solidarity and the postnational

7/31/2019 Solidarity and the Postnational

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Solidarity and the Postnational

Phillip QuinteroGPHI6531 Fall 2009Prof. Nancy Fraser


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The most troubling requirement for maintaining Habermas political groundings, and what is

perhaps the most important goal he identifies, is the need to strictly regulate the power of systems.

Systems, understood as anything that operates with strategic rationality, must in effect become tools of

communicative politics under Habermas prescription. The force of markets and bureaucracies, for

instance, must be expressly relegated to the tasks of economic and administrative matters. This

conclusion is a response Habermas proposes in the face of an analysis of what he calls the colonization

of the lifeworld. The political telos, for Habermas, is the establishment of institutional processes

reflecting a society in which norms are determined and maintained communicatively, through public

discourse. In such a utopia, communicative rationality is behind all political decisions, not strategic

rationality such as economic interest or administrative efficiency.

The prerequisite for this kind of renegotiation of strategic and communicative action is the

reaching of a modern social solidarity. The problem seems to revolve around defining social solidarity in

such a way that a) it is attainable, at least in a practical working-model sense and b) that it adequately

provides the conditions of possibility for democratic self-governance in the face of actual conditions. I

would like to explore his analysis in The Postnational Constellation, contextualized through earlier work

on communicative action, in order to evaluate the success of solidarity in the scheme of the theory of

communicative action.

More specifically, I would like to explore the following questions: In what way is solidarity

necessary for the decolonization of the lifeworld? In what way is a self-regulating lifeworld the only

viable basis for solidarity in the modern age? I am worried that the communicatively generated

solidarity that Habermas argues for as the basis for a postnational democratic politics is something that


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comes before itself in the course of Habermas theory. Some unity or solidarity must be in some way

prepolitical, as it empowers communicative action and needs to be in place for Habermas political goal

to be realized, but on the other hand the dominance of communicative action is the supposed outcome

of just such politics. I believe these specific problems bear investigation, and the complications of this

relationship should become clearer by looking at how and where social or civil solidarity plays its role.

The implications of this research are the testing of the critical thread in Habermas political

theory. I expect to evaluate the claims that Habermas has (a) communicative action is inconsistent with

globalization, and (b) Habermas philosophical commitments are inconsistent.

Section I will begin with Habermas reading of Weber on the idea of worldviews, with the hope

making clear the most basic notion of solidarity. This notion will be problematized as Habermas

examines the effect modernization has on the concept of a worldviewnamely, that the worldview is

not longer adequate for understanding the relationship between theoretical social relations and material

conditions of life. Section II will explain this process of modernization in terms of the expanding power

of systems and the colonization of the lifeworld. It will be necessary here to mention the stakes this has

for Habermas in terms of the implications such colonization has on his theory of Discourse Ethics.

Section III will examine the role solidarity plays in Habermas response to the problems I identify in

sections I and II.

I

In Habermas reading of Weber, worldviews provide the kind of shared experience necessary to

legitimate authority of the leadership or governing structure of a civilization: Worldviews function as a

kind of drive belt that transforms basic religious consensus into the energy of social solidarity and passes


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it on to social institutions, thus giving them a moral authority. 1 Insofar as the worldview is shared, it

validates the moral authority of basic norms and as such reinforces the political order as ours. This

understanding of worldview is as a unifying concept (a community identity based on something like

kinship, proximity, shared conditions, cosmological inheritance, religion, etc.) that allows the individual

to project an analogical nexus between man, nature, and society a totality in which everything

corresponds with everything else. 2 This is basically an analogue to the solidarity of a lifeworld, a shared

worldview that enables a collective identity and is the condition of possibility for action oriented

towards mutual understanding.

