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The Critique of Power The Critique of Power Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory Axel Honneth translated by Kenneth Baynes The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England First MIT Press paperback edition, 1993 First MIT Press edition, 1991. Translation © 1991 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This work originally appeared in German under the title Kritik der Macht. Reflexions- stufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie (© 1985 Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main). All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Set in Baskerville by DEKR Corporation. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Honneth, Axel, 1949- [Kritik der Macht. English] The critique of power : reflective stages in a critical social theory / Alex Honneth ; translated by Kenneth Baynes. — 1st MIT Press ed. p. cm. — (Studies in contemporary German social thought) Translation of: Kritik der Macht. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-08202-0 (HB), 0-262-581284) (PB) 1. Critical theory. 2. Horkheimer, Max, 1895-1973. Philosophische Fragmente. 3. Habermas, Jurgen. 4. Foucault, Michel. I. Title. ILSeries. HM24.H582713 <199)^ 301'.01—dc20 -- 91-6950 CIP Contents Translator's Preface vii Author's Preface xi Afterword to the Second German Edition (1988) xiii I The Incapacity for Social Analysis: Aporias of Critical Theory Introduction 3 1 Horkheimer's Original Idea: The Sociological Deficit of Critical Theory 5 2 The Turn to the Philosophy of History in the Dialectic of Enlightenment: A Critique of the Domination of Nature 32 3 Adorno's Theory of Society: The Definitive Repression of the Social 57 II The Rediscovery of the Social: Foucault and Habermas Introduction 99 4 Foucault's Historical Analysis of Discourse: The Paradoxes of a Semiological Approach to the History of Knowledge 105 Contents 5 From the Analysis of Discourse to the Theory of Power: Struggle as the Paradigm of the Social 149 6 Foucault's Theory of Society: A Systems- theoretic Dissolution of the Dialectic of Enlightenment 176 7 Habermas' Anthropology of Knowledge: The Theory of Knowledge-Constitutive Interests 203 8 Two Competing Models of the History of the Species: Understanding as the Paradigm of the Social 240 9 Habermas' Theory of Society: A Transformation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment in Light of the Theory of Communication 278 Notes 305 Index 335 Translator's Preface When it was first published in Germany in 1985, The Critique of Power was immediately recognized as a significant and in­ novative contribution to debates concerning the normative foundations and emancipatory claims of a critical social theory. Honneth's study not only presents a systematic interpretation of the various attempts by the early Frankfurt School (notably Horkheimer and Adorno) to clarify the theoretical status and practical aims of their enterprise; it also brings to light the deeper continuities between this school and the later critical theories of Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas. Moreover, by situating the latter two theorists within the context of the earlier tradition of critical theory, Honneth provides a con­ structive framework for a comparison between them that (at least in the United States) has so far been conducted only at an initial, highly polemical level. At the center of Honneth's reconstruction of the early Frank­ furt School is the thesis that both Horkheimer and Adorno remained so tied to ideas derived from a comprehensive phi­ losophy of history (e.g., social labor and the technical domi­ nation of nature) that they were unable to find a place within their theoretical analyses for a unique domain of the "social," that is, a domain in which individual and collective actors con­ test competing interpretations of their collective needs and normative orientations as well the distribution of scarce social resources. Insofar as a conception of social action becomes thematic for their theories, Foucault and Habermas are better Translator's Preface able to attend to the domain of the social, albeit in quite dif­ ferent ways. For Foucault, the socral is construed as a domain of strategic interaction in which actors continuously confront one another in a "perpetual battle." According to Honneth, however, this analysis of the "microphysics of power" encounters difficulties in its attempt to account for the formation and maintenance of more complex structures of social domination. In the end, Foucault is compelled to abandon a model of strategic inter­ action in favor of a systems-theoretic analysis of power in which power is construed as a self-expanding property of social sys­ tems rather than as the product of struggle among strategic actors. Honneth thus presents a novel and systematic interpre­ tation that is sure to find a place within current discussions of Foucault's work in the United States. According to Honneth, Habermas' theory