School of Politics and International Relations

RSSS, CASS

Australian National University

ANU CRICOS Provider No. 00120C

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TUTORIALS You will be able to sign up for Tutorials via Wattle from Week One of First Semester.

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CONTENTS OF WEBSITE

Introduction
Course Schedule: Part A - Lecture Programme
Course Schedule: Part B - Tutorial Programme
Course Schedule: Part C - Written Assignment
Bibliography/ Reading List
Relevant Web Sites
Contact Information
Consultation Times

INTRODUCTION

Part I of the course explores the sources of the Frankfurt School’s ideas. We will examine, in particular, Hegel’s critical reaction to Western modernity and the Enlightenment project, and Marx’s critique of capitalism. Part II examines major themes of the Frankfurt School’s critical social theory through the writings and ideas of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse. Themes include Weber’s idea of the rationalisation of society, the influence of Freud and psychoanalysis, the politics of art and the ‘culture industry’, the critique of ‘positivism’ and the idea of a critical theory of society. Part III looks in more detail at Jürgen Habermas’s distinctive social theory. Topics include Habermas’s account of the critical public sphere, his theories of communicative rationality and social movements, and his overall account of critical theory.

LEARNING RESOURCES, PRESCRIBED TEXTS AND READINGS

West, David: Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, 2^nd Edn (Polity, Cambridge, 2010)

Held, David: Introduction to Critical Theory (1980)

Pusey, Michael: Jürgen Habermas (1987)

Outhwaite, Michael: Habermas: A Critical Introduction (1994)

Additional Readings will available online via Wattle.

MODE OF DELIVERY AND WORKLOAD

The course will be delivered by two weekly lectures (available online via Wattle) and one weekly Tutorial (3 contact hours in total). In addition students should expect to work outside class time for about 7 hours per week on Tutorial Readings and the completion of two written assignments (see below).

PROPOSED ASSESSMENT

One 2,250 word essay and one take-home written assignment each contributing 45% to the final mark. In addition 10% of the final mark will be given for tutorial attendance and participation (involving one five minute oral presentation).

NB. Only students who have both submitted an essay and attended at least 7 out of 10 Tutorials will be eligible to submit the second assignment and complete the course.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

After successful completion of this course, students should be able to:

1. Demonstrate knowledge of the intellectual and historical background of the ideas of Frankfurt School thinkers.

2. Demonstrate knowledge of one or more central thinkers of the Frankfurt School including Habermas.

3. Demonstrate knowledge of major aspects of the ‘critical theory’ of the Frankfurt School and Habermas including: the relation of theory and practice; understanding of history; art and the culture industry; psychoanalysis and politics; societal modernisation and rationalisation; the normative basis of critical social theory.

GENERIC SKILLS DEVELOPED BY THIS COURSE

This course will develop generic skills in critical thinking, written communication (writing and reading skills), oral communication (presentation and discussion) and academic research methods.

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COURSE SCHEDULE: PART A – LECTURES

LECTURE VENUES:

Monday	2.00pm	MCC T6
Tuesday	1.00pm	MCC T6

A brief outline of each week’s topic (for two lectures) will be available via Wattle (after Monday’s lecture each week). Lectures will also be recorded and available via Wattle.

Part I: Sources of Critical Theory.

Week One (w/b 21^st February)

Lecture 1. Introduction and Overview.

Lecture 2. Western Modernity and the Enlightenment Project.

Week Two (w/b 28^th February)

Lectures 1-2. Hegel’s Ideas of Reason and History.

Week Three (w/b 7^th March)

Lectures 1-2. Marx and Marxism: Origins of Critical Social Theory

Week Four (w/b 14^th March)

Monday 14^th March - Canberra Day Public Holiday

No Lectures or Tutorial – Reading Week

Part II: The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.

Week Five (w/b 21st March)

Lectures 1-2. Introduction to the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory.

Week Six (w/b 28^th March)

Lectures 1-2. The Dark Side of Modernity. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Week Seven (w/b 4^th April)

Lectures 1-2. The Politics of Art and the Culture Industry.

Mid-Semester Break: April 9^th–26^th

Week Eight (w/b 25^th April)

Monday & Tuesday 25^th-26^th April – Public Holidays

No Lectures or Tutorials: Essay Completion Week

FIRST ASSIGNMENT DUE - ESSAY (45% of Final Assessment)

Due on Thursday 28^th April at 1pm – hard copy to be delivered to the Essay Slot outside the School’s Administration Office (HA G41 near HA Tank).

Week Nine (w/b 2^nd May)

Lectures 1-2. Marcuse’s Freudian Marxism: Eros and Civilization.

Part III: Habermas’s Critique of Modernity.

Week Ten (w/b 9^th May)

Lectures 1-2. Introduction to Habermas. Democracy and the Public Sphere.

Week Eleven (w/b 16^th May)

Lectures 1-2. The Normative Basis of Social Critique: Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Rationality.

Week Twelve (w/b 23^rd May)

Lectures 1-2. Social Movements and Opposition in Contemporary Society.

Week Thirteen (w/b 30^th May)

Lectures 1-2. Conclusion and Overview.

SECOND ASSIGNMENT – TAKE-HOME EXAMINATION (45% of Final Assessment)

Questions available on Thursday 9^th June via Wattle. Completed paper due on Thursday 16^th June at 1pm – hard copy to be delivered to the Essay Slot outside the School’s Administration Office (HA G41 near HA Tank). Please note that the Second Assignment is treated as an Examination. No comments are made on assessed scripts and scripts are not returned to students.

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COURSE SCHEDULE: PART B – TUTORIALS (10% of Final Assessment)

Tutorials are an essential part of the course. 10% of the final assessment is based on Tutorial attendance and participation including a short oral presentation (max. 5 minutes). N.B. Only students who both submit the First Assignment and attend at least 7 out of 10 Tutorials will be eligible to complete the final assessment for this course.

Essential readings (marked ‘*’ below) are available online via Wattle. Other readings are helpful for a broader understanding of the Course but are not essential. Some suggestions for further reading (marked ‘F’) are more advanced and can be quite challenging. Further references can be obtained from the Reading List (below). Tutorial questions (below) may refer either to material from the essential readings or to themes raised in lectures on the relevant topic (usually the previous week’s lectures). You will be able to sign up for Tutorials via Wattle.

Part I: Sources of Critical Theory.

Week One (w/b 21^st February)

No Tutorial – First Tutorial in Week Two.

Week Two (w/b 28^th February)

Introduction. An opportunity to discuss the course as a whole and ask any questions.

Western Modernity and the Enlightenment Project.

What historical events and social developments are involved in the modernisation of western societies? What is different about modern western thought? Are modernity and Enlightenment equivalent to ‘progress’ and ‘development’? Or are there problems with western modernity?

*D. West, Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, Ch. 2, Section 1, pp. 9-18.

C. Taylor, Hegel (CUP, 1975), Ch. 1, Section 1, pp. 3-11 (challenging at times!).

J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Lecture I.

(F) D. Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, Sections I-V.

(F) R. Descartes, ‘Meditations of First Philosophy’ in The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Dover), Vol. 1.

Week Three (w/b 7^th March)

Hegel’s Ideas of Reason and History.

In what ways is Hegel critical of Enlightenment ideas about rationality, morality and politics? Why does he reject Kant’s view of morality and rationality? In what ways is human life historical? Consider in what ways culture, philosophy, art and morality are historical? Do we need to have knowledge of the past in order to understand the present (e.g. present culture, philosophy, art and morality)? What are the main features of Hegel’s ‘dialectical’ view of history? Will history ever come to an end?

*D. West, Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, Ch. 2, Sections 2-4, pp. 18-44.

*P. Singer, Hegel, Ch. 3, pp. 24-44.

*G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to The Philosophy of History (trans. J. Sibree) esp. pp. 17-9.

R. Scruton, Kant, (Past Masters, OUP, 1982), Ch. 5.

(F) R. Plant, Hegel (Allen & Unwin, London, 1973), esp. Ch. 3.

(F) C. Taylor, Hegel (CUP, 1975), Ch. 1, Section 2-4, pp. 11-50.

Week Four (w/b 14^th March)

Monday 14^th March - Canberra Day Public Holiday.

No Lectures or Tutorial – Reading Week

Week Five (w/b 21st March)

Marx and Marxism: Origins of Critical Social Theory

What is the difference between followers of Hegel who are left-wing (‘Young Hegelians’) or right-wing (‘Old Hegelians”)? Why is Marx described as a left Hegelian? What makes Marx’s theory of history materialist and how does it contrast with Hegel’s theory? What does Marx mean when he says thinkers should aim ‘not only to interpret but also to change the world’? Has Marxism succeeded in changing the world? In good ways, bad ways or both?

*D. McLellan, Marx (Fontana, 1975), Ch. 3, pp. 24-70.

*K. Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ in Early Writings (Penguin Books, 1974), pp. 421-23.

D. West, Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, Ch. 3, Section 1, pp. 47-60.

(F) K. Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, ed. T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel (Penguin Books, 1961), esp. Pts I & III.

(F) K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto.

(F) J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Lecture III.

Part II: The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.

Week Six (w/b 28^th March)

Introduction to the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory.

What do members of the Frankfurt School think is valuable in the ideas and methods of Karl Marx? What do they think went wrong with Marxism? Why do they criticise positivism in both Marxism and the social sciences more generally? What do they mean by critical theory of society? Are feminism and/or queer theory examples of critical theory in the Frankfurt School sense?

*M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Ch. 1, pp. 3-40.

*D. West, Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, Ch. 3, Section 2, pp. 60-72.

D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, Introduction, pp. 13-26.

R. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School (Polity Press, 1994), esp. Introduction.

(F) R. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (CUP, 1981), esp. Ch. 1.

(F) H. Marcuse, ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’ in Negations (Penguin, 1968), pp. 134-58.

(F) M. Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (Continuum, New York, 1992), pp. 188-243.

Week Seven (w/b 4^th April)

The Dark Side of Modernity. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.

What does Weber mean by the rationalisation of western society? Do you think modern western societies are the most rational societies in every way? What do Adorno and Horkheimer mean by the dialectic of Enlightenment? What are the implications of Enlightenment (in their sense) for the natural world? What does it imply for human beings?

*R. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School (Polity Press, 1994), pp. 321-350.

*T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’, pp. 3-9.

D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, Ch. 5, pp. 148-74.

J. Keane, Public Life and Late Capitalism, Ch. 2, ‘The Legacy of Max Weber’, pp. 30-69.

(F) M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Ch. 8, pp. 253-80.

(F) J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Lecture V.

Mid-Semester Break: April 9^th–26^th

Week Eight (w/b 25^th April)

Monday & Tuesday 25^th-26^th April – Public Holidays

No Lectures or Tutorials: Essay Completion Week

FIRST ASSIGNMENT DUE - ESSAY (45% of Final Assessment)

Due on Thursday 28^th April at 1pm – hard copy to be delivered to the Essay Slot outside the School’s Administration Office (HA G41 near HA Tank)

Week Nine (w/b 2^nd May)

The Politics of Art and the Culture Industry.

Why do members of the Frankfurt School mean by the culture industry? What role do culture industries play in contemporary society and politics? Does art have a role in liberating human beings from an oppressive society? What are some examples of works of art and products of the culture industry that have political significance? What is the difference (if any) between works of art and products of the culture industry?

*J. M. Bernstein (ed.) The Culture Industry (Routledge, 1991), Introduction, pp. 1-25.

*M. Horkheimer, ‘Art and Mass Culture’ in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (Continuum, New York, 1992), pp. 273-90.

D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, Ch. 3, pp. 77-109.

M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Ch. 6, pp. 173-218.

(F) T. Adorno & M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, pp. 120-67.

(F) W. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations (Fontana/Collins, 1970), pp. 219-253.

(F) T. Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Routledge, 1991), Ch. 3, pp. 85-92.

Week Ten (w/b 9^th May)

Marcuse’s Freudian Marxism: Eros and Civilization.

What does Freud mean by the pleasure principle and the reality principle? What does Freud mean by civilization? What does he mean by sublimation and desublimation? What sacrifices must we make for the sake of civilization? Are the benefits of civilization worth the sacrifices we have to make? Does further social development necessarily mean giving up more pleasures? Is today’s societ a sexually liberated society in Marcuse’s sense?

