Martin Morris's book is written very much within the discourse of Frankfurt critical theory. It is specifically directed against those proponents of Frankfurt critical theory who identify its most advanced developments with Habermas's theory of communicative action. As is well known, Habermas explicitly sees his own critical theory of society as overcoming what he takes to be the defects of idealist philosophy and the philosophy of consciousness at the heart of Adorno's (and Horkheimer's) critiques of instrumental reason and of representation. In a bold move, Morris turns the tables on Habermas, criticizing both his theory of communication and his systems theory of society from the vantage point of Adorno's dialectical criticism of identity and reified consciousness.

In general, Morris accuses Habermas of failing to provide an adequate critique of the reification of social relations. Unlike Marx and the tradition of ideological critique transmitted to the Frankfurt School through Georg Lukács, Habermas, according to Morris, fails to find an adequate theory to criticize the reproduction of reified relations through the transformation of labor into exchange values. Habermas, furthermore, does not do a sufficient job of challenging “real abstraction” that flows from reification. Having abandoned the Marxian concept of “totality,” and thereby total critique of reification, he fails to challenge the tendency of ordinary social actors to treat exchange relations as given brute reality (pp. 88, 93).

For Morris, the cause of this defect has numerous reasons, of which three are essential to his argument. First, Habermas's systems-theoretic approach to society unnecessarily limits the criticism of reification to the invasion of instrumental and strategic action into the lifeworld of understood and validated meanings. That is, by maintaining the autonomy of the subsystems of economy, state, and administration, Habermas, according to Morris, fails to appreciate the Marxian insight that reification in the life-world is a necessary outcome of capitalist production and reproduction, that the activities of production and exchange cannot be contained within one functional system but produce and reproduce reified relations in all spheres of life. Second, Habermas wrongly finds an isomorphic relation between nature and purposive or instrumental activity mediated by power and money on the one hand, and communicative reason in the life-world. Arguing in a similar manner to Herbert Marcuse, Morris argues that technology can be liberated from its instrumental control over nature as part of a general transcendence of capitalist relations. Lastly, Habermas's theory of intersubjective understanding through communicative reasoning stands accused of capitulating to “identity thinking.” Unlike Adorno, who views the belief in reconciliation of the subject with objective circumstances as a historical fiction reproduced by capitalist relations, Habermas, on Morris's reading, reconciles himself to these relations in his claim that autonomy and self-identity can be achieved through the pragmatics of rational agreement (pp. 130, 148).

Thus, for Morris, Habermas has not overcome the need for Adorno's famous negative dialectic—the relentless uncovering in all manifestations of social life and thought of the breach between concept and its referent, between representation and the thing represented. On the contrary, Habermas, according to Morris, fails to immunize communicative reason from instrumental and strategic activity both at the sociological and conceptual levels. Thus, Adorno's criticism of language has not been vitiated but presents a less compromised account of Frankfurt School critical theory than that of Habermas.

Morris is scrupulously fair in presenting Habermas's theory of communicative action and criticism of the earlier Frankfurt School. However, time and again he levitates his own position above his opponent by simple assertion: We “ought” not foreclose on a general opposition to reification (p. 94) or “it is very important to allow such a challenge” (p. 86). To be sure, Morris's intention here is to keep a space open for the style of critical theory “represented” by Adorno. But to make his case against Habermas, Morris needs to show analytically where Habermas's reframing of Max Weber's rationalization theory to include a noninstrumental sphere of communicative reason and his subsuming of Marx's criticism of valorization of capital within his notion of the economic subsystem overlooks an entry point for the total dialectical criticism of reification that Morris wants to defend. Morris suggests such a possible analytical weakness in Habermas's identification of instrumental purposive activity as part of an ontology of action, but he does not show where such an identification goes wrong, or more basically, how we can do without means–ends calculations as part of social, economic, and political life.

It is in the defense of Adorno where this book truly makes its contribution, and here the contrast with Habermas works very nicely indeed. For Morris, Adorno's account of “aesthetic mimesis” provides a way of both criticizing reification and holding open the intimation of a society beyond reification. It does this by representing the contradiction between representation and the thing represented, between concept and referent, between subjective consciousness and the phenomenal world, and thereby undermines hypostatization of the socially given as brute reality. Yet this experience occurs in what does not seem, at least to this reader, a particularly social or political moment, namely, the moment of “the mimetic shudder,” a sudden dislocation of the senses that comes about when a work of art undermines its own appearance of verisimilitude. Indeed, one might want to say that Adorno valorizes this experience precisely because, unlike Habermas, he sees no social or political space for an alternative to instrumentalized and reified relations. Nevertheless, on Morris's reading, this disruptive moment in aesthetic representation upholds the possibility of a society based on nonidentity, and so it provides Morris with a critical-ethical standpoint to counterpose to Habermas's communicative reason.

