65156715 Schecter the Critique of Instrumental Reason From Weber to Habermas

The Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas

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The Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas

Darrow Schecter

2010

e Continuum International Publishing Group Inc80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

e Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd e Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

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Copyright ' Darrow Schecter, 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

ISBN: 978-0-8264-8771-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataSchecter, Darrow. e critique of instrumental reason from Weber to Habermas / by Darrow Schecter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-8771-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8264-8771-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Political sciencePhilosophy. 2. Instrumentalism (Philosophy) 3. Reason. 4. Weber, Max, 18641920. 5. Habermas, J?rgen. I. Title.

JA71.S2793 2010 320.01dc22 2009033600

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, IndiaPrinted in the United States of America

For Chris Malcolm

Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1 From Reason to Rationalization: e Emergence of the Weberian Paradigm 6

2 e Revolutionary Critique of Instrumental Reason: Lukcs and Benjamin 43

3 Horkheimer, Adorno and Critical eory 78

4 e Ontological and Republican Critiques: Heidegger and Arendt 114

5 Reason, inking and the Critique of Everyday Life 150

6 From Rationalization to Communicative Action: e Emergence of the Habermasian Paradigm 186

Conclusion: On Post-Liberal Autonomy and Post-Capitalist Legitimacy 223

Bibliography 235Index 247

ix

Acknowledgements

e critique of instrumental reason has a long and complicated history that I would not have been able to investigate without the help of students, colleagues and friends. Many of the students are or have been under-graduates and postgraduates at the University of Sussex, such as Tom Akehurst, Arianna Bove, Alasdair Davies, Matt Dawson, Francis Graham-Dixon, Claire Edwards, Verena Erlenbusch, Erik Empson, Matt Freeman, James Furner, Alasdair Kemp, Peter Kolarz, Angelos Koutsourakis, Charles Masquelier, David Mieres, Teodor Mladenov, Dave Murphy, Simon Mussell, Chris OKane, eo Papaioannou, Jorge Ollero Peran, Faure Perez, Miguel Rivera Quinones and many others. Id especially like to thank the students in my Modernism seminar in the spring of 2009. Chris Malcolm and Michael Tisdells irreverent intelligence have been a great in uence and a source of inspiration.

Some Sussex colleagues such as Paul Betts, Roberta Piazza, Cline Surprenant, Christian Wiese, Beryl Williams and especially Gerhard Wolf have been very supportive of the project in a direct or indirect way. Others include the faculty teaching on the Sussex MA in Social and Political ought, and especially Andrew Chitty, Gordon Finlayson, Kathryn Macvarish, Luke Martell and Daniel Steuer. Id also like to thank a number of colleagues at other universities for their advice, including Sam Ashenden, David M. Berry, Miquel Caminal, Heiko Feldner, Joe Femia, Peter Ives, Eric Jacobson, Russell Keat, Jeremy Lester, Raul Digon Martin, Mark McNally, Joan Anton Mellon, Drew Milne, Giles Moss, William Outhwaite, Jaroslav Skupnk, Sam omas, Alex omson, and especially Fabio Vighi and Chris Wyatt. Chris ornhills work and friendship continue to be one of my central reference points.

e help of friends has also been indispensable. A number of the ideas in this book have been developed in conversation with Fernand Avila, Julia Behrens, Declan Carey, Joan Contreras Castro, Costantino Ciervo, Jean Demerliac, Yolanda Diez, Irene Estrada Hernandez, Lasy Lawless,

Manuela Lintl, Volker Lorek, Franco and Giuliana Mistretta, Matthew Minns, Stewart Mitchell, Giorgio Moro, Mand Ryara, Jarret Schecter and Imke Schmincke. anks Francis and Diana there is a lot more to come.

Many thanks go to Marie-Claire Antoine, who makes working with Continuum a pleasure.

x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1

Introduction

is book analyses the critique of instrumental reason developed in the writings of a number of key political and social theorists from Max Weber to Jrgen Habermas. In a parallel vein which is less straightforwardly exegetical and more exploratory, the book also examines the various possible ways of institutionalizing instrumental reason as regulatory law in modern liberal democratic states, on the one hand, and distinct models of post-traditional legitimacy, on the other. It thus interrogates the epistemo-logical and political assumptions underlying what one may very broadly designate as the liberal democratic understanding of the relation between instrumental reason, formal law and negative liberty.1 At the same time, the study raises questions about the theoretical plausibility of an anticipated reconciliation between non-instrumental reason and post-state-juridical legitimacy. e particular use made of concepts such as instrumental reason, non-instrumental reason, post-traditional, post-state-juridical, life-world, and so on will be made clear in due course. By way of introduction it might simply be noted that the dialectic of legality (ostensibly universal reason) and legitimacy (particular needs and values) has been articulated within a markedly national context from the time of the American and French Revolutions to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. One is perhaps well advised to follow Habermas in thinking that the nation-based institu-tional pro le of this dialectic is likely to alter quite substantially as a result of the ongoing processes captured by the terms post-Fordism and globali-zation. e point is that practices of legality and legitimacy will almost certainly change with the continued evolution of what Habermas refers to as the post-national constellation.2 Bearing this in mind, the book tries to stimulate debate about what legitimacy might mean in theory and in practice in the near future. ose debates will almost certainly be informed

2 INSTRUMENTAL REASON FROM WEBER TO HABERMAS

by di erent conceptions of reason. In the course of subsequent chapters it will become clear that one can think of reason in a number of ways. Instru-mental, communicative, political and aesthetic-mimetic forms of reason are the main ones considered here.

e critique of instrumental reason is o en associated with Weber, Lukcs and the critical theory of the rst generation of the Frankfurt School. Many readers are likely to link the critique with philosophical, aesthetic and sociological theory rather than with notions of political authority or the dialectic of legality and legitimacy. Yet ever since Platos Republic (c.390 BC), the possibility of rational political authority based on knowledge rather than power or aggregation of interests has exercised the imagination of philosophers, legal theorists and activists. It seems clear that in the absence of divine authority, rational law and non-rational force are likely to be coterminous. One therefore quickly sees the extent to which the idea of rational authority is utopian. What becomes, then, of the Enlightenment and modernist projects of founding a rational alternative to government based primarily on arbitrary command, tradition and the functional requirements for order? If in a modern context legality is usually associated with reason and individual liberty, legitimacy is more o en aligned with issues related to authority, values and collective needs. In the rst instance one is normally referring to the institutionalization of private property, rights of assembly, and freedom of expression in the media and public sphere. In the second instance the emphasis is more likely to be placed on the various problems connected with guaranteeing national security as well as considerations about how to balance economic growth with acceptable levels of welfare provision. e chapters to follow suggest that in contrast to this dichotomized understanding, legality and legitimacy each have individual as well as collective dimensions. It is therefore mis-leading to separate them categorically into individual, normative-rational legality with an epistemological valence, and collective, non-normative functionalist legitimacy which is primarily concerned with territorial security, national unity and welfare entitlements. is may be likened to an instance of rei ed juridical categorizing rather than juridical thought. While the distinction between rei ed categorization and thought will attain clarity in the text, for the moment it will su ce to say that the separation in question presupposes that the egoistic individual is rational and reliable, whereas the nation is a potentially volatile collective subject whose needs can be arbitrarily de ned by what the political leadership of a given coun-try happens to perceive as imminent internal and external threats.

