New Political Science, Volume 25, Number 3, September 2003 REVIEW ESSAY Marketing Critical Theory Joseph Heath, Communicative Action and Rational Choice, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001, 363 ⫹ vi pp. The idea of an encounter between critical theory and rational choice seems improbable. While critical theorists have supported the integration of philosophy and social science, they have generally opposed the use of natural scientific, behaviorist, or positivist explanations of human action,1 such as those found in the comprehensive rational choice program. Critical theorists also rejected the atomism of rational choice, its inability to account for central aspects of the social world, and the market assumptions inherent in economic models of politics. Nor did the rise of Analytical Marxism (G. A Cohen, John Roemer, Eric Olin Wright and Jon Elster), which draws heavily on rational choice theory, meet with enthusiasm.2 Critical theorists think this approach leaves out the crucial areas such as (inter)subjectivity, freedom, self-transformation and critical reflection. 1 Max Horkheimer’s original research program for critical theory foresaw a fusion of philosophy and social science. See “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute of Social Research,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 1–14, and “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Seabury, 1972), pp. 188–252. Raymond A. Morrow with David A. Brown, Critical Theory and Methodology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994). Morrow and Brown note that Horkheimer’s early program “represented the first systematic attempt to employ traditional empirical techniques (e.g. survey research) to the refinement and testing of propositions derived from the Marxist tradition” (p. 15). For more recent attempts to conceptualize this problem, see Jurgen Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988); “Reconstruction and Interpretation in the Social Sciences,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 21–42; Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental–Pragmatic Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984); Brian Fay, Political Theory and Social Practice (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975); Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978); and James Bohman, New Philosophy of The Social Sciences: Problems of Indeterminacy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). 2 G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense, expanded edn (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 2000); Self Ownership Freedom and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John Roemer, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 1982); A Future for Socialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Theories of Distributive Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precomittment and Constraint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Eric Olin Wright, Class, Crisis and the State (London: NLB, 1979); E. O. Wright (ed.), Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on the Explanation and the Theory of History (London: Verso 1992). More generally, see Marcus Roberts, Analytical Marxism: A Critique (London: Verso, 1996). One discussion from a Habermasian point of view is found in Tony Smith, The Role of Ethics in Social Theory: Essays from a Habermasian Perspective (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991). ISSN 0739-3148 print/ISSN 1469-9931 online/03/030435–15  2003 Caucus for a New Political Science DOI: 10.1080/0739314032000110682 436 Brian Caterino It may come as a surprise then that in recent years there has been a discussion between rational choice and critical theories. Many rational choice theorists have questioned the viability of the comprehensive version of rational choice. Jon Elster, for example, distinguishes between the market and the forum, thus indicating a difference between the logic of strategically organized action and that of a deliberative rationality. The market model is an insufficient basis for the analysis of politics. In contrast, Elster proposes a deliberative model of politics.3 Internal critics of rational choice have also recognized the inability of rational choice models to explain the binding forces that knit individuals together in society. Kenneth Shepsle, founder of the neo-institutional approach to rational choice theory, argues, “Rationality based theories worry hardly at all about the sources of preferences and beliefs.”4 Such theories fail to uncover the “glue,” the binding force of social/political relations. Against core models of equilibrium, Shepsle proposes a model of structure-induced equilibrium in order to explain the ways in which institutional rules of order rather than core games can underlie equilibrium. Grasping such institutional rules and beliefs, however, brings rational choice into contact with the interpretive social sciences. Generally speaking, contemporary versions of rational choice attempt to distance themselves from the positivistic covering-law models of explanation of their predecessors.5 While also rejecting the aims of a comprehensive theory, a second group of theorists, impressed by what they see as the precision of the microfoundational models, see value in rational choice models for the critical diagnosis and explanation of social life. They have sought a rapprochement or at least a dialogue between the parties. James Johnson has called for a conversation between critical theory and rational choice, considering them as complementary approaches.6 Critical theorists such as John Dryzek have argued that rational choice illuminates the pathologies of the market.7 Dryzek proposes a circumspect integration of rational choice theory; however, Elster’s concern with deliberative democracy points to some broader areas 3 Jon Elster, “The Market and the Forum,” in Jon Elster and Aanund Hylland (eds), Foundations of Social Choice Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For an illustration of the exchange between rational choice, analytical Marxism, and critical theory on the role of deliberation, see James Bohman and William Rehg (eds), Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). 