In his 1968 essay “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’,” Jürgen Habermas deals more explicitly than in other works with phenomena related to modern technology and science.Footnote 1 He is well known for his social theory, legal theory, and theories of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and has been a major figure in the intellectual history of modern Europe due to the twin role he has played as both a voice and a representative of the political and philosophical movements of postwar and post-Holocaust West Germany. Exploring the role of technology in his thinking brings into focus technology's ambiguous status in critical social theory as well as the general relationship between intellectual history and the history of technology. The disturbingly open-ended question whether technology is modernity's blessing or its curse has mobilized critics and commentators at least since the Industrial Revolution and has divided them at political, epistemic, and moral levels. Habermas's project sits in the middle of such traditions, and his 1968 essay “updates” long-standing concerns about industrial modernity for the specific technological, philosophical, and political conditions of the early Cold War. Intersections between technology and his signature fields—intersections that he has both forged and contributed to—are found in political theories of technology and democracy (in the forms, for example, of technocracy and technological determinism), epistemologies of scientific knowledge and their relevance for theories of the reasonable subject and of knowledge communities, and theories of secularization and modern state-building.Footnote 2
In my reading of Habermas's 1968 essay, I trace junctions between intellectual history and the history of technology by contextualizing this essay with his (and others’) ideas at the time about the history of industrialization and with the political and philosophical ambitions he develops in response to the techno-political culture that surrounds him. I explore specifically how his stance toward technology and science and their important political and philosophical companions—often captured in terms of technocracy, technological determinism, and scientific realism—intersect with his far-reaching commitments to the idea of the emancipation of the individual as an autonomous being. My reading foregrounds how he negotiates his obligations to the idea of emancipation with the often competing significance he finds, for his theory of modern society, in technological and scientific rationalities and realities. Unlike some of his predecessors, he is not willing to renounce the latter.
The idea of the emancipation of the individual as an autonomous being guides Habermas's thinking in its entirety and is the very purpose of his developing a critical social theory.Footnote 3 It is at the center of my study, too, together with his efforts to integrate modern technology and science into a critical epistemology and social theory and thus, as he might say, reconcile industrial modernity with itself. Habermas famously described modernity as an “incomplete project” and his work as being about the reconciliation with the “crumbled-with-itself” modernity (“Versöhnung mit der sich selber zerfallenen Moderne”).Footnote 4 Habermas scholars have suggested that this reconciliation can be understood as being part of the same emancipatory project, and that the power of Habermas's thinking resides in his ability to bring together the most diverse questions about modernity and cast them in a coherent perspective under the all-encompassing idea of emancipation.Footnote 5 Typical of Habermas's engaging the incomplete modern project and emancipation of the self is his timely preoccupation, in the early Cold War, with modern technocratic democracies, which figured mostly in his early journalistic work.Footnote 6 His 1968 essay on technology, science, and ideology is part of this preoccupation: it appeared as a two-part article in two consecutive issues of Merkur, an intellectual magazine founded in Germany in 1947 as a political, literary, and moral institution.
The apparent tensions between commitments to emancipated rationality and to technological and scientific rationality come into focus in Habermas's 1968 essay, and the text also gives off the distinct vibe of the young Federal Republic of Germany's unstable and often anxious public. William Outhwaite aptly calls postwar West Germany a “country with a tendency to pull up its newly planted democracy to see how it was growing,” and Friedrich Kießling calls the country an “endangered and inchoate” democracy.Footnote 7 Kießling also emphasizes the very openness in the young Federal Republic of Germany of the question of how to deal with ongoing technological and scientific innovation and the modern mass society coming with it, in particular against the background of the catastrophic failures of the Weimar Republic less than a generation earlier. He points out how open-ended the process was of opening up Cold War West Germany toward the Atlantic alliance and having the country “arrive” in democracy and pluralism.Footnote 8
I analyze Habermas's text and its surroundings in the young Federal Republic of Germany, focusing in particular on the ways he outlines his theory of modern society in tandem with ideas about the history of industrialization and industrial modernity. Their convergence makes me speculate whether he ultimately retains an ambiguous, and perhaps even conveniently and strategically flexible, stance toward the industrial and technological dimensions of modern society. Unlike some of his peers and predecessors, Habermas opts out of morally discrediting the instrumental rationalities of technology and science, and instead takes them as given, universal, “inevitable” rationalities with which humans interact with the world. As my reading suggests, however, his commitment to techno-scientific rationalities remains oddly shallow and without consequences, and this ultimately raises the question of the yield and merit of his efforts to grant technology and science a legitimate place in critical social theory. To frame my reading, I first look briefly at Habermas's encounters with the disciplines of history and philosophy of science and technology in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as at Habermas's early writings on technology and the history of industrialization from the 1950s. I then explore in depth the 1968 essay on technology, science, and ideology with an emphasis on Habermas's quest for a model of society that provides due space and livelihood for both techno-scientific and political–ethical–emancipatory rationalities. I conclude by challenging the clarity and stability of Habermas's stance toward the powers and functions of modern technology and science and its relation to his extensive contract with the rational and autonomous subject.
