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Contemporary Cultural Theory

judgement on the avant-garde is much less sanguine than is
Adorno’s.

Communicative rationality
Habermas emphasised the essential ambiguity of modernity: the
historical need for emancipation from the rigid social structures
of pre-rational tradition on the one hand, the ‘colonisation of the
lifeworld’ by instrumental reason on the other. For Habermas,
reason is immanent within sociality, and especially within
language: through the structure of language, he wrote, ‘autonomy
and responsibility are posited for us. Our first sentence expresses
unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained
consensus’ (Habermas, 1971, p. 314). This notion of unimpeded
communication provided him with criteria by which to critique
existing social reality and elaborate the utopian possibilities for
real social change. The end result was the magisterial two-volume
theory of communicative action (Habermas, 1984, 1987a).
Habermas’ early work had sought to secure the emancipatory
potential in Enlightenment reason from Adornian cultural
pessimism. Increasingly, however, the irrationalist threat
appeared to emanate from French post-structuralism and post-
modernism as much as from his own one-time mentors
(Habermas, 1987). Though sympathetic to the postmodern ‘new
social movements’ (Habermas, 1981), he would remain deeply
suspicious of postmodern theoretical relativism. Hence the
dismissive comment on Foucault and Derrida: ‘On the basis of
modernist attitudes they justify an irreconcilable antimodernism’
(Habermas, 1985, p. 14).
He also became increasingly concerned with how to reconcile
the utopian ideal of free, rational communicative interaction with
the degraded reality of contemporary modern society. This might
explain his growing interest in the law, the interface between the
normative claims of the life-world and the imperatives of state
and market systems. This returned him to the problem of legiti-
mation: laws cannot be self-legitimating because of their inherent
rationality, as Weber had supposed (Habermas, 1988, p. 219); their
validity must flow from their moral and political dimensions,

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