Joseph Heath writes in 'Persuasion' magazine.
Suppose that you had been born in Nazi Germany.
In that case you would find it wrong or repugnant to suppose any such thing unless you are in fact a Nazi cunt. It's like saying 'suppose you had been born in the Jew-nited States of America.' You can't do this unless you are a raving anti-Semite planning to marry your sister-Mommy as soon as Grampa-Daddy's corpse is shifted out of the trailer.
Suppose that you found yourself, at the age of 12, in a Hitler Youth summer camp, singing “Deutschland über alles” alongside your friends. Would you have been able to figure out that you were supporting the wrong side of the war?
The wrong side is the losing side.
If so, what intellectual resources would you require to arrive at this conclusion?
You would need a bit of economic & military nous. Previously, if you didn't like your country, you could emigrate to the US where it was only the niggers & the Injuns who were being fucked over. But the US had greatly restricted immigration. The Great Depression hit everybody hard. If you had a job in one place, you didn't give it up just in case you could get something equivalent in a country whose regime you approved of.
Moreover, what is there to stop a totalitarian regime from denying such resources to its people?
The same thing which stops regimes from performing lobotomies on all and sundry. Doing evil shit costs money. It uses up resources.
These are the questions that animated Habermas’ critical theory.
Critical theory means the theory is wrong but maybe not all its theorists are evil shitheads. 'Sovietization' had failed in the East. Collective ownership of the means of production was bad for workers, consumers & everybody else- even bureaucrats.
By 1959, the SDP had embraced the Godesberg program which is 'mixed-economy Keynesianism' and is as fucking Utopian as you can get. Habermas objected to this because maybe talking is more important than working or consuming. Maybe if everybody talks enough to everybody else, nobody would want to own anything.
Like many Germans of his generation, his work was haunted by the specter of totalitarianism.
You can't be haunted by a ghost who lives just across the border from you. What haunted German academics teaching worthless shit was gaining a reputation for erudition while virtue signalling like crazy.
In Habermas’ specific interpretation this took two forms, which we can think of as Orwell’s nightmare and Kafka’s nightmare.
Orwell’s nightmare: Whoever controls language controls thought
Nobody controls language- with the exception of my neighbour's cat who controls anybody or anything crazy people think controls shit. It does this using invisible 'mind rays'. Read the fucking Epstein files- sheeple.
Karl Marx once declared that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”
This wasn't the case in England or Germany or France. The Aristocracy & the power-elite had different ideas from those of the rising bourgeoisie & bildungsburgertum. The fact is, where there is economic growth & technological change, there is likely to be a lag. In Revolutionary regimes, it is the people who lag behind but in countries whose big Revolution occurred in the late Seventeenth or Eighteenth Century, such is not the case.
This was based on the observation that, no matter how cruel and unequal the class structure of any society, it was always accompanied by some story that explained why all of the cruelty and deprivation was in fact merited by its victims.
There were many such stories. You paid your money & took your choice. The story might be about Heaven or Racial or Religious superiority but there was also an alethic Economic Structural Causal Model which not merely explained what obtained but which showed how general purpose & total factor productivity could be raised. This might involve finding political solutions to collective action problems. It might occur spontaneously in a 'Coasean' manner. Still 'public signals' can promote these superior correlated equilibria. Habermas blabbering shite helped nobody.
Acceptance of this story, Marx thought, explains why the poor and downtrodden, who are typically the vast majority of the population, passively accept their fate rather than rebelling.
I rebelled. I didn't go to work. I stopped getting paid. I ran through my savings. In order to eat, I had to stop rebelling & get a fucking job.
This is Marx’s influential theory of ideology.
Why do people die? It is because they accept some story about 'ageing' cooked up by so-called 'Biologists'. Why can't pigs fly? Same reason. Fuck you biologists! Fuck you very much.
It implied that certain beliefs were widely held only because society, in some sense, needed people to believe them.
Society needs you to die. It really doesn't like you. Also Society has shown partiality to avian species in denying aeronautical capacity to the porcine community.