e term rei cation points to a parallel of some consequence for the argument developed in this book. roughout the book it is explained why

Introduction 3

the rigid separation of subject and object can be analysed as an epistemo-logical shortcoming concerned with unsatisfactory mediations between knower and known.3 To the extent that categories like subject or object become xed, and mediations can be shown to be demonstrably awed, one can say that the knowledge-yielding mediation processes in question are not su ciently rational. Formulated slightly di erently with direct reference to the current study, the processes can be critiqued as instrumen-tally rational. e result of largely failed mediation on the basis of primarily instrumental reason is rather inadequate forms of knowledge. e parallel just alluded to is that the rigid separation of legality and legitimacy can be analysed as a juridical problem which is also concerned with less than satisfactory mediations. In this parallel instance it is the mediation between individual freedom and collective authority. e results of such failures are many-sided and di cult to summarize in a few introductory sentences they will be explored in detail in what follows. By way of prelude one can say that the failure adequately to mediate freedom and authority is o en oppressive legality, fairly one-dimensional freedom, and demagogic pop-ulism. Instrumental reason in the mediation of knower and known thus nds its juridical and political equivalent in the practice of instrumental legitimacy in the mediation of individual and state. Before this study can begin it must be stated how the critique of instrumental reason is related to the critique of instrumental legitimacy, and it must also be made clearer what is meant by instrumental legitimacy in this context.

It is o en argued with varying degrees of rigour and plausibility that the critique of instrumental reason in the writings of Weber, Georg Lukcs, T. W. A. Adorno and some of the other thinkers considered here has lost the political relevance it may have once had. is is because the critique is allegedly too general, too eschatological or simply more concerned with aesthetic reason than the political realities of power and contingency. It will be seen in the nal chapter that Habermas advances the most sophis-ticated line of argument in support of this conclusion. In addition to its exegetical aims, the book attempts to rescue the critique of instrumental reason from the charge of political obscurity levelled by Habermas and many others. It proposes to do this by re-articulating the critique of instru-mental reason as a critique of instrumental legitimacy. e latter can be understood as a mode of legitimacy which is not rationally legitimate in the epistemological sense related to mediation processes. It is on the con-trary functionally legitimate because it provides more or less stable frameworks for what are implicitly or explicitly taken to be inviolable liber-ties enshrined in modern civil/private law. ese are liberties connected in the main with private property and negative liberty more generally.


Habermas theory of communicative action is of fundamental impor-tance in this regard, and thus occupies a central position in the overall argument. He intuits that if there is no non-instrumentally rational dimen-sion to legitimacy, then one is likely to have legality without any real legitimacy as such. In his estimation communicative action in the life-world provides the non-instrumentally rational dimension of legitimacy that modern states require in order to institutionalize democracy without relying on more traditional, pre-rational modes of order. is amounts to the claim that since the revolutions associated with the Enlightenment, reason has become institutionalized in ways that are not merely instru-mental. Although these processes occur at di erent rates and to di erent degrees depending on the state in question, one caveat applies to all states: the non-instrumentally rational dimension cannot possibly become the basis of legitimate law. In the rst case (legality bere of non-instrumen-tally rational legitimacy, that is, purely functional legitimacy), one would be confronted with a potentially destabilizing normative de cit. In the second case (legitimacy as an end in itself, emancipated from instrumental means), one would be at loggerheads with supposedly inevitable sociological realities. Habermas suggests that while the normative de cit is particularly salient in the variant of systems theory defended by Niklas Luhmann, the sociological de cit is irreparable in the reformulated idealism of T. W. A. Adorno and other rst generation Frankfurt School philosophers. Yet how-ever much the theory of communicative action seeks to situate itself beyond the impasses of systems theory and Adornos version of critical theory, there is theoretical and empirical evidence to suggest that Habermas o ers ambiguous responses to some of the epistemological and political prob-lems raised by the theories of self-referential systems and negative dialectics. It is hoped that an exploration of some of those ambiguities will o er ways of recon guring the relation between reason, legality, legitimacy and free-dom understood and enacted as the greatest possible transcendence of individual and collective necessity. ese preliminary re ections introduce the claim that an adequate theory of politics and society cannot dispense with this recon guration. Readers are invited to judge whether or not the claim is substantiated by the chapters that follow.

Endnotes

1. For a discussion of the di erences between negative and positive liberty and their respective political implications, see Sir Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (1958), reprinted in Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (eds), Isaiah Berlin; e Proper Study of

Introduction 5

Mankind, London, Pimlico, 1998, pp. 191242. e essay is Berlins inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political eory at Oxford University, delivered on 31 October 1958, and originally published by Clarendon Press in the same year.

2. Habermas, Die postnationale Konstellation: Politische Essays ( e Post-National Constellation), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1999.

3. e frameworks establishing the respective roles of knower and known are of course of central importance in any debate on epistemology. ey are di erent, in other words, depending on whether humanity as subject knows nature as object, as in the natural sciences, or if it is some humanity that understands other humanity, as in the human/herme-neutic sciences and elds of inquiry. ese issues will be taken up at all relevant junctures.

6

1From Reason to Rationalization:

The Emergence of the Weberian Paradigm

e emergence of the Weberian paradigm can be studied in the shi from theoretical accounts of reason, natural law and autonomy in Enlighten-ment philosophers like Rousseau and Kant, to diagnoses of industrial rationalization and explanations of social strati cation, power and contin-gency in sociologists like Marx, Durkheim, Simmel and Weber. is marks an important evolution, since ideas and practices of reason are at least in theory subversive of the arbitrary power relations characteristic of pre-modern feudal and ecclesiastical hierarchies, and, it was thought by many looking to the future from the perspective of 1789, also potentially subversive of many other hierarchies existing in early modern society as well. is had been at any rate an implicit claim of the Enlightenment philosophes in France and their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. at is to say that however short-lived and speculative, reason enjoyed a utopian moment during the period where the legitimacy of regal government came under attack by scientists, philosophers, the progressive sections of the nobility, journalists and essayists, merchants, and other participants in the edgling public spheres of Europe and North America. It seemed to many that the people were in the process of emerging as the protagonist of a new political order in which they seemed to be becoming active and free citizens engaged in public debate instead of being merely obedient and passive subjects. is is the period culminating in the American and French Revolutions and the birth of the modern nation-state, also referred to at times as the age of bourgeois revolutions.1

In contrast with the Enlightenment vision of potential symmetry between reason, individual liberty and collective democratic autonomy

The Emergence of the Weberian Paradigm 7

(sovereignty), ideas and practices of rationalization o er a much more sober series of re ections on the possibilities of human freedom under conditions of systemic di erentiation between economic, political, admin-istrative, scienti c, religious, artistic, and the like, spheres, on the one hand, and entrenched social strati cation and elusive power, on the other. It is therefore possible to see two distinct moments within political modernity. e rst is centred on the ascension of the ideal of reason and the possibi-lity of active citizen participation in public life as an alternative to passive submission to authoritarian and unaccountable authority. It is a moment in which philosophy seems to provide clear theoretical orientations for ascer-taining the conditions of theoretical knowledge, and in which politics and the state indicate clear guidelines for practice. In very broad terms it is possible to say that as far as thinking and institutions are concerned, philosophy and the state appear to take over from religion and the church to a signi cant extent. While the state seems to emerge as the centre and fulcrum of politics in the rst moment, its integrity is challenged by the rise of society and phenomena connected with industrialization and urbaniza-tion in the second. at is to say that the second moment of political modernity is marked by the rise of functional di erentiation and steadily increasing social complexity, accompanied in theoretical terms by the increasing implausibility of an all-encompassing, rational overview of state and society that is required to make more than a highly fragmented knowledge of reality possible. e corollary is what Durkheim refers to as anomie and the widely perceived feeling across classes and other social divisions that the meaning of political and social action had become more di cult to ascertain in industrial society than it had been in the past, when religion and determinate codes of honour provided a stable framework for most people. e second moment can be seen as coterminous with the rationalization of reason and the increasing doubtfulness of philosophys ability to mediate between theory and practice (anticipating the rise of phenomenology and existentialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centu-ries). It can also be seen as the premonitory symptoms of the crisis of legal anthropology positing humanity as rational and self-legislating that is registered in the writings of thinkers as di erent as Benjamin, Heidegger and Schmitt. To this extent the second moment is still an actual moment related to contemporary phenomena such as the gradual undermining of the integrity of the national space of liberal and republican politics by global socio-economic forces. It will be seen in this chapter that the transi-tion from philosophical approaches to reason and autonomy to sociological approaches to di erentiation and strati cation is indicative of a political


transition from modern forms of republican humanism which are con -dent about the rational mediation of theory and practice, towards a sceptical and at times even apocalyptic vision of the impossibility of autonomy, except perhaps in commercial terms, with the corollary that only minimal levels of political accountability are possible.2

In this light the belief that the people of modern nation-states might become the protagonists of their own history seems to recede before a more pessimistic assessment that roughly runs as follows: in the course of the evolution of modern societies, subjects become citizens, it is true, but only as long as the number of citizens participating in public life is restricted to professionals and enlightened nobility, that is, as long as the number can be restricted to the protagonists of the heroic period of the bourgeois public sphere alluded to above. According to the theory of rationalization rst systematically expounded by Weber and analysed in this chapter, how-ever, this is necessarily a very brief period. With the gradual enfranchising of all European male humanity in the period 18481918, and therea er of female humanity at di erent rates depending on the country in question, the movement from subjects to citizens takes an unexpected turn. As an heir of the Enlightenment and a rm believer in the emancipatory power of reason, the young Marx predicts a trajectory from oppressed feudal sub-jects to politically emancipated citizens, and from there, in the wake of 1789, to humanly emancipated species-beings who realize their best quali-ties in creative, self-a rming labour liberated from capital and the wage system. In theoretical terms the turn comes as Weber remarks that what one witnesses is indeed a transition from subjects to citizens, but that this transition is then followed by the emergence of volatile and manipulated masses susceptible to various forms of authoritarian populism of the right and le . Webers argument is all the more remarkable if one bears in mind that it is developed before Mussolinis March on Rome in 1922 and Hitlers ascension to power in 1933.3 In charting this theoretical and historical evo-lution from Kant to Weber it will be helpful to say a few words in this rst chapter about the contribution to social and political theory made by three of the key gures separating them in chronological terms, that is, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. But before doing this it is already possible to identify some of the central questions which will structure the argument developed in e Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas. How might it be argued that the possibility of genuinely democratic legitimacy depends on there being non-instrumentally rational forms of legitimacy, and what is meant by non-instrumental in relation to reason and legiti-macy? Are there any plausible alternatives to a legal form of legitimacy,


given that extra-legal forms of legitimacy tend to be authoritarian, popu-list, theological, or, as in the case of anarchism, small-scale and eeting? Can one envisage forms of legitimacy based to a large extent on knowledge (and not, in the rst instance, power or some conception of uni ed sover-eignty), or has this possibility been de nitively subverted in ways that are illustrated by systems theory and bio-politics? Is the prevalence of instrumental over other forms of rationality in modern industrial societies indicative of the epistemological and political failure, at least to date, to nd ways beyond dogmatism and relativism? If so, could there be a path beyond dogmatism/relativism, to be sought in theory and practice which is individual and plural at the same time, rather than one-sidedly atomistic, as in the premises and practice of liberal democracy, or one-sidedly collec-tivist, as in the case of state socialism?4

Impasses in the Kantian System and the Responses of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche

In a number of ways it is possible to regard Kant as a philosophical anthropologist interested in the essential properties of humanity that enable it to legislate a particular form of political liberty which is qualita-tively di erent from the mechanical freedom governing the motion of falling bodies, and di erent too from the predatory freedom prevailing among animals. His view that political freedom is rational and human rather than mechanical, predatory and pre-rational is already suggested in his philosophical writings on epistemology, in which he attempts to solve some of the impasses reached in the debates between rationalists (dog-matic in theory, and therefore likely to be authoritarian in practice) and empiricists (relativist in theory, and thus implying passivity in practice).5 Kants Critique of Pure Reason (2 volumes, published in 1781), combined with the Critique of Practical Reason (1787) and the Critique of Judgement (1790) represent a turning point in epistemological inquiry and a water-shed in social and political thought. In his intervention in the debates between rationalists such as Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and empiricists such as Berkeley, Locke, Hume, Kant is determined to nd a way out of the epistemological impasse created by a one-sided approach to the question of knowledge focused either on the foundation of knowledge internal to the mind, as in the case of rationalism, or on the object of knowledge exter-nal to the mind, as in empiricism. e insoluble problems reached by these diametrically opposed approaches lead Kant to say that the question as to whether knowledge is to be sought in the human mind or in external nature is falsely posed, as is the question as to whether humanity has knowledge


