Conceptualizing Politics

part of the background for the student and protest movement in the 1960s in 
Europe and North America, here mainly in the wake of Marcuse’s radical the-
ory of civilisation as formulated in Eros and Civilization (Marcuse 1955) and The 
One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1963). Being a theory of society based on Marx’s 
critique of political economy, it did not acknowledge the specificity of politics 
and gave nearly no contribution to political theory, except for the work of Otto 
Kirchheimer (1905–1965) and Franz Neumann.
17
 Starting in the early 1960s, this 
changed to some extent with Habermas, even if one does not take into account 
his prolific writing, lasting decades, on Germany and the European Union, which 
has made him the most respected public figure inside and outside Germany. The 
following is a brief account of Critical Theory as redefined in Habermas’s thought.
His main contributions regard a binary view (lifeworld vs. system) on society 
and politics (Habermas 1981) and a philosophy of law and democracy (Habermas 
1999). In the first one Habermas, though being a critic of Luhmann’s holistic sys-
tem theory of society, comes to regard as irreversible the rationalization, follow-
ing an impersonal system logic, of the lifeworld
18
 into societal sectors such as the 
economy (regulator: money) and politics (regulator: Macht/power). The  expecta-
tion of early Critical Theory for a revolutionary renewal of the whole society is 
thus abandoned. On the other hand, the sectors of life concerned with the cultural 
reproduction of society, the social integration among citizens and education must 
and can be shielded against imperatives coming from the sub-systems (economy 
and political-bureaucratic realm), which tend to ‘colonise’ spheres of interaction 
that are entrusted to the power-free communication among persons mediated 
by language. It’s the structures of language, as detected by the speech acts theory, 
that encapsulate the chance of a reasonable understanding among actors, far from 
manipulation and reciprocal instrumentalisation. In Western countries this attitude 
of Habermas has partly mirrored, partly itself fostered or at least justified the shift 
of democratic politics from income (in)equality and class conflict to questions of 
cultural or principled nature such as human rights and gender.
19
 It’s the so-called 
shift towards postmaterialistic values,
20
 though in the years following the economic 
crisis of 2008 the ‘old’ class-based discontents seem to have regained importance – 
now often immersed in a populist ideology – in the sections of the electorate that 
have suffered most from globalisation. A balance is still missing.

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Ethics, philosophy and politics  197
In Faktizität und Geltung/Between Facts and Norms, Habermas (1993) focuses on 
law because of its contribution to social integration in a centrifugal society in which 
neither religion nor metaphysics give the people enough motivation to sticking 
together. In law, normative validity or legitimacy is as important as its legal facticity 
and formal correctness, which are the core of the positivist view of law. For Haber-
mas’s discourse theory of the law, ‘only those norms are valid to which all persons 
possibly affected could agree as participants in rational discourses’ (Habermas 1999, 
940). The legitimacy of the law in allocating liberties to individuals does not stem 
from morality; on the contrary law complements the weak post- traditional morality 
of late-modern societies. Though still in a normative terrain, we are, in this com-
municative conception of social interaction, far from the monistic rule of a single 
principle (of justice).
Habermas’s discourse theory consistently gives deliberation priority over deci-
sion by majority voting. He sees democracy and human rights as interdependent, 
and declares the insufficiency of both dominating traditions, the liberal (politics as 
compromise between self-interested actors) and the republican (ethical foundation 
of politics in justification and exaltation of the commonwealth) one; his design for 
an ideal procedure for deliberation claims to integrate elements from both tradi-
tions. That design is where Habermas comes closer to an ideal theory that should 
be a benchmark for the real interaction among diverging positions; alone, politics 
is almost never a cooperative and sober dialogue in search of a better understand-
ing, akin to that between the four instrumental voices in the classical era of string 
quartets, from Haydn and Mozart to Beethoven and Brahms (and Hugo Wolf ).
With this proceduralist view of democracy, Habermas’s Critical Theory tries 
to respond to the quest for its normative foundation after the break-down of its 
original roots in the Marxian philosophy of history: if you have such a philosophy 
telling you how history came about and, what is more, how it will go on or end, 
you do not need to find out which principles of justice should govern your actions, 
because they are already inscribed in past and present history (hence Marx’s con-
tempt for ‘modern mythology with its goddesses of Justice, Freedom, Equality and 
Fraternity’ worshipped by liberals and utopian socialists).
21
 How far Habermas’s 
turn towards a normative theory that is proceduralist in nature answers the ques-
tions raised by the more substantive old Critical Theory, in particular Horkheimer’s, 
cannot be discussed here. On the other hand, his theory marks a different path from 
the unreflected normativism of the theory of justice.
Notes
  1  Cf. Baier 1958. I shall however resort to the more common ‘ethics and politics’ whenever 
the specific meaning of morality is not in play. The Greek root of ethics, 
ἦθος/ethos, 
means character or behaviour, and ethics includes a course of action that can be, but is 
not necessarily guided by morality.
  2  From the Greek 
δέον: regarding what ought to be done or the obligation.
  3  This relational structure, the security dilemma (see Chapter 7, §5), is a central notion in 
political realism.
  4  This example is not quoted by Machiavelli, and we do not know how far his knowledge 
of Thucydides’s text in the Latin translation by Lorenzo Valla (completed in 1452) went.

