Critical Theory
and Libertarian
Socialism

ABOUT THE SERIES

Critical Theory and Contemporary Society explores the relationship between contemporary society as a complex and highly differentiated phenomenon, on the one hand, and Critical Theory as a correspondingly sophisticated methodology for studying and understanding social and political relations today, on the other.

Each volume highlights in distinctive ways why (1) Critical Theory offers the most appropriate concepts for understanding political movements, socioeconomic conflicts and state institutions in an increasingly global world and (2) why Critical Theory nonetheless needs updating in order to keep pace with the realities of the twenty-first century.

The books in the series look at global warming, financial crisis, post–nation state legitimacy, international relations, cinema, terrorism and other issues, applying an interdisciplinary approach, in order to help students and citizens understand the specificity and uniqueness of the current situation.

Series Editor

Darrow Schecter

Reader in the School of History, Art History and Humanities, University of Sussex, UK

BOOKS IN THE SERIES

Critical Theory and Film: Fabio Vighi, Reader and Co-director of the Žižek Centre for Ideology Critique at Cardiff University, UK

Critical Theory and Contemporary Europe: William Outhwaite, Chair and Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University, UK

Critical Theory, Legal Theory, and the Evolution of Contemporary Society: Hauke Brunkhorst, Professor of Sociology and Head of the Institute of Sociology at the University of Flensburg, Germany

Critical Theory in the Twenty-First Century: Darrow Schecter, Reader in the School of History, Art History and Humanities, University of Sussex, UK

Critical Theory and the Digital: David Berry, Department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University, UK

Critical Theory and the Contemporary Crisis of Capital: Heiko Feldner, Co-director of the Centre for Ideology Critique and Žižek Studies at Cardiff University, UK

Critical Theory
and Libertarian
Socialism

Realizing the political potential
of critical social theory

CHARLES MASQUELIER

To the memory of my father

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1  Human emancipation and labour as self-realization

2  Towards the reconciliation of humanity and nature

3  Realizing the transformative potential of critical theory

4  The premises of institutionalized emancipatory practice

5  Human emancipation and communication

6  Drawing the contours of institutionalized emancipatory practice

7  Critical theory, libertarian socialism and reconciliation

8  Conclusion: Critical theory, libertarian socialism and contemporary Western capitalist societies

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

I would firstly like to thank Darrow Schecter for his comments on the book proposal and giving me the opportunity to make my own contribution to this critical theory series. I am also grateful to my ex-colleagues and friends, Alana Lentin and Matt Dawson, in the Sociology department at Sussex University, whose moral and intellectual support has been, and remains, indispensable. Many thanks also go to Luke Martell, Eric Jacobson and the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of this book.

I would also like to thank Him, Miśa and Dave, and the Serruys family for their unique kindness, generosity and joie de vivre, which have played an invaluable role in making the whole process of writing this book manuscript an enjoyable one. I am particularly grateful to my parents, whose constant support – amid fundamentally different political views – made it possible for this piece to see the light of day.

Introduction

The financial crisis of 2007/8 not only developed into one of the most virulent economic crises since the Great Depression of the 1930s but also exposed and exacerbated sharp inequalities within advanced capitalist economies, revealed a striking democratic deficit most clearly illustrated by neoliberal governments’ decisions to bail out the culprits of the crisis at the expense of ordinary citizens and clearly indicated the extent of existing political elites’ incapacity to exert control over the large-scale economic structures they were responsible for liberating. Whilst, in the aftermath of the crisis, several political leaders and commentators called for, and even signalled the end of, a ‘predatory’ form of capitalism,1 several years later no clear sign of change can be observed. On the one hand, financial speculation retains a central function in the culture of economic competitiveness promoted by governments in advanced capitalist economies. On the other, politicians continue to play the technocratic game by favouring short-term monetarist measures and injecting heavy doses of public spending cuts allegedly aimed at restoring economic growth and quelling the fears of existing and potential investors within their respective economic spaces.2 Above all, however, what the crisis most clearly revealed is an all too evident lack of willingness on the part of mainstream left-wing political elites in contemporary Western capitalist societies to confront the systemic pathologies ensuing from the subordination of society to the economy and call into question the authority of economic facts. Whilst such an attitude can be partly explained by these same elites’ incapacity to envision progress and welfare beyond the liberal-productivist regime of growth and re-invent themselves into bearers of progressive social change capable of providing credible and historically relevant avenues for the actualization of the modern promise of human dignity, I shall contend that the Left can continue to promote and serve the realization of such a goal. Its success in doing so, however, depends upon the twofold task of defetishizing the liberal-productivist regime of growth and anticipating institutional forms capable of restoring individuals’ control over the socio-political and economic structures governing their life. It is this twofold task that I propose to undertake by uniting social and political theory and, more specifically, by both rethinking the practical orientations of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and updating the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole.

Humanity, nature and the task of critique

As an age characterized by major economic, political and cultural changes, modernity marked a major turning point in the history of Western societies. The development of democratic forms of representation, rational-scientific explanations and industrialization all appeared to be steering humanity towards a highly promising future, characterized by an unprecedented level and speed of accumulation of wealth and technological development, as well as significant improvements in material well-being. At the basis of such developments could be found a shift of attention ‘from nature as the source of marvels and new powers to the human instruments whereby these natural forces were discovered, integrated, and made serviceable for man’s purposes’ (Leiss 1972, 76). Modernity’s own stance towards progress along with its material achievements are, in this sense, grounded in a historically specific relationship between humanity and external nature, namely the instrumental mastery of the latter by the former. With Marx, however, one finds one of the very first attempts to significantly call into question the basis upon which such achievements have been made possible.

Although aware of the progressive character of this new phase of social development, he sought to expose the pernicious effects associated with the dominant form of economic organization underpinned by the newly emerging relationship between humanity and external nature mentioned above. Whilst capitalism had led to an unprecedented pace of economic growth and technological development, Marx pointed out, it had failed to bring about the economic and socio-political institutions whereby the direct producers, that is, the majority of the population, could exert control over their conditions of existence and reap the due rewards of their work. The universalism of the political community, he argued, consisted of a system of laws aimed at securing the private interests of owners of capital, and maintaining the exploitative and alienating character of the sphere of material reproduction. As a diagnosis exposing the relations between political and economic principles underpinning the social failings of modernity, therefore, his theoretical framework came to assume the form of a critique of political economy. Its primary aim was to transcend the economic and socio-political institutions that have prevented modernity from realizing its own promise of human dignity. With Marx, then, one witnesses the emergence of a social theory primarily oriented towards a form of political action leading to the radical re-organization of economic life, that is, the collective control of production.3 However, according to his later works, social change was not a merely desirable goal. It came to be construed as the inevitable consequence of the self-destructive dynamism of a form of capital accumulation relying upon the continuous expansion of productive forces. The relationship between humanity and external nature underpinning the capitalist mode of production, he came to argue, would eventually liberate humanity from the fetters of wage-slavery. Marx’s unity of theory and practice, therefore, immediately appears inextricably tied to the instrumental mastery of external nature steering the capitalistic development of productive forces.

A few decades later, a school of thought heavily inspired by new intellectual and socio-historical developments came to question the viability of Marx’s own critique of modernity. The emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe, combined with the development of capitalism into its ‘advanced’ form, led the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists4 to re-assess the achievements of modernity and the role of critique in an age whereby the prospects for justice and autonomy appeared as remote as they have ever been since modernity’s inception. Drawing their inspiration partly from the work of Nietzsche, Weber and Freud, they sought to expose the repressive mechanisms that had led to the emergence of such a state of affairs. Although clearly aware of the problematic character of capitalist production, they discovered that the translation of the principle of self-preservation into an epistemic foundation for the instrumental mastery of nature effectively prompted the elaboration of a critique capable of tracing the reified authority of economic facts to the spread of a distinctive form of knowledge. With Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, in fact, one witnesses a clear attempt to problematize the logic of domination supported by reason in its instrumental form and reflected in capitalist economic and socio-political institutions. They also chose to approach autonomy from the standpoint of the relationship between humanity and internal nature, and construe repression as the domination of the latter by the former, mediated by forms of property, state and consciousness, stemming from the relationship between humanity and external nature, that is, the matter, substance or forces making up our natural environment. Autonomy would therefore consist in the emancipation of the repressed, namely the sensuous or instinctual dimension of internal nature comprising the passionate, creative and spontaneous energies that make each individual unique beings, from the instrumental form of rationality unfolding under the principle of self-preservation. The earlier generation of Frankfurt School theorists therefore presented the form of knowledge oriented towards the instrumental-rational or technological mastery of external nature as ‘one of the means by which mastery of [external] nature is linked to mastery over man’ (Leiss 1972, 147). With a critique of instrumental reason echoing Arendt’s (1958) and Heidegger’s (1977) critique of modern technological forms as instrumental interventions in the world whose effects have proved partly detrimental to nature and humanity, then, one discovers that the ‘[m]astery of nature has not brought man to self-realization’ (Horkheimer 2012, 4), and that the prospects of human emancipation could no longer merely rely on the development of productive forces:

Marx received the thesis of the primacy of practical reason from Kant and the German idealists, and he sharpened it into a challenge to change the world instead of merely interpreting it. He thus underwrote something as arch-bourgeois as the program of an absolute control of nature. What is felt here is the effort to make things unlike the subject and make them like the subject – the real model of the principle of identity, which dialectical materialism disavows as such. (Adorno 1997, 244)

Marx’s apparent attempt to link theory with the bourgeois practice of the mastery of external nature prevented him from equipping his critique of political economy with the theoretical tools capable of grasping the repressive character of science and technology under the modern age. Thus, with the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists, the narrative of autonomy (as emancipation) remains central to theory, but is now separated from all forms of practice likely to reproduce the logic of domination promoted by instrumental reason. For this reason, they chose to rethink the role of critique in such a way as to prioritize the subversion of all forms of economic, political and cultural practices corresponding to the instrumental mastery of nature, and in the process effectively divorced theory from the task of anticipating alternative institutional forms. Emancipation would, as a result, be treated as a primarily theoretical exercise aimed at negating the ‘technological domination’ concealed by a reified social reality (Adorno 1991, 202–3). As such, for first-generation critical theorists, critique’s primary aim no longer consisted in uniting theory and practice for specific political ends. Instead, its task involved providing the theoretical tools with which individuals can treat society as a function ‘which originates in human action and therefore is a possible object of planful decision and rational determination of goals’ (Horkheimer 1975, 207).

The theoretical developments undertaken by second-generation critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, however, have contributed to the revision of critical theory’s practical orientations.5 In his famous work entitled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, for example, Habermas sought to draw some of the basic institutional contours capable of yielding autonomy. His nuanced praise of the Bourgeois public sphere emerging in the early stages of modernity did provide a somewhat clear indication of some of the institutional features he thought to be suitable for the actualization of autonomy. In his following works, Habermas did nevertheless make it clear that although human emancipation must be understood as a phenomenon regarding the communicative practices of the ‘lifeworld’, it effectively depended on humanity’s emancipation from the forces of external nature through the latter’s instrumental mastery in the ‘system’. On the one hand, then, the theoretical developments undertaken by Habermas stripped critical theory of its critique of technology. On the other hand, he re-oriented critical theory towards matters of a normative nature – favouring moral autonomy over the sublimation of instincts – thought to be regarding practices outside the sphere of material reproduction. Habermas’s re-assessment of the link between theory and practice, therefore, could be understood as a renewed attempt to assign a prescriptive role to critical theory, whereby the latter aims to explore the possible objective conditions for moral autonomy alongside the capitalist organization of material reproduction. As such, his own form of critique came to include, like Marx’s own, reflections on institutional conditions under which the promise of human dignity could be fulfilled, whilst both rejecting the need for a radical re-organization of economic life and abandoning the critique of instrumental reason elaborated by the previous generation of Frankfurt School theorists in favour of a theory of communicative action.

I shall nevertheless propose that the task of formulating a critical theory oriented towards the institutionalization of emancipatory practice depends on its reconnection with an alternative political form, albeit without presupposing an apology for the instrumental mastery of external nature. A revision of the practical content of critical theory may indeed succeed in combining the earlier generation’s critique of instrumental reason with an insight into the objective conditions of existence required for human emancipation. Critical theory’s articulation with the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole through a re-assessment of Marx’s concept of free labour could, as I hope to demonstrate in this work, maximize the former’s political impact in an age whereby both the actual and potential material, and spiritual and human costs resulting from the mastery of nature have gained prominence in collective consciousness,6 but failed to materialize into a political vision capable of challenging the continued preservation of the self championed, in its most recent political form, by the neoliberal doctrine.

Structure of the book

In the first chapter of the present work, I shall attempt to show that the aforementioned task ought to be undertaken by re-assessing Marx’s own concept of labour. A close inspection of his early works, and particularly his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, will reveal that Marx had in fact developed a conception of autonomous practice presupposing a relationship between humanity and nature distinguishable from his predecessors – Kant and Hegel – and exhibiting an affinity with the first generation of critical theorists’ conception of human emancipation as reconciliation exposed in the second chapter of this work. At this point, it shall be shown in what ways Marx’s concept of labour as self-realization could serve the practical function of mediating the reconciliation of humanity and nature, and be combined with Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason in such a way as to defetishize the productivist regime of economic growth and realize the transformative potential of critical theory.

In the third chapter, I shall argue that whilst the transformative potential of critical theory derives from the principle of negativity shared by Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, its maximization effectively depends on realizing its full expectations through the anticipation of dialectically inferred institutional forms. Whilst such a task was partly undertaken by Jürgen Habermas, Chapter 4 will seek to demonstrate that the prospects of the reconciliation of humanity with itself rest, contra the second-generation theorist, upon a re-organization of the relationship between humanity and external nature. Consequently, the dependence of communicative practices upon subject–object relations must be recognized. The task undertaken in the following chapter shall in fact consist of further exploring the implications of such a claim for the relationship between communication and emancipation, by proceeding with a further critical assessment of Habermas’s theory of communicative action and the exploration of the theoretical premises for the conceptualization of subject–object relations beyond the instrumental mastery of nature.

Whilst the above five chapters shall partly assume the form of a review of critical theory, it is one approached from a particular angle, one that is central to the task of the book, namely the realization of the political potential of critical social theory. It is in fact in the identification of such a potential, grounded in the relationship between humanity and both internal and external nature, that these chapters find their justification. In the first two chapters, one therefore finds an attempt to reconcile Marx’s own critique of political economy with Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason, in such a way as to lay the groundwork for the practical mediation of human emancipation. In Chapter 3, the latter task is complemented by a re-evaluation of dialectical negation by exposing both its acknowledged and unacknowledged potential by first-generation critical theorists, and especially Marcuse. Here the reader shall find core justifications for the task of complementing the affinity between Marx’s work and first-generation critical theory identified in the previous chapters, by an affinity between the latter and the anticipation of alternative institutional forms. Finally, the two chapters devoted to a re-evaluation of Habermas’s own revisions are aimed at further demonstrating the importance of conceptualizing human emancipation as a matter regarding the relationship between humanity and both external and internal nature, whilst recognizing the value of the second-generation critical theorist’s attempt to overcome the normative-communicative deficit characterizing the work of his predecessors. As such, these chapters also aim to demonstrate the desirability for the conceptualization of an alternative institutional model based on new subject–object relations, for which the work of G.D.H. Cole provides a highly suitable basis.

The transition to the latter’s libertarian socialist alternative is executed in Chapter 6. Here, the elective affinity between the broad theoretical orientations of Marx’s political economy, first-generation critical theory, and Cole’s social and political theory will be exposed through their articulation within a framework of the relationship between humanity and nature capable of realizing the modern promise of human dignity. In the following chapter, I shall aim to demonstrate the suitability of the latter’s institutional framework for the actualization of emancipation as reconciliation. It must nevertheless be noted here that the attempt to link the broad theoretical orientations of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School with Cole’s own work is not new.7 However, whilst previous attempts to establish such a link have tended to concentrate on the possibility of institutionalizing the Frankfurt School’s approach to emancipation as reconciliation from a libertarian socialist standpoint, I shall proceed with the more specific task of proposing that such a project requires a re-evaluation of critical theory’s stance towards Marx’s critique of political economy and the re-conceptualization of Marx’s concept of labour into a form of practice capable of mediating humanity and nature (both internal and external).

Finally, an analysis of the economic, political, cultural and social developments thought to mark the advent of the neoliberal stage of capitalist development will be provided. It will be shown here, how the form critique proposed in this work could not only be expected to capture the social malaise engendered by existing conditions of existence but also serve as a basis for the articulation of concerns and demands expressed by members of contemporary social movements into a coherent narrative of ecological and egalitarian emancipation finding its historically relevant institutionalization in the libertarian socialist alternative anticipated by G.D.H. Cole.

Notes

1  These declarations could be heard on various sides of the political spectrum in different European countries. In Britain, one could, for example, hear Conservative prime minister David Cameron calling for a ‘more responsible’ capitalism, or the Labour party leader Ed Miliband attacking ‘predatory’ capitalism. French president Nicolas Sarkozy bemoaned the ‘follies’ of capitalism at the 2010 Davos summit, and Francois Hollande named ‘la finance’ his ‘biggest enemy’ during his presidential campaign. So far, however, the discourse of austerity governing political life in these countries indicates that no concrete or effective measures aimed at providing solutions to the aforementioned problems have been introduced.

2  In April 2013, it was discovered that the findings published by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff regarding the causal relationship between high levels of government debt and economic contraction contained a fundamental flaw, thereby significantly weakening the justification for austerity measures.

3  It should nevertheless be noted here that, as Finlayson noted, the early Marx rejected the view according to which we ought to ‘confront the world as doctrinaires with a new principle’ and stressed the importance of ‘develop[ing] new principles for the world out of principles of the world’ (2008, 640). Marx’s critique could therefore be said to remain within the realm of immanence. However, the task of developing ‘new principles out of the principles of the world’ leading to the overthrow of the existing reality effectively remains to be addressed. This work is partly aimed at achieving such a goal.

4  Whilst Adorno, Horheimer and Marcuse are said to belong to this generation, also known as the ‘first generation’ of critical theory, Habermas is said to be a member of the ‘second generation’ of critical theory (Finlayson 2008).

5  His work entitled Theory and Practice (1974) was Habermas’s most explicit attempt to rethink the link between theory and practice.

6  Climate change science has significantly contributed to the increasing awareness of the human causes of environmental problems. In the academic world, Beck’s Risk Society (1992) represents a major turning point, for it introduced such concerns into mainstream sociological thinking. A plethora of texts addressing such issues and grounding them in the forms of life emanating from the capitalist mode of production have been published since then. See, for example, Redclift’s and Benton’s Social Theory and the Global Environment (1994), Martell’s Ecology and Society (1994) and Bellamy Foster’s Ecology Against Capitalism (2000).

7  See Darrow Schecter’s Beyond Hegemony (2005).

1

Human emancipation and labour as self-realization

Marx’s critique of political economy was chiefly formulated as a critical examination of the various economic and socio-political institutions unfolding the industrial or liberal stage of capitalist development, based on a reformulation of the dialectical frame of reference elaborated by Hegel. According to Adorno (1997), however, Marx failed to problematize sufficiently the form of autonomy advocated by idealism and, as such, fell short of calling into question the logic of domination underpinning this strand of philosophical thought and Bourgeois values. Marx’s approach to autonomous practice has therefore been charged by the same member of the Frankfurt School for promoting humanity’s mastery of both internal and external forces of nature. In this chapter, I shall nevertheless seek to demonstrate that, unlike his (idealist) predecessors, Marx (a) understood autonomy as a form of human emancipation and (b) provided a basis upon which the practice of such emancipation could manifest itself as the mediated non-identity of humanity and nature through labour. As such, he not only anticipated the approach to emancipation as the reconciliation of humanity and nature embodied in the works of first-generation critical theorists but also conceptualized the practical conditions required for its realization beyond capitalist economic and socio-political institutions.

Idealism, autonomy and the mediated unity of humanity and nature

Kant’s most explicit formulation of the conditions for autonomous practice can be found in his essay entitled What Is Enlightenment? (1991). In it, he describes enlightenment as a condition whereby one is able ‘to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another’ (Kant 1991a, 54). Individuals, he argued, can only expect to realize their freedom once they have developed the capacity to ‘think for themselves’ (Kant 1991a, 55). The development of such a capacity, he insisted, depends on humanity’s success in freeing the self from the fetters of nature and irrational impulses. As the ‘freedom to make public use of one’s reason’ (Kant 1991a, 55), the use of cognitive faculties is to the realization of autonomy. Despite such a heavy emphasis on reason, however, Kant wished to demonstrate that neither the purpose of his task nor his conclusions could be compared to the rationalist tradition of epistemology.

Central to Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ was the demonstration that epistemology should cease to seek the origins of knowledge in either humanity or nature, and move beyond the antagonism between pure rational thinking and sensory perception.1 Epistemology could no longer limit itself to the task of investigating the origins of knowledge per se. In order to satisfy the demands of autonomous practice, epistemology had to re-align its goals to include within its scope concerns regarding the conditions under which knowledge becomes possible. Such a re-alignment, Kant believed, should begin with the recognition of the fact that humanity is both part of and distinct from nature. Rather than dismissing the realm of sensory experience as unworthy participant in knowledge, the Kantian conception of autonomous thinking accepts the existence of contradictory – ‘sensible’ and ‘intelligible’ – forces in the constitution of knowledge and provides a potential avenue for their mediation. However, the transcendental subject, in possession of a transhistorical rational faculty seeking to master the chaotic impulses of sense-perception, cannot claim to know the ‘things in themselves’ (noumena). It must accept that any attempt to ‘think for oneself’ is limited to the knowledge of things as they appear (phenomena). In order to present themselves to the ‘twelve categories of the understanding’ and thus acquire validity in the constitution of knowledge, the sensuous objects, that is, nature in its human and non-human form, must be subjected to the rule of reason, whose function is to prepare such objects for their synthesis with the understanding, and eventually turn them into reliable representations, that is, the actual substance of rational experience. Failure to do so would deny knowledge its contradictory character and cause a fall into the relativism of empirical experience, thereby reducing humanity to nature. Kant’s investigation of the conditions under which knowledge is possible could therefore be treated as a re-assessment of the relationship between concepts and senses, or between distinctively human attributes and their distinctively natural counterpart. He found that rather than acting as two distinct sources of representation, they in fact belonged to a single epistemological foundation, but in order to hold the chaotic nature of subjective phantasy in check and convert the raw energy of sense-perception into a constructive component of autonomy, senses had to be brought under the control of reason. Thus, according to Kant, the prospects of autonomous thinking rest on reason’s capacity to mediate the forces of humanity and nature.

The realization of such a form of autonomy in practice does nevertheless depend upon further conditions. As was mentioned above, one must be capable of making public use of one’s reason. For Kant, this refers to ‘that use which anyone may make of it as a man of learning addressing the entire reading public’ (Kant 1991a, 55). Conditions must be such that all enlightened individuals have the opportunity to comment on the public affairs of a given society and political community. In order to become a member of the ‘public sphere’,2 and be in a position to question and eventually subvert the power in place, however, one must first develop one’s own conception of the common good. This, Kant argued, can be achieved only by fulfilling one’s ‘duty’ as a public person. Under this ‘absolute law of reason’ (Kant 1991b, 67), the potentially chaotic spontaneity of the will would be held in check. One would indeed be encouraged to act according to clearly defined motivations, be inclined to subsume individual happiness under motives of a universal nature, thus equipping citizens with a constant capacity to make decisions in line with the common good and ultimately providing the conditions required for the universal exercise of autonomous practice. The presence of a public sphere, in other words, ensures that the principle whereby the freedom of each can co-exist with the freedom of all others (Kant 1991c, 191) enshrined in laws governs the actions of individuals and, as such, serves as a key condition for the practice of autonomous thinking. By allowing sense-experience to be legislated by reason, Kant’s mediation of humanity and nature also favours the satiation of those faculties capable of protecting the former against its dependence on the latter’s forces,3 thereby treating sensations and other ‘natural’ inclinations as potential obstacles to autonomous thinking.4 Autonomy, as a result, becomes synonymous with the rational mastery of forces of internal and external nature, a condition of existence equated with a liberation through cognition, entailing a transhistorical conception of reason.

According to Hegel, however, such a state of affairs could only emerge as the culmination of a historical process of self-creation. Whilst Hegel maintained that knowledge is constituted through the interplay of contradictory forces, and presented rational will as the fundamental component of ‘self-determination’, he made several key adjustments to the Kantian concept of enlightenment. With Hegelian idealism, rational thinking no longer stands as a fixed faculty of the mind freeing individuals from the fetters of tutelage whilst securing the peaceful coexistence of autonomous wills through self-imposed limitations (duty). Instead, ‘absolute knowledge’5 emerges as the culmination of the historical unfolding of ‘spirit’ (Geist), which, following a process of externalization and re-appropriation between individuals’ determinate existence and their essence, eventually finds refuge in the rational laws of the state as the moment of ‘absolute freedom’. The individual, now acquiring his or her freedom through the recognition of the fact that ‘the real is rational, [and] the rational is real’, can expect to engage in autonomous practice only when reason ‘transforms thought into an existent thought, or being into a thought-constituted being’ (Hegel 1961, 283). Hegel’s liberation in thought, therefore, may only be possible under particular conditions of existence, but echoes Kant’s emphasis on reason as the mediating agent of humanity and nature, only this time by assuming the form of objective substance embodied in historically specific socio-political institutions. In his work Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel famously claimed that self-determination would be most effectively secured by a political institution like the modern state. The state is the ‘ethical idea’, the objective substance of reason as spirit, and the moment of identity between the self-conscious subject and its re-appropriated essence. As such, the state is the embodiment of the subject’s will and the so-called rational character of its laws serves to secure the free, competitive, yet harmonious, self-interested satisfaction of needs taking place in the sphere of civil society.6 Its abstraction from, and protection of, civil society and the family allows it to create the most favourable conditions for the self-conscious determination and realization of particular ends within society at large. The laws of the state, in this sense, not only embody the concept of absolute freedom, they are also the conditions for its actualization.

A key concern for the idealist thinker – one that is echoed in the works of his predecessor Kant – revolved around the resolution of the riddle emanating from the coexistence of particular and potentially conflicting wills. The two German philosophers were aware that both the determination and the realization of an individual’s particular ends could not be taking place in isolation from other individuals. Whereas for Kant such a problem is resolved by the limitation that one imposes on one’s will (duty) in one’s role as a public person (citizen), for Hegel the solution lies in the particular individual’s recognition of the ‘welfare of others’ as a precondition of the realization of his or her own ends.7 For the latter philosopher, individuals seeking to realize their ends as members of civil society must therefore treat the will of others as a constitutive part of their own.8 Only this way can the universal content of the will be expressed and serve as a basis for the formulation and realization of the common good. Such conditions cannot be met, however, by merely calling onto the subjectivity of the will. Doing so would indeed mean leaving the realization of particular ends to the arbitrary and chaotic rule of phantasy, and undermining the possibilities for a peaceful coexistence of individual wills. The orderly satisfaction of needs would instead be secured by the objective-universal moment of the will, which Hegel thought to be embodied within the laws of the state. As spirit, reason would, as in the case of Kant, mediate the actions of individuals. In the Hegelian system, however, the manifestation of reason does not limit itself to the channelling of the raw energy of sensory experience through the isolated action of an individual but crucially depends upon the recognition of other individuals’ will as a precondition for one’s own and is facilitated by ‘rational’ socio-political institutions.

According to Hegel, individuals may be in a position to determine their own ends – as the subjective moment of freedom – but can only expect to realize these ends as beings fully conscious of their role as members of the ‘family’, ‘civil society’ and the ‘state’. Whereas the development of the ‘subjective needs’ of an individual’s will already depends on the mere existence of ‘external things’ such as ‘the property and product of the needs and wills of others’ (Hegel 1991, 227), their satisfaction can take place only once such external things have been recognized, or as Hegel put it, ‘negated’, as integral components of a person’s will. In the relationship between a slave and a master, for example, the formal independence of the latter as a being driven by desires heavily depends on the labour of the former to realize such drives. Similarly, as the material form of the slave’s capacities, the object of labour is the external confirmation of his or her individuality. Both parties can nevertheless expect to move closer to their spiritual independence (self-consciousness) only once ‘each is for the other what the other is for it’ (Hegel 1977, 113) or once each party recognizes the other as the externalized/objectified form of their own individuality, with, on the one hand, the master conscious of his dependence upon the powers of another and, on the other hand, the slave realizing ‘that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own’ (Hegel 1977, 119). The subject’s conscious re-appropriation of its objectified self (self-consciousness) is the next and ultimate step towards the actualization of self-determination and its alignment with the common good. It is the stage whereby, as the embodiment of the universality of the will, the rational laws of the state accommodate the various particular wills so that each conscious individual (‘being with oneself’) recognizes the other as his or her externalized self (‘being with oneself in another’), and the totality of the social order as a realm of human practice or, put differently, as a rational reality.

Whilst Kant addressed reason as a subjective faculty freeing individuals from the fetters of nature and other forms of dependence, and located the basic conditions for autonomy in a ahistorical mediation of humanity and nature, Hegel believed the latter conditions to be found in a historically specific stage marked by the intersubjective recognition of the laws of the state as the ‘substantial will’ (Hegel 1991, 275). Drawing his inspiration from his reading of Feuerbach, however, the young Marx expressed serious doubts about the modern state’s capacity to provide individuals with the necessary means for autonomous practice. Although an advocate of Hegel’s historicized reading of the dialectics of humanity and nature, he was keen to expose the problems associated with their mediation by the state. For him, such a mediating function could not be performed by the abstract laws of the modern state and would have to be found, instead, within the economic base of society.

Labour as mediation

Marx is well known for writing some of the most famous of his early works as a form of critique of idealist philosophy, and more particularly Hegel’s own system of thought. In these same works, one even finds Marx explicitly acknowledging his debt to the German philosopher. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (2000a), for example, he made the following remark:

[T]he greatness of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its final product, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and creating principle, is on the one hand that Hegel conceives of the self-creation of man as a process, objectification as loss of the object, as externalisation and the transcendence of this externalisation. This means, therefore, that he grasps the nature of labour and understands objective man, true, because real, man as a result of his own labour. The real, active relationship of man to himself as a species-being or the manifestation of himself as a real species-being, i.e. as a human being, is only possible if he uses all his species powers to create (which is again only possible through the cooperation of man and as a result of history), if he relates himself to them as objects, which can only be done at first in the form of alienation. (Marx 2000a, 109)

Although Kant, in his attempt to find the conditions under which knowledge is possible, had already re-conceptualized the subject’s relation to the world of objects, Marx thought that it was not until Hegel that the most fundamental dynamics of such a relation had been discovered. Marx was particularly seduced by Hegel’s approach to the subject as a being endowed with an objective existence. From the Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) onwards, the prospects of autonomy would no longer rest on a world of objects mastered and dialectically mediated by the subject’s rational faculty, but would instead depend on the subject’s recognition of this world as the objective manifestation of the subject’s very own powers, and consequently allow this same subject to gain consciousness of this same world as a realm of human practice. Marx was in fact keen to praise Hegel for grasping autonomy as a condition realized through subjectively and objectively mediated forms of practice. Like Hegel, therefore, Marx construed the development of the individual as a process of creation whereby ‘all objects become for him the objectification of himself. They are objects that confirm and realise his individuality, his own objects, i.e. he becomes an object himself’ (Marx 2000a, 101).

Like Hegel, then, Marx conceived of self-creation as a process involving both a stage of estrangement and one of re-appropriation. He nevertheless expressed serious doubts regarding Hegel’s own approach to the latter stage.9 Indeed, as was explained by the idealist philosopher, re-appropriation would take place through a process of recognition regulated by the rational laws of the state, whose apparent universality is thought to serve the subject in his or her quest for self-consciousness by acting as a basis upon which the subject can become conscious of the limited freedom gained from the objectification of its own essence, and subsequently consider the abolition of such alienation as a condition for the realization of absolute freedom. For Hegel, it meant recognizing the external world as the subject’s ‘other’, a condition perceived as thoroughly problematic by Marx, who, inspired by Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (2008), expressed doubts regarding the predominant role the former thinker eventually came to assign to subjectivity in autonomy. Leaving the task of abolishing alienation to the mere activity of the mind, according to Marx, entails that the ‘appropriation of man’s objectified and alienated faculties is […] only an appropriation that occurs […] in pure thought, i.e. in abstraction’ (Marx 2000a, 108). Under such a state of affairs, the actualization of self-determination does not require the subject to alter existing social, political and economic conditions of existence. The state, as the objective-universal moment of the subject’s freedom, need only be thought as the subject’s externalized essence for the laws to acquire validity and the process of intersubjective recognition underpinning ‘absolute freedom’ to come to fruition. If Hegel ultimately reduced the reconciliation of essence (universality) and existence (particularity) to a mere activity of the mind, however, it is because he understood objectification as a process whereby the individual fails to confirm himself or herself practically. This is particularly problematic for Marx, as he significantly doubted the possibility of experiencing true autonomy through alienated labour, namely under conditions whereby the reconciliation of humanity and its creative essence, that is, internal nature, is not realized practically. Thus, whilst Marx acknowledged the fact that the mediation of the particular existence of individuals and the universal essence of humanity by the rational laws of the state marked the advent of a distinctively new and more advanced stage in the development of human capacities, he rejected the Hegelian understanding of autonomy, according to which ‘supersession in thought […] lets its object remain in reality [but] believes it has really overcome it’ (Marx 2000a, 116). Marx therefore rejected what he thought to be a predominantly subjectivist standpoint in Hegel’s dialectical frame of reference,10 and came to call into question its capacity to abolish the tension between the individual and society and anticipate the necessary conditions for actual autonomy. In virtue of their role in securing exploitative and alienating economic practices and generally oppressive conditions of existence, the abstract laws of the modern state could not, he argued, be expected to mediate autonomous practice. According to Marx, then, the prospects for the reconciliation of essence and existence, or ‘real, practical emancipation’, do not merely rest on the abstraction of the state from civil society, or ‘political emancipation’, and thus cannot be found within the socio-political institutions of the existing bourgeois order (Marx 2000b).11 Instead, true autonomy depends on the following conditions:

The actual individual man must take the abstract citizen back into himself and, as an individual man in his empirical life, in his individual work and individual relationships become a species-being; man must recognize his own forces as social forces, organize them, and thus no longer separate social forces from himself in the form of political forces. Only when this has been achieved will human emancipation be completed. (Marx 2000b, 64)

With Marx, then, autonomy becomes synonymous with ‘human emancipation’. But if the prospects of human emancipation depend on the abolition of the material conditions leading to estrangement, how, then, does Marx anticipate the reconciliation between individuals and the large-scale structures governing their life? What form of human practice can allow the individual to ‘take the abstract citizen back into himself’? To answer such questions one has to turn to his concept of ‘species-being’.

In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx, like Kant and Hegel before him, sought to extract the conditions for autonomy from the mediated relation between the universality of the human essence and the particularity of existence. However, whilst the two idealist philosophers ultimately left the task of mediation to the synthetic activity of reason (Kant) or to the historical unfolding of the ‘concept’ (Hegel), Marx re-conceptualized practice in line with his effort to turn the process of re-appropriation into a form of action bearing real consequences for the objective world. In his materialist schema, the labour process is given a central role in the actualization of autonomy. It is thought to serve as a key outlet for the transformation of both external nature and individuals’ inner nature. As the ‘inorganic body of man’ (Marx 2000a, 90) nature is both the object and the subject of practice, or labour. It is an ‘immense material’ transformed by human powers, ‘but also a potential’ dialectically realized by nature’s transfer into the products of such an activity (Schmidt 1971, 162). As a result, it is outside the abstract realm of the state and sphere of labour that Marx envisaged to reconcile humanity’s essence with its existence.

Universality, Marx thought, could no longer remain an illusory reality, or the mere substance of a political community abstracted from the ‘sensuous, individual, immediate existence’ of the members of civil society (Marx 2000b, 64). With Marx, the state becomes the necessary companion12 to an insufficiently emancipatory ‘vital activity’ (2000a, 90), namely labour. Here the modern state comes to be understood as the institutionalized form of a problematic relation between humanity and nature – an incomplete and transitory stage in the development of human powers that Hegel had failed to sufficiently problematize. For Marx, it is in the active process of self-creation mediating humanity and nature (the economy) that the individual finds the means to ‘relate […] to himself as to a universal and therefore free being’ (2000a, 89). Through an activity in which he makes ‘practically and theoretically […] both his own and other species into his objects [my emphasis]’ (Marx 2000a, 89), the individual acquires the capacity to recognize the products of labour ‘as examples of the kind’ (Chitty 1993, 24), thus ‘relat[ing] to himself as to the present, living species’ (Marx 2000a, 89) and obtaining confirmation of his universal essence within the sphere of labour itself.

Whilst Marx praised Hegel for grasping autonomy as the product of a dialectical-historical process culminating in the unity of the subject and the object mediated by the modern state, the former grounded their mediation in a form of practice located beyond the confines of existing economic and socio-political institutions. Now construed as human emancipation, the manifestation of autonomy could no longer be reduced to the mere activity of cognitive faculties, but would instead begin to be presupposed by the emergence of institutional forms making possible the realization of capacities one possesses in virtue of one’s being a member of the human species.

Autonomy as human emancipation

According to Kant and Hegel, the prospects of autonomy ultimately depended upon individuals’ capacity to allow their actions to be freely governed by reason, that is, to act rationally, manifesting itself either subjectively, as the quintessential human faculty, or objectively, through laws of a state acting as the embodiment of an individual’s will. Both therefore tended to restrict the scope for autonomy to the free development of cognitive faculties. The significance of the industrial age for the development of these distinctively human faculties was in fact emphasized by Marx himself. According to him, the age of progress was characterized by ‘relationships [that] are no longer determined by nature but are set up by society’ (Schmidt 1971, 178) and by the fact that, for the first time in its history, humanity could begin to contemplate ‘making its own and other species into its objects’. Capitalism, in fact, marked the advent of a new relationship between humanity and nature:

Industry is the real historical relationship of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If then it is conceived of as the open revelation of human faculties, then the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man will also be understood. Natural science will then lose its one-sidedly materialist, or rather idealistic, orientation and become the basis of human science as it has already, though in alienated form, become the basis of actual human life. (Marx 2000a, 102)

At least three key elements can be observed here. First, Marx attempted to draw attention to the fact that the rise of the capitalist mode of production signifies a radical break with all previous relations between humanity and nature. Whilst, prior to it, the development of the human species had remained highly vulnerable to the contingency of natural forces, the emergence of capital and the corresponding introduction of new methods of production meant that ‘[n]ature bec[ame] for the first time an object for mankind’ (Marx 2000c, 398), and the latter a species finally acquiring the technical means to emancipate itself from the shackles of nature. However, the emergence of scientific knowledge and an unprecedented development of ‘productive forces’, made possible by the technical mastery of external nature, do not by themselves create conditions entirely favourable for human emancipation, or, as Marx put it, for the realization of ‘natural science as the basis of actual human life’. This brings us to the second point.

Second, whilst Marx recognized that the intellectual and material wealth generated by capitalist methods of production marked a breakthrough in the history of human development, he was much less enthusiastic regarding the conditions under which such wealth was being accumulated. Capitalism, he thought, may have developed the technology necessary for the mastery of the forces of nature, but the introduction of the wage-system also meant that the immediate producer’s capacity to produce freely and, therefore, consciously would be jeopardized. Indeed, as soon as workers are forced to sell their labour to another person in order to have access to the basic means of subsistence, their relation to the product, the activity performed for its creation and their own nature tend to alter. No longer in control of the labour process, and with an activity performed as a means rather than an end in itself, the worker is forced to seek the confirmation of his essence in a sphere outside labour. Now only capable of satisfying his needs indirectly, he confronts both labour and the product created therefrom as moments external to the needs themselves, or ‘alien’ moments, and comes to experience objectification as alienation, ‘a loss of reality’ (Marx 2000a, 86).13 By denying the direct producers the means to confirm their essence as both cognitive and sensuous beings, their ‘vital activity’ turns them into ‘a purely subjective force without objective existence’ (Schmidt 1971, 175). In turn, therefore, the prospects for human emancipation not only rest on humanity’s capacity to master the forces of nature through labour. Individual producers must also be in a position to create the objects that will confirm their essence as unique beings with both a cognitive and sensuous make-up.

The third point made in the above passage provides a more or less clear indication of the nature of the aforementioned essence. The process whereby humanity appropriates nature, he argued, ought to serve as a mediation of ‘real historical relationship of nature to man’ by allowing the individual to realize the ‘open revelation of human faculties’. Labour, if performed under the right conditions, would enable individuals to realize the wide range of faculties belonging to them as member of the human species, through the transformation of nature. However, Marx’s early works rather inconsistently address the form assumed by the relationship between humanity and nature mediated by labour, and thought to provide the basis for the realization of the former’s essence. Two somewhat distinctive approaches can in fact be observed. The first one running through his works emanates from the distinction he made between the animal and the human species:

It is true that the animal, too, produces. It builds itself a nest, a dwelling, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc. But it only produces what it needs immediately for itself or its offspring; it produces one-sidedly whereas man produces universally; it produces only under the pressure of immediate physical need, whereas man produces freely from physical need and only truly produces when he is thus free; it produces only itself whereas man reproduces the whole of nature. Its product belongs immediately to its physical body whereas man can freely separate himself from his product. The animal only fashions things according to the standards and needs of the species it belongs to, whereas man knows how to produce according to the measure of every species and knows everywhere how to apply its inherent standard to the object; thus man also fashions things according to the laws of beauty. (Marx 2000a, 90–1)

To be human here means, once again, being capable of making nature the object of human practice or applying the ‘species’ standard to the object’, that is, transforming nature in a manner suitable for the development of what Marx thought to be an exclusively human quality, namely consciousness. Hence, humans do not merely produce instinctively; they create and turn nature into the object of this creative activity. Their capacity to think (cognition) means that through labour they do not only produce the objects that will satisfy basic needs such as ‘eating, drinking and procreating’ (Marx 2000a, 89) but also find an outlet for the expression of their creativity and the satisfaction of their more or less sophisticated needs. Thus, insofar as they allow human beings to turn nature into an object of human practice, cognitive faculties perform a central role in the realization of autonomy. For this reason, the rise of industry marks a turning point in the development of humanity’s transformative capacities. However, as suggested by his emphasis on the creative role of truly human practice, and his call for the emancipation of all human faculties, Marx’s approach to autonomy cannot be understood merely in terms of either an independence from external forces made possible by the cognitive faculty of reason (Kant) or a political emancipation ultimately reducing the scope of self-determination to the one-sided development of cognitive faculties (Hegel). Human emancipation, instead, assumes the form of a process of self-realization aimed at the ‘complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities’ (Marx 2000a, 100) but hindered by the separation of mental and physical faculties brought about by capitalist division of labour underpinning existing forms of productivist satisfaction of needs. Thus, inspired by Feuerbach’s materialist critique of religion and his attempt to restore the significance of humanity’s sensuous existence in philosophical thinking,14 Marx believed sense-experience to be playing a central role in emancipation. He insisted that, in virtue of his being a creative creature with the capacity to feel as well as think, ‘man is affirmed in the objective world not only in thought but through all his senses [my emphasis]’ (Marx 2000a, 101). Labour-mediated practice, therefore, not only frees humanity from the fetters of nature but also realizes a human essence whose content expands well beyond the confines delimited by cognitive faculties. The ‘real relationship of man to nature’ thus involves a process through which the same activity making the latter the object of the former also serves the development of a multiplicity of human faculties, both cognitive and sensuous. Autonomy is, in turn, thought to rest on the labour-mediated emancipation of such faculties, or a form of labour experienced as a free, conscious and creative activity capable of realizing an internal nature construed in both sensuous and cognitive terms.15

After careful examination of Marx’s materialism, one does nevertheless discover that the realization of the human essence is not necessarily presupposed by a merely receptive role of external nature, or its mastery by humanity. Indeed, whilst the immediately visible approach to the relationship between humanity and external nature tends to present the latter as an object of human practice, Marx also makes several utterances indicating a more active role for the realm of sense-experience as a whole:

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. (Marx 2000d, 171)

Referring to an essence comprising both cognitive and sensuous faculties, the term ‘human’ echoes the all-encompassing approach to emancipation discussed so far. The key message Marx intends to convey in this passage, however, takes the form of a clarification of his conception of sensuousness, thought to encompass both internal and external nature. It is in fact as sense-experience in general that Marx, here, wishes to present the active side of objects. Since ‘directly sensuous nature for man is man’s sense-experience (the expressions are identical)’, the potentialities of both nature and humanity are realized through one and the same process (Marx 2000a, 102). Thus, by treating the internal nature of humanity and external nature as ‘identical expressions’, Marx does not actually invert Hegel’s subject–object relation through Feuerbach’s materialism but, rather, shows that the ‘real relationship of man to nature’ must also be understood as a relation of man to his own, individual essence. In other words, whilst the first approach distinguishes a relation between man and external nature from the relation between man and his own, the second sees nature as ‘non-ontological’ (Schmidt 1971) or, as Schmidt also put it, as ‘socially mediated’, and thus treats it as another subject in human emancipation. Here, then, ‘consciously acting subjects’ are said to ‘confront […] nature itself as forces of nature’ (Schmidt 1971, 61).16

Central to Marx, and in accord with the idealist conception of autonomy, was his concern for humanity’s independence from the forces of nature. Like Kant and Hegel, Marx saw modernity as an age whereby the human species would, for the first time in its development, turn nature into its own object, thus gaining the technical means to make its own history. However, whilst the idealist philosophers have tended to construe autonomous practice in terms of an asymmetrical unity understood either as a subjection of nature to the legislative power of cognitive faculties (Kant) or as a ‘thought-constituted being’ (Hegel), Marx’s call for human emancipation gave nature, both in its human and non-human form, a more active role to play in autonomy. A case can in fact be made for an interpretation of both Marx’s conception of autonomy as ecological human emancipation and his concept of non-alienated labour as the basis upon which a non-productivist mode of satisfaction of needs could be anticipated.17 A tension nevertheless arises when one observes that not one but two approaches to the relationship between humanity and external nature can in fact be found in his works. Indeed, how can he safely defend the view that, on the one hand, the emancipation of humanity from the fetters of nature depends on the subjugation of the latter by the former whilst, on the other hand, arguing that human and natural sense-experience are identical? Before reflecting on the possible ways this apparent contradiction could be resolved, one must first investigate a last key precondition for the actualization of human emancipation, namely the realization of individuals’ communal essence.

On the social character of human emancipation

In the first section of the present chapter, it was briefly pointed out that central to the idealist project of autonomous practice could be found a concern for the socially cohesive character of rational thinking. Whereas Kant’s warning against the dangers of tutelage suggests that autonomy manifests itself through individuals’ toleration of, and respect for, each other’s freedom, Hegel’s philosophy of recognition appears to embody a conception of enlightenment whereby autonomy assumes an intersubjective form. It is out of this latter conception of autonomy, that is, one grounded in a form of freedom consciously exercised through others, that Marx would draw the inspiration for his own solution to the individual–society riddle.

Like Hegel, Marx regarded the labour process as a key phenomenon in the realization of autonomy. Both did indeed present the objectification of human powers as the material basis upon which the individual producer would, provided he can recognize the product as the external form of his individuality, eventually ‘become […] conscious of what he truly is’ (Hegel 1977, 118), and thus understood it as a necessary step in the development of the capacity to ‘think for oneself’. Through the direct exchange of goods, the products of labour also become objects that will meet another person’s needs. They are endowed with the purpose of serving the development of the species as a whole, and as such perform a central function in the process of realization of both the individual and the communal essence. However, whilst Hegel understood such a process of intersubjective recognition as one mediated by the apparently rational and universal laws of the state, Marx grounded its actualization in the labour process itself:

Supposing that we had produced in a human manner; each of us would in his production have doubly affirmed himself and his fellow men. I would have: (i) objectified in my production my individuality and its peculiarity and thus both in my activity enjoyed an individual expression of my life and also in looking at the object have had the individual pleasure of realising that my personality was objective, visible to the senses and thus a power raised beyond all doubt. (ii) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have had the direct enjoyment of realising that I had both satisfied a human need by my work and also objectified the human essence and therefore fashioned for another human being the object that met his need. (iii) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species and thus been acknowledged and felt by you as a completion of your own essence and a necessary part of yourself and have thus realised that I am confirmed both in your thought and in your love. (iv) In my expression of my life I would have fashioned your experience of your life, and thus in my own activity have realised my own essence, my human, my communal essence. (Marx 2000e, 132)

So with Marx, relations between individuals no longer rely on the laws of the state for their mediation. Instead, the character of such relations is determined by the sphere of activity directly mediating ‘sensuous [and] immediate existence’ (Marx 2000b, 64), namely labour as self-realization. In fact, as the passage above demonstrates, Marx went as far as presenting the activity through which humanity transforms nature as the exact same process whereby both the individual and communal essence of the human species are realized. However, in order to meet the conditions whereby both the immediate producer’s ‘sense-experience becomes human for him’ (Marx 2000a, 102) and the needs of individuals are consciously met as the needs of the species as a whole, the labour process ought to assume a particular form. What Marx understood by ‘human production’ entails, on the one hand, that labour must assume the form of ‘open revelation of human faculties’. It is by developing both cognitive and sensuous faculties through the appropriation of the material of nature that the objects produced can confirm an individual’s essence as identical to the essence of the human species as a whole. Consequently, any attempt to mediate social relations through a political community abstracted from the sphere of material production would ultimately fill the individual existence with an abstract communality, which Marx has consistently sought to problematize in his own critique of liberal democracy.18 What Hegel saw as the most absolute expression of the communal essence was thus understood by Marx as an incomplete manifestation of social freedom – the historical form of a society organized around non-human conditions of production. According to the latter thinker, therefore, communality is no mere ‘idea’. It is an integral component of the human essence to be realized through a form of practice capable of mediating faculties common to the entire human species.

On the other hand, Marx thought that the very possibility of developing the wide range of faculties available to human beings through labour was dependent on the nature of the intentions with which one engages with such an activity. What truly matters for him is not objectification per se, but the purpose one attaches to it. In other words, production can become human, and therefore social, only if the individual producer is conscious that the objects created will meet not only his needs but the needs of other individuals too.19 However, with the introduction of private property, Marx pointed out, one participates in production with a significantly different purpose in mind:

I have produced for myself and not for you, as you have produced for yourself and not for me. You are as little concerned by the result of my production in itself as I am directly concerned by the result of your production. That is, our production is not a production of men for men as such, that is social production. Thus, as a man none of us is in a position to be able to enjoy the product of another. We are not present to our mutual products as men. Thus, neither can our exchange be the mediating movement which confirms that my product is for you, because it is an objectification of your own essence, your need. For what links our production together is not the human essence. Exchange can only act in motion and activate the attitude that each of us has to his own product and thus to the product of another. Each of us sees in his own product only his own selfish needs objectified, and thus in the product of another he only sees the objectification of another selfish need independent and alien to him. (Marx 2000e, 130)

The emergence of an impersonal mode of allocation of resources known as the free market, combined with the introduction of wage-system and the corresponding need to sell one’s labour-power as a condition for survival, meant that labour transformed itself into a mere means for the satisfaction of a strictly individual need, thus effectively causing individual producers to lose sight of labour’s social character. What may appear at first glance as a change of mere technical significance does actually play a central role in the determination of relations between the individual and the human species as a whole, and stands in evident contradiction to the possibility for socialized production. Unable to transform nature in a conscious and therefore free manner, and thus prevented from investing the range of faculties required for the labour-mediated confirmation of the human essence, the individual producer is constrained to look outside labour itself, and into the process of exchange for the satisfaction of his needs. Now forced to ‘exchang[e] his products for the products of other people’ (Chitty 1993, 27) on the free market, the individual begins to construe his or her dependence on others for the realization of his or her essence in terms of self-interest. This is precisely the form of dependence which, as Marx suggested, Hegel tended to legitimate in his ‘system of all-round interdependence’ mediated by the laws of the modern state, and whereby ‘each [subject] asserts itself and gains through the others’ (Hegel 1991, 220). Where Hegel saw the emergence of a political community alongside the sphere of civil society as incontestable evidence that self-determination had not fallen prey to the hostile character of crude individualism, and argued that the state would ensure that ‘the subsistence [Subsistenz] and welfare of the individual [das Einzelnen] and his rightful existence [Dasein] are interwoven with, and grounded on, the subsistence, welfare, and rights of all, and have actuality and security only in this context’ (Hegel 1991, 221), Marx saw an abstract universality and communality. Indeed, since such an interdependence is in actual fact symptomatic of a condition of existence whereby the individual producer fails to relate to the objects created through labour as ‘examples of the kind’, Marx concluded that it cannot adequately serve the realization of the communal essence of the species. In Hegel’s so-called ‘rational reality’, individuals continue to be alienated from other individuals.

