Justice as the sacred in language: Durkheim and Habermas on the ultimate grounds of modernity and critique

Joining classical sociology and contemporary critical theory

From the beginning of the 1970s, Jürgen Habermas started working on a major theoretical and political project that aimed to revise Marxist historical materialism, in order to revive the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School on the bases of a broader interpretation of praxis (Habermas, 1971, 1973, 1979 [1976]). The renewed conception of human and social action was meant to enable a better explanation of the ambivalent nature of the rationalization process as it developed in Western civilization, a first step to diagnose and possibly correct the pathological effects of advanced capitalism (Habermas, 1975 [1973]). To clarify the foundations of this post-Marxist Critical Theory, Habermas first formulated the guidelines of a social theory based on a universal linguistic pragmatics, justifying the almost transcendental status of the norms linked to the validity claims implied in assertive, expressive, and regulative speech acts: truth, truthfulness, and justice (Habermas, 1976, 1998; Cooke, 1994).

Yet, to take advantage of the explanatory and critical resources of his revised conception of praxis, focused on the central role played by linguistic interaction for reciprocal understanding and coordination, Habermas had to develop further a more substantial account of social order and historical development, linking one another in an elaborated view of the global rationalization process having led to modernity. After having questioned the excesses of methodological positivism in the social sciences, denouncing it as part and parcel of a technocratic ideology of rational control (Habermas, 1973 [1968]; see, Adorno, 1976), he thus returned to the social theories of the founding fathers of sociology. Through a philosophical reading of classical sociology, his Theory of Communicative Action revitalized the original interdisciplinary project of the Frankfurt School, greatly helping to redirect cooperative research practices between social sciences and Critical Theory toward rethinking the principles of social order and the causes of historical development as a solid ground to a final conceptual analysis and normative assessment of modern pathologies (Honneth, 1991 [1985]).

In this context, Habermas encouraged the adoption of a new paradigm likely to overcome the shortcomings of the then dominant approaches in the German tradition of Critical Theory, which focused almost exclusively on the consideration of the destructive social effects of instrumental and strategic rationality (Habermas, 1984 [1981a]). He tried to enrich and correct this partial and ultimately self-contradictory view of modernity and critique by taking up the intuitions of an alternative tradition, the one he struggled to articulate by developing the synthetic perspective of communicative action, situated at the crossing point of the American tradition, inaugurated by George Herbert Mead, and the French tradition, founded by Emile Durkheim (Habermas, 1987 [1981b]). In the path leading to the reformulation of Critical Theory’s original project, Habermas confrontation with Durkheim’s sociology represented a particularly decisive step. By advancing the central explanatory hypothesis of a progressive linguistification of the sacred, he was able to, indeed, offer the guidelines for a secular translation of the normative resources provided by the collective religion studied by Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, one that allowed him a new understanding of the missing grounds of social critique, thus orienting the realization of a wholly modern, democratically constituded form of social solidarity.

The leading principle of a discursive rationalization of life-world enabled Habermas to denounce the abusive colonization of ordinary social relations by the instrumental and strategic constraints imposed on actors by the capitalistic market and the bureaucratic State, without relying on the conservative resources provided by specific and local cultural traditions. Instead, he shifted the integrative potential formerly exercised by religion through its practices to the exchanges of public reasons governed by universal norms – truth, truthfulness, and justice – the strength and content of which modern individuals were supposed to understand and foster by sticking to language as used in everyday interactions and within the public sphere. He was then in a good position to show in what sense and to what extent the normative consciousness characteristic of modern societies, together with their distinctive institutions and forms of knowledge, far from resting on the emancipatory ideals created by a particular historical tradition, as he first maintained in his previous works (Habermas, 1989 [1962], 1973 [1963]), only made explicit the normativity already implicit in the language used by humans, since the beginning of history, to know and master the external world, explore and express their inner world, communicate their intentions and coordinate their actions in one and the same meaningful common world (Habermas, 1987 [1985]).

It was an extremely ambitious project. The dramatic events of recent years, especially September 11 (Borradori et al., 2003), have come to reveal, however, the residual illusion hidden in this fundamentally progressive perspective, explicitly conceived as a philosophical and sociological justification of the expectations horizons opened in the West by the French Enlightenment. If Habermas already proved aware of the dangers entailed by a too self-confident reliance on the modern project issued from the French Revolution, ¹ he recently radicalized his critical stance toward the intrinsic limits of naïve enlightened critique, to the point of contemplating an overt revision of the modern conceptual constellation, inherited from the eighteenth century, toward a more systematic consideration of the place and function of religion in history and modernity (Habermas, 2015 [2012]). As he has himself pointed out, the growing asthenia of typically modern emancipatory ideals, starting with the core normative reference to individual and collective autonomy, now requires rethinking their remote historical sources as well as their complex social meaning, even more so as this void meets today the unexpected vitality of traditional religious movements.

