Table Of ContentTHE THEORY OF
COMMUNICATIVE ACTION
Volume 2
LIFEWORLD AND SYSTEM:
A CRITIQUE OF FUNCTIONALIST
REASON
Jiirgen Habermas
Translated by Thomas McCarthy
Beacon Press Boston
Beacon Press
25 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02108
Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
Translator's preface and translation © 1987 by Beacon Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published as Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns,
Band 2: Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft,
© 1981 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main;
3d corrected edition 1985
94 93 92 91 90 89 88 87 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Habermas, Jiirgen.
The theory of communicative action.
Translation of: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
Contents: v. 1. Reason and the rationalization of
society—v. 2. Lifeworld and system : a critique of
functionalist reason.
1. Sociology—Philosophy—Collected works.
2. Rationalism—Collected works. 3. Social action—
Collected works. 4. Communication—Philosophy—Collected
works. 5. Functionalism—Collected works.
I. Title.
HM24.H3213 1984^ 301'01 82-72506
ISBN 0-8070-1506-7 (v. 1)
ISBN 0-8070-1400-1 (v. 2)
Contents
Volume 2: Lifeworld and System:
A Critique of Functionalist Reason
Translator's Preface v
V The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim: From Purposive
Activity to Communicative Action 1
1. The Foundations of Social Science in the Theory of
Communication 3
2. The Authority of the Sacred and the Normative
Background of Communicative Action 43
3. The Rational Structure of the Linguistiflcation of the
Sacred 77
VI. Intermediate Reflections: System and Lifeworld 113
1. The Concept of the Lifeworld and the Hermeneutic
Idealism of Interpretive Sociology 119
2. The Uncoupling of System and Lifeworld 153
VII. Talcott Parsons: Problems in Constructing a Theory of
Society 199
/. From a Normativistic Theory of Action to a Systems
Theory of Society 204
2. The Development of Systems Theory 235
3. The Theory of Modernity 283
VIII. Concluding Reflections: From Parsons via Weber to Marx 301
/. A Backward Glance: Weber's Theory of Modernity 303
2. Marx and the Thesis of Internal Colonization 332
3- The Tasks of a Critical Theory of Society 374
Notes 405
Index 439
Analytical Table of Contents for Volumes 1 and 2 449
Translator's Preface
In preparing this translation, I was greatly reassured by the author's
willingness to read through a first draft and suggest whatever changes he
thought appropriate. The reader should be advised that, while these
changes were introduced to capture more precisely his meaning or to
make the translation more readable, they often resulted in minor depar
tures from the original text. At such points, then, the correspondence
between the German and English versions is not exactly that of transla
tion.
I am indebted to Victor Lidz and Jeffrey Alexander for reading and
commenting upon the translation of Chapter VII, and to Robert Burns
and Carol Rose for helping with the legal terminology in Chapter VIII. I
am particularly grateful to Sydney Lenit, Marina Rosiene, and Claudia
Mesch for undertaking the hardly inconsiderable task of typing and re
typing the manuscript.
Thomas McCarthy
Northwestern University
V
The Paradigm Shift in Mead and
Durkheim: From Purposive Activity to
Communicative Action
In the Marxist reception of Weber's theory of rationalization, from Lukacs
to Adorno, the rationalization of society was always thought of as a reifi-
cation of consciousness. As I have argued in Volume 1, the paradoxes to
which this conceptual strategy leads show that rationalization cannot be
dealt with adequately within the conceptual frame of the philosophy of
consciousness. In Volume 2 I will take up the problematic of reification
once again and reformulate it in terms of, on the one hand, communica
tive action and, on the other, the formation of subsystems via steering
media. Before doing so I shall develop these basic concepts in the con
text of the history of social theory Whereas the problematic of rational
ization /reification lies along a "German" line of social-theoretical thought
running from Marx through Weber to Lukacs and Critical Theory, the
paradigm shift from purposive activity to communicative action was pre
pared by George Herbert Mead and Emile Durkheim. Mead (1863-
1931) and Durkheim (1858-1917) belong, like Weber (1864-1920), to
the generation of the founding fathers of modern sociology. Both devel
oped basic concepts in which Weber's theory of rationalization may be
taken up again and freed from the aporias of the philosophy of conscious
ness: Mead with his communication-theoretic foundation of sociology,
Durkheim with a theory of social solidarity connecting social integration
to system integration.
The ideas of reconciliation and freedom, which Adorno—who in the
final analysis remained under the spell of Hegelian thought—merely
circled around in a negative-dialectical fashion, stand in need of explica
tion. They can in fact be developed by means of the concept of commu-
l
2 The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim
nicative rationality, toward which their use by Adorno points in any case.
For this purpose we can draw upon a theory of action that, like Mead's,
is concerned to project an ideal communication community. This Utopia
serves to reconstruct an undamaged intersubjectivity that allows both
for unconstrained mutual understanding among individuals and for the
identities of individuals who come to an unconstrained understanding
with themselves. The limits of a communication-theoretic approach of
this sort are evident. The reproduction of society as a whole can surely
not be adequately explained in terms of the conditions of communica
tive rationality, though we can explain the symbolic reproduction of the
lifeworld of a social group in this way, if we approach the matter from an
internal perspective.