In sum, therefore, although Marx drew his inspiration for the conceptualization of a socially cohesive form of autonomy from Hegel’s process objectification, he did not seek its completion outside the sphere of labour. As sensuous beings, Marx thought, humans must be capable of realizing their essence through their most ‘vital’ activity. The modern state, as the political form legitimating the condition of existence whereby individuals are forced to sell their own labour-power on a free and impersonal market in order to live and, consequently, systematically favour the satisfaction of their own needs over the needs of others, cannot be expected to overcome the self-interested particularism of bourgeois existence. Hegel’s conception of autonomy, in other words, does not resolve in any concrete manner the tension between the individual and society brought about by the rule of private property and the free market but, instead, leaves such a tension unresolved by championing a refuge in an abstract form of universality. For this reason Marx insisted that the prospects of closing the gap between particular existence and the common good, and eventually turning the individual act of satisfaction of needs into a process confirming the essence of the species as a whole, depended on the individual’s participation in a free, conscious, creative and cooperative transformation of nature, and the corresponding capacity to experience such an activity as a process of collective self-realization.

Concluding remarks

By shifting the focus of epistemology from an attempt to find the source of knowledge to the task of investigating the conditions under which its constitution is possible, Kant was the first philosopher to locate autonomy within the mediated unity of humanity and nature. Freedom from tutelage, he thought, could not be conceptualized without addressing the issue of the relation between humanity, its own nature, external nature and other individuals. Any attempt to achieve autonomy whilst fulfilling the demands of the common good should be, he argued, presupposed by the rational mastery of the chaotic world of sense-experience. In response to Kant’s conception of enlightenment can be found Hegel’s own, which, by giving objectification a key role in human practice, could potentially overcome the asymmetry between humanity and nature found in the philosophical frame of reference formulated by his predecessor. As Marx convincingly pointed out, however, Hegel’s own schema fails to meet its own expectations. Indeed, with the role of mediating agent now assumed by the so-called rational laws of the state, Hegel’s philosophy falls short of restoring the due role of sense-experience in autonomy, which Marx believed to be of particular significance in the mediated relationship between humanity and nature. As such, he conceptualized a form of autonomous practice understood as the labour-mediated emancipation of both cognitive and sensuous faculties, and anticipated its historical emergence beyond the capitalist division of labour, the free market and the modern state or, put differently, in objective conditions of existence capable of reconciling individuals’ relationship with their internal nature, external nature and other individuals. However, by presenting human and natural sense-experience as intimately related expressions, whilst admitting that autonomy is predicated upon the transformation of nature as a mere object of human practice, is Marx, on the one hand, not contradicting himself and, on the other hand, running the risk of confounding the subjugation of nature with that of humanity, thereby making his theoretical framework vulnerable to potential vulgarization and pernicious interpretations likely to reproduce the asymmetrical mediation of humanity and nature?20 Thus, although Marx’s concept of labour as self-realization did provide a basis upon which the realization of human emancipation as the labour-mediated reconciliation of reason with the senses could be anticipated, it fell short of containing explicit safeguards against the development of reason into an instrument of domination. Consequently, Marx’s critique of political economy ought to be supplemented by a critique of knowledge capable of grasping the full epistemological and institutional implications of the aforementioned asymmetries.

Notes

1  It is indeed the self-proclaimed task of his first critique – the Critique of Pure Reason (1855) – to revolutionize epistemology by overcoming the antagonism between rationalism and empiricism.

2  This term was coined by Habermas with reference to Kant’s own conception of ‘publicity’ in his work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989).

3  Kant’s distinction between autonomy and heteronomy is key to grasping the mediating role played by reason. Whilst he understood the former as a condition whereby the independence of the will is secured when desires and other inclinations are legislated by reason, he described the latter as a state of affairs where the will is under the influence of forces independent of our control, such as natural inclinations, or the will. Kant presented such a legislating role of reason in autonomy as a moral ‘duty’ which ‘is nothing more than a limitation of the will within a universal legislation’ (Kant 1991b, 65).

4  The term ‘natural’ used here refers to both external and internal nature. Kant’s liberation from nature is not only a liberation from the external forces of nature but, more generally, from those forces independent of our control. Instinctual desires and other forms of ‘natural’ inclinations do therefore fit into the definition.

5  In contrast to Kant, Hegel believed that one could know the ‘things in themselves’ but thought that this absolute form of knowledge could only be attained under particular socio-historical conditions.

6  Hegel also called civil society the ‘system of needs’. See Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1991)

7  Part three of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1991) contains his most explicit account of this point.

8  This is precisely what Hegel meant by ‘being-at-home-in-another’.

9  As will be made more explicit below, Marx also questioned Hegel’s own approach to alienation.

10  It must nevertheless be noted here that Marx’s own interpretation of Hegel’s idealism does at times tend to overlook the latter’s consideration of non-subjectivist orientations such as those found in his concept of Sittlichkeit or ‘ethical substance’, entailing a form of intersubjectivity partly grounded in the sensuous dimension of being such as feelings and sentiments.

11  It is with Marx, then, that autonomy effectively begins to assume the form of emancipation.

12  In ‘On the Jewish Question’, Marx claimed that ‘the perfection of the idealism of the state was at the same time the perfection of the materialism of civil society’, thus pointing out the contradictory, yet mutually necessary, relation between the two spheres (2000b, 63).

13  Marx’s and Hegel’s own uses of the term alienation deserve clarification here. The section of the Phenomenology entitled ‘Lordship and Bondage’ is often cited as the text from which Marx draws his inspiration for the concept of alienation and the mechanisms involved in its abolition. However, as C.J. Arthur pointed out,

Marx does not mention, and does not draw upon, the dialectic of ‘lordship and bondage’. Of the three sections he mentions as evidence for ‘critical elements’ in Hegel’s work, the most influential is ‘the struggle of noble and base consciousness’. Here Hegel treats of the estrangement of the individual from social institutions such as state power and wealth. As always, Marx finds in Hegel that the idealist exposition of such elements of criticism results in their presentation still in estranged form. (Arthur 1986, 92)

14  See Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity.

15  It is in fact this particular side of Marx’s approach to the relation of humanity and nature that tends to be overlooked in Habermas’s early critique of historical materialism. As will be shown in Chapter 4, although his call for a critique of knowledge does seem to justify a critical reading of Marx’s works, he failed to address labour as a process of sensuous self-realization, thus overlooking the non-instrumental relation between humanity and nature found in these same works.

16  This interpretation of Marx’s approach to the relationship between humanity and nature is echoed in Deborah Cook’s Adorno on Nature (2011).

17  The ecological content of Marx’s work has already been revealed by, for example, Ted Benton in Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice (1993) and The Greening of Marxism (1996), as well as by John Bellamy Foster in Marx’s Ecology (2000).

18  The problems Marx identified with liberal democracy could nevertheless also be attributed to all forms of state planning, for these entail the development of a coercively induced artificial form of communality.

19  In Chapter 7, it shall be demonstrated that such a mutual recognition of needs depends on an effective communication between the relevant agents, that is, on a dialogue.

20  An evident example of such interpretations can be found in the tradition of Soviet Marxism. Less evident, but equally misleading, are the interpretations of Adorno and Habermas, which, as will be shown below, only concentrate on a single dimension of Marx’s approach to the mediation of humanity and nature.

2

Towards the reconciliation of humanity and nature

As a movement aiming to free humanity from the fetters of nature and tradition, the Enlightenment has often been viewed as a source of progress. The proliferation of human and natural sciences brought about by reason meant that humanity could begin to develop an understanding of both itself and the laws of nature. Humanity, it was thought, could become its own master. However, the emergence of a totalitarian regime in Germany, followed by the spread of a heavily regimented workplace (Fordism) and state apparatus (bureaucracy) throughout Western capitalist societies, led members of the Frankfurt School to call into question the achievements of Enlightenment thinking. What was originally thought to facilitate a liberating process would soon reveal its insufficiencies and inherent flaws, such as those identified by Adorno in the philosophy of one of the Enlightenment’s most fervent proponents, Kant.1 In this chapter, I shall therefore seek to expose the first generation of critical theory’s attempt to trace the emergence of repressive institutional forms to the development of particular epistemic conditions and identify those required for the actualization of emancipatory practice.

Problematizing the primacy of the subject

According to Kant’s moral philosophy, the public person must ensure that the absolute law of reason, otherwise known as duty, governs his or her every action. The search for personal happiness, he thought, lacked the universal, and therefore moral, orientations which ought to accompany all individuals in the process of their enlightenment. To guarantee the development of a form of knowledge capable of yielding autonomy at the most general level, reason not only had to hold the forces of external nature in check, it would be called upon to impose a limitation on the will, thereby ensuring that the autonomy realized does not conflict with the common good. Thus, in the process of freeing oneself from self-incurred tutelage, one ‘must totally separate his desire for happiness from the concept of duty, in order to preserve the latter’s purity’ (Kant 1991b, 69). Presented in this manner, autonomy appears to be consisting in a struggle against both external and internal forces of nature, or as a condition of existence presupposed by the reason-mediated control over influences capable of impinging one’s freedom. Such an understanding of the function performed by reason is precisely what led Adorno and Horkheimer to draw the following conclusion:

The system the Enlightenment has in mind is the form of knowledge which copes most proficiently with the facts and supports the individuals most effectively in the mastery of nature. Its principles are the principles of self-preservation. Immaturity is the inability to survive. (1997, 83)

With the form of Enlightenment thinking defended by Kant, they thought, reason fails to mediate the relationship between humanity and nature in such a way as to liberate individuals from the repressive shackles of self-preservation. This is explained by the fact that the employment of reason as a means to ‘cope most proficiently with the facts’ tends to promote a continuous tension between individuals, their internal nature and their environment. By limiting freedom to a merely negative form, and restricting the scope of knowledge to a manipulative function, reason can only be expected to raise humanity above nature and ‘adjust […] the world for the ends of self-preservation’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 83–4), thereby prioritizing orientations towards mastery over the quest for a ‘better’ world.2 Consequently, reason turns not only into a means for mere survival – as opposed to emancipation – but also into an instrument for the mastery of nature – as opposed to a mere understanding of its forces. In Kant’s work, one therefore finds a form of reason mediating the domination of nature by humanity. That reason should assert its authority in its dealings with nature is in fact echoed in the following passage by Kant:

Reason must approach nature with the view, indeed, of receiving information from it, not, however, in the character of a pupil, who listens to all that his master chooses to tell him, but in that of a judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose. (1855, xxvii)

Autonomy is here thought to rest on a form of knowledge presupposing a legislative function for reason and, conversely, a receptive role for sense-experience. Consequently, one witnesses an epistemic differentiation between an active realm of cognition and a passive realm of sensuousness, that is, natural inclinations and external forces of nature. It is in this differentiation that Adorno and Horkheimer found the seeds of a system of thought (and set of institutions) promoting the domination of nature by humanity, or a world whereby the laws of nature are substituted for those of reason.

Such criticisms, however, may come as a surprise when one considers the task set out by Kant himself in his Critique of Pure Reason (1855), namely his attempt to show that the constitution of knowledge could not be reduced to a preferential treatment of either subjective (cognitive) or objective (sensuous) forces.3 One is therefore justified in further investigating the role played by nature in his most famous work. As a critique of pure reason, Kant’s first critique was partly aimed at distancing his own epistemology from the crude subjectivism of rationalist thinkers such as Descartes, Leibniz or Spinoza. In this key epistemological work, he also intended to distinguish his stance from the relativism of the empiricists, who, like the rationalists, had been misled by conforming to the traditional attempt of finding out the sources of knowledge, rather than identifying the conditions under which knowledge in general is possible. A key task of his so-called ‘revolutionary’ work would therefore be re-assessing the relation between subjective and objective forces in the constitution of knowledge, or to put it in Kantian terms, in identifying the role of experience in such a process:

That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare, to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it. (Kant 1855, 1)

So for Kant, experience plays a key role in the constitution of knowledge, but since, as was pointed out above, his critique of pure reason also aimed to distance his epistemology from the empiricist tradition, one is justified in asking what exactly allowed him to make such a claim? Indeed, how can one assign such a role to experience without falling into the empiricist reductionism of thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke? Kant certainly believed he could, but did not do so by merely re-assessing the role of experience in knowledge. In fact the idealist philosopher could not accept the empiricist concept of experience at face value, and, as a result, wished to redefine the terms under which one could speak of experience. Whilst he accepted the view that sensations play a role in experience, he believed that their ‘undifferentiated and indeterminate’ (Pippin 1982, 29) character meant that the material received directly from them could not constitute experience by itself. In order to make sense of the realm of sensibility, a faculty that could ‘compare, connect, separate’ sensations and eventually convert them into a material intelligible for the laws of the understanding would be required. An investigation of the conditions under which knowledge is possible, and, by extension, the conditions under which experience itself is constituted, must therefore proceed, in a first instance, with the separation of the ‘understanding’ and ‘sensibility’ into two distinct epistemic elements that must be consequently re-united for an actual account of experience to be possible. The function of joining up the two elements, Kant thought, would be assigned to reason, which he claimed ‘furnishes us with the principles of knowledge a priori’ (Kant 1855, 1) required for the constitution of experience. With Kant, therefore, experience no longer refers to a raw form of sensory perception, but is treated, instead, as the product of a dialectically mediated relation between subjective and objective forces – a relation that prevents him from falling into the dogmatic realm of rationalism or the relativist trap of empiricist epistemology.

However, an investigation into Kant’s own understanding of the subject–object relation – as an attempt to uncover the epistemic conditions stifling emancipation – would not be complete unless the respective role of ‘concepts’ and ‘intuitions’ is further explored. Whilst he famously claimed that ‘thoughts without content are empty’ and ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’ (Pippin 1982, 25), thus appearing to defend a dialectically symmetrical subject–object relation, his differentiation of the intelligible and the sensible worlds into ‘spontaneity’ and ‘receptivity’ respectively seems to suggest that whilst these two epistemic elements are intertwined, the role they perform and their place held in knowledge are distinct. In his attempt to identify the conditions under which knowledge is possible, Kant found that the undifferentiated and indeterminate character of the ‘sensory manifold’ significantly restricted its role as a source of representation. Sensations could enter the realm of representation as experience only after being located in space and time4 as ‘ideal forms of sensibility’ (Pippin 1982, 55), which Kant called intuitions. As such, one could only claim to know the objects as they appear to the subject. Furthermore, as ideal forms of a ‘passive contact with objects’ (Pippin 1982, 57) intuitions can only perform a receptive role. Their conversion into the actual content of knowledge therefore begins only once the synthesizing power of reason has unified the appearances of objects into an intelligible whole or, as Kant would put it, after being ‘subsumed’ under the universality of concepts:

Before objects are given to me, that is, a priori, I must presuppose in myself laws of the understanding which are expressed in conceptions a priori. To these conceptions then, all objects of experience must necessarily conform. (Kant 1855, xxix)

A close inspection of the process whereby concepts and intuitions are mediated thus exposes a degree of disparity between their respective contribution to the process of constitution of knowledge, with the latter assigned a somewhat more passive role than the former. The asymmetry consequently produced by such a relation led Adorno and Horkheimer to conclude that despite Kant’s concern with the conceptualization of a dialectical relation between subject and object, reason’s grip over the latter effectively liquidates the sensory manifold, thus causing the potentially liberating and expressive framework of a mediated unity between humanity and nature to evolve, and indeed regress, into the very foundation of a system promoting a ‘program of the absolute control of nature’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 244).

Adorno explained such a development by exposing two correlated tendencies in Kant’s works. First, Adorno suggested that the transcendental character Kant attributed to the subject, namely its capacity, through reason, to establish what counts as experience and what does not, meant that the idealist philosopher could not conceive experience in any way other than as a mere product of subjective forces. The member of the Frankfurt School believed such a condition to be truly problematic, as by endowing the subject with such a sovereign power,5 Kant not only assigned it the primary constitutive role in knowledge, he also entitled it to constitute experience itself, thus diminishing the role played by the sensory manifold in experience and ultimately failing to realize its liberating potential as a source of reflexive spontaneity. By claiming to experience objects only as they subjectively appear, and ‘ground[ing] objectivity in[,] the subject’ (Adorno 1959, 2), thereby transferring the object’s attributes onto the subject, Kant effectively assigned a constitutive function to a non-entity, whilst liquidating the givenness of the world of objects. However, as Adorno pointed out, the nature of the subject is such that ‘no matter how we define [it], some entity cannot be juggled out of it’ (1982, 502). The social reality both constituted and known by the transcendental subject must therefore be false:

The subject itself is an object insofar as existence is implied by the idealist doctrine of constitution – there must be a subject so that it can constitute anything at all – insofar as this has been borrowed in turn, from the sphere of facticity. The concept of what ‘is there’ means nothing but what exists, and the subject as existent comes promptly under the heading of ‘object’. As pure apperception, however, the subject claims to be the downright Other of all existents. This, too, is the negative appearance of a slice of truth: that the reification which the sovereign subject has inflicted on everything, including itself, is mere illusion. (Adorno 1982, 508)

Here Adorno could be said to echo Schiller’s own reservations regarding a form of ‘Reason do[ing] away with the Natural State’ and consequently taking ‘from man something he actually possesses and without which he possesses nothing’ (Schiller 1967, 13). Adorno was indeed particularly concerned with the Kantian conception of objectivity and, crucially, the relation between the subject and the object emanating from such a conception. Here Kant is being criticized6 for ignoring the key fact that ‘whilst it is impossible for us even to conceive of a subject which is not an object, we can very easily conceive of an object which is not a subject’ (Jarvis 1998, 182–3). The subject’s conditional existence is precisely what led Adorno to argue that not only are concepts empty without intuitions, they are also unthinkable. Kant’s contention that concepts can be thought prior to experience is, in this case, fallacious, and any facticity extracted from ‘pure’ concepts must, as a result, be illusory. Inherent in Kant’s theory of cognition is a formulation of the relation between subject and object whereby the alleged self-facticity of the former serves to produce an illusory or ‘false’ reality. In sum, having been denied the capacity to convert the particularity of their existence into the content of experience, individuals are ultimately prevented from relating to the social totality as a realm of human practice. A key explanatory feature of the system of domination Adorno believed to be embodied in Kant’s ‘philosophy of identity’, and to have materialized into economic (the capitalist division of labour and market) and socio-political institutions (the bureaucratic state) subjecting individuals to the rule of seemingly remote and unreachable structures driven by the regime of capital accumulation, is therefore found in the reifying tendency arising from the sovereign power of the subject. The reason-mediated asymmetry between the subject and the object could therefore be understood as a set of conditions giving rise to a false unity between the individual and society, whereby the former, despite failing to treat social reality as the product of their own practices, also believes that ‘there is no other course’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 22) and comes to experience this reality as a natural condition. In such a false reality, ‘domination appears to be the universal’ (1997, 22), thereby causing self-preservation to act as a subterfuge for ‘internalised self-sacrifice’ (Jarvis 1998, 31).

Unfolding alongside the reification of reality can nevertheless be observed a second, correlated tendency. In the process of establishing itself as constituens,7 the subject does not only produce an illusory reality, it also calls on reason to ‘discriminate the world’ (Pippin 1982, 92) and subsume it under the rule of conceptual universality. To question and ultimately know the world entails, according to Kant, allowing reason to impose its truths upon this world. It involves leaving the task of answering questions, posed by phenomena previously left unexplained by the predominance of myths and other traditional beliefs, to the rational faculty. For Adorno, however, the aforementioned process becomes problematic when the truths in question are equated to ‘whatever remains once everything sensory, everything ephemeral and hence deceptive has been subtracted’ (1959, 25),8 as in Kant’s epistemology. The consequence of such a ‘residual theory of truth’ (1959, 25), Adorno insisted, is that the knowledge, and with it the reality upon which those truths have been imposed, assume a ‘permanent, eternal and timeless’ (1959, 25–6) character.9 Accordingly, the radically different and new would emerge as undesirable occurrences, or ‘a source of insecurity, a threat, something worrying’ (1959, 26) likely to undermine the stability of the whole. With the development of Enlightenment thinking, reason would no longer be capable of questioning the established order, for it has become the established order itself. By turning into the very thing it was originally employed to subvert, reason thus loses its reflexive, and therefore liberating, character. In fact, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, Kant’s epistemology embodies the embryonic conditions upon which rests the generally repressive character of advanced capitalist institutions, such as the culture industry:

Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul which prepared directly intuitions in such a way that they could be fitted into the system of pure reason. But today that secret has been deciphered. While the mechanism is to all appearances planned by those who serve up the data of experience, that is, by the culture industry, it is in fact forced upon the latter by the power of society, which remains irrational, however we may try to rationalize it; and this inescapable force is processed by commercial agencies so that they give an artificial impression of being in command. There is nothing left for the consumer to command. Producers have done it for him. (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 125)

The tendency towards absolutization, therefore, also draws its energy and strength from ‘bourgeois philosophy’. Since in bourgeois societies individuals are subjected to the authority of economic facts, the scope of their actions becomes reduced ‘to the realization of the whole, whose rationality is reproduced in this way’ (1997, 22). More concretely, the mass production of standardized goods under the heavily regimented Fordist workplace, their consumption by individuals subjected to advertising and marketing campaigns designed by ‘commercial agencies’ and the involvement of the bureaucratic state in material reproduction, all contribute to the maintenance and expansion of the regime of capital accumulation, whilst providing very little scope, if any, for free and authentic self-expression. Already with Kant’s rational mediation of humanity and nature – as a relation paving the way for the subjection of individuals to immutable and unquestionable facts standing higher and above empirical individuals – can one therefore find the germs of historical circumstances under which individuals are prevented from not only relating to the wider social reality as their own (reification) but also challenging it (absolutization). The sovereign power of the subject, whose origins Adorno traced back to the limitations reason imposes on the will and to the concepts’ involvement in the ‘sensory uptake of the world’ (Pippin 2005a, 34), laid the foundations for a system whereby individuals not only confront the wider social reality as a given and insuperable other but also fail to realize the full range of their capacities as cognitive and sensuous beings.10 The capitalist division of labour and market, as well as the bureaucratic state apparatus administering the legal principles upon which they rest, are but institutional manifestations of a form of knowledge favouring survival over emancipation and, as such, create conditions of existence favourable for the development of a reality composed of, as Schiller himself put it, ‘separate’ (1967, 33) or ‘fragmented’ individuals forced to rely on their cognitive faculties for the competitive accumulation of wealth. Reason, by depriving the ‘imagination of its energy and warmth’ (Schiller 1967, 39), contributes to the exhaustion of knowledge’s potentially subversive function. In Kant’s works, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded, are found the elements of a repressive form of knowledge and social reality in nucleo, ‘unleashed’ by the ‘market economy’ as ‘both the actual form of reason and the power which destroyed reason’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 90).

Although Adorno’s criticisms of Kant’s epistemology convincingly exposed the problematic nature of conditions of existence arising from the subjection of the particularity of sense-experience to the universalistic tendencies of reason institutionalized in, and promoted by, the bureaucratic state’s rational-technical administration of life, the capitalist market and the division of labour, one is justified in asking what place, exactly, should concepts hold in the constitution of an emancipatory form of knowledge. What form, in other words, should the relation between subject and object assume in order to preclude humanity’s domination over its own and external nature, and create, thereby, conditions (epistemic and institutional) favourable for the emancipation of both mental and physical capacities? The following section shall begin to answer such questions.

From identity to the non-identical

Whilst most of Adorno’s critique of Kant’s philosophy was founded upon the latter’s apparently problematic distinction between the spontaneity of concepts and the receptivity of intuitions, and the asymmetrical relation resulting therefrom, Robert Pippin questioned Kant’s success in maintaining such a distinction, thereby paving the way for a re-assessment of the subject–object relation suggested by the idealist philosopher. In his article entitled ‘Concepts and Intuitions: On Distinguishability and Separability’ (2005a), Pippin sought to expose a tension in Kant’s work. Like Adorno, he believed that Kant’s own dialectical approach failed to fulfil its promises, such as the move away from subjectivism – a failure which he too identified as being caused by a tension between concepts and intuitions. However, whilst for Adorno the identity of subject and object is symptomatic of Kant’s formal separation between concepts and intuitions and the respective distinction between spontaneity and receptivity, for Pippin the fact that intuitions are ‘unusual species of conceptual representations’ (2005a, 37) effectively serves to blur the latter differentiations. The Kant of the ‘second-edition Transcendental Deduction’,11 he argued, does not appear to suggest that concepts impose themselves upon the world of objects from the outside, having to bring, and ultimately subsume, intuitions under their rule, but are instead already present in the sensory uptake of this same world:

[T]hought is not merely presented with and then applied to[,] and restricted by, a thoroughly non-conceptual sensory manifold. The manifold is already conceptually articulated; concepts are engaged in our ‘sensory uptake’ of the world, and the separation claim and the strategy it grounds and the mind-world picture it assumes must now all be qualified, even re-thought. (Pippin 2005, 34)

Thus, instead of presenting the relationship between subject and object in Kant’s epistemology as a ‘mechanical’ unity with a conceptual universality imposing itself upon, and subsuming the realm of sensibility, a case is made for a Hegelian reading of his dialectics. This entails the treatment of the relation as an ‘organic unity’ between the subject and its ‘negated other’ (the object), which Pippin grounds in the conceptual qualities of the sensory manifold. Could the recognition of the object as a ‘negated other’, then, offer a foundation upon which knowledge can be stripped of its subsumptive and repressive character? In order to answer this question, we shall now turn to Adorno’s treatment of Hegel’s dialectics.

A key problem Adorno discovered in his investigation of Kant’s own form of identity thinking revolved around the absolutizing and reifying tendencies arising from reason’s role as mediating agent. By imposing its truths upon the objects, reason not only achieves the classification of the content (subject) under the form (predicate) of any knowledge claim but also, and more crucially, their identity (Jarvis 1998, 165). The permanent character attributed to those truths and the strict concern with the immediate relation between the subject and the predicate eventually serve to congeal such a relation, thereby eradicating the contradictions making up the reality claimed to be known here, and ultimately failing to account for the fact that the truth of ‘what is’ actually depends on ‘what is not’. Hegel, however, sought to give recognition to these contradictions. As he put it:

The untruth of the immediate judgement lies in the incongruity between its form and its content. To say ‘This rose is red’ involves (in virtue of the copula ‘is’) the coincidence of subject and predicate. The rose however is a concrete thing, and so not red only: it also has an odour, a specific form, and many other features not implied in the predicate red. There are other flowers and objects which are red too. The subject and predicate in the immediate judgement touch, as it were, only in a single point, but do not cover each other. (Hegel in Jarvis 1998, 165)

Hegel’s dialectics, Adorno thought, provided a framework within which ‘the protest against any philosophy of identity’ (1997, 120) could be articulated. By ‘reliquifying’ (Adorno 1997, 120) the subject–predicate relation thought to be congealed in Kant’s own epistemology, Hegel did indeed succeed in revealing the contradictions making up the reality and was, as a result, capable of exposing the dependence of ‘what is’ on ‘what is not’, or, as Adorno put it, ‘[i]dentity’s dependence on the nonidentical’ (1997, 120). By turning the object into a negated ‘other’, that is, a definite entity now capable of retaining its character as particular, Hegel also turned the subject–predicate identity into a mere moment in the historical formation of knowledge. Now released from the shackles of eternal identity, the non-identical object can begin to endorse a multiplicity of forms, thus overcoming absolutization and opening up the way for a revival of reason’s subversive tendencies, that is, critical thinking. The treatment of the object as the non-identical, then, serves to free it from the dictates of conceptual universality and, accordingly, precludes the repressive asymmetry arising from the subsumptive function of reason. Hegel’s philosophy, therefore, appears to furnish the conceptual tools for a critique of both identity-thinking and the repressive reality emanating from it.

What allowed Hegel to reliquify the form–content relation was the fact that, contrary to Kant, he saw reason as a historicized form of consciousness called Spirit (Geist). In Hegel’s works, then, the subject enters a formative process taking place through ‘movement, contradiction and negation’ (Schecter 2005, 132)12 to attain its most accomplished form in the objectivity of rational social and political institutions. Reason, here, unlike Kant’s, does not consist of a cognitive faculty employed with the aim of controlling the forces of both internal and external nature. Instead, as objective spirit, it effectively mediates the subject. However, by famously declaring that ‘the real is rational’ and the ‘rational is real’, or affirming that ‘the whole is true’, Hegel significantly narrowed the gap between his own philosophy and Kant’s identity-thinking.

In its formative process, the subject’s development does not limit itself to a mere recognition of the object as other. The dialectical trajectory pursued by the subject does indeed involve yet another negation, which this time consists of the subject’s recognition of itself in that other, or, as Hegel put it, a ‘negation of the negation’. In the Hegelian system of thought, the subject recognizes the socio-political institutions as the objective form of itself, thus ultimately relating to the object as its very own other. Objectivity, therefore, mediates subjectivity only insofar as the former is the rational and self-conscious manifestation of the latter:

the laws give expression to that which each individual is and does; the individual knows them not merely to be what constitutes his universal nature as a ‘thing’, but knows himself, too, in that form, or knows it to be particularised in his own individuality and in each of his fellow-citizens. (Hegel 1961, 377–8)

So for Hegel the universal does not perform a subsumptive role akin to Kant’s mechanical unity,13 but, instead, serves as a medium for the differentiation of the particular. With reason now embodied in the laws of the state (the object), universality no longer imposes itself upon the particular, but instead serves as a medium for the subject to gain consciousness of itself as particularized universal. In order to do so, however, it must first recognize itself in those laws. In this sense, knowledge of the ‘thing’ begins with the discovery of the contradictions and particularities making up the reality (negation), and ends with the subject overcoming those contradictions through the recognition of the negated other as the subject’s externalized self (negation of the negation). For Hegel, then, knowledge is presupposed by a movement steered by the subject itself, namely the movement in thought through which the subject identifies itself with the object, and gives the latter and itself their place within the epistemological totality. In this totality, each element is said to have found its identical other. The subject/form/universal/individual has identified itself with its respective predicate/content/particular/institution. This subject-led process of knowledge formation through differentiation, which Hegel understood as totalizing and absolute, therefore, exhibits similar features to Kant’s identity-thinking. As Adorno pointed out, ‘[e]ven to Hegel, after all, subjectivity is the universal and the total identity’ (1997, 350), in which the particularity of existence begins to gain epistemological significance only ‘in its conveyance to the knowing subject that rediscovers itself’ in the reality (1997, 10). At first glance, then, and in virtue of the fact that the negation of the object as other not only opens up an horizon for a constitution of knowledge steered by the contradictions making up social reality but also recognizes the dependence of knowledge upon the non-identical (thus offering a framework within which the integrity of the object is maintained), Hegel’s conception of the relationship between subject and object does appear to contain the foundations for the development of a non-repressive form of knowledge. However, by proclaiming the possibility of absolute knowledge following the subject’s recognition of the object as its externalized self, Hegel eventually gave primacy to the subject, whose task was to bring a resolution of the aforementioned contradictions and the subsequent classification of the sensuous particulars under a totalizing conceptual apparatus. Consequently, Hegel is forced to make ‘the conscious result of the whole process of negation […] into an absolute’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 24). Critical theory, Adorno argued, should therefore attempt to realize the reflexive potential of determinate negation embodied in Hegel’s thought, whilst aiming to ‘transcend the concept’ (1997, 15).

One is nevertheless justified in asking, at this point, what epistemological alternative to the aforementioned conceptual apparatus Adorno is effectively defending, and which set of institutional forms can be intuited from such an approach. In order to answer the question, one must refer to the hitherto undisclosed first half of the quote regarding his treatment of the concept. There, Adorno recognizes the fact that ‘[p]hilosophy […] must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept’ [my emphasis] (1997, 15). In another chapter of Negative Dialectics, he even admits the following:

The purely particular activity and business of the individual refer to needs which he has as a part of nature, i.e. as a mere existent particular. That even these, its commonest functions, do not come to nothing, but have reality, is brought about by the universal sustaining medium. (1997, 376–7)

Rather than an outright rejection of the concept, then, Adorno’s task involves a re-assessment of its role in knowledge. Above all, in its exercise as a ‘universal sustaining medium’ giving ‘reality’ to the particularity of existence, the concept must be prevented from realizing its absolutizing tendencies. Whilst in Kant’s works the concept’s role as medium manifests itself as a subsumptive force, in Hegel such a role is overshadowed by the concept’s position as telos of knowledge. Thus, whilst its epistemological necessity is recognized, the conceptual apparatus cannot be expected to serve as the dominant or final epistemic moment in the constitution of knowledge. Instead, Adorno suggested, one should expect it to assist the sensuous particulars in their conversion into constitutive components of knowledge, whilst preserving their non-identical character. Within such a process, universality no longer designates, anticipates or absorbs the particular. Instead, it merely unfolds in a symmetrical partnership with the relevant particular; nor does the concept eternalize its bond with sensuous experience. The universal now enters into a situated and non-identical relation with the particular, which no longer restricts the objects to a single possible configuration with concepts. Movement and contradiction can henceforth be preserved. Inspired by Schönberg’s atonal music, which the Frankfurt School member praised for its capacity to reveal the false character of bourgeois societies, and presented as a ‘force which prohibits music from offering comforting consolation’ (Adorno 1973, 42) in a wretched reality, Adorno’s mediated non-identity of subject and object is ultimately aimed at maintaining a constant contrast between ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’, in such a way as to maximize the subversive energies of reflexivity against the reifying and absolutizing tendencies of a subject servicing the ends of self-preservation. It could therefore be suggested that whilst the false and repressive identity of subject and object finds its institutional expression in the ‘centralization of economic and therefore political power’ (Horkheimer 2012, 4), their mediated non-identity points towards a libertarian and pluralist form of politics and a non-hierarchical form of economic practices capable of serving the emancipation of internal nature from the shackles of identity-thinking.14

Whether Adorno is dealing with Kant or Hegel, his diagnosis is clear: idealist epistemology not only elevates the subject (reason) above the object (sense-experience), it is also underpinned by a positivist frame of reference (identity-thinking) precluding the pluralization of thoughts, and ultimately closing up possibilities for authentic self-expression. In response to such repressive epistemic forms – construed as the basis for oppressive and repressive social, political, economic and cultural practices – Adorno undertook a re-assessment of the subject–object relation, whose form, he believed, ought to be defined in terms of ‘affinity’ (Jarvis 1998, 177) rather than unity. Both anti-conceptual and anti-nominalist (Pippin 2005b, 106), Adorno’s epistemological stance attempts to locate the subject–object relation halfway between the objectivism of materialist thought and the subjectivism of idealist philosophies such as Kant’s and Hegel’s. In sum, therefore, the epistemological project defended by the critical theory of Adorno aims to reconcile humanity (reason) and nature (senses) through their mediated non-identity. The following section shall explore the implications of such a relation for the nature of mediation involved in reconciliation.

From instrumental to aesthetic rationality

In his attempt to conceptualize the foundations of a form of knowledge underpinned by a mediated non-identity of subject and object, Adorno exposed what he believed to be a rationality of a non-instrumental form. As he consistently, and rather convincingly, demonstrated in both Negative Dialectics (1997) and Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1997), identity-thinking is characterized by a concept of reason which has lost its capacity to realize the critical and expressive nature of individuals, and merely subjects them to the imperatives of universality. Whether subsumptive or totalizing, the bureaucratization of the social reality engendered by identity-thinking eventually turns reason into an instrument geared towards the domination of both external and internal nature, thereby preventing individuals qua producers and consumers from engaging in authentic and creative forms of self-expression. Reason, in this sense, no longer serves individuals in their quest for autonomy. Its motives are those of the preservation of the self under the authority of economic facts. Adorno, however, wished to cultivate reason’s critical orientations and reconcile the individual with society. He thought such a state of affairs to be realizable only through the mediated non-identity of subject and object.

At first glance, Adorno’s call for a reflexive form of rationality presents little differences with Kant’s ‘practical reason’. Both thinkers did indeed place a strong emphasis on the role played by reason in autonomous reflection. Adorno, however, takes issue with Kant regarding the nature of the mediation involved in such a process. Indeed, as was shown above, Kant understands autonomy in terms of ‘freedom from self-incurred tutelage [my emphasis]’, where reason is primarily employed to both preserve the self against the so-called chaotic world of objects by ordering it and exerting control over natural forces, rather than as a medium for the actual realization of the self through the emancipation of both a sensuous and cognitive internal nature from repression. This critique of both reason as a ‘causal necessity’ (Pippin 2005a, 114)15 and its development into an instrumental form has been presented by Adorno as deeply problematic:

[R]eason constitutes the court of judgment of calculation, which adjusts the world for the ends of self-preservation and recognizes no function other than the preparation of the object from the mere sensory material in order to make it the material of subjugation. (Adorno 1997, 83–4)

By presenting reason as a transcendental faculty effectively imposing its authority over natural forces, and assigning the concept the function of determining the senses (Adorno 1997, 89) in order to ‘cope most proficiently with the facts’, Kant developed a form of reflexivity founded upon reactive self-subjugation and the superiority of conceptual universality (subjective forces) over sensuous particularity (objective forces). In virtue of its role in preserving the self through manipulation, reason is here said to assume an instrumental form. As Adorno sought to emphasize, Kant effectively conceptualized epistemic conditions for the development of the mediation of humanity and nature by instrumental reason into a subsumptive process leading to the repressive and permanent resolution of the contradictory forces making up individuals’ existence – a subsumption which Nietzsche (2000) had already called into question in his critique of modernity’s tendencies to favour the release of Apollonian energies over Dionysian ones and Schiller depicted as the identity of the ‘sense-drive’ and ‘form-drive’ turning into a source of ‘constraint and violence’ (Schiller 1967, 119). Inspired by these thinkers’ observations and Max Weber’s own critique of bureaucracy, Adorno sought to condemn the spread of orientations succeeding ‘in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation’ (Weber 1978, 975), for they significantly limit the scope for free and authentic self-expression.16

With Hegel, on the other hand, one finds the potential to recognize the contradictions making up social reality in the process of reflection’s dependence of ‘what is’ on ‘what is not’. Here reason is indeed said to emerge as the result of a historical process of determinate negation within which the object is assigned a constitutive function. Such a function, however, only emerges as a moment in the subject’s formative process – as a negation to be superseded by an additional one. The fact that the object can expect to mediate the subject only following the latter’s recognition of the former as its externalized self presupposes that in its final developmental stage, that is, as reason, reflexivity loses, once again, its critical function. As a self-conscious subject, the individual merely recognizes the whole as true, the real as rational, and is thus left with a contemplative form of reflexivity in which reason accommodates the differentiated needs of each individual to the totalized, that is, non-contradictory, reality. Thus, in virtue of their ulterior indifference towards the spontaneity and particularity of sense-experience, both the Kantian and Hegelian form of identity-thinking could be said to find their most complete institutional expression in a heavily regimented system of administration ‘that leaves the individual only enough spontaneity to launch himself onto the path prescribed for him’ (Horkheimer 2012, 4).

Adorno, who praised Hegel for presenting reason as a moment, nevertheless wishes to preserve the ‘negative’ or ‘non-identical’ stage of reflection in such a way as to give the spontaneity of human existence its due in reflexivity. In this sense he, like Goethe (1989) before him, wishes to upgrade the senses, which both Enlightenment and bourgeois philosophy have subsumed under the universalist rule of cognitive faculties. Reason, Adorno believed, can retain its critical-subversive character only by giving sensuous experience the means to direct the process of reflection. His epistemological stance is therefore aimed at stripping knowledge of its reifying and absolutizing tendencies and, as such, points towards a political and economic form that is not only pluralist, but that also corresponds to an institutional framework sufficiently flexible or decentralized to allow individuals to make decisions on the basis of both their cognitive and sensuous faculties, that is, libertarianism.17 Such a form of reflexivity, he further argued, unfolds in what he called the ‘aesthetic feeling’:

Aesthetic feeling is not what is being aroused in us. It is more like a sense of wonderment in the presence of what we behold; a sense of being overwhelmed in the presence of a phenomenon that is nonconceptual while at the same time being determinate. The arousal of subjective effect by art is the last thing we should want to dignify with the name of aesthetic feeling. True aesthetic feeling is oriented to the object; it is the feeling of the object, not some reflex in the viewer. (Adorno 1984, 236)

In virtue of his or her capacity to experience the aesthetic feeling, the artist is in a position to grasp the moment of affinity between concepts and sensuous particulars, and preserve their non-identity, through what Adorno called ‘mimesis’. Schiller also claimed that ‘it is only through Beauty’ and the mimetically mediated reconciliation of the ‘form-drive’ and ‘sense-drive’ through the ‘play-drive’ it entails that ‘man makes his way to Freedom’ (1967, 9). Whilst, in his call for a mimetic reconciliation of reason and the natural inclinations of the will, Adorno is claiming to negate instrumental rationality with ‘what it is not’, he is not effectively exposing the dynamics of an entirely new form of rationality. As Jarvis pointed out:

Negative Dialectics […] does not recommend an ‘aestheticized reason’, but is giving an account of what reason is like. Reason cannot avoid being aesthetic, in the minimal sense that its concepts are all entangled with experience, rather than being rigid atoms of designation. Mimesis itself is a kind of rationality for Adorno […] (1998, 178)

Adorno’s mimetic mediation of the subject and the object cultivates the aesthetic moment of reflection, and turns it into the very fabric of emancipatory criticism. Through mimesis, then, rationality preserves the moment of the non-identical as a situated and symmetrical partnership between a concept and a particular, and eventually serves as an outlet for the channelling of the plurality of sensuous experience into social criticism, the outcome of which assumes the form of what Adorno called ‘constellation thinking’.

In his adaptation of Benjamin’s idea that concepts are mere arrangements of concrete phenomena within a particular representative configuration (Benjamin 1998, 34–5), Adorno’s constellations aim to accommodate the pluralistic character of sensuous experience with the conceptual character of human cognition. By allowing the object to gain a constitutive function sui generis, constellations can form a framework loose enough to yield expressive potential to the spontaneity of natural inclinations and provide a basis for the emancipation of a non-essentializable sensuous and cognitive internal nature.18 As such, constellations are thought processes that capture the movement of the objective reality and, for this reason, consist of a form of knowledge capable of accommodating the rapidly changing character of aesthetic impulses. Adorno therefore concluded that in advanced capitalist societies the only individuals capable of mimetically mediating the subject and the object are the artists, for in a work of art, the artist can channel his or her sensuous energies into the negation of the existing reality embodying a singular and alternative affinity between a particular and its universal. Without a ‘unifying moment’, however, sensuous particulars would find no affinity with the cognitive faculties and be precluded a conversion into the material of critique. Without such an affinity, no order in society would be possible either. Thus, even in non-identity thinking ‘the unifying moment survives’, but rather than causing concepts to ‘progress step by step to a more universal cover-concept’, it brings them ‘into a constellation’, where ‘what is specific in the object’ (Adorno in Jarvis 1998, 176–7) is brought to the fore, and the formation of, as Goethe himself put it, ‘many more relationships and affinities […] at present unknown to us’ (1994, 195) remains a constant possibility. Achieved through mimesis, this Goethean-esque ‘elective affinity’ does not involve a subject seeking to master the object (Kant) or the absorption of the latter into the former (Hegel), but can, instead, expect to constitute a basis for constellation thinking ‘only on the condition that the subject could accept what is other to it as other’ (Adorno in Jarvis 1998, 188). Implicit in Adorno’s work, therefore, is a notion of order without a centre corresponding to a particular attitude towards the world exemplified by the artist, and ultimately aimed at contesting the authority of bureaucratically administered economic facts.

Furthermore, since, through mimesis, the autonomous19 artist is in a position to negate the existing, albeit false, reality and explore ‘new’ affinities between subject and object, autonomous works of art are thought to embody both a critical and utopian character:

One of the crucial antinomies of art today is that it wants to be and must be squarely Utopian, as social reality increasingly impedes Utopia, while at the same time it should not be Utopian so as not to be found guilty of administering comfort and illusion. (Adorno 1984, 47)

The mimesis-negation matrix defended by Adorno is therefore geared towards the exposition of a tension between an existing/actual and a possible reality, whilst remaining within the realm of immanence. A degree of utopianism, then, is accepted only to the extent that it can serve individuals to accept ‘what is other to it as other’, and not drive them into the false and complacent security of a purely ideal world-to-be. Through the contemplation and creation of works of art crafted independently of the profit principle and market rationality, then, one discovers ‘pure and uncompromised’ contradictions which both reveal ‘that it is not ideology itself which is untrue but rather its pretension to correspond to reality’, and open up possibilities for thinking in terms of alternatives (Adorno 1984, 32). Thus, drawing his inspiration from Bloch’s work, Adorno argued that the possibility for a utopian moment understood as the contrast between the ‘badly existing’ and the ‘Not-Yet-Become’ (Bloch 1986, 148) persists. Orientations towards a ‘world which is more adequate for us, without degrading suffering, anxiety, self-alienation, nothingness’ (Bloch 1986, 18) are nevertheless presupposed by a ‘Not-Yet-Conscious’ having to become ‘conscious in its act, known in its content, as the process of dawning on the one hand, as what is dawning on the other’ (Bloch 1986, 144). Whilst such a ‘forward dawning’ (Bloch 1986, 137) can only be unleashed once history no longer acts as a ‘socio-economic barrier to vision’ (Bloch 1986, 130), autonomous art, especially in Adorno’s case, is said to provide the adequate impulse for (a) revealing the false unity of the universal and the particular embodied in Enlightenment and bourgeois thinking and materialized in the institutions of advanced capitalism, (b) mediating the non-identity of subject and object and (c) ultimately opening up an horizon of alternative relationships between the individual and society, or, put differently, a totality which does not presuppose the repression of internal nature and the domination of external nature.

According to Adorno, the failures of Marx’s critique of political economy lay precisely in its inability to approach utopia in the aforementioned manner. The Frankfurt School member insisted that since, instead of limiting his efforts to an attempt at revealing existing contradictions and preserving the autonomy of culture in his historical materialist perspective, Marx aimed to resolve the former and dissolve the latter, he was forced to turn his own thought ‘into a challenge to change the world instead of interpreting it’, and ultimately failed to overcome the ‘arch-bourgeois […] program of an absolute control of nature’ (Adorno 1997, 244). As such, he also failed to appreciate the problems associated with the move from negation to affirmation through the positive unity of subject and object, and ignored the potentially transformative role of the ‘reflection of the mind on its own failures’ (Adorno 1984, 32). After all:

Cultural criticism is […] only able to reproach culture so penetratingly for prostituting itself, for violating in its decline the pure autonomy of the mind, because culture originates in the radical separation of mental and physical work. It is from this separation, the original sin as it were, that culture draws its strength. (Adorno 1984, 26)

By vacillating between an immanent (revealing contradictions) and transcendent (utopian) critique of culture, Adorno claims to safeguard critical theory not only against contemplation and illusion respectively but also against the vain and potentially pernicious attempt of seeking to uncover the seeds of emancipation through the critique of political economy alone. As the very source of the aforementioned ‘original sin’, and in contrast with the function of autonomous works of art, labour, Adorno claimed, can no longer be expected to serve as a medium for the reconciliation of humanity and nature. Advanced capitalist societies do indeed deny the majority of workers the possibility of employing their mental faculties in labour. As a primarily ‘physical’ – and therefore one-dimensional – sphere of activity geared towards the mastery of nature by humanity under the capitalist division of labour, labour remains a sphere exclusively confined to the rule of instrumental reason and, as a result, cannot constitute the target of a critique aimed at revealing contradictions making up social reality. Why then should culture constitute a more appropriate site of crisis and struggle?

Adorno defended his own approach to culture for two main reasons. A first reason, partly revealed in the passage above, regards his own critique of Marx’s base-superstructure schema. On the one hand, he believed that ‘[b]y transferring the notion of causality directly from the realm of physical nature to society, it [Marx’s critique of political economy] falls back behind its own object’ (Adorno 1984, 34), as it eventually turns the very conditions it sought to problematize into (immutable) natural laws. On the other hand, the somewhat unilateral logic of causality employed by Marx led him to ignore the possibility of, and necessity for, autonomous works of art and the liberating potential of culture itself. The second and correlated reason regards the relationship between theory and practice. Marx and Marxists are keen to emphasize the role of practice, but Adorno contends that

[t]he trouble with this view is that it results in the prohibition of thinking. Very little is needed to turn the resistance against repression repressively against those who – little as they might wish to glorify their state of being – do not desert the standpoint that they have come to occupy. The often evoked unity of theory and praxis has a tendency to give way to the predominance of praxis. (Adorno 1991, 199)

Adorno’s defence of cultural criticism, then, aims to both preserve critique as the central instrument of resistance and protect it, as well as society, against the potentially repressive character of a form of practice incapable of involving a ‘reflection of the mind on its own failures’.20 Combined with the firm belief that ‘[a]t the present moment, no higher form of society is concretely visible’ (Adorno 1991, 202), his claim that ‘[t]he Utopian impulse in thinking is all the stronger, the less it objectifies itself in Utopia’ not only echoes Bloch’s (1986) own warning against a form of utopia construed as a purely ‘subjective factor’ (1986, 148) but also provides a clear indication of Adorno’s own expectations for critical theory. Rather than postulating the transformation of society as its primary goal, the form of non-identity thinking advocated by the Frankfurt School member appears to restrict the scope of critical theory to the confines of aporetic resistance. However, the depiction of Marx’s own critique of political economy as one reproducing the shortcomings of German idealism, and upon which Adorno relies for the justification of such goals, rests on a somewhat restricted understanding of the former philosopher’s work. Indeed, whereas Adorno believed that Marx’s critique of political economy failed to reach beyond the narrow confines of the domination of nature, it was shown in the previous chapter that his approach to labour could pave the way for the mediated non-identity of subject and object, thereby giving rise to free, spontaneous, creative and generally authentic practices, whose development Adorno confined to autonomous art. Once such a re-assessment of Marx’s early works has been undertaken, one can both begin to appreciate the closer affinity between his own stance and Adorno’s and initiate the task of anticipating the possibility for emancipation beyond the realm of art. In fact, it could be suggested that whilst Marx’s own contrast between alienated labour (‘what is’) and free labour (‘what is not’) provides elements of a more ambitious utopian programme than the Frankfurt School he himself wished to defend, it can make a valuable contribution to critical theory by consolidating its transformative potential, without compromising its key tenets. Indeed, the non-ontological approach to nature (Schmidt 1971), which Marx’s concept of labour as self-realization entails, makes it possible to revise critical theory in such a way as to include a concept of practice which ‘already contains within itself the moment of what Adorno calls nonidentity‘ (Vogel 1996, 96) and to give recognition to the fact that humanity’s relationship with nature, and any alteration thereof, effectively rests on ‘particular and historically varying sets of social practices’ (Vogel 1996, 134). Having reached a stage of capitalism under which the rule of instrumental reason has become so total, the consideration of theoretically informed conditions for a generalized (social, political, economic and cultural) emancipatory practice standing in opposition to the reifying, absolutizing and homogenizing tendencies of existing economic and socio-political institutions is in fact more pressing than ever.

