Overstated, uncharitable, and incompletely argued
Laurance Paul Strait (2009-11-17)
1. An argument that seems quite critical to the essay is that the distinction Habermas draws between strategic action and communicative action understates the degree to which strategic action is communicative. As Plot concludes, “Habermas still does not see that, to achieve success in the competition for access to the 'political system' in a democratic context, it is fundamental to reach understanding with the many, which means that political struggle has a built-in communicative dimension that Habermas persistently neglects, but that Arendt did not” (p. 849). This claim is risible. The statement that Habermas has neglected a ‘communicative dimension’ is bold enough, I would think, to give any author pause (and, presumably, their anonymous peer reviewers as well). But this claim in particular seems at stark odds with Habermas’ own words—in Truth and Justification, Habermas (2005) writes: “The divergent beliefs and conflicting intentions of different individuals can reasonably be integrated only by means of intersubjective processes of communication and deliberation. Political intervention in critical social developments therefore depends on democratic opinion- and will-formation” (p. 282).
Now, Habermas’ explicit claim to the contrary notwithstanding, maybe Plot still has a point. After all, Plot claims that although Habermas spends an “inordinate amount of time and intellectual effort in replying to, or even incorporating the main criticisms his theorization has raised,” he has never needed “to seriously establish and reformulate his central arguments” (p. 835). Assuming that this claim is correct, and not even a little bit overstated, it might not seem completely bizarre that Habermas explicitly defended a position that Plot believes he “still does not see,” four years after he ostensibly saw it. But even this most charitable reading of this situation (for Plot—it is decidedly uncharitable to Habermas) would only make sense if Plot had acknowledged Habermas’ stated position, and made some direct attempt to respond to it. On a related note, I am troubled that in an article entirely concerned with criticizing Habermas, nothing Habermas published in the last decade is even cited.
2. A central concern in this essay is the defense of Arendt’s theory of democratic action over against Habermas’. If one only read this article, and not any of the primary source material (esp. the one work cited on this question, Between Facts and Norms), one could only conclude that the only thing Habermas attempted to accomplish vis-à-vis Arendt’s theory is appropriation. Plot writes that “Although Habermas fails to recognize it, Arendt’s notion of action is not identical to his notion of communicative action, nor is her notion of power identical to his notion of communicative power." Bracketing everything else off, I cannot fathom how Plot came to believe that Habermas conflates his notions of action and power with Arendt's.
Now, to be fair, Plot may have a point when he claims that Habermas read his own thought into Arendt. But even if Habermas is guilty of that, it must be noted that Habermas did attempt to delineate between his theory and Arendt’s, and offered some fairly specific criticisms of Arendt. How could anyone criticize a theory that he or she failed to recognize as non-identical with their own thought? In any event, in his 1976 essay “Hannah Arendt’s Communicative Concept of Power,” Habermas criticized Arendt's notion that communicative power is spontaneous expression of the common will-- Habermas instead argues that it is the product of intersections between ethical-political, cultural, moral, and pragmatic discourses. Given this specific criticism, it is especially troubling that Habermas is condemned for his “inability… to grasp the complexities of democratic political action,” especially when such a oddly strongly worded claim is paired with an observation about the obvious plural character of society. Maybe Arendt’s true position still beats Habermas’ true position, but there is no way to tell without analyzing Habermas’ specific responses. To assert (incorrectly) that Habermas unfairly agreed with Arendt really begs the question—instead, I’d prefer to see an evaluation of Habermas’ disagreement with Arendt. More to the point, Habermas seems to be criticizing Arendt on exactly the same grounds Plot uses to criticize Habermas and praise Arendt – Habermas criticized Arendt for failing, in his view, to appreciate the importance of *strategic action* in the political, arguing that “we cannot exclude the element of strategic action from the political” (1976, p. 183).
In his 1996 essay “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” (that neither of these essays were cited is another curiosity that makes me wonder about the rigor of the review process) published in Benhabib’s excellent collection Democracy and Difference, Habermas criticizes the degree to which Arendt presupposes the centrality of the state in society—a criticism that seems salient enough to the view Plot defends that it ought to be anticipated as a possible objection Habermas might raise. Habermas notes that, for example, “the democratic will-formation of self-interested citizens is laden with comparatively weak normative expectations” (p. 27). This concern seems relevant to a proposal to eliminate the categories necessary to pass normative judgment against speech acts that are entirely perlocutionary and entirely strategic. Rather than see the constitution as “something secondary,” as Habermas contends Arendt does, one should conceive “the principles of the constitutional state as a consistent answer to the question of how the demanding communicative forms of a democratic opinion- and will-formation can be institutionalized” (ibid.). Note also that here Habermas clearly seems not to be neglecting the communicative dimension of political struggle.
3. Finally, though less problematic than the failure to cite relevant works of Habermas, it is strange that relevant literature in the deliberative democracy tradition seems entirely neglected. The Habermas/Arendt issue has been well explored by others, e.g., Seyla Benhabib’s excellent 1992 essay “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jurgen Habermas.” Why has this work been ignored? Did the reviewers not feel that Benhabib’s essay, for example, was sufficiently noteworthy or relevant to even merit notice? And what about the more recently published work of Habermas?
4. This is more of a minor point compared with the above, but I think important nonetheless – what about the problem of systematically distorted communication? This problem seems the main impetus for Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action in the first place – the various analytical distinctions he creates are if nothing else offered as a means to explain, understand, and critique communication that has become systematically distorted. Given that, it seems strange to offer a criticism of those analytical distinctions without at all addressing what Habermas was actually up to. Maybe the other issues are more important, maybe Arendt’s theory is equally capable of handling the problem in some other way, or whatever else might rationalize this move, but in any event I don’t know what is gained by simply ignoring the issue.
L. P. Strait
USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism
