Reifying and reconciling class conflict

Hegel’s estates: mediation and synthesis of group interests

Enlightenment political thought frequently makes recourse to a model of the relationship between state and citizenship, on the one hand, and civil society and private personhood, on the other, where the latter pairing is characterized by particular desires and interests, the former by universality and impartiality. This opposition between individual particularity and citizen universality persists well into contemporary political thought, most famously in Rawls’s conception of public reason (Rawls, 1999).The association of legitimate politics with universality has, however, never much appealed to more empirically oriented thinkers, who note that it bears little resemblance to the way that actual citizens in modern democracies behave (Geuss, 2008). And liberalism’s critics often argue that its discourse of universalism can serve as cover for the assertion of privileged interests (Brown, 1995). One of the few thinkers with a generally affirmative relationship to liberalism who breaks from this vision of a universalistic discourse of citizenship defining the legitimate terms of politics is Hegel. This way of situating him is rarely appreciated because the main place where Hegel makes this point – his account of the estates and their role within the state – is among the less well-received parts of his Philosophy of Right. ¹ Yet, while some of the common criticisms of the estates are well justified, his ideas about why institutions like these are important are well worth paying attention to, as they directly engage the questions concerning the conditions for individual autonomy in modern societies adverted to earlier.

Hegel inherits a question from Rousseau and Kant concerning the conditions for the possibility of social freedom (in the sense of a kind of self-authorship) for beings possessing reason and will, yet vulnerable and finite, dependent on others, and subject to coercive norms of social coordination, in particular, the state and its laws. ² The form of an answer Hegel is familiar with from Rousseau recommends a combination of subjective and objective factors: subjectively, we ought to identify our good not with personal interests, but the common good, understanding ourselves as members of ‘the general will’ (Rousseau, 1997: 48–51). Objectively, sustaining this general will requires a unified and patriotic public culture, and lack of faction within the state (Rousseau, 1997: 60, 91). Hegel’s own conception of reconciliation between individuality and sociality represents a version of this answer, albeit in a significantly modified form.

Given that the modern world seems to indelibly feature decentered markets, expert bureaucracies, and religious and cultural pluralism, Rousseau’s hope for the re-emergence of something like ancient Sparta in the middle of eighteenth-century Europe has struck many as a vain protest. Hegel accords with this objection, as by the time of composing The Philosophy of Right, he had abandoned any similar yearning for Greek ethical life, which he comes to view as rationally deficient due to its unreflective identification of the individual with the whole (Hegel, 2008: §260A, 235). The most commented-upon aspect of Hegel’s break with the Rousseauian model concerns his view of market-oriented civil society, which legitimates the un-heroic pursuit of self-interest, and his Smithean understanding of how markets promote the common good (Hegel, 2008: §183, 181; §199, 191). As important as this is, however, two related points have equal significance: first, Hegel does not believe that freedom requires the kind of concentrated public-spiritedness that Rousseau does. This is partly a consequence of the fact that Hegel hardly expects modern people to be consumed by the affairs of state, since their nations are sufficiently complex to require bureaucracies whose competency outstrips what could be expected from members of the general public. As a result, the subjective stance of ‘patriotism’, which Hegel does think is called for, is more passive: an attitude of ‘trust’ toward the state, associated with a habitual desire to respect the law, but not ordinarily requiring selfless dedication (Hegel, 2008: §268, 240).

Second, the modern division of labor is, on Hegel’s account, such that the existence of distinct groups performing significantly different forms of labor is inevitable. This prevents him from believing that a general will concerning what is equally in the interests of all can spontaneously emerge from civil society (Hegel, 2008: §308R, 294). So, while Hegel thinks, along with Rousseau and Kant, that freedom requires us to conceive of ourselves as willing the laws that bind us, and thus some sense that we are part of and active in the state, this sense cannot be very direct. Thus, intermediary institutions, situated between private individuals and the universal state, are needed to furnish a more tangible sense of belonging. The estates do this by operating as ‘a mediating organ’ between particular individuals and the state (Hegel, 2008: §302, 289–90). In brief, Hegel’s idea – and what he means by ‘mediation’ in this context ³ – is that membership in an estate allows individuals to discern how their activity contributes to one of the main spheres of labor (agriculture, business/commerce, and state administration) central to the reproduction of the social totality of which they are a part, and subsequently grasp how their interests and way of life are represented in the lawmaking process, which synthesizes them with other occupational spheres. As we will see, the political function of the estates accomplishes this synthesis, while the visibility of this process brings its accomplishment to consciousness, as Hegel stresses here:

The Estates have the function of bringing the universal interest into existence not only in itself, but also for itself, i.e. bringing into existence the moment of subjective formal freedom, public consciousness as the empirical universality of the thoughts and opinions of the many. (Hegel, 2008, §301, 287)

Our first inclination may be to think of the estates as class-based organizations, but this is misleading in that they are vertically stratified institutions. For example, the members of the agricultural estate are not only farmers, but everyone involved in agriculture, including the landed gentry. Hegel’s point is that different members of an estate share something substantial: not so much a similar material condition, as a shared way of life.

