new threats (local and asymmetric war, terrorism, eth-
nic cleansing and genocide, explosive movements of populations, ecological
disasters) is to extend the type of political and legal institutions that have been
successful in keeping peace and security in Europe to other areas of the world,
through multiplying autonomous regions and integrating them in reformed
international institutions. This is what he calls transforming classical interna-
tional law into some sort of cosmopolitan order. As a serious agent in such a
development (becoming perhaps another democratic pole in the world order),
Europe must be capable of sustained and more unified external action.
In order to play the roles allotted, Europeans will have to invent new insti-
tutions or at least apply old institutional solutions in innovative ways: given
the diversity of states, the federalist formulas of the past are not desirable, but
the primarily economy-driven, apolitical, functional method of integration
and its uneasy confinement in what is ultimately a treaty organization is no
longer adequate. Habermas seems to have abandoned his early (e.g., in a 1996
response to Grimm) adherence to a federalist model on the German example.
Even before Joschka Fischer’s famous 2000 speech (which Habermas probably
inspired, though it was probably also influenced by Carl Schmitt’s idea of the
Bund), Habermas seems to have adopted the model of a third formation,
between confederation and federal state. This was uneasily called a “state of
nation-states” (in one translation, for an English audience: “federation of
nation-states”) as against Fischer’s more clear “federation” (Föderation, con-
trasted to confederation and federal state), as the best way to describe the
regime that Europe could develop to serve both the interest of unity and the
integrity of its nation-states. Unfortunately, he never quite committed himself
to a clear formula here, perhaps because of his desire to stay clear of Schmitt’s
Bund concept, with its insistence on homogeneity among units, even though
that concept could and should have been reinterpreted in liberal-democratic
terms. His lack of clarity extended to the present as well as the projected future.
The issue is not fully explored, but Habermas seems to imply that the present
structure is a hybrid of a confederation created by treaties and a federation pro-
duced by informal processes. It is left to Brunkhorst to argue more explicitly
that precisely this mixed status is the source of the democracy deficit of the
whole. It would have been important for Habermas to see the present as an
unstable hybrid with serious legitimacy problems, in order to formulate the
right answer to go beyond it. Thus, much more importantly, as to the future, he
seems to be oscillating between treating the goal as a Bund, or a federation, and
the idea of a new hybrid between Bund and federal state as indicated by both the
(rather federalist) concept of a “state of nation-states” and the (incoherent or,
again, federalist) idea of Europe as somehow a “confederation” (Brunkhorst

2004, or his English translator) or federation of both nation-states and citizens.
Popular Sovereignty in Europe
It is not surprising that Habermas turns to constitutional theory and the proj-
ect of European constitution making as the vehicles for making the case for
greater integration and to address the democracy deficit. Recovering a dimen-
sion of the philosophy of praxis, he once rightly noted that while something
like a political culture develops, constitutions can be the object of will and
conscious action. While not a major participant in the German constitutional
debate in 1990 (which came before his work in legal theory), he expressed his
disappointment concerning the manipulative and legally dubious avoidance
of what Article 146 mandated. His analysis of the legal and political problems
of the highly accelerated democratic process in Germany is still relevant, even
though his own proposal, centering on a referendum, was unclear, and even
given that certain amendments (in the unification treaty) to the Preamble, to
Article 23 (eliminated), and to Article 146 neutralized the object of his worst
fear, namely, that the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) was being left open to invite
future annexations. It seems very likely that not only his turn to Europe but
also his interest in constitution making dates to this experience. Unfortu-
nately, it also linked him to the classical European model of sovereign demo-
cratic constitution making, with popular sovereignty interpreted in terms of
referenda, understood as the meaning of a “free decision by the German peo-
ple.” This occurred through an unfortunately common but textually and even
doctrinally by no means the only possible (cf. Murswiek 1978; Grimm 1991a,
1991b, 2004, 2005) interpretation of Article 146, which could have been satis-
fied, e.g., by using a newly elected constitutional assembly, deciding under
high consensus requirements, and/or ratifying conventions on the level of the
states, American style, or perhaps other democratic formulas. Justified or not,
his subsequent attachment to this one particular device as an alternative to
governmental decision seems to be based less on his own theory of “popular
sovereignty as procedure” than on the intensity of the conviction of the losing
side concerning what would have been the right road for Germany in 1990.
What he and probably others tended to miss, however, was the priority of a
governmental type of decision concerning the procedures and rules of a refer-
endum that always allows several choices strongly influencing the outcome,
even in Germany at that time, where voting could have been organized in at
least three or four very distinct ways (the Länder, single individuals, by two
states, or by one state—the GDR voting alone, as Grimm suggested, before an
Article 23 adhesion, and then the two together electing a constituent assembly,
436 Texts
with or without ratifying referenda, again by states or by individuals), and the

role of political power in making these types of choices. Thus the question of
how that power could be made legitimate could not even be raised and was in
fact occluded by the rhetorics focusing on referenda. That omission was to
become serious when Habermas applied what he learned to Europe.
In the European case, he actively joined the discussion concerning consti-
tution making, and he has had a very strong influence on the views of some
participants. Interestingly, Habermas himself started out in the debates by
holding a middle position, which rightly reflected the intermediate type of
regime he seemed to advocate for Europe. But that middle position eroded as
he set his sights on a Europe that was a federation not only of states but also of
citizens. Unlike some legal theorists in the tradition of Kelsen, he very rightly
believed that the procedure and process of actual (rather than merely imputed)
constitution making mattered for legitimacy, but against some of his own fol-
lowers he at first did not identify the right process with a fundamentally delib-
erative or even a fully democratic procedure that would replace the states by
individual citizens as the only relevant agents. Indeed, the notion of a federa-
tion of nation-states would require only an outcome where the states are
brought under the constitution with an amendment rule involving qualified
majorities. To create such a constitution (like the American regime up to
1860), only preexisting states (ready to make what is originally a constitutional
treaty) but not an already formed people or common citizenry is required. Yet,
with the failure of the German constitution-making process (if not its result)
and perhaps also misunderstood American examples in mind (which involved
no referenda in the European sense), as well as to counter some untenable
objections concerning the supposed impossibility of a European constitution,
Habermas has come to insist on a popular as distinguished from a governmen-
tal role, complementing or even somehow commencing the intergovernmental
process. This distinction between people and mere government, contrary to
his stress on procedure and his countless earlier warnings against an embodi-
ment model of popular sovereignty, tended to fill the empty place of the king
(Claude Lefort) with the majority will in a referendum.
Admittedly, instead of seeing the referendum as the expression of the Euro-
pean civic people, Habermas wished to see the method as the beginning of
constructing that subject in a Europe-wide debate. After dismissing the red
herring of the preexisting homogenous people, he introduces his now famous
circular process, where the voluntaristically constructed civic people, whose
solidarity does not stop at national boundaries, would be a result of, among
other things, the constitution and even the constituent process. The idea and
the logic would be unobjectionable if Habermas were proposing a constitution
in which all the major political offices of the overarching unit would be deriv-
able from the votes of the same citizens. Having renounced the federal state,
he is in no position to do this, and he instead counts on political culture, civil

society, and a set of publics really open to one another eventually to give sub-
stance to the idea of a European people with transborder solidarities. But since
these three domains would lead at best to interpenetrating pluralities based on
neither equality nor unity—and in any case are going to lag far behind the con-
stitution—his virtuous circle (on which the self-fulfilling prophecy is to be
based) is too small. Its burden, and the beginning of the general civic learning
process of equal citizens, is to be almost entirely borne by the Europe-wide
referendum, to which, to solve the problem, he more recently added the direct
election of a (presumably weak) European president. When that last step is
taken, the deliberative democrat, in search of a short cut, is in danger of becom-
ing a plebiscitary one. His recent appeal to the European “silent majority”
indeed recalls bad examples under American presidentialism.
But he vastly underestimates what it would take to establish a regime based
in part on plebiscitary legitimacy, even if the structural changes involved were
limited. Habermas unfortunately never engaged the systematic discussion
concerning the meaning of having a constitution and therefore never clarified
whether Europe already has one that needs a fundamental reform or has only
a treaty (or even an “imposed charter”) and therefore needs to be constitution-
ally refounded. The latter, with or without a political revolution, could easily
be interpreted as a legally revolutionary act. Accompanied by strong concepts
of popular sovereignty, that is how Hauke Brunkhorst and the ARENA group,
save Habermas, now interpret the situation. And although he agrees with
Brunkhorst that the Treaty of Lisbon is only a bureaucratically driven reform,
Habermas does not intend to go so far even when he in fact adopts a proposal
in which the idea of popular sovereignty plays such a large role and calls for a
referendum that would, as will be seen, break the framework of the intergov-
ernmental process. He is a very reluctant revolutionary. Yet it is unclear, given
his relatively unambitious constitutional program, why he is becoming a revo-
lutionary at all and, even more, whether such a revolution “without a revolu-
tion” (so unlike Germany in 1990, with the “self-limiting revolution” in the
East) could possibly succeed.
The contrasting attitudes to the Constitutional Treaty that failed to be rati-
fied in 2005 and the Lisbon Treaty, now also in some trouble, demonstrate the
problem. It is quite unclear why the latter is described as having been pro-
duced by the most bureaucratic procedure so far, when the former, routinely
called by Habermas a “constitution,” has earned his strong support, at least
before it failed. Certainly neither one nor the other was the work of any
European people, nor was it the product of a primarily participatory process.
Neither could be seen as the final version that European institutions should
take, especially as neither would have brought the masters of the treaties
under the constitution in a genuinely “constitutional” amendment rule based
438 Texts
on majorities of some kind (Grimm 1991a, 1991b, 2004, 2005). If the admittedly
new convention method, with all its initial weaknesses and later deformations
by the convention president, Giscard d’Estaing, did distinguish the making of
the Constitutional Treaty from mere intergovernmentalism, then it was still
the major part of the process that led to the hardly different substance of the
Lisbon Treaty. But neither constituent process could be seen as beginning the
circular process of citizen production. While the Constitutional Treaty comes
closer to a constitution in the formal sense, by uniting all the treaties in a sin-
gle document, neither treaty satisfied Habermas’s new minimum goals, for
example, a harmonized taxation policy, a common foreign policy (in spite of
different names for the head of foreign affairs), and a directly elected Euro-
pean president, nor, especially, his earlier goals, such as reducing the Council
to a second chamber, genuine parliamentarianism, and the Commission as a
more or less differentiated executive branch.
It is clear, however, that the option for referenda was greatly reduced by the
architects of the Lisbon Treaty, to one country precisely, and perhaps this may
be what Habermas is thinking of as bureaucratic, a funny term for parliamen-
tary democracy. The Constitutional Treaty at least was supposed to involve
several (nine or ten) national referenda, even if its makers did not have the
courage or more likely the power to enact (separate) European referenda on
the same day, as some wished. What he has therefore learned from the French
and Dutch referenda is not (as others, cf. Dehousse 2006) the inadequacy of
this device in complex constitutional matters as the instrument of democracy
but that those who wanted to stress the role of referenda even more were right
all along. He came to think that it is futile to expect the peoples of ten or espe-
cially twenty-seven individual states, voting separately, according to different
rules, all to vote positively in referenda on behalf of a Europe that has not been
(and cannot be) mobilized on behalf of a common constitutional goal. Refer-
enda remain the key, but their rules must be changed in order to favor the
particular result he desires.
Critical Reception
To me, Habermas’s positive view of referenda as they are practiced today, even
when formally freed of their Bonapartist heritage, as particularly democratic
instruments remains inexplicable, especially for the theorist of deliberative
democracy. Granted, the instrument has been procedurally cleaned up in
postwar European practice, starting with the exemplary making of the
Constitution of the Fourth French Republic. (Shortly afterward, early during
the Fifth Republic, it was seriously abused by de Gaulle.) Nevertheless, the
instrument remains singularly unwieldy for deciding complex constitutional
questions, where whole documents can get rejected over heterogeneous
opposition to very few, separate symbolic items, and it remains dramatically

open to political manipulation on both sides. At most it should be regarded as
a minor, complementary technique in a genuinely parliamentary democracy.
Why are referenda more democratic than parliamentary representation? Why
do they express the popular will any more clearly than the vote of representa-
tives? How are we to choose among different rules for referenda? By metarefer-
enda? And similarly, how are referenda to be accomplished in countries like
Germany, where they are constitutionally excluded or greatly limited? Unless
we want to order unconstitutional referenda, as did General de Gaulle in 1962,
only subsequently legalized, we first have to have “governmental” constitu-
tional change: that is, accept, quite illogically, governments in the national
foundational role but not in the European one. Finally, if proposing unlikely
scenarios, why not at least Fishkin’s and Ackerman’s deliberative polling, which
Habermas himself relies on to test (I think not entirely plausibly) the popular
sentiment of a European “silent majority” on greater integration (Fishkin and
Luskin 2005)? Finally, after the experience of democratic transitions from 1989
in Poland to 1996 in South Africa, we should understand better how to unite
democratic legitimacy and constitution making or even how to organize soci-
etal discussion concerning constitutions without referenda or plebiscites.
When referenda were first introduced by Habermas, the reason seemed to
have been normative. Europe-wide referenda, or the political discussions
around them, were supposed to be part of the circular process that will pro-
duce European citizens. But now the reasoning has shifted in part to a differ-
ent, more political, even strategic level. Accordingly, “the governments” have
failed. And though the French and the Dutch “people” (i.e., all kinds of
unlikely coalitions that agreed on nothing positive) voted against a “constitu-
tion” that Habermas believed was at least a good start, after the fact we should
now think that they were right. And it would be all too easy to agree because
the Convention really was not very political (the banishing of voting in favor
of something weird called consensus) nor very courageous (especially in
expanding democracy and bringing the states, the so-called masters of the
constitution, fully under law), and its product was not really very good or con-
sistent and was further diminished by the subsequent Intergovernmental
Conference (IGC). Had a Europe-wide referendum been held on the same day,
would that have compensated for these flaws? That would have supposedly
initiated the beginning of the already noted circular process of citizenship
building. This is what Habermas earlier stressed. Yet such a procedure also
might have contributed to the success of the thing. This is Habermas’s newer
claim, if an implicit one. The Constitutional Treaty accordingly failed because
it was not democratic enough; if it had been, it might have succeeded. And
undoubtedly a referendum in all countries on the same day could have avoided
the false politicization that occurred in France and the Netherlands, and so we
cannot tell what would have happened on a “referendum day” even if in that
440 Texts
case the countries still voted separately, as the failed plans of 2002–2003 would
have it. Habermas, however, would like really to make sure. Thus he is now
(both before and after the new Irish No) calling for a more radical version, one
where both the citizens of Europe and individual countries would be counted
but where simple majorities of each would decide. This greater radicality,
without a Convention behind him, does not exactly promise success.
Indeed, on the strategic level, it is all too easy to predict that what he is
proposing cannot possibly happen. His proposal now involves, substantively, a
plan for the harmonization (or integration) of European social and taxation
policy (the details presumably to be worked out), the popular election of a
European president (presumably uniting the two presidencies of the Council
and the Commission) in Europe-wide voting (rules unspecified, as usual,
though they would greatly matter!), and the establishment of the office of a
European foreign minister (powers with respect to Council of Ministers and
their voting rules unspecified). So far so good, and it is perhaps not his task to
formulate precise proposals. But Habermas is strangely unaware of the litera-
ture on the perils of plebiscitary presidentialism from Tocqueville and Marx
to Linz and Stepan, and most Europeans in any case are rightly attached to
parliamentary government. It is a more obvious problem that Habermas is
asking the heads of government to agree unanimously on a new proposal that
goes well beyond the Lisbon Treaty, which they could barely agree on in the
first place. But the greatest difficulty with all this has to do with the fact that
the procedure for achieving what is still only a minimum program would be a
Europe-wide referendum, according to a new and unified electoral law (that
would first have to be passed unanimously!), held on the same day as the
European elections, where a (simple!) majority of states and a (simple!) major-
ity of all voters would have to approve the plan, binding only the states who
voted for it.
There is a dimension of this argument that should be taken seriously. If the
scheme could be realized, the result would be a two-track Europe where only
the core would be under the new arrangement, but with easy entry to new-
comers from the periphery. Intended as a transitional solution when first pro-
posed by Fischer in 2000, a two-track or two-speed reform may have perhaps
become unavoidable at some point, since unfortunately the great expansion of
the European Union occurred before the major institutional questions were
solved. The proposal allows the film to be rerun, and the error corrected,
without excluding anyone from the European Union as a whole. Only it is a
matter of the power of the relevant core states whether such a proposal is prac-
ticable and not of an ultrademocratic decision, where the legitimacy of the
arrangements would come in part from “European” voters who will not be
included in that core.
Why would indeed an Intergovernmental Conference, where a number of
states would be opposed to the scheme, accept a referendum that might lead to
a two-track solution? Habermas admittedly has in mind the European Coun-

cil, which unlike the IGC is an organ of the European Union. But substan-
tively it is the same body as an IGC, and it is invited to carry out a coup d’état
against itself in the latter capacity. The hurdle of unanimity in any case would
still be there. There would also be a decided lack of interest of many govern-
ments, especially of smaller states, in ceding the constituent power to some
other entity dependent on the weight of sheer numbers, one that does not have
the power or the political vehicles to take that role and that, indeed arguably,
according to Habermas, does not yet exist. After all, there is no European rev-
olution taking place, led by elites speaking in the name of that future people to
support what would be a revolutionary legal act. The legal device is indeed all
too transparent. The choice for the procedure of a single-day referendum with
all its potential trappings by its very nature favors the outcome. Georg Jellinek
would have identified the initial choice as the real moment of the constitu-
tional break. On the part of governments opposed to the plan, the time to stop
it would be at the beginning, not during the referenda. Later, after the referen-
dum has been called, they may only have the choice of remaining on the
periphery; earlier they can defeat the whole two-track plan and preserve
equality among the states of the European Union.
Before the Irish vote, Habermas hoped to overcome the built-in limits with
the threat of a German-Latin (French, Italian, Spanish) use of the enhanced
cooperation provision of the Treaty of Nice, to establish, de facto (by a treaty
of four), the two-track structure that others could join. He knew, of course,
that he had no ready takers on the part of the relevant governments at the
time, but why such a threat should work at all is unclear. The referendum in
question would only help organize the states in an inner core, in potentially a
far greater number than using the mechanism of enhanced cooperation, and
in addition it would add the legitimacy of the voice of an amorphous Euro-
pean majority to support it. That majority would be guaranteed if the candi-
dates for the inner core were mostly large states. Why should those opposed to
any such two-track Europe risk a much larger integration in the core? Would
not a smaller, more peripheral one that could not marginalize them be prefer-
able? They might take the risk only if the union of the four were to be a lot
more federally organized than the plan for the twenty-seven; no one could
possibly wish for a new superstate (a new Prussia) in their midst. The power-
political threat would have to be raised quite high in order to work, but then
the same fears (now of German or German-French dominance of a smaller
superstate) may start working for the smaller partners in the projected
enhanced cooperation. So, two tracks established through enhanced coopera-
tion will not work as an overly grandiose project, and therefore it won’t work
as any kind of threat.
In any case, after the Irish No, the idea was again altered. Now the failure of
the governmental or bureaucratic process supposedly requires the procedure
442 Texts
Habermas strongly recommends. The implicit threat is once again only the
predicted future failure of functioning. But then why link the procedure to a
substantive scheme that is neither on the table, on the one hand, nor really is
structurally significant enough (both a foreign minister and a weak elected
president could be absorbed in the current hybrid structure, even if perhaps
destabilizing it further because of the new element of plebiscitary legitimacy)
to justify a radically new mode of ratification? If the argument is from realism
(because otherwise even a minimum cannot be accomplished), then link the
new procedure to the passing of the Lisbon Treaty itself. Why try to put a dif-
ferent, even if partially overlapping, scheme on the table?
And if the goal is really to serve the utopian goal of a more perfect union by
means that can be designed, would it not have been better to focus on struc-
tural constitutionalization, on what it takes to create a more consistent “fed-
eration of nation-states” structure? As against a confederation, a federation
should bring the states, previously the masters of the constitution, under the
constitution, where any one state would be bound by the decisions of the rest
in the relevant area of jurisdiction. This would above all require changing
the amendment rule, which could have the added benefit of making future
changes both more democratic and participatory and more easy to achieve.
And in such a context, the threat of a two-track structure through enhanced
cooperation might work much better. Through a new treaty, four or five states
could create a more flexible body that could repeatedly decide further consti-
tutional changes through qualified double majorities, unless, to cut this option
off, the European Union as a whole adopted such a rule for itself. There would
then be no limit to how strong such a federation within the federation (or rather
within the hybrid) could become, except its own qualified majority. In such a
case, states opposed to both far greater integration and a two-track union
would have greater incentives to accept a “revision of the revision,” since by
influencing the majorities it would take to change the constitution in the
future they could retain their role in change, a role that would be lost if a two-
track structure were created unilaterally by a core. Thus if the threat Haber-
mas has in mind is ever going to be used, it would be a pity to blow it because
of democratic expectations that are hopeless shortcuts to European citizen-
ship anyway, rather than focusing on the really important target, a consistent
structure of the European Union capable of legitimately changing itself,
instead of the informal self-alteration processes now relied on that are inevita-
bly more remote from publicity and participation.
At the moment, since the relevant states are not ready for enhanced coop-
eration, the Lisbon Treaty should be passed, and, given its vast support all over
Europe—as well as the probable consequences of its failure—even forced
through. Instead of seeing it as a product of merely bureaucratic compromise,
Habermas should understand it as in some indirect sense a product also of his
own efforts, and especially of the Convention for the Future of Europe, which
represented a disruption in if not a break with the intergovernmental status
quo. And we should all see it as yet another step through which a more perfect
and hopefully more democratic Union of Europe can be built, in a process that
is still in its early stages. There is, in any case, no finalité for constitutions.
References
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Evolution and Revolution.” In Eriksen, Fossum, and Menéndez 2004, 88–106.
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Eriksen, Erik Oddvar, John Erik Fossum, and Agustín José Menéndez, eds. 2004. Develop-
ing a Constitution for Europe. London: Routledge.
Fischer, Joschka. 2000. Vom Staatenverbund zur Föderation: Gedanken über die Finalität
der europäischen Integration. (Rede in der Humboldt-Universität in Berlin am 12. Mai
2000). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
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——. 1997. “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure.” In Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Rea-
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Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
40
RELIGION, METAPHYSICS,
FREEDOM
“Faith and Knowledge” (2001)
HELGE HØIBRA ATEN
J
ürgen Habermas understands his thinking as postmetaphysical
(see his eponymous book). The fact that he does not understand
his thinking simply to be postreligious—even though he has
referred to himself as “tone deaf” in matters of faith—met with interest long
before his debate with the future Pope Benedict XVI (Habermas and Ratz-
inger 2006; Naturalism). Discussion began with Habermas’s speech “Faith and
Knowledge,” which he held when he was awarded the Peace Prize of the
German Book Trade in 2001 (Future, Zeitdiagnosen; see Reder and Schmidt
2008, Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007; on themes not addressed here, see
especially Absolute, Theory and Practice, and Texte).
A Postsecular Society?
The phrase “postsecular society” invites misunderstanding: instead of con-

cerning the end of all religion as a consequence of Enlightenment, it can be
understood to involve the return of presecular religion after the end of moder-
nity. Habermas has spoken of the “theological self-understanding of the great
world religions,” which represent “the most cumbersome element [das sperrig-
ste Element] of the past” extending into modernity (Reder and Schmidt 2008,
27). Philosophy, he continues, should remain agnostic and not offer a defense
(Apologie) for religious belief—“At best, philosophy circumscribes the opaque
core of religious experience when it reflects on the specific character of religious
language and on the meaning of faith” (Naturalism, 143). The core of religion
remains “profoundly alien” to discursive thinking (143). However, inasmuch as
Habermas warns of the possibility of “ ‘uncontrolled’ [entgleisend] seculariza-
tion of society as a whole” and criticizes the limitations of “secular conscious-
ness” (Naturalism, 102, 112, 241, 263ff., 309), one may be tempted to ask whether
philosophy’s “circumscription” does not ultimately genuflect before the “opaque
“Faith and Knowledge” 445
core”—that is, whether it does not amount to a credo quia absurdum without
belief protesting against the nihilism of modernity.
Such a view would be mistaken. When Habermas delivered these remarks,
he was taking issue with two models of secularization: on the one hand, an
interpretation that considers secularization to represent an illegitimate expro-
priation of religion through worldliness and, on the other, an overly optimistic
view of human progress, according to which “religious ways of thinking and
forms of life are replaced by rational, at any rate superior, equivalents” (Future,
104). That Habermas does not owe his concerns about the “derailing” effects
of secularization to the first model is clear from the demands he places on
religious citizens in culturally modern societies. His expectations are secular
in three ways: first, religious citizens should display epistemic openness to
other religions and worldviews—i.e., they should not shy away from cognitive
dissonance (Future, 104; Naturalism, 135ff.); second, they should recognize the
“authority of ‘natural’ reason”—notwithstanding the “fallible results” of
“institutionalized science”; and third, they should recognize the “principles of
universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality” that underlie the modern
constitutional state (Reder and Schmidt 2008, 27; Naturalism, 136).
Habermas has spoken of the “transformation of religious consciousness”
that has occurred in Western culture “since the Reformation and the
Enlightenment” (Naturalism, 136). This reflexive turn has often been called
the “secularization of religion”—and applauded. Does he agree?
Yes. Even if he speaks of “secularization in . . . postsecular societies” (Future,
103), Habermas defends “secularized” religion as religion. As he views matters,
“secularized” religion continues to be religion in essence, and it must (be able
to) stay this way—i.e., it should remain precisely what is opaque to agnostic
ways of thinking. Habermas seeks to overcome an attitude that understands
religious traditions and communities as “archaic relics of premodern societies
persisting into the present”—an attitude that considers “freedom of religion
only as the cultural equivalent of the conservation of species threatened with
extinction” (Naturalism, 138). Nonreligious citizens should also observe epis-
temic openness. “Religious traditions have a special power to articulate moral
intuitions, especially with regard to sensitive forms of communal life” (Natu-
ralism, 131; translation slightly modified), Habermas affirms. In this light, his
perspective becomes clear. “Secularization has the function less of a filter that
eliminates the contents of tradition than that of a transformer that changes
the current of tradition” (Reder and Schmidt 2008, 30). Habermas holds that
the “current” of presecular tradition has been transformed but that self-reflective
secular modernity has not simply discarded the past. Secular modernity is
also postsecular insofar as what is cumbersome in tradition (das Sperrige der
Tradition) has entered the flow of communicative action and discourse—and
not as a burden but as an opportunity.
446 Texts
“Secularization that does not annihilate operates as translation,” Habermas

observes in “Faith and Knowledge” (Future, 114; translation modified). In
order to avoid promoting the destructive potential of uncontrolled seculariza-
tion, he demands of philosophy that it “[conduct] its work on its religious heri-
tage with more sensitivity than heretofore” (Time, 164). The matter concerns
“redemptive” translations, as Habermas puts it in Benjaminian terms (see
Profiles)—i.e., activity that transforms “original religious meanings” but does
not “deflate” or “exhaust” them (Naturalism, 110). In “Faith and Knowledge,”
Habermas employs the example of genetic technology (which he explores at
greater length elsewhere in The Future of Human Nature). He expresses his
unease as follows: “Would not the first human being to determine, at his own
discretion, the natural essence of another human being at the same time
destroy the equal freedoms that exist among persons of equal birth in order to
ensure their difference?” (Future, 115).
“In the Image of God” as Equal Dignity: Freedom and Autonomy
Habermas begins “Faith and Knowledge” by acknowledging the religious

notion that humanity has been fashioned in the divine image—the idea that
God created mankind to be like Him, as free beings. The redemptive act that
Habermas envisions translates being-in-the-image-of-God “into the idea of
the equal and unconditional dignity of all human beings” (Naturalism, 110). In
such a translation, two modern ideas are evident: the one liberal, the other
Kantian. The aim of the first is to secure an order of equal liberties or spaces of
freedom (Freiheitsspielräume): the individual is to have as much freedom as
proves compatible with the same space for others. The individual must accept
restrictions on his or her liberties to ensure the possibility of freedom for
all—a general order of liberty for all equally born individuals (Ebenbürtige).
Now, this general order may also be understood independent of morality.
Kant did as much when he observed that a “people of devils” could also found a
state insofar as they possessed understanding. Simply for reasons of prudence
(aus Klugheitsgründen), we may grant one another spaces of freedom without
mutual respect. In such a case, one recognizes that the Other represents a poten-
tial danger to one’s own liberty and works to avoid this eventuality by means of
a contract for securing equal spaces of freedom (Freiräume). When Habermas
speaks of the equal dignity of all human beings, he seeks to go beyond such a
purely conditional arrangement. For even if order were established in such a
way that all enjoyed the same liberty in actual fact, general respect for human
dignity would not underlie it; rather, one would only consider the Other inas-
much as one sought to preserve one’s own freedom and security.
Kant, on the other hand, posits an arrangement in which all human beings
have an inalienable inner dignity that goes beyond the relative value of any
“price.” All are to be viewed as “ends in themselves” (Zwecke an sich)—free
beings that can set their own purposes and are therefore capable of self-
determination. In this context, he speaks of “freedom of choice” (Willkürfrei-
heit), but he already knows what Habermas stresses: that the choice of purposes
and means occurs against the backdrop of possible reasons and motivations.
And not just that: Kant extends general freedom of choice into an order of
general autonomy. Ultimately, then, he affirms that human dignity means the
“dignity of a rational being that obeys no law other than that which at the same
time it itself gives” (Kant 2012, 46). The matter exceeds mere self-discovery
and determination inasmuch as it involves the ability to subordinate oneself to
transindividual moral law on the basis of rational insight. Kant pictures a moral
order in which autonomous beings respect one another in their self-legislating
dignity. No human being should be demoted to a mere means for others; at the
same time, however, no human being should be sacrificed on the altruistic
altar of an order deemed eternal.
When Habermas speaks of the redemptive “translation of the theological
doctrine of creation in God’s image into the idea of the equal and uncondi-
tional dignity of all human beings” (Naturalism, 110), this Kantian reflection
proves decisive. Accordingly, Habermas asks whether the first human being
who determines, at his own discretion, the natural essence of another human
being at the same time destroys the equal freedoms that exist among persons
of equal birth in order to secure their difference. All the same, one might ask:
where does this leave the one true God who created mankind—the Almighty,
who alone existed before Creation? Should one not trust in this God more
than in human beings?
In a certain sense, Habermas responds in the affirmative, speaking simply
of God “who is love” and “creates, with Adam and Eve, free creatures who are
like him” (Future, 114). He emphasizes that one does not need to believe “in
order to understand what is meant with ‘in the likeness of God’ [Ebenbildlich-
keit]. One knows that there can be no love without recognition of the self in
the other, nor freedom without mutual recognition” (114). But why, then, do
we need the idea of God at all—why does this idea still say something to “those
who are tone-deaf to religious connotations” (114)?
All of God’s “prior” love notwithstanding, Habermas conceives the rela-
tionship between God and Man on the model of mutual respect and recogni-
tion (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 401). If God really is free and decides
to create an autonomous human being, this means that He always treats the
human being as an end (Zweck) and not just as a means; in other words, “man”
can freely determine the particular difference that he is due. Yet at the same
448 Texts
time, the “expansion of freedom into autonomy”—as “a secularizing-redemp-

tive deconstruction of articles of faith [Glaubenswahrheiten]”—means translat-
ing the “authority of divine commandments” into “the unconditional validity of
moral duties.” Hereby, autonomy does not go missing; instead, “the echo” of
divine gravity (“das Echo” des göttlichen Ernstes) is present in human action.
This is also evident, Habermas observes, in the fact that Kant does away with
“the traditional representation of divine origin [Gotteskindschaft]” (Future, 114)
when he affirms that the human being—as a free entity that binds itself mor-
ally—does not need “the idea of another Being above him” (Future, 127; cf. Kant
1968, VIII, 649). But does this not lead to the idea that Man is born equal to God?
Does it not simply make God a human being?
The Separation Between Creator and Creation
Habermas responds in the negative (see chapter 41 in this volume). His con-
cern lies precisely in “the absolute difference between Creator and Creature.”
God, who is Creator and Redeemer in one, does not need “to abide by the laws
of nature like a technician, or by the rules of a code like a biologist or computer
scientist” (Future, 115). God does not need to “tinker” (basteln) with humanity:
“From the very beginning, the voice of God calling into life communicates
within a morally sensitive universe. Therefore God may ‘determine’ man in
the sense of enabling and, at the same time, obliging him to be free” (Future,
115). If, however, a human being begins to toy with the natural constitution
(Sosein) of another—even to make this party better—he not only puts the dif-
ference between Creator and Creature in question but also his own autonomy
(and in favor of a sovereign will [Willkür], at that). For all that, he does not
become God.
Habermas maintains that the “aggressive conflict between anthropocentric
and theocentric understandings of self and world is yesterday’s battle” (Natu-
ralism, 211)—at least in the European West. Now, however, danger emerges on
an “intrahuman” front. Until this point, the natural (naturwüchsig) structure
of ways of living has assured the “indisponibility” (Unverfügbarkeit) of human
nature, even if practices of “egalitarian and individualistic universalism” have
eroded it (211). The inheritance of the good Creator God is threatened by “injury
to the communicative constitution of our form of living, which reaches down to
its deepest moral dimensions [bis in moralische Tiefenschichten hinein]”
(Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 401). Magnus Striet, a theologian, has
pictured the process culminating in human beings of the future as playthings
of “preceding generations” (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 272).
Habermas does not conceive this genetic engineer on the model of a
God who loves human beings as ends in themselves—nor even as one who
presumes “at least counterfactually a consent of the concerned other” (Future,

115). Rather, he has in mind a dystopian outcome to social evolution, which
he—despite his critiques of Horkheimer and Adorno—has never excluded
(and which also plays a role in his debate with Niklas Luhmann [see Legitima-
tion, 134ff.]). Now, secular modernity—whose lifeworld has both been made
possible and colonized by systems (money and administrative power)—is
threatened by “derailing” secularism.
Does Habermas, independent of the social critique he pursues, conceive the
human being—unlike God, who is good—as evil? No. However, he does
observe: “The unrestrained way in which this biblical heritage is once more
dealt with today shows that we still lack an adequate concept for the semantic
difference between what is morally wrong and what is profoundly evil”
(Future, 110). The person who toys with constructing a genetically superior
human being is at risk of slipping into the maelstrom of uncontrolled secular-
ism. Habermas’s “antidote” involves a good God of Creation who demands of
mankind that it decide between a Nietzschean self-experiment beyond good
and evil, on the one hand, and establishing an ethics of responsibility toward
the order of Creation, on the other.
On a metalevel, Habermas combines this alternative with the uncontrolled
course (Selbstlauf) of capitalism as it is legitimated through philosophies of
scientistic naturalism and free choice (Willkürfreiheit), on the one hand, and,
on the other, by the possibility of political decision making with outcomes
that would still, of course, be open. In turn, he qualifies this opposition inas-
much as the complexity of the issues and the inevitability of further develop-
ments make such a dramatic “either/or” impossible and increase the moral
weight associated with choosing the “lesser” evil. The situation leads to an
unsettling conclusion: we must foresee the continued existence of reasonable
disagreement when faced with the “existential question” of “how we are to
understand ourselves as members of a species [Gattungswesen]” (Langthaler
and Nagl-Docekal 2007, 402–403; see Naturalism, 138; Reder and Schmidt
2008, 34).
Such is Habermas’s argument—even though he explicitly declares that his
agnostic philosophy of communicative reason cannot be asked to penetrate
the “opaque core” of religion (Naturalism, 143). Striet, on the other hand—as a
Christian—demands of an honest theology that it address the question of why
an omnipotent Deity has permitted mankind to undo the borders that have
guaranteed, until now, a shared field of morality (Langthaler and Nagl-
Docekal 2007, 274–275). As the advocate of agnostic philosophy, Habermas—
who speaks of “the glowing embers rekindled time and again by the issue of
theodicy” (Future, 113)—does not address the matter.
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The Linguistification of the Sacred
In chapter 5 of volume 1 of The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas

presents his model for how cultural modernity emerges by way of the linguis-
tification of the sacred. Using the work of Durkheim for a thought experi-
ment, he pictures an archaic society that rests on norms admitting no room
for criticism. Here, actions occur solely in the context of worship, and all
speech is ceremonial; as a result, a feeling of community pervades existence.
Social norms count as holy. To be sure, one may deviate from them, for other-
wise they would be unidentifiable. (If a norm is to hold, it must be possible to
identify—and accuse—instances of nonobservance.) Space for criticism exists
only in a limited sense: failure to realize norms is subject to censure, but it is
impossible to object to norms as norms.
Habermas focuses on archaic societies that are not yet constituted as
states and posits the absence of a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical
violence. Intentionally assuming such “unrealistic” conditions, Habermas
observes that society as a whole is “sacred”—i.e., no profane realms exist
within it. In this context, all deviations from the norm are acts of sacrilege:
something that “cannot be” yet happens all the same—and can be identified
as such. To employ the language of metaphysics (even though it does not exist
at this stage of development): the holy order of norms is, whereas sacrilege is
not—it is nothing/nothingness (das Nichts). As mentioned, it is presumed
that norms cannot be criticized as norms, for they are holy. However, because
they cannot be objected to, norms also cannot be justified. Their validity is
secured through actions and symbols, but it is not rationally founded.
Let us recall that no monopoly of physical power exists in this type of soci-
ety. If deviations occur, then the entire sacred order threatens to disappear
into nothing/nothingness. No defenses exist: first, there are no effective modes
for policing behavior, and, second, no norms—however holy—can be justi-
fied. Therefore, “moral panic” erupts when infractions occur. Because the
“nothing” of nonobservance/violation cannot/must not exist, incursions
against norms must be made never to have happened.
Metaphysics
This model of archaic societies offers parallels to classical metaphysics.

Parmenides holds that only Being is—after all, nothing/nothingness is not.
Accepting multiplicity, coming-to-be, ceasing-to-be, or change of any sort—
even moving from one location to another—means thinking that nothing/
nothingness exists. (For example, a table is not the floor: it is “not-the-floor.”)
According to this view, only the One is—a filled sphere of Being, as it were:
unchanging, immobile, and unitary, without the holes of nothing/nothing-

ness. Outside, there is also no nothing: the Sphere is all-that-is.
Needless to say, Parmenides offers a more complex view than this in his
philosophical poem. The point for the purposes at hand, however, is that he
inaugurates the tradition of metaphysics by seeking to master the relationship
between unity and multiplicity (see Postmetaphysical, 124ff.). Parmenides’s
difficult notion of the Sphere of Being forms the intellectual core of the long-
lived Greek doctrine of a full cosmos arranged concentrically with the earth at
the geometrical middle (though not representing the metaphysical center). In
this picture, the world harbors a perfection of the second order, as it were: a
continuous ladder of things—later called “the great chain of being” or the
“layered cosmos” (Stufenkosmos)—which extends from the most imperfect
and void (nichtig) entity up to what is absolutely perfect.
Such progression does not represent evolution but rather eternal order con-
stituted from on high—which Plotinus later described as emanating from a
single, transcendent source. The One and Same, which admits no differences,
is already perfect, but it acquires a second perfection through the manifold
divisions and subdivisions that emanate from it. Significantly, this model
makes it possible to reconcile equality (for example, that of free citizens) with
inequality (the status of slaves), thereby assuring—in comparative perspective—
“secondary perfection” in a comparative order of ascent from the less to the
more perfect.
One may view Parmenides’s Sphere of Being in analogy to Habermas’s
hypothetical “holy community.” A difference exists, however: if, contra Par-
menides, someone were to consider that nothing/nothingness is, in fact, some-
thing, this party would be “punished”—that is, disproven—only by means of
argument. On the one hand, it would seem that if an error of thought were to
occur and be left uncorrected just once, then the entirety of the Sphere of
Being would vanish into the abyss of nothing/nothingness. Yet this very argu-
ment (whose validity we assume here for the sake of argument) works only as
an argument—it exposes an error of thought. A free, discursive space (diskur-
siver Freiraum) has been opened up, where punishment occurs only by way of
refutation. It is not as if the argument eradicated catastrophic “holes” in Being
in expiation for human error; instead, a hypothetical possibility of thought
(that a multiplicity or change may be said to be) is rejected by referring to the
consequences it would hold if true (the destruction of world and thought).
At this early stage of cultural/intellectual/social development, free space for
thought is slight, to be sure, and thinking moves only to arrive, once more, at
the only possible truth: that the One is. Habermas observes, to be sure, that the
movement of metaphysical thinking—like efforts to eradicate sacrilege in a
ritual setting—expresses fear: “Negation, which opposed the many to the one
as Parmenides opposed nonbeing to being, is also negation in the sense of a
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defense against deep-seated fears of death and frailty, of isolation and separa-
tion, of opposition and contradiction, of surprise and novelty” (Postmetaphysi-
cal, 120). All the same, the matter concerns insight that occurs through reasoned
arguments (Gründe).
In contrast, thinking in archaic, ritualized societies does not, in fact, pos-
sess the unity that the thought experiment of a purely sacred community
brings forth. In a mythical worldview, a great array of different kinds of infor-
mation exists, and this information is ordered in terms of analogies and con-
trasts that lend the world meaning but, at the same time, express fear that
humanity stands defenseless before a universe that it does not control; hereby,
the world is explained through invisible forces that, though conceived in anal-
ogy to human beings, are immeasurably superior to them (Communicative
Action, 1:47–49).
Theoria
Greek theoria raises itself to a position above these forces (Übermächte). In an

act of “powerful abstraction” that achieves “an extramundane point of refer-
ence, a distancing perspective” (Postmetaphysical, 118), it takes Being (das Sei-
ende) as a whole into view. Thereby, contemplation is understood as intuitive
unification with the Whole. Because this view also takes in what eternally is
(das ewig Seiende), it occurs free from fear and offers “reflexive self-reassur-
ance” (Postmetaphysical, 119). As early as 1965, Habermas conceived of theoria
not just as a means of averting mortal terror but also as a process of liberation;
he wrote of banishing “interiorized demons in the realm of the soul”: the
“purely theoretical perspective, which promises the purgation of precisely these
affects, obtains a new meaning: now, disinterested contemplation [Anschau-
ung] clearly means emancipation” (Technik, 154–155, cf. Postmetaphysical, 120).
Needless to say, such an element of reflexive self-reassurance and emancipa-
tion is precisely what is missing in the model of the sacred in archaic societies.
Here, only ecstatic transport through the sacred (Außersichsein im Heiligen)
occurs. All the same, a parallel exists even under primitive conditions: inas-
much as a free space of discourse is achieved (however briefly), it is possible to
gain insight into the reasons (Gründe) underlying the world as a whole—a
matter that involves the possibility of reaching consensus through discourse.
In turn, this perspective offers “the model for all concepts of validity, especially
for the idea of truth” (Communicative Action, 2:71). For even when “obscurely”
felt (72), a “semantics of the sacred” is at hand, which describes something that
“exceeds” (übersteigt) (72) reality—an anticipation (Vorform) of theoria in the
feeling of what it means to think sub specie aeternitatis (71). The validity of
norms under conditions where the sacred does not admit criticism implies
conceptualizing “supratemporal impersonality” in the form of “idealized agree-

ment” (72). Such a shared view of how the sacred is valid involves something
that is authoritative and distancing but that also, and at the same time, makes
it possible—“outside” ourselves and within the dimension of holiness—for us
to be a “we.”
How does the idea of Truth emerge from the notion of sacred norms that
are immune to criticism? One can, as detailed above, point to the contrast
between moral panic when confronted with sacrilege, on the one hand, and
the calm weighing of arguments pro and contra, on the other. Habermas,
however—and here he agrees with Durkheim, too—identifies a “borrowing”
relationship: the “harmony of minds” that occurs in the experience of the
sacred is complemented by a notion of “harmony with the nature of things”
(72). This entails a fundamental transformation. Now, knowledge (Erkenntnis)
is no longer guaranteed by the moral authority of the sacred: “the concept of
truth combines the objectivity of experience with a claim to the intersubjective
validity of a corresponding descriptive statement, the idea of the correspon-
dence of sentences to facts with the concept of an idealized consensus” (72).
The force of sacred consensus—which is compelling and fearsome, on the one
hand, yet “fulfilling” and embracing, on the other—fades from view and yields
to a discursive space where claims to validity that admit criticism may be
voiced.
Accordingly, idealized consensus is no longer just felt; rather, it is achieved
(or to be achieved) by discursive means. Yet does this analysis hold for ancient
theoria? We have already described it as a free space for the calm evaluation of
arguments, but we have not discussed the matter of arguments supported by
experience. Is this not, in fact, already modern science?
Greek theoria did not involve only philosophical considerations on the
structure of the cosmos. It also collected, systematically, empirical facts and
mathematical aptitudes and combined them in astronomical calculations.
Theoria was, in part, an empirical science, though it did not pursue techno-
logical intervention. It was contemplation. If, in addition, it was conceived as
an intuitive unification (Vereinigung) with the world, its quasi-descriptive ori-
entation seems not to have been affected. Even though intuitive unification
with the universe ultimately means adopting a transcendent perspective
beyond all that is merely sensible (sinnlich), the experience is not just mystical
and religious but argumentative, as well. The matter concerns an “epistemic
ego . . . which can give itself over to the contemplation of what is, freed from
affects, lifeworld interests, prejudices, and the like” (1:213).
At the same time, the unified world of this theoretical cosmology was not
just the immortally eternal and true world but also the good world. Ens et
verum et bonum convertuntur. It was also the beautifully ordered world—the
crown jewel of a hierarchically arranged, unified cosmos. Seeming multiplicity
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was not viewed as an argument against its unity. On the contrary: if the world
(as it appears to mortals) were only true—that is, if it existed in a way that could
be described adequately in purely descriptive statements—it would not be real
but rather void (nichtig). Ultimately, the epistemic subject of theoria was less
concerned with the difference between being and nothingness (Sein und Nichts)
than with the difference between what is and what should be (Sein und Sollen).
Metaphysics and Religion: High-Cultural Worldviews
Of course, the epistemic moment of contemplation and the holistically

rounded mode of validity did not influence the Greek world alone. Habermas
is interested, in general terms, in the transition from archaic societies to high
cultures—which includes the emergence of the great world religions. The way
Augustine’s thought was shaped by Neoplatonic philosophy is well known; the
parallel between the Christian notion of the almighty Deity who loves
mankind and becomes human Himself out of love for Creation, on the one
hand, and Plotinus’s conception of overflowing Oneness, on the other, became
historically influential.
Habermas speaks of “mythical worldviews” (Communicative Action, 1:44ff.)
that emerged in postarchaic, high-cultural societies, assumed the form of
knowledge, and served the cosmological legitimation of social hierarchies.
Massive increases of inequality occurred—indeed, “barbaric injustice” (2:189).
However, Habermas does not mean simply to indict developments that compare
unfavorably with more egalitarian, archaic conditions. Innovative experiences
of freedom and equality in theoria and the equal freedom of citizens took
place. Yet the Aristotelian theory of natural slavery exists in the same frame-
work. There is not yet the universal idea of free and equal individuals in the
modern sense, which Habermas conceives as the secularized translation of the
“image of God.” What made this idea possible?
Habermas’s model for the genesis of modernity holds that the linguistifica-
tion of the sacred first establishes only “ritually protected normative consen-
sus” (2:70). The further course of development leads from the “authority of the
sacred . . . to the binding force of . . . validity claims that can be redeemed only
in discourse” (93–94). Does linguistification preserve the sacred? Habermas
speaks of the rational structure of linguistification (69), which moves toward
a universalistic understanding of “moral agreement” that “was always
intended”—namely, “the generality of the underlying interest” (81). Following
Durkheim, he describes social evolution as the transformation of collective
consciousness, whereby moral obligation is not dissolved but made more
humane and rational, based on individual accountability. The process there-
fore presumes individual accountability. Durkheim speaks of a “cult of the
individual” (85)—without, however, abandoning the view that morality has a

sacred foundation (49ff.). Habermas, in turn, specifies morality that has been
“set communicatively aflow and developed into a discourse ethics” as the site
where the archaic core of normativity is freed to unfold rationally. He, too,
holds that “something of the penetrating power of primordial sacred powers
still attaches to morality” (92).
The Differentiation of World Concepts and Validity Claims
The model of linguistification includes a theory of how formal concepts of the

world and validity claims undergo differentiation. Habermas distinguishes
between the objective world as “the totality of all entities about which true
statements are possible,” the social world as “the totality of legitimately regu-
lated interpersonal relations,” and the subjective world as the “totality of the
experiences of the speaker to which he has privileged access” (1:100). This tri-
partite scheme breaks with the substantializing and unified conception of the
cosmos and with the holistic conditions of validity that are operative in the
metaphysics and religions of high cultures. The distinction between the objec-
tive and social worlds runs parallel to Hume’s distinction between is and
ought; a corresponding difference now holds between truth and normative
rightness as validity claims and between institutions (above all, natural sci-
ence and technology, on the one hand, and law, on the other).
The notion of the objective world becomes necessary especially inasmuch
as modern natural science breaks through as a distinct sphere, which demotes
the “cosmos” to a field of objects that are available to “the nomological
sciences” (Postmetaphysical, 131)—i.e., the array of experiences that can be
grasped theoretically but only in a descriptive manner, à la Hume. The con-
cept of the social world, in turn, concerns what should be. Without breaking
with Kant, Habermas is able to speak of the social world—and not just the
moral one—in terms of law because the evaluation of maxims of action
through the Categorical Imperative always presupposes the possibility of
reflection on the conditions for moral identity through community (Verge-
meinschaftung). What is typical of immorality is that one makes an exception
for oneself.
These concepts of the world are complemented by the formal notion of a
“subjective world,” a world of experiences, wishes, feelings, and interests—a
world not just of the ego but also of the Freudian id (Communicative Action,
2:99, 389), the realm of the individual. In this context, Habermas speaks of the
validity claim of truthfulness (Aufrichtigkeit; see Communicative Action, 1:23).
It is very important for Kant that the individual find and determine the “self”
in the open spaces that the Categorical Imperative makes available, even
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though his sharp distinction between the intelligible and the empirical world
does not allow for an adequate understanding of individuality/individuation,
according to Habermas (Postmetaphysical, 158–159).
Ever since Kierkegaard, individuation has been viewed as the critical-para-
doxical assumption of a particular “life history” for which one must (be able
to) answer (166). Yet when Habermas discusses the “claim to individuality”
(170ff.), he does not view individuality as the property of the subject (Eigentum
des Einzelnen). For him, the subjective and social worlds meet up and merge
because the individual’s claim to individuality is constitutively dependent on
recognition through others, who raise claims of the same kind (170ff.). One
cannot be an authentic individual for oneself alone: the idea can only arise in
the social world in the first place. The claim can be measured only on the basis
of the critical view that others have on the consistency of intentions and
actions. By fusing the notions of a social and a subjective world, Habermas
arrives at his conception of a freedom for all subjects—a freedom-in-common
inasmuch as mutual recognition occurs, yet one different from person to per-
son. This, in his view, represents a secularized form of the idea of existence in
the divine image.
Kant had translated his insight into the unconditional nature of moral
norms into methodological rigorism—as if it were the case, for example, that
the Categorical Imperative could never conflict with the commandment not
to lie. Underlying this position is a vision of a world of categorical imperatives
admitting no contradiction—a kind of quasi-cosmos of the moral law “within
me,” to which Kant, at the end of Critique of Practical Reason, adds the heav-
ens “above me” (without thereby reintroducing the physical cosmos—for it is
only the law of morality that offers reassurance of self).
Habermas’s reworking of Kantian ethics in terms of communicative action
and discourse takes leave of this vision. His theory no longer conceives ethics
in terms of the individual subject but rather focuses on communication as it
actually occurs—whereby the validity claim of normative rightness still repre-
sents a kind of “transcendence from within” (Facts, 17ff.). Now Kant’s moral
world is understood more deeply as a social world, which—as such—is set
“communicatively aflow.” Habermas’s purposes are clear—and especially in a
political sense: to radicalize the theory of democracy and of the constitutional
democratic state.
Communication Out of Control?
Yet if we take communication as it actually occurs in modern democratic soci-

eties: might a danger of secular derailment not lie precisely in such a “flow”
(Verflüssigung)? Even if Habermas believes neither in the theory of natural law
nor in legal positivism but instead wants to consider both within the frame-
work of a theory of communicative reason (see Facts), is communicative “flow”
enough to halt the danger of a complete positivization of human nature? How
is the morally sacred—whose penetrating power Habermas invokes—to be
saved by means of linguistification?
Habermas’s first step is to understand society in phenomenological terms—
as a cooperative undertaking. Of course, society also contains conflicts and
potential for further conflict. All the same, however, communicative-cooper-
ative action takes place without problems for the most part, even if misunder-
standings and disagreements can happen. If truly stubborn disagreements
arise in communicative action and yield long-lasting conflicts, one may opt
for a discursive “timeout” as a drastic measure (Rosskur) (Høibraaten 2001),
whereby only factual information and convincing arguments stand at issue. If,
then, a solution is found—either in whole or in part—cooperative action may
be renewed. If this does not occur, parties typically are formed—which may
prove either productive or destructive for society. In the event of enduring
conflicts that do not become all-encompassing, the possibility exists for nego-
tiations containing discursive elements (diskursiv aufgemischte Verhandlun-
gen); inasmuch as there is consensus on fair standards of procedure, sanctions
may then be used (Facts).
In modernity, the cosmos came to be conceived as a field of objects for
the nomological sciences because this permitted “the matter at hand” to be
grasped more readily (präziser). The universe was now held to be equal to the
“objective world” of objects that are available for manipulation through
control of natural laws. Truth, as practiced under such conditions, does not
preclude profound modifications—as is made clear by experiments with the
genetic foundations of sociocultural ways of life that, hitherto, were “naturally
grown” (naturwüchsig). In the discourse of the natural sciences, the linguisti-
fication of the sacred has led to its dissolution (Auflösung), even though the
binding force of criticizable validity claims remains operative.
Are matters any different in the normative discourses of morality and
law—or in sciences where normative discourses accompany theoretical-
empirical ones? When the idea of mankind created in the image of God is
translated into the normative postulate of equal rights, permanent free-flowing
communication determines its meaning. The idea is no longer guaranteed by
a sacred-authoritative instance. In a certain measure, then, one can imagine
how mankind might change itself genetically in a legitimate way—which of
course does not include the possible case Habermas mentions, when a person
alters genetic material “without even presupposing, at least counterfactually, a
consent of the concerned other” (Future, 115). Now, humanity as a whole is
concerned. All human beings would need to be able to give their consent—and
it would be rather paradoxical to exclude future generations from decisions.
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However, since it cannot even be expected that all people now living would agree,
it is necessary to imagine a global consensus about procedures that would
lead—after lengthy discourses with many opportunities for revision—to a
majority decision.
Let us assume that such a process is legitimately conceivable. Would this
not dissolve the Sacred in the normative field, too, if the decision favored an
order that threatened to rob a portion of humanity of its autonomy?
The Image of Salvation
Perhaps, then, one may understand Habermas’s reflections on religion in the

following historical perspective as a theological “abbreviation”: mankind is
both a discursive entity and a potentially endangered one—as is the “tran-
scendence from within” that lends language transsubjective but not absolute
power (Faltering, 28; cf. Postmetaphysical, 103–104). For postmetaphysical
thinking, the idea of God ultimately remains opaque, yet at the same time, it
offers a critical image of salvation. God is all-powerful—the burning core at
which, according to Habermas, the question of theodicy is reignited time and
again, even for agnostics.
All the same—and seeking to move beyond the primal sources of the sacred
and to approach theology—let us ask: When did God become all-powerful?
Not in the Old Testament, for that would mean reading it through the con-
cepts of metaphysics. As Christian philosophers emerged, they accepted the
“invitation” to assume the divine standpoint of theoria. Over time, however—
and especially after the anti-Aristotelian measures undertaken by the Bishop
of Paris in 1277—the idea was taken seriously that God had created the world
(and with it mankind) out of nothing at all. The philosophical consequence
was nominalism: what exists (besides God) are individual things, including
individual humans, and the individual therefore exists directly unto God
(reichsunmittelbar) without intermediary metaphysical layers (Postmetaphysi-
cal, 29–30, 122–123).
Thereby, God became inconceivably powerful (Høibraaten 2007, Oakley
1984). The impersonal God of ancient philosophers had had little to do with
Evil; this also is why the “God’s-eye view” of theoria had been so appealing
(schön). Although St. Augustine had already admitted the possibility that God
permitted Evil, the doctrine of Original Sin marginalized the effect of the
argument. Now, however, the thought experiment expanding God’s power
was conducted in a radical manner. If, as Hans Blumenberg has claimed, the
legitimacy of modernity is to be understood as human self-assertion against
late-medieval theological absolutism, this interpretation—even if it were true
for modernity—presumes a (productive) misunderstanding of what nominal-

ist thinking was in fact seeking.
To think of God possibly as an evil deus mutabilissimus—if one is not sim-
ply to conceive Him as a capricious and rather weak tyrannical human within
time, that is—means having to impose limits on an unbounded Being both
within and beyond space and time. The late-medieval thinker John Mirecourt
(Blumenberg 1985, 195) made such a contribution by employing what was later
to be called the Kantian idea that “Ought implies Can”: he argued that even if
God were able to produce sinful effects directly in human beings, so to speak,
conversely he would not be able to coproduce moral accountability for this sin
in the “victim” of the “implantations.” But if one expands the omnipotence of
God even to this extent and, all the same, holds that He has entered a covenant
with mankind, what would a step like this mean in the history of thought?
Nominalism reflected on God so radically that it abandoned the theoria
position of philosophy. However, belief in the goodness of God remained. The
nominalists were unable to assure themselves of an unlimitedly almighty and
good God by means of thought alone. This was not thought of as evil on the
part of God, however, but attributed to the powerlessness of human thought
with respect to unfathomable divine power. Habermas’s postmetaphysical
thinking “eschews the rationalist presumption that it can itself decide which
aspects of religious doctrines are rational and which irrational” (Naturalism,
143). It observes an abyssal gulf between its own position and the opaque core
of religious experience, yet its attitude is neither hostile nor diffident, for the
religions of the world belong—like metaphysics—to the history and genealogy
of Reason (Naturalism, 6–7, 140). No logical chain leads from the penetrating
moral power of primal, sacred forces and the theoretically postulated holiness
of an impersonal cosmos to a tyrannically capricious and omnipotent God.
Rather, the Deity’s almightiness is expressed as follows: “From the very begin-
ning, the voice of God calling into life communicates within a morally sensitive
universe” (140). When Habermas affirms that religious traditions represent an
especially forceful way of articulating human life in community, “which
appear[s] to have remained more vitally present than metaphysics” (Natural-
ism, 142; translation slightly modified), he is speaking of this personal God.
As Kierkegaard, to whom Habermas has paid due attention from his dis-
sertation onward, once wrote: “That is what cannot be grasped: Omnipotence
can not only bring forth the most stately, the world in its visible totality; it
can also create the most delicate of all things, a creature independent of it”
(Kierkegaard 2003, 113, qtd. in Kodalle 1988, 99).
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41
HUMAN NATURE AND GENETIC
MANIPULATION
The Future of Human Nature (2001)
THOMAS M. SCHMIDT
D
epending on one’s temperament and sensibilities, progress in the
biological sciences occasions enthusiasm or misgivings. Either
way, these advances have prompted calls—which are only grow-
ing in number—for points of normative orientation. Genetic technology and
biotechnology have not only given rise to philosophical reactions along the
lines of applied ethics (e.g., disputes about appropriate standards and codes of
regulation). In addition, discussions concerning stem-cell research and changes
to human genetic material have brought into focus a basic anthropological
question about “the future of human nature.” As Habermas views things, the
fundamental provocation represented by preimplantation genetic diagnosis
(PGD) and embryonic-stem-cell research concerns the fact that the universal
morality of reason—which has hitherto offered a reliable standard for norma-
tive conflicts in pluralistic societies—must now be placed in a new and differ-
entiated relation to ethical notions about the right life of the human species.
It would be mistaken, then, to understand Habermas’s The Future of
Human Nature as if it were just another one of his politically influential
opinion pieces commenting on current debates. This view, while not unjusti-
fied, underestimates the significant revisions of, and changes to, the theory of
discourse that Habermas undertakes in the essay. Here, he broadens the rela-
tionship between morality and ethics—the theory of what is just and doctrines
of what is good—which runs throughout his philosophy as a whole. In consid-
eration of the anthropological challenges catalyzed by new biosciences (and
associated ideologies), Habermas addresses, in decisive fashion, the species-
ethical framework for a discursive theory of morality and law. In a certain
measure, he discusses the “weak” metaphysical preconditions for postmeta-
physical morality. Habermas does not revisit—much less revise—the basic
points of his theory; rather, he reconstructs their conceptual preconditions at
a deeper level. The revolution occurring in the biosciences makes it necessary,
in particular, to reexamine and justify the distinction between “the good life”
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and universal moral perspectives of equal respect that are valid for all. The
self-understanding of the human species as a whole stands at issue.
Accordingly, Habermas combines concrete matters of application and
diagnoses of the times with philosophical questions of principle that concern
the basic concepts underlying the overall design of discourse theory. To account
for—and honor—this complex web of arguments, the first part of this article
retraces the steps by which Habermas, in the main section of The Future of
Human Nature, arrives at his position on genetic technology and PGD and
justifies it philosophically (“On the Way to a Liberal Eugenics?”). The second
part (“The Debate on the Ethical Self-Understanding of the Species”) exam-
ines two of the most substantive objections to The Future of Human Nature in
conjunction with Habermas’s responses to them. (Thereby I principally—but
not exclusively—refer to objections collected in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Phi-
losophie [e.g., Honneth 2002], as well as to Habermas’s response, which is
found in the “Postscript” added to the essay from the fourth edition on.) The
third and last part (“Postmetaphysical Answers to the Question: What Is the
‘Good Life’? The Discourse Theory of Morality and Species Ethics”) explores
how these arguments are situated within the larger context of Habermas’s phi-
losophy; here, reference is made, above all, to the general considerations the
author presents in the first chapter of the book, “Are There Postmetaphysical
Answers to the Question: What Is the ‘Good Life’?” (Future, 1–15).
On the Way to a Liberal Eugenics?
Habermas begins by observing that medical-biotechnological advances in

PGD and stem-cell research have confused fundamental moral feelings and
intuitions. For this reason, he understands his essay as an experiment in the
literal sense—namely, as an exercise of discursive clarification that seeks to
calm emotions of perturbation and fear provoked by biotechnological prog-
ress. Such sensations of unsettlement derive from the impression that the dis-
tinctions—which, until now, have counted as firm and unchanging—“between
the nature that we ‘are’ and the organic endowment we ‘give’ to ourselves”
(Future, 12) are no longer clear.
A common reaction involves efforts to moralize human nature. Typically,
interventions into genetic arrangements are qualified as taboo, and a connec-
tion is affirmed between moral integrity and the natural indisponibility
(Unverfügbarkeit) of personhood. In reflecting on the current debate “about
new regulatory needs” (24), Habermas also considers “the question of the
meaning, for our own life prospects and for our self-understanding as moral
beings, of the proposition that the genetic foundations of our existence should
not be disposed over” (22). At the same time, however, he holds that it is a
The Future of Human Nature 463
matter of determining the precise nature of the relationship between the inac-
cessibility of human nature as such and the inviolability of persons. Habermas
seeks to give the principle of personal inviolability a meaning that is different
from, and independent of, the principle of natural indisponibility.
In so doing, Habermas takes issue with the utilitarian view that reduces
inviolability to technical matters. According to this position, all that can be
done should occur on the basis of individual preferences. This not only means
combating genetically conditioned handicaps and illnesses but also heighten-
ing human potential—including doping and technologically induced “enhance-
ment”; ultimately, it aims for a “transhuman” “self-transformation of the species”
(42). However, such a perspective fails to account for the taboo-like validity
of the inviolability of personhood, which affirms the principle of inalienable
human dignity. Moreover, it cannot explain, in terms of ethics, the strong feel-
ings of aversion—the sensation of disgust when faced with what seems to be an
obscenity—that is triggered by the “chimeric” beings that result when the bor-
ders between species are purposefully transgressed.
At the same time, Habermas remarks that the opposite, “metaphysical”
strategy of grounding personal inviolability in unchanging characteristics of
human nature is insufficient. For one, this view underestimates, in technical
and pragmatic terms, the plasticity of human nature, which is, in fact, a real-
ity. Accordingly, it proceeds in a politically naïve manner inasmuch as it pre-
sumes that the advances of bioscience—which are already operative—might
yet be “tamed.” Moreover, this line of argument exhibits epistemological
weakness inasmuch as it fails to consider that all substantive ideas about nec-
essary, natural qualities of human beings vary according to the metaphysical
ideas one holds about personhood—a matter that ultimately differs depending
on the contingencies of worldview under conditions of pluralism.
Therefore, Habermas maintains, preserving an autonomous sense of moral
respect for personal inviolability must be uncoupled from the notion that
(human) nature is inaccessible. It is not possible to derive such a sense from
the subjective will of individuals, nor from predetermined, objective, and
(supposedly) essential features of “mankind” as a whole. The call for the “mor-
alization of nature” must be understood correctly. Habermas holds that one
should reject efforts that engage in “dubious resanctification” (25; translation
slightly modified). This means projects that seek to reenchant nature by erect-
ing artificial taboos on the basis of archaic moral feelings of revulsion that
occur in the presence of “chimeras created by genetic engineering”—sensa-
tions that, restored to “second-order” taboos through reflection, would then
perform a functional role in stabilizing human self-understanding.
Instead, Habermas affirms that the borders marking personal inviolability
articulate conditions under which we may continue “to see ourselves as the
authors of our own life histories, and to recognize one another as autonomous
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persons” (25). They are not to be understood as an expression of the premod-

ern project of magically moralizing nature but rather should guarantee “the
conditions under which the practical self-understanding of modernity may
be preserved” (26). The “moralization of nature,” then, must be understood in
the sense of modernity becoming self-reflective. In other words, “understand-
ing the biological foundations of personal identity as something not to be dis-
posed over” (27) can only be justified in a derivative or mediated fashion. The
integrity of the moral person is not directly founded in the biological constitu-
tion (Ausstattung) of human individuals, even though interventions in this
natural substrate change the self-understanding of moral persons and their
relation to others in dramatic ways.
From a liberal perspective, this dramatic viewpoint hardly seems self-evi-
dent. For advocates of liberal eugenics, “new reproductive technologies as well
as substitute organs and medically assisted suicide are seen as increasing indi-
vidual autonomy” (27; translation slightly modified). Accordingly, advocates
of liberal eugenics want to leave the decision about genetic constitution to par-
ents and other responsible parties. In a free and democratic polity, the argu-
ment goes, decisions about the natural (i.e., genetic) constitution of children
must fall under the authority of parents, just as decisions about social and
cultural matters—religion, education, diet, etc.—do.
According to Habermas, however, advocates of liberal eugenics make it
“too easy” on themselves. They overlook the fact that genetic intervention
holds far-reaching moral consequences insofar as the familiar and “trusted”
basis of moral judgment and action is cast into doubt.
Shifting the “line between chance and choice” . . . makes us aware of the inter-
relations between our self-understanding as moral beings and the anthropo-
logical background of an ethics of the species. Whether or not we may
see ourselves as the responsible authors of our own life history and recognize
each other as persons of “equal birth” . . . is also dependent on how we see
ourselves anthropologically as members of the species.
(28–29)
Thereby, the further course of argument is set: to clarify in what way and in
what precise sense our moral self-understanding depends on species-ethical
preconditions. A main point of interest concerns the fundamental categorical
changes that new technologies of genetic reproduction have produced. Above
all, the matter involves the breakdown of terminological borders between
what is “grown” (Gewachsenes) and what has been “made” (Gemachtes)—i.e.,
the difference between organism (Lebewesen) and artifact (Karafyllis 2003).
The negation of the border between what has “become” naturally and what
has been technologically produced holds consequences for the logic of
interpersonal exchange, which is different where genetic programming and

natural reproduction are involved.
Interventions into genetic material (Erbgut) that are undertaken with the aim
of changing traits positively can no longer be understood to express a “logic of
healing”—i.e., as therapeutic support for the internal dynamics (Eigendynamik)
and self-development of natural organisms. Rather, genetically programmed
individuals are the objects of technological intervention. In the case of negative
eugenics, such interventions serve to avert damages, risks, and disadvantages
that may be viewed as “general ills.” In such instances, then, one may reasonably
presume belated agreement on the part of those affected. In the case of positive
eugenics, however, changes in qualities (Merkmalsveränderungen) result from
the subjective preferences of parents, who wish to have children with particular
features and/or talents. Accordingly, the communicative situation that obtains
in positive eugenics is wholly different. Here, the parents decide “only looking to
their own preferences, as if disposing over an object” (Future, 51).
For this reason, Habermas maintains that one must clearly see—and
name—the differences that hold between technological changes of genetic dis-
position (Anlagen) and the pedagogical shaping (Prägung) of attitudes and
patterns of behavior. Advocates of liberal eugenics claim that “there is no great
difference between eugenics and education” (49); denying this difference rep-
resents an argument “to justify the inclusion of the parents’ eugenic freedom
to improve the genetic makeup of their children in the scope of parental dis-
cretion which is guaranteed anyway” (49). Needless to say, Habermas is fully
aware that parents and educators already make far-reaching decisions about
newborn and growing children. However, these decisions are, in fact, elective
(advokatorisch) and reversible. Because parents and other responsible parties
count on the (later) assent of the parties affected, they implicitly consider—at
least in logical terms—the possibility that their decisions will be rejected. The
matter of consent as a condition of validity for elective actions logically pre-
sumes the chance that those affected will be able to say “no.” In turn, this
potential presumes the irreplaceable (unvertretbar) individuality of all partici-
pants in discourse. According to Habermas, the conditions of the ability-to-
be-oneself—manifest in the ability to say “no”—also include “that the person
be at home, so to speak, in her own body” (57). The embodied situatedness
(leibliche Positionalität) of the individual, as determined by nature, represents
the precondition for the discursive affirmation of selfhood through negation.
Habermas elaborates his anthropological thesis by drawing on Hannah
Arendt’s notion of “natality.” This concept refers to the natural fact of birth as
an “irreducible origin” (unverfügbarer Anfang) (58) that conditions the self-
understanding of responsible social actors. Birth represents the irreducible
point of differentiation “between what we are and what happens to us” (60).
When birth occurs “naturally,” the parents establish only the starting point
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for the natural and cultural history of the child; it is left to him or her to decide
what he or she will integrate into life subsequently—what he or she interprets
as an expression of his or her own self-conscious identity. Therefore, it is the
indisponibility of natural history that makes the process of socialization into
something to be shaped and not merely experienced (erlitten). The dialectical
aspect of the irreducible difference between natural destiny, on the one hand,
and the process of socialization, on the other—whereby it is also presumed
that natural disposition continues into individual social history—is what
makes it possible to see every decision and every action as a “new beginning.”
However, when genetic programming occurs, this border becomes blurry, for
the technician has already intervened in the natural constitution (Naturausstat-
tung) of the individual—as otherwise only parents and other responsible
parties do in the course of socialization/education (Erziehung).
Yet does the concept of natality really impose convincing “moral limits” on
eugenics? Why should a “eugenically programmed” individual not make
qualities his or her own that were afforded by engineering in the same way
that he or she accepts natural features such as sex, height, eye color, etc.? Until
now, such traits have been just as unavailable to and unalterable by individuals
by “natural” means as those that genetic engineering will create in the future.
The key difference, according to Habermas, lies in the fact that program-
ming—unlike interactive processes of education—does not treat the child as
“a second person” (62); instead, he or she remains an object “in the third per-
son.” Genetic intervention opens “no communicative scope for the projected
child to be addressed as a second person and to be involved in a communica-
tion process. From the adolescent’s perspective, an instrumental determina-
tion cannot be revised by a ‘critical reappraisal’ ” (62)—unlike a pathogenic
socialization process. For this reason, genetic modifications represent an egre-
gious restriction of personal autonomy; the subject is deprived of authorship
over his or her own life, and at the same time—because of the enduring asym-
metry between subject and object in the process of programming—the pre-
conditions for “the equal respect which every person in his quality as a person
is entitled to” (56) have been abandoned. At best, a genetic engineer “may
interpret . . . this intention,” but it is impossible to “revise or undo” it (64).
Between the party responsible for programming and the person who is pro-
grammed, irreducible intersubjective asymmetry prevails inasmuch as they
cannot exchange their social roles. An entirely new kind of social relation
results, which “jeopardizes a precondition for the moral self-understanding of
autonomous actors” (63).
But why should one not think that such missing interpersonal reciprocity
might be regulated or compensated for by means of democratically legitimated
procedures—as occurs, for example, with problems of distributive justice
associated with genetic technology and modern reproductive medicine? In
fact, righting the symmetry disturbed by genetic manipulation would, it

seems, overburden the procedural rationality of the constitutional state. The
political consensus required for regulation of this kind would necessarily
be “either too strong or too weak” (66). Although one can imagine consensus
about the general ills to be avoided through negative eugenics, determining
the collective benefit that would define the generally binding goals of positive
eugenics would restrict the ethical autonomy of citizens excessively—here, the
agreement required would be “too strong.” Conversely, the consensus neces-
sary would be “too weak” if one considered only the formal right of citizens to
define, for themselves, the goals of eugenic interventions with respect to their
(future) offspring. For this would not free parents of the responsibility they
assumed by irreversibly intervening in the natural basis of their children’s self-
interpretation and thereby changing the fundamental structure of their social
relationships. Consequently, Habermas arrives at the skeptical conclusion that
the practices of positive and enhancing eugenics “cannot be ‘normalized’ in a
legitimate way” in “a democratically constituted pluralistic society where every
citizen has an equal right to an autonomous conduct of life” (66).
With that, the last step of the argument in the main part of The Future of
Human Nature returns from philosophical matters of principle to the concrete
issue of normatively regulating PGD and stem-cell research in a manner
appropriate to a democratically constituted society.
On precisely this point, the way Habermas views the relationship between
applied ethics, on the one hand, and reflection on moral foundations, on the
other, has been criticized from varying positions. While some critics hold that
he overshoots the real problems of regulation by being too metaethical, others
consider that his efforts to avoid a metaphysically restrained species ethics do
not go far enough. In either case, Habermas’s thesis that genetic manipulation
puts “our self-understanding as a species” in question represents the core of
the debate. Whereas this position strikes advocates of liberal eugenics as
overly—and unjustifiably—dramatic, parties who hold to a metaphysical con-
ception of human nature fault Habermas for only going “halfway” with his
notion of species ethics.
The Debate on the Ethical Self-Understanding of the Species
The Future of Human Nature has been discussed in two settings, above all. In
autumn 2001, the arguments presented in the work were discussed at the con-
ference “Law, Philosophy, and Social Theory,” which Ronald Dworkin and
Thomas Nagel organized at the New York University School of Law. The first
volume (2002) of Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie honored The Future of
Human Nature by making it the focus of discussions by Robert Spaemann,
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Ludwig Siep, and Dieter Birnbacher. Habermas’s response to both events was,
in turn, published in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie (Habermas 2002).
Apart from a few new formulations, it is identical to the “Postscript” added to
the book in the fourth, expanded (German) edition (2002).
Habermas presents his response as a clarification—not a revision—of his
original intuitions and arguments. He first addresses the pronounced differ-
ences between the juristic and philosophical cultures of the United States and
Germany. “For the pragmatically minded Americans,” he observes, “these
new practices, while intensifying familiar problems of distributive justice,
don’t generate any fundamentally new problems of their own” (Future, 75–76);
this position, in his estimation, both represents “a still-unbroken trust in
scientific and technological development” (76) and expresses a tradition of phil-
osophical liberalism (shaped more by Locke than by Kant) that “foregrounds
the protection of the individual legal person’s freedom of choice against the
state” (76). Against the backdrop of such a liberal culture, “it virtually goes
without saying that decisions should not be submitted to any regulation by the
state, but rather should be left to the parents” (76). Habermas grants that “par-
ents’ rights to make eugenic decisions” (77) need not directly conflict with the
well-being of the child or with his or her liberties (Freiheitsrechte). At the same
time, however, adverse effects may occur, in mediated fashion, with respect to
affected parties’ understanding of personal autonomy inasmuch as they cease
to consider themselves the sovereign authors of their own lives and thereby
cease to be able to view themselves as autonomous moral agents.
Habermas holds that changes occurring through liberal eugenics could,
above all, transform the moral self-understanding of those concerned. Thereby,
he stresses, once more, his fear that two essential preconditions for moral
action and judgment—the fundamental equality of parties in interactions and
the individual autonomy of the moral subject—may be threatened by liberal
eugenics. As he views matters, the consequences of liberal eugenics do not con-
cern particular liberties so much as the ways that people are able to understand
themselves as enjoying rights at all. Following this restatement of the main
arguments already presented in The Future of Human Nature, Habermas
addresses four groups of objections to the position he has articulated.
The first set concerns the connection between “the practices of an improv-
ing eugenics and the ‘alien determination’ [Fremdbestimmung], even if always
indirect, of a future person” (79–80). Above all, Thomas Nagel and Thomas
McCarthy have offered objections along these lines. A second kind of
objection—raised especially by Ronald Dworkin (2000)—involves cases one
can easily imagine, when partial modification of characteristics leaves the
moral identity of the person intact and does not necessarily damage it. The
third set of objections—e.g., those offered by Robert Spaemann—takes issue
with the fundamental assumptions underlying a postmetaphysical theory of
morality; here, the call for a stronger ontological basis for species ethics is
voiced. Fourth and last, Ludwig Siep and others have objected that Habermas’s
arguments from moral principle contribute little to the normative regulation
of the problems prompted by PGD and embryonic-stem-cell research.
In the framework of exchanges during “Law, Philosophy, and Social The-
ory,” Nagel and McCarthy declared that it is “counterintuitive” (Future, 80) to
maintain that genetic programming represents a more dramatic interference
with human self-determination than do the biological contingencies of “natu-
ral” inheritance. One may doubt whether “a young person [would] struggle
with manipulated genetic predispositions in the same way as with naturally
acquired ones” (82). In response, Habermas has clarified his position and
argued that alien determination disturbs the moral agency of a person only “if
we assume that the child’s genetic constitution, chosen from among other
alternatives, actually reduces the range of her future life choices” (85). It is pre-
cisely this eventuality that we cannot foresee. Our “knowledge remains falli-
ble”; therefore, it “may be applied only in the form of clinical suggestions for
somebody whom the advisor already knows as an individuated being. . . . A
person who potentially stands to benefit from such a decision must always
preserve the ability to say no” (90).
These remarks are also meant to offer a response to Dworkin, who has
objected that Habermas’s argument about alien determination runs dry inas-
much as it is only certain characteristics—and not the morally relevant identity
of the person as a whole—that are determined by genetic interventions. Haber-
mas counters by affirming, once more, that his argument about alien determi-
nation derives its main force from the fact “that a genetic designer, acting
according to his own preferences, assumes an irrevocable role in determining
the contours of the life history and identity of another person, while remain-
ing unable to assume even her counterfactual assent” (87).
Do these reservations—which involve matters of principle—about the
potential moral consequences of positive eugenics offer suitable criteria for
drawing “any meaningful conclusions concerning the current decisions on
PGD and applied embryo research” (95)? Were one to protect embryonic life
by degrees (as Siep and other representatives of the German National Ethics
Council [Nationaler Ethikrat] propose), these points of hesitancy would, at
best, amount to “ ‘slippery-slope’- arguments” (Dammbruchargumente) (95).
The force of such lines of reasoning depends, as a rule, on the dimensions of
harm occurring in a worst-case scenario. Most important, however, is the
question whether the measures criticized—in this case, the admissibility of
PGD and stem-cell research—are really to be viewed as steps in this direction.
Clearly, such a view is controversial. Habermas himself refers to Dworkin,
McCarthy, and Nagel (among others), who do not consider future eugenic
practices to damage the principles of autonomous moral reason. Yet parties
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who reject this kind of practice as a matter of principle may respond that one
cannot know, at present, precisely what effects permitting PGD and stem-cell
research will have. At any rate, new biological technologies need not entail the
erosion of autonomy and the demise of moral equality.
All the same, changes in moral outlook can be produced by eugenic practices.
Habermas warns of potentially serious consequences. In his eyes, this is not
alarmism but rather anticipates the outcome of a possible course of development
that may serve as a means to judge present-day events inasmuch as it alerts one
to the change of attitudes that are happening, at least in the long term, to the ways
we have understood ourselves until now as a species of reasonable and moral
beings. With that, Habermas places his thesis that new biological technologies
put the normative self-understanding of the human species into question at the
core of discussion. This, in turn, relates to the matter of how one should view
The Future of Human Nature in terms of Habermas’s project as a whole.
Postmetaphysical Answers to the Question: What Is the “Good

Life”? The Discourse Theory of Morality and Species Ethics
The progress of the biosciences raises the species-ethical question of how we

want to understand our human/humane culture as a whole. The ethical ques-
tions Habermas raises are, as a matter of principle, to be distinguished from
moral questions of justice and equal respect inasmuch as they concern life that
has been deemed “good” and “well spent” (gelungen). Modernity, Habermas
observes, is an epoch in which the “doctrines of the good life and of a just
society” (Future, 2) have been differentiated—an age when substantive con-
ceptions about the “right” life and the “right” way of living occur in the plural
and are, moreover, accepted (indeed, welcomed) in the plural. Moral attitudes,
however—that is, the will to orient oneself on what is just inasmuch as it is
equally good for all—depend on motivational preconditions that follow from
divided values (and the ways of living and formative processes they make pos-
sible). The question of motivation—Why be moral at all?—cannot find a cogent
response in a procedural theory that explicates matters from a moral stand-
point (that is, from an impartial observation of interests). Such a perspective
may offer reasonable arguments that promote insight into what is equally
good for all, but it cannot bind the will to such insight(s). For this to occur,
moral knowledge must be embedded within an ethical self-understanding
that provides motivation.
Over and above this general embedding of cognitive morality within
ethical self-understanding, advances in the biosciences require one to under-
stand the relationship between morality and ethics in a more radical sense.
Biotechnological progress “make[s] a public discourse on the right under-

standing of cultural forms of life in general an urgent matter” (15). According
to Habermas, questions about the proper understanding of a given form of
living are to be called “ethical” because they do not address how we are sup-
posed to decide when faced with a moral problem—rather, they address how
we wish to understand ourselves existentially. “The good” does not concern a
moral “ought” (das moralische Gesollte) but what is willed (das Gewollte)—a
form of “un-misspent,” successful life on the part of the human species as a
whole. In the context of species ethics, then, the question of the good life
means asking about the general human self-understanding in which the moral
way of life shared by all reasonable persons is embedded.
Thereby, Habermas holds fast to “the restraint that postmetaphysical
thinking exercises regarding binding positions on substantive questions of the
good or the un-misspent life” (vii). He also reaffirms the guiding principle of
discourse theory—i.e., that the only arguments to possess moral cogency are
those of a secular character, which, on this basis, “may reasonably be expected
to meet with a rather general acceptance” in “a society with a pluralistic out-
look” (40). Accordingly, it is not a matter of negating the “priority of the just
over the good” (40), for this precedence founds a general morality of reason
declaring all persons to possess equal human rights. Although such a moral
perspective relies on intuitive agreement about what “really” constitutes a
human life form, the ethical self-understanding it entails does not declare that
moral rights are possessed by all persons because they belong to the species.
Instead, this general claim is based in a moral experience that can, in princi-
ple, be shared by all autonomous persons. To the extent that it can be shared
by all—that is, by all addressees of moral duties and subjects of human
rights—the experience possesses a universal character and provides the basis
for the validity of universal norms.
Under postmetaphysical conditions, then, a precarious balance obtains
between the notion of human rights along the lines of a universalistic morality
of reason, on the one hand, and general, strongly felt intuitions about the
defining qualities of human nature, on the other. It hinges on the fact that,
notwithstanding the ethical embeddedness of our notions concerning the
essential traits of human personhood, the cognitive precedence of the just
over the good is preserved. Therefore—like Rawls’s freestanding conception
of justice—the postmetaphysical morality of reason may be “inserted” as a
“module” into ethical contexts. To the extent that it operates independently, its
logic of validity remains distinct from ethical projects of the good life. At
the same time, this conception of morality provides the critical measure for
particular/individual ethics; a universalistic morality of reason is not com-
patible with every ethical context.
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As far as the species-ethical embedding of morality is concerned, then, a

form of ethics must be found that can be combined with the postmetaphysical
procedures of moral reason. Surprisingly, Habermas argues that Kierkegaard
offers a model for the postmetaphysical ethics—the articulation of human
self-understanding—that he seeks. Kierkegaard provides a suitable point of
departure for postmetaphysical species ethics because he “was the first phi-
losopher who answered the basic ethical question regarding the success or
failure of one’s own life with a postmetaphysical concept of ‘being-able-to-be-
oneself’ ” (5). In this regard, Kierkegaard may be viewed as the precursor of the
existentialist thinking of Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre. In the modern world,
the socialized individual can no longer find a ready answer to the question of
“the good life” in nature and tradition. “The good” is nothing given (nichts
Vorgegebenes) but rather a task (Aufgabe) that the individual him- or herself
must fulfill as a matter of free, subjective choice. Kierkegaard is the first to
have presented a formal conception of the good life—one that does not tie
existence to determinate contents but rather views matters in terms of the
authentic “ability-to-be-oneself.”
Clearly, Habermas is interested in Kierkegaard’s concept of being-able-to-
be-oneself above all else. The concept forms the hinge between an existentialist
and individualist ethos of authenticity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the
universalistic morality of reason based on egalitarian respect embedded in
species ethics. Being-able-to-be-oneself refers to qualities that define the spe-
cific nature of the human species and those who belong to it. It involves two
conditions that positive eugenics would systematically undermine: authorship
of one’s own life and the principle of symmetrical relations with all other
members of the species. At the same time, one should note that although
Kierkegaard’s concept of being-able-to-be-oneself may be understood in for-
mal terms, the notion has a religious determination. That is, Kierkegaard
locates the “ultimate justification” for “being-able-to-be-oneself” not in the
individual but in God.
Under secular conditions of cultural pluralism—as Habermas has long
argued—a general self-understanding of the entire species about how to be-
able-to-be-oneself cannot be based on religion. The indisponibility and
unconditionality of human nature—which make it possible for the individual
to be-able-to-be-him/herself in the first place—can, in his estimation, also be
conceived in a purely world-immanent fashion following the “linguistic turn.”
“In the forms of communication through which we reach an understanding
with one another about something in the world and about ourselves, we
encounter a transcending power” (10). Here, Habermas posits a strict, “inner-
worldly transcendence” (Facts, 17–27) that occurs through an intersubjectively
shared language and a way of life that is experienced as subjective and
incommunicable. Thus, it seems, discourse theory can justify a “weakly
proceduralist reading” of unconditionality—a mode of reading that both

admits error and resists skepticism. “The ‘right’ ethical self-understanding is
neither revealed nor ‘given’ in some other way. It can only be won in a common
endeavor. From this perspective, what makes our being-ourselves possible
appears more as a transsubjective power than an absolute one” (Future, 11).
Habermas’s reflections on a postmetaphysical conception of the “good life”
for the human species go back to a lecture he presented, in abbreviated form,
in the Neue Rundschau in September 2000. Since the first edition of The
Future of Human Nature, these remarks have preceded the main text as an
introduction—in a certain sense, to provide the context for the arguments that
follow. Habermas also discussed the question of how postmetaphysical think-
ing may at once be critical and appreciative (aneignend) of religious tradition
in “Faith and Knowledge”—the address he held when awarded the Peace Prize
of the German Book Trade (that is, independent of the events of September 11,
2001). In all these contexts, he has sought to maintain a clear separation
between his own postmetaphysical position and two alternatives he rejects: on
the one hand, the perspective of scientistic naturalism, which finds techno-
logical expression in certain trends of bioscientific development, and, on the
other, metaphysical and religious doctrines that wish to declare a particular
conception of the good life the universally binding basis of values.
Scientistic naturalism and metaphysical doctrines of natural law both call
for a conception of nature that is too strong in normative terms. Postmeta-
physical thinking, as Habermas understands it, does not derive normative
ideas from what human nature “is”—whether such determinations result from
progressivism that embraces technology or from conservatism that views cul-
ture pessimistically—but from those human activities in which rational per-
sons (can) account for their convictions and practices. After the publication of
The Future of Human Nature, Habermas has pursued the goal of demonstrat-
ing the superiority of this discourse-theoretical justification of law, democ-
racy, and morality over false alternatives in other writings—above all, in the
studies collected in Between Naturalism and Religion.
References
Dworkin, Ronald. 2000. “Playing God: Genes, Clones, and Luck.” In Sovereign Virtue.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2002. “Replik auf Einwände.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 50,
no. 2: 283–298.
Honneth, Axel. 2002. “Symposium zu: Jürgen Habermas: Die Zukunft der menschlichen
Natur.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 50, no. 1: 105–126.
Karafyllis, Nicole C., ed. 2003. Biofakte: Versuch über den Menschen zwischen Artefakt und
Lebewesen. Paderborn: Westedeutscher Verlag.
42
THE CONSTITUTIONALIZATION
OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AND
POLITICS
“Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still
Have a Chance?” (2004)
JAMES BOHMAN
F
rom 1999 onward, Habermas has significantly shifted the focus of
his political philosophy from questions of democracy and legiti-
macy within the nation-state to the burgeoning international
political domain. In his first such move to international politics, in the mid-
1990s, Habermas embraced the “Kantian project” of “Perpetual Peace” and
interpreted it as requiring cosmopolitan democracy. In his second phase, in
the late 1990s, Habermas began to see difficulties with any attempt to transfer
democratic ideals directly to the international system and argued for a more
limited conception of a fair negotiating system that cannot in principle attain
full democratic legitimacy. In his third phase, beginning in 2005 and continuing
to the present, Habermas advocates the “constitutionalization of international
law” and moves toward a theory of a multilevel world society characterized by
states, “world domestic politics,” and supranational institutions concerned
solely with human rights.
Habermas’s shift toward international and cosmopolitan political theory
occurred as social scientists and philosophers began to see globalization as a
transformative process that would greatly change the nature of politics. In
particular, many began to see globalization as challenging the assumption
that independent and sovereign states are the primary units of political analy-
sis and the carriers of democracy. Indeed, states now seem both too big and
too small: too big to generate the loyalty and legitimacy needed for the demo-
cratic ideal and too small to solve a myriad of global social problems, from
global capital flows to global warming. Powerful multinational corporations now
evade state power, even as international financial institutions increasingly
dictate the terms of cooperation to weak states. In the interest of promoting
“Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?” 475
free markets and trade, states now voluntarily delegate their powers to inter-
national bodies and private authorities. Antiglobalization protesters challenge
such neoliberal policies often in the name of local control and democracy.
What unites these diverse phenomena is a shift to forms of political authority
that are no longer necessarily accountable to a measure of popular influence
and control—one of the necessary but not sufficient conditions for any form
of democracy.
In his essay “Kant’s Perpetual Peace with the Benefit of Two Hundred
Years’ Hindsight” (Inclusion, 165–202), Habermas was optimistic about the
prospects for a global political order as the continuation of the form of democ-
racy based on human rights typical of nation-states. In a properly reformed
United Nations, democratization could be accomplished by organizing its
institutions so as to reproduce parliamentary democracy at the global scale,
with the General Assembly as a legislative branch, various world and interna-
tional courts, and the Security Council as its executive. Habermas soon came
to see that the extension of democracy beyond the state as the basis for the
legitimacy of the cosmopolitan order could not be achieved so easily, espe-
cially given the specific conception of democracy that he developed in Between
Facts and Norms. Habermas thus rejects cosmopolitan democracy and con-
cludes that the modern conception of democracy, where citizens are the
authors and subjects of the law, cannot be extended beyond a delimited politi-
cal community of free and equal citizens. Democracy on the nation-state
model connects three central ideas: that the proper political community is a
bounded one, that it possesses ultimate political authority, and that this
authority enables political autonomy, so that the members of the demos may
freely choose the conditions of their own association and legislate for them-
selves. The normative core of this conception of democracy is the conception
of freedom articulated in the third condition: that the subject of the con-
straints of law is free precisely in being the author of the laws. In the absence of
this demos, global parliamentary democracy is a nonstarter. The argument
here might be seen as a continuation of Habermas’s understanding of the need
for “decentering” democracy under the conditions of pluralism and complex-
ity. If this applies to the modern state, then it would seem that cosmopolitan
democracy would take this trend even further. Yet, when discussing “postna-
tional” legitimacy, Habermas clearly makes self-determination by a singular
demos the fundamental normative core of the democratic ideal, however unat-
tainable it is in the absence of a delimited demos.
In the face of these problems with existing political categories, Habermas
has consistently argued that they can best be understood and dealt with in the
context of “the Kantian project” of creating a “cosmopolitan condition,” that
is, as the extension of the rule of law and institutionalization of peace and
freedom beyond the state. Kant already saw the possibility of the emergence of
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a global public sphere, in which human-rights violations “in one part of the
world will be felt everywhere” (Kant 2002, 107–108). While such an emerging
global public provides a necessary condition for a political order beyond the
state, it does not identify the central concern of the Kantian project: in Haber-
mas’s terms, it is the constitutionalization of international law. “Constitution-
alization” here refers to the transformation of existing power relations through
law. In the case of cosmopolitan law, it is the transformation of the law of states
into a condition in which individuals as bearers of human rights are the legal
subjects of international law.
In the last decade, Habermas has come to distinguish the Kantian project
of transforming international law into cosmopolitan law from issues of
democracy and democratic legitimacy. Instead, Habermas suggests a “multi-
level political world society,” where functions are distributed across the
national, transnational, and supranational levels. Rather than constitute the
global demos that makes itself the author and subject of the law, constitution-
alization is now about the mutual limitation of the exercise of power at various
levels, including the power of democratic states, which are nonetheless the
source of legitimacy through popular and public accountability. This is what
Habermas now calls “global domestic politics”; he leaves to formal and legal
global institutions the exclusive task of promoting human rights and human
security. The question shifts from “How and in what institutional form can
democracy be realized beyond the state?” to “If not democracy, what form or
forms of legitimacy are adequate to a multilevel and pluralist world society?”
In his development of a more consistent and feasible Kantian project,
Habermas has offered three different versions: an initial interpretation, devel-
oped in terms of an ideal of cosmopolitan democracy; a second version, in
which democracy is argued to be at home only in the nation-state, leaving only
a system of fair bargaining and negotiation at the international level; and,
finally, a Kantian account of a multilevel political world society in which the
constitutionalization of international law is the main aim.
The Kantian Project I: Cosmopolitan Democracy
To understand Habermas’s distinctive position in the debate about a poten-

tial cosmopolitan political order, it would be useful to examine the main
options for political legitimacy. The current discussion can be reconstructed
on four main axes: political or social, institutional or noninstitutional, demo-
cratic or nondemocratic, and transnational or cosmopolitan. In this early
phase, Habermas takes a position that is political, institutional, democratic,
and cosmopolitan; he is thus in close proximity to David Held. Various
theories of this sort are informed by background assumptions about the

nature and scope of the cosmopolitan order: whether it is moral to the extent
that it is concerned with all individuals and their life opportunities, social to
the extent that it makes associations and institutions central, and political
to the extent that it focuses on specifically legal and political institutions,
including citizenship. Habermas’s position in this debate is moderate. It is not
as minimal as Rawls’s law of peoples, which denies the need for any strong inter-
national legal or political order at all, much less a democratic one. Nor is it a
strongly democratic position, such as David Held’s version of cosmopolitan
order. However, both Held and Habermas share a common emphasis on the
emergence of international public law as central to a just global political order.
Habermas rejects Held’s parliamentary account of constitutionalization to
the extent that it does not account for a pluralist and multilevel world polity:
its hierarchy of various laws and sovereignties implicitly accepts that there
must be some ultimate democratic justification for the exercise of political
power. When considering the problems facing a postnational polity, democ-
racy could very well play a role in legitimation, but it need not apply at all lev-
els; in fact, there are different forms of legitimation at each distinct level of a
pluralist world society: the national, the transnational, and the supranational.
Each has its own distinctive form of legitimation, which may be democratic to
some degree or another but only requires democracy at the national and sub-
national levels.
These debates in many respects mirror Kant’s own development, from the
idea of the constitutionalization of international law in a world republic to a
more dispersed and pluralistic conception of an ever-expanding federation of
states in which the plurality of legal orders is preserved. The first is modeled
on the idea of a social contract and is seen as the continuation of constitution-
alization processes begun in states. But this assumes a continuous process and
a unitary form of institutionalization across levels. The second attempts,
if unsuccessfully, to formulate the alternative of a pluralist world society in
which each person nonetheless has the moral and political statuses that we
now call human rights. Habermas continues the second version of the Kantian
project. This presents its own set of difficulties, including explaining how
political legitimacy can develop in an environment in which democracy plays
at best an indirect role. While some pluralists might weaken this role for
democracy even further (for example, Anne-Marie Slaughter), others might
seek to expand the role of democracy beyond the level of states to the extent
that democracy can be transformed beyond the demos form of the nation-
state. Habermas’s own solution articulates a third option: the emergence of a
“global domestic politics” based on the emergence not of policy networks but
of shared deliberation among representatives of national democracies.
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The Kantian Project II: From Democracy to Negotiation
In the second version of his Kantian project, Habermas introduces governance

as opposed to democratic government, so that his view is social, institutional,
nondemocratic, and transnational. To understand these changes, it would be
best to locate his current position in relation to the range of theories that have
developed since his first discussion of Kantian cosmopolitan law. As a defender
of the Kantian project, Habermas cannot be a minimalist about political insti-
tutions above nation-states, as are, for example, Rawls or Buchanan. If there is
any role for political legitimacy, it is in the service of a list of basic rights; how-
ever, the institutional and political bases of such an order leave the bases for
accountability unexplored. If stronger notions such as Held’s cosmopolitan
democracy fail, what is the alternative? By accepting that democracy just con-
sists in self-legislation, that the people are both authors and subjects of the law,
“postnational” legitimacy must have some other source.
In both The Postnational Constellation and more recent essays on the Euro-
pean Union, Habermas seeks to accommodate wider institutional pluralism
in the Kantian project. Still, he cannot have it both ways. When considering
various disaggregated and distributed forms of transnational political order,
he describes them in nondemocratic terms, as “negotiating systems” governed
by fair bargaining. The conception of democracy is restricted even more, since
Habermas requires that any putative “postnational democracy” acquire some
shared and therefore particular political identity, without which, he contends,
we are left with mere “moral” rather than “civic” solidarity. According to
Habermas, even if such a political community is based on the universal prin-
ciples of a democratic constitution, “it still forms a collective identity, in the
sense that it interprets and realizes these principles in light of its history and
in the context of its own particular form of life” (Postnational, 107). This con-
text is absent in the postnational polity. Without such a common ethical basis,
he argues that institutions beyond the state must look to a “less demanding
basis for legitimacy in the organizational forms of an international negotia-
tion system” (Postnational, 109), the deliberative processes of which will be
accessible to various publics and to organizations in international civil society.
In this postnational version of the Kantian project, regional organizations
such as the European Union function so as to provide higher-level political
integration when necessary. This less demanding standard of legitimacy does
not include the capacity to deliberate about the terms governing the political
authority of the negotiation system itself. Habermas’s position here is cer-
tainly transnational but ultimately nondemocratic, primarily because it restricts
its overly robust conception of deliberative democracy to the level of the
nation-state. Thus, stronger criteria for democracy are not applied outside
the nation-state, where governance is only indirectly democratic and left to

negotiations and policy networks. Such negotiation systems do not yet achieve
the level of “domestic world politics,” since they are not yet linked to a multi-
level and functionally distributed political world society. The participants in
such negotiation systems are not citizens but states, with all of their particular
interests.
Within his multilevel system of global governance, Held, by contrast, does
not solve this problem directly by appeal to the legislative acts of the global
parliament alone but rather by making the global political framework itself
the subject of the popular will and consent. Once legitimated, this political
subject emerges within a “common structure for political action” that enables
individuals and groups to pursue their individual and collective projects. The
framework itself functions as a would-be sovereign rather than a distributed
process of will formation, since sovereignty is now “an attribute of democratic
public law.” In order to reconstitute the community as sovereign, Held (1995)
argues that the demoi must ultimately submit to the will of the global demos:
“cosmopolitan law demands the subordination of regional, national and local
sovereignties to an overarching legal framework” (234). In order to be over-
arching, the framework must instantiate a hierarchy of authority. In order to
be democratic, the common framework will have to pass through the collec-
tive will and reason of its citizens, thereby recreating at the global level the
contractual moment of a determinate “people” granting one another their
mutual rights. In willing the general framework, the exact character of the
rights and obligations that the common structure of political action necessar-
ily entails cannot be fully determined. At the same time, however, in order to
be enforceable, these rights and duties must be specified in some way by an
authoritative institution possessing the competence to do so, and thus it must
act both legislatively and judicially. The dilemma can be put this way: if global
institutions act judicially, it seems undemocratic, yet if they act legislatively,
they have no special democratic status over other more fully legitimate and
politically constituted legislative wills.
Held’s demand for democratic control over “the overarching general legal
framework” creates a fundamental continuity between democracy within and
beyond the nation-state. But it does so at a high price. First, it makes second-
order questions about the framework somehow different than first-order ones,
matters to be settled impartially that somehow rise above the fray of everyday
democratic conflicts. Higher-level international politics are thus adjudicative
rather than deliberative. Although Held more recently in The Global Covenant
(2004) emphasizes multilevel and polycentric governance as necessary in the
short and medium term much more than global parliamentary institutions,
he still employs the same conception of cosmopolitan self-legislation as
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fundamental to a long-term global democratic order. In a word, in a period

when even democracy in the state is disaggregated and decentered, the cosmo-
politan conception of democracy is not sufficiently transformed and thus
risks increasing rather than decreasing the problems of domination through
juridification. While Habermas now clearly rejects the idea that democracy, even
in a modified form, should be the organizing principle of all constitutionaliza-
tion, he still has not provided an alternative to cosmopolitan democracy that
can provide a sufficiently robust basis for its political legitimacy, even for its
juridical institutions that enforce human rights. Otherwise, it cannot legitimate
its use of political power in institutions that are only indirectly democratic.
Mere assent to the global basic structure is not sufficient, since the indirect legit-
imation by already existing democracies leaves unanswered the mechanisms
of popular control or access to political influence at the postnational level. The
functional differentiation of tasks does not relieve the problem of legitimacy,
and this problem has no easy solution, since the decision-making procedures of
many of the institutions within a multilevel world society are not democratic.
Moreover, any solution is made more difficult because international law is not
jurisgenerative in the same way as domestic law. For Habermas, this means
that the Kantian project of constitutionalization is complementary but not
analogous to constitutionalization within states. Much to the detriment of
their theories of global politics, Held and other cosmopolitan democrats con-
tinue to hold on to this false constitutional analogy. But there is still another
possibility: even if disanalogous yet complementary, as Habermas asserts that
it is, the global political order does not exclude the possibility of a democracy
that is different in kind, of demoi rather than a demos.
The Kantian Project III: Constitutionalizing International Law

Without Democracy
Habermas has undertaken a third attempt to develop a systematic version of

the Kantian cosmopolitan project in a multilevel “politically constituted world
society.” The version represents a synthesis of the best of the earlier versions
with a new focus on the fundamental aim of transforming international law
and its legal subject. In such a multilevel order, states have an important role to
play: they are “the most important actors and final arbiters” precisely because
they have solved the problem of legitimate power by means of connecting law
to the achievement of freedom. Even so, these normative resources of states
are no longer adequate to the task of solving the many problems created by
globalization, including various risks created by cross-border transactions
and the migration of peoples. At least two further levels of institutions are
necessary to solve the many problems that states do not have the resources to
deal with, even with the ability to exercise legitimate power. Beyond the state
are the transnational and supranational levels, and in both cases processes of
institutionalization have already occurred. Habermas considers the “suprana-
tional level” to be exhausted by those executive and judicial aspects of the
United Nations that make it a fully inclusive “world organization.” The core
institutional achievements of the United Nations as a model of supranational
institutionalization are executive and juridical: the Security Council and vari-
ous world courts, including the International Criminal Court, both of which
must be strengthened and also detached from the many other functional
organizations of the current United Nations. These selectively strengthened
world organizations would limit themselves to two tasks and two tasks alone:
securing the peace and promoting and implementing human rights. Haber-
mas continues to place all other global political issues at the transnational
level in a system of fair negotiation among the relevant actors and stakehold-
ers, including regional regimes such as the European Union. The purpose of
these institutions, which will be functionally distributed according to problems
and functions, will be to create “global domestic policy” (Weltinnenpolitik),
making this structure genuinely transnational and no longer solely concerned
with matters of international foreign policy. Habermas foresees that states will
then also become further integrated horizontally into various networks and
regimes that will produce such policies and remain open to the influence and
deliberation of publics from below. Hence, it is the transnational level that
generates a “pluralist” and multilevel world society, in which governance is
dispersed across networks that incorporate states, state actors, and emerging
forms of civil society but also takes on the burden of a global domestic policy,
including issues of development.
With these distinctions between the national, transnational, and suprana-
tional levels, it is clear that the burdens of legitimation are spread throughout
the system via the division of labor. Legitimacy at the national level is demo-
cratic and ethical, dependent on the implementation of procedures that create
a demos and allow for the development of a public political culture. At the
transnational level, legitimacy is fundamentally a matter of politics and negotia-
tion, so that the complex agreements and policies can be seen to be open to the
influence of all affected and also seen as effective in solving particular prob-
lems. But the supranational level takes up and transforms what Habermas
calls “the classical agenda of international law,” that of promoting peace, secu-
rity, and freedom. But this means that on this proposal there must be a very
strong distinction between law and politics: the development of international
law “follows the intrinsic logic of an explication and extension of human
rights.” Thus, Habermas argues, “the issues the world organization faces tend
to be more of a legal than a political kind” (Naturalism, 343). Consistent
with his view of law and democracy in his earlier works, law and politics
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necessarily part ways without established democratic practice, rather than

being unified in the democratic states and its ideals of popular sovereignty
and democratic procedures. In the absence of such an order, the supranational
level is primarily concerned with “the enforcement of established law” and
“takes precedence over the constructive task of legislation and policy making”
(Divided West, 174). That human rights are taken to be settled issues and thus
need only the institutional means for their enforcement results in require-
ments of legitimacy that are in fact lower than in the case where transnational
negotiation produces decisions that “demand a higher degree of legitimation
and hence more effectively institutionalized forms of citizen participation”
(174). Habermas thinks that this difference in the requirements of legitimacy
means that the jury is still out on international politics. However, given the
“modest agenda” of supranational institutions, it seems more likely that they
will be able to accomplish their juridical task and implement human rights as
“negative duties associated with a universalistic morality of justice” (Divided
West, 143). This legitimacy will be enhanced by the periodic emergence of cos-
mopolitan solidarity in the reactions of the global public to grave violations of
human rights.
Despite this appeal to specific functions at the transnational and suprana-
tional level, both of which lessen demands of legitimacy as compared to
nation-states, Habermas now argues that “the viability of any form of democ-
racy, including the democratic state, depends on the success of [the Kantian]
project” of a political constitution of a world society (Naturalism, 313). By this
he means that the further viability of democracy depends on extending the
original scope of constitutionalization, that is, to the project of extending “the
pacifying function of law” to the global level, even as it “remains conceptually
intertwined with the function of a legal condition that citizens see as legitimately
promoting freedom” (313). This may seem once again to support cosmopolitan
democracy, but the argument here is much more modest. Constitutionalization
beyond the state is the only feasible means by which the international system will
enhance rather than detract from democratic forms of governance. This is
because constitutionalized supranational institutions back human-rights claims
with force and thus are able to secure the structural basis for democratic legit-
imacy at any level. This is not to say that the form of the constitution would be
the same at all levels but only that the specific role of the constitutionalization
of international law is to secure rather than to constitute freedom, as constitu-
tions do for democratic self-legislation.
This shift raises a basic question: what sort of democracy is this kind of
constitution supposed to establish? As we saw in Habermas’s rejection of both
stronger versions of cosmopolitan democracy, it is just this conception that
guided his account of democracy as jurisgenerative in Between Facts and
Norms. For this reason, Habermas argued against any notion of democracy
beyond the state or regional organizations of states in The Postnational Con-

stellation, still holding out the hope that the European Union could give itself
a constitution that would make for a European demos and European public.
Habermas has now again modified his position, arguing that the constitu-
tional order that needs to be created beyond the state would not be republican
in the sense that the self-legislating demos constitutes legally generated power;
rather, the constitutional tradition here is “liberal” rather than republican and
democratic. Accordingly, the constitution does not so much constitute author-
ity as it constrains power, by directing it into legal channels. Much as Bellamy
(2008) and other contemporary republicans discuss modern constitutions as
based on sharing power, Habermas argues that the constitutionalization of
international law does not produce the identity of the rulers and the ruled.
Instead, a republican (or “liberal,” in Habermas’s terms) constitution ensures
the “conceptual independence of three elements, namely the constitution, the
powers of the state and citizenship” (Naturalism, 316). On such an account of
constitutional order, the functions of the state are disaggregated into formal
and informal international organizations that lack the characteristics of the
state and do not legitimate their power by appealing to the will of citizens. If
the success of this new emerging constitutionalization is to “explain the via-
bility of democracy in any form, including the state,” as Habermas claims, it
does so only if extant normative conceptions of democracy are no longer uni-
vocal across the various levels of world society. On this view, democracy no
longer creates its own conditions of realization. If this version of a multilevel,
politically organized world society is not to be less than the sum of its parts,
how could institutional legitimacy be secured?
If democracy is not feasible beyond the national level, where does legiti-
macy come from? Only two possibilities remain: the source of legitimacy must
be either transnational or supranational. The first horn of the dilemma quickly
runs into the inherent normative weaknesses of global domestic politics.
Embracing this horn, neoliberalism emerges via this deficit of legitimation,
leaving the management of global markets to managers and executives and
issues of political legitimacy and redistribution entirely to states. Rather than
representative institutions, legal pluralists such as Anne-Marie Slaughter
(2004) see the disaggregating of state sovereignty as presenting the opportu-
nity to replace old vertical power–based dependencies with horizontal inter-
actions and functional interconnections in policy networks, which de facto
already make many binding decisions. The problem is that these networks are
not all that different, since participants in such multilateral global regulatory
processes are delegates of the executive branch of their own state. As defended
by Teubner (2004) and other legal pluralists, the attempt to give a greater
transnational role to private law suffers even greater deficits in accountability.
More formal transnational organizations are limited in other ways, lacking
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the authority to amend or formulate new legal norms. On the other hand,
supranational organizations are organized solely around universal negative
duties related to human rights and their enforcement as the justificatory bases
of their decisions. While recent developments in the United Nations have
called for a more expansive conception of security to include global redistri-
bution, such an agenda cannot be fulfilled by the United Nations, because it is
currently structured in such a way as to be unable to engage in the construc-
tive tasks of global politics and bargaining. In fact, Habermas emphatically
rejects such political functions for supranational institutions, since they would
overburden and potentially delegitimize them from their appropriate tasks of
constitutionalizing human rights. The aim of this division of labor is to shore
up the legitimacy of the supranational level by tying it exclusively to human
rights and their enforcement.
Does reconstructing this argument about a legitimation deficit as a
dilemma help in identifying a possible way to escape the problem? Democracy
is needed for expanding the notion of security underlying supranational insti-
tutions, on the one hand, and for underwriting redistributive features of global
domestic policy, on the other hand. But the form of democracy that would
make this possible is not available at either level. So is there a way out? As
Habermas sees it, the only solution available under conditions that will hold
for the foreseeable future is to institute a division of institutional labor that
would produce the necessary forms of legitimacy across the institutional sys-
tem as a whole without relying on only one form of legitimacy.
Does the distinction of various levels solve the problem? It does so not sim-
ply by having each level produce its own form of legitimacy. Instead, legiti-
macy at each level is regarded as mutually reinforcing. Consider the Kantian
problem of why law is the solution to the problem of peace: peace is attainable
only if the goals of the international system and of the republican states
are mutually reinforcing, and for this purpose constitutionalization moves
the state away from the self-defeating attempt to secure nondomination at
home through domination abroad. Such mutually enhancing relationships
can be found elsewhere in politically organized world society as well. The
establishment of the International Criminal Court means that the diffuse
global public sphere is given “an authoritative voice” when it is stirred by
moral reactions to political crimes and unjust regimes (Naturalism, 342). At a
more structural level, publics of citizens and their elected representatives
within democratic states provide a basis for accountability for global domestic
politics. They might, for example, put global warming more forcefully on the
political agenda.
At the same time, Habermas argues that these forms of legitimacy should
not be overextended, as when human-rights institutions were to be used to
promote the alleviation of poverty as a human right. While recognizing that
the expansion of security beyond its current boundaries is inevitable, Haber-

mas thinks that such an achievement would not be a matter of legal enforce-
ment but of creating a coordinated agreement at the transnational level. Critics
such as Lafont (2008), Scheuerman (2008), and Flynn (2009) demand a more
direct application of human-rights law to issues of severe poverty and depriva-
tion and argue that Habermas’s concerns with overburdened supranational
institutions leads instead to deficits in the legitimation of human-rights insti-
tutions themselves. Even if we accept this division of institutional labor, it is still
the case that human-rights interventions have inevitable political dimensions,
as Thomas Risse and Sikkink (1999) and others have pointed out, including
persuasion and dialogue leading to sustainable domestic change. Habermas
thinks that the instrument of human rights should not be the basis for any
such claims that are matters of global domestic policy. Instead, such an agenda
would work against, rather than mutually support, an effective and negotiated
solution to the problem of global poverty. We cannot expect an “uninterrupted
chain of legitimation” that runs from nation-states to the world organization.
Not only do gaps remain, but the form of legitimation is discontinuous across
levels.
With this multilevel account Habermas moves away from his initial under-
standing of constitutionalizing the cosmopolitan condition. The role of the
constitution of a pluralist world society is not to make individuals the authors
and subjects of law, where all legitimate power comes from the will of the peo-
ple; rather, the constitution of the pluralist world society, Habermas says, is
“liberal,” in that its goal is to set limits on power in creating a rule of law that
can, by “juridification,” normatively shape “existing power relations” (Divided
West, 138), regardless of their democratic origins, and direct the exercise of
political power into legal channels. Contrary to Habermas, however, such a
constitution is not merely liberal but also deeply republican. Because it empha-
sizes mutual limitation at the level of the institutional division of labor, it relies
heavily on the idea of representation across levels: representation in a demo-
cratic state, through which one is a principal within a negotiation system and
an individual subject of cosmopolitan law. Even with this multilevel system, it
is not clear that the protections afforded at the supranational level will be suf-
ficient for the genuine aim of constitutionalization: that every individual is the
subject of international law. One persistent global problem is the lack of basic
freedoms and statuses for millions of politically unrepresented people, many
of whom are living illegally as migrants or squatters. Human rights cannot be
constitutionalized merely as liberal rights or limited only to rights that pre-
vent violence and gross violations of human rights, such as crimes against
humanity (regardless of whether democracy can be extended beyond the
state). The simple existence of millions of people who live daily without free-
dom and status ought to represent a clear violation of the rule of law and
486 Texts
demonstrate the need for republican political demands at all levels. It is thus
not merely juridical institutions but also necessarily institutionalized political
orders across levels that only together could ensure the right to have rights.
This task is now more complicated, since this “right to rights” requires that all
have multiple memberships, as citizens of states, members of global publics,
and individual subjects of international law.
References
Bellamy, Richard. 2008. “Republicanism, Democracy, and Constitutionalism.” In Republi-

canism and Political Theory, ed. Cécile Laborde and John Maynor, 159–189. London:
Blackwell.
Flynn, Jeffrey. 2009. “Human Rights, Transnational Solidarity, and Duties to the Global
Poor.” Constellations 16, no. 1: 59–77.
Held, David. 1995. Democracy and the Global Order. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press.
——. 2004. The Global Covenant. Cambridge: Polity.
Kant, Immanuel. 2002. Political Writings. Trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lafont, Cristina. 2008. “Alternate Visions of a New Global Order: What Should Cosmo-
politans Hope For?” Ethics & Global Politics 1, no. 1–2: 1–20.
Risse, Thomas, and Kathryn Sikkink. 1999. “The Socialization of Human Rights Norms
Into Domestic Practices.” In The Power of Human Rights, ed. Thomas Risse et al., 1–38.
Scheuerman, William. 2008. “Global Governance Without Global Government? Haber-
mas on Postnational Democracy.” Political Theory 36, no. 1: 133–151.
Slaughter, Anne-Marie. 2004. A New World Order. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
Teubner, Gunther. 2004. “Societal Constitutionalism: Alternatives to State-Centered Con-
stitutional Theory.” In Constitutionalism and Transnational Governance, ed. Christian
Joerges et al., 3–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
PART IV
CONCEPTS
43
COGNITIVE INTERESTS
WILLIAM REHG
H
abermas’s concept of “cognitive interests” lies at the center of his
Knowledge and Human Interests (1972 [1968]). That work repre-
sents the culmination of his early efforts to ground critical social
theory in a critique of knowledge (Erkenntniskritik), an approach he aban-
doned when he made the linguistic-pragmatic turn in the 1970s (see chapter 29
in this volume). With input from Karl-Otto Apel (1971), Habermas developed
the idea of cognitive interests in hopes of reconstituting the philosophy of
reflection, which had reached its apex in German idealism. Specifically,
Habermas wanted to revive the critical, emancipatory aims of reflection in a
way that was open to sociological and historical research. For that task, he
looked to a systematic framework that had a sufficiently transcendental
character to ground critique yet that did not rest on the accomplishments of a
transcendental ego or the history of absolute mind, which in effect removed
critique from the input of the methodical sciences. The solution lay in critical
reflection on the conditions of possible knowledge in the empirical and cul-
tural sciences. These two forms of scientific inquiry, Habermas argued, rest on
two deep-seated human interests that predetermine what counts as knowledge
in their respective domains of inquiry. The reflective grasp of these two inter-
ests depends in turn on an emancipatory cognitive interest, which Habermas
linked with philosophy, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis and ideology
critique, on the other.
Consider first the empirical sciences, or, as Habermas dubbed them, the
“empirical-analytic” sciences (natural sciences and forms of social-scientific
490 Concepts
research tied to hypothesis testing). For his understanding of methodology in

the empirical sciences, Habermas relied on C. S. Peirce and Karl Popper: sci-
entific claims count as reliable knowledge only insofar as they issue from pro-
cesses of controlled experimentation in which general (lawlike) hypotheses
are tested against empirical observation. Thus epistemic access to objective
reality depends on the actual technical control of external events (controlled
laboratory interventions, field observations, etc.), and acquired knowledge
correlates with the possible control of objects in the relevant domain, where
“control” refers not only to technological applications but, more generally, to
reliable prediction of future events (and presumably to accurate retrodiction
of past events). Thus inquiry in these sciences brings methodical discipline to
a more basic human capacity, namely, our ability to intervene successfully
in nature—in a word, “social labor.” Because species reproduction depends on
our capacity for social labor, Habermas links labor with a fundamental human
interest in the technical control of nature. As governing human activity, this
interest is practical in a broad sense; because it involves knowledge of natural
processes, an ability to forecast the course of events and consequences of
causal interventions, the interest is also cognitive. More precisely, we have to
do with a “knowledge-constitutive” (erkenntnisleitend) interest that sets the
conditions on a specific mode of access to possible objects of knowledge. To
distinguish it from the interest that grounds the cultural sciences (which is
practical in a narrower sense reminiscent of Aristotle’s praxis), Habermas
dubbed this labor-based interest the “technical cognitive interest.”
Habermas’s understanding of the cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften)
relied mainly on Dilthey and Gadamer. Historiography, cultural anthropol-
ogy, religious studies, comparative literature, ethnography, and other inter-
pretive forms of sociology are inherently hermeneutic, oriented toward the
interpretation of discourse and human forms of life. Their object domains are
always already symbolically mediated, permeated by meaning and inter-
twined with ordinary language. To understand a given text (or individual
biography, culture, tradition, etc.) therefore, one must enter into the form of
life or individual life history in which it is situated; one then moves back and
forth between one’s initial sense of the text as a whole and the interpretation of
its parts, allowing each side to correct one’s understanding of the other until
parts and whole cohere. The point of departure is the interpreter’s own back-
ground or “horizon” of preunderstandings. The hermeneutic process thus
unfolds as a kind of dialogue between interpreter and interpretandum, lead-
ing to what Gadamer calls a “fusion of horizons.”
It follows from the above that the cultural sciences employ the same kinds
of hermeneutic competences that social actors rely on in everyday interaction.
Following Dilthey, Habermas roots such competences in ordinary language.
As a resource for mutual understanding, linguistic ability involves not merely
Cognitive Interests 491
the mastery of a lexicon and syntax but also the ability to integrate linguistic
expressions with actions and nonverbal accompaniments of speech in a man-
ner appropriate to the context. As a dialogical ability to understand one’s own
and others’ speech and action for the sake of stable social cooperation, these
communicative competences are of fundamental importance for both indi-
vidual socialization and ongoing social reproduction. Thus, in a manner anal-
ogous to the empirical sciences, the cultural sciences are also grounded in a
deep-seated human interest, namely, the “practical cognitive interest” in over-
coming interpersonal disruptions and reaching mutual understanding for the
sake of stable intersubjective relations. To call this a knowledge-constitutive
interest means that reality can appear as an object of possible knowledge in
the cultural sciences only insofar as scholars engage in the kind of hermeneu-
tic processes that are necessary for any mutually intelligible intersubjectivity
at all and in which human beings must take an interest if they are to under-
stand themselves as social actors.
Before moving on, we should avoid some possible misunderstandings that
could arise with the notion of “knowledge-constitutive interest.” First, this
idea refers neither to the motives of individual scientists nor to a priori struc-
tures of a transcendental ego but to transcendental conditions of collective
human development. More precisely, cognitive interests are “basic orienta-
tions” that are presupposed by social labor and interaction as two dimensions
in which the human species reproduces itself not merely biologically but
through a sociocultural learning process, what Habermas calls “self-forma-
tion” or “self-constitution” (Knowledge, 196, 195). These basic orientations are
built into the social-material practices that structure forms of inquiry in the
natural and human sciences, which have now become an essential element in
sociocultural development. Second, in linking knowledge with “interests”
Habermas does not intend “a naturalistic reduction of transcendental-logical
categories to empirical ones” (196). Because cognitive interests structure the
ways in which we grasp objects of empirical inquiry, an adequate understand-
ing of such interests must always include the human subject, which is to say:
such understanding must involve self-reflection. Habermas now associates his
position with a “weak naturalism”: although one may postulate a continuity
between the natural evolution of the species and cultural development, the lat-
ter unfolds in a linguistic, reflective medium that precludes its reduction to
merely natural processes that work independently of culture and could be
fully explained by the empirical sciences.
The reference to reflection brings us to the third cognitive interest. Haber-
mas associates reflection first of all with the critique of knowledge (Erkenntni-
skritik), specifically with the philosophical analysis of the sciences as rational
modes of inquiry that contribute to the self-formation of the human species.
Giving Fichte a social-materialist turn, Habermas holds that such reflection,
492 Concepts
as a process that makes explicit the conditions of inquiry, involves an emanci-

patory self-reflection of the sciences. In the movement of self-reflection, the
inquiring subject grasps the objects of inquiry in relation to the subject’s interest
in knowledge. One thereby frees oneself from the error of objectivism, which
naïvely assumes a contemplative, value-free ideal of pure theory. Self-reflection
thus presupposes an interest in emancipatory self-knowledge, the “emancipatory
cognitive interest.” This interest, Habermas asserts, is the interest in which
reason itself inheres, for it is the interest reason takes in freeing itself from
error and understanding itself as simultaneously cognitive and practical.
In a move that was soon recognized as problematic, Habermas applied the
term “self-reflection” not only to the philosophical analysis of invariant struc-
tures of human inquiry but also to Freudian psychoanalysis and ideology
critique, which target individual subjects and particular societies. In psycho-
analysis Habermas discerned the one clear example of a methodical form of
inquiry that fundamentally depended on self-reflection, for in the psychoana-
lytic situation, analyst and patient work together toward an insight by which
the patient reappropriates aspects of herself and her life history that have been
“split off ” as an alien “other,” whose modes of communication are cloaked
in an opaque private semantics and drive pathological forms of behavior.
Successful analysis thus requires on the part of the patient an interest in
self-knowledge, a “passion for critique” that sees through and frees her from
pathological self-misunderstanding—in short, an emancipatory cognitive inter-
est. As a methodical form of inquiry, Freudian psychology shares the herme-
neutic orientation of the cultural sciences, but rather than gradually refining
interpretations through dialogue, it submits them to a unique form of testing,
namely, the patient’s own reflective self-application.
To get at ideology critique as a self-reflective science, Habermas developed
Freud’s theory of civilization in light of Marx. Freud understands the develop-
ment of culture as a process of institution- and family-mediated repression of
basic psychic instincts. The instruments of repression include compulsory
social norms, religious worldviews, and social ideals and values—the “illu-
sions” of civilization that rationalize existing authority by removing it from
critique and reconciling human beings with renunciations of instinctual satis-
factions. Although all members of society are subject to such repression, the
lower classes feel its effects more acutely. Consequently, as technical progress
advances and as opportunities for need satisfaction expand, established forms
of repression appear unnecessary, particularly to the lower classes. The space
thereby opens up for ideology critique. Although Habermas’s account is
sketchy, such critique does not reject worldviews and norms tout court but
rather calls for the realization of their utopian content, which appears feasible
insofar as the existing means of social control have become obsolete, an
unnecessary “surplus repression.” For example, as modernity developed,
Cognitive Interests 493
religious ideals of equality before God were translated into demands for the
abolition of slavery, equal citizenship, etc.
As with psychoanalysis, so also ideology critique depends on an emancipa-
tory cognitive interest. In some passages, Habermas seems to regard this third
interest as equally fundamental as the other two, claiming that social repro-
duction takes place through labor, interaction, and power. But, in fact, that
position is not easily maintained, and he eventually clarified his view, giving
the emancipatory interest a derivative status: it comes into play in situations of
institutionalized domination masked by forms of distorted communication.
Reference
Apel, Karl-Otto. 1971. “Szientistik, Hermeneutik, Ideologiekritik. Entwurf einer Wissen-

schaftslehre in erkenntnisanthropologischer Sicht.” In Hermeneutik und Ideologiekri-
tik, by Karl-Otto Apel et al., 7–44. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971.
44
COLONIZATION
MAT TIAS ISER
H
abermas’s early writings already contain the leitmotif that finds
full expression in his thesis of colonization. From the beginning,
Habermas has been concerned with social pathologies and polit-
ical blind spots that result when instrumental orientations—embodied, above
all, in the structures of capitalism—distort and even repress practical reason
(or, as he came to put it later, communicative reason).
As early as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas
portrays the interventions of the welfare state as a reaction to the functional
deficiencies of the economic order under capitalism. The means-end rational-
ity that shapes economy and state undermines the conditions necessary for
human discourse oriented toward achieving understanding about values and
norms—an activity that became socially relevant for the first time in bour-
geois public spheres, e.g., literary salons. This concern continues in his critical
discussion of the technocracy thesis in his writings during the 1960s. Borrowing
from systems theory (at first in a loose fashion—which changed subsequently),
Habermas addresses the dominance of “subsystems of purposive-rational
action” (Rational Society, 94) inasmuch as they prove necessary to guarantee
the material reproduction of society through work. In his view, these systems
should remain “embedded” in the normatively regulated institutional frame-
work of society.
Not until the final section of The Theory of Communicative Action can the
reader find the polished version of this diagnosis of the times. Habermas’s
thesis of a “colonization of the lifeworld” is not only meant to actualize the
Marxian critique of reification. It is also intended to disprove the counter-
Enlightenment notion that modern pathologies are caused by the process of
rationalization itself (Communicative Action, 2:143; Discourse). Habermas
argues that pathologies arise when the functionalist rationality (i.e., not just
the instrumental rationality) embodied in systems of governmental bureau-
cracy and of the economy gain the upper hand. Within these systems, actions
are not coordinated by means of communicative action (indeed, they are no
longer coordinated even by strategic action) but are steered, instead, through
the “delinguistified media” (155) of money and administrative power, which
stabilize “functional interconnections that are not intended by them” (150).
Colonization 495
Habermas maintains that, in principle, such “delinguistification” is legiti-

mate because its efficacy affords advantages for everyone. At the same time,
however, it must be hedged in by democratic legislation, for the mechanisms
of systems always pose the risk of developing a life of their own. When this
occurs, they threaten the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld—that is, they
endanger the transmission of meaning (culture), the preservation of relation-
ships of solidarity (society), and the socialization of individuals with a strong
sense of self (personality). In so doing, these systems undermine the commu-
nicative bases of the same lifeworld from which they have emerged (and on
which they still depend). Habermas, then, views the (rationalized) lifeworld—
which he supposes to be free of the ills particular to modernity—in opposition
to an external “cause” represented by the two systems.
In keeping with the two subsystems—monetization through the economy
and bureaucratization through the state—colonization of the lifeworld occurs
along two lines. Because the economic system coordinates actions by means of
money exchanged in the market (as its central mechanism), labor is also nec-
essarily rewarded with money. Unlike (traditional) Marxists, Habermas does
not believe that a deficient relationship between the active subject and what he
or she produces restricts the process of symbolic reproduction—which he con-
siders to be of central importance—because he does not assign labor an identity-
constituting role. Indeed, in the sphere of material reproduction, ways of
thinking and acting oriented toward utility are not just appropriate but also
necessary. To be sure, this process influences the lifeworld, which becomes
technologized or “mediatized.” However, Habermas only identifies a problem
when delinguistified media encroach on the spheres of the lifeworld (which is
normatively organized) and damage it to an extent that symbolic reproduc-
tion suffers: when individuals begin to view their entire lives in light of the
categories they are used to from work, their self-perception and modes of
thinking and communicating grow deficient. When reason becomes one-
sided in this fashion, loss of meaning, anomie, and psychopathologies follow
in the social lifeworld. Moreover, the spread of a lifestyle focused purely on
consumption (385ff.) does not just entail an ossified and impoverished self-
understanding; it also means that the abilities and qualities necessary to ana-
lyze and solve political problems are lost.
The same problematic holds for colonization that occurs through bureau-
cracy. It is not the worker—as Marx held—who performs an emancipatory
role but the citizen (Bürger), who, as the author of legal regulations, is sup-
posed to determine the constitution of the economic sphere. However, because
law is also the medium through which the welfare state—which is compelled
to act in response to economic crises—intervenes in citizens’ private lives, it is
not just the corpus of law that grows as governmental tasks increase in num-
ber and scope but also the size of the administrative apparatus. In view of this
496 Concepts
juridification, Habermas draws attention to the way the bureaucracy imple-

ments policies and to the fact that social assistance is provided in monetary
form. Such paternalism on the part of the welfare state supposedly changes
active citizens into passive clients (356). Governmental agencies and courts
come to treat those affected simply as objects; because of overly generalized
norms and a lack of competency, they no longer address specific situations in
a sufficiently sensitive manner (372).
This process of reification becomes possible in the first place—and subse-
quently persists, unrecognized—through the cultural impoverishment of the
lifeworld. As a consequence of the differentiation that occurs between the
spheres of science, law/morality, and art, expert cultures have emerged that
can no longer relate to one another productively. Moreover, an increasing gap
emerges between expert cultures and the everyday world of citizens. Thus,
there is no adequate understanding of modernity and of the connection
between the different aspects of reason it embodies. As a corollary to the
“muteness” that results from such a fragmentation of everyday consciousness,
the stream of arguments that is necessary for the construction of meaning,
legitimation, and identity runs dry. This means that “fragmented” consciousness
comes to occupy the theoretical place of “false” consciousness (which, accord-
ing to Habermas, becomes ever more improbable in a rationalized lifeworld).
Habermas hereby continues the “classical” critique of ideology by other means
(Strecker 2009, part 3).
If a fragmented consciousness prohibits subjects from seeing through the
process of colonization, then the progressive technologization of the lifeworld
destroys the very communicative potentials that alone might enable an over-
arching perspective to be renewed. Like a tribal society that does not know
how to oppose the invasion of colonial masters (because the latter’s power is
incomprehensible to archaic ways of thinking), fragmented everyday con-
sciousness is helplessly exposed to the reifying force of system imperatives
(Communicative Action, 2:325).
Consequently, the task of critical social theory involves making transpar-
ent the reasons for self-produced dangers and thereby to create the cognitive
preconditions to counter these threats practically. When he was writing at the
beginning of the 1980s, Habermas had in mind, above all, the new social
movements that, despite the pacification of class struggle engineered by the
welfare state, allegedly demonstrated a keen sense for the ways that political
problems were repressed by “objective constraints.”
Between Facts and Norms assesses the situation somewhat more optimisti-
cally. Here, Habermas argues that the disempowering effects of law may be
prevented—at least potentially—through increased citizen participation in the
creation and application of laws. Whereas The Theory of Communicative Action
Colonization 497
presented the matter of juridification in fundamentally ambivalent terms,

Between Facts and Norms blames its “dark” aspects on a deficient understanding
of law—namely, one that follows the legal paradigm of the welfare state and
not a procedural model (Facts, 427ff.). Habermas illustrates this by discussing
problems associated with securing equal rights for women (409ff.; Inclusion,
209). In so doing, he shifts from criticizing juridification as the delinguistifi-
cation of social relations (and, as a corollary, the freedom of no longer needing
to justify oneself) to criticizing distorted procedures of legislation and overly
general legal determinations (for a fuller discussion, see Iser 2008, 122ff.).
Habermas has been criticized for not making the distinction between
mediatization and colonization sufficiently clear (Kneer 1990, 123–186). Above
all, however, he has been faulted for basing the idea of colonization on the
dichotomy between system and lifeworld—and therefore becoming uncritical
with regard to certain social spheres (Honneth and Joas 1991). On the one
hand—the argument goes—economic and political orders can no longer
be criticized for being the result of (potentially illegitimate) struggles between
social groups (e.g., Honneth 1993); on the other hand—it has been maintained—
the lifeworld no longer belongs to the purview of critical theory: inasmuch
as it is supposed to be rational, it excludes ideological deformations. Critics
believe that Habermas mistakenly transforms an analytical distinction into
two fundamentally different fields of investigation—which makes it difficult
to thematize, in an adequate manner, matters such as gender equality. After
all, women are subject to discriminatory practices not just in the economic
sphere but also in the private realm of the family. This means that the distinc-
tion between “system” and “lifeworld” simply and uncritically reflects the
distinction between wage labor and domestic work (Fraser 1989, 173ff.).
Habermas has responded to these objections by noting that his coloniza-
tion thesis is not supposed to address all social ills; rather, he means for it to
expose those phenomena of reification that elude criticism most stubbornly.
He has not explicitly updated his views since he first elaborated them. On a
subliminal level, however, the colonization thesis remains present in his writ-
ings on globalization. Here, Habermas warns of the ever-increasing sway of
economic forces over powerless (national) politics. He also criticizes political
measures that seek to make citizens “fit” for the employment market by
encouraging them to understand themselves as independent and responsible
“entrepreneurs of their own labor force” (Arbeitskraftunternehmer) or as so-
called I-corporations (Ich-AGs). Such ideological notions contribute to the
further economization of the lifeworld (Transition, 82). Even today, then, the
colonization thesis continues to be stimulating—especially for those who wish
to reformulate the critique of reification in a way better suited to the present
(e.g., Celikates and Pollmann 2006, 110–111).
498 Concepts
References
Celikates, Robin, and Arnd Pollmann. 2006. “Baustellen der Vernunft: 25 Jahre Theorie des
kommunikativen Handelns.” Westend 3, no. 2: 97–113.
mas’s The Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones.
Iser, Mattias. 2008. Empörung und Fortschritt: Grundlagen einer kritischen Theorie der
Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Campus.
Kneer, Georg. 1990. Die Pathologien der Moderne: Zur Zeitdiagnose in der “Theorie des
kommunikativen Handelns” von Jürgen Habermas. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.
Strecker, David. 2009. Logik der Macht. Zum Ort der Kritik zwischen Theorie und Praxis.
Weilerswist: Velbrueck.
45
COMMUNICATIVE ACTION
CRISTINA L AFONT
C
ommunicative action” is the central concept of Habermas’s
oeuvre. The term does not refer simply to actions that require
communication or instances of communication that perform
actions. Instead, its key feature is that participants attempt to coordinate their
different action plans on the basis of an understanding that has been mutually
achieved. In the technical sense, “communicative action” refers only to those
linguistically mediated interactions in which the “use of language oriented
to reaching understanding” assumes a “coordinating role” (Truth, 110).
Given that communicative action represents only one kind of social action
among others, it is important to bear in mind why Habermas considers it so
significant.
Despite the many qualifications, elaborations, and corrections he has
introduced to his project over time, Habermas has left his basic conception of
communicative action largely unchanged. According to this view, what distin-
guishes linguistic processes of reaching understanding is that their success
depends on the respective beliefs of all participants, and beliefs cannot be
coerced (for example, through violence or deception). Instead, they depend on
the unforced, rationally motivated agreement among all participants. For this
reason, communicative action represents a particular kind of social action
that cannot be reduced to strategic action (within the framework of which
deception or force are feasible means for achieving goals of action).
Two central assumptions of Habermas’s theory of communicative action
follow from this idea. The first states that communication cannot be explained
in terms of purely strategic action. Rather, communicative practices rely on a
form of rationality that is embodied in communicative action and incompati-
ble with the instrumental rationality operative in strategic action. The second
fundamental assumption underlying Habermas’s theory states that linguistic
understanding through communicative action offers a means of action coor-
dination that has no functional equivalent. For these reasons, a sociological
theory of action that neglects the concept of communicative action and
employs only the concept of strategic action cannot explain how social order is
possible in the first place. The first assumption plays a central role in Haber-
mas’s theory of communicative rationality (see chapter 30 in this volume); the
500 Concepts
second stands at the center of his theory of society (see chapter 35 in this
volume).
Communicative Versus Strategic Action
In order to grasp properly the exact meaning of the concept of “communica-

tive action,” it is helpful to contrast it with the notion of “strategic action”—
i.e., to take a more sustained look at Habermas’s thesis that communicative
action cannot be explained on the model of instrumental rationality that is
used to explain strategic action (Communicative Action, 1:101ff.; Pragmatics,
220ff.). According to Habermas, interpersonal communication displays a
tripartite structure: one / communicates with someone / about something. In
other words, communication is a process that involves knowledge along at
least three dimensions, namely, the speaker, the hearer, and the world. When a
statement is made in a communicative situation, it relates to (1) a certain state
of affairs, (2) a certain speaker intention, and (3) a certain interpersonal rela-
tion. It is thereby placed under validity claims that it need not and cannot
fulfill as a nonsituated sentence, i.e., as a purely grammatical formation.
If the aim of communication is to acquire information by means of speech
acts, then participants must be able to share the knowledge conveyed along
these three dimensions. Thus, in order to understand one another’s speech
acts, interlocutors must be able to share the knowledge implicit in the proposi-
tional content of the speech act, and hence they must assess the truth claim of
the utterance. They must share the normative presuppositions inherent in the
interpersonal relation established through the illocutionary act (i.e., they must
assess the rightness claim inherent in it), and they must also assess the sincer-
ity with which the speech act is uttered. Truth, rightness, and sincerity are the
three universal validity claims that speakers (implicitly or explicitly) raise
with their speech acts and that they must be prepared to justify by offering
reasons if challenged by the hearer. Communication succeeds when the hearer
is convinced of the claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity that the perfor-
mance of the speech act raises—i.e., when she or he accepts the “offering”
involved in the speech act.
However, as already indicated, convictions cannot be forced (i.e., they can-
not be brought about through violence or deception). They depend on the
rationally motivating force of reasons. Consequently, speech acts can gain
binding force only inasmuch as the speaker, in raising a validity claim, issues
a credible warranty that he would be able to redeem this claim with the right
sorts of reasons, if required. Conversely, if the hearer acknowledges the speak-
er’s validity claim and thereby accepts the offering made in the speech act, it
means that she or he, in turn, has taken on that portion of the obligations
Communicative Action 501
relevant to the sequelae of interaction that result from the semantic content of
the utterance (Pragmatics, 223–224).
Of course, the normative presuppositions that enable intersubjective under-
standing can turn out to be wrong in any individual case and at any point in
time. However, if participants could not, in principle, rely on the intralinguis-
tic guarantees and obligations relevant to their exchanges, communicative
practices would have no sense at all, since speech acts would fail to acquire any
meaning. Without a generalized trust on their mutual accountability, partici-
pants in communication would not be able to acquire any information out of
one another’s speech acts. As Habermas argues, if accepting a command or
making a promise did not imply any obligation to carry them out, or if accept-
ing an assertion did not imply believing it and directing one’s behavior accord-
ingly, speech acts such as commands, promises, or assertions would have no
meaning whatsoever. To the extent that a generalized instrumental or strate-
gic attitude toward communication would undermine the general trust of
speakers on their mutual accountability, it would render their speech acts
meaningless. If this view is accurate, then the instrumental/strategic use of
language is parasitic on the communicative use, i.e., the use of language
oriented toward reaching understanding, without which an enduring com-
municative practice is not possible at all (Communicative Action, 1:288; Truth,
86ff.). The rationality embodied in communicative action is a specific form of
intersubjective accountability (Pragmatics, 94) and is therefore irreducible to
the instrumental rationality embodied in strategic action.
Two Kinds of Communicative Action
However, even if one accepts that communicative action is guided by a kind of

rationality that is incompatible with the instrumental rationality operative in
strategic action, a question remains: How strong must the concept of under-
standing that is constitutive for communicative action be, in order to explain
the possibility of communication? From its inception, this question has stood
at the center of critical debates on the concept of “communicative action.” Lin-
guistic “understanding” is a highly ambiguous concept. Its meaning ranges
from the minimal sense, whereby speaker and hearer comprehend a gram-
matically correct sentence in identical fashion, all the way to a maximal sense,
whereby speaker and hearer both agree on what is said for exactly the same
reasons. It is quite uncontroversial that the minimalist sense of linguistic
understanding is insufficient to explain intersubjective communication. If the
aim of communication is to acquire information from the speech acts of oth-
ers, it is not enough that participants understand the grammatical meaning of
their utterances. They must also be able in principle to accept what has been
502 Concepts
said, and this in turn requires that they adopt an evaluative stance toward the
validity of what is said. However, even if this is accepted, it remains an open
question which (and how many) dimensions of validity are necessarily and
unavoidably involved in communicative processes. By Habermas’s formal-
pragmatic account, communication takes the form of a triangulation between
speaker, hearer, and world. Therefore, successful communication depends on
the ability of participants to reach an understanding alongside the three
dimensions of interaction. They must reach an understanding on the sincerity
of the speaker’s communicative intentions, on the truth of the beliefs about
the objective world conveyed in what is said, and on the normative rightness
of the interpersonal relationships that they undertake with their speech acts.
But even if the success of communication involves participants’ understand-
ing in all three dimensions, there is a clear asymmetry between the kind of
understanding that is possible regarding the truth of propositional contents,
on the one hand, and the rightness of the interpersonal relationship offered by
the speech act, on the other. Under the presupposition of a single objective
world, the fact that participants agree on the truth of the propositional con-
tents of speech acts can only be understood in the “strong” sense of an agree-
ment based on the same reasons. That is, if a listener accepts the truth claim
contained in the speaker’s statement “p,” this can only mean that she or he
considers “p” as true as the other party does. However, so long as the listener
does not agree with the reasons the speaker adduces in support of “p,” the dis-
cursive redeemability of the validity claim in question remains up in the air.
This is resolved only when an agreement based on the same reasons has been
achieved; until then, the listener simply does not have sufficient reason to
share the beliefs of the speaker.
The matter is different where the rightness of the interpersonal relation
offered through the speech acts is concerned. In cases of “naked” imperatives,
one-sided announcements, or insults (for example, “sit down,” “I will leave
tomorrow,” or “you’re a pig”), it is highly counterintuitive to assume that
the speaker wishes to bring about “consensus” of any kind—that is, that she or
he aims for reaching understanding in the strong sense of an agreement about
the normative rightness of the speech act in question. Of course, the speaker
must still aim for successful linguistic communication in the sense of the
hearer’s rational “assent,” if the utterance of the speech act is to be meaningful
at all. Yet the success of such communicative intentions depends only on the
recognition of validity claims such as “truth” and “sincerity” and not on an
agreement on the rightness of the interpersonal relationship that has been
offered. An announcement or a threat can be understood to aim for the ratio-
nal assent of the hearer only in the weak sense that the speaker’s reasons give
her or him no cause to doubt the seriousness of the speaker’s intention or the
feasibility of the declared action. But even if the hearer accepts the reasons of
Communicative Action 503
the speaker as rational in this sense, this does not mean that she or he has to
make these reasons her or his own. Consequently, different actors can have
different reasons for recognizing the rightness of the same verbal action; after
all, they find themselves in different situations and have different preferences,
which may all be equally legitimate. For example, the fact that a hearer agrees
completely that the speaker has the best reasons in the world to move to China
or to study medicine in no way entails that she or he (or anyone else) should
also move to China or study medicine. The distinction between actor-relative
and actor-independent reasons that is relevant here—and which has no
equivalent regarding the truth of utterances—makes it necessary to differenti-
ate between a “strong” and a “weak” sense of understanding with respect to
the kinds of interpersonal relations to which participants may aim with their
speech acts. In order to account for these differences, Habermas has intro-
duced a distinction between a strong and a weak sense of communicative
action (Pragmatics, 326ff). In weak communicative action, participants orient
themselves only toward claims to truth and sincerity, whereas in strong com-
municative action, they also consider intersubjectively recognized claims to
rightness concerning the norms and values that are supposed to justify the
actions at issue. This important revision of the concept of communicative
action raises the question: To what extent can the status of normative right-
ness (a key thesis of Habermas’s conception of formal pragmatics) as a neces-
sary condition for understanding any speech act whatsoever, comparable to
truth and sincerity, still be defended? The question whether this view still
holds is likely to determine future debates on the concept of communicative
action.
46
COMMUNICATIVE
ANTHROPOLOGY
DIRK JÖRKE
H
abermas’s engagement with the questions posed by anthropol-
ogy began during his university studies—when he evinced skep-
ticism about efforts to determine the unchanging qualities of
human nature. He presented his reflections in an encyclopedia article (1958)
that received broad attention at the time. According to Otfried Höffe (1992),
this piece is responsible for the hegemony of “postanthropological thinking”
that prevailed in the “human sciences” until the 1990s (7). In keeping with the
conventions of the genre, the first part of Habermas’s encyclopedia entry pro-
vides an introductory overview of the history and essential concepts of anthro-
pological thought; the second part, however, offers decidedly critical remarks
on anthropological projects in philosophy.
From Habermas’s perspective, it is impossible to determine the essence of
human nature, for human beings are woven into history. It is simply a “fact
that mankind [der Mensch] has a history and only becomes what it is through
history. This is an unsettling matter for an anthropology interested in the
‘nature’ of man and in what is common to all human beings at all times”
(Kultur und Kritik, 107). At the same time, Habermas did not object to philo-
sophical anthropology just by insisting on the historical and social nature of
mankind. He also pointed out the perspectival limitations of different anthro-
pological approaches. Epistemological interests that are socially determined
focus researchers’ attention in specific ways. Accordingly, a sociological clari-
fication of anthropology is in order. As Habermas views things here, anthro-
pology that seeks to justify (or even establish) norms and institutions amounts
to a conservative-restorative endeavor, both in terms of form and content. In
other words, such an approach conceals political objectives. In the works of
Arnold Gehlen—at the latest—philosophical anthropology led to “dogmatism
with political consequences, which is all the more dangerous for taking the
form of objective [wertfrei] science” (Kultur und Kritik, 108).
Against the backdrop of this fundamental critique of anthropological think-
ing, then, it is surprising that Habermas—only a few years later—undertook
Communicative Anthropology 505
his own effort to justify norms in terms of human universalia. This occurred
in his project of epistemological anthropology (Erkenntnisanthropologie).
In his inaugural address at the university in Frankfurt and in subsequent
publications, Habermas sought to demonstrate an inherent interest in emancipa-
tion (Mündigkeit) by epistemological-anthropological means (mit erkenntnis-
anthropologischen Mitteln). In so doing, he began with the assumption that
ways of acting (Handlungsweisen) that are fundamental for human beings and
the epistemological interests that result from them transcend cultures: “The
achievements of transcendental subjectivity have their basis in the natural his-
tory of the human species” (Knowledge, 314). Accordingly—he maintained—
three anthropologically anchored interests may be demonstrated. In addition
to the principles of work and interaction, on the one hand, and the empirical-
analytical and hermeneutic sciences that correspond to them, on the other,
Habermas affirmed that there exists an interest in critique—with which specific
sciences/forms of knowledge are associated. The human species, he averred,
not only needs instrumental and symbolic interaction but also demonstrates
(epistemological) interest in emancipation.
To be sure, Habermas took on considerable burdens of proof in advancing
this thesis, which required two kinds of demonstration. First, he had to name
the sciences that exercise an inherently critical function. Psychoanalysis
offered him the paradigmatic example for such a critical science. Accordingly,
Knowledge and Human Interests seeks to employ the psychoanalytic approach
in order to diagnose pathological phenomena in complex societies. While this
assessment may still prove acceptable, the question of how such interest in
emancipation may be grounded in anthropology does not receive a response.
In particular, Habermas fails to demonstrate that interest in emancipation
possesses the same fundamental importance (Stellenwert) as instrumental
and communicative action. It was likely this sticking point that led him to
abandon, shortly after Knowledge and Human Interests was published, all talk
of interest in emancipation based in the species.
In the 1970s, Habermas steered an alternative course in order to found a
critical theory of society by adopting the approach of “universal pragmatics.”
Since then, anthropological motifs appear less frequently in his works—
though they have not disappeared entirely. When Habermas elaborated his
conception of discourse ethics based on Kant, he left anthropological consid-
erations behind, for the most part. Here too, however, one may ask whether in
Habermas’s deontological theory of morality—which discourse ethics claims
to be, after all—there is not “an element of embarrassed [verschämt] anthro-
pology” at work “to philosophical ends” (Honneth 2000, 104).
Recently, in The Future of Human Nature, anthropological motifs have
once again come to the fore in explicit fashion. According to Habermas, the
506 Concepts
possibility of positive eugenics—that is, of genetically engineered influences

on the human phenotype—has not just exploded the borders of conventional
conceptions about human nature; it also has exposed the preconditions for
deontological conceptions of morality that have, until now, eluded discussion.
This admission, in particular, makes The Future of Human Nature a remark-
able text. The answer Habermas seeks to provide to the challenge posed by the
biosciences is revealing, as well, for he affirms that a “species ethics” derived
from anthropology is what gives morality—understood in deontological
terms—a secular foundation in the first place.
The Future of Human Nature possesses anthropological substance over and
above the author’s discussion of species ethics. Habermas also takes up
Helmuth Plessner’s distinction between “being” and “having” a body (“Leib
sein” und “Körper haben”)—a distinction that is intended to mark a border
that may not be violated by genetic manipulation (Future, 58). All the same,
Habermas clarifies the specific relationship between the “guidepost of species
ethics” (gattungsethischer Wegweiser) and the “morality of reason” embodied
in discourse ethics (diskursethische Vernunftmoral) just as little as he accounts
for the status of anthropological arguments in the framework of species ethics
in general. On the one hand, it seems that he fears the consequences of truly
justifying morality by reference to anthropology; on the other hand—and
especially when faced with the challenges posed by genetic engineering—it
appears that he cannot abandon such a project entirely.
References
Habermas, Jürgen. 2000. “Nach dreißig Jahren. Bemerkungen zu Erkenntnis und Inter-
esse.” In Das Interesse der Vernunft, ed. Stefan Müller-Doohm, 12–20. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
Höffe, Otfried. 1992. “Wiederbelebung im Seiteneinstieg.” In Der Mensch – ein politisches
Tier? Essays zur politischen Anthropologie, ed. Otfried Höffe, 5–13. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Honneth, Axel. 2000. “Anerkennungsbeziehungen und Moral: Eine Diskussionsbemerkung
zur anthropologischen Erweiterung der Diskursethik.” In Anthropologie, Ethik und
Gesellschaft. Für Helmut Fahrenbach, ed. Reinhard Brunner and Peter Kelbel, 101–11.
Frankfurt: Campus.
47
CONSERVATISM
MICHA BRUMLIK
C
onservative thinking in its various adumbrations has interested
Jürgen Habermas since the very beginning of his sociological and
philosophical efforts. In 1963, he authored the article “Kritische
und konservative Aufgaben der Soziologie” (Critical and conservative tasks of
sociology). Referring to Scottish moral philosophy—especially the works of
David Hume—as a conservative element of sociology in its early stages, Haber-
mas declared that conservatism “esteems tradition as the peaceful basis of
ongoing development precisely because it does not question the naturalness
[Naturwüchsigkeit] of progress.”
From the beginning, Habermas’s dialectical encounters with conservatism
of all stripes have worked on—and against—Hume’s declaration: “Liberty is
the perfection of civil authority; but authority must be acknowledged essential
to its very existence” (Habermas 1971a, 293). Habermas summarizes the spirit
of nascent sociology in words that might provide the motto for his own proj-
ect: “The tradition of progress is to be protected against the premature demo-
lition of socially useful authorities as much as it is to be critically secured
against the blind affirmation of historically obsolete authorities” (294).
Philosophical Anthropology and Hegel’s Theory of

the French Revolution
Previous to this article, Habermas penned “Der Zerfall der Institutionen”

(The decline of institutions)—a discussion of Arnold Gehlen and the theory of
institutions presented in Urmensch und Spätkultur (Primal man and late cul-
ture). In this piece, Habermas accepts Gehlen’s (1956) anthropological views
(also elaborated in the earlier work, Der Mensch [Gehlen 1988, original edition
1940]): humans are beings largely free of instinct, possessed of excess energy,
and extroverted (weltoffen). Habermas lauds the author’s “clever, inventive,
and exact derivation of what an institution is [kluge, erfindungsreiche und
präzise Ableitung der Institution selbst]” (Habermas 1971b, 102). By affirming—
contra Gehlen—the modern right to individuality and calling for a “balance
508 Concepts
between the institution and the individual” (106), he also draws the basic lines
of his discussion of conservative thinking in works to follow.
In terms of social theory and the philosophy of history, this position has
required Habermas to confront Hegel’s systematic critique of Kant and his
perspective on the revolution in France. Unlike Edmund Burke (who founded
modern conservative thought), Hegel sought to make revolution the principle
of his philosophy—or, to put it more precisely, to pursue “the revolutionizing
of reality without legitimizing the revolutionaries themselves.” Hegel, that is,
undertook the “magnificent attempt to understand the actualization of
abstract Right as an objective process” (Theory and Practice, 126).
The further course of Hegel’s political thinking, Habermas observes,
reveals that the philosopher failed to understand how the rule of law provides
the self-sustaining basis (selbsttragende Grundlage) for modern society. In the
theory of ethics (Sittlichkeit) elaborated in Philosophy of Right, Hegel enlists the
authority of the estates (ständische Authoritäten) to secure legality. Thereby,
he blocks the realization of his own aims by calling for social and political
conditions in which the principle of modern subjectivity—which is based on
civil law—is cut in half by being excluded from the process of democratic leg-
islation (116ff.).
The Internal Dynamics of Modern Societies
Needless to say, the internal dynamics (Eigendynamik) of modern societies—

which Hegel was the first to identify (when he distinguished subsystems of
abstraction such as “law,” “science,” and “economy”)—do not entertain a har-
monious relationship with the individualized forms assumed by modern
intersubjectivity. Accordingly, Habermas’s theory of communicative action—
which proceeds dialectically and critiques modern societies’ tendency to pro-
mote processes of “one-sidedness”—cannot do otherwise than to name realms
that merit defense and preservation:
The point is to protect areas of life that are functionally dependent on social
integration through values, norms, and consensus formation, to preserve
them from falling prey to the systemic imperatives of economic and adminis-
trative subsystems growing with dynamics of their own, and to defend them
from becoming converted over, through the steering medium of law, to a
principle of sociation that is, for them, dysfunctional.
(Communicative Action, 2:372–373)
Habermas’s purposes, then, are conservative inasmuch as they offer resistance

(which he justifies in functionalist terms) to the “colonization of the lifeworld.”
Conservatism 509
He defines such colonization as follows: “When stripped of their ideological

veils, the imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their way into the life-
world from the outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society—
and force a process of assimilation upon it” (2:355).
At the same time, new social movements emerge under these conditions.
Because they represent potential instances of revitalized communication in
the lifeworld, Habermas does not want to deny them his sympathy:
The revaluation of the particular, the natural, the provincial, of social spaces
that are small enough to be familiar, of decentralized forms of commerce and
despecialized activities, of segmented pubs, simple interactions and dedifferen-
tiated public spheres—all this is meant to foster the revitalization of possibili-
ties for expression and communication that have been buried alive. Resistance
to reformist interventions that turn into their opposite, because the means by
which they are implemented run counter to the declared aims of social inte-
gration, also belongs in this context.
(2:395)
Neoconservatism and Postmodernity
This constellation—in which the rationalization of the lifeworld is no longer

distinguished from the mounting complexity of the social system—has given
rise to a new form of “Young Conservative” antimodernism. This position
understands itself in contrast to another variant of conservatism, which
defends postmodernity even though it “robs a modernity at variance with
itself of its rational content and its perspectives on the future” (2:396).
In either case, the central reservoir of arguments occurs in the American
movement that calls itself “neoconservative” (Kristol 1995, Dorman 2001).
Neoconservatism, Habermas observes, offered the presidency of Ronald
Reagan more than a pragmatic justification inasmuch as it elaborated a theo-
retical perspective in which erstwhile members of the radical left who had
been disappointed by the course of history came to agree with antidemo-
cratic scholars and public figures of the interwar years in Germany. Indeed,
German authors open-minded about technology but hostile to democracy
(e.g., Joachim Ritter, Ernst Forsthoff, Arnold Gehlen, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst
Jünger) articulated viewpoints that agree with those of former Trotskyists
such as Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Daniel Bell on three essential
points.
The first point of overlap involves the systematic critique of intellectuals,
who are alleged to violate, in systematic fashion, the borders between a kind
510 Concepts
of modernity that has achieved economic and political equilibrium, on the one
hand, and, on the other, the hypertrophic fragmentation of the individual
(Aufspreizung des Individuums)—which is only admissible in the realm of art
(at best). This occurs, the argument goes, because intellectuals seek to obtain
illegitimate advantages for themselves as a “new class” at the expense of pro-
ductive elements of the general population. Second, neoconservatives declare
that the extravagant claims of the past have been settled (erledigt) once and
for all. With philosophical arguments, they dismiss (supposed) residues of
humanism and humanitarianism that have failed to provide results and
remain stuck in the positions of subject philosophy. In other fields—first and
foremost in architecture but also in philosophy and literary criticism—this
inheritance is deemed obsolete in light of postmodern/postmodernist cultural
developments. Finally, neoconservatives do not consider social conflicts—
which, however varied in kind, are matters of indisputable fact—in terms of
class relations and uneven access to material and political resources; instead,
they consider problems in society to express “intellectual and moral crisis”
(New Conservatism, 44).
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
Habermas lends systematic rigor to his rejection of neoconservatism—and of

the postmodernism that, in his estimation, is of a piece with it—by elaborating
a new framework for understanding modernity. The twelve lectures published
as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) outline this project. In pen-
etrating discussions of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Bataille, Foucault, and
Luhmann, Habermas seeks to reconnect with the young Hegel’s philosophy
of history. The task is to salvage the “normative content of modernity” (Dis-
course, 336) by combining thinking that is still centered on individual con-
sciousness with a theory of intersubjectivity.
In so doing, Habermas affirms that society, through the mediation of the
public sphere, can entertain a reflexive relationship with—and take influence
on—itself; moreover, he holds that this can occur in such a way that one may
counter the resigned acceptance of autonomous subsystems in the techno-
cratic state (Young Conservatism), in philosophy (deconstruction), and in the
realm of aesthetics (postmodernism). “Self-organized public spheres must
develop the prudent combination of power and intelligent self-restraint that is
needed to sensitize the self-steering mechanisms of the state and the economy
to the goal-oriented outcomes of radical democratic will formation” (365). For
this to happen, however, the notion of societal self-reflection and self-trans-
formation (which is based in subject philosophy) must change so that instead
Conservatism 511
of “the model of society influencing itself, we have the model of boundary

conflicts—which are held in check by the lifeworld—between the lifeworld
and two subsystems that are superior to it in complexity and can be influenced
by it” (365).
A Conservative Ethics of the Species
Although altogether modest when compared to the sociocritical and revolu-

tionary claims of early political modernity, Habermas’s ambition rests upon a
single, radical condition that may not, under any circumstances, be abandoned.
In his most recent publications—which now address matters of theology and
religion—Habermas has taken up the anthropological matter of individuality,
which, in his eyes, is not based only on language and communication but also
on the absolute certainty of its own uniqueness.
In his critique of liberal eugenics (which seeks to justify the use of embryos
in research and even human cloning), Habermas has called for a species ethics
that is no longer concerned merely with questions of generalizability and
justice but also addresses a basic precondition of “the good” in positive terms.
This involves elaborating a conception of personhood as something “grown”
(Gewachsenes) and not “made” (Gemachtes)—that is, a matter of chance that is
not attributable to the intentions of (other) human beings. Invoking Kant’s
doctrine of virtue in the Metaphysics of Morals, Habermas affirms that planned
interventions in the human genome contradict the postulate that man should
always be a “purpose” to man (dass der Mensch dem Mensch jederzeit auch
Zweck sein soll). Alterations of the genome threaten belief in human beings’
“ability-to-be-oneself”—that is, the notion that they may view themselves as
“undivided authors of their own life histories” (Future, 72).
Significantly, in defending the contingencies of creating new life through
the genetic lottery of sexual intercourse—which he considers to guarantee
existence possessed of human dignity—Habermas has sided with conserva-
tives who wish to adhere to and preserve the past. He observes that “most of
us”—even after the fall of religious and metaphysical worldviews—have
become neither “cool cynics” nor “indifferent relativists”: “almost by reflex we
[have] held—and [have] wanted to hold—to the binary code of moral judg-
ments being right or wrong” (73). For Habermas, the “opposition raised today
against a dreaded change in the identity of the species” (74)—which he also
remarks in himself—can be justified on similar grounds. The conception of
man rooted in the Bible (which the philosophy of Enlightenment—and Kant
in particular—took up and affirmed) must be “protected against . . . prema-
ture demolition.”
512 Concepts
References
Dorman, Joseph. 2001. Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words.
Chicago: Free Press.
Gehlen, Arnold. 1988. Man: His Nature and Place in the World. Trans. Clare McMillan and
Karl Pillemer. New York: Columbia University Press.
——. 1956. Urmensch und Spätkultur. Bonn: Athenäum.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1971a. Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Studien. Rev. ed. Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1971b. Philosophisch-politische Profile. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Kristol, Irving. 1995. Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. Chicago: Free Press.
48
CONSTITUTIONS AND
CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOTISM
RAINER NICKEL
C
onstitutionality received a central position and a positive defini-
tion only in Habermas’s later writings, specifically in the context
of his legal theory. In his early discussion of legitimation prob-
lems under late capitalism, the author voiced suspicion that “bourgeois consti-
tutions” (Legitimation, 101) harbor ideology, but the matter appeared to be
of secondary importance for the task at hand. The Theory of Communicative
Action hinted at a changed interest in structures of (constitutional) law.
Finally, Between Facts and Norms—Habermas’s main work of legal theory—
presented a kind of idealizing phenomenology of the democratic and constitu-
tional state and affirmed the equiprimordiality of democracy and the legal
system (Facts, 118–131). As described here, a constitution is more than an evo-
lutionary achievement that serves to connect and divide law and politics—
something that might disappear again after the divide between them has been
made porous (Luhmann 1990). Now, Habermas contends, “constitution” refers
to a necessary condition for the production of legitimate laws and rights.
For all that, constitutionality must be spelled out in a democratic process.
The five points Habermas enumerates in his system of rights (subjective rights
to act [Handlungsfreiheiten], membership [Mitgliedschaftsstatus], claims to
legal protection [Rechtsschutz], rights of political participation, and social
rights) simply provide “unsaturated placeholders” whose contents cannot be
abstractly determined beforehand but must rather be “filled” through pro-
cesses of democratic will formation (Facts, 126). In theory, the democratic and
constitutional state is oriented on universalistic constitutional principles; in
actual fact, however, it receives an ethical (nota bene, not an ethnic) imprint
inasmuch as every legal order “expresses a particular form of living and does
not just reflect the universal contents of basic rights” (Habermas 1993, 167).
Habermas—like Kant before him, whose republicanism provides the basis
for the procedural theory of law and constitution—has been criticized for
being too abstract and generalizing. His critics contend that he advocates an
idealistic conception of constitutionality that has no temporal or spatial coor-
dinates and, consequently, is rootless—that is, a bloodless abstraction that
514 Concepts
represses the fact that it depends on the shared convictions and communal
feelings of citizens (see, e.g., Michelman 2001 and the tendentious critique in
Isensee 2006, who denounces the author’s unpatriotic “left-wing cultural
hegemony”). For the most part, such objections are based on the assumption
that a constitution depends on prepositive conditions and not ones contained in
the constitutional text itself—i.e., that it depends on what the document itself
can neither generate nor guarantee (such as, for example, “the moral substance
of the individual and the homogeneity of society” [Böckenförde 1976, 60]).
However, even before the publication of Between Facts and Norms (1992)—
and at the end stage of the Bonn Republic—Habermas put a term into circula-
tion that both anticipated the basic traits of the concept of constitutionality he
would soon elaborate and protected it against essentialist and nationalist
objections. In 1987, in the wake of the Historikerstreit, Habermas took up the
matter of “constitutional patriotism”—a phrase coined by the political scien-
tist Dolf Sternberger (1979)—and introduced a semantic displacement that has
proved rich in consequences. Sternberger sought to salvage patriotism as a
variant of “love for one’s country” (Vaterlandsliebe) by understanding the
constitution as expressing a national community of values and the state as an
“association of friendship” (Freundschaftsverband). Habermas, in contrast,
affirmed a postnational version of patriotism free of all reference to cultural
values, shared destinies, and homogeneous populations—a concept that,
moreover, required no doctrine of virtue à la Aristotle for support.
To patriots who mourned a German nationalism unclouded by National
Socialism, Habermas (1987) declared: “The only patriotism that does not
alienate us from the West is constitutional patriotism. Unfortunately, an
attachment to universalistic constitutional principles anchored in convic-
tion was able to emerge in German national culture [in der Kulturnation der
Deutschen] only after—and through—Auschwitz” (135). For Habermas, con-
stitutional patriotism represents a historical learning process that leaves
behind the nation-state of old as culture and state politics split off from each
other (173). The new postnational state is not suited for ecstatic emotional
attachment. As is well known, when Bundespräsident Gustav Heinemann was
asked whether he loved Germany, he responded, “I do not love the state. I love
my wife.” In the postnational constellation, “state patriotism” yields to pride
in—and loyalty to—procedures of democratic will formation and the legal
guarantees of the constitution, which promote “coexistence and communica-
tion between different forms of life possessed of equal rights” (173).
Now, under the Berlin Republic, Habermas’s constitutional patriotism
names consensus in a liberal public sphere that has had enough of national-
ism. At the same time, Habermas’s understanding of the concept opens a new
perspective on the postnational state: constitutional patriotism henceforth
refers to a multicultural republic that has abandoned the idea of a community
Constitutions and Constitutional Patriotism 515
predating the state and possessed of a shared destiny and common cultural
core. In discussing the arguments of Charles Taylor (1994)—which are shaped
by communitarianism—Habermas (1994) has observed:
In complex societies the citizenry as a whole can no longer be held together by

a substantive consensus on values but only by a consensus on the procedures
for the legitimate enactment of laws and the legitimate exercise of power. . . .
The universalism of legal principles is reflected in a procedural consensus,
which must be embedded in the context of a historically specific political
culture through a kind of constitutional patriotism.
(135)
Conservatives have mourned the absence of positive patriotism and derided

multiculturalism as the battle cry of hegemonic, left-wing culture (see esp.
Isensee 2006, 13). They have even charged Habermas’s proceduralist theory of
law and constitutionality with undermining social unity (whose dissolution
they deem imminent) by promoting excessively permissive multiculturalism
(for an emphatic—and emphatically mistaken—account, see Ladeur and
Augsberg 2007). Even if this is not the writers’ intention, such allegations con-
firm Habermas’s thesis that struggles for recognition never end in the demo-
cratic and constitutional state.
The success of constitutional patriotism (and of Habermas’s expansion of
the concept along the lines of social and legal theory) extends far beyond the
borders of the Federal Republic of Germany. Especially in Spain and Can-
ada—and in the United States, as well—the matter has received a great deal of
attention (e.g., Michelman 2001, Müller 2007, Müller and Scheppele 2008).
Habermas’s idea has offered—and continues to offer—a frequent point of ref-
erence for parties seeking to counter skepticism concerning the project of a
European constitution (Lacroix 2002, Bellamy and Castiglione 2004). In
the 1990s, Habermas already called for constitutionality to be considered
independently of the nation-state. In his exchange with Dieter Grimm on the
preconditions for, and the consequences of, a European constitution, he
emphatically stressed that the burden of social integration “must not be shifted
from the levels of political will formation to presumed prepolitical substrates.”
There is no need for a homogeneous European “people” (whatever shape it
might [be supposed to] take), because the requisite “social integration” will
occur “in the legally abstract form of political participation . . . to secure the
substantive status of citizenship in democratic ways” (Inclusion, 159).
Habermas’s call for the constitutionalization of international law (Divided
West) makes the connection to universal legal principles even more abstract.
Yet debates about a European constitution have shown that the necessary
“ethical impregnation”—that is, the elaboration of a legal system through
516 Concepts
democratic procedure—strikes a limit on a supranational level because a vig-

