Member of a school or exponent of a paradigm? Jürgen Habermas and critical theory

Introduction: ‘The Frankfurt School’ – a myth?

There are many studies which talk of a Frankfurt School in the context of intellectual history. ¹ Despite all their differences, these approaches all arrive, implicitly or explicitly, at a remarkable and, one might say, paradoxical conclusion. They describe the object of their investigation in general terms as the ‘Frankfurt School’ and refer to an intellectual construction that is said to be determined by a consistent cognitive, social and historical identity. ² Its cognitive identity is linked, on the one hand, to an orientation to the humanistic tradition of the European Enlightenment, and, on the other, to Marx’s critique of capitalism and Freud’s critical analysis of the human subject. Its social identity is documented with the Jewish origins of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School and their experience as outsiders. Its historical identity is most often defined by the publication of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, edited by Max Horkheimer since 1931, for the Institut für Sozialforschung, and the fact that the Institute itself was the beneficiary of a private foundation which provided the institutional conditions for intellectual freedom. ³ But what is more concretely claimed by this use of the term ‘School’ appears, however, as a more conjectural attribution. There are, therefore, good reasons to doubt whether the Frankfurt School can be identified as a close circle of scholars, linked by brotherly solidarity and aiming to preserve something like the unity of a theoretical structure, still less the purity of a doctrine. This image of a Frankfurt School can be shown at the outset to be, on closer inspection, an over-interpretation, the imputation of an orthodoxy to quite independent and dissimilar thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, Erich Fromm and Fritz Pollock, to name only a few. There is also another equally questionable but persistent claim: that the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, born in 1929, who occupied Horkheimer’s former chair from 1964 to 1972 and was then again, from 1983 to 1994, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, was the representative of a ‘second generation’ of the Frankfurt School or critical theory.

Before going further into the question whether Habermas is to be located in the tradition of critical theory, I should briefly recall what was originally intended by this self-description of critical theory or the Frankfurt School, in order to provide a more solid basis for deciding whether or not it is correct to assign Jürgen Habermas to this circle of very diverse philosophical thinkers.

The tradition of critical theory as upholding a better alternative

As is well known, it was Horkheimer who first employed the term ‘critical theory’ in an article published in 1937 in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. This concept was intended at the time to outline the profile of the new research programme of the Institute of Social Research, now associated with Columbia University in New York, with the Director updating his conception of social theory and distinguishing it from what he called traditional theory. (Horkheimer, 1999 [1937]: 188–243). ⁴ By this, he meant a rationalist and positivist approach oriented to the ideal of the natural sciences and represented by the line of thought from Descartes to Carnap. In contrast to this, and also to the purely speculative currents of idealist metaphysics, Horkheimer defines his conception of theory, which at this time was intended to stand programmatically for the journal and for the Institute for Social Research, as critical: it is to be guided by an investigation of the way in which the division of labour in the individual sciences functions merely to reproduce what exists in a given society. The two essential conditions for critical thought were, for Horkheimer, first, the analysis of the causes of oppression, i.e. of the economic mechanisms which determine the repressive structures of society, and, second, an empathetic participation in the experience of social suffering. The knowledge-guiding interest of a critical theory was aimed at individual and collective emancipation which would lead to a society without exploitation. Here Horkheimer retained both the (Hegelian and Marxist) idea of a universal subject acting in history and also the primacy of productive labour as a force for self-realization and self-emancipation. As in Marx’s early writings, social labour is for Horkheimer the primary social relation: moreover ‘the idea of a reasonable organization of society that will meet the needs of the whole community, [is] immanent in human work’ (Horkheimer, 1999 [1937]: 213). This programmatic article therefore presents critical theory as a theory of the rational organization of the social labour process.

Despite these attempts to make the conception of critical theory more precise, Horkheimer himself puts in question at the end of his essay the practical prospects of this scientific programme. With the defeat of the labour movement and a historical situation of fascist regimes in Europe which is leading towards the ‘darkest barbarism’ (Horkheimer, 1999 [1937]: 241–2), there can be ‘no general criteria for judging the critical theory as a whole’. Thus, ‘critical theory has no specific influence on its side, except concern for the abolition of social injustice. This negative formulation, if we wish to express it abstractly, is the materialist content of the idealist concept of reason.’

