Susan Barber                                                                            22 March 2005

Educ 902                                                                                  Contemp. Educ. Theory

                           Jürgen Habermas

COMMUNICATION AND THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY

        (Translated by Thomas McCarthy.  Boston:  Beacon Press, 1979.)

Abstract:  Any attempt to develop a full social theory which comprises both historico-hermeneutic and critical aspects can no longer be considered purely empirical-analytic science; by necessity it must transform into a historically oriented theory of society with a practical intent, wherein it captures the formative process of society as a whole by reconstructing temporary present factors that include both the past and the projected future.  Through this lens Habermas presents his “critical theory of society” on three levels:  first, a general theory of communication, or a “universal pragmatics”; second, a general theory of socialization in the form of the acquisition of communicative competence; and third, building on the previous two, a theory of social evolution, viewed as a reconstruction of historical materialism.

Chapter One: “What is Universal Pragmatics?”

            (Summary:  Earlier in his career, Habermas decided that the normative-theoretical foundations of critical theory would have to be based on human life itself, specifically on language, for it is language above all else that makes us human.  His first task was to find a theory of language, and especially a universal pragmatics, which states that not only phonetic, syntactic and semantic aspects of sentences but the act of speaking itself situates the sentence in relation to an external reality (“world” of objects about which one can make true or false statements), an internal reality (speaker’s own world of intentional experiences), as well as the normative reality of society (our world of shared values and norms which are right or wrong).  From this pragmatic view then, speech raises “validity” claims that are not related to linguistic claims.  Therefore, Habermas believes universal pragmatics can offer a unifying framework for a large range of theories – from the theory of knowledge to the theory of social action.)

Habermas begins by defining the task of “universal pragmatics” as, 

…to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible understanding (Verständigung).   In other contexts, one also speaks of ‘general presuppositions of communication’ but I prefer to speak of general presuppositions of communicative action because I take the type of action aimed at reaching understanding to be fundamental.  (1). 

Along with Karl-Otto Apel, Habermas agrees there are things we must always presuppose or take for granted in our attempts to communicate and understand one another.  For example, we involuntarily assume there are “normative conditions of the possibility of understanding” (2).  Specifically, anyone communicating with another may raise validity claims, and at the same time, will satisfy them if she claims to be, 

a)     Uttering something understandably;

b)     Giving the hearer something to understand;

c)     Making herself thereby understandable; and

d)     Coming to an understanding with another person (2)

If coming to a full agreement through use of these four criteria were always possible, it would no longer be necessary to examine the process of understanding.   In reality, there are many areas of gray; incomprehension, misunderstanding, intentional or involuntary lying, concealed discord or pre-existing consensus may be factors that prevent full understanding.  As soon as doubt enters in, the participants negotiate for a new, mutually acceptable interpretation that will result in a new definition of the situation.  If the attempt fails, communicative action will cease.  A validity claim has been raised that must be resolved before communication can resume. 

Habermas’s thesis, then, is to propose to examine this process which he calls the “universal pragmatics”, or the act of human beings attempting to reconstruct validity claims in order to communicate. (3).  In order to defend his thesis against prevailing ideas in theories of language, he explores problems with analysis in the field, the major problem being the separation of study of language as structure and speaking as process.  Habermas sees no distinction between using a language and speaking to communicate.  The negotiation of meaning between participants cannot be abstracted out. 

I would like to begin (clarifying the distinction between empirical-analytic and reconstructive sciences) with the distinction between sensory experience or observation and communicative experience or understanding… Observation is directed to perceptible things and events (or states); understanding is directed to the meaning of utterances.  The observer is in principle alone (a single observer)…. In contrast, the interpreter who understands meaning is experiencing fundamentally as a participant in communication…(within an) intersubjective relationship with other individuals.   (9). 

In other words, the pairs of concepts, perceptible reality vs. symbolically prestructured reality, or observation vs. understanding, can be reduced to description vs. explication.  By starting with a sentence that describes a pure observation, we can list the observed aspects of reality.   By starting with a sentence that gives an interpretation of the meaning of a symbolic formation, we can explain the meaning of such an utterance.  (10). 

There are also two levels of explication of meaning.  When the meaning of a sentence is unclear, we are first directed to the semantic content of the symbolic formation; i.e. the meaning of language shown by the symbols of letters printed on the page.   

In trying to understand its content, we take up the same position as the “author” adopted when she wrote the sentence, performed the gesture, used the tool, applied the theory, and so forth.   Often too we must go beyond what was meant and intended by the author and take into consideration a context of which she was not conscious.  Typically, however, the understanding of content pursues connections that link the surface structures of the incomprehensible formation with the surface structures of other, familiar formation…. If (the interpreter) cannot attain her end in this way, … it may be necessary to alter her attitude… The interpreter draws on semantic meaning relations… and tries not only to apply intuitive knowledge but to reconstruct it.  (11-12). 

Ryle divides “know-how” (the skill a person has for producing or performing something) and “know-that” (the awareness of how she does this or the understanding that she is doing this).  This “know-that” skill is the task of reconstructive understanding that involves a rational reconstruction of the generative structures that underlie the production of symbolic formations, and therefore a knowledge of rules for doing this.   

Ultimately, this is the basis of Habermas’s comparison of the two versions of the science of language, one empirical-analytic, the other reconstructive.  His point here has been to deal with objections to his thesis and he argues for not limiting our study of communication to merely observation and empirical-analytic studies.   

Now Habermas takes a look at universal pragmatics vs. transcendental hermeneutics in light of Kant. 

Kant terms transcendental an investigation that identifies and analyzes the ‘a priori’ conditions of possibility of experience.  The underlying idea is clear:  in addition to the empirical knowledge that relates to objects of experience, there is, supposedly, a transcendental knowledge of concepts of objects in general that precedes experience. (21). 

Habermas allows for a “minimalist” acceptance of the transcendental in that every coherent experience is organized in a categorical network to the extent that we discover the same general conceptual structure that allows some reconstruction of a basic conceptual system.  But for Habermas, it is so general that the claim for ‘a priori’ experience is found to be insignificant.    

Although Apel refers to “transcendental hermeneutics” or “transcendental pragmatics”, Habermas disagrees with the usage.   

The expression ‘situation of possible understanding’ that would correspond to the expression ‘object of possible experience’ from this point of view, already shows, however, that acquiring the experiences we have in processes of communication is secondary to the goal of reaching understanding that these processes serve.  The general structures of speech must first be investigated from the perspective of understanding and not from that of experience….Experiences are, if we follow the basic Kantian idea, constituted; utterances are at most generated. (24). 

