FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND HABERMAS
(POLS2076)
First Semester 2007
Please read the following instructions carefully
1. This assignment must be handed in to the essay box outside the School of
Social Sciences Office no later than Thursday 14th June 2007 at 4 p.m.
2. Answer two questions only.
3. Do not answer a question on the topic you chose for the First Assignment.
Do not repeat material used in the First Assignment.
4. Do not repeat material provided in response to one question for this assignment
in your answer to the other question.
5. There is a word limit of 800 words (+/-10%) for each question and
1,600 words (+/-10%) in total for this assignment. Longer answers will
be penalised. Answers that do not include a realistic word count will also
be penalised.
6. Answers should not be written in note-form.
7. You should provide references for any quotations, but you need not provide
references for other claims and assertions. You should provide a short
list of references that you have actually consulted for each answer.
8. You should aim to provide a well-organised, clear, concise and, if possible,
critical discussion of your chosen topics.
Questions
1. Discuss the Frankfurt School’s critique of positivism and its idea of a critical theory of society. Discuss in relation to one or more of the theorists associated with the Frankfurt School.
2. What, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’?
3. What is the role of art and the ‘culture industry’ in contemporary Western societies? Discuss in relation to one or more theorists associated with the Frankfurt School.
4. What use do members of the Frankfurt School make of Freudian psychoanalysis? Discuss in relation to one or more theorists associated with the Frankfurt School.
5. Discuss the impact of either fascism or Soviet Communism or consumer society on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
6. Why does Habermas think that the ‘project of modernity’ is incomplete? Can the project of modernity be completed in the way that he suggests?
7. Why does Habermas think that science and technology have come to play a conservative role in contemporary Western societies?
8. Why does Habermas believe that the ‘lifeworld’ of contemporary societies is being ‘invaded’ or ‘colonised’ by the ‘systems of power and money’? What can be done to resist this colonisation?
9. Does Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality succeed in providing a normative basis for a critical theory of society?
10. Discuss feminist criticisms of Habermas. What are the implications of these criticisms?
11. In what ways, according to Max Weber, has Western society been ‘rationalised’?
12. Discuss the main contribution of Marx and/or Marxism to the critical theory of either one or more theorists associated with the Frankfurt School or Habermas?
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Responses to students' email queries will be posted here - anonymously - during the course.
You might be interested in a recent article by J. Habermas on 'How to save the quality press?', which gives a practical application to his ideas about the public sphere that we have been discussing...
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.
CONTENTS
First Semester 2007
Two lectures and one tutorial per week (22 lectures, 10 tutorials).
Lecturer: Dr. David West.
Part I of this course introduces some of the sources of the Frankfurt School’s
ideas in the reaction of Hegel and Marx to modernity and the Enlightenment project.
Part II examines some of the major themes of the Frankfurt School’s brand
of ‘critical theory’ through the writings, in particular, 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 critique of modernity and ‘instrumental’
rationality. Topics include Habermas’s account of the public sphere, his
theories of communicative rationality and social movements, and his overall
response to modern western society.
Introductory Reading
West, D.: An Introduction to Continental Philosophy (Polity Press, Cambridge,
1996), esp. Chs 1-3.
Held, D.: Introduction to Critical Theory (1980).
Pusey, M. J. Habermas (1987)
Outhwaite, M.: Habermas: A Critical Introduction (1994).
Proposed Assessment
One 2,250 word essay and a second assignment, each contributing 45% to the final
mark. In addition 10% of the final mark will be given for tutorial participation.
NB. Only students who have both submitted an essay and attended at least
7 of 10 tutorials will be permitted to sit the examination.
Return to Contents .
Lecture Times, 2007
Monday 2.00pm COP G030 Tuesday 2.00pm COP G031
A brief outline of each week’s topic will be available here after Monday’s lecture.
Week One (w/b 19th February)
Part I: Sources of Critical Theory.
Lecture 1. Introduction.
Lecture 2. Modernity and the Enlightenment Project.
Week Two (w/b 26th February)
Lectures 1-2. Hegel’s Idea of History.
Week Three (w/b 5th March)
Lectures 1-2. Marx and Marxism: Theory Changing the World.
Week Four (w/b 12th March)
Part II: The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.
Lectures 1-2. The Idea of a Critical Theory of Society.
Week Five (w/b 19th March)
Reading Week: No Lectures and No Tutorial
Monday 19th March: Public Holiday – Canberra Day
Week Six (w/b 26th March
Lectures 1-2. The Two Faces of Enlightenment.
Week Seven (w/b 2nd April)
Lectures 1-2. The Politics of Art and the ‘Culture Industry’.
Mid-Semester Break – 7th – 22nd April
Week Eight (w/b 23rd April)
Lectures 1-2. Marcuse and Psychoanalysis: Eros and civilization.
Essay due on Thursday 26th April at 4 p.m.
Week Nine (w/b 30th April)
Part III: Habermas’s Critique of Modernity.
