Abstract
At the heart of Habermas’s critical theory of society is a normative account of communicative action, which sets out to show that a potential for emancipation can be extracted from everyday linguistic practices among humans. This potential for emancipation is expressed in terms of the concept of communicative rationality. The emancipatory potential of communicative rationality resides in its critical power — its capacity for identifying and evaluating forms of unreason in the modern world and pointing the way towards forms of social life that are rational in the sense of being conducive to human flourishing. Specifically, it provides a yardstick for measuring the social pathologies of modern societies and for assessing the justice of moral norms and the legitimacy of democratic decisions and laws. In the following I offer a sketch of Habermas’s concept of communicative rationality and the critical power that he attributes to it.1 After outlining some of the main lines of objection that have been directed against his project, I propose a modification of Habermas’s strategy that is intended to overcome what I consider to be one of the main objections.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
This sketch draws on my Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Re-Presenting the Good Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), Ch. 3; and ‘Pragmatics in Habermas’ Critical Social Theory’, in W. Bublitz and N. Norrick (eds), Handbooks of Pragmatics, Vol. 1 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 289–313.
J. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, translated by W. M. Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 46;
J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, translated by W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 4.
Habermas mentions different idealisations on different occasions. See, for example, J. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, translated by S. W. Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 76–77; ‘Remarks on Discourse Ethics’, in his
Justification and Application, translated by C. Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 30–32; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 20;
Habermas, ‘Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn’, in On the Pragmatics of Communication, translated and edited by M. Cooke (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 367;
Habermas, ‘On the Architectonics of Discursive Differentiation’, in Between Naturalism and Religion, translated by C. Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 82.
J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, translated by T. McCarthy, Vols 1 and 2 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984, 1987).
J. Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, translated by S. W. Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 64–69. At the core of this vision is a conceptual triad that has defined his work from his earliest major publication: the concepts of the public sphere, discourse and reason. See
J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, translated by F. Lawrence and J. Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
This is the conclusion that Habermas draws from his formal-pragmatic thesis that the speaker with every speech act simultaneously raises three validity claims. See my discussion in Ch. 3 of Language and Reason. He holds this conclusion to be supported by the work of the German psychologist Karl Bühler, who posits three mutually irreducible but internally connected linguistic functions. See K. Bühler, Sprachtheorie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1934).
J. Habermas, ‘Reflections on Communicative Pathology’, in B. Fultner (ed.), On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 129–170.
Despite occasional remarks in his writings up to the middle of the 1980s about his plan to develop a normative account of systematically distorted communication, Habermas has not made any serious attempt to develop such an account. For an interesting way of doing so, see J. Bohman, ‘Formal Pragmatics and Social Criticism: The Philosophy of Language and the Critique of Ideology in Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 11/4, 1986, 331–353;
J. Bohman, ‘Distorted Communication: Formal Pragmatics as a Critical Theory’, in L. Hahn (ed.), Perspectives on Habermas (Indianapolis, IN: Open Court, 2000), 3–21.
Honneth’s relatively early essay ‘On the Social Dynamics of Disrespect’, in P. Dews (ed.), Habermas: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 320–337 gives a good sense of his objections. See also
A. Honneth, ‘The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder’, in N. Fraser and A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition: A Politico-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003), esp. 242–247; and
A. Honneth, ‘Critical Theory’, in D. Moran (ed.), Routledge Companion to 20th Century Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 784–813.
A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, translated by J. Anderson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
See A. Wellmer, ‘Ethics and Dialogue: Elements of Moral Judgement in Kant and Discourse Ethics’, in his The Persistence of Modernity, translated by D. Midgley (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 160–168. See also
A. Wellmer, ‘The Debate about Truth: Pragmatism without Regulative Ideas’, in D. Freundlieb, W. Hudson and J. Rundell (eds), Critical Theory after Habermas (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2004), 192.
J. Habermas, ‘Remarks on Discourse Ethics’, in Justification and Application, 190–191. See my discussion of this point in Language and Reason, 153–154. See also T. McCarthy, ‘Practical Discourse: On the Relationship of Morality to Politics’, in his Ideals and Illusions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 181–199.
See M. Cooke, ‘Five Arguments for Deliberative Democracy’, Political Studies, 48/5, 2000, esp. 950–954.
Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 51. Similar points are made by S. Benhabib in Situating the Self (New York: Routledge, 1992); and by McCarthy in Ideals and Illusions, 134–136.
See Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 16–17; and M. Cooke, ‘Avoiding Authoritarianism: On the Problem of Justification in Contemporary Critical Social Theory’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 13/3, 2005, 379–404. In both essays I attempt also to explain why the critic’s insulation of her critical perspective against rational interrogation is objectionable.
J. Butler, ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism’, in J. Butler and J. Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 6. In a postscript, Butler admits that the essay was written in a polemical style and was not one that she would write again today in the same way.
J. Butler, ‘For a Careful Reading’, in S. Benhabib, et al., Feminist Contentions: a Philosophical Exchange (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 127. Rorty likewise maintains that seen from an external perspective there is no significant difference between offering reasons and ‘wheedling’, ‘strategic sensitivity training’ and even ‘reaching for a gun’. He acknowledges that seen from an internal, participants’ perspective the distinction between violent and non-violent attempts to change people’s minds emerges as important.
R. Rorty, Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8, 20, 23, 27 n. 23.
This is abundantly clear in J. Habermas, ‘Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter’, in his Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action [1983], translated by C. Lenhardt and S. Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 1–20.
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 4–5; J. Habermas, ‘Are there Postmetaphysical Answers to the Question: What is the “Good Life”?’, in his The Future of Human Nature, translated by W. Rehg, M. Pensky and H. Beister (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 1–15, here 10–11.
Here I draw on Charles Taylor’s account of reasoning in transitions in Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 72–73. See my discussion in Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 149–150.
See William Rehg’s illuminating discussion of scientific argumentation in which he considers the ways in which the norm of inclusivity can impact negatively as well as positively on the epistemic quality of the outcome. W. Rehg, Cogent Science in Context: The Science Wars, Argumentation Theory, and Habermas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 Maeve Cooke
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cooke, M. (2012). Habermas’s Social Theory: The Critical Power of Communicative Rationality. In: de Boer, K., Sonderegger, R. (eds) Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230357006_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230357006_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31897-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-35700-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)