To appreciate the distinctiveness and relevance of Hegel’s view, two points are crucial: first, the estates are more like classes in the modern sense than, say, the social classes of feudal society (whose existence is to a greater extent based on ‘positive’ traditions and authority), by virtue of the fact that we, Hegel thinks, have come to regard the existence of these groups as the result of economic processes that lead types of labor to ‘converge, owing to the universality inherent in their content, and become distinguished into general groups’ (Hegel, 2008: §201, 193). The solidarity of estate membership is not so much ascribed by tradition as based on the recognition of shared material interests and ways of life that result from the contingencies of market development. ⁴ As such, estates blend elements of both Marxian classes and Weberian status groups, although Hegel does seem to hold that cultural factors associated with the latter will continue to be more important for defining group identity.

Second, Hegel introduces estates as part of civil society, that is, prior to the state – individuals are members of them as private persons, not citizens. Noting this offers some nuance to Hegel’s portrait of civil society: usually understood as the sphere of modern life where self-interest is given its moment of free reign, it is also the sphere of work and association. Hence, actors in it are driven by motives more varied than bald self-interest: in addition to preference fulfillment, they seek ‘recognition’ of their labor’s value. Hegel repeatedly speaks of the ‘honour’ of belonging to an estate (Hegel, 2008: §207, 196; §253, 225–6), and for a person lacking one (the major category being unskilled wage laborers), ‘his isolation reduces his business to mere self-seeking’ (Hegel, 2008: §253R, 226). Thus, the estates are crucial for persons’ ability to view themselves as ‘at home’ (literally, to have a ‘place’ [Stand]) in modern societies: they are highly differentiated and complex and, if left on their own, individuals may have difficulty comprehending how their particular efforts connect and contribute to the reproduction of the social whole, unable to see themselves as other than an isolated cog, buffeted by alien forces.

To contemporary critics, part of what makes Hegel’s estates objectionable is the directly political function he grants them, which seems intended to filter out popular participation, making state administration the business of a technocratic elite, and lawmaking that of a clubby association of noblemen and captains of industry. In Hegel’s state, the legislative function is dominated by representatives elected by the estates themselves (Hegel, 2008: §309–11, 295–7), and given that he spends a fair bit of space in these passages disparaging more ‘unmediated’ notions of popular sovereignty, it is clear that he envisages a process of elite selection, rather than competitive elections based on broad suffrage. ⁵ For Marx, Hegel’s thoughts here in some respects regress below the level of the French Revolution, which while twisted by bourgeois egoism, at least sought to abolish feudal privilege, which Hegel was simply too conservative to dispose of (Houlgate, 1997). Concluding our interpretation here, however, prevents us from raising questions about why Hegel feels the need to amend the vision he is familiar with from thinkers more sympathetic to the French Revolutionary model of a universal, rational state that citizens participate in as equals, regardless of differences in class, status, etc.

A weakness of Rousseau’s program related to those already discussed, and which Hegel reacts to, is that he wishes for the essential business of the state to be conducted by the citizens themselves, but doubts ordinary persons’ ability to do so with upright resolve, and hence that it be as uncomplicated as possible, based on simple laws and settled mores (Rousseau, 1997: 121–2). Hegel has little truck with such thinking, accepting the existence of an administrative apparatus that requires professionals who carry out the everyday business of the state as their livelihood and with specialized competence, rather than as a matter of occasional, patriotic public service (Hegel, 2008: §235, 216–17). It would be a stretch to conclude that he has more confidence than Kant or Rousseau in the capacity of modern persons to deliberate and act on the basis of the common good. But Hegel wrestles innovatively with a problem that Kant does not much address, and which Rousseau poses as a dilemma: how is a coherent conception of social freedom in the modern world possible, if on the one hand we must pay fealty to the normative principle that citizens ought to somehow be thought to author the laws that bind them, yet their ability to comprehend their individual activity as contributing to reproduction of the whole is stunted by social complexity and limited opportunities to participate meaningfully in the state? Hegel contends that an ‘unmediated’ juxtaposition of the universal state and the particular citizen leads to alienation or demagoguery where particular interests are dressed up as universal (Hegel, 1975: 119, 122). His estates, on the other hand, serve to mediate universal and particular: (1) by providing individuals with recognition of their general type of labor as being crucial for the reproduction of society; (2) by ensuring that they do not deteriorate materially below the level of social participation; and (3) by allowing them to perceive that their estate’s particular values and interests are represented in a legislative process that (hopefully) balances and synthesizes them with others.