Lectures 1-2. Introduction to Habermas. Democracy and the Public Sphere.
Week Ten (w/b 7th May)
Lectures 1-2. The Theory of Communicative Rationality.
Week Eleven (w/b 14th May)
Lectures 1-2. Social Movements and Opposition in Contemporary Society.
Week Twelve (w/b 21st May)
Lectures 1-2. Conclusion and Overview.
Week Thirteen (w/b 28th May)
Revision Week
No Lectures and No Tutorial.
SECOND ASSIGNMENT
The Second Assignment will be available here from Thursday 7th June 2007 and
from a folder outside my office. Second Assignment must be handed in to the
School of Social Sciences Office no later than Thursday 14th June 2007
at 4 pm. Please note that the second assignment is treated as an examination,
so marked scripts will not be returned to students.
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to Contents .
Tutorials are designed to give students an opportunity to discuss ideas and raise questions related to each week’s lectures and readings. They are an essential part of the course. 10% of final assessment is based on tutorial participation. N.B. Only students who both submit a first assignment and attend at least 7 of 10 tutorials are eligible to complete the assessment for this course.
Essential readings for each week are contained in the Reading Brick and are marked ‘*’ below. Other readings may be helpful but are not essential. Other suggestions for further reading (marked ‘F’) are more advanced and may be challenging. Further references can be obtained from the Reading List (see below). Tutorial questions refer either material from essential readings or themes raised in lectures.
You can sign up for Tutorials using the Faculty of Arts Tutorial Signup system from Week One of First Semester. Go to http://arts.anu.edu.au/tutorials/. Please note that you can only access the system via an ANU computer.
Week One (w/b 19th February)
No Tutorial.
Week Two (w/b 26th March)
Part I: Sources of Critical Theory.
Introduction. Modernity and the Enlightenment Project.
What historical events and social developments are involved in the modernisation
of western societies? What is different about modern thought? Are modernity
and Enlightenment just good things or is there a downside to modernity?
*D. West, Introduction to Continental Philosophy, Ch. 2, section 1, pp. 7-16.
J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Lecture I.
(F) C. Taylor, Hegel (CUP, 1975), Ch. 1, section 1, pp. 3-11 (challenging).
(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 5th March)
Hegel’s Idea of History.
In what ways is human life (thought, art, morality) historical? What are the
main features of Hegel’s developmental or ‘dialectical’ view
of history? Why is Hegel critical of Kant and, more generally, Enlightenment
ideas of rationality, morality and politics?
*D. West, Introduction to Continental Philosophy, Ch. 2, sections 2-4, pp. 16-41.
*P. Singer, Hegel, Ch. 3, pp. 24-44.
*G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to The Philosophy of History, 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 12th March)
Marx and Marxism: Theory Changing the World.
What is the difference between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ Hegelians?
Why is Marx sometimes described as a left Hegelian? In what sense is Marx a
materialist theorist? Can thinkers hope not only to interpret but also to change
the world? Has Marxism succeeded in changing the world?
*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, Introduction to Continental Philosophy, Ch. 3, section 1, pp. 42-55.
(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.
Week Five (w/b 19th March)
Monday 19th March: Public Holiday – Canberra Day
Reading Week
No Lectures and No Tutorial
Week Six (w/b 26th March)
Part II: The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.
The Idea of a Critical Theory of Society.
What do members of the Frankfurt School think is valuable in the ideas and methods
of Marx himself? What do they think went wrong with Marxism? Why do they criticise
‘positivism’ in Marxism and in social science? What do they mean
by a ‘critical theory’ of society?
*D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, Introduction, pp. 13-26.
*M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, Ch. 1, pp. 3-40.
D. West, Introduction to Continental Philosophy, Ch. 3, section 2, pp. 55-67.
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 2nd April)
The Two Faces of Enlightenment.
What does Weber mean by the ‘rationalisation’ of western society?
Do you think modern societies are rational? What do Adorno and Horkheimer mean
by the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’? What does Enlightenment (in
their sense) do to the natural world? What does Enlightenment do to human beings?
*R. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School (Polity Press, 1994), pp. 321-350.
*T. Adorno & 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 – 7th – 22nd April
Week Eight (w/b 23rd April)
The Politics of Art and the ‘Culture Industry’.
What, according to members of the Frankfurt School, is the political significance
of art? What do they mean by the ‘culture industry’? How significant
is the culture industry in contemporary politics?
*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.
R. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School (Polity Press, 1994), passim.
(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.
Essay due on Thursday 29th April at 4 p.m.
Week Nine (w/b 30th April)
Marcuse and Psychoanalysis: Eros and civilization.
What role do the ‘pleasure’ and ‘reality principles’
play in Freud’s psychoanalysis? Does the advance of ‘civilization’
involve giving up some kinds of pleasure? Does it have to involve giving up
these pleasures? Is today’s ‘permissive’ society a liberated
society in Marcuse’s sense?
