Habermas & the proper 'language' for social theory.

Societies are statistical ensembles featuring strategic games of various types. The proper 'language' for social theory is Statistical Game Theory eked out by various Structural Causal Models of a representative agent type. 

Communication is about solving coordination or discoordination games. Where there is a high incentive for both parties, ceteris paribus, solutions are highly efficient & consume minimal cognitive or other resources.  That's why a businessman in China can do a 100 million dollar deal with a businessman in Chile after speaking for 5 minutes on the phone even if neither speaks any language but their own. One reason for this is because 'the law of increasing functional information' goes into overdrive to provide better & better signalling and screening mechanisms such that communication becomes much more efficient where mutual benefit greatly burgeons.

Habermas had studied worthless shit at Uni & thus was unaware of contemporary developments in Econ & STEM subjects. 

William Rehg writes-

Drawing on insights from American pragmatism and the speech-act theories of ]. L. Austin and John Searle, Habermas considers a "formal-pragmatic" approach to language as most adequate for social theory.

What are 'the structural, universal conditions necessary for successful communication'? The answer has to do with the utility of communication. If it is higher than the cost, it will occur. If it isn't, it won't. The cost goes down if there are 'non-convexities' in provision- i.e. economies of scope & scale. The same is true of the benefit. Communication isn't 'philosophical' or 'linguistic'. It is economic & information theoretical. 

This approach goes beyond semantic and syntactic analyses of meaning and grammar

which aren't needed for communication. Get a fucking interpreter & you are golden. But, even that becomes unnecessary as purpose built screening & signalling devices become cheaper & better. 

to examine the general structures that enable competent speakers actually to engage in successful interaction, which involves more than simply knowing how to form grammatical sentences.

Sadly, the 'i-language' approach did not enable the creation of accurate machine translation or computers that can talk like HAL in Kubrik's 2001. The 'e-language' approach did but only because computing power started falling exponentially in price.  

 Specifically, competent speakers know how to base their interactions on validity claims that their hearers will accept or that could, if necessary, be redeemed with good reasons.

Nonsense! Chomsky was a competent enough speaker. Smart people thought he was babbling paranoid nonsense or indulging in magical thinking. .  

As already mentioned, this involves a tension between facticity and validity insofar as a claim to validity raised here and now, and perhaps justified according to local standards, ultimately points beyond a particular community.

I suppose Christians can say that about the New Testament & Hindus can say that about the Gita & Muslims can say that about the Quran. 

But only the STEM subjects can say that it is likely that sentient beings in other galaxies would consider their findings valid.  

At least this is the case with truth claims and moral claims. As understood by participants engaged in interaction and discourse, truth claims are claims about the objective world that all human beings share,

only if they share the same frame of reference.  

and moral claims have to do with norms for interpersonal relationships that any autonomous adult should find rationally acceptable from the standpoint of justice and respect for persons.

There are no such moral claims.  

If such claims are valid, then any competent speaker should, under suitable conditions, be able to accept the claim on the basis of good reasons.

Did you know that if you are a competent speaker you will agree that you should only eat dog turds? Why aren't you eating dog turds? Do you want people to think you are an incompetent speaker?  

When a claim is contested, actually bringing about such rational acceptance requires actors to shift into a discourse in which, the pressures of action having been more or less neutralized, they can isolate and test the disputed claim solely on the basis of arguments.

This is 'gaslighting'. You say you don't want to suck my cock. This proves you want to suck it. Your arguments are self-defeating.

The proper response to gaslighting is kicking the fucker's head in. Competent speaking can also be done by sticking a broom up the interlocutor's arse.  

To be sure, not all types of claims anticipate the agreement of a· universal audience.

None do. But then 'virtue signalling' is just 'cheap talk'. It doesn't mean shit. 

The differences between types of discourse can be quite important in this regard. For example, claims about what is good for a particular group (or person),

if there is a costly to disguise signal, there can be a 'separating equilibrium'. There is an uncorrelated asymmetry supporting a Eusocial bourgeois study.  

or about a particular group's authentic self-understanding, may be addressed only to the individuals concerned and those who know them well. Such discourses, which Habermas labels "ethical," differ both in theme and scope of audience from the "moral" discourse concerned with universal norms of justice. 

Habermas's shite was displaced by Woke 'Grievance Studies' shite. Boo fucking hoo.  

But even these more limited ethical claims presuppose an orientation to mutual understanding,

there is a discoordination game. It pays to say 'this is a Black (or Lezza or Islamist etc.) thing. You wouldn't understand.'  

which for Habermas is constitutive of communicative action.

Affiliative action. No Communication is necessary.  

The orientation to reaching understanding about validity claims

doesn't exist even within families, let alone any larger social unit.  

serves as a mechanism for social integration

that mechanism is family, school, job, Church, Pub, etc. The 'validity' claims of the padre are different from those of the publican.  

inasmuch as it grounds shared expectations,

based on asking a smart guy what is likely to happen 

ways of interpreting situations, and so forth. To illustrate Habermas's approach further, imagine that a dispute arises within a group and that its members wish to resolve it consensually on the basis of validity claims.

I can't. Such a thing is impossible. Habermas can't point to any such group as having existed or as existing now.  Consensus is arrived at by horse-trading. 

According to Habermas, conflict resolution on the basis of reasoned agreement involves at least three idealizing assumptions:

impossible assumptions 

members must assume they mean the same thing by the same words and expressions;

Very true. When you use the word 'me'- as in 'this belongs belongs to me' , you mean the book belongs to me, not you, because 'me' is the word I use to mean myself.

they must consider themselves as rationally accountable;

It is not rational to think you yourself can be 'rationally accountable'- more particularly if you need an accountant to file your tax return for you. Similarly, I expect the Doctor to account for the fact that I keep throwing up. He thinks it is because I drink too much. It isn't morning sickness because I'm a virgin. Also I have a dick, not a vagina.  

and they must suppose that, when they do arrive at a mutually acceptable resolution, the supporting arguments sufficiently justify a (defeasible) confidence that any claims to truth, justice, and so forth that underlie their consensus will not subsequently prove false or mistaken.

If Field Medal winning mathematicians can't reach this sort of consensus, what hope is there for the rest of us? 

No  local, spatiotemporally finite consensus can fully realize these idealizations; yet if they should subsequently prove false-if members discover that a crucial term was understood in two different ways or that they were seriously self-deceived or that they were mistaken about certain facts or norms- then there are grounds for questioning the original agreement and reopening the discussion.

These are grounds for never having it in the first place.  

That is, these idealizations

lies 

imply a tension between the de facto social acceptance (soziale Geltung) of a group consensus and the idealized validity ( Gilltigkeit) that such a consensus must claim for itself if members are to accept it as reasonable.

We are welcome to say that God guided each and every one of us to agree that we are truly sweet and nice and greatly superior to those savages across the border. One may say this is a 'white lie' or a polite fiction. One can't say it has any sort of validity- let alone that of an ideal type.  

Communicatively achieved agreements are in principle always open to challenge,

only to the extent that everything is.  

and thus are at best a precarious source of social integration.

They are irrelevant.  

If a community is to be a stable one, then,

certain economic & military conditions must be met 

it requires more than explicit agreement as a basis for social cooperation.

The basis of every type of cooperation is utilitarian gains in factor productivity.  

Conflict resolution will be rendered easier the more the members of the group can limit their discursive efforts to a few problematic validity claims.

Limit it to zero & there is no fucking conflict 

For example, if they are at odds over how best to manage a particular environmental threat-one might imagine a city council debating how to deal with an imminent flood

hire the guy best able to do it. Don't fucking debate the matter.  

-they have a better chance of reaching agreement if they only have to resolve an empirical question about the effectiveness of two competing strategies, and do not also have to argue over fairness criteria, or what would count as a successful outcome. In short, reaching agreement communicatively requires a large background consensus on matters that are unproblematic for group members.

Agree that hiring the guy best able to get the job done or don't. Just let it happen. The question is how will the thing be paid for. This is called 'mechanism design'. Habermas understands that there will be preference revelation (free-rider) problems, holdouts, etc. But there is always a Coasian solution for strategic behaviour irrespective of the law. 

 In fact, the need for modern law partly arises because,

they are public signals which support better Aumann correlated equilibria.  

with the growth of capitalist market economies,

which happens even faster where there are Coasian mechanisms rather than complex law codes 

contexts dominated by strategic action become increasingly important for social coordination.

No. The more State intervention there is, the more law there will be. Consider a situation where an industry is self-regulating. No laws with respect to it need be passed. The moment there is Government certification or licensing, there will be a substantial and evolving body of law concerning that industry. 

Haberman didn't bother to communicate with smart people over the course of his long, useless, life. He was wrong about everything because he held absurd beliefs- e.g. that a fucking Kraut like himself could understand Democracy or Rationality or how Discussions can be made productive. That's what happens when a boy studies, and then teaches, a non-STEM subject- more particularly if he is as stupid as shit.  

.

Habermas vs Judge Dredd- Faktizität und Geltung

 My cousin Vijay had a classmate who when asked, at his birthday party, what he wanted to be when he grew up, answered 'I want to be a Judge'. It so happened that a Supreme Court judge was attending the party. He asked the boy if he would like to come and observe how Judges settle legal cases. The boy was reluctant to accept the invitation. The judge was elderly. He didn't look at all like Judge Dredd- his favourite Comic book hero. Still, he might own a big gun and use it to shoot criminals. Thus the boy did go to the Supreme Court building. Tension built up within him as the Judge kept listening to boring arguments. When would he get round to shooting people? The boy's Mummy explained that Judges don't shoot people. Why not become Prime Minister instead? Since Granny had been PM & got shot, & Daddy had been PM & was blown up, the boy decided to settle for being a permanent Leader of the Opposition.

Habermas was a bit like that retarded little boy. He didn't want to be an out-and-out Commie- because that might entail suffering poverty & privation in East Germany- nor did he want to make some useful contribution to the German mainstream left. Thus he led the opposition to the 'tension between Faktizität und Geltung- i.e. the fact that Judges don't shoot people and that which one's close study of Judge Dredd comics would cause you to consider normative. 

