Praxis International 1984, 4-3

I am happy to accept editors' invitation to respond to the articles by Richard Rorty, Martin Jay, Thomas McCarthy, and Joel Whitebook. Though critical, their friendly spirit reveals that we are all concerned if not with the same problems, then at least the same themes. At the same time, it is immediately apparent there is some distance between us, for instance, between Rorty and myself. gaps between the different universes of discourse become so wide at times that the mixture of reciprocal interpretations, suppositions, and misunderstandings suddenly also serves to reveal residual unconscious presuppositions, implications, and background assumptions. this amounts to the quite normal confusion in conversation among friends different points of view. is more drastic controversies .. F..... L:~ T".,.. is threatened others' . . . . . . . . . . _ _ weapons. Scarcely anyone ............."...,"""...... ..-'11_""' have increased intensi...........'Y

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*This essay is a response to Martin Jay, liabermas and l\1odernism, loeI Whitebook Reason and happiness: Some perspecti'ves in critical theory; Richard Rorty, Elabermas and Lyotard on Posl-lvlodenzity; and Thomas McCarthy, Reflections on Rationalism in The Theory of Communicative Action. The essays by Jay, Whitebook, and Rony were published in Vol. 4, No. 1 (April" 1984). McCarthy's essay appeared in Vcl. 4, No. 2 (July, 1984). This essay \vas translated by james Bohman. When writing this response, I had not yet read the careful chapter on my work by Martin Jay in his Marxism and Totality (Berkeley, 1984), pp. 423-460.

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On the one side, Dilthey, Weber, Jaspers, and Kolakowski take an affirmative position on the growing pluralism of "gods and demons" (Glaubensmiichte), existential modes of being, myths, value attitudes, and metaphysical or religious world views. A philosophy that treats forms of truth in the plural is supposed to leave to the sciences the job of providing an adequate reserve of consensual knowledge. On the other side, philosophers such as Husserl, the early Wittgeenstein, Popper, and Apel all. attempt to maintain, at a higher level of abstraction, the unity of reason, even if only in a procedural sense. They distill the common characteristics of rational activity that must be implicitly presupposed in the pluralism of "gods and demons" and in the argumentative collisions between universes of discourse. In this way, there arise what Rorty calls "meta-narratives," that is, the theories of rationality that are supposed to account for why and in what sense we can still connect our convictions and our descriptive, normative, and evaluative statements with a transcending validity claim that goes beyond merely local contexts. These are philosophical answers to the unavoidable experience of modernity; when they are sharpened into the opposition between relativism and absolutism, an unmediated confrontation emerges between pure historicism and pure transcendentalism. At that point, the failures of both positions become clear: the one side carries the burden of self-referential, pragmatic contradictions and paradoxes that violate our need for consistency; the other side is burdened with a foundationalism that conflicts with our consciousness of the fallibility of human knowledge. No one who gives this situation much thought would want to be left in this bind. In the context of our discussion here, this reading of the present situation is not really in dispute although Rorty, Bernstein, and I react to it in different ways. Forcefully freeing himself from the straight-jacket of analytic philosophy, Richard Rorty has undertaken the most ambitious project: he wants to destroy the tradition of the philosophy of consciousness, from its Cartesian beginnings, with the aim of showing the pointlessness of the entire discussion of the foundations and limits of knowledge. He concludes that philosophers need only recognize the hybrid character of their controversies and give the field over to the practitioners of science, politics, and daily life to be rid of the problem. Like the later Wittgenstein, Rorty sees philosophy itself as the sickness whose symptoms it previously and unsuccessfully tried to cure. But Rorty is still enough of a philosopher to give a reason for his recommendation that we avoid the H olzweg of philosophical justification: one shouldn't scratch where it doesn't itch. It is just this assumption that "it doesn't itch" that I find problematic. Forms of life are totalities which always emerge in the plural. Their coexistence may cause friction, but this difference does not automatically result in their incompatibility. Something similar is the case for the pluralism of values and belief systems. The closer the proximity in which competing "gods and demons" have to live with each other in political communities, the more tolerance they demand; but they are not incompatible. Convictions can contradict one other only when those who are concerned with problems define them in a similar way, believe them to be in need of resolution and want to

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decide issues on the basis of good reasons. To be sure, it is also a characteristic of modernity that we have grown accustomed to living with dissent in the realm of questions that admit of "truth"; we simply put controversial validity claims to one side "for the time being." Nonetheless, we perceive this pluralism of contradictory convictions as an incentive for learning processes; we live in the expectation of future resolutions. As long as we take part and do not merely look over our own shoulders as historians and ethnographers, we maintain precisely the distinctions that Rorty wants to retract: between valid and socially accepted views, between good arguments and those which are merely successful with a certain audience at a certain time. In believing that he can consistently replace the implicitly normative conception of "valid arguments" with the descriptive concept of "arguments held to be true for us at this time," Rorty commits an objectivistic fallacy. We could not even understand the meaning of what we describe from a third person perspective as argumentative conduct if we had not already learned the performative attitude of a participant in argumentation, that is, what it means from the perspective of the first person to raise a validity claim that points beyond the provincial agreements of the specific local context. Only this capacity gives our opinions the character of convictions. (This is no less true for the practice of everyday communication than for argumentative disputes about th~ hypothetical validity of statements.) Any mutual understanding produced in communication and reproduced in the life-world is based on a potential reserve of reasons that may be challenged, reasons that force us to take a rationally motivated position of yes or no. This calls for a different type of attitude from that which we bring to the claims of mere influential ideas. From the perspective of the participant, a moment of unconditionedness is built into the conditions of action oriented toward reaching understanding. From the perspective of the first person, the question of which beliefs are justified is a question of which beliefs are based on good reasons; it is not a function of life-habits that enjoy social currency in some places and not in others. And because in the modern age the gaps between competing convictions reach deep into the domain of questions that "admit of truth," there exists, contrary to Rorty, a philosophical interest "to see social practices of justification as more than just such practices."l The stubbornness with which philosophy clings to the role of the "guardian of reason" can hardly be dismissed as an idiosyncrasy of self-absorbed intellectuals, especially in a period in which basic irrationalist undercurrents are transmuted once again into a dubious form of politics. In my opinion, it is precisely the neoconservatives who articulate, intensify, and spread this mood of the times via the mass media - with such an effect that "it itches."

11 In his latest book Richard Bernstein gives us another answer: instead of bidding farewell to philosophy from an artificially alienated viewpoint of an ethnologist, he turns it toward the practical. While Rorty absolutizes the

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perspective of the observer, Bernstein remains within the perspective of the participant and enters into a debate which today leads beyond the mistaken alternatives of historicism and trancendentalism, a debate going on among Gadamer, Arendt, Rorty, and myself, among others. 2 Bernstein does not end his splendid reconstruction of the diverse paths of this discussion - a discussion that has not yet come to a close - so much with a proposal for a theoretical solution, as with a practical recommendation: we ought to act under the presupposition of the unifying power of communicative reason. In order to make this argumentative move intelligible, let me cite a thesis of Herbert Schnadelbach with which Bernstein would probably agree: "that the difference between what we always claim for our rationality and what we are actually able to explicate as rational can in principle never be eliminated."3 If I understand the conclusion of his book correctly, it is for this reason that Bernstein, from the start, locates the moment of unconditionedness built into the universalistic validity claims of our communicative practices in the horizon of practical reason; he finds in the communicative infrastructure of the lifeworld a practical postulate, one that is dictated by reason itself. He refuses to regard the procedural unity of rationality within the historical and cultural multiplicity of standards of rationality as a question that is accessible to theoretical treatment. I suspect that behind Bernstein's argumentative strategy there lies an absolutizing of the perspective of the participant that is complementary to Rarty's absolutizing of that of the observer. I don't see why one could not, at least in a preliminary way, explore a third path, which I have embarked upon with my "theory of communicative action." In this approach, philosophy surrenders its claim of being the sole representative in matters of rationality and enters into a nonexclusive division of labor with the reconstructive sciences with the aim of clarifying the presuppositions of the rationality of processes of reaching understanding, which may be presumed to be universal because are unavoidable. Then philosophy shares with the sciences a fallibilistic consciousness in that its strong universalistic suppositions require confirmation in an interplay with empirical theories of competence. 4 This revisionary self-understanding of the role of philosophy marks a break the aspirations of first philosophy (Ursprungsphilosophie) in any even that of the theory of knowledge; but it does not mean that philosophy abandons its role as the guardian of rationality. With its self-imposed modesty of method, a philosophy starting from formal pragmatics preserves possibility of speaking of rationality in the singular. Unlike the sciences, it has to account reflectively for its own context of emergence and thus its own place in history. 5 Thus, "meta-narratives," in the sense of foundational "ultimate groundings" or totalizing philosophies of history, could never even arise. The most important achievement of such an approach is the possibility of clarifying a concept of communicative rationality that escapes the snares of Western logocentrism. Instead of following Nietzsche's path of a totalizing and self-referential critique of reason, whether it be via Hiedegger to Derrida, or via Bataille to Foucault,6 and throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it is more promising to seek this end through the analysis of the already

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Do not these and similar signs indicate that intellectuals articulate shifts in mood which they in no way invent, but which have instead palpable social, and often economic, causes? As a good pragmatist, I hold the view that a philosopher's capacity to create problems through intentionally inciting doubt is quite limited. I share Pierce's doubt about any type of Cartesian doubt. Problems emerge in situations over which we are not in control; they are something which objectively happen to us. The slogan that leftist intellectuals are the cause of the misery they analyze has already been bandied about for too long among rightist intellectuals in Germany to be credible. It is no more credible in the attractive packaging of a theory of the new class. To me, the notion of intellectual "value elites" is absolutely worthless. Like Rorty, for a long time I have identified myself with that radical democratic mentality which is present in the best American traditions and articulated in American pragmatism. This mentality takes seriously what appears to socalled radical thinkers as so much reformist naivete. Dewey's "attempt to make concrete concerns with the daily problems of one's community" expresses both a practice and an attitude. It is a maxim of action about which it is in fact superfluous to philosophize. Rorty puts in question the entire undertaking of the theory of communicative action. As opposed to this form of questioning, the reservations of Martin Jay, Thomas McCarthy, and Joel Whitebook are directed toward particular steps in its execution. These authors direct their attention to complications in any attempt to work out the concept of communicative rationality. Jay points out an under-illuminated aspect; McCarthy touches upon a central difficulty; Whitebook deals with a problem which emerges as a consequence of the theory. In the framework of a short reply, I can only respond in such a way as to allude to how I have dealt with some of these problems in the past, and how I would like to work on others in the future. An added difficulty here is that only McCarthy directs his remarks to my more recent works. III With a great deal of hermeneutic sensitivity, Martin Jay has collected and interpreted my scattered remarks on the question of a~sthetic modernity. In every case these remarks had a secondary character to the extent that they arose only in the context of other themes and always in relation to the discussions among Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse. In The Theory of Communicative Action, my discussion of Max Weber's theory of culture and his ·diagnosis of the times required understanding the autonomous art that emerged in modern Europe (together with art criticism institutionalized since the eighteenth century) as the product of a disintegration and the result of a process of rationalization. Weber describes the rationalization of worldviews as a process of decomposition and differentiation. On the one hand, the basic substantial concepts with which the world-orders of salvation history and cosmology were constructed have been dissolved; with this dissolution, antic, moral, and expressive aspects are no longer fused into one and the same concept. Without the possibility of recourse to God and the cosmic order as

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taste. Originating in the tinguished aesthetic pleasure from is, it separated the beautiful useful and the desirable, on Art emerges along with science and technology, la\\", and the inner logic or intrinsic meaning spheres, which are also separated functionally specified systems action. Since the .,.,C'' Hauser into the social history of modern art, this lns,tllu~llo:rzal riI·,t-·""O"..,~..... art has often been analyzed. 7 There is no need here to go into the external aspects of the transformation the forms of the production of art, the purposes to \vhich it \vas or modes of its reception in the transition from sacrally bound the art of the court and patron, to bourgeois commercialized art. \';lhat is in dispute are the internal aspects of the "inner logic" of autonomous art since the eighteenth century. One of the two questions raised by hlartin Jay is the extent to which one can speak of an aesthetic-practical rationality, or even of a learning process, in this sphere. There is an unmistakable indicator for the that a certain type of "knowing" is objectified in art works, albeit in a different ,vay than in theoretical discourse or in legal or moral representations: these objectivations of mind are also fallible and hence criticizable. .I.~rt criticism arose at the same time as the autonomous work of art; and, since then, the insight has established itself that the work of art calls for interpretation, evaluation, and even the "linguistification" CVersprachlichung) of its semantic content. Art criticism has developed forms of argumentation that specifically differentiate it from the forms of theoretical and moral-practical discourse. 9 As distinct from merely subjective preference, the fact that we link judgments of taste to a criticizable claim presupposes non-arbitrary standards for the judgment of art. As the philosophical discussion of "artistic truth" reveals, works of art raise claims with regard to their unity (harmony: Stimrnigkeit), their authenticity, and the success of their expressions by which they can be measured and in terms of which they may fail. For that reason I believe that a pragmatic logic of argumentation is the most appropriate guiding thread through which the "aesthetic-practical" type of rationality can be differentiated over and against other types of rationality. If we speak about "learning processes," it is the works of art themselves, and not the discourses about them, that are the locus of directed and cumulative transformations. As McCarthy correctly notes, what accumulates are not epistemic contents, but rather the effects of the inner logical differentiation of .i..l.l.'-".I."""..L.... '"

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special sorts of experience: precisely those aesthetic experiences of a decentered, unbound subjectivity is capable. Authentic experiences of type are possible only to extent that the categories of the patterned expectations of organized daily experience collapse, that the routines of daily are destroyed, and normality of action and conventions of ordinary foreseeable and accountable certainties are suspended. The ever more radical uncoupling of potential for experience, the purification of the aesthetic from admixtures of the cognitive, the useful, and the moral, is mirrored the reflections of the early Romantic period (especially in Friedrich Schlegel), in the aestheticism of Baudelaire and the Symbolists, in the program of pour l'art, in the surrealistic celebration of illumination through shock effects with its ambivalence of attraction and repulsion, of broken continuity, shudder of profanization, of agitated disgust: short, in the reflection on those moments in which the bewildered subject "transgresses his boundaries," as Bataille puts it. What is reflected in these interpretations and declarations is a transformation of the form of aesthetic experience, induced by avant-garde art itself, in the direction of the decentering and unbounding of subjectivity. At the same time, this decentering indicates an increased sensitivity to what remains unassimilated in the interpretative achievements of pragmatic, epistemic, and moral mastery of the demands and challenges of everyday situations; it effects an openness to the expurgated elements of the unconscious, the fantastic, and the mad, the material and the bodily, thus to everything in our speechless contact with reality which is fleeting, so contingent, so immediate, so individualized, simultaneously so far and so near that it escapes our usual categorial grasp. Benjamin called this style of experience "concentrated distraction" and set it off from the contemplative style of experience. It is in this direction that the characteristics and tendencies of the development of avant-garde art, analyzed repeatedly since Benjamin and Adorno, point. The loss of aura and the importance of allegory are continuous with the destruction of the organically unified work of art and its pretended totality of meaning; one can think here of the incorporation of the ugly, of the negative as such. By treating materials, methods, and techniques reflectively, the artist opens up a space for experiment and play and transfers the activity of the genius to "free construction" (Freie Arbeit).10 Forced novelty, dependence on the latest trends, and the accelerated pace of fads perpetuate the creative break with tradition and serve to make all stylistic means equally accessible. Art becomes a laboratory, the critic an expert, the development of art the medium of a learning process here, naturally, not in the sense of an accumulation of epistemic contents, of an aesthetic "progress" - which is possible only in individual dimensions - but nonetheless in the sense of a concentrically expanding, advancing exploration of a realm of possibilities structurally opened up with the autonomization of art. (I do not know whether or not the results of Piaget's genetic psychology are as appropriate for the analysis of this "level of learning" as they are for the analysis of the stages of postconventional conception of law and morality. I tend to be rather sceptical.) Martin Jay's other question concerns the relation between the independ-

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ence of art in a culture of experts and the cultural impoverishment of the life-world. Jay asks why I don't decide unambiguously between Adorno and Benjamin, between the esotericism of the exclusive, often hermeticaUy sealed, avant-garde work of art, and the hope for profane illumination in exoteric mass art. He notes that I seem to find some truth in both positions. Peter Burger takes an unambiguous position. In his view, the impulse of several avant garde movements to rebel against the institutionalizatio'n of art, against its being split off from the life-world, was correct despite the failure of the surrealistic revolt. Il I do not differ with this judgment per se. The intention of redeeming a promise of happiness, whose superabundance radiates beyond art, is part of art itself. But this intention cannot be realized the way in which the surrealists wanted: through the liquidation of appearance as the medium of artistic representation. This false Aufhebung of art into life certainly does preclude against the possibility of a correct mediation of art with the life-world. An aesthetic experience that is not simply to be transposed into judgments of taste by the professional arbiters, that is not merely to circulate in the realm of art alone, would entail a change in the status of an as it were experimentally unbound subjectivity. If aesthetic experience is incorporated into the context of individual lifehistories, if it is utilized to illuminate a situation and to throw light on individual life-problems - if it commmunicates at all its impulses to a collective form of life - then art enters into a language game which is no longer that of aesthetic criticism, but belongs, rather, to everyday communicative practice. Then it no longer only affects our evaluative language or only renews the interpretation of needs that color our perceptions; rather, it reaches into our cognitive interpretations and normative expectations and transforms the totality in which these moments are related to each other. In this respect, modern art barbors a utopia that becomes a reality to the degree that the mimetic powers sublimated in the work of art find resonance in the mimetic relations of a balanced and undistorted intersubjectivity of everyday life. However, this does not require the liquidation of an art set off from life in the medium of appearance, but rather a changed constellation of art and the life-world. I developed these ideas earlier at the suggestion of Albrecht Wellmer. 12 In the meantime, Wellmer has elaborated them in such an ingenious way that I can here be content simply to refer to his treatment. 13 I do not wish to retrace Wellmer's subtle line of argument but only to repeat his main thesis in order to offer it as an answer to Martin Jay's question. The fact that we can dispute the reasons for evaluating a work of art in aesthetic discourse is, as we said, an unmistakable indication for a validity claim inherent in works of art. The aesthetic "validity" or "unity" that we attribute to a work refers to its singularly illuminating power to open our eyes to what is seemingly familiar, to disclose anew an apparently familiar reality. This validity claim admittedly stands for a potential for "truth" that can be released only in the whole complexity of life-experience; therefore this "truth-potential" may not be connected to (or even identified with) one of the three validity claims constitutive for communicative action, as I have been previously inclined to maintain.

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The one-to-one relationship which exists between the prescriptive validity of a norm and the normative validity claims raised in regulative speech acts is not a proper model for the relation between the potential for truth of works of art and the transformed relations between self and world aesthetic experience. "Neither truth nor truthfulness may be attributed unmetaphorically to works of art, if one understands 'truth' and 'truthfulness' in the sense of a pragmatically differentiated, everyday concept of truth. We can explain the way in which truth and truthfulness - and even normative correctness - are metaphorically interlaced in works of art only by appealing to the fact that the work of art, as a symbolic formation with an aesthetic validity claim, is at the same time an object of the life-world experience, in which the three validity domains are unmetaphorically intermeshed. ,,14

IV Thomas McCarthy raises two sorts of objections: first, against my systematic interpretation of Weber's diagnosis of the times; and second, against my analysis of interpretative understanding. Since I believe that the relationship between the two problems established by McCarthy is artificial, I will first deal separately with the problem of the objectivity of understanding. In the field of meaning theory I hold the view that we understand a literally meant speech act when we know the conditions under which it could be accepted as valid by a hearer. This pragmaticaly extended version of truth conditional semantics is supported by the fact that we connect the execution of speech acts to various validity claims: claims to the truth of propositions (or of the existential presuppositions of the propositional contents), claims to the rightness of an utterance (with respect to existing normative contexts), and claims to the truthfulness of an expressed intention. With these claims we take on, as it were, a warrant for their redemption, should it be necessary - above all- in that we offer, at least implicitly, reasons for the validity of our speech acts. A hearer knows the content of what is said when he or she knows what reasons (or what sort of reasons) the speaker would give for the validity of his or her speech act (under appropriate circumstances). The interpreter (even the social scientific interpreter who deals with linguistically formed data) does not understand his or her symbolically pre-structured objects (in the normal case, communicative utterances) if he or she does not also understand the reasons potentially related to their validity claims. Now the interesting point is that reasons are of a special nature. They can always be expanded into arguments which we then understand only when we recapitulate (nachvollziehen) them in the light of some standards of rationality. This "recapitulation" requires a reconstructive activity in which we bring into play our own standards of rationality, at least intuitively. From the perspective of a participant, however, one's own rationality standards must always claim general validity; this claim to general validity can be restricted, subsequently only from the perspective of a third person. In short, the interpretative reconstruction of reasons makes it necessary that we place "their" standards in relation to "ours," so that in the case of a contradiction we either

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revise our preconceptions or relativize "their" standards of rationality against "ours." These reflections do indeed lead to the rather "strong" thesis that we cannot understand reasons without at least implicitly evaluating them. McCarthy argues that this conclusion is false, since, even if it is the case that it is necessary to take up a rationally motivated "yes" or "no" position on reasons in order to understand them, the interpreter can not only agree or disagree with them but can also practice a kind of abstention; he or she has the option of "leaving to one side" the question of the validity of "their" rationality standards (and hence of the reasons themselves). However, I think such an abstention is also a rationally motivated position, as much as a "yes" or a "no," and in no way relieves us of the necessity of taking a position. Abstention in this context does not really signify a true declaration of neutrality, but only signals that we are putting off problems for the time being and wish to suspend our interpretative efforts. For example, so long as we are unable to see a perspicuous internal relation between the categorial frameworks of Aristotelian and Newtonian physics, we do not know precisely in what sense Aristotle, in contrast to Newton, wanted to "explain" natural processes. Simply noting the competition between various paradigms comes close to confessing that we do not yet understand the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle as well as we do the basic assumptions about nature in classical mechanics. The rational character of understanding, which Gadamer always emphasized, becomes especially clear in limit cases, as, for example, in the interpretation of mythical narratives. Undercutting or leaving to one side (or merely shaking one's head while accepting) the totalistic categories of a worldview within which the narrative interweaving and (as it appears to us) the categorial confusion of surface phenomena lay claim to explanatory power, merely indicate that we are putting off, prematurely breaking off, the interpretative process. This is tantamount to confessing that we do not yet understand the point of mythical modes of thought. We understand them only when we can say why the participants had good reasons for their confidence in this type of explanation. But in order to achieve this degree of understanding, we have to establish an internal relation between "their" sort of explanation and the kind we accept as correct. We must be able to reconstruct the successful and unsuccessful learning processes which separate "us" from "them"; both modes of explanation have to be located within the same universe of discourse. As long as this is not achieved, the feeling remains that one does not understand something. It is this perplexity which finds its appropriate expression in suspension. But it does not follow from this that the sciences which have to establish hermeneutic access to their object domain have to renounce the objectivity of knowledge. I have criticized this hermeneutistic position in various ways. IS In principle, I do not see any difficulty in achieving some theoretical knowledge even in those domains of reality with which we have contact primarily through norm-conforming or expressive attitudes. My reservations concern only those theoretical positions which ignore the hermeneutic dimension of access to the

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object domain entirely.16 sentence McCarthy criticizes is to be read as reporting my own view, "that nothing can be learned in the objectivating attitude about inner nature qua subjectivity,"l? then it may be understood only in the sense of a rejection of purely objectivistic approaches to psychology. McCarthy is further interested in the question whether or not the rationality complexes which have been differentiated out in modern Europe, and there achieved a certain autonomy, do not, as it were, also communicate with one another and have their roots in one and the same reason. In my view, this theme can be treated independently of the problem of interpretative understanding. For this purpose, the schema reproduced by McCarthy is not really a fruitful point of departure. Its purpose was only to represent the content of Max Weber's famous "Zwischenbetrachtung.,,18 Unfortunately, in response to earlier objections I made the mistake of referring to this schema in a systematic way.19 And McCarthy does the same here. My previous carelessness thus makes it necessary in what follows to distinguish more carefully between my interpretation of Weber and my own views.

v I want first to isolate those elements of Weber's theory of culture that I appropriated into my own view(l). In so doing, we then encounter McCarthy's concern for the costs of a process of disenchantment that now leaves open the possibility only of a procedural unity of reason cutting across different forms of argumentation (2). McCarthy finally treats the question of the synthesis of the differentiated moments of reason under three quite distinct aspects. He lists three problems that cannot be subsumed under the same analytical perspective (that is, the perspective of varying basic attitudes toward the objective, the social, and the subjective worlds)(3). (1) To begin with, let me turn to what I have appropriated from Weber's theory of culture. In Weber's view, the assertion of a differentiation of "value spheres," each with its own inner logic - which was inspired by the N eoKantians Emil Lask and Heinrich Rickert - can be plausibly defended in regard to modern Europe on two levels: first, on the level of ideas that can be transmitted in traditions (scientific theories, moral and legal beliefs, as well as artistic productions); but also, second, on the level of cultural action systems, in which corresponding "discourses" and activities are given professionally and institutionally organized form. The differentiation of value spheres corresponds to decentered understanding of the world which is an important internal condition for a professional treatment of cultural traditions separated into questions of truth, justice, and taste. This modern understanding of the world makes possible a hypothetical approach to phenomena and experiences, which are isolated from the complexity of their life-world contexts and analyzed under experimentally varied conditions. This is equally true for the states of an objectified nature, for norms and modes of acting, and for the reflective experiences of an "unbound" subjectivity set free from the practical constraints of everyday life. The well-known distinction in cognitive developmen-

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tal psychology between structurally defined levels of learning, on the one hand, the learning of contents on the other, certainly may not be applied in same way to science, morality, and art. In this respect, my formulations were not careful enough. Compared to the growth of theoretical knowledge, described by McCarthy as accumulation of contents across paradigm shifts, the trends in the development of art (discussed at length above) do not so much signify an accumulation of contents as the progressive constitution of a particular domain of autonomous art and aesthetic experience purified of cognitive and moral admixtures; they also signify expanding explorations that illuminate more and more of this realm of experience. Yet this is not concentric expansion accompanied by the familiar effects of a devaluation of formerly held insights typical for cumulative learning processes. Moral and legal theories occupy a middle position. Here, too, we can observe the constitution of a domain of autonomous morality and moral univeralism that distills a class of rationally solvable problems from the complexity of the contexts of ethical life under the single aspect of justice. Learning processes in this sphere are similar to a theoretical progress achieved within the limits of a single paradigm. Thus, in the modern age the explication and justification of moral intuitions make a certain "progress": this progress not exhausted in ever new reinterpretations of the same moral principle. However, the thesis that capitalist modernization can be grasped as a selective actualization of the rationality potential contained in modern structures of consciousness requires the counterfactual supposition of a nonselective model of societal rationalization. 20 In this connection, I have suggested that for the value spheres of science, morality, and art in modern Europe "we should be able to demonstrate plausible correspondences with typical forms of argumentation, each of which is specialized in accord with a universal validity claim."zl Thus, the burden of proof is put on the theory of argumentation; leaving aside to explicative discourse and therapeutic critique, it has to distinguish and clarify the systematic content of three different forms of argumentation: namely, empircal-theoretical discourse,moral discourse, and aesthetic critique. 22 It was only due to the context of Weber's diagnosis of the times that I did not introduce the three rationality complexes via argumentation theory but by way of a scheme that was supposed to represent the characteristics of a decentered understanding of the world. Indeed, the modern understanding of the world structurally opens up the possibility of taking objectivating, norm-conforming, or expressive attitudes towards three different worlds (objective, social, or subjective - in short, to states of affairs, norms, or subjective experiences); it also allows us to vary these attitudes in relation to elements of one and the same world. If we keep to the scheme (Fig. 10, p. 238), but leave aside its application to Weber's diagnosis of the times and instead pursue a systematic line of thought, the three forms of argumentation corresponding to the modern complexes of rationality can, to begin with, be correlated with the formal pragmatic relations along the diagonal (1.1, 2.2, 3.3). (2) Based on reflections in the theory of meaning, I take as my starting point

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that facts, norms, and subjective experiences have their originary locus in "their" corresponding worlds (objective, social, or subjective), and, in the first instance, are accessible, or identifiable, only from the perspective of an actor who takes a corresponding attitude (be it objectivating, norm-conforming, or expressive). It is with this linear ordering that the first of the three questions McCarthy treats at the end of his article arises. How is it that we can talk in an objectivating attitude about something in the subjective or social world, that is, about those elements that we first experience as something subjective or which we first encounter as something normative? In theoretical discourse (scientific discourse for example) we can only incorporate these elements if we thematize subjective experiences and norms as states of affairs after having transformed them into components of the objective world. In everyday communication we certainly succeed, without much trouble, in transforming expressive utterances (or first person sentences) into equivalent statements in the third person, or in accurately reporting the content of normative utterances or imperatives from the third person point of view. On the level of scientific discourse, however, there is a tendency to delimit the object domains of, for example, psychology and sociology through 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. Mutatis mutandis, the same questions arise for moral-practical discourse and, indirectly, for aesthetic criticism. These forms of argumentation are also inherently related to components of one specific world: the social or the subjective. Here, too, elements of the other two worlds must be brought into play in such a way as to avoid the dangers of, respectively, moralism and aestheticism, just as previously the danger of objectivism had to be avoided. We can thus observe that science, morality, and art have not only been differentiated from each other; they also communicate with each other. But within the boundaries of each expert culture, the different moments of reason come into contact with one another in such a way as to avoid violating the inner logic of the dominant form of argumentation specialized either in truth, normative correctness, or aesthetic harmony. This is one concern of the last chapter of my Theory of Communicative Action. 23 At this point the motivations behind McCarthy's criticism become clear: an interest in the question of how the moments of reason retain their unity within differentiation, and in how this unity can be adequately expressed in philosophical analysis. Unfortunately, my schematic presentation of Weber's diagnosis of the times leads McCarthy to conflate three quite distinct questions under a single aspect. As just shown, the formal-pragmatic relations play.a role in the analysis of those interactions between the cognitive, moral, and expressive moments of reason. But the other two questions really have

