Abstract
Jürgen Habermas has been one of the most prolific and consistent writers in social theory and philosophy. His critical theory has been very much concerned with the reconstruction of the legacy of German philosophy, first basically in a Marxist framework, but increasingly under the influence of Kant. In contrast to Giddens, his attempt at theoretical synthesis has been closely connected to more empirically-oriented issues, in what he perceives as a Hegelian perspective in methodological terms.1 The theory of evolution, which he once deemed the basic element of a theory of society.2 supplies foundations to his standpoint, since ‘… in the course of social evolution the object as such changes.’3 He rejects, therefore, a more autonomous general theory, although in practice several sections of his work are solely dedicated to analytical reasoning and general conceptualisation. This, in fact, brings some problems to his theory, insofar as historically specific questions mingle in an unwarranted manner with truly general considerations.
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References
J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (London: Heinemann, [1981] 1984) vol. 1, p. xxxiv.
Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (London: Heinemann, [1973] 1976) p. xxv.
Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Polity, 1987) p. 301.
Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, [1985] 1987) pp. 16–17.
Habermas, ‘On the Logic of the Social Sciences’ (1967), in On the Logic of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988) pp. 240–1; The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, pp. 3–5.
Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (London: Heinemann, [1968] 1978) pp. 55ff.
Habermas, ‘Introduction: Some Difficulties in Attempting to Link Theory and Praxis’ (1971), in Theory and Practice (London: Heinemann, 1974) p. 13.
Habermas, ‘A Reply’, in Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (eds), Communicative Action. Essays on Jürgen Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action (Cambridge: Polity, [1986] 1991) p. 250.
Habermas, ‘Vorwort zur Neuausgabe’ (1982), in Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982) p. 9.
Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of Dialectic (New York: Verso, 1990) pp. 7, 237, 240.
Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jiirgen Habermas (Cambridge: Polity, [1974] 1984) p. 23.
A. Honneth, The Critique of Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, [1985] 1991) pp. 284–5; H. Joas, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Hermeneutics and Positivism’, in A. Honneth and H. Joas (eds), Opt cit., p. 114; P. Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983) p. 67. While N. Mouzelis (‘Appendix I’, in Back to Sociological Theory) is correct in pointing to the absence of collective actors in Habermas, he is prone to a form of reification.
He proposed a classification of theories according to their ‘holistic’ or ‘atomistic’ (elementaristischen) point of view, on the one hand, and their basic action concepts, on the other. See J. Habermas, ‘Vorlesungen zu einen sprachtheoretischen Grundlegung der Soziologie’ (1970/1), in Vorstudien und Ergdnzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984) pp. 23ff. He was otherwise predisposed to associate the dissolution of Marx’s concept of totality with the proliferation of autonomous disciplines. See Habermas, ‘Between Philosophy and Science: Marxism as Critique’ (1963), in Theory and Practice, p. 206.
Habermas, ‘Technology and Science as “Ideology” (1968), in Towards a Rational Society (London: Heinemann, 1971) pp. 91–8.
Habermas, ‘Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence’, in Hans P. Dreitzel (ed.), Recent Sociology, No.2: Patterns of Communicative Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1970); ‘What is Universal Pragmatics?’ (1976), in Communication and the Evolution of Society (London: Heinemann, 1979) p. 1.
Ibid., pp. 124–6, 137–8, 143–7, 155–6. For more on that ‘reconstructive science’, see his ‘What is Universal Pragmatics?’, plus ‘Reconstruction and Interpretation in the Social Sciences’ (1983), in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). Habermas extensively reviewed the literature on socialisation, maintaining the importance of childhood for the formation of personality. He shows little sympathy for psychoanalysis, however, borrowing much more from social and ego psychology and also from Piaget’s genetic epistemology. See Idem, ‘Stitchworte zu einer Theorie der Sozialisation’ (1968) and ‘Notizen zum Begriff der Rollenkompetenz’ (1972), in Kultur und Kritik; plus ‘Notizen zur Entwicklung der Interaktionskompetentz’ (1974), in Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. For a powerful Freudian critique, see Joel Whitebook, ‘Reason and Happiness: some Psychoanalytic Themes in Critical Theory’, in R. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1985).
J. Habermas, ‘Erkenntnis und Interest’ (1965), in Technik lind Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968) pp. 162–3. ‘On the Logic of the Social Sciences’, pp. 173–4; ‘On Hermeneutics’ Claim to Universality’ (1970), in Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, The Hermeneutics Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) pp. 297, 314; ‘Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie?’, p. 254. ‘Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism’, (1975), in Communication and the Evolution of Society, pp. 148–50; The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, pp. 131–8; ‘A Reply to my Critics’, p. 269.
J. C. Alexander, ‘The Parsons Revival in German Sociology’, Sociological Theory, vol. 2, 1984, pp. 401–2.
Habermas, ‘History and Evolution’ (1976), Telos, vol, 39, 1979, pp. 21–2; The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, p. 304; ‘A Reply’, p. 262.
A. Swingewood, The Myth of Mass Culture (London: Macmillan, 1977) p.82.
McCarthy’s excellent translation misses, however, this point, translating Herren as ‘masters’ (Ibid., vol. 2, p. 356). For the original version see Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, [1981] 1989) B. II, p. 522.
Habermas, ‘Zur Theorienvergleich in der Soziologie: am Beispiel der Evolutionstheorie’ (1974), in Zur Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, [1976] 1990) p. 139.
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© 1995 José Maurício Domingues
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Dọmingues, J.M. (1995). Life-World and System in Habermas’ Historical Materialism. In: Sociological Theory and Collective Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376342_3
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