Adorno, Habermas and the Search for a Rational Society (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas champion the goal of a r...

Author: Deborah Cook

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Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society

Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas champion the goal of a rational society on the basis of many shared premisses. Yet they not only disagree about prevailing social conditions, they have profoundly different views about what a rational society should look like and how best to achieve it. This book defends Adorno against the inﬂuential criticisms that Habermas levels against both his account of existing conditions and prospects for achieving reasonable conditions of life. Surveying these critical theories of Western society, the ﬁrst chapter focuses on their accounts of relations between the economic, political, and social spheres. Since Adorno and Habermas follow Georg Lukács when they argue that domination consists in the reifying incursions of a one-dimensional form of rationality into all areas of human life, their disagreements about reiﬁcation are discussed in the second chapter. Chapter 3 explores their conﬂicting claims about the historical development of the type of rationality now prevalent in the West. Given that both theorists claim to provide a critical purchase on reiﬁed social life, Chapter 4 appraises the critical leverage their theories actually offer. The ﬁnal chapter describes their views about what a rational society would look like, and evaluates their claims about the prospects for establishing such a society. Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society will be essential reading for students and researchers of critical theory, political and social theory, and the work of Adorno and Habermas. Deborah Cook is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Windsor, Canada. Her previous works include The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on Mass Culture (1996). She is also the author of numerous articles published in Philosophy and Social Criticism, Rethinking Marxism, New Left Review, Telos, Historical Materialism, and other journals.

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

1 Hayek and After Hayekian liberalism as a research programme Jeremy Shearmur 2 Conﬂicts in Social Science Edited by Anton van Harskamp 3 Political Thought of André Gorz Adrian Little 4 Corruption, Capitalism and Democracy John Girling 5 Freedom and Culture in Western Society Hans Blokland 6 Freedom in Economics New perspectives in normative analysis Edited by Jean-Francois Laslier, Marc Fleurbaey, Nicolas Gravel and Alain Trannoy 7 Against Politics On government, anarchy and order Anthony de Jasay 8 Max Weber and Michel Foucault Parallel life works Arpad Szakolczai 9 The Political Economy of Civil Society and Human Rights G.B. Madison 10 On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life Edited by W.S.F. Pickering, W. Watts Miller and N.J. Allen

11 Classical Individualism The supreme importance of each human being Tibor R. Machan 12 The Age of Reasons Quixotism, sentimentalism and political economy in eighteenthcentury Britain Wendy Motooka 13 Individualism in Modern Thought From Adam Smith to Hayek Lorenzo Infantino 14 Property and Power in Social Theory A study in intellectual rivalry Dick Pels 15 Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical Social Theory A critique of Giddens, Habermas and Bhaskar Nigel Pleasants 16 Marxism and Human Nature Sean Sayers 17 Goffman and Social Organization Studies in a sociological legacy Edited by Greg Smith 18 Situating Hayek Phenomenology and the neo-liberal project Mark J. Smith 19 The Reading of Theoretical Texts Peter Ekegren 20 The Nature of Capital Marx after Foucault Richard Marsden 21 The Age of Chance Gambling in Western culture Gerda Reith 22 Reﬂexive Historical Sociology Arpad Szakolczai

23 Durkheim and Representations Edited by W.S.F. Pickering 24 The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky Alison Edgley 25 Hayek’s Liberalism and Its Origins His idea of spontaneous order and the Scottish Enlightenment Christina Petsoulas 26 Metaphor and the Dynamics of Knowledge Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart 27 Living with Markets Jeremy Shearmur 28 Durkheim’s Suicide A century of research and debate Edited by W.S.F. Pickering and Geoffrey Walford 29 Post-Marxism An intellectual history Stuart Sim 30 The Intellectual as Stranger Studies in spokespersonship Dick Pels 31 Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social Science A critique of Gadamer and Habermas Austin Harrington 32 Methodological Individualism Background, history and meaning Lars Udehn 33 John Stuart Mill and Freedom of Expression The genesis of a theory K.C. O’Rourke 34 The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation From terror to trauma Michael Humphrey

35 Marx and Wittgenstein Knowledge, morality, politics Edited by Gavin Kitching and Nigel Pleasants 36 The Genesis of Modernity Arpad Szakolczai 37 Ignorance and Liberty Lorenzo Infantino 38 Deleuze, Marx and Politics Nicholas Thoburn 39 The Structure of Social Theory Anthony King 40 Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society Deborah Cook

Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society Deborah Cook

First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2004 Deborah Cook All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-41745-3 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-68030-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–33479–9 (Print Edition)

Contents

1

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction

1

Society 1 2 3 4

2

3

39

Damaged life 42 Colonized lifeworld 49 The problem of mediation 57 Reiﬁcation and the global economy 66

Reason 1 2 3 4

4

State capitalist or late capitalist society? 11 Habermas on late capitalist society 16 Preliminary remarks on domination 25 Concluding reﬂections on Habermas’ concept of the lifeworld 34

Reiﬁcation 1 2 3 4

10

71

The evolution of reason 74 The rational animal 80 Nature, reason, and history 87 The partiality for reason 92

Critique 1 Ideology: end or transformation? 101 2 The critical power of critical theory 112 3 Habermas against himself 123

99

x

Contents

5

Emancipation 1 2 3 4

130

Obstacles to emancipation 132 Adorno, and the idea of a rational society 140 Habermas, and the idea of a rational society 150 The utopian gambit 159

Conclusion

164

Notes Bibliography Index

179 211 222

Acknowledgements

Many people have commented on parts of this book. Not the least are the often anonymous reviewers who criticized work that I subsequently revised again and expanded here. The ﬁrst section of Chapter 1 borrows from parts of “Adorno on Late Capitalism”; this article was improved by the critical comments of Peter Dews and others at Radical Philosophy. Reviewers at Rethinking Marxism encouraged me to revise arguments in “Critical Perspectives on Solidarity” that reappear at the end of the ﬁrst chapter (Copyright © 2001 Association for Economic and Social Analysis). The discussion of globalization in Chapter 2 owes a great deal to Perry Anderson who alerted me to changes in Habermas’ views on the economy when I amended “The Talking Cure in Habermas’s Republic” for New Left Review. Chapter 3 is a much expanded and modiﬁed version of “Adorno and Habermas on the Human Condition” published in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. Some of the arguments in Chapter 4 were vetted by reviewers at Philosophy and Social Criticism and Historical Materialism where my articles on ideology ﬁrst appeared: “Adorno, Ideology, and Ideology Critique” (Copyright © 2001 Sage Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi) and “Critical Stratagems in Adorno and Habermas.” Gordon Finlayson’s later criticisms of “Critical Stratagems” in Historical Materialism sharpened my understanding of the differences between the two theorists. My work on Adorno in Chapter 5 is shaped by a paper that Brian O’Connor asked me to write for the Revue internationale de Philosophie to commemorate Adorno’s centenary. I gratefully acknowledge the critical acumen of reviewers and editors at all these journals. I would also like to acknowledge the reviewer at Routledge whose questions enabled me to frame my work on the critical social theories of Adorno and Habermas. This book beneﬁted equally from the ongoing commentary of my friend and colleague, Jeffrey Noonan, in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Windsor. Lambert Zuidervaart was also an important partner in dialogue; among other things, his critical assessment of J. M. Bernstein’s Adorno inﬂuenced my own. Before Jeffrey and Lambert appeared on the scene, sociologist Barry Adam and philosopher Ronald

xii

Acknowledgements

Aronson helped me to evaluate Habermas’ work during our informal reading group discussions in the 1990s. Since this book is also the product of thinking through the events that shaped the 1980s, 1990s, and early twenty-ﬁrst century, I should extend my gratitude to my students at the University of Windsor as well; their questions, concerns, and contestations during this period of rapid social, political, and economic change inﬂuenced my assessment of the relative merits of Adorno’s and Habermas’ social theories. Finally, as always, my friends gave me much needed emotional and moral support. In particular, Steven Bonhomme helped me to see the project through to completion. Although we have since parted company, I would like to thank Steven here.

Introduction

What is distinctive about the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas is its potent combination of philosophy and social science in the interest of developing a critical theory of Western society. Although a generation separates Adorno from Habermas, both theorists were afﬁliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt – also known as the Frankfurt School – which once housed thinkers as diverse as Walter Benjamin, Eric Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Habermas’ sojourn at the Institute may have been brief, but he continues to pursue the project that animates the Institute’s interdisciplinary studies: to formulate a critical theory of society that examines the impact of economic and political institutions on social life and the development of individuals. Addressing perennial philosophical issues in the course of pursuing this project, Adorno and Habermas often cross over into critical sociology. Their work has ranged from theoretical accounts of morality, aesthetics, and epistemology to empirical analyses of democratic and fascist tendencies in the West, and the psychological and social pathologies prevalent today. In addition, their views on methodological problems, such as the relative merits of understanding and explanation, and value-freedom in the social sciences, have had a lasting inﬂuence on the disciplines of sociology and anthropology.1 Adorno and Habermas lay claim to the tradition of critical theory in their concern for establishing what Horkheimer once described as “reasonable conditions of life:” an association of free individuals in which each enjoys the same possibilities for self-realization and self-determination as all the rest.2 Like other Frankfurt theorists, Adorno and Habermas critically target whatever impedes the emergence of such conditions. As Adorno’s junior associate at the Institute in the later 1950s, Habermas was much inﬂuenced by Adorno’s acute criticisms of the damage that has been inﬂicted on life under late capitalism. That inﬂuence is especially marked in one of his ﬁrst books, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (published in 1962), where Habermas denounces the manipulation of public opinion and the deterioration of the public sphere in the twentieth century. His trenchant commentary in this early inquiry won Adorno’s

2

Introduction

explicit approval. According to Adorno, Habermas had succeeded in demonstrating the contradiction that exists “between the modern emancipation of critical spirit and its simultaneous dampening” when he argued that the public sphere had become a mere commodity that “works against the critical principle in order to better market itself.”3 In his intellectual history of the Frankfurt School, Rolf Wiggershaus reports that The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere “was a disillusioning book for those who believed in democracy.” When they reviewed this book, sociologists Renate Maynatz and Ralf Dahrendorf objected that Habermas had “set himself an extremely high standard – one that was too utopian.” However, Wiggershaus contends that no other viable assessment emerged to counter Habermas’ claim that “dominant conditions in the post-war European democracies were far from what they claimed to be and far from what was desirable.”4 According to Habermas, rationalcritical debate had been superseded by the machinations of special interest groups, political parties, and public administration;5 these institutions generate “nonpublic opinion” that substitutes for opinion-formation in the public sphere. Now required solely for the purpose of acclaiming decisions made elsewhere, the public has effectively been removed “from the processes of the exercise and equilibration of power.”6 To cite Adorno, democratic nations actually prevent individuals from making autonomous decisions about the social arrangements that would best serve their interests.7 If reasonable conditions of life would entail a society composed “of free, equal, and emancipated people,” the organization of society today “hinders all of that and produces and reproduces a condition of permanent regression among its subjects.”8 Adorno and Habermas are staunch champions of democratic processes and institutions. The rational society to which they devote their work would certainly be a more emphatically democratic one. Along with other researchers at the Institute, Adorno and Habermas also orient their theories towards the normative ends of freedom and autonomy. Indeed, as Horkheimer pointed out in his programmatic 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” critical theory has a profoundly ethical thrust. It is just this normative orientation that distinguishes critical theory from other theories. Horkheimer also states that the goals endorsed by Frankfurt theorists have been forced upon them by “present distress.”9 With its two World Wars, the conﬂicts, famines and diseases that have killed tens of millions of people since 1945, fascism, Stalinism, McCarthyism, the Cold War, globalization, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and environmental disasters, the twentieth century exhibited highly destructive tendencies that persist today. It is the suffering these phenomena have caused that gives rise to the normative goals of a critical theory of society. Speaking for the entire tradition, Adorno once wrote that the goal of a rationally organized society “would be to negate the physical suffering of even the least of its members, and to negate the internal reﬂexive forms of that suffering.”10

Introduction

3

The image of a future society where suffering would be reduced to a minimum can only spring “from a deep understanding of the present.”11 On this, Adorno and Habermas also agree. Both theorists tackle the problems responsible for suffering in their penetrating and extensive analyses of social life in the West. From his essays on fascism, the culture industry, the welfare state, and the pervasiveness of exchange relations, to his more esoteric works on aesthetics and negative dialectics, Adorno plumbed the problematic aspects of life under late capitalism. He insisted that positive change could be effected only on the basis of undiminished, critical insight into our current predicament. For his part, Habermas attempts to gain insight into this predicament by exploring such problems as the crises that periodically afﬂict capitalism, reiﬁcation, civil privatism, democratic deﬁcits in the West, and globalization. Sounding a strongly Adornian note, Habermas remarks in Between Facts and Norms that what the twentieth century, more than any other, has taught us is “the horror of existing unreason.” To put that horror behind us, reason must ﬁrst put itself on trial.12 Some of the more important precursors of critical theory are Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lukács, and Weber. Adorno and Habermas not only draw on aspects of Immanuel Kant’s three critiques, they declare themselves partisans of the enlightenment tradition that Kant described in “What is Enlightenment?” Each sees himself as carrying forward this tradition with its emphasis on rational, autonomous, and critical thought. Adorno claims that his work contributes to enlightenment by promoting the self-critical spirit of reason (ND, 29). His ideal of a rational society in which humanity would no longer be “entrapped by the totality it itself fashions”13 cannot be dissociated “from the immanent process of enlightenment that removes fear and, by erecting the human being as an answer to human beings’ questions, wins the concept of humanitarianism that alone rises above the immanence of the world.”14 While Habermas will question the extent to which Adorno remains faithful to this process, he places his own work squarely within the modern enlightenment tradition. His work is intended to contribute to the project of enlightenment in which individuals progressively free themselves from superstition and authoritarian belief systems and submit to the unforced force of the better argument alone. Although many critical theorists denounce the afﬁrmative conception of reason that emerges in works such as The Philosophy of Right, where reason no longer stands against itself in “purely critical fashion,”15 they recognize that Hegel also advanced the project of enlightenment. With his dialectical conception of reason, Hegel tried, among other things, to resolve the tension between the universal (society) and the particular (the individual). Adorno does not believe that Hegel succeeded, but he agrees that this crucial tension must be resolved dialectically if enlightenment is ever to be fully attained. For Habermas too, the reconciliation of universal

4

Introduction

and particular, which Hegel broached in his Phenomenology of Spirit, is crucial for enlightenment. Equally critical of Hegel’s solution to this problem, Habermas nonetheless endorses the “idealizing supposition of a universalistic form of life, in which everyone can take up the perspective of everyone else and can count on reciprocal recognition by everybody” because this supposition “makes it possible for individuated beings to exist within a community – individualism as the ﬂip-side of universalism.”16 Furthermore, both Adorno and Habermas emphasize the importance of selfreﬂection in their social theories. The imperative that reason should criticize itself owes a great deal to Hegel’s Phenomenology where the progressive development of rationality presupposes that reason has become self-critical. Arguably, the work of Karl Marx is more signiﬁcant than that of either Kant or Hegel for the development of Adorno’s and Habermas’ work. While Adorno, along with other ﬁrst generation critical theorists, questioned Marx’s claim that the proletariat could play the role of the universal subject of history (and Habermas followed suit), he remained indebted throughout his work to Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism and the commodity form. Adorno also adopted Marx’s view that all aspects of society are mediated or, in the words of Martin Jay, that no aspect of society can be understood “as ﬁnal or complete in itself” because social life consists in “a constant interplay of particular and universal.”17 Even Habermas, who progressively dissociates his social theory from a strictly economic analysis, directly links his critical concept of colonization to the problematic of reiﬁed social reality which Marx originally targeted in his critique of commodity fetishism.18 Although he rejects the Marxist premiss that the economic base determines the political, social, and cultural superstructure (an idea that Adorno will revise, but not completely abandon), Habermas accepts the claim that the economy deﬁnes the path of development of Western society.19 Indeed, from the early 1950s to the present day, Habermas’ work has been marked by an extensive polemic with both Marx and Marxism. Adorno and Habermas follow the early Marx in their criticisms of Western reason. While Habermas is a far more circumspect critic, both theorists would agree with the comment Marx made in a letter to Arnold Ruge in 1843 to the effect that “reason has always existed but not always in a rational form.” Assigning to critics the task of deriving from the form of “existing actuality” a truer form of actuality – truer because it is more rational – Marx endorses the ruthless criticism of everything that exists in order to reveal the better potential that inheres in contemporary states of affairs.20 As Seyla Benhabib points out when she quotes Marx’s letter, this project of a critique of reason can be traced back to Hegel who rejects the idea that reason is “a mere principle of thought.” Because reason “must embody and externalize itself in the world,” its embodiment “may fail to give reason its most adequate expression.”21 This conception of reason as

Introduction

5

an imperfect historical phenomenon was also adopted by Georg Lukács who devoted some of his early work to a critical exploration of the form of objectivity or thought that currently shapes our social institutions, procedures, and practices. Lukács’ early work was crucial for the development of critical theory. In particular, his concept of reiﬁcation had a signiﬁcant impact on the work of both Adorno and Habermas. If Adorno deemed reiﬁcation less important than its cause – namely, the “conditions that condemn humankind to impotence and apathy and would yet be changeable by human action” (ND, 190; translation altered) – he dedicated much of his work to understanding both the causes of reiﬁcation and its various manifestations under late capitalism. Like Lukács, he claims that “the imposition of formal rationality on the social world” is largely to blame for those aspects of life under capitalism that Marx ﬁrst criticized.22 Railing against the pervasiveness of formal rationality in the West, Adorno also argues that its damaging effects are so extensive that they may never be repaired. Although Habermas later rejects this ostensibly blanket condemnation of Western reason, he too adopted and revised the concept of reiﬁcation that Lukács had drawn from Marx’s critique of capitalism. In fact, The Theory of Communicative Action was written expressly to address the problem of reiﬁcation.23 Habermas derives his colonization thesis from Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness which, as Wiggershaus remarks, fascinated him when he ﬁrst read it in 1953.24 Lukács’ notion of reiﬁcation relies in part on Max Weber’s theory of rationalization. To cite Andrew Feenberg, Lukács follows Weber in Economy and Society when he argues that reiﬁcation involves “the extension of formalistic, quantifying reason to the phenomena of social life.”25 This idea reappears in works such as Minima Moralia where Adorno laments that “[a]nything that is not reiﬁed, cannot be counted and measured, ceases to exist.”26 Recently, J. M. Bernstein has even advanced the controversial claim that Adorno’s entire philosophical enterprise is “best seen as an inﬂection of Weber’s analysis of disenchantment and societal rationalization.”27 Less controversially, Adorno recasts Weber’s claim that rationalization not only adversely affects science, but subjects social institutions and practices “to the norms of instrumental rationality (efﬁciency, calculability, standardization, etc.).”28 Indeed, Weber’s underdeveloped rationalization thesis probably had a greater inﬂuence on Habermas who borrows extensively from it, while modifying the thesis in line with an insight he attributes to Lukács, namely that “the seemingly complete rationalization of the world has its limit in the formal character of its own rationality,”29 or that the formal rationality Adorno condemned can never be totalizing. For Habermas, the process of rationalization has been beneﬁcial in many respects. The rationalization of everyday life not only contributes to enlightenment, it also serves to counter the colonizing incursions of the economic and political systems.

6

Introduction

Given the intellectual background they share, it is not surprising that Habermas’ earlier work sounded so many Adornian themes. Nevertheless, with his positive assessment of the rationalization of the lifeworld, Habermas ends by taking a very different path from the one that Adorno followed. Indeed, in retrospect it is somewhat ironic that, in his review of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Dahrendorf disparages Habermas’ disillusioning view of life in Western democracies on the grounds that domination has never been as unlimited as Habermas believes, and that there are countervailing powers which have had a decisive and positive inﬂuence on society.30 In hindsight, this criticism is ironic because what Habermas now holds against Adorno himself is just his disillusioning view of life under late capitalism – a view that Habermas describes as biased because it focuses on the pathological tendencies in modernity to the virtual exclusion of countertendencies (TCA II, 391). In my comparison of the two theories, I shall also offer a critical assessment of Habermas’ positive claims about the development of Western society and Adorno’s largely negative dialectics of social life. Chapter 1 provides a broad overview of the two social theories. It describes in very general terms Adorno’s and Habermas’ critical accounts of Western societies. Rejecting the claim advanced in much of the secondary literature that Adorno adopted Friedrich Pollock’s state capitalism thesis, I argue that Adorno actually claimed the economy had become such a dominant force that exchange relations now permeate all aspects of life in the West. I then examine Habermas’ account of the relations between the economic and political systems and social life today before contrasting Adorno’s and Habermas’ views about the nature and extent of domination in the West. Habermas argues that the economy and the state are autopoietic systems that exhibit a type of rationality which must be distinguished from the rationality characteristic of everyday life. While the functionally rational economic and political subsystems have had some adverse effects on life in the West owing to their colonizing incursions into the lifeworld, Habermas maintains that these effects are far less damaging than Adorno believes. At the end of the ﬁrst chapter, I take a critical look at Habermas’ conception of the lifeworld. This examination introduces the more extensive discussion of reiﬁcation in Chapter 2. Making use of Lukács’ critical concept as a tool for diagnosing what ails modern life today, Adorno and Habermas nonetheless differ signiﬁcantly in their views about reiﬁcation. Adorno’s concept of reiﬁcation remains close to its Marxist origins in commodity fetishism; Adorno was interested in the social and psychological problems that had developed as exchange relations extended their reifying effects throughout society. However, Habermas objects to Adorno’s predominantly economic interpretation of reiﬁcation. Despite the obvious beneﬁts it confers on individuals, the welfare state is equally to blame for reiﬁcation, and Habermas focuses on the colonization of the

Introduction

7

lifeworld by the political system. At the same time, he claims that communicative rationality, which characterizes action in the lifeworld, acts as a countervailing power to reiﬁcation. I examine these arguments at some length before proceeding at the end of the chapter to assess Habermas’ critical remarks about globalization in works such as The Postnational Constellation. Since it is the prevailing form of rationality that Adorno and Habermas put on trial in their work, Chapter 3 focuses at greater length on their distinct conceptions of reason. Adorno’s claim that Western reason currently takes the destructive form of identity-thinking is further contrasted with Habermas’ contention that communicative practices in the lifeworld remain basically rational despite the colonizing incursions of functionalist rationality. In this chapter, I also discuss their ideas about the historical development of reason. Agreeing that reason has evolved, Adorno claims that reason cannot (and, indeed, must not) ever break free from the natural drive for self-preservation, while Habermas argues that reason has already broken with nature in an emancipatory fashion. These contrasting views about the relationship between nature and reason ﬁgure prominently in Chapter 3. It is here that Adorno’s debt to Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis sharply distinguishes his work from that of Habermas. In the last section of the chapter, I evaluate Habermas’ claim in Legitimation Crisis that he exhibits the greater partiality for reason. Arguing that Adorno can no longer make any appeal whatsoever to reason because he believes that reason is utterly distorted, Habermas restates his longstanding objection that Adorno lacks a viable foundation for his critique. The problem of whether Adorno has adequately grounded his critique of late capitalism is one I explore in Chapter 4. Beginning with a discussion of the views of each theorist about ideology and ideology critique, I examine Adorno’s claims about liberal ideology and its contemporary positivist counterpart before turning to Habermas’ description of the historical genesis of ideology in the West, and his controversial thesis (borrowed from Daniel Bell) of the end of ideology. Where Adorno focuses his criticisms on the ideological effects of the identiﬁcatory reason that underlies exchange relations, what is ultimately at issue for Habermas is not ideology critique, but a critique of the colonization of the lifeworld by the economic and political subsystems. Targeting different phenomena, both critical theorists must nonetheless demonstrate that their theories offer a solid basis for a critique of the damage caused to human life by reiﬁcation. Once I have examined Habermas’ objection that Adorno’s critical social theory lacks a viable foundation, I scrutinize the basis for Habermas’ own critique of colonization. The chapter ends with an evaluation of the critical leverage offered by Habermas’ discourse theory of democracy in Between Facts and Norms. For Adorno and Habermas, critical theory has a practical intent: it is designed to provide the theoretical basis for surmounting reiﬁcation by

8

Introduction

examining its manifestations within human life while locating the rational potential in reiﬁed reality that points beyond it. Yet, given their conﬂicting accounts of the damage caused by the economic and political systems, it is not surprising that Adorno and Habermas disagree about what should be done to repair it. Chapter 5 explores these disagreements with a view to contrasting their ideas on emancipation. Adorno was so pessimistic about prospects for change that he questioned whether it is possible even to conceive of a more rational society. Yet he also maintained that a critical theory of society is needed if we are ever to achieve this emancipatory goal. Habermas advances a markedly different idea of what constitutes a rational society when he argues that social conditions need be reformed only because they already exhibit a rational character. It is in the context of their discussion of emancipation that Adorno and Habermas address the Hegelian problem of reconciling society and the individual. Chapter 5 concludes with an appraisal of their ideas on reconciliation. In Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society, I explore themes and ideas that are central to Adorno’s and Habermas’ social theories. This book is in part an expository tract that simultaneously maps the theoretical terrain occupied by both theories while examining some of the more important issues that divide them. Throughout their work, Adorno and Habermas pursue a common goal on the basis of shared premisses. While they disagree about what ails Western society and what can be done to solve its many problems, these disagreements should not obscure their common belief that there is an intrinsic connection between Occidental rationality, or the form of thought prevalent in the West, and social conditions today. Starting from this premiss, their critical social theories diverge in their claims about the character of Western reason, the pathologies that reason both exhibits and causes, and the prospects for remedying these pathologies. By comparing the two theories, I have been able to plumb the properly critical dimension of Adorno’s and Habermas’ work. For what is critical about their theories is just their evaluation of the existing organization of Western society, its institutions, practices, and forms of social life, in the interest of establishing a rational society. Apart from its expository aim, this book also has a polemical dimension to the extent that it engages with the controversial issues treated by ﬁrst and second generation critical theory with a view to taking a position on them. In fact, throughout this book, I shall defend Adorno against Habermas’ inﬂuential critique. The problem of deciding which theorist offers the better account of Western society is not academic in the pejorative sense of that term; it has ramiﬁcations for the way we think about ourselves and the world in which we live. Among the issues that divide Adorno and Habermas are the effects of exchange relations on individuals and social groups, the plight of the family and the public sphere today, and prospects for establishing more fully egalitarian human relations in order to foster greater social solidarity. Moreover, the two theorists dis-

Introduction

9

agree about the negative impact of welfare state agencies and procedures on our personal and interpersonal lives, and the scope and limits of democratic institutions in the West. By raising these issues in a critical and comparative context, I hope that readers will be encouraged to reﬂect further on our contemporary social predicament. I also hope that this book will be judged as much by the cogency of its defence of Adorno as by whether it brings to life the controversies generated within critical theory; that is, whether it succeeds in demonstrating that these controversies remain relevant to our self-understanding because they touch on problems that no one endowed with the capacity for self-reﬂection can plausibly ignore.

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Adorno and Habermas agree about the primacy of the capitalist economic system in Western nations today. Although the liberal democratic welfare state occupies a prominent place in both social theories because social welfare schemes have helped to pacify class conﬂict even as they foster dependency on state agencies and institutions, Adorno and Habermas contend that the welfare state remains subordinate to the economic engine of Western societies. They also share the view that action within both the economic and political spheres exhibits a distinct type of rationality that has increasingly made itself felt outside of these spheres. Adorno often uses the terms “identity-thinking” and “exchange principle” (Tauschprinzip) to designate this rationality, while Habermas variously refers to it as “functionalist rationality,” “cognitive-instrumental rationality” and, in a Weberian vein, “purposive rationality.” On a very general level, then, Adorno and Habermas view late capitalist societies as characterized by a “form of objectivity” (a term that Georg Lukács borrowed from Wilhelm Dilthey, which Habermas also adopts1), or by a speciﬁc type of rationality that not only shapes our interaction with the environment but determines our “inner and outer life.”2 They also maintain that the negative effects of this form of objectivity are currently felt throughout society. Equating “the commodity character of the commodity” with “the abstract, quantitative mode of calculability” that determines a commodity’s exchange value,3 Georg Lukács argued that the process of societal rationalization consists in the coercive extension of such abstract calculability to “every aspect of life.”4 Adorno aligns himself with Lukács when he inveighs against the damage that the exchange principle has inﬂicted on human beings both within and outside of the economic sphere. By contrast, Habermas maintains that the rationality characteristic of the economic and political systems is not problematic when it is conﬁned to regulating the action of agents within those systems. In fact, he argues that systems rationality is beneﬁcial because it ensures the indispensable material reproduction of society. Yet Habermas does concede that instrumental or functionalist rationality becomes problematic when it extends beyond the economy and the state, and penetrates “into areas of action that resist

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being converted over to the media of money and power because they are specialized in cultural transmission, social integration, and child rearing, and remain dependent on mutual understanding as a mechanism for coordinating action.”5 According to Habermas, what is distinctive about Western societies is just this unilateral penetration of systems rationality into the area of action that is coordinated by mutual understanding, an area he calls the lifeworld. With his concept of the lifeworld, Habermas distances himself from the Marxist tradition to which Adorno remains tied even as he modiﬁes Marxist theory by, among other things, supplementing it with Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Recognizing that the reifying incursions of the economic and political systems have damaged life in the West, Habermas expressly opposes Adorno when he contends that the symbolically selfreproducing lifeworld inherently resists these incursions owing to its multivalent communicative rationality. On Adorno’s far more sombre view, late capitalism’s ratio – the exchange principle – has reduced human beings to fungible, commensurable values, expunging what makes them particular or unique. This levelling of difference, or of heterogeneity, by exchange relations is now so extensive that thought and behaviour, instincts and needs have also been corrupted. Adorno maintains that exchange relations have invaded human life to the point where, to cite the bleak epigraph to Minima Moralia, life no longer lives. He devotes his work to understanding the myriad ways in which individual, social, and cultural life have been subordinated to, and distorted by, the exchange principle. Sharing some of Adorno’s concerns about the reiﬁcation of life in the West, Habermas nonetheless argues that, in the course of social evolution, distinct modes of symbolic interaction developed that continue to protect the lifeworld against the functionalist rationality of the autopoietic economic and political systems and the instrumental rationality of their agents. As a result, Habermas strongly disagrees with Adorno about the nature and extent of domination today. In this chapter, the divergent claims of these critical theorists about the structure and organization of Western societies will be examined with the aim of broadly characterizing the differences between their views on domination under capitalism. Since the differences between the two theorists may ultimately be traced to Habermas’ adoption of the lifeworld concept, the chapter will end with a critical discussion of this concept.

1 State capitalist or late capitalist society? In the secondary literature on Adorno, the claim is often made that he (along with Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse) adopted Friedrich Pollock’s thesis to the effect that there has been a transition in Western countries “from a predominantly economic to an essentially political era.”6 Although Pollock also qualiﬁed what soon came to be known as his state

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capitalism thesis, he did claim that the power motive was in the process of supplanting the proﬁt motive in both command economies (Nazi Germany, for example) and mixed economies (such as the economy of the United States under Roosevelt’s New Deal). Pollock’s thesis generated a great deal of controversy among co-workers at the Institute for Social Research. In Behemoth, for example, which offers a detailed critical analysis of economic conditions under the Third Reich, Franz Neumann rejects the application of this thesis to Nazi Germany, asserting that the German economy under Hitler remained “a private monopolistic economy.” Conceding that the monopolistic economy was “regimented by the totalitarian state,”7 Neumann also maintained that economic activity in Nazi Germany retained much of its independence from state control. In their accounts of Adorno’s position on the state capitalism thesis, commentators such as Helmut Dubiel, David Held, William Scheuerman, and Douglas Kellner maintain that he sided with Pollock against Neumann, applying the state capitalism thesis to both Nazi Germany and other Western countries.8 According to these commentators, then, Adorno argued that political domination had superseded economic domination in the West; they thereby imply that Adorno rejected Marx’s view of the primacy of the economic sphere over the political one. It is important to understand Adorno’s position on Pollock’s thesis, not only in order to situate Adorno’s critical and theoretical endeavours with respect to the Marxist tradition, but also to understand his ideas about the underlying structure and dynamics of Western society. Adorno discussed the relationship between the capitalist economy and the welfare state throughout his work.9 For example, in an early 1942 essay entitled “Reﬂexionen zur Klassentheorie” (Observations on the Theory of Classes), Adorno remarks on the growing “liquidation of the economy”10 while continuing to stress its primacy. In this essay, however, he neither explicitly nor implicitly condones Pollock’s view that state control over the economy characterizes the most recent phase of capitalism in the West. Furthermore, even though he remarks on the emergence of a new oligarchical ruling class in many Western countries, Adorno also maintains that this class has disappeared “behind the concentration of capital.” This concentration has reached such a “size and acquired such a critical mass that capital appears to be an institution, an expression of the entire society” (RK, 380). Owing in part to the concentration of capital, the ruling class has become “anonymous” in the sense that it has become difﬁcult to identify the groups and individuals who actually wield power today. In this early essay, Adorno describes the economy as “totalitarian”; its totalitarian character is due in part to the lack of competition under monopoly conditions. To be sure, Adorno did make reference to “the immediate economic and political command of ‘the great’ [der Großen] that oppresses both those who support it [the bourgeoisie] and the workers with the same

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police threat, [and] imposes on them the same function and the same need” (RK, 380). Here Adorno suggests that power in mass societies is wielded by both economic and political agents – though he does not state explicitly that the former are subordinated to the latter. Yet Adorno also claims in this essay that Western political systems follow the lead of economic developments, including changes in relations of production. That economic factors remain primary in mass societies is supported further by Adorno’s claims about the pervasiveness of reiﬁcation and the continued existence of classes. If he had adopted Pollock’s state capitalism thesis, Adorno would have been obliged to qualify carefully the idea he reiterates throughout his work that, under the guise of exchange value, the market system now permeates virtually all areas of human life. And he certainly would not have stated so baldly in a later essay that “[p]roﬁt comes ﬁrst in mass societies.”11 In Behemoth, Neumann remarked: “If one believes that Germany’s economy is no longer capitalistic under National Socialism, it is easy to believe further that her society has become classless.”12 Paraphrasing Neumann, one could equally well argue that if Adorno believed that the capitalist economy was no longer the predominant system in most Western states, he would probably also have denied the existence of class stratiﬁcation. Yet Adorno insisted on the continued existence of classes in the West – as should already be clear from his remarks in “Reﬂexionen zur Klassentheorie.” Although the subjective awareness of belonging to a class has certainly diminished, and the composition of classes has changed, Adorno stated that “the division of society into exploiters and exploited not only continues to exist but gains in force and strength” (RK, 377). The bourgeoisie – formerly comprised of relatively independent businessmen or entrepreneurs – lost much of its economic power when the earlier liberal stage of capitalism was transformed by the concentration of capital in monopolies (and the corresponding decrease in competition). This development led in turn to the formation of a new mass class comprising both workers and the economically disenfranchised middle class. On Adorno’s view, this change in the composition of classes in the later stage of capitalism conﬁrms Marx’s prediction about a society stratiﬁed into a “few property owners and the overwhelming mass of the propertyless” (RK, 380). Adorno repeats these ideas about the persistence of classes in much of his later work. For example, in his 1965 essay, “Society,” he maintained that “society remains class society” (S, 149; translation altered) because “the difference between the classes grows objectively with the increasing concentration of capital” (S, 150). Three years later, in “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?,” Adorno clearly linked his analysis of classes to the idea that economic forces predominate. If one were to argue that mass societies are industrial rather than capitalist in character, this would mistakenly imply that they have become “so thoroughly dominated by

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unanticipated technological developments that the notion of social relations . . . has by comparison lost much of its relevance, if it has not become illusory altogether.”13 By contrast, if, as Adorno believes, relations of production are paramount (and forces of production are “mediated by the relations of production”), then the industrial society thesis is not true in all respects because the economic system continues to prevail (LC, 242). Recognizing that some aspects of Marx’s analysis are no longer applicable to conditions today, Adorno nonetheless uses his criterion of ownership of, and control over, the means of production to appraise class membership (LC, 233). He also asserts that class relations are most obvious in North America (LC, 236). Adorno does admit that there is some truth to the claim that political control over the economy is growing. The claim that “control of economic forces is increasingly becoming a function of political power is true in the sense that it can be deduced from the dynamics of the system as a whole” (LC, 237). Expressed as a general tendency, then, state power is gaining ground (and Nazi Germany becomes the prototype for trends that are more or less latent in other Western nations). Still, Adorno strongly limits this claim about the primacy of the political system in most Western countries when he adds that there are “compelling facts which cannot in their turn, be adequately interpreted without invoking the key concept of ‘capitalism’.” Because Adorno remains convinced that “[h]uman beings are, as much as ever, ruled and dominated by the economic process,” he also believes that “[n]ow as much as ever, the societal process produces and reproduces a class structure” (LC, 237). The state capitalism thesis is conﬁrmed only in light of very general economic trends or tendencies in mass societies. So, although David Held is certainly correct when he notes an “ambivalence” in Adorno’s later work with regard to Pollock’s state capitalism thesis,14 this ambivalence is not conﬁned to the later work. Adorno’s ambivalence appears again in his response to Ralf Dahrendorf ’s criticisms of his essay on late capitalism when he remarks that late capitalist societies do manifest a tendency towards the primacy of the political. Nevertheless, he explains that political control over the economy in the West is itself the outgrowth of economic conditions. He then proceeds to argue that if this economically driven trend towards political domination were to continue, “contemporary society would, to put it succinctly, steer directly towards forms that are deﬁned meta-economically – that is, towards forms which are no longer deﬁned by classical exchange mechanisms.”15 Yet Adorno did not think it inevitable that this tendency – and he states explicitly here that he is speaking of a tendency, as opposed to a fully realized state of affairs – would actually come to fruition. Only if it did would a state capitalist reading of the “totally administered world” be substantiated. Hence, Scheuerman’s remarks about the administered world’s totalitarian political character are not substantiated by Adorno himself.16

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At the end of his essay on late capitalism, Adorno also offers a number of equally brief but interesting observations about the factors responsible for state intervention in the economy. He describes this intervention as “immanent to the system” – a form of “self-defense” (LC, 244; translation altered). Since he immediately preceded this remark with a discussion of relations of production (or class relations) under late capitalism, Adorno seems to imply that state intervention (in the form of a mixed economy or state planning) represents a defence against class conﬂict. Consequently, Adorno is espousing the view that state intervention was initiated – at least in part – as a response to social conﬂicts (real or perceived), and was geared to pacifying these conﬂicts. While this view is problematic,17 it is also shared by Habermas. For both social theorists, state intervention in the economy serves to counter the threat arising from “unrevolutionized relations of production” whose power today is greater than it was in the past (LC, 243). Making reference to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Adorno agrees that the relationship between the state and the economy shapes the immanent dialectics of bourgeois societies. For Hegel, the state develops through the interplay of laws and interests in civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) where individuals satisfy their needs and interests by way of exchange in the marketplace and through other forms of association. On his account, however, the state ultimately sublates the economy because it intervenes in civil society “from the outside with the help of the police” (LC, 244; translation altered). Here the “police” (Polizei) – which, for Hegel, include public authorities concerned with alleviating poverty, providing health care, and maintaining the material infrastructure of society – help the state to “actualize and maintain the universal contained within the particularity of civil society” by mediating between private relations (in the family, for example) and the state. Police control “takes the form of an external system and organization for the protection and security of particular ends and interests en masse, inasmuch as these interests subsist only in this universal.”18 With the “police,” then, the universal interests of the state succeed in prevailing over the particular interests of civil society, including economic interests. Still, Adorno refuses to apply Hegel’s account of state intervention to conditions in mass societies, just as he rejects the application of Pollock’s thesis to these conditions: “If it has long been argued on the basis of interventionism and, even more, of centralized planning, that late capitalism is far removed from the anarchy of commodity production and is therefore no longer capitalism, one must respond that the social fate of individuals is just as precarious as it was in the past.” If critics have tried to show that the liberal market never worked in the way its liberal apologists have claimed – that it was never a truly “free” market – Adorno thinks it ironic that this critique of liberalism has been “revived in the thesis that capitalism is not really capitalistic” (LC, 244; translation altered). In opposition

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to this thesis, he not only argues that the economic system has survived owing in part to state intervention; he also claims that such intervention has actually served to ensure the continued primacy of the economy: “What is extraneous to the [socio-economic] system reveals itself as constitutive of the system, even the political tendency itself. With interventionism, the resistive power of the system is conﬁrmed” (LC, 244–5; translation altered). At the same time, Adorno repeats remarks he had made earlier when he acknowledges that state intervention tendentially conﬁrms “the crisis theory of capitalism.” It does so because “the telos of state intervention is direct political domination independent of market mechanisms” (LC, 245; translation altered). Aided by the police and the military, and abetted by public authorities (such as state welfare agencies and institutions), the state begins to play a more prominent role within society as a whole. Once again, however, this growing trend towards political domination has never been fully realized in most Western states. Supplementing his interpretation of Hegel in his response to Dahrendorf, Adorno writes that by “evoking powers from out of itself – the so-called corporations and police” – civil society attempts to “function integrally” so as not to “fall to pieces.” While Hegel saw this “as something positive, in the meantime we have learned most thoroughly from fascism . . . what the renewed transition to direct domination can mean.”19 Hegel’s early nineteenth-century view of the transition to political domination serves to elucidate the changes that took place in only one Western country: Nazi Germany. This account – which views state primacy as enforced in part by the police and the military – therefore has a limited application, even though, once again, it may be used to explain totalitarian tendencies in other Western nations. This last point should help to clarify Adorno’s position on Pollock’s state capitalism thesis. Although he thought that this thesis applied to the situation in Nazi Germany (and to this extent he disagrees with Neumann20), Adorno was not convinced that it could be applied without qualiﬁcation to other Western countries. At best, the state capitalism thesis signals certain ominous trends in the West.

2 Habermas on late capitalist society21 Adorno never abandoned Marx’s postulate about the primacy of the economic base. In this respect, he and Habermas appear to be in basic agreement. Habermas asserts that “Marx was right to assign an evolutionary primacy to the economy” in the West because “problems in this subsystem determine the path of development of the society as a whole” (TCA II, 343). In stark contrast to both Marx and Adorno, however, Habermas traces the primacy of the economy back to the evolution of those learning processes that accompanied the rationalization of the lifeworld: the emergence and subsequent primacy of the economic system could only come

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about once the lifeworld had become “sufﬁciently rationalized” (TCA II, 173). Before discussing what the economy’s primacy actually entails for Habermas’ critical theory of society, I shall ﬁrst describe the connection he makes between the rationalization of the lifeworld and the rise of the economy as the leading steering mechanism in the West.22 In brief, rationalization refers to learning processes in which individuals progressively distinguish between the objective, social (or normative), and subjective domains of experience, and develop argumentation procedures for discursively redeeming validity claims for each.23 In the earlier phases of this process, law began to assume the form of “an external force, imposed from without,” while morality (the normative domain) was “deinstitutionalized” in the sense that it no longer found its sanction in kinship structures but was “anchored only in the personality system as an internal control on behavior” (TCA II, 174). Once law and judicial ofﬁces were differentiated from moral prescriptions and moral authority, the state centralized its control over the “means of sanction” (TCA II, 177). As the process of rationalization advanced, however, the religious and metaphysical worldviews that had served the state well by providing its laws with their legitimation in divinely inspired or transcendentally grounded rights started to lose their binding and blinding force; they were no longer accepted on the basis of authority alone. At this point, the legitimacy of the state could be challenged because its policies and procedures required justiﬁcation. With the emergence of democratic political systems to meet the new demands for legitimation, the state relinquished its economic functions, handing them over to what Habermas describes as “a block of more or less norm-free sociality:” the capitalist economic system (TCA II, 171). Responsibility for the material reproduction of society fell increasingly to the economy because power was “less suited for the role of a steering medium designed to relieve us of the burdens and risks of consensus formation in language than is money, which needs no legitimation” (TCA II, 272). Once it had developed “its own intrinsic dynamic of growth,” then, the economic system took “the lead, that is, the evolutionary primacy, for society as a whole” (TCA II, 384). According to Habermas, there are three principal modes of action coordination in Western societies. The ﬁrst involves communicative processes that are geared to reaching understanding (Verständigung), or agreement (Einverständnis), about aspects of the objective, social, and subjective worlds. The second – the instrumental or strategic – is said to be derivative of the ﬁrst: it involves an exclusively objectivating attitude towards the world, other people, and oneself, where the primary aim is success in the form of the acquisition of proﬁt or power. By contrast, in the third mode of action coordination, actions are coordinated behind the backs, so to speak, of the actors themselves “through functional interconnections.” This third, functional, mode of action coordination is found in the capitalist marketplace which Habermas deems “the most

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important example of a norm-free regulation of cooperative contexts.” For Habermas: “The market is one of those systemic mechanisms that stabilize nonintended interconnections of action by way of functionally intermeshing action consequences, whereas the mechanism of mutual understanding harmonizes the action orientations of participants” (TCA II, 150). Indeed, Habermas portrays the dynamics of the capitalist economy in terms recalling Adam Smith’s essentially benign Invisible Hand which is beyond the control – and justiﬁably remains beyond the control – of any individual or group of individuals. In liberal democratic political systems as well, action is coordinated largely through functional interconnections: the liberal democratic state and its administrative apparatus are steered by power imperatives and by the strategic interests of actors in acquiring and enhancing power. Like money, power also encodes “a purposive-rational attitude toward calculable amounts of value.” This “attitude” allows the state and its bureaucracies “to exert generalized, strategic inﬂuence on the decisions of other participants while bypassing processes of consensus-oriented communication” (TCA II, 183). However, in response to Thomas McCarthy, who has argued that, on both the empirical and normative levels, Habermas has conceded too much to systems theory,24 Habermas claims that the political system is equally dependent upon symbolically generated consensusformation because it relies on the lifeworld for its legitimation. The state has forfeited its former primacy, playing a lesser role in the material reproduction of society because it now requires time-consuming legitimation through the freely given consent of its citizens in elections and referenda. The problem of understanding why Habermas adopted a functionalist account of both the economic and political systems has spawned some interesting speculation.25 This account appears suspect to some commentators on the grounds that it does not correspond to the actual operation of these systems. In fact, Habermas himself seems to acknowledge the disparity in The Theory of Communicative Action when he argues that, even within the economy and the state, “interactions are still connected via the mechanism of mutual understanding.” Yet Habermas immediately qualiﬁes this claim. Economic and political interactions have also been “ethically neutralized” owing to the legally constituted organization of the economy and the state. Consequently, “communicative action forfeits its validity basis in the interior of organizations” (TCA II, 310; emphasis in original). The capitalist economy and the liberal democratic welfare state have become autopoietic systems and must remain so, owing to their evergrowing complexity and to the intolerable burdens that would be placed on the lifeworld if its members had to reach agreement about their day-today operations. This often evinced “burdensomeness” notwithstanding, Hans Joas has probably adduced the more compelling reason for Habermas’ adoption of

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functionalism. Joas argues that Habermas ultimately ascribes functional independence or autonomy to the subsystems “because he does not see the theory of action in relation to the task of describing collective actions, of describing the constitution of collective actors and identities.” This argument obviously requires a little unpacking. Against Marx, Habermas has maintained consistently throughout his work that there is no collective subject that could ever take control of the economic and political systems, guiding them towards rational ends. On Joas’ reading, while Habermas concedes that both nation-states and political parties can, and have, embodied universalizable goals, he rejects the idea of a national or political collective subject when he argues that nationalistic consciousness carries with it “the danger of a particularist regression.” Hence, Joas attributes Habermas’ adoption of functionalism partly to his rejection of the völkisch political culture of Nazi Germany. With its subjectless Invisible Hand, Habermas’ functionalism is designed from the outset to exclude a collectivity such as this. Accordingly, Habermas also rejects the claim that the proletariat could ever become the subject of history. In contrast to Adorno, who never excluded the possibility that a collective subject (in the form of needful species being) might one day emerge26 (while identifying the virtually insurmountable obstacles that impede its emergence), Habermas suspects “that any theory centred on the constitution of collective actors promotes (a) the reiﬁcation of organizations into collective subjects and (b) the assumption made by the philosophy of history that the history of humanity has a single persisting subject.”27 For reasons both historical and theoretical, then, the economic and political systems must remain independent of the collectivities or groups generated within the lifeworld. However, it should be noted that Habermas speculates later that a more democratic form of collective consciousness might be constructed within nations; here the “solidarity of citizens” would be “shifted onto the more abstract foundation of a ‘constitutional patriotism’.” This type of solidarity would take the form of adherence to constitutional principles that endorse self-determination.28 Having brieﬂy discussed some of the reasons for Habermas’ adoption of functionalism, I shall now turn to his account of the relationship between the economy and the state. In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas claims very generally that the “state apparatus” is “connected up with production via the yield from taxes on those employed.” Taxation makes the state “dependent” on the economy, forcing it to “reorganize.” In turn, this reorganization “leads, among other things, to an assimilation of power to the structure of a steering medium: power becomes assimilated to money” (TCA II, 171). Nevertheless, even as he acknowledges the assimilation of power to money (a claim he modiﬁes in his political essays on globalization and the disempowerment of the liberal democratic state29), Habermas staunchly rejects Marx’s “economistically foreshortened interpretation of developed capitalist societies” because it tends to

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“mislead us into tailoring the complementary relationship between the economy and the state apparatus to a trivial notion of base and superstructure” (TCA II, 343). To reduce the political system to a mere reﬂection of the economic base is to give short shrift to the new form of class compromise effected by the welfare state. Agreeing with Adorno, Habermas contends that class divisions continue to exist, while arguing that their existence is currently masked or concealed by collective bargaining processes and welfare state compensations. Class conﬂict has become latent because disparities in income and opportunity have effectively been offset by the social safety net, along with better wages, beneﬁts, and working conditions for employees.30 Yet Habermas differs from Adorno when he claims that the state now enjoys close connections with the lifeworld (in the form of the opinions, values, interests, and concerns of its citizenry). Whereas problems in the economy determine the development of society as a whole, the liberal democratic state has the role of interpreting and responding to “problems that concern society as a whole.”31 The state responds both to crises in the economy and to the problems these crises have spawned within the lifeworld itself; hence its introduction of social welfare policies and procedures. For Habermas, there is an “indissoluble tension” between the capitalist economy and the liberal democratic welfare state – a tension located in the opposition between two “principles of societal integration” that “compete for primacy” (TCA II, 345). Very generally, society is integrated in two different ways, both socially and systemically. Because they require legitimation from the public sphere, Western states depend ultimately on the success of social integration: their claim to legitimacy “can be redeemed only through the socially integrative force of the ‘concurring and united will of all’ free and equal citizens” (BFN, 32). In their constitutions, then, political systems in the West “assert the primacy of a lifeworld in relation to the subsystems separated out of its institutional orders”; that is, they endorse the will of the people as the touchstone for democratic decision-making. At the same time, however, liberal democracies also bank on the success of the capitalist economy which must “be kept as free as possible from lifeworld restrictions as well as from the demands for legitimation directed to the administrative system” (TCA II, 345). Again, the Invisible Hand of the economy must be allowed to operate more or less independently of lifeworld concerns because it is only by operating independently that the economy can adequately ensure the material reproduction of society. Consequently, the political system ﬁnds itself between a rock and a hard place, so to speak. It must respond not only to the will of the people it is constitutionally bound to represent but also to the demands of the economic system. It may therefore be more accurate to say that the “tension” between social integration and system integration (the two forms of societal integration) lies within the political system itself

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– because this system must respond to qualitatively distinct demands – rather than between the political and economic systems. In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas describes the position occupied by Western political systems as “asymmetrical.” Once again, the liberal democratic state is both a “functionally speciﬁed action system . . . limited by other functional systems” – especially by the economy – and a “constitutionally regulated action system . . . connected with the public sphere” because it “depends on lifeworld sources of communicative power” (BFN, 385). Liberal democratic states ignore problems in the lifeworld at their own peril: without legitimation from the lifeworld, they risk either being riven by conﬂicts that impede their ability to function effectively, or becoming totalitarian. The dependence of the political system on the lifeworld is at once genetic – because this system emerged from the protean lifeworld, and remains grounded in its institutions – and ideal or normative because it is constitutionally endorsed in a system of rights that must be discursively redeemed by lifeworld members. Indeed, despite his recognition of the primacy of the economy and the pivotal position that the political system occupies within Western societies, Habermas asserts that “the lifeworld remains the subsystem that deﬁnes the pattern of the social system as a whole” (TCA II, 154). The lifeworld can deﬁne this pattern because its institutions not only anchor the “evolutionarily leading system mechanism” – the money-steered economy – they also anchor the power-driven liberal democratic state (TCA II, 168). With his notion of the lifeworld as the anchor or “base” for the economy and the state, of course, Habermas not only bids farewell to Adorno, but to Marx as well. He portrays “capitalism and the apparatus of the modern state as subsystems differentiated off from the system of institutions, that is, from the societal components of the lifeworld, via the media of money and power” (TCA II, 318). These institutions are “the legitimate orders through which participants regulate their memberships in social groups and thereby secure solidarity” (TCA II, 138). Money is “normatively anchored,” or institutionalized, “in bourgeois civil law such as property and contract”; power is institutionalized “via the public-legal organization of ofﬁces” (TCA II, 270). It would therefore appear as though the capitalist economic system is really only “primary” with respect to the political system. For Habermas maintains that the fact that money and power “have to be anchored in lifeworld institutions speaks prima facie for the primacy of socially integrated spheres of action over objectiﬁed systemic networks” (TCA II, 312). By implication, the primacy of the lifeworld may also speak for the primacy of symbolic reproduction over material reproduction. However, before the plausibility of this controversial claim can be evaluated, Habermas’ conception of the lifeworld should be described in greater detail.32 Borrowing the concept from Husserl, who put it to good use in his criticisms of the European sciences, Habermas transforms it into the

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linguistically constituted and intersubjectively shared background knowledge on which communicative action, which aims at reaching understanding about the objective, social, and subjective worlds, relies. According to Habermas: “Participants draw from this lifeworld not just consensual patterns of interpretation (the background knowledge from which propositional contents are fed), but also normatively reliable patterns of social relations (the tacitly presupposed solidarities on which illocutionary acts are based) and the competences acquired in socialization processes (the background of the speaker’s intentions).”33 These patterns and competences are themselves generated in processes of reaching understanding which symbolically reproduce the structural components of the rationalized lifeworld: culture, society, and personality. Habermas describes the (benignly) circular process in this way: “[c]ommunicative action not only depends upon cultural knowledge, legitimate orders, and competences developed through socialization; it not only feeds off the resources of the lifeworld; it is itself the medium through which the symbolic structures of the lifeworld are reproduced” (TCA II, 255). Communicative action contributes to the reproduction of culture through the acquisition, transmission, and critique of knowledge. To this extent, it exhibits cognitive-instrumental rationality. But such action is also rational in a moral-practical sense: it contributes to the reproduction of society (the social world of institutions, or “legitimate orders,” on which the political and economic subsystems rest) by virtue of its discursive redemption of moral and ethical claims that foster social integration. Finally, communicative action is rational in an aesthetic and expressive sense; it contributes to personality formation (the subjective world) by discursively redeeming claims to sincerity and honesty, helping to socialize individuals – presumably by fostering trust (TCA II, 144). Communicatively achieved agreement about aspects of the cultural, social, and subjective worlds becomes sedimented in background knowledge to which reference is made either implicitly or explicitly in subsequent processes of reaching understanding. It is this notion of a relatively autonomous lifeworld, with its holistic communicative rationality which “ﬁnds its criteria in the argumentative procedures for directly or indirectly redeeming claims to propositional truth, normative rightness, subjective truthfulness, and aesthetic harmony,”34 that most obviously distinguishes Habermas’ account of society from Adorno’s. The distinction Habermas makes between the discursively engendered lifeworld and the functionalist subsystems has received much critical attention in the secondary literature. In his discussion of Durkheim’s theory of the division of labour, Habermas asserts that it is the French sociologist’s distinction between “social integration and system integration” that “calls for a corresponding differentiation of the concept of society itself” (TCA II, 117). Thus he explicitly bases his distinction between system and lifeworld on the differences between these two modes of societal integration.

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Against this, however, one could bring to bear Habermas’ own objections to basing this distinction on differences between hermeneutic and functional modes of action coordination.35 Although the economic and political systems presuppose, rely on, and “feed off” social integration, they simultaneously undermine it when they insinuate themselves into the lifeworld and distort social integration by substituting for it. As a result of this substitution, “social integration proceeds via norms of domination . . . and consensus formation in language which fulﬁls the conditions for latent strategic action.”36 In other words, system integration operates within lifeworld contexts, just as social integration plays a role within the systems. Consequently, the distinction between system and lifeworld cannot adequately be grounded on the distinction between the two types of societal integration. It could be argued that the distinction between system and lifeworld actually depends on a related distinction: a distinction between the domains of material reproduction and symbolic reproduction.37 While Habermas often does differentiate between system and lifeworld on this basis, he does not elaborate on this distinction and defend it. Indeed, at one point, he concedes that the symbolically reproduced lifeworld itself performs functions of material reproduction.38 More important, when he attributes largely symbolic functions to the lifeworld and largely material functions to the subsystems, Habermas renders problematic the degree and nature of the priority that the lifeworld actually enjoys because he also concedes that “maintenance of the material substratum of the lifeworld is a necessary condition for maintaining its symbolic structures” (TCA II, 151). Here the lifeworld is described as grounded in a material substratum without which it could not even begin symbolically to reproduce itself. Consequently, the problem of understanding the precise respect in which the lifeworld is primary becomes acute. At times, Habermas’ claim about the primacy of the lifeworld seems to involve a further, implicitly normative, claim: the subsystems should serve human life by maintaining it materially (metaphorically, then, the lifeworld is the “master,” and the systems its “slaves”). At other times, when Habermas speaks about the institutional hinges that anchor the subsystems in the lifeworld, the claim has a factual and historical character. So, for example, in Between Facts and Norms, he emphasizes the historical priority of the lifeworld when he writes that “the money-steered economy and a power-steered administration develop out of, and only out of, the ‘society’ component of the lifeworld”; that is, they develop out of lifeworld institutions such as law (BFN, 55–6). In the ﬁnal analysis, then, the rationalization of the lifeworld assumes the role of the “motor of history” in his theory because rationalization has given rise to the institutions that “make it possible to solve whatever system problems are producing a crisis . . . in virtue of features that derive from their embodiment of rationality structures” (TCA II, 314). However, if the lifeworld is itself grounded in a

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material substratum that is maintained primarily by the capitalist economy, and without which it could not exist, its pre-eminence within society may certainly be challenged. The problem of determining the status of the lifeworld within society as a whole will be taken up again at the end of this chapter and in Chapter 2. At this point, I shall venture a broad comparison between Habermas’ and Adorno’s conceptions of society before turning to a discussion of their views about the nature of domination in the West. For his part, Adorno would clearly reject Habermas’ deﬁnition of Western society as the “systemically stabilized complexes of action of socially integrated groups” (TCA II, 152). For this ﬁrst generation critical theorist, Habermas’ distinction between the economic and political subsystems and the lifeworld would at best represent an ideological gloss on late capitalist societies whose truth content might consist in foreshadowing the conditions under which individuals and the economic system may one day conceivably be reconciled. According to Adorno, human life has been damaged by the incursions of the exchange principle to such an extent that communicative interaction, on which so much depends in Habermas’ social theory, is currently dictated almost exclusively “by the market.”39 One of Adorno’s arguments in “Society” may be brought to bear, mutatis mutandis, against Habermas’ deﬁnition of society: Habermas assumes mistakenly that “society is already a society of human beings, that society is itself already human, is immediately one with its subjects; as though the speciﬁcally social did not consist precisely in the imbalance of institutions over men, the latter coming little by little to be the incapacitated products of the former” (S, 144). Citing The Communist Manifesto in “Reﬂexionen zur Klassentheorie,” Adorno argues that Marx’s prognosis for capitalist societies has been conﬁrmed in ways he could never have imagined: with social welfare, higher wages and better working conditions, the “ruling class . . . resolutely turns its fate of having to maintain workers into its own concern and secures for the ‘slave his existence within slavery’ in order to ensure its own existence” (RK, 386). In a later essay, he writes that individuals remain the “appendages of machines” in both a literal, and a “wider metaphoric sense:” they “are forced to obey – as role-bearers – an abstract social mechanism without demur, and that right down to their most intimate feelings” (LC, 238). Accordingly, Adorno describes his own concept of society as both a dynamic and functional one. As dynamic, the concept refers not to the process of rationalization, but to the increasing penetration of socio-economic institutions into our everyday lives such that we have now become their “incapacitated products” (S, 144). As functional, the concept refers to the socio-economic roles to which we have been reduced; that is, to our roles as producers and consumers. If we should fail to perform these functions, our existence would be imperilled (S, 145). Under existing conditions, “[t]he form of the total system requires every-

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one to respect the law of exchange if he does not wish to be destroyed, irrespective of whether proﬁt is his subjective motivation or not” (S, 149). Of course, the view that individuals have subordinated themselves to exchange relations and internalized them contrasts very strongly with Habermas’ positive conception of the basic integrity of the lifeworld in Western societies. Where Adorno retains a Marxist conception of the primacy of the economy whose negative inﬂuence makes itself felt even on the level of individual behaviour and interpersonal relations, Habermas reconceptualizes the Marxist notion of base so radically that he identiﬁes it with core institutions in the lifeworld, such as the family and law (TCA II, 173). Moreover, while Habermas believes that what is needed successfully to confront economic and political domination are more active attempts by lifeworld members to defend and restore “endangered ways of life” (TCA II, 392), Adorno questions whether the damage done to human life by exchange relations will ever be repaired. As opposed to Habermas, who believes the socially integrated lifeworld always collides with the systemically integrated capitalist economy and liberal democratic state, Adorno also claims that individuals have been integrated into the economic system to such an extent that they are incapable for the most part of even imagining a social order other than the prevailing one. It is to these differing claims about the nature of domination that I shall now turn.