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nothing to do within this problem: first, the question mediating the knowledge produced in expert cultures can be mediated with everyday practices, (which I touched upon above in relation to the constellation "art" and "life"); and second, the question of whether we can provide an equivalent for the meaning of traditional world views - for their function of "Sinnge bung." (3) With the emergence of autonomous art and science, problems of mediation arise, - such as the relation of art and life, or of theory and practice. Since Hegel a corresponding problem has emerged in terms of the relation of morality and ethical life (Sittlichkeit). This problem has less to do with taking an expressive attitude toward the social world than with the fact that the insights of a postconventional morality would remain without any impact on real life unless morality is anchored in concrete forms of ethical life. The deontological ethics developed in the Kantian tradition do indeed offer a solution to the problem of justification: they show how to choose between controversal norms of action with good reasons, (in light of what might be willed by all). But they do not offer any solution for two resuJtant problems: first, that of the application of justified norms which are general and abstracted from any context, and second, that of the efficacy of pure moral insights that have been gained under the condition of abstracting from available motivations. Autonomous morality owes its gain in rationality to the transformation of questions of the good life into problems of justice. As a consequence of this deontological abstraction, it can only provide answers to questions lacking specific contexts. This necessary disregard for the complexity of concrete forms of life, in which moral moments are always interlaced with evaluative, cognitive, and expressive moments, calls for specific compensations that make good the deficits with regard to the application and realization of moral insights. I am not able to go into this question here. 24 The discussions of morality and ethical life, theory and practice, art and life, all center around the idea of a non-reified everyday communicative practice, a form of life with structures of an undistorted intersubjectivity. Such a possibility must today be wrested away from the professional, specialized, self-sufficient culture of experts and from the systems imperatives of state and economy which destructively invade the ecological basis of life and the communicative infrastructure of our life-world. This same intuition is expressed in Marx's utopian perspective on the realization of philosophy: to the extent that the reason expressed in Hegel's can be embodied in the forms of life of an emancipated society, philosophy somehow becomes pointless. For Marx, philosophy realized is philosophy aufgehoben. The theory of communicative action gives this idea another reading: the unity of reason cannot be re-established on the level of cultural traditions, in terms of a substantive world view, but only on this side of the expert cultures, in a non-reified, communicative practice of everyday life. Indeed, in a certain way the unity of reason is a tergo always already realized in communicative action - namely, in such a way that we have an intuitive knowledge of it. A philosophy that wants to bring this intuition to a conceptual level must retrieve the scattered traces of reason in communicative practices themselves, no matter how muted they may be. However, it cannot simply repeat the attempt, long since discredited,

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to project some theoretical picture of the world as a I think I have learned from the tradition the Marcuse, and history of critical social theory from Marx to Benjamin, Adorno, that any attempt to the perspective of reconciliation in a philosophy of history of nature, however indirectly it is done, must pay the price of de-differentiating forms of knowledge behind whose categorial dis.. tinctions we can no longer retreat good conscience. this is not really an argument, but more an expression of skepticism in the face of so many failed attempts to have one's cake and eat it too: to retain both Kant's insights and, at the same time, to return to the "home" (Behausung) from these same insights have driven us. But, perhaps, McCarthy or others will some day succeed in formulating the continuities between human history natural history so carefully that they are weak enough to be plausible and yet strong enough to permit us to recognize humanity's place in the cosmos (Scheler), at least in broad outlines. VI The philosophical purpose behind Joel Whitebook's attempt to oppose to a "linguistic idealism" the truth of the materialist tradition from Feuerbach through Marx and Freud to the later Frankfurt School accords with McCarthy's arguments against banning all substantive moments from concept of a procedural rationality. The theoreticians of Western Marxism were relentless in their search for some Archemedian point between Kant and Hegel from which they might retrieve the materialist tradition without surrendering the justificatory achievements of formalist thought, on the one hand, or meaning giving capacity of holistic thought, on the other. These philosophers agreed the goal; they differed as to how to attain it since they could not avoid paying some price for it: excising part of Kant, or Hegel, or Marx. McCarthy and Whitebook chastise me either for cutting too much from Hegel and totalizing forms of thought (McCarthy), or too much from Marx and materialism (Whitebook). In their common diagnosis of too much Kantianism, both agree with Rorty, who is disturbed less by its formalism than by its supposed foundationalism. Whitebook's analysis sheds light on the reception of Freudian id.. psychology by Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Adorno, as well as on their critique of ego-psychology and the famous thesis of the "end of the individual." Whitebook himself retains a more or less orthodox interpretation of Freud; from a clinical perspective, he regards the contributions of ego-psychology rather as supplements to the classical Freud. However, I see the achievement of Heinz Hartmann and his allies to lie in having demonstrated the need to revise metapsychology; the revision itself should come, rather, from cognitive developmental psychology. This approach can supplement assumptions about the psychodynamic development of the child with hypotheses about the development of cognitive structures, so as to give us a handle on, and make empirically testable, the implicitly normative content of such concepts as "ego-strength," "conscious conflict resolution," and "the rational control of

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drives." I have proposed a communication-theoretic interpretation of approaches deriving from Piaget and Freud. To my mind, this proposal has a number of advantages: (1) It creates a common ground between Freud's therapeutic metapsychological writings by connecting the structural model of id, ego, and super-ego with the experiences gained in the communication between patient and analyst. 2s (2) This version conceptualizes clinical intuitions -about deviant and successful processes of ego development by making defense mechanisms comprehensible as inner-psychic communication disturbances and by relating the extremes of overly defined/deficient ego boundaries (isolation/diffusion) to the pragmatic ~resuppositions of intact intersubjectivity and undistorted communication. 6 (3) Reading of psychoanalysis in terms of communication theory also explains the central importance and individuating effect of the Oedipal conflict which remains decisive for the development of the structure of personality. Structurally described levels of interaction serve here as a conceptual bridge connecting developmental logic and developmental dynamics. (4) Finally, this reading offers a categorial framework in which metapsychology can be connected up with the basic concepts of research on socialization and the family. 28 (In Parsons's version, the vocabulary of a theory of drives formulated in terms of energy loses its currency here.) As I see it, nothing of significance is lost in this reading. The hydraulic model and its reliance on a mechanics of instinctual energy has only a metaphorical character, even for Freud himself. In any case, one cannot have both the analytic instrument of a depth-hermeneutics and a theory of drives formulated in quasi-physicalist concepts. The Freudo-Marxism of the earlier Frankfurt School could conceptually integrate psychology and sociology only through the mechanism of internalization; but, as Whitebook shows, this results in 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. It certainly makes more sense to attempt to integrate both disciplines 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. If one is clear about the purely methodological character of this decision, one need not fear the consequences Whitebook has in mind. It is only from the point of view of a reifying theory of drives that the extra-linguistic referent of the structure and autonomy of "inner nature" gets lost along with the vocabulary of instinct and drive energy, cathexsis, displacement, etc. But the essential difference actually consists only in replacing "drive energies" with "interpreted needs" and describing "instinctual vissicitudes" from the perspective of identity formation and processes of interaction. In this communicationtheoretical reading, inner nature is in no way vaporized into culturalistic haze. 29 In no way does it determine in advance that the substratum of inner nature has to fit harmoniously into linguistic structures, and even be utterly absorbed into them. But such a categorial framework does decide in favor of the perspective of a life-world intersubjectively shared by participants. One

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does give up biological or physicalistic third person d~s~riptions of the or~anic substratum. This change in the perspective of descrIptIOn does not entaIl the elimination of inner nature as an extra-linguistic referent. Whitebook is led astray by some of my remarks that belong to another context. They were made apropos the question of whether a theory of natural evolution could be projected from such an internal perspective. Naturally, I am enough of a materialist to take as my starting point that Kant is right only to the extent that his statements are compatible with Darwin. I have never had any doubts about the primacy of natural history over the history of the ~uman species. Nevertheless, it is better not to try to resovle all problems WIth the same theory, or even with theories of the same type. The neo-Darwinian theory of evolution has a different status and form than Newtonian physics, on the one hand, and Romantic theories of nature, on the other: the three theories are not concerned with the same "nature." "Instinctual nature" as dealt with in and in psychoanalysis is just as distinct. It seems to me that the single most important question here is whether that "inner nature," whose fateful entwinement in life histories is the object of psychoanalysis, can be better explained through interactional concepts or through concepts with more strongly physicalistic or biological connotations. The value of a theory is surely a matter of empirical fruitfulness and not a matter of the speculative content of its fundamental concepts. 30 It is, however, quite legitimate to ask how it is that I can hold on to those materialist motifs which Freudo-Marxism drew upon in the theory of drives. Whitebook suspects that a theory of society which no longer takes over intact the Freudian theory of drives necessarily truncates an important normative dimension, namely, that of happiness. At the same time, he also sees an excess of utopianism built into "linguistic idealism." The "concern for happiness" seems necessarily to become secondary to the "passion for justice" in a theory that gets involved with genetic structuralism and directs its interest to general structures of rationality, both in the development of the individual and in social evolution. I shall limit myself here to the moral and legal dimension, since both Whitebook and McCarthy, each in his own way, renew the critique of ethical formalism (and both with reference to the same passage in my essay on Benjamin). First of all, I have to point out that I have revised my earlier interpretation 31 of the post-conventional stage of moral judgment. 32 Even if the approach of a discourse ethic favored by Apel and myself should succeed in philosophical discussions, it would only have achieved an adequate description of the conditions of principled moral judgments as such. Previously, I was not sufficiently clear about the fact that such a competence for judgment does not, eo ipso, presuppose a flexible ego identity, even if it no longer accepts as given the interpretation of nees (as does Kantian ethics), but rather (as in discourse ethics) open them to an uncoerced intersubjective process of will formation. The cognitive capacity to justify ground moral actions and norms has to be supplemented if it is to become effective in the context of ethical life. Only a ca~acity for judgment (informed by practical reason) makes possible an applicaTIon of abstract and general norms that is appropriate to particular situa-

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tions; only motivation resources and structures of inner control make possible actions which are in accord with moral insight. Without the capacity for judgment and motivation, the psychological conditions for translating morality into ethical life are missing; without the corresponding patterns of socialization and institutions, i.e., without "fitting" forms of life to embodied moral principles, the social conditions for their concrete existence are missing. This is the substance of Hegel's critique of Kant's theory of morality, a critique that has always been recognized in the critical theory of society. Autonomy, in Kant's sense, with the strict separation of duty and inclination and without the awareness of the ego's communicative access to its own inner nature, also signifies unfreedoffi; Adorno developed the implications of this in the third part of his Negative Dialectics. In psychological terms, this means that inner nature is not transformed into the perspective of reconciliation merely through the capacity of moral judgment (as it is reconstructed in a discourse ethics). Rather, such a perspective is attained only through the structure of an ego-identity making possible "a freedom that limits itself in the intention of reconciling, if not of identifying, worthiness with happiness.,,33 In the theory of society the relation of morality and ethical life can be found in the contrast between general structures of the life-world capable of being rationalized, on the one hand, and the plurality of existing life-worlds in their specific, concrete historical totalities, on the other. Particular forms of life and life histories form a context that remains in the background and is experienced by us only as an horizon; this context cannot be objectivated in toto. Certainly, different life-worlds may be compared under different abstract points of view; but only a few such aspects are so general that they can be detached from the cultural patterns of a specific life-world. This is true, for instance, of problem-solving capacities that can be measured against the standard of universal validity claims (like propositional truth and normative rightness) and that can accumulate in the development of the forces of production, in the growth of theoretical knowledge, as well as in the stages of moral judgment. However, happiness, unlike justice or knowledge, is not a concept that relates only to one of these dimensions and to general structures of the life-world. It is related to particular constellations of lived practices, value orientations, traditions, and competences as a whole. Its object is always a historically unique configuration. We do indeed have more or less definite feelings about the success of modes of life and - with less deception - about their failure. But enormous difficulties stand in the way of conceptualizing these clinical intuitions about the "good life" in a universally binding way as we can with morality, though this was once the aim of classical ethics. One has to be satisfied with recognizing necessary conditions for such a life. Many of those who have been raised in a Protestant milieu tend toward the presumption that the balance of happiness, overall and in the long run, cannot be drastically altered. But even this goal would not be achieved if every generation did not set other goals for themselves and undertake anew utopian efforts to change the balance of happiness. Perhaps it is a remnant of theodicy to assume that every form of life inherently possesses the same chance to find its happiness. Such speculations are surely idealistic in the bad sense given the

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overwhelming experience of individual unhappiness and collective suffering, and in view of social catastrophes that are so terrible because, for their quasi-naturalness, they do not arise from natural necessity. Over and over again, the necessary conditions for a "good life" are carelessly and arbitrarily violated. It is from this experience that the tradition of thought unites Marx and Freud draws its inspiration. I am in full agreement with Whitebook in my desire not to give up this form of materialism. In conclusion, I don't want to pass over in silence the fact that McCarthy and Whitebook touch upon a basic philosophical problem, which, if I am correct, still awaits an adequate resolution this side of Hegelian logic: is it possible to weaken the claims of statements about totalities so that they might be joined together with the stronger statements about general structures? NOTES 1 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979), p. 390. 2 Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia, 1983). 3 H. Schnadelbach, in Kommunikation und Reflexion, ed. Kuhlmann and Bohler (Frankfurt, 1983), p. 361. 4 J. Habermas, "Die Philosophie als Platzhalter und Interpret," Moralbewusstsein und Kommunikatives Handeln (Frankfurt, 1983), pp. 9ff. 5 Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Vol. 11 (Frankfurt, 1981), pp. 586ff. 6 I have never used the term "neo-conservative" in this connection. I did once, in passing, compare the critique of reason in Foucault and Derrida to the "Young Conservatives" of the Weimar Republic. Usually Hans Freyer, Arnold Gehlen, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jtinger, and Carl Schmidt are numbered among this group. They all take from Nietzsche the radical gesture of a break with modernity and a revolutionary renewal of pre-modern energies, most often reaching back to Archaic times. Like any comparison, it has its weaknesses, but in the German context it does illuminate intellectual affinities that, notwithstanding the politically contrary positions, stem from the authority of Nietzsche. (See my "Modernity Versus Post-Modernity," New German Critique, Number 22 (1981), 3-22.) 7 P. Burger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis, 1983); also his "Institution Kunst," Vermittlung, Rezeption, Funktion (Frankfurt, 1979) and his Kritik der idealistischen Asthetik (Frankfurt, 1983). 8 J. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (Boston, 1984), Vo!. 1, pp. 157ff. 9 Ibid., pp. 40ff, and the references given there. 10 P. Burger, Kritik, pp. 104ff. 11 See also P. Burger, "Das Altern der Moderne," Adorno Konfernze 1983, ed. Habermas and Freideburg (Frankfurt, 1983), pp. 177ff. 12 Habermas, "Modernity," pp. 12ff. 13 On the following, see A. Wellmer, "Wahrheit, Schein, Versohnung," Adorno-Konferenz, p. 138ff. 14 Ibid., p. 165. 15 Habermas, Theory ofCommunicative Action, Vo!. 1, pp. 120ff and 130ff. Also, "Interpretative Social Science and Hermeneuticism," Social Science as Moral Inquiry, ed. Hann, Bellah, Rabinow, and Sullivan (Berkeiey, 1983), pp. 251-270. 16 Habermas, Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften (Frankfurt, 1982). 17 Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, p. 237.

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18 Ibid., p. 238. 19 Habermas, Vorstudien und Ergiinzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt: , 1982). 20 On this "rather risky model," see Theory of Communicative Action, pp. 239ff.

21

Ibid. See my "Excursus" on argumentation theory, ibid., pp. 18-42. 23 "In each of these spheres, the process of differentiation is accompanied by a countermove-

22

24 25

26

27 28

29

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31 32

ment which always re-incorporates the other two, at fIrst excluded validity aspects under the primacy of the dominant one. In this way, non-objectivist approaches to the human sciences also bring into play the perspectives of moral and aesthetic critique, while not endangering the primacy of the question of truth; only in this way is an encompassing theory of society possible. The discussion of an ethics of responsibility and the more pronounced consideration of utilitarian motives bring the perspectives of the calculation of consequences and the interpretation of needs into play in universalistic ethics, perspectives which lie within the cognitive and expressive validity domains; in this way, materialistic ideas can also be given their due, without endangering the autonomy of the moral perspective. Finally, post-avant garde art is characterized by the simultaneous presence of realistic and engaged intentions, along with the authentic continuation of classical modernity;J which distilled out the internal meaning of the aesthetic sphere. With realistic and engaged art, once again the cognitive and moral-practical moments enter into art, at the level of the wealth of form set free by the avant garde." Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Vol. 11, pp. 585-586. See Habermas, "Uber Moralitiit und Sittlichkeit: was macht eine Lebensforrn rational?" Rationalitiit, ed. H. Schnadelback (Frankfurt, 1984), pp. 218ff. This was, in any case, my intention in the Freud chapter of Knowledge and Human I n teresls . I do not find any basis in Freud for the strict separation between a clinically justified theory of neurosis and a metapyschological superstructure that Adolf Griinbaum proposes in "Freud's Theory: The Perspective of a Philosopher of Science," Proceedings and Addresses of the Anzencan Philosophical Association (1983), VoL 57, Number 6. This separation makes the specific roots of Freudian theory in the experiences of the analytic dialogue unrecognizable. Such an operation may be useful for the argumentative purpose of assimilating Freudian theory to the standard model of unified science, only to then reject it for failing to measure up to its standards. At the same time, it expresses the simple decision not to consider the hermeneutic character of this science. Habermas, "Der Universalitatsanspruch der Hermeneutik," Zur Logik der Sozialwissensehaften, pp. 331ff; also "Uberlegungen zut Kommunikationspathologie," Vorstudien, p. 226ff. Habermas, Moralbewusslsein, pp. 152-168. R . Dobert, J. Habermaas, G. Nunner-Winkler, Entwicklung des fehs (Koln, 1977), pp. 9ff. K. Horn expresses similar reservations in "Geheime kulturalistische Tendenzen der Modernen psychoanalytischen Orthodoxie," Psychoanlyse als Wissenschaft (Frankfurt, 1971), pp. 93ff. With respect to the empirical questions, I would like to point out that my reflections on the change in symptoms typical of our times and on the significance of the adolescence crisis are quite similar to those of Whitebook. See my Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Vol. II~ pp. 567-57L Habermas, "Moral Development and Ego Identity," Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston, 1979), pp. 78ff. Habermas, "A Reply to My Critics," Habennas: Critical Debates, ed. T'hompson and Held (London, 1982), pp. 258ff. Also see the essay in my Moralbewusstsein und Kommunikatives

Handeln. 33

Habermas, "Moral Development and Ego Identity," p. 94.

Karl-Otto Ape)

1. The present crisis situation of humanity and the situation of humankind in general The title of my paper already contains a thesis: the situation of humanity is an ethical problem for humankind. What is here meant by the "situation of humanity"? We could think of the present situation of humankind, for example of the challenge to moral reason, contained in the danger of a nuclear war of annihilation or in the perhaps greater danger of the destruction of the human eco-and biosphere, and in fact these dangers altogether justify us speaking of the situation of humanity. For both the danger of nuclear war and of an ecological crisis concern humankind as a whole: here, for the first time in world history, a situation is visible in which, in face of a common danger, men and women are called upon to assume a common moral responsibility. Thus we could characterize what is new in the present situation of humankind - prior to all philosophical analysis and justification of concepts like morality and responsibility. The new problem would thus lie in the necessity of a macroethics. It would involve the question - beyond the moral responsibility of the individual towards his or her neighbour, even beyond the responsibility of the politician in the usual sense of "reason of the state" - of organizing the responsibility of humankind for the consequences (and side-effects) of their collective actions on a planetary scale. To this degree we would have attained a preliminary foundation for the thesis that the situation of humanity today is an ethical problem for us. But hasn't the human situation always been an ethical problem? The Bible indicates that this situation was in fact constituted by the fall of the fIrst human beings. Since then humans know the difference between good and evil. Kant already gave an evolutionary interpretation of this mythically conceived event in his essay on the "presumable beginning of human history" as the "transition from the barbarity of a purely animal creature to mankind, from the harness of the instincts to the guidance of reason, in a word, from the tutulage of nature to the state of freedom."} In the light of Jacob von Uexkiill and modern ethology, we could complement and deepen this evolutionary interpretation in the following way: through the invention of tools and weapons humans have cancelled the organically determined correspondence between the "observational world" of '*

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sensuous experience and the "causal world" of possible actions. Since then the possible effects of our actions fundamentally surpass the possible control of behaviour by means of specific sensuous-emotional behavioural triggers. This applies especially to the triggering of residual instinctual inhibitions against killing. this respect the hand axe may well have meant a technical and moral revolution; for it first made possible Cain's fraticide and thereby, at the same time, that horror of the wrong doer at the consequences of his/her deed, motivated by something like a religious and ethical consciousness of sin. A similar consciousness of sin can also be demonstrated in totemism in the relation of the hunter to the murdered game and later even in the relation of the peasant to the exploited fertility of the earth. For the earth must also be propitiated by appropriate rites so that its fertility may be renewed. In short: the transgression by "homo faber" of the given, organically determined barriers of instinct, the intrusion on the natural environment through tools, and in particular the fatal assault with weapons on animals and fellow humans: all this appears to have led, already in the mythical age, to the birth of moral conscience in the sense of the necessity of atonement, retribution, and reconciliation. Against the background of this mythical consciousness of moral norms there followed, then, in the "axial period" (Karl Jaspers) of the Euro-Asian high cultures, the transition to "ethics" in the sense of the world religions and of philosophy. In the following age of science and technology the gulf between the "causal world" of humans and the organically determined, sensuous-emotional "observational world" attained a new quality. Given the spatial and temporal extension in particular of the collective actions of men and women - both in wars and industrial and technical activities - it is now scarcely possible for humans to be directly affected sensuously and emotionally by the consequences of their actions. Now the responsibility of reason must definitively take the place of a, so to speak, residual instinctual consciousness of sin. "Homo sapiens" must now recognize that "homo faber" has left us far behind through what we have already done and still can do - and that now the task has fallen to us - perhaps in the last hour - to bridge this gulf, and that means: to find with the aid of "practical reason" an answer to the situation which we have essentially created ourselves by means of technical rationality. With this onesidedly dramatizing illustration we can gain, I believe, a first understanding that the title thesis of my talk concerns not only the present situation of humankind, but also, at the same time, the phylogenetically conditioned situation of humanity in general: the situation of humans, emancipated from nature, who have emerged, externally as "homo faber" and internally as potential "homo sapiens," from the sphere of natural determination and are thus dependent on the normative principles of an ethical system - on principles of reason, which we alone, through the habitual following of these normative principles, can show to be analogous to the inviolable laws of nature. In the following my main concern is this indicated representative significance

of the problematic of the contemporary crisis situation of humankind with regard to the ethical situation of humans in general; and the sketch of the evolution of

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man's/woman's relation to environment from the emergence to ecological and as it were, to set the II.·n,rr.l~~~'lI,~yrJrD,... in which thesis are to read.

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It is now time, after the evocations of assumed much as self-evident, to change styles and thought, and also the pedantic scruples, of contemporary "_.. ophy. The first question which poses itself is following: to at all possible to derive from the situation - from ation or from it as its phylogenetically conditioned like the necessity of ethical responsibility? This seems to amount to Ought from an is and thus to a "naturalistic fallacy."2 I would readily concede if there were no ,~ which it could be shown that, independent of every situation, they must have already been recognized as philosophizes. there are, however, such fundamental norms a historical reconstruction of human situation is is in no way irrelevant to the closer definition our the contrary: only such a reconstruction, and critical, can means of f"nT'\f"O'll"'n,Q~n to concrete norms . . . . .

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norms The norm, arguer serious thinking person - has necessarily recognized, acceptance of the meta-norm of the argumentative formation consensus one about situationally related norms. (This does not mean

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recognized a special ethic of argumentative discourse, but rather that the argumentative discourse of all possible participants is the ideal grounding and legitimizing instance for all problematizable norms, that is to say, one has recognized the asymmetry in the relation of argumentative discourse to all other forms of communication and life. Only within the framework and on the basis of the rules of the discourse can valid judgments, theories, norms etc. about nondiscursive life forms be founded, and not vice-versa. 5) What is relation of this sketched fundamental norm of ethics to the human situation? How can it be applied to the reconstruction of this situation? a certain sense, the fact that every arguer has necessarily recognized the indicated fundamental norm belongs itself to the human situation. Following Heidegger's language usage, we would say: this fact also belongs in an essential fashion to "facticity" in the sense of the "prestructure" of the human "being in the world." Of course I would immediately add that it cannot just be a contingent moment of the historically conditioned facticity of being in the world, but that it is a moment which belongs to the conditions of the possibility of our intersubjectively valid distinction between "logically contingent" and "logically necessary." For this last distinction already presupposes that there are intersubjectively shareable (linguistic) meaning and intersubjectively shareable truth. The latter necessity, which we could call the transcendental necessity of logos, precedes methodically - therefore the meaningful reference to contingent preconditions our being the world. And exactly in this sense the reflexive assurance transcendental preconditions of logos, including the preconditions a norm of ethics, also methodically precedes every possible establishment of onto-historical conditions of our being in the world. Whoever seriously speal(s the conceptual meaning of "meaning" and as in the last instance dependent on events or fate 6 - that is, our discursive claim to meaning and is in principle the logos to cancels the claim to the meaning and truth of discourse. on reconstruction of the methodical primacy of transcendenas to primacy of onto-history and all similar structuralistic, evolutionistic declarations of the obsolescence transcendental This does not mean, however, denying reflexive assurance transcendental-normative conditions of argumentation belongs to "facticity" (in sense of "prestructure") of AJI.~Jl..IIl..a.lIo.'l~Jl.A being the By this is to be understood what Kant called the "fact of reason." meantime we can decipher this unique fact - again thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger - in the sense of an "a priori perfect" as necessarily having recognized the nonnative conditions of argumentation. And thus we can show that it in no way amounts to a naturalistic fallacy when we derive normative consequences from this fact. 7 These consequences are in no way derived from a contingent anthropological fact, but from the circumstance that it is undeniably true that as a meaningful arguer one has necessarily recognized normative conditions of the possibility of argumentation. This - I believe -is what Kant calls the "fact of reason," which I have u ......

