A tension I confess to struggling with in my own thinking harks back to Habermas’ distinction between communicative action (characteristic of the lifeworld and oriented to understanding and consensus) and strategic action (characteristic of the system and oriented to outcome). If sociology is part and parcel of Habermas’ reconstructed Enlightenment ‘project of modernity’, I have asked myself, does this preclude sociologists engaging – strategically – in the rough and tumble of politics? I have advocated sociology’s extension to embrace what I call ‘action sociology’, that is, commending a responsibility on the part of the discipline as a whole (although not of course drawing in all of its practitioners) to fight back, blocked or rubbished.
It transpires that it was also a tension that troubled Habermas when in conflict with others. I have been reading Stefan Muller-Doohm’s biography of Habermas, and on p.262 he discerns a prima facie contradiction between the latter’s argument in favour of communicative action, plus his discourse ethics, and the nature and character of his engagement with his critics in the public sphere. Referring to a debate with Germany’s ‘liberal conservatives’, he writes:
‘In hindsight it is clear that, in substance, the long dispute with the liberal conservatives was about the concept, the interpretation and the role of the Enlightenment within modernity. Both the political climate and the long pre-history – which actually went right back to the positivist dispute, during which cretain enduring battle lines were drawn – meant that it was more than just an academic quarrel. The fact that the dispute was carried out mostly in public, and thus quickly acquired a dynamic that resembled a classic cultural struggle, was also a contributing factor. The debate moved quickly into the maelstrom of fundamental moral questions. The threshold for irritability plunged rapidly on both sides, allies were gathered, and personal invective flew. In the heat of such battles, which can easily escalate from factual disputes into quarrels between opponents and fights between irreconcilable enemies, it is rare for someone to end up affirming his opponent’s perspective. Perhaps this is simply asking too much, given how much is at stake from the points of view of the different sides. In any case, there is a great danger of falling short of the ideal of discourse ethics, and, of course, the person who had put that ideal at the centre of his theory was far from immune to that danger. On the contrary, in the role of the public intellectual, Habermas frequently and consciously made use of the arsenal of weapons used in ideological warfare. He worked with dramatisation, generalisation and other rhetorical means of intensification, knowing full well that the politics of ideas he thus practised would have a polarising effect, would simplify the arguments, and would thus contradict his ideal of enlightenment. Here, it seems, the end did justify the means. And to a certain extent it does, for ideological controversies are not primarily about the formation of convictions; those directly involved have long since established their convictions. Rather, they are about gaining an audience for one’s convictions and winning public opinion over to one’s side. ‘The statements of political contemporaries about topical issues’, Habermas writes in the preface to ‘The New Obscurity’, ‘follow rules which are less restrictive than those of academic business.’ Thus, it lies partly in the nature of things – ie the practice of intellectual debates as such, or rather their intrinsic dynamic – that on both sides the ‘orientation towards understanding’ recedes into the background, and, all the more so, the more ferociously the two competing factions fight with and against each other.’
So, can action sociology – rationally, morally, and this sense legitimately – take legitimate advantage of communicative action ‘taking a back seat’? More food for thought.