The Idolatry of the Actual

Habermas, Socialization, and the Possibility of Autonomy

David A. Borman

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781438437385
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Sozialphilosophie

The first close study of Jürgen Habermas's theory of socialization, a central but infrequently discussed component of his defense of deliberative democracy, The Idolatry of the Actual charts its increasingly uneasy relationship with the later development of Habermas's social theory. In particular, David A. Borman argues that Habermas's account of the development of the subject and of the conditions under which autonomy can be realized is fundamentally at odds with the increasingly liberal tenor of his social theory. This leads Borman to return to the set of concerns that guided Habermas's social theory in the early 1970s, paying particular attention to questions of crisis and the means by which public reactions are shaped—questions perhaps more relevant today than they have been at any time since the 1930s. Using Habermas's early work as a framework, Borman constructs an original critical-theoretical argument that draws on research in the sociology of schooling to understand how attitudes toward work, reward, achievement, class, gender, and race are shaped in economically functional ways, and draws on philosophical and empirical scholarship to demonstrate the challenges of multicultural integration and the impact of both on the potential for progressive social transformation.

Chapter 1

Capitalism and Contradiction in Legitimation Crisis

My ultimate aim in the first sections of this book is to present Habermas' mature social theory, his two-tiered theory of society as system and lifeworld, and to show how this theory, after the pattern of classical critical theory, serves to point out and articulate the interests of groups who embody a potential for protest or resistance within the societal formation of advanced capitalism. On the basis of this discussion, in the Intermediate Reflections, I then turn to the sociology of schooling as a means of critically evaluating the empirical adequacy of the theory. But, although it is in the two volumes of The Theory of Communicative Action that Habermas develops his mature social theory, I'd like to make a running start at that account by way of an earlier and much less discussed work, Legitimation Crisis. There are a few reasons for this:

1. It is in Legitimation Crisis that Habermas first attempts to articulate the concepts of system and lifeworld.
2. Objections made against the argument of Legitimation Crisis set the stage for the theory of system and lifeworld as it is elaborated in The Theory of Communicative Action.
3. The analysis of the welfare state offered here is presupposed by the later thesis of the “colonization of the lifeworld by system.”
4. The argument I advance in this work actually bears a closer resemblance to the structure of Legitimation Crisis and, as I argue, represents an alternative response to some of the critical issues raised against it—an alternative, that is, to the path Habermas himself takes in The Theory of Communicative Action and thereafter.

On the Concept of Crisis

In its earliest employment, in the vocabulary of medicine, “crisis” referred to a critical situation in which the “self-healing” powers of the organism were put to the test: The crisis is that point at which the possibility of a recovery of the normal state of health hangs uncertainly in the balance. Such a crisis is induced by something external: the illness. Its effects are likewise objective deviations from the healthy, well-functioning state of the organism. But although the consciousness of the patient is, in that sense, immaterial, the critical connotations of the idea of a crisis imply a necessary connection to the “patient,” the one who is made passive precisely by the objectivity of the illness from which he or she helplessly suffers. There is an inevitable association between the idea of a crisis and the idea of domination, the deprivation of the powers of the individual by some objective force. Thus, the concept of crisis is inherently normative: “The resolution of the crisis effects a liberation of the subject caught up in it.”¹

It was Marx who first developed a socioscientific conception of crisis that remains the basis of this idea in the economic domain, for instance, as expressed by systems theory in sociology. Put simply, systems theory is a sociological methodology that views societies as a whole, and/or the various subsystems of society (economy, political administration, culture, family, etc.), as adaptive systems that self-regulate their interactions with their environment, something after the fashion of Adam Smith's view of the capitalist market or a biologist's view of an organism. So a crisis, according to such a view, occurs when the structure of the system or subsystem prevents it from adequately adapting to new problems in a way that permanently or deeply threatens its integration or coherence. One consequence of this approach is that, as Habermas argues, it makes the possibility of crisis contingent on changes in the “environment,” that is, on changes in those things external yet relevant to the system: When the environment changes in some way to which the system cannot accommodate itself, the system is destroyed, just as a biological organism is destroyed if, for instance, a new parasite or contaminant is introduced into its environment that overwhelms its defenses and compromises the organic processes on which its life depends. Habermas does not deny that this can and does occur; but he insists that there are also internal causes of social crisis to which such a theory is necessarily blind. An internal crisis results from the inherent structure of a social system if that system issues contradictory imperatives that cannot be hierarchically ordered, so that one or the other obviously has priority and thus cancels or relativizes its competitor. In short, as a model of society, systems theory suggests—as a sort of methodological presumption—a greater degree of seamlessness, homogeneity, and harmony than is to be found in actual, existing social systems.