This historically grounded scepticism of the Institute’s director towards the contemporary resonance and future prospects of a critical theory –for which Adorno was to use the revealing metaphor of the ‘message in a bottle’ ⁵ – contrasts with the fact that in the following decades there has been a growing tendency in the scholarly community and in the public to speak of a paradigm, ⁶ ostensibly identified as the ‘core’ of critical theory in the singular. This was encouraged by the fact that, after the end of the Second World War and the return of Horkheimer and Adorno, the Institut für Sozialforschung was re-established in 1951 at the University of Frankfurt. The two philosophers and sociologists were able through their teaching to achieve a growing impact, though each in their own distinctive way. This diversity must be stressed as much as the kind of family resemblance between them (Breuer, 1988, Faber and Ziege, 2008). Adorno in particular achieved in the 1950s and 1960s, through his intellectual activity in the public sphere, his numerous articles and essays in daily papers and magazines on cultural matters and public affairs and his presence in the evening discussion programmes of many radio stations, the diffusion and even popularization of a style of thought which was briskly identified with Frankfurt, where this left intellectual came from and worked. Despite his prominence in the media, he did not allow himself to be taken over by it. In Adorno’s thought, the gesture of refusal and intransigence is fundamental, and as an intellectual he always adopted an outsider position that ⁷ – as he described himself to Horkheimer – ‘sets as an a priori the deepest loneliness and the impossibility in principle of conformism in what one thinks and says’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2003: 374).

Whereas the concept of critical theory can be referred to the complex problematic developed by Horkheimer, focused on the antagonisms of a society which is unthinkingly destroying itself, the term ‘Frankfurt School’, which has been in use since the 1960s, is an external attribution which has increased its media impact at the cost of distortion. The correspondence which has since been published between Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and others is clear proof that the group of people assigned to the Frankfurt School were not exponents of a doctrine but rather a collection of distinctive and independent thinkers who not only asserted their intellectual autonomy but pursued open or concealed controversies among themselves. There is no coherence in the styles of thought, for example, between Adorno’s dialectical negativism, Horkheimer’s metaphysical pessimism and the utopianism of Marcuse’s ‘new human being’, nor can one speak of a basic group solidarity even between the internally most influential members of the Institute. When Adorno occasionally referred to the ‘spirit of the house’ in relation to the Frankfurt Institute, ⁸ that was either meant ironically or was just a euphemism. Mutual loyalty had its limits when pursuing radically different approaches to questions of the foundations of a modern philosophy and a social theory which was diagnostically effective. ⁹ Unlike Adorno, whose philosophical thought displays an astonishing continuity and singularity, unlike Marcuse, who retains the themes of Horkheimer’s early critique of capitalism, Horkheimer himself after his return in no way revived his conception of critical theory. For a long time he even had reservations about republishing, even as documents, his programmatic essays from the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung under the title ‘Critical Theory’ (for more details, see Albrecht et al., 1999: 367 ff.; and see also Habermas, 1993: 61–77).

This clearly exemplifies the historian of sociology Jerzy Szacki’s assertion that the term school is most often ‘unreflectively introduced’. Its stereotyping use leads to the falsification of ‘the image of the real state of affairs’ (Szacki, 1981: 17; 24). ¹⁰ But if the concept of ‘school’ is too imprecise and beside the point, does the group working in the Institut für Sozialforschung satisfy the criteria established by Thomas S. Kuhn (1962) for the existence of a research community? Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse shared a series of intellectual motifs and problematics and a preliminary conception about the status and perspectives of critical theory. But the circle representing this theory was not attached to a closed paradigm in its philosophical orientations, ¹¹ which would serve as a basis for collective research work on problems. It is true that the Institute claimed also to be a research site for what Kuhn called normal science, for example, in the Studien über Autorität und Familie or the Studies in Prejudice. However, these empirical social research projects can hardly represent the programme of critical theory defended by Horkheimer, conceived as serving the mobilization of the consciousness of the revolutionary subject. ¹² Thus, despite the extensive research activity deliberately planned by Horkheimer, accompanied by the routinized accumulation of knowledge, Kuhn’s conception of the paradigmatic phase can hardly be applied to the work conducted under the roof of the Institut für Sozialforschung.

‘Frankfurt School’ is a label which in [West] Germany came into use in the debate on the logic of the social sciences at the beginning of the 1960s. In his Introduction to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, Adorno (Adorno et al., 1976: 65) said of this label that the existence of a Frankfurt School was one of the ‘conceptions to which the opponents of dialectics … pay homage’, in order to differentiate their position of ‘critical rationalism’ from dialectical thinking, seen as obsolete. This polemical touch is matched by Adorno’s remark in his introductory lecture, Einleitung in die Soziologie of 1968, where he describes his own position as that ‘which people now call tant bien que mal the “Frankfurt School”’ (Adorno, 1993: 147, 217).