Habermas feels that the theory of speech acts has fundamental assumptions upon which a universal pragmatics can be based, adapted from ideas of Austin and Searle.  But again, he would like to emphasize the difference between linguistics, theory of speech acts and universal pragmatics.   

The basic universal-pragmatic intention of speech-act theory is expressed in the fact that it thematizes the elementary units of speech (utterances) in an attitude similar to that in which linguistics does the units of language (sentences).  The goal of reconstructive language analysis is an explicit description of the rules that a competent speaker must master in order to form grammatical sentences and to utter them in an acceptable way.  The theory of speech acts shares this task with linguistics.  Whereas the latter starts from the assumption that every adult speaker possesses an implicit, reconstructable knowledge, in which is expressed her linguistic rule competence (to produce sentences), speech-act theory postulates a corresponding communicative rule competence, namely the competence to employ sentences in speech acts.  A general theory of speech actions would thus describe exactly that fundamental system of rules that adult subjects master… (26)

Therefore, linguistic analysis can be examined from three points of view:  Phonetics (from the underlying meaning of sound), syntactic (the formal connections from the smallest meaningful units) and semantics (meaning of language).  It is in this later area that linguistics must yield to pragmatic aspects. 

Universal pragmatics on the other hand, are all the particular functions that an utterance can assume, and those are summed up in three functions,

With the help of a sentence, to represent something in the world, to express the speakers’ intentions and to establish legitimate interpersonal relations… The fulfillment of those general functions is measured against the validity conditions for truth, truthfulness and rightness. (33).

The goal of speech-act theory is to define the “performative” status of linguistic utterances.  Austin clarified the sense that sentences carry as the “illocutionary force”; i.e., in uttering a promise, an assertion, a warning, etc. in a sentence, the speaker tries to make a promise, or issue a warning, etc.  When we want to be understood in a certain situation, every utterance is aimed at bringing expression a certain relation between the speaker and hearer.  The illocutionary force aims at fixing the communicative function of the content uttered.  Habermas feels,

It is to this generative power that I trace the fact that a speech act can succeed (or fail).  We can say a speech act succeeds if a relation between the speaker and the hearer comes to pass – indeed the relation intended by the speaker – and if the hearer can understand and accept the content uttered by the speaker in the sense indicated…. The speaker…influence the hearer in such a way that the latter can take up an interpersonal relation with her. (35).

Therefore, Habermas sees a double structure to speech, where many sentences have both meaning and force, as seen in the following sentences,

Father’s new car is yellow (locutionary – meaning only)

I’m notifying you, father’s new car is yellow. (illocutionary – meaning and force)

I’m telling you, father’s new car is yellow. (“  “)

I assure you…

Locutionary acts of speech are constatives and reflect truth/ untruth, whereas illocutionary acts are performatives and influence the speaker in some manner.  Communication in language occurs when participants move into two simultaneous levels of speaking, the level of prepositional content or utterances about something, and, the level of intersubjectivity where they enter into interpersonal relations.  In speaking, we can choose to emphasize either one more strongly, so that thematically, we make more interactive or more cognitive use of our language.  This difference of thematics results from stressing one of the validity claims over another; in cognitive use of language we raise truth claims for propositions, and in the interactive use of language we claim (or reject) a normative context for interpersonal relations.  (55).

In concluding this chapter on “universal pragmatics” Habermas puts forth a model of linguistic communication that satisfies what he has determined lacking in previous models:

Chapter Two:  “Moral Development and Ego Identity”

(Summary:  Habermas takes as a starting point that because the autonomous ego and an emancipated society are interconnected, basic psychological concepts must be integrated with basic socioeconomic concepts in developing a comprehensive social theory.   This essay focuses only on one aspect, that of the development of the moral consciousness, and Habermas traces the stages of this ability within the larger project of his concept of interactive competence.   Here, he assumes that moral consciousness is the ability communicating participants employ when dealing “consciously” with moral conflicts.)

Habermas sees a connection between: 1) patterns of socialization, 2) the stages of adolescence that are triggered by crises, 3) the construction of identity which are deeply indicative of moral development, and 4) ego identity; all of which are the related to the basic foundations of critical theory.  Ego identity in particular reflects the symbolic organization of the ego which lays claim to being a universal since it is found in the formative processes, while paradoxically, an autonomous ego organization is hardly the result of a natural process of maturation and appears at different rates in individuals.  And yet, when psychoanalysis is used as a tool for interpreting language, there are normative models in the ego, superego and id to be held up as examples of unconstrained, pathologically undistorted communication. (70).   Studies by Fromm, Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse all follow,

the same conceptual strategy:   basic psychological and sociological concepts can be interwoven because the perspectives projected in them of an autonomous ego and an emancipated society reciprocally require one another.  (71)

Habermas identifies three separate theoretical traditions that attempt to define the concept of ego identity:  analytic ego psychology (Sullivan, Erikson); cognitive developmental psychology (Piaget, Kohlberg); and symbolic interactionist theory of action (Mead, Blumer, Goffman).  Consider their points of convergence:

1.     The ability of the adult subject to speak and act is the result of the integration of maturational and learning processes…. (the) motivational development (to mature and learn) seems to be intimately connected with the acquisition of interactive competence, that is the ability to take part in interactions.

2.     The formative process of subjects capable of speaking and acting runs through an irreversible series of discrete and increasingly complex stages of development; no stage can be skipped over, and each higher stage implies the preceding stage in the sense of a rationally reconstructable pattern of development.

3.     The formative process is not only discontinuous but as a rule is crisis-ridden.  The resolution of stage-specific developmental problems is preceded by a phase of destructuration and, in part, by regression.  The experience of the productive resolution of a crisis, that is, of overcoming the dangers of pathological paths of development, is a condition for mastering later crises.

4.     The developmental direction of the formative process is characterized by increasing autonomy (independence that the ego acquires through successful problem-solving.)

5.     The identity of the ego signifies the competence of a speaking and acting subject to satisfy certain consistency requirements.  A provisional formulation by Erikson runs as follows:  “The feeling of ego identity is the accumulated confidence that corresponding to the unity and continuity which one has in the eyes of others, there is an ability to sustain an inner unity and continuity.  Natural ego identity…consists… in a competence that is formed in social interactions.   Identity is produced through socialization…it is later secured and developed through individuation…

6.     The transposition of external structures into internal structures is an important learning mechanism…With this mechanism is connected the further principle of achieving independence – whether from external objects, reference persons, or one’s own impulses – by actively repeating what one has at first passively experienced or undergone. (72-75).