orous European public sphere (which would propel this process and set its
course) only exists in part. Moreover, the condensation that has occurred in
international law and has led to the emergence of a global sphere of legal think-
ing displays a socially integrative power that is even weaker than what public
processes of communication (Verständigungsprozesse) afford at present. There-
fore, despite Habermas’s efforts to describe the contours of a world legal consti-
tution (see most recently Habermas 2008), a less hierarchical approach—one
that regulates conflicts (Verfassungskonfliktrecht) and takes the manifold nature
of local and regional constitutions seriously—seems to have better prospects for
concretizing, in a way that admits justification, a global system of rights.
References
Bellamy, Richard, and Dario Castiglione. 2004. “Lacroix’s European Constitutional Patri-
otism.” Political Studies 52:187–193.
Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang. 1976. Staat, Gesellschaft, Freiheit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Grimm, Dieter. 1995. “Does Europe Need a Constitution?” European Law Journal 1, no. 3:
282–301.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. Eine Art Schadensabwicklung: Kleine Politische Schriften VI.
——. 1994. “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State.” Trans. Shi-
erry Weber Nicholsen. In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed.
Amy Gutmann, 107–148. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
——. 2008. “The Constitutionalisation of International Law and the Legitimation Prob-
lems of a Constitution for World Society.” Constellations 15:444–455.
Isensee, Josef. 2006. “Plädoyer für eine Wiederkehr der Gemeinschaft – Verdrängung und
Wiederentdeckung der Realität.” Die Politische Meinung: Monatsschrift der Konrad-
Adenauer-Stiftung 440:6–14.
Lacroix, Justine. 2002. “For a European Constitutional Patriotism.” Political Studies
50:944–958.
Ladeur, Karl-Heinz, and Ino Augsberg. 2007. Toleranz, Religion, Recht. Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck.
Luhmann, Niklas. 1990. “Verfassung als evolutionäre Errungenschaft.” Rechtshistorisches
Journal 9:176–220.
Michelman, Frank I. 2001. “Morality, Identity, and ‘Constitutional Patriotism.’ ” Ratio Juris
14:253–271.
Müller, Jan-Werner. 2007. Constitutional Patriotism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
Müller, Jan-Werner, and Kim Lane Scheppele. 2008. “Symposium Constitutional Patrio-
tism: An Introduction.” I–CON 6, no. 1: 67–71.
Sternberger, Dolf. 1990. “Verfassungspatriotismus.” In Schriften, vol. 10. Frankfurt: Insel.
Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the
Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann, 25–74. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
49
COSMOPOLITAN CONDITION
KENNETH BAYNES
I
n an essay (Habermas 1998) marking the two hundredth anniversary
of Kant’s essay “Perpetual Peace,” Habermas returns to Kant’s call for
a “cosmopolitan condition” (weltbürgerlicher Zustand) that would
bring about a definitive end to the bellicose “state of nature” between nation-
states. In this essay Habermas suggests that, in his contrast between a global
constitutional order or “world republic” and a weaker voluntary federation
among sovereign states, Kant was not as unambiguously in support of the lat-
ter as is generally assumed. On the one hand, the necessary cultural and social
conditions for a legitimate world republic are lacking, and thus the dangers of
a global despotism loom; yet, on the other hand, if states are to be subject to
enforceable law and obligated by more than (largely impotent) moral norms, a
loose federation will not suffice. Habermas’s initial response to this situation
was his cautious support for calls for a “cosmopolitan democracy” that would
include a reformed and strengthened United Nations (including a “world par-
liament”) (Inclusion, 186–187). Changes on the international scene since Kant’s
time also provide this utopian vision a greater degree of both urgency and
realism. The variety of phenomena that, taken together, have recently been
grouped under the heading “globalization” raises important questions about
the possibility of achieving democracy within the limited framework of the
nation-state. The increased number and expanding influence of multinational
corporations, growing international flows in labor and capital, expanding
population migration, and large-scale ecological threats challenge in new ways
the nation-state’s claim to legitimacy, even on the domestic front. In short, can
the nation-state, given its apparently diminished capacity to act, maintain its
legitimacy in the face of the growing demands of its citizenry? At the same
time, the widening (if fragile) recognition of human rights, the more active
role of the United Nations and other international organizations, and a devel-
oping global “civil society” (including worldwide communication media)
make it meaningful at least to ask whether a “postnational constellation” is not
emerging in which the locus of democratization is no longer centered exclu-
sively on the territorial nation-state.
In several other important essays published since Between Facts and Norms,
Habermas has pursued this idea of a “cosmopolitan condition” in connection
518 Concepts
with the idea of “global governance without a world government” (e.g., Divided
West). Indeed, there is much in his “two-track” model of democracy (with its
distinction between “weak” and “strong” publics) that suggests why this might
be so. On the one hand, there is no inherent reason why his idea of a weak
public sphere cannot be interpreted in the context of a “global civil society,”
and, on the other, there are also some reasons for extending his discursive
account of strong publics—the formal institutions of decision making—in
connection with the idea of a more multilayered and dispersed conception of
sovereignty and the related idea of “subsidiarity.” As he now argues, we need
to think more abstractly and imaginatively to allow for a distinction between
“state” and “constitution” that Kant did not make (Divided West, 131). Simi-
larly, his claim that there has been at most only a historical (not a necessary)
convergence between the political demos and a relatively homogenous nation
or people (Volk) also supports the claim that the former need not be limited to
the traditional (territorial) idea of the nation-state. At the same time, Haber-
mas has also modified his initial endorsement of a “world republic” and now
prefers to speak of a “constitutionalization of international law without a
world government” (Divided West, 146), and he distances himself from the
views of some stronger cosmopolitans (Naturalism, 323). In these subsequent
essays, Habermas advocates a “multilevel federal system” that distinguishes
among three global actors according to their respective functional roles: a
supranational political body limited to the maintenance of peace and protec-
tion of basic human rights (a reformed United Nations with a more modest
mission); an intermediate level occupied by regional bodies devoted to a
“global domestic politics,” including large-scale economic and environmental
policies; and nation-states that have assumed a more limited sovereignty but
continue to play the most important role on the global stage (Divided West,
176). In this context, Habermas has voiced support for strengthening the role
of the United Nations (though now focused on the goal of peace and protect-
ing human rights) and for creating an international criminal court with a
mandate to prevent at least gross violations of human rights. At the same time,
however, he is more cautious than some advocates of cosmopolitan democracy
about the likelihood of achieving on a global scale the kind of “civic solidar-
ity” (as a “solidarity among strangers”) that for him is a necessary condition
for a robust deliberative politics. In this respect, he reflects a limited agree-
ment with some of his more civic-republican critics such as Charles Taylor or
Benjamin Barber. His own constructive proposal (in addition to his support
for a European constitution) is for the development of what he calls “interna-
tional negotiating systems” in which various players (including nation-states,
regional governmental bodies, and nongovernmental organizations) would
fulfill the role of a “strong public,” while citizens motivated by a cosmopolitan
consciousness and active in various ways in a cosmopolitan civil society would
Cosmopolitan Condition 519
constitute a “weak public.” As with the two-track model described at the level
of the nation-state, the challenge again is for imaginative institutional design
leading to a more responsive and accountable “strong public” than is possible
today at the level of the nation-state alone. However, the basic structure of this
proposal for cosmopolitan democracy remains the same: a dynamic division
of labor between a free-wheeling public sphere that functions as a kind of
“receptor” for identifying and thematizing social problems—and ensuring
that they are placed on the political agenda—and the more formally organized
(though multilayered and dispersed) strong publics responsible for “translat-
ing” publicly generated reasons into socially effective policies via accountable
administrative bodies. This is certainly a highly abstract (and speculative)
model of democracy, and many of its more specific institutional details are
still missing. And, as some critics have noted, it is unclear how far it actually
remains from other proposals for a more (state-like) global order (Niesen and
Herborth 2007, Scheuerman 2008). Can a strengthened United Nations suc-
cessfully protect even basic human rights without assuming some of the fea-
tures of a traditional state, and, if not, how will it secure the increased demand
for legitimacy? But, contrary to other critics, it is at least clear that Habermas’s
model of a “cosmopolitan condition” is by no means simply an abdication to
neoliberalism but an attempt to challenge it through proposals for a “realistic
utopia.”
References
Habermas, Jürgen. 1998. “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace: At Two Hundred Years’ Histori-
cal Remove.” In The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran P.
Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, 165–202. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Scheuerman, William. 2008. “Global Governance Without Global Government?” Political
Theory 36, no. 1: 133–151.
50
COUNTERFACTUAL
PRESUPPOSITIONS
ANDREAS KOLLER
T
he notion of unavoidable, idealizing presuppositions of a pragmatic
nature that Habermas elaborates in his later works represents an
effort to nuance—and, ultimately, to replace—the confusing con-
cept of an “ideal speech situation” that he presented in the works of his middle
period. Since Between Facts and Norms, Habermas has understood “counter-
factual presuppositions”—or, alternatively, the “vocabulary of the as-if”—as
“the nerve of my entire theoretical undertaking” (1998, 418). The social sci-
ences in particular have paid little attention to this conceptual move, however.
Accordingly, the matter represents one of the most misunderstood elements of
Habermasian theory.
Idealizing presuppositions do not inhabit language per se; rather, they rep-
resent an aspect of the communicative use of linguistic expressions (Truth,
83ff.). Although an exhaustive inventory of such presuppositions does not
exist, Habermas names the four that are “most important” (Naturalism, 50):
publicity and inclusiveness: the presupposition that no one who is able to make
a relevant contribution be denied participation; communicative equality: the
presupposition that all be afforded equal opportunity to present their views on
a given matter; exclusion of deception and self-deception: the presupposition
that participants mean what they say and, accordingly, raise validity claims
admitting criticism in terms of truth, rightness, and/or truthfulness; and the
unforced force of the better argument: the presupposition that “yes” or “no”
stances be motivated only by the power of superior reasons to convince (and
not by external or internal constraints)—i.e., that only what is said (and not
who says it) plays a role (Inclusion, 44; Naturalism, 50).
The last of these indicates the tripartite structure of argumentative prac-
tice. In competing to make the better “case,” participants in discourse refer to
a third term, which is independent of them—that is, to the authority of reason
(or, in other words, to the logic of justification). In contrast, strategic interac-
tion—where participants’ preferences count as fixed and matters concern only
the balancing of interests within the framework of a given constellation of
power—lacks such reference to a third term (Habermas 2007, 415–416).
Counterfactual Presuppositions 521
Parties who engage in argumentation in earnest make idealizing presuppo-

sitions as a matter of course. This does not mean that they forget the counter-
factual nature of these presuppositions while interacting—that is, participants
are not absorbed entirely in the exchange. All that they know in an objective
capacity—i.e., the knowledge they possess when they are not caught up in dis-
course—remains intuitively present when they are engaged. At the same time,
however, such intuitive awareness of counterfactuality enters the equation
only when inconsistencies are perceived that arouse suspicion about the “gen-
uineness of an argumentative exchange” (dass hier überhaupt nicht argumen-
tiert wird) (Naturalism, 51). The response to such perceived inconsistencies
reveals the self-corrective mechanism at work: Once the participants start to
doubt their “expectation that the relevant information and reasons get ‘put
on the table’ and can influence the outcome,” they immediately seek to correct
the situation according to those very idealizing presuppositions. They change
the circle of the participants, expand the agenda or improve the information
base, and so forth (51). If and when this self-corrective mechanism sets in is an
empirical question, however. Alternatively, the participants may terminate the
give and take of reasons or switch to a strategic approach and simply continue
the practice by pretending that it matters.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Habermas began to distance himself from
his earlier view that an ideal speech situation represents a “prefiguration of a
form of life” (Vorschein einer Lebensform), as he had previously put it (Justifica-
tion and Application, 164; Habermas 1982, 261–262). By the end of the decade,
he had abandoned the notion entirely. Between Facts and Norms (1992) clarifies
the matter by making a central distinction between, on the one hand, idealizing
presuppositions, which represent unavoidable pragmatic preconditions for dis-
cursive practice, and, on the other, the ideal communicative community, which
offers a “methodological fiction” for understanding sociation strictly in terms
of communication.
In the interim (in Vorstudien and Communicative Action), Habermas had
come to view the ideal speech situation as “somewhat too concrete a term for
the set of general and unavoidable communicative presuppositions” that “a
subject capable of speech and action must make every time he or she wishes to
participate seriously in argumentation” (1985, 86). Now, he focused instead on
the “intuitive knowledge” that “every competent speaker” has at his or her
disposal (86). Accordingly, he critiqued the idea (first introduced by Charles
Sanders Peirce and later taken up by Karl-Otto Apel) of an “ideal communica-
tion community,” and he also stepped away from his own remarks concerning
ideal speech situations, which he now considered to exemplify the “ ‘the fallacy
of misplaced concreteness.’ These images are concretist, because they suggest
a final condition that might be achieved in time, which cannot be what they
are intended to suggest” (A Berlin Republic, 148). Despite such self-criticism,
522 Concepts
however, Habermas has stressed that he never elevated the idea of an unlim-
ited communication community into an ideal that really exists. Even before
Between Facts and Norms, he affirms, he hesitated “to call the communication
community a regulative idea in the Kantian sense, because the notion of an
‘unavoidable idealizing presupposition of a pragmatic kind’ cannot be sub-
sumed under the classical opposition between the ‘regulative’ and the ‘consti-
tutive’ ” (Justification and Application, 164).
Indeed, Habermas has gone beyond the Kantian dichotomy between regu-
lative and constitutive ideas. If one views idealizing presuppositions as the
“illicit objectivation of a regulative idea,” one’s perspective continues to be
shaped by a false opposition. Yet at the same time, even though presupposi-
tions are idealizing, we must make them matters of actual fact if we want to
pursue a course of argument at all. In other words, idealizing presuppositions
have empirical effects: “Every factually raised claim to validity . . . generates a
new fact with the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses of its addressees” (Justification and
Application, 165). Accordingly, Habermas considers that the Kantian “‘Doc-
trine of the Two Realms’ has been completely overcome. The structure of a use
of language oriented toward reaching understanding demands idealizing sup-
positions on the part of the communicative actors; yet these notions function
as social facts” (1991, 243).
The course of development leading from the ideal speech situation to
counterfactual presuppositions culminated in Between Facts and Norms.
Here, Habermas—in reference to the works of Hauke Brunkhorst, on the one
hand, and those of Bernhard Peters, on the other—clarifies a basic distinction.
Counterfactual, idealizing presuppositions—which represent inevitable prag-
matic requirements for discursive practice—are to be held separate from the
methodological fiction of an ideal communicative community, which pro-
vides a model for pure, communicative sociation. “The idealizing presupposi-
tions we always already have to adopt whenever we want to reach mutual
understanding do not involve any kind of correspondence or comparison
between idea and reality” (Brunkhorst 1993, 345, qtd. in Facts, 323). The notion
of idealizing presuppositions, then, is a matter distinct from the “projection of
ideals, in the light of which we can identify deviations”—and which can be
“approximately realized” (Facts, 322–323). As already holds for Kant’s regulative
idea (or, alternatively, its methodological elaboration as undertaken by, e.g.,
Weber), the issue involves approximation—which is precisely what idealizing
presuppositions of “as-if” do not allow (Habermas 2007, 426).
Drawing on Peters’s observations, Habermas reformulates regulative ideas
in terms of methodological fiction. As models of an ideal, they provide a “foil
to reveal [hervorheben] and describe empirical deviations from a fictive ideal
condition—and in this way make certain traits of reality visible, through
contrast” (Peters 1993, 240). The “idea of self-organization is projected onto
society as a whole,” and the concept of an ideal communication community

may be used “for a thought experiment” (Facts, 323ff.). “The essentialist mis-
understanding is replaced by a methodological fiction in order to obtain a foil
against which the substratum of unavoidable societal complexity becomes vis-
ible. In this harmless sense, the ideal communication community presents
itself as a model of ‘pure’ communicative sociation” (323).
The only means of self-organization available to such a “purely” communi-
cative community is opinion and will formation through discourse. On this
point, the notion of methodological fiction connects with Habermas’s reflec-
tions on the public sphere (see chapter 69 in this volume). In later works, the
notion that the public sphere possesses unlimited epistemic (or, alternatively,
self-corrective) capacity functions in this way. The concept of methodical fic-
tion enables Habermas to present his “reservations regarding such an idealist
misunderstanding of social integration, which some people incorrectly ascribe
to me” (A Berlin Republic, 147–148).
As indicated above, the matter is not to be confused with the notion of coun-
terfactual presuppositions. Here, the general idea—the vocabulary of “as if”
and the empirical effects associated with it—by no means belongs to Habermas
alone. C. Wright Mills, for example, clearly pointed to this phenomenon
decades earlier, in The Sociological Imagination. By “acting as if we were in a
fully democratic society . . . we are attempting to remove the ‘as if.’ ” Practices of
the “as if” can “help build a democratic polity” (Mills 2000, 189) in actual fact.
In the works of his middle and late periods, Habermas has explored the
circumstances under which this is not just possible but, indeed, unavoidable.
Whenever we engage in a discourse oriented toward understanding, we neces-
sarily make idealizing presuppositions along the four lines indicated above: we
presume that “only the unforced force of the better argument” (Justification
and Application, 163) motivates participants in discourse to adopt standpoints
of “yes” or “no” (and not a constraint external to the matter at hand).
Inasmuch as they are concretely operative, counterfactual presuppositions
constitute (social) facts. Presuppositions, that is, prove effective in reality and
counterfactual at the same time. They are immanent in communicative praxis
and transcend it simultaneously (McCarthy 1994, 38–39). Habermas has also
referred to this phenomenon as “transcendence from within” (Rizvi 2007).
These and similar idealizing yet unavoidable presuppositions for actual com-
municative practices possess a normative content that carries the tension
between the intelligible and the empirical into the sphere of appearances
itself. Counterfactual presuppositions become social facts. This critical thorn
sticks in the flesh of any social reality that has to reproduce itself via action
oriented toward reaching understanding.
(Postmetaphysical, 47)
524 Concepts
Accordingly, counterfactual presuppositions also form the basis for what

Habermas calls “postmetaphysical thinking” (see chapter 26 in this volume).
When asked why he employs the phrase “quasi-transcendental” in The Theory
of Communicative Action—and whether this does not amount to an exces-
sively weak conception of transcendental justification—Habermas is supposed
to have responded: “The weakest is the best!” Habermas’s intellectual itinerary
can, in this sense, be understood as the effort to arrive at the weakest possible
version of transcendental philosophy. This recurrent feature of his thought is
especially evident in the path of development leading from the notion of an
ideal speech situation to that of inevitable counterfactual presuppositions.
How effective these presuppositions prove in social life, whether they are
embodied in our institutions in such a way that “reality becomes reasonable”
(Hegel 1983, 51), and, finally, whether the developmental logic of reason mani-
fests itself in the developmental dynamics of evolution (see chapter 56 in this
volume)—and accordingly in the historical process (on the distinction, see
Evolution, esp. 98, 120ff.)—remains wholly undecided. Habermas concedes
that, in terms of empirical research practice, he has not developed the method
of rational reconstruction (see chapter 71 in this volume)—which is a related
matter—to an adequate degree (Habermas 2007, 425). All the same, he has
stressed that a theoretical approach cannot simply be faulted for problems of
investigative technique (Habermas 2007, 421–422). Accordingly, in recent
years he has begun to devote increased attention to securing empirical evi-
dence to demonstrate the factual effectiveness of counterfactual presupposi-
tions (Habermas 2005, 2007; Faltering, 138–183).
Especially in informal settings—or, alternatively, in everyday communica-
tive practice (which is not very institutionalized)—a relatively high amount of
interpretation is required to correlate, empirically, actors’ attitudes (Aktorein-
stellungen) and the utterances they make/respond to. Change often occurs
rapidly between understanding-oriented and strategic dispositions, and, as a
result, the “script” is often mixed. It is not easy to determine what aspects of a
given agreement derive from understanding-oriented dispositions and what is
based on strategic interests. Inasmuch as actors’ attitudes cannot be directly
observed and are revealed only in part through questioning, “costly” maieutic
methods of investigation are required (Habermas 2007, 417, 421–422).
Although it is not easy, in terms of method, to investigate actors’ disposi-
tions and the corresponding modes of action in social life—that is, to exam-
ine the precise extent to which idealizing presuppositions prove effective in
understanding-oriented exchanges—it counts as certain for Habermas that
these presuppositions are repeatedly made and, to some degree, operative.
This view is justified because “in everyday communicative practice, sociated
individuals cannot avoid also employing everyday speech in a way that is ori-
ented toward reaching understanding. . . . It’s really quite simple: whenever we
mean what we say, we raise the claim that what is said is true, or right, or
truthful. With this claim a small bit of ideality breaks into our everyday lives”
(Past, 101–102).
Of course, an individual may decide at any point to manipulate others or to
act in a purely strategic fashion. However, it is impossible for everyone to do so
all the time. Were this so, it would be impossible to lie, and, accordingly, the
way language is currently understood would no longer hold. Equally, such
matters as making-tradition-one’s-own (Traditionsaneignung)—socialization,
that is—would become impossible. To be able to live in a world of total manipu-
lation (or, alternatively, a world of purely strategic action), other concepts would
be required. According to Habermas, the conceptual categories (Begriffsnetz) of
language today are not compatible with this possibility (101–102).
In contrast to what happens informally (or, alternatively, in weakly institu-
tionalized, everyday practice), it is somewhat easier, in methodological terms,
to grasp how communicative reason (see chapter 30 in this volume) operates
in opinion and will formation occurring on the level of formally organized/
institutionalized procedures. Because formal conditions—in ways that vary
from case to case—promote the uncoupling of modes of communication from
actors’ attitudes/outlooks, it is possible, in Habermas’s estimation, to assess
the factual effectiveness of counterfactual presuppositions without reference
to the understanding orientation of individual participants (Habermas
2007, 417).
Moreover, the facticity of norms (des Normativen) rests on counterfactual
presuppositions (see chapter 50 in this volume). In contrast to philosophers
such as John Rawls (for example), Habermas does not seek a normative theory
that outlines—on a drawing board, as it were—the foundational norms for a
(supposedly) well-ordered society. Pragmatically inevitable, idealizing presup-
positions “have nothing to do with ideals that the solitary theorist sets up in
opposition to reality; I am referring only to the normative contents that are
encountered in practice” (Past, 102). Normative demands (das Normative) stick
in the flesh of social reality in the form of counterfactual presuppositions,
which act as a “critical thorn.”
Habermas introduced the method of rational reconstruction in the after-
word to the paperback edition of Knowledge and Human Interests (1973). Both
here and in the retrospective discussion of the book thirty years later (Haber-
mas 2000), he concedes that the conceptions of “knowledge” and “human
interests” presented in the first edition (1968) confuse two different meanings
of “self-reflection.” In fact, he observes, one should distinguish
between critically resolving instances of self-deception—which also restrict

the subject’s capacity for insight [Erkenntnisleistungen]—and making explicit
the intuitive knowledge that enables our normal speaking, acting, and knowing
526 Concepts
in the first place. . . . Such analytical liberation from self-produced pseudo-

objectivities clearly calls for a different method [Vorgehen] than the rational
reconstruction of knowledge that is general but implicit.
(Habermas 2000, 14)
This false course, Habermas explains, is why—in the first edition of Knowledge
and Human Interests and throughout his early work as a whole—he held that
ideological critique provides the central model for a theory of society. The
reversal of perspective means, then, that by beginning to correct the erroneous
assumption in his midcareer works, Habermas worked to establish a new basis
for the critical theory of society—i.e., the rational reconstruction of counterfac-
tual presuppositions as the critical thorn in the flesh of social reality.
This research-intensive path may also explain the thematic (or, alternatively,
disciplinary) change of focus that Habermas’s works have undergone. Espe-
cially in the social sciences in the English-speaking world, this change of focus
has led some to conclude that Habermas has replaced the sociohistorical analy-
sis of the public sphere (such as occurs in his early writings) with the analysis of
language from a philosophical perspective. This statement rests on a twofold
misunderstanding. For one, Habermas holds that it is not a matter of language
analysis per se but of the reconstructive analysis of the communicative use of
linguistic expressions (Truth, 83ff.). Second, the change in focus—from histori-
cal-sociological analysis of structure to reconstructive analysis—is a matter of
empirical research orientation and is not fundamental in nature. Indeed, at the
beginning of the 1980s, Habermas declared that he intended to write another
study on structural change in the public sphere (1992a, 129–130). It is clear that
time constraints rather than a change of principle is the reason this did not
occur. Habermas has not abandoned the analysis of the public sphere in socio-
historical terms; rather, he has completed it by adopting the reconstructive
approach—which follows from the necessity that “the normative foundations
of the critical theory of society be laid at a deeper level” (1992b, 442). Habermas
understands such analysis in terms of complementarity, not opposition.
Despite the fact that his perspective has become increasingly clear regard-
ing the “nerve” of his theoretical undertaking as a whole—and especially
apropos of the shift from an ideal speech situation to pragmatically unavoid-
able, idealizing presuppositions—Habermas concedes that, following Between
Facts and Norms, “there is still much work to be done in this area” (1998, 418).
References
Brunkhorst, Hauke. 1993. “Zur Dialektik von realer und idealer Kommunikationsgemein-
schaft.” In Transzendentalpragmatik: Ein Symposion für Karl-Otto Apel, ed. Andreas
Dorschel et al., 342–358. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1982. “A Reply to My Critics.” In Habermas—Critical Debates, ed. John

B. Thompson and David Held, 219–283. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
——. 1985. “A Philosophico-Political Profile.” New Left Review 151:75–105.
——. 1991. “A Reply.” In Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of
Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, 214–264. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.
——. 1992a. “Dialectics of Rationalization.” In Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with
Jürgen Habermas, ed. Peter Dews, 95–130. London: Verso.
——. 1992b. “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere,
ed. Craig Calhoun, 421–461. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
——.1998. “Reply to Symposium Participants, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.” In
Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges, ed. Michael Rosenfeld and
Andrew Arato, 381–452. Berkeley: University of California Press.
——. 2000. “Nach dreißig Jahren: Bemerkungen zu ‘Erkenntnis und Interessse.’ ” In Das
Interesse der Vernunft: Rückblicke auf das Werk von Jürgen Habermas seit “Erkenntnis
und Interesse,” ed. Stefan Müller-Doohm, 12–20. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 2005. “Concluding Comments on Empirical Approaches to Deliberative Politics.”
Acta Politica 40, no. 3: 384–392.
——. 2007. “Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik: eine Rep-
lik.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der
internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 406–459. Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1983. Philosophie des Rechts. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
McCarthy, Thomas. 1994. “Philosophy and Critical Theory: A Reprise.” In Critical Theory,
ed. David Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, 5–100. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Mills, C. Wright. 2000. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Harcourt.
Peters, Bernhard. 1993. “Intentionale und nichtintentionale Vergesellschaftung.” In Die
Integration moderner Gesellschaften, 229–248. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Rizvi, Ali Muhammad. 2007. Habermas’ Conception of “Transcendence from Within”: An
Interpretation. Ph.D. diss. La Trobe University. Bundoora, Victoria, Australia.
51
DELIBERATION
NICOLE DEITELHOFF
A
t its core, “deliberation” refers to processes of argumentation.
From the normative perspective that Habermas adopts, delib-
erative procedures represent a mechanism of legitimate rule
(Herrschaft). To be legitimate, such processes of discussion and debate should
be public and afford all parties who might potentially be affected by decisions
following from them the same opportunities to participate.
Habermas first employed the expression “deliberative politics” in Between
Facts and Norms (1992). Here, it stands at the center of his theory of democ-
racy. In so doing, he adopted a political concept from a broad-scale American
debate that had been prompted by his own discourse theory (Cohen 1989),
which he now reimported into his own writings. Building on his notion of
discourse, Habermas understands deliberative politics to refer to institution-
alized discursive procedures of will formation and decision making within
constitutional political systems.
In his works of legal and democratic theory, Habermas does not discuss the
foundation and conditions for the reproduction of social order(s) per se but
rather the concrete matter of how one may conceive legitimate rule in modern
societies. He remarks that, on the one hand, social spheres of action irrevoca-
bly move apart through the pressures of rationalization; on the other hand,
the remainders of inherited ethics dissolve into a multiplicity of individual
values and worldviews. Under these conditions, communicative action—
which Habermas charges with affording social integration—faces obstacles
both from within and without. From the inside, this occurs inasmuch as
communal values and understandings diminish and are replaced by individu-
alized perspectives; from the outside, it occurs when alternative steering mecha-
nisms such as money and power penetrate—and shape—the lifeworld (see
chapter 35 in this volume).
Habermas offers a two-tiered response to this problem. The first involves
supporting communicative action institutionally by embedding it in the law,
and the second the radical proceduralization of legitimate rule. For if it no
longer holds that decisions are based on shared—and substantive—values,
matters of legitimation (Legitimationsleistungen) must henceforth be achieved
by procedures that inspire confidence that their results are, in fact, reasonable
Deliberation 529
(Inclusion, 264). This is where deliberative politics comes in, which immedi-
ately receives a democratic turn inasmuch as it is constituted by the connec-
tion between discourse and legal form: “the centerpiece of deliberative politics
consists in a network of discourses and bargaining processes that is supposed
to facilitate the rational solution of pragmatic, moral, and ethical questions—
the very problems that accumulate with the failure of the functional, moral, or
ethical integration of society elsewhere” (Facts, 320).
In deliberative democracy, legitimate rule follows from opinion and will
formation that occurs through rational discourses and—coupled to them—
fair bargaining processes; for this reason, it is limited to negotiations that are fair
(see chapter 72 in this volume). The results of exchanges receive legitimacy
through two procedural qualities that are fused with each other: rationality
and participation. Rationality is achieved because of the epistemic nature of
exchanging arguments, which promotes reflection and, in so doing, creates
and assures processes of learning. At the same time, deliberative procedures
perform this function (Leistung) only when they are protected against alterna-
tive steering mechanisms like power and social influence—that is, they occur
solely on the basis of arguments made by participants whose interpretations of
the issue(s) converge (from which results emerge in turn). Moreover, proce-
dures must be sufficiently public so that potentially affected parties may par-
ticipate as equals and, free from constraint, contribute to the discursive
exchange. Processes that are structured in this way require that participants
examine (hinterfragen) their interests and, if need be, revise them, in order to
assure that only considerations that have withstood all critical objections and
therefore lie in the common interest of all enter the equation. Thereby, legiti-
mate results depend on two factors: the deliberative nature of the procedure
and its universal inclusiveness; these two together make certain that all con-
cerned have been able to make their views known.
Under the conditions of complex, individualized society—and given the
pressures of time and contingency—it is inevitable that such ideal conditions
can adequately impact actual processes of political decision making only if the
procedures of opinion and will formation are institutionalized in a way that
incorporates communicative reason. The objectivation, in positive law, of
communicative reason through procedural norms of jurisprudence frees citi-
zens from the substantial cognitive and motivational effort that determining
the truth would otherwise demand—i.e., from processes of argumentation
that are only informally regulated.
Deliberative politics is not specialized in seeking the truth but in the com-
bination of truth-functional (wahrheitsfunktional) discourses of problem
solving and practical procedures of decision making. The conclusions
cannot—or can only rarely—resolve conflicts of interest (which—if they are
not insoluble—are at any rate recurrent); indeed, they often fail to produce
530 Concepts
consensus. All the same, and as a rule, they should (after fair negotiations)
culminate in the (reversible) subordination of minoritarian interests to those
of the majority; that is, they should yield democratic rule (which, for its part, is
non-negotiable [unaufhebbar]). Habermas holds that the evolutionary achieve-
ment of democratic constitutions is to have institutionalized discourses
coupled to procedures of egalitarian decision making in such a way that the
justification afforded by discourse carries over to decisions; thereby, legitima-
tion and acceptability extend far beyond a majority view based only on opin-
ion and will (Facts, 168–193).
To lend concrete, sociological dimensions to the connection between inclu-
sive discourse and egalitarian decisions—between deliberation and rule
(Herrschaft) (Facts, 308)—Habermas employs Bernhard Peter’s “sluice model”
(e.g., Peters 2001), which is meant to explain how communicative power pro-
duced by deliberation transforms itself into administrative power (see chapter
67 in this volume). The sluice model specifies two spheres of deliberation that
are closely connected via the legal system: on the one hand, public spaces
structured by institutionalized procedures for decision making at the center of
the political system (parliamentary bodies, courts, and administration), and,
on the other, autonomous public spheres for informal opinion formation at
the periphery of the political system, spheres that are constituted above all by
organizations in civil society (Facts, 228–229).
The latter exercise pressure on the center and push for demands to be trans-
lated into action. Only when interplay occurs between both spheres can a
deliberative praxis of self-determination result that bears genuinely demo-
cratic traits: “Informal opinion-formation results in institutionalized election
decisions and legislative decrees through which communicatively generated
power is transformed into administratively utilizable power” (Inclusion, 249).
The idealistic quality of Habermas’s theory is not just grounded in the interde-
pendent relations between discourse and decision, on the one hand, and those
between center and periphery, on the other; in addition, the communicative
reason of ethical and moral discourses is transmitted (vermittelt) through
the everyday routines of technical politics (technische Politik). In crises great
and small—whenever communal matters are no longer simply administered
but become public—communicative reason becomes a “weapon of criticism”
(Facts, 357ff.). By the same token, however, should crises be systemically
repressed and the public use of communicative reason effectively substituted
by technocracy, held in a state of latency, and colonized (Communicative
Action) by means of administrative power and economic exchange value, then
the likelihood of legitimation crises increases.
What, then, are the characteristics that distinguish Habermas’s concept of
deliberation? For one, Habermas is not concerned with the content of delibera-
tion or its results; he focuses solely on its procedural properties. It is only these
Deliberation 531
properties that lend legitimacy to outcomes (Facts, 304). Second, Habermas’s

model of deliberative socialization concerns only what occurs in a constitu-
tional and democratic political system—not the steering of society as a whole
(Facts, 302). Finally, its third feature involves the explicit connection between
institutionalized procedures of deliberation and the informal, “free-floating”
currents of communication that circulate in autonomous public spheres.
Habermas has expanded his model of deliberative politics in response to
criticism. If Between Facts and Norms identifies a central function in the epis-
temic character of deliberation (or, as the case may be, in the discursive arena
where decisions are reached) (Facts, 305), later works view the matter in sig-
nificantly more critical terms. This shift occurred as a result of the objection
that prioritizing the epistemic character of deliberation set rationality against
participation in terms that were too simple. The problems at issue are evident
in the oft-quoted statement according to which deliberative procedures are
less a matter of direct participation than they are to be understood as epis-
temic insofar as they derive legitimacy from the “general accessibility of a
deliberative process whose structure grounds an expectation of rationally
acceptable results” (Postnational, 110).
The more the conception of procedural popular sovereignty proves radical,
the more actual participation by citizens is neglected. The idea can only prove
convincing if one is able to demonstrate that within a process of this kind, the
essential arguments and perspectives of those it affects are, in fact, thema-
tized. Accordingly, Habermas’s view has been contested by numerous authors
who muster empirical arguments (e.g., Gerhards 1994). Others criticize the
“ideologization” of deliberative democracy that has occurred among some of
Habermas’s readers—a matter that involves uncoupling deliberation from
egalitarian decisions, which in turn exalts technocratic politics (e.g., Brunk-
horst 2007, 334).
Habermas has accepted the criticism; more than before, he now relates the
legitimacy of democratic procedure to two qualities: the epistemic matters of
advising and decision making that are steered in deliberative fashion and, as
an inseparable corollary, the equal participation of citizens—which is meant
to assure that the addressees of laws can, at the same time, understand them-
selves as their authors (Naturalism, 104; Habermas 2007, 433–435).
References
Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2007. “Zwischen transnationaler Klassenherrschaft und egalitärer

Konstitutionalisierung. Europas zweite Chance.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen
Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen
and Benjamin Herborth, 321–349. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
532 Concepts
Cohen, Joshua. 1989. “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.” In The Good Polity: Nor-
mative Analysis of the State, ed. Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit, 17–34. Oxford: Black-
well.
Gerhards, Jürgen. 1994. “Politische Öffentlichkeit: Ein system- und akteurstheoretischer
Bestimmungsversuch.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 46, Son-
derheft 34: 77–105.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2007. “Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik:
eine Replik.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theo-
rie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 406–459.
Peters, Bernhard. 2001. “Deliberative Öffentlichkeit.” In Die Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit
und die Öffentlichkeit der Vernunft, ed. Lutz Wingert and Klaus Günther, 655–677.
52
DISCOURSE
KL AUS GÜNTHER
H
abermas’s notion of discourse—one of the key concepts in The
Theory of Communicative Action—is subject to many misunder-
standings; consequently, it is frequently debated and contested. This
holds especially for the matter of “domination-free discourse” (herrschaftsfreier
Diskurs). The standard misreading equates discourse with chatter—endless
debates in academic seminars or committees under the “dictatorship of idle
flesh” (Sitzfleisch) or, alternatively, harmonious handholding between parties
kindly disposed to one another, wishing only well, readily seeking agreement
at any cost, and fearful of any possible conflict. According to this interpretation,
one should be oriented toward understanding and therefore ready for compro-
mise, peaceable, and not quarrelsome. A further error holds that discourses
do not lead to concrete action because of their endless duration: they seek to
avoid action and defer decisions time and again; before arriving at any conclu-
sion, one must engage in discourse—which, then, yields nothing definite, after
all. Finally, it has been objected that Habermas does not conceive of discourse
as a truly inclusive event: all who are not open to discussion or who do not
wish to seek agreement are excluded—indeed, everyone, whether he or she
wishes to do so, must exercise general suspicion about anything and every-
thing and, at the same time, is exposed to an unyielding demand for justifica-
tion. Because of his overly idealistic view that all parties affected must be able
to agree with the results on the basis of rational motivation, discourses either
cannot be realized under historical-existential conditions as they are given or
can be realized only in part.
In fact, discourse represents a special form of communication whereby par-
ticipants react and respond to specific disturbances in their exchanges—a
reflexive form of communicative action or a reflexive medium (Communica-
tive Action, 1:24; McCarthy 1981, 291ff.; Schnädelbach 1977, 135ff.). In almost
every communicative interaction there arise misunderstandings, irritations,
errors, distortions, misinterpretations, and latent or manifest points of dis-
sent; indeed, it may even be that incomprehension represents a condition of
understanding itself (Wilhelm von Humboldt). At the same time, such distur-
bances have no crippling (gravierend) consequences and can be quickly
resolved in most instances.
534 Concepts
Moreover, routines exist that help participants manage difficulties—spon-

taneous arrangements that are not subject to further questioning—because
they stabilize social cooperation already in place and make new connections
possible: this is the “pretheoretical knowledge” (Sebstverständlichekiten)
(Communicative Action, 1:123) embedded in the lifeworld. Some of these rou-
tines are so effective that they split off (sich ausdifferenzieren) from everyday
processes of communication and develop their own functional logic. In this
way, for example, interminable and risk-filled negotiations about selling an
object and the readiness of the recipient to offer payment occur in a routine
that sets a price both parties tacitly accept, without negotiation. In simple
cases of this sort, no verbal exchange is necessary: one points to the object and
puts the money on the counter. When this kind of specialized and routinized
communication does not function, established (eingespielt) repair mecha-
nisms exist. In a worst-case scenario, matters may be remedied by the threat of
sanctions—i.e., through institutionalized procedures for exercising force. For
these reasons, it is necessary to thematize the disruption of communication
only when, for reasons of latent or manifest dissent, it cannot be continued
and a breakdown seems imminent. Finally, communication breakdown is not
problematic in every instance—sometimes, parties have nothing further to
say and part ways with a shrug of the shoulders, each leaving the others alone
and finding an alternate modus vivendi.
Of course, situations exist where one wishes—or needs—to cooperate, if
only in one’s own self-interest, yet the disagreement between parties is sub-
stantive and concerns different plans and intentions in an immediate fashion.
To overcome disagreement, then, participants may choose between different
options: they may reach a compromise, persuade the opposing party, offer
him or her the prospect of personal advantage, engage in manipulation, exer-
cise gentle pressure by suggesting potential disadvantages, blackmail the
other, or even threaten (or employ) violence. The party who uses any of these
means views disagreement as an obstacle to his or her own plans/intentions
and seeks a way to make the other—even against his or her will—submit to the
first party’s own interests. That said, the prospects for achieving success by
these means depends on the quality and quantity of available resources: rheto-
ric, wealth, violence, or simply one’s potential to conceal the truth. When this
is the case, the other will cooperate for only so long as an asymmetrical power
relation can be maintained.
However, a kind of disagreement exists that cannot be overcome by these
means: namely, when the truth of a statement or the bindingness (Verbindlich-
keit) of a norm is controversial. Truth cannot be purchased, and willingness to
observe laws can only be secured to a limited degree by the threat of force.
(When compliance is achieved only through fear, it can last only as long as
every infraction is punished effectively.) In this context, resources are not the
Discourse 535
only important thing. Insight counts, too—and it cannot be ordered, bought,

or produced by manipulation.
Insight (see Rehg 1994) is achieved by way of reasoned arguments that are
both convincing and justified (überzeugende und rechtfertigende Gründe). If
their compelling nature is not immediately evident, it is necessary that they
display it in the course of critical evaluation—that is, by way of argumenta-
tion. Rational discourse “is the name for pursuing a course of insight by evalu-
ating a series of reasons/arguments” (Wingert 2002, 352). Even though parties
must “walk” this path alone, the road is public. Truth, whether theoretical or
practical, does not merit its title if the reasons that justify it cannot be criti-
cally evaluated by everyone—that is, if the underlying reasons cannot be rec-
ognized by all who “run through” the series of arguments, and if parties
involved may not express doubt and demand/offer reasons concerning the
truth claim of a statement or the bindingness of a norm.
“Discourse,” then, not only emerges from disagreement(s) in everyday
communication; it also enables disagreement(s) to be made explicit in the first
place. Indeed, discourse increases the risk of variance inasmuch as it affords
all participants the opportunity to take a position of “yes” or “no” on any affir-
mation of truth or obligation. Seen in this light, those who raise objections are
not “obstacles” for realizing plans and intentions but parties who can demand
justification from others and offer it themselves; they have a “right to justifica-
tion” and, as a corollary, owe the same to their interlocutors (Forst 2012). If
there were such a thing as a “virtue” of participants in discourse, it would not
involve compliance or readiness to compromise (much less striving to achieve
it); instead, it would consist of a “passion” for dissent, the resolute refusal to
agree to anything that cannot hold up to critical evaluation or cannot be sub-
jected to it.
At the same time, Habermas’s conception of discourse demands that every
participant afford others the same right to take positions freely, and they must
be able to do so without fear of being held in contempt, avoided, or otherwise
sanctioned. This is what is meant by the “domination-free” aspect of dis-
course, which Habermas presumes counterfactually: that participants have, at
their disposal, a criterion for distinguishing the better and worse modes of
critical evaluation that occur in the public sphere. The rules of discourse
(Alexy 1989, 187ff.; 1978) involve ways of making such inclusive and self-critical
procedures possible.
Passion for varying opinions is ignited by the cooperative search for truth.
However, communicative action is also oriented on the goal of actual and
potential participants achieving understanding (Verständigung); therefore,
once disagreement reaches a certain pitch, parties are motivated to overcome
it by discursive means, instead of accepting it as a fact (which can only be
dealt with in a strategic fashion). The desire to arrive at an agreement
536 Concepts
(Einverständnis) that finds support in the insight(s) of individuals prompts

them to acknowledge one another as persons who speak from personal con-
viction and, accordingly, will vouch for what they say. Thus, preserving the
autonomy of speech and action systematically generates disagreement about
all that does not fulfill (genügen) this ideal; at the same time, the process
mobilizes arguments and counterarguments, which represent the sole means
by which participants can reexamine and correct their views so that this same
(individual) autonomy does not suffer damage. Inasmuch as interlocutors
modify their convictions by acknowledging better arguments, discourses act
as learning processes. Consensus, then, is always a form of dissent that has
been overcome by means of reasoned argument—to wit: by means of recipro-
cal, public, and critical evaluation of statements at odds.
The mode of discourse and the course it follows depend on what kind of
claim is being contested, the way a given speaker seeks to bring about ratio-
nally motivated agreement on the part of his or her interlocutor, and the
nature of the arguments/reasons with which the claim is voiced, contested,
revised, and/or proved. Besides theoretical and practical forms of discourse
(which focus, respectively, on truth and on moral truth), there exist ethical
and political discourses, which concern the aptness (Angemessenheit) of forms
of individual and collective self-understanding (Justification, 1–19). Moreover,
practical discourses must constantly alternate between discourses of justifica-
tion and application because, when justifying a norm, it is impossible to foresee
all cases where it applies (Günther 1993).
Because of its dynamic properties, which systematically generate (risks of)
disagreement, discourse is “not an institution—it is a counter-institution, pure
and simple” (Habermas 1971, 201). Here, the potential for “anarchic, unfettered
communicative freedom” (Facts, 186) finds full expression. Of course, dis-
courses can only achieve social effectiveness on a larger scale inasmuch as they
are institutionalized. They “weave” the “thread” of inclusive, communicative
self-reference and self-critique into institutions, which makes it possible—
given limitations of time and other contingencies—to achieve organization, to
generate authority (and authority for authority [Kompetenzen und Kompetenz-
Kompetenzen]), and to offer additional incentives for observing norms. For
this reason, true discourse can only be achieved by way of democratically
structured legislative procedure (Facts, 118ff.; Lieber 2007). At the same time,
overall circumstances may favor discourses more or less; they rely on life-
worlds that “meet them halfway”—in which the social, cultural, and individ-
ual conditions for releasing the anarchic potential of communicative freedom
have been given. Among other factors, this includes the public visibility (Hon-
neth 2001) of individual parties who are recognized as autonomous as well as
the performative force from which each individual draws the courage to take a
free and public stance (Günther 1998).
Discourse 537
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Normendurchsetzung, ed. Willi Oelmüller, 22–58. Paderborn: Schöningh.
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Schnädelbach, Herbert. 1977. Reflexion und Diskurs. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Wingert, Lutz. 2002. “Jürgen Habermas Faktizität und Geltung – Der Prozeß des Rechts in
den Satzungen der Macht.” In Klassische Werke der Philosophie, ed. Reinhard Brandt
and Thomas Sturm, 345–378. Leipzig: Reclam.
53
DISCOURSE ETHICS
RAINER FORST
T
he term “discourse ethics” refers to a conception of morality in
the Kantian tradition, which Jürgen Habermas developed in
conjunction with Karl-Otto Apel (1980, 1988). Its most important
feature is its replacement of the reflective evaluation of moral maxims—in
accordance with the prescriptions of the Categorical Imperative—with the
argumentative redemption of the validity claims of moral norms in practical
discourse. The transcendental self-reflection of practical reason à la Kant
yields to the pragmatic reconstruction of the normative implications of com-
municative rationality (Naturalism, 24–76). This theory of morality offers
numerous points of contact with Habermas’s philosophy of language (or,
alternatively, with the theory of the different kinds of validity claims), with his
theory of “postconventional” moral consciousness (in following with the work
of Lawrence Kohlberg), with his theory of epistemology (concerning the
capacity for truth of practical questions), and with his philosophy of law and
democracy (in which practical discourses play a central role). The key works in
which he develops his program are “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of
Philosophical Justification” (Moral Consciousness, 43–115) and Justification
and Application.
In his characterization of discourse ethics, Habermas stresses its deontologi-
cal, cognitivistic, formalist, and universalistic qualities (Justification, 49). That
the theory is deontological means it endorses a narrow concept of morality, one
limited to the norms of correct (or, as the case may be, just) action and not
addressing questions of “the good life.” To this end, he makes a terminological
distinction between “morality” and “ethics”—or, more precisely, between
moral norms and ethical values (cf. Forst 2012, chap. 3). Habermas seeks to
explain the strict and categorical validity of moral norms, which are recipro-
cally and generally binding and claimable; ethical values raise a different
claim to validity, one that is to be redeemed in closer relation to particular
forms of life and individual biographies.
The principle of universalization (U), which substitutes for the Categorical
Imperative, represents a rule of argumentation for justifying claims of moral
validity. It specifies, as the condition for valid norms, that “the consequences
Discourse Ethics 539
and the side effects that its general observance can be expected to have for the
satisfaction of each person affected must be such that all affected can accept
them freely” (Moral Consciousness, 120). This principle, states Habermas,
makes “razor-sharp cuts between . . . the good and the just” (104), whereby
justice is to be understood in the sense of moral rightness.
According to the cognitivistic aspect of the approach, moral norms articu-
late a “truth-analogous claim to validity” (Justification, 49). This is the basis
upon which they may be discussed in practical discourses on the (ideal) pre-
supposition that a “correct” justification exists. Thereby, the essential criterion
is their capacity for generalizability—or, as the case may be, their “ideal war-
ranted acceptability” (Truth, 248). The constructivist character of moral
norms is highlighted inasmuch as this acceptability is first produced through
discourses, including processes of interpreting needs and interests and the
reflection of the claims of other parties; accordingly, practical discourse
means “generating a world of norms” that “deserves recognition” (Truth, 224).
Discourse ethics is a formalist or proceduralist ethics in the sense that it
restricts itself to specifying a procedure of moral argumentation based solely
on principle, which holds that “only moral rules that could win the assent of all
affected as participants in a practical discourse can claim validity” (Justifica-
tion, 50). In contrast to Kant’s conception of moral law (Sittengesetz)—and
also to Apel’s approach of “transcendental pragmatics”—Habermas grants the
principle itself no moral or “ultimately justified” power of validity; rather, it
possesses only the force of the “ ‘must’ in the sense of weak transcendental
necessitation,” which does not correspond to the “prescriptive ‘must’ of a rule
of action” (Justification, 81; cf. Wellmer 1991). The procedure of discourse eth-
ics consists of generating norms, while the motivation for observing both pro-
cedure and compliance with those norms requires a basis in forms of life that
“meet it halfway” (Truth, 100), i.e., in which postconventional conceptions of
morality have evolved (so that insight into what is morally commanded finds
support in the way “the good” is conceived) (275).
Habermas’s discourse ethics maintains that moral norms present univer-
salizing validity claims and that these claims must be redeemed accordingly.
Thus the discourse principle claims to transcend culture and to articulate a
correspondingly general structure of morality. In turn, the norms that are to
be justified in practical discourse may substantially only ever anticipate
general acceptability; in fact, they are subject to discursive evaluation at any
time. Therefore, as much as discourse ethics stresses the necessity of the
implementation of real practical discourse(s), it still incorporates an element
of ideality into the process, which presumes a corresponding measure of moral
sensitivity and imagination on the part of morally reflecting parties.
540 Concepts
References
Apel, Karl-Otto. 1980. “The A Priori of the Communication Community and the Founda-
tions of Ethics: The Problem of a Rational Justification of Ethics in the Scientific Age.” In
Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. David Frisby, 225–300. London: Rout-
ledge.
——. 1988. Diskurs und Verantwortung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Forst, Rainer. 2012. The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice.
Wellmer, Albrecht: 1991. “Ethics and Dialogue: Elements of Moral Judgment in Kant and
Discourse Ethics.” In The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and
Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley, 113–231. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
54
EQUALIT Y
KENNETH BAYNES
A
lthough Habermas has rarely explicitly addressed the topic of
equality, it is clearly an ideal that informs much of his thought.
This is, of course, not surprising, since the idea of an association
in which “the free development of each is a condition for the free development
of all” is an ideal that informs the tradition of Western Marxism, of which
Habermas is a central figure. It is, however, important to see the ways in which
Habermas has learned from the deficiencies in Marxist thought and other
treatments of equality. His own conception of “radical democracy,” for which
the idea of the equal public and private autonomy of citizens is central, may
not settle the debate concerning the proper “metric” of equality (welfare,
resources, capabilities, etc.), but it does provide a rich and suggestive frame-
work in which that debate might be pursued (see Baynes 2008).
The ideal of equality operates at three distinct, though interconnected, lev-
els in Habermas’s work. First, within the context of his theory of communica-
tive action, and at its most basic level, a conception of equality lies at the core
of his conception of communicative reason. With their utterances, speakers
raise various claims about the validity of those utterances—to truth, right-
ness, and sincerity or authenticity—claims that a hearer is free to accept or
reject with reasons. At least in the case of “institutionally unbound speech
acts” (that is, speech acts whose illocutionary force or meaning does not
depend upon specific institutional contexts, such as a judicial court), hearers
are equally free to challenge the validity claims raised in them. This ideal of
the basic equality of speaker and hearer with respect to the exchange of rea-
sons concerning their action interpretations lies at the core of his model of
communicative action—that is, his notion of the coordination of action
through a process of communication (Verständigung). The fragile and fallible
consensus that is established through the exchange of reasons—through the
acceptance and/or contestation of the validity claims raised in speech—makes
possible a rational coordination of action that is in turn dependent on this
fundamental equality of speaker and hearer. One might call this first concep-
tion of equality “rational equality,” since it is an equality demanded by, and
constitutive for, reason itself.
542 Concepts
Second, in a series of essays on the idea of a “discourse ethics,” Habermas