The image of what it is allowing us to unify a group under the label society only become more

complicated as we turn our gaze to the contemporary. As Habermas writes, Whereas primitive

societies are integrated via a basic normative consensus, the integration of developed societies comes

about via thesystemic interconnection of functionally specified domains of action3. Here lies the source of

crisis in modern societiesthe social conditions of life are now determined in such a structured,

institutional way that it is not sufficient (and perhaps not possible) that we share one, communicatively

defined worldview. That is to say that the conditions and limitations of my action are not set by the

mutual understanding I come to through discourse with peers. Rather, there is a level of societal

institution that has a much more palpable hand in establishing the conditions of life, and the modern

lifeworld is not always already integrated through normative consensus. In light of this, we must drop

1Habermas,Jrgen.TheTheoryofCommunicativeActionVolumeTwo .trans.ThomasMcCarthy

(Boston:BeaconPress,1987),56.HereafterTCAII

2Ibid.

3TCAII.,115


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the identification of society with the lifeworld4. In more theoretic language, this is the historic basis for

a theory of social evolution that separates the rationalization of the lifeworld from the growing

complexity of societal systems5.

The difficult question arising here is how communicative action can translate mutual

understanding and discursively vetted norms into these institutions. Any reader of Habermas will

know that this depiction, far from providing new insight, merely frames the locus of Habermas work. It

is the drive belt in this scenario that does the interesting and largely nebulous work of linking the

phenomena of human communication and social institutions to each other. This is the abode of

communicative action, and Habermas sees its relation to modernity to be neglected by traditional and

interpretive sociology. For instance, he writes that Durkheims catchall concept of collective

consciousness cannot account for how institutions draw their validity from the religious springs of

social solidarity6. He follows the criticism with his own response: We can resolve this problem only if

we bear in mind that profane everyday practice proceeds by way of linguistically differentiated processes

of reaching understanding and forces us to specify validity claims for actions appropriate to situations in

the normative context of roles and institutions. 7

II

I can now identify, with Habermas, two main problems relating to my topic. One is a

philosophical problemthat pre-Habermasian sociological concepts rely on a notion of social

4Ibid.,150

5Ibid.,118

6Ibid.,57

7Ibid.,57.ThelinguisticdimensionisoneofthekeydifferencesbetweenHabermasianlifeworld

andWeberianworldview.


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solidarity that is historically limited and no longer adequate. This first problem is philosophically

troublesome only if we accept the empirical grounds of the moral/political second problem: the modern

colonization of lifeworlds by systems. I suggest we do accept this notion of colonization, and after

explaining why will return to the problem of solidarity. A brief look at what Habermas has to say on

this topic will serve us here to connect the theoretical placement of solidarity (as I have characterized it

up to this point) to the examination of how that solidarity is at work in Habermas political diagnosis

(which will lead us to the conclusion of this paper in section III).

We can start with observing historical phenomena to see what has gone wrong in society-as-

lifeworld that should otherwise continue to smoothly Habermas identifies the effect the systems-logic

of capitalism has on lifeworlds:

The market is one of those systemic mechanisms that stabilize nonintendedinterconnections of action by way of functionally intermeshing action consequences,

whereas the mechanism of mutual understanding harmonizes the action orientations ofparticipants. Thus I have proposed that we distinguish between social integration andsystem integration: the former attaches to action orientations, while the latter reachesright through them. In one case the action system is integrated through consensus,

whether normatively guaranteed or communicatively achieved; in the other case it isintegrated through the nonnormative steering of individual decisions not subjectivelycoordinated.8

Here we can begin to identify how systems break with rational communicative action. Habermas

characterizes the market as nonintentional, as based on consequences and not orientations, as

nonnormative, and as not subjectively coordinated. Against the background of how a lifeworld is

supposed to rationally establish social norms through mutual understanding, we can see how this

what Habermas calls a systemic influenceleads to social pathologies such as loss of meaning,

8Ibid.,150


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III

In an important way, solidarity is the goal of communicative action. That is to say, that

communicative action is not only a process of reaching understanding; in coming to understanding

about something in the world, actors are at the same time taking part in interactions through which

they develop, confirm, and renew their memberships in social groups and their own identities.

