Ashenden - On Violence in Habermas's Philosophy of Language

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Samantha AshendenOn violence in Habermas's philosophy of language

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DOI: 10.1177/1474885113499146

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E J P TArticle

On violence in Habermas’sphilosophy of language

Samantha AshendenBirkbeck College, London, UK

Abstract

Habermas does not rule out the possibility of violence in language. In fact his account

explicitly licenses a broad conception of violence as ‘systematically distorted commu-

nication’. Yet he does rule out the possibility that language simultaneously imposes as it

discloses. That is, his argument precludes the possibility of recognizing that there is an

antinomy at the heart of language and philosophical reason. This occlusion of the sim-

ultaneously world-disclosing and world-imposing character of language feeds and sus-

tains Habermas’s legal and political arguments, where he states that in order to achieve

consensus rational deliberation must eliminate force. In this paper, I claim that this

argument operates through a manoeuvre that leaves Habermas’s position curiously

blind to its own predicament. To explain why, I turn to Kant’s treatment of the problem

of evil in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Here, as in the Western philo-

sophical tradition more generally, evil has no separate existence: it is folded back into

Kant’s philosophical scheme. Arendt notes that as soon as Kant identifies the problem

of evil he rationalizes it into comprehensible motives. I will show how, through a move

that is structurally similar to Kant’s rationalization of evil, Habermas rationalizes and

attempts to eliminate violence from his consideration of law and language. In

Habermas’s work, law and language appear as ciphers for reason. The case to be

made here is that Habermas’s inability to recognize the paradoxical character of lan-

guage and reason makes his work blind to the violence in which it is unavoidably

implicated.

Keywords

evil, Habermas, Kant, philosophy of language, proceduralism, violence

Several scholars have noted that peace is a recent invention, some 200 years old,and that Kant is its pre-eminent philosopher.1 We can place Habermas in a directline of descent from Kant: both share an assumption of original (and ideal future)harmony in which violence and evil is derivative. For Kant, as for Habermas,

Corresponding author:

Samantha Ashenden, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX, UK.

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peace or consensus has chronological and ontological priority over violence. Wecan see this in Kant’s providentialism in Perpetual Peace, and in his wholly deriva-tive account of evil as the result of the arbitrariness of Willkur in Religion Withinthe Boundaries of Mere Reason.2 It is evident in Habermas’s philosophy of languagein which systematically distorted communication is secondary and derivative froma horizon of communicative consensus, in his sociological account of the way inwhich the system separates from the lifeworld, and in his account of the futurepossibility of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, reflecting on Kant’s Perpetual Peace,Habermas explicitly comments on the need to reformulate Kant’s idea in thelight of the ‘contemporary global situation’, re-conceiving peace as a process tobe achieved by properly distinguishing politics, law and morality in a way that canassist a ‘cosmopolitan transformation of the state of nature among states into alegal order.’3 For both writers, peace has chronological and ontological priority,and war and violence are conceived as privation or lack.

Kant and Habermas can thus be counterpoised sharply to those political the-orists, such as Hobbes and Schmitt, whose work begins from the assumption ofprimordial violence and whose arguments tend to issue in political realism and inromanticism.4 But Habermas’s work can also be contrasted with the work of his-torical sociologists who recognize an important role for violence not only in creat-ing but also in sustaining the conditions for politics.5 For Habermas, despite hissociological sensitivity to the conditions necessary for the formation of states,violence is ultimately a failure of politics, not a mode of its instantiation. Myaim in this paper is to examine the impact of this orientation to harmony, andthe erasure of violence it entails, in the work of Habermas. This is crucial because,as the leading critical theorist of his generation, Habermas has inspired extensivework in legal and political theory, international relations and related disciplines.It is his work that many claim holds out the strongest possibility both of enligh-tened social criticism and of the re-orientation of world politics in more peaceabledirections.

This paper emerges from a longstanding unease with Habermas’s work that hisrecent writings on constitutionalism and international law have only rekindled.This unease might be specified in a preliminary manner in the following way.Habermas has made a serious and sustained attempt to de-transcendentalizesocial criticism: in the modern world, and particularly after Kant, he maintains,there is no room for metaphysics.6 I am sympathetic to this: contemporaryattempts to secure metaphysical justifications or ontological grounds for argumentsseem to me to exceed what we can legitimately claim to comprehend, resulting indogmatic and messianic moments that push social criticism back through the doorof religion. And yet insofar as Habermas’s post-metaphysical move is successful,7

this refusal of metaphysics and ontology leaves us with bare proceduralism at thelevel of justification. The argument I want to advance here is that if we acceptHabermas’s own arguments about the post-metaphysical, purely procedural statusof communicative rationality, then his work faces the same jeopardy as Kant’s inrelation to evil. Kant’s attempt to discern a purely procedural, and thus universal,account of moral reasoning is designed to produce a criterion for autonomy as the

428 European Journal of Political Theory 13(4)



subject giving itself its own law. But this purely procedural argument is capable ofinversion, so that Kant himself notes the nightmare scenario of the subject willingradical evil.8 My aim in this paper is not to suggest that Habermas is in sometotalizing sense wrong, any more than Kant can sensibly be considered to havebeen wrong in toto. Rather, it is to elucidate the predicament that Habermas’swork reveals as ‘our’ predicament. The case I want to make is that Habermas’semphasis on purely procedural law and deliberative democracy, whilst it may looklike the only way adequately to respond to pluralism and the end of metaphysicsand religion as strategies of justification, in fact has its own dark side: Habermas’sproceduralism opens itself to problems of its possible perversion, without over-coming problems of political foundationalism.

In order to pursue this argument the paper first situates Habermas’s work indebates about violence, showing that whilst he conceives peace as prior to violencehe also, curiously, construes violence as potentially all-pervasive. Section twoexamines Habermas’s attempt to separate power from violence in order toground the legitimacy of law in the possibility of communicatively achieved con-sensus as qualitatively distinct from coercion. In order to do this, he argues for aradical separation of world-disclosing and problem-solving uses of language; adistinction that I argue cannot be sustained. Building on this discussion, sectionthree develops some reflections on the legal and political ramifications ofHabermas’s account of language specifically in relation to the attempt to separateforce and rational agreement. I turn to Kant to argue that purely proceduralargument is unable to guard against its own inversion, with potentially perverseeffects, before tracing the effects of this proceduralism in Habermas’s depoliticizingof political language. The argument advanced is that Habermas provides a purifiedaccount of legitimate political power that depoliticizes political conflicts, severelyconstrains the role of civil disobedience, and leaves us unarmed in the face of non-consensus. Finally, the paper reflects upon the ambivalences in Habermas’s ownrendering of contemporary problems in order to question the sustainability of hispurely procedural approach.

1. Habermas on violence

At first glance one of the most notable features of Habermas’s work is the absencewithin it of explicit and sustained discussion of violence; this is, as O’Neill notes,odd in a ‘critical theory’.9 In fact, Habermas has a maximal conception of violenceconceived as ‘systematically distorted communication’;10 however, this is predi-cated on a logically prior notion of consensus against which distortion might bemeasured, so that violence is understood as derivative. That is, the idea of rationalharmony, the possibility of a rationally achieved consensus, is for Habermas logic-ally and chronologically prior to violence, and at the same time guides his idea(l) ofcommunicative rationality as a future-oriented rationality potential.

We can clarify the simultaneously extensive but secondary character of the con-ception of violence in Habermas’s thinking by referring to other recent discussionsof violence. One key distinction is between those who favour a restrictive definition

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of violence as physical harm and those who wish to expand the concept to includesymbolic and structural dimensions. The OED offers a parsimonious conception ofviolence centred on physical harm: ‘The exercise of physical force so as to causeinjury or damage to a person, property, etc.; physically violent behaviour or treat-ment . . . . LAW. The unlawful exercise of physical force . . . .’11 This restrictive def-inition is favoured by writers such as John Keane and Shane O’Neill,12 both ofwhom emphasize the importance of limiting the concept of violence to somethinglike physical force on the grounds that otherwise it is apt to become so broad as tolose all critical purchase. At the other end of the spectrum are those who emphasizethe symbolic and structural character of much violence, including amongst othersBourdieu, Butler, Galtung, Harris, Lukes, and Zizek.13 This latter grouping can inturn be subdivided: on one hand are those such as Galtung, Bourdieu, and Lukes,for example, for whom ‘violence is present when human beings are being influencedso that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential real-ization’;14 on the other hand are those like Butler and Zizek who emphasise the‘normative’ or ‘structural violence’ that they claim is bound up with language.Zizek in particular alights upon Hegel’s account of the violence involved insymbolization:

Language simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismem-

bers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autono-

mous. It inserts the thing into a field of meaning which is ultimately external to it.15

This kind of violence is the violence of the attempt to name all that Adorno refersto in his discussion of the identitarian logic of instrumental reason: for Adorno theconcept does not exhaust the thing conceived, there is a remainder that indicatesthe untruth of identity.16 Similarly, Butler points to the existence of ‘normativeviolence’, violence to be found at the heart of language insofar as language forciblyenacts classification. This violence of classification, she suggests, simultaneouslyenables the more readily recognized violence of physical force, and erases thisfrom view by rendering it normative.17

We can use this distinction between physical violence on one hand and symbolicand structural violence on the other to begin to account for the understanding ofviolence that runs through Habermas’s work. Habermas’s conception of violence isof the broad, structural variety, but it is also cast in terms of a criticism of socialconditions that prevent the full realization of human life. It does not coincide withthe broad, structural conception of violence mobilized by Butler and Zizek,amongst others, precisely insofar as Habermas does not recognize the force ofthe post-structural argument that language imposes as it discloses. It is this struc-tural but derivative or secondary account of violence that enables Habermas tostand as a successor to Kant specifically as a philosopher of peace. This runsthrough his social theory and his philosophy of language, allowing him to conceiveof modern societies as pacified internal orders and of language as a medium ofpotentially unconditioned communication.




