Communicative Action

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

The subject–object relation of the philosophy of consciousness (from Descartes through Kant and Hegel to Smith and Marx), according to Habermas, is now exhausted; hence his “linguistic turn” away from individual action to communicative action and a focus on the communicative relation between people as the core building block for philosophical, social theoretical, and empirical analysis.

It is useful initially to distinguish between The Theory of Communicative Action, which is Habermas's mature exposition of his critical theory of society and late modernity, and communicative action itself, which is the point of departure for this theory. The two volumes run to more than 1,200 pages and the reader is referred to Thomas [Page 169]McCarthy's superb translator's introduction to the 1984 edition for probably the clearest synopsis of the sheer breadth and depth of this major 20th-century work.

At a macrolevel, this theory presents a two-level conceptualization of society that (a) integrates both lifeworld and system approaches; (b) maps a philosophical and social theoretical way out of the aporias and limits within the individualistic subject–object relation by providing a ground-breaking conceptualization of communicative rationality (as distinct from individual means–end, instrumental, or strategic conceptions of rationality), that draws on “language-in-use” and speech act theory; and finally, in genuine Frankfurt School tradition, (c) provides a sophisticated means of addressing the pathologies of late modernity in suggesting that the original emancipatory intent of the Enlightenment project is not exhausted but simply unfinished and that this theory identifies the pathways for substantive analysis, explanation, and human intervention to ameliorate or redress such pathologies, thus leading to a more critical redirection of this project.

The first and third points above are briefly addressed here, simply to note the macrolevel of analysis before moving more deeply into discussing the procedural dynamics of communicative action. The financial crisis, as it unfolded during September 2008, may be viewed through the macro lens of the theory of communicative action as it relates to the lifeworld and the steering systems of money and power. In very simple terms, and from a political economy and “critical management studies” perspective, a systemic failure was allowed within the banking system and an alliance quickly formed between the elites of both the money and the power systems on how to save extant economic structures from further collapse. Costs of the various “bailouts” of the money system, facilitated by the governmental agents of the administrative power system, were largely burdened on future citizen taxpayers with consequences for their working and private lives in their own particular lifeworlds. These citizens did not cause the pathology, yet private system losses and risks from the mortgage-based financial system were socialized at the expense of the general public and taxpayers. Many critical research questions may be addressed here by drawing on the entire theoretical architectonic of the theory of communicative action at both macro- and microlevels of analysis and from both participant and observer methodological perspectives.

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