Jürgen Habermas - The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society

For Ute Habermas-Wesselhoeft

First published as Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, Band I: Handlungsrationalitat und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung, 1981 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main

Translators preface and translation copyright Beacon Press 1984

This edition first published 1984 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

First published in paperback 1986.

Reprinted 1991, 1995, 1997, 2004

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ISBN 0745603866

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Translators Introduction

Since the beginning of the modern era the prospect of a limitless advance of science and technology, accompanied at each step by moral and political improvement, has exercised a considerable hold over Western thought. Against this the radicalized consciousness of modernity of the nineteenth century voiced fundamental and lasting doubts about the relation of progress to freedom and justice, happiness and self-realization. When Nietzsche traced the advent of nihilism back to the basic values of Western culturebecause nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideashe gave classic expression to a stream of cultural pessimism that flows powerfully again in contemporary consciousness. Antimodernism is rampant today, and in a variety of forms; what they share is an opposition to completing the project of modernity insofar as this is taken to be a matter of rationalization. There are, of course, good reasons for being critical of the illusions of the Enlightenment. The retreat of dogmatism and superstition has been accompanied by fragmentation, discontinuity and loss of meaning. Critical distance from tradition has gone hand in hand with anomie and alienation, unstable identities and existential insecurities. Technical progress has by no means been an unmixed blessing; and the rationalization of administration has all too often meant the end of freedom and self-determination. There is no need to go on enumerating such phenomena; a sense of having exhausted our cultural, social, and political resources is pervasive. But there is a need to subject these phenomena to careful analysis if we wish to avoid a precipitate abandonment of the achievements of modernity. What is called for, it might be argued, is an enlightened suspicion of enlightenment, a reasoned critique of Western rationalism, a careful reckoning of the profits and losses entailed by progress. Today, once again, reason can be defended only by way of a critique of reason.

Jrgen Habermas has been called the last great rationalist, and in a certain sense he is. But his is a rationalism with important differences; for, in good dialectical fashion, he has sought to incorporate into it the central insights of the critique of rationalism. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns,published in two volumes in 1981, represents the culmination to date of his efforts.Reason and the Rationalization of Society is a translation, with minor revisions, of the first volume; a translation of the second volume, System and Lifeworld: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, will follow.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to publishing the two volumes separately. On the positive side, the Anglo-American reception of a major work in twentieth-century social theory can get underway sooner, at a time when the questions it treats are moving rapidly to the center of intellectual interest. As the English-language discussion of these issues has not yet congealed into hard and fast patterns, the appearance of this volume at this time may well play a significant role in structuring it. On the negative side, there is the fact that Habermas sustains a continuous line of thought across the nearly 1,200 pages of the two volumes. The part of the argument deployed in Volume 1, while certainly intelligible and interesting in its own right, might well be misconstrued when detached from that larger context. In this introduction I hope to reduce that danger by sketching the argument of the book as a whole, especially the points developed in Volume 2.

In the preface, and elsewhere, Habermas tells us that The Theory of Communicative Action has three interrelated concerns: (1) to develop a concept of rationality that is no longer tied to, and limited by, the subjectivistic and individualistic premises of modern philosophy and social theory; (2) to construct a two-level concept of society that integrates the lifeworld and system paradigms; and, finally, (3) to sketch out, against this background, a critical theory of modernity which analyzes and accounts for its pathologies in a way that suggests a redirection rather than an abandonment of the project of enlightenment. Part I of this introduction deals with the first of these concerns; part II considers the lifeworld/system question and its relevance for a theory of contemporary society. But first, one general remark on Habermass approach: He develops these themes through a some-what unusual combination of theoretical constructions with historical reconstructions of the ideas of classical social theorists. The thinkers discussedMarx, Weber, Durkheim, Mead, Lukacs, Horkheimer, Adorno, Parsonsare, he holds, still very much alive. Rather than regarding them as so many corpses to be dissected exegetically, he treats them as virtual dialogue partners from whom a great deal that is of contemporary significance can still be learned. The aim of his historical reconstructions with systematic intent is to excavate and incorporate their positive contributions, to criticize and overcome their weaknesses, by thinking with them to go beyond them.

Interspersed throughout these critical dialogues with the classics are numerous excurses and two chapter-length Zwischenbetrachtungen or intermediate reflections, devoted to systematic questions. The concluding chapter attempts to combine the fruits of his historical reconstructions with the results of his systematic reflections in sketching a critical theory of modernity.

For reasons that Habermas sets forth in the text and that I briefly mention below, he holds that an adequate theory of society must integrate methods and problematics previously assigned exclusively to either philosophy orempirical social science. In the first portion of this introduction I consider some of the more philosophical aspects of the theory of communicative action; in the second part, I turn to more sociological themes.

The Cartesian paradigm of the solitary thinkersolus ipseas the proper, even unavoidable, framework for radical reflection on knowledge and morality dominated philosophical thought in the early modern period. The methodological solipsism it entailed marked the approach of Kant at the end of the eighteenth century no less than that of his empiricist and rationalist predecessors in the two preceding centuries. This monological approach preordained certain ways of posing the basic problems of thought and action: subject versus object, reason versus sense, reason versus desire, mind versus body, self versus other, and so on. In the course of the nineteenth century this Cartesian paradigm and the subjectivistic orientation associated with it were radically challenged. Early in the century Hegel demonstrated the intrinsically historical and social character of the structures of consciousness. Marx went even further, insisting that mind is not the ground of nature but nature that of mind; he stressed that human consciousness is essentially embodied and practical and argued that forms of consciousness are an encoded representation of forms of social reproduction. In establishing the continuity of the human species with the rest of nature, Darwin paved the way for connecting intelligence with self-preservation, that is, for a basically functionalist conception of reason such as we find in American Pragmatism. Nietzsche and Freud disclosed the unconscious at the heart of consciousness, the role of the preconceptual and nonconceptual within the conceptual realm. Historicism exhibited in detail the historical and cultural variability of categories of thought and principles of action. The end result was, in Habermass phrase, a desublimation of spirit and, as a consequence, a disempowering of philosophy.