The Theory of Communicative Action by Habermas

Context

Jürgen Habermas (born 1929) joined the Frankfurt School in 1956 which was composed of intellectuals such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. They were dissatisfied with the interwar socio-economic systems of the 1930s: capitalism, fascism, and communism. They thought that existing social theory was unable to explain the rise of Nazism, liberal capitalist societies or socially inflexible Marxism-Leninism. The School members were committed to human emancipation based on a synthesis of the Marxist tradition, psychoanalysis and empirical social research.

Habermas distinguished between three types of knowledge: empirical (technical or scientific); hermeneutic (interpretative knowledge); critical (freeing people from societal assumptions). He also argued that science was not value-free and that those studying society formed part of their own subject of investigation. It is his Critical Theory that reveals the distortions, representations and ideologies included in our knowledge.

Habermas emphasised the notion of lifeworld, that of everyday experiences: culture, social relations, and communication. He believed that the promise for the future is a society where people discuss in order to reach a consensus. This implies that everyone can speak without intimidation on any topic and without ideology. 

Summary

Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (The Theory of Communicative Action) was published in two volumes in 1981.

Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society

Communicative Action is fundamental for human interactions. It is based on language exchanges, with a view to reaching mutual comprehension and consensus. In the acts of Communicative Action people claim validity for the truth (factual correctness) moral appropriateness and sincerity of their speech. These claims are evaluated critically by others in the communication process.

Habermas affirms that communication is fundamental to forming and maintaining social order. However, he differentiates between two forms of rationality: strategic rationality (aimed at achieving individual goals) and communicative rationality (engaged in reaching mutual understanding through rational exchanges). Habermas underlines the importance of rational communication in building a just and democratic society.

Lebenswelt (Lifeworld) is distinguished from System by the author in that it includes everyday life where communicative action happens naturally. By System he means institutions like the market and bureaucracy, where power and instrumental action dominate. He criticises the colonisation of the lifeworld by the system and the increasing rationalisation of communicative action, which weakens its quality.

Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason

Habermas focuses on the tensions between lifeworld and system. He criticises the tendency of modern societies to place system efficiency above communicative rationality. He presents his critical theory project as supporting Lifeworld communication against the System. His concern is the encroachment of system into lifeworld, which could lead to alienation and reduced democratic participation.

The author uses communicative action as a frame to develop ethical discourse as a foundation for morality. This is based on the principle of universalising meaning, that the only justifiable norms are those that all affected parties can agree upon in a rational discourse. 

His argument is that moral principles must be justified through open and inclusive discussion. This will be made possible through the "ideal speech situation", where communication is freed from distortions and power, thus permitting a rational consensus. This is an ideal that may never be completely realised in practice, but it points to a standard for evaluating communicative actions.

Another of Habermas's concepts is that of public sphere which is a space where citizens can participate in a critical debate on social matters. He points out that this sphere can be distorted by factors such as commerce and non-inclusivity. He is critical of ideologies that distort communication and prevent rational discourse. He also discusses the dangers of totalitarianism and authoritarianism, advocating democratic institutions and free public communication as ways of counteracting these threats.

Themes 

Hegel

According to Habermas, Hegel emphasised the notion of his present modernity as the last stage in history, considering the beginning of the nineteenth century as the starting point of progress. This was based on the refinement of Enlightenment ideas, those of the French revolution and the century's emergence from historical contradictions. So it constituted a new era in the dialectical process of the march of history towards progress. He interpreted the previous three centuries, XVI, XVII and XVIII, with their discoveries and Reformation as breaking with the mediaeval period.

Habermas expressed a similar conception:

"Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself.”

Habermas understood that due to the rationalisation of the lifeworld and the break from religious worldviews, there arose three areas of value in modernity: theoretical, practical and aesthetic. Modernity bases its criteria of good, bad and truth on these areas and so has created its own criteria for morality and truth.

Marxism

The contemporary opinion of analytical Marxists was that Marxism was an outdated social science and to save its valid core it needed to be updated using positivist social science and analytical philosophy in order to reactivate its predictive and explanatory power.

Habermas started from a systems-theory approach to reintroduce some basic concepts and offer insights into Marx's analysis of capitalist crises. He suggested that some systems are integrated through functional codes; others are included through the medium of natural language in a system called lifeworld. This is holistic and resistant to adaptation, so the contradictions may be experienced as crises. Habermas concludes from this that the crises of late capitalism will not be economic in form but crises in legitimation. 

Capitalism depends on the functional performances of the State to maintain stability; the State depends on the lifeworld as a source of values and norms. However, because the lifeworld is not organised functionally the State cannot call on values and norms on demand. So the State makes use of the reserves of meaning in the lifeworld and this threatens its supply. If this occurs the State will not be able to support the capitalist economy because it will not be able to depend on motivated citizens to support its initiatives. This is the crisis of legitimation.

Habermas argues that different classes of system have their own internal logic. Capitalism, as a functional system, coordinates social action through incentives, relying on rational agents to reproduce itself and becoming increasingly complex and specialised. Lifeworlds are led by the logic of natural language, so they develop as communication. Concrete examples of these differences are the introduction of the steam engine to the factory system as the type of rationalisation of this system, whereas the sort of rationalisation that happens in the lifeworld is the emergence of democracy or secular morality.

Anti-Positivism

Habermas rejected the positivism in Marx's later works. He argued that science and philosophy had ceased to be determinant in the objectives to be sought after and had succumbed to instrumental rationality. It was thus that science contributed to the technical rationality that helped capitalism to develop commodities and weaponry. On the other hand, it can't produce a believable justification of the capitalist system. This meant that the technology of science was positivistic and so ideological, since it denied the interpretative element in scientific practice. Habermas considered science and rationality as turned against humans in capitalism, ruining their cultural lives and worsening pathologies, instead of improving them. Critical theory was required to fight against this positivistic science and turn it into a liberating activity.

The State

The author's early publications were aimed at showing how the modern State was the result of capitalism and contributed to its survival. One argument he put forward was that the State would not be able to save people from crises of the capitalist economy because of its limited capability to collect revenue to support the welfare system. He maintained that this marked a limit in the State's legitimacy, since less protective capacity meant less legitimacy.

Following the German idealists, Habermas presents a liberating critical theory. Marx insisted on the self-formative role of practical labour, whereas the author views labour as critique, aimed against the numbing force of ideological reasoning.

Criticisms of Habermas’s Approach

Habermas has been criticised for his total reliance on Hegel and Marx to the exclusion of the general philosophical tradition, despite claiming that he has modified their thinking. He also declares a concern for the universal and this is at odds with the narrow tradition he cites.

Habermas aims to establish a general theory of linguistic competence and distorted communication at the lifeworld level. He reduces communication to an instrumental interpretation of language as a means of communication. He uses a model of an ideal speaker and listener who are prior to language. However, this couple is actually constituted by language itself. Language speaks in its users as much as they speak language.