## 1. Biography


### 1.1 Biographical Introduction



Habermas was born in June 1929 and brought up in provincial
North-Rhine Westphalia, to conservative, educated middle-class
parents, who had been neither critical nor strongly supportive of the
Nazi regime. In 1944 he was called up to man the defences on the
western front. A little over a year later he was shaken to his core by
what he learnt of the Nazi atrocities from the Nuremberg Trials, and
news coverage of the Holocaust. Thus, although still in his teens, he
experienced 1945 as a turning point that would shape his political and
cultural outlook. As he put it frankly in an interview in 1979:



> 
> 
> I am myself a product of "reeducation" ... By this I
> mean that ... we learnt that the bourgeois constitutional state
> in its French, or American, or English form is an historical
> achievement. (1992a: interview 3, 79)
> 
> 
> 



Two moments exemplify Habermas's complex position in-between the
generations of 1945 and 1968. In 1953, when Habermas was a student at
Gottingen University, he published a critical essay in the
*Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* concerning Heidegger's
remark about "the inner truth and greatness of the Nazi
movement" that Heidegger had written in his lectures on
metaphysics in 1935, and then failed to retract or alter in 1953 when
republishing those lectures. (1971c [1977]) In 1968, at the height of
the student protests in Germany, Habermas, who had been critical of
the policing that had resulted in the killing of Benno Ohnesorg at a
student demonstration the year before, directly criticized the
students for acting out revolutionary fantasies, and for provoking the
authorities into violence. He used the phrase "left-wing
fascism", a term he later admitted was too harsh
(Muller-Doohm 2016: 141). Instead, he urged them to put the
latitude granted to them by liberal democratic institutions to work in
the service of a "radical reformism" (Specter 2010:
111-115).



Habermas studied German philosophy and literature at Bonn, and wrote
his doctoral dissertation on "The Absolute and History: the
Ambivalence of Schelling's Thought". He came to Frankfurt
in 1956, where he was Theodor Adorno's *Assistent* at the
Institute for Social Research for three years. In 1959 he left for
Marburg, having effectively been shouldered out by Max Horkheimer, who
considered him a dangerous Marxist, and who tried to have him
dismissed (Muller-Doohm 2016: 84-86; Habermas 1992a:
interview 8, 218). In Marburg, he wrote his habilitation dissertation,
*The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere*, under
Wolfgang Abendroth, one of the few Marxist academic philosophers in
the post-war Federal Republic. Habermas, though often deemed a member
of the Frankfurt School, was, in reality, at the institute for a very
brief period. Whilst there, he recalls, "Critical Theory, at
Frankfurt School--there was no such thing ... no coherent
doctrine" (Habermas 1992a: interview 4, 98). So it is misleading
to say that he was or became a "member" of the Frankfurt
School. In truth, he arrived there as an outsider, and while there,
briefly, ploughed his own furrow.



Habermas returned to Frankfurt, after a short period at the University
of Heidelberg, where he succeeded Horkheimer, with whom he soon
reconciled, as Professor of Philosophy and Sociology. He declined to
become director of the institute. In Frankfurt, Habermas spent the
latter half of the 1960s teaching in febrile and tumultuous political
circumstances not conducive to research. In 1971 he became director of
the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Living Conditions in the
Scientific and Technical World in Starnberg, Bavaria, where he
conducted the research which led to his magnum opus, the two-volume
*Theory of Communicative Action*. The year his magnum opus was
published, 1981, Habermas resigned from the Max Planck Institute under
unhappy circumstances, and again returned to Frankfurt. There he would
remain, but for various visiting professorships in the US, until his
retirement in 1994. Landmark publications during these years include
many essays on moral philosophy, and *Between Facts and Norms*
in 1992, Habermas's major work in political and legal
philosophy. Throughout his life Habermas has enthusiastically played
the role of the public intellectual, taking part in disputes about
positivism in the social sciences, the historical uniqueness of the
Holocaust, German reunification, genetic engineering, and secularism
and religion. He is the recipient of numerous honorary doctorates and
prizes, including the Adorno Prize of the city of Frankfurt and the
Kyoto Prize of the Inamori Foundation (Muller-Doohm 2016:
340).


### 1.2 The Public Sphere



The public sphere is one of Habermas's most well-known concepts,
introduced in his habilitation thesis, published in 1962 as *The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society*. Belonging to neither the state,
the economy, nor the family, the public sphere is where private
individuals come together to communicate about matters of general
concern. It is the location of the public use of reason and the place
where "public opinion" is formed. *Structural
Transformation* is a reconstructed history of the rise and fall of
the public sphere focused on Britain, France, and Germany from the
early modern era to the mid-twentieth century. In the Middle Ages,
there was a merely "representative" public sphere, in
which kings and nobles displayed their status before society (1962
[1989: 7-10]). The bourgeois public sphere begins to emerge in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at first in the guise of a
literary public sphere. In coffee houses, salons, and literary
societies, the new reading public came together to discuss
novels--Habermas cites Samuel Richardson's *Pamela*
as an example (1962 [1989: 31-6, 49-50, 174]). Skills of
critical reasoning first developed in the journals of the literary
public sphere were subsequently applied to the political public
sphere, where public affairs rather than literary texts are the
objects of criticism. In this period the modern state was emerging, as
political authority was gradually depersonalized and vested in
more-or-less independent bureaucratic institutions, rather than the
person of the monarch (1962 [1989: 17-8]). Simultaneously, the
development of mercantile capitalism endowed merchants with
unprecedented wealth and influence, and an ever-greater need for
accurate information about market conditions. This need was met by
news-sheets and gazettes, which soon turned their attention to state
policy as much as commodity prices (1962 [1989: 20-2]). The
bourgeois public sphere thus developed concomitantly with both the
capitalist economy and the Westphalian sovereign state, and flourished
during the high point of bourgeois-liberal politics in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.



The bourgeois public sphere is constituted by an ideological
separation between public and private. The state and politics are
deemed "public", whereas civil society, the market
economy, and the family are deemed "private". The public
sphere, according to Habermas, mediates between these two realms (1962
[1989: 30]). Participants in the bourgeois public sphere are
*private* individuals, coming together to rationally and
critically discuss *public* affairs, above all the actions of
governments; it is



> 
> 
> a realm of private individuals assembled into a public body who as
> citizens transmit the needs of bourgeois society to the state, in
> order, ideally, to transform political into "rational"
> authority within the medium of this public sphere. (1964 [1974:
> 53])
> 
> 
> 



Habermas would later refer to this as the generation of
"communicative power", which can legitimate the political
system's actions if yoked to the latter's
"administrative power" (1992b [1996b: 147-50]). As
members of the public, private individuals bring decisions into the
public sphere where they are open to rational discussion and
criticism. In the process, participants form and articulate the
general interest of society, drawing on ideas of truth, justice and
human rights.



Needless to say, participants in the bourgeois public sphere were
*de facto* almost all educated male property-owning members of
the bourgeoisie, along with some sympathisers from the aristocracy.
Habermas has acknowledged the selective membership of the bourgeois
public sphere during its heyday (1992c: 425-430), although
critics have charged that he does not pay sufficient attention to the
way it was *constituted* by excluding propertyless workers
(Negt & Kluge 1972 [2016]) and, above all, women (Landes 1988).
Despite its limitations, Habermas argues that the bourgeois public
sphere nevertheless embodied certain principles and ideals, never
fully realized, that are vital to any flourishing democratic society.
It was thus both an "ideal" and an "ideology"
(1962 [1989: 112]). Since differences in social status between
interlocutors were bracketed as "private" matters (1962
[1989: 36]) the public sphere was in theory universal, open to any
literate person (1962 [1989: 37]). This ensured that rational
argumentation was calibrated to universal standards of validity, not
to the relative status of interlocutors, and could function as a
cooperative search for truth and justice (1962 [1989: 54]).



Habermas's approach in this early work can be described as one
of historical reconstruction in the service of internal criticism. He
reconstructs an "ideal type" of the bourgeois public
sphere, in order to criticize the really existing public spheres of
modern democracies.



The structural transformation which marks the beginning of the end of
the bourgeois public sphere involves a re-definition of the
public/private distinction. Under conditions of mid-twentieth century
"welfare-state mass democracy", (1962 [1989: 208]) state
and society became ever more entangled as governments pursued
interventionist economic policies and expanded welfare provision. At
the same time, non-state actors such as pressure groups, corporations,
and political parties played an increasing role in governance (1962
[1989: 142]). Habermas refers to this process as
"refeudalization" (1962 [1989: 200-1]).



Habermas sees the modern public sphere as, in many ways, the victim of
its own success. As it expanded far beyond its original basis of
educated male property-owners, material inequalities could no longer
be set aside, but rather became the subject of public debate (1962
[1989: 127]). And this debate was no longer a matter of
rational-critical analysis of state action by the assembled public,
but of negotiation between interest groups which bypass public reason.
Instead of the approximation of society to the ideal type, what
emerged was an impoverished pseudo-public sphere, lacking its original
capacity for rational-critical discourse, easily manipulated by
states, corporations, and interest groups using the techniques of
"public relations" (1962 [1989: 176, 236]). Its role now,
as in the feudal era, is to acclaim decisions which have already been
made.



Habermas continues to make use of the concept of the public sphere in
his later works (1973a [1975: 37-8, 48]; 1992b [1996b]),
developing a detailed account of its place in modern societies (1992b
[1996b: 359-87]; 2008b [2009: chapters 8 & 9]). In his
original formulation, there was a tendency to assume the existence of
a single unified public sphere for a single polity. In response to
Nancy Fraser's discussion of "subaltern
counterpublics" (Fraser 1992) and acknowledging his own earlier
neglect of "plebian public spheres", Habermas now concedes
that there may be a multitude of intersecting public spheres within a
given society, focusing on different communities and topics but with
porous boundaries that allow flows of communication to pass between
them (1992c: 424-5; 1992b [1996b: 373-4]). The closest
thing to a "universal" public sphere is the political
public sphere, focused on the political system. The political public
sphere acts as a "sounding board" for problems which
affect society as a whole, as well as a "filter-bed",
filtering out contributions to public discourse which represent
generalizable interests (2008b chapter 11 [2009: chapter 9, 143]). In
this manner, reflexive public opinion is formed and communicative
power is generated. One of the most salient features of the
contemporary political public is its division into
"formal" and "informal" segments, the former
denoting the highly regulated discourse of elected politicians,
judges, parliaments, and courts, and the latter the
"wild", unregulated flows of communication outside these
spaces (2008b chapter 11 [2009: chapter 9, 159-62]). Habermas
argues that the right kind of feedback between formal and informal
public spheres is vital for legitimating the political system's
actions. At the same time, there is no reason to think that public
spheres must stop at national borders. In an increasingly
interdependent world, global attention can be focused on single
issues--Habermas mentions the wars in Vietnam and Iraq as
examples--creating, at least temporarily, a transnational public
sphere (2004: chapter 3 [2006c: 39-48]). The political
legitimacy of transnational polities like the EU hinges on whether the
public spheres of its member states can act together, functioning as a
European public sphere (2008b chapter 9, chapter 11 [2009: chapter 6,
87-8, chapter 9, 181-3]).


### 1.3 Early Works (1964-71)



*Knowledge and Human Interests* is a historical reconstruction
of the prehistory of positivism and scientism. The history Habermas
reconstructs is a decline and fall of self-reflection in
*Wissenschaft*--science in the broadest sense. His
particular interest is in *Erkenntniskritik*, namely the
tradition of critical philosophy from Kant, German Idealism, and Hegel
through to Marx, which, on his account, is gradually side-lined by
ways of thinking that employ the methods of positivistic natural and
social science. His thesis is: "That we disavow reflection is
positivism" (1968b: 9 [1971a: vii]).



Habermas's analysis takes its cue from Lukacs' idea
of reification--the idea that beings, forms of life, and social
relations assume the appearance of nature (Lukacs 1971:
83-223). Habermas's analysis reveals this illusory
independence and naturalness to be historical, and in principle
reversible. Horkheimer and Adorno's thesis that: "All
reification is a forgetting" also animates the analysis
(Horkheimer & Adorno 1971 [2002: 191]). Positivism in the
empirical and social sciences, and historicism in the cultural
sciences, Habermas argues, exhibit a merely contemplative stance
toward their respective objects, an attitude that obscures the point
that science and knowledge is fundamentally a human enterprise that
serves human interests, which are rooted in the natural history of the
species (1968b [1971a: 301-4]).



According to Habermas, there are three knowledge-constitutive
interests. The empirical and natural sciences are governed by the
cognitive interest in the technical control of objectified processes.
The historical-hermeneutical sciences are shaped by a practical
interest in orienting action and reaching understanding, while
self-reflection (and *Erkenntniskritik*) are determined by a
cognitive interest in emancipation and in
*Mundigkeit*--autonomy and responsibility (1968b
[1971a: 313-314]). Habermas's overall aim is to explain
how Marxism, and social theory more broadly, succumbed to a
positivistic self-misconception, while rescuing the animus of
Marx's theory of society for critical social theory, by
connecting it with the interest in emancipation and autonomy, and with
a method of critical self-reflection.



Habermas's long essay "Technology and Science as
'Ideology'" is a festschrift for Herbert Marcuse,
and not an uncritical one (1968a [1970]). It deals with topics he
broached in the volume of essays *Theory and Practice* (1971
[1973b]) that broadly argue against the reduction of political theory
from a body of thought answering practical questions of how one should
live, to "a form of social engineering that dispenses with
public discourse" (Celikates & Jaeggi 2009 [2017: 261]).



Habermas develops the following theses that exhibit the major concerns
of his early work, based on the following diagnosis: Capitalist
societies institutionalize the aim of economic growth, which has the
effect of expanding sub-systems of instrumental reason. In that
context, science and technology cease to be connected to a realm of
values that help people answer practical questions of how they want to
live, and become absorbed instead into the economic and administrative
systems as forces of production geared to the aim of continuous
economic growth. Politics, instead of residing in a popular practice
of democratic self-determination, atrophies to the technocratic
administration of public affairs in the hands of small groups of
experts, leading to a depoliticization of ordinary citizens (Celikates
& Jaeggi 2009 [2017: 261]). The question is who can reconnect
technocratic politics with the "good life".
Habermas's answer is that students may be part of the solution,
since their protests do not aim at securing them "a larger share
of social rewards", but are targeted against the reduction of
social and political life to economic growth and individual gain
(1970: chapter 6, 120-122).


### 1.4 Transitional Works (1971-1982)



Around the time of his move to Starnberg in 1971 Habermas initiated a
complete overhaul of his theoretical framework for social theory,
ultimately leading to the development of his mature communicative
paradigm (McCarthy 1978). He also produced some seminal transitional
works which dealt with the issues raised in the early work.
*Legitimation Crisis* (1975), or to give the full original
title, *Legitimationsprobleme im Spatkapitalismus* (1973),
is a sketch of an incipient research programme that sets out from a
critique of Marx's social theory, which sees crises in
capitalist societies as arising not from the immiseration of the
working classes and class struggle, which have largely been pacified
by the welfare state and economic growth, but from legitimation
deficits due to alterations in the constellation of economics and
politics. The problem posed by legitimation crises, which are specific
to late capitalism, is how the increasing intervention of the state in
economic affairs can be made legitimate to those who are affected by
these state interventions, and hold the state responsible for their
effects. In conclusion, Habermas develops some hypotheses about how
such crises can be resolved. The best-case scenario is that
legitimation takes place through discursive justification, on the
basis of norms embodying generalizable interests, and, failing that,
through various kinds of compromise (1973a [1975: 112-114]). On
this model normative structures and ideals of consensus become the key
vantage point through which societies can be understood and criticized
by the social theorist.



This thesis is further elaborated in the collection of essays entitled
*Zur Rekonstruction des historischen Materialismus* (1976a). In
this volume Habermas challenges the Marxian assumption that
developments in the sphere of social integration are determined by
developments in the sphere of material production. By contrast he
posits a logic of the development of normative structures, which
represent the institutional analogues of the stages of cognitive
development of moral consciousness in individuals as developed and
tested by the cognitive moral psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (1976a:
9-49 [1979: 95-130]). These normative structures represent
a directional sequence of discrete stages that gain in complexity and
comprehensiveness as they develop, and make collective learning
possible. They allow different kinds of reasons to count as
legitimations for the relevant kinds of social structures and levels
of social integration, and serve as normative standpoints in the light
of which societies can be understood and criticized. Crucially, they
exhibit a logic of development altogether independent from that of the
forces of production.