HABERMAS AND THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Habermas's 1968 essay was discussed in the history of science and technology in particular during the 1970s and 1980s, the post-Kuhn, postpositivist eras, when the fields were empirically and theoretically revamped. The problem of the authority of natural knowledge had climbed to the top of the fields’ agendas and was tackled with ideas from neo-Marxism, social constructivism, post-structuralism, feminism, and other critical epistemologies from both Anglo-American and Continental traditions.Footnote 9
The natural sciences and their relation to philosophy were central to Habermas's earliest work and have characterized his voice as a public intellectual to this day. The Max Planck Institute that he directed from 1971 until 1981 was, after all, dedicated to the study “of the living conditions in the scientific–technological world.”Footnote 10 The contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of science with which he was in dialogue was dominated by logical empiricism, which Habermas regarded as a “scientistic misconception of science.”Footnote 11 The widely known 1960s controversy on positivism (Positivismus-Streit) concerned the epistemic status of scientific knowledge, and its echoes can, again, be heard in Habermas's work to this day. The debate had its origins in comments that Habermas made on Adorno's critique of Popper's keynote address to the annual meeting of the German Society for Sociology in 1961. The debate's participants disagreed with each other on the status of positivism in the social sciences as well as about positivism's supposed lack of self-reflexivity.Footnote 12 Habermas worked through these issues in his theories of cognitive interests and epistemologies in the influential Knowledge and Human Interests, as well as in the essay on technology and science as ideology, both published in 1968.Footnote 13 By analyzing the interdependence of knowledge and human interests, Habermas aimed to demonstrate—not unlike contemporary historians of science—that a radical critical epistemology was only possible as a theory of society.Footnote 14 Developing alternative epistemologies that were separate from the scientific model and pursued emancipatory interests was an idea that also figured prominently in his essay on technology, science, and ideology.Footnote 15
HABERMAS’S WRITINGS ON TECHNOLOGY AND THE INDUSTRIAL AGE IN MERKUR
Habermas's earliest reflections on technology and industrialization include his 1954 Merkur article “The Dialectic of Rationalization: Of Pauperism in Production and Consumption.”Footnote 16 His 1968 essay on technology, science, and ideology also came out, in its earliest version, in Merkur. Merkur was an important product of its time. It is now the last remaining of a set of prominent monthly periodicals on cultural questions that were founded shortly after 1945 as political and moral institutions, and that became influential in these capacities in postwar and post-Holocaust West Germany.Footnote 17 In February of 1947, Merkur's founder, Hans Paeschke, placed this journal explicitly in a context of “responsibility for the guilt as first responsibility of the intellectuals of our time.”Footnote 18 Paeschke assembled in the journal the very core of distinguished postwar commentators, among them Theodor Adorno, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Jürgen Habermas, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Hannah Arendt. The two parts of Habermas's “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’,” published in the July and August issues of 1968, are, in fact, sandwiched between texts by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Hilde Domin, as well as Erich Fried and Golo Mann.
In a later interview Habermas said about his 1954 essay “The Dialectic of Rationalization” that it already contained the seeds of key ideas of the Theory of Communicative Action.Footnote 19 In the essay, he leads the reader a few times through a short history of industrialization from the early eighteenth century to his own time, revisiting Marx's and Engels's terms “pauperism” and “alienation”. While Habermas emphasizes that the terms are specific to the industrial age and the proletariat, his actual point is to ask whether, in the current age, another pauperism has appeared.Footnote 20 He concedes that the means for a satisfying standard of living are secure now—the proletarian has been verbürgerlicht, he says—but claims that the devaluation of the human world continues, and the alienation and pauperism from the age of industrialization become universal.Footnote 21 He further claims that this more recent pauperism and alienation are of a kind that Marx always meant, but that they became tangible in an isolated form only when the “wave of mass economic hardship receded” and left them as a “sediment.”Footnote 22 Less than a year later, Habermas develops this idea into a more explicit critique of Marx. In a 1955 review essay in Merkur, he says that “Marx never realized that this ‘machinery,’ that technology itself and not a specific economic system, draws humans into alienation.”Footnote 23
Several features of the 1954 text tell us about Habermas's relation to technology. He sets the tone in the text's first sentence by claiming a love–hate relationship that “we” have with technology and within which we receive each technological novelty.Footnote 24 On a few occasions, he lists technologies to illustrate his points about pauperism. Among them are the cinema, the portable radio, and the rattling motorcycle, which bring about, he says, together with piecework, an alienation that Marx meant but never separated from the concrete pauperism of low wages.Footnote 25 On another occasion, he counts the following machines toward the “universal machine culture” of his time: research machines in laboratories, institutes, and observatories; production machines in factories and offices; transportation machines on earth and in the skies; communication technologies such as the telephone, telegraph, camera, and microphone; and entertainment machines.Footnote 26 Habermas here offers the reader examples of technologies of two different types and scales: technologies of individual consumerism and technologies of large-scale enterprises in government and the private sector. His short article is, of course, not meant to be a fine-grained analysis of technology's uses, sizes, and spaces in the 1950s. But he effectively paints a collage of the wonders and pains of the industrial age in the mid-twentieth century, and the collage's elements emphasize what mattered to him and his readers in the technological world at the time.
While his account comes across as a bit clichéd at times, he also credibly cautions himself: he finds insufficient, for example, the “popular conclusion” that humans’ moral energy should help us use in positive ways the initially neutral instrument of technology.Footnote 27 And he does insist that there is a possibility to counter pauperism within the industrial factory system without endangering technical and economic progress.Footnote 28 Already in this early technology-critical piece, there thus appears in nascent terms an inclination that he refines later: Habermas is committed to pursuing an agenda of critical social theory and socioeconomic justice while aiming to preserve technical, scientific, and economic progress.