Habermas finds three main difficulties with these concepts, namely, 1) how the ego is developed through employing dimensions of behavioral control or superego formations, 2) that given stages of development follow an inner logic, and 3) that there may be alternate paths of development or that society may interfere with the pattern. 

In response, he points at Kohlberg’s six stages of a rational reconstructable development of moral consciousness.  Habermas defines moral consciousness as expressing itself,

in judgments about morally relevant conflicts of action.  I call those action conflicts “morally relevant” that are capable of consensual resolution.  

In light of this view, Habermas presents Kohlberg’s moral stages of development:

I.                 Preconventional level – the child is responsive to cultural rules and labels of good and bad, right and wrong, but interprets these labels in terms of either the physical or the hedonistic consequences of action (punishment, reward, exchange of favors), or in terms of the physical power of those who enunciate the rules and labels…Avoidance of punishment is valued in its own right but not in terms of respect for an underlying moral order.  Right action is what instrumentally satisfies one’s own needs… Reciprocity is a matter of ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’.

II.               Conventional level – (involves) maintaining the expectations of the individual’s family, group or nation (which) is perceived as valuable in its own right…The attitude is not only one of conformity to personal expectations and social order, but of loyalty to it, of actively maintaining it…Behavior is frequently judged by intention… One earns approval by being ‘nice’…  There is an orientation towards authority, fixed rules …(law and order.)

III.            Postconventional, autonomous or principled level – there is a clear effort to define moral values and principles which have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups or persons holding these principles…Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights, and standards which have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society.  There is a clear awareness of the relativism of personal values…Right is defined by the decision of conscience in accord with self-chosen ethical principles appealing to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency.  These principles are abstract and ethical (the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative); they are not concrete moral rules like the Ten Commandments.   At heart, these are universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity and equality of human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons. (80).

If we look at the above levels we see that each gives role qualifications that can be placed in a certain hierarchy, that of 1) reflexivity, 2) abstraction and differentiation and 3) generalization.   This suggests that a developmental-logical pattern exists along Piaget’s lines.  If that is correct, the same would hold true for stages of moral consciousness, insofar as they can be derived from the levels of role competence. (87).  For Habermas,

Moral consciousness signifies the ability to make use of interactive competence for consciously processing morally relevant conflicts of action.  You will recall that the consensual resolution of an action conflict requires a viewpoint that is open to consensus…Competent agents will – independently of accidental commonalities of social origin, tradition, basic attitude, and so on – be in agreement about such a fundamental point of view only if it arises from the very structures of possible interaction.   The reciprocity between acting subjects is such a point of view… Their relationship is completely reciprocal if both may do or expect the same thing in comparable situations.  (88).

The identity of the ego presents a paradox:  just the fact of being a human being implies that the ego is like other egos, but if we look at an individual, this ego is different from all other egos.  Ego identity “proves” itself in the ability of an adult to create new identities in conflict situations and to resolve these in relation to previous identities, which, when taken together, form a unique life history.  Up till now, Habermas has only focused on the cognitive aspects of ego identity, not the motivational aspects.  This, however, screens out the psychodynamics, especially of instinctive processes of the formative process. 

In the dynamics of superego formation, we can see the instrumental role that libidinous energies, in the form of a narcissistic attachment to the self, play in the development of ego ideas; we can also see the function that aggressive energies, turned against the self, assume in the establishment of the authority of conscience.  But above all, the two major maturational crises – the Oedipal phase and adolescence – in which sex roles are learned and the motive-forming powers of the cultural tradition are put to the test, show that the ego can enter into and penetrate beyond structures of interaction only if its needs can be admitted into and adequately interpreted within the symbolic universe…(It is an) extraordinarily dangerous process…Lying in the range of the normal are the frequent discrepancies between moral judgment and moral action. (91).

Because conflicts and crises put a person under stress for consciously working out solutions, moral consciousness is an indicator of the degree of stability of general interactive competence.  We label “morally good” the person who under stress can maintain a moral consciousness that allows her to maintain interactive competence instead of unconsciously defending herself against conflict.  External reality and instinctual impulses are not the only sources of danger; the sanctions of the superego present a threat.  In defending against anxieties, we conceal the discrepancy between our ability to judge and our willingness to act. (92).  However, specific identity formations promote such anxieties because they allow moral insights that are actually more advanced than if the anxiety did not exist. 

Habermas says this is the next stage in moral consciousness development – from an ethics of duty to an ethics of speech.  Internal nature is not subjected to the demands of the autonomous ego, but as a dependent ego, can find free access to the interpretive possibilities of the cultural tradition.  In this way, it can seek and find adequate interpretations.  

Ego identity means a freedom that limits itself in the intention of reconciling – if not identifying – worthiness with happiness.

Chapter 3:  “Historical Materialism and the Development of Normative Structures”

            (Summary:  In this essay and the next, Habermas now turns his eye to the proper socio-logical level of his project:   the theory of social evolution.  This is very much an outgrowth of his earlier proposals, that social evolution is a reconstruction of historical materialism, which is based on the idea of developments in the sphere of social integration following their own internal logic.  Put another way, “praxis cannot be reduced to techne, nor rationality to purposive or instrumental rationality…” (xxi) Habermas tests this against his framework of communicative competence, which he examines through three areas:  rationality structures in ego development and the evolution of world views;  ego and the group collective; and, the development of moral consciousness and the evolution of moral and religious representation.)

When Marx attempted to state a social theory there was, according to Habermas, a lack of clarity regarding the normative foundation.  Marx thought he had avoided the “bad philosophy” of earlier theories by combining Hegelian logic with historical materialism.  Habermas puts forth the idea that a philosophical ethics today is only possible “if we can reconstruct general presuppositions of communication and procedures for justifying norms and values.” (97) through validity claims in speech, claims to reason and so on.  Not only are there connections between the theory of communicative action and the foundations of historical materialism, but when we examine evolutionary theory, we can’t help but rub up against difficulties that make communications-theoretical reflections necessary. 

Whereas Marx localized the learning processes important for evolution in the dimension of objectivating thought – of technical and organizational knowledge of instrumental and strategic action, in short, of productive forces – there are good reasons meanwhile for assuming that learning processes also take place in the dimensions of moral insight, practical knowledge, communicative action and the consensual regulation of action conflicts – learning processes that are deposited in more mature forms of social integration, in new productive relations…The rationality structures that find expression in world views, moral representations, and identity formations that become practically effective in social movements and are finally embodied in institutional systems, thereby gain a strategically important position from a theoretical point of view. (98). 

