Habermas, Jürgen | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) was Germany's foremost social theorist and philosopher in the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, on June 18, Habermas is the leading representative of the second generation of the so-called Frankfurt School of critical social theory, taking inspiration from Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. At the same time Habermas was strongly influenced by the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy from Ludwig Wittgenstein to John L. Austin and John Searle, as well as by the classics of German thought from Immanuel Kant and Georg W. F. Hegel to Karl Marx and Max Weber. In his magnum opus, The Theory of Communication Action (1981), Habermas explained the genesis of modern society in terms of basic categories derived from the philosophical study of language and rationality. This analysis reveals that the processes of rationalization characteristic of modernity have been crucially onesided, privileging the instrumental or strategic rationality of selecting the most effective means to ends at the expense of the communicative rationality of reaching a shared understanding of ends on the basis of reasons that everyone can accept in free discussion.

A central strand in Habermas's narrative of modernity is thus the intrusion of quasinatural scientific and technological imperatives into the realm of politics. This raises the practical and theoretical issue of the proper relationship between science and politics. Habermas outlines three possible views of this in his early "Technology and Science as 'Ideology"' (1968). On Weber's decisionistic model, there isa strict separation between the functions of the politician and the expert: The former makes decisions on the basis of values that are at bottom irrational and the latter carries them out as effectively as possible on the basis of scientific knowledge. Technocrats, in contrast, see contemporary politics as bound by objective exigencies of preserving the stability of the system. Experts present policy alternatives as necessary for the achievement of goals like economic growth that are presumed to be grounded in objective needs. Thus whereas decisionists see values as irrational, technocrats consider them irrelevant.

But techne cannot be substituted for praxis. Needs must be interpreted in the light of values and cultural meanings before they can guide action. Habermas prefers, therefore, the third, pragmatist model of John Dewey. Means and ends are interdependent: On the one hand, the horizon of values in a society guides scientific research, on the other, value convictions persist only insofar as they are connected to potential satisfaction through instrumental action. Consequently technology cannot be value-neutral. Practically relevant scientific achievements must be subjected to free public discussion to make possible a "dialectic of enlightened will and self-conscious potential" (Habermas 1970, p. 73) that both allows new technologies to alter public self-understanding and lets that self-understanding determine the course of future research. Insofar as such discussion is governed by the "unforced force of the better argument," it yields decisions on ends that are rational in a sense decisionists failed to recognize.

Such domestication of technological development is impossible if technology as such amounts to ideology. Marcuse claimed that this is indeed the case since the progress of science and capitalism had undermined the legitimacy once enjoyed by religion and tradition. In partial agreement, Habermas argues in Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) that empirical science as such is bound up with an anthropologically deep-seated (and therefore quasitranscendental) technical interest in potential control and manipulation that is constitutive of its object domain. In contrast to Marcuse, however, he sees this interest as invariant, since it is rooted in the universal conditions of material reproduction of human life. As a result, there is no such thing as alternative science.

Where, then, does one find the normative resources to counteract the insidious form of social domination that legitimizes existing inequalities with an appeal to scientific (such as economic) necessity and placates the public with commercialized mass media and slow but steady growth in material comfort brought about by technological development? Habermas's strategy in his early work is to locate two equally fundamental human cognitive interests pertaining to interaction rather than work. As social beings whose very identity depends on mutual recognition in linguistic interaction, people have a practical interest in solving problems of communication and understanding within and between traditions. This is the task of the hermeneutic or cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). The emancipatory interest in countering the effects of systematically distorted communication through critical reflection is exemplified on the individual level by psychoanalysis and on the social level by critique of ideology that reveals the particular economic, political, and social interests that bias self-understandings embedded in human traditions. The ideological aspect of positivist views of science and technology consists in conflating the practical with the technical and thus obscuring the possibility of rationalization along these other dimensions. The problem is the universalization of instrumental thinking, not instrumental thinking itself.

In later work, Habermas replaces appeals to interests with references to the necessary structures of communication elaborated in formal pragmatics, but he remains concerned with the effects of technology on human interaction. The Future of Human Nature (2001) addresses the specific problem of liberal eugenics, genetic intervention designed not to prevent health problems but to create abilities that parents consider to be useful for the child. Habermas argues that this is ethically unacceptable. First, knowledge that they have been preformed according to someone else's preferences makes it impossible for children to view themselves as the sole ethically responsible authors of their own lives. Second, such engineering introduces a fundamental, irreversible asymmetry among the programmers and the programmed that is contrary to the basic principles of symmetric mutual recognition among free and equal persons that are grounded in the very structure of linguistic interaction.

In sum, Habermas's key contribution to the ethics of science and technology is a plausible theory of intersubjective rationality. Such rationality does not reduce to instrumental efficiency and can therefore be used to set nonarbitrary goals and limits to technical development, if implemented in suitable democratic institutions.

Critical Social Theory;; Discourse Ethics;; Marcuse, Herbert.

Habermas, Jürgen. (1968). Technik und Wissenschaft als 'Ideologie'. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp. Trans. (in part) by Jeremy J. Shapiro as Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics. Boston: Beacon Press 1970.

Habermas, Jürgen. (1968). Erkenntnis und Interesse. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro as Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.

Habermas, Jürgen. (1970). "Technology and Science as 'Ideology."' In Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press.

Habermas, Jürgen. (1971). Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press.

Habermas, Jurgen. (1981). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 2 vols. Trans. Thomas McCarthy as The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society; Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 and 1987.

Habermas, Jurgen. (1981). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated by Thomas McCarthy as The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society; Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 and 1987.

Habermas, Jürgen. (2001). Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur. Auf der Weg zu einer liberalen Eugenik? Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Trans. Hella Beister and William Rehg as The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2003.

Habermas, Jurgen. (2003). The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

McCarthy, Thomas. (1978). The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Boston: MIT Press. A classic study and critique of Habermas's early work that begins with a thorough discussion of his views on the scientization of politics and critique of instrumental reason.

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