In January 2010, Jürgen Habermas fell prey to an internet hoax.1 An anonymous prankster set up a fake Twitter feed purporting to be by Habermas, at the time professor emeritus of philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt. ‘It irritated me because the sender’s identity was a fake’, Habermas told me when I interviewed him. Like Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe and former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice before him, Habermas had been twitterjacked.
Twitter closed down the fake Habermas feed, but not before the philosophy blogosphere had become very excited. Could it be that the then eighty-year-old German thinker was joining the Twitterati? Was he really trying to explain his ethico-political theories in 140 characters or fewer? Some were taken in, others doubtful. One blogger wrote sceptically: ‘Firstly, the sentence “Sprechen Sie Deutsch, bitte?” does not seem to be a sentence uttered by a native German speaker – he would have simply asked “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” or said “Sprechen Sie bitte Deutsch?”’
Some of the tweets were authentic Habermas. For instance, at 5.38 p.m. on January 29, the account tweeted the following: ‘It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers.’ At 5.40 p.m.: ‘It also counterbalances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as …’ At 5.41 p.m.: ‘… it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes …’ At 5.44 p.m.: ‘But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics.’
Intrigued, I cut and pasted these tweets into Google and soon found that they were all taken from footnote three to the English translation of Habermas’s 2006 paper ‘Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension?’ Why would Habermas cut and paste from his own paper? Of course, it turned out that he hadn’t.
To find out who had, I posted appeals for information on philosophy blogs from Chicago to Leiden. Would the real creator of the fake Habermas please stand up? After a few weeks, I received an email from someone called Raphael, a Brazilian studying for a PhD in politics in the US, confessing that he had created the feed. At first he used it to ‘inform people about [Habermas’s] most recent publications’, as a form of flattery to the man he had admired since he was an undergraduate. But one day, an Austrian professor sent him a message asking if he was the real Habermas. ‘I thought that it would be funny to pretend a little bit. Then I quoted the passage about the internet and the fragmentation of the public sphere. It was interesting to see people’s reaction.’
Raphael didn’t want to disclose his surname or where he was studying, out of embarrassment. But in tweeting Habermas’s thoughts on the internet, he succeeded in getting the attention of many philosophers and sociologists. They were intrigued by how one of Habermas’s key concepts, the ‘public sphere’, which he developed in his 1962 book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, might apply to the internet age. This isn’t a trivial matter: at a time when contempt for traditional democratic party politics runs deep and when the so-called democratic deficit makes European political integration look like a scheme concocted by self-serving elites, perhaps the internet offers hope for change.
Habermas uses the term public sphere in a particular sense. ‘By the “public sphere” we mean first of all the realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed’, he wrote. ‘Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion – that is, with the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and the freedom to express and publish their opinions – about matters of general interest.’2 For Habermas, the public sphere briefly flourished at a specific historical moment. Just before the industrial revolution at the beginning of the eighteenth century, literary men and women met in London’s coffee houses, Paris’s salons and Germany’s Tischgesellschaften (‘table talks’) for what Habermas calls ‘rational-critical discussion’. It was also the era of literary journals and a nascent free press and these too were part of the public sphere that acted as a check on absolutist rulers.
‘In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state’, wrote Habermas in a sentence too long to be tweeted, ‘the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people.’3 This new sphere was made possible by new rights granting freedom of association and, to a limited extent, press freedom. The new social associations to which they gave rise were voluntary and, crucially for Habermas, united under a common aim, namely to make use of their reason in discussion. He argued that, for the first time, public opinion came out of these coffee-house associations and literary journals and led to the development of a notion of the common good. And that notion was used to critique the powers of what, in Europe at the time, were unrepresentative and closed forms of government.
But the eighteenth-century ‘public sphere’ was killed off during the twentieth century. Habermas found lots of different fingerprints on the murder weapon: the welfare state, mass media, the rise of public relations, the undermining of parliamentary politics by the rise of political parties. The fact that most of us know more about Kim Kardashian than post-endogenous growth theory probably doesn’t help. The freedom of the press that allowed critical voices to be raised against absolutist rule also resulted in mass circulation newspapers that became profit-generating machines for capitalist organisations, and thus, for Habermas, the public sphere lost its autonomy and critical power.
But there’s a problem with Habermas’s story here. The early eighteenth-century public sphere he eulogised is scarcely a role model for us in the twenty-first century wondering how democratic politics can become something other than an oxymoron. Those coffee-house associations and literary journals were spaces for educated men who owned property or otherwise had ample means. Moreover, their notion of the common good was probably very different from those not included in the public sphere, notably women, peasants and the nascent proletariat. Habermas’s thinking therefore had a nostalgic tenor: if only we were more like all those well-read, well-informed, critically minded coffee-house denizens, then democracy might have a chance in the twenty-first century. He argued that the principles of these associations were sound: in principle, they were voluntary and would admit anybody; in principle, status, class, gender and wealth were irrelevant to admission to this public sphere and to participation in informed and critical discourse. Principle and practice of course were very different, but the important thing was that people came together to reason in an unconstrained way. Habermas argued that this was where the ideal of democratic politics was born.
One can be sceptical about where he decided to locate the birthplace of that democratic ideal without doubting Habermas’s utopian hopes and his commitment to revivifying democratic institutions. But utopian hopes and commitment to democratic revivification were not the currency in which the first generation of the Frankfurt School traded. Adorno and Horkheimer conceived of emancipation in a negative way: they could change little and instead only say no to the existing state of affairs. Marcuse was of a similar temper, writing about the power of negative thinking and dabbling unconvincingly in imagining utopias only when caught up in the giddy euphoria of the New Left in the late 1960s.
That first generation, though, was fast disappearing (Adorno died in 1969, Horkheimer in 1973, Marcuse in 1979 and Fromm in 1980) and being replaced by a second generation, led by Habermas. That said, Habermas left Frankfurt in 1971 to become co-director of the superbly named Max Planck Institute for Research into Conditions of Living in a Scientific and Technological World, in Starnberg, a small lakeside town near Munich. Habermas’s conditions of living were certainly comfortable in this scientific and technological world. In Starnberg, which regularly tops lists of German towns with the highest disposable income per capita, he and his wife, Ute, whom he married in 1955, built a spectacular, pure-white house inspired by the Bauhaus architect Adolf Loos, filled with light and books. The house’s austere optimism, not quite built to Neue Sachlichkeit principles but certainly of a modernist temper, suited him, juxtaposing coolly against a world of gimcrack postmodernism. There the Habermases raised three children, and kept the home even after he returned to teach at Frankfurt in 1983.