At the time, Marxists criticized Habermas's work both for
abandoning central tenets of Marxism and for conceding too much to
Niklas Luhmann's system's theory (Ebbighausen 1976). That
said, Habermas denies Luhmann's central claim that legitimacy is
nothing but the motiveless acquiescence of citizens to the binding
decisions of an administrative mechanism (Luhmann 1969). As for
Habermas's Marxism, the very focus of his transitional work on
the system crises of capitalist society betrays not only the
theoretical aspiration to understand capitalism, but also the
practical aspiration to overcome it, or at least to understand how it
could be overcome. That said, since the theory of legitimation crisis,
as McCarthy noted, is not addressed to any agent of social
transformation, it must ultimately remain content with diagnosing
crisis tendencies (McCarthy 1978).


## 2. Habermas's Mature Social Theory: *The Theory of Communicative Action*



> 
> 
> The idea of reason, which is differentiated in the various claims to
> validity, is necessarily built into the way in which the species of
> talking animals reproduces itself. (2001a: chapter 5, 85)
> 
> 
> 



Habermas's mature work begins with *The Theory of
Communicative Action* (1981 [1984a/1987]), the fruits of a long
and difficult decade he spent at the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg
(Muller-Doohm 2016: 214). It is an ambitious and wide-ranging
work, which provides a general framework within which several related
research programs are arranged. It comprises:


1. A sketch of a unified theory of meaning and action.
2. A typological theory of social action.
3. A social ontology.
4. An outline of a critical social theory tied to (1)-(3).



This section will discuss these topics in turn.


### 2.1 Habermas's Pragmatic Theory of Meaning



While the theory of communicative action is designed to answer
questions in social theory, Habermas also considers it as a
contribution to the theory of meaning (1984b: 604). There are three
pillars to this theory:


1. The first comes from Karl Buhler's Organon Model of
language according to which language is triadic, with three functions
corresponding respectively to the objective world, the hearer, and the
speaker (or the third, second and first person): a cognitive function,
an appeal function, and an expressive function.
2. The second pillar is speech-act theory, and in particular the idea
of illocutionary force or meaning, which was developed by J. L. Austin
and John Searle.
3. The third pillar is "formal semantics", the
truth-conditional theory of meaning, and in particular Michael
Dummett's "verificationist" critique of it.



These three pillars form the basis of what Habermas calls
"formal pragmatics" or the pragmatic theory of meaning,
the basic idea of which is that "We understand a speech-act when
we know what makes it acceptable" (1984a: 297 hereafter TCAI):
to understand what a speaker means the hearer has to have access to
the reasons for the speaker's utterance.



The first pillar, Buhler's functional schema of language,
is important as a guiding assumption of Habermas's theory.
Habermas sets so much store by Buhler's model because it
encompasses the entire field of linguistic meaning, and gives equal
weight and priority to its three dimensions: what is intended by the
speaker, what is said in the content of the utterance, and what is
done with that utterance. All three dimensions are present in what
Habermas considers as the original mode of communication whereby a
speaker, *S*, reaches understanding with another person,
*H*, about something (1988b [1998b chapter 6: 279] [1992a:
58]). The triadic architectonic radiates into all aspects of
Habermas's theory: the thesis that there are three validity
claims: to truth, rightness and sincerity (TCAI: 307); that speakers
can adopt three attitudes: an objectivating, a norm-conformative, and
an expressive attitude (TCAI: 309); that speakers through their
utterances take up relations to three "worlds": the
objective world of states of affairs, the social or intersubjective
world of legitimate social orders, and the subjective internal world
(TCAI: 49-52, 60, 236, 308); and finally that there are three
basic modes of speech which forms the basis of the classification of
speech-acts: constatives or assertoric speech-acts, regulative
speech-acts (such as imperatives or requests), and expressive
speech-acts (TCAI: 309). Each of these triadic distinctions nests in
each other.



To the extent that there is an argument in *Theory of Communicative
Action* for the triadic structure itself, it rests on the basic
claim that there are three equiprimordial, meaning-critical validity
claims. Every speech-act simultaneously makes a claim to truth, to
rightness, and to truthfulness. That means a speech-act can be taken
up by the hearer, and assessed in the light of its propositional
truth, normative rightness, or the sincerity with which it is
expressed. If accepted, this means that agreement
(*Einverstandnis*) is reached "simultaneously on
three levels" (1981 [1984a: 307]). In defence of this view
Habermas argues that a speech-act can always be rejected from three
perspectives: in the light of its assertibility conditions, its
normative justification, or the sincerity of the speaker (1981 [1984a:
306]; 1988b essay 4 [1998b: 231]; 1988b essay 6 [1998b: 296]; 1999a
[1998b: 317]). However, the claim that needs to be defended, not
assumed, is that the validity claim for every speech-act can be
rejected from three and only three perspectives. And as Dorschel
claims, an assertion or utterance might be rejected in virtue of the
volume or style with which it is uttered (Dorschel 1988: 8-9).
In the final analysis, the "argument" that any utterance
can be rejected from three and only three perspectives is
question-begging. So the triadic structure, stemming from
Buhler's schema remains best thought of as a hinge
assumption.



The second pillar is speech-act theory. Because speech-act theory
construes speech as action, or, to use Austin's phrase, as
"doing things" with words, it is well suited to provide
the basis for a unified theory of meaning and action. According to the
theory, a speech has both propositional content, *p*, and
illocutionary force *M*. So the meaning of an utterance
*Mp*--"the ice is thin"--can be both a
statement about the way the world is, and, say, depending on the
context, a warning.



That said, Habermas's main focus is on illocutionary acts, the
aims of which, in contrast to perlocutionary acts, he contends, can
always be made manifest (1986b [1998b chapter 3: 202]). When a speaker
makes a declaration or a promise they thereby signal to the hearer
what they are doing. The key to Habermas's use of the term
"illocutionary" is that he identifies and specifies a
putatively universal internal mechanism by which speakers realize
their various illocutionary aims: they make validity claims for their
utterance in order to reach understanding (*Verstandigung*
or *Einverstandnis*). Speakers do this by making an
implicit guarantee that they can, if necessary, adduce good reasons
for their utterance. Hearers, for their part, are always free to
respond with a "yes" or "no" (1981 [1984a:
302]) to this validity claim. When they respond with a
"yes", speaker and hearer reach understanding or
agreement. "Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of
human speech" (1981 [1984a: 280]).



The third pillar is formal semantics. To explain the notion of a
meaning-critical validity claim, Habermas enrols Dummett's
verificationist critique of truth-conditional semantics, and the
epistemic turn in formal semantics (1981 [1984a: 316-8]; 1981
[1998b chapter 2: 153]). Dummett argues that justification is an
epistemic idea, but truth is not, and that the truth-conditions of
many sentences are unknowable, even where their justification
conditions are not. He proposes the view that we understand the
meaning of a sentence when we know the conditions under which it is
assertible, rather than the conditions under which it is true (Dummett
1993: 45; Heath 2001: 120-121; Fultner 2011a: 60-62).



Habermas takes Dummett's thought and extends it to natural
languages, and to the pragmatics of meaning and understanding. This is
why he calls his approach "formal pragmatics", rather than
"formal semantics".



> 
> 
> [I]t is possible to generalize Dummett's explanation. We
> understand a speech-act when we know the kinds of reasons that a
> speaker could provide ... claim validity for his
> utterance--in short when we know what makes it acceptable. (1986b
> [1998b chapter 3: 232])
> 
> 
> 



But as Heath points out this is problematic. For there is a semantic
dimension to, and motivation for, Dummett's idea that to know
the meaning of a sentence is to know the conditions under which it is
assertible. It offers a unified explanation of the compositional
structure of language, namely of how one can construct an infinite
number of meaningful sentences out of a finite number of semantic
units and the rules for their composition. In turn that explains how
we can understand the meaning of a sentence we have never encountered
before. This may work for assertions, but it is inapplicable to the
pragmatic dimension of meaning, to the illocutionary force of
utterances, which lacks a compositional structure. So it is also
unclear how it would work for the other kinds of speech-acts such as
regulatives and expressives.



This strongly suggests, as Heath argues, that there may after all be
only one validity claim that is "meaning-critical", or
"internal" in the sense that it is constitutive of the
meaning of utterances, namely the validity claim to the truth of
assertions or of the propositional components of other kinds of
speech-act (Heath 2001: 115-6). It is potentially damaging for
Habermas also for another reason. It shows that to understand an
utterance that makes a rightness claim one need not know how the
utterance or claim is justified. Understanding an utterance need not
involve accepting reasons for action. Recall that Habermas insists
that the illocutionary aim of the speaker is not only to be
**understood**, in the sense that addressees recognize
the *sense* of her utterance, but **agreed with**,
in the sense that they also **accept** the relevant
reasons that the speaker could adduce in support of their utterance.
In the case of utterances that make rightness claims these are reasons
to act or behave in certain ways. Habermas must establish the latter,
because his whole theory depends on the claim that the normative
commitments unavoidably generated in speech reach over into the
subsequent action sequence (1981 [1984a: 302-3]).



Habermas later makes a move that appears to address this problem
without solving it: he claims truth to be paradigmatic of validity,
and rightness to be merely analogous with truth (1999a [2003a: 229]).
However, he does not say what the analogues are, nor does he explain
what the basis for the analogy is (Finlayson 2005). To claim that that
validity claims to rightness are analogous to validity claims to
truth, in that they determine the meaning of the utterances that make
them, and can play the role as a core component of a theory of
meaning, is to beg the important questions.


### 2.2 A Theory of Social Action



The pragmatic theory of meaning is intended to provide the theoretical
framework for Habermas's social theory, which consists of a
typological theory of human action. Habermas offers a number of
typologies. He distinguishes four different "models" of
action: teleological action, subdivided into instrumental and
strategic action; normatively regulated action; dramaturgical action;
and communicative action (1981 [1984a: 85ff]). He later offers the
following more rudimentary typology which divides action on the
horizontal axis into success-oriented and consensus-oriented action,
and on the vertical axis between "non-social (individual) and
social action (1981 [1984a: 285]).




|  | Action Orientation |
| --- | --- |
| *Success* | *Consensus* |
| Action Situation | *Non-Social* | Instrumental Action | \* \* \* |
| *Social* | Strategic | Communicative Action |



At the heart of this typology is the distinction between communicative
action (rationality) on the one hand and instrumental and strategic
action (rationality) on the other.



Habermas defines communicative action in various ways but always to do
with agreement on the basis of validity claims. In one place, he
claims that it comprises "linguistically mediated actions in
which all participants pursue illocutionary aims and only
illocutionary aims" (1981 [1984a: 295]). That, however, is to
put the point too strongly since agents don't only aim to
understand and to be understood (Steinhoff 2009: 35-6). A better
definition is that communicative action is action in which
participants pursue illocutionary aims "without
reservation" also when they pursue "perlocutionary
goals" via "illocutionary goals already achieved"
(1986b [1998b chapter 3: 241]). This is important because Habermas
correlates instrumental action with perlocutionary aims and
communicative action with illocutionary aims, and he maintains that
instrumental and strategic action depends on communicative action, but
not vice versa. The idea is that agents, through their utterances,
make validity claims (to truth, rightness and truthfulness) on which
the meaning of their utterances depends, which are then taken up by
their interlocutors and form the basis of understanding and any
subsequent interactions.



In response to the basic worry that he conflates reaching
understanding of an utterance with reaching agreement on a norm of
action, Habermas introduces a distinction between weak and strong
communicative action. He tends to make the distinction in terms of the
difference between utterances for which speakers only make validity
claims to truth, and those for which they make validity claims to
rightness and hence offer normative reasons that "bind their
wills" (1999a [1998b chapter 7: 327]). In weak communicative
action the reasons that determine meaning are also supposed to guide
action by providing information about the way the world is: in strong
communicative action the reasons that are supposed to determine
meaning are action guiding because they are practical reasons based on
shared intersubjective norms (1999a [1998b chapter 7:
326-7]).



Habermas contrasts communicative action with instrumental action,
which he takes to be action whereby agents select the best or only
means in order to achieve the agents' ends (1981 [1984a: 285]).
He construes strategic action as a social variant of instrumental
action, whereby agents seek to influence other agents, in order to
achieve their ends, often (though not always) via the medium of
language (1981 [1984a: 285]). Habermas assumes that all action is
rational. But different action types involve different kinds of
rationality--instrumental and communicative. He also allows that
all action is broadly teleological, but claims that while instrumental
and strategic actions are oriented towards success, communicative
action is oriented towards consensus or reaching
understanding/agreement.



Habermas's conception of instrumental and strategic action has
come in for much criticism. He tends to assume that all instrumental
and strategic action is egocentric and monological action, in which
agents aim to achieve their desired ends, and that they pursue these
ends individually, not in concert with others. These assumptions are
brought out when he contrasts instrumental and strategic action with
communicative action whereby



> 
> 
> the actions of the agents involved are coordinated not through
> egocentric calculations of success but through acts of reaching
> understanding. (1981 [1984a: 285-6, 288]; 1981 [1998b chapter 2:
> 118]; Celikates & Jaeggi 2009 [2017: 263-4])
> 
> 
> 



He also assumes that strategically acting agents achieve their means
through influencing others. He allows that strategic actors can
cooperate, but claims that strategic cooperation is always
subordinated to the satisfaction of the agents own individual
(egocentric) ends.



> 
> 
> Success in action is also dependent on other actors, each of whom is
> oriented to his own success and behaves cooperatively only to the
> degree that this fits with his egocentric calculus of utility. (1981
> [1984a: 87-88])
> 
> 
> 



Habermas also assumes that in acting strategically an agent adopts an
objectivating attitude towards others. Strategic actors coordinate
their actions with others by trying to influence them or manipulate
them.



However, many critics have pointed out that it is not the case that
agents who act instrumentally or strategically must act selfishly, or
monologically, such that they are incapable of stable forms of
co-operation (Johnson 1991; Heath 2001; Steinhoff 2009; Blau, 2022).
These assumptions appear to be imported from the
"traditional" action theories as Habermas understands
them. Not only do these assumptions require independent justification,
but they are also incidental to the basic distinction Habermas is
attempting to draw.


#### 2.2.1 The Unavoidability Thesis



Having drawn the distinction between communicative and instrumental
action, Habermas argues for two basic theses. Recall the starting
intuition of *Theory of Communicative Action*:



> 
> 
> The idea of reason, which is differentiated in the various claims to
> validity, is necessarily built into the way in which the species of
> talking animals reproduces itself. (1984b [2001d: 85])
> 
> 
> 



Habermas claims that in societies like ours, there is *no
functional equivalent* for language as the medium of
action-coordination and social integration. And if his reconstruction
of language use is correct that takes place through communicative
action:



> 
> 
> the symbolic structures of the life-world can be reproduced only
> through the medium of action orientated to understanding. (1982:
> 237)
> 
> 
> 



If Habermas's pragmatic theory of meaning is correct, then a
weak transcendental necessity transmits from the premises, that
communication and discourse are necessary to social reproduction, to
features of his reconstruction thereof, such as validity claims, rules
of argumentation, etc. The transcendental necessity in question is
weak since the premises are contingent and empirical: they are not
themselves logically or even physically necessary. And the
reconstruction is itself defeasible. Nonetheless, the reconstructed
features, Habermas contends, are socially necessary for agents like
us--roughly agents of modern societies. Language exists, and
language use is not optional for human beings. Linguistic practice
presupposes the structures and rules of communication and discourse
that alone enable communication. So there is no feasible alternative
to speaking, making one's utterances understood to
interlocutors, and so of raising validity claims, and also, as we will
see below, invoking the rules of discourse (Heath 2001: 295-98).
Validity claims, and the rules of discourse that govern the practice
of argumentation, are what Habermas calls "pragmatic
preconditions" of communication. This means that



> 
> 
> *from the performative perspective of the participants in
> interaction*, these presuppositions *must* be undertaken.
> (Fultner 2019; Habermas 1999a [2003a: 85-86; 17-18])
> 
> 
> 



This is the "universality" expressed in the label
"universal pragmatics" which Habermas originally gave to
his research programme (1976b [1979: 1-68]).


#### 2.2.2 The Irreducibility Thesis



Habermas's theory is that communicative action is the
"basic form of action" and that instrumental and strategic
forms of action are derived from, and parasitic upon, action oriented
toward reaching understanding (1981 [1984a: 228]; 1999a [2003a: 86ff];
1976b [1979: 1]). This is a bold and controversial claim which
overturns the central "traditional" action theory which is
that the basic form or rationality is means-ends rationality, and that
the basic form of action is instrumental, and success-oriented.



