the ends of solidarity discourse theory in ethics and politics mar 2008

They range from a sprawling theory ofmodernity, through a theory of the universal pragmatics of language; a rec-onciliation of competing schools of modern sociology; a transformation oft

Max Pensky

The

Solidarity Discourse Theory in Ethics and Politics

The

SolidarityDiscourse Theory in Ethics and Politics

Solidarity

Dennis J Schmidt, editor

the State University of New York Press, Albany

©2008 State University of New York Press, Albany

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Library of Congress of Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pensky, Max, 1961‒.

The ends of solidarity : discourse theory in ethics and politics / Max Pensky.

p cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–7914–7363–4 (hardcover : alk paper)

1 Solidarity 2 Political ethics 3 Political science—Philosophy I Title.

HM717 P46 20081318.M46 2007

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2007024996

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

The Adventures of a Concept between Fact and Norm

Cosmopolitan Democracy, National Identity,

and Political Solidarity

Studies in Immigration Law and Policy

4 Constitutional Solidarity and Constitutional Scope 103The Dynamics of Immigration and the Constitutional Project

of the European Union

Civil Society and Religious Solidarity in the New Europe

IN AN ESSAY ENTITLED “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its

Voices” from1992, Jürgen Habermas argued that a modest but born, “non-defeatist”1conception of communicative rationality couldeffectively mediate between the antiquated claims of philosophical idealism,

stub-on stub-one side, and, stub-on the other, a reigning spirit of cstub-ontingency that hasabandoned all claims for the unifying power of reason The by-now familiarbasis for Habermas’s work is a mode of reason that inhabits the attitudesand performances of persons as they communicate with one another As

we realize a distinctly human capacity to give and take reasons, we also enterinto networks of intersubjective relationships: we project legitimate expec-tations of one another; we undertake mutual and symmetrical obligationsfor justifying to each other what we believe and intend to do; we acceptconditions for symmetrical recognition; we include each other, like it ornot, in ways we cannot simply manipulate for our own reasons In short,speaking and hearing, quite apart from what may be said and what heard,already entail all the reason we can expect from ourselves and one another,

in a world of real diversity in values, beliefs, and desires But it’s also allthat we need

“Weakly” anchored in the formal structures of everyday tion, reason warrants a normative conception of the social world, for if

communica-we are bound to one another by the formal structures of speaking andhearing, then underlying all we say and do—not despite but especially inour differences—we reaffirm, with each utterance, acts of ongoing inclu-sion These acts of ongoing inclusion, transmitted from basic linguisticcompetence through the affects and attitudes of persons, through politicalinstitutions and ultimately into the ethos of a democratic form of social

life, can be summarized as solidarity.

Preface

ix

This core intuition at the heart of Habermas’s enormous body of work—that communicative reason is itself the practice of solidarity—has of coursehad any number of different inflections, varying with context, with theo-retical angles of attack, with opponents But these versions have beenvariations on a theme of uncompromising consistency In its most lapidaryformations, as the one here in the essay on “The Unity of Reason,” theclaims of reason emerge in their full clarity and urgency.

The analysis of the necessary conditions for mutual understanding in general allows us to develop the idea of an intact intersubjectivity, which makespossible both a mutual and constraint-free understanding between individ-uals, in their dealings with one another, and the identity of individuals whocome to a compulsion-free understanding with themselves This intact inter-subjectivity is a glimmer of symmetrical relations marked by free, reciprocalrecognition.2

What it means for us to understand one another justifies no utopianfantasies about a specific form of life, an exemplary life history, or a commongood worth desiring But it does justify a kind of tenacity, a stubborn insis-tence on the possibility of living in solidarity with one another, a kind ofgrounding confidence that an insight into the link between reason and soli-

darity is itself not a fantastic or ethnocentric projection; a trust, to

paraphrase Emmanuel Levinas, that we have not been “duped” by our ownmoral intuitions.3When we arrange our lives and actions in such a waythat we are willing to listen to reasons, we assume obligations to one anotherfor justifications, and in order to do this we must include ourselves andothers in relations of solidarity

Solidarity—so I will be arguing in the chapters to follow—provides thegolden thread that connects the range of projects grouped together in whathas come to be known as “discourse theory.” It may be better to referinstead to a family of different theories, sharing a core of theoretical andmethodological commitments They range from a sprawling theory ofmodernity, through a theory of the universal pragmatics of language; a rec-onciliation of competing schools of modern sociology; a transformation oftheories of cognitive and moral learning processes; a theory of social domi-nation; a moral philosophy and a philosophy of law, rights, and democracy

in the modern constitutional state Beyond the dedicated theoretical

writ-ings (the Theory of Communicative Action and related texts, the essays on discourse ethics, and Between Facts and Norms), discourse theory extends

into Habermas’s vast collection of political writings and his work as a publicintellectual.

To claim the key notion of solidarity as a ‘golden thread’ connecting thisvast literature is a modest claim in one aspect Solidarity, I want to show, is

a unifying concept permitting us to read Habermas’s work with a degree ofconsistency and continuity that we might lack otherwise This unifyingconcept also connects Habermasian discourse theory with a range ofcontemporary ethical and political debates—in some senses, in ways differ-ently than Habermas himself has argued for For this reason, the chapters

in this book are intended to form a sustained argument, rather than anextended tour of Habermas’s texts There is no ambition here for an exhaus-

tive summary of Habermas’s work, and great swaths of it—Structural

Transformations of the Public Sphere, Knowledge and Human Interests, imation Crisis—will be mentioned only in passing or not at all Conversely,

Legit-several chapters will largely part company with Habermas’s texts, carrying

on explorations of the implications of Habermas’s work beyond the pointthat Habermas himself has I want to argue for the richness and power of anotion of solidarity, developed from out of Habermas’s texts, in illuminatingand clarifying issues as different as the basis for a European constitution andthe normative limits of genetic testing

I should make clear at the very outset that the present work does notaspire to develop a theory of solidarity of its own In all of what follows, theconception of solidarity I use is drawn from the most foundational andconsistent treatments of the term in Habermas’s theoretical writings, and forthat reason, as will become clear in the first chapter, I choose to register andnote, rather than solve, what I take to be a persistent tension in those treat-ments between normative and descriptive accounts of modern forms of

social and political solidarity I appeal to the notion of solidarity as

inclu-sion less as part of a theory than as a schema or model For all the chapters,

solidarity is taken as a mode or act of inclusion of a person or persons into a

group or institution structured discursively

Inclusion always implies exclusion Therefore, an exploration of solidaritycannot limit itself to how people are included in deliberative practices orgroups, but must also, inevitably, address how they are excluded as well Themagnitude or scope of inclusion in any social group or institution, or even

in abstract communities such as a moral domain, presupposes the capacity

to exclude, even where no manifest rule for exclusion is available The tics of identity in multicultural societies is, at its heart, about nothing otherthan how the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion will be negotiated: who

poli-is to determine the rules and terms of inclusion and exclusion, and whatsocial or political consequences membership, or lack of it, will bear Even themost benign and well-intentioned modes of political inclusion presupposethat democratic polities are composed of a finite and determinate set ofpersons Inclusion in a universal community of moral persons requiresmodes of exclusion as well, as advocates of animal rights will be quick toattest Theories of modern solidarity normally treat the borders or limits toinclusion, rightly, as sites of particular normative interest But to criticizeapparently normatively irrelevant borders and rules of exclusion—such asascriptive national or ethnic identity, for instance—should not commit one

to have to defend a limitless solidarity Cosmopolitan solidarity, which argues

for robust inclusion of individuals beyond national borders, cannot ently base its normative claims on the notion of an inclusion withoutexclusion Even the concept of “the human” presupposes the ongoing work

coher-of patrolling, revising, contesting, and enforcing exclusionary boundaries.Again, the real question is how such patrolling, revising, contesting, and

enforcing is carried out, who is included in that process.