To overcome the perplexity of those liberal minds wondering how to interpret the fact that in the heart of modern Western societies flourish confessions and doctrines rooted in the most ancient practices of worship, Habermas has finally come to question some basic assumptions of his rationalist theory of society and history. Joining with rare intellectual audacity political issues about the place that needs to be done today to religions in public debates with empirical and theoretical reflections about the function of the rite in the constitution of human societies, he is now trying to connect them in the framework of a revised paradigm, likely to break through day the secret of the sacred. Without yielding to the necessity of a secular translation of religious traditions, he has hence moved back to one of the main thesis of Durkheim’s sociology, which he first challenged in its significance for modernity. As he now argues, ritual practices, because they have played such a decisive role in the very process of humanization, still represent this form of collective action, both expressive and symbolic, that feed the common meanings driving the work of reason, to the point of even affecting the content of such a fundamental requirement as justice (Habermas 2008 [2005], 2015 [2012]).

It is this double movement of departure and return to Durkheim’s sociology of religion that I will analyze in this article. In what follows, I will first reconstruct Habermas partial appropriation of the Elementary Forms, highlighting how, in The Theory of Communicative Action, he used Durkheim’s work in order to assign a phylogenetic function to ritual practices. In his first perspective, rites were conceived as an evolutionary device having helped an already existing yet rudimentary symbolic order, made up of gestures and signals, to develop and became an autonomous medium regulating, through conventional signs, a distinctively moral cooperation between finally constitued human beings. Ritual practices were seen here as having provided language’s immanent norms with a collective strength that enabled them to develop and acquire a non-functional status. Habermas could thus think sociohistorical evolution as the progressive linguistification of the sacred realized in time by the critical transformation of inherited traditions in the light of those normative requirements he finally made explicit in his universal pragmatics. As he explicitly stated, the utopic perspective of reconciliation and freedom, first emerged in European modernity, was here considered as already implicitly contained in the communicative socialization of individuals guaranteed by the linguistic mechanisms of reproduction of the species.

After having critically discussed the two main objections Habermas addressed to Durkheim at the time of The Theory of Communicative Action, I will then show how, in the context of a still evolving theoretical framework, he recognizes today the validity for modernity of the socioanthropological thesis advanced in The Elementary Forms. Indeed, he now sees ritual practices not as a past evolutionary device, being at most an evanishing residue in modern societies, but as a structural anthropological ground, making social solidarity possible by giving to language immanent requirements, not only their peculiar normative force but also their proper semantic content. It is especially the case of the requirement of justice. Now considered as exceeding the natural needs implied in the reproduction of human species, justice appears both as a transcendental norm and a socio-historical ideal, insofar as its content is opened to the enrichment provided by the still evolving history of religions that Habermas recognizes as being an integral part of the reflexive appropriation of normativity made by critical reason, as realized by a philosophy working through the social sciences. Having seen in what sense Habermas admits, with Durkheim and his School, that ritual practices are the original and still operative source of social solidarity, as long as they contribute to foster its normative core, I will finally conclude by briefly pointing out the new directions in which the original hypothesis of a linguistification of the sacred must be seriously revised. This will open the way to the question of social justice, seen as the starting point of a new positive cooperation between sociology and Critical Theory, converging in the common task of understanding the conditions of solidarity in a still troubled modernity, needing more than ever a lucid form of critique.

The departure from Durkheim

In the second and more constructive volume of The Theory of Communicative Action, the confrontation with Durkheim’s sociology takes place in the context of an analysis of the phylogenetic functions performed by religion understood in its original element: ritual practices. Further developing the evolutionist perspective first opened through the reading of G. H. Mead’s symbolic interactionism, Habermas used Durkheim’s study of a less complex yet historical society, such as the totemic Australian tribes, in order to analogically reconstruct the archaic social condition of human beings at the beginning of history. In this evolutionist framework, the collective religion Durkheim defined as a complex structure organized around the relation between beliefs and practices, myths and rituals, presents itself in a simplified version as the practical horizon in which the exchange of signals between human beings taken in the process of their self-constitution finally assumed a pragmatic meaning quite irreducible to the purely instrumental and strategic logic that characterizes the interactions between living beings. This is the explanatory perspective developed by Habermas through his original interpretation of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim, 2016 [1912]). ² As he highlights, the symbolic objects used in rituals, such as the totem, can be considered as the first “signs with conventional significations,” sharing the “same semantic core,” encapsulated in “the power of the sacred” (Habermas, 1987 [1981b]: 51). From a phylogenetic point of view, explicit linguistic communication between humans, based on an articulated speech running on normatively fixed meanings, first required, therefore, the self-constitution of a group supporting moral interactions, through the expression in practice of a new communion of minds. Religion as a new kind of normative behavior observable even today in ritual practices is then retrospectively seen, by Habermas, as the missing link in the chain of evolution, breaking the monotonous continuity of individuals fighting for survival.