In this last lecture, which Adorno, who died in 1969, delivered on the topic of ‘Introduction to Sociology’, he repeatedly indicates his agreement with the article on ‘Analytic Theory of Science and Dialectics’ with which the young Habermas – after the debate between Adorno and Popper in 1961 at the Tübingen conference of the German Sociological Association – launched the second round of the positivism dispute, the controversy between himself and Hans Albert. It is no exaggeration to interpret Adorno’s numerous references in his lecture as an attempt to incorporate Habermas, to identify him as a representative of critical theory so as to give it a new intellectual weight with a view to future perspectives. Habermas himself nowhere uses the term Frankfurt School in his first contribution to the positivism dispute, nor later, in his reply to Hans Albert’s ‘The Myth of Total Reason’ in 1964 (which appeared in the same year in the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie under the title ‘Gegen einen positivistisch halbierten Rationalismus. Erwiderung eines Pamphlets’). ¹³ Habermas does defend and explicate the epistemological foundations of a dialectical social theory, as Adorno opposes it to Popper’s method of deductive testing of scientific hypotheses. But Habermas, who had been Adorno’s assistant from 1956 to 1959 at the Institut für Sozialforschung, and among other things had participated at that time in empirical projects on the political consciousness of students (see Habermas et al., 1961), ¹⁴ was above all concerned in the controversy with developing, through the confrontation between critical theory and critical rationalism, preliminary reflections for an independent conception of an epistemology, the goal of which was to be a theory of knowledge in the form of a social theory (Wellmer, 1971 [1969]; Dahms, 1994: 363 ff.).

He was indeed concerned in the first part of his essay with taking up Adorno’s dialectical concept of totality and his postulate of unrestricted experience and developing further arguments for them. He did not, however, want to stick with an affirmative continuation of Adorno’s critique of positivism (see McCarthy, 1978: 40–53; Habermas, 1982b: 7f.). Rather, the second and more substantial part of his discussion is centred – along with the emphatic critique of the objectivistic self-understanding of the sciences, a criticism of the programme of unified science and the establishment of self-reflection as a critical method – on another theme, namely, the constructive attainment of certainty on the scope and limits of the hypothetico-deductive methodology of the analytic-empirical approach for which, according to Habermas, a technical cognitive interest is constitutive.

Reading it half a century later, it is clear that in this essay Habermas sympathizes not so much with Adorno’s theory of knowledge, whose philosophical origin he traces back to Hegel’s dialectical logic, as with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. He was in touch with Gadamer at this time, having been appointed in 1961 as Ausserordentlicher Professor of Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. His critical engagement with Gadamer’s hermeneutic approach and with his major work Truth and Method of 1960 is also relevant (Habermas, 1988: 143–75). Against this background it is noteworthy that Habermas idiosyncratically attempts to assimilate the dialectical method of cognition to a ‘hermeneutic explication of meaning’ (1982b:18). Admittedly, Habermas defines himself in his first contribution to the positivism debate, which he wrote for Adorno’s Festschrift on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, ¹⁵ as a dialectician who at that time still defends the concept of totality against that of system, and derives dualisms such as those between praxis und technology, natural laws and social norms, decisions and facts. But what he is working on in this text and then above all in the substantial literature survey of 1967 on the Logic of the Social Sciences (1988: 89–170 ¹⁶ ), is the problematic of Verstehen or, in Habermas’s words, the access to the ‘symbolically prestructured object domain’ (Habermas, 1982a: 274). One can say without exaggeration that in the development of Habermas’s social theory these epistemological reflections – through to his book Knowledge and Human Interests of 1968 – were the catalyst for him after all to abandon the attempts at an epistemological foundation of the standards of critique which would update the project of a critical theory (Habermas, 2000). Instead of this, he develops, no later than the Christian Gauss Lectures, which he delivered in the course of a six-week guest professorship at Princeton University in February and March 1971, the independent conception of a communication theory of society, which sees itself, as is frequently overlooked, not as a transformation but as a complete alternative to the critical theory of society. ¹⁷ It is therefore understandable that in interviews and essays Habermas again and again denies an ‘unbroken identification with Critical Theory’ (1992d: 96). ‘For me,’ he explains point-blank, ‘there was no critical theory, no coherent doctrine’ (Habermas, 1992d: 98). ¹⁸ This clear self-positioning is also the motivation for a lecture which Habermas contributed to a professional symposium in December 1984 on the theme of The Frankfurt School and its Effects. He introduces his ‘Three Theses on the Reception of the Frankfurt School’ with the pointed claim that the ‘unity of this research tradition’ is a ‘fictitious unity’. It is just this lack of unity of the Frankfurt School which explains its great impact, which also derives from the ‘diverse combinations which critical theory entered into with other research approaches’. Habermas draws the conclusion: ‘The suggestive fiction of a unitary school should not divert too much energy into a self-portrait in the history of ideas. We would do better to direct ourselves to the problems themselves’ (Habermas, 1986: 8 f., 11 f.).

