Page 21 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

XXIi Translator’s Introduction

dividual and social development. Habermas is aware of these
pitfalls but argues that under certain restrictions one can indeed
find ‘‘homologous structures of consciousness’’ in the histories of
the individual and the species.
In “Historical Materialism and the Development of Normative
Structures’ he suggests three domains of comparison: rationality
structures in ego development and in the evolution of world
views; the development of ego and of group (or collective)
identities; the development of moral consciousness and the evo-
lution of moral and religious representations. After sketching
briefly the homologous patterns he finds in the first two areas, he
turns in the fourth essay, ‘““Towards a Reconstruction of Historical
Materialism,” to a more detailed examination of the development
of law and morality. The explanatory schema advanced there—a
combination of action-theoretic (in the competence-development
sense) and systems-theoretic motifs—makes it clear that he is not
proposing to read human history as an internal unfolding of
Spirit. There is an explicit distinction drawn between the logic
of development of normative structures and the dynamics of this
development. The former merely circumscribes the logical sphere
in which increasingly complex structural formations can take
shape; whether new structures arise, and if so, when, depends on
contingent boundary conditions and empirical learning processes.
The following are the principal elements of the schema: Social
evolution is conceived a bidimensional learning process (cogni-
tive/technical and moral/practical), the stages of which can be
described structurally and ordered in a developmental logic. The
emphasis is not on rhe institutionalization of particular contents
(e.g., values; cf. Parsons), but on the “institutional embodiment
of structures of rationality,” which makes learning at new levels
possible, that is, on learning applied to the structural conditions
of learning. In one sense it is only socialized individuals who
learn; but the learning ability of individuals provides a “resource”’
that can be drawn upon in the formation of new social structures.
The results of learning processes find their way into the cultural
tradition; they comprise a kind of cognitive potential that can be
drawn upon in social movements when unsolvable system prob-
lems require a transformation of the basic forms of social inte-
gration. Whether and how problems arise that overload the