At the end of the day, Morris's book still leaves one with the sense that Adorno's valorization of aesthetic mimesis and Habermas's valorization of rational communication are driven by conflicting ideals of a society without reification and domination. For Adorno, aesthetic perception always holds open the possibility of a society in which identity is never fixed, in which domination is overcome but, nonetheless, there is a sense always of something left out, left over, uncomprehended: Individual expression is always in tension with social reason. It is this notion of society that is embraced by Morris—although in keeping with the desire not to produce a false identity, the lineaments of this society can be only vaguely articulated. For Habermas, the very possibility of weighing truth claims through rational discussion bespeaks a society in which conventional life is constantly subject to increasing clarification, justification, and rational agreement. Rationally justifying the conditions of social and political and economic life trumps, so to speak, a defense of the ineffable, unknowable, the nonrepresentable in subjectivity. It would seem that we are thus left with two seemingly divergent roads away from a society of reified social relations. Morris wants to leave us with more than simply a lucid choice between two almost completely disparate styles of social theory. But the question is whether he in fact does.

Opening up a space within critical theory for “non-dominating mimises” is as far away from the discourse of Joseph Heath's book, Communicative Action and Rational Choice, as one could imagine. Writing in the idiom of analytic moral philosophy, Heath reads Habermas as providing a powerful, devastating, and comprehensive criticism of instrumental accounts of social action and moral conduct, in particular those provided by game theory. On the positive side of the ledger, Heath reads Habermas as having provided a potential solution within analytic moral philosophy to the nagging problem of relating moral cognition to moral agreement. However, for Heath, both Habermas's criticism of the reduction of social action to instrumental action and his account of moral agreement based on communicative reason need a stronger analytical defense than Habermas himself provides. Heath sees his job as providing that defense—although in doing so, he reveals weaknesses in Habermas's theory of language that will require the abandonment of some of that theorist's most ambitious claims.

In the first case, Heath supplements Habermas's criticism of strategic action by presenting an acute and often quite brilliant account of the inadequacies of decision and game theory as a philosophy of action. In a remarkably comprehensive discussion, Heath rather cleverly shows that as soon as we introduce the simple claim that strategic actors must use linguistic means in order to communicate their interests rationally, they will be unable even to generate a concept of what would count as a maximizing strategy. Even the most sophisticated of game theoretic accounts of how meanings are generated can produce “babbling equilibriums.” Heath's exhaustive account of strategic theories of rational choice buttresses Habermas's argument about the irreducibility of communicative reasoning to strategic reasoning through what one might want to call a kind of “rebound theory.” Rather than follow Habermas in upholding the autonomy of noninstrumental communicative reason, Heath demonstrates that whatever theory of strategic action agents adopt, they will have to justify their arguments by appeals to conventional meanings so as to avoid failure. In short, the internal analytic difficulties of rational choice theories force strategic agents to justify their commitments according to reasoning about the validity of noninstrumental norms. Of course, this demonstration depends, as Heath resolutely acknowledges, on an account of decision theory and game theory separated from any social context—a move that may very well allow him to prove his point, but, as I shall argue momentarily, gives us reasons why Habermas might resist Heath's analytical improvement on his critique of instrumental conduct.

In the second case, Heath demonstrates that in demanding propositions be universalizable, Habermas places an unreachable, and unnecessarily stringent, standard for moral agreement in his account of communicative reasoning. In place of such a standard, Heath proposes we rely on the fact that convergence on moral matters is built into the very pragmatics of using language, given its constitutive role in producing social order. Heath supports this claim by demonstrating that the various theories of language Habermas employs to draw an analogy between truth claims and claims to rightness and sincerity do not support the central notion of his theory of communicative action; namely, they do not support his mapping of validity claims of truth, rightness, and sincerity to assertoric, regulative, and expressive utterances. Thus, the meaning of these three kinds of utterances is not internally tied to making good on validity claims; only the first one is. Worse yet, when Habermas later argues that rightness claims do in fact contain propositions that can be subjected to the same decomposition into simple propositions as truth claims, they turn out not to have the same propositional content (pp. 123–25). So they lack a common semantic analysis. The upshot of this is that adherence to meaningful norms—the basis for varieties of social practice we engage in—does not, as Habermas insistently maintains, depend on our commitment to accept his three validity claims if we are asked to account for our conduct. Thus, in fact, meaningful norms are the backdrop for communicative reason, rather than the other way around. In sum, Habermas's argument that norms presume a reason based on certain presuppositions of communication proves to be inadequately supported. As so, Heath argues, the distinction between norm-conforming action and strategic action does a better job of protecting speech acts from reduction to strategic action than Habermas's distinction between communicative and strategic action.

Ironically, Heath may be analytically correct in deflating communicative reasoning based on universalizing validity claims in favor of normgoverned conduct. Yet Habermas may be politically and sociologically right to insist on maintaining the priority of communicative reason over ordinary norms and in opposition to instrumental reasoning. For Habermas's notion of communicative reason is derived only in part from his theory of speech acts; it is also derived from his notion of rational public discussion and opinion formation as providing society with precisely what the instrumental activity of administrative institutions, market relations, and technological applications are unable to provide: namely, public agreement on legitimate goals and policies. To jettison the distinction, as Heath would recommend, would be to lose the political force of his argument, even as it may gain in analytic rigor. Might one, therefore, say that the political force of Habermas's argument—including his criticism of the invasion of political discussion by various instrumental logics—depends on having a less than adequate philosophy of moral agreement? Perhaps it is this odd discrepancy in Habermas's eclectic theory of language, politics, and society that Morris's book unintentionally detects and exploits as it cobbles together a Marxian critique of capitalism with a rather individualistic notion of aesthetic imitation.