Habermas's argument for the irreducibility thesis rests on his
speech-act theory. He claims that perlocutionary meaning (roughly, the
intended or unintended ends that agents achieve through the use of
language) depends essentially on illocutionary meaning, namely on the
reason-based consensus arising from the offer and acceptance of
validity claims, but not vice versa. The latter--the
illocutionary--is the "original mode of language use"
upon which he instrumental use of language is "parasitic"
(1981 [1984a: 288]). In latently strategic uses of language,
perlocutionary effects are achieved only through the unreserved
pursuit of illocutionary aims. In other words, strategically acting
individuals use language normally, giving their interlocutors to
believe mistakenly they are aiming at reaching understanding, when
they are not (1981 [1998b chapter 2: 118]).



One problem with this argument is that Habermas recalibrates
Austin's terms "perlocutionary" and
"illocutionary" so that they are inextricably bound up
with instrumental/strategic and communicative action respectively from
the start. So his argument virtually presupposes what it is supposed
to explain. Another difficulty is that it is unclear whether the claim
that the normal mode of language use involves the illocutionary goals
of reaching agreement on shared norms and binding practical
commitments, as in "strong" communicative action, or
not.



For these and other reasons most commentators agree that Habermas
fails to establish the irreducibility thesis by argument (Baurmann
1985; Steinhoff 2009; Blau 2022). Steinhoff claims that *all*
Habermas's arguments for the claim that communicative
rationality is irreducible to instrumental rationality fail, but that
the reverse is true (Steinhoff 2009: 46) and the traditional theory of
action is correct. Others think that the basic distinction is useful
and can be justified by argument, even if Habermas's own
argument is not clinching (Blau 2022; Heath 2001). Heath provides an
argument in the other direction which shows, contra Steinhoff, that
instrumental and strategic action cannot account for language use, and
argues that this result can support Habermas's contention, that
instrumental and strategic action presuppose communicative action but
not vice versa. (Heath 2001: 45-48)


### 2.3 Habermas's Social Ontology



The third research program, Habermas's social ontology, rests on
the previous two.



This takes the form of dyadic analytic distinction between
"system" and "lifeworld", which form the
ontological counterparts or "complements" of instrument
and strategic action, and communicative action respectively (1981
[1987: 119]). Societies should be conceived "simultaneously as
systems and lifeworlds" (1981 [1987: 118]).



They are theoretical concepts, which enable social theorists to
explain social order.



They are also ontological concepts that respectively denote two
different kind of existing social order, or to put it another way two
distinct but complementary mechanisms of social integration. In the
former case, systems stabilize the



> 
> 
> non-intended interconnections of action ... by a non-normative
> regulation of individual decision that extend beyond the actor's
> consciousness.
> 
> 
> 



In the latter, the lifeworld, social integration is brought about by
means of "a normatively secured or communicatively achieved
consensus" (1981 [1987: 117]).


#### 2.3.1 Lifeworld



On the one hand, Habermas presents the lifeworld phenomenologically as
"a background stock of cultural knowledge that is 'always
already' familiar to agents" and thus makes mutual
understanding possible. In this it has what he calls a "peculiar
half transcendence" that, unlike the formal notions of the
subjective, objective, and intersubjective worlds, cannot be
objectified and brought before consciousness (1981 [1987:
154-4]). On the other hand, he associates it with specific
domains of social life--such as family life, everyday life, and
civil society--in which communicative actions predominate, and
agents coordinate their interactions by means of speech-acts and their
underling validity claims (Baxter 2011: 166; Heath 2011: 75). Either
way, the lifeworld enjoys a certain primacy over the system, since it
"remains the subsystem that defines the pattern of the social
system as a whole" and because systems "need to be
anchored in the lifeworld" (1981 [1987: 154]).


#### 2.3.2 System



Habermas developed his notion of the system in his writings prior to
*Theory of Communicative Action*, particularly through his
engagement with Luhmann (1973a [1975: 1-8]). Systems are
macro-level processes that stabilize complexes of actions via steering
mechanisms. The two main examples are the economy and bureaucracy,
which function respectively via the steering mechanisms of money and
power. Unlike the lifeworld, systems fulfil their functions through
"a non-normative regulation of individual decisions that extends
beyond the actor's consciousnesses" (1981 [1987: 117]).
This is a reference to an "invisible hand" mechanism of
the kind that occurs in Mandeville, Smith, and Hegel, with the
important difference that in these latter theorists the invisible
hand, providence-like, serves the common good. For Habermas the
function of the systems of the economy and bureaucracy is merely to
harmonize and stabilize complexes of individual actions, and thereby
to bring about societal integration and reproduction. They act as
relief mechanisms that ease the burden on communicatively acting
subjects. Of course, in functioning societies the economy and
bureaucracies *should* also serve the common good. According to
Habermas's theory this only happens when the system bears the
right kind of relation to the lifeworld.



When Habermas first introduced the idea of the system he was engaging
with Luhmann's work and thinking mainly of cybernetic systems
(1976a [1979: 170]; 1973a [1975: 130-142]). A good example of a
cybernetic system is a heater linked to a thermostat, where each
serves as input and output. If the heat rises beyond a fixed
temperature, say 20 Celsius, the thermostat switches the heater off,
and if it drops below that temperature the thermostat switches the
heater on again (Heath 2011: 83-84). The result (or goal-state
to use the slightly misleading technical term) is to keep the room at
an even ambient temperature.



Habermas construes systems, in the light of Luhmann, as spheres of
"norm free" sociality. "In capitalist societies the
market is the most important example of a norm-free regulation of
cooperative contexts" (1981 [1987: 150, 154]). This puts him on
the side of those who see markets as destroying rather than nourishing
the web of moral relations. His predominant way of thinking about
subsystems is that they are "demoralized". This is true of
the market economy, bureaucracies and state administration, and the
law, which in *Theory of Communicative Action* he treats as a
subsystem. That said, even in this text, while he claims that law in
the process of rationalization becomes "detached from the
ethical motivations of the legal person" (1981 [1987: 174]), he
nonetheless thinks of basic rights and the principle of popular
sovereignty as sources of legitimation which act as



> 
> 
> bridge between a de-moralized and externalized legal sphere and a
> deinstitutionalized and internalized morality. (1981 [1987: 178])
> 
> 
> 



Systems, which facilitate integration and social order through
"delinguistified steering media" like money and power,
have great advantages for citizens of modern societies. They fulfil
functions that are too complex or burdensome to be undertaken by
communicative action, that is, by individuals acting consciously in
concert. For example, markets distribute goods and resources to where
they are most needed, using price signals and laws of supply and
demand.



However, systems also have disadvantages. For one thing, systems, once
in place, operate independently of human agents. There is,
consequently, a gap between an actor's agency, and their
conscious intentions and aims, and the purpose that they serve in the
system. This lack of transparency is evident in firms, for instance,
where the agents fulfil their roles and tasks, whether using
instrumental, communicative, or moral rationality, or a mix of all,
while all the time behind their backs or "beyond their
consciousness" at the macro-level they are making profit for the
firm's owners and shareholders. For another, Habermas claims,
agents operating in spheres steered by delinguistified media are
inclined to shift from communicative to instrumental and strategic
action orientations with the result that



> 
> 
> success-oriented action steered by egocentric calculations of utility
> loses its connection to action oriented by mutual understanding. (1981
> [1987: 196])
> 
> 
> 



Whether Habermas holds that agents' actions in economic and
bureaucratic domains are merely constrained by system imperatives of
the relevant steering media, or reduced to instrumental and strategic
actions is moot (Jutten 2013). But it is empirically false for
reasons given by Honneth and Joas and others that the mediatization of
a domain of social life would force agents to adopt only one type of
action. As Joas puts it, every sphere of action contains "a
wealth of different types of action" (Joas 1986 [1991: 104]).
Systems, economic and bureaucratic, and the specific organisations
they comprise, all involve numerous different kinds of action. This is
not only an empirical claim but a conceptual one that follows from
Habermas's own theory that instrumental and strategic action is
parasitic on communicative action. Habermas has also been criticized
for being seduced by systems theory into merely accepting spheres of
norm free sociality, and the uncoupling of system and lifeworld as a
normal result of modernization and social differentiation (McCarthy
1991).


#### 2.3.3 The Relation of Lifeworld to System



The relation of lifeworld to system is pivotal to Habermas's
social theory. Most commentators (for example McCarthy 1991: 154 and
Baxter 2011: 166) take this to be the main problem facing the theory.
Actually, as Habermas notes, there are two related problems: the
problem of constructing a theory that can combine systems theory and
action theory fruitfully (1981 [1987: 201]), and the problem of
articulating the actual relation between system and lifeworld.



So what is that relation? Habermas accords primacy to the lifeworld,
on the on the grounds that it "defines the pattern of the social
system as a whole". Systemic mechanisms, he contends,
"need to be anchored in the lifeworld" (1981 [1987: 154]).
It is tempting to think that Habermas's thesis of the primacy of
the lifeworld over the system must have to do with the primacy of
communicative over instrumental and strategic action, the view that
instrumental and strategic action are "parasitic" on
communicative action, but not vice versa. However, that would be
problematic since Habermas does not succeed in establishing by means
of speech-act theory that communicative action *is* the basic
form of action on which instrumental and strategic action essentially
depend.



Even if Habermas had an argument that conclusively demonstrated the
primacy of communicative over instrumental action, that would not
suffice to establish the primacy of the lifeworld over the system. The
primacy of one kind of action over another could not itself establish
the primacy of one kind of social order over another. That would be a
conflation of levels. Habermas does in fact quite often conflate types
of action with spheres of action, as we see from his claim cited above
that success-oriented individual actions are "steered" by
egocentric calculations (Joas 1986 [1991: 104]). For example, he talks
of "subsystems of purposive rational action" and
"normative steering" (1981 [1987: 180-1]).


### 2.4 Habermas's Critical Social Theory



Habermas's thesis of the primacy of the lifeworld over the
system gives him a framework in which to criticize neo-liberalism and
its mania for the marketization and financialization of everyday life:
"the whole program of subjecting the lifeworld to the
imperatives of the market must be subject to scrutiny", whether
in health care, public transport, military security, or secondary and
tertiary education (2009: 186). He does this with his theory of the
colonization of the lifeworld by the system.


#### 2.4.1 Colonization



Recall that mediatization--the intrusion of steering media into
social domains that were hitherto not systematically organized and
integrated--is not, according to Habermas, itself a pathological
development. It has a positive side, namely as a relief mechanism, a
way of coping efficiently with complexity. But colonization, as the
label suggests, is bad. Colonization occurs where



> 
> 
> systemic mechanisms suppress forms of social integration even in those
> areas where a consensus-dependent coordination of action cannot be
> replaced, that is, where the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld is
> at stake. (1981 [1987: 196])
> 
> 
> 



Symbolic reproduction is where society is maintained through
communicative actions. As a consequence of colonization, the lifeworld
shrinks, and its capacity for symbolic reproduction atrophies (1981
[1987: 154, 173]). This is functionally bad. To the extent that the
system, and society as a whole, depend on the lifeworld and its
communicative resources, colonization is self-stultifying and
destabilizing.



Habermas follows Marx and Weber on this, rather than Luhmann, insofar
as he shows that



> 
> 
> the rationalization for the lifeworld makes possible the emergence and
> growth of subsystems whose independent imperatives turn back
> destructively upon the lifeworld. (1981 [1987: 186])
> 
> 
> 



This not only eradicates normative contexts of action but, he
maintains, supplants these with instrumental and strategic action
orientations, which he calls a "pathological de-formation of the
communicative infrastructure of the lifeworld" (1981 [1987: 375,
180, 181]). This recalls Adorno's discussion of bourgeois
coldness, but broadens and extends it and decouples it specifically
from the moral abomination of Auschwitz (Adorno 1966 [1973: 363]). For
example, consider that once healthcare and housing are privatized and
seen as mere commodities, landlords can evict tenants because of rent
arrears, and hospitals can turn away patients who cannot afford to
pay, with no moral qualms or social responsibility, because they see
these actions as merely economic transactions. Colonization is also
bad, according to Habermas, insofar as it leads to a variety of social
pathologies pertaining to culture, society, and person, including loss
of freedom, loss of meaning, crises in legitimation, anomie, and
alienation (1981 [1987: 385; 142-3]).


#### 2.4.2 Reification



Habermas presents his colonization thesis as a reformulation of the
Lukacsian idea of reification that was so influential on the
first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists, especially
Adorno (1981 [1984a: 399]; 1981 [1987: 1]). Lukacs argues that
the commodification of all domains of modern society, and
consciousness thereof, has led to its "taking on the character
of a thing", hence the economy and bureaucracy and the legal
system appear to subjects as a "second nature"
(Lukacs 1971: 83, 86). Consequently they adopt a passive
attitude towards it, in theory as contemplation, in practice as
adaptation. This results not only in an illusion, but also in a kind
of inaction, since people see and treat things as natural, and so not
up to them, and not alterable, when such things are in fact historical
and in principle reversible, and up to them. That idea needs
reformulating, Habermas maintains, because it mistakenly conflates
rationalization and social differentiation with reification.
Lukacs, for example, thinks of rationalization as the
destruction of social totality, namely the substantial ethical life of
a community, as an unqualified bad, whereas Habermas sees it as having
upsides and downsides.



Reification is the major downside, which Habermas sees as a specific
alienating effect of the destruction of the communicative capacity for
symbolic reproduction and social integration provided by the
lifeworld. In particular, reification arises when the intrusion of
steering media causes the "conversion to another mechanism of
action coordination" (1981 [1987: 375]). Since this conversion
happens as it were behind the backs of social agents rather than
through their conscious intentions and choices, colonization gives
rise to "objectively false consciousness" and its effects
"have to remain hidden" (1981 [1987: 187]). Notably,
contra the Marxist tradition up to Lukacs, the reification
effect arises in class-unspecific ways and thus the crises do not
precipitate class conflict, which, Habermas argues, the welfare state
has largely succeeded in pacifying (1981 [1987: 187]). Furthermore,
though reification effects are "filtered through the pattern of
social inequality", the latter is not one of the pathologies he
focuses on (1981 [1987: 349]). He focuses more on welfare state
clientism, and juridification (1981 [1987: 357, 363-4]). This is
one of the important differences between Habermas's social
theory and Rawls's *Theory of Justice*, and leads to a
completely different outlook in the diagnosis of social ills
(Jutten 2011).


#### 2.4.3 Normative Grounds



This brings us to the third significant feature of Habermas's
critical social theory: the problem of normative grounds. In the
introduction to *Theory of Communicative Action* Habermas
describes his project as "not a meta-theory but the beginning of
a social theory concerned to validate its own critical
standards" (Schnadelbach 1986 [1991: 8]), inviting the
contrast with the critical "social theory" developed in
the mid twentieth century by Horkheimer and Adorno, which, according
to Habermas's criticism, had foundered on "the difficulty
of giving an account of its own normative foundations" (1981
[1984a: 374]). He also criticizes systems theory for failing to see
the primacy and fragility of the lifeworld, its function of embedding
and facilitating all spheres of action, and its crucial role in
producing and reproducing social order. Systems theory conflates
system and social integration and "deprives itself of the
standard of communicative rationality" (1981 [1987: 186]).



This has led commentators to assume that the ideas of communicative
action together with the theory that in modern society socialization
takes place through communicative action provide Habermas with an
account of normative foundations, of the kind he claimed was missing
from earlier Frankfurt School theory. The trouble is that it is
unclear to what extent this is a functionalist theory, supported by
mainly empirical claims, or a normative one; and, if normative, in
what sense. As Herbert Schnadelbach was among the first to point
out, Habermas's approach of rationally reconstructing the
communicative infrastructure of modern societies does not obviously
fit the bill here. Functionalist explanation is not normative
justification (Schnadelbach 1986 [1991: 21]). This also applies
to his reconstructed theory of reification (Jutten 2011). It is
clear that Habermas's is a normative theory, to the extent that
if his diagnosis is correct, the "damage" done by
colonization is not only social and structural, individuals too are
harmed and suffer as a result of it, and their legitimate expectations
are disappointed. This is the case whether or not they are
"wronged". The problem can be put as a dilemma. Either
Habermas's social theory is genuinely critical, in which case it
judges that a colonized lifeworld is bad and ought to be changed (and
such judgement requires substantive normative premises), or it stops
short of such a judgement, and is hence not properly critical.



Maeve Cooke argues that Habermas's theory contains implicitly a
"utopian promise" of a rationalized lifeworld, that is
"reproduced through processes of intersubjective evaluation of
validity claims" (Cooke 1994: 162), so that substantial ethical
reasons ground its normative claims. Other commentators, such as
Honneth, assume that discourse ethics provides the account of its
normative foundations that, according to Habermas, earlier critical
theory stood in need of (Honneth 1985 [1991: 282]). However, there are
numerous problems with this view. One is that the normative claims of
critical theory stand in need of *substantive* moral reasons,
rather than *accounts of* those reasons (Finlayson 2013a), and
as Schnadelbach points out it is not clear that Habermas's
rational reconstruction of communication as discourse can provide such
reasons.


