A Marx for the Managerial Revolution: Habermas on Law and Democracy

Abstract

The early work of Jïrgen Habermas stressed the corrosive effects of the state and the market on the socio‐cultural life‐world. There could be no administrative creation of meaning. His more recent work argues that the system can redeem itself without sacrificing the emancipatory interests of humanity. However, this shift does not represent an abandonment of the revolutionary project of critical theory. On the contrary, the communicative model of proceduralist law‐making is designed to promote the revolutionary transformation of Western civilization under the auspices of managerial and administrative elites. The radical ideal of cosmopolitan democracy becomes an essential ingredient in the effective management of a complex socio‐economic system operating on a global scale. The demos in Habermas’s vision of radical democracy is not the people of any particular nation but humanity at large. As a consequence, the proceduralist model of law‐making provides the philosophical justification for a bizarre social experiment which aims to dissociate Western nation‐states from their core ethno‐cultural identities.