It also gave rise to the suggestion that intellectuals could make themselves useful by criticizing those ideas.
Why let homeless people wearing tin-foil hats monopolise the market? If you have a PhD in worthless shite, you can do just as good a job at screaming your tits off.
If the acceptance of a legitimating ideology is required for the reproduction of domination,
Then there is no 'domination'. There may be 'gaslighting' or swindling or the fact that a particular 'ideology' is the focal solution to a coordination game.
it stands to reason that exposing that story as ideological might make relations of domination more difficult to sustain.
only in the sense that exposing that story as plagiarised from Buffy Season 3, episode ten, would make domination difficult to sustain.
Unfortunately, the theory of ideology also gave rise, almost immediately, to an enormous number of skeptical problems.
Easily solved by shooting or sacking people or ensuring they don't get invited to the cool parties.
If the ruling class controls the production of ideas,
It won't rule shit. Why not control the production of farts instead?
why do they formulate those ideas
or farts
in a way that makes them vulnerable to criticism?
Criticism doesn't occur if it leads to sacking, shooting in the head, or not getting invited to cool parties.
Indeed, how are we to know that the criticism is genuinely outside the space of those ideas?
Why should it be? We want a criticism of the solution to an open problem in Math to come from inside 'Math Space'- not 'Porn Space'.
Perhaps the critic is as much a victim of ideology as the one being criticized?
Why are cunts who teach useless shite so obsessed with victims? Were they beaten & raped till they gave up STEM subject research?
Thinking through these questions generates what came to be known as the problem of total ideology. If everything is ideology, how can we escape from it?
Nobody wants to escape from what is useful or pleasant. Nor is there any 'victim' involved in what raises everybody's productivity.
And what is the difference between escaping from it and merely believing that we have escaped from it?
It is the difference between clinical paranoia & being trapped in a nightmare because you really can't wake up.
Twentieth-century philosophers found these questions extremely difficult to answer.
They weren't really trying.
While Enlightenment theorists had claimed that we each possess a “tribunal of reason” in our own mind—a sovereign capacity to separate truth from falsity—by the end of the 19th century this view had become hopelessly discredited. Far from possessing an inner tribunal of reason, Sigmund Freud had shown that we understand very little of what goes on in our own mind, much less the world.
He understood that he'd make more money treating healthy people for an imaginary ailment. The truly mentally ill will shit on your couch. Also, they have no fucking money.
But perhaps more importantly, philosophers had begun to realize the importance of language in structuring our thoughts.
Our thoughts structure language any which way. The reverse is not the case. Otherwise a teacher of grammar could ensure I have the same thoughts as Einstein.
Language came to be seen not as a code that we use to communicate our ideas to others but as the medium in which we formulate those very ideas.
No one knows what that 'inner language' is. If it exists maybe we could communicate 'telepathically'.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular, argued that linguistic meaning is not determined by what is in our heads but by the position that our utterances occupy in “language games” that we play with others.
Which is why I am right to insist that you agreed to suck my cock though what you said is 'fuck off you revolting creep'.
This linguistic turn in philosophy further intensified the problem of ideology. If the meaning of words is determined not by our private thoughts but by what occurs in our external practices of communication, what is to prevent the emergence of a perfect dictatorship, which controls not only all of society but, through its control of social practices, all that is thinkable in that society?
If there is a force powerful enough to cause you to think you don't want to suck my cock, what is to prevent the emergence of a perfect dictatorship where nobody will suck my cock because everybody would see me as a revolting creep? OMG! This has already happened! Fuck you Neo-liberalism! Fuck you very much!'
This was the challenge posed in George Orwell’s 1984, where “the party” does not just prevent criticism from being expressed but through the inculcation of “newspeak” attempts to make criticism unintelligible.
Tl; dr, Big Brother fucks up Winston using his fear of rats. That 'newspeak's shite was a red herring. Still emojis-eh? WTF? LOL!
Philosophers were troubled by similar concerns. If communication is just a bunch of language games, what is to stop the powerful from organizing or reorganizing the game however they like?
Organizing Premium League football games can make you a lot of money. Scrabble not so much.