*H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Sphere Books, 1969), Political Preface and Introduction, pp. 11-26.

*V. Geoghegan, Reason and Eros: The Social Theory of Herbert Marcuse (Pluto Press, London, 1981), Ch. 3, pp. 38-63.

D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, Ch. 4, pp. 111-47.

M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Ch. 3, pp. 86-112.

R. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School (Polity Press, 1994), pp. 496-507.

(F) H. Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, Utopia, ‘Progress and Freud’s Theory of Instincts’.

(F) M. Horkheimer, ‘Authority and the Family’ in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (Continuum, New York, 1992), pp. 47-128.

Part III: Habermas’s Critique of Modernity.

Week Eleven (w/b 16^th May)

Introduction to Habermas. Democracy and the public sphere.

What does Habermas see as the positive features of the ‘public sphere’, which emerged in Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries? What were its negative features? How has the public sphere been transformed by subsequent developments in western societies? Does the public sphere still serve a useful critical function in today’s society? What changes or reforms would help to improve the public sphere’s critical potential?

*R. C. Holub, Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere, Ch. 1, pp. 1-19.

*J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (MIT Press, 1989), Pt. VI, Ch. 21, pp. 190-211.

D. West, Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, Ch. 3, section 3, pp. 72-85.

N. Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’ in Justice Interruptus, pp. 69-98.

M. Pusey, Jürgen Habermas, Introduction and Ch. 1.

W. Outhwaite, Habermas: A Critical Introduction, Ch. 1.

(F) J. Habermas, ‘Technology and Science as “Ideology”’ in Toward a Rational Society.

Week Twelve (w/b 23^rd May)

The Normative Basis of Social Critique: Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Rationality.

Why, for Habermas, is communication as opposed to instrumental action such an important dimension of human life and society? What are the dangers of failing to recognise the importance of the distinction between communication and instrumental action? What is communicative rationality as opposed to instrumental rationality? What is the point of Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality? Does he succeed in providing a normative basis for critical social theory?

*M. Pusey, Jürgen Habermas, Ch. 3, pp. 69-86.

*W. Rehg, Insight and Solidarity (Univ. of California Press, 1994), Ch. 1, 23-36.

W. Outhwaite, Habermas, Ch. 3, pp. 38-57.

D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, Ch. 12.

(F) J. Habermas, ‘What is Universal Pragmatics?’ in Communication and the Evolution of Society, Ch. 1.

(F) T. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, Ch. 4.

(F) S. Benhabib F. Dallmayr, eds The Communicative Ethics Controversy, esp. Chs 2 & 9.

Week Thirteen (w/b 30^th May)

Social Movements and Opposition in Contemporary Society.

What are the two ‘systems’ of contemporary western society? How are the systems of ‘money’ and ‘power’ related to Weber’s ideas about the rationalisation of society? What does Habermas mean by the ‘lifeworld’? What is the relationship between society’s systems and instrumental rationality? What is the relationship between communicative rationality and the lifeworld? In what ways is the lifeworld currently being ‘invaded’ or ‘colonised’ by the workings of capitalism and the state? What is the role of social movements in resisting the colonisation of the lifeworld?

*W. Outhwaite, Habermas (Polity Press, 1994), Ch. 6, pp. 82-108.

*J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, ‘Potentials for protest’, pp. 391-6.

M. Pusey, Jürgen Habermas, Ch. 4.

(F) T. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, Ch. 5.

(F) J. Habermas, ‘What does a crisis mean today? Legitimation problems in late capitalism’, Social Research, 40, 1973.

SECOND ASSIGNMENT – TAKE-HOME EXAMINATION (45% of Final Assessment)

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COURSE SCHEDULE: PART C - WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS

ASSIGNMENT I – Essay – 45% OF FINAL MARK

Due on Thursday 28^th April at 1pm – hard copy to be delivered to the Essay Slot outside the School’s Administration Office (HA G41 near HA Tank).

This assignment addresses Learning Outcomes 1-3 (see above).

IMPORTANT GUIDELINES – PLEASE READ!
Suggested essay topics and readings are listed below. If you would like to write on a different topic within the overall subject matter of the Course, you must get approval of your proposed topic from me in advance.
• Essays must be produced on a word processor. You may be asked to submit an electronic copy of your essay in addition to the hard copy you hand in to the Essay Box.
• Use only published academic sources (i.e. books and journal articles) for this essay. If there is no alternative, you may use online versions of published books and journals – but always include page references. For this course, it is definitely not a good idea to rely on other internet resources (such as unrefereed publications, freelance web-sites, blogs etc.).
• It might helpful to consult a dictionary, but it is not a good idea to cite dictionaries or other reference books or sites (such as encylopaedias, wikipedia etc.) in your essay.
• It is important to draw on a reasonable range of sources (perhaps 5-10 sources approximately). But it is more important that you read carefully and understand the ideas discussed in those sources. Don’t list items that you don’t reference!
• Essays must have clearly and consistently set out footnotes or end-notes and a bibliography of referenced sources. Consult the PSIR Essay Writing Guide for appropriate ways of referencing. You must include full bibliographical details including author, title, date, journal or publisher, location and, above all, page numbers.
• Originality and creativity are valuable, but you should first show that you understand some of the existing literature on your topic. If you ignore the work of people who have thought about the topic before you, you are very unlikely to produce a good essay.
• The best essays are critical of the ideas and arguments they discuss.
• Think about the question. Make sure you answer all the parts of the question.
• Make a draft plan of your essay to work out how you will go about answering the question. Go back to the plan during your research and writing to see how your essay is going, but you may be able to improve the organisation of your ideas as your research and essay-writing proceeds.
• Essays should be concise, clearly expressed and logically structured.
• Presentation is also important. You can improve the impression your essay makes by presenting it well, including reasonable font size and print quality, good layout and paragraphing. And remember to use a spelling checker to eliminate at least some unnecessary errors! But remember, spelling checkers don’t find all missteaks.
• Plan ahead and leave time after your first draft for some thinking time, a second draft and careful final proof-reading and editing. You will be able to improve your essay a lot.
• Your essay should be about 2,250 words in length. Essays that are substantially shorter or longer (more than +/-10%) will be penalised. You must indicate your essay’s precise word count ) on the cover sheet. Hint – use the Word Count function on the Tools menu of your word processor.

QUESTIONS
Choose one of the essay questions listed below. Please note that suggested readings (below) are intended only as a starting-point for your research. These readings also include references to other readings and, in some cases, extensive bibliographies for further reading. You should also consult the Tutorial Readings and Reading List (below) as well as making use of the ANU Library’s resources and academic advisers. Learning to select and make good use of academic sources is an important generic skill of academic research.

1. Discuss the Frankfurt School’s critique of ‘positivism’ and the idea of a ‘critical theory’ of society. Discuss this topic in relation to the ideas of one member of the Frankfurt School (such as Horkheimer, Adorno or Marcuse). Consider any problems with this theorist’s ideas.
Some suggested readings:
M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Ch. 2
D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, Ch. 5
R. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory, esp. Ch. 3
M. Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ in his Critical Theory: Selected Essays
H. Marcuse, ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’ in Negations
R. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, passim

2. What do Adorno and Horkheimer mean by the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’? What are the implications of their account of Enlightenment? Are there any problems with their views?
Some suggested readings:
T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment; esp. ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’
D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, Ch. 5
M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Ch. 8
R. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, pp. 321-350

3. What, according to one or more members of the Frankfurt School, is the potential role of art in western societies? What is the ‘culture industry’ and what are its effects? Are there any problems with this account of art and culture?
Some suggested readings:
D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, Ch. 3
M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Ch. 6
T. Adorno, The Culture Industry
T. Adorno, Prisms, esp. ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’
R. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, passim

4. Discuss the use made by one or more members of the Frankfurt School of Freudian psychoanalysis? Does psychoanalysis play a useful role in the Frankfurt School’s critique of society?
Some suggested readings:
D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, Ch. 4;
M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Ch. 3;
A. Elliott, Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition, chs. 1-3;
J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, Part III.
R. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, passim.

5. Why does Habermas think that the ‘project of modernity’ is ‘incomplete’? How can the project of modernity be completed, according to Habermas? Are there any problems with his views?
Some suggested readings:
R. J. Bernstein, ed. Habermas and Modernity, esp. Introduction
J. Habermas, ‘Modernity - an incomplete project’ in H. Foster, ed. Postmodern Culture, 1988
W. Outhwaite, Habermas, Ch. 8
D. West, An Introduction to Continental Philosophy, Ch. 7

6. Discuss Habermas’s account of the public sphere. What are the implications of Habermas’s account? Are there any problems with his views?
Some suggested readings:
J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
R. C. Holub, Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere, Ch. 1, pp. 1-19
N. Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’ in Justice Interruptus, pp. 69-98
W. Outhwaite, Habermas: A Critical Introduction, Ch. 1

7. Briefly outline Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. How is this theory supposed to provide moral standards for a critical theory of society? Does Habermas succeed?
Some suggested readings:
W. Outhwaite, Habermas, Ch. 3
D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, Ch. 12
M. Pusey, Jürgen Habermas, Ch. 3
T. McCarthy, Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, Ch. 4.

8. Discuss Habermas’ distinction between ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’? Why does Habermas believe that the lifeworld of contemporary society is being ‘invaded’ or ‘colonised’ by the systems of power and money? What form does resistance to this invasion take? Are there any problems with Habermas’s account?
Some suggested readings:
W. Outhwaite, Habermas, chs 5-6
M. Pusey, Jürgen Habermas, esp. chs 2-4
J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, Part VI, pp. 113-19

9. Discuss Habermas’s ‘debates’ with either Gadamer and hermeneutics or Lyotard and postmodernism or Foucault. Explain both sides of the debate. Who do you think has the stronger position in the debate and why?
Some suggested readings:
R. C. Holub, Jürgen Habermas, chs. 2, 3, 6 or 7
W. Outhwaite, Habermas, Ch. 8
D. C. Hoy & T. McCarthy, Critical Theory
J. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
R. Rorty in Bernstein, Habermas and Modernity, Ch. 3

ASSIGNMENT II – TAKE-HOME EXAMINATION (Two Short Essays) – 45% OF FINAL MARK

ASSESSMENT CRITERIA FOR ASSIGNMENTS I AND II.
Your work will be judged on:
• Adequate reading and research - Are you aware of the main contributions other people have made to this topic? Have you referred to these contributions where relevant throughout your essay? Are you aware of the main points for and against your point of view?
• Clear, consistent and logically developed argument - Have you thought about the topic? Do you understand the main ideas and the way they relate to each other? Do you have a clear point of view? Is your point of view developed consistently and logically throughout your essay? Are your paragraphs in the right order? Are your sentences in the right order?
• Clear expression of ideas and use of language - Is it easy for someone else to understand what you have written? Is the meaning of your individual points clear and unambiguous? Have you used language in a grammatical way? Do you use words correctly?
• Good presentation - Is your essay clearly laid out with reasonably sized and recognisable paragraphs? Is the essay printed clearly in a reasonable font size (neither too big nor too small)? Have you run a spelling-checker to eliminate some unnecessary errors? Have you left time for a careful last edit and proof-reading?

GENERAL INFORMATION

For ANU policy and procedures regarding ACADEMIC HONESTY, PLAGIARISM AND APPEALS, please visit http://cass.anu.edu.au/students/rules/index.php

For assistance with assignment writing and completion, visit the ACADEMIC SKILLS AND LEARNING CENTRE at https://academicskills.anu.edu.au/, Lower Ground Floor, Pauline Griffin Building (Building #11)

SUBMISSION OF ASSIGNMENT I – ESSAY
1. Once essays on a particular topic have been returned to students, no further essays on that topic will be accepted.
2. All essays submitted by the due date will be assessed and returned before the examination/ second assignment.
3. No essays will be accepted after the commencement of the examination/ second assignment in a course unless permission is secured on ‘medical or other reasonable grounds’.

