Theory of Communicative Action

What is communicative action?

Imagine four friends deciding where to eat. One gives a reason, "We had meat yesterday, so how about fish?", and another objects, "The fish place is too far." They trade reasons until they settle on a place everyone can accept. Habermas calls this coordination of action through reaching understanding in language "communicative action" (kommunikatives Handeln).

There is another way. One friend might lie, "That place has a discount today," to get to his favourite restaurant, or offer to pay in order to win the others over. Here language is not a way of making oneself understood but a tool for getting a desired result. Habermas calls this "strategic action", and action that calculates means to ends as one handles things "instrumental action". His theory argues that society cannot in the end be held together by strategy and calculation alone, and that communicative action forms its foundation.

How is the book organized?

The Theory of Communicative Action appeared in two volumes in 1981 and is regarded as Habermas's main work. Volume I, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, rereads Max Weber's theory of rationalization and examines the line from György Lukács to Theodor W. Adorno that understood "rationalization as reification". Volume II, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, follows the "paradigm shift in Mead and Durkheim: from purposive activity to communicative action", then treats "system and lifeworld", and ends with a conclusion that runs from Talcott Parsons back to Weber and Marx.

Standing in the tradition of critical theory, the book also examines Marxism closely, including the theory of value, the critique of instrumental reason and concepts such as reification and abstraction. At the same time it draws widely on Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and developmental psychology.

What does it take to understand one another? Validity claims

Habermas holds that when we say something we also raise several "validity claims" that the listener can challenge. The first is truth: what is asserted must be the case. The second is normative rightness: it must fit the values and norms that are shared. The third is truthfulness: the speaker must be sincere. The fourth is intelligibility: the listener must be able to understand what is meant.

If someone tells us "Tomorrow's meeting is cancelled", we can ask whether that is true, whether the person is in a position to announce it, and whether they are lying. If doubt remains, we move on to "discourse", in which reasons are argued over. In an ideal conversation everyone has the same chance to speak and no one is dominated or deceived, and the only force that counts is "the unforced force of the better argument". Habermas knows that no real conversation is like this. But he argues that whenever we begin to talk we implicitly presuppose such an ideal.

Why is it called a shift from the labour paradigm to the communication paradigm?

Marx, and the critical theory that followed him, tried to understand society and history through "labour", through which human beings work on nature and produce things. Habermas split this picture early on. In Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) he treated the natural sciences as an extension of "labour" (instrumental action) and material reproduction. The human and social sciences, by contrast, he treated as an extension of "interaction" (linguistic communication) and symbolic reproduction. Labour alone cannot explain how people establish norms and recognize one another.

In On the Reconstruction of Historical Materialism (1976) he went further. Against the Marxian assumption that developments in social integration are determined by developments in material production, he argued that normative structures follow a developmental logic of their own, independent of the forces of production. The title of a chapter in Volume II, "from purposive activity to communicative action", states the shift directly.

The shift was also Habermas's answer to the older generation. In Dialectic of Enlightenment Max Horkheimer and Adorno had reached the pessimistic conclusion that human reason had hardened into an instrumental reason dominating nature and people. Habermas looked for reason not in the consciousness of the isolated individual, the "philosophy of the subject", but in communication between people, and thought this could restore normative grounds for critique. Scholars of critical theory call this the "communicative turn".

How do system and lifeworld differ?

Habermas sees society as having two levels. One is the "lifeworld": the domain of family, friends, neighbours and clubs in which people reach understanding through language, hand on culture and norms, and form their identities. The other is the "system": domains such as the market economy and state administration that run on the "steering media" of money and power.

Think of a supermarket checkout. We do not debate the price with the cashier; we pay what the label says and the transaction is over. When we collect a certificate at the town hall, it is handled according to rules and needs no agreement each time. Habermas accepts that such systems relieve the burden of a complex modern society, and that their existence is not itself pathological. Following Luhmann, he even called the market "the most important example of a norm-free regulation of cooperative contexts".

What is the "colonization of the lifeworld"?

The problem arises when the system oversteps its place. Habermas says that progressive rationalization brings a "colonization of the lifeworld" (Kolonialisierung der Lebenswelt): the system enters the lifeworld as a colonial master enters a tribal society. Through the goods and services of consumer society, bureaucratic constraints and juridification, the system penetrates the lifeworld more and more. Individuals are left only with the roles of consumers and clients of state and other services.

In paraphrase, Habermas's point is this: the imperatives of the economy and the administration, mediated by money and power, push into domains that break down once they are cut off from action oriented to understanding. Childcare priced by the hour, schooling judged only by performance indicators, disputes between neighbours settled by complaints and lawsuits instead of talk are examples. The lifeworld then shrinks, and its capacity to hand on culture, create solidarity and form personalities withers. Since the system itself depends on the lifeworld's communicative resources, colonization destabilizes the system too.

How was Marx's concept of reification changed?

With the colonization thesis Habermas tried to reformulate Lukács's concept of reification. But for Habermas the effects of reification arise in ways that are not specific to any class. He held that the welfare state had largely pacified class conflict, so these crises no longer turn into class struggle. He admitted that reification effects are filtered through social inequality, but did not treat inequality itself as one of the main pathologies. His attention went to welfare-state clientism and juridification.

What did the left object?

Marxist criticism came from the 1970s on. At the time Marxists criticized Habermas's work for abandoning central tenets of Marxism and for conceding too much to Luhmann's systems theory. His acceptance of the market as a "norm-free" domain was a problem in the same sense, since it treated the market not as a relation of exploitation and domination but as a neutral device for reducing complexity.

Ulrich Paetzel compared Habermas with Marx and Adorno. In his account Marx's aim of overcoming capitalism altogether shrinks in Habermas to "containing" the encroachments of the system on the lifeworld. Marx spoke of revolution. Adorno had no utopia of revolution left but still held capitalism's principle of profit and domination guilty. Habermas, in trying to protect the lifeworld, risked accepting in practice the constraints of the economic and administrative subsystems.

Habermas himself never broke with Marxism. In a 1979 interview he said he did not believe in Marxism as a sure-fire explanation, but that Marxism had given him the impetus and the analytical means to investigate the relation between democracy and capitalism. As late as 1989 he called himself "the last Marxist". Yet within critical theory, too, the critique of crisis and of capitalism was largely set aside for decades afterwards, with Moishe Postone's work a notable exception.

What other criticism was raised?

In 1982 Herbert Schnädelbach pointed out that even answers reached by consensus rest on presuppositions that can never be fully objectified. Luhmann held that neither rationality nor human action can grasp the decisive processes of society. Hans Albert, Karl-Otto Apel and Jean-François Lyotard each qualified its claim to normative grounding from different directions.

Even so, the book counts among the most important works of twentieth-century sociology. On its basis Habermas developed the discourse ethics of Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983) and the theory of democracy and law in Between Facts and Norms (1992). Its key concepts, the lifeworld and the public sphere, have entries of their own.