The Unforced Force of the Better Argument: Reason and Power in

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“The Unforced Force of the Better Argument:
Reason and Power in Habermas’s Political Theory”
Amy Allen
Dartmouth College
DRAFT – please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission
The tension between reason and power has a long and illustrious history in political
theory. It emerges prominently in Book One of Plato’s Republic, in Thrasymachus’s challenge
to Socrates to prove to him that justice is something other than the advantage of the stronger, and
its line of descent runs, on the reason side, through Plato to Kant to Rawls, and on the power
side, through Machiavelli to Nietzsche to Schmitt. One of the distinctive – and, in my view,
distinctively appealing – features of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, what sets it apart
from normative political philosophy, on the one hand, and empirical political science, on the
other hand, is that it explicitly concerns itself with this tension between reason and power. Such
a concern is evident in Max Horkheimer’s programmatic essay, “Traditional and Critical
Theory,” the essay that is typically taken to mark the beginning of the Frankfurt School project.
In that essay, Horkheimer argues that those who adopt the critical attitude must both “identify
themselves with [the social] totality and conceive it as will and reason” and, at the same time,
they must acknowledge that existing social reality is structured by war, oppression, and
capitalism. 1 The existing social world is both the critical theorist’s own world, a world of
collective human creation of which she is a part, and not her own, but an alien world structured
by unjust power relations. As a result, Horkheimer writes, “the identification…. of men of
critical mind with their society is marked by tension, and the tension characterizes all the
concepts of the critical way of thinking.” 2
On the one hand, critical theory and the critical
theorist are rooted in, emerge out of and are shaped by existing social reality; on the other hand,
the critical theorist cannot accept existing social reality as it is but must instead critique and even

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condemn it. This “dialectical character of the self-interpretation of contemporary man” leads, for
Horkheimer, to a critique of the Kantian conception of pure reason, for “reason cannot become
transparent to itself as long as men act as members of an organism which lacks reason.” 3
But it is at precisely this point that a version of the problem of ideology that has plagued
Marxist and post-Marxist thought rears its ugly head. If reason cannot become transparent to
itself so long as we are part of a social world that lacks reason, then how are we ever to know
when reason is lacking in the first place? Does not the very claim that the social world lacks
reason or is irrational rely on some prior assumption of reason’s capacity for self-transparency, at
least to some degree? Recognizing these difficulties, Horkheimer emphasizes that the difference
between critical and traditional theory “springs in general from a difference not so much of
objects as of subjects.” 4
That is, what is distinctive about critical theory is its conception of the
critical subject as self-consciously rooted in and shaped by the power relations in the society that
she nevertheless aims self-reflexively and rationally to critique. Up to this point in the essay,
Horkheimer highlights the ambivalent relationship between reason and power, and emphasizes
the methodological importance for critical theory of appreciating and thinking through this
ambivalence. And yet, Horkheimer goes on to say:
Critical thinking…is motivated today by the effort really to
transcend the tension and to abolish the opposition between the
individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those
work-process relationships on which society is built. Critical
theory has a concept of man as in conflict with himself until this
opposition is removed. If activity governed by reason is proper to
man, then existent social practice, which forms the individual’s life

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down to its least details, is inhuman, and this inhumanity affects
everything that goes on in society. 5
In this passage, Horkheimer is sanguine about the possibility – and clear about the necessity – of
transcending the tension between reason and existing social relations and practices that are
structured by power relations. The conflict between the reason proper to man and the inhuman
social conditions that deform our existing practices is figured here not as an essential tension, but
instead as a socially contingent one, a conflict that could be resolved through social struggle.
With this move, Horkheimer seems to resolve the tension between reason and the power
relations rooted in the economic structure of society in favor of reason, which is “proper to man,”
and by whose lights existing social practices can be judged as “inhuman.”
In my view, Horkheimer’s foreclosing of the tension between reason and power is highly
problematic. Precisely what is so promising about critical theory as a methodological approach
is its attempt to hold open the tension between reason and power and to render it productive for
social and political critique. Indeed, this very tension is already apparent in most definitions of
critical theory, as for example, the relatively thin (and thus hopefully non-controversial)
definition recently offered by Nancy Fraser: “a theory is ‘critical’, as opposed to ‘traditional’,
only if it is guided by a practical, emancipatory interest in unmasking domination.” 6
Critical
theorists must be attuned to the depressing realities of domination, including the ways in which
these realities shape both the subject position of the critical theorist and the practice of critical
theory itself, while still hopefully articulating the possibilities for emancipation. Resolving the
tension between reason and power (in either direction) renders critical theorists unable to
accomplish this dual aim.