has also argued that a basic notion of “moral equality” is best captured in its
principle of universalization. “Principle U” states that a norm is morally justi-
fied if (and only if) the likely and foreseeable consequences that would follow
from its general observance could be equally accepted by all affected (Moral
Consciousness). This principle, he suggests, best captures the moral intuition
of a “postconventional morality” that aims to show equal concern and respect
for each individual—better, that is, than the current utilitarian and deontic
alternatives—and he has recently referred to it as a norm of “egalitarian uni-
versalism” (Naturalism, 271–311). Habermas also argues that this principle can
be logically derived from the pragmatic presuppositions of speech—that is,
from the notion of “rational equality” just discussed—if combined with a rela-
tively uncontroversial idea of the justification of norms. Were this derivation
to succeed, it would provide a rational justification or grounding for a more
demanding moral principle. However, as in Hegel’s critique of Kant, others
have also argued that the egalitarianism of this principle remains rather for-
mal and abstract and can only acquire a more determinate content in the con-
text of specific social institutions. Habermas is sympathetic to this charge and
suggests that moral discourses generally take place against the background of
more specific ethical and political interpretations (Habermas 1986). This leads
to the third conception of equality.
Finally, a conception of equality is also found at the political level, in con-
nection with his treatment of the “co-originality” of the public and private
autonomy of citizens. A proper understanding of the freedom and equality of
citizens—the understanding Habermas identifies with “radical democracy”—
requires not only that citizens be guaranteed an equal scheme of basic
liberties, as in Rawls. It also requires that citizens have an equally effective
opportunity to exercise their “public autonomy”—that is, to participate in the
processes that lead to the formation of the laws governing them. This view of
the co-originality of public and private autonomy points to a more robust con-
ception of political equality than the one generally found in liberal thought,
though it is arguably close to Rawls’s notion of the “equal worth” of political
liberty. It does not require that a political regime’s laws and policies have an
equal effect on every citizen’s life opportunities, but it does require that the
institutions and procedures through which laws and policies are enacted are
“rational” in the sense that they could meet with the rational agreement of all
affected. And it requires that there are equal and effective opportunities for all
actually to participate in those institutions. As Habermas has recently argued,
this understanding of political equality gives rise to a dialectic of “facticity
and validity” that makes possible new forms of social learning and richer
interpretations of the meaning of equal citizenship. In certain contexts, it also
may allow for limited group rights as a means for an effective guarantee of the
Equality 543
liberty and equality of each citizen (Naturalism, 271–311). As with the concep-
tion of moral equality, this conception of political equality also retains a
distant but still significant connection with the “rational equality” of actors to
take a yes/no position with respect to speech-act offers. A “rational” political
order will be one that achieves a proper balance with respect to the public and
private autonomy of citizens—and this is itself a political ideal that must be
tested in connection with the ideals of the moral equality of individuals and
the rational equality of social actors.
References
Baynes, Kenneth. 2008. “Democratic Equality and Respect.” Theoria 55, no. 117: 1–25.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1986. “Moralität und Sittlichkeit: Treffen Hegels Einwände gegen Kant
auch auf die Diskursethik zu?” In Moralität und Sittlichkeit: Das Problem Hegels und
die Diskursethik, ed. Wolfgang Kuhlmann, 16–37. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
55
EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP
CHRISTIAN JOERGES
T
he concept of citizenship spans many disciplines—without, for all
that, necessarily connecting them. The following discusses the
divergent understandings of the term in positive European law,
on the one hand, and in the works of Jürgen Habermas, on the other. Two
matters will be made clear: the conceptual anchoring of legal discourses in
neoliberal visions and the sociocritical dimension of Habermas’s advocacy of
the European project.
Institutionalized Europe, both as it defines itself and in common academic
parlance, is not a “state”; instead, it is simply a “union.” What does this mean
for its citizens? European law supplies no shortage of answers. With the
umbrella term of “Union,” the Treaty of Maastricht (1992) introduced “Union
citizenship” among its provisions. Since then, its core component, freedom of
movement (Freizügigkeit), has assumed dimensions that extend beyond the
“market citizenship” originally envisioned—above all, when the European
Court of Justice banned discrimination and affirmed fundamental European
rights. How is this? The law continues to evolve in a thoroughly concrete
manner—especially where the legal issues addressed by the European Court
of Justice are concerned. Recently, it achieved particular notice when Austrian
medical schools began to open their doors to German students who had not
been admitted at home—and also when Great Britain was obligated to bear
the costs of medical treatment abroad when—and because—patients sought to
shorten the waiting times decreed by the National Health Service.
Cases like these are legion, but they do not make it clear how, exactly, EU
citizenship is developing. When it was first taken up, two far-reaching ideas
were at play. On the one hand, states sought to promote the identity of Europe;
on the other, they sought to transform—and enhance—the simple “market
citizenship” already in place. It was assumed that both these matters were to
be undertaken so that the economic community would also succeed as a pol-
ity. For all that, however, the relationship between ambition and achievement
has remained fraught (Everson 1995). Signatories were unwilling to surrender
the authority necessary to make social rights a reality; the array of provisions
that, according to a discourse theory of law, are supposed to support the legiti-
mate concretization of such objectives have not improved by much. Because
European Citizenship 545
rights of free movement impair demands for solidarity, the European system
of rights has remained indebted to the neoliberal program. (The same holds
for antidemocratic demands—provided they aim only for equal treatment
[Somek 2009].)
Anyone wishing not just to expose such dependencies but also to overcome
them must seek alternative frames of reference for EU citizenship. Efforts of
this kind certainly have been made in European constitutionalism (e.g., Wei-
ler 1999, Schönberger 2005). At least in terms of method, they meet up with
Habermas’s “constitutional patriotism” and with his defense of the constitu-
tional achievements of the nation-state.
Habermas contributed both these categories to the debate on Europe in his
1991 essay, in which he reconstructed the history of the concepts and their
points of interdependency; one year later, against this backdrop, he discussed
the challenges that the European constellation posed for his theories of
democracy and law. The interdependency of both categories constitutes a key
feature of his views on Europe; both in general and in a specifically European
context, they have achieved independence as figures of discourse.
Particular attention was paid to the idea of “constitutional patriotism.”
When it was applied to Europe as a whole, it became a key term in debates on
identity and EU citizenship (for a systematic discussion, see Müller 2007).
Habermas made the concept—originally developed by Dolf Sternberger (1982,
1999)—an integral component of his theory of the constitutional state; he then
introduced it into the discourse on European constitutionalism. The topos of
constitutional patriotism, which refers to the specific historical context of
the early Federal Republic, concerns Germany’s past and the country’s re-
civilization—the transformation of its political culture after the Second World
War. Time and again—especially in his works on the situation in Europe—
Habermas has stressed interconnections between historical and theoretical
concepts (e.g., Postnational, 74ff.; Inclusion, 118ff.; Time, 138ff.; see chapter 49
in this volume).
If one considers these connections, one must reject the objection that con-
stitutional patriotism is too “thin,” in sociological terms, to identify the pre-
conditions necessary for the integrity (Zusammenhalt) of modern societies—
as well as the claim that it drily abstracts from the fact that citizens’ lives are
embedded in real social, political, and cultural conditions. For Habermas, the
nation-state—and especially Germany—represents an ambivalent achieve-
ment, and its past is problematic. If, ultimately, republicanism has prevailed—
that is, the “nation of the state” (Staatsnation) has succeeded the “nation of the
people” (Volksnation)—this has only occurred after “a painful process of
abstraction through which local and dynastic loyalties were ultimately trans-
formed into the self-consciousness of democratic citizens as belonging to one
and the same nation” (Time, 101). The solidarity that has been established
546 Concepts
thereby—by artificial and altogether violent means—must not be pictured as a

substance having existed previously, nor should it be afforded a normative
value of its own. Instead, the democratic nation-state owes the normative dig-
nity it possesses to the fact that its legal constitution enables citizens to view
themselves as the authors of the laws that govern them. What distinguishes
the idea of constitutional patriotism is that it has freed itself of substantive
notions of identity—in this way, it acknowledges both multicultural condi-
tions and the need for decision (Entscheidungsbedarf ) that modern societies
must accept (Inclusion, 146).
To be sure, the idea of constitutional patriotism cannot be transferred to
the European plane without further ado. How, after all, can a framework for a
European polity ever be defined if all European societies declare the forms
they have assumed historically and culturally to be sacrosanct? Constitutional
patriotism can only be understood in programmatic terms: the plurality of
Europe is not to be transformed into homogeneity but should, instead, yield
reciprocal relations of recognition. The matter involves taking up the felici-
tous formulation of Article I.8 of the Constitutional Treaty (which itself met
an unhappy end), which affirms that the unity of Europe lies in its multiplicity
(Inclusion, 146–147; Naturalism, 106). It may prove difficult to determine the
practical chance of success for this outlook, but it is certainly greater than that
of positions proclaiming unified legal conditions on a European scale. Equally,
Habermas’s view is superior to efforts to pursue “identity politics” on the
model of nation building.
Constitutional patriotism represents a bridge leading to Europe. However, if
one bears in mind that the aim is not to eliminate the multiplicity of Europe,
then two difficult points of connection become evident. The first involves
organizing processes of communication (Verständigungsprozesse) through
which Europeans may achieve (wahrnehmen) their rights. This is not just a
matter of weighing traditions against one another but of engaging with con-
flicting interests that are based on political and socioeconomic differences
(which, indeed, have only become more pronounced as the process extends to
the eastern half of the continent). To be sure, the idea of federalism has
remained alive in the history of European integration—with which Habermas’s
reflections also connect (Time, 101ff.). Such an arrangement would strengthen
the power of political decision making, even if it is difficult to assess how a fed-
eration would respond to the complexities of internal conflicts.
The second difficulty stems from the expectations that Habermas associ-
ates with more advanced integration. As he has observed on many occasions,
Europe must
conserve the great achievements of the European nation-state beyond its

frontiers in a new form. . . . What must be conserved are the standards of
European Citizenship 547
living, the opportunities for education and leisure, and the social space for
personal self-realization which are necessary to ensure the fair value of indi-
vidual liberty, and thereby make democratic participation possible.
(Time, 90)
It hardly seems possible to object more strongly to the program of a transna-

tional “private company” (Privatrechtsgesellschaft) inhabited by market-
citizens or to demand in more vigorous terms that the rights secured within
nation-states be preserved in the postnational constellation. For Habermas,
the welfare state (Sozialstaatlichkeit) is not just a constitutional option that
arose through the contingencies of history in Western Europe. Instead, it is a
condition for the integration of societies organized as nation-states—the rec-
onciliation of capitalism and democracy and a matter of achieving “solidarity
between strangers” (Inclusion, 138).
Conditions do not favor a European constitution. Habermas expressed his
clear and emphatic disappointment at the referendums against the constitu-
tional treaty; after the return to intergovernmentality, he also criticized the
way the politics of Europe have been pursued (Faltering). However, he did not
abandon his advocacy of the European project but rather developed political
and institutional recommendations that were meant to lead out from the dead
end where things now stand.
All the same, Habermas has hardly reflected on three developments that
stand in the way of his project for reconstituting citizenship on a European
scale: the proclamation of rights that have no chance of being achieved,
whereby politicians gloss over social deficits in and between countries; the
matter of “soft methods of government” that jeopardize European legality
(Rechtsstaatlichkeit) without making the social entitlements (sozialstaatlicher
Gewinn) they are supposed to afford even slightly probable; and the tendency
of the Court of Justice of the European Union, in appealing to rights of eco-
nomic freedom, to invalidate member states’ provisions for work and social
conditions (die Arbeits- und Sozialverfassungen der Mitgliedstaaten)—in so
doing, they pave the way for a transnational society of private (property)
rights.
This raises, once more, the question of how democratic citizenship is to
survive. Before these gains deteriorate further through the process of Europe-
anization, it will be necessary to demand their recognition on the part of the
European Union—which, now as ever, remains incompetent in matters of the
social state. This is imperative in order to preserve the form of democracy that
has achieved recognition in Old Europe and must yet become a real option in
the New Europe under construction.
548 Concepts
References
Everson, Michelle. 1995. “The Legacy of the Market Citizen.” In New Legal Dynamics of
European Union, ed. Jo Shaw and Gillian More, 73–89. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Müller, Jan-Werner. 2007. Constitutional Patriotism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
Schönberger, Christoph. 2005. Unionsbürger: Europas föderales Bürgerrecht in verglei-
chender Sicht. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Somek, Alexander. 2009. “Idealisation, De-politicization and Economic Due Process: Sys-
tem Transition in the European Union.” In The Law/Politics Distinction in Contempo-
rary Public Law Adjudication, ed. Bogdan Iancu, 137–167. Utrecht: Eleven.
Sternberger, Dolf. 1999. “Verfassungspatriotismus: Rede bei der 25-Jahr-Feier der Akade-
mie für Politische Bildung in Tutzing am 29.6.1982.” In Politische Reden 1945–1990, ed.
Marie-Luise Recker, 702–719. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.
Weiler, Joseph H. H. 1999. “To Be a European Citizen: Eros and Civilisation.” In The Con-
stitution of Europe: “Do the New Clothes Have an Emperor?” and Other Essays on Euro-
pean Integration, 324–355. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
56
EVOLUTION
MARCELO NEVES
L
ike Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann, Habermas holds that
social evolution entails heightened system complexity (Communi-
cative Action, 2:155ff.). Unlike his colleagues, however, he affirms
that increases in social complexity are mediated by a “developmental logic”
whose structure corresponds to the way moral consciousness evolves in stages
(esp. Communicative Action, 2:174ff.; Evolution, 69–94, 95–129; Rekonstruktion,
129–143; Moral Consciousness). Contra Luhmann’s (1975, 2003) systems theory,
Habermas argues that mounting complexity and the social differentiation that
accompanies it depend on “learning mechanisms.” In this sense, his position is
that differentiation can represent either “evolutionary processes” or stagna-
tion (Rekonstruktion, 133–134, 230; Communicative Action, 2:175ff.). By the
same token, he argues—contra Marxism—that what determines evolution
does not lie in the “developmental dynamics” of forces of production but in
the “developmental logic” of intersubjective and normatively oriented rela-
tions (Evolution, 118, 130–177; Rekonstruktion, 139–140). Progress in the
technology of production and mounting systems complexity represent the
conditions for social evolution, and the evolution of normative structures
provides its basis.
In elaborating the framework for his theory of communicative action and
discourse ethics, Habermas reconstructs the model—formulated by Jean
Piaget (1966) and developed by Lawrence Kohlberg (1976, 1981)—of ontogenetic
(individual) development, which he transfers to the realm of phylogenetic
(social) evolution (Moral Consciousness; Evolution, 69–94, 99ff.; Rekonstruk-
tion, 133ff., 232–233; Communicative Action, 2:174ff.; Justification, 113–132).
According to this model, there are three stages of moral development for indi-
viduals, and these stages each correspond to a different societal formation: pre-
conventional, conventional, and postconventional.
As Habermas sees things, the process of cognitive and moral maturation
relates closely to the “decentering of the young person’s understanding of the
world” in three differentiated modes of relation to objective, social, and subjective
phenomena (Moral Consciousness, 132ff., 168); equally, it relates to corresponding
modes of action—strategic and communicative—and to the distinction between
discourse and communicative action.
550 Concepts
Like ontogenetic development, phylogenetic evolution concerns three levels

of moral consciousness in society: a preconventional one, a conventional one,
and a postconventional one. For all that, Habermas does not equate ontogeny
and phylogeny:
Individual consciousness and cultural tradition can agree in their content

without expressing the same structures of consciousness. . . . Not all individu-
als are equally representative of the developmental stage of their society. Thus
in modern societies, law has a universalistic structure, although many mem-
bers are not in a position to judge according to principles. Conversely, in
archaic societies there were individuals who had mastered formal operations
of thought, although the collectively shared mythological world-view corre-
sponded to a lower stage of cognitive development.
(Evolution, 102)
Moreover, Habermas emphasizes that collective moral consciousness holds

only for adults; accordingly, “ontogenetically early stages of incomplete inter-
action” have no corollary in the oldest societies. From the beginning, social
relations within the family have involved the complementary connection of
generalized expectations of how members should act—the matter of “com-
plete interaction” (Evolution, 102). Despite this qualification (and others),
Habermas affirms that homologies obtain, and he draws a parallel between
the two developmental models by positing analogies in “sequences of basic
concepts and logical structures” (Evolution, 17ff., 97ff., 133ff.; Communicative
Action, 2:174; Eder 1980); in so doing, he considers the analogy “between world
views and the system of ego demarcations” especially relevant (Evolution, 104).
When primate hordes made the transition to the Paleolithic Age—that is,
“with the transformation of primitive systems of calls into grammatically reg-
ulated, propositionally differentiated speech”—“the sociocultural starting
point [was] reached at which ritualized behavior changed into ritualized
action” (Communicative Action, 2:191). Following this initial state, three social
stages of moral development may be identified: archaic societies, high cultures
(Hochkulturen), and modern society—which correspond, respectively, to the
levels of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional development
(Communicative Action, 2:174–178; Evolution, 104–106; Rekonstruktion, 135,
97ff.)
Archaic societies are marked by the fact that they distinguish inadequately
between the objective, social, and subjective worlds. Here, normative structures
are interpreted in light of mythical images of nature. Actions are not evaluated
in terms of the actor’s intentions but rather with respect to their results. The
absence of a clear distinction between culture and nature, between normative
and cognitive matters, and between individual and society expresses itself in
Evolution 551
rituals and myths. The melting together of different dimensions, which is evi-
dent in ritual praxis, is regulated and secured by the worldviews presented in
myths. Mythical interpretations of the world confuse “internal meaning with
external conditions” (Sachzusammenhänge); in this way, they are able to
“protect ritual practice against rips in the fabric woven from communicative
and purposive activity indistinguishably” (Communicative Action, 2:193). This
implies that, on a profane level—even if a certain differentiation between goal-
and understanding-oriented attitudes already exists—claims to truth, truth-
fulness, and rightness still form a unit (2:194).
This merging of the objective, social, and subjective world that is anchored
in mythical worldviews confuses individual and collective actions; conse-
quently, the individual affirms his or her identity only as a member of a group
structured by kinship (family, clan, and/or tribe). The equation that occurs
between individual life and group life—which finds practical expression in
ritual and reflective expression in myth—connects with the model of precon-
ventional morality. In addition, the fact that events and things are perceived as
matters of immediate and binding self-evidence blocks the distinction
between (individual) action and established conventions. In this context, it is
impossible to conceive of deviant behavior as something that belongs to com-
munal life; instead, deviations represent “attacks” on the group (which, ulti-
mately, are attributed to external forces of nature).
In “high cultures”—even in the realm of sacred action—the difference
between objective, social, and subjective worlds is already operative. Internal
relations of meaning and external, factual conditions are distinguished.
Actions are no longer evaluated solely in terms of effects. At the same time,
however—and even though a difference obtains between goal-oriented and
understanding-oriented attitudes—the realm of the sacred is constituted by
religious and metaphysical worldviews that, inasmuch as they are predicated
on a holistic conception of validity, prove “resistant to every attempt to sepa-
rate off the aspects of the true, the good, and the perfect” (2:194). Within this
sphere, then, the unity of claims to truth, rightness, and truthfulness is
assured. All the same, religious worldviews “are more or less dichotomous in
structure; they set up a ‘world beyond’ and leave a demythologized ‘this world’
or a desocialized ‘world of appearances’ to a disenchanted everyday practice”
(2:194).
Consequently, the holistic conception of validity dissolves within the
profane sphere of activity (2:194). In matters of communicative action, partici-
pants distinguish “between individual pragmatic basic attitudes”—that is,
between outlooks that objectivate, conform to norms, and belong to the realm
of expression. Thereby, differences between claims to truth, rightness, and truth-
fulness emerge. Society, which is now organized as a state with conventional
legal institutions, demands that individuals observe and obey the legitimate
552 Concepts
order, and it is important that this (social) attitude be distinct from the (objec-
tivating and expressive) attitudes displayed toward outer and inner nature
(2:194).
In this context, individual identity is not equated with that of the group. It
has been differentiated from the collective and no longer depends on kinship
relations but on a territorially bound organization whose unity is embodied by
a leader figure (Rekonstruktion, 26). Only in this way does obedience—and, as
a corollary, deviant behavior—become a clear conception operative in everyday
life. “At this stage, communicative action can free itself from particularistic
contexts, but it stays in the space marked out by solid traditional norms”
(Communicative Action, 2:194). As a consequence of interpreting (argumentativer
Umgang mit) (holy) texts, the differences between communicative action and
discourse are now evident. However, contrasting validity claims are operative
only in terms of action (auf der Handlungsebene)—in other words, “there are not
yet forms of argumentation tailored to specific aspects of validity” (2:195). Stand-
ing institutions therefore remain incontestable, and discourses of truth and
rightness still overlap.
In early modernity, a specific validity claim—truth—emerges in science. At
the same time, morality, law, and art—even though they constitute distinct
value spheres—have not separated off from the realm of the sacred enough to
offer unambiguously specific validity claims (2:195). That is: a thoroughgoing
differentiation between discourses and their validity claims still has not
occurred. However, inasmuch as the forms assumed by modern religiosity
break with the dogma that places, in dichotomous and hierarchical fashion, a
profane “this world” in opposition to the realm of transcendence—the world
of phenomena to the world of absolute Being—“in domains of profane action,
structures can take shape that are defined by an unrestricted differentiation of
validity claims on the levels of action and argumentation” (2:195).
Finally, not just science but art, morality, and law also split off from the
realm of the sacred. The “secularization of bourgeois culture” entails sharp
divisions between spheres of value, which henceforth develop autonomously—
i.e., “according to the inner logics specific to the different validity claims”
(2:196).
Such desacralization makes it possible for critical discourses to emerge
even in opposition to standing institutions insofar as “the hypothetical dis-
cussion of normative validity claims is [itself] institutionalized” (2:195). While
institutionalized normativity splits off from metaphysical and religious world-
views, goal-oriented instrumentality (Zwecktätigkeit) now operates indepen-
dently of normative contexts and comes into closer alignment with the system
of science, from which it derives objective information for developing tech-
nologies, techniques, and strategies of action. Now, instrumental reason
expresses itself, inasmuch as it has been freed from understanding-oriented
Evolution 553
activity, as an “ethically neutralized system of action” that fundamentally

employs scientific and technological strategies (2:178, 196).
Given the differentiation between, and autonomy of, spheres of validity—
the conditions underlying the uncoupling of system and lifeworld (see chapter
75 in this volume)—Habermas offers a diagnosis of modernity that opposes
both models of fragmentation and paradigms of ideological critique, for he
places the rationality of a discourse that is not subordinate to system impera-
tives in reflexive relation to communicative (i.e., understanding-oriented)
action. Ultimately, this diagnosis affirms—contra prevailing tendencies—that
postconventional or, alternatively, universalistic morality characterizes mod-
ern society.
References
Eder, Klaus. 1980. Die Entstehung staatlich organisierter Gesellschaften: Ein Beitrag zu einer
Theorie sozialer Evolution. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1976. “Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-Developmental
Approach.” In Moral Development and Behavior: Theory, Research, and Social Issues,
ed. Thomas Lickona, 31–53. New York: Holt McDougal.
——. 1981. “Appendix. The Six Stages of Moral Judgment.” In The Philosophy of Moral
Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice, Essays on Moral Development 1,
409–412. New York: Harper & Row.
Luhmann, Niklas. 1975. “Evolution und Geschichte.” In Soziologische Aufklärung 2: Aufsä-
tze zur Theorie der Gesellschaft, 150–169. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1975.
——. 2003. Theory of Society. Vol. 1. Trans. Rhodes Barrett. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press.
Piaget, Jean. 1966. The Moral Judgment of the Child. New York: Free Press.
57
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
MARTIN HARTMANN
T
he theory of historical materialism developed by Marx and Engels
understands social conditions as the result of a teleological his-
torical process. The analysis of operative categories—forces of
production, relations of production, and superstructure—permit the further
course of history to be explained and even predicted. As outlined in Marx’s
Grundrisse (Marx 1993), the model of historical materialism is as follows:
Forces of production (i.e., the labor of persons who are active in production,
the specialized knowledge that manages/directs their efforts, the tools
employed, and instruments/instances of certification and coordination) give
rise to institutions and mechanisms that determine who has access to the
means of production and in what way (for example, who owns them) as well as
how the wealth that has been produced socially is distributed (the relations of
production). In turn, phenomena such as law and morality serve to justify
particular relations of production; to the extent that the latter are deemed
necessary, they possess an ideological character and become part of the
superstructure. The model accounts for the dynamics of history by positing
that the forces of production develop without the relations of production that
correspond to them changing in kind; to the extent that this occurs, the rela-
tions of production “fetter” the forces of production, which can result in
social revolutions that overturn relations of production as they have stood
until this point.
Especially in the 1970s, Habermas integrated the materialist model of his-
torical evolution into his own writings; in so doing, he modified it. The essen-
tial feature of Habermas’s transformative theoretical reconstruction is the
claim that “moral-practical consciousness” develops following the course of
its “own logic” (Society and Politics, 127)—a process that is independent of the
way forces of production evolve. Thereby, superstructure phenomena such as
morality and law are freed of their dependency on material, economic pro-
cesses and come, ultimately, to shed their ideological qualities (which legiti-
mate only the relations of production as they stand). Having abandoned a key
element of Marxist doctrine, Habermas now, in a further step, goes so far as to
call “normative structures” the “pacemaker” of social evolution (Society and
Politics, 190).
Historical Materialism 555
This is the case, he argues, because advances in technological/instrumental

knowledge—which occur “endogenously” as forces of production develop—
can only be implemented when an institutional framework exists that permits
one to secure, legally and morally, the (potentially) more efficient mode of
work that they involve. Although roles based on class (group A uses tools/
machines, group B supervises them, group C owns the tools/machines) are
necessary to optimize work processes, the arrangement can succeed only if a
position of leadership (Herrschaftsposition) has been instituted—and acknowl-
edged as legitimate—that has at its disposal the military and juridical means
to settle conflicts that may emerge between classes. In other words: only to the
extent that conflict resolution occurs through generally acknowledged legal
norms (i.e., ones not tied to contingent power differentials) is it possible to
transfer improvements of technical/instrumental knowledge (which have
been obtained independently) in such a way that the enhancement of the
forces of production can be said to “result” (Society and Politics, 126) from
institutionalized changes in moral-practical consciousness.
According to some readers, this perspective stands Marxian theory on its
head (Tomberg 2003, 84). All the same, Habermas claims to hold fast to the
model of historical materialism, for two reasons. Although he considers
that normative structures follow an autonomous course of evolution in
“logical” terms, he also views them—at least as they develop specifically under
capitalism—as reactions to system problems that are “economically” conditioned
(Society and Politics, 124). Therefore, the points where the moral-practical
consciousness that has “condensed” in worldviews can augment the forces of
production depend on the specific economic challenges for which solutions
are necessary. “Culture,” according to Habermas, “remains a phenomenon of
the superstructure” (124). Second, Habermas considers that interpretations of
contemporary society and its possible transformations can only prove empiri-
cally accurate if one knows the challenges to which this society has reacted
historically. This implies that all observations concerning present-day society
must be checked against an “instructive theory of social evolution.”
Habermas constructs such a model by combining elements of Marxist
structuralism (Godelier 1977), sociological functionalism (Habermas and
Luhmann 1971), and cognitive psychology (Piaget 1997). Thereby, the typical
evolutionary scheme is as follows: At the level of the social base (which is
structured exclusively in economic terms only under capitalism), problems
emerge that can no longer be solved within the framework of the standing
order. For example, a farming community may experience population growth
that leads to a food shortage. Habermas’s name for such an event—whereby
continued existence is threatened—is “system problem.” This type of situation
calls for innovation both in terms of forces of production and in terms of
social integration. Until this point, the knowledge operative in the forces of
556 Concepts
production (Produktivkraftwissen) and moral-practical knowledge have devel-

oped independently—for example, individual subjects have developed prob-
lem solutions in a creative way; although they enter collective structures of
knowledge, they are actually enlisted only under the pressure of concrete eco-
nomic challenges. When this occurs under the guidance of moral-practical
knowledge to solve the threats to continued existence (Bestandsgefährdungen)
at hand, societies have “learned” how to deal with a challenge and can, conse-
quently, claim to have achieved a higher level of development.
With this newly reconstructed conception of historical materialism, Haber-
mas claims to have jettisoned the “philosophical ballast” of the critical theory
of the 1930s (Communicative Action, 2:382). The more thinkers like Hork-
heimer, Adorno, and Marcuse consider that the potential for reason inherited
from bourgeois culture diminishes under the influence of totalizing bureau-
cracies and mounting economization, the smaller the chance becomes even to
demonstrate such potential empirically (2:381).
In contrast, Habermas’s theory of social evolution places its hopes—from
the inception—in a higher level of abstraction inasmuch as it does not con-
sider that the language of learning processes is tied to concrete historical
events; what is more, its functionalist vocabulary permits one not to put the
challenges and systemic problems these phenomena entail solely in economic
terms. Even if the economic system—and the crises it produces—have guided,
in a certain measure, the evolution of organized, Western capitalism, this is
not the case for socialism; here, it is the incapacity of state apparatuses to ful-
fill a certain level of popular demand that generates crisis (2:383ff.).
The category “lifeworld,” which is introduced in The Theory of Communi-
cative Action, makes the analytical framework more complicated. All the
same, Habermas continues to hold to the evolutionary model of society/soci-
eties and to the Marxist notions of “base” and “superstructure.” As he observes,
impulses for social transformation—e.g., the differentiation of the economic
system from the governmental/administrative system (Herrschaftssystem)—
“emanate from the domain of material reproduction” (2:168). What is more, to
the extent that economic and administrative imperatives come to penetrate
the lifeworld (which has achieved differentiation solely on the basis of ratio-
nalization), Habermas identifies a further form of self-contradiction within
capitalism, which he calls the “paradox of societal rationalization” (2:186).
However, despite the continued references to its Marxian inheritance,
Habermas’s reworking of historical materialism leaves many questions unan-
swered. On the one hand, it seems that capitalism, which has come to be
accepted as a system of material reproduction without a viable alternative, has
deprived the original theory of historical materialism of its teleological “bite”
(i.e., the thesis of socialism as the end stage of social development). Yet at the
same time, mounting economic inequalities in the national and international
Historical Materialism 557
spheres (which can be empirically verified without great effort), the increased
delegalization of how wars are conducted, and so on make the notion that
progress must necessarily occur in human social evolution seem less and less
persuasive. Indeed, Habermas can hardly say as much without drawing
gloomy conclusions about contemporary society.
The tension between normative consciousness as the “vanguard” of social
evolution and the colonization of the lifeworld that prevails in actual fact is
palpable. The further such colonization proceeds, the less it is clear how eco-
nomically induced system crises may be absorbed by implementing (suppos-
edly autonomous) processes of moral and legal learning (autonom erzielter
Lernfortschritte der Moral und des Rechts) (Allen 2008). If the communicative
potential of reason—which is easy enough to posit in the abstract—has no
empirical site of application, Habermas’s theory threatens to deteriorate into
reconstructive nostalgia.
References
Allen, Amy. 2008. “Empowering the Lifeworld?” In The Politics of Our Selves: Power,
Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, 96–122. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Godelier, Maurice. 1977. Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology. Trans. Robert Brain. Cam-
ogie: Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Marx, Karl. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Mar-
tin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin.
Piaget, Jean. 1977. The Moral Judgment of the Child. Trans. Marjorie Gabain. New York:
Free Press.
Tomberg, Friedrich. 2003. Habermas und der Marxismus. Zur Aktualität einer Rekon-
struktion des historischen Materialismus. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
58
HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMAN
RIGHTS
REGINA KREIDE
T
he relationship between human rights and democracy is most
often described in terms of tension (e.g., Gosepath 1998, 209ff.;
Michelman 1999, 52–66; Wellmer 2000). Human rights impose
on popular sovereignty moral prescriptions that restrict the freedom of choice
and decision. Conversely, the results of democratic processes may run counter
to the standing conceptions of human rights—and, as a result, undermine
their observance.
Jürgen Habermas’s deliberative conception of human rights—which holds
equally distant from liberal and republican positions—integrates important
aspects of both theories to justify human rights and democracy. On the one
hand, this approach is directed against advocates of the liberal tradition,
which as a rule focuses on “classic” human rights—that is, the precedence of
subjective freedoms over rights of political participation. On the other hand,
Habermas criticizes the tradition of republicanism going back to Arendt (and,
ultimately, Aristotle), which grants rights of political participation—as an
important component of “the good life”—precedence over individual
freedoms.
For both the liberal and the republican traditions, human rights and popu-
lar sovereignty compete with each other (Facts, 122). In contrast, Habermas’s
deliberative theory seeks to show that the relationship is, in fact, complemen-
tary. In this context, one particular distinction is of central importance. Inas-
much as they are moral, human rights are justified norms of action, and they
express demands that hold for all human beings. As basic rights (Grundrechte)
or juridical rights they are enforceable constitutional rights; although they
retain their universal validity claim, they can, de facto, only be demanded
within a determinate legal community (Rechtsgemeinschaft) (Facts).
The “interreferentiality” (Verweisungszusammenhang) between human
rights and democracy is evident, for one, in the fact that juridical human rights
represent—in the form of subjective rights—a necessary condition for the
democratic process. That is, agreement between citizens about fair procedures
of political participation presupposes that citizens recognize one another as
Human Rights and Human Rights 559
free and equal. Rights to freedom such as the inviolability of persons and of
the private sphere must be institutionally secured to make it possible for citi-
zens to exercise their political rights in the first place (Günther 1994, Kreide
2016).
At the same time, human rights are not just the precondition for democ-
racy; they also depend on a fair democratic process in a normative sense. Only
through democratic procedure is it possible for moral human rights to be
thematized by citizens, interpreted, and endowed with the authority of
enforcement—i.e., institutionalized. On this point, Habermas takes distance
from the traditional distinction between natural law and positive law, which
he does not consider convincing: if one adopted a conception of human rights
in terms of natural law, the task of the legislator would be limited to “pouring”
moral norms into the “mold” of positive law—which would occur without
rights (and their “contents”) being granted publicly and reciprocally (Inclu-
sion, 190). The internal connection between human rights and popular sover-
eignty—i.e., the counterfactual assumption that human rights and democracy
presuppose and result from each other—lies, as Habermas puts it, “in the nor-
mative content of the very mode of exercising political autonomy” (Facts, 103).
That said, Habermas considers that human rights are, in terms of their
structure, not moral norms but rather “juridical by their very nature” (Inclu-
sion, 190). Although they can be justified in the political process only by way
of moral argument, this cannot occur independent of a democratic procedure.
They rely on political procedures that are already established to achieve the
status of human rights in the first place.
For some, the assumption that human rights are juridical in nature and
based on a fusion of legal form and the principle of discourse does not attach
due significance to their moral dimensions (Michelman 1999). Human rights,
the argument goes, are not rights that citizens of a state grant one another.
Their defining feature is that they point beyond membership in one particular
nation-state and, instead, are conceived in universalistic terms (Forst 1999).
Conversely, others contend that human rights—because they are juridical
by nature—connect with legislative instances and reach the “administered
ears of professional politicians” (Brunkhorst 2005, 199). Precisely because of
their ambivalent moral-legal nature, human rights are “stand-ins” for demo-
cratic legitimation that represents an “emergent public sphere” (199).
The culture of human rights forms the common “normative denominator”
upon which different legal cultures can reach agreement, even short of legisla-
tive elaboration and juristic concretion (Möllers 2001, 49). Moreover, for civil
society—which already involves the “politics of appeal” (49) as a matter of
necessity—the moral aspect of human rights is a trump for uncovering abuses
and making them known. When addressed in legal terms, however, human
rights are not just actionable constitutional rights—they also provide the
560 Concepts
building blocks for the new forms of transnational legality that were estab-
lished, after 1945, within the framework of the United Nations.
The procedural notion of human rights may also be a reason why Habermas
does not justify social human rights in terms of their “inherent value” (eigener
Wert) but only in relation to rights to freedom and political rights. Habermas’s
rejection of a legal principle that would grant social rights constitutional status
as human rights is based on the fact that the principle of discourse does not
entail a principle of social law (soziales Rechtsprinzip) that would necessarily
have to be a part of the procedure for justifying legality. “The system should
contain precisely the rights citizens must confer on one another if they want to
legitimately regulate their interactions . . . by means of positive law” (Facts,
122). Hereby, Habermas means, above all, rights that represent preconditions
for legitimate legislation—i.e., for procedures that occur in terms of demo-
cratic principle (125–126). Such a proceduralist perspective on the justification
of human rights considers social rights only as the precondition for citizens’
use of other rights. As a legal component of the procedure itself, they hold no
significance (for a critical assessment, see Frankenberg 1996; for Habermas’s
response, see Habermas 1996, 1542ff.; cf. Lohmann 1999).
Although Between Facts and Norms connects the “equiprimordial” justifi-
cation of human rights and democracy to the democratically constituted
nation-state, Habermas in no way excludes the democratic legitimation that
would be provided by a transnational constitution. The abstractness of the
notion of constitutionality—to which the state and other social institutions
are subjected—permits one to speak of a “social constitution” instead of a
“state constitution” (Brunkhorst 2006, 112); such a constitution would provide
the normative measure for all international legislation (Rechtsgebilde) in the
political order of world society (Naturalism, 322ff.). For all that, Habermas
does not advocate a world republic but rather a “world domestic policy with-
out a world government” (Postnational, 110), carried by citizens, as well as the
progressive constitutionalization of international law (see chapter 17 in this
volume) on the basis of fundamental human rights. Here, the frame of norma-
tive reference is constituted by a deliberative theory of democracy that offers
to transnational institutionalization the functional equivalents for decision-
making processes that are democratically organized.
Habermas has responded to numerous objections that have been raised
in the context of international discourses on human rights (Postnational,
113–129). For many critics, human rights are a “Western” achievement and rest
on a purely “occidental” conception of reason that is by no means shared
everywhere in the world. Habermas responds to such skeptics by observing
that even if the idea of (universalistic) reason first originated in “Western”
societies, the practice of justification based on reason forms an integral com-
ponent of communicative action, which in turn rests on the idea of reciprocal
Human Rights and Human Rights 561
relations of communication. In the international discourse on human rights,

participants of different cultural origins—inasmuch as they wish to agree on
interpretations—must allow themselves to be guided by certain presupposi-
tions (Postnational, 129). A key component of this process is that symmetrical
relations obtain between participants—relations that are expressed by, e.g.,
mutual recognition, reciprocal exchanges of perspective, and shared readiness
to see one’s own tradition from the perspective of the other. This backdrop
makes it possible to critique one-sided readings and instances of political instru-
mentalization that undermine the normative preconditions that must be given
to achieve reasonable agreement about standards of human rights.
References
——. 2006. Habermas. Leipzig: Reclam.
Forst, Rainer. 1999. “The Basic Right to Justification: Toward a Constructivist Conception
of Human Rights.” Constellations 6, no. 1: 35–60.
Frankenberg, Günter. 1996. “Why Care? The Trouble with Social Rights.” Cardozo Law
Review (Special Issue: Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges, Part I
and II), 17, no. 4–5: 1365–1390.
Gosepath, Stefan. 1998. “Das Verhältnis von Demokratie und Menschenrecht.” In
Demokratischer Experimentalismus, ed. Hauke Brunkhorst, 201–241. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
Günther, Klaus. 1994. “Diskurstheorie des Rechts oder liberales Naturrecht in diskursthe-
oretischem Gewande?” Kritische Justiz 27, no. 4: 470–487.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. “Reply to Symposium Participants, Benjamin N. Cardozo School
of Law.” Cardozo Law Review (Special Issue: Habermas on Law and Democracy: Criti-
cal Exchanges, Part I and II) 17, no. 4–5: 1477–1559.
Kreide, Regina. 2016. “Between Morality and Law: In Defense of a Political Conception of
Human Rights.” Journal of International Political Theory 12, no. 1: 10–25.
Lohmann, Georg. 1999. “Soziale Rechte und die Grenzen des Sozialstaates.” In Politische
Philosophie des Sozialstaates, ed. Wolfgang Kersting, 351–372. Weilerswist: Velbrueck.
Michelman, Frank. 1999. “Bedürfen Menschenrechte demokratischer Legitimation?” In
Recht auf Menschenrechte. Menschenrechte, Demokratie und internationale Politik, ed.
Hauke Brunkhorst et al., 52–66. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Möllers, Christoph. 2001. “Globalisierte Jurisprudenz.” Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphi-
losophie Beiheft 79: 41–60.
Wellmer, Albrecht. 2000. “Der Streit um Wahrheit. Pragmatismus ohne regulative Ideen.”
Die Renaissance des Pragmatismus. Aktuelle Verflechtungen zwischen analytischer und
kontinentaler Philosophie, ed. Mike Sandbothe, 253–270. Weilerswist: Velbrueck.
59
IDEOLOGY
MARTIN SA AR
I
n Habermas’s works, the concept of ideology displays multiple—and
polyvalent—aspects. It features prominently as one of the central cat-
egories in his account of Marxism—above all, in his early discussions
of the project of critical theory as it was first conceived. The matter continues
to be of central importance in Habermas’s discussions of “late capitalism,”
where he seeks to offer a political-sociological diagnosis of the times. How-
ever, in the course of the author’s turn to the theory of communication, which
crucially revises his approach to critical social analysis, ideology offers a point
of reference less and less; in late writings, the concept is invoked only rarely
(cf. Habermas 2001, 2008).
Habermas’s early essays on Marxism, political theory, and social philoso-
phy (e.g., Theory and Practice) discuss the Marxist doctrine of ideology in
terms of the history of bourgeois society. In his Habilitation, however, Haber-
mas takes issue with the vulgar-Marxist reduction of bourgeois ideals to inter-
ests based purely on class (as Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse had done in
the foundational texts of critical theory, written during the 1930s). He observes
that the principle of the public sphere—which was only partially realized in
bourgeois societies of the Enlightenment—harbored “ideology and simultane-
ously more than mere ideology” (Structural Transformation, 88). In “Technology
and Science as ‘Ideology’ ” (1968), the quotation marks in the title are decisive:
because of the successful rationalization and changed form of late-capitalist
societies, the traditional conception of ideology can “no longer be employed as
[it] stand[s]” (Society and Politics, 107).
For Habermas, then, “ideology” is less a matter of “false consciousness”
that a political class employs for strategic reasons (as Marcuse still held) than
it is a matter of social life becoming depoliticized when the “reified models”
(Society and Politics, 91) of scientific-technological knowledge gain the upper
hand. “The legitimation system” (Legitimation, 36) of late capitalism experi-
ences a severe crisis not least because “the residue of tradition” and “core com-
ponents of the bourgeois ideology” (48) can no longer operate in a justificatory
(apologetisch) way. Even the capitalist “ideology of achievement and success”
(Leistungsideologie) (81), a cornerstone of capitalism’s legitimation, too openly
contradicts the actual conditions of work and life in liberal societies.
Ideology 563
By engaging with the methodologies of psychoanalysis (Knowledge, 214–

300; Society and Politics, 111) and hermeneutics (Habermas 1990), Habermas
reformulates ideological critique as an inquiry into the “conditions of system-
atically distorted communication” (1990, 265). He outlines the project on a
grand scale in The Theory of Communicative Action, which is founded both in
the philosophy of language and in social theory; here, after the systematic
revision performed in “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism,”
the concept of ideology no longer plays an explanatory role. The “ballast” of
“subject philosophy and the philosophy of history that . . . serves as the foun-
dation” for ideological and social critique in first-generation critical theory
(Communicative Action, 2:382) is replaced by a theory of crises and problems
in the lifeworld: here, understanding-oriented forms of communication (and
forms of self-understanding) count as “pathological” when they have been
distorted by strategic modes of interaction (and self-relation) (2:141–143, 318–
331, 367–373).
In Habermas’s work, then, the field of ideology critique—that is, the effort
to point out possible traces of power in knowledge and self-understanding—
has been preserved, albeit in rather different terms. However, one may doubt
what consequences his markedly rationalist (rationalitätstheoretisch) assump-
tions really hold for understanding the actual communicative capabilities of
modern subjects. His analytical framework seems to exclude an understand-
ing of deep-lying distortions that pervade entire vocabularies and perspec-
tives and inscribe heteronomy into subjectivity itself. Moreover, it seems that
subjects may even affectively attach themselves to harmful and epistemically
deficient convictions—which translates into enduring problematic patterns of
life. Habermas’s theory can hardly explain such operations, which would fall
under a wide definition of the term ideology. This possibility of a radically
problematic but self-willed self-misunderstanding can hardly be accounted
for by way of the strict dichotomy between power and validity.
Habermas’s philosophical optimism about communicative reason—which
stands in marked contrast to the pessimism of older critical theory (Discourse,
106–130; Postmetaphysical, 28–56)—has a correlate, in his political theory, in
his confidence in the power of pluralistic, democratic public spheres to guar-
antee rational decisions. The discourse-theoretical conception of democracy
places an enormous systematic weight on “the higher-level intersubjectivity of
communication processes” (Inclusion, 248) inasmuch as it holds that demo-
cratic politics “stand in an internal relation to the contexts of a rationalized
lifeworld that meets it halfway” (252). At the same time, however, Habermas
simply declares that modern forms of social life are reasonable to a consider-
able degree. The fact that the public sphere is to be understood as a “commu-
nication structure rooted in the lifeworld through the associational network
of civil society” (Facts, 359) could also mean that all partisan stances and
564 Concepts
points of irreconcilable difference within the social now reappear in the politi-
cal realm. Thus, it might be that democracy offers no way of escaping the ever-
recurring distortions and disruptions of political dynamics—and that, for this
reason, democratic engagement itself is always “ideological” to a certain
degree.
The question remains, then, whether Habermas’s view that the “project of
modernity” may yet succeed avoids addressing fundamental doubts about the
freedom to be achieved through reasonable communication—indeed, whether
Habermas is afraid that he cannot do so within the narrow confines of his
theory. The growing marginalization, in critical discourse, of the very idea of
ideology could itself be a symptom of a certain theoretical attitude that denies
the very possibility of ideology—which might be “ideological” itself.
Moreover, Habermas’s harsh rejection of totalizing conceptions of ideologi-
cal critique—above all, those that follow from early critical theory and struc-
turalist Marxism—has prevented him from engaging with newer theoretical
articulations of subjectivity and ideology. In particular, such projects have
been outlined by Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Çiäek (1994), who take up the
works of Gramsci and Althusser, and by Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau
(2005), and Judith Butler—with clear implications for the theory of “radical
democracy.” One can assess the consequences of this missed opportunity in
different ways. It is certain, however, that the failure to engage with these
authors (and the distance from their positions that this implies) has obscured
a key point of agreement: despite his departure from ideology critique in the
classical sense, Habermas shares with these thinkers a fundamental frame of
reference that remains indebted to Marx.
References
Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. “Reflections on Communicative Pathology.” In On the Pragmatics

of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action, 129–170.
——. 2008. “Nach dem Bankrott.” Interview with Thomas Assheuer. Die Zeit 46. http://
www.zeit.de/2008/46/Habermas.
——. 1990. “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality.” In The Hermeneutic Tradition: From
Press.
Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
Çiäek, Slavoj, ed. 1994. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso.
60
INTELLECTUALS
RENÉ GABRIËLS
O
n the basis of certain normative convictions, the intellectual has
a sense both for what is and for what could be different. In other
words, he unites what Robert Musil (1996) called a “sense of real-
ity” and a “sense of possibility.” However, not all intellectuals manage to strike
a balance between the two: self-declared realists possess an unrestrained sense
of reality, and unworldly idealists possess an excessive sense of possibility.
Jürgen Habermas belongs among the very few philosophers and sociolo-
gists who, both in what they write about intellectuals and in their intellectual
interventions, seek a point of equilibrium between the sense of reality and the
sense of possibility—and, what is more, achieve it, for the most part. In Haber-
mas’s (1987) view, intellectuals address the public and stage interventions
“with rhetorically pointed arguments on behalf of injured rights and repressed
truths, overdue innovations and delayed progress” (29). On the basis of uni-
versalistic values—especially democratic principles and human rights—the
intellectual judges what can and must be changed in reality as it stands.
In most cases, intellectuals as citizens put “their expertise to public use
beyond the limits of their profession” (Faltering, 51) without being asked to do
so. Of course, citizens who have no professional knowledge at the ready may
raise a critical voice in the public sphere. However, because current debates
tend to concern complex issues as well as normative questions that pose at
least as many difficulties, it happens only rarely that laypeople succeed in tak-
ing positions that receive considerable media attention. Although they hold
views on pressing normative issues (e.g., stem-cell research and assisted sui-
cide), their voices are rarely heard in public debates, which are dominated by
experts and politicians. For this reason, a serious tension exists between
expertocracy and democracy.
In Habermas’s view, a scientist possessing professional knowledge who
articulates a position in a matter of public controversy performs a different
role than a scientist who only intervenes in specialized debates among col-
leagues. Habermas makes an explicit distinction between the roles of intellec-
tuals and scientists. Whereas the latter communicate with others in the field
about how a certain aspect of reality is to be interpreted or explained, the for-
mer seek—and not just on the basis of their knowledge but also on the basis of
566 Concepts
their normative convictions—to influence processes of opinion and will for-

mation. If one does not keep these two roles separate, one risks losing one’s
scientific reputation.
In his reflections on intellectuals and their role(s), Habermas has both pre-
scriptive and descriptive purposes in mind. He not only sketches the ideal
“type” of the intellectual; he also describes another type, which does not fulfill
this ideal. The ideal intellectual is aware of the fallible nature of what she or he
thinks and says and also possesses an intuitive sense for important topics.
Both these qualities require certain virtues:
a mistrustful sensitivity to damage to the normative infrastructure of the pol-

ity; the anxious anticipation of threats to the mental resources of the shared
political form of life; the sense for what is lacking and “could be otherwise”; a
spark of imagination in conceiving of alternatives; and a modicum of the
courage required for polarizing, provoking, and pamphleteering.
(Faltering, 55)
In Habermas’s estimation, the intellectual works as a kind of stand-in for the

universalistic values that represent the normative contents of modernity
itself—on the basis of which the status quo may be criticized. In Germany, this
type of intellectual emerged only after 1945—and slowly, at that. Heinrich
Heine—a radical advocate of Enlightenment—was a lonesome forerunner of
this type; accordingly, he found himself driven into exile in France, and his
works were so censored that they hardly influenced the German public sphere
(which, at any rate, barely existed in his lifetime).
Before 1945, the term “intellectual” was used primarily in a disparaging
manner in Germany. For this reason, intellectuals themselves tended to call
themselves “men of spirit” (Geistige) (Bering 1978). Between the world wars,
there emerged—inasmuch as spirit and power now stood at odds—a type of
intellectual that did not want to be viewed as such. This type breaks down into
five categories (Habermas 1987, 33–34). The first includes apolitical writers and
scholars who held that matters of spirit and power stand so far apart that politi-
cizing the former expresses a will to power that betrays creativity and education.
A second group, represented by, e.g., Max Weber, believed that professional
politicians, whose authority derives from specialized knowledge, are impeded
by the incompetence of men of spirit (and especially by philosophers and writ-
ers). Third, there were activists and expressionists who, on the basis of the
access to intellectual life afforded by an elite education, viewed themselves as a
political vanguard and claimed their own position of power within politics—a
matter far removed from egalitarian ideals. Fourth—and in contrast to the
latter—party intellectuals claimed no special position but subordinated them-
selves to the political apparatus because they considered any special status
Intellectuals 567
that might be afforded to intellectuals to represent class treason. Finally, intel-

lectuals on the right denounced those who betrayed the “spirit of the people,”
which they were supposed to represent—but not to criticize.
In addition to intellectuals who do not want to be intellectuals at all, Haber-
mas (1987) also discusses counterintellectuals (Gegenintellektuelle). This type
is distinguished above all by the fact that it “presents the role of the intellec-
tual, which has already been institutionalized, as a social pathology” (50).
With intellectual tools, counterintellectuals such as Helmut Schelsky and Kurt
Sontheimer contest the role of intellectuals in the public sphere and maintain
that society would function better without them. Thus, counterintellectuals
make intellectuals responsible for increasing the legitimation burdens of the
government with their public critiques and for unnecessarily endangering
social cohesion (Brunkhorst 1987, 133–157).
In order to exercise true influence on opinion and will formation, “a respon-
sive, alert, and informed public” (Faltering, 52) is required. In this context, Haber-
mas asks what “the structural transformation of the public sphere”—which
increasingly supersedes traditional media such as books, newspapers, and radio
through newer ones like television and the Internet—means for intellectuals.
While the Internet has added interactive elements to the scope of intellec-
tual activity, it is also fragmented through “millions of ‘chat rooms’ scattered
throughout the world and globally networked ‘issue publics’ ” (Faltering, 157–158).
Through this fragmentation, the national and transnational public spheres
undo the interactive potential of the Internet. What is needed in the age of the
Internet is the centripetal power of the classical public sphere, which created
conditions under which public opinions emerged from the multiplicity of
positions occurring in a diffuse mass public.
In the case of television, the dynamic is different. As a visual medium, tele-
vision inevitably induces intellectuals not just to participate in a reasonable
discourse (on talk shows and in cultural programs, for example) but also to
cultivate a certain image. This combination of discourse and self-(re-)presen-
tation breaks down the border between the roles of politicians and of intellec-
tuals, and it equates the two—that is, it confuses political power based on
images with influence that derives from intellectual discourse (Faltering, 54).
Moreover, intellectual scope is threatened by the outgrowths of media power—
i.e., through the ability of actors within the media to influence, in lopsided
fashion, public opinion and will formation by selecting political themes tai-
lored to specific interests.
Despite the fragmentation of the public sphere that the Internet has cre-
ated, the dedifferentiation of the roles of politicians and intellectuals, and the
outgrowths of media power, Habermas sees possibilities for intellectuals to
exercise influence. Even if their opponents act strategically and exploit their
media power, they must—if they want to present their views effectively—adopt
568 Concepts
certain rules of the game: “They must contribute to the mobilization of impor-
tant issues, concrete facts, and convincing arguments, which are in turn
exposed to critical examination” (Faltering, 171).
In the course of globalization a transnational public sphere emerged—even
if its existence is very precarious as yet—which enables intellectuals to direct
their critical attention beyond national borders and onto problems that affect
many citizens worldwide (for example, global warming and the growing gap
between the rich and the poor). Although not all intellectuals view themselves
as cosmopolitans, a cosmopolitanization of intellectuals has occurred all the
same, for they are inevitably tied both to the local or regional society and to
world society. Engagement for the “world domestic politics” that Habermas
envisages requires that intellectuals deal with at least two tasks: first, overcoming
extreme economic disparities that exist in a stratified world society, reversing
ecological imbalances, and averting collective endangerments; second, pro-
moting intercultural understanding (Verständigung) with the aim of securing
equality in exchanges between world civilizations (Naturalism, 338).
At first glance, it seems that no conception of the intellectual stands as
opposed to the one presented here as that of Michel Foucault. Indeed, it has
often been suggested (Tully 1998, 116; Maes 2002, 223; Bühl 2003) that Haber-
mas’s ideal type of intellectual corresponds to the “universal intellectual” that
Foucault declared obsolete—i.e., a party in possession of the truth who, in
the name of universal values, advocates for the rights of underprivileged and
marginalized persons/groups. According to Foucault, this kind of intellectual
was replaced after the Second World War when the “specific” intellectual
emerged—that is, an expert who employs his or her knowledge in power
struggles that occur within his or her own field (1984, 69). In a society pene-
trated by relations of power, the task of intellectuals is to establish a counter-
power. In contrast to Sartre’s intellectual, “someone who meddles in what does
not concern him,” specific intellectuals do not presume to offer judgments in
the name of truth and justice. Foucault holds that the unreflective nature of
universal intellectuals is evident in the mistaken belief that their own ideas of
truth and justice have somehow remained uncontaminated by power strug-
gles. Specific intellectuals, on the other hand, self-reflectively assume that
their public interventions also represent a way of exercising power.
In fact, Habermas’s concept of the intellectual in no way corresponds to
Foucault’s universal intellectual. In the first place, Habermas’s discourse the-
ory of truth declares it impossible for an intellectual to “possess” the truth;
claims to truth do not prove valid on the basis of personal status but on the
basis of discursive redeemability. Second, Habermas’s radically democratic
views exclude that an intellectual may be an advocate (Fürsprecher) for others.
Were she or he to assume this position, it would amount to endorsing the out-
dated notion of the philosopher equipped with a privileged insight who assumes
Intellectuals 569
the role of “usher” (Platzanweiser) for others. (Indeed, Sartre cannot be

unambiguously designated as a universal intellectual [Brunkhorst 1990]; his
ambivalent status is attributable to the fact that, on the one hand, he ascribes
to intellectuals a privileged access to truth that recalls Plato’s philosopher-
king yet, on the other hand, assumes that every human being, as a creature
condemned to freedom, should shape his or her life in autonomous fashion.)
Foucault’s conception of the intellectual is problematic in two respects.
First—as Habermas details in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity—the
reasons to establish a counterpower remain obscure (Discourse, 275). That is,
Foucault does not specify the moral norms on the basis of which intellectuals
could justify the establishment of a counterpower. Second, Foucault levels the
distinction between truth and power, and, as a result, both concepts lose a part
of their critical force (Stachel). In his later writings, Foucault addressed this
matter by calling for parrhesia: the candor and boldness to tell the truth to
those who possess power and don’t want to hear it (Foucault 2011).
Thereby, Foucault approaches Habermas’s ideal type of intellectual more
closely than he would probably like—especially since he holds that parrhesia
means criticizing the abuse of power (Eribon 1992). What is more, Habermas
and Foucault both believe that critique involves the ability to detect possibili-
ties for different social conditions. At the same time, however, Foucault would
not subscribe to the distinction that Habermas has made between influence
and power. According to this view, one should distinguish between having an
influence on the public and exercising political power (Habermas 1987, 36):
intellectuals act communicatively and not strategically, seek to affirm com-
municative rationality through the public use of reason, and do not wish to
occupy a position of power within the political system.
Although there are good reasons to critique the equation of influence and
power, it would be mistaken to limit the public interventions of intellectuals to
either one or the other. The difference between influence and power goes back
to a categorical distinction between communicative and strategic action. Yet
can it always be clearly determined whether a given intellectual intervention is
understanding oriented or purpose oriented? Are having an influence and
exercising power not simply two modes of intellectual engagement? Is it not a
matter of degree more than one of categorical difference?
In public debates, the communicative and strategic actions undertaken by
intellectuals merge. This makes it difficult to separate influence from power.
Moreover, opponents understand such engagement to promote understanding
(Verständigung) more often than agreement (Einverständnis). They recognize
“that the other, given his preferences, has good reasons for his position under
certain circumstances—that is, reasons that are good for him; it does not follow,
however, that one must make these reasons one’s own, given one’s own pref-
erences” (Habermas 1999, 116–117). Habermas believes that in such instances
570 Concepts
of “weak” communicative action (i.e., understanding without agreement),