*H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Sphere Books, 1969), Political Preface &
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.
Week Ten (w/b 7th May)
Part III: Habermas’s Critique of Modernity.
Introduction to Habermas. Democracy and the public sphere.
What does Habermas see as the positive features of the bourgeois ‘public
sphere’, which emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries? What
were its negative features? How has the public sphere been transformed by subsequent
developments in western societies? How can the public sphere serve a useful,
critical function today?
*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, Introduction to Continental Philosophy, Ch. 3, section 3, pp. 67-78.
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 Eleven (w/b 14th May)
The Theory of Communicative Rationality.
Why, for Habermas, is communication as opposed to instrumental action such an
important dimension of human life and society? What is communicative as opposed
to instrumental rationality? What is the point of Habermas’s theory of
communicative rationality? Does he succeed in providing a moral standard for
a critical theory of society?
*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 Twelve (w/b 21st May)
Social Movements and Opposition in Contemporary Society.
What are the two ‘systems’ of contemporary western society? What
does Habermas mean by the ‘lifeworld’? In what ways is the lifeworld
being invaded or ‘colonised’ by the systems of power and money?
What is the role of social movements in resisting 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.
Week Thirteen (w/b 28th May)
Revision Week
No Lectures and No Tutorial.
Return
to Contents .
Outlines will usually be posted here just before the first lecture for each week's new topic.
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. The Onset of Modernity in the West
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;
e. Rise of capitalism.
3. Renaissance revival of classical (pagan) humanism and challenge to authority
of religion and the Church; value of human knowledge.
4. Associated rise of science, scientific rationalism and ‘modern’
philosophical thought.
III. Central Principles of Modern Thought - Descartes and Hume
1. Modern thought as replacement of overwhelmingly religious world view of
Middle Ages with scientific rationalism.
2. René Descartes’s (1591-1650) (Cartesian) method of doubt and
Enlightenment project of putting knowledge on new, more rational foundations
(despite Descartes’ own religious belief).
3. Dualism of mind and matter:
(i) objective world of matter as a mechanical system extended in space, able
to be explained by mechanistic natural sciences;
(ii) mind or ‘subject’ of knowledge as disembodied or separate from
material world.
4. David Hume’s (1711-76) radical Enlightenment scepticism:
(i) against religion and ‘evidence’ of miracles as superstition;
(ii) scepticism even about our scientific knowledge of external world.
5. Hume’s ‘positivism’ – two models of genuine knowledge:
(i) natural science or ‘empirical knowledge’,
(ii) logic and mathematics;
(iii) proposal to apply scientific method to morality and ‘science of
man’.
6. I.e. the origins of social and political science.
IV. Social and Political Thought of the Enlightenment
1. The Enlightenment project’s challenge to the political order:
(i) erosion of traditional and religious authority of monarchs, princes, Pope;
(ii) winding path to liberalism and democracy;
(iii) … and ever on, to the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama by
way of Hegel)
2. The project of a rational morality:
(i) new foundations for old values;
(ii) new values, or even…
(iii) no values or nihilism.
3. Utilitarianism and social reform of J. Bentham (1748-1832).
4. I. Kant (1724-1804): attempt to found a universal morality on the basis of
reason.
5. Nihilism of Marquis de Sade (1740-1814).
2. Reason in History: Hegel’s Critique of the Enlightenment
I. The French Revolution
1. The French Revolution (1789-99) as typical product of the Enlightenment:
liberty and ‘equality’; secular rationalism; ‘bourgeois’
interests.
2. Unexpected degeneration of the Revolution to tyranny, Terror and Empire.
3. Horrified conservative reaction: E. Burke (1729-97) on ‘accumulated
wisdom’ and ‘organic balance’ of tradition.
4. England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and constitutional
monarchy as balancing need for change and preservation of tradition
5. C.f. M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics.
II. Hegel’s Critique of the Enlightenment
1. Reaction of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) as 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 not to reject Enlightenment rationality, but to
identify a more adequate conception of rationality.
III. Hegel’s Critique of Kant
1. Kant as pre-eminent thinker of the Enlightenment.
2. Kant’s morality: ‘categorical imperative’ 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.
4. Abstract freedom leads to the destructiveness of the French Revolutionary
Terror.
5. Abstract Kantian ‘morality’ (Moralität) must be supplemented
by concrete ethical life (Sittlichkeit) of particular communities.
6. C.f. contemporary ‘communitarianism’.
IV. The Hegelian Synthesis: The Historical Character of Human Life
1. Problems of conservatism and relativism: how is it possible to criticise
the concrete forms of life of a community? E.g. human sacrifice, slavery.
2. Hegel’s solution that humanity develops through history:
(i) there is no timeless and universal human nature or essence or morality;
(ii) but there is an historical process of human development.
3. Process of development means that human societies (a) change over time, and
(b) generally progressive direction of change.
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,
(ii) but they have less truth than ‘ours’.
