THE THEORY OF
COMMUNICATIVE ACTION
Volume 1
REASON AND THE
RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
Ji.irgen Habermas
Translated by Thomas McCarthy
Beacon Press Boston
German text: Copyright c 1981 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main,
originally published as Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, Band I,
Handlungsrationalitiit und gesel/scha{tliche Rationalisierur>.o.
Introduction and English translation: Copyright c 1984 ·con Press
Beacon Press books are published u 'he ausr:
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:
Habermas, Jiirgen.
The theory of communicative action.
Translation of: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: v. 1. Reason and the rationalization of
society.
1. Sociology-Philosophy-Collected works.
2. Rationalism-Collected works. 3. Social actionCollected
works. 4. Communication-PhilosophyCollected
works. 5. Functionalism-Collected works.
I. Title.
HM24.H3213 1983 301' .01 82·72506
ISBN 0·8070·1506·7 (v. I) ISBN 0-8070-1507·5 (v. ll(pbk.)
.J8
Contents
Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society
Translator's Introduction
Author's Preface
v
xxxix
I. Introduction: Approaches to the Problem of Rationality 1
1. "Rationality" -A Preliminary Specification 8
2. Some Characteristics of the Mythical and the
Modern Ways of Understanding the World 43
3. Relations to the World and Aspects of Rationality
in Four Sociological Concepts of Action 75
4. The Problem of Understanding Meaning
in the Social Sciences 102
II. Max Weber's Theory of Rationalization 143
1. Occidental Rationalism 157
2. The Disenchantment of Religious-Metaphysical
Worldviews and the Emergence of Modern
Structures of Consciousness 186
3. Modernization as Societal Rationalization:
The Role of the Protestant Ethic 216
4. The Rationalization of Law.
Weber's Diagnosis of the Times 243
III. Intermediate Reflections: Social Action,
Purposive Activity, and Communication 273
IV. From Lukacs to Adorno:
Rationalization as Reification 339
1. Max Weber in the Tradition of Western Marxism 345
2. The Critique of Instrumental Reason 366
Notes 403
Index 459
Contents
Volume 2. Lifeworld and System:
A Critique of Functionalist Reason
V. The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim: From
Purposive Activity to Communicative Action
1. The Foundations of Social Science in the Theory of
Communication
2. The Authority of the Sacred and the Normative
Background of Communicative Action
3. The Rational Structure of the Linguistification of the
Sacred
VI. Intermediate Reflections: System and Lifeworld
1. The Concept of the Lifeworld and the Hermeneutic
Idealism of Interpretive Sociology
2. The Uncoupling of System and Lifeworld
VII. Talcott Parsons: Problems in the Construction
of Social Theory
1. From Normativistic Theory of Action to Systems
Theory of Society
2. The Development of Systems Theory
3. The Theory of Modernity
VIII. Concluding Reflections: From Parsons through Weber
to Marx
1. A Backward Glance: Weber's Theory of Modernity
2. Marx and the Thesis of Internal Colonization
3. The Tasks of a Critical Theory of Society
Translator's 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 culture-"because nihilism represents the ultimate
logical conclusion of our great values and ideas"-he 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 ori 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
v
vi REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
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.
Jiirgen 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. 1
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 AngloAmerican
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 near 1 y 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
Habermas's approach: He develops these themes through a someTHE
THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION vn
what unusual combination of theoretical constructions with historical
reconstructions of the ideas of "classical" social theorists.
The thinkers discussed-Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Mead, Lukacs,
Horkheimer, Adorno, Parsons-are, 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 or empirical 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.
I
The Cartesian paradigm of the solitary thinker-solus ipse-as
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
viii REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
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 Habermas's phrase, a "desublimation of spirit" and, as a consequence,
a "disempowering of philosophy."
But the history of ideas is full of surprises; and twentiethcentury
philosophy bore witness to the continued power of the
Cartesian model, in a variety of forms-from Edmund Husserl's
openly Cartesian phenomenology to the Cartesianism lying just
below the surface of logical empiricism. More recently, however,
the critique of this model has been vigorously renewed. Thus
we are said to be living in a "post-Heideggerian," "postWittgensteinian,"
"poststructuralist" age. The spirit has once
again been desublimated. Subjectivity has been shown to be
"infiltrated with the world" in such a way that "otherness is
carried to the very heart of selfhood."2 This "twilight of
subjectivity'' is not merely an intraphilosophic affair, a reminder
to philosophers that they are not after all the high priests of
culture. 3 lt is the theoretical center of the stream of antimodernist
thought I mentioned at the outset; thus it has implications that
go well beyond the confines of academic philosophy. The critique
of "rootless rationalism" goes hand in hand with an unmasking
of the anthropocentric, egoistic, possessive, and domineering
aspects of Western individualism; together they frequently serve
as a prologue to the rejection of central concepts of European
humanism. We cannot ignore the question of whether, in the
absence of an archimedean point outside the world, anything can
be salvaged from these emphatic concepts and the universalist
claims connected with them. And if the subject is desublimated,
can we really expect much more from general social "theory"
than a historicist contemplation of the variety of forms of life
in the musee imaginaire of the past; or a hermeneuFc dialogue
with other cultures and epochs about the common concerns of
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION ix
human life; or, perhaps, a genealogical unmasking of any pretense
to universal validity?
Habermas's response to the decline of the paradigm of consciousness
is an explicit shift to the paradigm of language-not
to language as a syntactic or semantic system, but to languagein-
use or speech. Thus he develops the categorial framework and
normative foundations of his social theory in the form of a general
theory of communicative action. "If we assume that the human
species maintains itself through the socially coordinated activities
of its members and that this coordination is established through
communication-and in certain spheres of life, through communication
aimed at reaching agreement-then the reproduction of
the species also requires satisfying the conditions of a rationality
inherent in communicative action" (1:397).
In the atomistic perspective of much of modern thought, the
subject stands over against a world of objects to which it has two
basic relations: representation and action. Accordingly, the type
of rationality associated with this model is the "cognitive-instrumental"
rationality of a subject capable of gaining knowledge
about a contingent environment and putting it to effective use
in intelligently adapting to and manipulating that environment.
By stressing the fact that the goal-directed actions of different
individuals are socially coordinated, Habermas shifts our attention
to the broader context of individual purposive actions, to the
structures of social interaction in which teleological actions are
located.
The communicative model of action does not equate action
with communication. Language is a means of communication
which serves mutual understanding, whereas actors, in
coming to an understanding with one another so as to coordinate
their actions, pursue their particular aims ... Concepts
of social action are distinguished by how they specify this
coordination among the goal-directed actions of different participants-
as the interlacing of egocentric calculations of
utility, as a socially integrating consensus· about norms and
values instilled through cultural tradition and socialization,
or as reaching understanding in the sense of a cooperative
process of interpretation ... The interpretive accomplishments
on which cooperative processes [of situation .definition)
are based represent the mechanism for coordinating
action; communicative action is not exhausted by the act of
reaching understanding ... (1: 101)
X REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
This shift of attention from the teleological to the communicative
dimension of social action makes an analysis of language,
as the basic medium of communication, essential to laying the
foundations of social theory. Drawing on linguistics and the
philosophy of language, as well as on cognitive developmental
psychology, Habermas sets forth jespecially in Chapters I and
III) the basic ideas of his theory of communicative competence.
As this was developed in earlier writings and has already been
widely discussed,4 we can limit ourselves here to the aspects that
are directly relevant to the theory of social action.
Habermas argues that our ability to communicate has a universal
core-basic structures and fundamental rules that all subjects
master in learning to speak a language. Communicative
competence is not just a matter of being able to produce grammatical
sentences. In speaking we relate to the world about us,
to other subjects, to our own intentions, feelings, and desires.
In each of these dimensions we are constantly making claims,
even if usually only implicitly, concerning the validity of what
we are saying, implying, or presupposing-claims, for instance,
regarding the truth of what we say in relation to the objective
world; or claims concerning the rightness, appropriateness, or
legitimacy of our speech acts in relation to the shared values and
norms of our social lifeworld; or claims to sincerity or authenticity
in regard to the manifest expressions of our intentions and
feelings. Naturally, claims of these sorts can be contested and
criticized, defended and revised. There are any number of ways
of settling disputed claims-for example, by appeal to authority,
to tradition or to brute force. One way, the giving of reasons-for
and reasons-against has traditionally been regarded as fundamental
to the idea of rationality. And it is, in fact, to the experience
of achieving mutual understanding in communication that is free
from coercion that Habermas looks in developing his idea of
rationality.
The key to his notion of reaching understanding I Verstiindigung)
is the possibility of using reasons or grounds to gain
intersubjective recognition for criticizable validity claims.5 This
possibility exists in each of the three dimensions mentioned
above. It is not only claims to propositional truth and to the effectiveness
of means for attaining ends that can be criticized and
defended with reasons; the claim that an action is right or appropriate
in relation to a certain normative context, or that such a
context deserves to be recognized as legitimate, can also be disTHE
THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION xi
cussed in this way; as can the claim that an utterance is a sincere
or authentic expression of one's own subjective experiences. That
is, in each of these dimensions it is possible to reach agreement
about disputed claims by way of argument and insight and without
recourse to force other than that of reasons or grounds. In
each dimension there exists a "reflective medium" for dealing
with problematic validity claims-that is, modes of argumentation
or critique that enable us to thematize contested validity claims
and to attempt to vindicate or criticize them. "The rationality
proper to the communicative practice of everyday life points to
the practice of argumentation as a court of appeal that makes
it possible to continue communicative action with other means
when disagreement can no longer be headed off by everyday
routines and yet is not to be settled by the direct or strategic use
of force" 11:17-18).
Because validity claims can be criticized, there is a possibility
of identifying and correcting mistakes, that is, of learning from
them. If this is carried through at a reflective level, forms of argumentation
take shape which may be transmitted and developed
within a cultural tradition and even embodied in specific cultural
institutions. Thus, for instance, the scientific enterprise, the
legal system, and the institutions for producing, disseminating,
and criticizing art represent enduring possibilities of hypotheticaily
examining the truth of statements, the rightness of
actions and norms, or the authenticity of expressions, and of productively
assimilating our negative experiences in these dimensions.
Through this connection with cultural traditions and social
institutions the concept of communicative action becomes serviceable
for social theory.
At the same time, the turn to the sociocultural matrix of individual
action orientations brings Habermas face to face with
the cultural and historical variability of lifeworld structures. If
the variety of worldviews and forms of life entails an irreducible
plurality of standards of rationality, then the concept of communicative
rationality could not claim universal significance and a
theory of society constructed upon it would be limited from the
start to a particular perspective. Habermas deals with this
problem from a number of different angles. In section 2 of
Chapter I he highlights the types of structural differences in question
through a comparison of "mythical and modern ways of understanding
the world.'' Then, in a careful reconstruction of the
recent rationality debates among English anthropologists and
xii REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
philosophers, he argues that the case for relativism is by no means
conclusive. In the end, the claim that the concept of communicative
rationality has universal significance can be decided only
by the empirical-theoretical fruitfulness of the research programs
based on it-in different domains from the construction of a
formal pragmatics of language and the reconstruction of the
ontogenesis of communicative competence to the development
of theories of anthropogenesis and social evolution.6
This last line of inquiry is one of Habermas's principal preoccupations
in the present work, particularly in the form of the
question, whether and in what respects modernization can be
viewed as rationalization. This question has dominated concept
and theory formation in modern sociology: "Sociology arose as
the theory of bourgeois society; to it fell the task of explaining
the course of the capitalist modernization of traditional societies
and its anomie side effects. This problem ... was the reference
point from which sociology worked up its foundations as well.
On a metatheoretical level, it chose basic concepts [of action
theory] that were tailored to the growth of rationality in the
modern lifeworld ... On a methodological level, the problem of
gaining access to the object domain of symbolic objects through
understanding ( Verstehen) was dealt with accordingly: Understanding
rational action orientations became the reference point
for understanding all action orientations ... Finally, [these
concerns] were connected with the empirical question, whether
and in what respects the modernization of society can be
described from the standpoint of cultural and societal rationalization"
(1 :5-6).
Habermas wants to argue that this is no historical accident,
that any sociology that aspires to a general theory of society has
to confront the rationality problematic on all three levels. His
own contributions on the meta- or action-theoretical level can
be found here in Chapters I and III; they issue in a theory of communicative
action that is further developed in Chapters V (Mead
and Durkheim) and VI (Lifeworld and System) of Volume 2, and
is elaborated and shaded throughout the book. The methodology
of Sinnverstehen and its relation to the rationality of action is the
explicit theme of section 4 of Chapter I; it is the implicit theme
of the discussion of the internal relation between meaning and
validity in Chapter III; and it turns up repeatedly in the reconstruction
of classical approaches to social inquiry. Finally, the
question of how to comprehend modernity, and in particular the
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION xiii
capitalist modernization of society, dominates the work as a
whole. It is the axis around which the discussions of Weber and
Western Marxism turn in this volume, the motivation behind the
lifeworld/system discussion in Volume 2, and the central theme
of the concluding chapter, in which the different lines of argument
converge on a theory of modernity. I shall consider his
treatment of this last question in part II below; but for now, there
are several additional aspects of his views on metatheory and
methodology that should be mentioned.
In section 3 of Chapter I Habermas examines four influential
concepts of social action-teleological, normatively regulated,
dramaturgical, and communicative action-with an eye to their
presuppositions and implications regarding rationality. He argues
that only the last of these fully incorporates language as a medium
for reaching understanding in the negotiation of common definitions
of situations: "A definition of the situation establishes an
order ... A situation definition by another party that prima facie
diverges from one's own presents a problem of a peculiar sort;
for in cooperative processes of interpretation no participant has
a monopoly on correct interpretation. For both parties the
interpretive task consists in incorporating the other's interpretation
of the situation into one's own in such a way that ... the
divergent situation definitions can be brought to coincide sufficiently''
11: 100). In section 4 of the same chapter Habermas goes
on to develop his principal point concerning the logic of Verstehen.
In the model of communicative action, social actors are themselves
outfitted with the same interpretive capacities as socialscientific
interpreters; thus the latter cannot claim for themselves
the status of neutral, extramundane observers in their definitions
of actors' situations. They are, whether consciously or not, virtual
participants whose only plausible claim to objectivity derives from
the reflective quality of their participation. But this reflexivity
is in principle open to the actual participants as well; it does not
exempt the social scientist from having to take a positionhowever
reflective and however implicit-on the validity claims
relevant to the definition of the situation.
In order to understand an utterance in the paradigm case
of a speech act oriented to reaching understanding, the
interpreter has to be familiar with the conditions of its
validity; he has to know under what conditions the validity
claim linked with it is acceptable or would have to be
xiv REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
acknowledged by a hearer. But where could the interpreter
obtain this knowledge if not from the context of the observed
communication or from comparable contexts? ... Thus the
interpreter cannot become clear about the semantic content
of an expression independently of the action contexts in
which participants react to the expression with a "yes" or
"no" or an abstention. And he does not understand these
yes/no positions if he cannot make clear to himself the
implicit reasons that move the participants to take the
positions they do ... But if, in order to understand an expression,
the interpreter must bring to mind the reasons with
which a speaker would, if necessary and under suitable conditions,
defend its validity, he is himself drawn into the
process of assessing validity claims. For reasons are of such
a nature that they cannot be described in the attitude of a
third person ... One can understand reasons only to the
extent that one understands why they are or are not sound
(1:115-16). .
This very strong claim, which supports the methodological
thesis that "communicative action requires an interpretation that
is rational in approach,'' is grounded at another level in Chapter
III. There Habermas attempts to expand the truth-conditional
approach to semantics into a general theory of the internal relationships
between meaning and validity. This involves shifting
the level of analysis from semantics to pragmatics, extending the
concept of validity to include types of claims other than truth,
identifying the validity conditions for the different types of claims,
and establishing that, in these other cases as well, the meaning
of an utterance is inherently connected with the conditions for
redeeming the validity claims raised by it. If these methodological
and language-theoretical arguments for the inseparability of
meaning, intelligibility, and understanding from validity,
rationality, and assessment could be sustained, Habermas would
have gone a long way toward setting the foundations of a critical
social theory.
In any case, because the object domain of social inquiry is
symbolically prestructured, antecedently constituted by the interpretive
activities of its members, the social scientist can gain
access to social objects only via Sinnverstehen or interpretive understanding-
be these "objects" social actions themselves, their
sedimentations in texts, traditions, cultural artifacts and the like,
or such organized configurations as institutions, systems, and
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION XV
structures. On the other hand, social reality is not exhausted by
the ideas embodied in it; and these ideas change in response to
forces and factors that cannot be explained in terms of inner logic.
It is with this duality in mind that Weber, for instance, adopted
his two-sided approach to the study of modernization: "from
above," that is, with a view to the ideas embodied in cultural
value spheres, in personality structures, and in social institutions;
and "from below," with a view to the empirical factors that condition
this embodiment-such as the interests and conflicts of
interest of relevant social groups, the organization of authority
and the struggle for political power, the process and problems
of economic reproduction, and so on.
Habermas is also interested in developing an approach to
social research that combines "internalist" and "externalist" perspectives.
This methodological concern is in fact one of the central
motifs of the lifeworld/system discussion that occupies so much
of Volume 2. We shall be considering that discussion below; at
present it is important to note that the internalist side of
Habermas's two-level approach turns essentially on the related
notions of developmental logic and learning process. As he did earlier
in Communication and the Evolution of Society, he argues here that
changes in social structure cannot be comprehended solely from
the outside, in terms of external, contingent factors; there are
features of social evolution that must be understood as advances
in different types of ''knowledge.'' While learning processes ''have
to be explained with the help of empirical mechanisms,'' they
are "conceived at the same time as problem solutions" that can
be internally reconstructed, that is, "insightfully recapitulated
from the perspective of participants" 11 :66-67). It is, in fact, this
combination of conceptual and empirical analysis that distinguishes
the disciplines which now lay claim to the heritage
of philosophy as a theory of rationality.
Philosophical thought that has surrendered the relation to
totality loses its self-sufficiency. The goal of formally
analyzing the conditions of rationality can be connected
neither with ontologicl!l hopes ... nor with transcendentalphilosophical
hopes. All attempts at discovering ultimate
foundations, in which the intentions of First Philosophy live
on, have broken down. In this situation, the way is opening
up to a new constellation of philosophy and the sciences.
As can be seen [for example] in the history and philosophy
of science, formal explications of the conditions of rationality
XVI REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
and empirical analysis of the embodiment and historical
development of rationality structures mesh in a peculiar way.
Theories of modern empirical science ... make a normative
and universalist claim ... that can be tested against the
evidence of counterexamples; and it can hold up in the end
only if reconstructive theory proves itself capable of distilling
out internal aspects of the history of science and, in conjunction
with empirical analysis, systematically explaining the
actual, narratively documented history of science ... Cognitive
developmental psychology provides [another] example
of this. In the tradition of Piaget, cognitive development in
the narrower sense, as well as socio-cognitive and moral
development, are conceptualized as internally reconstructible
sequences of stages of competences (1:2-3).7
Such rationally reconstructive enterprises serve Habermas
as models for the type of cooperation between conceptual and
empirical analysis that is required to develop an adequate theory
of society. Combining the "philosophical" with the "scientific,"
they eschew the apriorism of traditional philosophy and advance
proposals that, however universal their claims, retain the hypothetical
character of conjectures open to empirical refutation. It
is thus that he seeks to renew the original program of critical
theory (developed in the 1930s), which Horkheimer envisioned
as a form of critical social research integrating philosophy and
the various human sciences i11 an "interdisciplinary
materialism."8 As we shall soon see, Habermas's relation to
critical theory as it developed in the 1940s, epitomized by Horkheimer's
and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, is decidedly
more ambivalent.
II
The Enlightenment's belief in progress rested on an idea of
reason modeled after Newtonian physics, which, with its reliable
method and secure growth, was thought to provide a paradigm
for knowledge in general. The impact of the advance of science
on society as a whole was not envisioned in the first instance
as an expansion of productive forces and a refinement of administrative
techniques but in terms of its effect on the cultural context
of life. In particular, the belief-for us, today, rather implausiblethat
progress in science was necessarily accompanied by progress
in morality, was based not only on an assimilation of the logics
of theoretical and practical questions but also on the historical
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION XVII
experience of the powerful reverberations of early modern
science in the spheres of religion, morals, and politics. The
cultural rationalization emanating from the diffusion of scientific
knowledge and its emancipatory effect on traditional habits of
thought-the progressive eradication of inherited "superstitions,
prejudices, errors" -formed the center of an encompassing rationalization
of social life, which included a transformation of
political and economic structures as well. The embodiment of
reason in the political realm meant the establishment of a republican
form of government with guarantees of civil liberties and
an institutionally secured public sphere, so that political power
could be rationalized through the medium of public discussion
to reflect the general will and common interest. On the other
hand, the embodiment of reason in the economic sphere meant
the establishment of a social space for the free pursuit of one's
own self-interest, so far as it was compatible with a like pursuit
by all other individuals. The global result of this would be a
continuous increase in the general wealth of society and a growing
equality of the shares falling to its individual members.
The first classical social theorist Habermas discusses in this
book, Max Weber, directly challenged all these tenets of the
Enlightenment faith in reason and progress in ways that remain
relevant for us today. In his view, the rationality that defines
modernity is at bottom a Zweckrationalitiit, a purposive or
means/ends rationality, the inherent aim of which is the mastery
of the world in the service of human interests. As a consequence,
the growth and spread of reason does not, as Enlightenment
thinkers supposed it would, furnish a new, nonillusory center
of meaning to modern culture. It does, to be sure, gradually dissolve
traditional superstitions, prejudices and errors; but this ''disenchantment
of the world," as Weber calls it, does not replace
traditional religious worldviews with anything that could fulfill
the functions of, for instance, giving meaning and unity to life.
Rather, the disenchanted world is stripped of all ethical meaning;
it is devalued and objectified as the material and setting for purposive-
rational pursuit of interests. The gain in control is paid for
with a loss of meaning. And the control that we gain is itself valueneutral-
an instrumental potential that can be harnessed from
any one of an unlimited number of value perspectives. This subjectivization
of "ultimate" ends means that the unity of the world
has fallen to pieces. In place of the one God or the unitary ground
of being, we have an irreducible plurality of competing, often
xviii REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
irreconcilable values, and as Weber says, "over these gods and
their struggles it is fate, and certainly not any "science," that holds
sway" 11 :246-47).
Because in the final analysis values cannot be rationally
grounded but only chosen, there are at the core of life rationally
unjustifiable commitments through which we give the disenchanted
world meaning and unity. Correspondingly, the sphere
of politics has to be understood as a sphere of decision and power
and not of reason: Legitimacy is not a question of rational justification
but of de facto acceptance of an order of authority by
those subject to it; 9 and law is not an expression of rational will
but a product of enactment by duly constituted authorities
according to established procedures. Weber's views on economy
and society are equally antithetical to Enlightenment hopes regarding
the institutionalization of reason. The progress of societal
rationalization was indeed well along by the end of the nineteenth
century; but what this progress turned out to be, according to
Weber, was the ascendency of purposive rationality, of technique
and calculation, of organization and administration. The triumph
of reason brings with it not a reign of freedom but the dominion
of impersonal economic forces and bureaucratically organized
administrations-a "vast and mighty cosmos" that "determines
with irresistible force the lifestyles of all the individuals who are
born into lit)" 11:247). Nor would the advent of socialism improve
the situation; it would, says Weber, merely mean the final and
complete victory of bureaucracy. The realization of reason that
the eighteenth-century philosophers envisioned as a Kingdom of
God on earth has turned out to be an "iron cage" in which we
are henceforth condemned to live. Disenchantment and rationalization
are irreversible, as are the loss of meaning and the loss
of freedom that accompany them.
The undeniable power of this analysis has, of course, often
been harnessed for conservative purposes. What interests
Habermas, however, is the immediate and profound impact it
had on Western Marxism from Lukacs onwards. Writing in the
early 1940s, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno surrendered,
in effect, to the force of Weber's diagnosis. The rise of fascism
in Europe, with the complicity of some segments of the working
class; the degeneration of socialism into Stalinism, with its bloody
suppression of any dissent from party rule; and the apparently
seamless integration of the American populace, including the
working class, into what appeared to be a thoroughly comTHE
THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION xix
modified and totally administered society-left them, they felt,
no realistic basis for hope. In analyzing this hopeless situation,
Horkheimer and Adorno keyed in on a factor that Weber had
singled out: the spread of formal, means/ends rationality, which
they called instrumental reason. In doing so, they completely
revised Marx's positive evaluation of scientific-technological progress.
What for him represented an unambiguously emancipatory
potential, for them was the core of a domination generalized
to all spheres of life. Subjects who, in Horkheimer's words, "have
to form themselves, body and soul, in relation to the technical
apparatus" are no longer potential subjects of revolution (1:353).
This was empirically borne out by the collapse of the revolutionary
labor movement in all industrial societies and by the disappearance
of the proletariat into the pores of consumer society.
Thus the scientific-technological progress that Marx connected
with the unleashing of productive forces and the overthrow of
capitalism had for Horkheimer and Adorno the ironic effect of
immobilizing the very subjective forces that were supposed to
accomplish this overthrow. As Horkheimer put it, "All life today
tends to be increasingly subjected to rationalization and planning
... The individual's self-preservation presupposes his adjustment
to the requirements for the preservation of the system" (1:353).
Given this pessimistic diagnosis, it is not surprising that they saw
little hope of changing things. Critical theory became resignative,
contemplative. It could, at best, disclose the unreason at the heart
of what passes for reason, without offering any positive account
of its own.
In Habermas's view, the dead end in which critical theory
thus found itself is by no means unavoidable. To avoid it requires,
however, a fundamental shift of paradigm away from the
philosophy of consciousness, in which the critique of rationalization
as reification from Lukacs to Adorno remained rooted in
spite-of itself. There are two steps to this shift: first a move from
the (monological) teleological concept of action to the concepts
of communicative action and lifeworld; and second a joining of
the lifeworld perspective to that of systems theory. In Chapter
V, which opens Volume 2, Habermas approaches these tasks
through a consideration of the work of George Herbert Mead and
Emile Durkheim. In the former he finds the essential elements
of a communications-theoretic reformulation of social-action
theory; in the latter, the lineaments of a theory that links social
integration with system integration.
XX REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
There is no need here for a detailed summary of his splendid
discussion of Mead. In essence, he uses the theory of communication
developed in Volume 1 to reconstruct Mead's account
of the conceptual or logical genesis of self and society; and this
reconstruction in turn makes that theory serviceable for
sociological analysis. Along the way, one finds another twist in
the critique of strictly individualistic models of social action.
Habermas argues that individuation processes are simultaneously
socialization processes (and conversely), that motivations and
repertoires of behavior are symbolically restructured in the course
of identity formation, that individual intentions and interests,
desires and feelings are not essentially private but tied to language
and culture and thus inherently susceptible of interpretation, discussion
and change. At the end, one finds an attempt to explicate
the ideas of freedom and reconciliation that Adorno alluded to
without being able to elaborate in a categorial framework still
tied to the philosophy of the subject. The explication draws
heavily upon the theory of communicative rationality, particularly
on the ideas of a rationally binding force that accrues to illocutionary
acts by virtue of their internal connection with reasons,
and the corresponding possibility of intersubjective recognition
based on insight rather than on external force. Habermas
maintains that this utopian perspective is ingrained in the very
conditions of the communicative sociation of individuals, is built
into the linguistic medium of the reproduction of the species. He
supports this thesis by reconstructing Mead's notion of universal
discourse. "Reconciliation" is fleshed out in terms of an intersubjectivity
based on mutual understanding and free recognition;
"freedom" in terms of an identity that takes shape within the
structures of such an intact intersubjectivity-sociation without
repression. 10 This approach aims to integrate the universalism
of ethical notions of rational self-determination (e.g., Kant's
categorical imperative) with the particularism of psychological
notions of self-realization.
The idea [of universal discourse] actually contains two
utopian projections ... Imagine individuals being socialized
as members of such an ideal community; they would be
acquiring identities with two complementary aspects: the
universal and the particular. On the one hand ... they would
learn to orient themselves within a universalistic framework,
that is, to act autonomously [in Kant's sense]; on the other
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION xxi
hand, they would learn to use this autonomy-which makes
them equal to every other morally acting subject-in order
to develop themselves in their subjectivity and uniqueness.
Mead ascribes both autonomy and the power of spontaneous
self-development to persons who, as participants in universal
discourse, free themselves from the fetters of habitual concrete
forms of life. Membership in such an ideal community
is, in Hegel's terms, constitutive for both the I as universal
and the I as individual (2: 148).
To put this another way, Habermas is after a notion of ego identity
that centers around the ability to realize oneself under conditions
of communicatively shared intersubjectivity. The moment of
universality requires that actors maintain a reflective relation to
their own affective and practical natures, that is, that they act
in a self-critical attitude. 11
For all its groundbreaking insights, Mead's account of the
genesis of behavior mediated by language and guided by norms
suffers from several major deficiencies. He reconstructs the
development of role behavior from the ontoge!.fetic perspective
of the growing child; particularly in his account of the transition
to the final stage, he neglects the phylogenetic line of questioning,
presupposing on the part of the_ adults the level of role behavior
to be acquired by the child. The crucial mechanism in this
transition then is the child's "taking the attitude of the generalized
other" toward itself. What remains inadequately accounted for
is precisely the genesis of this generalized other. Habermas undertakes
to complete the picture by exploiting the affinities with
Durkheim's idea of a collective consciousness that is constitutive
for group identity. But even if Mead's reconstructive account is
filled out in this way, it can be only part of the explanation:
developmental logic has to be supplemented by developmental
dynamics. Mead does not give adequate consideration to the
external factors that influence the actual course of development;
he does not give the functional aspects equal play with the
structural aspects; he generally neglects the constraints that issue
from the material reproduction of society and reach right into
the action orientations of sociated individuals. In attempting to
make good this deficiency, Habermas looks first to Durkheim's
account of how the forms of social solidarity change with the
division of labor and then to Talcott Parsons' theory of the social
system.
xxii REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
In his study of ''The Elementary Forms of Religious Life''
Durkheim suggests that the moral'authority of social norms has
its roots in the sacred. The oldest sacred symbols express a normative
consensus that is established and regenerated in ritual
practice. This ritually secured and symbolically mediated
normative consensus is the archaic core of collective identityin
Mead's terms, of the generalized other. Accordingly, the task
of explaining the phylogenesis of the generalized other becomes
that of providing an account of the structural transformation of
that archaic fund of social solidarity formed in the medium of
religious symbolism and interpreted in the semantics of the
sacred. The guiding thread in Habermas's account is "the linguistification
of the sacred" jdie Versprachlichung des Sakralen):
''To the degree that the rationality potential ingrained in communicative
action is set free, the archaic core of the normative
dissolves and gives way to the rationalization of world views, the
universalization of law and morality, and accelerated processes
of individuation. It is upon this evolutionary trend that Mead
bases his idealistic projection of a communicatively rationalized
society" j2:74-75).
Taking Durkheim's analysis of the shift from mechanical
to organic solidarity as his point of departure, Habermas
examines the process whereby social functions originally fulfilled
by ritual practice and religious symbolism gradually shift
to the domain of communicative action. This disenchantment
means a growing sublimation of the spellbinding and terrifying
power of the sacred jdie bannende Kraft des Heiligen) into
the rationally binding/bonding force of criticizable claims to
validity jdie bindinde Kraft kritisierbarer Geltungsanspruche). In
virtue of this ''communicative liquifaction'' of the basic religious
consensus, the structures of action oriented to reaching understanding
become more and more effective in cultural reproduction,
social integration, and personality formation. The
authority of tradition is increasingly open to discursive q?estioning;
the range of applicability of norms expands while
the latitude for interpretation and the need for reasoned justification
increases; the differentiation of individual identities
grows, as does the sphere of personal autonomy. Consequently,
the conditions of communicative rationality, of rationally motivated
intersubjective recognition of norms, gain greater empirical
significance for processes of societal reproduction.
"The continuation of traditions, the maintenance of legitiTHE
THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION xxiii
mate orders, and the continuity of the life histories of individual
persons become more and more dependent on attitudes that point
in problematic cases to yes/no positions on criticizable validity
claims (2: 164). As Habermas sums up, the linguistification of the
sacred means a rationalization of the lifeworld. 12
The idea of the lifeworld is introduced as a necessary complement
to the concept of communicative action. It links that
concept firmly to the concept of society; and by directing our
attention to the ''context-forming horizon'' of social action, it takes
us another step away from the subjectivistic biases of modern
social theory. Moreover, it makes it possible to construe rationalization
primarily as a transformation of implicitly known,
taken-for-granted structures of the lifeworld rather than of
explicitly known, conscious orientations of action.
Habermas announces his basic approach to the lifeworld
theme in the introductory chapter of Volume 1; but it is only in
Volume 2, in the second Zwischenbetrachtung, that the concept
of the "lifeworld" is determined more precisely, distinguished
from that of "system," and integrated with it in a two-level
concept of society. The specification of the concept proceeds by
way of a review, critique, and synthesis of existing approaches.
The guiding intention behind this tour de force is to capture the
structural complexity of the lifeworld and to show how it is
symbolically produced and reproduced through the medium of
communicative action. Habermas criticizes existing approaches
as typically "selective," "one-sided." The phenomenological
approach stemming from Husser} and Schutz suffers from a
"culturalistic abridgement," that is, an overemphasis on the reproduction
and renewal of cultural knowledge and a relative neglect
of the formation and transformation of group memberships and
personal identities. In the tradition going back to Durkheim and
Parsons, the concept appears with an "institutionalistic bias" in
which the aspect of social integration predominates. And the
symbolic interactionism inspired by Mead tends to treat the lifeworld
from the standpoint of socialization, primarily as a
sociocultural milieu for the self-formative processes in which
individuals are involved through role playing, role taking, and
so on.
Habermas seeks to develop a multidimensional concept of
the lifeworld in which these different aspects are integrated; the
key to his construction is the multidimensionality of the communicative
action through which the lifeworld is symbolically
xxiv REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
reproduced. He begins his discussion by examining phenomenological
notions of the Lebenswelt as the ever-present horizon
of social action, as its Verweisungszusammenhang, as the takenfor-
granted background that is "always already" there when we
act. Finding these formulations still too strongly tied to the
philosophy of consciousness, he turns to reformulations in which
the lifeworld is represented as a "culturally transmitted and linguistically
organized stock of interpretive patterns.'' In the form
of "language" and "culture" this reservoir of implicit knowledge
supplies actors with unproblematic background convictions upon
which they draw in the negotiation of common definitions of
situations. Individuals cannot "step out" of their lifeworlds; nor
can they objectify them in a supreme act of reflection. Particular
segments of the lifeworld relevant to given action situations can,
of course, be problematized; but this always takes place against
an indeterminate and inexhaustible background of other unquestioned
presuppositions, a shared global preunderstanding that
is prior to any problems or disagreements. 13
Even when reformulated in communication-theoretic terms,
the phenomenological concept of the lifeworld is inadequate. To
begin with, it retains a culturalistic bias. The taken-for-granted
background of social action comprises norms and subjective experiences,
social practices and individual skills, as well as cultural
convictions. Not only culture but also institutional orders and
personality structures should be seen as basic components of the
lifeworld.
To develop a more adequate framework Habermas returns
to the communicative practice of everyday life, the medium of
symbolic reproduction:
In coming to an understanding with one another about their
situation, participants in communication stand in a cultural
tradition which they use and at the same time renew; in coordinating
their actions via intersubjective recognition of
criticizable validity claims, they rely on memberships in
social groups and at the same time reinforce the integration
of the latter; through participating in interaction with competent
reference persons, growing children internalize the
value orientations of their social groups and acquire generalized
capabilities for action ... Under the functional aspect
of reaching understanding communicative action serves the
transmission and renewal of cultural knowledge; under the
aspect of coordinating action, it serves social integration and
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION XXV
the establishment of group solidarity; under the aspect of
socialization, it serves the formation of personal identities
(2:208).
Thus, to the different structural components of the lifeworld jculture,
society, personality) there correspond reproduction processes
jcultural reproduction, social integration, socialization)
based on the different aspects of communicative action !understanding,
coordination, sociation), which are rooted in the structural
components of speech acts !propositional, illocutionary,
expressive). These structural correspondences permit communicative
action to perform its different functions and to serve as
a suitable medium for the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld.
When these functions are interfered with, there arise disturbances
in the reproduction process and corresponding crisis manifestations:
loss of meaning, withdrawal of legitimation, confusion of
orientations, anomie, destabilization of collective identities,
alienation, psychopathologies, breakdowns in tradition, withdrawal
of motivation.14
Habermas argues that the concept of communicative action
and the lifeworld concept developed as a complement to it can
serve as basic categories of general social theory: They establish
the framework within which concrete historicallifeworlds vary.
Although these structural limitations tell us nothing about the
dynamics of development, they do account for the developmental-
logical effect of a directional variation in the structures of
the lifeworld. The "linguistification of the sacred" can be
internally reconstructed as a learning process in which the "prejudgemental
power" of the lifeworld over the communicative
practice of everyday life progressively diminishes, in the sense
that communicative actors increasingly owe their mutual understanding
to their own interpretive accomplishments, to their own
yes/no positions on criticizable validity claims. This involves a
growing differentiation of lifeworld structures and of the processes
through which they are maintained, a sharper separation
of questions of content from those of form or procedure, and a
"reflective refraction" of processes of symbolic reproduction je.g.,
in science, law, art, democratic institutions, educational systems).
For questions of developmental dynamics, on the other hand,
we have to turn to contingent historical conditions, particularly
to the interdependence of sociocultural transformations on the
one hand, and changes in the form of material reproduction on
xxvi REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
the other. Once again Durkheim furnishes important clues, in
this case through his study of how the growing "division of labor"
is connected with changing forms of social solidarity and why
it leads in the modern period to symptoms of social disintegration.
From this point of departure Habermas seeks to reconstruct
a Marxist approach that traces pathological forms of symbolic
reproduction not to the rationalization of the lifeworld itself (as
do conservative critics of bourgeois culture) but to constraints
issuing from processes of material reproduction. The key to his
reconstruction is the distinction between lifeworld and system,
which he presents as a distinction between two fundamentally
different ways of approaching the study of society.
From one point of view, society is conceptualized as the lifeworld
of a social group in which actions are coordinated through
harmonizing action orientations. From another point of view,
society is conceptualized as a self-regulating system in which
actions are coordinated through functional interconnections of
action consequences. Habermas considers either of these conceptual
strategies, taken by itself, to be one-sided. The theory
of society requires a combination of the two-of the internalist
perspective of the participant with the externalist perspective of
the observer, of hermeneutic and structuralist analysis with
systems-theoretic and functionalist analysis, of the study of social
integration with the study of system integration. Because social
action is symbolically mediated, structural patterns of action
systems that are integral to their continued existence have to be
grasped hermeneutically; we have to understand and reconstruct
the meaning of symbolic structures. Moreover, the selfmaintenance
of social systems is subject to internal limitations
resulting from the "inner logic" of symbolic reproduction. For
the medium of such reproduction is communicative action;
therefore, the validity claims built into that medium, and the constraints
under which they stand, have empirical significancethey
are social facts. On the other hand, the lifeworld approach,
taken by itself, runs the risk of a "hermeneutic idealism" that
conceptualizes society from the perspective of participants and
remains blind to causes, connections, and consequences that lie
beyond the horizon of everyday practice. It implicitly relies on
such idealizing fictions as the autonomy of actors, the independence
of culture, and the transparency of communicative
interaction-that is, the absence of systematic distortions. In this
perspective the reproduction of society appears to be only a
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION xxvii
question of maintaining the symbolic structures of the lifeworld;
processes of material reproduction, through which the social
system secures its physical existence in relation to nature and
to other social systems, fade into the background.
To remedy both forms of one-sidedness, Habermas proposes
that we combine the two perspectives and conceive of society
as a ''system that has to satisfy the conditions of maintenance
of socioculturallifeworlds," or as a "systemically stabilized nexus
of action of socially integrated groups.'' The key to this two-level
construction is a methodological objectification of the lifeworld as
a boundary-maintaining system.
The material reproduction of the lifeworld cannot be represented
as the intended result of collective labor. Normally
it takes place as the fulfillment of latent functions that go
beyond the action orientations of participants ... These
reflections suggest a change of method and of conceptual
perspective, namely an objectivating view of the lifeworld
as a system ... Survival imperatives require a functional inte·
gration of the lifeworld that takes effect in and through the
symbolic structures of the lifeworld and cannot be grasped
directly from the perspective of participants. It calls instead
for a counterintuitive analysis from the standpoint of an
observer who objectivates the lifeworld. From this methodological
point of view we can separate the two aspects under
which the integration problems of a society can be analyzed.
Whereas social integration presents itself as part of the
symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld-which depends not
only on the reproduction of memberships (or solidarities) but
also on cultural traditions and socialization processes-func·
tiona} integration amounts to a material reproduction of the
lifeworld that can be conceived as system maintenance. The
transition from one problem area to the other is tied to a
change of methodological attitude and conceptual apparatus.
Functional integration only comes into view when the life·
world is objectified as a boundary-maintaining system"
(2:348-49). 15
Neither point of view is merely a point of view; each is a response
to something in the social object, in the one case to the fundamentally
symbolic nature of social action, in the other to the latent
functions it fulfills. The lifeworld perspective enjoys a certain
priority, as it corresponds to the basic structures of a communicatively
mediated reality-and it is at least conceptually possible
xxviii REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
for all of the functions of action to be manifest, that is, perceptible
within the horizon of the lifeworld. On the other hand, the course
of social evolution itself has enhanced the importance of the
system perspective: Functions of material reproduction have
increasingly shifted to mechanisms je.g., the market) that are differentiated
off from the lifeworld and require the counterintuitive
approach of systems theory.
In section 2 of his second set of intermediate reflections
!Chapter VI), Habermas presents a view of social evolution as
a two-level process of differentiation. On one level, there is a
growing differentiation between the lifeworld and system aspects
of society, a "decoupling of system and lifeworld." The
mechanisms of functional integration are increasingly detached
from the lifeworld structures responsible for social integration,
until, as Weber diagnosed, they congeal into quasi-autonomous
subsystems of economic and administrative activity. On another
level, there is a progressive differentiation within the dimensions
of lifeworld and system themselves. We have discussed the
former under the rubric "the rationalization of the lifeworld";
the latter takes the form of newly emerging systemic mechanisms
that make possible higher levels of system complexity and
enhance society's capacity to steer itself. The two levels do not
simply lie parallel to one another, they are interconnected:
systemic mechanisms have to be anchored in the lifeworld, that
is, institutionalized. More specifically, the rationalization of the
lifeworld-particularly of law and morality-is a necessary
condition for the institutionalization of new mechanisms of
system integration-in the modern era, of formally organized
subsystems of purposive-rational economic and administrative
action.
The material reproduction of society requires that the purposive
activities of different individuals be effectively coordinated.
To the extent that economy of effort and efficacy of means
are measures of success, there is pressure in the direction of a
cooperative division of labor, that is, a functional specification
of activities with a corresponding differentiation of their results
or products. This requires in turn that these activities be somehow
coordinated and these products be somehow exchanged.
"The competent combination of specialized performances
requires a delegation of the authority to direct, or of power, to
persons who take on the tasks of organization; and the functional
exchange of products requires the establishment of exchange
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION xxix
relations" 12:239). Thus the division of labor goes hand in
hand with the development of organizational power and exchange
relations. In tribal societies this transpires through
institutions that are still linked to social integration-for example,
status differentiations based on sex, generation, and ancestry;
the circulation of goods via marriage relations; the reciprocity
of services built into the normative requirements of social roles;
and the ritual exchange of valuable objects. This interlocking
of system and social integration gives way in the course of
social evolution to a gradual separation of mechanisms that
serve to heighten system complexity and adaptive capacity
from those mechanisms that secure the social solidarity of
collectives via normative consensus and the achievement
of mutual understanding. Systemic mechanisms become less
tied to pregiven social structures, such as kinship relations;
they are increasingly linked to spheres of action that are already
functionally specified-for example, the organization of exchange
relations in a market economy, the institutionalization of
political power in the modern state. As these spheres become
increasingly independent of the normative structures
of the lifeworld, they assume the form of quasi-autonomous
subsystems.
One of the preconditions for this development is a ''postconventional''
level of moral and legal consciousness-at which
values and norms are generalized and social action is released
from concrete traditional patterns of behavior, at which distinctions
are drawn between contexts of instrumental or strategic
action and those that rest on or aim at normative consensus. As
the rationalization of the lifeworld progresses, so does the risk
of disagreement among the parties to interaction. The less the
need for mutual understanding is covered in advance by traditions
that pre-decide which validity claims are to be recognized, the
greater the burden placed on actors themselves to achieve common
definitions of situations, and the greater the danger of deficits
or failures in coordination. Different types of mechanisms
have developed for reducing these risks by reducing the burden
placed on communicative action. One type in particular is basic
to the structure of modern society: The medium for coordinating
action in certain domains has changed over from language
to "delinguistified" steering media. By decoupling action
in certain ways from yes/no responses to validity claims, these
media neutralize the usual lifeworld requirements for consenXXX
REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
sus formation. They ''encode'' certain forms of purposive-rational
activity, symbolically generalize certain categories of rewards and
punishments, and make it possible to exercise strategic influence
on action by nonlinguistic means. Further, media-steered interactions
can link up in more and more complex functional networks,
without anyone commanding an overview of the latter
or being responsible for them. The clearest instance of such a
medium is money.