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interpreted here in the sense of the normative unity of theoretical and practical reason. 8 Now, of course, the circumstance that there are humans and that they, as mature rational beings, are capable, among other things, of the reflexive assurance of the normative conditions of argumentation, is also a contingent fact of evolution and of human history. And this circumstance is of the greatest significance for the answer to our question of the possible function of the ethical fundamental norm in the hermeneutic and critical reconstruction of the genesis of the human situation, from the emergence of humankind to the present. For it follows from this circumstance that a contingent fact of history must correspond to the a priori of argumentation as the methodical a priori of all scientific reconstruction of history; and that means that every adequate reconstruction of history must at least take account of the possibility of the historical development of its own presuppositions, for instance, of Habermas' so called four validity claims of human speech: intelligibility, truthfulness, truth, and moral rightness. 9 I would like to call this the self-accountability postulate of the reconstructive sciences; and I should like to add the following with respect to the "architectonics" of the scientific-theoretical grounding, regarding which there is some disagreement between Habermas and myself: the self-accountability we postulate, like the four necessary validity claims of human speech and the connected normative conditions of the possibility of their argumentative realization, does not belong, I consider, to the possible empirical results of the reconstructive sciences but to the conditions of their possibility. 10 (When with regard to the philosophical eliciting of these conditions of possibility we speak of "reconstruction," this does not mean empirical-historical reconstruction in the light of theories, which already presupposes the self-accountability principle, but transcendental-pragmatic reconstruction in the sense of strict reflection on precisely those conditions which must have been understood and recognized if the discourse of theories and their argumentative defence or disputation is to have any meaning at all. 11 ) With the recognition of the self-accountability principle, all anthropological, psychological or sociohistorical conceptions of science are naturally excluded as inadequate which seek in any form to deterministically reduce the fact of the normative validity claims of human speech to something else. One does not have to immediately think of the massive paradoxes in which, for example, an absolute theory of conditioning a la Skinner entangles itself. More interesting in our context are other, subtler versions of anthropological reductions: for instance, the exaggeration of the ideological-critical approach in the sense of a so-called "materialistic hermeneutics," which is no longer able to distinguish between that which is to be understood and discussed in the light of grounds and that which is only to be explained externally; or a sociological functionalism, which from the beginning is prepared to understand the discursively realizable validity claims of human communication only as functions in a limited system of self-affirmation; or a cultural-anthropological relativism, which, on the one hand, espouses the validity claim to understand foreign cultures from their own preconditions, and, at the same time, declares

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that all understanding of meaning is relative in its validity to contingent sociocultural life forms and their incommensurable paradigms of world understanding; or, finally, the presently most important philosophical version of relativism: theorecticism (that is, the conception according to which grounding can only occur within the framework of fallible theories, which are not themselves groundable, but are nevertheless to be played off critically against one another). In this last case the paradox, to my mind, consists in the necessity of applying to themselves the absolutized principle of fallibility and of pluralism. 12 At the same time, all independent normative yardsticks for the understanding of concepts like "theory," "comparison of theories," "critique," "testing," etc., are also lost, which, for instance, can be shown in detail in the anarchistic consequences of Paul Feyerabend. One may well say that all discoveries in the modern social sciences of psychic, socio-historical or linguistic conditions of-mediation of human validity claims have been exaggerated and absolutized in the sense of reductionism. That was, so to say, the empirical condition of their literary effect in the history of science, and in the present one readily gains the impression that the demonstration of paradoxes, indeed even of unequivocal pragmatic selfcontradictions, leaves the representatives of reductionistic or relativistic positions completely cold. As against this, they seem to lay the greatest value on the conclusion that, through their method of reduction and unmasking, all earlier positions are shown to be obsolete and therewith historically outdated. And they react with disquiet only when this outmoded,"argument" is turned against them. We could really speak here of a secret "historicism" - and this even in the case of those who consider that they have seen through the historicist faith in the historical necessity of progress as historically obsolete. 13 Although, as indicated, the self-accountability postulate tends to make little impression on the representatives of reductionist theories, I wish to make it the basis of my sketch of a global reconstruction of the ethically significant aspects of the human situation. How does the starting point of such a reconstruction appear for researchers who understand themselves as members of a self-reflexive argumentation community? 1. On the one hand, the researchers, as long as they argue, must not only presuppose the possibility of an ideal communications community in the sense of the ethical fundamental norm but even counterfactually anticipate its existence through engaging in arguments. (The best way to convince oneself of this necessity is when an arguer makes the effort to convince his or her public that the counterfactual anticipation of the ideal conditions of discourse is utopian in a bad sense.) In the context of our problem the necessity of the counterfactual anticipation of ideal conditions of the formation of consensus is particularly important for the following reason: through this anticipation a normatively grounded telos is posited for the process to be reconstructed, and this telos is not identical with the reality of the present social state of the reconstructors but with the aimed for state of every possible argumentative community. The self-accountability postulate thus does not mean that the critical reconstruction of the human situation must end with taking up a specific contemporary perspective, for instance that of Western industrial

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society. The counterfactual anticipation of the ideal communication community points to the future in the sense of a regulative idea of moral progress which must be recognised as binding by everyone who argues in every socio-culturally conditioned situation. In fact it is the very condition, ignored by relativism, of the possibility of understanding and tolerance in a non-Eurocentrically oriented conception of the unity and difference (multiplicity) of human cultures. 2. This, however, is the indication of only one side: the teleological, future oriented side of the starting point of the reconstruction of the human situation. The other side of the starting point, which must be simultaneously considered, is posed by the contemporary situation of the real community of communication in which the researchers live. Its conception is necessarily centered in a perspective, and, therefore, the reconstruction of the historical situation must be continually renewed and cannot be solved once and for all in the sense of an (a priori) metaphysics of history. At this point we have to recall that the facts of the ecological and nuclear crisis have, for the first time, presented something like an empirically conditioned perspective of humankind for the ethically relevant reconstruction of history. In the light of this perspective the emergence of humans appears primarily as the breaking through by "homo faber" of instinctual barriers, and, therewith, the barriers of the balancing system of animal life. the question of the relationship of "homo sapiens" to "homo faber" appears as the central problem of the human ethical situation from the emergence of humanity until today: the question, that is, whether humans are able to compensate their constitutive lack of instinct through ethical reason and whether themselves are able to answer the challenge of the situation as faber," they have brought about. This explication of the current . . . . . . . . ,.. . . . . ~Iloperspective of reconstruction is still somewhat onesidedly conditioned categories of the older philosophical anthropology and ethology. the ing I want to pose the question of rational compensation, and connea xion the question of the relation of "homo sapiens" and more general and abstract e.g., the question of (possible) forms or types of human rationality of action 14 (from of humanity until today). In this context I want to show of evolution through the "process of rationalization" can be regards its achievements and deficits, from the critical given self-accountability postulate. To put it briefly and provisionally: critical discursive rationality of consensual communication, which makes the reconstruction possible, must, at the same time, supply the normative yardstick for the evaluation of the reconstructable tendencies of the human process of rationalization, more exactly, for the evaluation of the different types of human rationality of action in their reciprocal relations of determination. .........

Ill. The problem of ethical rationality. At this point something needs to be said about the use of the concepts "rationality," or "types of rationality," and "process of rationalization." I

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It IS principle possible, by means of transcendental-pragmatic to systematically ground a typology of the possible forms of human action rationality. the following, however, I shall deal with such a systematization only in passing and seek rather to obtain an explication of the different exemplary fashion from the ethical debate with tradition . me the following observation. concept "rationality" or "rationalization" one does not of different forms of rationality but rather of something can be opposed to the irrational or - alternanot disagree idea of a continuum as it were, "transcended" in the selfstructure of the ethical rationto be made visible. But also one talks of "rationality." This sense of a value neutral capacity for can be instrurnentalHobbes, practical reason. ""-'" , , since we

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more or less consistently

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contemporary world by most educated liberals - looks, at first sight, very plausible, especially when it is compared with the claims of the Eastern state ideology, which seeks to morally guide the actions of persons in the public and private sphere solely on the basis of scientific insight into the necessary course of history without the mediation of democratic majority decisions. A closer examination shows, however, that the price which the Western system of complementarity must pay for its value neutral concept of rationality is alarmingly high and that the basis of the system is finally paradoxical. The price is the following: the organization of moral responsibility for the collective consequences of people's actions, which I showed at the beginning to be the task of a contemporary ethics, is not possible under the preconditions of the system of complementarity. For these preconditions do not only mean - as with Kant - the difference between legality and morality, that is, between institutionalizable grounding of norms, on the one side, and an ethical-philosophical discourse, on the other. It is, rather, that the possibility of an intersubjectively valid outcome of the ethical-philosophical discourse is in principle denied; its claim, in the sense of the "reasoning public sphere" (Kant), to legitimation or critique of the institutionalized process of grounding, enabling, and executing norms appears as obsolete, or even as a threat to democratic freedom. 16 According to the system of complementarity, there is no rational legitimation problem beyond the institutionalized processes. They are already the basis of democracy and not merely approximations which are subordinate to the regulative idea of a progressive realization of the consensual-communicative rationality of discourse. It is hardly surprising, if as regards the problems of an ethic of responsibility the following consequences are drawn from the limiting preconditions of the system of complementarity (I refer here to a review of the book by Hans Jonas, The Principle of Responsibility in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung): In this review it is stated that it is impossible for the individual to assume responsibility, which goes beyond "sanctions and controls," for the unforseeable consequences of the political, technological, and economic activities of modern industrial society. Responsibility is to he limited, in the sense of Arnold Gehlen, to the sphere of institutions and roles, "where the individual is called to public account for the consequences of his actions and knows this: the politician through success, the factory owner through the market, the civil servant through the criticism of his superior, the worker through the control of management. "I? One does not have to be of the opinion that quiet fulfilment of duty in the conventional areas of responsibility should be replaced by hectic protests or ceaseless discussion. Nevertheless, we can see from the quotation that written into it is a total blocking of the possibility of moral responsibility actions (in the sense of the necessary consciousness of crisis today). interest here is above all the (deeper) reason why an responsibility is regarded from the outset as utopian. A rationally grounded responsibility is held possible only for the individual's isolated following of rules within the framework of a conventionally established system of rules . A rational grounding and regulation of responsibility in the sense of partici-

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pation of the individual in the public (consensual-communicative) processes of the organization of responsibility for institutions, and thereby, in mediated fashion, for the consequences of collective actions, is not held to be possible. This is source of the apparently plausible argument of the impotence of individual, could well represent only the other side of frustrated protest actions. ideological system of complementarity. The So much on the price of paradox of its presuppositions appears in the inability of its representatives through lack of a concept of consensual-communicative rationality - to recognize necessary connexion between the private moral conscience and a rational grounding of collective actions which is not value neutral. The deficit in their concept of rationality is evident above all as regards the conception of regulated agreements, from which, fact, in democratic conditions, goals and evaluations of public praxis must derive. Under the conditions of the system complementarity sketched here, a democratically regulated agreement for instance a majority decision - must appear as a strategic compromise between decisions of the will, incapable of a further grounding, made by individuals or their representatives. This compromise, which already forms basis for rules of procedure, is, as agreement, to serve as the only grounding of publicly valid norms, above all those of positive law. This means the only foundation of publicly valid norms which does not consist in the mere fact of an agreement, appears to lie in the purely subjective decisions of of individuals, which ultimately derive from the private sphere outside of intersubjectively valid norms. root of this conception of agreements, can be error,which is at shown in exemplary fashion by the fact that there are normative conditions of possibility of agreements which cannot themselves be grounded in agreements - for example, the ethical and legal norm to keep agreements. This norm is clearly identical with the more general norm of striving for agreement in the case of practical conflicts, and thus is grounded in the fundamental norm of an ethic of consensual communication, introduced at the beginning. it is here that we must seek the rational mediation between the individual's morality of conscience and a publicly valid morality; for without the subjective precondition of the possibility of consensus in an ideal communication community the individual's decisions of conscience cannot be morally binding in the sense of an ethic of communication. 18 The most important result of this critical discussion of the precondition of the "Western system of complementary" lies, I believe, in the distinction between the consensual-communicative and the strategic rationality of action. Both forms of rationality are those of interaction and - if we want to use the word in this way - of communication between persons as subj'ects of action. But only consensual-communicative rationality presupposes rules or norms, which lie a priori beyond the calculated self-interest of the individual; strategic rationality, by contrast, grounds itself solely in the reciprocity ofthe application of instrumental-technical action rationality in human intercourse. And so to this extent it cannot itself be an adequate foundation of ethics. If the basis of free agreements, as the foundation of law, is to be sought only

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in the arbitrary freedom and strategically self-interest of the individual, then it is not understandable why anyone should enter a contract without criminal reservations. Nota bene: we must concede to Hobbes the social contract, which grounds the legal state, lies the interest of the individuals. But it also lies their calculated interest, on condition that the others keep the contract, that when suitable one dispense oneself of it order to enjoy the parasitic extra advantage. It is not always easy to remain awar~ of the difference between ethical rationality of consensual communication and strategic-instrumental rationality. Thus, for instance, the reference above to the ethical norm of striving for agreement in case of conflict is itself ambiguous. It can, for example, lead to the following model of the ethical grounding of norms: 19 in the case conflict the opponents should agree as quickly and effectively as possible - i.e. by excluding ideological or esoteric implications - on the next end beyond the disputed ends which corresponds to their common interest. It follows so the argument continues - that it is then possible to treat the of the grounding of norms with reference to the common highest problem of technical-instrumental rationality. The reason for this apparent simplification of an ethical problem obviously lies in the fact that the agreement on the highest end is conceived here as a problem of strategic co-operation. As far as the model is concerned it could be applied by a Mafia interested in drugs or by a military alliance of states, which, according to the famous observation of Augustine, can be compared with robber bands. 20 Nevertheless it has to be admitted that successful political or economic negotiations generally follow this model more or less closely. But it can only become an ethically relevant model of agreement if the criterion of consensuality for all concerned and not only for the participants in the conflict is introduced as the normative condition of agreement to be reached. Only in this case, which excludes from the beginning an agreement at the expense of third parties through the 'principle of generalized reciprocity, is it possible to speak of an agreement in the sense of consensual-communicative rationality as ethical rationality. This of course poses the question whether the application of such a principle of rationality is not utopian in the bad sense. Each of us must accept responsibility for systems of self-affirmation: for oneself, for one's family, for a for the selfsocial interest group, finally -especially as politician affirmation system of a state. From this perspective of responsibility the individual cannot, indeed may not, assume that the others - who equally are responsible for self-affirmation systems - will follow the categorical imperative or (in our sense) the principle of the generalized reciprocity of the formation of consensus. In short: in such situations the individual cannot act only in consensual-communicative fashion but must also act strategically. This appears to me to be the problem posed by Machiavelli and by Max Weber's opposition of an ethic of conviction (Gesinnungsethik) and a political ethic of responsibility,21 which philosophical ethics has not yet been able to solve. And this problem is obscured rather than illuminated if in a political ethic for the present one goes back to Aristotle and his concept of "Praxis" or

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"Phronesis" and considers this a suitable complement to Kant's political ethic. It is true the Aristotelian concept "Praxis" grasps the difference between ethical-political praxis and value producing work qua "Poiesis," not the difference between strategic and consensualcommunicative action. This difference was to a certain extent mediated by the rationality concept of "Phronesis" with its relation to "Praxis," but without being reflected as difference. The clearest evidence for this is the self-evident orientation of Aristotle's political ethics to the self-affirmation system of the polis - as compared, for instance, with the cosmopolitical ethics of Antisthenes and of the Stoa. Since then the problematics of political ethics have been stamped by (often hidden) tension between consensual universaland strategic reference to systems of self-affirmation. And this applies in particular to the contemporary situation of ecological and nuclear crisis. The whole ambivalence of all public appeals to political responsibility is dramatically underlined by the recommendation of a Nobel Prize winner for economics that, order to restore the balance of the human biosphere in the face of overpopulation of the earth, one should allow the inhabitants of the World, who cannot help themselves, to starve to death. 22 (This is, as it were, the answer of purely strategic reason to the arational efforts of the Pope to prevent the Catholics of Third World from practicing birth control.) ... _A'lIo4 ... _·'Io4

IV. The problem of a moral goal strategy as requirement of a human continuation

of evolution.

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us attempt, however, at this point to distance ourselves from the actuality of the contemporary problem by trying to understand it as representative situation of humanity in general since the emergence of humankind. It is useful this attempt at anthropological distancing to link up results of recent combination of evolution theory and ethology (i.e. so-called "sociobiology"). For here they appear to have succeeded for the first time determining more exactly Darwin's law of evolution for all animal behaviour by conceiving of it - in the light of the mathematical games theory of behaviour - as a norm of "evolutionary stabilized strategies," as a norm, is, of the optimal reproduction of the gene. 23 Of course it is not a question of imputing strategic maxims subjective action rationality to animals but of an heuristic as-if fiction of behavioural explanation. Its speculative justification is given simply by the fact that natural selection, statistically seen, is related to the gene, and behaviour, which does not follow the optimal strategy of gene reproduction, tends to be eliminated. Nevertheless, the method of "understanding" animal behaviour, as it were, in human terms of a strategic norm of rationality has revealed not only an immense heuristic fruitfulness, it also allows, in my opinion, a linking of anthropological ethics to ethology in the sense that the conditions of a responsible continuation of evolution by humans are made clearer. In the view of Konrad Lorenz it was already possible to interpret individual phases of animal behaviour in a morally analogous way and in turn to recognize them in residually instinctual human behaviour - e.g. as protective

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behaviour or fighting posture. In the view of the new ethology the morally analogous,e.g. altruistic, behaviour of animals is explained as a possible limited element of strategic behaviour, which as a whole receives its telos, as it were, from the "self-interest of the gene." To this extent we have a relativization of Lorenz's imputed analogy of the understandability of animal and human behaviour. But at the same time a more abstract analogy of the understandability of animal and human behaviour is P9stulated, at least heuristically, in the concept of strategic behaviour; and it is possible, I believe, in the light of this analogy, to clarify the ethical problematic of the human situation more radically than in relation to K. Lorenz . If we postulate an analogy in the sense of rationality of strategic behaviour in the comparison of human and animal, then it is immediately obvious that the concept of strategic behaviour in humans requires modification in one decisive respect: for a human,who can really as an individual think strategically, the goals and the limiting rules of strategic behaviour are no longer unequivocally given by natural selection in the sense of the optimal multiplication of the gene. Humans can and must establish the goals and rules themselves - and in a more and more conscious fashion; and they can do this as regards survival in very different ways: One can in the present, for instance, raise the survivial ofthe species to the goal of collective strategies of action - as the older ethology already postulated for animals. 24 But one can also hold fast to the goal of the multiplication of one's own and related genes -. in the sense of racist politics; and finally one can negate these two goals and beyond that even one's own survival as an individual. The most dubious attitude in the present is the one which, for the sake of one's own survival and prosperity, puts at risk the survival of the species in the coming generations - or, in the sense of the economist already mentioned, the survival of at least large parts of the human species. I have just' spoken, in the usual jargon of philosophers, of what humans can establish in terms of goals and rules of strategic behaviour.. This way of speaking hides, however, an important problem: the question, that is, what behaviour and what action rationality are required in order that people can actually determine among themselves the goals and rules of strategic action, especially of collective action. Can this occur only on the basis of strategic action? Or must - also for purely anthropological reasons· as well as from the theory of action - a non-strategic form of action and rationality, that of consensual-communicative action, complement strategic action? It could be considered - and many theorists are of this opinion tod ay25 that communications which lead to agreements on goals and rules of strategic action - e.g. political goals and legal norms - may also be derived from open or hidden forms of strategic action, as they are analyzed in the games theory of economic behaviour. Even the genesis of language conventions is supposedly explicable in this fashion. 26 I wish to contest this possibility on grounds of principle.. I do not wish to deny that real human interaction and even language communication always also has and must have strategic features; and I wish to add that co-operative behaviour is naturally very well genetically explicable on the basis of the games theory of strategic action.. But

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this does not permit the possibility of explaining the sharing of intersubjectively valid meaning and truth in language: more exactly, this possibility to the extent it can become the object of validity claims and of argumentative discourse directed to the realization of these validity claims, for it is not conceivable that we as an argumentative community - for instance, here and now could reach agreement on the basis of strategic interaction on the meaning of the concept of strategic rationality or on the truth or falsehood of the thesis all interaction is strategic. Rather, it is the case that we must postulate from the beginning - as already asserted - an ethical trans-subjective principle of consensual-communicative behaviour, of a nature that, for instance, so-called argumentative strategies of a disputation must serve from the beginning the formation of consensus about meaning and truth27 - and thereby also be able to serve the formation of consensus about ethical norms, e.g. rules of strategic behaviour. this is correct, then it follows that all human communication - and thus also human thought, which is dependent on communication - must always have participated in the principle of trans-subjectivity. And from this it follows that a reconstruction of the human continuation of evolution in history, which wants to make do with instrumental-strategic rationality, contradicts the self-accountability principle of the reconstructive sciences formulated above. This is the provisional result of our evolutionary and anthropological distancing of the contemporary problem of the tension between ethical and strategic reason in political ethics. As regards this problem itself, the following possibility of a solution can be indicated on the basis of our sketched reflexions. It seems to be the case as regards animal behaviour that goals and rules of a quasi-strategic interaction are established from the beginning in the sense of the so-called "self-interest" or "egoism of the gene.,,28 As regards human cultural evolution, which now stands under the challenge of the ecological and nuclear crisis, the following basic position of a' political ethic seems to be demanded and principally possible. The requirement is that strategic thinking, which is related to the self-affirmation of the various political-social systems and finally also of individuals, be joined in every concrete situation with a long-term strategic goal of consensual morality. This goal strategy follows from the fundamental norm of consensual morality and from the contingent circumstances of the human condition, that we - as representatives of political systems of selfaffirmation - do not live in a world in which we may always assume that the fundamental norm of consensual morality is followed. The required goal strategy thus states that we should always seek to contribute to the realization of the conditions, demanded by the fundamental norm, and which must be counterfactually anticipated in argumentative discourse. Is this a utopian postulate in the bad sense? One observation in conclusion: the innumerable discussions and conferences nowadays which deal with the problems of humankind - such as the questions of the growth of population, the reserves of raw materials and energy, and the possible limitation of armaments - these discussions are certainly not ideal (argumentative) discourses; but, interestingly enough, they stand under the compulsion of at least

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pretending that the strategic concerns of the particular self-affirmative interest are joined to a consensual mediation of the interests of concerned. need not be - I believe - only the occasion for ironic smile the tough political realists. NOTES 1 Kant, Werke, Bd. VIII (Berlin 1912/13), p. 115. and after him especially Charles S. Peirce - set forth the difference and analogy between natural laws and normative principles of reason. The - naive-scientistic presupposition of universal natural laws of human behaviour rests, I believe, on the confusion of reified quasi-laws (behavioural dispositions) in the sense of the historically sedimented quasi-nature of humans with what, as result of a rationalization process, may n possibly be counterfactually anticipated. Cf. K.-O. Apel, Die "Erkliiren:Verstehen Kontroverse in transzendental-pragmatischer Sicht (Frankfurt, 1979), pp. 253ff. and 289ff. 3 Since my essay on the "A priori der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft und die Grundlagen der Ethik" (in Transformation der Philosophie (Frankfurt, 1973), Bd.Il, pp. 358-436), I have made various attempts at a non-deductive foundation of normative ethics. Cf. most recently the not yet published accompanying material by Apel, D. Bohler, and W. Kuhlmann to the radio series Praktische Philosophie/Ethik, and in particular W. Kuhlmann, "Reflexive Letztbegriindung. Zur These von der Unhintergehbarkeit der Argumentations-situation," Zeitschrift fur Philosophische Forschung, 35, pp. 3-26. 4 The presupposition - which I believe must be shared by every non-relativistic theory of truth - is weaker than the presupposition of a consensus theory of truth, which argues that the concept "truth" in the relevant criterion determined sense can only be explicated through the concept of a grounded consensus in an ideal argumentative community. Independent of the ethical foundation, the author - along with C.S. Peirce and J. Habermas - defends the stronger theory. Cr. K.-O. Apel, "C.S. Peirce and PostTarskian Truth," The Monist, 63 (1980), pp. 386-407, and "C.S. Peirce and J. Habermas' Consensus-Theory of Truth," to appear in Transactions of the Peirce Society. The last mentioned explication of truth, which has the character of a transcendental-pragmatic postulate or of a regulative idea, is naturally not identical with the reduction of truth to the possible result of a factual consensus. On the contrary, it is compatible with the intended, but not formulatable, explication in the relevant criterion determined sense of a Tarskian or metaphysical- correspondence theory of truth. 5 Cf. K.-O. Apel, "Warum transzendentale Sprachpragmatik?" in H.M. Baumgartner (ed.), Prinzip Freiheit (Freiburg/Munich, 1979), pp. 13--43. 6 This appears to me now as the radical meaning of the sublime historicism of the late Heidegger and also the position of H.-G. Gadamer's Truth and Method. 7 Cf. K.-H. Ilting, "Der naturalistische Fehlschluss bei Kant", in M. Riedel (ed.), Rehabilitierung der praktischen Philosophie (Freiburg, 1972), pp. 113-132. 8 The normative unity of theorecticaI and practical reason rests, I believe, on the inseparability of the four validity claims, set forth by J. Habermas, as the conditions of human speech: meaning (or intelligibility), truthfulness, truth, and rightness (in the ethical sense). The demonstrability of this inseparability rests on the performative-propositional double/complementary structure of mental acts as communicative speech acts. Cf. J. Habermas, "Was heisst Universalpragmatik?", in K.-O. Apel (ed.), Sprachpragmatik und Philosophie (Frankfurt, 1976), pp. 174-272, and K.-O. Apel, "Zwei paradigmatische Antworten auf die Frage nach der Logos-Auszeichnung der menchlichen Sprache," in H. Liitzeler (ed.), Kulturwissenschaften (Bonn, 1980), pp. 13-68. 9 Cf. footnote 8.

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CL K.-O. "Sprechakttheorie und transzendentale ,n,'"«1ronT"\'l""<:lO'rn':lltlv zur ethischerNormen," in Sprachpragmatik und and "\X'arum transzendentale Sprachpragmatik." Cf. ~r. "Reflexive letzt begrundung . . .". Cf. H. Albert, Transzendentale Triiumereien pp. 122ff. Albert does not appear to understand that the necessity of the of the unlimited of fallibility in "Critical Rationalism" leads to a \vhich is identical \vith the total self-immunization of this position against possible criticism. on this Kuhlmann, p. 8. I cannot escape the impression that the psychologically r1·~"~'I"'""",n1nD' ity in Albert's asserted replacement of the "idea of the of permanent critique lies in a crypto-historicist conviction of the necessary ourmodedness the first the latter principle. This conviction is stronger than the insight into the paradox of an unlimited However, for the pO~)SltH111:V an alternative reconstruction of the history of the idea of see K.-O. "Begrundung," in H. Seiffert Handlexikon der "/t.sset1.ScJ'lafltsUl~eor1e \J.l'.IU.~I,...u.""'~l.II.., Cf. the contributions of J. Habermas and K.-O. Today (Ottowa, 1979). ef. K.-O. Apel, "Das Apriori deI' K.OffiIJnUrl1k~ltl0lnS~~enlel1)scha!t, unseI'er Zeit und das Erfordernis einer Apel, et alia (eds.), Reader zum t'UJnkk:OUt~J! !J''t''nt)tH,,'*,ho lJnUOS~Of)JfZle!'J:!,lntR pp. 267-291. I refer here to the works by H. Liibbe and W·. Becker on the of aerno(:ra(:y Their justified and unjustified conclusions are discussed \'X7. Kuhlmann in the material 8, the F unkkolleg Praktische p. 34 ff. G. Aiaschke in the A. Gehlen, Moral und Hypermoral (Frankfurt, 1973), p. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 7.10.1980. Cf. D. Bohler's discussion of the concepts of "conscience" In study material 5, the Funckkolleg, 41ff. pp. 179ff., 183, Cf. H. Lubbe, Philosophie nach der Aufkliirung (Diisseldorf, 200ff..

St. Augustine, The City of God, IV, 4.

Cf. Max Weber, "Politics as Vocation." von Hayek correctly; 22 I hope I have reproduced the recommendation of Friedrich otherwise I will be, of course, happy to correct myself. 23 Cf. John Maynard Smith, "The Evolution of Behavior," Scientific lhnencan 239, 3 pp. 136-145, and the summary of the results of the ne\v ethology in '1/. Wickler/U. Seibt, Das Prinzip Eigennutz (Hamburg, 1977). 24 Wickler/Seibt, ibid., pp. 77ff. 25 Cf. the critical discussion of the contribution to ethics of decision theory and strategic games theory by O. Hoffe, Strategien der Humanitiit (Freiburg/Munich, 1975). 26 Cf. my critical discussion of the meaning theory of Paul Griee in H. Parret/J. Bouveresse, Meaning and Understanding (Berlin/New York, 1981), pp. 91ft. 27 This appears to me the transcendental-pragmatic point of P. Lorenzen/K. Lorenz's approach, Dialogische Logik (Darmstadt, 1978). 28 Cf. Wickler/SeibeI't and R. Dawkins, The Egoistic Gene.

Item I A powerful social movement combining the program of democratic revolution with the types of association characteristic of the struggles of the working class is dramatically successful, in a "totalitarian" setting, in initiating the constitution of a new type of civil society based on solidarity, legality, plurality, and publicity. Nevertheless, despite its overwhelming legitimacy in society, this movement is crushed by the military forces of a party-state apparently on the brink of disintegration. Item 11 The representatives of an ecological-alternative movement, which has made a powerful impact on public opinion, succeed being elected to the national as well as several provincial parliaments. Bound by direct democratic rules such as the imperative mandate, and by a certain ideological fundamentalism, most of these representatives are for the moment incapable of compromise and thus unable to enter into coalitions that might help to advance some (not all) of their causes. If they remain in parliament on the basis of such a posture, parliamentary stalemates and constitutional crises cannot be excluded. If, however, their position of being an anti-party party opposed to the formally democratic system in the name of substantive democracy were abandoned in favor of parliamentary cooperation, a deep split in the movement could occur.

Item III A powerful peace movement, having already affected the rhetoric and tactics of the American political-military-industrial complex and the relevant positions of several European governments, faces a double trap, according to its most famous spokesman. The highly unintended consequences of its actions, which coalesce around the slogan of the protection, democratization, and autonomy of society (national and international) from irresponsible sovereign states, might be the strengthening of the Soviet empire and a right wing response in the West.

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Item IV A relatively new socialist political party, highly open to the demands for autonomy by ecological, feminist, regionalist, and autogestionaire movements, is elected to political power with an overwhelming majority on the basis of a program for democratizing civil society and strengthening social actors while restricting the role of the centralized administrative apparatus. After initiating some significant reforms in most of these areas, as well as in the domain of civil rights and public communication, the new government settles first into an etatist, then into a neo-liberal, posture and seems to be interested only in economic crisis management. During its first three years social movements that helped it to power are quiescent. all of these cases, social movements have raised the theme of autonomy and self-defense of civil society against the state. Is this return to a category of early modern political theory defensible? Can contemporary movements be properly understood in this framework? Is it possible to connect the theme of the self-defense and autonomy of society to that of the democratization of complex modern social systems? While contemporary social movements are characterized, as we shall argue, by an entirely new type of orientation to the modern state, l they nevertheless implicitly raise questions regarding the limits to the sovereignty of that state vis-a-vis group life that have yet to be successfully confronted. These questions are serious, because the new social movements of the West have been repeatedly portrayed by their critics as fundamentalist, neo-romantic, populist attacks on modern society itself. They are thus presented as incompatible with contemporary conceptions of democracy. It is our contention, however, that despite the different contexts, and despite some fundamentalist and anti-modern tendencies, these movements have a deep affinity with the project of Polish Solidarity:2 the creation of a postbourgeois, democratic civil society, no longer integrated primarily through the market and property but also through networks of free associations and publics independent of central state administration. In all the above cases, however, social movements (and radical reformist parties) come up against the seemingly intractable problem of society against the state. Their attempts to create post-bourgeois civil societies founder against the problem of sovereignty. We would like to examine this problem in three steps: (1) by specifying what is new in the new social movements, focusing on the general political context and on the issue of social identity; (2) by posing the problem of the relation between movements and reform; and (3) by focusing on the question of the limits to societal democratization vis-it-vis the state.