V. History as Dialectic
1. Origins of dialectic in Plato’s Socratic dialogues: advance towards
truth through dialogue.
2. The dialectical process of history: history advances through dialogue or
conflict between worldviews.
3. So historical development is ‘spiral’ rather than ‘linear’:
i.e. not continual progress but progress over long periods or cycles.
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: history advances dialectically irrespective of the intentions
of people or historical agents.
6. But history is also the ‘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?
3. Marx and Marxism: Theory Changing the World
I. Hegel’s Influence: Left and Right Hegelians
1. The dispute between ‘left’ and ‘right’ Hegelians
according to whether present society and thought are regarded as the last, or
only the latest stage of history.
2. Right (or ‘Old’) Hegelians: from conservatism to reaction; organic
state; return to religion; sacrifice of individuals to state; totalitarianism?
3. Left (or ‘Young’) Hegelians: necessity of further critique and
transformation of society.
4. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) on ‘alienation of religion’ and idealist
philosophy; scientific materialism and progressive political reform.
5. Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95) as left Hegelians, but
critical of merely intellectual ‘critical critics’ (e.g. Poverty
of Philosophy).
6. So Marx rejects Hegel’s idealist dialectic of world views, proposing
instead a materialist dialectic within the realm of production.
II. Marx’s Materialist Conception of History
1. Marx’s materialist conception of history as the evolving relationship between human beings and nature 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 means or forces of production (people, technology, methods)
and relations of production (relationships of ownership and control of means
of production).
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) communism (as anticipated classless form of society).
5. 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, i.e.
‘motor of history’.
7. Two main examples of revolution:
(i) Bourgeois revolution from feudalism to capitalism.
(ii) Socialist/ communist revolution from capitalism to socialism/ communism.
8. Overall, Marx regards conflict as intrinsic (Hegel) to an unfinished dialectic
(left Hegelian) of material social development (Marxism).
III. Theory and Practice
1. 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)
2. So are critical ideas or theories really useless – i.e. fatalism?
3. No. 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)
4. Criticisms of 19th century utopian socialism (Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon):
no theory of agency; against direction of history (growth of capitalism); vulgar
communism.
5. Scientific socialism: proletariat as agent of revolution; communism as ‘wealth
of needs’; revolution depends on further development of capitalism.
6. Social theory of capitalism: concentration and homogenisation of working
class; its impoverishment; organisation of working class; emergence of working
class consciousness.
7. Proposed relationship between theory and practice provides both a model and
serious problems for the critical theory of Frankfurt School.
4. The Frankfurt School and 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, not a detailed historical account (for that, see Jay, Held or Wiggershaus).
2. Schematic history of Institute for Social Research:
(1) founded in Frankfurt (1923);
(2) exile to USA during fascist period (1932-45);
(3) return of some members (Adorno) to Germany after 1945; others (Marcuse)
stayed in USA.
3. ‘First generation’:
Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
Theodor Adorno (1903-69)
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
II. Formative Context I. Fascism (1933-45)
1. Demise of liberal capitalism in Germany/Italy/Spain not as predicted by
Marxism.
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 and Enlightenment; even dialectical
progress.
4. Monopoly capitalism’s totalitarian features;
(i) Marcuse on ‘one-dimensional society’ and ‘repressive tolerance’
(ii) incorporation of working class; poor revolutionary prospects.
III. Formative Context II. Soviet Communism
1. Similarities of Soviet Communism with both fascism and monopoly capitalism
rather than differences (e.g. Marcuse, Soviet Marxism).
2. Soviet communism not an obvious improvement on capitalism:
(i) alienated labour;
(ii) inequalities;
(iii) party dictatorship;
(iv) overall: not a workers’ state.
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.
5. The unelectability of radical social democracy (e.g. Green parties).
V. Theoretical Legacy of Marxism
1. Engagement of intellectuals and theory on behalf of the oppressed.
2. Relation of theory and practice: not to interpret the world, but to change
it.
3. Marx’s historical materialism:
(i) importance of material factors, political and economic realities;
(ii) importance of capitalism.
4. Marx’s critique of political economy 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) distinction between content and method
of Marxism:
(i) dialectical method of Marx;
(ii) dogmatic content of his theories: factual claims, predictions;
2, Diagnosis of dogmatism of orthodox Marxism: retains contents but abandons
or ignores critical method of Marx.
3. Method of Marxism as critical theory:
I. moral critique of society, practical engagement of theory;
II. based on social and political realities;
III. material and historical basis of all thought and ideas;
IV. critical theory develops and change with society;
V. critical theory self-critical.
4. Critique of positivism as conservative:
(i) undermines criticism of society;
(ii) preserves existing power relations;
(iii) creates ‘false nature’.
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 dialectically uncovers ‘negative’ dimension of
existing order through utopian thought, art, imagination and critique.