PENALTIES AND EXTENSIONS

In fairness to students who meet the deadline, a penalty will be imposed on all essays submitted after the due date or later than an approved extension of the due date. The penalty is two percentage points (2%) subtracted from the assessed mark (out of 100%) for the essay, for each calendar day (or part thereof) excluding weekends by which the essay is overdue.

Extensions may be granted on medical or other reasonable grounds. Students seeking an extension must discuss their request with me before the due date. Please let me know as soon as possible if you are experiencing any problems that may affect your studies. Extensions may be granted on medical or other reasonable grounds.
Please note the following guidelines:
1. Medical reasons -requests for extensions must be supported by a medical certificate.
2. Personal problems – requests for extensions should be supported by some documentation such as a letter from your doctor, college tutor, parent or other appropriate individual. If you have been seeing a counsellor from the University Counselling Service, s/he may be able to write a letter in support of your request – but please note that you should not see a counsellor merely in order to obtain such a letter.
3. Clash of essay deadlines - extensions will not normally be given where a clash of essay deadlines is known in advance.
4. Outside employment - extensions will not normally be given where external work commitments are known in advance. Requests for extensions must be supported by a letter from your employer.
5. Participation in sporting events - requests for extensions must be supported by a letter from the appropriate sporting body.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following list covers the major topics of this course and is intended to supplement Tutorial Readings. It is not intended to be exhaustive. Many listed works include further references and, in some case, extensive bibliographies. You can also consult the Library’s catalogue, advisers and electronic resources. More readable and/or recommended works are marked with ‘*’.

Influences, Background and Introductory

Kaufmann, W.: Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1974).

Lukács, G.: History and Class Consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone (Merlin Press, London, 1971).

*McLellan, D.: Marx (Fontana, London, 1975).

*MacRae, D. G.: Weber (Fontana/Collins, Glasgow, 1987).

*Plant, R.: Hegel (Allen & Unwin, London, 1973).

Schiller, F.: On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. & trans. E. M. Wilkinson & L. A. Willoughby (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1967).

Scruton, R.: Kant (Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 1982).

*Singer, P.: Hegel, (Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 1983).

Taylor, C.: Hegel (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1975).

*West, D.: An Introduction to Continental Philosophy (Polity Press, Cambridge and Blackwell, US, 1996).

Wollheim, R.: Freud (Fontana/Collins, London, 1971).

The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory

Alway, J.: Critical theory and political possibilities : Conceptions of emancipatory politics in the works of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas (Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 1995).

Arato, A. and Gebhardt, E. (eds.): The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978).

Benjamin, W.: Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (Fontana/Collins, London, 1968).

Bernstein, J. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992).

*Bottomore, T.: The Frankfurt School (Ellis Horwood/Tavistock, Chichester & London, 1984; 2^nd edn Palgrave, 2000): critical discussion from a Marxist perspective.

Bubner, R.: Modern German Philosophy, trans. E. Matthews (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge & New York, 1981).

Connerton, P.: The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

Dews, P.: Logics of Disintegration (Verso, London & New York, 1987).

Dominic, Strinati: An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (Florencetype Ltd., New York, 1995).

Elliott, Anthony: Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self and society from Freud to Kristeva (Blackwell, 1992), esp. Chs. 1-3.

Geuss, R.: The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

*Held, D.: Introduction to Critical Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

Ingram, D.: Critical Theory and Philosophy (New York: Paragon House, 1990).

*Jay, M.: The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973) - useful bibliography.

Kearney, R. Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984).

*Keat, R.: The Politics of Social Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981)

Stirk, Peter M. R.: Critical Theory, Politics and Society: An introduction (Continuum, London and New York, 2000).

Tar, Z.: The Frankfurt School: The critical theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (Wiley, New York, 1977).

Whitebook, Joel: Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1995).

*Wiggershaus, R.: The Frankfurt School (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994) - detailed history until early 1970s; extensive bibliography.

Wise, C. ‘The Profane Illumination’, Arena, 2, 1993/94, pp. 195-214 (esp. art and culture).

Max Horkheimer

Horkheimer, M. Eclipse of Reason (CUP, Cambridge, 1974).

Adorno, T. W. & Horkheimer, M.: Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) trans. John Cumming (Verso, London & New York, 1979).

Horkheimer, M.: Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. M. J. O’Connell et al. (Continuum, New York, 1992).

Horkheimer, M.: Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected early writings, trans. G. F. Hunter et al. (MIT Press, Cambridge USA & London UK, 1993).

Stirk, Peter M. R.: Max Horkheimer: A new interpretation (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, UK, and Barnes and Noble, Lanham, MD, 1992).

Theodor Adorno

Adorno, T. W.: Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (Routledge, London, 1973).

Adorno, T. W.: Minima Moralia: Reflections from damaged life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Verso, London, 1974).

Adorno, T. W. et al., eds.: The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. G. Adey & D. Frisby (Heinemann Educational Books, London, 1976).

Adorno, T. W.: Aesthetic Theory (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London & Boston, 1984).

Adorno, T. W.: The Culture Industry: Selected essays on mass culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Routledge, London, 1991).

Adorno, T. W. & Horkheimer, M.: Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) trans. John Cumming (Verso, London & New York, 1979).

Buck-Morss, S.: The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School (Sussex: Harvester, 1977).

Huyssen, R. ‘Introduction to Adorno’, New German Critique, 6, Fall, 1975.

Jameson, F.: Adorno, or, the persistence of the dialectic (Verso, London, 1990).

Jay, M.: Adorno (Fontana/Collins, London, 1984).

*Rose, G.: The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London: Macmillan, 1978).

Zuidervaart, L.: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1991).

Herbert Marcuse

Marcuse, H.: One-Dimensional Man (Sphere Books, London, 1968).

Marcuse, H.: Negations: Essays in critical theory, trans. J. J. Shapiro (Allen Lane, London, 1968).

Marcuse, H.: Eros and Civilization (Sphere Books, London, 1969).

Marcuse, H.: An Essay on Liberation (Allen Lane, London, and Beacon Press, Boston, 1969).

Marcuse, H.: Soviet Marxism (Penguin Books, London & New York, 1971).

Marcuse, H.: Counterrevolution and Revolt (Allen Lane, London, 1972).

Marcuse, H.: ‘Sartre’s Existentialism’ in H. Marcuse, Studies in Critical Philosophy Breines, P., ed.: Critical Interruptions: New Left Perspectives on Herbert Marcuse (Herder and Herder, New York, 1970).

Fry, J.: Marcuse, Dilemma and Liberation: A critical analysis (New Left Books, London, 1972; Beacon Press, Boston, 1973).

*V. Geoghegan, Reason and Eros: The social theory of Herbert Marcuse (Pluto Press, London, 1981).

Katz, B.: Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An intellectual biography (Verso, London and New York, 1982).

*Kellner, D.: Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Macmillan, London, 1984).

Lind, P.: Marcuse and Freedom (Croom Helm, 1985).

*MacIntyre, A.: Marcuse (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1970) – a fairly hostile critique.

Pippin, R. (ed.): Marcuse, Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia (Bergin and Garvey, 1988).

*Schoolman, Morton: The Imaginary Witness: The critical theory of Herbert Marcuse (New York University Press, 1984).

Wolff, K. H. & Moore, B, eds: The Critical Spirit: Essays in honor of Herbert Marcuse (Beacon Press, Boston, 1967)

Wolff, R. P. et al, eds: A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Jonathan Cape, London, 1969).

Jürgen Habermas

Habermas, J.: ‘On systematically distorted communication’, Inquiry, 13, 1970, pp. 205-218.

Habermas, J.: ‘Summation and response’, Continuum, 8, 1970, pp. 123-133.

Habermas, J.: Toward a Rational Society, trans. J. J. Shapiro (Heinemann, London, 1971).

Habermas, J.: Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. J. Shapiro (Heinemann, London, 1972).

Habermas, J.: ‘Wahrheitstheorien’ in Wirklichkeit und Reflexion: Walter Schulz zum 60 Geburtstag (Neske, Pfullingen, 1973).

Habermas, J.: Theory and Practice, trans. J. Viertel (Heinemann, London, 1974).

Habermas, J.: ‘New Social Movements’, Telos, 49, 1981, pp. 33-7.

Habermas, J.: ‘Modernity versus postmodernity’, New German Critique, 22, 1981, pp. 3-14.

Habermas, J.: Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols, trans. T. McCarthy (Beacon Press, Boston, 1984).

Habermas, J.: Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. T. McCarthy (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1984).

Habermas, J.: ‘Modernity - an incomplete project’ in H. Foster, ed. Postmodern Culture (Pluto Press, London, 1985)

Habermas, J.: Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas, ed. P. Dews (Verso, London, 1986).

Habermas, J.: Law and Morality: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (1988)

Habermas, J.: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger (MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1989).

Habermas, J.: Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990).

Habermas, J.: Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. C. Lenhardt & S. W. Nicholson (MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1990).

Habermas, J.: Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. W. M. Hohengarten (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992).

Habermas, J.: Justification and Application: Remarks on discourse ethics, trans. C. Cronin (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1993).

Habermas, J. Between Facts and Norms: Toward a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Polity Press, Oxford, 1994).

Benhabib, S & Dallmayr, F., eds: The Communicative Ethics Controversy (MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma. & London, 1990).

Bernstein, J. M.: Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the future of critical theory (Routledge, London and New York, 1995).

*Bernstein, R.J.: Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 1985).

Habermas, J.:

Brand, A.: The Force of Reason: An introduction to Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990).

Calhoun, C. J., ed.: Habermas and the Public Sphere (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

Edgell, Stephen, Sandra Walklate, Gareth Williams, eds. Debating the future of the public sphere: transforming the public and private domains in free market societies (Aldershot, Hants, England 1995).

d’Entrèves, P. and Benhabib, S., eds. Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1997).

Gadamer, H-G. : ‘On the scope and function of hermeneutical reflection’, Continuum, 8, 1970, pp. 77-95.

*Held, D.: Introduction to Critical Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

*Holub, R. C.: Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (Routledge, London and New York, 1991).

How, A.: The Habermas-Gadamer Debate and the Nature of the Social: Back to bedrock (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1995).

Keane, J.: Public Life and Late Capitalism, (Cambridge University Press, London & New York, 1984).

Kohlberg, L., Levine C. & Hewer, A: Moral Stages: A current formulation and a response to critics (Karger, Basel & New York, 1983).

Love, N.: ‘Ideal speech and feminist discourse: Habermas re-visioned’ in Women and Politics, vol. 11, no. 3, 1991, pp. 101-122.

*McCarthy, T.: The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (London: Hutchinson, 1978).

Meehan, J. A., ed.: Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse (Routledge, New York and London, 1995).

*Outhwaite, W.: Habermas: A Critical Introduction (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994).

Outhwaite, W., ed.: The Habermas Reader (Polity, Oxford, 1995).

*Pusey, M.: Jürgen Habermas (Ellis Horwood, Chichester and Tavistock, London and New York, 1987).

Rasmussen, D. M.: Reading Habermas (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

Rehg, W.: Insight and Solidarity: A study in the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994).

Roderick, R.: Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986).

Thompson, J. & Held, D.: Habermas: Critical debates (Macmillan, London, 1982).

*White, S. K.: The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas: Reason, Justice and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1988).

White, S. K., ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge & New York, 1995).

The Poststructuralism, Postmodernism Debates

Benjamin, A., ed.: Judging Lyotard (Routledge, London & New York, 1992), Chapter 5.

*Holub, R. C.: Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (Routledge, London and New York, 1991), Chapter 6.

Hoy, D. C. & McCarthy, T.: Critical Theory (Blackwell, Oxford UK & Cambridge USA, 1994).

Kelly, M.: Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/ Habermas debate (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1994).

Lyotard, J-F.: The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge, trans. G. Bennington & B. Massumi (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984).

McNay, L.: Foucault: A Critical Introduction (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994).

Pefanis, Julian: Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1991).

Stanley, R.: Habermas, Lyotard and the Concept of Justice (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1992).

*White, S.: Political Theory and Postmodernism, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge & New York, 1991).

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RELEVANT WEB LINKS

N.B. Please refer to the IMPORTANT GUIDELINES above on the FIRST WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT/ ESSAY - Use only published academic sources (i.e. books and journal articles) in referncing your essay. If there is no alternative, you may use online versions of published books and journals – but always include page references. For this course, it is definitely not acceptable to rely on other internet resources (such as unrefereed publications, freelance web-sites, blogs, reference sites like wikipedia etc.).