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198  Ethics and politics
  5  The republican tradition has been in the past half century investigated by historians such 
as J. G. A. Pocock (1975) and Quentin Skinner (1978).
  6  A major example of this literature remains Arendt’s essay Lying in Politics in Arendt 1972, 
1–47. Politics that is indifferent to the (argumentatively verifiable) truth, hence often 
hostile to it, seems to represent a very new chapter, which The Economist of 10 Septem-
ber 2016 has dubbed ‘post-truth politics’. Also, a philosophical inquiry into this complex 
under the conditions of the digital age would be welcome.
 7  Weber’s main text in this respect is Politik als Beruf/Politics as a Vocation a talk given in 
Munich at the end of 1919, a few months before Weber died, at the age of fifty-six, of 
the Spanish flu pandemic that ravaged the world immediately after the Great War; it has 
been already quoted several times in this volume (Weber 1919a).
  8  The original move in this direction was made by Lyotard (1979).
 9  A superb example of both these moves was Dr. Martin Luther King’s ability to force or 
persuade President Lyndon B. Johnson to use his own clout as President and his shrewd-
ness as former Democratic majority leader in the Senate in order to forward the passage 
of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the US Congress back in 1964–65, 
cf. Kotz 2005.
 10  For reformist realism see Scheuerman 2011.
 11  Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962), who as First Lady of the United States had acted against 
racial and gender discrimination, was the driving force behind the drafting of UDHR, 
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EleanorRooseveltHumanRights.png.
 12  I have examined these aspects of ‘normative political philosophy’ in the case of climate 
ethics (see Cerutti 2016).
 13  The key figure, in this sense, was US President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924, in office 
from 1913 through 1921), whose interventionist ‘democratic idealism’ as a tenet of for-
eign policy continues to build one of the recurrent strains in US diplomatic history.
 14  The term ‘decent’ describes ‘nonliberal societies whose basic institutions meet certain 
specified conditions of political right and justice’ (Rawls 1999b, 3n2).
 15  This label also had the advantage of not making explicit any reference to Marxism, suspi-
cious to public authorities both in Germany and the USA in the Thirties.
 16  Walther Benjamin, a close friend Adorno’s, was never a member of the Institute, even 
if he was supported by them; nor can his thought be labelled as belonging to Critical 
Theory.
 17  See above Chapter 3, §2, note 3, Neumann also wrote Behemoth, an early political con-
ceptualization of the National Socialist regime (1942).
 18  ‘German  Lebenswelt, . . . the world as immediately or directly experienced in the sub-
jectivity of everyday life, as sharply distinguished from the objective “worlds” of the sci-
ences, which employ the methods of the mathematical sciences of nature’ (from https://
www.britannica.com/topic/life-world). The term was introduced in philosophy by 
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and developed in the phenomenological sociology of 
Alfred Schütz (1899–1959).
 19  In Marx’s vocabulary, this means giving a higher relevance to Überbau/superstructure in 
comparison to the economic basis of society and politics; for this terminology see Marx 
1859.
 20  The now popular concept of postmaterialism was introduced by the American sociolo-
gist Ronald Inglehart (Inglehart 1977).
 21  As Marx wrote to F.A. Sorge (Marx 1877).