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In what follows I shall argue that Horkheimer’s problematic foreclosure of the tension
between reason and power is repeated in more recent critical theory by his intellectual fellow
traveler, Jürgen Habermas. Like Horkheimer, Habermas explicitly thematizes the tension
between reason and power, only ultimately to foreclose it in the direction of a rationality that has
been conceptually and methodologically purified of the strategic power relations that pervade
social reality. In order to make this case, I will examine in detail Habermas’s most complex,
sophisticated, and ambitious attempt to confront the tension between social facticity and
normative validity, an attempt found in his magnum opus of legal and political theory, Between
Facts and Norms. 7
I begin by examining the conceptual framework of Between Facts and
Norms, the core of which is the internal tension between facticity and validity. Habermas
proposes that although this tension cannot be eliminated, it can be operationalized through the
structure of the constitutional state, in particular through the role that law plays in mediating
between the generation of communicative power and the administrative employment of power.
This will lead me to a discussion of Habermas’s conception of power. My focus here will be on
what I will call, following Joel Whitebook, 8 the demand for purity plaguing the structure of
Habermas’s conception of power, a demand that leads him to attempt to insulate communicative
action and power from the pernicious influence of strategic power. In order to make the case that
the demand that communicative power be purified of or insulated from strategic power is
unreasonable and unattainable even at the conceptual level, I consider the relationship between
social power and subjection. Finally, by way of a conclusion, I consider the consequences of
Habermas’s foreclosure of the tension between reason and power for his meta-philosophical
position. In the end, I argue that this line of criticism, if convincing, need not compel Habermas

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to abandon his normative theoretical and political agenda, but that it does require him to defend
that program in a more contextualist way.
The Internal Tension between Facticity and Validity
Habermas begins by claiming that the tension between facticity and validity is among the
fundamental concepts of the theory of communicative action. He presents this tension in terms
that recall Horkheimer’s account, discussed above, of the tension between a reason that is proper
to human beings and the actually existing unjust societies in which that reason is realized. As
Habermas puts it:
The theory of communicative action already absorbs the tension
between facticity and validity into its fundamental concepts. With
this risky decision it preserves the link with the classical
conception of an internal conception, however mediated, between
society and reason, and hence between the constraints and
necessities under which the reproduction of social life is carried
out, on the one hand, and the idea of a conscious conduct of life,
on the other (BFN, 8).
However, Habermas admits that this methodological strategy comes with a cost. It leaves him
with the problem of explaining how the fragile bonds of communicative validity can secure the
reproduction of social order, especially in post-conventional, internally differentiated, modern
societies in which the integrating force of ethical and religious traditions has waned. In an effort
to address this problem, Habermas turns to positive law, which, he says, “offers itself as a
candidate for such an explanation. Legal norms of this type make possible highly artificial

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communities of free and equal legal persons whose integration is based simultaneously on the
threat of external sanctions and the supposition of a rationally motivated agreement” (ibid). In
other words, the social integration made possible by positive law is based simultaneously on
positive, coercive force and on a rational claim to legitimacy. Still, Habermas makes an
interesting and, I think, significant terminological choice inasmuch as he tends to refer to the
coercive force of law as ‘facticity’, rather than as ‘force’ or ‘violence’. 9
This has the effect of
taming somewhat the paradoxical relationship between force or violence and law that is so
prominent in contemporary debates about sovereignty, 10 transforming it into a tension that is
much easier (though still not easy) to dispel.
Habermas’s terminological choice may be traced to the connection between his
reflections on law and his earlier work in philosophy of language. As is exceedingly clear in his
polemical attacks on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Horkheimer and Adorno, Derrida, and Foucault, 11
Habermas goes to great lengths in his philosophy of language to ward off the reduction of
validity to power that he sees as symptomatic of the counterdiscourse of modernity. 12
To be
sure, Habermas does admit that “the task of justification, or, in other words, the critique of
validity claims carried out from the perspective of a participant, cannot ultimately be separated
from a genetic consideration that issues in an ideology critique – carried out from a third-person
perspective – of the mixing of power claims and validity claims.” 13 But notice how this passage
performs the very separation that it claims is impossible, by confining the ideology critique of
the mixing of power and validity claims to the third-person, empirically grounded observer’s
perspective, thereby insulating it both methodologically and conceptually from the first person,
rationally reconstructive task of normative justification carried out from the participant point of
view. With this move – a move that we will see repeated in the theory of power as developed in

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Between Facts and Norms – Habermas simultaneously domesticates power and insulates validity
from its effects.
Even with his terminological transmutation of force, violence and power into the more
benign sounding facticity, Habermas still faces the tall order of negotiating the tension between
facticity and validity that is internal to the presuppositions of communication. This brings us to
the difficult and crucial notion of the context-transcendence of validity claims, for it is here that
the tension between facticity and validity is ultimately rooted. The challenge for Habermas’s
notion of context-transcendence is to explain how validity claims are both raised from with a
particular context and simultaneously “overshoot” that context and the local standards that
govern it (BFN 15). In other words, the challenge is to envision transcendence as an
innerworldly phenomenon without thereby deflating it entirely. 14
Habermas puts it this way:
The idea of the redeemability of criticizable validity claims
requires idealizations that, as adopted by the communicating actors
themselves, are thereby brought down from the transcendental
heaven to the earth of the lifeworld. The theory of communicative
action detranscendentalizes the noumenal realm only to have the
idealizing force of context-transcending anticipations settle in the
unavoidable pragmatic presuppositions of speech acts, and hence
in the heart of ordinary, everyday communicative practice. Even
the most fleeting of speech-act offers, the most conventional
yes/no responses, rely on potential reasons (BFN 19).
Validity claims are raised in specific contexts, but the validity (Gültigkeit) that is claimed for
them “conceptually transcends space and time”; such validity is thus distinct from the mere de