If Habermas had not rebelled against his teachers, he would have become yet another philosophical Cassandra; instead, he became more like the Frankfurt School’s Pollyanna. This is surprising given that he came of age in post-war Germany. As his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry notes: ‘The Nuremberg Trials were a key formative moment that brought home to him the depth of Germany’s moral and political failure under National Socialism.’4 Shouldn’t he, then, have despaired as his teacher Adorno did? It was Adorno who mused with the guilt of a Holocaust survivor on whether ‘one who escaped [Auschwitz] by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living’.5 Habermas’s hopeful direction for German philosophy looked like a rebellious response to Adorno’s philosophical despair. Adorno’s negative dialectics was a style of thinking that scorned method and held out against creating just the kind of systematically theorised, rationally achieved consensus that has guided Habermas’s work. But Oedipal rebellion is hardly all there is to this.
Significant too is the fact that Habermas is not Jewish. Nor is he a Holocaust survivor like those of the first Frankfurt School generation and, if there is anything to suggest that he felt guilt or shame for his adolescent role in fighting for Hitler (and there’s no sense in his writings that he felt either), his feelings are very different from those Adorno experienced. The guilt of the survivor that Adorno described in a letter to his mother in 1946 after the death of his father, is not something that Habermas could share.
‘It is well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future’, Walter Benjamin wrote in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. ‘The Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance. This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice from the soothsayers. For that reason the future did not, however, turn into a homogeneous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.’6 Habermas was under no such prohibition. Jews focus, if Benjamin was right, on the remembrance of past sufferings rather than imagining futures in which suffering and injustice are not part of the programme. Not so for Habermas. Unlike Heidegger, he took responsibility; unlike Adorno, he declined to despair. Unlike his teacher, too, he has sought to develop system and method, and to work out how, as he described it to me, ‘the citizens of a political community could still exercise collective influence over their social destiny through the democratic process’. Unlike Benjamin, Habermas dared to look into the future and imagine a utopia, even if it was one for which few shared his enthusiasm.
Never since Kant and Hegel has a German philosopher and social theorist developed such an elaborate intellectual system. And yet this multidisciplinary system is based on one simple idea, namely that through rational communication we can overcome our biases, our egocentric and ethnocentric perspectives, come to a consensus or community of reason, and develop thereby what the American pragmatist philosopher George Herbert Mead, who much influenced Habermas, called the ‘larger self’. Nietzsche called Kant the ‘catastrophic spider’, entangling philosophy in a crazy web of intellectual constructs – phenomena, noumena, transcendental unities, imperatives, categories and judgements. Habermas, though, is of a similar sensibility to the great Enlightenment systems builder: the hundreds of thousands of words he has written in the past half century in philosophy, social theory, political theory, ethics, moral theory and legal theory constitute a vast web – not a dismal intellectual trap but a heroic construction designed by one opposed to fascism, postmodernism and his masters’ despair. The great difference between Kant and Habermas is that the former’s system was monological, imagining that the individual could generate a whole, universalisable moral system from their own reasoned reflection, while the latter is dialogical: for Habermas, it is only through reasoned discussion in what he calls an ‘unlimited communication community’ that we can arrive at rational consensus, that professorial vision of utopia. Habermas might well then be thought of as a post-Kantian philosophical spider if not a catastrophic one.
One of his foremost American critics, Stanley Fish, professor of English and law at Duke University, has been particularly critical of Habermas’s notion that we might talk our way past our biases in rational discussion. In order to enter into a conversation in which you might lose your prejudices, Fish argued, you would have to begin by putting aside your prejudices – as Habermas assumed those coffee-house denizens of the early eighteenth-century public sphere did. Fish doubted the possibility of doing this:
The trouble with Habermas’ way of thinking is that you couldn’t possibly take this first step. This first step is in fact the last step. I have always been mystified by the attention that Habermas receives. His way of thinking about these matters seems to me to be obviously faulty. The only way I can explain it to myself is that Habermas represents something that a lot of people would like to buy into: He seems to offer a way out of corrosive relativism.7
But even if Fish is right and Habermas’s way out is just yet another cul de sac, the impulse to avoid relativism – whereby there is no truth but many truths, no correct moral judgement but only a competing clamour of different value claims – has been an important part of what has kept Habermas spinning his web of words more than half a century. Habermas’s fight against the relativism of postmodern thought is central to understanding his work.
More important, though, in understanding Habermas, is the thought articulated, as we have seen, by Adorno: ‘Hitler imposes a new categorical imperative on human beings in their condition of unfreedom: to arrange their thought and action that Auschwitz would not repeat itself, [that] nothing similar would happen.’8 It is this thought, and this moral duty, that has impelled Habermas to work to ensure that human beings never stoop to such barbarism again. It’s striking that Adorno spoke of a categorical imperative, the notion that Kant made central to his moral theory, because Adorno temperamentally disdained what Habermas embraced, not only the system building of German philosophy and social theory, but also the hopeful Enlightenment commitment to the use of reason as a way of safeguarding human beings from domination, be that domination by superstition or political oppression. Kant’s idea was that a moral system could be generated by means of reason, and so, because it was free of personal biases, interests and passions, become universalisable: reason was a court in which every human being was guaranteed to be treated fairly and that produced results that were incontestable.
David Hume had argued that reason is the slave of the passions and thus, effectively, rubbished the possibility of the Kantian moral system before the spider of Königsberg had even started work on it. For the latter, if an action was founded on the passions, it was by definition not moral; only those actions that were in accord with the categorical imperative and thus arrived at by means of reasoned reflection were universalisable and thus capable of being truly moral. But what if Hume is right and all our reasoned judgements are premised on mere passions? Then, you might think, the Kantian system collapses. Hume’s moral psychology was intolerable to Kant. For him, such slavery to the passions is improper if man is to become mature, self-mastering and autonomous. Passions are to be mastered and, if we are not mature enough to master ourselves, then others must help us. The categorical imperative was at the heart of his moral theory, one that expressed his Enlightenment commitment to the use of reason to achieve individual autonomy. He took the use of reason to demonstrate Mündigkeit, or the ability to think for oneself.