This is just what Habermas has done in an original manner. In what follows, the emphasis is on this originality, and on three innovative aspects of Habermas’s social-theoretical paradigm. The three thematic complexes pointed out here are, first, Public Sphere and Language, then Democracy and Constitutional State and, finally, System and Lifeworld as basic categories of a theory of modernity. The accentuation of these theoretical elements will make clear that the commonalities between Habermas’s critical intentions and the perspectives of critical theory are in fact limited to a very general level, in an attachment to the ‘negative idea of abolishing discrimination and harm and of extending relations of mutual recognition to include marginalised men and women’ (Habermas, 1998a [1996]: xxxvi).

Object domains of a communication theory of society

Critique as a discursive practice

The three thematic complexes which map out essential elements of Habermas’s social theory and conceptual apparatus demonstrate that it stands alone, independently of critical theory. ²³ This tradition of thought, as primarily represented by Adorno and Horkheimer, ²⁴ is centred neither on substantial reference points for a theory of language and the public sphere, nor for a developed theory of democracy and the constitutional state. And the theory of modernity, whose architecture Habermas has outlined, is in clear contrast both to the themes of the critique of reason in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and to the elements of a fundamental critique of capitalism, based on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, which exist in a fragmentary form in the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer. These have in common the diagnosis that the capitalist mode of production and the abstract value-form of the commodity are the fundamental evil of antagonistic class societies. This judgement is obviously a different approach to the critique of capitalism from Habermas’s reformist ²⁵ approach, which aims initially to demonstrate the functional deficits of this form of economy, rather than abolish it altogether. Similarly, Habermas’s attempt to bring Marx’s critique of reification up to date in the context of his thesis of the colonization of the lifeworld has only external commonalities with the orthodox conception of universal reification as a necessary feature of commodity exchange, as it was for Adorno, following Georg Lukács (Habermas, 2001c [1998] 130–56). ²⁶ It is also even more striking that Habermas vehemently contests the levelling consequences of the defeatism of reason and rejects from the beginning a construction of the whole of society as a totality (a mystification or Verblendungszusammenhang). ²⁷ Habermas imaginatively treats the problem of an overwhelming purposive rationality in modernity as a critique of functionalist reason: he shows that the dynamic of system rationality is at the cost of the decoupling of the system and the lifeworld (Habermas, 1987 [1981]: 332–73). Habermas also abandoned the conception of ideology as a socially necessary illusion no later than the Theory of Communicative Action. But in his social criticism as a ‘critique of relations of understanding’ (the title of the German-language version of McCarthy, 1978), he retains the principle that these relations can be pervaded by power which results in a pseudo-communicative understanding and which must be uncovered within a theory of systematically distorted communication. ²⁸

A cursory look back to their divergent conceptions of critique ²⁹ shows how Habermas on this decisive point has taken a quite different direction.

For Horkheimer, critique was first of all the diagnosis of a contradiction, measuring the reality of a society in the light of its potential prospects of emancipation, and, second, the diagnosis of the necessarily false consciousness which leads to the misperception of reality. Adorno practises critique as determinate negation, as ‘resistance to everything that is merely posited, that justifies itself with its mere existence’ (Adorno, 1998: 282). For Habermas, by contrast, critique does not have its origin in the negativity of existence: its conditions of possibility result from the immanent rationality potential of communicative action. More precisely, it links the modus operandi of critique to the rules of the practice of justification, according to which there is no (objective) concept of the true and the right prior to any examination or testing. Thus only after a discourse has taken place can something be evident or not evident, and under the different aspects of functional, moral or epistemic rationality. Critical theory’s programme of the critique of ideology is replaced by a reconstructive process ³⁰ which makes things explicit, which uncovers the ‘particularity (Eigensinn)’ of institutionalized and operatively effective normative rationality structures and the tension between the effectiveness of norms and their (discursively tested) ideal validity. This yields what, for Habermas, is the important task, ‘to bring up to date the unexploited normative content … of the system of rights’ (Habermas, 2001b: 144).