It’s just here that discourse theory, and the discourse principle thatexpresses its core normative claim, makes the thoroughly dialectical rela-tion between inclusion and exclusion more complex and more interesting.Exclusion and inclusion ought to be understood as moments in processes

of the construction and transformation of solidarities that are dynamic and

ongoing, rather than static oppositions Much depends on how exclusions

happen For instance, as sovereign nation-states establish legal provisions forthe ascription of citizenship status, with its corresponding basket of rightsand obligations, they set norms for the exclusion of persons But these

norms, in turn, may well be (indeed, I will argue, must be) publicly

acces-sible and open toward discursive contest and redemption in institutions,such as a nascent transnational civil society, which may be inclusive preciselywhere national-state institutions exclude

To include is to exclude But, on discourse-theoretical terms, conversely,

to exclude by publicly contestable legal norms is also to include, insofar asthose excluded are taken as persons who are significantly affected by the

implementation and likely effects of a given norm and are therefore owed

reasons In the context of what Habermas has called the “postnational

constellation,” social and political theory ought to become sensitive toways that new solidarities are generated from within the interplay of inclu-sions and exclusions; at the “force field” where inclusion and exclusion, atdifferent registers, become unstable and creative For this reason, several

chapters argue in one form or another for a reflexive or “second order”

soli-darity Forms of inclusion can emerge precisely from out of exclusionarypractices of various kinds, insofar as such practices—if they are to be norma-tively justifiable at all—have to be justifiable to those who are mostsignificantly affected by them To present reasons to those affected is toinclude them in the circle of all those to whom reasons as justifications areowed And, often enough, in the case of postnational democratic practices,making good on this debt requires that even the most exclusionary prac-tices point toward institutional forms that are not yet in existence—forinstance, stronger transnational civil society institutions in which opinionand will-formation cannot be mapped onto national polities, and thuscannot be determined by geographical borders, but are dynamically flexibleaccording to the shifting boundaries of those caught up in practices ofjustification inherent in democratic governance itself

Solidarity, in other words, is not here taken primarily in affective terms

as fellow-feeling, friendship, the bonds of love, or the feeling ofcommunal belonging These affective dimensions are certainly important

in any study of solidarity attempting to understand the transformations

of solidarity attending the rise of social and political modernity, especially

in a current context of globalization, where affectively saturated and tion-appropriating modes of political inclusion and exclusion aremobilized to compensate for the decay of national sovereignty and collec-tive identifications at the national and supernational levels But asociological and political theory of contemporary solidarity will need topresuppose, rather than prove once more, the basic point that traditionalsources for the creation and maintenance of social solidarity have beentransformed, and are only available for the work of inclusion in a highlyreflexive, nonnạve form

tradi-The implication of this model of solidarity is that the range of porary social, moral, and political issues that discourse theory brings into

contem-sharper focus are ones involving debates over the ends of solidarity: that is,

where the dialectic between inclusion and exclusion is actually conducted.Who is authorized to make the determinations of exclusionary and inclu-sionary rules and practices? What provisions of democratic constitutionsdetermine who is to be included under the canopy of constitutional rights?Can transnational institutions authorize discourses in which those tradi-tionally excluded from national solidarities—immigrants, legal residentaliens, migrant workers, temporary guests—might become effective agents

in debating the terms of citizenship? What forms of moral inclusion do we

encounter that effectively trump our political solidarities, and how doesmoral inclusion relate the call for justice with the demand for expandedsolidarity? Who determines the limits of the human: can the present includefuture generations into its own ethical self-understanding, such that currentethical convictions should remain binding for future persons? Does soli-darity toward the future demand a present-day disavowal of genetictechnologies that might one day transform the future beyond our ethicalrecognition?

This range of questions, I hope to show, is rendered more powerful,more pointed, and also just a bit more manageable by a reading of Haber-masian philosophy as a philosophy of modern solidarity In the first chapter,

I discuss briefly the history of the concept of solidarity, and go on to sketchout Habermas’s social theory of modernity, his theory of communicativeaction, showing how solidarity constitutes the crucial link between modernlifeworlds and the demands and pressures of highly complex social systems

In the second chapter, the model of solidarity as inclusion is applied to thecontemporary “postnational” constellation, in an attempt to clarify theterms of national, postnational, and cosmopolitan solidarities The thirdchapter offers a discussion of the social, economic, and political factors incontemporary transnational migration, along with an argument for transna-tional civil society as an institutional seat for an expanded form of politicalsolidarity, in which noncitizens are increasingly able to exercise the kind ofpolitical agency establishing them as significant participants in politicaldiscourses about their exclusions at the national level Chapter foursharpens this thesis with a study of the dynamics of legal-political inclu-sion and exclusion in the constitutional process in the European Union As

a postnational and transnational democratic polity, the European Union isfaced with a startlingly new constitutional process On the basis of Haber-masian discourse theory, I argue that this new opportunity calls for a newmode of constitution-making, one in which the scope or extent of consti-tutional provisions is itself made into a manifest component ofconstitutional law, rather than relegated to a question of naturalization to

be handled legislatively

In the fifth chapter, I conclude the institutional-political analysis of thedynamics of European integration, this time in the context of religion.Arguing against a simplistic “secularization thesis,” I analyze conflicting atti-tudes toward religion and religious institutions in EU countries, revealing acomplex and shifting tapestry This complex picture is then understood asthe background for a debate between Rawls and Habermas on the question

of the secular and the sacred, on the relation between religious and gious citizens in a liberal democracy An analysis of Habermas’s responses

nonreli-to Rawls reveals the central importance of civil society—in this case, a pean civil society—as the key factor in determining how secular andreligious citizens will and will not bind themselves to one another in rela-tions of solidarity over the giving and taking of justifications for theirpolitical positions

Euro-In the last two chapters, I turn from politics to moral philosophy Euro-Inchapter six, reading Habermas’s writings on discourse ethics, I reconstructhis claims on the internal connection between justice and solidarity in apost-Kantian deontic moral theory The chapter ends by questioningwhether Habermas’s own explanation for this codependence of justice andsolidarity is convincing The seventh and final chapter expands and chal-lenges the implications of discourse ethics through a critical reading ofHabermas’s objections to new genetic medical technologies, and his argu-ments in favor of an “ethical self understanding of the species.” By tracingHabermas’s position back to an older struggle against a specific Germantradition of (conservative) philosophical anthropology, I attempt to showhow deeply moral discourse remains within (national) ethical contexts

The chapters that make up The Ends of Solidarity reflect work on

Haber-masian discourse theory and issues in contemporary ethics and politics thatdate back nearly ten years Looking back over that decade, it’s reassuring tosee how much of this work has been cooperative and dialogical, and howmuch of what I think has grown out of being argued with, corrected, andchallenged by colleagues and friends

In acknowledging the intellectual debts I’ve incurred in this work, thefirst person to thank is Jürgen Habermas himself, whom I’ve had the privi-lege to know, to work with and for, and learn from, for over twenty years Ican’t hope to express adequately the depth of my gratitude, but I hope thatthe present work is at least a promissory note—even (or better, especially) atthose points where my disagreements are most clear Thank you

I want to extend special thanks to those colleagues and friends whoseinput and advice concerning this book have been especially important forme: Ken Baynes, Seyla Benhabib, Jim Bohman, Nancy Fraser, Peter UweHohendahl, Eduardo Mendieta, Tom McCarthy, and Stephen Shiffrin

I would not have been able to write this book without the help of thefollowing foundations and institutions: the Alexander von Humboldt Foun-dation, the Institute for German Cultural Studies and the Society for the

Humanities at Cornell University, and the Office of the Harpur CollegeDean at Binghamton University My colleagues in the Philosophy Depart-ment at Binghamton University, especially Bat-Ami Bar On and JohnArthur, were inspirational and supportive in ways they probably didn’talways notice.