But while Adorno took Mündigkeit in an entirely negative way, as meaning a refusal to adjust to the existing order, Habermas insisted it was the foundation for the creation of truly democratic institutions. He conceded that rationality may have been the cause of our problems, but insists too that it must be the solution to them. Only through the kind of communicative reason Habermas imputes to eighteenth-century public spheres and yearns for in a contemporary society beset by democratic deficit, can humanity become what Adorno feared it never would be – mature, autonomous, free.
But then Adorno and Habermas had very different attitudes to what the Enlightenment was. Indeed, much of Habermas’s writing can be taken as an overturning of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, that foundational text written in the 1940s when what they took to be the barbarisms of Nazism, Stalinism and the totally administered society were making a mockery of the Enlightenment heritage. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment of Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot and Kant was supposed to liberate man from myth, to allow him to think for himself (women weren’t part of the Enlightenment’s purportedly emancipatory narrative). But, with the rise of industrialisation and capitalism in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century came more bureaucracy, administration and thus control. Using a form of immanent critique (i.e. critiquing a phenomenon using its own values), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the Enlightenment hoisted itself on its own petard, because in supposedly achieving that very freedom from domination by myth and sacrifice, man was forced to repress his instincts and natural drives.9
Hence their focus on the episode in The Odyssey in which Odysseus orders his shipmates to chain him to the mast so that he can’t surrender to the Sirens’ seductive song. Although Homer’s epic was written about ten centuries before the European Enlightenment, it is in The Odyssey that Adorno and Horkheimer find the birth of humanity’s impulse, characteristic of the Enlightenment, to liberate itself from myth and to dominate nature. As Habermas put it: ‘The permanent sign of enlightenment is domination over an objectified nature and a repressed internal nature.’10 In The Odyssey, man separates himself from nature the better to dominate it. For Adorno and Horkheimer, we are all little Odysseuses, chained to our masts, sundered from nature and from our own instincts and drives. With the exceptions, of course, of Adorno and Horkheimer.
Habermas demurred. He had read Dialectic of Enlightenment as a young man and was excited by it, only later coming to regard its immanent critique as having gone too far. But it was only after the deaths of its authors that he dared publish his misgivings. Even then, in a lecture published in his 1985 book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, he admitted how difficult it is not to be overwhelmed by his masters’ rhetoric, to step back and see how simplistic it was. Habermas, then, is a new Odysseus, hearing the Siren call of that rhetoric and overcoming his natural impulse to be seduced. His masters had argued that reason itself destroys the humanity it first made possible and that this happened because ‘of a drive to self-preservation that mutilates reason, because it lays claim to it only in the form of a purposive-rational mastery of nature and instinct – precisely as instrumental reason’. But, for Habermas, there were other forms of reason he wanted to salvage from the Enlightenment heritage – notably communicative reason, of the kind that thrived in and supposedly produced consensus in the public sphere of the early eighteenth century and which he regards as the basis for hope in the revival of democratic ideals in our age.
The term instrumental reason is key here. Habermas defined it in his 1968 book Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie as the interest in understanding the necessities of nature and the potential for technically harnessing natural laws, and manipulating living and dead nature, constitutive of the natural sciences.11 That sounds anodyne, but Horkheimer, in his 1947 book The Eclipse of Reason, gave it a rhetorical, perhaps even histrionic spin, suggesting that instrumental reason has two opposing elements, namely ‘the abstract ego emptied of all substance except its attempt to transform everything in heaven and on earth into means for its preservation, and on the other hand an empty nature degraded to mere material, mere stuff to be dominated, without any other purpose than that of this very domination’.12
The Enlightenment was supposed to have freed us from myth and disenchanted the world, slain the gods and made humans masters of their domains. But, so the writers of Dialectic of Enlightenment argued, it had failed. In 1797, Goya produced one of the Enlightenment’s most terrifying and emblematic images, that of a dozing man beneath a roomful of terrifying winged creatures, and called it The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. Adorno and Horkheimer’s suggestion was that the awakening of reason had produced other monsters. Max Weber, Habermas noted, imagined the ancient, disenchanted gods rising from their graves in the guise of depersonalised forces to resume their irreconcilable struggles with the demons. Those depersonalised forces – rationalisation, administration, the very workings of capitalism – properly understood, show we have not killed the old gods, just allowed them to put on new masks. Such is the Enlightenment’s perversion of its own values.
Habermas went along with this, but only up to a point: ‘It is true that with the capitalist economy and the modern state the tendency to incorporate all questions of validity into the limited horizon of purposive rationality proper to subjects interested in self-preservation and to self-maintaining systems is strengthened.’13 But the rhetorical leap Adorno and Horkheimer made from this is unwarranted: ‘This does not yet prove that reason remains subordinated to the dictates of purposive rationality right into its most recent products – modern science, universalistic ideas of justice and morality, autonomous art.’14 There is more to science than the deployment of instrumental reason, more to art than the culture industry, and the universalistic foundations of the law and morality as well as constitutional government are worthy of much more than censure. The Enlightenment, that is to say, has for Habermas ‘a sound core’. But it is one that Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘oversimplified presentation’ skated over. ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment holds out scarcely any prospect of an escape from the myth of purposive rationality that has turned into objective violence.’15
That, though, is what Habermas tries to do in his writings – namely, to theorise his way from beneath the shadow of that intimidating German compound noun Verblendungszusammenhang, or total system of delusion. In a 1979 interview he said: ‘I do not share the basic premise of Critical Theory, the premise that instrumental reason has gained such dominance that there is really no way out of a total system of delusion, in which insight is achieved only in flashes by isolated individuals.’16 That kind of insight sounded by turns both elitist and hopeless. Habermas was sceptical about how the first generation of Frankfurt scholars were able to step outside the influence of this total system of delusion in order to provide a critique of it: if it was so total, then surely they were deluded too? He used a similar argument against postmodernists: if, as they claimed, all truth was relative then even the claim that truth is relative becomes relative in its turn. For the Frankfurt School’s first generation, this total system of delusion could only be overcome with the collapse of advanced industrial society and the arrival of socialism. Habermas rejected this perspective, arguing instead for reform of the existing system: for him, the eighteenth-century idea of the public sphere could be revivified to resist the ideological apparatuses of the system. Mündigkeit or maturity, the self-mastery and autonomy that Kant had extolled, could be realised in our time to overcome the total system of delusion that was late capitalism.