One other aspect is important here for exploring Habermas's 1968 article. He is particularly interested in the later periods of the history of industrialization: the high industrial age and its specific technologies, such as automation, the assembly line, and technical, economic, and social rationalization, mostly in the form of Taylorism.Footnote 29 These are the political and technological systems that Habermas is coming to terms with in his early work in the 1960s, together with the technologies of a nascent new era that followed the high industrial age after 1945: an era of computing, information, and biotechnologies that is often dubbed “postindustrial.” His historical journeys through different periods in the history of industrialization, and the images he uses to put together his collages of the industrial age, are part of his working through the tensions between the social and technical conditions of the incomplete late modernity. As I argue at the end of my analysis, these historical journeys confuse and clarify at the same time his efforts to reconcile emancipation and industrialization.
THE 1968 ESSAY “TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE AS ‘IDEOLOGY’”
In his 1968 essay, Habermas proposes a revised epistemology of scientific knowledge and a revised metaphysical account of technology, together with a two-part model of modern society.Footnote 30 The two-part model of society is based on a fundamental distinction that he draws between communicative–normative and technical–scientific rationalities, which are, in their turn, rooted in two fundamental modes in which humans interact with the world: “work” and “interaction.” Habermas claims these two categories of human experience to be “quasi-transcendental.” I discuss the issues arising from this claim later in my essay. For now I want to state that one consequence of his terminology is that he all but divides the modern world into a sphere for techno-scientific matters and a sphere for political, cultural, and ethical matters. It is another attempt, after many others in the modern period, to grasp the boundary between the natural and the social and find a place for the laws of nature and machines in the world of rational, autonomous, and communicative subjects.Footnote 31 Similar to the generic philosophical boundary between the natural and the social, Habermas's boundary between communicative and technical–scientific rationalities also appears at times arbitrary and sets up an easy target for a range of challenges. I spell this out later in my essay as well.
Habermas's two quasi-transcendental categories and corresponding two-part model of society allow him to compellingly explicate the intuitive (and, in the twentieth century, often vaguely articulated) unease that technical–scientific rationalities somehow “seep into” the sphere of communicative rationalities. Technology and science seemingly subvert arenas of political, cultural, artistic, and emancipatory activity and impose their rules on them.Footnote 32 Habermas suspects, like many others at the time, that the widely perceived crisis of modernity in the twentieth century has its roots at least partly in modern technology and science. But he disagrees with earlier sweeping critiques of technology and science from the 1940s, such as those of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who interpreted modern rationality as purely “instrumental” reason and suggested that the kernel of the catastrophes of the twentieth century was already seeded in the rationalist thinking of the “Enlightenment.”Footnote 33
Habermas calls Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno's “blackest” book and an “odd” book, saying that their perspective on the self-destructive process of the Enlightenment is no longer “ours.”Footnote 34 He believes that they turned the Enlightenment's ability for “totalized, self-reflexive” critique against itself and thus “outperformed” it, attacking the foundation of its own validity.Footnote 35 He also emphasizes that, at the level of political theory, the “old Frankfurters” never took seriously bourgeois democracy. He views this, together with first-generation Critical Theory's problematic normative foundation and problematic relationship with the sciences, as one of the three most important deficits of Critical Theory.Footnote 36 Even if it comes out in an implicit way here, I would argue that Habermas's pairing of the problem of bourgeois democracy with the problem of the status of scientific knowledge in Critical Theory is another instantiation of his ongoing project, at this time, of squaring emancipatory social theory with the epistemic significance of natural knowledge.
Habermas is thus left with a dual stance: he wants to pursue sustained social and political critique at least partly in the tradition of Critical Theory while integrating technology and science into his theory of modern society as valid, equitable, and inevitable (that is, transcendental) rationalities. He aims to resolve this dual stance by formulating an epistemological account of scientific knowledge that argues against positivism and objectivism while simultaneously conferring an independence (and even appreciation) upon modern science and technology that would have been difficult to conceive in Horkheimer and Adorno's thinking.Footnote 37 Habermas develops, instead, in his 1968 essay an explicitly post-Marxist conception of ideology that can be applied to scientific–technological knowledge without branding it “ideological” as such.Footnote 38
THE TEXT
Habermas's “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” is dedicated to Herbert Marcuse for his seventieth birthday in July 1968. The essay is one of the most important exchanges between the two philosophers about science and technology.Footnote 39 In it, Habermas critiques Marcuse's 1965 essay “Capitalism and Industrialization in Weber,” and uses this as an opportunity to introduce his two-part model of modern society.Footnote 40 The essay is almost always quoted in the version published in 1968 in the edited volume Technik und Wissenschaft als “Ideologie”. Habermas himself describes the earlier Merkur version as “a slightly abridged preprint.”Footnote 41
One major change from the earlier Merkur version to the later version in the edited volume is the omission of the question mark in the title, from “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’?” to “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’.”Footnote 42 The question mark appears in both parts of the Merkur version and in the tables of contents of both issues, and therefore seems to be a deliberate part of Habermas's framing his text in this early version. No question mark in the title appears anywhere in the version of the edited volume. Another major difference between the earlier Merkur version and the later version in the edited volume is the omission of all nine subheadings in the later publication. They are substituted by Roman figures.Footnote 43 They serve as important signposts for this intricate text, and their removal significantly changes the reading experience. The collection of works in Technik und Wissenschaft als “Ideologie”, finally, gives additional weight and context to Habermas's ideology essay, connecting it to his most influential work from the 1960s. The texts in the collection contain ideas that Habermas would return to for decades to come.Footnote 44 The ideology essay, in its turn, lends its name to this forceful assemblage, standing as a token for a set of concerns that occupied Habermas's thinking in the first half of the Cold War.