OF ALL THE CONCEPTSthat form the constellation of modern political

thought, surely “solidarity” is a strong candidate for the most lenging At once influential and undertheorized, the concept of solidarityappears to function across a startling range of discourses At the core of thedifficulties involved in using the concept of solidarity for illuminatingcontemporary political problems is an ambiguity between normative anddescriptive uses of the concept itself The goal of this introductory chapter

chal-is to offer a reconstruction, in part intellectual-hchal-istorical and in partanalytic, of the normative-descriptive ambiguity in our current usage of theconcept of solidarity This ambiguity between fact and norm shouldn’t betaken as an unfortunate outcome of a history of misinterpretations, or as anexample of a muddy concept in need of clarification Rather, we should viewthe fact-norm ambiguity as a dialectical tension, in the sense that a degree

of undecidability between normative and descriptive moments (in Hegel’ssense) of solidarity is itself the core meaning of the term—a tension that can

be turned to highly productive use, as the subsequent chapters will attempt

In contemporary political theory solidarity can be invoked as a synonymfor community, as the political value against which the freedom of individ-uals must be balanced and without which freedom becomes hollow In thiscontext, solidarity effectively translates the eighteenth-century republicanideal of “fraternity,” intended as a sibling to the ideal political norms of lib-erty and equality It is a strange sibling, at that: while much political theoryover the past decades has been dedicated to the question of the primacy ofliberty or equality, solidarity has often remained marginalized In the “lib-eral versus communitarian” debates of the1980s and 1990s, communitariancriticisms of political liberalism often appealed to an abstract conception ofcommunity that seems roughly equivalent to solidarity On the other hand,

1

Solidarity

The Adventures of a Concept between Fact and Norm

1

the core idea of a “shared sense of the good” or a substantive ethical sensus on how a group ought to live, indeed the idea of a shared identity, isquite different from the meanings normally attached to solidarity, whichseems in many respects as willfully abstract, as open to ongoing contesta-tion, as personal liberty and social equality The ideal of fraternity itselfembodies these tensions insofar as it connotes both a pre-political blood-based or kinship bond while simultaneously appealing to a transcendence orexpansion of just those highly local, ascriptive ties toward fellow-citizensbeyond the bonds of clan or family belonging To the extent that solidaritytranslates the older, republican ideal of fraternity, it continues to embodythis tension between premodern and specifically modern ideals of belonging,bonding, and inclusion.

con-In a different register, in moral philosophy and normative ethics, darity can refer to the concept of membership in a moral community or thecollective, intersubjective bonds that hold autonomous moral agentstogether, both engendering and limiting their capacities for solitary moralreflection We can therefore speak of a “moral solidarity” as an importantentailment of moral deontology To be an autonomous moral agent is onlypossible insofar as one thinks of oneself as included in an abstract set of allthose who count as free and equal actors; a member in a set of all equallyconstituted moral agents whose mutual recognition forms the interwovenfabric of a moral point of view The Kantian kingdom of ends transcends allpossible political solidarities But it is nevertheless constitutive for moralpractice, in the sense that moral solidarity, the acknowledgment and recog-nition of inclusion in a universally constituted moral group, is a necessarycondition for the possibility of morality In Habermas’s post-Kantian moralphilosophy, as we will see, the notion of a moral solidarity as the “obverseside” of justice is the effort to argue for just this point

soli-Modern political and moral solidarity express belonging or mutual tiesbeyond contingent and ascriptive bonds But solidarity can also be aphenomenologically highly rich term, referring to any number of greater

or lesser forms of belonging or bonding We can speak of national darity whose particularist features (ethnic descent, a natural language,specific national histories, and so on) enter into tension with the univer-salist principles of modern constitutional democratic states; of local orsubnational, religious, ethnic, or racial solidarities that jostle for primacywithin an overdetermined cultural-political landscape; of shifting, contin-gent, and multiply determined solidarities engendered by the dynamics ofcomplex societies

soli-Solidarity can have widely disparate political-moral connotations as well.

In its moral-universalist reading, as well as its Enlightenment, republicanvariant in the civic ideal of fraternity, it seems to demand an unconditionedsocial and political symmetry not just between individuals in a social groupbut between social groups overall Solidarity evokes the dream of freedomand equality reconciled But in other, principally nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century usages, solidarity specifies a strong bonding betweenmembers of subordinated groups in a condition of sociopolitical asymmetry

In its usages in actual political and moral struggles for the past one hundredand fifty years, “solidarity” was, of course, a central term in the tradition ofsocialist theory and practice from the middle of the nineteenth century tothe Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s, a span through which thecore intuition—the preparedness for mutual aid and sacrifice of anoppressed group in opposition to an otherwise hegemonic oppression—remained the same even as the opposition itself changed radically And as asecular version of an older monotheistic, predominantly Christian concep-tion of bonds of love and aid that transcend particular and contingentattachments, solidarity has been widely “resacralized” over the second half

of the twentieth century by various Christian congregations exercising cacy for, and supplying aid to, populations of the poor and oppressed in thedeveloping world

advo-We can thus distinguish between an Enlightenment, universalist reading

of solidarity, surviving in various forms to the present, in which the abstractand voluntarist claims concerning the inalienable freedom and equality ofpersons might itself generate, or demand, a form of social cohesion or inter-subjective bonding based upon these very rational attributes Solidarities

between persons and between groups presuppose a basic norm of

symmet-rical conditions of mutual inclusion in this abstract sense On the other

hand, specifically in the nineteenth century, in both socialist and nationalist

thought solidarity was normally taken to presuppose an asymmetrical

rela-tion between an in-group and its hostile other; an intense intergroupbonding in response to external threats

These powerfully normative usages of the concept of solidarity,

comprising more of a family resemblance than a consistent definition, also

have to be squared with the descriptive usages of the term in discourses

within contemporary social theory For the founders of modern socialtheory—Emile Durkheim and Max Weber—the fundamental question ofsocial theory was the task of explaining the distinctive features of modernity

on the levels of culture, society, and personality Solidarity, most famously in

Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society, lay at the heart of this task In

its various forms, the founding generation of sociology attempted to answerthe question of modernity by explaining how the transition from traditional

to modern societies entailed a transformation of social solidarity as a modefor integrating new members into social institutions and practices Tradi-tional modes for the validity and legitimacy of social codes, norms, andapproved practices or normed behavior become devalued The old, obliga-tory normative consensus carried by metaphysical-religious worldviewscollapses, and with it the most familiar and most effective mechanism forsocial integration and cohesion, namely, discourses of individual and collec-tive identity and belonging, paired with strongly motivating, normedbehavior, connecting social institutions and practices, cultural values, andpersonality structures

In modernity, the creation and maintenance of legitimate social tions and practices increasingly shift from preestablished normativeconsensus to the shoulders of social members themselves, who must under-take the work of social integration through their own participation in largelydisenchanted procedures and institutions Durkheim sees this shift in thetransformation from mechanical to organic solidarity; Weber sees theprocess of disenchantment interwoven with the dissemination, differentia-tion, and institutionalization of instrumental rationality In both cases, thedescriptive account of solidarity enters into a complex and productiverelationship with a normative version Both Durkheim and Weber wereguided by powerful moral and political convictions Social theory is itselfalso a form of social praxis, and modern sociology is a discipline that speaksfrom, and appeals to, the very phenomena it attempts to explain: themodern, secular worldview Durkheim’s writings on the need for the estab-lishment of a postreligious mode for social bonding, like Weber’s ethics offraternity beyond the “iron cage” of means–ends rationality, deliberatelyblurs the distinction between a functionalist, descriptive account of soli-

institu-darity as social integration—a function that any society must perform if it

is to reproduce itself successfully—and a normative account of how our society ought to be in solidarity, how we ought to include one another, on

what basis we ought to recognize one another, what we owe to one another

as social members, or as human beings

This tension between normative and descriptive accounts of modernforms of social solidarity is, as I hope the following chapters will show, not

a problem to be solved Instead it ought to be taken as definitive for modernsocial and political thought—as it is in so many of Jürgen Habermas’s

works The distinction between normative and descriptive accounts of darity is ultimately itself referred to ongoing social practices insofar as thevery idea of such a distinction—what counts as an “ought” statement, whatdoesn’t—is reflective of actual practices of justification, practices that aredeeply socially and institutionally embedded If we probe deeply enoughinto the relation between the descriptive and the normative uses of soli-darity, we ultimately confront the status of those intersubjective processesthat themselves are constitutive for the very possibility of a distinctionbetween normative and factual claims in a social context Such processes arenot solitary They are themselves processes that consist of including personsinto discursive relationships.

soli-Indeed it is the loss of the distinctive tension between normative and

descriptive conceptions of modern social solidarity, in the development offunctionalist sociological theories, that is more problematic, and moretypical As we will see, the sociological conception of solidarity supposes that

a certain kind of agency has to be invoked to explain how increasinglycomplex societies are able to integrate and include new members, andthereby meet the ongoing and increasing need for legitimation A collectiveagency of this kind, of course, supposes a very great deal about how modernsocieties function It presupposes that functional accounts of modern soci-eties are incomplete as long as they remain silent on how the dynamics ofintegration and legitimation involve the attitudes, norms, and beliefs ofsocial subjects themselves, rather than the performance of social institutions.Another way to put this is that social solidarity, as the mode of integrationfor modern, posttraditional societies, demands a sociological explanation atboth macro and micro levels—both at the level of large and complex social

systems and at that of the lifeworld.

