(Adapted from Georgia Warnke, "Communicative rationality and cultural values" in The Cambridge companion to Habermas; David Held,Introduction to Critical Theory)
Habermas is by no means just critiquing, and drawing on other theories (psychoanalysis) to draw attention to distortions in communication. He has an elaborate theory of how communication works, and how it can be distorted. This theory has undergone evolution; in the 60's he focussed on knowledge and human interests (in fact, that was the name of a major book). By about 1970 and ever since, he has modified the theory.
The basic question that starts this off is this: How does language have the ability to coordinate action in a consensual or cooperative manner as opposed to a forced or manipulated way? How can language lead to agreement? We recognize that this can be done through force, guile, manipulation, deceit, and many other ways, but these are all forced.
So, the ideal of consensus is in the background of all discourse. In fact, the truth or falsity of a statement and the correctness of norms is determined by whether the ideal is supported. So, we anticipate a form of life in which truth, freedom, and justice are possible.
The problem is that there is more than one way to establish consensus. It can be done coercively or manipulatively. In such a case, discourse is systematically distorted. Systems that do this are ideology, in other words, systems that could not be supported if subjected to rational discourse. So, we have to transcend such systems.
As individual and societal evolution moves on, there is a growing capacity to master theoretical and practical discourse. We have a growing communicative competence for self-reflection and criticism.
To understand this growing competence, we have to understand the situations in which discourse takes place. See these charts.
The first two categories are directed to the technical mastery of the natural and social worlds respectively. Humans evolve in two separate but parallel and interrelated dimensions, that is, the forces of production and the normative structures of interaction. As these two develop and interact, "possibility spaces" are opened up -- potential areas of future development -- and at the same time, crisis areas to which the structures are vulnerable become apparent.
Habermas could focus on any part of the development (e.g., primitive communities), but his choice is modern capitalist society. Advanced capitalism, he argues, has a legitimation crisis. This is the withdrawal of support and loyalty from the existing order by most of the population, as their motivational commitment is broken. Think of the commonplace that there are no good politicians anymore, that people want to do politics in a new way. This suggests to him that, although there has been an evolution of our norms of interaction, the breakdown suggests that there are ideological elements which have to be investigated in order to move on.
The problem is founded in what Habermas calls the public sphere, that place where something like public opinion can be formed. Ideally, it is a sphere where individuals can "confer in an unrestricted fashion". Political life can be discussed openly. Habermas traces the emergence of this to the 18th century; in other words, it began at a particular phase of bourgeouis society, when individuals had interests which could be fostered in this setting. At the same time, it was a place that represented the public interest. The press was highly involved at the beginning, but (Habermas argues) the eventual commercialization of the press also excluded political and practical questions from the public sphere. Large organizations emerged, which had the effect of stabalizing the economy, but also turned social life into instrumental life; that is, how do we get things done as efficiently as possible? This further pushed politics from public life.
The result is that public opinion is undermined in its original sense, and is replaced by publicity, public relations, and so forth. There is no more discursive will, and no more real ability to critique the structures of power.
This move to push politics out of public discourse is countered by some factors, to be sure. The extension of fundamental rights to the social welfare state means that all information available to the government should also be available to those affected by the decisions of the government. To the extent that this actually happens, critical political discourse is possible. However, technocratic consciousness and the institutions that support it make any real critique of political structures unlikely.
This technocracy to which I have referred is primarily that which encourages the state to intervene to stabilise economic growth, and encourages science, technology, and industrial production to be at the forefront of economic growth. This focusses the production in the hands of private interests.
This is not just economics; it is politics too. Economics, the need for stable, predictable growth, has transformed the structure of ideology and communication. The more this comes under political control, the more the social institutions are repoliticized, but in line with the ideology. This all requires a new form of legitimation, one that ensures sufficient latitude for state intervention to secure the private utilization of capital, as well as mass loyalty to the system. This is done by depoliticizing practical issues. Think of the marginalization of "special interest groups" in the US and Canada.
Politics, in this world, becomes reoriented not toward the realization of practical goals, but toward the solution of technical problems. Governmental tasks are reunderstood as technical problems, solvable by technical means.
So, this is ideology. But it is ideology in a new sense. It is not old-style ideology, where an idealized form of life is reified (think Soviet Communism). It is, however, farther reaching than that style of ideology. It seems to eliminate the distinction between the practical and the technical, and as such suppresses ethics as an issue in life. Ethics itself becomes private morality, and is enforced technocratically.
All this is possible through instrumental reason. All conflicts become technical ones. In fact, it is these conflicts that develops the force of technical or instrumental reason:
As we move through these four levels of rationalization, we see that decisions have been removed from the bulk of humans' control. So what can be done?
Habermas stresses that language is one of the crucial media through which the social life of humanity unfolds. This is more than the instrumentalist use of language. Marx thought that our modes of production were just technological (and in this, paves the way for ideological interpretations by later communists). Habermas sees discourse as part of production of human life, not in the instrumentalist sense, but in the sense that social structures are discursive structures. As such, we have to analyse these structures. Freud becomes very useful here.
Habermas' take on Freud is that he understood institutions as "historically required repression of instinctual drives" which result from "the conflict between surplus impulses and conditions of collective self-preservation". Given scarcity, humans have to adapt to their environments in ways that prevent the complete satisfaction of instinctual desires. Our social institutions facilitate this repression, while giving us the possibility of staying alive. So, we have to do psychoanalysis of institutions. As the repression is reduced, institutional framework can be adjusted to accommodate higher gratification needs.
In this, Habermas thinks, Freud has a better handle on institutions than Marx could or did. Emancipation, then, entails not only overcoming conditions of scarcity, but also the repression which leads to distorted communication.
In the chart "rationalization of action" Habermas contends that our purposive rational action has undergone development, but our communicative action is behind. This has created the legitimation crisis, which technical reason tries to solve using technical means, but which will only really be solved when the category is dealt with properly.
So, how does this process work? As with Freud, we: