The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 1: Reason and the rationalization of society

508 Pages·1987·31.16 MB·English

by  Jürgen Habermas

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 ©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 ©1984 ·con Press
Beacon Press books are published u 'he ausr:
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Printed in the United States of America
(hardcover) 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
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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 action
Collected works. 4. Communication-Philosophy
Collected 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.)
Contents
Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society
Translator's Introduction v
Author's Preface 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 con
sciousness of modernity of the nineteenth century voiced funda
mental 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 power
fully 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 Enlighten
ment. The retreat of "dogmatism" and "superstition" has been
accompanied by fragmentation, discontinuity and loss of mean
ing. Critical distance from tradition has gone hand in hand with
anomie and alienation, unstable identities and existential inse
curities. 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 perva
sive. 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 rational
ism. 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 Anglo
American reception of a major work in twentieth-century social
theory can get underway sooner, at a time when the questions
it treats are moving rapidly to the center of intellectual interest.
As the English-language discussion of these issues has not yet
congealed into hard and fast patterns, the appearance of this
volume at this time may well play a significant role in structuring
it. On the negative side, there is the fact that Habermas sustains
a continuous line of thought across the near1 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 devel
oped 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 con
siders 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 some-
THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION vn
what unusual combination of theoretical constructions with his
torical 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 dis
sected 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 Zwischen
betrachtungen, 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 communica
tive 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 pre
ordained 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 intrin
sically historical and social character of the structures of con
sciousness. 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 representa
tion 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 un
conscious at the heart of consciousness, the role of the precon
ceptual and nonconceptual within the conceptual realm. Histori
cism 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 con
sequence, a "disempowering of philosophy."
But the history of ideas is full of surprises; and twentieth
century 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," "post
Wittgensteinian," "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 antimodern
ist 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 con
sciousness is an explicit shift to the paradigm of language-not
to language as a syntactic or semantic system, but to language
in-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 commu
nication 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-instru
mental" 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 communica
tion which serves mutual understanding, whereas actors, in
coming to an understanding with one another so as to coor
dinate 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 par
ticipants-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 accomplish
ments on which cooperative processes [of situation .defi
nition) are based represent the mechanism for coordinating
action; communicative action is not exhausted by the act of
reaching understanding ... (1: 101)