From a certain perspective, it is fair to view the estates as a check on participation by ordinary citizens. The other side of Hegel’s view, however, is a conception of politics more tolerant of clashes of interests than one might expect, especially compared to Rousseau’s. ⁶ Although ‘deputies are selected to deliberate and decide on universal matters’ (Hegel, 2008: §309, 295), they are not expected to become ‘abstract individuals’, but rather must and should ‘retain within their very determination the distinctions between estates’ (Hegel, 2008: §304, 292). The representation of these in the legislative process ‘implies the possibility, though no more, of harmonization, and the equally likely possibility of hostile opposition’ (Hegel, 2008: §304, 292). It is probably Hegel’s hope that a shared sense of patriotism – thin though we have seen that his conception of that is – will prevent politics from degenerating into rent-seeking squabbles, allowing the estates to perform their ‘mediating’ function: the interests and values of the vocational spheres in civil society are made visible, hopefully in their complementarity, and recognized in their importance and dignity.

Horkheimer and Adorno: ‘latent’ class conflict in the authoritarian state

Left Hegelians looking at this part of the Philosophy of Right have tended to follow Marx’s initial diagnosis: Hegel’s idealism and/or ideological predilections lead him to project a false harmony onto the state that papers over the antagonistic structure of civil society, with the estates representing an unsatisfying effort to pacify the nascent class conflicts of early capitalism (Adorno, 1993: 27–32; Honneth, 2001: 75–80; Marcuse, 1999: 169–223). ⁷ While acknowledging that there is much to these criticisms, the significance of Hegel’s effort lies not in some rearguard struggle supporting feudal privilege, but in conceptualizing existing forms of belonging as potentially being substantial determinations of rationality: what members of an estate share is not a statistically average living condition, but a way of being actively, self-consciously integrated into a self-reproducing social whole.

This vision of being free, reconciled, and at home in the social world as involving the conditions (cognitive, recognitive, and material) that Hegel tasks the estates with fulfilling remains compelling, especially if one is attracted to conceptions of politics that view it as potentially cooperative and reconciling, but without denying agonistic elements, and blending class and status dimensions of group membership and conflict. The Left Hegelian criticisms that trail Hegel’s political thought from the 1840s onward are more directed at the ability of modern institutions to accomplish this harmonious synthesis, rather than with his more general notion of social freedom as the reconciliation of individuality and sociality. Perhaps fatefully, the most influential Left Hegelians in the ensuing century – Marx and Lukács – adopt something approaching an all-or-nothing view on the conditions for such reconciliation. For them, the fact that civil society is characterized not just by individual avarice and competition (as Hegel acknowledges), but group antagonism between workers and owners, implies that the discourse of universal citizenship present in the state is hollow (Lukács, 1971: 96–110; Marx, 1994a). Moreover, Marx regards the blending of class and status identification found in Hegel’s estates as being incompatible with capitalism, as ‘the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank’ (Marx, 1967: 886) characteristic of status orders will give way to the proletariat’s rightful recognition of the material interests they share as a result of being contingently subject to asocial market forces. Genuine reconciliation can only occur once class has been abolished, the division of labor overcome. And yet, in the years following the publication of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, the expectation in such circles that modern societies contained immanent potentials for sublating class divisions was fading, with the first generation of the Frankfurt School devoting a good deal of energy theorizing why the working class had not fulfilled what Marx and Lukács regarded as its historical destiny, and more specifically, why class, while persistent, was losing its explosive potential. I aim to show in this section that the melancholic tone of these texts is explained not only by faded hopes for genuine social revolution, but also the Horkheimer’s group’s view that modern political institutions cannot effect the rational mediation of a class structure that Hegel envisions, which they think is partly due to the reassertion of new Weberian status categories within advanced capitalism – a reversal of Marx’s contention that class and status orders were decoupling, with the former eroding the latter.

For as much as Marx is remembered for his confidence in the development of revolutionary working-class consciousness and the clarity of the modern class situation, like Weber, he is aware that groups in premodern societies are based as much on cultural status orders as shared material interests, and if it is the latter that in the long run determines their fates, the former is often more constitutive of their self-understanding. In fact, Marx thinks of the development of class as more than merely something ‘in itself’ ([an sich], i.e. rooted in a common relationship to the means of production), but also ‘for itself’ ([für sich], i.e. consciously based on a group’s recognition that they participate in such a shared relationship), as a basically modern phenomenon (Sayer, 1991). Its possibility, he argues, is based on the reduction of productive relations to ‘naked self-interest’, which has ‘pitilessly severed’ status orders (Engels and Marx, 1996: 3). On the other hand, Marx is also well known for contending that such developments – the commodification of labor and the transformation of social relations of production into impersonal, systemic ‘relations between things’, i.e. ‘the fetishism of commodities’ (Marx, 1990) – tend to put individuals in a position where the social character of their labor, and ties of domination and dependence involved in production are obscured, inclining them more to view themselves as isolated cogs in a vast, nature-like system of market forces. These considerations imperil the development of class ‘for itself’ and one might plausibly conjecture that the widespread reassertion of status-based forms of common identity would further undermine it – Marx seems just not to think this is likely. Under the influence of Weber and with added decades of experience, however, the first generation of the Frankfurt School comes to a different view.