But in holding to the ‘sound core’ of the Enlightenment in this way Habermas was a man out of time – opposed not just by student radicals in the late 1960s but by postmodernist thinkers in the following decades. Postmodernism was never Habermas’s bag, for two reasons. Firstly, he saw it as a means of silencing oppositional voices. His critique of postmodernism in this sense was akin to that of the American Marxist thinker Fredric Jameson, who argued that postmodernism was less a theory than a systemic modification of capitalism, one that countered the critical force of what Habermas took to be the project of modernity.17 For Jameson, without such a project, without a critical stance, we are defenceless against global capitalism. But while Jameson still maintained a Marxist vision of a new international proletariat rising up against globalised capital and postmodern decadence, Habermas had moved on from his earlier Marxism. Secondly, Habermas poured scorn on postmodernism because like Rudi Dutschke’s politics (which Habermas had called left fascism), it seemed to him to flirt with irrationalism and nihilism and so reminded him of the Nazi era.
The postmodernists, for their part, were equally scornful of Habermas’s project. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition, wrote: ‘After the enormous massacres we have experienced, no one can any longer believe in progress, in consensus, in transcendent values. Habermas presupposes such a belief.’18 In this, it was as though Lyotard was the inheritor of Adorno’s philosophy rather than Habermas. But perhaps not: arguably it is Habermas, more than any other European intellectual, who has tried to adhere to Adorno’s new categorical imperative.
IN 1980, HABERMAS gave an ardent speech in Frankfurt after he received the Adorno Award, a prize set up to recognise outstanding achievement in philosophy, theatre, music and film. It was called ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’.19 In it he defended what he took to be the values of modernity against various postmodernists – among them Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida – as well as against certain neoconservative thinkers who blamed those values for corrupting western society. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, he wrote: ‘Modernity can and will no longer become the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch: it has to create its normativity out of itself.’20 That didn’t mean modernity was anti-historical; rather that it was directed only against, as he put it in his Frankfurt speech, ‘the false normativity of a historical understanding essentially oriented towards the imitation of past models’.
Walter Benjamin dreamed of exploding the continuum of history; modernity similarly has a transformed notion of time, one that frees itself from the authority of tradition. With the rise of modern science from the seventeenth century onwards, involving the growth of new techniques of measurement, hypothesis-testing and mathematical theorising, and the increase of technically useful knowledge, the authority of the Church waned, as did the previous Aristotelian approach to scientific inquiry. The authority of both was replaced by that of reason. More specifically relevant to Habermas’s thesis was that modernity freed humans from traditional roles and enabled them to choose their own ends and become autonomous. In this, Kant’s moral philosophy was key: he insisted that we treat others ‘never merely as a means, but always at the same time as an end’ and so for him, from the moral point of view, the most distinctive feature of human nature was our ability freely to choose our own ends. This is precisely the story of the Enlightenment that Horkheimer countered in Eclipse of Reason with his description of how reason collapsed into irrationality through its emphasis on instrumental concerns. Instrumental reason, as Horkheimer understood it, was devoted to determining the means to an end, without reasoning about ends in themselves.
Habermas’s thesis about modernity, then, overturned the Frankfurt School’s most distinctive shibboleth. He countered his teachers by arguing that reason had freed rather than enslaved us. For Habermas, modernity freed us in particular from the monotheistic Judaeo-Christian tradition and saw the emergence of a secular morality. That secular morality also decoupled humanity from a substantial conception of the good life. The good was different from the right or the just – indeed from the Enlightenment onwards there was a competing plurality of conceptions of the good. It’s striking that aspects of Kant’s moral theory, forged in the Enlightenment, were seized on by two leading philosophers – one American, the other German – nearly simultaneously two centuries later. It is almost as if both philosophers were reviving it as they tried to imagine how to hold together, in a just and fair way, western societies that otherwise seemed destined to fragment. Certainly the plurality of conceptions of the good was not something anyone could miss if they were raised, like Habermas and the American philosopher John Rawls, in the increasingly multicultural, multi-faith west after the Second World War. Modern societies were not held together by overarching traditions; rather they consisted of individuals who took themselves to be autonomous subjects.
What, then, could hold such societies together? A leading feature of Rawls’s account, set out in his his hugely influential 1971 book A Theory of Justice, was that there is a priority of the right over the good. By that Rawls meant that claims based on the rights of individuals were more important than and thus prior to claims based on the good that would result to them, or to others, from violating those rights. The first duty of the liberal state was to safeguard the individual’s basic civil liberties. This entailed, as Rawls put it, that ‘the loss of freedom for some’ could never be ‘made right by a greater good shared by others’. The impartiality of the concept of the right ensured, for Rawls, social stability or harmony.
Habermas agreed with much of this: clearly modern societies could not be held together by one overarching concept of good as earlier ones had been. What’s more, inviolable liberties and rights are essential to ensure human flourishing and autonomy, to the Mündigkeit Kant extolled. For Habermas, all that was necessary but not sufficient. His philosophy, social theory and political theory was devoted to protecting us from the bad consequences of the Enlightenment. That is what he meant by insisting that modernity is an unfinished project: we have benefited from becoming modern in terms of technical progress, economic growth, rational administration, greater autonomy, but we have been scarred by that transformation too.
In his Adorno Prize talk, Habermas said: ‘The project of modernity as it was formulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century consists in the relentless development of the objectivating sciences, of the universalistic foundations of morality and law, and of autonomous art, all in accord with their own immanent logic.’ He cited Max Weber who argued that, with the collapse of religious and metaphysical worldviews as a result of the Enlightenment, three value spheres or discourses open up to replace them – the natural sciences, morality and law, and the arts. Each of these has become institutionalised and so the preserve of experts, scarcely on speaking terms with each other let alone laypersons. ‘The distance between these expert cultures and the general public has increased’, he pointed out.21
The result? What Habermas called the ‘lifeworld’ has become impoverished. This is of great importance for his social theory. The lifeworld is one of two distinct spheres of social life, the other being the system. For him lifeworld means the pre-theoretical everyday world of family and household, of shared meanings and understandings, of the unconstrained conversations that take place in the public sphere. The system by contrast means structures and patterns of instrumental rationality and action, notably money and power, whose chief function is the production and circulation of goods and services. The system then includes the economy, state administration and state-sanctioned political parties. The relationship between lifeworld and system is important for Habermas: the former, which is the home of communicative reason and action, risks being colonised by the latter, which is the home of instrumental reason. But that is disastrous for the project of modernity.