With the advent of capitalism the economy was differentiated
out as a functionally specified subsystem by the institutionalization
of money in bourgeois civil law, particularly
property and contract law. This meant a monetarization not only
of the relations of different economic units among themselves,
but also of the exchange relations between the economy and its
noneconomic environments:
The institutionalization of wage labor and of the modern taxbased
state was just as constitutive of the new mode of production
as the rise of the capitalist enterprise. Only when
money became an intersystemic medium of exchange did
it produce structure-forming effects. The economy could
constitute itself as a monetarily steered subsystem only to
the extent that it regulated its exchange with its social environments
through the medium of money. Complementary
environments were formed as production was converted to
wage labor and the state apparatus was connected back to
production through the taxes of the employed. The government
apparatus became dependent on the media-steered
economic subsystem; this forced it to reorganize in such a
way that political power took on the structure of a steering
medium-it was assimilated to money (2:256).
As this last sentence indicates, Habermas wants to treat
power as a second steering medium, through which government
administration also takes the shape of a subsystem decoupled
in important respects from the lifeworld. Reviewing Parsons's
media theory, he examines the analogies and the disanalogies
between money and other claimed steering media. In the case
of power, he finds that despite the undeniable differencesfor
instance, the exercise of power is typically tied to positions
in hierarchical organizations and requires legitimation
(and thus is more susceptible to risks of disagreement and more
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION xxxi
dependent on consensus at another level)-there are sufficient
similarities to warrant treating it as a steering medium.
In the other cases, he argues, the structural analogies are so vague
and the conceptual determinations so imprecise as to render the
use of the term "medium" almost metaphorical. Specifically, he
argues that subsystems can be differentiated out by way of
steering media only for functions of material reproduction and
not for those of symbolic reproduction; the latter cannot be
''mediatized'' without sociopathological results. 16
With this contrast between the lifeworld and those domains
of social interaction that are formally organized and steered by
media, we are in a position to sketch Habermas's account of
modernity. It turns on the following alternative:
From the mere fact that system integration and social integration
become largely decoupled, we cannot yet infer linear
dependencies in one or the other direction. Both are
conceivable: the institutions that anchor steering mechanisms
like money and power in the lifeworld might channel
either the influence of the lifeworld on formally organized
domains of action or, conversely, the influence of the system
on communicatively structured contexts of action. In one
case they would function as the institutional framework that
subordinated system maintenance to the normative restrictions
of the lifeworld, in the other case as the basis that
subordinated the lifeworld to the systemic constraints of
material reproduction (2:275-76).
Habermas attributes the "paradoxes of modernity" to the predominance
of the latter state of affairs jdespite the promise of
democracy to ensure the opposite): "The rationalized lifeworld
makes possible the rise and growth of subsystems whose independent
imperatives strike back at it in a destructive fashion"
j2:277). It is not the competition between mechanisms of system
and social integration nor the "interference" thereby produced
that is per se pathological. The "mediatization of the lifeworld"
turns into a "colonization of the lifeworld" only when symbolic
reproduction is at stake, that is, when systemic mechanisms drive
out mechanisms of social integration from domains in which they
cannot be replaced.
The principal points of reference for Habermas's theory
of modernity are Marx and Weber. He alternately characterizes
xxxii REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
his approach as a "second attempt to appropriate Weber in the
spirit of Western Marxism,'' a ''reformulation of the reification
problematic in terms of systemically induced lifeworld
pathologies" and as a reconstruction and generalization of
Marx's analysis of the "real abstraction" involved in the transformation
of concrete labor into the abstract commodity "labor
power." The phenomena Weber pointed to in his vision of
an "iron cage" and Marxists have dealt with in terms of "reification"
are here traced back to the exchange relations between
system and lifeworld that crystallize in the roles of employee
and consumer, citizen and client of the state. Through these
channels the lifeworld is subordinated to system imperatives,
moral-practical elements are driven out of the private and
public spheres, and everyday life is increasingly "monetarized"
and "bureaucratized." To the extent that the economic system
subjects private households, employees, and consumers to its
imperatives,
consumerism and possessive individualism, motives of performance
and competition gain the force to shape conduct.
The communicative practice of everyday life is one-sidedly
rationalized into a specialist-utilitarian lifestyle; and this
media-induced shift to purposive-rational action orientations
calls forth the reaction of a hedonism freed from the pressures
of rationality. As the private sphere is undermined and
eroded by the economic system, so is the public sphere by
the administrative system. The bureaucratic disempowering
and dessication of spontaneous processes of opinion- and
will-formation expands the scope for mobilizing mass loyalty
and makes it easier to decouple political decisions from concrete,
identity-forming contexts of life (2:480).
Whereas ''reification'' can be traced back to the colonization of
the lifeworld-the subversion of socially integrated spheres of
symbolic reproduction and their assimilation into formally
organized domains of economic and bureaucratic action-parallel
phenomena of "cultural impoverishment" are a consequence
of the professionalization that has increasingly separated the development
of expert cultures from the communicative infrastructure
of everyday life. Processes of mutual understanding are cut
off from important cultural resources, while the blind, naturelike
traditions upon which everyday practice still draws steadily
dry up.
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION xxxiii
This reappropriation of Weber's reflections on the paradoxes
of rationalization does not in itself account for the dynamics
behind the colonization process. For this, Habermas turns again
to Marx, particularly to his analysis of the dual character of labor
in capitalist society. As a concrete action it belongs to the lifeworld
of the producer; as an abstract performance organized
according to imperatives of capital realization it belongs to the
economic system. The commodification of labor power via the
institutionalization of the wage-labor relation neutralizes the lifeworld
context of labor and renders it abstract. As the Marxian
analysis of "real abstraction" relates problems of system integration
(crises of capital accumulation) to problems of social integration
(class struggle), it restricts itself to what is, on Habermas's
view, only one-however central-case of a more general phenomenon:
the subordination of the lifeworld to systemic
imperatives. He argues here, as he did earlier in Legitimation
Crisis, that the economy cannot be treated as a closed system;
to begin with, it is essentially interconnected with an administrative
subsystem that fulfills market-complementing and marketreplacing
functions. Problems arising in the process of capital
accumulation can be transferred to the political system and dealt
with administratively; conversely, problems arising in the political
sphere can be dealt with through the distribution of economically
produced values. Thus Habermas proposes a model of two
complementary subsystems that are based on two different media
and involved in exchange relations with both the private and
public spheres of the lifeworld. He seeks to demonstrate that this
model can make good the failure of orthodox Marxism to comprehend
central features of advanced capitalism-in particular,
government interventionism, mass democracy, and the socialwelfare
state. In developed capitalist societies, class conflict has
been "institutionalized" and the world of labor "tamed" through
a "normalization" of occupational roles and an enhancement of
consumer roles; the political realm has been "pacified" through
"neutralizing" the possibilities for political participation opened
up with the universalized role of citizen and inflating the role
of the client of the state. ''The burdens that result from institutionalizing
an alienated mode of political participation are shifted
to the role of client, just as the burdens of normalizing alienated
labor are shifted to that of consumer" (2:515). Both are paid for
in the coin of economically produced value. As long as capital
continues to expand under political protection, as long as there
xxxiv REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
is an adequate supply of compensatory use-values that can be
channeled into the roles of consumer and client, economic and
political alienation does not develop explosive force.
But social-welfare state, mass democracy is an arrangement
marked by structural dilemmas and beset by crisis tendencies
(as Habermas elaborated in Legitimation Crisis, albeit from a somewhat
different perspective). In particular, the inner dynamic of
capitalist growth means a continuous increase in systemic complexity,
an expansion of the "monetary-bureaucratic complex"
into ever new areas of life. This leads to conflicts within the lifeworld
when communicatively structured domains of action are
transformed into formally organized domains-a process that
takes the form of Verrechtlichung, juridification or legal
regulationY For purposes of illustrating the kind of empirical
research relevant to his thesis of the internal colonization of the
lifeworld, Habermas considers the legal regulation of communicatively
structured spheres of action, in particular the socialwelfare
measures that are an integral part of developed capitalism.
''The social-welfare policies of the state were marked from the
start by the ambivalence of securing freedom on the one hand
and cancelling it on the other ... The net of social-welfare guarantees
is supposed to head off the [negative) effects of a
production process based on wage labor. The tighter this net is
drawn, however, the more pronounced is the ambivalence ... that
results from the very structure of legal regulation. The means
of guaranteeing freedom themselves threaten the freedom of those
who are to benefit'' (2:531). In other words, the legal-bureaucraticmonetary
form of administratively dealing with certain problems
itself works against their resolution. For one thing, it necessitates
a redefinition of life situations in ways that are counterproductive.
The situation to be regulated, which is embedded in the context
of a life-history and a concrete form of life, has to be
subjected to violent abstraction, not only because it has to
be subsumed under the law but also in order that it can be
dealt with administratively ... Furthermore, the life risks in
question (e.g. sickness, old age, unemployment) are usually
met with compensation in the form of money ... As the
social-welfare state spreads the net of client relationships
over private spheres of life, it increasingly produces the
pathological side effects of a juridification that is simultaneously
a bureaucratization and monetarization of core
domains of the lifeworld. This has the structure of a
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION XXXV
dilemma, in that the social-welfare guarantees are supposed
to serve the ends of social integration and yet they foster
the disintegration of those life contexts (2:532-34).
In this way, the increasingly complex economic-political system
penetrates ever deeper into the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld,
drawing ever-new spheres of communicatively structured
interaction into the vortex of capitalist growth.
In Habermas's view, one of the important advantages of a
critical social theory that analyzes processes of real abstraction
in this way is that it puts us in a much better position to comprehend
the new potentials for conflict that now "overlie" the traditional
politics of economic, social, and military security. For it
is precisely along the ''seams between system and lifeworld'' that
these new potentials for emancipation, resistance and withdrawal
have developed.
In advanced Western societies conflicts have developed in
the last ten to twenty years that deviate in various respects
from the social-welfare-state pattern of institutionalized
conflict over distribution. They do not flare up in areas of
material reproduction; they are not channeled through
parties and associations; and they are not allayed by compensations
that conform to the system. Rather, these new
conflicts arise in areas of cultural reproduction, of social integration
and of socialization; they are carried out in subinstitutional,
or at least extraparliamentary, forms of protest; and
the deficits that underlie them reflect a reification of communicatively
structured domains of action, which cannot be
gotten at via the media of money and power. It is not primarily
a question of compensations that the social-welfare
state can provide, but of protecting and restoring endangered
ways of life or of establishing reformed ways of life. In short,
the new conflicts do not flare up around problems of distribution
but around questions concerning the grammar of
forms of life (2:576).
Habermas is thinking here of such phenomena as the ecology
and antinuclear movements, the limits-to-growth debate, the
peace movement, the women's movement, experiments with
communal and rural living-with alternative lifestyles generally,
gay liberation, conflicts over regional and cultural autonomy,
protests against "big government," religious fundamentalism
xxxvi REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
and the proliferation of religious sects, the multifarious ''psychoscene,"
the proliferation of support groups, and the like. He
maintains that a proper classification, comprehension, and assessment
of this confusing variety of "new social movements"
requires the adoption of the theoretical perspective of internal
colonization. They cluster around those roles through which the
imperatives of the system are channeled into the lifeworld; and
they can be understood in large part as a reaction to the processes
of real abstraction that are institutionalized in them.
What does all this tell us about enlightenment and the
dialectic of enlightenment with which we began? Habermas is
arguing, in effect, that Weber, because he construed rationalization
in terms of the increasing dominance of purposive rationality,
did not adequately grasp the selectivity of capitalist rationalization
or its causes. Following him in essential respects, Horkheimer
and Adorno were led to deny any trace of reason in the structures
and institutions of modern life. In Habermas's view, this
diagnosis misinterprets the very real distortions of modernity and
underestimates its equally real accomplishments and as-yet
unrealized potentials. The utopian content of Enlightenment
thought, to which the realities of a society delivered up to the
uncontrolled dynamic of economic growth gave the lie, was
certainly ideological. But it was no mere illusion:
To the extent that the validity basis of action oriented to
reaching understanding replaces the sacred bases of social
interaction, there appears the form of a posttraditional
everyday communication that stands on its own feet, that
sets limits to the inner dynamic of independent subsystems,
that bursts open encapsulated expert cultures-and thus that
avoids the dangers both of reification and of desolation. Paradoxically,
the rationalization of the lifeworld does bothmakes
possible a systemically induced reification and opens
up the utopian perspective from which capitalist modernization
has always been faulted for dissolving traditional
forms of life without salvaging their communicative substance.
It destroys these life-forms but does not transform
them in such a way that the interconnection of cognitiveinstrumental
elements with moral-practical and expressive
elements, which obtained in everyday practice before it
was rationalized, could be retained at a higher level of
differentiation (2:486-87).
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION xxxvii
The discontents of modernity are not rooted in rationalization
as such, but in the failure to develop and institutionalize all
the different dimensions of reason in a balanced way. Owing to
the absence of institutions that could protect the private and
public spheres from the reifying dynamics of the economic and
administrative subsystems, communicatively structured interaction
has been increasingly pushed to the margin; due to the
lack of feedback relations between a differentiated modern
culture and an impoverished everyday practice, the lifeworld has
become increasingly desolate. In Habermas's view, the constant
attack on the communicative infrastructure of society poses a
growing threat to the welfare-state compromise that obtains today
in advanced capitalism. For it instrumentalizes spheres of action
that have to be structured communicatively if they are to perform
their functions in the reproduction of social life. The more
deeply these spheres are penetrated by systemic imperatives, the
greater the danger of collapse.
The continuous development and balanced institutionalization
of the different aspects of reason demands a decolonization
of the lifeworld, but not in the sense of insulating it altogether
from processes of modernization. There is a type of rationalization
proper to the lifeworld, namely an expansion of the areas
in which action is coordinated by way of communicatively
achieved agreement. A communicatively rationalized lifeworld
would have to develop institutions out of itself through which
to set limits to the inner dynamic of media-steered subsystems
and to subordinate them to decisions arrived at in unconstrained
communication. Central among these institutions are those that
secure an effectively functioning public sphere, in which practical
questions of general interest can be submitted to public discussion
and decided on the basis of discursively achieved agreement.
The Enlightenment's promise of a life informed by reason
cannot be redeemed so long as the rationality that finds expression
in society is deformed by capitalist modernization. Nor is
its ultimate redemption guaranteed by any laws of history. It
remains, as Habermas once put it, a "practical hypothesis" from
which critical social theory takes its start.
Author's Preface
More than a decade ago, in the preface to Zur Logik der
Sozialwissenschaften, I held out the prospect of a theory of communicative
action. In the meantime, the methodological interest I
then connected with a "language-theoretic foundation of the social
sciences" has given way to a substantive interest. The theory of
communicative action is not a metatheory but the beginning of a
social theory concerned to validate its own critical standards. I
conceive of my analysis of the general structures of action oriented
to reaching understanding as a continuation of the theory of knowledge
with other means. In this respect the action theory developed
by Talcott Parsons in 1937 in The Structure of Social Action, with its
combination of conceptual analyses and reconstructions of the
history of social theory, certainly provided me with a model; at the
same time, however, it led me astray because of its methodological
orientation. In good Hegelian terms, the formation of basic concepts
and the treatment of substantive issues belong inseparably together.
My initial expectation, that I had only to work out the Christian
Gauss lectures I had delivered at Princeton University in 1971jand
which I shall publish separately), turned out to be mistaken. The
deeper I penetrated into the theories of action, meaning, speech acts,
and other similar domains of analytic philosophy, the more I lost
sight in the details of the aim of the whole endeavor. The more I
sought to satisfy the explicative claims of the philosopher, the further
I moved from the interests of the sociologist, who has to ask what
purpose such conceptual analysis should serve. I was having
difficulty finding the right level of presentation for what I wanted
to say; and, as we have known since Hegel and Marx, problems
of presentation are not extrinsic to substantive problems.1 In this
situation, the advice of Thomas McCarthy, who encouraged me to
make a new start, was important.
With the exception of one semester as a visiting professor in
xxxix
xi REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
the United States, I have been writing this book in its present form,
without interruption, for the last four years. The concept of
communicative action is developed in the first set (Chapter III) of
"Intermediate Reflections" (Zwischenbetrachtung], which provides
access to three intertwined topic complexes: first, a concept of
communicative rationality that is sufficiently skeptical in its
development but is nevertheless resistant to cognitive-instrumental
abridgments of reason; second, a two-level concept of society that
connects the "lifeworld" and "system" paradigms in more than a
rhetorical fashion; and finally, a theory of modernity that explains
the type of social pathologies that are today becoming increasingly
visible, by way of the assumption that communicatively structured
domains of life are being subordinated to the imperatives of
autonomous, formally organized systems of action. Thus the theory
of communicative action is intended to make possible a
conceptualization of the social-life context that is tailored to the
paradoxes of modernity.
In the "Introduction" (Chapter I), I attempt to establish the
thesis that the rationality problematic is not brought to sociology
from the outside. Every sociology that claims to be as theory of society
encounters the problem of employing a concept of rationality-which
always has a normative content-at three levels: It can avoid neither
the metatheoretical question concerning the rationality implications
of its guiding concepts of action nor the methodological question
concerning the rationality implications of gaining access to its object
domain through an understanding of meaning; nor, finally, can it
avoid the empirical-theoretical question concerning the sense, if any,
in which the modernization of societies can be described as
rationalization.
A systematic appropriation of the history of (sociological) theory
helped me to find the level of integration on which the philosophical
intentions unfolded from Kant through Marx can be made
scientifically fruitful today. I treat Weber, Mead, Durkheim, and
Parsons as classics, that is, as theorists of society who still have something
to say to us. The excurses I scatter throughout these
(historicalreconstructive)
chapters are, like the ''Introduction'' and the two
sets of "Intermediate Reflections" (Chapters III and VI). devoted
to systematic questions. In ''Concluding Reflections'' (Chapter VIII)
I then bring the historical and the systematic investigations together.
I attempt, on the one hand, to render the proposed interpretation
of modernity plausible in connection with the tendencies toward
regulation by law [Verrechtlichung] and, on the other hand, to spell
out the tasks with which critical theory of society is faced today.
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION xli
An investigation of this kind, which uses the concept of communicative
reason without blushing, is today suspect of having fallen
into the snares of foundationalism. But the alleged similarities of
the formal-pragmatic approach to classical transcendental philosophy
lead one down the wrong trail. I would recommend that the reader
who harbors this suspicion read the conclusion first.2 We would not
be able to ascertain the rational internal structure of action oriented
to reaching understanding if we did not already have before us-in
fragmentary and distorted form, to be sure-the existing forms of
a reason that has to rely on being symbolically embodied and
historically situated. 3
The contemporary-historical motive behind the present work
is obvious. Since the end of the 1960s, Western societies have been
approaching a state in which the heritage of Occidental rationalism
is no longer accepted without argument. The stabilization of internal
conditions that has been achieved on the basis of a social-welfarestate
compromise (particularly impressively, perhaps, in the Federal
Republic of Germany) now exacts increasing sociopsychological and
cultural costs. And we have become more conscious of the instability
of the relations among the superpowers, which was temporarily
repressed but never mastered. The theoretical discussion of these
phenomena touches the very substance of Western traditions and
inspirations.
Neoconservatives want to hold at any price to the capitalist
pattern of economic and social modernization. They give highest
priority to the economic growth that the social-welfare-state
compromise fosters-and increasingly also constricts. They seek
refuge from the socially disintegrative side effects of this growth
in uprooted but rhetorically affirmed traditions of a biedermeierlichen
culture. It is difficult to see how relocating problems that, since the
end of the nineteenth century, and for good reasons, have been
shifted from the market to the state-that is, how shoving problems
back and forth between the media of money and power-is going
to give us new impetus. It is even less plausible to attempt to renew,
with an historically enlightened consciousness, the traditional
padding that capitalist modernization has devoured.
Neoconservative apologetics are countered by a critique of
growth-sometimes sharpened in antimodernist fashion-that is
directed against the hypercomplexity of economic and administrative
action systems, as well as against an arms race that has become
autonomous. Experiences of the colonization of the lifeworld, which
the neoconservatives want to head off and muffle in a traditionalistic
manner, lead on this side to radical opposition.
xlii REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
When this opposition sharpens into a demand for de-differentiation
at whatever price, an important distinction is lost. Restricting the
growth of monetary-administrative complexity is by no means
synonymous with surrendering modern forms of life. In structurally
differentiated lifeworlds a potential for reason is marked out that
cannot be conceptualized as a heightening of system complexity.
To be sure, these remarks touch upon only the motivational
background to this work and not its actual theme.4 I have written
this book for those who have a professional interest in the
foundations of social theory.
I would like to express my gratitude to Inge Pethran, who typed
the different versions of the manuscript and put together the
bibliography. This is only one link in a 10-year chain of close
cooperation, without which I would have been helpless. I am also
grateful to Ursula Hering, who helped me to obtain necessary
literature, as well as to Freidhelm Herborth of Suhrkamp Verlag.
This book is based in part on courses I gave at the universities
of Frankfurt, Pennsylvania, and California at Berkeley. I owe a debt
of thanks to my students for stimulating discussions, and to my
colleagues at these places, above all to Karl-Otto Apel, Richard
Bernstein, ang John Searle.
If, as I hope, my presentation has strongly discursive traits,
this merely reflects the milieu of argumentation in our section of
the Max Planck Institute at Starnberg. Various parts of the
manuscript were discussed, in a way that was fruitful for me, at
the Thursday colloquia in which Manfred Auwarter, Wolfgang Bonss,
Rainer Dobert, Klaus Eder, GUnter Frankenberg, Edit Kirsch, Sigrid
Meuschel, Max Miller, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, Ulrich Radel and
Ernst Tugendhat participated. To Ernst Tugendhat I am also indebted
for a profusion of comments. I also learned much from discussions
with colleagues who had longer stays at the Institute-Johann Paul
Arnasson, Seyla Benhabib, Mark Gould, and Thomas McCarthyor
who visited us regularly-Aaron Cicourel, Helmut Dubiel,
Lawrence Kohlberg, Claus Offe, Ulrich Oevermann, and Charles
Taylor.
J.H.
Max Planck Institute for Social Sciences
Starnberg, August 1981
Introduction:
Approaches to the Problem
of Rationality
The rationality of beliefs and actions is a theme usually dealt
with in philosophy. One could even say that philosophical thought
originates in reflection on the reason embodied in cognition,
speech, and action; and reason remains its basic theme. 1 From
the beginning philosophy has endeavored to explain the world
as a whole, the unity in the multiplicity of appearances, with
principles to be discovered in reason-and not i-n communication
with a divinity beyond the world nor, strictly speaking, even
in returning to the ground of a cosmos encompassing nature and
society. Greek thought did not aim at a theology nor at an ethical
cosmology, as the great world religions did, but at an ontology.
If there is anything common to philosophical theories, it is the
intention of thinking being or the unity of the world by way of
explicating reason's experience of itself.
In speaking this way, I am drawing upon the language of
modern philosophy. But the philosophical tradition, insofar as
it suggests the possibility of a philosophical worldview, has
become questionable.2 Philosophy can no longer refer to the
whole of the world, of nature, of history, of society, in the sense
of a totalizing knowledge. Theoretical surrogates for worldviews
have been devalued, not only by the factual advance of empirical
science but even more by the reflective consciousness accompanying
it. With this consciousness philosophical thought has
1
2 REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
withdrawn self-critically behind itself; in the question of what
it can accomplish with its reflective competence within the framework
of scientific conventions, it has become metaphilosophy.3
Its theme has thereby changed, and yet it remains the same. In
contemporary philosophy, wherever coherent argumentation has
developed around constant thematic cores-in logic and the
theory of science, in the theory of language and meaning, in ethics
and action theory, even in aesthetics-interest is directed to the
formal conditions of rationality in knowing, in reaching understanding
through language, and in acting, both in everyday
contexts and at the level of methodically organized experience
or systematically organized discourse. The theory of argumentation
thereby takes on a special significance; to it falls the task
of reconstructing the formal-pragmatic presuppositions and conditions
of an explicitly rational behavior.
If this diagnosis points in the right direction, if it is true that
philosophy in its postmetaphysical, post-Hegelian currents is converging
toward the point of a theory of rationality, how can
sociology claim any competence for the rationality problematic?
We have to bear in mind that philosophical thought, which has
surrendered the relation to totality, also loses its self-sufficiency.
To the goal of formally analyzing the conditions of rationality,
we can tie neither ontological hopes for substantive theories of
nature, history, society, and so forth, nor transcendental-philosophical
hopes for an aprioristic reconstruction of the equipment
of a nonempirical species subject, of consciousness in general.
All attempts at discovering ultimate foundations, in which the
intentions of First Philosophy live on, have broken down.4 In this
situation, the way is opening to a new constellation in the relationship
of philosophy and the sciences. As can be seen in the
case of the history and philosophy of science, formal explication
of the conditions of rationality and empirical analysis of the
embodiment and historical development of rationality structures
mesh in a peculiar way. Theories of modern empirical science,
whether along the lines of logical empiricism, critical rationalism,
or constructivism, make a normative and at the same time
universalistic claim that is no longer covered by fundamental assumptions
of an ontological or transcendental-philosophical
nature. This claim can be tested only against the evidence of
counterexamples, and it can hold up in the end only if reconstructive
theory proves itself capable of distilling internal aspects
of the history of science and systematically explaining, in conTHE
THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION 3
junction with empirical analyses, the actual, narratively documented
history of science in the context of social development.5
What is true of so complex a configuration of cognitive rationality
as modern science holds also for other forms of objective spirit,
that is, other embodiments of rationality, be they cognitive and
instrumental or moral-practical, perhaps even aesthetic-practical.
Empirically oriented sciences of this kind must, as regards
their basic concepts, be laid out in such a way that they can link
up with rational reconstructions of meaning constellations and
problem solutions.6 Cognitive developmental psychology provides
an example of that. In the tradition of Piaget, cognitive
relations between speakers and hearers coming to an understanding
about something by way of communicative acts. Tugendhat
justifies this self-limitation of semantics with the claim that the
communicative use of language is constitutive only for special linguistic
expressions, in particular for the performative verbs and for
the speech acts formed with them; in the areas essential to semantics,
however, language can be employed in a monological train of
thought. There is in fact an intuitively accessible distinction between
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION 441
thinking in propositions in abstraction from speaker-hearer
relations and imagining interpersonal relations. In imagining stories
in which 1-the imagining subject-have a place in a context of
interactions, the roles of participants in the first, second, and third
persons-however internalized-remain constitutive for the sense
of what is thought or represented. But solitary thought in
propositions is also discursive in more than a figurative sense. This
becomes evident when the validity, and thereby the assertoric force,
of a proposition becomes problematic and the solitary thinker has
to go from inferring to devising and weighing hypotheses. He then
finds it necessary to assume the roles of proponent and opponent
as a communicative relation in his thought-as the daydreamer
takes up the narrative structure of speaker-hearer relations when
he recalls scenes from everyday life.
43. If, for example, a promise were to take the form:
1. + I promise you that I was in Hamburg yesterday.
one of the grammatical conditions of well-formedness would be
violated. By contrast, if S uttered the correct sentence ( 1) in a
situation in which it was presupposed that H could count on a visit
from S in any case, one of the contextual conditions typically
presupposed for promises would be violated.
44. Contributions to speech-act theory from philosophy and linguistics
are chiefly concerned with analyzing these conditions. D.
Wunderlich analyzes speech acts of giving advice from the theoretical
perspective developed by Searle, in Grundlagen der Linguistik
(Hamburg, 1974). pp. 349ff.
45. R. Bartsch speaks in this sense of "acceptability conditions" in
contrast to conditions of correctness or validity, in "Die Rolle von
pragmatischen Korrektheitsbedingungen bei der Interpretation von
Ausserungen," in G. Grewendorf. ed., Sprechakttheorie und Semantik
(Frankfurt, 1979). pp. 217ff.
46. Surprisingly, Searle also comes close to this view of intentionalist
semantics in Speech Acts (London, 1969), p. 66. Compare S. R.
Schiffer, Meaning (Oxford, 1972).
47. M. Schwab, Redehandeln (Konigstein, 1980).
48. In the case of commands or directions, principally for the addressees;
in the case of promises or announcements, principally
for the speaker; in the case of agreements or contracts, symmetrically
for both parties; in the case of advice (with a normative
content) or warnings, for both sides but asymmetrically.
49. On these speech-immanent obligations, see J. Habermas "What is
Universal Pragmatics?," pp. 62ff.
50. See Volume 2, Chap. V.1 below.
51. Because Schwab distinguishes neither between simple and normed
442 REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
requests, imperatives and commands, nor between monologically
and communicatively employed intention sentences-that is,
between intentions and declarations of intention-he draws a mistaken
parallel between imperatives and declarations of intention
and distinguishes both from constative speech acts by virtue of the
separation and hierarchical ordering of success in the sense of
validity and success in the sense of fulfillment. Redehandeln, pp.
72-73, 74ff., 95ff.
52. E. Stenius, "Mood and Language Game," Synthese 17(1967):254￡￡.;
compare D. Follesdal, "Comments on Stenius' 'Mood and Language
Game,"' Synthese 17(1967):275￡￡.
53. A. Leist, "Was heisst Universalpragmatik?," Germanistische
Linguistik 5/6(1977):93.
54. Ibid., pp. 97-98.
55. Ibid., p. 109.
56. H. P. Grice, "Logic and Conversation," in P. Cole and J. L. Morgan,
eds., Syntax and Semantics (New York, 1975). 3:41ff.; A. P. Martinich,
"Conversational Maxims and Some Philosophical Problems,"
Philosophical Quarterly 30( 1980):215￡￡.
57. For other objections of this kind, see John Thompson, "Universal
Pragmatics," in Thompson and Held, eds., Habermas: Critical
Debates (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). pp. 116-33.
58. A. Leist, "Was heisst Universalpragmatik?," p. 102; K. Graham,
"Belief and the Limits of Irrationality," Inquiry 17(1974):315￡￡.
59. Searle refers to this argument in Expression and Meaning (Cambridge,
Eng., 1979).
60. Ernst Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung (Frankfurt,
1979). lectures 5 and 6; English transl. (MIT Press, forthcoming).
61. L. Wittgenstein, Zettel, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright,
eds. (Berkeley, 1970). 1404, 549.
62. Thgendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung, p. 131.
63. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York, 1966). p.
222. CompareS. Hampshire, Feeling and Expression (London, 1961);
B. Aune, "On the Complexity of Avowals," in M. Black, ed.,
Philosophy in America (London, 1965), pp. 35ff.; D. Gustafson, "The
Natural Expression of Intention," Philosophical Forum 2(1971):299￡￡.;
D. Gustafson, "Expressions of Intentions," Mind 83(1974):321ff.;
N. R. Norrick, "Expressive Illocutionary Acts," Journal of Pragmatics
2( 1978):277￡￡.