HABERMAS’S NEW ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK
In his 1968 essay, Habermas first recapitulates Weber's notion of “rationalization,” describing it as a process during which more and more areas of society are subjected to criteria of rational decision making and “technical or mechanical rules.”Footnote 45 He then discusses Marcuse's analysis of Weber's work, agreeing with Marcuse that the rationality of technology and science extends itself into an entire “form of life” of its own and a “historical totality.” Habermas criticizes both Marcuse and Weber, however, for merely stating and not explicating this process of rationalization and its expansion into a totality.Footnote 46 He derives two assignments for himself from this. First, he aims to trace and evaluate the gradual expansion of technology into human life-worlds—an assignment whose difficulty is only glossed over, he complains, when Marcuse and others claim a “political content of technical reason.”Footnote 47 Second, he aims to revisit the question of the supposed political indifference, or political neutrality, of technology. Claiming that there is a “political content of technical reason” was not an unusual position to take at the time, against the background of the 1960s technocracy debate (about which I say more later in my essay) and countercultures in Germany and the US, and also in the academic technological-determinism debate.Footnote 48 But Habermas is not content with merely suspecting that technological rationality can be deployed for political purposes. He wants to formulate a theory of society, and, I would say, a corresponding theory of technology, on the basis of which he can theoretically and empirically analyze such suspicions. He eventually counters them with a normative claim that he derives from his analysis.
Habermas reformulates Weber's notion of rationalization in terms of a new analytical framework—the two-part model of society—to tackle the interrelated analytical problems of “rationalization” and the “political content of technology.” His two-part model is grounded in a distinction between techno-scientific (or “purposive–rational”) strategies and communicative action. Purposive–rational strategies are governed by technical and logical rules, rely on empirical knowledge, and can be deduced in correct and incorrect ways. Communicative action subsumes symbolically mediated communication that is governed by consensual norms. Such norms imply mutual expectations about appropriate behavior in communicative interaction and must be understood and accepted by at least two subjects. The norms are validated through consensus, which is usually the result of debate, negotiation, and agreement, either among the subjects involved, or among other groups of subjects who count as legitimate representatives. Norms are enforced through social sanctions.Footnote 49
The validity of rules works differently in the two realms, and the violation of rules has different consequences, according to Habermas. The validity of rules in purposive–rational action depends on the validity of empirically true or analytically correct sentences, while the validity of cultural and social norms is solely grounded in the intersubjectivity of the mutual understanding of intentions. Behavior that violates empirically secured (i.e. technical) principles about a material reality results per se in failure: the “punishment is built into the failure,” Habermas says, because of the causal effects of this material reality. Violation of norms in the realm of communicative action results solely in socially defined sanctions, which are merely “externally” connected to the norms: the connection is made by convention. Sanction of failure, and even the occurrence of perceived failure, are matters of social or situational contingency.Footnote 50
THE QUASI-TRANSCENDENTAL STATUS OF HABERMAS’S MODEL OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
What initially looks like a plain division of human experience into a material and an ideal realm cuts deeper philosophically than it seems. It seems at first glance that the functioning of Habermas's categorical framework relies on a basic distinction about how rules or norms are made valid: in the case of instrumental action, a rule is valid empirically, naturally, materially, or logically; in the case of communicative action, a norm is valid ethically, socially, culturally, or discursively. In the former case, Habermas refers to a material reality to explain the validity of rules; in the latter case, he refers to discursive intersubjective negotiation to explain the enforcement of norms. This means in particular that, in the case of techno-scientific rationalities, Habermas is in a position to merely gesture toward a material reality that, just by itself, sorts out the validity of rules of action. Rules of purposive rationality are, in his framework, universally valid in a seemingly unproblematic way.
A closer look at Habermas's model indicates that what looks like a bluntly materialist gesture is his attempt to compose a variation on a Kantian transcendental theme.Footnote 51 The purpose of Kantian transcendental philosophy—identifying the conditions of the possibility of knowledge through experience—is usually achieved through investigating the work that is accomplished by a subject: unifying its own self-consciousness with the experience of objects. The result of a transcendental analysis is typically the establishment of a priori categorical frameworks that make possible the most basic forms of human thought and action. Habermas claims to have established such categorical frameworks, an instrumental one and a communicative one, which constitute fundamentally human knowledge and action. As “transcendental” categories (although he later calls them “quasi-transcendental”Footnote 52), they are fundamental to, and constitutive of, the possibility of knowledge about the world: they shape and delimit the ways in which the world is accessible to humans.