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facto validity or social acceptance (soziale Geltung) of a norm, a ‘validity’ that is “based merely
on settled custom or the threat of sanctions” (BFN, 20). 15
Validity claims are, Habermas is fond
of saying, Janus-faced: “as claims, they overshoot every context; at the same time, they must be
both raised and accepted here and now if they are to support an agreement effective for
coordination – for this there is no ‘null context’’ (BFN, 21).
The tension between facticity and validity in everyday communication is, for Habermas,
unavoidable and ineliminable, but it is also “explosive” (BFN 21). The ongoing process of
submitting validity claims to discursive, critical examination means that there is an unavoidable
risk of disagreement and dissension built into processes of communication (BFN 21). Moreover,
from the point of view of action coordination, disagreement and dissension are quite costly
inasmuch as they threaten to undermine social integration (BFN 21). Hence in order for social
order to be possible, societies need to find ways of stabilizing the tension between facticity and
validity inherent in linguistic communication. Habermas delineates three strategies for
stabilizing this tension. The first strategy stabilizes the tension by leveling it out entirely or
fusing facticity with validity. This strategy comes in two variations. The first appeals to a
shared, cohesive lifeworld that acts as the “sprawling, deeply set, and unshakable rock of
background assumptions, loyalties, and skills” against which critique crashes in vain (BFN 22),
the second to an archaic and authoritarian institution “that imperiously confronts us and arouses
ambivalent feelings” (BFN 24). Such institutions must achieve their stability “below that
threshold at which the coercive force of sanctions irreversibly splits off from the forceless force
of plausible reasons” (ibid). Hence, the validity that they secure is mere de facto validity
(Geltung), a validity that “retains the force of the factual” (BFN 25).

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This first stabilization strategy goes wrong, in Habermas’s view, by fusing together two
moments that we now cannot help but consider incompatible – legitimate validity, on the one
hand, and the facticity of either a thick, unquestioned, shared tradition or awesome, overpowering,
uncriticizable authority, on the other. However, the second type of stabilization
strategy that Habermas considers, which involves giving communicative action unfettered free
play, goes too far in the other direction, shifting the entire burden of social integration in modern,
complex, internally differentiated societies onto communicative interaction itself. Habermas
maintains that “under the modern conditions of complex societies, which require self-interested
and hence normatively neutralized action in broad spheres, the paradoxical situation arises in
which unfettered communicative action can neither unload nor seriously bear the burden of
social integration falling to it” (BFN 37). Hence this turns out to be a lousy stabilization strategy
since unfettered communicative action in a post-traditional context is inherently de-stabilizing.
In contrast to these two strategies, Habermas interprets his third and preferred alternative,
stabilization through positive law, 16 as one that not only recognizes the incompatibility of
genuine validity and unquestioned tradition or authority but is also better suited for large,
complex, internally differentiated modern societies. Habermas interprets positive law as retaining
some aspects of each of the first two stabilization strategies but incorporating them into an
institutional form that also allows for each to have its own proper sphere of influence. In
modern, positive law, the coercive power of the state to enforce the law “offers a functional
equivalent for the stabilization of behavioral expectations by spellbinding authority” (BFN 37),
while the free play of communication in the public sphere and in deliberative political
institutions “exposes all values and norms to critical testing,” thus conferring legitimacy on the
results of political opinion and will formation (ibid). Viewing facticity and validity as

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intertwined but not fused, Habermas maintains that in modern law “the facticity of the
enforcement of law is intertwined with the legitimacy of a genesis of law that claims to be
rational because it guarantees liberty” (BFN 28). The key to understanding both the legitimacy
and the positivity of modern law thus lies in understanding it as a mechanism that preserves
unfettered communication while relieving already overburdened individuals from the onerous
tasks of social integration (BFN 38).
Through positive law, then, the tension between facticity and validity is “behaviorally
operationalized” (BFN 28). The key to this institutional realization of the tension between
facticity and validity is the way in which the constitutional state confines the coercive power of
the state and the free play of communication to their own proper spheres of influence. These
spheres of influence – the administration, on the one hand, and the formal deliberative
institutions plus the informal public sphere, on the other hand – correspond to the distinction
between administrative and communicative power, to which we now turn.
The Conceptual Structure of Habermas’s Account of Power
The core of Habermas’s account of political power is his distinction between
communicative and administrative power, with positive law functioning as the mediator and
translator between the two. Habermas emphasizes that his primary concern at the reconstructive
stage of his argument is with the internal tension between law and political power. Habermas
characterizes this tension as follows: “political power is not externally juxtaposed to law but is
rather presupposed by law and itself established in the form of law” (BFN 134). Habermas
distinguishes this tension within the law from the external tension between legal norms and the
real social contexts and political processes in which those norms must be discussed, legitimated