Concluding remarks

Drawing its inspiration from Adorno’s own views on Kant’s epistemology, the critique of knowledge formulated here sought to expose the limitations and problems emanating from the Enlightenment thinker’s attempt to mediate humanity and nature through reason. It has been shown that by prioritizing cognitive faculties in the constitution of knowledge, his epistemology effectively paved the way for the development of a logic of domination of nature by humanity, which Hegel himself fell short of overcoming, and finding its institutional forms in the economic and socio-political institutions making up advanced capitalist societies. The spread of a form of reason, that is, instrumental reason, causing individuals to internalize self-sacrifice can therefore be traced back to (a) the degradation of sensuous faculties in the form of autonomy promoted by identity-thinking and (b) the domination of key (economic, political and cultural) practices by a refined division of labour, a productivist market rationality and bureaucratic rules and regulations geared towards the efficient accumulation of capital and severely restricting the scope for free and authentic self-expression. An epistemological project aimed at reconciling humanity and nature and inspired, once again, by Adorno’s own critique of idealist philosophy and positivist epistemology could therefore offer epistemic conditions favourable for both the emancipation of internal nature from the reifying and absolutizing tendencies of identity-thinking and the formation of non-repressive institutions. It was nevertheless argued that in order to take critical theory beyond the narrow and merely contemplative realm of aporetic resistance, the non-identity of subject and object corresponding to the aforementioned reconciliation ought to be mediated by a transformative activity conceptualized by Marx in his early works and potentially capable of giving rise to an emancipatory-aesthetic form of rationality, namely labour as self-realization. Such a task, however, entails rethinking critical theory’s own stance towards the conceptual elaboration of institutional forms capable of yielding emancipatory practice. As such, it also prompts a re-evaluation of its scope, which the next chapter shall aim to tackle explicitly.

Notes

1  Adorno’s claim that a classical German idealism like Kant’s is the philosophical manifestation of bourgeois society is, according to Robert Pippin, not given sufficient justification in the member of the Frankfurt School’s works. Due to space limitations, this chapter shall not attempt to address such a debate. It shall indeed accept Adorno’s immanent criticism of idealism as the epistemological counterpart of his critique of bourgeois society at face value. However, for an exposition of Pippin’s argument, see his chapter on Adorno in The Persistence of Subjectivity (2005b).

2  Under conditions of self-preservation, reason no longer assists individuals in their attempt to formulate conceptions of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or reflect on what ought or ought not to be. These concerns are said to have been replaced by a quest for certainty about the world, through its manipulation.

3  In the preface of this work, Kant insisted that his epistemology revolved around a ‘critical distinction of the two modes of representation (the sensible and the intellectual) and the consequent limitations of the conceptions of the pure understanding, and the principles which follow from them’ (Kant 1855, xxxiv).

4  According to Kant, objects can be known only as they appear to us in space and time. For this particular reason, one can never claim to know such objects ‘in themselves’.

5  One may recall, here, Adorno’s own phrase ‘sovereignty of the object’ cited in ‘Subject and Object’ (1982) from which the phrase above is borrowed.

6  Here, Adorno is actually making a criticism applicable to the idealism of both Kant and Hegel.

7  This term was used by Adorno to emphasize the centrality of subjectivity in the constitution of experience in Kant’s works and to be distinguished from the constitutum – a term used to denote the passivity of the Kantian object.

8  Adorno named such a take on the conception of truth a ‘residual theory of truth’.

9  Adorno followed this observation by noting that ‘this strange idea of the truth as something lasting and enduring somehow always appears where urban exchange societies have developed’ (1959, 26). For him, therefore, one could find in Kant’s works the epistemological equivalent to the bourgeois institutions flourishing under modernity.

10  A similarity with Marx can be observed here. Indeed, both thinkers understood autonomy as the emancipation of both mental and physical capacities.

11  Pippin is here referring to the section entitled ‘Transcendental Deduction’ in Kant’s second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.

12  In the final chapter, I shall attempt to show why and how such a process could be given both intellectual and material expression by a re-organization of economic and political life into consumer councils and producer guilds.

13  Worth reminding here is the fact that, as Pippin (2005a) argued, Kant’s understanding of the subject–object unity assumes this ‘mechanical’ form in most of the passages of the Critique of Pure Reason, whereas the ‘organic unity’ appears confined to the second edition ‘Transcendental Deduction’.

14  It will be shown below that the libertarianism in question is of a socialist, rather than conservative, form.

15  In this work, Pippin also attempts to separate Adorno’s claims from the actual content of Kant’s thought. He concluded that, contrary to Adorno’s interpretation of Kant, the latter understands the employment of reason as a derivative of a practical – not causal – necessity. In other words, individuals acting rationally do so on the basis of strictly normative compulsions, rather than as an attempt to free themselves from their conditions as ‘natural animals’. I do contend, however, that Pippin tends to abstract Kant’s claims from the historical conditions under which they were made. In order to understand fully the Kantian dynamics of reason, his philosophical claims should be read within the context of the Enlightenment, namely as a part of a current of thought advocating humanity’s freedom from the fetters of nature and tradition. In this sense, reason becomes an instrument at the disposal of humanity in its quest for freedom from physical and traditional constraints through the control of natural forces and rational questioning of the established socio-political order.

16  Culture, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is not immune from the spread of such orientations. They were in fact a key object of analysis in their critique of the ‘culture industry’, whose main tenets will be exposed in Chapter 6.

17  It is worth noting here that the Frankfurt School members’ own experiences under fascist Germany, and their ensuing distrust of the state, have led them to develop clearly visible, albeit often unacknowledged, affinities with anarchist and libertarian socialist thought. Their critique of centralized forms of control from an epistemological standpoint could indeed be said to complement pre-existing anarchist and libertarian socialist political economic critiques.

18  Adorno could be said, here, to anticipate non-essentialist approaches to human nature found in later developments within the social sciences such as sociology and anthropology.

19  The term ‘autonomous’ was often used by Adorno to refer to artists and works of art that are not subjected to the imperative of capital accumulation or, put differently, that do not ‘resolve[…] objective contradictions in a spurious harmony’ but ‘express[…] the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contractions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure’ (Adorno 1967, 32).

20  Such a view is echoed in Adorno’s ambivalence towards the 1968 protests. Indeed, although he was sympathetic to the cause, he condemned the violent character assumed by the protests.

3

Realizing the transformative potential of critical theory

The previous two chapters revealed the affinity between Marx’s concept of labour as self-realization and the first-generation critical theory’s own approach to emancipation, whilst emphasizing the practical role free labour could be expected to play in mediating humanity and nature in such a way as to emancipate the former from the shackles of a form of self-preservation underpinned by the imperatives of both instrumental reason and capitalist production. In this chapter, I shall seek to demonstrate that despite first-generation critical theorists’ own reticence towards the formulation of a concrete alternative, and their intention to limit the scope of their critique of advanced capitalist societies to the dialectical negation of ‘what is’, elements comprised in their formulation of the expected achievements of the principle of negativity effectively contain the potential for aligning some of their key diagnostic observations with a particular set of alternative institutions. To this end, I shall mainly concentrate on Marcuse’s own works, which, despite several limitations, provided some of the key conceptual tools capable of realizing critical theory’s potential beyond the narrow confines of aporetic resistance.

Rethinking the task of critical theory: The premises

In line with one of Adorno’s central goals, Marcuse wished to elaborate a ‘mode of thought capable of [both] piercing the ideology’ and resisting the technological domination produced by a society founded upon an asymmetry between humanity and (both internal and external) nature (Marcuse 1987, 451). In order to achieve such a goal, Marcuse, again like Adorno, founded part of his critical theory upon Hegel’s ‘determinate negation’. However, several of his works indicate that, in contrast with Adorno, he believed in the possibility of supplanting the existing socio-political institutions with new, non-repressive ones.1 As a result, Marcuse could not accept the limitations imposed upon critical theory by his fellow member of the Frankfurt School,2 and therefore more explicitly engaged with the task of identifying the ways in which the critical content of theory could inform a form of political action oriented towards radical change.

Marcuse began his attempt to rethink the practical content of critical theory by proceeding with a return to the works of Hegel. Although he clearly praised Hegel for the same reasons as Adorno had before him, that is for uncovering the reliance of ‘what is’ on ‘what is not’, and coming up with a ‘tool for analysing the world of facts in terms of its internal inadequacy’ (Marcuse 1987, 445), Marcuse did so with the aim of ‘comprehending the reality whole’ (Marcuse 1987, 451). As he put it:

[Hegel’s negative philosophy] starts with the concepts that grasp reality as a multitude of objective things, simply ‘being,’ free from any subjectivity. They are qualitatively and quantitatively connected with each other, and the analysis of these connections hits upon relations that can no longer be interpreted in terms of objective qualities and quantities but requires principles and forms of thought that negate the traditional concepts of being and reveal the subject to be the very substance of reality. (1955, 65)

The passage seems to suggest that, whilst the first-phase negation remains a key moment in revealing the contradictions making up social reality, it can only perform a limited role in the wider and more ambitious project of social transformation. According to Marcuse, the prospects for the realization of the latter project effectively depend on individuals’ capacity to grasp social reality as the product of human action, or as a ‘multitude of objective things’ that are not ‘free from any subjectivity’, thereby piercing the veil of reification. By revealing the subject as the ‘very substance of [the total] reality’, the second-phase negation thus offers a basis for ‘mastering reality through self-conscious practice’ (Marcuse 1955, 110). Armed with this mode of thought, individuals are said to be in a position to grasp ‘reality [as] realization’ (Marcuse 1987, 446). It is therefore not surprising to find Marcuse praising Hegel for providing a highly valuable approach to the relationship between individuals and social reality, and the eventual implementation of social change. One can therefore observe, here, a striking contrast with Adorno’s own stance towards Hegelian philosophy and the task of critical theory as a whole. Indeed, instead of limiting the latter to the mediated non-identity of subject and object, Marcuse’s object ought to appear to the collective subject as a known totality whose contradictions it can now aim to resolve.

Despite frequently praising Hegel’s ‘determinate negation’ for both its critical and transformative potentials, Marcuse noted a significant problem with the idealist philosopher’s own system of thought. Although Hegel provided a framework within which one could both identify and potentially resolve the contradictions making up social reality, he reduced the moment of ‘absolute freedom’ to a process of self-reflection, thereby taking ‘refuge in the pure mind’ (Marcuse 1955, 92). It thus follows that whilst the subject can become conscious of a contradiction caused by a phenomenon such as estrangement in labour, it can only expect to resolve it by ‘reflecting into its own self in and from its other’ (Hegel 1961, 80–1), that is, as a purely intellectual exercise reduced to the discovery of the subject in the object, thus leaving the material conditions causing alienation unchanged. With the role of resolution (as self-consciousness) assigned to the mind, then, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (1961) and his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1991) could only be expected to serve as a defence of a ‘reconciliation with the prevailing system’ (Marcuse 1955, 92) rather than a call for its transformation. For this reason, Marcuse turned to Marx’s critique of alienated labour, which, as was shown above, was partly elaborated as a critique of Hegel’s idealism. As the member of the Frankfurt School put it:

Insight into objectification as insight into the historical and social situation of man reveals the historical conditions of this situation and so achieves the practical force and concrete form through which it can become the lever of the revolution. We can also understand how far questions concerning the origin of estrangement and insight into the origin of private property must be an integrating element in a positive theory of revolution. (1972, 35)

Whilst Hegel’s dialectical thought was capable of uncovering contradictions, it could only be expected to resolve them theoretically, through the subject’s discovery of itself as substance of the reality. The subject, in other words, could only proceed with an insight into itself. The real, objective conditions for a phenomenon such as alienation, therefore, could not be identified, let alone be superseded, by adopting a strictly Hegelian stance. With Marx’s critique of the ‘vital activity’ through which individuals transform both nature and themselves, that is, labour, ‘relations of things and “natural” laws’ appear as ‘relations of men and historical forces’ (Marcuse 1955, 112), thereby allowing for contradictions to be uncovered. In the process, though, are also revealed the practical, objective and material origins of such contradictions. Marx, then, endowed critique with the insight required to turn it into a ‘practical force’. As Marcuse himself put it, ‘insight [into objectification] is no mere theoretical cognition or arbitrary, passive intuition, but praxis: the supersession of what exists’ (Marcuse 1972, 34–5). What is implied by the elaboration of a theory aimed at informing revolutionary action, then, is the notion that critique draws its practical potential from the fact that it grounds contradictions in objective conditions of existence. Marcuse’s combination of Hegel’s discovery of the subject and Marx’s insight into objectification as a basis for a transformative critique was nevertheless formulated on the basis of a firm belief in the historical emergence of a self-conscious subject, the core limitations of which will now be exposed.

Conscious of the specific problems that a highly rationalized and affluent society is likely to cause to the prospects of revolutionary emancipation, Marcuse (1964) no longer thought that the proletariat would be in a position to serve the interests of society as a whole. As a result, he questioned the relevance of Marx’s theory of revolution and anticipated the emergence of a collective subject no longer confined to the economic sphere. According to him, ‘Marx’s concept of labour has led far beyond the economic sphere’ (Marcuse 1972, 14). Alienation, oppression and exploitation have developed into conditions of existence that can no longer be confined to a particular economic group, but have in fact become the very ‘forms of life’ (Marcuse 1987, 450) that a new subject would come to negate through the self-conscious re-appropriation of the world of objects. However, whilst the correlation between a critique of labour and the collective interest of the working class in taking part in revolutionary action was somewhat self-evident, a difficulty arises when one attempts to find such a correlation between diverse forms of resistance resulting from generalized conditions of existence and collective action. This is probably what led Marcuse to rely on an eventual and nebulous structural change or ‘shifting situation’ (Marcuse 1969a, 53). Like Marx, then, he identified several tendencies3 indicating advanced capitalism’s move towards self-destruction and the emergence of a free society. However, unlike Marx, who by presenting the proletariat as the ‘universal class’ had provided an explanation for the translation of conscious experiences of alienation, oppression and exploitation into the material of collective action, Marcuse did not explore the mechanisms whereby individual experiences of negation and resistance could be translated into wider, collective ones (Bernstein 1988, 24–5), thereby leaving the medium through which the bearers of change can gain consciousness of their mutual interests unaccounted for. Even his latest work, entitled The Aesthetic Dimension, in which he exposed art’s role in revealing the ‘exemplary fate of individuals’ (Marcuse 1978, xi), presented little evidence of any intention to explain how the so-called truths of art can become the very substance of a collective experience. Stripped of a theory of class, the fate of change is, as a result, forced to rely on a somewhat providential revolutionary consciousness.4

Furthermore, whilst Marcuse’s revision of Marx’s theory of revolution imposes real limitations upon the elaboration of a critical theory capable of justifying the emergence of a self-conscious subject engaging in revolutionary practice, it shall also be contended here that no resolution of the theory–practice riddle can be found until the wider issue of revolution-as-practice itself is re-assessed. Marcuse’s critical social theory has been founded upon the presupposition that radical change is both possible and necessarily preceded by an ‘explosion’ of society (1964, xv), beginning with the ‘Great Refusal’ and culminating in revolutionary action. The risks of adopting such a standpoint, however, consist in allowing theory to treat revolutionary practice or civil disobedience as an end instead of a means. Indeed, by failing to anticipate the institutional framework likely to emerge in the aftermath of such an explosion, critical theory effectively displaces its expectations onto a form of practice limited to the destruction of the existing social relations, thus leaving other avenues for the implementation of radical change unaccounted for and, more crucially, failing to protect action against a potentially pernicious opportunism rising out of the ashes of repression and blossoming out of a system lacking the institutional maturity to produce non-oppressive social relations.5 Marcuse’s reliance on practice-as-destruction, therefore, contributed to the elaboration of a critical theory aimed at both informing a reductionist, shortsighted and hazardous form of political action and increasing the likelihood of reducing the radicalism of social criticism to a merely destructive function with potentially pernicious consequences.6

Finally, despite Marcuse’s apparent concern for social transformation, his reliance on the eventual emergence of a self-conscious revolutionary subject ultimately caused him to favour theory over practice:

Since the established universe of discourse is that of an unfree world, dialectical thought is necessarily destructive, and whatever liberation it may bring is a liberation in thought, in theory. However, the divorce of thought from action, of theory from practice, is itself part of the unfree world. No thought and no theory can undo it; but theory may help to prepare the ground for their possible reunion, and the ability of thought to develop a logic and language of contradiction is a prerequisite for this task. (1987, 449)

‘Liberation in thought’, then, constitutes a central component of the task of critical theory set out by both Adorno and Marcuse. However, whilst the former warned against the ‘barbarism’ of praxis and, consequently, favoured ‘open-thinking’ above concerns regarding the translation of theory into political action, the latter supported political action but defended the ‘development of a logic and language of contradiction’, that is, dialectical negation, as the most immediate concern for critical theorists. Such a central function assigned to dialectical negation is defended by both thinkers on the grounds that the nature of the ‘unfree world’ is such that no unity of theory and practice is possible under its auspices. Whilst Adorno’s pessimism regarding the prospects of social change could explain such a stance, Marcuse’s emphasis on the primacy of dialectical negation was justified on the basis of his firm belief in the eventual emergence of a collective revolutionary subject. Such an asymmetry between theory and practice nevertheless raises several issues regarding the prospects of elaborating a form of critique aimed at social transformation. Indeed, in the case of Marcuse’s particular emphasis on the preparatory function of theory, not only does it involve a reliance on both providential change and a form of action potentially incapable of yielding sustainable social and institutional changes, it also fails to safeguard critical theory against a fall into contemplation. Critical theory must therefore attempt to transcend the restrictive interpretation of its own role as theoretical resistance to advanced capitalism and be prepared to accept challenging its institutions with concrete proposals oriented towards the implementation of an economic, political and social form lying somewhere beyond the existing reality, for example, social democratic and neoliberal institutional models, and the ‘Great Refusal’. Whilst Marcuse’s ‘language of contradiction’ may succeed in revealing the internal inadequacies of advanced capitalism, it falls short of arming critical theory with the practical orientations required to turn it into a language effectively contradicting the existing reality in constructive terms. In order to overcome such limitations, I shall contend that critical theory ought to be revised in such a way as to complement its diagnostic orientations with an insight into alternative economic and socio-political institutions capable of institutionalizing emancipatory practice. In other words, the language of contradiction must no longer limit itself to a mere rejection of existing values and institutional forms, but must begin to challenge it with sufficiently radical and constructive demands in order to meet the expectations of a form of critical theory oriented towards the reconciliation of humanity and nature. In the following section, I shall seek to explore the conditions under which such demands could be met.

Rethinking the promises of dialectical negation

The principle of negativity underpins both Adorno’s and Marcuse’s critical theories. The role assigned by Adorno to his negative dialectics consisted in capturing the inherently contradictory character veiled by a reified, totalized and absolutized social reality or, put differently, in revealing the ‘false’ and irrational character of a social reality immediately appearing as ‘true’ and rational. With the capacity to grasp the reliance of ‘what is’ on ‘what is not’, he thought, the individual would be in a position to denaturalize the existing state of affairs, re-assess his or her relation to society and eventually resist the institutional repression resulting from the spread of instrumental reason and the authority of economic facts. By applying the principle of negativity, then, individuals would become capable of apprehending what appeared to them as (a) the only possible relation between themselves and the wider social reality, and (b) the only possible mediation between humanity and nature, as one configuration among various others, and eventually discover alternative ways of organizing social life. Negative dialectics, therefore, equips individuals with the theoretical material to cease accepting the reality as it immediately appears to them by opening up an horizon of possibilities, albeit without the anticipation of a concrete political alternative. Adorno’s pessimism regarding the prospects of generalized social change, combined with his reticence to both reflect on the possibilities for the development of a collective programme for political action (Buck-Morss 1977) and anticipate alternative institutional forms, could in fact explain why he limited the scope of negative dialectics to a theoretical resistance against the existing state of affairs and runs the risk of reducing the role assigned to the revelation of contradictions to a sort of protective, albeit atomized, intellectual shield against institutional repression.

Marcuse, however, appeared to hold higher expectations for dialectical negation. The negation of existing social reality, he thought, would eventually give rise to a new form of society. Thus, although he believed that to ‘tread on alien ground, external to the theory’ (Marcuse 1972, 4–5) would involve distracting critical theory away from the more pressing task of piercing the veil of reification, he maintained that the revelation of contradictions within the existing social order would eventually serve as a basis for revolutionary action:

The negation is determinate if it refers the established state of affairs to the basic factors and forces which make for its destructiveness, as well as for the possible alternatives beyond the status quo. In the human reality, they are historical factors and forces, and the determinate negation is ultimately a political negation. (Marcuse 1987, 449)

Negation is political inasmuch as the revelation of contradictions does not merely consist of a contrast between ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’, but sets up a conception of ‘what ought to be’ in opposition to the ‘what is’. For Marcuse, then, dialectical negation does not limit itself to the revelation of contradictions, but is a process whereby the subject also strives to realize existing potentialities. It is a ‘state of privation that forces the subject to seek remedy’; one endowed, as Marcuse claimed, with a ‘positive character’ (1955, 66). In fact Hegel, who was the first to capture the movement of ‘spirit’ through dialectical negation, had himself pointed out that ‘the externalisation of self-consciousness has not merely negative, but positive significance’ (1961, 789). In virtue of its positive character, then, dialectical negation cannot be expected to limit itself to the mere knowledge of the existence of human potentialities, but is effectively thought to drive individuals towards their realization. Despite the problematic aspect of his concept of practice exposed in the previous section of this chapter, Marcuse offers an approach to negativity intrinsically compatible with the challenge of ‘what is’ with a reality that ‘ought to be’. In Marcuse’s works one can, therefore, find a reconstructive component of dialectical negation, whose political potential, I contend, could be fully realized through the anticipation of alternative economic and socio-political institutions capable of framing emancipatory practice.7

One is here nevertheless justified in asking exactly how Marcuse himself expected to realize dialectical negation’s potential without ‘treading on alien ground’ or, as Adorno would put it, without falling into the illusory, and potentially hazardous, realm of a strictly transcendent critique. The answer lies in his adaptation of some of Freud’s and Nietzsche’s ideas, particularly those related to the ‘return of the repressed’ and the ‘perpetuity of pleasure’ (Marcuse 1970, 41) respectively. Indeed, like the latter two thinkers, Marcuse believed in the possible re-surfacing of instincts. However, whilst Freud believed that such a return would manifest itself as a source of psychological disorder, the member of the Frankfurt School incorporated it in his critical theory to indicate the moment whereby dialectical negation exposes the potentiality of reconciling humanity with internal nature as the Nietzschean reconciliation of Apollonian energies with Dionysian ones. Marcuse, then, identified the ‘what ought to be’ uncovered by dialectical negation as the positive expression of the ‘inherent truth values of the senses’ (1969b, 181), which, in virtue of their being identified as repressed forms of life by the self-conscious subject, are not sought outside immanent reality. The positive moment of Marcuse’s principle of negativity, in other words, manifests itself as a form of life, that is, the reconciliation of humanity and internal nature, which Marcuse called the ‘Aesthetic Form’, repressed by the heavily bureaucratized social reality, but also continuously seeking realization. The positive content of dialectical negation emanates from a longing for a potentially realizable state of affairs or manifests itself, as Bloch himself put it, as a ‘venturing beyond [which] knows and activates the tendency which is inherent in history and which proceeds dialectically’ (Bloch 1986, 4). As such, it equips critical theory with the utopian content required in order to become technically capable of challenging the existing reality, whilst retaining the immanent character necessary to prevent it from developing into fiction or a merely idealized alternative.

As soon as the affirmative or reconstructive component of dialectical negation is articulated with a concept of practice both understood as a destructive moment and founded upon the emergence of a providential revolutionary consciousness, however, the capacity of Marcuse’s critical theory to challenge the existing social reality is forced to face significant limitations. As the principle underpinning the great refusal or ‘the protest against that which is’ (1964, 63), dialectical negation may serve immediately political ends, but since the form of practice it is meant to inform consists of civil disobedience culminating in revolutionary action, Marcuse effectively stripped the utopian content – the vaguely defined ‘Aesthetic Form’ – of a direct role in his critical theory. It shall therefore be contended that in order to overcome such limitations critical theory must first accept the task of not only assigning the utopian content of dialectical negation a key function in its orientations but also engaging in a more extensive exploration of the potentialities to be found within the existing state of affairs. This would involve not only reducing the dialectical negation of ‘what is’ to the merely subjective opposition between the existing value-system and a ‘new sensibility’ but also treating alternative economic and socio-political institutions as unrealized potentialities, or latent institutional forms, and elements worthy of consideration by critical theorists. To this end, critical theory must no longer be expected to rely on a ‘shifting situation’, but must instead serve as a force steering the latent subjective and objective tendencies within advanced capitalism towards their realization as the ‘Aesthetic Form’. The absence of a clearly identifiable collective revolutionary subject in the present situation does indeed make such a role for critical theory all the more pressing, necessary and justified.

So far, I have contended that critical theory ought to be revised in such a way as to aim for the transformation of society through the dialectical negation of existing institutional forms and the discovery of existing potentialities of an objective nature, whilst accepting that success in achieving such goals rests on the articulation of these potentialities into a coherent set of alternative institutions. In his essay entitled ‘Resignation’, however, Adorno expressed his concerns regarding any attempt to elaborate a critical theory on the basis of such propositions. With both Marx’s theory of revolution and the Soviet experience in mind, Adorno argued that ‘thinking, employed only as an instrument of action, is blunted in the same way as all instrumental reason’ (1991, 202). Such an attempt to construe theory as the direct guide for political action, he believed, would turn knowledge into a means for the mastery of social reality and, with it, reproduce the logic of domination underpinning bourgeois societies. With such orientations, Adorno thought, critical theory would effectively re-create conditions favouring the development of reason into a medium supporting the primacy of the subject and lead to the ‘prohibition of thinking’ (Adorno 1991, 199) itself. Whilst such a view rightly emphasizes the risks of reproducing the subject–object asymmetry in the practice of resistance, the most significant element conducting this member of the Frankfurt School to reach such a conclusion is nevertheless derived from an orthodox, and somewhat problematic, interpretation of a particular form of practice, namely Marx’s own. Indeed, what effectively led Adorno to develop such an aversion to direct political action is Marx’s apparent reduction of practice to the ‘increased production of the means of production’ (Adorno 1991, 200) and his incapacity to resist the domination of nature by humanity, which such an economic determinism appears to entail. It could nevertheless be suggested here that the actual victim of reductionism is in fact Adorno himself, whose interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy fails to give recognition to the breadth of his concept of labour,8 thereby also failing to anticipate the possibility of uniting theory and practice for the end of the reconciliation of humanity and nature. Applying dialectical negation in this way would thus entail opening up critical theory to the treatment of labour as self-realization as the historical negation of alienated labour or, put differently, as the discovery of a potentially emancipatory form of practice achieved through the negation of its existing form. How, then, can such demands be reconciled with what Adorno called ‘open thinking’9 (1991, 202)?

Whilst Adorno eventually came to regard the task of steering society towards what it ‘ought to be’ as a course of action antagonistic to dialectical negation, Marcuse expressed the following reservations regarding the formulation of a concrete alternative:

We are still confronted with the demand of a ‘concrete alternative’. The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which could be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops. If we could form a concrete concept of the alternative today, it would not be that of an alternative; the possibilities of the new society are sufficiently ‘abstract, ’ i.e., removed from and incongruous with the established universe to defy any attempt to identify them in terms if this universe. (1969a, 86)

The anticipation of a set of alternative economic and socio-political institutions is here being depicted as a meaningless task, for providing such an insight into new objective conditions of existence would consist in formulating expectations which Marcuse thought dialectical negation could not meet. It would, in other words, entail engaging in an intellectual exercise reaching far beyond the scope provided by dialectical negation. Consequently, he limited the scope of such negation to a ‘methodical disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment […] aiming at the transvaluation of values’ (Marcuse 1969a, 6). Like Adorno, then, and as already mentioned above, Marcuse tended to favour liberation in thought. Unlike Adorno, however, he did so alongside a particular concern for the discovery of potentialities within the existing state of affairs and their articulation into an ‘Aesthetic Form’ construed in terms of an ‘environment in which the nonaggressive, erotic, receptive faculties of man, in harmony with the consciousness of freedom, strive for the pacification of man and nature’ (Marcuse 1969a, 31). He therefore sought to negate the general features of existing forms of life and their associated values with the discovery of tendencies towards a ‘new sensibility’, that is, the ‘Aesthetic Form’, thereby also revealing the latter’s dependence on the existing social reality. However, by treating the formulation of a concrete alternative as an abstract exercise, Marcuse is not willing to recognize the existence of latent institutional forms. Instead, he seemed to understand them as a too distant objective manifestation of the new sensibility, that is, as an unforseeable institutionalized form of the values opposing the advanced capitalist sensibility. It must nevertheless be remembered that the latter is upheld by historically specific institutions, such as bureaucracy, the capitalist market and division of labour, that is, the authoritarian corporation, and that any dialectical negation of existing values also corresponds to a negation of the institutions upholding them. For this reason, the act of treating existing social reality as ‘false’ is not restricted to a mere ‘transvaluation of values’ but is often complemented – even in Adorno’s, Horkheimer’s and Marcuse’s work10 – by a transvaluation of institutional forms. The longing for the mediated reconciliation of humanity and nature cannot therefore be coherently and comprehensively accounted for if critical theory excludes from its analysis an equally important role to the revelation of potentialities of both subjective and objective forms. In order to do so without risking what Adorno would describe as a fall into ‘barbarism’, critical theory must nevertheless be safeguarded against the tendency towards the suppression of thinking. The institutional arrangement emanating from the discovery of objective potentialities, then, must be expected to guarantee the non-identity of subject and object or, put differently, the actual reconciliation of individuals qua producers, consumers and citizens with the relevant institutional forms.11 Critical, ‘open’ or ‘constellation’ thinking would, in this sense, have to be secured by the economic and socio-political institutions in question. The task of drawing the contours of the dialectically inferred institutional negation of advanced capitalist institutions will be undertaken in Chapter 6. At this point, however, I shall proceed with a further exploration of Marcuse’s ‘Aesthetic Form’, if only to obtain a more detailed understanding of the potentialities he sought to expose.

Realizing the potential of dialectical negation

Like Freud (2002), Marcuse observed that since the conflict between instinctual gratification and the imperative of social order has historically been resolved in favour of the latter, ‘the history of man’ has effectively assumed the form of a ‘history of repression’ (Marcuse 1969b, 11–12). In contrast with the psychoanalyst, however, Marcuse believed in a possible, and somewhat inevitable, resolution of such a conflict without the domination of the ‘reality principle’ over the ‘pleasure principle’. In his most generic formulations, he presented the ‘Aesthetic Form’ as the historical stage marking the ‘reconciliation between pleasure and reality principle’ (Marcuse 1969b, 151). Although Marcuse believed the task of anticipating the economic and socio-political institutions capable of upholding the ‘Aesthetic Form’ to be lying outside the scope of critical theory, it is possible to articulate the more or less scattered discussions on the conditions of existence required for the aforementioned reconciliation found in his works into a coherent formulation of some key institutional principles.

A first set of indications can be observed in his discussions on the subversive tendencies of aesthetic rationality. As the product of dialectical negation, the pseudo-utopian content of Marcuse’s thought rests on theory’s capacity to develop into a critical force. To do so, reason, which under the domination of the reality principle over the pleasure principle treats ‘phantasy as a separate mental process’ (Marcuse 1969b, 142) and develops into a highly problematic technological form of rationality (Marcuse 1964), must accept that as a reflexive force, it effectively ‘originates in […] value-judgment’ (Marcuse 1969a, 220), thereby recognizing its convergence with, rather than opposition to, aesthetic judgements. As the exclusive realm of the Aesthetic Form in advanced capitalist societies, then, art is thought to serve as an outlet for the conversion of reason into a subversive force:

In contrast to Orthodox Marxist aesthetics I see the political potential of art in art itself, in the aesthetic form as such. Furthermore, I argue that by virtue of its aesthetic form, art is largely autonomous vis à vis the given social relations, and at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience. (Marcuse 1978, xi)

Dismissed by several Marxists as goods entirely subjected to the regime of capital accumulation, art is here being presented by Marcuse as a possible medium for emancipatory thinking. Some works of art, he thought, had indeed remained autonomous from the repressive rule of the ‘culture industry’. He therefore sought to locate the seeds of emancipation within advanced capitalist societies in the nuclear manifestation of the ‘Aesthetic Form’ found in works of art thought to be autonomous from the logic of capital accumulation and believed that although ‘[a]rt cannot change the world […] it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world’ (Marcuse 1978, 32–3). Once matured, he further argued, such a revolutionary consciousness would seek to turn the ‘Aesthetic Form’ into the basis for the generalised ‘order of values’ (1970, 41) of the new society by making art’s ‘traditional function […] obsolete’ (1978, 28). As the negation of a heavily bureaucratized form of life, such an ‘abolition of art’ would indeed contribute to the elimination of repressive institutional forms and the advent of a new, non-repressive order founded upon ‘a harmony of the mental faculties’ (1969b, 179) so far rendered unrealizable by the capitalist division of labour, and the various economic and socio-political institutions upholding it. The treatment of aesthetic rationality as a source of emancipation does appear to echo Shiller’s own claim that ‘Aesthetic experience would arrest the exploitative productivity which made man into an instrument of labor’ (Schiller cited in Sharpe 1995, 90). Once reconciled with reason, then, aesthetic judgements, and the creativity channelled through them, can begin to enter the sphere of labour and affect it in such a way that ‘the convergence of technology and art and the convergence of work and play’ (Marcuse 1970, 68) effectively underpin the material conditions of a new order. Marcuse’s reconciliation of the pleasure and reality principle, therefore, assumes the form of a ‘harmony of the mental faculties’ presupposed by the recognition of the ‘cognitive and emancipatory power of sensuousness’ (1978, 66) and its development into a fundamental condition of existence whereby the senses are capable of performing a socially useful and productive function. The technological form of rationality, along with the organization of production underpinning it, that is, the capitalist division of labour, could therefore be said to find their dialectical negation in a form of labour capable of mediating both sensuous and cognitive faculties, for the emergence of the ‘Aesthetic Form’ effectively entails the ‘abolition of art’ through a fundamental re-organization of economic practices into outlets for the release of the powers of the imagination.

Marcuse, then, believed in the historical possibility of a form of civilization whereby instinctual energies enter the process of production as the realization of already existing creative potentialities formally excluded from such a process and confined to the realm of autonomous works of art, as a result of the division of labour. To be prevented from assuming a chaotic character, and become a productive force in the satisfaction of needs, the release of instinctual energies must nevertheless be subjected to a certain degree of control. As Marcuse himself pointed out:

To be sure, if freedom is to become the governing principle of civilization, not only reason but also the sensuous impulse requires a restraining transformation. The additional release of sensuous energy must conform with the universal order of freedom. However, whatever order would have to be imposed upon the sensuous impulse must itself be ‘an operation of freedom’. The free individual himself must bring about the harmony between individual and universal gratification. In a truly free civilization, all laws are self-given by the individuals: ‘to give freedom by freedom is the universal law’ of the ‘aesthetic state’; in a truly free civilization, ‘the will of the whole’ fulfils itself only ‘through the nature of the individual.’ Order is freedom only if it is founded on and sustained by the free gratification of the individuals. (1969b, 191)

In order to become ‘an operation of freedom’, restrictions imposed by the heavily administered society must be removed to be replaced by others laid down by free individuals themselves. The logic of this ‘non-repressive sublimation’ (1969b, 218) of instincts assuming the form of ‘self-sublimation’ (1969b, 210) effectively derives from the belief that if ‘free gratification’ becomes universal, the reconciliation of reason and the senses that such a phenomenon entails would ultimately prevent the release of instinctual energies from assuming a chaotic form, and even serve the reconciliation of individuals with one another. What is meant here is that freedom would no longer operate as the preservation of the self against nature and fellow human beings but, by depending upon a logic of reconciliation mediated by labour and capable of turning ‘free gratification’ into a universal condition of existence, would instead transcend the competitive and self-interested inclinations emanating from the negative conception of freedom underpinning the Enlightenment project and the capitalist system of production. The reconciliation of humanity with internal and external nature is here understood as a reconciliation of humanity with itself, for it would, as Marx himself anticipated,12 allow individuals to realize themselves as unique cognitive and sensuous beings whilst recognizing what they share in common as members of the human species, namely their capacity to produce creatively. ‘Universal free gratification’ can, in this sense, provide a basis for the actual reconciliation of particularity and universality, align individual conceptions of the good life with the common good and eventually give rise to cooperative forms of behaviour within the economic sphere. It follows, then, that the emergence of the ‘Aesthetic Form’ crucially rests on the presence of institutions capable of upholding ‘universal free gratification’ through egalitarian, emancipatory and cooperative practices.

The institutions of advanced capitalism, underpinned by the principle of self-preservation and modelled around the capitalist division of labour, have both developed from and served to cultivate a conception of reason stifling the release of instinctual energies. Despite making numerous references to the general morphology of the ‘Aesthetic Form’, Marcuse always approached it from the standpoint of the subjectivity of experience and consistently held back from venturing into an exploration of its objective counterpart. His ‘failure to come to grips theoretically with the problem of social objectivity’ (Schmidt 1988, 56), however, does not undermine the possibility of anticipating some of the key institutional forms capable of actualizing the general principles encapsulated by his ‘Aesthetic Form’. It could indeed be suggested that despite limiting the scope of his analysis of potentialities within the existing social reality to a presentation of the value-orientations (pacification, gratification, cooperation) associated with the logic of reconciliation of humanity and nature construed as the dialectical negation of the logic of domination supported by Enlightenment thinking and advanced capitalist institutions, the cooperative practices and ‘the convergence of technology and art’ they entail provide a fruitful basis upon which alternative objective conditions of existence can be dialectically inferred. In practical terms, then, the ‘harmony between individual and universal gratification’ calls for the institutionalization of economic practices echoing those entailed by Marx’s own concept of labour as self-realization.13 The development of such practices does nevertheless involve the effective control, by the relevant actors, of the mechanisms through which needs are satisfied. For this control to be possible both supply and demand can no longer be left to the vicissitudes of a free market or the stringent demands of centralized planning. Instead, these ought to be subjected to the direct control of individuals, for which the re-organization of the economy into different associations of producers and consumers in dialogue with one another appears to provide a highly suitable basis. In Marcuse’s critical theory, one can therefore identify an affinity between the value-orientations comprised in the ‘Aesthetic Form’, Marx’s critique of political economy and some of the key institutional forms comprised in the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole – an affinity which will be further explored in the last chapters of this work.

Concluding remarks

As a member of the Frankfurt School particularly confident and enthusiastic about the prospects of change, Marcuse elaborated a critical theory more explicitly aimed at the transformation of society than, for example, Adorno’s. However, despite sharing a concern for an insight into objectification with Marx, raising the expectations of the principle of negativity above Adorno’s own, and drawing the contours of alternative value-orientations articulated into the ‘Aesthetic Form’, Marcuse fell short of fulfilling the full range of promises contained in his own critical theory. It was therefore suggested that in order to realize the transformative potential of critical theory, Marcuse’s own ought to be revised in such a way as to complement the insight into the ‘new sensibility’ with a coherently articulated dialectical negation of the various economic institutions upholding the domination of nature by humanity. It was finally argued that actualization of the reconciliation of humanity and nature ought to be presupposed by the transformation of labour into a sphere of self-realization and the re-organization of economic life into a dialogue between associations of producers and consumers. With Marcuse’s critical theory, therefore, one finds the potential to complement Adorno’s dialectical negation of heavily centralized and hierarchically organized institutions with the value-orientations contained in, and alternative institutional forms entailed by, the ‘Aesthetic Form’. The task of finding out how particular institutions can be expected to guarantee the non-identity of subject and object does nevertheless remain. Since Habermas was the first critical theorist to venture into such grounds, the next chapter shall attempt to reflect on the relative merits of his own propositions.

Notes

1  Marcuse’s optimism regarding the prospects of supplanting the so-called repressive institutions of advanced capitalism with liberating ones is particularly evident in Eros and Civilization (1969b) and An Essay on Liberation (1969a).

2  It should be noted here that even in his most pessimistic work, One-dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse continues to present revolutionary action as a possibility: ‘One-dimensional Man will vacillate throughout between two contradictory hypotheses: (1) that advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future; (2) that forces and tendencies exist which may break this containment and explode the society’ (1964, xv).

3  The tendencies leading to what Marcuse called the ‘Aesthetic Form’ have been summarized as follows: ‘first of all the growing technological character of the process of production, with the reduction of the required physical energy and its replacement by mental energy – dematerialization of labor. At the same time, an increasingly automated machine system […] would allow […] the emergence of a free subject within the realm of necessity. Already today, the […] material becomes increasingly susceptible and subject to aesthetic forms […]’ (1969a, 49–50).

4  In his An Essay on Liberation (1969a), for example, Marcuse relied on the revolutionary potential of students and the Third World without clearly seeking to find out how and why they could perform the role of collective subject.

5  It will be shown below that despite insisting on the ‘positive’ or constructive character of negation, Marcuse fails to solve such problems.

6  The lack of a constructive component anticipating an alternative ‘life in common’ in critical theory was in fact emphasized by Peter Wagner (2008) as a possible reason for the rise of individualism in the years following the 1960s protests.

7  In the last three chapters of this work, I shall demonstrate the role G.D.H. Cole’s libertarian socialism could play in realizing this potential.

8  See Chapter 1.

9  The term ‘open thinking’, which Adorno uses in his essay entitled ‘Resignation’, could effectively be another way to designate the form of knowledge he believed to be required to maintain the non-identity of the subject and the object. Constellation thinking, in this sense, can be described as a form of open thinking.

10  These first-generation critical theorists have indeed made repeated attempts to reveal the repressive character of the various key institutions making up advanced capitalist societies in their critique of knowledge and the culture industry. Adorno and Horkheimer (1997), for example, make explicit references to the problems associated with the capitalist system of exchange in their chapter entitled ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. In a similar vein, Marcuse (1964) provides a critique of the ‘wrong’ form assumed by the organization of production under the advanced stage of capitalist development in his chapter entitled ‘From Negative to Positive Thinking: Technological Rationality and the Logic of Domination’.

11  Habermas was the first member of the Frankfurt School to anticipate the institutionalization of non-identity thinking. However, as will be shown in the following chapters, his critical theory eventually served to reconcile individuals with the existing socio-political institutions rather than assisting the former in their challenge of the latter.

12  See Chapter 1.

13  For a detailed account of Marx’s concept of labour as self-realization, see Chapter 1 of the present work.

4

The premises of institutionalized emancipatory practice

In the last chapter, I sought to explore the manner in which the transformative potential of critical theory could be maximized through a re-assessment of the expectations of dialectical negation. It was shown that the success of such a task depends upon critical theory’s orientation towards the implementation of an institutional framework capable of creating the conditions of existence required for the reconciliation of humanity with both external and internal nature. However, it was not until Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) that such considerations made their way into critical theory and became an explicit object of analysis. In this chapter, I shall proceed with an analysis of some of the key and relevant theoretical developments proposed by the second-generation Frankfurt School theorist and reflect on their implications for the task of formulating a critical theory oriented towards the institutionalization of human emancipation.

Habermas, modernity and emancipation

Habermas shared very similar concerns to those expressed by other members of the Frankfurt School. Like them, he sought to understand the development of capitalism into its ‘advanced’ form as a phenomenon closely connected with the seemingly unstoppable spread of instrumental rationality thought to be detrimental to the prospects of human emancipation. However, Habermas’s optimism with respects to the promises of the Enlightenment caused his critical theory to depart significantly from those of his predecessors. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987b), for example, the second-generation critical theorist attempts to demonstrate the somewhat oversimplified and paradoxical character of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claims. On the one hand, he questioned the treatment of instrumental reason as a form of knowledge ‘overblown into a totality’ (Habermas 1987b, 119) and, correspondingly, sought to emphasize the positive and potentially emancipatory achievements of the modern age by giving recognition to the ‘progressive differentiation of […] reason’ (1987b, 113) already identified by Weber in his works. With such theoretical developments, Habermas claims to be able to turn Adorno and Horkheimer’s own critique of instrumental reason against itself by declaring that ‘this description of the self-destruction of the critical capacity is paradoxical, because in the moment of description it still has to make use of the critique that has been declared dead’ (1987b, 119). With Habermas, then, modernity would no longer be interpreted as a constellation of economic, social and cultural forces, all failing to create the conditions favourable for human emancipation, but is now thought to consist in an ‘unfinished’ (Habermas 2007) project, whose completion becomes the task of critical theory. It is in this particular context that Habermas presented modern societies as ones characterized by not one but two distinct forms of rationality – instrumental and communicative – based on the differentiation of two spheres of action entitled ‘work’ and ‘interaction’ in his early works, and later reconceptualized into ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’.

Although clearly indebted to Weber’s distinction between instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität) and value-rationality (Wertrationalität),1 it is through a reconstruction of Marx’s historical materialism that Habermas began to re-assess the achievements of modernity. Central to the critical theorist’s early works is the view that despite the high level attained by the productive forces – a level indicating humanity’s success in mastering the forces of external nature – modernity had fallen short of yielding conditions favourable for the development of a class consciousness that seeks human emancipation, thereby calling into question the validity of Marx’s base/superstructure schema. Whilst first-generation critical theorists concluded that the failed emancipation of internal nature was inextricably linked to processes involved in humanity’s relation with external nature,2 Habermas was critical of such an approach to modernity, whose holistic and totalizing character, he thought, tends to reduce the epistemic achievements of the modern age to the rise of instrumental reason and, consequently, reproduces some of the problems he identified with Marx’s materialist approach. The prospects of emancipation, Habermas thought, actually depend on the evolution of two distinct logics of action:

A society owes emancipation from the external forces of nature to labor processes, that is to the production of technically exploitable knowledge (including ‘the transformation of the natural sciences into machinery’). Emancipation from the compulsion of internal nature succeeds to the degree that institutions based on force are replaced by an organization of social relations that is bound only to communication free from domination. This does not occur directly through productive activity, but rather through the revolutionary activity of struggling classes (including the critical activity of reflective sciences). (1987a, 53)

With Habermas, then, the reflexive activity of social agents is no longer directly determined by the sphere of activity geared towards the transformation of external nature. The success of bourgeois ideology in hindering the revolutionary struggle of the working class should indeed serve to confirm the distinction between the two spheres of activity, for if class consciousness depended solely on ‘the growing potential of control over the natural processes objectified in work’ (1987a, 61), the superstructure would transparently reveal, and fail to succeed in concealing, the alienating and exploitative conditions under which material reproduction takes place. Somewhere along the line, therefore, the ‘object of conflict’ had to be made ‘unrecognizable for both parties, capitalists as well as wage laborers’ (1987a, 59). Whilst such observations suggest that consciousness emerges as a result of processes distinguishable from those involved in material reproduction, Marx, according to Habermas, claimed that the self-reflexive activity necessitated for the supersession of false-consciousness – a distortion made possible by the ostensible exchange of equivalents legitimated by market relations – depends on the level of development attained by the productive forces. As such, his ‘critique of commodity fetishism’ may be able to reveal the distorted nature of communication in bourgeois societies, but falls short of identifying the distinctive character and full range of the processes involved in the development of such a distortion, thus overlooking the analytical distinction between a logic of action geared towards ‘emancipation from external constraints’ and another seeking to eliminate ‘repressions of internal nature’ (1987a, 55). Consequently, Habermas argued, a social theory aiming to identify the conditions required for human emancipation must be reconstructed in such a way as to accommodate both levels of analysis.

Several sociological and epistemological inferences can be drawn from Habermas’s distinction of the two logics of emancipation. First, and from a sociological standpoint, the distinction effectively corresponds to a differentiation between processes of social integration which involve ‘systems of institutions in which speaking and acting subjects are socially related’, that is, the ‘lifeworld’, and processes of system integration maintaining ‘their boundaries and their continued existence by mastering the complexity of an inconstant environment’, that is, the ‘system’ (Habermas 1988, 4).3 The evolution of the human species, then, can be fully comprehended only by differentiating the evolutionary dynamics of the ‘self-formative’ and ‘self-generative’ spheres and not, as Marx understood it, by reducing the former to the ‘self-generative act’ (Habermas 1987a). Consequently:

the introduction of new forms of social integration, as for instance, the replacement of the kinship system with the state, demands knowledge of a practical-moral kind. Technical knowledge, which can be implemented with rules of instrumental and strategic action, or an expansion of our control over external nature, is not what is required, but, rather, a knowledge which can seek its embodiment in structures of interaction. We can understand the development of the productive forces as a problem-generating mechanism that releases but does not create the evolutionary renewal of the mode of production. (Habermas 1975, 293)

Second, then, the constitution of knowledge follows two distinct trajectories. On the one hand, the knowledge constituted in the ‘system’, where actions are oriented towards both the efficient mastery of the forces of external nature (instrumental action) and success (strategic action) is said to embody the ‘technical’ or manipulative interest of reason giving rise to an instrumental form of rationality. Here, individuals relate to external nature and each other through the steering mechanisms of ‘power’ and ‘money’, which cause their actions to be governed by imperatives of efficiency, productivity and success, also known as ‘systemic imperatives’. On the other hand, when actions are oriented towards ‘mutual understanding’, such as those found in the ‘lifeworld’, the knowledge arising therefrom is constituted on the basis of what Habermas termed the ‘practical’ or normative interest of reason giving rise to communicative rationality. Since this particular sphere of activity essentially comprises interactions between individuals oriented towards the alignment of their individual conceptions of the good life with the common good, relations are thought to be mediated by the communicative mechanisms of ‘language’ and ‘symbols’, and governed by the consensual and deliberative principles of ‘practical discourse’. The formulation of a social theory aimed at identifying the conditions favourable for human emancipation, Habermas contends, ought to give recognition to the sociological and corresponding epistemic distinction between actions oriented towards efficiency, productivity and success and those oriented towards mutual understanding, for the ‘emancipatory interest’ of such a critique of society effectively depends – contra Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse – on both ‘the interests in possible intersubjective action-orientation and in possible technical control’ (Habermas 1975, 211). It therefore follows that the unfinished character of modernity and its project of emancipation cannot be fully grasped unless it is re-articulated as a problem connected with the failure to introduce an institutional framework providing conditions favourable for the exercise of communication free from the distortion of systemic imperatives, rather than a failure to eradicate, once and for all, the technical or manipulative interest of reason through the reconciliation of humanity with external nature. It was in the light of these observations that Habermas re-assessed the development from liberal to advanced capitalism.