Relevant web sites are: Illuminations - Critical Theory with articles and information on Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin,_ Marcuse, Habermas (not all of them currently active) as well as a lot of other links.

There are also a large range of links on critical philosophy and radical politics maintained by the_ Spoons Collective including Habermas and the Frankfurt School as well as Foucault, Lyotard and postmodernism.

Some relevant texts are online at the Cultural Studies and Critical Theory website.

A host a relevant links can be found on the Culture page of the Amsterdam Sociosite of a large number of links relevant to sociology.

Encyclopedia Britannica online.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Normative Political Theory at the American Political Science Association.

Oxford English Dictionary online.

Political Studies Association of the UK.

Political Thought at Richard Kimber's Political Science Resources.

QandA Philosophy Resources

Slow TV/ The Monthly Magazine with interviews about Australian Politics, Society and Culture.

Spoon Collective links on radical and/or critical political philosophy/theory.

Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy.

Please send any suggestions for new links to David.West@anu.edu.au

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CONTACT INFORMATION

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PREVIOUS LECTURE OUTLINES (2007-09)

1. Introduction: Modernity and Enlightenment.

I. Introduction

1. Aim to situate the ideas of the Frankfurt School and Habermas in terms of central ideas of the Enlightenment project (Week 1).
2. Frankfurt School and Habermas can be seen as the outcome of Hegel’s critique of the Enlightenment project via Marx and Marxism (Weeks 2-4).
3. Enlightenment project:
(i) Aim to reconstruct society and morality on rational foundations;
(ii) Progress as expected outcome.

II. Sources of Western Modernity

1. The idea of modernity/‘being modern’ from Europe’s belief in its radical break from its own past and from other societies.
2. The onset of modernity around 1500 AD marked by:-
a. Voyages of discovery, colonisation and ideas of cultural difference;
b. Protestant Reformation and the rise of individualism;
c. Capitalism and the ‘Protestant Ethic’;
d. Renaissance and humanism;
3. Renaissance revival of classical (pagan) humanism:
(i) challenge to authority of religion and the Church;
(ii) value of human knowledge.
4. Associated rise of western rationalism:
(i) science, scientific approach to knowledge;
(ii) ‘modern’ philosophical thought.

III. Central Principles of Modern Thought I. Descartes

1. Modern thought as replacement of overwhelmingly religious world view of Middle Ages with scientific rationalism.
2. René Descartes (1591-1650):
(i) Enlightenment project of putting knowledge on new, more rational foundations
(i) Descartes’s (Cartesian) method of doubt;
(iii) Descartes’s own religious beliefs – the problem of the ‘evil demon’
3. Dualism of mind and matter – two fundamental ‘substances’.
4. Material world of nature:
(i) objective world as a mechanical system;
(ii) extended in space – geometry;
(iii) explicable by mechanistic laws – physics, astronomy.
5. Mental world of mind/ souls:
(i) only indubitable truth – from method of doubt
(ii) cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)
(iii) ‘subject’ of knowledge as essentially separate substance;
(iv) soul, eternal life and religious assumptions.
6. Problem of ‘evil demon’ and assumption of God’s existence.

IV. Central Principles of Modern Thought II. David Hume

1. David Hume’s (1711-76) more radical Enlightenment scepticism:
(i) against religion – no evidence for belief in God
(ii) Supposed ‘evidence’ of miracles as superstition;
(iii) Overwhelming evidence for ‘laws of nature’.
2. Scepticism – two models of genuine knowledge:
(i) Contingent truths of ‘empirical knowledge’ through observation.
(ii) Necessary truths of logic and mathematics.
3. Scepticism about our knowledge of external world:
(i) cause and effect – as product of habit
(ii) substance of things and self as illusion
4. Hume’s ‘positivism’:
(i) science as nearest we get to genuine knowledge.
(ii) proposal to apply scientific method to morality and ‘science of man’.
5. Humean origins of social and political sciences as sciences.

V. Social and Political Thought of the Enlightenment

1. The Enlightenment project’s challenge to the political order:
(i) Erosion of traditional and religious authority – monarchs, princes and Pope;
(ii) Path to liberalism and democracy – revolution and reform
(iii) ‘End of history’?
2. The project of a rational morality:
(i) No reliance on tradition or religion;
(ii) Need new foundations for old values;
(iii) Or possibly new values, or even…
(iv) No values or nihilism.
3. Kant’s (1724-1804) attempt to found a universal morality on the basis of reason.
4. Utilitarianism and social reform of J. Bentham (1748-1832).
5. Nihilism of Marquis de Sade (1740-1814).

2. Reason in History: Hegel’s Critique of the Enlightenment

I. Introduction

1. Last week on features of western ‘modernity’, modern philosophy and the ‘Enlightenment project.
2. Basic implication that scientific rationality will lead to progress:
knowledge,
material and economic,
social and political,
moral etc.
3. Hegel’s alternative conception of ‘reason’ undermining these claims.

II. The French Revolution and Conservative Reaction

1. The French Revolution (1789-99) was a typical product of the Enlightenment:
(i) liberty and ‘equality’;
(ii) secular rationalism;
(iii) ‘bourgeois’/ capitalist commercial interests.
2. Unexpected degeneration of the Revolution to tyranny, Terror and Empire.
3. Horrified conservative reaction: E. Burke (1729-97):
(i) ‘accumulated wisdom’ of tradition;
(ii) ‘organic balance’ of society.
4. England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688:
(i) constitutional monarchy;
(ii) balancing need for change and preservation of tradition
5. Cf. M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics for 20th century version of this argument.

III. Hegel’s Critique of the Enlightenment

1. Reaction of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831):
not simply conservative rejection of Enlightenment,
but ‘dialectical’ critique.
2. Aim to transcend or incorporate and go beyond Enlightenment insights and assumptions.
3. Hegel’s aim is thus
(i) not to reject Enlightenment rationality, but
(ii) to identify a more adequate conception of rationality
(iii) Hegel’s ‘reason’ vs. limited ‘rationality’ of Enlightenment.

IV. Hegel’s Critique of Kant

1. Kant as pre-eminent thinker of the Enlightenment (esp. in Germany).
2. Kant’s morality (Moralität):
(i) ‘categorical imperative’ or unconditional obligation
(ii) morality as universality vs. particularity of individual wants
(iii) that whatever we do, we must be prepared to ‘universalise the maxim of our action’.
3. Hegel’s critique of empty abstraction of Kantian morality:
(i) no content to categorical imperative.
(ii) Sade and universalisation of evil maxims;
4. Abstract freedom leads to destruction:
French Revolutionary Terror.
5. Abstract Kantian ‘morality’ must be supplemented
(i) concrete ethical life (Sittlichkeit);
(ii) practices/ ethics of particular communities;
(iii) But is this just conservatism in another guise?

V. The Hegelian Synthesis: The Historical Character of Human Life

1. Problems of conservatism and relativism:
(i) How is it possible to criticise ‘ethical life’ or tradition?
(ii) Examples of human sacrifice, slavery etc.
2. Hegel’s solution that humanity develops through history:
(i) No timeless and universal human nature or essence or morality;
(ii) Historical process of human development.
3. Process of development means that human societies
(a) change over time,
(b) change in a progressive direction.
4. Dimensions of human historical development:
(i) politics and the state;
(ii) morality;
(iii) art;
(iv) religion;
(v) philosophy.
5. Ambivalence of Hegel’s historical perspective:
(i) Earlier forms of politics/ morality/ art/ religion/ philosophy have some truth (anti-chauvinism)
(ii) But they have less truth than ‘ours’ (chauvinism).

VI. History as Dialectic

1. Origins of dialectic:
(i) Plato’s Socratic dialogues:
(ii) advance towards truth through dialogue.
2. The dialectical process of history:
(i) history advances through dialogue
(ii) i.e. conflict between worldviews.
3. So historical development is ‘spiral’ rather than ‘linear’:
(i) Not continual progress;
(ii) But progress in the long run;
(iii) Progress in human freedom.
4. Hegel’s view of the goal of world history (Hegel, History of Philosophy, p. 19):
The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom... and ipso facto, the reality of that freedom.
5. Cunning of reason:
(i) history advances dialectically
(ii) but ‘behind the back’ of people/ historical agents.
6. History is also a ‘slaughter-bench’ of countless human beings. I.e. history is not just about progress.
7. Hegel’s developmental view of history as a form of western chauvinism?

4. Marx and Marxism: Can Ideas Change the World?

I. Introduction

1. Hegel’s critique of the Enlightenment.
(i) Hegel’s critique of the abstract rationalism of the Enlightenment.
(ii) Kant’s abstract morality and the destructiveness of the French Revolution.
(iii) Hegel’s communitarian emphasis on Sittlichkeit/ ethical life.
(iv) Hegel’s avoidance of relativism through the dialectic of history.

2. This topic – development of the Hegelian tradition in Marx and Marxism.
(i) Frankfurt School as a continuation of the Hegelian and Marxist traditions.
(ii) This tradition of thought is sharply critical of the dominant patterns of Enlightenment thought,
- its limited conception of rationality
- vision of unlimited, linear progress
- faith in capitalism and free markets.
(iii) At the same time, it attempts to preserve the connection between reason or rationality and human emancipation.
(iv) Frankfurt School tradition remains committed to at least one version of the ‘Enlightenment project’.

II. The Dispute between Left and Right Hegelians

1. The dispute between ‘left’ and ‘right’ Hegelians according to whether:
society and thought are regarded as the last stage of history
society and thought are the latest stage of history.
2. Right (or ‘Old’) Hegelians:
(i) from conservatism to reaction;
(ii) organic state;
(iii) return to religion;
(iv) sacrifice of individuals to state;
(v) totalitarianism?
3. Left (or ‘Young’) Hegelians:
(i) necessity of further critique
(ii) transformation of society.

III. Left Hegelians: Feuerbach, Marx and Engels

1. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72):
(i) religion as alienation of human power;
(ii) idealist philosophy;
(iii) scientific materialism
(iv) progressive political reform.
2. Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95):
(i) as left Hegelians,
(ii) but critical of merely intellectual ‘critical critics’ (e.g. Poverty of Philosophy).
3. So Marx
(i) rejects Hegel’s idealist dialectic of world views,
(ii) proposing instead a materialist dialectic
(iii) within the realm of production/ economics.

IV. Marx’s Materialist Conception of History

1. Marx’s materialist conception of history as
(i) the evolving relationship between human beings and nature
(ii) for the satisfaction of human needs:

… life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. (German Ideology)

2. Fundamental concepts of mode of production (MOP)
referring to the way in which a society ensures its material existence.
3. MOP comprises
(i) means or forces of production – people, technology, methods
(ii) relations of production – relationships of ownership and control of MOP
4. History as a series of MoPs according to basic class divisions, including:
(i) ancient slavery (slaves vs. slave-owners),
(ii) feudalism (feudal lords vs. peasants),
(iii) capitalism (capitalists/ bourgeoisie vs. workers)
(iv) socialism – to each according to their labour
(v) communism – to each according to their need
5. The ‘motor of history’:
development of forces of production leads to changes in relations of production.
6. Conflict between classes as factor leading from one MOP to the next.
7. Two main examples of revolution:
(i) Bourgeois revolution from feudalism to capitalism (past).
(ii) Proletarian revolution from capitalism to socialism, then communism (present/future).
8. Overall, Marx regards
conflict as intrinsic (Hegel) to an unfinished dialectic (left Hegelian) of material social development (Marxism).