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and applied. The external tension, then, is the tension between the legal norm and the messy
social and political reality of actually existing constitutional democracies, a reality structured by
asymmetrical social power relations. Habermas claims that this external tension between norm
and reality is not relevant to the task of rationally reconstructing – and thus conceptually
legitimating – the structure of the democratic constitutional state. Although he does discuss this
external tension in Between Facts and Norms, he does so much later in the book, in the context
of his discussion of empirical analyses of the dangers that inequalities in social power can pose
for constitutional democracies. So it turns out that there are actually two kinds of tension
between facticity and validity possible, an internal tension that Habermas analyzes through a
normative rational reconstruction, and an external tension that he sets aside and seems to view as
irrelevant for the purposes of his reconstructive project.
Arguing from the internal, reconstructive perspective of a participant in modern legal
orders, then, Habermas calls for a differentiation in the concept of political power. “If the
sources of justice from which the law itself draws legitimacy are not to run dry,” he writes,
“then a jurisgenerative communicative power must underlie the administrative power of the
government” (BFN 147). Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s work, Habermas uses the term
communicative power to refer to the political power that emerges “only in undeformed public
spheres” and issues “only from structures of undamaged intersubjectivity found in nondistorted
communication” (BFN 148). Habermas distinguishes this from administrative power, which
refers to the instrumentally rational process of exercising power on the part of the state (BFN
149). The two are connected through – but also separated from one another by – law, which
translates the communicative power that emerges in the public sphere and in the deliberative

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bodies of the parliament or legislature into the administrative power exercised by the state (BFN
150).
Muddying the waters of conceptual framework in ways that we will return to in a
moment, Habermas also introduces the notion of social power – which refers to the external
rather than the internal tension between facticity and validity – in the context of his
reconstructive argument. In a Weberian vein, he defines social power as “a measure for the
possibilities an actor has in social relationships to assert his own will and interests, even against
the opposition of others” (BFN 175). Habermas maintains that his tripartite distinction between
communicative, administrative, and social power allows us to “interpret the idea of the
constitutional state in general as the requirement that the administrative system, which is steered
through the power code, be tied to the lawmaking communicative power and kept free of
illegitimate interventions of social power (i.e., of the factual strength of privileged interests to
assert themselves)” (BFN 150). This interpretation generates two further requirements for the
proper exercise of administrative power. First, it must not be allowed to reproduce itself without
drawing on the normative resources provided by communicative power (BFN 150). Second,
since administrative power is instrumentally rational, the administration must not concern itself
with normative reasons or justifications. Rather, it must limit itself to drawing on the pool of
normative reasons that are generated by communicative power and using these to rationalize its
decisions (BFN 484). 17
Indeed, Habermas maintains that the legal rationalization of the coercive power of the
state through the conversion of communicative to administrative power is one of the principal
tasks of the constitutional state. However, Habermas maintains that “the legal rationalization of
force must not be conceived as taming a quasi-natural domination whose violent core is and

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always remains uncontrollably contingent. Rather, law is supposed to dissolve this irrational
substance, converting it into a ‘rule of law’ in which alone the politically autonomous selforganization
of the legal community expresses itself” (BFN 188-189). How is law able to
perform this amazing feat of alchemy, dissolving the irrational, violent substance of coercive
political power into the transparent liquid of rationality? The answer has to do with the close
connection between political authority and political autonomy in democratic, constitutional
states. The organization of such states ultimately serves “the politically autonomous selforganization
of a community that has constituted itself with the system of rights as an association
of free and equal consociates under law” (BFN 176). The modern constitutional state unifies
practical reason and sovereign will through the principle of popular sovereignty, according to
which “all political power derives from the communicative power of citizens” (BFN 170).
Because they emerge out of communicatively structured processes of opinion- and willformation
(in informal public spheres and deliberative institutions such as a parliament or
legislature, respectively), legal norms can be understood as unifying “the power of an
intersubjectively formed will and the reason inherent in the legitimating procedure” (BFN 189).
Not only is Habermas concerned that administrative power might regenerate itself on its
own terms, without drawing on the normative resources of communicative power that alone can
render it legitimate, he is also concerned that social power might be converted directly into
administrative power. This concern leads Habermas to endorse “the principle of the separation
of state and society,” which is designed to ensure that social power cannot reach administrative
power “without first passing through the sluices of communicative power formation” (BFN 169-
170). The relationship between social power and political autonomy isn’t entirely negative,
though, for social power can either facilitate or restrict the exercise of political autonomy.

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Habermas maintains that social power facilitates political autonomy by providing the necessary
material conditions for its exercise, and it restricts political autonomy by providing some social
actors greater influence than others over the processes of opinion- and will-formation and over
the actions of the administration. This seems to boil down to the rather obvious point that social
power facilitates political autonomy to the extent that everyone is equally able to exercise such
power, and it restricts it to the extent that there are pervasive, structural inequalities in the
abilities of individuals to exercise social power. In other words, structures of domination and
subordination inhibit the political autonomy of those who are subordinated and enhance the
political autonomy of those who occupy positions of dominance. Hence, it is the job of civil
society to “absorb and neutralize” inequalities and asymmetries of social power, such that “social
power comes into play only insofar as it facilitates the exercise of civic autonomy and does not
restrict it” (BFN 175).
Habermas does not address the ways in which civil society can accomplish this difficult
task in the context of his rational reconstruction of the basic principles and institutions of the
democratic constitutional state, since this task concerns the external tension between legal
validity and a social facticity plagued by widespread and deeply rooted asymmetries of power.
He does return to this problem later in the book, in the context of his more empirically focused
discussion of the dangers posed to the constitutional state by inequities in social power. There,
he draws on the work of the German sociologist of law, Bernhard Peters, to argue that “the
illegitimate independence of social and administrative power vis-à-vis democratically generated
communicative power” can be ameliorated by weak public spheres that have specific capacities –
including the capacity “to ferret out, identify, and effectively thematize latent problems of social
integration” – and the opportunity to exercise them (BFN 358). 18
But the assumption that these