5. No Lecture.
6. The Two Faces of Enlightenment. Nietzsche, Weber and the Dialectic of Enlightenment
I. Introduction
1. Frankfurt School’s criticism of positivist Marxism (last topic).
2. Two significant influences: F. Nietzsche (1844-1900) and M. Weber (1864-1920).
3. Overall diagnosis of Marxism as falling victim to the ‘dialectic of
Enlightenment’.
II. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Critique of Enlightenment Dogmatism
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) pursuit of truth as ‘will to power’.
3. Absence of faith in history and politics:
(i) against belief in Enlightenment progress;
(ii) against Hegelian philosophy of history;
4. Critique of complacent humanism and moralism:
(i) Christianity as ‘slave morality’;
(ii) western culture not a reliable basis for morality;
(iii) need for ‘transvaluation of all values’.
5. Nietzsche’s less attractive features: danger of nihilism; anti-political;
elitist.
III. Max Weber: Western Modernity as Instrumental Rationalisation
1. Frankfurt School criticisms of historical materialism:
(i) positivism;
(ii) inadequate critique of Enlightenment rationality;
(iii) excessive focus on economic base.
2. Weber’s account of the formal rationalisation of Western society.
(i) Formal rationality as organisation of efficient means to given ends;
(ii) Substantive rationality as rationality of ends/ goals.
3. Rationalisation of the economy in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (1904-5):
(i) superstructure and base;
(ii) Protestant ethos;
(iii) worldly success.
4. Capitalism as formally or instrumentally but not substantively rational.
5. Other dimensions of the formal rationalisation of Western society:
(i) impersonal law;
(ii) separation of politics/ ‘reason of state’ from religion;
(iii) bureaucratisation of state;
(iv) disenchantment – privatisation of meaning and value.
6. Weber’s ambivalence about modernity as an inescapable ‘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.
3. Symbolises rationality as control over objectified nature (technology) and
alienation from nature.
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) Weberian rationalisation;
(ii) alienated labour and the critique of capitalism;
(iii) leisure, entertainment and the culture industry.
V. Myth Strikes Back
1. But Enlightenment also becomes ‘engulfed in mythology’:
(i) fetishism of commodities;
(ii) dogmatic commitment to scientific method;
(iii) driven by fear and urge to control.
2. Positivist social science:
(i) the denial of change;
(ii) ‘sacralisation of reality’.
3. The destructive potential of Enlightenment:
(i) Marquis de Sade (1740-1814);
(ii) National Socialism.
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 interest in art, culture and psychoanalysis; attempt
to explain the integration of the working class and non-occurrence of revolution.
2. Compare Gramsci on hegemony.
3. Ambivalent implications for political practice:
‘pessimism of the intellect’ threatens ‘optimism of the will’
(Gramsci).
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 Stalinism: suppression of modernism, surrealism etc.
4. Compare Marx’s own appreciation of Shakespeare, ancient Greeks etc.
III. The Critical Potential of Art and Culture
1. Adorno and Horkheimer on the relative autonomy of art and culture.
2. Liberation of art from religion and daily life after Renaissance.
3. Critical potential even of bourgeois art and modernism:
4. Horkheimer on art:
An element of resistance is inherent in the most aloof art.
Art, since it became autonomous, has preserved the utopia that evaporated from
religion. (Horkheimer, ‘Art and Mass Culture’)
5. For Marcuse beauty and harmony are ‘the sensuous appearance of the
idea of freedom’ (Counterrevolution and Revolt).
6. Limitations of bourgeois art:
(i) class origins;
(ii) censorship;
(iii) deceptive promise of freedom or utopia.
7. Problems of modernism:
(i) difficulty;
(ii) social exclusiveness.
8. Elitism vs. truth.
IV. Walter Benjamin on ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’
1. W. Benjamin (1892-1940) on the ‘work of art in the age of mechanical
reproduction’ (Illuminations).
2. Mass production destroys art’s mystical ‘aura’: Chaplin
vs. Picasso.
3. Progressive potential of ‘post-auratic’ art:
(i) art and the masses;
(ii) film, photography, posters;
4. The Nazi ‘aestheticisation of politics’: Nuremberg; Riefenstahl;
futurist violence.
5. Alternative communist or socialist ‘politicisation of art’: art
and revolution; democratic potential.
6. Politicised art movements of 20th century: surrealism; Dadaism; Brecht’s
‘alienation effect’.
7. Evaluation of Benjamin: closer to Marx; too close to Stalin?
V. Adorno and Horkheimer on the Culture Industry
1. The fate of art and culture in the 20th century as culture industry.
2. Characteristics of culture industry:
(i) mass but not popular;
(ii) industrialised scale of mass production;
(iii) for profit motive not critique/
3. Affirmative nature of culture industry: denial of critical/ negative; as
a ‘mode of controlling individual consciousness’; fatalism; realism
and escapism; ‘realistic dissidence’; sport.
4. The ‘fetish character’ of popular music and the ‘regression
in listening (Adorno).
