Page 9 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

x Translator’s Introduction

ophy of history derived in part from ignoring the essentially
practical nature of its prospective dimension. The projected future
(which conferred meaning on the past) was not a product of
contemplation or of scientific prediction but of a situationally
engaged practical reason.

The meaning of the actual historical process is revealed to the extent
that we grasp a meaning, derived from “‘practical reason,” of what
should be and what should be otherwise ... and theoretically examine
the presuppositions of its practical realization... We must interpret
the actual course and the social forces of the present from the point
of view of the realization of that meaning.5

Thus Habermas already found in the young Marx many of the
necessary correctives to the excesses of traditional philosophy.
But Marx, in his desire to distinguish himself from the ‘‘merely
philosophic” critique of the left Hegelians, subsequently ascribed
to his own views the features of a strictly empirical theory of
society; and later, in the hands of his ‘“‘orthodox’’ followers,
Marxism seemed to provide a purely theoretical guarantee of the
outcome of history; the importance of critical self-reflection and
enlightened political practice receded behind the solid, objective
necessity of inexorable laws of history. The spectacle of this
retrogression was one of the motivatifig factors behind the Frank-
furt School’s renewal of the philosophical dimension of Marxism;
and it was behind Habermas’ concetn to demarcate critical social
theory from strictly empirical-analytic science as clearly as Marx
had from philosophy—to locate it “between philosophy and
science.”
While the essays of the late fifties and early sixties introduced
the idea of comprehending society as a historically developing
whole for the sake of enlightening practical consciousness, build-
ing a collective political will, and rationally guiding practice,
they provided as yet no detailed articulation of the logic, method-
ology, or structure of this type of theory. The first attempts to
do so appeared in the later sixties, principally in Zar Logik der
Soztalwissenschaften (1967) and Knowledge and Human Inter-
ests (1968).® Although these studies were still labelled “pro-
paedeutic’”” by Habermas, they did contain extended discussions