communicative rationality fuses with instrumental rationality. Yet does this
not mean that he is collapsing the border between influence and power?
Ultimately, Habermas’s ideal type of intellectual resembles, in a certain mea-
sure, the way he conceives of the philosopher (Moral Consciousness, 1–20). If an
intellectual, in exercising influence on the public, offers good reasons for his or
her views, he or she represents a kind of stand-in for reason and embodies com-
municative rationality. Against the background of differentiated cultural
spheres, intellectuals are also critical interpreters of scientific, moral, and aes-
thetic viewpoints (see chapter 34 in this volume). What this means in actual
practice Habermas has demonstrated not just for the Bonn and Berlin republics
but on an international stage, as well. Whether the debate involved the Histori-
kerstreit, German reunification, the Iraq War, or the democratic deficits and
austerity policies of the European Union, in each instance Habermas demon-
strated the stakes of the public use of reason. As a sociologist, he has always been
aware of the fact that he can fulfill his role as an intellectual only under certain
social conditions. With that, the “sense of possibility” and the “sense of reality”
strike a balance. This has prevented Habermas—in contrast to many other intel-
lectuals—from displaying either a stubborn cynicism or an unworldly moralism.
References
Bering, Dietz. 1978. Die Intellektuellen. Geschichte eines Schimpfwortes. Stuttgart: Klett-
Cotta.
Brunkhorst, Hauke.1987. Der Intellektuelle im Land der Mandarine. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 1990. “Ohne Mandat—Sartres Theorie des Intellektuellen.” In Der entzauberte Intelle-
ktuelle, 99–125. Hamburg: Junius.
Bühl, Achim. 2003. “Die Habermas-Foucault-Debatte neu gelesen.” Prokla 130:256–287.
Eribon, Didier. 1992. Michel Foucault. Trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Truth and Power.” In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow,
51–75. New York: Pantheon.
——. 2011. The Government of Self and Others. Trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave.
——. 1999. Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung: Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Maes, Michael. 2002. Diskurs, Macht und Geschichte. Foucaults Analysetechniken und die
historische Forschung. Frankfurt: Campus.
Musil, Robert. 1996. The Man Without Qualities. Trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike.
New York: Vintage.
Tully, James. 1998. “To Think and Act Differently. Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to
Habermas’ Theory.” In Foucault Contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue Between
Genealogy and Critical Theory, ed. Samantha Ashenden and David Owen, 90–142.
London: Sage.
61
LATE CAPITALISM
FRANK NULLMEIER
H
abermas’s Legitimation Crisis (Legitimationsprobleme im Spät-
kapitalismus [1973]) assigns the concept of “late capitalism” a
position of central importance, which it has retained in his
works as a whole. However, in presenting this sketch of a comprehensive the-
ory of society, Habermas employs the term “late capitalism” only with
restraint. More often, he refers to “state-regulated” or “organized capitalism.”
And even when the chapter heading promises “A Descriptive Model of
Advanced Capitalism,” what follows speaks primarily of “organized capital-
ism” (Legitimation, 33).
Habermas’s references to “late capitalism” should be understood in light of
the Sixteenth Conference of German Sociologists (Soziologentag) in Frankfurt
(1968). To acknowledge Karl Marx’s 150th birthday and at the instigation of
Theodor W. Adorno, the theme of the event was “Late Capitalism or Indus-
trial Society?” In his opening remarks, Adorno called for Marxist categories to
be preserved. Given the dominance (Vorherrschaft) of capitalist relations of
production over forces of production, he argued, “industrial society” cannot
prove central to analysis, for it refers only to technical aspects of social devel-
opment. For all that, Adorno’s lecture did little to clarify the concept of “late
capitalism,” in particular. Adorno presented points of contrast with “liberal
capitalism” and advanced the thesis that state intervention should not be
deemed an element foreign to its system. Instead, he argued, intervention is
constitutive of capitalism: its telos (or, alternatively, the inevitability of its col-
lapse) involves the transition to “rule [Herrschaft] independent of market
mechanisms” (Adorno 1979, 368).
Afterward, Habermas began to use the term “late capitalism” with greater
frequency. Thus, in his discussion of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional
Man (1964)—which refers mainly to “advanced industrial societies”—he spoke
of the “system of advanced capitalism [Spätkapitalismus]” (Rational Society,
133; cf. Habermas 1968, 12), and he entitled a 1968 lecture “Conditions for
Revolutionizing Late-Capitalist Societies” (Kultur und Kritik, 70–86). In the
foreword to a new edition of Theory and Practice that appeared around the
same time, Habermas used the term as a matter of course and without any
further explication.
572 Concepts
The phrase “late capitalism” was coined by Werner Sombart in Der moderne
Kapitalismus. In the entirely revised second edition (1916–1927; the original
work is dated 1902), Sombart divided capitalism into “early,” “high,” and “late”
phases—whereby the last phase connotes decline. “Early capitalism” (a term
that Habermas uses—as well as “high capitalism”—in The Structural Transfor-
mation of the Public Sphere) refers to the development of commercial enterprises
and market orders from the fourteenth century until the Industrial Revolution
(c. 1760). High capitalism is defined as the unfolding and ultimate consolida-
tion of capitalist production in the nineteenth century. “Late capitalism,”
finally, refers to the rise of social politics and public enterprises, as well as to
mounting state intervention in market cycles after 1914 (Pribram 1983, 226–227,
376–380). Except in isolation—e.g., a book by the Polish economist Natalie Mosz-
kowska (1943)—the term found little use even among economists who foresaw
a decline, or even the end, of capitalism (for example, Joseph A. Schumpeter).
In contrast, terminology developed by Rudolf Hilferding (1910) achieved
prominence. Hilferding analyzed processes of economic concentration and
the domination of finance capital in terms of the replacement of “competitive
capitalism” (Konkurrenzkapitalismus) by “monopoly capitalism” (Hilferding
1981).
After the 1968 Soziologentag had renewed the idea of late capitalism in
political and theoretical debates, Claus Offe’s effort to develop the concept
fueled further discussion (“Spätkapitalismus—Versuch einer Begriffsbestim-
mung” [Late capitalism—an attempt at definition]; Offe 1972, 7–25). In Offe’s
estimation, capitalism’s potential for adaption is “categorically exhausted”
because no forms of state regulation exist in which “new mechanisms for the
self-perpetuation of the capitalist system” may be combined with the system
as it stands (24). All the same, should strategies of adaptation in fact be avail-
able, one might “employ the term ‘late capitalism’ in a sense that is not overly
loose” (24). Thereby, Offe indicated that the term refers to a state of crisis: the
modifier “late” stands for the possible end of capitalism—one that will not
occur when class struggles escalate to revolution but rather when further
potential for development runs dry.
Habermas adopted this “crisis-theoretical” view—albeit with a different
orientation—in Legitimation Crisis (1973). That said, the central opposition
between “liberal capitalism” and “late capitalism” had already occurred in his
1968 discussion of Marcuse (Habermas 1968, 74). The two-phase theory of cap-
italism dates back even earlier and informs The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere (original ed. 1962), which analyzes the transition from the
public sphere of liberal societies to a public sphere under conditions where
public and private realms are fused. Here—and in contrast to Legitimation
Crisis—“late capitalism” refers to the point when liberal capitalism met its
end, following the Great Depression of the 1870s (Structural Transformation,
Late Capitalism 573
143ff.). In this work, Habermas interprets liberal capitalism entirely in terms of

the market and competition, which requires the state (Staatlichkeit) only to
secure the legal preconditions for exchange.
It is not the state that stands at the institutional center under liberal capital-
ism; rather, the state serves only as a complementary organization for market
transactions that regulate themselves. Late capitalism, in contrast, has a politi-
cal constitution: relations of production are repoliticized, destructive forces of
the market are restricted by government, and class conflicts are hedged in by
the welfare state (Legitimation, 37, 54, 61, 74). Late capitalism is a form of political
capitalism: state and market have entered such a close connection that neither
can exist without the other. Late capitalism is distinguished by two phenom-
ena in particular: markets are concentrated and organized, and the state inter-
venes extensively (Legitimation, 33–34).
On a theoretical level, the concept of “late capitalism” rejects key categories
of Marxist analysis inasmuch as the law of value is no longer admissible. Now,
the state works against cyclical crises in order to stabilize the system as a whole
(Blanke, Jürgens, and Kastendiek 1975, 392–393). Economic crises can be
averted politically—the state is not just the executor (Vollzugsorgan) of the law
of value (Legitimation, 45–46). Contra the thesis that this law still holds—a
position argued by, e.g., Ernest Mandel (1975)—Habermas shifts attention
from purely economic logic to the way that politics affects relations of produc-
tion as a whole. In his estimation, capitalist structures are shaped both by eco-
nomic process logic and by political countersteering. The late-capitalist state
intervenes in the market economy in four ways (Legitimation, 51ff.): it creates
favorable conditions through legislation, the protection of rights, and the
guarantee of inner and outer security; moreover, it assures that the legal sys-
tem operates in a fashion that complements the market. These governmental
activities were already operative under liberal capitalism; now, however, they
intensify.
The innovative aspects of late capitalism involve state operations that
address problems in the market that occur as a result of the economic system,
on the one hand, and compensate for the consequences of dysfunction, on the
other. In particular, the creation of welfare programs is meant to remedy such
matters. New constellations of power emerge. With the development of the
educational system and the research sector, realms that do not obey the logic
of exchange value come into being, negotiations between large-scale organiza-
tions (Großverbände) determine the wage structure, and modern mass democ-
racy makes demands that do not serve the interest of capital. Accordingly, one
may no longer reduce politics to a superstructure phenomenon (Legitimation,
58ff.).
Despite such increased flexibility, however, Habermas maintains that capi-
talism is headed for a crisis. As a matter of principle, the political system
574 Concepts
cannot fulfill the legitimation requirements that grow in response to state

interventionism. Because modernization generates universalistic norms and
discursively reflected motivations, which now count as the sole bases for a
valid practical orientation, the political claims and demands of citizens can-
not be met. Habermas considers the term “late capitalism” justified only because
the legitimation crisis that he identifies derives from capitalist development as
a matter of necessity (Legitimation, 49).
For all that, however, Habermas’s interpretation of capitalism in terms of
crisis became less dramatic in the works that followed Legitimation Crisis.
Indeed, the American translation of the book makes no mention of “late capi-
talism” in the title. In the body of the work, Spätkapitalimus is rendered, for
the most part, by the less “loaded” term “advanced capitalism.” (Although
“late capitalism” does occur in isolation.) The Theory of Communicative
Action (1981), in turn, drops the concept of legitimation crisis for a theory of
the “pathologies of the lifeworld.” Here, Habermas contends, the thorough
penetration of the lifeworld by external imperatives prevents the possibility of
protest that might explode the system.
Still, Habermas employs the term “late capitalism” in The Theory of Com-
municative Action—even though he abandons “liberal capitalism” (its oppos-
ing term in Legitimation Crisis) without introducing another term/concept to
replace it. The Theory of Communicative Action addresses only “modern,”
“developed,” or “organized” capitalism—whereby a distinction is made between
“state capitalism” (the variant under communist regimes) and “private capital-
ism” (in the West). In systematic terms, late capitalism is distinguished by
three elements: governmental intervention, mass democracy, and the wel-
fare state (which is charged with “pacifying” class conflict) (Communicative
Action, 2:332).
Like Legitimation Crisis, The Theory of Communicative Action critiques
orthodox Marxism. Given the extent of state intervention (even if it never
assumes the dimensions of business investments), a theory of crisis that takes
only economic matters into consideration is inadequate, for now crisis tenden-
cies are displaced onto the administrative system. Marxist value theory can-
not grasp the colonization of the lifeworld—especially the systemic endanger-
ment of the public sphere (Communicative Action, 2:323ff.). Accordingly, in
The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas reformulates late capitalism
in terms of the system-lifeworld paradigm; even more clearly than before, he
avoids attaching political significance to class struggles and conflicts involv-
ing the distribution of wealth. “Reification” that “does not . . . produce effects
distributed in any class-specific manner” (Communicative Action, 2:332) now
becomes the point of crystallization. Conflict flares up in “questions having to
do with the grammar of forms of life” (2:392); in turn, responses aim to “dam
in” the independence of the state and economy (Habermas remarks with a
Late Capitalism 575
nod toward new social movements of the late 1970s). It does not follow that a
legitimation crisis occurs for the capitalist system as a whole, however. A func-
tional equivalent for bourgeois ideology emerges: fragmented everyday
consciousness, which undermines the demands of cultural modernity, i.e.,
universalism and discursivity (2:330).
Capitalism’s potential for adaptation has by no means been exhausted.
“Late capitalism”—as Claus Offe (2006) put it recently—amounts to “a termi-
nological mistake [Missgriff]” (194). Since the middle of the 1980s, Habermas
has not used the term. Both in his central writings on political theory—
Between Facts and Norms and The Inclusion of the Other—as well as in shorter
essays, he has avoided the modifier “late” in discussing the economic realities
of modern capitalism, which admit no alternative (even though they “require
regulation”) (Habermas 2007, 428). Since there is no chance of “opting out,”
the best one can do in the “new stage” of “politically unleashed” capitalism
is to “tame,” “cushion,” or “politically shape” it (Time). Recent debates about
appropriate interpretations of, and names for, capitalism as it now exists—
“post-Fordism” and the “Schumpeterian competition state” in the terminology
of the Regulation School (Jessop 2002), “capitalism of the financial market”
(Windolf 2005), or “project-based capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2003)—
have not, to date, led Habermas to revise the architecture of his theory, devote
renewed attention to capitalism, or change his analytical vocabulary.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1979. “Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft? Einleitungsvor-

trag zum 16. Deutschen Soziologentag.” In Soziologische Schriften, 1:354–370. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
Blanke, Bernhard, Ulrich Jürgens, and Hans Kastendiek. 1975. Kritik der Politischen Wis-
senschaft: Analysen von Politik und Ökonomie in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. 2 vols.
Frankfurt: Campus.
Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello. 2003. Der neue Geist des Kapitalismus. Konstanz: UVK.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1968. “Zum Geleit.” Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse, 9–16. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
In Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der inter-
nationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, 406–459. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
Hilferding, Rudolf. 1981. Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Develop-
ment, ed. Tom Bottomore. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Jessop, Bob. 2002. The Future of the Capitalist State. Oxford: Polity.
Mandel, Ernest. 1975. Late Capitalism. Trans. Joris De Bres. London: NLB.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Indus-
trial Society. Boston: Beacon.
Moszkowska, Natalie.1943. Zur Dynamik des Spätkapitalismus. Zurich: Aufbruch.
576 Concepts
Offe, Claus. 1972. Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

——. 2006. “Erneute Lektüre: Die ‘Strukturprobleme’ nach 33 Jahren.” In Strukturprob-
leme des kapitalistischen Staates. Veränderte Neuausgabe, hrsg. und eingel. von Jens
Borchert und Stephan Lessenich, 181–196. Frankfurt: Campus.
Pribram, Karl. 1983. A History of Economic Reasoning. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press.
Sombart, Werner. 1987. Der moderne Kapitalismus: Historisch-systematische Darstellung
des gesamteuropäischen Wirtschaftslebens von seinen Anfängen bis zur. Gegenwart.
Munich: DTV.
Windolf, Paul, ed. 2005. Finanzmarktkapitalismus: Analysen zum Wandel von Produktion-
sregimen. Sonderheft 45 der Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie.
Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
62
LEARNING PROCESSES
GERTRUD NUNNER-WINKLER
U
nlike genetically determined changes that occur in the process of
maturation, changes through learning result from experience.
By definition, learning processes—because they occur over a
longer period of time—are distinct from punctual instances of learning
(“imprinting”). As Habermas defines them, they do not refer to the acquisition
of motor skills (for example, swimming), simple cultural aptitudes (Kultur-
techniken), or narrowly delimited systems of knowledge (for example, reading
and writing or mathematical abilities). Instead, learning processes concern
the formation of the (cognitive or moral) capacity of judgment.
Unlike the learning mechanisms that behaviorism and psychoanalysis
investigate—which involve classical and operant conditioning and the intro-
jection or cultural transformation of biological need structures—what inter-
ests Habermas is not the passive adoption of given patterns of behavior or
value orientations but subjects’ self-directed and consciously accessible mental
constructions. At the same time, the focus does not fall on positive contents
but on structures of judgment. For Habermas, “learning process” refers to a
normative concept: on rational grounds, both actors and observers identify
the new views as more adequate than those that preceded them. The approach
derives from Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg’s developmental theory but
was also transferred from an individual plane to a collective one. Two ques-
tions follow: What are the criteria for evaluating learning processes? And what
is it that motivates them?
Individual Learning Processes
The normative notion of developmental progress may be illustrated by

increases in role-taking abilities. Younger children believe that the world is as
they see it. Subsequently, they recognize that others see the world in a different
manner—and eventually realize that people are capable of knowing about the
differences between their own perspective and the views of others. During
adolescence, maturing subjects learn to adopt the system perspective: now
they no longer consider only the intentions of parties who are concretely
578 Concepts
involved in a given situation but also the functional demands of life in society.
Finally, the “prior-to-society-perspective” at the highest level of development
permits social arrangements as they actually occur to be questioned from the
(hypothetical) perspective of all reasonable beings.
It is incontestable that awareness of the way one’s own perceptions are
bound to a particular standpoint makes it possible to achieve a view of the
world that is more adequate to reality. What proves decisive for Habermas,
however, is that this learning process plays a constitutive role in the develop-
ment of a secular understanding of morality. Instead of being derived from
what is simply given (the word of God, sacrosanct tradition, ideas of natural
law, and so on), norms are now considered valid because all parties who are
(potentially) affected could freely accept them because they lie in the rational
interest of everyone. By this standard, solutions to moral dilemmas are appro-
priate to the extent that participants are capable of taking the roles of others—
that is, validity increases the more inclusive the circle of parties whose interests
actors can understand and take into consideration.
Children develop their cognitive and sociocognitive abilities by engaging
with the physical and social worlds. The process moves forward when resis-
tance is experienced in the physical environment and contradiction occurs
in social interactions (especially among others of the same age—including
friends), as well as through discussion of dilemmas. The highest levels of
development—i.e., formal-operational thinking and critical reflection on pre-
vailing norms in terms of universalizability—are only achieved in complex
societies and through a formal system of education. Here, learners systemati-
cally consider situations that are not, in fact, given; the experience of conflict-
ing norms (in subsystems and subcultures within the larger society) compels
subjects to seek universally justifiable solutions on a metalevel. In this sense,
Habermas (1987) speaks of, e.g., “university learning processes” (universitäre
Lernprozesse) that go beyond academic training and liberate subjects from
“one-sidedness” (83) by familiarizing them with the “productive force of
discursive conflict” (96); in addition—and here the matter passes over to the
collective—such processes concern “cultural communication [Selbstverständi-
gung] and public opinion-formation” (80).
Collective Learning Processes
For Habermas, social evolution does not simply result from the variables of
blind chance; it also always involves historical learning processes. Accord-
ingly, he has reconstructed the transformation of the institutionalized form of
conflict regulation (i.e., law) in a way that corresponds to how development
occurs on an individual level (i.e., in terms of morality). The primitive
Learning Processes 579
(vorhochkulturell) orientation to the consequences of action and retribution

is replaced, in archaic high cultures, by an orientation to intentions and
punishment—which in turn leads to a system of administering justice justi-
fied first by tradition and then, in early modernity, by a formal code founded
in natural law and by a principled private morality (Society and Politics, 134).
Under these conditions, claims to universality conflict with public morality
that is still tied to individual states—i.e., there is tension between the cosmo-
politanism of “man” in general and the loyalties of citizens. To resolve the
problem, a new learning process is required. It is necessary for “the dichotomy
between inner- and outer morality to disappear, the opposition between mor-
ally and legally regulated realms to be relativized, and the validity of all norms
to be tied to the discursive will-formation of all who might be potentially
affected” (327). This requisite learning process seeks to continue the Kantian
project (Naturalism, 314).
Later legal forms are “better” insofar as growing numbers of human beings
are granted more and more basic rights. In this way, simple restrictions on
power are replaced, first, by the “rule of law” and then by the self-determina-
tion of democratic nation-states; finally—at least in theory—“cosmopolitan
law as a law of individuals” (314) may be achieved. Civil and human rights—
which initially were secured negatively, by limits on power—are “complete”
when political, social, economic, and cultural rights are granted.
Collective learning processes of this kind are motivated by a combination
of intentional action and systemic growth (318). At earlier stages of develop-
ment, one can find anticipations of evolution in select individuals’ capacities
for learning, which translate into worldviews that social systems enlist when
their steering capacities are overtaxed (Society and Politics, 131ff.). In the tran-
sition to a world society (which is now underway), social evolution begins with
the institutionalization of a legal order (Rechtssetzung) that effects a change of
consciousness among those to whom it is addressed. The matter involves a
“constructive, self-referential, and circular learning process” (Naturalism, 321)
propelled by discourses that proceed through the exchange of arguments, are
inclusive and open, and occur free of external and internal constraints (Facts,
306).
At the same time, the question arises—and not just on an international level
but already on a national scale—whether public discourses oriented toward
truth still exist in mass societies (Faltering). In Habermas’s view, the replace-
ment of real interactions and the asymmetrical structure of mass media make
discourse participants who pose questions and offer responses to one another
into spectators and consumers—likewise, beliefs articulated on the basis of
validity claims simply become opinions. Ultimately, the question can only be
answered empirically—even though Habermas gives good reason to sup-
pose that a public circulation of views that is as undirected (ungesteuert) as
580 Concepts
possible produces pressures of rationalization that improve the quality of

political decisions. (That said, this holds only when it is certain that the inde-
pendence of a self-regulating media system is tied both to the informed dis-
courses of elites and to a receptive civil society.)
Other authors who seek to explain collective learning processes focus
attention on the experiences and struggles of the actors. To mention a few
examples: it is claimed that the better treatment of slaves in ancient Israel was
based on the “continuously present ‘counter-memory’ of the ‘Egyptian house
of bondage’ ” (Brunkhorst 2000, 69); workers owe their increased rights of
participating in material prosperity to massive uprisings (which were nour-
ished by outrage at social inequalities made more acute by industrialization
and identified as manmade [Moore 1978]) in the years following the First
World War; women secured voting rights at the beginning of the twentieth
century only through intensive protests—and under massive pressure by
transnational organizations, domestic violence was defined as a violation of
human rights only in the 1990s (Buckel 2008).
These examples attest to normative progress, but they offer no guarantees.
There are also “learning processes with a deadly outcome” (Kluge 1996). One
may consider the painful termination of the “Starnberg Project”—which had
an unusually discursive form of organization—as a case in point.
References
Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2000. Einführung in die Geschichte politischer Ideen. Munich: Fink.
Buckel, Sonja. 2008. “Feministische Erfolge im transnationalen Recht.” Leviathan 36, no. 1:
54–75.
Kluge, Alexander. 1996. Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome. Trans. Christopher
Pavsek. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Moore, Barrington. 1978. Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt. New York:
Random House.
63
LEGAL WARS VERSUS
LEGITIMATE WARS
ANNA GEIS
A
s a public intellectual, Jürgen Habermas has, from the beginning
of his career, taken stands on current events. His political obser-
vations have not avoided an especially touchy matter in liberal
and democratic public spaces: the justification of military intervention. Since
the end of the Cold War, Habermas has—in essays, newspaper pieces, and
interviews—articulated positions on three wars involving Western states: the
first Gulf War (1991), Kosovo (1999), and Iraq (2003). He has said little, in con-
trast, about ongoing activities in Afghanistan (Habermas 1991, 1999; Haber-
mas and Derrida 2003; Divided West).
Habermas prompted the strongest—and most critical—response in jour-
nalistic and academic circles when, in an article for Die Zeit, he defended mili-
tary intervention in Kosovo, which occurred without a UN mandate, as an
anticipation (Vorgriff ) of future cosmopolitanism; to this day, “Bestiality and
Humanity” (Habermas 1999) remains an often-quoted point of reference. Even
though the piece stresses that NATO’s self-empowerment (Selbstermächtigung)
should not become the norm and includes numerous reservations, Habermas
expresses an understanding for the “inevitability of a transitory paternalism.” In
a time of transition, he declares, the dilemma of human-rights politics is that
one is required “to act as though there were already a fully institutionalized
global civil society, the very promotion of which is the intention of the action”
(Habermas 1999, 270).
Adopting a normative perspective on global politics, Habermas advocates
the Kantian project of constitutionalizing international law—that is, the task
of transforming, over the long term, the rights and legal systems of individual
states into a cosmopolitan constitution (Divided West, 123, 149, 159; see chapter
17 in this volume). Even if Habermas rejects Kant’s advocacy of a world repub-
lic, the latter’s thoroughgoing juridification of international relations has pro-
vided the normative standard for Habermas’s political reflections on wars
since 1990. At the same time, one may also discern a certain sobriety that has
surfaced in his reflections on steps made toward constitutionalization—a view
582 Concepts
that has been expressed in his increasingly pointed critiques of the policies of
the United States.
Already during the first Gulf War, Habermas (1991) criticized the tendency
of the sole Western superpower to make a justified “police action” into an
“entirely normal war” for securing its own interests in the Near East. During
the Kosovo War, Habermas articulated the differences between the ways
Americans and (continental) Europeans view human-rights politics even
more clearly. The latter, he observed, are inclined to promote the further
juridification of international relations, whereas the former consider it their
national mission as the world power to pursue human rights (Habermas 1999,
269). In the 2003 Iraq War, this normative disagreement culminated in the
“divided West”—a development for which Habermas holds the United States
largely responsible.
Habermas considered the Gulf War and the Kosovo War—which proved
central for the West in the 1990s—to be justified “police actions.” Despite
his criticism of the way military operations were conducted and their unin-
tended consequences, he declared that they promoted cosmopolitanism, at
least in principle (Habermas 1991, 1999). In contrast, Habermas has con-
demned the so-called War on Terror decreed by the United States after 2001—
including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—as “calamitous setbacks” for the
project of constitutionalizing international relations (Divided West, 148; Ter-
ror): “Instead of the kind of international police operation we had hoped for
during the war in Kosovo, we have, once again, old-fashioned wars, albeit con-
ducted with state-of-the-art technology” (Divided West, 11).
Habermas has not discussed his precise conception of what “war” means.
However, his criticism of the “War on Terror” proclaimed by George W. Bush
makes it clear that he links the concept of war to the use of force between
states (Divided West, 97). Habermas considers it a “grave mistake”—both nor-
matively and pragmatically—to speak of a “war” on terror, since this designa-
tion lends terrorists the status of war criminals, and, moreover, it is impossible
to wage a war against a hardly graspable network (Divided West, 32, 98).
Accordingly, in his philosophical writings on constitutionalization, Habermas
has abandoned the concept of “war” and instead chosen to speak of “police
actions.” In the long-term perspective of a global legal order, military confron-
tations are destined to assume “the character of police actions and operations
of criminal justice” (Divided West, 123).
This interpretation of military intervention as the use of “police force” is
problematic insofar as international relations find themselves in a state of
transition from classical international law to cosmopolitan conditions—the
ambivalent nature of which is becoming clearer and clearer. The basic prob-
lem involves the enormous differences in power between the legitimating but
relatively weak authority of the United Nations, on the one hand, and, on the
Legal Wars Versus Legitimate Wars 583
other, the power of nation-states that are capable of military action—and pur-
sue their own interests in “partisan” fashion (Habermas 1999, 270). In reality,
the supranational capacities of the world organization—which, in Habermas’s
conception, should not restrict its activities to securing peace and human
rights—are underinstitutionalized and lack resources. This both harms the
credibility of the United Nations and makes it possible for states that are ready
to act to issue their own warrants—with the result that a “would-be police
action . . . becomes indistinguishable from a run-of-the-mill war” (Divided
West, 20).
Habermas has sharply condemned the Iraq War in 2003 as illegal. He holds
that it represented an “obvious” and unprecedented violation of international
law and that it occurred without justification (Divided West, 85). Moreover,
the developments leading to the conflict amount to an about-face in interna-
tional law inasmuch as the actions of the United States raise the question
whether the juridification of international politics is to be replaced by an ethi-
cization of world politics that intends to erect a global order on the basis of
hegemonic liberalism (Divided West, 116). The Iraq War has prompted Haber-
mas to emphasize that military actions must be strictly bound by international
law; after all, provisions in the charter of the United Nations establishing pro-
cedures for identifying and punishing violations have represented a decisive
step toward the constitutionalization of world politics: “Since then, we no lon-
ger have just and unjust wars, only legal or illegal ones, depending on whether
they are justified or unjustified under international law” (Divided West, 102).
In pronouncing this judgment, Habermas takes distance both from John
Rawls and from Michael Walzer, who hold fast to the notion of the “just war.”
Whereas Rawls (by Habermas’s account) wishes to leave decisions about
enforcing international justice to a liberal elite of states, Walzer considers the
matter to fall to the governments concerned—whether they are democratic or
not (Divided West, 101). Walzer’s conception of a “just war” is problematic for
Habermas above all because judgments are not tied to inclusive and impartial
procedures for producing and applying norms—and it is only by this means
that reciprocal exchanges of position and due consideration of mutual inter-
ests can occur (see chapters 51 and 53 in this volume). Because the criteria for
determining “just wars” are essentially ethical and political in nature, their
use demands prudence and a sense of justice on the part of nation-states
(Divided West, 104).
Here, Habermas’s positions on the wars in Iraq and Kosovo conflict on a
few points. The engagement in Kosovo proved controversial especially in Ger-
many because the United Nations had issued no explicit mandate and because
the Bundeswehr was deployed in a combat mission (in the narrow sense) for
the first time (e.g., Lutz 2000). Some advocates conceded that it was illegal—
because there was no mandate—yet defended its moral legitimacy because it
584 Concepts
occurred to avert a humanitarian catastrophe; for this reason, they under-

stood it in terms of the doctrine of a “just war” (see Mayer 1999). The engage-
ment was accompanied by a strongly moralizing discourse; members of
NATO—graciously including Turkey in the coalition of democratic and con-
stitutional states—considered that they possessed sufficient legitimation
to act.
Habermas (1999) acknowledged this perspective in positive terms by inter-
preting it as an “anticipation”—and not a violation—of international law. In
part, he has affirmed this view subsequently (Divided West, 35, 86). That is: in
the case of the Kosovo War, Habermas abandoned strict adherence to the
mandate of the UN Security Council—upon which he then insisted for the
Iraq War. Ultimately, he makes the questionable point that intervention in
Kosovo was justified by the “undisputed democratic and constitutional char-
acter of all the states participating in the vicarious military coalition” (Divided
West, 29). It is worth noting, in this context, that Habermas also affirmed,
apropos of the war in Iraq, that the democratic hegemon is bound to inclusive
discursive procedures for epistemic reasons (Divided West, 185); in the case of
Kosovo, however, he deemed exclusive deliberation among Western states to
be adequate. Are the nineteen member states in NATO not subject to cognitive
limitations? Habermas’s epistemic privileging of a group of democracies is
unconvincing, especially inasmuch as it recalls recent efforts by American
theorists of international law to privilege democracies politically, legally, and
morally in global politics—a matter that contradicts Habermas’s Kantian
objectives.
Finally, beyond the wars in Kosovo and Iraq, it remains unclear how the
difference between police force and military force is to be conceived in con-
crete terms—the role of troops remains strangely indistinct. Habermas has
called for ius in bello to be expanded to include the right to intervene in a way
that resembles the rights of domestic police forces, as well as for fine-tuned
regulation of how military power is employed (Divided West, 100). Here, he
considers that, e.g., “precision weapons” represent a favorable development
(Divided West, 174). However, these brief hints do not make it clear how the
effects and collateral damages of concrete deployments of (police) force could
be lessened for civilians to any meaningful extent.
The way Western powers conducted operations in Kosovo and Iraq (includ-
ing the use of “precision weapons”) hardly permits one to expect that the pro-
tection of civilians on the opposing side might trump protection afforded to
one’s own soldiers (see Shaw 2005). Habermas turns a blind eye to a key ques-
tion in discussions of “just” wars: whether states ready to perform “police
actions” would be prepared to accept sacrifices on their own side and take
greater risks for the sake of sparing civilians (see Walzer 2004, 73–74).
Legal Wars Versus Legitimate Wars 585
References
Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. “Wider die Logik des Krieges.” Die Zeit (February 15, 1991).
——. 1999. “Bestiality and Humanity: A War on the Border Between Legality and Moral-
ity.” Constellations 6, no. 3: 263–272.
Habermas, Jürgen, and Jacques Derrida. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues
with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Interview by Giovanna Borradori. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Lutz, Dieter S., ed. 2000. Der Kosovo-Krieg: Rechtliche und rechtsethische Aspekte. Baden-
Baden: Nomos.
Mayer, Peter. 1999. “War der Krieg der NATO gegen Jugoslawien moralisch gerechtfer-
tigt?” Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen 6, no. 2: 287–321.
Shaw, Martin. 2005. The New Western Way of War. London: Polity.
Walzer, Michael. 2004. “The Politics of Rescue.” In Arguing About War, 67–84. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press.
64
LEGALIT Y, LEGITIMACY, AND
LEGITIMATION
RAINER NICKEL
H
abermas first developed a positive conception of legitimacy at
the beginning of the 1970s, when he took up Max Weber’s sociol-
ogy of government (Herrschaftssoziologie) and the Marxist cri-
tique of capitalism (Legitimation; Rekonstruktion). Legitimacy, as he has
defined it, means the “worthiness of recognition [Anerkennungswürdigkeit] of
a political order” (Rekonstruktion, 271). Legitimation Crisis, which dates from
this period, focuses on the production of meaning (and crises of meaning)
within the capitalist system—when the administration can shoulder economic
problems but can no longer account for its operations (Legitimation, 98).
Weber’s (1978) analysis of the legitimacy of rational rule offers no way out of
such a dilemma. In this perspective, legitimacy is an empirical phenomenon.
As Habermas observes, Weber requires that only two conditions be fulfilled:
“(a) the normative order must be established positively; and (b) those legally
associated must believe in its legality, that is, in the formally correct procedure
for the creation and application of laws” (Legitimation, 98). Habermas coun-
ters this conception with a notion that starts from the “truth-dependency of
belief in legitimacy.” This means that the procedure of creating and applying
laws “does not suffice” to generate legitimacy and that “grounds for the legiti-
mating force of . . . formal procedure must be given” (98).
Modern parliamentarianism and forms of political thinking oriented on
popular sovereignty consider a positive conception of legitimacy backward
(rückwärtsgewandt) because it permits legitimacy to oppose—and, indeed,
even to trump—parliamentary legality in the name of a “higher” authority.
Carl Schmitt—with his unrivalled eye for the obsolete—made this very point
in Constitutional Theory (1928) by pitting legality (that is, the positivity of law)
against legitimacy: legality, he argued, is only legitimate because it expresses a
“political existence” that itself admits no justification. Political unity, as a
given fact, “requires no justification via an ethical or juristic norm. Instead, it
makes sense in terms of political existence. A norm would not at all be in a
position to justify anything here” (Schmitt 2008, 136).
Legality, Legitimacy, and Legitimation 587
Habermas rejects this view on the grounds that it is decisionistic (Legitima-

tion, 99); likewise, he rejects Niklas Luhmann’s conception of procedure,
which also assumes an arbitrary instance admitting no further justification
(or, at any rate, one that operates independently of truth [cf. Luhmann 1975,
20–25]). The background of the issue is twofold. For one, it follows from the
heated debate about the legitimacy of positive law that occurred in the politi-
cal laboratory of Weimar Germany (especially in exchanges between Schmitt,
Hans Kelsen, and Hermann Heller; see Dyzenhaus 1997). Second, the matter
concerns the extent to which unjust rule may find legitimation. (In the fore-
word to the new edition of Legitimität durch Verfahren, Luhmann even found
it necessary to defend himself against the charge that his theory made it pos-
sible to legitimize concentration camps [Luhmann 1975, 1–2].)
Habermas does not oppose a doctrine of natural law or a system of ethical
values (Wertethik) to decisionism, because these efforts to determine material-
ground norms have failed, in his estimation (Legitimation, 100). Rather, he
appeals to discourse theory—that is, to the justification of norms of action
through reasoned argument (101ff.). To this end, he introduces a concept of
procedural legitimation (esp. Rekonstruktion, 277–279) resting on validity
claims that admit criticism (Rekonstruktion, 329). For all that, however, he
leaves the sociophilosophical notion of legitimation strangely undecided inas-
much as he suspects “written bourgeois constitutions” of ideology (Legitima-
tion, 101) and locates the core reason for legitimation deficits in class structures
(Rekonstruktion, 320). Likewise, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981)
fails to offer a “deeper” alternative to decisionism and/or the doctrine of natu-
ral law. Instead, the book problematizes the modern welfare state, whose social
politics are tainted by ambivalence inasmuch as they assure freedom, on the
one hand, while withdrawing it, on the other; indeed, its tendencies toward
juridification entail the “colonization of the lifeworld” (Communicative
Action, 2:322).
In Between Facts and Norms (1992) Habermas presents the conditions of
legitimation for late-capitalist rule by elaborating the conditions for produc-
ing legitimate law(s). “How Is Legitimacy Possible on the Basis of Legality?”
(Habermas 1994, 541ff.; resp. Habermas 1988)—which he first delivered as part
of the Tanner lecture series at Harvard University—marks a turning point.
Here, Habermas addresses law itself and develops a procedural conception of
legitimacy on the basis of the principle of discourse:
The proceduralist understanding of law . . . qualifies the preconditions of

communication and conditions of procedure in democratic opinion and will
formation as the sole source of legitimation. It is just as incompatible with the
Platonic notion that positive law can derive its legitimacy from a higher law
588 Concepts
as it is with the overly empiricist denial of any legitimacy that reaches beyond
the contingencies of legislative decisions.
(Habermas 1994, 664)
To be sure, this postmetaphysical and procedural conception of law cannot do

without legislation and rights for support; however, the latter are not pre-
formed, as it were, by natural law but must instead be spelled out—as a sys-
tem—through the process of self-legislation (Facts, 118ff.).
Habermas holds that the constitutional state and democracy are linked
internally and cannot be pitted against each other or viewed as independent
entities. Accordingly, legitimacy cannot arise through an arbitrary form of
legality but only through legislation that occurs in the framework of a demo-
cratic and constitutional state: “the conditions of legitimacy for democratic
law must be sought in the rationality of the legislative process itself” (1988,
237). Because it is fused with the procedure of democratic legislation (and with
a rational procedure in the courts), Habermas’s conception of law approaches
the systems-theoretical conception of legitimation through procedure (even
though systems theory lacks a conception of democracy of its own and recog-
nizes normative efficacy only in strictly factual terms). Now, the critical view
of the potentially destructive force of empowering the public sphere (Ver-
machtung der Öffentlichkeit) and the concomitant risks of reifying and colo-
nizing social relations—which were central to his early writings—yields to an
abstract model of legitimation that uncannily resembles that of the Constitu-
tion of the Federal Republic of Germany (and that of the democratic and con-
stitutional state more generally).
However, if Habermas formulated a coherent conception of legitimation for
the nation-state in Between Facts and Norms, its conditions for emergence
have dissolved since then. What fits together perfectly in the context of the
individual state does not translate into a postnational constellation. The well-
ordered, procedural concept of legitimation developed for the nation-state
founders on the absent structures of a vigorous supra- or transnational global
public sphere. Consequently, the constitutionalization of international law
that Habermas has since proposed (Divided West, 113–193) enlists different
parameters of legitimation than the democratic and constitutional state.
Henceforth, the task of legitimating legal regulations is carried by a constitu-
tion of the “liberal” kind—which is to be connected with the legitimation
structures of the nation-state in a way that Habermas has only roughly
sketched out (Divided West, 139ff.).
The viability of this approach to legitimation is questionable. The regulatory
structures of world society, although largely independent (verselbständigt)
on an executive level, have—at least until now—been “counterbalanced” only
by a weakly formed global public sphere (Brunkhorst 2005); moreover, the
Legality, Legitimacy, and Legitimation 589
parliaments of nation-states seem hopelessly overtaxed when confronted with

the superior power of knowledge and decision that the executive wields (Lübbe-
Wolff 2009, Nickel 2009). In seeking the parameters of supra- and transnational
juridification that fulfills the demands of substantive legitimation, Habermas’s
procedural conception of legitimation must yet prove itself in the postnational
constellation.
References
Dyzenhaus, David. 1997. Legality and Legitimacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1988. “Law and Morality.” In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed.
Sterling McMurrin, 8:217–250. Salt Lake City: Utah University Press.
——. 1994. Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des
demokratischen Rechtsstaats. 4th ed. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Lübbe-Wolff, Gertrude. 2009. “Die Internationalisierung der Politik und die Machtver-
luste der Parlamente.” In Soziale Welt. Sonderheft: Demokratie in der Weltgesellschaft,
ed. Hauke Brunkhorst, 127–142. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Luhmann, Niklas. 1975. Legitimation durch Verfahren. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Nickel, Rainer. 2009. “Verwaltungsrecht und Rechtsverwaltung in der Weltgesellschaft.”
In Soziale Welt. Sonderheft: Demokratie in der Weltgesellschaft, ed. Hauke Brunkhorst,
143–158. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Schmitt, Carl. 2008. Constitutional Theory. Trans. Jeffrey Seitzer. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press.
65
MASS CULTURE AND CULTURAL
CRITICISM
GERTRUD KOCH
H
abermas’s understanding of “mass culture” is indebted to
Adorno. Accordingly, it does not refer to culture produced by the
masses but rather to culture that is produced on a massive scale.
Liberal, bourgeois culture is made by and for the bourgeoisie, yet this does not
mean that consumers and producers are identical—rather, producers and con-
sumers build a public sphere in a shared social stratum. Such a transformation
of internal topology does not occur under the conditions of mass democracy,
however. Mass culture addresses the masses only as consumers—and in the
atomized form of private property, at that—without affording any liberal grat-
ifications. Its anonymous mode of production makes mass culture into a
medium that largely serves private property. In mass democracy, interests are
administered by the welfare state, and they are no longer negotiated in the
public sphere by parties possessed of equal property rights.
Therefore, Habermas argues, the idealized and ideologically restricted
model provided by bourgeois culture loses its foundation in mass democracy
and the modern welfare state. A “structural transformation of the public
sphere” occurs, which amounts to a kind of “refeudalization.” Organizations
pursue their interests behind closed doors and, at the same time, “must assure
themselves at least of plebiscitary assent in the population by developing dis-
plays of public relations [demonstrative Publizität]” (“Öffentlichkeit. Ein
Lexikonartikel,” 1964, reprinted in Kultur und Kritik, 68; this volume col-
lects essays situated between Structural Transformation and Communicative
Action).
The masses, then, neither transform into an active class—as Marx thought
should occur—nor are they sovereign. They dissolve, so to speak, into an array
of groups administered from outside (e.g., employees and taxpayers), whose
consensus on individual administrative actions is sought only by plebiscite.
Mass culture attests, in a certain measure, to the empty space that gapes
between the participatory public spheres of earlier times and the public
spheres not yet organized by mass democracy in the welfare state. This is the
same gap into which the concept of “the masses” has itself disappeared.
Mass Culture and Cultural Criticism 591
However, the dissolution of the masses into classes—or, as the case may be,
into forms of organization provided by the welfare state—cannot lessen the
impression that the term “mass” vanishes in a mounting tautology (tautologisch
zum Verschwinden gebracht wird). The blank space is immediately surpassed
inasmuch as the masses—in this (obsolete) model—can only be conceived as a
kind of formless matter that requires shaping either into a class or along institu-
tional lines. In both cases, the masses dissolve into the new forms. At the same
time, the semantic surplus of the concept remains evident in composite notions
such as “mass media,” “mass democracy,” “mass communication,” and so on.
Habermas’s concept of the political public sphere addresses this problem.
He follows, in a first step, the model of the aesthetically appreciative public
(kunsträsonierendes Publikum)—that is, the matter is conceived in terms of
internal participation. When discussing the development of modern society—
in which social spheres close themselves off to the others—Habermas invokes
Adorno once more: art achieves autonomy at the cost of growing more and
more hermetic and detached (Ein- und Abkapselung); this makes critical
distance from society possible in the first place. Mass culture, on the other
hand, succumbs to economic and stabilizing modes of affirmation that secure
domination. In The Theory of Communicative Action (which adopts a histori-
cal perspective), Habermas emphasizes the importance of a “differentiated
assessment of the complex and contradictory character both of forms of inte-
gration in postliberal societies and of family socialization and mass culture”
(2:381), in light of Walter Benjamin’s theoretical observations—and, moreover,
with reference to views of mass communication derived from systems theory
and sociology.
In keeping with the division between “system” and “lifeworld,” Habermas
also distinguishes different functions performed by the mass media. He does
not classify the latter as “steering media” but views them, instead, as “general-
ized forms of communication” (Communicative Action, 2:390). In the shift
from “mass culture” to “mass media,” a far-reaching semantic transformation
takes place. The notion of “culture industry” that Adorno and Horkheimer
introduced in Dialectic of Enlightenment—which seems to have formed the
basis of Habermas’s initial understanding of “mass culture”—is rearranged, by
way of a kind of theoretical “castling” (which represents a general paradigm
shift) from the realm of system to that of communication. In this new frame-
work, the sender/receiver model centered on domination (Herrschaft) gives
way to a flexible and dynamically open net structure; conceived along these
lines, the specific contexts of the lifeworld (e.g., regional particularities) prove
irreducible, yet—at the same time—their horizon constitutes a kind of public
sphere that expands perspectives in both spatial and temporal terms.
A rigid, predetermined order no longer holds, then. Although the direction
of “streams of communication” can be hierarchical and controlling, they offer
592 Concepts
“emancipatory potential” that prevents participants in the network from being

“taken over” (gleichgeschaltet) by a single interest group. It follows that “mass
media” are “ambivalent,” at the very least. That is, they are demonstrably
open—both as a matter of principle and in a way that admits empirical dem-
onstration. (For example, they admit minorities and social movements such as
feminist and civil-rights groups.)
However, “mass culture” does not exist at all, but only via mass media as
their bearer. In comparison to writings from the 1960s, Habermas’s recent
works refer more positively to the openness of the public sphere anchored in
communication. Here, his reflections connect with Hannah Arendt’s political
theory and conception of power (which Habermas calls “communicative
power” to distinguish it from Talcott Parsons’s conception of power along
administrative lines). Therefore—and now as then—the stubbornly blank
space that “the masses” occupy remains opaque. In Habermas’s differentiated
theory of mass-mediated communication, the masses disintegrate into groups
formed and generated by the lifeworld. The promise of constantly expanding
horizons has left room for a new definition, but it has remained unfilled.
This fact may be related to the way Habermas connects “mass culture” with
the matter of “cultural criticism.” As a rule, “mass culture” is discussed in terms
of “cultural criticism” (whether the perspective is Marxist, conservative, or lib-
eral), where it is held to destroy values (e.g., those of the bourgeois family or
art)—or else it amounts to the affirmative celebration of everything by every-
one. Habermas seeks a middle ground. Even when he posits an “emancipatory”
or “critical” potential within “mass culture”—in the form of the public sphere,
which emerges through “mass media”—he does not view the “masses” them-
selves as a critical instance; instead, they display this quality only inasmuch as
individual groupings within them undergo (political) transformation.
In this context, Between Facts and Norms has shifted the conceptual accent
of “mass culture.” In so doing, it does not modify the distinctions made in The
Theory of Communicative Action so much as it adduces validity claims made
by art and religion. All same, the “sobriety of a secular, unreservedly egalitar-
ian mass culture” (Facts, 490) that Habermas calls for remains affirmative
insofar as it avoids the “negativity of modern art.” It is still the case that only
when “the trivial” is broken through and the “radically indisponsible” (radikal
Unverfügbaren) is brought to light that a potential for change exists. Haber-
mas leaves the question open whether it is possible to conceive of a form of
“mass culture” that might survive the confrontations this entails. Art’s critical
potential for radical negation once more assumes the traits of an alternate
concept (Gegenbegriff); the dialectical relationship between Enlightenment
and emancipation through culture stands at issue, again.
The question of mass culture also remains open because Habermas has, to
date, offered no analysis that might be tested with any methodological rigor.
Mass Culture and Cultural Criticism 593
On occasion, he has discussed works of art, but he has not devoted significant
attention to phenomena of mass culture. Early on—if in isolation—Habermas
mentioned films in journalistic pieces. His more recent articles, in contrast,
focus mainly on the political consequences that arise from the progressive
commodification and monopolization of both the public media and indepen-
dent newspapers.
66
POSTMETAPHYSICAL THINKING
GEORG LOHMANN
F
or Habermas, “postmetaphysical thinking” (nachmetaphysisches
Denken) refers to the only ways of pursuing philosophy still pos-
sible in today’s world. He employs the term in two senses: first, in a
critical/negative capacity that is meant to counter the “return to metaphysics”
he diagnoses; and second, as a positive designation for the philosophical
thinking that can only occur after—and according to (nach)—metaphysics,
i.e., thinking that does not abandon the claim to comprehensive rationality. In
historical terms, postmetaphysical thinking belongs to the tradition of the
Young Hegelians (Discourse, 53ff.; Postmetaphysical, 124). As a critical coun-
terconcept opposed to metaphysics (which extends, in Habermas’s eyes, from
Plato to Hegel), it turns against three aspects of the metaphysical tradition:
“the theme of unity within the philosophy of origins,” “the equation of being
with thought,” and “the redemptive significance of the contemplative life”; in
brief, it opposes “identity thinking, the doctrine of ideas, and the strong con-
cept of theory” (Postmetaphysical, 29). Habermas uses the term to describe
numerous philosophical currents after Hegel. As the name for his own
approach and style, postmetaphysical thinking defends—as a “stand-in”—the
universal conception of rationality given in the communicative structures of
the lifeworld (Postmetaphysical, 14).
Habermas employed the term for the first time in his debate with Dieter
Henrich (Habermas 1985; 1988, 267ff.). The latter, after taking a position in
Munich (1981), sought “to renew the claim of metaphysics.” Sketching “reha-
bilitation attempts” of metaphysics and currents in twentieth-century phi-
losophy that oppose them, Habermas describes Henrich’s interpretations
of the “purposeful life” (bewusstes Leben) as the effort, founded in the the-
ory of consciousness, to lend philosophy the power of metaphysics once
more by “combining” self-description of the ideal life and a “conclusive”
(abschließende) perspective that counters the naturalism of the sciences
(Henrich 1982, 1987).
The critical encounter with Henrich’s modern project of metaphysics
prompted Habermas to articulate the “themes of postmetaphysical thinking”
(Postmetaphysical, 28–56). Postmetaphysical thinking, he argues, responds to
the convulsions that have been shaking metaphysics since the seventeenth
century—upheavals that, “in the final analysis,” are “socially conditioned”
(33). This occurs along new lines: through “procedural rationality,” “situating
reason,” the “linguistic turn,” and the “deflation . . . of extraordinary events”
(33). Needless to say, these general features of postmetaphysical thinking are
not unproblematic; accordingly, Habermas seeks to defend his understanding
of postmetaphysical thinking—which he elaborates from the perspective of
communicative action—against competing projects.
In contrast to metaphysics—which affirms the unity of thinking and the
world—natural science and formalist approaches to morality and law focus on
the “rationality . . . of [the] procedures” through which knowledge is gained,
the distinction (Ausdifferenzierung) between examining nature and the mind
(Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften), and the fallibilism of scientific theories
(36ff.). For all that, Habermas argues, philosophy should neither assimilate
itself to individual sciences nor stand in opposition to them. Habermas con-
siders that reference to the communicative practice of everyday life makes
postmetaphysical thinking (as he conceives it) possible. Through procedures of
rationally reconstructing the intuitive knowledge of “competently speaking,
acting, and judging subjects,” philosophy can retain its universalistic line of
questioning (Fragestellung)—which concerns “the Whole”—while, at the same
time, not laying claim “to a method, an object realm, or even just a style of
intuition” (38). Conceived this way, postmetaphysical thinking—by perform-
ing the roles of stand-in and interpreter—remains critical both of the “com-
mon sense” of everyday practice and of immoderate (ausgreifend) claims
advanced by individual sciences.
The postmetaphysical ambition to situate reason motivated the Young
Hegelians’ critique of idealism (Discourse, 53ff.). According to Habermas,
however, the matter was pursued to better effect by the projects of histori-
cism, Lebensphilosophie, and phenomenology, which detranscendentalized
the basic concepts of Kantian transcendental philosophy (Postmetaphysical,
10ff.). It is only through the paradigm shift from the philosophy of con-
sciousness to the philosophy of language (Habermas 2001), he maintains,
that reason may now properly be situated in the communicative praxis of a
shared lifeworld.
At the same time, Habermas contends, the linguistic turn—which has
enabled the philosophy of language to critique the philosophy of conscious-
ness in any number of ways—requires modification along the lines of formal
pragmatism. Only by doing so can one address the problem of individuality,
which otherwise defies the philosophy of language. The “analysis of the uni-
versal presuppositions that must be fulfilled if participants in communication
are to be able to come to an understanding with each other about something
596 Concepts
in the world” (Postmetaphysical, 46; cf. Truth) makes it clear that “all under-
standing is . . . always simultaneously non-understanding” (Wilhelm von
Humboldt). The formal-pragmatic conditions for linguistic understanding
that he reconstructs are supposed to account for both “individuation” and
“socialization” (Postmetaphysical, 149ff.).
The fourth element of postmetaphysical thinking may be understood as a
consequence of the preceding: a deflation of the everyday occurs when one
refuses the “classical precedence of theory” over practice (Truth, 280ff.) and, in
so doing, situates philosophy next to—and not above—the sciences. “Post-
metaphysical thinking” that has an index in lifeworld praxis is meant to avert
two dangers. First, it protects the critique of Western logocentrism from suc-
cumbing to defeatist skepticism about the power of reason. In addition, it
guards against the danger of presuming to assign value to a given form of liv-
ing. Because postmetaphysical philosophy “surrenders its extraordinary sta-
tus” (Postmetaphysical, 51), it is able to provide critical mediation between the
lifeworld and the sciences. At the same time, however, “it continues to coexist
with religious practice” (51). In this respect, philosophy’s relationship with
religion entails the obligation of performing “redemptive criticism” (Benja-
min). As Habermas puts it, this is to occur by “translating” religious contents
“into justifying discourses” (51).
Postmetaphysical thinking has come to play an especially prominent
role in the exchanges with religion that Habermas has pursued of late (Nat-
uralism; Reder and Schmidt 2008; cf. Forum für Philosophie 1999). Because
postmetaphysical philosophy no longer attaches transcendental meaning to
nature and history, it attempts to compensate for the motivational deficits
in practical solidarity that arise. This is to occur, as mentioned, through the
redemptive “translation” of religious notions (Reder and Schmidt 2008,
30–31). For all that, Habermas has also affirmed that philosophy possesses
sufficient resources of its own: against the dangers of postmodern defeat-
ism and naturalism, which place too much stock in science, he puts his trust
in calm (unaufgeregt) postmetaphysical reason (Discourse; Naturalism).
These features of “postmetaphysical thinking” have received a fair amount
of criticism—first, from Henrich himself (Henrich 1987) but also from others
who, like him, doubt that the “non-descriptor” (Nicht-Titel) (Henrich) of
“metaphysics” need be understood as Habermas proposes. Moreover, it has
been argued, Habermas must make his own the very metaphysical assump-
tions he claims to do without (Langthaler 1997, Henrich 2007). However this
may be, the self-critical effort to focus philosophy on the reconstruction of the
reasonable potentials within a preexisting lifeworld, on the one hand, and to
retain the universalistic claims of reason, on the other, represents a leitmotif of
Habermas’s thinking in general—an undertaking that “proves effective by
seeking the middle ground between bare existence and what is merely an
ideal” (Theunissen 1981, 52).
References
Forum für Philosophie Bad Homburg, ed. 1999. Nachmetaphysisches Denken und Religion.
Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1985. “Rückkehr zur Metaphysik – Eine Tendenz in der deutschen Phi-
losophie?” Merkur 39, no. 439–440: 898–905.
——. 1988. Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 2001. Kommunikatives Handeln und detranszendentalisierte Vernunft. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
Henrich, Daniel C. 2007. “Jürgen Habermas: Philosoph ohne metaphysische Rückende-
ckung?” Zeitschrift für Philosophie 55, no. 3: 389–402.
Henrich, Dieter. 1982. Fluchtlinien. Frankfurt.
——. 1987. “Was ist Metaphysik—was Moderne?” In Konzepte: Essays zur Philosophie der
Zeit, 11–43. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Langthaler, Rudolf. 1997. Nachmetaphysisches Denken? Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
Reder, Michael, and Josef Schmidt, eds. 2008. “Ein Bewusstsein von dem, was fehlt”: Eine
Diskussion mit Jürgen Habermas. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Theunissen, Michael. 1981. Kritische Theorie der Gesellschaft: Zwei Studien. Berlin: de
Gruyter.
67
POWER
MAT TIAS ISER
T
he concept of power is of central importance for a critical theory
of society. In academic discussions, however, “power” refers to
different things. A distinction is often made between theories
that focus on “power over” persons or groups and those that speak of “power
to” do or achieve something. Habermas’s theory of society seeks both to clarify
the connections between the most important—and traditionally competing—
conceptions of power and to clarify their normative hierarchy. To this end,
he distinguishes between communicative, administrative, and social power.
With regard to the legitimacy of political processes, the task involves, above
all, determining how the different forms of power influence one another.
Habermas’s main concern is to counter the “illegitimate” “independence of
social and administrative power vis-à-vis democratically generated communi-
cative power” (Facts, 358). Given this effort of synthesis, one must ask, how-
ever, whether Habermas has presented a unified theory of power at all or if he
has not, instead, subsumed entirely different phenomena under a single term.
How, then, do his three conceptions of power relate to one another?
Along the lines articulated by Hannah Arendt, albeit with significant modifi-
cations, Habermas understands “communicative power” as the motivating force
of forceless consensus formation (Profiles, 171ff.; Facts, 147). Arendt stresses col-
lective action in the sense of an increased “power to”; at the same time, she
understands public speech to be an act that reveals one’s self to other subjects.
Habermas, in contrast, emphasizes the cognitive aspect of communicative power
(see also Canovan 1983). Communicative power does not merely concern the fac-
tual ability to act of a cooperating group (whose legitimacy is already guaranteed
by having originated in a free association). Rather, Habermas observes the
(weakly motivating) “power” afforded by discursive insight (Facts, 113).
In keeping with the basic thought that underlies his theory of discourse as
a whole, Habermas considers communicative power to represent the source of
all legitimacy: all voices (and therefore all arguments) should be able to be
heard. For this reason, Habermas—unlike Arendt—is not confident that com-
municative power will always occur spontaneously. Accordingly, he demands
a twofold institutional guarantee. First, the public sphere based in civil society
requires that certain basic rights obtain (and, moreover, that a vital political
culture exist, to function as a sensorium for problem situations in everyday
Power 599
life and to offer a reservoir of convincing reasons). Second, the arguments

articulated in the public sphere must pass through “sluices” (358)—that is, fil-
ters of rationalization—which secure that the solutions proposed really are in
the interest of all affected.
Communicative power, then, is constituted by an adequate interplay
between informal and formal political public spheres. The parliament serves
as the main example of the latter. The parliament is to be “challenged”—in
positive fashion—by the reasonable arguments that are produced in public
discussions; in no case may it be programmed by the social power of particu-
lar groups. In this way, Habermas maintains, the procedure of general, free,
and equal elections guarantees that each citizen can exercise equal influence
on the political composition of the legislative assembly. Moreover, in a parlia-
ment—in contrast to the public sphere—procedural standards can be estab-
lished; for example, a prohibition may be declared on presenting religious
arguments when it is clear that they cannot be shared by all.
However, communicative power does not only require an institutional
framework being safeguarded by the law. It also needs “administrative” power
to provide it with the means of asserting itself. Modern societies, according to
Habermas, must rely on the medium of law underwritten by the force of sanc-
tions in order to provide a counterweight to the cognitive, motivational, and
organizational deficits of morality. Especially where motivation is concerned,
(democratically determined) laws must be implemented even against the
wishes of potentially egoistic individuals—if necessary, by force (92). This rep-
resents “power over” citizens on the part of the state; at the same time, how-
ever, it makes possible—and promotes—the capacity for action of the entire
collective; that is, it is also “power to.”
It is not until this point that “power” comes into play in a specific sense—
namely, as a “delinguistified medium of communication” that performs a
steering function. Unlike the rational motivation that occurs through argu-
ments, this medium of power proves effective because it integrates empirical
motivations (Communicative Action, 2:178)—in particular, the desire to avoid
punishment. On this basis, bureaucratic hierarchies of power can be estab-
lished. At the same time, however, because orders only prove effective when
they are backed by an authority—and because force only functions when used
exceptionally—the medium of power evinces an internal relation to matters of
validity, after all (McCarthy 1985).
Administrative power, then, ultimately calls for a normative anchoring in
communicative power, that is, in the (rational) consensus of citizens. The dan-
ger that administrative power will develop a life of its own must be countered
not only through a vital civil society and public sphere but also through adher-
ence to the law and the division of powers. Given that the law extends beyond
the doors of legislative bodies, Habermas understands the division of powers
not in institutional but in functional terms. Communicative power must be
600 Concepts
able to assert itself wherever the law—in the course of its (supposed) imple-
mentation or interpretation—is taken up and thereby “made.”
Third, Habermas holds that “social” power involves the capacity to assert
one’s own interests successfully, even against the will of other parties—
whether it is persons or groups that do so (Facts, 357). This corresponds to the
way Max Weber defines power. From the latter, however, Habermas also
inherits a certain conceptual vagueness. The paradigmatic case of (illegiti-
mate) “social power” concerns threats or promises made by a superior actor
who seeks to realize empirical objectives. The matter is not as clear when
influence derives from the reputation or prestige of a person. Is this a matter
of social power at all? On the one hand, orientation on the behavior of the sta-
tus bearer promises empirical advantages—for example, displays of favor. On
the other hand, in the “advance” of trust with which the utterances of the
influential party are met, linguistic communication occurs, as well. Conse-
quently, the matter involves a special form of “communicative power” insofar
as status bearers are held to possess superior understanding (Communicative
Action, 2:177). When (social) prestige and influence are at issue, both goal-
oriented action and action oriented toward understanding are largely fused—
a fact that is evident, paradigmatically, in the premodern institutions of
chiefdom and priesthood (Facts, 138ff.).
With the rationalization of the lifeworld, Habermas argues, empirical
threat potentials and rationally recognizable reputations become more and
more distinct from each other (Communicative Action, 2:275). At the same
time, this analytical distinction comes to represent the border between ille-
gitimate and legitimate social power. According to Habermas’s theory of
democracy, the danger that social power will illegitimately influence the polit-
ical process manifests itself especially in pressure groups, which informally
influence the members of parliament and its committees, governmental bureau-
cracies, and/or the courts behind closed doors through promises or threats.
Hereby, they circumvent the “circulation of power” that is regulated by the
rule of law (Facts, 354ff.). For all that, however, not every form of social power
is illegitimate, because it may also draw on support through rationally moti-
vated acceptance—that is, validity claims implicitly raised by the “socially
powerful” may (sometimes) be redeemed in discourse.
All the same, relationships that are grounded in communication grow rigid
if power hierarchies render it difficult to question political regulations. There-
fore, already in Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas observes that
“power of one class over another” (Knowledge, 48) represents social power. His
early notion of an epistemological interest in emancipation is directed toward
eliminating such unnecessary domination.
Because his commentators often pay insufficient attention to this internal
differentiation, Habermas has, time and again, been faulted for losing sight of
phenomena of power within the lifeworld—which, it is claimed, he conceives
Power 601
in terms that are excessively harmonistic (e.g., Honneth 1993, 288, 329).
According to this criticism, the colonization thesis considers power only inas-
much as it penetrates the lifeworld from the outside—Habermas, the argument
goes, views the lifeworld only in terms of communicative action and holds it to
be distinguished by an unqualified capacity and willingness for understand-
ing. That fails to consider, however, that administrative power represents only
one form of power. Although Habermas places it in the foreground of his
diagnosis of the present, his conception of power is, in fact, more comprehen-
sive. Otherwise, “all premodern societies would have to be described as power-
free” (Habermas 1991, 246).
All the same, it remains unclear, on the whole, what connects the three
forms of power over and above the set of relations discussed so far. For Haber-
mas’s view—much more than for Arendt’s—the question arises why, in the
case of communicative power, one should speak of “power” at all—and not,
instead, of “collective insight” or “political autonomy.” Here, perhaps, power
should be understood above all as “power to”—as an increase of the collective
capacity for action. What is more, it is not clear how one should conceive of
the relationship between social and communicative power in the modern—
and supposedly rationalized—lifeworld. Ultimately, communicative power is
supposed to enable actors to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate
forms of social and administrative power. In general, the latter prove legiti-
mate when they promote the sources and structures of communicative power,
as well as the objectives that it articulates, and they are illegitimate when they
restrict and distort them (as happens only too frequently in social reality
[Facts, 174ff.]). Habermas’s critique of power takes aim at precisely such cases.
Thus, if something is depicted as “power,” this does not necessarily amount to
a contestation of its legitimacy (see, also, Strecker 2009).
References
Canovan, Margaret. 1983. “A Case of Distorted Communication. A Note on Habermas and