Putting the matter in this way reminds us of just how ambitious

Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action truly is The theory is, among

many other things, an attempt at a definitive resolution of the century-olddispute between macro and micro sociological approaches, a dispute that,

notwithstanding the Theory of Communicative Action’s many virtues, appears

to continue unabated to this moment.1For the present context, the point I

am offering is relatively simple: the project of reconciling macro andmicrosociology, or functionalist and phenomenological-interpretiveapproaches in social theory is in large measure provoked by the need, overthe course of Habermas’s theory, to return to the foundational question ofmodern social theory, and explain how the shift from traditional to modern

societies is made possible by a transformation of solidarity, a shift from

tradi-tional resources to ongoing, ratradi-tional, error-prone human agency as themode for the creation and maintenance of social integration and legitimacy This theoretical need is met by a theory as vast, complex, and demanding

as any that social theory has seen But one core claim should be articulated:

the Theory of Communicative Action places a new conception of modern

social solidarity at its heart This conception embodies a tension betweennormative and descriptive accounts of intersubjective inclusion and bonds;this tension is transferred from social theory to moral philosophy, to polit-ical theory and the philosophy of law, and finally to occasional writings oncontemporary politics and culture, without being lessened Finally, thetension between normative and descriptive accounts of solidarity—

“between fact and norm”—is not a problem to be solved or reduced, but isconstitutive for contemporary theory as such

AS WE USE THE TERM“SOLIDARITY”IN THE PRESENT, we appropriate a term

whose origins trace back to Roman law, in which obligatio in solidum defines

the status of joint liability for a financial debt In an illuminating intellectualhistory, Andreas Wildt examines how this narrow legal-financial termacquires (in a quintessentially Roman fashion) the added connotation of amoral virtue To be in solidarity means that a man is good for his debts andstands up to his obligations to others even when he has not benefited fromthem directly To be the cosignatory of a loan means that one is liable forthe reversals of fortune of another; that one’s own economic well-being is nolonger completely in one’s own hands.2The original scope of inclusion intothe circle of those who found themselves in such solidary obligation wouldhave been the extended family, and it is worth lingering a moment on this

older conception of solidarity as fraternité The bonds of fraternal

recogni-tion—to the circle of those whom we recognize as family—are not bloodbonds in this Roman conception, nor are they affective Neither genes norlove, but liability is the bonding force We are bound together with thosewith whom, like it or not, our own fates and our own well-being are inter-woven That, and not a sum of money to be repaid, is the sense of theacknowledgment of debt

Wildt’s candidate for the earliest modern example of a usage of the term

“solidarity” is French While “solidarity” translates the older revolutionaryconception of “fraternity” as the third element of the republican tricolor, thistranslation—with the added connotation of shared liability from the olderRoman word—is as late as 1840, in Pierre Leroux’s De l’humanité, de son

principe, et de son avenir, a work in which solidarité is evoked as the founding

creed of a secular-humanist ersatz religion For Wildt, it is a conception iated with, and roughly contemporary with, other early concepts of secular

affil-humanist faith, most notably the idea of Gattungswesen or “species being” in Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums and Marx’s 1844 manu-scripts.3Solidarity based on the cognition of shared humanity and the affect

of filiation and friendship is meant to replace the Christian ethic of duty.Likewise it is August Comte who introduces the conception of solidarityinto academic discourse “He uses the term to refer to social and economicinterdependencies—just as liberal economists do—without losing sight ofthe universalist-moral and affective dimensions of the concept.”4

From this beginning in the discourse of secular humanism, canism, and revolutionary ethics, as a nineteenth century translation of theEnlightenment-revolutionary ideal of fraternity, solidarity is thus, via Marx,taken into the socialist tradition, where it reaches the zenith of its politicalcurrency in the last decades of the nineteenth century up until the Germanrevolutions of 1918 In its migration from the French communards to the

republi-German communists—from solidarité to Solidarität—the term now

effec-tively trumps liberty and equality, and stakes its claim as the highest politicalvalue “The concept of general human solidarity,” Karl Liebknecht claimed,

“is the highest cultural and moral concept; to turn it into reality is the task

of socialism.” Or, in Eduard Bernstein’s version of the same claim, “It can besaid that no principle, no idea, exerts greater force within the working classmovement than the recognition that it is necessary to exercise solidarity Allother great principles of the social law pale by comparison—whether it isthe principle of equality or the principle of liberty.”5

Normative and descriptive determinations of the concept appear beside

the point in emphatic claims such as these The fact of the shared interests,

values, and fate of the working class, while constituted by the condition of

oppression under capitalism, provides a sufficient account of the norm of an

ongoing political practice, as in this earlier, highly Hegelian claim by Lassallefrom1862: “The ethical idea of the working class is that the unrestricted,

free exercise of individual powers by the individual is not sufficient by itself, but that in an ethically structured community the following has to be added

to it: the communality and reciprocity of development.”6Of special significance

in this social-revolutionary, Marxist appropriation of the older republicanideal is, perhaps not surprisingly, an insistence on completing the work ofdisenchantment on the way to a “scientific” political science and practice:the dissolving of the last admixture of romantic sentiment from the concept

of solidarity as a political norm Insofar as the situation of the working

classes, and the solution to that situation, must be diagnosed from peachable scientific principles, the political value that characterizes thisstruggle must be equally unsentimental, equally “scientific.” Solidarity, onthis German Marxist reading, must be expunged of its vestige of affect Alonger and absorbing quotation from Kurt Eisner, speaking in 1918, cansummarize the special timbre of this social-revolutionary appropriation ofthe older republican ideal.

unim-No, no more talk of love, pity, and compassion But the cold, steely word darity has been welded in the furnace of scientific thought It does not appeal

soli-to floating, gliding, sweetly shining, perishing sentiments; it trains the mind,fortifies the character, and provides the whole of society with an iron foun-dation for the transformation and renewal of all human relations in theirentire scope Solidarity has its cradle in the minds of mankind, not in thefeeling Science has nurtured it, and it went to school in the big city, betweenthe smokestacks and the streetcars Its apprenticeship is not yet completed.But if it has become mature and omnipotent, then you will recognize how, inthis cold concept, the burning heart of a world of new feelings and the feeling

of a new world passionately beats.7

For all its bombast, this quote is so evocative and arresting because it saysmore than it intends The image of a solidarity anthropomorphized precisely

as posthuman, having put away its recognizably human attributes in theinterest of fighting for truly human conditions, ought to remind us of onelast inheritors of the Marxist tradition of solidarity, Horkheimer and Adorno

in Dialectic of Enlightenment, who would surely have been quick to

recog-nize in Eisner’s evocation of the power of “coldness” the same principle ofthe bourgeoisie, renunciation of life in the name of its continuation, thatEisner’s socialism was meant to oppose Not just the renunciation of affectbut the establishment of group identity through opposition—bitter, cold,and indefinite in duration—is what unsettles.8Behind the evocation ofcoldness, the “new world” whose heart burns so hotly is not one, I suspect,

in which the question of the extension of solidarity beyond existing litical and economic antagonisms is ultimately open The socialist version ofsolidarity effectively denies the contribution of agency in the formation ofnew kinds of social solidarities insofar as the claim to objectivity of its diag-nosis of the contemporary “conjuncture” extends to prognosticating thefuture of solidarity as well