## 3. Discourse Ethics



Discourse ethics was developed contemporaneously with the theory of
communicative action and fits into roughly the same framework.
Discourse ethics comprises a number of different interlocking
theories:


* the lineaments of a social theory of morality
* a normative moral theory
* a philosophical justification of the moral standpoint (the
principle of universalization)
* a theory of the development of moral consciousness



Unlike the *Theory of Communicative Action* there is no single
work in which Habermas's discourse ethics is given a settled and
canonical statement. Instead, it is an evolving research programme,
presented in a series of essays most of which are contained in two
volumes published in English as *Moral Consciousness and
Communicative Action* (1990a) and *Justification and
Application* (1993). The development of Habermas's discourse
ethics falls into two phases, roughly 1983-1990 and
1991-1996. Broadly speaking, the essays in *Moral
Consciousness and Communicative Action* comprise phase one, and
those from *Justification and Application* through to
*Between Facts and Norms*, phase two. We will call the theory
developed in phase one "discourse ethics", and that in
phase two, "discourse morality". For in the beginning of
the 1990s Habermas introduces a distinction between morality as a
normative theory of rightness, and ethics as a theory of the good, in
which light, he himself later notes, to be accurate he should have
renamed his theory "the discourse theory of morality"
(1993: 1; 1991: 7).


### 3.1 Discourse



Discourse is not a synonym for language or speech. Only speech that is
explicitly oriented towards reaching rationally motivated consensus
counts as discourse (1981 [1984a: 42]). In other words, discourse is
communication, for Habermas stipulates that communication just is
speech oriented towards reaching understanding. But discourse is
communication of a special kind. When communication breaks down and
the everyday shared meanings and understandings that normally
coordinate interactions are disrupted, interlocutors have to switch
from action to discourse. Discourses are a "reflective form of
agreement-oriented action that ...sit on top of the latter"
(1986a [1990b: 245-6]). Discourse is a higher order of
communication, with the aim of renewing or replacing a problematized
consensus. To participate in discourse just is to provide reasons with
the aim of convincing all interlocutors to accept a disputed validity
claim. So, on Habermas's view, discourse just is the language
game of argumentation in which disputed validity claims are
"redeemed", and when a validity claim is redeemed
successfully the disrupted consensus is restored, renewed, or replaced
by a new one.



On this picture, argumentation is a rule-governed practice, not a
verbal free-for-all. Habermas identifies three levels of rules. First,
there are the basic rules of logic such as the principle of
contradiction, and the basic semantic rules of universalizability and
consistency (1983 [1990: 86]). Second, there are procedural norms such
as the principles of sincerity and accountability, namely that every
participant must undertake, if only implicitly, to assert only what
she genuinely believes and always either to justify upon request what
she asserts or to provide reasons for not offering a justification.
These are, contends Habermas, preconditions for all genuine
argumentation, i.e., argumentation conceived as a "search for
truth" and organized like "a competition for better
arguments" (1983 [1990: 87-8]). Third, there are the
processual preconditions that immunize discourse against coercion,
repression, and inequality. These norms are supposed to insulate
discourse from all persuasive forces except the "unforced force
of the better argument", and they must be followed, if a
rationally motivated consensus is to be reached.



Habermas suggests that the following rules of discourse can be
established:



(1)
Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to
take part in a discourse.
(2)


a.
Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.
b.
Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the
discourse.
c.
Everyone is allowed to express his attitudes, desires, and
needs.
 
(3)
No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion,
from exercising his rights as laid down in (1) and (2) (1983 [1990:
89]; Rehg 1994: 62).


The above list is not intended to be complete. And Habermas nowhere
provides a complete list. They are a representative sample borrowed
from Robert Alexy's *Theory of Practical Discourse*
(Alexy 1978 [1990: 165-7]).


### 3.2 Performative Self-Contradiction and Transcendental Pragmatic Justification



Habermas assumes that the
 rules (1), (2) a-c, and (3)
 above can be identified by a test of performative self-contradiction.
A performative contradiction arises when a rule that speakers
pragmatically invoke by the illocutionary act of, say, assertion, is
contradicted by the semantic content of that assertion. An example is
Moore's paradox: "It is raining but I don't believe
it" (Moore 1993). Habermas maintains that the test of whether
the denial of a rule yields a performative contradiction does not
justify rules of discourse so much as identify them (1983 [1990: 95]).
On that point, he differs from his colleague Karl-Otto Apel, who in
his seminal 1973 paper attempts what he calls a
transcendental-pragmatic, "ultimate" justification of the
norms of a minimal ethics, by showing how they follow directly from
the pragmatic preconditions of communication (Apel 1976 [1980]).
According to Cristoph Lumer, Habermas made the same attempt in the
original manuscript of *Moral Consciousness and Communicative
Action*, though abandoned it in subsequent versions (Lumer 1997:
50). Later, as Heath (2014: 843) notes, Habermas denies that his
principle of universalizability (U)--see
 SS3.3
 below--can be justified through a "performative
contradiction argument", not only because applying the test of
performative contradiction to a rule is in his view heuristic, not
justificatory, but also, because he thinks, no such principles and
certainly no substantive moral norms follow directly from those
rules.


### 3.3 The Principles of Discourse Ethics and their Justification



The two principles of discourse ethics are principle (D) and principle
(U), the principle of universalizability. In phase one, Habermas
formulates (D) as follows:



(D)
Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet)
with the approval of all in their capacity as participants in a
practical discourse (1983 [1990: 66]).


He initially calls (D) "the principle of discourse ethics"
(1983 [1990: 66]). It takes the form of a straightforward validity to
consensus (or possible consensus) conditional. The scope of the
consensus is "all those affected" by the norms. As such it
is universal among participants in practical discourse, namely among
all agents.



In addition, there is principle (U)--the principle of
universalization, which spells out the "criterion for
generalizing maxims of action" (1983 [1990: 62]). Every valid
norm has to fulfil the following condition:



(U)
All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its
general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of
*everyone's* interests (and these consequences are
preferred to those of known alternative possibilities (1983 [1990:
65]).


Habermas first introduces (U) as "a rule of argument that makes
agreement in practical discourses possible" (1983 [1990: 66]).
In phase one he begins with a justification of (U), and then infers
(D) (1983 [1990: 93]). The initial idea was that (U) was to be given a
"transcendental pragmatic" derivation from the rules of
discourse, and (D) inferred from (U). The nature of the putative
transition between (U) and (D) however remains unclear (Lumer 1997:
49), and Habermas has not succeeded in clarifying it.



In the 1983 programme, after having distanced himself from
Apel's programme, Habermas proposes to justify (U) by deriving
it logically from two premises: (1) the rules of discourse and (2)
"the idea of the justification of norms" or "a weak
idea of normative justification" (1983 [1990: 92, 97]). Later,
in phase two, Habermas reverses the order of justification, and infers
(U), now designated the "moral principle", from (D). At
the same time, he weakens (D) by making it apply generally to all
norms of action whether moral or not, and labels it "the
discourse principle":



(D)
Only those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected
persons could agree *as participants in rational discourse*
(1992b [1996b: 107]).


(D) now merely "expresses the meaning of post-conventional
requirements of justification" (1992b [1996b: 107]), and is
given along with premise (2). It supposedly merely explicates
"the point of view from which action norms can be impartially
grounded" (1992b [1996b: 109]). While Habermas weakens (D) he
strengthens (U).



> 
> 
> a norm is valid *if and only if* the foreseeable consequences
> and side effects of its general observance for the interests and
> value-orientations of *each individual* could be freely
> accepted *jointly* by *all* concerned. (1996a essay 1:
> 60 [1998a: 42 translation amended])
> 
> 
> 



Neither Habermas's followers, with the possible exception of
Rehg (1991 & 1994), nor any of his critics, think that this
logical derivation of (U) goes through. Gradually, Habermas backs away
from the claim that (U) can be given a logical or formal derivation.
He presents discourse ethics as a "programme" of
philosophical justification and keeps adding stronger premises to that
programme (Lumer 1997: 53; Habermas 1983 [1990: 43]). According to
Kettner the fact that in phase two (D) is no longer the principle of
discourse ethics, but construed as "still neutral" with
regard to morality and law, together with the fact that (U) is now the
*moral principle*, means that the grounding of discourse ethics
is normatively incomplete, and this effectively amounts to the
"disappearance" of the original project, which was
supposed to show that the moral principle and the moral point of view
fall out of the success conditions for communicative action (Kettner
2002: 207, 211-12).



To sidestep the absence (or failure) of a logical derivation of (U),
Habermas presents (U) provisionally as an abductive hypothesis (1996a
essay 1: 60 [1998a: 42]) where abduction is an inference to the best
explanation. Ott makes an attempt to justify (D) and (U) as a
conjunction of pragmatic implications (Ott 1996: 42-45), while
Finlayson claims that U is best thought of as an inference to the best
explanation, and both agree that it rests on supplementary premises
drawn from Habermas's modernization theory (Finlayson 2000; Ott
1996). This raises the question of what kind of justification of the
moral standpoint Habermas has in mind. In *Moral Consciousness and
Communicative Action* he presents discourse ethics as a defence of
a cognitivist account of morality against the moral sceptic on grounds
that even the sceptic must accept (1983 [1990: 76ff]). The
philosophical programme of justification looks like a
constructivist--and what Gunnarsson calls a
"rationalist"--argument, invoking slender premises
and reaching thick normative conclusions, albeit the said normative
conclusions are not substantial moral norms, but a moral principle of
universalization, and an account of the moral point of view, in which
moral agents (participants in discourse) collectively validate
substantial moral norms (Gunnarsson 2000: 99, see also Rees 2020:
678-81, 689-91). Gunnarsson argues that all
Habermas's rationalist arguments for (U) fail. Benhabib is also
of this view. In an early critique she argued that (U) was redundant,
and that (D) should be given a "weak justification
programme" which adduced supplementary moral premises of
"universal respect" and "egalitarian
reciprocity" (Benhabib 1986: 308; 1992: 31). Habermas's
tendency to add ever stronger supplementary premises for his
justification of (U) is a tacit acknowledgement of his failure to
provide either a formal derivation or a "rationalist"
justification of (U). In doing so he moves away from his original idea
of providing a philosophical justification of (U), towards a more
modest explication and reconstruction of the moral point of view,
which can be corroborated by insights drawn from an array of
disciplines, including the moral psychology of Lawrence Kohlberg.


### 3.4 (U) and Kant's Categorical Imperative



Principles (D) and (U) are supposed to capture the practice of
universalization in ethics, but in a social sense that differs from
apparently similar procedures in Rawls, whom Habermas takes to be
working in the Kantian tradition of political philosophy. The
differences are as follows. (U) is not presented as a moral norm: it
is not formulated as an imperative. Initially, (U) is presented as
"a bridging principle" on analogy with the principle of
induction, except that (U) tests whether norms are amenable to
consensus among all affected, given their interests. (U) is not a
*hypothetical* test for generating moral norms. It rationally
reconstructs an *actual* practice by which *real* moral
agents, as participants in an actual discourse, themselves ascertain
the validity of moral norms, or institute them. Finally, whereas,
according to Habermas, the test of universalization contained in
Kant's first formulation of the Categorical Imperative is
"monological", since it can be performed by each person
individually, the procedure captured by (U) is
"dialogical" since it must involve other people acting
together. As McCarthy puts it:



> 
> 
> Rather than ascribing as valid to all others any maxim that I can will
> to be a universal law, I must submit my maxim to all others for the
> purposes of discursively testing its claim to universality. The
> emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradiction to be a
> general law, to what all can will in agreement to be a universal norm.
> (1983 [1990: 67], Habermas quoting McCarthy 1978: 326)
> 
> 
> 



Finally, on the Kantian conception a maxim is adopted in virtue of its
universal form, whereas on Habermas's conception it is not just
the form of the maxim that is universalized. It is in part the
**content** of the norm that is universalized. This is
why (U) refers to the "interests" of everyone affected it.
But on Habermas's view universalization is thought of as a
social process that extends to the very self-conception of the moral
agent. Habermas's guiding idea here is G. H. Mead's notion
of "ideal role taking" (1988b: chapter 3 [1992a]; 1983
[1990: 56-68, 121]), in which moral agents learn by projecting
themselves into the position of all other moral agents. This is a
process whereby agents consider "every interest involved"
and evaluate what is "good for everyone under the same
conditions", a process that, according to Mead, leads "to
the development of a larger self, which can be identified with the
interests of others" (Mead 1934 [1962: 363]).


### 3.5 The Return of Habermas's Kantianism and the Morality/Ethics Distinction



Habermas thus develops a distinctively social and intersubjective
version of ethics, different from Kant's. But certain
developments in phase two push back toward a Kantian conception of
discourse ethics (Heath 2014: 846). In *Between Facts and
Norms*, (U) is said to allow participants to agree on norms that
are impartial, and that have "categorial validity" (1992b
[1996b: 28]). And Habermas appears to hold, like Kant, that the
rational will is the source of moral obligation (1992b [1996b: 110];
Kettner 2002, 212). Furthermore, the moral domain, which in phase one
encompassed the entire domain of action norms and values, later
"shrinks" to a domain of thinner, universal moral norms
with characteristic overridingness and stringency (1991a chapter 6,
202 [1993: 91]).



It is primarily Habermas's introduction of a tripartite typology
of practical reason--the ethical, moral, and pragmatic
employments of practical reason--that drives his return to Kant
in *Between Facts and Norms*. In particular Habermas introduces
a notion of ethical discourse that differs from moral discourse in
that it addresses clinical questions such as "What is the good
life (for me, or for us)?" and that is restricted in scope to
communities with shared values. Ethical discourses differ, he claims,
from moral discourses which deal with questions of justice, understood
as what is equally in the interests of all (1983 [1990: 180]; 1991a
chapter 5, 101-105 [1993: chapter 1, 3-8]; 1996a essay 1:
39-40 [1998a: 26-7]). He understands "justice"
not as a political value, as the later Rawls does, but as the supreme
moral value, and the designated value of moral discourse, on analogy
with truth for theoretical discourse. Although he allows that many
questions can be addressed by both ethical and moral discourses, he
draws a sharp distinction between them and accords priority to
morality over ethics (1983 [1990: 104]; 1991a chapter 5, 100-119
[1993: chapter 1, 1-17]). Ethical discourses always take place
within the bounds of moral permissibility, and on Habermas's
account no moral norm can be weighed against, or trumped by, any
ethical value. Along with various communitarians, Charles Taylor and
Martin Seel both criticize Habermas on this point and defend the idea
that the good (albeit construed in different ways) has priority over
the morally right (Taylor 1989 [1992]; Seel 1995).



The ethics/morality distinction has also been a target of much
criticism. Benhabib (1986), McCarthy (1991; chapter 7: 181-200);
Putnam (2002); and Kettner (2002), among others have shown that
Habermas cannot and does not maintain a sharp distinction between the
two. The main reason they give is that the notion of value that
Habermas associates with ethics bleeds into his conception of a valid
moral norm. Indeed, Habermas himself acknowledges the existence of
what he calls a "hidden link" between justice and the
common good (1983 [1990: 202]), and "the remnant of the good at
the core of the right" ("das Gute im Gerechten")
(1996a essay 1: 43 [1998a: 29]). And he appears to think of this
relation, not as threat to his conception of morality but as a feature
of it, namely that it rests on an underlying web of solidary relations
between human beings. Habermas claims that morality arose from this
web of solidarity as a process of generalization and universalization
in the course of modernization, and, he claims, although solidarity
remains as the other side of justice (*qua* moral rightness)
this does not smudge the bright line between ethics and morality
(Habermas 1986a [1990b]).



Kettner objects that Habermas's typology is dogmatic,
established by "terminological fiat" and that it should
not be seen as an insight into the nature of practical reason (Kettner
2002: 208). Few critics are prepared to defend Habermas's
distinction with the notable exception of Rainer Forst (Forst 2007
[2011: 60-79]). In the final analysis, Habermas settles on the
view of discourse ethics in general, and (U) in particular, as a
reconstruction of an alternative to Kant's first formula of the
Categorical Imperative that is allegedly superior to the latter in
virtue of being dialogical rather than monological and the
reconstruction of an actual practice involving real moral agents.


