Abstract
Schecter’s book sets out to do two things. Outwardly, it is about a specific line of research in sociology—one that is normally thought to begin with Max Weber but which Schecter traces back ultimately to Karl Marx. However, it also sets out to answer an important question in the philosophy of the social sciences, which is how a theoretical program that developed in German sociology led, in the work of the Frankfurt School, to an alternative justificatory project in political theory. With regard to the first goal, it is beyond a doubt the most important effort to date to trace the contours of various theories of instrumental reason. With regard to the second, goal—which Schecter describes as “to shed light on the relations between the critique of a particular form of reason that one can broadly follow Weber in designating as instrumental, and the forms of legality and legitimacy associated with that specific instantiation of rationality” (187-88)—the book advances a strong but ultimately unconvincing argument, one that suffers, in the end, from some unfortunate theoretical choices made along the way.
Schecter does not begin the account of instrumental reason with Weber, as is common, but instead argues that the origin of theories of instrumental-rational action can be found in the work of Marx, among other places. He thus sets himself a difficult task, as methodologically there are serious problems with any attempt to trace the line of thought from Marx to Weber (16). However, Schecter argues that we see an early, albeit undifferentiated, account of the emergence of practical reason in Marx. The early Marx, Schecter argues, saw humankind’s relationship to nature as one whereby structures designed to control the natural world flourished, effacing humankind’s original, sensuous relationship to nature. By constructing the growth of instrumental reason in terms of a movement away from an authentic relationship with nature, Marx helped develop a framework that will lead members of the Frankfurt School to see, in the development of instrumental rationality, the progressive disenfranchisement of humanity from her natural surroundings coupled to the slavery of mankind to bureaucracy. At this point, however, Schecter introduces what I will try to argue is an infelicitous theoretical move into his work: the distinction between nature and society.
Schecter sees a parallel account of the origin of instrumentality in Nietzsche (18). In the German philosopher, instrumentality acts to limit human freedom by instantiating a system of negative liberty and private accumulation. Against instrumentality and slavery, Nietzsche posits original noninstrumentality as a unique moment of freedom: “the joyous intuition of innocence from the burden of original sin and the norms of standardized performance” (20). Schecter’s Nietzsche is a thinker primarily occupied with demonstrating that so-called reason is often either irrational or directed towards the pursuit of power (18-19), while out of nonreason emerges joy, nature, and freedom.
While this view of instrumentality in Nietzsche is undoubtedly correct, I think Schecter makes a mistake by proposing a radical rereading of Weber that views the Weberian project as an attempt to bring together a synthesis of Marx and Nietzsche (24). This is not to say that subsequent members of the Frankfurt School and others have not advanced a Nietzschian reading of Weber but that the Nietzschian strain in Weber is substantially less important that Schecter asserts. Similarly, the influence of Marx on Weber is complicated, and it is an error, I believe, to suggest, as does Schecter, that Weber subscribed to Marx’s project—rather, there is considerable evidence that Weber rejected many of Marx’s ideas, including the latter’s monocausal account of history.
In his discussion of Weber, Schecter introduces one more important, and often overlooked, thinker into the mix: Georg Simmel. Simmel, particularly his Philosophy of Money, has been enormously influential not just on Weber but also on Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and lately Axel Honneth (as a representative of post-Habermasian critical theory). Schecter contends that Weber combines all three thinkers, Marx, Nietzsche, and Simmel, to argue that in the modern world, we see the emergence of strategically rational religion, contractually rationalized exchange, and hierarchically rational command divorced from traditional modes of life (31).
Lukács and Benjamin serve as the next major thinkers to be examined in this tradition. Lukács, as is well known in light of recent work on reification, argued that the advance of capitalism (described so well by Weber) brought with it two additional changes, which he labels reification: (1) the spread of instrumental rationality to all spheres of life and (2) the tendency to misconstrue fluid social relations as fixed immutable relations among producers and consumers (53). Modern social relations, exemplified in the fixed forms of commodity exchange (Simmel) and bureaucratization (Weber), become reified, a process whereby contingent relations take on the appearance of fixed, immutable objects. It is this line of thinking that Benjamin picks up in his writings, drawing on various Lukácsian themes—most notably, those of commodification and instrumental legitimacy—to construct a critique of history and art in the present, namely in the Arcades Project, which develops a critique of architecture, economics, and commodity production.
As part of the line that runs from Weber and Lukács through the early Frankfurt School to Habermas, Schecter turns to the major figures of German 20th-century philosophy: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. I will not treat the discussion of Heidegger or Arendt in this review, for it seems to me that the chapter devoted to the two thinkers is unnecessary for the development of Schecter’s argument (and is in any case the weakest in the book). Conversely, Schecter’s discussion of Adorno and Horkheimer, while covering well-trodden ground, is one of the strongest in the book. In the path he traces from Lukács through Adorno and Horkheimer to the second generation of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer are presented, rightly, as exegetes of Weber. Taking Weberian Marxism to its natural conclusion, Adorno and Horkheimer, in typically pessimistic fashion, believed that the development of instrumental rationality led to the potential for the so-called totally administered society, one where society is progressively organized around efficiency and production and one that is alienated from the sensuous word of nature (78). However, Schecter differentiates himself from many post-Habermasian readers of Adorno and Horkheimer who have read those two thinkers as setting up an opposition in their thought as one between power, administration, and rationality on the one hand and a sensuous, spontaneous nature on the other. “Enlightenment, which presents itself as the secular modern movement par excellence, becomes secular mythology in the course of its unfolding, that is, something more insidious than the straightforwardly mythological” (94).
Nevertheless, this contrast between the sensuous and the rational does not necessarily sit well with Horkheimer’s conception of critical theory. Horkheimer, as is well known, argued in one of the founding texts of critical theory, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” that there is no realm of autonomous knowledge outside of historical processes and structures designed for the reproduction of social relationships (88-89). If this is true, then the contrast between a supposedly original human nature and modern instrumental rationality must rest on shaky ground indeed.
Before showing how Habermas proposes to rectify the pessimistic tendencies in the thought of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Schecter returns to Marxist thought to show how that tradition argues for the necessary connection between the conditions of legitimacy in capitalist society and the rise of capitalist economic relations. On the traditional telling, Marx believed that while the development of capitalism was partially successful in emancipating the citizens of the bourgeois state by casting off the fetters of preindustrial legitimation (i.e., the feudal system), it did so at the price of instantiating the norms of bourgeois exchange in the market system into the system of private and constitutional law.
Schecter does not stick closely to this Marxian line however, focusing instead on the critique of religion proffered by Feuerbach (153). Schecter argues that Marx’s critique of the state takes its impetus from Feuerbach’s materialist account of religion. In particular, Marx borrows from Feuerbach the idea that religious beliefs about the nature of divinity represent abstractions from our day-to-day practice. For Marx, however, in capitalist society these beliefs become transformed: no longer are our best moral intuitions made the properties of some supposedly objective deity but become tied instead to the state as abstract, juridical forms. The emergence of these purportedly objective forms makes it impossible to develop a subjectively inspired critique of alienation in day-to-day life; instead, liberal thought focuses on the formal characteristics of justice and legitimacy. On this nonorthodox telling, the Marxist critique becomes a way to link religion, politics, and the economy into one regime that oppresses the working class (159). Even though this discussion of Marx forms a comparatively minor part of the book, I stress it to highlight the continuous strain in Schecter’s book, present even in his interpretation of Marx, which is the setting in opposition of objective (and repressive) social existence to a richer subjectivity that (partially) disappears under rationalization.
In the final chapter, Schecter treats the emergence of the communicative paradigm in Habermasian thought. While Habermas concedes the existence of many of the reifying effects of late capitalism, which have been brought about by instrumental reason, he continues to believe that societies generate means of nonrepressive legitimation through the emergence of communicative structures (187). In this way, the development of instrumental reason clears the way for an alternative form of legitimacy. While Weber was right to view the growth of instrumental reason as the decline of traditional modes of social integration, he erred, Habermas argues, by not realizing that secularization and rationalization led to the emergence of alternative forms of legitimation, which appeared beyond the realm of systemic imperatives for action coordination (208). This emergent communicative power can influence (in Schecter’s version) and perhaps even control (on the orthodox reading of Habermas) the economic and political systems, allowing for the emergence of a form of radical democracy (211). Out of pessimism comes hope.
In the end, Schecter has offered a compelling and insightful account for how different thinkers used the concept of instrumental reason for their own ends. This alone is a major accomplishment. However, he also tries, but never quite succeeds, to answer the “why” question: namely, why the importance in 20th-century political thought of the theory of instrumental rational action?
By piecing together the disparate arguments made in various places in the book, it seems that Schecter’s answer is that the critique of the growth of instrumental reason is a way of analyzing the alienation that results when people are separated from their sensuous natures by the development of capitalism. Setting in opposition nature and rationality early in the book allows Schecter to argue that thinkers adopted the social scientific account of rationalization and secularization and turned it into the key for unlocking the normative disruptions brought about by late-capitalist society.
This argument rests, however, on questionable theoretical choices and an idiosyncratic reading of the theorists (particularly Marx) discussed in the book. While some of the thinkers cited may have viewed the matter this way (such as Heidegger, perhaps), it is far from clear that most did. Certainly, neither Adorno nor Horkheimer believed in the existence of an immutable sensuous human nature that could be accessed unshaped by the underlying means of production. Whether Marx ever did so is a disputed question among Marxists (I favor the view that the early Marx did but that the later Marx did not).
More problematic, it seems to me that any such argument would undercut critical theory: critical theory, as it is usually understood, is a form of immanent critique that does not rest on underlying norms of human nature. Certainly, Habermas does not believe that there is a human nature to which political theorists might appeal (though Karl-Otto Apel, to whom Habermas is much indebted, might). Habermas merely believes that rationalization (and possibly secularization) releases a new potential for legitimation (i.e., communicative action). It is only because Schecter insists on setting up an opposition between a natural order and the emergence of instrumental rationality that he can make such a bold claim: after all, only if there is something beyond the structure of society can we appeal to it as grounds for legitimation. So while I must disagree with the answer that Schecter provides for the prevalence of the critique of instrumental reason, there can be no doubt that this is a book strong on the sociological and philosophical fundamentals, which nonetheless proposes an unconvincing solution to a vexing question in social theory.