Following this Durkheimian inspiration, Habermas tries then to grasp in collective religion both the structure of a group identity as well as the origin of personal identity. Indeed, at the beginning of history, social agreement was obviously not yet an achieved consensus between already rational beings since, for human beings to use their reason in discussion, they had first to develop their capacities in and through a language, which first required the existence of a community of belonging. This is why, as he emphasizes, “the identities of individual group members” were established originally with “the identity of the group,” in such a way that both forms of identity converged in one and the same point: “What makes the individual into a person is that in which he agrees with all the other members of his social group,” since the “identity of the person is to begin with only a mirror image of collective identity” (Habermas, 1987 [1981b]: 53). Thus, by securing a mechanical kind of social solidarity, to speak as Durkheim, religious practices based on required similarities of behavior in the use of sacred symbols, constituted at the same time the very rationality of human individuals as persons, giving them access to a normative authority freed from purely natural constraints. As opposed as it is to the modern one, this primordial concept of person would mark the crossing of that “threshold of anthropogenesis” where Mead himself stopped in his speculative reconstruction of the evolution of the symbolic order (Habermas, 1987 [1981b]: 22).

Having closely associated an early autonomous symbolic order with the religious practices in the development of a non-functional normativity, Habermas then quickly measures the consequences of the global changes introduced in social order by the process of rationalization in that very history that collective religion is seen as having inaugurated. He thus seeks in ritual practices the historical source helping us to hypothetically understand and explain how a new normativity developed in the course of the phylogenetic process: the one that language, once became fully articulated speech, subsequently endeavored to support by itself. According to this perspective, sociohistorical evolution would have led the order of communicative interactions to progressively emancipate from its original religious base, leaving any need for a substantive communion behind. As Habermas points out, purely linguistic interaction has indeed assumed in time “the socially integrative and expressive functions that were at first fulfilled by ritual practice,” as it freed itself from any “sacrally protected normative contexts.” In other words, a “disenchantment and disempowering of the domain of the sacred” took place by way of a “linguistification of the ritually secured, basic normative agreement,” thus revealing the “rationality potential in communicative action” (Habermas, 1987 [1981b]: 77). It is precisely this assumption of a progressive discursive rationalization of the sacred by the linguistic construction of a rationally negotiated consensus that Habermas himself recently questioned, in a retrospective reading of his major work thanks to which we can now appreciate the central strategic position occupied by his original confrontation with Durkheim’s sociology. To understand the reasons of this self-criticism, we must first complete the analysis of his initial and quite partial appropriation.

Since the phylogenetic account developed by Mead stopped at the threshold of anthropogenesis, Habermas takes advantage of Durkheim’s sociology of religion to fulfill the main explanatory gap left open. It concerns the genesis of that kind of moral authority Mead referred to by speaking of a generalized Other. In Mead’s view, this instance is supposed to emerge in the individual by the internalization of the group’s normative expectations, starting with the family. The problem is that the explanation can work for the ontogenetic process of individual subjective constitution only insofar as it assumes the existence of an already given group, provided with a distinctive moral authority. Without a supplementary account, the generalized Other is as presupposed in its very existence as it is not elucidated in its status. To overcome this fundamental difficulty of Mead’s perspective, Habermas thus tries to explain, with Durkheim, the very genesis of the group’s moral authority. Referring to the seminal essay on The Determination of Moral Facts (Durkheim, 1974 [1924]; Karsenti, 2012b), he first elucidates the structure of the group’s moral authority, by synthetically recalling the principle difference Durkheim pointed out between technical rules, at the basis of instrumental and strategic actions, and moral rules, at the origin of the normative consensus among the participants in the interaction. In the case of technique, the rule exists only because the outside world comes to bring its sanctions to actions in the form of the failures actors run into in the course of their effectuation: here, there is a regulative and strategic rule because there is a material sanction, the relationship between the two being external. In the case of morality, there is a sanction only because the rule has superimposed a normative qualification of the act over its natural properties: here, there is a moral sanction because there is first a regulative and prescriptive rule, the relationship between the two being internal.

Access to a moral rule thus presupposes a peculiar understanding of its specific authority. As Habermas underlines, following a Kantian insight shared with Durkheim, this kind of normative endorsement arises only when the individual calculation of undesirable consequences of deviation gives way to a grasp of the claim to justice internal to moral norms: “Violations of these norms are punished because they claim validity in virtue of moral authority; this validity does not accrue to them because external sanctions compel their observance” (Habermas, 1987 [1981b]: 48). It is this specific kind of authority, indexed to a claim to justice irreducible to any given material interest, frustrated in the course of action, which makes of morality the privileged entry into the social order, properly understood. Indeed, insofar as they impose themselves on the biological individual, moral rules necessary refer to the impersonal normative horizon that only a group can support. Thus, it is first in moral rules claiming justice that a human society constitutes itself. Such is the kind of inference at the best explanation that Durkheim placed at the base of his sociology. If moral rules exist, if acting individuals do have even a little idea of regulative prescriptive norms claiming to be just, then a society exists too which proves to be irreducible to them, constituting them as persons capable of more than strategically interacting with one another.

