A Brief Intro to Habermas’ Critical Theory

1  An Introduction to Habermas

Jurgen Habermas is less discussed than he was even a decade ago, but having written of the relevance of his work for health and health care I am still occasionally asked to give talks on applications of his theories to the health domain. Hence this first in a short series of blogs. All I am aiming at here is a positioning and annotated exposition of his contributions. Unless I change my mind – surely a blogger’s right – I will follow-up with a précis on each of the public sphere, legitimation crises and communicative action (I am likely to remain reluctant to track him into considerations of constitutional law and speculations about Europe’s future). These are not blogs for experts.

Habermas walked in the footsteps of the progenitors of critical theory, Horkheimer and Adorno (he was the latter’s assistant during the postwar resettlement in Frankfurt). Yet he was destined to react to and counter the deep pessimism of their ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’, published in 1947. What these authors anticipated for the post-Holocaust era was decline and decay. This prophecy was rooted in Weber’s earlier analysis of rationality and rationalization. Habermas quickly came to reject their equation of rationality with Weber’s Zweckrationalit, or ‘instrumental rationality’: that form of rationality that governs the choice of means to ends. He made it clear that a Weberian focus on a disenchanted western world ineluctably constrained by an ‘iron cage’ of instrumental rationality was seriously flawed. Instrumental rationality, he argued, takes for granted our ‘background assumptions’ about the world. Moreover it is insufficient on its own to grasp the nature of either ‘cultural evolution’, which is not governed by instrumental reason alone, or even economic and administrative systems, which are too complex to be seen simply as its products.

The first of Habermas’ books to make an impact was ‘The StructuralTransformation of the Public Sphere’, published in 1962 (and arising out of an Habilitation thesis rejected by Adorno but supported subsequently by Abendroth at Marburg). What this contribution did was put what has been called an ‘emancipatory twist’ on ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’. Habermas traced the notion of public opinion back to its genesis in the bourgeois public sphere emergent in eighteenth-century Europe.  It was at this time, he contended, that the literate bourgeois public began to assume a political role vis-à-vis the state. The clubs, coffee houses and salons that sprang up from the early 1700s, underpinned by an expanding and increasingly free press, provided a critical forum for the gentlemen of the day to turn over the pressing issues of the day, and to do so with a degree equality of engagement. It was, he added, very much in accord with the material interests of the bourgeoisie to monitor and influence state policy at this time. But it is an analysis that, however limited (rather like its bourgeois. Male protagonists), heralded his later preoccupation with the informed, rational discussion of public policy.

Habermas admitted that this European prototype of the public use of reason was compromised from the outset by limitations of class and gender. Furthermore, he went on to chart the rapid commercialization and ‘re-feudalization’ of the public sphere. He linked this to the growth of businesses with long corporate arms on the one hand, and to the expansion of the role of the state (‘welfare statism’) on the other. Modern media no longer mediate the reasoning process of private persons coming together in public spaces: they now dictate this process. In similar vein, he argued that public opinion has been reduced to a social-psychological variable to be manipulated by political party gurus and activists. This does not seem so different from ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’.

In ‘Theory and Practice’, a series of essays published in 1962, Habermas distinguished between ‘work’ and ‘interaction’. This was key to his appropriation of Marxism. Marx, he maintained, neglected interaction, in effect reducing communicative action to instrumental action. This encourages the interpretation of Marxism as mechanistic and undermines it as explanatory theory and as a theory of human liberation. Liberation from hunger and misery is not the same thing as liberation from servitude and degradation, ‘for there is no automatic developmental relation between labour and interaction’.

This theme is pursued in ‘Towards a Rational Society’, which saw the light of day in Germany in 1968. Here he stressed that student activists might play their part in resisting a progressive rationalization of society linked to the institutionalization of scientific and technological development. He vividly portrayed the ‘scientization of politics’ as a form of depoliticization. ‘Knowledge and Human Interests’, also published in 1968, pulled assorted threads together. There are, he argued, three basic and universal ‘knowledge-constitutive interests’. These are related to work, interaction, and a newcomer, ‘domination’; and they give rise, respectively, to:

• the natural or empirical-analytical sciences, which are governed by ‘a technical interest in the prediction and control of objectified processes’;
• the historical-hermeneutic sciences, which are governed by a practical interest in intersubjective understanding; and
• the critical-dialectical sciences (like psychoanalysis and ideology-critique), which are directed to the emancipation from the domination of ‘ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed’.