In his sociological work, Habermas gives an account of the modern state as theresult of processes of differentiation and rationalization. Specifically, he argues thatthrough rationalization the state and economy separate from lifeworld contexts ofcommunicative interaction and become instrumentally ordered systems of commu-nication organized through money and power.18 In this, pace Weber, he describesthe modern state as a rationalized administrative structure that is characterized byits claim to a monopoly of the legitimate use of force, and, pace Parsons andLuhmann, its codification through power as an instrumental, ‘delinguistified’medium of communication. Thus, Habermas’s sociology of the modern state atfirst sight appears to chime with those historical and political sociologists who haveconceptualized the state as an organization claiming a monopoly on the legitimateuse of violence, and with organized power as its regular means of operation.19 ButHabermas’s work does little to foreground the role of violence in state formationand functioning. Rather, he places emphasis on endogenous change producedthrough the development of more complex divisions of labour and rationalizedcommunication systems. 20 Within this, administratively organized coercion has apositive, progressive role in maintaining complex systems: the development ofadministrative power in the modern state is, according to Habermas, necessaryto system complexity.

Nonetheless, Habermas recognizes that the potential for what we might callsymbolic violence is an immanent aspect of the operation of administrativepower. The second volume of The Theory of Communicative Action in fact dem-onstrates a preoccupation with such violence understood in terms of administrativemis-descriptions of lifeworld practice; this is summed up in his thesis of the ‘col-onization of the lifeworld’.21 Habermas, following Weber, calls administrativepower Gewalt; however, unlike Weber Habermas counterpoises administra-tive power or use of force with Macht, conceived as a distinct form of communi-cative power that he suggests is ‘jurisgenerative’ and which emanates fromlifeworld contexts of communicative action. Here Habermas uses Arendt’s charac-terization of the distinction between Macht and Gewalt as a way of distinguishingcommunicative power on one hand, and instrumentally conceived and enactedadministrative power on the other.

Arendt divides power and violence so that they are conceptual opposites:‘power and violence are opposites: where one rules absolutely, the other isabsent’.22 According to Arendt, violence is mute instrumentality, whereaspower is established when people come together to enact the political.Habermas uses exactly this division to designate the difference between com-municative and administrative power. Macht, on Habermas’s reading, is ‘jur-isgenerative’, and to be contrasted sharply with Gewalt. Habermas recognisesthat the legitimate force of administrative power signified by the term Gewalt ispart of politics, but this is read as the administrative ordering of the statemachine, as opposed to the communicative power of the people actingtogether.23 Habermas claims that this distinction enables him to separate thecommunicatively generated power of discursive consensus from any hint of

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violence or coercion. In this model violence is external to, and a failure of,politics considered as the practical activity of people coming to agreements inlanguage.

For Habermas therefore, violence is a derivative category. This is so in twosenses: it is derivative in a chronological sense, in that the state and its adminis-trative systems are separated from their original lifeworld contexts through a pro-cess of societal evolution, where the lifeworld is conceived by Habermas asprimarily a context of shared meaning and interaction rather than power; and itis derivative in a conceptual sense, insofar as rational consensus is the horizon ofintelligibility of communication, and symbolic violence conceived as ‘systematicallydistorted communication’ figures as a parasitic aberration from this.24 ForHabermas violence and language are thus in principle antithetical; language canbe used violently, but only as ‘distorted communication’. Rational argumentation,the potential for which makes sense of our language use as such, can be described in‘purely formal terms’: it ‘excludes all force. . .except the force of the better argu-ment’.25 To understand how Habermas conceives a moment of ‘jurisgenesis’ in apower that is separate from force via the ‘unforced force’ of argument and toexamine the impact of this on his account of politics, it is necessary to examinethe conceptual distinction he makes between world-disclosing and problem-solvinguses of language. This is the task of the next section.

2. Distinguishing coercion and consensus: Habermas’sseparation of world-disclosing and problem-solving usesof language

The idea of the ‘unforced force’ of argument rests upon a model of language asproblem-solving, where this is normalized via the assumptions of speech act theory.Habermas takes up JL Austin’s account of the felicity conditions of speech andbuilds on this in giving an account of language in its problem-solving mode asstable and transparent, with clear contextual parameters.26 This has a profoundeffect upon Habermas’s political and legal discussion, as we will see in section three.In particular, the separation of the language of argumentation (‘philosophical’ or‘problem-solving’ language) from other forms (ones apparently less transparent),whilst essential in enabling the Macht/Gewalt distinction to stand, in turn providesthe ground for a peaceful politics from which violence is excluded.

It is well known that Habermas uses ordinary language philosophy to argue forthe primacy of the communicative use of language. This argument suggests thatfundamental to language is the attempt to reach understanding, and that other usesof language are derivative of and parasitic upon this basic use.27 While a compre-hensive account of Habermas’s critical appropriation of ordinary languagephilosophy is beyond the scope of this paper,28 this section builds upon somewell-established criticisms of Habermas’s use of the philosophy of language inorder to open up the peculiar effects of this on his politics. In particular, this sectionexamines the distinction between ‘problem-solving’ and ‘world-disclosing’ uses oflanguage that underpins Habermas’s conception of language as a transparent




vehicle for communication separate from force. The aim is to bring into questionhow Habermas thinks it is that we can know what constitutes a ‘problem’ to besolved within ‘problem-solving’ uses of language, and to assess his suggestion thatwe can thoroughly separate the languages of religion, science and art. I will suggestthat Habermas presupposes that we can discern the character of political and otherproblems in a neutral manner, when this is far from obvious.

We can begin by noting how Habermas’s privileging of communicative,problem-solving language underpins his discussion of Derrida in ThePhilosophical Discourse of Modernity. In this context Habermas asserts thatDerrida is engaged in ‘levelling the genre distinction between philosophy and lit-erature’ such that he ‘dulls the sword of the critique of reason itself’.29 Against thisDerrida states that he makes no such levelling, but equally points out that phil-osophy uses natural language and as such is more opaque than it would like to be,and than it appears to itself. Philosophy has ‘practiced a disavowal in relation to itsown language’;30 there is and can be no firm and final genre distinction. My pointin focusing on this debate is to clarify the normalizing features of Habermas’sphilosophy of language, a step that is necessary if we are to examine his under-standing of the relationship between violence and politics.

Habermas accepts speech act theory’s reliance on standards of stability andnormality of context in which a performative statement occurs, what Austincalled the ‘felicity conditions’ of speech.31 Derrida radically calls into questionthis basic distinction between ‘felicitous’ and ‘infelicitous’ conditions by pointingout that the context(s) of an utterance can never be fully and finally stabilized. Heobserves that Austin’s analysis requires the idea that a context can be ‘exhaustivelydetermined’ so that ‘no residue [reste] escapes the present totalization.’ 32 As we willsee, this dependence on exhaustively determined context also characterisesHabermas’s way of proceeding. We can demonstrate this by developingDerrida’s line of questioning, applying his insight to Habermas’s texts.