The optimistic dream of Enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet, Habermas argued, was that the arts and sciences would ‘not merely promote the control of the forces of nature, but also further the understanding of self and world, the progress of morality, justice in social institutions and even human happiness’.22 That, he argued, hasn’t happened. Instead, systems of power and money have imposed constraints on human action. Systems are dominated by instrumental rationality. Instead of reflecting on our ends and changing them, the system takes on an internal logic that escapes human control.
This distinction between lifeworld and system owes much to Heidegger and also to Marx, but mostly it owes a great deal to Habermas’s Frankfurt School predecessors. It was they who took those living in advanced industrial societies to have been utterly colonised by the system to the extent that the lifeworld no longer existed: we have become one-dimensional men and women, mere functionaries of a capitalist system rather than autonomous beings capable of the proper autonomy and self-mastery Kant envisaged.
Habermas differs from his predecessors on two counts. Firstly, he thinks that humanity has gained from the Enlightenment and the rise of science. Secondly, he refused to give up hope as they did. In his Adorno Prize talk, he characterised his former colleague as a man for whom ‘the emphatic claim to reason has withdrawn into the accusatory gesture of the esoteric work of art, morality no longer appears susceptible to justification, and philosophy is left solely with the task of revealing, in an indirect fashion, the critical content sealed up within art’.23 That shrinking from politics into esoterica was not for Habermas: he held rather to the grand promise of the Enlightenment that Adorno thought he and Horkheimer had obliterated. Halfway through ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’, Habermas asked two rhetorical questions:
should we continue to hold fast to the intentions of the Enlightenment, however fractured they may be, or should we rather relinquish the entire project of modernity? If the cognitive potentials in question do not merely result in technical progress, economic growth and rational administration, should we wish to see them checked in order to protect a life praxis still dependent on blind traditions from any unsettling disturbance?24
But even if we should continue the project of modernity as Habermas counselled, what is less clear is how the impoverishment of lifeworld by system is to be halted. For it is in the lifeworld that Habermas finds the potential bulwarks against the evisceration of social life by capitalism, state and what his colleague Marcuse called one-dimensional society. It is there that he finds the public sphere that once offered a utopian hope for a rational, autonomous, voluntary association where we might, through communicative reason and communication action, become more than one-dimensional men and women.
Shortly after he had been twitterjacked, I asked Habermas if the internet and social media might function as a public sphere. He was sceptical. ‘The internet generates a centrifugal force’, he replied.
It releases an anarchic wave of highly fragmented circuits of communication that infrequently overlap. Of course, the spontaneous and egalitarian nature of unlimited communication can have subversive effects under authoritarian regimes. But the web itself does not produce any public spheres. Its structure is not suited to focusing the attention of a dispersed public of citizens who form opinions simultaneously on the same topics and contributions which have been scrutinised and filtered by experts.
Perhaps social networking websites might help create that solidarity? ‘As regards its impact on the public sphere, accelerated communication opens up entirely new possibilities for organising activities and for large-scale political mobilisations of widely dispersed addressees … However, they remain contingent on their relation to the real decision-making processes that take place outside the virtual space of electronically networked monads.’25
Maybe Habermas was wrong to be so dismissive of the potential of the internet and social media to function as public spheres, to serve as virtual spaces for discussion untainted by status and spin. Certainly nowadays, the kind of interventions in political matters that Habermas has made in performing his role as a public intellectual throughout his career increasingly take place in cyberspace. When I interviewed him, he was concerned rather about the risk of newspapers being rendered obsolete as a result of the rise of the internet. ‘In our own countries, too, the national press, which until now has been the backbone of democratic discourse, is in severe danger. No one has yet come up with a business model that would ensure the survival of the important national newspapers on the internet.’ That worry was understandable given how much hope he had placed in the idea that newspapers might (just sometimes) facilitate ‘ideal speech situations’ in which citizens are able to raise moral and political concerns and defend them by rationality alone. His hope was that newspapers would act as a counterbalance to the erosion of lifeworld by system, or to put it another way, that they would ward off the disenfranchisement of the modern party political system. Certainly Habermas, perhaps more than any other public intellectual of his generation, took his role seriously as a participant in that public sphere. In the revivification of that sphere, the role of intellectuals was key. They must guide debate towards a rational consensus, rather than allowing spin doctors and other media manipulators to stifle freedom of expression and undermine democracy. Habermas argued that rationally achieved consensus, which Adorno’s Negative Dialectics implacably refused, was necessary and possible for human flourishing post-Auschwitz. The barriers preventing the exercise of reason and mutual understanding could be identified, comprehended and reduced.
Typical of Habermas’s public engagement in the German press was his intervention in the Historikerstreit, or Historians’ Dispute, about how the Holocaust should be interpreted, that raged for four years from 1986. The German historian Ernst Nolte argued that ‘Auschwitz … was above all a reaction born out of the annihilating occurrences of the Russian Revolution … the so-called annihilation of the Jews during the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original’. Nolte argued that the Gulag Archipelago preceded Auschwitz and inferred from this that Germany had ‘reasonably’ turned to Nazism in face of the Bolshevik threat.26 Four decades after the fall of Hitler, Habermas sensed that Nolte and other right-wing historians were trying to exonerate their nation for responsibility for the Third Reich’s atrocities. Worse yet, some of the historians against whom Habermas wrote were intellectuals who had contacts in West German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrat government. For Habermas, their revisionist account of the Final Solution represented the misuse of academic history for political ends. And those ends, quite possibly, involved bolstering Kohl’s popularity at home and serving to justify a cessation of West Germany’s reparation payments to Israel for the Holocaust.
Habermas described his opponents as trying to normalise German history and attempting to erase what Nolte had called the ‘past that refused to go away’. Habermas argued that these historians were trying to get a nation off the hook by suggesting that Nazism was a breach with German history by a small criminal clique. In a series of articles attacking this attempt ‘to make Auschwitz unexceptional’, he wrote of ‘the obligation incumbent upon us in Germany – even if no one else were to feel it any longer – to keep alive, without distortion and not only in an intellectual form, the memory of the sufferings of those who were murdered by German hands’.27 The spectre of Adorno’s new categorical imperative was never far from his mind as Habermas wrote these articles.
