Nancy Fraser
To my mind, no one has yet improved on Marx’s 1843 definition of critical theory as “the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age.”1 What is so appealing about this definition is its straightforwardly political character. It makes no claim to any special epistemological status, rather it supposes that with respect to justification there is no philosophically interesting difference between a critical theory of society and an uncritical one. However, there is, according to this definition, an important political difference. A critical social theory frames its research program and its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan, though not uncritical, identification. The questions it asks and the models it designs are informed by that identification and interest. Thus, for example, if struggles contesting the subordination of women figured among the most significant of a given age, then a critical social theory for that time would aim, among other things, to shed light on the character and bases of such subordination. It would employ categories and explanatory models that revealed rather than occluded relations of male dominance and female subordination. And it would demystify as ideological any rival approaches that obfuscated or rationalized those relations. In this situation, then, one of the standards for assessing a critical theory, once it had been subjected to all the usual tests of empirical adequacy, would be: How well does it theorize the situation and prospects of the feminist movement? To what extent
does it serve the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of contemporary women?
In what follows, I am going to presuppose the conception of critical theory which I have just outlined. In addition, I am going to take as the actual situation of our age the scenario I just sketched as hypothetical. On the basis of these presuppositions, I want to examine the critical social theory of Jurgen Habermas as elaborated in The Theory of Communicative Action and related recent writings.2 I want to read this work from the standpoint of the following questions: In what proportions and in what respects does Habermas’s critical theory clarify and/or mystify the bases of male dominance and female subordination in modern societies? In what proportions and in what respects does it challenge and/or replicate prevalent ideological rationalizations of such dominance and subordination? To what extent does it or can it be made to serve the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the contemporary women’s movement? In short, with respect to gender, what is critical and what is not in Habermas’s social theory?
This would be a fairly straightforward enterprise were it not for one thing: apart from a brief discussion of feminism as a “new social movement” (a discussion I shall consider anon), Habermas says virtually nothing about gender in The Theory of Communicative Action. Now, according to my view of critical theory, this is a serious deficiency, but it need not stand in the way of the sort of inquiry I am proposing. It only necessitates that one read the work in question from the standpoint of an absence; that one extrapolate from things Habermas does say to things he does not, that one reconstruct how various matters of concern to feminists would appear from his perspective had they been thematized.
Thus, in the first section, I examine some elements of Habermas’s social — theoretical framework in order to see how it tends to cast childrearing and the male-headed, modern, restricted, nuclear family. In the second section, I look at his account of the relations between the public and private spheres of life in classical capitalist societies and try to reconstruct the unthematized gender subtext. And finally, in the third section, I consider Habermas’s account of the dynamics, crisis tendencies, and conflict potentials specific to contemporary, Western, welfare state capitalism, so as to see in what light it casts contemporary feminist struggles.3