- Length
- 1200 pagesMcCarthy, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols, Beacon Press, 1984-87
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
The Theory of Communicative Action
Two volumes arguing that reason is not a property of individual minds but a structure built into the attempt to reach an understanding with someone. It was written to find a way out of the dead end its author's teachers had reached, and it is the most sustained defence of the Enlightenment written after the Enlightenment stopped being defensible.
- Date
- 1981
- Author
- Jürgen Habermas
- Region
- Frankfurt and Starnberg
- Language
- German
- 1984 English, Thomas McCarthy Two volumes, 1984 and 1987; the standard, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 21 years
The most systematic attempt anyone has made to defend rationality after the century that discredited it, by the last major figure of the Frankfurt School.
What the book says
Twelve hundred pages attempting to find a form of reason that is not instrumental, and thereby to escape the conclusion the previous Frankfurt generation had reached. Habermas begins from a distinction between two ways of acting. In strategic action I treat other people as obstacles or means and aim at success; in communicative action I aim at understanding, and that changes everything, because reaching an understanding with someone requires that they could accept what I say for reasons rather than because I have arranged for them to. Any speaker making a serious claim, he argues, implicitly raises three validity claims at once - that what they say is true, that they are entitled to say it, and that they mean it - and any of the three can be challenged and defended with reasons. Reason therefore lives in the structure of ordinary speech rather than in the mind of an isolated subject, which is what the tradition from Descartes onward assumed. The second volume applies this to society. A lifeworld of shared background understanding is progressively encroached upon by the systems of money and administrative power, which coordinate action without agreement - a process he calls the colonisation of the lifeworld.
What it argues
That anyone who speaks to another person seriously has already committed themselves to standards they cannot then disown. To say something is to claim it is true, to claim one is entitled to say it in this relationship, and to claim one means it - and to invite the hearer to accept on those grounds rather than on any other. The commitment is not optional and not culturally local: it is what distinguishes speaking to someone from manipulating them, and it makes an ideal implicit in every conversation, of agreement reached without force where only the better argument decides. From this Habermas rebuilds critical theory on a positive footing. Domination can be identified as communication that could not survive being made explicit, and modernity is diagnosed not as the triumph of instrumental reason but as an unfinished project in which the systems have grown at the lifeworld's expense.
What it answered
Gadamer directly, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment behind him. Horkheimer and Adorno had concluded that reason is instrumental all the way down and left themselves no ground to criticise from; Habermas' whole career is an attempt to show they had identified only one kind of reason and mistaken it for the whole. He is also answering the poststructuralists - Foucault and Derrida - whom he regarded as reaching the same dead end by a different route and attacked directly a few years later.
How it argues
By reconstructing the sociological tradition and finding in it the resources for a theory it did not know it needed. Half the book is exposition of Weber, Mead, Durkheim, Lukács, Parsons and the earlier Frankfurt School, and Habermas' method is to show what each got right and where each stopped. This makes the book enormously long and the argument hard to extract, and it also does real work: the claim is that the theory is not imposed on the material but is what the material requires. The prose is dense, technical and famously unrewarding at the sentence level.
The moment
Habermas grew up under the Third Reich, was fifteen at the surrender, and described the Nuremberg trials as the moment his political consciousness formed. He worked as Adorno's assistant in Frankfurt, broke with the student movement in 1968 over its tactics, and spent a decade at a research institute in Starnberg before returning to Frankfurt. He has been the most publicly engaged philosopher in Europe for half a century, arguing in newspapers about German history, European union and biotechnology.
How it travelled
Into political and legal theory more than into philosophy departments. Deliberative democracy as a field descends from this book; discourse ethics is a standard position in moral philosophy; and the vocabulary of the lifeworld and its colonisation is used across sociology and social policy. Habermas' public interventions - with Rawls, with Derrida, with Ratzinger - have kept the framework visible outside the academy.
The strongest objection
That the ideal implicit in speech is either trivial or smuggled in. If the claim is only that we normally proceed as though agreement were possible, it is true and yields no standard; if it is that a substantive ideal of uncoerced consensus is presupposed by anyone who opens their mouth, then a great deal of moral content has been derived from the fact that people talk to each other. Critics from the poststructuralist side add that the conditions Habermas describes are themselves a historically particular ideal of rational discussion, formed in a specific Europe, presented as the universal structure of speech - which is exactly the move Gadamer's argument said could not be avoided. The dispute between them was never resolved and both men said afterwards that they had understood the other's position and continued to reject it.
Why read it
Almost nobody reads it entire and there is no reason to. The sections setting out communicative versus strategic action and the validity claims are the core; the lifeworld and colonisation material in the second volume is what social scientists use. Habermas' shorter essays state the position far more clearly, and anyone who wants the argument rather than the reconstruction should start there.
- First printed
- 1981
- First in English
- 1984
- Digitised
- No
Between Facts and Norms (1992) applies the framework to law and democracy and is now the more used of the two for political theory.
Thomas McCarthy's English of 1984 and 1987 is the standard and is in copyright, as is the German.
Where it stands
Live. Discourse ethics and deliberative theory are active fields, and Habermas remains the standing alternative for anyone who wants critique without abandoning the idea that some arguments are better than others.
On quoting this book
In copyright in German and English. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the validity claims are genuinely presupposed by all speech or only by a particular register of it is the central objection and has never been settled. Whether the theory can accommodate the forms of exclusion that operate by deciding in advance who counts as a competent speaker is pressed by feminist and postcolonial critics. And whether Habermas' account of Adorno and Horkheimer is fair to them, or straightens their position in order to have something to escape, is argued within the Frankfurt tradition itself.