Communicative actions are not only processes of interpretation in which cultural knowledge is tested

against the world; they are at the same time processes of social integration and of socialization11. Thus

understanding one another is the explicit task of communicative action, the hope being that more

understanding will translate to greater consensus, more unity of purpose, and more solidarity. Here

however, I worry that solidarity or some social unity is already at work as an assumption. If we imagine a

case of two individuals who have conflicting interests to one another, then greater understanding could

lead to less solidarity. They could be two people who take opposing sides of a political issue, who meet

and make friends before going to a debate where they suddenly realize they are at odds. Surely,

understanding on one level, the outcome of communication is necessary but not sufficient for social

integration.

The argument against this position can be made that understanding the differences between

myself and my enemy is a superficial one, and that acting together in a truly communicative way would

move us further from this opposition. I am inclined to agree, and hope I am right to do so, but it

remains to be explained where this human unity comes from. It is this sort of common purpose or

natural fraternity that Habermas relies on. While such an assumption is not pernicious, especially for

critical theory, it does make me question his argument. Again, the contradiction is that solidaritya

11Ibid.,139


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concept so key for Habermas workis at once the product of communicative action and a premise. In

this light, it is as though there is a starting place of unity, something we come back to, that has been

fractured through systematization or alienation, or something else. Again too, I am inclined to agree in

intuition and optimism. Such a returning, however, seems to come before itself, and may complicate

the move from formal-pragmatic work to the more historical and political12.

Despite this preoccupation, a look at the more historical and political work shows that

Habermas avoids an explicit contradiction about where and what solidarity is. A reading of this notion

in action shows that, while perhaps not providing the answer to the idea of an assumed human unity,

the theory of communicative action still maintains when applied to real issues.

Habermas extensive body of work precludes the helpfulness here of scouring his writing for

theoretical contradictions by which to draw out or ameliorate the tension I feel in his reliance on

solidarity. The stakes of the project I have tried to lay out up to this point should assist in teasing out

such a tension from within the diagnosis of The Postnational Constellation. That is, in the

contemporary global political order, the kind of solidarity I have depicted as paying a key role in the

stability of lifeworlds is tightly bound with national identity. Social problems, for instance, are treated

largely in the framework of the nation-state. There is also a general sense of national identity defined as

the us in distinction to the foreign them. The notion of civil solidarity is in this way the most relevant

path through which to contextualize the theoretical notions discussed up to this point. I also take it

that the imagining of a relevant and enduring model of solidarity (which is where Habermas hope lies

for the stabilization of communicatively-regulated lifeworlds now and in the future) is largely a civil

12Ibid.,119


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solidarity, albeit not a national one. I propose reading this essay with the following questions in mind: Is

a postnational civil solidarity possible? Is it practically attainable?

The Postnational Constellation (PC) strives to answer these questions in a way that leaves open

the possibility for constructive social change. There is a political impetus to find an answer to

globalization. If Habermas is right about solidarity in the previous sections then it will be crucial to find

a postnational source of solidarity. At stake, too, in this investigation is the particular sociological

perspective that underpins critical theory itself. I am referring here to the presupposed normative

expectation that social conflicts can be effectively perceived as challenges to the normal functioning of

a self-regulating rational egalitarian community, and which can be addressed and resolved through

political action13.

Globalization is a context in which the normative assumption that a rational democratic society

can intervene reflexively to create solidarity and resolve conflicts comes under threat. In PC, this threat

is explored in terms of the tendency of globalizing trends, specifically the international expansion of

economic network power, to dissolve structures of the modern nation-state. This threat, in light of the

historical association of civil solidarity with the nation-state gives rise to alarmist feelings of

enlightened helplessness... a crippling sense that national politics have dwindled to more or less

intelligent management of a process of forced adaptation to the pressure to shore up purely local

positional advantages14. If, Habermas claims, this helplessness is to be avoidedif we are not doomed

to political impotence in the face of colonizing global marketswe must find a way of adapting the

following argument so that democracy is not an exclusive feature of the nation-state.

13Habermas,Jrgen.ThePostnationalConstellationPoliticalEssays .trans.MaxPensky

(Cambridge:MITPress,2001),59. Hereafter PC

14PC,61


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Habermas begins by depicting the foundations of social solidarity that have made modern

democracies possible. These foundations lay historically in the structure of the modern nation state.