5. Illusory fulfilment of cultural consumer’s ‘false needs’;
amusement as work:
Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. (Dialectic of Enlightenment)
6. Elitism? But no simple opposition of high-as-critical vs. low-as-affirmative
culture.
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. (Bernstein, Culture
Industry)
8. Marcuse and 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 of the allegiance of the
‘masses’ to an oppressive, exploitative and authoritarian system.
3. Economic or class factors not enough to explain ‘false consciousness’
or ‘ideology’.
II. Freud, Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory
1. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): psychoanalysis contributes to a ‘decentring
of the subject’.
(i) Feuerbach and Marx the deep-seated bases of religion and ideology.
(ii) Freud on the ‘unconscious’ mind.
2. Breuer, Charcot and the explanation of hysteria:
(i) Physical symptoms without physiological basis,
(ii) E.g paralysis of the hand;
(iii) I.e. psychosomatic disorders (psyche and soma)
(iv) Hypnosis as cure.
3. Unconscious mind:
(i) psychological but involuntary causes of hysteria;
(ii) dreams, jokes and ‘Freudian’ slips of the tongue.
4. Related concepts: trauma, repression; symptom; neurosis.
5. Freud’s ‘talking cures’:
(i) dream analysis,
(ii) association of ideas and ‘psycho-analysis’.
III. Psychoanalysis and 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 for the sake of survival or reality principle;
3. Civilization depends, in other words, on sublimation.
4. Freud’s pessimistic view of ever increasing repression and sublimation
in Western civilization.
IV. H. Marcuse (1898-79): Eros and Civilization
1. Frankfurt School’s studies of Authoritarian Personality (1950) and
family:
fascism;
decline of bourgeois family,
individualism and authoritarianism.
2. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955) as radicalisation of Freud by Marxism:
(i) unequal repression and exploitation;
(ii) repression and means of production.
(iii) development of means of production implies decreasing need for repression;
3. Surplus repression of contemporary civilization:
(i) Enormous productivity of capitalist society;
(ii) Implication that much repression is now unnecessary.
4. 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. Desublimation of eros as liberation of playful-erotic-aesthetic humanity:
(i) beyond the performance principle;
(ii) transcending oppositions between work and play, art and reality, sex and
love;
(iii) ‘permanent aesthetic subversion’ of reality.
2. Avoiding repressive desublimation:
(i) commercialisation of sex;
(ii) sexualisation of commerce;
(iii) sex according to performance principle.
3. Obstacles to transformation:
(i) integration of working class (One-dimensional Society, 1964);
(ii) ‘repressive tolerance’ of liberal capitalism.
4. Optimism of late 1960s:
(i) New Left, student movements and opposition to Vietnam war;
(ii) counterculture against work ethic;
(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.
9. Introduction to Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere.
I. Introduction
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) project of (re)construction of historical materialism;
(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.
2. Emergence of critical bourgeois public sphere (BPS):
(i) autonomous discussion of ‘republic of letters’;
(ii) science;
(iii) arts and literature;
(iv) political economy and the state.
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).
4. Critical function of BPS:
(i) 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).
5. Limitations of the BPS:
(i) exclusive of non-bourgeois classes;
(ii) gender;
(iii) pre-established harmony of interests.
6. Criticisms of Habermas:
(i) neglects exclusion of women;
(ii) 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, A. de Tocqueville).
3. Bureaucratisation of state and economy:
(i) expanding state and bureaucracy;
(ii) bureaucratic capitalism and managerial corporations./
4. Politics:
(i) mass political parties and organised interest groups;
(ii) 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’
6. Social developments:
(i) decline of bourgeois family and autonomous individual;
(ii) rise of organised leisure and culture industry.
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 public
sphere.
2. Positivism and rationalisation:
‘decisionism’ and ‘subjectivism’ about values.
3. Technocratic politics:
(i) scientific opinion research;
(ii) advertising and public relations in politics.
4. Technocratic state:
(i) state organisation of research and industry;
(ii) 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.
6. Habermas’s overall view:
(i) conservative role of science and technology in contemporary society;
(ii) independence of ‘moral-political’ and ‘technical’
progress.
7. Cf. Marx and historical materialism:
science and technology/ forces of production as intrinsically progressive.
10. 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) negation and immanent critique;
(ii) desperate circumstances;
(iii) viable politics or pessimism?
4. Habermas’s more positive reconstruction of alternative communicative
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 treats people as manipulable things.
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 from technical progress.
7. Compare Marxism’s assumption about the progressive role of forces of
production (i.e. labour).
III. Habermas’s Pragmatic Theory of Subject and Knowledge
1. Habermas’s theory of communication as theory of subject and knowledge:
(i) Kant’s transcendental subject of knowledge;
(ii) Hegel’s intersubjective and historical subject;
(iii) Marx’s historical materialism – mode of production.
2. Habermas’s pragmatic theory: subject and knowledge based on different
forms of action.