For example, we have the idea that when individuals use force against others, they need to provide some justification for their actions.
Only if we don't have a lot of force. But this is a more a case of talking your way out of a beating or spell in prison.
What if this turned out to be just an ethnocentric expectation and that, in some distant land, such demands for justification were met with incomprehension or were rejected as “not how we do things around here”?
There's a sink Estate five minutes walk from me, where I could get my head kicked in for sounding like English might be first language.
Is there anything that rules out such a possibility?
Common sense.
It has often been observed that critical theorists working in the Frankfurt School tradition became less interested over time in actually criticizing things and more perplexed by the question of how critique was even possible or what might prevent the powerful from making it impossible.
They were useless tossers. Still, if they got paid for enabling credential craving cretins to earn a like livelihood, what great harm had been done? Shitheads we will always have with us. It is better that they teach nonsense than that they become bureaucrats & fuck up the economyy.
These are certainly the questions that troubled Habermas. What is to prevent the emergence of a perfect ideology, which is not just internally consistent but quite literally impossible to think one’s way out of?
We can think ourselves out of life, the universe, & everything- or let Douglas Adams do it for us- easily enough. Lots of guys with PhDs in Kantian Mathematics in Teheran were blown up by Trump. According to their ideology, they are now nailing 72 virgins in Paradise. That's more than Epstein ever got to do.
Kafka’s nightmare: The totally reified society
Not totally. There has to be at least one consciousness which resists its own reification. Joseph K isn't 'that distinguished thing'- which is the death of the scapegoat.
One aspect of the Holocaust that many people found particularly disturbing was its organizational efficiency.
Which used up scarce resources in a foolish manner. Genocide is better done by mobs equipped with cheap agricultural implements. Still, we understand that presiding over a gas chamber was safer & more comfortable than fighting the Rooskis. Moreover, there were profit opportunities. Schindler did well for himself.
Much of the killing in the death camps was carried out not by men caught up in the throes of bloodlust but by faceless bureaucrats who documented with meticulous care every aspect of the procedure.
It would have been cheaper to just let peasants from conquered territories loose on the Jews, Gypsies etc.
Even the decision to use poison gas was made because the previous method—a single shot to the back of the head—was considered too expensive, at the cost of one bullet per victim.
That's why poison gas was used in the Great War. Still, it is a bit silly to get our knickers in a twist over gas when our current offensive strategy is based on destroying all life on earth.
These calculations seemed like a clear-cut instance of scientific rationality run amok,
It was like the 'schweinmord'- the slaughter of the pigs as 'co-eaters'- during the Great War. That backfired badly. Pig manure is useful.
with considerable technical ingenuity deployed in the discovery of effective means, combined with a complete failure to evaluate the merits of the goals being sought.
No. The evaluation was okay. But they could have been left to starve & their deaths should have been used as propaganda or a bargaining chip.
While Marx had insisted that capitalism was the source of all evil,
He thought Capitalists would be forced to grind down the faces of the workers so as to engender a competitive rate of profit. This was self-defeating. Profits would go to zero. Marx didn't realize that Capitalists would rather spend on conspicuous consumption than put their money into enterprises from which they would get zero return. Workers might have no alternative to working save that of starvation. Capitalists always have the option of going on a long ocean cruise.
the events of the early 20th century, including the emergence of totalitarianism
replacing Tzarist absolutism which, sadly, simply hadn't been brutal enough
in the Soviet Union, suggested that hierarchical authority was just as much a problem.
Not Gulags, not pogroms, it was the fact that the Director was under the Joint Secretary who was under the Principal Secretary which was the problem.
One way of reconciling the two views was to see the emergence of capitalism and bureaucracy as linked.
to the emergence of sodomy & aerobics & rap music
Max Weber, in particular, suggested that humanity was becoming imprisoned in an “iron cage,” governed by a technical rationality that gave us incredible powers of control yet deprived us of the ability to deliberate in any meaningful way about the goals we are seeking.
'Iron cage' prevented him from consummating his marriage with his wife. Also, it forced him to die rather than emigrate to the planet Jupiter.
