Legitimation Crisis by Jürgen Habermas

Legitimation Crisis Reviews

• 
  Thom Kaife

  I understood about 50-60% of this and from what I get, I really enjoyed. No critical engagement in this review because I spent 2200 words doing that in an essay.
• 
  Justin Evans

  This short book might be the worst written thing I've ever finished. That said, it's particularly interesting reading for our moment. Habermas wrote it to suggest what a critical theory would look like in a world no longer organized on strictly capitalist principles. As such, it is written against then prominent social scientific theories, including Luhmann's increasingly, bafflingly popular systems theory.
  But that organized capitalistic world went away shortly after this was first published; then capitalism did its thing again. Now, of course, the world of government intervention and so on is back. Where to from here?
  Habermas' approach is no longer tenable. It was tailored for a kind of organized capitalism which was still operated along class-war lines: capitalism had to be saved from revolution. Today, capitalism is not threatened by revolution (despite what Fox News would have you believe), but by its own dynamics and blind spots.
  What is interesting is the idea that economic crises are displaced onto politics when government steps in to the economy. It seems likely that this will happen again. The next time the economy tanks, governments will be thrown out of power. But whereas Habermas argued that this was rational (since the crisis, on his view, is the fault of government), today economic crises are not the fault of governments; political turmoil is an ideological response to economic problems. Habermas thought the world was entering a post-liberal-capitalist society. It wasn't true then and it isn't true now. Instead, we have completely immoral governments taking over from completely immoral businesses. Business is driven by profit, government is driven by electability, and we all suffer.
  Habermas' solution to all problems is to invoke communicative ethics. According to this, communication is possible only if there is rationality. Since communication is possible, rationality exists. It is also necessarily 'interested:' rationality leads to emancipation.
  Parts of this project seem salvageable (especially the link between reason and interest). But the foundations are too wobbly.
  A pretty good reading guide, only a few pages long, can be had at:
  
  
  http://www.arasite.org/hablc.htm
• 
  David M

  I confess to having great difficulty with Habermas. His encyclopedic grasp of different modes of thought is indeed impressive, but then there's this dearth of empirical content - sociology without society, historiography without history, political philosophy without politics, etc - that I find discombobulating. Also, he's just a very dull writer, no?
  
  That said, if you can steer through the thicket of jargon, this book does address some very pertinent issues. Against his mentors Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas seeks to make a qualified rehabilitation of the enlightenment legacy. He understands the risk of a totally administered society, but does not accept that this is the only possible outcome for modern, rational humanity.
  
  (At this level of course, it all still sounds extremely abstract. For a real world example of this peril, please see the recent history of the euro crisis. In particular I recommend
  And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future. )
  
  I think Habermas's project can be fruitfully compared to that of his late contemporary Ernest Gellner - another polymath philosopher and sociologist with an ambivalent attitude toward the enlightenment. Gellner wrote in a much livelier style, and was far more generous about illustrating his concepts with references to history and culture.
  
• 
  Richard Newton

  Probably worth more than 3 stars - but although I tried hard, I found this a rather tricky read. The translation did not help, which was quite literal and if you directly translate German into English it can come across as rather flat and stilted - which given it is such an expressive language means a lot is missed. It might be that I also do not have enough of a background in Habermas or related thinkers to get the most from this.
• 
  g

  Legitimation Crisis is about how the social democratic state fails to rectify the contradictions engendered by late capitalism. Rather, when the state tries to intervene to eliminate the inequalities of the system, economic problems merely become displaced and transform into political and socio-cultural difficulties, thereby damaging the legitimacy of the state. For instance, when the state offers tax cuts to capitalists in order to withstand the complexities of the global order, the public protests and argues that the state is not fair in its policies. In reality, by doing so the state may be trying to compensate for the welfare cuts that it provides to the ‘inactive proportion of the population’ (p. 66), yet it becomes more difficult for the state to make such claims intelligible, Habermas argues. Thus the inherently economic problems of the era become rendered into political problems that prompt complaints about the legitimacy of political order.
  
  However, modernity is an unfinished project, as Habermas would suggest, and Reason will be accommodated in the system only through such legitimacy crises, eventually pushing the public sphere, that is the life-world, to engage in debates and to arrive at consensus about how to manage the system. What Habermas observes in late capitalism is the colonization of narrative/traditional knowledge by scientific/bureaucratic rationalities, and this condition will be overcome only when the society takes its own management at hand. This colonization should be reversed and the life-world should become more powerful than the system itself, Habermas asserts. Otherwise, the legitimation crisis of the political circle will develop into a motivation crisis in the internal worlds of its subjects, leading to further decay and unproductivity.
  