Habermas calls his quasi-transcendental categories “interests.” The interest corresponding to “purposive–rational action” is the technical–cognitive interest in the control of nature, and the interest corresponding to “communicative action” is the practical–cognitive interest in communication.Footnote 53 According to Habermas, the world can be known to humans in two fundamental ways: as an object of labor and as a place requiring interaction with others. Habermas elevates technical–cognitive and practical–cognitive interests to transcendental status and thus claims them to be basic conditions for the reproduction and self-constitution of the human species. Cognitive interests stem from material conditions; they are conditions of the things man must do to survive on this planet. While the interests derive from these material conditions, they do not stop there. Each interest sets the conditions under which the possible objects of experience can be known, but interests do not constitute the objects themselves. Habermas's epistemology is thus neither simply idealist nor simply materialist. He claims that the objects of experience, in conjunction with human nature (e.g. man must eat to survive), establish the framework within which these objects can be known and interacted with.Footnote 54
The transcendental element in Habermas's theory of interests helps him bypass, at least for the moment, the pitfalls of the idealism–materialism dichotomy. It prevents him from prioritizing in naive ways technical rationalities over communicative rationalities, and this move also helps him, at the end of his essay, to construct an argument about the “ideological” role of technology and science in the process of Weberian rationalization. Habermas's neo-Kantian epistemology for realms of communication and work allows him to account for the social character of knowledge while avoiding the antirealist implications that emerge from extending social(-constructivist) accounts of knowledge to knowledge about nature. He thus appears to circumvent the tensions inherent in attempts to reconcile nonobjectivist accounts of human knowledge with materialist views of nature—something that both the history and philosophy of science and Critical Theory have struggled with ever since the beginnings of their intellectual traditions.Footnote 55
However, Habermas puts another fundamental dualism in the place of the dichotomy that he purports to bypass, and this explains his apparent success. Initially, Habermas seems merely to demonstrate that knowledge about the material world is different from knowledge about communicative interaction. But he carries the distinction further. He not only distinguishes technical knowledge from social interpretations of the world; he also strictly assigns an exclusive realm in society to each way of producing knowledge. Habermas's argument rests on conceding that techno-scientific rationality has a rightful place in human inquiry, while insisting that instrumental reason has to be prevented from becoming reason per se. This dualism, and the attached normative directive of preventing techno-scientific reason from “taking over” the life-world, has several more consequences in the unfolding of Habermas's argument.
HABERMAS’S COMMITMENT TO REASON AND TO TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE
I want to emphasize once again that it is precisely the division of human experience into two strictly separate spheres that allows Habermas to follow, on the one hand, a critical tradition of social theory, while, on the other, still epistemologically accounting for the natural sciences and engineering as a privileged form of man's interaction with, and appropriation of, material reality. He develops an epistemology in which science and technology are somehow inevitable. In this theory, science and technology are “interested,” but they operate within categorical frameworks that are characteristic of the human species as a whole. This implies that the only possible cognitive orientation toward nature is the purposive–instrumental way, and that there is no alternative to man's interest in apprehending the world as a place to be manipulated and controlled. There is no New Science or New Technology for Habermas, neither is there a social-constructivist or otherwise antirealist account of knowledge about nature.Footnote 56 As if he wanted to remedy his unusually strong commitment to techno-scientific rationality (in comparison to that of his peers in Critical Theory), Habermas then decrees that science and technology be confined to a limited domain of society.
Habermas does not relinquish his predecessors’ and contemporaries’ suspicion that there is a connection between the perceived crisis of modernity in the twentieth century and modern science and technology. At the same time, he insists on a different account of the empirical and operational success of science and technology. At the root of Habermas's insistence on recognizing science and technology's rational merits might be his commitment to an eighteenth-century idea of reason. In accordance with principles spelled out in the Enlightenment, Habermas's self is subject to laws that it made for itself rather than being subject to the constraints of nature. The subject's disembedding from nature is part of his larger goal to constitute theoretically the rational autonomy of the self.Footnote 57 And dividing human experience into two separate parts, one of communication and one of work, enables him to formulate decisive conditions for the formation of this rational, autonomous self and its interactions with other rational, autonomous selves and with the world. The crucial point here may be, as Joel Whitebook aptly puts it, that Habermas, in spite of theoretical and empirical evidence to the contrary in the disastrous first half of the twentieth century, believes rational autonomy to be “a perfectly adequate idea of selfhood, and feels no need to formulate an alternative emancipatory concept.”Footnote 58
It is Habermas's commitment to long-standing ideas of reason and emancipation, mediated through the quasi-transcendental character of his theory of cognitive interests, one could say, that forces and ultimately allows him to confer a universal and ahistorical status upon technology and science—a status that renders them unsubjectable to historical, political, or emancipatory change. It also allows him, in his discussion of ideology (which I describe at the end of this essay), to locate the seat of ideological deception outside scientific or technological rationalities. In his new two-part theory of modern society, ideology sits elsewhere.
DOES HABERMAS SOLVE HIS PROBLEM?
