Legitimation Crisis by Jürgen Habermas

Author:Jürgen Habermas [Habermas, Jürgen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-10-08T04:00:00+00:00

Only bourgeois art, which has become autonomous in the face of demands for employment extrinsic to art,7 has taken up positions on behalf of the victims of bourgeois rationalization. Bourgeois art has become the refuge for a satisfaction, even if only virtual, of those needs that have become, as it were, illegal in the material life-process of bourgeois society. I refer here to the desire for a mimetic relation with nature; the need for living together in solidarity outside the group egoism of the immediate family; the longing for the happiness of a communicative experience exempt from imperatives of purposive rationality and giving scope to imagination as well as spontaneity. Bourgeois art, unlike privatized religion, scientistic philosophy, and strategic-utilitarian morality, did not take on tasks in the economic and political systems. Instead it collected residual needs that could find no satisfaction within the “system of needs.” Thus, along with moral universalism, art and aesthetics (from Schiller to Marcuse) are explosive ingredients built into the bourgeois ideology.8

I would like to divide into four steps the proof for the assertion that the socio-cultural system will not be able, in the long run, to reproduce the privatistic syndrome necessary for the continued existence of the system. I would like to make plausible (a) that the remains of pre-bourgeois traditions, in which civil and farnilial-vocational privatisin are embedded, are being non-renewably dismantled; and (b) that core components of bourgeois ideology, such as possessive individualism and achievement orientation, are being undermined by changes in the social structure. I would then like to show (c) that the, as it were, denuded normative structures, that is, residues of world-views in bourgeois culture—which I find in communicative morality on the one hand and in the tendencies to a post-auratic art on the other—allow no functional equivalents for the destroyed motivational patterns of privatism. Finally, it must be shown (d) that the structures of bourgeois culture, stripped of their traditionalist padding and deprived of their privatistic core, are nonetheless still relevant for motive-formation, and are not simply being pushed to one side as a façade. Motivations important for continued existence can in no way be produced entirely independently of these enfeebled, or only limitedly effective, cultural traditions. Naturally, my goal in this connection too is merely to collect arguments and indicators for future empirical testing. I shall restrict myself to a few very general catchwords.

a) The components of traditional world-views, which represented the context of and the supplement to bourgeois ideologies, were softened and increasingly dissolved in the course of capitalist development. This was due to their incompatibility with generalized social-structural forces of the economic and administrative systems, on the one hand, and with the cognitive attitudes proceeding from the system of science on the other. Social-structural discrepancies are a matter of problematic consequences of the expansion of areas of strategic-utilitarian action. Since Max Weber these tendencies have been examined from the point of view of the rationalization of areas of life once regulated by tradition.9 The advanced-capitalist development

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