In what follows, I will (1) examine how Mead develops the basic con
ceptual framework of normatively regulated and linguistically mediated
interaction; he arrives at this point by way of a logical genesis, starting
from interaction mediated by gestures and controlled by instincts, and
passing through the stage of symbolically mediated interaction in signal
languages. (2) In the transition from symbolically mediated to norma
tively guided interaction, there is a gap in the phylogenetic line of devel
opment which can be filled in with Durkheim's assumptions concerning
the sacred foundations of morality, the ritually preserved fund of social
solidarity. (3) Taking as our guideline the idea of a "linguistification" [Vfcr-
spmchlichung] of this ritually secured, basic normative agreement, we
can arrive at the concept of a rationalized lifeworld with differentiated
symbolic structures. This concept takes us beyond the conceptual limi
tations of the Weberian theory of action, which is tailored to purposive
activity and purposive rationality.
1. The Foundations of Social Science in the Theory of
Communication
Early in the twentieth century, the subject-object model of the philos
ophy of consciousness was attacked on two fronts—by the analytic phi
losophy of language and by the psychological theory of behavior. Both
renounced direct access to the phenomena of consciousness and re
placed intuitive self-knowledge, reflection, or introspection with proce
dures that did not appeal to intuition. They proposed analyses that
started from linguistic expressions or observed behavior and were open
to intersubjective testing. Language analysis adopted procedures for ra
tionally reconstructing our knowledge of rules that were familiar from
logic and linguistics; behavioral psychology took over the methods of
observation and strategies of interpretation established in studies of ani
mal behavior.1
Despite their common origins in the pragmatism of Charles Sanders
Peirce, these two approaches to the critique of consciousness have gone
their separate ways and have, in their radical forms, developed indepen
dent of one another. Moreover, logical positivism and behaviorism pur
chased their release from the paradigm of the philosophy of conscious
ness by reducing the traditional roster of problems with a single coup de
main—in one case through withdrawing to the analysis of languages con
structed for scientific purposes, in the other by restricting itself to the
model of the individual organism's stimulus-induced behavior. The anal
ysis of language has, of course, freed itself from the constrictions of its
dogmatic beginnings. The complexity of the problematic developed by
Peirce has been regained along two paths—one running from Carnap and
Reichenbach through Popper to postempiricist philosophy of science,
the other from the early Wittgenstein through the late Wittgenstein and
Austin to the theory of speech acts. By contrast the psychological theory
of behavior has, notwithstanding occasional moves for liberalization, de
veloped within the bounds of an objectivistic methodology. If we want
to release the revolutionary power of the basic concepts of behavior
theory, the potential in this approach to burst the bounds of its own
paradigm, we shall have to go back to Mead's social psychology.
Mead's theory of communication also recommends itself as a point of
intersection of the two critical traditions stemming from Peirce.2 Al
though Mead took no notice of the linguistic turn in philosophy, looking
back today one finds astonishing convergences between his social psy-
3
4 The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim
chology and the analysis of language and theory of science developed in
formal-pragmatic terms. Mead analyzed phenomena of consciousness
from the standpoint of how they are formed within the structures of
linguistically or symbolically mediated interaction. In his view, language
has constitutive significance for the sociocultural form of life: "In man
the functional differentiation through language gives an entirely different
principle of organization which produces not only a different type of
individual but also a different society?'3
Mead presented his theory under the rubric of "social behaviorism"
because he wanted to stress the note of criticism of consciousness. Social
interactions form symbolic structures out of sentences and actions, and
analyses can deal with them as with something objective. There are how
ever two methodological differences separating Mead's approach from
behaviorism. The model from which he starts is not the behavior of an
individual organism reacting to stimuli from an environment, but an in
teraction in which at least two organisms react to one another and be
have in relation to one another: "We are not, in social psychology, build
ing up the behavior of the social group in terms of the behavior of the
separate individuals composing it; rather, we are starting out with a given
social whole of complex activities, into which we analyze (as elements)
the behavior of each of the separate individuals composing it."4 Mead
rejects not only the methodological individualism of behavior theory but
its objectivism as well. He does not want to restrict the concept of "be
havior" to observable behavioral reactions; it is to include symbolically
oriented behavior as well, and to allow for the reconstruction of general
structures of linguistically mediated interactions: "Social psychology is
behavioristic in the sense of starting off with an observable activity—the
dynamic, ongoing social process, and the social acts which are its com
ponent elements—to be studied and analyzed scientifically. But it is not
behavioristic in the sense of ignoring the experience of the individual—
the inner phase of that process or activity"5 In comparison with the as
pect of behavior, the meaning embodied in social action is something
nonexternal; at the same time, as something objectivated in symbolic
expressions, it is publicly accessible and not, like phenomena of con
sciousness, merely internal: "There is a field within the act itself which is
not external, but which belongs to the act, and there are characteristics
of that inner organic conduct which do reveal themselves in their own
attitudes, especially those connected with speech."6
Because Mead incorporated a nonreductionist concept of language
into behaviorism, we find combined in him the two approaches critical
of consciousness that otherwise went their separate ways after Peirce:
the theory of behavior and the analysis of language. His communication
theory is not restricted to acts of reaching understanding; it deals with