What angered him in particular during the Historikerstreit was the revival of something he found intolerable – German nationalism. Nationalism in general nauseated Habermas, but German nationalism was worse. One concern for him was that a nation-state, particularly one founded on an ethnic unity, is exclusionary. Another is that the bonds of solidarity between members of a nation are emotional, sentimental and affective and therefore not open to the communicative reason he takes to be necessary for a flourishing public sphere or civil society that can act as a check on the state. Nationalism, then, serves an important function in smoothing the workings of what Habermas calls the system, notably the state administration, since it gives citizens a sense of belonging to a unitary political community, rather than equipping them with the social spaces and intellectual tools to be a critical check on state power. In Habermas’s technical terms, this pre-discursive nationalism is a phenomenon that arises in the lifeworld but can be colonised by the system. Put more simply, nationalist feelings can always be readily manipulated by political elites: Hitler had done just that and Habermas was understandably queasy about history repeating itself.
The rise of nationalism in Germany in particular subverted the idea of communicative rationality that Habermas set out in his 1981 masterpiece The Theory of Communicative Action, whereby participants in argument learn from others and from themselves and question suppositions typically taken for granted. In the aftermath of one of the most brutal centuries in recorded history and with the threat of worse to come, this sounded welcome – like an ongoing version of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But that seemed to be precisely what was not happening as, at the end of the 1980s, Germany hurried towards reunification. Here, Habermas repeatedly sounded a cautionary note, fearing that reunification was a polite word for an economically successful republic in the west annexing a former Soviet satellite state.28 His fear was that reunification was happening so quickly that East German citizens would be incorporated into the Federal Republic by West German bureaucrats without having any say in the kind of society they might want to live in. There was, or so he hoped, more to reunification than economic advantage for the citizens of the former GDR. For him the manner of reunification may have served West German political elites, but it thwarted communicative rationality, the dialogical consensus he took to be the mark of a mature polity. In other words, system was once more impoverishing lifeworld.
In his writings from the 1980s and 1990s, he worried that a pre-discursive nationalism was undermining what he liked about how his homeland had developed since the Second World War. He took some measure of pride in the fact that the Federal Republic had rejected nationalism in favour of what he called ‘constitutional patriotism’. ‘For us in the Federal Republic’, he wrote in Die Nachholende Revolution (The Catch-up Revolution) in 1990, ‘constitutional patriotism means, among other things, pride in the fact that we have succeeded in permanently overcoming fascism, establishing a just political order, and anchoring it in a fairly liberal political culture.’29 His hope was that constitutional patriotism could take the place of nationalism.
Only an academic, you might well think, could find constitutional patriotism inspiring. And yet one can understand Habermas’s impulse in trying to find a substitute for rising nationalism. The unspeakable crimes committed by the German nation between 1933 and 1945 had, at least, given its citizens an opportunity to confront the delusions of nationalism in a way other Europeans have not. Certainly the British, in part thanks to the triumphalist national narrative that was among the toxic spoils of winning the Second World War, have rarely reflected on the pitfalls of the exclusive, racist nationalism to which we are so frequently prone. There is something, then, if not inspiring, then admirable, about Habermas’s constitutional patriotism, not least at a time when western Europe becomes more multicultural. If multicultural societies are to work, then nationalism has to be overcome with something like a democratic constitution in which all different ethnicities, religions and cultures can feel at home.
Habermas also insisted that that constitution must conform with the ethical understanding of all groups in the political community. No longer could western European countries be held together by the (traditionally Christian-based) conception of the good of a majority. His notion of constitutional patriotism was intended as a bulwark against the bad nationalism he loathed since in it he saw the impulses that had been harnessed by Hitler. Moreover, constitutional patriotism was neither exclusionary, nor premised on one single conception of the good: it was something that everybody in a polity could share since it was an expression of pride in the free and fair workings of the state, which was always held to account by a flourishing public sphere or civil society. That, at least, was Habermas’s purportedly inspirational notion. Clearly, though, it wasn’t inspirational to the racists who attacked foreign guest-workers in the former East German cities of Rostock and Hoyeswerda after reunification, when the new Germany struggled with rising unemployment.
Habermas’s scepticism about nationalism also underpinned his dream of European unification – something that, as the millennium reached its teens, looked utopian, as the Greek debt crisis threatened to destroy the eurozone and thus the foundation of political integration. In his 2010 book Europe: The Faltering Project, he argued that the ‘monstrous mass crimes of the twentieth century’ meant that nations can no longer be presumed to be innocents and thus immune to international law.30 Constitutional patriotism, then, is a way station to the greater goal of replacing petty nationalisms with a better, more rational organisation based on worldwide consensus.
Habermas’s hope was that a more unified Europe could work closely with the US to build a more stable and equitable international order. He told me in 2010 that Europe should be bolstering US President Barack Obama in his international goals, such as disarmament and securing peace in the Middle East, as well as encouraging Washington to lead efforts to regulate financial markets and stem climate change. ‘But as so often is the case, the Europeans lack the political will and the necessary strength. Measured against the expectations which it encounters at the global level, Europe is a major failure on the international stage.’31
Significantly, the German title of the book was Ach, Europa. The transnational community he yearned for as a means of overcoming the European nationalist nightmare that had led to two world wars and the Holocaust wasn’t likely to exist on the continent any time soon. Ever the Pollyanna, though, Habermas snatched optimism from the jaws of seeming hopelessness, when I suggested to him that the European Union was too remote from its citizens to be inspiring and that, in any case, the Greek crisis and his own government’s attitude to it menaced the EU’s future existence. ‘Greece’s debt crisis has had a welcome political side-effect’, he said. ‘At one of its weakest moments, the European Union has been plunged into a discussion concerning the central problem of its future development.’ But he did concede that one of the EU’s biggest problems, and a stumbling block to the transcending of national borders he favours, is his homeland’s renewed narcissism. The spectre of German nationalism that had made him queasy in the late 1980s was having the same effect again. He told me he thought Angela Merkel’s Germany was as nationalistic as Thatcher’s Britain. ‘The German elites apparently seem to be enjoying the comforts of self-satisfied national normalcy: “We can be like the others once again!” … The willingness of a totally defeated people to learn more quickly has disappeared. The narcissistic mentality of a complacent colossus in the middle of Europe is no longer even a guarantee that the unstable status quo in the EU will be preserved.’32 His fear, here and during the Historikerstreit, was that Germany’s singular shame – its responsibility for the Holocaust – which imposed on it a singular, chastened identity, was being forgotten.
