Subject: HAB: Missing Link
Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2002 10:17:03 +0000
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<P>Missing Link</P>
<P>I am currently working my way back through the basic argument of Habermas's _TCA_. Just finished Habermas's reconstruction of Weber's theory of modernity and now looking at his argument in support of his thesis that language oriented to understanding and not language orienetd to success is the "natural" mode of language.</P>
<P>What I am looking for is the passage/s whereby Habermas links the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions to latently strategic action orientations then to openly strategic action and instrumental action orientations. </P>
<P>In other words - as far as I can tell - Habermas appears to be conflating the category of latently strategic action with purposive-rational action *in general*. Now, whilst Habermas does take some shortcuts I suspect have simply not yet *found* the missing link passage.</P>
<P>Whilst latently strategic action is close to being the "opposite" of communicative action this does not mean that Weber's action model postulates this subtype of purposive-rational action as the basic unit of the modern social order. In fact the ethical nature of the methodical conduct of life would surely have *excluded* latently strategic action in the formative period of early capitalism I would have thought. Then, as the systemworld's media of money and power begin to assert themselves outside of the economic and administrative subsystems there still does not appear to be much room for latently strategic action.</P>
<P>Unless, Habermas's connecting of latently strategic action to capitalism is how he nods in the direction of ideology critique, and thereby keeps a foot in that camp of western marxism. What do others think?</P>
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