64. M. Dummett, "What is a Theory of Meaning?" in G. Evans and
J. McDowell, eds., Truth and Meaning (Oxford, 19761. pp. 67ff.
65. Ernst Thgendhat, Vorlesungen zur Einfuhrung in die sprachanalytische
Philosophie (Frankfurt, 1976). pp. 256ff.
66. Dummett, "What is a Theory of Meaning?," p. 81.
67. Ibid., pp. 110-11.
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION 443
68. Ibid., p. 126.
69. P. M. S. Hacker, Illusion and Insight (Oxford, 1972), chaps. VIII
and IX.
70. A convincing example of this is P. F. Strawson's analysis of the
resentments called forth by moral violations, in Freedom and Resentment
(London, 1974). pp. 150ff.
71. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, pp. 150ff.
72. One should not, however, make the requirements as strong as T.
Ballmer does in "Probleme der Klassification von Sprechakten,"
in G. Grewendorf, ed., Sprechakttheorie und Semantik (Frankfurt,
1979), pp. 247ff.
73. J. Searle, "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts," in Expression and
Meaning (Cambridge, Eng., 1979), pp. lff.
74. D. Wunderlich "Skizze zu einer integrierten Theorie der grammatischen
und pragmatischen Bedeutung,'' in Studien zur
Sprechakttheorie (Frankfurt, 1976), pp. Slff.; "Was ist das fiir ein
Sprechakt?," in Grewendorf, ed., Sprechakttheorie und Semantik, pp.
275ff.; idem, "Aspekte einer Theorie der Sprechhandlungen," in
H. Lenk, ed., Handlungstheorien (Munich, 1980), 3:381ff.; B. G.
Campbell, "Toward a Working Theory of Illocutionary Forces,"
Language and Style 8( 1975):3ff.; M. Kreckel, Communicative Acts and
Shared Knowledge in Natural Discourse (London, 1981).
75. One measure of the flexibility of a society is the share of the totality
of available illocutionary possibilities made up by institutionally
more-or-less-bound, idiomatically set, ritualized speech acts. Thus
Wunderlich distinguishes speech acts according to whether they
depend more on action norms or on action situations (Wunderlich,
"Skizze," pp. 86ff.) Campbell uses the dimensions "institutional
vs. vernacular" and "positional vs. interactional" (Campbell,
"Working Taxonomy"). In this regard, the dimension "initiative
vs. reactive" is also relevant (Wunderlich, "Skizze," pp. 59ff.).
76. On the speech acts that serve to organize speech, see E. Schegloff
and G. Jefferson, "A Simplist Semantics for the Organization of
Turn-Taking for Conversation," Language 50(1974):696ff., which
draws on the work of Harvey Sacks; see also D. Wunderlich, Studien
zur Sprechakttheorie, pp. 330ff.
77. For this class of speech acts the most likely thesis may still be that S,
through his illocutionary act, informs the hearer of the execution of
this act, or tells him that the act is being carried out. For a critique of
this thesis (which has been advanced by Lemmon, Hedenius, Wiggins,
D. Lewis, Schiffer, Warnock, Cresswell, __ and others), see G.
Grewendorf, ''Haben explizit performative Ausserungen einen
Wahrheitswert?," in Grewendorf, ed., Sprechakttheorie und Semantik,
pp. 175ff. It is, of course, wrong to assimilate operatives, which express
the carrying out of constructive performances, to cognitive
444 REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
speech acts. The speaker connects with them not a claim to propositional
truth but to constructive well-formedness or intelligibility.
78. W. Kummer, Grundlagen der Texttheorie (Hamburg, 1975); M.
Halliday, System and Function in Language: Selected Papers (Oxford,
1976); K. Bach and R. M. Hanisch, Linguistic Communication and
Speech Acts (Cambridge, Eng., 1979).
79. M. Coulthard, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (London,
1977); L. Churchill, Questioning Strategies in Sociolinguistics (Rowley,
Mass., 1978); J. Schenken, ed., Studies in the Organization of Conversational
Interaction (New York, 1978); S. Jacobs, "Recent Advances
in Discourse Analysis,'' Quarterly journal of Speech 66( 1980):450ff.
80. D. Hymes, ed., Language in Culture and Society (New York, 1964)
and "Models of the Interactions of Language and Social Life," in
J. Gumperz and D. Hymes, eds., Directions in Sociolinguistics (New
York, 1972), pp. 35ff.
81. R. Rommetveit, On Message-Structure (New York, 1974).
82. K. 0. Apel, "Sprechakttheorie und transzendentale Sprachpragmatik,"
in Apel, ed., Sprachpragmatik und Philosophie, pp. lOff.; J.
Habermas, "What is Universal Pragmatics?."
83. See the critical appraisal of the formal-pragmatic approaches of
Allwood, Grice, and myself in Kreckel, Communicative Acts, pp.14ff.
84. Classification into constative, regulative, and expressive speech acts
means that we attribute a dominant basic attitude to the speaker.
In admitting a performative attitude we are taking account of the
fact that complex processes of reaching understanding can succeed
only if each speaker undertakes an orderly, rationally controlled
transition from one attitude (be it objectivating, norm-conformative,
or expressive) to the others. Such transformations are based on
intermodal invariances of validity. This area of the logic of speech
acts has scarcely been studied. Why, for example, can we infer from
the validity of an expressive speech act, Mep, to the validity of a
corresponding speech act of the form Mcp? If Peter truthfully
confesses to loving Frances, we feel entitled to accept as true the
assertion that Peter loves Frances. And if, conversely, the assertion
that Peter loves Frances is true, we feel entitled to accept as truthful
Peter's confession that he loves Frances. This transition could be
justified by the rules of propositional logic only if we could
assimilate expressive to constative speech acts or experiential sentences
to assertoric sentences. Since we cannot, we have to look
for formal-pragmatic rules for the connections among speech acts
that appear with the same propositional content in different modes.
The table in Figure 17 is meant merely to illustrate which transitions
we intuitively regard as allowable ( +) and which not (- ).
These phenomena cannot be explained by the familiar modal logics.
On the constructivist approach to a pragmatic logic, see C. F. GethTHE
THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION 445
mann, ed., Theorie des wissenschaftlichen Argumentieriens !frankfurt,
1980), part 3, pp. 165-240; and C. F. Gethmann, Protologik
!frankfurt, 1979).
Figure 17
Intermodal Transfer of Validity Between Speech Acts
with the Same Propositional Content
From: To: To: To:
Constative Expressive Regulative
Speech Acts Speech Acts Speech Acts
(truth) (truthfulness) (rightness)
Constative
Speech Acts X + ---
(truth)
Expressive
Speech Acts + X ---
(truthfulness)
Regulative
Speech Acts --- + X
(rightness)
85. This is the methodological meaning of Searle's "principle of
expressibility," Speech Acts ICambridge, Eng., 1970), pp. 87-88.
Compare T. Binkley, "The Principle of Expressibility," Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 3911979):307ff.
86. J. Habermas, "Universalpragmatische Hinweise auf das System der
Ich-Abgrenzungen," in M. Auwarter, E. Kirsch, M. Schroter, eds.,
Kommunikation, Interaktion, Identitiit ~frankfurt, 1976), pp. 332ff.;
idem, "Some Distinctions in Universal Pragmatics," Theory and
Society 311976):155-67. See also the empirical study by Auwarter
and Kirsch, "Die konversationelle Generierung von Situationsdefinitionen
im Spiel 4- his 6 jahriger Kinder," in W. Schulte, ed.,
Soziologie in der Gesellschaft IBremen, 1981), pp. 584ff.
87. J. M. Ruskin, "An Evaluative Review of Family Interaction
Research," Family Process llj1972):365ff.; J. H. Weakland, "The
Double Bind Theory: A Reflexive Hindsight," Family Process
13j1974):269ff.; S. S. Kety, "From Rationalization to Reason,"
American Journal of Psychiatry 13111974):957ff.; D. Reiss, "The
Family and Schizophrenia,'' American Journal of Psychiatry
13311976): 181ff.
446 REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
88. J. Searle, "Literal Meaning," in Expression and Meaning, pp. 117ff.
See also R. D. Van Valin, "Meaning and Interpretation," journal of
Pragmatics 4p980):213ff.
89. G. E. Moore, "Proof of an External World," Proceedings of the British
Academy (London, 1939).
90. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York, 1969) , 103, p. 16.
91. Ibid., , 102, p. 16.
92. Ibid., 1 144, p. 21.
93. Ibid., , 205, p. 28.
Chapter IV. From Lukacs to Adorno:
Rationalization as Reification
1. Karl Lowith, Max Weber and Karl Marx (London, 1982); W.
Schluchter, Wert(reiheit und Verantwortungsethik, zum Verhiiltnis von
Wissenschaft und Politik bei Max Weber (Tiibingen, 1971); Norman
Birnbaum, "Conflicting Interpretations of the Rise of Capitalism:
Marx and Weber," British journal of Sociology IV(1953):125-40;
Anthony Giddens, "Marx, Weber and the Development of
Capitalism," Sociology 4(1970):289-310.
2. See Chap. III, above.
Section IV.1: Max Weber in the Tradition of Western Marxism
3. On the history of the Frankfurt School during the emigration, see
Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston, 1973); Helmut
Dubiel, Wissenschaftsorganisation und politische Erfahrung (Frankfurt,
1978), English transl. (MIT Press, forthcoming); David Held,
Introduction to Critical Theory (London, 1980).
4. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York, 1974); hereafter
cited as EoR.
5. EoR, preface, p. v.
6. EoR, p. 10.
7. EoR, p. 5.
8. EoR, p. 5.
9. EoR, p. 12.
10. EoR, p. 19.
11. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
(New York, 1972); hereafter cited as DoE.
12. DoE, pp. 117-18.
13. EoR, p. 40.
14. DoE, p. 23.
15. EoR, pp. 23-24.
16. Max Weber bears witness to this heroic self-understanding of
modern science in his lecture on "Science as a Vocation," in
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION 447
Gerth and Mills, eds., From Max Weber, pp. 129-56. Karl Popper
also professes this kind of subjectivism, as he bases scientific criticism
not on a grounded choice between knowledge and faith but
on an irrational decision between "two kinds of faith." K. R.
Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, (London, 1966), 2:246.
See my critique of this view in "Dogmatism, Reason and Decision,"
in Theory and Practice (Boston, 1973), pp. 253-82.
17. EoR, pp. 144-45.
18. EoR, pp. 137-38.
19. EoR, pp. 138-39.
20. Max Weber, Economy and Society, G. Roth and C. Wittich, eds., 2
vols. (Berkeley, 1978), p. 1156; hereafter cited as ES.
21. W. Mommsen, Max Weber, Gesellscha{t, Politik und Geschichte
(Frankfurt, 1974), p. 138; see also his Max Weber und die deutsche
Politik 1890 bis 1920 (Tiibingen, 1959).
22. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, 1950).
23. EoR, pp. 95-96.
24. EoR, p. 98.
25. Under the rubric of "options versus ligatures" R. Dahrendorf again
takes up this idea of a dialectic;: between growing possibilities of
choice and increasingly weaker bonds, in Lebenschancen (Frankfurt,
1979).
26. Compare the picture of the plebiscitarian leader that Wolfgang
Mommsen draws in Max Weber, Gesellscha{t, Politik und Geschichte,
pp. 136-37: "The politician is obligated only to himself and to the
task he has chosen in the light of certain personal value ideals. His
responsibility is limited to 'proving his worth'; that is, he has to
show by his successes that the unconditional surrender of his followers
to him purely as a person has an inner justification. On the
other hand, there are no obligations in regard to the material goals
of the masses; Weber emphatically attacks any hint of the theory
that the democratic leader has to carry out the mandate of those
who elect him. On his view, what is proper to the plebiscitarian
Fiihrerdemokratie is a binding of the masses to the person of the
leading politician and not their substantive conviction of the value
of the aims pursued. It is not the substantive goals as such that
decide the outcome of an election but the personal charismatic
qualification of the candidate for leader. Only in this way can Weber
conceive of the independent domination of the great individual
under modern conditions, without prejudice to any constitutional
safeguards. He describes Fiihrerdemokratie as a continual
competition among politicians for the favor of the masses. It is
carried on primarily with demagogic means; a system of formal
rules of the game ensures that the victorious politician has to prove
himself and that if he fails he must step aside."
448 REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
27. DoE, pp. 29-30.
28. DoE, p. 30.
29. EoR, p. 145.
30. Compare Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic
(Evanston, Ill., 1973), pp. 30ff.
31. DoE, "Introduction."
32. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.,
1971), pp. 83-222; cited hereafter as HCC.
33. HCC, p. 83. I shall not be discussing the aesthetic and culturecritical
writings of the young Lukacs. For the concept of a form
of objectivity, "Die Seele und die Formen" and the "Theorie des
Romans" are particularly important. See A. Heller, P. Feher, G.
Markus, and R. Radnoti, Die Seele und das Leben (Frankfurt, 1977);
A. Arata and P. Breines, The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western
Marxism (New York, 1979), part 2.
34. HCC, p. 153.
35. EoR, pp. 9ff.
36. HCC, p. 92.
37. Karl Marx, Capital (New York, 1906).
38. Capital, p. 83.
39. H. G. Backhaus, "Zur Dialektik der Warenform," in A. Schmidt,
ed., Beitrii.ge zur Marxistischen Erkenntnistheorie (Frankfurt, 1969);
H. J. Krahl, ''Zum Verhaltnis von Kapital und Hegelscher Wesenslogik,"
in 0. Negt, ed., Aktualitii.t und Folgen der Philosophie Hegels
(Frankfurt, 1970); P. Mattik, "Die Marxsche Arbeitswerttheorie,"
in F. Eberle, ed., Aspekte der Marxschen Theorie I (Frankfurt, 1973);
J. Zeleny, Die Wissenschaftslogik und das Kapital (Frankfurt, 1973);
D. Horster, Erkenntnis-Kritik als Gesellschaftstheorie (Hannover,
1978) pp. 187ff.
40. HCC, p. 99. I shall take up the concept of "abstract labor" in my
"Concluding Reflections," vol. 2, Chap. VIII.
41. H. Dahmer develops this idea in connection with his study of the
Marxistically inspired social psychology of the Freudian left: Libido
und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1973).
42. Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (Berlin,
1953), pp. 908-09.
43. Ibid., p. 909.
44. HCC, p. 88.
45. See volume 2, Chap. VII, Section 2.
46. HCC, p. 93.
47. HCC, p. 100.
48. HCC, p. 101.
49. HCC, p. 120.
50. HCC, p. 121.
51. This is the point of departure for the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel; see
esp. Intellectual and Manual Labor (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1978).
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION 449
52. HCC, p. 139.
53. HCC, pp. 136-37.
54. HCC, p. 142.
55. See the controversy between Lukacs and Adorno, Georg Lukacs,
Wider den missverstandenen Realismus (Hamburg, 1958).