4 Kenneth A. Shepsle, “Studying Institutions: Some Lessons from the Rational Choice Approach,” in Farr, Dryzek and Leonard (eds), Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 5 Robert Bates, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Barry S. Weingast, Analytic Narratives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 6 James Johnson, “Habermas on Strategic and Communicative Action,” Political Theory 19 (1991), pp. 181–210; “Is Talk Really Cheap? Prompting Conversation Between Critical Theory and Rational Choice,” American Political Science Review 87⬊1 (1993), pp. 74–86; “Rational Choice as Reconstructive Theory,” in Kristen Renwick Monroe (ed.), The Economic Approach to Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 113–142. 7 John Dryzek, “How Far is it from Virginia and Rochester to Frankfurt? Public Choice as Critical Theory?” British Journal of Political Science 22 (1992), pp. 397–417. More generally, see Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy and Political Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Also see Bryce Weber, “It’s a Very Long Way from Frankfurt to Virginia and Rochester: On the Hierarchy Market Distinction,” paper presented at the meeting of the British Columbia Political Science Association, May 5–6, 1995. Marketing Critical Theory 437 of comparison—primarily that of the normative grounds of political and moral theory. Habermas’s discourse ethics, for example, is an element of his longstanding attempt to rethink the normative grounds of critical social theory. Analytical Marxists such as John Roemer have also turned their attention to normative questions of distributive justice, and post-positivist rational choice theory has come to define itself as a normative rather than a value free enterprise.8 Of course, this common focus does not necessarily mean that convergence is on the horizon. There is a distinct danger that, given the seeming incompatibility of the two perspectives, an attempted synthesis will occlude central elements of critical theory. Joseph Heath’s Communicative Action and Rational Choice takes up these normative issues from a position sympathetic to James Johnson’s approach— though Heath places greater emphasis on philosophical grounds of normative commitments. Heath develops a version of the complementarity thesis. He holds that communicative action and strategic action can be linked as forms of normative social action. In so doing, he poses a series of significant revisions that, he argues, “weaken” the overly strong requirements of Habermas’s critical theory (p. 310). Heath is concerned with the links between questions of social action, such as the problem of order, and normative theory (pp. 6–7, 16–17). He agrees with Habermas that rational choice theory lacks the resources to solve questions of order. Yet Heath is not satisfied with Habermas’s alternative approach to the questions of social order—especially his analysis of the presuppositions of moral discourse—and generally with those elements inherited from the continental tradition. Heath believes that there is a central confusion in Habermas’s approach between a “discourse theoretical” approach and an “action theoretical” approach to the question of order. Heath proposes that under the action theoretical approach, strategic and communicative action can be seen as complementary approaches to social order. Lacking an action theory foundation, he argues, the discourse theoretical approach cannot tell us why we should or would take up the stance of communicative action. In spite of its insufficiencies, rational choice theory as a form of action theory provides a better account of the need for adopting a communicative stance than Habermas’s approach. In analyzing the theory of communicative action from this angle, Heath has produced a serious, detailed, and careful engagement with Habermas’s work. The book is distinguished by its clear account of some of the main features of game theory, including recent philosophical literature on the subject. Heath has carefully followed many of the important debates that have followed in the wake of the Theory of Communicative Action, and he is alert to the subtle modifications in Habermas’s position. This is no mean task! For all its virtues, however, Heath’s reading of the theory of communicative action, and his attempt to “weaken” the normative grounds of critical theory, 8 A decent summary of some of these attempts is found in Vidhu Verma, Justice, Equality and Community: An Essay in Marxist Political Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000). For an example of the view of post-positivist rational choice, see Randall Calvert’s polemical exchange “Lowi’s Critique of Political Science: A Response,” PS: Political Science and Politics 26⬊2 (1993). Calvert is responding to Theodore Lowi’s inaugural address to the APSA published as “The State in Political Science: How We Become What We Study,” American Political Science Review 86 (1992), pp. 1–7. 438 Brian Caterino are unsuccessful. Heath’s attempt to replace discourse theory with action theory is artificial. Discourse theory is already linked to action through mutual understanding. Heath’s amendments provide a reductionist version of “action theory,” one that has a subjective character incompatible with Habermas’s basic understanding of mutual knowledge. It integrates rational choice by limiting the formative power of communicative action. At the heart of these problems is Heath’s tendency to devalue the hermeneutic/interpretive foundations of Habermas’s project. Heath narrows the scope of problems that a critical theory can address, and weakens such a theory’s power to transform through critical self-understanding. I can illustrate the scope of interpretive problems by considering Heath’s approach to Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Heath reads Habermas’s theory as if it could be adequately explained as a product of debates in Anglo-American philosophy. One looks in vain for references to Gadamer, Heidegger, Hegel, Humboldt, and others. While Heath’s account clarifies Habermas’s use of such important thinkers as Dummett, Davidson, Austin, Searle and Brandom—although I find Habermas’s own expositions more lucid9—Heath’s account is one-sided. Habermas’s engagement with Anglo-American theory is significant, but it is not sufficient to capture central aspects of Habermas’s approach.10 As Christine Lafont notes: Despite the importance of Habermas’s appropriation of different views from the Anglo-American philosophy of language, his conception of language is decisively influenced by the basic premises developed in the German tradition (especially in Humboldt’s and Gadamer’s view) These are premises that … cannot be regarded as equally central for the Anglo-American tradition.11 In Humboldt’s work, Habermas discovers the origin of the idea (later elaborated by Gadamer and others) that language is a medium of intersubjectivity achieved though mutual understanding. A society is a web of symbolically mediated interactions, which are bound together consensually. The idea of mutual understanding, however, is also linked to moral and ethical problems of self-interpretation and self-formation. As members of a linguistic community speakers are shaped through the supra subjective character of linguistic community, but at the same time speakers also shape language. This process of renewal, however, is not simply a reproduction of meaning but always holds out the possibility of calling into question existing meaning and hence creating new meanings. 