Arendt.” Political Theory 11, no. 1: 105–116.
The Theory of Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, trans. Jeremy
Gaines and Doris L. Jones, 214–264. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Honneth, Axel. 1993. The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in Critical Social Theory.
McCarthy, Thomas. 1991. “Complexity and Democracy, or the Seducements of Systems
Theory.” In Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Com-
municative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris
L. Jones, 119–139. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Strecker, David. 2009. Logik der Macht: Zum Ort der Kritik zwischen Theorie und Praxis.
68
PRAGMATIC TURN
ALI M. RIZ VI
R
obert Brandom (2002) describes pragmatism “as a movement
centered on the primacy of the practical” (40). This primacy of
practice over theory is manifested in Habermas’s writings in two
ways. First, it emerges in his lifelong insistence on the primacy of “know how”
(what he often calls intuitive knowledge) over “know that.” This is a key Hei-
deggerian distinction, which Habermas uses in his theoretical analyses, in his
formal pragmatics, and in developing his social theory. Second, it is mani-
fested in Habermas’s rejection of what he calls the “spectator model” of knowl-
edge and his insistence that action has “cognitive” significance—in other
words, that our way of acting is also our way of knowing the world. This is also
derived from Heidegger’s notion of “being in the world.”
Habermas has always been a pragmatist in the senses mentioned above, but
after Knowledge and Human Interests he did not pay much attention to issues
in theoretical philosophy; he wanted to amend this situation with his Truth
and Justification. In Truth, Habermas went back to revive the “weak natural-
ism” he espoused in Knowledge, and in so doing he aimed to achieve two
things. First, he wished to relate his theoretical enterprise both to his formal
pragmatics and to his theory of communicative action. Second, he wanted to
overcome certain impasses and aporias that his theories of communicative
action and social evolution face. His renewed emphasis on pragmatic themes
is of crucial importance to both these endeavors.
In Knowledge, Habermas tried to marry Kantian transcendentalism with
naturalism (in the broad sense of the term) by maintaining a distinction
between “subjective/objective nature” and “nature in itself.” This, according to
Habermas and his critics, led to an aporia similar to the one that Kant faced
when making a distinction between “phenomenon” and “noumenon.” The
aporia is this: in order to maintain the distinction between “subjective/objec-
tive nature” and “nature in itself,” it appears necessary to have a “glimpse
behind the stage set by the human mind” (Truth, 22). But to do this would be
to violate the basic assumption of postmetaphysics, which is something that
Habermas wanted to avoid at any cost. In Truth, however, Habermas aims to
show that the aforementioned aporia is not so much a result of attempting to
marry a transcendental approach to naturalism but rather the result of a
Pragmatic Turn 603
representationalism that must be abandoned in the wake of pragmatism. Rep-

resentationalism conceives knowledge in terms of a two-way relation between
subject and object, where access to what is beyond the object must be conceived
in terms of a glimpse behind the constitution of the human mind. However, if
knowledge is considered in pragmatic terms, and if we consequently abandon
the representational model of knowledge and give action its cognitive due, we
can transcend this aporia. Habermas claims that this requires the adoption of
what he calls a “nonclassical” form of realism.
In developing his formal pragmatics and theory of communicative action,
Habermas initially tried to go beyond the representational model of knowl-
edge, replacing the two-way model of representation with a three-way model
in which an actor tries to reach an understanding with another actor about
something in the world. Similarly, in his theory of communicative action,
Habermas conceptualized objectivity as a condition of reaching an understand-
ing between two or more interlocutors. However, this theory of objectivity is a
far cry from our own realist intuitions about the world, and so Habermas’s
renewed emphasis on pragmatism leads him to reconsider and deepen this
model. The world is not only a condition of mutual understanding but is also
something we encounter in pursuing actions. We experience the resistance of
reality when our plans are frustrated; we experience its cooperation when we
are able to fulfill our plans of action.
The world that we experience in pursuing our material goals is beyond
objectification (because objectification involves “mind” and not “being in the
world” as such), and so we are able to get a “glimpse” into the existence and
reality of a world beyond our “objectification,” albeit through our actions and
not our minds. This world that is beyond the world of our objectification is
nothing but “nature in itself.” Thus we gain access to “nature in itself,” in this
model, not on the level of perceptions of mind but through “disclosures” of
action. This in turn helps us overcome the aporia mentioned above, of having
to “glimpse beyond the stage set by the human mind” without having to relin-
quish the distinction between subjective world, objective world, and nature in
itself. The distinction is pertinent on the level of mind, but on the level of
action we experience something that is beyond the distinctions that are made
indispensable within the bounds of our mind and our language. Here, the
world overwhelms us, in a way, and we experience its resistance or coopera-
tion on an immediate, direct, and unmediated level.
The resistance (or cooperation) of the world that we face at the pragmatic
level must also feed back into our linguistic and mental apparatus. This sug-
gests that our mental and linguistic apparatuses have also developed under
the constraints of reality, even if the constraint is an indirect one. This sug-
gests a way out of contextualism that haunts any serious version of transcen-
dentalism and the linguistic turn. Habermas now claims that if our conceptual
604 Concepts
apparatus has developed under the constraints of reality, which has been
shown to be a reality that resists us and is beyond the whims and caprice of
our individual or communal desires, then we must take the continued viability
of our conceptual repertoire as proof of their objectivity. This pulls the rug out
from under the feet of any contextualism. However, this doesn’t entail a return
to conceptual realism, as the constraint on our conceptual apparatus is an
indirect one, and there is a certain distance between the constraints of reality
and the workings of our language and our conceptual apparatus (Habermas
calls it “half transcendence”). In this way, in Habermas’s later theoretical phi-
losophy, pragmatism plays a crucial role in combining transcendentalism and
naturalism, on the one hand, and realism and transcendentalism, on the other.
Reference
Brandom, Robert. 2002. “Pragmatics and Pragmatisms.” In Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism

and Realism, ed. James Conant and Ursula M. Zeglen, 40–58. London: Routledge.
69
PUBLIC SPHERE
PATRIZIA NANZ
T
he works of Jürgen Habermas have shaped the way the public
sphere (Öffentlichkeit) is understood in Germany and the Anglo-
American world. The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere (1961) presented the key ideas that later were treated in systematic fash-
ion in Between Facts and Norms (1992), Habermas’s main work of legal and
democratic theory. The “public sphere” forms a space of reasoned communica-
tive interaction—the principal means of arriving at collective understanding
(Selbstverständigung). Under modern conditions, the public sphere of politics
in the democratic community (Gemeinwesen) plays a central role in social
integration. Public debates form the basis for legitimating political decisions.
According to Habermas, such space serves as the normative measure for the
critique of social reality and, at the same time, represents a medium of collec-
tive learning. The methodological correlate of the public sphere is philosophi-
cal analysis that keeps both social and cultural structures (and anomies) in
view simultaneously.
Habermas’s Ideology-Critical Approach
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere seeks to separate the ideal
form of the bourgeois public sphere from the historical context(s) in which
it developed, socially, in Germany, England, and France over the course of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until this time, the public sphere
expanded in keeping with the politicization of social life—i.e., through the
rise of the press and publishing guilds that struggled against censorship for
freedom of opinion. The foundation for the bourgeois public sphere is the sep-
aration between state and society, i.e., the separation between public and pri-
vate realms. After the bourgeois public sphere achieved its highest state of
development in the late nineteenth century, however, these divisions came to
be neutralized (aufgehoben) pursuant to the transformations introduced by
the welfare state. Accordingly, the bourgeois public sphere began to dissolve.
With the ascent of the culture industry, the “literary public sphere” (Structural
Transformation, 245) declined. Now, the mass media could only produce a
606 Concepts
“virtual” public sphere (Scheinöffentlichkeit), for the public itself fell increas-
ingly mute; like democratic politics, the critical public sphere became impov-
erished (verkümmert), at least in formal terms.
Habermas published The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
during the Adenauer era—when the bourgeois public sphere, as a normative
vision, offered an emancipatory promise for the repoliticization of public life.
The new edition of the book that appeared in 1990, on the other hand, derived
its actuality from the “delayed revolution” (nachholende Revolution) in East-
ern Europe. Only then was the work translated into English; the debates it
occasioned in the social sciences in North America were particularly vigorous.
Habermas’s subsequent publications have taken up the intellectual motifs of
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere time and again in further
discussions of the theory of language and action, in the forms of rationality
associated with it (the “public use of reason”), and in theoretical reflections on
society, politics, and law.
The Concept of the Public Sphere in the Deliberative Theory of

Democracy
Habermas’s studies of the discursive public sphere have given rise to much
debate on varying understandings of deliberative democracy—especially in
German- and English-speaking countries. Habermas presents his model as
the “third way” between liberal and radically deliberative models. In particu-
lar, the new edition of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere dis-
tances itself from the idea that a potential for social self-organization dwells
within the political public sphere—that is, Habermas rejects the notion that
society as a whole is to be steered via deliberation. What is more, he now
incorporates mass-mediated public space (which displays a great range of
internal complexities/differentiations) in his reflections; only in this way is it
possible to guarantee the adequate inclusion of all citizens. In his theory of
democracy—which is constructed along normative lines—the “political public
sphere” represents the “embodiment [Inbegriff ] of those conditions of com-
munication under which the discursive opinion- and will-formation of a pub-
lic formed by citizens of the state can be constituted” (Habermas 1990, 38).
Between Facts and Norms presents a conception of deliberative politics that
operates “on two tracks.” Here, Habermas distinguishes between the political
system (which is specialized in collectively binding decisions) and autono-
mous public space (which faces no pressures of decision). Thereby, he takes up
Bernhard Peters’s (1993) sociological sluice model, which views political pro-
cesses of communication and decision making in terms of an axis running
between “center” and “periphery.” While the core realm of the political system
Public Sphere 607
consists of the parliamentary complex—government, administration, and the

courts—the peripheral realm is formed by the infrastructure of civil society.
Between these two poles extend complex network structures involving public
administration and private organizations—interest groups, associations, and
lobbyists. To varying degrees, they enter cooperative relations and have coor-
dinating functions in the implementation (Umsetzung) of public functions.
Moreover, there are found—in a certain measure at the outermost periphery—
intermediary structures whose task involves less the implementation of policies
that have already been decided than the identification and articulation of the
problems to be addressed. The idea behind Peters’s model is that procedures and
communicative conditions of democratic opinion and will formation form a
conduit for the discursive rationalization of political decisions. Only in this
way can it be prevented that the administrative or the social power of interme-
diary structures win the upper hand over the communicative power that is
constituted by the parliamentary complex.
Habermas gives Peters’s sociological sluice model a normative turn. The
correlate of his discursive conception of democracy is the idea of popular sov-
ereignty as communicatively produced power, which derives from the interac-
tion between will formation as it is institutionalized by the constitutional
state, on the one hand, and by the mobilized public sphere, on the other. Popu-
lar sovereignty has its basis in organized civil society, whose task is to “pass
along” (weiterleiten) problematic social conditions to the political public
sphere. In complex societies, however—and for purely practical reasons—it is
not possible to tie all political decisions to the processes of opinion and will
formation at the periphery. What proves decisive, instead, is that—in the event
of conflict—decisions at the political center are “fed back” (rückgekoppelt) to
public processes of opinion and will formation.
“The health of a democracy can be gauged from the pulse of its professional
public arena” (Naturalism, 22). At the same time, however, the danger exists
that transregional dailies and weeklies, as a consequence of reorganization
and economizing measures, will no longer prove adequate to their own jour-
nalistic standards and therefore will cease to fulfill their role as “lead media”
(Leitmedien) in the realm of political communication. For this reason, the
state must protect the public resource (Gut) of quality journalism from failure
in the market (Faltering, 133).
The “Public Sphere” in More Recent Empirical Research
Habermas’s reflections on the public sphere and politics have influenced two
new fields of research in a decisive fashion: first, empirical investigations that
verify the specific expectations placed on public deliberation (see, e.g., studies
608 Concepts
by Gerhards, Neidhardt, and Rucht 1998; Daele and Neidhardt 1996); and sec-
ond, works of democratic theory that discuss transnational orders (e.g., the
European Union, global governance). The latter address the question whether
deliberative politics is also a suitable medium for the transferal of the legiti-
mation potential found in nation-states onto international decision-making
processes (see, e.g., the contributions in Niesen and Herborth 2007).
Empirical findings have often given reason for skepticism, but they also
suggest that a world public sphere is beginning to emerge—in the sense of
global civil society. For example, NGOs employ media structures that are
already in place. They make the politics of international bodies (e.g., the World
Trade Organization) more transparent and at the same time establish a feed-
back loop (Rückkoppelung) between government representatives and those
parts of civil society that are already mobilized in nation-states (Nanz and
Steffek 2007). What is missing, however, is a European (or, alternatively,
global) public sphere that would engage in continuous observation of, and
commentary on, decision-making processes; likewise, the inclusion of citizens
in such processes is still in its infancy (Kies and Nanz 2013).
From The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere up to Between
Facts and Norms, Habermas connected his understanding of the public sphere
to the sovereign power of the nation-state. Now, however, it is difficult to
imagine how public opinion can be an effective critical force in a “postna-
tional constellation,” where personal and political interest and “membership”
match up less and less (Fraser 2010, 95). The further course of events will
depend, ultimately, on whether—against the backdrop of world society (im
Horizont einer Weltgesellschaft)—the public spheres constituted by national
media will “open up” and take notice of “foreign” issues and positions in such
a way that transnational communication communities emerge. In the future,
it will not be a matter of building a supranational (European or global) public
sphere but rather of the “transnationalization of public spheres” (Faltering, 88)
that register one another’s contributions to European or global affairs and
translate political standpoints and controversies for domestic publics.
References
Daele, Wolfgang van den, and Friedhelm Neidhardt, eds. 1996. Kommunikation und Ents-
cheidung: Politische Funktionen öffentlicher Meinungsbildung und diskursiver Ver-
fahren. WZB-Jahrbuch. Berlin: Sigma.
Fraser, Nancy. 2010. “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Effi-
cacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World.” In Scales of Justice: Reimagining
Political Space in a Globalizing World, 76–99. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gerhards, Jürgen. 1997. “Diskursive versus liberale Öffentlichkeit.” Kölner Zeitschrift für
Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 49:1–34.
Public Sphere 609
Gerhards, Jürgen, Friedhelm Neidhardt, and Dieter Rucht, eds. 1998. Zwischen Palaver und
Diskurs: Strukturen öffentlicher Meinungsbildung am Beispiel der deutschen Diskussion
zur Abtreibung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kat-
egorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Mit einem Vorwort zur Neuauflage. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
Kies, Raphael, and Patrizia Nanz, eds. 2013. Is Europe Listening to Us? Successes and Fail-
ures of EU Citizen Consultations. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Nanz, Patrizia, and Jens Steffek. 2007. “Zivilgesellschaftliche Partizipation und die
Demokratisierung internationalen Regierens.” In Anarchie der kommunikativen Frei-
heit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and
Benjamin Herborth, 87–110. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Neidhardt, Friedhelm, ed. 1994. Öffentlichkeit, öffentliche Meinung und soziale Bewegun-
gen (Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 34). Opladen:
Westdeutscher Verlag.
Peters, Bernhard. 1993. Die Integration moderner Gesellschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
70
RADICAL REFORMISM
HAUKE BRUNKHORST
J
ust as the label “the theory of communicative action” effectively
covers all of Habermas’s work to date, the phrase “radical reform-
ism” stands for the author’s view of political praxis—i.e., the
practical implications of his theoretical reflections. In a lengthy introduction—
written in the winter of 1969—to his first collection of essays, notes (Denk-
schriften), and contributions to debates on university reform and student
protest, Habermas addressed the objectives, theoretical justifications, achieve-
ments, reactions, and origins (which were the same across the globe) of the
first international movement of this kind. The piece ends with Lenin’s famous
question: “What is to be done?”
Ultimately, Habermas (1969) rejects the “categorical pairing of ‘reform’ and
‘revolution’ ” on the grounds that it fails to distinguish adequately between
“alternative strategies for change” (49). Likewise—and in equal measure—he
distances himself, polemically, from revolutionary actionism, on the one hand,
and from mere reformism, on the other. Habermas objects to actionism
because, in his estimation, it disregards the fact that—in countries like the Fed-
eral Republic of Germany, France, and the United States—it opposes a “system
of institutions” that already embodies “past processes of emancipation”
(however imperfectly it may do so). Institutions in place cannot—and must
not—simply be “skipped over” or given up (43). Employing a Marxian vocabu-
lary, Habermas condemns what he calls, by turns, “utopian socialism,” “left-wing
fascism” (146), the “show business of revolutionary actors [Revolutionsdarsteller]”
(50), and “revolution in appearance alone [Scheinrevolution]” (188).
Habermas’s critique of “mere reformism”—which is indebted to Benjamin,
Marcuse, and Adorno—is couched in similar terms. Such efforts, he main-
tains, are all too “sure of themselves as ends in themselves”; that is, “already
today, they promise to maintain the status quo for tomorrow, without even
knowing what it is.” This brand of reformism simply replaces blind and inde-
terminate negation with equally blind and indeterminate affirmation:
Such preemptive affirmation folds back on the beginning [schlägt auf das Begin-
nen zurück] and ruins the necessary radicalism of thorough investigation and
reasonable will. The charge of “social-democratism” [Sozialdemokratismus]—
a term with a storied tradition—aptly names this kind of forward-directed
Radical Reformism 611
counterinsurance [trifft daran das Moment vorwärtsgewandter Rückversicher-

ung zu Recht].
(50)
“Revolution-in-appearance-alone” and “social-democratism” form two sides

of the same coin. Whereas the actionistic protest of one side does not manage
even to touch the ills it wishes to change, the reformism of the other has long
since closed off any prospect of a world beyond the “independent [verselbstän-
digt] administrative apparatuses of the authoritarian and alienated welfare state
and the depoliticized public sphere” (43). Therefore, Habermas contends, politi-
cal strategy that wishes to avoid affirmative reformism and, at the same time,
does not wish to squander the potential for emancipation that is embodied in
standing institutions must “implement and assert” (zur Geltung und zu “Willen
und Bewusstsein” bringen) radical revolutionary praxis within the institutional
framework of “social mass democracy and the liberal constitutional state” (43).
All the same—that is, despite his criticism of the “poses” struck by the “revo-
lutionary actors” of 1968—Habermas discerns elements of a genuine radicalism
that is not a matter of imitation but represents, instead, an insight to be “taken
seriously”: “political changes change nothing if the stakes—in addition to pal-
pable ills to be remedied and averted—do not involve subtler liberations,
improvements, and gratifications.” The radical reformism he calls for means
“not abandoning this insight while still seeking to pursue political action” (50).
This statement stands as a maxim behind almost all the political positions
Habermas has assumed and all the interventions/declarations he has made
over the years. The latter include the merciless critique he heaped on the
Brandt government’s helpless reformism, his contributions to debates on ter-
rorism and the Historikerstreit, and his advocacy of the project of European
constitutionalization. Habermas considered the latter a textbook example of
ill-conceived social democratism on the part of established parties and leader-
ship cadres, which did not really want to admit democratic legitimation or
control (Habermas 2007, 458–459). Habermas knows full well that when
phrases such as “The Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe” appear in
juridical documents, they are more than Goethe’s mere “noise and smoke”
(Schall und Rauch). Taken at their word, they can “strike back” (see Müller
1997, 54) when the voting public remembers the historical “processes of eman-
cipation” embodied in a real constitution and activates “a past charged with
now-time” in order to explode “homogeneous and empty” (Benjamin 2003,
395) transnational bonapartism. Needless to say, this need not satisfy any of
the social actors. However, a politics of “counterinsurance” in which “nothing
is at stake” (Habermas 1969, 50) runs the risk of losing everything.
The metaphors of communicative “flows” and “charges”—of the anarchy of
communicative freedom and the untamable public sphere—which recur
throughout Habermas’s writings harbor an element of radicalism that declares
612 Concepts
nothing immune—no sacrosanct article of the constitution and no institu-

tional arrangement, however venerable—from the sole source of legitimation:
the egalitarian self-determination of a freely communicating public. Even in
its weakest form, this radicalism—without which all reform and “intelligent
action” would remain “groundless and without consequences”—represents
the driving motivation both for intellectual praxis and for academic theory.
As Habermas puts it: “If there is any small remnant of utopia that I’ve pre-
served, then it is surely the idea that democracy—and the public struggle for
its best form—is capable of hacking through the Gordian knots of otherwise
insoluble problems” (Past, 96).
That is an empirical thesis that today, if I view things correctly, hardly
anyone still makes in earnest. It is not just doubted by parties who have, with
banners waving, run over to join the “new elites.” All the same, it marks the
border between the right and the left. On the “right” stand those who believe
that solutions to global environmental problems, ethnic and religious racism,
governmental and nongovernmental terrorism, world conflicts, drug crimi-
nality, the new slave trade, and current and coming economic crises can only
be found outside the institutional framework of inclusive discussion (i.e.,
deliberation; see chapter 51 in this volume) and egalitarian decision making.
For these parties, “low-intensity democracy” (Marks 2000) (i.e., democracy
restricted to the nation-state and parliamentarianism) can at best promote
more effective policies (and “better” elites) in the general terms that philo-
sophical experts have determined. On the “left” stand those who—with
Dewey, Rorty, and Habermas—believe that the ills of democracy may only be
remedied with “more democracy” (Dewey) and that the aforementioned “alto-
gether insoluble problems” can only be dealt with adequately through global
and globalized democracy (if this is even possible). Inasmuch as such democ-
racy is not, a priori, restricted to national and parliamentary frameworks and
courses of action, it would serve—albeit with occasional difficulty and
defeat—to dissolve any and all hegemonies formed by experts and philoso-
phers, capitalists and professional politicians, and/or social and administrative
power. (At the very least, it would threaten emergent hegemony with dissolu-
tion by “besieging” [Facts] its centers publicly.)
As Habermas puts matters (in Marxist terms), the site of radical reformism
in theory—and the point of intersection between theory and practice—occurs
when the system experiences crisis. Crisis—which, he contends, can only be
overcome through radical reformism—takes many forms. It appears in prob-
lems of democratic legitimation and of globalized capital as well as in patholo-
gies of the desolated lifeworld and the depoliticized public sphere. As a matter
of systemic necessity, these forms of crisis occur because of uncontrolled
functional imperatives and rule that lacks legitimation (legitimationsferne
Herrschaftsverhältnisse)—in a word, because of the repression and destruction
Radical Reformism 613
of democratic self-determination. Such is the central empirical thesis of

Habermas’s theory—which, ultimately, can be tested only by way of successful
(or unsuccessful) “democratic experimentation.”
References
Benjamin, Walter. 2003. Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings and
Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1969. Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
——. 2007. “Kommunikative Rationalität und grenzüberschreitende Politik.” In Anarchie
der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen
Politik, ed. Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Marks, Susan. 2000. The Riddle of All Constitutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Müller, Friedrich. 1997. Wer ist das Volk? Eine Grundfrage der Demokratie: Elemente einer
Verfassungstheorie VI. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
71
RATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION
MAT TIAS ISER
T
he method of rational reconstruction, at which Habermas arrived
via two steps—ideology critique and philosophical anthropology—
sets itself three tasks. First—and above all—it seeks to ground the
normative standards for a critical theory of society (section 2). Second, it wants
to demonstrate that social development from premodernity to modernity
manifests an instance of progress—which it also intends to explain, at least in
part (section 3). Finally, it tries to identify current potentials for resistance
(section 4). Although Habermas has not realized this ambitious project in its
entirety, the method of rational reconstruction—because of its combination of
philosophy and the social sciences—continues to display a significant poten-
tial to stimulate discussion (section 5).
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas derives the

ideal of freedom from domination by way of ideology critique—that is, start-
ing from the terms in which bourgeois society consciously understands itself.
Soon, however, he realized that an immanent approach along these lines is
inadequate for critical theory if an openly repressive society discards all pre-
tense of legitimacy. When the National Socialist regime, for example, “cashed
in” bourgeois ideals, it did so “cynically” (Habermas 1992, 441). Therefore, in
later writings from the 1960s, he seeks to demonstrate that the normative cri-
teria of his theory are anchored in human life at a much more fundamental
level. In his Knowledge and Human Interests, by engaging critically with posi-
tivism, he develops the notion that instrumental reason represents a form of
reflection for only one of three anthropologically deep-seated knowledge-
constitutive interests—namely, the technical interest. This interest is comple-
mented by two further interests, namely, the practical and the emancipatory.
These three interests are supposed to result from the functional demands
of shared human life. Societies do not only need to transform their environ-
ment effectively in order to achieve material reproduction; they also require
Rational Reconstruction 615
successful forms of symbolic reproduction, especially the transmission of tra-

ditions and the socialization of their members. Impulses must be shaped not
only to provide the motivational energy for the instrumental transformation
of nature but also to be compatible with the dominant societal norms. At the
same time, Habermas argues, human life is inscribed with an interest that
domination of some by others (or by norms) not grow beyond necessary
measure—that is, that it not become irrational. The emancipatory interest, he
continues, reflects on itself in the critical sciences. Here, self-reflection is sup-
posed to lead to insight into, and liberation from, compulsions that otherwise
remain uncomprehended—what psychoanalysis achieves for individuals, crit-
ical theory does for society.
In response to criticism, Habermas subsequently conceded that the idea

of self-reflection by a society or even by the species as a whole—that is, of
macrosubjects—neglects the fact that successful instances of communication
between individual subjects must remain at the center of a critical theory
of society. Accordingly, his later writings distinguish much more clearly
between, on the one hand, the rational reconstruction of universal (communi-
cative) capacities and, on the other, self-reflection that occurs when historically
obsolete relations of domination are criticized (Truth, 180–181, 198–199). Ratio-
nal reconstruction is therefore supposed to articulate the implicit precondi-
tions of communication in general—that is, its deep structure. Social critique
performs the secondary task—against a foil provided by reconstruction—of
revealing the deficits of communicative processes in concrete situations.
Rational reconstruction is supposed to transform our “know how”—our
knowledge of rules, which operates unreflexively—into explicit “know that.”
Habermas’s main reference points for such a methodology are the universal
grammar of Noam Chomsky, which has generative rules as its object, and Jean
Piaget’s structuralist theory of development, which analyzes cognitive sche-
mata. Enlisting the speech-act theory developed by J. L. Austin and John
Searle, Habermas adopts the perspective of universal pragmatics, which inves-
tigates the general rules of language use. When performing a speech act, we do
not, after all, just talk about states of affairs—we also do something: validity
claims are raised with the implicit promise that speakers will be able—and
will desire—to justify statements when faced with objections. Communicative
action is binding because of this unspoken assumption. According to Habermas,
then, we are in fact always already aware that, if our statements are problema-
tized, we must engage in discourse that does not admit force or exclusion. On
616 Concepts
the basis of how validity claims are raised, Habermas arrives at the ideal of
freedom from domination as the normative foundation for a critical social
theory.
The method of rationally reconstructing impersonal systems of rules is sup-

posed to hold equally for all concrete contexts. For this reason, Habermas
believes that it provides the basis for theorizing the developmental logic at
work in moral and political progress. In this context, it is important to distin-
guish this demanding conception of reconstruction from the rather more
straightforward approach Habermas adopts in Communication and the Evolu-
tion of Society, where he “[takes] a theory apart and [puts] it back together again
in a new form in order to attain more fully the goal it has set for itself” (Evolu-
tion, 95). At the same time, however, this “weak” conception of reconstruction
draws on the strong one, according to which—as “world views, moral represen-
tations, and identity formations” (98) change—the three dimensions of reason
(truth, rightness, and truthfulness) grow increasingly distinct.
Thereby, Habermas contends, the central idea driving the project of
universal pragmatics becomes clearer and clearer—namely, that all human
regulations are based on the fragile consensus of those affected. Where moral-
learning processes are concerned, Habermas makes particular use of the the-
ory of development presented by Lawrence Kohlberg. The latter applies the
ontogenetic scheme of progressive stages to the phylogenesis of the human
species. Accordingly, the transition from premodern to modern societies dis-
plays structural similarities to the maturation of adolescents when they adopt
a critical attitude toward received ideas and practices (Moral Consciousness,
144). Taking up the works of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, Habermas
also speaks of the “disenchantment” of traditional worldviews and the “delin-
guistification of the sacred,” respectively (Communicative Action, 2:77ff.).
Finally—and in explicit contradistinction to the Marxist tradition—he affirms
that learning processes do not occur only in the realm of instrumental reason
but also in that of practical reason.
Unlike this logic of rationalization, the dynamic of social progress that
interests Habermas draws on the dialectical interrelation between labor (mate-
rial reproduction) and interaction (symbolic reproduction). Unsolved system
crises within the realm of material reproduction lead, in his view, to the insight
that, for the forces of production to develop further, a new form of organizing
labor is necessary. For this to occur, however, it must be possible to fall back
on—and employ—innovations that have been made in the normative sphere
of symbolic reproduction. In particular, two conditions must be fulfilled for
Rational Reconstruction 617
an evolutionary step to take place: first, there must be “unresolved system

problems that represent challenges”; second, “new levels of learning [must]
have already been achieved in world views [but] . . . not yet incorporated into
action systems” (Evolution, 121–122). On this model, the transition from tribal
communities to societies organized as states—a process characteristic of
archaic high cultures—means replacing one organizational principle with
another. The passage from premodernity to modernity is similarly effected.
Although Habermas performs this analysis retrospectively and only in theory,

he means for it to serve a prognostic function (McCarthy 1978, 302–303).
System crises, he contends, do not primarily represent intrasystemic, purely
economic phenomena. Rather, any given system is subject to “inner contingen-
cies” (Communicative Action, 2:159) inasmuch as it relies on the dispositions/
outlooks of subjects—i.e., motivational sources that spring from the lifeworld.
In turn, the kinds of motivation required vary historically—in keeping with
the state of development that reason has achieved. Therefore, Habermas main-
tains, one may speak of a system crisis when subjective motivations no longer
“fit” the dominant level of relations of production. This may be the case
because in modernity motivations cannot simply be “created.” The reason for
this lies in the invariant nature of the developmental logic.
According to Habermas, the modern, postconventional form of symbolic
reproduction does not only represent (moral) progress—it is also supposed to
cut off the motivational energies that fuel capitalism. It follows from the ratio-
nal reconstruction of universal competencies, then, that theory should be able
to shed “prognostic” light on sites and sources of resistance in the world today.
For this reason, Habermas identifies postconventional consciousness at work
not just in the student revolts of the 1960s but also in the social movements of
the 1980s.
To be sure, Habermas has presented this ambitious theoretical program

merely in outline. Its empirical verification and concretization through scien-
tific practice, which he called for, was never conducted. It has subsequently
been doubted that the logic of moral development is in fact universal. This in
turn has provoked critics to fault him for making normative critique depen-
dent on empirical findings—a matter that would weaken its foundation
instead of strengthening it. In response, however, one should note that the
618 Concepts
affirmation of unavoidable expectations remains empirically fallible and, more-

over, that such a position is not meant to replace normative justification.
Instead, the point is to combine philosophy and social theory in a fruitful
manner. With such a reconstructive critique of society—which Axel Honneth
has continued, in modified form, in his theory of recognition—Habermas
inherits the left-Hegelian notion that practical reason does not exhaust itself
in a mere ought but instead is already at work within social reality (Iser 2008).
References
Habermas, Jürgen. 1993. “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere.” In Habermas and the
Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, 421–461. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Iser, Mattias. 2008. Empörung und Fortschritt. Grundlagen einer kritischen Theorie der
Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Campus.
Press.
72
RATIONALIT Y AND
RATIONALIZATION
HAUKE BRUNKHORST
I
n the introductory remarks to his early study Grundrechte als Institu-
tion (Basic rights as an institution), Niklas Luhmann (1965) observed
that the task at hand was to replace the old-European “reason of per-
ception” (Vernehmen) with the “reason of comparison” (Vergleich) (8). In so
doing, he quoted the title of a book by Ernst Cassirer (to which he has referred
on many other occasions, as well). The latter’s Substance and Function (2003
[1910]) addresses precisely this transition from substance, which may be
“heard” or “seen” (vernehmbare Substanz), to function, which admits com-
parison (or, alternatively, represents functional equivalence). Although—to
the best of my knowledge—Habermas has never directly referred to Luh-
mann’s observations here, his response to the project outlined in Grundrechte
als Institution could only be: Right, but the reason of perception must not
only be replaced by the observational reason of comparison; it must also—and
before all else—be replaced by the participatory reason of understanding
(Verständigung).
It would be a mistake to understand Luhmann’s thesis in purely techno-
cratic terms—i.e., as the opening (Erschließung) of the via moderna through a
shrewd combination of observation and steering from without (Außensteue-
rung). Likewise, it would be a mistake to view the reason of understanding
that Habermas endorses as a hermeneutic of dialogical cultures (Gesprächs-
kulturen) that shows no interest in truth. Luhmann and Habermas made the
communicative turn at the same time, even if they did so in very different
ways (Brunkhorst 2006). For Luhmann, social evolution is triggered by an
enormous concentration (Massierung) (Luhmann 1981, 48) of communicative
negations (Negationsleistungen)—i.e., “double contingency” (doppelte Kontin-
genz). These operations promptly condense into complex social systems that,
from this point on, can only be observed and described “through themselves”;
moreover, they encompass the standpoint of the sociological observer, who
occupies a position of the second order. With consequences that are, by defini-
tion, incalculable, social actors’ efforts at agreement (Einigungsversuche)
constitute a form of communicative autonomy that is unprecedented in
620 Concepts
evolutionary terms. This immunizes individual actors and their social life-
world against the unmediated effects (Durchgriff ) of system imperatives
because it makes it possible to transform negation into critique—which means,
in turn, that actors can “take credit for” (sich zurechnen) the consequences of
their communicative action(s), at least counterfactually.
The latter, “secondary” form of social evolution comes about through the
contingent emergence of an indisponible (unverfügbaren) reference to truth (i.e.,
reference to validity), which makes social communications dependent on dis-
cursive justifications (Begründungsleistungen). For Habermas, understanding
an utterance means knowing the reasons that assure its truth—or, in simpler
terms: knowing what makes it true (see chapter 30 in this volume). Reference
to the “giving and taking of reasons” (Brandom) in communicative dispute
(Streit) is essential for Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. Here
lies the difference between Luhmann and Habermas, whose theories both fol-
low from the communicative turn in sociology. This also marks the point
where Habermas differs from Foucault, whose writings also follow from the
communicative (discursive) turn.
Only because every speech act occurs in reference to universal (and
unavoidable) truth claims is it possible for subjects not just to act “by choice”
(willkürlich) (Luhmann) and “powerfully” (machtvoll) (Foucault) but arbitrarily
and autonomously, as well. On this basis, they distinguish—in the further
course of action—between true and false, between unforced forces of argu-
mentation and the causal consequences of communicative operations, and
between discursive knowledge and discourse power. What is more, Habermas
contends, actors are capable of doing so in the midst of all-pervasive (social)
evolution—i.e., ongoing developments of causality, functions, and power.
Because Luhmann and Foucault contest this very possibility of communica-
tive autonomy (not, nota bene, of subjectivity), they must content themselves
with the reason of comparison. Alas, any reason that could make itself reason-
able is fated to vanish in the realm of old-European “illusion” (Freud).
All the same, Habermas’s project combines with theirs on a point Hegel
(1970) articulated in a famous aphorism: “Reason without Understanding is
nothing, yet Understanding is something without Reason. Understanding
cannot be dispensed with [geschenkt werden]” (551). One need only replace
solitary, reflexive “Reason” with “reason of communication” (Vernunft der
Verständigung) and “Understanding” with reflexive, systemic “reason of com-
parison” (Vernunft des Vergleichs). As it stands with comparison and commu-
nication, so too does it stand with system and lifeworld (see chapter 75 in this
volume): the system cannot be dispensed with (Nassehi 2006).
The title Habermas proposed for his joint publication with Luhmann—
Sozialtechnologie oder Theorie der Gesellschaft? (Habermas and Luhmann
1971)—can now be properly evaluated. Habermas needed to qualify his
Rationality and Rationalization 621
objection that Luhmann’s systems theory represents the “epitome of techno-

cratic consciousness” (see chapter 11 in this volume) inasmuch as Luhmann
also observed that technocracy does not, in fact, “work” and regularly proves
counterproductive. Once one accepts as much, Luhmann contends, it becomes
possible to entertain a more effective technical relationship with what is “pres-
ent at hand” (vorhanden) (Heidegger) by leaving it be and trusting in the
greater wisdom of evolution (or not). If understanding (Verstand) founds
unreflected, technocratic consciousness, then the reason of comparison founds
“negative technocratic” consciousness—or, alternatively, sociotechnological
negativism.
However, Habermas’s (1976) effort to integrate understanding that has grown
reflexive (i.e., “negatively rational”) into a “rational” theory of society—and
into a society that forms a reasonable identity for itself—does not content itself
with this position. Habermas seeks to abandon the old-European conception
of reason to which Luhmann holds (if in negative fashion—by repeating its
features in an endless spiral of reflexive iterations). The “classical” conception
of reason must be replaced by communicative rationality. This concept encom-
passes all aspects of rationality—including purely instrumental ones—and
therefore avoids establishing a hierarchy of reason over understanding (which
still echoes in Luhmann’s and Adorno’s conceptions of reason inasmuch as
the distinction between reason and understanding is preserved). According to
Habermas, reason may be fully democratized only in the “dry” (spröd) form
of communicative rationality (see chapter 34 in this volume).
On this point, Habermas draws on another intellectual turn, which
twentieth-century sociology performed when Max Weber (1993) replaced the
concept of (historical) reason with that of rationalization. (Admittedly, the
transition was completed only when Talcott Parsons freed it from the histori-
cal corset of the history of society and incorporated it into the theory of social
evolution.) In Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus, Habermas
retraces the development and steers it in a neo-Marxist direction. The Theory
of Communicative Action, in turn, reconstructs sociological rationalization in
light of communicative rationality explicated in philosophical terms (vol. 1)
and integrates it into a theory of society encompassing both system and life-
world. On this basis, Habermas is able to understand the (neo-)Marxist con-
cepts of alienation, reification, and commodification as the “colonization of
the lifeworld” (see chapter 44 in this volume), which does not involve the
“destruction of reason” (Lukács) in its entirety but rather the destruction
of communicative rationality within the social lifeworld (a phenomenon
expressed by crises and pathologies).
With that, Habermas kills two birds with one stone: he jettisons the impe-
rialism of reason that has been (rightly but problematically) critiqued by
thinkers from Adorno to Derrida, from critical theory to postcolonial studies;
622 Concepts
at the same time, however, he avoids endorsing cultural criticism along the
lines of the “Young,” “Old,” or “New” conservatism (see chapter 33 in this
volume).
References
Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2006. “Contemporary German Social Theory.” In Handbook of Con-

temporary European Social Theory, ed. Gerard Delanty, 51–68. London: Sage.
Cassirer, Ernst. 2003. Substance and Function. Trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie
Collins Swabey. New York: Dover.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1976. “Können komplexe Gesellschaften eine vernünftige Identität aus-
bilden?” In Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus, 92–126. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
Habermas, Jürgen, and Niklas Luhmann. 1971. Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechno-
logie – Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1970. Werke. Vol. 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Luhmann, Niklas. 1965. Grundrechte als Institution. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
——. 1981. “Subjektive Rechte. Zum Umbau des Rechtsbewußtseins für die moderne
Gesellschaft.” In Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, vol. 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Nassehi, Armin. 2006. Der soziologische Diskurs der Moderne. Frankfurt.
Weber, Max. 1993. The Sociology of Religion. Trans. Ephraim Fischoff. Boston: Beacon.
73
SOCIAL PATHOLOGY
MARTIN HARTMANN
T
he concept of pathology derives from ancient medicine, where it
refers to the doctrine of kinds and causes of illness. According to
Galen, the pathological is what deviates from “the normal course
of nature” (Seidler 1989, 13). Discourse about social pathologies, in turn, stems
from the metaphorical transferring of this medical concept onto societies—
which are treated as if they were organisms that can be sick or healthy. Haber-
mas’s reading of Freud, in Knowledge and Human Interests, is decisive for the
conception of pathology in his works as a whole. For Freud, pathology is based
on the linguistification or verbalization of unconscious processes (Whitebook
1995): (neurotic) symptoms the subject does not understand result when she or
he proves unable (most commonly, in early childhood) to communicate needs
and wishes directly (öffentlich) and, instead, introjects and “privatizes” the lin-
guistic elements that symbolize them. From this point on, repressed impulses
express themselves in the form of behavioral symptoms that remain incom-
prehensible to the subject and give rise to perceptions that she or he suffers
from a “communication disturbance” within her- or himself (Knowledge, 228).
At the same time, such inner communicative alienation does not prevent the
subject from communicating with others; consequently, the “appearance of
intersubjectivity” is unaffected (228). Because normal communication with
others still occurs, the subject deceives her- or himself into not noticing how
idiosyncratic the intentions are that find expression in her or his symptoms
(“slips of the tongue and of the pen, misreading, bungled actions,” etc. [Knowl-
edge, 219]). Only by working with a therapist is it possible to decode them.
Such are the operative elements of Habermas’s conception of pathology.
Pathologies represent internal communication disturbances that do not
impede external communication; for the most part, their significance remains
unavailable (undurchsichtig) to the subject, and they stem from the internal-
ization of external pressure(s). For pathologies to be identified and countered, it
is necessary that a therapist help the subject—on the basis of the symptoms in
evidence—to break through internal communicative blockades.
Überlegungen zur Kommunikationspathologie (Reflections on communica-
tive pathology, 1974) relates these considerations to the theory of communica-
tive validity claims that Habermas developed after Knowledge and Human
624 Concepts
Interests. Under pathological conditions, the claims of comprehensibility,

truthfulness, and rightness that are associated with linguistic utterances expe-
rience “systematic” distortion inasmuch as interacting subjects break with
them in a way that they fail even to notice. For example, a wife who declares
affection for her husband when, in fact, she has long since despised him,
breaks with the claim to truthfulness (Habermas 1974, reprinted in Vorstu-
dien, 250). Communicative pathologies of this kind can only make themselves
felt (zur Geltung kommen) because subjects also possess the means—in the
form of communication that evinces no signs of disturbance—to conceal from
others the conflicts that actually prevail (wishes, aggression, etc.). In a sense,
then, “healthy” communication provides the precondition for the emergence
of pathological forms of behavior and interaction. Pathological communica-
tion becomes “systematic” in contexts (Habermas has families in mind, above
all) where the price of breaking a supposed consensus is deemed particularly
great and where there are no “metacommunicative” patterns of exchange (Ver-
ständigung) that would help process the differences at issue (Vorstudien, 261).
The Theory of Communicative Action lends the notion of pathology a social-
theoretical turn, dividing its articulations among different structural levels of
the lifeworld. In Habermas’s view, the task of the lifeworld is to make resources
of communication available. The latter transmit and renew knowledge (cul-
ture). They make legitimate (i.e., institutionalized) coordination of action pos-
sible, which produces social integration (society). Finally, through the process
of socialization, they permit stable identities to be constituted (personality).
Each resource/function (Leistung) in the lifeworld has a corresponding pathol-
ogy. Pathologies make themselves felt when subjects do not employ knowledge
to direct their actions (meaning loss), when they do not coordinate actions in
consideration of communally accepted norms (anomie), and when they do not
view one another as accountable (zurechnungsfähig) individuals (psychopathol-
ogy) (Communicative Action, 2:140ff.). From a sociological perspective, pathol-
ogy concerns matters of form and function; it does not involve individual
psychology to any significant extent.
In this framework, pathologies are gauged in relation to the reproduction
and/or the self-preservation of the lifeworld. At the same time, Habermas still
views the matter in terms of external problems whose pressures have been
directed inward. Functional disturbances of society represent “crises”; they
occur, for example, when citizens deny legitimacy to economic institutions
and/or to the apparatuses of caregiving afforded by the welfare state because
they do not adequately perform intended functions (i.e., lessening class
conflict and securing general prosperity). However, when such crises are suc-
cessfully displaced into the lifeworld (i.e., into “culture” and spheres where
“personality” is constituted), this gives rise to pathological conditions: alien-
ation and the destabilization of collective identities.
Social Pathology 625
In other words, crises of anomie are defused or avoided by incurring

pathologies in the lifeworld—which may, consequently, be considered to result
from efforts to overcome social crises by means of displacement (Communica-
tive Action, 2:386). Habermas holds, then, that legal claims to financial-trans-
fer operations in cases provided for by the social state (e.g., old age or illness)
strengthen subject positions and therefore represent gains in freedom. At the
same time, however, the same assurances have an individualizing effect that
dissolves subsidiary forms of solidarity in their traditional form; consequently,
intervention on the part of state bureaucracies into spheres of life that have
hitherto been structured informally becomes more pronounced (Communica-
tive Action, 2:368). What is more, the displacement of crises in the social sys-
tem into the lifeworld produces pathological consequences when it replaces
communicative mechanisms of coordination and legitimation with media-
steered forms of interaction, i.e., power and money; such substitutions make
seeking consensus through communication superfluous. Here, too, Haber-
mas’s conception of pathology involves a communication disturbance induced
from outside. The “appearance” of continuous communication (which, in his
early works, was deemed essential for pathological phenomena) no longer
proves important. It is less the break or distortion of communication that now
counts as pathological than the effects of such disturbances.
It remains somewhat unclear, then, what mechanisms prevent subjects
from remarking the pathologies that beset them (even with help of a therapeu-
tic gaze). The withdrawal of freedom and the push for formalization that the
colonization of the lifeworld entails can pass unnoticed only when subjects
accept the compensations of the welfare state (which seek to avoid crisis) with-
out becoming aware of the loss of communicative freedom that such measures
entail. Thereby, however, the concept of pathology risks losing the subjective
index that—if only in mediated fashion—still occurs in the form of symptoms
that “impose themselves” on subjects individually. Just as vague is Habermas’s
conception of alienation in The Theory of Communicative Action. Likewise, it
is questionable whether system crises in society follow the logic of wealth dis-
tribution (Güterverteilung) as a rule—that, is, whether the threat of imbalance
(i.e., when legitimation and motivation go missing) need to be averted by
monetary compensation.
What happens when the demands that citizens make of political institu-
tions include the more immaterial issue of the “distribution of cultural and
psychological life chances” (Honneth 1995, 217)? Were the logic of conflict to
be extended along these lines, it might prove possible to identify socially
induced pathologies that involve more than disturbances in the ability to
communicate (Honneth 2007)—consequently, the notion of pathology would
once again receive a dimension that can be described in psychological terms
and addressed therapeutically. Moreover, one must ask whether it is enough
626 Concepts
to understand the political and economic colonization of the lifeworld only as