Certainly ontogenetic models are simpler to analyze than their socio-evolutionary counterparts.  But there are homologous structures of consciousness in the history of the human species if we consider that linguistics permits an intersubjectivity of understanding which introduced sociocultural learning.  Thus, the reproduction of society and the socialization of its members belong to the same process and depend on the same structures. 

Two areas must be examined for their rationality structures:  first, ego development and the evolution of worldviews, and second, ego and group identities.  But first we must look at four stages of Piaget’s psychoanalytic and cognitive development:

a)     The symbiotic – in the first year of life, there is no sense of a separation between subject and object (mother and child).

b)     The egocentric -- sensory-motor and preoperative phases of development where the child succeeds in differentiating between self and environment, but without a sense of differentiating between physical vs. social environments.

c)     The sociocentric-objectivistic – stage of concrete operations where the child takes the step toward constructing a system of demarcation between things and events, and understandable action-subjects and their utterances.

d)     The universalistic – only in adolescence does a person free herself from the dogmatism of the preceding phase and begin to think hypothetically and conduct discourses.  She no longer accepts the validity claims contained in assertions and norms but transcends the objectivism of a given nature.  She begins to see the given in the light of principles and criticize existing norms. (102).

In light of ego development and world views, then, it must be remembered that individuals are not always representative of their society, nor are all members of society at the same stage of cognitive development, even as adults.  Also, the unifying power of worldviews of a society is directed not only against cognitive dissonance but also against social disintegration.  Legal and moral aspects are distinguished from concepts and structures that stabilize ego and group identities, i.e., gods, origins, concepts of the soul or fate, etc. 

Habermas goes on to compare society’s development as a whole through history as compared to the development of the ego in the individual.  In the logical structures of early societies, for example, mythology permits narrative explanations of a world view for the group by means of exemplary stories:  cosmological world views, philosophies and religions.  Here we are more interested in the structural analogies between worldviews and the system of ego demarcations.

Apparently the magical-animistic representational world of Paleolithic societies was very particularistic and not very coherent.  The ordering representations of mythology first made possible the construction of a complex of analogies in which all natural and social phenomena were interwoven and could be transformed into one another.  In the egocentric world conception of the child at the preoperational level of thought, these phenomena are made relative to the center of the child’s ego; similarly, in sociomorphic world views they are made relative to the center of the tribal group…myths establish a unity in the manifold of appearances in formal respects, this unity resembles the sociocentric-objectivistic world conception of the child at the stage of concrete operations.

The further transition from archaic to developed civilizations is marked by a break with mythological thought.  (New) world views, philosophies and higher religions replace the narrative explanations of mythological accounts with argumentative foundations…an explicitly teachable knowledge that can be dogmatized, that is, professionally rationalized.  (This) formally corresponds to the unity that the youth can establish at the stage of universalism.

In the course of the establishment of universalistic forms of intercourse in the capitalist economy in the modern state (the Reformation)…the highest principles lost their unquestionable character; religious faith and the theoretical attitude became reflective… The unity of theoretical and practical reason then became the key problem for modern world interpretations, which have lost their character as worldviews. (105).

The same parallels hold true when we compare the structures of ego identity and of group identity.  Habermas defines the “epistemic ego” as the ego in general, comprised of the linguistic, cognitive and active ability that individual egos have in common with all other egos.   On the other hand, forming and maintaining itself through performing its unique actions characterize the “practical ego”.   The practical ego facilitates the continuity of life history through repeatedly actualized self-identifications by locating itself in the intersubjective relations of social life.  When we make identifications of others, we single out certain bodily traits but also through communicative actions we ask a person to identify herself.    In other words, in ambiguous cases, we are required to identify other persons according to the characteristics through which they identify themselves.  Ironically, no one is able to construct an identity independently of the identifications that others make of her.  Subjects must reciprocally agree, therefore, about what distinguishes oneself from others.  It is not self-identification per se, but intersubjectively recognized self-identification.

In English, personal pronouns do the work of including and excluding others from one’s own identity.    For example,

1)     We took part in the demonstration (while you sat home).

2)     We are all in the same boat.  (108).

where sentence (1) is addressed to another group, and sentence (2) addresses members of the same group.  The logic behind the use of personal pronouns is key to the concept of identity.  Further, the unity of the person, established by this intersubjectively recognized self-identification, is determined by belonging to or demarcating oneself from, the symbolic reality of a group.  But if the development of moral consciousness through one’s life exceeds a stage, then role identity collapses.  When the ego judges certain principles to no longer be justified, then the person can no longer identify to the old roles and sets of norms.  At this point continuity can only be established through the ego’s own integrating ability.   The person learns to resolve identity crises by reestablishing itself at a higher level in response to the disturbed balance between self and the changed social reality, and role identity is replace by ego identity.

Habermas sees three provisos to these patterns of identity in individuals and the historical articulation of collective identities:

1) The collective identity of a group or society secures continuity and recognizability but societies do not have the “cut-off” points such as birth and death that individuals do.  2) Collective identity also determines how a society demarcates itself from its natural and social environments through actions that are interpreted internal, whereas individuals are bounded by their personal experiences in exchange with her social environment.  3) The most important – is that collective identity regulates the membership of individuals in the society (or exclusion).  Here there is a complementary relation between ego and group identity, because the unity of the person is formed through relations to other persons of the same group. (111).

Habermas feels that in the past he underestimated the complexity of the connection of collective identities with worldviews and systems of norm.  It is not the whole of cultures which are germane to collective identity – only the “taken for granted”, consensual, basic values and institutions that are of fundamental validity, so much so that when individual members fear the destruction or violation of this normative core, they perceive it as a threat to their own personal identity. 

In a broad historical survey, Habermas pinpoints how collective identity was insured.   Neolithic societies secured their collective identity through tracing their descent from mythologies concerning a common ancestor who grounded their worldview.  Social reality was not yet clearly distinguished from the natural environment and contact with outside tribes was interpreted through kinship connections.  Later, as tribes encountered civilizations that could no longer be assimilated to their own, a threat was perceived to the collective identity.

As societies came to be organized through the state, group identities needed to be relativized and constructed more abstractly so that belonging meant sharing a territorial organization.  First, this meant identifying with the figure of a ruler who could claim access or connection to mythological powers.  But as the state grew, mythologies had to expand and this became unstable for rulers.  Eventually, collective identity had to break from mythological thought and the universalistic world interpretations of the founders of great religions and philosophies established their identity connections through teaching traditions.  Because members recognized common values in their ruler and the order he or she represented, they could accept political dominion.