I. One cannot understand what is new about contemporary social movements without reflecting on the political, social, economic, and cultural context in which they form. Here, however, we can only briefly sketch some general features of advanced welfare-state capitalist systems, necessarily abstracting from specific political cultures and national traditions. It is now a commonplace that the formally democratic political system

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seems unable to provide collective identities or to generate a common will. In process of becoming catch-all, vote-maximizing political parties have lost any intrinsic connection social movements have abandoned commitment to worldviews or motivating, action-orienting ideologies. 3 Far from articulating the political will of social collectivities, far "society" from serving as the means of the self-organization and expression (freely associated individuals or groups with specific collective .II,"'... catch-all parties neutralize the political subject into an atomized voter qualities, severing completely the abstract political will of citizen social action 9r identity. 4 This over-differentiation between the contexts of political system and social action implies that the organizational components of the former - parties, unions, parliaments, elections to between collective identities and politics. Particularism, egoism, lIn1",Clior~IC't" emphasis on instrumental/strategic action, and dependency of individuals and groups on the administrative state are the products of such "rationalized" political organization. Although we cannot enter here into the debates regarding the nature and role of the state in advanced capitalist societies, we can indicate that various theories of "liberal corporatism," "refeudalization," "technocracy,''' and "repoliticization of civil society" all have similar implications regarding the "crisis of liberal democracy." In different ways, these theories thematize the bypassing of the institutionalized public sphere (parliaments, parties) public policy and decision-making. The corresponding denormatization of politics, and the abandonment of even the myth of a general, legitimate political will embodied in representative institutions, weakens power of established, formally democratic political processes to persuade "minorities'" that decisions made according to correct procedures either reflect the will of the majority, serve the interests of society as a whole, conform to the force of the better argument, or speak to the needs of those affected by 5 expansion of welfare-state functions has, as a side-effect, the reduction of political action to strategic action and to administrative control. More tant than the attendant fiscal and rationality problems is increased penetration by the administrative bureaucracies of the state into all spheres of social life. As the "public" administrative agencies take over more and more tasks of socializing, providing, and caring for the population, psychological, medical, educational, and family experts proliferate, increasing dependency of privatized individuals on service organizations undermining the associational forms that previously carried out some of these tasks. The demands for autonomy by newly constituted groups and movements relate directly to this dynamic of administrative penetration socio-culturallife-world. In short, societal spaces for the generation of solidarity, meaning, and consensual coordination of interaction become threatened. The communicative genesis of power, authority, and legitimacy becomes decreasingly possible for atomized citizens whose social world is reduced to an array of consumer, client, or patient roles. 6 It is not only political institutions, however, that have lost their power to mobilize social actors, to generate a common political will "democratically," V'IJ.IUlq,..II,_UJI.

JI."Iio.ll ...... JI..II.IL...Il ....

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to express coherent social identities. Parallel difficulties are evident large-scale socio-economic organizations - especially unions which, in a previous generation, appeared as vanguards of economic democracy . framework welfare-state or social democratic compromises, unions restrict their role to pressing for redistributive measures to benefit their constituencies disciplining the latter in exchange for recognition, collective bargaining rights, and in some cases (West Germany, Sweden) a degree of representation decision-making bodies. 7 It was relatively unproblemaric for unions to maintain the image of defending and representing the needs and interests of the working class as a whole in this way, given a context of general expansion and growth, although only needs thus represented were those of workers qua consumers. The end of high growth rates, however, apparently entails the emergence of a zero-sum relation between expanding investment and consumption, between the protection of privileged sectors of the labor market and the total insecurity and absence of protection for declining sectors, and for new social strata. The role of unions has thus been drastically reduced to that of defending very particular interests of specific sectors of workers. The changing social composition of the labor force and the emergence of new forms of poverty and marginality (periodically employed youth, victims of local or regional decline, the aged, early retirees, women) imply the development of new kinds of needs and goals which the trade unions do not seem capable of addressing. At the same time, an ever increasing portion of one's standard of living is determined less by one's wage and more by the array of social benefits, public services, and tax obligations that are established at the level of the political system rather than at the enterprise level. 8 These developments present a fundamental challenge to the classical role of unions. The political deficit of parties and unions is in one respect the same: the crisis of the growth economy and the redistributive state means that the articulation and defense of a series of particular interests can no longer take the place of a coherent political or social project. Nor can appeals to an obviously nonexistent objective class interest substitute for the formulation of a meaningful collective identity for those whom these organizations claim to represent. As yet, neither components of the political/economic system, parties or unions, have risen to the task. Hence their decline in membership and in the ability to mobilize aggregate interests or generate consensus. It should come as no surprise that those active in the new social movements - youth, women, the new marginals, the new middle stratacannot recognize themselves in the institutions of the political or economic system and, hence, tend to bypass them. 9 The new social movements begin where existing, large scale, formal organizations leave off: to expand, redefme, and democratize social spaces in which collective identities, new meanings, new solidarities and forms of democratic association can emerge. Contemporary social movements (and, for that matter, pathologies of individual and social identity and reactionary quests for community,) can surely be seen as, in part, responses to the over-extension of administrative/economic subsystems into the modern socio-culturallife-world. 10 Above all they react against the reduction of politics to administration, of political association to interest organizations intent solely on influencing state redistributive policies.

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What is new about the contemporary movements, however, is the emphasis on the defense of society without corresponding attempts to take power or to call for the de-differentiation of society, economy or polity. Contemporary movements and their theorists operate with frameworks that presuppose and even defend structural differentiation as well as social spaces in which action oriented to meaning and solidarity can form. They do not seek the abolition of the formally democratic modern state and they accept some version of a modern economy. They thus transcend the opposition of "reform" vs "revolution" typical of earlier democratizing movements in defense of "society" .11 To be sure, most analysts stress the anti-productivist, postmaterialist cultural model of contemporary movements as their defining characteristic. Indeed, despite some anti-modern rhetoric, many formulations of the ecological issue correspond to a communicatively re-interpreted ethic of responsibility regarding development and an increasingly reflexive cultural model regarding historicity and political choice in society. Certainly one of the issues of dispute is: which institutionalization, which societal articulation and political form, will be set up to incorporate insights from this cultural modeL 12 But it is not only this cultural model that distinguishes the new movements from earlier ones for the democratization of society. What is more striking is that movements reacting against the administrative or capitalist levelling of contemporary civil society do not seek to return to an undifferentiated total community but rather to defend and extend spaces for social autonomy. All of the contemporary social movements alluded to above struggle in the name of autonomy, plurality, and the right to difference without, however, renouncing the formal legal principles of modern civil society, or the universalistic principles of the formal, democratic state. The affirmation of these principles and the rejection of revolutionary mythologies does not lead the movements into the political orientation of classical reformism. Rather, the fundamentally positive, albeit critical, attitude toward, and emphasis on, civil society distinguishes the contemporary movements from both types of earlier democratizing movements: those concentrating on offensive strategies to continue the democratic revolution by reforming the political system (inclusion of the excluded); and those focusing on defensive strategies against state and market in the name of a total democratic, communitarian reorganization and de-differentiation of society, economy, and polity. 13 The new movements build on the achievements of past democratic movements, namely, a plural civil society and formal democracy, while seeking to create new solidarities, public spaces, and additional democratic forms. Neither the formally democratic political institutions nor democratizing social movements can survive without the presence of a vital civil society whose associative forms are the key bearers of history, memory, tradition, and, potentially, democratic interaction. The project of a post-bourgeois civil society tied to post-materialist values is expressed in the very diversity and plurality of many of the contemporary struggles. Hence the futility of theoretical or organizational attempts to unify them under one single system contradiction or class confrontation. Struggles

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for democratic local or regional autonomy against cultural, institutional, administrative or technological monopolies challenge the administrative apparatus of the state or capital and contest the restriction of legitimate collective action to organizations of the political system.. This means that the locus as well as the content of political action is being questioned . The movements meet and discuss in spaces outside the political system: churches, clubs, liberated urban spaces, universities, occupied houses, etc.. Their complex networks devoted to transmitting information, articulating solidarity, and economic self-help provide ne\v collective symbols and identities "from below" that could reactivate a democratic political culture and revive the normative dimension of social/political life that has atrophied in institutionalized public spaces . 14 The intended expansion of political life to a variety of loci within society raises, of course, two key issues: the relation of the movements to existing institutions and institutional reform, and the related problem of sovereignty, or of boundary lines between society and state.. Before proceeding to examine these issues, let us define the main levels of our own key category: civil society.. Historically speaking, from the 19th century on, civil society came to mean the domain of interaction protected from state interference and defined "negatively" by the set of civil rights institutionalized in constitutions and by formal law: the private sphere of the family, the social and public spheres of voluntary associations, free press and assembly, and the market economy . The 19th century liberal model of the state-civil society duality, itself inherited from the democratic movements against absolutist states, entailed the development of a political public sphere (parliament) that could mediate the dangerous over-differentiation between state and society.. Within the institutionalized public sphere this mediation took the form of discursive interaction generating compromises and political will with universalistic claims, both of which could insure against the abuse of power by the state.. On a normative level, civil society entailed two, often contradictory, principles. In the version of economic liberalism and utilitarianism, it was restricted to an extreme individualism focused on private property and the free market, and tended to be identified primarily as the "system of needs." Yet simultaneously civil society became the source for the legitimacy of the state . Political actors were deemed representative of an enlightened public opinion.. Their decisions in the political system (legislation) were meant to reflect the input and ultimate control of public opinion on these representatives. Legitimacy was derived from the universality of the laws established and from their conformity with the general consensus of the sovereign population.. For political liberals such as Tocqueville and J.S . Mill, the normative dimension of civil society referred to this interconnection between legitimacy and democracy and the principle of plurality of association (both voluntary and political). In addition to the concept of negative liberty typical of all liberalism, this second tradition of liberal thought defended a positive concept of freedom understood in terms of the active participation of citizens in political life on the local and/or regional level. The participation of individuals in the processes of politics and in voluntary forms of associational life entails,

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according to Tocqueville and a process of political paideia generating responsibility, virtue (concern with publicly relevant issues), and social solidarity (integration). It is, moreover, the necessary condition for the formally democratic institutions of the political system to remain democratic. While the two normative concepts of civil society defend its "autonomy" vis-a-vis the state, they are distinct from each other. The first tends to reduce society to economy and individuality to possessive individualism guided by instrumental or strategic action. In defending the self-regulating market and the capitalist system of production as the key integrative principle of society, economic liberalism has been used to deny the right of association that has subsequently become, perhaps, the essential element of an independent civil society. The second version, of course, postulates the political relevance of social action in civil society, defends the plurality of associations as essential for a democratic polity and a plurality of democratic forms. It thus differentiates key elements of civil society from both the system of needs and the state. One might object that the greatest 19th century liberal partisan of . civil society, Tocqueville, left us with a paradox: i.e. that a viable democratic, pluralist civil society seems possible only in a pre-industrial America due to a unique set of circumstances and traditions. There are two ways to respond to such an objection. One could point out, first, that the contemporary movements demonstrate that if the norms of civil society (plurality, publicity, democratic association) no longer have sufficient motivating power for twentieth century liberalism, they still inform the identities and projects of social actors, albeit in radicalized and reinterpreted versions. Of course, it may nevertheless be the case that twentieth century developments render the key normative dimensions of civil society irrelevant. It is incumbent upon the theorist to show that projects for the further democratization of society are compatible with modernity, i.e. with the functioning of a modern state administration apd a modern economy. The recent work of Jurgen Habermas provides the most interesting clues in this regard. 15 On an extremely abstract, metatheoreticallevel, he has analyzed each of the elements of our equation - civil society, economy, state - in terms of distinct rationalities of action: the instrumental, the strategic, the normative, and the communicative. This approach enables one to conceive of democratization in terms of an increase of communicative interaction (or the possibility of communicative interaction) vis-a-vis strategic/instrumental and norm-oriented action in each domain. It also provides the basis of a response to the historicist implications of the Tocquevillian paradox. The analytic of action types that presuppose the experience of civil society reveals that the degree to which each form of action can be accommodated in specific institutions care empirical and are normative questions depending on the degree of differentiation and on the projects of the actors in each domain. other words, this level of analysis permits one to see that the principles of civil society are open to various forms of institutionalization of which "bourgeoiscapitalist" society and monistic sovereign state represent only one possibility. It th~s permits o~e to argue for the necessity of some form of coordinating or steerIng mechanIsms (markets and state administration) without either

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defending any actually existing arrangement or postulating a romantic, v ................ vision. short, from the analytic point of view, we can derive at least theoretical possibility of post-bourgeois forms civil society might be to institutionalize new more democratic relations, thus realizing content the theories of society in a more adequate form. presence of movements with the project of a post-bourgeois civil society enables us to go a step further - to clarify the relation between the self-defense of society democratization. This could, and often does, mean the attempt to re-establish autonomous social spaces devoted to communicative interaction the interstices of a rationalized economy and state. 14 But it could also entail a challenge to the given institutionalizations of state and economy the direction of an extension of the principles of democratic association to the latter, and a revitalization the democratic institutions in which the former is embedded. But the implication would be that institutionalized as well as non-institutional spheres of action are involved, if indirectly, in the projects for democratization of society. the limits are regarding democratization in any domain is a practical question that cannot be decided from the standpoint of system requirements. The practicalcommunicative dimension has primacy regarding how much room we \vish to give to strategic/instrumental calculation, how much "efficiency" - and at what price - we need or want. But only social movements and the relevant social actors in each domain have the chance to determine the forms of democracy adequate to each and the plasticity of institutions enmeshed in bureaucratic and/or capitalist economic rationality. It is clear, however, that these conceptions of post-bourgeois civil society would require a dualistic strategy (institutional and extra-institutional) for democratization and a plurality of actors, both movements from below and reform initiatives from above. Jl.J......

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social movements are a key dynamic process in the further democratization of civil society, on their own they are incapable of securing the public spaces that their practice and discourse open up. In short, institutional embodiments are essential for the preservation of their gains. To be sure, all movements coalesce around values and have fundamentalist tendencies. Yet a purely defensive anti-institutional posture conflicts with the normative con,tent of the concept of a post-bourgeois civil society and carries the risk of particularism, fundamentalism, and self-indulgence in forms of action that cannot have a lasting issue. The alternative models of society that movements project, however, call for institutionalization and hence the willingness to compromise. There are, in this regard, two basic points to be made regarding the concept of institutional reform. First, the fruits of earlier struggles for democracy parliaments, plurality of parties, unions, division of powers, principles of majority rule and minority rights, structures of compromise - are indispensible for the generation of political norms and decisions vis-a-vis the common good. Any attempt to dispense with these democratic forms would be authoritarian. Second, unlike pure crisis management "reform" strategies that seek to restrict or manipulate the role of participation and democratic consensus in

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decision-making, institutional reform entails the development of new structures of compromise based on publicity; the creation of new counter-powers within political and economic domains; and the institutionalization of discourses (public spaces) in domains of social interaction where they have hitherto been prevented (e.g., the capitalist enterprise). Of course, what is being advocated here is a dualistic strategy for democratization that involves both movements and organized political actors (parties, unions). In addition to defending new forms of association, democratic interaction, and social spaces, existing institutions must be addressed. The plurality of struggles should find expression in a plurality of parties whose most important role is to enter into public debate and make policy proposals without, however, claiming to be the only voice of society. The multiplicity of needs and interests in civil society and the creative, democratizing potential of social movements require interaction with reform-oriented parties. But it is also true that in order to become sensitive to new public issues, in order to revitalize their identities, parties must be open to the progressive dimension in social movements. Parties have something to learn from the movements, namely, that it is possible to revive "the vanishing opposition" in contemporary political systems without reverting to the old model of a totalizing party-movement based on class or confession. The reform-oriented parties we would defend would be oriented toward defending the democratic workings of institutionalized public spaces while restricting the perogatives of the state. The vicious circle in which political institutions lose their meaning and relevancy for social actors, while organized political actors deny legitimacy to non-institutionalized forms of contestation and association, can be broken through a fruitful interaction between movements and reformers. Such a combination might be able to achieve a plurality of democratic forms, respect the requirements of steering, and preserve public spaces essential for political interaction. Nevertheless, the interaction between party and self-limiting movements suggested above, or between movement and institutional reform, raises the fundamental question of the limits of an offensive strategy to democratize the state and to politicize society. It is one thing to accept in principle, as contemporary movements tend to do, self-limitation vis-a-vis the state, and another to determine where the limits should lie. The problem of sovereignty defmes, in principle, the claims of the modern state to autonomy and to the monopoly of certain powers. While the claims of absolutely unified, indivisible, unlimited sovereignty as an all or nothing proposition should be resisted, nevertheless it seems to us an open question what dimension of sovereignty of the state can and should devolve to society. While the modern state implies modern civil society, the line of demarcation between them, as well as the political powers carried by institutions of society, allows for significant variation. Ill. It is our belief that the new social movements tacitly recognize that modern civil society - which is their condition of possibility and which they seek to defend - is in a complementary relation to at least some version of the

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modern state. No state, no civil society. Theoretically this means that without certain economic and administrative steering functions, without the universalization of law, without structures for the aggregation of divergent interests, and without unification and protection necessary in a system of states, no modern society could survive either as modern or as society. The concept of sovereignty involves the last two of these dimensions: legality and unity" From Hobbes' synthesis of a contract model with a notion of absolute sovereignty, to Tocqueville's attempt to think simultaneously centralization of government and decentralization of administration, the great theorists of modern democracy had to take up the issue of sovereignty as a particularly intractable limit to democratization. Although he recognized that the notion of absolute, undivided sovereignty is a mere transposition of the self-understanding of the absolute monarchy to forms of popular sovereignty, even Tocqueville, the great defender of intermediate bodies, could not give up all aspects of a unified sovereignty because, like Hobbes, he knew that the system of states is, juridically speaking, in the state of nature. Let us state the Tocquevillian idea that is the foundation of our attitude to the relation of contemporary social movements to the state: without a significant devolution of sovereignty, the democratization of society is tautologically impossible, and yet the complete devolution of sovereignty to society is also undesirable and even impossible. Indeed, the very project of such a complete devolution destroys the object that is to be democratized and is therefore also incompatible with the aim of democratization. Hence the need for a dualistic strategy. Thus we seek to get beyond the abstract antinomy of absolute state sovereignty and the abolition of sovereignty, or what is the same thing, the "sovereignty of society." This abstract opposition is most classically posed in debates such as those of Carl Schmitt with the socialist pluralists, G.D.H. Cole and H. Laski. 17 Schmitt was indeed right: Cole and Laski proposed a model of society ("pluralism") where sovereign power disappears, having devolved to a plurality of more or less democratic economic, cultural, religious, and political associations among which none has priority. But Schmitt's own state-centered friend-enemy model of politics implied that all genuine social plurality gives a foothold to the collective enemy in society. Not only is he unable to provide the integrating principle of the friend unit in his analysis, but he is an enemy of modern civil society whose essence implies plurality just as his opponents are, to varying degrees, enemies of the state. To be sure, later pluralist thinkers assumed that the presence of a democratic consensus regarding the political process does away with the problem of sovereignty. But Otto Kirchheimer's prescient quest for sovereignty, as well as the contemporary debate over neo-corporatism, tell us differently. In fact, they indicate that sovereignty seems to have already partially devolved - to select corporate interests that make decisions affecting the entire population behind closed doors and shielded from public scrutiny. The presence of disproportionately powerful groups within society, and the blurring of the lines betwen public and private through state intervention and/or neocorporatist arrangements, are the context in which contemporary movements raise the slogan of the autonomy and democratization of society. The issue

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seems to be not whether, but which model of of state sovereignty is to occur: neo-liberal (shift from state to market), neo-corporatist, or "democratic." The problem for democratic theorists is thus two-fold: can societal plurality involving a significant yet partial devolution of sovereignty be made compatible (a) with the retention of some crucial dimensions of unified sovereign power and Cb) the project of democratization, and not simply the further politicization or depoliticization of society? Are we trying to square the circle? We think that an analysis of concept of sovereignty into its constituent parts is the first step out of these difficulties: LOCUS

INTERNAL

EXTERNAL

DIMENSION

A

Law

Possession of the means of violence

C

B Sovereignty of Parliament or some other center(s).

International Law

Centralized

Sovereignty of Federated units

'State of nature'

Decentralized

I AdminiCentral , stration < ,Police ( Armies

World State (Empire) World Federation

Centralized

Self-administration Local control over police, militia

Systems of States

Decentralised

D.

It seems to us that, normatively speaking, there are two and only two defensible arguments for the centralization of sovereignty. First, in the domain of domestic law (box A), as long as significant economic and cultural contacts exist among units of society, universal laws must regulate their interaction. Universal laws, however, do not and cannot emerge spontaneously from necessarily particular communities and associations. For the latter tend to develop norms and laws adequate to their particular form of life: only abstract formal law posited by a political center that renounces claims to embody the substantive morality of a specific life-form can be universalistic in the sense of being able to tolerate and regulate the interrelations between a plurality of forms of life. This argument leaves ample room for a federal synthesis among national, regional, and local levels of jurisdiction, as well as for different models of representation: territorial and functional, political and economic. And, indeed, this jurisdictional issue has been raised concretely by social movements revealing that no simple majoritarian claim on the part of the center can wish away the problem. 1 For example, the argument goes, if

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there is a conflict between jurisdictions regarding nuclear plants - the majority need not have the right to decide to impose particular installations on any locality. If no locality wants them, nuclear plants ought not to be built despite a parliamentary majority's decision to have them, but always in someone else's locality. Secondly, in the area of domestic possession of the means of violence (box C), as long as one operates within a world "state of nature," i.e. in a system of states, a concentration of control over armed forces is unfortunately unavoidable. A world empire (for us undesirable) or a world federation (for us in principle desirable) could relativize this claim in two directions, respectively: abolition of national force or its pluralization. Nevertheless, such a federation is possible only if existing pluralities of state units, including political enemies, are willing to federate. In this sphere, then, ultimate conflict resolution must remain the reserve of national legislators. The majority of the whole that has a state system for its inter-national environment must be able to make decisions that overrule particular localities and associations. Otherwise one is always a potential situation of being divided and conquered. This argument, of course, leaves room for the expression of public will and opinion on such issues, as well as for the demand of adequate, relevant information and publicity of debates and the articulation of alternative proposals which can be objects of compromise. These two arguments indicate the direction and limits of the devolution of sovereignty in the currently existing international context, a system of states, which, unlike a world empire or a system of empires seeking to be worlds, is not in principle unfavourable to democratic rule. In such a context the combination of federalism in the legislative sphere and decentralization of police and bureaucratic - but not military - authority are possible, and from the point of view of societal democratization, desirable. Our analysis assumes throughout the crucial norm of the new social movements - societal democratization - which involves, as previously stated, a pushing back, but not elimination, of the authority of the state. On such unavoidably normative and theoretical levels of analysis, the exact boundaries between the spheres of state and society cannot be delineated: this must ultimately be an empirical and practical task. In this context we want to take a closer look at two of the "items" mentioned at the outset, which exemplify in two different contexts some of the crucial problems that must be resolved if the new social movements are to find institutional solutions to what their very existence already implies, but qua movement cannot in a lasting fashion achieve: the democratization of society. We take as the two case studies the Polish democratic movement and the Western European peace movement, not to focus on all the elements that divide them, but to study one common aspect: the paradox of the program of society against the state in the context of inadequate reflection on state sovereignty. No social movement has more clearly articulated a program of society against the state than Solidarity in Poland. To be sure, the most important reason for this, the existence of a state with totalitarian aspirations based, above all, on the power of a foreign, imperial master, made a fundamental opposition to it on the part of the whole democratic movement more or less

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inevitable. This sharply distinguishes Poland from the overall context analyzed in the first part of this essay. In Poland, civil society in the juridical sense did not exist in the period 1945-1980, even if the totalitarian project always foundered on, among other things, the existence of the Catholic church as well as an extensive web of informal associations. 19 The social movement that developed on the bases of these associations, and in a context of rapidly evolving alternative public spheres, had as its first task a project of what we call institutional reform: the institutionalization of something that countries of Western Europe and North America already possess - civil society, albeit in a different (non-capitalist) form. While the period of 1980-1981 has been called that of the "self-limiting revo}ution,,,21 the accent was on self-limitation for one essential reason: the democratic opposition, above all KOR, and later Solidarity, always assumed that the re-establishment of civil society would occur in a dualistic context whose second pole would be an authoritarian state continuous, in significant respects, with the past. A rigid juxtaposition of society and state was not the utopia of a democratic movement that would have preferred (and in the long run aimed at) parliamentary mediation. Such an arrangement was consciously understood as the second best, given the impossibility of a democratic movement to accept the existing Polish state as its state, and the obvious unwillingness of the party apparatus supported by the Soviet Union to undertake a structural reform (i.e. genuine modernization, not to speak of democratization). In this context, the strategy of the democratic movement aimed at compromises among adversaries whose survival presumably depended on some kind of arrangement with one another. This presumption was based on two premises. It was assumed that the rationally understood interests of the Soviet Union favored such a compromise, because the costs of military intervention would outweigh any possible benefit. 22 It was further assumed that the Polish state itself, however desirous of putting an end to a duality of power (there was no duality of sovereignty), was incapable of physically suppressing the social movement. This second assumption flowed from the same theoretical premises as the program of society vs the state. To be sure, in the period after August 31, 1980, this program seemed dramatically successful: the organization of most sectors of society and the immense weakening of the state were unprecedented achievements for a Soviet-type society.23 These two results in particular reinforced some fundamental illusions of the movement. Modern civil society is not self-sufficient; as we have argued, it needs the various outputs of a (more or less modern) state. If the Polish state could not be overthrown or replaced, it was the sole candidate for the exercise of the several crucial functions of economic steering, legal regulation, and military defense, even if by its structure it was incapable of any wider aggregation of social interests. The logic of the weakening of the state by society thus corresponded to the policy of its diehard apparatus: to weaken society by doing nothing. Most visibly, the resulting decision-less political situation led to the spectacular aggravation of the economic crisis. Less visibly, the weakening of the state reduced the freedom of action of any would-be reformers, i.e. partners to compromise, who began to fear total collapse. The final result was the nearly subterranean reconstitution of sovereign state power.