Habermas states that in Derrida’s hands, ‘language as such converges with lit-erature or indeed with ‘‘writing’’. This aestheticizing of language, which is purchasedwith the twofold denial of the proper senses of normal and poetic discourse, alsoexplains Derrida’s insensitivity to the tension-filled polarity between the poetic-world-disclosive function of language and its prosaic, innerworldly functions’.33

Moreover, ‘For Derrida, linguistically mediated processes within the world areembedded in a world constituting context that prejudices everything’.34 Derrida,on Habermas’s account, equates philosophy with literature and criticism.35

Against this purported levelling36 Habermas asserts a need for sharp distinctionsbetween philosophy and literature, logic and rhetoric, normal and abnormal usesof language. In asserting a clear distinction between poetic or literary language andphilosophical language, he argues that the former is ‘world generating’ or ‘worlddisclosing’ (something that requires the bracketing of illocutionary force) whereasthe latter is ‘problem-solving’.37 According to Habermas it is in problem-solvingmode that we acquire knowledge, form personal identities, undergo socializationand maintain social integration. The claim of a fundamental division betweenworld-disclosing and problem-solving uses of language is in turn tied to

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Habermas’s account of social evolution as a process of the progressive differenti-ation of rationality domains or value spheres.38 Following Kant and Weber,Habermas argues that in modern societies science, morality and law, and autono-mous art, form distinct domains and that their corresponding cultural systems ofaction produce problem-solving capacities with respect to science, law and moral-ity, and a specialization for world disclosure in art and literature.39 As such, argu-ments respectively concerning propositional truth, the rightness of norms, andaesthetic judgments take place in specialized argumentative forms as part ofexpert cultures. Aesthetic criticism and philosophy are then attributed the task ofmediating between expert cultures and the ‘everyday world’.40

In sum, Habermas’s account places law, morality and science on one side, andart, literature, and also religion, on the other.41 He writes of ‘specializing the lan-guage of philosophy and science for cognitive purposes’ so ‘that they are cleansedof everything metaphorical and merely rhetorical, and kept free of literary admix-tures.’42 In practice, although he recognizes that rhetorical elements are ineradic-able, he nonetheless argues that these elements recede: ‘[in] the specializedlanguages of science and technology, law and morality, economics, political sci-ence, . . . the rhetorical elements, which are by no means expunged, are tamed, as itwere, and enlisted for special purposes of problem-solving.’43 Here, whilst seemingto recognize the ineradicably rhetorical elements of science and philosophy,Habermas nonetheless claims that these moments are contained such that theyare no longer disruptive.44 It seems to me that there are at least two difficultieswith this attempt fundamentally to divide problem-solving and world-disclosinguses of language, both of which contribute to the erasure of violence fromHabermas’s thinking; one problem centres on the question of problem definitions,and one is focused on the idea of boundaries between spheres of validity.

First, the account of the ways in which rhetorical language is ‘tamed’ in pro-blem-solving uses of language noted immediately above might work, assuming wealready know and agree on the contours of the particular problem being addressed;it is less clear that it can be sustained in respect of problems whose definition iscontested. Thus whilst the distinction may be a useful way of thinking about, forexample, the differences between reading instructions on how to mend a washingmachine and reading a poem, I would still want to contest the idea that one canusefully draw a sharp analytical distinction between problem-solving and world-disclosing language in the manner Habermas suggests. To assert a category differ-ence between these two uses of language assumes that for science, law, politics, andso on, the difficult boundary issues are already resolved and problems to beaddressed extant. The first question then is: how do we know when we haveidentified and outlined a ‘problem’ sufficiently well to go about ‘solving’ it?What is an adequate or complete description of a problem? This may be exactlywhat is at stake in a political conflict. Think, for example, of contested distinctionsbetween the terms ‘freedom fighter’ and ‘terrorist’ found in many civil conflicts,45

or of the US Government’s insistence on use of the terms ‘enhanced interrogationtechniques’ or later, ‘abuse’, rather than ‘torture’, to describe the mis-treatment of




prisoners at Abu Ghraib.46 In politically charged contexts, neutral descriptiveterms are often unavailable.

Habermas is himself, to an extent, attentive to this. In ‘an interview on war andpeace’ he comments critically on the tendency of the Bush administration and itsallies ‘effacing important distinctions’ via the prosecution of a ‘War on Terror’, ‘asthough al-Qaeda were no different from the guerrilla campaigns of terrorist inde-pendence and resistance movements confined to specific territories’.47 This seems toreflect recognition that in politicized contexts, language inevitably has rhetoricalforce and cannot straightforwardly be pruned to carry the unforced force of reasononly. Yet, If one examines Habermas’s discussions of discourses of justification andapplication in Between Facts and Norms and Justification and Application one cansee that he relies upon an Austinian notion of the possibility of ‘standard situ-ations’ in which there can be a complete situation definition and a description of aproblem ‘whose relevant features have been described as completely as possible’,48

in order for a discourse of justification or application to take place.This goes to the heart of Habermas’s distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnor-

mal’ uses of language noted earlier. He identifies normal use of language as ‘normallinguistic utterances from which all complex, derivative, parasitic and deviant caseshave been filtered out.’49 But how are we to know in advance, in practical contexts,which are the ‘deviant cases’? This is a significant problem with respect to politicalconflicts but also with respect to science: indeed it is not clear on this model howscientific or political innovation is to take place; is science to be reduced to tech-nology and politics to be reduced to administration?50 On the other hand,Habermas goes on to qualify his discussion of ‘normal’ language use by statingthat ‘As long as language games are functioning and the preunderstanding consti-tutive of the lifeworld has not broken down, participants rightly count on worldconditions being what is understood in their world community as ‘‘normal.’’’51

Here it looks as though meaning rests to a substantial extent on prejudice, yetcan still be reliably stabilized without remainder.

Habermas has attempted to argue then, for an account of language that in onemode, its ‘problem-solving mode’, is neutral in respect of world descriptions: a puretechnique available for scientific communication. But he can only do this insofar ashe conceives philosophy, science and so on as working on already establishedproblems. Insofar as this is not the case, I venture that the problems broachedby politics, law and economics, are in important ways constituted by the manner oftheir description, and that rhetorical resources are often far from ‘tamed’ or con-tained in this. Thus the boundary between world-disclosure and problem-solving,between the capacity of language to disclose the world and to impose interpretiveschemata, is neither clear nor secure.

The second difficulty with Habermas’s account concerns the standing of differ-ent spheres of validity. He offers an evolutionary account of the development ofmodern differentiated societies through processes of rationalization. He argues thatup to ‘the threshold of modernity’52 mythological, religious and metaphysicalworldviews provided a totalizing unity that has subsequently broken down through

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rationalization. Habermas expresses this latter development in terms of a process ofdisenchantment or ‘linguistification of the sacred’,53 whereby totalizing ways ofthinking are displaced by procedural forms of rationality. Rationalization thusproduces the differentiation of religion (morality and law), science (knowledge)and art (aesthetics) such that each develops its own internal criteria of validity.54

In ‘Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter’ Habermas asserts that there is noneed for a philosophical justification of modern differentiated structures of ration-ality, that these just require description and analysis. He states: ‘Reason has splitinto three moments – modern science; positive law and posttraditional ethics;autonomous art and institutionalized art criticism – but philosophy had preciouslittle to do with this disjunction.’55 Habermas then asserts that the ‘sons and daugh-ters of modernity’ have learned to deal with these aspects of rationality – truth,justice, and taste - discretely rather than simultaneously. He goes on to say thatthese ‘trends toward compartmentalization, constituting as they do the hallmark ofmodernity, can do very well without philosophical justification’, although they dopose ‘problems of mediation’.56 This, according to Habermas, is where philosophycan take on the role of ‘interpreter on behalf of the lifeworld’, where it ‘might thenbe able to help set in motion the interplay between the cognitive-instrumental,moral-practical and aesthetic-expressive dimensions that has come to a standstilltoday, like a tangled mobile.’57

Habermas’s argument here seems to be that the divisions between scientificreasoning, law and ethics, and art and aesthetics, because they have developedthrough processes of social differentiation, need no justification. They are self-evident. But he then goes on to attach normative value to this differentiation asa progressive ‘evolution’ and adds substantive claims about these moments ofreason by tying them to specific contexts. This is the force behind his criticism ofthose, like Derrida, whom he accuses of regressing back behind the achievementsof modernity:

The unmediated transposition of specialized knowledge into the private and public

spheres of the everyday world can endanger the autonomy and independent logics of

the knowledge systems, on the one hand, and it can violate the integrity of lifeworld

contexts, on the other. A knowledge specialized in one validity claim, which, without

sticking to its specific context, bounces across the whole spectrum of validity, unsettles

the equilibrium of the lifeworld’s communicative infrastructure. Insufficiently complex

incursions of this sort lead to the aestheticizing, or the scientizing, or the moralizing of

particular domains of life.58

In this quotation one sees Habermas asserting the need for clear boundariesbetween science, law and morals, and art, where these boundaries, although theydo not themselves require justification since they are the very ‘hallmark of mod-ernity’, nonetheless do need policing lest ‘insufficiently complex incursions’ acrosstheir borders produce ‘disequilibria’ in the lifeworld.59 In short, Habermas’sassumption of an evolutionary schema enables him to bridge the factual develop-ment of differentiation and the normative evaluation of this as progressive and




requiring defence, while at the same time the felt need to police these boundarieshints at the strains in Habermas’s philosophical system.

