The critical theory of Jürgen Habermas

History of the Human Sciences, 1993

Theory and Society, 1974

This work maintains that Jürgen Habermas‘s moral and political theories rely on a modified version of Kant‘s notion of normativity. Taking this as a starting point, it examines this component in light of criticisms inspired by Hegel‘s critique of Kant. The text shows that Habermas can answer most of the criticisms that could arise from Hegel‘s critique. That said, Hegel‘s criticism of the will as a tester of maxims does apply to Habermas. This criticism states that Kant cannot connect the universal will of morality and the particular will of the empirical subject because he rules out particular contents as susceptible of being universalized. And it can apply to Habermas because he set strict limits to what can count as a content which may bleed into the justification of moral norms and, following Kenneth Baynes – in his interpretation of Habermas‘s theory –, of legal and political norms. To be justifiable, – according to Habermas – these norms need to embody generalizable interests and they cannot be based on particular interests. However, Habermas infers from this that norms can only be justified with impartial, that is agent neutral reasons, and cannot be justified with agent-relative reasons. From this, emerges the question whether and to what extent a theory of this sort can successfully include particular contents (for example a particular agents‘ real interests, inclinations and needs). The strict version of the generalizability of norms seems to occlude this possibility. Nonetheless, it is possible to rebut this criticism by slackening the strong version of normative justification that Habermas has built into the theory. By means of an analysis of two elements that he incorporates into his reconstruction of the normative point of view, namely, the concept of ideal role taking and the notion of mutual recognition, it is possible to argue that the loosening of the strict notion of generalizability is a modification that does not contradict and actually coheres with Habermas‘s Kantian concept of moral reason, and this operation fortifies the theory in the face of the Hegelian criticism of the will as a tester of maxims. To develop these issues, this work is divided in two parts with two chapters each part. Part I is an analysis of Habermas‘s notion of moral reason and autonomy and it reconstructs its normative Kantianism. After that, it discusses Hegelian criticisms of Habermas‘s moral theory. Part II focuses on Habermas‘s political Kantianism in Between Facts and Norms and in the debate with Rawls and it examines Hegelian criticisms of that Kantianism.

Constellations, 2013

According to Jürgen Habermas, his Theory of Communicative Action offers a new account of the normative foundations of critical theory. Habermas’ motivating insight is that neither a transcendental nor a metaphysical solution to the problem of normativity, nor a merely hermeneutic reconstruction of historically given norms, is sufficient to clarify the normative foundations of critical theory. In response to this insight, Habermas develops a novel account of normativity, which locates the normative demands of critical theory within the socially instituted practice of communicative understanding. Although Habermas has claimed otherwise, this new foundation for critical theory constitutes a novel and innovative form of "immanent critique." To argue for and to clarify this claim, I offer, in section 1, a formal account of immanent critique and distinguish between two different ways of carrying out such a critique.

Heathwood Press, 2014

In a previous piece on the Heathwood website, we argued that Frankfurt School critical theory falls into two distinct periods. 1 In the first, which runs from the 1920s until the 1970s, the School's writings remain challenging and forward-looking and inspirational. In the second, during which Habermas and (following Habermas) Honneth are the main figures, Frankfurt School theorising loses its critical and revolutionary edge. In the present contribution, we add detail to these generalisations.

Science & Society, 1977

Jürgen Habermas’s assessment of Marxism consists of both a defense and a critique. According to Habermas, Marx held the key to incorporating the German idealistic philosophical tradition into his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of subject-object identity, but failed to use it fully. In Habermas’s view, Marx only partially resisted positivistic social theory’s attack upon epistemology and consequently adopted a framework of sociological inquiry that actually prevents critical self-reflection, the methodological foundation of the theoretical recognition of the human interests in identity, control over nature, and emancipation. In spite of Marx’s obvious concern for the self-emancipation of the human species, his naturalistic theoretical framework, Habermas contends, cannot articulate that freedom’s realization except as the automatic by-product of natural-historic evolution. We examine Habermas’s theory of “cognitive interests” insofar as it determines his critique of Marxism, to which critique we shall then turn. I hope to show that Habermas’s view of Marxism is a sympathetically critical one from Marxists should learn, even as they attempt to answer it.

In: Gabriel Ricci (ed.): The Persistence of Critical Theory, vol. 8 of Culture & Civilization. Transaction Publisher 2017

Jürgen Habermas’s project of a reformulation of critical social theory was from the very beginning characterized by a confrontation with Marx and the Marxist tradition. In particular, their concepts of labor, production, and social synthesis repeatedly gained Habermas’s attention and became objects of his critique. The rejection of what later came to be called the “production paradigm” occurred at three levels: in terms of social theory, Habermas doubts that a sufficient concept of social unity can be obtained through the concept of labor; in terms of social philosophy, Habermas complains about the meager normative potential of the concept of labor; and sociologically, the relevance of labor as a leading category in the epoch of late capitalism is called into question. In the following, I wish to concentrate upon the dimension of social theory. Since Knowledge and Human Interests, and culminating in his critique of the production paradigm in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas attributes to Marx a model of social synthesis through “labor.” Habermas’s critique is that the limitation of the concept of praxis to labor in the sense of “the making of products”1 or the “metabolic process between society and nature”2 brings the problem of reducing “rules of social interaction” to “technical and utilitarian rules for production and employing products.”3 If, however, Marxist theorists decide to distinguish between these dimensions, then according to Habermas they necessarily depart from the categorical framework of the production paradigm. Thus, “labor” for Habermas can only be understood according to the model of a non-social, technical–manipulative relationship to an object. Accordingly, “the production paradigm is fit solely for the explanation of labor and not for that of interaction,”4 i.e., praxis in this sense “has structure-forming effects only for the metabolic process between human beings and nature.”.5 In contrast, according to Habermas’s two-leveled concept, society appears on the one hand, as a process of production and appropriation, which proceeds in accord with technical-utilitarian rules and signals the relevant level of exchange between society and nature (that is, the state of the forces of production); and on the other hand, as a process of interaction, which is regulated by social norms and brings about a selective access to power and wealth (that is, expresses the relations of production).6 That “practice in the sense of norm-governed interaction cannot be analyzed on the model of the productive expenditure of labor power and the consumption of use-values”7 is an understandable statement. However, the question arises as to whether such a reductionism is actually developed in Marx’s critic of political economy. In the following, I will demonstrate that Habermas, through his approach to Marx, which proceeds on the basis of Marx’s early writings, does not perceive changes to social-theoretical categories in the course of the development of Marx’s work. This applies above all to the form-analytical distinction between abstract and concrete labor, which is first fully developed in Capital.8 The core problem of Habermas’s social theory will prove to be that with the replacement of the concept of “relation of production” through that of the “institutional framework” or “interaction” on one hand and the “subsystem of rational-purposive behavior” on the other hand, the innovative content of the critique of political economy’s concept of society is missed, thus transforming social theory into an external combination of symbolic-interactionist reductionism and systems-theoretical affirmation of social alienation. Society is dissolved into the dualisms of labor and interaction, technics and ethics, human being–thing, and human being–human being relations. Habermas thereby consummates a separation of the class relation from its objective mediation, i.e., from its economic character in the narrow sense, and also trivializes autonomous economic mechanisms to media of communication that disburden activity with the goal of augmenting nature and an optimal material reproduction.