sociopo-The historical discourse of solidarity offers two troublesome alternatives,then In the first instance, a conception of solidarity concentrates on affectand sentiment, on the principle of likeness Such a conception has an appar-ently inevitable shortcoming Its concentration on affective or ascriptivefactors such as “shared identity,” fellow-feeling, friendship, or empathy tends

to undermine the basic and productive sociological claim that there is a

qualitative difference in premodern and modern forms of engendering social

solidarity, and that this qualitative difference entails both mechanisms forinclusion into social groups, and also the scope of possible inclusion, or thecapacity to move mechanisms for inclusion beyond contingent and ascrip-tive, morally arbitrary features of human beings Theorizing solidarity asaffect thus risks occluding the very phenomenon most in need of explana-tion In the second instance, a conception of solidarity abstracts entirelyfrom the normative dimension and offers “scientific” explanations for howhighly advanced and hypercomplex societies manage the ongoing task ofsocial integration Such conceptions—shared both by liberal political theo-rists and functionalist sociological approaches such as systems theory—have

the inevitable effect of foreshortening the agency of social actors in the task

of creating and maintaining their own social world

AS THIS BRIEF GENEALOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION SHOWS, any effort to derive anunambiguous definition of the concept of solidarity across a broad spectrum

of disciplines and histories is bound to run up against some persistent (it’stempting to say dialectical) limits to explanation More promising is theeffort to construct a family resemblance across this spectrum, in order toattend how the concept changes and translates itself Solidarity refers, first

and foremost, to the status of intersubjectivity, in which a number of persons are bound together, whether by the facts of their existing needs or their inter- pretations of their own interests, into definite relations The status of mutual

relationships of interdependence seems to be a necessary but not sufficientcharacterization; for in the normative reading of solidarity, subjects—whether self-reflexively aware of this normativity or not—are in solidaritywith one another insofar as these very relations of reciprocity and interde-pendence are identified as a resource for the provision of need or thesuccessful mastering of challenges In this sense, conceptions of social soli-darity, as in the socialist tradition, often construct the norm of socialsolidarity as cohesion of a subaltern group in a situation of asymmetricalpower To be in solidarity in an oppressed group is to resist oppression by

sticking together The shared experiences of injustice and deprivation bothgenerate a sense of shared fate and shared identity for the subaltern group,and provide a weapon in its struggle insofar as these experiences themselvesstrengthen the group’s resolve This conception of solidarity in the context

of asymmetrical power is of course most clearly articulated in the labor andunion movements of the twentieth century, and indeed “solidarity” under-stood as intersubjective cohesion of union members—mutual aid andsupport during strikes or in times of contentious labor-management nego-tiations, for instance—remains a core concept of the labor union movement

in the developed world to this day In more recent Christian appropriations

of solidarity, this presumption of asymmetrical conditions acquires anunusual twist, as solidarity between, say, an affluent Christian congregation

in the United States and an impoverished parish in a developing countrypresupposes multiple asymmetries (both between the two congregations andthe larger global asymmetries that generates the relationship in the firstplace) and demands that the rich “stand up for” the poor prior to the artic-ulation of any concrete obligations

The consciousness of one’s status as a member of a set of persons whoseneeds and interests are intertwined highlights the norm of bonds and debt,

a normative core that seems deeper than, even prior to, the bonds of family

or of fellow-feeling, love, or friendship It also foregrounds the element of

belonging The status of belonging to a group in solidarity is not derivative

from a calculation of the benefits that membership grants to the individualperson, as in some version of rational choice Rather, the fact of member-ship, of belonging, is primary, and extends to cover both the benefits andthe costs To be in solidarity, in this sense, is to be committed, to belongfully, precisely through the consciousness of vulnerabilities, of possibleharms and liabilities, that have to be assumed collectively even if—perhapsespecially if—dissociation from the group would circumvent them Tobelong is to share troubles; to make oneself, at least potentially, more vulner-able than one might be otherwise

Finally, this conception of a norm of belonging—the status of ship as a rule on which norm-conforming behavior of one kind or another

member-is expected to follow—can connect us back once again with the dmember-iscourse ofsocial solidarity derived from the tradition of modern sociology, a tradition

in which social solidarity is understood primarily as the outcome of any

successful process of social integration In its functionalist inflection, of course,

this sociological understanding is rigorously descriptive and disavows any

normative evaluation of whether a given group ought to be solidary, let alone

whether the basis of a group’s solidarity is itself normatively desirable Thereare plenty of social groups that come readily to mind that one would wantvery much to have less, not more solidarity, and there are plenty of sources

of social solidarity, now as before, that one might very much want to seedisappear Still, for any society or social group to function, in the sense ofperpetuating itself by the creation and integration of new members and themaintenance of the validity of norms and the legitimacy of institutions, asocial theorist interested in the use of the term “solidarity” will have toassume that a successful, “solidary” process of integration has alreadyoccurred

If we register the various points in this constellation, or the various ations in this family resemblance, we can perhaps construct a model forfurther discussion, if not a tidy definition For the following chapters Ipropose the model of inclusion The word itself is not quite satisfactory,since by “inclusion” here I mean a rendering into English of the German

iter-Einbeziehung, not coincidentally the word that Jürgen Habermas chooses

for his collection Die Einbeziehung des Anderen, “The Inclusion of the

Other.”9

That title was intended to evoke the specifically modern challenge of darity Modern norms of community, whether abstract moral communities,postnational democratic polities, or identity-based social groups, must allnegotiate mechanisms for inclusion that allow for the subject’s agency, andthat are different from absorption In Habermas’s often-used formula,

soli-“inclusion does not imply locking members into a community that closesitself off from others The ‘inclusion of the other’ means rather that theboundaries of the community are open for all, and most especially for thosewho are strangers to one another and want to remain strangers.”10

This deceptively simple formula is meant as an encapsulation of the shiftfrom premodern solidarities based on the principle of likeness, where “to belike” is normally achieved only via ascriptive differences of family, clan,ethnos, or nation to modern solidarity, in which the nation-state had to find

an effective mechanism for the inclusion of large numbers of persons pendently of traditional symbolic resources These “strangers”—people we

inde-don’t know, and never will—“remain” strangers: they will retain

traditional-cultural differences, they will maintain separate agendas for loyalties, andwill have different, often inscrutable tastes, preferences, and ambitions Tointegrate different people into one democratic polity, to come to see dif-ferent people as “one of us” on the basis of abstract, voluntarist principlesand attributes, is, for Habermas, the basic challenge that the Westphalian

nation-state system had to solve, as we will see in a subsequent chapter.

“Inclusion” in this specific sense means this modern and challenging mode

in which differently situated people are brought into a larger fold—whether

an unlimited moral community, a nation-state whose conceptions of ship as political belonging rest (uneasily) on universalist normative grounds,

citizen-or a postnational polity such as the European Union—without making theerasure or suppression of their differences a condition for inclusion

In its German original, The Inclusion of the Other bore an essay whose

subtitle read, “Einbeziehung oder Inklusion?,” one of those insolubledilemmas that Habermas’s translators wisely chose to omit altogether rather

than render, in exact English, “Inclusion or Inclusion?” Inklusion connotes assimilation or consumption of the part into the whole; Einbeziehung would

literally mean “to draw in,” but with its close etymological connection to

relation or relationship, Beziehung, retains the connotation of building a

relationship between an individual and a group, with accommodation as a

process involving someone in a group or practice, a discussion or debate

Inclusion in this sense entails the entry of a person or persons (whether

by birth or voluntary choice) into an intersubjective group defined in terms

of intertwined needs, vulnerabilities, interests, and expectations for mutualrecognition and obligations Inclusion in the sense of involvement, or theestablishment of relation, implies that the act or procedure of inclusion will

inevitably have a transformative effect on both the person or persons involved and the including group itself To include by establishing a

relationship, to involve, implies that the solidary group may not (and maynot expect to) exercise unilateral control over the consequences of inclusion

