Habermas's Legitimation Crisis Today

Yesterday I finished Jurgen Habermas's Legitimation Crisis. Published in May 50 years ago, it is probably his best known and most explicitly political and Marxist of his works. Written as the post-war consensus was cracking, this was a meditation on how we needed to rethink notions of crisis in light if the systemic change capitalism had undergone in the advanced countries since the war. I.e. The expansion of the state into more areas of social life and the rise of state-directed 'organised capitalism'. Drawing heavily on systems theory and earlier insights via Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Talcott Parsons, Habermas argued the shift from the law of value to the state as the primary organiser of production and social reproduction meant crisis had become more complex. Marx no longer had all the answers.

Still accepting capitalism's tendency to crisis for the reasons explored in Capital, Habermas argued that economic crises were displaced onto the state, resulting in political crises. In turn, the steering media of politics coped with crisis by intervening and also displacing it onto other institutions of the state. Such as austerity, which turns a capitalist crisis into a crisis of public finances. This also had consequences for the system-legitimation and individual-motivational aspects overseen and underwritten by the state. How to justify pain for the many and riches for the few? And how to keep people trudging on the hamster wheel or work while the rewards for it diminish? In fact, while Habermas was writing about a different kind of capitalism, in a different context and informed by a different assumptions about the way of the world, this book from 1973 is very close to describing the situation we're in now.

If you can bear the functionalist/systems vocabulary, Legitimation Crisis is a worthwhile read for thinking through the interconnectedness of social formations, what constitutes a 'crisis', how crisis is managed, and why a whole-system revolutionary crisis that would wipe the slate clean is next to impossible. Habermas's accent on systems theory does have some utility - that of conveying the weight and inertia of social relationships, and therefore an implied caution against flighty, excitable politics and unrealistic assumptions. Pretty much what Timpanaro warned us about in his discussion of Marxist materialism, sans the nose of Niklas Luhmann poking out from each page.

What Habermas wasn't squeamish about was discussing the role of interests. He recognised that the post-war social order was based on a compact of class interests, and that the antagonisms between capital and labour were smoothed out (some might say policed) by negotiations and compromise, often overseen by the state. Unlike his Luhmannian and Parsonian influences, Habermas also understands that norms, which play a crucial integrative role in functionalist sociology and its forebears, were materially rooted in and negotiated around interests. What makes compromise possible and therefore the 'normal' operation of capitalism are the separation of powers (the fact that politics - the state - is separate from economics), which is variously interpreted and laid down by bourgeois constitutions, and the freedom of the individual as guaranteed by law. However, for a genuine compromise to be possible between contending classes there has to be an equitable balance of power. Where this is not present there is 'pseudo-compromise'.

Habermas is not naive. He argues that pseudo-compromise is the norm in capitalist societies. Because capital and labour are unequal and the very structure of institutions reproduce the former, capital's minority interest is what is generalised as natural, or national interests. As such, this manifestly exploitative and unjust state of affairs generate discourses of legitimation that express but fundamentally distort the competition and clash of interests.

He writes,

legitimations consist of interpretations, of narrative presentations or (for example in national law) of systematised explanations and chains of argument, that have the double function of proving that the validity claims of norm systems are legitimate and of avoiding thematisation and testing of discursive validity claims. The specific achievement of such ideologies consists in the conspicuous manner in which communication is systematically limited (pp 112-3)

Thinking about this point today, a the neoliberal settlement crumbles and the centrist B team limbers up for their turn in office, the discourse around alternatives to Rishi Sunak's paltry, plastic populism and Keir Starmer's authoritarian managerialism is strictly policed by explicit (and often crude) boundary drawing. This must keep out the politically unreasonable and unwelcome ideas that threaten the narrow basis the eroding consensus rests on. "Serious" politics is about "tough choices", and nothing else can be considered. There is no room for hope or expectations life might get better. It is excluded entirely.

Like all good works of social theory, the vocabulary Habermas brings to bear in Legitimation Crisis might not have dated well, but his arguments, insights, and conclusions are fresh because they remain relevant.