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weak peripheral public spheres – as distinct from the strong central public spheres that are the
deliberative institutions of the state (i.e. parliament or the legislature) – have such critical
capacities is problematic inasmuch as “it places a good part of the normative expectations
connected with deliberative politics on the peripheral networks of opinion-formation” (BFN
358). This raises the difficult question of whether the opinions formed in weak public spheres
are the result of practices of reason-giving and assessing or of the pernicious influence of
unequal social power. Habermas admits that “despite the wealth of empirical investigations, we
still do not have a well-established answer to this cardinal question. But” he continues, “one can
at least pose the question more precisely by assuming that public processes of communication
can take place with less distortion the more they are left to the internal dynamic of a civil society
that emerges from the lifeworld” (BFN 375). I have read that last sentence many times, and I
confess I still do not understand what it means. At best it seems tautological: communicative
practices are less distorted the more they emerge from the “undeformed public spheres” that are
structured by “undamaged intersubjectivity” (BFN 148) and hence are not distorted by the
pernicious influence of asymmetrical social power. How this is supposed to help us settle the
empirical question of whether opinion formation in weak public spheres is governed by
communicative reason or social power is mysterious.
It seems to me that Habermas ends up in this awkward spot in large part because of his
ultimately quixotic attempt to keep separate the internal and external tensions between facticity
and validity. To the extent that he succeeds in separating these two tensions, it becomes unclear
how Habermas’s proposed resolution of the former – through the institutionalization of modern,
positive law – is supposed to help us at all with resolving the latter. But, even more
fundamentally, it seems worth worrying about whether or not Habermas can possibly succeed in

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maintaining a clear distinction between the internal tension (the coercive power of the state vs.
valid law) and the external tension (a social facticity structured by asymmetrical power relations
and the normative validity claimed for his theoretical project). These two tensions map on to
two basic distinctions in Habermas’s conception of power. Related to the internal tension is the
distinction between communicative and administrative power, which are connected but also kept
separate by the mechanism of law; related to the external tension is the distinction between
communicative and social power, which are kept separate but ultimately related by the
methodological distinction between the quasi-transcendental project of rational reconstruction
and the empirical analysis of power. In both cases, communicative power is counterposed to a
kind of strategic power (both administrative and social power are defined in instrumental and
strategic terms). And in both cases, the distinctions are designed to insulate communicative
reason and power from the pernicious influence of strategic power: conceptually, in the case of
the internal tension, and methodologically, in the case of the external tension.
At the intersection of these two sets of distinctions is social power, a hybrid normativeempirical
concept that enjoys an ultimately problematic status in Habermas’s argument. Like
administrative power, social power is understood in strategic, instrumental terms. But unlike
administrative power, social power does not seem to belong to the discussion of the internal
tension between the facticity of coercive state power and the validity of legitimate law. And yet
Habermas introduces social power during the reconstructive stage of his argument and claims
that equal social power (or at least a lack of systematic subordination) facilitates the achievement
of political autonomy by providing the material conditions necessary for its exercise. This
suggests that social power is relevant not only to the external tension between norm and reality
but also, in a deep and consequential sense, to the internal tension, since democratically enacted

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law cannot be presumed to be valid unless it is enacted under conditions of equal social power.
Thus, the problem with social power is not just, as Bill Scheuerman argues, that Habermas lacks
a robust enough account of it, although this is undoubtedly true. 19
Habermas’s account of social
power is insufficiently complex to bear all the weight that Habermas puts on it, for reasons we
will explore in the next section. In addition, social power has a fundamentally ambiguous status
in Habermas’s argument, an ambiguity that troubles the argument’s basic conceptual structure.
The structure of Habermas’s argument reflects a conceptual demand for purity. This can
be seen in his operationalization of the internal tension between facticity (understood as the
coercive enforcement of law) and validity (understood as the democratic genesis of law). In that
case, positive law connects communicative and strategic power but also keeps them separate
from one another. This demand for purity is also reflected in the attempt to keep the internal and
external tensions between facticity and validity separate, and is enacted at the methodological
level in Habermas’s distinction between the normative, conceptual project of rational
reconstruction and the empirical analysis of social power. Habermas demands purity because he
thinks that it is only by keeping communicative action, reason, and power purified of the effects
of strategic action, rationality and power that he can distinguish genuine from merely
conventional or de facto legitimacy. In other words, the assumption of purity is the only thing
that enables him to break out of contextualist circle. But the ambiguous status of the notion of
social power in Habermas’s theory suggests that such purity is unattainable even at the
conceptual level. And the more we complicate Habermas’s overly simplistic notion of social
power, the less attainable it will come to seem.