Whilst Habermas’s reconstruction of historical materialism aimed to overcome the latter’s incapacity to address the distinct sociological and epistemic character of actions oriented towards mutual understanding, it did not originally intend – at least before the linguistic turn taken by his work from The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987c) onwards – to result in an outright rejection of all of its key tenets. In fact he agreed with Marx with regards to the economic nature assumed by relations of production in the early stage of capitalist development:

The identification of substructure with economic structure could lead to the assumption that the substructural level is equivalent to the economic system. That is, however, valid only for modern societies. Relations of production are defined by their function in regulating access to the means of production and indirectly the distribution of social wealth. This function is assumed in primitive societies by kinship systems and in traditional societies by political institutions. It is not until the market, in addition to its cybernetic function, also takes over the function of stabilizing class relations that the relations of production assume a purely economic form. (Habermas 1975, 292)

The central aim of Habermas’s critique of Marx, therefore, was to historicize the latter’s base/superstructure schema as one only applicable to a critique of ‘the [liberal] capitalist principle of organization’ (Habermas 1988, 23). He did so by reconstructing historical materialism in such a way as to include the two aforementioned levels of analysis required to turn it into a critique of society capable of grasping the early modern conditions of existence, whereby the ‘uncoupling of the state and the economy’ provided the institutional framework within which the ‘socially integrative functions’ previously performed by the political system could be transferred to ‘a subsystem that primarily fulfils system integrative functions’, namely the market (Habermas 1988, 25).4 As such, the dynamics involved in the distortion of communication could, as Marx insisted in his critique of the fetishism of commodities,5 be explained by the ‘double function’ performed by the market as ‘steering mechanism’ (through the medium of money) and ideology (through the symbols generated by the ‘value form’), but their origins and conditions for the latter’s dissolution, Habermas (1987a) contends, can only be adequately grasped from a standpoint lying outside the sphere of the relationship between humanity and external nature. Thus, in order to pierce the veil of distorted communication arising from the social conditions of existence found within the liberal capitalist framework, the phenomenon itself must first be explained as a transfer of the function of social integration over to the market and problematized as a conflict between the power-driven character of the social relations governed by instrumental rationality and the consensual nature of those developing under the rule of its communicative counterpart.

However, the age of bourgeois capitalism was also marked by a significant achievement. The uncoupling of state and economy,6 or ‘depoliticisation of the relations of production’, resulted in the creation of a deliberative space permitting individuals to interact on the basis of communication free from domination:

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people who come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public use of their reason (öffentliches Räsonnement). (Habermas 1989, 27)

Individuals could, for the first time in history, engage with ‘the public authorities themselves’ and make use of a ‘morally pretentious rationality that strove to discover what was once just and right’, thus finding the means to form a ‘public opinion’ which would ultimately serve as ‘the only legitimate source of th[e] law’ (1989, 54). Access to such a space of subversive self-reflexive practice was nevertheless limited. Only autonomous individuals, or, as Kant put it, those free ‘from self-incurred immaturity’ (1991a, 54), could expect to participate in such deliberative processes. In a bourgeois society, that is, a society where relations of production assume an economic form, the free ‘homme’, or the only person capable of being his own (moral) master, is the ‘property-owning private person’ who, as Habermas observed, could appear ‘morally free’ precisely due to the apparent ‘justice immanent in free commerce’, that is, a system based on the free exchange of equivalents (1989, 111). The moral freedom of the bourgeois was, therefore, nothing more than a ‘fiction’. Thus, although the emergence of a public sphere mediating the state and civil society consisted in a hitherto unseen and potentially liberating social development, the fact that the socially integrative functions happened to be performed by a system founded on an exchange of equivalents such as the market effectively concealed the ‘conflation of bourgeois and homme’ as ‘citoyen’, thereby making the communicative freedom of the public sphere particularly vulnerable to ‘processes of concentration and crisis’ that would eventually ‘pull[..] the veil of an exchange of equivalents off the antagonistic structure of society’ (1989, 111). The emergence of the bourgeois public sphere, therefore, heavily depended on the transfer of socially integrative functions onto the market. However, since the liberal capitalist market also performed systemic functions such as the allocation of resources, the ‘conflation of bourgeois and homme as citoyen’ the aforementioned transfer entailed could not prevent the development of conflicts of interests into organized private-interest groups leading to the encroachment of the public sphere by imperatives of efficiency, productivity and success eventually leading to its ‘structural transformation’, and the corresponding demise of the subversive function of public opinion. It was such a transformation that marked the advent of bureaucratic stage of capitalist development and led to the highly problematic distortion of communication by instrumental reason.

Although Habermas problematized the development of capitalism into its advanced/bureaucratic stage from diverse angles,7 most of his accounts have been underpinned by one key concern, namely the distortion of communication and its effects on modernity’s capacity to realize its promises. Under advanced capitalism, then:

The social potential of science is reduced to the powers of technical control – its potential for enlightened action is no longer considered. […] Emancipation by means of enlightenment is replaced by instruction in control over objective or objectified processes. Socially effective theory is no longer directed toward the consciousness of human beings who live together and discuss matters with each other, but to the behavior of human beings who manipulate. (Habermas 1974, 254–5)

In what Habermas also called the ‘scientific civilization’, the interest in technical control spreads to such an extent that it subjects all forms of knowledge to its own imperatives, thus causing an identity of the two logics of action assuming the form of a subsumption of the normative fabric of society under the power-driven actions of instrumental reason. The incapacity of the market to solve its socially integrative ‘functional weaknesses’ and ‘dysfunctional side effects’ as steering mechanism has led the state to re-appropriate the latter functions (Habermas 1988, 36).8 Since the role of the state as steering mechanism meant that it would have to become ‘actively engaged in’ the ‘general conditions of production’ (1988, 36), one is effectively witnessing, under the advanced capitalist stage, a ‘re-coupling of state and economy’ and the corresponding repoliticization of relations of production. Consequently, the state found itself confronted with the ‘problem of how socially produced wealth may be inequitably, and yet, legitimately distributed’ (1988, 20). Having to seek, under such a refeudalization with a smiling face, the validity claims required for the legitimation of unequal access to the means of production and uneven distribution of wealth, the state would be forced to seize control of the normative sphere of social life, thus prompting Habermas to argue that ‘[d]uring the course of capitalist development, the political system shifts its boundaries not only into the economic system but also into the socio-cultural system’ (1988, 47). Under a social system governed by the bureaucratic state, then, actions oriented towards the emancipation of internal nature no longer address socio-cultural matters from the standpoint of intersubjective communication, but rather turn such matters into problems of ‘administrative manipulation’ (1988, 47). With a ‘public authority’ now ‘compet[ing] for publicity’ (Habermas 1989, 195), communication becomes distorted in such a way that the members of advanced capitalist societies ‘are no longer able to distinguish between practical and technical power’ (Habermas 1974, 255). Consequently, one also witnesses the suppression of ‘a critical public reflection still preoccupied with itself’ (Habermas 1989, 29) and the corresponding development of a democratic deficit. It therefore follows that the realization of the promises of modernity are presupposed by the capacity of individuals to engage in democratic processes assuming the form of public self-reflection which, Habermas contends, is itself dependent upon both their capacity to engage in actions oriented towards mutual understanding independently of those oriented towards manipulation and control or, put differently, upon the institutionalized non-identity of instrumental and communicative reason.

Restoring communication free from domination

So far in this chapter, it has been shown that some of Habermas’s fundamental assumptions regarding both the prospects and conditions required for human emancipation marked a departure from those underpinning Marx’s critique of political economy and the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists. Indeed, by conceptualizing the critique of advanced capitalism in terms of a ‘colonisation’ of the ‘lifeworld’ by systemic imperatives, not only did Habermas seek to present the existing problem of emancipation as one primarily concerning social relations outside the sphere of material reproduction, he also attempted to expose, especially in his later works, the potentially emancipatory tendencies unfolding under the modern age. How, then, did Habermas explain the failure of such tendencies to materialize and lead to the development of undistorted communication?

Before exploring the nature of the challenge facing Habermas, one must first seek to comprehend the distinctive mechanisms and orientations involved in the exercise of communicative reason. Although no explicit account of this form of rationality can be found in his work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), it is through his qualified defence of bourgeois public sphere that the first glimpses of the emancipatory potential of communicative action can be identified. It was not until The Theory of Communicative Action (1984), however, that he provided a fully fledged account of this form of action and the form of knowledge associated with it. Here is how he sought to define the latter:

This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-binding force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld. (Habermas 1984, 10)

In light of such an observation, the emphasis placed by Habermas on the role played by the public sphere in the exercise of communicative reason becomes fairly straightforward. As a public space of free argumentation serving ‘privatized individuals’ in their quest for the ‘peculiar obviousness [emphasis added]’ of the ‘criteria of generality and abstractness characterizing legal norms [emphasis added]’, the public sphere performed a central function in unleashing the subversive force of communicative rationality (Habermas 1989, 54). It also allowed members of the ‘public sphere in the world of letters’ – where culture is turned into ‘an object of critical debate’ (1989, 173) – to channel the particularity of their experiences as private individuals (father, artist, merchant, etc.) into the ‘rational-universal’ (Schmitt cited in Habermas 1989, 81) force of a public opinion formed through public deliberation and converted into a public criticism of the established authority by the ‘political public sphere’. The subversive exercise of communicative reason, in this sense, involves the dual process of ‘universalistic justification of norms’ and ‘democratic generalization of interests’, whose ultimate end is the self-regulated discovery of the ‘ethical life’ framing social relations (McCarthy 1997, 64). The form of interaction underpinning these processes, then, aims to reach beyond the confines of mere compromise (McCarthy 1997, 59). Indeed, compromises begin with a conflict of at least two parties, each seeking to maximize its own interest. The resolution of such a conflict must assume the form of a trade-off between the relevant interests. For this reason, compromises not only arise from the particularity of self-interested power relations but also tend to remain within the normative space framed by these relations in the form ‘generalised particularism [emphasis added]’ (Habermas 1992a, 445). Rational consensus, on the other hand, in virtue of its reliance on the impartiality of communicative reason and the ‘consensus-binding force of argumentative speech’, seeks to uncover the general interest and, as such, aims to transcend the normative boundaries erected by the subjectivity of the world of private individuals. The public sphere, in sum, serves as a platform for individuals seeking to uncover the ‘ethical life’ of society through the free exercise of communicative reason and, as such, constitutes the key institutional basis upon which the realization of a pluralist ‘democratic universalism’ can be made possible (Habermas 1992a, 445).

However, as was partly shown above, Habermas’s work on the public sphere also sought to expose the structural limitations of this historically unique institution. Indeed, he observed that with the commercialization of the press and the pluralization of competitive interests that ensued, the process of public opinion formation began to assume a different form. As conflicts of interest began to spread into the political public sphere, the power of private organizations and inequalities between various class interests became visible, thereby undermining the impartiality of public opinion and forcing the state to seek ‘temporary compromises between groups’ of private interests (Habermas 1989, 199). Thus, as Habermas pointed out:

In the same degree to which this kind of mutual penetration of state and civil society dissolved a private sphere whose independent existence made possible the generality of the laws, the foundation for a relatively homogenous public composed of private citizens engaged in rational-critical debate was also shaken. Competition between organized private interests invaded the public sphere. If the particular interests that as privatized interests were neutralized in the common denominator of class interest once permitted public discussion to attain a certain rationality and even effectiveness, it remains that today the display of competing interests has taken the place of such discussion. The consensus developed in rational-critical debate has yielded to compromise fought out or simply imposed nonpublicly. (1989, 179)

As institutionalized class compromise, the welfare state of advanced capitalist societies ultimately acts as a source of communicative distortion, where the latter is directly analogous to the way surplus value is appropriated. The state’s involvement in the resolution of conflicts of interests has effectively stifled civil society’s capacity to both regulate itself and subvert the established public authority, thereby removing the basic conditions required for the application of the ‘criteria of [communicative] rationality’ (1989, 195). Here is the challenge facing Habermas: How can the neutralization of private interests presupposing the rationally deliberated search for ‘ethical life’ be immunized against the highly distorting tendencies of systemic imperatives under advanced capitalism?

Since in his early works, such as the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) and Legitimation Crisis (1988), Habermas traced back the depoliticization of the relations of production necessary for the neutralization of private interests and the exercise of ‘democratic universalism’ to the formal separation of the state and the economy and, correspondingly, explained the suppression of communication in terms of a recoupling of the two spheres under the latest stage of capitalist development, it would seem coherent to conclude that the non-identity of communicative and instrumental reason must be presupposed by a transformation of advanced capitalism’s socio-political institutions to be realized ‘democratically from within [emphasis added]’ (Habermas 1992a, 443–4). However, Habermas’s strategy for the restoration of unconstrained communication has changed over the years. Whilst in his early works the non-identity of the two forms of rationality still relied on the ‘parallelization of the action systems’ of state and economy with the respective ‘action types’ of instrumental and communicative action, from the Theory of Communicative Action (1987c) onwards Habermas abandons such a configuration in favour of another that would be capable of giving recognition to the ‘different resources for societal integration’ (Habermas 1992a, 443) lying outside the state, whose functions are now thought to assume unalterable systemically integrative forms. For this reason, the non-identity of instrumental and communicative action would now be reduced to the act of ‘erect[ing] a democratic dam against the colonializing encroachment of system imperatives on areas of the lifeworld’ (1992a, 444). Thus, Habermas’s reconceputalization of the state as a systemically integrative sphere per se has led him to substitute the pessimism regarding the prospects of unconstrained communication under a state accused of appropriating systemically integrative functions, with an optimism regarding the possibility of maximizing the ‘forces of societal integration’ for the protection of the ‘lifeworld’ against imperatives now thought to be unalterable properties of both economic and political life (1992a, 444). The impact of such a re-orientation on his emancipatory strategy was made most explicit in the following passage:

The theory of communicative action intends to bring into the open the rational potential intrinsic in everyday communicative practices. […] Such a task no longer restricts the search for normative potentials to a formation of the public sphere that was specific to a single epoch. It removes the necessity for stylizing particular prototypical manifestations of an institutionally embodied communicative rationality in favor of an empirical approach in which the tension of the abstract opposition between norm and reality is dissolved. (1992a, 442–3)

Thus, instead of seeking to identify the conditions required for the argumentative discovery of the general interest outside the institutions of advanced capitalism, critical theory ought to embrace the more empirical and pragmatic stance of an approach seeking a ‘radical-democratic change in the process of legitimation [emphasis added]’ (1992a, 444). The task of immunizing communicative rationality against the threat of systemic imperatives, therefore, depends no longer on the implementation of an idealized institutional arrangement of communicative practices but on cultivating the ‘transhistorical capacity for human communication’ within the basic contours offered by the current institutional framework (Calhoun 1992, 31).

What led Habermas to adopt such a stance can be partly explained by a degree of fatalism regarding the place held by instrumental reason in the existing social reality or, as Thornhill put it, because ‘the media of money and power have now established themselves instrumentally against their normative environments’ (2000, 165). Such an observation would eventually lead him to conduct a more detailed analysis of communicative practices, the implications of which effectively informed the development of his thought. Thus, having established that the ‘normative content of democracy’ is realized through wide-ranging practices of ‘discursive public communications’ and discovered in truths universally implicit in all speech, Habermas could no longer restrict the scope of his democratic procedures to the legal-institutional domain, but he had to also consider the existence of a ‘spontaneous flow of communication unsubverted by power [emphasis added]’ effectively escaping the grasp of formal institutionalization (Habermas 1992a, 451). The task of securing the non-identity of communicative and instrumental reason, therefore, ‘is based on the interplay between a constitutionally instituted formation of the political will’ and the ‘nonorganized’ socially integrative resources (1992a, 451). For this reason, it could be argued that although instances of practical discourse do fall outside ‘formally instituted processes of communication and decision-making’, Habermas never fully abandoned his concern for institutional changes but, instead, sought to ground the prospects for undistorted communication in the realization of transhistorical communicative potentials through the maximization of resources made available by modern social relations (1992a, 451). Drawing on such a line of thought, it could be further argued that, since the discursive discovery of both ethical life and the resolution of problems of a practical nature no longer depend on the prioritized implementation of fundamental institutional changes, but rather on the introduction of structures of communication requiring minor institutional adjustments,9 Habermas has, from The Theory of Communicative Action (1984) onwards, ‘bid a [definitive] farewell to the notion of alienation and appropriation of objectified essentialist powers’ (Habermas 1992a, 452) whose accomplishment would depend both on the emancipatory drive for self-realization pushing humanity beyond the boundaries imposed by the existing economic and socio-political institutions and the ensuing need to engage in a radical re-organization of both political and economic life.

Habermas’s confinement of the socially integrative resources required for human emancipation to the ‘lifeworld’, his rejection of the philosophy of consciousness for apparently treating ‘the formative process of the species’ as one ‘marked by the tendency for laboring individuals, in proportion to their domination of nature, to gain their identity only at the cost of repressing their own nature’ (Habermas 1987b, 67), and the reformulation of social criticism into a theory of communicative action seeking the non-identity of communicative and instrumental reason through an intersubjective legitimation of authority, all mark a break with the first generation of critical theory. Despite serving the salutary task of overcoming the normative deficit of the critique of instrumental reason elaborated by Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, these theoretical developments in fact appear to have contributed to the transformation of critique into one no longer treating existing economic and socio-political institutions and the liberal-productivist regime of growth they uphold as fundamentally problematic, thereby striking the final blows against the transformative radicalism of critical theory10 – blows that constitute a significant problem as soon as the possibility of ‘fair negotiations and free debates’ (Habermas 1992a, 449) under the authority of the aforementioned regime is called into question.

For a labour-mediated reconciliation

Since Habermas presented the repressive character of advanced capitalism as a problem caused by the gradual subsumption of the logic of emancipation of internal nature under the logic of the emancipation from external nature and traced its origins back to the development of the state into a ‘steering mechanism’ for the sphere of material reproduction and eventually interfering with matters of cultural significance, he sought the solution to the problem of human emancipation in the radical democratization of legitimation processes thought to be dependent on social actors’ capacity to distinguish between orientations towards manipulation, control and success and those towards normative consensus. With such theoretical developments, the task of critical theory would effectively be in serving the enlightenment of individuals in such a way as to maintain the non-identity of instrumental and communicative action, understood by Habermas as a precondition for human emancipation. The central issue to be discussed here is whether such a goal can be achieved – as Habermas seemed to suggest in his later work – without a radical transformation of both economic and socio-political institutions.

Since, as was discussed above, Habermas’s decision to treat the non-identity of instrumental and communicative action as a matter regarding the maximization of socially integrative resources outside the sphere of material reproduction stems from his intention to depart from ‘an emancipatory praxis’ thought to ‘proceed from labor itself’ (Habermas 1987b, 65), it is worth reiterating here the key problem he identified with Marx’s historical materialist stance, namely the so-called ‘reduction’ of ‘the process of self-reflection to the level of instrumental reason’ (Habermas 1987a, 44):

Alongside the forces of production in which instrumental action is sedimented, Marx’s social theory also incorporates into its approach the institutional framework, the relations of production. It does not eliminate from practice the structure of symbolic interaction and the role of cultural traditions, which are the only basis on which power (Herrschaft) and ideology can be comprehended. But this aspect of practice is not made part of the philosophical frame of reference. It is in this very dimension, however, which does not coincide with that of instrumental action, that phenomenological experience moves. (1987a, 42)

According to Habermas, the form of experience whereby individuals are said to be capable of reflecting upon the conditions of their existence – known as phenomenological experience – and begin a ‘world-transforming accumulation of knowledge’ lies outside the sphere of material reproduction (1987b, 335). Thus, according to his own schema, one finds, on the one hand, the forces of production which, in virtue of direct involvement in the transformation of nature (as instruments and products of labour), are thought to release a form of knowledge of a strictly ‘technically exploitable’ form (Habermas 1986, 16). On the other hand, one finds the relations of production, which as the field of the social organization of labour and the site of the ‘struggle for recognition’, are thought to entail a (normative) form of action and knowledge both falling outside the scope delimited by humanity’s mastery of external nature (instrumental action) and individuals’ orientations towards success (strategic action), and aimed at maximizing the socially integrative resources required for the formation of legitimation processes. For this reason, the prospects of human emancipation are not thought to be presupposed by a radical re-organization of economic life, but by the ‘lifeworld’s’ existing capacity to protect itself against the encroachment of systemic imperatives.

However, the presuppositions that have led Habermas to reconstruct historical materialism in such a way as to differentiate between the two logics of emancipation and confine subject–object relations to the actions oriented towards manipulation, control and success are founded upon a somewhat reductionist interpretation of Marx’s concept of labour. A central problem Habermas identified with Marx’s critique of political economy is the fact that by locating the problem of human emancipation within the framework of the ‘synthesis of man and [external] nature’ (Habermas 1987a, 30–1), the latter was incapable of incorporating non-instrumental forms of knowledge within the scope of his ‘philosophical frame of reference’. It was nevertheless shown in the first chapter of this work that such an interpretation fails to do justice to the breadth of Marx’s approach to the relationship between humanity and nature. Indeed, whilst it is possible to identify, in his work, explicit references to a conception of labour as a sphere of activity governed by the instrumental and strategic orientations manifesting themselves in humanity’s attempts to treat external nature as an object of mastery, a less explicit but fairly consistently defended thesis can also be found, namely one whereby external nature, and the parties involved in its metabolic transformation, that is, co-workers and their internal nature, are treated as partners in emancipation. The scope of social practice through labour, in the latter case, is no longer reduced to actions governed by the ‘logic[…] of the instrument’ (Agger 1979, 199) or success, but is now extended to include ‘intellectual knowledge and conversation about reality’ (1979, 200). The degree to which the faculties associated with each logic of action develop through labour would therefore depend on the conditions under which it is performed, for as a ‘vital link between doing and being’ (1979, 200) rather than a ‘sloppy confusion of two fundamentally distinctive kinds of rationality’ (1979, 199–200), labour possesses the potential for the reconciliation of humanity with both external nature and itself. However, in a famous essay written as a tribute to Marcuse, Habermas expressed additional concerns. In this text, the second-generation critical theorist explicitly rejected Marcuse’s solution to the problem of ‘technological domination’, namely the reconciliation of humanity and external nature:

Instead of treating nature as the object of possible technical control, we can encounter her as the opposing partner in a possible interaction. We can seek out a fraternal rather than an exploited nature. At the level of an as yet incomplete intersubjectivity we can impute subjectivity to animals and plants, even to minerals, and try to communicate with nature instead of merely processing her under conditions of severed communication. And the idea that a still enchained subjectivity of nature cannot be unbound until men’s communication among themselves is free from domination has retained, to say the least, a singular attraction. (Habermas 1971, 88)

The somewhat satiristic and dismissive style of the above passage reveals Habermas’s doubts regarding the possibility of transforming nature in such a way as to treat it as a ‘partner’ in emancipation, or ‘recognizing it as possessing potentialities of its own with a certain inherent legitimacy’ (Feenberg 1996, 48). This doubtful attitude towards this form of reconciliation stems from the view that the relationship between humanity and external nature involved in ‘[t]echnological development [necessarily] follows a logic that corresponds to the structure of purposive-rational action’ (Habermas 1971, 87). Thus, ‘as long […] as we have to achieve self-preservation through social labour […] we could not renounce technology, more particularly our technology, in favor of a qualitatively different one’ (1971, 87). Implicit in such an assertion, then, is the assumption that systemic imperatives apply to all processes of transformation of external nature, independent of the form assumed by the social organization of production. It follows that such imperatives ‘cannot […] be themselves conceived as values’, and that, in turn, the problem of interference of the ‘technocratic consciousness’ with processes of legitimation cannot merely be explained in terms of the instrumental mastery of external nature and overcome by a ‘new technology’ (Habermas 1974, 269). Habermas justifies such claims on the basis of the distinction between the relations of production and the forces of production as a distinction between a normative sphere of action and a value-neutral or norm-free sphere of action. Under such a schema, the interpenetration of the relationship between humanity and both internal and external nature is rejected and the task of anticipating a society freed from systemic imperatives treated as illusory. However, it becomes difficult to maintain such a distinction, defend the value neutrality of the economic foundation of society and anticipate the possibility for human emancipation under the existing liberal-productivist regime of growth as soon as the role played by the social organisation of labour in technological development is re-assessed.

As the previous points revealed, the historical materialist approach attributed to Marx by Habermas locates the ‘stored up forces of production’ at the centre of social evolution (Habermas 1987a, 29). Their development, Habermas argued, ought to be interpreted as the key driving force identified by Marx behind the transformation of ‘the world within which subjects relate to their objects’ (1987a, 29). Although fairly conventional among both Marxist and non-Marxist scholars, this interpretation of Marx’s materialism fails to fully appreciate the complexity of the dynamics of social structure identified by the latter. As Poulantzas put it:

it is the primacy of the relations of production over the productive forces that gives to their articulation the form of a process of production and reproduction. The productive forces do indeed have materiality of their own that can by no means be ignored; but they are always organized under given relations of production. Thus, while the two may enter into contradiction with each other and undergo forms of uneven development, they always do so within a process that stems from the primacy of the relations of production. [emphasis added]. (1978, 26)

According to the above passage, then, the materiality of society cannot be reduced to the forces of production. In fact, we now discover that an accurate understanding of Marx’s materialist stance ought to place a strong emphasis upon the fundamental role played by the organization of production, that is, division of labour, property, law, legitimacy, into a class of owners of the means of production imposing its productivist regime onto a class of dispossessed workers, in both the development of the productive forces and society at large.11 After all, it was Marx who first raised concerns regarding the direct and causal relation between the capitalist division of labour12 and both the unprecedented pace of development of the productive forces and the conditions of existence (exploitation and alienation) that characterize bourgeois societies.13 One therefore finds, in his work, an intention to expose the key role played by such an organizational principle, and even to demonstrate that ‘[s]cientific knowledge of laws of nature […] is generated and then helps sustain a form of the division of labour which is simultaneously a structure of domination’ (Stockman 1978, 31). Whereas such a clarification may, at first glance, appear to consist in a merely academic exercise, its implications effectively call into question Habermas’s treatment of subject–object relations as norm-free. Indeed, by re-assessing the role played by the organization of production in the development of the productive forces and society at large, one also becomes capable of fully appreciating the epistemic status of the so-called ‘systemic imperatives’ (efficiency, productivity and success), which, as orientations traced back to the emergence of the capitalist division of labour, can no longer be treated as components of a knowledge-constitutive interest of a merely technical kind but, rather, as ones ‘embedded in a rich and complex network of normative relationships’ (Cannon 2001, 126). As such they not only inform the technical appropriation of the materials of nature but also emanate from the value-judgements of individuals communicating with each other and their internal nature in historically specific actions oriented towards the transformation of external nature organized around the capitalist division of labour. In virtue of science and technology’s ‘essentially social’ (Feenberg 1996, 65) character, even actions comprised in subject–object relations entail an assessment of the truth content of validity claims according to a normative yardstick framing imperatives of efficiency, productivity and success. The democratic deficit characterizing advanced capitalist societies cannot, in this sense, be explained in terms of a gradual subsumption of a logic of interaction under a formally distinct logic of technical control resulting from the supersession of the separation between the state and the economy, but must directly be traced back to the existence of a sphere of material reproduction organized around the division of labour and imposing its norms on society at large. Thus, since ‘there is no [value-]neutral notion of efficiency and productivity’ (Eyerman and Shipway 1981, 563) and, therefore, no value-neutral material reproduction, it is possible to argue that Habermas’s distinction between a form of knowledge thought to emanate from the transformation of external nature and another from the interaction between humanity and itself cannot be upheld. How, then, can the problem of emancipation be re-assessed in light of such observations?

Having exposed the necessary involvement of normative orientations in subject–object relations, one can begin to fully grasp the material origins of the repressive mechanisms unfolding under advanced capitalist societies and, consequently, identify the fundamental problem with Habermas’s own diagnosis. With the aforementioned claims in mind, one can begin to appreciate labour’s potential to assume the form of an activity whereby individuals transform nature in such a way as to satisfy their own needs, performed with the conscious knowledge of satisfying another person’s needs and requiring them to cooperate with other members of society. In other words, it becomes possible to anticipate a central role for labour in both the mediation of humanity and external nature and humanity with itself.14 If one were to agree with Habermas’s approach, however, one would have to claim that attributing such functions to labour would mean reducing reflection to the framework of instrumental reason, thereby subsuming all forms of interaction to the logic of technical control. What Habermas fails to appreciate here is the central role performed by the relations of production in the transformation of external nature,15 thereby overlooking the fact that the actual problem does not effectively lie in attributing the aforementioned mediating function to labour, but derives from the manner in which such a form of practice is organized. As Eyerman and Shipway pointed out:

While it is true that the human need to transform nature requires that people turn themselves into instruments, and leads them to act purposively as objects rather than communicatively as subjects, this is only one dimension of the labor process. To this dimension must be added another, reflected in the use of imagination and creativity which precedes, terminates, and weaves its way throughout the instrumental dimension of the labor process. Work is, in other words, simultaneously cultural and technical activity, and is never purely instrumental […] (1981, 559)

Addressing the shortcomings of Habermas’s diagnosis, then, involves connecting the rise of instrumental reason with the historical emergence of the division of labour, thereby recognizing both the normative and historically specific character of the imperatives of efficiency, productivity and success, and the possibility of re-organizing labour in such a way as to maximize the ‘use of imagination and creativity’. The central problem with the capitalist mode of production, therefore, revolves around the fact that the form assumed by its relations of production tends to legitimate a culture of manipulation and control, combined with a conception of success construed in atomistic and competitive terms, and eventually paving the way for a purposeful transformation of external nature favouring a logic of mastery over one of cooperative self-realization. On the one hand, then, the separation of mental and manual labour prevents the powerless worker from ‘interpret[ing] the implications of the technical demands placed upon him’ (Eyerman and Shipway 1981, 562). On the other hand, by confining individual workers to the competitive, productive and efficient realization of specialised tasks, the division of labour prevents them from ‘mutually recogniz[ing] one another as equally rational and goal oriented’ individuals who ‘can grasp that the pursuit of their individual plan is entangled in a web of social interdependencies’ (Livesay 1985, 190). It could therefore be suggested that Habermas’s conceptualization of subject–object relations in strictly instrumental and atomistic-strategic terms and the corresponding intention to reject the radical transformation of the material conditions of existence as a necessary precondition for human emancipation stem from a problematic stance ‘tak[ing] absolutely for granted what is but a tendency under the capitalist mode of production’ (Eyerman and Shipway 1981, 559). Such a ‘conceptual “blindness” [not only] places Habermas behind the thinking of Marx himself’, who, by defending human emancipation as self-realization in labour (Marx 2000a), was able to grasp the fact that ‘the instrumentality of labor was a direct by-product of human social organization and interaction’ and therefore not, as Habermas contended, a condition that can be ‘absolutized for all historical periods and for all social formations’ (Eyerman and Shipway 1981, 559). It also shows that by stripping labour of its normative dimension, he is himself ‘guilty’ of ‘reducing moral-ethical experience to one form of human activity’ (Breen 2007, 391), and ‘if in his early work Habermas criticized Marx and others for emphasizing labor and ignoring interaction, in his late work he seems guilty of precisely the opposite sin’ (Vogel 1996, 151). Let’s now turn to the implications of the aforementioned observations for the anticipation of socio-political institutions capable of yielding human emancipation.

As was shown in the first section of this chapter, despite Habermas’s attempt to undertake a major reconstruction of historical materialism, he wished to present Marx’s base/superstructure schema as one capable of grasping the material character of the ‘steering mechanism’ of society and the economic form assumed by the relations of production under the liberal stage of capitalism. Once the state begins to play an active role in material reproduction and the relations of production (re-)assume a political character, he nevertheless contended, the feasibility of Marx’s schema is immediately called into question, for it is the so-called superstructure that is now said to perform the function of ‘steering mechanism’. The re-politicization of the relations of production taking place under the advanced stage of capitalist development is therefore thought to constitute a key development in the processes of legitimation of the various norms and laws governing capitalist societies, for it effectively marked the demise of a rational consensus establishing the truth content of the validity claims of (a) free and equal citizens who have made their private interest public and (b) those embodied in the laws, in favour of structures of legitimation assuming the form of a political compromise between conflicting economic interests. According to Habermas, then, the conflict between labour and capital begins to enter legitimation processes and undermine the deliberative – and therefore democratic – character of debates only once the state begins to intervene in the economy and resolves their opposition into an imposed political compromise failing to reconcile the individual and the collective. However, as one of the prominent Marxist figures seeking to reveal the embeddedness of structures of legitimation in material reproduction – Nicos Poulantzas – pointed out, the politicization of the relations of production, which Habermas identified as a phenomenon specific to traditional societies and the advanced stage of capitalism, is in fact one also found in the earlier stage of the latter mode of production. This can, once again, be explained by addressing the implications of the primary function performed by the relations of production in society:

Form this primacy flows the presence of political (ideological) relations within the relations of production: the latter, like their constituent relation of possession and economic property, find expression in class powers that are organically articulated to the political and ideological relations which concretize and legitimize them. These relations neither represent simple additions to already existing relations of production, nor do they merely react upon them in the mode of absolute exteriority or temporal sequence. They are themselves present in the constitution of the relations of production, in ways that vary with each mode of production. We should therefore rid ourselves of the now widespread idea that political (and ideological) relations enter only into the reproduction of the relations of production, which for their part retain all the original purity of self-generation. It is precisely because political-ideological relations are already present in the actual constitution of the relations of production that they play such an essential role in their reproduction; that is also why the process of production and exploitation involves reproduction of the relations of political-ideological domination and subordination. (Poulantzas 1978, 26–7)

Thus, since ‘[t]he Political field of the State (as well as the sphere of ideology) has always, in different forms, been present in the constitution and reproduction of the relations of production’ (Poulantzas 1978, 17) – relations that play a key role in the material foundation of society – it is possible to suggest that the rational universality ensuing from the debates in the bourgeois public sphere was in fact illusory, even in its earliest stages. Whilst Habermas himself had raised concerns regarding such a sphere,16 he maintained that the ‘bracketing of social inequality’ constituted a sufficient condition for the relevant ‘interlocutors’ to be able to ‘deliberate as peers’, thereby overlooking the political character of the ‘relations of dominance and subordination’ under liberal capitalism (Fraser 1997, 121). Thus, we discover that as the ‘political-ideological’ basis of the division of labour, the ‘relation of possession and economic property’ performs a distorting function in all stages of capitalist development. This, in turn, calls into question Habermas’s overall position, namely the possibility of radically democratizing the legitimation structures of capitalist societies whilst leaving the material conditions unchanged.

Concluding remarks

In the postscript of his essay entitled ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, Horkheimer warned that since ‘the economy is the first cause of wretchedness, […] critique, theoretical and practical, must address itself primarily to it’ (1975, 249). However, by differentiating two logics of emancipation and locating the prospects of reconciliation within the confines of subject–subject relations, Habermas repositioned critical theory in such a way as to direct both its theoretical and practical implications at the radical democratization of structures of legitimation lying outside the economic sphere. Thus, whilst his proposed reformulation of critical theory into a critique of modernity capable of giving recognition to forms of ‘knowledge constituted subject to interests’ could be viewed as an essential development for the task of identifying existing potentialities of both a normative and institutional form, the failure to accept or anticipate that ‘these interests are real social interests, which arise historically and also pass away’ (Vogel 1996, 123) led him to conflate the relationship between humanity and external nature with an historically specific form of practice emerging under Taylorist methods of production (Honneth and Ash 1982), exclude the possibility for non-instrumental subject–object relations and, consequently, reject the radical re-organization of economic life as a necessary precondition for the emergence of truly democratic decision-making processes. With Habermas, then, one witnesses the dissolution of the transformative potential found in Marcuse’s critical theory. An additional evaluation of the theoretical developments proposed by the second-generation critical theorist does nevertheless remain to be addressed, namely the nature and role of communicative practices in emancipation.

Notes

1  Habermas makes his debt to Weber most explicit in his work The Theory of Communicative Action.

2  See Chapter 2.

3  It must be pointed out here that from Legimitation Crisis (1988) onwards, Habermas no longer refers to the distinction between social and system integration made in Knowledge and Human Interests (1987a) in terms of ‘work’ and ‘interaction’, but replaces the two terms by ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’, respectively. Such a development can be attributed to the fact that the work/interaction distinction did not give sufficient recognition to the fact that it is also possible to find forms of interaction within processes of system integration. He called them ‘strategic actions’, and despite being ‘themselves a class of interactions’ (Habermas 1982, 263–4) they assume a different form than those found in processes of social integration.

4  It must be noted here that, from The Theory of Communicative Action onwards, Habermas abandons the differentiation ‘between the action systems of state and economy’ and begins to approach the state itself as an administrative system also governed by systemic imperatives. The implications for his theory of democracy – which will be dealt with in more details below – are not negligible. In fact, it meant that, as an institution governed by principles of efficiency and productivity (‘systemic imperatives’) the state could not be ‘transformed democratically from within’ (Habermas 1992a, 443–4).

5  Marx made his concern for the distorted nature of interaction in the following passage:

The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally, the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.

(Marx 2000f, 472)

6  It follows that a recoupling of state and economy would effectively correspond to their refeudalization, a phenomenon witnessed with the emergence of state-controlled economies such as those found in state-socialist countries.

7  For example, whereas in Legitimation Crisis (1988) Habermas problematizes the move from the liberal to capitalist stage in terms of a ‘shift by the political system into the economic system’, in The Theory of Communicative Action (1987c), problems characterizing the latter stage are re-articulated into processes of ‘colonization’ of the ‘lifeworld’ by systemic imperatives.

8  According to Habermas, the functions of social and system integration had already been performed by the state in the ‘pre-capitalist’ stage of social evolution. For this reason the advanced capitalist state effectively ‘re-appropriates’ a function lost to the market in the liberal stage and effectively becomes somewhat refeudalized.

9  Habermas even went as far as arguing that ‘despite […] structural disadvantages […], at the critical moments of an accelerated history, […] actors get the chance to reverse the normal circuits of communication in the political system and the public sphere’ (1996, 381). Thus, the possibility for restoring undistorted communication is no longer thought to rest on the participation in a yet-to-be-implemented public sphere, but on the realization of already available communicative potentials.

10  I am not alone in making such a claim. Scheuerman (1999) and Bohman (1994), for example, have highlighted a conservative shift in Habermas’s theory, particularly from Between Facts and Norms onwards. Such claims have nevertheless been contradicted by Grodnick, who identified in Between Facts and Norms a clear attempt to ‘make radical democracy compatible with a political system that resembles our own’ (2005, 395). I shall nevertheless contend that, on the one hand, the abstractness of Habermas’s own democratic theory poses a significant problem for its practical realization and that, on the other hand, the prospects for radical democracy depend on the development of new, non-manipulative, subject–object relations. Furthermore, even when Habermas approaches the problem of equal participation from the standpoint of economic redistribution, he fails to engage in a sufficiently comprehensive discussion on the compatibility (or lack thereof) of such a redistribution with the fundamental imperatives of capitalist material reproduction.

11  The annual summits held in Davos by government officials, entrepreneurs and ‘other leaders of society’, all joining their efforts in order to find ways in which growth and efficiency can be maximized and legitimated, serve to illustrate the dependence of the development of productive forces upon relations of production. The political implications of the ‘primacy of the relations of production’ in the material base of society will be further discussed below.

12  The division of labour does indeed underpin Marx’s conception of the relations of production: ‘the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour’ (Marx 2000g, 177–8).

13  It is as ‘a form of existence of capital’, and therefore in virtue of its central role in processes of wealth accumulation, that the division of labour effectively underpins the technological achievements – and the problems resulting therefrom – of the industrial age (Marx 2000f, 514).

14  Central to the present work is the attempt to show that the labour-mediated relationship between humanity and nature can be achieved without a recoupling of state and civil society. Such an issue will be addressed more extensively in the last two chapters.

15  Such a view echoes Negri’s own reading of Marx’s Grundrisse in Marx Beyond Marx (1991). Here, Negri’s call for a political reading of Marx’s analysis is partly supported by revealing the political character of the extraction of surplus value in the political economist’s work.

16  Most of these concerns revolved around what Habermas understood as the ‘conflation of bourgeois and homme’ in the citizen, which are thought to have made the public sphere vulnerable to conflicts of interests.

5

Human emancipation and communication

With the emergence of countercultural movements at the end of the 1960s, appearing to mark both a departure from the ‘bread and butter’ issues emanating from organized labour and a move towards issues regarding alternative ways of life, Habermas (1971, 1981) sought to revise critical theory in such a way as to give recognition to the distinctive character of these ‘new’ social movements. Culture, it seemed, had overtaken the economy and become the key site of struggle and crisis. Demands for emancipation, it also seemed, had assumed a primarily cultural form. Consequently, new forms of resistance appeared to treat emancipation as a matter primarily regarding intersubjective relations or ‘recognition’ (Fraser and Honneth 2003). The formulation of a theory of communicative action and the corresponding departure from the critique of instrumental reason elaborated by his predecessors can therefore be partly attributed to a particular concern for the accommodation of the distinctively cultural character of concerns and demands expressed by members of social movements emerging at the time he was writing.1 In this chapter, I shall seek to find out whether Habermas’s rejection of some of the key tenets of the critique of instrumental reason is adequately justified and whether the form of communicative action he came to defend can be expected to succeed in achieving the goal of emancipation as reconciliation.

The ‘critique of instrumental reason’ versus the ‘theory of communicative action’

Several of Habermas’s early works served as an attempt to defend the elaboration of a theory of knowledge that would not only complement Marx’s critique of political economy but also prompt significant revisions of some of its central tenets. Marx, Habermas argued, had failed to explore the epistemological implications of repression. Such a view, however, had already been expressed by Adorno and Horkheimer, who, also unsatisfied with Marx’s economic reductionism, had developed their own theory of knowledge, known as the ‘critique of instrumental reason’, partly as a response to some of the problems identified with the latter’s critique of political economy. One is therefore justified in wondering why, a few decades after Adorno’s own attempt to overcome the limitations found in Marx’s work, the second-generation theorist chose to undertake his own reconstruction of historical materialism as a basis for his own revision of critical theory. The following passage provides a key indication of Habermas’s motives:

I want to maintain that the program of early critical theory foundered […] from the exhaustion of the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness. I shall argue that a change of paradigm to the theory of communication makes it possible to return to the undertaking that was interrupted with the critique of instrumental reason; and this will permit us to take once again the since neglected tasks of a critical theory of society. (Habermas 1984, 386)

The previous generation had apparently failed to realize the very goal it had set for itself, namely identifying the suitable conditions for the reconciliation of humanity and nature. The reason for such a failure, Habermas contended, can be found in the critique of instrumental reason’s (apparently) problematic affinity with the philosophy of consciousness, and the ensuing incapacity to give recognition to the forms of action required for reconciliation. Like Marx, the first-generation theorists were found guilty of turning the emancipation of humanity into a problem inextricably linked to the relationship between humanity and external nature. Indeed, whilst Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical theory succeeded in overcoming some of the limitations resulting from the epistemological deficit of Marx’s critique, the reduction of their theory of knowledge to the framework of subject–object relations, Habermas thought, led them to ignore the distinctively human and communicative basis upon which reconciliation can be realized. Habermas consequently suggested that the task of a critical theory effectively consists in both recognizing the existence of actions oriented towards mutual understanding and maximizing the development of such communicative practices. The possibility of recognizing the forms of action corresponding to reconciliation must nevertheless be presupposed, as Habermas emphasized above, by the abandonment of the ‘paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness’ in favour of a ‘theory of communicative action’.2 What, then, led Habermas to treat the former as a framework incapable of incorporating subject–subject relations within its scope?

Implied in the above passage is the claim that since the problem of the emancipation of humanity is undifferentiated from the relationship between humanity and external nature in the philosophy of consciousness, such an approach can only be expected to ‘understand […] the capacities to relate oneself to […] entities in the world in an objectivating attitude and to gain control of objects, be it theoretically or practically’ (Habermas 1984, 385). For this reason, Habermas argued that it is incapable of distinguishing between actions oriented towards manipulation, control and success and those oriented towards mutual understanding. With such a narrow understanding of the scope of human action, Habermas concluded, the earlier generation of critical theorists was eventually prevented from grasping the distinctive logic of emancipation underpinning subject–subject relations corresponding to the relationship between humanity and itself. Although Habermas did assign the relationship between humanity and external nature a role in emancipation, he insisted that it was inevitably confined to the logic of mastery and domination and, as a result, could not yield the communicative basis upon which the reconciliation of humanity with itself could be realized:

The societal subject behaves in relation to nature just as the individual subject does in relation to objects: Nature is objectivated and dominated for the sake of reproducing the life of society. The resistance of the law-governed nexus of nature, on which the subject toils in knowing and acting, thereby continues in the formation of society and of its individual members. (Habermas 1984, 389)

A framework delimited by subject–object relations, according to Habermas, causes individuals to treat each other as manipulative objects and, consequently, fails to conform to the demands of communicative action. What the so-called proponents of the philosophy of consciousness such as Marx and first-generation critical theorists have apparently failed to grasp, therefore, is the necessarily instrumental form of knowledge emanating from subject–object relations and the specifically human character of the logic of action required for reconciliation. One cannot expect external nature to voice its opinions or expect humanity to treat this ‘other’, incapable of argumentation, as a mutual partner in emancipation. The absence of the preconditions required for mutual understanding within the relationship between humanity and external nature led Habermas to conclude that the subject will never succeed in treating the object in non-manipulative ways. The conditions for reconciliation, then, ought to be located in a framework in which individuals communicate with each other as humans qua humans. One must, in other words, raise humanity out of the relations framed by its relationship with external nature, a task which he proposes to undertake by exploring the logic of action mediated by a distinctively human attribute, namely language.3

Since, as Habermas insisted, ‘[r]eaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech’, language is thought to be the medium of reconciliation par excellence (1984, 287). Consequently, in order to be expected to yield the conditions required for the emancipation of internal nature and the general reconciliation of humanity with itself, critical theory must abandon any ‘philosophy that withdraws behind the lines of discursive thought to the “mindfulness of nature”’ in favour of an approach focusing on the strictly human and consensual character of intersubjective relations, namely the ‘theory of communicative action’ (Habermas 1984, 385). This explicit dismissal of the subject–object relations as a suitable basis for reconciliation marks a clear break with the critique of instrumental reason elaborated by his predecessors.

Such a repositioning of critical theory towards a theory of communicative action would, Habermas further argued, not only serve to capture the logic of action specific to reconciliation but also give recognition to the emancipatory potential of the later period of modernity. Although the advanced stage of capitalist development marks the advent of money as a ‘medium […] replac[ing] understanding in language as a mechanism for coordinating action’, it is also characterized by the spread of ‘mass media of communication’ that ‘technically amplify communication, bridge over spatial and temporal distances, multiply possibilities of communication and intensify the network of communicative action’ (Habermas 1984, 371–2). Thus, the strength of the theory of communication is thought to lie in its capacity to grasp both the distorting and positive achievements of modernity and, as such, can serve both a critical-theoretical purpose and an emancipatory-practical one. The apparent incapacity of the critique of instrumental reason to appreciate the fact that the ‘external world is differentiated into the objective world of entities and the social world of norms (or normatively regulated interpersonal relations)’ (Habermas 1987b, 115) has led Habermas to conclude that first-generation critical theorists could not adequately grasp the communicative character of human emancipation.

It must nevertheless be noted here that Adorno did attempt to conceptualize a form of mediation explicitly aimed at reconciliation. His concept of mediation, however, does not rely on language but on a form of ‘mimesis’ inspired by Schiller’s (1967) ‘play drive’. Here is how Habermas evaluated it:

The critique of instrumental reason, which remains bound to the conditions of the philosophy of the subject, denounces as a defect something that it cannot explain in its defectiveness because it lacks a conceptual framework sufficiently flexible to capture the integrity of what is destroyed through instrumental reason. To be sure, Horkheimer and Adorno do have a name for it: mimesis. And even though they cannot provide a theory of mimesis, the very name calls forth associations – and they are intended: Imitation designates a relation between persons in which the one accommodates to the other, identifies with the other, empathizes with the other. There is an illusion here to a relation in which the surrender of the one to the example of the other does not mean a loss of self but a gain and an enrichment. Because the mimetic capacity escapes the conceptual framework of cognitive-instrumentally determined subject-object relations, it counts as the sheer opposite of reason, as impulse. Adorno does not simply deny to the latter any cognitive function. In his aesthetics he attempts to show what the work of art owes to the power of mimesis to unlock, open up. But the rational core of mimetic achievements can be laid open only if we give up the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness – namely, a subject that represents objects and toils with them – in favor of the paradigm of linguistic philosophy – namely, that of intersubjective understanding or communication – and puts the cognitive-instrumental aspect of reason in its proper place as part of a more encompassing communicative rationality.

(Habermas 1984, 390)

According to Habermas, then, the very process of mimesis, that is, the act of imitating nature through a non-manipulative form of mediation, requires a communicative framework of action. Indeed, since Habermas understood rationality as ‘a disposition of speaking and acting subjects that is expressed in modes of behaviour for which there are good reasons or grounds’ (Habermas 1984, 22) and interprets ‘imitation’ as a process whereby one party necessarily seeks to accommodate the interests of another party through identification and empathy, he was forced to conclude that mimetic achievements could only be attained outside the framework of (necessarily) manipulative subject–object relations, and into the realm of ‘intersubjective understanding’. In virtue of its capacity to equip individuals with the capacity to imitate, and therefore understand and accommodate the needs of the ‘other’, mimesis could play a potentially significant role in reconciliation. Habermas’s objection, however, is in revealing the problematic implications in regarding this ‘other’ as external nature, that is, as an entity lacking the capacity to communicate its interests. Consequently, subject–object relations constitute an inadequate frame of reference for actions oriented towards mutual understanding. According to him, then, reconciliation ought to be turned into a matter of linguistic competence, which an inanimate party such as external nature must by definition be excluded from. Habermas is here therefore echoing his own objection to Marcuse’s proposal for a ‘fraternal relation to nature’, but appears, once again, to be missing the point both first-generation critical theorists sought to make. Like Adorno, ‘Marcuse does not recommend chatting with nature’ or ‘endowing an objectified nature with a language to tell us what is being perpetrated upon it by human subjects’ (Habermas 1987b, 68) but, rather, ‘recognizing it as possessing potentialities of its own with a certain inherent legitimacy’ (Feenberg 1996, 48). Furthermore, if one follows the logic of Habermas’s own argument, then, one becomes confronted with a particularly striking equation: any party lacking the capacity to engage in linguistic forms of communication – the object – must necessarily be manipulated by the linguistically competent one – the subject.

