Habermas and the Prospects of Critical Theory

Abstract

The account of Habermas’s communication theory developed in Chapters 3 and 4 follows the various stages of his attempt to answer the two fundamental problems faced by the critical theory of society: the problem of normative foundations and the problem of the relation of theory to practice. These two problems arose in the context of what I have called the problematic of rationality outlined in Chapter 2. This problematic centres on the relationship between the concept of reason and the actual socially and historically embodied rationality characteristic of capitalist society. Habermas addresses this relationship directly in The Theory of Communicative Action. The basic strategy Habermas adopts in the name of a reconstruction of critical social theory is to move the problematic of rationality from the context of Marx’s paradigm of production to the context of the paradigm of communication. Harbermas argues that the development of the problematic of rationality from Marx through Lukacs to the Frankfurt School, which I discussed in Chapter 2, remains within the confines of what he calls ‘the philosophy of consciousness’. He attempts to show how each of the above theorists relies, either implicitly or explicitly, on a philosophical concept of substantive reason, which includes the ideas of autonomy and freedom, for the norms in terms of which they are able to criticise the actual losses of autonomy and freedom entailed by the empirical and historical processes of capitalist rationalisation.