Now, according to Durkheim, the sui generis nature of moral rules, as compared to technical ones, always points to the sacred foundations of any social order. Yet, by saying that morality would not be moral if it had nothing religious, the founder of the French School of sociology intended less to consecrate social order as such, than to emphasize the constitutive relation of any given moral rule to the sacred ideals of the group, first and foremost to its own way of understating the ideal of justice itself. In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas analyzes this internal link between morality and religion through justice, before criticizing it in its significance for modernity. Addressing the explanation offered by Durkheim, he acknowledges first that there is a fundamental similarity between the characteristics of morality and religion. Organized by a polarity of the sacred and the profane, religion enables us to understand the kind of transcendence each acting individual experiences when he leaves the narrow perspective of his profane occupations, oriented toward himself and purely utilitarian, to strive for justice, finding support in the “impersonal power of the sacred” (Habermas, 1987 [1981b]: 49). In this perspective, even the most insignificant moral action evokes an ambivalence of feelings, being at the same time constrained by a rule and oriented by an ideal, an ambivalence through which the individual is supposed to experience the sacred foundation of morality. Yet, we need to see what is meant here by foundation, since this term can oscillate between the origin now lost and the necessary present ground. In this question, the problem of the ultimate grounds of modernity is clearly posed. As Habermas rightly underlines, we must indeed ask, with Durkheim, whether there can be a secularization of morality that does not amount to a profanation of the sacred principle of justice by worldly interests, reinterpreting “the fundamental moral phenomenon of the obligatory character of valid norms” in such utilitarian terms as to make it disappear, as it happens “in all ethics developed on empiricist assumptions” (Habermas, 1987 [1981b]: 50).

By recognizing in the sacred itself the expression of the specific powers of social relations and practices, Durkheim tried to make clear in what sense moral rules are doomed to preserve, even in modern societies, the mark of their religious origins, if they have to keep their distinctive normative authority. It is precisely this last step in the process of the sociological explanation that Habermas intends to contest. Thus, he formulates two main objections to this typically Durkheimian answer to the problem of modern foundations (Habermas, 1987 [1981b]: 50). First, the explanation in question seems to work only if society is seen as a highly dubious thinking subject, constituted by a core of “collective representations” in principle distinguished from “individual representations.” Second, this still metaphysical explanation would be viciously circular. Indeed, after having traced morality back to its sacred foundation, Durkheim invokes society as a system of collective representations characterized by their binding, that is, moral, force. Durkheim’s sociology would thus rest on a circular explanation relying on a doubtful ontological postulate. Grounding on these two objections, Habermas comes to the conclusion that society, far from being an irreducible order of reality, emerged in the course of history only as a religious representation, in and through a language that developed its internal structure through the use of sacred symbols to finally reveal in modernity its intrinsic normativity, operating in the cultural rationalization of life-world traditions. Language is thus supposed to have recovered its original function of being a discursive medium in the relations between individuals no longer required to think of themselves as members of groups, but only as interacting partners in a life-world structurally distinguished from the henceforth functionally autonomous systems of the State and the market. Global society conceived as a totality appears here as a cultural illusion, a myth that modern individuals are supposed to have lost with the disappearance of religion as an organizing founding dimension of thought and action, in what seems to be an acceptance of the fundamental creed of liberalism (Descombes, 2009).

According to Habermas, the Entzauberung of the world having finally led to a post-metaphysical thought freed of any hypothesis concerning the existence of orders of reality exceeding the immediately empirical dimension of observable individuals and relations would thus be accompanied by the emergence of a fully autonomous language as the only given source for a rationally understandable social normativity, including the sui generis status of justice as an effective critical norm and a potential emancipatory ideal. The perspective of a linguistification of the sacred thus leads Habermas to a different account of the origin and identity of modernity, as well as of the possibilities of critique in it. Indeed, this overall evolutionist account is the basis of his purely procedural conception of democracy, replacing the radical ideal of a society self-instituting historical process, aiming at a normative transformation of both the State and the market, with the reformist project of expanding the impact of exchanged reasons in civil society and public sphere upon both systems, in order to reduce their colonization of in principle unconstrained life-world intersubjective relations (Castoriadis 1996; Habermas, 1994). Thus, Habermas’ characteristically dualist conception of modern social order, resting on the distinction between systems and life-world, together with his diagnosis of colonization as the main pathology of our times (Honneth, 1991 [1985], 1990), ultimately follows from his rejection of the relevance of Durkheim’s sociology of religion for modernity.