According to this view, it was the calculative, instrumental form of rationality, focused on means rather than ends, that was the villain of the story.
Why can't everybody just think good thoughts? Why do they get hung up on gaining useful skills & working long hours doing boring jobs?
A distinctive feature of the instrumental style of reasoning is that it treats everything as an object, susceptible to manipulation and control (which is to say, it is reifying).
This is a mere reification- a stupid and paranoid one- of an aspect of any type of ratiocination. Essentially, worthless cunts who teach worthless shite are taking up a word they don't understand- 'instrumentalism' in this case- and using it to belabour the smart people doing useful stuff.
In economic relations, this generates the illusion that Marx called commodity fetishism.
Like when you call rich peeps 'Capitalist pigs' & pretend they worship Mammon & probably sacrifice their own little babies to that pagan god.
In bureaucratic relations, it produces the ideology of modern management, which
was like ancient management. It turns out the guys who built the pyramids were well paid & motivated by all manners of perks/
treats human beings as resources to be controlled in various ways.
As opposed to hiring cretins to build cyclotrons.
In the realm of ideas, it produces positivist social science,
Not to mention natural science. Did you know Einstein was a Jew? Jews make a fetish out of commodities- i.e. love money. Lots of money in atomic energy. Connect the fucking dots, mate! All this talk of 'Relativity' & 'QMT' is bullshit. We live inside a hollow earth. Hitler was a pure vegetarian who gave all his money to the poor. He abstained from sex even with his beloved dog. Thus he gained spiritual powers & found out the truth about physics. The real reason for the Second World War was that an evil cabal of Jewish scientists wanted to bury the truth.
which seeks to employ experimental methods
Statistical, not experimental.
to improve our capacity to predict the behavior of human beings.
Predicting stuff is 'positivist'. It's totes Jewish & Capitalist & homophobic & racist towards lazy, stupid, useless darkies like me.
This diagnosis of the times, which was pioneered by the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists—Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—persuaded an entire generation of leftists that they needed to reject not just capitalism but “the System” as a whole.
While teaching shite or publishing shite magazines. Was this subsidised by the 'deep State'? Who cares?
Whereas Marx had predicted that capitalism would collapse of its own accord, in the post-war period the concern became increasingly that capitalism would not collapse but that it would be successfully stabilized through bureaucratic interventions, creating a vast politico-economic technostructure that would become increasingly governed by its own functional imperatives, unresponsive to human intervention or control.
& Collidge Professors of useless shite might get to live comfortably enough while molesting their students & destroying their life chances.
This image of a “totally reified society” would be the realization of Franz Kafka’s vision of a bureaucratic system whose operations had a predictable, machine-like quality, but where none of it added up to anything rational and where no one could find out why anything was being done the way it was.
Stupid people who teach worthless shite have no incentive to find out anything.
Unlike the problem of total ideology,
or the problem of total shit
a totally reified society
would be totally shit
would be one in which certain forms of ideology would not even be necessary
ideology really isn't necessary. It's just some shite some shitheads make a bit of money out of for historical reasons.
because the incentives would always be correctly aligned, impelling us to do what the system needed us to do regardless of what stories we told ourselves about it.
Which is how the world works. I tell myself a story about how Whitey will never allow a darkie like me get a job cleaning toilets but it turns out that once I lower my wage demand from one trillion dollars an hour to ten, I get plenty of such job offers. There is an incentive to hire a cheaper worker regardless of colour.
Habermas’ solution
Faced with these problems, the naïve response is to search for what philosophers call an Archimedean point based on the plausible intuition that, in order to criticize a system, it is necessary to find some standpoint outside of that system.
An Archimedean point is needed to overturn something (for example by suggesting something better) . Criticism can be done anywhere and be about everything. I personally deplore the planet Jupiter's failure to condemn atrocities committed by Iyengars on Iyers.
However, the first step to wisdom lies in the realization that there is no such point when it comes to human society or thought.
Evolutionary game theory was such a point. John Maynard Smith explains why uncorrelated asymmetries can give rise to eusocial bourgeois strategies.