The aforementioned observations call for a re-assessment of the nature and significance of the ‘mimetic achievements’, such as those proposed by Adorno in his defence of the ‘primacy of the object’. What the first-generation theorist effectively had in mind by defending the role of the object in reflexivity is, as Habermas himself put it, a specific achievement of the work of reason. However, what fails to transpire in the second-generation critical theorist’s account is the fact that Adorno interpreted mimesis as the process initiated by reason’s reflection upon itself, eventually leading to a reconciliation with its previously subsumed self, namely sensuous experience. Under the principle of self-preservation, whereby reason is employed as a coping mechanism ultimately directed at the mastery of the forces of external nature and natural inclinations, an asymmetry between the cognitive and sensuous faculties becomes inevitable, thereby stifling the realization of the aforementioned process of reconciliation. Reason’s capacity to overcome the subsumption of sensuous experience under conceptuality therefore depends upon the elimination of the principle of self-preservation. The individual must indeed be in a position to seek emancipation rather than survival, a condition of existence unrealizable under the permanent state of insecurity generated by the constant need to preserve the self against the forces of (internal and external) nature. Instead of attempting to step outside – as Habermas did – the framework of action giving rise to instrumental reason, Adorno in fact sought to conceptualize an alternative, non-subsumptive, relationship between cognition and sensation or, to put in his own terms, a non-identity between the subject and the object. Above all, therefore, what Adorno thought to achieve through mimesis is the reconciliation of humanity and nature (both internal and external) as a reconciliation of reason with itself, whereby reason accommodates, rather than represses, sensuous experience in emancipation. In order to illustrate such a state of affairs, one could reflect upon the contrast between a worker producing under the guise of instrumental reason and another whose labour is mediated mimetically. In the former case, the imperatives of efficiency and productivity, and the ensuing division of labour, would ultimately stifle the possibility for the worker to be involved in the creative execution of the object he produces, for he or she is only required to employ those faculties oriented towards the maximization of productivity within a hierarchically imposed time frame and the application of standardized production methods. In the latter case, however, the worker is said to exert control over the labour process and be involved in both the design and execution of the product, thereby making it possible for his or her creativity to enter production.4 Here a mediation of his or her instinctual energies (sensuous experience) and the planful decisions (cognitive faculties) is effectively being realized. Each product would, in this sense, become the material form of the worker’s mimetically mediated instinctual and cognitive energies. Adorno, in other words, does not presume to approach nature in such a way as to treat it as another subject, but rather expects the subject to recognize its dependence upon the object, that is, to recognize the role of the aesthetic impulse in reflexivity. In sum, therefore, any attempt to escape the framework of subject–object relations would leave untouched the very conditions upon which subsumption rests. Whereas Habermas charged Adorno with failing to step outside subject–object relations, the former could be charged with failing to look beyond the narrowly defined concept of linguistically mediated reconciliation and diverting critical theory away from the root causes of repression.5

Another reason for not choosing to prioritize linguistic communication in reconciliation can be found in Adorno and Horkheimer’s approach to language. Contra Habermas, they argued that ‘speech geared towards intersubjective understanding itself relies […] on the coercive, identificatory subsumption of particular objects under universal concepts [,] and that these activities are in turn animated by the drive for self-preservation’ (Cook 2004, 74). Language, in other words, ‘served (and continues to serve) as a means to the end of controlling nature’, and cannot, consequently, qualify as the primary medium for reconciliation (Cook 2004 74). Such a critical assessment of language led Habermas to conclude that the first generation of critical theorists could only be expected to provide a ‘path of reconstruction […] that cannot be traversed discursively’ and, as a result, offer a restrictive account of rationality (Habermas 1984, 373–4). But, as Bernstein put it:

Adorno does not claim that either language or conceptuality is intrinsically identitary, and that therefore a relation to the other which does not linguistically or discursively dominate must be non-discursive. On the contrary, he contends that nonidentity is ‘opaque only for identity’s claim to be total […]’; and in The Dialectic of Enlightenment he attempts to reveal how this claim became materially and historically dominant. (1995, 149)

Thus, whilst Adorno sought to warn us about the potential dangers associated with the prioritization of language in reconciliation, he did not exclude it entirely form the emancipatory project. The function performed by language should instead be qualified. Indeed, before linguistic communication can be expected to serve reconciliation, reason must first proceed with a reflection upon itself whereby its sensuous self is raised to the same level as cognition and the subsumptive identity of particularity and universality, abolished. Once it is reconciled with nature, that is, no longer treated as an attribute raising humanity above nature, and its universalizing tendencies prevented from assuming a repressive character, language can begin to serve as a communicative medium for reconciliation.

The task of finding out how first generation of critical theorists expected reconciliation to be turned into a socially cohesive phenomenon does nevertheless remain to be undertaken. It was Marcuse, who, as was shown in Chapter 3, provided the most explicit and extensive insight into the sublimation of instincts. There, it was argued that the solution to the riddle of the relationship between ‘individual and universal gratification’ was in fact already embodied in the primacy of the object which, by involving a reconciliation between reason and sensuous experience, could ultimately serve intersubjective reconciliation. Here, the free gratification of one, or the reconciliation of an individual with his or her sensuous self, is understood as the precondition of the reconciliation between individuals themselves. However, to be sure, true and sustainable intersubjective reconciliation also rests on individuals’ capacity to engage in a conscious interpretation of the fact that one’s own emancipation of internal nature acts as the precondition of another’s. Indeed, as Marx pointed out in his own account of ‘human production’,6 the self-realization of one individual as the precondition for the self-realization of another means that the individual must be in a position to experience the satisfaction of the needs of another individual as one and the same moment in the satisfaction of his or her own. Individuals must therefore find a medium through which they consciously communicate their interests and engage with those of other individuals. This dialogical moment, which the first generation of critical theorists have failed to place a sustained and consistent emphasis upon, is precisely what Habermas sought to address in his formulation of a theory of communicative action. However, by turning this moment into a priority over reason’s reconciliation with its sensuous self, and locating it outside the framework of subject–object relations, not only did he fail to consider the non-linguistic core of reconciliation, but effectively ended up circumventing the very relations critical theory ought to tackle if it is expected to overcome the existing repressive conditions of existence. Before further addressing the nature of a dialogical moment compatible with the framework of subject–object relations, an assessment of Habermas’s own dialogical procedure and rationality of reconciliation will be provided. Such an exercise will indeed serve to identify the conditions under which the dialogical moment can fail or succeed in yielding the reconciliation of humanity with both internal and external nature.

On the limitations of the Habermasian communicative framework

Habermas located the process whereby ‘all participants harmonize their individual plans of action with one another and […] pursue their illocutionary aims without reservation’ at the core of his project of emancipation (Habermas 1984, 294) following the linguistic turn taken by his work. The success of humanity’s reconciliation with itself is, in this sense, presupposed by the participants’ capacity to engage in unconstrained linguistic communicative practices whereby they must all seek both to make the particularity of their own position explicit and coordinate their actions in such a way as to reach a consensus on the various ‘illocutionary aims’ or interests entering dialogue. At some point in the process, then, each individual will seek to accommodate the interests of others with their own. Before doing so, however, each participant must be in a position to establish, on an intersubjective basis, the validity of the claims uttered by others. It is here that Habermas turns to a central feature of communicative action, namely argumentation. Through the so-called ‘force of the better argument’ participants are not only capable of making their own position and the reasons for such a position explicit but also find the conditions whereby the particularity of their own interests contributes to the constitution of a general consensus. The harmonization of individual plans of action through communicative action, then, is understood as an intersubjective reconciliation between the individual level of action and its general counterpart. As Habermas himself put it:

As a mechanism of socialization, the first act of reaching understanding itself sets a dialectic of universalization, particularization and individualization into motion, a dialectic which leaves only the differentiated particular in the position of an individual totality. General structures of the lifeworld, collective forms of life, and individual life histories arise within the structures of the diffracted intersubjectivity of possible understanding and are at the same time differentiated. The ego is formed equiprimordially as a subject in general, as a typical member of a social collective, and as a unique individual. The universal, particular and individual constitute themselves radially, as it were – and no longer as moments bound within a totality. (1991, 219–20)

According to Habermas, then, the communicative procedure whereby individuals are socialized and understanding is universalized does not stifle the development of the individuality of the speakers but, in actual fact, stimulates it. Since the intelligibility of the process of argumentation depends on the participant’s capacity to locate his or her interests within a pre-existing normative framework (the ‘general structures of the lifeworld’), the participant is said to be socialized. Only this way can understanding between the various participants in discourse be universalized. In interaction, however, the individual confronts the general character of the ‘collective forms of life’ with the uniqueness of his or her ‘individual life history’ and can begin to affirm the particularity of the latter (particularization) as soon as the argumentative procedure is set in motion. For this reason, and because ‘more discourse means more contradiction and difference’ (Habermas 1992a, 140), the participant ‘augments his[/her] individuality in the course of this effort’ (Humboldt cited in Habermas 1991, 218) and, as such, is also said to be individualized. Thus, Habermas argued, by maintaining each process in motion, communicative action prevents the exhaustion of the multifaceted ego formation in intersubjective communication and can apparently serve to realize what Horkheimer and Adorno had attempted to achieve before him, namely the reconciliation of particularity and universality.

As the above observations seem to suggest, the reconciliation of particularity and universality can be realized only once the dialogical procedure is set in motion. Consequently, it is thought to be inapplicable to the economy, that is, the framework of subject–object relations. The emancipation of internal nature through communicative reason presupposes that the participant in discourse must be in a position to communicate (rationally) his or her interests in such a way as to achieve mutual understanding, which means that he or she must not only ‘interpret[…] the nature of his desires and feelings [Bedürfnisnatur]’ but also do so ‘in the light of culturally established standards of value’ (Habermas 1984, 20). Whilst such a process aims to both secure the conversion of private interests into public ones and form the basis upon which a consensus can be achieved, this ‘democratic generalisation of interest’ would limit the dialogical procedure to the mere interpretation of the desires and feelings of the participant without requiring an engagement with the validity of the value standards in light of which they ought to be interpreted, and would therefore fall short of equipping participants with the full range of communicative practices required for moral autonomy. For this reason, Habermas suggested that the dialogical procedure ought to include a process of evaluation, whereby participants ‘adopt a reflective attitude to the very value standards through which desires and feelings are interpreted’ (1984, 20). The ‘democratic generalisation of interests’ must therefore be complemented by a ‘universalistic justification of norms’. The normative validity of the illocutionary aims of the various participants and the value standards according to which they are interpreted are, in this sense, established procedurally. In other words, any individual failing to explain and render plausible his or her attitudes and evaluations is thought to behave irrationally, and is consequently incapable of engaging in emancipation (Habermas 1984, 17). This is in fact why the tastes and feelings, or the possibility of other sensuous manifestations, falling within the scope of what Habermas called the ‘aesthetic-expressive’ realm are, for the most part, considered a non-public affair. However, by emphasizing the discursive distinction between the moral-universalist and the aesthetic-expressive realms in the process of interpretation, Habermas effectively turned his back on an entire dimension of particularity, which the first generation of critical theorists had consistently sought to give recognition to in the process of reconciliation:

Habermas labels the forms of discourse in which our need interpretations are thematized, and whose semantic content defines happiness and the good life, ‘aesthetic-expressive.’ This, of course, coheres with the idea that the good life is a (semi-) private affair, that is non-universalizable and culturally specific, and hence outside the bounds of either truth or morality. (Bernstein 1995, 147)

Thus, by displacing reconciliation onto the dialogical level, Habermas turned the relationship between the individual and his or her internal nature into a strictly moral-universalist matter. According to Habermas’s approach to emancipation, only those courses of action all participants in discourse are likely to reach an agreement on can be considered legitimate. Consequently, what each participant regards as the good courses of action, namely those courses of action oriented towards the happiness of each participant, can be expected to play a role in emancipation only if other participants recognize them as legitimate in discourse. The substance of emancipation, then, is composed of elements concerning the ‘right life’ or common good rather than those concerning the ‘good life’ of each participant, a state of affairs which ultimately implies that ‘reaching agreement about what is universally good for humanity as a whole has “absolute priority” over the particularistic good’ (Cook 2004, 157). In response to such an observation, Habermas would suggest that although the outcome of discourse would not consist in a ‘consensus of hearts’ it would remain a ‘consensus of arguments’, and therefore one serving each participant in their rational self-reflective emancipation.7 In other words, the fact that through discourse, a ‘legitimate decision […] is one that results from the deliberation of all’ (Cook 2004, 152) led Habermas to argue that, as the product of a so-called harmonization of individual plans of action, the common good is effectively in line with the conception of the good life of each participant. It could nevertheless be suggested that by turning the differentiation between the ‘aesthetic-expressive’ and the ‘moral-universalist’ spheres into a differentiation between private and public concerns respectively, and ‘defin[ing] emancipation in strictly procedural terms’ (Cook 2004, 152), Habermas eventually excluded the sensuous dimension of reconciliation from dialogue. Whereas first-generation critical theorists were particularly concerned with issues regarding the relationship between individuals and their sensuous selves, whilst somewhat underconceptualizing the relationship between individuals themselves, Habermas’s own conceptualization of the dialogical moment runs of the risk of mistaking the moral-universalist reconciliation between subjects for an all-round reconciliation of humanity with itself.

The latter issue was picked up by Seyla Benhabib in her work entitled Critique, Norm and Utopia (1986). As Bernstein himself put it, she argued that Habermas’s ‘standpoint of rights and entitlements’, which was developed under the acknowledged influence of George Herbert Mead’s ‘generalised other’,8 meant that ‘the moral dignity of individuals derives not from what differentiates them from all others, but from what, as speaking and acting agents, they have in common with all others’ (Bernstein 1995, 151). Since, in order to play a role in emancipation, the interpretation of needs required for the reconciliation of individuals with their internal nature must be recognized as legitimate by all participants in discourse, this key process of interpretation is primarily the result of a process of universalization. The non-identical, here, is effectively being ‘dialogised’ and, one could even argue, disciplined by language. Thus, by approaching the interpretation of needs from the moral-universalist standpoint of intersubjectively recognized rights and obligations, Habermas is forced to subsume the process of particularization under the process of universalization. As a corrective to such a state of affairs, Benhabib proposed

to view each other and every rational being as an individual with a concrete history, identity, and affective-emotional constitution. Our relation to the other is governed by the norm of complementary reciprocity: each is entitled to expect and to assume from the other forms of behaviour through which the other feels recognized and confirmed as a concrete, individual being with specific needs, talents, and capacities. The norms of our interaction are… the norms of solidarity, friendship, love and care. (Benhabib in Bernstein 1995, 151)

In her attempt to overcome the subsumption of particularity under universality, Benhabib sought to combine elements of Adorno’s philosophy of non-identity with elements of Habermas’s theory of communicative action. The substitution of the ‘generalised other’ with a ‘concrete other’ allows participants in discourse to address each other’s interests from the standpoint of both ‘needs and solidarity’ (Bernstein 1995, 151). No longer treating each other as rational beings abstracted from their ‘specific needs, talents, and capacities’ and prioritizing the normative generalization of their interests, the various participants can begin to engage in a dialogue whereby the realization of their concrete selves is made the priority of their interpretation of needs. Actions oriented towards mutual understanding cease to manifest themselves as ones primarily directed at the compliance with normative standards and can begin to allow each participant in discourse to ‘expect and entitle’ others to ‘feel confirmed and recognised’ as particular beings. On this account, discourse could more effectively give the plurality of interests constituting social life their due and turn the attainment of the common good into the outcome of a process of particularization unstifled by the process of universalization. By repositioning the communicative framework of action in such a way as to accommodate the sensuous experiences constitutive of each individual’s plan of action and, consequently, turning discourse into a process potentially capable of assigning a central role to the good life in emancipation, Benhabib made it possible to begin to envisage how the reconciliation between individuals could simultaneously serve the reconciliation between humanity and the ‘aesthetic expressive’ dimension of internal nature through dialogue.9

So far, it has been suggested that Habermas attributes, at best, a secondary significance to mimetic knowledge in emancipation. It has been shown that, as a result of treating sensuous experience as a primarily private affair and conceptualizing intersubjective reconciliation as a process involving rational subjects unreconciled with their sensuous selves, Habermas had ultimately failed to elaborate a dialogical moment capable of combining moral autonomy and self-realization. The reasons leading Habermas to both adopt such a stance regarding the place of sensuous experience in emancipation and maintain that a process of particularization can exist alongside a process of universalization do nevertheless remain to be both clarified and further assessed. Indeed, whilst one can understand why a consensus of arguments can be expected to reflect the rational interests of the various participants in discourse, the claim according to which this consensus is expected to reflect the good life of each participant stands in need of justification. Habermas’s exploration of the relationship between reason and the senses undertaken in Knowledge and Human Interests (1987a) provides a useful starting point. Drawing his inspiration from Kant’s ‘pure interest of reason’, Habermas argued the following:

The (pathological) interest of the senses in what is pleasant or useful arises from need; the (practical) interest of reason in the good awakens a need. In the former case the faculty of desire is stimulated by inclination; in the latter it is determined by principles of reason. By analogy with sensual inclination as habitualized desire, we may speak of an intellectual inclination free of the senses if it is formed from a pure interest as a permanent attitude [.] (1987a, 199)

The practical interest of reason, or interest deriving from practical reason, is thought to ‘awaken a need’ since, as Habermas further suggested, it is an interest that ‘aims at existence, because it expresses a relation of the object of interest to our faculty of desire’ (1987a, 198). Habermas was able to draw such conclusions following his assessment of Kant’s own attempt to find out ‘how a mere thought, which contained nothing of the senses, could produce a sensation of pleasure and pain’ (1987a, 201). Whereas Kant sought to solve the latter riddle by exploring the path of causality between theoretical reason and sensation, Habermas questioned the capacity of a form of reason abstracted from actions to produce sensations of pleasure and pain. The latter argued that in order to be able to yield such results, reason must in fact be oriented towards action. This is precisely what led him to turn to practical reason which, he argued, could effectively serve as a framework within which conceptions of a pleasurable or good life can be formulated. Thus, although understood as a form of ‘intellectual inclination free of the senses’, practical reason is thought to be capable of stimulating the needs making up the conception of the good life of each participant in discourse. However, within the communicative framework of Habermas’s practical discourse, practical reason orients itself towards a particular set of actions, namely those aimed at reaching a mutual understanding. Within this framework of action, the interpretation of needs of each participant develops in relation to the interpretation of needs of other participants in discourse, thus leaving no room for a conception of the good life formulated independently of the intersubjective recognition of norms. Thus, as Deborah Cook pointed out, ‘in Habermas’ work, the particular refers, not primarily to individuals, but to collective forms of life in which individuals take shape by developing their own personalities through identification with social groups and collectively shared values and goals’ (Cook 2004, 156). As the discursively produced interpretation of needs turns the particularity of pleasure into a product of reason – as ‘pleasure in the fulfilment of duty’ – the sensuous particularity of the good life itself becomes effectively dissolved in the moral universality of the ‘collective forms of life’ (Habermas 1987a, 201). It could therefore be suggested that Habermas’s approach to the interpretation of needs in strictly moral-procedural terms turns his attempt to harmonize individual plans of action into a subsumption of individual conceptions of the good life under the universality of the common good.

The origins of such a state of affairs can be traced back to Habermas’s own point of departure. As was shown above, part of his conceptualization of the conditions for human emancipation involved an attempt to provide an answer to the riddle Kant himself had tried to resolve, namely how a thought could produce a sensation of pleasure and pain. Thus, instead of seeking to identify the conditions under which thought could assist the realization of our sensuous nature in emancipation, Habermas ‘demot[ed] human desires to the status of subjective expressions that lack any natural, material, or even social referents’, thereby submitting internal nature to thought itself, that is, to reason (Cook 2004, 85). Here, a clear departure from the first generation of the Frankfurt School’s own project of emancipation can be observed:

Against the Freudian project of bringing our rational powers into harmony with the instincts – the project that Adorno embraced – Habermas suggests that reason and desire have already been reconciled: desire is just the subjective expression of disembodied needs that are rational, at least in principle, because they cannot be divorced from their articulation in speech. (Cook 2004, 86)

According to Habermas, then, the critical theorist is not required to seek the reconciliation of sensuous experience and reason in emancipation, for as merely ‘subjective expressions’, desires bear no relation to the objective world – the very world which the senses belong to. Language, he thought, is oriented towards the ‘[e]mancipation from the compulsion of internal nature [my emphasis]’ (Habermas 1987a, 53). However, by ‘linguistif[ying] desire in order to domesticate it’ (Cook 2004, 88–9) Habermas, who was strongly influenced by the neo-Kantian approaches giving a central place to formal rationality (Dallmayr 1988), subordinates internal nature to reason, thereby revealing his antagonism to natural inclinations and a failure to safeguard knowledge against its development into a source of repression. In sum, therefore, Habermas’s attempt to harmonize the individual plans of action in his theory of communicative action led him to abandon the project of self-realization in favour of a conceptual framework both reproducing the subsumption of particularity under universality and stripping the latter of its sensuous dimension.

With the subject ridden of its somatic self, one is faced with the difficult task of exploring the motives thought to lead individual agents to engage into a dialogue governed by communicative reason and aimed at intersubjective reconciliation. Indeed, if discursive processes are not expected to include considerations of an ‘aesthetic-expressive’ nature, then one is justified in asking why it is that individuals would be willing to participate in them. Before directly addressing such an issue, however, a further clarification of Habermas’s communicative form of action is required:

I shall speak of communicative action whenever the actions of the agents involved are coordinated not through egocentric calculations of success but through acts of reaching understanding. In communicative action participants are not primarily oriented to their own individual successes; they pursue their individual goals under the condition that they can harmonize their plans of action on the basis of common situation definitions. In this respect the negotiation of definitions of the situation is an essential element of the interpretive accomplishments required for communicative action. (1984, 285–6)

The pursuit of individual goals in practical discourse, then, cannot assume the form of an orientation towards individual success, for it is dependent on the successful coordination of the participants’ actions. Orientations towards success are here presented as antagonistic to orientations towards mutual understanding. How, then, can Habermas explain why individuals come to treat the formation of a rational consensus achieved through dialogue as an intentional and desirable process for their emancipation? If it is indeed the case that, as was shown above, Habermas views internal nature as a phenomenon ‘entirely generated by communicative practices’ (Cook 2004, 88), then it must follow that the ‘discursively produced and intersubjectively shared beliefs’ themselves are endowed with the ‘motivating force’ behind actions oriented towards the emancipation of internal nature (Habermas 1996, 147). From this perspective, the mere capacity to exercise ‘the public use of communicative freedom’ in order to express ‘good reasons’ for performing particular speech acts appears, as Habermas himself put it, as a ‘weak’ but sufficient motivating force behind procedural emancipation (1996, 147). According to such line of thought, then, the fact that internal nature is mediated by language is, in itself, a sufficient reason for supposing that, under conditions of unrestrained communication, individuals will seek to ‘pursue their individual goals under the condition that they can harmonize their plans of action’, that is, to engage in communicative action.

However, as soon as the competitive and insecure environment framed by the capitalist mode of production is taken into consideration, the weakness of such a motivating force suddenly surfaces as an all-to-evident problem. Whereas Habermas would maintain that the linguistic mediation of nature necessarily brings individuals into a dialogue with each other, his proposed distinction between ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’ means that he fell short of giving sufficient recognition to the influence of economic scarcity and competition on (a) individuals’ plans action, (b) their capacity to engage in fair legitimation processes and (c) their motivation to reach an agreement through discourse. Furthermore, if, according to Habermas, non-discursive factors such as systemic imperatives have the capacity to enter into and affect communicative practices, under what concrete conditions, then, can individuals be expected to favour orientations towards mutual understanding over those towards manipulation, control and success? One may indeed be required to step outside language in order to understand not only what prevents individuals from engaging in actions oriented towards mutual understanding but also what motivates them, for in order to decide to engage in a discourse aimed at achieving a harmonization of individual plans of action, they must first be in a position to realize that they indeed need to do so independently of their orientations towards manipulation, control and success. As it currently stands, Habermas’s communicative framework fails to provide a sufficiently convincing and comprehensive account of such motivations. As Cook put it:

He […] makes it difficult to understand what motivates human behaviour, including communicative action. Reaching agreement may be the telos of communicative action, but it is not at all clear that this goal is the sole motivation for communicative action. For one can always ask a further question: Agreement for what purpose? Understanding to what end? The goal of reaching agreement on validity claims is always pursued within particular contexts that define the aims such agreement will serve. What motivates individuals to pursue these further aims is moot. (2004, 171)

Whilst Habermas’s theory of communicative action clearly, albeit problematically, seeks to explain the centrality of dialogue in human emancipation, it fails to demonstrate why the various participants would seek to do so by attempting to achieve a consensus rather than pursuing their individual interests. One may indeed seriously question the capacity of individuals forced to compete in the satisfaction of their needs to bracket their orientations towards manipulation, control and success in favour of actions oriented towards mutual understanding. Habermas’s failure to tackle this issue in a sufficiently extensive manner could be attributed to the fact that ‘[b]y linguistifying needs, Habermas confuses the linguistic articulation of needs with needs themselves’, thereby dissolving the motivations behind discursive interaction within the discursive procedure itself, and making it very difficult for his critical theory to anticipate (a) the possibility of harmonizing plans of action on the basis of individuals’ concrete needs, and (b) the exclusion of self-interested orientations from communicative practices. The latter implies that the prospects of intersubjective reconciliation effectively rest on critical theory’s capacity to construe the harmonization of individual plans of action in terms of collective success or, as Marcuse and Marx would put it, on the recognition that the practical realization of one’s own conception of the good life is a precondition for another’s. Above all, then, the aforementioned observations point towards the need to give recognition to the inevitable intertwinement of subject–object relations with their intersubjective counterpart. It follows that the possibility for undistorted dialogical relations may itself depend upon the development of an alternative relationship between humanity and external nature. Not doing so could entail, as appears to be the case with Habermas’s critical theory, defending forms of social practices operating in the shadow of liberal thought.

In sum, therefore, a critical theory realistically seeking to turn the reconciliation of humanity and nature into a process applicable to society at large must attempt both to safeguard the dialogical process against the repressive tendencies of the subsumption of particularity under universality and, in order to identify the conditions under which individuals choose to reach an agreement, distinguish the motivations leading individuals to engage in discourse from the discursive procedure itself. For such reasons, as it currently stands, the dialogical procedure suggested by Habermas cannot be expected to yield the rationality of reconciliation required for human emancipation. The development of the latter is in fact dependent upon the recognition of the role played by mimetic knowledge in emancipation, for it would not only ensure the maintenance of the good life in the face of a universalizing force such as the common good but also enable critical theory to trace the decisions to engage in dialogue back to the spontaneous particularity of human existence. The next section of the present chapter as well as the next two chapters shall partly attempt to explore the form a dialogue expected to give the reconciliation of reason and the senses in emancipation its due.

Towards a communicative framework for the reconciliation of subject and object

As the preceding section partly attempted to demonstrate, Habermas’s attempt to harmonize the individual plans of action fails to counter the universalizing tendencies of reason identified by the members of the earlier generation of Frankfurt School theorists – especially Adorno – as key factors causing the repression of internal nature. In response to such a problem, Seyla Benhabib (1986) suggested a revision of the dialogical procedure in such a way as to allow the participants to develop an intersubjective interpretation of needs whereby they recognize and confirm each other as ‘concrete others’, thus defending an approach to dialogue from the standpoint of ‘needs and solidarity’ against one approached, as Habermas himself did, from the standpoint of ‘rights and entitlements’. The advantage of adopting such a standpoint, she argued, lies in the possibility for each participant in discourse to achieve a ‘complementary reciprocity’ between individuals treating each other as beings with ‘specific needs, talents, and capacities’. Here, the discursive manifestation of reason would no longer give absolute priority to the common good, often construed as economic stability, growth and full employment in advanced capitalist societies. Instead, each participant is thought to be reconciled with their internal nature whilst seeking to experience the satisfaction of another’s needs as an integral part of his or her own. As such, it could be suggested that Benhabib elaborated a conceptual framework potentially capable of aligning the common good to individual conceptions of the good life, thereby circumventing the problems found in Habermas’s own schema.

The fact of introducing the concrete particularity of individuals’ existence into the communicative framework of action does nevertheless raise several issues regarding the role of communicative reason in emancipation. If one accepts, as Benhabib did, that the concrete particularity of existence can indeed be introduced into the communicative framework of action, one faces the task of establishing the origins of the needs interpreted in the discursive realm. Whilst her emphasis on the concrete particularity of individuals’ existence opens her theoretical framework to the possibility of anticipating the development of individual conceptions of the good life outside the discursive realm, no clear indication of the latter’s relationship with non-discursive processes has been provided. This is problematic as it means that her framework cannot be safeguarded against a confusion between the needs themselves and their linguistic articulation. Consequently, her own revision fails to fully overcome some of the key limitations found in Habermas’s theory of communicative action discussed above. This can be partly explained by her stance, shared by Habermas, towards subject–object relations. Here is how Bernstein summarized her position:

[S]he argues that, firstly, the category of ‘objectification,’ as employed within the labour model of activity, is inadequate to characterize communicative activities; secondly, that this model of activity is fundamentally monological, moving from ideas in the head to actions in the world, and hence abstracts from the linguistic mediation of desires, intentions and purposes; thirdly, in so doing it illegitimately suppresses the interpretive indeterminacy of human action; fourthly, it is only as a consequence of the suppression of the interpretive indeterminacy of human action that the model of a trans-subjective subject comes into being, but such a subject involves a denial of the inescapable fact of human plurality; finally, the model of self-actualization operative in the philosophy of the subject assumes ‘an epistemologically transparent self, who seems to possess unequivocal knowledge for determining what would “actualize” him/her’[…]; as such, it suppresses the very situatedness that characterizes interpersonal existence. (1995, 139–40)

Like Habermas, then, Benhabib treats the framework of subject–object relations as a restrictive realm of human action. The subject is here understood as a manipulative and conscious being with determinate needs interpreted and satisfied monologically through the efficient mastery of external nature. For these reasons, not only is the subject–object framework of action thought to reduce interpersonal existence to actions oriented towards success and relations of power, it is also believed to be incapable of accommodating the dialogical basis upon which the ‘interpretive indeterminacy of human action’ is thought to rest. According to Benhabib, then, the plurality of needs interpretations must be understood in terms of the situatedness of interpersonal existence, whose actualization requires an intersubjective framework of action. As such, the various needs, talents and capacities of the participants in discourse are thought not to bear any relevance to reconciliation until they are intersubjectively interpreted through the discursive process or, as Benhabib herself would put it, until their complementary reciprocity with the needs, talents and capacities of others is established. However, by abstracting the interpretation of needs from the so-called determinacy of subject–object relations and reducing human plurality to the situatedness of interpersonal relations achieved through linguistic communication, Benhabib, like Habermas before her, effectively runs the risk of dissolving the concrete particularity of individual existence in the indeterminacy of linguistically mediated interpersonal existence, whilst failing to give recognition to the potentially dialogical character of ‘self-actualization’ exposed in the previous chapter. Thus, despite containing an explicit attempt to assign a central role to human plurality and the concrete needs of individuals participating in discourse, the failure to fully reflect on the ‘misrepresentations of subject and substance, of subjects as substance [my emphasis]’ (Bernstein 1995, 156) means that her intersubjective model runs the risk of abstracting the interpretation of needs from subject–object relations, whilst treating the latter as unproblematic. The search for a single framework of action capable of giving both the situatedness of interpersonal existence and the concrete particularity of human existence their due continues.

Both Habermas and Benhabib, then, sought to harmonize the individual plans of action oriented towards the emancipation of internal nature by stepping outside the framework of subject–object relations. Whilst the former’s somewhat evident neglect of the sensuous particularity of human existence in emancipation led him to subsume it under the universalism entailed by his politics of ‘rights and entitlements’, the latter’s insistence on the need for all participants in discourse to treat each other as ‘concrete others’ fell short of overcoming the problems associated with the theory of communicative action identified above. Benhabib’s unsuccessful attempt to overcome the universalist tendencies of Habermas’s critical theory could in fact be attributed to a lack of consideration of the full epistemological implications to be drawn out of the recognition of others in their concrete particularity. As Bernstein put it:

The meaning of universality in the context of need interpretations will have to shift away from the paradigm of communication altogether since it will have an epistemic component equivalent to whatever is involved in recognizing others in their concrete particularity, which, again, is what Adorno employs art in order to interrogate; and hence an alternative conception of what universality means for ethical theory if need interpretation is nonetheless going to be an element of a universalistic moral theory. (1995, 154)

What form, then, would ‘an epistemic component equivalent to whatever is involved in recognizing others in their concrete particularity’ assume? In order to provide an answer, one must first seek to explain what the concrete particularity in question consists of. According to Benhabib, it refers to the specific needs, talents and capacities of a rational being with a ‘concrete history, identity, and affective-emotional constitution’. The dialogical formation of the interpretation of needs she proposed therefore requires each participant to recognize the (partly) sensuous origins of the other participants’ desires. In contrast with Habermas’s, then, Benhabib’s own theoretical re-orientations open up the possibility for participants to turn the senses into the substance of their needs in the process of interpretation. Drawing on the concrete particularity of existence for the intersubjective interpretation of needs would entail, therefore, a necessary reflection on the nature of, and role played by, self-actualizing processes in the development of an individual’s concrete existence. For example, in her attempt to actualize the self, a female worker is likely to face a variety of obstacles unknown to male workers. These obstacles, for example, the glass ceiling, are likely to have a significant impact on the ‘concrete history, identity and affective-emotional constitution’ of this worker. An attempt to accommodate the other, for example, the female worker, as an individual with concrete needs and capabilities in dialogue would, therefore, entail the incorporation of an epistemic component subject to interests involved in orientations towards self-actualization. Unfortunately, Benhabib failed to fully consider such an issue. This may be due to the fact that by treating the epistemic component involved in self-actualization as merely monological, she was somehow forced to overlook the fact that an individual’s attempt to achieve success in their apprehension of the world of objects assumes, more often than not, the form of a collective and even cooperative endeavour resting on the complementary reciprocity of needs and capabilities. Indeed, if a sphere of subject–object relations like the workplace may not, today, provide the space for a dialogically accomplished complementary reciprocity of individual conceptions of the good life, it is because the existing organizational structure, that is, the capitalist division of labour, within which ‘objectification’ takes place, frames a culture of competitive specialization whereby individuals are not encouraged to treat their apprehension of the world of objects as a cooperative enterprise, and other individuals’ success in self-actualization as a moral responsibility. In turn, Benhabib’s claim that no subject–object relations can successfully accommodate the plurality of existence prevented her from accepting the necessity to re-evaluate the role of these relations in the formulation of an emancipatory epistemology.

In sum, therefore, although Benhabib emphasized the need for participants to treat each other as ‘concrete others’, her failure to both safeguard her theoretical framework against the abstraction of intersubjective reconciliation from subject–object relations, and adequately reflect on the epistemological implications regarding the inclusion of the ‘concrete other’ in the interpretation of needs, reveals an unresolved tension between the epistemic achievements of the particularity of concrete existence, on the one hand, and the universality of intersubjective understanding, on the other. Furthermore, since she maintained, again like Habermas, that the scope of human action yielded by the framework of subject–object relations remains, whatever its form, too narrow to be capable of accommodating the reconciliation of humanity with itself, she was ultimately forced to discipline the ‘concrete other’ with the universalizing tendencies of the linguistically mediated interpretation of needs and capabilities. As a result, instead of giving full scope to the ‘purely particular activity and business of the individual’ in relation to the ‘needs which he[/she] has as a part of nature’ (Adorno 1997, 376–7) in dialogue, Benhabib reproduced the problematic epistemic dualism found in Habermas’s own critical theory, thereby separating the ‘epistemic component’ relating to concrete particularity from ‘whatever is involved in recognizing’ concrete others. It follows, therefore, that the articulation of the concrete particularity of individuals’ existence with the situatedness of interpersonal existence is best served by the conceptualization of a single logic of emancipation presupposing the reconciliation of every rational being (subject) with their existence as beings belonging to nature (object). Under what conditions, then, can such a logic of emancipation be expected to realize its full potential?

First, a confusion between the needs themselves and their linguistic articulation must be prevented. As such, the linguistification of internal nature must be abandoned in favour of a form of reconciliation whereby knowledge becomes mimetically mediated. At the epistemological level, such a task involves a departure from the subjectivist tendencies of communicative rationality towards a form of knowledge capable of reconciling the universal and the particular. At the level of the needs themselves, such a task involves turning both internal and external nature, that is, sensory experience in general, into the fabric of knowledge one has of his or her needs, thereby treating the emancipation of internal nature as a phenomenon inextricably linked to the relationship between humanity and external nature. Finally, at the level of social actions, it involves anchoring communicative practices in the sphere of labour, where dialogue could simultaneously serve the reconciliation of subject and object, and the actualization of this same reconciliation on a societal and intersubjective level.

Second, and as a general precondition for the aforementioned task, the critical theorist must accept the possibility of a subject–object framework of action stripped of the manipulative tendencies of a sovereign subject oriented towards the preservation of the self. In order to do so, one must step outside the bourgeois-productivist model of labour – preserved by Habermas in his theoretical framework – in which humanity seeks to dominate external nature and alongside which this same subject treats internal nature as an entity to be disciplined by language. One therefore ought to move away from a conception of emancipatory practice denying a role to sensory experience. Whilst such a task involves a repositioning of reconciliation within the framework of subject–object relations, it also corresponds to a transformation of the relationship between humanity and nature into one mediated by labour as a process of meaningful self-discovery, namely a process whereby ‘human activity itself’ is conceived as ‘objective activity’ (Marx 2000d, 171) and ‘man is affirmed […] not only in thought but through all his senses [my emphasis]’ (Marx 2000a, 101). Under such a state of affairs, the possibility of maintaining the non-identity of subject and object defended by the first generation of critical theorists is secured by stripping labour of its imperatives of efficiency and productivity, and turning it into an activity oriented towards the release of creative energies. As such, labour would effectively perform the role of mimetic mediation between humanity and nature, and serve as a basis upon which it becomes ‘possible to transform individual need into an aesthetic value with cognitive content’ (Schecter 2005, 160). The reconciliation of reason and the senses in knowledge mimetically mediated by labour is, here, synonymous with the reconciliation of humanity with both internal and external nature.

Third, the project of human emancipation approached from the reconciliation of subject and object involves envisaging a radically different way of experiencing social life. This new set of experiences is grounded in what Adorno called the ‘aesthetic feeling’, which he interpreted as follows:

Aesthetic feeling is not what is being aroused in us. It is more like a sense of wonderment in the presence of what we behold; a sense of being overwhelmed in the presence of a phenomenon that is nonconceptual while at the same time being determinate. The arousal of subjective effect by art is the last thing we should want to dignify with the name of aesthetic feeling. True aesthetic feeling is oriented to the object; it is the feeling of the object, not some reflex in the viewer. (Adorno 1984, 236)

Understood as neither a compulsive nor a conceptual phenomenon, the aesthetic feeling lies between the sensuous and cognitive realms. It arises from the mimetic mediation of individuals’ instinctual energies (sensuous experience) and their capacity to choose the best course of action (cognitive faculties) in, say, the production of objects or the mere interpretation of needs. As the product of the reconciliation of reason and the senses, then, the ‘aesthetic feeling’s’ content arises from the object, whilst its determinacy is ‘brought about by the universal sustaining medium’, that is, the concept (Adorno 1997, 376–7). As such, the aesthetic feeling expresses a non-identical, yet relational, moment between the subject and the object. It is a reflexive moment experienced as a ‘feeling for the object’, made possible by the unifying, yet non-subsumptive, force of a universal flexible enough to ‘accept what is other to it as other’ (Jarvis 1998, 188), and therefore capable of giving the particularity of human existence, suppressed by existing rationality and non-discoverable by its communicative form, its due. In other words, ‘aesthetic behaviour is the ability to see more in things than they are [in accordance with conceptual frameworks]’ (Adorno in Bernstein 1995, 150). A form of human emancipation approached from the standpoint of the reconciliation of subject and object therefore requires one to overcome the subsumption of the good life under the right life and turn the former into the substance of a meaningful process of self-discovery by substituting communicative rationality with a form of rationality capable of turning the aesthetic feeling into a reflexive force, that is, an aesthetic rationality. It requires one to look beyond the principle of self-preservation as a result of which existing rationality came to treat the aesthetic feeling as a foe of reason. Thus, whilst the major social, political, economic and intellectual transformations of the modern age all serve to indicate that the subject is now equipped with the capacity to engage with the object in reflexive terms, they have demonstrated that at both the epistemological (Cartesian dualism) and sociological (division of labour) levels, such a reflexivity has tended to subsume the particularizing tendencies of objectivity under the universalizing ones of subjectivity. The task of critical theory, therefore, is to ensure that what Adorno believes autonomous art to be the sole outlet for, namely an aesthetic feeling that ‘keeps alive the memory of a kind of objectivity which lies beyond conceptual frameworks’ (Adorno in Bernstein 1995, 150), is diffused throughout social life as whole. Critical theory must therefore seek, as Marcuse put it, the ‘abolition of art’ by stripping subject–object relations of the division of labour, which prevents humanity’s recognition of itself as a part of, albeit irreducible to, external nature.10 Whereas this may lead to a new form of rationality corresponding to new forms of social experiences, its being an orientation whereby the memory of a phenomenon is ‘kept alive’ means that it does not correspond to the realization of a utopia, but to the mere actualization ‘of what reason is like’ (Jarvis 1998, 178), or the realization of a latent potentiality which only an age characterized by a mimetic mediation of subject and object can be expected to actualize. This is in fact why one speaks here of ‘reconciliation’, that is, of a mediated non-identity of humanity and nature, whose historical possibility has been both unleashed and denied by modernity.

The final condition regards the manner in which dialogue could be expected to accommodate the form of rationality corresponding to the reconciliation of humanity and nature. As Habermas and Benhabib have themselves already demonstrated, the possibility of giving the situatedness of interpersonal existence in the process of harmonization of individual plans of action its due depends on the introduction of a dialogue as its fundamental communicative medium. However, as was shown above, human emancipation, if approached from the standpoint of the reconciliation of humanity and nature, can only be expected to give the particularity of human existence its due and assume a socially cohesive form if this dialogue plays a role in mediating the free gratification of one with the free gratification of all, or where the former is experienced as a precondition of the latter. Since such a state of affairs depends on the possibility for each individual’s satisfaction of needs to be consciously and simultaneously experienced as the satisfaction of the needs of others,11 the role played by dialogue would become one of a medium through which the mimetically mediated needs of individuals engaged in a self-realizing transformation of nature can be communicated to each other. Dialogue would not, in this sense, serve as the communicative medium between humanity and external nature as such, but would rather take place between individuals conscious of their needs as beings belonging to nature, and not reducible to it.12

Furthermore, since, as was shown in the preceding chapters, the framework of subject–object relations comprises actions involved in the satisfaction of material needs, individuals will tend to interpret them and seek their satisfaction from the dual and complementary perspective of the producer and the consumer.13 Although the needs of individuals producing objects or providing a service effectively differ from the needs of individuals consuming these same goods and services, the task at hand, here, is to anticipate the possibility for both dimensions to serve as coordinated outlets for meaningful self-discovery. Indeed, whilst under the principle of self-preservation, workers are denied the possibility of treating labour in such a way as a result of imperatives of efficiency and productivity, a similar form of repression identified by Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse in their critique of the culture industry can also be observed among consumers of mass culture. For in both cases, individuals’ incapacity to engage in both production and consumption in such a way as to experience them as processes of meaningful self-discovery can be traced back to the asymmetry between sensuous experience and cognitive faculties in their interpretation of needs: the repression of natural inclinations by instrumental reason turning the workers’ activity into toil and causing the unrestrained (and non-reflexive) release of instinctual energies through consumption, resulting in the individuals’ subjection to the manipulative psycho-mechanisms upon which the consumerist culture of advanced capitalism relies.14 It follows that a self-realizing satisfaction of needs rests on the removal of the pressure exerted on both dimensions by the division of labour and an abstract system of exchange of equivalents, that is, the capitalist market, imposing their demands on individuals. The free and meaningful process of self-discovery therefore partly rests on the direct and successful coordination of the needs of individuals qua producers and consumers, and is, in this sense, dependent upon an undistorted communicative framework of action within subject–object relations. On the one hand, then, in virtue of its capacity to release the spontaneity of concrete existence in conjunction with the ‘planful decision and rational determination of goals’ (Horkheimer 1975, 207), the mimetic interpretation of needs by individuals qua producers and consumers serves the reconciliation of reason and the senses in reflexivity. On the other, the introduction of a dialogue aimed at the harmonization of individual plans of action in processes oriented towards self-actualization would make it possible to turn the free gratification of one into the precondition for the free gratification of all by situating such an interpretation interpersonally. Here, however, dialogue would not effectively serve as the chief basis upon which needs come to be interpreted – as is the case with Habermas and Benhabib – but would instead make its contribution to emancipation by coordinating two potentially meaningful processes of self-discovery or self-actualization, namely production and consumption.

Concluding remarks

Habermas’s call for a departure from the critique of instrumental reason in favour of a theory of communicative action was motivated by an attempt to reflect on the type of actions and knowledge interests suitable for a concept of emancipation construed in terms of reconciliation. In virtue of their necessarily manipulative character, he argued, subject–object relations cannot provide a basis for actions seeking to accommodate the point of view of others. Instead, he sought to raise humanity above nature, by emphasizing the distinctiveness and significance of intersubjective relations, and assigning a key role to language in their mediation. However, by doing so, he effectively ended up with a theoretical framework failing to safeguard itself against the conditions of existence which the earlier generation of Frankfurt School theorists (Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse) had identified as the seeds of a repressive social order. Indeed, his approach to the relationship between humanity and internal nature as a matter primarily regarding actions guided by communicative reason not only led him to subsume individual conceptions of the good life under the common good, thereby reproducing the subsumption of particularity and universality, but also caused him to liquidate the somatic dimension of human existence in dialogue. In order to overcome such limitations, it was suggested that the prospects of humanity’s reconciliation with itself depended not only on the treatment of other individuals as concrete selves, as suggested by Benhabib, but also on the introduction of undistorted communicative practices within the realm of subject–object relations. These demands could in fact be said to echo Fraser’s own treatment of ‘recognition’ (culture) and ‘redistribution’ (the economy) as equally significant and mutually irreducible categories (Fraser and Honneth 2003), and overlapping sites of resistance. However, in this chapter, additional implications were identified. Indeed, it was also suggested that the aforementioned observations necessitate one to elaborate a framework of action whereby the subject is capable of recognizing its dependence on the object – or a form of reflexivity arising from the mimetically mediated reconciliation of reason and senses – and on a communicative medium capable of paving the way for mutually recognized free gratification. For these reasons, it was finally suggested that a key precondition for the reconciliation of humanity with both itself and external nature consists in the introduction of a dialogue between individuals satisfying their needs as beings consciously belonging to nature. It must nevertheless be pointed out here that I do not intend to limit the task of filling the normative vacuum present in the work of first-generation critical theorists to the above discussion.15 In the following two chapters, I shall proceed with a detailed exploration of the socio-political institutions capable of accommodating the aforementioned demands and attempt to present the re-organization of economic and political life into associations as a possible practical step towards the reconciliation of aesthetic rationality with ethical orientations.

Notes

1  In the concluding chapter, I shall partly aim to show that contemporary social movements such as Occupy and alter-globalization have tended to articulate their concerns and demands differently, namely by treating the economy, culture and external nature as overlapping sites of crisis and struggle.

2  Habermas’s self-proclaimed success in stepping outside of the framework of the philosophy of consciousness was contested by Bernstein (1995, 140). Whether Habermas did indeed succeed in doing so, however, falls outside the scope of the present chapter. My main concern here is to find out the reasons why the second-generation critical theorist insisted on elaborating a theory of communication, and whether such a repositioning of critical theory is worth pursuing.

3  Habermas’s position on the distinctively human character of language was most clearly expressed as follows: ‘What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know’ (1987a, 314).

4  Mimetic labour, then, entails the elimination of the division of labour. The further implications of this form of mimetic labour – such as the introduction of cooperative practices into production – will be addressed later in this chapter and in Chapter 6.

5  This criticism shall be further developed below. It must be noted here, however, that I am not alone in defending the critique of instrumental reason against Habermas’s theory of communicative action. See, for example, Darrow Schecter’s The Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas (2010).

6  See Chapter 1, section ‘On the social character of human emancipation’.

7  With such a distinction Habermas sought to differentiate his stance from Rousseau’s ‘general will’, which he also described as a ‘democracy of nonpublic opinion’ (Habermas 1992a, 445).

8  Habermas credited Mead for identifying the dynamics of a form of authority which

differs from authority based only over the means of sanction, in that it rests on assent. When A regards the group sanctions as his own, as sanctions he directs at himself, he has to presuppose his assent to the norm whose violation he punishes in this way. Unlike socially generalized imperatives, institutions claim a validity that rests on intersubjective recognition, on the consent of those affected by it. (Habermas 1987c, 38–9)

In this sense, Mead is also credited, albeit implicitly, for serving as a more democratic alternative to Rousseau’s ‘general will’, which, as a ‘generalized will of all individuals’, can only ‘express[…] itself in the sanctions the group applies to deviations’, and therefore excludes the intersubjective and consensual basis upon which the rights and obligations of those affected by it could rest (Habermas 1987c, 38–9).

9  Benhabib’s framework does nevertheless contain several limitations, some of which will be the object of the next section of this chapter.

10  See Chapter 3 for a detailed account of Marcuse’s call for the ‘abolition of art’.

11  See the third section of Chapter 3.

12  Although this form of communicative practice appears, at first glance, to depart significantly from the ‘communicative theory of nature’ defended by Steven Vogel (1996), it constitutes a first and necessary step towards its implementation. I am in fact suggesting here that the recognition of the social and historical concept of nature defended by Vogel can only be safeguarded against anthropocentrism if individuals’ communicative recognition of themselves as beings belonging to nature is given its due in subject–object relations. Thus, whilst nature is historical, human beings themselves belong to nature. Any attempt to anticipate the reconciliation between humanity and both internal and external nature must be presupposed by such a dual recognition.

13  Marx, for example, presented the process of satisfaction of needs in terms of production and ‘enjoyment or use’. See Chapter 1 for a more detailed explanation of his concept of ‘human production’.

14  The unrestrained release of instinctual energies is said to assume a repressive form here, for it effectively strips individuals of their capacity to engage reflexively with the products they consume. Marcuse (1964) called this phenomenon ‘repressive desublimation’.

15  One of Habermas’s self-proclaimed tasks was to revise critical theory in such a way as to incorporate a normative content within its scope. In this work, I partly aim to show that such a task is best served by re-evaluating the role of communicative practices in subject–object relations. This is why the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole discussed below shall be presented as a suitable alternative to some of the theoretical developments proposed by Habermas.

6

Drawing the contours of institutionalized emancipatory practice

Frankfurt school critical theorists, with the possible exception of Habermas, have refrained from exploring the institutional arrangement potentially capable of yielding emancipatory practices. The reason for this can be found in their conceptualization of critical theory’s task as a primarily diagnostic one. Critical theory, they argued, can only be expected to negate the existing world by revealing the ‘separation between individual and society’ (Horkheimer 1975, 207). However, as I sought to demonstrate in Chapter 3, the principle of dialectical negation, in virtue of its opposition to the status quo, necessarily entails considerations and anticipations regarding what the status quo is not. Although some prescriptive recommendations can be found in the work of first-generation critical theorists,1 it was suggested in Chapter 3 that critical theory should fulfil its own, at times unacknowledged, promises and realize the full scope of dialectical negation in such a way as to provide an insight into alternative objective conditions of existence. In this chapter, I shall attempt to accomplish the aforementioned goal by revealing the affinity between Marx’s work, the critique of advanced capitalism formulated by first-generation Frankfurt School thinkers and the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole.

Democracy and the reconciliation of humanity and nature

Habermas was the first member of the Frankfurt School to engage in a theoretical exercise partly aimed at drawing the contours of the democratic processes through which individuals could be expected to find the practical means for the emancipation of their internal nature from the repressive mechanisms of advanced capitalism. One could indeed discover, in his work, a significant concern with the institutional arrangement making such a form of emancipation possible as early as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989). At the core of his critical theory is the notion of control intimately connected with his approach to moral autonomy and democracy:

We shall understand democracy to mean the institutionally secured forms of general and public communication that deal with the practical question of how men can and want to live under the objective conditions of their ever-expanding power of control. (1971, 57)

In accordance with his differentiation of the two logics of emancipation discussed in Chapter 4, Habermas wishes to present the issue of democratic control and the decisions regarding the common good as questions of a practical rather than a technical nature. Since actions involved in the efficient mastery of external nature are guided by knowledge interests of a different kind from those involved in decisions regarding ‘how men can and want to live’, communicative channels oriented towards the latter can only be expected to find their institutional forms alongside economic and technological development, rather than within the subject–object relations framing the so-called technical mastery of external nature.

Habermas, however, did not seek to remove technical matters entirely from decision-making processes. He in fact suggested that the problem facing individuals in advanced capitalist societies ‘can […] be stated as one of the relation between technology and democracy: how can the power of technical control be brought within the range of the consensus of acting and transacting citizens’ (Habermas 1971, 57). For this reason, human emancipation depends on individuals’ capacity to make decisions regarding the fate of the productive forces. Under such a model, the successful mastery of nature in the ‘system’ is thought to be complemented by the successful, that is, undistorted by systemic imperatives, orientations towards the common good framed by the communicative practices found in the ‘lifeworld’. Here individuals would effectively find themselves capable of reaching an intersubjective consensus regarding the ‘right’ role and function for various technological achievements such as nuclear energy or the extraction of fossil fuels. Construed in these terms, then, democratic control lies in actualizing a form of moral autonomy with regards to technology, rather than one depending on, or anchored in, its development. The problem of democratic control, in other words, is understood by Habermas as one abstracted from the relationship between humanity and external nature. Consequently, the possibility for undistorted communicative practices oriented towards ‘how men can and want to live’ are not thought to depend on a re-organization of processes involved in the satisfaction of needs, but on the development of a sufficiently extensive range of socially integrative resources, that is, orientations towards mutual understanding.

