Reason in Chains

A Last Look at Habermas

In an effort to read Habermas charitably, on the assumption that an immanent critique of his work remains fruitful, in my previous post I didn’t go into much detail about what is actually the most problematic aspect of his approach. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere still stands for me as his strongest work, not least because it preserves the horizon of a self-governing society. The decisive shift occurs later, with his turn from Marx to Parsons. At that point, the impersonal subsystems of the market and state bureaucracy are no longer treated as historically contingent forms open to transformation, but as functional prerequisites of a rational, civilized society.

More troublingly, these domains are effectively insulated from any significant democratic intervention from below. Capital and its institutional apparatus – despite the rhetoric of “domestication” – are in the end to operate autonomously, as though on autopilot. Any attempt to extend popular control into the sphere of production is dismissed in advance as a dangerous regression. The result is a theoretical framework that preserves the language of rationality and critique while foreclosing the very possibility of a democracy of producers. What presents itself as communicative rationality becomes a closed circuit, incapable of interrogating the material foundations of power. 

In this respect, as I argue in my earlier piece, Habermas’s later framework appears less as a correction of first-generation Critical Theory than as a stabilization of the existing order under the guise of procedural reason. Yet, as Marcuse had already observed:

The slogan ‘let’s sit down and reason together’ has rightly become a joke. Can you reason with the Pentagon on any other thing than the relative effectiveness of killing machines – and their price? The Secretary of State can reason with the Secretary of the Treasury, and the latter with another Secretary and his advisers, and they all can reason with Members of the Board of the great corporations. This is incestuous reasoning; they are all in agreement about the basic issue: the strengthening of the established power structure. Reasoning ‘from without’ the power structure is a naïve idea. They will listen only to the extent to which the voices can be translated into votes, which may perhaps bring into office another set of the same power structure with the same ultimate concern.

Habermas’s faith in the redeeming force of communication thus tends to overlook how deeply communicative processes are embedded in, and constrained by, systemic imperatives. Perry Anderson, from a different angle, identifies a parallel tension internal to Habermas’s own theory:

In situations ‘where social power relations cannot be neutralized in way rational discourse presupposes’, the discourse principle can still ‘regulate bargaining from the standpoint of fairness’, by ensuring that there is an ‘equal distribution of bargaining power between the parties’. In other words, no matter how unequal the actual balance of power between [...] capital and labour, the legal outcome a bargaining process between them will be ‘fair’, provided they are given an equal opportunity to talk to each other. With this wave of the wand, inequality becomes something like equality again after all.

Here, the problem is no longer merely that discourse is confined within power structures, but that it is credited with compensating for them without altering them. The formal symmetry of participation substitutes for substantive equality, allowing deeply asymmetrical relations – between capital and labor, in particular – to appear normatively justified. What remains then is a conception of democracy confined to the management of given structures, no longer capable of seriously imagining, let alone effecting, their needed transformation.