In order to find an alternative to Habermas’ denormativisation of modern political and economic relations, a first step toward reviving the perspective of a democratic and socialist critique of State and market, we must then go as far as to take into account religion itself and its role in the constitution and transformation of social order. Indeed, the question of religion ultimately concerns modern individuals themselves, in their capacity of thinking themselves as belonging to one and the same global society. It is an obvious precondition for the dispersed argument advances by the multiple actors in the public sphere – the only relevant level recognized by Habermas at the time of The Theory of Communicative Action and the source of his subsequent definition of radical democracy as the true meaning of socialism, as carried out in Between Facts and Norms ³ – to cluster around some main problems, sufficiently recognized as common as to grapple with them in the name of justice. Surprisingly as it may seem, it is the possibility of this different perspective about modernity and critique – in which a radical democratic socialism can find a new spring – that Habermas has himself opened up in his recent writings, marked by an unexpected turn to Durkheim.

The Durkheimian turn

The two objections addressed to Durkheim at the time of Theory of Communicative Action concern the very basic assumptions of his sociology. The latter subsists only on the basis of an ontological postulate concerning social reality, grounding an account of the original co-implication of morality and religion within social relations and practices. There is no proper social science, according to Durkheim, if we do not admit the existence of a global society, thought of as an order consisting of impersonal norms that precede and survive the ephemeral interactions between actors and secondary groups. Living through such interactions, society is undoubtedly always political, because it exists as such and persists over time only if the conflicting and cooperative relations between individuals and groups are collectively organized and handled by deliberative processes (Durkheim, 1992 [1950]; Honneth, 2014 [2011]). Yet, for Durkheim, these sociopolitical dynamics are ultimately based, even in modern societies, on moral norms and ideals whose origin and nature he thought as being ultimately religious, as it clearly appears in his sociological analysis of modern individualism (Karsenti, 2006; Callegaro 2015a). To measure the distance between Habermas and Durkheim, it is therefore necessary to better understand these constitutive assumptions by answering the ontological and epistemological objections. This will help us to grasp the change Habermas himself finally introduced in his own overall perspective.

The ontological objection seems at first irrefutable. Indeed, society is certainly not a great individual, even less a large subject, to be added to the list of persons composing it and leading a life of its own. Yet, Durkheim himself explictly rejected the “obvious absurdity” attributed to him, according to which society would be possible without the existence of individual persons. As he frequently pointed out, thinking and acting individuals are everything a society has in terms of reality, together with the objects they use. Consisting in their “association”, society itself would disappears without them, despite the fact that its “objective spirit” may survive in the objectified form of ethnological artifacts and historical documents (Descombes, 2014). From the fact that a society is not a collective individual, and even less a thinking subject on its own, it does not follow, however, that it has not its specific mode of existence, irreducible to that of the isolated individuals composing it. To understand the meaning of such terms as “collective consciousness” or “collective representations,” it is necessary to grasp the implications of Durkheim’s sociological inference: if there are moral rules internally linked to justice, then a society exists. In light of this inference, it appears that society is at first a condition of intelligibility of moral normativity itself as it internally organizes the linguistic interactions between individuals brought together as members of large and lasting groups. In this sense, Durkheim’s certainty is based less on metaphysical faith and more on the existence of an empirically observable difference between the register of the causes to which an individual is subjected, as a living body, and the practical reasons he endorses, exchanging them in the course of his moral cooperation and conflicts with significant others, as a social being marked out by his recognized subjective personhood (Callegaro, 2012; Karsenti, 2012a).

Thus, if Durkheim posed society as an irreducible order of reality, it is because this seemed to him the only rational condition likely to explain the difference of perspective empirically manifested in ordinary interactions, when actors take distance from their strictly egoistic viewpoint, in order to justify to others, through the impersonal norms of the group they therefore recognize themselves as belonging, what they think and do. In this light, it is basically the very possibility to adopt the social stance depending on the impersonal perspective of the generalized Other, to take up the Mead’s concept, that shows the actual existence of a collective reality differing from the ephemeral orders constituted by occasional interactions. For this reason, collective representations are not to be conceived as a special sphere of representations, belonging to a weird supra-individual subject. In fact, these collective representations are the very same representations used by individuals as long as they are socialized, insofar as they express the norms of thought and action that a person must stand to when she tries to justify to significant others, belonging to the same group, what she says and does (Lemieux, 2009). The irreducibility of society is thus linked to the difference that allows a plurality of individuals first defined by their impulses and sensations, rough intentions and perceptions, to become persons able to interact on the basis of identical meanings, normatively established by the regulated use of signs in the context of a fundamentally moral interaction. As obscure as the referent may seem to be, society appears here as the name of that kind of reality each individual encounters when she goes back to the source of the norms she actually follows in her thoughts and actions. It is precisely at this point that religion enters the scene. Indeed, Durkheim considered religion as the dimension through which societies tried in their history to conceive themselves as this Other to which individual refer when they justify their thoughts and actions. Religion thus conceived belongs to the very constitution of a social order, despite the significant differences introduced in history by its metamorphosis.