### 3.6 Dialogical vs. Monological Morality



Much depends on Habermas's articulation and defence of the
distinction between a dialogical and a monological ethics, and his
argument for the superiority of the former, which he makes with
vehemence and conviction both in his critical engagement with Lawrence
Kohlberg and later in his debate with Rawls. Nonetheless, critics have
argued that the putative distinction between dialogical and
monological ethics is one without a difference, and have cast doubt on
Habermas's argument for the cognitive superiority of dialogical
ethics. McMahon argues that (U) is ambiguous between two very
different conceptions of dialogicality. Weak dialogicality consists in
the concurrence of independent judgements about which norm would
satisfy the interest of all concerned, that is put together in
piecemeal fashion (McMahon 2000: 521). Strong dialogicality, by
contrast, involves a collective, joint judgement by all affected.
McMahon claims that Habermas, and Rehg (1991 & 1994), whose
interpretation of (U) Habermas cites approvingly (1992b [1996b: 109]),
endorse the strong conception. But the strong conception, which
requires that each participant in discourse suspend judgement until
all other have cast their vote, is, so to speak, incoherent. For one
thing, it robs each participant of any reason to judge from their own
perspective whether a norm is valid. For another, it renders deviation
from a norm impossible, because as soon as an agent deviates from a
norm, it is no longer valid, and cannot be criticized as mistaken
(McMahon 2000: 529).



Another reason to think that the distinction is without a difference
is that Habermas allows participants in an actual discourse to conduct
advocatory discourses whereby they imaginatively project themselves
into other people's points of view. He must allow this because
it would be impossible to conduct an actual discourse with "all
affected" by a norm. So Habermas must allow that the
constituency of all participants in an actual discourse might be
small, at the limit two people, and that the constituency of
"all affected" by a norm might consist of every moral
agent and patient including the unborn. But with that degree of
idealization, the difference between an ideal discourse conducted
monologically and an actual but advocatory dialogue between real
people has all but disappeared, and the cognitive superiority of the
latter cannot be maintained.


### 3.7 Discourse Ethics and Critical Social Theory



Habermas claimed in *Theory of Communicative Action* that
Adorno and Horkheimer's critical theory failed to provide an
adequate account "of its own normative foundations" (1981
[1984a: 374]) and that his own project was, by contrast the
"beginning of a social theory concerned to validate its own
critical standards" (1981 [1984a: xxxix]).



In *Legitimation Crisis* Habermas had explored the idea that
critical social theory could find its *point d'appui* in
"suppressed generalizable interests", namely the
unrealized rational potentials of modern society (1973a [1975: 111]).
As we saw, and Habermas himself admits, he did not develop this
approach in *Theory of Communicative Action*. He claimed that
critical theory must refrain from "critically evaluating
... forms of life and cultures ... as a whole" and
focused instead on investigating the way in which communicative
pathologies arising from the colonization of the lifeworld hinder
"learning potentials" (1981 [1984a: 383]). Critics such as
Schnadelbach and Taylor countered that such an approach would
only *explicate* critical or rational potentials, but never
*justify* normative criticisms of society (Schnadelbach
1986 [1991]; Taylor 1986 [1991]). Recall that (U) is a moral principle
that is supposed to validate norms containing generalizable interests.
Some of Habermas's supporters in the 1980s, for example, Honneth
and Benhabib, argued that discourse ethics could serve as the account
of the normative foundations that Habermas argued first generation
critical theory was missing (Honneth 1985 [1991: 286]; Benhabib 1986:
279-81).



The trouble is that Habermas's social theory does not set out to
criticize society in virtue of its degree of conformity to principle
(U) or to any substantive moral principle. Habermas continues to deny
that this is the proper approach of social theory. He explicitly
rebukes Rawls for thinking that the theorist can criticize society by
first designing "the basic norms of a well-ordered society on
the drafting table" and then checking society against it (1990d
[1994: 101]; 1996a essay 3: 122 [1998a: 97]). That approach arrogates
the task of criticism to the philosopher, instead of social agents and
citizens. Besides which, the problem, as Schnadelbach understands
it, is that social criticism proper requires normative judgements,
which must be supported by normative reasons, while discourse ethics
limits itself to the clarification of the moral point of view, and (U)
is a procedural principle that leaves such judgements up to
participants in discourse, and cannot furnish the requisite reasons
(Finlayson 2013b).


### 3.8 Other Criticisms



In the 1980s and 1990s a number of feminist critics, inspired by Carol
Gilligan's critique of Kohlberg, *In a Different Voice*,
developed two significant lines of argument against Kantian moral
theory and Rawlsian liberalism. The first was that the
"liberal" conception of the moral self is formal,
abstract, and gender-neutral. The second was that the moral self is a
male self masquerading as neutral and universal. The suggestion is
that morality/moral theory is complicit with discrimination against
women and patriarchal oppression. They aimed a similar criticism at
Kantian, Rawlsian, and Kohlbergian conceptions of "the moral
standpoint" (Benhabib & Cornell [eds] 1987a; Benhabib 1992;
Meehan [ed.] 1995). Among these feminist critics, some, e.g., Benhabib
and Meehan, were initially supportive of discourse ethics because of
its emphasis on including other voices, and its insistence its ideals
must be won from the reconstruction of actual practices of real
agents. Later, their arguments were recalibrated and turned against
discourse ethics. Because the moral self is conceived as formal and
abstract, and because the moral point of view is characterized by the
formal criteria of universalizability and reversibility,
Habermas's discourse ethics cannot accommodate the kind of moral
experiences that, Gilligan maintains, are characteristic of women: it
is blind to the importance of considerations of care and
responsibility for others. This leads Benhabib claims to a
privatisation, personalisation, and devaluation of women's moral
experiences (Benhabib & Cornell 1987a: 7-9; Benhabib 1992:
152, 184). She argues further that "the restriction of the moral
domain to questions of justice" results in "the
privatization of women's experience and leads to epistemological
blindness towards the concrete other" (Benhabib 1992: 164).
There is some doubt whether Benhabib's position amounts to a
refutation of Habermas's theory or an explication of it. The
universalization procedure imposed by discourse involves participants
in moral discourse imaginatively switching perspectives with concrete
other people. If it were not so, if "ideal role taking"
demanded only that one examined candidate norms from the perspective
of others generally conceived, there would be nothing to gain from
such a procedure (Finlayson 2013a). It is also unclear, whether such
criticisms apply to Habermas's moral theory, or to the actually
existing Kohlbergian "Stage 6" morality he takes as its
object. Second, it is unclear whether the criticism shows merely that
discourse ethics is a flawed moral theory, or whether it shows that,
by dint of these flaws, the theory (or the morality it theorizes)
perpetuates discrimination or oppression against women.



Finally, discourse ethics together with the theory of modernity in
*Theory of Communicative Action* has been criticized from an
anti-colonial perspective. The most sustained and detailed criticism
comes from Amy Allen. Noting that Habermas's argument for
principles (D) and (U) rests on assumptions drawn from modernization
theory, she brings the charge of Eurocentrism. Furthermore, building
on criticisms by Dussel (1993) and Bhambra (2011) among others, she
argues that Habermas's discourse ethics is wedded to a theory of
social evolution and the idea of modernization as a learning process,
which commits him to a "progressive view of history"
(Allen 2016: 72-3). In spite of his attempt to deflate the
presuppositions of the philosophy of history that weighed on Western
Marxism, Allen and Dussel argue that Habermas's theory is
freighted with a dogmatic Hegelian universalism that in the final
analysis asserts the developmental superiority of European
modernity.


## 4. The Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy: *Between Facts and Norms*



*Between Facts and Norms* is a legal and political theory
focused on the ways in which constitutional democracies produce and
institutionalize democratically legitimate law. As Habermas wrote and
researched the book in the late 80s and early 90s, political theory
was in the grip of the debate between liberalism of a Rawlsian or
Kantian stripe, and communitarianism, or as Habermas preferred to call
it Neo-Aristotelianism. In *Between Facts and Norms* he
attempts to mediate between these two opposed approaches to political
theory. He does this by setting out and defending the thesis of the
equiprimordiality (or co-originality) of liberal rights and popular
sovereignty, and their correlative values of individual and collective
autonomy.



One of the basic ideas in *Between Facts and Norms* is that the
rule of law, and indeed--though this is implied not
stated--legitimate liberal constitutional states, cannot exist
without radical democracy (1992b [1996b: xlii]). But at the same time
radical democracy has to be made compatible with the exigencies of
large scale administrative and bureaucratic states organized through
law. At the same time Habermas also tries to locate and defend the
common ground between legal positivists, like Austin, and normativists
like Dworkin and Rawls. He does this by identifying and rationally
reconstructing the "normative self-understanding" of the
legal system as embodied in



> 
> 
> particles and fragments of an "existing reason" already
> incorporated in existing practices. (1992b [1996b: 287])
> 
> 
> 



Habermas does not oppose the ideal, but attempts to reconstruct
idealizations embodied in existing practices, and set these in play
without relying on the optimistic providential assumptions of the
philosophy of history. The practices he has in mind are legislative
practices, and the "particles of existing reason" consist
in the various ways in which discourse is built into those practices.
In short Habermas reconstructs and describes the ways in which
discourse is institutionalized by political and legal systems. Thus
his approach is a hybrid between the sociology of law and
jurisprudence, and normative political philosophy. The approach is
captured by the title *Faktizitat und Geltung* (literally
"Facticity and Validity"), or *Between Facts and
Norms* where the "between" designates a complex set of
interrelations, rather than a middle ground.


### 4.1 The Two-Tracked Theory of Democracy



Habermas's conception of democracy has been called a "two
track" theory (Baynes 1995). That said, it is more like a
"two complex" conception, since the "tracks"
in question designate the formal and informal public spheres and each
of these is a complex. At the centre is the parliamentary complex, not
only parliament but the administrative and judicial bodies
accompanying it. Parliament itself is a formal "public"
forum that is legally established and organized to take decisions
(1992b [1996b: 355]).



It is surrounded by and embedded in an "informal" public
sphere, an "open and inclusive network" of various kinds
of discourse--moral, ethical, and pragmatic--that form
"a 'wild' complex" that is not formally
organized, even though each form of discourse has its own internal
discipline. (1992b [1996b: 307]). (Habermas also calls the informal
public sphere "civil society" to indicate that it is not
legally or political regulated.) When deliberative democracy works as
it should, discourse and its outputs--moral norms, values, and
more broadly public opinion--percolate into the parliamentary
complex through a system of sluices and channels (1992b [1996b: 355]).
These inputs are then worked up in parliamentary discussion and debate
and eventually embodied in the form of laws and policies and returned
as outputs into society at large. As they have been shaped by public
opinion and shared moral values, and worked up through debate, they
find acceptance by citizens on the basis of the reasons they embody.
That is how, when things go well, according to Habermas's
theory, legitimate law is produced. Roughly, this is Habermas's
account of the production of the "validity" of modern
law.



This model can also be thought of in terms of the circulation of
communicative power from periphery to centre, whereby the unregulated
flows of communication and discourse in civil society lay siege to the
political system, "without, however, intending to conquer
it" (1992b [1996b: 487]) but in a manner than allows them to
influence judgement and decisions in the political system. The model
is supposed to explain how the embers of radical democracy can stay
aflame within a modern bureaucratic state. Earlier models of popular
sovereignty presuppose that society is "an association writ
large" or a macro-subject with a sovereign will: citizens are
actually authors of the very laws to which they must submit, and hence
encounter these as an expression of, not a constraint on, their
autonomy. But such a model would only work, if at all, in small-scale,
ethically homogeneous societies, with a very high degree of popular
participation, none of which applies to modern Western states (1992b
[1996b: 102-3]). By contrast, Habermas's discourse theory
offers a picture where members of civil society can, through
participation in discourse, help shape public opinion, which through
the circulation of communicative power from periphery to centre can
indirectly "program" or "counter-steer" the
political system (1992b [1996b: 372; 332]) by means of laws and
policies that are "in the equal interest of all" (1992b
[1996b: 98; 154]). In this way, he claims, the political autonomy of
legal persons is ensured since they



> 
> 
> can at the same time understand themselves as authors of the law to
> which they are subject as addressees. (1992b [1996b: 408 187])
> 
> 
> 



William E. Scheuerman's objection is pertinent here. On
Habermas's view, a law acts as a "transformer"
between the communicative power circulating in civil society and the
administrative power of the legal and political systems, and it has to
do so if it is to facilitate social integration. However, this view is
incompatible with Habermas's earlier conception of system and
lifeworld, according to which the former, which includes the legal and
administrative system, remains a "block of more or less norm
free sociality" (1981 [1987: 171]). And Scheuerman points out
that, not only is it improbable that communicative power can be
transformed into administrative power and counter-steer the political
system, but Habermas gives no detail about where this interface
lies--institutionally speaking--and how it operates.



A more radical objection stems from direction of the Rochester School
who consider that the very idea of a "common good" or
"the equal interests of all" that might be served by law,
is an illusion (Riker 1982). Other realist theorists of democracy,
e.g., Luhmann, deny that public reasons flowing into the political
system from civil society can and do steer political decisions
(Luhmann 1969).


### 4.2 The Co-Originality Thesis



Habermas's theory asserts what he calls a co-originality thesis,
between various pairs of political ideas: between the system of rights
and the principle of democracy; between private/individual and
public/political/civic autonomy; between individual rights that secure
the former, and popular sovereignty that is the expression of the
latter. Co-originality means that both enjoy equal priority, and that
neither is reducible to each other: they reciprocally call one another
into being. The co-originality relations are revealed when the idea of
self-legislation, namely "that the addressees of law are
simultaneously authors of their rights" is decoded in
discourse-theoretical terms (1992b [1996b: 104, 314, 409]).



The co-originality thesis has both architectonic significance for
Habermas's theory and substantive implications. The
architectonic implication is that both the principle of democracy, and
the system of rights are derived independently of principle (U). One
substantive implication is, as Ingeborg Maus argues (Maus 1996 [2002:
90-98]), that



> 
> 
> the circular process in which the ... legal form, and ...
> the democratic principle--are *co-originally constituted*
> (1992b [1996b: 122])
> 
> 
> 



indicates that basic rights are called into being by the democratic
process and vice versa, in such a way that neither depends on, or is
externally constrained by, an antecedently existing order of moral
rights (*pace* Larmore 1995) or an ethical form of life
(*pace* Bernstein 1996 [1998] & Michelman 1998). The
co-originality thesis thus expresses Habermas's view of the
autonomy of the political (and legal) domain from the moral, and the
*sui generis* nature of political legitimacy.


### 4.3 The Principle of Democracy



The keystone of Habermas's political theory is the principle of
democracy that states:



> 
> 
> Only those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent
> of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn
> has been legally constituted. (1992b [1996b: 110])
> 
> 
> 



It also takes the form of a validity to consensus conditional, though
democratic discourse is inclusive of ethical, moral, and pragmatic
reasons, and indeed fair compromises, so that consensus is a messy and
imperfect affair. This makes the process of reaching discursive
agreement far more difficult, when one considers that many deeply held
ethical values are limited to particular cultural communities, though
this difficulty is supposed to be mitigated by the mediation of the
legislative process.



A central contention of *Between Facts and Norms* is that what
Habermas calls the principle of democracy "derives" from
the interpenetration of principle (D) and the legal form (1992b
[1996b: 122-3]). Recall that in phase two principle (D) is
supposed to be a rule of practical argumentation in general that is
neutral with respect to morality and law (1992b [1996b: 107]). In this
respect, Habermas claims, as in respect of the circular process of
reciprocal co-original constitution, the principle of democracy is
"morally freestanding" (1992b [1996b: 80]). That is, the
principle of democracy is derived completely independently of the
moral principle (Finlayson 2019: 94). Here again Habermas insists on
the autonomy of the democratic political process, and claims that the
democratic procedure of the production of law is the sole source of
its legitimacy, and he criticizes the views of Rawls, Dworkin,
Larmore, and Apel, all of whom, in various different ways, claim that
the legitimacy (or validity) of law is borrowed from that of
morality.



One difficulty facing Habermas is to square his claims that (a)
democratic discourse is an amalgam of all three kinds of discourse,
and (b) that political legitimacy is *sui generis* and both
ethically and "morally freestanding", with (c) the
absolute priority of morality in all spheres. He claims that
legitimate laws "must harmonize with the universal principles of
justice" (1992b [1996b: 99, 155]) and that legitimate laws must
not "contradict basic moral principles" (1992b [1996b:
106]), by which he means valid moral norms. He places a moral
permissibility constraint on political legitimacy, in such a way that
it appears that morality constrains political legitimacy from the
outside (Finlayson 2016). Habermas does not, though, see this as an
"external" constraint, since he argues that morality flows
into the political and legal domain through the constitutional role of
basic rights, and circulates within it. Nevertheless, the moral
permissibility constraint smudges the bright line that Habermas likes
to draw between what he calls natural law theories of legitimacy,
which are based on an antecedent morality, and discourse theory, which
is not.


