THESIS on Libertarianism

Habermas’ concept of Communicative Action – A Constructive Challenge to Classical Liberal and Libertarian Social Philosophy

Patrik Schumacher, London 2018

This paper is written from a libertarian perspective and presupposes the insights, facts and arguments that recommend the libertarian project. Rather than repeating these arguments here, this paper presents a constructive challenge to the conceptual foundations of libertarian theory.

The social philosophy of Jürgen Habermas’ exposes a gap in the basic categories of libertarian social philosophy that has led to a blind spot in its conception of modern society and its conditions of development. The gap is due to the narrowness of the libertarian conception of human action. Libertarian social philosophy, including Mises’ Human Action, as well as all social theory adhering to the rational choice paradigm, conceives of all human action in terms of individuals’ means-ends rationality. Individuals aim to maximize utility by choosing means to further purposes in accordance with their preferences.

This conception is blind to Habermas’ crucial distinction of communicative action versus instrumental action. Classical liberal and libertarian social philosophy only recognize what Habermas calls instrumental action which includes strategic action as sub-category, i.e. instrumental action in relation to other people rather than in relation to inanimate things. This blindsot in the basic typology of action types leads to a further blindspot, namely the failure to take account of discourse as necessary ingredient of societal progress and prosperity.

Communicative action is communication seeking mutual understanding, consensus and coordination within inherently shared pursuits. Communicative action is primary. Instrumental action is secondary, dependent on prior communicative action.

In communicative actions or interactions all motives except the motive of cooperatively seeking consensus about shared goals and appropriate means are suspended. Most everyday socialising and chatting, as well as more serious communicative exchanges between friends belong to this category. These non-strategic communications are crucial for maintaining a shared world view, for the sake everybody’s orientation in the world with respect to potential values, aspirations and goals, and with respect to everybody’s appraisal of available means and their effectiveness.

Without positing one's thinking sincerely, i.e. non-strategically, one obviously cannot test one's ideas and forgoes the required corrective input. The exposure to criticism engenders learning. Isolated individual thinking is very vulnerable to going astray. In this sense instrumental action depends on an ongoing stream of communicative interactions. This is our daily experience. Habermas calls this, following Husserl and Schutz, the life world.

Here is why instrumental and strategic action are dependent on communicative action in the life world: Instrumental action and strategic interaction, presuppose a stable sense of self, a sense of purpose and, crucially, knowledge of means-ends relations for ascertaining what would be in the individual’s interest. All this presupposes a social life with continuous, truthful, open, non-strategic communications with the shared goal of understanding the world and of establishing worthy ends. 

This insight in the primacy of communicative action with inherently shared goals takes nothing away from Hayek’s crucial insight that the market achieves the miracle of coordinating myriads of individual plans without presupposing shared goals. Market exchanges and contract negotiations are paradigm examples of strategic action.

Instrumental reason is parasitic on communicative reason. This insight is posited against the social contract model of society. Society cannot be built and sustained merely on the basis of individually expected and negotiated mutual advantages of cooperation for the sake of individuals' interests. The contract analogy leads us astray. Contract is an institution germane to market exchange. But it is a fallacy to model all human action and interaction on economic action and interactions in markets.

Destutt de Tracy in his 1817 ‘A Treatise On Political Economy’ writes:  “Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. It is never anything else … exchange is an admirable transaction, in which the two contracting parties always both gain, consequently society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages … ”

Similarly, Mises' "law of society formation" ("law of association") is positing the prosperity advantages of social cooperation as explanation of the emergence and growth of societies. This is compelling, if one interprets this as identifying the gains of cooperation as evolutionary attractor, but Mises goes wrong when he explains society via individuals' calculated, utility maximising appraisal of the advantages of social cooperation.  However, while social cooperation is often objectively in the interest of the co-operators, this does not imply that social cooperation is always strategic action, nor that a society based solely on strategic action would even be possible. No such society has ever existed.

Habermas objection is not merely that the social contract story is historically false  - it was admittedly a theoretical fiction -  but that it is a fallacious theoretical reconstruction that falters on a naive conception of the individual as cognitively self-sufficient agent with autonomously formed ends and the self-sufficient capacity for means-ends thinking.