The era of the “great empires” realized that collective identity could now only be secured through doctrines with a universal claim and political order had to be in accord with this claim.   But its boundaries were more fluid, including both allies and dependent states.  These empires had to demarcate themselves from the “barbarians”, who were to be conquered or converted, while only other empires existed outside its boundaries.  Their political existence did not require a system of reciprocal recognition.

Later, new discrepancies arose, that between identity formation through kinship and that of citizen.  In stratified civilizations the integrating power of the identity of the empire had to confirm itself in unifying structures within the country -- the aristocracy, tradesmen, religious leaders, officials -- and bind them to the same political order. 

This discrepancy increased in the transition to the modern world so much so that it became unavoidable.

The capitalist principle of organization meant the differentiation of a depoliticized and market-regulated economic system.  This domain of decentralized individual decisions was organized on universalistic principles in the framework of bourgeois civil law.  It was thereby supposed that the private, autonomous, legal subject pursued their interests in this morally neutralized domain of intercourse in a purposive-rational manner, in accord with general maxims…Members of bourgeois society, whose conventional identity had been shattered, could now know themselves as a) free and equal subjects of civil law, b) morally free subjects (private person), and c) politically free subjects (citizen of a democratic state)…Thus the collective identity of bourgeois society developed under the highly abstract viewpoints of legality, morality and sovereignty.  (114).

The conflict between person and citizen was temporarily appeased through membership in nations, which is now finding its own point of departure in the European working class movement, conceived as socialism.  Identity has become reflective, in the knowledge that to a certain extent, individuals and societies themselves establish their identities.

Habermas is convinced that normative structures do not automatically follow the path of development of reproductive processes, nor do they respond to the pattern of system problems; rather they have an “internal history”. 

Communicative action can be rationalized neither under the technical aspect of the means selected nor under the strategic aspect but only under the moral-practical aspect of the responsibility of the acting subject and the justifiability of the action norm.  Rationality structures are embodied not only in amplifications of purposive-rational action – that is, in technologies, strategies, organizations, and qualifications – but also in mediations of communicative action – in the mechanisms for regulating conflict, in world views and in identity formations.  I would even defend the thesis that the development of these normative structures is the pacemaker of social evolution… (120).

Problems in systems present themselves as disturbances in the reproduction process of society that is normatively fixed in its identity.  It becomes a question of how to access a new learning level.  Every economic advancement was preceded by a need for a new rationality structure at a higher level of development; i.e., royal courts of justice permitted administration of justice at the conventional level of moral consciousness. 

For Habermas the question of taking historical materialism as a starting point refers back to Marx and the investigation of capitalist accumulation process, and Habermas see the anatomy of bourgeois society as key to the anatomy of premodern societies, and the analysis of capitalism provides a good starting point for his theory of social evolution.  Crises which threaten a society’s existence go hand in hand with accumulation process.  Actions that come to dominate social movements are structured by cultural traditions.  If we agree that social movements are learning processes where structures of rationality are translated into social practice and end up as institutions, then we see the potential of cultural traditions. (125).

Chapter Four:  “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism”

(Summary:  In this chapter, Habermas moves into a more detailed exploration of how law and morality developed, focusing mainly on the principles of logic behind this development.  Social evolution occurs as a two-tiered learning process:  cognitive/technical as well as moral/practical, with distinct stages that can be described structurally and follow a developmental logic.  The emphasis here is not on the institutionalization of certain values, but “the institutional embodiment of structures of rationality” which allows learning at new levels to take place.  The results of this learning make their way into the cultural tradition and form a “cognitive potential” that can be drawn upon for social movements when system problems require changing the forms of social integration.)

Instead of Marx’s materialist concept of history being interpreted purely as a theoretical framework, his work has been misunderstood as a heuristic intended for systematic application.   In 1938, Stalin codified Marx’s ideas to great consequence.  But historical materialism has not been accepted this way, neither by Marx and Engels, nor Marxist theoreticians, nor in the history of the labor movement.   Therefore Habermas is only viewing it as theory, especially as a theory of social evolution, mainly due to its reflective capabilities.

Habermas lays down some definitions of social labor and the history of the human species as connected to assumptions about historical materialism:

1.     Socially organized labor is the specific way in which humans, in contradistinction to animals, reproduce their lives…to produce the means of subsistence, a step is required towards physical organization.  By producing food, humans indirectly produce material life itself.  On the level of labor processes, one must describe the relation between organism (human) and environment.  The expenditure of human energy occurs but what is decisive is the sociological aspect of goal-directed transfer of material (food, etc.) according to the rules of instrumental action.  This is not only true for individuals, but depends on the social cooperation of many.  The production of life, in both procreation and one’s own labor, requires a social relationship.  Individuals cooperate no matter in what conditions or for what purpose.  A mode of production or industry is always combined with a mode of cooperation at the social stage, and this mode of cooperation is itself a “productive force”.   The distribution of products requires rules of interaction that can be set intersubjectively at levels of linguistic understanding and made permanent as recognized norms or rules of communicative action.  An economy is a system that socially regulates labor and distribution.  Marx sees the type of economy used in a society as indicative of the human stage of development. (131-132).

2.     Through anthropological findings, we see that social labor has distinguished humans from hominids and from apes.  It is not clear where actions mediated by gestures became a language of gestures, nor where true language came into usage, but communication developed through necessity in the hunt, making of tools and weapons (technology), division of labor (cooperative organization) and distribution of prey within the collective (rules of distribution).  The model of production was based on the kinship system, and the need for a controlled exchanged arose, also between hunters and gatherers.   Therefore the economy of the hunt/gathering is mediated by the familial social structure.  Previously, the apes’ system was based purely on power as an attribute of personality, the capacity to threaten or harm.  In contrast, the social role systems are based on the intersubjective recognition of normed expectations of behavior.  This change between apes and humans indicates a moralization of motives for action.  (134-135).

For a number of reasons, the above could not occur before language was fully developed.  For this reason, labor and language are older than Homo sapiens and society, specifically, a) because the concept of social labor is fundamental and the evolutionary achievement of socially organized labor and distribution obviously precedes the emergence of linguistic communication, which therefore precedes the development of social role systems; b) what became distinctly the human mode of life requires the combination of the concept of social labor and the familial principle of organization; c) the structures of role behavior mark a new stage of development in relation to social labor – the rules of communicative action cannot be reduced simply to rules of instrumental or strategic action; and, d) production and socialization, social labor and care for the young are equally important for the reproduction of the species.  Thus the familial social structure which controls both is fundamental. (137-138).