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Like many political theorists, the democratic movement tended to associate sovereignty with legitimacy much too closely. Though legitimacy is a crucial support of sovereign power, the two dimensions of the state are nonetheless logically distinct. To be sure, the Polish state possessed no legitimacy in the eyes of its population, although it did retain its recognition in both the eastern and western parts of the system of states. All international economic and political links of Polish society (except the church) had to proceed through this state and this state alone. Internally it was the post-1914 newly reconstituted state (after four partitions) which represented the legal and physical guarantee of the territorial integrity of the nation. Polish society was unable and unwilling to generate its own army; in this context, too, it had to rely on the state that existed. Since it was widely assumed that under some emergency conditions the Polish army would fight against East German or Russian invaders, it retained an astonishingly high popularity. Very likely December 13 was understood as an immense betrayal by a large majority of Polish society. Nevertheless, in a context of a decisionless political situation with a Soviet intervention never completely excluded, the Polish party-army-state could not be effectively opposed. While it is unfortunately all too easy to judge retrospectively, the only road out of the Polish dilemma now appears to have been the acceptance of a compromise structure on a relatively low level of social independence: i.e., a corporatist structure of compromise and interest aggregation. It may very well have been the case, however, that the mobilization of the population and the imperial logic of Soviet domination left little room for such experimentation, at various times proposed by people as different as Wojcicki, Kuron, and "Experience and Future" (DIP). Nevertheless, illusions about the absence of sovereign power and about the viability of a fundamentalist program of society against the state contributed to a very real disinterest in corporatist solutions rightly seen as corrupting, but wrongly seen as a blockage of, rather than as a potential first step (liberalization) toward,democratization. The Western European peace movements also represent the program of society against the state. 24 Here, as in Poland in 1980--1981, the result has already been democratization of aspects of social life, including the emergence of new forms of association, solidarity, and publicity. But here, too, theoretical reflection, in particular reflection on the relationship of society and sovereign power, has been lagging behind the actual development, and, we believe, needs, of the movements. While the recovery of national sovereignty vis-a-vis the V.S. and popular sovereignty vis avis their own states genuinely moves some of the best West Europeans, the results in both respects could turn out to be paradoxical if some theoretical and practical reorientation does not occur. E.P. Thompson's eloquent, if ambiguous, article, "END and the Soviet 'Peace Offensive' ,"25 indicates both areas of our concern, as well as some structural analogies to the Polish situation just described. According to Thompson, the peace movement is threatened by (a) falling into a Russian trap and Cb) a consequent right wing response. Falling into a Russian trap would mean that the peace movement helps to achieve a goal it shares with the Soviet Union, the "screwing up of the

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Western Alliance and unraveling NATO," while helping to achieve the contrary of a goal that puts them in diametrical opposition to Soviet policy, ioe. instead of loosening, the freezing of the Soviet empire. Since Thompson unfortunately says that one might be able to "live with" such an outcome if it brought disarmament closer to reality, we must inquire why a Russian armed to the teeth would be dangerous for him beyond the distasteful apparently still acceptable result of putting the East "under quarantine seems to us that the subtext of Thompson's essay admits that in a system of states it is not acceptable that only one's adversary, which is well known to be an imperial power, possesses some absolutely decisive military weapons, which would indeed be the case with NATO unravelled and the Soviet military system intact. We believe that any such outcome implies the recovery of some aspects of European sovereignty from the V.So (American control over nuclear weapons relevant to the European theater) only at the cost of surrendering more of it to the Soviet Union. This is true in terms of the one definition of sovereign power that links legislation with armed power: independence from the commands of another, external entity. Even more important is the fact that the internal economic difficulties of the Soviet Union and the highly centrifugal tendencies of the peripheries of its Empire give the Russians several important motives to use any excess of military-geopolitical power vis-a-vis Western Europe in the future. We do not refer to an actual invasion but to pressures seeking to use the European economies and to diffuse the culturally and socially disruptive influence of the West on the East. The Soviet Union is apparently incapable of undertaking even a limited program of socio-economic reform. While we do not want to accept all aspects of Castoriadis' analysis,26 we do believe that he has been very persuasive on this .point. He has shown what has become the substitute for internal reform: a dual socio-economic structure that involves a backward, conservative, stagnating society co-existing with a fully modern military-industrial subsociety. To Castoriadis, only actual expansion can stabilize this structure and provide it with a raison d'etre, i.e., symbolic integration (the "nationalimperial imaginery"). We believe, however, that a long period of unequal economic exchange with a still capitalist Western Europe, whose terms the Western Europeans would be unable to alter, might serve Soviet purposes better without the same risks This would be all the more true if such a relationship were coupled with the suspension of a critical Western European cultural role in the western periphery of the empire: human rights policies, broadcasts, exchanges with strings attached, support for dissidents, etc. However, only a significant shift in the European balance of sovereign power can attain these results for the Soviet Union. The point here is not to present a scenario for the use of surplus military power, but to affirm and exemplify that in the context of Soviet needs and a European power vacum, a diminution of sovereignty would be potentially extremely dangerous. Thompson's second fear is related to the first. In a manner somewhat analogous to our own description of the Polish situation, he fears the strengthening of the established form of sovereign power within Western European states, the opposite of the popular sovereignty for which the peace 0 "

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movement struggles. The reason for this outcome in Thompson's view would be the Soviet threat that inevitably strengthens the military and conservative forces that claim to be willing and able to resist'it. Such an outcome has, to be sure, apparently been avoided, in any case temporarily, by the installation of the cruise/Pershing missiles. But these missiles do not tackle the problem for which they were supposedly designed: the re-linking of Western Europe'and the U. S. in the context of the recently achieved de facto Soviet nuclear parity. The use of the cruise/Pershing on behalf of purely European objectives is no more believable than that of the ICBM's. European sovereignty is today de facto under threat and only a united European form of defense could protect it . As long as a Left, in the name of the fundamentalist goal of unilateral disarmament, seems to promise even greater erosion of sovereignty, the claims of sovereign power could very well be taken up by the right. If some of the support for the peace movements is in fact based on the desire to reclaim sovereignty from the Americans, this dimension itself could still swing to the right if threats to sovereignty from the East are not addressed by activists and theorists. Thompson's suggestions for avoiding the Soviet and right wing trap are unfortunately not convincing. Neither outcome would be much affected by boycotting East European official peace conferences to which no selfrespecting Western peace activist should go anyway, or by sitting in front of Soviet embassies and consulates. Only a viable strategy (economic, cultural, and political) against the Soviet nuclear weapons (8S20's) by the movements could make a significant difference here. While some elements of the German Greens have considered such a strategy, this was not well received by the movement as a whole. Such a context is unfortunately hardly propitious for the discussion of the fundamental issue: what are the military conditions for the defense of Western European sovereignty? There is an important lesson here. that sums up what has been said about the peace movement. Those who defend the societies of Western Europe against the state must realize that sovereign power cannot be eliminated, but only transformed, i.e., reinstitutionalized. The alternatives to somewhat reduced sovereignty within the American alliance system and to a greatly reduced sovereignty within the Soviet Empire are either sovereign nation states (perhaps impossible and undiserable), or a sovereign European federation fully capable of self-defense. In the absence of effective international peacekeeping mechanisms, we do not see a fifth solution. We hope we can safely leave to our readers which of these four arrangements represents the most fruitful context for the expansion of new forms of democracy. Social movements, of course, have a fundamentalist dimension, and if it is true, as we have argued, that a total opposition to the sovereignty of the state only strengthens it, a strategy for democratization cannot rely on movements alone. While our interest here was in the limits and possibilities of the politicization of society, the further democratization of the power of the state, i.e . , the extension of the forms of formal, as well as direct, democracy, is equally important. In the context of the peace movement the election of political groups, parties, and individuals supporting the cause of disarmament

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remains crucial. In relation to this, however, two points are essential. First, one has the right to expect a growing sensitivity to questions of sovereignty precisely from representatives who function on the parliamentary level that legislates for the whole of society. As elsewhere, the "mandat imperatif " in the case of the West Germ~n Green Party, ties representatives on this level to an unacceptable fundamentalist logic of social movements. This blurring of the lines between movement and party sabotages achieved forms of democracy as well as structures of compromise, and in the long run threatens the chances for new forms to survive. In other words, movement and party, direct action and structural compromise, must remain distinct. Secondly, all those who participate in a representative system must accept majority rule in relation to matters of defense, even if in relation to other matters the voice of localities should override, when relevant, the vote of parliaments. We cannot here develop analogous implications for the other problem areas listed in the beginning of the essay.27 We are not entirely optimistic about the possibilities of movements as such accepting a dualistic strategy for democracy outlined here: a combination of institutional reform and extra-institutional action, and a devolution of sovereign power that would keep some of its key dimensions intact. It nevertheless remains the task of social theory and theorists committed to the plurality of democracies to represent exactly such a possibility, even against the most fundamental impulses of those addressed. NOTES

2 3

4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

For a good discussion, see Claus Offe, "Konkurrenzpartei und kollektive politische Identitat" in Parliamentarisches Ritual und politische Altemativen, Roth and Roland, eds. (Frankfurt, 1980), pp. 26-42. Cf. Alain Touraine, Solidarity (New York, 1983), for a discussion of fundamentalist and modernist tendencies within Polish Solidarity itself. Ibid., and also Otto Kirchheimer, "The Waning of Opposition in Parliamentary Regimes" and "The Vanishing Opposition," in Politics, Law and Social Change (New York, 1969). Dffe, Ope cit. Claus Dffe, "Political Legitimation Through Majority Rule?" Social Research, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Winter 1983), pp. 709-757. Jurgen Habermas, "New Social Movements," Telos, #49 (Fall 1981), pp. 33-38. Claus Offe, "The Attribution of Public Status to Interest Groups: Observations on the West German Case," in Berger, ed., Organizing Interests in Western Europe (New York, 1981), pp. 123-159. Pierre Rosanvallon, "La deregulation sociale," Intervention, #2 (January-February 1983), pp. 87-94. Jean L. Cohen, "Rethinking Social Movements," Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vo!. 28 (Fall 1983), pp. 97-113. Habermas, op. cit. Cohen, op. cit. Alain Touraine, Antinuclear Protest (New York, 1983), Part One, pp. 3-28, and Claus Eder, "A New Social Movement?" Telos, 52 (Summer 1982), pp. 5-20. Cohen, op. cit. See Andrew Arato, "Civil Society vs. the State," Telos, #47 (Spring 1981), pp. 23-47, and

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

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Andrew Arato, "Empire vs. Civil Society: Poland 1981-82," Telos, #50 (Winter 1981-82), pp. 19-48, for discussions of this process in the case of Polish Solidarity. Jiirgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt, 1981). See Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class (Boston, 1982). Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (New Jersey, 1976); Harold Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven, 1916); G.D.H. Cole, Guild Socialism Restated (New Jersey, 1980). Offe, "Political Legitimation Through Majority Rule?", op. cit. Wojcicki, "The Reconstruction of Society," Telos, #47 (Spring 1981), pp. 98-103. J. Goldfarb, On Cultural Freedom (Chicago, 1982). A. Arato "The Democratic Theory of Polish Opposition," working papers of the Kellogg Institute (Notre Dame, 1984). A. Arato, "Empire vs. Civil Society, " op. cit. Ibid., for a discussion of the achievements of Solidarity. Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen, "The Peace Movement and Western European Sovereignty," Telos, #51 (Spring 1982), pp. 158-170. E.P. Thompson, "END and the Soviet Peace Offensive," The Nation (February 26, 1983). Cornelius Castoriadis, Devant la Guerre (Paris, 1981). See the article by Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen, "The Greens: Between Fundamentalism and Modernism," Dissent (Summer 1984). See also Jean L. Cohen, "The Problem of French Socialism," Telos, #55 (Spring 1983), pp. 5-13.

Seyla JiellnaDID

1. Introduction It is h~rd to avoid the sense these days that one is living the end of an epoch. The intensifying threats of nuclear and ecological disaster are probably the most obvious, but .by no means sole, indicators of the widely shared percep.tion that the"project of modernity" has exhausted itself. From its beginnings, the project of the moderns entailed ~wo conceptions of reason: the first was technical-instrumental reason whose vision was strikingly captured by Descartes' phrase that the task is "to render ourselves masters and possessors of nature."l The second conception of reason was a moral-practical one, emphasizing that only those norms are valid and worthy of consent which autonomous individuals would freely choose to live by. What constituted the distinctiveness of the "classical moderns," from Descartes to Kant, J. Bentham to Saint Simon, and from John Locke to J.S. Mill, was the conviction that moral and political autonomy could only be attained by unleashing the powers promised by the scientific-technological use of reason. Not only was there no incompatability between autonomy and the mastery of nature, moral progress and scientific growth, but the first presupposed the second. Since mid-nineteenth century the promises of the classical moderns have come to ring hollow. We have come to recognize that the project of the moderns entails a dialectic of Enlightenment. Reason that is solely an instrument for the mastery of nature takes its vengeance upon humanity by reducing the very subjects of reason to the status of the objects they seek to dominate. Objectivating reason objectifies the subject of reason. Nietzsche and Weber, and following them Adorno and Horkheimer, have driven this lesso'n home. We can no longer assume with Descartes that rendering ourselves "masters and possessors of nature" will pave the path of moral progress and social justice. In many ways nineteenth-century Marxian social theory shares the discourse of the classical moderns, and their belief that unleashing human productive forces is a necessary, even when insufficient, condition for social progress and the development of autonomy. In other ways Marxian social theory can be seen as one of the first criticisms of the proclivities of modernity, and as a pioneering attempt to distinguish between true modernity and its limited bourgeois form. 2 Thus, whether one construes classical Marxism as adumbrating classical modernity or as criticizing it, there is little question that 284

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the widespread malaise with the modern project has implications for the Marxian project as well. Among social theorists who address the relationship of the Marxian to the modern project, one can distinguish two trends of analysis. I will name the first "deconstructionist," and the second "reconstructivist," Marxism. Common to both trends is the rejection of the primacy of production both in explanatory and normative senses. Jean Baudrilland and Marshall Sahlins, for example, whom I would name "deconstructivist Marxists," hold that the fundamental tenets of historical materialism, like the distinction between relations of production and forces of production, the view that social transformation takes place through contradictions between them, are useless in explaining precapitalist societies. 3 Historical materialism is a typically ethnocentric perspective, they argue, that illegitimately generalizes the experience of the West into a universal social theory. This enthnocentric bias means that, normatively, Marxist discourse serves as an ideology of development in integrating so-called "backward" countries into the world-market. The dis-course of Marxism is not an alternative to, but a perpetuation of, growth and production based on the experience of Western modernity. Reconstructivists like Anthony Giddens and Jiirgen Habermas are equally aware of the limits of the production paradigm. Instead of rejecting this paradigm wholesale, however, they seek to limit its centrality at the empirical and normative levels. For the purposes of empirical analysis, Habermas dissects the category of social production into the components of instrumental, strategic, and communicative action, 4 while Giddens writes of the "structured properties of social systems that are simultaneously the medium and outcome of social ac~s."s Normatively both intend to develop the Marxian vision of emanicipation beyond that of a society run by a centrally planned economy and equally as dedicated to the ideas of growth and production as capitalism itself. In this essay I want to argue that among those normative presuppositions of classical Marxism which must be abandoned today is the Philosophy of the Subject. While contemporary Marxism has done much to displace or replace the paradigm of production, less attention has been paid to the implications of this critique of production for the Marxian concept of the subject - again as an empirical and a normative category. Since the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx replaces the Hegelian model of Spirit externalizing itself through its objectifications in history by the model of the human species producing itself through the activity of labor in history. Just as Spirit manifests what it is and what it can become through literally emptying itself out in history, for Marx, too, the species becomes human by unfolding its capacities via the material appropriation and transformation of the world. The secret of emancipation is the reappropriation by concrete humans of this wealth from which they have become alienated. Now many will be ready to concede that such a model may have been at work in Marx's early writings, but will deny its relevance for Marx's later works and in particular for Capital. My point is that precisely in order to understand the respects in which Capital is a critique of the capitalist mode of

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production, and not just another doctrine in political enconomy, we have to invoke this modeL Sim.ply put, according to this model human emancipation consists in the reappropriation by social agents of their own alienated wealth (wealth here refers not primarily to material objects but to human talents, capacities, knowledge, and skills). I want to begin by examining the three levels of critique Marx'sCapital. These will be named immanent and defetishizing critique, and critique as crises theory (11). I will then pose the question why the critique of capitalist political economy functions as a critique of capitalism as a whole (11). Subsequently, I will analyze the dual concept of crises with which Marx operates in Capital (Ill). Whereas one perspective corresponds to crisis as lived phenomenon of disorientation, anomie, and alienation, the second point of view yields a concept of systemic or functional crisis. Marx brings these two perspectives together in his class theory which itself rests on the Philosophy of the Subject. In my concluding remarks 1 will discuss what implications a critique of the Philosophy of the Subject has for reconceptualizing the project of the moderns (IV).

11. The Three Levels of Critique in Marx's Capital At one level, Marx's Capital unfolds a categorical discourse. Proceeding from the accepted definitions and significations of the categories of political economy, Marx shows how these definitions and significations turn into their opposites. For example, political economy postulates the unity of labor and property, and claims that labor. provides the only title to property. However, the capitalist mode of production is based upon the radical separation of the property of labor-power from the ownership of the means of production. Labor provides no title of property to the products of labor; the only property that the laborer acquires as a consequence of selling his or her labor power is its cash equivalent - the wages of labor power. 6 In this procedure Marx does not juxtapose his own categorical discourse to that of political economy, but through an internal exposition, elaboration, and deepening of the already available results of classical political economy he shows that these concepts are self-contradictory. This self-contradictoriness does not amount to a logical inconsistency. The categories of classical political economy are self-contradictory in the sense that when their implications are thought to their end, they fail to explain the phenomenon which they intend to explain: the capitalist mode of production. To cite another example: if capital is defined as self-expanding value, and if the process of the increase in the value of capital is sought in the sphere of the exchange of commodities, then either the exchange of commodities violates the principle of equivalence, or the self-expansion in the value of capital, becomes unintelligible. The violation of the principle of equivalence means that one commodity in the market place always commands less exchange value than it is worth. But this is a nonsensical claim, for exchange value is precisely the measure of the value of a commodity in relation to others. Thus, if one accepts the classical definition of exchange value, one cannot explain the increase in the value of

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capital. In fact, Marx accepts this definition and shows that the increase in the value of capital cannot be analyzed in light of the exchange process alone, but that one must consider the process of the production of commodities, and the unity of exchange and production, as moments of the self-realization of capital. 7 Since Marx does not measure the achievements of political economy against external criteria but confronts the claims of this science with the thought-out consequences of its own categories and assumptions, this aspect of his procedure presents an immanent critique of political economy. The categories of political economy are measured against their own objective content. It is this discrepancy and inconsistency between categories and their objects, or concepts and their actual content, which reveals how these categories turn into their opposites. There is a second dimension to Marx's procedure. Immanent critique is not only categorical critique, but also normative critique. In the transition from the exchange of commodities to the labor-process in Capital, Marx writes: "This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labor-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of Man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham On leaving this sphere of simple circulation of exchange of commodities He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour power follows as his labourer."8 The normative ideals of bourgeois society - the right of all to freedom, equality, and property - are expressed as social relations of exchange between individual property owners, who are equal in their abstract right to voluntarily dispose of what belongs to each. The exchange of commodities in the capitalist market place actualizes the norms of equality, freedom, and property. With the transition to the sphere of production, Marx shifts the perspective from the surface appearances of capitalist society to its deep structure. In the sphere of the exchange of the commodities, the genesis of the social relations between commodity owners remains unexplained. But when the process by which individuals become commodity owners, or the process of production of commodities, is drawn into consideration, the social-existential meaning of the norms of freedom, equality, and property changes. Freedom for some now simply means the social necessity they face to recurrently sell their laborpower; equality means the social dependence of one class upon the members of another; and property the right of some to appropriate the products of the labor of others. When the norms of bourgeois society are compared to the actuality of the social relations in which they are embodied and instantiated, the discrepancy between them becomes apparent. This juxtaposition of norm to actuality is the second aspect of Marx's method of immanent critique. Marx contrasts the normative self-understanding of this society to the actual social relations prevailing in it, without appealing to a different set of norms than the ones immanent in bourgeois society. On another level, Marx's critique of political economy is both a critique of a specific mode of theoretical and social consciousness, and a critique of a specific mode of social production whose theoretical expression takes the form of

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political economy. Capital is a critique of the social reality articulated by the discourse of political economy, as well as of this discourse itself. This dimension of Marx's procedure will be named "defetishizing critique." The theoretical expression of capitalist social relations in the discourse of political economy assumes a specific conceptual form to which Marx gives the name "fetishism. " This form is characterized by the following: social relations between humans appear as a relation between things. "It is a definite social relation between men, that assumes in their eyes, the phantastic form of a relation between things.,,9 The categories of political economy, and, specifically, the category of value, present economic reality as a set of objective, law-governed relations between various abstract quantities and entities. The social process of production which lies behind the product, and the social relations among humans that assume in their eyes an objective, mystified quality, are concealed. Political economy cannot uncover the social constitution of its own object domain. The fetish character of social life, which the categories of political economy express, is not a mere resemblance (Schein) but an appearance (Erscheinung). Not only in political economy, but in spontaneous everyday consciousness as well, the social character of their activities appears to individuals to be the property of the products of their labor. 10 Since bourgeois society reduces sociality (Vergesellschaftung) to exchange relations between independent commodity owners, it is assumed that only when the product of each can be exchanged for the product of every other one that the societal character of the labor embodied in them becomes apparent. The proof of the sociality of one's activity is that in the market place the product of one's activities can be sold to another or bought by oneself. With the method of defetishizing critique Marx analyzes the historicity of theoretical and everyday forms of consciousness, as well as of social formations, from the standpoint of a future actuality. This future actuality manifests itself in moments of crises. The capitalist mode of production cannot reproduce itself eternally: it has systemic as well as social limits. The systemic limits of capitalism are analyzed by Marx as a series of contradictions between the socialization of the mode of production and the continuing private ownership of capital, between the diminishing significance of labor in the production process and the law that socially necessary labor time remain the measure of value. The social limits of capitalism are manifested as class conflicts, struggles, and antagonism fighting against the social hegemony of capital. In the historical chapters of Capital, Marx analyzes the struggles against the lengthening of the working day, the intensification of production, and child labor. Whereas the systematic limits of capital give rise to dysfunctionalities in the economic sphere - the falling rate of profit, unemployment, bankruptcies - the social limits of capital express themselves as conflicts, struggles, and antagonisms of social groups and classes in the process of resisting the hegemony of capitalist relations. In such moments of crises both the irrationality of the system and its transitoriness reveal themselves. The irrationality of the system manifests itself as a discrepancy between the potential wealth of society and the actual misery of individuals, while its

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transitoriness becomes apparent to the individuals who struggle for its transformation. This aspect of Marx's procedure reveals the unity of critique and crisis theory. The critique of capitalism which brings to light the internal contradictoriness of the system has the purpose of explaining how and why this internal contradictoriness gives rise to oppositional demands and struggles which 'cannot be satisfied by the system as it is at present, and which require its radical transformation. The procedures described above as immanent and defetishizing critique, and critique as crisis theory, suggest that Capital does not present yet another doctrine of political economy. Marx's use of the term "critique" to describe his procedure is not a slip of the pen but suggests the presence of a rather complicated mode of conceptual analysis at work. But why did Marx assume that by criticizing its political economy he would be criticizing capitalist society as such? Could a critique of capitalism take the form of a critique of its culture and other social institutions instead? Let me clarify the thought behind this question. In his earlier contributions to the Deutsch-Franzosische J ahrbiicher of which he was the co-editor, in his essay "On the Jewish Question" and in his 1841 Critique ofHegel's Philosophy ofRight, Marx's critique of civil society centered around its political as well as civic institutions. Il In these early writings, Marx is more concerned with the failure of true universalism,in bourgeois society: neither the political institutions of the bourgeoisie, which did not at that time allow universal suffrage and the principle of one man/one vote, nor relations in bourgeois civil society based on the glorification of the bourgeois as opposed to the citoyen, seem to Marx to have actualized the promise of universalism made by the American and French Revolutions. In this period Marx writes as a philosophically inspired political sociologist, whereas in Capital he proceeds as a political economist. Here the claim is that the critique of capitalist society cannot be carried out via a critique of its apparent social institutions, like parties, the press, various civil associations, the state and its administrative organs. This shift focus from political sociology to political economy can be explained in light of the following considerations. In the first place, we have to recall that capitalist society is the first social formation in history which derives its legitimation from immanent as opposed to transcendent norms. Precapitalist social formations were articulated into hierarchical whales in which activities in all life spheres received their meaning with reference to a transcendent norm - naturally, cosmologically, or metaphysically grounded. The institutional framework of these societies, relations of production as well as relations of domination, were grounded in an unquestioned structure of legitimation provided by mythical, religious, or metaphysical interpretations. These communities assured themselves of their identity and unity by positing a transcendent norm which gave cohesion to their self-interpretations and which legitimized the organization of relations of production and domination. There was no clear distinction between production and domination, between the economy and the political sphere. 12

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More importantly, Marx notes that in all these early social formations "the

reproduction of presupposed relations ... of the individual to his commune · · · of his relations both to the conditions of labor and to his co-workers, fellowtribesmen, etc ... are the foundation of development.,,13 The goal of social life is not production but the reproduction of social relations of domination. general, in such societies wealth is never an end-in-itself but a means to the perpetration of the naturally grown conceptions of the good life of community. The development of capitalism destroys these relations: the land is no longer a natural means of production and sustenance but the private property of some serving the creation of value; the individual confronts the instruments of labor as the property of someone else; the community no longer appears as an organic group but as the grouping together of free and autonomous individuals. This transformation brings with it a shift from transcendent to immanent legitimation which is thematized by natural law and contract theories from Hobbes to Kant. In these theories the constitution of civil society is presented as an act of consensual union among free and autonomous subjects. The justification of this union is that it corresponds to a necessity of human nature or human reason. Not a transcendent source, whose dictates remain unintelligible to human reason, but the needs, desires, and enlightened self-interest of an emancipated subjectivity provide the legitimizing instance of the new social formation. The ideology of just exchange institutionalizes the principle that individuals are entitled to the pursuit of their own good as long as this does not conflict with the right of others to do the same. Political domination is only legitimate to the extent that it can guarantee all subjects their entitlement to participate in just exchange relations. Political domination is legitimized "from below" with reference to the activities of civil society as a whole. Since capitalist civil society does away with the transcendent point of view, and since the legitimizing norms of this society, like equality, freedom, and property, are embodied in the normatively regulated activities of exchange, the critique of political economy becomes a critique of the normative self-understanding of this society at large. Marx's critique of capitalist civil society does not replace the immanent by the transcendent point of view. Rather this critique aims to show that this society contains within itself an unrealized potential for expressing "the most developed social relations." Under conditions of capitalist production, this unrealized potential appears through the oppositions of poverty and wealth, exploitation and accumulation, individual impoverishment and social enrichment. Commenting on the lofty view of the ancients which seems to make wealth a means, and not the end, of individual and collective development, Marx writes: In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is ,wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities and pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as humanity's own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presuppositions other than previous historic development,

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which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick. 14

Capitalist civil society has the potential to develop the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures and to allow the fl111 unfolding of the human mastery over nature as well as over humanity's own nature and to bring forth total This process is not to be measured by a predetennined yardstick, "development of all human powers as such is an end itself." IS The potential immanent in capitalist civil society is the self-actualization through the unfolding of capacities and powers. This passage expresses a nutshell the normative ideal underlying Marx's critique of capitalism. Marx's normative vision is that of an active humanity, enterprising, transforming nature and unfolding its potentialities in process. The bourgeoisie, which can be named the first social class in to its legitimation from an ideology of change and growth rather than one of order and stability, is, on Marx's view, not to be rejected but sublated (aufgehoben). For in bourgeois society the "true universality of individual needs, capacities and pleasures" is identified with a limited form, namely with wealth in the sense of the mere accumulation of material objects. What is required in the society of the future is to make this wealth not an end but rather a precondition for the development of real human wealth, i.e. true human universality and individuality. Marshall Berman correctly observes that in this respect: .m..A_.iLA..II.JIo. ....

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Marx is closer to some of his bourgeois and liberal enemies than he is to traditional exponents of communism, who, since Plato and the Church Fathers, have sanctified self-sacrifice, distrusted or loathed individuality and yearned for a still point at which all strife and striving will reach an end. Once again we find Marx more responsive to what is going on in bourgeois society than are the members and supporters of the bourgeoisie themselves. He sees in the dynamics of capitalist development ~ both the development of each individual and of society as a whole - a new image of the good life: not a life of divine perfection, not the embodiment of prescribed static essences, but a process of continual, restless, open-ended, unbounded growth. Thus he hopes to heal the wounds of modernity through a fuller and deeper modernity. 16

The "overcoming of modernity through a fuller and deeper modernity" can only be accomplished in Marxian terms when humans reappropriate the wealth which they have created and alienated. This dual perspective of alienation (Entfremdung) , exteriorization (Entiiusserung) , and reappropriation (Wideraneignung) is at work in Marx's Capital; most significantly this vision provides the normative background to the twofold concept of crisis with which Marx operates. Let me now turn to an examination of the two concepts of crisis in Capital.