56. HCC, p. 148.
57. Merleau Panty's important, but admittedly "very free," Lukacs
interpretation ignores this point: "This 'philosophy of history' does
not so much give us the key to history as restore history to us as
a permanent interrogation; it does not so much give us a certain
truth hidden behind empirical history as present empirical history
as the genealogy of truth. It is quite superficial to say that Marxism
reveals to us the meaning of history; it binds us to our time and
its partialities; it does not describe the future for us; it does not
stop our questioning; on the contrary, it intensifies it. It shows us
the present worked on by a self-criticism, a power of negation and
sublation which has historically been delegated to the proletariat"
(Adventures of the Dialectic, pp. 56-57). Merleau-Ponty here assimilates
the position of the young Lukacs to an existential Marxism
for which what counts is not so much an objective sense of history
as the removal of non-sense. Lukacs himself revoked the thesis
developed in HCC in his preface to the new edition (1967). It is
by no means necessary to accept his self-criticism on all points,
even if there is one point on which we can agree: "But is the
identical subject-object anything more in truth than a purely metaphysical
construct? Can an identical subject-object really be created
by self-knowledge, however adequate, even if this were based on
an adequate knowledge of the social world-that is to say, by selfconsciousness
no matter how perfect? We need only to formulate
the question precisely to see that it must be answered in the
negative. For the content of knowledge does not thereby lose its
alienated character. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel rightly
rejected the mystical irrationalistic realization of an identical
subject-object, Schelling's "intellectual intuition," and demanded
a philosophically rational solution of the problem. His healthy sense
of reality led him to leave this standing as a demand; it is true that
his most general construction of the world culminates in the perspective
of its realization; but within his system he never shows
concretely how this demand could be fulfilled. The proletariat as
the identical subject-object of real human history is thus not a
materialist realization that overcomes the idealist thought-construction;
it is rather an effort to out-Hegel Hegel, a construction boldly
raised in thought above all reality, and thus an attempt objectively
to surpass the master himself" (p. xxiii) . Compare Arato and
Breines, The Young Lukacs, part 2; J. P. Arnasson sees the conception
450 REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
of HCC as less consistent. See my remarks on Merleau-Ponty in
"Literaturbericht zur philosophischen Diskussion urn Marx und
den Marxismus," in Theorie und Praxis (Frankfurt, 1971), pp.
387-463, here pp. 422ff."
58. Lukacs, "Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization,"
in HCC, pp. 295-342. Compare my critique in the "Introduction"
to Theory and Practice (Boston, 1973), pp. 32ff.
59. Albrecht Wellmer, "Communication and Emancipation: Reflections
on the Linguistic Turn in Critical Theory," in J. O'Neill, ed., On
Critical Theory (New York, 1976), pp. 241-42. [There are some
differences between the English and German versions; Habermas
cites the latter, which I have translated in the text. Trans.]
Section IV.2: The Critique of Instrumental Reason
1. For now I shall leave to one side the position developed in the 1930s
by the Frankfurt School and take it up instead in vol. 2, Chap. VIII,
Section 3.
2. By taking the Dialectic of Enlightenment as my point of reference
for discussing the reception of Weber, I shall be able to say little
beyond a few incidental remarks about the unmistakable
differences between the positions of Horkheimer and Adorno. On
the interpretation of Adorno advanced by the editors of his collected
works, H. Schweppenhauser and R. Tiedemann-an interpretation
that considers itself to be orthodox-see F. Grenz, Adornos
Philosophie in Grundbegriffen (Frankfurt, 1974). By contrast, Alfred
Schmidt maintains the continuity of critical theory in its Horkheimerian
version, in Zur Idee der Kritischen Theorie (Munich, 1974)
and Die Kritische Theorie als Geschichtsphilosophie (Munich, 1976).
3. Helmut Dubiel, Wissenscha{tsorganisation und politische Erfahrung,
pp. 15-135.
4. Wellmer, "Communication and Emancipation," p. 237.
5. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, 1964); compare
my remarks in "Technology and Science as 'Ideology,''' in Toward
a Rational Society (Boston, 1970), pp. 81-122, and "The Place of
Philosophy in Marxism, " Insurgent Sociologist 5(1975):41-48.
6. HCC, p. 101.
7. HCC, p. 168.
8. HCC, p. 172.
9. DoE, pp. 120-67.
10. See Horkheimer, "The Revolt of Nature," in EoR, pp. 92-127. I shall
here confine myself to the social-psychological side of a theory for
which the economic works of F. Pollock were also important. On
the differentiated analyses of fascism in the Institute for Social
Research during the years 1939-1942, see the documentary volume
edited and introduced by H. Dubiel and A. Sollner, Horkheimer,
Pollock, Neumann, Kirchheimer, Gurland, Marcuse: Wirtscha{t, Recht
und Staat im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt, 1981).
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION 451
11. EoR, p. 109.
12. See the contributions to the issue of Esprit devoted to the Frankfurt
School, May 1978.
13. EoR, pp. 121-22.
14. On this thesis, compare R. Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in
Germany (New York, 1967).
15. EoR, pp. 122-23.
16. Erich Fromm, Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten
Reiches. Eine soialpsychologische Untersuchung, W. Bonss, ed.
(Stuttgart, 1980).
17. T. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson, and R.N. Sanford,
The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950); compare M. V.
Freyhold, Autoritiirismus und politische Apathie (Frankfurt, 1971).
18. HCC, p. 172.
19. In The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Andrew Arato and Eike
Gebhardt, eds., (New York, 1978), pp. 270-99.
20. Ibid., p. 279.
21. DoE, p. 141.
22. J. Habermas, "Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism,"
New German Critique 17(1979):30-59.
23. DoE, p. 222.
24. See volume 2, Chap. VIII, Section 3.
25. HCC, p. 211, n. 9.
26. In his inaugural lecture at Frankfurt University in 1931 Adorno had
already rejected Lukacs' proposed solution to the problem of the
thing-in-itself because it rested on a genetic fallacy. "Die Aktualitat
der Philosophie," in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt, 1973), 1:337.
27. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt,
1973), 6:21; English transl., Negative Dialectics (New York,
1973).
28. In The Origin of Negative Dialectics Susan Buck-Morss elaborates
the genuine Adorno-line of critical theory and stresses the continuity
of his philosophy from the early 1930s to the mature works,
Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. In his early philosophical
writings Adorno already began with a renunciation of the illusion
"that it is possible to grasp in thought the totality of the real"
(Gesammelte Schriften, 1 :325). From the very start he criticized the
idealism, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of identity thinking,
whether in the form of the Hegelian system or in the neoontological
thought of Heidegger. In his lecture "Die Idee der
Naturgeschichte," we find the strongest version of his Heidegger
critique: "For Heidegger, history, understood as an encompassing
structure of being, is synonymous with the ontology of being. From
this we get such feeble antitheses as that between 'history' and
'historicity' -to which there is nothing more than that some
452 REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SoCIETY
qualities of being observed in connection with Dasein are removed
from entities, transposed into the domain of ontology and made
into ontological determinations, and are thus supposed to contribute
to interpreting what is in reality merely said over again. This
element of tautology does not derive from accidental features of
the form of language being used; it adheres necessarily to the
ontological line of questioning itself, which holds fast to the ontological
endeavor but, owing to its rational point of departure, is
not in a position to interpret itself ontologically as what it isnamely,
something produced by and conceptually related to the
starting point of an idealist ratio" (ibid., pp. 351-52). ·And again:
''The tautological tendency seems to me to be explained through
nothing other than the old idealist motif of identity. It arises from
the fact that a being (Sein) which is historical is brought under a
subjective category of historicity; the historical being comprehended
under the subjective category of historicity is supposed to
be identical with history. It is supposed to accommodate itself to
the determinations stamped upon it by historicity. The tautology
appears to me to be less a self-plumbing of the mythical depths
of language than a new concealment of the old classical thesis of
the identity of subject and object. And if Heidegger has recently
taken a turn toward Hegel, that appears to confirm this reading''
(ibid., pp. 353-54). It is only later that Adorno radicalizes this
critique of identity-thinking into a critique of identifying thought
generally, which denies to philosophy not only the claim to totality
but the hope for a dialectical grasp of the nonidentical. In 1931
Adorno still spoke confidently of the "actuality of philosophy"
because he still believed it capable of a polemical, nonaffirmative
grasp of a reality that preserves in vestiges and remnants the hope
of someday arriving at a right and just reality. Negative Dialectics
gives up this hope.
29. Negative Dialektik, pp. 322-23.
30. G. Rose, The Melancholy Science. An Introduction to the Thought of
Theodor Adorno (London, 1978), pp. 43ff. On the concept of
reification in Adorno, see also F. Grenz, Adornos Philosophie, pp.
35ff.
31. Negative Dialektik, p. 191.
32. Y. H. Krikorian, ed., Naturalism and the Human Spririt (New York,
1944).
33. From the ranks of the neoconservatives, recruited in great numbers
from the schools of J. Ritter and E. Voegelin, R. Spaemann
stands out: Zur kritik der politischen Utopie (Stuttgart, 1977).
34. EoR, pp. 61-62.
35. EoR, p. 80.
36. EoR, p. 77.
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION 453
37. This has been taken seriously as a requirement by the second
generation of critical theorists, as can be seen in the works of Apel,
Schniidelbach, Wellmer, myself, and others.
38. EoR, pp. 81-82. On the concept of the "empirical" in early critical
theory, see Wolfgang Bonss, Kritische Theorie und empirische Sozial{
orschung (diss., University of Bielefeld, 1981), Die Einubung des
Tatsachenblicks (Frankfurt, 1982).
39. Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory
(Philadelphia, 1978).
40. J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, 1971).
41. Negative Dialectics (New York, 1973).
42. On the derivative status of exchange rationality in the work of
Adorno, see J. F. Schmucker, Adorno-Logik des Zer{alls (Stuttgart,
1977), pp. 105ff.
43. Compare Schmucker, Adorno, p. 106: "Whereas for a member of
modern exchange society the dialectic of self-preservation is constituted
through the exchange process, for the structure of the
Odyssean subjectivity it is rather derived from the principle of mastering
nature."
44. EoR, p. 93.
45. DoE, p. 31-32.
46. DoE, pp. 54-55.
47. On the connection between truth and natural history in Adorno,
see F. Grenz, Adornos Philosophie, pp. 57-58.
48. EoR, p. 175.
49. EoR, p. 173-74.
50. EoR, p. 176.
51. EoR, p. 177.
52. Mimesis does not, to be sure, denote "the form of an unmediated
participation in, and repetition of, nature by men," as G. Rohrmoser
thinks. Das Elend der Kritischen Theorie (Freiburg, 1970). p. 25.
Rather, even in the terror of speechless adaptation to the experienced
superior power of a nature that hits back chaotically at the
interventions of instrumental reason, it recalls to mind the model
of an exchange of the subject with nature that is free of violence.
"But the constellation under which likeness is established-the onmediated
likeness of mimesis as well as the mediated likeness of
synthesis, assimilation to the thing in the blind discharge of life
as well as the finding of likenesses in what has been reified in the
process of scientific concept formation -is still the sign of terror''
(DoE, p. 181). The fact that mimetic behavior, "the organic accommodation
to the other," stands under the sign of terror does not
take away from it its role as the placeholder for a primordial reason
whose position has been usurped by instrumental reason.
Schmucker fails to see this (Adorno, p. 29, n.63), as does G. Kaiser in
454 REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
Benjamin, Adorno (Frankfurt, 1974). p. 99.
53. On the significance of this motif in Bloch, Benjamin, and Scholem,
see my Philosophical-Political Profiles (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).
54. EaR, p. 177.
55. EoR, p. 179.
56. DoE, p. 77. On Adorno's philosophy of language, see F. Grenz,
Adornos Philosophie, pp. 211ff.
57. DoE, p. 40.
58. On Marcuse's attempt to extricate himself with a theory of the
instincts from the aporias-especially the quietistic consequences-
of the critique of instrumental reason that he shared, see
my "Psychic Thermidor and the Rebirth of Rebellious Subjectivity,"
Berkeley journal of Sociology XXV(1980):1-12.
59. T. Baumeister andJ. Kulenkampf, "Geschichtsphilosophie und philosophische
Asthetik," in Neue Hefte fur Philosophie 5(1973):74ff.
60. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 1:336.
61. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London,
1977).
62. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 1:357.
63. Ibid., p. 341.
64. Schmucker, Adorno, pp. 141ff.
65. F. Grenz, Adornos Philosophie, p. 117.
66. Axel Honneth, "Adorno and Habermas,'' Telos 39(1979):45ff.
67. Theodor Adorno, "Der Essay als Form," in Gesammelte Schriften,
(Frankfurt, 1974, 11:27).
68. Compare R. Bubner, "Kann theorie asthetisch werden?," Neue
Rundschau (1978):537ff.
69. H. Morchen has devoted a detailed and wide-ranging study to the
reception of Heidegger by Adorno, Macht und Herrschaft im Denken
von Heidegger und Adorno (Stuttgart, 1980).
70. "Even though we had noticed for some time that in the modern
scientific enterprise great discoveries are paid for with the growing
decay of theoretical culture, we still thought that we might join
in to the extent that we would restrict ourselves largely to criticizing
or developing specialized knowledge. Thematically, at any rate, we
were to keep to the traditional disciplines of sociology, psychology
and the theory of knowledge. The fragments collected in this
volume show, however, that we had to abandon that confidence"
(DoE, p. xi). Helmut Dubiel provides an excellent analysis of the
change in their views on the relation between philosophy and
science and on the status of social theory ( Wissenschaftsorganisation,
pp. 51ff., 81ff., 113ff., 125ff). He traces through the thirties
the "re-philosophizing" of the whole theoretical orientation of the
Institute in its emigration to the United States. "Finally, in the
Dialectic of Enlightenment all specialized scientific work is identified
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION 455
with its technical application to production or to society and
discredited as 'positivistic,' 'instrumentalist' and the like. In
opposition to the 'instrumentalist' spirit of the age, which finds its
exemplary palpable expression in the specialized sciences,
philosophy is supposed to become encysted as a mental preserve
for a shattered intellectual culture. The actual research practice of
the Institute is symptomatic of the relation between philosophy
and specialized science. It is true that further empirical work was
done in the wideranging studies on Fascism and in the "Studies
in Prejudice"; but the empirical work of Adorno, for example,
stands alongside his temporally parallel philosophical reflections
in a bewildering absence of any mediation between the two" (ibid.,
pp. 125-26). Of course, Adorno had always been secretly skeptical
of Horkheimer's program for a materialist theory of society which,
supported by interdisciplinary research, would take up the heritage
of philosophy. In his inaugural lecture of 1931 he expressed this
skepticism in the form of a parable in which sociology is assigned
the role of a thief who steals treasures without realizing their value
("Die Aktualitat der Philosophie," p. 340). Adorno's later critique
of positivism, which amounts to a total devaluation of social
science, is already prefigured here .
. 71. Dieter Henrich, "Die Grundstruktur der modernen Philosophie,"
in H. Ebeling, ed., Subjektivitiit und Selbsterhaltung (Frankfurt, 1976),
p. 117.
72. Hans Blumenberg, "Selbsterhaltung und Beharrung," in Ebeling,
ed., Subjektivtiit und Selbsterhaltung, pp. 144-207.
73. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (1961).
74. Max Horkheimer, "Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung," in Ebeling, ed.,
Subjektivitiit und Selbsterhaltung, pp. 47-48.
75. EoR, p. 176.
76. DoE, p. 217.
77. Negative Dialektik, p. 192.
78. EoR, p. 135.
79. Negative Dialektik, p. 294.
80. Compare D. Henrich, "Die Grundstruktur der modernen
Philosophie.''
81. Ibid., p. 138.
82. Ibid., p. 114.
83. Dieter Henrich, Fichtes ursprii.ngliche Einsicht (Frankfurt, 1967);
idem, "Selbstbewusstsein," in Bubner, Cramer, and Wiehl, eds.,
Hermeneu~(k und Dialektik (Tiibingen, 1970), 1:257ff.; compare U.