or merely unfounded opinions. For Kant the real question is, under what conditions is knowledge possible? In his epistemological and political enquiries this methodological compromise can be regarded as a conces-sion to the argument that unconditional knowledge is metaphy sical knowledge of essences, and hence inaccessible to human reason, and that unconditional freedom is therefore unfortunately a fantasy. Kant submits that the problem is that there is no such thing as pure, unmediated reason that is accessible to humanity, and, in a related vein, there is no immediate relation between theory and practice that is not simply arbitrary and there-fore voluntarist/irrational. While all human knowledge is mediated by conceptual form, all human freedom is mediated by the political form set by law, and, by extension, the state. e implication is that the ends of rational action are mediated by what in principle should be neutral means, so that the means respect universal individual autonomy rather than pre-scribing a dogmatic version of what is good for all. But if the means are neutral, which suggests that they are not necessarily rational, what guaran-tee is there that the ends will be rational? is is one of the central epistemological, legal and political problems of idealism bequeathed to historical sociology in Germany and well beyond. In anticipation of some of the issues to be raised during the course of this book, it might be remarked at this early stage that many epistemological post- metaphysicians from Kant to the present join political liberals in arguing that in the face of the limits to reason and freedom just cited, reason must con ne itself to legislation that de nes and when necessary rede nes the socio-economic and political terms of mutual non-interference. e implication is that only negative liberty is su ciently rational liberty. is seems to follow from the idea that if the citizens of a secular state can only de nitely agree on what they do not want, then rational law has necessarily to be formal law that can only forbid. If law tries to prescribe in a positive vein it thus lapses into epistemological and political dogmatism. Before proceeding, it is worth noting that it would be erroneous to construe the relations obtaining between ostensibly neutral means, formal freedom, instrumental reason and modern liberal juridical subjectivity as accidental. Subsequent chapters will explain that taken together, they form a constellation of interests, forces and values with a number of implications for the critique of instrumental legitimacy.6

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant stipulates that the condition of possible knowledge is the existence of a transcendental subject that is more receptive to experience than an isolated rationalist foundation, and less arbitrary than an empiricist collector of random sense impressions.


Against both schools he quips that concepts without intuitions are empty (rationalism), and that intuitions without concepts are blind (empiricism). ere will be much more to say about the relation between the emergence of modern subjectivity and the rise of instrumental reason in the course of this chapter and the chapters to follow. For the moment it will su ce to say that when the Kantian epistemological subject re exively uni es itself with reason, it cannot grasp the objects in themselves independently of the mediation of conceptual form. But it is nonetheless entitled to formal knowledge of the objects which present themselves to the understanding of the subject in time and space, where the understanding is structured by the 12 categories, that is, plurality, possibility, unity, causality, necessity, sub-stance, reality, negation, limitation, totality, reciprocity and inherence.7 at is to say that if the rationalist epistemological foundation of knowledge is hermetically detached from experience, and the empiricist individual is lost in the midst of it without any really stable orientation, the Kantian subject enjoys a kind a synthetic and porous relation with experience, which stops or is blocked o by the limits of reason and the limits of conceptual knowledge. For Kant experience is the basis of knowledge, but there must also be an a priori dimension to knowledge that makes more than random experience possible. While the rationalists posit a dualistic separation of humanity and nature based on what they take to be the primacy of the human mind in all epistemological questions, and the empiricists posit the unity of humanity and nature based on the identity of mind and matter, Kant insists that humanity is both separate from nature and part of nature at the same time. is means that for Kant, and for Hegel and Marx to follow, the relation between humanity and nature is mediated rather than dualistic or identitarian, since humanity and nature exist in a eld of dialectical tension in which they are neither separated nor fused. Hegel and Marx retain the idea that the relation between humanity and nature is dialectical, while suggesting in di erent ways that Kant errs in assigning permanent and ahistorical validity to the two forms of sensible intuition (time and space) and the 12 categories of the understanding.8

It is Hegels implicit claim in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and other works that Kants philosophy is not dialectical enough precisely because it is not historical enough. Kant pushes epistemological inquiry and political theory beyond the stagnant impasses reached by rationalists and empiricists, which he does by reintroducing a modest kind of dialectics into philosophy which had largely disappeared since the gradual decline of Greek philosophy a er the passing of the ancient world. But from Hegels perspective (and for thinkers like Lukcs and Benjamin considered in Chapter 2) it is not enough to


regard the relation between humanity and nature as mediated. e relation is dialectical in a speci cally historical sense which Hegel attempts to explain as follows: while Kant successfully demonstrates that all objectivity is mediated by human subjectivity, the more pertinent point that Kant ignores is that human-ity is always a transformed humanity whose subjectivity is mediated by historical and social objectivity, that is, by institutions like the family, civil society, the state, and so on. ese institutions are concepts which become real as practice; they accompany Geist (mind, spirit) as its self-discovery unfolds in stages which are the stages of world history. In other words, these concepts assume objective form as living institutions at precise junctures in the historical process. ese institutions are the phenomenological forms in which Geist realizes its substantial freedom. Crucial for Hegel in this regard is that it is not su ciently philosophical to contrast free and unfree or true or false in some absolute sense. is is because freedom is not a thing but rather a relation. Freedom is achieved in a struggle in which unfreedom is overcome, which for Hegel means that freedom bears unfreedom within it as a moment of free-doms own development. e same can be said of true/false, is/ought, subject/object and, of more direct importance for this study, rationality/irrationality.9

For Hegel it is mistaken to juxtapose the phenomenal world of formally knowable objects with the noumenal world of things in themselves. It is imprecise because the knowledge process is characterized by the media-tion of di erence rather than the demarcation of absolute limits such as those supposedly separating mind (internal) and nature (external). Every idea and institution that is real (or actual to use Hegels term) has become historically real by absorbing what is historically real in the ideas and insti-tutions it has come to replace. What exists on this basis must itself be absorbed and replaced by truer ideas and freer institutions which them-selves eventually become subject to philosophical critique and historical change, which for Hegel is why knowledge and history are intertwined processes which unfold in stages. Since humanity is not a perfect vehicle for this realization, spirit has to push humanity to create, negate and recre-ate new institutional forms which are more adequate to this task. Interesting in this regard is the notion that spirit is not a human faculty or possession, but rather something that articulates itself through humanity. On this account spirit is somewhat akin to the reconciliation of all apparent anti-theses during the course of a journey. Although superior to humanity, Hegelian spirit needs human history as the form for the gradual resolution of the con icts characterizing an antithetical, contradictory reality which is spirits estrangement from itself. In this context existing socio-historical form is always imperfect, but it is constantly being raised to the level of


perfection despite its own limitations at any particular juncture. What Hegel refers to as the cunning of reason is spirits liberty to make history seem opaque to its participants at times, when in fact spirit is simply adjusting its movements to the reluctance or inability of humanity to move with it. Humanity eventually comes round, however, even if this entails su ering, con ict and war. Hence within the Hegelian system as a whole, psychology and anthropology provide the bases of subjective spirit, while art, philosophy and religion are the elds of inquiry for the study of abso-lute spirit. e theory of socio-historical objective form or objective spirit is outlined in the Philosophy of Right as a theory of Sittlichkeit, that is, of ethical life.

e point about the objectivity of form, in contrast with the metaphysics of essence, is related to the point made above about the emergence of mod-ern subjectivity and instrumental reason signalled by Kants critical philosophy. Albeit in very di erent ways, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche set out to undermine the Kantian dichotomy between what is (sein) and what ought to be (sollen). is is achieved by relativizing truth in history (Hegel, Marx) or by relativizing truth in the Dionysian chaos of life and the metaphorical ambiguity of language (Nietzsche). e idea that one might relativize truth in history leaves a number of thinkers considered in this study with a recurring sense of doubt, especially when the historical process seems to go so far o course (atomic and chemical warfare, geno-cide, etc.) that the notion of the cunning of reason fails to provide adequate grounds to establish the rationality of the real. Hence it might be argued that the historicism of Hegel and Marx as well as Nietzsches genealogy are bold but ultimately unsatisfactory responses to the problems of Kantian epistemology and legal anthropology. is raises the question of subjecti-vity anew.

