EMANCIPATION IN THE INDUSTRIAL AGE: TECHNOLOGY, RATIONALITY, AND THE COLD WAR IN HABERMAS’S EARLY EPISTEMOLOGY AND SOCIAL THEORY

Abstract

In his 1968 essay “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’,” Jürgen Habermas deals more explicitly than in other works with phenomena related to modern technology and science.1He is well known for his social theory, legal theory, and theories of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and has been a major figure in the intellectual history of modern Europe due to the twin role he has played as both a voice and a representative of the political and philosophical movements of postwar and post-Holocaust West Germany. Exploring the role of technology in his thinking brings into focus technology's ambiguous status in critical social theory as well as the general relationship between intellectual history and the history of technology. The disturbingly open-ended question whether technology is modernity's blessing or its curse has mobilized critics and commentators at least since the Industrial Revolution and has divided them at political, epistemic, and moral levels. Habermas's project sits in the middle of such traditions, and his 1968 essay “updates” long-standing concerns about industrial modernity for the specific technological, philosophical, and political conditions of the early Cold War. Intersections between technology and his signature fields—intersections that he has both forged and contributed to—are found in political theories of technology and democracy (in the forms, for example, of technocracy and technological determinism), epistemologies of scientific knowledge and their relevance for theories of the reasonable subject and of knowledge communities, and theories of secularization and modern state-building.2