1. Jürgen Habermas Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 1

2. Habermas came of age in postwar Germany. 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 Habermas was a student of Theodor Adorno, and a member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. (He is perhaps the last major thinker to embrace the basic project of the enlightenment) Foucault, Gadamer, Lyotard, etc. are often set up as his opponents. Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 2

3. Habermas and the Public Sphere He first gained serious public attention, in Germany, with the 1962 publication of his habilitation, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; English ed., 1989), a detailed social history of the development of the bourgeois public sphere from its origins in the 18th century salons up to its transformation through the influence of capital- driven mass media Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 3

4. In his description of the salons we clearly see his interest in a communicative ideal that later would provide the core normative standard for his moral-political theory: the idea of inclusive critical discussion, free of social and economic pressures, in which interlocutors (participants in a discourse) treat each other as equals in a cooperative attempt to reach an understanding on matters of common concern. As an ideal at the center of bourgeois culture, this kind of interchange was probably never fully realized; nonetheless, it “was not mere ideology” Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 4

5. As these small discussion societies grew into mass publics in the 19th century, however, ideas became commodities, assimilated to the economics of mass media consumption. Rather than give up on the idea of public reason, Habermas called for a socioinstitutionally feasible concept of public opinion-formation “that is historically meaningful, that normatively meets the requirements of the social-welfare state, and that is theoretically clear and empirically identifiable.” Such a concept “can be grounded only in the structural transformation of the public sphere itself and in the dimension of its development” Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 5

6. Habermas's interest in the political subsequently led him to a series of philosophical studies and critical-social analyses that eventually appeared in English in his Toward a Rational Society (1970) and Theory and Practice (1973b). Whereas the latter consists primarily of reflections on the history of philosophy, the former represents an attempt to apply his emerging theory of rationality to the critical analysis of contemporary society, in particular the student protest movement and its institutional target, the authoritarian and technocratic structures that held sway in higher education and politics. Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 6

7. Habermas's critical reflection takes a nuanced approach to both sides of the social unrest that characterized the late sixties. Although sympathetic with students' demand for more democratic participation and hopeful that their activism harboured a potential for positive social transformation, he also did not hesitate to criticize its militant aspects, which he labeled self- delusory and “pernicious” Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 7

8. Habermas sharply distinguished between two modes of action, “work” and “interaction,” which correspond to enduring interests of the human species. The former includes modes of action based on the rational choice of efficient means, that is, forms of instrumental and strategic action, whereas the latter refers to forms of “communicative action” in which actors coordinate their behaviors on the basis of “consensual norms” (ibid., 91–92). Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 8

9. Habermas's distinction in effect appropriates the classical Aristotelian contrast between techne (Craft) and praxis (action)for critical social theory (1973b, chap. 1). The result is a distinctively Habermasian critique of science and technology as ideology: by reducing practical questions about the good life to technical problems for experts, contemporary elites eliminate the need for public, democratic discussion of values, thereby depoliticizing the population Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 9

10. The legitimate human interest in technical control of nature thus functions as an ideology—a screen that masks the value-laden character of government decisionmaking in the service of the capitalist status quo. Habermas affirmed the technical control of nature as a genuinely universal species-interest; unlike Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, the technical interest did not necessitate social domination Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 10

11. Habermas defended this take most fully in his Knowledge and Human Interests, the work that represents his first attempt to provide a systematic framework for critical social theory. In it, Habermas develops a theory of “knowledge- constitutive interests” that are tied both to “the natural history of the human species” and to “the imperatives of the socio-cultural form of life,” but are not reducible to them Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 11

12. There are three knowledge-constitutive interests, each tied to a particular conception of science and social science. The first is the “technical interest,” the “anthropologically deep-seated interest” we have in the prediction and control of the natural environment. Positivism sees knowledge in these terms, and naturalistic accounts of human possibilities often regard human history only from this point of view. Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 12

13. Second, there is the equally deep-seated “practical interest” in securing and expanding possibilities of mutual and self-understanding in the conduct of life. Finally, there is the “emancipatory interest” in overcoming dogmatism, compulsion and domination. Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 13

14. In retrospect, Habermas's analysis of the constitutive interests is limited by the concerns of the day. His distinction between the sciences that take nature as their object, and interpretive modes of inquiry that depend on communicative access to domains of human life, still has some plausibility. It is not clear whether prediction and control exhaust the interests that drive the natural sciences (e.g., the interest in the geologic past seems to involve more than technical control). Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 14

15. As a theory of rationality and knowledge, his theory of knowledge-constitutive interests is both pragmatic and pluralistic: pragmatic, inasmuch as human interests constitute knowledge; pluralistic, in that different forms of inquiry and knowledge emerge from different core interests Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 15

16. In Knowledge and Human Interests we can see the beginnings of a methodologically pluralistic approach to critical social theory. Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 16

17. Habermas and Communication Theory Power is a key concept in Habermas's conception of communicative rationality. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas note that the publication of this work, "brought to a provisional conclusion the intellectual efforts of twenty years of reflection and research." They see the large work by Habermas as adressing the following four general themes: a meaningful concept of the rationality of actions the problem of an appropriate theory of action a concept of social order the diagnosis of contemporary society Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 17

18. In Moral Consciousness and Communicatative Action Habermas defines the concept of communicative action: Communicative action can be understood as a circular process in which the actor is two things in one: an initiator, who masters situations through actions for which he is accountable, and a product of the transitions surrounding him, of groups whose cohesion is based on solidarity to which he belongs, and of processes of socialization in which he is reared Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 18

19. The END Sneha Subhedar, DMM, Ramnarain Ruia College 19