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Social Power and Subjection
Recall that Habermas defines social power as “a measure for the possibilities an actor
has in social relationships to assert his own will and interests, even against the opposition of
others” (BFN 175). As a definition of social power, this one has a rather obvious, but important,
lacuna. It assumes that the will and interests asserted by social actors are genuine, that is, that
they are not themselves a function of pervasive asymmetries of social power. However, given
the pervasiveness, depth, and systematicity of asymmetrical social power relations – along lines
of class, gender, race, and sexuality, for example – and given the ways in which such power
relations are constitutive of the identities of their targets, this assumption seems problematic.
The assumption is connected to Habermas’s reconceptualization of practical reason in
communicative terms, for it is his faith in the power of practical reason and individual autonomy
that leaves him unconcerned about what I will call, following Foucault, the problem of
subjection. 20
A central aim of Habermas’s project as a whole is to translate the Kantian conception of
practical reason into communicative terms. As Habermas sees it, this move has the advantage of
allowing him to defend a proceduralized version of reason from charges of essentialism while
escaping the dead ends of contextualism and the post-Nietzschean denial of reason. In his view,
communicative rationality is not a capacity of the individual subject but instead is “expressed in
a decentered complex of pervasive, transcendentally enabling structural conditions” of
communication (BFN 4). The normative force of communicative action is thus the force of a
“weak transcendental necessity” whereby “a set of unavoidable idealizations forms the
counterfactual basis of an actual process of reaching understanding, a practice that can critically
turn against its own results and thus transcend itself” (ibid). Although communicative rationality

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inheres in the practice of communication rather than in the individual subject, as a practice, it is
still dependent on the formation of communicatively competent, autonomous subjects who are
capable of engaging in the ongoing exchange and critically reflexive evaluation of reasons. As
Habermas points out repeatedly, his normatively demanding models of morality and politics
depend upon a rationalized lifeworld that meets them halfway by promoting the requisite forms
of cultural and political socialization.
For individuals who have been so socialized, “reasons owe their rationally motivating
force to an internal relationship between the meaning and the validity of linguistic utterances.
This makes them double-edged from the word go, because they can both reinforce and upset
beliefs” (BFN 35). But is it not the case that all beliefs must be assessed in light of some
standards of rationality that we take to be given for the purposes of that assessment? In that case,
would there not be some bedrock beliefs or assumptions that cannot be upset by reason? In a
concession to contextualists such as Rorty, Habermas acknowledges that “reasons count only
against the background of context-dependent standards of rationality,” but, he insists, “reasons
that express the results of context-altering learning processes can also undermine established
standards of rationality” (BFN 36). The difficulty for Habermas is this: even if the rationally
motivating power of what we take to be good reasons is derived from internalized standards of
rationality, those internalized standards are themselves not internalized for good reasons.
Indeed, they are not internalized for any reasons whatsoever because the creature that
internalizes them is not yet reasonable, but only becomes so by virtue of internalizing those very
standards. Moreover, as Habermas himself admits in the context of his social theory, the only
way to get unruly toddlers to internalize those standards of rationality is through the mechanisms
of punishment, guilt and shame, that is, through a healthy dose of repression and

20
authoritarianism. 21 This suggests that not all of the irrational substance of coercive power can be
dissolved in the acid of communicative rationality.
To some extend, Habermas acknowledges this point in his account of the socially
stabilizing and integrating functions of modern, positive law, though he is overly sanguine about
its implications. Methodologically, Habermas argues that legal orders can be analyzed both from
above (that is, from the point of view of an idealized philosophy of justice that views law solely
in normative terms) and from below (that is, from the point of view of a cynical sociology of law
that views law as a mechanism for social control) and that “a reconstructive sociology of law
must do justice to both perspectives” (BFN 69). In his attempt to view law from above and
below at the same time, Habermas builds on the work of Durkheim and Weber. From Durkheim,
he takes the idea of the socially integrative force of the internalization of moral norms. By
translating Kant’s principle of autonomy into sociological terms, Durkheim sought to explain
how actors who are free in their decisions bind themselves to
norms at all, that is, let themselves be obligated by norms to realize
the corresponding values. However gentle it may be, the force of
normative claims will be experienced by actors as externally
imposed coercion, unless they make it their own as moral force,
that is, unless they convert this force into their own motivations
(BFN 67).
This conversion from the coercive force of an external moral authority to the internal
motivational force of self-controlled moral insight occurs via the internalization of the values
incorporated in the community’s norms. Habermas concedes that this internalization process “is
usually not repression-free; but it does result in an authority of conscience that goes hand in hand

21
with a consciousness of autonomy” (ibid). In the context of his social theory, Habermas does
hedge the point as he does here; he admits that repression is necessary for this process, but insists
that the process can’t be the result of repression alone.
Following Weber, however, Habermas argues that modern, complex social orders can not
be based solely on this intrapsychic mechanism of internalized norms (BFN 68). Indeed, the
principal reason we need positive law in postconventional, highly complex, internally
differentiated modern societies is that the intrapsychic mechanisms of guilt and shame are no
longer sufficient for securing compliance to norms. As Habermas puts it, “A morality that
depends on the accommodating substrate of propitious personality structures would have a
limited effectiveness if it could not engage the actor’s motives in another way besides
internalization, that is, precisely by way of an institutionalized legal system that supplements
postconventional morality in a manner effective for action” (BFN 114). Law thus unburdens the
modern, postconventional moral actor in three senses. From a cognitive perspective, “law
complements morality by relieving the individual of the cognitive burdens of forming her own
moral judgments” (BFN 115); from a motivational perspective, it supplements motivational
indeterminacy by providing a strong incentive for “norm-conformative behavior” (BFN 116);
and from an organizational perspective, it takes the place of traditional legitimating institutions
(such as thick ethical traditions, archaic institutions, or shared religious beliefs).
In other words, the social integration that Habermas views as necessary for stability
depends upon a double repression. First, there is the repression that leads to internalization of
moral norms, the internalization of the superior power and authority of parent, who stands in for
and transmits the demands of the community or society. According to the terms of Habermas’s
own account of individuation through socialization, this process takes place prior to child being