the “ruthless exploitation” (Communicative Action, 2:386) of its resources.
After all, other theories of society hold that capitalism does not simply
destroy the cultural resources of the lifeworld but rather needs them to justify
itself ethically (Boltanski and Chiapello 2003). On this view, the absence of
manifest social anomie is not explained by the successful displacement of
social conflicts into culture and personality but rather on the basis of the
motivational attractiveness of capitalist logic. The contradictory and paradox-
ical effects that arise from this social and economic constellation can no lon-
ger be grasped adequately within the framework of lifeworld and system
(Hartmann and Honneth 2006). Rather, the diagnosis of “pathology” holds
when an empirically verifiable pressure that produces pain (Leidensdruck)
coincides with the systematically produced inability to name the source of
suffering as such.
References
Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello. 2003. Der neue Geist des Kapitalismus. Konstanz: UVK.
Hartmann, Martin, and Axel Honneth. 2006. “Paradoxes of Capitalism.” Constellations 13,
no. 1: 41–58.
Honneth, Axel. 1995. “Moral Consciousness and Class Domination: Some Problems in the
Analysis of Hidden Morality.” In The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social
and Political Philosophy, 205–219. Albany: SUNY Press.
——. 2007. “Pathologies of the Social: Past and Present of Social Philosophy.” In Disrespect:
The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, 3–48. Cambridge: Polity.
Seidler, Eduard. 1989. “Pathologie.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed.
Joachim Ritter et al., 7:182–185. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Whitebook, Joel. 1995. Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical The-
ory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
74
SOCIET Y
HARTMUT ROSA
S
ociological concepts admit analysis along three lines of question-
ing (Rosa, Strecker, and Kottmann 2007): What is a society? That
is, how and by what means does it constitute itself—what forms
its basis or fundamental unity? (Synthesis). Through what processes and in
what manner does society change? What factors serve as “motors” for transfor-
mation? Are there rules underlying its course of development? (Dynamis). Can
the evolution of societies be steered, controlled—or, at very least, influenced by
social actors? (Praxis).
The conception of society elaborated in Habermas’s philosophical and
sociological thinking—which finds its fullest articulation in The Theory of
Communicative Action—can also be examined in terms of these questions.
Synthesis
With the publication of this book, at the latest, Habermas introduced a funda-
mental change of theoretical orientation with respect to the way society is
conceived—a “paradigm shift” for critical theory and Marxian projects in
general. Marx and the so-called first generation of critical theorists (that is,
Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse) considered social relations of production
and/or relations of exchange to constitute the basis of society and to determine
its form. According to this perspective, the origin and form of society ulti-
mately derive from the collective transformation (Bearbeitung) of raw (stoff-
lich) nature. In keeping with the development of forces of production, the
shape of society changes, as well (Dynamis).
Habermas’s early works already critique, by implication, the one-sided
reduction of society to purely economic matters. The criticism becomes
explicit in The Theory of Communicative Action, where Habermas replaces
economic factors with relations of communication—or, as the case may be,
with relations of understanding (Verständigungsverhältnisse). In this concep-
tion, language, communication, and agreement provide the foundation for all
processes of social formation and reproduction; only on this basis is a sym-
bolically constituted lifeworld, divided into distinct spheres, in place—which
628 Concepts
also represents the precondition for the forms assumed by collective produc-
tion and economic exchange. According to Habermas, it is not production but
(linguistically or symbolically mediated) interaction that forms the basis for
society as a whole. This shift from relations of production to relations of inter-
action has inspired other important representatives of critical theory—e.g.,
Habermas’s student Axel Honneth (1996).
For Habermas, society consists first—and foremost—of the “fabric of every-
day communicative practice,” which constitutes and reproduces both shared
interpretations and a divided social reality: the lifeworld.
From the internal perspective of the lifeworld, society is represented as a net-

work of communicatively mediated cooperation. . . . What binds sociated
individuals to one another and secures the integration of society is a web of
communicative actions that thrives only in the light of cultural traditions. . . .
The lifeworld that members construct from common cultural traditions is
coextensive with society.
(Communicative Action, 2:148–149).
Although Habermas gives his view of society a foundation in the theory of

action, this does not amount to individualism in terms of method. Society is
not formed simply of individuals (or, as the case may be, of their actions and
communication between them); the opposite is true, as well: individual identi-
ties are constituted by the communicative fabric of society—subjectivity and
intersubjectivity are, in fact, “equiprimordial.” As a lifeworld, society thereby
performs three essential functions: it produces meaning (“culture”); generates
solidarity (“society” in the narrower sense of social integration); and, finally,
generates ego strength, or capacity for action (“personality”).
All the same, Habermas—influenced by Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory,
which he subjects to critical revision (Habermas and Luhmann 1974)—proves
highly sensitive to the tendency of modern societies to promote systemic
autonomy. Accordingly, he observes that the material reproduction of modern
society follows its own logic—a matter largely independent of communication
occurring in the lifeworld. Habermas discerns vigorous “systemic” arrange-
ments of function (Funktionszusammenhänge) in state and economy; here,
actions are not coordinated linguistically but through the steering media of
power/law and money.
According to Habermas, the enormous success that modern societies have
achieved in scientific/technological and instrumental terms consists, in par-
ticular, of having freed the spheres (Funktionsbereiche) of material reproduc-
tion from the demands of (permanent) communicative understanding. This
insight, in turn, has prompted him to distinguish between “system” and “life-
world.” Whereas the latter, which is constituted and steered by means of
Society 629
communication, assures the symbolic reproduction of the society, the systems

of the economy and the (administrative) state are coordinated by means of
nonlinguistic steering media; they, for their part, assure material reproduc-
tion. System and lifeworld together form the unity of society.
If, in the modern world, system functions have separated off from the life-
world, achieved autonomy, and become independent entities, nevertheless
they remain connected to, and embedded in, it; they form, as it were, stable
structural “calcifications” (Verhärtungen) of the lifeworld. On this basis,
Habermas ultimately defines societies as “systemically stabilized complexes of
action of socially integrated groups” (Communicative Action, 2:152), and he
advances “the heuristic proposal that we view society as an entity that, in the
course of social evolution, gets differentiated both as a system and as a life-
world” (2:152). At the same time, Habermas diagnoses the mounting threat
that “colonization of the lifeworld” will occur through administrative regulation
and economic pressures, which are immune to the processes of communication/
understanding that originate in the lifeworld (Kneer 1990). In contrast, Between
Facts and Norms (1992) voices the hope that even the differentiated systems of
economics and bureaucracy may yet—by means of democratic self-steering
and legislation (that is, by way of law and politics)—be brought to communi-
cate with the lifeworld.
Dynamis
The “paradigm shift” Habermas engineers for determining the conceptual

unity of society (Synthesis) also holds direct consequences for the ways the
forces that produce change are analyzed (Dynamis). Marx identifies the motor
of historical change in the uninterrupted growth of forces of production—
which entails changes in relations of production and societal formations.
Adorno and Horkheimer—as well as Lukács—take up this view and, in line
with Max Weber’s theoretical reflections, present historical transformation as
the progressive historical unfolding of instrumental reason. Habermas, how-
ever, considers this perspective on social rationalization to be one-sided and to
occur “by halves” (halbiert). Accordingly, he identifies a second wellspring of
social change that traditional sociology has overlooked—one whose potential
is especially evident in modern societies. The matter concerns the fact that, in
the culture and lifeworld of modernity (see chapter 75 in this volume), validity
claims concerning what is (scientifically) true, what is (morally or politically)
good or right, and what is (ethically or aesthetically) beautiful (schön) or
authentic (wahrhaftig) are not only distinct—for this has always been observ-
able in the different criteria applied to science, morality, and art—but, more-
over, are set “communicatively aflow” (sich kommunikativ verflüssigen) (that
630 Concepts
is, they can be openly questioned by anyone and are subject to communicative
justification). On this basis, Habermas discerns the unfolding of communica-
tive reason.
Modernization, then, does not just signify increasing instrumental or
means-end reason. It also means that communicative rationalization expands
in equal measure: the structures of the lifeworld may now be interrogated and
negotiated with respect to the normative, evaluative, and factual validity
claims they raise (even if, for the most part, such claims are implicit). According
to the large-scale project outlined in The Theory of Communicative Action, the
basis for this process of transformation ultimately lies within the immanent
logic of language itself. Language—or, more precisely, speech acts (i.e., the
communicative use of language)—automatically aims for communication
(Verständigung)—or, as the case may be, for clarifying the validity claims
operative in all utterances in order to achieve consensus.
Because the normative, epistemic, and expressive structures of the life-
world must always be reproduced in communication, they can, as a matter of
principle, always be questioned; the potential need for justification pushes for
change whenever acceptable reasons cannot be formulated. Thereby, Habermas
identifies the logic of language—or, alternatively, of communication (Verständi-
gung) itself—as a historically active, driving principle of transformation. At the
same time, however, he recognizes that this immanent, dynamic power does
not operate at all times and in all social formations: conditions of communica-
tion (Verständigungsverhältnisse) may be so distorted, “frozen,” or ideologi-
cally perverted that the communicative flow of validity claims becomes
impossible (Strecker 2009).
In no way, then, does Habermas postulate a necessary process of historical
evolution. The further course of modernization depends on how both forms
of rationalization—increases in technical-instrumental rationality, on the one
hand, and the elaboration of communicative reason, on the other—relate to
each other as they respectively evolve. If the tendencies of “one-sided,” system-
atically steered, instrumental (or means-end) rationalization become more
pronounced, then the “project of modernity”—which aims for the unfolding
of communicative reason—will be jeopardized (“Modernity”).
Praxis
Because Habermas locates the core dynamic of social evolution in the logic of
communication (Verständigung), he ultimately declares that the “project of
modernity” itself is a matter of society steering itself democratically: where
conditions of communication (Verständigungsverhältnisse) are not dis-
torted by one-sided power distribution and the structures of the lifeworld are
Society 631
communicatively “aflow,” it is possible for social evolution to be controlled—

and even steered—by means of “deliberative democracy.”
Although Habermas has claimed (in, e.g., Knowledge and Human Interests)
to have identified a quasi-anthropological desire for emancipation (or at least
for uncovering and achieving liberation from unjustified claims of power), the
process of social evolution cannot, in general, be steered or even influenced
through intentions. This can occur only under very specific historical-cultural
conditions that favor the collective unfolding of communicative reason. In
words that recall Luhmann, he remarks: “Before a society can effectively inter-
vene in its own course, it must first develop a subsystem that specializes in
producing collectively binding decisions” (Postnational, 62–63).
Today, the cultivation of communicative reason is especially threatened by
the uncoupling of bureaucratic and capitalist system imperatives from validity
claims based in the lifeworld—and their immunization against them; addi-
tionally, new ideologies—e.g., “neoconservatism”—pose a risk. All the same,
Habermas holds fast to the possibility that self-steering may occur through
law and politics (Facts); indeed, he considers that further social evolution
depends on precisely this development: “The legal concept of self-legislation
has to acquire a political dimension: it must be broadened to include the con-
cept of a society capable of a democratic mode of self-direction and self-inter-
vention. This is the only way that existing constitutions can be interpreted in
terms of the reformist project of the realization of the ‘just’ or ‘well-ordered’
society” (Postnational, 60). In other words: “we will only be able to meet the
challenges of globalization in a reasonable manner if the postnational constel-
lation can successfully develop new forms for the democratic self-steering of
society” (88).
References
Habermas, Jürgen, and Niklas Luhmann. 1974. Gesellschaftstheorie oder Sozialtechnologie.

Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Honneth, Axel. 1996. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts.
Trans. Joel Anderson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Kneer, Georg. 1990. Die Pathologien der Moderne. Zur Zeitdiagnose in der ‘Theorie des
kommunikativen Handelns’ von Jürgen Habermas. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.
Rosa, Hartmut, David Strecker, and Andrea Kottmann. 2007. Soziologische Theorien.
Konstanz: UTB.
Strecker, David. 2009. Logik der Macht. Zum Ort der Kritik zwischen Theorie und Praxis.
75
SYSTEM AND LIFEWORLD
MARCELO NEVES
T
he distinction between system and lifeworld stands at the center
of The Theory of Communicative Action. Society is viewed neither
in strictly systemic terms, nor is it understood exclusively in
terms of the lifeworld. Habermas conceives it “simultaneously as a system and
as a lifeworld” (Communicative Action, 2:120). Social evolution, in turn, is
defined in terms of the differentiation that occurs between these two dimen-
sions (2:152ff.).
Habermas’s model presents the lifeworld “as the horizon within which
communicative actions are ‘always already’ moving” (2:119). In other words, it
is conceived as the “background for communicative action” (Vorstudien, 593)
and represents a complementary concept to that of communicative action
(Communicative Action, 2:119; Vorstudien, 546; for a critique, see Apel 1989).
The lifeworld reproduces itself through communicative action, oriented on inter-
subjective understanding (Facts, 524n18). “Naturally,” this does not mean “that
strategic interactions [cannot] emerge in the lifeworld” (524n18). When this
occurs, however, the lifeworld “offers no shared consensus in advance, because
strategic actors encounter normative contexts, as well as other participants, only
as social facts”—that is, “its action-coordinating force” is “neutralized” (524n18).
Accordingly, the lifeworld can be understood as the symbolic frame of reference
for communicative action, even when its material substrate reproduces itself
along instrumental lines (Vorstudien, 546; Communicative Action, 2:138ff.).
Habermas does not share the culturalistic conception of lifeworld that
goes back to Edmund Husserl (Husserl 1970; Berger and Luckmann 1967;
Schütz and Luckmann 1974, 1989; Luckmann 1981; cf. also Luhmann 1975, 70–73),
which he considers one sided (Communicative Action, 2:139ff.). Moreover, he
considers the model Talcott Parsons (1966) inherits from Émile Durkheim
(1984)—according to which the lifeworld merely assures (normative) societal
integration—to be incomplete (Communicative Action, 2:139). Finally, Habermas
rejects the tradition that follows George Herbert Mead (1967) and views the
lifeworld in terms of the socialization of individuals (Communicative Action,
2:140). Instead, he argues that culture, society, and personality constitute the
structural components of the lifeworld:
System and Lifeworld 633
I use the term culture for the stock of knowledge from which participants in
communication supply themselves with interpretations as they come to an
understanding about something in the world. I use the term society for the
legitimate orders through which participants regulate their memberships in
social groups and thereby secure solidarity. By personality I understand the
competences that make a subject capable of speaking and acting, that put him
in a position to take part in processes of reaching understanding and thereby
to assert his own identity.
(2:138)
The rationalization of the lifeworld is related to its structural differentia-

tion (2:145). The three components of the lifeworld correspond, respectively, to
cultural reproduction (the semantic dimension of meaning or content), social
integration (the dimension of social space), and socialization (the dimension
of historical time—succeeding generations) (2:138). Culture, society, and per-
sonality are not just subsystems of the “general system of action”—i.e., they do
not represent environments for one another (2:155). Rather, they structure
communicative action and, at the same time, reproduce themselves in this
capacity. Communicative action serves tradition and the renewal of cultural
knowledge by promoting understanding (Verständigung), social integration,
solidarity (through the coordination of actions), and the formation of personal
identities (through socialization) (2:137).
Habermas does not equate the lifeworld with the world as the sum total of
reference points for communicative actors (2:137, 120ff.; Moral Consciousness,
136ff.). “Communicative actors are always moving within the horizon of their
lifeworld; they cannot step outside of it. As interpreters, they themselves
belong to the lifeworld, along with their speech acts, but they cannot ‘refer to
something in the lifeworld’ in the same way as they can to facts, norms, or
experiences” (Communicative Action, 2:126; see also Communicative Action,
1:70ff.). Rather, the world emerges as a system of references for those who act
communicatively (Moral Consciousness, 136). In the course of social evolution,
the objective, social, and subjective worlds split off from one another (see
chapter 56 in this volume). The objective world consists of the conditions and
events about which statements are made that can prove true or false. The
social world is formed by legitimately regulated intersubjective interactions, to
which participants make reference with claims to (normative) rightness.
Finally, when communicative actors express their experiences in the horizon
of the lifeworld, they refer to their inner (subjective) world with claims to
truthfulness (e.g., Communicative Action, 1:319ff.; Moral Consciousness, 136ff.;
Vorstudien, 588–589, 137ff., 426–427, and 462ff.). “Thus, agreement in the com-
municative practice of everyday life rests simultaneously on intersubjectively
634 Concepts
shared propositional knowledge, on normative accord, and on mutual trust”

(Moral Consciousness, 136).
Beyond the differentiation between culture, society, and personality, the
rationalization of the lifeworld implies decentering the understanding of the
world (Weltverständnis) and making a distinction between validity claims.
Symmetry obtains between the differentiation of the lifeworld and world ref-
erences in Habermas’s theoretical scheme. Inasmuch as culture (knowledge
supply), society (legitimate orders), and personality differentiate from one
another, reference patterns to the objective, social, and subjective worlds grow
equally distinct. One should note, however, that communicative action—
through which the lifeworld reproduces itself—remains oriented on com-
munication (Verständigung) in all three dimensions. “Thus, it is a rule of
communicative action that when a hearer assents to a thematized validity
claim, he acknowledges the other two implicitly raised validity claims as
well—otherwise, he is supposed to make known his dissent” (Communica-
tive Action, 2:121).
Consensus does not obtain if the hearer accepts the truth of a statement but
doubts the truthfulness of the speaker or the normative appropriateness of his
or her utterance. Likewise, no consensus is achieved if the hearer agrees to the
normative validity of an order but doubts the existence of the objective condi-
tions for performing it—or does not believe that it was declared in earnest
(2:121ff.). Finally, there is no consensus if the hearer believes in the truthful-
ness of the speaker but at the same time considers his or her statement false or
his or her order not to be right. Habermas’s conception implies an overbur-
dening for the communicative actors as they are required to search perma-
nently for a consensual result in order to be “rational.”
In this context especially, Habermas focuses on the “contribution of . . .
reproduction processes to maintaining the structural components of the life-
world” as well as on “manifestations of crisis when reproduction processes are
disturbed (pathologies)” (2:121, 141ff.; see also Vorstudien, 562ff.). Cultural
reproduction involves schemes of interpretation that may be agreed upon (i.e.,
valid knowledge) within the realm of culture itself, elements that assure legiti-
mation in society, and patterns of behavior (or, alternately, educational goals)
that prove effective in terms of shaping personality. When crisis occurs, cul-
tural reproduction fails with respect to the three structural components of the
lifeworld—accordingly, loss of meaning, legitimation withdrawal, and/or a
breakdown of orientation (or education) ensues.
Social integration involves obligations in matters of culture (im Kultur-
zusammenhang), legitimately ordered interpersonal relations within society
itself, and social belonging in terms of personality. In the event of crisis, social
integration fails, and a collapse of collective identity, anomie, and alien-
ation result. Socialization enables acts of interpretation (culture), provides
System and Lifeworld 635
motivation(s) for actions conforming to norms (society), and, finally, deter-

mines the construction of identity (personality). In situations of crisis, when
socialization fails, it entails breaks in tradition, the withdrawal of motivation,
and psychopathologies. Individual processes of reproduction—or, as the case
may be, the crisis phenomena that correspond to them—“can be evaluated
according to standards of the rationality of knowledge, the solidarity of mem-
bers, and the responsibility of the adult personality” (Communicative Action,
2:141). In all cases, however, a state of crisis may be diagnosed only insofar as
hindrances to possibilities of communicative, understanding-oriented action
have arisen.
Habermas understands crisis in terms of the interaction between system
and lifeworld (Vorstudien, 565–566). Provisionally, one may define “system” as
the self-regulated sphere where instrumental action is mediated. That said, the
formulation is imprecise because, in Habermas’s model, the concepts of sys-
tem and action are distinct, and one can only speak of system rationality in a
figural sense: “changes of condition in a self-regulated system may be under-
stood as quasi-actions—as if a subject’s capacity to act found expression
hereby” (Rekonstruktion, 261). For all that, it is certain that Habermas views
the system along the lines of purposive rationality and, consequently, under-
stands it in terms of purposive-rational actions (e.g., Rational Society, 124–125;
Communicative Action, 2:180, 183; Rekonstruktion, 261; Vorstudien, 578–579). The
system can be defined as the ensemble (Zusammenhang) of instrumental actions
that are mediated by money and power (“delinguistified media”) (Communica-
tive Action, 2:154ff.). On the basis of this mediation, the intentions of actors incor-
porated in the “system network” are neutralized.
Habermas’s conception of system is narrow; it is limited to the economy and
“administrative power” (2:171ff., 344ff.). Science, religion, art, education, parts of
law, and democratic politics occurring through discursive will formation (i.e.,
through communicative power) do not represent systems but rather reflexive
institutional planes of the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld (2:151). The
media of generalization that correspond to them are all constituted linguistically.
Habermas’s notion of “the colonization of the lifeworld” (2:332ff.) is in keeping
with his narrow conception of “system.” When colonization occurs, the self-reg-
ulated systems of economy and politics penetrate the lifeworld to destructive
effect, disrupting its processes of reproduction and thereby endangering the
integrity and continued existence of its constitutive elements. The colonization of
the lifeworld connects directly to three of the aforementioned crisis phenomena:
meaning loss, anomie, and personality disturbance (Vorstudien, 565) occur, and
system integration—in a state of “malfunction”—exercises a destructive effect on
cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization.
In short: the lifeworld is rationalized by differentiation that occurs between
structural components, on the one hand, and differentiation between world
636 Concepts
references (decentered understanding of the world) and corresponding valid-

ity claims, on the other. This rationalization cannot be separated from differ-
ences between types of action and differences between levels of action and
discourse. The rationality of the lifeworld is also externally differentiated
with respect to the system. The latter can, when it becomes more complex,
further the former’s material reproduction and, in this way, contribute to the
rationality of knowledge, solidarity between members of society, and the
autonomy of persons. At the same time, however, systemic hypertrophy can
penetrate the lifeworld and produce destructive consequences for culture,
society, and personality—above all, in the form of “meaning loss,” anomie,
and psychopathologies.
In conclusion, Habermas links the rationality of the lifeworld to the possi-
bility of creating situations where consensus may be achieved. However, the
strict interpretation of the lifeworld in terms of communicative action dimin-
ishes the analytic efficacy of his approach for understanding the highly com-
plex world society and democratic and constitutional states as they exist today.
References
Apel, Karl-Otto. 1989. “Normative Begründung der ‘Kritischen Theorie’ durch Rekurs auf
lebensweltliche Sittlichkeit? Ein transzendentalpragmatisch orientierter Versuch, mit
Habermas gegen Habermas zu denken.” In Zwischenbetrachtungen im Prozeß der
Aufklärung – Jürgen Habermas zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Axel Honneth et al., 15–65.
Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality. New
York: Doubleday Anchor.
Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2006. Habermas. Leipzig: Reclam.
Durkheim, Émile. 1984. The Division of Labor in Society. Trans. Lewis A. Coser. New York:
Free Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenol-
ogy: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press.
Luckmann, Thomas. 1981. Life-world and Social Realities. London: Heinemann Educa-
tional.
Luhmann, Niklas. 1975. Macht. Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius.
Mead, George Herbert. 1967. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behav-
iorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Parsons, Talcott. 1966. Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
APPENDIX
CHRONOLOGY
June 18, 1929 Born in Düsseldorf

1949 Final secondary-school examinations in Gummersbach
1949–1954 University studies in philosophy, psychology, German literature
and economics in Göttingen, Zürich, and Bonn
1954 Doctorate in Bonn under Erich Rothacker: The Absolute and His-
tory: On the Ambivalence in Schelling’s Thought
1954–1956 Freelance journalist; assistantship from the German Research
Foundation
1955 Married Ute Wesselhoeft (children: Tilmann [1956], Rebekka
[1959], Judith [1967])
1956–1959 Research assistant at the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt
1957–1959 Work on a study at the Institute for Social Research on “Student
and Politics”
1959–1961 German Research Foundation habilitation grant
1961 Habilitation, University of Marburg (The Structural Transforma-
tion of the Public Sphere)
1961–1964 Associate professor of philosophy, Heidelberg University
1964–1971 Professor of philosophy and sociology, Goethe University Frank-
furt; debate regarding hermeneutics, ideology critique, and
positivism
1968–1969 Debates in the student movement about reform and revolution,
the political mandate of student associations, and the reform
of higher education
638 Chronology
1970/1971 Debate with Niklas Luhmann about systems and social theory
1971–1980 Director, Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Conditions of
Life in the Scientific-Technical World, Starnberg
1974 Hegel Prize of the city of Stuttgart
1975–1982 Honorary professor of philosophy, Goethe University Frankfurt;
the University of Munich had earlier denied Habermas an
honorary professorship
1976 Sigmund Freud Prize
1977–1979 Dispute about terrorism, the state of emergency, and neoconser-
vatism; Briefe zur Verteidigung der Republik (Letters in defense
of the republic), edited by Freimut Duve, Heinrich Böll, and
Klaus Staeck (1977)
1980 Adorno Award in Frankfurt; lecture on “Modernity: An Unfin-
ished Project.” Since then, multifaceted debates on postmod-
ernism, poststructuralism, and young conservatism
1980 Honorary doctorate, New School for Social Research, New York
1980–1981 Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Sciences, Starnberg
Since 1983 Professor of philosophy, Goethe University Frankfurt (emeritus
since 1994)
1985 Geschwister Scholl Prize
1985–1987 Historikerstreit
1987 Sonning Prize, Copenhagen
1989 Honorary doctorate, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Since 1989 Frequently at the New York University School of Law (as partici-
pant in the colloquium organized by Ronald Dworkin and
Thomas Nagel)
Since 1994 Permanent visiting professor, Northwestern University, Evan-
ston, Ill.
1995 Karl Jaspers Prize of the city of Heidelberg
1995 Honorary doctorate, Tel Aviv University
1995/1996 Debates with Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls about law and
democracy
Since 1996 Multiple visits to China
1997 Honorary doctorate, Sorbonne University, Paris (St. Denis-
Vincennes)
Since 1998 Debates about cloning, autonomy, and genetic technology
1999 Theodor Heuss Prize
Since 2000 Professor of global law, New York University School of Law
2001 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
Since 2001 Debate about religion in the public sphere; beginning of the
ongoing debate about the divided West, “core Europe,” and
the United States
Chronology 639
2003 Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences

2004 Kyoto Prize for Philosophy; debate with Cardinal Ratzinger
over metaphysical differences and operative commonalities
between the Catholic faith and postmetaphysical thinking
Since 2004 Debate over naturalism and freedom
2005 Holberg Prize
2013 Erasmus Prize
2015 Kluge Prize
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C ON T RIBU T ORS
Andrew Arato is the Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor in Political and Social Theory at
the New School for Social Research, New York.
Amy Allen is the Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender,
and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University.
Amy R. Baehr is associate professor of philosophy at Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y.
Kenneth Baynes is professor of philosophy and political science at Syracuse University,
N.Y.
Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at
Yale University.
Richard J. Bernstein is the Vera List Professor of Philosophy at the New School for
Social Research, New York.
James Bohman is the Danforth Professor of Philosophy and Professor of International
Studies at Saint Louis University.
Micha Brumlik was professor of education at Goethe University Frankfurt until 2013
and is since then senior advisor at the Berlin-Brandenburg Center for Jewish
Studies, Berlin.
Hauke Brunkhorst is senior professor of sociology at the University of Flensburg.
Jean L. Cohen is the Nell and Herbert Singer Professor of Political Theory and
Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University, New York.
Robin Celikates is associate professor of political and social philosophy at the
University of Amsterdam.
Felmon J. Davis is associate professor of philosophy at Union College, Schenectady, N.Y.
Nicole Deitelhoff is professor of international relations and theories of global orders at
Goethe University Frankfurt.
650 List of Contributors
Klaus Eder is senior professor of sociology and comparative structural analysis at the
Humboldt University of Berlin.
Rainer Forst is professor of political theory and philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Nancy Fraser is the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at
the New School for Social Research, New York.
Manfred Frank is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen.
René Gabriëls is a lecturer in philosophy at Maastricht University.
Anna Geis is professor of international security policy and conflict research at Helmut
Schmidt University/University of the German Federal Armed Forces.
Klaus Günther is professor of legal theory, criminal law, and criminal procedure at
Martin Hartmann is professor of philosophy at the University of Lucerne.
Helge Høibraaten is professor emeritus of philosophy at the Norwegian University of
Science and Technology, Trondheim.
Axel Honneth is senior professor of social philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt
and the Jack C. Weinstein Professor for the Humanities at Columbia University,
New York.
Mattias Iser is associate professor of philosophy at the State University of New York,
Binghamton.
Rahel Jaeggi is professor of practical philosophy, philosophy of law, and social
philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Christian Joerges is a co-director of the Centre of European Law and Politics at the
University of Bremen and part-time professor of law and society at the Hertie
School of Governance, Berlin.
Dirk Jörke is professor of political science at the Technische Universität Darmstadt.
Matthias Kettner is professor of philosophy at Witten/Herdecke University.
Thomas Khurana is visiting professor of philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Gertrud Koch is professor of film studies at the Freie Universität of Berlin.
Andreas Koller is a research fellow at the Social Science Research Council and at New
York University.
Regina Kreide is professor of political theory and the history of ideas at the University
of Giessen.
Cristina Lafont is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, Evanston.
Georg Lohmann is emeritus professor of philosophy at the Otto-von-Guericke
University Magdeburg.
Ingeborg Maus is emeritus professor of political theory and the history of ideas at
Thomas McCarthy is emeritus professor of philosophy at Northwestern University,
Evanston, and was the William H. Orrick Visiting Professor at Yale University.
Christoph Menke is professor of philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Christoph Möllers is professor of public law and philosophy of law at the Humboldt
University of Berlin and permanent fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study,
Berlin.
List of Contributors 651
Stefan Müller-Doohm is emeritus professor of sociology—specializing in theories of

interaction and communication—at the University of Oldenburg.
Patrizia Nanz is scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies
(IASS) and professor for transformative sustainability studies at the University
of Potsdam.
Marcelo Neves is professor of public law and legal theory at the University of Brasilia.
Rainer Nickel is a lawyer with Stark and Kollegen solicitors in Frankfurt am Main and
was research assistant at the Institute of Public Law at Goethe University
Frankfurt.
Andreas Niederberger is professor of philosophy at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Peter Niesen is professor of political theory at the University of Hamburg.
Frank Nullmeier is professor of political science at the University of Bremen.
Gertrud Nunner-Winkler was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for
Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Munich.
William Rehg is professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University.
Ali Rizvi is a tutor at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.
Hartmut Rosa is professor of general and theoretical sociology at University of Jena
and director of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies
in Erfurt.
Martin Saar is professor of political science at Leipzig University.
William E. Scheuerman is professor of political science and international studies at
Indiana University, Bloomington.
Rainer Schmalz-Bruns is professor of political science at Leibniz Universität Hannover.
Thomas Schmidt is professor of philosophy of religion at Goethe University Frankfurt.
David Strecker is a junior fellow at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and
Social Studies in Erfurt.
Joel Whitebook is the director of the psychoanalytic studies program at Columbia
University, New York.
INDE X
Abendroth, Wolfgang: Marxism and, Bakunin, Mikhail, 225, 238

36–39; social welfare and, 118, 155–156 Bataille, Georges, 400
Adenauer era, 4, 36, 606 Bellamy, Richard, 483
Adorno, Theodor W., 6–8; Derrida and, 174; Benhabib, Seyla: conception of justice, 165;
Habermas’s critique of, 31–35; Jewish public sphere and, 249
philosophy and, 201–202; Late Benjamin, Walter, 357; Jewish philosophy
Capitalism or Industrial Society, 571; and, 199–201; mass culture and, 591;
Popper and, 272; psychoanalysis and, reformism and, 610
64–66. See also Dialectic of Bernstein, Richard J., 401
Enlightenment Bloch, Ernst: Jewish philosophy and,
Alexy, Robert, 118–120, 421 200–201; Schelling and, 220, 222
alienation: colonization thesis and, 17; Blumenberg, Hans, 458
Hegel and, 242; technology and, 260 Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang, 426
anthropology, 504–506; philosophical, Bohman, James, 411
27–28, 267, 507, 614 Bourdieu, Pierre, 380
Apel, Karl-Otto, 274, 538; discourse Brandom, Robert S., 193–195
ethics and, 538–539; Peirce and, 281; Brunkhorst, Hauke: counterfactual
transcendental pragmatics and, 296, presuppositions and, 522; transnational
383–386, 388; ultimate justification and, publicity and, 252; Treaty of Lisbon
43–47 and, 437
Aquinas, Thomas, 133–134 Buber, Martin, 197
Arendt, Hannah, 4, 592; conception of power Bubner, Rüdiger, 282
and, 113, 357, 592, 598; Jewish philosophy Bühler, Karl, 60
and, 203–204; natality and, 465 Bürger, Peter, 336
Aristotle, 133–134; virtue and, 514 Bush, George W., 252: invasion of Iraq and,
Austin, John L., 58–62; Derrida and, 252; “War On Terror” and, 582
404–406 Butler, Judith, 406–407
654 Index
Chomsky, Noam, 615 and, 100; supranational, 143, 147–148;

Clayton, Philip, 211 Ridder and, 126–127; transnational, 560;
cognitive interests, 489–493; emancipatory well-ordered society and, 631; world
cognitive interest, 16, 278; Peirce and, society and, 85, 482, 485
277; Popper and, 272; quasi- constitutional patriotism, 513–516;
transcendental status of, 281–285 antifascist consensus and, 9; citizenship
Cohen, Hermann, 196–197, 204 and, 427; cosmopolitanism and, 150;
Cohen, Joshua, 123, 129–131 European Union and, 432, 545–546;
colonization of the lifeworld, 17–18, multiculturalism and, 515; nationalism
372–378, 494–498, 508–509; bureaucracy and, 514
and, 495; juridification and, 587; Cooke, Maeve, 211
Legitimation Crisis and, 321–322; cosmopolitan condition, 88, 143–145,
Marxist theory and, 494, 574, 631; 148–149, 475, 485, 517–519, 582
monetization and, 495; social cosmopolitan constitution, 88, 148, 151, 581
pathologies and, 625–626; cosmopolitan democracy, 252, 474–476,
technologization and, 496 480, 482, 517–519
communicative action, 499–506; Brandom cosmopolitan global governance, 42
and, 193–194; Derrida and, 405; cosmopolitan law, 20, 145–146, 476,
deconstruction and, 172; disagreement 478–479, 485, 579
in, 535; discourse and, 283; disturbances cosmopolitan order, 144, 433–434, 477
in, 533; equality and, 541; law and, 166, cosmopolitan political system, 143
421; lifeworld and, 266, 368, 601, 620; cosmopolitan right, 88
normative rightness and, 456, 503; counterfactual presuppositions, 520–527;
obstacles to, 528; one-sided forms of, communicative praxis and, 523;
365; pragmatic turn and, 602–603; “domination-free” discourse and, 535;
psychoanalysis and, 279; Putnam and, factual effectiveness of, 523–525; ideal
191; self-consciousness and, 72; social speech situation and, 520, 522, 524;
evolution and, 33–34, 106, 108, 110, 549, normative demands and, 525; possibility
551–552; social pathologies and, 494; of universal agreement as, 282;
social reproduction and, 369; speech postmetaphysical thinking and, 524
acts and, 59; strategic action and, 62, 83, cultural criticism, 259–260, 590–593;
291, 366–367, 370–371, 500–501, 569; conservatism and, 622; mass culture
system and lifeworld and, 632–636; and, 592
validity claims and, 63, 319, 385–386, 615
communicative turn, 192, 265, 619–620; Dahrendorf, Ralf, 1–4
reason and, 398. See also linguistic turn Davidson, Donald, 62, 349
conservatism, 127, 473, 507–512; deliberation, 528–532; formal-pragmatic
“compassionate,” 378; neo-, 336, 509–510, conditions of, 303; human rights and,
631; “young,” “old” and “new,” 622 558; political legitimation and, 418;
conservatives, 515; neo-, 2, 170, 337, 510; political system and, 530; public sphere
“New,” 339, 409; “Old,” 339, 409; and, 251, 606; “sluice model” and, 530;
“Young,” 170, 339–340, 409 The Structural Transformation of the
constitution, 513–516; American, 78; Public Sphere and, 184–186
constitutional patriotism and, 427, deliberative democracy: Between Facts and
514–515; cosmopolitan, 151, 581; Norms and, 15, 302, 378, 424–425;
federalism and, 442; European, 151, 155, Derrida and, 174; nation-state and, 478;
157–158, 160, 435–438, 483, 516, 518, 547; religious neutrality and, 427; social
global, 146, 148, 150; Kant and, 78, evolution and, 631; social homogeneity
85–89, 146, 350, 478, 482, 513; Luhmann and, 429
Index 655
deliberative politics, 528–529, 531; Joshua Dworkin, Ronald: juridical discourses

Cohen and, 129–131 and, 120–121; liberal eugenics and,
Derrida, Jacques: deconstruction and, 468–469
170–175; Foucault and, 69; Heidegger
and, 71; Jewish philosophy and, Eder, Klaus, 329
204–205; parasitic uses of speech and, Engels, Friedrich, 224
59; phallogocentrism and, 398; The equality, 541–543; communicative, 520;
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity democratic, 126, 426; European Union
and, 401–410; poststructuralism and, and, 437, 441; feminism and, 185–186,
177–181 250; formal, 422; freedom and, 80, 82,
Dewey, John, 43, 188, 192 129, 454; moral, 470, 542; political, 131,
Dews, Peter, 40, 51 542; public sphere and, 124; rational,
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and 541; states and, 146, 433; world domestic
Horkheimer): Foucault and, 407; Jewish politics and, 568
philosophy and, 201–202; modernity European citizenship, 439, 442, 544–548
and, 395–398; psychoanalysis and, evolution, 549–553; biological, 330;
64–65; “mass culture” and, 259, 591 historical, 32, 630; historical
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 276–278; Gadamer and, materialism and, 554–557; law and, 119;
490 learning processes and, 578–579;
discourse, 533–537; argumentative, 44, 46, Legitimation Crisis and, 308–309;
190–191, 285, 294, 300; ethical, 133–134, Luhmann and theory of, 619–620;
137, 139, 355, 536; fictional, 180; juridical, moral development and, 94, 119, 328;
117–121, 166, 355, 421; legal, 153–154, 544; natural, 491; social integration and, 328;
moral, 75, 133, 137–140, 192, 391, 542; society and, 629–633; sociocultural, 45;
moralizing, 584; practical, 47, 77, 185, theory of, 29, 105–110, 137, 188, 211;
283, 300, 383–388, 392, 536, 539; public, theory of society and, 360; Zur
106, 124, 173, 186, 263, 377, 425, 471, 579; Rekonstruktion des Historischen
religious, 211, 214; scientific, 284; Materialismus and, 327–332
strategic, 421; theological, 17, 220;
theoretical, 192, 284, 300, 330; truth- Feuerbach, Ludwig: Marx and, 224, 226,
oriented, 115, 579 399; Schelling and, 228
discourse ethics, 383–393, 538–540; Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 230; Marx and,
abstract universalism and, 135; 226; Schelling and, 234
anthropology and, 505–506; Fischer, Joschka, 434, 440
communicative rationality and, 301; Flynn, Jeffrey, 485
evolution and, 549; feminism and, 185; Forst, Rainer, 137
foundational norm of, 47; justification Forsthoff, Ernst, 4; social state and, 118,
and, 164; Kant and, 75–76; morality 155–156
and, 133–134; principle of Foucault, Michel, 18; conception of the
universalization and, 542; Putnam intellectual of, 568–569; The
and, 191; Rawls and, 138; ultimate Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
justification and, 45 and, 178, 398–403; theory of madness of,
Döbert, Rainer, 329 69; theory of power of, 114–115, 407–408
Dummett, Michael, 292 Fraenkel, Ernst, 4, 38
Durkheim, Émile: developmental Fraser, Nancy, 372, 408
sociology and, 105, 134; lifeworld and, Freud, Sigmund: Knowledge and Human
632; rationalization and, 616; social Interests and, 64, 67–68, 623; Marx and,
evolution and, 454 279–280, 492; methodology of, 326;
Dutschke, Rudi, 10 theory of civilization of, 492
656 Index
Gadamer, Hans-Georg: debate with ideology, 562–564; legitimation and, 307;

Habermas, 53, 55, 274; psychoanalysis technology and science as, 261–263;
and, 68 The Theory of Communicative Action
Gehlen, Arnold, 3–4; conservatism and, and, 265
420, 504, 507; “superstructure” and, ideology critique: emancipatory cognitive
259; theory of action of, 27–29 interest and, 492–493; Foucault and, 115;
Gilligan, Carol, 164, 389 Freud and, 280, 284; public sphere and,
Grice, H. Paul, 60 605; rational reconstruction and, 614;
Grimm, Dieter, 428, 515 The Theory of Communicative Action
Günther, Klaus, 389, 421 and, 379
intellectuals, 1–3, 565–570; conservative,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: French 322; Jewish, 203; neoconservative, 509
Revolution and, 507–508; Kant and,
76–77, 134–135, 349–350, 358; Marx and, James, William, 188
275; modern subjectivity and, 398–399; Jencks, Martin, 345
Schelling and, 220–228, 241–242
Heidegger, Martin, 5–6; Daseinsanalyse Kant, Immanuel: constitutionality and,
and, 27–28; Derrida and, 408; 78–79, 128; cosmopolitan condition
hermeneutics and, 49–51; National and, 144, 475–476, 517; Critique of
Socialism and, 28 Judgement, 410; freedom and, 446–447;
Heine, Heinrich, 222, 224 Hegel and, 76–77, 134–135, 349–350, 358;
Held, David, 476–480 international law and, 84–89; “master
Heller, Herrmann, 156 thinker,” 350–352; moral philosophy
Henrich, Dieter: postmetaphysical and, 75–77; normativity and, 420;
thinking and, 71–72, 594, 596 popular sovereignty and, 81–83, 129;
historical materialism, 554–557; Piaget pragmatism and, 188, 192, 194;
and, 328; psychoanalysis and, 326; procedural interpretation of justice,
Schelling and, 220; social evolution 162; religious faith and, 208–209;
and, 331–332; systems theory and, transcendental philosophy, 89–90, 354;
326–327 world state and, 145
Hitler, Adolf, 3–4 Kelsen, Hans, 151
Honneth, Axel: theory of recognition and, Kierkegaard, Søren, 140, 229, 459;
268, 323 postmetaphysical ethics and, 472
Horkheimer, Max, 7–8, 31; psychoanalysis Kirchheimer, Otto, 38–40
and, 64–66. See also Dialectic of Kluge, Alexander, 1–3; Negt and, 246–248
Enlightenment Kohlberg, Lawrence: Gilligan and, 164;
human rights, 558–561; Apel and, 47; Piaget and, 92–95, 549, 577; theory of
cosmopolitan constitution and, moral development and, 138, 164; theory
144–145, 148, 485; global political of psychological development and, 389.
system and, 89, 149–150, 475–476; See also Piaget, Jean
international law and, 84, 143, 429,
481–482; political justice and, 165; Lafont, Cristina, 149–150, 485
postmetaphysical thinking and, 471; Langthaler, Rudolf, 209
sovereignty and, 21; supranational late capitalism, 12–13, 571–576; colonization
organizations and, 20, 484–485; of the lifeworld and, 373, 378; crisis
United Nations and, 518; war and, tendencies in, 313–314; cultural system
581–582 and, 316; family and, 183; ideology and,
Hume, David: conservatism and, 507 562; legitimation problems and, 323,
Husserl, Edmund: lifeworld and, 632 384, 513; liberal capitalism and, 310–313,
Index 657
572–574; reification and, 264; standards nature and, 472; postmetaphysical

of living and, 374; state and, 118 thinking and, 595; pragmatism and,
learning processes, 577–580; behaviorism 194; Putnam and, 191; Rorty and,
and, 92; cognitive interests and, 491; 189
collective, 578–580; constitutional linguistic-pragmatic turn, 271, 285, 489
patriotism and, 514; deliberation and, Lorenzen, Paul, 384
529; democratization of philosophy Lorenzer, Alfred, 279
and, 354; discourse and, 536; European Luhmann, Niklas: debate with Habermas,
citizenry and, 437; individual, 577–578; 98–99, 307, 328; Flakhelfer generation
Kohlberg and, 95, 616; naturalism and, and, 2–3; functional self-organization
188; social evolution and, 329–330; and, 108; legal system and, 101–102;
supranationalism and, 148; theory of legitimation and, 100, 587; Marxism
argumentation and, 285, 299; validity and, 103; social evolution and, 549,
claims and, 191 619–620; systems rationality and, 321;
legality, 422–423, 426, 586–589; “belief in technocracy and, 41, 99, 268, 621
legality,” 100, 124, 319; European, 547; Lukács, Georg: reification and, 257–258,
human rights and, 560; legitimacy and, 372
586, 588; normativistic, 40; Luria, Isaac, 198, 222, 238
transnational, 560 Lyotard, Jean-François, 400–403
legal wars vs. legimitate wars, 581–585
legitimacy, 586–589; communicative power Mach, Ernst, 273
and, 598; cosmopolitan condition and, MacIntyre, Alasdair, 138–139
477–478, 480–481, 517, 519; deliberation Marcuse, Herbert: critique of technology
and, 303, 529, 531; democratic, 130, 148, and, 33, 259, 262, 268; late capitalism
474, 476, 482; domestic world politics and, 571–572; psychoanalysis and, 64;
and, 89; European consitutionalization reformism and, 610
and, 155–157, 436–437, 440–441; legality Marx, Karl, 6; emancipation of humanity
and, 124; normative theory of, 319–320; and, 29; empirical sciences and, 226;
public opinion and, 245, 249–250; Freud and, 279–280, 492; historical
supranational politics and, 149, materialism and, 554; Knowledge and
475–478, 482–484; Weber on, 100, 328 Human Interests and, 275–276; labor
legitimation, 586–589; Between Facts and and, 32, 107; realization of philosophy
Norms and, 423–425; democratic, 19, and, 355; reification and, 256–258;
611–612; European democracy and, Schelling and, 28, 224–225, 235, 237–242;
428–429; human rights and, 559; theory of value and, 12
ideology and, 263, 562; “just war” and, mass culture, 317, 357, 590–593; mass media
584; late capitalism and, 118, 312–313, and, 591–592
513; legitimation deficit, 483–485; Maus, Ingeborg, 127–129
legitimation crisis, 12–13, 264, 311, McCarthy, Thomas, 323, 469
314–316, 318, 321–323, 384, 418, 530, Mead, George Herbert: developmental
574–575; Luhmann and, 100–102; sociology and, 134; perspective
procedural law and, 130; Schmitt and, taking and, 192; symbolic interaction
100; supranantional constitution and, and, 164
148, 477, 481, 560; three-leveled theory Mills, C. Wright, 523
of, 320; Weber and, 100 Mirecourt, John, 459
Levinas, Emmanuel, 205 Mouffe, Chantal, 564
linguistic turn, 227, 603; Apel and, 43;
critical theory of society and, 7, 283, Nagel, Thomas, 167, 468–469
288; epistemology and, 89; human Nagl-Docekal, Herta, 209
658 Index
National Socialism, 4–5, 117; German 592, 598; colonization of the lifeworld
nationalism and, 514; Heidegger and, 494, 601; communicative, 250, 357,
and, 28 426, 598–599, 601; constitutionalization
Negt, Oskar, 246–248 of, 79, 483, 485; divine, 458–459; division
Neumann, Franz L., 38–40, 123 of powers, 78, 147, 350; Foucault’s
Nietzsche, Friedrich: Knowledge and conception of, 114–115, 178–179, 407–408;
Human Interests and, 280; The gender and, 183, 185; intellectuals and,
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 566, 568–569; money and administrative
and, 398–400, 510; postmetaphysical power, 102, 373–375; Parson’s conception
thinking and, 71 of, 111–112, 592; public spheres and, 563,
567, 607; speech acts and, 404–405;
Offe, Claus, 12, 315, 572 social, 250, 372, 375, 598, 600; violence
and, 357
Parmenides, 450–451 pragmatic turn, 7, 362, 364, 602–604.
Parsons, Talcott: AGIL-scheme and, 308; See also linguistic-pragmatic turn
concept of power and, 111–112, 592; public sphere, 9–10, 245, 605–608;
social evolution and, 108, 621; theory of categorization of, 246–247; colonization
social systems and, 327 of the lifeworld and, 313, 370, 373,
Peirce, Charles Sanders: empirical sciences 375–376, 574, 588; communicative power
and, 276–278, 490; neopragmatism and, and, 426, 598–599; constitutional
188; regulative ideas and, 43, 521 patriotism and, 514; counterfactual
Peters, Bernhard: counterfactual presuppositions and, 523, 535;
presuppositions and, 522; sluice model deliberation and, 530–531; European
and, 606–607 constitutionalization and, 159;
Piaget, Jean: cognitive psychology and, 92, fragmentation of, 567; global, 22, 89,
231; moral development and, 93–95, 318; 149, 250, 476, 484, 516, 588; historians
ontogenetic development and, 549, 577, on, 249; human rights and, 559;
615. See also Kohlberg, Lawrence ideology and, 562; intellectuals and,
Plato: classical metaphysics and, 72; 565, 567; Kant and, 77; late capitalism
philosopher-king and, 569 and, 572; mass culture and, 590–592;
Plessner, Helmuth, 506 modernity and, 510; Negt and Kluge on,
Popper, Karl, 272–273, 490 247–248; radical reformism and,
postmetaphysical thinking, 594–597; 611–612; rationality and, 563; social
Adorno and, 8; Apel and, 43; evolution and, 136; transnational,
counterfactual presuppositions and, 250–252, 428, 516, 567–568, 588; weak vs.
524; fallibilism and, 210; “good life” strong publics, 518–519; women’s
and, 470–473; Kierkegaard and, 140; movement and, 184
lifeworld praxis and, 596; linguistic Putnam, Hilary: epistemological realism
turn and, 595; methodical atheism and, and, 191; ethical values and, 391;
211; neopragmatism and, 194; Kantian dualism and, 349; moral
philosophy of the subject and, 71–72; constructivism and, 192;
practical reason and, 137; procedural Neopragmatism and, 188–189
rationality and, 595; radical skepticism
and, 67; Ratzinger and, 212; religion Quine, Willard V. O., 349
and, 444, 458–459, 596; Schelling and,
219, 229; situating reason and, 596; radical reformism, 610–613
Young Hegelians and, 594 rationality, 619–622; communicative, 34,
power, 598–601; administrative, 250, 357, 66, 69, 288–294, 297–304, 362–364, 383,
598–599; Arendt’s conception of, 113–114, 385, 499, 538, 569–570, 620–621; critical,
Index 659
395; discursive, 102, 289, 303; economic, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 227, 568
160; functionalist, 494; instrumental, Saussure, Ferdinand de, 402
21, 66, 259, 265, 291–293, 321, 376, Scanlon, Thomas M., 138, 163–164
499–501, 570, 630; lifeworld and, 494, Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph:
636; Marcuse and, 262; moral The Ages of the World, 233–237; Jewish
judgments and, 136; practical, 321; philosophy and, 196–198; late
procedural, 73, 352, 467, 595; scientific, philosophy of, 223–229; Marx and,
69, 272; social, 257; system rationality, 237–242; philosophy of nature of,
99, 321, 635; Weber’s concept of, 33; 229–231; philosophy of identity of,
Western, 395, 403 231–232
rationalization, 619–622; communicative, Schelsky, Helmut, 263
630; communicative interaction and, Scheuerman, William E., 149, 250, 485
329; cultural, 395; deliberation and, 528; Schmitt, Carl: Bund concept and, 434;
Dialectic of Enlightenment and, 395; legality and, 39–42, 128, 586; Luhmann
differentiation and, 338–339, 341–343; and, 100–101; National Socialism and,
economic, 260; evolution and, 108; 3–4
ideology and, 562; Kohlberg and, 385; Scholem, Gershom, 198–199
law and, 370; lifeworld and, 262, 298, Searle, John R.: illocutionary speech acts
343, 373, 376, 509, 600, 633–634, 636; and, 58–59, 61–62; performative speech
modernity and, 396–397; one-sided, 28, acts and, 404–405
99–100, 360, 372; pathologies and, 494; Seel, Martin, 140
productive forces and, 329; scientific, Siep, Ludwig, 468–469
317; self-rationalization of reason, 354; Sikkink, Kathryn, 485
social, 260, 629; system and, 262; Singer, Peter, 167
technical, 260–261; Weber’s concept of, Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 483
258, 262–263, 394, 621 social pathology, 623–626; capitalist
rational reconstruction, 284, 524–526, modernization and, 177; colonization of
614–618, 627 the lifeworld and, 18, 256, 266, 322, 373,
Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benedict XVI), 375, 494, 574; counterintellectuals and,
212–213, 444 567; desiccation of meaning resources
Rawls, John: basic liberties and, 542; just and, 373; Freud and, 623; instrumental
war and, 583; law of peoples and, 477; reason and, 29, 35; deconstruction and,
moral justice and, 163; “original position” 173; reification and, 256, 258, 265, 269;
and, 387; “overlapping consensus” and, religion and, 210
139; political justice and, 166–167; society, 627–631; archaic, 450; art and, 346;
“reflective equilibrium” and, 138 bourgeois, 41, 246, 562, 614; capitalist,
Reagan, Ronald: neoconservatism and, 509 125, 258, 306, 331; contemporary, 31,
Ricœur, Paul: psychoanalysis and, 67–68 247, 322, 331, 408–409, 555, 557;
Ridder, Helmut: theory of democracy and, cosmopolitan civil, 518; critical theory
125–127 of, 193, 288, 323, 372, 396, 505, 526,
Risse, Thomas, 485 598, 614, 615; democratic, 417, 467,
Ritter, Joachim, 337, 421 523; democratization of, 39, 186;
Rogers, Joel, 131 emancipated, 395; functionally
Rorty, Richard, 349; deconstruction and, differentiated, 38; global civil, 518, 581,
173; neopragmatism and, 188–190; The 608; good, 53, 55, 56; human, 106, 197,
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 310; individualized, 529; industrial, 261,
and, 401 571; international civil, 478; just, 395, 470;
Rosenzweig, Franz, 197–198 late-capitalist, 11, 313; Marxist theories of,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 82, 146, 238 256, 309; members and, 377, 379, 380, 492;
660 Index
society (continued) 18; gender and, 183–184; hermeneutics

modern, 29, 207, 245, 335, 371, 508, 550, and, 51–53; law and, 101–102; mass media
553, 591; multilevel world, 474, 476, and, 591; protest and, 574; reification
480–481; nonrepressive, 64; political, 82; and, 268. See also colonization of the
politically constituted world society, 88, lifeworld
143, 145, 146, 148, 480; postsecular, 207,
444; pluralist world society, 477, 485; Taylor, Charles, 137, 515
pluralistic, 166, 209, 467; reproduction Teubner, Gunther, 483
of, 370, 494; repressive, 614; secular, 21; Tugendhat, Ernst, 139–140
state and, 37, 122–127, 131, 374, 605;
stratified, 248; theory of, 6, 8, 33–34, 306, Walker, Neil, 149
361, 368, 407, 418, 500, 526, 621, 626; Walzer, Michael: just war and, 143,
transnational, 251, 547; tribal, 496, 509; 583–584
well-ordered, 525; world, 15, 433, 479, Weber, Max: legitimacy and, 100–101, 318,
482–484, 560, 568, 579, 588, 608, 636 586; power and, 111; rationalization and,
Spaemann, Robert, 467–468 33, 108, 262, 335, 394–395, 421, 621;
Sternberger, Dolf, 9, 427, 514. See also reification and, 257–258; typology of
constitutional patriotism action and, 365
Strawson, Peter F., 60–61, 385 Wellmer, Albrecht: discourse ethics and,
system vs. lifeworld, 34–35, 123, 262, 389; postmodernity and, 341
265–266, 323, 368–377, 632–636; Wingert, Lutz, 390
evolution and, 108; expropriation and, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 32, 52

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THE

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara

Columbia University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Columbia University Press books are printed

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

PART I. INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY 1

PART II. CONTEXTS

1. The Philosophy of History, Anthropology, and Marxism 27

2. The Frankfurt School and Social Theory 31

4. Pragmatism and Ultimate Justification 43

5. Hermeneutics and the Linguistic Turn 49

10. Cognitive Psychology 92

11. The Epitome of Technocratic Consciousness 98

12. Evolutionary Theories 105

13. Power Discourses 111

14. Juridical Discourses 117

15. The Theory of Democracy 122

16. Moral and Ethical Discourses: The Distinction

17. The Constitutionalization of International Law 143

18. European Constitutionalization 153

19. The Theory of Justice 162

20. Deconstruction 170

21. Poststructuralism 177

22. Feminism 183

23. Neopragmatism 188

24. Jewish Philosophy 196

25. Monotheism 207

PART III. TEXTS

28. Technology and Reification: “Technology and Science as

29. Critique of Knowledge as Social Theory: Knowledge and

30. Communicative Rationality: Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer

31. Late Capitalism and Legitimation: Legitimation Crisis (1973) 306

32. History and Evolution: Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen

33. Aporias of Cultural Modernity: “Modernity—an Unfinished

34. Stand-In and Interpreter: “Philosophy as Stand-In and

35. The Theory of Society: The Theory of Communicative Action (1981):

36. The Discourse Theory of Morality: “Discourse Ethics—Notes on a

37. Defense of Modernity: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

39. Europe, European Constitution: “Why Europe Needs

40. Religion, Metaphysics, Freedom: “Faith and Knowledge” (2001) 444

41. Human Nature and Genetic Manipulation: The Future of

42. The Constitutionalization of International Law and Politics:

PART IV. CONCEPTS

43. Cognitive Interests 489

44. Colonization 494

45. Communicative Action 499

46. Communicative Anthropology 504

47. Conservatism 507

48. Constitutions and Constitutional Patriotism 513

49. Cosmopolitan Condition 517

50. Counterfactual Presuppositions 520

51. Deliberation 528

52. Discourse 533

53. Discourse Ethics 538

54. Equality 541

55. European Citizenship 544

56. Evolution 549

57. Historical Materialism 554

58. Human Rights and Human Rights 558

59. Ideology 562

60. Intellectuals 565