### 4.4 The System of Rights



Habermas argues that, alongside the principle of democracy, what he
calls a "logical genesis of rights" arises from the
"interpenetration" of the legal form and the discourse
principle (D) (1992b [1996b: 121]). The argument is hard to follow. It
begins from the premises of (D) and the form of modern law, and
assumes that the idea of legitimate law presupposes that of a legal
subject qua bearer of rights, no matter what the content of those
specific rights is. The conclusion to the argument is a system of
rights, of five different kinds.


1. Basic rights to the greatest possible measure of equal individual
liberties.
2. Basic rights to membership in a voluntary association of
consociates under law.
3. Basic rights to the actionability of rights arising from the legal
protection of rights-holders.
4. Basic rights to the equal opportunity to participate in the
processes of political will formation and the production of legitimate
law.
5. Basic rights to living conditions that are socially,
technologically, and ecologically safeguarded, insofar as this is
necessary for citizens to exercise their civil rights 1-4
(1996b: 123-4).



The first three rights are supposed to arise theoretically from the
application of the discourse principle to the form of law. These are
rights that citizens must grant to one another if they are
"legitimately to regulate their living together by means of
positive law" (1992b [1996b: 126; 82; 118]). The next
two--political and social rights--are practical and material
enabling conditions that ensure the effectiveness of the first three
rights. The first three rights, Habermas claims, are not specific
rights, but what he calls "unsaturated placeholders" for
specific rights that have to "be interpreted and given concrete
shape" by actual citizens in response to determinate historical
conditions (1992b [1996b: 125-6]). This is crucial to
Habermas's theory, because it purports to reconstruct the
ability of citizens, from their perspective, to reciprocally grant one
another the rights necessary for their common existence as consociates
under law. That's why he claims that he, unlike Rawls,
doesn't design "the basic norms of a well-ordered society
on the drafting table", and then apply them to society (1990d
[1994: 101]). In that sense, just as discourse ethics leaves the
validation of moral norms to participants in discourse, the discourse
theory of law and democracy has to leave the political process of
establishing a system of rights up to citizens themselves as much as
possible. This is the sense in which Habermas claims the discourse
theory of democratic legitimacy is "strictly procedural"
and more modest than "normative political theory" a
la Rawls (Habermas 1995: 117 & 132; Rawls 1995: 175-177).
For all that, unlike in discourse ethics where neither (U) nor (D)
have the status of valid moral norms, Habermas nonetheless derives a
system of rights that for all the world resembles T. H.
Marshall's Whiggish account of civic, political, and social
rights, in his classic work of political sociology (Marshall
1950).


### 4.5 Objections to *Between Facts and Norms*



Joshua Cohen objects that the principle of discourse does not amount
to a requirement of equal liberty, and that nothing so rich as
Habermas's scheme of individual liberties follows solely from
the application of the discourse principle to the legal form (Cohen
1999: 393, 398). He objects even while acknowledging that the various
rights are not yet saturated: they are not yet specific, historically
and socially determinate rights. But contra Cohen, on Habermas's
account, legal form, or modern "form of law" is a richer
idea than the mere rule of law, and refers to a complex of features
that law has in a modern constitutional democratic state. As Baynes
and Zurn point out, Habermas's theory reconstructs the way that,
via the discourse principle, the form of law in modern--that is,
post-traditional and post-conventional--societies functions to
compensate for the loss of shared traditions, and relieves the burden
on citizens to reach reasoned agreement with one another and thereby
coordinate their actions (Baynes 2016: 166: Zurn 2011).



Some critics argue that Habermas is wrong to look for a justification
of basic rights that is functionalist, or merely "internal to
law", one that sees them only as necessary conditions for the
institutionalization of the democratic process, or one that is
strongly constructivist, that begins from slender premises that eschew
moral or ethical considerations (Forst 2011; Larmore 1995; Michelman
1998; Bernstein 1996; and Cohen 1999; cf. Flynn 2003). The upshot of
such criticisms is that Habermas's justification of the system
of rights requires stronger normative support of one kind or another,
and that political legitimacy is not entirely *sui
generis*.



Rawls, Cohen, and Larmore argue in addition that Habermas's
political theory rests on what Rawls calls a "comprehensive
doctrine" since it is based on a controversial theory of meaning
and communication and a controversial doctrine of method (Rawls 1995:
139; Cohen 1999; Larmore 1995). However, there is an important
difference between comprehensive philosophical doctrines and
comprehensive moral, ethical or religious doctrines. The fact that a
normative political theory has controversial philosophical
assumptions, which almost all do, does not create the kind of
practical problems that arise when a political system, or
constitution, is saddled with controversial moral or religious
assumptions, and its citizens cannot regard it as legitimate (Lister
2007). To make that claim is to presuppose that political theory
answers to the same canons of justification as political systems
(Laden 2010).


## 5. Methodology and Philosophical Framework



In the transitional period of the 1970s when Habermas began his
communicative turn, he developed various ideas about method that came
to shape his mature work: for example, rational reconstruction
 (SS5.1)
 as a method for critical social theory, postmetaphysical thinking
 (SS5.2)
 as a framework for philosophy, and a set of related views about the
proper role of philosophy.


### 5.1 Rational Reconstruction



Rational reconstruction is the method, and the label, for a cluster of
methodological assumptions shaping the major philosophical projects of
Habermas's middle period: the theory of communicative action,
discourse ethics, and the discourse theory of law and democracy. He
originally developed it as part of an attempt to explain social
phenomena and to recalibrate critical social theory on the basis of
formal pragmatics.



Rational reconstruction is an approach that Habermas developed on the
model of Noam Chomsky's universal grammar (1976b [1998b 1: 35]),
Jean Piaget's developmental psychology, and Lawrence
Kohlberg's moral psychology (1983 [1990: 33-41]). These
are theories that reconstruct universal human capacities--for
language acquisition, cognitive development, and moral reasoning,
respectively. Habermas's use of rational reconstruction aims to
set out the structures, rules, and competences underlying lifeworld
practices. The targets of the method may also be described as the
idealizing, counterfactual commitments which participants in a
practice must make, in order for the practice to be meaningful or
rational for them (1999a [2003a: 85-6]; 2005b chapter 3 [2008a:
81-4]). To rationally reconstruct a practice is to turn the
implicit "know how" of participants into explicit
"know that" (1976b [1998b: 33, 34-5]). For example,
rationally reconstructing the everyday practice of communication gives
access not to the semantic *content* of the speaker's
particular utterances, which is already explicitly known, but the
implicitly known *rules* which the speaker follows in
successfully communicating (1976b [1998b: 33]). Habermas calls this
"illocutionary" or "pragmatic" meaning.



These underlying structures are



> 
> 
> brought to consciousness through the choice of suitable examples and
> counterexamples, through contrast and similarity relations, through
> translation, paraphrase and so on--that is, through a well
> thought out, maieutic method of interrogation. (1976b [1998b: 40])
> 
> 
> 



They are revealed not as timeless constants, but as they have
developed over time, with their internal developmental logics
(Pedersen 2008: 463, 474-9). Habermas originally claimed that
rational reconstruction uncovers knowledge of universal human
capabilities, "species competences", rather than the
competences of particular groups or individuals (1976b [1998b:
34-5]; McCarthy 1991: 130-2). For example, rationally
reconstructing the practice of everyday speech uncovers the rules of
communicative action as such, not the grammar of a particular
language. However, Habermas's later description of the discourse
theory of law and democracy as a rational reconstruction of "the
self-understanding of modern legal orders" of democratic
constitutional states (1992b [1996b: 82], emphasis removed), evidently
a local phenomenon, suggests that he has since modified the scope of
the reconstructive method. Commentators are dividend on this point,
with some distinguishing between an "empirical" variety of
reconstruction on display in the *Theory of Communicative
Action*, and a "normative" variety in *Between
Facts and Norms* (Peters 1994: 119), and others arguing that the
same methodology underlies both projects (Patberg 2014: 511-3;
however, see Gaus 2013: 561). This tension is partly resolved if we
remember that democratic law-making draws on general communicative
competencies, and makes use of pragmatic, ethical, and moral
discourses. The phenomenon is local, but the capacities involved are
general.



In terms of his own work, formal pragmatics rationally reconstructs
the communicative capacities possessed by all human beings, making
them explicit in Habermas's accounts of communicative action and
the rules for redeeming validity claims (1976b [1998b: 22-4]).
The discourse theory of morality does this for our capacity for
engaging in moral discourse, formalizing this in the (D) and (U)
principles (1983 [1990a: chapter 2: 37, chapter 4: 174-5]),
while the discourse theory of law and democracy does the same for the
practice of lawmaking in democratic constitutional states, formalizing
this in the system of rights and the principle of democracy (1992b
[1996b: 110-1, 118-24, 287]). Importantly, Habermas claims
that the theories produced by these processes of rational
reconstruction have the status of *falsifiable
hypotheses*--they are not *a priori* since they are
not necessary claims, although they are supposed to be
"universal" in the sense that they are, at present,
without alternatives. Habermas sometimes refers to them having a
"weakly transcendental" status.



Whether or not formal pragmatics accurately describes the practice of
human communication can only be decided *a posteriori*, by the
future "success" or "failure" of the theory as
an input in further empirical investigations (1976b [1998b: 39]; 1983
[1990: 32]), with Habermas suggesting coherence between theories as
the criterion of success (1981 [1987: 399-400]; 1983 [1990a:
chapter 2, 39]). Jorgen Pedersen has argued that it is still
not clear what constitutes success and failure in this context, and
thus not fully clear how rationally reconstructed theories can be
tested (Pedersen 2008: 478-1). Karl-Otto Apel, similarly,
questions what it would mean to falsify the "unavoidable
presuppositions of argumentation" itself (Apel 2002: 19).



Habermas claims that knowledge of the underlying structures and
competences acquired through rational reconstruction can then be used
for the purposes of social critique. Supposedly, a version of a
practice can be identified as pathological, or not fully rationalized,
if it does not meet the counterfactual idealization which the practice
presupposes (1983 [1990: 31-2]). Habermas thus identifies
systematically distorted communication, invalid moral norms, and
illegitimate laws as deficits in communicative action, moral
discourse, and democratic lawmaking, respectively. Rational
reconstruction allows us to critique these actual practices according
to their own internal standards, rather than the critic's
arbitrarily chosen standards or the philosopher's supposedly
transcendental standards (1992b [1996b: 5]). Similarly, the
developmental logic revealed by rational reconstruction can be used to
evaluate processes of historical development as progressive examples
of collective learning, or as regressive and pathological. As a method
for explaining social phenomena, rational reconstruction is neither
merely empirical nor hermeneutic; the principles it produces are
supposed to ground a kind of social and political theory which is
neither "ideal" nor "real", but somewhere in
between. Habermas's claim that philosophy can find within
traditions construed as learning processes a "standpoint of
critical evaluation" (1996a essay 3 [1998a: 97]; 1992b [1996b:
5]) is certainly in the spirit of critical theory, but arguably in
tension with his other claims that that philosophy should "limit
itself to the clarification of the moral point of view and the
procedure of democratic legitimation" (Habermas 1995: 131;
Finlayson 2019: 205).


### 5.2 Postmetaphysical Thinking



Postmetaphysical thinking, Habermas's paradigm for modern
philosophy, must be understood through contrast with its predecessor,
metaphysics. He labels much of the history of Western philosophy as
"metaphysics", counting Parmenides, Plato, Plotinus,
Augustin, Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel as metaphysical
thinkers (1988b essay 2 [1992a: 12-13]; 1988b essay 3 [1992a:
29]). He sometimes distinguishes between metaphysics proper and the
"philosophy of consciousness" or "philosophy of the
subject" associated with the rationalism of Descartes and the
idealism of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling (1988b essay 3 [1992a: 31];
1988b essay 8 [1992a:, 158-62]), though it is not clear whether
this should be considered a separate paradigm (1988b essay 2 [1992a:
12-13]) or simply a late stage of metaphysics.



Among the characteristics of metaphysics are:


* A conception of *philosophy as the queen of the sciences,*
with its own unique method and form of knowledge, distinct from the
natural and social sciences, which can yield special insights into the
nature of reality and the meaning of life. Plato's theory of
forms is an excellent example of this, since Plato thinks that
philosophy, with its dialectical method, can offer true knowledge
(*episteme*) of the forms, superior to mere opinion
(*doxa*) about the material world.
* A substantive conception of *reason as an Archimedean
point* from which the philosopher can observe reality as a whole.
The metaphysical philosopher's goal is to attain an
observer's perspective on reality, from which they can learn
universal and necessary truths. Philosophy can thus act as the judge
and arbiter of both science and culture (1983 [1990: 2-3]).
* *Idealism and identity thinking* (1988b essay 3 [1992a:
29-31]). Metaphysics assumes that ideas are primary and the
material world secondary, and that to grasp the underlying
intellectual reality is to grasp the whole: "the structures of
being themselves are what is laid hold of in knowledge" (1988b
essay 2 [1992a: 13). Again, Plato's theory of forms is a prime
example.
* For philosophy of consciousness, the use of *strong
transcendental arguments* to ground claims about the nature of
reality on the individual subject's self-knowledge. Habermas
thinks that this turn to introspective self-knowledge as foundational
took place as a result of the pressure which natural science was
putting on metaphysics by the eighteenth century. It may no longer be
plausible that the individual subject can grasp "the structures
of being themselves" in thought, but they can at least grasp the
structure of their own thoughts, and build on these foundations some
certainty about the world. Kant's transcendental unity of
apperception (1988b essay 7 [1992a: 124-5]) and refutation of
idealism in the First Critique are the clearest examples.



Habermas concedes that this is a stipulative definition of
metaphysical philosophy, focused on idealism. Ancient materialism and
scepticism, medieval nominalism, and modern empiricism do not fit the
mould, but Habermas argues that they should be seen as
"antimetaphysical countermovements" within the horizon of
metaphysics (1988b essay 3 [1992a: 29]). He often characterises modern
philosophical trends of which he is critical as covertly metaphysical.
Habermas sees some trends as attempted breaks with metaphysics which
remain trapped within the paradigm (Nietzsche, Heidegger,
Derrida--1981 [1987: 83-105, 131-160,
161-184]), others as still being mired in the philosophy of
consciousness (Niklas Luhmann's systems theory--1981 [1987:
368-385]), and other again as deliberate attempts to return to
the philosophy of consciousness (Dieter Henrich-- 1988b essay 2
[1992a: 10-27]).



Postmetaphysical thinking begins with the first generation of
post-Hegelian thinkers (Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard) (1988b essay 3
[1992a: 39]), and includes pragmatists such as C.S. Peirce and G.H.
Mead, speech-act theorists such as J.L. Austin and John Searle, the
later Wittgenstein, and Karl-Otto Apel.



Among the characteristics of postmetaphysical thinking are:


* *Rational reconstruction* as a method (1988b essay 3 [1998b:
38]). Since rational reconstruction is also used by many of the social
sciences, philosophy is no longer seen as unique in its method and
form of knowledge, but simply as one discipline among others.
Postmetaphysical philosophy has no priority over the natural and
social sciences, but neither is it subordinate to them. It opposes
scientism, the idea that the natural sciences have unique authority
and privileged access to the truth.
* A "weak but not defeatistic (*sic*) concept of
linguistically embodied reason" (1988b essay 7 [1992a: 142]).
Postmetaphysical philosophy conceives of reason as being historically,
socially, and linguistically situated, embedded in the intersubjective
communicative processes of the lifeworld, rather than transcending
them. The philosopher is a participant in these processes, not an
outside observer. Postmetaphysical reason is immanent in the
communicative practices of the lifeworld, and procedural (1988b essay
3 [1992a: 34-5]), rather than being the external Archimedean
point of metaphysics. Habermas thus sees postmetaphysical thinking as
having a *detranscendentalized conception of reason*.
* The use of *weak transcendental arguments*, rather than the
strong transcendental arguments of metaphysics (Yates 2011:
41-4). Benhabib defines strong transcendental arguments as ones
which aim to



> 
> 
> (prove) the necessity and singularity of certain conditions without
> which some aspect of our world, conduct, and consciousness
> *could* not be what it is.
> 
> 
> 



Descartes' *cogito* and Kant's refutation of
idealism are examples, aiming to prove the existence of the subject
and of the external world. Weak transcendental arguments, in contrast,
focus on lifeworld practices such as communicative action, moral
discourse, and democratic deliberation (rather than experience as
such), and



> 
> 
> demonstrate more modestly that certain conditions need to be fulfilled
> for us to judge those practices to be of a certain sort rather than of
> a different kind. (Benhabib 2002: 38)
> 
> 
> 



Unlike strong transcendental arguments, weak transcendental arguments
are both *a posteriori*, since they are based on rationally
reconstructed experience, and falsifiable, since they can be refuted
by further empirical experience (1976b [1998b: 42]).
* The ability to provide *context-transcending validity*, despite
abandoning metaphysical philosophy's search for universal
necessary truths. Validity claims are the clearest example (1988b
essay 7 [1992a: 142]; 1983 [1990: 19, 203]). Although they are always
advanced from within a particular lifeworld context, they hold that a
certain thing is morally right for the intersubjective world, or true
for the objective world, as a whole. The claims raised are not just
valid within the context of the interlocutors raising them, but for
all speaking and acting subjects, as they must be if postmetaphysical
philosophy is to critique existing social and political conditions
(1988b essay 3 [1992a: 50]). Habermas speaks in this context of the
"immanent transcendence" or "transcendence from
within" of language (2005c).
* Modesty with regard to *ethical and ontological claims* (Rees
2018: 55-6, 60-2). Although it can clarify the procedures
of moral discourse, it should refrain from making substantive
contributions to ethical discourse (1988b essay 3 [1992a: 50]; 1988d
[1990a chapter 5, 211]). Unlike metaphysical philosophy, it refrains
from making ontological claims about matters such as the existence of
God. In accordance with the postsecular orientation of
Habermas's recent work, postmetaphysical philosophy remains
agnostic about such matters, while being open to the truth-contents of
religious language.