This was an influential formulation that he continued to ponder and work on.

‘Legitimation Crisis’, an analysis of ‘late capitalism’ that I consider a neglected book acutely relevant to a sociology of the present, came out in 1974. Still defining himself as a Marxist, Habermas nevertheless argued against the prepotency of economic crisis, instead discerning a multiplicity of possible crises. The state in late capitalism, he maintained, acts self-consciously to avoid dysfunctions: it engages in ‘reactive crisis avoidance’. In particular it acts to iron out the peaks and troughs of the business cycle and to engineer a ‘partial class compromise’ between wage labour and capital. But the state pays a price: by assuming greater responsibility for the ‘management of the economy it risks a crisis of legitimation.  While accepting the Marxist line that it is capitalism’s contradictions and class structure that stand in the way of authentic legitimation, Habermas insisted that crises now had new and many roots.

Preliminary mention should also be made here of the opening section of ‘Communication and the Evolution of Society’, published in 1976. It amounted to a revision of Marx. Habermas argued that the development of human society can be represented/reconstructed as a learning process. Marx, whose historical materialism remains the best account of this learning process, nevertheless focused too much on work and insufficiently on interaction. Or, to anticipate his two-volume opus, Marx’s preoccupation with strategic action meant he underestimated the salience of communicative action.

This ‘taster’ item can only touch on the several hundred pages of synthesis in ‘Theory of Communicative Action’, first published in 1981. In point form, it:

• made a case for ‘reconstructing’ the Enlightenment project that originated in late eighteenth-century Europe;
• argued that Weber, and Horkheimer and Adorno in his wake, had mistakenly regarded western ‘iron cage’ rationalization, which has indeed occurred (and with a vengeance), as inevitable and irreversible;
• contended that in our complex and highly differentiated modern societies, the lifeworld (the mundane everyday world of ‘social integration’ divided into private and public spheres) and the system (the world of ‘system integration’ comprising the economy and the state) have become detached or ‘uncoupled’;
• argued that we have witnessed a de facto ‘colonization’ of the lifeworld by the system, meaning that much of what used to be decided via communicative action oriented to consensus in the lifeworld is now decided – as it were, behind our backs – via strategic action oriented to outcome in the system;
• expressed differently, the steering media of the economy (money) and the state (power) have come to dominate those of the private sphere (commitment) and the public sphere (influence);
• stoutly defended the notion that the lifeworld might yet fight back or de-colonize through collective activism arising and exploding in its public sphere.

Hopefully enough has been intimated here: (1) to hint at the continuity in Habermas’ work, and (2) to commend it as relevant to a sociology of financial capitalism. Much has been omitted. The follow-up blogs I have in mind will pick up on his interpretations of the public sphere, legitimation crisis, strategic versus communicative action and, maybe, discourse ethics.

2. Habermas and the Public Sphere

Habermas’ early study of the rise of the bourgeois public sphere, initially in England in the eighteenth century and subsequently elsewhere in Europe, is well known (see blog ‘Introduction to Habermas’). The public sphere for him represented the public use of reason (as articulated by private individuals engaged in argument that was in principle open and unconstrained). It was a domain in which activities of the state might be confronted and subject to critique. The emergence of the public sphere was facilitated, first, by the rise of the periodical press and, second, by the establishment of new centres of sociability like salons and coffee houses. Habermas argued that this led to a greater accessibility and scrutiny of Parliament and a constitutional extension of rights of freedom of speech and expression. Over time, however, the public sphere experienced a decline (Habermas refers to its ‘re-feudalization’). In a review article in 1993 John Thompson summarized:

‘what was once an exemplary forum of rational-critical debate became just another domain of cultural consumption, and the bourgeois public sphere collapsed into a sham world of image creation and opinion management in which the diffusion of media products is in the service of vested interests’.

