The Debate with Jiirgen Habermas
Jean L. Cohen
The relation between feminism and the critical theory of Jurgen Habermas is characterized by ambivalence, as the essays collected in this volume witness. On the one hand feminists are critical of Habermas’s peculiar blindness to gender issues, of his one-sided interpretation and assessment of the contemporary feminist movement, and of the ways in which his categorial framework is androcentric. On the other hand, even Habermas’s most determined feminist critics are unwilling to dispense with the key categories of his thought: they make use of the concepts of communicative action, public space, democratic legitimacy, dialogic ethics, discourse, and critical social theory.
This essay takes up the relationship between Habermas and feminism, focusing on his most important work in social theory, The Theory of Communicative Action. Considering Habermas’s social theory from two perspectives, I try to show what his categorial framework has to offer to the analysis of social movements in general, and the feminist movement in particular. But I also take seriously the critique of this framework generated from the standpoint of feminist theory and practice. My thesis is that while many of the criticisms hit the mark, the problem lies more in Habermas’s prejudices regarding feminism,1 and in his interpretation and application of his categorial framework than in the framework itself. Thus where there are problems with the theory, I try to revise rather than jettison it. I hope thereby to generate a fruitful dialogue between feminist critics and the most important living practitioner of critical social theory.
Habermas’s most significant contributions to the understanding of these contemporary movements involves three theses that, taken together, offer insight into the stakes of contemporary collective action.2 The first states that the emergence of cultural modernity—of differentiated spheres of science, art, and morality, organized around their own internal validity claims— carries with it a potential for increased self-reflection (and decentered subjectivity) regarding all dimensions of action and world relations. This opens up the possibility of a post-traditional, postconventional relation to key dimensions of social, political, and cultural life and of their coordination through autonomous processes of communicative interaction. This would form a basis for further modernization of the lifeworld through an incorporation of the achieved potentials of cultural modernity into everyday life, involving the replacement of gemeinschaftliche coordination by potentially self-reflective forms.
The second thesis involves the “selective institutionalization” of the potentials of modernity (self-reflection, autonomy, freedom, equality, meaning). A dualistic model of society, one that distinguishes between system and lifeworld, lies at the heart of the thesis. In this model, the processes involved in the modernization of the economy and the state are distinct from those involved in the “rationalization” of the lifeworld. On the one hand, I have the development of media-steered structures in which strategic and instrumental rationality are unleashed and expanded; on the other, the development of communicatively coordinated and egalitarian cultural, social, and socializing institutions appropriate to the new forms of decentered subjectivity made possible by cultural modernization. Societal rationalization has been dominated, however, by the imperatives of the subsystems; that is, the requirements of capitalist growth and administrative steering have predominated over lifeworld concerns. The “selective institutionalization” of the potentials of modernity has thus produced overcomplexity and new forms of power on the system side and the impoverishment and underdevelopment of the institutional promise of the lifeworld. The “colonization of the life — world” related to capitalist development and to technocratic projects of administrative elites has blocked and continues to block these potentials.
The third thesis insists on the two-sided character of the institutions of our contemporary lifeworld—that is, the idea that societal rationalization has entailed institutional developments in civil society involving not only domination but also the basis for emancipation. The dualistic theory of society thus places the core elements of civil society—legality, publicity, civil associations, mass culture, the family—at the heart of the discussion. The important point for us is that Habermas’s sketch of developments within an already (albeit incompletely) modern civil society provides a way to understand the double character of contemporary movements and also their continuities or discontinuities with the past. The idea of the double character of the institutional makeup of civil society is a real gain because it goes beyond a one-sided stress on alienation or domination (Marx, Foucault) and an equally one-sided focus on integration (Durkheim, Parsons). We are thereby afforded a theoretical means of avoiding the stark alternative between apologetics and total revolution. If modern civil societies are not entirely reified, if our institutions are not thoroughly pervaded by inegalitarian power relations, then it becomes possible to think in terms of the positive potentials of modernity that are worth defending and expanding through a radical but self-limiting politics. Considered together with the colonization thesis, this allows us to explain why civil society is the target as well as the terrain of contemporary collective action.