Precisely because Habermas's account is so deeply grounded in a dualism of a communicative–normative and a technical–scientific sphere of human experience, it becomes doubtful that he really overcomes the fundamental problems of the idealism–materialism dichotomy. Stephen Vogel demonstrates that the quasi-transcendental status of Habermas's theory of interests entails a profoundly ambiguous status for nature in Habermas's account of modern subjects and society.Footnote 59 On the one hand, as the object of natural-scientific inquiry, nature must be a realm that is constituted by humans: constituted by their technical interest in predicting and controlling their environment. This is the Kantian transcendentalism in Habermas's quasi-transcendentalism: nature investigated in the natural sciences has no existence independent of human interest. At the same time, because of Habermas's materialist transgression, nature must play a further, and more fundamental, role in his theory of interests: nature must also appear as the source of the very interests that he invokes as categories constitutive of knowledge. Nature thus not only is constituted by the interests, but is also the material realm that engenders interest.Footnote 60
Habermas construes a further distinction, between “nature in itself” and “nature for us,” to bypass this problem.Footnote 61 “Nature in itself” is the nature preceding humans and bringing forth the interests; “nature for us” is the nature disclosed to us via the medium of interest-driven thought and action.Footnote 62 The analogous Kantian solution to this problem is to distinguish “things-in-themselves” from “phenomena” as they can be known to us, respectively. While part of the point of Kantian philosophy is to keep these two realms apart, this separation is no option for Habermas. The “interest” that grounds our knowledge has, in Habermas's theory, an empirical origin: he explains the existence of interest with the help of arguments from evolutionary biology, anatomy, and natural history.Footnote 63 Commentators even go as far as to claim that the unity of the transcendental subject in Habermas stems from evolution.Footnote 64
This ambiguous reliance on the natural world is the reason why Habermas calls his interests “quasi-transcendental.” Aiming to synthesize materialism and transcendentalism, Habermas does not construct his interest theory as being simply empirical. It is partly founded as an anthropology of knowledge. He derives his “interests” from something that he learns from the sciences, while the sciences are themselves constituted by interest. To explicate the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, Habermas thus needs to have recourse to knowledge about nature as if it were independent of him. If his explication of human knowledge were valid, however, he would not be able to know anything about nature as it is, independently of him or us. Calling knowledge-constitutive categories “interest” and stepping back by evaluating them as “quasi-transcendental,” so Vogel summarizes, seems to only “name the problem, but not solve it.”Footnote 65
This problem of the antinomy of nature is generated precisely by Habermas's attempt to reconcile a nonobjectivist account of knowledge with a materialist view of nature. His stab at this fundamental philosophical problem is at least as elegant and sophisticated as many other attempts from the philosophy of science, but it may not solve the problem. Aiming to forestall any objectivist pretense, he insists rightly on a priori contributions that the rational subject makes to any knowledge about nature. However, he then faces the antinomy of combining a theory of knowledge as the act of a world-constituting subject with a materialism in which nature must retain ontological priority. The assumption of this pre-human nature moves him back toward a pre-Kantian, precritical ontology that challenges his transcendental ambitions. The problem of the status of nature in his theory appears to be so pressing that Habermas seems willing to surrender the very idea of Kantian critical philosophy.Footnote 66
Habermas was certainly aware of the problematic nature of his terms. Among his peers and critics, he is admired precisely for his ability and willingness to engage in self-critical analysis of his positions and for his responsiveness to criticism.Footnote 67 During the 1970s, he entirely revised the project outlined in his 1968 essay (as well as in Erkenntnis und Interesse) and replaced the knowledge-constitutive interests with a new paradigm based on a theory of communicative action.Footnote 68 Like others, I still find it worthwhile to go back to his old views, though there are different reasons to do so. Steven Vogel, for example, emphasizes that there is a “deep structure to Habermas's view of nature,” and he suspects that Habermas never escapes “the basic problem of nature,” which, in Vogel's view, has been “endemic to Western Marxism from the beginning.”Footnote 69 I am just as interested in the “basic problem of nature” and the ways in which Habermas never escapes it. There is something else, however, that he never seems to escape and even actively grasps for: a comprehension and (moral) evaluation of the industrial, technologized society of his time and its historical roots. Because his work is anchored in Marx's and Weber’s—both of them arguably historians of industrialization—and because of his keen interest in the technological landscape of his time and its origins, Habermas's suggestions for a theory of modern society consistently gravitate toward assumptions about the values, accomplishments, and hazards of modern technology that do not always coalesce into a coherent stance.
HABERMAS’S ANTITECHNOLOGICAL BIAS
There is a related problem in Habermas's overall argument that I take to be of interest for the study of emancipation in the industrial age. It is rooted in his empirical and theoretical assumptions about technology as a foundational part of modern society. The issue goes back to the evocative collage of the industrial age that he presents to his reader in his 1954 article on the dialectic of rationalization. I try to understand how Habermas weighs and values the two spheres of communicative and techno-scientific rationalities, and, by extension, what he ultimately treasures most about the human experience of the world, what he puts at the center of his philosophical work, and what he marginalizes and ghettoizes, perhaps inadvertently, in his powerful and influential observations about the conditions of human subjectivity.
It is not so surprising, one could say in an uncharitable manner toward Habermas's critics, that there is a flaw in any argument that claims to overcome the idealism–materialism dualism. It might simply be too difficult a philosophical problem. Habermas's claim to overcome this dualism, and his inability to do so, are no exception to this. It is thus interesting to analyze his argument, but not remarkable in itself to find it flawed. What is worth pointing out in Habermas's thinking about modern society is that the dualism between a communicative–normative and a technical–scientific sphere that he establishes in the place of the idealism–materialism dichotomy entails an outspoken—and typically Habermasian—hierarchy. In distinguishing a social–normative from a technical–material world, Habermas consistently privileges the former. Scientific and engineering rationalities are irrelevant to what matters most for him: political–cultural communication and establishing and legitimizing normative principles. For Habermas, matters relevant to political participation (and discursive intersubjectivity in general) have nothing to do with nature; they arise exclusively in interaction between at least two subjects. Habermas isolates and ghettoizes the techno-scientific way of experiencing the world when he suggests that it does not contribute anything to the communicative sphere of society—the sphere he cares about most.Footnote 70
Habermas is keen to distance himself from any kind of naturalism, which would hold that fundamental questions about how we want to live can be answered by appeal to something other than the social realm. Habermas considers the social realm as the only source of normative justification. The requirement of “discursive scrutiny” is part and parcel of Habermas's very idea of normativity itself.Footnote 71 Since only communication can serve as the basis for consensus about normative rules, Habermas's social theory privileges subject–subject relationships over subject–object relationships. The scenario of technology “taking over” society becomes, in Habermas's system, a threat of technology undermining such subject–subject relationships and converting them into subject–object relationships. The collage he paints in his 1954 essay on the dialectic of rationalization brings this into focus: “we” are suspicious about technological novelty, and against this retrospective stance in the later 1960s he mobilizes a new epistemology that supposedly rescues technological and economic progress from the hostility that it usually receives in critical social theory, while he aims at the same time to preserve commitments to social justice and critical political discourse.