But in any case, how could European unification serve his dream of extending and enriching democracy when it remains an elite project? Habermas believes that, like the internet, Europe has created no public sphere in which citizens can express their views freely and without regard to status. How can this be changed? He argued that ‘a co-ordination of the economic policies in the eurozone would also lead to an integration of policies in other sectors. Here what has until now tended to be an administratively driven project could also put down roots in the minds and hearts of the national populations.’ Again the Pollyanna hope: the system can serve the lifeworld, which can enrich the system, in a virtuous spiral or feedback loop. But that seems a remote possibility, especially as Europe’s leaders revel in cross-border sniping and remain mired in nationalism.
Why did Habermas pin so much hope on an integrated Europe? Why not plump for a neoliberal network of European states, each just one selfish player in a capitalistic world? ‘Aside from the insensitivity to the external costs of the social upheavals that [neoliberal policy] casually takes for granted’, he replied,
what annoys me is the lack of a historical understanding of the shifts in the relationship between the market and political power. Since the beginning of the modern period, expanding markets and communications networks had an explosive force, with simultaneously individualising and liberating consequences for individual citizens; but each such opening was followed by a reorganisation of the old relations of solidarity within an expanded institutional framework.
This is typical Habermas: instead of wallowing in the hopelessness of a Marxist-inspired philosopher confronted with a capitalism endlessly rampant and utterly destructive of the kind of egalitarian politics he wants to see, he told me a story about the past that seems to suggest things weren’t as hopeless as we might have feared. ‘Time and again, a sufficient equilibrium between the market and politics was achieved to ensure that the network of social relations between citizens of a political community was not damaged beyond repair. According to this rhythm, the current phase of financial market-driven globalisation should also be followed by a strengthening of the international community.’33 It’s a dialectical story of recent history, but hardly one that Adorno could have written.
Unlike his teachers, Habermas has always found reasons to be positive and ambitious about political reform. His career might be seen as a heroically hopeful response to his teachers’ pessimistic works and to the prevailing intellectual zeitgeist in Europe. While Adorno, like Marx, said little about what a good or rational society should look like, and poststructuralists like Foucault were highly suspicious of institutions in general, Habermas has spent a lot of his career writing books that identify the conditions that best foster individual autonomy and thereby give individuals the capacities to enable them to resist the homogenising nature of capitalism and the corrosive effects of state administration. While Horkheimer and Adorno linked emancipation to refusing to adapt to current social reality, Habermas’s extraordinary hope is that social reality can be changed by means of creating truly democratic institutions that are capable of withstanding the corrosive effects of capitalism.
But perhaps Adorno was right to despair. True, we may have left the Third Reich behind, but we live in an era in which commitment to democracy appears to be at a low ebb. The notion of a well-functioning public sphere seems the barmy dream of a cock-eyed optimist. ‘There are good reasons to be alarmed’, retorted Habermas when I put this to him:
Some people already think that authoritarian mass democracies will provide the functionally superior model under conditions of a globalised world economy … Today many people are intimidated by a growing social complexity which is ensnaring individuals in increasingly dense contexts of action and communication. In this mood, the notion that the citizens of a political community could still exercise collective influence over their social destiny through the democratic process is also being denounced by intellectuals as a misguided Enlightenment inheritance. Liberal confidence in the idea of an autonomous life is now confined to the individual freedom of choice of consumers who are living off the drip-feed of contingent opportunity structures.34
But that freedom of choice, as Habermas understood from the first generation of Frankfurt scholars, and from Marcuse in particular, was no freedom at all. Like Marcuse, Habermas was struggling to theorise his way out of one-dimensional society.
Eminent critics such as the philosophers Richard Rorty and Slavoj Žižek have argued that the vast intellectual web of theory Habermas has spun is inadequate. They contended that the public sphere as a place of purely rational independent debate never existed, and that his cherished and meticulously theorised notion of communicative action was a professorial utopian dream that will never be realised. The possibility of untrammelled debate as the foundation of political legitimacy is a beautiful, but deluded, hope. Against such criticisms, Habermas – a man out of time, a utopian modernist living in a postmodern dystopia, but also the most engaged of European public intellectuals – retorted in an interview: ‘If there is any small remnant of utopia that I’ve preserved, then it is surely the idea that democracy – and its public struggle for its best form – is capable of hacking through the Gordian knot of otherwise insoluble problems. I’m not saying we’re going to succeed in this; we don’t even know whether success is possible. But because we don’t know, we still have to try.’35
HABERMAS’S COMMITMENT to keep hacking through that Gordian knot has had one unexpected consequence. A few years after 9/11, he published An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, which marked an extraordinary break with his former philosophy. He had once argued that ‘the authority of the holy is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus’.36 That, so he had thought, was one of the good legacies of the Enlightenment: the rise of secular morality and the decline of religious authority allowed us to think for ourselves and develop our own conception of the good.
In the first decade of the new millennium, however, he was rethinking the role of religion in public life. ‘Postmetaphysical thinking’, he wrote, ‘cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalisation of the “dialectic of the Enlightenment” and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.’37 Worse, he argued, the liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost ‘its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole’ and is unable to formulate ‘collectively binding ideals’.38 His notion of constitutional patriotism had involved such an ideal, one that might inspire different groups in a multicultural society even as each one pursued its own conception of the good, but clearly that constitutional patriotism was less inspiring to citizens than to the professor. Enter religion, to do what reason, and the Enlightenment, apparently could not.
Habermas didn’t stop there in his engagement with religion. In 2004, two elderly Germans, both former members of the Hitler Youth, met at the Catholic Academy of Bavaria to debate the topic ‘Pre-political moral foundations of the liberal state’. One was Habermas, the leftist professor; the other was Cardinal Ratzinger, who would soon become Pope Benedict XVI. Habermas argued that the liberal state should ‘treat with care all cultural sources on which the normative consciousness and solidarity of citizens draws’, not least because they were important allies in its own struggle against the alienating forces of the modern world. Ratzinger, equally emolliently, argued that the ‘divine light of reason’ had a role to play in controlling the ‘pathologies of religion’.39
Reading the transcript of their conversation makes one think, uncharitably, of the end of Orwell’s Animal Farm, when the creatures outside the farmhouse looked ‘from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which’. Sometimes, as Ratzinger and Habermas debated, it was hard to tell which was the cardinal and which the one-time defender of the Enlightenment’s secular legacy.