Taken together, these theses reveal the stakes of contemporary movements in the struggle over the detraditionalization and democratization of social relations in civil society. The redefining of cultural norms, individual and collective identities, appropriate social roles, modes of interpretation, and the form and content of discourses (which I have called the “politics of identity”) is part of this project. However, since authoritarian institutions are often reinforced by unequal control of money and power, and since the colonization of the institutions of civil society by these media prevents their further modernization, contemporary collective actors must also address political society. A “politics of inclusion” targets political institutions to gain recognition for new political actors as members of political society and to achieve benefits for those whom they “represent.” A “politics of influence,” aimed at altering the universe of political discourse to accommodate new need-interpretations, new identities, and new norms, is also indispensable. Only with such a combination of efforts can the administrative and economic colonization of civil society, which tends to freeze social relations of domination and create new dependencies, be restricted and controlled. Finally, the further democratization of political and economic institutions (a “politics of reform”) is also central to this project. Without this effort, any gains within civil society would be tenuous indeed. While the democratization of civil society and the defense of its autonomy from economic or administrative “colonization” can be seen as the goal of the new movements, the creation of “sensors” within political and economic institutions (institutional reform) and the democratization of political society (the politics of influence and inclusion), which would open these institutions to the new identities and egalitarian norms articulated on the terrain of civil society, are the means to securing this goal.3
I am not arguing that Habermas himself has provided the synthetic theoretical paradigm of social movements that his framework makes possible. While available movement theories have much to learn from that framework, Habermas’s own social theory could also benefit from integrating the results of other contemporary analyses. Indeed, his most recent discussion of the new social movements is misleading because it is based on a one-sided interpretation of the dualistic conception of society that he himself introduced.
Habermas’s approach to social movements has evolved over time. His earlier analysis was close to that of Alain Touraine.4 Like Touraine, he saw the New Left and especially the student movement as potential agents of societal democratization opposing technocratic projects to functionalize social institutions and the existing public sphere. These movements seemed to hold a promise of new, rational social identities and a revived democratic political culture to the extent that they sought to expand and democratize public spaces from the university to the polity.
In more theoretical terms, Habermas ascribed two interrelated roles to social movements. First, movements were the dynamic element in social learning processes and identity formation. Drawing on potentials embedded in cultural traditions and new forms of socialization, social movements transposed latently available structures of rationality into social practice so that they find embodiments in new identities and norms. Second, movements with democratic projects had the potential to initiate processes by which the public sphere might be revived and discourses institutionalized, within a wide range of social institutions. These roles were only very abstractly situated in contemporary institutional developments, however, because the old Frankfurt School thesis of “one-dimensionality” still haunted Habermas’s assessment of existing social, economic, and political institutions. Thus, while he (like Touraine) criticized the revolutionary rhetoric of the sixties movements for diverting attention from the project of democratizing political and social institutions in favor of their total overthrow, he could provide no alternative to their totalizing critique of modern society.5 I have criticized the earlier version of Habermas’s theory for its “institutional deficit,” that is for locating emancipatory potentials on the abstract level of cultural modernity and in socialization processes and not in the institutional articulation of civil society.6
Habermas resolved this difficulty by introducing the dualistic conception of society as a basis for analyzing the two-sided character of contemporary institutions.7 He interpreted the ambivalent potentials of our social institutions in terms of a clash among system imperatives with independent communication structures. By implication, these institutions are open to both defensive struggles to protect and to democratize the communicative infrastructure of everyday life and offensive projects of radical institutional reform. It is all the more ironic that this recent work has also yielded what I consider to be an extremely one-sided interpretation of the new social movements, for in this conception, these movements appear primarily as defensive reactions against the colonization of the lifeworld.8
Habermas maintains that what is at stake in the new forms of resistance and conflict is the defense not of a traditional (communal, ascriptive, diffuse) sociocultural lifeworld but of one that is partially modernized. He also distinguishes between defenses of property and status acquired on the terrain of a modernized lifeworld and “defensive” action involving experiments in new forms of cooperation and community. The latter form the core of the new conflict potential. Nevertheless, the new movements are seen only as forms of resistance and retreat, seeking to stem the tide of the formally organized systems of action in favor of communicative structures. Although they signify the continued capacity of the lifeworld to resist reification, and thus take on positive meaning, Habermas is sceptical of their “emancipatory potential” and suspicious of their apparently anti-institutional, defensive, antireformist nature. In short, he does not see the new movements as carriers of new (rational) social identities but as mired in particularism. Nor does he see them as oriented toward or capable of fostering the institutionalization of the positive potentials of modernity or of transcending an expressive politics of withdrawal.
Nevertheless, Habermas is on to something when he argues that the new conflicts arise at the “seam between system and lifeworld”—over precisely those roles that institutionalize the media of money and power and mediate between the public and private spheres and the economic and administrative subsystems. Resistance to the functionalized roles of employee and consumer, citizen and client, surely characterizes much of contemporary collective action:
It is just these roles that are the targets of protest. Alternative practice is directed against the… market-dependent mobilization of labor power, against the extension of pressures of competition and performance all the way down into elementary school. It also takes aim at the moneta — rization of services, relationships, and time, at the consumerist redefinition of private spheres of life and personal life-styles. Furthermore the relation of clients to public service agencies is to be opened up and reorganized in a participatory mode…. Finally, certain forms of protest negate the definitions of the role of citizen.9
In Habermas’s view, however, the movement challenges to these roles are purely defensive. He construes the attempts of collective actors to come up with counterinstitutions within the lifeworld to limit the inner dynamics of the economic and political-administrative systems not only as “reactive,” but also as tendentially antimodern communalist projects of dedifferentiation and withdrawal.10 The only exception he sees is the feminist movement. It alone has a dual logic and a clear emancipatory potential: an offensive universalist side concerned with political inclusion and equal rights, along with a defensive particularist side focusing on identity, alternative values, and
the overturning of concrete forms of life marked by male monopolies and a one-sidedly rationalized everyday practice.11 The first dimension links feminism to the tradition of bourgeois-socialist liberation movements and the universalist moral principles. The second links it to the new social movements. As indicated above, however, the new resistance movements, including the second dimension of feminism, involve exclusively defensive reactions to colonization. Hence the label “particularist” for the concern with identities, norms, and alternative values, and hence the charge of a “retreat” into ascriptive or biologistic categories of gender. According to Habermas, the emancipatory dimension of feminism therefore involves nothing new, while the new dimension of feminism suffers from the same drawbacks as the other new movements.