In order to be able to identify such an internally generated crisis, we need to be able to differentiate between the essential structures of a society, those directly related to what Habermas refers to as its “organizational principle” and that cannot be altered without undermining the identity of the system (i.e., without destroying it, turning it into a different kind of system), and those structures that can be altered to meet new challenges. Systems theory fails on this score as well, according to Habermas, because it is impossible to distinguish on the basis of its vocabulary between a reorganization that should count as a learning process contributing to the evolution of a given system, and one that should be interpreted as system dissolution. The reason is that the unity of a social system, defined relative to its goals and identity, can only be assessed from the perspective of its members—as we will see, from the perspective of the “lifeworld.”

Thus, only when members of a society experience structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak of crises. Disturbances of system integration endanger continued existence only to the extent social integration is at stake, that is, when the consensual foundations of normative structures are so much impaired that the society becomes anomic. Crisis states assume the form of a disintegration of social institutions.²

System integration refers to the functional interweaving of the actions and action consequences of individuals, irrespective of both their personal motive and intent; for example, individuals are integrated with one another in the economic system by being integrated into the market, which their individual actions serve to reproduce and sustain. The unity or integration of the system is ensured so long as individuals continue through their behavior, howsoever motivated, to carry out the operations necessary for the maintenance of the system as a whole, to perform, for example, those acts from which Adam Smith's “Invisible Hand” would purportedly emerge. So, disturbances in system integration, which open a gap between individual performances and the functional needs of the system itself, only present the possibility of crisis, Habermas has said, if they threaten social integration.

Social integration is more difficult to explain; it will be necessary in the course of this chapter and the next to critically examine Habermas' account of social integration as it develops and varies over his career. For now, let us say that social integration, for Habermas, seems to refer to the ability and willingness of individuals within a society both to (a) recognize one another as belonging to the same society, and (b) see themselves, as a group, in continuity with the traditions of previous generations that have been constitutive for their society and its institutions. It should be clear that these are in fact two distinct—although often interrelated—questions: We can easily imagine a case in which a society remained integrated in the first sense but not in the second.³ In Legitimation Crisis, however, Habermas appears to equivocate with respect to these two senses although, in its main argument regarding the diagnosis of the crisis tendencies of advanced capitalism, he focuses on the latter question (b) at the expense of a consideration of the conditions for (a), mutual recognition between contemporary citizens. But with respect to this historical conception of integration, he notes that it contains rather too much idealism: Experiences of rupture of tradition are not only inexact as a criterion for identifying crises, it is often the case that a contemporary sense of crisis turns out to have been a false alarm, even one that was intentionally—that is, ideologically—sounded.

Thus, objective disturbances of system integration only count as a crisis if they threaten social integration; but we can't rely on the subjective sense of a crisis alone to tell us when social integration is truly threatened. Habermas' solution is to attempt to combine the merits of both perspectives: Objectively describable problems that overwhelm steering capacity (not limited to problems introduced by contingent changes in the environment, but including those that arise from internal contradictions) will count as crises only insofar as their consequences affect the consciousness of individuals “precisely in such a way as to endanger social integration.”⁴ The crisis theory Habermas articulates in Legitimation Crisis is intended to catalogue the vulnerability of advanced capitalist societies to crises that meet this criterion. The first step in constructing such a theory is to elaborate the distinction between system and lifeworld.

System and Lifeworld

The two expressions “social integration” and “system integration” derive from different theoretical traditions. We speak of social integration in relation to the systems of institutions in which speaking and acting subjects are socially related. Social systems are seen here as lifeworlds that are symbolically structured. We speak of system integration with a view to the specific steering performances of a self-regulated system. Social systems are considered here from the point of view of their capacity to maintain their boundaries and their continued existence by mastering the complexity of an inconstant environment. Both paradigms, lifeworld and system, are important. The problem is to demonstrate their interconnection. From the lifeworld perspective, we thematize the normative structures (values and institutions) of a society. We analyze events and states from the point of view of their dependency on functions of social integration … while non-normative components of the system serve as limiting conditions. From the system perspective, we thematize a society's steering mechanisms and the extension of the scope of contingency. We analyze events and states from the point of view of their dependency on functions of system integration … while the goal values serve as data. If we comprehend a social system as a lifeworld, then the steering aspect is screened out. If we understand a society as a system, then the fact that social reality consists in the facticity of recognized, often counterfactual, validity claims is not taken into consideration.⁵