22
able to critically assess whether that authority is legitimate, indeed, as a precondition for its
having the capacity to make that critical assessment. Second, there is the repression of coercive
positive law, which ‘relieves’ subjects who have not sufficiently internalized the power and
authority of the parent of the ‘burden’ of having to decide for themselves what is the right thing
to do. A surprising amount of force thus lies behind and undergirds the unforced force of the
better moral and legal argument. As Nietzsche put it, “ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the
affects, the whole somber thing called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of man:
how dearly they have been bought! how much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all ‘good
things’.” 22
In light of this double repression, it is interesting how much methodological weight
Habermas puts on the rational reconstruction of the normative demands of our modern law and
democracy from the internal, participant point of view. Habermas maintains that from that point
of view, participants cannot consider either morality or the law as merely a system of coercion;
rather, such a cynical view of can only be offered from a disinterested, third person, observer
point of view. But Habermas does not seem to appreciate fully – even as his own argument
presupposes – the ways in which our internal participant perspectives are themselves shaped by
the deeply asymmetrical relations of social power that structure the lifeworlds into which we are
socialized. To what extent is our own internal participant perspective, and thus the project of
rational reconstruction itself, distorted by these relations of power? Recall Horkheimer’s
observation that the difference between critical and traditional theory is a difference not so much
of objects as of subjects. Given that difference, shouldn’t critical theory remain committed to
trying to answer this question (even if we admit that it can never be answered once and for all)?

23
By shunting the discussion of power off to the third person, observer perspective, Habermas not
only fails to offer an answer to this question, he makes it difficult even to pose the question.
Of course, Habermas’s could respond to this line of criticism by claiming that autonomy
gives us the ability to reflect critically on the very processes of subjection and repression that
have made us who we are. As Habermas puts it in the context of his recent reflections on human
nature, “[adolescents] can retrospectively compensate for the asymmetry of filial dependency by
liberating themselves through a critical reappraisal of the genesis of such restrictive socialization
processes.” 23
So even if individual subjection is necessary for the achievement of individual
autonomy, just as political subjection (to the coercive force of law) is necessary for the
achievement of political autonomy (the production of valid law through democratic means),
insofar as this doubly repressive process yields autonomy in the end, what’s the problem?
The problem is, I think, that Habermas’s faith in autonomy is overblown, especially given
the role that he admits that power and repression necessarily play in the formation of the
autonomous subject. We have to internalize the standards of rationality that hold sway in our
culture – standards that may well be connected to broad and deep asymmetries of power – as a
precondition for being in a position to submit those standards to rational, critical assessment.
This doesn’t mean that such assessment is impossible, nor does it mean that we should deny
reason altogether (whatever that might mean). But it does mean that we must be exceedingly
mindful of the ways in which, as Judith Butler has put it, “power pervades the very conceptual
apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the critic.” 24 At best,
Habermas seems uninterested in the process of subjection, hence his insistence that the process
of individuation through socialization takes place “only in the medium of action oriented toward
reaching understanding [i.e., of communicative action].” 25 At worst, he is highly skeptical of

24
the very idea of subjection, hence his claim that Foucault’s account of subjection can only lead to
an image of the individual as a “mechanically punched out” copy. 26 And even when
acknowledges that power does play a role in the formation of the subject, by acknowledging that
the internalization of the authority of the parent is necessary for the formation of individual
autonomy and that the coercive force of law is necessary for achieving social integration in
postconventional societies, he remains overly sanguine about the implications of this.
This is the point at which Habermas forecloses the tension between reason and power,
coming down ultimately on the side of reason, and downplaying accordingly the role that power
plays in the formation of the practically rational, communicative subject. This foreclosure is
motivated by the same demand for purity that informs the basic structure of argument in Between
Facts and Norms. Habermas needs to keep the autonomous subject separate from the genetic
power-laden processes that form her, the communicative power that emerges out of rational
process of debate and deliberation separate from the strategic power utilized by the
administration, and the methodology of the rational reconstruction of normative frameworks
separate from the empirical investigation of social power relations, in order to maintain the
strong universalism of his moral and political project. But it is precisely the concept of social
power, especially when filled in with the notion of subjection, that collapses under the weight of
this structural edifice, and takes us back to the ambivalent relationship between reason and
power with which we began.
Conclusion
In conclusion, let me first recapitulate my argument. Although Between Facts and
Norms attempts to address the tension between reason and power in human social and political

