Abstract
The post-war boom was an exciting time to be in Germany. An entire generation of younger Germans enjoyed new economic growth and cultural liberalisation, yet under the shadow of the Nazi years atrocities and the enforced divide into West and East.
As the student protests of ‘68 showed, it was an era in which everything was open – and if not, forced to be – for contestation. Within this context (what has been described as the period of Suhrkamp-kultur, after the famous publisher), social theory enjoyed a wide readership to the point of making today’s scholars jealous. It was a period in which the need to rethink German and European society was felt urgently.
Two rising academic stars, Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, found each other on a collision course. Their intellectual sparring famously led to a joint publication in 1971. While this debate has been studied comprehensively in Germany, even the above publication has not been translated into English. However, finally, after precisely 50 years, the first book-length study in English, courtesy of Gorm Harste, has appeared.
Structurally, the book lays out the debate roughly chronologically. A good deal of attention is given to the context in which Germany found itself leading up to the early 1970s. It means that, throughout, one is reminded of the genuine and concrete questions the two participants wanted to address. Only after the stage has been set does the book dive into the co-authored work, and it highlights the problems of intersubjectivity and how society can explain the pertinent questions of history and social evolution. The later phases of the debate (from the 1980s on) circle around political legitimacy, law, and social crises. The book’s final part brings the Germans’ debate into relation with their French peers, Foucault and Bourdieu, with an epilogue detailing Luhmann’s influence on Habermas’s 2019 monograph on the history of philosophy.
Harste does well to sketch the stakes of the debate. While Habermas and Luhmann might typically be considered abstract thinkers, it is clear just how pressing the need for their respective projects had been. For two young men who came of age during the Nazi years and saw how quickly Germany adapted to its new course after the war, understanding the foundations of such a society became a life-long project. Despite their similarities, one could hardly imagine two more different protagonists. On the one hand was Habermas, the already-famous idealistic philosopher who eagerly wanted to find the moral grounds for political communication and action after an era of propaganda and newspeak. On the other hand Luhmann, the unassuming civil-servant-turned-sociologist from the new university in Bielefeld, seemed content to observe society from the side-lines. Harste sums up the distinction as Habermas’s embrace of Marx’s eleventh thesis and Luhmann’s scepticism towards it. As diverse as our dramatis personae could be, both nevertheless attempted to cook up that German speciality, a grand theory of society.
As mentioned, the early days of the debate led to a joint publication in 1971, still untranslated into English. It seems that, initially, Habermas had not yet known what to make of his colleague. He mistook Luhmann’s work for that of the first generation of cyberneticians. Habermas feared a description of a cybernetic society of social technology, obsessed with control through impersonal processes, which was what his own work wanted to combat. Accordingly, he aimed his attacks at clichés and strawmen that did not do justice to his opponent’s theory. However, this view can be somewhat forgiven – as Harste points out – in that some of Luhmann’s trademark features, such as self-reference and autopoiesis, had not yet been developed. In turn, Luhmann dismissed Habermas’s work as perhaps naïve in its anthropocentrism, moralism, and belief that modern society could be steered in more desirable directions. If Habermas tried to find the conditions under which social consensus could be reached, Luhmann understood from the start that modern society was based on radical dissensus and that this state would most likely only intensify as society continues to differentiate over time.
At the time, the debate contrasted the dry, technical and seemingly pessimistic Luhmann with the hopeful Marxist heir of the famous Frankfurt School. This had the unfortunate effect of painting the former as a dumbed-down caricature of conservatism. Habermas’s earlier writings contributed to this image. In line with other Luhmann scholarship of the last decade or so, Harste meticulously dismantles this distortion to show a sensitive, nuanced theorist to the Anglophone world whose work’s radicality is only slowly being recognised.
If Harste had left his analysis to the co-authored publication, it would already have been a worthwhile contribution. However, he satisfyingly extends the continuing interactions between the two figures over the subsequent years. While the debate has typically been characterised as a series of misunderstandings and charging at windmills, Harste’s more comprehensive view foregrounds a more delicate relationship. For the three decades that followed, we see the writings of the two interlocutors remained in dialogue with one another, whether in footnotes, in asides or directly, as in a special issue of the Cardozo Law Review in 1996. Specifically, Habermas softened toward his rival and adapted parts of his theory to address criticism from Luhmann. However, such instances are harder to find in the case of the stubborn systems theorist. Not mentioned in the book is that Luhmann seems to have had a diminished interest in Habermas’s theory in the early 1980s. For example, his literary estate contains very little personal correspondence with Habermas from after the original publication. In a humorous case, when Luhmann was asked in an interview whether he thought Habermas used a filing system similar to his own famous Zettelkasten, he responded to the effect that it was unlikely since, for Habermas’s theory, simple criteria of order seemed to be sufficient.
The long wait for an English monograph has at least one more advantage, namely that with the publication of the 92-year-old Habermas’s magnum opus, the two-volume Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, in 2019, the entire body of the two thinkers’ work can be read together. Harste illustrated how, even in the 2019 volumes, Habermas has continued to debate his theory with the deceased Luhmann. Thus, their debate, far from being a wasted effort, existed at the cutting edge of German theory for an entire generation, and as Harste devotes substantial attention to, inspired and entered into dialogue with ideas across the Rhine developed by Lyotard, Foucault and Bourdieu.
The book favours Luhmann, although Harste never descends into the currently fashionable attitude of dismissing Habermas. For some critics, political events since 2016 are seen as proof that communicative rationality and ideal speech situations are but an illusion. Increasingly we have learned (again) that communication is not a simple solution but part of society’s problems. One could say that diverging conceptions of truth lie at the core of this problem. While Habermas poses truth as communication with external veracity, Luhmann sees it as a contingent communicative symbol that convinces. In a world of post-truth, it seems that Luhmann’s tortoise, the scepticism towards reason to establish consensus, has overtaken Habermas’s hare.
One might very well ask what, apart from a doubtlessly fascinating part of intellectual history, does a return to this episode mean today? Habermas and Luhmann attempted to fill the clean slate of the Stunde Null that they found themselves in after 1945. While 2022 is perhaps not precisely another Year Zero, it is clear that society is drastically transforming in front of our eyes. Economic, political, environmental and healthcare crises are instead pointing at a countdown to midnight. The feeling that society has to be fundamentally rethought is gaining ground again, as the famous environmental slogan ‘system change, not climate change’ reflects. The Habermas-Luhmann debate serves as a social memory that we should draw from, not only in answering our current problems but also in formulating the right questions in the first place. These include interrogating whether we can find consensus on our problems (scepticism towards the efficacy of masks and vaccines against pandemic viruses point against agreement; the impotence of international climate treaties highlights that consensus in politics or law is insufficient); what role individuals even have in reversing worrying trends; or whether a differentiated world society can be steered at all.
Acknowledgement should be given to Gorm Harste for making this debate more accessible than ever to an Anglophone readership, and despite the passage of half a century, the questions raised by Habermas and Luhmann remain as crucial as they did then.