The difference between system and lifeworld is, thus, in the first instance, defined perspectivally: They refer to aspects of social systems considered as a whole that are illuminated by competing theoretical perspectives. But at the same time, they are more than that: The aspects of the social system so thematized are distinct structures, namely, the structures relevant to the reproduction of modern, differentiated societies. These theoretical perspectives recommend themselves, in other words, in the light of considerations regarding the object domain of social theory.⁶ Although it is possible to view all of society from either perspective, it is not possible to do so with equal felicity, since each perspective suffers from its aforementioned weakness. To put it crudely, because system and lifeworld therefore are also things—they refer to distinct phenomena—there is a real question about their relation and potential interaction. Systems theory, however, cannot respond to this question, because it either screens out normative structures entirely or reinterprets actions in the service of social integration as mere “behavior,” the consequences of which are to be analyzed from the perspective of their functional effects. And because systems theory cannot even identify bounded systems and their goal states (or crises) except through appeal to the vocabulary of action theory, lifeworld analysis retains a kind of priority. Action theory, on the other hand (as in a theory of communicative action), successfully avoids one-sidedness, but only at the cost of a brute “dichotomy between normative structures and limiting material conditions”⁷ (the dichotomy is brute in that one half, the systemic half, remains opaque to such a theory). This is a limitation of action theory that holds not only at the macro-level of society as a whole (composed of system and lifeworld) but also with respect to the individual subsystems themselves (the components of system and lifeworld, such as subcultural forms of life, the political system, and the economic system), all of which combine social and system elements.

The point is that action theory alone cannot ground a social theory adequate to contemporary reality. What is required is a theory that is able to explicate both the operations of system, the material substratum of society and its resources for solving steering problems, and the normative structures of society, including the ways that they are affected by disturbances in the substratum. Habermas claims that these conditions are met by an “historically oriented analysis of social systems” that allows us to determine the range “within which the goal values of the system might vary without its continued existence being critically endangered. The boundaries of this range of variation are manifested as boundaries of historical continuity”⁸ (i.e., (b), the historical sense of social integration). The “goal values” for a society as a whole include both imperatives issued by the normative cultural system—which must be more or less satisfied if the social system is to be perceived as legitimate by its members—and the requirements of system integration—which must be more or less satisfied if the society is to function, to reproduce itself stably. By proposing an “historically oriented analysis,” Habermas intends a theory of social evolution. These aspects of the theory—the determination of goal values and social evolution—come together in the following thesis: “Change in the goal values of social systems is a function of the state of the forces of production and of the degree of system autonomy; but the variation of goal values is limited by the logic of development of world views on which the imperatives of system integration have no influence.”⁹ Thus, the logics of the development of productive forces and of normative structures are independent of one another, although both are important factors in the evolution of society as a whole. This is the basic argument of Habermas' theory of social evolution.

In both cases, the sequence of development is irreversible so long as the continuity of tradition is not broken: Cognitive advances with respect to technical knowledge, as well as those that underwrite the stages of (in this case, collective) moral consciousness, cannot simply be forgotten (although they can be repressed, on pain of pathological side effects). But there is nevertheless an asymmetry between them: Although the development of productive forces always results in increasing contingency in the sociocultural sphere—that is, as production expands and intensifies, social relations become more complex, necessitating new learning—evolutionary advances in the development of the normative structures governing the sociocultural sphere do not necessarily result in an advance of (new learning in regard to) productive forces. Habermas points to the experience of developing nations as evidence for the claim that modernization of economic and political structures often does overwhelm traditional, stratifying, and limiting social institutions; the development of productive forces can also stimulate sociocultural change when knowledge produced in the service of technical goals has the effect of discrediting traditional worldviews. But the fact that these technical developments act as catalysts for the sociocultural development of normative structures does not tell us anything about what the latter developments will look like. This is the point of insisting that the respective logics of development are independent and asymmetric: It may be the case that, rather than resulting in new normative structures that satisfy the imperatives of expanding production, which spurred the development in the first place, the changed normative structures may instead end up restricting the autonomy of economic systems by resulting in new demands for legitimation that alter the goal values of the society as a whole. It is Habermas' argument in Legitimation Crisis that this may well be what happened in advanced capitalist societies in the 1960s.

Liberal Capitalism and Contradiction

In Legitimation Crisis, Habermas offers some limited substantiation for this theory of social evolution, particularly for the way in which the organizational principle of a society relates to its characteristic vulnerabilities to crisis, through a sketch of primitive (kinship), traditional (feudal), liberal capitalist, and advanced capitalist societies. The first two are not crucial for understanding the details of advanced capitalism, but its specific difference from liberal capitalism is. In his analysis of the latter, Habermas relies quite heavily on Marx, who saw in the relationship between wage labor and capital—enshrined in bourgeois legal codes—the fundamental, in Habermas' terms, “organizational principle,” of liberal capitalism. The key structural change in the development of this social formation (from the crumbling feudal system) is the emergence of an autonomous civil society in ...

Table of contents

• TITLE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: CAPITALISM AND CONTRADICTION IN LEGITIMATION CRISIS
• CHAPTER 2: RATIONALIZATION AND SOCIAL PATHOLOGY IN THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION
• POSTSCRIPT: BETWEEN FACTS AND NORMS, IN WHICH LAW SAVES US FROM OURSELVES
• INTERMEDIATE REFLECTIONS: HABERMAS AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE SCHOOL
• CHAPTER 3: MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND POSTCONVENTIONALITY
• CHAPTER 4: SOCIALIZATION AND EGO AUTONOMY
• CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS: MULTICULTURAL IDENTITY AS POSTCONVENTIONALITY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY