The Idolatry of the Actual

David A. Borman

Description

The first close study of Jürgen Habermas's theory of socialization, a central but infrequently discussed component of his defense of deliberative democracy, The Idolatry of the Actual charts its increasingly uneasy relationship with the later development of Habermas's social theory. In particular, David A. Borman argues that Habermas's account of the development of the subject and of the conditions under which autonomy can be realized is fundamentally at odds with the increasingly liberal tenor of his social theory. This leads Borman to return to the set of concerns that guided Habermas's social theory in the early 1970s, paying particular attention to questions of crisis and the means by which public reactions are shaped—questions perhaps more relevant today than they have been at any time since the 1930s. Using Habermas's early work as a framework, Borman constructs an original critical-theoretical argument that draws on research in the sociology of schooling to understand how attitudes toward work, reward, achievement, class, gender, and race are shaped in economically functional ways, and draws on philosophical and empirical scholarship to demonstrate the challenges of multicultural integration and the impact of both on the potential for progressive social transformation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Structure of Critical-Theoretical Argument
The Argument
The Critique of Late Habermas

1. CAPITALISM AND CONTRADICTION IN LEGITIMATION CRISIS

On the Concept of Crisis
System and Lifeworld
Liberal Capitalism and Contradiction
“A Descriptive Model of Advanced Capitalism”
Crisis Tendencies in Advanced Capitalism
The Critical Reception of Legitimation Crisis

2. RATIONALIZATION AND SOCIAL PATHOLOGY IN THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION

The Theory of Communicative Action in a Nutshell
Linguistification as Rationalization: An Evolutionary Account of the Lifeworld
Mediatization as Rationalization: An Evolutionary Account of System
System and Lifeworld Interchange Roles and the Thesis of Colonization
Summary
Protest Potential in The Theory of Communicative Action
Culture and Economy: On the Instrumentalization of Status Distinctions
The “Inevitability” of System

POSTSCRIPT: BETWEEN FACTS AND NORMS, IN WHICH LAW SAVES US FROM OURSELVES

INTERMEDIATE REFLECTIONS: HABERMAS AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE SCHOOL

Habermas on the Function of the School
Dominant Perspectives in the Sociology of the School
Schooling in Capitalist America: The Correspondence Principle
Correspondence and Legitimation
Jean Anyon and the Differentiation of the “Hidden Curriculum”
Paul Willis and “the Lads”
The Educational Exchange and the Counter-School Insight
“The Lads” Culture and the Role of Race and Gender
Fatalism, Positivism, and Working Class Culture
Conclusion

3. MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND POSTCONVENTIONALITY

Interactive Competence and the System of Speaker and World Perspectives
Postconventionality and Discourse
Vindicating the Developmental-Logical Argument
Problems in Kohlberg

4. SOCIALIZATION AND EGO AUTONOMY

The True Individual
The Causes of Postconventionality
Arrested Development and the Systems-Theoretical Individual
Arrested Development and Moral Consciousness

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS: MULTICULTURAL IDENTITY AS POSTCONVENTIONALITY

New York Multiculturalism and the “Contact” Hypothesis
Multiculturalism as a Fact and Multicultural Integration as an Aim of Policy
Multiculturalism as Political Integration
Constitutional Patriotism as Multicultural Identity
The Actualization of Democratic Rights as a Source of Postconventional Recognition
Multicultural Education and Capitalist Colonization: A Social Contradiction
The Practical Significance of the Contradiction
Conclusion: The Status of the Argument

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la psychologie
• Social class
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438437385
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SUNY series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences

Lenore Langsdorf, editor

The Idolatry of the Actual
Habermas, Socialization, and the Possibility of Autonomy
David A. Borman

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Borman, David A.
The idolatry of the actual : Habermas, socialization, and the possibility of autonomy / David A. Borman.
p. cm. — (Suny series in the philosophy of the social sciences)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3737-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Social sciences—Philosophy. 2. Socialization. 3. Social structure. 4. Habermas, Jürgen. I. Title. II. Title: Habermas, socialization, and the possibility of autonomy.
H61.15.B667 2011
300.1—dc22                                                                                          2011003123
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To James L. Marsh, for cultivating in me both the philosophical desire to make sense of the world, and the practical desire that it should make sense .
Acknowledgments
The bulk of the research that went into this work was originally completed as my doctoral dissertation at Fordham University under the supervision of James Marsh, to whom I have dedicated the book. I also would like to express my gratitude to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Fordham for a research grant that enabled me to work full time on the dissertation for the academic year 2007–08, without which I might still have been writing it today. Additionally, I owe my thanks to the other members of my committee—especially Merold Westphal and John Davenport—both for their comments on specific portions of the text as well as for their invaluable advice regarding how to go about turning what was a much longer dissertation into what I hope is a readable book. My wife, whose patience greatly exceeds my own, also provided much assistance with the editing and formatting of the text. And, finally, I owe a great deal of thanks to the staff at SUNY Press, particularly Jane Bunker and Andrew Kenyon, as well as to Lenore Langsdorf, and the anonymous readers of the manuscript, all for their support and assistance.
Introduction
There are perhaps few aspects of what I do as satisfying as introducing first- and second-year university students to philosophy. I mean those cases where a genuinely interested student discovers through my class a radically new way of thinking about the world, knowledge, social reality, and so on, a kind of world of problems, forces, and concepts hidden within what is, in other respects, already familiar to them. And yet, despite this kind of general, formal insight, the vast majority of even such genuinely interested students seem, in the end, to regard this philosophical perspective in purely academic terms. That is, even where the course material succeeds in engaging and challenging their existing convictions—and this, it must be admitted, is rare enough—the impact of this challenge is subtly undermined: It succeeds in inducing only a fractured sort of aporia . Beliefs and social institutions that are revealed as being without warrant or legitimacy are nevertheless declared, sometimes openly and sometimes not, to be inevitable. Often the result is, in philosophical-logical terms, incoherent; yet there seems to be some nearly irresistible pull felt by so many first- and second-year students toward the view that, for instance, what Kant argues in the Groundwork sounds good on paper, but that people “just aren't like that.” No amount of explicit thematization of the problems involved in such a response—for example, that if people were already “like that,” why would Kant bother to write the book?—seems to diminish the unarticulated conviction that the sheer reality of the status quo, of how people or things “are,” somehow lends it normative force. In a word, the conviction seems to be that, as Margaret Thatcher callously declared, “there is no alternative.”
Although when I began teaching, I found the pervasiveness of this attitude surprising, as a critical theorist, I should have been expecting it. And although, in my initial surprise, I took it as a pedagogical problem, both critical-theoretical and empirical research quickly pointed me in a more or less sociological direction. From Marx, through Adorno and Horkheimer, to the early Habermas, this attitude of passivity or helplessness in the face of the status quo—which Horkheimer, quoting Nietzsche, once aptly described as the “idolatry of the actual” 1 —has been identified as the ideology of last resort for an advanced capitalism for which many of the traditional legitimating narratives, such as religion or unrestricted entrepreneurial freedom, have lost plausibility. All of these authors agree in seeing the “idolatry of the actual” as an obstacle to both effective critical insight and meaningful social transformation; but they disagree in deep ways about the causes of this syndrome or attitude, the means by which it is produced and sustained, and the prospects and possibilities for its overcoming. In what follows, I hope to accomplish two things: first, to offer a more or less novel, empirically informed analysis of these questions, in methodological concordance with the original program of critical theory; second, while drawing for my theoretical framework on the thought of Jürgen Habermas, to demonstrate that his earlier work contained the resources—although largely undeveloped—for a far more adequate, more genuinely critical answer than is actually to be found in his later work. The two tasks are intertwined because it is the empirically informed analysis that offers at least some preliminary and independent justification for my critical modifications of Habermas' social theory and theory of the subject; as a result, there is in fact one single argument that stretches the length of the book. Given that it would thus otherwise be some time before the whole would come into view, it seems worthwhile to summarize my main contentions by way of introduction. Before I do so, however, I also need to clarify—by way of a rather simplified sketch—just what it means to say that this argument attempts to advance the original program of critical theory.

The Structure of Critical-Theoretical Argument
As Seyla Benhabib noted, the argumentative structure of critical theory owes a great deal to Hegel and, specifically, to Hegel's (sometimes misplaced) critique of Kant. 2 To put the point succinctly, Hegel formulated the doctrine of immanent critique as a rather conservative reaction against the normativism of Kant's practical philosophy, a rejection of the pure “ought” that would justify the attempt of individuals to jump ahead of the historical process, of the level of development of their society, an attempt that Hegel feared could only end in the sort of terror manifested, for him, in the outcome of the French Revolution. The new order is not to be brought about through a process in which individuals iconoclastically sever their ties with the social world that has shaped them; to the contrary, the source of stable and just transformation is to be found not outside the world as it is, but within it. The seeds of the new are nourished in the heart of the old, in the internal contradictions that, over time, lead to its self-overcoming. In the place of a “utopian” critique that would harshly juxtapose to existing reality an external and “abstract” ideal, immanent critique entails an illumination of the ways in which societies are unable to fully realize their own purported nature, or fail for intrinsic reasons to achieve their own purported ends.
Despite their differences, Marx absorbed this structural element of Hegelianism, transposing it into a radical context. For Marx, the utopianism against which was posed the necessity of immanent critique was not Kantian rationalism but a vapid and anesthetizing sort of theoretical socialism, which contented itself with vivid descriptions of the Crystal Palace while remaining more or less uninterested both in a detailed critique of the operations of the present order and in any serious consideration of the conditions under which socialist ideals could become realizable. But if socialism is to have a genuine claim to practical realizability, it must be shown to be a potential outcome of developments within the present capitalist order itself. As the Habermasian educationalist R. E. Young has written, “historically-immanent critique is the form in which we hope,” 3 that is, the form in which we are able to hope without succumbing to an impotent idealism. Immanent critique can fully support this hope, however, only by fulfilling two conditions: First, it must unmask capitalism as a system of injustice, not only as a violation of the abstract norm of distributive justice (e.g., insofar as it entails the private appropriation by the capitalist class of socially produced wealth), but as hypocrisy, as ideological—in other words, as violating its own legitimating principle of equality in the market or the exchange of equivalents. Marx's analysis of capitalism demonstrated that, in the exchange of labor power for wages, the former was systematically undervalued and, indeed, that this undervaluing was the source of profit.
But this element of immanent critiq