That is, modern democracy, which is (as we will see below) functionally reliant on solidarity, takes the

modern nation-state as its exclusive historical form.

The first reason for making this association is a simple observation: Not all nation-states were, or

are, democratic; that is, constituted according to the principles of an association of self-governing free

and equal citizens. But wherever democracies on the western model have appeared, they have done so in

the form of the nation-state15. To strengthen the impact of this observation, Habermas explains four

structural aspects of nation-states, which make possible functional democratic self-governance.

Interpreting these structural aspects of the nation-state as conditions for civil solidarity, they are a) the

development of a functional administrative state apparatus, b) geographical sovereignty, c) a culturally

integrated nation, and d) democratic legitimating of authority. It is a reading of these structural

elements in these terms that allows PCto serve as an advanced location to examine the work done by

the notion of solidarity.

a) Habermas discussion of the formation of a state administration amounts to the claim that the

effectiveness of a politically self-governing society depends on its ability to make collectively binding

decisions16. To understand this in terms of Habermas earlier writing, a society must separate the

strategic rationality of effective administration and of the market from the communicative rationality

of the social sphere. This is the function of lawa democratic community must be self-legislating. Civil

unity is largely the shared identity as subjects of the same law. We can look to the example of taxation

15Ibid.,62

16Ibid.,63


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without representation as a source for the solidarity and identity as colonists in the American

Revolution.

b) The structural aspect that Habermas refers to as maintaining sovereignty over a determinate

geographical territory is really a reference to the delimitation of a territory that will be under the

administration of the law of the nation. This is another part of the idea of a national self. Within the

borders of the territorial state the population of a state is defined as the potential subjects of self-

legislation, as democratically united citizens, while society is defined as the potential object of their

control17.

c) The concept of a nation provides necessary cultural cohesion to a group of individuals that is to

constitute the society of a nation-state. It thereby makes the residents of a single state-controlled

territory aware of a collective belonging that, until then, had been merely abstract and legal. Only the

symbolic construction of a people makes the modern state into a nation-state 18. This structure is in

most need of a radical transformation to adapt to globalizing forces. If the solidarity necessary for

democratic politics is to survive globalization, it must find a basis other than the historical ones of

kinship, race, class, or geographical origin.

d) Democratic legitimation of political power is necessary to ensure that the legal authority of the

administrative state is subordinate to the self-governance of the citizens. Likewise, legitimation

theoretically ensures that the strategic logic of capitalism does not endanger the the social,

technological, and ecological conditions that make an equal opportunity for the use of equally

17Ibid.

18Ibid.,64


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distributed basic rights possible19.

Habermas here identifies the ways in which solidarity is a condition of possibility for the kind of

stability that makes the nation-state the continued system of contemporary political organization. That

is, democratic self-determination depends on a prior cultural integration of what is initially a number

of people who have been thrown together with each other20. This is what is in the way to the

continued integration of the European Union, for instance. It is through communicative action that

solidarity is formed, but the level to which a society is already culturally integrated provides a greater or

lesser basis for the formation of this political solidarity. This conclusion is also in-line with the

assessment in section I that a society needs to translate communicatively determined norms into social

institutionsthis translation is analogous to the progression from social to political solidarity.

Political solidarity, understood in this way, is the institutionalization of social solidarity. Such

institutionalization is exactly what is required to effect a decolonization of the lifeworld.

We have now located the position solidarity takes in Habermas theory. It is the guiding

principle by which to see if communicative action is functioning as it should be. At every levelthe

interpersonal, the community, the national, and the postnationalcommunicative action provides the

means within Habermas theory to discursively identify and vet norms. This conclusion, that it is too

much to expect the characteristics of solidarity to hold across cultural, social, and political realms,

speaks to the critical openness of the theory of communicative action. The task, then, remains as

Habermas described itfirst the achievement of agreed-upon norms through our collective

19Ibid.,65

20Ibid.,64


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communicative action, then the institutionalization of these same norms to form political solidarity,

the basis and condition of possibility for democracy.

solidarity and the postnational

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