Ill. Systemic and Lived Crisis: The Unresolved Tension Throughout Capital two strands of analysis corresponding to two distinct

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these two the first injustice crises as the thinker-observer. Lived points from which Marx observes interl1al . . . J~_~..I ism. I nov\' want to turn to Marx's attempted perspectives show why his is a synthesis we can no For capitalist social relations begin when labor-power can and sold in the market place as a commodity. Yet labor-power is other commodity three ways: first, it is not separable its owner. There can be no labor-power without tIle one who labors. 1'hrollgh the wage-labor contract the worker alienates to the o\vner of the means production his/her capacity to preform a concrete form of labor over a period of time. Second, not being separable its owner, labor-power is not reproducible at will, either. The reproduction labor-power is identical the reproduction of those individuals who sell their labor-power as a COll1ffiOdity. Third, unlike a machine, labor-power can only be set into motion when its owner consents to labor, i.e., when the individual agrees to perform the activity involved. Labor-power is a subjective capacity whose enlployment depends upon subjective will of the laborer. the ideological kernel of capitalist social relations is that what all previous societies was a direct relation of domination between immediate producers and those appropriating their surplus product or labor, in capitalism appears as an objective relation between things: labor-povver is viewed as a commodity whose value is likewise one, i.e., monetary \vages. all human societies the distribution of social wealth entails a set of power relations, while under capitalisrn the power relations inherent in the distribution of social wealth appear as laws of the market, as an autolnatic process. But this complete objectification or thingification of labor power does not and cannot succeed. The purchase and sale of labor-power is unlike that of any other comlllodity, although the internal logic of capitalism is based upon a denial of fact. The purchase and sale of labor-power entails a social struggle, a conflictual social relation. In the historical discussions and digressions of Capital, Marx portrays the struggle of the workers against the lengthening of the working day and against child labor; their resentments and outbursts against machinery; strikes; and the gradual emergence of a collective consciousness that transforms the wage-labor contract from a private act into a collectively negotiable power relation. These struggles set objective limits upon the functioning of capitalism: absolute surplus value cannot be attained via the lengthening of the working day for the political struggle prevents it. The extraction of relative surplus through the increase in the productivity of labor and the rationalization and scientification of production also have limits as """,,,,,"L.:bi"lL"l>''''''

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Durkheim's notion of the organic division of labor, and Parsons' notion of the "generalized media," social theory has emphasized this aspect of modern societies according to large domains of social life become functionally dependent upon one another without this being willed, desired, or even to Social integration, by contrast, refers to the co-ordination of social actions through the harmonizing action orientations. Individuals orient actions to one another because they understand the meanings, social rules, values in question. Whereas systems integration occurs because of the discrepancy between intention and consequence, social integration cannot take place unless action consequences result from the intentions of social actors. social integration, the co-ordination social action takes place intentionally. It follows that whereas action systems can be analyzed, and in fact can only be analyzed from the perspective of third, of the observer, social integration must be analyzed from the internal perspective of the first second person. Commenting on these two perspectives, Claus Offe observes: "All social systems reproduce themselves through normatively regulated and meaningful action of their members on the one hand, and the effectiveness of objective functional contexts on the other. This differentiation between "social integration" and "systems integration," between followed rules and rule-like regularities that assert themselves beyond subjects, is the basis for the entire sociological tradition.,,19 We certainly cannot take Marx to task for not having developed the social-theoretical means of analysis by which to integrate these two perspectives, but it is no coincidence that as a social theory Marxism seems to vacillate between economistic objectivism, 011 the one hand - emphasizing tlle moment of functional crisis - and culturalist or psychological perspectives of alienation, on the other - corresponding to the moment of lived crisis. The theoretical problem left unresolved by Marx's analysis is the relationship between action-contexts out of which lived crises emerge and objective-functional interconnections among action consequences that lead to systemic malfunctioning. This unresolved theoretical problem has normative consequences. The reader of the historical excursus in Marx's Capital cannot avoid the impression that in these passages the workers are not the subjects of their struggles but become so only to the extent that they are made into subjects by capitalism itself, i.e., only insofar as their misery is so collectivized and their living conditions so homogenized that they become members of a single, unified class. Marx's evaluation of this process of the constitution of the workers into a "class" is positive. 20 The formation of class consciousness is seen as a step towards autonomy, as a step in the direction of becoming true subjects. Collective actors whose struggles cannot be subsumed under the concept of "class" are not subjects at all. But the concept of "class," as Marx himself also points out, is only a meaningful social category for analyzing those social systems in which stratification is not ascriptive, in which birth, age, bloodlineage, and profession no longer determine social rights and privileges, and where social integration is achieved primarily through the free market of wage-Iabor. 21 In such social systems class formations are not subjective but objective means of identification by which the observer-thinker can determine

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the functional regularities and statistical qualities that come to characterize the living conditions, actions, and through-patterns of large masses of the population. At the subjective level what is supposed to "bind" members of a class together is their "objective interest," Le., the preservation of their material and power status within the system of production. But class interests, in the true sense of the word, are "ascribed" (zugerechnet), for one can determine what is or is not in the interests of a class only through an "objective" analysis of the social system itself. There is, however, no such purely "objective" analysis; the determination of so-called "class interests" requires us to specify what we see as just or unjust, as exploitation or domination, in social relations. the concept of a class-interest is to designate more than a statistical regularity of the behavior of large human groups, and is to be used as a nonnative measure as to how real groups ought to act, then one's normative standards must be identified previously and not subsequently to "objective" class analysis. 22 Social classes are specific historical forms of collective actors. They are not the only ones. Struggling collectivities may be formed around other normative concerns besides class interests, and relations of exploitation and domination may be based upon other characteristics like sex, race, ethnic and linguistic identity, and even age. Marx was correct in diagnosing the manner in which capitalist society seemed to render previous modes of collective identification irrelevant, but he was wrong in ascribing a normative status to the only mode of collective identification that capitalism seemed to create. In ascribing such a normative status to the concept 'of class, Marx adapted exclusively the point of view of the thinker-observer, ignoring the very social experiences of collectivity and plurality which are fundamental to struggling actors. In conclusion let me elaborate why this concept of class rests on the Philosophy of the Subject. IV. Conclusion: the Philosophy of the Subject The four presuppositions of the position which I describe as the "Philosophy of the Subject" are: 1. that there is a unitary model of human activity which can be defined as "objectification" or "production"; 2. that history is constituted by the activities of this one subject - humanity or mankind; 3. that human history presents the unfolding of the capacities of this one subject; and 4. that emancipation consists in our becoming conscious of and acting according with the knowledge that the constituting and constitutive subjects of history - the subject of the past and the subject of the future - are one. Insofar as we in the present can see our identity with this subject whose past "work" is our present, we can either attain reconciliation with an objectivity which we know to be our doing (Hegel), or we can attain emancipation by reappropriating those forces and achievements of the past which we know to be products of our activity (Marx). In Marx's theory the proletariat represents a universal interest because it acts in the name of this collective, singular subject of history. The emancipation of the proletariat amounts to the emancipation of humanity, precisely because the specific interests of this class

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correspond to the universal interests of humanity. Note, however, this equation of proletarian with universal human interests tout court rests on two assumptions: first, it is asssumed that there is a real subject of history to whom we can ascribe a "universal" interest; in the second place, it is maintained that one social group or class must be capable of representing the universal interest as such.. Both assumptions are faulty. First, the claim that there is a subject of history to whom we can ascribe an interest rests on a confusion of empirical and normative categories. For Marx, empirically, humanity is the subject of history, in the sense that history develops as a consequence of human activities. But humanity is an abstraction, for it is the concrete activities of specific individuals in certain times and places that drives the historical process on. The subjects of history, in the sense of agents of history, are human beings in the plural, not humanity as such. , In the second place, what allows Marx to shift from the plural to the collective singular, from humans to humanity, is the second assumption that lets him view humanity as a normative category. History is the condition of the possibility of becoming a subject, not in the sense of agency, but in the sense of a goal and a telos. Humanity here appears as the goal of history, as that toward which history tends. Having inherited this dual perspective of humanity as an empirical subject and as a nonnative goal from Classical German Idealism and its philosophy of history,23 Marx often conflates the two principles and writes as if what is a regulative ideal in history - the idea of humanity - is also operative in history as an agent - humanity as an empirical subject. It is this conflation of equally the empirical and normative perspectives which drives Marx to But if questionable assumption that one can impute an "interest" to humanity is a normative category, the interests of humanity would then have to be defined in the course of struggle and could not be specified beforehand, for humanity itself would only be a teIos of struggle and would not refer to a pre-existent subject. Not what the theorist claims to be the human interest, but what struggling actors themselves would come to recognize as own goals and desires would constitute human interests. human interests cannot be defined theoretically and a priori, then it also follows that it makes no sense to view one social class alone as representing the universal interest. proletariat in Marx's work is ascribed a normative role that follows the theoretical conflation I have been attempting to outline. As Jean Cohen astutely observes in her book Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Marxian

Critical Theory: The concept of universal class and the identification of one historically produced, empirically existent group as the bearer of universality rests on the problematic attempt, derived from Hegel, to present history as positive and rational. The universal class, the subject/object of history, the negation of the negation, are concepts in Marx's thought that imply a return to Hegel's absolute through the substitution, first of species for Geist, second, of the class as the general representative of society for the species. The concept of the universal class subjugates the contingencies of historical praxis and the plurality of potential actors to the demands of "reason" - to the demands of a logic that seeks to discover its own operations on the level of human praxis. 24

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Marx thereby commits the fallacy of "representational logic." This allows for some of the most objectionable equations of traditional Marxism. If the working class represents the universal interest of humanity, then the Party represents the universal interests of the working class, and the Central Committee represents the universal interests of the Party. Authoritarian, substitutionalist politics, while not being deducible from, is not incompatible with, this point of view. Let me return once more to the project of the moderns in light of these considerations. Clearly, the Philosophy of the Subject was born with the experience of Western modernity. Not only the Enlightenment ideal of humanity, but, more significantly, the creation of a world-market and the integration of other continents and countries into the West via capitalist and industrial policies, are the material and intellectual preconditions of the concept of the Subject of History. However, very often this process took place by a "List der Vernunft," behind the back of social agents and at their cost. Humanity was not the goal but the carrier of this process. Of course, Marxist social theory is one of the first to have criticized the "limited bourgeois form" of this process of capitalist modernization. But this Marxist critique did not go so far as to subvert the representational logic and substitutionalist politics of the bourgeoisie. Marx conflated his systemic perspective which allowed him to establish the centrality of the wage-labor/capital conflict with the normative view, that class alone could represent true universal interests which lived this contradiction most fully. This was a move that pre-empted in theory the kind of universality and commonality of interests that could only derive from practice. Marx's effort to strip the modern epoch of its "bourgeois form" is thus incomplete, for the Philosophy of the Subject remains caught within the presuppositions of this bourgeois form. Only a form of universality in ethics and politics that does not deny the otherness of the Other(s) and that does not pre-empt her or his perspectives, needs, struggles, and interests can succeed in stripping modernity of its bourgeois form. In this sense the Marxian project of "overcoming modernity through a fuller and deeper modernity" (Berman) is incomplete. NOTES

2 3 4

5 6

Rene Descartes, "Discourse on Method" in: The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. E. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge, 1967), p. 119. For this view, cf. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982), p. 355, n. 9. J. Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production eSt. Louis, 1975); M. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976). J. Habermas, "Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism," in Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston, 1979), pp. 130-178. A. Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981), p. 19. More precisely, wages are the cash remuneration of the exchange-value of labor-power, while the use of labor-power is concrete laboring activity measured in terms of labor hours. The generation of surplus-value is a consequence of the distinction between the value created by concrete laboring activity on the one hand, and the exchange-value of laborpower and the other. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, ed by F. Engels, trans. by Samuel Moore

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12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

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22 23 24

Praxis International and E. Aveling (New York, 1967); Karl Marx, Groundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Maryland, 1973), p. 307; pp. 400 ff. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, ch. XXIV, "Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital"; Grundrisse, pp. 304-318. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1., p. 176. Ibid., p. 72. The difficulties of the Marxian theory of ideology according to which both forms of everyday consciousness and reflective knowledge structures (science, philosophy) are explained in light of the same logic of essence and appearance have been analyzed by ~thusser, Reading Capital, pp. 43-46; 54-63. For the correspondence with A. Ruge, cf. Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin, 1980), Vo!. 1., p. 344; K. Man, "On the Jewish Question," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. by R. C. Tucker, 2nd edition (New York, 1978), pp. 26-53; Karl Marx, Critique of Begel's Philosophy of Right, trans. by A. Jolin and J. O'Malley (Cambridge, 1970). Cf. M. Godelier, "Fetishism, Religion and Marx's General Theories Concerning Ideology," Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology (New York, 1977). K. Marx, Gntndrisse, p. 487. Ibid., p. 488. Emphasis in the text. Ibid. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, p. 98. I am much indebted to Georg Lohmann's insightful analysis, "Gesellschaftskritik und normativr Massstab," in A. Honneth and U. Jaeggi, eds., Arbeit, Handlung und N ormativitat (Frankfurt, 1980), pp. 270 ff. J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. by T. McCarthy (Boston, 1973), pp. 8 ff. Claus Offe, '''Unregierbarkeit'. Zur Renaissance konservativer Krisentheorien," in J. Habermas, ed., Stichworte zur 'Geistigen Situation der Zeit', 1 (Frankfurt, 1979), p. 313. English translation by Andrew Buchwalter :Cambridge, Mass., 1984). Cf. W. Schiifer's excellent reconstruction and demystification of Marx's relationship to the early worker's movement in "Collective Thinking from Below: Early Working Class Thought Reconsidered," Dialectical Anthropology 6 (1982), pp. 193-214. K. Marx and F. Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie, Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin, 1961), pp. 75 ff. These passages in the Gennan Ideology also show that Marx is critical of the subsumption of individuals under the category of "class," but has blind faith in the power of the double negation. J. Cohen, "The Subversion of Emancipation," Social Research: Marx Today, Andrew Arato, ed. (Winter 1978), No. 45, pp. 789-844. Cf. Immanual Kant, Anthropologie in Pragmatischer Hinsicht, Werke in Zehn Baenden, Vol. 10 (Darmstadt, 1971), pp. 399--400, for the dual concept of humanity analyzed here. Jean Cohen, Class and Civil Society: The Limits ofMarxian Critical Theory (Amherst, 1982), p.78.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOCIAL SCIENCE HISERRORS* Branko Horvat Every genuine science makes discoveries about the world in which we live. These discoveries may be universal, and then they become a permanent part of our scientific repertory (example: Corpernicus's discovery that the earth rotates around the sun.) They may be partial, and then further development of science incorporates them into more general systems within which they represent special cases (example: Newtonian physics in relation to Einstein's physics). However, later research may also show that some presumable truths were simply errors. The possibility of a definite refutation is a fundamental characteristic of science. This possibility does not exist in religion, politics or arts - wherever we deal with values. Therefore the identification of errors represents the identification of science and its development. In this context I propose to analyze Marx's contribution to social science. Due to limitations of space, the analysis will be no more than a review of the more important components of Marx's opus. I do not intend to engage in the popular citatological interpretations since this is irrelevant for my purpose. I shall apply the usual scientific method of proving and disproving.

Scientific contributors Marx has been glorified and contested more than any other scholar. And yet, if we try to find a concise analysis of his scientific contribution and errors, we shall discover that such a study has not been written so far. In this respect, in his monumental History ofEconomic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter admitted characteristically that Marx's "work is not analytic in the usual sense, and the author of this book, congenitally incapable of doing justice to it, ought to keep his unholy hands off it."} The probable reason is to be found in the fact that Marxism is not the usual parcialized discipline, such as Darwinism in biology; it is not simply economics, but is also many other things, almost a universal social science. Therefore a correct evaluation requires that this complex universality be taken into account. We may note, in passing, that this also explains why Marxism is almost an ideal doctrine for both divinization and vulgarization. The author of such a doctrine must have been an unusually erudite person. First of all, Marx was a classically educated member of the bourgeois intelligentsia of his time with good knowledge of literature and of classic and * Paper presented at Colloque Marx de l'EHESS, Paris, December 1983.

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contemporary culture. the university Marx was trained as a lawyer and philosopher. His chosen field of research was economics. As an economist he read practically everything written by that time, and no contemporary economist could compare with him in erudition. He followed closely the developments of the natural sciences; after all, they helped to expand the forces of production which were to shape the production (Le., social) relations eventually. His life orientation - to change the world - required extensive historical studies: economic, social, and political. It also required sociological research. He was earning a living - when he was not helped by Engels - as a journalist. The journalistic involvement was closely connected with his political activities in the German revolution, various socialist associations, and in the First International. After all is said, it would nevertheless be erroneous to evaluate Marx as a belated Renaissance personality. It was not simply great scholarship and the creative participation in the culture of his time that was involved. The entirety of Marx's scholarly and political activity was subject to one single goal: superseding the capitalist order. It follows that in order to be a Marxist in terms of understanding and continuing the Teacher's work, one needs to master a similar assortment of scientific disciplines and practical activities. In spite of universality, in Marx's eduation there were two serious lacunae in relation to the goal he set. One was psychology, the other mathematics. Marx could not use any serious literature in psychology since the discipline hardly existed, and even less could he use empirical psychological research since nothing was available. Thus, although his insights were remarkable,2 particularly in social psychology (the potentials of which were exploited only around the middle of this century by Erich Fromm), Marx essentially remained the product of the rationalism of his epoch. This rationalism blocks his psychological insights when it comes to applications to the society under analysis. The effects of socialization, the irrationalities of mass movements, nationalism - all escape his analysis. For this reason there is no adequate analysis in his voluminous opus of motivations of economic and other agents. For him the working class was not a group of concrete persons, but a historically determined category constructed along typically rationalist lines of his time: if the historically determined interests are such and such, the agents cannot fail but behave so and so, i.e., their behaviour is fully predetermined. It was not realized that interests must be mediated by psychology (for instance, by socialization) before the stage of behaviour is attained. In Marx, psychology is substituted by logic. For this reason, using his analytical apparatus, he would be unable to explain the behaviour of the German working class under Fascism, the apartheid of the South African workers, and the conservatism of the American working class. The Hegelian crutches "Klasse an sich" and "Klasse fur sich" are of little use, and the concept of worker aristocracy, invented in troubled circumstances, is hardly applicable. The second lacuna is the lack of mathematical education. Again the personal excuse that by that time only one mathematical economist, Cournot, had appeared - and he, characteristically, was the only important economist not noticed by Marx - does not change the consequences. Several ingenious

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analytical innovations were left blocked in numerical examples and outright errors. It is of some interest to notice that the same lack of knowledge of psychology and mathematics was displayed by all Marxists until the generation of Fromm, Lange, and Kalecki in the 1930s, and is displayed by "Marxists" even today. Let us have a look first at Marx as an economist. It is generally considered that the main contribution of Marx to economics was the labour theory of value. However, this view must be seriously qualified. In this area Marx inherited his analytical apparatus almost entirely from Smith and Ricardo, and so he may be considered the last classical economist. The denotation of labour as a source of value can be traced back to Cantilon (first half of the eighteenth century), for whom this was agricultural labour, and was then continued through the literature until the classical economists, for whom this was any (productive) labour. The socialist implications of the postulate were derived by Ricardian socialists: if value is determined by labour, and profit is a part of value, then profit is a product of unpaid labour. The Ricardian socialists had the following to say: William Thompson used the term "surplus value";3 John Gray described profit, interest, and rent as taxes by which the labour of non-owners was taxed by owners;4 Thomas Hodgskin distinguished capital as embodied labour from capital as social relation in his working Labour Defended (1825), which was called by Marx "vorzugliche Schrift"; and John Bray calculated the rate of surplus value at 200%, though he did not use the same word. 5 One may add that already around the mid eighteenth century, Quesnay distinguished use value and exchange value with great precision, 6 the latter implying market exchange. Thus at the time of Marx's birth, or shortly afterwards, all the necessary ingredients for a radical theory were available. Out of these ingredients Marx cooked his theory of value. He first eliminated the unnecessary assumption of non-equivalent exchange by distinguishing labour power as a commodity from labour as creator of value: labour power is sold at its value which, however, is less than the value created by labour. The difference - surplus value - is appropriated by the owner, and the ratio between this difference and wages - the rate of surplus value - is a measure of exploitation. Further, Marx uses the dual character of a commodity - use value and exchange value - to derive the dual character of labour - concrete and abstract labour. The value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour time, and the market values (prices) oscillate around values determined in this way. This theory is sufficiently original to be considered an important scientific accomplishment. But by itself it is certainly not an epoch-making discovery. Here, however, Marx enters the scene as a philosopher and sociologist. A commodity begins to be treated as a fetish, labour and its product as alienated from the worker, the appropriation of surplu~ value becomes the foundation of class domination, and economic structure generates a definite system of social relations which, after Louis Blanc, begins to be called capitalism. The derivation of the characteristics of a social formation from the properties of commodities represents a very fertile scientific hypothesis and is, essentially,

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an epoch-making discovery. In all this human labour appears as a fundamental analytical category which makes possible the synthesis of various disciplines such as economics, sociology, and philosophy. The new horizons opened have little connection with the specialist views of Ricardian economics, the point which, for example, even Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson was unable to comprehend. 7 Among the analytical innovations, the most important is certainly the one contained in the second volume of Das Kapital. I have in mind the fundamental idea about the circular flow of commodities and money in the economic process described schematically. Marx is here not completely original, either. His precursor was Quesnay with his Tableau Economique, and he, in turn, was preceded by Cantilon (around 1730), who considered the circles of distribution of social product among farmers, landowners, and artisans. However, Marx replaced the historically specific distinction between productive (agriculturalists) and sterile classes by the modern analytical distinction between capital and consumer goods. In this way he creates a two-sector model which - after an interval of eight decades - was developed only during the Second World War and is today the most versatile analytical tool in the modelling of economic processes. Man: needed his model to show the high probability of structural disequilibria in an unplanned market economy resulting in periodic crises. this way he refuted, six and a half decades before Keynes, the famous Say's Law according to which each sale creates its own demand. To be quite precise, however, I must point out that the explicit critique of Say's Law was carried out by Marx differently: he stressed that commodities are not simply exchanged but are bought and sold for money, and money is not just a means of exchange (as was thought by Say) but has other functions as well. In other words, purchasing power and demand are different things: money earned need not be spent, and demand and supply need not be in equilibrium. Say's Law is thus erroneous since supply and demand need not match either structurally or in volume. The reproduction schemes also anticipate modern input-output analysis and the modelling of economic growth. Finally, the distinction between a stationary and a growing economy - simple and enlarged reproduction Marx's terms - is a fundamental analytical distinction. Thus Marx may be considered a precursor of modern growth theory. Yet due to an insufficient mathematical education, Marx was unable to exploit the potentials of his analytical innovation. The schemes were elaborated in terms of a tedious series of numerical examples that absorb dozens of pages of the second volume, which later made Engels work for months to correct arithmetical errors and which make possible neither an exhaustive analysis nor generalizations. The schemes have led many Marxists of lesser calibre of whom the most distinguished was Rosa Luxemburg. Her basic result in the book Die Akkumulation des Kapitals - the impossibility of capitalist reproduction without the conquest of new (colonial) markets - was fatally wrong since she used an arbitrary numerical example to derive an unwarranted generalization. Similarly, two decades later Henryk Grossmann

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(Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgesetz des kapitalistischen Systems, 1929) constructed an example in which constant capital expanded faster than surplus value and then derived the world-shaking conclusion that, after a while, the surplus value would be exhausted causing, thus, the breakdown of the capitalist system. Using modern analytical techniques, we obtain exhaustive information from the schemes in a few pages of mathematical-economic analysis without any danger of the wild conclusions noted above. 8 Marx's work also made possible other analytical innovations which he left unexploited. Let me mention only two of them. As a growth theorist, Marx was much more aware of the economic importance of technological progress than his contemporaries, but was unable to formalize his intuition. He treats technological progress in terms of the technical composition of capital (today usually called "capital intensity," which is one of the four components of abstract technology9) and the organic composition of capital. By using the concepts of organic composition of capital and the rate of surplus value, one can classify technological progress so as to make possible the derivation of the labour theory of prices. Besides, this classification is easily transformed into the classification by Roy Harrod, elaborated just before the last world war. 10 In order to put the problem into proper perspective, it is necessary to add that a satisfactory analysis of technological progress has been developed only in the last thirty years. The second unutilized innovation concerns a strange phenomenon which I denoted as depreciation multiplier. 11 Having studied economic growth, Marx noticed that depreciation and replacement were not equal. The difference represented accumulation generated without any real cost incurred. Marx wrote to Engels asking him, as a practicing factory manager, what managers did in practice with that surplus. Engels did not understand the problem and answered by quoting the accounting practice. After this exchange of letters, Marx stopped working on the problem. The problem requires mathematical treatment and was solved in a satisfactory way only in the 19508. The last of the more important economic contributions consists in the idea of the periodicity of business cycles. In this regard Marx anticipated the work of Clement Juglar. Marx attempted statistical and mathematical descriptions of business cycles but, due to insufficient knowledge in both fields, had to give up very disappointed. Though Marx postulated that humanity set only those tasks which it could solve, he himself kept on setting the tasks he was unable to solve (and neither was anybody else of his generation). The mechanism of business cycles looked to Marx roughly as follows. In the upswing labour is increasingly employed; later labour resources are even exhausted. As a consequence, wages rise and profits fall. After a point lower profitability leads to stagnation and business trends are reversed. Investments contract, output falls, workers are fired, wages fall, aggregate demand contracts even further, prices fall, individual firms go bankrupt. In order to survive in the market, capitalists compete by introducing innovations. Labour saving innovations increase unemployment and reduce wages. In the meantime, old equipment is scrapped and replaced by that technologically more efficient, investment demand rises, profitability increases, thus a new upswing begins.

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In stressing innovation waves as machines of cyclical upswings, Marx anticipates Schumpeter. Marx made his second epoch-making discovery as a sociologist who studied history. The genesis of the discovery may, perhaps, be reconstructed in the following way. Marx learned from Hegel to look at the world not as a place of pre-established harmony, as something full of conflicts. Hegelian philosophy of history, which considered historical development as the selfdevelopment of absolute mind, must have left deep impressions on him intellectually, but its speculative character did not satisfy him. In this way he was challenged to work out something better. In historical literature, Marx stumbled upon French historians who had explained history as a sequence of class struggles.. That was well in accord with the Hegelian vision of the struggle of contradictions and with his own journalist experience in Rheinland. Next, from the French eighteenth century materialists Marx learned that humanity was a product of environment. Further historical studies persuaded him that there was a parallelism between the development of forces of production and the social structure. At a certain level of forces of production very definite social classes and social relations are established. Since forces of production are objectively given, people must evidently adapt their social organization. Consequently, it was not consciousness that determined a social being, but the other way round: social being determined social consciousness. In this way, the (so far) most fertile sociological hypothesis was formulated. It became known as historical materialism or as the economic interpretation of history. In the hands of his pupil, Hegel's philosophy of history was transformed into the sociology of socio-economic development. The development of forces of production and the development of social relations possess certain autonomies with a proviso that the latter, due to the existentially conditioned conservatism of the ruling class, has a tendency of lagging behind. When the discrepancy becomes so great as to form a barrier to the further development of forces of production, the dialectics of class struggle generate revolution, which brings social relations in accord with the forces of production. The application of this theory to what Marx considered his life goal is evident. By its own development, capitalism prepares its disappearance from the world scene. The faster the development, the closer is the Last Judgment. It only remains to determine which social class will be the carrier of social transformation. Of all existing classes, only the exploited classes may have an interest in the elimination of exploitation, and only a class of non-owners may have an interest in abolishing ownership which serves as the basis for exploitation. The only class which fits these specifications of a historical subject of social transformation is the working class. It follows that this class must be politically organized in order to conquer state power and speed up socialist transformation. While Marx and Engels were still alive, the first social-democratic worker parties were established.. Almost all of them were Marxist and many of them - directly or indirectly - are Marxist even today . If this may be taken as a criterion of evaluation, no other political theorist, either earlier or later,

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exerted such an influence over the formation of political movements as did Marx. That tells something about the scientific foundations of his theory. The scientific contributions described so far became a common heritage of economists and sociologists regardless of their ideological or political beliefs. Genuine science is always a universal science, though it occasionally takes some time before scientific truths are accepted. Marx said little about socialist society and economy, and even that little was not original. The idea of withering away of the state was generally accepted in the socialist circles of his time. The postulate that in communism management of men would be replaced by management of things was taken from Saint-Simon and was not further elaborated. The assertion that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a necessary precondition for the period of transition was taken from Blanqui (though in Marx's hands it was essentially modified: the terms did not imply a political dictatorship but the replacement of the old ruling class by the proletariat). The distinguishing between the two phases of communist society by the two formulas of distribution belongs to Marx, but the formulas do not. "Distribution according to work" was taken over from Saint-Simonists, 12 ,and "distribution according to needs" from Louis Blanc. 13 The entire socialist tradition up to Marx - from Morus and Campanella in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries until utopians in the nineteenth century - was centralistic. Only one anarchist - the little known Godwinappeared before Marx was formed as a man and scientist. Marx considered associationist experiments by Owen and Fourier utopian (which they were), but it did not occur to him that the entire economy might be organized in a similar way. Self-managing workshops financed by the government, such as attempted by Louis Blanc and Lassalle, looked to Marx not only to be unrealistic, but also reactionary. It was not possible to build socialism by the charity of the bourgeois state. He did not believe much in cooperatives. Thus before a revolution Marx did not expect any appreciable socialist development, and so far as the new socio-economic order after the revolution was concerned, he imagined that it would be centralized because it catered to common social interests which cannot be parcelized. This centralistic position was revised under the influence of the Paris Commune. It seems that Marx then became a persuaded associationist, and Engels emphatically asserted: Look at the Commune; that was the dictatorship of proletariat! However, neither the one nor the other went beyond general statements and beyond praising individual practical solutions of the Communards. In order to make the historical image complete, it is necessary to add that in the Communes political decisions were made by Banquists and the economic ones by Proudhonists, while members of the International were a minority and without direct influence. It follows that Marx was able to assimilate the ideas of socialist groups with which he otherwise disagreed if the ideas proved their value in practice. This is also one of the characteristics which "Marxists" do not possess.