Marx also links the concept of social labor with the history of the species. 

In sustaining their lives through social labor, people produce at the same time the material relations of life; they produce their society and the historical process in which individuals change along with their society… Marx conceives of history as a discrete series of modes of production, which, in its specific developmental-logical order, reveals the direction of social evolution.   (138).

In the orthodox version, six modes of production are outlined:  1) the primitive communal mode of bands and tribes prior to civilization; 2) the ancient mode based on slaveholding; 3) the feudal; 4) the capitalist; 5) the socialist; and 6) in the ancient Orient and Americas there existed the village system. (139).  None of these were pure modes and often there was interrupted development or regressions.  But when we speak of evolution, it is in terms of cumulative progression, that indicates a direction.  Neoevolutionism cites “greater complexity” as an acceptable directional component and Marx felt the social division of labor and the system differentiation into subsystems reflected an internal complexity, but Habermas sees weaknesses here, in particular, that complexity comparisons can become blurred and there are no clear boundaries between complexity of the society and self-maintenance of the individual.  Habermas prefers Marx’s judgment of social development not by increasing complexity but by the stage of development of productive forces and by the maturity of the forms of social intercourse.  Progress here is measured against two validity claims:  the truth of proposition and the rightness of norms (142). 

Habermas believes it is important to look at the theory of “superstructure” in terms of historical materialism.  As people enter into relations of social production, a totality of these relations constitutes the economic structure of a society whose real foundations become seen as a legal and political/moral superstructure which corresponds to definite forms of social consciousness.   Every society is divided into subsystems that can be placed in hierarchies:  economic, administrative-political, social, and cultural.  Processes in higher subsystems are determined in the sense of causal dependency on the subsystems below it.  In times of crisis, Marx sees that the material productive forces come into conflict with the existing relations of production (i.e., property relations – who owns the factories, the farms, etc.).  Previously seen as forms of development, these relations are now viewed as what is holding society back.   Thus begins an era of social revolution.   The changes in the economic foundation now will lead towards the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.  (144-145).

The “dialectic” of forces and relations of production has often been understood in a technologistic sense.  Habermas believes we must separate the level of communicative action from that of the instrumental and strategic action combined in social cooperation. Evolutionary innovations are due to learning mechanisms that arise out of new forms of social integration; for example, the replacement of the kinship system with the state requires knowledge of a moral-practical sort and not technically useful knowledge than can be implemented in rules of instrumental and strategic action.  In other words, the species learns not due to the necessity for technically useful knowledge, (the technology follows the social need), but also in the dimension of moral-practical consciousness decisive for structures of interaction.  The rules of communicative action follow their own logic. (148),

Habermas analyzes how we can distinguish change in societies through history.  The “Neolithic revolution” signifies not only a new stage of development in productive forces but also a new mode of life.  Whereas hunters and gatherers seized what they could from nature, tillage and breeding required means of production (soil, livestock) and therefore raised questions of ownership.    Later, there was a noteworthy change in “world view”, from the mythological-cosmological worldview to a rationalized worldview in the form of cosmological ethics that took place between 8,000- 3,000 BC in Greece, China, India and the Middle East.  But it is still difficult to define universal stages of development without conceiving of a more abstract view of the mode of production, mainly on two levels, 1) regulation of access to means of production and 2) the structural compatibility of these rules with the stage of development of productive forces.     Also included must be considerations of claims to property vs. power over things; power over human labor-force vs. power over human movements; power to punish vs. immunity from punishment; privileges and liabilities in judicial process, family, social mobility, religious, political and military spheres.

Organizational principles of society can be characterized through the institutional core which reflects the dominant form of social integration.  But Habermas feels these institutions lie in too many different dimensions to be analyzed.  On the other hand, developmental-logical connections for the ontogenesis of action competence, especially moral competence, are more fruitful.  How individuals acquire competence passes through three stages:  1) symbolically mediated interaction, where speaking and acting are still enmeshed in the framework of a single imperativist mode of communication; 2) propositionally differentiated speech, where speaking and acting are separated.  Two reciprocal behavioral expectations can be coordinated in social roles.  3) argumentative speech, where validity claims can be justified that will make claims legitimate or illegitimate based on principles. (155).

To the extent that action conflicts are not regulated through force or strategic means but on a consensual basis, there come into play structures that mark the moral consciousness of the individual and the legal and moral system of society.  Habermas now goes back to determine the levels of social integration through history and their various structures:

-        Neolithic societies:  had a “conventional” structured system of action (motives assessed independently of concrete action consequences, but “preconventional” patterns of resolving moral conflicts still existed (subjects’ actions seen on a single plane of reality –only the consequences of action evaluated).  Legal regulation based on consequences, compensation and restoration of status quo.  Mythological “world view” enmeshed with system of action.

-        Early civilizations:  Conventional system of action but the mythological world view is now set off from the system of action, which takes on a legitimating function for the figure of authority.  Conventional morality tied to a ruler who administers justice (transition here from retaliation to punishment, joint liability to individual liability).

-        Developed civilizations:  Conventionally structured system of action, break with mythological thought and development of rationalized world view (with postconventional (justification from universalistic points of view) legal and moral representations.  Conventional morality detached from reference person of the ruler (developed system of administering justice, tradition-dependent but systemized law.)

-        Modern age:  Postconventionally structured domains of action – differentiation of a universalistically regulated domain of strategic action (capitalist enterprise, bourgeois civil law), approaches to a political will-formation grounded in principles (formal democracy); doctrines of legitimation (rational natural law) and strict separation of legality and morality; private morality guided by principles.  (157-158). 

Habermas faults many theories that fail to distinguish between system problems that overload the adaptive capacity of, say, the kinship system, and the evolutionary learning process that explains the change to a new form of social integration.  Only with the help of learning mechanisms can we explain why a few societies could find solutions to the directional problems that triggered their evolution, and in the case of kinship, they could find precisely the solution of organizing themselves by creating a state. 

The introduction of a new principle of organization means the establishment of a new level of social integration.  This in turn makes it possible to implement available or to produce new technical-organizational knowledge; it make possible, that is, an increase in productive forces and an expansion of system complexity.  Thus for social evolution, learning processes in the domain of moral-practical consciousness function as pacemakers. (160). 