What lies 'between Facts & Norms'? The answer is 'Expectations'- more particularly those which are 'action guiding'. John Muth provided a theory of 'Rational Expectations' whereby if there is 'common knowledge' & people expect the prediction of the correct economic theory, then there is rapid convergence to a 'reflective' equilibrium.

 Habermas, in his book with that title, claims otherwise. He thinks the law is a power that extracts obedience such that facts are changed. This is why, in Germany, the law against rape ensures that no rape occurs. This is a fact. Suppose the law banned masturbation. Masturbation would disappear. If levitation were made compulsory, people would fly around the place. 

Surely I making this up? Even a German pedant couldn't hold so absurd a belief. Sadly, he can do so provided he is able to disguise it from himself with pseudo-intellectual jargon

William Rehg, in this introduction to 'Between Facts & Norms', writes of 

The Duality of Modern Law

Which is the doctrine that national and international legal systems are distinct, separate, and independent entities. Under dualism, international treaties must be explicitly translated into national law through legislation to be valid and enforceable by domestic courts, separating them from the domestic order.

But this isn't what Habermas means. 

To approach the analysis of modern law in terms of a tension "between facts and norms"-or between "facticity and validity," to translate the German title of the book more literally- is not so surprising.

There is no tension between what is 'de facti'- which is independently verified- and what is 'de juris'- which is endogenously determined within the legal system in a 'buck stopped' manner- i.e. there is a Supreme Court which has the final word.  

The legal sphere has long been characterized by theorists in terms of a duality of this sort.

No. There is a 'bright line' distinction, not a duality. In the Anglo Saxon tradition we might say 'A jury decides matters of fact. The Judge decides matters of law.' On the other hand, one could at one time have said there was 'duality' between Equity & Common law. With respect to facts, we could say that there is duality re. admissibility. The same fact may be admissible in one case but not another. 

As we shall see, this tension resides at several levels, but at each level we find a social reality on the one side and a claim of reason (which is sometimes belied by the reality) on the other. Consider, for example, compulsory laws backed by sanctions.

This is positive law or law as command.  

On the one hand, such laws appear as the will of a lawgiver with the power to punish those who do not comply; to the extent that they are actually enforced and followed, they have an existence somewhat akin to social facts. On the other hand, · compulsory laws are not simply commands backed by threats but embody a claim to legitimacy.

All legal commands are legitimate. However, legitimacy may exist even if there is no law by reason of not being contested. I am legitimately the President of the Institute of Socioproctology simply because nobody else wants that post & the thing is not per se illegal.  

Oliver Wendell Holmes's insistence that we must understand law as the "bad man" does-that is, look at laws only in view of the possible negative consequences of being caught at lawbreaking- cannot be the whole story.

There is the Law Merchant & that of Contract etc. What is or isn't a 'vinculum juris' is itself a justiciable matter. However, any judgment of a court is a command even if it says it is appealing to natural law or morality. The command may or may not be obeyed. That is a separate matter.  

In fact, many citizens are not consistently "bad" in this sense, and it is doubtful whether a system of law could long endure if everyone took this external approach all the time.

It could not endure if the external approach wasn't enforced at least some of the time and at some places. What Habermas is getting at is that laws would be difficult to enforce unless the people accepted their legitimacy. Sadly, kill enough people & obedience follows by itself. The people have to accept what they can't change or, indeed, challenge, without being quickly and very painfully put to death. 

At least some portion of a population, indeed the majority, must look at legal rules as standards that everyone ought to follow, whether because they reflect the ways of ancestors, the structure of the cosmos, or the will of God, or because they have been democratically approved or simply enacted according to established procedures.

No. This is wholly unnecessary. That is the lesson of history. Habermas may say 'I wish things were otherwise', but he might equally disapprove of the Law of Gravity or Evolution by Sexual Selection. The only 'tension' here is between wishful thinking & being a fucking grown-up.  

What H. L. A. Hart has termed the "internal aspect" of law

i.e. an internalizing of a legalistic ethic by those involved in the practice of the law 

is a function of its legitimacy or social recognition. 

Hart considered this internal aspect essential to distinguish a true legal system from a mere "gunman situation". Hart was wrong. India had a 'true legal system' even though everybody thought it was illegitimate by reason of foreign origin even though the framers of the constitution adopted the doctrine of 'autochthony'. Still, the fact that there was nothing to replace it with (Gandhi's attempt to set up a parallel 'Swadesi' justice system had failed immediately) meant it continued to exist. 

Hart was a second generation Jewish immigrant & more open to Continental ideas. My impression is that doctrine of political question has weakened as the British legal system yielded to Brussels. Will this be reversed?  

Exactly how such legitimacy should be construed is a further question, of course.

If the Crown in Parliament is supreme, then some might say there has been judicial overreach in the UK. But we can't say any Supreme Court decision is 'illegitimate'. It is up to Parliament to decide otherwise.  

The important point is this: law is a system of coercible rules and impersonal procedures that also involves an appeal to reasons that all citizens should, at least ideally, find acceptable.

There are many such systems. Some Boarding Schools, when I was young, had such systems. Professional Associations have powers of coercion- e.g expulsion or suspension for malpractice. Certain religious sects or ideological parties may act in a similar way. This may have no legal basis or even run counter to the law. 

What of the law itself? Does it need to 'appeal to reasons' citizens find acceptable? No. This may be desirable but it is not a defect in a ratio if the thing is omitted. 

Habermas is heavily indebted to Immanuel Kant's concept of legitimacy,

which was illegitimate in that he was ignorant of the law. Also Kant's concept of concept was crap.  

which brings out this tension in law particularly well. Consider, for example, the basic equal rights of individual liberty, such as property and contract rights.

There is no such 'equal right'. There is restricted eligibility (dokimasia).  

Kant grounded their legitimacy in a universal principle of law (the Rechtsprinzip, often trans- xii William Rehg lated as "principle of right"), which can be interpreted as summarizing the conditions under which it is possible for a morally oriented subject to universalize coercible limits on the external behavior of strategically oriented individuals.

  Kant thought that 'an action is right if it allows for the freedom of each individual to coexist with the freedom of everyone else according to a universal law.' But that which is 'right' isn't necessarily that which is legitimate or lawful & vice versa. It would be nice if the eldest son of the King is also the best person to succeed him but where there is 'primogeniture', the legitimate heir isn't that person. This doesn't mean that every public office in the land should be inherited by the eldest son. Primogeniture may be restricted to the Crown & the Aristocracy. 

Even if there were a 'universal principle of law', it would be defeasible.

According to Kant, the "moral conception" of law is "the sum of those conditions under which the free choice ( Willkur) of one person can be conjoined with the free choice of another in accordance with a universal law of freedom."

No one knows even one of those conditions let alone the sum of all them. One may say 'the moral conception of law is that which, if everybody had it, would lead to the rapid discovery of techniques to make everybody immortal and grant them possession of a really nice galaxy of their own from which they could instantaneously visit everybody else in their own galaxies'  We can't prove such a moral conception doesn't exist but we can be sure it is currently inaccessible to us. There is little point talking about it unless you are running a UFO cult.                                          

This analysis of rights

does not exist. There is 'Hohfeldian analysis' on the one hand and there is virtue signalling diarrhoea on the other. Hohfeld is useful & should be better incorporated into 'Law & Econ'.  

brings out the internal tension between facticity and validity

i.e. the tension between thinking Judges should be like Judge Dredd & the fact that no such Judges exist. Comic books are only a valid source of knowledge in a comic book world.  

inhabiting law in general: as actionable and enforced, such rights (and legal norms in general) represent social facts

No. They refer a set of Hohfeldian immunities & entitlements. They are legal, not social, facts. Socially, I may be accepted as the spouse of Beyonce. But, legally, I am not her spouse unless we actually got married and did not subsequently divorce.  

demarcating areas within which success oriented individuals can choose and act as they wish;

There is no such demarcation. There are immunities but they are defeasible. Someone else may have a superior immunity or entitlement.  

as linked with a universalizable freedom,

There is no such link. One might as well say- 'it would be nice if freedom were universalizable & if Mahua Moitra's dog anally rapes Rahul Gandhi then Amit Shah too is buggered'  

rights deserve the respect of moral subjects,

No. My right to fart while wanking in the privacy of my own home doesn't deserve any respect whatsoever even if everybody has an equal right.  

and thus carry a claim to legitimacy.

If the law upholds a claim- the we may say legitimacy arises. But why bother? The fact is, things we respect don't thereby become legitimate. You may respect me for my twerking. You may consider I have a strong claim to be considered Beyonce's true heir & successor. But, I am not her legitimate daughter even though I have often claimed otherwise while drunk off my head.  

However, Kant's account of legitimacy, as Habermas reads it, ultimately subordinates law to morality.

Nothing wrong with that. Many people defy what they consider to be immoral laws.  

Kant also relied on a metaphysical framework that is no longer plausible:

it was never plausible. The question was whether it was self-consistent? Yes, provided it wasn't informative in any way. In other words, it was either silly or utterly meaningless.  

on his account, the possibility of universal rational acceptability depends on a preestablished harmony of reason beyond the empirical world. Whereas subordinating law to morality oversimplifies the rational bases of legitimacy, invoking a transcendentally unified reason presumes consensus prior to actual public discourse.

But thinking 'actual public discourse' is desirable presumes that there could be a consensus that such is the case. Yet, nobody wants any such thing unless very strict eligibility criteria are applied. Otherwise you could have a State Legislature fixing the value of Pi or some other such foolishness.  

Nonetheless, Kant's appeal to rational consensus as a regulative ideal captures an important part of the tension in law.

No. It merely captures a particular notion in Contract Law re. whether or not there is a 'meeting of minds'. French law is regarded as being more stringent in this respect than Anglo-Saxon law. However, in practice, there may be little difference.

If law is essentially constituted by a tension between facticity and validity

then that is what the historical record would show. It doesn't. The writing of Constitutions, the making of laws by legislators or stare decisis judgments are all delegated activities which, in most instances, have had minimal 'popular' participation.  