Horkheimer declines to follow Lukács in linking the perspective of a critical theory of society to that of the proletariat, appealing instead more generally to ‘reason’ and humanity’s interest in ‘the rational organization of society’ (Horkheimer, 1972: 212–13). The motives behind this conceptualization may well be historically prompted (based on the fate of working-class movements in central Europe during the 1920s and 1930s), but the text attests them to be based on Horkheimer’s views concerning structural changes in capitalism that make conceiving of the relationship between owners and workers along the lines of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, as Lukács does, untenable. Horkheimer observes that lodging research and development (‘science’) at the heart of the capitalist enterprise renders the ‘legal owners’ of capital rather more marginal (Horkheimer, 1972: 235). He attributes great significance to the fact that economic domination is increasingly channeled through formal organizations, in which visible hierarchical relations are between specialists/managers and workers – or, in the state, between officials and clients – with the former themselves being subject to employee role demands that they neither define nor control. None of this necessarily obviates the basic Marxian point that capitalism is a system where profit is based on the exploitation of labor power, but if Marx’s theory of surplus value is supposed to reveal the class-based domination taking place behind the appearances of voluntary market transactions, Horkheimer’s point is that it no longer accomplishes this: a stratified class structure is in place, but is maintained through a network of autonomous state and private organizations. ⁹

In Horkheimer and Adorno’s subsequent conception of later stage capitalism, they deem social integration to be heavily dependent on political and cultural power (as opposed to market systems, as in Marx and Lukács), but unlike Hegel, the political process that accomplishes this does not allow individuals to locate themselves within a defined set of relations of production or understand how their interests harmonize with those of differently positioned others; rather, it obscures the possibility of this sort of recognition and belonging. Their position is importantly influenced by Friedrich Pollock’s writings on ‘state capitalism’ (Pollock, 1982). Pollock argues that the concentration of capital and monopolization of industry that Marx anticipated lead to changes in the relationship between state and civil society that he did not foresee: if the ‘liberal’ phase of capitalism is characterized by competition among independent owners of capital, passively overseen by the state’s legal apparatus, state capitalism is characterized by a relatively smaller constellation of large, vertically organized, increasingly bureaucratic business concerns whose relationship to each other is less intensely competitive, and more actively managed through the state, which has a recognized interest in preventing economic crises from occurring. ¹⁰

Horkheimer builds on Pollock and Weber, defining what he calls an ‘authoritarian state’ by the ability of administrative power to accomplish non-mediational integration by co-opting opposed group interests into the state (Horkheimer, 1982: 98). If Marx is aware of tendencies toward monopolizing concentrations of power, it is Weber who has a livelier sense of this trend working at all levels of social organization (Bendix, 1974). For Marx, the political organization of class interests should counteract their being obscured by commodity fetishism, but Weber and Horkheimer see how this may prove double-edged: the organization of material interests opens the possibility of elites enacting ‘closure’ over their sphere of influence (Weber 1978: 342). Authoritarian states are characterized by incompatibilities of interests between labor and capital, large industry and stockholders, political, military, and cultural elites and the masses. But the precedence of power and formal codes over group solidarity in the upper echelons of social groups creates a false reconciliation, as the benefits of coexistence among elites counteract the substantive incompatibility of the different class interests they supposedly represent: ‘State capitalism sometimes seems almost like a parody of the classless society’ (Horkheimer, 1982: 114). The institutionalization of group interests leads to organizations becoming not so much vehicles for the expression of these incompatible interests, and more self-sustaining centers of social power. Adorno’s quip that class conflict in late capitalism has become ‘the history of gang wars and rackets’ (Adorno, 2003: 100) mirrors his colleague Kirchheimer’s description of the political sphere in terms of balance-of-power politics conducted among organizational elites that have become unmoored from underlying class dynamics (Kirchheimer, 1982).

Horkheimer and Adorno conclude that while it remains the case that individuals have vastly different interests at stake regarding the preservation of the socio-economic status quo, and that these interests can be understood in terms of qualitatively different relations that groups have to the forces of production, the technocratic administration of this order reifies the appearance of the social world: the manner in which a person’s identity and place are mediated by social relations of recognition and domination is obscured, appearing instead as the fate of an isolated individual enmeshed in a vast network of action systems beyond their control and (for the most part) comprehension.