Furthermore, although – as was shown in Chapter 4 – Habermas insisted that the maximization of the aforementioned resources would not require a radical transformation of political life, he did make his concern regarding the democratic deficit resulting from the colonization of the ‘lifeworld’ by systemic imperatives quite explicit. His solution to this problem is worth reiterating here, if only to explore further its implications for the relationship between democracy, technology and the economy as a whole. According to Habermas, the colonization of the ‘lifeworld’ can be resisted through the creation of a ‘democratic dam’ against systemic imperatives of efficiency and productivity. Consequently, the problem of democratic control ought to be addressed as ‘a question of setting in motion a politically effective discussion that rationally brings the social potential constituted by technical knowledge and ability into a defined and controlled relation to our practical knowledge and will’ (1971, 61). As such, the second-generation theorist effectively argued that human emancipation could co-exist with what Marcuse called ‘technological rationality’. However, the possibility for such a co-existence is immediately called into question as soon as the value-neutrality of technology itself is disputed. In fact, as was also shown in Chapter 4, Habermas’s differentiation between practical-normative and technical-scientific knowledge interests rests on the disputable claim that the sphere of material reproduction excludes orientations of a ‘communicative’ nature. Whilst Habermas’s claim that one can either have the existing form of technology or no technology at all implied an almost entirely value-neutral status for the imperatives of efficiency and productivity, a revised interpretation of Marx’s historical materialist approach revealed the contrary. Indeed, once the role of the relations of production in the development of the productive forces and humanity’s relationship with external human nature has been acknowledged,2 and the true origins of the imperatives of efficiency and productivity have been uncovered – as orientations traced back to a particular manner of organizing social life, that is, as matters concerning ‘how men can and want to live’– the distinction between the two spheres becomes untenable, for the so-called systemic imperatives immediately acquire a political and cultural form. It follows, then, that the development of democratic decision-making abstracted from the sphere of material reproduction may itself be insufficient for the task of actualizing human emancipation. What, then, would constitute truly emancipatory forms of decision-making processes?

With the above considerations in mind, one could anticipate a possible solution to the democratic deficit brought about by existing socio-political institutions in the effective control of material reproduction by a ‘political public’, as defended by Marx himself. However, according to Habermas, although it is indeed possible to re-organize the economy in such a way as to bring the ‘reproduction of social life’ under rational planning through the democratically organized ‘will and insight of the associated individuals’, such an option is thought to be highly undesirable (Habermas 1971, 58). Here are his reasons:

Here Marx equates the practical insight of a political public with successful technical control. Meanwhile we have learned that even a well-functioning planning bureaucracy with scientific control of the production of goods and services is not a sufficient condition for realizing the associated material and intellectual productive forces in the interest of the enjoyment and freedom of an emancipated society. For Marx did not reckon with the possible emergence at every level of a discrepancy between scientific control of the material conditions of life and a democratic decision-making. (1971, 58)

Thus, any attempt to bring material reproduction under the direct democratic control of individuals organized into associations would necessarily entail the confusion of practical matters with those of a technical form and pave the way for the total administration of human affairs by the principles of efficiency and productivity, that is, instrumental reason. In this so-called total bureaucratization of life, individuals would fail to find the suitable normative channels for the development of moral autonomy, thereby also failing to find the means for intersubjective reconciliation and, ultimately, complete human emancipation.3

Habermas’s objections do nevertheless rest once again on his problematic distinction between a logic of emancipation corresponding to the relationship between humanity and external nature (system) and another corresponding to the relationship between humanity and internal nature (lifeworld). His own understanding of a democratic control of industry fails to anticipate the possibility of a relationship between humanity and external nature governed by principles of a form different from those currently steering the sphere of labour. Such a conceptual blindness, it was argued, caused him to adopt a reductionist approach to labour. What Habermas effectively failed to appreciate was the full scope and meaning of Marx’s critique of alienated labour, on the one hand, and his aversion to bureaucratization, on the other. Indeed, as was shown in Chapter 1, not only did Marx wish to give recognition to a non-instrumental relationship between humanity and external nature, but his critique of ‘centralized State power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature’ combined with his advocacy of the ‘self-government of the producers’ (Marx 2000h, 584–9) in his assessment of the Paris Commune provide clear indications that he wished to promote a universe beyond the narrow scope of instrumental action.

Despite conceptualizing a form of labour potentially capable of giving rise to the reconciliation of humanity and nature, Marx fell short of reflecting on the full epistemological implications of his critique of political economy. As such, he failed to safeguard his communist vision against vulgarizations of the sort found in the defence of state-socialist alternatives. These limitations, it was argued in Chapter 2, could be overcome by exposing the affinity between the critique of instrumental reason formulated by Adorno and Horkheimer and Marx’s own critique of political economy. Both critical theorists did indeed share with Marx the view that matters regarding the relationship between humanity and external nature are inextricably linked to those regarding humanity and internal nature. The Frankfurt School members’ own theoretical contributions to the critique of bureaucratization could therefore be said to serve as a basis for the realization of labour’s potential to yield the conditions required for emancipation. On the one hand, Adorno placed a particular emphasis on the universalizing tendencies of the ‘primacy of the subject’ framed by the principle of self-preservation and finding its institutional form in a capitalist division of labour and heavily bureaucratized state apparatus, stifling the possibility for a sustained questioning of the established order. The total administration of life is here being criticized for not providing sufficient scope for the expression of the plural and subversive character of particular existence. On the other hand, Horkheimer raised significant concerns regarding the democratic deficit associated with the phenomenon whereby, under the same principle, ‘economic questions are becoming technical ones’ (1982, 105). Although none of the first-generation critical theorists wished to venture into the conceptualization of alternative institutional forms thought to be capable of actualizing emancipation as reconciliation, their depiction of advanced capitalist repressive mechanisms as ones intrinsically connected to the relationship between humanity and external nature makes it possible to anticipate the radical re-organization of both economic life and political life as a precondition for the development of emancipatory practices. In fact, it is even possible to find, in Horkheimer’s work, an explicit reference to a ‘system of workers’ councils’ as ‘the theoretical conception which […] will show the new society its way’ (1982, 104).

The autonomous control of industry and political pluralism entailed by the conceptualization of emancipation as the reconciliation of humanity with both internal and external nature could thus be said to constitute the dialectically negated institutional contours of emancipatory practices, such as those found in the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole. In his work, one in fact finds fairly detailed conceptualizations of the different forms of ‘operative organizations’ (Warren 2001, 54) thought to oppose existing repressive institutions, and stemming from his own aversion to bureaucracy:

The driving force behind the Guild Socialist movement is a profound belief that man was born for freedom – freedom that shall be full and complete. The bureaucrat, on the other hand, looks at life from the point of view of ‘efficiency.’ What he desires is that the State shall arrange and manage the affairs of its citizens, whether industrial or political, with an eye to extracting the most that machine production can achieve. For him life must be organised by those above for the benefit of those below. His ideal is a bureaucracy masquerading as a democracy. (Cole and Mellor 1918, 25)

Here one finds a clear opposition between democracy and bureaucracy. The system Cole has in mind may be the heavily bureaucratized institutions corresponding to state socialism, but his objections to such a set of institutional forms appear familiar. By opposing technical matters, such as orientations towards efficiency and productivity, to the ‘full and complete’ freedom of individuals, Cole effectively raises almost identical issues to those found in the work of critical theorists in their critique of state capitalism, state socialism and advanced capitalist institutions. However, instead of rejecting, as Habermas problematically does, all attempts to promote the direct control of industry, Cole believed in the possibility of overcoming the repressive rule of imperatives of efficiency and productivity by applying democratic principles ‘not only or mainly to some special sphere of social action known as “politics,” but to any and every form of social action, and, in especial, to industrial and economic fully as much as to political affairs’ (Cole 1980, 12).

Furthermore, like Marx, Cole located a key precondition for human emancipation in the development of free labour. According to him, most of the problems associated with capitalism derive from the fact that ‘it destroys freedom and individuality in the worker, that it reduces man to a machine, and that it treats human beings as means to production instead of subordinating production to the well-being of the producer’ (Cole 1917, 23). For this reason, he expected such problems to be solved ‘only by the workers asserting their freedom and proving their individuality, by their refusing to be regarded as machines, and by their determining to assume the control of their own life and work’ (Cole 1917, 23). His fervent critique of ‘industrial autocracy’ (Cole 1917, 3), therefore, led him to advocate a radical re-organization of economic life in such a way as to rid the sphere of material reproduction of instrumental forms of action. With Cole, then, one discovers that the development of truly democratic decision-making processes can no longer consist of a mere ‘mastery’ of the ‘irrationality of domination’ (Habermas 1971, 61) by individuals seeking to harmonize their individual plans of action alongside the sphere of material reproduction, but is now thought to depend on the total elimination of such irrationality through the introduction of a direct democratic control of the economy. What form, then, did Cole expect such decision-making processes to assume?

Associations and the ‘good life’

Cole’s social and political theory was partly formulated as an attack against both the economic and socio-political forms flourishing under capitalism. In a manner echoing the works of Marx and Frankfurt School thinkers, he depicted the ‘present political machine [as] an organ of class domination’ (1980, 122), and therefore sought to expose the illusory democratic character of the decision-making processes composing it. Such a democratic deficit, he also argued, largely resulted from the state’s incapacity to manage human affairs in highly differentiated and complex societies:

Men found themselves called upon to master the art not of governing the State as it was, but of prescribing for the government of a vast society which changed its basic structure so fast that the magnitude and growing complication of its problems outran hopelessly their capacity to learn the difficult art of collective control. Under the leadership of science things ran away with men, and the social mind was left groping further and further behind. (Cole 1950, 91)

In order to appreciate the full scope of Cole’s critique of existing socio-political institutions, one must turn to his more specific criticisms of representative democracy and the institutional forms emanating from it. Such a mode of representation, he argued, fails to provide individuals with the means required for the exercise of ‘collective control’, for, in virtue of the distance created between ordinary citizens and their representatives, such a political system tends to create conditions of existence whereby individuals become vulnerable to ‘the man with the loudest voice, or […] the loudest loud-speaker and the most efficient propagandist technique’ (Cole 1950, 99). In fact, Cole came to the conclusion that by preventing the development of decision-making processes ‘in which everyone has a chance to count as an individual, and to do something that is distinctively his own’ (1950, 99), the ‘omnicompetent State, with its omnicompetent Parliament’, has effectively become ‘utterly unsuitable to any really democratic community’ (1980, 32). Thus, these operative political organizations ‘must be destroyed or painlessly extinguished’ (1980, 32). It follows that, if, according to Cole, a central problem with existing socio-political institutions is their apparent ‘hugeness’ and remoteness, any change towards emancipatory – and therefore truly democratic – practices depends on the possibility for individuals to ‘control great affairs only by acting together in the control of small affairs, and finding, through the experience of neighbourhood, men whom they can entrust with larger decisions than they can take rationally for themselves’ (1950, 94–5). Thus, political life ought to be re-organized into ‘groups small enough to express the spirit of neighbourhood and personal acquaintance’ (1950, 94–5) thought to be the prerequisite for effective collective control. This is precisely what led him to defend associations as the most suitable operative form of organization for democratic control.

In his work aimed at exposing the highly democratic character of associations, Warren exposed the key role played by such operative organizations in the development of a form of political autonomy experienced as the ‘power to make collective decisions’ and presupposed by ‘equal participation in collective judgment’ (Warren 2001, 60). Cole traced the possibility for such an egalitarian and collective control back to the ‘consciousness of a want requiring co-operative action for its satisfaction’ (1920, 34) characterizing associative action. As such, he was fully aware that members of associations would be given sufficient scope for the cooperative ‘translat[ion] of their consciousness of wants into will’ (Cole 1920, 33) and, therefore, believed in their capacity to allow each member to ‘count as an individual, and to do something that is distinctively his own’ whilst contributing to the satisfaction of needs of other members. The form of collective control afforded by associations, he nevertheless thought, ought to apply to both political and economic action:

[…] Society ought to be so organised as to afford the greatest possible opportunity for individual and collective self-expression to all its members, and […] this involves and implies the extension of positive self-government through all its parts [Emphasis added]. (1980, 13)

The possibility for collective control is here presented as one depending on the radical re-organization of both political life and the sphere of material reproduction. Associations could play a key role in both abolishing the distance between ordinary citizens and decisions regarding the common good and ‘reintroduc[ing] into industry the communal spirit’ (1980, 46). With Cole’s libertarian socialism, then, one finds an attempt to oppose dialectically the reified character of an economic, political and social life subjected to market forces, the capitalist division of labour and bureaucracy.

How, then, does Cole envisage the various political and economic associations to interact with one another in such a way as to yield egalitarian, emancipatory and socially cohesive practices? A key feature of Cole’s social and political theory is the particular emphasis he placed on the purpose of each association, namely the particular set of needs each of them has been formed to meet. According to him, ‘[e]very such purpose or groups of purposes is the basis of the function of the association which has been called into being for its fulfilment’ (1920, 49). The purpose of each association is, in this sense, thought to represent a particular function and ought to be treated as ‘the underlying principle of social organisation’ (1920, 48). The purpose of each association, whether civic or economic,4 serves as a basis for representation at the political level. As such, political associations themselves exist in virtue of the social function performed by associations in both economic and civic life. Furthermore

Due performance by each association of its social function […] not only leads to smooth working and coherence in social organisation, but also removes the removable social hindrances to the ‘good life’ of the individual. In short, function is the key not only to ‘social,’ but also to communal and personal well-being. (1920, 62)

Functional representation, therefore, entails the re-organization of political life in such a way as to give direct recognition to the specific purpose of economic and civic associations. It makes it possible to reconfigure social life in such a way as to substitute the principle of productivist efficiency with a principle ensuring that the needs of different members of associations are directly represented at the political level, whilst enabling ‘the now stifled civic spirit to work wonders in the regeneration of human taste and appreciation of the good things in life’ (Cole 1980, 115–6). Through collective control, associations effectively actualize the ‘creative, scientific and artistic impulses which capitalism suppresses or perverts’ (Cole 1980, 115–6) as a result of bureaucracy, the division of labour and market forces. Through functional representation, the realization of the good life of individuals organized into associations can be turned into a socially cohesive process of a non-bureaucratic form, for decisions regarding the common good or ‘how men can and want to live’ are here thought to make a direct contribution to the satisfaction of particular needs the different members of associations seek to meet in cooperation with one another in economic and civic life. It could therefore already be argued at this stage that Cole’s functional-associative democracy could succeed where Habermas’s theory of communicative action had failed, namely by providing the institutional forms capable of aligning the common good with the good life of each individual in highly differentiated and complex societies, and circumventing the conditions leading to the subsumption of the latter under the former.5

Cole’s attempt to turn the alignment of the common good with individual conceptions of the good life into a reality can be further explained by his own interpretation of Rousseau’s work. The French political theorist’s concept of ‘general will’ could indeed help illustrate what Cole was trying to achieve in the re-organization of economic, political and civic life into associations, for it stems from a particular concern with the relationship between individual conceptions of the good life and the common good. Although Rousseau’s ‘general will’ has been the object of severe criticisms – including Habermas’s own6 – the libertarian socialist praised him for putting ‘right at the heart of social thought the notion of will, rather than so passive a notion of “consent” or so objectionable a notion as obedience of the subject to the commands of a superior’ (Cole 1950, 113–4). Indeed, as Cole further argued:

He [Rousseau] was insisting that men, whenever they form or connect themselves with any form of association for any active purpose, develop in relation to the association an attitude which looks to the general benefit of the association rather than their own individual benefit. This is not to say that they cease to think of their own individual advantage – only that there is, in their associative actions, an element, which may be stronger or weaker, of seeking the advantage of the whole association, or of all its members, as distinct from the element which seeks only personal advantage. (1950, 114)

With Rousseau, one therefore witnesses the defence of a ‘special kind of will’, namely one whereby there is a possibility for reconciling the active search for meaningful self-discovery with the common good. For Cole, this ‘attitude which looks to the general benefit of the association rather than their own individual benefit’ characterizes the spirit of associations. Thus, associations are thought to be suitable for the development of a ‘general will’ whereby the common good is treated as an extension of individual conceptions of the good life. The form of solidarity such a phenomenon entails does not, however, merely derive from a strictly rational form of action. What mainly attracted Cole to Rousseau’s work was the fact that the notion of will allows for a more active, personal and emotional understanding of the relationship between individual conceptions of the good life and the common good than, for example, Habermas’s (primarily rational) orientations towards mutual understanding. In Cole’s institutional framework, social solidarity is thought to be experienced as a ‘strong impulsion’ or ‘primitive social impulse that has been overlaid by bad institutions, but not destroyed’ (Cole 1950, 128–9).

Cole’s associative model could therefore be said to provide solutions to the problems identified with Habermas’s critical theory. The conceptual opposition between ‘reason ordering and will acting’ (Habermas 1989, 82), which the second-generation theorist sought to solve in his theory of communicative action, assumed the form of a translation of the latter into the former. Indeed, as was shown in the previous chapter, since Habermas sought to turn the common good into an absolute priority, his attempt to overcome the aforementioned opposition inevitably turned into a subsumption of ‘will acting’ under ‘reason ordering’, for it forced individuals to accept a project that fails to grow organically from their will, thereby forcing the sensuous dimension of social solidarity and reconciliation into retreat.7 In sum, therefore, it could be argued that in order to create the conditions favourable for human emancipation, the institutional framework must be engineered in such a way as to allow ‘sentiment’ to become ‘a force in the shaping of human affairs’ (Cole 1950, 128), or, to use Habermas’s own words, a force shaping decisions regarding ‘how men can and want to live’. It is with this particular concern in mind that ‘Rousseau finds the sanction of his General Will in human feeling itself’ (Cole 1993, liii), and Cole seeks to realize the good life in his associative model, a realization that, according to him, cannot be limited to a re-organization of the sphere of production, but should also be extended to consumption as well.

Emancipation, production and consumption

Drawing their inspiration from Marx’s critique of political economy, orthodox Marxists have tended to concentrate most of their attention on the sphere of production as a source of repression. Any attempt to re-organize economic life in such a way as to yield egalitarian and emancipatory practices has consequently been conceptualized as a matter associated with the fate of production and workers. This has also been the case for several forms of socialism of a libertarian character, such as those of Proudhon (1994) and Kropotkin (1995), which, despite embodying a sharper critique of centralised and hierarchical control8 than the one found in Marx’s communist vision and orthodox socialist forms, sought to locate production at the core of their alternative institutional model. Thus, libertarian socialists have tended to ground egalitarian and emancipatory practices in the social ownership of the means of production and highly de-centralized and democratic forms of control over the process of production. Whilst these features are reflected in Cole’s own work, the latter made one of his most distinctive and valuable contributions to the libertarian socialist tradition by expanding the horizon of emancipation to the sphere of consumption. It is this particular concern for the plight of consumers under capitalist societies which bears particular relevance to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

Indeed, whilst the role of exploited and alienated labour in the development of repressive mechanisms should not be underestimated, first-generation critical theorists, such as Adorno and Horkheimer, wished to expose equally problematic tendencies associated with the consumerist practices flourishing under advanced capitalism. In their critique of the ‘culture industry’9 Adorno and Horkheimer sought to show that in order to fully grasp the processes whereby individuals are prevented from engaging in emancipatory practices, one ought to complement elements of Marx’s critique of political economy with a critique of culture capable of giving recognition to the various repressive mechanisms unfolding within the sphere of consumption. The emergence of an age of ‘mass culture’, they thought, has intensified the subjection of individuals ‘as producers and consumers’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 120) to the principle of self-preservation. In fact, in their work, one finds that the loss of control by producers over the labour process has effectively been complemented by the development of culture into a form of social control. With the rule of market forces and the division of labour, individuals qua producers are prevented from treating the labour process as a sphere of self-realization and forced to seek pleasure in consumption. However, ‘by occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 131), the culture industry effectively fails to provide individuals with the means to engage in ‘sustained thought’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 127). Although it promises pleasure, it ‘perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 139), for it is only capable of offering an effortless experience of pleasure aimed overcoming the ‘longing for a “feeling on safe grounds”’ (Adorno 1991, 61) caused by the wretched reality of the workplace. The sublimation of instincts through the consumption of mass-produced cultural goods is therefore out of the question. Instead, consumers of mass culture are ensnared ‘as completely as possible […] in the service of pre-meditated effects’ (Adorno 1991, 166), all in the name of fun and entertainment. Consequently, the culture industry could be said to promote ‘adjustment and unreflecting obedience’ (Adorno 1991, 163), rather than an active and critical engagement with the world. Two of the most problematic effects of the culture industry identified by Adorno and Horkheimer are, therefore, the impossibility for consumers of culture to experience ‘real’ pleasure and exert full control over the decisions made in the sphere of consumption. Whilst they are unable to realize the full scope of their cognitive and sensuous faculties at the workplace, individuals qua consumers can only expect to experience an unrestrained release of instinctual energies otherwise known as ‘desublimation’, both precluding the possibility for prolonged gratification and turning them in beings vulnerable to the various ‘psycho-dynamic mechanisms’ (Adorno 1991) upon which the various commercial agencies rely in their attempt to attract as wide an audience as possible for their cultural goods.

After having established the existence of repressive mechanisms in the sphere of consumption, the task of anticipating institutional forms capable of yielding emancipatory practice can no longer be construed merely in terms of a democratic control of production. With the critique of the culture industry elaborated by first-generation critical theorists, one does indeed discover that the emancipation of internal nature ought to be treated as a matter regarding both the labour process and consumption. The vision of democratic control must, in this sense, treat production and consumption as two potential spheres of self-realization – something Cole was in fact fully aware of:

[T]he only way in which industry can be organised in the interests of the whole community is by a system in which the right of the producer to control production and that of the consumer to control consumption are recognised and established [emphasis added]. (Cole 1917, 281)

Like, Marx, then, Cole envisioned emancipation as a matter regarding production and sought to design ‘the political form […] under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour’ (2000h, 589). However, Cole also knew that since, at present, the worker ‘does not find his job interesting or pleasurable [he] seeks his pleasure outside it, in his hours of leisure’ (1957b, 16), the sphere of consumption itself has become an additional, and equally significant, potential sphere for meaningful self-discovery. Indeed, since ‘the decision of the character and use of the product is clearly a matter primarily for the user’ any attempt to anticipate the conditions required for emancipation must address itself to the sphere of consumption in such a way as to prevent such decisions from ‘remain[ing] in the hands of outsiders’ such as ‘commercial agencies’ (Cole 1917, 106–7). As such, an analysis of Cole’s libertarian socialism10 reveals an affinity not only with Marx’s work but also with those of first-generation critical theorists. The Guild socialist’s distinctive contribution to the debate, however, can be found in his attempt to draw the institutional contours, making it possible for producers and consumers to both define and satisfy their needs beyond the invisible hand of the capitalist market and the repressive rule of both the capitalist division of labour and bureaucratic management. If, as Cole himself put it, ‘the good life is a blend of satisfactions achieved from consumption and satisfactions achieved from successful creation, the only answer […] is that men themselves must decide collectively what blending of these elements they like best’ (1950, 97), then the re-organization of the key dimensions of economic life – production and consumption – into democratic associations could be expected to serve the development of practices making possible the conscious, cooperative and creative realization of the self. With the substitution of imperatives of efficiency and productivity by the functional principle, and the possibility to treat the purpose of each association as one’s own, a space for the cooperative expression of the sensuous dimension of internal nature in associative deliberations opens up. Individuals qua producers and consumers would here find themselves in a position to reach collective decisions on the basis of their will and engage with the various activities involved in their respective associative actions on the basis of an active commitment to a common good aligned with their individual conceptions of the good life.

Cole’s attempt to envision truly democratic and emancipatory forms of decision-making processes did not, however, end here. Fully aware of the problem of order posed by the re-organization of economic, political and civic life into associations, he sought to reflect on the possible ways in which individuals would come to harmonize their individual plans of action on a societal scale. Two levels on which such a process is thought to take place can be identified. The first one is located within the associations themselves. Here, individuals communicate with one another to realize a ‘want requiring co-operative action for its satisfaction’. At this level, the common good is directly aligned with the individual conceptions of the good life, for individual members will have joined their association with the view of treating the satisfaction of their needs as producers, consumers and so on in relation to the purpose/function of the association itself. However, in order to provide a service that will directly satisfy the needs of consumers, producers must first be in a position to establish the nature of the demand to be met. In capitalist societies, such a demand is never directly communicated by the consumers to the producers. It could be researched through different surveys, or even manipulated through advertising campaigns and marketing strategies, but is rarely (almost never) communicated dialogically. Cole sees this as problematic as it prevents the producers and consumers from ‘negotiat[ing] on equal terms’ (Cole 1917, 86). Instead, he proposed to envision a process of satisfaction of needs whereby different associations would be politically represented by consumer cooperatives and workers’ councils in dialogue with one another at the local, regional and national levels. Such a dialogue is, in this sense, aimed at maximizing both the efficiency of the satisfaction of needs on a societal scale and ‘the freedom of the producer as well as the consumer’ (1917, 302). In sum, therefore, it could be suggested that Cole sought to overcome the democratic deficit engendered by the various socio-political and economic institutions of advanced capitalism by anticipating the development of operative organizations (the associations) in dialogue with one another through functional representation and making it finally possible for individuals to reach collective decisions regarding ‘how men can and want to live’.

Concluding remarks

In this chapter, I showed that despite first-generation critical theorists’ refusal to anticipate alternative political forms, democratic control could be identified as central to the form of human emancipation they advocated. Habermas was in fact the first member of the Frankfurt School to conceptualize the conditions of existence under which such a control could be made possible. It was nevertheless shown that his attempt to locate democratic decision-making processes alongside the sphere of material reproduction rests on a problematic differentiation between the two logics of emancipation discussed in the two preceding chapters. It was consequently argued that, in line with both Marx’s and the first-generation critical theorists’ approach to emancipation as a matter regarding the interwoven relationship between humanity and both its internal and external nature, Cole’s programme for the democratic control of the economy provided a more suitable vision of the dialectically negated institutional contours capable of giving life to egalitarian and emancipatory practices than Habermas’s own. It was then shown that, in virtue of associative action’s capacity to yield the required expressive and communicative space for the treatment of the function of each association as an extension of their members’ own conception of the good life, Cole’s libertarian socialism provides institutional solutions to the problems identified with the second-generation critical theorist’s tendency to subsume the particularity of existence under the universality of the common good in his theory of communicative action. Finally, an elective affinity between Marx’s own approach to free labour, the critique of the culture industry formulated by first-generation critical theorists and Cole’s defence of the re-organization of economic life into associations of producers and consumers was exposed. Here, it was argued that the latter’s libertarian socialist vision could potentially pave the way for the dialogically coordinated democratic control of both production and consumption, thereby meeting the demands expressed by Marx in his critique of political economy and Frankfurt School theorists in their critique of advanced capitalism. In the following chapter, I shall further explore such an elective affinity by presenting Cole’s institutional framework as the most suitable one for the task of reconciliation.

Notes

1  Indeed, despite refraining from the task of anticipating alternative institutional forms, several members of the Frankfurt School have made more or less explicit prescriptive recommendations. Whilst Marcuse’s own recommendations – embodied in the ‘Aesthetic Form’ – were exposed in Chapter 3, additional ones can be found in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Towards a New Manifesto (2011). In Fromm’s work, one also finds the defence of a system whereby the individual actively ‘participates in the social process’ in such a way as to make the ‘active and spontaneous realization of the self’ (2002, 237).

2  Habermas’s emphasis on the productive forces in his interpretation of Marx’s materialism led him to ignore such a role. See the last section of Chapter 4 for a more detailed critique of his stance towards Marx’s critique of political economy.

3  The weaknesses in the Soviet system, or the communist regimes of Mao’s China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam, made such a view entirely plausible.

4  Cole did indeed propose to organize all domains of social life requiring an effective satisfaction of needs (whether economic – such as milk production – or civic – such as educational services) into associations or ‘guilds’.

5  See Chapter 5 for a more detailed account of such a subsumption.

6  In the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) Habermas charges Rousseau for failing to solve the tension between individual conceptions of the good life and the common good in his concept of the general will. Cole (1950, 1993) himself identified some key problems with Rousseau’s ‘General Will’ but sought to retrieve what he thought was most valuable in the French philosopher’s work, namely the role he assigned to the sensuous dimension of solidarity and, more generally, internal nature in communicative practices.

7  Ferdinand Tönnies’s (2001) distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘rational’ could be used here to distinguish actions guided by a personal concern for the needs of other individuals and actions performed on the basis of self-interested motives guided by (impersonal) contracts, respectively. Thus, it could be argued that the associative model could serve as a basis upon which the natural will could flourish and be expected to perform a socially cohesive function.

8  This stance towards centralized control was heavily influenced by anarchism’s own aversion towards state power.

9  A great deal has been written about the culture industry since Adorno and Horkheimer first elaborated their critique in one of the chapters of their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1997). Some of the secondary literature, such as Steinert’s Culture Industry (2003), has attempted to expose the relevance of their critique to contemporary Western societies. Others, such as Cook’s work entitled The Culture Industry Revisited (1996), have even gone as far as showing that despite Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimism, their approach does leave scope for resistance.

10  The significance of Cole’s concern with consumption for the conceptualization of a truly democratic and socialist institutional model has been emphasized by Wright in G.D.H. Cole and Socialist Democracy (1979), Wyatt in his thesis entitled ‘G.D.H. Cole: Emancipatory Politics and Organisational Democracy’ (2004) and Schecter in Beyond Hegemony (2005). What I am attempting to achieve here is to reveal the ways in which such an emphasis provides a basis upon which the transformative potential of critical theory, along with Marx’s concept of labour as self-realization, could be realized.

7

Critical theory, libertarian socialism and reconciliation

In his work entitled Modernity as Experience and Interpretation (2008), Peter Wagner identified three levels on which interpretations and experiences of modernity could be conceptualized: economic, epistemic and political. Throughout the present work, I sought to present critical theory as a theoretical framework addressing the ‘modern way of confronting these [three] problématiques’ (Wagner 2008, 13) and calling into question their capacity to realize human emancipation in the form they have assumed under advanced (Western) capitalist societies. I also sought to defend the task of revising critical theory in such a way as to provide an insight into an alternative way – the reconciliation of humanity and nature – of confronting these problématiques, in accordance with the concerns and demands expressed by Marx and Frankfurt School thinkers. Below I aim to draw on the various observations made in the previous chapters by demonstrating the suitability of G.D.H. Cole’s libertarian socialism for the institutionalization of a logic of reconciliation between humanity and nature at the economic, epistemic and political level.

Reconciliation at the level of the satisfaction of needs

The first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists are well known today for the strong emphasis they placed on culture and, more specifically, art in both their critique of the advanced stage of capitalist development and their approach to emancipation. It has been the contention of the present work to demonstrate the equally strong emphasis placed by the same generation upon the role played by humanity’s transformation of external nature in repression. However, whereas Horkheimer identified the economy as the ‘first cause of wretchedness’ (1975, 249) and, along with Adorno, presented work as ‘the active, practical basis, and thus the historically and logically prior form of domination’ (Honneth and Ash 1982, 44), both tended to view culture and, more specifically, works of art as the potential loci of reconciliation of humanity and internal nature. At first glance, then, the critical theories of Adorno and Horkheimer appear to dismiss work as a potentially suitable sphere for emancipatory practice. It has nevertheless been suggested in the previous chapters that since emancipatory practice cannot be located outside the framework of subject–object relations, critical theory ought to be revised in such a way as to include explicit and direct concerns with the possible form of mediation for the reconciliation of humanity and external nature. Thus, whilst Adorno and Horkheimer sought to present reconciliation and the process thought to mediate it as matters primarily concerning culture, or the relationship between humanity and internal nature, it was argued that the inextricable tie between reconciliation and the transformation of external nature, which they have consistently sought to uncover throughout their works,1 effectively exposed the process of satisfaction of needs itself to mimesis. As a result, any attempt to strip social relations of their repressive character ought to involve the transformation of labour into a mimetic process of mediation between subject and object or, in Marcuse’s own words, aim for a ‘convergence of technology and art’ (1970, 68).

How, then, can the institutional framework broadly outlined in the preceding chapter be expected to accommodate mimetic labour? If mimesis, as Adorno himself understood it, involves cultivating the aesthetic moment in reflection,2 then its introduction into labour would turn the latter into the activity giving the ‘aesthetic feeling’ its due. As such, production would become an activity whereby the spontaneity of the senses can be channelled into the process of satisfaction of needs and finally become one of the key contributory forces to the knowledge individuals have of their needs. Labour, here, would in fact consist in a creative process of self-sublimation inasmuch as its products would serve to confirm the essence – cognitive and sensuous – of the producers, whilst satisfying the needs of other individuals, that is, other producers and the consumers themselves. However, before labour can be expected to assume such a form, the producers must be given enough scope for the release of their creative impulses. In other words, they must cease to produce under the pressures of efficiency and productivity, which have served the development of the most significant hindrances to creativity under capitalism, namely the introduction and intensification of the division of labour. Drawing his inspiration from the works of William Morris, Cole undertook the task of elaborating an institutional framework that would protect labour against such hindrances. In a lecture entitled ‘William Morris as a Socialist’ (1957), Cole not only wished to expose the full extent of his admiration for the politically engaged English artist but also expressed his agreement with the view according to which modern production

had divorced the routine executant from the artist-designer, and had thus destroyed the opportunity for the craftsman to employ his creative impulses, converting what should have been joyous creative effort into mechanical toil and, in the process, depriving the detailed work of all real meaning. (1957, 8)

The separation of cognitive and sensuous faculties brought about by the capitalist division of labour followed by the elevation of (instrumental) reason caused by a system of satisfaction of needs forcing individuals to ‘cope with the facts’ have divided production into specialized designers and manual workers, depriving the latter of a creative engagement with the act of production and the former of an engagement with the manual dimension of production. As a result, most productive activities are turned into highly specialized and restrictive activities falling short of realizing the creative essence of each individual. Under such conditions, the producer fails to identify with the product of labour, the labour process itself and fellow workers and, as a result, takes part in an activity deprived of ‘all real meaning’. As an alternative to this alienating model of production, Cole proposes to re-organize labour in such a way as to create conditions favourable for its conversion into a ‘joyous creative effort’, for he refuses ‘to contemplate working for any kind of society that does not put high among its objectives the restoration to man […] of a chance to engage in friendly co-operation with others, in satisfying forms of creative work’ (1957, 17). Economic institutions must therefore allow the producers to enjoy sufficient freedom in, and control over, the productive process in order to be able to turn the reconciliation of sensuous experience and cognitive faculties into the basis for the interpretation and satisfaction of needs. One can therefore begin to appreciate more clearly why the cooperative and democratic character3 of associations of producers such as those proposed by Cole would succeed in accommodating mimetic labour. Indeed, if the possibility for a widespread release of the aesthetic feeling in production depends on overcoming the division of labour and the autocratic form of management imposing this organizational structure onto the workers, then an environment in which the various agents involved in production can be given the chance to understand, through deliberative processes, the tasks undertaken by the functionally different parties and, in turn, exert control over the wide range of operations composing the labour process would create conditions favourable for its realization. Thus, although following Morris, Cole did not ‘mean to deny the existence of functional differences between architect and craftsman or between manager or technologist and manual worker’, the deliberative character of his associative model would enable ‘the former […] to understand the practice of the operations they directed, and the latter [to] be given the largest practicable freedom in carrying out their work under the general directives imposed by the master plan’ (1957, 9). Associations would, in other words, provide enough scope for the diffusion of information required for the various producers to exert control over both the design and execution of the products of labour, thereby opening up a space for the creative self-sublimation paving the way for the reconciliation of reason and the senses. Once in a position to confirm their essence on a cooperative basis, individuals qua producers can become conscious of the social utility of the products of labour. The latter, which are no less than the material form of the producer’s individuality, become ‘examples of the kind’ (Chitty 1993, 24) as each producer ‘practically and theoretically’ makes ‘both his own and other species into his objects’ (Marx 2000a, 89). As such, mimetic labour and its products would serve to confirm not only the particularity of each producer but the essence of the whole species as well. It follows that by engaging in labour on both a creative and cooperative basis and, consequently, interpreting in common the ‘implications of the technical demands placed upon [them]’ (Eyerman and Shipway 1981, 563), producers can begin to reflect on matters regarding ‘how men can and want to live’. Products would, in virtue of their being ‘examples of the kind’, acquire a moral significance. After all, by becoming conscious of the fact that the objects created will meet not only their needs but the needs of other members of the same species too, producers are directly confronted with these individuals’ interpretations of the good life.4 In other words, by consciously producing an object that will directly satisfy the needs of other individuals, each producer consciously produces the object that will serve the confirmation of the essence of other beings and can therefore orient his or her action towards matters regarding how other individuals can and want to live. The social utility of new technologies, such as contraceptive and transportation technologies, would here be directly interpreted by the producers themselves, who would become conscious of the place they hold in the conception of the good life of other producers.

Attributing a key role to the process of satisfaction of needs in orientations towards the life in common is not to say, however, that economic factors ought to dominate political power. As Cole put it, since it ‘is undeniably true that, under the capitalist system, “economic power precedes political power”’, it must be the goal of ‘the Guild Socialists to destroy this predominance of economic factors’ (1980, 180). The idea of a life in common is, under Cole’s framework, no longer abstracted from the sphere of activity, that is, labour, which makes each individual a ‘species-being’, nor does it fall prey to the repressive tendencies of societies dominated by the liberal-productivist regime of growth. As such, the political sphere would neither assume the form of abstract universality (Marx 2000b) found under the liberal capitalist state nor contribute to the subsumption of socially integrative resources under the rule of efficiency and productivity imperatives (Habermas 1988, 1989) characterizing the advanced capitalist state and state socialism. Instead, one witnesses the recovery, by the labour process itself, of its socially integrative functions and the formation of a space in which the individual qua producer can ‘take the abstract citizen back into himself’ and ‘recognize his own forces as social forces’ (Marx 2000b, 64).

The relevance of Cole’s institutional framework for a critical theory aimed at turning the satisfaction of needs into a means for the reconciliation of humanity with itself and external nature does not, however, merely rest on its capacity to turn labour into a process of creative self-sublimation. Fully conscious that, under capitalism, the worker ‘does not find his job interesting or pleasurable and seeks his pleasure outside it, in his hours of leisure’, Cole sought to tackle the new role played by the sphere of consumption in self-realization (1957b, 16). Drawing his inspiration, once again, from the works of Morris, he observed that the productivist and consumerist nature of the capitalist mode of production meant that ‘things […] could give no pleasure to use any more than to make’ (1957, 4). With the constant drive towards consumption for its own sake and a repressive form of desublimation relying upon the endless manufacture of ‘false needs’ (Marcuse 1964) forced upon the consumers by the various commercial agencies, the former not only fails to experience the act of consumption as a sustained form of self-gratification but effectively loses the capacity, as atomized agents vulnerable even to the most superficial of instinctual releases, to exert control over the definition of such needs. As a result, the act of consumption deprives individuals of any meaningful and authentic engagement with the definition of their needs and the objects thought to satisfy the latter.

The prospects of emancipation consequently rest on a re-organization of consumption in such a way as to enable individuals qua consumers to turn the release of instinctual energies into both a gratifying and collective exercise. The transformation of consumption into a component of self-realization here depends on the consumers’ capacity to define, in cooperation with one another, their needs in accordance with both their cognitive and sensuous faculties.5 Sustained gratification, then, would be secured by their capacity to formulate their demand in accordance with the mimetically mediated interpretation of their individual needs. In this sense, they would find themselves in a position to identify directly with the products they have directly chosen to consume. It follows that since the ‘main function of the consumers’ organisation is to make articulate and definite the consumers’ needs and desires’, their interests would best be served in associations (Cole 1980, 88–9). Indeed, their democratic and cooperative character would provide the scope for its members not only to exert control over the definition of their needs but also to bring the release of their instinctual energies under their own control. With an act of consumption assuming the form of a collective process of self-gratification, one therefore witnesses the development of a new relationship between individuals qua consumers and the products, where the latter finally enters the process of satisfaction of needs as objects directly serving the sustained gratification of its participants. The re-organization of consumption into associations would also encourage the emergence of a new relationship between the consumers themselves, for rather than seeking to both define and meet their needs in isolation from each other, the goal they share as members of the same association means that they would collectively make ‘articulate and definite their needs and desires’ by directly engaging with the conception of the good life of others. Since the goal of an association can only be realized on the basis of the communicatively shared interpretation of needs of its members, the effective demand for, for example, new contraceptive and transportation technologies is the result of collectively articulated views on the necessity and desirability for such products. Thus the act of consumption, like production, would encompass decisions regarding ‘how men can and want to live’.

Individuals qua producers and consumers would, under such conditions, be in a position to combine orientations towards the situatedness of interpersonal existence (between producers and consumers, respectively, as well as between producers and consumers in dialogue with one another) with those regarding self-actualization and the expression of the concrete particularity of existence. On the one hand, an industrial or knowledge worker would here be in a position to treat the process whereby an object is produced or service is provided, as a cooperative and meaningful process of self-discovery, for this worker would be able to engage in the labour process with the conscious aim of articulating the development of his or her needs with the creation of an object or service not only aligned with the needs of his or her ‘co-producers’ but also directly meeting the needs of those consuming it. On the other, the consumer would finally be in a position to choose a product or service tailored to his and her needs, serving as the basis for authentic and sustained gratification.

It must be noted here, however, that I am not referring to a model akin to post-Fordism here. Indeed, despite the latter’s apparent capacity to accommodate the constantly changing nature of individuals’ needs (Piore and Sabel 1984), the system of production it entails continues to promote the hostile pursuit of self-interest by subjecting both producers and consumers to the whims of the capitalist market. Under such a system, success in production continues to be measured by the productivist notion of efficiency. Flexibility is framed by a ‘structure remain[ing] in the forces driving units or individuals to achieve’ (Sennett 1998, 57), thereby continuing to presuppose the individual’s ‘adjustment to the requirements for the preservation of the system’ (Horkheimer 2003, 96) and, consequently, failing to provide the form of control required for meaningful self-discovery. The re-organization of the process of satisfaction of needs proposed here, therefore, is aimed at overcoming the ‘corrosion of character’ (Sennett 1998) and powerlessness experienced by individuals under the post-Fordist regime of capital accumulation, by allowing them to ‘design[…] a system by which the demands [of producers and consumers] can be carried out [my emphasis]’ (Sennett 1998, 56).6 This entails placing the direct control of the supply and demand mechanism in the hands of cooperatively organized consumers and producers. In such a system, one would anticipate the norm of efficiency to be measured in terms of interpersonally situated creative service (producers) and self-gratifying use (consumers), rather than on the basis of a mere pursuit of self-interest and capital accumulation.

Given the inseparability of the reconciliation of reason and the senses, and humanity’s relationship with external nature, one is now justified in asking exactly how associations could prevent the former from dominating the latter. Since the prospects of self-realization rest on the re-organization of production and consumption into associations of producers and consumers in which the productivist norm of efficiency and, more generally, the elimination of the principle of self-preservation are substituted with the complementary imperatives of interpersonally situated creative service and self-gratifying use, the reconciliation of humanity with itself depends on identical conditions to those favourable for the reconciliation of the former with external nature. For with both a process of satisfaction of needs stripped of the imperatives causing humanity to dominate internal nature and their substitution with imperatives allowing the former to become conscious of itself as a part of nature, a space for the treatment of external nature as a partner in emancipation opens up. Associations of producers and consumers, therefore, can play a key role in preventing the domination of the object by the subject at the level of both internal and external nature. The next section shall further explore the contribution of this institutional model to the project of reconciliation, but this time by assessing its role in the constitution of knowledge.

Associations, dialogue and the constitution of emancipatory knowledge

With the possibility of experiencing the satisfaction of needs as a process of self-sublimation and self-gratification, the separation of ‘art’ and ‘technology’ characterizing the capitalist mode of production becomes obsolete. As the ‘material’ division of labour is overcome and the cognitive faculties are reconciled with sensuous ones, artistic creation finally acquires the status of social utility. Such a ‘convergence of technology and art’, therefore, reaches beyond the confines of the material realm of social life to become a source for change in the nature of knowledge itself. Indeed, as individuals no longer come to experience production and consumption as processes through which reason seeks to bring natural inclinations under its control (production) and the instincts are repressively desublimated (consumption), but as processes whereby the labour of both reason and the senses are combined, the cartesian dualism of ‘understanding’ and ‘reason’ vanishes. In turn, a space for the reconciliation of subject and object in thought opens up.

As a phenomenon mediated by mimetic labour, the convergence of art and technology relies upon reason’s capacity to ‘assist and support nature’ (Horkheimer in Benhabib et al. 1993, 395). Accordingly, the conversion of the labour of the imagination into a socially useful force must depend upon the recovery, by reason itself, of its ‘spirit of humility’ (Horkheimer 2003, 124). By ceasing to master, and now effectively channelling the plurality of sensuous experience into knowledge, reason equips the latter with the capacity to preserve the moment of the non-identity of subject and object in thought and, in turn, capture the rapidly changing character of aesthetic impulses. With the aforementioned convergence, then, one witnesses the substitution of a rationality of domination, also known as ‘technological rationality’, with a rationality of reconciliation, that is, one capable of preserving the non-identical and situated symmetry between the particularity of the object and the conceptual universality of subjective forces. Here the spontaneity of human existence is said to be channelled into a productive force through its mimetically mediated relation with cognitive faculties, thereby turning the interpretation of needs into a constellation of reflexively determined thoughts that remains open to the fluctuations of sensuous experience. What, then, are the implications of this form of rationality – also known as aesthetic rationality in Adorno’s work – for the relationship between individuals and the social reality encompassing them, and how can Cole’s institutional model be expected to create the full range of conditions for its development?

With the emergence of an institution such as the modern state, individuals have been ‘placed in a position in which they are called upon to take part in decisions which involve reasoning in generalizations which far transcend the limits of their practical knowledge and personal experience’ (Cole 1950, 90), thereby falling short of finding the means for the confirmation of their own essence in decision-making processes. The heavily bureaucratized nature of political life and the resulting treatment of individuals’ own affairs in terms of efficiency and productivity under advanced capitalism have effectively led to the subsumption of individuals’ needs under administrative management and cost-effectiveness schemes falling short of giving sufficient recognition to the particularity of these individuals’ existence. Unable to treat decision-making processes as outlets directly capable of accommodating their conceptions of the good life, individuals have been reduced to the status of abstract citizens. In contrast, and because of its capacity to preserve the moment of non-identity between subject and object, aesthetic rationality equips individuals with the reflexive means to affirm themselves in the world as beings with a unique cognitive and sensuous make-up. An institutional framework enabling each individual to ‘take the abstract citizen back into himself[/herself]’ must therefore be organized in such a way as to channel aesthetic rationality into the various decision-making processes he or she participates in. As such, institutions must be sufficiently democratic and small to be able to both connect the ‘individual man[/woman] in his[/her] empirical life’ (Marx 2000b, 64) to the decision-making processes affecting the conditions under which individuals seek to confirm their essence, and maximize their control over such processes.

Thus, since individuals ‘can control great affairs only by acting together in the control of small affairs’ (Cole 1950, 94–5) and finding the means ‘to count as an individual, and to do something that is distinctively his own’ (Cole 1950, 99), the introduction of aesthetic rationality into decision-making processes depends on a re-organization of the economic and political realms into institutions small enough to be able to give cooperative action and the spontaneity of natural inclinations their due in social relations. As producers collectively interpret the technical demands placed upon them under the imperative of creative service (Cole’s ‘guilds’), and consumers cooperate in the definition of their needs under the guise of self-gratifying use (Cole’s ‘consumer councils’), they end up in a position to communicate their individual conception of the good life, drawn from the mimetically mediated non-identical reconciliation of their cognitive and sensuous energies, to one another. They therefore also become capable of reflecting upon their own conditions of existence on the basis of such a reconciliation. However, in order to be capable of giving such a reflexivity its due, orientations towards matters regarding the life in common, that is, practical orientations, must serve as an extension of each individual’s will. This is precisely where the principle of function comes to play a part:

Each of us has in mind, whether we rationalise it or not, some conception of the sort of social life which is ultimately desirable. Our conceptions of the functions of particular associations are inevitably formed in the light of our ultimate conception of social value. (Cole 1920, 54–5)

With the purpose of each association forming the basis of its function, and each purpose consisting in an extension of the individual members’ will, the functional re-organization of political life endows the representatives of the various associations with the responsibility to accommodate the conception of the good life of others in their decisions and generally act in accordance with the aesthetic-rational orientations of individuals qua free producers and consumers. The ‘social value’ of an association, or its function in social life, would, in this sense, stem from the aesthetic-rational definition of the good life of the members of the various associations and underpin the dialogue between the representatives directly involved in political decision-making processes. In other words, the interpretation of the social utility (by producers) of, say, new contraceptive and transportation technologies along with the articulation and definition of the demand for such technologies (by consumers) enter the politically oriented dialogue as the content of negotiation construed in terms of public opinion. The successful re-organization of decision-making processes into outlets through which the rationality of reconciliation underpinning the conception of the good life of each individual can be channelled into public opinion, therefore, depends on the re-organization of the institutional structure into associations of producers and consumers represented by functionally organized political associations.

Such a re-organization entails, in more concrete terms, the possible articulation of personal values regarding, for example, whatever is involved in self-development through production, and those of an interpersonal nature such as commitment and loyalty. The Mondragon experience has demonstrated that

in times of stringency when an orthodox firm would lay off workers or shut down, the members of a self-governing enterprise can decide to reduce wages, curtail their share of the surplus, if any, or even contribute additional capital funds, as at Mondragon, self-governing enterprises are likely to tap the creativity, energies, and loyalties of workers to an extent that stockholder-owned corporations probably never can, with profit-sharing schemes. (Dahl 1985, 132)

Self-governing associations make it possible for individual producers (and consumers) to regard the interest of the association as an extension of their own, for they open up a space whereby the actualization of the concrete needs and capabilities of one worker or consumer is undertaken in cooperation with other workers’ and consumers’ own self-actualizing orientations. As such, they also open up a space for interpersonally situated decisions capable of accommodating the demands of workers and consumers as concrete others. In an association of producers, a worker would regularly enter into a dialogue with his fellow workers to make decisions regarding the pace and nature of the labour process, as well as the goods and services to be supplied. These decisions would be made on the basis of their own orientations towards the good life, namely on the basis of what they deem to be capable of allowing them to develop as individuals with particular needs and capabilities. As such, they would engage in negotiations regarding various factors susceptible to affect their self-actualization. These decisions, however, would also be made on the basis of the interpersonally situated demand expressed by consumers organized into associations, for to be able to meet their needs, producers must first be in a position to know what these are. Negotiations within and between associations of producers and consumers would therefore develop in such a way that each member’s concrete particularity is given recognition in collective decisions. With this libertarian socialist institutional model, therefore, one becomes capable of anticipating the reconciliation of the epistemic component corresponding to the particularity of concrete existence and its interpersonal counterpart, and its development into public opinion.7 In short, it constitutes a highly suitable institutional form for the transformation of ‘individual need into an aesthetic value with cognitive content’ (Schecter 2005, 160) in both the individual interpretation of the good life and the interpersonally situated decisions regarding, for example, the pace and nature of the labour process.