V. The Critique of Utopian Socialism

1. For Marx there is an essential relationship between theory and practice:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ (Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, Early Writings, pp. 421-3)

2. Materialist view of history implies that ideas and consciousness are secondary to economic developments:

Morality, religion, metaphysics, and other ideologies, and their corresponding forms of consciousness… have no history, no development; it is men, who, in developing their material production and their material intercourse, change, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. (German Ideology)

3. So are critical ideas or theories really useless:
(i) as product rather than cause of fundamental material social change;
(ii) leads to fatalism?
(iii) or ideas have to ‘stand the test’ of material conditions and practic3
4. Criticisms of 19th century utopian socialists:
(i) Figures such as Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837), Saint-Simon (1760-1825)
(ii) no theory of agency – how will socialism come about?
(iii) against direction of history – inevitable growth of capitalism/ socialism only after capitalism;
(iv) vulgar communism – of simple equality of poverty
(v) genuine communism - ‘to each according to their need’/ ‘wealth of needs’

VI. Theory and Practice in Scientific Socialism

1. Scientific socialism:
(i) proletariat as agent of revolution;
(ii) communism as ‘wealth of needs’;
(iii) revolution depends on further development of capitalism.
2. Social theory of capitalism:
(i) concentration and homogenisation of working class;
(ii) its impoverishment and levelling at level of subsistence;
(iii) emerging organisations of working class:
educational association, trade unions, co-operatives, mutual help societies etc.;
(iv) emergence of working class consciousness.
3. Proposed relationship between theory and practice
(i) provides a model for the critical theory of Frankfurt School;
(ii) Also implies problems for the project of critical theory.

5. The Idea of a Critical Theory of Society

I. Introduction: Historical Origins of the Frankfurt School

1. Aim to present some of the central ideas contributing to FS’s critical theory,
(i) not a detailed historical account;
(ii) see books by M. Jay, D. Held or Wiggershaus).
(iii) intellectual influences: Hegel, Marx, Marxism
(iv) but also Nietzsche, Max Weber
2. Schematic history of Institute for Social Research:
(1) First Phase - founded in Frankfurt (1923);
(2) Second Phase - exile to USA during fascist period (1932-45);
(3) Third Phase - return of some members (Adorno) to Germany after 1945; others (Marcuse) stayed in USA.
3. ‘First generation’ of Frankfurt School thinkers:
Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
Theodor Adorno (1903-69)
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) – associated but not member of FS

II. Formative Context I. Fascism (1933-45)

1. Demise of liberal capitalism and rise of fascism:
(i) Germany/Italy/Spain
(ii) not predicted socialist revolution of Marxist theory.
2. Modernity of fascist barbarism:
(i) instrumental rationality of means (technology, bureaucracy);
(ii) irrationality and immorality of ends or goals.
3. Consequent scepticism about progress:
(i) scepticism about Enlightenment;
(ii) scepticism even about dialectical progress (Hegel, Marx)
4. Monopoly capitalism’s totalitarian features – similarities with fascism;
(i) Marcuse on ‘one-dimensional society’;
(ii) ‘repressive tolerance’ (the ‘purloined letter’)
(iii) incorporation of working class;
(iv) poor prospects for socialist revolution.

III. Formative Context II. Soviet Communism

1. Similarities rather than differences of Soviet Communism with
(i) fascism
(ii) monopoly capitalism
(iii) e.g. H. Marcuse, Soviet Marxism.
2. Soviet communism not an obvious improvement on capitalism:
(i) alienated labour;
(ii) inequalities and Party privileges
(iii) party dictatorship, not ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’
(iv) as a workers’ state in name only.
3. Bureaucratisation of state and industry
common to capitalism and ‘communism’.

IV. Formative Context III. Social Democracy

1. Failure of communist uprisings (e.g. Germany 1918) and weakness of revolutionary Marxism in the West.
2. Reformist social democracy:
(i) gradualist, ‘evolutionary’ (E. Bernstein);
(ii) focus on state (Fabian socialism) and bureaucracy;
(iii) ‘nationalisation’ as piecemeal socialisation of the means of production.
(iv) welfare state and incorporation of working class.
3. Fate of social democracy:
(i) accommodation to capitalism;
(ii) bureaucratic parties and statism;
(iv) dilution then abandonment of socialist goal;
4. Social democracy and the dismantling of the welfare state.
(i) ‘Forward March of Labour Halted’;
(ii) Vulnerability to neoliberalism, neo-conservatism, globalisation.
5. The unelectability of radical social democracy:
e.g. Green Party in Australia?

V. Theoretical Legacy of Marxism

1. Engagement of knowledge, intellectuals and ‘theory’:
(i) not complicity with ruling class – providers of the ‘ruling ideas’
(ii) not neutrality;
(iii) but engagement on behalf of the oppressed.
2. Relation of theory and practice:
‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’).
3. Marx’s historical materialism:
(i) importance of material factors, political and economic realities;
(ii) importance of capitalism.
(iii) so ideas are not enough.
4. Marx’s critique of political economy in Capital etc. as:
(i) Marx’s method;
(ii) as model for a critical theory of society.

VI. Critical Theory and the Critique of Positivism

1. G. Lukács’s (1885-1971) on the distinction between content and method of Marxism:
(i) dialectical method of Marx;
(ii) dogmatic content of his theories:
(iii) falsified factual claims and predictions of Marxism;
2. Diagnosis of dogmatism of orthodox or ‘vulgar’ Marxism:
(i) retains dogmatic contents
(ii) abandons or ignores critical method.
3. Method of Marxism as critical theory:
I. moral critique of society through politically engaged theory;
II. not utopian – i.e. is based on social and political realities;
III. materialist – recognises material and historical basis of thought;
IV. contextualist – develops and changes with society, history;
V. auto-critique – must always be self-critical.
4. Critique of positivism as conservative:
(i) undermines criticism of society;
(ii) preserves existing power relations;
(iii) creates ‘false nature’ – unchangeable social relations;
5. Positivist degeneration of orthodox Marxism:
(i) Engels and ‘iron laws’ of capital;
(ii) ‘scientific socialism’ and determinism;
(iii) authoritarian experts and Party dictatorship.
6. Critical theory dialectical – return to Hegel:
(i) uncovers ‘negative’ dimension of existing order
(ii) through utopian thought, art, imagination and critique;
(iii) ‘determinate’ negation and ‘immanent critique’

6. The Dark Side of the Western Enlightenment. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.

I. Introduction

1. Frankfurt School’s criticism of positivist Marxism (last topic).
2. Two significant influences:
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and
Max Weber (1864-1920).
3. Overall diagnosis:
(i) Marxism as falling victim to the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’
(ii) Western society trapped within the dialect of Enlightenment
4. Difficulty of the text – look to secondary sources for ‘enlightenment’!

II. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): The Critique of Enlightenment Dogmatism

Reading
W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ
R. Schacht, Nietzsche.
D. West, An Introduction to Continental Philosophy, Ch. 4.

1. Nietzsche’s ant-systematic philosophy:
(i) aphorisms; paradoxes and contradictions;
(ii) influence on Adorno’s thought and style.
2. On the dogmatism of truth and rationality:
(i) Kantian philosophy as ‘superstition’ and ‘lies’;
(ii) i.e. Kantian postulates of causality, substance etc.
(iii) pursuit of truth as ‘will to power’.
(iv) cf. Michel Foucault.
3. Absence of faith in history and politics:
(i) against belief in Enlightenment progress;
(ii) against Hegelian philosophy of history;
(iii) against sacrifice of present life to future telos.
4. Critique of complacent humanism and moralism:
(i) Christianity as ‘slave morality’;
(ii) Western culture not a reliable basis for morality;
(iii) So no attempt to reconstruct traditional morality on ‘rational foundations’;
(iv) That would be humanism.
(v) Need for radical ‘transvaluation of all values’;
(vi) Towards the ‘over-man’.
5. Nietzsche’s less attractive features:
(i) as victim or conqueror of nihilism?
(ii) anti-political, elitist – appeal to few exceptional individuals;
(iii) not a proto-Nazi: Nietzsche’s anti-anti-Semitism and anti-nationalism.

III. Max Weber (1864-1920): Western Modernity as Instrumental Rationalisation

1. Frankfurt School criticisms of historical materialism:
(i) positivism;
(ii) inadequate critique of Enlightenment rationality;
(iii) excessive focus on the economic base – economism.
2. Weber’s account of the formal rationalisation of Western society.
(i) Formal rationality as organisation of efficient means to given ends;
(ii) i.e. ‘instrumental’ rationality for Frankfurt School.
(iii) Substantive rationality as rationality of ends/ goals.
(iv) i.e. ‘reason’ according to FS.
3. Rationalisation of the economy in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5):
(i) Superstructure and Base – the primacy of ideas or economic forces?
(ii) Protestant ethos – individual works, delayed gratification (investment);
(iii) religious acceptance of worldly success;
(iv) cf. other Christian doctrines.
4. Overall: capitalism is formally or instrumentally but not substantively rational.
5. Other dimensions of the formal rationalisation of Western society:
(i) Increasing role of impersonal law – from Roman law on.
(ii) Separation of politics and ‘reason of state’ from religious values (Machiavelli);
(iii) Increasing bureaucratisation of the state;
(iv) Disenchantment – privatisation of religious belief, meaning and values.
6. Weber’s ambivalence about western modernity as:
(i) inescapable, beneficial in many way;
(ii) an ‘iron cage’.

IV. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

1. Enlightenment as overcoming of superstition and myth:
[the] primal history of a subjectivity that wrests itself free from the power of mythic forces. (Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 108)
2. Odysseus rationally overcoming myth in the form of the Sirens:
Having himself tied to the mast…
3. Symbolises rationality as:
(i) control over objectified nature (technology) and
(ii) alienation from nature and natural impulses.

The permanent sign of enlightenment is domination over an objectified external nature and a repressed internal nature. (Habermas, p. 110)

4. Reification of humanity:
(i) Humanity becomes an object of control as well;
(ii) Cf. positivist human sciences/ social sciences;
(iii) Weberian rationalisation of western society;
(v) Cf. Marx on alienated labour and the critique of capitalism;
(iii) Leisure, entertainment and the culture industry (next topic).

V. Myth Strikes Back

1. But eventually Enlightenment also becomes ‘engulfed in mythology’:
(i) The ‘fetishism of commodities’ (Marx);
(ii) Dogmatic commitment to scientific method, i.e. positivism.
(iii) Society driven by fear and the urge to control nature and society.
(iv) Cf. totalitarian ideologies of fascism and Soviet communism.
2. Positivist social science:
(i) The denial of change – i.e. unchanging laws of society;
(ii) Understood as the ‘sacralisation of reality’.
3. The destructive potential of Enlightenment:
(i) Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) – the rationality of cruelty;
(ii) National Socialism – the technical perfection of evil.
4. Escaping the fateful dialectic of Enlightenment? Despite their pessimism, Adorno and Horkheimer seek to preserve:

[the] anti-authoritarian tendency, which (though of course only in a subterranean form) still relates to the utopia in the concept of reason. (p. 93)

7. The Politics of Art and the ‘Culture Industry’.

I. Introduction

1. Frankfurt School’s interests beyond/ different from orthodox Marxism:
(i) in art, culture and psychoanalysis;
(ii) attempt to explain the integration of the working class
(iii) non-occurrence of revolution.
(iv) art and culture under fascism and Stalinism.
2. Compare Gramsci on hegemony as supplement of coercive power.
(i) dominant ideas and values;
(ii) moral and cultural hegemony – universities, churches, schools;
(iii) politics of hegemony or ‘war of position’
(iv) i.e. not just revolutionary class struggle or ‘war of manoeuvre’.
3. Ambivalent implications for political practice:
(i) ‘pessimism of the intellect’ threatens ‘optimism of the will’ (Gramsci);
(ii) elitism of ‘critical intellectuals’ who see through deceptions of ideology.

II. Art and Historical Materialism

1. Recall historical materialism’s view of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’.
2. Orthodox Marxism’s reduction of art to class function:
(i) ‘bourgeois’ art just ideological;
(ii) proletarian art as socialist realism and ‘agitprop’.
3. Art under Soviet Communism:
(i) early flourishing of radical art movements after Revolution;
(ii) suppression of modernism, surrealism etc.
(iii) e.g. Shostakovich
(iv) imposition of socialist realism.
4. Compare Marx’s own broader cultural appreciation of
Shakespeare, ancient Greeks, Balzac etc.