I believe that this analysis of the new movements in general and of feminism in particular is misleading. Indeed, Habermas’s interpretation of what is new in these movements as particularist and defensive reactions to the penetration of social life by the media of money and power involves a revival of the classical breakdown thesis.12 This, in turn, derives from a one-sided interpretation of his own dualistic social theory. Thus, Habermas’s analysis of movements does not do justice to the potential of his theory, for two reasons. The first has to do with the failure to translate the categories of the lifeworld in to a full-fledged conceptualization of civil and political society. The suggestive passages on the public and private institutions of the lifeworld neglect the one key dimension that would have enabled him to avoid the breakdown thesis—namely, that of associations. Despite his acknowledgment that contemporary struggles are situated around the dimensions of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization, he fails to link these to the positive side of the institutions within civil and political society.13 Instead of recognizing that the new movements have a role to play in the further modernization of these spheres, he perceives only their defensiveness vis-a-vis the expansion of steering mechanisms. At best, he sees the new movements as having the potential to contribute to learning along the dimensions of cultural transmission and socialization, but not to institutional change within civil society.
Habermas is wrong to conclude from their focus on reinterpreting traditions and identities that what is involved in the new movements is only an anti-institutional, cultural politics. The movements also generate new solidarities, alter the associational structure of civil society, and create a plurality of new public spaces while expanding and revitalizing spaces that are already institutionalized. This involves challenging the roles that mediate between system and lifeworld. The other side of contemporary collective action, however, entails institutional change along the dimension of social integration. It involves conflict over social relations in civil institutions ranging from the family to the public spheres.
Habermas’s tendency to view the subsystems as “self-referentially closed” screens out from view the possibility of institutional reform in these domains, as well. His overly rigid separation of the domains of system and lifeworld blinds him to the offensive strategies of contemporary movements aimed at creating or democratizing receptors within the subsystems, for it makes success tautologically impossible. Consequently, his account of movements does not do justice to the thesis of institutional doubleness to which the dual logic of the movements is addressed. He is thus led to a reductive analysis of the ecology, citizen initiative, green, and youth movements and to misconstrue the dual logic when he does perceive it, as in the case of feminism.
A reconstruction of the system/lifeworld distinction along the lines of a theory of civil society corrects these two blind spots. On the one hand, it translates the concept of the lifeworld into the institutional articulation of a civil society secured by rights. On the other hand, it recognizes that there are receptors for the influence of civil society within political (and economic) society and that these can, within limits, be added to and democratized. Consequently, in this version of the dualistic conception of society, the dual logic of all the new movements can come into view. This approach enables us to see that movements operate on both sides of the system/lifeworld divide, and is thus able to accommodate the contributions of both paradigms of collective action.
This framework also yields a more synthetic interpretation of the meaning of “defensive” and “offensive” collective action than can be found in any of the approaches discussed above. On this account, the “defensive” aspect of the movements involves preserving and developing the communicative infrastructure of the lifeworld. This formulation captures the dual aspect of movements discussed by Touraine, as well as Habermas’s insight that movements can be the carriers of the potentials of cultural modernity. This is the sine qua non for successful efforts to redefine identities, to reinterpret norms, and to develop egalitarian, democratic associational forms. The expressive, normative, and communicative modes of collective action have their proper place here; but this dimension of collective action also involves efforts to secure institutional changes within civil society that correspond to the new meanings, identities, and norms that are created.
The “offensive” aspect of collective action targets political and economic society—the realms of “mediation” between civil society and the subsystems of the administrative state and the economy. Certainly, this involves the development of organizations that can exert pressure for inclusion within these domains and extract benefits from them. The strategic/instrumental modes of collective action are indispensable for such projects. But the offensive politics of the new movements involve not only struggles for money or political recognition, but also a politics of influence targeting political (and
perhaps economic) insiders and (self-limiting) projects of institutional reform. How else are we to understand attempts to make the subsystems more receptive to new issues and concerns, more responsive to the needs and self-understanding of actors in civil society, and more internally democratic than they are now? In other words, those elements of the new movements that target political society (and will one day perhaps target economic society as well) articulate a project of self-limiting, democratic institutional reform aimed at broadening and democratizing the structures of discourse and compromise that already exist in these domains.