9 In addition to Habermas’s remarks in Theory of Communicative Action, volume 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984; especially pp. 273–337), he revises and restates his position in the following essays collected in On the Pragmatics of Communicative Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998): “Actions: Speech Acts, Linguistically Mediated Interaction and Life World,” pp. 215–256, especially 226ff; “Toward a Critique of the Theory of Meaning,” pp. 277–300; and “Some Further Clarifications of the Concept of Communicative Rationality,” pp. 307–342. 10 Just to give one example out of many Habermas noted in an interview from 1984 that his notion of universal pragmatics combines elements form both speech act theory and phenomenological sociology’s analysis of the life world. “A Philosophical–Political Profile,” in Peter Dews (ed.), Habermas: Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas (London: Verso, 1986), p. 151. 11 Lafont, The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 118–119. Another useful source is Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). Marketing Critical Theory 439 Participants also have an independent ability to critically judge and transform common sense. Speakers are at the same time members of a community and self-interpreting subjects endowed with the capacity for individuality and autonomy. They have the capacity to take up a position on the world and transform it.12 Since mutual understanding is both a medium of language and a medium of social life, it is difficult to see the basis for Heath’s central distinction. With this broad conception of mutual understanding, action and language are linked to reproduce the world through mutual understanding. Habermas’s theory of communicative action draws on a distinction between our access to the natural world and our access to the social world. While the natural scientist has to employ symbolic means to grasp the world, the social world requires a twostage interpretive process. Members of the social world are also other interpreters of the world and we have access to these interpretations only as fellow participants in the social world. Habermas spells out the implications of the double hermeneutic for morality. He argues that questions of truth take place within an “objective world,” while norms are aspects of the social world. The latter is a world of normatively regulated interaction. In the social world, unlike the objective world, norms are directly related to our commitments to act. Norms and values (no matter how unique the latter are) have to be worthy of being recognized. While we can consider nature to be constituted independently of our claims about it, this is not he case with the social world. We cannot grasp the social world without seeing it as an order of validity that is made up of the very activity of mutually understanding that world; it is not independent of the assent of participants. Norms are connected to and dependent upon the continual renewal of the social world through mutual accountability. The latter provides the binding character of social life. When a member of a social group holds a norm to be valid, it is assumed that she is obliged to act accordingly. There is, in Habermas’s words, a “mutual dependence of language and the social world.”13 Heath’s action theoretical reformulation of Habermas is in large measure directed against the special status accorded such mutual knowledge. He rejects the idea that moral understanding is distinct from understanding of facts in the objective world. Habermas’s conception of mutual understanding is also crucial to his political thought. Though often seen as a liberal procedural theory of justice, communicative theory provides more than a simple defense of liberalism; it also draws on the counter enlightenment critique of liberal individualism. Habermas fre12 Habermas’s relation to Humboldt is developed in “Communicative Rationality and the Theories of Meaning and Action,” in On the Pragmatics of Communicative Action, op. cit., pp. 183–192. Language also has a world-disclosing character. It makes it possible for something to appear in the world. The world exists before language, but it can only be understood as something thought language. Habermas reads this world-disclosing, however, in different way than Heidegger or post-structuralism. The world is not disclosed as a given meaning but as a mode of understanding. Claims still have to prove themselves independently through discourse. 13 “Discourse Ethics,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), p. 61. Simone Chambers in Reasonable Democracy: Jurgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) also argues that Habermas’s theory is a kind of “interpretive deontology” (p. 43ff) and employs “hermeutical reconstruction” (p. 55). However, I think her reading is too Kantian. 