As I hope to explore in the coming chapters, this core conception of sion emerges again and again as the normative kernel of Habermas’s politicalethics—the discourse principle—translates, in various registers, into anormative foundation for political projects, governmental policy, innova-tions in postnational constitutional law, ethical debates over the rights offuture persons, even debates about the meaning of the shared past and thestatus of vanished subjects That principle states that norms are justifiedaccording to how well they can be understood as approved by, or hypothet-ically approvable by, all those who are likely to be significantly affected by

inclu-their implementation Solidarity in its modern sense, as Einbeziehung, rests

on norms or rules for inclusion Such norms can no longer be atically appropriated from a taken-for-granted reservoir of shared tradition;they must be reflexively reappropriated in an ongoing fashion To includeaccording to a publicly accessible norm or rule presupposes that all those

unproblem-whom the rule significantly affects—including those who are excluded by it—

are at least in principle authorized to participate in normative discourses onthe rule’s validity And this means that the only normatively legitimate way

to exclude someone according to a rule, whether that exclusion is from anidentity-political or cultural-minority group, a community of the faithful, ademocratic polity, or the community of moral agents, can sometimes bealso, to include them: anyone excluded by a public rule is also owed a justi-fication if that exclusion is likely to affect them significantly And to be owed

a justification is, in a broader sense, to be included

To understand inclusion as a model for discussion of solidarity is not the same as defining solidarity as inclusion By offering inclusion as a model, I

am hoping to provide a useful tool for highlighting the relevant features ofcontinuity as the analysis in the following chapters shifts from discourse to

discourse, examining the problems of the limits of solidarity in various

regis-ters and different magnitudes How do we include, for example, in ademocratic polity?11What are the limits of inclusion for democratic politieswhose boundaries are determined largely by territorial claims, as national-state democracies still are? Must inclusion in a solidary group be voluntary?

Insofar as all acts of inclusion also presuppose acts of exclusion as well, what,

if anything, does a solidary group owe to those whom it excludes? If weunderstand moral obligation in the Kantian sense of inclusion of a person

in a “kingdom of ends” composed of all those who ought to expect nition as an autonomous moral agent, how ought we to reconcile thesolidarity of inclusion in a universal moral community with exclusion from

recog-a precog-articulrecog-ar democrrecog-atic polity? Is there recog-a humrecog-an solidrecog-arity brecog-ased on sion in a single species with its own natural history and future, or are allsolidarities constructed by agents themselves? How do we rank-order thesuccessive magnitudes of solidary inclusion, from the universal solidarity of

inclu-a morinclu-al community of “ends in themselves” down through polities inclu-all theway to the very contextual, “thick” solidarities of contingent and highlyexclusive subsocial groups? What kind of solidarity counts most; whichought we to dedicate our energies to protecting, expanding, making moreinclusive? Is there a crisis of solidarity? How best to speak of it, how best toact against it?

THEGERMAN SOCIOLOGISTULRICHPREUSShas observed that the concept ofsolidarity occupies a distinctive and peculiar place within modern socialtheory On the one hand, it still refers to the archaic and traditionallysecured power of social bonding that pre-modern societies were capable of

generating precisely because of the close connection between social systemand lifeworld In this sense, premodern social solidarity is both intense andspecific; its strength is connected to its weakness in resisting pressurestoward expansion, differentiation, and reflexivity On the other hand, soli-darity also refers to the highly secular and universalistic political and socialideals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as a modern translation ofthe Enlightenment, republican ideal of fraternity as the third element of therevolutionary tricolor “The concept of solidarity unites two seeminglycontradictory elements,” Preuss writes.

On the one hand it includes duties of care which are essentially based on

personal feelings of sympathy, and hence to Gemeinschaft-like types of communities; on the other, these duties area directed toward impersonal addressees, be they individuals or groups Solidarity exacts duties of brother-

hood vis-à-vis aliens.12

In describing this paradox, Preuss also identifies the chief explanatorytask of modern sociology itself: how modern, complex, differentiated andrationalized societies manage to reproduce themselves successfully—to solvethe simultaneous problems of cultural reproduction, social integration, andsocialization—without the traditional resources of social bonding inpremodern societies Modern solidarity is the structural solution to theproblem of connecting abstract moral and legal duties, impersonal socialinstitutions, and mass democracies with the older notions of mutualbelonging and interpersonal bonding such that even wholly impersonalsocial systems can still count on the ongoing participation of new members,hence their own legitimacy Moreover, if we accept that a key to socialtheory’s outlook on modernization is the increasing differentiation betweenlifeworld and social system, then, as Preuss observes, solidarity is also the

crucial bridging principle between two otherwise increasingly distant

mech-anisms for social function

If we consider for a moment the familiar distinction between social tion and system integration or between lifeworld and system, solidarity can be

integra-regarded as a combination of the two opposing types of integration: it isnurtured by the sources of the lifeworld, but it is implemented by the mainelements of system integration, namely bureaucracy and law In other words,solidarity is one of the few aspects of moral reasoning which have proven to

be fully compatible with the statist model of political community.13

Social solidarity understood as successful social integration bridging the

divide between lifeworld and system is the basic explanatory position of

Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action In terms of political theory, the

communicative accomplishments of citizens inhabiting a specific dimension

of the lifeworld—civil society—are also the key for Habermas’s standing of how the democratic constitutional state under the rule of lawaccomplishes an ongoing maintenance of legitimacy between state systemand popular will For these reasons, it is crucial to understand three

under-phenomena, from the beginning, as inextricably linked: first, the

social-theo-retical position that modernity consists in the construction of new forms ofsocial solidarity that replace older, traditional sources of interpersonal moral

bonding with ones tailored to modern conditions; second, that the

produc-tion of modern forms of social solidarity consists in the inclusion of personsand groups in society based on the communicative accomplishments ofsocial agents themselves, rather than appeals to traditional explanations

rooted in a lifeworld; and third, that modern solidarity accomplishes the

major link or bridge between disarticulated system and lifeworld in modernsocieties Here the central question would appear to be whether modern

forms of solidarity expand or further the modes of inclusion and bonding

accomplished by traditional societies, or, conversely, whether modern

soli-darity constitutes a transformation of social integration so that it is better to

speak of a new mode of solidarity entirely Preuss’s quote indicates that weought to think beyond this either/or, however, and one major project of the

Theory of Communicative Action is to document this

At the very beginning of the history of this question, Durkheim himself

remained ambivalent Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society

presup-posed what seems to have been the outcome of much debating between

“liberals” and “communitarians” in the 1980s and 1990s: under conditions ofsocial modernity, solidarity cannot be coherently understood as antinomi-cally opposed to the dynamics of complexity, differentiation, and

individualization since it cannot be regarded as only the product of

pre-polit-ical commonalities, shared ascriptive traits, or inherited norms The samesocial dynamic that renders the problem of individuation increasinglyurgent and difficult also makes this problem soluble through an alternativemode of social solidarity Hence Durkheim’s account of the transition from

mechanical to organic solidarity in The Division of Labor in Society functions

both as the expression of the basic problem of modernity and its solution.The transition from mechanical to organic solidarity is, for Durkheim,

part and parcel of the broader task of the normative integration of society He

proposes a descriptive account of the moral “function” of social tion.14Mechanical solidarity is generated according to the principle oflikeness; organic solidarity on the principle of articulated differences, ofcooperation and coordination of differentiated complex tasks The transi-tion is registered indirectly for Durkheim via the empirical analysis ofaccessible social institutions, specifically law The transition of solidaritythus appears most clearly in the differentiation between criminal and civillaw; at its core, the former still reflects the archaic element in mechanicalsolidarity Shared norms constitute a we-consciousness of inclusion based onshared identity, and violations of this normative we-consciousness requirepunishment to restore stasis Contract law, on the other hand, embodies thedistinct principle of differentiation and mutual accommodation of differ-ences, a sense of nonviolent “fit” of multiple individualities and acorresponding ideal of justice as restitution rather than retribution.15Whilemechanical solidarity binds individuals directly to the social whole, organicsolidarity does so only indirectly via the coordination of differences; whilemechanical solidarity presents an image of society as a holistic set of normsand practices putatively common to the group, organic solidarity proposes

differentia-a coordindifferentia-ation of unlike functions differentia-and differentia-actors And while mechdifferentia-anicdifferentia-al darity is at its strongest when a collective consciousness envelops that ofindividuals, organic solidarity demands that the quintessentially moderntask—of becoming ever more an individual—be taken as a condition for,not an obstacle to, the solidary life of the social whole The production of aschedule of abstract rights, as a specification of how individual differencesare referred to and encompassed by a social whole, becomes the distinctiveexpression of this task As a negative social bond, the schedule of basic andpolitical rights devalues social bonding on the basis of acknowledged simi-larities The division of labor, differentiation, assumes its “moral” character

soli-in the functional capacity to soli-include under the conditions of difference.16