Habermas: reification and reconciliation at the ‘interchanges’ between system and lifeworld

That Habermas represents some departure from these gloomy reflections is clear, however, the degree and manner of the departure is less so. Rather than simply viewing him as countering Horkheimer and Adorno by offering a more ‘upbeat’ account of reason’s universality and emancipatory potential, and the rationality of the democratic constitutional state, I argue that we can interpret Habermas – when Theory of Communicative Action and Between Facts and Norms are taken together – as a sort of dialectical synthesis of Hegel and Adorno/Horkheimer that attempts to conceive the political process as a struggle to balance and reconcile differentiated group interests amidst ‘latent class conflict’ (Habermas, 1971: 37ff).

Like his predecessors, Habermas views this latency as a ‘reification effect’, while conceptualizing reification as a ‘colonization’ of the communicatively integrated ‘lifeworld’ by market and administrative systems, which disrupts the ‘symbolic reproduction’ of the lifeworld. ¹¹ While I lack space here to give a full account of the way that Habermas uses these terms, the idea is that when some action coordination or socialization process previously dependent upon conferral of recognition or the achievement of understanding through ordinary language is replaced by a system of ‘media’ (i.e. money and power), this can have pathological side effects, most notably in the forms of discontent and disconnection (alienation, anomie, etc.) (Habermas, 1987: 140–8). The basic architecture of Habermas’ theory is, therefore, very Lukácsian: a fundamental level of normatively regulated, rational, human sociality (e.g. social labor for Lukács, communication for Habermas) is supplanted or ‘colonized’ by autonomous systems of instrumental action. Habermas is more ecumenical than some of his predecessors in holding that the spread of markets and systems of administrative rationality may equally produce reification effects. So although he is more inclined than Lukács to see legal-administrative rationalization as the dominant form that this overlay takes (Habermas 1987: 338–43), what more starkly separates him from the tradition of Western Marxism is the relative sanguinity with which he regards this legally enabled spread of systems rationality, which apparently shares more with Weber than with Lukács et al.

For Weber, the spread of autonomous bureaucratic systems is an inexorable tendency of an increasingly complex modern world, and while he allows that we may regret its side effects (i.e. ‘the disenchantment of the world’ and ‘the iron cage’), it is normatively unimpeachable in the sense of being rational and, at a certain point, inevitable. The rationalization of administration produces these side effects because modern legal persons are subject to a vast amount of law, most of which they are unaware of, or have a vague to nonexistent sense of the legislative rationale behind it, but which nevertheless massively impacts their life prospects. The best case that Weber makes for the rationality of this acquiescence is an appeal to a thin version of Hegelian ethical life: law’s legitimacy normally rests on little more than our sense that it is based, somewhere down the line, on efficient technologies and reliable knowledge (Weber 1981: 179).

While Habermas accepts much of this as an account of modern legal development, his stoicism regarding this obscurity does not extend as far, as for Weber it implies jettisoning the notion that legitimacy depends on justification. Habermas, on the contrary, has long defended the thesis that any society featuring group-based stratification in the distribution of status, wealth, and power is subject to functional demands for legitimation, on the hypothesis that joint participants in social systems that produce unequal outcomes require some justification for this inequality as a condition for their compliance, in the long run (Habermas, 1979). Traditionally, such requirements have been met by overarching (usually religious) worldviews – Marx’s ‘ideology in general’. However, Habermas contends that the differentiation of modern society into lifeworld and a variety of market and administrative sub-systems, along with the ‘functional differentiation’ of the lifeworld itself into specialized discourses, prevents it from being graspable (and hence, legitimated) through ‘basic religious and metaphysical concepts’ (Habermas, 1987: 189; see also Habermas,1996: 66–75). So, if tradition, religion, and ideology cannot furnish a comprehensive, publicly shared sense of the modern legal-political order’s legitimacy, this begs the question of how and whether these functional demands are being met. Following from these conclusions, and in accord with Weber, Habermas accepts that the only credible source of legitimacy for a modern social order must be the rational acceptability of procedures of legal decision-making, rather than some sense that it reflects a substantial moral order (as with religious ideas of social order, natural law, etc.) (Habermas, 1987: 178). And yet, against Weber, Habermas insists that this acceptance needs to be a continuously renewed ‘achievement’ based on intersubjective justification, not a mere background assumption ‘normatively ascribed’ on the basis of the legal order’s purported rationality and necessity – or rather, to the extent that such a demand can be met by the latter sort of technocratic ideology, this cannot per hypothesis be accomplished without dysfunctional consequences (Habermas 1971: 113; 1996: 436).