of communicative action offers a more promising point of departure for an anal­ ysis of the social, since it recognizes the role of consensual agreement as well as strategic conflict in both legitimate and illegitimate forms of power. However, two different and com­ peting models of social change can be found in Habermas' writings: one that is indebted to his earlier critique of the "technocracy thesis" (a largely conservative thesis, hotly de­ bated in the 1960s, that affirmed the spread of scientific reason and technocratic rule into more and more aspects of social life) and stresses the independence of "labor" and "interaction" and one that is more indebted to his reading of Marx and is better described as a moral "dialectic of class struggle" in which col­ lective actors engage in conflict with one another about the interpretation of norms and the asymmetrical distribution of power. In The Theory of Communicative Action, with its two-tiered model of society as "system" and "lifeworld," Habermas dis­ plays a clear preference for the first model, with the result, according to Honneth, that the domain of the social is divided into a "norm-free" domain of strategic interaction and a "power-free" lifeworld. By way of an immanent reconstruction, Honneth thus offers a critique of Habermas' most recent for­ mulation of critical social theory, which is still at the center of Translator's Preface discussion (see Communicative Action, ed. A. Honneth and H. Joas [MIT Press, 1991]). The result of Honneth's study is thus not merely a rich and at times provocative interpretation of the history of critical theory, but also a sketch of the contours of "the social" that should furnish that theory with its normative and practical orientation. Honneth pursues this latter task in greater detail in Kampfum Anerkennung (Suhrkamp, 1991). In the following translation I have cited existing translations of both French and German texts whenever possible; any mod­ ifications are indicated in the notes. Axel Honneth was unduly patient in responding to my queries and offered many helpful suggestions during the long course of the translation. I would also like to thank Charles Wright for reading through the manuscript #nd for assuming primary responsibility for the translation of chapter 5. Shari Hartline assisted with the notes. Author's Preface In this study, I attempt to clarify the central problems of a critical social theory. At the first level of a history of theory I have been guided* by the conviction that the two most influential new approaches to a critical social theory, that of Michel Fou­ cault and that of Jiirgen Habermas, are to be understood as competing developments of a set of questions opened by a critical theory: Both the theory of power, which Foucault has grounded in historical investigations, and the theory of society, which Habermas has developed on the basis of a theory of communicative action, can be viewed as attempts to interpret in a new way the process of a dialectic of enlightenment ana­ lyzed by Horkheimer and Adorno. If the history of critical social theory is reconstructed from this point of view, then Foucault's theory of power proves to be a systems-theoretic and Habermas' social theory a communication-theoretic solu­ tion to the aporias encountered by Adorno and Horkheimer in their philosophical-historical analysis of the process of civilization. Insofar as the study traces historically the movement of thought that leads from Horkheimer's early essays through Adorno's philosophy of history and finally to the competing theories of Foucault and Habermas, there arises from an in­ quiry into the theoretical models a systematic viewpoint from which the construction and maintenance of social power can be apprehended. On the second level of a clarification of the central problems of a critical social theory, I examine the approaches de- Author's Preface veloped by Adorrro, Foucault, and Habermas in order to crit­ icize the conception of contemporary societies as relations of social domination. The purpose of such a comparison is to work out in the represented positions the conceptions of action that lie at the basis of social integration and thus, too, at the basis of the exercise of power. From this background it is shown, first, that Adorno must have failed in the task of an analysis of society, since throughout his life he remained im­ prisoned to a totalized model of the domination of nature and was thus uanble to comprehend the "social" in societies (chap­ ter 3). Foucault and Habermas, by contrast, open up the do­ main of the social that was foreign to the tradition of critical theory from two opposed extremes: in the action-theoretic paradigms of "struggle" (chapter 5) and "mutual understand­ ing" (chapter 7). The form that a "critique of power" should assume today follows implicitly from a critical analysis of the difficulties encountered, at different levels of reflection, within both of these approaches.
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