  To put it in simple terms, what Habermas proposes as a method to overhaul the contradictions of capitalism is an enlightened civil society, which will have internalized Reason, and eventually unveiled the truth, thus having access to the correct tools to manage the inadequacies of the system. This civil society will be constructed through the democratic efforts of the public, and therefore the final consensus will not suffer from legitimacy problems.
  
  However, in seeking to reveal capitalist ideology through Reason and to rid of the contradictions of the system, what Habermas suggests is to replace the state sponsored ideology by another mystification this time sponsored by an enlightened group of civil society members. Even though Habermas begins to tackle the status quo by approaching its problems as instigated by capitalism, he does not criticize capitalism per se, but rather looks for an alternative way to legitimize capitalist practices through engaging more people with the system, and through bringing their life-worlds closer to the capitalist system. While the state legitimizes its presence by formal democracy this new rule of law becomes a more ‘legitimate’ alternative as it has access to a wider variety of institutions and peoples, thus putting on a false front to sort out the problems that formal democracy did not resolve. This elitist method is not very different from formal democracy in its approach to capitalism.
  
  In addition, the class struggles and power relations within this group that participates in discussions remain completely disregarded in the book. The idea of a consensus and universal truth are very exclusive concepts in themselves, and they become even more select when the internal utterances of the group that is constructing the universal are not questioned. For instance, in the beginning of the book (p. 15) Habermas carefully delineates how society should be educated in order to fulfill the conditions for participating in debate: this proposition on its own discloses that taking part in the public sphere requires a certain manner of conditioning, and in places that lack this sort of prerequisites further prevents the dissolving of the debates within every sphere of society. Once again, the idea of public consensus translates as a bourgeoisie rule with different institutions to back it up. This is a very Eurocentric and exclusive manner of approaching the inherent contradictions of capitalism, and it deeply suffers from a lack of imagination on the part of the author. I concur with Lyotard’s opinion on Habermas: ‘the cause is good, but the argument is not’ (p.66).
  
• 
  Steven Peterson

  Jurgen Habermas' Legitimation Crisis explores crisis tendencies in late capitalism and the possible order that might follow. Crises themselves come about from unresolved problems that begin to raise questions about the nature and efficacy of the system. When people lose faith in the values undergirding a system, the regime in power and, perhaps, even the entire system itself comes to be at risk.
  
  The underlying engine of crisis is the economic system. He notes that "In liberal capitalism, crises appear in the form of unresolved economic steering problems" and ". . .crises become endemic because temporarily unresolved steering problems, which the process of economic growth produces at more or less regular intervals, as such endanger social integration." Economic crisis might occur when output declines and its distribution becomes increasingly unequal, so disproportionate that it raises questions about the fairness and viability of the system. In this way, the ideology supporting capitalism would come under question and cease generating loyalty from the people. If government capabilities are questioned too much by citizens, crisis develops, and people come to lose faith in the ideology supporting the system and the system's legitimacy in dividing up the pie so that all gain "fairly."
  
  People will not be actively involved in politics as long as their careers, family lives, and enjoyment of consuming material goods continue. Under such circumstances, they allow the capitalist economy and government to operate with rather little question. By providing an appropriate level of "goodies" to the people, the system renders the masses quiescent and allows the elite to remain in power. When questions arise as to whether the system is generating consumer goods at the proper rate, then the political disengagement may end and a legitimation crisis begins as people begin to doubt the validity of the current system.
  
  Habermas' ideal system would be based on dialogic communication and open discourse. The question here: If the current late capitalist system suffers a legitimation crisis and transformation of the system looms, how will new norms develop? Habermas answers: "Only communication ethics guarantees the generality of admissible norms and the autonomy of acting subjects solely through the discursive redeemability of the validity claims with which norms appear. That is, generality is guaranteed in that the only norms that may claim generality are those on which everyone affected agrees (or would agree) without constraint if they enter into (or were to enter into) a process of discursive will-formation."
  
  Citizens will test the validity claims of the various ideas and norms under debate. In the final analysis, "The validity claim of norms is grounded not in the irrational volitional acts of the contracting parties, but in the rationally motivated recognition of norms, which may be questioned at any time." And what determines which validity claim is best? Habermas contends that the better argument that emerges from a cooperatively engaged in dialogue should rule--if a consensus forms around this one possibility.
  
  This is a powerful work, whether or not one agree with the thesis. Habermas has faith in the ability of people to create the norms that will govern politics and society. Is he too optimistic? That is the key question that readers will have to grapple with.
  
• 
  Chelsea Szendi

  I came to this book with lots of prejudices about how to read Habermas, although this is my first real try. His communicative theory and public sphere etc. etc. have become part of the air breathed in graduate school programs, which means that lots of people toss about the word "Habermasian" and embrace their own caricatures of what that means (and, important for graduate students, why it's lacking/naive/wrong). So I had that monkey on my back, but I was mostly interested to read this book as a historian.
  
