Jürgen Habermas' Postmetaphysical Paralysis?

Chapter 6 Jürgen Habermas’ Postmetaphysical Paralysis?

[6.24] Diogenes would constantly say that to manage our lives properly, we need either reason [logon] or a halter [‘rope’—brochon].

Contrary to the arid idealist caricatured by his critics, Jürgen Habermas has always shown an acute sensitivity to the potentially repressive character of moral ‘progress’—particularly in light of his personal experiences of postwar Germany, and the Federal Republic’s long, painful return to democracy. On the other hand, unlike other, more ‘radical’ critical theorists, Habermas evinces little faith in the capacity of philosophical critique to break free of ‘hegemony’:

For his practical research purposes [Marx] could be content to take at its word, and to criticise immanently, the normative content of the ruling bourgeois theories of modern natural law and political economy—a content that was, moreover, incorporated into the revolutionary bourgeois constitutions of the time. In the meantime, bourgeois consciousness has become cynical; as the social sciences—especially legal positivism, neoclassical economics, and recent political theory—show, it has been thoroughly emptied of binding normative contents. However, if … the bourgeois ideals have gone into retirement, there are no norms and values to which an immanent critique might appeal with [the expectation of] agreement. On the other hand, the melodies of ethical socialism have been played out without result. A philosophical ethics not restricted to metaethical statements is possible today only if we can reconstruct gen- eral presuppositions of communication and procedures for justifying norms and values.1

Habermas’ jaundiced utopianism has long been criticised for forfeiting the emancipatory intent that defines ‘critical’ theory’s alternative to ‘traditional’ moral and political philosophy.2 Alongside the accusations of conspiratorial

1 Jürgen Habermas, “Historical Materialism and the Development of Normative Structures,” in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979): 96–7. 2 Most notably: Nancy Fraser, “What’s Critical About Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender,” in Unruly Practices (University of Minnesota Press, 1989): 113–43.

‘liberalism’ we saw earlier from the Schmittians, sympathetic critics have ex- pressed concerns about the later Habermas’ gradual slide towards Neo-Kantian dogmatism. John McCormick, for example, argues that Habermas’ political writings—most especially those on European post-nationalism and the consti- tutionalisation of international law—betray a ‘trans-epochal philosophy of history,’ according to which democratically deficient institutions are judged by an inflexibly ideal (and therefore politically superfluous) standard of legitimacy.3 McCormick contends that this ideal normative framework is founded upon a no-less problematic characterisation of the ‘modern’ bureaucratic state drawn from Max Weber’s model of the Rechtsstaat and Sozialstaat—a dubious means of capturing the unique empirical-historical characteristics of emerging trans- national structures of governance.4 Amy Allen goes even further in suggesting that Habermas’ theory of social evolution relies upon a dubious conception of historical ‘progress,’ by which the peculiar features of European modernity (e.g. the desacralisation of world views and the rationalisation of economic and cultural domains) become universal metrics for tracking the development of ‘higher’ moral competencies—thereby glossing over the unrepeatable, mur- derous history by which civilisational advancement was only possible through the unrestrained plundering of Europe’s ‘periphery.’5 Nevertheless, in spite of these and other equally disappointed appraisals of Habermas’ sprawling research programme, I will argue that his methodological approach remains highly pertinent to our reckoning with cynicism—precisely because of the way Habermas seeks to impose ‘postmetaphysical’ constraints upon his own analyses while simultaneously exploiting whatever residual normative and epistemological privileges are afforded to prominent ‘public intellectuals.’ More than any other author we have encountered, Habermas comes closest to manifesting a recognisably cynical orientation for coping with the ‘contingen- cies’ of social/historical change. Undoubtedly, this suggestion will seem counterintuitive to Habermas’ critics and almost perverse to his supporters—inconsonant as it is with the familiar image of the greying guardian of ‘reason.’ Surely this ‘last Marxist,’ whose ties to the early Frankfurt School grow evermore distant with each protracted de- fence of piecemeal legislative reform, can hardly be considered a promulgator

3 John P. McCormick, Weber, Habermas, and the Transformations of the European State: Constitutionalism, Social, and Supranational Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2007): 292–4. 4 McCormick (2007): 29; 59–65. 5 Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonising the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Columbia University Press, 2016): 40–50.