The constitution, identity and stability of rational individual selves and their interests depends on prior societal socialisation as well as on continuous confirmation or correction in communicative interactions. To the extent that strategic interactions that regard the alter ego of the interaction merely as a means to ego’s ends take over more and more of the space of interactions the consensual base of genuinely shared and non-strategically ascertained goals and knowledge is being eroded, and requires to be replentished. In this sense strategic action is indeed parasitic on communicative action.

The primacy of communicative action is already established by reflecting the fact that all action requires knowledge and all knowledge requires genuine communicative action.

Knowledge is a collaborative rather than individual achievement, not least with respect to its dependence on the shared language resources that emerge in the largely non-strategic life world. Individual cognition is of course always presupposed, but not enough. Our individual cognitions go astray all too easily without our mutual weeding out of the noise. Consensus is a very good noise filter, although no guarantee against further corrections. Knowledge keeps progressing collectively. Of course the collective process is made up of individual contributions, but each is steered, corrected and confirmed by many other contributions in a social process, and these contributions must be non-strategic.

Any ambitious notion of knowledge is dependent on discourse. In particular, all scientific knowledge, including theoretical and reproducible empirical knowledge, is always the result of a discursive process of multiple cross-referencing authors. Belief becomes knowledge when it survives the discursive process of probing questions and criticisms.

Discourse is a special, ambitious form of communicative interaction, while strategic action is incompatible with and indeed undermines discourse.

Discourses consist in communicative interactions with an inherently open ended group of participants. We can consider these discourses to be public discourses conducted in what has been called the public sphere. Genuine discourse, like all genuine communicative interaction, presupposes a shared goal, at least the shared goal of reaching understanding.

The contribution of public discourses to societal evolution becomes evident since the advent of modernity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, where elaborate discourses and literatures emerged in the domains of political theory, political economy and juris prudence, as well as history and critical sociology.

Discourses are not markets, they operate via the communicative exchange of arguments or reasons rather than assets. Science, a particular type of discourse, is structured and guided by the distinction true vs false while markets are guided by the very different success criterion profitable vs unprofitable. These are strictly incommensurable action domains. Truth cannot be bought, nor can profit be argued into existence. Both interaction domains are irreducible and equally indispensable for the functioning and progress of modern society.

Societies, even societies without governments, cannot be equated with markets. Markets must be complemented by discourses.

The withering away of coercive political power does not imply the withering away of public political discourse. Critical debates concerned with the overall progress of society will continue even if there are no more political elections and majority decisions that now, unfortunately, seem to be the endgame of all public discourse. However, the impactful orienting function of discourses does not depend on this.

The implicitly self-effacing bent of libertarian political discourse, and its prospect of a society of pure market exchanges, without politics is unrealistic and unsustainable. Politics in the libertarian society continues as a public sphere of critical discourses concerned with the common weal.

The same applies to the discourse of juris prudence. This too will continue after the libertarian revolution. Once the legal provisions and processes, and the development of the legal system, have been wrested from the inefficient hands of state courts and parliaments, and transferred to the initiative of entrepreneurs competing in markets of law provision, scholarly legal discourse will be, more than ever, in demand. But again, scholarly discourse, although a bottom up, competitive process in its own way, is itself no market process.  Exchanges of property titles, money and monetary negotiations neither can nor should determine legality or justice, just as monetary exchanges neither can nor should determine scientific truth. Rather, both justice and truth are determined by the exchange of frank arguments in open discourses.

The domains of economy, science, and law have been differentiated and cannot be collapsed, as the Marxists tragically presumed, trying to sublate them into democratic politics, thereby annihilating them. Neither can they be collapsed into a mere market process.

Communicative action and its reflective use in critical, probing discourse, is an indispensable ingredient of the social-evolutionary processes that have propelled human progress. The progressive thrust of communicative action applies with particular force to public political discourse. It was the emergence of a truly public sphere via the print media  - books, magazines, pamphlets, newspapers -  that, together with the capitalist expansion of markets, engendered a new momentous stage of societal evolution, namely the arrival of modernity with its new level of rationality and with it’s much accelerated pace of progress. END