3 Preliminary remarks on domination In “Reﬂexionen zur Klassentheorie,” Adorno followed Marx when he argued that capital is now monopolized, centralized, and concentrated in a few hands. With the development of monopoly capitalism at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the organization of society began to assume an increasingly totalitarian economic character. Capital began to appear as though it were “an institution . . . an expression of the whole society.” Under late capitalism, the monopolized whole “usurps the particular: the old fetish character of commodities, which reﬂects human relations as if they were relations between things, ends in the socially totalitarian aspect of capital” (RK, 380). Adorno reiterates this point in his 1965 essay “Society” when he claims that “the abstraction implicit in the market system represents the domination of the general over the particular, of society over its captive membership” (S, 148). With the increasing concentration and centralization of capital, the “general” (society) assumes the form of the abstract exchange principle. The domination of the exchange principle continues to have such pernicious effects on human behaviour and activity that individuals have become “mere objects of administration for monopolies and their states” (RK, 386). Traded for a salary or wages, human labour has been subordinated for

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centuries to the abstract and anonymous exchange principle. After capitalist modes of production emerged in the West at the end of the ﬁfteenth century, labour began its transformation into a quantity of socially necessary labour-time or, to cite Marx, “the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society.”40 This abstraction of labour into socially necessary labour-time reduced human labour – regardless of its use value – to quantiﬁable units of value, and thus had a levelling effect on labour of various kinds and differing degrees of utility. Because it has become a commodity, whose value is equated exclusively with its market or exchange value, and which individuals are compelled to sell in order to survive, living human labour now “counts . . . only as an average sample of its kind.”41 The transformation of productive labour into an abstract quantity, a measure of exchange value in the capitalist marketplace, ﬁnds its counterpart today in the realm of consumption. Sold as commodities to advertising agencies and corporations, statistical data are compiled about the age, sex, consumption habits, social afﬁliations, likes and dislikes of consumers, and this data is subsequently classiﬁed and ranked by marketing agencies. As consumers, then, individuals are reduced to sets of abstract and fragmented categories related to their purchasing power. Furthermore, it is now expected that individuals will view themselves in relation to these categories. Advertisers encourage the individual to “behave . . . in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type.”42 While admitting that his observations might be difﬁcult to conﬁrm empirically, Adorno also warned that late capitalist societies had socially “pre-formed” the needs of consumers “beyond anything which one might naively imagine” (S, 148). Needs are now taken in charge by the culture industry and adapted to the proﬁt interests of the owners of the means of production. Dominated by the exchange principle, individual consumers and producers have been reduced to mere “agents and bearers of exchange value” (S, 148–9). But aside from its effects on production and consumption – activities that take up by far the larger part of human life – the exchange principle has extended its inﬂuence to other areas of life, including interpersonal relationships. Adorno maintains that individuals are incapable of relating to one another immediately because they now see themselves, and are seen by others, as “economic subjects”; that is, as deﬁned by their wages or salaries, and levels of consumption.43 The regressive narcissistic traits prevalent today have only exacerbated this social isolation. Critical of revisionist psychologists because they failed to identify the socio-economic roots of narcissism, Adorno argued that the individual’s subordination to the exchange principle also helps to account for the ego weakness characteristic of narcissistic disorders. These have become so pervasive that they

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impede spontaneous and direct relationships between people today.44 Thus, along with the negative effects of the transformation of individuals into agents and bearers of exchange value, the asocial and anomic traits characteristic of narcissism have also made interpersonal relations – intimate relationships, friendships, and relations with members of the community – much more difﬁcult to initiate and maintain. Domination in late capitalist societies consists in the extension of the exchange principle into all areas of human life and activity – even those that were once relatively immune from it. In his critique of domination, then, Adorno targets this abstract and supra-individual force that pervades individual and social life. In Minima Moralia, he wrote that life can reproduce itself under late capitalism only when “the metamorphosis of labourpower into a commodity has permeated men through and through and objectiﬁed each of their impulses as formally commensurable variations of the exchange relationship.”45 Later, in Negative Dialectics, he added that, when it reduces “human labor to the abstract universal concept of average working hours,” the exchange principle reveals its fundamental kinship with “the principle of identiﬁcation.” Today, the exchange principle has become the “social model” for the principle of identiﬁcation because it reduces both human activity and human beings themselves to the same commensurable numerical values. As the social model for the principle of identiﬁcation, the exchange principle ampliﬁes the identity-thinking that has characterized our relations to nature ever since we confronted the threats nature poses by coercively identifying it with our concepts. Habermas is certainly correct when he observes that identity-thinking “lies deeper historically than the formal rationality of the exchange relation, although it does ﬁrst gain its universal signiﬁcance through the differentiation of the medium of exchange value” (TCA I, 378). Identity-thinking is, in fact, the prototype for the bourgeois ratio. However, unlike the philosophical manifestations of this type of reason (the various idealisms that tried, but failed, to subsume nature under the ego and its concepts), the economic principle has rendered everything identical “with increasing, if potentially homicidal, success.” Less and less is currently “left outside” of exchange relations (ND, 23). In a revealing point of contrast with Habermas, who views “an impersonal learning process” – rationalization – as both the carrier of reason46 and the motor of history, Adorno posits the exchange principle as the anonymous, abstract force that currently prevails in society. It too embodies a form of reason, but the reason of which it is the bearer is pathic and irrational. Exchanging things that “are equal and yet unequal” by identifying them, the principle of universal commensurability refuses to tolerate any “qualitative difference” between them.47 Consequently, the predominant form of reason in the West has become “totalitarian”; it is “blinded to the point of madness by the sight of whatsoever will elude its rule” (ND, 172).

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Of course, to say that the exchange principle is the dominant force under late capitalism is not to imply that state institutions and agencies have no effects whatsoever on individuals today. However, since he thought that their role consisted largely in maintaining and reinforcing economic domination, Adorno offered only a few scattered remarks on political domination and its effects in countries other than Nazi Germany. During a discussion of his 1959 lecture, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” Adorno observed that democracy currently prevents individuals from becoming as autonomous and self-empowered as it promises. Yet, apart from a vague reference to “the preponderance of innumerable societal processes over the particular individuals” – which is supposed to explain why “people in their societal role are not identical with what they are as immediate, living people”48 – Adorno does not elaborate on these impediments to democracy. In fact, he implies in this passage that it is economically engendered reiﬁcation that has thwarted the emergence of more substantive and participatory forms of democratic government. Still, an explanation for democracy’s self-stultiﬁcation may be inferred from Adorno’s proto-Foucauldian observation in “Society” that “all over the globe, administrations have tended under constraint towards a greater self-sufﬁciency and independence from their administered subjects, reducing the latter to objects of abstractly normed behavior.” Again, this tendency “points back to the means–ends rationality of the economy itself” (S, 151). Not only is such normed behaviour useful to captains of industry (the example Adorno gives here is Taylorism), it also discourages the autonomy and spontaneity needed to establish government of, by, and for the people. Although Adorno neither identiﬁes the abstract norms to which political administrations have reduced individuals, nor explicitly discusses how these norms act as impediments to democracy, his references to law in Negative Dialectics may serve to illustrate these points. While law does “protect the reproduction of life,” it is also “the socially controlling authority in the administered world.” The exchange principle ﬁnds its largely ideological counterpart in legally sanctioned and purely formal egalitarianism. “In law,” Adorno wrote, “the formal principle of equivalence becomes the norm; everyone is treated alike.” In a more critical vein, Adorno adds that this “equality, in which differences perish, secretly serves to promote inequality” (ND, 309; translation altered). Earlier, in “Individuum und Organisation,” he had remarked on the abstract norms or procedures employed by bureaucratic organizations. These procedures allow bureaucracies to “deal with every case automatically and ‘without consideration for the person’.” On the one hand, then, they promise “an element of justice” to the extent that they guarantee that “arbitrariness, accident, and nepotism do not rule people’s destiny.” On the other hand, these same procedures are partially responsible for “depersonalization and reiﬁcation.”49 Treating everyone as “the same,” regardless of the particular

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and concrete circumstances in which they ﬁnd themselves, both bureaucratic and legally sanctioned egalitarianism generally only bolster and extend the homogenizing and levelling effects of the exchange principle. Maintaining that the economy continues to predominate over political forces, Adorno portrays political domination as a permutation of late capitalism’s reifying tendencies. However, cautious inferences may be made from his discussion of Nazi Germany about other features of political domination. First, a state capitalist society not only controls the economy, which it presses into service for its own ends; it also commandeers the media, using them for propagandistic purposes. Adorno distinguished the state-controlled media under Hitler’s regime from media in other Western countries where the culture industry had become an industrial sector in its own right. Owing in part to their more complete control over radio and ﬁlm, the Nazis simply fostered compliance with the status quo more effectively. As Adorno observed in his response to Ralf Dahrendorf’s criticisms of “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?”, state capitalist societies rely heavily on police and the military. Backed in part by police intimidation, which always threatens to erupt into extreme forms of military repression, these societies use physical force to maintain themselves in power. Hence Adorno believed that political domination – which he also labelled “direct domination” – is more malignant in some respects than its economic counterpart.50 Wherever the power motive supersedes the proﬁt motive, direct physical and psychological control over citizens is often the option of ﬁrst resort. Thus, despite Habermas’ objection to the view that domination today has become direct, Adorno actually argued that domination would become direct only if the political system were to succeed in supplanting the capitalist economy as the predominant force within society. To be sure, tendencies towards direct political domination in the West do exist, but these tendencies have never been fully realized, and domination continues to take a more “indirect” economic form. Still, one might expect that Habermas would agree with Adorno about the primacy of economic forms of domination given that he recognizes the primacy of the capitalist economy in contemporary Western societies. But this is not the case. In Habermas’ view, the reifying effects of colonization result from both the bureaucratization and the monetarization of the lifeworld (TCA II, 343). With his colonization thesis, Habermas wants to refer to the distinct encroachments of political and economic imperatives – power and money – on the lifeworld. Because the economy is currently the dominant force within society, the institution most affected by colonization is the private household which serves as the economy’s “environment” (TCA II, 385). Communicative infrastructures within the family are therefore most at risk when colonization occurs. Yet colonization also consists in the encroachment of political imperatives on the lifeworld’s communicatively generated structural components.

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When he argues that the problem with Marxist claims does not lie in their economic interpretation of domination per se, but in their “overgeneralization of a speciﬁc case of the subsumption of the lifeworld under the system” (TCA II, 342), Habermas also maintains that Adorno tends to “overgeneralize” reiﬁcation by interpreting it almost exclusively as an economic phenomenon (or as the political expression of an underlying economic phenomenon). Yet, though Habermas argues that the political system and its form of domination are relatively independent of the economy, he does acknowledge that the liberal democratic welfare state relies heavily on the economic system for tax revenue, and that power has been subordinated to money under late capitalism. As I have already mentioned, Habermas also follows Adorno when he claims that the welfare state arose in response to crises and problems caused by capitalist accumulation and production. The welfare state was designed to mitigate “the external effects of a production process based on wage labor” (TCA II, 362). Furthermore, while Adorno and Habermas believe that the welfare state serves primarily to contain, or to “pacify,” class conﬂict, they both recognize that, for all the beneﬁts gained by the introduction of social welfare policies and measures, a punishing price has been exacted. Adorno alludes only brieﬂy to the problems experienced by clients of the welfare state, but his remarks about our abject dependency on state bureaucracies and administration in exchange for freedom from economic insecurity foreshadow some of Habermas’ own concerns. Nevertheless, these broad similarities between the two social theories do not mask the signiﬁcant differences in these theorists’ conceptions of domination under late capitalism. For Habermas deﬁnes the colonization of the lifeworld as follows: “The thesis of internal colonization states that the subsystems of the economy and state become more and more complex as a consequence of capitalist growth, and penetrate ever deeper into the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld” (TCA II, 367). Completely revamping the Marxist concept of reiﬁcation in accordance with this thesis, Habermas believes that the penetration of the system imperatives of money and power into the lifeworld results in “a new type of reiﬁcation effect” which takes “class-unspeciﬁc” forms and has negative effects on “communicatively structured domains of action” (TCA II, 349). Because class conﬂict is now contained, the effects of colonization are experienced more or less equally by all members of the lifeworld. Very generally, colonization disturbs the discursive generation of social integration within the lifeworld. With colonization, “[m]echanisms of system integration” in the political and economic systems encroach upon “spheres of action that can fulﬁll their functions only under conditions of social integration” (TCA II, 305). Maeve Cooke has shown that Habermas does not always identify consistently the type of rationality that characterizes the mode of action within the economic and political systems and that encroaches on the lifeworld,

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distorting its communicative infrastructures. At times, he claims that the systems are the carriers of strategically motivated instrumental rationality and, at others, that their rationality is functionalist in character. There is therefore some confusion about whether it is functionalist or cognitiveinstrumental rationality that substitutes for communicative rationality once colonization takes place. Yet Cooke also implies that the two types of rationality are connected.51 Action regulated by instrumental rationality involves using others as a means to the end of achieving one’s own proﬁtor power-oriented goals; functionalist rationality regulates the consequences of these strategic actions in such a way that they unintentionally fulﬁll the goal of maintaining the subsystems. Within the subsystems, then, the two forms of rationality work in tandem. The subsystems’ Invisible Hand ensures that the instrumental action of their agents works to the beneﬁt of the material reproduction of society as a whole. However, despite its positive contribution to the material reproduction of society, when strategic action that has been instrumentalized by the subsystems insinuates itself into the lifeworld’s communicative infrastructure, reproductive processes within the lifeworld are distorted and reiﬁed. Interestingly, and in stark contrast to Adorno, Habermas refers to the reifying effects of the economic system only in passing: once colonization occurs, “private households” are “converted over to mass consumption” (TCA II, 351). Notwithstanding his claims about the evolutionary primacy of the economy, Habermas offers no analysis of the encroachment of monetary imperatives on the lifeworld. This lacuna in his theory is particularly glaring, and it only underlines his refusal to make common cause with Marxism. Indeed, in The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas focuses exclusively on what he describes as the “model case for the colonization of the lifeworld:” the spread of client relations within the private sphere which occurs when the welfare state encroaches upon the lifeworld (TCA II, 322). Using the term “juridiﬁcation” to designate this political colonization, Habermas echoes Adorno when he writes that state bureaucracies subject concrete forms of life to “violent abstraction” by subsuming them under legal deﬁnitions and norms, and imposing abstract bureaucratic procedures on them (TCA II, 363). Dissimilar life contexts and situations are thereby forced into a legal mould where differences are effectively levelled and dissolved. Appearing to accept Adorno’s claim that political domination involves the imposition of levelling and homogenizing abstractions on the lifeworld, Habermas also contends that these legal and administrative abstractions are unrelated to the abstractions imposed on individuals by the capitalist economy – the predominant subsystem in the West today. Yet he nowhere argues against Adorno that political incursions into the lifeworld are qualitatively distinct from economic encroachments; that is, that political domination is not connected in some way to the monetarization of core areas of the lifeworld. In fact, Habermas implies that there are more

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similarities than differences between economic and political domination. Both types of domination involve the incursion of cognitive-instrumental or functionalist reason into the lifeworld. With colonization: “capitalist modernization follows a pattern such that cognitive-instrumental rationality surges beyond the bounds of the economy and state into other, communicatively structured areas of life and achieves dominance there.” Furthermore, the effects wrought by these “colonial masters” are substantially the same: both economic and political colonization result in “disturbances in the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld” (TCA II, 304–5). Habermas’ discussion of colonization is fragmentary and incomplete. For example, in his analysis of juridiﬁcation – the only example of colonization he examines at any length – Habermas fails to consider in what precise respects the symbolic reproduction of social integration is distorted when communicative contexts of action are legally supplemented through “the superimposition of legal norms” (TCA II, 369). Towards the end of Volume II of The Theory of Communicative Action, he merely states without argument that colonization distorts the linguistically generated contributions of social integration to personality and culture, resulting in alienation and the unsettling of collective identities, and a corresponding diminution in social solidarity among lifeworld members (TCA II, 386). These broad claims need to be paired with equally broad remarks in the ﬁrst volume where communication pathologies are described as resulting from a confusion between actions oriented towards understanding and actions oriented towards success (TCA I, 332). Unlike Adorno, who is concerned primarily about the effects of reiﬁcation on material dimensions of human existence under late capitalism, Habermas contents himself with a very cursory and general account of the effects of colonization on symbolic reproduction, and later admits that this account requires much greater elaboration.52 Finally, and to repeat a point made earlier, despite the fact that colonization has had a negative impact on social integration, Habermas does not appear to view it as a serious threat to lifeworld resources. In contrast to Adorno’s sometimes hyperbolic assessment of domination in late capitalist societies, Habermas argues that, at its worst, colonization distorts some forms of symbolic interaction in the lifeworld. Social solidarity is jeopardized – but not to the point where the solidary movements that challenge colonization would collapse or become completely ineffective. Indeed, since he conceptualizes the invading forces as qualitatively distinct from their target – the lifeworld – in terms of their types of rationality (functional or instrumental versus communicative), reproductive processes (material versus symbolic) and modes of integration (systemic versus social), it is all the easier for Habermas to assert that economic and political imperatives necessarily “clash with independent communication structures” (TCA II, 391). When system imperatives encroach upon sym-

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bolic reproduction, Habermas writes, “the lifeworld evidently offers stubborn and possibly successful resistance” (TCA II, 351) because “communicative rationality . . . gives an inner logic . . . to resistance against the colonization of the lifeworld” (TCA II, 333). As opposed to Habermas’ claim about the basic integrity of the lifeworld, Adorno believed that individuals were more or less impotent in the face of the monopolistic economic system and its ally, the welfare state. There is no analogue for the lifeworld in Adorno’s work: even the last bastions of human comfort and sanctuary have fallen victim to exchange relations. This has led a number of commentators – including Habermas – to object that Adorno’s long-standing concerns about the insidious economic forces assailing human life under capitalism generally make it appear as though resistance to “the totally administered world” is not only virtually absent, but utterly futile even where present. Referring occasionally to the instinctual basis for resistance – which fascist movements exploited successfully – Adorno was extremely guarded about the prospects for effective and radical opposition to economic domination while freely conceding on several occasions that he tended to “exaggerate the somber side.”53 By way of highlighting the contrast between the two thinkers, it may be said that while Adorno engages ethically with the irrational and barbaric tendencies in Western society, Habermas insists repeatedly in Hegelian fashion that “[r]eason is by its very nature incarnated in contexts of communicative action and in structures of the lifeworld.”54 In a further point of contrast to Adorno, who admitted that some of his claims would be difﬁcult to conﬁrm empirically, Habermas also thinks that his “classical conception of an internal connection . . . between society and reason” (BFN, 8) is both ethically neutral and susceptible of empirical (sociological) veriﬁcation (BFN, 287). The divergence between the claims of the two critical theorists may arguably be explained by a single factor: Adorno’s condemnation of late capitalism was shaped much more deeply by his experience of Nazism. Adorno always remained vigilant to aspects of domination in the nonfascist West that resembled those he had identiﬁed in Nazi Germany. Conversely, he argued that individuals in the Third Reich exhibited the conformist and narcissistic traits that he observed in those who are under the spell of the all-pervasive exchange principle in other Western countries. Although Habermas certainly does share some of Adorno’s concerns, he tends to view Nazi Germany as a unique historical regression55 that has subsequently, though painfully, been overcome. For all its faults, the West has succeeded in conquering the threats that Nazism once posed; there is now a strong commitment to the principle of self-determination that underpins constitutional democracies, and citizens demonstrate an increasingly rational orientation towards what lies in the general interest. Opposing Adorno’s bleak pronouncements about damaged life under late capitalism, then, Habermas believes that the lifeworld continues to thrive

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despite its colonization. In the ﬁnal section of this chapter, I shall continue to examine critically the distinction that Habermas makes between system and lifeworld.

4 Concluding reﬂections on Habermas’ concept of the lifeworld Despite Habermas’ attempts to reﬁne his distinction between lifeworld and system, it remains in some important respects a distinction without a difference (to borrow a phrase from Hegel) because the boundaries between system and lifeworld are actually very porous. The same individuals who inhabit the lifeworld also work as employees within the economic system, or as civil servants within the political system. Their perpetual “migration” between system and lifeworld will inevitably compromise the integrity of each. Most individuals will spend as much as (if not more than) half their active lives working within the conﬁnes of either one or both of these subsystems. Their attitudes, orientations, motivations, and behaviours will at the very least be affected or coloured by the strategic and instrumental ways of thinking that prevail in there. Although the thesis of the uncoupling of system and lifeworld is unproblematic in the sense that one can speak independently and meaningfully about the actions of economic and political agencies, organizations, and agents, Habermas fails to reckon with the simple but signiﬁcant fact that individuals move constantly between the two spheres. Their behaviours oscillate between strategically motivated action controlled by functionalist rationality and action oriented to reaching understanding. This not only makes it probable that lifeworld orientations will insinuate themselves into the economic and political systems, it also suggests that functionalist rationality permeates the lifeworld even in the absence of colonization.56 And, of course, once colonization is added to the mix, the boundaries between system and lifeworld become even more blurred. If individuals alternate constantly in their roles as agents of the systems and members of the lifeworld, this also suggests that the loss of freedom is currently much more extensive than Habermas will admit when he interprets “Weber’s thesis of the loss of freedom in terms of a systemically induced reiﬁcation of communicatively structured domains of action” (TCA II, 351–2), or as the incursion of instrumental or functionalist rationality into the lifeworld “from outside” (TCA II, 387). For, on his own account of the systems’ Invisible Hand, economic and political agents are mere pawns of the functionalist rationality of the systems; their actions are combined in ways they cannot foresee and over which they have little control.57 (In fact, at one point in The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas states that functionalist rationality also coordinates action within the lifeworld.58) Habermas thereby implies that individuals who work within the systems are unfree in the sense that their actions are

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determined by economic processes which occur “over their heads.” And, of course, this unfreedom is precisely what Adorno criticized in his own assessment of late capitalism (though he also believed that such unfreedom extended far beyond the conﬁnes of the political and economic subsystems). Adorno (along with other Marxists) would also criticize the mystifying, ideological cast of Habermas’ Invisible Hand.59 In his critical assessment of Hegel, for example, Adorno remarked that, by insisting that human activity subordinate itself to an “alien necessity,” Hegel gave theoretical expression to the fact that the individual is “a mere agent of the social process of production.” By extension, Habermas not only offers an ideologically suspect reading of the capitalist economy, he too unwittingly reveals the true extent of the loss of freedom today. This loss of freedom is inevitable since individuals must work within either one or both of the subsystems for most of their lives, barring illness or incapacitation. In fact, Habermas not only splits life into two distinct and mutually incompatible halves – freedom rules one, and unfreedom the other – he also restricts the sphere of freedom to that of so-called “leisure time.”60 Against this, it could certainly be argued that the freedom Habermas equates with settling questions by appealing to the “unforced conviction of a rationally motivated agreement”61 will inevitably be undermined and tainted by the unfreedom of our lives as agents of the subsystems and by the strategic motivations we must adopt in order to survive. Indeed, Adorno once claimed that the free time granted to individuals in Western societies is only the “unmediated continuation of labor as its shadow”62 because the social roles of worker and consumer now extend into the “innermost composition” of individuals.63 While Habermas denies that systemic imperatives of selfpreservation seriously compromise communicative action in the lifeworld – “communicative reason resists the denaturing of the self for the sake of self-preservation” because it “cannot be subsumed without resistance under a blind self-preservation” (TCA I, 398) – this denial ultimately relies for its plausibility on his dubious and blurred distinction between system and lifeworld. This problem of the blurred boundaries between system and lifeworld is ampliﬁed in a different way by Cooke, who argues that Habermas fails to show that language-use oriented to reaching understanding is both conceptually and functionally prior to the strategic use of language. Since the action of agents within the economic and political subsystems is also strategic, Habermas’ distinction between system and lifeworld would obviously be compromised further if strategic action actually enjoys functional primacy within the lifeworld itself. At best, Cooke argues, Habermas succeeds only in demonstrating that language oriented to reaching understanding has “conceptual priority” in the sense that it is the ﬁrst use of language that we learn. He does not show that it is the primary use of language in lifeworld contexts. Conceding that Habermas attempts later to

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shore up his weak arguments about the functional primacy of communicative action, Cooke nonetheless counters that he never succeeds in specifying “how much communicative action is necessary for the reproduction of the lifeworld.” Without such speciﬁcation, we have good reason to question “the extent to which modes of strategic action can take over the lifeworld (or . . . the extent to which modes of functional integration can penetrate into the lifeworld) before cultural interpretation and transmission, the maintenance and creation of normatively regulated social practices, and the development of personal identities are irremediably threatened.”64 In other words, Habermas has not shown that colonization actually poses a serious threat to lifeworld resources. There is another important challenge to the distinction between system and lifeworld. For Habermas does not resolve satisfactorily the question of the division of labour between system and lifeworld. While acknowledging that the lifeworld engages in (unspeciﬁed) tasks of material reproduction, he has also argued that, without a degree of symbolic interaction within the systems themselves, “formally regulated social relations could not be sustained, nor could organizational goals be realized” (TCA II, 310). Consequently, the economic and political subsystems are socially integrated to a certain extent. In addition, they rely on successful social integration within the lifeworld because they have emerged from the institutions such integration has spawned and remain dependent upon them. In the words of Jeffrey Alexander, who argues against the distinction between system and lifeworld in terms that Habermas himself sometimes seems to accept: “political and economic life are never simply instrumental. They are always coded by deep structures of cultural life.” Conversely, our cultural, social, and subjective worlds are not the “simple intuitive lifeworlds” that Habermas describes; they “are themselves also systems subject to organization on levels that individuals scarcely intuit.”65 The distinction between system and lifeworld becomes even more blurred if one accepts the relatively uncontroversial claim that the lifeworld reproduces itself on both the symbolic and the material levels.66 In the lifeworld we cohabit, mate, and physically reproduce ourselves. Childrearing is carried out, not only symbolically, but also in such activities as cradling, nursing, health care, and other activities involving material and physical support. The lifeworld is where we conserve food, prepare, and eat it, where we take physical care of ourselves and others (bathing, grooming, clothing, exercising), where we clean and repair our dwellings, and so on. These activities reveal that the rationalization of the lifeworld does not extend so far that the lifeworld has been more or less divested of processes of material reproduction.67 It could, in fact, be argued on both normative and empirical grounds that these vital tasks can only be carried out in the lifeworld. The capitalist economy and the welfare state have not completely relieved the lifeworld of tasks related to the material-sensual preservation and enhancement of life. Indeed, they could do so only at

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the price of intervening to such an unconscionable extent in everyday life that our autonomy would be reduced to that of the proverbial brain in a vat. Tasks of reproduction undertaken in the lifeworld involve biological, physiological, and material activities and behaviours. To the extent that the concept of the lifeworld is at all useful, it must also refer to these lifesustaining and life-enhancing tasks. Although his account of the human condition in late capitalist societies is certainly not immune from criticism, Adorno does have the merit of recognizing that human beings are also bodily creatures with needs and drives. This is, in part, what he means when he speaks about the preponderance or priority (Vorrang) of the object over the subject in Negative Dialectics.68 Although we can detach ourselves from nature through reﬂection, we remain part of nature. Differing from other animals by virtue of our advanced capacity for self-reﬂection (among other things), we are nonetheless attached to a living, natural substratum – “the libidinous energy of the species” – without which we would be utterly incapable of autonomous action (ND, 185). Yet it is this very attachment to nature that Habermas denies when he takes his linguistic turn and claims that language has allowed us to rise above nature.69 His conception of the lifeworld is profoundly affected by this denial. Once again, he not only fails to specify what material reproductive processes the lifeworld actually carries out, he also thoroughly linguistiﬁes the lifeworld by deﬁning it as the discursively generated and transmitted background knowledge which communicative action presupposes and which it reproduces. Unlike Husserl’s later concept, Habermas’ conception of the lifeworld seems designed from the outset to exclude activities of material reproduction. When the capitalist economy and the welfare state interfere with the lifeworld’s own processes of material reproduction, conﬂicts may arise. On the most basic level, such interference may take place when drinkingwater in the private household is poisoned by industrial pollution, for example, making family members ill. A deterioration in the state’s delivery of health care may also undermine material practices in the lifeworld that are directed to maintaining the health of family members or members of the community. In such cases, interests in clean drinking-water and improved medical services are grounded in material needs for a safe water supply and adequate health care. (Parenthetically, it could also be objected that Habermas’ discussion of the environmental movement is problematic precisely because he fails fully to recognize that what is at stake in environmental protests are processes of material – not symbolic – reproduction that are carried out in part by the lifeworld.) Though expert cultures do contribute to it, the maintenance of health and physical wellbeing is one of the lifeworld’s primary tasks. When this vital function is jeopardized by economic crises or government policies, individuals do not, as Habermas claims, unite in a struggle to protect the lifeworld’s

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communicative infrastructure. Rather in these cases, they coordinate both their symbolic and their “material” action to preserve the material life conditions and life chances that are necessary for their physical survival and well-being. To end this chapter, I shall summarize these critical points about Habermas’ distinction between system and lifeworld. If, as Habermas claims, the lifeworld deﬁnes the pattern of the system as a whole, then it does so both symbolically and materially. For the life-sustaining goals that orient its material reproduction also serve to coordinate action through the material dependencies and reciprocities that they foster. Moreover, it should be obvious that the economic and political subsystems rely a great deal on the lifeworld’s material reproductive processes (at the very least, on its reproduction of the species) to achieve their own proﬁt- and poweroriented ends. However, Habermas’ colonization thesis only compounds the difﬁculties with his distinction between system and lifeworld because it further compromises the already problematic differentiation between social integration and system integration. With the colonizing incursions of the subsystems, the lifeworld is inﬁltrated by system imperatives to the point where system integration occasionally substitutes for social integration. Furthermore, the instrumental rationality that characterizes the actions of agents within the subsystems is never completely segregated from the communicative rationality that presides over action in the lifeworld; it is not possible strictly to compartmentalize, even on analytic or methodological grounds, systemically integrated action from socially integrated action. I would also argue, with Adorno, that since the economic and political subsystems negatively affect both the symbolic and the material reproduction of life – especially within lifeworld institutions such as the family – the effects of colonization are actually much more extensive than Habermas will allow when he conﬁnes its damage to the lifeworld’s symbolic processes. This problem will be treated at greater length in the next chapter where I continue to question whether the lifeworld enjoys sufﬁcient autonomy to withstand the onslaught of the colonizing subsystems.

2

Reiﬁcation

Karl Marx broached the problem of the damage that capitalism had caused to human life in the context of his analysis of the commodity form. Once use value undergoes its transformation into exchange value, concrete things become abstract, commensurable, and fungible commodities; their unique properties, which satisfy real human needs, are expunged. No sooner does a sensuous object emerge as a commodity than “it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness.”1 Along with this abstraction from the sensuous qualities of objects and from their value for the satisfaction of needs, abstraction is also made from the concrete human labour that is involved in the production of commodities. Labour has been objectiﬁed and transformed into socially necessary labour-time, or “the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society.”2 As a result, the commodity merely “reﬂects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.”3 Finally, it is also the case that relations between the living human producers of commodities are transformed into relations between things; the circulation of commodities on the market determines relations between individual producers. Under capitalism, commodity exchange manifests itself “as an alien social power” that stands above individuals, producing their “mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them.”4 Commodities take on a life of their own to which human life has become passively subject. This inverted world, which personiﬁes things and reiﬁes people (Versachlichung der Personen5), reveals “the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities.”6 Georg Lukács generalized this idea of commodity fetishism, viewing it as even more protean and pervasive than Marx had done. Examining the genesis of Lukács’ concept of reiﬁcation, Andrew Feenberg writes that he placed Max Weber’s claims about rationalization, or the subordination of “social reality to forms of calculability and control,” under the lens of Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism.7 In Marx’s criticisms of the

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personiﬁcation of things and the reiﬁcation of people (and in his other critical analyses of capitalism as well8), Lukács unearthed a critique of the formal rationality that underlies capitalist modes and relations of production. Once he had discovered this philosophical dimension in Marx’s work, Lukács was able to align Marx with Weber by treating “the capitalist economy as the source of a cultural system, a paradigm of rationality prevailing throughout the social order.”9 On Feenberg’s account, “wherever in capitalist society quality appears as quantity, or human interactions as the interaction of social things, and wherever the course of social events appears to be determined by quasi-natural laws, Lukács will interpret the phenomena through his concept of reiﬁcation.”10 In Lukács’ own words, reiﬁcation abstracts from and conceals the “qualitative and material . . . character of things as things.”11 Lukács certainly follows Marx when he remarks that reiﬁcation means that “a man’s own activity, his own labour becomes something objective and independent of him, something that controls him by virtue of an autonomy alien to man.”12 However, unlike Marx, Lukács links the development of these abstractions explicitly to the type of reason that currently prevails under capitalism: a calculating, systematizing reason that is geared to prediction and control. Today, the rationalization of the world by formal reason “appears to be complete, it seems to penetrate the very depths of man’s physical and psychic nature.”13 If Adorno often uses the phrase “exchange principle” to designate this pathic and coercive rationality; he generally reserves the term “reiﬁcation” (Verdinglichung) to refer to the negative effects of this principle on human life. However, Adorno also raises several objections to Lukács’ concept of reiﬁcation. In the ﬁrst, he argues that the concept has an idealist cast because it merely designates a subjective form of consciousness. For Adorno, “exchange as a process has real objectivity”; it “will create a false consciousness,” but it cannot be reduced to one. To this criticism he adds that reiﬁcation, as Lukács described it, existed long before capitalism.14 Capitalism is distinguished by the extension of exchange relations to areas of society that were formerly unaffected by them, rather than by the transformation of quality into quantity per se. Third, Adorno argued that a principle of identiﬁcation underlies the now ubiquitous transformation of quality into quantity (ND, 146). Consequently, he has a somewhat different conception of the reifying effects of exchange relations on life under late capitalism. As Martin Jay points out, Adorno uses the term “reiﬁcation” to refer very broadly to “the suppression of heterogeneity in the name of identity.”15 Owing to the pervasiveness of exchange relations throughout society, “non-identical individuals and performances” have become “commensurable and identical” (ND, 146). The exchange principle accounts for the homogenizing and levelling tendencies that such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche and Alexis de Tocqueville had already described in the nineteenth century, but it has also had material effects as well in its impact on human needs and instincts.

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In some respects, Habermas’ concept of reiﬁcation bears a greater resemblance to Lukács’ concept than does Adorno’s. As Habermas once told an interviewer: “When I was writing The Theory of Communicative Action my main concern was to develop a theoretical apparatus with which the phenomena of ‘reiﬁcation’ (Lukács) could be addressed.”16 Taking up Lukács’ idea that human history manifests itself in different forms of objectivity – or in forms of “‘existence or thought’” that characterize “‘the totality of the stage of development of society as a whole’” – Habermas adapts it to his own theory. “In our own terminology,” he writes, “the form of objectivity that predominates in capitalist society prejudices the worldrelations, the ways in which speaking and acting subjects can relate to things in the objective, the social, and their own subjective worlds.”17 More speciﬁcally, functionalist or cognitive-instrumental rationality substitutes increasingly for moral-practical rationality, and aesthetic-practical rationality (TCA I, 363). With reiﬁcation, systems rationality undermines these other dimensions of communicative reason, distorting communicative practices that are oriented towards reaching understanding. In fact, Habermas uses the terms “reiﬁcation” and “colonization” as synonyms to refer to the inﬁltration of latent strategic orientations into communicative practices in the lifeworld. In what follows, these divergent claims about the nature and extent of reiﬁcation will be contrasted in much greater detail than they were in the previous chapter. I maintained that one of the differences between them may be found in Habermas’ assertion that the economic and political systems reify or colonize the lifeworld in different ways, through monetarization and juridiﬁcation respectively. However, I also argued that this claim is rather specious given that colonization by both subsystems not only involves the same basic process – the inﬁltration of functionalist rationality into the lifeworld – but has the same effects – the distortion of communicative practices. Still, Habermas insists that one of the major distinctions between his theory and Marxist theories (which allegedly reduce relations between the subsystems to the relation between economic base and political superstructure) is his recognition of the relative autonomy of the political system in contemporary Western societies and its distinct reiﬁcation effects on the lifeworld.18 This claim is also problematic because Adorno did not deﬁne reiﬁcation as an exclusively economic phenomenon. Although reiﬁcation by the political system is a permutation of the reifying effects of the capitalist economy – given the economy’s primacy within society as a whole – Adorno does recognize that reiﬁcation takes a political form as well. In another point of contrast discussed brieﬂy in Chapter 1, Habermas insists on the basic integrity of the lifeworld in the face of the colonizing or reifying incursions of the subsystems. The effects of reiﬁcation on the lifeworld are not nearly as extensive as the ones Adorno describes when he rails against the damage done to human life by the exchange principle.

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Where Adorno remarks on the damage that the exchange principle has inﬂicted on the material basis of human existence – to instincts and needs that have a somatic component – Habermas claims that reiﬁcation exclusively affects those communicative practices in the lifeworld that serve to reproduce culture and personality. Moreover, Habermas views the family and the public sphere as mediating between system and lifeworld in such a way that they also help to protect culture and personality from the full effects of reiﬁcation. His view not only stands in sharp contrast to Adorno’s controversial thesis of the “fatherless society,” which fosters weak egos that lack the autonomy necessary for resistance, it is also intended speciﬁcally to counter Adorno’s criticisms of the negative impact of the culture industry on thought and behaviour. In this chapter, these differences will be explored at some length before I turn to Habermas’ important reassessment of Western societies in light of globalization.

1 Damaged life Before discussing Adorno’s criticisms of the reifying effects of the exchange principle, I shall remark brieﬂy on his views about the social and psychological development of individuals under late capitalism. On Adorno’s account, the socialization (Vergellschaftung) of individuals today is often carried out by public and private institutions and agencies. Owing to what Christopher Lasch later calls the “socialization of reproduction,”19 care-givers, social workers, primary and secondary schoolteachers, psychologists, counsellors, public health ofﬁcials, medical doctors, and the like, partially substitute for – and, in some cases, usurp completely – the role that the family once played as the primary agent of socialization. Their increasing inﬂuence is, of course, a function of the growth of the welfare state which, in Adorno’s view, serves the increasingly centralized, monopolistic economic system well by ensuring (among other things) that excessive poverty no longer destabilizes it. Falling under state jurisdiction, education, unemployment insurance schemes, pensions, and welfare beneﬁts, and (in most Western countries) state-subsidized health care serve to contain class conﬂict by mitigating the negative effects of illness, unemployment, underemployment, old age, as well as disparities in income and opportunity. Recognizing that the welfare state had improved the life conditions and life chances of individuals, Adorno was concerned nonetheless about our growing dependency on the state during the twentieth century. Although individuals have never been fully autonomous, he observed that, with the development of monopoly capital and the welfare state, there had been a decline in the little autonomy that had been enjoyed in the earlier stage of liberalism. Formerly self-employed entrepreneurs became wage-labourers and salaried employees as capital was concentrated and centralized in monopolies. Today, the vast majority of individuals are entirely dependent

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for their survival on the often ﬁckle largesse of the state and the economy. Together with the socialization of reproduction, these changes have had a profound impact on the family. As a relatively independent entrepreneur, the father once commanded respect and obedience from his children. At the same time, his children were also motivated to rebel against the reality principle he represented. The father, then, was a ﬁgure who was both emulated and resisted. With their current dependency on the state and the economy, however, parents have largely forfeited their status as authority ﬁgures. Their children neither internalize their values nor measure their strength against them through rebellion or resistance. The real problem in the fatherless society is that the “forces of opposition” within it have become paralysed.20 Adorno’s controversial thesis about the “fatherless society” helps to explain the prevalence of narcissistic tendencies in the West. In “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” Adorno was among the ﬁrst theorists to observe that narcissism has become a widespread “psychological afﬂiction.”21 He repeats this remark a few years later in “Sociology and Psychology” where he adds that “manifestations of paranoid tendencies, too, are increasingly apparent.”22 Although ego formation was always a precarious achievement, Adorno observes that, under existing conditions, the ego largely fails to “develop its intrinsic potential for selfdifferentiation” and therefore regresses “towards what Freud called ego libido.” In this regressive state, “[w]hat actually wanted to get beyond the unconscious . . . re-enters the service of the unconscious and may thus even strengthen its force” (SP II, 87). Since its “self-preserving function” has been “split off from that of consciousness and [is] thus lost to rationality” (SP II, 88), the ego’s defences against the energies of the id and the superego are now weak and infantile. Consequently, individuals often lack the capacity for rational self-control and autonomous decision-making. This loss of ego autonomy, which accompanies the decline of the family’s role as the primary agent of socialization, helps to account for the narcissistic pathologies visible today, and makes it much easier for demagogic political leaders and the culture industry to prey upon instincts and emotions. The prevalence of narcissistic pathologies within the “fatherless society” also makes it easier to understand why regressive forms of social identity and solidarity have emerged – in movements like Nazism and neo-Nazism, for example – where group leaders attract a following by substituting themselves for the narcissistic superego. Adorno borrowed extensively from Sigmund Freud in his own analysis, ﬁnding Freud’s studies remarkably prescient.23 In “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” Freud observed that, once individuals have formed a group by identifying or bonding with a leader, “what is heterogeneous is submerged in what is homogeneous.” He went on to explain that, in most group formations, “the mental superstructure, the development of which in individuals is so

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dissimilar, is removed, and the unconscious foundations, which are similar in everyone, stand exposed to view.”24 As members of a group led by a charismatic leader, individuals behave instinctually rather than following their more rational, egocentric interests. Freud also noted that such groups often act as a “negatively integrating force” by distinguishing themselves (often violently, in the case of Nazism, for example) from other groups. Negative emotions towards out-groups provide a narcissistic gain for followers of the in-group because followers believe that “simply through belonging to the in-group,” they are “better, higher and purer than those who are excluded.”25 Narcissism has sociological roots that may be traced to the development of capitalism which ultimately undermined the very ego autonomy that it had fostered during the earlier stage of liberalism. Commenting again on narcissism in his 1952 polemic against revisionist psychology, “Die Revidierte Psychoanalyse” (Revised Psychoanalysis), Adorno wrote that this pathology has become widespread because “the individual is compelled to direct his unused instinctual energy against himself owing to the virtually insurmountable difﬁculties that obstruct any spontaneous and direct relationship between people today.”26 Interpersonal relations have been “obstructed” because they now issue neither from individuals’ “free will nor from their instincts, but from social and economic laws which prevail over their heads” (RP, 36). Relations with others are increasingly difﬁcult to sustain; narcissists tend to establish shallow interpersonal relationships in order to avoid experiencing the frustration they originally felt in their attempts to bond with their mothers as infants. This is another reason why people are attracted to such groups as the National Socialists; they obtain emotional satisfaction from their identiﬁcation with a leader, as well as from their derivative identiﬁcation with other members of the group, without risking serious, and potentially hurtful, emotional commitment. If narcissism results in superﬁcial emotional relationships, reiﬁcation also damages interpersonal relations. Adorno emphasizes the connection between narcissism and reiﬁcation when he writes that “narcissism in its current form is nothing but the individual’s desperate struggle to compensate at least partially for injustice: that no one ever gets his money’s worth in the society of universal exchange” (RP, 33). In “Sociology and Psychology,” Adorno again ascribes impediments to intimate relations to the fact that individuals have become “economic subjects”; they “do not relate to one another at all immediately but act according to the dictates of exchange value.”27 Love itself – one of the stronger bonding agents in society – has succumbed to exchange relations. If love once resisted the full force of the exchange principle, the principle has now “completely absorbed it; the last immediacy falls victim to the distance of all the contracting parties from all the others” (MM, 167). Against the revisionists, then, Adorno praises Freud’s analytic coldness: “Freud makes himself as hard as the petriﬁed conditions in order to break them” (RP, 37). Through

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such coldness, as Adorno remarks a few years later, Freud showed himself to be attuned to the reifying effects of exchange (SP II, 96). When it reduces objects and individuals to discrete units of value, the “spread of the [exchange] principle imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total” (ND, 146). The reifying effects of the exchange principle on interpersonal relations may be seen in the commodiﬁed understanding that individuals have of themselves and others as so many instances of exchange value. Individuals measure their own self-worth in terms of the “value” of the goods they possess and the places they occupy within the economic system; their possessions and occupations serve as social markers that simultaneously position them within groups and distinguish them from other individuals and groups. But, of course, this is a distinction without a difference (to borrow Hegel’s phrase again) because it merely demonstrates that all individuals have succumbed to exchange relations: “what they are for themselves, what they think they are, is secondary.”28 Under the “spell” of exchange, or what Adorno also called the “universal,” individuals have effectively become “the same.” He referred to this subsumption of the particular under the universal as “total socialization”(ND, 346). Individuals are now determined by what is as “extraneous” and “heteronomous” to them as “anything once said to have been ordained” for them “by demons” (ND, 315). If one of the effects of the exchange principle is the erosion of substantive social bonds between individuals, and their displacement by forms of sociality that are often pathological in character, this principle has a second, obverse, effect which accompanies the ﬁrst. Because it transforms interpersonal relations into relations between things, the exchange principle also estranges or alienates individuals from each other. Even as individuals become “the same,” and form pseudo-collectivities, they are simultaneously “atomized and separated from each other by an unbridgeable chasm” (RP, 35). In defence of Freud, Adorno observed, in a characteristically paradoxical formulation, that Freud “discovered the nature of socialization by dwelling persistently on the atomistic existence of the individual” (RP, 24). In fact, individuals experience alienation precisely because the bonds between themselves and others are cemented by nothing more substantive than exchange value. Finding it difﬁcult to sustain lasting, emotionally involved relationships, they stand aloof from each other as so many dissociated monads without windows. Adorno always stressed that individuality is socially produced. Although Habermas accuses him of adopting a “philosophy of consciousness,” in which an isolated subject contemplates an equally isolated object, Adorno actually shares his view that there is no individuation without sociation. In Minima Moralia, for example, he stated that the self “owes society its existence in the most literal sense” because its entire “content comes from society” (MM, 154). This point is reiterated in “Die Revidierte Psychoanalyse” when Adorno argues that revisionists have forgotten “that not

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only the individual, but the category of individuality, is a product of society” (RP, 27). In Negative Dialectics, he insists once more that society “destines the individuals to be what they are, even by their immanent genesis” (ND, 219). Since individuality is now generated by a society pervaded by exchange relations, it has decayed in comparison to its earlier manifestations under liberal capitalism. In this respect, too, reiﬁcation and narcissism reinforce one another. The weak narcissistic ego is produced by a “social power structure” which “hardly needs the mediating agencies of ego and individuality any longer.” Rather than fostering strong egos, our “brutal, total, standardizing society arrests all differentiation, and to this end it exploits the primitive core of the unconscious” (SP II, 95). Buffeted by the demands of the superego and the id, the narcissistic ego makes an easy target for advertising and political propaganda. This loss of ego autonomy is also one of the effects of exchange, a point Adorno emphasized when he wrote that, even when people think “they have escaped the primacy of economics – all the way into their psychology, the maison tolérée of uncomprehended individuality – they react under the compulsion of the universal” (ND, 311). Owing to the rule of the exchange principle, the damage suffered by individuals now extends as far as their instinctually based needs. If individuals today are substantially “the same,” this is also because the captains of industry have harnessed their needs to the machinery of production. While the human species shares the same needs – and so potentially falls under a more substantive or concrete universal than the abstract universality of exchange – needs today have “become wholly a function of proﬁt interests” (SP I, 77). Late capitalism distorts needs by subordinating them to the offers of satisfaction made by commodity producers in their proﬁtseeking ventures. Thoroughly manipulated and forced into commodiﬁed channels, needs are now mobilized by the socio-economic apparatus “in its own defense.”29 Of course, Marx made similar observations. Rather than serving as the basis for more robust forms of social solidarity, needs today merely reﬂect the domination of individuals by the exchange principle; they isolate individuals from each other (through competition for status symbols, for example) while serving at the same time as the basis for pathological forms of collective behaviour (such as the narcissistic need to be part of a select group). As Adorno observed in his 1942 essay, “Theses on Need:” “The danger that domination will migrate into people because of their monopolized needs is not an heretical belief which might be exorcised by excommunication, but a real tendency of late capitalism.”30 Later in this short, seminal essay, he remarks: “Nothing may be thought, written, done, or made that goes beyond this society – a society which, to a great extent, maintains its power owing to the needs of those who are subjected to it.”31 In Negative Dialectics, Adorno criticized the ideological “veil” of individualism which impairs any real “insight into objectivity” because it prevents

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individuals from perceiving the homogeneity that has been imposed upon them by the exchange principle. The credo of bourgeois individualism, which vaunts the individual as the very substance of society, masks an entirely different reality: the predominance of the universal exchange principle and its homogenizing and levelling effects on needs, behaviour, thought, and interpersonal relations (ND, 312). Even as he inveighed against Hegel’s subordination of the individual to the universal social order, Adorno commented on its socio-economic signiﬁcance: “This much of Hegel’s insistence on the universality of the particular is true: in its perversion, as impotent individualization at the universal’s mercy, the particular is dictated by the principle of perverted universality” (ND, 344). Indeed, candidly to acknowledge the damaging effects of the exchange principle on human life would do “all but unbearable psychological harm to the narcissism of all individuals and to that of a democratically organized society” because such candour would reveal selfhood as “non-existent . . . an illusion.” Selfhood is now illusory because “the individual has no experience, nor any so-called empirical material that the universal has not predigested and supplied” (ND, 312–13). Even as the “nominalist principle simulates individualization,” individuals invariably “act as a collective” – albeit a severely damaged one (ND, 344). Utterly dependent on economic forces that are, for the most part, beyond their comprehension and control, individuals have become depersonalized and denatured cogs in the gears of the economic machinery. Despite his often vitriolic criticisms of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of Being, Adorno recognized that what his “existential ontology ascribes to Dasein . . . as an eternal and fundamental category, like anxiety, the ‘they’ [das Man], idle talk, and ‘thrownness,’ is nothing other than the scar of a very speciﬁc and contradictory state of society.”32 Paradoxically, selfpreservation dictates conformity to a society that undermines all attempts to preserve any vestige of autonomous selfhood. To preserve oneself, one must adapt to socially approved models of behaviour (often provided by the culture industry), as well as to prevailing offers of need satisfaction, in which real differences between oneself and others are suppressed. Conformity to the status quo appears to be the only line of conduct available today. Failure to conform poses serious risks: “the refusal to play the game arouses suspicions and exposes offenders to the vengeance of society even though they may not yet be reduced to going hungry, and sleeping under bridges.”33 In late capitalist societies, then, “freedom remains no less delusive than individuality itself” because the “law of value comes into play over the heads of formally free individuals” who have become “the involuntary executors of that law.” Adorno also notes in this passage that freedom has always been a function of economic factors. Even in the earlier phase of capitalism, the freedom and autonomy enjoyed by bourgeois entrepreneurs was only accorded to them by an economic system that required

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a certain measure of individual autonomy “in order to function” (ND, 262). Today, however, the ruling class is itself “ruled and dominated by the economic process.” As Marx correctly predicted, the ruling economic and political powers have become “appendages of their own machinery of production.” Adorno therefore endorses Friedrich Nietzsche’s view that society may now be described “with the formula ‘no shepherd and one herd’.”34 Although he does not cite the rest of this passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Adorno agrees largely with Nietzsche’s criticisms of the conformity that prevails today in Western societies: “Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”35 The liberal democratic political system serves only to reinforce the pseudo-individualism and ersatz forms of collectivity and solidarity that accompany the spread of the exchange principle. For example, the purely formal character of the liberal democratic ideal of equality simply underscores the coercive identity of all individuals. In principle, all citizens of Western democracies – regardless of their race, sex, and beliefs – are equal. However, because this equality is entirely formal, it has also been the case in recent history that only those individuals who manifest a high degree of conformity in thought and behaviour have been granted the status of equals. In a society that champions formal equality, “actual or imagined differences” (between races and sexes, for example) are considered to be “stigmas indicating that not enough has been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.” Consequently, for many, the thought of being cast into the egalitarian melting-pot “conjures up martyrdom, not democracy” (MM, 103). In the ﬁnal analysis, the ideal of equality has the same illusory character as the ideals of individuality and freedom; it serves as an ideological veil for the universal commensurability that is dictated by the exchange principle. Accompanying reiﬁcation is its ideological shadow: positivism. Although positivism will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4, a few brief remarks are apposite here. Claiming that positivism is now widespread owing in part to the pervasive inﬂuence of mass culture on thought and behaviour, Adorno also argued that it reinforces conformity to existing conditions by undermining the distinction between these conditions and their better potential. Repeatedly duplicating what exists in allegedly neutral, descriptive-explanatory concepts and images, positivism serves to legitimate these conditions because it implies that what is, is already what it ought to be. With positivism, “[r]eality becomes its own ideology through the spell cast by its faithful duplication.”36 Individuals now bow to the apparently incontrovertible truth expressed in the tautological afﬁrmation of late capitalist societies: “That’s just the way things are.” Implied in this afﬁrmative mode of identity-thinking, for which – once again – the exchange principle supplies the social model, is the idea that things

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cannot change, that the only option available is to accept and conform to existing states of affairs.

2 Colonized lifeworld Increasingly unable even to imagine that things could be other than what they currently are, denatured, depersonalized, and dissociated from others, individuals under late capitalism have been severely damaged by the “spell” that exchange relations have cast “upon all living things” (ND, 345). Having internalized the demands and values of the socio-economic order, they now act as its largely unwitting agents. According to Adorno, then, domination is currently “propagated by the dominated” (MM, 183). Of course, given the overwhelmingly pessimistic cast of this critique of contemporary society, Adorno has many critics, including Habermas, who targets both his sombre depiction of reiﬁed life and his revisions to Lukács’ notion of reiﬁcation. With respect to Adorno’s appropriation of Lukács’ concept, Habermas correctly remarks that the principle of identiﬁcation, which Adorno believes underlies exchange, actually has much deeper historical roots “than the formal rationality of the exchange relation.” But even though he recognizes that identity-thinking ﬁrst gains “its universal signiﬁcance through the differentiation of the medium of exchange value” (TCA I, 378), Habermas nonetheless criticizes both Adorno and Max Horkheimer for detaching the concept of reiﬁcation “not only from the special historical context of the rise of the capitalist economic system but from the dimension of interhuman relations altogether” (TCA I, 379). Here he reiterates a claim he had made earlier, namely that his predecessors “project the process of reiﬁcation back behind the capitalist beginnings of the modern age into the very beginnings of hominization” (TCA I, 366). Still, it should be obvious that this criticism of Adorno’s conception of reiﬁcation rests on a contradictory assessment of Dialectic of Enlightenment. On the one hand, Adorno did trace identity-thinking all the way back to the prehistorical “origin” of language – to the use of language as an instrument for bringing a hostile environment to bay by appropriating it in concepts. On the other hand, Adorno also observed that identity-thinking assumes a qualitatively distinct form under capitalism because it now appears in the guise of the ubiquitous exchange principle. Although there would be no exchange principle without identity-thinking, it is also the case that, once exchange relations insinuated themselves into all areas of human life under capitalism, “non-identical individuals and performances” became “commensurable and identical” to a degree unparalleled in human history. Where difference, non-identity, was tolerated to a limited degree in the earlier stage of capitalism – if only in the form of the independent bourgeois entrepreneur – the exchange principle currently expunges even this economically engendered autonomy because it now

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“imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total” (ND, 146). Consequently, pace Habermas, Adorno does not “detach” the exchange principle from the development of capitalist economic relations (their concentration and centralization). Rejecting the nostalgia for a pure and untainted – non-reiﬁed – past when he argues that the “meaningful times for whose return the early Lukács yearned were as much due to reiﬁcation, to inhuman institutions, as he would later attest it only to the bourgeois age” (ND, 191), Adorno agrees with Lukács to the extent that he also believes that the inﬁltration of exchange relations into all aspects of human life has radically altered society. Under late capitalism, he writes, “the old fetish character of commodities, which reﬂects human relations as though they were relations between things, ends in the socially totalitarian aspect of capital.”37 Habermas also rejects Adorno’s bleak view of the state of interpersonal relations and personality formation under late capitalism. He counters it with his own account of the damage caused by colonization in the West today. A closer examination of this account is needed before his colonization thesis can be accurately assessed. In The Theory of Communicative Action – the only work in which reiﬁcation is discussed in any detail – Habermas lists four conditions that must be satisﬁed before reiﬁcation, or the colonization of the lifeworld, can occur. Under the ﬁrst condition, the lifeworld must already be rationalized, that is, its structural components of culture, society, and personality (along with the “three worlds” – the objective, social, and subjective – that correspond to these components) must be sufﬁciently differentiated before reiﬁcation takes place. Second, the relationship between lifeworld members and the economic and political subsystems must already be mediated by the “differentiated roles” of employee, consumer, citizen, and client (of the welfare state). Third, lifeworld members must be prepared to trade meaningful participation in, and inﬂuence on, the political and economic systems for welfare state beneﬁts (a client role) and higher wages or salaries (a consumer role). Referring to this condition in several passages in The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas associates it with the paciﬁcation of class conﬂict. Finally, before reiﬁcation may occur, individuals must not only identify self-actualization with the consumption of commodities, they must also equate self-determination with the opportunities offered by welfare state guarantees for improving their life conditions and life chances (TCA II, 356). Leaving aside the ﬁrst condition, which relies for its plausibility on Habermas’ controversial thesis about the rationalization of the lifeworld, and ignoring the second (which, unlike the ﬁrst, is relatively uncontroversial38), the third and fourth conditions suggest that individuals are now more or less satisﬁed with their roles as consumers of goods and clients of the welfare state, or at least that they are sufﬁciently satisﬁed to renounce activity geared towards radical social change. In general, then, they are

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satisﬁed with the right to cast a vote every few years, and with their wages and working conditions. Similar observations were made years earlier in Legitimation Crisis when Habermas coined the terms “civil privatism” and “familial-vocational privatism” to refer to the motivations characteristic of individuals under capitalism. For its part, civil privatism “denotes an interest in the steering and maintenance [Versorgung] performances of the administration system but little participation in the legitimizing process . . . (high-output orientation versus low-input orientation).” Complementing civil privatism is familial-vocational privatism which “consists in a family orientation with developed interests in consumption and leisure on the one hand, and in a career orientation suitable to status competition on the other.”39 Following Weber, Habermas maintains that this second syndrome “crystallizes around the well delimited achievement motive.” He adds that each syndrome contains “pre-capitalist and bourgeois elements of the tradition:” the former is tied both to “traditions of bourgeois formal law” and “to the traditionalistic civic ethic or, even, to familial orientations”;40 the latter is “secured by religious traditions,” and its “bourgeois elements” take the form of “possessive individualism and Benthamite utilitarianism.”41 However, where he had argued earlier that these privatistic orientations were being overcome,42 Habermas observes in The Theory of Communicative Action that, in Western nations, “consumerism and possessive individualism, motives of performance, and competition gain the force to shape behavior” (TCA II, 325). This account of consumerism and possessive individualism as conditions for colonization is also confusing. Although these phenomena seem to correspond to the fourth condition in which individuals adopt “those roles in which, withdrawn from the world of work and the public sphere, privatized hopes for self-actualization and self-determination are primarily located, namely in the roles of consumer and client” (TCA II, 356), Habermas also states that consumerism and possessive individualism only acquire the force to shape behaviour once “the economic system subjects the life-forms of private households and the life conduct of consumers and employees to its imperatives.” Rather than being conditions for reiﬁcation or colonization, then, consumerism and possessive individualism appear here as effects of the colonization of the lifeworld by economic imperatives. Amending Weber’s explanation for the emergence of utilitarian and hedonistic lifestyles (specialists without spirit and sensualists without heart), Habermas writes: “It is not the irreconcilability of cultural value spheres – or the clash of life-orders rationalized in their light – that is the cause of one-sided lifestyles and unsatisﬁed legitimation needs; their cause is the monetarization and bureaucratization of everyday practices both in the private and public spheres” (TCA II, 325; emphasis added). A related problem with Habermas’ account of civil privatism emerges in Between Facts and Norms – where, interestingly, the colonization thesis is

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never once mentioned. On the one hand, this syndrome is said to be a hold-over from the early stages of liberalism, with its negative freedoms guaranteeing private liberties. This view agrees with the claim Habermas makes in Legitimation Crisis when he argues that civil privatism “delimits attitudes only negatively, namely on the basis of deﬁcient contributions to will-formation.”43 On the other hand, Habermas also contends that the syndrome of civil privatism develops when citizens’ participation in government has been marginalized: “The syndrome of civil privatism and the selective use of citizenship from the standpoint of client interests is all the more probable the more the economy and the state . . . develop systemic logics of their own and push citizens into the peripheral role of mere organization members.” Acting independently of lifeworld concerns, issues, and values, the capitalist economy and the welfare state “explode the model of a legal community that determines itself through the common practice of associated citizens.”44 In this passage, it appears to be the very uncoupling of the subsystems from the lifeworld (which Habermas usually casts in an entirely positive light) that is responsible for civil privatism. The confusion between the conditions of reiﬁcation and its effects also appears in Habermas’ reinterpretation of Weber’s thesis of the loss of meaning: the second problem afﬂicting the lifeworld in Western societies. Indeed, the cultural impoverishment entailed by the loss of meaning is said by Habermas to interlock with and reinforce systemically induced reiﬁcation, threatening the communicative infrastructure of the lifeworld (TCA II, 327). Brieﬂy, Habermas associates the loss of meaning with the emergence of the specialized cultures of science, morality, and aesthetics. These expert cultures threaten the more holistic cultural traditions of the lifeworld in which the three corresponding domains of rationality – the cognitive-instrumental, the normative, and the subjective-expressive – supposedly interpenetrate in a more balanced way, and the unity of communicative reason remains more or less intact. While the emergence of expert cultures also represents a positive learning process, Maeve Cooke cites Habermas when she remarks that it may lead to pathologies if these cultures do not “automatically ﬂow back into everyday communicative practice but remain cut off from it.” Once a rift develops between the culture of experts and the cultural traditions of the lifeworld, the result is a “drying up of vital traditions” and “the impoverishment of everyday practice” in the lifeworld itself.45 Yet Cooke also observes that Habermas “regards loss of meaning (cultural impoverishment) both as a pathological development that runs parallel to the colonization of the lifeworld and as a social pathology caused by colonization of the lifeworld.”46 Nevertheless, if we treat privatistic syndromes as one of the conditions for reiﬁcation and view the loss of meaning as a development that runs parallel to reiﬁcation, an interesting picture of life in the West emerges which deﬁnes the context in which reiﬁcation takes place. The market

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and the welfare state have alleviated the effects of “heteronomously determined work” either by ensuring through their accreditation of collective bargaining processes that the workplace is humanized, or by providing “monetary rewards and legally guaranteed securities” for dehumanizing work. The rise in the standard of living that accompanies increased wages and beneﬁts has effectively shielded the private sphere against the “palpable consequences” of system imperatives, such as unemployment and poverty. Consequently, “conﬂicts over distribution also lose their explosive power” (TCA II, 349–50). This situation, in which classes continue to exist but the conﬂict between them has been paciﬁed – the third condition for reiﬁcation – effectively means that “the real abstractions that make possible the labor power of the employed and make possible the vote of the electorate are tolerated by those affected as a trade-off against social rewards (in terms of time and money)” (TCA II, 356).47 In most Western countries, then, the former militancy of workers has been quelled with better wages and working conditions, and citizens have become depoliticized. Individuals now search for opportunities for selfactualization and self-determination that have little or no connection with their social roles as citizens and employees. To repeat an earlier point, “there are two channels through which the compensations,” or social rewards, now generally ﬂow: the role of consumer and the role of client of the welfare state (TCA II, 351). In the leisure time afforded them, individuals spend their disposable income on vacations and consumer goods through which they seek personal fulﬁlment. Status symbols and other social markers signal their place within society; success is measured in terms of the possession of these social markers. Furthermore, having accepted a nugatory role in the political life of the state, individuals equate freedom with welfare state protection from illness, unemployment, and the vagaries of old age; that is, with the rewards associated with their role as clients of the welfare state. Rather than trying to expand and deepen their democratic rights and freedoms, they are generally content to identify their freedom with freedom from economic insecurity rather than with freedom to participate more actively as citizens in political decision-making processes. Although he later identiﬁes political selfempowerment as the normative core of liberal democracies, Habermas also believes that self-empowerment and self-determination generally take a depoliticized form today. This unﬂattering picture of life under late capitalism takes on even stronger colours when Habermas speaks of the homogenizing and levelling tendencies that also exist in the West today. Where Adorno believed that the exchange principle was responsible for levelling differences between individuals, Habermas follows Weber (and, ultimately, Hegel) when he remarks on the prevalence of life-styles that have become “mass phenomena,” namely the “utilitarian life-style of ‘specialists without spirit’ and the aesthetic-hedonistic life-style of ‘sensualists without heart’.” In the

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ﬁrst, individuals adopt an instrumental orientation towards their occupational roles, viewing these roles exclusively in terms of the opportunities they present “for income and advancement.” The second is equally onesided: the aesthetic-hedonist life-style emphasizes “expressive attitudes” oriented towards “‘heightening the capacity for sexual and erotic experience’” (TCA II, 323–4). The adoption of such life-styles impoverishes life because the cognitive-instrumental orientation of utilitarians brackets out normative and aesthetic considerations, and the life-style of sensualists without heart excludes both cognitive-instrumental and normative points of view. Even here, however, Habermas seems to turn this condition for colonization into one of its effects when he links these homogenizing, “massiﬁed,” life-styles to “the disintegration of socially integrated contexts of life and their assimilation to the formally organized domains of the capitalist economy and the bureaucratic state apparatus” (TCA II, 325). The lifeworld is also impoverished because everyday consciousness has been “robbed of its power to synthesize,” and is now “fragmented” (TCA II, 355). This fragmentation, with its negative impact on everyday communicative practices, is one of the major effects of the loss of meaning under capitalism. Assertions in everyday communication make explicit reference to at least one of three “worlds:” the objective, social, and subjective worlds. Indeed, Habermas argues that each assertion simultaneously makes reference to all three worlds: “With any speech act, the speaker takes up a relation to something in the objective world, something in a common social world, and something in his own subjective world.”48 It is this multivalent orientation, in which “cognitive interpretations, moral expectations, and valuations . . . interpenetrate” that may be threatened by expert cultures with their emphasis on one world to the exclusion of the other two (TCA II, 327). Accordingly, Habermas argues that the “unmediated transposition of specialized knowledge into the private and public spheres of the everyday world” may not only corrupt this knowledge itself, but also “violate the integrity of lifeworld contexts.” With respect to the latter point, he explains: “A knowledge specialized in one validity claim, which, without sticking to its speciﬁc context, bounces across the whole spectrum of validity, unsettles the equilibrium of the lifeworld’s communicative infrastructure.” These “unsettling” incursions lead to onedimensional orientations, to “the aestheticizing, or the scienticizing, or the moralizing of particular domains of life.” They thereby “give rise to effects for which expressivist countercultures, technocratically carried out reforms, or fundamentalist movements can serve as drastic examples.”49 When expert cultures usurp the “global knowledge” that lies behind everyday communicative practices, the validity claims of cultural traditions are “suspended” (TCA II, 355). As a result, these traditions lose their vital force and die out (TCA II, 327). At one point, Habermas even turns the loss of traditional meaning into one of the conditions for the possibility of colonization: it is only with “fragmented consciousness,” he writes, “that

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the conditions for a colonization of the lifeworld are met” (TCA II, 355). Yet earlier, as I have already noted, he had described the loss of meaning as a “complementary” phenomenon with respect to reiﬁcation (TCA II, 326). Leaving aside the problem of the exact relationship between the loss of meaning and the loss of freedom, however, Habermas clearly associates reiﬁcation (or colonization) with the loss of freedom. In his own words, he is interpreting “Weber’s thesis of the loss of freedom in terms of a systemically induced reiﬁcation of communicatively structured domains of action” (TCA II, 351–2). Habermas therefore equates the loss of freedom experienced today, not with the subordination of employees to the occult machinations of the Invisible Hand, nor with the introduction of repressive technologies and institutions of social control, nor even with the everincreasing curtailment of democratic rights and freedoms, but rather with the inﬁltration of system imperatives into symbolically generated communicative practices in the lifeworld. To return to a point that was made in Chapter 1, while Habermas acknowledges both the primacy of the economy in the West and the economic form that colonization takes, he offers only the briefest description of the colonization of the lifeworld by economic imperatives. Referring very broadly to both economic and political colonization, he contents himself in one passage of The Theory of Communicative Action with the observation that the “functional ties of money and power media become noticeable only to the degree that elements of a private way of life and a cultural-political form of life get split off from the symbolic structures of the lifeworld through the monetary redeﬁnition of goals, relations and services, life-spaces and life-times, and through the bureaucratization of decisions, duties and rights, responsibilities and interdependencies.” Deliberately attempting to deﬂect an exclusively economic interpretation of his colonization thesis in order more sharply to distinguish that thesis from an allegedly one-sided Marxist account of reiﬁcation, Habermas focuses equally one-sidedly on what he calls the “model case” of colonization: “the relationship of clients to the welfare state” (TCA II, 322). Examined under the rubric of juridiﬁcation, this “model case” arises whenever the political system treats individuals exclusively as clients, subjecting them to abstract legal-bureaucratic deﬁnitions and regulations. Echoing Adorno, Habermas argues that individuals who are forced into the legal-bureaucratic mould of the political system end up subordinating themselves to the welfare state and its power imperatives. Although it has served to improve the life chances and life opportunities of individuals owing to its social policies and programmes, Habermas also remarks throughout his work that, with its cradle-to-grave provisions, the social welfare model “pays for the expanding agency of the state at the expense of the autonomous status of individual actors” (BFN, 406). In other words, welfare state guarantees have a Janus face: while exhibiting a “freedomguaranteeing” character (TCA II, 361), they nonetheless diminish

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freedom at the same time by subjecting concrete forms of life to “violent abstraction” (TCA II, 363). Very generally, then, Habermas agrees with Adorno that individuals have suffered a loss of autonomy in late capitalist societies owing to the imposition of abstract rules, regulations, and procedures on their concrete life histories and circumstances. The loss of freedom which accompanies juridiﬁcation manifests itself in communication pathologies in the lifeworld. Failing to advance much beyond this very vague description, Habermas claims that colonization systematically distorts communication because it results in “a confusion between actions oriented to reaching understanding and actions oriented to success” (TCA I, 332). Since the goal of reaching understanding is inherent in everyday communicative practices, these practices are damaged when latent orientations towards individual success substitute for this social and consensual goal.50 Speciﬁcally, the colonization of the lifeworld negatively affects those communicative practices that contribute to the reproduction process of social integration which is “measured by the solidarity among members” of the lifeworld (TCA II, 140). Again, diminished solidarity in the lifeworld is the major effect of colonization. The loss of freedom leads to a diminution in social solidarity because, when individuals communicate with the latent aim of pursuing their own private projects, they undermine the cooperative ventures on which the lifeworld depends for its social cohesion. On Habermas’ all too sketchy account, socially integrative communicative practices help primarily to maintain the society component of the lifeworld which consists in “legitimately regulated interpersonal relations” (TCA II, 140), or the institutions that anchor the economic and political systems: the family, bourgeois private law, and the authority of ofﬁce (TCA II, 173). But social integration serves secondarily to maintain the two other structural components of the lifeworld: it contributes to culture through the inculcation of moral duties and obligations, and to personality formation by providing legitimation for the social memberships that help to shape personal identity (TCA II, 141). Although Habermas never explains why the subsystems speciﬁcally target social integration – rather than the two other processes of cultural reproduction and socialization – one may infer from his emphasis on the essentially privatistic orientations characteristic of latent strategic action that these would indeed corrupt the social coordination of action within the lifeworld, as well as destabilize socially integrated groups. Habermas also asserts that it is largely the more peripheral contributions of social integration to personality and culture that are compromised when the lifeworld is colonized. When the subsystems are no longer able to fulﬁl material expectations in the lifeworld and confront resistance from it, they are allegedly concerned above all to avoid creating the anomic conditions that would result from a direct attack on societal institutions such as the family. Bypassing the society component of the life-

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world, these subsystems speciﬁcally distort those communicative practices that contribute to the social integration of culture and personality. The social memberships needed for personality development are corrupted, and cultural traditions – the vehicles for shared values, goals, and norms – are undermined when individuals orient their actions in accordance with their private interests in proﬁt and pleasure. Consequently, “instead of manifestations of anomie (and instead of the withdrawal of legitimation and motivation in place of anomie), phenomena of alienation [Entfremdung] and the unsettling of collective identity emerge.” In this passage, then, alienation and the unsettling of collective identities are explicitly traced back “to a colonization of the lifeworld”; these are the phenomena in which “a reiﬁcation of the communicative practice of everyday life” is exhibited (TCA II, 386). Unfortunately, Habermas is content simply to label these phenomena. He neither undertakes an analysis of how the colonization of the lifeworld by economic and political imperatives gives rise to strategically motivated speech acts, nor does he explain how these speech acts speciﬁcally distort the social integration of culture and personality, thereby unsettling collective identities and fostering alienation. Although he examines juridiﬁcation at some length in The Theory of Communicative Action, he fails to examine with any degree of precision or speciﬁcity these effects of colonization on the lifeworld. In fact, in his interview with Nielsen, Habermas concedes that he has made no attempt since 1974 to develop his ideas on “communication pathologies that arise at the level of elementary interactions.” Yet he also claims that the suggestions he made in his 1974 article, “Reﬂections on Communicative Pathology,” are still relevant.51 In this article, Habermas had already blamed latent strategic action for distorting communication,52 just as he does in The Theory of Communicative Action where he writes that communicative pathologies arise when “at least one of the parties is deceiving himself about the fact that he is acting with an attitude oriented to success and is only keeping up the appearance of communicative action” (TCA I, 332). However, it is unclear whether the earlier analysis, which was conducted years before Habermas had developed his colonization thesis, and which traced communication pathologies back to the unequal distribution of power in families, can be made serviceable for the colonization thesis which concerns distortions of communication that are caused exclusively by system imperatives when they “openly come at” families “from outside” (TCA II, 388).