440 Brian Caterino quently employs a theoretical nexus developed from Hegel to Humboldt through to Mead to build upon a notion of mutual recognition. This nexus links Habermas’s critical theory to elements of the 19th century critique of possessive individualism. The expressivist version of this critique saw humans as developers and exerters of powers, but recognized that processes of individuation and the development of capacities and powers were social processes. Individuals were dependent upon social conditions and institutions for the development of their abilities. Certainly, the early Marx drew on this notion. This critique could thus be more sensitive to the restrictions and deformations of the capitalist social and economic system. Communicative theory does not, however, rehabilitate the expressivist critique, which it considers inadequate; rather it clarifies the ambiguities inherent in 19th century notions of mutual recognition, which fluctuated between a subject-centered model, used by expressivists, and an intersubjective notion of recognition. The latter incorporates both elements of self-determination and self-realization under the rubric of an expanded notion of communicative freedom. With this expansion of the concept of mutual understanding, critical theory is capable of addressing questions of both recognition and identity, as well as the pathologies of communicative action (such as “colonization”).14 Thus while Habermas employs a procedural approach to justice, one which seeks to illustrate the limits of a purely republican conception resting on homogenous community, he also incorporates elements of republicanism, such as its emphasis on popular sovereignty, into his theory of democracy. His analysis of the presuppositions of the moral point of view can also be the basis for a conception of democratic legitimacy which can include a more widespread democratic participation in political institutions, and for a widespread democratization of social life.15 Revising Strategic and Communicative Action Heath’s neglect of the hermeneutic roots of Habermas’s theory is more than an interpretive flaw; it is a central element in his revision of Habermas’s normative theory. Heath rejects many of the elements central to Habermas’s notion of mutual understanding, beginning with his analysis of the presuppositions of discourse. One of the central tenets of hermeneutics is the idea that understanding meaning never occurs in isolation but only against a background of other 14 As pointed out clearly in work of C. B. Macpherson and Charles Taylor. See C. B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) and Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Chapter 1. Also see Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). For Marx’s expressivism, see “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), pp. 72ff, 86ff, among many possible references, and “Excerpt-Notes of 1844,” in Selected Writings, p. 50ff. Of course Marx uses a labor theory of constitution which has other well known problems. 15 Habermas’s relation to Rousseau is discussed in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), especially Appendix 1, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure,” pp. 463–490. The concepts of communicative freedom, self-determination and self-realization are developed throughout Between Facts and Norms. I would emphasize these more radical elements more than some commentators and more than perhaps Habermas himself. Marketing Critical Theory 441 meanings. We can only make sense of meaning within the system of language as a whole. Habermas gives this mode of analysis a formalistic twist. He asks what conditions we have to accept to make sense of the idea of reaching understanding. Are there unavoidable conditions we must accept when we “perform, understand, or respond to a speech act”?16 This approach, which forms the core of universal pragmatics, is not identical to Kant’s analysis of the transcendental conditions of experience. Where the latter seeks the conditions of our possible experience of objects in the world, universal pragmatics begins with subjects who are members of a community who possess the interpretive knowhow to come to accord about elements of the world. Universal pragmatics then is a way of explicating or making explicit the interpretive achievements of participants in social life. These conditions help us to make sense of the practice of reaching understanding. What Habermas has in mind is a more formal version of what Heidegger and Gadamer mean by anticipatory understanding. We have to assume in advance that these elements are constitutive of a practice that could not function without them, anticipate that certain conditions can or ought to exist. In a similar manner, Habermas argues that his discourse ethics explicates the basic conditions of the moral point of view. These basic conditions include freedom of access, equal rights to participate, the truthfulness of participants, and the absence of coercion. Our moral norms are fair only if they are decided by the force of reasoning that all can accept. Heath is uncomfortable with Habermas’s modified transcendental argument—at least as it applies to morality. In his view, it does not provide a plausible account of the reason subjects would engage in communicative action. Heath rejects Habermas’s claim that basic norms of equality, freedom, and reciprocity are built into the structure of discourse itself. Speech acts, he argues, do not generate any “extra discursive” commitment (p. 307). We cannot, he contends, draw any normative implications form the presuppositions of mutual understanding. Habermas argues that mutual accountability requires that participants be able when required to provide justifications of the norms they hold valid with reasons that can be intersubjectively accepted. Heath raises an objection to this claim based on the status of imperatives, such as commands, exclamations, and the like (“Get me coffee” or “I hate broccoli”). Such imperatives only require that the single actor consider them valid. Their meaning is agent-relative not intersubjective. Yet even if this objection is true for a limited class of imperatives, this does not seem to undermine Habermas’s basic starting point. For the objection here only holds against one aspect of Habermas’s reconstruction of our moral know-how, not against the necessity of its starting point. Even common sense reflection indicates that any imperative can become a contested claim in the proper context. An employee may not think that an employer has a right to make him a glorified gofer, with good reasons, and turn the command into a contested claim. Such moral imperatives are not agent-relative. We still have to reconstruct our implicit knowledge of such norms using the model of moral discourse. Heath overextends this objection. He believes that it undercuts any notion of a reconstruction that starts from the assumption of mutual understanding. 16 On the Pragmatics of Communicative Action, p. 22. 