We are condemned to working on the inside (or to engaging in what Habermas, somewhat obscurely, called “postmetaphysical thinking”).
Only if you teach worthless shite.
After a few false starts, the idea that Habermas hit upon was to search for a solution in the structure of linguistic communication.
Linguistic communication needn't have any fucking structure. Indeed, it needn't even be linguistic in the sense of using words.
Since words do not, in general, mean different things when used in different contexts,
They always have this property.
linguistic meaning is too systematic to be grounded in a set of disconnected social practices.
Linguistic meaning exists even in purely private practices. True, it can be 'grounded' in a disconnected social practice (viz. teaching grammar or studying linguistics) but what matters is 'theory of mind'- i.e. ability to think strategically & act mimetically- not Language. Look at Chomsky. What a fucking worthless waste of space! Even Habermas was less useless.
This observation led many philosophers to believe that the meaning of our utterances must be determined not by any old language game but rather by the role these utterances play in the specific practice of argumentation.
Why argue with a cretin teaching useless shit? You need to use arguments which carry weight with decision makers. These are based on economic or military or political calculations & are based on statistical and game theoretic methodologies.
Habermas expressed this idea by claiming that, whenever we perform a speech act, we commit ourselves to justifying the content of that claim (i.e. we raise a “validity claim”).
This may be the case with small children. I want cake. Not getting cake is UNFAIR! But it doesn't apply to grown ups. I don't have to explain why I won't give you a blow job.
This is not just extra baggage—our understanding of linguistic meaning consists in a grasp of the conditions under which speech acts could be justified.
This is only true of lawyers dealing with justiciable matters. However, they may be wrong. Indeed, even the ratio of the Supreme Court may be overturned subsequently.
As a result, Habermas claimed, there is an intrinsic, necessary connection between the social practice of justification (what he called “discourse”)
This is not required of us when we act as principals save if justiciability arises.
and the meaningfulness of our speech. Understanding someone’s speech acts is inextricably tied to the evaluation of that person’s claims,
No. I understand the Doctor wants me to take this pill. I can't evaluate the claims he makes about the manner in which it will affect my endocrine system. I didn't even know I had any such thing.
and, for similar reasons, the production of a speech act always involves undertaking a commitment to the justification of one’s claims.
This is never the case even when under oath as an expert witness in a court of law.
Thus, the person who comes along and demands justification is not imposing a new obligation on the speaker but is merely asking that person to make good on a commitment that has already been undertaken.
No. Such a person is called a 'nuisance'. We tell them to fuck the fuck off.
The structure of interpersonal commitment
is wholly undefined in every single case. Sometimes it can be captured well enough by a directed graph. At other times it can't at all.
that secures the intelligibility of language
You can have a strong interpersonal commitment to your grandmother back in the old country. But you are mutually unintelligible to each other- save when giving kisses & being rewarded with cookies.
has an important secondary effect, which is that it allows us to coordinate interpersonal interaction.
This can be done well-enough non-verbally.
This gives rise to what Habermas called communicative action,
bullshitting
which differs from instrumental action in that, rather than relying on means-ends reasoning to determine a preferred action, it allows the choice of action to be directly determined by the content of the validity claims raised in speech.
If you teach worthless shite then all you can do is bullshit.
The type of rule-following that sociologists had traditionally tried to explain by invoking the concept of a social norm is, in Habermas’ view, a primary instance of communicative action.
Because you can do empirical work on 'social norms'. This can be marginally useful. Habermas wanted to focus on being not just stupid but also wholly useless.
An important feature of communicative action is that, because it relies directly on speech acts to coordinate interaction, it is always open to contestation and demands for justification.
Not for grown-ups. If the thing isn't justiciable, you don't have to justify shit.
As a result, the more heavily human societies rely on language to construct complex systems of cooperation,
Human societies rely on laws & screening, signalling & allocative 'mechanisms'. They don't rely on language any more than they rely on farting.
the more completely they expose those arrangements to demands for justification
this is why there is no requirement to 'expose' shit about how your family or your enterprise decides things save if the matter is justiciable.