Of course, recognition of the specificity of different kinds of judgement isimportant: aesthetic judgements are neither judgements of utility nor epistemo-logical arguments. As a model for communication about political, scientific andother problems, however, Habermas’s account of language as sharply dividedbetween problem-solving and world-disclosing uses is unsustainable insofar as itrecommends a model of communication in which language is stripped down in itstask within a specific domain only, with philosophy necessary to mediate its rela-tion to the lifeworld. Yet insofar as philosophy has to navigate three differentrealms for the lifeworld its language cannot be specified ahead of time and mustbe more porous than the distinction between world-disclosure and problem-solvingallows. Furthermore, if political theory and practice cannot generate worlds as wellas arguments, surely they cannot ‘convince’, but remain either impotent or sub-sumed to technical calculation. This becomes especially significant in respect of thelimits of Habermas’s capacity to recognize the possibility of the existence of genu-ine political disputes that may be incapable of rational resolution.

In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action Habermas’s specification ofthe rules of argumentation includes the injunction: ‘Different speakers may not usethe same expression with different meanings.’60 One might instead say that polit-ical theory and practice can only take place with the possibility of transformingexisting meanings; as James Tully puts the matter, emancipation implies using thesame words with different meanings.61 The assertion of a sharp division betweenworld-disclosing and problem-solving uses of language, and the injunction touphold boundaries between science, law and morality, and aesthetics, seems tohave the (unintended?) implication of removing all capacity for criticism, savefor the clarification of concepts, from theoretical knowledge and moral-practicalargument. For, inasmuch as Habermas’s conception of philosophical language isthat of a technical code or algorithm, this seems to foreclose the most eminentlypolitical of questions.

In the next section, I argue that the attempted sharp division between world-disclosure and problem-solving, and the purely procedural conception of commu-nication it promises, occludes the multi-valence of language. This occlusion is thebasis for Habermas’s legal and political arguments that rational discourse works toeliminate force. A purely procedural philosophical language is necessary to upholdthe distinction between Macht and Gewalt that articulates Habermas’s distinctiveaccount of the legitimacy of a political power separate from any trace of violence;however, this has the effect of eliminating from his account the possibility of prop-erly considering the role of force in politics.

3. Political language: Proceduralism and perversion

In Between Facts and Norms,62 Habermas argues that in order to deliver consensus,rational deliberation must eliminate force. While he recognizes both the role of

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conflict, bargaining and strategic action as inevitable aspects of political life, andthat the legal system can only demand that its addressees behave in a legalmanner,63 he is keen to stress that in modern societies legitimate legislation canonly be grounded in rationally achieved agreement.64 This underpins his argumentthat deliberative democratic mechanisms are capable of producing political deci-sions that are qualitatively different from, for example, those that result from bar-gaining over interests. As such, Habermas’s account of argumentation as a processof rational deliberation leading to consensus plays a key role in his normativetheory of democracy.

The idea that rational agreement eliminates force presents a distinctive andpurified account of political power. To see the implications of this, it is worthbriefly developing the comparison of Habermas with Weber mentioned earlier.In Weber’s classic definition the state is ‘a human community that (successfully)claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’.65

While Weber does not suggest that actual use of force is the modus operandi ofpolitical power, such force stands in reserve. So, for Weber even legitimate power isbound to violence and in this sense violence is structurally and ineliminably boundup with the state. One might even say that for Weber it is through the state thatviolence or its threat achieves regularized social form: violence is not eradicated bymechanisms of agreement; rather, it is routinized through legal and political means.As noted above, the German concept Gewalt denotes this, usually implying vio-lence but also suggesting power or legitimate authority. We have seen thatHabermas contrasts his position with Weber’s. He posits a political power sepa-rated from violence: communicative power (Macht), which can be discerned in thepotential for rational consensus contained in communicative action.66 Habermas’sposition, in positing a moment of communicative power beyond the entwinementof power and violence (Gewalt) in politics, rests on the possibility of a moment ofthe pure (unforced) force of rational consensus as the underlying, idealizing pre-supposition of communication.

Arendt, as Habermas notes, conceptualized power and violence as opposites,with power understood as a potential produced by humans acting publicly in con-cert.67 Habermas reconstructs this as an account of a common will producedthrough non-coercive communication, and by doing so opens a distinction betweenpower (Macht) and violence (Gewalt) that separates his account from Weber’s.68

At the same time, Habermas separates this aspect of Arendt’s account from herbroader conception of politics, claiming that her separation of labour, work, andaction produces an account of politics from which all strategic aspects are screenedout as violence.69 Instead, Habermas holds onto Arendt’s communicative conceptof power as key to engendering political power, to what he calls the ‘jurisgenesis’ ofpolitical power, but insists that strategic action is also part of the political.70 Thisenables him to develop a conception of political power fundamentally rooted in theidea of communicative action, but without counterpoising this to the necessarilyadministratively organized aspects of the modern state.

Habermas’s discussion of Arendt is brief but pivotal. It is on this basis that hebegins to mark out the differences between modern natural law theory, which he




claims aligns power and violence, and his own position that counterpoises powerand violence and aligns power with law. Habermas’s claim that communicativepower is ‘jurisgenerative’ is a claim to have overcome the problem of the arbitrari-ness of political foundations found within the natural law tradition.71 ForHabermas discourse and the possibility of rational consensus that is at its corestands in place of Arendt’s recognition of the need for some ‘higher law’; thismakes sense of his statement that:

the constitutional state has a twofold task: it must not only evenly divide and distrib-

ute political power but also strip such power of its violent substance by rationalizing

it. This legal rationalization of force must not be conceived as taming a quasi-natural

domination whose violent core is and always remains uncontrollably contingent. Rather,

law is supposed to dissolve this irrational substance, converting it into a ‘‘rule of law’’

in which alone the politically autonomous self-organization of the legal community

expresses itself.72

If we ask of this statement ‘where does law come from?’ the answer is from language,or at least from the form of communicative rationality advanced in discourse. Butwe should note that it is only by assuming a model of language in which orientationto agreement has priority over other language uses, and where rhetorical elementshave been ‘tamed’ to achieve a proceduralized consensus, that Habermas’s formu-lation stands. So we see that Habermas’s philosophy of language must do vital workhere in overcoming the problem of the arbitrariness of beginning. The idea(l) ofrational consensus as the inherent goal of communication provides an immanentnormative structure such that Habermas can claim to overcome the problem ofpolitical foundations. Violence and politics are thus counterpoised via an accountof argumentative language as a transparent vehicle for legitimation.

With this move Habermas eviscerates an important sense of the violence ofpolitics that is central to Weber’s case. Weber uses the term violence in its standardform, not as linguistic violence or force of argument, but as the warring conflictsbetween players whom the state subdues through law but also through arms ifnecessary. Its monopoly of the means of violence is literal, in the form of thearmy and police, as well as authority to pass laws. Habermas’s argument thatrational agreement grounds the legitimacy of laws obscures this sense of violenceas intrinsically bound up with the state; for Habermas violence seems to meansomething like doing violence to the truth, or wilfully mis-communicating or mis-representing. I suspect that Weber’s insight is more realistic and useful thanHabermas’s when thinking about politics and state formation and functioning.Rather than merely re-asserting a standard realist position against Habermas,however, I want to develop the implications of this argument further and to suggestthat the danger of Habermas’s insistence on the separation of violence and rationalagreement is, paradoxically, the possible perversion or corruption of his ownsystem.

At the outset I argued that rational deliberation can only be regarded as elim-inating force if one accepts Habermas’s claims that language can be a transparent

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vehicle for reason; that it can be used in ‘problem solving’ mode tout court and thatthe deliberative use of language can therefore effect rational resolutions to politicalproblems without residue. This idea of the transparency of language, of language ascapable of operating as a neutral cipher for political decisions, underpinsHabermas’s proceduralism. And yet this proceduralism contains a dark side.To examine this we can turn to Kant. To develop the parallel between Kant andHabermas, and so advance my critique, it will be useful to look at Kant’s similarattempt to produce a purely procedural form of argumentation and criterion forjudgement with respect to morality, in his account of the categorical imperative andin Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. The purpose of making thiscomparison is to indicate the presence of a problem that neither is able to resolve(or even recognize?) and which each thus leaves as a lacuna, for similar reasons thatare intrinsic to their approach.

