Page 23 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

xxiv Translator’s Introduction

advanced there, some responses to critics, and several important
conceptual clarifications. The evolution-theoretic background to
the argument can be seen in the concept of levels of justification—
formal conditions for the acceptability of different kznds of
grounds or reasons, for the efficacy of different types of legitima-
tion, for their power to produce consensus and shape motives.
The crux of the argument is that legitimation problems arise in
developed capitalist societies as the result of a fundamental con-
flict built into their very structure, a conflict between the social
welfare responsibilities of mass democracies and the functional
conditions of the capitalist economy. The state is forced to deal
with the dysfunctional side effects of the economic process under
a number of restrictive conditions—balancing a policy of eco-
nomic stability against a policy of social reform in a world econ-
omy that increasingly limits the individual state’s latitude for
action and without being able effectively to control social integra-
tion or to “‘plan ideology.’ To the extent that it fails to keep
these side effects within acceptable bounds, manifestations of
delegitimation appear—for example, a sharpened struggle over
distribution, economic instability, the breakdown of reform poli-
tics, and even the disintegration of motivational patterns essential
to capitalist society and the spread of dysfunctional patterns. As
those familiar with the argument of Legstimation Crisis will
recall, it is this last level of delegitimation that Habermas re-
gards as fundamental. If the form of life reflected in such system-
conforming rewards as money, free time, and security can no
longer be convincingly legitimated, “‘the ‘pursuit of happiness’
might one day mean something different—for example, not ac-
cumulating material objects of which one disposes privately, but
bringing about social relations in which mutuality predominates
and satisfaction does not mean the trtumph of one over the re-
pressed needs of the other.”

I would like to express my gratitude to the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation for a grant in the spring of 1978 that
enabled me to complete this translation.
Thomas McCarthy
Boston University