The metaphysical philosopher is an isolated figure, aiming through the
use of their individual reason to attain a neutral observer's
perspective on reality as a whole and produce knowledge of universal,
necessary truths. The postmetaphysical philosopher, in contrast, aims
at a participant's perspective, working in dialogue with the
natural and social sciences and making use of a situated, procedural
conception of reason. There is no transcendent Archimedean point for
the philosopher to occupy, since we are all embedded in our lifeworlds
and our thinking conditioned by social, historical, and linguistic
factors. What remains distinctive about philosophy as a discipline is
that it can step back from the particular questions which the natural
and social sciences focus on and produce general knowledge about the
human condition; but this knowledge is now based on empirical data and
rational reconstructions, and as such is contestable and revisable.
Postmetaphysical philosophy no longer claims to be the role of judge
and usher of science and culture, assigning each discipline and
cultural practice to its proper place. Instead it acts as a
placeholder for fruitful collaborations between empirical research and
philosophical ideas, and as an interpreter mediating between the
rationalized value-spheres of science, law, and art and the everyday
discourse of the lifeworld (1983 [1990: 15-9]).


## 6. Constitutional Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and International Law



Habermas's views on national identity, the nation state, and
global politics have been shaped by the historical experience of
living through the Third Reich, the division of Germany into East and
West, reunification, and the development of the European Union. The
key to his applied political theory



> 
> 
> consists in differentiating between the three elements of statehood,
> democratic constitution, and civic solidarity, which are closely
> linked in the historical form of the constitutional state. (2009
> chapter 7: 112)
> 
> 
> 



Habermas argues that the conjunction of these elements is contingent,
not necessary, and that in the "postnational
constellation" of the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries they should be disaggregated. His theory of constitutional
patriotism argues that civic solidarity need not be reduced to
national identity, but can rather be generated by the process of
constitution-making itself
 (SS6.1).
 With regard to the international arena, he argues that the
constitutionalization of international law can proceed without a
global state, and, as such, cosmopolitans should aim at a
"politically-constituted world society" (2004 chapter 8
[2006c: 161]) rather than a world republic
 (SS6.2).


### 6.1 Constitutional Patriotism



The term "constitutional patriotism"
(*Verfassungspatriotismus*) was not coined by Habermas, but by
the political scientist Dolf Sternberger, who popularized it in a 1979
article marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Federal Republic of
Germany (Muller 2006). Habermas took up the term and developed
his own distinct interpretation of it beginning with the
"historians" dispute' of 1986. Constitutional
patriotism is the theory that in modern states the constitution can,
and should, take the place of the nation as focus of citizens'
feelings of collective identity and the source of their civic
solidarity. While originally concerned with specifically post-war West
German questions about history and national identity (1988a), and thus
drawing on a rational reconstruction of the postnational form of
identification developed in the divided Germany, Habermas later
applied the theory to modern states more generally, and to the
European Union in particular (1998c).



National identity, for Habermas, is a product of the modern era,
dating from the time of the French Revolution and the later Romantic
movement. It was constructed by linguists, historians, and writers and
propagated through the education system and the public sphere. As
such, the nation is intermediate between traditional and
post-traditional forms of identity (1988a: 5-7; 1992b [1996b:
494-5]). In a traditional society, collective identity is
accepted unreflexively, as are the society's conventional
morality and worldviews. It is a supposedly natural, pre-political
given. Collective identity in post-traditional society, in contrast,
is adopted in a reflexive manner, in light of reasons given in the
public sphere. While in reality post-traditional, the nation is
reified as traditional and quasi-natural, and projected into a distant
past. From the beginning, the nation played a political role in
generating civic solidarity among strangers. National identity
establishes an abstract level of solidarity, transcending the
face-to-face associations which bind people in traditional society:
villages, clans, and localities. The feeling that they belong to the
same nation motivates individuals to make sacrifices for others who
they have never met, whether in terms of redistributive taxation or
military service (1998c [2001a: 64-5]). This was crucial for the
viability of democratic republics at the transition from traditional
to post-traditional society. Nationhood provides the cultural
substrate for the "nation of citizens" who govern
themselves democratically (1996a essay 4 [1998a: 117-8]). But,
for a number of reasons, the nation is less and less able to play this
role today. For one, all contemporary nation states are increasingly
multi-ethnic and multicultural, undermining the idea that a
purportedly homogeneous collective identity can act as the substrate
for democracy. For another, the dangers of extreme ethnonationalism
are all too obvious: they generate in-group/out-group distinctions
that can lead to discrimination, racism, and at the limit to ethnic
cleansing and genocide. Finally, nation states themselves are
increasingly powerless in the face of factors outside their control,
such as global capitalism and climate change. This "postnational
constellation" requires a different form of social integration
(1998c [2001a: 58-112]).



Luckily, according to Habermas, the relationship between
constitutional democracy and the nation is historically contingent
(1992b [1996b: 495]; 1996a essay 5 [1998a: 132-3]; 1998c [2001a:
76]). A modern society does not need anything as substantial as a
shared religion, way of life, or repository of values to serve as the
basis of collective identity. A democratic political system can
generate its own civic solidarity. Supposing that individuals have
progressed from a traditional to a post-traditional level of identity
and are willing to adopt a more reflexive understanding of their
identity, the constitution can replace the nation as a source of civic
solidarity and attachment. The democratic procedure of
constitution-making not only produces legitimacy, as described in the
discourse theory of law and democracy, but can also serve as the basis
of belonging. The goal of constitutional patriotism is not, then, to
*eliminate* national identity, but rather to *decentre*
it and deprive it of its political function. In concrete terms,
constitutional patriotism involves citizens developing critical and
reflexive loyalties and attachments to their country's
constitution and the moral principles encoded therein. What results
from this is a collective identity with a political function.
Citizens' status as joint makers and interpreters of the same
constitution takes the place of their shared natality and status as
co-nationals. This view is *constitutional* in that it revolves
around the work of making, interpreting, and reflecting on the
constitution, which takes place in the public sphere. It is
*patriotic* in that it has a binding effect on the community of
citizens, furnishing them with civic solidarity and a collective
identity. The formation of constitutional-patriotic identity,
significantly, takes place at the level of opinion- and will-formation
in the public sphere. Unlike supposedly natural and pre-political
national identity, it is formed in the light of rational discourse
(2004 chapter 6 [2006c: 76-9]).



Critics of constitutional patriotism argue that it is either too
"thin" to play the role Habermas assigns to it, or too
"thick" to really be postnational and open to all, as he
claims (Hayward 2007: 186-9). The first criticism is that the
universal moral principles encoded in constitutions are too abstract
and affectively thin to generate a sense of personal loyalty and
collective belonging among citizens, compared to the thick bonds of
national identity (1996a essay 5 [1998a: 132]; Canovan 2000). Habermas
rejects this criticism. Citizens interpret the principles found in
their constitution--which represent universal moral and political
norms of democracy and human rights, and might be found in any
liberal-democratic constitution--*in the light of their
community's unique historical experience*. They internalize
these principles, not abstractly, but in the context of the history of
their country (1996a essay 8 [1998a: 225-6]). Constitutional
principles become part of the "dense web" of a
society's (and an individual's) historical experiences and
pre-political values (2004 chapter 6 [2006c: 77-8]). It follows
that each country's constitutional patriotism will be different,
inflected by the particular past that country has worked
through--Habermas notes that French constitutional patriotism,
marked by a tradition of revolutionary democracy, will be different to
German constitutional patriotism, marked by the historical failure to
produce a working democracy (1992h: 240-1). Far from being an
abstract, bloodless construct as critics have alleged, Habermas sees
constitutional patriotism as intimately connected to each
community's particular history and culture, and to its concerns
about identity and the common good--its ethical-political
self-understanding.



> 
> 
> The same universalistic content must each time be appropriated from
> out of one's own specific historical life-situation, and become
> anchored in one's own cultural form of life. Every collective
> identity, even a post-national one, is much more concrete than the
> ensemble of moral, legal and political principles around which it
> crystallizes. (1992h: 241)
> 
> 
> 



The second criticism is that supposedly constitutional-patriotic
identity is, in reality, the thick identity of the dominant majority
culture, albeit disguised (Laborde 2002: 593-9).
Habermas's argument that constitutional principles are
interpreted in the light of particular histories plays into this
criticism. If a particular country's constitutional patriotism
is so closely bound up with its ethical-political self-understanding,
then the language, culture, beliefs, and values of that
country's majority culture will make a deep impression on it.
Constitutional patriotism consequently collapses into civic
nationalism. At the same time, Habermas's claim that the
connection between national identity and constitutional democracy is
merely contingent holds open the possibility that, even if they have
overlapped in the past and the present, an ongoing learning process
may lead to the two being fully decoupled in the future (1998c [2001a:
101-2]). A further question, articulated by Andrea Baumeister
among others, is whether the liberal-democratic values which are to be
interpreted in the light of national histories are, in fact, as widely
accepted as Habermas believes (Baumeister 2007: 491-5). If not,
constitutional patriotism may be more particularistic and Eurocentric
than it at first appears, raising questions about how those who do not
adhere to such values are to be integrated into
constitutional-patriotic polities.



Habermas's longstanding support for a European constitution
(2001c [2006g]; 1996a essay 6 [1998a]) can be explained by his hope
that a European constitutional patriotism would provide the civic
solidarity that would allow the transnational polity of the European
Union to fulfil its democratic potential (2004 chapter 6 [2006c]).


### 6.2 Cosmopolitanism and the Constitutionalization of International Law



Habermas's views on international politics are characterised by
a revision of Kant's cosmopolitanism, and a total rejection of
Carl Schmitt's conception of the political as irreducibly
antagonistic (1996a essay 7 [1998a: 193-201]; 2004 chapter 8
[2006c: 188-93]). After some early explorations (1996a essay 7
[1998a]), he rejects a Kantian version of cosmopolitanism, arguing for
a "politically constituted world society" (2004 chapter 8
[2006c: 161]) rather than a world republic or a global federation. His
focus is the "constitutionalization of international law"
(2004 chapter 8 [2006c: 132-5]) *without* a world
government, with the limited aims of ensuring peace and protecting
human rights, rather than democracy on a global scale. Habermas pays
particular attention to the different types of legitimation which
different levels of global governance would require, and the different
types of constitution they would need.



In *Perpetual Peace,* Kant looks forward to the transformation
of international law, with states as its subjects, into cosmopolitan
law, with global citizens as its subjects. Habermas, in contrast,
argues that cosmopolitan law must be dualistic, with both states
*and* individuals as its subjects. The cosmopolitan community
is dualistic in the sense that it is a community of both human beings
(individual subjects), and states (collective subjects) (2004 chapter
8 [2006c: 135]; 2005b chapter 11 [2008a: 317]). Both can act as the
founding subjects of a world constitution (2009 chapter 7: 119; 2011
[2012: 58]).



Habermas describes "a multilevel political system that does not
assume a state-like character as a whole" (2004 chapter 8
[2006c: 144]), divided into three levels (2005b chapter 11 [2008a:
322-7]), each with its own form of legitimation and type of
constitution:


* **National:** nation states (2009 chapter 7:
115-6). Although they are no longer fully sovereign in a
globalized world, states still have the monopoly on the use of force
within their territories. They are based on a defined self-legislating
demos ("national" or otherwise), which gives itself laws
by following democratic procedures, thus linking the rule of law to
democracy. In other words, states have a more "republican"
type of constitution, which gives a central role to popular
sovereignty established in a revolutionary moment (1998d [2001a:
116-8]; 2004 chapter 8 [2006c: 122]). They can have full
democratic legitimacy, as described in *Between Facts and
Norms*, since within a state the authors of law can also be its
addressees (2004 chapter 8 [2006c: 141]). States have the highest
requirements of legitimacy within Habermas's model. They have
two functions: firstly, to provide military force for implementing
human rights and policy decisions of the higher levels (2005b chapter
11 [2008a: 320-321]), and secondly, to generate indirect
political legitimacy for the higher levels.
* **Transnational:** continental blocs like the EU,
Habermas's prime example of a transnational polity, along with
its less-integrated siblings such as ASEAN and Mercosur (2005b chapter
11 [2008a: 325-6]). Great powers such as the USA, China, Russia,
and India also operate at the transnational level (2009 chapter 7:
114), as do economic organizations such as the WTO, IMF, and World
Bank; and UN agencies such as the WHO and UNESCO (2011 [2012: 56]).
This is the most "pluralist" level in Habermas's
model, since it contains very different types of polities, and
includes ones which are both liberal and illiberal, democratic and
non-democratic. At the transnational level there exists a
"global domestic politics" (2004 chapter 8 [2006c: 136,
160]) addressing socioeconomic questions. Issues of wealth and
redistribution, health and disease, trade, migration, and
environmental policy can be discussed within and between transnational
polities. Habermas still considers relations in and between them to
count as international relations or foreign policy, although recourse
to war should be ruled out (2005b chapter 11 [2008a: 325]). The
normative yardstick for relations between transnational polities is
fair negotiation, not the full democratic legitimacy which can exist
within states (2009 chapter 7: 125-6; 2011 [2012: 57, 68]). They
are nonetheless open to the influence of deliberative publics from
below, and should institutionalize some degree of citizen
participation, via referenda or mechanisms for responding to
transnational public spheres. Transnational polities also receive some
indirect legitimation in virtue of their member states being
legitimate (2004 chapter 8 [2006c: 142]). They thus have middling
requirements of legitimacy, which can be generated in a number of
direct and indirect ways, and may have several different types of
constitutions.
* **Supranational:** global organizations with
universal membership, comprising both individuals and states as
members. Habermas envisages a reformed United Nations as the central
component of the supranational layer, along with a stronger version of
the International Criminal Court (2004 chapter 8 [2006c: 133-4,
173-4]). Their remit is strictly to secure peace and prevent
human rights violations (2004 chapter 8 [2006c: 136]; 2005b chapter 11
[2008a: 322]; 2011 [2012: 60-1]), with the security council
performing an executive function, the ICC a judicial function, and the
UN Charter acting as a supranational constitution (2004 chapter 8
[2006c: 160-1]; 2009 chapter 7: 120). A reformed General
Assembly could function as a world parliament, containing
representatives of both states and cosmopolitan citizens (2009 chapter
7: 120-1), with its deliberations focused on interpreting and
elaborating the meaning of the Charter, rather than the kind of
political will-formation which takes place within national parliaments
(2011 [2012: 60-1, 65]). All other cross-border political issues
should be dealt with at the transnational level--the
supranational level is the preserve of law, rather than politics
(2005b chapter 11 [2008a: 333-4, 343]; 2011 [2012: 65]).



This division of labour has drawn criticism, with Cristina Lafont
arguing that the relegation of all socioeconomic issues to the
transnational layer ensures that human rights violations stemming from
global inequality cannot be addressed (Lafont 2008). Habermas's
suggestion that the "slender but robust" cross-cultural
consensus on basic human rights is enough to legitimate the
supranational level's policies (2004 chapter 8 [2006c: 143];
2005b chapter 11 [2008a: 343-4]) has also been criticized. There
is room for doubt on this point, especially with regard to contentious
cases such as LGBT rights (1998d [2001a: 113-129]; Scheuerman
2008: 143-5).