3 The problem of mediation A few points will now be made by way of drawing a comparison between Habermas’ work and Adorno’s. Very generally, both philosophers view social solidarity as one of the major casualties of reiﬁcation. The unsettling of collective identities that results from colonization in Habermas’

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theory ﬁnds its counterpart in Adorno’s discussion of the ersatz forms of collective identity that have emerged with the inﬁltration of exchange relations into social life. Furthermore, both philosophers remark on the damage that reiﬁcation has inﬂicted on personality. When the discursively engendered contributions of social integration to personality are colonized by strategic or functionalist system imperatives, those patterns of social membership which help to shape personal identity are reproduced in a distorted form. Individuals are alienated or estranged from others because of these distortions in the legitimately ordered social interactions through which they “develop, conﬁrm, and renew . . . their own identities” (TCA II, 139). Similarly in Adorno, individuals are damaged precisely because interpersonal relations (especially within the family) have been corrupted. Under improved conditions, Adorno once wrote, “the abolition of the [individual] monad through solidarity, would . . . prepare the ground for saving the single being, who only in relation to the general becomes particular” (MM, 135). Finally, both Habermas and Adorno observe that levelling or homogenizing tendencies have become prevalent in the West. Where Adorno believes that individual differences are expunged in favour of conformity to the status quo, Habermas argues that one-dimensional utilitarian and hedonistic “mass” life-styles accompany colonization. Despite these broad similarities, however, Adorno’s and Habermas’ views about reiﬁcation diverge signiﬁcantly at several points. Indeed, James Bohman alleges that theories of reiﬁcation like Adorno’s fall short precisely because they lack a “more complete social and historical theory, that is, one that includes many levels of mediation between the individual and the social structure.”53 Here Bohman is adopting Habermas’ interpretation of Adorno to the effect that, for Adorno, domination has become direct or unmediated under late capitalism. For ﬁrst generation critical theorists, Habermas objects, it “seemed as if systemic imperatives now had the chance – by way of a mediatized family – to take hold directly of intrapsychic events” (TCA II, 387). Although Adorno does argue that domination would become direct – that is, it would take the form of direct physical and psychological control – only if the political system were to succeed in undermining the primacy of the economic system in the West, Habermas’ critique of “direct” domination also contends that Adorno failed to take into account the mediating links between system and lifeworld. Among these links, in Habermas’ view, are the family and the public sphere. If he had earlier described “family status, the authority of ofﬁce,” and “bourgeois private law” as the institutional cores of the lifeworld that “deﬁne society’s base, in the Marxian sense” (TCA II, 173), Habermas refers to yet another such core later in The Theory of Communicative Action when he discusses the lifeworld’s socially integrated private and public spheres which are formed “over against those areas of action that are sys-

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temically integrated in the economy and the state.” The nuclear family is the “institutional core of the private sphere,” but the public sphere has its own institutional core which is anchored in the lifeworld and “comprises communicative networks ampliﬁed by a cultural complex, a press and, later, mass media” (TCA II, 318–19).54 These “institutional cores” help to shield the socially integrated lifeworld from the incursions of the systemically integrated economy and political apparatus. Nevertheless, what I shall argue here is that Adorno fully recognized the mediating role that the family and the public sphere might play within society. In addition, I shall argue that Habermas and Bohman do not succeed in deﬂating Adorno’s claims to the effect that existing conditions have compromised the mediating functions of these institutions to the point where they now serve, not to protect human life against systemic incursions, but rather to bolster the systems themselves. While each theorist stresses the importance of sociation in personality formation and cultural reproduction, Adorno and Habermas strongly disagree about the nature of sociation today. Adorno maintained that economic conditions are such that they impair the interpersonal relations necessary to sustain both a viable public sphere and autonomous family life. Not surprisingly, then, his assessment of the parlous state of interpersonal relations today casts much greater doubt than Habermas’ colonization thesis unwittingly does on the prophylactic powers of the public sphere. For Adorno, the public sphere is “the most important medium of all politically effective criticism.” Today, however, this sphere has become commodiﬁed to the point where it actually “works against the critical principle in order to better market itself.”55 Indeed, Adorno decries the absence of an autonomous sphere in which citizens would generate their own opinions about what lies in the general interest. Relying in part on his analysis of the role of the privately owned culture industry in opinion-formation, Adorno writes that what passes for public opinion today has been imposed on people “by the overall structure of society and hence by relations of domination,”56 thereby making a mockery of the liberal ideal of self-directed, egalitarian opinionformation. The “dominant opinion” disseminated by the culture industry merely reﬂects the opinion of the economic and political elite; it is “indissolubly entangled” with particular interests in proﬁt and power that pass themselves off as universal.57 Following Hegel’s dialectical assessment of public opinion, Adorno did acknowledge that public opinion can serve a positive mediating role by averting “the worst in an antagonistic society.” He remarks that it had already played such a role, not only during the Dreyfus affair, but also when Göttingen students forced the resignation of a Nazi sympathizer (Franz Leonard Schlüter) who was named Minister of Culture in Lower Saxony in 1955.58 Hence Adorno argued that the concept of public opinion should be respected. However, in light of the fact that it now

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often takes a pathological form – the form of collective narcissism which gives “individuals some of the self-esteem the same collective strips from them and that they hope to fully recover through their delusive identiﬁcation with it” – public opinion must also be disdained.59 Opinion- and willformation could acquire complete autonomy only in a society of “free, equal, and emancipated people.” Today, however, “society’s actual organization hinders all of that and produces and reproduces a condition of permanent regression among its subjects.”60 In a short article written three years later, “Kann das Publikum Wollen?” (Can the Public Will?), Adorno underscores this point when he claims that the public generally wills “what has already been imposed upon it.” Its identiﬁcation with the oppressor (in the form of the nation-state, and the offers of satisfaction provided by cultural commodities and consumer goods) must “ﬁrst be broken, and the weak ego . . . built up” before opinion- and will-formation become autonomous.61 While Habermas originally shared Adorno’s pessimistic views about public opinion and the role of the media in shaping it, he has a much more generous view of the media in later work because he sees them as “condensing” those discursively reached agreements in the lifeworld of which he unreservedly approves. Observing that the mass media are “dependent on recourse to the resources of the lifeworld background,” he adds that they also serve to “free communication processes from the provinciality of spatiotemporally restricted contexts,” permitting “public spheres to emerge” (TCA II, 390). Gesturing towards limited effects theories of the media in both The Theory of Communicative Action and Between Facts and Norms, Habermas denies that the media have the one-sidedly negative effects ascribed to them by thinkers like Adorno. Adorno overstated the case because (among other things) “the inner logic of everyday communicative practice sets up defenses against the direct manipulative intervention of the mass media” (TCA II, 391). In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas adds that “research on effect and reception” has “done away with the image of passive consumers as ‘cultural dopes’ who are manipulated by the programs offered to them” (BFN, 377).62 At the same time, Habermas does concede that there are problems with public opinion- and will-formation today. This recognition ultimately calls into question the viability of the public sphere as an effective prophylactic against the incursions of the systems into the lifeworld and makes it difﬁcult to understand how the lifeworld can be preserved from the sort of reiﬁcation effects that Adorno describes. In fact, one can already infer from Habermas’ accounts of privatistic orientations and paciﬁcation that lifeworld members are generally quite receptive to the consumerist ethos purveyed by privately owned media and that individual interests in proﬁt and power now tend to supersede more collective activities and goals. Furthermore, in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas fully acknowledges that the public sphere is extremely fragile because citizens in Western coun-

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tries generally lack the capacities to identify, articulate, and effectively bring to the attention of their political representatives their values, concerns, and interests. Although he does not claim that the weakness of “peripheral networks of opinion-formation” in the public sphere is caused by colonization, Habermas readily admits that these networks only rarely fulﬁl the strong conditions that are required, not only for spontaneous opinion-formation, but also for ensuring that citizens’ opinions are given a full and fair hearing by liberal democratic states. It is currently “unrealistic” to assume that citizens autonomously generate opinions in “an unsubverted political public sphere” (BFN, 488). Only under conditions that Habermas describes as counterfactual would the public sphere be sufﬁciently “resonant and autonomous” to fulﬁl successfully its bridging functions (BFN, 358). The frailty of the public sphere may also be inferred from a remark made in the preface to Between Facts and Norms where Habermas reiterates one of the central theses of The Theory of Communicative Action: the resource that is most endangered in the West today is social solidarity (BFN, xlii). Without such solidarity, a robust public sphere remains an ideal to be achieved rather than a reality. As a result, the public sphere can only act as a weak intermediary between system and lifeworld today. Both Habermas and Adorno agree that there is another forum for interpersonal relations that may act as a mediating link between individuals and the political and economic orders: the family. In this case too, criticisms like Bohman’s fall short. As I have already shown, rather than ignoring the family, Adorno criticized prevailing conditions for having undermined the role that the family once played in cultivating resistance to the status quo. To be sure, he is less interested in tracing the effects of the economic system on communicative infrastructures within the family than he is in its effects on psychological dynamics among family members and the individual’s psychic economy. Martin Jay describes these effects in this way: “With the invasion of the family by external forces of socialization . . . and the erosion of the father’s economic dependence in monopoly capitalism, the child lost the powerful father-ﬁgure needed to actualize his own capacity for independence.”63 Always a precarious achievement, the ego autonomy cultivated by the family has given way to repressed but legitimate feelings of helplessness and powerlessness. These feelings not only point “to the disproportion between the individual and his powers within the whole but still more to injured narcissism and the fear of realizing that they themselves go to make up the false forces of domination before which they have every reason to cringe” (SP II, 89). Owing to the psychic economy of the reiﬁed and narcissistic personality, society now “extends repressively into all psychology in the form of censorship and the superego ”(SP II, 79). Demagogues and the mass media reanimate narcissistic superego introjects (which take shape in images of ferocious, omnipotent, and unbridled

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parental ﬁgures), thereby exacting compliance with values and goals that only perpetuate the sense of helplessness experienced today.64 If Freud had shown throughout his work that “it is power which the individual internalizes,” the internalization of social domination is mediated today by a repressive superego (RP, 32). For Adorno, then, privately owned and publicly operated institutions and agencies have usurped the role of the family. This helps to explain why domination has become more “direct” in Habermas’ sense of that term. Interestingly, Habermas too maintains that, owing to the primacy of the economy, the private household (the economy’s “environment” or institutional anchor) is now the major point of entry for reifying system imperatives (TCA II, 385). Furthermore, he contends that reiﬁcation affects the family primarily by substituting for its contributions to social integration, thereby undermining social solidarity. Here, however, the similarities between the two theories end. Arguing that the family is under attack from system imperatives, Habermas rejects the view that reiﬁcation has damaged psychological dynamics within the family and the psychic economy of family members. The damage caused by colonization is limited to its effects on communicative interaction. Citing Christopher Lasch, Habermas does acknowledge that “narcissistic disturbances are on the increase.” However, he links narcissism to the rationalization of the lifeworld rather than to its colonization by system imperatives, thereby turning narcissism into a problem related to “cognitive and socio-moral development” (TCA II, 389). Narcissism is a disturbance resulting from the new communicative burdens placed on the rationalized lifeworld: the better explanations of narcissism “start from the premise that the communication structures that have been set free in the family provide conditions for socialization that are as demanding as they are vulnerable” (TCA II, 388). By implication, then, when learning processes have further evolved, narcissism and the problems associated with it (emotionally shallow and manipulative interpersonal relations, a reduced capacity for intimacy and social commitment, fantasies of omnipotence that are easily exploited by demagogues and political leaders) will disappear. These problems will be overcome once the family learns to shoulder the new burdens of symbolic reproduction occasioned by the rationalization of the lifeworld.65 Rejecting a psychological account of the damage caused by reiﬁcation, Habermas contends that, when colonization occurs, communicative relations become strained as family relations are formalized by being “opened up to bureaucratic intervention and judicial control,” for example. In this case, family members are assimilated into client roles; they encounter each another as legal subjects, and adopt “objectivizing, success-oriented” attitudes (TCA II, 369). Since Habermas also maintains that colonization wreaks less havoc on the socialization of individuals (one of the family’s central functions) than on social integration, the effects of colonization

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are conﬁned to the family’s peripheral contributions to social solidarity. Once spheres of communication within the family are redeﬁned around the private roles of client and consumer, group identities are destabilized because children no longer acquire from their families the values and competencies they need to interact successfully with others in larger social units. Today, the capitalist economy and the welfare state distort those communicative interactions in the family through which individuals derive a sense of their obligations and duties, and develop, conﬁrm, and renew their memberships in social groups. Yet these negative effects of colonization are counterbalanced by the positive effects of rationalization and the learning processes it has spawned. Adorno was allegedly incapable of recognizing this because he viewed the family as “the agency through which systemic imperatives inﬂuenced our instinctual vicissitudes [Triebschicksale],” and failed to take seriously the family’s “communicative internal structure.” In contrast to Adorno, Habermas argues that rationalization has meant that “some of the potential for rationality ingrained in communicative action is also released.” This potential, he claims, is located in the middle-class nuclear family’s “egalitarian patterns of relationship . . . individuated forms of intercourse, and . . . liberalized child-rearing practices” (TCA II, 387). While acknowledging, then, that “the private household is the point of incursion for the displacement of crises into the lifeworld” (TCA II, 386), Habermas also refers vaguely to unnamed “empirical indicators” which suggest that communicative infrastructures in the family have actually “freed themselves from latent entanglements in systemic dependencies” (TCA II, 387). Against Habermas, however, one could certainly cite empirical evidence in support of the counter-claim that the family has indeed been besieged by system imperatives (this is the crux of much of Christopher Lasch’s work, as well as that of other social psychologists). Failing to assess this evidence in The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas strongly criticizes Adorno for viewing processes of reiﬁcation “as manifestations of a repressive integration emanating from an oligopolistic economy and an authoritarian state.” In the rationalized lifeworld, he stresses, system imperatives always come into conﬂict with “independent communication structures.” Habermas also implies here that Adorno offers an undialectical and biased account of the pathologies caused by reiﬁcation when he insists that the analysis of such pathologies “calls for an (unbiased) investigation of tendencies and contradictions [Gegentendenzen]” (TCA II, 391). Furthermore, lifeworld resistance to the reiﬁcation of its communicative infrastructure appears much more likely to be effective than Adorno believed owing in large measure to the rational patterns of communicative interaction that supposedly prevail within the middle-class nuclear family. In his 1974 study of communicative interaction (mentioned earlier), Habermas focused on pathological communication within the family,

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referring to the work of social psychologists which showed that families suffering from pathologies are usually “characterized by an asymmetrical distribution of power, with dominance relations and coalition formations, as well as by corresponding tensions, discrepant expectations, reciprocal deprecation, and so on.”66 According to this early study, then, families in which non-egalitarian interpersonal relations predominate suffer distortions in their communicative interaction. This view changes with the appearance of The Theory of Communicative Action in 1981.67 While continuing to focus on distorted communication in the form of latent strategic interaction, Habermas now traces these distortions back to the colonization of the lifeworld whose effects are allegedly experienced by all families because reiﬁcation “now works itself out in ways that are less and less class speciﬁc” (TCA II, 302). At the same time, however, he singles out the middle-class nuclear family, claiming that it exhibits predominately egalitarian interpersonal relations which help to shield it from the colonizing onslaught of the subsystems. Indeed, his analysis here appears to give the lie to the claim that reiﬁcation affects all classes equally. On the basis of this unsupported and inconsistent claim about the middle-class nuclear family, Habermas argues that “[f]amilial lifeworlds see the imperatives of the economic and administrative systems coming at them from outside, instead of being mediatized by them from behind” (TCA II, 387). Ultimately, his assertion that the lifeworld can withstand the onslaught of system imperatives depends for its plausibility on the idea that discursively generated social integration, on which the middle-class family relies for its viability as an institution, can be sustained. For Adorno, of course, the task of integrating children into society has been wrested from “familial lifeworlds” and taken over by state agencies and institutions. Referring to the “triumph of integration” in the West, Adorno equates it with the fact that individuals now identify themselves “in their innermost behavior patterns with their fate in modern society.”68 Today, socialization (Vergesellschaftung) consists in integrating individuals into the prevailing socio-economic order in such a way that they impose its standards and values upon themselves (as Michel Foucault will later claim in his analysis of disciplinary society). Opposing this account of the subversion of personality formation and interpersonal relations by exchange, Habermas asserts that both personal and social identities are originally shaped in relatively autonomous acts of “linguistically mediated interaction” (TCA II, 105). Consequently, as Hans Joas argues, Habermas narrows the scope of both socialization (Sozialisierung) and social integration (soziale Integration).69 In Habermas’ view, personal and social identities are not shaped initially by the political system (in national identity, for example70) or the economic system (via class afﬁliations). Rather, individuals are socialized originally and integrated socially through lateral – non-hierarchical and egalitarian – discursive processes of reaching understanding in the lifeworld. Once again, it is

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because he believes that such non-manipulative, consensus-oriented communicative interaction not only prevails within the family but also clashes with attempts made by the systems to assimilate it that Habermas rejects Adorno’s account of “direct” domination. The family now mediates between system and lifeworld in such a way that its communicative infrastructure, which may certainly be distorted by system imperatives, remains more or less intact. However, there are further problems with Habermas’ assessment of the middle-class family as a haven in a heartless world. As I have remarked above, it is social integration, which is measured by social solidarity, that is the major casualty of the colonization of the lifeworld. With colonization, “systemic mechanisms suppress forms of social integration even in those areas where a consensus-dependent coordination cannot be replaced, that is, where the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld is at stake” (TCA II, 196). But if this is the case, it is highly unlikely that the lifeworld’s institutional “cores” will remain untouched by the suppression of social integration and the resulting diminution of solidarity within the lifeworld. Habermas does attempt to circumvent this problem when he not only asserts that system imperatives come at the family from outside but that they speciﬁcally attack the contributions of social integration to culture and personality rather than undermining society with its “principles of legal order and of morality” which also sustain the family (TCA II, 146). Against this, however, I would argue that, once the social integration of culture and personality is distorted or “suppressed,” social institutions, including the family, will inevitably suffer. Distorted social integration in these two areas will also affect the lifeworld’s society component because each reproduction process contributes to “maintaining all the components of the lifeworld” (TCA II, 142). If it is possible only to distinguish analytically between the contributions of social integration to culture, society, and personality, as Habermas suggests here, then the suppression of social integration in one area will have negative effects on the other two. This means that the anomic conditions which the economic and political subsystems allegedly try to avoid by focusing their attacks selectively on culture and personality cannot be stemmed. The family, too, suffers pathologies when strategic attitudes and behaviours undermine the discursively generated norms on which it depends for its legitimacy. Tied as they are to lifeworld contexts that are currently degenerating owing to alienation and the unsettling of collective identities, institutions like the family are losing the normative basis they require to sustain themselves. Although Habermas claims that the family is both the primary target of colonization and the primary cushion against it – or, more generally, that communicative action within the lifeworld has been simultaneously reiﬁed and rationalized (TCA I, 382) – it is entirely unclear whether this institution can continue to act as an effectively rationalized buffer zone or “mediating level” between system and lifeworld

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owing to the damage inﬂicted on social integration by the incursions of system imperatives into the lifeworld. This state of affairs poses another serious challenge to Habermas’ distinction between lifeworld and system because Habermas explicitly differentiates between them on the basis of the distinction between social integration and system integration.

4 Reiﬁcation and the global economy At the end of Volume I of The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas presents his concept of the lifeworld in the context of reinterpreting Lukács’ claim about the limits to reiﬁcation. Although Lukács followed Marx, and portrayed reiﬁcation as economically engendered, Habermas endorses his conviction that reiﬁcation “not only can be stopped practically but, for reasons that can be theoretically demonstrated, has to run up against internal limits” (TCA I, 361). Even as Lukács criticizes the penetration of reiﬁcation deep into the “soul” of the worker, he argues that “it remains true that precisely his humanity and soul are not changed into commodities.” Unlike the bourgeois, the proletarian has not been “mechanized and reiﬁed in the only faculties that might enable him to rebel against reiﬁcation.”71 While workers remain the primary victims of capitalism, because their bodies are forced to adapt to the rhythms of the machine in exchange for subsistence wages, their minds have been left free. It is in this sense that workers have retained sufﬁcient humanity to see through the irrationality of capitalism. Their reiﬁcation within the workplace runs up against the limits of their consciousness of themselves as living human subjects. Habermas reinterprets these limits to reiﬁcation as limits that are drawn by the lifeworld rather than by a particular class. While the cognitiveinstrumental and functionalist rationality that characterize action within the economic and political subsystems are not problematic in and of themselves because they – and they alone – ensure the continued material reproduction of the lifeworld, these forms of rationality do threaten the lifeworld’s integrity when they surge beyond the boundaries of the economic and political systems and reify its communicative infrastructure. Yet the lifeworld supposedly contains the antidote to colonization because it exhibits a more holistic form of communicative rationality that comprises not only cognitive-instrumental rationality (which characterizes the actions of agents within the subsystems), but also moral-practical, and aesthetic-practical rationality. Consequently, the colonizing subsystems run up against human subjects whose lives are occupied primarily with reaching understanding about their environing objective, social, and subjective worlds. The one-dimensional rationality of the subsystems is countered (and more or less successfully thwarted) by the multidimensional communicative rationality of the lifeworld. Against this, however, I have argued that, on Habermas’ own descrip-

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tion of it, colonization poses a far more serious threat to the integrity of the lifeworld than Habermas is prepared to acknowledge. With colonization, “central areas of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization have been openly drawn into the vortex of economic growth and therefore of juridiﬁcation” (TCA II, 367–8), and the lifeworld is increasingly systemically integrated. Once system integration is substituted for social integration, it becomes difﬁcult to understand how Habermas can credibly maintain that the lifeworld continues to serve the prophylactic role he ascribes to it in The Theory of Communicative Action. Adorno’s account of life under late capitalism may well be closer to the mark. Since the mediating levels between system and lifeworld have been undermined, the lifeworld is no longer protected against the incursions of the systems. The extent to which it is capable of acting as an “internal limit” to the rationality of the subsystems – in the same way that the consciousness of Lukács’ workers acts as a limit to reiﬁcation – is minimal given that the already porous boundary between system and lifeworld are breached when colonization occurs. Indeed, I would argue that the porousness of this boundary helps to explain why the lifeworld is threatened by colonization at all. Signiﬁcantly, Habermas appears in his most recent work to return to the more critical, Adornian reading of life under late capitalism that he originally broached in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. There he emphasized the extent to which public opinion is manipulated and controlled by the culture industry, and spoke very critically about “the peculiar ambivalence of a domination exercised through the domination of nonpublic opinion.”72 As vehicles for the prevailing ideology, the media exert “pressure toward conformity with existing conditions.” Citing Adorno, Habermas also maintained that the false consciousness fostered by the media results in “a nexus of modes of behavior” that is consonant with the behaviours required by the political and economic systems.73 Against this early view, Habermas’ assessment of the media in The Theory of Communicative Action and Between Facts and Norms is far more positive. However, in The Postnational Constellation, even Habermas’ apologetic references to “new anthropological research” with its “remarkable dialectic between leveling and creative differentiations” fail to mute his newly revived critical attack on “commodiﬁed, homogenous culture.” Owing to mass communication, consumption and tourism, mass culture not only “imposes itself on distant lands,” it “levels out even the strongest national differences, and weakens even the strongest local traditions” in the West as well.74 More importantly, Habermas argues that the political system, which once protected the lifeworld against some of the more harmful effects of the economy by virtue of its social welfare policies and programmes, is now falling victim to the vagaries of global capital. If he had earlier ascribed primacy to the economy, while focusing exclusively on the colonization of the lifeworld by political imperatives, Habermas fully

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acknowledges the primacy of the economic system in his discussion of globalization.75 It is in this sense, too, that Habermas appears to be returning to the Adornian fold. Since the 1980s (at the very latest),76 Western states have reduced, or in some cases virtually eliminated, social welfare beneﬁts; they have also severely restricted access to them. Habermas lays the blame for this gutting of social welfare policy squarely on “supply-side economic policies – anti-inﬂationary monetary and ﬁscal policies, the reduction of direct taxation, the transfer of state-owned enterprises into the private sector, and so on.” All these changes were “aimed at deregulating markets, reducing subsidies, and creating a more favorable investment climate” for global capital.77 Habermas describes this trend variously as the state’s forced capitulation to capital – markets “drive out politics”78 – or its voluntary “‘self-dismantling’.”79 Furthermore, he remarks that the globalization of capital has at least three major, and interrelated, consequences for the lifeworld. With the neo-liberal state’s increasing subordination to the economic system, the lifeworld, which once exercised some sporadic and indirect inﬂuence on the economy owing to the political system’s need for legitimation, is losing the little “communicative power” it once had. As the economy begins to regulate all “social spheres,” Habermas argues, “the possibilities for a democratic self-steering of society slip away.”80 In The Theory of Communicative Action, where he acknowledged the primacy of the economy, Habermas had argued that power is assimilated to money due to the state’s dependence on taxation to fund its social welfare programmes (TCA II, 171). With the globalization of capital, however, money “replaces power”81 because “national politics is gradually losing its inﬂuence over the conditions of production under which taxable income and proﬁts are generated.”82 The second effect of globalization on the lifeworld stems from this replacement of power by money. As Western states attempt to create a more favourable investment climate for global capital, and the social safety net is withdrawn, the paciﬁcation of social conﬂict – which is one of the four conditions for the colonization of the lifeworld – evaporates. While he focuses on the negative effects of this development on symbolically reproduced social integration – to the virtual exclusion of its material damage (i.e. poverty, and the malnutrition, disease, and psychosomatic disorders to which poverty gives rise) – his description of the unravelling of the welfare state compromise is worth citing at some length: Of course, the consequence of the revocation of the welfare-state compromise is that the crisis tendencies it had previously counteracted now break out into open view. Emerging social costs threaten to overburden the integration capacities of liberal societies. The indicators of a rise in poverty and income disparities are unmistakable, as are the tendencies toward social disintegration. The gap between the stan-

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dard of living of the employed, the underemployed, and the unemployed is widening. ‘Underclasses’ arise wherever exclusions – from the employment system, from higher education, from the beneﬁts of transfer payments, from housing markets, from family resources, and so on – are compounded. Impoverished social groups, largely cordoned off from the broader society, can no longer improve their social position through their own efforts. In the long run, a loss of solidarity such as this will inevitably destroy a liberal political culture whose universalistic self-understanding democratic societies depend on.83 Social solidarity is damaged even more severely than it was by colonization because, with the state’s abandonment of its social obligations, class conﬂicts re-emerge, tearing apart the social fabric. If, under the short-lived welfare state compromise, these conﬂicts supposedly remained latent, and the egalitarian pretensions of liberal democracies seemed to transcend mere ideology, it is again the case that socio-economic disparities divide the privileged from the underprivileged, potentially giving rise to antagonisms. The primacy of the economy, to which Habermas paid only lipservice in The Theory of Communicative Action, now unfurls its full colours. It is therefore unclear whether Habermas can plausibly continue to reject what he once criticized as the “economically foreshortened” analyses of reiﬁcation offered by Marxists. In fact, his objections to these analyses may themselves need to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Once the social safety net is undermined, and money replaces power, the system imperatives of the economy unilaterally destabilize the lifeworld. Since individuals can no longer rely on state protection, the imperative to ﬁnd gainful employment in the unstable and expanding global economy means that they must accommodate themselves all the more submissively (if not resentfully) to market forces. Third, with economic globalization, Habermas’ colonization thesis also goes by the board. Where it was once the case that citizens traded a diminished role in the political system for social welfare beneﬁts, little is now offered by way of compensation for political powerlessness. One of the necessary conditions for colonization therefore no longer obtains. Indeed, this may explain why Habermas makes no further mention of colonization in his later work. As the holes in the social safety net grow larger, many individuals will fall into unemployment, underemployment, and poverty. Economic domination will become all the more powerful and its effects more acute, prompting, perhaps, vocal and militant – unpaciﬁed – resistance to these same imperatives. Of course, Adorno denounced the spread of exchange relations throughout society, but he did not live to see the effects of the globalization of capital. In fact, he agreed largely with Habermas’ earlier view about the pacifying effects of the welfare state compromise. Arguing that

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the political system remains subordinate to the capitalist economy, Adorno also believed that “differences between classes” continue to grow “objectively with the increasing concentration of capital.” With paciﬁcation, however, the existence of classes had been “[s]creened from subjectivity.”84 Contributing to the invisibility of classes was the rising standard of living, which allowed workers to buy better food, clothing, and housing, and the protections provided for the unemployed, unemployable, ill, and ageing members of society.85 The idea that workers are impoverished takes on a more ﬁgurative meaning: impoverishment refers to the powerlessness of the vast majority of individuals in the face of the ruling economic powers that are supported by the welfare state. Although he incorrectly attributed the theory of absolute impoverishment to Marx, Adorno rejected this theory (along with the theory of relative economic impoverishment) precisely because he recognized that workers’ living standards had improved. Owing to the unravelling of the welfare state compromise, Adorno himself would have to concede, not only that the stratiﬁcation of society into classes will become increasingly acute (thereby facilitating the emergence of class-consciousness), but also that economic domination may become even more pronounced. One question remains, however: may Adorno have been right all along? The answer to this question would involve, at least in part, a critical analysis of the extent to which the political system was subordinate to the economy during the brief period of the welfare state compromise (from about the 1940s to the 1980s). As we have seen, Habermas prevaricates on this issue. Conceding that power was assimilated to money even under the welfare state compromise, he nonetheless argues in The Theory of Communicative Action that political domination remains distinct from economic domination. Against this, I have already argued that Habermas has not shown successfully that political domination was ever qualitatively distinct from economic domination. Furthermore, the subordination of power to money under the welfare state compromise itself suggests that political domination was no more than a permutation of economic domination even before globalization began to have a direct impact on the policies of Western states. With globalization, however, one can predict with some certainty that, as socioeconomic disparities increase, our commodiﬁed, homogeneous, mass societies will become much more internally divided, fractious, and potentially violent, class societies. The potential for violent class conﬂict becomes even greater as Western states arrogate to themselves new powers of oppressive social control in the interest of maintaining the free ﬂow of capital.

3

Reason

At issue in the previous chapter were conﬂicting ideas about the ways in which economic and political rationality affect everyday life under late capitalism. Indeed, conceptions of reason or rationality lie at the very core of both Adorno’s and Habermas’ social theories. Their indebtedness to Lukács is especially evident here. Citing “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics,” Andrew Feenberg observes that, for Lukács, “history itself can become the study of reason” because “‘history consists precisely in the constant transformation of those forms which earlier modes of thinking, undialectical and stuck fast in the immediacy of their present as they always were, regarded as suprahistorical’.”1 In fact, Habermas had already advanced this interpretation of the early Lukács in the ﬁrst volume of The Theory of Communicative Action where he accepts Lukács’ claim that reason is objectivated “in the relation of human beings to one another and to nature,” and adopts Lukács’ terminology in his own account of late capitalist societies.2 According to the Hungarian philosopher, correctly to identify the forms of objectivity (Gegenständlichkeitsformen) that have succeeded each other in the course of human history is tantamount to acquiring “a knowledge of the historical process in its totality.”3 In his attempt to reconcile the insights of Marx and Weber, Lukács fashions an original account of history in which “intellectual genesis must be identical in principle with historical genesis.”4 While modifying Lukács’ claim that the form of objectivity animating capitalism is characterized by the “principle of rational mechanisation and calculability,”5 both Adorno and Habermas follow him when they distinguish late capitalism from other societies in terms of the type of rationality that predominates within it. For his part, Adorno summarily declared: “Critique of society is critique of knowledge, and vice versa.” To gain a critical understanding of society, social theorists must ﬁrst become aware of the “societal coercions” at work in their own theoretical attempts to acquire this understanding. Only such radically self-reﬂective knowledge is capable of obtaining “epistemological objectivity”6 about society because it recognizes the degree to which it too has been affected by the prevailing form of thought: the reifying identity-thinking whose social model is

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exchange. Late capitalist society has become irrational because all social activity, including thinking, expunges particulars (the very condition of its possibility) under the spell of the levelling exchange principle. Without referring explicitly to Lukács, Adorno echoes him when he adds that the “subject’s reﬂection on its own formalism is reﬂection upon society.”7 Formalistic, identiﬁcatory thought may be traced back historically to early stages of human development, but it acquired its “universal signiﬁcance” as the form of objectivity or thought speciﬁcally characteristic of late capitalism only “through the differentiation of the medium of exchange value.” Thus, as Habermas notes correctly in his otherwise problematic discussion of Adorno, the “abstraction of exchange is . . . the historical form in which identifying thought develops its world-historical inﬂuence and determines the forms of intercourse of capitalist society” (TCA I, 378). But, of course, Habermas is also very critical of Adorno’s pessimistic account of late capitalism. Some of his disagreements with Adorno emerge when he later revises Lukács’ notion of a form of objectivity. Observing in the ﬁrst volume of The Theory of Communicative Action that cognitive-instrumental reason one-sidedly rationalizes or reiﬁes everyday communicative practices, or that the form of objectivity characteristic of capitalism prejudices the way “in which its members categorially interpret objective nature, interpersonal relations, and their own subjective natures” (TCA I, 355), Habermas modiﬁes Lukács’ concept of a form of objectivity or thought in the second volume. Unlike the Gegenständlichkeitsform, which is allegedly focused exclusively on “the conditions of the objectivity of possible experience,” Habermas’ Verständigungsform, or form of understanding, refers to “the formal properties of the intersubjectivity of possible understanding.”8 Although Habermas does try to retain the critical thrust in Lukács’ concept when he argues that “[h]istorically variable forms of understanding are, as it were, the sectional planes that result when systemic constraints of material reproduction inconspicuously intervene in the forms of social integration and thereby mediatize the lifeworld” (TCA II, 187), his conception of the modern form of understanding also reﬂects his positive assessment of the rationalization of the lifeworld. Crystallizing in the West since the eighteenth century (TCA II, 196), the form of understanding that prevails today is one in which “communicative actions are increasingly detached from normative contexts and become increasingly dense, with an expanded scope for contingencies; and . . . forms of argumentation are institutionally differentiated, namely, theoretical discourse in the scientiﬁc enterprise, moral-practical discourse in the political public sphere and in the legal system, and aesthetic criticism in the artistic and literary enterprise” (TCA II, 352–3). As Habermas insists throughout The Theory of Communicative Action, this progressive rationalization of the lifeworld had to occur before system imperatives could reify the lifeworld by intervening from outside and substituting for mechanisms of social integration. Thus, where Adorno unilaterally identiﬁes the “process of increasing

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social rationalization” with the “universal extension of the market system,”9 Habermas deﬁnes societal rationalization as a process which consists in both the rationalization of everyday communication and “the growing complexity of subsystems of purposive-rational action” (TCA I, 342). Yet it should also be obvious that, Habermas agrees with Adorno on a very general level when he evaluates late capitalist societies in terms of the type of rationality that predominates within them. When he praises Max Weber at the very beginning of The Theory of Communicative Action for his examination of Western society “from the perspectives of rational action, rational conduct of life, and rationalized worldviews,” Habermas programmatically states that “any sociology that claims to be a theory of society has to face the problem of rationality simultaneously on the metatheoretical, methodological, and empirical levels” (TCA I, 7).10 In Between Facts and Norms, he remarks on the philosophical signiﬁcance of this programme when he explains that his theory of communicative action attempts to “preserve the link with the classical conception of an internal connection, however mediated, between society and reason, and hence between the constraints and necessities under which the reproduction of social life is carried out, on the one hand, and the idea of a conscious conduct of life, on the other.”11 For both Adorno and Habermas, then, social theory must examine the type of rationality that predominates in social interaction at a given point in history. On the diachronic level, too, they agree with Lukács that “the essence of history lies precisely in the changes undergone by those structural forms which are the focal point of man’s interaction with the environment at any given moment and which determine the objective nature of both his inner and his outer life.”12 With its Hegelian overtones, this view of society may appear idealistic in the extreme. For if human history must be studied as a succession of forms of thought or understanding, then it may seem to be the case that history consists entirely in the cunning or ruse of reason. What have yet to be examined, however, are the historical conceptions of reason that Adorno and Habermas advance. In the last chapter, it became clear that they disagree about the form of thought that prevails today. Where Adorno rails against the identiﬁcatory exchange principle, Habermas believes that the lifeworld’s communicative rationality is pitted against the functionalist rationality of the subsystems and the instrumental rationality of their agents. For the purposes of this chapter, then, what are of greater interest are their claims about the evolution of reason. Although both philosophers maintain that reason has evolved over the course of human history, their views about its historical trajectory diverge at a critical juncture. As a result, they have distinct conceptions of the relationship between reason and “inner nature,” instinct or desire. After examining these conﬂicting claims, it will be possible to determine in what precise sense each depicts human history as impelled by the cunning of reason and exhibits a partiality for reason.13

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1 The evolution of reason In the previous chapter I remarked brieﬂy that Habermas rejects Adorno’s account of the evolutionary course of reason. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas objects, Adorno and Horkheimer “expand instrumental reason into a category of the world-historical process of civilization as a whole, that is, they project the process of reiﬁcation back behind the capitalist beginnings of the modern age into the very beginnings of hominization” (TCA I, 366). Yet this objection can also be raised against Habermas himself because he too inserts his notion of communicative reason into an overarching world-historical civilizing process. The rationalization of the lifeworld is paradoxical because it has not only made possible “a heightening of systemic complexity, which becomes so hypertrophied that it unleashes system imperatives that burst the capacity of the lifeworld they instrumentalize,” it has also initiated a “world-historical process of enlightenment” (TCA II, 155). In fact, Habermas traces this process all the way back to “the transitional ﬁeld between primate hordes and paleolithic societies” (TCA II, 191). His positive assessment of the historical trajectory of reason obviously stands in sharp contrast to Adorno and Horkheimer’s grim declaration that “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”14 In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer advance the speculative claim that Western rationality ﬁrst emerged in response to threats posed by external nature. This claim about the relationship between reason and the ego instinct of self-preservation reappears in Adorno’s later work as well: “Ratio came into being in the ﬁrst place as an instrument of self-preservation, that of reality-testing.”15 Interpreting the Odyssey as “one of the earliest representative testimonies of Western bourgeois civilization”16 – whose destructive inﬂuence is currently felt around the world in the guise of ubiquitous exchange relations – Horkheimer and Adorno ﬁnd in Odysseus’ epic encounters with the forces of nature a conﬁrmation of their view that it was speech which allowed human beings to differentiate themselves from natural objects and to gain mastery over them. So while they would agree with Habermas that reason developed ﬁrst with speech, Horkheimer and Adorno nonetheless argue that speech originally served (and continues to serve) as a means to the end of controlling nature. These ﬁrst generation critical theorists would therefore also reject Habermas’ claim that “reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech” (TCA I, 287) because they maintain that speech geared towards intersubjective understanding itself relies on classiﬁcation, ordering, and explanation – or on the coercive, identiﬁcatory subsumption of particular objects under universal concepts – and that these activities are in turn animated by the drive for self-preservation.17 Adorno and Horkheimer also observe that the primitive attempts of speakers to dominate nature through concepts for the purpose of self-

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preservation soon turned against inner nature itself in the form of human drives or instincts. This suppression or denial of inner nature, exempliﬁed dramatically in Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens (among other places in The Odyssey), was not only “the nucleus of all civilizing rationality,” it was at the same time “the germ cell of a proliferating mythic irrationality.” For, “with the denial of nature in man, not merely the telos of the outward control of nature but the telos of man’s own life is distorted and befogged.” The attempt to preserve the self against the powers of nature culminates in the loss of the very self for whose sake the attempt was originally made. By repudiating our connection to nature, Horkheimer and Adorno write, all our goals – “social progress, the intensiﬁcation of . . . material and spiritual powers, even consciousness itself – are nulliﬁed, and the enthronement of the means as an end, which under late capitalism is tantamount to open insanity, is already perceptible in the prehistory of subjectivity.”18 In the beginning was the species. Asserting that the individual is not historically primary, Adorno counters in his 1969 essay, “Subject and Object,” that in “the history of evolution, a more likely presumption would be the temporal prius, or at least the contemporaneousness of the species.” He ﬁnds evidence for the temporal priority of the species in nature itself which “on its lower levels teems with unindividuated organisms.”19 In accord with Hegel in The Philosophy of Mind, then, Adorno maintains that it is out of the primal mud of species being that human beings ﬁrst began to individuate themselves. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, the ego emerges speciﬁcally with the reﬂective introversion of sacriﬁce that is epitomized in Odysseus’ cunning during his confrontation with Polyphemus where he denies himself as “Nobody” in order to save himself.20 Once Odysseus had distanced himself from the forces of nature of which he was nonetheless inextricably a part, he hollowed out an ego devoid of content (an empty “I”), thereby sacriﬁcing his fully human self. These observations about the process of individuation are made with different emphases in Negative Dialectics where Adorno again links the development of the ego to the evolution of the Western ratio. Arguing for materialism, and against Kant’s “thesis of subjective apriority,” Adorno criticizes Kant’s denial of nature in the subject, insisting that “no subject of immediate data, no ‘I’ to which they might be given, is possible independently of the transsubjective world. He to whom something is given belongs a priori to the same sphere as the given thing.” In this context Adorno also asserts that “in the evolutionary course of rationality and ego principle, the two have come into opposition to each other; yet neither is without the other.”21 Adorno’s speculations are not only sketchy;22 they are as controversial as all philosophical accounts of the process of hominization. For his part, Habermas accuses Adorno of smuggling into his account a philosophy of history: Adorno allegedly shifts “the primordial history of subjectivity and the self-formative process of ego identity into an encompassing

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historico-philosophical perspective” (TCA I, 380). With some qualiﬁcations, Habermas is correct. Adorno does make reference to “the unity that cements the discontinuous, chaotically splintered moments and phases of history – the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over men, and ﬁnally to that over man’s inner nature.” He postulates a line of universal historical development that led from “the slingshot to the megaton bomb” (ND, 320). However, other commentators have resisted the temptation to interpret Adorno as offering a straightforwardly unilinear and teleological account of history in the form of a “‘retrogressive anthropogenesis’.”23 For example, Martin Jay maintains that this interpretation, while “justiﬁable in part,” is “too one-sided” because Adorno also believed that human history “displayed . . . the ability to break dramatically with the course it had been following and open itself up to something radically different.”24 Simon Jarvis concurs: while domination has accompanied the evolutionary course of reason like a shadow, human nature is not “irrevocably founded on domination.”25 A future reconciliation of human beings with both outer nature and their own inner instinctual nature cannot simply be excluded by ﬁat. To the extent that reconciliation remains possible, it may yet be the case that history will dramatically change course for the better. Habermas’ criticisms of Adorno and his protestations to the contrary do not successfully conceal the philosophy of history that undergirds his own theory of societal evolution. This theory takes shape in a bricolage of speculative anthropologies dealing with hominization, conjectures by Mead about the historical emergence of language, Durkheim’s hypotheses about the origins of religion, and Piaget’s and Kohlberg’s developmental cognitive psychologies, among other theories. In this evolutionary account of reason, human history consists in a progressive movement towards “a growing decentration of interpretive systems and to an ever-clearer categorical demarcation of the subjectivity of internal nature from the objectivity of external nature, as well as from the normativity of social reality and the intersubjectivity of linguistic reality.”26 As he examines this evolutionary pattern under the rubric of the rationalization of the lifeworld, Habermas attempts to do nothing less than to demonstrate that the more developed, post-conventional form of communicative reason (the terminus ad quem of societal evolution deﬁned as rationalization) satisﬁes “universalistic claims,” or that the “rational internal structure of processes of reaching understanding,” which manifests itself today in communicative interaction among lifeworld members in Western countries, is “universally valid ” (TCA I, 137). To be sure, Habermas has tried to support the contention that he successfully avoids incorporating a philosophy of history into his theory. For example, in 1976 he distinguished a Hegelian-like logic of social evolution (consisting in “the rationally reconstructible pattern of a hierarchy of more and more comprehensive structures”) from empirical processes of evolu-

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tion (or “the processes through which the empirical substrates develop”). With respect to the actual course of history, he wrote, “we need require of history neither unilinearity nor necessity, neither continuity nor irreversibility.”27 The historical course of communicative reason has never run entirely smoothly: Nazi Germany offers an example of the historical regression of reason.28 Yet Hegel himself could plausibly argue both that he has a philosophy of history and that this philosophy requires neither strict continuity nor irreversibility. Moreover, for both Hegel and Habermas, the underlying pattern or logic of history reveals the cunning of reason: the trajectory of social evolution is marked by the development of increasingly comprehensive rational structures. As David Ingram remarks, the higher phases of this process, allegedly visible in the West today, “logically presuppose and incorporate lower ones, thereby constituting a cumulative advance in learning potential.” While Ingram staunchly attempts to distinguish this account from the views of Hegel and Marx,29 a philosophy of history does indeed emerge from Habermas’ theory of rationalization. In fact, in an early essay Habermas admitted that he had a teleological view of history: historical processes exhibit a direction that is deﬁned in part by “the maturity of the forms of social intercourse.”30 In this respect he advances a view of history that Adorno would emphatically reject, namely a universal history that leads “from savagery to humanitarianism” (ND, 320). The evolution of society involves the rationalization of both the subsystems and the lifeworld. However, the rationalization of the economy and state, which is marked by their growing complexity, is itself “dependent on the structural differentiation of the lifeworld” (TCA II, 173). Only when the lifeworld had been rationalized sufﬁciently could the political and economic systems differentiate themselves from it, forming more or less autonomous subsystems. Historically, the rationalization of the lifeworld occurs when “motive and value generalization progress and the zones of what is unproblematic shrink.” Subsequently, there is a “growing pressure for rationality” in the form of “the need for achieved consensus” and a concomitant increase in the “expenditure of interpretive energies and the risk of dissensus.” These “demands and dangers” can only be “headed off by media of communication,” either through “consensus formation in language,” or the “transfer of action coordination from language to steering media” (TCA II, 183). Thus, the historical development of communicative reason gave rise to functionalist reason. Once lifeworld members began to redeem validity claims about moral and ethical norms by means of argumentation (rather than by appeals to authority or tradition), everyday language became overloaded or overburdened, and its material reproductive functions were benevolently taken over by the political and economic subsystems with their delinguistiﬁed media of money and power (TCA II, 155). In Habermas’ view, “a lifeworld can be regarded as rationalized to the extent that it permits interactions that are not guided by normatively

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ascribed agreement but – directly or indirectly – by communicatively achieved understanding” (TCA I, 340). Again, the evolution of learning processes involves both a progressive distinction between the objective, social, and expressive domains – domains that were often confused or conﬂated in tribal societies based on kinship relations and, later still, in societies with religious and metaphysical worldviews – and the development of formal procedures for redeeming validity claims in each. With the discursive redemption, through argumentation, of these three distinct types of validity claim, communicative action’s rational potential has been more fully actualized. Anthony Giddens offers a succinct account of Habermas’ view of the evolution of communicative reason when he writes: “The more we are able rationally to ground the conduct of our lives in the three main spheres of existence – relations with the material world, with others, and in the expressive realm of aesthetics – the more advanced our form of society can be said to be.”31 According to Habermas, it is this learning process associated with the rationalization of the lifeworld which now separates us from the “opaque ﬁgures of mythical thought” and the “bizarre expressions of alien cultures” (TCA II, 400). Citing Axel Honneth, Joel Whitebook observes that those “‘processes of rationalization, in which he [Habermas] attempts to conceive the evolution of society’” actually involve “‘a suprasubjective learning process carried by the social system’.”32 Although Honneth’s interpretation is somewhat problematic because Habermas did acknowledge that there is a “circular process between societal and individual learning”33 – or between what he calls phylogenesis and ontogenesis in The Theory of Communicative Action (TCA II, 5) – this interpretation also contains more than a kernel of truth. For when Habermas argues that his own version of historical materialism need not assume “a species subject that undergoes evolution,” and instead focuses on the evolution of “societies and the acting subjects integrated into them,”34 supra-subjective society does become one of the two carriers of reason. Without rehearsing the objections of methodological individualists to the claim that society can be conceived independently of the individuals who comprise it – objections Adorno himself attempted to refute in his essay “Society” – it should be clear that Habermas has radically altered the meaning of “phylogenesis” which usually refers to the evolution of the species, not of societies. It should also be emphasized here that Habermas expressly rejects the claim that rationalization is bound in any way to natural evolution. In fact, he goes so far as to deny that the human species now evolves naturally. Whereas earlier stages of hominization did involve both organic and cultural changes, “at the threshold to homo sapiens . . . this mixed organic-cultural form of evolution” gave way “to an exclusively social evolution.” As a result, Habermas argues, the “natural mechanism of evolution came to a standstill.”35 Having sketched Habermas’ account of the rationalization of the lifeworld, I shall review of some of the key differences between Adorno’s and

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Habermas’ conceptions of the evolutionary course of reason. According to Adorno, reason evolved in the course of humanity’s attempts to deal with an environment perceived as hostile. To this extent, there is some validity to Habermas’ objection that Adorno focuses primarily on epistemological concerns. For Adorno, our relations with nature have determined the evolutionary trajectory of reason; reason developed as an adaptive response to the threats that nature posed to self-preservation. Embedded in nature, reason becomes increasingly antagonistic to nature throughout the course of human history. However, as Adorno observes in Negative Dialectics, this antagonism itself is a natural one: “Human history, the history of the progressive mastery of nature, continues the unconscious history of nature, of devouring and being devoured” (ND, 355). In sharp contrast to this view, Habermas focuses on the development of reason through those processes in which we learned slowly to orient our linguistic endeavours to reaching understanding, thereby laying the foundation for cooperative social interaction. The coordination of action required linguistically achieved consensus which made it possible for us to work together more or less harmoniously in tribes, groups, and, ultimately, nations. Thus Habermas describes communicative action as a “switching station for the energies of social solidarity” (TCA II, 57). These theorists’ conceptions of what one might call (with some important qualiﬁcations) the state of nature are also quite distinct. For Habermas, the state of nature is actually a state of incipient culture in which discursively generated social relations enabled families to combine into ever larger groups, creating a “network of lasting reciprocities” (TCA II, 161). Against this paciﬁc conception, which in some respects hearkens back to Rousseau, Adorno views the state of nature in a more Hobbesian fashion. Acting largely instinctually and aggressively, human beings forged weapons of reason to conquer and subdue external nature, each other, and, ﬁnally, themselves. Of course, Adorno’s idea of the state of nature is just as speculative as Habermas’, and each has long found a place within the philosophical tradition. It is therefore impossible to pronounce one wholly right and the other wholly wrong on empirical grounds. However, I would like to end this section of the chapter with the bare suggestion that there may be a rapprochement between the two conceptions if theoretical emphasis were placed (as Adorno did not, and Habermas did, but only by subjectifying and linguistifying it) speciﬁcally on the erotic component of human existence.36 Whereas Adorno pays much less attention to eros – which he nonetheless once described as the instinctual basis for democratic tendencies prevalent in countries such as the United States37 – than he does to thanatos because of his concerns about the recurrence of fascism, Habermas eviscerates eros (as the next section of this chapter will demonstrate), ultimately undermining his democratic theory. The social solidarity he rightly claims democracy requires is not reducible to something that is generated only symbolically.