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Errors It is possible to distinguish three types of errors: analytical, methodological, and errors in predictions. The most important analytical error is an attempt to prove theoretically the increase in the organic composition of capital. This is not a question of theory, but of empirical facts. Marx observed that in the course of economic growth the technical composition of capital (capital per worker) was increasing and then concluded that the organic composition (capital per unit of variable capital) will also increase - disregarding the need for continuous revaluation of both components of capital due to technological progress. The presently available statistical series show that, at the time of Marx, organic composition was indeed increasing and that lasted until the beginning of the present century, while after the First World War the trend was reversed. 14 The increase in the organic composition served Marx's derivation of the law of the (tendential) fall of the rate of profit. Since the basic assumption is wrong, there can be no such law. However, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall exists, albeit for other reasons. Assuming that there is no technological progress (or that it is insufficient), capital formation leads to the decreasing marginal efficiency of investment which, ceteris paribus, forces the rate of profit to fall. In a certain sense, Marx's error had unexpected and dramatic consequences. Young Lenin, unaware of the error in reasoning, applied the "law" to the reproduction schemes and obtained a logical, though inaccurate, result that Department I (means of production) must expand faster than Department 11 (objects of consumption) in order to make continuous reproduction possible. That was later to become dogma in the Soviet Union, and this official "scientific" view has persisted until today. The next error is to be found in Marx's procedure for calculating prices. As capitalism was developing, the importance of fixed capital increased and so differences in the organic composition of individual capitals increased as well. The simple Smith-Ricardian labour theory of value evidently could no longer explain the formation of prices, even as a first approximation. There was a need to modify the theory. Marx defined the problem as the transformation of values into prices. The transformation problem - which is still being discussed - was solved by Marx erroneously. He starts from the assumed initial situation in which the rates of surplus value are equal in various industries. Due to differences in organic composition, this brings about different profit rates. The competition will equalize the profit rates and so establish new prices. In order to arrive at new prices, Marx calculates the average rate of profit by relating the aggregate surplus value to aggregate capital and then applies the obtained rate to each individual capital. The error consists in not realizing that the replacement of "value" prices by "prices of production" implies a revaluation of fixed capital. Since this revaluation is not made, the new price of fixed capital is not known, and there is nothing to which the profit rate can be applied. The transformation problem may be solved in at least two ways. Regardless

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of the differences in the organic composition, Marx's method may be considered as a first approximation, i.e., first iteration. Since it is possible to show that the sequence of iterations converges by repeating the same calculations a number of times, we can arrive at the correct solution. The other possible solution was produced by Bortkiewicz half a century after the problem was posed. Bortkiewicz applied a system of simultaneous linear equations. This system can be defined in various ways (later economists use other assumptions), and there is no unique solution. At this juncture we encounter a purely theoretical problem. It is obviously possible to solve the transformation problem. But why do we have to pose the problem in the first place? In other words, what is the use of labour value if the prices of individual commodities do not depend on it and can be derived directly? Marx, obviously, needed labour value because of the role the category "labour" played in his social theory. However, for that purpose it is not necessary to consider individual capitalists and individual capitals. It suffices to look at aggregate capital and aggregate labour, consequently to juxtapose capitalist class and working class. In that case the aggregate surplus value is equal to aggregate profit at existing prices; there is no need for revaluation, and the rate of surplus value (i.e,., of exploitation) and the rate of profit may be calculated directly (assuming that the organic composition of total capital does not change in time). Clearly, individual rates of surplus value will be different in different industries, but this conflicts with nothing. Although it is possible to save Marx's approach from contradictions, it is still desirable to assign to our theory a more ambitious task: the integration of the theory of value and the theory of prices into a single labour theory of prices. A century after Marx's death this task is still unfulfilled, which does not throw a particularly favourable light on the theoretical abilities of Marxists. But the solution of the problem now seems in sight. The gravest methodological error is to be found in the sociological segment of Marx's opus. It is the unproved, not even considered, implied assumption regarding a linear socio-economic development and a closely connected assumption of rigid historical determinism. In his historical studies Marx himself realized that contemporaneously with ancient society in Europe, a very different society existed in Asia (Egypt ought to be included as well). Marx denoted it as the "Asiatic mode of production" or "Oriental despotism." We could also call it "primitive etatism." This socio-economic formation re-appeared a millennium later in Latin America in the enormous empire of Ineas (which some historians and anthropologists, joined recently by some guerilleros, characteristically call the "socialist empire of Incas"). Accordingly, the European succession of socio-economic formations represents a special case without universal validity. And if in the past there was no linear succession, why should it be obligatory for the future? In other words, there is no valid reason to assume that after capitalism socialism follows necessarily, that it will be ordained by blind historical determinism. Other possibilities are open as well, and one of them has even been put into operation in modern etatism in the East. To call Stalinist dictatorship the revolutionary dictatorship of proletariat, and a society with GULAG a socialist society, is,

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obviously, to make a mockery of Marx and Marxism. The assumption of historical linearity and of rigid determinism has had fatal consequences. it is really true that by historical necessity socialism succeeds capitalism, all that is needed is to destroy capitalism; those who survive will know what they have to do: "they will be no less intelligent than we" remarked Engels. so Marxists have been oriented towards destruction, caring little what they will be doing after a revolution. Since no serious programme of socialist reconstruction had been prepared, or even considered, in the course of and after the revolution, there has been a proliferation of tragic stupidities such as "war communism," "Soviet power plus electrification," "administrative socialism," moralistic phantasies, forced collectivization, the "great Cultural Revolution," phantasmagories of Pol Pot, and the like. The latest event, the dictatorship, not of the proletariat but of the military, Poland, with the formal declaration of war against their own people, provides an example of how an accumulation of a quantity of stupidity generates a new quality: a new class society. From the point of view of the methodology applied, all this is socialism ("real" socialism) since after capitalism nothing else can exist but socialism. When people from all social strata began to leave such socialisms and ran away over borders into capitalist countries, it was not concluded that something was wrong with the "historically determined" socialism. Instead, the conclusion was derived that something was wrong with the people. The Berlin wall was erected, a military dictatorship set up, and barbed wire placed all along socialist borders. The next methodological deficiency is caused by the lack of a socialpsychological analysis of the motivation and behaviour of economic and political agents, individuals, groups, and classes. Socialist society is envisaged as an economically and politically centralized society in which commodities, money, and the market have been abolished and replaced by state property and all-embracing administrative planning. When Lenin and his colleagues started constructing such a social organization in the Soviet Union, they only continued the best tradition of the two Internationals. At the same time, this centralized and hierarchical society was supposed to be a society of free and equal individuals with a state that was withering away, and, after the Commune, a society of self-managing (economic) and self-governing (political) groups. This (behavioural, not logical) contradiction was fully included in Lenin's book, State and Revolution, without the author (assuming he was honest) being aware of it. When, after a victorious revolution, such voluntaristic notions could not be effected - since praxis, different from "revolutionary" theory, does not tolerate contradictions - precisely those elements most socialist (self-management, self-government, liberty, equity) were sacrificed and the state-preserving ideas (hierarchy, administrative planning, and strengthening of the state) were maintained. The absence of motivational analysis conditioned, at least partly, erroneous predictions. If the working class is the product of capitalist development, and, at the same time, it is also the historical agent of revolutionary transformation, then socialist revolutions must break out in the most advanced capitalist countries. The question whether the working class wants or does not want to

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carry out the revolution is not posed. By the order of history it must do it. However, in actual history revolutions occurred in less developed countries (China for example) which did not even have a working class, and so the revolutions were led by intellectuals and carried out by peasants. This is not the place for an extensive discussion of the great theme of socialist revolutions. 15 It suffices to note that violent revolutions broke out in less developed countries with insignificant working classes, while in advanced countries, with mature and numerous working classes, such revolutions are neither likely nor necessary. 16 But in one respect Marx's historical materialism provided a correct indication: with or without revolution, socialism is more likely in a developed than in an undeveloped country. The most developed country, or at least one of the most developed countries, today is Sweden. This country is about to socialize capital (wage earners' funds) and to establish self-management as a universal system of economic organization. Political democracy and social services have a long, established tradition. The answer to the question whether Sweden or, say, the Soviet Union, is closer to socialism ~s pretty obvious. The second reason for the erroneous prognosis regarding the revolution is to be found in the mistake made in the extrapolation of changes in the class structure. Marx expected that capitalist development would destroy the petty bourgeoisie and polarize society into capitalists and workers, the latter becoming a large majority of the population. What has actually happened has been the rapid growth of a middle stratum; the share of manual workers in the active population has never gone much beyond fifty percent. And since about 1950, this share is diminishing followed by a decline in the absolute number of workers. Apart from polarization, Marx expected an impoverishment of the working class - if not absolutely, then at least relatively. That should have been a consequence of the general law of capitalist accumulation. I7 This somewhat Malthusian law, which should have kept wages close to subsistence level by means of the reserve labour army, ceased to function soon after the Industrial Revolution. Since then living standard of manual workers has increased several times, and their political and social power, helped by Marx himself and institutionalized in trade unions and worker parties, increased beyond recognition when compared with the middle of the last century when unions were forbidden all European countries and working class political parties not exist. a somewhat simplified manner one could describe the simply changes by saying that workers have humanized the system and the system has socialized and co-opted the workers. In such a situation violent revolutions are not likely, but radical reforms oriented towards socialism are likely and do, in fact, happen.

The Definition of Marxism One does not become a Marxist by repeating Marx's errors - at least this does not seem to be sensible behaviour. On the other hand, serious scholars would generally accept Marx's scientific contributions. Thus by accepting this

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part of Marx's teaching one does not define one's position; differentia specifica is lacking. What is, then, the meaning of Marxism - if there is any? Although modern physics is based on the ideas of Planck and Einstein, physicists do not call themselves Planckists and Einsteinians. If an additional explanation is to be given, one would mention quantum physics and relativity theory. On the other hand, why - apart from, say, historical materialismdo we need a special denotation of Marxism as a school of thought? One possible answer is to draw attention to analogy with the situation in biology. In the last century biologists were divided between Darwinists and Lamarckists. After it had become generally accepted that Lamarckian views cannot be scientifically defended, all that remained was Darwinism. That rendered the term unnecessary since it lost its discriminating property: all, or nearly all, biologists were Darwinists. In the social sciences possibilities of rigorous argumentation are more limited, and various schools of thought may co-exist for a long time. The question is therefore posed: What is specific for Marxism as an orientation in the social sciences? It seems that for definitional purposes Marx's scientific discoveries are not decisive, though, for instance, historical materialism could define Marxism as a separate theory. What appears decisive is the methodology for researching social phenomena. Marx's methodological innovations may be described as follows: - Integration of logical and historical approaches whereby it is possible to compensate for the impossibility of macrosocial experimentation analogous to experiments in, the natural sciences. - Insistence on the complexity of social phenomena which cannot satisfactorily be researched by means of partial disciplines such as economics, sociology, psychology, etc. An interdisciplinary approach is not sufficient either. Again, we need integration, a view of the totality. - Treating development processes as a sequence of dynamic disequilibria (in economics) or as a sequence of conflict resolutions (in society generally). - Finally, there are postulates of historical materialism which can be reduced to the hypothesis that social being determines social consciousness. The foregoing methodological postulates ought to be supplemented by an explicit value orientation for the humanization of the world within the possibilities given by contemporary civilization. This possible, and therefore imperative, humanism represents what is called socialism. The value orientation generates an additional methodological postulate: - Critique of everything existing. Not, clearly, in the sense of nihilistic negation, but in the sense of critical re-examination of unrealized possibilities. If the world is to be changed, everything which deviates from, lags behind or does not come to the possibilities of the epoch should be subject to a critique. Coming to terms with the real, the phenomenal, means conservatism. Marxist revolutionary activism implies an all-embracing critique, critique as a method, critique "which is not afraid of its own results neither of the conflict with the powers that be." In this way Marxism is defined by means of five methodological postulates and one value orientation. However, in order to be a Marxist, it is not

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sufficient to these six tenets; they must be applied. Therefore, Marxism is not Marx a years ago, which can be read and documented by quotations ought to be called Marxology. Marx did not build a system (as his teacher Hegel). According to his own words, he "rejected systems and their place posed the critical examination of conditions, and general results of real social movement. And it is impossible to such an investigation after anybody."18

NOTES 1

J.

Schumpeter,

Economic Analysis (New York, 1955), p. 385.

2 Cf. F. Bahtijarevic-Siber, "Psihologijski aspekti Marxovog djela," Revija zapaihologiju, 1-2,1982,103-119. 3 Professor Baletic dre\v n1Y attention to P. Ravenstone who already in 1821, three years before used the concept of surplus value. 4 "We have endeavoured to sho\v that the real income of the country, which consists in the of \\'ealth created by the labour of the people, is taken from its producers by the rent of by the rent of houses, by the interest of money, and by the profit obtained persons \vho buy their labour from them at one price, and sell it at that these immense taxes of rent, interest and profits on labour must ever continue \vhile the system of individual competition stands; ..." J. Gray, Lecture on flu:ntan 1825. 5 "All profit must come from labour ... the gain of an idle class must necessarily be the loss of an industrious class. n "Capitalists and proprietors do no more than give the working man, for his labour of one 'Neck, a part of the wealth which they obtained from him the week before." 'fhc systen1 of unequal exchanges "robs every working man of two-thirds of his just to keep up the supremacy and the wealth of those who are not working Labou.r's and Labour's Remedy" (Leeds, 1839). men." 6 "On doir dans un Etat les biens qui ont une valeur usuelle et qui n'ont pas de valeur d'avec les richesses qui ont une valeur usuelle et une valeur venale; ... " 'Tableau l~'conor'flique (London, 1972), p. 9. Marx found the first indication of the difference bct\veen the use value (the "proper" use of a thing) and the exchange value ("the improper or secondary" use of a thing) in Aristotle's J:>olitics. 7 Sau1uelson describes lviarx as a "Ininor Ricardian." l~'cononzic Models (Zagreb, 1962), ch. 6. 8 Cf. B. 9 Cf. B. Iforvat., J:'corunnic A.na(ysis (Beograd, 1971), ch. 3.1. 10 Ibid .., ch. 13.3. 11 'The history of this discovery is described in my book Towards a Theory ofPlanned Economy (New York, Appendix 1I. 12 "Si ... l'hun1anite s\lchemine vers un etat Oll tous Ies individus seront classes en raison de leur capacirc et retribllCS sllivant leurs oeuvres, il est evident que la propriete, telle qu'elle existe, doit etre aboli ... " [)octrirze de Saint-Simon, Exposition 11th March 1829. ". . . nOllS vou!ons un ordre social completement base sur le principe: A chacun seIon sa capacitt\ a capacitc seIon ses oeuvres... " The programme of Saint-Simonists as fornlulated in CJ!obe, 9th February 1831. The same formula was later used by Proudhon who thought that L..ouis Blanc's formula was not realistic. 13 "A chacun scion ses besoins, de chacun selon se facultes." L'organisation du travail, 1840. 14 Cf. l~c()n()mic ilna(vsis,ibid., pp. 221-35. 15 Cf. my book 7'he I>olilicall~collomy a/Socialism, (New York, 1982), ch. 14-1.

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16 After all, Marx himself, in a speech in 1872, allowed for the possibility that America, England, and the Netherlands could carry out socialist transformation peacefully. 17 On the one hand, this law should have reduced the rate of profit through an increase in the organic composition of capital resulting in surplus capital (which exerted pressure towards conquering colonial markets); on the other, it generated surplus labour (and the resulting impoverishment of the working class should have created revolutionary potential). 18 K. Marx, Gospodin Vogt (Zagreb, 1955), pp. 73-74.

INTELLECTUALS I O~lcnllm

Israel

It was George Orwell's merit to make 1984 into a symbol of the futurecharacterized by the suppression of human rights, the cherished values of individualism and liberalism, and a future signifying the end of democracy. Now we are there. The future has overtaken us. Why not push the future further into the future by inventing a new date. I suggest using 2020, being a well-formed, symmetrical numeral, giving us a few years both to figure out what the world would look like at that date and how we may prevent it from becoming so. Using the pronouns "we" and "us" raises the question to whom I refer. The answer, using a not especially well-defined term, is "we the intellectuals." This immediately establishes a link to one of Orwell's most prominent preoccupations. In the Animal Farm, the leaders of the newly established revolutionary regime, having proclaimed equality, take care of the milk and apples for their own privileged consumption. One of the leading pigs is sent to explain this move to the grumbling populace. "Comrades," he cried. "You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of pigs. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink milk and eat those apples." The leaders of the revolution for the abolishment of oppression turn into oppressors themselves. The rise of the commissar and his unlimited domination, as well as the abuse of science and moral values to defend and legitimize his supremacy, is one of Orwell's themes, voiced at a time when intellectuals on the left still defended a totalitarian system in spite of their avowed opposite values. Another theme is the development of modern information technology and its use as means for control and domination. The development of technology and its role for economic growth and capital accumulation was supported by an ideology asserting that most of our human, moral, and political problems can be solved by transforming them into technical problems, which then can be conceptualized within the framework of instrumental rationality. The outcome of this development, which we can observe now and which Orwell predicted, is a tendency which can be summarized as the notion that Human life in its immense variety can be reduced to information - usually digital 313

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information - amenable to electronic processing. The reduction of human activity into information not only devalues emotions, artistic expression, and the richness of nuances in our language - in general the expressive aspects of human life. It also facilitates extended control of human activity into the most remote corners of intimacy and privacy, a threat which in turn strengthens the tendency for acceptance of the above mentioned reduction, the acceptance of the notion that information and information processing represent progress and that those who oppose it are reactionaries. This briefly sketched development is related to a change in the notion of instrumental rationality, characterized by Max Weber as one of the predominant ingredients of the spirit of capitalism. In totalitarian societies rational actions are those actions which produce or enhance material means which are accessible to the ruling class and are disposed by it. The very control of material means becomes the goal of economic activity, irrespective of the fact that it may lead to an enormous waste of scarce resources and irrespective of social costs and human suffering. Since control over material means ensures control over human beings, all those actions which further the autonomy or independence of individuals and groups outside the ruling class, and actions which may lead to the development of material resources not controlled by the commissars, have to be prevented, and their originators will be persecuted as "enemies of the people," as "enemies of the proletariat," as "enemies of basic christians values," as "marxist conspirators," or as the "enemies of white supremacy and therefore of civilization." A third important theme in Orwell's writings is, as we have hinted at before, the criticism voiced against the role of intellectuals in general and various groups of specific intellectuals. A deep influence on Orwell's position was, as we try to show, his experience in the Spanish civil war in which he was gravely wounded. Orwell went to Spain in December 1936. After a short and insufficient period of training and equipped with obsolete weapons, he was sent to the front as a member of the militia of that political party with which he sympathized. The party's name was P.O.V.M. (Partita Obrero de Unificaci6n Marxista). According to his own words in Homage to Catalonia, he "had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites." P.O.V.M. was branded by the communists faithful to Moscow as a "Trotskyite" organization, "a gang of disguised Fascists, in the pay of Franco and Hitler," or as "Franco's Fifth Column." P .0.U .M. was, in spite of its limited membership, one of the three or four predominant political organizations in Catalonia at the outbreak of the civil war. The others were the AnarchoSyndicalists (probably the strongest one), the socialists, and the pro-Moscow communists. The alignment of forces at that time was, on the one side, the anarcho-syndicalists, the P.O.U.M., and some socialist groups, standing for workers' control under the parole of the ,var and the revolution being unseparable, and, on the other side, right-wing socialists, liberals, and communists standing - in Orwell's own words -- "for a centralized government and a militarized army" (Homage to Catalonia).

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Orwell's integrity is illustrated by his account of the fight between the two sides. He admits that the communists followed a line indicating "a definite practical policy, an obviously better policy from the point of the common sense which only looks a few months ahead." The policy of P.O.V.M. in comparison seemed utopian, in spite of, or due to, its intention to realize the ideal for which the members of the Commune in Paris had once fought, and for which they were persecuted and killed: popular power, egalitarian practice, and the revolutionary transformation of society. "The thing for which the communists were working," says Orwell, "was not to postpone the Spanish revolution till a more suitable time, but to make sure that it never happened" (Homage to Catalonia). There was a manifest reason for that: for example, a more or less misunderstood Marxist ideological reason that a bourgeois revolution had to precede a working class revolution. Secondly, an argument which carried much more strength was the fact that the communists knew that they could not control a revolution, and therefore it had to be prevented. Thirdly, a revolutionary development went strictly against the foreign political interests of the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was the major provider of weapons, and they used their position to strengthen their influence, for example by deliberately withholding the delivery of weapons to those groups whose policies they disapproved, even when they were involved in decisive battles with Franco and his German and Italian allies. Orwell describes his stay in the front line from December 1936 to April 1937 in the following way: Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by that I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life - snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of boss, etc. - had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England ... However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynism, where the word 'comrade' stood for comradship and not as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. (Homage to Catalonia)

Orwell emphasizes how deep an influence this period had upon his consequent life and writings. With sarcasm and contempt he denounces "sleek little professors," who follow Stalin's edict that socialism had nothing to do with egalitarian strivings, who argued for the notion that socialism meant a planned economy and state control, and for the notions which today are called uie "real existing socialism." But fortunately, says Orwell, "there also exists a vision of socialism quite different from" this . . . to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all" (Homage to Catalonia). At the end of April 1937, Orwell's unit was relieved fronl front line duties

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and sent for a two week's vacational leave to Barcelona. Arriving there he immediately sensed great changes. The heroic days were over, people were tired of the war, and the old traditional life-style, including the class division between poor and rich, with its apparent consequences, had been revived. He witnessed the communists' action to eliminate their political enemies on the left - the anarcho-syndicalists and especially the P.O.V.M. The communists had taken over the leadership of the police and especially the Guardia Civil, being hated by the working class because it was considered to be the instrument of the ruling class against which the! war was fought. The communists had armed the Guardia Civil with the then most modern Soviet Russian weapons - weapons the soldiers at the front line needed desperately, but could not obtain. Orwell used the main time of his leave in Barcelona to guard the headquarters of the P.O.V.M. After a few days everything was over. The communists had won total control. The leaders of the P.O.U.M. were incarcerated and as "trotskyte-fascist spies" accused of helping the enemy. Orwell discovered with dismay that large portions of the international press, without investigating the matter, spread the mendacious version of the communist propaganda organs. "One of the drearest effects of this war," he writes, "had been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right," taking the Manchester Guardian explicitly as a remarkable example (Homage to Catalonia). "In Spain", he continues, "for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie." Furthermore: I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors and others who never had some shot fired, hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines' . (Homage to Catalonia)

However, he adds that most of the reports were not concerned with the main problem - the survival of democracy and popular power in Spain - but with the Russian desire to prevent revolution and the consequent power struggle within the Left to gain controL His participation in the Spanish civil war; his experience of egality and fraternity in the P.O.U.M. militia at the front; the behavior of the Spanish communists, following directions from Moscow, who gave priority to the fight against the groups on the left, which at the beginning of the war were those who repulsed the onslaught of the insurgents; the systematic lies spread by the powerful communist propaganda-apparatus, greatly distorting the events; the withholding of the best weapons by the communists to arm themselves; the government-spokesmen's admittance that the communist version was a grave distortion, but that the government did not dare to fight the communists in order not to offend the Russians, who could cut off the deliverance of weapons so badly needed - all this forms the experiential background of Orwell's Animal Fann as well as of 1984.

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Orwell returned from Barcelona to the front line and his P.O.V.M. comrades who did not receive any information about the witch-hunt going on in Barcelona, about the savage suppression of their party, and of the fact that their leaders, together with plain party members and men whose only offence was that they had fought at the front in the P.O.V.M. militia, were imprisoned and many of them killed. The people at the front line, unaware of all that, continued their fight against Franco's troops and their German and Italian allies. A few days later a sniper's bullet hit Orwell in the throat and ended his participation in the Spanish Civil War. His participation in the events, however, was not ended yet. After a short hospital stay he returned to Barcelona only to find out that he, like all other P.O.V.M. members or sympathizers (Orwell, in fact, was not a member), was sought in order to be arrested as a fascist spy. Sleeping in a burned-down church during the nights and walking around during the days in the streets, he finally managed to leave Spain and to return to England. One of the most urgent problems his experiences had forced upon him was the threat of the advancement of totalitarianism in Europe in general and in Spain, especially in the wake of the war. As mentioned before, Orwell was deeply disturbed about the degree to which the events in Spain were reported in an inaccurate and distorted way. He asked himself whether in general it was possible to give a true account of history, what the notion of "truth in history" meant, and if a "true," in the sense of a non-partial, description was not possible, what could be done in order to prevent totalitarian forces in their attempt to interpret or reconstruct history so it would fit their interests and goals. As a consolation he believed that as long as truth exists it can be temporarily denied or distorted, but it will exist behind our backs. Furthermore, as long as the liberal and humanistic tradition existed somewhere on earth, totalitarianism would not be victorious. Which people, then, would defend these ideals against the nightmare of totalitarianism? Orwell asked. His answer was that in Spain the working class was the backbone of the resistance. Without indulging in working class romanticism, he thought that the working class may be temporarily duped by propaganda lies, but their very life conditions would sooner or later make them fight against totalitarianism. This idea could be dispatched of as wishful thinking developed within a traditional Marxist framework. But as our recent history indicates, the Polish workers rose to do what Orwell had hoped for and did it when a thorough analysis led some observers to say "Good-bye to the proletariat." From the intellectuals Orwell did not expect much. In general his relation to the "intellectuals" (sometimes he also uses the term "intelligentia") is ambivalent, to put it mildly. Surely he saw himself as an intellectual, but not as an intellectual who only talked, but who also acted in accordance with his convictions. His spite against the pro-communist intellectuals is openly and unmistakenly declared. Whereas they condemned the first world war, "they made their swing-over from 'War is hell' to 'War is glorious' not only with no sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage" (Homage to Catalonia). He denounced war and did it as a consequence of his experiences.

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Later on in Inside the Whale he discusses Auden's poem "Spain," which he himself had characterized as one of the few acceptable things written about the civil war. Let me quote that part which Orwell discusses: To-morrow for the young, the poems exploding like bombs, The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion; To-morrow the bicycle races Through the sururbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle. To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder: To-day the expending of powers On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting

The second verse, Orwell comments ironically, is thought of "as a sort of thumbnail sketch of a day in the life of a good Party man. the morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes' interlude to stifle 'bourgeois' remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and evening chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All very edifying. But notice the phrase 'necessary murder'. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. " Orwell himself emphasizes that he has seen the bodies of murdered people and therefore has some knowledge about what murder implies: hate, terror, blood, the smells, the cries of distress. Not only murder, but the very notion of "necessary murder" has to be rejected. Hitler and Stalin may think of "necessary murder," but they would use expressions such as "liquidation" or "elimination" in order to arrange an effect of calming and reassurance. The amoral attitude, which Orwell ascribes to Auden, belongs to those people who always are somewhere else when you have your finger on the trigger of your gun. It should be pointed out, however, that when Inside the Whale was published, Auden, like Stephen Spender and other members of the group of writers attacked by Orwell, had renounced his previous adherence to the party-line and even had joined Orwell's stand in several respects. I think that Orwell reproaches the (left wing) intellectuals for writing about things of which they have no experience, and they do not have this experience because they do not wish to take the consequences of their beliefs: to transform their beliefs into actions. As a consequence, they view events from a distance, which in turn makes these events abstract and isolated happenings without mediating an accurate emotional flavour, one of the conditions of such mediation being to place such events in a relevant context and to make them concrete. Without such an experience, Orwell seems to imply, the intellectual cannot rely on his or her moral standards or - what is worse - he or she will not even acquire these standards. Can we infer that Orwell wants us to think that only action provides that experience which turns abstract words into concrete events? There is that type of anti-intellectualism which asserts that "they only talk, they never act" or "what people want of their leaders is action not idle talk." No, Orwell does not represent this crude form of anti-intellectualism. To make that somewhat clearer, let me use another example. I have met many - too many - young Marxist students, talking about the working class and in the name of the

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working class in such abstract terms that not only would a worker not understand what they meant, but neither would their own colleagues. The next step is that the lack of understanding is not attributed to one's own insufficient experience and hence one's own lack of clear thought, or at least one's ability to express thoughts clearly. The lack of understanding is attributed to the backwardness of the recipients of the message. This is the crucial step. Here the foundation of elitism is laid and hence the seeds of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. This is at least the lecture we ought to have learned from the development of Leninist strategy and its societal practice. Orwell's criticism of the intellectuals who do not know what they are talking about and talk about things of which they have not enough knowledge and experience is not crude anti-intellectualism. He is deploring the consequent gap between what they say and how they act, the lack of congruence. In this gap the seed of authoritarianism may grow. On the other hand, a onesided emphasis on action and getting rid of talking may reveal this very authoritarian ideology. Orwell points out that he was frightened by the fact that the left intelligentia, from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War on, transformed "radical thinking" into a vague anti-fascism of a rather negative kind: propaganda was disseminated instead of thorough analysis, creating the ingredients of a war atmosphere. Orwell contends that intellectuals, and especially authors, ought to keep out of politics, if being in politics means adherence to a political party and therefore either strictly following a party line or alternatively keeping the mouth shut when it may be necessary to speak out. Good novels are not written by people who suspect heresies or have a bad conscience for not following the party line to the point of not exhibiting sufficient orthodoxy, says Orwell in Inside the Whale. Good novels are not written by people who are afraid. One writer he considers to be courageous is Henry Miller. A good deal of Orwell's analysis takes his (Miller's) writings, and especially the Tropic ofCancer, as a point of departure for formulating his (Orwell's) programmatic views. In order to place Inside the Whale in a historical context, we should know that it was written 1940 when The Tropic of Cancer was published. Orwell notes that the Italians were on the verge of occupying Ethiopia, and Hitler's concentration camps were already filled to the brim. How could a novel which disregards what is going on in the world and concentrates - at least on the surface - on the life of an American loafer in Paris be important? Miller, says Orwell, had the courage - and emphasizes the word "courage" - to reveal that which is well known. Here Orwell follows a theme which has been prevalent in philosophy and especially in epistemology. One often implies that the task of an intellectual is to solve new problems as they arise in every intellectual and scientific enterprise. In general, one rule could be formulated as: Try to identify the problematic and suggest solutions. An alternative line of approach, though not as usual as the first one, identifies an important intellectual task as problematizing that which appears to us as normal or even self-evident. The two tasks, however, are not mutually exclusive.

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In his Phenomenology Hegel formulated the problem in a way which cannot be correctly translated into English: "Das Bekannte ist, gerade weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt." That which is well known is exactly, because it is well known, not grasped . In order to grasp it, one has to problematize that which seems to be unproblematic, or at least non-problematic. Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, took up the same theme and tried to explain it: "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike man at all: Unless that fact has at some time struck him . And that means we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful." Orwell had reached a point where he could add another dimension in his search for expressing the truth - the problem so central to his aspirations as a writer and as a goal in general for intellectual functioning . A true description of an event could not be given by either a detached attitude or by unreflected involvement. It could not be given where there exists a gap between the written or spoken word and the individual's daily practice . Finally, the real disaster was following a party line and therefore being afraid to criticize. the opposite, one has to be critical of one's own experiences; one has to look for hidden motives and to reflect about implicit assumptions. But an additional step towards truth is necesary: One should make that problematic which seems most obvious; one ought to put question-marks behind that which appears to be "natural"; one should doubt that which seems to be self-evident. And what appears to be most obvious, most natural, most self-evident, if not our daily experiences, the experiences of every-day life, that which we do habitually, and that which we take for granted? I believe that his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, at least, facilitated his attitude. He asked himself how is it that the gigantic trivialities which Henry Miller narrates become so fascinating? His answer is that all the time one feels that these things do happen to oneself. One feels, not so much that one understands, but that one is understood . Furthermore, the language itself in Miller's narrative is without terror or anxiety - no anxiety about being rhetorical or poetic, or about talking about the unusual, though the unusual is our daily experience. I think what Orwell, to his - and perhaps our - surprise, found in Henry Miller's books exactly what he was looking for: the genuine human without embellishment or excuse. One can agree or disagree with Orwell about his estimation of Miller, but one has to agree with him that the search for the genuine human is a search for truth. But not only that: it is the necessary condition for us to survive until 2020. In an earlier writing in Wigan Pier, Orwell said: "The job of the thinking person is not to reject Socialism, but to make up his mind to humanize -it." Humanization, whether in socialism or in any other societal context, is the precondition for survivaL Let me end this short expose by returning once more to Orwell's description of the war in Spain.. In Homage to Catalonia he tells us an anecdote about one of his experiences . Being at the front line, he and a friend left the trench

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creeping into a hole nearer to the fascist line in order to snipe at the enemy. Orwell writes: Some of our aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment, a man presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention fIXed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at 'Fascists', but a man who is holding up his trousers is not a 'Fascist', he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you do not feel like shooting at him.

This could be considered as an expression of an eccentric version of English fair play. I like to interpret it as an expression of the most central message which Orwell wants to get us to grasp.