Thompson went on to object, however, that in ‘The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’ Habermas:

• neglected non-bourgeois or popular forms of public discourse and activity, some of them militantly opposed to bourgeois culture and practice;
• overlooked prior historical examples, notably at the time of the English Civil War;
• made too little of the absence of women (as feminists have pointed out, the absence of women was constitutive of the public sphere: it was juxtaposed to the private sphere in a gender-specific way);
• exaggerated both the precipitous nature of the decline of the public sphere and the passivity of later recipients of media products.

These criticisms are certainly telling of Habermas’ original analysis, long since modified in some crucial respects. Yet some current commentators share his general pessimism. The literature of the late 1990s is replete with references to the near-disappearance even of what Oldenberg in ‘The Great Good Place’ called third places – that is, casual everyday meeting places like parades of shops and lauderettes – let alone civil society and the public sphere. Mayhew suggested that a new cadre of professional specialists, using market and promotional campaigns, have come to dominate public communication. He wrote of a ‘new public’, subject to mass persuasion through relentless advertising, lobbying and other forms of media manipulation.

While earlier concepts of civil society in particular, and the public sphere more rarely, were pitted against the power of the state, in his early and explicitly Marxist writings Habermas set them in opposition also to the economy. But by this time the public sphere of the lifeworld, to use his terms, had been substantially colonized by the subsystems of economy and state via their respective steering media of money and power. There is perhaps no gainsaying this conclusion. But there remains more to be said. There is space here for the raising of three sets of issues.

The first draws on an argument I made with the late David Kelleher. Habermas located civil society at the interface of the private and public spheres of the lifeworld. In ‘Between Facts and Norms’ he wrote that civil society consists of those ‘more or less spontaneously emergent associations, organizations and movements that, attuned to how societal problems resonate in the private life spheres, distil and transmit such reactions in amplified form to the public sphere’. We went on to suggest that two sectors of civil society be distinguished. What we called the enabling sector of civil society is located in, or derives its impetus from, the private sphere of the lifeworld. It is within the enabling sector that – as part and parcel of the ordinary day-to-day intercourse of the lifeworld (and typically in Oldenberg’s third places) – issues of potential concern arise and are often identified. The protest sector of civil society is located in, or is directed towards, the public sphere. It is within the protest sector that people come together, or are mobilized, in networks, campaign groups, social movements and other forms of association in pursuit of influence for purposeful change (third places are often salient here too). I still find this conceptualization serviceable.

The second set of issues concerns social movements. Habermas reluctantly concluded that even before the present era of what I call financial capitalism ‘old’ class-based movements had yielded territory to ‘new’ social movements. Producer society had been displaced by consumer society, and collective action had come to focus on issues of identity and belonging rather than material distribution. Along with others, like Susan Edwards, I think Habermas, less inclined to Marxism than in his earlier writings, has overstated the decline of class politics. In fact, in their excellent ‘Farewell to the Leftist Working Class’, Houtman et al show that class politics and voting remains alive and well but have been compromised by an increase in cross-cutting cultural voting. Anyway, class is far from dead even if class-consciousness is for the time being an unlikely precipitant of collective action.

In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008-9 and the Arab uprisings, there occurred a series of transnational-to-local occupations, protests, campaigns and marches under the large and twitchy umbrella of a broadly anti-capitalist movement of movements. In the UK foci of discontent included the ending of the EMA, the tripling of student fees, the Health and Social Care Bill, benefit cuts, and corporate tax evasion and avoidance. One student activist told me that for all the anarchistic and other honed theoretical tendencies sheltering under the umbrella, most activists acknowledged that Marx was the ‘granddaddy’ of pertinent theory without espousing Marxism. In short, those we might call resisters, heterogeneous and smart, were clear and united about what they were against, but much vaguer about what they were for. This of course was both a strength and a weakness. It was also a scenario beyond old versus new social movements.