442 Brian Caterino Norms entail no commitments to mutual accountability or discursive redemption since in their basic form they are agent-relative (pp. 47, 121ff). In contrast, Heath argues that rational choice theory provides a better account of why we enter into communicative action. He thinks we enter into communicative action for strictly pragmatic reasons. When we discover that instrumental action is either insufficient or not feasible, then “it seems reasonable to suppose that agents will enter into discourse just because normatively regulated interaction works better than strategic action” (p. 310). Discourse best fixes “the content of the normative system.” This argument recommends that we take up a communicative perspective because it is a more effective way to reach our goals. Adopting this perspective, however, would involve the participant in a type of performative contradiction. One cannot act strategically and communicatively at the same time. In order to engage in communicative action, an actor has to relinquish strategic or purposive aims. If a social actor retained the possibility of defecting in the background, as Heath seems to argue, then agreements would be untrustworthy. The only way that Heath’s proposal makes sense is if we view it as consistent with the analytic starting point of rational choice theory, and begin with the premise that individuals are at the start either purposive or strategic actors. Then we can decide at some point that consensual action is superior, and switch to another perspective. Of course the classic objection to this approach asks how we have developed the ability to employ a communicative perceptive and how we explain its development beginning from purposive or strategic action. Heath provides no adequate answer to this question, because we can only make sense of our social world to each other as members of an already existing community. The performative contradiction noted above though indicates that we are already in such a community if we are able to take up a communicative stance. He has to suppose the very capacity he wants to explain. Heath hopes to meet this objection by collapsing the strong distinction Habermas makes between strategic and communicative action. The strong distinction between facts and norms is unwarranted. All discourse is normative, but its normative features apply in the first instance to fact-oriented discourse (p. 85).17 17 Heath relies on the work of philosopher Robert Brandom to formulate an alternative. Brandom’s major work is Making it Explicit: Reasoning Representation and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); a shorter and more accessible version of his work is Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge: Harvard University press, 2001). Habermas reviews Brandom in “From Kant to Hegel: On Robert Brandom’s Pragmatic Philosophy of Language,” European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000), pp. 322–355. Brandom replies in the same issue. Like Habermas, Brandom looks to the accountability of knowledge as its central feature. Ordinary social activity that is relatively inexplicit must be capable of transformation into explicit claims about the world when questions arise. However Brandom, whom Heath follows, restricts accountability to facts or at least he reduces moral norms to facts. All forms of inquiry according to Brandom are normative. While it is beyond the scope of this review to give a full discussion of Brandom’s interesting proposal, it is fair to say the in the end Brandom’s attempt to make the world of fact normative leads him toward idealism. The basic problem with his work relevant to the review is the attempt to absorb norms into facts. Moral norms become rather moral facts. This line of argument has difficulty grasping the types of self-relations that Habermas claims are central for communicative action. Nor can it grasp all dimensions of interpretive access to the world. Marketing Critical Theory 443 He merges the world of morally regulated actions to a variant of the objective world. Norms are facts that can be true or false. Heath thus defines the terms of the critical theory–game theory encounter, not as distinctive theories of the rationality of action but as competing conceptions of rational choice (p. 2). Critical theory simply takes a broader interpretation of rational choices to include communicative actions. Heath argues that Habermas wrongly characterizes the nature of strategic action.18 For Heath, critical theory employs the model of a singular (atomistic) subject who has no connection with the interests of others. These conditions, according to Heath, only hold true for decision-making theories that construct models of the individual subject who decides upon a course of action in isolation. In contrast, game theory models of strategic action involve social action. Individuals respond to the choices of others and change their preferences based on the choices of others (pp. 47–51). Heath contends that Habermas does not take into account the social character of strategic action. Thus, he does not clarify the typological distinction between actions oriented to success and communicative action oriented to agreement. Heath argues that the only way to show the difference between types of action is to show that game theory models of action cannot generate the kind of obligations and commitments that Habermas attributes to communicative action. In doing so, however, he reformulates Habermas’s basic distinctions as the relation between non-social (instrumental) action and social (communicative) action. An action that has a natural outcome as its goal is a success oriented action. An action hat has another’s belief as its goal (and does not rely upon “natural” meaning) is an understanding oriented action … It is precisely the introduction of beliefs into the actor’s environment that introduces the distinction between these two orientations; since beliefs cannot be handled using the tools associated with nonsocial decision problems. (p. 80) This reformulation is problematic. Heath reads Habermas’s critique as a derivation of the expressivist critique of atomism. This is incorrect. As I indicated above, Habermas extends this critique with an updated conceptual framework. Habermas’s theory does not, as far as I can determine, consider strategic action to be non-social action. With Max Weber, Habermas considers social action to be any action in which actors are guided by the expectations of others. Not all social action is communicative action, however, only that activity in which “actors coordinate their action plans with one another by way of linguistic processes of reaching understanding”19 can be termed communicative. In contrast, strategic action is a type of social action in which actors seek to influence others to act in a certain way to further a desired goal. Strategically acting individuals understand the meanings of others such as their beliefs, their values, etc., but do not take their bearing from the question of the mutual understanding among participants. In strategic action, actors take account of the expectations of others; in communicative action, we are accountable to the expectations of others. “As soon as we take the role of a strategic actor we relinquish, not the social dimension of action, but some of the central dimensions of the role of the 18 19 A point also argued by Johnson. “Some Further Clarifications,” p. 326. 