  Since Habermas was writing in the early 1970s, part of the implicit background for the kind of identity crises he notes in advanced capitalist nations is that of mass demonstrations and student unrest (although the only moment in which a glimmer of a real challenge appeared, for Habermas, was in "May 1968 in Paris"). I could feel his urge toward clear, structured communication (which, naturally, I was also seeking): none of those topsy-turvy textual layerings of Adorno... but also so few specifics. Habermas is trying to hammer out the outlines of a model (yeah, I know: that's what theory is), and trying to be so clear and careful, but without explicit clues to what specific circumstances he has in mind, he ends up being very vague at moments. I suppose this book is rather a slim volume, and to include examples and explications would quickly triple it.
  
  My reading coincided with desperate maneuvering by the Fed to save the US dollar and observers in Japan going batty over the outrageous strength of the yen. The public expectations for the state to intervene in these issues underlined Habermas' point about legitimacy in late capital ("organized capitalism") requiring state stewardship of the market. Of course, the counterpoint to those expectations is the lingering utopia of the free market that Polanyi discussed in the 1930s and still resonates in populist discourse in the United States.
  
  This phrase in particular came back to me when I put aside Habermas to glance at the newspaper:
  
  "No previous social formation lived so much in fear and expectation of a sudden system change, even though the idea of a temporally condensed transformation -- that is, of a revolutionary leap -- is oddly in contrast to the forms of motion of system crisis as a permanent crisis."(25)
• 
  Michael

  This is an exceptional book by an exceptional philosopher. Habermas presents a sweeping analysis of contemporary economic, political and social philosophy and their associated crises of legitimation. As western societies emerge from natural explanations for the legitimation of social strata and organization, the technocratic rationality that functioned as a liberating medium, in turn, finds itself unable to ground its own action or make reference to an other for its grounding. As a result, western social systems become mired in positivisms or decisionisms incapable of justifying their actions.
  
  This book is a joy to read, with Habermas's precise and complex thinking on full display.
• 
  Aaron Crofut

  I tried. Not worth the strain. For a guy best known for his communicative theory of society, the man sucks at communicating. Usually, when someone uses large and complex words exclusively, they are trying to hide weakness in thought behind a verbal smoke screen. Crises of legitimately occur, but they have little to do with the supposed difference between surplus value and use value. This book is a sad attempt to keep Marxist class theory alive well after Marx's theories have been refuted by time.
  
• 
  Zachary

  I've been told many times that Habermas is kind of a frustrating writer, but didn't entirely believe it until I waded into this volume. The object of his various ires is not always clear here, he does a less-than-stellar job of attributing theories and ideas and tracing their connections, and I'm still not 100% convinced I understand the main problem that he's addressing in this book. Still, though, the moments of clarity that are on display here are quite interesting, and when he does form a meaningful connection it really does mean something and adds a lot to the developments that he's arguing about. Some of this, of course, is surely my own ignorance of some of the theories and theorists that he's dealing with. I can say, though, that in the end I found a lot here to be interesting and, I hope, useful. Habermas may not be clear, and he may be frustrating, but he is also interesting, and sometime's that's enough.
• 
  Adrian Fanaca

  A must read for anyone who is a fan of Habermas. I did not read many Habermas books in my life, actually this is the first book I read from the famous German philosopher. I recall him teaching us in this book about the various types of crises: system crisis or identity crissi, legitimation crisis, motivational crisis, rationality crisis, and the economic crisis. I enjoyed this book very much as it explains how a crisis leads to another. The solution is that we need a big restart in the political administration and economic model, you need a new tradition for legitmation, you need a political system that give total autonomy to the new traditions of legitimacy.
• 
  Aaron

  Most useless book I've read all year. I not only couldn't understand most of Habermas's arguments, I couldn't understand why I should make the effort. I only read this because it's short and I've had it for years, and even then I nearly gave up.
• 
  Donald

  I read this because of its relevance to Wolfgang Streeck's recent writings on crisis theory. The book is almost a forensic explanation of what we mean by a crisis. The Habermasian stuff about his overall worldview was less interesting to me than the core idea of a legitimation crisis, but I see why he had to defend the various components.
• 
  Gabriel

  I did my college thesis on this, in German, so I bet I'd get a little more out of it if I read it in English, but it was very interesting nonetheless.
  It is fascinating to think about it in terms of the current American administration.
• 
  Steve Cucharo

  If you're interested in the subject matter, I'd suggest reading a paper about this book rather than reading the book itself. Nancy Fraser has written plenty about it and she makes it pretty digestible. Habermas just can't write.
• 
  babak haghighi

  read it carefully,so useful and so brilliant
• 
  Adam

  No