Durkheim remained keenly aware of the dysfunctional potentials of this

transition, and one important undercurrent in the argument of The Division

of Labor in Society is the advocacy of a pan-European, cosmopolitan mode

of social and political organization, as forms of differentiation betweenEuropean societies came increasingly to outweigh differentiations withinthem The description of new solidarities is also the diagnosis of socialcrises.17The threat of social anomie—the loss of legitimacy of the specifi-cally modern normative foundation of political institutions—rests in theend in the failure to realize and institutionalize organic solidarity, and this is

the failure of the “moral function” of the division of labor: “to create in two

or more persons a feeling of solidarity In whatever manner the result isobtained, its aim is to cause coherence among friends and to stamp themwith its seal.”18

For Durkheim, the question of solidarity asks how the normative

coordi-nation of society is effected; hence the question is also one of secularization

In the wake of the collapse of “metaphysical worldviews” or the normativeconsensus of monotheistic religion, how are norms concerning inclusion,belonging, action, and meaning generated? What is the source of socialnormativity in the secular age? Durkheim did not remain content with the

arguments of The Division of Labor in Society that the moral force of organic

solidarity could be plausibly explained by analyzing the changed social sion of labor itself His insistence on the reality of something like a collectiveconsciousness, however, made the task of explaining the binding force ofmoral norms ultimately circular The capacity for moral rules to commandobedience independent of sanctions must derive from older forms of oblig-atory religious community, in some way or another The bonding effect ofreciprocal moral ties traces back to the sacred; indeed, for Durkheim

divi-“morality would no longer be morality if it had no element of religion.”19

But in his insistence that religious consciousness in turn derives from theexperience of a unified, supra-individual collective consciousness—

consciousness of the collective, by the collective—Durkheim effectively

answers the question by re-posing it

This position leaves Durkheim no resources left to explore how cally modern forms of social cohesion can bear a normative consensus andyet be rational in the specific sense of open for the reflexive understanding,and conscious shaping, by agents themselves In Habermas’s reconstruction

specifi-of Durkheim’s position in the second volume specifi-of the Theory specifi-of

Communica-tive Action, the latter’s gradual abandonment of the idea that the normativity

of modern solidarity arises from the processes of social differentiation selves obliged Durkheim to come ever nearer to Weber’s project.Modernization is to be taken in the final analysis as rationalization, andrationalization is the adoption of modes of intersubjective interaction lessand less dependent on the pre-interpretive resources of a traditionallysecured lifeworld, and more and more dependent on the interpretive accom-plishments of social actors themselves In this way, both Durkheim andWeber inaugurate the discipline of social theory by postulating “a new form

them-of solidarity,” as Habermas writes, “that is no longer secured by prior value

consensus but has to be cooperatively achieved by virtue of individualefforts In place of social integration through belief, we have social integra-tion through cooperation.”20

THET HEORY OF C OMMUNICATIVE A CTION, notwithstanding its enormousscope, is at heart a theory of social modernity It is an attempt to answer thequestion of “what happened” to differentiate modern from traditional soci-eties over the course of the second half of the last millennium The answer

to this question is essentially Weberian It proposes a differentiationbetween social system and phenomenological lifeworld, and argues thatmodernity can best be characterized as an intricately intertwined transfor-mation of both, in which social systems, generated from out of a traditional

lifeworld, become increasingly complex, while the lifeworld becomes ingly rationalized.

increas-In this account, the conception of social solidarity plays a crucial role.Habermas offers the idea of social solidarity as the connecting point betweensmall-scale intersubjective interactions and social cohesion and coordination

in modern lifeworlds overall; in addition, he suggests that social solidarity isthe only possible “uplink” between the lifeworld and otherwise nondiscur-sive elements of the social system, namely, bureaucratic politicaladministration and regulated market economy Given this role, one might

have expected a lengthy analysis of solidarity in the Theory of

Communica-tive Action Somewhat bafflingly, this is not the case Solidarity is a term

often invoked but notably undertheorized in the theory itself Why thisshould be the case is not a subject that speculation here will probably domuch to clarify “Rationalization” determines how Habermas will introduce

a revised version of the origins and birth of modern solidarity in ways thatavoid the pitfalls of Durkheim’s approach Durkheim’s macrosociologicalaccount of the transformation of mechanisms of social coordination has to

be supplemented with George Herbert Mead’s theory of the transformedconditions of individual social ontogenesis System and lifeworld, developedside by side in a single theory, provide the framework for an explanation ofthe new theory of solidarity

The most basic methodological premise of the Theory of Communicative

Action is the inadequacy of the philosophical model of the isolated,

autonomous subject, and the demand instead that any successful theory ofrationality be based on an intersubjective model of reason and agency Thesecond premise is the demand that such a model, in turn, be based upon aphilosophy of language—understood as speech, in the performative sense—

rather than a philosophy of consciousness Habermas draws on his extensivework in the areas of speech act theory and the philosophy of argumentationfrom the 1970s Focusing on the basic features of any successful intersubjec-tive communication, Habermas developed a universal pragmatics thatspecifies the conditions for the communicative competence of persons Inaddition to the material content of linguistic communication, successfulcommunication requires that speaker and hearer are able to coordinate theirmutual expectations according to the illocutionary force associated with anutterance Such force is the normally implicit aspect of a speech act, inwhich a speaker associates a given speech act with a form of validity claim.

An illocutionary force attaches to any utterance, implying that the speaker

“promises” to a hearer that the utterance is valid—that is, that it makes a(normally implicit) validity claim And validity claims, in turn, serve aspromissory notes that the speaker can, if required, satisfy challenges to herutterance’s validity by giving reasons

An utterance can raise a validity claim, however, in four distinct ways.Speech act theory distinguishes, first, the logical coherence or the formal-syntactical correctness of an utterance; second, the truth of an utterance orits claim to refer to a state of affairs in an objective world open to intersub-jective disagreement; third, the rightness of an utterance or its conformity tointersubjectively valid norms; and, fourth, the truthfulness or authenticity

of an utterance or its claim to represent the authentic internal state or sition of the speaker Thus, the modalities of illocutionary force—above allthe last three—correspond to the different forms of validity claims, demar-cating three different modes for redemption of validity claims by the giving

dispo-of reasons And these modes dispo-of justification, finally, imply three distinctkinds of argumentative demand, related to three pragmatically constituted

“worlds”: an objective world about which we may expect (and challenge)claims to factual truth, an intersubjective world in which we may raiseclaims to normative rightness, and a subjective world in which we may raiseclaims concerning the truthfulness or sincerity of a subject’s linguistic repre-sentation of an internal state

Habermas thus argues for an internal connection between meaning andvalidity The capacity to understand the meaning of an utterance is theability to take a yes or no position in an argument, real or imagined, inwhich a speaker gives reasons for the validity of her utterance, and in whichsuch validity can be asserted in the forms of truth, rightness, or sincerity (or,more normally, some admixture of all three that can in principle be disag-gregated analytically)