444 Brian Caterino participant engaged in an intersubjective process of reaching understanding with others.” In strategic action, Habermas argues, “this potential for communicative rationality remains unexploited, even where the interactions are linguistically mediated.”20 The careful reader is going to see the connection between this argumentative strategy and Heath’s criticism of Habermas’s speech act theory above. By making the basic form of normative action agent-relative, Heath argues that strategic action is a basic form of normative social action, along with communicative action. Heath also rejects Habermas model of social acquisition of capacities for individualization. He argues that norms can be better explained using a sociological model of the social learning of behavioral expectations. While Heath accepts the accountability model for the establishment of facts, he takes a sociological approach derived from Parsons. “Accountability structure of social norms is to be explained … by the mechanism that must be in place in order to ensure that agents acquire the correct fundamental choice position” (p. 151). Here language is not a medium of mutual understanding but a form of norm-governed action. Meaning is determined by its effects in transforming the status of obligations social actors hold (p. 310). While Heath argues that such commitments require that agents must subordinate their goals to norms, he does so in way that undercuts the very nature of the agents’ necessary capacities as participants. Heath defines accountability sociologically as the capacity to verbally justify actions and as the ability to be held to account for failure to comply with norms (pp. 151–152). This analysis is applied to collective decision problems. Individuals can defect, dissent, or deviate from collective expectations. The problems with this approach can be seen through a thought experiment. A social scientist approaches a culture and has to understand when subjects are carrying out an agreement and when they are not. In short, she has to know when they dissent or defect, and when they comply. Heath’s sociological perspective seems to take the standpoint of an observer, who can discern the meaning of these activities independent of the participants’ perspective. He can discern the social currency of a norm through observational analysis of socialization patterns. But how does the observer know what how to discern what is “dissent” vs. “deviance” from the observers perspective? Both entail non-compliance. In fact, there is no observer-neutral description of choice dispositions that can satisfy this requirement. In order to understand the difference between dissent and deviance the social inquirer must adopt a participant’s perspective. She must examine the reasons why an individual does or does not comply. The social inquirer must suppose that the participants have the capacity to take a position through reasons that can be validated. For even though we are all bought up within a social world, we are not simply cultural dopes socialized to accept the norms of our society. Participants are autonomous; they have the ability to independently judge and take a position on social norms. 20 Ibid. Marketing Critical Theory 445 Norms and Morality Heath employs a restricted reading of Habermas’s moral theory. He treats Habermas as a social contract theorist in the tradition of Rousseau and Kant (pp. 211ff; more generally on the contractualism of his project, see pp. 34, 104). Analogous to the problem of order, a theory of justice has to answer the question: how do individual interests fuse into a general interest or general will? Some of Habermas’s earlier formulations such as that found in Legitimation Crisis might suggest this reading, but it is inconsistent with his most recent work. Reading Habermas’s approach to morality as a strict deontological one, Heath rejects Habermas’s concern with ethical questions as insistent with his basic idea (pp. 236ff). Like many rational choice theorists who criticize the idea of popular sovereignty, Heath finds it difficult to see how general interests can be discerned under conditions of value plurality. Heath takes up a version of Thomas McCarthy’s objection to Habermas’s conception of justice.21 McCarthy contrasts Habermas’s attempt to find universal “generalizable interests” with Max Weber’s conception of essential value pluralism (warring gods). McCarthy argues that ultimate value commitment requires incommensurable orientations. The only plausible alternative is compromise. Where Habermas, however, thinks that compromise has to include the interests of the participants and by implication both their sense of justice and their self-respect, McCarthy argues that compromise can and must bypass the participants’ perspective and incorporate nonmoral elements. In a sense, McCarthy’s position implies, like Rousseau’s, that the only viable basis for generalizable interests would be a homogeneous community. Heath takes up McCarthy’s objection by arguing that in cases of value disagreement critical theory does not have to surrender to the clash of warring gods. It can “fall back” to a solution provided by bargaining theory (p. 243). While bargaining theory solutions do not assure agreement or establish socially binding norms, they do, in Heath’s view, narrow the scope of disagreement postulated by McCarthy. Thus, bargaining theory provides a guarantee that is lacking in Habermas’s theory: the guarantee that individuals can roughly agree about outcomes. Given this rough convergence, Heath argues, game theory can help to shape and structure the expectations of the participants such