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2 The rational animal Years before he had fully developed his theory about the rationalization of the lifeworld, Habermas was already speculating about the evolutionary trajectory of reason when he argued that reason does not merely serve “as an organ of adaptation for men just as claws and teeth are for animals.”38 In Knowledge and Human Interests, he asserts that language has succeeded in raising us “out of nature” because, “through its structure,” the (Kantian) ideas of reason – autonomy and responsibility – “are posited for us.”39 The quasi-transcendental interests in technical control, mutual understanding, and emancipation are derived from nature, but they are also derived “from the cultural break with nature.” Realizing or actualizing natural drives, these interests have, in Habermas’ view, simultaneously “incorporated the tendency toward release from the constraint of nature.”40 However, while appearing to concede here that humanity retains a tenuous connection to nature, when Habermas denies that reason is an organ of adaptation, he adopts a view that is diametrically opposed to Adorno’s.41 For in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno maintained that, ever since homo sapiens attempted to break from nature by means of language, reason has served the function of an organ of adaptation: the “human race with its machines, chemicals, and organizations – which belong to it just as teeth belong to a bear, since they serve the same purpose and merely function more effectively – is the dernier cri of adaptation in this epoch.”42 Consequently, where Habermas not only thinks that human beings have broken with nature but sees this break as emancipatory and self-afﬁrming, Adorno denies that human beings can ever break fully with nature, while condemning our attempts to do so by means of language as repressive and self-vitiating. Although most philosophers have deﬁned human beings as rational animals, Adorno appears to give greater weight to the animal over the rational dimension of human existence throughout his work. When he speaks of the preponderance or precedence (Vorrang) of the object in Negative Dialectics, Adorno is referring, inter alia, to the preponderance of somatically based drives or instincts over mentation. If philosophers such as Kant allowed “no movens of practice but reason,” Adorno recapitulates the objections of many other thinkers (from Hobbes, through Hume, to Merleau-Ponty) when he writes that “practice also needs something else, something physical which consciousness does not exhaust, something conveyed to reason and qualitatively different from it” (ND, 229). In his critique of Kant’s idea of freedom, Adorno posits a physical addendum (das Hinzutretende), originally untamed impulse, “the rudiment of a phase in which the dualism of extramental and intramental was not thoroughly consolidated yet, neither volitively bridgeable nor an ontological ultimate” (ND, 228). Maintaining that this addendum may, at most, be sublimated, Adorno also states that its complete elimination would render action

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impossible.43 Hence the freedom of Kant’s transcendental subject is entirely illusory: to the extent that freedom entails the freedom to act, freedom can only be ascribed to an embodied subject situated in space and time. Adorno infers the preponderance of the object from the possibility of conceiving of an object that is not a subject and the concomitant impossibility of fully conceiving of a subject that is not an object: “Not even as an idea,” he writes, “can we conceive a subject that is not an object; but we can conceive an object that is not a subject” (ND, 183). Disembodied and supposedly “pure,” Kant’s transcendental subject is ultimately unthinkable or unintelligible. At the same time, Adorno warns against placing “the object on the orphaned royal throne once occupied by the subject.” To give the object logical primacy would be to turn it into “an idol.” For Adorno, the “purpose of critical thought” is not to make the object usurp the place of the subject, but rather (in a proto-deconstructive move) “to abolish the hierarchy” (ND, 181). Like Maurice Merleau-Ponty before him, Adorno battles on two fronts. Against idealism, he argues that in order to exist at all, the subject must ﬁrst exist objectively or materially as part of the natural world. If it were an immaterial no-thing (as in Sartre, for example), lacking any afﬁnity with nature, the subject would be incapable of grasping objects. By extension, its reason too is a thing of this world; reason’s trajectory is inextricably tied to the development of the concrete life of the human species. Against empiricism, Adorno counters that a subjective “moment” necessarily inheres in the object. Struggling to advance a dialectical account of the relationship between subject and object, Adorno criticizes David Hume’s notion of an object that is completely detached from the subject: if the object “lacked the moment of subjectivity, its own objectivity would become nonsensical.”44 To conceive of the object as lacking “any admixture of thought and visuality” would be to conceive of it as a pure substratum, a subiectum, or (paradoxically) as an abstract subject (ND, 184). The qualities that the subject attributes to the object “are borrowed from the objectivity of the intentio recta”; they are themselves objective. Hence, the very qualities which “the traditional critique of knowledge eliminates from the object and credits to the subject are due, in subjective experience, to the object’s primacy.”45 The subject is ineradicably material, objective. Nevertheless, it is also the case that the subject is deﬁned by its capacity for abstraction, for thinking in universal concepts. Simply put: “Abstraction is the subject’s essence” (ND, 181). By virtue of its cognitive development, consciousness has secured a degree of independence not only from objects but also, and by extension, from its own material substratum. With anthropogenesis, “the consciousness that has become independent, and is epitomized in carrying out cognitive performances, has branched off from the libidinous energy of humanity’s species being.” Adorno immediately adds that human nature is not indifferent to this development because, by virtue of

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having branched off from the instincts, consciousness remains “a function of the living subject” (ND, 185; translation modiﬁed). Since “mental activity can be attributed to no one and to nothing but the living” (ND, 201), what the break between consciousness and nature ultimately means is that “everything mental is modiﬁed bodily impulse.” So, while dismissing the question of whether the mind or the body has priority because it abstracts from our lived experience,46 Adorno also cites Friedrich Schelling: “Urge [Drang] . . . is the mind’s preliminary form” (ND, 202; translation modiﬁed). This modiﬁcation of somatic impulses – which Adorno links to the development of self-consciousness or self-reﬂection – has had both positive and negative consequences. Viewed positively, it is the harbinger of freedom because it entails a “qualitative recoil into what not merely ‘is’” (ND, 202). Owing to its capacity for self-reﬂection, humanity has succeeded in raising itself above nature to the extent that its abstractions allow it to think beyond the given. In Minima Moralia, Adorno argues that, while “mind arose out of existence, as an organ for keeping alive,” it is also the case that in “reﬂecting existence . . . it becomes at the same time something else.” Following Hegel, he adds that “negation is the mind’s element.”47 This idea, which implies that thought is inherently critical and self-critical, is developed at greater length in Negative Dialectics where Adorno describes thought as “an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it.” Resisting “mere things in being,” thought represents “a revolt against being importuned to bow to every immediate thing;” it intends in the object “even that of which the object was deprived by objectiﬁcation.” Currently doing violence to objects, even identiﬁcatory thinking “heeds the potential that waits in the object, and . . . unconsciously obeys the idea of making amends to the pieces for what it has done [an den Stücken wieder gutzumachen, was es selber verübte].” Adorno also remarks here that this unconscious tendency to make restitution for the damage that we have done to nature actually “becomes conscious” in philosophy (ND, 19). In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer even sounded a Habermasian note when they remarked that “[e]scape from the dismal emptiness of existence calls for resistance, and for this speech is essential.” Nevertheless, these ﬁrst generation critical theorists tend to stress the negative consequences of the resistance that speech offers to mere things, or to the dismal emptiness of existence. Since cognition now involves the subsumption of particular objects under universal concepts, thought has become coercive and the subject deluded about both the world and itself. If other animals lead “dreary and harsh lives” because they lack concepts or words “to seize the identical in the ﬂux of phenomena, to isolate the same species in the alternation of specimens, or the same thing in altered situations,”48 homo sapiens has used, and continues to use, its concepts for purposes of domination. Twenty years later, Adorno elaborates on these

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ideas when he describes the fetish character of concepts: we are no longer aware that the concepts we use to identify, classify, and explain the natural world “are moments of the reality that requires their formation, primarily for the control of nature” (ND, 11). Observing that it cost our species “unspeakable effort . . . to produce the primacy of identity even against itself” (ND, 148), Adorno emphasizes again that thought is caught within a circle of identiﬁcation that will tolerate nothing outside of itself. Following up another observation in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno repeats: “Such totalitarian and therefore particular rationality was historically dictated by the threat of nature.” Owing to the prevalence under late capitalism of this “thoughtless rationality,” reason has now become “pathic; nothing but to cure ourselves of it would be rational” (ND, 172). Thoughtless rationality has also abandoned its sense of itself as material and instinctual, bodily. Adorno had already underscored this point in “Die Revidierte Psychoanalyse” when he criticized neo-Freudian revisionists for abandoning Freud’s instinct theory in favour of ego psychology. Against Karen Horney’s bald substitution of egocentric “‘emotional drives, impulses, needs or passions’ for the libido,”49 Adorno again remarks that the relatively autonomous ego is an historical achievement. Both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, the ego develops out of the instincts or drives. However, this claim obviously requires further parsing because the status of instincts in Freudian theory is controversial, and Adorno can certainly be interpreted as offering a purely biologistic account of the instincts in some of his work. In “Sociology and Psychology,” for example, he equates the libido with extra-psychic, “objective” reality when he points out that Freud unwittingly advanced a dialectical concept of the ego as “both psychic and extrapsychic, a quantum of libido and the representative of outside reality.”50 Later in the essay he remarks that, while the ego does not constitute an “autonomous second source of psychic life in addition to the id,” it “has separated off from the pure immediacy of the instinctual impulses.” For Adorno, this means that the ego is “both so much instinct and something else.”51 This reference to the “pure immediacy” of the instincts is highly contentious. Ten years earlier, Adorno had emphasized the social character of instincts or drives in “Thesen über Bedürfnis” when he remarked that “every instinct [Trieb] is socially mediated to such an extent that what is natural in it never appears immediately but always only as something produced by society.”52 In fact, J. M. Bernstein argues that “Adorno is intensely aware [that] there is very little, if any, ‘nature’ in evidence; all the nature we come across has already been, inevitably, socially mediated.”53 Furthermore, Adorno’s interpretation of the instincts as pure biological or material immediacy in “Sociology and Psychology” fails to match the sophistication of Freud’s instinct theory in which instincts lie on the frontier between psyche and soma.54 In Negative Dialectics (as in other works), Adorno is much truer to Freud when he speaks of instinct

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or impulse as “intramental and somatic in one” (ND, 228–9). Of more importance for the purposes of this chapter, however, is Adorno’s stress on the preponderance of the object, including the somatic dimension of existence, over the subject or psyche. Although the instincts are also socially mediated, they do have a material or physical moment whose deferral, displacement, or suppression has been the source of tremendous suffering throughout human history. In such suffering, too, the preponderance of the object has been expressed. Adorno’s philosophical anthropology is based on reﬂections such as these about the relationship between ego and instinct, reason and desire – reﬂections that have been central to theories of human nature from the inception of Western philosophy. However, it should be noted once more that Adorno does not advance a full-ﬂedged philosophy of human nature. Simon Jarvis makes this point while remarking on Adorno’s 1965 debate with the anthropologist Arnold Gehlen in which Adorno maintained that the “only possible anthropology is a ‘negative anthropology’ or a ‘dialectical anthropology’.”55 This idea reappears in Negative Dialectics where Adorno launches an attack on existentialism. Sartre’s and Heidegger’s “eureka” (existence precedes essence) loses its “evidential character” upon the slightest reﬂection. It is not yet possible to say what humanity is (even in this extremely vacuous form) because “[m]an today is a function, unfree, regressing behind whatever is ascribed to him as invariant.” Even a thoroughly historical anthropology would wrongly abstract from “the dehumanization that has made the subjects what they are,” or from “the de-subjectifying process that has paralleled the historic subject formation since time immemorial.” The fact that “we cannot tell what man is . . . vetoes any anthropology” (ND, 124). Nevertheless, it should also be clear that Adorno follows the philosophical tradition when he identiﬁes reason and instinct as the very “stuff” of human existence. Owing to their mutilation by social conditions, however, human beings have not yet been able to develop freely as both rational and instinctual beings. Currently, reason remains coercive and repressive; it subjugates and distorts the instincts. Up until the present day, human history has been the history of domination of human beings by human beings. Only when domination ends will it be possible to say what it is to be fully human. Aligning himself with an equally venerable philosophical tradition, Habermas successively distances himself from Adorno when he begins to emphasize the rational dimension of human existence over the instincts. In the earlier stages of his philosophical career, however, he could occasionally sound very much like his former mentor. Echoing Adorno, Habermas was prepared to acknowledge in Knowledge and Human Interests that an “enticing natural force [is] present in the individual as libido.” Furthermore, both theorists make reference to our break with nature, or with the material substratum of human life. Yet, even at this early stage, Habermas already believes that this break is far more complete than Adorno will

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allow because the libido has been ﬁrmly harnessed to interests (for example, the interest in emancipation) that reveal its independence from nature. Over the course of human history, he writes, this enticing natural force has “detached itself from the behavioral system of self-preservation” (which itself is now only apparently “natural” anyway), and it “urges toward utopian fulﬁllment.”56 Indeed, by the time the magisterial Theory of Communicative Action appeared in 1981, Habermas had effected the theoretical subordination of this force to the demands of reason. Habermas was attempting to incorporate natural drives into his burgeoning linguistic theory as late as 1974. Yet in this very attempt, his fundamental differences with Adorno only emerge all the more clearly. Whitebook explains that in “Moral Development and Ego Identity,”57 Habermas was trying to overcome the Kantian dichotomy between inclination and duty when he recommended that a seventh stage be added to Lawrence Kohlberg’s psychological theory of moral development (a recommendation he would later abandon). In the seventh stage, content from inner nature was to be (re)introduced into cognition. But Whitebook objects that, even here, Habermas manages to reconcile inclination with duty only by linguistifying inner nature when he asserts that inner nature is already Sprachfähig, or capable of being articulated in speech. Whitebook also points out that Habermas had already broached this argument in Knowledge and Human Interests.58 There, reconciliation was ultimately achieved at the cost of subsuming eros under logos – a move that even Plato, with his view of reason as sublimated, “spiritualized,” desire in The Symposium and Phaedrus would not have sanctioned. Yet Whitebook overlooks an equally controversial move that occurs later – in The Theory of Communicative Action – where Habermas denies altogether that desire is a natural force. Rather than existing objectively as part of nature, or the natural dimension of our species being, desire is deemed completely subjective. In contrast to our “cognitions, beliefs, and intentions,” which “belong to the subjective world” but also “stand in relation to the objective world,” human desires are purely subjective experiences that cannot be assimilated “to entities, to elements of the objective world” (TCA I, 9). Conﬂating desires and feelings when he argues that both are rooted in need, Habermas maintains that desire – the volitional side of need – “can only be expressed as something subjective”; it “cannot be expressed otherwise, cannot enter into relation with the external world, whether the objective or the social” (TCA I, 92). By demoting human desires to the status of subjective expressions that lack any natural, material, or even social referents,59 Habermas effectively ensures that desire can no longer upstage reason. The break with nature postulated in Knowledge and Human Interests is apparently now complete. Having subjectiﬁed and linguistiﬁed inner nature, Habermas also insists that it submit to reason. Just as cognitive claims about states of affairs and normative claims about what ought to be done may be judged rational or

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irrational, so too expressions of needs are more or less rational to the extent that they satisfy those ideal presuppositions of communicative reason which underlie attempts to reach understanding or agreement. Among other such presuppositions, [p]articipants in argumentation have to presuppose in general that the structure of their communication, by virtue of features that can be described in purely formal terms, excludes all force – whether it arises from within the process of reaching understanding itself or inﬂuences it from the outside – except the force of the better argument (and thus that it also excludes, on their part, all motives except that of a cooperative search for the truth). (TCA I, 25) With his notion of communicative reason, which is so broad that it encompasses expressions of desires and feelings when these are articulated in validity claims, Habermas asserts that he has made “a prior decision for a wider concept of rationality connected with ancient conceptions of logos.” Like these early conceptions, which associate reason with speech, communicative reason “carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech” (TCA I, 10). This holistic reason ﬁnds its limits only in the derivative and mute functionalist rationality of the political and economic subsystems, and in the equally derivative onedimensional instrumental rationality that characterizes the activity of agents within these subsystems. In contrast to Adorno, then, who thinks that reason has inﬂicted a great deal of damage on an inner nature that is at once intramental and somatic, Habermas believes that a more salubrious type of reason envelops even desire. Thus, while many other philosophers have argued that rationality marks our speciﬁc difference from other animals, in Habermas’ view, we are the bearers of a reason that has removed us completely from the natural realm by emancipating itself from what Plato once called the “taskmaster” of heteronomous desire. Against the Freudian project of bringing our rational powers into harmony with the instincts – the project that Adorno embraced – Habermas suggests that reason and desire have already been reconciled: desire is just the subjective expression of disembodied needs that are rational, at least in principle, because they cannot be divorced from their articulation in speech. Even as desiring beings, then, we are always already rational. Inverting Nietzsche’s claim, “body am I entirely, and nothing else; and the soul is only a word for something about the body,”60 Habermas apparently believes that human beings are entirely mind (or “soul”); and “body” is only a word for something about the mind. With this monistic conception of the human being as rational through and through, Habermas hopes to obviate the difﬁculties that he believes Adorno and others have encoun-

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tered with their allegedly Nietzschean invocation of an Other of reason. In fact, he even accuses Adorno of setting up a “false antagonism between the domain of the organism, which is described in biological terms, and the domain of the social apparatus, which invades the individual from the outside.”61 Rejecting this antagonism, which also has the theoretical inconvenience of requiring a second conceptual framework to supplement the linguistic one,62 Habermas refuses to pit reason against an heteronomous Other, to turn it into the “plaything of unmediated forces working upon it, as it were, mechanically.” As a mark of this refusal, he opposes to the “exclusion model ” of reason a “diremption model ” which “distinguishes solidary social practice as the locus of a historically situated reason in which the threads of outer nature, inner nature, and society converge.”63 All that now limit communicative rationality are the limits of reason itself.

3 Nature, reason, and history In point of fact, however, it is Habermas who pits reason against an heteronomous Other. For this second generation critical theorist, what lies beyond the reason that is embodied in language must remain radically outside of it – an empty X towards which speech points only clumsily. Although he wants to reject “Kant’s dichotomy between an intelligible realm comprising duty and free will and a phenomenal realm comprising inclinations, subjective motives, political and social institutions, etc.,”64 Habermas actually retains the Kantian distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal realms while recasting it. In one of the opening sections to Between Facts and Norms, where he discusses the problem of meaning and truth, Habermas concurs with Charles Sanders Pierce when he writes that “we cannot break out of the sphere of language and argumentation.” While admonishing that “we must not forget that the relation to reality contains a reference to something independent of us and [which is] thus, in this sense, transcendent,” Habermas also asserts that “we must understand reality as what we can represent in true statements” (BFN, 14). To employ Fredric Jameson’s apt phrase, with his linguistic turn, Habermas changes language into a prison house from which escape has become impossible. In his work, nature is either radically Other than reason and inaccessible to it, or it is completely assimilated by, subordinated to, reason.65 Seyla Benhabib once asked whether the “cognitivist bias of communicative ethics also leads to the rationalistic fallacy, namely, to a view of reason as a self-generating faculty, determining both the conditions of its own genesis and application.”66 She then went on to show that Habermas posits a virtually unbridgeable hiatus or gap between discourses of justiﬁcation and discourses of application such that his communicative ethics may indeed be accused of committing the rationalistic fallacy. More important, Benhabib also subjects to critical scrutiny what Habermas has called “‘the

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motivating power of rational argument.’” In her discussion, however, she wrongly contrasts Habermas to Hegel when she writes that, for Hegel, “reason becomes a fact,” in the Kantian sense of a motivating Faktum der Vernunft, “only if it shapes and transforms desire, without condemning it to silence.” This contrast between Hegel and Habermas is misleading because both believe that the “desirability of reason entails the rationality of desire”;67 that is, they rationalize desire. For both, inner nature is ultimately dirempted from nature by virtue of being “spiritualized,” or realizing its universal form, in the course of human history. In Hegel too, the diremption of reason from nature occurs in such a way that desire is brought entirely under the power of the universal logos.68 However, when Benhabib points out that a reason which “refuses to heed inner nature and the individual’s demand for happiness and fulﬁllment can lose its motivating power,”69 she captures Adorno’s position against that of both Hegel and Habermas. Of course, Habermas is concerned with the problem of the power or force that motivates action but he succeeds in “discarding” the Kantian dichotomy between “duty and inclination, reason and sense experience” only by linguistifying inclination and sense experience. In his 1989 essay, “Morality and Ethical Life,” Habermas acknowledges that moral insights must be “undergirded by the thrust of motives and by socially accepted institutions.” What this means, for Habermas, is that “any universalistic morality is dependent upon a form of life that meets it halfway.” He then proceeds to equate the motivational force that undergirds moral insights with discursively generated “practices of socialization and education” in the lifeworld.70 Socialization and education contribute to maintaining the lifeworld’s structural components of personality and culture; they are two of the reproductive functions of communicative action. As discursively generated, however, the motivating power behind these practices stems ultimately from communicative reason itself. And Habermas readily admits that rational motivation is weak: the “motivating force” behind “discursively produced and intersubjectively shared beliefs” is actually “limited to the weakly motivating force of good reasons” (BFN, 147). By separating reason and nature to the point where outer nature appears in his work as radically Other than language, while inner nature is said to be generated entirely by communicative practices, Habermas does not successfully solve the problem of motivation that he himself poses. To paraphrase Adorno, the traditional antithesis between nature and reason, which Habermas merely recasts, is both true and false. It is true “insofar as it expresses what happened to the natural element” as reason opposed itself to nature in the course of human history. But it is false insofar as it “apologetically repeats” the concealment of reason’s natural growth by reason itself (ND, 358). Following Freud, Adorno insists that the demands of our inner instinctual nature be given their due. Inner nature cannot be subordinated to reason in the way that Habermas has done

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because this constitutes a false and premature reconciliation of the two. In Adorno’s view, it is precisely because inner nature has historically been seen as a threat to reason owing to its putative “heteronomy,” that reason attempts to dominate it either by subordinating it to its imperatives or excluding it by ﬁat. Habermas capitulates to this trend; he by no means goes beyond the natural imperative to eat or be eaten when he linguistiﬁes desire in order to domesticate it. He reveals his antagonism to nature by allowing reason to devour it. As J. M. Bernstein puts it, this denial of reason’s afﬁnity with nature is “the fantasy of reason.”71 I would only add here that it is the fantasy of a reason that reveals its afﬁnity with nature even as it denies it. In its very antagonism to nature, reason remains attached to nature because this antagonism is motivated by nature in the form of the instinct for self-preservation. To cite Adorno: “The suppression of nature for human ends is a mere natural relationship, which is why the supremacy of a nature-controlling reason and its principle is a delusion” (ND, 179). Where Habermas believes that nature is always already rational, Adorno would counter that reason is always already natural. For Adorno, then, nature is only apparently opposed to reason as its Other. Historically dictated by the threat of nature (ND, 172), the drive to preserve the self by opposing reason to nature may yet be overcome. As paradoxical as this may at ﬁrst appear, to begin to redress the damage that has been done to inner nature, the latter must ﬁrst be respected in its otherness or difference from reason. This otherness is not absolute because our afﬁnity with the natural world has never been, and can never be, completely severed. However, since reason has broken with nature to a limited extent, nature cannot be fully assimilated to reason and its descriptiveexplanatory concepts. Both outer nature and inner nature resist attempts linguistically to capture them; they are not themselves inherently conceptual or linguistic in character. If, as Whitebook points out with respect to inner nature, “Habermas is correct in arguing that ‘language functions as a kind of transformer’ that draws the individual into the intersubjective social world,” it is equally the case that the individual is not socialized and socially integrated “without remainder”; that is, “without a residuum of private in-itselfness – without which we would all be preconditioned clones – and it is this residuum that does not adequately appear in Habermas’s account.”72 Indeed, Habermas makes the same category mistake as many others who have taken the linguistic turn: from the proposition that needs and desires are expressed in language, he infers wrongly that needs and desires are themselves inherently linguistic. At the same time, however, if nature were radically Other than reason, it would be fruitless to speculate – as Adorno certainly does – about a future reconciliation between reason and nature. Since we are part of nature, it is possible in principle to reconcile ourselves with it but only by respecting that which we have denied in the course of our history: our afﬁnity with nature. Only a completely revamped mode of cognition could effect this reconciliation.

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For Adorno, once again, human history consists in the denial of nature in “man”73 owing to the predominance in history of a formalistic reason that has subjugated both outer and inner nature. By extension, whenever Adorno spoke in a speculative vein about a future reconciliation between reason and nature, he also wanted to effect a reconciliation between history and nature. Very early, in his 1932 Frankfurt lecture to the Kant Society, Adorno endorses such reconciliation, while attributing the dialectical concept of natural history both to Lukács (with his idea of second nature in Theory of the Novel ) and Walter Benjamin. Adorno contends that nature and history can be related to each other only “if it is possible to comprehend historical being in its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical, as natural being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as an historical being where it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature.”74 Nearly thirty-ﬁve years later, Adorno attributes the idea of natural history to the “youthful Marx” who “expressed the unending entwinement of the two” in the following passage that Adorno cites from Volume V of The German Ideology: We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be considered from two sides, divided into the history of nature and the history of mankind. Yet there is no separating the two sides; as long as men exist, natural and human history will qualify each other. It is at this juncture that Adorno makes the remark that I paraphrased above: the antithesis of nature and history is true to the extent that it serves to express the historical antagonism which has developed between them. However, this antithesis is also false because it “apologetically repeats the concealment of history’s natural growth by history itself ” (ND, 358). Consequently, when Adorno depicts history as the history of reason, he actually views history quite differently from Habermas who also claims to be following Lukács when he tracks our historical trajectory in light of the evolutionary course that reason has taken. In stark contrast to Adorno, Habermas offers a history of reason that is sui generis. The reason whose history he charts has been dirempted from nature in such a way that it follows its course in complete independence of both nature and any sort of natural evolution. (Parenthetically, it is not surprising that Habermas also reconceptualizes what Marx called society’s material “base,” deﬁning it as the discursively generated “institutional complex that, at a given stage, anchors the evolutionarily leading system mechanism in the lifeworld” (TCA, 168).) The Hegelian cast of Habermas’ conception of history should be obvious – though Habermas may be right when he attributes this conception to Lukács. Against his own intentions, Lukács may not have avoided an idealist view of history. For, if Andrew Feenberg is correct, and Lukács does not succeed in reconciling history and nature

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in History and Class Consciousness then, contra Feenberg, he has also failed to avoid the charge of idealism. If there is a dualism in the early Lukács – “a clear methodological split between history and nature”75 – then Lukács may justiﬁably be accused of advancing an idealist conception of history when he views it as the history of forms of objectivity or thought. Indeed, Susan Buck-Morss has argued that the “importance of the category of nature as a corrective to the ideological implications of history as progress had been lost by Lukács.”76 Interestingly, Rolf Wiggershaus offers an opposing interpretation of the early Lukács, one that sees Lukács as mediating between nature and history. His rejection of Feenberg’s reading may be inferred from his claim that, “by bringing mind (Geist) to recognize itself as an aspect of nature . . . Adorno was supporting precisely the same Hegelian-Marxist position which Lukács had developed in History and Class Consciousness.”77 Of more importance here, however, is Adorno’s later gloss on the idea of natural history in Negative Dialectics where he traces this idea back to Marx rather than to Lukács. Contrasting Marx to Hegel, Adorno approves Marx’s view that “the objectivity of historical life is that of natural history.” Furthermore, he adds that Marx knew this “strictly in the context of the universal that is realized over the subjects’ heads.” The universal exchange principle represents nature turned against itself; the drive for selfpreservation that underlies the principle now threatens to destroy what it is supposed to preserve. As the social model for the Western ratio, the identiﬁcatory exchange principle exercises a destructive inﬂuence on human life because it abstracts from the living substratum of society, showing a complete “disregard for living human beings” (ND, 354; translation altered). As Adorno lamented in Minima Moralia, the “consummate organization” of society under exchange relations “demands the coordination of people that are dead.”78 When he analyses human history in light of the history of reason, then, Adorno does not advance an idealistic conception of history which reduces history to that of a spirit that develops independently of a material substratum. In his lectures on moral philosophy, Adorno expresses this point in general terms when he criticizes Kant for failing fully to acknowledge that what transcends nature – reason, freedom – is just nature that has become conscious of itself.79 For Adorno, the historical course of reason must be charted with reference to its relationship to the embodied subject and its drives. So, in “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” he argues that rationality and the ego cannot “simply be split off from selfpreservation” because the rational faculties of the reality-testing ego originally emerged as an instrument for self-preservation.80 Furthermore, given his assertion that the idea of a universal history must at one and the same time “be construed and denied” (ND, 320), it is also signiﬁcant that Adorno ﬂatly denies that the antagonism or rift which developed between reason and nature was historically necessary. Targeting not only Hegel but

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also Marx, “whose idealism was hardly anywhere as pronounced as in relation to totality” (ND, 321), Adorno rejects their views of necessity in history when he argues that necessity must be recognized as “realized appearance,” and that “historic determination” should be known “as a metaphysical accident.” In a more heuristic vein, Adorno adds that critical social consciousness can “retain its freedom to think that things might be different some day” only if the claim of the totality to be absolute “is broken” (ND, 323). Habermas makes a similar disclaimer about necessity in history. In the course of human history we have developed rational structures, and there is a direction or pattern in history that may be gleaned from a diachronic study of these structures. It is in this sense that Habermas has a philosophy of history. But while he describes rationalization as “the world-historical process of enlightenment” (TCA II, 155), Habermas does not believe that there was any historical necessity involved in this process, nor was it necessary that reiﬁcation or colonization occur. The course of human history could well have run otherwise. At the same time, however, his view of history as the history of forms of understanding is idealistic in character to the extent that he dissociates the process of rationalization from the natural history of the species, including the historical vicissitudes of our somatically based drives. Although the process is contingent, rationalization involves the development of a reason that has divorced itself completely from nature, or from the material world and material processes. Where Marx once boasted that he had put Hegel back on his feet, and Adorno adopted his own version of materialism, Habermas has – to borrow a phrase from Marx that Habermas himself often uses against his own opponents – actually regressed behind the insights that were originally reached by Marx and later adopted and modiﬁed by Adorno.

4 The partiality for reason In Legitimation Crisis, Habermas criticized Adorno for endorsing the pessimistic views of conservative critics of culture; namely, that socialization processes today are so overwhelmingly corruptive that they have actually succeeded in liquidating the individual. In an overtly sarcastic response to this account of existing conditions under late capitalism, Habermas objects: “Until now, no one has succeeded in extracting the thesis of the end of the individual from the domain of the malaise and self-experience of intellectuals and made it accessible to empirical test.”81 To this untested thesis, Habermas opposes his own claim that socialization may be generated only communicatively within the lifeworld. As we have seen, against Adorno’s top-down model of socialization mediated through exchange, he offers his conception of egalitarian and “lateral” processes of socialization and social integration that occur in communicative practices within the family and other institutions. On this basis, he argues for the

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“independent development of normative structures” – in new social movements, for example – “that are irreconcilable with the suppression of generalizable interests.”82 Yet, somewhat confusingly, Habermas also concedes that it is not possible empirically to decide which interpretation of new social movements is correct: the more pessimistic one that claims the autopoietic political system is “in no way restricted today by independent systems of norms that follow a demand of their own” (i.e. the normative demands of protesters that arise within lifeworld contexts), or the one (his own) which contends that these demands are rational and must be given a hearing if the state is to retain its legitimacy.83 He reformulates this point later when he admits that it is not possible to determine empirically which view of the political system is correct – the one that portrays it as acting (whether justiﬁably or not) entirely independently of the will of the people, or his own, which states that the political system always ﬁnds its limits in the lifeworld.84 However, despite these important concessions, Habermas wants us to recognize what is at stake in the choice between these two positions. Opting for his own position, he states, entails a partiality for reason. Moreover, Habermas contends that positions like Adorno’s (which he often simply conﬂates with that of systems theorist Niklas Luhmann) do not permit a similar appeal to reason. Apart from his rejection of Adorno’s appropriation of Freud’s instinct theory, Habermas argues that Adorno can no longer plausibly appeal to reason because he believes that reason is now utterly perverted by its identiﬁcatory logic. Here Habermas restates his long-standing objection that Adorno lacks a foundation for his critique. Nevertheless, the differences between the two theorists cannot be summarized in Habermas’ constantly repeated criticism that Adorno rejects reason outright, while he himself retains an emphatic view of reason. For Adorno certainly does not reject reason tout court. Instead, he rejects a particular manifestation of reason – albeit one that has predominated throughout human history. Since pathic identiﬁcatory reason is not the result of a necessary historical development, it should be clear that Adorno believes that reason could have taken, and might yet take, a very different course; its antagonism to nature is historically contingent. Accordingly, he argued in his 1962 lecture, “Progress,” that the “innerworldly progress” which has resulted in institutions appearing to evolve independently of their creators while oppressing them at the same time “remains open” to the possibility of another kind of progress in which these man-made institutions are revoked in the name of a reconciliation with nature.85 For Adorno, progress would actually entail stepping “out of the magic spell, even out of the spell of progress that is itself nature, in that humanity becomes aware of its own inbred nature and brings to a halt the domination it exacts upon nature and through which domination by nature continues.”86

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Habermas claims that his own concept of communicative rationality “gives an inner logic . . . to resistance against revolt.” He then proceeds to argue that the basis for resistance to identiﬁcatory reason in Adorno’s work lies exclusively in the “rage of nature in revolt” – a basis which he baldly declares “impotent” (TCA II, 333). However, Adorno actually maintains that reason itself is needed in order to step out of the spell of what we currently call progress – the progressive domination of nature – because “[o]nly reason, the principle of societal domination inverted into the subject, would be capable of abolishing this domination.” For Adorno, the “concept of progress is dialectical in a strictly unmetaphorical sense, in that its organon, reason, is one; a nature-dominating and a reconciling level do not exist separate and disjunct within reason, rather both share all its determinations.” Praising Kant for preserving the unity of reason, Adorno continues: “The one moment [of reason] inverts into its other only in that it literally reﬂects itself, in that reason applies reason to itself and in its self-restriction emancipates itself from the demon of identity.”87 Reason must be used critically against itself, as Adorno reiterated throughout his work when he endorsed a radically self-reﬂective knowledge that recognizes in itself the reifying identity-thinking whose social model is exchange. This is the enlightened “self-critical spirit of reason”(ND, 29) that refuses to succumb to the “defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried” (ND, 3). To be sure, Adorno offers a mere outline of what a more emancipated and rational society would look like. Very generally, he claims that society will become rational only when reason becomes “cognizant of its own natural essence.”88 Indeed, the more uninhibitedly reason “turns itself into the absolute opposite of nature and forgets nature in itself, all the more will a self-preservation gone wild regress into nature” (ND, 289; translation modiﬁed). Thus, in “Progress,” Adorno insists that the mind (Geist) “is not what it enthrones itself as, the Other, the transcendent in its purity, but rather is also a piece of natural history.”89 Fully to recognize the mind’s embeddedness in nature would open up the prospect of a reconciliation between a truly universal social order and fully individuated individuals. In a similar vein, Adorno admonishes in an earlier essay that the “resolution of the antinomy of universal and particular remains mere ideology as long as the instinctual renunciation society expects of the individual neither can be objectively justiﬁed as true and necessary nor later provides him with the delayed gratiﬁcation.”90 Projecting his utopian ideal of reconciliation into an uncertain future, Adorno also recognizes that radical praxis is needed to ensure that society ﬁnally orients itself to the satisfaction of the needs of all of its citizens. It will take the protracted efforts of the species as a whole to ensure that reason ultimately prevails over the irrationality of the universal exchange principle which, in the very interest of self-preservation, distorts human needs, thereby thwarting the preservation of the fully human self.

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By contrast, while explicitly rejecting the view that there is, or ever could be, a collective subject of history (and understandably wanting to avoid the theoretical accommodation of a nationalist subject – the German Volk, for example), Habermas also believes that improved conditions, in the form of a rational society, are now at hand. Indeed, his partiality for reason reappears in his assertion that the real is already more or less rational. This assertion, which I shall assess at greater length in the next two chapters, is clearly enunciated at the beginning of Between Facts and Norms when Habermas announces that he is presupposing an “internal connection” between existing Western society and reason (BFN, 8). Although both he and Adorno claim that there is a rational potential immanent in existing conditions, it is sufﬁcient for Habermas that communicative practices become what they already are; that is, that they actualize, in the course of their apparently unstoppable evolution, their potential within a society that should remain more or less as it is today. Curiously, however, and despite his claim in The Theory of Communicative Action that communicative reason is capable of providing a healthy counterweight to the functionalist rationality of the political and economic systems, Habermas also severely restricts the compass of reason when he insists in Between Facts and Norms that the communicative power of the people limit itself to mere inﬂuence over the political system.91 Even when citizens do succeed in generating it – in some new social movements and other activist groups in civil society, for example – communicative power must take a back seat to parliaments and the courts. In fact, at one point, Habermas appears to collapse the distinction between communicative and political (or administrative) power altogether when he claims that “public inﬂuence is transformed into communicative power only after it passes through the ﬁlters of the institutionalized procedures of democratic opinion- and will-formation and enters through parliamentary debates into legitimate law-making” (BFN, 371). In this passage, the exercise of communicative power is subordinated entirely to political decisionmaking processes and procedures. The public sphere can really only serve as a “sounding board for problems that must be processed by the political system because they cannot be solved elsewhere” (BFN, 359). In the end, the political system must decide whether or not to act on the discursively generated and rational will of the people by (among other things) making public opinion pass a “generalizability of interests” test (BFN, 371). These restrictions on the scope of communicative power are all the more surprising because Habermas argues that a state’s legitimacy relies on both the quality of the public opinion generated by its citizens, and its sensitivity and responsiveness to their needs, interests, and value orientations. Furthermore, he readily admits that liberal democracies usually operate independently of communicatively generated power: the “normal business of politics, at least as it is routinely conducted in Western democracies,” cannot satisfy the strong conditions for legitimacy outlined in

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Between Facts and Norms. Proximally and for the most part, Western states are relatively indifferent to lifeworld concerns; they set their own agendas, making no concerted effort to ascertain and respond to what lies in the general interest of their citizenry (BFN, 356–7). However, when he argues that the lifeworld would be intolerably overburdened if its members had to engage in decision-making about all political issues, Habermas shifts from a descriptive analysis to a prescriptive one: power should normally circulate in this unconstitutional fashion in order to shelter the lifeworld from the burden of involvement in the increasingly complex and timeconsuming business of politics. In other words, Habermas ultimately endorses the unofﬁcial, unconstitutional circulation of power that he had criticized earlier in Legitimation Crisis. Habermas certainly does express some concerns about the development of “illegitimate power complexes that are independent of the democratic process” (BFN, 328). Conceding on occasion that the exercise of power within Western democracies is increasingly illegitimate precisely because it now usually reverses the constitutionally regulated circulation of power, Habermas adds that Western states are now permanently in crisis because of the “growing need for integration” between “decentered, increasingly autonomous social sectors” (BFN, 358). However, his undeveloped criticisms of the “normal,” or “unofﬁcial” circulation of power are also rescinded at crucial points, especially when he deals with protest movements. As long as the “settled routines [of courts, parliaments, and political parties] remain open to renovative impulses from the periphery,” Habermas appears willing to grant Western states a degree of legitimacy (BFN, 357; italics added). Admitting, then, that the constitutionally regulated circulation of power – from the peripheral citizenry to the political centre – does not usually obtain today, and that this has resulted in unmistakable “trends toward the independence of illegitimate power” (BFN, 430), Habermas also dilutes the normative ideal of self-empowerment to such an extent that he seems to believe that its simple constitutional endorsement is sufﬁcient to secure the legitimacy of existing Western states. Habermas differs most obviously from Adorno in his belief – expressed throughout much of his work – that citizens in Western countries are able, at least in principle, rationally to identify what lies in the general interest of society as a whole. Yet, while occasionally depicting Western society as antagonistic when he pits an increasingly irrational (illegitimate and crisisridden) political system against an increasingly rational citizenry,92 he nonetheless limits the communicative power of citizens to indirect inﬂuence over political decision-making processes under highly circumscribed, “extraordinary” circumstances. Despite his strong claims about the importance of communicatively generated power for a genuinely democratic polity, Habermas ends by defusing this power: the ideal, normative (even “revolutionary”) core of liberal democracy, which lies in self-empowering

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communicative practices, is more or less actualized in existing Western states because citizens do succeed in mobilizing on rare occasions with the limited aim of brieﬂy reversing the illegitimate circuit of decision-making that normally characterizes politics. Habermas seems to believe that the communicative power of such a sporadically mobilized citizenry is all that is ultimately required to realize democracy’s normative ideal of selfdetermination. In his work, government of, for, and by the people – the principle of popular sovereignty – consists in the stringently self-limiting inﬂuence of citizens on the political process. Ostensibly trying to effect a compromise between liberalism and republicanism, Habermas ends by undermining the republican ideal to the point where he condones the existing supremacy of political over communicative power. In the best of all possible democracies, the former will always trump the latter. Unlike Adorno, Habermas is also content to allow the capitalist economy to continue to operate autonomously as an Invisible Hand that is guided even more indirectly than the political system by communicative power. Indeed, despite his many objections to Luhmann’s systems theory in Legitimation Crisis and elsewhere, Habermas grants so much to the latter’s idea of autopoietic systems that he now accepts their complete functional separation from the lifeworld, and wants to shield the economy from all but the most oblique forms of rational control. Communicative reason has its place; it ought not to stray too far beyond the lifeworld contexts that spawn it. To allow the rational interests of citizens to direct the operations of the capitalist economy (with its one-dimensional functionalist rationality) would allegedly run the risk of undermining material reproduction. It also conjures up the spectre of a collective subject that must be banished in order to accommodate pluralism and avoid regression into fascism. Although his claim that the economic system is completely norm-free or ethically neutral raises serious problems of its own, when he insists that the economy be allowed to operate independently of any moral or ethical considerations, Habermas is also sanctioning this system’s divorce from a normative orientation towards the material satisfaction of all members of society. In light of the limitations that Habermas wants citizens to place on their democratic expectations and aspirations, it is somewhat paradoxical that his major theoretical disagreement with Adorno should concern the existence of the relatively independent lifeworld that is able to thwart the colonizing incursions of the political and economic subsystems owing to its multivalent and enlightened rationality. Against Habermas, it could certainly be argued that, if there is any truth to his strong claim that communicative practices today remain more or less rational despite colonization – a claim I challenged earlier but which is speciﬁcally intended, once again, to counter Adorno’s “pessimism” – then the role of communicative reason in society today should not be curtailed or limited in the way Habermas suggests. Notwithstanding Habermas’ self-declared partiality for

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reason in the face of what he sees as Adorno’s abandonment of it, I would argue that it is Adorno who actually shows the greater partiality for reason when he urges that all aspects of society be brought under rational control and be directed towards emphatically rational ends. To the extent that the demands and interests of citizens are rational in Habermas’ sense of that term, they should take precedence over the one-dimensional, derivative, and morally neutral rationality of the capitalist economy and the welfare state. Even if one were to accept the highly questionable view that needs have no objective basis in nature, one could nonetheless insist that, as long as the subjective expression of needs satisﬁes Habermas’ criteria for rationality, material reproduction should be oriented to their satisfaction. It is not sufﬁcient for Habermas to maintain that the lifeworld deﬁnes the pattern of the political and economic systems. If – and this is admittedly a big “if ” – members of the lifeworld have really become as rational as Habermas contends, then they ought to assume the role of deﬁning the pattern of society as a whole. Both the political and the economic systems ought to subordinate themselves to the rationally generated interests and needs of all citizens in such a way that citizens themselves consciously deﬁne the pattern of society. A true partiality for reason would support no lesser demand.

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Maintaining that the form of thought which animates late capitalism is thoroughly ideological in character, Adorno nonetheless objected to the blanket generalization that all Western culture exhibits false consciousness. In a section of Minima Moralia titled “Baby with the Bath-water,” Adorno argued that to equate culture with lies would be tantamount to repudiating even those forms of thought that are critical of existing conditions.1 If the “great refusal” is illusory or false, it is so only to the extent that the pervasiveness of exchange relations in the West appears to give the lie to the idea that society could be ordered in any other way than it currently is; it ﬂies in the face of the overwhelming and seemingly irremediable existence of matters as they are. Yet the refusal to accept and adapt to existing conditions must also be given its due. For our exchange-based society has never been egalitarian and free in the more emphatic sense of those terms – a point Adorno reiterates in Negative Dialectics when he criticizes the blatant injustice and unfreedom that lie within the coercive equality of exchange.2 To denounce the bald assertion that exchange is truly free “is at the same time to speak for truth: in the face of the lie of the commodity world, even the lie that denounces it becomes a corrective.”3 Like Martin Jay, Fredric Jameson pays particular attention to this section of Minima Moralia in his assessment of Adorno’s Marxism. Here he aligns himself with many commentators who not only contest the claim that culture is a mere superstructural reﬂection of the economic base, but defend a more dialectical reading of culture that accords with Adorno’s views. According to Jameson, the “methodological conclusion” to be drawn from Adorno’s view of culture as something more than a mere epiphenomenon “is that we must denounce culture (as an idea but also as a phenomenon) all the while we continue to perpetuate it, and perpetuate it while continuing tirelessly to denounce it.”4 Indeed, with the idea that culture must be simultaneously preserved and overcome, Jameson accurately describes the self-critical spirit of reason that Adorno endorsed throughout his work. On the one hand, culture serves to legitimate conditions that continue to cause tremendous human suffering; this is why it

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must be overcome. On the other hand, to denounce culture as false consciousness would wrongly extirpate “with the false, all that was true also, all that, however impotently, strives to escape the conﬁnes of universal practice, every chimerical anticipation of a nobler condition,” thereby bringing about “directly the barbarism that culture is reproached with furthering indirectly.”5 Here Adorno suggests that some cultural phenomena are not merely superstructural, or completely determined by underlying economic trends, because they also hold out a promissory note for a future in which the obvious injustices, inequalities, and lack of freedom that characterize Western societies today have been eradicated. Culture, including philosophy, has a truth content that “transcends” – in a sense that has yet to be deﬁned – existing conditions. Of course, Habermas believes that Adorno has indeed thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Making this accusation with great polemical force in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, he charges that Adorno utterly repudiates the rational potential in the culture of modernity. Focusing on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas argues that Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s conﬁdence in modern culture had been shaken so badly by Nazism and Stalinism that their scepticism ﬁnally embraced reason itself. As a result, they were obliged to call into question their own immanent ideology critique of modernity which came “under suspicion of not producing (any more) truths.” On Habermas’ account, then, Adorno and Horkheimer had little choice but to render their suspect critique “independent even in relation to its own foundations.”6 Their critique is allegedly so “totalizing” that it ends by undermining itself. As a corrective, Habermas offers his own notion of communicative reason. Assailed as it currently is by economic and political forces, the lifeworld has also evolved in terms of its rational structures. The damage that colonization has inﬂicted on the lifeworld can be assessed against the rational potential that manifests itself within the lifeworld’s communicative practices. At the end of Chapter 3, I said that Habermas is mistaken when he claims that Adorno’s critique of modernity lacks a rational foundation. Not only does Adorno maintain that emancipation from the demon of identity depends on reason and its critical self-examination,7 he grounds his critique on the rational potential that he ﬁnds in modern culture. I want to develop this argument at greater length here; it will be crucial for the discussion of prospects for emancipation that follows in the next chapter. However, before addressing the issue of the viability of critique in the “totally administered world,” I shall begin by treating Adorno’s and Habermas’ distinct accounts of ideology. For his part, Adorno found ideology everywhere: from the scientiﬁc search for facts to the blandishments of mass culture, from seemingly benign social interchange to our sense of ourselves as individuals. This is another reason why he questions the causal relationship between base and superstructure postulated by some Marxists: “it lags behind a condition in which not only the machineries of

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production, distribution, and domination, but economic and social relations and ideologies are inextricably interwoven, and in which living people have become bits of ideology” (ND, 268). Habermas’ views about ideology stand in sharp contrast to this assessment of the ideologically suffused culture of the West. Offering a novel deﬁnition of ideology as the conﬂation of the good, the true, and the beautiful – or the three spheres of validity corresponding to the social, objective, and subjective worlds described in The Theory of Communicative Action – Habermas proceeds to endorse Daniel Bell’s proclamation of the end of ideology. As hardy and perennial as ideologies once were, he argues that ideological interpretations of the world “had to break down in the communication structures of a developed modernity.”8 Consequently, Habermas abandons ideology critique altogether, proposing instead that social theorists examine and expose the distortions of communication that follow in the wake of the colonization of the lifeworld by the economic and political subsystems. In this chapter, I shall examine these opposing claims about the nature and scope of ideological formations in Western societies before I proceed to assess Adorno’s and Habermas’ divergent views about the foundations and efﬁcacy of critique.9

1 Ideology: end or transformation? To understand Habermas’ conception of ideology, it will be necessary to review his claims about the cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive spheres of validity since these spheres are confused or conﬂated in ideological formations. Similarly, Adorno’s claims about identity-thinking will be re-examined here because such thinking looms large in his account of ideology. Again, it was the primal fear of nature that ﬁrst spawned identity-thinking. In fear, the subject slowly distinguished itself from objects while attempting at the same time to subordinate them to its concepts. But far from escaping the powers of nature through this conceptual assimilation, the subject actually bound itself all the more to nature by perpetuating “a thinking that identiﬁes, that equalizes everything unequal.” Nature remained binding because the subject’s unrelenting attempts to subsume it under its concepts only revealed that it was “blinded to the point of madness by the sight of whatever eludes its rule” (ND, 172; translation modiﬁed). Hegel himself implicitly sanctioned such blindness. Mocking those who claim to know the intrinsic reality of things, Hegel argued that even animals show they understand the mysteries of the ancient Greek schools of wisdom regarding objects when they “fall to without ceremony and eat them up.”10 In its “compulsion to achieve identity” (ND, 157), Hegel’s idealism is the conceptual analogue to this physical devouring of particulars; it represents “the belly turned mind” – a mind that will allow nothing to remain outside of its conceptual grasp (ND, 23).

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In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer described the crucial moments in the formation of subjectivity. Trying to protect itself from a threatening natural environment, the subject emerged as it distanced itself from that environment through language. Odysseus’ encounter with Polyphemus offers an early illustration of how the attempt to preserve the self from physical harm led to the formation of the subject. As he was drinking the wine Odysseus had given him, the Cyclops asked Odysseus for his name. Odysseus responded by exploiting the double meaning in his proper name in such a way that Polyphemus understood him to say that he was no one. Where Polyphemus represents the selﬂess state of nature, self-prepossessed Odysseus ironically afﬁrms his identity as a subject only by denying it. The escape from nature succeeds, but at the unwarranted cost of self-denial: the denial of nature in the subject. Odysseus “acknowledges his name to himself by disavowing himself as ‘Nobody;’ he saves his life by making himself disappear.” In the Odyssey, then, the constitution of the subject as non-nature – an ego that ultimately lacks content – is bound together with the growing rift between words and the objects to which they refer: “the price of the perennial bindingness of words is that they distance themselves from all fulﬁlling content and from this distance they refer to all possible content, to ‘Nobody’ as much as to Odysseus himself.”11 This distance of the subject from the objects that it tries to approximate with its concepts has not yet been overcome. The exchange principle merely represents another, more contemporary and pervasive, manifestation of this rift or chorismos between subject and object because it perpetuates our estrangement from the natural world. Reducing human labour to the “abstract universal concept of average working hours,” and forcing all other activities into the mould of exchange relations, the exchange principle is “fundamentally akin to the principle of identiﬁcation.” Of more importance here, however, is Adorno’s assertion that, as the “social model” for the principle of identiﬁcation, exchange itself is ideological in character (ND, 146). For, on his deﬁnition of it, ideology “lies in the substruction of something primary, the content of which hardly matters; it lies in the implicit identity of concept and thing” (ND, 40). As a variant of this coercive assimilation of objects by concepts, the exchange principle too advances “the claim that the non-I is ﬁnally the I.” This identiﬁcatory claim, which has been echoed in a variety of forms throughout human history, constitutes “the primal form of ideology” (ND, 148). In Negative Dialectics, Adorno also takes up his earlier argument in Dialectic of Enlightenment to the effect that “the fatal part of ideology is that it dates back to biology.” From time immemorial, the content of self-preservation has been the “tautology of identity: what ought to be is what is anyway” (ND, 349). Before examining Adorno’s views about the more pernicious manifestations of ideology in the West today, I want to address a remark that

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J. M. Bernstein makes about identity-thinking when he objects to Albrecht Wellmer’s interpretation of Adorno to the effect “that simply in virtue of the fact that concepts are general and discursive they are thereby always an imposition upon and a violation of the uniqueness of whatever objects to which they are applied.”12 Rejecting this interpretation, Bernstein argues that to identify an “object as such-and-such does not reduce the object to the concept it comes under, and hence does not by itself ‘violate’ the object.”13 Against this, however, I would counter that, by its very nature, the subsumption of particular objects under universal concepts (or laws) for purposes of classiﬁcation and explanation does involve the suppression of particularity. The concept of particularity itself serves to illustrate this suppression. As with other concepts, when a particular object is subsumed under the concept of particularity, the concept “cuts short what the particular is and what nonetheless cannot be directly named, and it replaces this with identity” (ND, 173). Subordinated to the concept of particularity, particulars are considered identical qua particular. What is problematic in this sort of identity-thinking (as opposed to the rational identity-thinking Adorno championed) is its subsumption of particulars under universals without further ado – that is, without further attempts to compensate for the universalistic bias inherent in the use of concepts so that justice is done to particulars. When thought is satisﬁed with calling objects “such and such,” it does “violate” them precisely because it remains content with subsuming them under concepts.14 To cite Simon Jarvis: “classiﬁcatory thinking [is] a thinking which seeks to say not what something is, but what it comes under, of what it is a representative or an example – and what, therefore, it is not itself.”15 Again, it is in part this identiﬁcatory subsumption of objects under concepts that Adorno labelled ideology and criticized throughout his work. According to Adorno, “the mistake in traditional thinking is that identity is taken for the goal” (ND, 149). Throughout his work, Adorno criticized positivism as the most recent form of ideology that mistakes identity for its goal. With the spread of the exchange principle and its reduction of objects and activities to commensurable units of numeric value, our value as human beings is equated with our labour-power, wage-earning potential, the tax revenue we generate, our purchasing power, the commodities we own. Positivism merely reproduces or re-presents the conditions under which this reduction is made. It takes the form of a tautology: A=A or, what is, is. In a 1954 essay, “Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre” (Contribution to the Theory of Ideology), where he traces the historical genesis of the concept of ideology and examines the role of ideology in modern history, Adorno observes that, today, “ideology scarcely says anything more than that things are the way they are, even its own untruth dwindles into the weak axiom that things could not be other than what they are.” Glorifying power and “the irresistibility of pure existence,” ideology no longer masks or veils existing conditions. Rather, it is

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“simply just the world’s threatening face” precisely because it “scarcely says anything more than that things are the way they are.”16 Adorno makes this point throughout his work. Thus, for example, in “The Schema of Mass Culture,” he writes that, with positivism, “[r]eality becomes its own ideology through the spell cast by its faithful duplication.”17 Where there was once a certain dissonance between ideology and reality which allowed thought a critical ﬁngerhold on reality, positivism effaces even this because it “resigns itself to conﬁrmation of reality by its mere duplication.” If it was formerly possible to say “such it claims to be, but such it is,” positivistic thought “falls back on the argument that things are like this, a simple ﬁnding which coincides, for it, with the good.”18 It is in this respect that positivism continues to ﬁll the function that Adorno ascribed to all ideologies: legitimation. Immediately after emphasizing that all ideology is legitimation, he adds: “Just as ideology requires the experience of an already problematic social state of affairs which must be defended, so it also demands an idea of justice itself – without which an apology would not be necessary” (BI, 465). However, as Adorno later remarks in Negative Dialectics, positivist ideology differs from the liberal ideology that preceded it because it “is no longer added to things as a vindication or complement.” Instead, positivism merely evokes “the seeming inevitability and thus legitimacy of whatever is” (ND, 268). Suggesting that existing conditions are unassailable and unchangeable, positivism carries with it the idea that these conditions cannot change, and that the only available option is to accept them and conform to them. The afﬁrmative refrain of positivist thought – that’s just the way things are; things are like this – implies that what exists should exist simply by virtue of the fact that it exists. In a number of respects, Adorno’s critique of contemporary ideology echoes Edmund Husserl’s views about objectivism with its exclusive focus on “what the world, the physical as well as the spiritual world, is in fact.”19 Although Adorno was certainly critical of Husserl’s idealist response to objectivism, he reiterated Husserl’s denunciation of the “sort of objectivity which dominates our positive sciences with respect to method.” Adorno too thought that, with its exclusive reliance on facts, the prevailing notion of objectivity was “the basis for the support and widespread acceptance of a philosophical and ideological positivism.”20 Adorno’s criticisms of Karl Popper illustrate some of his concerns. In science, as Popper conceives it, the emphatic or normative element of thought is completely absent; “the scope of concepts” is reduced to an abbreviation of “particular existent facts,” failing to “lead beyond their compass.”21 Science merely attempts to register the facts and nothing but the facts; it does not recognize that its so-called “facts” are socially mediated, and it positively abjures all valuejudgements about them. To this extent, as Lukács also recognized, formalistic science simply reproduces the basic structure of capitalist society because it conﬁnes itself to the study of discrete, isolated phenomena,

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which it subsumes under laws, while ignoring the ostensibly lawless social totality.22 Furthermore, the facts that science claims to register with its allegedly neutral descriptive-explanatory concepts are themselves constructed with these concepts. It is for this reason that Adorno argued that science had become idealistic; it remains satisﬁed with “the pure identity of thought with itself.” The truth that science claims to offer is “illusory” because “the pure non-contradiction, to which it contracts, is simply a tautology – the empty compulsion to repeat, which has developed into a concept.”23 Like positivism, then, science lacks “a rational element on which criticism can work” (BI, 465); it eradicates the crucial distinction between what is and what ought to be in favour of a simple depiction of what is. To cure science of its positivistic bias, Adorno argues that “the idea of scientiﬁc truth” should not be divorced from the more emphatic idea “of a true society.” Owing to its ideational content, the latter idea points beyond existing states of affairs, making criticism of them possible. Accordingly, Adorno also insists that the concept of criticism be extended “beyond its limitations in Popper’s work” where it is reduced to criticism of logical inconsistencies. Since society does not fulﬁl adequately the goal that it posits for itself – the goal of preserving humankind and satisfying its needs – science should orient itself towards the unrealized truth content of this normative goal.24 Apart from criticizing science for its positivism, Adorno contends that this type of identity-thinking now permeates society as a whole owing to the global reach of the culture industry, positivism’s most inﬂuential and insidious vehicle. In “Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre,” he remarked that the industry simply “limits itself to placing once more before the eyes of the people what makes up the conditions of their existence anyway.” Reproducing the world as it is, cultural commodities generally lack that critical and speculative moment which can still be found in less commodiﬁed instances of culture. For Adorno, then, the culture industry is “tied to pure existence in faithless belief ” (BI, 476–7). Although positivism is an extremely weak ideology because it legitimates existing conditions by suggesting that conditions cannot be other than what they are, Adorno stressed its pernicious character throughout his work. In “Fernsehen als Ideologie” (Television as Ideology), for example, he wrote that commodiﬁed culture ﬁlls “empirical life with a false meaning whose deception viewers can scarcely see through.”25 In Minima Moralia, he warned: “The gesture of the unthinking That’s-how-it-is is the exact means by which the world dispatches each of its victims.”26 Just as scientiﬁc facts are conceptual constructs, so too the culture industry offers a thoroughly constructed version of reality. Even as it attempts to duplicate the way things are right down to the most insigniﬁcant details, the industry remains pseudo-realistic because its products are standardized, stereotypical, and schematic in character. Appearing to mirror existing

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reality impartially and objectively, the industry ends by subordinating the social and natural world to its abstract concepts, norms, and standards. Like science, then, which tends “both to fetishize its object and, in turn, to degenerate into a fetish”27 when it examines “an object by means of an instrument, which through its own formulation, decides what the object is,”28 the culture industry ﬁnds nothing in the world but what it has put there through its equally narcissistic projections. In television, “[e]ven what is accidental, what appears unaffected by the plot,” is corrupted by the industry’s pseudo-realistic portrayal of reality because “it is created under the abstract category ‘contingency of everyday life’.”29 Moreover, as Adorno noted in his essay on ideology, such “ﬁnely-tuned pseudo-realism prevents what has been decreed from being seen through as something already preformed for the purpose of social control” (BI, 476). Adorno’s critique of the culture industry may be formulated in a paradox: the industry lies when it tells the truth, and it tells the truth when it lies. While reproducing reality as “truthfully” or adequately as possible (with its “photological proof,” the camera never lies), cultural commodities falsely make “existence itself a substitute for meaning and right.”30 Yet, as an ersatz form of realism, the industry tells the truth because it simultaneously reveals and reinforces “the pure essence of that into which the course of the world has turned people.”31 With their standardized formulas, stereotypes, and schemata, cultural commodities both reproduce and perpetuate the damage done to individuals under late capitalism where virtually every aspect of human life has been subsumed under abstract exchange relations. Individuals now fall completely under the spell of the fetish character of the commodity. As workers and consumers, they have been transformed into fungible and commensurable things, into so many instances of exchange value. This has affected both the way they view others and their understanding of themselves. Under late capitalism, the commodity, a “self-made thing,” has become “a thingin-itself, from which the self cannot escape any more” (ND, 346; translation modiﬁed). Taken at face value, this description of the human predicament seems to preclude any hope that things could change for the better. For, if it is the case that the self is now completely spellbound, that it cannot escape its thraldom to the commodity form, then resistance is indeed futile and prospects for an emancipatory critique of existing conditions are shattered. This is the substance of Habermas’ criticism of Adorno. Things are not as bad as Adorno claims; otherwise his critique of existing conditions would fall under its own axe. Ignoring Adorno’s claims about the pervasiveness of positivism in the West today, Habermas appears to go to the other extreme when he declares that ideology has ended – a declaration he attempts to support with his rationalization thesis. Before taking a critical look at the claim that ideology has ended, however, it will be necessary ﬁrst to examine Habermas’ views about ideology.

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Earlier, I remarked brieﬂy on the three types of validity claim embraced by communicative reason and the ideal presuppositions that underlie them; this chapter will give me a further opportunity to elaborate on Habermas’ conception of communicative reason. Habermas deﬁnes ideology as the conﬂation of spheres of value – a type of category mistake. This deﬁnition may be inferred from his observations about one of the historical predecessors of our modern form of understanding. Writing about “civilizations,” or societies organized exclusively around a state, Habermas claims that they had a pressing need for legitimation because they were marked by “an unmistakable increase in social inequality” in comparison to tribal societies based on kinship relations (TCA II, 188). This growing need for legitimation was ﬁlled by religious and metaphysical worldviews which fused together the “ontic, normative, and expressive aspects of validity.” Failing to “differentiate sufﬁciently among the various validity claims,” religious and metaphysical worldviews also systemically limited “possibilities of communication” (TCA II, 189–90). Owing to the aura of sacredness that surrounded it, and to the prohibitions on questioning its basic tenets, the inscrutable realm of faith and belief was effectively “immunized against objections already within the cognitive reach of everyday communication” (TCA II, 189). In contrast to this ideological conﬂation of value spheres, Habermas maintains that everyday communication may be regarded as rational to the extent that speakers use reasons to redeem the three types of validity claim: cognitive-instrumental claims about the objective world, moralpractical claims about the social world, and aesthetic-expressive validity claims about their own subjective worlds.32 His concept of communicative reason ultimately “ﬁnds its criteria in the argumentative procedures for directly or indirectly redeeming claims to propositional truth, normative rightness, subjective truthfulness, and aesthetic harmony.”33 In the West, “the need for achieving understanding is met less and less by a reservoir of traditionally certiﬁed interpretations immune from criticism.” Rather than relying, as civilizations once did, on appeals to authority backed by onerous sanctions, members of Western lifeworlds now meet “the need for consensus . . . more and more frequently by risky, because rationally motivated, agreement – be it directly, through the interpretive accomplishments of participants, or through a professionalized expert knowledge that has become customary in a secondary sense.”34 The Western form of understanding is marked to a very high degree by its propensity to offer reasons in support of the three types of claim, using argumentative procedures speciﬁc to each, and to solve disagreements by appealing to the force of the better argument alone. This propensity distinguishes modernity from periods in which ideological interpretations of the world prevailed. To return to Habermas’ discussion of civilizations, while the “profane practice of everyday life” in these societies already required the distinction between an orientation to

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success and an orientation to mutual understanding, as well as a distinction between internal relations of meaning and external relations between things, the basic concepts of religious and metaphysical worldviews also “proved to be resistant to every attempt to separate off the aspects of the true, the good, and the perfect” (TCA II, 194). Following Weber, Habermas sounds more than one Nietzschean note when he contends that this conﬂation of value spheres allowed the ruling classes to legitimate their rule with reference to a real, more essential, world behind this earthly veil of tears where injustice and inequality triumph. The world beyond was supposed to make sense of human suffering: suffering was said to be a trial sent by a transcendent being – a being that could neither be understood nor questioned but which was alleged to be the embodiment of the true, the good, and the perfect – to punish or to test the mettle of the sufferer. This being promised rewards for tolerating suffering, for being meek, mild, and turning the other cheek – that is, for accepting existing conditions. Thus the unequal distribution of material wealth in civilizations acquired its legitimation as an expression of the will of God (TCA II, 189). It was, in part, the cunning of reason – in the form of the partially supra-subjective rationalization of the lifeworld – that began to undermine religion’s credibility as an ideology. In the early modern period that followed “the age of the world picture” (to borrow Heidegger’s phrase), the three value spheres had already started to differentiate themselves from one other, thereby overcoming religion’s confused validity claims. Once the early modern period was under way, then, “forms of modern religiosity” gave up “basic dogmatic claims,” and in the process, the metaphysicalreligious transcendence that had held individuals in thrall to an unjust social order was destroyed (TCA II, 195). But this development alone was not sufﬁcient to stem the tide of ideologies. Even with the subsequent success of the enlightenment critique of religion, ideology persisted because the rationalized lifeworld itself opened up a utopian horizon that was belied by “the realities of bourgeois life,” riven as life was by class distinctions, and race and gender ascriptions (TCA II, 329). This ideologically inﬂected utopian vision took shape in “the basic ideas of rational natural law, which offered a justiﬁcation for the modern state from the perspective of a social order free of violence and centered on markets ordered by private law” (TCA II, 328–9).35 Although he criticizes the ideological dimension of bourgeois culture, Habermas nonetheless accepts Marx’s view that bourgeois culture has an “ambivalent content.” To be sure, eighteenth-century culture is ideological to the extent that it conﬂates the objective and the normative spheres of validity. Ascribing normative content to existing states of affairs when it applies the concepts of freedom, autonomy, and equality to its own institutions and practices, liberal culture was not yet fully rationalized. However, “[i]n its claims to autonomy and scientiﬁc method, to indi-

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vidual freedom and universalism, to radical, romantic self-disclosure,” bourgeois culture did exhibit the effects of “cultural rationalization.” Relying increasingly on forms of argumentation – rather than on the authority of tradition – to redeem its differentiated validity claims, culture also became “sensitive to criticism and self-criticism.” In fact, its concepts of freedom, equality, and autonomy could be used to cast a more critical light on the very conditions they were used to legitimate. Summarizing this point about the ambivalence of liberal culture, Habermas writes that “the normative contents” of its “abstract and unhistorical ideas, overshooting as they do existing social realities, not only support a critically transforming practice by providing some initial guidance, but also support an afﬁrming and endorsing [legitimizing] practice by providing a measure of idealistic transformation” (TCA II, 352). Liberal ideology spawned nineteenth- and twentieth-century variants. This “second generation of ideologies” has taken “heterogeneous” forms, ranging “across a broad spectrum of scientiﬁc – mostly pseudo-scientiﬁc – popular views, from anarchism, communism, and socialism, through syndicalist, radical-democratic, and conservative-revolutionary orientations, to fascism and National Socialism” (TCA II, 353). These latter-day ideologies attempt to “‘salvage’ the moral-practical and expressive moments suppressed or neglected by the capitalist pattern of modernization” by establishing these normative and aesthetic moments “practically in the new life forms of a society revolutionized in some way or other.” Like their eighteenth-century progenitor, then, nineteenth- and twentieth-century worldviews have taken the form of “totalizing conceptions of order.” Today, however, the process of rationalization has eradicated even these last vestiges of ideology. The age of the world picture, in which individuals clung to a belief in another world where the good, the true, and the beautiful are united, has ended because our contemporary form of understanding, “now fully differentiated in terms of its validity basis, becomes so transparent that the communicative practice of everyday life no longer affords any niches for the structural violence of ideologies” (TCA II, 354). Nevertheless, the effects of rationalization have not been entirely positive. If the evolution of learning processes accounts for the differentiation of validity claims in everyday communication within the lifeworld, it also “makes possible the emergence and growth of subsystems whose independent imperatives turn back destructively upon the lifeworld itself ” (TCA II, 186). As James Bohman remarks, Habermas makes reference to both these effects of rationalization to support his controversial claim about the end of ideology.36 To return to an earlier point, Habermas believes that Western culture has been damaged by “a pattern of cultural and societal rationalization that helps cognitive-instrumental rationality to achieve a one-sided dominance” (TCA I, 66). Succeeding ideological formations, like those concerning the normative value of the “free” market economy and the democratic bona ﬁdes of our political institutions, is the

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instrumentalization of the lifeworld which occurs with colonization when non-linguistic system imperatives begin to substitute for the linguistic mechanisms needed for social integration. No longer concealed behind an ideological veil, instrumental imperatives now advance unmasked; they “exert their inﬂuence on socially integrated domains of action from the outside, and in a discernible fashion” (TCA II, 354). The colonization of the lifeworld is late capitalism’s “functional equivalent for ideological formation.” Among its many effects, colonization prevents “holistic interpretations from coming into existence” (TCA II, 355). What is ultimately at issue here is the contemporary experience of the loss of meaning – including ideologically inﬂected meanings – that would give substance to life practices and help to orient them.37 Not only is everyday communication colonized by the subsystems, but the vital cultural traditions on which speakers formerly relied to make sense of their experience have been replaced by the one-dimensional expert cultures of science, morality, and art. Accordingly, once the lifeworld is “assimilated to juridiﬁed, formally organized domains of action and simultaneously cut off from the inﬂux of an intact cultural tradition” (TCA II, 327), everyday consciousness is “robbed of its power to synthesize” the three different validity spheres and becomes fragmented (TCA II, 355). Late capitalism’s functional equivalent for ideology consists in its instrumentalization of the lifeworld to the point where more synthetic (and potentially ideological) interpretations of experience can no longer take shape. If ideology always had a legitimating function, colonization is its equivalent in the sense that it serves to legitimate existing conditions by unilaterally substituting its own instrumental sphere of validity for the multivalent whole, thereby compromising the unity of communicative reason. Where Adorno believes that positivist ideology is far more transparent than its liberal predecessor because it consists in the simple claim that things are the way they are, Habermas speaks about the transparency of the modern form of understanding which has rendered ideologies obsolete owing to its differentiation of value spheres. However, when he adds that rationalization results in the fragmentation of everyday consciousness, and that such fragmentation acts as a further impediment to ideology formation, Habermas describes one of starker counter-tendencies in the lifeworld under late capitalism. On the one hand, with their differentiation of value spheres in everyday communication, individuals are now too savvy to be duped by the ideological conﬂation of these spheres. On the other hand, rationalization has also meant that these spheres begin to fall apart as culture and personality (the structural components of the lifeworld most directly affected by colonization) are overtly instrumentalized, and holistic cultural traditions wither with the emergence of onedimensional expert cultures. If the rationalization of the lifeworld preserves the integrity or unity of communicative reason despite its increasing differentiation of value spheres,38 the derivative rationalization of the sub-

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systems (which indirectly helps to account for colonization) appears to compromise further reason’s fundamental integrity by severing the connections between the three spheres.39 There are certainly problems with the view that we are too intellectually mature to be fooled by ideologies, but are not yet able to counteract the far more visible and direct onslaught of colonization. Although she also considers this view problematic, Maeve Cooke attempts to explain why the overt clash between system imperatives and lifeworld orientations is seldom openly recognized. With their fragmented consciousness, members of the colonized lifeworld have lost their capacity to understand the whole: fragmentation “prevents the coordination necessary” to resist colonization and “to create ‘institutions of freedom’ which would harness the colonizing power of the market and the administrative apparatus.”40 However, despite this attempt to support Habermas, there are other problems with his view as well. For, as Bohman points out, rationalization itself serves to counteract the fragmentation of consciousness (a point Habermas makes on several occasions).41 Bohman goes on to argue that, as long as the lifeworld is not totally reiﬁed, and language is not completely replaced by non-linguistic system imperatives, “the ideological potential for speech remains.”42 Bohman also objects to Habermas’s end of ideology thesis on the grounds that it is premature.43 Indeed, this thesis may be countered with the eminently credible claim that action within the economic and political systems continues to be legitimated ideologically. Although Adorno himself believes that domination is tending to become more direct – a state of affairs that he claims would, in fact, allow the economic and political systems to dispense with ideologies altogether (BI, 465) – he also maintains that ideology persists. What has changed is that ideology now often takes a weaker and more transparent form. With equal cogency, Adorno argues that, while its hold on consciousness is waning, liberal ideology continues to perform legitimating functions (as should be obvious whenever Western nations try to justify their self-interested policy initiatives and military interventions by appealing to such universals as freedom, democracy, justice, and so on). Yet Habermas never directly challenges Adorno’s deﬁnition of ideology as identity-thinking, and he completely overlooks the latter’s claims about positivism as the latest ideological legitimation of capitalism. Instead, he contents himself with the bare assertion (not unlike an article of faith) that ideology evaporated with the demise of the ideological offspring of liberalism: anarchism, fascism, and communism. On this highly questionable account, ideology died after World War II. Implausibly, then, phenomena such as McCarthyism and the Cold War – with their invocation of the “red menace” – not only lacked an ideological cast, but Americans and other Westerners were too mature to be duped by state propaganda ampliﬁed by the culture industry.