Thus the line of development is as follows (in the example of how Neolithic society moved into the state phase): 

-        The initial state:  Neolithic societies in which the complexity of the kinship system had already led to a more strongly hierarchical organization were the “evolutionarily promising societies”.  They began to institute temporally limited political roles.  Chieftains or kings were judged by their concrete actions but not legitimated per se, and their roles were limited to special tasks (war, harvest), and had not yet moved to the center of social organization.  Particular system problems might arise that could not be managed under the kinship system, such as land scarcity, population density, or unequal distributions of social wealth.  Insolvable with time, they led to more frequent conflicts that overloaded the archaic system.

-        The testing of new structures:  Under pressure from evolutionary challenges, societies made use of the cognitive potential in their world views and institutionalized (at first on a trial basis) an administration of justice at the conventional level.  For example, the war chief was empowered to adjudicate cases of conflict, now according to socially recognized norms grounded in tradition.

-        Stabilization through the formation of systems:  These trial institutions could become the pacemakers of evolution.   Roles were permanently differentiated and stabilized so they became the core of a political subsystem. 

-        Emergence of class structures:  The emergence of a political order organized society so its members could belong to different lineages.  The function of social integration passed from kinship to political relations.  Collective identity was no longer based in the figure of a common ancestor but in that of a common ruler.  On the basis of political domination the material production process could then be uncoupled from the limiting conditions of the kinship system and reorganized along lines of domination.  The ruler secured the loyalty of officials, of the priest and warrior families by assuring them privileged access to the means of production (palace and temple economy). 

-        The development of productive forces:  The forces that were already discovered in the Neolithic revolution could now be utilized on a large scale:  the intensification of cultivation and stock-farming, and the expansion of crafts were the results of the enlarged organizational capacity of class society.  Thus there emerged new forms of cooperation (i.e., irrigation farming) or of exchange (market exchange between town and country).  (161-163).

Ironically, evolutionarily important innovations mean not only a new level of learning but also a new problem situation as well.  That is, a new category of burdens accompanies each new social formation.  In industrial capitalism, society consciously placed itself under the imperatives of economic growth and increasing wealth.  Value came into consciousness as a scarce resource.  The experience of social inequality called into being social movements and corresponding strategies of appeasement.  These seemed to lead to their goal in social welfare state mass democracies.  Finally, if postmodern societies, as they are seen today, should be characterized by a primacy of the scientific and educational systems, one can speculate about the emergence of the problem of a self-regulated exchange of society with internal nature.  Again, a scarce resource would become problematic – not due to a supply of power, security or value, but the supply of motivation and meaning.   Perhaps a new institutional core would then take shape around a new organizational principle, in which there merge elements of public education, social welfare, liberalized punishment and therapy for mental illness.  New historical needs are coming to the fore and it follows that the logical space for evolutionarily new problems is exhausted by the reflexive turn of motive formation and the structural scarcity of meaning.  The discovery then of the internal limits which the socialization process runs up against will coincide with the outbreak of new contingencies at the limits of social individuation.  (166-167).

Habermas examines many parallel theories in different disciplines and defends against other approaches to establishing other theories.  He does not

regard the choice of the historical-materialist criterion of progress as arbitrary.  The development of productive forces, in conjunction with the maturity of the forms of social integration, means progress of learning ability in both dimensions:   progress in objectivating knowledge and in moral-practical insight. (177).

Chapter Five:  “Legitimation Problems in the Modern State”

            (Summary: An important contribution to the analysis of contemporary capitalism, this essay argues that legitimation problems arise in developed capitalist societies due to a fundamental flaw in the system, a conflict between social welfare responsibilities and the functional conditions of the economy.  If the form of life reflected by capitalism – rewards such as money, free time and security – can no longer be legitimated, then the “pursuit of happiness” may come to mean something different – perhaps not about accumulating material objects but pursuing social relations in which mutuality is valued, and achieving satisfaction in life does not involve the success of one due to repression of another.)

In defining “legitimacy” we mean there are good arguments for a political order’s claim to be right and just; when an order is legitimate, it deserves to be recognized because it is worthy.  In stating it this way, we are highlighting the fact that legitimacy is contestable as a validity claim and the stability of the order of domination also depends on its recognition.  If the order of domination comes into crisis, it is connected to change in the basic institution not only of the state but of society as a whole, and then we begin to speak of revolutions.

Only political orders can possess or lose legitimacy and only political orders require legitimacy.  Multinational corporations or the world market are outside of legitimation.  This is also true of kinship relations.  Historically, political domination concentrated around the function of the royal judge.  The judge’s legitimate power became the nucleus to which the society handed over the function of intervening when its integrity was threatened.  We recall it is not the state that establishes collective identity, but because the state aims to prevent social disintegration by way of binding decisions, its exercise of power is tied to maintaining society in it normatively determined identity.

Problems of legitimacy are not a modern phenomenon.  We only need to look at Rome and the Middle Ages, if not since Aristotle.     Legitimacy conflicts arose in all older civilizations in the wake of colonization, when societies collided with states.   In traditional societies, conflicts typically took the form of prophetic and messianic movements that turned against the official version of religious doctrine.  Insurgents appealed to the original religious content of the doctrine; for example, prophetic movements in Israel, the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire, the heretical movements in the Middle Ages. (181).

Habermas believes legitimation problems are also tied to class conflicts.  From the kinship system, class emerged as a structure of privilege of estates, castes and ranks.  In the Middle Ages, revolts by peasants, journeymen and urban communities were frequent.   Legitimacy conflicts were not as a rule carried out in terms of economic conflicts but on the level of legitimating doctrines.   They were related to concepts of collective identity that established unity and guaranteed consensus.  Therefore,

The claim to legitimacy is related to the social-integrative preservation of a normatively determined social identity.  Legitimations serve to make good this claim, that is, to show how and why existing institutions are fit to employ political power in such a way that the values constitutive for the identity of the society will be realized…What are accepted as reason and have the power to produce consensus, and thereby to shape motivations, depends on the level of justification required in a given situation.

What are these levels of justification?  In early Egypt, ruling families justified themselves with the help of myths of origin.  The pharaohs represented themselves first as gods – the god Horus, son of Osiris.  In later civilizations, the need for legitimation grew.  Now not only the person as ruler had to be justified but a political order needed to be grounded in ethics, higher religions and philosophies, which produced the great “founders”, like Confucius, Buddha, Socrates and Jesus.  These rationalized worldviews took on the dogma of knowledge and arguments replaced narrative.  In modern times, we learned to distinguish between theoretical and practical argumentation.  With Rousseau and Kant, this development led to the formal principle of reason replacing material principles such as nature and God in practical questions about justification of norms and actions.  Ultimate grounds were no longer acceptable; therefore, the formal conditions of justification themselves obtained legitimating force.