that they can “agree” that such strategically achieved balances are “fair” compromises. Through regularized expectations, choice problems come to be accepted as fair. Retranslating problems of political order into questions of choice solved by regularized behavioral expectations does not, however, address the questions raised by Weber’s challenge. For questions of distinctive value orientations are entwined with questions of individual and cultural identity and recognition. The latter are not resolved by stable outcomes, but by the creation of moral respect. Individuals and groups are harmed when the organization of power limits their communicative freedom to interpret the world and develop their unique powers. Without this power subjects are prone to communicative as well as political colonialization. Morality also draws on the power of recognition. Moral norms are part of the web of mutual understanding through which individuals are 21 Thomas McCarthy, “Practical Discourse: On the Relation of Morality to Politics,” in Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Critical Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 181–199. 446 Brian Caterino bound to each other. Morality like identity requires recognition of others as part of a common world. The issue that has to be addressed is one of discerning universal aspects of recognition that do not rely on homogenous values or community. Habermas draws upon the liberal social contract tradition, especially its procedural versions, but he also incorporates elements of republican political theory. Read though the Hegel–Humboldt–Mead position more than the expressivist one, this critique holds that the identity of moral subjects is be formed though mutual understanding and recognition. Moral theory does not begin from the fiction of a state of nature or from any type of analytical procedure that can derive political community from self-interested individuals. It proceeds holistically from already socialized individuals who are already members of an ethical community and who have a conflict over some aspect of the world. The social contract could not provide a satisfactory response to this challenge because an agreement motivated by interests can lead at best to an externally imposed social regulation of conduct but not to a binding, let alone a universalistic, conception of the common good … The members of a moral community are not trying to replace morality with a social regulation of behavior that is to everyone’s advantage.22 In his more recent formulations, Habermas distinguishes different types of the rationality of action, such as instrumental strategic and communicative action, through the orientations of action (success-oriented or oriented to mutual understanding), not as different forms of choice. This is significant in light of his more recent work that develops a three-part conception of practical reason. More in the spirit of Kant and Hegel, Habermas distinguishes between the pragmatic, the ethical, and the moral as three ways of answering the question: what should I do?23 Only the pragmatic is concerned with choice. Pragmatic action is a type of success-oriented action that comes into play in situations where we want to choose between courses of action in order to achieve a goal. Here we choose in the light of fixed purposes or by assessing ends in light of existing preferences.24 Ethical and moral practical reason requires forms of action oriented to mutual understanding. In the first case actions are concerned with questions of identity, that is, questions of who I am or what kind of person I want to be. (For example, someone might ask: should I become an academic an activist or can I combine elements into the person I want to be?) Such ethical considerations require self-interpretation. We take up our own life history through an interpretation that links our own descriptions of what we are to our strong evaluations of what we want to be, in the course of a life project. According to Habermas, this entails a process of hermeneutic self-clarification. The moral use of practical reason requires reference to a broader web of social relations in which we develop obligations to others. Conflicts of ideas and interests require us to 22 “A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Morality,” in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), p. 23. 23 Habermas, “On the Pragmatic, the Ethical and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason,” in Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (Cambridge: MIT Press), pp. 1–18. 24 “On the pragmatic,” pp. 2–3. Marketing Critical Theory 447 consider what kind of norms and maxims of action we can reasonably expect to oblige us to others and others to us as participants in common worlds. Unlike strategic actions, which may benefit all, questions of justice require a shift to the participants’ perspective. We do not try to influence others to do what we wish, or to reciprocally influence each other, but to come to an understanding with them about the right thing to do. Certainly the conditions of modernity, most notably the breakdown of religious and metaphysical worldviews, assure that competing conceptions of the good arise. These conditions, however, are not identical to the conditions McCarthy or Weber cite. On the one hand, modern plurality assumes some version of equal freedom for all and the right not just to choice but also to individuality. On the other hand, it relativizes these value orientations. Under these conditions value orientations are reflexively understood. None carries an absolute certainty, yet they do belong to the same ethical universe. Moral questions arise as a new level of moral reflection on the conditions of modern plurality. Moral questions do not ask about the relative worth of differing conceptions of the good, but the conditions under which the vulnerable processes of mutual recognition that underlie value orientations can be protected. When there is no substantive agreement about the good, participants have access to another level of consideration, that is, consideration of the general conditions of communicative forms of life in general. Habermas argues that the line of analysis he derives from the Hegel–Humboldt–Mead nexus can ask just these questions. This approach illustrates that “communicative actions involve shared presuppositions and that communicative forms of life are interwoven with relations of reciprocal recognition and to