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Even on Habermas’ idiosyncratic deﬁnition, one could show without much difﬁculty that ideological formations persist. In his response to Habermas, Jeffrey Alexander takes this tack. Conceding that validity spheres are differentiated more clearly today than they were in the past, Alexander also argues that “the arbitrary, unconscious, fused, and, yes, irrational elements of culture have not . . . disappeared.” Modern culture has not yet become completely disenchanted and enlightened in Habermas’ sense of these terms: “Modern, rational people continue to infuse values, institutions, and even mundane physical locations with the mystery and awe of the sacred.”44 More generally, as Terry Eagleton asserts, proclamations about the end of ideology are “vastly implausible:” if they were true, it would be difﬁcult to understand “why so many individuals . . . still ﬂock to church, wrangle over politics in pubs, care about what their children are being taught in schools and lose sleep over the steady erosion of the social services.”45 Following Nicos Poulantzas, Eagleton later argues that the end of ideology thesis is itself ideological because bourgeois ideology is just “that form of dominative discourse that would present itself as entirely innocent of power” – including the power of dissembling ideologies. Although Eagleton does not attribute this thesis to Habermas, he unwittingly targets him when he argues that those who declare the end of ideology, and applaud the transition from a “metaphysical” rationality to an ideologically neutral, scientiﬁc, or “technological” rationality, are “simply endorsing what was endemic in bourgeois ideology all along.”46

2 The critical power of critical theory Despite his controversial claims about the end of ideology, Habermas does not abandon the project of ﬁrst generation critical theorists; he endorses the critique of existing conditions with the aim of contributing to what he sees as the ongoing process of emancipatory enlightenment. Like Adorno who uses the rational potential he ﬁnds in modernity to target forms of identity-thinking that serve as the ideological mask or veil for oppressive economic conditions, Habermas also wants to make use of modernity’s rational potential as the basis for his social criticism. In place of ideology critique, however, Habermas criticizes the loss of meaning and freedom under capitalism to reveal the damage done when consciousness is fragmented and everyday communicative practices become commodiﬁed and juridiﬁed. Of course, Adorno was also very concerned about the commodiﬁcation of everyday life – though he believed that commodiﬁcation was much more extensive than Habermas is prepared to concede, and that it is reinforced ideologically. With his critical theory, Adorno takes aim speciﬁcally at positivism, showing how it helps to legitimate existing conditions with its tautological claims. If Habermas praises Marx’s recognition of the ambivalence of bourgeois culture, with its normative concepts that serve, not only to legitimate

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existing conditions, but also to transﬁgure them, Adorno deliberately attempts to salvage from liberal culture its critical purchase on reality. To repeat a claim I made earlier, Adorno did not deny the rational potential in bourgeois culture. Throughout his work, he made constant use of the emphatic concepts that emerged under liberalism to ground his ideology critique. Although concepts such as freedom, individuality, and autonomy do serve a legitimizing function, they also have a normative dimension which allows them to indicate the better potential latent in modernity. Liberal culture attests to the power of thought to conceive of something better, to think beyond the given; it is implicitly self-critical because its normative claims may be held up against its own pretension that things are already like this, namely free, equal, and so on. Its ideas are “negative signs”; they “live in the cavities between what things claim to be and what they are” (ND, 150). This is one reason why Adorno’s critique of modern culture is directed almost exclusively against its positivistic tendencies. Under the spell of positivism, culture is now tending to degenerate into a thoroughly uncritical endorsement of existing conditions, a mere imprint of damaged life. As an antidote, Adorno often deployed concepts he borrowed from liberal culture to expose positivism’s afﬁrmative and tautological claims. Adorno adopts an emphatic conception of some universals. By way illustrating the emphatic dimension of liberal concepts and modelling his ideology critique, he devotes a section of Negative Dialectics to an examination of Kant’s concept of freedom. Although this concept arose at a particular stage in human history and currently expresses our conﬂictive experience of ourselves “as now free, now unfree” (ND, 299), it cannot simply be reduced to our contemporary experience of freedom. There is a contradiction between our experience of freedom and what is predicated of it under the concept because the concept “feeds on the idea of a condition in which individuals would have qualities not to be ascribed to anyone here and now” (ND, 150). Individuals are both more and less than what this concept attributes to them: they are more because the concept of freedom does not exhaust them qua particular, but they are also less because no individual has fully experienced the possibilities conveyed by the concept. The particular would come to itself only by voiding that contradiction – in other words, by achieving an identity of the particular with its concept – the individual’s concern is not only to hold on to that of which the general concept robs him; he is equally concerned with that “more” of the concept compared with his need. (ND, 151) The liberal concept of freedom evokes the better potential that currently manifests itself in existing conditions, even as its normative content holds

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these conditions to account. However, because the content of emphatic concepts such as freedom is derived from these same conditions, it is also “suspended and frail, due to its temporal substance” (ND, 34). Claiming that it would have been “an anachronism to talk of freedom, whether as a reality or as a challenge” before the development of self-consciousness, or the capacity for self-reﬂection (ND, 218), Adorno further emphasizes the historical character of this concept when he writes that “the picture of freedom against society lives in the crushed, abused individual’s features alone.” Moments of freedom only become “concrete” in experiences that exhibit “resistance to repression” (ND, 265). In Negative Dialectics and other works, Adorno claims that freedom arose as a counter-concept, or a polemical counter-image (ND, 223), to experiences of oppressive social relations. We become aware of freedom through our painful experiences of the boundaries or limits to freedom. Our concept of freedom – “a concept in which the oppressed also participate – recoils against domination as freedom’s model” (ND, 221; translation modiﬁed). Indeed, it is only because the idea of freedom is not a regulative, Kantian idea, unconditioned by historical reality – or, because it does not “so far transcend the bounds of . . . experience that no given empirical object can ever coincide” with it47 – that it not only renders our experience intelligible, but it may also be held up against existing conditions in ideological-critical fashion. Nevertheless, if the concept of freedom (along with that of other emphatic concepts) merely reﬂected historical conditions, it would offer a poor corrective to positivism. Arising within particular socio-historical contexts, this concept also transcends these contexts by virtue of its truth content. Concept and object, what ought to be and what is, do not coincide; they cannot be identiﬁed with each other in the way that positivism suggests. As Adorno explains in his essay on ideology, concepts such as freedom are true “an sich” – in themselves (BI, 473). This is why he insists in the passage from Minima Moralia quoted at the beginning of this chapter that the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. A concept such as freedom “lags behind itself [bleibt hinter sich zurück] as soon as we apply it empirically” because historical conditions falsify the concept, but if it were stripped “of what philosophical terminology used to call its idea,” the concept would be diminished arbitrarily “for utility’s sake, in comparison with what it means in itself” (ND, 151). This concept should not be dismissed as a manifestation of false consciousness not only because we do experience a measure of freedom in resistance to oppression, but because it may be also used critically to gauge the very lag or gap that prevents experience from fully measuring up to it. It is precisely by means of concepts such as these that culture has occasionally opposed – directly or indirectly – the unfreedom, inequality, and lack of autonomy that have accompanied the development of capitalism. Emerging from the social process as something spiritual, ideological formations become

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“independent, substantial” to the extent that they offer their “own standard.” If untruth is the price that ideology must pay for rising above the social process and equating reality with its normative concepts, “its moment of truth” nonetheless “clings to such independence, to a consciousness that is more than the simple impression of what exists and which accordingly strives to penetrate what exists” (BI, 474). In Negative Dialectics, Adorno tries to account for the relative autonomy or independence of some ideas when he suggests that the activity of thinking itself makes such independence possible. As I remarked in the previous chapter, Adorno follows Hegel when he deﬁnes thought in general as “an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it.” The activities in which thought engages are “negative already – a revolt against being importuned to bow to every immediate thing” (ND, 19). However, despite its resistance to the overwhelming existence of things as they are, which could potentially give its concepts a speculative and restorative grasp on damaged reality, thought has refused historically to bow to reality by negating it in a coercive fashion when it uncritically subordinates objects under its concepts. Today this subsumption takes an extremely pernicious form because the “hallmark of ideologies” is the absence of any kind of independence from the social process, “rather than the deceptiveness of their pretension” to correspond to that process with concepts that also implicitly transcend it (BI, 474). Negative dialectics criticizes such positivistic and identiﬁcatory thinking; it aims to make conscious the damage that reason now inﬂicts on inner and outer nature owing to its abject failure to respect particulars. If ideology’s “power of resistance to enlightenment is owed to its complicity with identifying thought, or indeed with thought at large,” negative dialectics takes the form of ideology critique when it attempts to assist the identifying subject to “see reason against its reason.” Accordingly, ideology critique is not “something peripheral and intra-scientiﬁc, . . . something limited to the objective mind and to the products of the subjective mind.” Rather, as a “critique of the constitutive consciousness itself,” ideology critique lies at the very centre of Adorno’s philosophical enterprise (ND, 148). Once again, the concepts that philosophy has inherited from eighteenth century liberal culture provide the basis for a critique of constitutive consciousness. Complaining on many occasions that positivism makes “the world as it is . . . the only ideology,” and recognizing that positivism has supplanted liberal ideology to the point where the latter’s concepts have become borderline values – one does not really “dare” to set forth a concept such as freedom “even as a complementary ideology” (ND, 274) – Adorno nonetheless continued to use such concepts critically against positivism’s assimilative mode of identiﬁcation. As Gillian Rose observed in The Melancholy Science, Adorno referred to this critical mode of thinking, with its strongly speculative, Hegelian cast, as rational identity-thinking.48 More recently, Bernstein has made an

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impressive attempt to develop the conceptual basis for an Adornian mode of thought with his notion of the complex concept. If philosophy, in the form of negative dialectics, “must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept” (ND, 15), Bernstein takes this to mean that the concepts it deploys must exhibit both a “logical axis through which thought identiﬁes different particulars . . . as belonging to the same concept . . . and a material axis composed of the mediating moments of object, image, language, and tradition.”49 In Bernstein’s view, the normative impetus behind Adorno’s negative dialectics is satisﬁed when the concept is oriented towards the object qua particular through structures of inference that enable it to name the object materially. As intriguing as his idea of the complex concept is, however, Bernstein overlooks crucial elements in Adorno’s discussion of the use of concepts to transcend concepts. For, as I am arguing here, the kind of identity-thinking Adorno championed involves the use of speculative and emphatic concepts to identify particulars. It is this latter use of concepts alone that gives negative dialectics its emancipatory thrust. To do justice to objects in the strong, ethical or emphatic sense, a concept must make good the damage that has been done to objects. Such damage is recognizable as damage only if one adopts a speculative orientation towards an undamaged form of life. In a passage that deserves careful consideration, Adorno writes that negative dialectics entails the reciprocal “criticism of the universal and of the particular”; it involves “identifying acts which judge both whether the concept does justice to what it covers, and whether the particular fulﬁlls its concept” (ND, 146; translation modiﬁed). Here Adorno certainly advocates using concepts in such a way that the particular is given its due. In Bernstein’s terms, concepts should have an intransitive material axis. Applying concepts to particular objects, rational identity-thinking must show that particulars cannot be subsumed under them without remainder. For example, the concept of autonomy does not exhaust individuals qua individual; not only will individuals always be more than simply autonomous, but there is also a contradiction between the concept of autonomy and the potential to which it refers that reveals the concept’s own insufﬁciency qua concept. Currently tainted by “what an inevitable formalization” has made of them (ND, 151), concepts such as autonomy are inadequate to their objects owing to both their derivation from damaged reality which continues to taint or contaminate them, and their more or less impotent reference to a potential lying in objects themselves that remains unrealized. Conversely, rational identity-thinking must judge whether the particular fulﬁls its concept. This does not merely entail judging whether particulars have been ranged properly under the appropriate concepts by virtue of an orientation towards the material dimension of our experience of particulars. As a more rational mode of identity-thinking, negative dialectics uses normative concepts to highlight the failure of objects to corres-

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pond to them: what exists has not yet become what it ought to be. This lack of correspondence can be held against objects in a critical fashion only because what exists is at the same time potentially more than what it actually is. It is this “more” to which the emphatic concept refers, not by imposing it upon the object, but by revealing that it “remains immanent in it, as that which has been pushed out of it” (ND, 161). Following the example given above, society should be so organized that its members are able to realize the autonomy that now exhibits itself in distorted form in them, while simultaneously retaining what makes them unique as particular individuals. What Bernstein’s complex concept lacks, however, is just this speculative, conceptual moment in which possibility comes to the fore – a moment Adorno stressed when he wrote that the “means employed by negative dialectics for the penetration of its hardened objects is possibility.” Negative dialectics is a rational mode of identity-thinking because it grasps objects emphatically and prospectively using concepts (e.g. autonomy, freedom, individuality) that express “the possibility of which their reality has cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one” (ND, 52).50 Thought must critically confront an irrational reality with its better potential if it is to be rational in Adorno’s sense of that term. Giving priority to the object does not imply that the universal concept should be treated like “a soap bubble” because such treatment “would let theory grasp neither the universal’s pernicious supremacy” – in the form of ubiquitous exchange relations that prevent individuals from realizing their potential – “nor the idea of a condition which, in giving individuals their due, would rid the universal of its wretched particularity” (ND, 199; translation modiﬁed). Revealing the non-identity of concept and object, rational identity-thinking simultaneously respects not only “the concept’s longing to become identical with the thing” but the rational potential that lies hidden in objects themselves. Hence, negative dialectics apprehends both the pathic rationality of universal and particular as well as their largely implicit reference to the as yet unfulﬁlled prospect of improved conditions. This reference to modernity’s rational potential constitutes “the truth moment of ideology.” Hidden in the ideological supposition of an identity between universalizing thought and the particular objects to which it refers is also “the pledge that there should be no contradiction, no antagonism” (ND, 149). For Adorno, the particular “would come to itself only by voiding that contradiction” in such a way that it not only holds on “to that of which the general concept robs” it (ND, 151), but ﬁnally measures up to what the concept implicitly promises (ND, 150). With rational identity-thinking, Adorno hoped to carry forward the selfcritical spirit of reason that characterizes enlightened thought. Of course, Habermas too believes that modern culture harbours a rational potential that contributes to the process of enlightenment. Yet, in contrast to Adorno, he not only claims that this potential has existed throughout

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human history in “the profane practice of everyday life” (TCA II, 194), but that it has manifested itself more completely in modernity owing, of course, to the rationalization of the lifeworld. In place of the mystery and authority of religion, which formerly prescribed what was true, good, and beautiful, stepped the enlightened force of the better argument, revealing modernity’s more fully evolved rational core. For Habermas, the degree of rationality attained by any culture must be assessed “in terms of the capacity of responsible participants in interaction to orient themselves to validity claims geared to intersubjective recognition.”51 Recalling “older ideas of logos,” Habermas’ conception of communicative rationality “brings with it the connotations of a noncoercively unifying, consensus-building force of a discourse in which the participants overcome their at ﬁrst subjectively biased views in favor of a rationally motivated agreement.”52 Despite the incursions of cognitive-instrumental and functionalist reason into the lifeworld, its members do actualize the rational potential in modernity insofar as “they reciprocally raise claims that their utterances ﬁt the world (objective, social, or subjective), and . . . they . . . criticize and conﬁrm those validity claims, settle their disagreements, and arrive at agreements” (TCA II, 126). In a striking metaphor, Habermas describes communicative reason as a “rocking hull” that does not “go under in the sea of contingencies, even if shuddering in high seas is the only mode in which it ‘copes’ with these contingencies.”53 The sea of contingency rocking the hull of communicative reason takes the form of concrete communicative practices in the lifeworld. Although these practices threaten to submerge it in empirical reality, communicative reason remains aﬂoat because it enjoys what Habermas calls (in Kantian fashion) a “moment of unconditionality”54 which ensures that its “hull” can neither be breached nor its integrity compromised. Still, communicative reason “shudders” because it is “at most an absolute that has become ﬂuid as a critical procedure.”55 Unconditioned and absolute, communicative reason shares with the high seas on which it struggles a pliant character. It owes its pliancy or ﬂexibility to the very fact that it is already “built into factual processes of mutual understanding.” An ideal or absolute, communicative reason also inheres in the real: it is “by its very nature incarnated in contexts of communicative action.”56 The Janus face of communicative reason makes it difﬁcult to compare with rational identity-thinking. Yet commentators such as Herbert Schnädelbach have drawn important parallels between ﬁrst and second generation critical theory: Just as Critical Theory, following Marx, always referred to the freedom and equality of all human beings, and this was purportedly incorporated, at least in the form of a claim, into bourgeois society and drew its critical energy from this source, so Habermas attempts to use a normative concept of reaching understanding founded in commu-

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nicative action itself as the basis for his “critique of given relations of reaching understanding” and the paradoxes and aberrations of Modernity.57 Like Marx, who believed that existing conditions harbour the seeds of a more humane order, both Adorno and Habermas contend that modernity’s better potential is partially embedded in modern culture. Reﬂecting Marx’s concern for human emancipation, Adorno and Habermas also associate emancipation with enlightenment ideals: freedom, equality, autonomy, spontaneity, justice, and solidarity. Finally, both philosophers claim that the rational potential in modern culture is capable of grounding a critique of existing conditions. One of the major differences between Adorno’s and Habermas’ understanding of the rational potential of modernity lies in their divergent conceptions of its historical character. Where he had once expressly located this potential in the “rational-critical” debate of the bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century, Habermas now wants to lay “the normative foundations of the critical theory of society . . . at a deeper level.” No longer idealizing a “public sphere that was speciﬁc to a single epoch,” as he did in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas currently claims that modernity’s more fully evolved rationality was always “intrinsic in everyday communicative practices.” This in turn means that rationalization processes may be traced “back beyond the threshold of modern societies.”58 Again, however, while immanent even in premodern communicative practices, communicative reason simultaneously transcends these practices. Given its Kantian moment of unconditionality, Habermas has spoken almost apologetically about “the shadow of a transcendental illusion” that accompanies it.59 In contrast to these claims about the unconditioned moment of communicative reason, Adorno maintains that the rational potential in modernity is historical through and through. The precarious basis of his critique in the evanescent Wahrheitsmomenten of some concepts contrasts sharply with the transcendent and transhistorical grounding provided by communicative reason. While it may rock and shudder, this “hull” nonetheless offers a more secure bulwark against the vicissitudes of history than Adorno’s more ephemeral concepts. Adorno’s radically historical conception of reason is nowhere more evident than where he conjures up the Orwellian nightmare that the rational potential in liberal ideas “might be wholly extinguished again, perhaps without leaving a trace” (ND, 218). In some periods of history, both the concept and the reality of freedom have been completely absent, and it is equally possible that both may one day vanish entirely. Precisely because the ideational content of emphatic concepts is thoroughly historical, the ground for Adorno’s ideology critique is extremely unstable. There are fragments of good in the world but these appear only through a glass darkly, so to speak: they are glimpsed by those

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who resist (in thought, behaviour, or both) prevailing forms of injustice, unfreedom, intolerance, and repression. Modernity’s rational potential manifests itself wherever individuals confront and contest the limits to their freedom, in conditions that reduce them to mere cogs in the wheel of the economic machinery, or in their struggles against multifarious forms of state oppression. Unlike Habermas’ conception of it, Adorno’s view of modernity’s rational potential also evokes conditions that would be realized only if existing states of affairs were utterly transformed (rather than merely reformed). Yet these conditions are not merely chimerical because they also have an existential basis in our experience and self-understanding. Agreeing with Adorno that modernity’s rational potential is not a pipe-dream, Habermas advances different arguments to support this claim. First, while the ideal presuppositions of communicative reason give rise to the ideal of “intact intersubjectivity,” they are not supposed to be ﬁlled in substantively “as the totality of a reconciled form of life.” Rather than evoking a conception of the good life, communicative reason is purely formal or procedural in character.60 Reason manifests itself in those procedures that must be satisﬁed to achieve mutual understanding. Second, Habermas maintains that reason is already embedded in existing communicative practices. Communicative reason is “always already” there. Third, when he rejects Adorno’s view of the distorted character of reason (and communication) in the modern world, Habermas also claims that communicative reason now ﬂourishes there, albeit in a less than perfect form. So, where Adorno decries the continuing devolution of reason in modern culture, Habermas applauds the evolution in the West of a salutary, procedural form of reason that may be found in discourses oriented to reaching understanding by way of argumentation. Rather than deploying communicative reason to criticize an allegedly defunct ideology, Habermas suggests that communicative reason can be wielded against the pathological effects of colonization in the lifeworld. To cite Kenneth Baynes, who attempts to explicate the normative basis for Habermas’ social criticism, everyday communicative practices rest on a number of ideal presuppositions that speakers always make whenever they argue seriously. Baynes asserts that the rational potential of communicative reason resides in these presuppositions which are immanent in communicative practices themselves; they are the “real presuppositions of all argumentation” in the sense that speakers cannot avoid making them if they want to argue. At the same time, it is also the case that “no single discourse can completely fulﬁll the conditions of an ideal speech situation.” The ideal presuppositions that would need to be satisﬁed if the ideal speech situation were ever to be realized also involve counterfactual claims “that transcend the spatial and temporal horizons of their own embodiment.” Baynes believes these claims serve as regulative ideas “that can be used to criticize actual discourses.”61

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Maeve Cooke considers and rejects a number of interpretations of the critical thrust of communicative reason, including Habermas’ own claim that communicative reason can serve as a standard for criticizing “the incomplete character of the rationalization that appears as reiﬁcation” by virtue of its integrated multivalent rationality (TCA I, 363). Rejecting this claim on the grounds that communicative reason offers no critical purchase on the functionalist rationality of the subsystems – as opposed to the cognitive-instrumental rationality of its agents62 – Cooke reaches the same conclusion as Baynes: “the critical power of the notion of communicative rationality resides in the tension between the normative promise contained in the strong idealizations implicit in the very notion of argumentation and what happens in actual empirical practices of argumentation.”63 She then proceeds to describe some of these strong idealizations: they include the ideal that those who participate in argument are motivated solely by the force of the better argument, that everyone who engages in discussion is willing to reach understanding, and that participants in argumentation accept the obligation to support their claims with reasons while viewing others as similarly obligated. Cooke also tries to demonstrate that these ideal presuppositions perform critical work by exposing latent strategic action. Measured against the presupposition that speakers are motivated by the force of the better argument alone, strategic actors may be shown to be motivated by their personal interest in success, in the form of proﬁt or power. Against the ideal of being willing to reach understanding, strategic actors fall short because they are not concerned ultimately with arriving at agreement about the issues under discussion but with winning the argument to achieve their own private ends. Similarly, when judged in terms of its fulﬁlment of the obligation to support claims with reasons, strategic action fails because it makes recourse to manipulation to reach its goals.64 If Baynes and Cooke are correct, then, the social criticism that Habermas endorses is based on presuppositions that are at once ideal and factually made by speakers when they try to reach agreement by means of argumentation about aspects of their objective, social, and subjective worlds. This interpretation ﬁnds some support in Habermas’ positive assessment of the utopian content in eighteenth-century bourgeois culture and, more indirectly, in his misguided criticisms of Adorno’s rejection of the rational potential that inheres in this content. Yet Cooke also observes that Habermas provides little guidance for those who would use communicative reason as the basis for criticism.65 Indeed, given his repeated criticisms of the performative contradiction that allegedly mars Adorno’s ideology critique, it is striking that Habermas nowhere clariﬁes fully the normative basis and goals of his own critique. Furthermore, unlike Adorno, who also practises the form of criticism he endorses, Habermas does not actually engage in social criticism to identify the pathological disturbances in communicative action that are caused by

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colonization. Asserting very generally that colonization leads to the instrumentalization of communicative practices in the lifeworld that contribute to the reproduction of personality and culture, diminishing social solidarity by fostering alienation and unsettling collective identities, Habermas has left to others (primarily sociologists) the task of examining critically and empirically the disturbances that afﬂict communicative action when the lifeworld is reiﬁed. In addition to these problems with the critical dimension of Habermas’ theory, the interpretation of the normative basis of social criticism offered by Baynes and Cooke is highly problematic because the ideal presuppositions underlying communicative reason cannot provide the required critical leverage on the pathologies caused by colonization. As I argued at the end of Chapter 1, strategic action afﬂicts communicative practices even in the absence of colonization because the boundaries between system and lifeworld are porous, and lifeworld members will not be able to avoid (barring a complete split in their personalities) bringing their work home with them, so to speak, in the form of the orientations to success that they must adopt within the subsystems. However, apart from the blurry boundaries between system and lifeworld, Habermas himself acknowledges that strategic action is endemic in lifeworld contexts (while claiming at the same time that action oriented to reaching understanding is the original mode of language-use). Linguistic interaction is not exhausted by the more harmonious and cooperative attempt to build consensus.66 “Without doubt,” Habermas writes, “there are countless cases of indirect understanding” in which, inter alia, “one subject inconspicuously harnesses another for his own purposes, that is, induces him to behave in a desired way by manipulatively employing linguistic means and thereby instrumentalizes him for his own success” (TCA I, 288). If this is the case, however, then the critical edge offered by communicative reason is much duller than even Cooke recognizes67 because the ideal presuppositions of communicative reason would need to be honed more ﬁnely to target those instances of strategic action that are occasioned speciﬁcally by colonization. Moreover, the same problem arises if we accept the more problematic view that communicative reason owes its critical power to its multivalent unity because the free play of value spheres cannot be used with sufﬁcient precision selectively to distinguish reiﬁed instrumental orientations from non-reiﬁed ones. In fact, both types of social criticism would target all instances of strategic action indiscriminately regardless of their provenance. Furthermore, and to turn against Habermas his own objections to Adorno’s “foundationless” ideology critique, there is a performative contradiction in his suggestion that communicative reason may be used (in any fashion) as a critical prophylactic against the reifying effects of the subsystems. For if colonization has corrupted reason itself, communicative reason can only offer a weak critical lens on lifeworld pathologies; the

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mote in the eyes of social critics would need to be removed before they are sufﬁciently clear-sighted to remove motes in the eyes of others. In other words, reason must ﬁrst become self-critical in the way Adorno suggests. Among other things, this means that the positivistic, cognitiveinstrumental orientations that pervade social science must themselves be scrutinized critically. Although he also praises Kant’s unitary concept of reason68 – a concept Habermas adopts even as he modiﬁes it by conceiving of reason as a procedural, linguistic accomplishment – Adorno argues, once again, that reason has become one-dimensional owing to its identiﬁcatory domination of nature for the purpose of self-preservation. To emancipate itself from such afﬁrmative identity-thinking, reason must be applied critically to itself.69 If one adds to this “performative contradiction” in Habermas’ social criticism the fact that the normative content of communicative reason cannot be deployed with sufﬁcient critical acuity to separate the lifeworld wheat from its colonized chaff, so to speak, and that Habermas neither provides a model for the practice of his brand of social criticism nor offers a clear statement about the basis for his critique, then it would seem that the critical dimension of his theory is not sufﬁciently developed to serve as a viable basis for assessing the damage caused by the incursions into the lifeworld of the functionalist subsystems and the strategic orientations of their agents.

3 Habermas against himself Recently, Habermas has given communicative reason an overtly political function. In Between Facts and Norms, he recasts his views about reason when he examines the conditions needed to promote and sustain a thriving democratic political culture. Repeating nearly verbatim earlier remarks in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas speaks once more about the moment of unconditionality in communication.70 To cite Baynes’ discussion of Habermas’ democratic theory, this reference to “a context-transcending reason existing in society . . . is the origin of the tension between facticity and validity”71 in both law and politics, as well as one of the major themes in Between Facts and Norms. An “internal” tension between facticity and validity affects law. As factually existing, the laws of democratic states have a coercive character that allows order to be maintained while stabilizing citizens’ expectations. At the same time, law also has normative validity to the extent that it is recognized by citizens as worthy of respect. In what follows here, however, I shall focus on what Habermas calls the “external tension” between facticity and validity – that is, on his view of the tension between “the normative self-understanding of the constitutional state, as explained in discourse-theoretic terms, and the social facticity of the political processes that run their course along more or less constitutional lines” (BFN, 288). In the external tension between facticity and validity, the Janus face of

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communicative reason resurfaces in its most perplexing form because Habermas also claims that he is taking the “risky decision” to “absorb” the tension between existing practices and institutions in liberal democratic states and their more ideal normative validity or legitimacy (BFN, 8). If, in his social criticism, Habermas was formerly prepared to deploy communicative reason’s rational potential critically against colonization, he endorses a much more afﬁrmative use of communicative reason in Between Facts and Norms when he attempts to diminish the tension between the real and the ideal. What Herbert Marcuse once said of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is relevant here: if Hegel formerly thought reality should be transformed in accordance with the demands of reason, as soon as “such an attempt threatened the very society that hailed this as man’s privilege, Hegel preferred to maintain the prevailing order under all circumstances.”72 As a result, reason lost its critical edge. The realization or actualization of reason in the state was no longer a task to be accomplished but a fact to be observed. To cite Marcuse again: “The rule of law was at hand; it was embodied in the state and constituted the adequate historical realization of reason.”73 Deciding to portray existing liberal democratic states as rational, Habermas also revises his notion of communicative reason in a way that is both plausible and suspect. Because he has always maintained that communicative reason is embedded in existing practices, Habermas can argue quite consistently that the real and the ideal are not opposed to each other, thus diminishing the tension between them. This is just what he does in the following passage: The counterfactual presuppositions assumed by participants in argumentation indeed open up a perspective allowing them to go beyond local practices of justiﬁcation and to transcend the provinciality of their spatiotemporal contexts. . . . This perspective thus enables them to do justice to the meaning of context-transcending validity claims. But with context-transcending validity claims, they are not themselves transported into the beyond of an ideal realm of noumenal beings. In contrast to the projection of ideals, in the light of which we can identify deviations, “the idealizing presuppositions we always already have to adopt whenever we want to reach mutual understanding do not involve any kind of correspondence or comparison between idea and reality.” (BFN, 323) As I interpret this passage, the critical leverage that Baynes and Cooke ascribe to communicative reason has been made to disappear by theoretical sleight of hand.74 Since Habermas now maintains that no salient distinction can be made between the ideal dimension of reason and existing practices in the rationalized lifeworld, it is difﬁcult to understand how

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communicative reason can continue to serve a critical function. In fact, much earlier, when he refused to allow the normative content of his ideal presuppositions to preﬁgure a concrete form of life in the guise of an ideal communication community,75 Habermas already started to undermine the normative foundations for his critique. Commenting on this refusal in his interview with Torben Hviid Nielsen, Habermas acknowledges that communicative reason’s ideal presuppositions would be fulﬁlled only in an ideal speech situation. At the same time, he not only warns against hypostatizing this ideal, he also hesitates to call it “a regulative idea in the Kantian sense.”76 This hesitation casts doubt on Baynes’ claims about the normative basis for social criticism because Baynes argues that the ideal presuppositions of communicative reason can perform a critical function only because they serve as regulative principles. By extension, prospects for grounding a critique of the political system have also grown much fainter. To use constitutionally endorsed norms to assess existing practices and institutions does not “imply an opposition between the ideal and the real.” Just as our communicative practices already approximate reason’s ideal presuppositions, and so cannot be said to oppose them, Habermas also argues that the “normative content” of his idealizations, which he wants to use “for reconstructive purposes,” is in fact already “partially inscribed in the social facticity of observable political processes.” According to Habermas, then, “particles and fragments of an ‘existing reason’ [are] already incorporated in political practices, however distorted these may be.” Furthermore, rather than asking sociologists to engage in the critical task of identifying distortions, Habermas now gives a “reconstructive sociology of democracy” the task of identifying those practices in which reason is already embedded. In other words, sociologists are to ratify his decision to portray the real as rational (BFN, 287). Indeed, as Marcuse observed with respect to Hegel’s equally afﬁrmative Philosophy of Right : at this point, critical philosophy effectively cancels itself out.77 If Habermas had earlier emphasized the opposition between the ideal and the real, he now emphasizes the immanence of reason to the detriment of its transcendent character. He collapses the distinction between the ideal and what is factually the case in such a way that the tension between validity and facticity now “enters the world of social facts”; it must be conceived of as “a moment of social facticity” (BFN, 35).78 Of course, this shift in emphasis was always possible given the peculiar status of communicative reason – a status which Habermas describes revealingly in his interview with Nielsen: “To put it paradoxically, the regulative idea of the validity of utterances is constitutive for the social facts produced through communicative action.”79 Neither fully constitutive nor merely regulative, transcendent or immanent, ideal or real, communicative reason was always a strangely dichotomous hybrid. Still, while the Janus face of communicative reason does permit such a shift in emphasis, it is certainly interesting that Habermas insists on making this shift when he develops

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his political theory. There is no opposition between the real and the ideal, not because communicative reason will not permit it, but because Habermas has decided to accentuate the rational character of existing liberal democratic polities. In his discussion of Between Facts and Norms, Bernhard Peters touches on a related problem with Habermas’ distinction between the real and the ideal when he argues that Habermas should have distinguished more clearly between “normative theorizing and empirical reconstructions of [the] normative contents of cultural belief systems or social institutions.”80 Peters implies here that Habermas should have made a far more trenchant distinction between democracy’s normative content and the empirical manifestations of that content in our current institutions and practices. Habermas derives his conception of liberal democracy directly from both “our modern world-view” and “our legal and political traditions and institutions,” rather than looking to “certain traditions of philosophical, political or legal thought . . . for conceptual elements that could be reassembled or reconﬁgured to a coherent and normatively convincing theoretical conception.”81 Although this conﬂation of fact and value does not completely blind Habermas to problems in these institutions and practices (he is especially concerned, as I remarked earlier, about the health of civil society given the loss of solidarity caused by colonization, but he also criticizes the dearth of institutions that would serve as channels of communication between the lifeworld and the subsystems), his criticisms are piecemeal and underdeveloped. Because he now claims that the ideal is already inscribed within really existing political practices, Habermas ends by levelling the distinction between the ideal of selfdetermination and its empirical manifestations in the constitutions, institutions, and procedures of existing liberal democratic states. Even if one were to agree that no communication community could rule itself owing to “unavoidable societal complexity,” this would not obviate the problems with Habermas’ afﬁrmative recasting of communicative reason. Although one may concede that “no complex society could ever correspond to the model of purely communicative social relations” (BFN, 326), this concession alone does not authorize the demotion of the ideal model to the status of a mere thought experiment. If democracy’s normative core is not to be completely eviscerated, the ideal model of selfdetermination must be allowed to retain its critical leverage. Bohman raises a similar objection in his criticisms of Between Facts and Norms when he argues that “granting too much to social complexity and its forms of power simply threatens to eliminate any vestige of radical democracy and the very meaning of democratization itself.”82 Vestiges of radical democracy reside in the normative model of a democratic polity – outlined in the ideal of an unlimited communication community – in which all citizens would contribute to political decision-making, and help to steer the economy towards emphatically rational ends.

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Admitting that his decision to portray existing democracies as rational is risky, Habermas also seems to believe that the only risk he faces consists in having to counter objections from the very “ideological” and “totalizing” Marxist theories whose demise he has already proclaimed as the harbinger of our more fully rationalized Western lifeworlds. However, even barring reference to a body of work whose death he greatly exaggerates, it may be objected that, on Habermas’ own deﬁnition of ideology, Between Facts and Norms assumes ideological functions with respect to existing liberal democracies because Habermas ends by “fusing” or conﬂating the normative and the objective spheres of validity, thereby immunizing liberal democracies from objections that, to use his own phrase, are already within everyone’s cognitive reach. The transcendent dimension of the ideal presuppositions of reason, on which the validity of constitutional democracies ultimately rests, is now deemed by Habermas to be entirely “innerworldly” or immanent – the shadow of the transcendental illusion that once accompanied communicative reason seems to have vanished without a trace. Years earlier, in The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas maintained that both religious and metaphysical worldviews posit a fundamental order in a “true” world behind the world of appearances. By describing “the orders of a stratiﬁed class society as homologous to that world order” (TCA II, 189), these worldviews were able to assume ideological functions. Yet, paradoxically, by “detranscendentalizing” communicative reason in Between Facts and Norms (BFN, 19), Habermas gives his concept an ideological function which resembles that of the religious and metaphysical worldviews he had previously criticized. To invoke Habermas against himself: when it is possible to explain the order of contemporary liberal democracies as homologous to the ideal order postulated by communicative reason, reason itself assumes ideological functions. Having declared his partiality for liberal democracy with its particles and fragments of rationality, Habermas now expresses this preference in a new way: under the cover of a reinterpretation of one of his central concepts. Once reformulated and applied afﬁrmatively to existing conditions, however, communicative reason takes its own place in the pantheon of all-too-living ideologies. It is probably no accident that communicative reason – in the guise of the constitutionally endorsed project of self-determination – is Habermas’ answer to the moribund tradition of natural law. For communicative reason shares with the religious foundation of natural law characteristics that Marx once ascribed to religion. In Between Facts and Norms, reason has been transformed into “the general theory” of our inverted world (where, pace Habermas, communicative action does not yet stand on its feet); it has become this world’s “encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its universal ground for consolation and

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justiﬁcation.”83 Despite their many ﬂaws, which include – as Habermas openly admits – an exaggerated respect for “the systemic logic of an economy steered through markets” (BFN, xlii), Western democratic states are said to harbour in their constitutions a rational and normative core which is no longer opposed to – or in tension with – their current practices and institutions. In Habermas’ work, communicative reason has become the apotheosis of liberal democracies under the economic conditions that characterize late capitalism. Apparently concerned that empiricists or sceptics might make light work of the ideal presuppositions that underlie communicative practices by “displaying the facticity of a world that is not set up in this way” (BFN, 325),84 Habermas recasts his notion of reason in an ideologically suspect fashion. Moreover, Between Facts and Norms assumes ideological functions on Adorno’s deﬁnition of ideology as well. For Adorno: “Real ideologies . . . can be true ‘in themselves,’ as are the ideas of freedom, humanity and justice, but they behave as though they were already realized” (BI, 473). When Habermas claims that communicative practices in the West exhibit rational structures, or that these structures are already “more or less” (a recurring phrase in his discourse theory of democracy) instantiated empirically, he also uses communicative reason to legitimate contemporary liberal democratic states: what ought to be is what exists anyway. Rather than attempting to preserve and deploy in a more speculative fashion whatever critical leverage his notion of reason may originally have offered, Habermas now afﬁrmatively predicates rationality of the real. There may also be a positivist dimension to Habermas’ ideologically freighted theory of democracy. Indeed, owing to its peculiar conﬂation of facts and values, it is not entirely clear whether Habermas is asserting that Western states are legitimate by virtue of the fact of their mere existence as constitutional democracies that endorse self-determination, or whether he is offering a liberal ideological legitimation of political systems in the West with his normative principle of self-determination. This issue is even more difﬁcult to decide given other remarks that Habermas makes in Between Facts and Norms. On the one hand, I have emphasized here that he tries to absorb the tension between facticity and validity that gave communicative reason its Janus face; this is what allows him to preserve the link between his theory and “the classical conception of an internal connection, however mediated, between society and reason” (BFN, 8). On the other hand, Habermas seems occasionally to want to maintain the opposition or tension between facts and norms. For example, in the postscript to Between Facts and Norms, Habermas objects to Onora O’Neill’s interpretation of his work to the effect that “the counterfactual idea that a norm deserves universal assent” is “absorbed and neutralized by the facticity that attends the legal institutionalization of public discourse” (BFN, 458). Habermas appears to have second thoughts here about conﬂating the ideal and the real. More important, for all its ideological prevarications,

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his conception of a thriving democratic political order, which derives its legitimacy in part from the exercise of free, egalitarian, autonomous (and undistorted) communication in the lifeworld, does manage to retain its critical edge. Following Adorno, who rejects the classical pejorative view of ideology, this is true of many liberal ideas; they have a speculative dimension which belies the very conditions they are used to afﬁrm. To paraphrase Marx’s more charitable views about religion, Habermas’ stubborn appeal to reason does have a critical purchase on reiﬁed social conditions because it expresses real distress about our fundamentally irrational world as well as a powerfully articulated protest against such distress.85 Far from being merely illusory, then, a fantastic creation of false consciousness, communicative reason can serve as the historically immanent intimation of modernity’s better potential. It reminds us that a fully rational democratic order is not a fact to be observed but a normative task to be achieved. More precisely, the critical power of the ideal presuppositions of communicative reason rests on their projection of just that radical vision of self-determination which Habermas rejects. When he demotes the ideal communication community to the status of a mere thought experiment, Habermas himself admits that his presuppositions foreshadow a polity that takes the normative core of liberal democracies far more seriously than he would like. This is one of the reasons why he no longer wants to grant them a critical purchase on political practices and institutions in the West. However, if self-determination is the normative core of Western democracies, then existing Western states should be judged against this liberal ideal – an ideal which Habermas once described positively as a “transcendental apparition” that represents communication “as standing on its own feet, setting limits to the inner dynamics of autonomous subsystems, bursting encapsulated cultures, and thus as escaping the combined threat of reiﬁcation and desolation” (TCA II, 329). To take up the argument that I advanced at the end of Chapter 3, democracy will be realized only when the rationally generated interests, concerns, and value-orientations of citizens in the West direct the practices and institutions of the amoral and one-dimensionally rational subsystems. For the time being, as Adorno argued, democracy and reason are one and the same: both take the form of critique. Democratic and rational impulses manifest themselves in the critique of those conditions that both impede enlightenment by fostering political immaturity (as opposed to rational autonomy), and prevent society from emancipating itself from its irrational tutelage to the exchange principle.86 To paraphrase Freud, where unreason now is, there reason shall one day be.

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Emancipation

Following the Marxist tradition, Adorno and Habermas claim that their theories have a practical intent: their critiques of late capitalism are meant to contribute to the implementation of positive change. Speciﬁcally, the practical intent of critical theory is to provide the theoretical basis for surmounting reiﬁcation by examining its nature and its damaging effects on human life while locating the rational potential in reiﬁed reality that points beyond it. However, both theorists deny that the course of human history led necessarily to reiﬁcation, and neither believes that reiﬁcation will inevitably be overcome. With more than a dash of irony, Adorno observed that the drive for self-preservation had led to the coercive domination of exchange relations around the globe and the attendant threat of total annihilation by military and environmental means. Adorno also questions whether social conditions will ever improve in such a way that they ﬁnally nourish and enhance all human life. Prospects for resistance to these conditions are exceedingly slim owing in part to the psychological damage suffered by individuals under late capitalism. Accompanying the spread of reiﬁcation in the West during the twentieth century is the loss of class-consciousness under the (now crumbling) welfare state compromise, the emergence of authoritarianism in the form of fascist tendencies that remain visible in the West even today, and the decline of the family which once fostered resistance to the status quo. These factors now stultify the forces of opposition that could contribute to changing them. Like Adorno, Habermas denies that reiﬁcation was the necessary outcome of historical development. Although history followed a course such that the economic and political subsystems were uncoupled from the lifeworld, and established themselves as autopoietic systems with their own distinct form of integration which now threatens social integration, the uncoupling of system and lifeworld could equally have enabled the lifeworld to exert greater inﬂuence on the economy and the state. Even now, “the institutions that anchor steering mechanisms such as power and money in the lifeworld could serve as a channel either for the inﬂuence of the lifeworld on formally organized domains of action or, conversely, for the inﬂuence of the system on communicatively structured contexts of

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action.”1 But, of course, if the one-sided relationship between system and lifeworld that now obtains may yet be altered, there is certainly no guarantee that the reifying impact of the subsystems on the lifeworld will be reversed. Advanced capitalist societies exhibit important countertendencies to reiﬁcation owing to the rationalization of the lifeworld, but Habermas describes protest potentials as ambivalent: some social movements are emancipatory and resistive, while others display regressive traits (TCA II, 393). Marx is said to have championed a monolithic collective subject in the form of the proletariat, a universal class which represents the interests of humanity as a whole. It was this class on which he pinned his hopes for emancipation. Nevertheless, owing to the paciﬁcation of class conﬂict under the welfare state compromise – a phenomenon Marx could not have foreseen but which his working-class movement actually helped to bring about – both Adorno and Habermas maintain that class relations persist but are effectively obscured from consciousness. According to Adorno, while exploitation has intensiﬁed with the employment of psychological techniques of integration (in the media, for example), the subjective awareness of belonging to a class has evaporated because paciﬁcation facilitates the emergence of a mass society where economic and political powers oppress both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie “with the same police threat,” and impose on them “the same function and the same need,” making it “virtually impossible for workers to see through the class relation.”2 Adorno refused to pin his hopes for emancipation on a single class when he argued that “the very possibility of alliance and mass revolution” had become problematic because, with improvements in their standard of living and social welfare beneﬁts, workers now have “more to lose than their chains.”3 Of course, globalization may yet lead to the return of the repressed because it threatens to bring class conﬂict to the surface of Western societies once more. However, Habermas objects to Marx’s claim that the proletariat is the agent of emancipation, not only because the welfare state paciﬁes class conﬂict and masks class relations, but because the idea of a singular collective subject raises the spectre of totalitarianism which would undermine the plurality of lifeworld contexts. According to Habermas, Marx wrongly adopted the classical conception of society “as a developing self-referential totality” which would realize its essence in “the future association of producers who, freed of the commodity fetish, will have brought the conditions of the material life process under their common control.”4 Here again, Habermas rejects the idea of a global or collective subject, arguing that lifeworld members do not constitute a homogeneous mass that could consciously control the state and the economy. His discourse theory of democracy is therefore “at cross purposes” with Marx’s conception of society; it “frees itself of overly concrete notions of ‘the people’ as an entity” by unleashing “the pluralism of beliefs and interests” in the

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amorphous and anarchic public sphere (BFN, 185–6 passim). In addition, Habermas contends that societal complexity, which relies on the uncoupling of the subsystems from the lifeworld, must be preserved because complex societies exhibit a “higher and evolutionarily advantageous” level of system integration (TCA II, 339). Like Marx, however, both Adorno and Habermas engage in an immanent critique of reiﬁed reality that attempts to bring to the fore its rational and emancipatory potentials. While questions were raised in the last chapter about whether Habermas has a viable basis for his critique of colonization, at times he does seem to advance the tradition of critical theory by focusing on the as-yet-unrealized potentials within communicative reason. However, because he believes that reason is “always already” there, and that it need only develop incrementally in order to ﬂourish, Habermas orients his critique towards reform. Indeed, his liberal reformism has been examined critically by commentators such as Seyla Benhabib in Critique, Norm, and Utopia, and Joel Whitebook in Perversion and Utopia. By contrast, Adorno not only retains Marx’s notion of critique with his exploration of the emphatic possibilities immanent in modernity, his work also has a far more speculative, utopian cast. Fundamental changes are needed to overcome reiﬁed reality and redeem its rational potential. These changes demand an even more radically pluralistic society than Habermas is willing to endorse; they would also reshape the social solidarity which both theorists believe is an essential condition for emancipation. In this ﬁnal chapter, I want to contrast Adorno’s and Habermas’ ideas about emancipation by examining what each thinks is necessary to realize the possibilities that point beyond reiﬁed social life. Starting with a review of their claims about the damaging effects of reiﬁcation on social solidarity, I shall proceed to examine their ideas about what a more emancipated society might look like.5

1 Obstacles to emancipation According to Adorno, both the individual and social collectivities have degenerated under late capitalism; this helps to explain why there have been relatively few serious challenges to existing conditions. As psychologists conﬁrmed many years after he ﬁrst made the observation, narcissism is the “psychological afﬂiction” that characterizes the era of mass societies, an era which “for socio-economic reasons witnesses the decline of the individual and his subsequent weakness.”6 Again, Adorno attributed this pathology in part to the decline of the family’s role as the primary agent of socialization. Although the family had also been “the most effective agency of the bourgeoisie,” it nonetheless promoted resistive behaviours during the earlier stage of liberalism as children negotiated the Oedipus complex.7 But when competition led to the concentration of capital, the relatively independent bourgeois entrepreneur was absorbed into a new mass class comprising both workers and the bourgeoisie. Deprived of his

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former autonomy in the capitalist marketplace, reduced to wage-labour or salaried employment under volatile economic conditions, and often vying impotently for authority with experts and specialists employed by the state, the father has ceased to serve as the standard against which children measure their strength through rebellion, thereby gaining a degree of autonomy. Hence, with the concentration and centralization of capital, and the rise of the welfare state, parents forfeited the important role they once played in socialization and their children no longer rebel against the reality principle which they represent. With his thesis about the fatherless society, Adorno was not, as some commentators have charged, advocating a return to the earlier stage of liberalism or indulging in nostalgia for a golden age. He certainly recognized that a return to the heyday of liberalism was impossible, while observing that the only autonomy individuals had ever really enjoyed was itself a function of economic conditions, which effectively negated autonomy “at the source.”8 This is one reason why bourgeois autonomy cannot be held up as the model for autonomy tout court. But Adorno also criticizes the way in which autonomy had developed on the psychological level with the formation of a superego during the resolution of the Oedipus Complex. Against this, he advances the contentious claim that if “a state of universally rational actuality [ein Zustand allseitiger rationaler Aktualität] were conceivable, no super-ego would come into being” (ND, 273). If society were fully rational, the superego would be sublated “as something truly heteronomous and alien to the ego” (ND, 272), possibly ﬁnding a substitute in a non-repressive ego ideal.9 For these reasons, then, Adorno did not advocate a return to the earlier period of liberalism in which a repressive superego developed through identiﬁcation with an economically independent father. Nevertheless, Adorno remained concerned about the increase in narcissistic disorders that followed in the wake of the so-called “fatherless society.” With their weak egos, narcissists make easy targets for the exploitative psychotechnology of advertising agencies and authoritarian groups because ego weakness allows libidinous drives channelled through the superego and the id to play a far more prominent role in individual psychology than they had previously. If the superego has always been the repository for “blindly, unconsciously internalized social coercion” (ND, 272), narcissists exhibit strong superegos with introjects formed in the image of an “all-powerful and threatening primal father.”10 These introjects act as an effective force for adaptation and assimilation when reanimated by demagogic political leaders and the culture industry. Rational thought is undermined because there is a “regression to illogical judgment”11 as “stereotypes replace individual categories,” and individuals identify with “stereotyped value scales.”12 Once their instincts are harnessed to the political and economic interests of the ruling class, narcissists will adapt to existing conditions rather than try to change them.

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According to Adorno, the “process of evolving individual independence is a function of a society based on exchange and terminates in the individual’s abolition by integration” (ND, 262; translation modiﬁed). In other words, the very socio-economic forces that had earlier fostered relatively autonomous egos now revoke this autonomy by promoting submissive and weak egos. These forces are also responsible for another damaging phenomenon: reiﬁcation. As cogs in the wheel of the economic machinery of capitalism, individuals have become as fungible as any of the commodities they produce and consume. Their understanding of themselves and others is thoroughly mediated by exchange relations; they measure their own self-worth and the worth of others in terms of their purchasing power and ownership of material goods. Reduced to simple “agents and bearers of exchange value,”13 or to “mere executive organs of the universal” in late capitalist societies, individuals have lost the little individuality they once enjoyed and effectively cease to exist qua individual (ND, 343).14 If, like autonomy, individuality was a product of the earlier stage of liberalism, both individuality and autonomy have degenerated, compromising prospects for effective opposition to damaged life. Equally important for explaining impediments to effective resistance today are the effects of reiﬁcation and narcissism on the interpersonal relationships that would enable individuals to form healthy social bonds, thereby facilitating collective forms of action. The reifying effects of the exchange principle on social relations are most evident in the prevailing tendency to derive a sense of group membership from the display of symbols that signal the socio-economic status of their bearers. Class struggle is displaced by the struggle for social prestige which is tied directly to exchange, but the narcissistic tendencies prevalent today are just as damaging in their effects on interpersonal relations. Lacking a robust sense of self, narcissists often band together in ersatz collectivities where they identify with leaders on to whom they project traits of their omnipotent and unbridled superego introjects. Following Freud’s account in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,”15 Adorno observes that love of self is transferred to the leader who reanimates these introjects. He also underscores the precarious nature of this bond which collapses or dissolves when the leader abandons the group. Accordingly, Adorno offers two related accounts of the damage inﬂicted on interpersonal relations under late capitalism. Narcissism helps to explain why people would form collectivities in which they subordinate their wills to equally narcissistic leaders; reiﬁcation has meant that interpersonal relations frequently develop on the ﬂimsy basis of social markers and status symbols. As the exchange principle becomes ever more pervasive, reiﬁcation degrades relations between people into relations between things. Compensating for the justiﬁable feelings of helplessness and powerlessness experienced today, the exchange of these markers and symbols also serves a narcissistic function by allowing individuals to turn

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themselves “either in fact or imagination into members of something higher and more encompassing to which they attribute qualities which they themselves lack and from which they proﬁt by vicarious participation.”16 Like the followers of demagogic leaders, who “seek a compensatory identiﬁcation with the power and the glory of the collective,”17 those who use social markers to distinguish themselves from others derive a narcissistic sense of satisfaction from belonging to an exclusive group which they view as superior to other groups. Paradoxically, narcissism and reiﬁcation also alienate individuals from one other. Forming pseudo-collectivities in which they are all “the same” – as mere instances of both exchange value and their channelled instincts – individuals are nonetheless atomized and isolated from each other at the same time.18 Alienation occurs precisely because relations between people are secured by nothing more solid than abstract exchange relations and frail narcissistic afﬁliations. Incapable of forming and sustaining strong social bonds with others, individuals have become dissociated monads without windows who self-destructively but stubbornly “balk at their real dependence as a species as well as at the collective aspect of all forms and contents of their consciousness” (ND, 312). This widespread sense of social isolation fostered in the very heart of pseudo-collectivities is yet another reason why Adorno believes resistance has become so rare and ineffective today. In Adorno’s view, then: “Collectivism and individualism complement each other in the wrong direction” (ND, 284). Not only are individuals subsumed under exchange relations to such an extent that they are now mere pawns of their easily exploited instinctual drives, but they form pathological social bonds that only reinforce their sense of social isolation. Of course, fear of ﬁnancial insecurity also plays a part in thwarting resistive behaviours. Even in the rare cases where they have not internalized the values of our exchange-based society, individuals will subordinate themselves to its demands because they fear the loss of their livelihoods and social status.19 As a counterpart to this, with its cradle-to-grave provisions, the welfare state has offered real compensations for economic and political powerlessness that keep workers relatively content with their lot.20 Adorno therefore grants an element of truth to Hegel’s hypostasized world spirit when he asserts that a spiritless spirit has become independent of human life to the point where it now prevails “over men’s heads and through their heads, and [is] thus antagonistic from the outset.” Hegel gives us a “distorted sense of the real predominance of the whole” over individuals whom it degrades to its “mere executors, mere partners in social wealth and social struggle” (ND, 304). Like Adorno, Habermas observes throughout his work that reiﬁcation threatens social solidarity. Indeed, for both theorists, reiﬁcation undermines the very solidarity that is required to overcome it. Yet, even before colonization occurs, lifeworld members already exhibit privatistic

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orientations associated with their roles as consumers of commodities and clients of the welfare state. Equating self-actualization with the purchase of consumer goods and self-determination with access to social welfare beneﬁts, individuals are now largely depoliticized. Their private orientations towards personal success and satisfaction effectively override more socially solidary concerns. In addition, the loss of meaning that accompanies the loss of freedom under conditions of colonization has its own negative effects on social solidarity because it devalues and impoverishes the lifeworld’s traditional, collectively shared substance. As expert cultures develop with the differentiation of value spheres, the vital traditions that once gave substantive meaning to human life die out because these one-dimensional cultures cut the lifeworld off “from the inﬂux” of a more “intact cultural tradition” (TCA II, 327). Hence, “with the one-sided canalization and destruction of possibilities for expression and communication in private and public spheres, chances are fading that we can bring together again, in a posttraditional everyday practice, those moments that, in traditional forms of life, once composed a unity” (TCA II, 329–30). The colonization of the lifeworld by the economic and political subsystems only reinforces prevailing privatistic orientations and further erodes cultural traditions. Agreeing with social psychologist George Herbert Mead, Habermas asserts that personality formation relies in part on the discursively engendered integration of individuals into social groups. Here, of course, he emphasizes that individuation is a function of sociation; personality formation is a social achievement because personality is shaped by social memberships. However, when the lifeworld is colonized from outside by functionalist system imperatives, the important role that the family plays in integrating children into larger social groups is undermined, adversely affecting the formation of the child’s personality. With colonization, individuals fail increasingly to recognize and respect the legitimately regulated social memberships on which their own development depends. Rather than coordinating their actions in accordance with the interests and values of environing social groups, they tend to orient their actions towards their own private interests. As group identities are destabilized, individuals become alienated from one another. Habermas seems to believe that this social alienation helps to explain both symptoms of withdrawal and narcissism (TCA II, 388–9). While social integration is a factor in the reproduction of personality, the reproduction of the cultural component of the lifeworld also depends in part on successful social integration. The inculcation of moral duties and obligations helps to integrate lifeworld members into their cultures. Colonization has a negative effect on the contributions that social integration makes to culture because it undermines social obligations fostered in the family. When the lifeworld is colonized, children are less likely to share the values, norms, and goals of environing social groups; their sense

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of obligation to the prevailing cultural ethos begins to wane as private orientations trump socially solidary ones. When economic and political imperatives substitute for the duties and obligations needed to sustain cultural traditions and collective forms of life, pathologies arise. In this case, collective identities become unsettled. Furthermore, by colonizing the discursive reproduction of the “central stock of cultural values institutionalized in legitimate orders” (TCA II, 141), system imperatives only exacerbate the erosion of cultural traditions that accompanies the loss of meaning today. In short, reiﬁcation undermines both social memberships and social obligations. As strategic orientations to money and power substitute for the social integration of culture and personality, the solidarity of lifeworld members diminishes. Yet, while I argued in Chapter 2 that reiﬁcation actually has far more damaging effects than Habermas is prepared to concede, he clearly believes that solidarity has not been completely eroded in the colonized lifeworld. Inexplicably and inconsistently, he maintains that the pivotal contribution of social integration to the reproduction of the lifeworld’s society component – which serves as the institutional anchor for both the economy and the state – remains largely untouched by colonization. The anomic conditions that would ensue if society’s basic institutions were threatened by colonizing system imperatives “are avoided, and legitimations and motivations important for maintaining institutional orders are secured, at the expense of, and through the ruthless exploitation of, other resources,” namely culture and personality (TCA II, 386). As long as the subsystems do not damage the central contributions of social integration to social institutions, solidarity in the West is not seriously jeopardized. Suppressing “forms of social integration even in those areas where a consensus-dependent coordination of action cannot be replaced” (TCA II, 196), reifying system imperatives nonetheless always clash with independent communication structures in the rationalized lifeworld (TCA II, 391). Interestingly, Habermas never once mentions the colonization thesis in Between Facts and Norms. However, in the preface to his discourse theory of democracy, he does restate, with far less ambivalence, the claims he made in The Theory of Communicative Action about diminished solidarity in the lifeworld. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, the victorious West, which could have emerged “as the sole heir of the moral-practical selfunderstanding of modernity,” has lacked “the energy to drive ahead with the task of imposing social and ecological restraints on capitalism at the breathtaking level of global society.” Although it displays a zealous respect for “the systemic logic of an economy steered through markets,” and attempts to guard “against overloading the power medium of state bureaucracies,” the listless West does not yet “display a similar sensibility for the resource that is actually endangered – a social solidarity preserved in legal structures and in need of continual regeneration.” Only a more radically

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democratic and socially solidary West could deal successfully with the challenges that confront it today (BFN, xlii). In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas discusses impediments to social solidarity when he comments on the external tension that obtains between existing liberal democratic states and their normative understanding of themselves. On their own constitutionally enshrined selfunderstanding, Western states are legitimate to the extent that they institutionalize practices of self-determination. To this end, they must ﬁrst establish and maintain channels of communication that allow power to ﬂow from the public sphere to their own administrative centres. According to Habermas, then, the success of deliberative politics depends in part “on the institutionalization of the corresponding procedures and conditions of communication” (BFN, 298). Second, self-determination requires “widely diversiﬁed and more or less autonomous public spheres” (BFN, 299) because “the claim to legitimacy on the part of a legal order built on rights can be redeemed only through the socially integrative force of the ‘concurring and united will of all’ free and equal citizens” (BFN, 32). Consequently, the legitimacy of Western states requires both viable democratic institutions and an intact and thriving public sphere. However, the ﬁrst condition for legitimacy – the institutionalization of viable channels of communication between lifeworld and system – has not been met. Western states have not yet fully developed institutions of freedom that would enable them to be more sensitive and responsive to the needs, interests, and value orientations of their citizens. As a result, “trends towards the independence of illegitimate power are unmistakable today” (BFN, 430). Nonetheless, Habermas argues that these trends do not irrevocably threaten the legitimacy of existing states because they “are not built into the structures of functionally differentiated societies in such a way that they would intrinsically compromise the project of selfempowerment” in the West (BFN, 386). If the failure of liberal democracies to heed citizens’ opinions, interests, and needs reveals that their constitutional principles are “insufﬁciently institutionalized ” (BFN, 436), citizens can take back the power illicitly wrested from them by using their inﬂuence to ensure that the state creates institutions that foster constitutionally endorsed practices of self-determination. Trends towards illegitimate power may therefore be reversed by citizens themselves in a robust public sphere. To act in this self-empowering way, citizens must exhibit the capacity “to ferret out, identify, and effectively thematize latent problems of social integration (which require political solutions).” They must then introduce these problems “via parliamentary (or judicial) sluices into the political system in a way that disrupts the latter’s routines.” However, Habermas admits readily that citizens’ capacity to “perceive, interpret, and present society-wide problems in a way that is both attention-catching and innovative” is problematic today (BFN, 358). It is increasingly the case that

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“lifeworld resources for spontaneous public communication no longer sufﬁce to guarantee an uncoerced articulation of social interests” (BFN, 386). Only when “networks of noninstitutionalized public communication make possible more or less spontaneous processes of opinion formation” will the public sphere adequately confront the tendencies towards illegitimate power that are visible today (BFN, 358). Under ideal conditions, in which the second requirement for legitimacy is satisﬁed, communication would ﬂow uninterruptedly from the discursively mobilized and politically engaged public sphere through parliaments and the courts; but conditions today are obviously not what they should be. Having remarked earlier on alienation and the unsettling of collective identities in the lifeworld, Habermas focuses in Between Facts and Norms on waning solidarity in the public sphere. Moreover, if he had observed previously that some social movements are responding to the damaging effects of colonization on the lifeworld, Habermas now questions whether the public sphere is sufﬁciently robust to reverse the illegitimate, unconstitutional circulation of power that prevails currently in the West. Indeed, he admits that citizens rarely exhibit the capacities needed to contest the legitimacy of a state. Under exceptional circumstances, citizens are mobilized by “a consciousness of crisis, a heightened public attention, an intensiﬁed search for solutions, in short, by problematization.” Only when “the normative aspects of the problems most at issue” become controversial, and citizens somehow acquire capacities they normally lack, may political protest against the growing illegitimacy of the state become effective (BFN, 357). Without elaborating on the impediments to a more socially solidary public sphere in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas appears to believe that the persistence of civil privatism is to blame. To return to Legitimation Crisis, where he ﬁrst discussed this syndrome, Habermas had predicted that privatistic orientations would eventually erode owing to the emergence of new normative structures. Among the structures “unsuited to reproduce civil and familial-vocational privatism” are scientism, with its demands for “discursive justiﬁcation,”21 post-auratic art – which “strengthens the divergence between the values offered by the socio-cultural system and those demanded by the political and economic systems” – and universalistic morality with its own distinct redemption of validity claims.22 Yet, in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas not only asserts that privatistic syndromes persist; he also claims that “civil privatism and the selective use of citizenship from the standpoint of client interests become all the more probable the more the economy and the state – which have been institutionalized through the same [negative] rights – develop systemic logics of their own and push citizens into the peripheral role of mere organization members” (BFN, 78). By marginalizing citizens, the subsystems – whose uncoupling from the lifeworld was earlier presented in an entirely positive fashion – “explode the model of a legal community that determines itself

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through the common practice of associated citizens” (BFN, 79). Thus civil privatism seems to be at least partially to blame for waning solidarity among lifeworld members. Like Adorno, then, Habermas focuses on both the decline of social solidarity in the West and its negative effects on prospects for change. But where he originally attributed the dearth of solidarity directly to reiﬁcation, he now appears to ascribe it to one of the conditions for reiﬁcation: civil privatism. Furthermore, Habermas later emphasizes the illegitimate independence of the subsystems from the lifeworld rather than their colonizing incursions into it. Legitimation crises occur when “the links between decentered, increasingly autonomous social sectors loosen in the course of progressive functional differentiation,” thereby creating a “growing need for integration that renders crises permanent” (BFN, 358). Increasingly detached from their legitimating basis in lifeworld contexts, Western states now tend to ally themselves with economic interests to the detriment of the values, interests, and concerns of their citizens. Political power becomes “independent of communicatively generated power,” thereby nullifying the “constitutionally regulated circulation of power” (BFN, 386). In his gloss on this passage, William Outhwaite explains that “the political system can fail to preserve social integration if its decisions, however effective, emerge from the independent operation of administrative systems and commercial corporations rather than from a functioning public sphere.”23 Although Habermas attempts to downplay the signiﬁcance of these legitimation crises in his discourse theory of democracy when he argues that they do not inherently undermine the project of self-determination in the West, his apologetic stance is belied in more recent work. In fact, in work published after Between Facts and Norms, it appears as though the now virtually complete subordination of political power to the capitalist economy leaves citizens as vulnerable and impotent in the face of the capitalist economy as Adorno once claimed. Yet, if Habermas now acknowledges fully the primacy of the economic system, he has not explicitly altered his view that the real is more or less rational. In the following section of this chapter, I shall therefore focus on Habermas’ conciliatory and optimistic project for reform in The Theory of Communicative Action and Between Facts and Norms. This project will be contrasted with Adorno’s recommendations for comprehensive social, political, and economic change.