CRITICAL REVIEW

Zagorka Golubovic The appearance of Dictatorship Over Needs, as a collective production of outstanding representatives of the "Budapest School," has manifold meanings among which I shall mention only the following: 1. it affirms the capacity of a critical Marxist theory to explain the phenomenon of "really existing socialism"; 2. it also proves the validity of an anthropological approach within Marxist critical theory which explains economic and political, as well as ideological, aspects of the societies in question in terms of the consequences they exert upon the real life and free development of society's members; and 3. its claims as a critical reconsideration of the socialist nature of these societies from the point of view of an authentic democratic socialism. When all the three characteristics are given due importance, the book appears to be a unique presentation of a Marxist theory of East European societies whose authors have persisted in maintaining their Marxist and socialist orientation despite their dramatic personal experiences, unlike certain Polish and Czechoslovakian intellectuals with whom they share similar lifeexperiences, but who have abandoned both Marxism and socialism. This book, therefore, has two equally significant qualities: firstly, it represents a serious theoretical and scientific consideration of the totality of social structures and everyday life in Eastern Europe and the USSR; and, secondly, it reaffirms the idea of socialism by critically analyzing the Soviet-type society from the point of view of what these societies' achievements have brought to their population with regards to a new quality of life and the possibilities for emancipation. When attempting to answer the question "What are these societies really like?" the authors confront the Western leftists with that reality as it really is by clearly showing "all that socialism is not" (pp. 2-3). Thus they take a stand very different from that supported by the apologists and anti-socialist critics, both of whom have succeeded in discarding any hope of a possibility for democratic socialism while equating the practices in Eastern Europe with socialism. However two problems might arise from what has just been said: (1) it may seem paradoxical to put these two qualifications together, (i.e., a theoreticalscientific consideration of the systems in question, implying an impartial, value-free standpoint, on the one hand; and the approach presupposing the * A Review

of Dictatorship Over Needs, F. Feher, A. Heller, and G. Markus, Basil Blackwell: Oxford,

1982.

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opposite, that is, a negation of the neutrality position, on the other. For the very term "socialism" is not a neutral concept. But this paradox is apparent, emerging only from the wrong premises. It disappears as soon as one reveals a non-positivistic approach that indiciates that the authors do not present a description of the facts as neutral observers, but rather attempt to generalize their own experiences of the existing regimes, combined with an analysis of these societies' structural elements and institutional functions in relation to the way of life being promoted within them. As a matter of fact, the authors continue along the line of Marx's tradition when they dispute the claim that these two points are incompatible. Here we come back to the old debate on "two Marxs": one a philosopher whose anthropological point of view is value-laden; and the other the "mature" Marx who has reached the height of scientific purity when, so to say, he abandons all evaluations through the use of "neutral concepts" in Capital.. A lot of pros and cons have been offered so far, and I am not going to recall that debate once again. I want only to state clearly that the authors of Dictatorship Over Needs have contributed to the affirmation of a critical Marxist approach precisely by productively combining these two components without which a critical theory of society would lose its grounds. (2) Another problem refers to a seemingly controversial statement which seems to arise from an uncompromising critique of "really existing socialism" and the authors' claim that they themselves are the advocates of socialism.. The authors solve this problem not only by abandoning the phrase ("really existing socialism"), which has been uncritically adopted by convention in scientific usage also, utilizing instead either a neutral one such as "Soviet-type society," or a more value-colored phrase such as "dictatorship over needs"; but they also show that a critical stance towards these regimes does not contradict the affirmation of socialist ideas and values. That is why they set a task to reveal the non-socialist nature of these societies, hidden behind the taken for granted phrase of "really existing socialism.. " They are, however, aware of the difficulties which this endeavor faces, in particular because the regimes in question have done enormous damage to the very idea of socialism and socialist doctrine by producing "general hostility against any kind of Marxism, official or reformistic" (p. 292). Owing to "its marriage with 'dictatorship over needs' ," history "took its revenge" on Marxism - "even if only one very impoverished version of Marxism can reasonably be declared responsible for it" (p. 293) . At the same time, this very fact enforces a need to critically cope with both the nature of these regimes and the revenge against socialism, in part by arguing that socialism has not been discarded as an emancipatory practice and that "really existing socialism" has by no means practiced an appropriate idea of socialism. That is why the authors state that the question "Is society in Eastern Europe socialist or not?" (p . 294) should be put forth by critical theory as a crucial one. Contrary to those critics who believe it to be irrelevant, in the authors' viewpoint this question should be articulated, because without "stripping the regime of its 'socialist' facade," it is impossible to unearth self-deception and to give new impetus to socialist-oriented movements in these societies . Unless a clear distinction is made between socialist aspirations

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and these regimes' policies, the chance is small socialist movements in Eastern Europe to regain dignity. An additional element should also be pointed out when taking a critical stance toward Soviet-type societies. It is the authors' claim that these socieities still live "under Stalin's shadow," which is very often forgotten in an uncritical treatment of the process of "de-Stalinization from above" in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Irrespective of the alterations these societies have gone through for the last three decades, critical analyses have already unmasked the basic components of Stalinism as remaining intact. This fact justifies the authors' characterization of these regimes as being continuously a "dictatorship over needs," standing, as such, opposite of the enlightenment tendencies and emancipatory aspirations. However, the very term "dictatorship over needs" that very well characterizes a general tendency against emancipation is sociologically, and even anthropologically, not quite satisfactory for indicating all the paradigmatic features necessary for differentiating this unique social order from other totalitarian regimes. On the other side, it implies the equalizing of all phases of the post-revolutionary development in the USSR, as if no greater differences existed between the developments and aspirations in the early 1920s and in the period from the 1930s on. Following this line of reasoning, one may arrive at the conclusion that a historical perspective has remained unchanged or has been neglected. This is how one could explain why the authors' primary concern is the establishment of Soviet-type society as it is constituted at present. However, when a historical perspective is taken into account, a characterization of this regime by "dictatorship over needs" manifests its shortcomings: it disregards those aspects of the early revolutionary practices which had indicated a direction different from that of the dominant faction within the Bolshevik party, whose carriers were the toiling masses themselves who created new forms of "power" so as to reorganize production and social relationships in order that people could become the masters of their own destiny. Here I refer to the emergence of the soviets and factory committees in 1905 and early 1917 which lasted till 1918, as well as to the relative independence of the trade unions in that early stage. The left-wing Bolsheviks and the Workers' Opposition supported these trends advocating a form of democratic socialism against the prevailing authoritarian policy of the Leninist faction. These experiences also belong to the tradition of the revolutionary movements, and they cannot simply be ignored merely because the opposite alternative has won. This is not only a question of an interpretation of a particular historical development; rather, it is of more general theoretical significance as it concerns the question of what is relevant in historical analysis, and whether only the successful alternatives with their outcomes should be taken into consideration while the "lost" ones are ignored. Due to their temporary weakness, they are treated as irrelevant because they have proved to be incapable of influencing the course of history. I do not believe the latter i~ justified when history is conceived as a continuously growing experience which should always be a source of learning; then no experience is lost and irrelevant to human development, in particular,

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not one which opens new horizons, regardless of the shortness of the length of time of its implementation. Otherwise it may seem as if nothing in revolutionary movements and practices has been relevant so far with regard to the experiences of an authentic democratic socialism. Hence, one might come to the conclusion that it is only a "pure idea of socialism" that could be critically confronted with the existing practices whose socialist nature is to be questioned. However, the contrary holds true. And in order that the socialist-oriented movements be revitalized, due attention should be payed to those heroic efforts of people in Russia and Eastern Europe to create and defend new forms of organization, even against the leading part of the revolutionary movements (let us only recall the Kronstadt uprising). Moreover, these early experiences, wherein the socialist ideas of various origins were interplaying, may become the kernel of a renaissance of democratic socialism. For one cannot disregard the fact that all revolts against the etatistic-bureaucratic Establishment in Eastern Europe that have occurred so far shared the positive attitude towards a "republic of councils." This indicates that the ideas of self-organization and self-government had been generally accepted as uncontestable principles. Why the authors have not taken these experiences into account as a legitimate heritage of the revolutionary movements is difficult to guess, especially when, from this historical perspective alone, one could understand that the "dictatorship over needs" came about not as an inherent trend in Marxist doctrine, but rather as a policy tending to repress those early emancipatory trends in order that the "dictatorship of the party" (or better, of the party leadership) could be established. However, the main significance of the book lies in the fact that it offers convincing arguments, to which additional comments are not necessary, for defending the thesis that the Soviet-type society is neither capitalist nor socialist. The arguments which are worth repeating concern both the "transition theory" and that formulated by Rudolf Bahro in terms of an analogy with the "Asiatic mode of production." As to the former, the authors argue that the "transitional stage" thesis serves, willy-nilly, an apologetic function when speaking in terms of a "perverted" or "bureaucratized socialism" (which implies that the Soviet state is a "workers' state" but in a deformed stage), setting aside the demands for radical structural changes of this regime. According to the authors, " ... our socialist duty [is] to comprehend its oppressive nature and contribute to its radical alteration ..." (VIII). With regard to the latter, certain common characteristics, which the Soviet society shares with those named as "Asiatic despotism," are not denied (like the use of enforced labor, the elements of semi-bondage to land, the role of non-monetary privileges, etc.); rather, the claim is that these pre-capitalist features are not essential to the functioning of this society-type but are "subordinated to such mechanisms of socialeconomic reproduction which have no analogies in history, and ought to be regarded as unique" (p. 40). It is, in fact, the authors' main concern to present an explanation of what is unique with regards to this regime in order to convince those who take things for granted that the nature of the system in question does not correspond to the name it carries. How far have the authors gone in their efforts to reveal the hidden structure

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of the system which is neither capitalist nor socialist "something else"? Has that "something else" become more transparent after having read

Dictatorship Over Needs? What we learn in a very sketchy way is the following: the system is explained in terms of a command economy based on the corporate property of the apparatus whose members "act as the representatives of the institutional interests of the apparatus as a corporate entity" (p. 69); hence, the apparatus, which is interested neither in efficiency nor in the social utility of production, orients itself to increasing its "power of disposition," i.e., the power of the apparatus over labour (of which it absolutely disposes), and that is what represents a specific "logic" of the functioning of the system, its own "rationality," different from and not explainable as "economic rationality" by the analogy with the capitalist system. The social structure is characterized by an all-encompassing and centrally administered hierarchy within which no social organization has institutional autonomy, but rather is subordinated to the party power penetrating all the domains of social life and activities. The nature of power in this system is precisely expressed as aiming". . . to submit all spheres of existence to the same logic of domination through a unified and all-encompassing system of commands originating from a single selfappointed centre" (p. 107). And, finally, the normative system is defined in terms of a "supremacy of state interest" as a primary norm, wherein the loyalty to the apparatus "takes precedence over both technical rationality and purposive effectiveness"; that is, the "leading role of the party" represents the basic principle of unification. I find the authors' explanation of the functioning of a new economic system which has emerged in this society quite sound, as well as their paying due attention to the changes in property relations which helped establish and strengthen political power through the aforementioned specific "logic" of the economic system (a fact which is often disregarded when the thesis of the predominance of political factors in this society is favoured). Perhaps owing to the intention to clearly distinguish classicial categories from the new ones in order to reveal this society's uniqueness, the authors introduce certain new concepts whose application to this society seems to be unjustified. For example, the concept of "corporate property": I have good reasons to doubt that this invention has contributed at all to a better understanding of the nature of property relations in Soviet-type societies in particular, because it indicates less clearly the specific nature of the "entity" which disposes of the property than the concept of "state ownership" since the state in this society is an instrument of the ruling party. Thereby, the latter more precisely specifies the group making use of the apparatus through which it gains control and disposes of property. When one speaks in terms of "state property" it becomes clearer who performs the function of disposal (for it is not just a corporate entity, but a very specific one, which can monopolize overall control), and how it comes about that the party leadership has historically evolved as the main body of power monopoly when seizing power in the name of the "workers' state". All these remain hidden when we speak in terms of a "corporate property" with regard to which an additional explanation is

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needed in order to understand what is unique to a particular "corporate entity." Why should we exchange, then, well-established concepts for those which do not shed new light on the problem in question, but rather enforce our relying on analogies (with corporations, estates, etc.)? Furthermore, the concept of "corporate property" undermines the role of the holders of power who appear, as the functionaries of the apparatus, as merely the puppets of an institutionalized power, while their enormous personal power in disposing not only of property, but also of men and women as labour power, and even of people's lives, is hidden behind the importance ascribed to the apparatus itself. It is justified by the statement that the functionaries have power only as long as they are in the apparatus. But who makes the permanence of their power possible? Certainly not an abstract "corporate entity," but their actual (personal as well) monopoly of power. However, when losing sight of this fact, the uniqueness of the monopoly of power in this society-type becomes hardly explainable. Thanks to the nomenclatura system, a group of the top functionaries, whose power certainly originates in their being the representatives of the party/state apparatus, becomes almost unreplaceable; hence, the members of the ruling group exercise an unheared-of amount of power as a particular group, and as individuals as well, which is manifest in their being free of any public and even institutional control. The apparatus is their instrument, not the other way round. However, this was made possible not because this group acted on behalf of the state and the party as a "corporate entity," but because it "privatized" the state/party apparatus as an instrument of its uncontrolled power (in Castoriadis' terms, as a private use of collective interest). It is true, the functionaries of the apparatus hold power in as much as they remain in the apparatus. Yet in the reality of social relations, one shoud recognize that this principle becomes relative; for people create institutions, and when they get hold of them it is the holders of power who transform the institutions into their instruments. This is not to say that the ruling group serves purely its private interests, because it is true that the "supremacy of the state interests" is their primary norm; still they define what is the "state interest." Intimately linked with the concept of property is a rather ambiguous conclusion on the classless nature of the Soviet-type society. The explanation suggested in the book, which makes the ruling group too dependent on the apparatus, leads the authors to think of it primarily in terms of the functionaries of the apparatus who "do not share the interests beyond ... reinforcing their common power" (i.e., the "bureau interest"). Does this image correspond to the character of the ruling group in the Soviet-type society? I believe a negative answer is given in the book itself when three characteristics are attributed to the ruling group: its homogenization through the similarities of culture and life-styles, the sharing of the privileges, and the emergence of a consciousness of the group's "separation from those who are ruled." What are these features if not the important elements of class differentiation, indicating that a new ruling class has been emerging? Thus what does a counterargument mean when the authors claim a non-existence of class consciousness

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in "terms of an opposition of interest" between the ruling group and society? Do not the experiences in Eastern Europe from 1956 to 1981 in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland sufficiently speak for themselves in favour of the ruling group's consciousness of the opposition of its interests in relation to the rest of the society and vice versa? How could one name what happened in Poland on December 13, 1981, if it were not a clear class-conscious action on the part of the ruIJng class in order to defend its interests, which it did with bayonets, openly showing it to be on the other side of the barricade against the wholeness of the society? Do we better understand the nature of the holders of power in Soviet societies when we name them a "corporate ruling group" (p. II8)? That the authors themselves have faced the difficulty can be recognized in the corrections they have been compelled to make when introducing another interpretation of class, i.e., a "relational correlative concept" according to which it becomes possible to speak of the ruling group as a class. As a matter of fact, I do not see how one can speak in terms of a class concept unless one recognizes the relationships between social groups of which a society is composed, at least if one follows Marx's concept of class. Despite the lack of a strict definition of class in Marx's works, it is rather clear that it should be understood only as a "relational correlative concept," i.e., in terms of the opposition of interests among social groups. Only then are we on the terrain of class relations, and it is not by accident that the authors themselves introduce, in this context, the essential elements that characterize the existence of the classes: disposition and appropriation of surplus, and conflict between the classes in which this originates while not being fully explainable by economic categories. The authors' ambiguity in regard to the class structure of this society-type is partly justified because the mechanisms through which the ruling class performs its role serve to hide its class position; at the same time, the absence of the elementary rights of independent social organizations and of the expression of their interests makes it difficult to recognize the possibilities for class formation in classical terms. However, one may rightly wonder whether any modern social phenomenon is fully explainable in classical terms. Perhaps we need quite another conceptual apparatus in order to comprehend the meanings of compositions and confrontations in modern societies? But unless we find a better term to express the kinds of confrontations attributed to classes in the classical conception, its replacement with a notion as ill-defined as a "corporate ruling group" does not solve the problem. That the alteration primarily concerns the term, not the content, is evidenced by the authors' description of the conflicting relations in Soviet society as ". . . the opposition of interests that exist between those who monopolize all forms of public authority and enjoy all the ensuing economic, social and cultural privileges, who realize in their activity the domination of the apparatus over the whole society, and those who not only have no say in the everyday matters of social life, but are dependent even in their private activities upon uncontrolled decisions taken by others" (p. 125). And once again: "The appropriation of social surplus by the apparatus as a corporate

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entity which constitutes the material basis of its overall social domination (and which is effected through the control its members exercise over the whole process of social production and the distribution of its results) stands in sharp conflict both with the immediate material concerns and the long-term social interests of the productive workers themselves, and more generally of the whole ruled majority of the population. Nor does this opposition of basic interests remain unconscious" (emphasis added, p. 126). Further comments would not be necessary after this passage if it were not that the authors continue to balance between a "yes" and "no" answer (where the class or classless nature of society is concerned). When denying the class character of the conflicts among social groups, they argue that the". . . social structure of these societies cannot be reduced . . . to a case of dichotomic antagonisms, or ... to a number of such dichotomies superimposed upon each other, but all being constituted in a single dimension, determined by a single principal source (be it monopolization of social power, appropriation of social surplus or whatever)" (p. 129). Quite right, this society's structure cannot be explained by a one-dimensional basis of conflicting interests, in particular because the divisions, emerging from the conflicts of economic interests and from the existing structure of monopoly power, are mixed up in this society-type. No single princple for the confrontations can be determined. But who has defined the concept of class simply in terms of a dichotomic opposition of interests, and which class formation in history corresponds to such a scheme? If the class analyses made so far have done so, that is not convincing proof of the invalidity of the concept, which can produce quite different results when used more intelligently. This book is the best evidence of that. (I can understand the reasons for the authors' being cautious where the concept of class and class analysis are concerned, in particular with regard to modern societies' relationships. Their reinterpretations of the concepts sound reasonable; however reinterpretation is one thing, and rejection quite another. The latter we encounter in other critiques of conceptions of class which, however, fail to provide a more adequate concept that can penetrate the reality of conflicting relations which continue to exist in modern societies as well.) From that point of view, I do not think that the authors' suggestion of a multi-dimensional character of social group formation within Soviet society contradicts statements on the class nature of its structure. We would have gone too far by commenting on all the important innovations of the authors in their attempt to modernize a critical Marxist approach and to make it more appropriate in an analysis of Soviet-type society. Instead, I shall concentrate on a few more points worthy of mention. First of all, the problem of the legitimation crisis. The statement that there is no legitimation crisis in the USSR, while we face it in Eastern Europe, does not sound quite convincing when grounding it on the absence (or presence) of a confrontation with another alternative. We can come to agree that the alternative has not been clearly articulated in the USSR; however, I doubt that the dissenters' ideologies and actions can merely be conceived of in terms of a "dissatisfaction." The varieties of alternative ideas that have persisted for decades erode by their very presence the legitimation of the system based on a

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supposed monolithic ideology and unshakable consensus in all fields of social life which no longer exists - that is to say, the very refusal of the official ideology calls into question the nature of the regime whose legitimation rests on the myth of a monolithic ideology. The break with the ideological monolith represents a challenge not only to the party's ideological monopoly, but to the entire system of domination. That is why I would hesitate before being as categorical as the statement suggests (i.e., that no legitimation crisis exists), for the erosion of the legitimation of power in the USSR through challenges to its monolithic culture can hardly be denied. The real problem, however, may be formulated as follows: Is it the consensus of the population that explains the absence of an articulated alternative in the USSR, or is it a fragmentary dissatisfaction that blocks possibilities for the universalization of an oppositional perspective? If it is the latter, which I believe is the case, one should speak in terms of a latent crisis rather than of an absence of a crisis of legitimacy of the regime. I also doubt that the alternative in Eastern Europe can simply be defined as one of the Western type. (What has been offered by the Solidarity movement in Poland it is hardly possible to describe either in terms of the Western alternative or as a "socialist version," for it was an alternative to both). It is not possible here to go into the very interesting exploration of the historical transformation of a "Jacobin dictatorship" into a "totalitatian despotism" which occurred in 1921 in the Soviet Union. However, I wonder whether a Stalinist despotism can be given a satisfactory explanation in terms of a "terroristic totalitarianism," Le., whether the concept of totalitarianism in itself helps us to understand the uniqueness of this kind of despotism? (This is not to say that a Soviet-type society does not belong to the totalitarian system, but rather that a more appropriate characterization of it calls for a more specific definition that is inseparable from an inversion of Marxist socialist doctrine into a religious messianism that justifies terror and despotism in the name of a promised "radiant future.") Another statement on "an all-evasive effect which alters even the human nature" in Soviet society so as to leave the population unable "to form an idea [ofJ what an alternative democratic system might be" (p. 153), seems to have gone too far. First of all, it does not seem to sufficiently take into account the nature of the ideology in question, and how disillusionment with SllCh an ideology affects people's consciousness. Given the very important role of ideology in this society, and the fact that it pretends to be humanistic, a more and more evident confrontation of the negative sides of reality with the ideologically defined ends cannot remain without effects. That is, the latter serves as a catalyst enabling the growth of the social consciousness of the population, at least in negative terms, as an awareness of the fact that the promised land has nothing to dO'with reality. From this perspective it is unrealistic to speak of the Soviet man or woman as being completely changed, in particular where the young generation is concerned. The evidence shows that there is no greater change of "human nature," for, according to studies of the young population's needs and aspirations, we find that the young people in the USSR have very similar aspirations to youngsters all over the world

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(with an emphasis on personal needs and self-realization, in particular). Another significant contribution concerns the presentation of a variety of conditions existing in East European countries which point, in particular, at differences between the USSR and other members of the Soviet block. This is an important situation to analyze because the answer to the question of possible future developments in these societies will depend very much on the different options. The idea of people's sovereignty being reduced to a single legitimate political force (the party) indicates very well the unique nature of this political system whose inborn hostility towards a democratic form of the legitimation of power (i.e., its denial of people's sovereignty) is the very basis of the regime. However, this is explained more precisely when the party is defined as a "sovereign without power," because the real power lies in the hands of the leadership (p. 158). What makes this system specific (when referring to totalitarianism) should have been emphasized more because it is not only a complete totalization of society by the state, all pluralism being outlawed, but a paternalistic kind of totalitarianism which models an omnipotent party (and the state) after the image of a good father whose blessings are the only source of permitted actions, without which people would be lost. That is the reason why Stalin, one of the greatest despots of the twentieth century, was experienced by the majority of the average population as "batyshka" who takes care of their "offsprings." This orientation is due to the heritage of a traditionally peasant society, on the one hand, and to an ideological heritage based on Lenin's concept of the party as that which "knows better" than the immature working class what is "to be done," on the other. It is a "merciful state" which grants people everything, even their own lives. Only from this perspective can one understand how people could have swallowed a complete totalization of society by the state. It was a combination of paternalistic care and terror that produced rather similar psychological effects, i.e., a need to completely rely upon authorities and to exchange sovereignty and freedom for loyalty. It is, therefore, built into the logic of the system that the subjects should be grateful to the state, otherwise the punishments are justified. Another significant demystification of this regime's nature is worth being mentioned, in particular because even Western leftists have not recognized it. This concerns so-called "socialist rights" in these societies, i.e., full employment and economic security. These are uncritically taken as "important achievements" in terms of which "the preservation of the stable maintenance of these states" can be explained. 1 Contrary to it, a double face of "welfare" policy and economic security is well revealed in the book when the other side of the coin of "security" is pointed out, i.e., its coercive nature. For the liquidation of unemployment also means the "legal obligation to work, enforced through punitive measures" (pp. 72-73, 181), which leads to the identification of the right to work with enforced labour. When it is added that "the strong presence of a purely coercive element" lies in the very fact that unemployment is not allowed - moreover, it is made impossible due to the absence of unemployment benefits - it becomes clear that job "security" is

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"often accompanied by degrading and humiliating forms of personal dependence . . ." because the "right to work means . . . compulsory employment" (p. 181). Due attention is payed to the decisive role of ideology in this society-type; however, the statement that present "soviet ideology is not ideology at all" but becomes dogma (pp. 187, 188) sounds strange, at leas!. The authors justify their position by saying that present-day Soviet ideology is missing one of the basic characteristics of ideological thinking, i.e., the representation of a class interest. This is because party sovereignty became a goal in itself; hence, the ideology, when identified with science, is transformed into a special kind of doctrine. According to the authors, this very fact provides evidence against the existence of ideology, because "doctrine cannot tolerate ideology of any kind, and Marxist ideology least of all." What remains unclear in such an interpretation is, first of all, the very notion of "ideology." (To speak of a "Marxist ideology" is, to my mind, a contradiction in terms. If Marxism signifies a critical theory of society, that is the opposite of Marx's concept of ideology.) I wonder what arguments can support such a sharp separation of ideology from doctrine upon which the authors' ground their implication of the "end of ideology" in the Soviet bloc? If ideology (regardless of the forms and modifications) is essentially an expression of class interest, it is always on the border-line to becoming a doctrine when pretending to express a general interest while, in fact, speaking from the point of view of a narrow class perspective. One can follow such a turn of ideology into a dogmatized doctrine in the cases of both religion and Marxism. Both are of the same nature. For having had similar aims, i.e., more to mobilize and indoctrinate than to explain the facts of real life and possibilities for changing them (wherein lies the basic difference between Marxism as a critical theory and a Marxist-Leninist ideology), they are both closer to beliefs than to cognition. Therefore, one cannot put a "rational argumentation" as the demarcation line between ideology and doctrine as is suggested by the authors of Dictatorship Over Needs. 2 The result is the lack of a necessary critical stance with regard to the concept of ideology. I am not suggesting, however, that there is no difference between an early Marxist-Leninist ideology, which still pretended to retain a theoretical and philosophical flavof, and the present-day Soviet ideology, which became sheer ideological thinking, devoid of any pretension to theorizing. In fact, nothing is left in the latter, at the official level, but a reduced, ideologically-directed (captive) mind. However, this is a difference of degree, not of kind. It is precisely what the authors recognize themselves when interpreting the role of Soviet ideology in terms of "de-enlightening" influence. For it is strictly the feature of ideology, by its very nature, to be opposed to enlightenment because it (ideology) is characterized by being inspired with a particular interest and, correspondingly, with a limited perception. Therefore, when it requires from the subjects reliance on "the collective intellect of the party" instead of on one's own reason (p. 195), the basic function of ideology is fulfilled. One of the principal characteristics of the ideological mind is stereotyped and taken-for-granted reasoning, which expresses "depersonal-

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ized consciousness" relying upon an uncontestable authority, which, so it is believed, guards a class interest. It is precisely this trait of ideology that makes "self-alienation to be its creed." To come back to the authors' main argument against the existence of ideology in Soviet-type systems, Le., to the claim that a representation of class interest is missing in them - I believe it is justified to call such a statement into question if one recognizes the party leadership as a new ruling class which abandoned one class interest (that of the working class, whom it was supposed to represent) but replaced it with another: the interest of the ruling political functionaries. When looked at from this perspective, it is more correct to speak of the changing class representation of present-day Soviet ideology, rather than of its absence. In concluding, I shall touch once again upon the crucial question Why "dictatorship over needs" cannot be socialism? Given "a value degradation and a demolition of the potentially free individual whose voluntary association would form an emancipated society," this regime deserves radical criticism for denying the very idea of emancipation. The same criticism should be directed to socialist doctrines, according to the authors, because they are coresponsible for the historical course that brought about the constitution of Soviet-type societies. The main reason for a co-responsibility for Marxism can be found in a "double anthropology" which produces a "flagrant contradiction at the very heart of the theory." It is manifest in a double concept of humanity: one treated as a "paragon of all virtues," while another is viewed "as an incorrigible waste product unworthy of the status of subject" (p. 260). This maintains a wide gap between an uncritically accepted idea of "human perfectability" and one which affirms a "pesimistic view of human substance" (p. 225). This controversy has enabled the manipulation of human needs through their homogenization, which has had a fatal effect on the doctrine when it implies that it is a "proscription of free individuality." Being characterized by a "coercive need imposition," which stands "contra the individual and his need dynamic," the Soviet-type system cannot be taken uncritically as socialist, unless basic socialist values are left out. I am in full agreement with the statement that the only socialist answer which has a future with regard to the socialist nature of Soviet-type societies is a negative one, which calls into question "really existing socialism" as socialist. For "As long as the population accepts the term socialism as the correct self-description of the regime, the chances of a socialist future are near zero" (p. 295). In order to re-establish confidence, the socialist (Marxist) opposition should "cut the umbilical cord with this regime" and regain independence. A very important task of a socialist opposition consists in redirecting the attention of an oppositional programme to social aspects rather than national ones, despite the fact that the presence of the Soviet Army in Eastern Europe re-enforces the latter. NOTES See o. MacDonald, "The Polish Vortex: Solidarity and Socialism," New Left Review, 139 (1983), pp. 5-49.

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2 This kind of reasoning has been inspired by Castoriadis and is rather widespread among East European critical Marxists. See a very similar interpretation, denying the existence of ideology in Soviet-type societies by Lubomir Sochor in Contribution to an Analysis of the Conservative Features of the Ideology of "Real Socialism," Research Project "Crisis in Soviet-type Systems," Study No.4, pp. 35-46.

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JURGEN is professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. He is the author of The Theory of Communication. APEL is professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. His works include Charles Sanders Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism and Towards a Transfonnation of Philosophy. ANDREW teaches sociology at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. His current research deals with social movements in Eastern Europe. JEAN teaches sociology at Columbia University. She is the author of Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Marxian Critical Theory.

SEYLA teaches philosophy at Boston University. She is the author of a forthcoming work on Critical Theory. BRAN KO is professor of economics at the lJniversity of Belgrade. He is the author of Political Economy of Socialism. JOACHIM is professor of sociology at the University of Lund. He is the author of Language of Dialectics and The Dialectic of Language. ZAGORKA GOLUBOVIC has served as Director of the Center for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade. She has written extensively on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.