25
life, Habermas lowers the bar for himself somewhat by referring to the coercive power of law in
terms of facticity rather than violence or force. The basic structure of Habermas’s argument
turns around two separations – the conceptual separation of communicative from administrative
power and the methodological separation of normative rational reconstruction from empirical
analysis – both of which evince a demand for conceptual and methodological purity. But the
hybrid concept of social power, by the confines of this conceptual and methodological structure,
reveals this to be an impossible demand. In the end, Habermas’s account of social power is too
simplistic to bear all the weight that he puts on it, but the attempt to complicate it further with the
notion of subjection makes Habermas’s demand for purity seems even less attainable.
In the preface to Between Facts and Norms, Habermas notes that the stakes of his inquiry
are quite high. “After a century that, more than any other, has taught us the horror of existing
unreason,” he writes, “the last remains of an essentialist trust in reason have been destroyed. Yet
modernity, now aware of its contingencies, depends all the more on a procedural reason, that is,
on a reason that puts itself on trial” (BFN xli). The stark inhumanity of the catastrophes of the
20 th century may have shaken our faith in the power of reason, but they have produced no viable
substitute. Hence, Habermas presents his proceduralist version of a reason that interrogates and
cross-examines itself as the only palatable alternative to the “brash denial of reason altogether”
(BFN, 3). I do not wish to deny reason, brashly or otherwise, nor do I think that the desire to
highlight without foreclosing the tension between reason and power commits me to such a
denial. But I do think that Habermas could successfully respond to the line criticism that I have
pursued in this paper by another option that he considers but rejects, namely, by endorsing a
more contextualist version of his project.

26
Habermas explains that although contextualism is “an understandable response to the
failures of the philosophy of history and philosophical anthropology, it never gets beyond the
defiant appeal to the normative force of the factual” (BFN, 2). Thus, in his view, it doesn’t do
justice to the tension between facticity and validity, since it ultimately collapses this tension in
the direction of the mundane facticity of ‘our’ social practices and beliefs. Although this may be
true of the most naïve forms of relativism, it isn’t obviously true of more principled forms of
contextualism that continue to appeal to the context-transcending (rather than the contexttranscendent)
force of claims to validity. Such forms of contextualism hold on to the claim to
context-transcending validity as an ideal that emerges out of and remains bound to the context of
late Western modernity. As Thomas McCarthy puts this point: “’Our’ culture is permeated with
transcultural notions of validity. If, in the absence of any God’s eye view, we have to start from
where we are – for instance, to use the forms of justification actually available to us – this will
involve, in many pursuits at least, offering arguments that claim validity beyond the confines of
our culture.” 27 The guiding insight of this contextualized version of Habermasian critical theory
is this: “Many of the objectionable features of the classical critique of reason can be overcome
by deabsolutizing ideas of reason through stressing their relations to social practice and building
deconstructive concerns into reconstructive endeavors from the start.” 28
Such an approach
stands a much better chance of keeping open and doing justice to the essential tension between
reason and power by enabling us both to posit context-transcending ideals and to unmask their
rootedness in contexts structured by social power.
1 Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected
Essays (New York: Continuum, 1972), 207.
2 Ibid., 208.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 209.

27
5 Ibid., 210.
6 Fraser, “Identity, Exclusion, and Critique: A Response to Four Critics,” European Journal of
Political Theory 6(3): 305-338, p. 322.
7 Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). Henceforth cited
parenthetically in the text as BFN.
8 Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
9 For these alternative formulations, see Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” translated
Edmund Jephcott, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and
Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), and Jacques Derrida,
“Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law
Review 1989/90: 921-1045.
10 See, for example, Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
11 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G.
Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).
12 I discuss this issue in more detail in Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy and
Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), ch. 6.
13 Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 323-324.
14 See Habermas, “Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World,” in Habermas,
Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, ed. Eduardo Mendieta
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 91. For an excellent discussion of the difficulties inherent in
Habermas’s notion of context-transcendence, see Maeve Cooke, Re-presenting the Good Society
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). I discuss this issue in more detail in chapter 6 of The Politics of
Our Selves.
15 In connection with this distinction, it is worth noting that the German title of Habermas’s book
– Faktizität und Geltung – is at the very least misleading (perhaps even unintentionally selfundermining?).
Given the central role played by the tension between ideal normative validity
and real empirical facticity in the book, the title should be Faktizität und Gültigkeit.
16 Habermas’s emphasis on stability is interesting, and indicative of the fundamentally
conservative (in the classical political theory sense of that term) nature of this work. This might
explain why so many critical theorists were so disappointed by this book. For an example of a
critique along these lines, see William Scheuerman, “Between Radicalism and Resignation:
Democratic Theory in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms,” in Peter Dews (ed), Habermas:
A Critical Reader (London: Blackwell, 1999).
17 But, as Habermas explains later, “on this view, rationalization signifies more than mere
legitimation but less than the constitution of political power” (Habermas, “Three Normative
Models of Democracy,” in Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory,
ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Greiff (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), p. 250).
18 For critical discussion of Habermas’s use of Peters’ work, see Scheuerman, “Between
Radicalism and Resignation.”
19 Ibid. It is also unclear whether the Weberian definition of social power that Habermas offers
is suitable for developing such an account. I come back to this issue in the next section.

28
20 For Foucault, subjection refers to the double-edged process whereby an individual becomes a
subject endowed with the capacity to think and act only by being subjected to power relations.
See Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2 nd
edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). See also Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of
Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), and Allen, The
Politics of Our Selves, chs 3 and 4.
21 I discuss the relationship between autonomy and subjection in Habermas’s social theory in
Allen, The Politics of Our Selves, chs 5 and 6.
22 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and RJ Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 62.
23 Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 62.
24 Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’” in
Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A
Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 39.
25 See Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt
and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), p. 102.
26 See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 293.
27 David Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory (London: Blackwell, 1994), p. 40. For a
similar view, see Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society.
28 Ibid, p. 14.