III. The Critical Potential of Art and Culture: Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse

1. Adorno and Horkheimer on:
(i) relative autonomy of art and culture.

that which is specifically cultural is that which is removed from the naked necessity of life. (Adorno, Culture Industry, p. 94)

(ii) art related to historical context;
(iii) but not determined by historical context.
2. Liberation of art from religion and daily life after Renaissance.
(i) overwhelmingly religious art of Middle Ages;
(ii) Renaissance humanism;
(iii) return to ancient ideals of beauty, harmony, perfection.
(iv) i.e. classicism.
3. Critical potential even of bourgeois art and modernism:

Culture as that which goes beyond the system of self-preservation of the species – involves an irrevocably critical impulse towards the status quo and all institutions thereof. (Adorno, Culture Industry, p. 100)

(i) bourgeois themes, audience, economy.
(ii) BUT retention of humanist/ classicism/ beauty etc.
4. Limitations of bourgeois art:
(i) class origins, audience;
(ii) censorship, bias;
(iii) deceptive promise of freedom or utopia.
5. Artistic modernism:

An element of resistance is inherent in the most aloof art.
Art, since it became autonomous, has preserved the utopia that evaporated from religion. (M. Horkheimer, ‘Art and Mass Culture’)

(i) greater abstraction/ autonomy from everyday life;
(ii) innovation, against tradition;
6. For Marcuse beauty and harmony are:

‘the sensuous appearance of the idea of freedom’
(Counterrevolution and Revolt).
Art is the emphatic assertion of what is excluded from Enlightenment’s instrumental rationality: the claim of sensuous particularity and rational ends. Art is the cognition of ends and of sensuous particularity cut off from practice.
(J. Bernstein, Introduction to The Culture Industry, p. 6)

7. Limitations of critical art:
(i) the ‘deceptive promise’ of utopia;
(ii) modern art’s difficulty and social exclusiveness;
(iii) artistic truth – is art’s difficulty unavoidable?

IV. Walter Benjamin on ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

1. W. Benjamin (1892-1940): famous essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (in Illuminations).
(i) mechanical reproduction as technical development – cf. Marx;
(ii) examples of printing, reproductions of art, film, recording;
2. Mass production destroys art’s mystical ‘aura’:

that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. (W. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 223).

(i) aura as the almost mystical or spiritual atmosphere of works of art;
(ii) contrast the image in a medieval church vs. contemporary advertising hoarding;
(iii) Chaplin’s films as radical and popular art;
(iv) cf. Picasso.
3. Progressive potential of ‘post-auratic’ art:
(i) art and the masses;
(ii) film, photography, posters – John Heartfield
4. The Nazi ‘aestheticisation of politics’:
• Nuremberg Rallies; ‘
• Leni Riefenstahl and the ‘Triumph of the Will’;
• futurist violence – Futurist Manifesto.
5. Alternative communist or socialist ‘politicisation of art’:
• art and revolution;
• democratic potential of art/ culture.
6. Politicised art movements of 20th century:
• surrealism;
• Dadaism;
• Brecht’s theatre – the ‘alienation effect’.
7. Evaluation of Benjamin:
• closer to Marx;
• too close to orthodox Marxism?

V. Adorno and Horkheimer on the Culture Industry

1. The fate of art and culture in the 20th century
as the culture industry.
2. Characteristics of culture industry:
(i) mass culture but not popular culture;
(ii) industrialised scale of mass production (cf. Benjamin);
(iii) for profit motive not social critique or artistic truth.
3. Affirmative nature of culture industry:
• denial of critical/ negative dimension;
• as a ‘mode of controlling individual consciousness’;
• fatalism, realism and escapism;
• ‘realistic dissidence’ – the commercialisation and domestication of dissent.
4. Adorno on the ‘fetish character’ of popular music and…
(i) the ‘regression in listening (Adorno);
(ii) music as intoxication;
The liquidation of the individual is the real signature of the new musical situation. (Adorno, Culture Industry, p. 31)
(iii) the case of Wagner;
(iv) cf. Mahler, Bach, Dylan…
5. Illusory fulfilment of culture industry:
(i) cultural consumer’s ‘false needs’;
(ii) amusement as work:
Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work.
(Dialectic of Enlightenment)
(iii) Sport – commerce, advertising, culture.

Sport itself is not play but ritual in which the subjected celebrate their subjection. They parody freedom in their readiness for service, a service which the individual forcibly exacts from his own body for a second time. In the freedom which he exercises over his body the individual confirms what he is by inflicting upon this slave the same injustice he has already endured at the violent hands of society.
(Culture Industry, p. 77)

6. Elitism?
• But no simple opposition of high vs. low’ art/ culture;
• ‘high’ art can be consumed uncritically as bourgeois status symbol;
• ‘low’ culture can be critical – protest music, folk music.
Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up. (Adorno quoted in Culture Industry, p. 2)
7. Pessimism?
• But consumers ‘ambivalent’ rather than enthusiastic:
The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
(J. Bernstein, Culture Industry)

8. No Lectures in Week Eight.

9. Marcuse and Freudian Psychoanalysis: Eros and Civilization.

I. Introduction

1. An important contribution to the ideas of the Frankfurt School is made by Freud and psychoanalysis.
2. Psychoanalysis supplements Marxist explanations:
(i) allegiance of the ‘masses’ to exploitative capitalist system;
(ii) allegiance to authoritarian fascism and Soviet communism.
3. i.e. Economic and/or class factors not enough to explain ‘false consciousness’ or ‘ideology’.

II. Sigmund Freud – Basic Concepts of Psychoanalysis

1. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): psychoanalysis contributes to
‘decentring of the subject’ or ‘critique of the subject’
(i) Feuerbach on the deep-seated basis of religion;
(ii) Marx on the deep-seated basis of ideology;
(iii) Freud on the ‘unconscious’ mind.
(iv) So – do we know what we really think/ want/ believe?
2. Breuer, Charcot and the explanation of hysteria:
(i) Physical symptoms without possible physiological basis,
(ii) E.g paralysis of the hand;
(iii) So psychic causes or psychosomatic disorders –
(iv) From Greek psyche (mind) and soma (body)
(v) Hypnosis as mental cure for physical symptoms.
3. Unconscious mind:
(i) psychological cause (see above)
(ii) but involuntary or unconscious cause;
(iii) Cf. evidence dreams, jokes and ‘Freudian’ slips of the tongue.
4. Related Freudian psychoanalytic concepts of mental disorder:
(i) childhood trauma,
(ii) repression of ‘dangerous’ desires/ experiences;
(iii) symptoms disguise underlying or unconscious causes;
(iv) neurosis – as a ‘burden from the past’
5. Freud’s ‘talking cures’:
(i) dream analysis;
(ii) association of ideas;
(iii) ‘psycho-analysis’;

III. Freud’s Psychoanalytic Social Theory

1. Psychoanalysis and social theory:
(i) society’s ‘burden from past’;
(ii) ideology as a kind of neurosis.
2. Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930):
(i) civilization depends on the repression of ‘eros’
(ii) repression of pleasure principle or ‘id’;
(iii) for the sake of survival or reality principle;
(iv) desires or ‘id’ transformed into socially useful desires.
3. In other words, civilization depends on sublimation.
4. Freud’s pessimistic view:
(i) ever increasing repression and sublimation of civilization;
(ii) war and aggression as other symptoms of repression.

IV. H. Marcuse (1898-79): Eros and Civilization

1. Frankfurt School’s studies of Authoritarian Personality (1950) and family:
• Concern particularly with fascism and Soviet communism;
• decline of bourgeois family,
• individualism and authoritarianism.
2. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955):
(i) as radicalisation of Freud with the help of Marxist concepts:
(ii) unequal repression of eros implies exploitation of proletariat.
(iii) repression varies according to the means of production;
(iv) development of means of production – e.g. automation, machinery;
(v) now implies decreasing need for repression;
3. So contemporary civilization involves surplus repression or more repression than is strictly necessary:
(i) Enormous productivity of capitalist industrial society;
(ii) Implication that much repression is now unnecessary.
4. But capitalism’s ‘performance principle’:
(i) work and productivity as compulsion and performance;
(ii) generation of false needs through advertising and promotion;
(iii) organised leisure and the culture industry;
(iv) sexuality restricted to reproductive sexuality.

V. Marcuse’s ‘Realistic Utopia’

1. Possible desublimation of eros as liberation of playful-erotic-aesthetic humanity:
(i) moving beyond the performance principle;
(ii) does not imply unqualified rule of id/ pleasure principle/ primitive eros;
(iii) Rather transcending oppositions between work and play, art and reality, sex and love;
(iv) For playful work, beautiful reality and loving sexuality;
(v) … or what Marcuse calls a ‘permanent aesthetic subversion’ of reality.
2. BUT need to avoid repressive desublimation:
(i) commercialisation of sex/ desire;
(ii) sexualisation of commerce;
(iii) manipulation of sex according to the performance principle.
3. Other obstacles to emancipatory transformation:
(i) integration of working class into capitalism (cf. One-dimensional Society, 1964);
(ii) ‘repressive tolerance’ of liberal capitalism.
4. Optimism of late 1960s:
(i) Black civil rights, New Left, student movement and opposition to Vietnam war;
(ii) Counterculture/ ‘dropping out’ against the work ethic (cf. ‘downshifting’)
(iii) feminism and sexual liberation movements against repressive sexuality.
5. Political practice:
(i) Role of students, outsiders and outcasts;
(ii) Anti-colonial liberation movements;
(iii) Ambivalent role of working class – strategic importance, subjective accommodation to capitalism.

10. Introduction to Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere.

I. Introduction: Habermas and the Frankfurt School

1. Similarities and continuities with the earlier Frankfurt School:
(i) influence of Marxism/ materialism;
(ii) need to understand transformation of capitalism;
(iii) critique of positivism;
(iv) aim to provide critical theory of society.
2. Contrasts and divergences:
(i) less Nietzschean and sceptical,
(ii) less faith in Hegelian dialectic and ‘immanent critique’;
(iii) constructive rather than purely critical or ;negative’;
(iv) engagement with analytical philosophy of language etc.
(v) return to interdisciplinary social theory of early FS.
3. Habermas’s intellectual project:
(i) reconstruction of historical materialism;
(ii) explicit normative foundations for critical theory;
(iii) explicit account of alternative conception of rationality.

II. The 17th-18th Century Bourgeois Public Sphere

1. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (STPS) (1962) as
• alternative history of Enlightenment;
• concentrating on its institutional embodiment;
• cf. Dialectic of Enlightenment.
2. Emergence of critical bourgeois public sphere (BPS):
(i) autonomous discussion in the ‘republic of letters’;
(ii) science;
(iii) arts and literature;
(iv) political economy and the state.
(v) newspapers and journals.
3. Public sphere and capitalism:
‘The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public’ (STPS, p. 26).
• Economy from Greek: oikos/ house + nomos/ law or management
• Capitalism and civil society;
• Political economy
4. Critical function of BPS:
(i) rational consensus through deliberation and debate,
(ii) leading to
‘the articulation of “opinion” into “judgment” through the public clash of arguments’ (Bolingbroke at STPS, p. 5).
(iii) as initially progressive function of capitalism – popular sovereignty.
5. Limitations of the BPS:
(i) excluded non-bourgeois classes;
(ii) excluded women;
(iii) i.e. a pre-established harmony of interests.
6. Criticisms of Habermas:
(i) neglects exclusion of women;
(ii) assumes there is only one public sphere?
(iii) ignores ‘subaltern counter-publics’ (N. Fraser)

III. Degeneration of the Public Sphere

1. Degeneration from critical public sphere to
‘manipulated publicity’ of contemporary society
2. Rise of working-class masses
• leading to liberal fear of ‘tyranny of the majority’
• rather than state despotism
• J. S. Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville.
3. Bureaucratisation of state and economy:
(i) expanding state and state bureaucracy;
(ii) welfare state and Keynesian state;
(iii) bureaucratic capitalism and managerial corporations.
4. Politics:
(i) mass political parties;
(ii) organised interest groups;
(iii) re-privatisation of debate ‘behind closed doors’;
5. From public discussion to manipulation of publicity:
(i) opinion research,
(ii) advertising, marketing and promotion;
(iii) public relations and ‘spin’;
(iv) applied not only to commerce but also to politics.
6. Social developments:
(i) decline of bourgeois family and autonomous individual;
(ii) rise of organised leisure and culture industry.
(iii) decline of printed newspapers?
(iv) role of the internet?
7. Habermas’s overall view:
Critical publicity is supplanted by manipulative publicity. (STPS, p. 178).

