Well, not exactly; an excerpt:
When, at the beginning of his Minima Moralia, Adorno expressed grave reservations about the “liberal fiction which holds that any and every thought must be universally communicable to anyone whatever,” he was criticizing both political liberalism and the use of “communication” as a fundamental organizing principle in philosophy. This hostility toward both liberalism and the fetish of universal communication, on the other, was not maintained by the members of the so-called Frankfurt School and was abandoned even before the next generation had fully come on the scene. Even as early as the beginning of the 1970s, the unofficial successor of Adorno as head of the school, Jürgen Habermas, who turns ninety this week, began his project of rehabilitating a neo-Kantian version of liberalism. He proposed to do this by having recourse to a normatively highly charged concept of “discourse.” What exactly discourse meant was to be explained in what he called a “theory of communicative action.”
His program is “neo-Kantian” in three senses: First of all, it is dominated by the idea that the central philosophical issue is one of “legitimacy” (just as for Kant, the central philosophical question was “quid juris?”, not “quid facti?”). Second, Habermas is fixated, as Kant was, on the idea that there are historically invariant structures that are capable of generating normativity endogenously. In Kant’s case these are structures of “reason”; in Habermas’s structures of communication. Finally, Kant was obsessed with clear, strong dichotomies, and deeply anxious about possible violations of the boundaries between what he took to be radically different domains (such as morality and prudence or the a priori and the a posteriori). This Kantian preoccupation is mirrored in the sharp opposition between the central concepts of discourse and of instrumental action one finds in Habermas’s position. Adorno took the liberal fiction of universal communicability to be a clear pathology. Habermas, on the contrary, makes no attempt to distance himself from this fiction; he actively embraces it, takes it seriously and even promotes it to be a criterion for legitimacy: “legitimacy” is to be defined by a certain kind of universal communicability. His liberalism is supposed to have foundations, and to find them in a transcendental theory of communication.
As longtime readers know, I'm basically sympathetic with this line of criticism, although the Kantian rot in the Frankfurt School starts as early as Horkheimer's attack on instrumental reason in the 1930s, but it culminates with the complete abandonment of Marx's conception of philosophy and theory in Habermas's mature work. Habermas remains, however, a vitally important public intellectual in Germany, one of the few who can always be counted on to criticize the closet Nazis and apologists for the Reich.
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