It is within this context that Habermas offers his own thesis concerning the fate of potentially transformative class dynamics in capitalist societies: they are still, as Marx held, structured by an unequal and antagonistic class structure. However, these divisions are less the visible result of class conflict, than of a diffuse and anonymous system of administration, resulting in the suppression of class-consciousness. Class-based exploitation continues to exist, but the discontent it engenders is displaced – mainly onto alienation and anomic social pathologies – rather than being channeled directly into political discourse about what Habermas calls the crucial ‘interchange roles’ between system and lifeworld of ‘employee and consumer’ (economy), ‘client and citizen’ (state): ‘conflicts that do not appear primarily in class-specific forms and yet go back to a class structure that is displaced to systematically integrated domains of action’ (Habermas, 1987: 350). To the extent that the spread of legal regulation that supplants ideologically-backed power is understood by those affected as an autonomous, quasi-natural process, the normative expectations of persons – in their roles as workers and consumers, citizens and state clients – are ‘normalized’ (Habermas, 1987: 349), i.e. ‘rendered innocuous’ as a site of contestation and democratic self-determination.

If this is correct, administratively driven reification tends to neutralize recognition of social/class power operating through legislation and adjudication: the immediate appearance of social inequality is the product of opaque forces operating through institutions that present themselves as fair, just, and/or (in the case of courts and administrative agencies) apolitical in the sense of being above the partisan fray (Kennedy, 1997). It is in this regard that Habermas’ references to class conflict being ‘normalized’ are so ambiguous and potentially misleading: it may be the case that along with the amelioration of pauperization within advanced capitalist societies that the welfare state has accomplished, the legal mediation of class has neutralized it as the sort of transformative social conflict that so much Marxist theory held it to be. But at the same time, it has diminished the scope for democratic self-determination by ossifying and naturalizing the interchange roles through which persons participate in systemically organized domains of action coordination, in turn undermining, as Honneth puts it, ‘the communicative infrastructure which is the basis of a cooperative mobilization and elaboration of feelings of injustice’ (2007: 217). And it seems unnecessary to conclude, as Habermas strongly suggests, that this ‘normalization’ is such a firmly established feature of modern societies that social movements could not be persuasive in ascribing greater political agency to the existence of unequal statuses and outcomes presently seen as the quasi-natural result of legal administration.

To illustrate this, consider how Habermas’ ‘interchange roles’ could (if not subject to reification effects) function in a manner that in some important ways resembles Hegel’s estates. The estates, recall, mediate between particular individuals – their needs, abilities, statuses and values – and the larger economic and political systems into which their actions are incorporated. They do this by providing an institutionally anchored vantage point from which individuals become cognizant of how their particularity contributes to the universal, the totality of which they are a part. The estates are normative in the double sense of being prescriptive (i.e. of values appropriate to one’s estate) and recognitive (i.e. giving a sense of what one’s contribution is owed, in terms of esteem and material security), and Hegel holds that the harmonious interplay of state and market systems depends on participants internalizing these responsibilities and expectations. Although Habermas’ frequent use of system-theoretic language of ‘autonomous’ systems of ‘norm-free sociality’ can obscure this point, he too holds that systems do need to coax semi-voluntary performances out of persons in order to function, and the internalization of interchange roles facilitates this, just as the disappointment of normative expectations associated with them can create dysfunctions, either in the systems themselves, or anomic social pathologies.

By making the estates positive political institutions, Hegel makes the state responsible for addressing disruptions in the satisfaction of internalized role expectations. Clearly, there are significant differences between this and Habermas’ interchange roles: the latter are more general (most everyone inhabits them, in one form or another), not institutionalized in a directly positive manner, and thus do not confer the same sense of belonging. But one of the main reasons that it is difficult to overcome the impression that the estates are authoritarian institutions is that membership in them involves being ascribed a concrete identity, which, while not fully determinative, is nevertheless prescriptive in terms of occupation, lifestyle, and ethical values. ¹² For Habermas, on the other hand, the modernization processes associated with the ambiguous, liberating-yet-dislocating phenomena of the decline in the public authority of tradition and ‘metaphysical’ worldviews, create a social world in which the ethical value of self-determination is more genuinely paramount (not to mention unavoidable) than for Hegel, where persons are increasingly expected to ‘find themselves’ amidst a swirl of demands and contingency (Habermas, 1992: 193–200; 1996: 94–9). If Hegel hopes that persons will become reconciled to such things through inclusion in traditional organizations like the estates, for Habermas any similar such reconciliation must be an ongoing achievement among participants themselves.

