Page 221 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

198 Communication and Evolution of Society

the rate of unemployment—which can be substituted for one
another only within limits—are measures of failure in the tasks
of securing stability; the breakdown of reform politics is a sign
of failure in the task of altering undesirable structures of pro-
duction and privilege. At the moment, some of these symptoms
can be found in the Federal Republic of Germany; yet the re-
percussions in the political sphere are almost minimal. I do not
have data at my disposal with which we might satisfactorily ex-
plain this situation, and which would allow us to make a correct
estimate of the weight of particular factors—for example, the role
of a turn-around, emanating from the universities, which was
consciously brought about through the mobilization of fear, much
anthropological pessimism, adjuration of the virtues of subordi-
nation, and little argument.
Delegitimations on this level presuppose that the categories of
rewards over which the distributional struggle is carried on are
not themselves contested. One wants money, free time, and secur-
ity. These “primary goods”’ are represented as neutral means for
attaining an indefinite multiplicity of concrete ends selected ac-
cording to values. These are certainly highly abstract means that
can be employed for a number of purposes; nevertheless, these
media lay down clearly circumscribed “opportunity structures.”
In them is reflected a form of life, the form of life of private
commodity owners who bring their property—labor power, prod-
ucts, or means of payment—into exchange relations and thereby
accommodate the capitalist form of mobilizing resources.*? I shall
not go through the characteristics of this familial, vocational, and
civil privatism in detail. Nor shall I criticize the form of life that
has its crystallizing point in possessive individualism (McPher-
son). I doubt, however, whether the form of life mirrored in
system-conforming rewards can today—in the light of the alter-
natives opened by capitalist development itself—still be as con-
vincingly legitimated as it could in Hobbes’ time. Of course,
such questions relevant to legitimation need not even be allowed
if the powers that be are successful in further redefining practical
questions into technical questions, if they are successful in pre-
venting questions that radicalize the value-universalism of bour-
geois society from even arising.