2 Adorno, and the idea of a rational society Now endemic in society to the point where it adversely affects even intimate behaviours and private thoughts, reiﬁcation seriously damages human life. Given his claims about the breadth and depth of the damage caused by reiﬁcation, it should come as no surprise that Adorno championed radical change through collective action. In Negative Dialectics, he argued

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that it is not “up to the individual sufferer to abolish suffering.” This task must be assigned “solely to the species, to which the individual belongs even where he subjectively renounces it and is objectively thrust into the absolute loneliness of a helpless object” (ND, 203). Consequently, Adorno advocates global resistance by humanity as a whole against the suffering inﬂicted on it by the entirely self-interested proﬁt-making and powerseeking ventures of the ruling class. Emphasizing this point in his lecture on progress, Adorno sounded this strident note: “the possibility of progress, of averting the most extreme, total disaster, has migrated to the global subject alone”; it is around this subject that everything involving progress must crystallize.24 Consequently, what is needed is nothing short of universal emancipation from a now universal domination. But of course, the nearly total integration of individuals under late capitalism, and the pacifying compensations offered by the welfare state, block the class-consciousness that might once have given expression to more genuinely universal interests, or to interests that would orient the species’ unquenchable drive for self-preservation towards more comprehensive and salutary ends. Adorno complains that the “rationality of selfpreservation is ultimately doomed to remain irrational because the development of a rational collective subject, of a uniﬁed humanity, failed to materialize – a situation with which, in turn, each individual has to contend.”25 Adorno was also extremely critical of the attempts of existing social movements to effect change. He views these movements and groups as part of the problem rather than as the solution because he believes that they tend to suppress individuals by forcing them to subordinate themselves to the collective, thereby merely reproducing their subsumption under exchange relations to the beneﬁt of the false universality of the entirely self-interested socio-economic order. This is why Adorno objected in a 1962 radio lecture that praxis “would inevitably eternalize precisely the present state of the world, the very critique of which is the concern of philosophy.” To be sure, he adds immediately that praxis only risks reproducing damaged reality “at this historical moment.”26 But his lifelong concern about the suppression of individuality in the name of a collective order – in the former Soviet Union, for example, which Adorno accused of betraying socialism by demanding the individual’s complete subordination to society (ND, 284) – still carries weight. Alluding to The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,”27 Adorno observed that group discussions in activist circles are frequently corrupted by strategic manoeuvres. While all participants ought to be heard, and to contribute to decision-making processes on an equal footing, discussions today are often manipulative, directed only to scoring points for particular positions. Opposing views are “hardly perceived, and then only so that formulaic clichés can be served up in retort.”28 In short, what prevail in activist groups are particular interests disguised as universal ones; it is the force of

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a group member (or members), rather than the force of the better argument, that usually carries the day. Here again, collective practice merely reﬂects and reinforces existing conditions. Despite this negative assessment of collective action, Adorno did comment favourably on 1960s protest movements when he asserted that, even in the face of the dissolution of the individual, “traces of a counter movement have also become visible, primarily among the most diverse sections of the youth, namely resistance to blind conformism, freedom to opt for rationally chosen goals, disgust with the condition of the world as the hoax and illusion it is, and an awareness of the possibility of change.” However, he adds that only time “will tell how signiﬁcant a movement this is, or whether society’s collective drive to self-destruct will triumph nevertheless.”29 Of course, Adorno was equally concerned about our regressive, narcissistic propensity to submerge ourselves in groups led by authoritarian leaders who oppose our real interests but allow us to feel part of an elite, exclusive group. Given these problems with collective action under late capitalism, Adorno appears to ﬂout Marx in his search for an “Archimedian [sic] point”30 that would serve as the basis for establishing a nonrepressive praxis and allow individuals to ﬂourish within groups rather than being suppressed by them. Without presuming to have discovered this standpoint, he insisted that, if it exists at all, only theory can ﬁnd it. Should activists reject theory, “traits, such as a unilateral solidarity degenerating into terror, will become manifest” (TP, 274). By “theory,” Adorno obviously means critical theory. To abandon critical theory would be tantamount to succumbing to the “defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried” (ND, 3). Indeed, critical thought survives only because the “undiminished persistence of suffering, fear, and threat necessitates that the thought that cannot be realized should not be discarded.”31 Theory ﬁnds itself at an impasse today: praxis “is put off and cannot wait”; that is, while imperative, praxis must also be deferred because individuals can do nothing “that will not threaten to turn out for the worst even if meant for the best.” This very impasse should encourage criticism of the conditions that have led to it (ND, 245). More precisely, what is needed is self-criticism, or criticism that targets the obstacles to radical change within society and its hapless subjects through the theorist’s own critical self-examination. This point was already made aphoristically in Minima Moralia where Adorno wrote: “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass” (MM, 50). Theorists must attempt to “think the totality in its untruth,”32 proving themselves a match “for the power of regression” by recognizing this power in themselves, and reaching a thorough understanding of it.33 What must precede radical change is therefore the enlightened, self-critical spirit of reason (ND, 29). Rejecting Marx’s sarcastic comments about critical critique in The Holy Family, along with the aspersions he cast on those who interpret the world rather than trying to change it, Adorno counters that Marx himself

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endorsed “the ruthless critique of everything existing,” giving the subtitle “Critique of Political Economy” to his major work, Capital.34 Given Marx’s own voluminous critical output, Adorno argues further that Marx “by no means surrendered himself to praxis” (TP, 278). But if Marx did not abandon himself to praxis, Adorno also contends that critical thinking is itself “a comportment, a form of praxis.” More controversially still, he claims that critical thought “is more akin to transformative praxis than a comportment that is compliant for the sake of praxis” because “thinking is actually the force of resistance, from which it has been alienated only with great effort.”35 Responding to charges that he had resigned himself to existing conditions by refusing to draw practical consequences from his theory, Adorno parries that “the leap into praxis does not cure thought of resignation as long as it is paid for with the secret knowledge that that really isn’t the right way to go.”36 Of course, the resistive and practical character of thinking is emphasized in Negative Dialectics where Adorno writes that thought is “an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it.” Here he also observes that “this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material.” Because thought is already a resistive act, a practical behaviour, theory and praxis cannot be opposed to each other as something passive and abstract, on the one hand, to something active and concrete, on the other. Working on its material differently from the manual labourer who tills the soil or toils in factories, thought by no means leaves its material in its original state because it reshapes or refashions it by giving it universal, conceptual form. Furthermore, one of the more salient characteristics of all thought – even that which exhibits the pathic rationality shaped by exchange relations – is that it unconsciously “heeds a potential that waits in the object.” The task of a critical and dialectical philosophy is to make this unconscious tendency conscious (ND, 19). Refusing to endorse existing forms of collective action, which reward the activist’s leap into practice with “the grace of being chosen, of belonging,” Adorno insisted that critical thinking alone “may help bring about change.”37 Against the claim that “by abandoning one’s own reason and judgment one is blessed with a higher, that is, collective reason,” he countered that “to know the truth, one needs that irreducibly individual reason that . . . is supposedly obsolete, and whose message has long since been refuted and laid to rest by the comrades’ superior wisdom” (TP, 276). A thousand eyes do not necessarily see better than two. In fact, Adorno described Brecht’s phrase as “the exact expression for that fetishising of the collectivity and organisation which knowledge of society has the supreme duty to break through.”38 Under the pressure of total socialization, individuals internalize the values of society to the point where they now inﬂict upon themselves and others the damage done to them. Adorno therefore pins his hope on individual thinkers, echoing his

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lifelong concern with “the utopian particular that has been buried beneath the universal – with that nonidentity which would not come into being until realized reason has left the particular reason of the universal behind” (ND, 318). Similar claims about the power of individual thought may be found in a 1953 lecture: “As opposed to the collective powers that usurp the world spirit in the contemporary world, the universal and rational can hibernate better in the isolated individual than in the stronger battalions that have obediently abandoned the universality of reason.”39 Describing the ethical imperatives that motivate his critical theory of society in Negative Dialectics, Adorno also offers a proﬁle of these isolated individuals: “If a stroke of undeserved luck has kept the mental composition of some individuals not quite adjusted to the prevailing norms – a stroke of luck they have often enough to pay for in their relations with their environment – it is up to these individuals to make the moral and, as it were, representative effort to say what most of those for whom they say it cannot see or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves to see” (ND, 41). Although they are certainly as damaged socially and psychologically as everyone else, this maladjusted “unhappy few” inﬂict a wound on their narcissistic selfunderstanding (ND, 312) when they recognize that “the entire sphere of individuation,” which has made them what they are, is a mere “epiphenomenon” (ND, 265). Conversely, critical thinkers also recognize “in the universal a truth which the universal as blindly prevailing power conceals from itself and from others” (ND, 344). While theory cannot prescribe the praxis that would put an end to alienation (TP, 278), Adorno believes that “a reasoned analysis of the situation is the precondition for political praxis” because such an analysis will also emphasize “aspects that might be able to lead beyond the given constraints of the situation” (TP, 264). Again, what permits a critical assessment of existing states of affairs to point beyond them is a characteristic of thought that facilitates its resistance to mere things in being. Thought is not simply the “intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway” because it may also acquire a “secure hold on possibility.”40 Relentlessly criticizing the conditions that imperil human life today by transforming it into an increasingly lifeless thing, Adorno imbues his negative dialectics with an emphatic, speculative dimension, or “with the potential of what could be different.”41 This potential lies in the damaging and damaged conditions themselves. Negative dialectics breaks through its hardened objects by means of possibilities that are already “visible in each one” (ND, 52). The very conditions that currently prevent modernity from realizing its better potential also point dialectically to their own reversal because that potential resides within them. If a continuous line leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb, it is nonetheless the case that, “in the age of the bomb a condition can be envisaged for the ﬁrst time in which violence

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might vanish altogether” (P, 153). Adorno reiterates this point in Negative Dialectics when he distinguishes between the aim of Hegel’s dialectics and his own: “whether consciousness, theoretically and in the resulting practice, maintains and reinforces identity as the ultimate, the absolute, or experiences identity as a universally coercive mechanism, which it ultimately needs in order to free itself from universal coercion, just as freedom becomes real only through coercive civilization, not by way of any ‘Back to nature’” (ND, 147; translation modiﬁed, emphasis added). What is negative already implicitly points forward to what is positive. This is what Adorno calls the dialectic of progress. In “Progress,” Adorno describes this dialectic as follows: “While the perpetual oppression that unleashed progress always arrested it at the same time, this oppression – as the emancipation of consciousness – ﬁrst made the antagonism and the full extent of the deception recognizable, [and this is] the prerequisite for settling the antagonism” (P, 150; translation modiﬁed). Experiences of suffering from humiliation, degradation, and oppression – or the constant pressure to conform and adapt to conditions that damage life under the guise of preserving it – impel some individuals to negate them if only, at ﬁrst, in thought. The ineradicably physical moment in these resistive experiences “tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different” (ND, 203). Hence, pain and negativity are “the moving forces of dialectical thinking” (ND, 202). Through them we may glean the better potential that lies within damaged reality; we can draw lessons about what ought to be from our painful experiences of what is. The shape of freedom, for example, “can only be grasped in determinate negation [bestimmte Negation] in accordance with the concrete shape of unfreedom” (ND, 231; translation modiﬁed). In other words, the concept of freedom arises by virtue of the negation (through resistance in thought or in action) of the negation (unfreedom). Consequently, unfreedom is not merely “an impediment to freedom but a premise of its concept” (ND, 265). At the end of his 1969 radio lecture “Critique,” Adorno makes this claim in a somewhat different way: “the false, once determinately known and precisely expressed, is already an index of what is right and better.”42 The dialectic of progress does not offer a retroactive justiﬁcation for suffering. Not only might history have followed a completely different course in which suffering would have been mitigated, but, Adorno insists, much of the suffering experienced by humankind should never have happened at all. All the suffering caused by domination has been contingent: “it need not have been” (ND, 321). Indeed, suffering calls for its own abolition: “Woe speaks: ‘Go’.” As utterly misguided and irrational as they doubtless are, even the self-destructive measures that society now takes in the interest of self-preservation exhibit “forms of unconscious social action against suffering” (ND, 203). To repeat an earlier point, Adorno’s own remedy for this situation may be expressed in Freudian terms: what is now

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often sought unconsciously and blindly should be made conscious through critique and realized in practice. Conscious resistance to oppression reveals the prospect of a society that would negate the physical and psychological suffering of “even the least” of its members (ND, 204). Only in such a society would suffering ﬁnally be redeemed. It is for the sake of redemption that the critical theorist must reﬂect dialectically on progress in this “age of catastrophe,” revealing to the living the conditions that rob them of a fully human life while intimating what life might yet become (P, 147). Adorno follows Marx when he disdains ephemeral thought models of redemptive transcendence and insists that “transcendence feeds on nothing but the experiences we have in immanence” (ND, 398). Like Marx, he also approaches utopian thinking with great caution.43 Although thinkers who attempt to “nail down transcendence can rightly be charged . . . with . . . a betrayal of transcendence,” it is still the case that “if the possibility, however feeble and distant, of redemption in existence is cut off altogether, the human spirit would become an illusion, and the ﬁnite, conditioned, merely existing subject would eventually be deiﬁed as carrier of the spirit” (ND, 400). Thought derives its critical power from its “speculative moment.” Since it will “not have its law prescribed for it by given facts,” thought “transcends them even in the closest contact with the objects,” but only by “repudiating a sacrosanct transcendence” (ND, 17). In the ﬁnal section of Minima Moralia, Adorno describes the aporia that critical thinkers now face. They are burdened with the task of fashioning “entirely from felt contact with their objects” perspectives on the world that “displace and estrange” it, revealing the world to be “as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.” By invoking possibilities immanent in reality, thinkers acquire the critical leverage needed to achieve this Verfremdungseffekt. On the one hand, estrangement through the lens of possibility “is the simplest of things” because “consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror image of its opposite.” On the other hand, thought only derives the idea of something positive from “the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape.” Estrangement is therefore “also the utterly impossible thing because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence” (MM, 247). Since we derive our ideas about what ought to be from our negative normative assessment of what is, whatever we postulate as reality’s better potential, its more fully rational identity, has also been contaminated and distorted by damaged actuality. Thus, critical thinkers must strive to think what it is virtually impossible to think – possibility – because possibility alone affords a critical perspective on damaged life. Adorno deﬁnes utopia as the “consciousness of possibility that sticks to the concrete, the undisﬁgured” (ND, 56–7). Because freedom and autonomy only become “concrete in the changing forms of repression, as resis-

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tance to repression”(ND, 265), this consciousness emerges in resistive experiences to society that intimate what it might be like to be free and autonomous (ND, 261). For its part, scarcity too negatively points to its own abolition, or to a more rational course for self-preservation that would serve the welfare of all equally, satisfying repressed, deferred, displaced, or only partially satisﬁed needs, thereby transforming them at the same time. According to Adorno, the “perspective vanishing point” of materialism is the “spirit’s liberation from the primacy of material needs in their state of fulﬁllment” (ND, 207). Society would also become democratic and classless in a sense that can scarcely be conceived. Finally, if we were to recognize our solidarity with all the living – our identity with “the rational general interest”44 – we would at last become what we are, developing as unique individuals within a more universal and humane society whose institutions are geared to facilitating this development rather than obstructing it. However, Adorno warns in Negative Dialectics that the possibilities inscribed within experience also block off utopia because their “inextinguishable color comes from non-being” whose servant is thought, “a piece of existence extending – however negatively – to that which is not” (ND, 57). Not only do we derive our ideas of possibility from the very reality we want to change, but the colours of a possible world, of non-being, can by no means be used to paint a complete picture of utopia because they allude more or less impotently to what does not yet exist. Moreover, if possibility – that which is not – should ever unfold into actuality – that which is – it would be completely transformed in the process. After characterizing Kant’s concepts of freedom and the intelligible character as subjective possibilities, things that come to be rather than things that are, Adorno cautions against describing them when he writes: “In the right condition, as in the Jewish theologoumenon, all things would differ only a little from the way they are; but not even the least can be conceived now as it would be then” (ND, 298–9). In Minima Moralia, Adorno situates utopia in “blind somatic pleasure, which, satisfying the ultimate intention, is intentionless” (MM, 61). Later, he criticizes the fetishism that often mars images of utopia when utopia is linked either implicitly or explicitly to unfettered production, to “the collective as a blind fury of activity.” Although there is “tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more,” the “vanishing lines” that point to an emancipated society will probably “have little in common with increased production and its human reﬂections.” On the contrary, “a humanity that no longer knows want will begin to have an inkling of the delusive, futile nature of all the arrangements hitherto made in order to escape want, which used wealth to reproduce want on a larger scale.” Speculating that our experience of pleasure would be radically altered, Adorno ﬂouts his own prohibition on images (Bilderverbot) when he offers this description of utopia: “Rien faire, comme une bête, lying

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on water and looking peacefully at the sky, ‘being, nothing else, without any further deﬁnition and fulﬁlment’ might take the place of process, act, satisfaction.” Here Adorno also asserts that “none of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulﬁlled utopia than that of eternal peace” (MM, 156–7). Years later, he explains: “Peace is the state of differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each other.”45 Adorno’s speculation about utopia is not exhausted in images and concepts. Utopia also receives philosophical expression in his work as the dialectical reconciliation of subject and object. “Subject” refers to both the spatio-temporal individual caught in the web of exchange relations and, in Kantian fashion, to the “universal attributes of ‘consciousness in general’,”46 or to thinking beings with their universal concepts, such as those of space and time. But, of course, our dependence on space and time has an objective dimension as well: it marks our “dependence on the species”47 which alone gives us meaning as particular subjects.48 Similarly, the cognitive practices that currently frustrate our realization as human beings also unite us implicitly as a concrete, trans-subjective species.49 For its part, “object” designates both objective economic processes and the somatic, material dimension of existence. Yet the objectivity that weighs on individuals in the form of the exchange principle now shrouds particular, subjective interests in universal clothing, while the material haecceity of particular individuals, partially manifest in the somatically based drive for self-preservation, has a subjective dimension as well inasmuch as it is “an actual universal, society – in its full logic – humanity” (TP, 272). Conceding that the terms “subject” and “object” are “patently equivocal,” Adorno refuses to deﬁne them because deﬁnitions would only subsume under other concepts that to which these terms refer,50 thereby exhibiting the identiﬁcatory thought that “says what something falls under, what it exempliﬁes or represents, and what, accordingly, it is not in itself ” (ND, 149; translation modiﬁed). Moreover, even though he grants priority to the object, or to the material dimension of society and individual existence, Adorno certainly does not endorse the current state of affairs in which the object – society – virtually obliterates the particular subjects over which it preponderates. Instead, he claims that the ultimate task of critical thought is “to abolish the hierarchy” of object over subject (ND, 181). Speciﬁcally, the very preponderance of the material substratum over subjects under conditions of real or contrived scarcity must be abolished. Utopian reconciliation ultimately involves the satisfaction of needs to the point where individuals cast off their tutelage to exchange relations, and materialism sublimates itself (ND, 207). For reconciliation to occur, society must adapt itself to individuals qua particulars while simultaneously fostering their more universally human traits – traits which have never fully manifested themselves in history owing to the emergence of a falsely universal social order. To return to a passage cited earlier, Adorno claims that a rational society would leave

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behind “the particular reason of the universal,” while unearthing the “utopian particular” that lies beneath it at the same time (ND, 318). A free society would therefore not “agree with the present concept of collectivity” under late capitalism, but neither would the individuals in it “be frantically guarding the old particularity” (ND, 283–4) because “the category of the individual” would cease “to be self-seclusive.” In fact, Adorno imagines a change so radical he thinks it probable that “every citizen of the wrong world would ﬁnd the right one unbearable; he would be too impaired for it.” Since “even the sharpest critic would be a different person, like the ones he wants to change,” Adorno pleads for tolerance when he warns: “If a man will not be stopped from differing and criticizing, he is still not free to put himself in the right” (ND, 352). Accordingly, the philosophical dimension of Adorno’s speculation about utopia concerns in part the relationship that should obtain between society and the individual. Entailing neither the “undifferentiated unity of subject and object,” nor “their hostile antithesis,” a utopian state of reconciliation demands “the communication of what is differentiated.”51 Adorno also made this point in Negative Dialectics when he stated that there is “no available model of freedom save one: that consciousness as it intervenes in the total social constitution [Gesamtverfassung], will through that constitution intervene in the complexion of the individual” (ND, 265). It is certainly true that the individual subjects who constitute society will always also be constituted by society because “not only particularity but the particular itself is unthinkable without the moment of the universal which differentiates the particular, puts its imprint on it, and in a sense is needed to make a particular of it.” But the fact that universal and particular reciprocally deﬁne each other does not authorize a Hegelian reduction of one to the other. The universal must never completely “submerge the moment of something particular, something opaque” (ND, 328). In their opaque particularity, free individuals would actively intervene in the society that constitutes them. Even and especially as nonidentical with society, they would refashion and reshape its organizations and institutions to accommodate their own unique needs and interests. Advocating a differentiated reconciliation between individuals and society, Adorno maintains that thought too must learn to accommodate difference in the shape of the particular objects which it now simply subsumes under its supposedly neutral descriptive-explanatory concepts. Hence, as Martin Jay remarks: “‘peace’ is a three-starred constellation composed of collective subjectivity, individual subjectivity, and the objective world.”52 As the model for a radically different cognitive relationship between universalizing thought and its particular objects, negative dialectics overcomes the contemporary form of objectivity or thought by attempting to rescue particulars from under its crushing weight. To do this, once again, thought must signal the better potential within damaged life. Aiming to think damaged particulars by using concepts that “feed on

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the idea of a condition in which individuals would have qualities not to be ascribed to anyone here and now” (ND, 150), the critical theorist wants nothing less than a complete transformation of the Western ratio. Arranged in constellations, emphatic concepts may be used to transcend concepts because they represent “from without what the concept has cut away within: the ‘more’ which the concept both desires and is incapable of being” (ND, 162). The transition to the praxis that will contribute to the rational organization of society by preserving “its societalized subjects according to their unfettered potentialities” (TP, 273) begins with the thoroughgoing critique of the rationality that self-destructively refuses to accommodate particulars, thereby impeding any progress worthy of the name.

3 Habermas, and the idea of a rational society In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas actually endorses Adorno’s idea of reconciliation which he encapsulates in a phrase which Adorno borrows from the romantic poet Baron von Eichendorff.53 He agrees that reconciliation consists in granting proximity to the “beautiful alien” – das Schöne Fremde – while simultaneously allowing what is alien to remain “distant and different, beyond the heterogeneous and beyond that which is one’s own” (ND, 191). However, Habermas views reconciliation as an intersubjective and linguistic accomplishment, claiming that Adorno himself implicitly “describes reconciliation in terms of an intact intersubjectivity that is only established and maintained in the reciprocity of mutual understanding based on free recognition.” In fact, Habermas believes that Adorno agrees ultimately with Mead who “had already elevated symbolically mediated interaction to the new paradigm of reason.”54 Although he concedes that Adorno merely alludes to this new paradigm, Habermas contends that the “structures of reason” to which his predecessor refers really only “become accessible to analysis when the ideas of reconciliation and freedom are deciphered as codes for a form of intersubjectivity, however utopian it may be, that makes possible a mutual and constraint-free understanding among individuals in their dealings with one another, as well as the identity of individuals who come to a compulsion-free understanding with themselves – sociation without repression” (TCA I, 391). In this passage, Habermas also reinterprets Adorno’s ideas about collective subjectivity and individual subjectivity while denying that reconciliation should extend to the cognitive relationship between thought and its objects. Somewhat problematically, given his recognition of the need for ecological restraints on capitalism, Habermas claims that we do not need to rethink, “in and of themselves, the knowledge and mastery of an objective nature.” What is required instead is an explication of “the intersubjectivity of possible understanding and agreement – at

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both the intrapersonal and intrapsychic levels.” Habermas therefore focuses exclusively on “the intersubjective relation that speaking and acting subjects take up when they come to an understanding with one another about something” (TCA I, 392). Functionalist (or cognitiveinstrumental) rationality is problematic only when it colonizes communicative practices oriented to reaching understanding about objective, normative, and aesthetic-expressive claims, thereby compromising communicative reason’s multivalent rationality. When conﬁned to the coordination of action within the economic and political spheres, and to our relations with external nature, cognitive-instrumental rationality allegedly poses no real threat. But, of course, for Adorno, the pathic rationality that haunts late capitalism adversely affects all aspects of our experience: not only our selfunderstanding, but our psychological and somatic development, our symbolic and material relations with others, and our linguistic and nonlinguistic relations to external nature. By expunging the uniqueness of the beautiful alien, its concrete haecceity, the identiﬁcatory exchange principle has damaged the self, interpersonal relations, and the environing natural world. This is why Adorno demands far more radical change than Habermas will endorse. Believing that Adorno lays all the blame for reiﬁcation on cognitive-instrumental rationality, while ignoring the more positive differentiation of value spheres that accompanies the rationalization of the lifeworld, Habermas largely misconstrues the thrust of Adorno’s critical theory. Adorno could easily counter that the communicative interaction on which Habermas pins his emancipatory hopes simply perpetuates the coercive subsumption of particulars under universals. For Adorno, language will become “a measure of truth only when we are conscious of the nonidentity of an expression with that which we mean” (ND, 111). Because Habermas never addresses this dimension of Adorno’s criticisms in a sustained way, his notion of communicative rationality fails to obviate any of the more serious problems that Adorno attributes to the deployment of the Western ratio. Communicative rationality would offer a solution to these problems only if it provided a radical alternative to the identity-thinking that underlies exchange. According to Fredric Jameson, Habermas accuses Adorno of succumbing to irrationalism only “because he cannot himself allow for the possibility or the reality of some new, genuinely dialectical thinking that would offer a different kind of solution in a situation in which the limits and failures – indeed the destructive effects – of non-dialectical ‘Western’ reason are well known.”55 Although he appears to modify his view about the nature of the threats to solidarity, and later criticizes the illegitimate independence of the subsystems vis-à-vis the lifeworld rather than their colonizing incursions into it, Habermas continues to hold that the Western ratio exhibits positive tendencies which need only to unfold and develop to realize their emancipatory potential. Speciﬁcally, if one focuses

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on “the degree of freedom gained by the structural components of the lifeworld” by virtue of their rationalization, “the following vanishing points result: for culture, a condition of the constant revision of traditions that have been unthawed, that is, that have become reﬂective; for society, a condition of the dependence of legitimate orders upon formal and ultimately discursive procedures for establishing and grounding norms; for personality, a condition of the risk-ﬁlled self-direction of a highly abstract ego-identity.” With rationalization and the subsequent differentiation of validity claims, “self-consciousness returns in the form of a culture become reﬂexive; self-determination in the form of generalized values and norms; self-realization in that of the advanced individuation of socialized subjects.”56 Of course, Adorno himself commented favourably on the growth of reﬂectivity in the West. Self-reﬂection, or self-consciousness, not only contributes to the process of individuation that he champions, it has also made it possible to think beyond the given, or “mere things in being.” As I observed at the end of Chapter 3, Adorno insisted in his lectures on morality that both reason and freedom depend on nature becoming conscious of itself.57 In the interest of emancipation, human beings must become aware of their own “inbred nature,” while putting an end to their domination of nature which only perpetuates their domination by nature (P, 150). Accordingly, one of the conditions for self-realization and selfdetermination is self-reﬂection, or reﬂection on ourselves as part of the environing natural world. It should also be obvious that the self-critical spirit of reason required for radical, emancipatory change itself depends entirely on the advanced capacity for self-reﬂection. However, the development of this capacity is precisely what is thwarted today because late capitalism demands that individuals simply “capitulate before reality,” rather than reﬂecting critically on the reiﬁed social world and their place within it.58 Consequently, while Adorno also views advanced reﬂectivity as the harbinger of an emancipated society, his criticisms of the stultifying effects of the identiﬁcatory Western ratio call into question the extent to which self-determination and self-actualization have actually been achieved. In contrast to Adorno, Habermas deﬁnes emancipation in strictly procedural terms. Conceding that emancipation entails the idea of “intact intersubjectivity,” with its “glimmer of symmetrical relations marked by free, reciprocal recognition,” Habermas also warns that “this idea must not be ﬁlled in as the totality of a reconciled form of life and projected into the future as a utopia.”59 To return to the interview cited in Chapter 4, when Nielsen asks about the precise status of the ideal speech situation in which intact intersubjectivity glimmers, Habermas responds that the conditions under which the ideal presuppositions of communicative reason would be satisﬁed cannot “be transformed into an idea that constitutes a reality.” On the one hand, then, he denies that the ideal speech

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situation is constitutive in Kant’s sense of that term. On the other hand, he hesitates to call “the ideal communication community a regulative idea in the Kantian sense.” Although truth does function as a regulative idea in discourse, the ideal presuppositions of argumentation are not merely regulative because they must also be satisﬁed “to a sufﬁcient degree here and now if we want to engage in argument at all.” The ideal speech situation “implies only that the unlimited communication community (unlimited, that is, in social space and time) is an idea that we can approximate in real contexts of argumentation.”60 Again, real contexts of argumentation more or less approximate the ideal today by virtue of their deployment of rational procedures for redeeming validity claims. Here Habermas begins to “detranscendentalize” the ideal speech situation to the point where it is no longer able to serve a critical function. Of course, in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas is even more strenuously opposed to idealizing a community that would reproduce itself solely by means of communication. Rather than preﬁguring a society in which mature and rational citizens would consciously direct the economy and the state, the model of an unlimited communication community is “merely a methodological ﬁction” which raises the spectre of a collective subject that hides “the unavoidable inertial features of societal complexity.” This community is ﬁctitious because it “assumes a society without law and politics and projects the democratic idea of self-organization onto society as a whole” (BFN, 326). Rejecting the normative content evoked by the ideal presuppositions of communicative action – the model of purely communicative social relations – Habermas will allow this model to play the afﬁrmative role of illuminating the complexity of Western societies only where material reproduction must be relegated to the autopoietic subsystems and fairly shielded from the inherently rational demands of the symbolically self-reproducing lifeworld. Here Habermas not only denies that a singular collective subject could direct the course of history, he also insists that the material reproduction of society must remain in the invisible hands of the increasingly complex economic and political subsystems. In Chapter 4 I argued that the dialectic of immanence and transcendence effectively cancels itself out in favour of immanence in Habermas’ work. If Adorno problematizes utopian transcendence when he claims that a fully rational society is barely conceivable today because our imaginations are irrevocably chained to reiﬁed social reality, Habermas simply refuses to ascribe any kind of transcendent role to communicative reason. Although he does not always maintain this claim consistently, Habermas does assert on several occasions that his discursively generated ideals cannot be opposed to the real because they are already instantiated to a greater or lesser degree in communicative practices. While afﬂicted with reifying distortions, these practices are nonetheless already rational owing to the rationalization of the lifeworld. Moreover, discursively

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generated self-determination, which constitutes the normative core of liberal democracies in Between Facts and Norms, is now more or less a reality. Citizens need only exert somewhat more inﬂuence over the state and the economy via institutionalized channels of communication than they currently do. Citizens can acquire such inﬂuence on the condition that opinion- and will-formation in the public sphere become genuinely unfettered. Describing this condition as “unrealistic,” Habermas also contends that “it is not utopian in a bad sense” because it “would be realized to the extent that opinion-forming associations developed, catalyzed the growth of autonomous public spheres, and, in virtue of the natural visibility such associations enjoy, changed the spectrum of values, issues, and reasons.” Indeed, despite his concerns about the vitality of public opinion today, Habermas immediately belies the transcendent or utopian dimension of this assumption when he suggests that the condition required for a robust public sphere already exists, namely, “a liberal-egalitarian political culture sensitive to problems affecting society as a whole – a culture that is even jumpy or in a constant state of vibration, and thus responsive” (BFN, 488; translation modiﬁed). Reform is, therefore, all that is really required to redeem modernity’s rational potential. Habermas will only go so far as to endorse “the gradual improvement of institutionalized procedures of rational collective will-formation, procedures that cannot prejudge the participants’ concrete goals” (BFN, 489). These concrete goals must not be predetermined paternalistically, either by political leaders or social theorists; it is left to members of each community to decide what improvements should be made. Again, the idea of intact intersubjectivity, which community members project as the vanishing point of their attempts to reach rational agreement about what constitutes a good life, “contains no more, but also no less, than the formal characterization of the necessary conditions for the unforeseeable forms adopted by a life that is not misspent.”61 Refusing to allow the ideal presuppositions of communicative reason to preﬁgure in any way a form of life that is “exemplary and binding on all,”62 Habermas claims that discursively engendered ideas about the good life will necessarily vary because they are inextricably tied to shared traditions, collective identities, and “encompassing historical forms of life.”63 All that can justiﬁably be said in advance about ethical forms of life “is that if they could be realized at all, they would have to be produced through our own combined effort and be marked by solidarity, though they need not necessarily be free of conﬂict.”64 Arguing that the redemption of validity claims about the good life presupposes neither determinate (concrete) goals nor utopian (transcendent) goals, Habermas nonetheless adopts his own version of the reconciliation of universal and particular that had earlier inspired Adorno. He wants to reconcile the ethical ways of life of particular

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communities with the larger human community governed by universal moral norms. He distinguishes between morality and ethics when he claims that moral discourse requires a complete “break with all of the unquestioned truths of an established, concrete ethical life.” Unlike ethical discourse, which is bound to particular lifeworld contexts, moral discourse involves a “higher-level intersubjectivity” that intermeshes “the perspective of each with the perspectives of all.”65 Moral questions are ultimately questions about justice, or “what is equally good for all.”66 In other words, they concern the rights that should govern all human beings on the face of the planet. Maeve Cooke explains that moral validity claims are universal in a double sense: “They are conceptually linked to the idea that everyone would agree that what is agreed to be valid is valid for everyone.”67 Particular forms of life must be reconciled with universal moral norms. Among other places, this idea of reconciliation is broached in “Justice and Solidarity.” Since justice “concerns the equal freedoms of unique and selfdetermining individuals,” whereas solidarity “concerns the welfare of consociates who are intimately linked in an intersubjectively shared form of life,” the more particularistic solidarity can be reconciled with universal justice only when it “has been transformed in the light of the idea of a general discursive will formation.”68 This transformation is effected when the “normative content of the presuppositions of communicative action is extended – in universalized, abstract form and without limitations – to an ideal communication community.”69 When this occurs, solidarity appears as the “consciousness of a prior solidarity of all concerned” that is detached from “contingent social ties (and collectivities).”70 Again, however, the idea of an unlimited and socially solidary communication community only “transcends the boundaries of social space and historical time from within, from the perspective of a ﬁnite existence situated within the world.” The extension of solidarity to all humanity does not, therefore, harbour a utopian project; it is “always already” inscribed in communicative practices in the West. The tension between these practices (facticity) and the normative content of the presuppositions that inform them (validity) is nugatory because these ideal presuppositions are actually made by participants in discourse.71 Conversely, the universal moral claims that govern the human community must be reconciled with particular, ethical forms of life. This aspect of reconciliation – the particularizing of the universal – involves the application of moral norms to lifeworld contexts. To cite William Hohengarten: although moral validity claims (for example, those embodied in the United Nations Charter on Human Rights,) transcend the boundaries of particular communities and nations, and apply to all human beings without exception, this “does not imply that differences in concrete forms of life must be leveled, or that every person must conform to a single ideal life-style.” Rather, because universal norms are abstract, they can be made “compatible with increasing diversity.”72 When applying abstract moral

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norms to ethical forms of life, what must be determined is “which of the norms already accepted as valid is appropriate in a given case in light of all the relevant features of the situation conceived as exhaustively as possible.”73 Once such a determination is made, it becomes possible to reconcile universal norms with the “beautiful alien,” or “concrete other,” that feminists such as Carol Gilligan have accused Habermas of neglecting.74 Arguably, Habermas only manages to reconcile the universal with particular forms of life by implicitly accepting Adorno’s critique of universals – namely, that they are too indiscriminately abstract to cover all concrete situations and life contexts. Since moral validity claims are abstract, concrete forms of life are preserved by default, as it were. More important, while denying throughout his work that there is a collective subject of history, Habermas nonetheless suggests that participants in moral discourse themselves postulate a singular, socially solidary, humanity on which universal norms are universally binding. Here humanity appears as the vanishing point in those communicative practices that are geared to reaching agreement about what is equally good for all. Factually presupposed in these practices as their ideal referent, Habermasian humanity is also an entirely discursive construct. By contrast, where Adorno agrees with Habermas that solidarity must be extended to all human beings, he argues that this extension should take a concrete form. His global subject will comprise real human beings with real needs. Should it ever emerge in history, this collective subject will be the only viable agent for the radical transformation of economic, political, and social conditions that is required to satisfy needs in such a way that self-preservation ﬁnally manifests itself in a rational form. A suprasubjective collectivity also appears on a smaller scale in Habermas’ claims about the evolution of society75 and, by extension, in his conception of the lifeworld as a discursively reproduced (Durkheimian) conscience collective. In fact, in Habermas’ work, the particular refers, not primarily to individuals, but to collective forms of life in which individuals take shape by developing their personalities through identiﬁcation with social groups and collectively shared values and goals. In sharp contrast to this view, Adorno conceptualizes particulars as concrete, spatio-temporal individuals that have emerged out of the primal mud of species being owing to the historical development of their capacity for self-reﬂection. Even though he agrees that there is no individuation without sociation, Adorno contends that the earlier phase of liberalism brieﬂy promoted the emergence of an autonomous individual whose vestiges must be redeemed because humanity can “be thought only through this extreme form of differentiation, individuation, not as a comprehensive generic concept” (P, 151). According to Adorno, the life of particular individuals is the very substance of the universal: “without the particular, the universal declines to an abstract, separate, eradicable form” (ND, 346). Bypassing the social groups

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and collectivities that have been damaged by reiﬁcation and narcissism, then, Adorno champions the equally damaged individual. His utopian idea of reconciliation preﬁgures a much more radically pluralistic society than Habermas will allow because it would accommodate each individual in his or her concrete particularity – a particularity that will only develop fully with the complete transformation of society. In contrast to this prescriptive retention of individuality qua potential, Habermas is satisﬁed with the descriptive claim that what makes individuals persons is that in which they “agree with all the other members of the social group” (TCA II, 53). In fact, this is what prompts Whitebook to argue that Habermas runs the risk of portraying individuals as “preconditioned clones”; there is virtually no “residuum of private in-itselfness” that would serve to differentiate individuals in his work.76 Ironically, Habermas’ view of the individual as a product of socialization, social integration, and enculturation actually compromises the very pluralism he tries to preserve when he rejects the idea of a collective subject that could consciously control society as a whole, and refuses to allow the glimmer of intact intersubjectivity to serve as the basis for social criticism and to preﬁgure a concrete form of ethical life. To the extent that reproductive processes in the lifeworld succeed, Habermasian individuals are completely submerged in a collective form of life. In turn, this particularistic form of life must subordinate itself to universally binding moral obligations which may be ascertained only when solidarity is extended beyond the spatio-temporal boundaries of lifeworld contexts to humanity as a whole. The solidarity whose decline Habermas laments demands, ﬁrst, that disagreement give way to discursively reached agreement in the lifeworld and, second, that the needs, interests, and value orientations of ethical communities yield to universally valid moral obligations. Although individuals may (and certainly do) disagree about what is true, good, and beautiful, it is still the case that reaching agreement about validity claims is the underlying telos of communicative practices in the lifeworld. By extension, reaching agreement about what is universally good for humanity as a whole has “absolute priority” over the particularistic good.77 For reconciliation to occur, then, the particular must submit to the universal in Hegelian fashion. Apparently oblivious to Adorno’s emphatic and dialectically inﬂected conception of the reconciled relationship between the individual and society, Habermas asserts in “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices” that universalism should not be treated as the enemy of individualism because it unilaterally makes individualism possible. Retaining a view of language that fails to correct its coercive subsumption of particulars under universals, Habermas subsumes the particular under the universal on both the micro- and macro-levels of society as well. Against Adorno, whose idea of reconciliation is realizable only on the condition that both particular and universal have been radically transformed on the cognitive and the social levels so that diversity is not sacriﬁced to unity, Habermas

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argues that reconciliation consists in communicatively achieved consensus on both the idea of the good life and universally binding moral norms. Intact intersubjectivity glimmers in this consensus about what is to be done in the ethical and moral spheres. In the ﬁnal analysis, then, it is this fragile and transitory unity – “generated in the porous and refracted intersubjectivity of a linguistically mediated consensus” – that “not only supports but furthers and accelerates the pluralization of forms of life and the individualization of lifestyles.”78 Such consensus is already within reach. To be sure, Habermas admits that there are threats to social cohesion that subvert the rational potential of democracy. No mere pipe-dream, the normative content of democracy has not yet been realized because the solidarity that is needed to overcome these threats is precisely what is endangered by them. Whether solidarity is threatened by colonization or by the illegitimate circulation of power, Habermas is fully aware that these threats must be contested, by civil disobedience if necessary, so that citizens can inﬂuence the subsystems more effectively with their own inherently rational demands. However, while the solidarity needed to reach consensus on issues of public concern is an endangered resource today, it is by no means completely absent from lifeworld contexts. In The Theory of Communicative Action, where solidarity is threatened by colonization, basic social institutions remain intact and solidary movements already exist that contest the reifying incursions of the subsystems into the lifeworld. In Between Facts and Norms, where privatistic syndromes endanger solidarity, the conditions needed for a robust public sphere that can, under certain extraordinary circumstances, disrupt the prevailing unconstitutional circulation of power, are now present in the form of the rationalized lifeworld which sustains our liberal democratic political culture. Yet, even on the best case scenario, when their action is oriented to a common idea of the good that allows them to form a cohesive, articulate, and mobilized public sphere that is capable of shifting the prevailing balance of power between lifeworld and system, citizens must voluntarily limit their expectations. Should they succeed in reaching agreement about their interests, values, and needs, citizens must nonetheless “give up holistic aspirations to a self-organizing society, aspirations that also undergirded Marxist ideas of social revolution.” According to Habermas, civil society can “directly transform only itself, and it can have at most an indirect effect on the self-transformation of the political system.” On the whole, civil society can have “an inﬂuence only on the personnel and programming of this system” (BFN, 372). Claiming that the project of selfdetermination is a revolutionary one, Habermas implies that such weak inﬂuence is already revolutionary. The reconciliation of universal and particular demands that citizens reach agreement on what is to be done while simultaneously limiting their aspirations to self-determination, allowing politicians to have the last word on what lies in the general interest.

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4 The utopian gambit The utopian motif has a venerable history. In The Republic, Plato sketches an ideal polity in which philosophers are entrusted with political leadership because they alone are capable of orienting society towards the objective, universal idea of the good. In response to questions about the viability of his republic, Plato argues that his vision should not be faulted for its utopianism; it is intended explicitly to provide a model of perfect justice which is none the worse for being ideal. Despite this disclaimer, however, he proceeds to offer reasons to support the claim that a more or less just society can be established. First, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that philosophers of the character and intellect he described may one day exist. Second, it is also possible that some necessity of fortune – a natural catastrophe, for example – might recommend philosophers, with their reputation for wisdom, to the general population. Third, citizens might be convinced with rational arguments that it is in their best interest to choose philosophers as rulers. So, while Plato conceded readily that a real polity would never be as just as the ideal society he described, and that an imperfectly just society would necessarily degenerate, he rejected soundly the claim that his republic was merely a “pious dream.” Adorno and Habermas embrace Plato’s utopian aspirations to the extent that they too want reason to rule. The ultimate goal of their critical theories is “the rational organization of humankind.”79 But, of course, Adorno’s conception of reason differs signiﬁcantly from that of both Plato and Habermas, and not only because it entails a completely revamped relationship between universal and particular. Unlike Plato (in The Republic) and Habermas, who separate reason from its somatic basis in desire, Adorno retains reason’s links with the instincts, especially the instinct for self-preservation. He insists that “rationality cannot . . . be simply split off from self-preservation” because it is not only the case that the Western ratio has historically been impelled by this drive but because, prospectively, the “preservation of humanity is inexorably inscribed within the meaning of rationality” (TP, 272). Yet, if reason “should not be anything less than self-preservation, namely that of the species, upon which the survival of each individual literally depends” (TP, 273), its very universality, which will ultimately ratify “the needfulness of everything particular, its dependence on the whole,” now stands in sharp opposition to the particular owing to “the process of abstraction on which it rests.” A fully rational society would ﬁnally leave behind “the particular reason of the universal” by casting off its empty abstractions (ND, 318). Adorno’s utopian reconciliation of universal and particular is, by his own admission, barely conceivable today. Like Plato, however, Adorno contends that reconciliation is not merely a pious dream. Given the rational potential latent in modernity that may be discovered through determinate negation, critical thinkers can think beyond the given. In

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fact, Adorno claims that the concept and the theory of society are legitimate only on the condition that they “hold in negative fashion to the possibility inherent in them: that of expressing the fact that such possibility is threatened with suffocation.” This melancholy awareness of possibility, “without any preconceptions as to where it might lead, would be the ﬁrst condition for an ultimate break in society’s omnipotence.”80 Critical thought, informed by emphatic possibilities gleaned from damaged reality, is required if society is ever to be radically transformed to the point where it fulﬁls its utopian promise of “togetherness in diversity [ein Miteinander des Verschiedenen]” (ND, 150; translation modiﬁed). For his part, Habermas abandons utopian speculation altogether. Where Adorno viewed radical critique as the necessary condition for an emancipated society that would accommodate individuals qua particulars, Habermas believes that reconciliation already glimmers in communicative practices in the rationalized lifeworld. As a result, liberal democracies in the West need only be reformed to realize their more rational, democratic potential. Constitutionally endorsed democratic procedures, which allow “issues and contributions, information and reasons to ﬂoat freely,” thereby securing “a discursive character for political will-formation” (BFN, 448), currently rely “on a principle of justice entailing equal respect for all” (BFN, 266). In the constitutions of Western countries, the just society is already posited as an ongoing project. To the extent that the constitutional principles of Germany and the USA – the two pragmatic touchstones for Habermas’ discourse theory of democracy – are discursively redeemed by all citizens and serve them as a resource of justice, selfempowerment is more or less a reality. In contrast to the Platonic idea of justice as a transcendent eidos whose truth discussants must simply acknowledge, Habermas conceives of justice as a universal and ideal limit towards which public debate now tends. Benhabib and Whitebook have argued that Habermas effectively distances himself from the tradition of critical theory precisely because his work lacks a utopian dimension. In Benhabib’s view, since Habermas’ critique exhausts itself in the “‘joyless reformism’ of a welfare statist or social-democratic compromise,” he has established the link between Enlightenment and emancipation at the cost of “forsaking far too much of its utopian tradition.”81 However, I would counter that a theory need not be utopian to lay claim to the title of critical theory. As problematic as it may be, Habermas opposes Adorno’s “pessimism” with the assertion that existing practices and institutions have already acquired a degree of rationality such that they do not require radical transformation to release their potential. On this basis, he can justiﬁably claim that social reform should be the ultimate goal of critical theory. In fact, it could be argued that Habermas is only following in the footsteps of his predecessors here. In “Traditional and Critical Theory,” where he outlines the task of critical theory, Max Horkheimer maintains that what a critical analysis of society

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posits as the goal of human activity is just “the idea of a reasonable organization of society that will meet the needs of the whole community.”82 Habermas by no means abandons this goal. Believing that this goal is already within reach, however, he can consistently argue that a utopian transﬁguration of existing conditions is no longer necessary. In the previous chapter, I questioned whether Habermas has a viable basis for his reform-oriented critique of society. Not only does he deny that the ideal presuppositions of communicative reason can be opposed critically to existing institutions and practices, he now uses them in an entirely positive way to afﬁrm the status quo. It is for this reason, and not because his theory lacks a utopian dimension, that one may question the extent to which Habermas remains a critical theorist. Following Adorno (and other ﬁrst generation theorists) when he locates the basis for critique in modernity’s immanent rational potential, Habermas gradually abandons the tradition of critical theory as he afﬁrmatively proclaims modernity’s rational potential while lacking an adequate normative basis for criticizing its all too obvious ﬂaws. In their current positivistic guise, the ideal presuppositions of communicative reason offer little more than an ideological veil that masks the irrationality of social life today. To paraphrase Max Horkheimer in “Traditional and Critical Theory:” Confronted with persisting contradictions in human existence, and with the impotence of individuals in the face of the social totality, the Habermasian solution seems a purely private assertion, a personal peace treaty between the philosopher and an inhuman world.83 Habermas often interprets in an entirely positive fashion the processes his predecessors criticized as irrational. For example, when he insists that the economic system ought to operate as an autonomous Invisible Hand, he endorses the very ideological mystiﬁcation that was anathema both to early critical theorists and the Marxist tradition as a whole. What ﬁrst generation theorists deemed irrational is given a thoroughly positive spin in his work: workers should have little or no control over the economic forces which they not only constitute through their labour but that shape the material basis of the societies in which they live. Despite its more fully rational character, the symbolically self-reproducing lifeworld must keep its hands clean, so to speak, and allow the subsystems virtual autonomy to steer society materially. By extension, Habermas severely restricts democratic practices of self-determination in his rational society. Rather than championing “a state of affairs in which man’s actions no longer ﬂow from a mechanism but from his own decision,”84 he acts as an apologist for the very disempowerment Adorno disparaged when he wrote that democracy has never lived up to its own promise that people “themselves would make decisions about their world.”85 Although Habermas’ social theory is “dominated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life,”86 the question of whether the lifeworld is really as rational as Habermas claims remains moot. If

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rationalization depends on the lifeworld’s uncoupling from the economic and political subsystems, the resulting boundary between system and lifeworld remains extremely porous, compromising the distinction between system integration and social integration that Habermas wants to make. He also seems to forget that each individual is simultaneously consumer, client, citizen, and worker. Only pathologically split personalities could segregate completely their systemically integrated behaviours from their communicative practices in the lifeworld – and reiﬁcation only exacerbates this problem. Furthermore, institutions, such as the middle-class nuclear family which allegedly serves as a haven in a heartless world, are not as immune from the reifying effects of the systems as Habermas would have us believe, nor are they so thoroughly rational that they are now ideology-proof. Indeed, Christopher Lasch devoted a book to debunking as ideology the claim that the family serves as a haven in a heartless world, and Terry Eagleton has argued that the end of ideology thesis is itself ideological. However, Habermas is now prepared to concede, not only that the circulation of power in liberal democracies has become irrational to the extent that political power has become unhinged from its legitimate source in the communicative power of the public sphere, but that economic imperatives now dominate the political agenda in the West. If he had remarked earlier that late capitalism always “swings between the contrary policies of ‘the market’s self-healing powers’ and state interventionism” (TCA II, 385), he observes later that the nation-state is “currently being overwhelmed, and its power eroded, by processes of globalization.”87 However, even this situation does not prompt Habermas to revise his afﬁrmative stance. Recognizing that globalization might lend credence to the pessimistic view that normatively guided politics is now impotent “in the face of an increasingly independent global economic system,” Habermas simply responds by raising the stakes, as it were, when he suggests that the nation-state could be superseded by supranational agencies and institutions (such as the United Nations) that preserve its normative content. Although troubled by the question “of whether democratic opinion- and will-formation could ever achieve a binding force that extends beyond the level of the nation-state,”88 Habermas refuses to abandon his claim that the real is already more or less rational. Most of the problems that led Adorno to adopt a more radical, utopian perspective are either sanctioned by Habermas in an ideologically suspect way or simply glossed over. In other words, Habermas does not successfully refute Adorno’s criticisms of the irrationality that pervades late capitalist societies. Communicative reason fails to act as an effective break on the identiﬁcatory exchange principle because it only perpetuates identity-thinking with its bias for the universal over the particular. In its current form, communicative reason also legitimates the economic and political status quo in a positivistic and identiﬁcatory fashion. Equally

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important, when Habermas endorses the diremption of reason from the instincts, he severs reason from the drive for self-preservation. Cut off from this drive, contemporary society may appear more rational than it actually is because its blatantly self-destructive tendencies cannot be blamed on the historical trajectory of the Western ratio. In fact, these tendencies themselves are virtually invisible in Habermas’ work. For Adorno, by contrast, it is the Western ratio, impelled by the drive to selfpreservation, that imperils the lives of people everywhere. War, famine, disease, and environmental disasters are among the more harmful effects of harnessing the drive for self-preservation to interests in proﬁt and power. As long as these interests, which only masquerade as universal while remaining stubbornly particular, determine the fate of life on the planet, society will never be fully rational because they will always triumph over the perennial needs of humanity as a whole for clean air, fresh drinking-water, wholesome food, and adequate housing and health care. Having severed reason from the drives, Habermas lacks the tools to diagnose what his later analysis of globalization implicitly reveals: the irrationality of a world that sustains itself by satisfying the interests of some to the detriment of the needs of all.

Conclusion

Arguing that “social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought,”1 Horkheimer and Adorno also issue the sombre declaration that “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”2 Like the dialectic of progress which is modelled after it, the dialectic of enlightenment outlined by these ﬁrst generation critical theorists emphasizes the negative effects on human life of identiﬁcatory reason and its social model – the exchange principle – to the virtual exclusion of the more positive features of enlightened thought. In the last two chapters of this book, however, I attempted to make these unaccentuated positive elements explicit. Apart from grounding his critique of reiﬁed social reality in enlightenment’s emphatic concepts, Adorno endorsed enlightenment’s critical, and selfcritical, impulses. His negative dialectics exhibits a positive dimension to the extent that it carries forward the free, self-critical, spirit of reason that characterized the thought of French encyclopedists.3 The importance of critical self-reﬂection had already been acknowledged in 1944 when Adorno and Horkheimer insisted that “the Enlightenment must consider itself if human beings are not to be wholly betrayed.”4 What Adorno promotes in the work of Immanuel Kant is just his tacit equation of reason, democracy, and critique. In “What is Enlightenment?” Kant had argued that enlightenment involves the release from selfincurred tutelage to authority. According to Kant, such tutelage is selfincurred to the extent that it stems from a lack of courage and resolution on the part of individuals rather than from the lack of reason.5 Adopting sapere aude (literally: dare to know) as the motto for enlightenment, Kant claimed that enlightened individuals would exhibit the courage to think for themselves. This is what he meant by Mündigkeit, or maturity.6 Adorno explicitly fastens on this idea in “Critique” when he writes: “Politically mature is the person who speaks for himself, because he has thought for himself and is not merely repeating someone else; he stands free of any guardian.” For Adorno, critique and maturity belong together. Maturity entails “the power to resist established opinions and, one and the same, also to resist existing institutions, to resist everything that is merely posited, that justiﬁes itself with its existence.” Moreover, this critical dis-

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tance from accepted conventions is essential for democracy: Madison’s system of checks and balances depends entirely on criticism. But if democracy and critique belong together, so too do critique and the modern concept of reason. Kant implied as much when he labelled his three major works critiques while criticizing the dogmatism of rationalist philosophical systems.7 A staunch proponent of enlightened, critical thought, Adorno protests that “critique, cornerstone of reason and bourgeois thinking tout court, by no means dominated spirit as much as one would assume from that spirit’s self-image.”8 On this point as well he comes into conﬂict with Habermas. Of course, Habermas too adopts a Kantian perspective to the extent that he equates enlightenment with the release from tutelage to authority. Unlike Adorno, however, Habermas claims that enlightenment is already more or less a reality: the rationalization of the lifeworld represents a world-historical process of enlightenment because it consists in “successive releases of the potential for rationality in communicative action.”9 During the age of enlightenment, mystifying religious and metaphysical worldviews began to lose their binding force, authorities were disputed, and the force of the better argument ﬁnally won the upper hand. Rational, critical thought started to come into its own in the eighteenth century when lifeworld members began to think for themselves rather than taking direction from others. In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas even asserts that there is “empirical evidence for the spread of a humanistically enlightened moral consciousness from the time of the Enlightenment” (TCA II, 290). This dissemination of enlightened moral consciousness is crucial because the evolution of morality and law has played “the role of pacemaker” in the rationalization of the lifeworld (TCA II, 155). In contrast to Habermas, Adorno disputes the actuality of enlightenment when he criticizes the afﬁrmative and apologetic character of thought in the modern age. Although the idea of rational, critical thought was certainly advanced during the enlightenment, reason remained largely positivistic. The dialectic of enlightenment was “broken off too early,”10 resulting, not in the excess of rationality, but in the lack of rationality.11 Even Kant, who advocated political maturity, “blamed critique for being improper.” He also wanted to “punish reason” for “exceeding its bounds,” and “to bridle its use.” For his part, Hegel, “who in many passages equates thinking altogether with negativity and hence with critique,” also exhibits the opposite tendency “to bring critique to a halt.” Hegel deems those who rely on their own understanding to be vain, carping raisonneurs because they refuse both to acknowledge their own ﬁnitude and to subordinate themselves “to something higher, the totality.”12 More generally, what Adorno claims is characteristic of the entire bourgeois period is just this “contradiction between the modern emancipation of critical spirit and its simultaneous dampening.”13

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Unfortunately, the contradiction which Adorno thought Habermas had correctly diagnosed in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere afﬂicts Habermas’ own assessment of Western society in later work. To paraphrase Kant, if ours is not yet a fully enlightened age, Habermas does seem to believe that it is an age of enlightenment because lifeworld members now allegedly deal more or less freely, through rational, critical debate, with what they need for their spiritual welfare. Where Adorno argues that enlightened reason remains bound to superstition, or to the universal context of delusion, the “spell” cast by the exchange principle, Habermas claims that enlightened reason ultimately triumphed over superstitious belief systems. His positive assessment of Western reason is not only problematic in its own right, but if true, it “contradicts” his attempt to bridle its use when he insists that communicative reason limit itself to exerting a weak inﬂuence over the political and economic systems. Habermas seems to believe that lifeworld members ought to remain the pawns of economic processes that play themselves out over their heads, and that they should always give the ﬁnal word to their political lawgivers. Implicitly criticizing Adorno when he calls for the unbiased exploration of both negative tendencies and positive counter-tendencies in the lifeworld (TCA II, 391), Habermas simultaneously restricts the scope of enlightenment by refusing to allow individuals, who have supposedly acquired a high degree of cognitive maturity owing to the rationalization of the lifeworld, to make decisions about their political and economic fate. Of course, the question of whether individuals have become as rational as Habermas contends has not been resolved. Critics have argued that most individuals in the USA, for example, would fall below Kohlberg’s postconventional stage of moral development (which Habermas adopts as the terminus ad quem of communicative reason) in which rules for testing universal principles, as well as procedures for justifying principles, are deployed.14 However, even if we grant that Habermas successfully refutes arguments like these, this concession would not satisfy Adorno. For what is ultimately at issue between these ﬁrst and second generation critical theorists is not an empirical question about the degree of rationality attained in the West which can be decided with reference to existing (Western) theories of cognitive development. Rather, the issue that lies at the core of the debate between Adorno and Habermas concerns the optimum development of reason itself. Individuals who have attained a high degree of cognitive maturity in Habermas’ sense of that term by no means exhibit the type of enlightened rationality that was the object of Adorno’s speculation in Negative Dialectics and elsewhere. As beneﬁcial as the development of (essentially Kantian) procedures for testing moral principles may be, Adorno would reject the claim that all that is required for reason fully to actualize itself is the deployment of rational procedures to redeem cognitive, normative, and expressive validity claims. In fact, Adorno’s criticisms extend to this notion of reason itself.