Habermas went so far as to suggest that religious notions had their parallels in secular reason and that, as a result, the Enlightenment was infused with Judaeo-Christian values. For instance, the Biblical vision of man as made in the ‘image and likeness’ of God finds its profane expression in the principle of the equal worth of all human beings. But in the translation, something went missing: ‘When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offence against human laws, something was lost.’ It was as though Habermas was arguing that the Enlightenment had a God-shaped hole and that the secular needed what it had programmatically disowned, i.e. the religious, if it was to flourish. ‘Among the modern societies’, he wrote, ‘only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.’40
But what could that mean? In 2007 Habermas took part in a dialogue with four Jesuit academics in Munich that was later published as An Awareness of What Is. In it he recalled the funeral of a friend who in life ‘rejected any profession of faith’, and yet indicated before his death that he wanted his memorial service to be held at Saint Peter’s Church in Zurich. Habermas suggested that his friend ‘had sensed the awkwardness of non-religious burial practices and, by his choice of place, publicly declared that the enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rite de passage’. The story isn’t very convincing: many atheists and agnostics have mourned loved ones at funerals that did not take place on hallowed ground without sensing the kind of awkwardness or failure Habermas imputed to his friend. But still, he took it ‘as a paradoxical event which tells us something about secular reason’.41
What Habermas wanted to tell us about secular reason, which he had spent most of his career extolling, and indeed about the modern secular state, was that both lack what religious authority offers the faithful – not just salvation but, he argued, virtuous lives. Secular reason suffered from a ‘motivational weakness’ in that it could not inspire its citizens to virtuous acts. Not that he was junking secular reason. He wanted to hold on to the ‘cognitive achievements of modernity’ – tolerance, equality, individual freedom, freedom of thought, cosmopolitanism and scientific advancement. He wanted to counter, too, the fundamentalisms that willfully ‘cut themselves off’ from everything that is good about the Enlightenment project. But he was proposing something more. It was characterised by Stanley Fish as
something less than a merger and more like an agreement between trading partners: … the religious side must accept the authority of ‘natural’ reason as the fallible results of the institutionalised sciences and the basic principles of universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality. Conversely, secular reason may not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith, even though in the end it can accept as reasonable only what it can translate into its own, in principle universally accessible, discourses.42
In this, Habermas was suggesting a tolerant attitude towards faith akin to what the American journalist H. L. Mencken once wrote: ‘We must accept the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.’43 Such tolerance was, after all, an Enlightenment achievement worth holding on to.
That said, Habermas was arguing that the great product of the Enlightenment, secular reason, is ‘unenlightened about itself’, it doesn’t know what it is for. That’s to say, he had found at the centre of his intellectual web what critical theorists virtuosically discovered in other thinkers’ theories, namely an aporia (a word taken from the Greek for ‘no passage’, and often signifying perplexity). Two of his interpreters tried to pinpoint the aporetic nature of Habermas’s account of secular reason. If the modern west is to be perceived as more than merely ‘godless’, Edward Skidelsky wrote, ‘if it is to inspire not just fear, but also respect, it must recover its ethical substance’. This, he thought, demanded a reconciliation with its religious inheritance.44 Stanley Fish argued: ‘The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield.’45
But surely Habermas’s elaborate intellectual systems – his discourse theory of ethics and his programme of political theory – were expressly devised to ensure that what Fish called the worldviews welcomed into the marketplace of ideas flourished in so far as they didn’t overturn the moral order of liberal society. Habermas distinguished ethics from morality: the former concerns questions of individual happiness and the good of communities; the latter has to do with deciding which actions are right or wrong according to valid norms. Moral order depends on most agents being disposed to adhere to those norms and they will only do so if those norms clearly demonstrate a universalisable interest.
Morality, thus conceived, is Kantian; ethics an Aristotelian notion of the good life and the good community. Fish’s characterisation of Habermas’s secular reason, then, wasn’t quite right: the political structure that allows all worldviews into its marketplace of ideas does have a procedure for judging the outcomes its procedures yield: an action is right or wrong according to whether it is permitted or prohibited by a demonstrably valid norm to which agents adhere, and they adhere to those norms that embody a universal interest – such as don’t be cruel to your children or be kind to friends. Precisely because they embody such a universal interest they can help hold society together, even one comprised of different faiths, ethnicities and conceptions of the good life. Such norms, then, are likely to be very general in character. Just as Rawls prioritised the right over the good in part to ensure the fairness and stability of modern liberal society, so Habermas prioritised the moral over the ethical, and his suggestion was that valid norms are prior to substantial conceptions of the good that, properly understood, are distinctively ethical.
But this is where Habermas’s discourse ethics gets tricky. He wants to separate norms from values – norms are universalisable and thus moral, whereas values are non-universalisable and thus ethical. But the distinction between norms and values, as critics including Thomas McCarthy and Hilary Putnam have argued, is not as sharp as Habermas wanted to make it because moral norms develop from values such as friendship and kindness.46 Habermas’s project was a kind of immunisation project aimed at protecting the moral order from infection by ethical values. His hope was that such immunisation would stop the spread of conflicts in modern multicultural societies. But the suggestion of critics like McCarthy and Putnam was that the moral order of the secular state upholds norms already infused with ethical values, some of them religious.
Habermas’s point in An Awareness of What is Missing was that, as we move from the secular to a post-secular age (and he thought we should), those religious values should be respected since they can help hold societies together. The liberal state should ‘treat with care all cultural sources on which the normative consciousness and solidarity of citizens draws’. Not for him the militant atheism of Richard Dawkins or the late Christopher Hitchens who took religion to be a phenomenon that needed to be anathematised in the secular society: ‘the liberal state must expect its secular citizens, in exercising their role as citizens, not to treat religious expressions as simply irrational’.47 Rather, religion could be useful; his hope was that it could be used to help overcome social disruptions and the alienation from the modern liberal state. In effect, religion was being instrumentalised by Habermas. In a 2001 lecture, he described 9/11 as a reaction to ‘an accelerated and radically uprooting modernisation’.48 The terror attacks and the rise of religious fundamentalism were responses to an alienation from that modernisation, and his hope was that non-fundamentalist religion could help overcome that alienation. Whether the Catholic Church was prepared to be co-opted thus is less clear.
Habermas’s encounter with religion highlighted many poignant things – not least, the failures of his own intellectual system and the difficulty of making modern liberal societies work. For our purposes, too, it highlighted the long journey the Frankfurt School of critical theory has taken since its inception as a Marxist research institute in the early 1920s. Instead of regarding religion as an opium of the masses that would be abolished in a communist society, the Frankfurt School was now treating it as an invaluable ally.