—a dynamic that one can see playing out over the course of human history, in the process that Habermas referred to, somewhat provocatively, as the “linguistification of the sacred.”
Habermas was pretending that nutters screaming slogans in the street actually wanted or were capable of comprehending 'justifications'.
How does any of this help with the two nightmares?
Wake up helps dispel nightmares. Being woke is its own nightmare. What if you are secretly homophobic in that you are not currently fisting yourself?
First of all, it directly rules out the possibility of a society being immunized against demands for justification.
All societies with a kick-ass army are of this type.
Such a society is logically possible, but it would be unintelligible to us, in the strong sense that we would be unable to understand what anyone was saying.
This fucker could understand the German spoken in the Democratic Republic. But he also knew that the Stasi would beat you to death while you kept demanding it justify doing so.
(Fans of Kantian philosophy will recognize this as a transcendental argument.
It is nonsense. Transcendental arguments work backward from a universal feature of consciousness. Habermas is working backwards from a feature which, though desirable to shithead Professors, is incompossible with reality.
One of Habermas’ most important contributions to philosophy is to have pioneered, along with Karl-Otto Apel, what he called “transcendental pragmatics.”)Any attempt to deny or challenge the truth of something already presupposes the transcendental rules of communicative, rational argument, which Apel calls "transcendental" because he thinks they are unavoidable. This may be true in Heaven. It is obviously false on earth.
So we must justify ourselves and our practices, and no society, no matter how totalitarian or manipulative, can free itself from that obligation.
Every society only requires justification where there is justiciability.
But what counts as a justification? Here Habermas is a formalist, in that he thinks that what counts as a justification is ultimately determined by what others will accept in discursive practice.
If a judge says it is justification, that is what it is even if everybody else objects. Thus, when asked how you got rich even though you are lazy and stupid, you are justified in saying 'by fucking your mother'.
That practice, however, is rule-governed, and those rules have content that is not morally neutral.
Practice isn't rule governed though it may have justiciable aspects. In other words, I might say 'I think what you are doing breaks such and such rule. Why should I not inform the boss/professional association/police about this?' You may reply, 'Eat shit & die, mother fucker.' I discuss the matter with others & find that it is difficult to prove that a rule has been broken without 'exogenous' evidence- e.g. that a sportsman deliberately underperformed. In this case, finding evidence he received money from a 'match-fixer' provides indirect proof that such may well have been the case. But even then the easier thing would be to say that the broken rule has to do with not performance but taking money from a tainted source.
Specifically, argumentation is governed by a set of symmetry conditions that establish equal standing among participants (anyone is entitled to introduce any argument, a position is valid regardless who introduces it, and so on).
No. Argumentation is governed by uncorrelated asymmetries which dictate bourgeois strategies. Thus, when I get into an argument about the theory of Relativity, the guy with the PhD in Theoretical Physics wins.
Because of this, and no matter where a society starts out, the reliance on linguistic communication as a central practice for the reproduction of its institutions biases cultural evolution in the direction of greater universalism and equality over time.
No. It biases it towards greater uncorrelated asymmetries. That's why wealth & power & expert knowledge become more concentrated.
This does not prove these commitments to be correct. If one is looking for a knock-down argument that is guaranteed to convince the Nazi that he is wrong, this will not do it.
Nor will anything else. That is why Churchill & Roosevelt & Stalin bombed & then invaded Germany. Nazis thought they'd win. They lost. That's an uncorrelated asymmetry. The bourgeois strategy that prevailed involved killing, incarcerating & 're-educating' Nazis by threatening to beat the fuck out of them.
What Habermas’ argument shows, however, is that the more specific moral resources we rely upon to condemn Nazism, such as equality of moral standing or the inalienability of human rights, are not arbitrary but represent rather the expression of a logic that is inherent in communication among persons, that works its way out over time in all societies.
Habermas thought Churchill argued with Hitler till that fool saw the error of his ways & shot himself.