Habermas notes that ‘Kantian philosophy marks the birth of a new mode ofjustification’.73 Although he concludes that the epistemological foundationalismand attempt at transcendental justification found in Kant can no longer holdsway, Habermas nonetheless maintains that there is in Kant’s work a ‘theory ofmodernity’, and he develops his own approach as a form of ‘linguisticKantianism’.74 That is, Kant effected a rejection of substantive rationality foundwithin metaphysical and religious worldviews, and fore-grounded proceduralrationality in relation to the domains of objective knowledge, moral-practicalinsight and aesthetic judgement.75 Habermas’s conception of modernization as aprocess whereby substantive ways of thinking are progressively displaced by pro-ceduralized rationality thus owes a direct debt to a de-transcendentalized Kantianargument. This is most illuminating regarding the arguments and shortcomingsI have been pursuing.

Kant’s categorical imperative aims to provide a formal and universal criterionfor moral judgement. It is centred on autonomy, on the idea of the freedom of thesubject to make its own law: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can atthe same time will that it should become a universal law.’76 The categorical impera-tive is ‘imperative’ because it is necessary; ‘categorical’ because it is without refer-ence to a purpose, concerned only with the form of an action (unlike conditionalimperatives). This formality grants its universality: Kant’s categorical imperative isgenerated as a purely procedural criterion for right and thus as a statement of themoral law. So from Kant we have an account of a procedural universal that pro-duces a criterion for autonomy as the subject giving itself its own law. As notedabove, Habermas de-transcendentalizes this and transforms it from a subject-centred model of reason to one centred on communication and inter-subjectivity.77

But he retains the emphasis on purely formal, procedural justification and this iswhat I want to bring into question here.

Let us continue with Kant for a moment. If the categorical imperative specifies aformal criterion for right action, his account of ‘radical evil’ is the inversion of this.Kant states that we do not consider a human being evil because he performsactions that are evil (contrary to law) but because such actions allow the inferenceof evil maxims in him. He is referring to the subjective ground of the exercise of




human freedom that is logically antecedent to every deed falling within the scope ofsenses. In other words, the source of evil is a maxim, a rule made by the will for theuse of its own freedom. This evil is ‘radical’ because it corrupts the ground of allmaxims, going to their root, and ‘evil’ because it is grounded in the subject’s cap-acity for freedom.78 In the structure of Kant’s argument, freedom of choice(Willkur) is necessary to the subject as a moral subject, and yet evil is its immanentpossibility and resides in human frailty, impurity or wickedness, in failure to makeduty the sufficient motivation for conduct. He comments that ‘we may presupposeevil as subjectively necessary in every human being, even the best.’79 Nonetheless heargues that it must be possible to overcome this evil, since ‘it is found in the humanbeing as acting freely’.80 He then refuses the idea of diabolical evil, saying that this‘should rather be named perversity of the heart’, and adding ‘An evil heart cancoexist with a will which in the abstract is good. Its origin is the frailty of humannature.’81

There are two things to note about Kant’s discussion. First, in its formalismthe account of radical evil is simply the inversion of the categorical imperative.The formalism of this argument is necessary to Kant’s attempt to sustain itsuniversality, and yet this formalism implies that the categorical imperativeand radical evil are symmetrical: as Lacan put it the categorical imperativeand the Sadean system are mirror images.82 Secondly, and as a result of thisformalism, Kant’s account of evil is derivative; evil is an error bound up withthe frailty of human nature and is therefore not a positive principle in itself. 83

Bernstein notes that Kant’s account of evil is thus ‘little more than a way ofdesignating the tendency (propensity) of human beings to disobey the morallaw’.84 This is the source of Arendt’s frustration with Kant, noted in theabstract to this paper: Arendt wants to use the term ‘radical evil’ to designatea special kind of evil that has ‘emerged in connection with a system in whichall men have become equally superfluous’ but she finds that Kant rationalizesevil as an error.85

We might compare Arendt’s complaint against Kant with Derrida’s observationon the way in which Austin regards infelicities as errors rather than as structuralfeatures of speech acts. Derrida comments:

Austin’s procedure...consists in recognizing that the possibility of the negative (in this

case of infelicities) is in fact a structural possibility, that failure is an essential risk of

the operations under consideration; then, in a move which is almost immediately

simultaneous, in the name of a kind of ideal regulation, it excludes that risk as acci-

dental, exterior, one which teaches us nothing about the linguistic phenomenon being

considered.86

Thus, according to Derrida, the ‘ordinary’ is marked by the exclusion of that whichis considered ‘parasitic’ or ‘abnormal’.87 Reflecting on the same limitation,Matustik observes that Kant’s account makes of evil a weakness, not a powerthat can be positively asserted. He states ‘Kant does not conceive anything unfor-givable’ adding that ‘If radical evil amounted to moral guilt then ethical

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community, democratic procedures, and just courts could replace Yom Kippur aswell as the Kyrie eleison or Buddhist meditations on nothingness.’88 There arecrucial similarities between these features of Kant’s argument and the dilemmasattending Habermas’s specification of a purely procedural discursive justification ofvalidity claims.

What does radical evil amount to in Habermas’s system, once Kant’s mono-logical and subject-centred reason is turned into the polyphony of communicativeinter-subjectivity (as one of my reviewers eloquently put the matter)? It is here thatthe demand for consensus haunts communicative reason and structuresHabermas’s arguments in a manner that makes them parallel Kant’s. Firstwe can note that Habermas’s insistence on a sharp distinction between problem-solving and world-disclosing language, an insistence that as we have seen is integralto the possibility of a purely procedural language of justification, effaces differ-ence in much the same way as Kant’s account of the subject of the morallaw effaces individuation. For Kant the subject requires freedom (Willkur) inorder to count as a subject capable of morality, though it is not in his individual,differentiated, choices that morality resides, but rather in his accession to or rec-ognition of the moral law. Similarly, though in Habermas’s system we find a pol-yphony of voices, the language of justification transcends difference such that thevoices in communication are, logically speaking, substitutable.89 Human pluralityis, at this moment, elided.

But there is a second, and perhaps more telling, parallel. Kant’s ‘radical evil’ canbe thought in Habermas’s scheme in terms of ‘systematically distorted communi-cation’, where this might, in a totalitarian context, be writ large. We can specify thisby noting that, despite modifying his previous commitment to a consensus theoryof truth and advocacy of a ‘pragmatic epistemological realism’,90 there is nothing inHabermas’s account of deliberative democracy that would necessarily act as abrake on a pernicious consensus concerning moral and legal norms. His assertionthat accounts of propositional truth and normative rightness are ‘analogous’ doesnot help because, as Habermas himself notes, ‘The concept of ‘‘normative right-ness’’ can be reduced without remainder to rational justification under ideal con-ditions. It lacks the ontological connotation of reference to things about which westate facts.’91 The limit situation implied by the potential totalization of systemat-ically distorted communication suggests that agreement cannot equal rightness, yetin discourse theory Habermas is explicit that nothing stands outside communica-tion. Others have noted that this leaves Habermas’s argument in a weak positionwhen it comes to grounding the rights needed to protect individual differences andfoster their expression.92 This would be a corruption of Habermas’s aims, but itremains an immanent possibility of his position and demonstrates the limits ofprocedural arguments concerning violence and evil.

Even disregarding the limit possibility of totally distorted communication, thereis a third parallel between Kant and Habermas. Significantly, Kant’s account of thecorruption of the will as a turning away from the moral law finds a strong echo inHabermas’s account of the limitations of political arguments that insist on the




virtues of politics understood as the achievement of a modus vivendi or pragmaticbargain rather than communicatively achieved consensus. Such bargains, fromHabermas’s viewpoint, look wanting in legitimacy in a manner that can be com-pared with Kant’s account of the frailty of human will and its failure to live up toor tendency to turn away from the moral law; pragmatic bargains (though theymay be the instantiation of peace understood as the absence of conflict) are failuresto realise consensus/harmony and as such are insufficient to ground a legitimatepolity.

We can take up the implications of these parallels between Kant and Habermasby turning directly to Habermas’s political arguments. We will do this first byexamining the ways in which his insistence on separating reason and rhetoricalforce depoliticizes political language, secondly reflecting on the limits of civil dis-obedience in his account, and thirdly noting Habermas’s own recent ambivalencetoward his strict proceduralism. This will take us back to the fundamental role of anotion of originary peace/consensus that for both theorists produces a blind spotconcerning violence.