- between its factual generation, administration, and enforcement in social institutions on the one hand and its claim to deserve general recognition on the other

they are one and the same. The subset of law which is 'generally recognised' is the same as the subset regarding expected enforcement. 

- then a theory that situates the idealizing character of validity claims in concrete social contexts

is similar to a theory which explains that Judges shoot criminals, just like Judge Dredd- at least from the idealizing point of view.  

recommends itself for the analysis of law.

to cretins. Lawyers who can analyse law in a manner which greatly benefits their clients become very rich. 

This is just what the theory of communicative action allows,

i.e. you can teach this shite to cretins doing Media Studies as opposed to guys who want to make a lot of money as Corporate attorneys. 

without the metaphysical pretensions and moralistic oversimplification we find in Kant.

Kant was a high IQ dude. Habermas had shit for brains. Both knew nothing about the Law or how Democracies work. 

 

Sunstein & Habermas's legacy

Cass Sunstein writes- 

Most people know that the Constitution’s First Amendment provides the rights to freedom of speech and to the free exercise of religion.

No. It prohibits Congress from restricting freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, and petition. This was to appease anti-Federalist sentiment. Only from 1925 onward was this principle extended to the States ('incorporation'). Even in the 1960's some States had discriminatory, religion based, practices- e.g. tax funding for Protestant but not Catholic Congregations or only permitting public officials of one particular sect. 

But in the first Congress some people seriously proposed that the First Amendment should contain another right: the right on the part of constituents ‘’to instruct’‘ their representatives how to vote.

This right did exist with respect to Senators till  the 17th Amendment (1913). Some state legislatures, which elected U.S. Senators, often "instructed" them on how to vote. Once Senators were directly elected, they were free to vote as they pleased. 

The first Congress ultimately rejected the proposal. Roger Sherman

who wanted the US to be a parliamentary democracy- i.e. the President has to have the confidence of the House.  

made the central argument against it.

Arguments didn't matter. There was dual sovereignty with States being more powerful than the Union. If a State wanted to 'instruct' its Senators it did so. It might also chuck the fellow in the river if he annoyed them in any particular.  

In Sherman’s view, representatives had a ‘’duty to meet others from the different parts of the Union, and consult. . . . If they were to be guided by instructions, there would be no use in deliberation.’‘ A right to instruct would destroy the object of the meeting.’‘

The Connecticut compromise was that the directly elected House of Representatives wasn't bound by 'instructions', whereas Senators might be bound in this manner if that's what their own State legislature wanted.  

By rejecting the right to instruct,

in the House, not the Senate 

the first Congress

achieved a pragmatic compromise between the big and small states.  

affirmed a distinctive concept of politics.

No. There was a compromise. Slave states could get more representation in the lower house by counting a slave as 60 percent of a free man.  That was pretty fucking distinctive. 

It favored what might be called a deliberative democracy,

State legislatures did the deliberation and, if they chose, instructed their Senators who were seen as their 'Ambassadors'. Incidentally, all types of polity feature deliberation. The Tzars had a 'Collegia' which was replaced, in 1802, with a Committee of Ministers. There was deliberative despotism and deliberative theocracy and deliberative cannibalism.  

in which representatives would be accountable to the people but also operate as part of a process that prized discussion and reflection about potential courses of action.

In other words, Americans talked to each other just like the Chinese & the Rooskis & the fucking Cannibals. Even if Democracies decide things by holding referendums, nobody can prevent voters from deliberating over the issue.  

Jurgen Habermas is one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century;

he was stupid & ignorant. 

he has been preoccupied for much of his life with the problem of political legitimacy.

This exists either de jure or de facto. In the former case it is a matter for lawyers. In the latter case, it is an empirical matter for political analysts. Nothing philosophical is involved. One might ask 'given ideology X, is such and such Political arrangement compatible with it?' Thus if you are a crazy Communist, you might side with Browder and admit that Commie nutters can take power through the ballot box. If you are anti-Browder, you think this is illegitimate. You should wade through a sea of blood to seize power. This is a question of ideological consistency not legitimacy. One might ask- as people in the FDR did in the Sixties- whether parties which aim to put an end to Democracy (Nazis or Commies) should be banned. However, ever since 'Sovietization' tanked the East German economy in 1952, there was no real danger that voters would turn against the system which had delivered Wirtschaftswunder- an economic miracle. 

Under what circumstances is it legitimate for political authorities, mere human beings, to exercise power over other human beings?

Lawyers can present arguments & Judges can decide what those circumstances are. Legitimacy has to do with what is legal. It has nothing to do with Philosophy. One might say 'my 'philosophy' of life affirms the existence of shape shifting lizards who hold all positions of authority. Is it right for me- given my 'philosophy'- to suck off sailors rather than swear at my jailors?  

It is unsurprising that a German philosopher - in his teens during the Nazi period and a witness to countless other atrocities since

atrocities by the Allies? There weren't many of them.  

- should direct his attention to this question.

What is surprising is that the cunt didn't get that Hitler didn't need to get rid of the Weimar constitution. Stupid professors like Hugo Preuss & Max Weber had made sure that it could be turned into a totalitarian dictatorship without any loss of legitimacy. That's why the regime didn't need the spoiled Catholic Carl Schmitt. 

Mr. Habermas thinks that the question is especially urgent in an era that is ‘’postmetaphysical,’‘ in the sense that it has lost the sense that we have wholly external foundations by which to ground our judgments and choices.

That would be 'post-economic'- i.e. after scarcity has ended. Till then, our judgments & choices are founded on the wholly external foundation that is the fitness landscape. 

Suppose Kant had found a way to ground metaphysics in physics, then there would be nothing 'beyond physics'. That's 'post-metaphysical'. Habermas was as stupid as shit.  

Whether or not we believe that God exists, it seems clear that as citizens in a heterogeneous society we must proceed on the understanding that our choices are our own.

No. We are welcome to delegate them or just use 'Tardean mimetics'- imitate the superior or, more commonly, follow the herd. Because of Knightian Uncertainty, choice should be 'regret minimizing'. Ceteris paribus, this means doing less 'deliberation' & more 'discovery'.  

But even as he insists on this point, Mr. Habermas draws a line against modern irrationalists, many of them - like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida - influential within the modern academy.

The totally shit part of it.  

Mr. Habermas says, tellingly, that those who oppose reason and the Enlightenment

have prevailed. That's why Europe isn't ruled by people with names like 'Fredrick the Great' or 'Catherine the totes Fabulous'. Instead you have boring blokes in suits- except in Italy. Meloni is as cute as a button.  

can give no account of the basis for their own rhetoric,

sure they can. True, it would be a shitty account but only shitheads go in for this shite.  

which seems inspired by the Enlightenment commitment to human liberation.

There was no such commitment. There were some Evangelical Christians who were Abolitionists. But this was because keeping slaves is a one way ticket to Hell. Christ doesn't want that for you. Accept him as your Lord God & Saviour & stop being such a fucking asshole.  

In his influential past work, Mr. Habermas offered a ‘’theory of communicative action’‘

No. He merely ascribed some magical property to a type of ideal communication which doesn't fucking exist. Communication is strategic. Game theory is the way to go. Schelling got a Nobel Prize. Habermas stuck his thumb up his ass. 

whose centerpiece is the ‘’ideal speech situation.’‘ In the ideal speech situation,

i-languages don't exist. Chomsky was a useless tosser.  

all participants have equal power, attempt to reach understanding, do not act manipulatively or strategically, and understand their obligation to offer reasons. In this situation, outcomes depend on what he calls ‘’the unforced force of the better argument.’‘

There are three problems here

1) As John Maynard Smith showed, 'uncorrelated asymmetries' support eusocial 'bourgeois strategy'. Once people grasp this, they see that accepting the better argument could be socially suboptimal. this relates to

2) Aumann agreement. Even if two people share the same Bayesian priors they should not agree if there are uncorrelated asymmetries or preference & endowment diversity doesn't meet a Goldilocks condition or there are higher returns to 'discovery' than 'deliberation'- which is likely to be the case under Knightian Uncertainty. In other words, regret minimizations precludes Aumann agreement. Aumann himself showed that there is a Talmudic rule against unanimity.  

3) Dimensionality & McKelvey Chaos. When the policy space becomes 'multi-dimensional', there is a struggle for 'agenda control' such that hysteresis effects arise & successive iterations become increasingly sub-optimal- if not actively mischievous. 

One might say 'The US Constitution was a compromise of a good enough sort.' But, the truth is, it really wasn't. The Civil War killed about 2.5 percent of the population. It was the deadliest conflict in US history. 

This is abstract stuff, and for many years Americans, Germans and many others have been interested in the real-world implications of Mr. Habermas’s work.

The implication was that 'Political Philosophy' was stupid shit. Mathematical Politics was okay. But the big bucks are pulled in political analysts & consultants who can get shitty candidates elected or who can form PACs which bypass Party structures.  

For example: Can we derive a set of rights from those ideas?

Shitheads can derive any old shit from shite.  

Real-world politics is far from the ideal speech situation; might that notion bear on the obligations of the mass media, on issues of race and sex, on campaign finance law?

Lizard people occupy all high offices of state. Media should expose these facts. Incidentally, I am actually a blonde teenaged Vampire Slayer born & bred in sunny California. Lizard people are using 'mind control rays' to make it appear that I am a fat, elderly, Tamil man. 

My point is, if you hold an absurd belief, you also think the 'mass media' has all sorts of crazy obligations- e.g. casting me in the Buffy reboot.  

Mr. Habermas’s new book, ‘’Between Facts and Norms,’‘

there are action guiding heuristics with an empirical component- e.g. rules of professional practice.  

is both the culmination of a lifetime of thought about political legitimacy and his effort to bring his argument closer down to earth by developing new understandings of law, democracy and the relationship between them.

In a Sovereign Democracy, all law is positive even if itself speaks of 'natural' or 'moral' law. Why? Because that's how Sovereignty works. Even if a right is deemed 'imprescriptible', the issue of jurisdiction & enforceability arises. 