For this reason, it must also be said, against the second epistemological objection, that the account given by Durkheim is not circular, for it is not meant to be an explanation, at least if by that we mean a reduction of one order of reality to another, independently intelligible. A society produces so little a religion and a morality external to its inner structure that the two concur, according to Durkheim, in constituting its immanent normativity, albeit in different ways and forms according to each social configuration. Reductive explanation is thus excluded from the start, to the extent that the concepts used – society, religion, morality – are taken as being mutually dependent. In this sense, Durkheim develops less a reductive explanation than an expressive elucidation of socially constitutive normativity. Society is not here the original cause, intelligible in itself regardless of these effects that are supposed to be morality and religion, since that would diminish it to the mere morphological dimension of a “population” seen as a “mass of individuals”. It is rather the specific kind of reality made up of normative practices linking these individuals together as long as they already contain within them a moral constitutive dimension, the one that the sociological analysis intends to elucidate in its significance, by studying precisely how it is reflected in the different forms of religion. The only theoretical assumption underlying this perspective is that social practices contain the normative power expressed in the distinctive morality and religion of a given group. Once granted this assumption, it is the task of sociology to give us the means to better understand why morality first developed, on the scale of human history, out of the ritual practices of custom religions, helping modern people to see why it still preserves something of its origin, even if it is now far more autonomous and in a way rational.

Now, as surprising as this may be for those used to his more classical Enlightenment perspective, it is precisely this residual yet constitutive role of religion and especially of ritual practices that Habermas himself ended up acknowledging, explicitly rejecting the central explanatory hypothesis advanced in The Theory of the Communicative Action (Habermas, 2015 [2012]: XI). Reaffirming the historical task of reflexive philosophy to develop a general understanding of oneself and the world, by critically recovering the whole of scientific knowledge in order to address the major political issues of the present, he has realized that his anticipation of the course of modernity was too obviously in contradiction with the troubling reality of contemporary Western societies not to be corrected on its fundamental point. Developing a different theoretical framework, Habermas now sees the sacred and language not as two elements distributed along the linear axis of a progressive evolution, according to the subtraction account of modernization he once defended (Taylor, 2007), but as two intimately linked dimensions, determining even in modernity, despite huge historical changes, the conditions of social solidarity as well as the possibilities of critique in it. To formulate his central thesis, we must return to that threshold of human evolution where Mead’s speculative reconstruction stopped and that the reference to Durkheim’s ritual practices already helped to cross. Building on the comparative studies of the anthropologist Michael Tomasello (1999) and (2008), Habermas now fixes in more precise empirical terms the phylogenetic jump in the use of symbols that humanity had to accomplish to establish cooperative groups likely to last in time. In fact, he now distinguishes more clearly between two evolutionary thresholds, corresponding to the development of two categorically distinct regimes of normativity organizing two radically different forms of communicative action.

The first threshold corresponds to the development of what Habermas now refers to as a weak normativity: it concerns the system of conventions governing the use of signs. Projecting in the remote past of human evolution what is shown in the present by language learning, Habermas follows Tomasello in making the hypothesis that this normative regime would have developed in the wake of the use of deictic gestures and iconic signals. Rooted in the natural capacity to designate objects and imitate others, language would thus have taken first the pre-propositional and holophrastic form of symbolic expressions – like “Fire!” – ordained by a first layer of conventions, not yet distinguishing the three dimensions of all speech acts. These conventions would express the accumulation of a fallible knowledge based on the regular observation of a constant association between a certain gesture/signal and a given practical meaning, endorsed in cooperative interaction. This naturalistic explanation of the genesis of language is grounded in the idea of a structural triangulation realized today by children and mother as yesterday by hominids having in view the same natural world. An apparently easy performance, this triangulation goes beyond the capacities of even the most intelligent primates – our next of kin, the chimpanzee – confined as they are in a purely egocentric and dyadic perspective. Instead of bringing the other to the central stage of its own intentions, in the absence of a common world clearly reflected by the exclusive access of primates to power relations, the language of symbolic gestures would have enabled human beings in the process of self-making to express and coordinate their intentions, in order to act together in the same natural world.

Yet, this first naturalistic account is, according to Habermas, structurally incomplete. It cannot explain, indeed, how the very social environment as young children encounter it today first developed in the phylogenetic past of humanity. Contrary to what Tomasello seems to suppose, the mere need to communicate factual truths and personal intentions in order to effectively cooperate cannot explain the normative status of the reciprocal expectations organizing social interaction (Habermas, 2015 [2012]: 50–51).Working out a more complex evolutionist account, Habermas thus emphasizes the role played by the disturbances produced by the crossing of the first evolutionary line, characterized by the access to a first rudimentary form of language and cooperation. It would have created the empty space that religion came to fulfill with its rituals. Torn between the still vivid requirements of individual survival and the new requirements involved by the now palpable existence of a cooperative group, humans were indeed taken in a “structural tension” between self-preservation and group-preservation that could not find a solution in the resources made available by the weak linguistic normativity. The precarious cooperative solidarity could not have given life to stable groups likely to last over time if the relations between humans had not been constituted as such by a stronger normative dimension: the one defined by the moral norms attached to the use of symbols in a communicative extraordinary context, freed from all profane regulation of vital interests.

