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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 81

Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

their ability to guarantee and reflect the will of people, as this is
generated in intersubjective communicative action. In other
words: ‘There can be no autonomous law without the realization
of democracy’ (p. 279). Habermas’ later writings have become
increasingly political in tenor, dealing by turn with immediately
German problems, such as those posed by reunification, and with
more generally European problems, such as the relationship
between the European Union and globalising capitalism
(Habermas, 1994; Habermas, 1998). He has continued to argue
that ‘there are alternatives’ to the privatisation of the social threat-
ened by the peculiar combination of corporate globalisation and
ideological individualism. Confronted by the individualism of
the so-called ‘Berlin generation’, he is insistent on the need for
‘a language capable of skewering the phenomena of the hour as
mercilessly as Adorno did in the early days of the Federal
Republic’ (Habermas, 1998a, p. 11). In The Postnational Constella-
tion, Habermas has even called for the reconstitution of the
welfare state at a supranational level, precisely as a counterweight
to the globalisation of the economic system (Habermas, 2001).
Habermas has thus continued the work of critique initiated
by the first generation of critical theorists, even if this has become
increasingly a matter of commentary and polemic rather than
social theory in the grand fashion. In the latter respect, Adorno’s
mantle appears to have passed to Honneth, whose work
promises to add a distinctly subjectivist dimension to post-
Adornian critical theory by substituting ‘recognition’ for
undistorted communication as its guiding normative principle
(Honneth, 1996). There are obvious parallels between second-
generation critical theory and cultural materialism, which have
on occasion been remarked upon (Eagleton, 1990, pp. 404, 409).
But there are also crucial differences, which are partly discipli-
nary and partly national-cultural in origin. For cultural
materialism the concretely experiential has remained stubbornly
relevant, not so much as the antithesis but as the complement to
abstract reason. As Eagleton observes: ‘Williams’s subtle sense of
the complex mediations between such necessarily universal
formations as social class, and the lived particularities of place,
region, Nature, the body, contrasts tellingly with Habermas’s

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