Whilst channelling aesthetic rationality into decision-making processes is a fundamental prerequisite for the adequate representation of individuals’ interests in the political sphere and the control by these individuals of the conditions under which they seek to confirm their essence, the prospects of their emancipation do nevertheless also rest on yet another condition. Indeed, as beings with both cognitive and sensuous energies, individuals continuously develop new needs and desires, thereby constantly altering their conception of the good life. Once such new developments take place, a discrepancy between the existing state of affairs (existing products and services, methods of production, etc.) and the new interests (new goods and services, new methods of production, etc.) they wish to fulfil unfolds, prompting an inclination towards the alteration the status quo itself. For this reason, decision-making processes ought to be designed in such a way as to allow individuals to be in a position to turn their newly defined conception of the good life into politically effective decisions. The demand for new contraceptive technologies along with the interpretation of their social utility may indeed change at any time. Thus, the institutional framework must not only enable individuals to cultivate the aesthetic moment in reflection but also accommodate and respond to the ever-changing demands of individuals qua producers and consumers or members of civic associations.

If, as Adorno himself argued in relation to the artist’s reflexive engagement with autonomous works of art, a truly emancipatory form of reflexive activity consists in a form of thought capable of giving a constitutive role to the object in knowledge,8 then it follows that the institutional structure must be organized in such a way as to allow decision-making processes to capture the rapidly changing character of aesthetic impulses. What I take this to mean is that the institutional framework itself ought to become sufficiently flexible to give sensuous experience its due in decision-making processes. As such, political life ought to become immediately responsive to a public opinion composed of the reflexive orientations stemming from the affinity between subject and object characterizing the new needs and desires individuals seek to satisfy – a responsiveness which the unwieldy character of existing socio-political institutions is not capable of yielding. As individuals organized into associations of producers mimetically and cooperatively interpret the demands placed upon them, and consumers collectively articulate and define the needs to be satisfied in order to realize self-gratification, they are in a position to turn their conception of the good life into a matter of public significance. For, insofar as the needs are defined and satisfied on a cooperative basis, and become the purpose of the associations themselves, they are endowed with a public quality. Furthermore, since the completion of the process of the satisfaction of needs requires the two categories of associations to enter into a dialogue with each other, the needs of individuals acquire a public significance beyond associative action. Any change in the conception of the good life of each member of the association therefore directly enters the dialogue between producers and consumers and, as such, immediately becomes part of the public realm.

To become the fabric of public opinion, however, the new conceptions of the good life must have an impact on the decision-making processes determining the nature of the life in common. They must be unified in such a way as to become a subversive force. Dialogue confirms the public character of the needs and desires of individuals organized into associations, and provides both the institutional flexibility and reflexive unity required for the satiation of the rapidly changing character of aesthetic impulses and their conversion into a coherent subversive force respectively. Whilst such a unity arises, in nucleo, from the newly emerging affinity between the particularity of sensuous objectivity and the conceptual universality unfolding in creative production and self-gratifying consumption, it can become a subversive force only once the members of the various associations are in a position to communicate it at the more general level of dialogue. Each member of the association shall, at this level, defend the good of the association as a whole. However, they shall do so without what Habermas himself problematically accomplished, namely the subsumption of the good life of each individual under the common good.9 Indeed, since the purpose and function of each association lie in an extension of the good life of their members, the degree of generality attained by the subject–object affinity stemming from the associative level and its representation at the dialogical level remain sufficiently particularized to give individual conceptions of the good life their due in dialogue. Any change in the individual conception of the good life taking place at the associative level, therefore, becomes a force capable of challenging the established order once it enters the dialogue composed of the representatives of each association.

One does not witness, here, a ‘conflation of bourgeois and homme’ in the citizen, and the ensuing colonization of public opinion by the imperatives of efficiency and productivity but, rather, a conversion of individuals’ wills as, for example, consumers seeking self-gratification and producers seeking creative self-expression, into differentiated public wills defended by representatives functionally organized into political associations in dialogue with one another. Studies on the self-governing enterprises of Mondragon have revealed that the alignment of the common good with individual conceptions of the good life could indeed succeed in turning decision-making processes into outlets whereby ‘economic plurality/difference has been celebrated’ (Gibson-Graham 2006, 86). Warren’s (2001) own studies on the democratic effects of associations also partly aimed to reveal such a potential. Political and economic decisions are neither conflated nor separated but differentiated and complementary. Furthermore, one cannot define the nature of such a political life in terms of ‘generalised particularism’, for, as the consequence of self-interested orientations and cause of temporary compromises, this form of political resolution falls short of giving the cooperative character of associations their due and is in turn unable to strip the tension between the various conflicting interests from political decision-making processes. Nor can it be defined in terms of ‘democratic universalism’, for the constantly changing character of the aforementioned public opinion excludes any possibility for universalistic tendencies to gain the upper hand. One could, instead, speak of a public opinion assuming the form of a pluralistic general will, inasmuch as the will of the representatives, functionally organized into political associations, consists in a reflexive extension of the will of the various members of the associations of producers and consumers and is, therefore, directly aligned with the changing – and, in this sense plural – character of aesthetic impulses of the represented parties.10 The phenomenon identified by Adorno as constellation thinking is effectively made possible by what Marx understood as the process whereby individuals take ‘the abstract citizen back into himself’, where the latter consists in accomplishing an affinity between the particularity of sensuous experience (the empirical individual) and reason (the cognitive self) as a moment of non-identity between object and subject in thought which, in virtue of its capacity to accommodate the rapidly changing character of aesthetic impulses, can both serve to reliquify a reality previously congealed by reifying, totalizing and absolutizing tendencies of a sovereign subject and be expected to turn the interpersonally situated conceptions of the good life into a subversive public opinion. In sum, Cole’s associative model does not turn will into ratio, but effectively reconciles both in political decision-making processes, thereby creating the conditions required for the permanent ‘reliquification’ of social reality and maximization of control by individuals over their social setting. With it, therefore, one could anticipate a possible avenue through which the epistemic problems associated with the tension between individual and society brought about by the modern state, the capitalist market and division of labour – and identified as key sources of repression by Frankfurt School theorists – could be solved.

Finally, whilst the dialogical nature of the decision-making processes composing Cole’s associative model serves to convert the individual conceptions of the good life into a pluralistic form of public opinion and underpins the institutional flexibility required in order to accommodate the rapidly changing character of aesthetic impulses, such phenomena are significantly facilitated by the power of the represented to recall their representatives. Under existing forms of parliamentary democracies, decision-making processes take place on the assumption ‘that one man can “represent” another or a number of others, and that his will can be treated as the democratic expression of their wills’ (Cole 1920, 103). However, as Cole further pointed out, decision-making processes whereby the will of the represented only directly plays a part whenever the representatives themselves are elected remain insufficiently democratic. Representation, here, fails to give a voice to the immediate needs and desires of the represented. This is precisely what led Cole to conclude that ‘[n]o man can represent another man, and no man’s will can be treated as a substitute for, or representative of, the wills of others’ (1920, 103). Representation, therefore, ought to be re-organized in such a way as to align the decisions made by the representative with the cooperatively defined needs and desires of the represented. Whilst the functional representation of the various associations makes it possible for the representative to act ‘in relation to a quite narrow and clearly defined purpose or group of purposes which the association exists to fulfil’, it is the power of the represented to recall whenever they see fit those representing them, that will safeguard decision-making processes against the elected person’s ‘pretension […] of substituting his personality for those of his constituents’ (1920, 105). With such a proximity between the elected and their constituents, political decision-making processes effectively become directly aligned with the interpersonally situated needs and desires of the represented, that is, with public opinion itself. Whilst the mimetically mediated affinity between subject and object turns the aesthetic moment of reflection into the very fabric of emancipatory criticism (subversive public opinion), the latter is turned into a politically effective mode of thought by the re-organization of political life into associations in dialogue with one another and functionally represented by representatives whose own decisions, in virtue of their direct alignment with the constituents’ wills, can finally be treated as the democratic expression of these wills. Political life thus becomes a realm of reconciliation sui generis. I now turn to the task of exploring how subject–object relations could be expected to serve as a basis for the formation of a legitimate legal-political order.

The ethical life of associations as a basis for a legitimate legal-political order

Habermas and Benhabib have addressed the issue of reconciliation as a matter regarding intersubjective relations, ‘outside’, so to speak, of the structures of instrumental reason. Accordingly, they have sought to expose the limitations of subject–object relations in framing the normative basis for a legitimate legal-political order. However, as has already been demonstrated in Chapter 5, several problems associated with their normative approach render their defence of the intersubjective framework unsustainable. Indeed, not only have they provided a somewhat problematic epistemic differentiation between intersubjective relations and their subject–object counterpart, they have also fallen short of preventing the dissolution of the particularity of human existence in the linguistic articulation of needs, and finally failed to envisage the possibility for non-manipulative subject–object relations. As an alternative approach, it was suggested that critical theory’s normative axis ought to be grounded within the framework of subject–object relations, for decisions regarding how individuals can and want to live rest on their experiences as individuals seeking self-actualization or, as Marx and first-generation critical theorists put it, orientations towards the transformation of external nature are inextricably linked to matters regarding the emancipation of internal nature. How, then, can critical theory be revised in such a way as to give subject–object relations their due in the constitution of a legal-political order capable of giving recognition to the plurality of conceptions of the good life, that is, of a legitimate – and in the present context, emancipatory – political order?

First, participants in political decision-making processes must be in a position to orient themselves towards matters regarding how other individuals can and want to live. In order to do so, communication between the relevant agents must first be freed from all distortions – actual or potential – causing these same agents to engage in conflictual practices. Whilst Habermas and Benhabib restricted the possibility for such forms of undistorted communication to social relations lying outside subject–object relations, it has been argued that denying such a possibility to the latter framework poses a real problem for critical theory. Indeed, by rejecting the philosophy of consciousness as a suitable theoretical frame of reference for reconciliation, both social theorists problematically take for granted what is but a historically specific condition, namely the principle of self-preservation. As a result, they fail to grasp the communicative, and therefore normative, potential of labour, and the specifically distorting nature of its capitalist form (Eyerman and Shipway 1981; Honneth and Ash 1982). Once the distorting tendencies in the sphere of labour have been traced back to the principle of self-preservation, it becomes possible to identify the social hindrances rendering such a sphere incapable of providing the communicative means for reconciliation.11 The conception of individual need as an aesthetic value with cognitive content that such a reconciliation entails does not, therefore, imply a return to organic communities, for it seeks to give both reason and sensuous faculties their due in reflexivity. With the substitution of self-preservation by the principle of self-realization, furthermore, one begins to discern the contours of a normative framework of action anchored in subject–object relations.

As argued above and in previous chapters, the transformation of subject–object relations into a non-manipulative framework of action rests on the conversion of the activities central to the satisfaction of needs into processes of self-realization.12 It was shown that whilst such conditions would be partly met by transforming the supply side into a process of creative service mediated by mimetic labour, a consideration for non-repressive forms of consumption was also required. The latter, it was suggested, ought to be transformed in such a way as to allow individuals to experience self-gratifying use, which the control over their definition of needs presupposes. Thus, by re-organizing the satisfaction of needs into associations whose actions are underpinned by the principles of creative service and self-gratifying use – the two principles corresponding to self-realization in production and consumption respectively – one not only becomes capable of anticipating the treatment of nature (both internal and external) as a partner in emancipation but also gains an insight into the institutional model capable of yielding the necessary control, by individuals, over the satisfaction of their needs. Where, though, do normative orientations likely to form the basis of a legitimate legal-political order fit into such a model? In order to provide an answer, one ought to turn to the nature of the social relations yielded by associative action and dialogical coordination.

With the development of associative action aimed at turning an individual’s self-actualization into the precondition for others’, a change in the orientations of those taking part in the process of satisfaction of needs occurs. In a free market economy, milk producers, for example, are forced to seek the maximization of surplus value. As such, the purpose of production is immediately governed by the need to turn their efforts into a profitable enterprise, thereby subsuming their own needs and those of the consumers under the search for capital accumulation. In a democratically organized association of milk producers in dialogue with a democratically organized association of milk consumers, however, the actions and decisions of the members of the former type of association are effectively oriented towards the cooperative and negotiated satisfaction of a need. Such a re-organization entails a change in the purpose assigned to the satisfaction of needs itself or, more specifically, a change in the motivations of the various actors involved in the process. Now in a position to treat the satisfaction of needs of other members of the association as their own, whilst seeking to coordinate their actions qua producers and consumers in dialogue, individuals no longer seek to pursue their self-interest but, rather, begin to treat matters regarding how other individuals can and want to live as central to the transformation of inner and outer nature. As the Mondragon experience demonstrated, such a model can ultimately frame a form of ‘intentional community economy’ giving life to an ‘economic being-in-common’ (Gibson-Graham 2006, 84). Indeed, in order to fulfil the purpose of each association and successfully coordinate their needs at the level of dialogue, individuals must become conscious of the conceptions of the good life of others and consciously treat their realization as an integral part of the satisfaction of their own needs. The raison d’être of associative action, namely the ‘consciousness of a want requiring co-operative action for its satisfaction’, coupled with dialogue’s coordinating function, therefore, secure the alignment of the common good with the individual conceptions of the good life and effectively turn the realization of the latter into the precondition for the realization of the former:

[T]o give freedom by freedom is the universal law of the ‘aesthetic state’; in a truly free civilization, ‘the will of the whole’ fulfils itself only ‘through the nature of the individual.’ Order is freedom only if it is founded on and sustained by the free gratification of the individuals. (Marcuse 1969b, 191)

Under the guise of ‘technological rationality’, validity claims are assessed according to the normative yardstick13 framed by the imperatives of efficiency and productivity. Individuals, here, compete to succeed in an environment rendered hostile by the pressure to preserve the self. As such, they come to treat other individuals and, more generally, their environment as means for, or impediments to, the satisfaction of their needs. However, as soon as supply and demand are brought under the control of individuals organized into associations of producers and consumers, and the aforementioned imperatives replaced by those of creative service and self-gratifying use, one gains an insight into an altogether different normative yardstick. No longer oriented towards the preservation of the self, and equipping individuals with the reflexive means to (a) affirm themselves as social beings with a unique cognitive and sensuous make-up, (b) view themselves as beings belonging to nature and (c) regard the realization of the good life of others as an integral part to the realization of their own, the ‘motives of greed […] and fear’ (Cole 1980, 44) vanish to give way to those of self-gratification and cooperation. Under such a state of affairs, the validity of a claim is no longer judged according to the morally pernicious yardstick of atomistic success, but, instead, acquires legitimacy in virtue of its capacity to yield communicative practices capable of aligning the needs and desires of each individual with the common good. Success in self-actualization, here, assumes a cooperative and, therefore, collective form. Since the ‘position of the individual [acts] as the source and sustaining spirit of every association’, and each member of the association comes to treat its purpose as their own, anyone seeking to satisfy one’s needs through associative action necessarily develops a strong concern with the well-being of the members they cooperate with in achieving their goals (Cole 1920, 191).14 As the competitive-individualist ethos framing social relations under the principle of self-preservation vanishes, and individuals begin to experience, consciously, their satisfaction of needs as a process immediately contributing to the satisfaction of needs of others, a new set of social relations, this time framed by the ethos of cooperative self-realization, emerges.15 Under such circumstances, a reflexive space within which individuals can begin to seek the reconciliation of their cognitive faculties with their sensuous ones opens up, for the new social relations referred to here correspond to a state of affairs whereby individuals freed from the pressures exerted by productivist efficiency can be given scope for the conscious recognition of themselves as beings part of nature but not reducible to it. Here their actions would be safeguarded against the media of money and power entailed by orientations towards mastery and exploitation. Ultimately, a space would open up for the development of a legal framework no longer founded upon power and inequality and drawing its legitimacy from the universal protection of private property and economic freedom. Instead, since the laws corresponding to the proposed model would be grounded in the ethos of cooperative self-realization, they are likely to draw their legitimacy on positive, albeit differentiated, conceptions of freedom adjusted to the function of the different associations.

So far, it has been possible to catch a glimpse of the form assumed by a system of satisfaction of needs comprising communicative practices serving as a basis for the formation of a legitimate legal-political order. In other words, a case was made for a framework of political action mediated by labour and capable of attributing socially integrative functions to subject–object relations. The task of establishing exactly how processes of legitimation of norms can be expected to emerge from this new set of subject–object relations does nevertheless remain. I propose to undertake it by looking more closely at the form of freedom enjoyed by individuals organized into associations of producers and consumers. The ‘personal liberty’, which Cole believed associations to be capable of yielding, was summarized as follows:

It is simply the freedom of the individual to express without external hindrance his ‘personality’ – his likes and dislikes, desires and aversions, hopes and fears, his sense of right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, and so on. (1920, 184)

In associations underpinned by the principle of creative service (production) and self-gratifying use (consumption), individuals do not merely seek to satisfy basic needs such as shelter and food, but are also in a position to affirm themselves as beings with a unique cognitive and sensuous make-up and express desires of both moral and affective quality. The reflexive power of reason is here being combined with the subversive power of the senses to yield conditions of existence whereby individuals express and seek to realize desires as both producers and consumers. By assuming such a form, then, the satisfaction of needs also serves as an outlet for these individuals’ meaningful and authentic self-discovery. What is meant here is that in their effort to express and affirm a wide range of already existing tastes and preferences, they acquire the capacity to reflect on their own biographies, thereby opening up an horizon of new possibilities for further development of their identity.16 How, then, can the reconciliation of humanity and nature at the individual level become the basis upon which the legal fabric of society can unfold?

Since the overall communicative-emancipatory character of the libertarian socialist model has already been exposed above, the following discussion shall concentrate on the specific communicative practices involved in the translation of norms into laws. First, I shall contend that the development of the process of constitution of laws capable of embodying the normative achievements of reconciliation rests on the successful recognition of the plurality of needs in the harmonization of individual plans of action on a societal scale or, as Adorno would put, on the ‘true’ reconciliation of universality and particularity. Under a process of satisfaction of needs underpinned by the principle of self-preservation and regulated by free market forces, individuals compete with one another in the pursuit of their self-interest. As such they seek to maximize their competitive advantage with, at best, a complete disregard for the life chances of other individuals. Orientations towards the life in common17 assume, under such circumstances, a conflictual form, thereby becoming incapable of yielding the normative basis required for a harmonization of individual plans of action at the legal level. Any successful attempt to realize the common good, here, would have to take place in an abstracted political sphere, where the tension between the general character of the former and the particularism of self-interested actions would ultimately be resolved through the atomistic subsumption of individual conceptions of the good life under the de jure universality of private property rights and the de facto domination of a particular group of economic interests over another. For Marx, the illegitimacy of a political life resulting from such a configuration of economic and political forces was already visible in the early stage of capitalism’s development. With the diagnosis developed in Habermas’s early works, one nevertheless finds that the illegitimacy of the political order becomes more acute once the state begins to interfere with the sphere of material reproduction. In the libertarian socialism of Cole, one finds a radical vision for the re-organization of political and economic life beyond the state and the capitalist institutions, capable of addressing the specificity of the problems identified by the above two thinkers. Here, the development of a legitimate legal-political order is thought to rest on its capacity to uphold egalitarian emancipation through (a) a characteristically Marxian ‘appropriation of objectified essentialist powers’ (Habermas 1992a, 452), and (b) a harmonization of individual plans of action within and between different associations of producers and consumers or, put differently, through the introduction of ideal-typically Habermasian public spheres within subject–object relations.

Second, with Cole’s institutional framework, it becomes possible to anticipate the seeds of legitimate laws to flourish through the possibility for individuals engaged in associative action not only to exert direct control over economic and political decision-making processes but also to treat the needs and desires of other individuals as an extension of their own. Whilst Benhabib clearly sought to conceptualize the conditions under which a complementary reciprocity between the needs, talents and capacities of individuals can be achieved, the framework of action she defends fails to safeguard critical theory against the dissolution of the concrete particularity of human existence. Her failure to distinguish the interpretation of needs from their linguistic articulation in orientations towards matters regarding how individuals can and want to live, caused by her efforts to locate complementary reciprocity outside subject–object relations, has led her to dissolve the concrete particularity of human existence in her search for the ‘situatedness of interpersonal existence’, thereby falling short of anticipating conditions of existence capable of adequately actualizing the reconciliation of humanity with itself.18 Under Cole’s institutional model, however, the representatives of associations of producers perform their actions in relation to the function of the association and orient them towards the provision of a creative service. As such, they must seek to coordinate their actions with the representatives of associations of consumers, whose role is to ensure that the represented parties experience self-gratifying use. In the case of a demand for, for example, additional bus routes by consumer councils, the representatives of associations responsible for public transportation services will inform consumer representatives of the limitations placed upon them by the technical demands such a request entails. The latter may offer alternative options (such as additional buses on, or the extension of, already existing routes) formulated in accordance with their existing resources, capacities and needs which may not directly match the original demand, but could nonetheless aim to maximize the satisfaction of the needs expressed by consumers. Here, a complementary reciprocity between the needs of individuals qua producers and consumers stripped of the pressures of a free market would have ultimately been sought. As producers seeking to perform a creative service, then, individuals develop conceptions of how they can and want to live distinguishable from those of individuals seeking self-gratification in consumption. However, they are not irreconcilable, for the organization of social life into activities oriented towards service, and others oriented towards use, opens up a space for complementary reciprocity whose ‘logic of meeting needs is other-directed: I help you because it is good for you’ (Wright 2010, 210–11). It is therefore a responsibility of a moral kind, which echoes the call for the ‘transformation of tolerance into solidarity’ (Bauman 1997, 63) found in Bauman’s own reading of Levinas’s philosophy. It follows that the form of associative action discussed above would not only frame the ‘recognition of other people’s misery and sufferings as one’s own responsibility’ (Bauman 1997, 63) but would also allow individuals to recognize, more generally, the self-actualization of others as their own responsibility. It is in this distinctive form, therefore, that the moral fabric and legal framework of Cole’s associations is thought to develop.

Finally, political decision-making processes ought to become sufficiently flexible to give the plural and rapidly changing character of the needs and desires of individuals its due. Dialogical coordination cannot, in this sense, assume the form of rational consensus. For, in virtue of their emphasis on similitude, consensual orientations lead to a form of action too passive for an adequate recognition of individuals’ wills in dialogical coordination (Cole 1950). It also involves too high a degree of universality to give the spontaneity of natural inclinations its due in dialogue, for it implies too fixed and absolute a character to remain open to changes in individual conceptions of the good life. The various participants in the form of dialogical coordination defended here do not effectively set themselves the task of realizing the common good, for which the generalized particularism attained through consensus would constitute the most appropriate form.19 Instead their efforts are concentrated on the achievement of a complementary reciprocity between the different needs and desires of producers and consumers expressed as a ‘special kind of will’ in the function of each association. Cole’s dialogical coordination, therefore, unfolds on the basis of individuals’ points of difference rather than in relation to their identity. This is not to say that a unity between the various interests expressed in dialogue cannot be found, for without it, the legal foundation of the social order would not be possible. What is being suggested, instead, is that such a unity assumes the form of a temporary affinity between the various conceptions of the good life: a non-identical moment manifesting itself as a constellation of wills. This constellation is, more concretely, made up of orientations establishing the moral value and significance of, say, contraceptive and transportation technologies stemming from a temporary affinity between the demand articulated and defined by associations of consumers and the interpretation of this demand by producers. Thus, in a constellation one finds – in contrast with a rational consensus – a temporary affinity between the various ethical orientations comprised in dialogue, and manifesting itself as a situated complementary reciprocity. The laws thereby constituted, in virtue of their immediate relation with the knowledge of empirical individuals, do not effectively mediate social relations in abstraction from the context of action in which these same individuals are engaged by, for example, sanctioning one conception of the good life and prohibiting another independently of the given situation, but rather draw their legitimacy from their capacity to give recognition to the singularity of each situation in mediation. As such, approaching the legal order from the standpoint of constellation involves attributing an ad hoc character to the laws themselves, for the affinity underlying them permanently remains open to the possibility of a configurational change triggered by the subversive force of what it is not emanating from the aesthetic impulses. In a libertarian socialist legal order such as this one, the common good is no longer said to comprise interests shared by individuals, which connect these same individuals in virtue of what they have in common, but rather refer to a singular configuration of wills, which are connected to one another in virtue of their reciprocal complementarity. The legitimacy of laws related to, for example, contraceptive or transportation technologies is here determined by the complementary reciprocity, that is, affinity, between the demand articulated and defined by consumers and the interpretation of this demand by producers at a particular time and place.20 As a constellation of wills, then, the system of rules mediating social relations, that is, the laws, is stripped of the absolutizing tendencies ensuing from a subject made sovereign by the imperatives of efficiency and productivity, thereby safeguarding the achievements of dialogical coordination against the dissolution of the particular. As a moment of pluralist generalism yielded by the dialogical coordination of functions, the legal framework becomes flexible enough to accommodate new individual plans of action manifesting themselves as a subversive force in public opinion. Norms, under such circumstances, can finally be expected to serve the constitution of laws capable of accommodating the spontaneity of natural inclinations, thus giving maximum scope to individuals for the control of their own conditions of existence.

Concluding remarks

In order to shed further light on the relevance of Cole’s libertarian socialism to critical theory, I proceeded with a demonstration of the capacity of his institutional framework to actualize the reconciliation of humanity and nature (internal and external) at the economic, epistemic and political levels. It was argued, first, that the re-organization of economic life into associations of producers and consumers seeking to engage in creative service and self-gratifying use, respectively, would effectively turn the satisfaction of needs into a process of self-realization capable of performing socially integrative functions. Second, it was shown how functional representation of individuals’ wills at the dialogical level could serve the translation of the aforementioned reconciliation into the fabric of emancipatory knowledge in the form of a subversive pluralistic public opinion safeguarding individuals against institutional repression. Finally, I sought to show that the dialogically coordinated complementary reciprocity between creative service and self-gratifying use would, as decision-making processes ensuing in a constellation of wills, locate the process of identity formation at the centre of deliberative decision-making processes and assume a sufficiently flexible and democratic form to accommodate the rapidly and constantly changing character of the ethical orientations making up the pluralistic public opinion, and turn them into the basis of a legitimate legal-political order. As an institutional model capable of turning the reflexive capacity of individuals affirming themselves as beings with a unique cognitive and sensuous make-up, Cole’s libertarian socialism provides a framework of action whereby individuals could be in a position to maximize their participation in the constitution of the rules regulating their life in common. It is, therefore, an institutional model entirely suitable for a critical theory seeking to actualize the modern promise of human dignity hitherto hindered by the configuration of economic, epistemic and political forces unfolding under the liberal-productivist regime of capital accumulation. To what extent, however, is the revision of critical theory proposed throughout this work relevant to conditions of existence unfolding under neoliberal capitalism? It is to this final question that I shall now turn.

Notes

1  Here is in fact the point of convergence between the earlier generation of Frankfurt School theorists and Marx, for despite approaching human emancipation from two contrasting standpoints – a critique of knowledge, that is the epistemological standpoint, for the former and a critique of political economy, that is the economic standpoint, for the latter – both viewed the relationship between humanity and external nature as a determining factor for the relationship between humanity and itself.

2  See Chapter 2 for a more detailed account of mimesis.

3  See Chapter 6 for a more detailed account of the nature of associations.

4  The significance of such a model of production – which Marx called ‘human production’ – and of the dialogue between associations of producers and consumers for what Habermas called ‘practical’ orientations will be discussed at length in the last section of the present chapter.

5  The idea of a counter-public sphere elaborated by Negt and Kluge in their Public Sphere and Experience (1993) shares very similar features to this call for a transformation of consumption into a sphere of cooperative self-gratification.

6  A more detailed critique of post-Fordism will be provided in the next chapter.

7  See Chapter 5 for a detailed discussion of the tension of the epistemic tension between the particularity of concrete existence and its interpersonal counterpart found in Habermas’s and Benhabib’s work.

8  See Chapter 2 for an exploration of the constitutive role of the object in emancipatory criticism.

9  See Chapter 5 for a more detailed account of this phenomenon.

10  The phrase ‘general will’ is here being used to refer to Rousseau’s own political theory, according to which the will of an association ‘is, in Rousseau’s sense, “general” in relation to the members of the association, but “particular” in relation to the community as a whole’ (Cole 1950, 51–2).

11  As mentioned in Chapter 6, the social hindrances include competition, alienation, the division of labour, class inequalities, bureaucracy, the wage system, etc.

12  Chapters 4, 5 and 6 all more or less explicitly address this issue.

13  In Chapter 4, I sought to demonstrate the normative character of such imperatives.

14  In the elaboration of his institutional model, Cole, in fact, drew a significant proportion of his inspiration from the guild system of the medieval age for precisely its capacity to induce the moral orientations causing individuals seeking to satisfy their needs to regard the well-being of others as central to their own:

a fundamental difference between mediaeval industry and industry to-day is that the former was imbued through and through with the spirit of free communal service, whereas this motive is almost wholly lacking in modern industrialism, and the attempt to replace it by the motives of greed on one side and fear on the other is manifestly breaking down. It is undoubtedly the case that, though there were sharp practices and profiteering in the Middle Ages, the Gildsman or the Gild that committed or sanctioned them did so in flat violation of moral principles which he or it had explicitly accepted as the basis of the industrial order, whereas to-day moral principles are regarded almost as intruders in the industrial sphere, and many forms of sharp practice and profiteering rank as the highest manifestations of commercial sagacity. (Cole 1980, 44–5)

15  Such an approach to the satisfaction of needs can, once again, be related to the idea of an ‘economic being-in-common’ spelled out in Gibson-Graham’s chapter on the Mondragon self-governing enterprises. Other historical examples, such as the cooperative movement in central Italy or the self-government of Yugoslav workers, could also serve to illustrate it. The latter example was analysed by Loucks (1958) in his interesting article on associations of producers in Yugoslavia.

16  The dynamics of this ‘learning mechanism’ have been explored by Piaget, whom Habermas cites in the first volume of The Theory of Communicative Action: ‘If reciprocal actions between subject and object modify both, it is a fortiori evident that every reciprocal action between individual subjects mutually modifies them. Every social relation is thus a totality in itself which creates new properties while transforming the individual in his mental structure’ (Habermas 1984, 69).

17  One can here still speak of orientations towards a life in common, for, as was demonstrated in Chapter 4, competition and other forms of action arising from the imperatives of efficiency and productivity do embody normative elements. Their normative content, however, is insufficiently cooperative to be able to lead to a successful harmonization of individual plans of action.

18  See Chapter 5 for a more detailed critique of her framework of action.

19  See Chapter 4 for a critique of ‘generalised particularism’.

20  In their study of the Mondragon community of self-governing enterprises, Bradley and Gleb observed that

Workers may benefit from the absence of a formal framework for several reasons. By their nature, legalistic codes at national levels are insensitive to the needs of local groups. […] Workers can press for more in unofficial, sequential, disputes than as an institutionalized component of the political system with broader responsibilities. (1983, 43)

Mondragon therefore serves to confirm both the possibility of, and desirability for, a form of pluralist generalism of the kind defended here.

8

Conclusion: Critical theory, libertarian socialism and contemporary Western capitalist societies

Throughout this work I sought to demonstrate the benefits emanating from the task of exposing the triangular affinity between Marx’s concept of labour, the critique of instrumental reason formulated by first-generation Frankfurt School theorists and the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole for the formulation of a critical theory oriented towards progressive social change. I concluded Chapter 3 by suggesting that despite having sought to maximize the transformative potential of critical theory, Marcuse fell short of fully realizing the expectations of the principle of dialectical negation underpinning his work. It was then suggested that meeting such expectations ought to entail the ambitious, albeit constructive, task of anticipating the contours of alternative institutional forms thought to be capable of actualizing the reconciliation of humanity and nature. Whilst it was shown that Habermas’s own revision of critical theory was partly formulated on such a basis, it fell short of providing adequate solutions to the problems associated with the spread of instrumental reason. The task of meeting the full scope of dialectical negation was therefore presented as one best served by articulating Marx’s own critique of labour and first-generation critical theorists’ critique of instrumental reason with Cole’s own libertarian socialist alternative. However, in order to further reveal the transformative potential contained in the revision of critical theory proposed in this work, its historical relevance ought to be exposed. Before doing so, however, I shall proceed with an anatomy of the latest stage of capitalist development, namely neoliberal capitalism.

Anatomizing neoliberal capitalism

The popularity and relevance of first-generation critical theory among the members of the 1960s social movements can be explained by its stringent attack on the historically specific form of capitalism emerging in Europe in the years following the Second World War. This form of capitalism, often referred to as ‘bureaucratic’, marked the advent of a rigid system of regulation made up of a particular configuration of economic, political, social and cultural forces often thought to provide prosperity and ‘security’ at the expense of ‘freedom’ (Bauman 1991). In the years following the end of the 1960s, one could nevertheless witness the emergence of a new capitalist form said to emerge as a response to (a) concerns and demands expressed by members of new social movements (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999) and (b) the economic crisis of the 1970s (Harvey 1989, 2005). This new stage of capitalist development, often referred to as ‘network’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999), neoliberal (Harvey 2005) or ‘disorganised’ (Lash and Urry 1987) capitalism, corresponds to a new configuration of economic, political, social and cultural forces thought to have given rise to historically specific conditions of existence.

Post-Fordism

At the level of production, developments have been marked by the substitution of the Fordist model by its post-Fordist counterpart (Piore and Sabel 1984; Kumar 1995; Sennett 1998; Boltanski and Chiapello 1999; Harvey 1989, 2005). The general aim of post-Fordism was to induce much greater flexibility in the production process than Fordism was ever thought capable of achieving. As such, this new regime of accumulation could be said to emerge as a response to the apparent rigidity of Fordist methods of production, namely its incapacity to ‘accommodate ceaseless change’ (Piore and Sabel 1984, 17). As Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) observed, however, the technological and institutional changes such a new system entailed were also the product of distinctive demands for autonomy, authenticity and creativity expressed by members of countercultural movements dominating the protests of the 1960s. With the application of new technologies such as the computer, and the development of ‘flatter, leaner, more decentralized and more flexible forms of organization that emphasize the strategic management of interdependencies around core competencies’ (Jessop 2002, 100), post-Fordism was not only aimed at making supply more responsive to demand, it was also expected to provide sufficient scope for self-realization in production (Piore and Sabel 1984). In more concrete terms, it entailed a move away from the highly refined separation of ‘thought and action, conception and execution, hand and mind’ (Braverman 1974, 171) characterizing the Fordist-Taylorist workplace, towards the ‘elimination of job demarcation’ (Harvey 1989, 177). Post-Fordism, therefore, was thought to contain the potential for a reconciliation of cognitive and sensuous energies capable of leading to an ‘enhanced work satisfaction for the bulk of workers’ (Kumar 1995, 47) and the return of craft production (Piore and Sabel 1984). In short, these new methods of production presented opportunities for the development of a regime of accumulation thought to be capable of increasing efficiency and productivity whilst ‘making use of the desire of all individuals to be creative, autonomous’ (Rose and Miller 1995, 457).

Whilst the aforementioned responses were aimed at overcoming the problems associated with the hierarchical, routinized, regimented and generally unwieldy character of ‘bureaucratic forms of governance’ (Jessop 2002, 100), their capacity to yield the forms of autonomy and creativity required for emancipatory labour practices has been called into question by several commentators. Richard Sennett, for example, remarked that ‘revulsion against bureaucratic routine and pursuit of flexibility has produced new structures of power and control, rather than created the conditions which set us free’ (1998: 47). Instead of freeing individuals from the authority of economic facts, self-preservation has been reconfigured in such a way as to expose ‘the inside structure of institutions’ and individual producers more completely to the ‘shifting demands of the outside world’ (Sennett 1998, 52). It could therefore be argued that far from introducing working conditions paving the way for increased autonomy in production, post-Fordism has effectively produced new, non-disorganized organizational forms effectively increasing the subjection of individual workers to forces independent of their control. Such a diagnostic is shared by Harvey who pointed out that

what is most interesting about the current situation is the way in which capitalism is becoming ever more tightly organized through dispersal, geographical mobility, and flexible responses in labour markets, labour processes, and consumer markets, all accompanied by hefty doses of institutional, product, and technological innovation. (Harvey 1989, 159)

Thus, whilst the various organizational structures underpinning post-Fordist methods of production aimed to ‘instrumentalize the self-actualizing impulses of the worker’ (Rose and Miller 1995, 454), they were driven by highly volatile, yet tightly integrated, labour and consumer markets, exerting significant pressures on individuals to adapt to rapidly changing economic conditions. In their attempt to ‘cope with the facts’, then, these individuals are under the continuous pressure to strategize and adapt, and, as such, are constantly required to subsume their self-realization under the ‘model of utility-oriented calculation’ (Hartmann and Honneth 2006, 56) corresponding to instrumental action. In virtue of their incapacity to provide sufficient scope for prolonged gratification, such practices tend to pave the way for ‘symptoms of inner emptiness’ (Honneth 2004) and the overall ‘corrosion of character’ (Sennett 1998). Consequently, the aforementioned structures could be said to prevent the development of emancipatory practices by limiting workers’ effective control over the forces governing labour processes. Post-Fordism, therefore, has somewhat failed to turn the sphere of production into one capable of serving the emancipation of internal nature through labour, whilst continuing to impose productivist demands highly unlikely to promote the reconciliation of humanity with external nature.

It was therefore not surprising to find other commentators claiming that, despite having turned ‘autonomy in personal life and at work, creativity, unhindered self-realisation, an authentic personal life’ into ‘widely recognised as essential modern values’1 (Boltanki and Chiapello 1999, 502), ‘flexible specialisation’ has also led to ‘the degradation of ways of life associated with a form of capitalism freed from numerous constraints’ (1999, 501). The institutionalization or ‘organisation’ (Honneth 2004) of self-realization in the new capitalist form took place alongside an increased flexibility of labour made possible by an overall decrease in regulation and the implementation of various market-oriented policies by neoliberal states aiming to increase the competitiveness of their national economies. Consequently, whilst the regime of capital accumulation was reconfigured in such a way as to accommodate ceaseless change, such a development also entailed the emergence of new employment practices limiting labour’s capacity to mediate the reconciliation of humanity with nature. Indeed, ‘hidden behind the imperative of flexibility, one also finds the development of employment practices clearly favouring temporary work’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999, 306) and effectively contributing to the casualization of labour and the ensuing ‘dismantling of the world of work’. With it emerged different feelings of insecurity and uncertainty associated with the precariousness of a life subjected to the vicissitudes of market forces. The result was the transformation of the world of work from the typically Fordist schema of a relatively unskilled mass of workers in secure employments into the post-Fordist differentiation between a small core of highly paid, highly skilled, secure and autonomous or ‘self-programmable’ (Castells 2000) forms of labour and a large periphery of relatively unskilled, temporary and low-paid workers (Kumar 1995). Ultimately, then, the translation of autonomy into flexibility effected by post-Fordism creates a striking fossé between what it promises to individual workers (sustained gratification) and what it is capable of achieving (precariousness). For this reason, the move away from Fordism as the ‘self-consciousness of modern society in its “heavy”, “bulky”, or “immobile” and “rooted”, “solid” phase’ (Bauman 2000, 57) has fallen short of creating conditions of existence capable of securing the emergence of organizational structures that enable the development of the different forms of collective control over the sphere of material reproduction required for sustained gratification. In fact, as Horkheimer himself pointed out decades ago, ‘despite all the improvements and despite unimaginable wealth, the brutal struggle for existence, hardship, and anxiety are dominant’ (2012, 28). What, however, can be said about the role of the state in such a state of affairs?

The neoliberal capitalist state

In the years following the Second World War, advanced capitalist economies in Europe witnessed the emergence of a new political form, known as the bureaucratic state. Often described as the institutionalization of a compromise between labour and capital (Harvey 1989, 2005; Crouch 2011), this historically specific form of state has been credited for giving rise to unprecedented economic growth, a significant reduction of inequalities and an overall improvement in living standards. Through heavy doses of regulation and significant investment in infrastructures and welfare provisions aimed at compensating for the failures of markets regarding the delivery of ‘expected values of economic growth, balanced regional development inside national borders, full employment, low inflation, a sustainable trade balance, and a socially just redistribution of wealth and income’ (Jessop 2002, 61), the state became ‘actively engaged’ (Habermas 1988, 36) in the sphere of material reproduction, thereby requiring the development of an extensive bureaucratic apparatus. It nevertheless became rapidly clear that despite its role in contributing to the emergence of the so-called ‘golden age’ of capitalist development, the heavily centralized, hierarchical, regimented and generally repressive character of bureaucracy, which Weber (1978) had expressed significant concerns for several decades earlier, would eventually come to develop mechanisms of control significantly impeding on the development of decision-making processes (Habermas 1988, 1989). The ‘crisis of legitimation’ (Habermas 1988) caused by the transformation of economic, political and even cultural matters into technical ones would eventually lead commentators such as the members of the Frankfurt School to observe that the bureaucratic capitalist state, upon which Fordism itself depended (Harvey 1989, 135), could only be expected to yield ‘prosperity without freedom’ (Habermas 1988, 123). It is in fact partly as a response to the ‘very special [paternalist and dirigiste] role’ assumed by this state in an ‘overall system of social regulation’ stifling autonomous political, economic and cultural practices that students in countries like France and Germany took to the streets at the end of the 1960s (Harvey 1989, 135). Furthermore, once bureaucratic capitalism revealed its incapacity to sustain economic growth after the oil shocks of the 1970s, political leaders themselves began to call into question the suitability of the compromise between labour and capital for the efficient accumulation of capital and chose to rethink the state’s own role with regards to the economy and society at large.

The various political responses to the demands expressed by members of the countercultural movements in the 1960s and the economic crisis of the 1970s have assumed the form of what is today referred to as the neoliberal political doctrine. The latter consists of a particular approach to the role of the state vis-à-vis the economic sphere and society, and is often associated with the policies implemented by the Thatcher and Reagan administrations in the 1980s. Thus, although today one can observe the development of such a doctrine into a ‘neoliberal strategy’ shared by most advanced capitalist economies including the two aforementioned countries and others such as France, Germany and Italy (Baccaro and Howell 2011), it is in the policies implemented by Reagan and Thatcher that one finds the very first attempt to engage with the neoliberalization of socio-political institutions. One of the founding fathers of the philosophy underpinning neoliberalism is Friedrich von Hayek, whose work was praised by Thatcher herself and had a significant influence on Reagan’s chief economic adviser, Milton Friedman. In his seminal work entitled The Road to Serfdom (2001), Hayek famously claimed that

Few people ever have an abundance of choice of occupation. But what matters is that we have some choice, that we are not absolutely tied to a particular job which has been chosen for us, and which we may have chosen in the past, and that if one position becomes intolerable, or if we set our heart on another, there is always a way for the able, some sacrifice at the price of which he may achieve his goal. Nothing makes conditions more unbearable than the knowledge that no effort of ours can change them; and even if we should never have the strength of mind to make the necessary sacrifice, the knowledge that we could escape if we only strove hard enough makes many otherwise intolerable positions bearable. (2001, 98)

In this passage, Hayek exposes what he thought to constitute a significant precondition for freedom, namely the maximization of individuals’ choice of occupation. Such freedom, he further argued, could only be realized under conditions whereby the markets themselves are set free from the shackles of state intervention. Freedom from ‘serfdom’ or repression is here therefore thought to depend on the ‘rolling back’ of the state from economic affairs and, consequently, on the retreat of bureaucratization. It is with such principles in mind that Thatcher and Reagan rethought the role of the state and justified the implementation of a series of market-oriented policies – such as de-regulation, privatization and the financialization of the economy – aimed at boosting economic growth whilst, apparently, minimizing state intervention. Neoliberal policies, therefore, provided the political conditions favourable for the flexibilization of markets. Eventually, it became possible to ‘discern the tendential crystallization of a distinctive form of state concerned to promote economic and extra-economic conditions deemed appropriate to the emerging post-Fordist accumulation regime’ (Jessop 2002, 95).

Whilst the transformation of the state from a ‘Keynesian Welfare National’ form, primarily concerned with crisis management through demand-driven policies, to a ‘Schumpeterian Competition’ form, ‘proactive in promoting the competitiveness’ of its economic space ‘in the face of intensified international […] competition’ (Jessop 2002, 124), took place partly as a result of a configuration of political, economic and even cultural forces expressing their aversion to big government, it soon became clear that the neoliberals’ claims of non-interventionism was nothing short of a mere illusion. The flexibilization of markets, the privatization of public services, the financialization of the economy and casualization of employment, all justified in the name of economic freedom and competitiveness, do indeed require heavy doses of state intervention through both economic and extra-economic means. These can assume the form of a legal framework upholding, for example, the contractual relations necessitated by the casualization of employment practices,2 or the promotion of practices geared towards the privatization of public wealth, for example, water, gas, public spaces, effectively transferring public goods into the hands of owners of capital, that is, ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2005). Thus, instead of providing economic security within highly competitive markets, the neoliberal state aims to increase competitiveness and promotes a ‘huge transfer of public funds to private power’ (Chomsky 1999, 67–8); ‘instead of communities, it produces shopping malls’ (Chomsky 1999, 11). Consequently, the practice of neoliberalism entails, as in the bureaucratic stage of capitalist development, a key role of the state in the ‘overall mode of regulation’ (Jessop 2002, 124). However, since the state is now involved in freeing the regime of capital accumulation from the so-called constraints on competitiveness imposed by the ‘Keynesian Welfare National’ model, its activities now involve ‘extensive and invasive interventions in every area of social life’ (Saad-Filho and Johnston 2005, 4) of a different form. Instead of security, the neoliberal state aims to maximize freedom. However, as should by now have become clear, the ‘freedoms it embodies’ tend to ‘reflect the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial capital’ (Harvey 2005, 7) and have therefore contributed to a reconfiguration of class power in favour capital (Harvey 2005). In short, therefore, whilst these new forms of intervention can be experienced as enabling for those in a position to benefit from financialization, de-regulation and privatization, they are experienced by the vast majority of individuals as added pressures to preserve the self in an increasingly hostile, insecure, fragmented and unstable environment. Consequently, neoliberalism has contributed to the emergence of ‘an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless’ (Chomsky 1999, 11).

In addition to such social powerlessness, the development of the state’s role as promoter of competitiveness has led to a significant democratic deficit, manifesting itself in two main and interrelated ways. On the one hand, the reconfiguration of class power in favour of capital facilitated by neoliberal governments has created conditions under which business forces are given significant scope to ‘codify their political power on every possible front’, thereby making it ‘next to impossible […] for non-market, non-commercial, and democratic forces to exist at all’ (Chomsky 1999, 9). Processes of financialization, de-regulation and privatization, often promoted by regional or global free-trade agreements, have led to a transfer of ‘decision making about people’s lives and aspirations into the hands of private tyrannies that operate in secret and without public supervision or control’ (1999, 132–3). Under such conditions, political autonomy for the many becomes significantly undermined, for the unashamed subjection of political decisions to the principles of productivity and efficiency underpinning economic competitiveness, combined with significant decline in welfare provisions, effectively causes the subsumption of the common good under the autocratic rule of economic facts and the interests of owners of capital. On the other hand, ‘the domination of society by the market’ (MacEwan 2005, 171) and the emergence of a state of affairs whereby all that is needed for social integration is ‘the market-orientation of individuals pursuing the satisfaction of their ever-rising needs’ (Bauman 1988: 81) have further undermined political autonomy. The promotion of consumerist practices by the neoliberal state3 aimed, once again, at the maximization of economic growth has led to a devaluation of civic and political engagement in favour of practices whereby the individual is encouraged to ‘express his or her identity […] through consumption’ (Clarke 2005, 66). Whilst such a phenomenon may significantly undermine political autonomy and, with it, individuals’ capacity to exert control over the economic and political structures governing society, neoliberal governments are currently far from willing to treat it as problematic. In fact, as Bauman pointed out:

Today’s governments are more concerned with absence of dissent than with presence of support. A passive citizen meets the bill perfectly, as he refrains from doing damage; his help is not called for anyway, at least under normal, peaceful conditions. Exit from politics means an indirect acceptance of the type of government which has little to gain, and a lot to lose, from the active involvement of its subjects in the process of political decision-making. (1988, 82)

Thus, by producing consumers instead of citizens (Chomsky 1999) and creating the general conditions under which the formulation of a common good through collective and democratic decision-making processes becomes an almost impossible task, the neoliberal doctrine could be said to rest on a very narrow conception of freedom, namely one whose purpose and realization is circumscribed by the competitive accumulation of capital. It follows that whilst it is possible to observe an evolution of the state’s role from one oriented towards the generalization of prosperity through the bureaucratic administration of life into one aimed at ‘facilitat[ing] conditions for profitable accumulation’ (Harvey 2005, 7) through a legally supported exposure of individuals’ own existence to the autocratic rule of economic facts, the neoliberal stage of capitalist development has, like its predecessor, failed to create the conditions required for the development of egalitarian and emancipatory political practices. Instead, the various neoliberal political institutions have facilitated the radicalization of the principle of self-preservation, contributed to the re-emergence of sharp socio-economic inequalities, whilst failing to match the economic growth rates of the 1950s and 1960s.4 It will be shown below that in an age where the political sphere becomes proactive in framing the ‘reified authority of the economy’ (Horkheimer cited in Wiggershaus 1994, 151), ‘unprecedented impotence’ (Bauman 2000) and socio-economic injustice, the triangular articulation of concerns embodied in Marx’s critique of political economy, the critique of instrumental reason of the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers and the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole proposed in this work becomes a more pressing task than ever.

Economic performance, consumerism and the cult of self-realization

As a ‘total way of life’ (Harvey 1989, 135), Fordism marked the emergence of a particular configuration of political, economic and social forces shaping culture. It did so, as Frankfurt School thinkers famously claimed, by developing economic and socio-political institutions playing a key role in the bureaucratization of life or, put differently, in the subjection of most areas of life under the rule of instrumental reason and the model of utility-oriented calculation upon which it rests. With the emergence of both a culture industry made possible by the mass production of standardized cultural goods (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997) and the bureaucratic administration of cultural matters resulting from a state addressing ‘its citizens like consumers’ (Habermas 1989, 195), individuals’ tastes and preferences came to be subjected to the ‘monotony, regularity, repetitiveness and predictability’ (Bauman 2000, 55) of a heavily regimented and regulated supply-driven regime of capital accumulation. The development of culture into its consumer form, in other words, came to serve the ends of capital, but did so in such a way that ‘someone somewhere […] must [constantly] interfere with the probabilities, manipulate them and load the dice, seeing to it that events do not occur at random’ (Bauman 2000, 55). Thus, whilst the Fordist-Taylorist workplace and its refined division of labour encouraged individuals to seek instant gratification through consumerist practices, the infiltration of the ‘model of utility-oriented calculation’ into culture transformed the various tastes and preferences of individuals into objects of manipulation and control, and eventually limited their capacity to actively realize themselves as unique cognitive and sensuous beings. By performing the function of social control, culture effectively came to play a significant role in the overall system of repressive regulation.

With the emergence of post-Fordism and the principle of flexibility upon which it rests, one does nevertheless witness a striking development:

The relatively stable aesthetic of Fordist modernism has given way to all the ferment, instability, and fleeting qualities of a postmodernist aesthetic that celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodification of cultural forms. (Harvey 1989, 156)

Here the departure from a Fordist aesthetic characterized by order, homogeneity, permanence and stability towards a ‘postmodernist’ one celebrating almost radically opposed qualities is thought to rest on the flexibility of consumer markets which the post-Fordist regime of accumulation presupposes. As such, with its apparent orientation towards the satisfaction of individuals’ ever-changing needs, post-Fordism is thought to pave the way for consumerist practices potentially capable of serving as outlets for the free and spontaneous release of instinctual energies. Its capacity to fulfil such a promise is, as in the case of the producer, immediately called into question once the full implications of the reality of the principle of flexibility are taken into account.

