Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action

Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action

For Habermas the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer failed to bite. The main reason, it would seem, is that they failed to identify a universal ground for social critique. Habermas claims to find that ground in the presuppositions of every (communicative) act through which people attempt to say what is true. Adorno and Horkheimer, following Weber and Lukacs, insightfully traced ideas about rationality back to social practices, but they lacked a universally valid theory of rationality that could be referred to to criticise the status quo.

Communicative reason is only one form of reason among others, but it becomes THE form of reason in Habermas' argument. The only kind of critique that he wants to put forward concerns the fate of communicative action, i.e. the relative health of the public sphere in which the truth of ideas, principles and policies are discussed. Having insisted that philosophy must have a universally valid theory of rationality, and having found it only in communicative action, he cuts his philosophy off from any direct critique both of the form of instrumental reason that predominates in the world of work, and of the split between the different domains of rationality (for Adorno the split between the area of instrumental reason and that of aesthetic rationality in the form/content of the work of art is crucial). Although the radical democrats on the ground would doubtless have a great deal to say about developments in the economy, for instance, Habermas must leave that out of his philosophy.

It is interesting the way that this division of communicative reason and the rest of society that is beyond philosophical criticism maps perfectly onto Kant's distinction between the public use of reason (the public debate which people engage in in their free time) and the private use of reason, which could well be unreason since in practice it will be little more than a matter of following the dictates of the prevailing division of labour....