The idea that one can separate reason and rhetorical force, world-disclosing andproblem-solving uses of language, is surely undesirable even if it could be achieved.It would produce a wholly ineffectual, depoliticized political language. This isapparent in Habermas’s description of terrorist violence as ‘systematically distortedcommunication’ in Philosophy in a Time of Terror.93 Here he is discussing what hecalls the ‘structural violence’ he believes we have become accustomed to. He cites‘unconscionable social inequality, degrading discrimination, pauperization, andmarginalization’94 as examples. A broad definition of violence is used here.Habermas goes on to explain such violence as follows:

conflicts arise from distortion in communication, from misunderstanding and incom-

prehension, from insincerity and deception. When the consequences of these conflicts

become painful enough, they land in court or at the therapist’s office. The spiral of

violence begins as a spiral of distorted communication that leads through the spiral of

uncontrolled reciprocal mistrust, to the breakdown of communication. If violence

thus begins with a distortion in communication, after it has erupted it is possible to

know what has gone wrong and what needs to be repaired.95

This passage is perhaps best read as a narrative of emergence, of the way violencein language (‘distorted communication’) can spiral into visceral violence. It revealsseveral important aspects of Habermas’s thinking. As already noted, violence isdefined very broadly here, and with several different senses, to the point that onemight think the concept begins to lose purchase. But, more tellingly, violence is alsomarked out as derivative, as parasitic on and secondary to communicative action.In the process, Habermas assumes first a unitary world of validity and secondlythat our primary world-orientation is not to hate (as e.g. Freud suggested) but tocommunicate. Habermas’s idea of communicative consensus provides a horizon ofharmony against which violence, evil and the like can be measured, yet in light of

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which they are defined as derivative, secondary, and thus capable of being over-come. Habermas’s theoretical scheme thus leaves us unarmed with respect to dis-agreements that cannot be resolved rationally. His observation that conflicts landin court or in the therapist’s office assumes in relation to the first case that theparties’ recognition of the court is not in question, and in relation to the secondcase that there exists positive willingness to engage in a therapeutic reconciliation.That is, a unitary world of validity, and the prospect of consensus, is presupposed.Similarly, appeal to the idea that over time intractable conflicts might succumb toreasoned deliberation and consensus,96 does not help to resolve problems in thehere and now, nor help to work out how to engender or even impose peace to thepoint where arguments might replace arms. 97

Recognizing the way in which an assumed horizon of harmony structuresHabermas’s thinking also helps explain his position on civil disobedience.Habermas limits legitimate civil disobedience to non-violent action;98 that is, forhim political violence can never be morally justified.99 Nonetheless, asked whetherterrorism should be distinguished from ordinary crime and other types of violence,Habermas responds ‘Yes and no. From a moral point of view, there is no excuse forterrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carriedout. Nothing justifies our ‘‘making allowance for’’ the murder or suffering of othersfor one’s own purposes.’100 However, he goes on to differentiate ‘political terror’and ‘ordinary crime’ during change of regimes, in which case ‘former terrorists’may ‘come to power and become well-regarded representatives of their country.’ Insuch cases Habermas suggests former terrorists may gain some retrospective legit-imation for their actions to ‘overcome a manifestly unjust situation.’101 So, whilepolitical violence can never, according to Habermas, be morally justified, heremains ambivalent about whether it may (retrospectively) be politically or legallyjustified. This suggests that Habermas’s account is not as pure as he would like, andthat we could productively pursue a different strategy here, emphasising the impur-ity of his concepts.

This is indeed the route recently taken by White and Farr, in an essay emphasis-ing the role of negativity in Habermas’s account.102 Referring to Habermas’s 1985essay on civil disobedience, they claim Habermas’s emphasis on ‘no-saying’ bearswitness to the insufficiency of communicative reason and demonstrates that dissen-sus has ontological ground in his argument. Their re-reading certainly makesHabermas’s work look more open to agonistic conceptions of the political andproduces a useful corrective to the multiple readings of his account as a ‘consensusmachine’. However, the suggestion that negativity, ‘no-saying’, is embedded in thecore of his conception of communicative action in a way that dislodges the priorityof consensus is doubtful. In particular, though Habermas suggests that civil dis-obedience is the ‘touchstone’ of a mature constitutional democracy, he is quite clearthat such disobedience takes place always already within a legal order, and import-antly involves recognition of that order: ‘Civil disobedience does not place theexistence and fundamental significance of constitutional order in question.’103

Thus whilst there is clearly space for dissensus in Habermas’s system (otherwisewhy would discursive democracy be necessary?), this does not break with the




ontological and chronological priority accorded to consensus which continues toprovide the horizon of his work.

Habermas is clear: civil disobedience assumes the legitimacy of the law, and doesnot seek to bring the whole legal order into question. Under his scheme we remain,as we do with Kant, with the notion that law is necessary. There are importantdifferences of course: Habermas refers approvingly to the right of resistanceenshrined in the post-war German constitution, whereas Kant’s work gives nosuch right and in fact imposes a duty to obey even evil authority. Habermas’saccount also attempts to heal the rift between the addressee and addressorof law, to straighten the ‘crooked timber of humanity’, by levelling us up througha requirement for participation in discourse, whereas Kant prefers that we donot enquire too thoroughly into the grounds of the authority of the state.104 Butboth look like natural lawyers engaged in a coercive proceduralism that alwaysalready has law as its horizon (thus Habermas’s uncomfortable ambivalenceover the retrospective legitimation of what have previously been regarded as ‘ter-rorist’ acts).105

If we return directly to the reversibility of Kant’s categorical imperative andradical evil, and its potential translation in Habermas’s system as communicativeconsensus versus distorted communication, there is a further problem. Habermashimself comes close to recognising this when he comments that we do not have anadequate way properly to distinguish what is morally wrong from what is pro-foundly evil. He makes this comment whilst discussing new reproductive technol-ogies in The Future of Human Nature. Here, Habermas urges the ‘secular side’ ofthe argument to remain ‘sensitive to the force of articulation inherent in religiouslanguages’ if secular society is not to be severed from ‘important resources ofmeaning.’106 Habermas develops this by referring to Kant’s account of autonomy,stating that whilst this undermines the ‘traditional image of men as children ofGod’ it critically assimilates religious contents in the idea of the ‘unconditionalvalidity of moral duties.’ He continues ‘[Kant’s] further attempt to translate thenotion of ‘‘radical evil’’ from biblical usage into the language of rational religionmay seem less convincing. . .we still lack an adequate concept for the semanticdifference between what is morally wrong and what is profoundly evil.’107 Headds: ‘Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended leaveirritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine com-mands to an offence against human laws, something was lost.’108 Here, Habermasseems to gesture to something not quite right with his own formula for exclusivelyprocedural forms of justification. Certainly it would appear that there is somethingmissing from problem-solving language. Matustik interprets Habermas’s observa-tions as suggestive of a need for a ‘critical religiousity’, stating that the wish for anideal communication community is ‘the surviving phantom limb of a religiouslonging.’109 It seems to me that this is right; the idea that religion offers reservoirsof meaning that cannot be translated into secular language and procedural ruleswithout leaving ‘irritations’ certainly problematizes Habermas’s own quest for astable procedural philosophical form. It suggests that Habermas’s account is notquite as purely procedural as it might seem.

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4. Conclusion

For Kant and for Habermas peace and consensus have ontological and chrono-logical priority over violence and evil. The latter are derivative, understood asfailures to follow the moral law or the law of language. As Kant ‘evisceratesevil’,110 so Habermas eviscerates the possibility of recognizing violence within lan-guage. Habermas’s model of language is one in which consensus has priority; thushis account provides no way to deal with violence other than as derivative orsecondary. This has a marked effect on his political writing, where he cannot con-strue dissensus as potentially in-eliminable, and thus leaves us unarmed in the faceof non-consensus. At the same time, his position assumes the legitimacy of law: inarguing that communicative reason provides jurisgenesis he aligns power with lawand claims to have abrogated the problem of the lawgiver. But this only works iflanguage can function as a neutral medium, something we have challenged throughthe examples of the contested concepts of ‘terrorist’ and ‘freedom fighter’; use ofthese terms is context dependent and cannot be specified without remainder, asevidenced in the current ‘War on Terror’.

In Philosophy in a Time of Terror Habermas comments on those he sees asmerely engaged in ontologizing communication, and complains that they find init nothing but violence.111 But does anyone actually do this? Surely it is rather thatthe clear dividing lines Habermas asserts, which enable him to argue for commu-nicatively achieved consensus without remainder, are considerably more conten-tious and muddled than he admits. Habermas’s attempt at the conceptualseparation of problem-solving and world-disclosing language holds up the possi-bility of a language that is transparent to itself, and which is the pure opposite offorce. This paper has suggested that this is not only politically ineffectual, but alsolikely to produce its own perversions. Habermas rationalizes and attempts to elim-inate violence from his consideration of law and language. In Habermas’s work,law and language appear as ciphers for reason. But his inability to recognizethe paradoxical character of language and reason makes his work blind to theviolence in which it is unavoidably implicated. Pure proceduralism might bewhere we end up after the end of metaphysics and the death of God, but this isindeed precarious.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to participants at the Manchester Workshops in Political Theory, the staff and

students of the University of Sussex Social and Political Theory group, Steve Bastow,Diana Coole, Sven Opitz, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their helpfulcomments on the text.