Much of Mr. Habermas’s analysis turns on an exploration of two accounts of democracy,

given at a time when the thing didn't exist anywhere. This is like my account of my distant descendant who becomes the Empress of the Andromeda galaxy. It has no probative value.  

which he labels ‘’liberal’‘ and ‘’civic republican.’‘ Under the liberal account, rooted in the work of Thomas Hobbes, politics is a process of bargaining, a matter of aggregating private interests.

Politics is a matter of solving 'collective action problems'. You can aggregate shite all you like but you need money & muscle to actually change anything. Hobbes wasn't utterly stupid- unlike those who have to teach  

Liberals define citizens as holders of negative rights against the state.

Pedants may do so. Liberals don't. Citizenship is a legal concept.  

In the liberal view, politics is a struggle among interest groups for position and power.

That could be said of Society hostesses competing to hold the best salon or kids fighting over who gets the remote control. I want to watch Buffy. The baby prefers Telly-tubbies. He beats the shit out of me & gets to choose the channel. But this doesn't greatly matter. Society is about having a good social life. Family life is about good family life. Politics is about solving collective action problems. Which hostess has the most glittering salon, or which kid has the remote control or which monkey in a suit has climbed atop the greasy pole doesn't greatly matter. 

Sayre's Third Law of Politics states: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." Transgender bathrooms don't matter. Defence policy does. By all means, invoke Habermas in the former context. Nobody in their right mind would mention him in the latter case. 

The civic republican account, rooted in Aristotle and Rousseau, is very different: politics is not a mere matter of protecting our selfish interests but instead an effort to choose and implement our shared ideals.

Like not getting invaded & enslaved or suffering hyperinflation or a market meltdown.  

Civic republicans see rights not as negative constraints on government, but as promoting participation in political practices through which citizens become authors of their own community.

Moreover, they take responsibility for their own orgasms & can proactively follow their own bliss in an inclusive, diverse & totes gay manner.  

Consider the right to free speech and the right to vote.

Will a remedy be provided for violations of those rights? That's what matters. On the other hand, if you can provide it for yourself- i.e. beat anybody who tries to stop you- then, you are golden.  

For civic republicans, politics is a matter of discussion and self-legislation, in which people participate not in bargaining and compromise but in forms of reflection and talk.

Only if they couldn't get on the Cheerleading squad & had to settle for the Debate team. Full disclosure. I myself was a Mathlete till my boobs came out. Then my Watcher appeared & told me I was the Chosen One.  

The organizing theme of the book is Mr. Habermas’s rejection of both views and his effort to defend instead what he calls ‘’deliberative politics’‘ or deliberative democracy.’‘ This is emphatically a procedural ideal.

It is schoolgirl naivete. My bff Monica became an intern in the White House coz she thought she'd get to hear a lot of deliberation. Instead, POTUS got her to stick a cigar up her hoo-ha. 

It is intended to give form to the notion of an ideal speech situation.

i.e. one where communication serves no purpose beyond itself- e.g. when learning a new language. It doesn't matter what you say or what others say. What matters is you are using the new language & gaining familiarity with understanding and responding to what is said in it.  

Like civic republicans, deliberative democrats place a high premium on reason-giving in the public domain.

Officials may be obliged to give an account of their actions or urge reasons of a particular sort for their policy recommendations. But this is also the case with lawyers or accountants acting in a profession capacity in a private matter.  

But like liberals, they favor a firm boundary between the state and the society,

If you act for the State you get paid by the State or gain some perquisite thereby.  

and they insist on a robust set of constraints on what the government can do.

Save under exigent circumstances. The problem is that the State may not itself have any incentive to constrain the actions of its agents.  

Mr. Habermas sees majority rule not as a mere statistical affair, an effort to tally up votes, but instead as a large social process by which people discuss matters, understand one another, try to persuade each other and modify their views to meet counterarguments. In this way we form our beliefs and even our desires.

Anyone can see anything as any other thing. The truth, however, is that persuasion & deliberation play little role in belief or desire formation. Mimetics & delegation predominate. In some particular fields there may be a debate between experts on certain matters. Indeed, this may be a professional requirement. But in many other cases, there is automatic belief or desire revision on the basis of exogenous signals.  

The deliberative conception of democracy anchors Mr. Habermas’s theory of political legitimacy.

There can be a deliberative conception of theocracy or despotism  of any type. Moreover, deliberative decision making is more salient where there is no sovereignty or rule of law- i.e. where no form of governance exists.  

For him, democracy does not exist to secure rights with which we have been endowed by our Creator; nor is it simply a way to allow us to throw the rascals out; nor is it a mechanism for processes of accommodation, compromise and the exercise of power.

He didn't know what the thing was. It had been imposed on West Germany by the Allies. Once their economy took off, they made some stupid but appreciative noises. That is all that can be said.  

Democracy, ideally conceived, is a process by which people do not implement their preferences but consult and deliberate about what values and what options are best.

This could be said of any type of Government or none at all.  

Mr. Habermas’s argument sees constitutional law as institutionalizing the presuppositions of a system of discussion by which legitimate lawmaking is made possible.

Laws create legitimacy. Legitimate lawmaking is made possible by lawmaking by a legally authorised body- which could be itself. This is a circular definition & has nothing to do with 'presuppositions' of any kind.  

Thus his account of fundamental rights includes the right to ‘’equal opportunities to participate in processes of opinion- and will-formation in which citizens exercise their political autonomy and through which they generate legitimate law.’‘

There has never been any such right. Loyalists weren't allowed to participate in the drafting of the American constitution. Communists were not consulted in the drafting of the German 'Basic Law'. In law, there is such a thing as 'mere puffery'. A despot may issue a Constitution in which he is described as the 'Obedient Slave' of the People.  

Mr. Habermas thinks that the principal goal of a court, interpreting a constitution, should be to protect the procedural preconditions for deliberative democracy.

You can't protect what doesn't and can't exist.  

The point suggests an especially aggressive role for courts when democratic processes do not fit with the aspirations to deliberation and democracy - for example, when people are excluded from politics,

e.g. felons not being allowed to vote or stand for office?  

or when outcomes reflect power and pressure rather than reason.

This could be said of any and all outcomes.  

This is how Mr. Habermas tries to reconcile the tension between law and democracy, seeing them not as opposed but instead as mutually supportive.

Only in the sense that the Law & Nazism or Stalinism were mutually supportive.  

Law can create the preconditions for democracy,

There are no preconditions. Any polity whatsoever can be democratic- even one filled with Muslims or darkies.  

by insuring freedom of speech,

the law can't do so. Only incentive compatible remedies have that power. But they may be available absent any legal framework or vinculum juris.  

voting rights, political equality and so forth. Democratic ideals can inform the appropriate content of law.

Any sort of ideal can inform anything whatsoever.  

. . .

For those interested in a deliberative approach to democracy,

a brain transplant is recommended.  

much future work lies not in abstractions but in more concrete thinking designed to help with concrete problems. American democracy, for example, is far from deliberative, and we might ask how to make it more so.

Insist on public hearings before any federal employee can do anything whatsoever. The postman is trying to deliver a letter to my neighbour. I demand that a public debate be held at the Town Hall regarding whether that letter should or should not be delivered.  

Can the mass media - even the Internet - be harnessed to promote political deliberation?

Yes. This is also true of sodomy. Senators can discuss Bills while buggering each other.  

How can a deliberative democracy operate when there are huge disparities in both wealth and education?

Sodomy is one way forward. It has a levelling effect. Musk wouldn't be so uppity if he was being fucked in the ass by a large black man.  

What sorts of constraints should be imposed on the permissible substance and form of public talk?

Everybody should be referred to only with their preferred pronouns while taking it up the ass.  

Should we strengthen local democracy? Mr. Habermas does not much take up these issues.

Nor did he sodomize Rawls. Sad.  

But this is a work of political philosophy, dealing with the foundations of democratic theory, and as such it has great value,

to shitheads teaching shite to cretins 

above all because of its careful exposition of deliberative democracy and the potential for productive interactions between democracy and law.

Senators should sodomize SCOTUS.  

The 20th century is ending at a time when democratic aspirations are proliferating throughout the globe;

It turned out, China had chosen a better path. 

Jurgen Habermas has provided one of the best and, I think, most enduring accounts of the values that underlie those aspirations.

He provided an ignorant & vacuous account of the utter uselessness & stupidity of German academic availability cascades in political philosophy & sociology. 

After the Second World War, Christian & Conservative parties could flourish in West Germany. Catholic, or 'spoiled Catholic', academics could be rehabilitated. On the Left, the Frankfurt school had American protection & it was under Adorno's & Horkheimer's wing that Habermas got his start.  Less prominent, but equally tolerated were Mathsy philosophers- like Grete Hermann- who contributed to the Bad Godesberg program. 'Sociological' nutters like Abendroth- whom Habermas crossed over to- were kept under surveillance but were sexier. After 1951-52, the East German economy had turned to utter shit & so one didn't have to emigrate that if one professed to be a Commie. The Germans are a gemutlich people. They like their beer and sausages. 

Habermas's first 'major' work was his 'The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere' published in 1962.

Wikipedia says ' According to Habermas, the notion of the "public sphere" began evolving during the Renaissance in Western Europe. 

The Renaissance view of the 'public sphere' was that of Cicero or Pericles. The Teutonic & Nordic peoples had tribal institutions similar to those out of which Greek or Latin Republics evolved. Anglo Saxons made much of this 'convergent evolution'. For Lord Coke, the Druids, who created the Common Law, were fluent in Greek.

Germans had an Imperial Diet (Reichstag) for the Holy Roman Empire (c. 1100–1806). There was a sort of fractal structure to German society with local assemblies, formal or informal ; ecclesiastical, aristocratic or bourgeois- giving expression to or helping to shake 'public opinion'. The Guttenberg revolution & the Reformation & Counter-Reformation were self-enforcing but the devastating effect of the 30 years war rendered Germany relatively backward. The Economic centre of gravity had shifted to the Western European littoral- Portugal, Spain, Holland, France, England- even Scotland.  