this extent both have a normative content.”25 On this reading, moral consideration extends to persons not just as unique individuals but also as members of a community. This type of moral universalism takes into account the general conditions of identity formation and is sensitive to the question of difference. Because Habermas formulates the problem in this way, I do not think that his attempt to incorporate ethical and moral questions under the horizon of mutual understanding is inconsistent. Rather we can see that questions of recognition are central to both moral and ethical understating. Such questions, however, cannot be approached from the standpoint of rational choice games. They require reference to the integrity (and the vulnerability) of participants who form their identity though communicative forms of life. Rational Choice, Social Crisis and Diagnosis Heath argues that the system of functionalism employed by Habermas in Theory of Communicative Action fails as a method of diagnosing the problems of market society. For Heath, functionalism is a circular explanation that presumes order exists (through presumed functions) without showing how order is achieved. It does not explain problems of social disorganization in which aspects of social 25 “Genealogical Analysis,” p. 40. Axel Honneth has also developed a version of mutual recognition using primarily Mead and Hegel. See especially Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 448 Brian Caterino life are instrumentalized but not successfully integrated. Rational choice provides a more “scientific” foundation for analysis of political/economic problems. Marx, he argues, held a 19th century view of capitalism based on 19th macroeconomic analysis. After the marginalist revolution in the 20th century, however, micro foundational analysis such as rational choice provides “small scale concrete analysis of interaction” that is “rigorously developed and empirically verifiable.”26 Such concrete analysis he argues enhances the diagnostic power of a critical theory. It can illustrate some of the pathologies of strategic action, e.g. it shows the ways in which strategic action fails to solve problems of order. The explanatory diagnostic function, however, also goes hand in hand with a commitment to critique. Communicative action provides the basis for an emancipatory/utopian critique missing in rational choice theory. I do not think we can reject Heath’s clams for this employment of rational choice out of hand. However, his examples of fruitful research, such as William Riker’s critique of populism, seem ill chosen. Riker’s analysis is a prime example of what Ian Shapiro and Donald Green see as artificially problem-generated research.27 If one begins with the false assumption that democracy can be explained by strategic action, a methodological decision that excludes the participant’s perspective at the start, then no doubt one will get the conclusion that a populist version of democracy is impossible Heath narrows the scope of diagnosing social ills in contemporary society. In a correlate work, The Efficient Society, Heath argues that the market, that is, capitalist markets, is an unassailable foundation of social organization. Those who think that markets can be overthrown are wrongheaded. “There are,” according to Heath, “no viable alternatives.” This includes market socialism, which he views simply as capitalism under another name. In the post-socialist world, Heath sides with the new end-of-ideology thinkers. He even compares Habermas’s work to Francis Fukuyama’s, a claim I consider very dubious.28 Heath, in spite of his earlier claims, rejects the utopian project. We must do away with the totalizing spirit of the French Revolution and content ourselves with small reforms. Yet, these reforms are largely matters of game theoretical intuitional design. According to Heath: The most exciting proposals for social reform currently being generated all come from the field of economics known as “mechanical design.” Rather than simply trying to legislate desirable social outcomes, the goal of the mechanism designer is to develop a set of rules that will indirectly constrain the conduct of individuals in such a way that it will be in their interest to promote the desirable outcome …29 Here Heath takes leave of the participants’ perspective and adopts the standpoint of a detached scientist and social engineer who designs institutions 26 Heath, “Rational Choice as Critical Theory,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 22 (1996). See Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 28 Even a quick reading of Habermas’s essay “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” whatever its limits, would have differentiated him from contemporary end-of-ideology thinkers. In The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 53–112. 29 Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is as Close to Utopia as it Gets (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. 306. 27 Marketing Critical Theory 449 that are best for every one. This is not the standpoint of the critical theorist who must engage in mutual critique. Heath’s conception of change seems more like social engineering than critique. He does not refer to the questions of the freedom or the happiness of the participants. Habermas’s theory explores the connections between mutual understanding and social order. He also argues that his conception preserves a dimension of critical understanding that was not well clarified in earlier critical theory, including his own. Because he employs a notion of understanding social life that is rooted in the participation of actors in social life, he can develop the idea of mutual critique. In such a critique, the knowledge of the participant and that of the inquirer are (in principle) on the same level. The critic has no privileged position of knowledge prior to discourse with participants. The only critique of society then that is valid is one that can be accepted and taken up by the participants themselves. The diagnostic element of critical theory requires reference to our interpretive access to the world though mutual understanding. A diagnosis of the times is not just an explanation in the sense that Heath and rational choice theorists employ the term. It is more akin to an historical and narrative account—one that because of its narrative structure can only grasped from the standpoint of a participant. BRIAN CATERINO Rochester, NY