Is the need for criticism justified? Is there a benefit to struggle on its own, or is it an engine of growth? Can the power of understanding in everyday communication minimize argument, including in political life? If so, the narrativity of understanding must be justified. But its justification lies in ethics, which defines the paradigm of communication as a standard of action. “As a rule of ethics, it has a normativity that does not belong to it as a mere factual product of the history of social science theory (1)” This article discusses the notion of the communicative reason of the public sphere through Jürgen Habermas’ concept of “communicative reason(2)” with Hannah Arendt’s concept of communicative (political) power(3).
The political reason for the public sphere is explained here as the medium of the political. Habermas’s political constitution of philosophy opens and substantiates the next thesis: “Political philosophy is a dispute about the good.” This can become a standard of action. In his later work, Habermas attempts to define the notion of communicative reason as a reflection of philosophy.
Communication and rationality gradually become the basis of social relationships and displace the position of transcendental consciousness. Once we abandon the idea that the actor is the source of meaning in the world, we can see that the actor is just one Understanding comes from rational communication and norms of understanding in the space of reasons.”
The basic principles of rationalized communication are to move away from the subject as a constituent of society and to preserve the possibility of criticism. The subject has been replaced by an understanding of the living world as an integral part of society. Despite this, the requirements of the validity of communication retain the possibility of criticism. They are based on two broad aspects. One can criticize strategic action based on the action of understanding the lifeworld. Second, the traditions of everyday communication are not exempt from their criticism. Because they could conflict with the claims of the validity of communication that they condition as contingent traditions. The grounding and critique of society thus become equally possible. In this article, we primarily focus on the second aspect, the possibility of social critique, which is examined here from the perspective of J. Habermas as well as that of Hannah Arndt.
When it is rooted in the source of legitimacy of human unity, an act has the communicative structure of the lifeworld. When rooted in the source of political legitimacy, which is the formation of human unity, it is legitimate. Recent contemporary thought has repeatedly emphasized that sovereignty is the legal title of political legitimacy. According to Arendt, a functional and federal separation of powers should not limit democracy, but rather facilitate it and strengthen and increase the power of the people to create their law. The system of checks and balances is supposed to ensure that state authorities don’t abuse their power.” Abstraction action always emanates from the experience of the lifeworld. “The appropriation of traditions, the renewal of solidarity, the socialization of the individual require a natural hermeneutic of everyday communication”.
THE ACTIVITY-THEORETIC CONCEPTION OF POWER
However, according to Hannah Arendt, communicative power is impermanent. It exists only in the “fleeting moment of joint action (5)” and “disappears” as soon as those gathered “disperse again. However, Arendt does not only have this singular, negative, and activity-theoretic conception of power, which she first develops in Vita Activa. In “On Revolution” she supplements it with a second, constructive, and structural conception of power. In doing so, she not only takes up the constitutional-theoretical legacy of the Declaration of Independence but also, in a radical counter-movement, taps into the third concept of power she had used earlier in her study of totalitarianism, to develop an alternative to both bureaucratic, imperial and totalitarian power and the negative evanescence of performative communicative power on the example of the revolutionary constitution. However, the question remains open as to whether communicative power can be reasonable.
How can communicative power be maintained, stabilized, and increased in the long term? How can the reflexive mechanism that generates street power be institutionalized? The answer, which Arendt finally found after a careful study of the American Revolution in the chapter “Constitutio Libertatis” of her book On Revolution, is this: through a constitution that establishes rule. This constitution must be constructed in such a way that it can make permanent the communicative power of the constitutional law unleashed by the revolution. This idea leads Arendt to a fundamental critique of the “constitutionalism” of the English rule of law and the German constitutional state, which only limits power. She calls it, which she opened in the final section of The Origins of Totalitarianism as the last lifeline of Western civilization, now a “counterrevolutionary” project, created only to “break the revolutionary power of the people” and sow “deep distrust of the people” to provide “a relatively small group of technical specialists” with the means “in the class struggle (6).”
Habermas, on the other hand, talks more about procedural popular sovereignty. The difference with Arendt lies in his understanding of autonomy. Whereas Arendt, like Carl Schmitt, identifies political autonomy with a specific public space in which citizens confront each other face to face, for Habermas, Kelsen, and Luhmann autonomy is a characteristic of a specific form of communication that can take place anywhere and anytime and is separated from law only by claims of validity (Habermas), specialization (Luhmann) and method (Kelsen)(7). However, the main difference between Habermas and Arendt is not in the concept of power, but in the concept of rationality, which for Habermas is closely linked to power in all its manifestations. The broad communicative conception of rationality allows Habermas to hold to the claim of the truth of political legitimacy and democratic self-legitimacy. 30
Thus, he acts in line with Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, whereas Arendt sharply and historically ontologically demarcates politics and truth from each other and thus inevitably moves in line with Hobbes, Austen, and Schmitt, whom she abhors. Unlike Habermas (and Hobbes), Arendt does not understand the formation of political power as a purely social phenomenon, but clearly distinguishes it (like Hegel and Schmitt) from social “violence,” which for her includes administrative power. She thus moves the political, separated from truth, society, and violence, into the neighborhood of the poetic, which in turn links her to Heidegger, Nietzsche, and some poststructuralists(8). A critique needs the argumentation, which normally grows up on the moral life experience of a community. The life-world itself accommodates the discourse principle to connect it with the knowledge of the existential claims of moral norms – and at the same time, in turn, to recognize in it the ground of the procedure of gaining moral knowledge(9). Both concepts, Arendt’s notion of communicative power and Habermas’s notion of communicative reason mark a clear distance from liberalism. Power cannot be limited by law from the outside, but it can be constituted, enabled, and established by law.
THE LITHOGRAPHY:
1. Hindrichs, G. (2009): Kommunikative Macht; Philosophische Rundschau, 2009, Vol.56, No.4 (2009), p. 277
2. Hindrichs, G. (2009): Kommunikative Macht; Philosophische Rundschau, 2009, Vol.56, No.4 (2009), p. 273-295 Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handels , IV
3. Arendt, H. (1960): Vita activa, S. 194. Arendt, H. (1963): Über die Revolution, München 1974, S.96, S 198, S.222, S.218,S.228
4. Arendt, H. (1963): Über die Revolution; S. 196; S.200
5. Arendt, H. (1960): Vita activa, S. 195.
6. Arendt, H. (1963): Über die Revolution, S. 187, S. 379.
7. Brunkhorst, H. (2011): Affinität wieder Willen? Hannah Arendt, Theodor W.Adorno und die Frankfurter Schule; Fritz Bauer Institut, Liliane Weissberg (HG.), Campus Verlag, Frankfurt/New York, 2011
8. Vgl. Brunkhorst, H. (1999): Hannah Arendt, München, 1999, S. 107 ff.
9. Vgl. Hindrichs, G. (2009): Kommunikative Macht; Philosophische Rundschau, 2009, Vol.56, No.4 (2009), p. 27