Pothast, Uber einige Fragen der Selbstbeziehung (Frankfurt, 1971).
84. E. Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung (Frankfurt,
1979), p. 62; English trans. (MIT Press, forthcoming).
85. Henrich, "Selbstbewusstsein," p. 280.
456 REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
86. Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung, pp. 64ff.
87. Henrich, "Selbstbewusstsein," p. 283.
88. Compare Pothast, Vber einige Fragen der Selbstbeziehung, p. 76.
89. Niklas Luhmann, "Selbstthematisierungen des Gesellschaftssystems,"
in Soziologische Au{kliirung, (K6ln, 1976), 2:72ff.; English
transl., The Differentiation of Society (New York, 1982).
90. Henrich, "Die Grundstruktur der modernen Philosophie," p. 113.
91. Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung, pp. 63ff.
92. K. Buhler, Sprachtheorie (Jena, 1934). See Chap. III above.
93. H. Neuendorf￡, Der Begriff des Interesses (Frankfurt, 1973).
Index
Index
Abel, Theodor, 109
Action, analytic theory of, 273-275
defined, 96
four action concepts, 75-96
communicative, 94-96
dramaturgical, 90-94
normatively regulated,
88-90
teleological. 86-88
types of, 101, 280, 285-286, 294,
332-334
Weber's theory of, 279-286
See also Communicative action
Adler, Max, 150
Adorno, Theodor W., 144, 343,
351' 353' 366
collapse of Marxism, 366-367
critique of Kant, 391
culture industry in, 370-372
and Heidegger, 385
mimesis in, 382-390
negative dialectics, 370-372,
384-387
recondliation in, xx-xxi, 374,
381-384, 386, 389-390
self-preservation in, 387-394
See also Dialectic of Enlightenment
Agreement, and validity, 287
analysis of conditions of, 307
See also Argumentation; Communicative
action
Apel. Karl Otto, 277
Argumentation, defined, 10, 18
and rationality, 249
theory of, 18-42
Aristotle, 26, 85
Austin, John, 95, 277, 288-291,
294, 319-320
Basaglia, F., 369
Bellah, Robert, 195
Bendix, R., 163, 188
Bernstein, Richard, 111
Black, Max, 12
Blumenberg, Hans, 393, 397-398
Buhler, Karl, 275-278, 307, 397.
Calvinism, 173, 223-224
See also Protestant ethic
Carnap, Rudolph, 271
Circourel, A., 127
Communicative action, analysis
of, ix, 94-101, 305-310
and illocutionary force, 294-295,
305, 327
orientation toward reaching understanding,
99-101, 286-288
as reproducing and coordinating
action, xxv-xxix, 101, 305,
397-398
shift toward in Critical Theory,
392
and validity claims, 278, 298,
306-308
See also Action; Language; Lifeworld
Condorcet, Marquis de, 145-151
460 REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
Crisis theory, xxv, 4, 361
Critique, and validity, 192
of instrumental reason, 366-377,
387-399
paradigm shifts in, 392
Darwin, Charles, vii, 151, 152, 388
Davidson, Donald, 276
Developmental psychology, and
rational reconstruction, 3,
68-69
decentration in, 69-70, 392
moral development, 254-262
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno,
Horkheimer). xvi, 144, 346-
347, 349, 378-383, 386-389
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 107, 153, 355
Discourse, conditions of participation
in, 117-118
defined, 42
and procedural rationality, 249
types of, 19, 20-22, 42
Disenchantment, 195-215
Dobert, Rainer, 196
Dubiel, Helmut, 366
Dummett, Michael, 276, 316-318
Durkheim, Emile, xxi-xxiv, 86, 399
Elkana, Y., 376
Engels, Friedrich, 150
ethnomethodology, 120, 124-131,
376
Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 44, 55-57
Fascism, 367-370
Feyerabend, Paul, 109, 376
First Philosophy, xv-xvi, 2
Formal pragmatics, analysis of
agreement in, 276-277
concept of language in, 95
distorted communication, 331
and empirical pragmatics, 139,
321, 328-339
and speech act theory, 277
and theory of meaning, 276,
297-305
universalistic claims of, 137-140
See also Language; Meaning; Semantics;
Speech act theory;
Validity claims
Foucault, Michel, 369
Frege, G., 276, 277, 396
Gadamer, H. G., 53, 95, 107,
133-136
Garfinkel, Harold, 124-130
Gehlen, Arnold, 341
Gellner, Ernst, 63-65
Giddens, Anthony, 109
Goffman, Irving, 90-91, 93-94
Godelier, Maurice, 45
Good life, 73-74
Grice, H. P., 151, 274-276
Groethuysen, Bernard, 230
Hartmann, Nicolai, 77
Heidegger, Martin, 107, 385, 386,
393
Hegel, G. W. F., 150, 357, 361-363,
366, 368, 372-373, 377,
386-387
Henrich, Dieter, 392-395
Hermeneutics, 120, 130-136, 376
Hesse, Mary, 109, 376
Honneth, Axel, 385
Horkheimer, Max, critique of instrumental
reason, 345-354,
366-377, 387-392
critique of objective reason,
374-377
domination in, 379-380, 388-390
and Marxism, 367
and paradigms of Critical
Theory, 386-399
reification in, 369-380
self-preservation in, 387-394
and Weber, xviii-xix, 343-345,
347-350, 366, 378
See also Dialectic of Enlightenment
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION 461
Horton, Robin, 61-65
Husserl, Edmund, 107
Identity, collective, xxi
securing of, 64, 230, 271-273
Illocutionary force
See Speech act theory
Interpretative understanding, and
communicative action, 106-
108, 115-118
performative attitude of, 112-118
in social science, 102-108
theory of, 102-141
and validity, 116-118
Intersubjectivity, and agreement,
287, 307
formal presuppositions of, 50
and language, 278
and reconciliation, 390-394
of validity, 12-14, 298, 303, 316
Jarvie, I. C., 76, 79, 80-82
Jakobson, Roman, 277
Kant, Immanuel, 145-146, 150,
230, 345, 356, 361-362, 387,
391
Kautsky, K., 150
Kenny, Anthony, 277
Klein, Wolfgang, 26-31
Korsch, Karl, 150
Kreckel, M., 321
Laing, R. D., 369
Lakatos, Imre, 376
Language, conceptions of action
and, 95-101
and communicative action,
99-101
function in cultural reproduction,
101, 305
as mechanism for coordinating
action, 94, 101, 305, 397-398
as paradigm for Critical Theory,
viii-x, 386-397
substituted for by media, 342
Leibniz, G. W., 387
Leist, Anton, 310
Leninism, 367
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 45-46
Levy-Bruhl, L., 44
Lifeworld, as background knowledge,
335-337
as correlate of communicative
action, xxiii-xxvii, 13, 70-71,
100, 108
opposed to ontology, 82-84
opposed to system, xxiii
rationalization of, xxv, xxvii, 13,
43, 71-72, 340-343
in social science, 108
Luhmann, Nicolas, 395-396
Lukacs, Georg, 150, 343
critique of, 363-365
and Hegel, 356-357
History and Class Consciousness,
354-365
and Marx, 357
reification in, 356-368
unification of Marx and Weber,
359
Lukes, Steven, 53-55
Luxemburg, Rosa, 367
Macintyre, Alasdair, 54, 67
Marcuse, Herbert, 144, 367, 384
Marx, Karl, forces of production
in, 367-368
and Lukacs, 357-361
naturalism of, 387
philosophy of history in, 150,
158, 362-363
rationalization in, 144, 343, 367
and Weber, xxvii-xxxiv, 186, 193,
221
Mead, George Herbert, xxiv-xxv,
86, 95, 140, 390, 399
Meaning, illocutionary, 300-303
theory of, 274-277, 307
and validity, 307
462 REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
See also Language; Semantics;
Speech act theory
Media, money, xxvii-xxx, 342,
358-359
and paradoxes of modernity,
xxxi, power, xxx-xxxv, 342
substituting for language, 342,
398
system forming, 359
Modernity, vi, xxxi-xliii, 44, 74,
130, 211-216, 236
Moore, G. E., 310, 336
Morris, Charles, 276
Mommsen, Wolfgang, 352
Morgenstern, Oskar, 186
Needs, and interests, 91-92
rational interpretation of, 20, 89
in Weber, 188
Needham, Joseph, 209
Neo-Hegelianism, 77
Neo-Kantianism, 83, 108, 154,
186-188, 191, 339, 355
Nietzsche, Friedrich, v, viii, 155,
246, 247
Norman, Richard, 16
Norms, and cognitivist ethics, 230
and consensus, 19, 189-191
post-conventional moral and
legal structures, xxix, 166,
254-256, 260-262
Parsons, Talcott, xxii-xxiii, 188,
341, 343
Peirce, C. S., 276, 387
Piaget, Jean, 3, 14, 45, 67-69, 72,
140
Pollner, Melvin, 13
Popper, Karl, 76-79
Positivism, 109, 375
Progress, v-vi, 145-155
Protestant ethic, 216-233
dissolution of, 228-229
in Horkheimer, 351
methodical conduct of life, 172-
175, 184, 224-225
and purposive . rationality,
217-219, 222-224
and rationalization, 218
as selective, 232
See also Weber, Max
Psychoanalysis, and distorted
communication, 332, 391
and therapeutic critique, 21, 41
Rational reconstruction, counterfactual
element of, 220
internal relation of meaning and
validity in, 197, 220
logic and dynamics in, xv-xvi,
67, 195, 237-239
performative aspect of, 192, 220
of worldviews, 197
Rationality, and argumentation, xi,
16, 34, 249
of action, 10-11, 17, 19, 103-105,
132, 331
communicative, 11, 75, 140,
397-399
context independent standard
of, xi, 62
formal-procedural conception
of, 92-93, 249, 363
and knowledge, defined, 8-11
of lifeworld, 13, 17, 144
phenomenological and realist
conceptions of, 11-15
and relativism, xv-xxii, 53-54,
62, 137, 249
in social sciences, 3-6, 136-141
universalistic claims of, xii, 2,
62, 137-138, 249
and validity, 9, 66
Rationalization, and communicative
action, xlii, 138-141, 335-
343, 397-399
cultural, 237-242
of law, 243, 258-262
of lifeworlds, xlii-xliii, 340-343,
398-399
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION 463
paradoxes of, xxxi, 342, 362
possibilities of, defined, 237-239
and reification, 354-365, 368-377
as selective under capitalism,
xlii-xliii, 180-183, 221-223,
233, 363-364
of society, 158, 166, 335
and theory of action, 145,
335-339
as universal historical process,
143-145, 158, 175, 335
of worldviews, 66, 70, 175-180
Reason, history of, 34, 135, 143,
249
impartiality of, 34
and philosophy, vii-ix, 1-2
procedural unity of, 249
See also Rationality
Reification, in Adorno and Horkheimer,
355, 369-377
in Lukacs and Marx, 355-357
in myth, 51
paradoxes of, 399
and rationalization, 354-365,
368-377
and science, 376-377
and steering media, 358-359
as universal, 368-370
and utopianism, 73
Relativism, and rationality, 135,
180-184
in Weber, 154
Rickert, H., 186
Schelling, Friedrich). W. von, 387
Schluchter, Wolfgang, 176,
225-226, 258, 285
Schutz, Alfred, 13, 79, 82, 121-124,
337
Searle, John, 277, 320-321, 323,
335-337
Self-presentations, and aesthetic
criticism, 20, 40
and dramaturgical action, 91
as raising a validity claim, 15
as relation to world, 237
Semantics, analysis of sentence
forms in, 39, 276
dependent on action context, 115
intentionalist, 95, 274-275
and pragmatics, 316-319
as replacing philosophy of consciousness,
316-319
truth-conditional, 276,316
See also Language; Meaning;
Speech act theory
Skjervheim, H., 111-115
Social evolution, differentiation of
attitudes toward world in, 49
as learning process, xv, 68
nineteenth-century theories of,
152-155
Social integration, principles of,
342
Society, subsystems of, vi, 4-6
as symbolically prestructured,
107
Speech act theory, classification in,
319-328
and communicative action,
305-307
illocutionary force, 278, 288-295
as binding, 278
illocutionary, perlocutionary
and locutionary acts,
288-295
meaning in, 307
self-sufficiency of speech acts,
289
theory of action in, 288-289
See also Communicative action;
Language; Meaning; Semantics;
Validity claims
Spencer, Herbert, 151-152
Spinoza, B. de, 387
Stalinism, 367
Stenius, E., 277
Strawson, P. F., 292
Tenbruch, F. H., 195
464 REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY
Toulmin, Steven, 24-27, 31, 35, 36,
376
Thgendhat, Ernst, 313-314, 317, 396
Validity claims, and argumentation,
10, 39
formal world concept and, 50,
236-237, 309
intersubjectivity of, 12-14, 298
illocutionary role as determining,
308
and language, x-xi, 278
and meaning, 301-302
obligations in, 303
systems of, 38
types of, 17, 302-309
and types of utterances, 15, 37
and value spheres, 180
warranty, defined, 302
in Weber, 180, 189-191
See also, Formal pragmatics;
Speech act theory
Von Neumann, F., 186
Weber, Max, charisma, 352
counterfactual reflection in, 155,
220-222
custom, 189- 284
diagnosis of times, 243-254
loss of meaning, 244-24 7, 348-
350
loss of freedom, 244, 247-248,
350-354
critique of, 248-254
disenchantment in, xvii-xviii,
167, 205, 212-213
Economy and Society, 158, 228,
280, 284
identity, securing of in religion,
271-273
interest, 189-284
legitimation, 189-191, 235,
255-256, 264-267
methodical conduct of life in,
164-173
occidental rationalism, 155,
157-168, 179, 284
orders of life, 234-250
positivism of, 231, 254, 262-
264
post-conventional moral structures,
162, 166, 199, 271
rationality, 168-185
formal and substantive, 176
purposive and value, 168-
172
types of, 168-174, 181-185
rationalization, 143-216, 240-284
critique of Weber's theory of,
214, 267-270
cultural, 159-164, 176-178,
187-188, 240-241, 284
of law, 254-256, 258-267
of religion, 195-215
of society, 158-160, 166, 284
of worldviews, 175-176, 197,
211-214, 216
reconstructive method in, 155,
190-1911 220-222
relativism in, 180-181, 235
theory of action, 45, 72, 83,
102-103, 279-292
critique of, 221-223, 339-343
and validity claims, 179, 189-
190, 284
value spheres in, 160-164,
176-184
Zwischenbetrachtung zur Religionssoziologie,
183, 227,
229, 233-235, 240-242
See also Protestant ethic; Disenchantment;
Rationality;
Rationalization
Weiss, J., 176
Wellmer, Albrecht, 72-73, 375
Western Marxism, xxxii, 343
Winch, Peter, 45, 53-67, 111
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 95-97, 115,
276, 279, 313-314, 315,
336-337, 393
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION 465
World, differentiation of basic attitudes
toward, 49, 236-237
formal pragmatic concept of,
. 50-52
and language, 49
three world-concepts, 69-70, 278
Worldviews, as action orienting,
44
comparison of, as cognitively
adequate, 58
decentration and development
of, 71, 211-216, 236, 392-397
formal properties of, 138, 188,
236
modern,44, 73-74,138,188,216,
236
mythical, 44-56
rationalization of, 175-180
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12/31 21:06, 4F