Notes

1. See Otfried Hoffe (2006) Kant’s Cosmopolitan Theory of Law and Peace. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press; Michael Howard (2000) The Invention of Peace. London:

Profile Books; William Rasch (2008) ‘Kant’s Project of Perpetual Pacification’, Law andCritique 19: 19–34.




2. Immanuel Kant ([1795] 1983) Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (trans. T. Humphrey).Indianapolis: Hackett; Immanuel Kant ([1793] 1998) Religion within the Boundaries of

Mere Reason and Other Writings (trans. and eds A. Wood, G. Di Giovanni, and RobertM. Adams). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3. Jurgen Habermas ‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace: At Two Hundred Years’ Historical

Remove’ in C. Cronin and P. De Grieff (eds) (1998) The Inclusion of the Other: Studies inPolitical Theory (trans. C. Cronin), pp. 166, 201. Cambridge: Polity Press. See also JurgenHabermas (1970a) ‘On systematically distorted communication’, Inquiry 13: 205–18;Jurgen Habermas ‘What Is Universal Pragmatics’ (1979) Communication and the

Evolution of Society (trans. T. McCarthy), chapter 1, pp. 1–68. London: Heinemann;Jurgen Habermas (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason andthe Rationalization of Society (trans. T. McCarthy). Boston: Beacon Press; Jurgen

Habermas (1987a) The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2: Lifeworld andSystem (trans. T. McCarthy). Cambridge: Polity; Jurgen Habermas (2006) The DividedWest. Cambridge: Polity.

4. Thomas Hobbes ([1651] 1991) Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; CarlSchmitt ([1932] 2005) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty(trans. G. Schwab). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

5. For example, Ernest Gellner ‘War and Violence’ (1995) Anthropology and Politics, chap-ter 11. Oxford: Blackwell; Anthony Giddens (1985) The Nation State and Violence.Cambridge: Polity; John Hall (1994) Coercion and Consent: Studies on the ModernState. Cambridge: Polity; Michael Mann (1988) States, War and Capitalism: Studies

in Political Sociology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; Douglas C. North, John J. Wallis, andBarry R. Weingast (eds) (2009) Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework forInterpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Charles

Tilly (1992) Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992. London: Blackwell;Max Weber ‘Politics as a Vocation’ in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds) ([1919]1991) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, pp. 77–128. London: Routledge.

6. Jurgen Habermas (1992) Postmetaphysical Thinking. Cambridge: Polity.7. Something I have questioned elsewhere (Samantha Ashenden (1998) ‘Pluralism within

the limits of reason alone? Habermas and the discursive negotiation of consensus’,Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 1(3): 117–36).

8. Kant ([1793] 1998), n. 3.9. Shane O’Neill (2010) ‘Struggles Against Injustice: Contemporary Critical Theory and

Political Violence’, Journal of Global Ethics 6: 127–39.

10. Habermas (1970a), n. 4; Jurgen Habermas (1970b) ‘Towards a Theory ofCommunicative Competence’, Inquiry 13: 360–75.

11. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. For recent collections of papers in violence see

Vittorio Bufacchi, ed. (2009) Violence: A Philosophical Anthology. London: PalgraveMacmillan; and Helene Frappat (ed) (2000) La Violence. Paris: Flammarion. Theformer is oriented to analytic philosophy, the latter to continental thought.

12. John Keane (1996) Reflections on Violence. London: Verso; John Keane (2004) Violenceand Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; O’Neill (2010), n. 10.

13. Pierre Bourdieu (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity; Judith Butler(1997) Excitable Speech. London: Routledge; Judith Butler (2004) Precarious Life: The

Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso; Judith Butler (2009) Frames of WarLondon: Verso; Johan Galtung (1969) ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’, Journal ofPeace Research 6: 167–91; John Harris (1980) Violence and Responsibility. London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul; Steven Lukes (1974) Power: A Radical View. London:

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Macmillan; Slavoj Zizek (2008) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: ProfileBooks.

14. Galtung (1969), n. 14, p. 80.15. Zizek (2008), n. 14, p. 52.16. Theodore Adorno ([1966] 1973) Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge.

17. Butler 1997, 2004, 2009, n. 14; also Sam Chambers and Terrel Carver (2008) JudithButler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics, chapter 4. London: Routledge.

18. Habermas (1984) (1987a), n. 4.19. See, inter alia, Gellner (1995), Giddens (1985), Hall (1994), Mann (1988), North et al.

(2009), Tilly (1992), n. 6.20. Gerard Delanty (2001) ‘Cosmopolitanism and Violence: The Limits of Global Civil

Society’, European Journal of Social Theory 4: 41–52; Hans Joas (2003) War and

Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.21. Habermas (1987a), n. 4.22. Hannah Arendt (1969) On Violence, p. 56. Florida: Harcourt Brace and Company.

23. Jurgen Habermas (1983) ‘Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power’ in Philosophical-Political Profiles (trans. F. G. Lawrence), pp. 171–88. Massachusetts: MIT Press; JurgenHabermas (1996) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law

and Democracy. Cambridge: Polity.24. See Habermas 1970a, n. 4; 1970b, n. 11; 1979, n. 4.25. Habermas (1984) n. 4, p. 25. Note that Habermas does not suggest that communicative

consensus can be achieved; rather it is a regulative idea that makes sense of everyday

language use and is thus immanent to language.26. See J. L. Austin (1962)How to Do Things With Words. Oxford: Clarendon; also see J. R.

Searle (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. CUP: Cambridge.

For Habermas’s use of these ideas see (1979) n. 4, and ‘Social Action, Purposive Activityand Communication’ (1981), both of which are reprinted in (1998) On the Pragmatics ofCommunication (M. Cooke, ed). Cambridge: Polity; for developments in his use of

ordinary language philosophy since this initial specification, see Jurgen Habermas(2003a) Truth and Justification. Cambridge: Polity.

27. Habermas 1970a, 1979, n. 4. Also see Maeve Cooke (1994) Language and Reason: AStudy of Habermas’s Pragmatics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT.

28. It is possible to question the priority Habermas accords communicative action, forexample by reference to the role of jokes and irony or via psychoanalytic accounts ofthe unconscious. See, e.g. Diana Coole ‘Habermas and the Question of Alterity’ in

M. Passerin D’Entreves and S. Benhabib (eds) (1996) Habermas and the UnfinishedProject of Modernity, pp. 221–44. Cambridge: Polity; David Held and JohnThompson (eds) (1982) Habermas: Critical Debates. Cambridge: Polity; Jean-Jacques

Lecercle (1990) The Violence of Language. London: Routledge.29. Jurgen Habermas (1987b) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.30. Jacques Derrida (1995) ‘Is there a philosophical language?’ in E. Weber (ed)

Points . . . Interviews 1974–1994 (trans. P. Kamuf), pp. 216–27. Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press.

31. Austin (1962), n. 27.32. Jacques Derrida ([1972] 1988) ‘Signature Event Context’ in Limited Inc (trans. S. Weber

and J. Mehlman), pp. 1–23. Northwestern University Press: Illinois, at p. 14.33. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 205, emphasis in text.34. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 205, emphasis in text.

35. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 207.




36. As a counter to Habermas’s assertions that Derrida deals with works of philosophy asliterature, it is salutary to recognize the importance of texts such as Derrida’s

‘Supplement to the Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics’ in Jacques Derrida (ed)(1982) Margins of Philosophy (trans. A. Bass), pp. 177–205. Chicago: University ofChicago. In ‘Supplement’ Derrida criticizes Benveniste’s claim that Aristotle’s concep-

tion of the fundamental categories of thought was determined by the categorical struc-ture of the Greek language itself, that Aristotle’s list of the fundamental attributes thatcan be predicated of a subject is an effect of grammar. See Emile Benveniste (1971)Problems in General Linguistics, chapter 6. Miami: University of Miami Press. Derrida

shows that the central category neglected by Benveniste is that of category itself, that weneed a category of category, and that Benveniste is simultaneously availing himself ofthis and denying it; Derrida thus defends the autonomy of philosophy. In this regard

then, Derrida’s point would seem to be not that we do not need philosophy, but ratherthat the purity often asserted for it, and that Habermas needs to keep his argument onthe rails, is not available.

37. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, pp. 200–1.38. Habermas (1984), n. 4, pp. 197–215.39. Habermas (1984), n. 4; (1987a), n. 4, p. 326; (1987b), n. 30 pp. 201, 207.

40. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, pp. 207–8. See Pieter Duvenage (2003) Habermas andAesthetics: The Limits of Communicative Reason. Cambridge: Polity, especially chapter3, for a more elaborate account of Habermas’s conception of the value spheres ofmodernity and the ways in which this circumscribes aesthetic judgement. For the argu-

ment that aesthetic judgement has become an independent cultural sphere of value, andthat religion could achieve a similar level of differentiation ‘but only at the price of theneutralization of its experiential content’ see Jurgen Habermas (2002) Religion and

Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity, p. 84. Cambridge: Polity. But com-pare this with Habermas’s comments at the end of ‘popular sovereignty as procedure’,where he writes of ‘another kind of transcendence’ in the negativity of modern art in its

‘refus[al] to be assimilated by pregiven categories.’ Habermas (1996), n. 24, Appendix I,p. 490.

41. Jurgen Habermas (2008) Between Naturalism and Religion, Cambridge: Polity; JurgenHabermas (2010) An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular

Age, Cambridge: Polity.42. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 190.43. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 209.

44. This parallels Habermas’s argument that art criticism ‘brings the experiential content ofthe work of art into normal language’ (1987b, n. 30, p. 208), i.e. renders the artworkassimilable.

45. Ben Saul (2006) Defining Terrorism in International Law, chapter 1. Oxford UniversityPress: Oxford.

46. See Clive Stafford Smith (2007) Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons, p. 34.

London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; Sam Chambers (2007) ‘Normative ViolenceAfter 9/11: Rereading the Politics of Gender Trouble’, New Political Science 29: 43–60,at p. 59.

47. Jurgen Habermas (2006) ‘An interview on War and Peace’, in The Divided West (trans.

C. Cronin), p. 98. Cambridge: Polity.48. Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 162, 172; Jurgen Habermas (1993) Justification and

Application. Cambridge: Polity, esp. chapter 2.

49. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 194.

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50. Nikolas Kompridis (1994) ‘On world disclosure: Heidegger, Habermas, and Dewey’Thesis Eleven 37: 29–45, notes that Habermas’s opposition between world-disclosure

and capacity for reason-giving implies that he identifies intersubjective learning exclu-sively with practices of argumentation and problem solving, and that this can provide noaccount of semantic innovation and meaning change.

51. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 197.52. Habermas (1992), n. 7, p. 17.53. Habermas (1984), n. 4, p. 141.54. Habermas (1984), n. 4, pp. 197–215.

55. Jurgen Habermas ‘Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter’ in K. Baynes, J. Bohman,and T. McCarthy (eds) (1987c) After Philosophy? End or Transformation? p. 312.Massachusetts: MIT Press.

56. Habermas (1987c), n. 56, p. 312.57. Habermas (1987c), n. 56, p. 313.58. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 340, emphasis in text.

59. See James Schmidt (1989) ‘Habermas and the Discourse of Modernity’, Political Theory17: 315–20.

60. Jurgen Habermas (1990) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 87.

Massachusetts: MIT Press.61. James Tully ‘To Think and Act Differently: Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to

Habermas’s Theory’ in S. Ashenden and D. Owen (eds) (1999) Foucault contraHabermas, pp. 90–142. London: Sage.

62. Habermas (1996), n. 24.63. Jurgen Habermas (2001) ‘Constitutional Democracy: A Paradoxical Union of

Contradictory Principles?’ Political Theory 29: 766–81, esp. p. 779.

64. Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 188, 282, 310, 313–4.65. Weber [1919] 1991, n. 6, p. 78.66. Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 147–8.

67. Arendt (1969), n. 23, p. 40.68. Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 147–8.69. Habermas (1983), n. 24, p. 179.70. Habermas (1983), n. 24, p. 180; also Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 136–49.

71. See Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 136–49; also J. Habermas (1974) Theory and Practice,chapter 2. ‘Natural law and revolution’ (trans. J. Viertel), pp. 82–119. Boston: BeaconPress.

72. Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 188–9, emphasis added.73. Habermas (1987c), n. 56, p. 296.74. Habermas (2003a), n. 27, p. 7

75. Habermas (1987c), n. 56, p. 298.76. I. Kant ([1785] 1981) Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (trans. J. W. Ellington),

p. 416. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

77. Habermas (2003a), n. 27, chapter 2.78. Kant ([1793] 1998), n. 3, p. 59.79. Kant ([1793] 1998), n. 3, p. 56.80. Kant ([1793] 1998), n. 3, p. 59.

81. Kant ([1793] 1998), n. 3, p. 60.82. J. Lacan (1989) ‘Kant avec Sade’, October 51: 55–104, at pp. 59–60. See also

A. Zupancic (2000) Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, p. 90. London: Verso, and S. Zizek




(1993) Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology. Durham:Duke University Press.

83. Kant ([1793] 1998), n. 3, pp. 58–9.84. Richard J. Bernstein (2002) Radical Evil: A Philosophical Investigation. Cambridge:

Polity, p. 43.

85. She adds ‘It is inherent in our entire philosophical tradition that we cannot conceive ofa ‘‘radical evil’’ and this is true both for Christian theology, which conceded even to theDevil himself a celestial origin, as well as for Kant, the only philosopher who, in theword he coined for it, at least must have suspected the existence of this evil even though

he immediately rationalized it in the concept of a ‘‘perverted ill will’’ that could beexplained by comprehensible motives.’ Hannah Arendt (1966) The Origins ofTotalitarianism, p. 459. New York: Harcourt.

86. Derrida (1988), n. 33, p. 15.87. Derrida (1988), n. 33, p. 16.88. Martin B. Matustik (2008) Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope. Indiana: Indiana

University Press, pp. 92, 150–1.89. See, amongst others, Iris M. Young (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

90. Habermas (2003a), n. 27, p. 7.91. Habermas (2003a), n. 27, p. 42.92. See Carol Gould ‘Diversity and Democracy: Representing Differences’ in

S. Benhabib (ed) (1996) Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the

Political, pp.171–88. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.93. Giovanna Borradori (ed) (2003) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jurgen

Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

94. Habermas in Borradori (2003), n. 94, p. 35 emphasis in text.95. Habermas in Borradori (2003), n. 94, p. 35, emphasis in text.96. Jurgen Habermas (1993) Justification and Application (trans. C. Cronin), Cambridge:

Polity, pp. 59–60.97. Although Habermas has argued for something like this in respect of NATO interven-

tion into Kosovo in 1999; see (2006), n. 4.98. Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 382–4.

99. Habermas in Borradori (2003), n. 94, p. 34. Also see W. Smith (2008) ‘CivilDisobedience and Social Power: Reflections on Habermas’, Contemporary PoliticalTheory 7: 72–89. O’Neill (2010), n. 10, p. 133 observes that in calling violent acts

against injustice ‘crimes’ Habermas takes for granted the legitimacy of existing laws,something O’Neill finds a ‘deeply problematic legalistic assumption’. There are manyexamples of the importance of violence in generating political community. See for

example Keane’s observations on the Dublin Uprising 1916, see (1996), n. 13, pp.76–9. In a similar vein, Howard (2000), n. 2, discusses the pervasive role of war inordering political power, and North et al., n. 6, (2009) focus on the role of violence in

generating social orders.100. Habermas in Borradori (2003), n. 94, p. 34.101. Habermas in Borradori (2003), n. 94, p. 34.102. S. K. White and E. R. Farr (2012) ‘‘‘No-Saying’’ in Habermas’, Political Theory 40:

32–57.103. Jurgen Habermas (1985) ‘Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test of the Democratic

Constitutional State’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology 30: 95–116, at p. 105.

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104. See Immanuel Kant ([1785] 1996) The Metaphysics of Morals (trans. and ed. MaryGregor). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 6: 318, p. 95.

105. Thomassen suggests two possible readings of Habermas which illuminate his ambiva-lence in respect of this matter. On one reading, Habermas’s account of rational lawpresupposes that legality and legitimacy can be reconciled; on another reading

Habermas’s account presupposes a ‘constitutive gap’ between legality and legitimacysuch that autonomy and rational law cannot be realized. Habermas’s more strictlyphilosophical arguments tend to proceed along the former, while his political commen-taries are more open to the latter reading. See Lasse Thomssen (2007) ‘Within the Limits

of Deliberative Reason Alone: Habermas, Civil Disobedience and ConstitutionalDemocracy’, European Journal of Political Theory 6: 200–18, at p. 201.

106. Jurgen Habermas (2003b) The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge: Polity, p. 109.

107. Habermas (2003b), n. 106, p. 110.108. Habermas (2003b), n. 106, p. 110; see also Jurgen Habermas (2008) Between

Naturalism and Religion. Cambridge: Polity, esp. chapter 5 ‘Religion in the Public

Sphere’.109. Matustik (2008), n. 89, pp. 62, 70. Matustik continues by suggesting that the human

possibility of diabolical evil ‘revisits us as a religious phenomenon after the death of

God.’ He asks ‘if such evil never arose, would there be need for its rational translation?Kant and Habermas cannot have it both ways’, p. 77.

110. Bernstein (2002), n. 85, p. 34.111. Habermas in Borradori (2003), n. 94, p. 38.




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