Given that it has come to be Habermas’ view that class stratification and cultural pluralism are indefeasible consequences of the differentiation of society into system and lifeworld (Heath, 2009), this is a process that can never be completed. Modern persons are subject to a complex division of labor, sometimes-Kafkaesque bureaucratic systems, and a class structure that, if not wholly determinative of life prospects, nevertheless massively impacts them. It is through the interchange roles that individuals conceive of themselves as (to some minimal degree) voluntarily participating in these (to some degree divisive and unequal) structures: they norm behavior and shape expectations (for preference satisfaction, material security, esteem, civic participation, etc.) that can be satisfied or frustrated. Reconciliation (in the active, rational Hegelian sense of the term) with one’s integration into these systems depends on the ability to conceive of one’s self as an active participant in a political process that aims at the rational, consensual organization of the domains of work and consumption, political participation and the regulation of the public and private spheres for the common good, in a way that reasonably balances competing interests, and more ambitiously, seeks to articulate generalizable interests among differently positioned and abled others – or at least discloses the possibility of such a thing. It is mainly through the political configuration and contestation of these interchange roles that the class and status inequality appear as something other than just a second nature, a cruel or fortunate contingency, and therefore something that reconciliation with can appear as a (fraught) possibility. This is not a new idea for Habermas. In 1963, he writes:

The rights to freedom, property, and security… are based on an integration of the interests, of all the organizations acting in relation to the state, and in turn controlled by an internal as well as external public sphere. This integration has to be continually constituted in a democratic manner. (Habermas, 1973: 117)

Nearly two decades later, in Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas specifies the interchange roles as the mediators between particular individuals and general interests embodied in the constitution and state, with the normative expectations attaching to them being the site at which this ‘continual constitution’ through democratic discourse ought to take place. The consciousness of oneself as active in this process would be as close to ‘reconciliation’ with ‘totality’ that Habermas’ theory allows. But even this simulacrum of reconciliation seems blocked by the reification effects: interchange roles are, as Habermas puts it, ‘rooted’ in the lifeworld, meaning that their articulation, interpretation, internalization, etc. – and ultimately, the normative validity of the duties and entitlements they entail – are dependent upon shared understandings of situation types consensually developed through the use of natural languages. But, the hypothesis of Habermas’ colonization thesis is that the interchange roles start to appear as a ‘second nature’, wholly determined by the functional requirements of the systems themselves, compelling individuals to understand themselves merely as the subjects of demands foisted upon them by systems of disparate action types that are governed by their own, internal logics.

Adorno writes that, ‘Inasmuch as society remains a product of human activity, its living subjects are still able to recognize themselves in it, as from across a great distance’ (1992: 63). But if it is the case that today, as he posits, the concept of society ceases to be meaningful (at least to positivistic social science), this is due to the fact the processes through which individuals relate themselves to one another have lost their social character, becoming opaque or mechanistic, reducing individuals to a bundle of roles and needs (Adorno, 2003: 109). We find Habermas echoing this thought when reflecting on the naturalization of the interchange roles wrought by the effects of colonization: one might predict that the injury and disrespect felt by individuals as a result of alienating labor and income inequality, commodified consumerism, bureaucratic paternalism, and the lack of meaningful opportunities for political participation (among the ‘dysfunctions’ possible at the site of the interchange roles) would force ‘competition between forms of social and systems integration’ to ‘openly come to the fore’. However, colonization has the effect of ‘preventing holistic interpretations [of society] from coming into existence’ (Habermas, 1987: 355). Thus, to the extent that colonization obscures the possibility for the interchange roles becoming sites of democratic discourse, inequalities and injuries that result from the operation of market and administrative systems tend to become depoliticized rather than perceived as class-based injustices.

Habermas’s turn toward normative legal and political theory in the 1990s is often thought to represent more abandonment than continuation of the critique of reification and its effect on the social dynamics of advanced capitalism. Although Habermas has done some things to buttress this impression, I want to close by arguing that it is hardly a necessary one. As we have just seen, Habermas is in accord with the long line of Left Hegelian thought that views the freedom and autonomy of the individual as dependent upon rationally achieved reconciliation between the particularity of the individual and the demands of sociality (Baynes, 2002). Moreover, like Hegel, he views the possibility for such a thing as dependent upon the existence of some institutionally anchored perspective from which persons can perceive the group differences to which they are subject as being consensually configured. He eventually arrives at the thought that a society’s legal constitution could offer this perspective, provided that it be understood, interpreted, and applied in a manner that counteracts the reifying effects that often result from the day-to-day operation of market and administrative systems – this would amount to the recovery of a ‘holistic interpretation of society’ under ‘postmetaphysical conditions’. This begs the question of what a conception of law that resisted these reifying tendencies would amount to, but what is not often appreciated about Habermas’ later work is that it aims to furnish precisely this in the form of a ‘proceduralist paradigm of law’ (Hedrick, 2010; Ingram, 2002, 2010).¹³ Built into that model is the recognition that the more that complex, modern societies use law for political steering and social planning, the greater the burden of legitimation on its democratic genesis, i.e. for individuals to be able to grasp law as a social relation continuously reconstituted through intersubjective justification and rearticulation.

