Theoria

I’ve often maligned Habermas for a variety of reasons: his strange hatred of the French, his occasionally terrible prose (although I’m coming to think that the relative un-readibility of his prose is a result of translation: McCarthy’s translation of The Theory of Communicative Action is quite readable as is Thomas Burger’s translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jerry Stark’s translation of On the Logic of the Social Sciences and William Rehg’s translation of Between Facts and Norms are nearly unreadable — the latter two are so unreadable that I have not, in fact, read them) and, of course, that bourgeois mysticism of the public sphere and the ‘ideal speech situation.’ Simply put, Habermas is not my go-to guy. And I’m not sure why anyone uses him in that way, but do they ever!

As such, I was surprised to discover how moderately enjoyable it has been to read Habermas (second volume of The Theory of Communicative Action) in spare time and at bed this past week. While I’m not finding myself in agreement with him on most issues (still), I have a greater appreciation for his argument and, indeed, his prose. More interesting, however, is the closet Schmittianism (if I may coin a term) inherent in his argument. Do recall that Habermas had a fling with Schmitt in his early career and then turned around and called Foucault (among others) a “young conservative” (in reference to Schmitt, Junger and Heidegger). Do also recall that his most substantial intervention on French thought began in 1983 with his first lecture on Foucault (later collected as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), just two years after the publication of The Theory of Communicative Action in Germany in 1981.

I thus present the following passage (Volume II, 171) for your consideration:

In traditional societies the state is an organization in which is concentrated the collectivity’s capacity for action – that is, the capacity for action of society as a whole; by contrast, modern societies do without the accumulation of steering functions within a single organization. Functions relevant to society as a whole are distributed among different subsystems. With an administration, military, and judiciary, the state specializes in attaining collective goals via binding decisions. Other functions are depoliticized and given over to nongovernmental subsystems. The capitalist economic system marks the breakthrough to this level of system differentiation; it owes its emergence to a new mechanism, the steering medium of money. This medium is specifically tailored to the economic function of society as a whole, a function relinquished by the state; it is the foundation of a subsystem that grows away from normative contexts. The capitalist economy can no longer be understood as an institutional order in the sense of the traditional state; it is the medium of exchange that is institutionalized, while the subsystem differentiated out via this medium is, as a whole, a block of more or less norm-free sociality.

Emphasis added.