Habermas's thinking leaves the reader wondering how serious he ultimately is about his commitment to techno-scientific rationalities. In the second part of his argument in the 1968 essay Habermas presents another insight: he realizes after more exegesis of Weber's and Marcuse's work that the very core of his project—the communicatively structured life-world where legitimation of political power and social organization are constantly being negotiated—is confronted, in a newly sustained way in the modern age, with technical–scientific rationality.Footnote 72 He claims that this was not the case in premodern, “traditional” societies. In such societies, he says, technical knowledge would never expand in such a way that its rationality was a threat to the authority of the cultural traditions that legitimize political power.Footnote 73 Only since capitalism has provided a mechanism for more or less continuous growth of productivity, Habermas argues, is “the introduction of new technology, is innovation as such, institutionalized.”Footnote 74 In this newly constituted modern world, the communicative realm proves inferior to the realm of technology and science, even though Habermas of course meant to establish communicative rationality as being on par with techno-scientific rationality.Footnote 75 As a consequence, Habermas demands a neat and strict (and philosophically easily attackable) separation between the spheres of communicative and techno-scientific rationalities.
In the groundwork of his argument, it was his strategy of a quasi-transcendental epistemology that allowed him to take science and technology as “given” manifestations of a universal human condition while retaining his commitments to the communicative–normative sphere and general tenets of critical social theory. This straddling, it now seems, comes with a price tag. Unlike some of his peers, he chose not to reject technology and science to sustain a critical social theory, but he is now forced to claim a neat and stable demarcation line between two rather artificially separated realms of human experience, and to decree that technology and science not overstep this line. He is forced to formulate a vague and easily attackable principle that science and technology stay away from the most crucial realms where humans organize and negotiate their lives and social order. Habermas understands that technology and science do transgress the boundary and move into realms of communicative rationality: that is his and many others’ complaint about his supposedly “technocratic” age. It is from this process of transgression that he derives his notion of ideology.
IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE AND THE “TECHNOCRACY DEBATE”
“Ideology” captures for Habermas the process of covering up, obscuring, and legitimating the intrusion of technical rationality into the sphere of communicative rationality. Political goals, he argues, are pursued within communicative–normative orders because this is the only form in which political power can be legitimated. Once these communicative–normative orders are subjected to techno-scientific reasoning (in a Weberian rationalized modern society), however, political action and governing confine themselves to securing the functioning of a controlled technical system.Footnote 76 “Ideology,” in Habermas's terminology, subsequently makes plausible this “de-politicization”: it is not inevitable, he says, and needs to be made acceptable to people. Not only do techno-scientific rationality and “progress” take over the communicative sphere; they also make less visible the fact that there were, originally, two separate and equitable modes in which we experience the world. After the takeover of the communicative realm through the technical realm, Habermas says, to people living in a modern society it “seems that social change is determined by scientific–technological change.”Footnote 77 The “ideology” of technology and science obscures the autonomy of the realm of communicative rationality.
For Habermas, ideological belief is the appearance that there is an immanent law-likeness of techno-scientific progress that produces constraints that politics must obey. Social and political decision making in a modern society become understood as a technical task, Habermas says, and society planned as a self-regulating system of purposive–rational action and adaptive behavior—in the same way, Habermas claims, that nature is controlled.Footnote 78 The problem of the “ideology of technology and science” leads Habermas back to the ostensibly law-like and deterministic qualities of techno-scientific systems. Their contrast with the discursive, communicative, and social worlds prompted him at the beginning of his argument to divide up modern society into a technology realm and a social realm, and then assign quasi-transcendental status to each form of human action in the world. His move with the ideology argument can be read as an attempt to deal with the resulting internal contradictions between his acceptance of modern technology and science as “given” and unsubjectable to historical, political, or emancipatory change, and his challenging the determinism that seems to be part of techno-scientific rationalities and that is part, as he defines it, of the “ideology” of science and technology, as well as part of the ideology critique that he performs in this part of his argument.
Integrating his thinking into an important contemporary debate, the “technocracy debate,” Habermas calls the subordination of politics under technical constraints the “technocracy thesis.”Footnote 79 The adjective “technocratic” became colloquial in West Germany during the early 1970s, in the course of the technocracy debate.Footnote 80 It referred most often to the prevalent and often pessimistic discussions about technology's “consequences” and the risks that technology posed not only to society but also to democracy.Footnote 81 The debate captures well the political and technological landscape of postwar West Germany that Habermas was struggling with. Before 1970, the term “technocratic” had been, as observers stated in 1971, “at most a cue for casual discussion among small circles of sociologists.”Footnote 82 The technocracy debate picked up a great deal of momentum when Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, undeniably the two principals of German sociology and social theory at the time, jointly edited a book in 1971 on social theory, social technology, and systems theory.Footnote 83
Among observers, there was a widespread complaint that the debate was lacking precision and in-depth analysis. They made a historical argument, too, pointing out that, in West Germany at the time, most of the sectors described as “technocratic” were run on the basis of pre-technocratic strategies. And they pointed out that the term “technocracy,” while widely conceived as a form of political power typical of late capitalism, poorly described the real forms and conditions of power in the country.Footnote 84 This confusion about where to place, historically, grievances about technical politics and society is an aspect that I find conspicuous about Habermas's theory of modern society, too, and I pick up this concern once more in my conclusion.