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With his colonization thesis, Habermas maintains that what belongs “to the idiosyncratic traits of Western culture is not scientiﬁc rationality as such, but its hypostatization.” In the West today, cognitive-instrumental rationality has achieved “a one-sided dominance not only in our dealings with external nature, but also in our understanding of the world and in the communicative practice of everyday life.”15 This development is one-sided because reason cannot be reduced to cognitive-instrumental rationality; it also embraces moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive dimensions. Nevertheless, while expanding the concept of reason, Habermas adopts a procedural deﬁnition of all these dimensions of validity. Speciﬁc procedures must be deployed if the redemption of any validity claim is to be deemed rational; these procedures are a means to the end of reaching rational agreement. Hence, Habermas actually advances a conception of reason that is fundamentally instrumental in character. To put it in Hegelian terms, he offers a Kantian conception of reason as Verstand, rather than a more dialectical conception of reason as Vernunft. More important, in light of his predecessor’s claims about the pathic Western ratio, Habermas never responds adequately to Adorno’s critique of identity-thinking and the pervasiveness of the identiﬁcatory exchange principle. Critical of reiﬁcation, or of the colonization of the lifeworld by the functionalist rationality of the economic and political subsystems (which instrumentalizes the equally instrumental or strategic orientations of economic and political agents), Habermas nonetheless fails to provide an extended analysis of economic colonization that would respond satisfactorily to Adorno’s concerns about the spread of exchange relations into all areas of human life. This lacuna in his theory is even more glaring given his later discussion of globalization. Moreover, in the lifeworld itself, Habermas takes the identiﬁcatory use of universal concepts as given. When applied exclusively to states of affairs, cognitive-instrumental reason is deemed by Habermas to be unproblematic. For its part, moral-practical reason ﬁnds its goal in reaching agreement about universal norms that apply to everyone equally. The goal of communication is to coordinate action by reaching agreement about what is universally true, universally right, and ethically valid for members of the lifeworld. Paradoxically, given that he rejects the idea of a collective subject of history, the normative content of Habermas’ theory is equally weighted towards the universal: the goal of reaching agreement or understanding evokes the idea of intact intersubjectivity both within lifeworld contexts and, by extension, within the human community as a whole. This idea of intersubjective unity is what glimmers in the ideal presuppositions that inform procedures for redeeming validity claims. Again, agreement is achieved to the extent that everyone would concur that a propositional truth claim, or a moral validity claim, is valid for everyone.16 For Habermas, Westerners already approximate the ideal content of the presuppositions of argumentation; they make these idealizing assumptions “as a

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matter of fact ” whenever they engage seriously in argumentation.17 This is why Habermas believes that Western thought in its current form already exhibits a high degree of rationality. In the political realm as well, Western societies display a high degree of rationality because the normative principles on which constitutional democracies are based are discursively redeemed and redeemable by citizens in the public sphere. Selfdetermination – the normative core of liberal democracies – involves just this discursive redemption of normative principles. Of course, Adorno is famous for his claim that the whole is the false18 – or that society is currently irrational because the drive for self-preservation has been self-destructively harnessed to interests that are only apparently universal. “Measured by complete reason [an ein voller Vernunft],” Adorno wrote, “the prevailing one unveils itself as being polarized and thus irrational even in itself, according to its principle” (ND, 317). Once the pursuit of self-preservation had been surrendered to the state – which is supposed to represent the interests of the species as a whole – “the general rationality” was placed “at odds with the particular human beings whom it must negate to become general” (ND, 318). To counter the now universal sway of the exchange principle – under which individuals subordinate themselves to the pursuit of particular interests in proﬁt and power in order to preserve themselves – Adorno prized the individuality that ﬁrst emerged during the heyday of liberalism. Even though he insists that the particular must not usurp the universal, because its one-sided predominance would only invoke “a complementary ideology” by concealing “how much the particular has come to be a function of the universal” (ND, 313), Adorno also endorses the view that “extreme individuation is the placeholder for humanity.”19 In contrast to Habermas, then, what Adorno considers rational today is not the promotion of abstract universality, but of concrete particularity. Under late capitalism, the universal already holds sway in a distorted form: “the being-in-itself of the universal” is now inﬂicted on individuals “all the way into their innermost core” (ND, 315; translation modiﬁed). Emancipatory politics “ought not, therefore, propound the abstract equality of men even as as idea.” Rather, it “should point to the bad equality today, the identity of those with interests in ﬁlms and weapons, and conceive the better state as one in which people could be different without fear” (MM, 103). Only the redemption of damaged particulars will serve as a corrective to the false universality of late capitalism. Such redemption would entail that individuals become completely unfettered from the offers of satisfaction that are currently made available to them in commodiﬁed form. At the same time, they would participate actively in economic and political decision-making in order to secure the satisfaction of their needs and the pursuit of their freely generated interests. In the realm of knowledge as well, rational thought would accommodate particularity such that particular objects and universal concepts reciprocally inﬂuence and shape one

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another. Enlightened reason will emerge only when a differentiated, and emphatically articulated, reconciliation between universal and particular (society and its subjects, concepts and objects) comes to the fore. If Adorno accentuates the negative and Habermas stresses the positive features of modernity, their views are not simply the torn halves of a critical theory that could one day be put back together again. Their ideas about enlightenment also conﬂict owing to their irreconcilable views about the relationship between reason and the material or somatic dimension of human existence. Adorno argues that the Western ratio will become enlightened only when it is harnessed far more emphatically than it currently is to the drive for self-preservation. Rather than praising the diremption of reason from somatically based drives, Adorno not only maintains that reason is currently motivated and shaped by the drive for self-preservation, he also believes that reason ought to remain oriented towards the goal of self-preservation. A rationally organized society would serve the goal of preserving “its societalized subjects according to their unfettered potentialities.”20 Here Adorno reiterates his claim that a rational society must accommodate individuals qua particulars in order to overcome the suffering caused when the drive for self-preservation unilaterally favours the proﬁt-making and power-seeking ventures of particular individuals who claim falsely to represent the general interest. Inextricably tied to the drive for self-preservation and oriented towards the normative goal of the preservation of the species as a whole, Adorno’s dialectically inﬂected concept of reason stands in sharp contrast to Habermas’ procedural conception of communicative reason with its orientation to reaching understanding. Agreeing with Kant, who thought that enlightenment could be attained only on the condition that individuals are granted the freedom “to make public use of [their] reason at every point,”21 Habermas believes that this freedom currently obtains owing to the uncoupling of system and lifeworld which has released lifeworld members from many of the burdens of political and economic decisionmaking. The economic and political realms are responsible for the material welfare of society as a whole; the material preservation of the species now falls to the functionally rational capitalist economy and the welfare state. Furthermore, where Adorno thought that surrendering the task of self-preservation to the economy and the state had resulted in the domination of exchange relations over all aspects of human and non-human life, Habermas believes that it has given lifeworld members much greater freedom to engage in time-consuming processes of reaching understanding about their objective, social, and subjective worlds because they are no longer burdened with the demands of the struggle for survival. Communicative reason is tied to self-preservation only to the extent that communicative action is responsible for the symbolic reproduction of society. Unlike instrumental reason, then, “communicative reason cannot be subsumed without resistance under a blind self-preservation” (TCA I, 398).

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I argued in Chapter 1 that Habermas’ distinction between the realm of material reproduction and the realm of symbolic reproduction is ideologically suspect because it surreptitiously reproduces the division between manual and mental labour. If mental labour, which has historically been deemed superior to manual labour, requires manual labour in order to sustain itself, so too the symbolic labour of lifeworld members relies on the material reproduction of human life. At one point, Habermas acknowledges this himself when he argues that “maintenance of the material substratum of the lifeworld is a necessary condition for maintaining its symbolic structures” (TCA II, 151). This admission makes it all the more difﬁcult to understand the basis for Habermas’ claim that symbolic reproduction deﬁnes the pattern of society as a whole. Indeed, his division of labour between symbolic and material reproduction tends to mask the simple fact that lifeworld members are also employees or workers who are engaged daily in the struggle for survival – that is, in the struggle materially to support themselves and their families. This struggle is tied inextricably to the successes and failures of the proﬁt-making ventures of the owners of the means of production and their power-seeking allies. Admittedly, to acknowledge this simple fact by no means demonstrates conclusively that communicative reason is tied to the drive for selfpreservation. At the same time, however, it should be obvious that lifeworld members must spend a substantial portion of their lives within the subsystems in pursuit of the resources they need to sustain themselves materially. In the ﬁnal analysis, they can acquire these resources only by subordinating themselves to “systemic imperatives of self-preservation that develop their force objectively” by operating through them in their capacity as workers (TCA I, 398). Inasmuch as lifeworld members are also agents of the subsystems, then, they are motivated by imperatives of self-preservation. Furthermore, these imperatives are not absent from the lifeworld itself. For, if material reproduction is a necessary condition for symbolic reproduction, and the functionalist rationality that animates material reproduction can, in fact, be subsumed “under a blind self-preservation,” then the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld is, at the very least, indirectly linked to self-preservation. To the extent that the lifeworld contributes to its own material reproduction in the ways outlined at the end of Chapter 1, it is also tied directly to the drive for self-preservation. In Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas was already attempting to sever reason from self-preservation when he argued that reason is not a simple organ for adaptation to the environing world because the libido detaches itself from “the behavioral system of self-preservation” when it “urges toward utopian fuﬁllment.” Emancipatory interests (in the good life, for example) “do not initially accord with the requirement of collective self-preservation.” Hence, unlike Adorno, who emphatically links our emancipatory interests in a rational society to self-preservation, Habermas

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maintains that knowledge is an instrument that “transcends mere selfpreservation.”22 In Chapter 3, however, I questioned his claim about the diremption of reason from the drives. By linguistifying needs, Habermas confuses the linguistic articulation of needs with needs themselves. He also makes it difﬁcult to understand what motivates human behaviour, including communicative action. Reaching agreement may be the telos of communicative action, but it is not at all clear that this goal is the sole motivation for communicative action. For one can always ask a further question: Agreement for what purpose? Understanding to what end? The goal of reaching agreement on validity claims is always pursued within particular contexts that deﬁne the aims such agreement will serve. What motivates individuals to pursue these further aims is moot.23 I also objected that Habermas offers an unacceptably idealist conception of reason when he argues that communicative reason is entirely independent of any sort of material base or substratum. The uncoupling of system from lifeworld, or the uncoupling of the domain of material reproduction from that of symbolic reproduction, only recapitulates this idealist tendency in his work. It is on the basis of this problematic division of labour alone that Habermas can plausibly argue that communication is not entangled in domination to the point where “each communicative step is falsifying truth and selling it out” (ND, 41). To cite Simon Jarvis, Habermas and his followers develop a theory in which communication is the grounding element of society, and social conﬂict is what is grounded, because the reifying functionalist rationality of the subsystems is itself derived from the more multivalent communicative reason. In contrast to this, Adorno refuses to “accept a ﬁxated separation, even a methodological or procedural one, between a theory of communication and a model of social conﬂict.”24 In Adorno’s view, communication will always be entangled in domination – it will remain nothing more than “the noise that drowns out the silence of the spellbound” (ND, 348) – until we recognize (to quote Jarvis again) “that society is not pure culture, not subjectivity and not (only) intersubjectivity.”25 This recognition also makes it imperative to challenge Habermas who (like the phenomenologists from whom he borrows his concept of the lifeworld) posits a relatively pure and untainted realm of symbolic interaction that is affected by the subsystems only “from outside,” and that is completely dirempted from somatically based drives. Against such a view, Adorno argues that communication today is entangled in identity-thinking and inﬁltrated by the imperatives of exchange. Free and uncoerced communicative interaction “cannot be separated from the idea of a free society”26 in which people would not only think for themselves, but make important decisions about their political and economic fate. Adorno wants to direct the natural drive for self-preservation, which has blindly impelled the course of our history thus far, towards the emphatically rational end of a free society.27 Indeed, Adorno’s critical theory is not

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so much an epistemological or aesthetic theory (though it is also both of these), as it is an ethically motivated and oriented theory. In this respect Adorno remains faithful to the programme outlined by Horkheimer in “Traditional and Critical Theory.” Even his reﬂections on epistemology and aesthetics are thoroughly imbued with the ethical concern for the redemption of the particular and its reconcilation with the universal in the interest of creating an enlightened society – a goal which requires, in the ﬁrst instance, the self-critical spirit of reason. As I remarked at the end of Chapter 5, the normative dimension of critical theory is precisely what distinguishes it from traditional philosophies and scientiﬁc theories. Consequently, if Habermas were correct when he contends that the normative basis of Adorno’s theory is problematic, Adorno would effectively be discredited as a critical theorist. In Chapter 4, however, I argued that Adorno does have a viable normative basis for his social criticism with the emphatic ideas or concepts that he borrows from enlightenment. By contrast, Habermas not only fails to clarify the normative grounds for his own criticism, he uncritically absorbs the tension between the real and the ideal to such an extent that he ends by undermining what some commentators have taken to be the normative foundations of his social criticism. Presupposing in an entirely afﬁrmative fashion that society is already rational, Habermas ﬁnally refuses to allow the normative content of his ideal presuppositions – with its glimmer of intact intersubjectivity – to ground his critique. When he takes the risky decision to portray the real as rational, Habermas effectively abandons the ethical orientation that distinguishes a critical theory of society from traditional theories. In the introduction to Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, J. M. Bernstein remarks that what is striking about Adorno is just “the ethical intensity of his writing.” Yet Bernstein also concedes that the ethical dimension of Adorno’s theory may appear to offer only “a partial and limited perspective” on life under late capitalism because it focuses relentlessly “on what distorts and corrupts what is of worth.” As Habermas himself argues when he criticizes Adorno for his biased focus on existing tendencies towards reiﬁcation to the virtual exclusion of counter-tendencies, Adorno accentuates the negative over the positive features of social life today. Although there is also a positive dimension to Adorno’s negative dialectics, it is certainly not unfair to say that his is a “sombre ethical vision of a world grown inhuman in which the primary task of the intellectual had become critical vigilance.” However, Bernstein offers a defence of Adorno’s “pessimism” that I would like to take up and supplement here. Describing Adorno’s ethical partiality for the negative as “a risk he felt compelled to make without believing it could be unconditionally justiﬁed,” Bernstein adds that “the justiﬁcation for this partiality is that through it we can gain an insight into (acquire knowledge of) our ethical predicament that cannot be had in any other way.”28 Adorno conveyed a similar idea when he cited

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F. H. Bradley in his epigraph to Part Two of Minima Moralia: “Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.” To know the worst, theorists must maintain a critical distance from the damaged reality on which they reﬂect. Along with his descriptive claim that thought always distances itself from its objects by virtue of its universality, Adorno argued in Minima Moralia that critical thought ought to “aim beyond its target just because it never quite reaches it” (MM, 127). What is essential to criticism of reiﬁed social reality “is an element of exaggeration, of over-shooting the object, of self-detachment from the weight of the factual, so that instead of merely reproducing being it can, at once rigorous and free, determine it” (MM, 126–7). Even though he rejects Hegel’s notion of speculation as excessively positive, Adorno praises both Hegel and Nietzsche for their view of the life of the mind as a form of play: “The unbarbaric side of philosophy is its tacit awareness of the element of irresponsibility, of blitheness springing from the volatility of thought, which forever escapes what it judges.” In giving preponderance to the object, critical theorists must also bring into play the more universal, “diversionary” aspects of thought which positivists would reject as “mental disorder,” or “mere wrongness,” owing to their obsession with facts (MM, 127). Adopting his own version of determinate negation, Adorno nonetheless criticizes Hegel for lacking sympathy with “the utopian particular that has been buried beneath the universal – with that non-identity that will not come into being until realized reason [verwirklichte Vernunft] has left the particular reason of the universal behind” (ND, 318; translation modiﬁed). The element of exaggeration, which takes thought beyond the realm of the merely factual, is also what gives thought the power to unearth the utopian dimension of particularity because this element enables thought to thrive in “the medium of virtuality, of anticipation that cannot be wholly fulﬁlled by any single piece of actuality” (MM, 127). Intimating what might yet be – the better potential that lies within damaged life – this medium simultaneously casts a negative light on existing conditions, revealing that they fail to make good on the promise they contain: what is, is not yet what it ought to be according to its own immanent potential. The negativity that pervades Adorno’s work stems from his ethical judgement that the real is not yet rational, or the whole is the false. Yet Adorno admits that this judgement is exaggerated in a different sense to the one I have described above. It is exaggerated, not simply because it transcends the given, but also, and correlatively, because it does not adequately reﬂect the given, or the human predicament under late capitalism. Following Michael Theunissen,29 Jarvis remarks correctly that stark pronouncements such as “the whole is the false” should not be read entirely literally “because if taken with total literalness they are not thinkable.” Jarvis continues: “In the very act of thinking such a claim we provide ourselves with evidence of the extent to which it is untrue.”30 The element

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of exaggeration in Adorno’s negative judgements consists in his virtually blanket condemnation of conditions in which prospects for redemption and reconciliation nonetheless faintly glimmer. Statements such as “the whole is the false” are untrue because they do not acknowledge that it is only in and through such falsity that truth can appear to us at all. At the end of “Individuum und Organisation,” Adorno refers again to the dialectic of progress when he writes: “We may not know what people are and what the correct arrangement of human affairs should be, but we do know what they should not be and what arrangement of human affairs is false. Only in this particular and concrete knowledge is the other positive one open to us.”31 However, if Adorno’s strong condemnation of conditions under late capitalism must always be played against the weak light of redemption that issues from these conditions themselves, his exaggerated criticisms are not, for all that, superﬂuous. In “Theory of Pseudo-Culture,” where he condemns the web of socialization that divests consciousness of selfdetermination to such an extent that it now destructively “clings to the approved elements of culture as an inalienable right,”32 Adorno concedes that there is “convincing empirical evidence to refute the thesis of the withering of culture.” At the same time, he insists that this thesis must not be rejected simply because it is exaggerated. Admitting, then, that his thesis about the universality of pseudo-culture “is simplistic and exaggerated,” Adorno wants to retain this concept, and others like it, because what they purport to do is, “not to include all peoples and classes indiscriminately but rather to give shape to a tendency, to sketch the physiognomy of a spirit which also determines the signature of an age, even if its validity is limited both quantitatively and qualitatively.” Casting a damning light on reiﬁed conditions, these concepts “deserve to be represented even if this does not square with statistics.”33 In other words, by exaggerating the negative, Adorno is responding to the ethical demand that things ought not to be like this, that damaged reality ought to change. Knowing the worst is a precondition for altering a situation where things are already bad. What ultimately impels this ethical demand is the horror that was Germany under the Third Reich. Here, even Adorno’s strongest condemnations of the human predicament fall far short of their mark. Even his exaggeration pales. In Nazi Germany, the faint glimmer of redemption was completely extinguished. Pointing to “the worst,” Adorno wants us to recognize just how bad things are in order to satisfy the new categorical imperative that nothing like this should ever happen again (ND, 365). Under National Socialism, identity-thinking emerged in its most barbaric and repulsive form. To cite Bernstein: “Nowhere else in history has the terrifying proximity of spiritual death and physical death been so emphatically realized.”34 Even before the Nazis physically exterminated millions of people in the camps, they had already succeeded in systematically eradi-

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cating their humanity while leaving their bodies alive: “what occurred was hence the most elaborate and extreme literal process of reiﬁcation.”35 That Auschwitz “could happen in the midst of the traditions of philosophy, of art, and of the enlightening sciences” suggests far more than that “these traditions and their spirit lacked the power to take hold of men and work a change in them.” It also reveals “an untruth in these ﬁelds themselves” (ND, 366). During the age of enlightenment, autonomy, spontaneity, and freedom were no sooner fostered than they were completely subverted. In a world “whose law is universal individual proﬁt,” individuals have been compelled to submit to a form of integration so complete, so far-reaching, that Adorno compares it to genocide. “Even in his formal freedom,” he writes, “the individual is as fungible and replaceable as he will be under the liquidators’ boots” (ND, 362). If, in Negative Dialectics, Adorno speaks about the direct line leads from the slingshot to the bomb, he makes the same point with different emphasis earlier in Minima Moralia when he refers to the “straight line” (MM, 183) that led from thraldom to reifying exchange relations, from being compelled to exercise “distorted instincts in collectively approved and proper ways” (MM, 182), to “Gestapo torturers and the bureaucrats of the gaschambers” (MM, 183). That unspeakable atrocities occurred in Nazi Germany is not the only point which Adorno makes here. He is also implying that we could all have been, and might yet well become, Gestapo torturers and bureaucrats of the gas chambers. In other words, what happened in Nazi Germany could be repeated elsewhere. It is precisely this horrifying prospect that animated Adorno’s exaggerations, his ethical partiality for the negative. Nazi Germany was the product of conditions that obtain even now in the West. Indeed, with globalization, we are caught in the web of exchange relations to a far greater extent than Adorno had diagnosed. Reiﬁcation, or the sacriﬁce of heteronomy in the name of homogeneity or identity, not only persists, it has grown by leaps and bounds. Given the everincreasing subordination of human relations and behaviour to the homogenizing power of exchange relations, the individual currently regresses all the more fatefully to the status of a lifeless thing, a mere object, that can be manipulated and controlled by interests as irrational as they are inescapable. Conformity is one of the major consequences of the monopoly system which conﬁnes individuals in both “body and soul” to such an extent that “they fall helpless victim to what is offered to them.”36 The forces that once made resistance possible are now paralysed. Clearly then, Adorno neither explains what occurred in Germany, nor fears its possible recurrence elsewhere, on the basis of the view – rejected by many Jewish thinkers – that humanity is fundamentally evil. Habermas agrees with Adorno when he criticizes Joachim Fest (an editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) for attributing opposing views about the moral signiﬁcance of Auschwitz to a partiality for pessimistic or optimistic

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interpretations of history. Although Habermas will proceed to repeat his long-standing criticism of Adorno’s “intuitions” as “one-sided,” he remarks that the “practical conclusions suggested by pessimistic interpretations of history” themselves differ, “depending on whether one holds the wickedness of human nature accountable for the constants of disaster or conceives of them as socially produced.” Here, Habermas attributes to Gehlen the view that humanity is fundamentally evil, while opposing Gehlen’s interpretation to Adorno’s equally pessimistic view that “the constants of disaster” are socially produced.37 As we have seen, Adorno claims that the West exhibits totalitarian tendencies because social conditions in Western societies “command all moments of human and interhuman immediacy,” diminishing our capacity “to recall that this web has evolved” (ND, 358). At his most pessimistic, then, Adorno criticized, not individuals per se, but what existing social, political, and economic conditions have made of them. That these conditions might give rise to another Holocaust is what compelled Adorno to opt for knowing the worst, rather than merely complaining that things are bad. Attempting to provide a less “one-sided,” or pessimistic, assessment of the West which takes into account both its tendencies and countertendencies, Habermas refuses to sanction Adorno’s ethical partiality for the negative. This refusal is linked in part to Habermas’ claim, expressed most strongly in his debate with revisionist historians in the mid-1980s, that Nazi Germany was a unique historical occurrence. Writing the day after Ernst Nolte published his controversial revisionist account of Nazi Germany in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 6 June 1986, Habermas ﬁnds it “astonishing” that Nolte should attempt “to make Auschwitz unexceptional by remarking, among other things, that with the sole exception of the technical procedure of gassing, what the Nazis did had already been described in an extensive literature dating from the early 1920s.” Indeed, Nolte also suggests that the Gulag Archipelago was more “original” than Auschwitz, while arguing that Nazism was “merely a response to the Bolshevist threat of annihilation.”38 Strongly objecting to this assessment of the Third Reich, Habermas observes rightly that Nolte effectively relativizes the atrocities committed in Nazi Germany when he claims that these atrocities were not unique. Against this morally repugnant relativism, Habermas insists that levelling comparisons not be used “to play down the fact that no one can take our place in the liability required of us.”39 This debate between Habermas and revisionist historians concerning the signiﬁcance of the years between 1933 and 1945 revolves around the word “unique.” However, I want to argue here that the claim that Nazi Germany was unique cuts both ways. For the thesis that Nazi Germany was a unique occurrence also implies that it was a singular, unrepeatable event. When he frames the issue as one that concerns the need for Germans to come to terms with their uniquely aberrant history, then,

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Habermas suggests that what happened in Germany will never recur there, or anywhere else, precisely because it was unique. If it is true to say that many Germans have yet to come to terms with that period in their history (and it is undoubtedly the case that many have not, or will not, do so), Habermas also seems to believe that Nazi Germany lingers only in memory, in a past that some Germans would like to bury through forgetfulness or, in the case of Nolte and other historians, by relativizing it, or more recently and perhaps more problematically still, by diverting attention to the suffering of Germans after their defeat in World War II. And, where Habermas’ own mindfulness of the past is exhibited on the theoretical level in his conﬂictive universalism – which at one and the same time denies the existence of a collective subject in order to ward off the ghosts of the past, and raises the spectre of that collective subject to the same end – what Adorno ultimately contests is the very “pastness” of that past.40 Without a doubt, historians such as Nolte are morally wrong to relativize the Holocaust when they focus on what is “unoriginal” about the techniques used by the Nazis to exterminate their victims. For his part, however, Adorno does not argue that nothing uniquely horriﬁc, in Nolte’s sense of the word “unique,” occurred during the Third Reich. Instead, he argues that we must remain vigilant so that Auschwitz is never repeated. And, for Adorno, once again, the problem is precisely that something like Auschwitz could recur even today. If Habermas’ work exhibits its own problematic universalistic defence against the legacy of Nazism in Germany, Adorno believed that the best defence against the resurgence of fascism involves not only the championing of particularity on the theoretical level, but a thorough understanding of conditions which, even now, may produce regressive social and political movements precisely because individuals remain under the spell of the universal exchange principle. Indeed, the majority of individuals are far more habituated to following others than to thinking for themselves. Unlike Kant, however, Adorno does not believe that this herd mentality is the result of laziness or lack of courage. As he explains in “The Meaning of Working through the Past:” “The economic order, and to a great extent also the economic organization modeled upon it, now as then renders the majority of people dependent upon conditions beyond their control and thus maintains them in a state of political immaturity.” Repeating a remark he makes countless times throughout his work, Adorno claims that individuals who want to survive under existing conditions have little choice but to submit to these conditions. In the interest of self-preservation, they are forced to “negate precisely that autonomous subjectivity to which the idea of democracy appeals; they can preserve themselves only if they renounce their self.”41 In this essay too, Adorno admits readily that he has “exaggerated the somber side” in his work. However, he explicitly justiﬁes his accentuation

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of the negative by appealing to “the maxim that only exaggeration per se today can be the medium of truth.” At the same time, he warns that his pessimism must not be confused with that of conservative critics such as Oswald Spengler who make “common cause with the catastrophe.” His exaggeration serves to illuminate an objective historical tendency42 which, in answer to a question following his lecture, he repeats may be found in other Western countries as well. This tendency exists in all societies where “the immense concentration of economical and administrative power leaves the individual no more room to maneuver,” that is, where society “tends toward totalitarian forms of domination.”43 Unlike Habermas, then, who also gives theoretical expression to his ethical condemnation of the Holocaust, Adorno exaggerates the negative with the aim of reminding us, not only that the conditions which produced the Holocaust remain in effect and may even have intensiﬁed, but that they could lead to a resurgence of that horror. To conclude my defence of Adorno, I shall simply assert that his unremitting pessimism, his exaggeration of the sombre side, which Habermas rejects as partial and one-sided, is ethically justiﬁed on the basis that we have not yet created a society in which it is no longer possible for radical evil to triumph.

Notes

Introduction 1 For a discussion of these and other aspects of critical theory, readers should consult the following intellectual histories: Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–50, Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1973, and Rolf Wiggershaus’ The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Signiﬁcance, trans. Michael Robertson, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994. 2 Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell, New York: Herder and Herder, Inc., 1972, p. 199. 3 Theodor W. Adorno, “Critique,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 283. 4 Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, op. cit., p. 561. 5 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989, p. 176. 6 Ibid., p. 180. 7 Theodor W. Adorno, “Discussion of Professor Adorno’s Lecture ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 296. 8 Idem, “Opinion Delusion Society,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 119. 9 Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory, op. cit., p. 217. 10 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Continuum, 1973, p. 204. Cited henceforth in the Introduction as ND. 11 Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory, op. cit., p. 220. 12 Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996, p. xli. 13 Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 145. 14 Ibid., p. 148. 15 Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory, op. cit., p. 204. See also Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1941. 16 Jürgen Habermas, “Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity,” in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992, p. 186. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987, p. 40, Habermas explains

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Notes

that, though he too endorses Hegel’s attempt to reconcile universal and particular, his model is different from Hegel’s because he wants to achieve reconciliation through “the higher-level intersubjectivity of an uncoerced formation of will within a communication community existing under constraints toward cooperation.” Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, op. cit., p. 54. According to Wiggershaus in The Frankfurt School, op. cit., p. 540, Habermas believed that “Marx’s thought was signiﬁcant for the present day not as a critique of capitalism but rather as a theory of reiﬁcation.” Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987, p. 343. Cited henceforth in the Introduction as TCA II. Marx’s letter is quoted by Seyla Benhabib in Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 34. Adorno cites this letter himself in “Critique,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 282. Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, op. cit., p. 35. Andrew Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 78. Jürgen Habermas, “Morality, Society, and Ethics: An Interview with Torben Hviid Nielsen,” in Justiﬁcation and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1993, p. 170. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, op. cit., p. 540. Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, op. cit., p. 63. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reﬂections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, London: New Left Books, 1974, p. 47. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 30. Ibid., p. 10. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, p. 377. Dahrendorf’s review of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which appeared in the Frankfurter Hefte, is cited by Rolf Wiggershaus in The Frankfurt School, op. cit., p. 561.

1 Society 1 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, p. 355. Cited henceforth in Chapter 1 as TCA I. See Chapter 3 for further discussion of this term. 2 Georg Lukács, “Reiﬁcation and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1971, p. 153. 3 Ibid., p. 93. 4 Ibid., p. 91. 5 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987, p. 330. Cited henceforth in Chapter 1 as TCA II. 6 Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Research 9, 2 (1941), p. 207. 7 Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, New York: Octagon Books, 1963, p. 261.

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8 See Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory, trans. Benjamin Gregg, Cambridge, Mass., and London: The MIT Press, 1985, p. 81; David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980, pp. 63–4; William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London: The MIT Press, 1994, p. 124; and Douglas Kellner, Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, pp. 62–3. 9 In the next few pages, I shall be revising sections of my article, “Adorno on Late Capitalism: Totalitarianism and the Welfare State.” This article ﬁrst appeared in Radical Philosophy 89 (May/June 1998), and is reprinted here with permission. 10 Theodor W. Adorno, “Reﬂexionen zur Klassentheorie,” in Soziologische Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 385. Cited henceforth in Chapter 1 as RK. 11 Idem, “Society,” trans. Fredric Jameson, Salmagundi 3, 10–11 (1969–70), p. 148. Cited henceforth in Chapter 1 as S. 12 Neumann, Behemoth, op. cit., p. 365. 13 Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” trans. Fred van Gelder, in Modern German Sociology, eds V. Meja, D. Misgeld and N. Stehr, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, p. 232. Cited henceforth in Chapter 1 as LC. 14 Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, op. cit., p. 63. 15 Theodor W. Adorno, “Diskussionsbeitrag zu ‘Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft?’,” in Soziologische Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 583. 16 Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception, op. cit., p. 124. Criticizing the dystopian view which commentators such as Scheuerman attribute to him, Adorno wrote: “The rigidiﬁed institutions, the relations of production, are not Being as such, but even in their omnipotence they are man-made and revocable. In their relationship to the subjects from which they originate and which they enclose, they remain thoroughly antagonistic. Not only does the whole demand its own modiﬁcation in order not to perish, but by virtue of its antagonistic essence it is also impossible for it to extort that complete identity with human beings that is relished in negative utopias.” See “Progress,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 156. 17 The claim that the welfare state was developed in order to pacify class conﬂict is challenged by Herman Van der Wee. In brief, this economic historian argues that after World War II, John Maynard Keynes’ policy of “full employment, social security, income redistribution, and mutual co-operation” was adopted primarily as a means to the end of economic growth. Countries such as Britain, Sweden, the USA, France, and Italy “went over to economic planning in order to be able to specify extra-high growth rates and ensure that they were achieved.” See Van der Wee’s Prosperity and Upheaval: The World Economy, 1945–1980, trans. Robin Hogg and Max R. Hall, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986, p. 283. 18 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 152. 19 Adorno, “Diskussionsbeitrag,” Soziologische Schriften I, op. cit., p. 584. 20 Neumann argued that the National Socialist economy had two characteristics: it was “a monopolistic economy” and “a command economy” – a conjunction Neumann described with the phrase “totalitarian monopoly capitalism.” In other words, the German economy under the Third Reich was “a private

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monopolistic economy, regimented by the totalitarian state” (Behemoth, op. cit., p. 261). Acknowledging, then, that aspects of a command economy had been adopted, Neumann proceeded to examine the extent of state intervention in the economy, taking into account the state’s direct economic activities, its control over prices, investments, proﬁts, and foreign trade and labour. On the basis of this examination, he concluded that economic activity in the Third Reich had preserved much of its former autonomy. However, since the economy had been monopolized by large industrial and business concerns, proﬁts could not be “made and retained without totalitarian political power” (Behemoth, op. cit., p. 354). This is allegedly what distinguished Nazi Germany from other Western countries (though, given the growing monopoly on capital in these countries, one can only wonder why totalitarian monopoly capitalism arose only in Nazi Germany). Apart from the descriptors “advanced capitalist,” and “late capitalist,” Habermas also uses the terms “postliberal,” “postconventional,” and “modern” to describe Western society. Habermas’ theory of rationalization will be treated at greater length in Chapter 3. See TCA I, 340: “To the degree that the institutionalized production of knowledge that is specialized according to cognitive, normative, and aesthetic validity claims penetrates to the level of everyday communication and replaces traditional knowledge in its interaction-guiding functions, there is a rationalization of everyday practice that is accessible only from the perspective of action oriented to reaching understanding.” Thomas McCarthy, “Complexity and Democracy: Or the Seducements of Systems Theory,” in Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, eds Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, pp. 127–33. For Habermas’ response to this criticism, see “A Reply,” p. 259, in the same collection of essays. For example, some commentators have argued that Habermas adopted a systems-theoretical or functionalist perspective on society precisely because he could not otherwise account for “the problem of the unintended results of action.” See Thomas McCarthy, Communicative Action, op. cit., p. 121; and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 230–1. However, as I point out below, Hans Joas ultimately dismisses this claim, which he attributes to Habermas himself, arguing that the problem of unintended results of action cannot in the end be a “compelling reason” for adopting a functionalist perspective because many theories have successfully accommodated unintended consequences without resorting to functionalism. See Hans Joas, “The Unhappy Marriage of Hermeneutics and Functionalism,” in Communicative Action, op. cit., p. 109. See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Continuum, 1973, pp. 203–4: Society must be so organized that its telos would consist in negating “the physical suffering of even the least of its members, and to negate the internal reﬂexive forms of that suffering. By now, this negation in the interest of all can be realized only in a solidarity that is transparent to itself and all the living.” Hans Joas, “The Unhappy Marriage of Hermeneutics and Functionalism,” in Communicative Action, op. cit., pp. 113–14. Joas bases his claim about Habermas’ fear of regression on the latter’s speech in Stuttgart on the occasion of receiving the Hegel Prize in 1973. This fear is reiterated later in “Justice and Solidarity: On the Discussion Concerning ‘Stage 6’,” trans. S. Weber Nicholsen, in

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Hermeneutics and Critical Theory in Ethics and Politics, ed. M. Kelly, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990, p. 47. Here Habermas criticizes the authoritarian form of solidarity and collectivity in Nazi Germany where “fellowship” was “combined with followership.” Jürgen Habermas, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. Max Pensky, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001, p. 74. Ibid., p. 78. I discuss this shift in Habermas’ thinking at the end of Chapter 2. Like Adorno, Habermas also follows Marx in deﬁning the concept of class. This deﬁnition may be inferred from the following passage: “With the institutionalization of class conﬂict, the social antagonism bred by private disposition over the means of producing social wealth loses its structure-forming power for the lifeworlds of social groups, although it does remain constitutive for the structure of the economic system” (TCA II, 348). Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996, p. 385. Cited henceforth in Chapter 1 as BFN. In the ﬁnal section of this chapter, I offer a more extensive and critical discussion of Habermas’ concept of the lifeworld. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987, p. 314. Ibid., p. 314. In “A Reply,” in Communicative Action, op. cit., p. 254, Habermas argues that the distinction between system and lifeworld is not based on the differences between hermeneutic and strategic modes of action coordination (or, by extension, on the differences between communicative and functionalist rationality). See also TCA I, p. 342: “Thus there is a competition not between the types of action oriented to understanding and to success, but between principles of societal integration – between the mechanism of linguistic communication that is oriented to validity claims – a mechanism that emerges in increasing purity from the rationalization of the lifeworld – and those de-linguistiﬁed steering media through which systems of success-oriented action are differentiated out.” Habermas, “A Reply,” in Communicative Action, op. cit., p. 254. In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas maintains that “the only functional domains that can be differentiated out of the lifeworld by steering media are those of material reproduction. The symbolic structures of the lifeworld can be reproduced only via the basic medium of communicative action” (TCA II, 261). Indeed, his distinction between system and lifeworld may only provide a different – albeit interesting – gloss on the division between mental and manual labour. Of course, this division of labour is criticized by Marx, who attributed to it the origin of private property. Adorno also criticized this distinction: “Ever since mental and physical labour were separated in the sign of the dominant mind, the sign of justiﬁed privilege, the separated mind has been obliged . . . to vindicate the very claim to dominate which it derives from the thesis that it is primary and original – and to make every effort to forget the source of its claim, lest the claim relapse.” See Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Continuum, 1973, p. 177. See Habermas’ oblique reference to these functions in “A Reply,” in Communicative Action, op. cit., p. 253: “It is always possible to approach from its own perspective the manner in which the lifeworld reproduces the material conditions of its existence.” Without specifying how the lifeworld materially reproduces itself, Habermas immediately remarks: “yet whether these processes have become so opaque and complex as to be inadmissibly foreshortened by being examined from this perspective and can thus be better explained under the

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aspect of system depends on the degree of differentiation within a society.” Given the high degree of differentiation in Western societies, Habermas would opt for a systems perspective on these unnamed, “opaque and complex,” material processes. Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993, p. 106. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York: Random House, 1976, p. 129. Ibid., p. 130. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, New York: Continuum Books, 1972, p. 123. Theodor W. Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology,” trans. Irving N. Wohlfarth, New Left Review 46 (1967), p. 74. Idem, “Die Revidierte Psychoanalyse,” in Soziologische Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 33. Idem, Minima Moralia: Reﬂections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, London: New Left Books, 1974, p. 229. Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995, p. 83. Here Whitebook is citing Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reﬂective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991, p. 284. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Continuum, 1973, p. 147. Cited henceforth in Chapter 1 as ND. Throughout his translation of Negative Dialektik, E. B. Ashton seriously distorts the text when he translates the German “Tausch” as “barter.” In what follows, “Tausch” will be translated as “exchange.” Idem, “Discussion of Professor Adorno’s Lecture ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 296. Idem, “Individuum und Organisation,” in Soziologische Schriften I, op. cit., p. 447. Idem, “Diskussionsbeitrag,” in Soziologische Schriften I, op. cit., p. 584. References to direct domination may also be found in Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 45 and p. 228. See Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics, London and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994, pp. 145–6. See Jürgen Habermas, “Morality, Society, and Ethics: An Interview with Torben Hviid Nielsen,” in Justiﬁcation and Application, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993, pp. 148–9. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 99. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, op. cit., p. 322. Idem, “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1979, p. 141. See also “Apologetic Tendencies,” in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian’s Debate, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989, pp. 223–4, where Habermas twice uses the term “unique” to refer to the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Of course, as Cooke has pointed out, Habermas never denies the presence of strategic action – and thus of relations of domination – within the lifeworld (See Language and Reason, op. cit., p. 20). However, my argument here concerns neither pre-existing power relations in the lifeworld nor the effects of the colonizing incursions of the subsystems. Instead, I am arguing that the instrumentality characteristic of strategic action in the economic and political

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spheres (where the agent uses others to obtain his or her own ends) necessarily insinuates itself into lifeworld contexts because we could completely separate the strategic orientations that characterize our role as employees from our hermeneutic orientation in the lifeworld only by pathologically splitting our personalities. There are other problems with the Invisible Hand. As Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz points out in Globalization and its Discontents (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002, pp. 73–4), the idea that market forces alone will drive “the economy to efﬁcient outcomes as if by an invisible hand” is correct only under “highly restrictive” conditions: “Indeed, more recent advances in economic theory . . . have shown that whenever information is imperfect and markets incomplete, which is to say always . . . then the invisible hand works most imperfectly. Signiﬁcantly, there are desirable government interventions which, in principle, can improve the efﬁciency of the market.” See TCA II, p. 150: The goal-directed actions of lifeworld members “are coordinated not only through processes of reaching understanding, but also through functional interconnections that are not intended by them and are usually not even perceived within the horizon of everyday practice.” Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, op. cit., p. 46. Interestingly, Habermas recognizes that the “contrast between the homme who is educated to freedom and humanity in the intimate sphere and the citoyen who obeys functional necessities in the sphere of social labor was always an ideology,” but he does not succeed in distinguishing his own view from this ideological one. In fact, he seems to imply that he has only given a “different meaning” to this ideological account (TCA II, 387). Habermas, “Morality, Society, and Ethics,” in Justiﬁcation and Application, op. cit., p. 151. Theodor W. Adorno, “Free Time,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p.173. Ibid., p. 167. See Cooke, Language and Reason, op. cit., p. 27. Jeffrey Alexander, “Habermas and Critical Theory: Beyond the Marxian Dilemma?,” in Communicative Action, op. cit., p. 61. In the following few paragraphs I shall draw from some of my arguments in “Critical Perspectives on Solidarity,” Rethinking Marxism 13, 2 (2001), pp. 103–5. In “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender,” in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 115–16), Nancy Fraser makes the following point about child-rearing: “it is not the case that childrearing practices serve symbolic as opposed to material reproduction. Granted, they comprise language teaching and initiation into social mores – but also feeding, bathing, and protection from physical harm. Granted they regulate children’s actions with other people – but also their interactions with physical nature. . . . In short, not just the construction of children’s social identities but also their biological survival is at stake.” Here I am arguing that lifeworld activities other than child-rearing also contribute to material reproduction. See ND, 183ff. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, p. 314. This claim will be examined at greater length in Chapter 3.

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2 Reification 1 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York: Vintage Books, 1976, p. 163. 2 Ibid., p. 129. 3 Ibid., pp. 164–5. 4 Idem, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, New York: Vintage, 1973, pp. 196–7. Cited in Theodor W. Adorno, “Extorted Reconciliation,” in Notes to Literature, Vol. II, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, p. 220. 5 See the translator’s note in Capital, op. cit., p. 209. 6 Marx, Capital, op. cit., p. 165. 7 Andrew Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 62–3. 8 Feenberg cites “On the Jewish Question,” “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” and The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 to illustrate his claim that Marx levelled his criticism of capitalism against a formalistic reason which he targeted for its irrationality. Feenberg also claims that Marx opposed to formalistic reason a naturalistic conception of reason grounded in need. See Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, op. cit., pp. 33–58. 9 Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, op. cit., p. 67. 10 Ibid., p. 63. 11 Georg Lukács, “Reiﬁcation and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1971, p. 92. 12 Ibid., p. 87. 13 Ibid., p. 101. 14 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Continuum Books, 1972, p. 190; translation modiﬁed. Cited henceforth in Chapter 2 as ND. 15 Martin Jay, Adorno, London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984, p. 68. 16 Jürgen Habermas, “Morality, Society, and Ethics: An Interview with Torben Hviid Nielsen,” in Justiﬁcation and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1993, p. 170. In Reiﬁcation or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2002, p. 15), Timothy Bewes make the interesting remark that “the very idea of ‘colonization’ – an idea, as Marx puts it, of ‘virgin soil colonized by free immigrants’ – is structurally analogous to the ‘simple’ concept of reiﬁcation.” However, Bewes never discusses Habermas’ concept of colonization, and he often misinterprets Adorno. 17 Idem, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, p. 355. Cited henceforth in Chapter 2 as TCA I. 18 Idem, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987, p. 343. Cited henceforth in Chapter 2 as TCA II. 19 See Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984, pp. 3–21. 20 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reﬂections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, London: Verso, 1974, p. 23. Cited henceforth in Chapter 2 as MM. 21 Idem, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, New York: Urizen Books, 1978, p. 120.

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22 Idem, “Sociology and Psychology,” trans. Irving N. Wohlfarth, New Left Review 47 (1968), p. 89. Cited henceforth in Chapter 2 as SP II. 23 Idem, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, op. cit., p. 120: “It is not an overstatement if we say that Freud, though he was hardly interested in the political phase of the problem, clearly foresaw the rise and nature of fascist mass movements in purely psychological categories.” 24 Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” in The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 12: Civilization, Society and Religion, trans. James Strachey, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 100. 25 Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, op. cit., p. 130. 26 Idem, “Die Revidierte Psychoanalyse,” in Sociologische Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 33. Cited henceforth in Chapter 2 as RP. 27 Idem, “Sociology and Psychology,” trans. Irving N. Wohlfarth, New Left Review 46 (1967), p. 74. (This is a translation of the ﬁrst part of “Zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie.”) See also ND, 277: “Complete weakness of the ego, the subject’s transition to a passive, atomistic, reﬂex-type conduct, is at the same time the well-earned judgment passed upon a ‘person’ in which the economic principle of appropriation has become anthropological.” 28 Idem, “On Subject and Object,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 248. 29 Idem, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?,” trans. Fred van Gelder, in Modern German Sociology, eds V. Meja, D. Misgeld, and N. Stehr, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, p. 238. 30 Idem, “Thesen über Bedürfnis,” in Sociologische Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 393. 31 Ibid., p. 395. 32 Idem, “Individuum und Organisation,” in Sociologische Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 449. 33 Idem, “Sociology and Psychology,” trans. Irving N. Wohlfarth, New Left Review 46 (1967), p. 71. 34 Idem, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?”, op. cit., p. 237. 35 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968, p. 154. 36 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” trans. Nicholas Walker, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 55. 37 Idem, “Reﬂexionen zur Klassentheorie,” in Soziologische Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 380. 38 When I claim that Habermas’ role ascriptions are relatively uncontroversial, I am not ignoring Nancy Fraser’s criticisms of them as gender-biased in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 124–7. For Fraser accepts the usefulness of these ascriptions while pointing out that it is women who generally play the roles of client and consumer, and that men generally play the roles of worker and citizen. Moreover, by adding to this roster of roles the childbearing role, Fraser rightly underscores the fact that the lifeworld also reproduces itself materially – a point I supported at the end of Chapter 1. 39 Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1975, p. 75. 40 Ibid., p. 76. 41 Ibid., p. 77.

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42 Ibid., pp. 80–4. 43 Ibid., p. 76. 44 Idem, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996, pp. 78–9. Cited henceforth in Chapter 2 as BFN. 45 See Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994, p. 140. 46 Ibid., p. 191n59. 47 Habermas nowhere states clearly what causes colonization. At times he suggests that the complexity or density of the subsystems – which he views elsewhere in a positive light – is to blame (TCA II, 351). Equally problematic, Habermas sometimes suggests that lifeworld members are to blame because they demand social welfare guarantees in times of economic crisis. In Language and Reason (op. cit., pp. 136–7), Maeve Cooke claims that Habermas offers a Marxian explanation: “the colonization of the lifeworld can ultimately be traced back to class conﬂict.” However, I would counter that, if colonization presupposes the paciﬁcation of class conﬂict (that is, if it takes place only after employees have been “normalized” and citizens “neutralized”), then paciﬁcation is clearly one of the conditions for colonization. This means that paciﬁcation does not cause colonization but merely helps to shape the context in which colonization takes place. In addition, Cooke fails to recognize that Habermas also traces colonization back to the rationalization of the lifeworld, to the regulation of interchange relations between system and lifeworld through the roles of client, consumer, citizen, and employee, and ﬁnally to the privatistic motivations and orientations of members of the lifeworld – the three other conditions for colonization mentioned above. 48 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987, pp. 313–14. 49 Ibid., p. 340. 50 The problem of understanding Habermas’ claims about the pathological effects of colonization is made more acute when one considers his claim that “steering media . . . are a substitute for special functions of language” (TCA II, 263). On one interpretation, this may mean that system imperatives simply usurp some of the family’s former functions. Habermas himself only adds to the confusion by calling his colonization thesis a thesis of “internal colonization” (TCA II, 332–73) while arguing at the same time that money and power “do not so much insinuate themselves into the family, establish themselves in systematically distorted communication, and inconspicuously intervene in the formation of the self as, rather, openly come at the family from outside” (TCA II, 388; italics added). Jane Braaten also remarks on this problem in Habermas’s Critical Theory of Society (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991, p. 93): “The colonization of the lifeworld is a process in which communication is replaced by exchanges . . . in a nonlinguistic medium, such as money. This could be taken to mean that a price is put on some communicative task, and its performance is sold as a service. But if the term replacement is taken seriously, this cannot be what is meant. If consensus-oriented communication is replaced with the exchange of money . . . then that communication no longer takes place.” If Braaten is right, it also becomes difﬁcult to understand how colonization distorts communication given that communication is simply “replaced” by steering media. 51 Habermas, “Morality, Society, and Ethics,” in Justiﬁcation and Application, op. cit., p. 149. 52 Idem, “Reﬂections on Communicative Pathology,” in On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Barbara Fultner, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001, p. 161.

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53 James Bohman, “Critical Theory and Democracy,” in The Handbook of Critical Theory, ed. David M. Rasmussen, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, p. 198. 54 At the very end of The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas writes that his theory of modernity should allow us to recognize that in “modern societies there is such an expansion of the scope of contingency for interaction loosed from normative contexts that the inner logic of communicative action ‘becomes practically true’ in the deinstitutionalized forms of intercourse of the familial private sphere as well as in a public sphere stamped by the mass media” (TCA II, 403). 55 Theodor W. Adorno, “Critique,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 283. 56 Idem, “Opinion Delusion Society,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 121. 57 Ibid., p. 117. 58 Ibid., p. 117; see also the translator’s note, p. 346n18. Nine years later, in “Critique” (Critical Models, op. cit., p. 287), Adorno argues that he is not “underestimating attempts at effective public critique in Germany,” citing once again the “fall of a radical right-wing minister of culture” (Schlüter) as one instance of effective critique. He continues: “However, since that solidarity between students and professors does not exist anywhere now the way it did then in Göttingen, it is doubtful whether something similar could happen again today. It looks to me as though the spirit of public critique, after it was monopolized by political groups and thereby became publicly compromised, has suffered severe setbacks; I hope I am mistaken.” 59 Ibid., p. 118. 60 Ibid., p. 119. 61 Idem, “Kann das Publikum Wollen?”, in Vermischte Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986, p. 343. 62 For a more critical approach to this research see David Sholle, “Resistance: Pinning Down a Wandering Concept in Cultural Studies Discourse,” Journal of Urban and Cultural Studies 1, 1 (1990), pp. 87–105. 63 Jay, Adorno, op. cit., pp. 91–2. 64 See Lasch’s discussion of the “[a]rchaic, punitive, and sadistic elements that predominate in the superegos” of narcissists in The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979, pp. 82–6. 65 Habermas misinterprets Lasch when he claims that his analysis “conﬁrms the fact that signiﬁcant changes in the present escape sociopsychological explanations that start from the Oedipus problematic” (TCA II, 388). Like Adorno, Lasch accounts for narcissism using Freudian categories, including the Oedipus complex; his analysis of narcissism is based on Freud’s instinct theory (see The Culture of Narcissism, op. cit., pp. 80–7). Against this Freudian account, Habermas wants to “recast” the structural model of ego, id, and superego by connecting Freud to George Herbert Mead through object relations theory and ego psychology (TCA II, 389). 66 Habermas, “Reﬂections on Communicative Pathology,” in On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction, op. cit., pp. 161–2. 67 These arguments offer indirect support to Nancy Fraser and Marie Fleming who object that Habermas fails to “recognize the extent to which bourgeois domesticity is organized around relations of domination and subordination.” See Pauline Johnson, “Distorted Communications: Feminism’s Dispute with Habermas,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 27, 1 (2001), p. 43. Yet it should also be clear from “Reﬂections on Communicative Pathology” that Habermas earlier acknowledged that domesticity is distorted by relations of domination and subordination. Contra Johnson, it is also important to recognize that

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Habermas’ view of bourgeois familial relations as fundamentally egalitarian in The Theory of Communicative Action is indispensable for his attempt to distinguish his account of reiﬁcation from that of theorists such as Adorno. For, as I am arguing here, if the family does not serve as a haven in a heartless world, then Habermas would have to admit that the negative effects of the exchange principle on individuals may well be as extensive as Adorno suggests, thereby effacing the “utopian perspective” offered by rationalization. Theodor W. Adorno, “Society,” trans. Fredric Jameson, Salmagundi 3, 10–11 (1969–70), p.152. Hans Joas, “The Unhappy Marriage of Hermeneutics and Functionalism,” in Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, eds Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, p. 112: “The scope of social integration is thus regarded, at least in modern societies, as fundamentally smaller than that of society in general which embraces both system and lifeworld.” In “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy” (The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. Max Pensky, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001, pp. 64–5), Habermas describes the development of national identity in this way: when national consciousness (the “cultural substrate for civil solidarity”) emerges, “the bonds that had formed between members of a concrete community on the basis of personal relationships . . . change into a new, more abstract form. While remaining strangers to one another, members of the same ‘nation’ feel responsible enough for one another that they are prepared to make ‘sacriﬁces’ – as in military service or the burden of redistributive taxation.” Lukács, “Reiﬁcation and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 172. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989, p. 178. Ibid., p. 215. Idem, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” in The Postnational Constellation, op. cit., p. 75. I would like to thank Perry Anderson at New Left Review for alerting me to Habermas’ revised assessment of Western society in The Postnational Constellation. Habermas’ discussion of the impact of globalization on the relationship between the economic and political systems may also be found in “The European Nation-State,” in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, trans. Ciaran Cronin, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998, pp. 120–4. It seems that Habermas is not entirely certain about when this change occurred. In “The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies,” (in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989, p. 56), he was already referring to “the changed constellation” that had transformed the relationship between capitalism and the welfare state, arguing that this constellation “has existed since the 1970s.” Jürgen Habermas, “Learning from Catastrophe?,” in The Postnational Constellation, op. cit., p. 50. Idem, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” in The Postnational Constellation, op. cit., p. 79. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 78. Idem, “The European Nation-State,” in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Polit-

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ical Theory, trans. Ciaran Cronin, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998, p. 122. 83 Idem, “Learning from Catastrophe?,” in The Postnational Constellation, op. cit., p. 50. See also Habermas’ warning about the consequences of globalization in “The European Nation-State,” in The Inclusion of the Other, op. cit., pp. 122–3: “The social consequences of an abdication of politics, which tacitly accepts a chronically high level of unemployment and the dismantling of the welfare state as the price to be paid for international competitiveness, are already discernible in the OECD countries. The sources of social solidarity are drying up, with the result that social conditions of the former Third World are becoming commonplace in the urban centers of the First World. These trends are crystallizing in the phenomenon of a new ‘underclass’.” 84 Adorno, “Society,” in Salmagundi, op. cit., p. 150. 85 Idem, “Reﬂexionen zur Klassentheorie,” in Soziologische Schriften I, op. cit., p. 384. 3 Reason 1 See Georg Lukács, “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics,” in Tactics and Ethics, trans. M. McColgan, ed. R. Livingstone, New York: Harper & Row, 1975, p. 215. Cited in Andrew Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 85. 2 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, p. 355. Cited henceforth in Chapter 3 as TCA I. 3 Georg Lukács, “Reiﬁcation and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1971, p. 153. 4 Ibid., p. 155. 5 Ibid., p. 91. 6 Theodor W. Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 250. 7 Ibid., p. 257. 8 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987, p. 187. Cited henceforth in Chapter 3 as TCA II. 9 Theodor W. Adorno, “Society,” trans. Fredric Jameson, Salmagundi 3, 10–11 (1969–70), p. 149. 10 In Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987, p. 19), David Ingram offers a succinct gloss on these distinctions: “The metatheoretical level situates the relationship between action and reason within a developmental account of rational learning capacities. This proves to be indispensable at the methodological level, where the understanding of meaningful social action is shown to presuppose rational critique. Third, the theory of rationality establishes at the empirical level a critical basis for identifying progressive and regressive features of society.” 11 Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996, p. 8. Cited henceforth in Chapter 3 as BFN. 12 Lukács, “Reiﬁcation and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 153. 13 In the ﬁrst two sections of this chapter, and the ﬁnal one, I shall be revising and expanding “Adorno and Habermas on the Human Condition” (Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 33, 3 (2002), pp. 236–59).

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14 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, New York: The Seabury Press, 1972, p. 3. 15 Theodor W. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 272. 16 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. xvi. 17 Cf. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 283: “Perfectly communicable thought without any sensory accompaniment is equally thought that in leaving behind the individual’s response to experience leaves the sensuously particular, concrete ‘thing’ behind; in leaving concrete things behind, it leaves behind the world of individuated things, so the world; the discourse that arises through these abstractions must hence be perfectly ‘false’ – untrue to every concrete thing in the world.” Indeed, when Habermas endorses a cognitive-instrumental orientation towards external nature, he also champions the very calculative, strategic linguistic attitudes and behaviours with respect to the objective world that Adorno emphatically rejects on the grounds that these attitudes and behaviours expunge the unique and particular. 18 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 54. 19 Theodor W. Adorno, “Subject and Object,” trans. E. B. Ashton, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, New York: Urizen Books, 1978, p. 510. This is an earlier translation of the essay cited at the beginning of the chapter. 20 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 60. 21 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Continuum Books, 1973, p. 196. Cited henceforth in Chapter 3 as ND. 22 In Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (op. cit., p. 260), Bernstein explains that “Adorno’s employment of natural history is intensely repetitious, thin, and gestural” because he “takes seriously, perhaps too seriously, the obliteration of anthropomorphic nature.” As a result, “the only direct philosophical use he can make of natural history is the gestural one concerning the origins or prehistory of reason, will, subject. To do more would . . . overstep what his own diagnosis asserts: anthropomorphic nature is not now available.” 23 Paul Connerton, The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 114. Cited in Martin Jay, Adorno, London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984, p. 107. 24 Jay, Adorno, op. cit., pp. 107–8. 25 Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 39. 26 Jürgen Habermas, “Historical Materialism and the Development of Normative Structures,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1979, p. 106. 27 Idem, “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society, op. cit., p. 140. 28 Ibid., p. 141. 29 David Ingram, Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987, p. 22. 30 Habermas, “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society, op. cit., p. 142. In this passage, Habermas is also prepared to “defend the thesis that the criteria of social progress singled out by historical materialism as the development of productive forces . . . can be systematically justiﬁed.” However, as Tom Rockmore points out in Habermas and Historical Materialism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 96), by the time he wrote The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas would no longer consider Marx’s historical materialism to be “even

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a potentially viable [theoretical] option.” Marx’s “old philosophy of history is irreparably defective, its inadequacies cannot be remedied through its reconstruction or in other ways.” Anthony Giddens, “Reason without Revolution? Habermas’s Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns,” in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985, p. 100. Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reﬂective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991, p. 284. Cited in Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995, p. 83. Habermas, “Historical Materialism and the Development of Normative Structures,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society, op. cit., p. 121. Idem, “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society, op. cit., p. 140. Ibid., p. 133. To a certain extent, this suggestion for a rapprochement between Adorno and Habermas is met by Herbert Marcuse in works such as Eros and Civilization and An Essay on Liberation. However, what I am suggesting here would involve a more positive assessment of the role of eros under late capitalism than Marcuse’s notion of surplus repression will allow, as well as a theoretical shift away from an exclusive preoccupation with communicative action in Western democracies towards a social solidarity that also has an instinctual basis. The socalled “new sensibility” may be found wherever genuinely democratic tendencies emerge in the course of human history. For an excellent critique of Marcuse, see Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, op. cit., pp. 24–41. See T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality, abridged edn, New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982, p. 480. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, p. 312. Ibid., p. 314. Ibid., p. 312. In Habermas: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, pp. 58–9), William Outhwaite remarks that there is “a fairly clear distinction between [evolutionary] theories which emphasize the Darwinian theme of the adaptation of systems to their environments and those based on a notion of development – what Giddens has called an ‘unfolding model’.” He adds that “Habermas’ version is closer to the latter.” However, Outhwaite does not comment on the fact that Habermas’ unfolding model of social evolution presupposes that human beings have broken with nature, making the Darwinian model inapplicable to human development. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 222. Bernstein describes the addendum in this way: “the addendum is ﬁgured as an ancient impulse, suppressed, sublimated, withered, but necessarily weakly present if real willing is to be intelligible; and as such, it ﬁgures as a promise of a reconciliation between mind and nature that is not now actually conceptualizable.” See Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, op. cit., p. 256. Adorno, “Subject and Object,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, op. cit., p. 509. Ibid., p. 503. See also Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, op. cit., pp. 288–301. Adorno explains in his discussion of Kant that the psychic moment and the somatic moment “are by no means separately experienced; but philosophical analysis has tailored the phenomenon in such a way that afterwards, in

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philosophical language, it simply cannot be put otherwise than as if something were added to rationality” (ND, 229). Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reﬂections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, London: Verso, 1974, p. 243. See also “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical Models, op. cit., pp. 264–5: “Those alone think who do not passively accept the already given: from the primitive who contemplates how he can protect his small ﬁre from the rain or where he can ﬁnd shelter from the storm to the Enlightenment philosopher who construes how humanity can move beyond its self-incurred tutelage by means of its interest in selfpreservation.” Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., pp. 246–7. Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Revidierte Psychoanalyse,” in Soziologische Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 22. Idem, “Sociology and Psychology,” trans. Irving N. Wohlfarth, New Left Review 47 (1968), p. 86. Ibid., p. 96. Idem, “Thesen über Bedürfnis,” in Soziologische Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 393. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, op. cit., p. 189. Whitebook writes that “Freud’s entire drive theory consists precisely in the attempt not to conceptualize inner nature an sich but to elucidate the ‘frontier’ (Grenze) between soma and psyche.” Whitebook then quotes Freud in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes:” “an ‘instinct’ (Trieb) appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body” (Perversion and Utopia, op. cit., p. 186). Indeed, Whitebook strongly criticizes Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment for tacitly wanting to preserve inner nature in a state of presocialized immediacy: “This is the unacknowledged hubristic-absolutist requirement that constitutes the psychoanalytically formulated bad utopianism on which the entire construction [of Dialectic of Enlightenment] tacitly rests” (Perversion and Utopia, p. 151). I shall return to this point in the ﬁnal chapter, but it should be clear from my discussion here that Adorno recognized in much of his work that inner nature cannot be preserved in an unmediated fashion; it always is, and will always remain, socially mediated. Jarvis, Adorno, op. cit., p. 70. On Rolf Wiggershaus’ remarkably evocative account, the debate between Gehlen and Adorno sounded at times as though “the Grand Inquisitor from Ivan Karamazov’s story in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov was talking to a Jesus who was no longer silent.” See The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Signiﬁcance, trans. Michael Robertson, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994, p. 588. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, op. cit., p. 312. See Jürgen Habermas, “Moral Development and Ego Identity,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1979, pp. 69–94. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, op. cit., pp. 86–9 passim. Habermas’ view of the Sprachfähigkeit of inner nature is expressed, among other places, on page 285 of Knowledge and Human Interests: “At the human level, we never encounter any needs that are not already interpreted linguistically and symbolically afﬁxed to potential actions.” In Ideals and Illusions (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991, p. 147), Thomas McCarthy argues that there is a contradiction in Knowledge and Human Interests between the claim that our knowledge of nature is bound exclusively to the interest in technical control over nature and the

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claim that “nature is the ground of spirit.” Habermas’ reduction of our relationship to nature to an objectivating and purposive relationship is incompatible with his “notion of a ‘nature preceding human history’ in the sense of a ‘natural process that, from within itself, gives rise likewise to the natural being man and the nature that surrounds him’.” Habermas never satisfactorily responds to this question, stating only that there may be other, nonobjectivating, relations with nature (see Jürgen Habermas, “A Reply to My Critics,” trans. Thomas McCarthy, in Habermas: Critical Debates, eds John B. Thompson and David Held, London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1982, pp. 242–50). However, I am arguing that there is a further contradiction here. It consists in the incompatibility of Habermas’ conception of nature as natura naturans, or as the ground or source of human nature, and his diremption thesis. To be sure, Habermas objects to Whitebook’s ﬁrst attempt to advance an interpretation of his theory as a linguistic monism when he denies that his “communication–theoretical reading” of inner nature would “determine in advance that the substratum of inner nature has to ﬁt harmoniously into linguistic structures, or even be utterly absorbed into them”; his linguistiﬁcation of needs and drives “does not entail the elimination of inner nature as an extra-linguistic referent.” At the same time, however, he claims that it is necessary to “give up biological or third person descriptions of the organic substratum” in favour of “the perspective of a life-world intersubjectively shared by participants” (see “Questions and Counterquestions,” in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985, p. 213). Moreover, in The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas does speciﬁcally state that, qua subjective, needs have no extra-linguistic referents. By severing psyche from soma in this way, Habermas can only offer what Whitebook continues to describe in his later work as a “thoroughgoing linguistic monism” (Perversion and Utopia, op. cit., p. 185). Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1982, p. 146. Jürgen Habermas, “Questions and Counterquestions,” in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985, p. 212. Ibid., p. 213. It would make more sense, in Habermas’ view, “to integrate both disciplines [sociology and psychology] from the beginning within the same conceptual framework. Such a framework would permit us to understand the development of personality as socialization, and to understand sociation as individualization.” Idem, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987, p. 306. Idem, “Morality and Ethical Life: Does Hegel’s Critique of Kant Apply to Discourse Ethics?,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990, p. 203. This point has been made somewhat differently by Joel Whitebook. In an essay written long before Between Facts and Norms, Whitebook remarks that “Habermas adopts different strategies for treating extralinguistic existence within and outside of the person. With external nature, after conceding it completely to the domain of the nonlinguistic, he formulates a theory of reference to account for the mediation between the web of intersubjectivity and res extensa. With respect to inner nature, on the other hand, he attempts not so much to solve the problem as to dissolve it. He tries to assimilate as much of inner nature as possible to the category of the linguistic.” See “Reason and Happiness: Some Psychoanalytic Themes in Critical Theory,” in Habermas and Modernity, op. cit., p. 156.