So much for Orwell’s nightmare, but what about Kafka’s? The totally reified society is also, in Habermas’ view, an impossibility. The central weakness of communicative action, as a means of social integration, arises precisely from its openness to contestation and challenge. “Discursively achieved consensus” is, as we all know, difficult to obtain. As a result, societies that rely increasingly on communication to organize their affairs are tempted to unburden themselves by creating systemically integrated domains of interaction. This is accomplished by instituting a set of incentives that motivate individuals to act in a cooperative manner without explicit reliance on validity claims, but rather on instrumental action. The two primary examples of such systems, in Habermas’ view, are the market economy and the bureaucratic state.
Both explicitly rely on validity claims- e.g. being able to pay for stuff you buy or have a permit or ration-book or whatever.
The nightmare of the totally reified society arises from the experience of interacting in these systemically integrated domains and wondering what prevents the extension of this mode of integration to all of society.
High cost & negative benefit.
The answer, however, is straightforward. Instrumental action cannot produce a self-sustaining order; left to its own devices, it produces mere chaos.
What instrument can be used to let itself be left to its own devices? None at all. We are speaking of nonsense, not chaos.
The incentive system that sustains the integrity of these systems of instrumental action must therefore remain “anchored” in the commitments undertaken in communicative action.
Yet the Third Reich fell. 'Anchoring; didn't achieve shit.
If the system expands beyond its proper boundaries, so that it begins to impinge upon these communicative systems, it generates a set of pathological consequences (which Habermas described, for reasons that need not detain us, as “the colonization of the lifeworld”).
Germany was occupied. It wasn't colonized.
As a result, no matter how extensive and complex these systems may become, they can never escape from the communicative obligation to justify the social order.
Yet that is what happened in both West & East Germany.
Habermas’ views on democracy, which many have identified as his singular contribution, are downstream from this model of the relationship between communicative and instrumental action.
They are normative for representative democracy- but also for the Chinese Communist party. Everything is supposed to be decided after informed debate by representatives of the people. True, this may be merely ceremonial or conducted in bad faith.
Habermas's 'constitutional patriotism' would have allowed GDR to continue to exist in a merely cosmetically revised form. After all, its Constitution says it is Democratic and thus patriotism requires its people to suffer in silence rather than seek to escape.
Although much has been said on this point, it is perhaps worth noting that Habermas was more of a realist on these issues than he is typically portrayed as being.
Hypocrisy could be said to be a form of realism.
That is because he viewed the state as a relatively self-contained bureaucratic system, populated by individuals who respond only to a narrow range of incentives. He saw democracy primarily as a mechanism for translating everyday arguments into incentives that could influence—not control, but merely influence—the behavior of this system.
The problem is 'preference falsification'. Everybody pretends to really care about refugees. But they don't really want them moving in next door. The result is saying one thing & doing another.
Finally, it should be noted that despite the extraordinary ambition of his core philosophical project, Habermas was more of a syncretic than systematic thinker.
Sadly he was drawing on obsolete availability cascades.
Rather than working out, step by step, his own position, he had a habit of presenting the views of others, then showing how they could fit together to solve some problem.
Not solve it, but gas on about it endlessly.
This creates formidable difficulties for students and interpreters. The number of other things that one must understand in order to understand Habermas probably constitutes the most important threat to his legacy.
The justification for studying Habermas is that you then have to study all sorts of other useless shite. Hopefully, this will keep you from masturbating yourself to death.
I have tried to describe, in general terms, the stakes of Habermas’ project, in order to explain why the investment of time and energy that it requires remains worthwhile.
If you are stupid & have nothing better to do.
I have also tried to explain, more indirectly, why his death this month has been marked by so many as the end of an era.
Trump's victory in 2016 didn't just end an era. It sodomized that era so severely that it topped itself.
He was truly one of the giants of 20th century philosophy.
He didn't know mathematical logic & thus wasn't part of 20th century philosophy. Political theory, maybe. But there is a mathematical politics which is actually useful.
By comparison, contemporary political theory seems almost listless, uninterested in confronting the most fundamental, most urgent problems of the modern age.
It can say 'Boo to Trump! He is a Nazi!' just as well as anybody else.
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