Nothing “untrue” is found in the ideological work of the technocracy thesis, according to Habermas, and very little “ideological deception.” This distinguishes it, he explains, from standard notions of “ideology” in Critical Theory. Technology as ideology is not ideology in the old sense, Habermas suggests: it is not only ideology.Footnote 85 Rather, ideology resides in an unjustified extension of one mode of man's appropriation of the world to another. For Habermas, it is not science or technology themselves that are the agents in his revamped, post-Marxist theory of ideology. Habermas attributes the problem of the imperialism of science not so much to its belief in itself as the only valid form of knowledge, but rather to the role it is called upon to play “in the cultural drama of rationalization.”Footnote 86
The final unfolding of Habermas's account of modern society and its technocratic ideology partly challenges his confidence in his epistemology. According to his account, the communicative mode of being in the world is inferior to the technical–instrumental mode of being in the world. As a result, the world of communicative rationality is slowly being taken over by the world of techno-scientific rationality. This powerful metaphorical process, so important for illustrating twentieth-century relations between technology and society, ends up guiding, as a thread, Habermas's thinking all the way to the close of his argument. Habermas comes up with an insightful and nuanced way of articulating the intuitively compelling inferiority of communicative rationality vis-à-vis techno-scientific rationality—the vulnerability of the life-world to being “taken over” by “technology.” His effort and exercise in ideology critique, however, can only partly remedy this threat, and might even contribute to making ever more compelling the idea that technology “takes over” the life-world.Footnote 87
CONCLUSION
I have identified three peculiarities in Habermas's project of formulating basic metaphysical assumptions and normative intuitions about the relationship between technology and society. One is the unspectacular philosophical weakness of his argument: he is unable to resolve the materialism–idealism dualism with anything but another equally feeble and artificial dualism. This weakness, one could say, is unavoidable and inherent in any sophisticated reflection on the relationship between discursive–normative and technical–artifactual worlds. Habermas's revisiting this long-established problem still contributes a great deal to our understanding of the challenges of the “technological society,” and he casts the problem as a whole in an up-to-date form that is appropriate to the early Cold War and the intellectual history of this significant period. For the transition from a “high-industrial” to a “postindustrial” era in the history of West Germany, this stocktaking is a desirable and challenging historical and philosophical exercise. The significance of Habermas's pains to avoid dismissing modern technology and science as destructive “instrumental reason” can hardly be overestimated, in the face of the long and influential history of the Frankfurt school, as well as in the face of a directive so nicely formulated in 1977 by Langdon Winner, who said that philosophical discussion about technology “requires much more than facile talk about how well or how poorly technology accords with ‘human values’.”Footnote 88
Another peculiarity of Habermas's project has to do with how he weighs the discursive and the techno-scientific realms of modern society. Habermas invests a great deal of philosophical labor, in his 1968 essay and other works, into retaining technology and science in his model of critical social theory, in explicit distinction from his peers and predecessors. My readings of his texts, however, make me speculate about how committed he is, after all, to technology and science. He naturally invests much more philosophical labor in his signature ideas—the exploration of ethics and politics in the communicative sphere—and his preference for the human life-world is never challenged at all by his commitment to retaining techno-scientific rationalities in his model of society. This makes his commitment seem shallow and lacking consequences. It also results in his holding on to an undecided stance toward the industrial dimension of modern society, and he dodges the (moral) assessments that his peers engage in and that modern technology in the twentieth century, one could argue, calls for. Since he never manages to resolve his strong dualism, and does not allow technology and science to migrate from their own realm into “his” normative–communicative realm, he does not actually commit himself to the “technological” in the “technological society.”
Finally, I merge this finding with my interpretation of how Habermas relies on, and accounts for, the history of industrialization and technological progress, and how his understanding of this history, and his way of portraying it, tell us about his view of the reality and perhaps even authority of modern industrial technology. In important parts of his early work, Habermas pursues abstract social theory and philosophy of modernity while at the same time interspersing historical collages and excursions about the wonders and pains of the industrial age. It is in such moments that he is prone to tripping up. The emergence of “modern” societies from premodern “traditional” ones, and the “intrusion” of techno-scientific rationality into the communicative–normative life-world that he emphasizes all along in his essay, are at their heart deeply historical processes. It is only occasionally that Habermas acknowledges the historicity, contingency, and nonlinearity of such processes. And, like others at the time, he does not situate with sufficient precision in a historical period his grievances about “techno-scientific” politics and society, which leaves the reader puzzled about the nature of these grievances and their solution in his newly developed social theory.
The historical expeditions that he goes on—to different periods in the history of industrialization, to premodern “traditional” societies, and back to modern ones—and the metaphors and examples of technological artifacts that he uses to put together his account of modernity and present it to the reader, are part and parcel of his wrestling with the tensions between human autonomy and the determined rationality of techno-scientific systems. Much more so than, say, the technocracy debate, these tensions make tangible why we are worried that technology might accord poorly with “human values.” At the same time, Habermas's journeys into history do not consistently strengthen his philosophical analysis and subsequent ideology critique of the industrial modern age. The productive tension that he builds up between emancipation and industrialization in the modern age makes it harder to develop a clearly circumscribed philosophical position. This tension does make his essay a signpost, however, to better grasp altogether the place of technology and science in theories and practices of modernity.