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66 Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 317. 67 Ibid., p. 324. 68 See G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Being Part III of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace, Together with the Zusätze in Boumann’s Text (1845), trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, p. 27: “The ﬁrst stage in Anthropology is the qualitatively determined soul which is tied to its natural forms. . . . Out of this immediate oneness with its natural aspect, soul enters into opposition and conﬂict with it. . . . The outcome of this conﬂict is the triumph of the soul over its corporeity, the process of reducing, and the accomplished reduction of, this corporeity to a sign, to the representation of the soul.” 69 Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, op. cit., p. 324. 70 Habermas, “Morality and Ethical Life,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, op. cit., p. 207. 71 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, op. cit., p. 292. 72 Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, op. cit., p. 194. 73 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 54. 74 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History,” trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, Telos 60 (1984), p. 117; emphasis in original. 75 Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, op. cit., p. 210. 76 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute, New York: The Free Press, 1977, p. 48. 77 Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Signiﬁcance, trans. Michael Robertson, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994, p. 95. 78 Adorno, Minima Moralia, op. cit., p. 229. 79 Idem, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 104. 80 Idem, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 272. 81 Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1973, p. 128. 82 Ibid., p. 135. 83 Ibid., p. 130. 84 Ibid., p. 135: “The two competing descriptions, which emphasize either the autonomy or the dependency of the state apparatus, can be weighed by arguments that achieve, at best, a certain plausibility.” 85 Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 156. 86 Ibid., p. 150. 87 Ibid., p. 152. 88 Idem, “Reason and Revelation,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 138. 89 Idem, “Progress,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 156. 90 Idem, “Sociology and Psychology,” trans. Irving N. Wohlfarth, New Left Review 47 (1968), p. 85. 91 Here I am paraphrasing remarks I made in defence of anti-globalization protest in “The Talking Cure in Habermas’s Republic,” New Left Review 12 (November/December 2001), pp. 135–51. 92 In Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason (op. cit., p. 148), David Ingram interprets the loss of freedom and meaning in the West as “symptomatic of a trenchant contradiction between normative conditions of social reproduction, which foster rational expectations of democratic participation, and functional prerequisites of material reproduction, which necessitate the accumulation of capital under conditions of private appropriation.” Although this interpretation is too imprecise to serve as a description of Habermas’ colonization thesis, it expresses in very general terms the tension I am describing here between the

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rationalized lifeworld, with its orientation to rational consensus, and the irrationality of the economic and political subsystems when they operate independently of consensual mechanisms in the naked pursuit of proﬁt and power. Indeed, when Ingram remarks (on page 116) that Habermas also expresses a desire to “recouple, if only in part, the economic-administrative system with the democratic ethos of the lifeworld” – a desire which conﬂicts with his positive assessment of the uncoupling of system and lifeworld – he points to another dimension of this tension. If the lifeworld must be uncoupled from the subsystems in order to develop its rational structures, its rational demands must also be fed back into these subsystems in such a way as to exert some inﬂuence over them. Yet the very uncoupling of system and lifeworld appears to make such feedback impossible. 4 Critique 1 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reﬂections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, London: Verso, 1974, pp. 43–5. 2 Idem, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Continuum Books, 1973, p. 147. Cited henceforth in Chapter 4 as ND. 3 Idem, Minima Moralia, op. cit., p. 44. 4 Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic, London and New York: Verso, 1990, pp. 47–8. See also Martin Jay, Adorno, London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984, p. 114; Adorno argued that “too dismissive a concept of culture, which reduced it to a mere ideological reﬂex of the status quo, did an injustice to the countervailing impulse in high culture at its best.” 5 Adorno, Minima Moralia, op. cit., p. 44. 6 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987, p. 116. 7 Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 152. 8 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987, pp. 354. Cited henceforth in Chapter 4 as TCA II. 9 Throughout this chapter I shall draw on two of my published articles: “Adorno, Ideology, and Ideology Critique,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 27, 1 (2001), pp. 1–20, and “Critical Stratagems in Adorno and Habermas: Theories of Ideology and the Ideology of Theory,” Historical Materialism 6 (summer 2000), pp. 67–87. 10 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 65. 11 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, New German Critique, 56 (Spring, 1992), p. 124. Cf. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, New York: Continuum, 1972, p. 60. 12 J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 266–7. 13 Ibid., p. 267n3. 14 Bernstein himself appears occasionally to admit this when he claims that what is wrong with identifying abstractions is their claim “to exhaust the possibilities of cognitively encountering the empirical world” (Adorno, op. cit., p. 215), or again, when he states that Adorno indicts the “cognitive norms and ideals” of the simple concept because they are not “exhaustive for what cognition might be” (Adorno, op. cit., p. 275). Indeed, when Bernstein subordinates the logical axis of concepts to their material axis (Adorno, op. cit., pp. 279–87), he implies

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that there is something wrong in itself with identifying abstractions: what is wrong is just their failure to accommodate particulars, their violation of their material axis (Adorno, op. cit., p. 279–87), a failure that can be made good only with the complex concept. Later in the chapter, I shall have more to say about Bernstein’s complex concept. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 29. Later, on page 165, Jarvis correctly attributes this formulation to Adorno himself (cf. ND, 149). Theodor W. Adorno, “Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre,” Soziologische Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 477. Cited henceforth in Chapter 4 as BI. Idem, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 55. See also “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1967, p. 34: “There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.” Idem, Minima Moralia, op. cit., p. 211. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 6. Ibid., p. 7. Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adley and David Frisby, London: Heinemann, 1976, p. 29. Georg Lukács, “Reiﬁcation and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1971, p. 102: “The capitalist process of rationalisation based on private economic calculation requires that every manifestation of life shall exhibit this very interaction between details which are subject to laws and a totality ruled by chance.” Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, op. cit., p. 58. Ibid., p. 27. Of course, Adorno is not denying that science “works.” Rather, he is arguing that science would work better if it were oriented towards normative goals while becoming far more sensitive and responsive to particulars than is possible under positivist identity-thinking. In Adorno’s Positive Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Yvonne Sherratt focuses on this second problem when she describes what Adorno means by non-identitythinking. However, Sharratt completely overlooks the ﬁrst problem, namely that science lacks an orientation towards normative ends. Adorno called this dimension of his negative dialectics rational identity-thinking and it is this dimension that affords the critical, speculative purchase on reality that constitutes Adorno’s “positive dialectic.” Indeed, what makes Adorno’s theory a critical one is its normative orientation towards damaged reality. Max Horkheimer stresses this point about the emphatic dimension of critical theory in his seminal 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell, New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. I shall raise this point again later in the chapter and develop it further in Chapter 5. Theodor W. Adorno, “Fernsehen als Ideologie,” in Gesammelte Schriften 10.2, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977, p. 522. Idem, Minima Moralia, op. cit., pp. 211–12. Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, op. cit., p. 72. Ibid., p. 73.

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29 Adorno, “Fernsehen als Ideologie,” in Gesammelte Schriften 10.2, op. cit., p. 522. Joel Whitebook cites Dialectic of Enlightenment to illustrate this point: “‘Intuitively, Kant foretold what Hollywood consciously put into practice: in the very process of production, images are precensored according to the norm of understanding which will later govern their apprehension’” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 84). Whitebook then remarks: “Put in psychoanalytic terms, this means that the ego only apprehends the object narcissistically, that is, in terms of its own reﬂection. And, what it encounters in the object is what it has already projected into it, in this case, its own abstract unity.” (See Whitebook’s Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995, pp. 143–4.) 30 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 148. 31 Theodor W. Adorno, “Prolog zum Fernsehen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, op. cit., p. 514. 32 In Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994, p. 90), Maeve Cooke offers some insightful criticisms of Habermas when she questions whether he has correctly identiﬁed three qualitatively distinct types of validity claim. However, she concedes that nothing crucial to Habermas’ theory hinges on the existence of precisely three types; he must only show that rational communicative interchange fulﬁls three functions, and that speakers simultaneously make reference to three dimensions of validity in each of their speech acts. Moreover, Cooke contends that he can in fact do so. Since an evaluation of these criticisms would involve a lengthy digression, I shall continue to use Habermas’ terminology, and refer to three types of validity claim, with the caveat that this terminology is considered problematic by at least one astute commentator. 33 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, op. cit., p. 314. 34 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, p. 340. Cited henceforth in Chapter 4 as TCA I. 35 Habermas attempts to deal the coup de grâce to natural law in Between Facts and Norms by taking the function of legitimation away from transcendentally grounded rights and ceding it to the “force of a discursive process of opinionand will-formation, in which the illocutionary binding forces of a use of language oriented to mutual understanding serve to bring reason and will together – and lead to convincing positions to which all individuals can agree without coercion.” See Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996, p. 103. 36 James Bohman, “Formal Pragmatics and Social Criticism: The Philosophy of Language and the Critique of Ideology in Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 11, 4 (1986), pp. 346–7. Recognizing that Habermas declares the end of ideology, and identifying correctly the reasons offered in support of this declaration, Bohman also argues that the communication pathologies caused by colonization can themselves be treated as ideological in character. Bohman bases this argument on a remark he alleges Habermas makes to the effect that ideology takes the form of latent strategic action (see “Formal Pragmatics and Social Criticism,” p. 340). However, I have been unable ﬁnd any such reference in Habermas’ twovolume work. Indeed, Habermas not only endorses Daniel Bell’s thesis, he also states explicitly that colonization prevents ideological formations from coming into existence (TCA II, 355). Furthermore, Bohman’s deﬁnition of ideology does not correspond to the deﬁnition that can be inferred from Habermas’ work.

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37 In Chapter 2, I questioned whether the loss of meaning is a phenomenon that runs parallel to colonization, or is caused by it. In the passages I am citing here, Habermas appears to portray the loss of meaning as an effect of the colonization of the lifeworld. Earlier, however, he had cautioned against confusing the one-sided rationalization of the lifeworld with a “different phenomenon: the complementary manifestation of cultural impoverishment that threatens a lifeworld whose traditional substance has been devalued. The thesis of a loss of meaning can be applied to this, albeit in a modiﬁed form” (TCA II, 326). 38 This claim may appear contradictory: on the one hand, Habermas is arguing that speakers in the rationalized lifeworld now distinguish between value spheres, and on the other, that value spheres are uniﬁed under the umbrella of communicative reason. He also rejects the ideological conﬂation of value spheres while speaking positively about holistic communicative reason. However, multivalent communicative rationality differs from the ideological conﬂation of value spheres. While communicative reason embraces all three dimensions of rationality, and speakers simultaneously make reference to three types of validity claim with each speech act, the process of rationalization has allowed them to distinguish between the three types, and to develop distinct rational procedures for redeeming each. 39 Thus, at the end of the second volume of The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas poses two questions that his formal pragmatics must answer: “whether a reason that has objectively split up into its moments can still preserve its unity, and how expert cultures can be mediated with everyday practice” (TCA II, 397). 40 Cooke, Language and Reason, op. cit., p. 142. 41 See, for example, Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, op. cit., p. 113: “It is true that with the capitalist economy and the modern state the tendency to incorporate all questions of validity into the limited horizon of purposive rationality proper to subjects interested in self-preservation and to self-maintaining systems is also strengthened. But the far from contemptible compulsion toward the progressive differentiation of a reason that, moreover, assumes a procedural form – a compulsion induced by the rationalization of world views and lifeworlds – competes with this inclination toward a social regression of reason.” 42 Bohman, “Formal Pragmatics and Social Criticism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, op. cit., pp. 348–9. 43 Ibid., p. 347. 44 Jeffrey Alexander, “Habermas and Critical Theory: Beyond the Marxian Dilemma?”, in Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action, eds Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, p. 71. 45 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, London and New York: Verso, 1991, p. 42. 46 Ibid., p. 154. 47 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1929, pp. 310–11. 48 Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, p. 44: “According to Adorno, there are three ways of thinking: identity thinking, non-identity thinking, and rational identity thinking. . . . [C]oncepts also refer to their objects, and by this he [Adorno] means to the conditions of their ideal existence. This is the utopian aspect of identifying. For the concept to identify its object in this sense the particular object would have to have all the properties of its ideal state. Adorno called this condition rational identity (rationale Identität).” See also

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ND, 147; translation modiﬁed: “If no man had part of his labor withheld from him any more, rational identity would be a fact, and society would have transcended the identifying mode of thinking.” Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, op. cit., p. 33. Lambert Zuidervaart’s review of this book helped me to formulate my arguments more clearly. See Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 10, 2 (2003), pp. 280–3. See also Adorno, Minima Moralia, op. cit., p. 247: “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique.” Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, op. cit., p. 314. Ibid., p. 315. Idem, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices,” in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992, p. 144. Idem, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, op. cit., p. 322. Idem, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices,” Postmetaphysical Thinking, op. cit., p. 144. Idem, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, op. cit., p. 322. Herbert Schnädelbach, “The Transformation of Critical Theory,” in Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action, eds Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones, Cambridge: Polity Press,1991, p. 20. Idem, “Further Reﬂections on the Public Sphere,” trans. Thomas Burger, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992, p. 442. Habermas would therefore not accept Cooke’s deﬁnition of communicative rationality as “the mode of dealing with validity claims that is practiced by participants (primarily) in postconventional forms of understanding” (see Cooke, Language and Reason, op. cit., p. 34) because communicative rationality is always already there. Nor would he accept the strict equation of communicative rationality with “the rational potential of action oriented toward understanding” (Language and Reason, op. cit., p. 29) because such rationality also always manifests itself empirically in less than ideal communicative practices in the lifeworld. Idem, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices,” in Postmetaphysical Thinking, op. cit., p. 144. Ibid., p. 145. Kenneth Baynes, The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, Habermas, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992, pp. 113–14 passim. In Chapter 1, I noted that Cooke criticizes Habermas for confusing cognitive-instrumental rationality with functionalist rationality. At the end of her book, she draws from this confusion consequences for Habermas’ social criticism, namely that “the idea of a free and harmonious interplay of the three value spheres cannot serve as a yardstick for measuring the selectivity of modern rationalization processes” (Cooke, Language and Reason, op. cit., p. 146). Cooke, Language and Reason, op. cit., p. 157. Ibid., pp. 157–61. Indeed, Cooke prefaces her discussion of the critical dimension of Habermas’ social theory with the highly qualiﬁed assertion that Habermas “appears to suggest” in “remarks scattered throughout his writings” (which Cooke does not cite) two ways in which communicative reason may be used as the normative

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basis for criticism of the pathologies afﬂicting modernity (see Cooke, Language and Reason, op. cit., p. 144). While she does not recognize the problems that this claim poses for Habermas’ critique of colonization, Cooke also stresses that “strategic action is a mechanism of action coordination within the lifeworld” (Language and Reason, op. cit., p. 20). See Cooke, Language and Reason, op. cit., p. 161. See “Progress,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 152: “Kant’s incomparable greatness proved itself not least in that he incorruptibly maintained the unity of reason even in its contradictory uses – the nature-dominating, what he called theoretical, causal-mechanical, and the power of judgment snuggling up to nature in reconciliation – and displaced reason’s difference strictly into the self-limitation of nature-dominating reason. A metaphysical interpretation of Kant should not impute a latent ontology to him but instead read the structure of his entire thought as a dialectic of enlightenment.” To be sure, Habermas recognizes the need for such self-critique in the following passage in “Questions and Counterquestions,” trans. James Bohman, in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard M. Bernstein, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985, pp. 208–9: “On the level of scientiﬁc discourse . . . there is a tendency to delimit the object domains of, for example, psychology or sociology, by neglecting their hermeneutic dimensions, in such a way that the components of the subjective or social world are naturalistically assimilated to physical entities or to observable behavior. In each case they are made into components of the objective world, inherently accessible only in the objectivating attitude; that is, they are forced into the basic conceptual framework of physicalism or behaviorism. As opposed to this naturalistic reduction, the point here is only to defend non-objectivistic approaches in psychology and the social sciences.” Implied in this passage is the idea that, to play a critical role, the social sciences would need to adopt not only a hermeneutic orientation towards social reality, but also an emphatic or normative one. And, since this orientation is often stigmatized in “value-free” science, science would need to subject itself to a thoroughgoing critique before it could assume the Habermasian task of criticizing reiﬁed social practices. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996, pp. 20–1. Cited henceforth in Chapter 4 as BFN. Kenneth Baynes, “Democracy and the Rechtsstaat: Habermas’ Faktizität und Geltung,” in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 204. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1941, p. 177. Ibid., p. 182. Habermas is quoting Hauke Brunkhorst’s interpretation of his work in this passage. See Brunkhorst’s “Zur Dialektik von realer and idealer Kommunikationsgemeinschaft,” in Transzendentalpragmatik, eds A. Dorschel et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993, p. 345. Jürgen Habermas, “A Reply to My Critics,” trans. Thomas McCarthy, in Habermas: Critical Debates, eds John B. Thompson and David Held, London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1982, p. 261. Idem, “Morality, Society, and Ethics: An Interview with Torben Hviid Nielsen,” in Justiﬁcation and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993, p. 164. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, op. cit., p. 252. Gordon Finlayson has objected to these arguments which I originally advanced

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in “Critical Stratagems in Adorno and Habermas: The Theory of Ideology and the Ideology of Theory,” Historical Materialism 6 (summer 2000), pp. 67–87. Despite Habermas’ explicit pronouncement to the contrary, Finlayson claims that Habermas continues to ascribe critical leverage to his ideal presuppositions: they allegedly make it possible for us to judge whether institutions or policies are morally acceptable “by seeing whether or not they are based on principles which every affected person has reason to accept.” See Gordon Finlayson, “The Theory of Ideology and the Ideology of Theory? Habermas contra Adorno,” Historical Materialism 11, 2 (2003), pp. 165–87. However, this defence of Habermas not only lacks textual support, but Finlayson ignores the real difﬁculties (as adduced not only by myself, but also by the Habermasian Cooke) in locating the normative basis for criticism in Habermas’ work. In addition, Finlayson does not sufﬁciently take into account the fact that Habermas hesitates to describe his ideal presuppositions as regulative ones. I raise these points in “A Response to Finlayson,” Historical Materialism 11, 2 (2003), pp. 189–98. Habermas, “Morality, Society, and Ethics,” in Justiﬁcation and Application, op. cit., p. 165. Bernhard Peters, “On Reconstructive Legal and Political Theory,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 20, 4 (1994), p. 127. Ibid., p. 119. James Bohman, “Critical Theory and Democracy,” in The Handbook of Critical Theory, ed. David Rasmussen, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996, p. 209. Karl Marx, “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Reader in Marxist Philosophy: From the Writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, eds Howard Selsam and Harry Martel, trans. unknown, New York: International Publishers, Co, 1963, p. 227. See also BFN, 136 and 461. See Karl Marx, “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Reader in Marxist Philosophy, op. cit., p. 227: “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Critique,” in Critical Models, op. cit., pp. 281–2: “Democracy is nothing less than deﬁned by critique. . . . He who equates the modern concept of reason with critique is scarcely exaggerating.”

5 Emancipation 1 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987, p. 185. Cited henceforth in Chapter 5 as TCA II. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, “Reﬂexionen zur Klassentheorie,” in Soziologische Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 380. 3 Ibid., p. 384. 4 Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996, p. 46. Cited henceforth in Chapter 5 as BFN. 5 My discussion of Adorno is based in part on a paper I wrote to commemorate

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Adorno’s centenary. See “Ein Reaktionäres Schwein? Political Activism and Prospects for Change in Adorno,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 227 (2004), forthcoming. Theodor W. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, New York: Urizen Books, 1978, p. 120. Idem, Minima Moralia: Reﬂections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, London: Verso, 1974, p. 23. Cited henceforth in Chapter 5 as MM. Idem, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Continuum, 1973, p. 262. Cited henceforth in Chapter 5 as ND. In Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York: Columbia Press, 1986, p. 207), Seyla Benhabib claims that Adorno wants to substitute a non-repressive ego ideal for the superego. Unfortunately, this claim rests on both a confusion between the terms “superego” and “ego ideal,” and a mistaken account of the genesis of the ego. As a result, Benhabib questions whether ego-identity might ever develop in a non-repressive manner. Her suggestion is interesting, however, because psychoanalysts have made important distinctions between the superego and the ego ideal on the basis of Freud’s work. These distinctions may actually serve to make good on the substitution that Benhabib views as problematic. See, for example, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, The Ego Ideal: A Psychoanalytic Essay on the Malady of the Ideal, trans. Paul Barrows, New York: W. W. Norton, 1985. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, op. cit., p. 124. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, New York: The Seabury Press, 1972, p. 201. Ibid., p. 198. Theodor W. Adorno, “Society,” trans. Fredric Jameson, Salmagundi 3, 10–11 (1969–70), pp. 148–9. See also Adorno, Minima Moralia, op. cit., p. 135: “In the midst of standardized, organized human units, the individual persists. He is even protected and gaining monopoly value. But he is in reality no more than the mere function of his own uniqueness, an exhibition piece, like the foetuses that once drew the wonderment and laughter of children. Since he no longer has an independent economic existence, his character begins to contradict his objective social role.” See Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 12: Civilization, Society and Religion, trans. James Strachey, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, pp. 95–178. Theodor W. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture,” trans. Deborah Cook, Telos 95 (spring 1993), pp. 32–3. Idem, “Opinion Delusion Society,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 111. Idem, “Die Revidierte Psychoanalyse,” in Soziologische Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 35. See, for example, “Sociology and Psychology,” trans. Irving N. Wohlfarth, New Left Review 46 (1967), p. 71: “Today anyone who fails to comply with the economic rules will seldom go under straight away. But the fate of the déclassé looms on the horizon. Ahead lies the road to an asocial, criminal existence: the refusal to play the game arouses suspicions and exposes offenders to the vengeance of society even though they may not yet be reduced to going hungry and sleeping under bridges. But the fear of being cast out, the social sanctions behind economic behaviour, have long been internalized along with other taboos, and have left their mark on the individual. In the course of history this

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fear has become second nature; it is not for nothing that the word ‘existence’ in usage uncontaminated by philosophy means equally the fact of being alive and the possibility of self-preservation in the economic process.” Adorno, “Reﬂexionen zur Klassentheorie,” in Soziologische Schriften I, op. cit., p. 386. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1975, p. 84. Ibid., p. 86. William Outhwaite, Habermas: A Critical Introduction, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 147. Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 144; translation modiﬁed. Cited henceforth in Chapter 5 as P. Idem, “Sociology and Psychology,” New Left Review, op. cit., p. 78. Idem, “Why Still Philosophy,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 14. See Henry Pickford’s note to “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 382n18. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 269. Cited henceforth in Chapter 5 as TP. Idem, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?,” trans. Fred van Gelder, in Modern German Sociology, eds V. Meja, D. Misgeld, and N. Stehr, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, p. 245. In The Holy Family, Marx rejects the aim of the young Hegelians to ﬁnd a transcendent Archimedean point against which existing conditions may be judged. However, in his own search for an Archimedean point, Adorno is actually much closer to Marx than it might at ﬁrst appear. For, as Seyla Benhabib remarks in Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 34), Marx claims that the task of critical theory is to “reveal that what is, already contains within itself what ‘ought’ to be as a possibility” by virtue of its “‘ruthless critique of the existent’.” Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 14; translation modiﬁed. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 16. Idem, “Critique,” in Critical Models, op. cit., pp. 282–3. Idem, “Resignation,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 293. Ibid., p. 291. Idem, “Opinion Delusion Society,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 122. Idem, “Individuum und Organisation,” in Soziologische Schriften I, ed. R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 455. See also ND, 46, and Minima Moralia, op. cit., p. 51: “In the course of time, however, solidarity has turned into the conﬁdence that the Party has a thousand eyes, into enrolment in workers’ battalions – long since promoted into uniform – as the stronger side, into swimming with the tide of history.” Ibid., p. 455. Idem, “Resignation,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 292. Idem, “Why Still Philosophy,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 16. Idem, “Critique,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 288. In “Television as Ideology” (Critical Models, op. cit., p. 70), Adorno ends with the same point: “However, just as everywhere else, the canon of the negative would not be far from that of the positive.” In “Negativität bei Adorno” (Adorno-Konferenz, 1983, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983, p. 51), Michael Theunissen writes the following about determinate negation: “Adorno orients his rejection of Hegel’s thesis about the positive result of the negation of the negation, not against the thesis itself, but against its ontologization; he claims that the thesis is accurate when

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44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Notes

applied to the ‘subjective development of philosophical knowledge’.” However, as I shall argue, what emerges from the negation of negation in Adorno is not entirely positive because it is tainted by that from which it is derived (the negative, or damaged life). Theunissen also observes that Adorno follows Marx when he postulates “the necessity of universal compulsion for the realization of freedom.” In “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” (in Modern German Sociology, op. cit., p. 239), Adorno remarked on the dialectically inﬂected ambivalence of Marx and Engels who criticized utopianism only “for fear that such thinking would undermine a more humane organisation of society.” He adds that what Marx and Engels criticized as utopianism “has now become a distinct possibility.” For Adorno, the very “critique of utopian thinking has today degenerated to a stock ideological response.” Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 119. Idem, “On Subject and Object,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 247. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid., p. 247. Martin Jay, Adorno, London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984, p. 65. Unfortunately, this sentence is missing from the English translation of Negative Dialektik. In German it reads: “Über die Romantik hinaus, die sich als Weltschmerz, Leiden an der Entfremdung fühlte, erhebt sich Eichendorffs Wort “Schöne Fremde.” See Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966, p. 192. The sentence may be translated as follows: “Hovering over romanticism, which experienced the suffering caused by reiﬁcation as worldweariness, is Eichendorff’s phrase: ‘Beautiful Alien’.” Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, p. 390. Cited henceforth in Chapter 5 as TCA I. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic, London and New York: Verso, 1990, p. 24. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987, p. 345; emphasis added. Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 104. Idem, “Critique,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 282. Jürgen Habermas, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices,” Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992, p. 145. Idem, “Morality, Society, and Ethics: An Interview with Torben Hviid Nielsen,” Justiﬁcation and Application, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993, pp. 163–4. Idem, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices,” in Postmetaphysical Thinking, op. cit., p. 145. Idem, “Morality, Society, and Ethics,” in Justiﬁcation and Application, op. cit., p. 173. Idem, “On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason,” in Justiﬁcation and Application, op. cit., p. 6. Idem, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices,” in Postmetaphysical Thinking, op. cit., p. 146.

Notes

207

65 Idem, “On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason,” in Justiﬁcation and Application, op. cit., p. 12. 66 Idem, “A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Modernity,” in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998, p. 29. 67 Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994, p. 32. 68 Jürgen Habermas, “Justice and Solidarity: On the Discussion Concerning ‘Stage 6’,” trans. S. Weber Nicholsen, in Hermeneutics and Critical Theory in Ethics and Politics, ed. M. Kelly, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990, p. 47. 69 Ibid., p. 48. 70 Ibid., p. 39. 71 Idem, “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” Justiﬁcation and Application, op. cit., p. 53; emphasis added. 72 William Hohengarten, “Translator’s Introduction,” Postmetaphysical Thinking, op. cit., p. xviii. 73 Habermas, “On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason,” in Justiﬁcation and Application, op. cit., p. 14. 74 Carol Gilligan’s criticisms of Habermas appear in In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. 75 I disagree with Seyla Benhabib in Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), when she claims on pages 330–1 that Habermas postulates the species as the subject of societal evolution. Although I accept her claim that there is a reversion here to the so-called philosophy of the subject, I have argued in Chapter 3, following Whitebook, that this subject is not the species, but progressively rationalized society. 76 Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, op. cit., p. 194. 77 Habermas, “A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Modernity,” in The Inclusion of the Other, op. cit., p. 27. 78 Idem, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices,” in Postmetaphysical Thinking, op. cit., p. 140. 79 Theodor W. Adorno, “Reason and Revelation,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 138; translation modiﬁed. 80 Idem, “Society,” in Salmagundi, op. cit., p. 153. 81 Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, op. cit., p. 329. 82 Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” trans. Matthew J. O’Connell, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, New York: Herder and Herder, 1972, p. 213. 83 Ibid., p. 204. 84 Ibid., p. 229. 85 Theodor W. Adorno, “Discussion of Professor Adorno’s Lecture ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 298. 86 Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory, op. cit., p. 199. 87 Habermas, “The European Nation-State,” in The Inclusion of the Other, op. cit., p. 124. 88 Ibid., p. 127. Conclusion 1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, New York: The Seabury Press, 1972, p. xiii. 2 Ibid., p. 3.

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3 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Continuum, 1973, p. 29. Cited henceforth in the Conclusion as ND. 4 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. xv; translation modiﬁed (emphasis in original). 5 Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?,” in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck, Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1959, p. 85. 6 Henry Pickford notes that “Mündigkeit” stems from the German word for “mouth” (“Mund ”): “hence political maturity also means speaking for oneself, not parroting another.” See Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 383n1. 7 Theodor W. Adorno, “Critique,” Critical Models, op. cit., pp. 281–2. 8 Ibid., p. 282. 9 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987, p. 155. Cited henceforth in the Conclusion as TCA II. 10 Theodor W. Adorno, “Reason and Revelation,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 137. 11 Ibid., p. 138. 12 Idem, “Critique,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 282. 13 Ibid., p. 283. 14 See, for example, Habermas’ discussion of the criticisms of Carol Gilligan and Norma Haan in “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Leenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990, pp. 175–87. 15 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, p. 66. Cited henceforth in the Conclusion as TCA I. 16 See Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics, Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 31–2: “Habermas singles out claims to propositional truth and normative rightness as validity claims that are conceptually linked to the idea of universal agreement on the universal validity of what is agreed. Universal validity claims are thus universal in a double sense: They are conceptually linked to the idea that everyone would agree that what is agreed to be valid is valid for everyone.” 17 Jürgen Habermas, “Morality, Society, and Ethics: An Interview with Torben Hviid Nielsen,” in Justiﬁcation and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994, p. 164; emphasis in original. 18 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reﬂections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Ephcott, London: Verso, 1974, p. 50. Cited henceforth in the Conclusion as MM. 19 Idem, “Progress,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 151. In Minima Moralia Adorno wrote: “In the face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere. If critical theory lingers there, it is not only with a bad conscience” (MM, 18). 20 Idem, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical Models, op. cit., pp. 272–3. 21 Kant, “What is Enlightenment?,” in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, op. cit., p. 87. 22 Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro, Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, pp. 312–13; emphasis in original. 23 Moreover, if reason has been dirempted from the drives, it also becomes difﬁ-

Notes

24 25 26 27

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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cult to understand the process of individuation. To cite Joel Whitebook, individuation in Habermas seems to consist “merely in the external mapping of one’s viewpoint against a variety of other viewpoints.” Such mapping “is undoubtedly an important cognitive component of decentering and individuation. . . . However, it fails to consider the deeper unconscious meaning of individuation.” See Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995, p. 194. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: An Introduction, New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 36. Ibid., p. 221. Theodor W. Adorno, “Opinion Delusion Society,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 119. I disagree with Jarvis in this respect: where Jarvis claims that Adorno wanted to overcome self-preservation because it is currently self-destructive, I am arguing that Adorno wanted to orient the drive for self-preservation towards more rational ends. Indeed, the reconciliation of nature and culture that Adorno endorses consists partially in such an orientation. Adorno argues in “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis” (in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 273) that selfpreservation should be posited as an emphatic goal: “Through self-preservation the species indeed gains the potential for that self-reﬂection that could ﬁnally transcend the self-preservation to which it was reduced by being restricted strictly to a means.” J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 1–2. Although Bernstein begins with an inspired and inspiring account of the ethical thrust of Adorno’s work, I argued in Chapter 4 that his reconstruction of an Adornian mode of thought lacks the emphatic and speculative orientation which Adorno borrows from Hegel. See Michael Theunissen, “Negativität bei Adorno,” in Adorno-Konferenz, 1983, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983, pp. 49–50. Jarvis, Adorno, op. cit., p. 213. Theodor W. Adorno, “Individuum und Organisation,” in Soziologische Schriften I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 456. Idem, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture,” trans. Deborah Cook, Telos 95 (spring 1993), p. 16. Ibid., pp. 22–3. Bernstein, Adorno, op. cit., p. 381. Ibid., p. 380. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 133. Jürgen Habermas, “On the Public Use of History,” in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989, pp. 238–9. Idem, “Remarks from the Römerberg Colloquium,” in The New Conservatism, op. cit., p. 211. Idem, “On the Public Use of History,” in The New Conservatism, op. cit., pp. 236–7. Richard Wolin contends plausibly that the predominance of the universal in Habermas is meant to serve as a counter against both neo-nationalism and historical revisionism. (Furthermore, as I point out in Chapter 1, Habermas’ concern to ﬁnd a counterweight to neo-Nazism and other regressive collective movements accounts for his adoption of a systems theoretical perspective.) Habermas’ distinction between conventional and postconventional stages of moral development hinges on the individual’s capacity to apply rules for testing, and procedures for justifying, principles that are universal in scope. This universalist orientation, which is meant to exclude discriminatory principles and practices, extends to the political realm as well where Habermas

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endorses a constitutional patriotism that shares the universalistic features of postconventional morality. To cite Wolin, the “Western constitutional state may be viewed as a postconventional form of political consciousness, insofar as the inherent distinction between ‘law’ and ‘right’ . . . mandates that all concrete legislation be evaluated in light of universal normative precepts embodied in the constitution itself.” See Richard Wolin, “Introduction,” in The New Conservatism, op. cit., p. xix. 41 Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 98. 42 Ibid., p. 99. 43 Idem, “Discussion of Professor Adorno’s Lecture ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 298. See also Adorno’s famous remark in “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models, op. cit., p. 90: “I do not wish to go into the question of neo-Nazi organizations. I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.”

Bibliography

I Cited works by Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas Part one: cited works by Adorno Section A In this section of the bibliography, works by Adorno cited in abbreviated form are listed alphabetically in order of their abbreviations. BI: “Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre.” Soziologische Schriften I. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972. LC: “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” Translated by Fred van Gelder. Modern German Sociology. Edited by V. Meja, D. Misgeld, and N. Stehr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. MM: Minima Moralia: Reﬂections from Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: New Left Books, 1974. ND: Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973. P: “Progress.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. RK: “Reﬂexionen zur Klassentheorie.”Soziologische Schriften I. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972. RP: “Die Revidierte Psychoanalyse.” Soziologische Schriften I. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972. S: “Society.” Translated by Fredric Jameson. Salmagundi 3, 10–11 (1969–70). SP II: “Sociology and Psychology.” Translated by Irving N. Wohlfarth. New Left Review 47 (1968). TP: “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Section B In this section of the bibliography, other works by Adorno to which reference is made are listed in order of their publication dates. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” Prisms. Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1967.

212

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“Sociology and Psychology.” Translated by Irving N. Wohlfarth. New Left Review 46 (1967). Dialectic of Enlightenment. By Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Translated by John Cumming. New York: The Seabury Press, 1972. “Diskussionsbeitrag zu ‘Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft?’” Soziologische Schriften I. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972. “Individuum und Organisation.” Soziologische Schriften I. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972. “Thesen über Bedürfnis.” Sociologische Schriften I. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, by Theodor W. Adorno et al. Translated by Glyn Adley and David Frisby. London: Heinemann, 1976. “Fernsehen als Ideologie.” Gesammelte Schriften 10.2. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977. “Prolog zum Fernsehen.” Gesammelte Schriften 10.2. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977. “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda.” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt. New York: Urizen Books, 1978. “Subject and Object.” Translated by E. B. Ashton. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt. New York: Urizen Books, 1978. The Authoritarian Personality. By Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982. “The Idea of Natural History.” Translated by Bob Hullot-Kentor. Telos 60 (1984). “Kann das Publikum Wollen?” Vermischte Schriften I. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986. “Extorted Reconciliation.” Notes to Literature. Vol. II. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. “The Schema of Mass Culture.” Translated by Nicholas Walker. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited by J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 1991. “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment.” By Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. New German Critique 56 (Spring 1992). Hegel: Three Studies. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993. “Theory of Pseudo-Culture.” Translated by Deborah Cook. Telos 95 (Spring 1993), pp. 15–38. “Critique.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. “Free Time.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. “On Subject and Object.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. “Opinion Delusion Society.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. “Resignation.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

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“The Meaning of Working Through the Past.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. “Why Still Philosophy.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. “Discussion of Professor Adorno’s Lecture ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Part two: cited works by Habermas Section A In this section of the bibliography, works by Habermas cited in abbreviated form are listed alphabetically in order of their abbreviations. BFN: Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996. TCA I: The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. TCA II: The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.

Section B In this section of the bibliography, other works by Habermas to which reference is made are listed in order of their publication dates. Knowledge and Human Interests. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Legitimation Crisis. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975. “Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism – The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin.” Translated by Philip Brewster and Carl H. Buchner. New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), pp. 30–59. “Historical Materialism and the Development of Normative Structures.” Communication and the Evolution of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. “Moral Development and Ego Identity.” Communication and the Evolution of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism.” Communication and the Evolution of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. “A Reply to My Critics.” Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Habermas: Critical Debates. Edited by John B. Thompson and David Held. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1982. “Questions and Counterquestions.” Translated by James Bohman. Habermas and Modernity. Edited by Richard J. Bernstein. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985.

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The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger, with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989. “Apologetic Tendencies.” The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989. “On the Public Use of History.” The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989. “The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies.” The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989. “Remarks from the Römerberg Colloquium.” The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989. “Justice and Solidarity: On the Discussion Concerning ‘Stage 6’.” Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Hermeneutics and Critical Theory in Ethics and Politics. Edited by Michael Kelly. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990. “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action.” Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Translated by Christian Leenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990. “Morality and Ethical Life: Does Hegel’s Critique of Kant Apply to Discourse Ethics?” Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990. “A Reply.” Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action. Edited by Axel Honneth and Hans Joas. Translated by Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. “Further Reﬂections on the Public Sphere.” Translated by Thomas Burger. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992. “Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity.” Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays. Translated by William Mark Hohengarten. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992. “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices.” Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays. Translated by William Mark Hohengarten. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992. “Morality, Society, and Ethics: An Interview with Torben Hviid Nielsen.” Justiﬁcation and Application. Translated by Ciaran P. Cronin. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993. “On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason.” Justiﬁcation and Application. Translated by Ciaran P. Cronin. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993. “Remarks on Discourse Ethics.” Justiﬁcation and Application. Translated by Ciaran P. Cronin. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993. “A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Modernity.” The Inclusion of

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the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Translated by Ciaran P. Cronin. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998. “The European Nation-State.” The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Translated by Ciaran P. Cronin. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998. “Reﬂections on Communicative Pathology.” On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action. Translated by Barbara Fultner. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001. “Learning from Catastrophe?” The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Translated by Max Pensky. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001. “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy.” The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Translated by Max Pensky. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001.

II Secondary works Agger, Ben. The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992. Alexander, Jeffrey. “Habermas and Critical Theory: Beyond the Marxian Dilemma?” Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action. Translated by Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones. Edited by Axel Honneth and Hans Joas. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Anderson, Perry. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: New Left Books, 1976. Arato, Andrew, and Gebhardt, Eike, eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Translated by Various. New York: Urizen Books, 1978. Baynes, Kenneth. The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, and Habermas. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992. —— “Democracy and the Rechtsstaat: Habermas’s Faktizität und Geltung.” The Cambridge Companion to Habermas. Edited by Stephen K. White. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Benhabib, Seyla. Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Benjamin, Andrew, ed. The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Benjamin, Jessica. “Authority and the Family Revisited: or, A World without Fathers?” New German Critique 5 (winter 1978), pp. 35–57. Bernstein, J. M. Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory. London: Routledge, 1995. —— Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Bernstein, Richard J., ed. Habermas and Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985. Bewes, Timothy. Reiﬁcation or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso, 2002. Blaug, Ricardo. Democracy, Real and Ideal: Discourse Ethics and Radical Politics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999. Bloch, Ernst. The Spirit of Utopia. Translated by Anthony A. Nassar. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Bohman, James. “Formal Pragmatics and Social Criticism: The Philosophy of Language and the Critique of Ideology in Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 11, 4 (1986), pp. 331–53.

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Index

action coordination 17–18, 23, 79, 183n35 addendum 80–1, 193n43 Adorno, T. W.: The Authoritarian Personality 79; “Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre” 103, 105; “Critique” 145, 164, 189n58, 203n86; “Cultural Criticism and Society” 198n17; Dialectic of Enlightenment 49, 74–5, 80, 82–3, 100, 102, 194n54; “Discussion of Professor Adorno’s Lecture ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’” 28; “Diskussionsbeitrag zu ‘Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft?’” 14, 16, 29; “Extorted Reconciliation” 186n4; “Fernsehen als Ideologie” 105; “Free Time” 35; “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” 43; Hegel: Three Studies 35; “The Idea of Natural History” 90; “Individuum und Organisation” 28–9, 174; “Kann das Publikum Wollen?” 60; “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” 13, 206n43; “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis” 91, 141, 194n47; “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” 177, 210n43; Minima Moralia 11, 27, 82, 91, 99, 105, 114, 142, 146, 173, 204n14, 208n19; Negative Dialectics 27, 28, 46–7, 75, 79, 80, 91, 99, 102, 104, 113, 115, 140, 143, 149, 166, 206n53; “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” 102; “On Subject and Object” 72; “Opinion Delusion Society” 2; The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology 104–5; Problems of Moral Philosophy 91; “Progress” 93–4, 141, 145, 202n68; “Prolog zum

Fernsehen” 106; “Reﬂexionen zur Klassentheorie” 12–13, 24, 25; “Resignation” 143; “Die Revidierte Psychoanalyse” 44, 45, 83; “The Schema of Mass Culture” 104; “Society” 13, 25, 28, 78; “Sociology and Psychology” 43, 44, 83, 204n19; “Television as Ideology” 205n42; “Theory of Pseudo-Culture” 174; “Thesen über Bedürfnis” 46, 83; “Why Still Philosophy” 141 agreement (Einverständnis) 17, see understanding Alexander, J. 36, 112 alienation (Entfremdung) 45, 57, 122, 135, 136 Anderson, P. xi, 190n75 anomie 56, 57, 65, 137 anthropogenesis: Adorno on 74–6, 78–9, 81–2; Habermas on 76–8 anthropology 84 autonomy: Adorno on 28, 42, 43–4, 47–8, 49, 113, 116–17, 119, 133, 175; Habermas on 56, 80, 108, 119 base and superstructure: Adorno on 4, 11–16, 25, 99–100, 101–2; Habermas on 4, 16–17, 20, 25, 30, 67–8 Baynes, K. 120–2, 123, 124, 125 Bell, D. 7, 101, 199n36 Benhabib, S. 4, 87–8, 132, 160, 182n25, 204n9, 205n30, 207n75 Benjamin, W. 1, 90 Bernstein, J. 5, 83, 89, 102–3, 115–17, 172, 174, 192n17, 192n22, 193n43, 197n14, 209n28 Bewes, Timothy 186n16 Bilderverbot 147–8

Index Bohman, J. 58–9, 61, 109, 111, 126, 199n36 Braaten, J. 188n50 Bradley, F. H. 173 Brecht, B. 143 Brunkhorst, H. 202n74 Buck-Morss, S. 91 bureaucratization 29, 51, 55; see also juridiﬁcation capitalism, see economic system citizen role, see role civil privatism, see privatism class: Adorno on 12–14, 20, 183n30; Habermas on 20, 30, 64, 183n30 class conﬂict: Adorno on 20, 30, 42, 131, 134; Habermas on 20, 30, 53, 131, 188n47; see also paciﬁcation class consciousness 13, 70, 130, 131 client role, see role cognitive-instrumental rationality, see rationality, cognitive-instrumental collective action 19, 131, 136–8, 141–4 collective identity: Adorno on 43–5, 134–5; Habermas on 19, 57, 65, 122, 136–7, 139; see also collective subject, species subject, solidarity collective subject 131; Adorno on 141, 149, 150, 156–7; Habermas on 19, 95, 131, 150, 153, 155–7, 167, 177; see also collective identity, species subject colonization 29–33, 49–57, 109–110, 137, 158, 186n16, 196n92; causes of 188n47; conditions for 50–3, 69; critique of 101, 112, 120–9, 132, 201n65, 202n66; effects of 31–2, 34–6, 41, 55–7, 62–6, 122–3, 126, 136–7, 167, 188n50; and reiﬁcation 5, 30, 41; see also reiﬁcation commodity 10, 26, 39, 134 commodity fetishism 6, 25–6, 39–40, 50, 106, 131 communicative action 17, 22, 36, 37, 55, 63–4, 72, 79, 88, 118–9, 151 communicative power 21, 68, 95–7, 140, 162 communicative reason, see rationality, communicative concept 74–5, 81–3, 101–5, 113–17, 149–50; see also universal Connerton, P. 75 consumer role, see role Cooke, M. 30–1, 35–6, 52, 111, 121–2,

223

124, 155, 184n56, 188n47, 199n32, 201n58, 201n62, 201n65, 202n66, 208n16 critique 93, 94, 99–101, 116–17, 142–150, 160–1, 164–5, 172–8, 202n69, 203n86; see also colonization, ideology critique cultural reproduction, see reproduction culture: as ideological 99–101, 108–9, 113; expert culture 52, 54–5, 110, 136, 200n39; liberal culture 108–9, 113–17, 119; as structural component of lifeworld 22, 32, 56–7, 65, 88, 110, 136–7, 152 culture industry 29, 43, 48, 59, 61–2, 105–6, 131 Dahrendorf, R. 2, 6, 14, 16, 29, 180n30 Darwin, C. 193n41 democracy: Adorno on 2–3, 28, 48, 129, 147, 161, 165, 177, 203n86, 210n43; Habermas on 2–3, 53, 95–8, 124–9, 131–2, 138–9, 158, 160, 161; see also political system, welfare state desire; Adorno on, see instinct; Habermas on 84–7, 89 determinate negation 145–7, 159, 173–4, 205n42 Dews, P. xi Dilthey, W. 10 domination: Adorno on 12–16, 25–29, 42–9, 58, 62, 76, 82, 84, 93, 111, 171, 178; see also exchange principle; Habermas on 29–33, 49–57, 58, 171; see also colonization Dreyfus affair 59 Dubiel, H. 12 Durkheim, E. 22, 76, 156 Eagleton, T. 112, 162 economic system: Adorno on 4, 10, 11–16, 25–9, 40, 44–9, 59, 69–70, 132–3; Habermas on 4, 10, 16–24, 30–2, 52–3, 55, 62, 68–70, 97, 137, 162 egalitarianism 28–9, 48 ego 26, 43, 46, 61, 75–6, 83–4, 133–4, 187n27, 204n9 Eichendorff, Baron von 150 emancipation: Adorno on 8, 94, 119, 131, 141–50, 165; Habermas on 8, 119, 150–8, 160 employee role, see role

224

Index

enlightenment: Adorno on 3, 74, 94, 115, 117, 119, 164–5, 175, 202n68; Habermas on 3, 74, 92, 108–9, 112, 117–18, 119, 165–6, 169 exaggeration 33, 173–5, 177–8 exchange principle (Tauschprinzip) 10, 11, 25–9, 40, 41, 48, 49, 72, 73, 91, 94, 102, 134–5, 162, 164, 168, 175, 184n47; see also identity-thinking expert culture, see culture familial-vocational privatism, see privatism family: Adorno on 43, 61–62, 130, 132–3; Habermas on 29, 58–9, 61, 62–6, 136, 162 fascism, see Nazi Germany fatherless society 43, 133 Feenberg, A. 5, 39–40, 71, 90–1, 186n8 Fest, J. 175 Finlayson, G. xi, 202n78 Fleming, M. 189n67 form of objectivity or thought (Gegenständlichkeitsform) 10, 41, 71, 72, 73 form of understanding (Verständigungsform) 72, 107, 109 Foucault, M. 28, 64 fragmentation 54–5, 110–11 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 175, 176 Fraser, N. 185n67, 187n38, 189n67 freedom: Adorno on 35, 47–8, 113–14, 119–20, 145, 147, 149, 164, 171, 175; Habermas on 35, 55–6, 108–9, 111, 150, 152, 169; see also loss of freedom, self-determination Freud, S. 7, 11, 43–5, 83, 86, 88, 93, 129, 134, 145, 187n23, 194n54 Fromm, E. 1 functionalism 18–19, 182n25; see also systems theory functionalist rationality, see rationality, functionalist Gehlen, A. 84, 176, 194n55 Germany, Federal Republic of 160 Giddens, A. 78, 193n41 Gilligan, C. 155, 207n74, 208n14 globalization 7, 19, 67–70, 131, 162, 163, 175, 191n83 Haan, N. 208n14 Habermas, J. “Apologetic Tendencies”

184n55; Between Facts and Norms 7, 21, 51, 60–1, 67, 73, 87, 95–8, 123, 126–8, 137–40, 153, 158, 199n35; “The European Nation-State” 191n83; “Further Reﬂections on the Public Sphere” 119; “A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Modernity” 155; “Historical Materialism and the Development of Normative Structures” 76; “Individuation through Socialization” 179n16; “Justice and Solidarity” 155, 182n27; Knowledge and Human Interests 80, 84–5, 170, 194n58; “Learning from Catastrophe?” 68–9; Legitimation Crisis 7, 51, 52, 92–3, 96, 97, 139; “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action” 208n14; “Moral Development and Ego Identity” 85; “Morality and Ethical Life” 88; “Morality, Society, and Ethics” 57, 125; “The New Obscurity” 190n76; “On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason” 154–5; “On the Public Use of History” 176; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 100, 123, 179n16, 200n41; “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy” 67; “Questions and Counterquestions” 202n69; “Reﬂections on Communicative Pathology” 57, 63–4, 189n67; “Remarks from the Römerberg Colloquium” 176; “Remarks on Discourse Ethics” 155; “A Reply” 183n35, 183n38; “A Reply to My Critics” 194n58; The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 1–2, 6, 67, 119, 141, 166; The Theory of Communicative Action 5, 18, 19, 31–2, 34, 41, 50–1, 55, 57, 58, 60, 63–4, 66–8, 70, 71–3, 95, 101, 127, 137, 140, 150, 158, 200n39; “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism” 76–7, 192n30; “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices” 157 Hegel, G. W. F. 3–4, 15–16, 35, 47, 59, 75, 77, 82, 88, 91, 101, 115, 124, 125, 135, 145, 157, 165, 173, 196n68, 205n42

Index Heidegger, M. 47, 84 Held, D. 12, 14 history 49, 71–3, 75–9, 91–2, 192n22; see also anthropogenesis, philosophy of history, rationalization, reason Hobbes, T. 79, 80 Hohengarten, W. 155 homogeneity: Adorno on 29, 31, 40, 47, 53, 58, 175; Habermas on 31, 53–4, 58, 67 Honneth, A. 78 Horkheimer, M. 1, 11, 49, 74–5, 82, 100, 160, 161, 172, 198n24 Horney, K. 83 Hume, D. 80, 81 Husserl, E. 21, 104 id 46, 83, 133 ideal presuppositions 120–9, 152–5, 161, 167–8, 172; see also ideas ideas: constitutive 125, 152–3; regulative 120, 125, 153 identity-thinking 7, 10, 27, 40, 49, 71–2, 82–3, 93, 94, 101–6, 115–17, 151, 162, 167, 171, 174; see also exchange principle ideology: Adorno on 7, 48–9, 101–106, 111, 128, 129; Habermas on 7, 101, 106–10, 127, 199n36; liberal 7, 108–9, 113–17; positivist 7, 103–6, 113, 115; see also culture ideology critique: Adorno on 7, 100–1, 112–17, 119–20; Habermas on 7, 100, 101, 112, 120 individual: Adorno on 25–8, 33, 42–8, 58, 94, 113–14, 116, 134–5, 141–4, 149–50, 156–7, 168–9, 204n14, 208n19; Habermas on 55, 58, 62–4, 92, 150, 156–7 individuation: Adorno on 74–6, 102, 134, 144, 152, 156, 168; Habermas on 89, 136, 152, 156–7, 195n62, 208n23 Ingram, D. 77, 191n10, 196n92 instinct (Trieb) 11, 42, 43–4, 46, 73, 75, 80–4, 88–9, 94, 133, 135, 159,194n54; see also self-preservation Institute for Social Research 1, 179n1 integration: social 20, 22–3, 24, 30, 32, 36, 38, 56–7, 58–9, 62, 64–6, 67, 68, 72, 89, 92, 130, 136–7, 157, 162, 183n35, 190n69, see also socialization (Vergellschaftung); system 20, 22–3, 24, 30, 38, 65–7, 72, 130, 137, 162, 183n35

225

interpersonal relations: Adorno on 43–7, 49, 58–9, 61, 64, 134–5, 141–2, 151; Habermas on 50, 56–8, 61, 63, 64, 135–7, 150–1; see also collective identity, solidarity Invisible Hand 18, 20, 34–5, 161 Jameson, F. 87, 99, 151 Jarvis, S. 76, 84, 103, 171, 173, 209n27 Jay, M. 4, 40, 61, 76, 99, 149,179n1 Joas, H. 18–19, 64, 182n25, 182n27, 190n69 Johnson, P. 189n67 juridiﬁcation 31–2, 41, 55–7, 67, 110 Kant, I. 3, 75, 80–1, 85, 87–8, 91, 94, 113, 118, 123, 147, 153, 164–5, 169, 177, 193n46, 202n68 Kellner, D. 12 Keynes, J. M. 181n17 Kohlberg, L. 76, 85, 166 labour 25–6, 27, 30, 35, 39–40, 102, 143, 161, 170, 183n37 Lasch, C. 42, 62, 63, 162, 189n65 law 17, 28, 31, 56, 58, 108, 123, 127, 165; see also juridiﬁcation libido 37, 81, 83, 84–5, 170 lifeworld 6, 11, 16–17, 21–4, 76–8, 156; and system 11, 20–1, 22–4, 29–33, 34–8, 50, 64–7, 77, 92–3, 96–8, 109–10, 130–1, 132, 136–40, 161, 166, 171, 183n35, 183n37, 183n38; colonization of, see colonization; institutions in 21, 22, 23, 56, 58–9, 62, 65, 130, 137, 162; rationalization of, see rationalization; structural components of 22, 32, 50, 151 limited effects theory 60, 189n58 logos 86, 88, 118 loss of freedom 34–5, 55–7, 112, 136; see also colonization, freedom loss of meaning 52–5, 112, 136, 200n37 Luhmann, N. 93, 97 Lukács, G.: and Adorno 5, 6, 10, 40, 49, 50, 71–2, 73, 90–1; and Habermas 5, 6, 41, 49, 66–7, 72–3; on form of objectivity 10, 41; on formal rationality 39–40, 66–7, 72, 104; on history 71–2, 90–1; on reiﬁcation 5, 6, 39–40 Marcuse, H. 1, 11, 124, 125, 193n36

226

Index

Marx, K.: and Adorno 4, 12, 13, 24, 25, 48, 90–2, 99–100, 101, 118–19, 131–2, 142–3, 146, 205n42, 206n43; and Habermas 4, 19, 21, 30–1, 66, 77, 90, 92, 108, 112, 118–19, 127, 131–2, 180n18, 192n30; on base and superstructure 16; on class 131, 183n30; on commodity fetishism 25, 39–40; on critique 4, 132, 205n30; on the commodity form 26, 39; on nature and history 90–1; on reason 4–5; on religion 127, 129, 203n85 mass media: Adorno on, see culture industry; Habermas on 59, 60, 67 mass society 12–14, 131, 132–3 material reproduction 17, 21, 23, 31, 36–8, 72, 98, 153, 169–70, 183n37, 183n38 maturity (Mündigkeit) 111, 164, 166, 208n6 McCarthy, T. 18, 182n25, 194n58 Mead, G. H. 76, 136, 150, 189n65 media, see mass media mediation 4, 29, 58–66, 83–4, 104 Merleau-Ponty, M. 80, 81 monetarization 29, 41, 51 motivation 80–2, 87–8, 171 narcissism: Adorno on 26–7, 43–4, 61–2, 132–5, 142; Habermas on 62, 189n65 Nazi Germany 12–14, 16, 19, 28, 29, 33, 43–4, 77, 174–7, 181n20, 182n27 need: Adorno on 11, 26, 37, 42, 46–7, 94, 105, 147, 148, 156; Habermas on 85–6, 98, 158, 171, 194n58 negation 82, 115–17, 143, 145; see also determinate negation New Deal 12 Neumann, F. 11–13, 16, 181n20 Nielsen, T. H. 125, 152 Nietzsche, F. 40, 48, 86–7, 173 Nolte, E. 176–7 non-identity 117, 149, 151, 198n24, 200n48 normative validity claim, see validity claim object 80–1, 101–3, 114, 116–17, 148–9, 173; see also subject O’Connor, B. xi Odyssey 74–5, 102 Oedipus Complex 132–3, 189n65

O’Neill, O. 128 Outhwaite, W. 140, 193n41 paciﬁcation: Adorno on 15, 30, 70, 131, 141; Habermas on 15, 30, 50, 53, 68–9, 131, 188n47 particular 3–4; Adorno on 45, 47, 59, 72, 82, 94, 103, 113, 116–17, 144, 148–50, 156–7, 159, 163, 168, 173; Habermas on 154–8; see also universal performative contradiction 100, 106, 122–3 personality 22, 32, 56–7, 58, 65, 88, 110, 136, 152 Peters, B. 126 philosophy of history: and Adorno 75–6; and Habermas 76–8 Piaget, J. 76 Pickford, H. 208n6 Pierce, C. S. 87 Plato 85, 159 pluralism: and Adorno 132, 157; and Habermas 131, 157 political system: Adorno on 6, 11–16, 20, 28–9, 42, 70, 129, 141, 168; Habermas on 18–21, 30–2, 34, 41, 55–7, 67–70, 93, 95–8, 123–9, 137–40, 154, 160, 162, 168, 169; see also democracy, welfare state Pollock, F. 6, 11–16 Popper, K. 104–5 positivism, see ideology Poulantzas, N. 112 praxis 94, 141–4; see also theory presuppositions, see ideal presuppositions privatism 51–2, 60, 135–6, 139–40, 158 proletariat 4, 19, 66–7, 131 public opinion: Adorno on 2, 59–60; Habermas on 1–2, 60–1, 95 public sphere 21, 58–61, 119, 138–9, 154 rationality 73; aesthetic-expressive 22, 52, 54, 66; cognitive-instrumental 10, 17, 22, 30–1, 52, 54, 66, 73, 86, 109, 121–3, 167; communicative 7, 11, 17, 32–3, 52, 66, 86–7, 97–8, 100, 107, 110–11, 118–29, 151, 162, 166, 167, 200n38, 200n39; formal 5, 39–40; functionalist 10, 17–19, 30–1, 32, 34, 66, 73, 77, 86, 121, 151, 167, 170, 171; moral-practical 22, 52, 54, 66,

Index 72,167; see also identity-thinking, rational identity-thinking, reason, logos rationalization: of lifeworld 5, 6, 16–17, 23, 27, 50, 63, 72–3, 74, 77–8, 92, 107–10, 118–19, 162, 165, 200n41; of system 73, 77, 110–11 rational identity-thinking 115–17, 118–19, 173–5, 198n24, 200n48 rational potential 95, 100, 112–17, 118–21, 124, 143–4, 159, 160 reason: evolution of 7, 74–80; and history 7, 74–79, 80, 81, 87–92, 94; and nature 7, 74–5, 80, 81, 87–92, 94, 208n23; and self-preservation 7, 74–5, 79, 89, 91, 94, 123, 159, 163, 169–71; see also identity-thinking, rational identity-thinking, rationality, rationalization, logos reconciliation 3–4, 8: Adorno on 76, 89–90, 94, 148–50, 157, 159–60, 169, 172; Habermas on 85, 120, 150, 154–8, 160 reiﬁcation 5, 11, 25–9, 30, 39–70, 74, 92, 122, 130–1, 134–7, 140, 180n18; see also colonization resistance 33, 43, 82, 130, 133–5, 141, 143–4, 146, 147 reproduction: of culture 22, 56, 65, 67, 122, 136–7, 152; of society 22, 56, 65, 152; of personality 22, 56, 65, 122, 136, 152; socialization of 42–3; see also material reproduction, symbolic reproduction revisionist psychology 26, 44, 83 Rockmore, T. 192n30 role 50, 158, 187n38; citizen 50, 53, 60–1, 96–8, 138–9, 158, 168; client 50, 51, 53, 62–3, 136; consumer 50, 51, 53, 63, 136; employee 50, 53, 170 Roosevelt, F. D. 12 Rose, G. 115, 200n48 Rousseau, J. J. 79 Sartre, J. P. 81, 84 Schelling, F. 82 Scheuerman, W. E. 12, 14 Schlüter, F. L. 59, 189n58 Schnädelbach, H. 118–19 self-determination: Adorno on 152, 174; Habermas on 33, 50, 53, 97, 126, 128–9, 138–40, 152, 161, 168; see also autonomy, freedom

227

self-preservation: Adorno on 35, 43, 47, 74–5, 79, 89, 91, 94, 102, 122, 123, 130, 141, 148, 159, 163, 168, 169, 171, 177, 194n47, 204n19, 209n27; Habermas on 35, 85, 163, 170–1; see also reason self-reﬂection 71–2, 82, 94, 114, 152 Sherratt, Y. 198n24 Sholle, D. 189n62 Smith, A. 18 social integration, see integration socialization: Adorno on (Vergellschaftung) 42–8, 61, 64, 92, 133–4, 143; Habermas on (Sozialisierung) 56, 62, 64–5, 67, 88, 92, 89, 136, 157, 195n62; of reproduction, see reproduction social movements 93, 95, 131, 139, 141 society deﬁned 24; as structural component of lifeworld 21, 22, 23, 56, 58–9, 65, 137 solidarity: Adorno on 43, 48, 57–8, 132, 135, 147, 156, 189n58, 205n38; Habermas on 19, 32, 56, 57–8, 61, 63, 65, 69, 79, 122, 126, 132, 135–8, 151, 154, 157–8, 182n27, 191n83 species (being) 46, 75, 81, 85, 94, 141, 148, 159, 168 species subject: Adorno on 19, 141; Habermas on 19, 78, 207n75; see also collective subject Spengler, O. 178 Stiglitz, J. 185n57 strategic action 31, 35–6, 41, 56, 64, 121–3, 202n66; see also cognitiveinstrumental, rationality subject 75, 81–2, 84, 101–2, 148–9; see also collective subject, object, species subject superego 43, 46, 61, 133, 204n9 superstructure, see base and superstructure symbolic reproduction 17, 23, 32, 36–8, 68, 153, 161, 169, 170, 183n37, 183n38 system integration, see integration systems theory 18–19, 182n25; see also rationality, functionalist Taylorism 28 taxation 19, 68 teleology 74, 76–7 theory 142–6; see also praxis

228

Index

Theunissen, M. 173, 205n42 Tocqueville, Alexis de 40 understanding (Verständigung) 11,17, 18, 41, 56, 64, 66, 72, 74, 76, 80, 86, 108, 118–20, 121, 124, 150–1, 157, 167 United Nations 155 United States 79, 160, 166 universal 3–4; Adorno on 45, 47, 59, 74, 91, 94, 103, 113–17, 134, 141, 143, 144, 148–50, 156–7, 159, 163, 168, 173; Habermas on 154–8, 177, 209n49; see also concept, particular utopia: Adorno on 94, 146–50, 160; Habermas on 108, 150, 152, 154, 160–1 validity claim 77–8, 107–9, 139, 153, 154–6, 167, 171, 199n32, 200n38, 208n16

Van der Wee, H. 181n17 Weber, M. 5, 34, 39–40, 51, 52, 53, 73, 108 welfare state: Adorno on 10, 12–16, 28–9, 30, 33, 42–3, 55–6, 69–70, 130, 133, 135, 141; Habermas on 6, 10, 18–21, 30, 50, 53, 55–6, 67–70, 136, 169; see also democracy, political system Wellmer, A.103 Whitebook, J. 78, 85, 89, 132, 157, 160, 193n36, 194n54, 195n59, 195n65, 199n29, 208n23 Wiggershaus, R. 2, 5, 91, 179n1, 180n18, 194n55 Wolin, R. 209n40 Zuidervaart, L. xi, 201n49

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