This militates toward the need for democratic society to be oriented around a reflexive legal paradigm that makes the criterion of legal equality appropriate to a certain context itself an object of deliberation among those affected (Habermas, 1996: 415). The impression exists that this intensified focus on normative legal theory and constitutional rights is a reversion to a Rousseauian-Kantian model of politics, behind Hegel’s suspicion of abstract universalism and Marx’s critique of ‘the rights of man’, and thereby retreating from the Hegelian aspiration of a politically mediated reconciliation toward the division of labor and the Marxian motif of politicizing/contesting class domination. But it should be observed that Habermas has a broad conception of constitutionalism that connotes the spine of institutions through which a society recognizes itself as an integrated whole (Habermas, 2008b: 328). Thus, in order to actualize their integrative potential, constitutional discourse should be seen as vehicles for the ongoing construction of generalizable interests in the face of persistent difference of status and class inequality.

The reconciliatory potential of a proceduralist paradigm of law needs to conceive of the interchange roles from the Theory of Communicative Action as sites of democratic discourses of justification and contestation, in a way that Habermas does not make plain. He has trended toward the thought that, however severe the normative presuppositions for genuinely legitimate democratic deliberations may be, we ought not to be unrealistically demanding in our views about the conditions for the possibility of a proceduralist model of law being relevant to actually existing constitutional democracies. He hopes that it makes sense to think of existing systems of democratic lawmaking as ‘self-correcting learning process[es]’ that facilitate the formulation of, and are responsive to, justice claims, amidst class stratification and cultural pluralism (rather than viewing the overcoming of those divisions as a precondition for legitimate discourse) (Habermas, 2006). Still, Habermas should be more clear that the stabilization of large-scale group political conflicts over the terms and appropriate expectations attached to employee/consumer and citizen roles is as much a cause for concern as celebration, so long as we think that this stabilization is based, at most, on what he once called ‘pseudo-compromises’ (i.e. not fully discursively redeemed) (Habermas, 1971: 112), or at worst, as a result of the interchange roles vanishing as topics on the political agenda as a result of reification effects.

While it would be implausible to maintain that all current struggles for social justice and recognition can be conceived within its orbit, I hope to have credibly indicated why the conception of reification attaching to Habermas’ system/lifeworld social theory (which members of the post-Habermasian waves of critical theory often give the impression of wanting to discard) has unexplored potentials and ought to play a vital role in critical social theory today. Following Horkheimer, and more recently Nancy Fraser, we can agree that status-based hierarchies, rather than becoming relatively epiphenomenal as Marx predicted, are re-entwined with class-based exploitation in contemporary capitalist societies (Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 54–9). Habermas may acknowledge the analytic dualism between distributional and recognitional justice claims that Fraser urges (Fraser, 2009: 48–75; Habermas, 2008a: 294) – the reflexivity in his proceduralist paradigm of law after all demands that participants themselves be able to thematize their discontent with the laws that affect them in terms of denials of either formal or material equality, depending on their experience. But the integrated perspective on Habermas’ theory developed here permits a kind of diagnostic and explanatory depth not present in his successors, for we can also employ his conception of reification to critically analyze possible reasons why such discontent may be hazily perceived by individuals and/or not effectively thematized at the group level. In this way, Habermas avoids a charge that Honneth has leveled at Fraser (which, in a way, mirrors the Horkheimer’s circle’s trepidation regarding Lukács), namely, that in abjuring an explanatory account of why social conflicts do or do not appear, and take the shape that they do, her theory hitches itself to the actual mobilization of ‘new’ social movements, ‘merely affirming the existing level of conflict’ (Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 134). Habermas thereby preserves the aspiration of Marxian critique to gather individual pathologies (e.g. alienation) and distributional injustice within the same theoretical framework, as does Honneth, but Habermas’ stress on the legal system’s role both in producing reifications effects at the site of the interchange roles, as well orienting normative aspirations for reconciliation through these role expectation adds a level of historical/institutional specificity to the diagnostic end of his theory that Honneth tends to downplay (Chari, 2010). Finally, regarding the normative dimension of his theory, Habermas’ assumption that class stratification is inevitable in functionally differentiated societies may or may not be the case, but drawing from Hegel’s estates model, I have sought to indicate that modern states’ aspirations for legitimacy substantially depend on ongoing efforts to configure differential statuses and material outcomes (if they cannot be presently overcome) in a reasonable and visible manner that at least strives for the construction of common goods and shared interests. As Hegel is, in moments, willing to recognize, this may involve as much contestation as reconciliation. Seen in this light, it would be desirable for class stratification to be politicized rather than normalized, and if, as Habermas’ conceptual apparatus suggests, this normalization is substantially a result of ‘juridification’, then what is needed are theoretical methods and practical strategies for highlighting the role of the legal system in the production of social inequality.