IV. Science and Technology as “Ideology”

1. The rise of science and technology as ideology further undermines critical public sphere.
2. Positivism and rationalisation:
• ‘decisionism’ and ‘subjectivism’ about values;
• Value-free social science
• Weber and pluralism of private values.
3. Technocratic politics:
(i) scientific opinion research;
(ii) advertising and public relations in politics.
(iii) emotions against reason?
4. Technocratic state:
(i) state organisation of research and industry;
(ii) the ‘military-industrial complex’ (Eisenhower)
(iii) welfare state and social sciences – cf. Foucault.
5. Technocracy or rule of experts:
(i) substitution of technical expertise for reasoned discussion;
(ii) presentation of politics as facts rather than values.
(iii) e.g. economics.
6. Habermas’s overall view:
(i) conservative role of science and technology in contemporary society;
(ii) independence of ‘moral-political’ and ‘technical’ progress.
(iii) Habermas’s persistent dualism of labour/ instrumental action vs. communication.
7. Cf. Marx and historical materialism:
• development of science and technology/ forces of production;
• intrinsically progressive – revolutionising ‘relations of production’

11. The Moral Basis of Social Critique: The Theory of Communicative Rationality

The human interest in autonomy and responsibility is not mere fancy, for it can be apprehended a priori. What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy and responsibility are posited for us. Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus.
(Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 314).

I. Introduction

1. Weber and Frankfurt School’s critique of limitations of instrumental rationality.
2. Weber’s pessimism:
(i) no alternative to formal or instrumental rationalisation:
(ii) disenchantment;
(iii) the ‘iron cage’.
3. Frankfurt School:
(i) ‘determinate negation’ and ‘immanent critique’ – e.g. bourgeois justice;
(ii) desperate circumstances – fascism, totalitarian rationality;
(iii) viable politics or pessimism?
4. Habermas’s more positive approach:
(i) ‘cynicism’ of bourgeois consciousness, so immanent critique not enough;
(ii) reconstruction of alternative rationality.

II. Early Thoughts on Labour and Interaction

1. Labour, work or ‘purposive-rational action’
as instrumental manipulation of objects.
2. Purposive-rational action
‘realizes defined goals under given conditions’.
3. Compare strategic action, which
(i) treats people as manipulable things;
(ii) related to instrumental rationality.
4. Work is the pragmatic context for instrumental rationality, science and technology.
5. Interaction or communicative action takes place between subjects. It is
governed by binding consensual norms, which define reciprocal expectations about behavior and which must be understood and recognized by at least two acting subjects’
(‘Technology and Science as “Ideology”’, p. 92).
6. Distinction between labour and interaction designed to entrench
independence of moral progress from technical progress.
7. Compare Marxism’s assumption about the progressive role of forces of production
(i) labour or ‘forces of production;
(ii) determining revolution in the ‘relations of production’.

III. Habermas’s Pragmatic Theory of the Subject and Knowledge

1. Habermas’s theory of communication as theory of subject and knowledge:
(i) Descartes’s subject of cogito (I think);
(ii) Kant’s transcendental subject of knowledge;
(iii) Hegel’s intersubjective and historical subject;
(iv Marx’s historical materialism as an account of the ‘subject’.
2. Habermas’s pragmatic theory:
• subject and knowledge based on action;
• BUT based on fundamentally different modes of action.
3. Dual pragmatic contexts and dual rationalities:
(i) logic or rationality of communicative action – ‘relations of production’
(ii) independent of rationality of purposive-rational action – labour, ‘forces of production’
4. Habermas’s version of Marxist theory of ideology:
(i) ideology as distorted communication:
(ii) i.e. ideology occurs within dimension of communicative action;
(iii) BUT communication is distorted by social power.
(iv) Examples:
• bourgeois notions of justice;
• patriarchal understanding of gender;
• racism.
5. Hence need for theory of undistorted communication
as basis for critique of ideology.

IV. The Project of a Universal Pragmatics

1. Assumption that the structure of communicative action is reflected in language as an essential medium of social reproduction.
2. BUT emphasis on the pragmatics of language as action:
• linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure:
• speech (parole) rather than
• language (langue)
3. Emphasis not on truth of propositions but on
(i) illocutionary speech acts (J. L. Austin):
(ii) ‘doing things with words’;
(iii) e.g. promising, advising, agreeing, commanding, confessing, marrying etc.
(iv) also ‘stating that’ (statements) or making a truth-claim
(v) e.g. Clinton on Lewinsky, Marcus Einfeld etc.
4. The pragmatic dimension of speech means that
communication involves values other than truth.
5. Hence project of a universal pragmatics:
(i) establish full normative basis of communication
(ii) for all human societies.
6. Cf. Chomsky’s notion of linguistic competence and universal grammar
• In order to explain our ability to acquire language
• As ability to make grammatical sentences.
7. Habermas on universal communicative competence
i.e. competence required to take part in communication.

V. The Normative Foundations of Speech

1. Speech involves raising validity claims;
(i) speech can succeed or fail in ways other than being ungrammatical or false;
(ii) so speech acts can be challenged;
(iii) speech acts need to be justified.
2. Validity claims and speaker’s four ‘world relations’:
(i) language/ comprehensibility;
(ii) intersubjectivity/ moral rightness;
(iii) external world/ truth;
(iv) internal nature/ sincerity:
3. Or in other words:

The speaker has to select a comprehensible expression in order that the speaker and hearer can understand one another: the speaker has to have the intention of communicating a true propositional content in order that the hearer can share the knowledge of the speaker; the speaker has to want to express his intentions truthfully in order that the hearer can believe in the speaker’s utterance (can trust him); finally, the speaker has to select an utterance that is right in the light of existing norms and values in order that the hearer can accept the utterance, so that both speaker and hearer can agree with one another in the utterance concerning a recognised normative background.
(Habermas in McCarthy, Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, p. 288)

4. Validity claims raised both directly and indirectly:
• ‘Is the King of France bald?’
• ‘Have you stopped beating your cat?’
• ‘Your partner is having an affair’
5. Thus communicative competence implies
‘mastery of these values, the basis of our ideas of truth, freedom and justice’ (Habermas).

World Relation	Language	Intersubjectivity	External Reality	Internal Nature
Validity Claim	Intelligibility	Moral Rightness	Truth	Sincerity
Discourse		Practical Discourse	Theoretical Discourse
Speech Act		Regulative	Constative Statement

VI. Consensus Theory of Factual and Moral Truth

1. Values of truth and rightness elucidated in terms of
consensus theory of discourse.
2. Science and ‘theoretical’ or factual truth:
(i) no correspondence theory of truth – no independent access to reality;
(ii) truth determined by community of scientists;
(iii) as the long-term, ultimate consensus of science.
3. Basis of moral rightness (practical truth or Richtigkeit):
(i) cannot be correspondence – to what?
(ii) no metaphysical or religious first principles;
(iii) against subjectivism, decisionism, relativism – because they undermine critical theory.
4. Therefore, intersubjective agreement or consensus as only basis of moral validity.

VII. Discourse and The Ideal Speech Situation

1. But actual or de facto consensus is no guarantee of moral truth:
(i) insufficient information, undeveloped concepts etc.
(ii) moral learning like scientific learning process;
(iii) communication is distorted by power (ideology);
(iv) ideological distortion bigger threat to moral than to factual truth.
2. Therefore moral truth must be based on
rational consensus as the product of an ideal speech situation.
3. Conditions of Ideal Speech Situation as an idealised ‘learning process’:
(i) absence of power relations;
(ii) equal opportunities to speak;
(iii) openness to all relevant considerations;
(iv) revisable concepts;
(v) consensus is always provisional or ‘anticipatory’.
4. Ideal Speech Situation as ‘anticipation’ or ideal standard:
(i) as basis of criticism;
(ii) NOT something we can ever fully achieve;
(iii) NOT something we can ever know we have fully achieved;
(iv) so does not support dogmatism or chauvinism.

VIII. Criticisms and Qualifications

1. As Kantian transcendentalism in a new guise?
2. N.B. Discourse theory applied to:
(i) morality (universal norms or Moralität);
(ii) NOT culturally variable ethical life (values or Sittlichkeit).
3. Thus the fundamental principle of ‘discourse ethics’ is that a norm (or law) is acceptable if and only if:
the consequences and side-effects for the satisfaction of the interests of every individual, which are expected to result from a general conformance to [that] norm, can be accepted without compulsion by all.
(Habermas at S. K. White, p. 49)

12. Social Movements and Opposition in Contemporary Society

I. Introduction: A Critical Theory of Advanced Capitalism

1. Habermas’s theory of modernisation emphasises rationalisation along two possible dimensions of rationality:
(i) instrumental rationality;
(ii) communicative rationality.
2. The onset of modernity is understood in corresponding terms of socially embodied action as
interaction of system and lifeworld.

II. The Distinction between System and Lifeworld

1. System and lifeworld correspond to the fundamental distinction between
• instrumental action (work, labour) and
• communicative action (interaction).
2. Systems correspond to Weber’s formal rationalisation of society.
3. Distinction refers to different forms of social coordination:
The integration of an action system is produced in the one case by a normatively secured or communicatively achieved consensus, and in the other case by a non-normative regulation of individual decisions, which operates outside of the consciousness of actors. This distinction between a social integration, operating upon action orientations, and a systems integration of society, which operates behind action orientations, requires a corresponding differentiation in the concept of society itself... (my emphasis)
4. Compare distinction between perspectives of observers and participants:
Society [can be] conceived from the participant perspective of acting subjects as the lifeworld of a social group. On the other hand society can be conceived from the observer perspective of someone not involved as merely a system of actions, in which actions attain a functional value according to their contribution to the maintenance of the system. (Habermas at White, p. 105, my emphasis)
5. Pusey’s definition of system and lifeworld:
The lifeworld is defined to contain the background of shared meaning that makes ordinary symbolic interaction possible … (Pusey, p. 106)
…the system refers to those vast tracts of modern society that are ‘uncoupled’ from communicatively shared experience in ordinary language and co-ordinated, instead, through the media of money and power. (Pusey, p. 107)

III. The Purpose of The Distinction

1. Habermas’s distinction serves as critique of
• functionalism
• ‘totally administered society’
2. Market as example of system coordination:
(i) machine-like;
(ii) not subject to direct human control;
(iii) internal criteria – efficiency;
(iv) otherwise potentially amoral/ meaningless/ irrational outcomes.
3. Critique of universalist claims of functionalism (Luhmann).
4. Communication and the lifeworld as essential to the distinctive
• meaningfulness of human life
• threatened by ‘technocratic nightmare’ of ‘totally administered society’
• ‘Brave New World’

IV. Modernisation as Rationalisation of the Lifeworld

1. Weber’s ‘disenchantment’ and formal (instrumental) rationalisation of society.
2. Rationalisation as the uncoupling of systems of ‘money’ (capitalism) and ‘power’ (state) from the lifeworld:
(i) Protestant ethic and the rise capitalism;
(ii) secular modern state – ‘reason of state’ (Machiavelli)
3. The differentiation of cultural spheres of value from the Renaissance:
(i) modern science vs. religion (Galileo)
(ii) rational foundations for morality;
(iii) autonomy of art and the aesthetic.
4. Juridification:
• Law independent of both religion and ruler;
• rationalisation of law and authority;
• law as a specialised discipline.
5. Shrinking of the lifeworld to a sub-system including
(a) culture/ meaning,
(b) solidarity/ social integration;
(c) socialisation.
6. The positive potential of modernity:
(i) critical morality – subject to communicative rationality;
(ii) economic and political efficiency – material wealth, health etc.
(iii) ‘enhanced learning-potential’ of separate cultural spheres.