This is where Habermas moves back to the central hypothesis of Durkheim’s sociology of religion, 30 years after the first German publication of The Theory of Communicative Action. Looking once again for inspiration in the work of the “most important author” for those who are interested in the “true meaning of ritual behavior” (Habermas, 2015 [2012]: 67), he thus sees the rituals taking place on the axis of an extraordinary communication as the very source of the strong solidarity that the rough and ready language used in everyday communication was incapable of generating. In this perspective, history began when humans crossed a second and more decisive threshold, marked by the genesis, in and through ritual practices, of a wholly new kind of normativity, freed from the functional constraints of interested cooperation. Humans began their history by being part of societies now identifiable as such in their specific identity structured by the constitutive duality of the sacred and the profane. Indeed, it is this polarity, placed by Durkheim at the heart of religion that orders the opposition between the two categorically distinct regimes of normativity related to the two radically different forms of communicative action, ordinary and extraordinary. Human groups are thus seen as having been primordially organized along the distinction between the fragile solidarity made possible by cooperation in an incipient division of labor and the strong solidarity of the communion of minds achieved through participation in early rituals. One can easily recognize here the reformulation of the socioanthropological perspective Durkheim himself first developed in The Division of Social Labor. By replacing it in the theoretical framework defined by The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Habermas gives it new vigor, showing the sources of the constitution of human societies in this duality of forms of solidarity that Durkheim called “organic” and “mechanical.” The distinction between the two forms of solidarity is thus ultimately grounded in the very opposition between the sacred and the profane, as it distributes two uses of language and two levels of normativity along the lines of two kinds of communicative action. Before concluding and going back to the problem of the grounds of modernity and critique, we need to work out the main philosophical implication of this different view, in which an unnatural dimension is seen as having been superadded to natural evolution by religion. We must indeed explain in which sense the original hypothesis about the utopian ideal of freedom and reconciliation as being grounded in the natural mechanisms of linguistic reproduction finds here a decisive objection, reorienting the understanding of critical reason itself once again toward society and history.

If the rite can be recognized as having played such a decisive function in the process of constitution of humanity, it is because it appears as the vector of a deep transformation of language itself. As Habermas notes, when compared to the exchange of gestures and signals in the context of a daily communication within the early forms of interested cooperation, the specific communication of a ritual practice distinguishes itself by the fact that it “looks elsewhere”: the arrow of intentionality, symbolized by the finger directed to a mundane object, appears here to “point towards a vacuum” (Habermas, 2015 [2012]: 52). It is precisely this lack of reference to profane objects in the natural world that led Durkheim to say that the rite, before referring to an invisible presence that fills the void, does not refer to anything except to the group itself, which it represents as well as it helps constituting. As Habermas correctly points out, in this self-referential dimension of the rite Durkheim saw the emergence, unparalleled in profane terms of interested cooperation, of a “self-reflexive practice,” stabilizing the group through two closely linked operations: the “self-thematization of society” and the practical production of “the binding character of behavioral expectations.” In this perspective, religion appears as what enabled a plurality of biological individuals to form a group of humans capable of implicitly saying “we” by implicitly saying “we owe (each other).” Habermas recovers here an animating idea of the French School of Sociology, to the point of even questioning the taken for granted assumption of the still dominant anthropological accounts of early religions, as they refer rituals to their mediating function with divine powers mythically constituted, thus taking sacrifice as a paradigm. To the contrary, rituals first helped constituting the human group itself, by handling its internal differentiation, as it appears in the cult of the dead and in the rites of passage, studied by Arnold Van Gennep. In the same way, on the outside axis of external relations, Habermas emphasizes the work done by another Durkheimian, the path-breaking study of The Gift made by Marcel Mauss, which he reads as highlighting the solidarity instituting capacity of meaning constituting practices, likely to bring peace between potential enemies through reciprocal exchanges (Habermas, 2015 [2012]: 66–67).