For historicists and genealogists the distinction between what is and what ought to be is made redundant by the immanent rationality of the actual/real; the abolition of what remains of a priori metaphysics in Kants anthropological account of the modalities of human reason is achieved by a subject that unites theory and practice to such an extent that existing institutions embody reason, however imperfectly in its initial phases of development. Kant sets the stage for Hegels veritable apotheosis of the subject, which in Hegels philosophy of history and spirit is also presented as the apotheosis of reason.10 Hegel suggests that form, both conceptual and socio-historical, mediates between individual human subjects and existing historical objectivity in ways that are not external or neutral with regard to consciousness, but are in fact helping modern individuals gain


insight into the structure of individual and collective freedom. In other words, Kant has to introduce dialectics to resolve the impasses of the rationalist-empiricists debates. Hegel in his turn has to introduce histori-cized dialectics to resolve the impasses in the Kantian system. Hegel is thus determined to show how it is possible to move from formal knowledge, negative freedom based on the greatest possible non-infringement, and the temporal and cognitive priority of theory over practice, on the one hand, to substantive knowledge, positive freedom based in the state, and the dialec-tical unity of theory and practice, on the other. It is not that form and experience are neutral tools or pre-rational means which provide access to objective content and rational ends. For Hegel thought and experience are themselves rational, though they are rational in qualitatively di erent ways, depending on the historical epoch in question. e example of the relation between legality and legitimacy implicitly o ered in the Philosophy of Right provides a good example.11

For Hegel dichotomies such as form-content, subject-object and consciousness-nature are only thinkable in terms of a higher other that enables the individual terms in question to be thought of as distinct but complexly articulated moments of a totality that is slowly becoming aware of its mediated unity with everything and everyone. is totality is a sub-ject which is in the process of realizing, as it comes to know itself in a series of stages, that there is nothing external to it.12 In simple abstract terms, A and non-A are in some real sense uni ed at a level of spirit that is the condition of the distinction itself. e dichotomy between subject (thesis) and object (antithesis) is resolved in a higher synthesis, which in turn becomes a new thesis opposed by a new antithesis, and the process carries on in a movement which is driven by contradiction, con ict and continual but ultimately rational change. If one looks at the relation between legality and legitimacy as one of form and content, he suggests, it is clear that legal-ity is the form of a legitimate state in the extended sense, that is, it is the form of the institutions which make a speci c institution like the govern-ment in a more restricted sense possible. But the law will always be opposed as an impediment to real legitimacy unless the citizens of the state realize that law is itself a legitimate means, that there is no legitimacy or legitimate ends without law.13 at is to say that the now famous remark in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right that what is actual (sometimes translated as real) is rational and what is rational is actual nds its counterpart in the suggestion that the legal (form, procedure) is legitimate and the legitimate (content, freedom) is legal. ere is no, nor can there be (contrary to what Kant implies) a contradiction between what is and what ought to be.


is is a merely apparent con ict between form and content that Geist makes rational use of in order to translate its theoretical, potentially sub-stantial freedom into actual, historical freedom. In the course of human history Geist overcomes the dichotomy between is and ought in the proc-ess of realizing its essence by adopting, rejecting and subsequently adopting new forms of freedom realized in continually evolving institutions until the theoretical form of freedom is no longer at odds with its practical con-tent.14 is means that the point concerning legality and legitimacy can also be made in relation to democracy and freedom. It could be argued that democracy is the objective, institutional form that freedom assumes under the conditions of modernity. But this is imprecise, since democracy is more than mere form or only a means it is the practice of freedom itself and as such an end. Hence Hegel has no di culty arguing in the Philosophy of Right that there is no need to fetishize universal su rage, as most democrats do, since it is really in their practical existence as members of agricultural, business and civil service Stnde (estates) that individuals have concrete, active subjectivity and freedom. Citizens achieve meaning-ful representation as members of these corporate bodies engaged in collective consultation with law-makers. Atomized, self-seeking individu-als who regard their relation with the state as antagonistic and contractual are not free in any meaningful sense for Hegel. ere is indeed scope for contractual and strategic action in civil society, but civil society and its contractual modalities cannot be the basis of the state. A contract does not o er a substantively rational basis for political authority, since what one contracts into today one can contract out of tomorrow. Hence pre-state level corporations such as guilds are important supraindividual instances of collec-tive decision-making, but they degenerate into bureaucratic castes if they attempt to usurp state authority. Moreover, a valid contract presupposes a state that makes contract valid in the rst place. is implies that the social contract thinkers are wrong to suppose that contract could ever serve as the basis of the state. Contract is an essential component of the institutionalization of modern freedom, since modern individuals are only instrumentally rational in the means they employ to pursue their daily ends. But instrumental reason can only exist in a subordinate relation to substantive reason in a genuinely rational state. Hence for Hegel the modern state is the practice of a rational ideal, it is an ideal become real, or, as he puts it in paragraph 257, the state is the actuality of the ethical idea, and, as he says in paragraph 260, e state is the actuality of concrete freedom.15

e distant origins of the contemporary crisis of the nation-state in the era of globalization, including the forms of reason and institutional


practices investing it with legitimacy, can be found in Marx and Nietzsches very di erent critiques of Hegels concept of objective form and substantive reason. It is in fact the ideas of Marx and Nietzsche that prompt Weber to argue that rather than being the actuality of the ethical ideal, the state is really the monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a given territory. At rst glance, Hegel seems to overcome the dichotomies and impasses in Kants critical philosophy. But he is only able to do this to the extent that reason becomes immanent in the institutions of the modern state and in the course of world history, that is, by bringing idealism to a point of no return. A er the Philosophy of Right, idealism looks like a metaphysical apology for the existing order. is would seem to confront people with the choice of either passively waiting and watching history unfold, or interven-ing to accelerate the process of making history fully rational through decisive action. To Hegels critics, this does not look like a convincing move beyond relativism and dogmatism. In their eyes Hegel opposes the limits on knowledge and freedom implied in Kants formalism by relativizing truth in history and by implicitly celebrating the actual as the already rational. So while he rejects a voluntarist interpretation of his ideas, Hegel nonetheless provokes a voluntarist reaction to them. is is clear in the writings of those who, like the young Marx, declare that philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, while the point is to change it, and in the polemics of those who, like Nietzsche, defend the life-a rming will to power as an alternative to the futile search for the Kantian thing in itself and Hegels historical justi cation of waiting for the thing to nally reveal itself, in all probability that is, when the owl of Minerva eventually spreads its wings.16

