Αυτονομία και αλληλεγγύη : Ιδεολογίες και κοινωνία στον μεταπολεμικό κόσμο

by Jürgen Habermas, Ζήσης Σαρίκας (Translator)

Ιδεολογίες και κοινωνία στον μεταπολεμικό κόσμο: Συντηρητισμός και κρίση του καπιταλισμού: Η διαλεκτική του εξορθολογισμού: Συντηρητική πολιτική, εργασία, σοσιαλισμός και ουτοπία σήμερα: Ένα φιλοσοφικοπολιτικό πορτρέτο: Μορφές ζωής, ηθικότητα και το καθήκον του φιλοσόφου

Genres: Philosophy

162 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, the topic of his first book entitled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics—particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests.

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN ILLUMINATING SERIES OF INTERVIEWS WITH THE GERMAN SOCIAL PHILOSOPHER

Jürgen Habermas (born 1929) is a German philosopher and sociologist who is one of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School.

The Editor’s Introduction to this 1992 collection of interviews states, “For well over thirty years Habermas has pursued and developed a project which is rooted in the traditions of Critical Theory, the form of interdisciplinary Marxist social analysis initiated by members of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, under the aegis of Max Horkheimer, during the 1930s. As the inheritor of this tradition, Habermas accepts that philosophy can no longer sustain its claims to reveal the fundamental nature of reality; but he also denies that contemporary thought is obliged to choose between trivialized technicality or a grandiose arbitrariness. Philosophy CAN continue to deal with substantive questions, but only by acknowledging that it can no longer do so alone, through a collaboration with other empirical disciplines. In Habermas’s work philosophy functions as the problem-sensitive medium which integrates the results of the individual social and human sciences into a multifaceted, yet coherent, account of our history, our present dilemmas, and our prospects.”

Habermas says, “I can understand neither those students in our universities who, after the collapse of the protest movement, went over to a party on the Soviet model, nor the so-called ‘New Philosophers’ in Paris who remained unaware of the true nature of bureaucratic socialism until they had read Solzhenitsyn---and who now throw out the baby with the bathwater. These things are two sides of the same coin. I welcome the move towards Eurocommunism in the Western parties---although it has been far too long in coming. But I only say this by way of explaining why for me Soviet Marxism could never be the privileged object of vast hopes or profound disappointments, and why I was never able to get excited about it.” (Pg. 49)

He states, “I certainly don’t believe… that one cannot capture the unity of reason, the interrelation of the different aspects of reason, on the level of cultural systems of interpretation, in the form of a religious world-picture or a philosophy. That is what is meant, in Marxist terms, by the sublation of philosophy. Nothing is going to come together any more on the level of cultural systems of interpretation. However, the moments of reason fit together in social relations and in everyday communicative practice, albeit in a remarkably distorted way.” (Pg. 93-94)

He explains, “There are essentially four motifs that I have brought together [in ‘Theory of Communicative Action’]… The first motif is an attempt at a theory of rationality… I develop the second motif … in the form of a theory of communicative action, in order to deal with a series of more theoretical problems, such as the theory of argumentation. Above all, I want to demonstrate that beginning with understanding-orientated action if useful for purposes of social theory… I also had a third motif, namely, the dialectic of enlightenment. I wanted to show that one can develop a theory of modernity using communications-theoretical concepts which possess the analytic precision needed for social-pathological phenomena, for what the Marxist tradition calls reification.

"For this purpose I have developed---perhaps this is a fourth motif---a concept of society that brings together systems and action theory. Because Hegelian-Marxist social theory… has decomposed into … action theory and systems theory, the present task now consists of combining these two paradigms in a non-trivial fashion…. Thus, one can give new form to the critique of instrumental reason which could not be pursued further using the methods of the old Critical Theory. The appropriate form is a critique of functionalist reason.” (Pg. 104-105)

In the fifth interview, he observes, “Philosophy today is no longer in possession of metaphysical truths. It is involved… in the fallibilism of a research process which takes place on the shaky ground of argumentation which is never immune to revision. Nowadays it is philosophizing animal behavior specialists, or physicists, who push towards popular syntheses which have something of the character of world views, and with regard to which philosophers are unable to conceal a certain skepticism. To this extent the traditional roles have rather been reversed. On the other hand, philosophy still retains a more intimate relation to common human understanding and to the life-world than do the sciences. It still has to play the role of a interpreter in the exchange between autonomized cultures of experts and everyday life.” (Pg. 131-132)

He points out, “Right from my earliest publications, I understood ‘materialism’ in the Marxist sense, as a theoretical approach which does not simply affirm the dependence of the superstructure on the base, the life-world on the imperatives of the accumulation process, as a ontological constant, so to speak, but which simultaneously explains the DENOUNCES this dependence as the latest function of a particular, historically transitory social formation.”(Pg. 173)

He admits, “I don’t really like the distinctions between the disciplines. I have never understood how one can distinguish between, say, political science and political sociology, or between social theory or political theory and related work in philosophy. It really makes no sense… We never had any political science as such in Germany before about 1947-1948… Today, I am in a philosophy department, but the reasons are rather external and institutional.” (Pg. 188)

He argues, “This is what I think philosophers should also do: forget about their professional role and bring what they can do better than others into a common business. But the common business of political discourses among citizens nevertheless stays what it is. It is not a philosophical enterprise. It is the attempt of participants to answer the question ‘what now?’---in these circumstances, for us particular people, what are or would be the best institutions?” (Pg. 199-200)

In a later interview, he adds, “In my view philosophy today plays two roles simultaneously---and interpretative role, in which it mediates between the life-world and the specialized cultures of experts, and a more specific role within the system of organized knowledge itself, where it co-operates with the various reconstructive sciences in particular. Here it produces statements which make a claim to truth.” (Pg. 258) He concludes, “I take the task of philosophy to be the clarification of the conditions under which both moral and ethical questions can be rationally answered by those concerned.” (Pg. 270)

He notes, “I am not just an apologist for modernity. I am fully aware of its ambivalences, its dark sides; above all, the peculiar feature of modern societies---and this is a structural property---that they continually endanger themselves in the course of the development of their potentials. At the moment I see such dangers above all in the economic and the military-strategic domain. To get the capitalist machine going again, people accept the need for two and a half million, perhaps soon three million or more, unemployed. The attempt is made to produce a majority consensus which is based on lack of sympathy, capable of coming to terms with the marginalization of minorities. Rational politics scarcely seems possible any more in this domain.” (Pg. 226)

This is an excellent book, that sheds a great deal of light and clarity to Habermas’s thought and his writings. It will be “must reading” for anyone seriously studying Habermas and the development of his thought.

[Dante]

'But we have to be allowed to write theory...'

Although my only concern while reading through this series of interviews was to check I fully understood Habermas' relation to the earlier Frankfurt School theorists, there was good reason to read beyond his fairly repetitive, yet revealing, re-statements of his 'fidelity through transgression' approach to these intellectual influences. Much of the sociological detail and commentary on German political minutiae went straight over my head, but Habermas' insights into the nature of theory building, inter-disciplinary work and the shifts in 20th century thought are useful. Quite how critical theory's original radical sympathies and methodological transgressions were dispersed and reconstructed into his liberal-adjacent communicative paradigm is on clear show, too. Know thy enemy and all that.