Thus, after having stressed, with Tomasello, the natural rooting of some linguistic conventions, Habermas explains, with Durkheim, the distance between moral norms as such and the strategic rules derived from the need to cooperate. This step beyond a narrow naturalistic approach to the constitutive moral normativity of social relations and practices has a fundamental consequence for the very understanding of language norms themselves. Indeed, if one can try to derive the birth of an articulated cognitive and expressive discourse from the requirements of interested cooperation, showing how assertive and expressive speech acts developed out of the first deictic gestures and iconic signs, the symbolic exchanges dictated by the urgent need to inform each other of one own intentions and to share perceptions about the world could not by itself take humans out of the natural world in which they were still immersed. The emergence of the collective expectations related to the strong normativity of moral rules, later expressed in regulative speech acts as we use them today – orders, promises, and so on – remains unexplained as long as we stick to the premise of interested cooperation. If we find again the problem of the generalized Other, it now appears more clearly that it is the singular status of the claim to justice that must be accounted for, in its principle difference with claims to truth and truthfulness. By explaining the gap between non-human and human beings, ritual practices not only help to account for the formation of stable groups: they also disclose the human sources of those normative energies that gave rise to the unnatural requirement of justice itself. Moved in time to profane language and everyday communication, this requirement would then have become the focal point of the conflicting confrontations animating the life of public reason, without losing its necessary rootedness in those practices that still give it both its motivational strength and its semantic content. We see in which direction the previous assumption of a progressive linguistification of the sacred needs to be profoundly rethought.

Religion and reason: A new path for the critique in modernity

Once emerged, fully articulated language has given rise to myths that have tried to express the semantic content deposited in ritual practices, while seeking to overcome the “cognitive dissonance” with the natural world produced by the differences that any society must reduce if it wants to subsist and persist in time. Indeed, according to Habermas, the structural antagonism which opposed the “sacral complex,” henceforth made of rites and myths, to “profane knowledge” has dictated the rhythm of cultural change, following the underlying reversal of the relationship between the two forms of solidarity, mechanical and organic. The progression of the division of labor was thus manifested by some huge “cognitive waves” which, in a context marked by growing inequalities and theological–political conflicts in emerging cities and States, ended up opening the way to the universalist perspective of the higher religions of Eurasian civilizations. These resulted from the codification, in written canonical texts, of inherited oral traditions, which enabled both the development of a new reflexive stance and the consolidation of a stable cultural core, assuring their transmission by sheltering some central beliefs and norms from excessive critical attitudes (Assmann, 2011 [1992]; Goody, 2000). Witness the revolution of the axial age studied by Weber in his sociology of religion, as it determined the transformation of the elementary forms of religion on which Durkheim focused himself in his Elementary Forms. Imposing an intellectual rationalization of the myths in dogmatic systems supporting coherent worldviews, especially for what concerns the Middle-East religions of the Book, it required and led in turn to a corresponding moral rationalization of ritual imperatives in the form of those ethical doctrines which were and are oriented toward not collective intraworldly success but individual extraworldly salvation (Bellah, 2011; Taylor, 2007).

If here lie the premises of the modern process of rationalization, Habermas now explicitly resists to the “pseudo-enlightened ideology of an uninterrupted progress” (Habermas, 2015 [2012]: 57–58). The fact is that the kind of reflexive critique deployed in time by public reason cannot do more than measure its own limits when it comes to its own grounds. The semantic contents originally embodied in rituals cannot be fully translated into a rational discourse, despite the intermediate cultural rationalization already realized by theology and science. As Habermas now clearly acknowledges, human social order is not coextensive with the space of linguistically articulated reasons. If we as modern certainly can and should strive to constantly translate the inherited sacred contents in a more secular language, we still work within a “horizon of meaning” that only ritual practices disclose, making use of expressive symbols that embody meanings always escaping full discursive articulation. The persistence of religion in modernity finds here a beginning of explanation. Without the participation in ritual practices, modern subjects would indeed not have access to the “archaic source of solidarity” that the history of religions has finally linked to some “salvific ideas of justice” (Habermas, 2015 [2012]: 59).

Thus, without the existence of ritual practices, even critique would not find its spring. Its very orientation toward justice, the continually renewed attempt to contest the factual validity of social rules through reasoned confrontations and irrepressible conflicts in the public sphere, reflects the still living presence of the sacred in language. The question now open before us is to know whether this source of solidarity, closed as it is to unbelievers minds, is the only dimension of action capable of maintaining alive such an ideal of justice or whether we should exploit its resources to look differently to other social relations, starting with those cooperative practices of work which, in modernity, clearly do not aim at the sole satisfaction of profane interests. Durkheim’s analysis of modern division of labor and its contradictions, as well as his scientific translation of socialist expectations, seem to suggest that modern social solidarity also requires satisfying a peculiar demand for justice, the one he understood as a democratically guaranteed substantive equality (Callegaro, 2015b; Rawls, 2003). A renewed reflection upon the historical origins and the social destination of this specific requirement might thus be the starting point for a further confrontation and possible convergence between Critical Theory and sociology, joined in the common task of understanding both the remote religious source and the actual meaning of social justice, as a step in the intellectual and political struggle for a democratic society based on a more fully realized freedom (Honneth, 2014 [2011], 2015; Karsenti and Lemieux, 2017).