In comparison with Kant and Hegel, Marx says very little about reason or the di erent possible forms of reason (pure, practical, aesthetic, etc.). He follows Hegel in one decisive respect, which is to regard history as a rational process in which humanity becomes increasingly conscious of its objective capacities vis--vis nature. is will prompt Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) to suggest that Marx contributes to the problem of instrumental reason in that like Kant, Marx regards human autonomy to be dependent on its ability either to detach itself from natural spontaneity and unpredictability, or to exploit nature for the satisfaction of human needs. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, when humanity forgets that it is part of nature, it is condemned to experience the revenge of nature on society: institutions become oppressive, bureaucratic and irrational. ese issues, including the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer as well as Habermas subsequent rupture with it, will be addressed in Chapters 3


and 6 of this book. At this stage in the discussion of the emergence of the Weberian diagnosis of instrumental reason it will su ce to note that reason has a somewhat ambiguous status in Marx. is is in large part explainable in terms of the evident reality that a er Hegel there was little to do except marvel at the rationality of the real, or translate immanent reason into revolutionary practice with no further hesitation.17

In Marx there are two related senses in which reason is implied. ese usages break with the Kantian notion of reason as the basis of individual autonomy and law. ough they also signal a shi away from Hegels the-ory of Geist and the corresponding idea that the state is the actuality of the ethical idea, they nonetheless bear the marks of their Hegelian origins. First, Marx accepts Hegels notion that history unfolds rationally in stages marked by contradictions, con icts, resolution of con ict and new contra-dictions. Second, he retains and modi es the notion that there is always a discrepancy between human freedom and the forms of human society in which freedom is institutionalized. e discrepancy between freedom and objective form is not the irreducible di erence between some formal, abstract formulation of an ahistorical standard of reason which inevitably nds every historical present to be insu ciently rational. In this case the claims of reason would amount to moralistic condemnations of the real and would demarcate an undialectical and de nitive xing of the a priori limits of knowledge and freedom. For Marx the rational is real, as Hegel indicates, and reality is marked by the constant struggle between the subjective forces (individual and collective agency) and objective forms (social structure) which traverse it. But for Marx the key to agency is the mode of production and the organization of the labour process. Revolu-tions serve to adjust the relation between subjective agency and objective form by expanding the latter to suit the steadily increasing power of the former to transform nature in accordance with human needs and creati vity. Here the links with Hegel are clear. Human labour power can be likened to a subject that needs objective forms to institutionalize its freedom. In epistemological and historical terms there is no possible retreating behind epistemological terrain already staked out by Kant here: the ques-tion is not about whether the subjective factor or the objective factor is the source or object of knowledge it is the relation between subjective and objective that constitutes the real as a mediated totality of distinct but not isolated moments. In terms of the dynamism of a phenomenology of constantly changing forms, the real is to be evaluated in terms of quantity turning into quality, and not in absolute or rei ed terms such as true/false or rational/irrational.18


Like Hegel and Marx, Nietzsche detects a con ict between human freedom and the forms of human society in which freedom is institutional-ized, and like them he also regards agency to be a function of the relation between humanity and nature, in which humanity is part of nature but not reducible to it. But for Nietzsche there is no evidence that the mediation of humanity and nature is inherently rational in the sense in which Hegel and Marx might understand that term, and there is also no evidence that the forms of mediation are ultimately conducive to freedom in the long-run, that is, for Nietzsche there can be and there o en is decline in history. Decline very o en sets in when culture strays too far from the extra-moral forces of life which appear in society in the guises of inequality and hierar-chy. Whereas for Hegel and Marx objective form performs a contradictory function in history in that it both impedes the unfolding of subjectivity and spurs it to creative action and development, Nietzsche identi es a fundamental problem with subjectivity itself, which in his social theory also turns out to be an unveiled attack on Kantian and Hegelian accounts of reason, law, history and the state. Kant asks, under what conditions is knowl-edge is possible? He concludes that the condition is the existence of a subject that has objective knowledge of the phenomena that present themselves to the subjects understanding in time and space. While Hegel attempts to project philosophy beyond its Kantian limits by positing the existence of an historical subjectivity which is moving towards absolute knowledge and freedom, Nietzsche asks, how much truth can a human being stand? He concludes that the answer varies tremendously from person to person, and, what is more, depending on the culture in question, reason can become an e ective tool in the project to condemn the extra-moral truths of life as bad, immoral, unjust, undemocratic, and so on. e philosopher of the will to power believes that some human subjects are capable of developing aristocratic values which enable the a rmative forces in them to assume a knowledge-enhancing form in which life, as something which is not merely a human attribute and which creates a di erent e ect in each human, is able continually to renew itself, change, and test its own boundaries. e aristo-cratic individual thus enables life to become far more vital than brute natural life, through the mediation of extra-human creativity that has liber-ated itself from the fear of nature that drives ordinary humans into society, cuts them o from the praxis of terrestrial knowledge, and induces social conformity. e romantic dimension of Nietzsches argument is that think-ing and knowledge are concerned with inner force, self-transformation and individual creation and not, in the rst instance, classifying, registering and ordering or, for that matter, dialectics.19


e beauty which is achieved in such creations is an expression of individual aesthetic values which are o en incommensurable with the values of other creators. But for Nietzsche, this tragic incommensurability is o en an indication of the vitality required continually to recreate oneself individually and collectively as a culture. In healthy cultures, the questions raised by issues of form/content and means/ends push individual subjects to rede ne the conditions of their existence as well as the sense and ends of their action. In these rare cases human agency tends to reject the restric-tions on life and culture implied by existing ways of being (all too) human in society. If so, agency strives towards the protean forms characteristic of the superhuman or, as Nietzsche alludes to it in us Spoke Zarathustra (1883), the superman. Hence if there is freedom, it is not God-given, jurid-ical or productive in an economic sense, nor is it equally distributed in the ways that formal freedom can be. It consists in the desire and will of a very unusual subject to establish an agonistic relation with subjectivity itself and to entertain an active relation with life which results in the theoretical-practical elaboration of unique values and knowledge. Hence values, knowledge and art are closely interrelated. e condition of knowledge is not a study pack of innate faculties which is handed out to everyone by God at the mythical beginning of human school life, a er which humans continually are tested and judged to see if they are making good use of their course materials. According to this conception, God is comparable to a great schoolmaster who unites pedagogical discipline and state authority in His person, and who demands obedience and solemn respect in return for His generosity. To speak in terms more appropriate to this study than anything Nietzsche directly says himself, individuals who believe in God are incapable of anything other than instrumental thought and passive behaviour which is directed to pleasing authority and passing ludicrous tests. People renounce their own, autonomous and plural ends for heter-onomous ends chosen for them. In the speci c case of modern industrial societies governed by Christian religious values, the consequence is that genuinely individual ends become increasingly rare. As subjectivity shriv-els into strategic self-defence against external threats and illusory hopes of individual redemption, there are merely more or less successful means of attaining the same end for all individuals salvation of which wealth and security are the secular versions. Taking his cue from Nietzsche, Weber is able to show that the internalization of the aspiration to freedom and salva-tion helps consolidate the bases of a social order based on the privatization of experience (and the corresponding obsolescence of republican politics) in three decisive areas. Negative liberty, private accumulation and money