The final set of issues has been much debated – how to characterize today’s versions of civil society, the public sphere and social movements. Castells writes of ‘networked social movements’ in his ‘Networks of Outrage and Hope’. This is in acknowledgement of the rise of what he calls ‘mass self-communication’, based on horizontal networks of interactive, multidirectional communication on the Internet and, even more, in wireless communication networks. The movement activity of the last few years, he insists, have their genesis in structural economic crisis and deepening crises of legitimation. But they do not just arise from poverty or political despair. They have also been triggered by outrage against the brazen injustice of and by hope for change deriving from successful uprisings in other parts of the globe. These movements have, Castells posits, common characteristics. For example:

• they are spontaneous in origin, usually sparked by indignation (typically, with seeds sown in the enabling sector of civil society);
• they comprise ‘networks of networks’ (typically, moving into the protest sector of civil society, with decentred structures involving interaction between multiple nodes);
• this horizontality of networks supports cooperation and solidarity while undermining the need for leadership;
• they accomplish the transition from outrage to hope by deliberation (Habermas’ public use of reason) in autonomous or democratic spaces;
• they favour non-violence (typically, using civil disobedience as a tactic of choice);
• they become movements by occupying urban spaces (typically, local spaces globally connected);
• they are highly self-reflexive;
• they are rarely programmatic;
• they aim at changing the values of society;
• they are fundamentally political (typically, engaging in direct, deliberative democracy based on networked democracy;
• they generate their own form of time: ‘timeless time’ (typically, living in the moment while opening up an unlimited horizon of possible futures);
• they are ‘viral’, globally accessible and inspirational to others.

Of course I have done less than justice to Castells here; but he does in my view raise shrewd and highly topical sociological questions about civil society, the public sphere and social movements. It is within a frame ‘something like this’ that a contemporary theory and programme of research might be established. Things have moved on since Habermas addressed and then ceased to address such issues.

3 Habermas and Crisis Tendencies

I think Habermas’ ‘Legitimation Crisis’ one of his more neglected books. Published in Germany in the early 1970s it has proved remarkably perspicacious

In the era of liberal capitalism the logic, ethos and praxis of political economy soaked deep into – some would say stained – the fabric of everyday life. Capitalism provided not only for ‘system integration’ but also for ‘social integration’. Habermas’ analysis of liberal capitalism is explicitly Marxist, his accounts of its later stages noticeably less so.

Because of its internal contradictions, capitalism is ever prone to economic crisis. Moreover such crises can be frequent, following the natural course of the ‘business cycle’. In post-war, post-liberal capitalism, Habermas argues, the state has come to play a greater part in managing the economy to offset these economic crisis tendencies. The state now monitors inflation and unemployment, for example, counteracting potentially damaging trends by manipulating the supply of money or interest rates or by changing policy. It makes welfare provision available, keeping the unemployed afloat, and slows the downward spiral of overproduction by underwriting the unemployed as consumers. It finances research and development. As Nick Crossley puts it, it has brought the proletariat ‘inside’ the system (they have more to lose than their ‘chains’, like welfare, their homes, consumer goods and so on).

This enhanced role of the state represents a ‘functional adaptation’ within capitalism: it contains class conflict. But it also carries risks: with engagement comes responsibility. Capitalisms’ crisis tendencies are not eliminated, but rather displaced. The state picks up the tab. This opens up the possibility of what Habermas calls a rationality crisis, or a crisis emanating from the very philosophy of mediation adopted by the state. It is a philosophy that must deliver economically and retain legitimacy re-the electorate. Some maintain that in the mid-to-late-1970s the state’s Keynesian philosophy was no longer (seen to be) ‘fit for purpose’, thus heralding a potential rationality crisis.

Habermas argued that a legitimation crisis occurs when the citizenry experiences a democratic shortfall: in other words, when people feel under-represented. He is well aware that the formal democracy characteristic of modern and highly differentiated societies falls well short of substantive or participatory democracy. People know this. For the most part they are content to let politicians get on with it (Habermas refers to a widespread ‘civic privatism’ in this context); but they can and will sometimes rebel when they judge those they elect too unaccountable to the electorate. The state, in sum, runs the risk of a rationality crisis if it fails to meet the demands of the economy, and a legitimacy crisis, or a loss of public support, if it fails to meet those of its citizens.

A fourth type of crisis is what Habermas calls a motivation crisis.  This can occur when the lifeworld culture in which civic privatism is embedded falters. More specifically, it becomes a risk when the institutions of primary and secondary socialization fail to produce and reproduce the work ethic. A weakening of the work ethic can leave citizens, especially the young, unresponsive or indifferent to the ‘imperative to work’ that fuels the subsystems of the economy (directly) and the state (indirectly).