Brought on partially by merchants' need for accurate information about distant markets

The activity of arbitrageurs suffices for this. You don't need to know who grows the coffee you drink or the copper you use. You just need information re. price & quality & demurrage & discount rate on relevant documentary credits and so forth. Some of this information would be 'open'. Some would not. 

 as well as by the growth of democracy and individual liberty 

like in East Germany? 

and popular sovereignty, the public sphere was a place between private individuals and government authorities in which people could meet and have critical debates about public matters. 

People everywhere meet each other. Some of them will talk politics. This may get them shot in some places or ignored in others. 

Such discussions served as a counterweight to political authority

No. The discussions didn't matter. Killing soldiers & beheading the King did. 

 and happened physically in face-to-face meetings in coffee houses and cafes and public squares as well as in the media in letters, books, drama, and art.

All these things existed in the Soviet Union. But they didn't in many agricultural American Districts which were far more democratic. 

 Habermas saw a vibrant public sphere as a positive force keeping authorities within bounds lest their rulings be ridiculed.

Weimar Germany had a vibrant Cabaret tradition. Ridiculing Nazis did no good at all. They simply kicked your head in. 

 According to the journalist David Randall, "In Habermasian theory, the bourgeois public sphere was preceded by a literary public sphere whose favored genres revealed the interiority of the self and emphasized an audience-oriented subjectivity.'

Everybody has always known that the self is 'interior' and that there is a signalling aspect to subjectivity- which is why you smile when you see something you like and you frown when you smell something you don't like at all. 

You can have a bourgeoisie where there is very little in the way of literature & a purely feudal civilization with a rich literary canon. Habermas was telling a particularly stupid 'Just So' story. 

The first transition occurred in England, France, the United States, and Germany over the course of 150 years or so from the late seventeenth century.

Cervantes represents the School of Salamanca which is late sixteenth century. Spain & Portugal were ahead of England. That is why Gloriana feared Phillip's Armada- not the other way around. Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre appeared threadbare compared to the Golden Age of Spanish drama. 

As for the Dutch, they were plenty bourgeois but excelled in painting (which they did with their 'right hand') not literature (which they dashed off with their left hand). 

England led the way in the early eighteenth century, 

Their 'Glorious Revolution' did stimulate both commerce & literature. British bonds & books gained in currency because there was a greater incentive to provide value for money. 

with Germany following in the late eighteenth century.

It had a large class of under-employed graduates & suffered Gershenkron backwardness. When it comes to 'political philosophy' this is still the case. 

 Habermas tries to explain the growth and decline of the public sphere by relating political, social, cultural and philosophical developments 

which he was too stupid & ignorant to understand

to each other in a multi-disciplinary approach. Initially, there were monarchical and feudal societies which made no distinction between state and society or between public and private, 

sure they did. To raise money, monarchs granted 'liberties'. 

and which had organized themselves politically around symbolic representation and status.

Fuck that! Money mattered. Kill-rates mattered. Even sex might matter. Symbolic representations didn't matter save in so far as they were 'screening' & 'signalling' devices. Harvard University doesn't really have a Professor of Symbology who cracks the Da Vinci Code while being pursued by an albino monk. 

 These feudal societies were transformed into a bourgeois liberal constitutional order 

Clearly, this didn't happen in Germany. The Kaiser chose the Chancellor. But, under the Weimar Constitution, this was also the case with Hindenburg from 1930 onward. The truth is, Adenauer only got to be Chancellor because the Americans were cool with him. 

which distinguished between the public and private realms; further, within the private realm, there was a bourgeois public sphere for rational-critical political debate which formed a new phenomenon called public opinion.

The Bible tells us that Saul spared Agag (the Amalekite king) and the best of the livestock, disobeying God's command to destroy everything, because he was afraid of public opinion. That was 3000 years ago.

Habermas inherited academic availability cascades of an ignorant, parochial & wholly mischievous type. His legacy is to have kept those availability cascades trundling on so credential craving cretins can get tenure to engage in a like exercise in vacuous virtue signalling. 

 

Rawls v Habermas & why cats say bow wow.

The Rawls/Habermas debate dates back to 1995. It was a dialogue between the deaf. Rawls's 'social primary goods' are 'the essential rights, liberties, opportunities, income, wealth, and social bases of self-respect that any rational person would desire to pursue their life plans.' For Habermas, it is the outcome of fair, rational, and inclusive communicative action. 

Both were wrong. Why? We only have a right if there is an effective remedy under a bond of law. Suppose I invested all my money with Bernie Madoff. I think I am well off. Unknown to me, Madoff has pissed that money against the wall. Thus, though 'social primary goods' may exist, nobody can be sure that they do. As for 'rational communicative action'- it can result in our society doing stupid shit and thus getting invaded & enslaved. 

Rawls, in his response to Habermas, wrote

Of the two main differences between Habermas's position and mine, the first is that his is comprehensive while mine is an account of the political and it is limited to that.

Nobody knows what the limits of the 'political' are. There may be an environmental or invasion threat which we aren't paying attention to. Our politics ought to be about solving that 'collective action problem' rather than deciding who gets which Cabinet portfolio.  

The first difference is the more fundamental as it sets the stage for and frames the second. This concerns the differences between our devices of representation, as I call them: his is the ideal discourse situation as part of his theory of communicative action and mine is the original position.

Both only make sense if there is no Knightian uncertainty & thus the Social Contract can be 'complete'- i.e. provide for every eventuality. Sadly, in such a world, there would be no need for language, education or any type of coordinating device. There would be some algorithm which solves the Social 'Transportation problem' in an optimal manner without any resources getting used up in communication.  

These have different aims and roles, as well as distinctive features serving different purposes.

Rawls wanted to replace Risk Pooling & Insurance with a rule for redistributing assets to those worst off. This was foolish. There is an obvious moral hazard. Moreover, having an insurance industry creates an incentive for discovering ways to reduce risk & getting Society to implement such mechanisms- e.g. the Fire Insurance company has an incentive to lobby for the creation of a Fire Brigade & fire safety regulations for buildings, etc.  

(1) I think of political liberalism as a doctrine that falls under the category of the political. It works entirely within that domain and does not rely on anything outside it.

Even liberal countries need armies to defend themselves. Thus diplomacy & military doctrine are 'political'. But so is Scientific research- e.g. finding out how to split the atom.  

The more familiar view of political philosophy is that its concepts, principles and ideals, and other elements are presented as consequences of comprehensive doctrines, religious, metaphysical, and moral.

Fuck that. What matters is defence & diplomacy & raising productivity so as to pay for more of both.  

By contrast, political philosophy, as understood in political liberalism, consists largely of different political conceptions of right and justice viewed as freestanding.

Which would be cool if missiles launched on another continent can't take out our cities within a matter of minutes. 

There may be 'freestanding' political issues- i.e. ones which have no economic or national security implications. But they are likely to be trivial. After all, people with different 'conceptions' may agree that the sensible thing is to let smart people make important decisions just as they did in the past.  

So while political liberalism is of course liberal, some political conceptions of right and justice belonging to political philosophy in this sense may be conservative or radical; conceptions of the divine right of kings, or even of dictatorship, may also belong to it.

This doesn't matter in the slightest. I may believe God has appointed King Charles III as an absloute monarch but be perfectly content that he continues to 'reign, not rule'. Equally, I might decide that Sir Keir Starmer is actually a Dictator who, for some reason of his own, chooses to appear to wholly lack a spine. 

Although in the last two cases the corresponding regimes would lack the historical, religious, and philosophical justifications with which we are acquainted, they could have freestanding conceptions of political right and justice, however implausible, and so fall within political philosophy.

Anything at all can fall within it. I am totes triggered by the fact that girls have to sit down to pee. Compulsory gender reassignment surgery is required.  

Thus, of the various freestanding political conceptions of justice within political philosophy, some are liberal and some are not.

In your opinion. Sadly, if you are not for compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all heterosexual males, you are a fucking Fascist.  

I think of justice as fairness as working out a liberal political conception of justice for a democratic regime, and one that might be endorsed, so it is hoped, by all reasonable comprehensive doctrines

Sadly, it is anything goes. Just say 'for commodity x to exist income distribution y is required.'  Currently even the worst off get some quantity of x. If there was income redistribution, nobody would get any.'  

I do not know of any liberal writers of an earlier generation who have clearly put forward the doctrine of political liberalism.

Because it is either stupid or meaningless. Liberalism is about the Taxman not fucking you over. Let 'Welfare Queens' get jobs cleaning your mansion. 

 Rawls thought Liberalism could be 'freestanding' in the sense of not having to deal with Metaphysics or Theology. The problem here is that willingness to defend the country may depend on a common bond of religion which is itself essentially metaphysical. 

...Habermas's position, on the other hand, is a comprehensive doctrine

a silly one which comes down 'it's nice to talk things over & get everybody to agree. Hitler's big mistake was to beat people & send them to gas chambers. He should have bored them to death instead.' 

and covers many things far beyond political philosophy. Indeed, the aim of his theory of communicative action is to give a general account of meaning, reference, and truth or validity both for theoretical reason and for the several forms of practical reason.

Since the time of Ancient Greece, there have been highly selective criteria for eligibility & accountability (dikomasia & euthnoi) which gets narrowed down as the importance of the issue being decided increases. 

It rejects naturalism and emotivism in moral argument

though both are persuasive 

and aims to give a full defense of both theoretical and practical reason.

None can be given save their relative success. But that is a contingent matter.  

Moreover, he often criticizes religious and metaphysical views.

You should hear what Religion & Metaphysics say about him.  

Habermas does not take much time to argue against them in detail; rather, he lays them aside, or occasionally dismisses them, as unusable and without credible independent merit

though there have been plenty of successful polities founded on Religion. There have been none founded on his stupid shite.  

in view of his philosophical analysis of the presuppositions of rational discourse and communicative action. I mention two passages in Faktizitdt und Geltung. From the preface: 'Discourse theory

useless shite 

attempts to reconstruct this self-understanding [that of a universalistic moral consciousness and the liberal institutions of the democratic state] in a way that empowers its intrinsic normative meaning and logic to resist both scientific reductions and aesthetic assimila- tions..

You can't 'reconstruct' my self-understanding save by the means I myself took. You may say you have arrived at the same conclusion as I have done by some different method. Thus my self-understanding is that I am a teenaged cheerleader who slays Vampires. I came to it by watching Buffy & noticing that Sarah Michell Gellar looks just like me. Well, not quite, but I have the very same frock she wore in Series 2, Episode 4. By contrast, you come to the conclusion that I am a teenaged Vampire Slayer by studying the Mochijuki proof of the abc conjecture. At least, that's what I hope will happen. 

.After a century that more than any other has taught us the horror of existing unreason, the last remains of an essentialist trust in reason are destroyed.

The Germans had a shitty first half of the century. Then, they were conquered & an occupying Army enabled them to rise up.  

Yet modernity, now aware of its contingencies,

in which case it knows how it came about- i.e. it possesses omniscience.  

depends all the more on a procedural reason, that is, on a reason that puts itself on trial.

Procedural reason does no such thing. Law courts use it. The Judge is not put on trial.  

The critique of reason is its own work:

No. It is stupid shit done by some useless tosser in the Philosophy Dept. Nobody talks to him. He takes to drink & then tops himself. Sad.  

this Kantian double meaning is due to the radically anti-Platonic insight that there is neither a higher nor a deeper reality to which we could appeal-

Sure there is. STEM subject mavens are discovering more and more about it.  

we who find ourselves already situated in our linguistically structured forms of life (FG 11).

We who teach stupid shite to morons while smart peeps do STEM subjects.  

Now, read as not appealing to religious or metaphysical doctrines, political liberalism could say something parallel to this passage regarding political justice,

i.e. unjust redistribution of hard earned money 

but there would be a fundamental difference. For in presenting a freestanding political conception and not going beyond that, it is left entirely open to citizens and associations in civil society to formulate their own ways of going beyond, or of going deeper, so as to make that political conception congruent with their comprehensive doctrines.

Also citizens and associations can discover a worm-hole which takes them to a parallel dimension where I am a teenaged Vampire slayer.  

Political liberalism never denies or questions these doctrines in any way, so long as they are politically reasonable.

Political liberalism stupid shite.  

That Habermas himself takes a different stand on this basic point is part of his comprehensive view. He would appear to say that all higher or deeper doctrines lack any logical force on their own.

That is a question for mathematical logic which these two cretins were too stupid to understand.  

He rejects what he calls an essentialist Platonic idea of reason

like the one Godel had?  

and asserts that such an idea must be replaced by a procedural reason that puts itself on trial and is the judge of its own critique.

I am the judge of my own shit. This doesn't turn it into chocolate cake.  

In another passage in chapter 5 of Between Facts and Norms, after an explanation of how the ideal discourse situation proceeds, he stresses that the principle of discourse requires that norms and values must be judged from the point of view of the first-person plural.

More particularly if that first-person plural is a bunch of kittens.  

The practice of argumentation recommends itself for such a jointly practiced, universalized role taking.

Kittens can be very argumentative more particularly with a ball of yarn.  

As the reflexive form of communicative action,

e.g. telling Habermas he has shit for brains & should kindly fuck the fuck off 

it distinguishes itself socio-ontologically, one might say, by a complete reversibility of participant perspectives, which unleashes the higher-level intersubjectivity of the deliberating collective.

This would only be the case if 'origins' were 'recoverable'- i.e. the underlying process was non-dissipative & no impredicativity supervened.  

In this way, Hegel's concrete universal [Sittlichkeit]

Sittlichkeit is the practical application of the concrete universal.  

is sublimated

it can't be sublimated or sublated. It merely is what is currently happening in 'ethical life'.  

into a communicative structure purified of all substantial elements (FG 280).

This is nonsense even by the low standards of German pedants. Remove 'substantial elements' from a 'communicative structure'- e.g. all the words from a sentence- and you are left with nothing at all. 

Thus, according to Habermas, the substantial elements of Hegel's view of Sittlichkeit, an apparently metaphysical doctrine of ethical life (one among many possible examples), are-so far as they are valid- fully sublimated into (I interpret him to mean expressible, or articu- lated, by) the theory of communicative action with its procedural presuppositions of ideal discourse.

In other words, actual morality & ethical behaviour disappear completely because there is no need for them under ideal conditions.  

Habermas's own doctrine, I believe, is one of logic in the broad Hegelian sense:

i.e. nonsense or a cascade of intensional fallacies. Did you know dogs are sublimated into cats? That's why cats say 'Moo!'  

a philosophical analysis of the presuppositions of rational discourse (of theoretical and practical reason) which includes within itself all the allegedly substantial elements of religious and metaphysical doctrines.

Mathematical logic is a 'rational discourse'. Does it include 'substantial elements' of karma or the doctrine of incarnation? No. But it could have 'oracles'.  

His logic is metaphysical in the following sense:

it is shit emanating from the asshole of his asshole.  

it presents an account of what there is.

That's not 'beyond physics'. It is descriptive shite of some stripe.  

And what there is are human beings engaged in communicative action in their lifeworld.

Human beings have spent a lot of time ignoring the fuck out of me in my life-world. Is it coz I iz bleck? No. It is because I am very flatulent.  

As to what 'substance' and 'substantial' mean, I would conjecture that Habermas intends something like the following: people often think that their basic way of doing things- their communicative action with its presuppositions of ideal discourse, or their conception of society as a fair system of cooperation between citizens as free and equal- needs a foundation beyond itself discerned by a Platonic reason that grasps the essences, or else is rooted in metaphysical substances.

People communicate for utilitarian reasons or merely a result of mimetic drives. Plato's 'methexis' may be relevant in the sense that we want to 'participate' in good things- e.g. share happiness if our team won the match.  

In thought we reach behind, or deeper, to a religious or metaphysical doctrine for a firm foundation.

Only if that is what we are paid to do and we are too stupid to understand STEM subjects.  

This reality is also expected to provide moral motivation.9 Without these foundations, everything may seem to us to waver and we experience a kind of vertigo, a feeling of being lost without a place to stand. But Habermas holds that "In the vertigo of this freedom there is no longer any fixed point outside the democratic procedure itself- a procedure whose meaning is already summed up in the system of rights" (FG 229).1

 Nonsense! Parliaments have procedures. But political parties or action committees may not. You tend to moored in your party & don't feel vertigo when you get elected to Parliament because you are still moored in that same party.

The preceding comments bear on Habermas's last two paragraphs (131). Here he says we each see our own views as more modest than the other's. He sees his view as more modest than mine, since it is purportedly a procedural doctrine that leaves questions of substance to be decided by the outcome of actual free discussions

not free at all. You are elected to represent a particular constituency & you may belong to a particular party which has made pledges of a binding type in its manifesto.  

engaged in by free and rational, real and live participants, as opposed to the artificial creatures of the original position.

In the original position, rational people refuse to sign a social contract because it is null & void save for the passing of immediate consideration. Rawls had shit for brains.  

He proposes, he says, to limit moral philosophy to the clarification of the moral point of view

of which, being a fucking Kraut, he knew nothing 

and to the procedure of democratic legitimation,

see above 

and to the analysis of the conditions of rational discourses and negotiation.

ditto 

In contrast, my view, he thinks, takes on a more ambitious task, since it hopes to formulate a political conception of justice for the basic structure of a democracy, all of which involves fundamental substantive conceptions, which raise larger questions that only the actual discourse of real participants can decide.

Suppose we have to decide whether cats say bow wow. I think we will decide that cats don't say bow wow because that is the fact of the matter. You may say 'we can't say that. First there must be a public discussion. Only after everybody agrees that cats don't say 'bow wow', can be affirm that such is the case.

The contrast between Habermas & Rawls is that Rawls thinks we will agree, if behind a 'veil of ignorance', that cats say bow wow. Habermas feels not enough time has been wasted on this matter. Why not bring everybody together so they can agree cats say bow wow? 

At the same time, Habermas thinks I see my view as more modest than his: it aims to be solely a political conception and not a comprehensive one. He believes, though, that I fail in doing this. My conception of political justice is not really freestanding, as I would like it to be, because whether I like it or not, he thinks that the conception of the person in political liberalism goes beyond political philosophy.

That's true enough.  

Moreover, he claims that political constructivism involves the philosophical questions of rationality and truth. And he may also think that, along with Immanuel Kant, I express a conception of a priori and metaphysical reason laying down in justice as fairness principles and ideals so conceived. I deny these things.

I merely think cats say bow wow. My cat bites the postman. Would it do so if it didn't say bow wow? I think not. Harsanyi may disagree but he is stoooopid.  

Why Habermas was utterly shit

India has many languages of diverse origins. Yet it is a 'deliberative Democracy'. Almost everybody in Iran speaks Persian. It isn't a democracy at all. 

India is Hindu. Hindus need to hang together because there is a Muslim threat but Hindus don't want to kill each other. Elections are a peaceful way of resolving conflicts as to who gets to set policy. 

Iran is Shia majority. Shias want to dominate Islam for historical reasons. They are going to be theocratic, not democratic. They may hold elections, but the game is rigged in advance. 

Does 'Communicative action'- i.e. talking- matter? Not very much. Tardean mimetics- i.e. imitating the superior- is cheaper, faster & more effective. 

Habermas, who has just died, believed otherwise. 

Wikipedia says- 

The Theory of Communicative Action is a two-volume 1981 book by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in which the author continues his project of finding a way to ground "the social sciences in a theory of language".

Social Science is founded in Statistics & mathematical structural causal models. It isn't founded on language or a theory of language.  

 which had been set out in On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967).

Which features mathsy stuff like 'Granger causality' & Muth Rationality & Hannan Consistency. Habermas had studied shit and was stupid. He didn't know any type of logic. The Natural Sciences feature 'games against nature'. Social Sciences feature strategic games. In the latter, things like Shapley values matter. Not so in the former.   

The two volumes are Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung),[3] in which Habermas establishes a concept of communicative rationality,

It is irrational to talk to a guy about a Social problem if he doesn't have all the relevant facts and figures at his fingertips. The question is whether his SCM churns out better predictions.  

 and Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft),

Fuck Functionalism or Neo-Kantianism as a game for soldiers- or drug addled anthropologists.  

 in which Habermas creates the two level concept of society

 There is- 'the Individual Level (Agency): This refers to the actions, choices, and intentions of individuals. People make decisions based on personal beliefs, values, and goals, and through their behavior, they influence social dynamics and outcomes'. 