A major theme of Habermas’s reconstructive social theory is in fact that it holds back from prescriptive claims or evaluative judgements about what a generally right or good society is or should be. Instead of postulating objective forms of better knowledge (on the part of the theorist), Habermas focuses on the moral point of view and argues for an anti-essentialist conception in which those affected by dramatic malfunctions of a generally unjust and unsolidaristic society themselves become aware of this in processes of mutual agreement.

But insight is compatible with weakness of will. Without the support of complementary processes of socialization and structures of identity, without a background of complementary institutions and normative contexts, a moral judgement that is accepted as valid can establish only one thing: that the insightful addressee then knows he has no reason to act otherwise. (Habermas, 1994 [1991]: 33)

Despite these premises, he stresses that his social theory does not anticipate ideal conditions (of a community of communication); what is constitutive for it is an indeterminacy about what is best for all and it therefore expects dissensus in relation to conceptions of a good life. ³¹ It is also not based, in his view, on the assumption that society as a whole could be shaped only according to the principle of action oriented to mutual understanding. It aims rather at justification: that those dealing with one another in situations of disagreement can more clearly understand, with reasons, what they can be certain or uncertain about. ‘It would be a concretistic fallacy to assume that an emancipated society could consist in nothing but “communication free from domination”’ (Habermas, 1992e: 180).This theory is therefore not normative in relation to the detailed determination of a desired state of society. Rather, it is proceduralist and fallibilist in the sense of ‘a weak transcendental necessity’, to initiate processes of self-clarification (Forst, 1994: 195; Habermas, 1996: 18). What forms of life are just and shaped by solidaristic responsibility for one another, and to this extent can be called worth living, is something that must be discovered – through discourse.

Discourses are procedures, that is specific processes in which something which has become contentious between actors can be made explicit. They bring out the latent and manifest disagreements in the always controversial questions over conceptions of social arrangements. For discourses, Habermas prescribes the (discourse ethical) criteria of an unconstrained practice of argumentation: all participants in the discourse have, as subjects capable of speech and action, an equal opportunity to speak. All can make observations and demand justifications for them. All allow themselves to be guided by the principle of honesty, including to themselves, and mechanisms of constraint inside and outside the discourse are to be excluded.

Habermas distinguishes various types of discourse. Theoretical discourse functions to test truth claims. Practical discourses should clarify claims to normative rightness. The task of aesthetic criticism is to open up to judgement the domain of the expressive, though here without being able to attain an intersubjectively binding agreement. This holds also for the realm of subjective feelings as interpretations of needs, which is the object of a therapeutic critique. The conditions of an ideal speech situation, which regulate discourse in Habermas’s developed discourse ethics, ³² serve as a reference point against which to identify and criticize forms of systematically distorted communication. The rules of discourse are not a fictitious ideal but rather a ‘counterfactual assumption’ which is ‘operatively effective’. He assumes that ‘counterfactual presuppositions become social facts. This critical thorn sticks in the flesh of any social reality that has to reproduce itself via action oriented to understanding’ (Habermas, 1992a [1988]: 47). Anyone who engages in argument must necessarily assume the communicative preconditions of argumentative speech. It remains open, however, whether in a given case they are in fact respected. This holds also for the aims of discourses, even when their form and processes take account of all the requirements (of discourse ethics). All must assume that these aims, the answers which are right for all, can be found, although there can be no certainty of this and no absolute quality for what is discursively arrived at – the good reasons. ³³

Habermas’s claims, which are modest compared to the philosophies of history shaping critical theory, ³⁴ culminate in his discourse theory. Even as a post-metaphysical thinker, he could still retain the aspiration to capture his time in thought. At any rate, his sociological diagnoses of the times do include thoroughly critical analyses of social and political conditions and also statements about what needs to be changed (see, for example, Habermas, 2001c: 91–169). He links the hopes which he invests in the future prospects of democratic procedures ³⁵ with communicative reason. To anticipate its outcome would be self-contradictory: the social theorist’s individual diagnoses and prognoses can only have the status of intelligent contributions to discussion. The rational must be generated in the interactional praxis of mutual understanding – and rejected if new experiences show that it does not entirely correspond to that which deserves universal recognition.

Conclusion