V. The Pathologies of Modernity

1. Pathologies of lifeworld correspond to elements of lifeworld (point III, 5):
(i) loss of meaning or alienation;
(ii) absence of solidarity or anomie;
(iii) personality disorders or motivational deficit.
2. Cultural impoverishment and loss of meaning:
(i) cultural specialisation;
(ii) elitism of cultural experts;
(iii) culture industry’s organisation of culture according to system imperatives.
3. Colonisation of lifeworld by capitalism/ money:
(i) alienated work;
(ii) disruption of family life;
(iii) commodification of human relations – Marx on money;
(iv) consumerism, materialism and generation of false needs.
(v) culture industry (again).
4. Colonisation of lifeworld by state/ power:
(i) state regulation and ‘juridification’;
(ii) welfare state;
(iii) bureaucratic definition of needs – paternalism;
(iv) deficit of democratic will formation.

VI. New Social Movements

1. NSMs are potential bearers of communicative rationality
• against ideological values/ traditions embodying distorted communication;
• e.g. against patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, racism.
2. In that sense,
NSMs promise revival and rationalisation of the lifeworld.
3. Relation of NSMs to the lifeworld rather than state or economy:
‘the new conflicts are not sparked by problems of distribution, but concern the grammar of forms of life’
(Habermas, ‘New Social Movements’, p. 32).
4. Defensive movements defend traditional values against modernity: e.g.
(i) ethnic nationalism/ racism/ white supremacist.
(ii) pro-family values – anti-gay marriage etc.
(iii) religious fundamentalisms etc.
5. Offensive movements promote universal values: e.g. feminism.
6. Ambiguous status of (radical) environmental and peace movements:
(i) they (defensively) neglect the need for ‘technical and economic solutions’ (‘back to nature’);
(ii) they (offensively) operate
‘on the basis of a rationalized life-world’ and try out ‘new forms of co-operation and community’ (p. 35).

VII. Postscript: Crisis Tendencies of Welfare State Capitalism: Legitimation Crisis

1. The concept of crisis:
when the structure of a social system allows fewer possibilities for problem solving than are necessary to the continued existence of the system
(Legitimation Crisis, 1973, p. 2).
2. Crisis as choice or, in social and political terms, a revolutionary situation (Marx).
3. Welfare state capitalism potentially displaces economic crisis tendencies of liberal capitalism (but not always!)
• through welfare,
• demand management,
• regulation of international capital.
4. But economic management risks overloading the state in the form of
• rationality crisis (failures of state management);
• requirements of capitalist economy
• vs. political demands of population.
5. Expanding state, escalating expectations, failures of economic management and erosion of bourgeois ideology threaten
• legitimation crisis,
• i.e. population’s tendency to withdraw political support.
6. Motivation crisis occurs as a crisis tendency within the lifeworld, when there is:
a discrepancy between the need for motives declared by the state, the educational system and the occupational system on the one hand, and the motivations supplied by the socio-cultural system on the other. (LC, p. 75)
7. Necessity of lifeworld as distinctively human form of the reproduction of society:
There is no administrative production of meaning....
The procurement of legitimation is self-defeating as soon as the mode of procurement is seen through. (LC, p. 70)

13. Habermas, Lyotard and the Critique of Modernity

I. Introduction

1. Habermas’s intellectual debates - Holub, Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere.
(i) positivism;
(ii) hermeneutics;
(iii) neo-conservative historians;
(iv) feminism.
2. Focus on debates with poststructuralism and postmodernism:
(i) Michel Foucault;
(ii) Jean-François Lyotard.

II. Habermas on the Incomplete Project of Modernity

1. Earlier Frankfurt School’s dialectic of Enlightenment:
(i) negative or unconstructive;
(ii) pessimistic;
(iii) against positive philosophies of history.
2. Habermas’s more constructive response:
(i) theory of communicative rationality;
(ii) ‘responsibility and autonomy’ grounded in language;
(iii) philosophy of history as developmental/ learning process.
3. Theory of the pathologies of modernity.
4. But gains of modernity:
(i) secularisation;
(ii) instrumental rationalisation of state and economy;
(iii) differentiation of cognitive spheres;
(iv) potential rationalisation of the lifeworld.

III. Jean-François Lyotard and the Mood of Postmodernity

1. The postmodernist break with modernity and the Enlightenment project.
2. Formative contexts of postmodernism:
(i) fascism,
(ii) genocide and colonialism;
(iii) ‘actually existing socialism’ and the fate of Marxism.
3. Marxism as modernism at its most intense:
(i) capitalism as progressive;
(ii) overcoming irrationalities of capitalism through socialist planning;
(iii) pathologies of modernity (bureaucracy, alienation, totalitarianism).
4. Zygmunt Bauman:
Communism was modernity in its most determined mood and most decisive posture; modernity streamlined, purified of the last shred of the chaotic, the irrational, the spontaneous, the unpredictable.
(Intimations of Postmodernity, p. 167)
5. Postmodernist disillusionment with both main ‘meta-narratives’ of the Enlightenment:
(i) mainstream narrative of emancipation;
(ii) speculative narrative of Hegel and Marx.
6. Postmodernism as the culture of postindustrial society:
(i) ‘spirit of performativity’ – cf. Marcuse;
(ii) ‘incredulity toward meta-narratives’;
(iii) self-annihilation or auto-critique of Enlightenment rationality.
7. The anti-authoritarian politics of postmodernity:
(i) against totality;
(ii) heterogeneity of ‘language games’;
(iii) reinforcing diversity;
(iv) aesthetic modernism – cf. Adorno.

IV. The Habermas-Lyotard Debate

1. Lyotard:
‘Consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value’ (PC, p. 66).
2. For artistic modernism as constant renewal:
‘Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’ (ibid., p. 79).
3. Lyotard on the values of justice and democracy – grounded in diversity, rejection of universalism
4. Habermas on postmodernism as a new conservatism;
(i) irrationalism;
(ii) continuing commitment to critical theory:
‘One thing, of course, it must oppose: the thesis that emancipation itself mystifies’ (Habermas, quoted by White, p. 144).
5. The compatibility, according to Habermas, of an always provisional consensus with diversity.
6. Critique presupposes appeal to shared standards:
truth and rightness.
7. Habermas on art and aesthetics:
(i) as an element of modernity,
(ii) not something beyond modernity;
(iii) for flexible access to internal nature;
(iv) unlearning the bad lessons of modernity.
8. White’s synthesis of postmodernist and Habermasian themes (Political Theory and Postmodernism):
(i) responsibility to act (Habermas);
(ii) responsibility to otherness (Heidegger, postmodernism).

1. The Task of a Critical Theory of Society - Knowledge and Human Interests

I. Introduction

1. Critical view of positivist degeneration of Marxism: 'labour', 'interaction'.
2. The need for an alternative epistemology or theory of knowledge and rationality.

II. Review of Theories of Knowledge from Hume to Habermas

1. Hume's conception of knowledge as 'matters of fact' and 'relations of ideas'.
2. Kant on the contribution of mind to experience: 'Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.' (CPR, p. 93)
3. Hegel's view of mind as social and historical: dialectic of mind or consciousness.
4. Marx's materialist transformation of Hegel: historical dialectic of production.
5. Habermas on the dual development of labour (modes of production) and interaction (relations of production) as pragmatic (action) contexts for knowledge and rationality.

III. The Limits of Scientific Explanation in the Empirical-Analytic Sciences

1. Natural scientific knowledge or 'empirical-analytical sciences' and the pragmatic context of labour or 'instrumental action'.
2. Influence of C. S. Peirce (1839-1914): science as product of learning processes within context of labour (subject's action on nature as object).
3. But natural scientific knowledge also depends on the community of scientists, i.e. processes of social 'interaction' or 'communication'.

IV. The Limits of Hermeneutic Understanding in the Historical -Hermeneutic Sciences

1. 'Historical-hermeneutic sciences' and the pragmatic context of interaction.
2. Influence of W. Dilthey's (1833-1911) role of 'understanding' (Verstehen) as opp. to scientific 'explanation' (Erklären) in human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften).
3. Hermeneutic understanding as product of learning processes within the context of interaction (between subjects).
4. Limits of hermeneutic knowledge: (a) Natural scientific method valid in its proper area. (b) Hermeneutics not able to understand the workings of power, ideology or 'distorted communication', which require causal explanations (c.f. Gadamer).
5. Two examples: (a) Neurotic's access to inner nature distorted by childhood trauma (Freudian psychoanalysis); (b) Social ideologies (bourgeois ideology, patriarchy) distorted by power (bourgeoisie, men) (Marxist critique of ideology).

V. Critical Theory, Reflection and the Interest in Emancipation

1. 'Critically oriented sciences' uncover processes of distorted communication.
2. Critical theories combine hermeneutic and empirical-analytic method to uncover 'ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed'.
3. The pragmatic context of critical theories is 'reflection' on processes of formation: e.g. psychoanalysis; critique of ideology.
4. Psychoanalysis as a model of social emancipation; c.f. earlier Frankfurt School.
5. Critical theories confirmed only in the process of emancipation: avoids reification and authoritarian paternalism.

VI. Postscript: Earlier Thoughts on Labour and Interaction

1. Labour, work or 'purposive-rational action' as instrumental manipulation of objects. 2. Work 'realizes defined goals under given conditions'; c.f. 'strategic action', which treats people as manipulable things.
3. Work is the 'pragmatic context' for instrumental rationality, science and technology.
4. Interaction or communicative action takes place between subjects; it essentially involves moral norms.
5. Interaction is: 'governed by binding consensual norms, which define reciprocal expectations about behavior and which must be understood and recognized by at least two acting subjects' ('Technology and Science as "Ideology"', p. 92).
6. Distinction between labour and interaction entrenches autonomous developmental logic at the level of interaction: i.e. independence of moral and technical progress.
7. Compare Marxism's neglect of interaction: historical materialism and the forces of production; positivist epistemology or theory of knowledge.
8. Need for an alternative theory of knowledge, which Habermas sketches in Knowledge and Human Interests (see next week).

2._ The Ambivalent Fate of Modernity:_ From Habermas to Foucault

I._ Introduction

1._ Habermas_s vision of the completion of modernity.
2._ Foucault and the critique of modernism.
3._ Useful reading:_ David Couzens Hoy & Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory (Blackwell, Oxford UK & Cambridge USA, 1994).

II._ Habermas on The Progressive Potential of Modernity._ New Social Movements

1._ Irreversibility of uncoupling of systems and lifeworld.
2._ But defense and further rationalisation of an autonomous lifeworld is possible.
3._ Rationalisation of lifeworld as communicative rationality, harmonious cognitive spheres;_ integration of specialised knowledge into the lifeworld.
4._ Potential subordination of systems to a rationalised lifeworld through genuine democracy and law.
5._ Role of new social movements _at the seam between system and lifeworld_:

the new conflicts arise in areas of cultural reproduction, social integration and socialization....the new conflicts are not sparked by problems of distribution, but concern the grammar of forms of life.(Habermas, _New Social Movements_, p. 32)

6._ Defensive and offensive movements:

the question is how to defend or reinstate endangered life styles, or how to put reformed life styles into practice... (ibid., p. 32)

7._ Defensive movements and _particularistic values_:_ patriarchal, homophobic and racist movements.
8._ Offensive movements and universal discourse ethics:_ women_s movement.
9._ Ecological movements:_ problems of complexity and necessity of technical solutions;_ ecological consciousness and the lifeworld.

III._ Historical Background to the Critique of Modernism

1._ Marxism as prime example of _modernist_, _totalising_ theory and prime target of critique.
2._ Historical developments and disillusionment with Marxism:_ Events of 1968 and Marxist cooption;_ Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan;_ Chinese cultural revolution;_ Chinese road to capitalism;_ 1989 and collapse of _actually existing socialism_.
3._ Intellectual developments:_ the defection of Marxist intellectuals like Sartre and Althusser;_ conservative liberalism of _new philosophers_ (_nouveaux philosophes_.
4._ Intellectual biographies of Foucault, Baudrillard and Lyotard.

IV._ Foucault and the Critique of Modernism

1._ Foucault_s critique of humanism and the philosophy of history.
2._ _Genealogy_ emphasises lowly and contingent origins of pillars of humanism:_ truth, the subject, rationality, morality.
3._ Foucault and Deleuze on totalising theory, _power-knowledge_ and the complicity of intellectuals.
4._ Alternative view of theory as a _local and regional practice_ and an _instrument for multiplication_.
5._ Against political representation;_ on the _indignity of speaking for others_.