These levels of justification can be ordered hierarchically, where legitimations on one level are superseded and depreciated by another, higher level.  Habermas believes the depreciatory shifts are connected with social-evolutionary transitions to new learning levels, those that lay down the possibility for learning processes in the dimensions of both objectivating thought and practical insight.  What is decisive in the modern age is that the level of justification has become reflective. 

The procedures and presuppositions of justification are themselves now the legitimating grounds on which the validity of legitimations is based.  The idea of an agreement that comes to pass among all parties, as free an equal, determines the procedural type of legitimacy of modern times.  (By contrast, the classical type of legitimacy was determined by the idea of teachable knowledge of an ordered world.)… This procedure type of legitimacy was first worked out by Rousseau.  The contrat social that seals the break with nature means a new principle of regulating behavior:   the social.  It shows by what path “justice can replace instinct in (human) behavior”.  That situation in which every individual totally gives himself …over to the community sums up the conditions under which only those regulations count as legitimate which express a common interest, that is, the general will. (185).

Habermas now turns to legitimation problems that are arising in the modern state.  When we leave behind a narrowly politicized view which fixates on the state, we can consider the emergence of capitalist society in terms of internal and external issues.  Internally, the modern state is

the result of the differentiation of an economic system which regulates the production process through the market – in a decentralized and unpolitical manner.  The state organizes the conditions under which the citizens, as competing and strategically acting private persons, carry on the production process.  The state itself does not produce….(but) develops and guarantees bourgeois civil law, the monetary mechanism and certain infrastructures – overall the prerequisites for the continued existence of a depoliticized economic process set free from moral norms and orientations to use value.  Since the state does not itself engage in capitalist enterprise, it has to siphon off the resources for its ordering achievements from private incomes.  The modern state is a state based on taxation. (189).

Compared to the state of feudalism, the modern state gains greater functional autonomy.  But because it is excluded from capitalist production, it is forced into the position of creating the formal and increasingly material conditions for carrying on production and accumulation, as well as ensuring that their continuity does not founder on the instabilities inherent in the process. 

The external aspects of the state emerge over history as a system of states.  Starting in the sixteenth century, European traditional power structures were dissipated as secular and spiritual authority parted ways and trade centers developed.  The modern system of states emerged as the world market became dominated by European trade.  However, no one state gained power to control the worldwide relations of trade and the modern state took shape not only together with an internal economic environment but with an external one as well.

These two aspects of state structure, internal and external, show that the process of state building had to react upon the form of collective identity.  Previously, great empires could demarcate themselves externally from other states territorially through incorporation or subjugation, but the identity of such empires had to be anchored internally in the consciousness of a small elite.  Whereas with the emergence of nations, collective identity was transformed under the pressure of the modern state structure.  The nation is a “structure of consciousness” that satisfies two imperatives:

1)     It makes the formally egalitarian structures of bourgeois civil laws (political democracy) in internal relations subjectively compatible with the particularistic structures of self-assertion of sovereign states in external relations.

2)     It makes possible a high degree of social mobilization of the population (for all share in the national consciousness).  (191).

However, the bourgeois state could not rely on the integrative power of national consciousness alone.  It struggled to avert conflicts inherent in the economic system and shunt them into the political system as an institutionalized struggle over distribution.  When this was successful, the modern state began to adopt one of the forms of “social welfare state-mass democracy”. 

Today, we see legitimation problems in developed capitalist societies arising from fundamental conflicts.  In the “social welfare state-mass democracy”, two properties which are effective for legitimation are, 1) regulating competition between political parties and a public which participates in voting; and 2) when threats to legitimation can be averted by the state intervening in dysfunctional side-effects and rendering them harmless to the individual (mainly through social security, equal-opportunity to schooling, etc.)  We measure three great areas of responsibility in the government’s performance today in:  shaping a business policy that ensures growth, influencing production towards collective needs and correcting the pattern of social inequality.  And herein lies the conflict:

the state is supposed to perform all these tasks without violating the functional conditions of a capitalist economy… The interdependence of conditions in once-private domains increased the susceptibility to disturbance and also gave these disturbances a politically relevant scale.   Thus the dysfunctional side effects of the economic process could less and less be segmented from one another and neutralized in relation to the state… This places the state in a dilemma. (195).

Thus the legitimation problem of the state today is not concerned with how to redescribe the functional relations between state and capitalist economy in terms of ideological definitions of public welfare, but rather in terms of the accomplishments of the capitalist economy, specifically casting it as the best possible satisfaction of general interests while keeping dysfunctional side effects within acceptable limits.  But there are restrictive conditions for legitimation, such as goal conflicts between state and economy (such as downward business cycles, unemployment, inflation), which is seen as failure of the state; the consequences of interlacing national economies with one another (the influence of multinational corporations cannot be neutralized), and lastly, the planning of ideology in the expansion of the educational system is susceptible to self-contradiction (mixed or conflicting messages in the media).

It is difficult to determine the weight of particular factors that indicate signs of delegitimation.  Throughout history, people have wanted money, free time and security.  These “primary goods” are represented as means for acquiring an indefinite multiplicity of concrete ends selecting according to values.  In “opportunity structures” are reflected a form of life that has its “crystallizing point” in possessive individualism.  Habermas doubts that the form of life mirrored in system-conforming rewards can today be as convincingly legitimated as it could in Hobbes’s time.  Of course, such questions are irrelevant if the powers that be are successful in redefining practical questions into technical questions and avoiding the value-universalism aspect that spurred bourgeois society into action.  Thus,

The “pursuit of happiness” might one day mean something different – for example, not accumulating material objects of which one disposes privately, but bringing about social relations in which mutuality predominates and satisfaction does not mean the triumph of one over the repressed needs of the other.  In this connection it is important whether the educational systems can again be coupled to the occupational system, and whether discursive desolidification of the (largely externally controlled or traditionally fixed) interpretations of our needs in homes, schools, churches, parliaments, planning administrations, bureaucracies, in culture production, generally, can be avoided. (199).

In conclusion, Habermas returns to the conceptual-analytic beginning of the essay.  He criticizes social scientists like Max Weber for their understanding of legitimacy as an order of domination measured against the belief in its legitimacy on the part of those subject to the domination.  In response, Habermas asks, can legitimation be created?   Learning theorists accommodate the question of the sociopsychological conditions under which a belief in legitimacy can be established in a theory of the motivation for obedience. ((199).