become the key instances regulating the lives of individuals for whom there is no value distinction to be made between survival and life. It is the reduction of life to survival that blurs and eventually eliminates the distinction between the means to living and living itself.20

e condition of non-instrumental knowledge is the joyous intuition of innocence from the burdens of original sin and the norms of standardized performance implied by the institutionalization of linear conceptions of time. Nietzsche seems to regard original sin and linear time as perfect complements to the stable epistemological subject emerging from Kants philosophy. For Nietzsche this is a pygmy subject which recoils in horror before the chaos of the external world, and shrinks in despair at the spectacle of its steadily diminishing units of time. It is a transcendental ego that rejects the challenges of terrestrial philosophy by eeing into the religious worship of another, better world, while also seeking safe refuge in monotonous, time-consuming labour for the sake of another, better future.21 A er all that sacri ce the unenviable but inevitable fate of all those who su er from original sin this exemplary specimen of bad faith wants compensation for what it gives of itself in the guise of pious devotion and e cient work. Unsurprisingly, it is appalled by the uncer-tainty and meagreness of the reward. Since this is a passive subject that cannot really give or create, it reacts by condemning or isolating forms of life that exceed subjectivity in the self-transformative project involved in thinking terrestrially and inventing fully terrestrial values. It is central to Nietzsches thinking that the victory of passive and reactive forces over active and a rmative ones is a victory of metaphysical longing for a world of certainty and safety, the manifest absence of which leads to a condemna-tion of this-worldly beauty and knowledge. It is a condemnation on the part of a decadent humanity which has come to resent its helplessness vis--vis nature and culture. As a consequence, it seeks punishment and revenge against the life within it and around it, which in fact is the very force that needs to be liberated if decadence and nihilism are going to be overcome. e hallmark of slave morality throughout the ages is to want to manipulate the fact that humanity is part of nature but not reducible to it as an excuse to deny nature, reject individual singularity and renounce per-sonal strength. Hence in a number of respects slave morality implies a psychological disposition of the individual towards self-in icted punish-ment. In many of his writings Nietzsche implies that modern humanity is particularly susceptible to denying the natural life within it. It seems prone to react to natural inequality and the disparity of individual values by a rm-ing natural equality in law and institutionalizing democratic value-sharing


in culture. In di erent ways Dilthey, Simmel and Weber attempt to trans-pose Nietzsches psychological insights into more systematic sociological theory.22

In summary of this section, and before moving on to historical socio-logy, it is clear that Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche o er various ways of resolving the antinomies in Kants philosophy. e critiques signal the lim-its of subjectivity and knowledge when these key concepts are pursued along exclusively philosophical lines. e challenge for philosophy, which is taken up with particular verve by Nietzsche, is to become multidiscipli-nary without becoming arbitrary or eclectic. Hegels theory of history and objective form/spirit, Marxs theory of political economy, and Nietzsches genealogical theory of values and domination amount to a many-sided challenge to Kants attempt to rescue philosophical enquiry from the problems of empiricism and rationalism within a rigorously epistemologi-cal framework. Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche present traditional philosophy with a set of challenges, many of which are taken up by the thinkers examined in Chapters 26. e rst point is that philosophy has to take up the issues raised by history, political economy and psychology, in which case it ceases to be philosophical in the ways that it had been until Hegel, or ignore these paths of enquiry and become narrowly academic and irrelevant.23 It is a challenge that questions the role of philosophical con-ceptions of reason in epistemology and politics, and simultaneously a rms the rationality of the actual. is implies two things. First, it implies that it is not possible in absolute terms to measure the rationality of existing society against a theory of reason developed as a philosophical, trans-historical abstraction. History is the context within which all considerations of reason have or lack sense. Second, it radicalizes and decentres the Kantian notion that some of the conditions of knowledge, such as space and time, are to a certain extent external to the subject (although they are also pure, subjective intuitions for Kant).24

To place the conditions of knowledge outside of the epistemological subject is to raise important issues about the quality of human knowledge and freedom, and to question the plausibility of freedom conceived of as rational individual autonomy within a national state understood as the centre or the source of collective political authority. It has been seen so far that these problems are analysed di erently by Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. If the conditions of knowledge are to be located to a certain extent outside of the subject in Hegel and Marx, the relation between the subjective and objective moment of knowledge nonetheless remains historical and dialec-tical. is idea is expressed in the ways that the concepts of Au ebung and


synthesis are developed in the writings of these thinkers. Central to the idea of knowledge and praxis in Hegel and the young Marx is that at some point in its journey towards self-discovery, subject (as Geist or as labour power in the widest sense) is able to re-appropriate what has become objecti ed outside of and alienated from it. Hence for Hegel and Marx the-ory and practice can be mediated in a rational way that simultaneously gives a sense to history. Here the links between reason, re-appropriation, humanism, action and historical progress are clear. In Nietzsche (life), and even more so in Weber (life, history and society), the factual externality of the conditions of knowledge is no longer conceived of dialectically as a relation between subjectivity and objectivity. e movement from Marx to Weber can be interpreted as a movement from subject-object dialectics in the young Marx, to subject(s)-social relations in the mature Marx and Weber. In the course of this theoretical and historical movement, roughly corresponding the period from 18481918, the moment of synthesis between subject and object becomes elusive, and the notion of some gen-eral sense of action becomes tenuous and oblique. It is at this juncture that reason starts to look more like an instrumental and strategic means than a substantive end.25

us the study of what Hannah Arendt refers to as the rise of the social, and the implicit impossibility of a subjective re-appropriation of a plurality of dispersed institutions and di erentiated codes, is initiated by Marx. ere is a discernible transition from Hegels political version of the ration-ality of the real, which for Hegel is emblematically represented by the authority of the state in the Philosophy of Right, to Marxs social version of the rationality of the real in the Grundrisse, which for Marx can be under-stood as a series of social relations and processes that do not culminate in the state or any other foundation or centre, and which, by extension, are not easily re-appropriated or represented without a substantial remainder, so to speak. Seen in these terms, and contrary to what Marx himself sug-gests in the Communist Manifesto and what Lenin and Lukcs say about Marx as a political thinker, Marxs analysis seems to cast doubt on the capacity of a political party to distil and represent the totality of social rela-tions within its organizational and leadership structures. On the basis of this reading of the Grundrisse and Capital, and at the risk of making Marx sound a little bit too much like Michel Foucault for just a moment, it is pos-sible to say that the coherence of political theory, and along with it the raison dtre of political parties and even of the nation-state form of politi-cal legitimacy full stop, has been substantially undermined. ey have been undermined by the transfer of authority from the state to non-transparent


and unaccountable networks of power in society. At that point traditional political philosophy loses its points of contact with social reality. In a now famous passage in Between Past and Future (1954), Arendt has put the matter thus:

Our tradition of political thought had its de nite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less de nite end in the theories of Karl Marx. e beginning was made when, in e Republics allegory of the cave, Plato described the sphere of human a airs all that belongs to the living together of men in a common world in terms of darkness, confusion, and deception which those aspiring to true being must turn away from and abandon if they want to discover the clear sky of eternal ideas. e end came with Marxs declaration that philosophy and its truth are located not outside the a airs of men and their common world but precisely in them, and can be realized only in the sphere of living together, which he called society.26

In Arendts terms, Marx is a live witness to the demise of an ancient tra-dition that culminates in Kant and nally with Hegel. At the start of this chapter it is seen that for Kant there is no absolute knowledge of essences because of the reality of mediating form. e political corollary of this epistemological position is that there can also be no absolute freedom in which theory and practice are fused. In Kants philosophy this leads to the subordination of metaphysical knowledge to formal knowledge, and the corresponding subordination of life, being and practice to consciousness, law and theory. Needless to say, the reduction of knowledge to its formal dimension, like the reduction of practice to the conditions of possible prac-tice, raises questions about the possibility of reason that is not reduced to its instrumental instantiation. In very di erent ways, Marx and Nietzsche attempt to reverse the priority of theory over practice. is sets them apart from Hegel, who believes in the dialectical mediation of life, being and practice with consciousness, law and theory in historical reason, as opposed to the abstract and formal reason defended by Kant.27 e end of any cred-ible grand mediation between these terms, ushered in by Marxs critique of Hegels theory of the state and Nietzsches critique of modern conscious-ness, marks a crisis of the idea of legitimate law as the primary mediating instance between a stable epistemological subject capable of de ning the limits of objective knowledge, on the one hand, and a rational state capable of de ning the limits of freedom, on the other. It will be seen in the next


section that Webers sociology registers the shi from Kantian reason of Enlightenment inspiration to modernist rationalization, which is com-pounded by the parallel shi from the rational state of Hegels political philosophy to the legal-rational domination pervading industrial society. In the latter, legitimate authority is replaced by techniques of legitimation. In response to the call for a revolution of social relations to address this crisis of state, Weber responds that social relations can be analysed and understood, but not consciously changed without causing more disen-chantment and even more bureaucracy than that which already exists in a world dominated by instrumental reason.

The Rise of Historical Sociology in the Light of the Crises of Legitimate Law and the Rational State

Weber reads Nietzsches critique of modernity and Marxs analysis of capitalism with critical sympathy. But he also attempts to move beyond their respective analyses in order to provide a more nuanced and more sociological account of subjectivity and social action than is possible within the frameworks o ered by Nietzsches psychology and Marxs notion of class interest. Webers project is in uenced by Wilhelm Diltheys (18331911) historical sociology, Max Schelers (18741928) anthro pology, and especially the philosophical sociology developed by Georg Simmel (18581918) in the Philosophy of Money (1900) and other writings. While in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant attempts to provide a critique of meta-physics that nonetheless saves objectivity from relativism, Dilthey argues that the critique of metaphysics must go beyond the critique of pure reason by o ering a critique of historical reason as well. Dilthey wants to enlist certain elements of Hegels theory of objective form and Nietzsches account of individual psychology in the project to provide the human sciences with a foundation and status independent from the methodologies of traditional philosophy and the natural sciences. If Kant can claim that the condition of knowledge is an epistemological subject, Dilthey anticipates Weber by argu-ing that the conditions of understanding are psychological, intersubjective and interpretative. In contrast to Kants and especially Hegels project to trace the modalities through which structured experience (Erfahrung) is converted into systematic knowledge, Dilthey seizes on the epistemologi-cal importance of slightly less structured and more discontinuous experience (Erlebnis). In Diltheys usage Erlebnis is closer to Nietzschean vitality than it is to the idealist concept of experience. e subtle distinction is employed by Dilthey to emphasize that the relation between past and


future and with it tradition and memory becomes uncertain in an epoch characterized by rapid industrialization and the failure of the philo-sophical ideal of reason to materialize in historical practice in the way Hegel had predicted.28

In his confrontation with Humes scepticism, Kant makes causality a category of the understanding, such that it becomes a faculty of the human mind. is corresponds to his notion that objects and events are not simply given in time and space. ey must be thought by a stable epistemological subject, in other words, a fundamental condition of rational knowledge is that objects and events have to orient themselves towards human understanding. Dilthey suggests that Kants view of knowledge and causality is largely taken from the scienti c epistemologies of Galileo, Newton and Bacon. Hence while Kant is correct in his debate with empiri-cism to shi the explanation of external causality to an internal plane of mental energy, Kant restricts the life of the mind to an almost mechanical set of predictable functions which rests on a dogmatic separation of con-sciousness and external world. According to this interpretation, Kant seems to vacillate between empiricism and rationalism instead of moving beyond their respective problems. Diltheys critique of historical reason attempts to do two things with regard to Kants theory of the relation between knowl-edge and experience. First, it attempts to show why the Kantian model is too close to that of the natural sciences to be applicable to human sciences like history. e human sciences require a di erent methodology capable of formulating knowledge for areas of life in which interpretation and empathy are more appropriate than classi cation or categorization. Sec-ond, while relying on Hegels theory of objective form to some extent, Dilthey breaks with Hegelian subject-object dialectics in favour of a less ambitious epistemological programme. He wants to be able to explain the actions of people in particular historical contexts embedded in speci c institutions which vary from culture to culture. For Dilthey, Kant is a philo-sophical idealist who speaks of consciousness and knowledge, when in fact one must speak in terms of the contents of consciousness, where the latter are bound to vary according to historical circumstances. Moreover, and in anticipation of themes that emerge in Heidegger and Arendt, the historical world is a mental and physical reality that does not respect rigid distinc-tions between mind and world. Hegel succeeds in breaking down this barrier, it is true, but only by identifying thought and being. Dilthey seeks to take the Hegelian insight that all subjectivity is mediated by socio-historical objectivity and to prise it away from Hegels idealist framework. e task is to move beyond idealism without falling prey to positivism.
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65156715 Schecter the Critique of Instrumental Reason From Weber to Habermas