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224 Notes

on Philosophy and Society, L. D. Easton and K. H. Guddat, eds. and
trans. (New York, 1967), pp. 216-248.
28. W. Wette, “Bundeswehr ohne Feindbilder?,” in Friedensanalysen,
1 (Frankfurt, 1975), pp. 96-114.
29. Cf.e.g., B. R. Dulong, La question Bretonne (Patis, 1975).
30. In discussion, Klaus Eder advanced the thesis that there could be
collective identities corresponding to personal identities only at the stage
of conventional (role) identity. Postconventional ego identity would have
to do without support from a collective identity. The fictions of a cosmo-
politan state of affairs, a socialist order of society, an association of free
producers, and so on, would then merely signify stages in the dissolution
of collective identity as such. Kant, for example, represented the intel-
ligible world as a “universal kingdom of ends-in-themselves.” He saw
that “the concept of the ethical community is always related to the idea
of a totality of all men; it is distinguished therein from the concept of
the political [community}.’’ The kingdom of rational beings is an ideal
that can never be empirically fulfilled by the just order of a cosmopolitan
state of affairs. Nevertheless, such identity projections illustrate the con-
ditions of a universalistically regulated domain of communicative action,
against which the provisionally constructed, collective identities of par-
ticular reference groups can be relativized and rendered fluid. From this
perspective the question of whether complex societies can construct a ra-
tional identity would have to be answered as follows: a collective identity
becomes superfluous as soon as the mass of the members of society are
sociostructurally forced to lay aside their role identities, however gen-
eralized, and to develop ego identities. The idea of an identity become
reflective, to be collectively established in the future, would now be the
last illusory husk before collective identities as such could be given up
and replaced by the permanent variation of all reference systems. Such a
state of affairs also bears utopian features; for in it all wars—as orga-
nized efforts of collectives that demand from their members a willingness
to die—would be thinkable only as regressive states of emergency but no
longer as something institutionally expected to happen.
31. J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, 1971),
and Toward a Rational Society (Boston, 1970). I am grateful to T.
McCarthy for his contributions to the analysis of the concepts of instru-
mental, strategic, and communicative action {in The Critical Theory of
Jiérgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), section 1.2, “Labor and
Interaction: The Critique of Instrumental Reason’’}. Cf. also J. Keane,
“Work and Interaction in Habermas,” in Arena 38 (1975) :51-68.
32. On what follows, cf. also A. Wellmer, “Communication and Eman-
cipation....”
33. On the concept of systematically distorted communication, cf. J.
Habermas, “Der Universalitatsanspruch det Hermeneutik,” in Kaltur
und Kritik, pp. 263-301. [Some of the same ground is covered in “Sum-