Habermas’s adoption of speech act theory leads to a theory of nicative reason, which attempts to reconstruct the basic intuition thatrationality as such is principally characterized by the capacity to give andtake reasons as a mode for coordinating actions Rather than attachingprimarily to a subject, rationality is reconceived as an attribute, chiefly, offorms of communicative interaction And such a reconception of reason is

commu-to be seen in sharp contrast commu-to strategic or means–ends rationality Thetheory of universal pragmatics that grounds the universal character ofcommunicative reason also endows it with a strongly idealizing element, onethat, in turn, is meant to capture the essentially normative intuitions caught

up with the notions of practical reason characteristic of modern deonticmoral theories Unlike teleological action, communicative action is guided

by processes of communication in such a way that success can be registeredonly through the ideal of a rational consensus among agents as a result of adiscursive process Hence the reconstructible idealizations that constitutesuch a situation—the universal pragmatic conditions for the possibility of aviolence-free consensus, in which each discourse participant is capable ofspeaking and hearing, taking unforced and unmanipulated positions of yes

or no on contested claims, and so on—serve as claims about the universality

of reason The pragmatically unavoidable elements of any successful process

of coming-to-agreement about contested claims to factual or normative

validity turn out also to be accurate reconstructions of the basic moral thrust

of the tradition of Western Enlightenment, in which intact procedures ofcollective will formation define both the normative character of the well-rundemocratic polity and the inherently social dynamic of even the most indi-vidualistic notions about the autonomy of the rational agent

Much of the Theory of Communicative Action is perhaps not surprisingly

occupied with the attempt to show the relevance of this highly idealizingnotion of communicative reason for a modernity characterized above all bysecularization and the pluralism of worldviews In the transition from atheory of rationality to a reconstruction of the problem of reason for thebasic tasks of sociology, Habermas claims that his theory of communicativereason offers resources for settling intractable problems of a theory of moder-nity, the rationality problem, and problems of sociological methodologybetter than any competing model insofar as it can link under one theory thebases for teleological, normatively guided, and dramaturgic action

The interlocutor of the first volume of the theory is for the most partWeber: Habermas accepts much of Weber’s basic orientation Social andcultural modernity in the West have been characterized above all by the

emergence of new modes of reason, and the dynamic of rationalization isfundamentally the work of differentiation of different validity spheres Asall traditional social and cultural sources of meaning and interpretation areprogressively devalued, rationality generates increasingly distinct and self-maintaining spheres, and modern lifeworlds are obliged to disintegrate intoculture, society, and personality.

By contrast, the basic distinction between strategic and communicativeaction permits Habermas to formulate a simple and powerful objection toWeber’s theory of modernization as rationalization: Weber had grasped thatWestern rationality was best analyzed as a process of rationalization in whichtraditional lifeworlds were institutionally differentiated into autonomousvalue spheres, whose criteria of legitimacy and efficiency became internal tothe spheres themselves Understood as the institutionalization of rationalconduct, the spheres of science and technology, law and morality, and aes-thetics were united, if at all, only in their commitment to rationality as pur-posive Rational reflection on the higher-order value of ends, as opposed tomeans, became increasingly difficult to anchor institutionally No higher-order perspective, whether religious or metaphysical, was available toencompass the overall relations of these value spheres to one another; noholistic account of reason could provide a critical perspective from which tolodge a protest against the loss of meaning in the context of the rationaliza-tion of life Weber’s often-cited iron cage of instrumental reason, however,appears on Habermas’s terms to have been a seriously one-sided mistake ofemphasis Unable to identify the fundamental differences between commu-nicative and strategic or instrumental, purposive reason, Weber was alsounable to grasp the pathological dimension of the one-sidedly strategicrationalization of culture, society, and personality, as opposed to a commu-nicative rationalization Thus, Weber mistook as inevitable and alternative-less a historical process that in reality consisted of an ongoing strugglebetween two different modes of rationalization and hence two different

visions of modernity.

The second volume of the Theory of Communicative Action is given over

to a reconceptualization of the relation between systems theory and

microsociology From Durkheim and Mead, Habermas borrows, mutatis

mutandis, some of the basic resources for a theoretical reintegration of

social-action theory and Parsonian functionalism Drawing on theories ofindividual ontogenesis and social integration that he had developed in hisreadings of Piaget, Kohlberg, and Mead over the course of the 1970s,Habermas takes Mead’s symbolic interactionism as a basic blueprint for a

communicative theory of individuation through socialization The internallink between individual states and attitudes, preferences, and personalitystructures with social structures, via institutionalized processes of commu-nication, serves as the basis for the publicity of even the most internalaspects of personality Social integration thus emerges as a mediating linkbetween the symbolic transmission of lifeworlds and the ongoing function

of social institutions The idealizing perspective of domination-freecommunication once again borrows from the older Enlightenment vision ofthe rational autonomy of moral persons as responsible agents whose actionsand intentions are the proper objects of rational criticism and justification,

by self and others Mead’s vision of “universal discourse” thus emerges withits full Kantian implications Systems theory, on the other hand, is meant toprovide a plausible account of the various external factors for ontogenesismissing from Mead’s theory

This underlying normative-political vision is the background for the

Theory of Communicative Action’s goal of integrating systems theory and

action theory, in essence a synthesis of a theory of modernity (phylogenesis)and modern personality (ontogenesis) via a theory of communication Thisentails a reconstruction of the process of phylogenesis in which social insti-tutions and practices are gradually transformed, generating social solidarityless and less via their sacral or ritual functions and increasingly according todifferentiated and autonomous processes of communication The disen-chantment of social systems, their dwindling ability to generate socialsolidarity and solve factual or normative disputes via a preestablishedconsensus of traditional interpretations, means that social functions gradu-ally and increasingly come to depend on the communicative competence of

subjects, who conversely can successfully emerge as subjects only through

those very same functions Hence Weber’s theory of societal modernization

as rationalization, and rationalization as differentiation, Durkheim’s gation of the tasks of manufacturing social solidarity in the wake of thesecularization of worldviews, and Mead’s theory of ontogenesis as a process

investi-of symbolic interaction with a generalized other, all merge into a singletheory of the rationalization of modern lifeworlds

Habermas’s reformulation of the notion of the lifeworld, as received fromcompeting sociological traditions, is one of the most difficult and centralaspects of the theory For Habermas the phenomenological approaches ofHusserl and Schutz were overly concerned with the problem of symbolicreproduction and the transmission of traditional stores of symbolicmeaning, and too little concerned with the dynamics of personalization and

socialization Mead, by contrast, overemphasized just these factors and thusmissed the role that the lifeworld plays in placing limits on processes ofontogenesis, rather than simply providing a reservoir of material for them.

In a highly characteristic move, Habermas therefore constructs a dialoguebetween the vying candidates for a theory of modern lifeworlds and pro-duces a multilevel model far more complex and nuanced than any previoustheory To summarize broadly, Habermas argues for a model of the lifeworld

as both the unproblematic horizon or background against which any form

of social action must bear meaning and the reservoir of symbolically

struc-tured meanings, situation interpretations, and explanations that generate

the sources of possible disagreements as well as materials for their solution.

For Habermas, the lifeworld thus cannot be restricted to cultural tions, but must include in symbolically accessible form the level of socialinstitutions and personality structures as well Hence the lifeworld is in adynamic process of self-unfolding in which all three aspects (culture, society,and personality) are in constant and tense interaction Likewise, the threetasks of cultural reproduction, the manufacture of social solidarity via socialintegration, and personal ontogenesis can certainly be analytically distin-guished, but are entwined processes at the interface between a communica-tive (modern) lifeworld and competent social actors These competencies,finally, are rooted in processes of coming-to-agreement on contested validity

interpreta-claims, problems that subjects must solve in order to coordinate their action

communicatively Hence the basic structure of communicative tence—the interdependent system of illocutionary forces previouslydescribed—maps onto the differentiated modes in which social actors canreflexively experience their own lifeworld Cultural reproduction, socializa-tion, and social integration are, in the end, isomorphic with the internalstructures of illocutionary claims constituting a system of objective, inter-subjective, and subjective worlds The institutionalized differentiation of(scientific) facts, (legal-moral) norms, and (aesthetic-therapeutic) internalstates, the hallmark of Western modernity, rests upon the differentiation ofobjective, intersubjective, and subjective world attitudes that is alreadyimplied in the very idea of basic communicative competence—of being able

compe-to speak and hear, of knowing how compe-to give and take reasons

RATIONALIZATION OF A LIFEWORLDmeans that social members themselvesfind the semantic reservoir of tradition increasingly unhelpful or inacces-sible as a tool for solving problems or agreeing on the definition ofsituations Older religious or “metaphysical” worldviews established a moral