Since it is neither democratic nor a state, the supranational level
has the lowest requirements of legitimacy (2004 chapter 8 [2006c:
133-4, 143]; 2011 [2012: 65]), and is not suited to a republican
type of constitution, contra Kant. It is suited to a liberal type of
constitution, which prioritizes the rule of law rather than popular
sovereignty (2004 chapter 8 [2006c: 137-9]). A liberal
constitution constrains established power in accordance with human
rights, but does not connect it to the will of a self-legislating
demos, which is in any case lacking at the global level (2005b chapter
11 [2008a: 316]). Instead, the supranational level derives its
legitimacy directly from the negative duties which it enforces (to
prevent human rights abuses and wars of aggression), and indirectly
from the legitimacy of the states which comprise it (2004 chapter 8
[2006c: 140-1, 143]; 2005b chapter 11 [2008a: 342-4]).
This may be supplemented by the periodic emergence of a global public
sphere, mobilised in opposition to wars of aggression or in
condemnation of gross human rights violations (2004 chapter 8 [2006c:
142]; 2005b chapter 11 [2008a: 343-4]; 2009 chapter 7:
124-5).



In this model, supranational law is to have primacy over state law, in
much the same way that EU law has primacy over the laws of member
states (2004 chapter 8 [2006c: 137]). The plausibility of
Habermas's proposals depends on two learning processes.
Individuals must learn to think and act as both national and
cosmopolitan citizens, switching between a perspective that centres
national interest and one that centres universal standards of justice
(2009 chapter 7: 116-8), while states must learn to regard
themselves as members of an international community, not absolute
sovereigns (2011 [2012: 61]). Habermas regards the
constitutionalization of international law as the "legal
domestication of the intensified cooperation between states"
(2014: 8), by which the Hobbesian state of nature at the global level
can be gradually regulated and subject to law without the need for a
global government, which could not in any case be fully legitimate.
Some degree of global governance is unavoidable in the contemporary
postnational constellation. What is crucial is that it should be
constitutional and grounded in universal moral principles, rather than
a technocracy at the service of neoliberal capitalism.


## 7. Religion and Postsecularism



Habermas's views about religion and its place in modern society
have changed strikingly over the course of his career. In a series of
texts written mostly after 2001 he revises the secularist bent of his
earlier social and political theory, as expressed in *Theory of
Communicative Action* and *Between Facts and Norms*, so as
to acknowledge religion's close relation to philosophy and the
central place of religious believers in democratic states.



Influenced by Weber and Durkheim, Habermas had earlier characterised
religious beliefs as the worldviews of traditional societies that in
the course of rationalisation are superseded and replaced by secular
forms. In religious belief the validity claims of objective truth,
moral rightness, and sincerity, and along with them the objective,
intersubjective, and subjective world-relations, were fused together.
Speakers could not thematize and contest them (1981 [1984a: 214]; 1981
[1987: 189]). This fusion, maintained by the strict segregation of
sacred from profane domains of life, enabled a normative consensus to
crystallize by non-discursive means (1981 [1987: 54]). That which was
in accord with society's ritually protected normative consensus
was right, that which violated it was wrong, and the consensus itself
was beyond questioning. The transition to modernity begins with the
"linguistification of the sacred", in which "the
authority of the holy is gradually replaced by the authority of an
achieved consensus" (1981 [1987: 77, see also 288]). Normative
consensus and social integration are achieved in modern societies
through communicative action, carried out by competent speaking and
acting subjects who have mastered all three validity claims and
world-relations (1981 [1987: 107, 145]). The sacred, the lynchpin of
religious worldviews, has dissolved into unrestricted discourse, in
which any validity claim may be contested. Religious belief may
continue to exist, but it is now one worldview among many, and like
every other social practice it must be continued by means of
communicative action (1981 [1987: 88-9]).



Habermas at this stage saw post-traditional society as secular (1992b
[1996b: 443-4]). He subsequently rejected this view, stating
that



> 
> 
> My earlier Hegelian view of religion as a formation destined to be
> dialectically superseded in the modern world has indeed changed. The
> empirical evidence of the survival of religion under modern conditions
> has accumulated in recent decades. (2012 chapter 6 [2017: 143])
> 
> 
> 



His most recent work paints a very different picture of the role of
ritual and the sacred (2012 chapter 3 [2017]), revising many of his
central claims in the *Theory of Communicative Action.* Aside
from these revisions to his social theory, Habermas's
postsecular writings address the philosophical theme of the
relationship between religious faith and philosophical reason
 (SS7.1)
 as well as the political theme of religion's place within
deliberative democracy
 (SS7.2).


### 7.1 Jerusalem and Athens: Religious Faith and Philosophical Reason



Habermas has, since phase two of discourse ethics in the 1990s,
considered religious traditions in modern societies to be fruitful
sources of ethical values (1983 [1990]; 2001b chapter 1 [2003b]).
Since postmetaphysical philosophy refrains from proposing concrete
visions of the good, modern subjects must "appropriate" or
"translate" insights from religion (alongside art and
literature) to use as inputs in their ethical-existential and
ethical-political discourses. Maeve Cooke suggests that this process
of ethical appropriation involves re-presenting the semantic contents
of ethical insights, shorn of their religious, literary, and artistic
contexts, such that their exemplary force in disclosing visions of the
good remains intact and can be used in secular ethical discourses
(Cooke 2011).



Philosophy, too, has a long history of appropriating or translating
concepts from religious traditions (2012 chapter 4 [2017:
63-4]). Many apparently secular philosophical ideas have
genealogies stretching back to religion. Alongside well-known examples
such as Schelling and Hegel's concept of the Absolute (2005c:
304), Benjamin's use of the Messiah, and Adorno's use of
the ban on graven images (2005b chapter 8 [2008a: 232]), Habermas
discusses several examples from Kant: the *summum bonum*, the
ethical community, moral faith, radical evil, and even the moral law
itself can be seen as secular philosophical translations of the
kingdom of God, the church, religious faith, original sin, and the Ten
Commandments (2001b chapter 2 [2003b: 110]; 2005b chapter 11 [2008a:
220-3, 224-6]). Habermas lists universal egalitarianism
and communicative action (2002 chapter 8: 149, 160) as concepts from
his own work which have religious genealogies. Although some of the
original concepts' meaning is inevitably lost in translation
(2005c: 309; 2002 chapter 8: 164), such "critical
*assimilation(s)* of religious concepts" or
"secularizing, but at the same time salvaging, deconstruction(s)
of religious truths" (2003c: 110) can enrich the vocabulary of
postmetaphysical philosophy (2005b chapter 5 [2008a: 142]). Despite
this, Habermas insists that philosophical discourse itself remains
secular, retaining its "methodological atheism" (2005c:
304, 309; 2002 chapter 8: 160)--it appropriates religious
concepts, but they do not *remain* religious concepts. They
must be contestable in justificatory discourses.



These conceptual appropriations link the apparently secular
philosophical tradition to the major world religions, and focusing on
them helps to establish a new postsecular self-understanding of
philosophy. Nonetheless, the process of appropriation could be said to
place philosophy in a superior position to religion. It seems as if
philosophy is able to judge which elements of religion count as
rational enough to be worth appropriating, and which can be discarded
as irrational; religion is reduced to a fund of concepts for
philosophy's use (2012 chapter 4 [2017: 63]). Habermas resists
this interpretation, arguing against a Kantian view in which pure
rational faith should eventually replace historical faiths (2005b
chapter 8 [2008a: 223]), or a Hegelian view in which religion is one
moment in the dialectic of absolute spirit, soon to be sublated into
philosophy (2005b chapter 8 [2008a: 230-1]). A *truly*
postsecular self-understanding of philosophy, he claims, must move
beyond this.



Habermas attempts to deflate philosophy's stance of superiority
with regard to religion by arguing that philosophical reason and
religious faith have a shared origin. Both originated in the Axial
Age, the intellectual revolution which took place in Greece, Israel,
India, and China between 800 and 200 BCE, as described by Karl Jaspers
(Jaspers 1949 [1953]). This transition from *mythos* to
*logos* saw the emergence of universal, context-transcending
thinking, and a deepening of human subjectivity and ethical thought.
The Western philosophical tradition beginning with Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle is as much an axial phenomenon as Judaism, Buddhism, and
Confucianism (2012 chapter 4 [2017: 66-9]; Rees 2017:
221-2). As Habermas puts it,



> 
> 
> both modes, faith and knowledge, together with their traditions based
> respectively in Jerusalem and Athens, belong to the history of the
> origins of the secular reason which today provides the medium in which
> the sons and daughters of modernity communicate concerning their place
> in the world. (2008c [2010: 17])
> 
> 
> 



Religious faith is not, then, the "opaque other of reason"
(2005b chapter 5 [2008a: 142]). Rather than being hostile strangers,
philosophy and religion are in reality estranged siblings and equal
partners in a fruitful dialogue (2008c [2010: 17-18]).


### 7.2 Postsecular Deliberative Democracy



In writings since the turn of the millennium, Habermas adapts his
discourse theory of law and democracy so as to take account of the
postsecular nature of modern societies. He uses this expression



> 
> 
> to describe modern societies which must assume that religious groups
> will continue to exist and that different religious traditions will
> remain relevant, even if the societies themselves are largely
> secularized. (2012 chapter 4 [2017: 63])
> 
> 
> 



His postsecular political theory, then, applies mostly to European and
other Western countries with an established tradition of secular
democracy, which must take account of the presence of religious
minorities (2009 chapter 5: 59). One alleged problem with earlier
models of deliberative democracy, such as those outlined by Rawls in
*Political Liberalism* or by Habermas himself in *Between
Facts and Norms*, is that they place unfair cognitive burdens on
religious citizens of secular states, and in doing so threaten to
undermine these states' legitimacy. The central issue is the
exclusion of religious language from the public sphere, and it can be
addressed by modifying the discourse theory of law and democracy so as
to let religious citizens participate fully. Habermas identifies two
problems with secular deliberative democracy. It forces religious
citizens to "split their identities" between public
(secular) and private (religious) personae (2005b chapter 5 [2008a:
126-7, 130]), and places asymmetrical burdens upon them,
compared with their secular fellow citizens. Consider Rawls's
"duty of civility" which required citizens not to make use
of their comprehensive doctrines while deliberating in public, and to
restrict themselves to political conceptions of justice, which are
within the bounds of public reason (Rawls 1995 [1996: 217]). Or
consider Rawls's later, more moderate view, namely the proviso
which allows that citizens can adduce "comprehensive
reasons" in public political discussion, provided that "in
due course" these are replaced by proper political reasons
(Rawls 1993 [2005: 462, l]). Following Paul Weithman and Nicholas
Wolterstorff (Weithman 2002; Audi & Wolterstorff 1997), Habermas
objects to Rawls's proviso for placing morally unacceptable
burdens on citizens of faith, since



> 
> 
> many religious citizens would not be able to undertake such an
> artificial division within their own minds without jeopardizing the
> pious conduct of their lives. (2005b chapter 5 [2008a: 127])
> 
> 
> 



He also claims that burden is unfairly distributed, weighing only on
believers (2001b chapter 2 [2003b: 109]; 2005b chapter 5 [2008a:
136]). Some critics have countered that identity-splitting can also
affect non-believers (Boettcher 2009; Holst & Molander 2015),
while others rejoin that it is a reasonable demand to make of modern
democratic citizens in pluralist societies, which does not threaten
their complex identities (Mautner 2014: 24; Finlayson 2019: 11).
Habermas, however, argues that both objections apply to Rawls's
idea of public reason, governed by the proviso.



Now, Habermas's account of legitimate law-making in *Between
Facts and Norms* is wedded to the principle of the separation of
church and state, and has an unabashedly secular conception of
politics. The principle of democracy implies that laws are legitimate
when citizens' contributions to the *informal public
sphere* filter through into the *formal public sphere* (the
state apparatus, parliaments, and legal systems), and influence
law-making (1992b [1996b: 371-2, 441-2]). When this cycle
of feedback is operating correctly, citizens can understand themselves
as the "authors and addressees" of the law (1992b [1996b:
120]), since they have indirectly participated in the legislative
process.



However, religious citizens cannot contribute authentically to a
secular public sphere. Their contributions to public discourse, if
phrased in secular language, will have little meaning for them, and
thus they will find themselves in the heteronomous position of only
being the addressees of the law, not its authors (2005b chapter 5
[2008a: 128, 130]). Habermas fears that the secular nature of the
public sphere prevents religious citizens from fully taking part in
the discursive processes which legitimate laws. They might comply
strategically, seeing the law as a mere fact, and not a norm, but for
them the laws passed by secular democratic states would lack
legitimacy. There is evidently a danger here of large numbers of
religious believers becoming alienated from democratic law-making,
with the concomitant danger of political instability and a
legitimation crisis (2009 chapter 5: 76).



The problem is how to construe and design the modern political system
in a way that is more congenial to religious citizens, without
abandoning the secular political state, and how to show that the
Weithman/Wolterstorff objections, which Habermas agrees apply
Rawls's proviso, do not apply to his own theory. His proposed
solution, a model of *postsecular deliberative democracy*, has
two elements corresponding respectively to the formal and informal
public spheres; namely to the political system and civil society.



First, echoing Rawls, Habermas proposes an "institutional
translation proviso" at the threshold between the informal and
formal public spheres. In the formal public sphere, public officials,
politicians, and judges must restrict themselves to secular language,
but in the informal public sphere, ordinary citizens are free to
contribute to public discourse in religious language (2009 chapter 5:
76; 2005b chapter 5 [2008a 130-2]). Before these religious
statements pass through into the formal public sphere and impact the
legislative process, they are to be translated into secular terms, a
cooperative task in which both religious and non-religious citizens
take part (2005b chapter 5 [2008a: 112-3]; 2012 chapter 7 [2017:
172]). The institutional translation proviso thus acts as a filter,
maintaining the secular nature of the state, but allowing religious
citizens free reign to air their religious reasons in informal public
discourse (2005b chapter 5 [2008a: 131]).



Second, religious and non-religious citizens in civil society must
undergo complementary learning processes, leading to them becoming
reflexive about their beliefs (2005b chapter 5 [2008a: 111-2]).
For religious believers, this involves coming to terms with three
aspects of modern society: reasonable pluralism, the priority of
scientific knowledge, and the secular nature of the state (2001b
chapter 2 [2003b: 104]; 2005b chapter 5 [2008a: 137]; 2012 chapter 7
[2017: 173]). For non-believers, it involves accepting the continuing
presence of religion in modern society, coming to view their
disagreements with believers as reasonable, accepting that believers
have a right to contribute to the public sphere in religious language,
being willing to help translate those contributions into secular
language, and finally forgoing scientism, and scientistically
motivated atheism, in favour of political agnosticism (2005b chapter 4
[2008a: 113]; 2005b chapter 8 [2008a: 263-4]; 2005b chapter 10
[2008a: 309-10]; see also Baxter 2011: 205).



Taken together, Habermas claims, these learning processes help to
equalize the cognitive burdens borne by religious and non-religious
citizens. This model of postsecular deliberative democracy, Habermas
argues, solves the problems of identity-splitting and de-legitimation
which secularism inflicts on religious believers. Since they can now
contribute to the informal public sphere in religious language,
believers no longer have to split their identities in two; since they
know that their religiously based contributions are making an impact
on the formal public sphere, they can see the laws which it produces
as legitimate.



> 
> 
> Even if the religious language is the only one which they speak in
> public, and if religiously justified opinions are the only ones they
> can or wish to contribute to political controversies, they
> nevertheless understand themselves as members of a *civitas
> terrena*, which empowers them to be the authors of laws to which
> they are subject as addressees. (2005b chapter 5 [2008a:
> 130-1])
> 
> 
> 



Habermas's theory has come in for criticism from all sides. On
the one hand critics like Amy Allen claim that there is a residual
asymmetry, and that Habermas still "stacks the decks in favour
of secularism" (Allen 2013: 149). Wolterstorff agrees, though he
thinks the problem lies with the idea of "post-metaphysical
reason", while Allen traces it to his "genealogy of
post-secular reason". Cristina Lafont argues, by contrast, that
the asymmetric burden falls the other way, since the cognitive
learning process imposes a duty on secular citizens to give up their
scientistically motivated atheism in favour of politically motivated
agnosticism (Lafont 2013: 238; Finlayson 2019: 14). The idea of
"sacred-to-secular translation" is central to
Habermas's model of postsecular deliberative democracy. As an
example, Habermas cites German Christian groups translating the
statement from Genesis that "God created man in his own
image" into secular language as "a gamete fertilized
*ex utero* has the status of a subject of human rights"
as part of their arguments against stem-cell research (2001b chapter 2
[2003b: 109]). Yet the idea has proved controversial. It is not clear,
for example, whether or not Habermas considers it to work the same way
as ethical and philosophical appropriations of religious concepts (see
Cooke 2011; Kerkwijk 2015; Rees 2018: 143-65). For Wolterstorff
it relies on the idea of post-metaphysical reason that is skewed in
favour of secularism, while Rees argues that the idea is empty, since
no such translations are possible.