Bear in mind that Habermas developed these ideas 40 years ago. There is much more that might be said of course. I for one regret his movement away from his earlier brand of Marxism; and in any event much has been written since about capitalism’s crisis tendencies and their management. But his analysis still has an echo. That this echo can be heard today has much to do with the global financial crisis of 2007-8 and subsequent implosion of the ‘eurozone’, the Arab uprising, and the anti-capitalist/anti-corporate occupy and other protest initiatives from 2010. The financial capitalism of the post-1970s did indeed seem to be lurching into crisis a year or two ago. Even cautious reformists wrote of windows of opportunity.

That the Clinton/‘bankster’-prompted economic crisis called for drastic inter- as well as intra-state interventions is axiomatic. Nor is it yet possible to deem these interventions effective. Furthermore, the limited effectiveness of state action to date has called into question the ubiquitous neo-liberal philosophy of free-market economics, raising the possibility of a rationality crisis. For many, however, it is the threat of a crisis of legimation that seems most tangible.

Consider Britain’s present profile. The ConDem alliance that emerged out of the debris of the 2010 general election not only embarked on a flawed philosophy of economics based on a programme of class-based austerity but also on a series of measures it had thought it prudent to eschew in opposition. Student fees were tripled, EMA abolished and health care subject to a top-down ‘reform’ paving the way for its re-commodification. Mid-term unpopularity does not necessary signal a legitimation crisis, even with more cuts planned before 2015 than have to date been implemented. But the London riots of 2011 were an eloquent reminder that millionaires in the cabinet who put into effect policies millionaires in finance and industry paid for can be unconvincing, notwithstanding the sympathetic ideological influence of millionaire media moguls and think tank sponsors. ConDem ministers born with no need ever to work can find it hard to sell the imperative to work to youths who see no opportunity to earn despite being subject to material and cultural vilification for being unemployed. There is no question that a motivation crisis remains a possibility.

It is enough in this short blog, one of a series, to suggest that the analysis of crisis tendencies ventured by Habermas on the cusp of the displacement of one stage of capitalism (industrial, Fordist, welfare statist, organized) by another (post-industrial, post-Fordist, post-welfare statist, dis- or reorganized), and the conceptual distinctions that this gave rise to, retain a certain pertinence and vigour today.

4. Lifeworld and System in Habermas

I move on now to consider Habermas’ use of the concepts of lifeworld and system. These receive their fullest expression in his magisterial two-volume ‘Theory of Communicative Action’, although many of the theories pre-existed this treatise.

One enduring problem Habermas set out to solve was how best to combine two discrete strands of thinking in social theory: (a) ‘the perspective that analyzes society as a meaningful whole for its participants’ (or Verstehen theory), and (b) ‘the perspective that analyzes society as a system that is stabilized behind the backs of the participants’ (or systems theory). In ‘Theory of Communicative Action’ these two perspectives transmute into, respectively, a focus on the action orientations of society’s members, and a focus on how the action consequences are coordinated without necessitating the will or consciousness of the participants. And this gives rise to the celebrated distinction between the lifeworld, based on social integration, and the system, based on system integration.

The lifeworld is not easy to define. Nor can it be ‘known’, since it serves as the vehicle of all knowing. We cannot step outside of our lifeworld any more than we can our language. But if the lifeworld as a whole cannot be interrogated, aspects of it can. In such instances, the aspect is ‘thematized’, or made subject to argument as the participants attempt to re-establish their mutual definition of the situation, a prerequisite for successful cooperation. Thus the lifeworld can be reproduced through communicative action, but not through instrumental or strategic action. The lifeworld is a medium of ‘symbolic space’, within which culture, social integration and personality are sustained and reproduced.

The system has to do with material rather than symbolic reproduction and is characterized by strategic not communicative action. In a manner more than reminiscent of Parsons, Habermas argues that societal differentiation has produced four subsystems: the economy and the state (comprising the system), and the private and public spheres (comprising the lifeworld). Moreover there has been a fundamental ‘uncoupling’ between the system on the one hand and the lifeworld on the other.

The four subsystems are interdependent: each is specialized in terms of what it produces but is dependent on the others for what it does not produce. In sum:

• the economy produces money
• the state produces power
• the private sphere (paradigmatically, household) produces commitment
• the public sphere (assorted media of discussion and debate) produces influence

Money, power, commitment and influence constitute the ‘steering media’ of the subsystems. And these products or steering media are traded between subsystems. For example, in the words of Crook and colleagues in 1992: ‘the economy relies on the state to establish such legal economic institutions as private property and contract, on the public lifeworld to influence consumption, and on the private lifeworld to provide a committed labour force, and itself sends money into each other subsystem’.