3. But logic of communicative action independent of purposive-rational action.
4. Habermas’s account of ideology as distorted communication:
(i) ideology occurs within dimension of communicative action;
(ii) BUT communication is distorted by social power.
(iii) e.g. bourgeois justice; patriarchy; racism.
5. Hence need for theory of undistorted communication as basis of critique of
ideology.
IV. The Project of a Universal Pragmatics
1. Structure of communicative action manifest in language as an essential medium
of social reproduction.
2. Emphasis on pragmatics of language as action:
speech (parole) rather than language (langue) (Saussure)
3. Emphasis not on statements of fact but on illocutionary speech acts (J. L.
Austin):
(i) ‘doing things with words’;
(ii) e.g. promising, advising, agreeing, commanding, confessing, marrying etc.
4. The pragmatic dimension of speech means that values other than truth are
involved.
5. Hence project of a universal pragmatics:
(i) establish full normative basis of communication
(ii) for all human societies.
6. Chomsky’s notion of linguistic competence and universal grammar.
7. Habermas on universal communicative competence
competence required to take part in communication.
V. The Normative Foundations of Speech
1. Speech involves raising validity claims;
i.e. speech acts may be challenged and need to be justified.
2. Validity claims and speaker’s ‘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: ‘Have you stopped
beating your cat?’
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. Theoretical and Practical Discourse. The Ideal Speech Situation
1. Values of truth and rightness elucidated in terms of consensus theory of
discourse.
2. Basis of moral rightness (practical truth):
(i) not correspondence;
(ii) no metaphysical or religious first principles;
(iii) against subjectivism, decisionism, relativism.
3. Therefore, intersubjective agreement or consensus as only basis of moral
validity.
4. But actual or de facto consensus is no guarantee of moral truth:
(i) insufficient information, undeveloped concepts etc.
(ii) communication distorted by power (ideology);
5. Therefore moral truth must be based on rational consensus as the product
of an ideal speech situation (ISS).
6. Conditions of ISS:
(i) absence of power relations;
(ii) equal opportunities to speak;
(iii) openness to all relevant considerations;
(iv) revisable concepts;
(v) consensus always provisional .
7. ISS as ‘anticipation’ or ideal standard:
(i) basis of criticism;
(ii) NOT something we can ever actually achieve;
(iii) NOT something we can know we have achieved.
VII. 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)
11. 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...
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)
5. Habermas’s distinction serves as critique of functionalism and the
‘totally administered society’.
6. Market as example of system coordination:
(i) machine-like;
(ii) not subject to direct human control;
(iii) potentially amoral/ meaningless. irrational.
7. Communication and the lifeworld as essential to the distinctive meaningfulness
of human life threatened by ‘technocratic nightmare’.
III. The Transition to Modernity 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) secularisation;
(ii) capitalism;
(iii) modern state;
(iv) welfare state.
3. Modernity and the differentiation of cultural spheres of value:
(i) scientific,
(ii) moral,
(iii) art and aesthetic.
4. The rationalisation of law/ ‘rule of law’ and rational authority.
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;
(ii) economic and political efficiency;
(iii) increased ‘learning-potential’ of separate cultural spheres.
IV. The Pathologies of Modernity and Colonisation of the Lifeworld
1. Pathologies of lifeworld correspond to elements of lifeworld (point III,
5):
(i) loss of meaning, alienation;
(ii) absence of solidarity or anomie;
(iii) personality disorders, ‘motivation deficit’.
2. Cultural impoverishment and loss of meaning:
(i) cultural specialisation and elitism;
(ii) culture industry’s (systemic) organisation of everyday culture.
3. Colonisation of lifeworld by capitalism/ money:
(i) alienated work;
(ii) disrupted family;
(iii) commodification of human relations;
(iv) consumerism, materialism and false needs.
(v) culture industry;
4. Colonisation of lifeworld by state/ power:
(i) state regulation through welfare state;
(ii) bureaucratic definition of needs;
(iii) deficit of democratic will formation.
V. New Social Movements
1. NSMs are potential bearers of communicative rationality against ideological
values:
e.g. against patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, racism.
2. In that sense, NSMs promise a possible revival and rationalisation of 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;
(ii) pro-family values;
(ii) 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).
12. 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. 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).
Return to Contents .
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. Habermas, Lyotard and the Critique of Modernity
I. Introduction
1.
Habermas's intellectual debates: positivism; hermeneutics; neo-conservative historians;
feminism (See Holub, Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere).
2. Focus on debates
with poststructuralism and postmodernism: Foucault (B. Hindess); Jean-François
Lyotard (this week).
II. Habermas on the Incomplete Project of Modernity
1.
Earlier Frankfurt School's dialectic of Enlightenment: negative or unconstructive;
pessimistic; against positive philosophies of history.
2. Habermas's more
constructive response: theory of communicative rationality; 'responsibility and
autonomy' grounded in language; philosophy of history?
3. Theory of the pathologies
of modernity.
4. But gains of modernity: secularisation; instrumental rationalisation
of state and economy; differentiation of cognitive spheres; 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: fascism, genocide
and colonialism; 'actually existing socialism' and the fate of Marxism.
3.
Marxism as modernism at its most intense: capitalism as progressive; overcoming
irrationalities of capitalism through socialist planning; pathologies of modernity
(bureaucracy, alienation, totalitarianism). 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)
4.
Postmodernist disillusionment with both main 'meta-narratives' of the Enlightenment:
mainstream narrative of emancipation; speculative narrative of Hegel and Marx.
5.
Postmodernism as the culture of postindustrial society: 'spirit of performativity';
'incredulity toward meta-narratives'; self-annihilation of Enlightenment rationality.
6. The anti-authoritarian politics of postmodernity: against totality; heterogeneity
of 'language games'; reinforcement of diversity, 'paralogy'.
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.
4. Habermas on postmodernism as a new conservatism;
irrationalism; continuing task of 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; critique presupposes appeal to a shared concept of truth.
6. Habermas on art and aesthetics: as an element of modernity, not something
beyond modernity; flexible access to internal nature; unlearning the bad lessons
of modernity.
7. White's synthesis of postmodernist and Habermasian themes
(Political Theory and Postmodernism): responsibility to act and responsibility
to otherness.
8. Postmodernism and respect for otherness: Foucault; Heidegger;
Derrida; Rorty; feminism. Habermas and respect for otherness?
3. 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’:
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’.
4. 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 displaces economic crisis tendencies of liberal
capitalism through welfare, demand management, regulation of international capital.
4. But economic management risks overloading the state in the form of a rationality
crisis (failures of state management); tension between requirements of capitalist
economy and 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)
Return to LECTURE OUTLINES Index
Return to Contents .
FIRST WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT/ ESSAY
IMPORTANT GUIDELINES – PLEASE READ!
Suggested essay topics and readings are listed below. If you would like to write
on a different topic, you must discuss your proposed topic with 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.
ESSAY QUESTIONS
Choose one of the essay questions listed below.
Please note that suggested readings (below) are intended only as starting-points
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 skill and aim of
this course.
1. Discuss the Frankfurt School’s critique of ‘positivism’
and its related 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 their views.
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.
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.
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 their views?
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’.
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; Anthony Elliott, Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self
and society from Freud to Kristeva (Blackwell, 1992), chs. 1-3; J. Habermas,
Knowledge and Human Interests, Part III.
5. Why does Habermas think that the ‘project of modernity’ is ‘incomplete’?
How can the project of modernity be completed? Are there any problems with his
views?
Some suggested readings:
R. J. Bernstein, Habermas and Modernity, esp. Introduction; Habermas, J.: ‘Modernity
- an incomplete project’ in H. Foster, ed. Postmodern Culture, 1988; Habermas,
‘Modernity versus postmodernity’; W. Outhwaite, Habermas, Ch. 8;
D. West, An Introduction to Continental Philosophy, Ch. 7.
6. Discuss Habermas’s account of the public sphere. Are there any problems
with Habermas’s 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; W. Outhwaite,
Habermas: A Critical Introduction, Ch. 1.
7. Briefly outline Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. How
is this theory supposed to provide a moral standard for a critical theory of
society? Does it succeed?
Some suggested readings:
Outhwaite, Habermas, Ch. 3; Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, Ch. 12; 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 can be done to resist this invasion? Are there any problems with
Habermas’s account?
Some suggested readings:
Outhwaite, Habermas, chs 5-6; Pusey, Jürgen Habermas, esp. chs 2-4; J.
Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, Part VI, pp. 113-197.
9. Discuss Habermas’s ‘debates’ with either Gadamer and hermeneutics
or Lyotard and postmodernism or Foucault. Explain who you think wins the debate
and why?
Some suggested readings:
Holub, Jürgen Habermas, chs. 2, 3, 6 or 7; Outhwaite, Habermas, Ch. 8;
Hoy, D. C. & McCarthy, T.: Critical Theory; Habermas, Philosophical Discourse
of Modernity; R. Rorty in Bernstein, Habermas and Modernity, Ch. 3.
GENERAL ADVICE ON WHAT MARKERS ARE LOOKING FOR
• 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?
DEPARTMENTAL RULES
ESSAY SUBMISSION
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’.
EXTENSIONS
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.
PENALTIES
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 subtracted from the assessed
mark for the essay, for each calendar day (or part thereof) excluding weekends
by which the essay is overdue.
PLAGIARISM AND APPEALS
Your attention is also drawn to the School and Faculty Policies on Plagiarism
and Appeals.
Return
to Contents .
The following list covers the major topics of this course and supplements 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 introductory and/or 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; 2nd 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).
Whitebrook, 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).
Return
to Contents .
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.
Please send any suggestions for new links to <David.West@anu.edu.au>
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.
Spoon Collective links on radical and/or critical political philosophy/theory.
Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy.
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CONTACT INFORMATION
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