The Fordist consumer was certainly limited by the choices available in an era of mass standardized goods. His or her choices also tended to be significantly influenced by the various advertising and marketing campaigns seeking to sell the mass of consumer goods yielded by Fordist methods of production. Work-incentivization through relatively high wages, secure employment and substantial safety nets subsidized by the welfare state did nevertheless provide a very large section of the population – such as the newly emerging middle class – with a sufficiently high and secure purchasing power to save and invest. With the emergence of post-Fordism and the implementation of neoliberal policies, one nevertheless witnesses a decline in security in favour of a form of freedom construed as flexibility. Whilst freeing capitalism from numerous constraints, the flexibilization of labour and consumer markets, cuts in welfare provisions, de-regulation and privatization have all, in their own way, contributed to the proliferation and diversification of choices for individual consumers, combined with a stagnation of wages (Harvey 2005), an increase in socio-economic inequalities (Harvey 2005; Saad-Filho and Johnston 2005) and prolonged periods of ‘unemployment and underemployment’ (Saad-Filho and Johnston 2005, 5). Thus, the ‘unprecedented freedom’ which the neoliberal stage of capitalist development ‘offers its members has arrived […] together with unprecedented impotence’ (Bauman 2000, 23). It is under such distinctive conditions of existence that cultural practices came to be further subjected to the model of ‘utility-oriented calculation’.

In order to grasp the full implications of such a subjection for the realization of the self, it is worth reiterating here its effects on the sphere of production. Under the post-Fordist regime of capital accumulation, drawing its capacity for ‘accommodation to ceaseless change’ from constant ‘institutional, product, and technological innovation’ can be witnessed the emergence of a culture of performance assuming a historically specific form. Indeed, whereas Fordism relied on efficient and productive workers, their performance was mainly measured in terms of their capacity to fit into the highly regimented and routinized regime of production. With their subjection to increasingly globalized, flexible and highly competitive markets and workplaces, today’s workers have become increasingly exposed to a culture of performance measured in terms of adaptation and the capacity to engage in innovative strategies for self-development, all in the name of economic competitiveness. Consequently, individuals qua producers are under a constant pressure to treat the realization of the self as a task (Bauman 2000), but find their self-development significantly circumscribed by highly volatile labour markets. They are ultimately forced to ‘cope most proficiently with’ such markets, subsume their own performances under the model of utility-oriented calculation and defer, if not suppress, their search for pleasure through labour. A similar pattern can be found regarding the sphere of consumption and the cultural practices it has come to dominate.

The culture of performance identified with production has indeed been extended to cover consumerist practices themselves. With the endless possibilities afforded by flexible and globalized consumer markets, individuals qua consumers are under the constant pressure to adopt strategies aimed at finding answers to the question ‘How shall I live?’ (Giddens 1991). Accordingly, a successful performance for a consumer in the neoliberal stage of capitalist development appears to entail choosing the goods, that is, mobile phone contract, film, music, trip, most suitable for his or her own tastes and preferences, that is, authentic self-realization. However, as soon as the full array of conditions of existence under which consumers are required to make such choices are revealed, one discovers a non-negligible set of limitations to self-realization. Indeed, no reliable account of ‘organised self-realisation’ (Honneth 2004) practiced through consumption can be provided without giving due recognition to the significant degree of risk, ‘impotence’ and uncertainty ensuing from the domination of societies by flexible labour and consumer markets. With such elements in mind, the performance of the consumer comes to assume an altogether more complex and problematic form, for it is now situated within an overall system of regulation geared towards the maximization of economic competitiveness, incapable of yielding the forms of security enjoyed under the bureaucratic stage of capitalist development. As such, the act of consuming becomes a strategy with potentially significant risks. Combined with ‘unprecedented impotence’ and the development of a credit system making it possible for individuals to consume the goods they would not otherwise be in a position to acquire, the act of consuming is often – at least for the vast majority of individuals – experienced as a process of self-discovery significantly circumscribed by the model of utility-oriented calculation they are required to adopt in their attempt to ‘cope most proficiently’ with the post-Fordist consumerist culture. For example, very high tuition fees and increased competition on the labour market have turned university students into consumers encouraged to ‘think of themselves as mini-entrepreneurs competing in a marketplace’ (Gillespie and Habermehl 2012, 13) and to accept the risks associated with such practices. Post-Fordist consumerism, however, is also experienced as an intense pressure by the poorest sections of the population who, if incapable of contributing to the competitiveness of their respective economic space, often choose to ‘escape from public places into one’s home, which now serves as a place to hide from the real or imagined threat of communal condemnation, ridicule or pity’ (Bauman 1988, 85).

By aligning ‘organised self-realisation’ with a culture of performance framed by the model of utility-oriented calculation serving the ends of state-facilitated economic competitiveness, post-Fordism has effectively contributed to development of consumerist practices into matters of technical competence. Under such circumstances, it should come as no surprise that the privatization of education and, more specifically, universities has also led to the latter’s transformation into units serving the economic competitiveness of their respective economic space, whilst exposing scientific research more completely to the ‘economic-epistemic determinism in the light of which all other aspects of human social life fade into significance’ (Wagner 2008, 93). Even ‘intimate relationships’ are now affected by the model of utility-oriented calculation, for, today, one witnesses the ‘tendency to calculate the long-term chances of […] love relationships according [to] their compatibility with the future mobility demands of a career path that can only be planned in the short term’ (Hartmann and Honneth 2006, 56). If when ‘[b]ureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is “dehumanized”, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation’ (Weber 1978, 975), then the neoliberal stage of capitalist development has clearly failed to mark its demise. Its manifestation does nevertheless assume a distinctive form, for as a bureaucratization of life no longer imposed by the ‘coercive pressure of political bureaucracy’ (Bauman 1988, 88), it is now more adequately understood as an organized or institutionalized imperative of performance-oriented self-administration masquerading as self-realization,5 founded on the values of ‘rugged individualism’ (Chomsky 1999, 84) and giving rise to the ‘normative fragmentation of societies’ (Crouch 2011, 180). Critical theory and, more specifically, the revised form proposed in this work could play a significant role in diagnosing such a malaise, for existing institutional forms continue to uphold and promote the principle of self-preservation at the source of the tension between the individual, their internal nature, external nature and society at large. As will be shown below, though, by anticipating institutional forms likely to bridge the fossé between the ideals embodied in post-Fordism and neoliberalism and the actual condition whereby ‘security is missing’ and ‘free agents are stripped of the confidence without which freedom can hardly be exercized’ (Bauman 2005, 36), it also becomes central to the timely project of transcending the predominant postmodern cynicism emphasizing difference at the expense of unity.

On the socio-historical relevance of the proposed revision

The aforementioned analysis aimed to reveal some of the key economic, social, political and cultural transformations taking place under the neoliberal stage of capitalist development. With it, I sought to emphasize the limitations of these developments with regards to individuals’ capacity for egalitarian emancipation. In this section, a particular emphasis will be placed on the relevance of the triangular affinity between Marx’s critique of political economy, the critique of instrumental reason formulated by Frankfurt School thinkers and the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole to the analysis of the malaise engendered by capitalism by exposing the key role it could play in (a) capturing the various concerns and demands expressed by members of contemporary social movements, and (b) actualizing the potentialities inherent in neoliberal capitalism.

Inside contemporary social movements

The various developments discussed in the first section have significant implications for the task of putting theory ‘in a form that makes it useful for the closest possible description of facts’ (Horkheimer 1975, 188). With economic, political, social and cultural transformations often emerge new conditions of existence giving rise to historically specific concerns and demands. Whilst it is possible to contend, as was suggested above, that neoliberal capitalism has failed to mark the demise of the principle of self-preservation, it is nevertheless also possible to observe new ways in which such a principle has come to manifest itself, particularly at the level of individuals’ own experiences. The task of capturing the existing malaise through a ‘description of facts’, therefore, cannot be limited to a mere evaluation of material changes, but also ought to be complemented by an analysis of existing concerns and demands, such as those expressed by members of contemporary social movements.

In their seminal work entitled The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), Boltanski and Chiapello provide a basis upon which such a subjective-diagnostic component of the existing social malaise could be conceptualized. In it, they identified two distinct forms of critique thought to emerge as a response to specific socio-historical conditions of existence. On the one hand can be found the ‘social’ form of critique embodying concerns and demands related to issues such as socio-economic equality, justice, solidarity and economic security, and mainly drawing its ‘sources of indignation’ from Marx’s critique of liberal capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999, 82–3). Such a critique, they argued, tends to preponderate among resistance movements in the form of organized labour and treats the economy as the key site of crisis and struggle. On the other hand, one finds the ‘artistic’ critique, particularly concerned with lifestyle issues such as those raised by members of countercultural movements towards the end of the 1960s. More specifically, this historical form of critique is aimed at resisting

the disenchantment, the lack of authenticity, the ‘misery of everyday life’, the dehumanisation of the world under the rule of scientific-technical knowledge and technocracy, […] the loss of autonomy, the absence of creativity, and the different forms of oppression characterising the modern world. (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999, 245)

Culture, here, is treated as the key site of crisis and struggle. Its main line of attack against existing conditions of existence finds its ‘sources of indignation’ in the critique of a repressive bureaucratic capitalist form, for which the work of first-generation Frankfurt School critical theorists provided a key source of inspiration. A new stage of capitalist development has nevertheless emerged since the period throughout which the artistic critique rose to dominance. Alongside it, the emergence of two key resistance movements, otherwise known as the alter-globalization and Occupy movements, could also be witnessed. A question therefore arises: what form of critique(s) could these historically new social movements be said to embody? In order to provide an answer, one ought to turn to the nature of concerns and demands expressed by their members. Whilst I have sought to undertake such an analysis elsewhere (Masquelier 2013), some of the key claims made in this piece are worth reiterating here.

As a ‘movement of many movements’ (Klein 2001, 81), the alter-globalization movement, which gained momentum at the 1999 WTO summit in Seattle, sought to attack neoliberal globalization through the articulation of a variety of social and political forces. More specifically, its members sought to resist existing conditions of existence on the basis of ‘innovative conceptions of social justice and solidarity, of social possibility, of knowledge, emancipation, and freedom’ (Gill 2000, 140). As such, they captured the malaise engendered by post-Fordist methods of production and neoliberal policies through the articulation of different, albeit overlapping, sites of crisis struggle. The Décroissance movement, for example, articulated its environmental concerns within a critique of neoliberal capitalism encapsulating a critique of the existing principle of economic growth and a critique of everyday life (Latouche 2009). Consequently, it could be suggested that the movement has paved the way for a historical articulation of environmental concerns and those embodied in both the ‘social’ and ‘artistic’ critiques. A similar pattern can be identified with the Occupy movement. Indeed, whilst this movement drew some of its key sources of indignation from the socio-economic injustices engendered by the reconfiguration of class power in favour of capital exemplified by the neoliberal states’ own attempts to make the ordinary citizen pay for a crisis caused by financial capital, the ‘inner core of the movement’ did not merely ‘want different policies’, but ‘wanted a different way of life’ (Gitlin 2013, 8), beyond the inegalitarian, democratically deficient and environmentally damaging productivist regime of economic growth. Thus, by serving as a platform for the expression of ‘bread and butter’, environmental and lifestyle concerns, this movement could also be said to have given recognition to a wide range of issues, often thought to act as both a source of ‘strength and fragility’ (Hayduk 2012, 49). Members of both movements have in fact sought to resist the ‘[t]he model of market-oriented behaviour of individuals seeking to maximize personal interest’ (Pleyers 2010, 61) framed by post-Fordist methods of production and neoliberal policies, with a variety of demands for environmental protection, socio-economic justice, economic security and authentic self-realization, thereby treating culture, the economy and external nature as overlapping sites of crisis and struggle.6

It follows that a critical theory of society aiming to capture the distinctive nature of existing forms of resistance must be in a position to achieve ‘the task of articulating the two [historical] forms of critique’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999, 500). It is precisely by making possible the accomplishment of such a task that the revision of critical social theory proposed in this work could be expected to play a central role. Indeed, since it was partly formulated on the basis of an articulation of Marx’s concept of labour as self-realization – exposed in Chapter 1 – and the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists’ critique of knowledge, technology and the culture industry – extensively discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, and partly addressed in Chapters 4–6 – the framework of the relationship between humanity and nature exposed throughout this work effectively incorporates within its scope both the economy and culture as sites of struggle. Furthermore, in virtue of its capacity to treat the relationship between humanity and external nature as a phenomenon inextricably linked to the relationship between humanity and itself, it could be said to provide a framework within which ends of an environmental, economic, ethical and countercultural nature could all be articulated within a coherent narrative of ecological egalitarian emancipation. Thus, whilst it is capable of addressing the values of socio-economic justice, economic security and solidarity (social critique) in conjunction with those of autonomy, creativity and authenticity (artistic critique), it remains sufficiently open to be able to include external nature as an additional site of struggle within its scope (Cook 2011; Masquelier 2013). With the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole, one can nevertheless observe an additional role the revision of critical theory proposed here could be expected to play in capturing the existing spirit of resistance.

A striking feature of alter-globalization and Occupy’s mode of operation is their members’ commitment to participatory forms of democracy based on what is often referred to as the principle of horizontalism. Drawing its origins from operational modes of resistance employed in the 1994 Zapatista uprising against NAFTA and the spontaneous organization of Argentinian workers into ‘horizontal assemblies’, aimed at eliminating ‘hierarchy, bosses, managers, and pay differentials’ (Taylor et al. 2011, 10) following the economic collapse of 2001, this principle came to define several of the practices alter-globalists and Occupy protesters wished to implement in their day-to-day operations. In order to maximize transparency, dialogue, equality and autonomy, horizontalism was implemented, which paved the way for the emergence of organizational forms in the movements closely resembling G.D.H. Cole’s own attempt to build ‘networks’ instead of ‘pyramids’ (Schecter 2007) in the libertarian socialist alternative he advocated decades earlier. In the alter-globalization movement, for example, their operations came to be organized into ‘“spokes-councils” [which] allowed coalitions of groups to meet at “convergence centers” to strategize and coordinate actions, but with the close support and frequent input of members of each group’ (Hayduk 2012, 47). Its members also organized various World Social Forums with the aim of debating ‘the root cause of the current economic and ecological crisis in pursuit of feasible alternatives to the existing global economic order’ (Park 2013, 66). In several occupations making up the Occupy movement, one could also witness ‘thoughtful descriptions of a new way of political organizing […] revolving around the words like “General Assemblies” and “horizontals” and “consensus” and “working groups”’ (Flank 2011, 8). Some members did, in some cases, assume leadership roles, but the ‘empowerment to execute proposals and fulfil leader-like positions [was] temporary and in service to the community’ (Flank 2011, 104). Thus, the movements’ operational modes indicated a particular concern for the creation of ‘the most open, participatory, and democratic space possible’ (Taylor et al. 2011, 5) in the different practices making up their day-to-day activities. Although many of their members refrained from aligning themselves with a particular political ideology, their horizontalist practices and demands for ‘local-centred economic models’ (Park 2013) tend to echo those advocated by G.D.H. Cole himself, who proposed the transformation of economic, political and civic life into locally and democratically organized associations whose members hold the power to both elect and ‘recall’ (Cole 1980, 134) their own leaders and representatives.

Thus, in spite of the presence of a wide diversity of concerns and demands reflecting the highly complex and differentiated character of contemporary Western capitalist societies, their members continuously sought to fight against the competitive and conflictual practices framed by existing economic and political structures. Whilst the achievement of such a goal proved to be quite a challenge, the difficulties they have encountered never extinguished their desire to ‘embody the alternative [they] wish to see in [their] day-to-day relationships’ (Taylor et al. 2011, 5). This was particularly evident in the different occupations making up the Occupy movement. These included a wide ‘diversity of people and grievances’ exemplified by the presence of ‘recent graduates and veterans who can’t find work, elderly who fear losing their pensions, the long-term unemployed, the homeless, peace activists, people with a day job in a corporate office who show up after work, members of the military, and off-duty police’ (Van Gelder 2011, 6–7). In an attempt to prevent the existence of a multiplicity of interests from acting as a source for the development of conflictual exchanges, occupiers organized various working groups, workshops and meetings, each endowed with a particular purpose or function directly corresponding to a particular set of interests, for example, anti-patriarchy meetings (Taylor et al. 2011) or practical issues, for example, ‘legal, food, medical’ working groups (Hayduk 2012, 48). Occupations, therefore, involved a wide diversity of democratically organized discussions on specific issues. Unity in the diversity of the voices and operational practices making up the movement would nevertheless be secured by the coordinating function assigned to general assemblies (Hayduk 2012). It is in these particular organizational forms that one finds yet another similarity with Cole’s libertarian socialism:

It is first a problem of co-ordinating the functional bodies of the various types into a single communal system, and it is secondly a problem of co-ordinating bodies operating over a smaller with bodies operating over a larger area. Both these problems have to be solved in the structure of the co-ordinating, or as I shall henceforward call it, the communal, organisation of Guild Socialist Society. (Cole 1980, 124)

The different working groups or workshops comprised in the occupations represent what Cole chose to call ‘functional bodies’ in the above passage, and otherwise known as associations of producers and consumers, and civic associations. The general assembly could here be said to perform the function Cole himself assigned to the ‘commune’ in his associative model of democracy. More crucially, though, it is by attempting to address an inescapable fact of highly differentiated and complex societies, namely the existence of ‘wants […] of the most diverse character’ (Cole 1920, 33) and ‘complex and detailed issues’ (Cole 1920, 119), that both Cole and the occupiers sought to achieve unity in diversity in the aforementioned terms.7

The members of contemporary social movements’ commitment to ‘inclusive democracy’ (Fotopoulos 2001) also led to the development of decision-making practices in line with the principle of horizontalism, whilst echoing those advocated by Cole in his libertarian socialist alternative. Members of the alter-globalization movement, for example, sought to ‘combine limited and controlled recourse to delegation with consensus-based instruments appealing to dialogue, to the transparency of the communicative process and to reaching the greatest possible consensus’ (della Porta et al. 2006, 30). Indeed, a fairly large proportion of alter-globalists (della Porta et al. 2006) advocated consensual practices ‘based on an incremental model, whereby a decision can always be brought back into discussion so as to satisfy the widest possible number of people’ (della Porta et al. 2006, 53–4). Such orientations could also be found among members of the Occupy movement, who, clearly aware of the undemocratic character of existing decision-making processes, came to apply the principle of ‘collective thinking’ to their own decision-making processes:

The aim of Collective thinking […] is to construct. That is to say, two people with differing ideas work together to build something new. The onus is therefore not my idea or yours; rather it is the notion that two ideas together will produce something new, something that neither of us had envisaged beforehand. This focus requires us that we actively listen, rather than merely be preoccupied with preparing our response. (Flank 2011, 72)

Occupiers, therefore, sought to maximize the cooperative nature of their decisions by embracing a radicalized notion of consensus aimed at transcending the competitive and confrontational values upon which mainstream conceptions of democratic decision making – such as Habermas’s own – rest. Indeed, instead of valuing the ‘force of the better argument’, the harmonization of individual plans of action favoured by members of the Occupy movement tended to be oriented towards the development of a pluralistic public opinion à la Cole in the form discussed in Chapter 7. As such, members of both movements effectively introduced decision-making practices aimed at safeguarding consensual decisions against the subsumption of individual conceptions of the good life under the common good. For both alter-globalists of the ‘way of subjectivity’ (Pleyers 2010) and the ‘inner core’ of the Occupy movement, these practices were primarily dedicated to the assertion of ‘our self-confidence, our sexuality, our playfulness, our creativity’ (Holloway 2002, 157), or, as Calhoun remarked regarding Occupy Wall Street, to ‘the direct expression of feelings, to the importance of passion, to a concern for nature both in the sense of the environment and in the sense of being true to human nature’ (2013, 35). Like Cole’s libertarian socialist alternative, then, they were aimed at providing sufficient scope for the reconciliation of cognitive and sensuous energies in decision-making processes.

The spirit of resistance has therefore developed in such a way that a convergence of concerns and demands previously differentiated into two distinct and historical forms of critique can now be identified. The interpenetration of different sites of struggle, that is, the economy, culture and external nature, in the new spirit of resistance has led members of contemporary social movements to articulate their demands in complex and innovative ways prompting the reformulation of a critical theory of society in the form advocated in this work, namely through the reconciliation of Marx’s critique of political economy and the critique of instrumental reason elaborated by first-generation critical theorists. Furthermore, although members of alter-globalization and Occupy have refrained from associating their actions with a particular political project, they have effectively turned the broad forms of ecological, egalitarian and emancipatory practices anticipated by G.D.H. Cole himself into a lived experience. An analysis of the historical relevance of Cole’s libertarian socialist alternative would nevertheless be incomplete without proceeding with a clear demonstration of its potential capacity to bridge the fossé between the actual and the possible, that is, actualize existing potentialities.

Libertarian socialism as actualization of potentialities

The ideals articulated within the neoliberal capitalist project have emerged as a contemporary attempt to actualize some of the key values, that is, autonomy, pluralism, equality, toleration, embodied in Enlightenment thinking and classical liberalism. It soon became clear, however, that their subjection to a principle of flexibility serving the ends of a regime of accumulation freed from numerous constraints failed to bring these values to fruition. A clearly distinguishable fossé between these ideals and the reality of societies exposed to a principle of self-preservation running amok can therefore be identified. It is this fossé that G.D.H. Cole effectively proposed to bridge. Indeed, whilst there are key lessons to be learned from the historical emergence of neoliberal capitalism, these could be said to have been anticipated several decades earlier by Cole – and other thinkers such as Proudhon and Kropotkin – for, today, it appears that the ‘leading principles of classical liberalism receive their natural modern expression not in the neoliberal “religion” but in the independent movements of working people and the ideas and practices of the libertarian socialist movements’ (Chomsky 1999, 40). As the ‘natural modern expression’ of classical liberal values, libertarian socialism ought to be able to actualize them whilst building upon already existing tendencies. How, then, can it be expected to achieve such a task? I shall seek to answer this question by placing my emphasis on the work of Cole. It must nevertheless be noted here that I do not intend to reduce the libertarian socialist tradition to his own work. For example, Chomsky’s (2005) own libertarian socialist vision is partly indebted to the work of American anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker. What is of particular interest here, however, is the appeal to a form of emancipation grounded in decentralized, cooperative and democratic forms of political and economic governance which most libertarian socialist visions, including Cole’s, tend to share.

Post-Fordist methods of production and neoliberal policies have set out to actualize autonomy in historically specific ways. On the one hand, the ‘post-Fordist strategy’ consists of a programme of innovation aiming ‘for quality rather than quantity; for flexibility of response rather than standardized long runs; for skilled autonomous worker input rather than the programmed input of de-skilled process operators’ (Matthews 1989, 72). Furthermore, as was shown above, the post-Fordist strategy aims to actualize autonomy by institutionalising self-realization. On the other hand, the neoliberal doctrine promotes free marketization, privatization and the ‘rolling back’ of the state as necessary means for the maximization of individuals’ freedom. In order to achieve such goals, their respective proponents – often treating both sets of orientations as two sides of the same coin – have sought to implement their principles through hefty doses of institutional restructuring. However, as was revealed above, both have failed in their attempt to create conditions favourable for the development of truly egalitarian and emancipatory practices.

Whilst the ‘networked’ or horizontal re-organization of economic structures streamlined for the maximization of economic competitiveness may have created new opportunities for both the release of creative energies by and an increased responsibility for a core of workers in labour processes, their direct exposure to the rule of flexible and highly competitive globalized markets has tended to deprive the vast majority of individuals from the forms of control required for autonomous self-realization at work. In addition to this, the neoliberal obsession with economic freedom has also failed to mark the demise of state interventionism, whilst contributing to the degradation of democracy through the subsumption of the common good under the manifest, albeit manufactured, universality of the ends of economic competitiveness. It therefore follows that the task of reconfiguring economic and political life in such a way as to actualize the liberal value of autonomy is effectively best served by the development of horizontal forms of economic organizations (production and allocation of resources) subjected to the direct control of workers and modes of representation capable of turning the particular interests of ordinary citizens into the direct content of decision-making processes.

Implicit in the latter points is the claim that the actualization of autonomy depends on the institutionalized recognition of what makes individuals unique beings, namely the fact that ‘wants are of the most diverse character, and require the most diverse means for their satisfaction’ (Cole 1920, 33). Post-Fordism may have emerged as an attempt to accommodate ceaseless change and meet the ever-changing needs of individuals, but it has done so in the name of a form of economic competitiveness contributing to the development of values associated with the preservation of the self, namely values that ‘can only emerge from dispute and struggle’ (Crouch 2011, 180). Affirming one’s difference today tends to be treated as a solitary act. The satisfaction of a need or want is construed as one’s own responsibility. However, as Crouch pointed out, ‘[w]e are unable to sustain our lives by ourselves and we run a considerable risk that the way we conduct our lives can damage those of others’ (2011, 180). The task of actualizing autonomy, therefore, cannot be adequately undertaken through the mere recognition of the diversity of wants but also through the recognition of the fact that their satisfaction requires, more often than not, ‘co-operative action’ (Cole 1920, 34).

It is by meeting such a twofold requirement that the libertarian socialism of G.D.H. Cole could be said to offer timely and sustainable avenues for the institutionalization of the liberal value of autonomy. Conscious of the need to build on existing subjective and objective tendencies, however, Cole claimed ‘not to be imagining a Utopia in the clouds, but to be giving form and direction to certain quite definite tendencies which are now at work in Society, and to be anticipating the most natural developments of already existing institutions and social forces’ (Cole 1980, 11). It is nevertheless striking that despite having written his works during the first half of the twentieth century, his thought has become more relevant than ever under the neoliberal stage of capitalist development. Cole, for example, was particularly concerned with the task of considerably reducing the distance between individuals and the various economic and political structures governing their life. In his libertarian socialist project, he in fact offered alternatives to unwieldy and impersonal bureaucratic organizations, the fragmentary effects of the division of labour and abstract and remote systems of allocation of resources such as the capitalist market. The re-organization of economic and political life into associations, he thought, would create the conditions required for the development of a social form that is ‘based upon the individuals, exists in and for the individuals, and can never transcend the wills of the individuals who compose it’ (Cole 1920, 192). As such, his associative model of democracy provides a historically relevant basis upon which to satisfy the longing for control and security engendered by neoliberal capitalism beyond the repressive rule of bureaucracy. More concretely, Cole proposes to turn the principle of operational horizontalism promoted by post-Fordist strategists into an organizational principle capable of actualizing autonomy and minimizing, or even eliminating, the role of the state (neoliberal ideal).

As was shown in Chapters 6 and 7, the various associations of producers and consumers contained in his libertarian socialist alternative aim to provide a space for the cooperative reconciliation of individuals with their internal nature. It is in fact in virtue of the role attributed to both production and consumption in emancipation that Cole’s institutional framework distinguishes itself from other libertarian socialist forms. The coordination of the process of satisfaction of needs on a societal scale would be made possible by the introduction of a dialogue between the representatives of these two spheres, making it possible for Cole to give due recognition to the highly complex and differentiated character of contemporary societies. As such, dialogue is here thought to facilitate the accommodation of ceaseless change promised by post-Fordism, for the supply and demand mechanism would manifest itself as a direct negotiation between consumers and producers. It is nevertheless thought to achieve it on the basis of principles distinguishable from those upon which the strictly economic and ‘negative’ freedom framed by neoliberal capitalism rests. The principles of cooperation and self-determination could indeed contribute to the large-scale substitution of the condition of ‘unprecedented impotence’ characterizing existing conditions of existence, with the collective pursuit of a common purpose aligned with the individual conceptions of the good life of the different members of the associations. Choices made by consumers would no longer be subjected to the impersonal rule of invisible market forces and the manipulative practices of commercial agencies. Instead, individuals would be given the scope for making authentic choices. To paraphrase Bauman, then, ‘the fullest possible scope for creativity’ (Cole 1950, 97) which the libertarian socialist alternative offers its members could arrive together with unprecedented control. In short, it is by giving life to a positive conception of freedom anchored in cooperative practices that Cole anticipated the actualization of the liberal value of autonomy.

With the ‘democratization of economic and social life’ (Matthews 1989, 220) proposed by Cole, one could also anticipate the actualization of additional liberal values such as pluralism, toleration and equality. Under neoliberal capitalism, the liberal value of pluralism fails to gain actualization as a result of political representatives’ tendency to favour the ends of economic competitiveness and, therefore, capital over those of ordinary citizens. By setting out to ‘destroy this predominance of economic factors’ (Cole 1980, 180) through the re-organization of key spheres of life into forms of associative action and coordination capable of giving the ‘fullest development of functional organisation’ (Cole 1920, 114), Cole effectively sought to turn political representation into a system actually capable of giving direct recognition to the multiplicity of interests making up highly complex and differentiated societies. As such, his focus on the ‘non-statist role of associations’ could be said to ‘represent a significant coming to terms with the pluralist realities of modern democracies’ (Matthews 1989, 63) and a fresh basis for the re-invention of economic efficiency beyond the liberal-productivist regime of growth. Furthermore, by emphasizing the values of ‘cheerfulness, comradeliness, co-operativeness, consideration, kindness’ on the ‘plane of conduct’, and promoting ‘knowledge, respect for truth, rationality, tolerance’ on the ‘intellectual plane’, Cole also invested a great deal of energy in attempting to actualize the liberal value of toleration (Cole 1950, 7). He envisaged to achieve such a goal by introducing into economic, political and social life operational organizations, that is, civic associations and associations of producers and consumers, making it possible for individuals to ‘agree[…] together upon certain methods of procedure, and lay[…] down, in however rudimentary a form, rules for common action’ (Cole 1920, 37). It is finally ‘out of the actual experience of free and democratic industrial and social conditions’, such as these ones, that ‘equality […] can develop’, for they would not only involve ‘equal distribution of the power to make collective decisions’, but also ‘equal participation in collective judgment’ (Warren 2001, 60).

In short, therefore, Cole proposed the substitution of the neoliberal culture of performance by a ‘culture of [functional] democracy’ (Matthews 1989, 220). By proposing to strip social, economic, political and cultural practices of the principle of economic competitiveness and substituting it with those of self-government, authentic self-realization and cooperative satisfaction of needs, Cole anticipated the actualization of autonomy, plurality, toleration and equality beyond their current and incomplete manifestation as flexibility, risky economic strategies, the ‘right to be left alone’ (Crouch 2011, 180), equal rights to compete. By giving the ‘fullest possible capacity for initiative and self-expression’ (Cole 1980, 98) through the direct control of economic and political structures by producers and consumers, his associations provide a space whereby the ‘creative impulse in all of us’ (Cole 1917, 302) is given maximum scope for realization. Combined with the release of the ‘impulse of free and unfettered service’ (Cole 1917, 302) made possible by associative action, however, the capacity for self-expression is prevented from taking an inward-looking form. Instead a moral responsibility for the other – as producer or consumer – is likely to develop, for associative action entails the alignment of the common good with individual conceptions of the good life, thereby making possible for producers or consumers alike, to treat the realization of the self as a phenomenon inextricably linked to the self-realization of others. Put differently, Cole’s libertarian socialism would make it possible for individuals to be conscious of a fact of life obscured by the principles underpinning neoliberal capitalism, namely that ‘we are enmeshed in needs for collective and public goods’ (Crouch 2011, 180). Finally, an alternative relationship between humanity and external nature could also be expected, for it would no longer be mediated by economic practices oriented towards an almost unfettered exploitation of nature, which the highly productivist nature of neoliberal capitalism clearly continues to promote.

Final remarks

In his work The Enigma of Capital (2010), David Harvey observed the following:

Contemporary attempts to revive the communist hypothesis typically abjure state control and look to other forms of collective social organisation […]. Horizontally networked, as opposed to hierarchically commanded, systems of coordination between autonomously organised and self-governing collectives of producers and consumers are envisaged as lying at the core of a new form of communism. […] All manner of small-scale experiments around the world can be found in which such economic and political forms are being constructed. (Harvey 2010, 225)

Whilst key principles associated with such ‘collective forms of social organisation’ were applied by members of contemporary social movements to their practice of resistance, they have also materialized into promising non-productivist and accountable forms of economic governance, such as the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain, the Ohio worker-managed industries in the United States, Denmark’s cooperative and municipal wind power, the cooperative economy in the UK, the French ‘Economie Sociale et Solidaire’ and countless additional examples throughout the contemporary Western (and non-Western) world. Although the tendencies exhibited by such organizational forms cannot be reduced to those advocated by G.D.H. Cole, they find several of their key features in the labour-mediated reconciliation of humanity and nature proposed by the British libertarian socialist. Despite its anti-statism and particular concern for individuals’ empowerment, Cole’s libertarian socialism aims to mediate the individual and authority structures whilst recognizing the role of both production and consumption in emancipation – a mediation upon which members of the Frankfurt School placed a particular strong emphasis in their work, albeit without providing the practical orientations for its translation into an alternative set of institutional forms. However, the aforementioned experiments have tended to derive mostly from a pragmatic urge to address problems engendered by an increasingly precarious life, independently of coherently articulated political ideals.8 The revision of critical theory proposed here could therefore be treated as an attempt to formulate a ‘coherent vision of the future, in order to guide practical concerns and interventions in the present’ (Matthews 1989, 14) such as those found in contemporary social movements and other small-scale experiments aimed at maximizing autonomy, creativity, authenticity, socio-economic equality, solidarity and economic security. Thus, as these practices demonstrate, utopian energies have not been exhausted;9 they have instead been reconfigured into the lived experience of a different way of life fulfilling the promise of human dignity.

In short, critical theory and Cole’s libertarian socialism could play a key role in revealing the gap between this distinctively modern promise and the actuality of existing conditions of existence – a gap which idealist philosophy, social democracy, political (neo)liberalism and capitalist forms of production have failed to bridge. Above all, both provide an auspicious basis upon which a coherent narrative of ecological and egalitarian emancipation could be expected to develop into a large-scale progressive political vision. The European Left’s complicity with statist- and liberal-productivist forms of governance has significantly limited its capacity to form pressing alliances with progressive social and political forces and champion innovative solutions to deep systemic problems such as those exposed by the recurrent crises of capitalism. What the labour-mediated reconciliation of humanity and nature proposed here offers, however, is a timely programme for coordinated progressive political action, whose prospect for development into a staunch challenger to the neoliberal worldview has become an all too plausible expectation.

Notes

1  All of the quotations extracted from the New Spirit of Capitalism (1999) are my own translation of the original French version.

2  Such forms of intervention could be illustrated by the recent ‘Agreement on Employment Practices’ (‘Accord sur L’emploi’) reached by the ‘socialist’ government in France and involving a selection of trade unions and the French corporate leaders’ association (Medef). Whilst this agreement, which Sarkozy himself had planned to propose before Hollande came to power, is presented as a move to ‘secure’ employment by forcing employers to propose salary reductions or deployments as alternatives to redundancies in times of economic difficulties, it has been severely criticized by other trade unions and Jean-Luc Mélenchon as a move aimed at increasing the flexibility of labour and favouring the interests of capital through legal measures.

3  One can recall here George W. Bush urging Americans to go shopping on the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

4  This diagnostic mainly applies to European economies, for the United States did briefly enjoy similar growth rates to those immediately following the Second World War in the 1980s and 1990s.

5  One can here find an implicit reference to Foucault’s work on governmentality, often held as a useful basis for an analysis for neoliberal disciplinary mechanisms. Strong similarities between the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and Foucault’s critique of modernity can in fact be identified – similarities that the latter thinker explicitly recognized:

If I had known about the Frankfurt School in time, I would have been saved a great deal of work. I would not have said a certain amount of nonsense and would not have taken so many false trails trying not to get lost, when the Frankfurt School had already led the way. (Foucault cited in Wiggershaus 1995, 4)

Such an affinity was made somewhat explicit by ‘third generation’ critical theorist Axel Honneth, in his work The Critique of Power (1991).

6  A more extensive analysis of these movements will be provided below. See also my article entitled ‘Critical Theory and Contemporary Social Movements’ (2013) for a more detailed explanation of the role critical theory could play in conceptualizing contemporary forms of resistance.

7  One could also include Adorno whose ‘constellation thinking’ was precisely aimed at reconciling the plural character of concrete existence with the unifying force of the concept.

8  The ‘social economy’ in France and Britain, for example, has significantly expanded since the 2007–8 financial crisis.

9  One finds here a response to Habermas’s (1986) own claim that modern societies have evolved in such a way as to cause the exhaustion of ‘utopian energies’.

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Index

Note: Locators followed by letter ‘n’ refer to notes.

Accord sur l’Emploi 194n. 2

accumulation by dispossession 175–6

Adorno, Theodor

on emancipation 4, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48, 49, 96, 98, 100, 117, 118, 119, 129, 139

on Hegel 38–40, 41, 43

on instrumental reason 42–4, 47, 49, 95–103

on Kant 33–8, 41

on Marx 3–4, 46–9, 96

on modernity 3

on non-identity 40, 44, 45, 49, 58–9, 107

see also division of labour, Habermas, mimesis, subject-object relations, rationality

The Aesthetic Dimension (Marcuse) 56

aesthetic feeling 44, 118, 144

Aesthetic Form 60–7, 69n. 3

aesthetic rationality see rationality

alienation see Marx, labour

alter-globalization movement 183–4, 185, 186–7

art

autonomous 46, 47, 48, 51n. 19, 64–6, 144, 154

see also mimesis

associations 122, 128, 158

of consumers 67, 68, 159–60, 162–5

and cooperation 158–61, 162–5

of producers 67, 68, 129, 159–60, 162–5

and self-realization 158–61

see also Cole

authenticity 36, 41, 42, 43, 48, 49, 147, 148, 161, 170, 172, 180, 183, 184, 191, 192, 194

autonomy 3, 4, 5, 42, 47, 170, 171, 172, 176, 183, 184, 185, 188–93

moral 107, 126,128

see also Kant, Hegel, Marx

Benhabib, Seyla 106–7, 113–17, 119, 121, 163

Benjamin, Walter 45

Bernstein, Richard 101, 106, 114, 115, 122n. 2

Bloch, Ernst 46, 48, 60

bureaucracy 29, 43, 46, 49, 63, 77, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 137, 167n. 11, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 181, 183, 190

see also Cole, state

capital accumulation 2, 3, 34, 36, 49, 51n. 19, 65, 94n. 13, 149, 159, 166, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 188

capitalism

advanced 46, 56, 58, 61, 67, 68, 75, 77, 78, 81, 82, 83, 120, 125, 126, 136, 139, 151

liberal 9, 75, 76, 90, 91, 93n. 8

neoliberal 5, 7, 58, 166, 169, 170–94

Cartesian dualism 119, 150

civil society 12, 13, 16, 17, 25, 27n. 6, 28n. 12, 77, 80, 81, 94n. 14

Cole, George Douglas Howard

on associational life 132–5, 151–7, 161, 190–3

on bureaucracy 130, 151

on capitalist state 131–2

on civic associations 192

on commune 186

on consumer associations 137–9, 147–8, 149, 151–4, 186, 191–3

on democracy 130–9

on emancipation 137–9, 145–57, 161

on functional representation 133–4, 138–9, 152, 186, 191

producer associations 137–9, 144–7, 149, 151–4, 186, 191–3

producer-consumer dialogue 138–9, 148, 152–7, 164, 191

see also division of labour

collective thinking 187

colonisation of lifeworld see Habermas

communicative action see Habermas

communicative rationality see rationality

competition 1, 12, 36, 66, 80, 89, 111, 116, 160, 162, 167n. 11, 172, 175–81, 185, 187, 189, 190, 191

complementary reciprocity 106–7, 113, 114, 116, 163–5

concept 10, 16, 32–8, 40–1, 43, 44–5

constellation thinking 45, 63, 69n. 9, 164

consumerism 177, 178, 180

Cook, Deborah 28n. 16, 108, 111, 140n. 9

critique

and culture 47–9, 182

immanent 8n. 3, 47

of instrumental reason 3, 5, 6, 72, 83, 95–103, 121, 122n. 5, 129, 169, 177, 182, 188

of political economy 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 27, 46–8, 67, 78, 85, 95, 96, 129, 135, 136, 139, 166n. 1, 177, 182, 188

and practice 2–5, 48–9, 56–8, 61–3, 125, 129, 140n. 6

culture industry 35, 51n. 16, 65, 69n. 10, 120, 136–7, 140n. 9, 178

Davos 8n. 1, 94n. 11

of nature 3, 30, 31, 33, 36, 42, 46, 48, 49, 53, 62, 68, 72–4, 83, 85, 149

Décroissance movement 183

de-regulation 176, 179

desublimation 120, 123n. 14, 137, 147

Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer) 42, 102, 140n. 9

division of labour 34, 89, 101, 116, 119, 120, 122n. 4, 136, 150, 156

Adorno on 36, 47, 49, 129

Cole on 132, 133, 137, 144, 145, 190

and Fordism 178

Marcuse on 63, 65, 66, 67

Marx on 20, 26, 87–8, 91, 94n. 12

domination

ideological 91

technological 53, 62, 85–6, 150, 160

economic crisis 1, 170, 174, 175, 185, 195n. 8

economic efficiency 74, 77, 87, 88, 89, 93n. 4, 94n. 11, 101, 118, 120, 127, 128, 130, 133, 138, 144, 147, 149, 151, 155, 160, 165, 167n. 17, 171, 176, 192

economic insecurity 35, 100, 111, 172, 176

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx) 6, 14, 16

emancipation see Adorno, Cole, humanity-nature relationship, Habermas, Marx

Enlightenment thinking 29, 30, 66

environment 8n. 6, 183, 184, 187

ethical life 80, 81, 83, 157–65

exchange relations 22, 24, 25, 73, 76, 77, 120

Feuerbach, Ludwig 15, 20, 21

financialization 175, 176

flexible specialization 172

Fordism 29, 170, 173, 177, 178–9

see also division of labour

Foucault, Michel 195n. 5

freedom

Bauman on 170, 179, 181

Cole on 130, 138, 145, 146, 161, 191

economic 161, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 189

Habermas on 76, 77, 110, 128, 173

Hegel on 12, 13, 15, 55

Kant on 10, 11, 22, 30, 42, 51n. 15

negative 30, 191

social 24, 66, 77, 110, 160

Freud, Sigmund 3, 60, 64, 109

Friedman, Milton 174

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 44

governmentality see Foucault

Great Refusal 57–8, 61–3

Habermas

on Adorno 98–100

on communicative action 74,75, 76–8, 79–83, 84, 97–112, 114, 135, 167n. 16

on democracy 76–8, 79–83, 84, 91, 105, 126–8, 131

on emancipation 5, 6, 7, 71–83, 85–6, 89–90, 97–106, 107–112, 119, 125–9

on instrumental action 72–4, 76, 77, 84–5, 126–8

on Kant 108–9

on lifeworld 5, 72, 73–5, 78, 79, 81, 83, 85, 92n. 3, 93n. 7, 103, 104, 111, 126, 127

on Marcuse 86

on Marx 72–4, 75, 84–5, 86–7, 95–6, 128

on modernity 72

on the public sphere 4, 11, 76–82, 91, 93n. 9, 94n. 16, 162, 166n. 5

on strategic action 74, 85, 92n. 3

and system 5, 72, 73, 74–5, 81, 92n. 3, 111, 126

Harvey, David 171, 193

Hayek, Friedrich von 174

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

on absolute knowledge 11–12, 27n. 5, 40

on autonomy 14–15, 16

on intersubjective recogniton 12–13, 14, 22, 25

on modern state 25

and negation 13, 38–40, 43, 54–6

historical materialism see Marx

Hollande, Francois 8n. 1, 194n. 2

horizontalism 186

Horkheimer, Max

on critique 3, 4, 6, 63, 83, 91, 96, 129, 140, 144

on self-preservation 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 72, 101, 173

humanity-nature relationship

and capitalism 2, 3, 18, 172, 184

and critique 2–6, 58, 59, 97, 184

and emancipation 7, 18–22, 26, 72, 76, 83, 85, 96–8, 125–31, 138, 143–65, 172

and idealism 9–14, 21–2, 26, 30–3, 43

and labour 15–17, 18–22, 23, 49, 72, 83–92, 128–31, 143–50, 172

and language 97–121

and reconciliation 42, 44, 47, 66, 67, 71, 96, 97, 100–21, 125–31, 143–65, 172, 187, 192–3, 194

see also domination

idealism 9–14, 21–2, 29–33

see also Adorno, Hegel, humanity-nature relationship and Kant

identity thinking 37–40, 42–4

ideology 46, 53, 73, 76, 84, 91, 185

see also domination

individualism 25, 69n. 6, 181

inequality 1, 80, 91, 161, 167n. 11, 173, 177, 179

instincts 3, 27n. 4, 60, 64, 101, 178

sublimation of 5, 65–7, 102, 109, 118, 136, 147–8

see also Marcuse

instrumental reason see Adorno, Habermas, rationality

intersubjectivity 13, 15, 22, 23, 74, 83, 95, 98–121, 123n. 8, 126, 128, 157–66

see also Hegel

intuitions 32, 33, 34, 35, 37

Kant, Immanuel

on autonomy and knowledge 9–11, 13, 27n. 5, 29–30, 42

on duty 11, 29–30

and enlightenment 9–10

see also Adorno, Habermas, freedom

Knowledge and Human Interests (Habermas) 92n. 3, 108

Kropotkin, Peter 135, 188

labour

alienated 2, 14–16, 18–19, 24–5, 28n. 13, 48, 55, 56, 62, 87, 128, 136, 145

casualization of 172, 175

and cooperation 14, 22–6, 67, 88, 89, 102, 116, 120, 122n. 4, 132–3, 138, 145–9, 153–4, 160–1, 191–2

as mediation 6, 7, 14–17, 18–22, 48–50, 53, 66, 83–92, 94n. 14, 101, 117–20, 144–6, 150, 151, 158, 161, 172, 193

as self-realization 23, 89, 102, 118, 158–9, 160–1, 170, 172, 179, 189

see also division of labour, humanity-nature relationship, Marx, mimesis

legitimate political order 162–6

liberal democracy 24, 28n. 18

liberal-productivist growth 1, 83, 86, 166, 192

liberal values 188–93

liberalism 24, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194

libertarian socialism 5, 67, 69n. 7, 124n. 15, 125, 130–5, 137–9, 143, 144–9, 151–7, 159–66, 184–94

left-wing politics 1, 194

Legitimation Crisis (Habermas) 81, 93n. 7

lifeworld see Habermas

Marcuse, Herbert

on freedom 66–7

on Hegel 54–6

on instincts 64–7

on Marx 56–7, 61–2

on modernity 3

on negation 54–6, 58, 59–67

on revolution 56–8, 65, 68n. 2

on technology 53, 65, 67, 85–6, 144

see also division of labour, Habermas, subject-object relations

market flexibility 149, 170, 171, 172, 175, 178, 179, 180, 188, 189, 192, 194n. 2

Marx, Karl

on alienation 2, 14–16, 18–19, 24, 28n. 13, 48, 55, 56, 62, 87, 128

on autonomy 14–22, 51n. 10

on critique 2–3, 47–9

and Hegel 9, 14–15, 17, 22, 24, 27n. 10

on human emancipation 9, 16–26, 28n. 11, 48, 51n. 10, 72, 73, 85, 89, 96, 97, 128, 130, 135–6, 137, 162

on labour 15–26, 46–9, 85, 89–90, 117–18, 128–9, 130, 135–7, 139, 141n. 10, 146, 162, 166n. 4, 184

on materialism 15, 16, 18, 20–1, 28n. 12, 47, 72, 75, 84–7, 90, 96, 127, 140

on modern state 15–16

on modernity 2

and Paris Commune 129

see also Adorno, division of labour, Habermas, Marcuse, subject-object relations

Marxism 28n. 20, 64–5, 135

Mead, George Herbert 106, 123n. 8

mediation

by language 99–121

by reason 10–14, 30–3

by state 11–12, 23, 25, 26

see also labour

mimesis

Adorno on 44–6, 98–101

and art 45–8

Habermas on 99–100

and labour 101, 118, 120, 121, 122n. 4, 144–6, 147, 150, 151, 154, 158

modernity 2–4, 21, 43, 50n. 9, 71–8, 98, 119, 143

Mondragon cooperatives 152, 155, 159, 167n. 15, 168n. 20, 193

Morris, William 144–5, 146

nature see domination and humanity-nature relationship

negation see Hegel and Marcuse

Negative Dialectics (Adorno) 40, 42, 44

neoliberalism see capitalism, state

Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 43, 60

non-identity see Adorno

Occupy movement 183–4, 185–6, 187

see also social movements

‘On the Jewish Question’ (Marx) 28n. 12

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas) 71

philosophy of consciousness 83, 96–7, 99, 158

pleasure principle 64–5

political emancipation 16, 20

positivism 41, 49

post-Fordism 148–9, 170–3, 175, 178–9, 181, 190

Poulantzas, Nicos 87, 90, 91

practical reason 4, 42, 108

private property 24, 25, 55, 161, 162, 176

privatization 175, 176, 179, 181, 189

production

forces of 3, 4, 18, 72, 73, 74, 84, 86, 87, 94n. 11, 126, 127, 128, 140n. 2

human 22–4, 102, 166n. 4

relations of 75–6, 78, 81, 84–91, 94n. 11, 127

productivity 65, 74, 77, 87, 88, 89, 93n. 4, 101, 118, 120, 127, 128, 130, 138, 144, 147, 151, 155, 160, 165, 171, 176

proletariat 56

Proudhon, Joseph 135, 188

public opinion 76, 77, 79, 80, 152, 153, 154–7, 165, 166, 187

public sphere see Habermas

rationality

aesthetic 44–50, 64–7, 118–22, 150–3

communicative 72, 74, 76, 79–83, 99, 104, 110, 113, 117–19

instrumental 3, 4, 5, 6, 42–4, 47, 49, 53, 59, 61, 71–8, 81–4, 88–9, 95–103, 120–1, 128, 145, 157, 169, 178

market 46, 49

see also Adorno and Habermas

Reagan, Ronald 174, 175

reality principle 64–5

reification 34, 36, 54, 59

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 134–5, 140n. 6

Sarkozy, Nicolas 8, 194n. 2

self-consciousness 12, 13, 15, 56, 57, 60

self-preservation 3, 30, 34, 41, 43, 50n. 2, 53, 67, 86, 100, 101, 119, 120, 129, 136, 149, 158, 160, 162, 171, 177, 181, 182, 188

self-realization see labour

Schiller, Friedrich 34, 43, 44, 65, 98

Schönberg, Arnold 41

Sennett, Richard 171

social movements 170, 174, 182–8

countercultural 95, 170, 174, 182, 184

socialism

libertarian 135, 162, 185–94

state 130, 147

solidarity 107, 113, 134, 140n. 6, 163, 182, 183, 184, 194

state

bureaucratic 34, 36, 78, 173

modern 12, 14, 16, 17, 25, 26, 151, 156

neoliberal 172, 173–7, 183

welfare 173, 175

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas) 4, 27n. 2, 71, 79, 81, 126, 140

subject-object relations

and Adorno 33–49, 99–101

and communication 6, 113–21, 157–8, 163

and emancipation 17–22, 44–9, 58–64, 96–7, 113–21, 144, 151, 156, 157–8

and Habermas 89, 99–103, 108–10, 113–21, 126

and idealism 10–14, 31–3, 37–44, 54–5

and Marcuse 54–6, 67

and Marx 14–16, 17–18, 21–2, 46–9, 85, 88, 89, 96

and mimesis 44, 45, 99, 144, 150, 151, 157, 158

system see Habermas

systemic imperatives 74–5, 77, 81, 86, 87, 126, 127

technology 4, 5, 18, 65, 67, 86, 88, 126, 127, 144, 150, 184

Thatcher, Margaret 174, 175

Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas) 75, 79, 81, 83, 92n. 1, 93n. 7, 167n. 16

Tönnies, Ferdinand 140n. 7

unskilled labour 172, 189

Wagner, Peter 69n. 6, 143

Warren, Mark 132, 155

Weber, Max 3, 43, 72, 92n. 1, 173, 181

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First published 2014

© Charles Masquelier, 2014

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