But the steering media of the subsystems are not equivalent in their thrust or capacity. With the progressive uncoupling of system and lifeworld the media, and thus subsystems, of the former have come to dominate the media of the latter. Habermas writes in this context of the ‘colonization’ of the lifeworld. Developing the analyses of Weber on the theme of ‘rationalization’ and Marx on that of ‘commodification’, the lifeworld, her asserts, has become:

‘increasingly state administered (‘juridified’) and commercialized. Possibilities for communicative action in the lifeworld become attenuated as social participation becomes hyper-rationalized in terms of immediate returns. Participants encounter each other as legal entities and as parties to contracts rather than as thinking and acting subjects’ (Crook et al again).

System rationalization, in short, has outstripped lifeworld rationalization. Rationalization, in the West at least, has been ‘selective’. Importantly, however, Habermas distances himself from Weber and his more pessimistic Frankfurt mentors (see first blog). He has no truck with talk of ‘iron cages’. He accuses Weber of treating the processes of rationalization/colonization that have undoubtedly happened in the West as inevitable when they were contingent and selective. Weber, in sum, is charged with conflating the dynamic with the logic of development. Habermas contends that the logic of development allows for the further rationalization of the lifeworld – that is, for an extension of the scope for communicative rationality or action –  and, it follows, for lifeworld ‘decolonization’. Lifeworld decolonization is mostly likely to come via activity in its public sphere (see earlier blog). The most likely ‘agents’, Habermas argued, are the ‘new’ as opposed to the ‘old’ (class-based) social movements. There are few grounds for optimism he added, looking with most hope in the direction of the women’s movement.

In line with previous blogs on Habermas and other matters, I would suggest that the passing in the English parliament of the Health and Social Care Act in 2012 affords a timely example of the colonization of the lifeworld by the system in early 21^st century financial capitalism.

My own analysis would certainly be contested by some sociologists but to me what happened seems as clear as the nose on  my or anyone’s face. The ConDem coalition government not only had no mandate for a top-down reform of the NHS after the general election of 2010, Cameron and his coterie had explicitly ruled it out. The LibDems were natural allies of Labour, not the Tories, instinctively and doctrinally opposed to what was to emerge in 2011 in the small print of Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill. For ‘reform’ read ‘commodification’. The NHS was/is to be handed over to for-profit health providers in which a number of MPs and members of the House of Lords, not all of them Tory, have a pecuniary interest. (I transpires that a third of the GPs on the new GP commissioning bodies also have a direct or indirect financial interest in private providers.) I have argued in previous blogs for a new ‘class-command dynamic’ in post-1970s financial capitalism. What I have been suggesting is that core ‘executive’ or ruling-class interests have come to exercise more sway than in the postwar (welfare-statist) era over the political elites at the apex of the apparatus of the state. Crudely, and courtesy of the LibDems, the Tory cabinet has been bought off. In Habermasian terms, the colonization of the lifeworld has proceeded apace, with class-based representation in the subsystem of the economy requiring of the subsystem of the state tighter regulatory control of the populace/electorate in its interests. Money buys more power now. How else would you account for the deconstruction of the most efficient/cost-effective health care system (the NHS) in favour of a shift towards the worst candidate in the marketplace (sic) (the USA)? American health care cost more in 2010-11 than any of its OECD rivals and continues to take one dollar in three in administrative costs. Nor was there much resistance in the public sphere (see blog on civil society and the public sphere).

In my view the frame Habermas worked on has a continuing salience within and without sociology. And it does so at the micro- as well as the macro-sociological level. The enhanced social differentiation that has accompanied modernity’s displacement of simpler or ‘traditional’ societies might inevitably have precipitated a new ‘systemness’. This is arguably not intrinsically problematic. Colonization occurs when this systemness skirts around public accountability: that is, when it signals the displacement of (the possibility of) substantive or participatory democracy by formal or parliamentary democracy of the kind that delivered the ConDem coalition and the health and Social Care Act.