Sadly, that's not how we actually behave. We imitate what smarter people are doing even if we don't understand their reasoning. My preference is to stay in bed rather than go to skool. I go to skool coz smart kids do so. Losers stay in bed & become morbidly obese 'shut ins'. 

There is also the 'Social Level (Structure): This encompasses the organized systems and institutions—such as family, economy, education, religion, and government—that guide and constrain individual behavior. Social structures are durable patterns of relationships and institutions that provide stability and continuity across generations'. 

Families break up. Economies go down the toilet. Education turns out to be a crock of shit. Priests turn out to be pedophiles. The good news is that you can avoid bad structures and adhere to good ones- till something better comes along. 

and lays out the critical theory for modernity.

Did you know we live in 'modern times', not 'days of yore'? That's why there are no dragons flying about the place.  

After writing The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas expanded upon the theory of communicative action by using it as the basis of his theory of morality, democracy, and law.

He decided they might be good things which was very nice of him.  

 The work has inspired many responses by social theorists and philosophers, and in 1998 was listed by the International Sociological Association as the eighth most important sociological book of the 20th century.

All sociological books are shit.  

The theory of communicative action is a critical project which reconstructs a concept of reason which is not grounded in instrumental or objectivistic terms, but rather in an emancipatory communicative act.

There are no 'emancipatory communicative acts' save that of a kidnapper or a jailor who says 'I'm now going un-cuff you. You are free to leave'. But that's 'instrumental' & 'objectivistic'. Talking bollocks isn't emancipatory. It is a fucking nuisance. 

 This reconstruction proposes "human action and understanding can be fruitfully analysed as having a linguistic structure",

Language has a linguistic structure. Stuff you do or think can have a linguistic description. What a fucking amazing discovery! 

and each utterance relies upon the anticipation of freedom from unnecessary domination.

No. It doesn't rely on anything at all. If you can talk without danger to yourself, you talk even if some dude is dominating the fuck out of you.  

 These linguistic structures of communication can be used to establish a normative understanding of society.

Even a cat can have such a normative understanding. It purrs to show it likes society. It hisses & scratches you if it doesn't like your society.  

 This conception of society is used "to make possible a conceptualization of the social-life context that is tailored to the paradoxes of modernity.'

Since this was already possible, that conception was useless.  

This project started after the critical reception of Habermas's book Knowledge and Human Interests (1968),

at least the fucker wasn't a raving Commie.  

after which Habermas chose to move away from contextual and historical analysis of social knowledge

which might involve some actual research 

toward what would become the theory of communicative action.

which was mindless garbage.  

 The theory of communicative action understands language as the foundational component of society and is an attempt to update Marxism by "drawing on Systems theory (Luhmann), developmental psychology (Piaget, Kohlberg), and social theory (Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, Mead, etc.)".

i.e. useless, dated, shite.  What constitutes Society is 'collective action problems' featuring coordination & discoordination games. Even a deaf & dumb person can participate. The Allied armies which defeated Hitler & Tojo spoke a lot of different languages. Consider the Swahili speakers who fought alongside Indians & Chinese Nationalists in Burma. If you saw the platoon opposite you was advancing, you provided covering fire, before sprinting forward yourself. You didn't have to understand Chinese or Hindi. 

Thomas A. McCarthy states that

The Theory of Communicative Action has three interrelated concerns: (1) to develop a concept of rationality that is no longer tied to, and limited by, the subjectivistic and individualistic premises of modern philosophy and social theory;

Habermas failed. John Muth succeeded. Moreover, if there is Knightian uncertainty, regret minimization is the way to go.  

(2) to construct a two-level concept of society that integrates the lifeworld and systems paradigms;

though they are already integrated- or become so by the time we are about three years old.  

and, finally, (3) to sketch out, against this background, a critical theory of modernity

modernity is about higher productivity & the law of increasing functional information 

which analyzes and accounts for its pathologies

i.e. stuff this shithead didn't like. Was Nazism a pathology? Yes. It turned out conquering land to the East was a game not worth the candle. True, initially you get a windfall but, very soon, the productivity of conquered land falls precipitately. You can't live off unproductive land.  

in a way that suggests a redirection rather than an abandonment of the project of enlightenment.

There was no such project. Some stupid professors gassed on about it in the Eighteenth century and despots like Fredrick & Catherine were, initially enthused by it because they thought it could lead to rapid 'catch up' growth.  

The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1 sets out "to develop a concept of rationality that is no longer tied to, and limited by, the subjectivistic and individualistic premises of modern philosophy and social theory."

Modern philosophy & Econ had turned mathsy. It had no fucking premises whatsoever. Anybody can say 'boo to Nazism'. You need smart people to figure out ways to bomb Hilter to buggery.  

 With this failure of the search for ultimate foundations by "first philosophy"

Being as being. But you can have a logic without an ontology. 'Shut up & calculate' is good advise- if you are smart. If you arent' teach shit to shitheads. 

or "the philosophy of consciousness", an empirically tested theory of rationality must be a pragmatic theory based on science and social science.

Of both of which Habermas was impartially ignorant.  

This implies that any universalist claims can only be validated by testing against counterexamples in historical (and geographical) contexts – not by using transcendental ontological assumptions.

Verification, not validation, is all that is available to us.  

This leads him to look for the basis of a new theory of communicative action in the tradition of sociology. He starts by rereading Max Weber's description of rationality

which was irrational.  The exercise of reason which results in increased inclusive fitness is rational. Anything else isn't. But this is determined by the fitness landscape. It is fine to do Model Theory if you are employed for that purpose. It isn't, if you earn your living as a plumber. 

and arguing it has a limited view of human action. Habermas argues that Weber's basic theoretical assumptions with regard to social action prejudiced his analysis in the direction of purposive rationality, which purportedly arises from the conditions of commodity production.

Weber understood that people need jobs to earn money to buy food. Habermas thought differently.  

 Taking the definition of action as human behaviour with intention, or with subjective meaning attached, then Weber's theory of action is based on a solitary acting subject and does not encompass the coordinating actions that are inherent to a social body.

People intentionally coordinate with each other.  When you throw a party, you make sure to send out invitations giving the time & place of the bean-feast. 

According to Weber, rationalisation (to use this word in the sense it has in sociological theory) creates three spheres of value: the differentiated zones of science, art and law.

Value pre-exists in what is produced under these rubrics. Scientists & artists & lawyers get paid because of the 'Expected Value' of their work. If that work is shit, they get the sack.  

 For him, this fundamental disunity of reason constitutes the danger of modernity.

We must escape from that danger by migrating to 'days of yore'.  

This danger arises not simply from the creation of separate institutional entities but through the specialisation of cognitive, normative, and aesthetic knowledge that in turn permeates and fragments everyday consciousness.

Why don't people shit while they are eating? It would save time- right? Is it because of 'modernity'? Yes. Fuck you modernity! Fuck you very much! 

This disunity of reason implies that culture moves from a traditional base in a consensual collective endeavour

Slavery? Serfdom? Killing off the Neanderthals?  

to forms which are rationalised by commodification

People were trading flint axes 50,000 years ago.  

and led by individuals with interests which are separated from the purposes of the population as a whole.

This stupid fucker is against specialization on the basis of comparative advantage & the division of labor. Men should give birth to just as many babies as Women. Evolution took a wrong turn 100 million years ago.  

This 'purposive rational action' is steered by the "media" of the state, which substitute for oral language as the medium of the coordination of social action.

The State uses oral language. So does organized crime.  

An antagonism arises between these two principles of societal integration—language, which is oriented to understanding and collective well being,

because nobody ever calls anybody else a fucking wanker who eats his own shit- right?  

and "media", which are systems of success-oriented action.

The State ordered Habermas to eat his own shit. That is why he turned into a shithead. True the State didn't use 'oral language' to communicate its order. But Habermas understood that is what it wanted him to do. He wasn't an utter cretin, you know.  

Following Weber, Habermas sees specialisation as the key historical development,

i.e. the Neolithic Revolution was very evil. We should go back to being hunter-gatherers. Also, men should give birth to babies. Gender dimorphism is a type of specialization which is deeply repugnant. Everyone should have both a vagina & a penis.  

which leads to the alienating effects of modernity, which 'permeate and fragment everyday consciousness'.

Drinking too much fragments my consciousness every day. Habermas was fortunate to be born stupid.  

Habermas points out that the "sociopsychological costs" of this limited version of rationality are ultimately borne by individuals,

which is why we feel sorry for Elon Musk 

which is what György Lukács had in mind when he developed Marx's concept of reification in his History and Class Consciousness (1923).

Lukacs suspected that evil capitalists might use him as a toilet and sell him on that basis.  

They surface as widespread neurotic illnesses, addictions, psychosomatic disorders, and behavioural and emotional difficulties; or they find more conscious expression in criminal actions, protest groups and religious cults

& homosexuality. Lukacs considered gay people to be morally decadent. Stalin reintroduced the sodomy ban around this time.  

 Lukács thought that reification, although it runs deep,

he genuinely was a toilet.  

is constrained by the potential of rational argument to be self-reflexive

Lukacs was the anus which shat on himself 

and transcend its occupational use by oppressive agencies.

He was a toilet so filled with his own shit that no oppressor wanted to use it.  

 Habermas agrees with this optimistic analysis,

If this is optimism, what is despair?  

in contrast to Adorno and Horkheimer, and thinks that freedom and ideals of reconciliation are ingrained in the mechanisms of the linguistically mediated sociation of humanity.

Very good of him, I'm sure. At the time, if a Professor wasn't actually foaming at the mouth and trying to stab the American ambassador, he counted as a freakin' genius.  

Volume 2

Habermas finds in the work of George Herbert Mead

who was perfectly sensible.  

and Émile Durkheim concepts which can be used to free Weber's theory of rationalisation from the aporias of the philosophy of consciousness.

This can also be done by masturbating.  

Mead's most productive conceptis his theoretical base of communication and Durkheim's is his idea of social integration.

Yet, it is Tardean mimetics which rules over all.  

Mead also stressed the social character of perception: our first encounters are social.

Our first crimes are anti-social.  

From these bases, Habermas develops his concept of communicative action: communicative action serves to transmit and renew cultural knowledge, in a process of achieving mutual understandings.

Mimetics ensures it will happen anyway. If your company has a superior product, your rivals will try to re-engineer it or send spies to find out how you make it.  

It then coordinates action towards social integration and solidarity.

It may do. It may not. But markets solve coordination problems better than pi-jaw. 

Finally, communicative action is the process through which people form their identities.

No. People were homosexual even when it was 'the love that dare not speak its name'.  Incidentally, I am actually a highly trained Ninja warrior even though my Japanese is unintelligible to any body except the baby. Sadly, baby beats me up. 

Following Weber again, an increasing complexity arises from the structural and institutional differentiation of the lifeworld, which follows the closed logic of the systemic rationalisation of our communications.

It is markets which support 'increasing complexity'. Otherwise there is 'error accumulation' & a 'scissors crisis'. Hayek was right. Kantorovich was wrong.  

There is a transfer of action co-ordination from 'language' over to 'steering media', such as money and power, which bypass consensus-oriented communication

Nope. There are plenty of theorems in Social Choice theory & Mathematical Politics which show how 'transferable utility' (pay-offs) promote consensus.  

with a 'symbolic generalisation of rewards and punishments'.

The problem with having lots of punishments & few rewards is smart people either run away or pretend to be as dumb as shit.  

After this process the lifeworld "is no longer needed for the coordination of action".

Coz of Ebay & PayPal & Ali Express.  

This results in humans ('lifeworld actors') losing a sense of responsibility with a chain of negative social consequences.

When you buy stuff from China you lose human connection with the anus of the Chinese worker. Thus you are unable to lick it tenderly. This is the reason the Chinese are so angry with Trump.  

Lifeworld communications lose their purpose becoming irrelevant for the coordination of central life processes.

As Mahatma Gandhi said, we must all spin cotton and live sexlessly in self sufficient villages. Death will be a welcome release.  

This has the effect of ripping the heart out of social discourse,

because we are unable to tenderly lick the anus of Chinese or Vietnamese factory workers 

allowing complex differentiation to occur but at the cost of social pathologies.

Like buying stuff with money & neglecting to tenderly lick the anuses of the workers. 

"In the end, systemic mechanisms suppress forms of social integration even in those areas where a consensus dependent co-ordination of action cannot be replaced, that is, where the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld is at stake.

For example, the British King Emperor was not able to tenderly lick the anuses of every kangaroo & wallaby. This is why the 'lifeworld' of Ozzies produced Dame Edna Everage.  

In these areas, the mediatization of the lifeworld assumes the form of colonisation".

Queen Victoria did not tenderly lick Mahatma Gandhi's anus. He was not amused.  

 Habermas argues that Horkheimer and Adorno, like Weber before them, confused system rationality with action rationality.

because individuals act rationally to implement the agenda of particular systems. Why not say 'my wife does not suck cock. It is as part of the Prostitution system that she guzzles jizz. I am not guilty of living off immoral earnings. All is the fault of the system.' ? 

This prevented them from dissecting the effects of the intrusion of steering media into a differentiated lifeworld, and the rationalisation of action orientations that follows.

Eichmann, after all, was only following orders. He wasn't guilty of anything. Some of his best friends were Jews- or would have been if he hadn't killed them.  

They could then only identify spontaneous communicative actions within areas of apparently 'non-rational' action, art and love on the one hand or the charisma of the leader on the other, as having any value.

Whereas, when a woman says 'me love you long time', it means she greatly values your jizz.  

According to Habermas, lifeworlds become colonised by steering media when four things happen: 

Traditional forms of life are dismantled.

Which happened at least 12000 years ago 

Social roles are sufficiently differentiated.

Men don't give birth to babies 

There are adequate rewards of leisure and money for the alienated labour.

So slavery is okay. It is just well paid blue-collar work which is evil.  

Hopes and dreams become individuated by state canalization of welfare and culture.

i.e. you can live quite well on the dole and the State owned TV channel broadcasts lots of nice operas.  

These processes are institutionalised by developing global systems of jurisprudence.

No. They arise as Hayekian 'spontaneous order'. There is no global system of jurisprudence. There may be 'comity of nations' & treaty law in certain areas.  

He here indicates the limits of an entirely juridified concept of legitimation and practically calls for more anarchistic 'will formation' by autonomous networks and groups.

Like the 'Tea Party'? No. He means the Skinheads.  

"Counterinstitutions are intended to dedifferentiate some parts of the formally organised domains of action, remove them from the clutches of the steering media, and return these 'liberated areas' to the action co-ordinating medium of reaching understanding".

Definitely the Tea Party. Trump is now a two term President.  

After dispensing with Weber's overly negative use of rationalisation, it is possible to look at the Enlightenment ideal of reason in a fresh light.

It was bullshit. Still, teaching Kant & Rousseau is less demoralizing than having to teach Woke shite.  

Rationality is redefined as thinking that is ready to submit to criticism and systematic examination as an ongoing process.

There is no such need. A rational guy making a shitload of money on the Options market is under no obligation to reveal what algorithm he is using. On the other hand, a drooling imbecile may be willing to accept advise & criticism on the type of dog turd he chooses to devour.  

A broader definition is that rationality is a disposition expressed in behaviour for which good reasons can be given.

It is perfectly rational to stick with a non-deterministic decision rule which produces a superior outcome. You don't know why it works but it is obvious that it does work. Still, this isn't a 'good' reason. Why not? There may be some side-effect which is currently unobservable. It is worth spending a bit of money turning the 'black box' into a 'white box'.  

Habermas is now ready to make a preliminary definition of the process of communicative rationality: this is communication that is "oriented to achieving, sustaining and reviewing consensus

This must be false because there are uncorrelated asymmetries which can lead those with the same Bayesian priors to reject 'Aumann agreement'. More broadly, by a theorem of Chichilnisky & Heard, consensus is only desirable if preference & endowment diversity meets a Goldilocks condition.  Finally, by the McKelvey Chaos theorem we know that making the decision space multi-dimensional creates an 'agenda control' problem which renders the thing 'anything goes'. Habermas ignored everything interesting that was happening in the Social Sciences over the course of his very long, utterly useless, life. That's what happens if you don't study STEM subjects at skool. Your brain turns to shit.  

– and indeed a consensus that rests on the intersubjective recognition of criticisable validity claims".

There can be no such intersubjective recognition unless there is an objective function such that categoricity obtains. Sadly, even if there is an objective function, the objective itself is arbitrary and so 'naturality' is far to seek.  

 With this key definition he shifts the emphasis in our concept of rationality from the individual to the social.

He has no theory of the social- i.e. what constitute 'collective action problems' & which mechanisms are available to solve them.  

This shift is fundamental to The Theory of Communicative Action.

It is a shift from shit to shit.  

It is based on an assumption that language is implicitly social and inherently rational.

Math is inherently rational & does provide solutions to collective action problems. Language doesn't greatly matter. Just imitate what more successful societies are doing. 

Argument of some kind is central to the process of achieving a rational result.

It is irrelevant. Still, for some purposes- e.g. 'adversarial' justice systems, or parliamentary democracies of the Anglo-Saxon type- it is considered a good thing if there is a venue where such arguments are presented and 'put on the record' so to speak. 

To overcome agent-principal hazard, there may be a stipulation that decisions have to be made after rival arguments have been presented. There may also be Professional obligations of this type.  

Contested validity claims are thematised and attempts are then made to vindicate or criticise them in a systematic and rigorous way.

He was too stupid to do so. Lawyers get paid a lot of money to examine such questions in various contexts.  

This may seem to favour verbal language, but allowance is also given for 'practical discourses' in which claims to normative rightness are made thematic and pragmatically tested.

Like in the fashion industry. You imitate what the cool kids are wearing. That's Tardean mimetics.  

Non-verbal forms of cultural expression could often fall into this category.

So do verbal forms. That's why my entire vocabulary changed after I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  

Habermas proposes three integrated conditions from which argumentative speech can produce valid results: "The structure of the ideal speech situation (which means that the discourse is) immunised against repression and inequality in a special way ...

Since there can be no 'i-language', there can be no ideal speech situations. Watanabe's ugly duckling theorem applies.  

The structures of a ritualised competition for the better arguments

the thing isn't 'ritualised' at all. If you can get in a smart guy to talk about it, you do so. Otherwise you have to be content with tossers like Habermas.  

… The structures that determine the construction of individual arguments and their interrelations".

There are no such structures- at least for grown-ups who do useful stuff.  

Granting such principles of rational argumentation, communicative rationality is: The processes by which different validity claims are brought to a satisfactory resolution.

That depends on the 'fitness landscape'. There may be a very good argument for disarmament & Pacifism. But it goes out of the window when the country is attacked.  

The relations to the world that people take to forward validity claims for the expressions they deem important.

Circumstances- or expectations re. states of the world- are what matters. Expression doesn't matter. If you notice that all the smart people are packing up and fucking off, you don't hang around. You follow their example. 

When I was a kid, I noticed that all the intellectuals who were loudest in denouncing Western Imperialism had secured tenure on Western campuses. They urged me, with tears in their eyes, to go to the villages and join the toiling masses in their struggle against Neo-Liberalism. I moved to Hampstead- quite a lovely village but too full of darkies.  

Habermas then discusses three further types of discourse that can be used to achieve valid results in addition to verbal argument: these are the aesthetic,

holding your nose when you see the other guy so that he comes to believe that he smells bad 

the therapeutic

I often used to advise Amartya Sen to chop off his own head so he would be less ugly. Also, his health would improve because he would have lost 5 k.g. worth of useless shit.  

and the explicative.

Telling people why they are shit.  

Because these are not followed through in The Theory of Communicative Action the impression is given that these are secondary forms of discourse.

Like farting. Habermas may be dead but his oeuvre will continue to hang in the air like a bad smell.