The Theory of Communicative Action

...DEGREE SPECIALIZATIONS Students may specialize in Scripture, Theology, Pastoral Dturgy, Pastoral Ministry, and Splntuahty ~n'the Master of Arts Program FLEXIBLE SCHEDULES The School offers: Fall, Spring, and Summer-only study options, three and stx week summer courses, four day weeks, and day and evening classes...

...The inevitable result was a metaphysical pessimism not unlike Weber's own...

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...Wrestling with modernity THE THEORY OF EONIqUNlCATIVE ACTION VOLUME I: REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY Jiirgen Ihbermas Translated by Thomas McCarthy Beacon Press, $29.95, 456 pp...

...The irreducible plurality of conflicting values scattered in the wake of God's death can only be managed, though hardly reconstituted, by the institutionalization of calculative reason, Weber's famous "iron cage" of bureaucracy...

...While Volume One of The Theory of Communicative Action presents the theory of communicative competence more elaborately and incisively than before, its promise as the foundation for a new paradigm of social action will remain unfulfilled until Volume Two, in which Haberrnas promises to develop critical social theory in relationship to the seminal thinking of George Herbert Mead and Emile Durkheim...

...Jiirgen Habermas's major work, The Theory of Communicative Action could easily be dismissed in this way...

...What he has learned in wrestling with the legacy of I The wells went dry I FUNNY NOIIEY Mark Singer Knopf, $15.95, 222 pp...

...Despite their commitment to Marxism and its visionary rhetoric, they, too, are trapped by the modern philosophy of consciousness which ultimately renders their critical intentions impotent...

...INTERNATIONALLY RESPECTED FACULTY AND GUEST SPEAKERS An excellent resident faculty ts complemented by outstanding guest lecturers...

...Even for those familiar with his earlier work, The Theory of Communicative Action makes clear just how intellectually venturesome Habermas is prepared to be in retrieving an authentically Marxist critical social theory...

...As the title may suggest, Reason and the Rationalization of Society is Habermas's definitive attempt to situate the Frankfurt School tradition of social thought vis-~t-vis Max Weber's theory of modernization...

...The bumper sticker said, 'Don't tell my folks I'm working in the oil patch...

...To be concrete, modernity's elusive aspirations for universal participatory democracy in all social institutions, private as well as public, economic as well as political, and religious as well as secular, will have realized their enduring legitimacy as intrinsic to the project of human rationality as such...

...As a corporate lawyer beginning a teaching career in what then to me was a remote area of the country, the failure of a shopping center bank in my new state capital took second place to other, more pressing matters like finding an apartment...

...In the last three chapters of the book Dolan caixies his story from the 1920s, the high watermark of the devotional parish, to the present...

...If Habermas is right about the anthropological priority and normativity of communicative action, the project of human rationality in general and the modern Enlightenment in particular cannot be identified with or reduced to the aporias of calculative rationality...

...I am confident that the crisis in church and gociety which, among other things, inspires this paradigm shift, alas, is severe enough and will be protracted enough to allow this conversation to proceed at its own pace...

...The conversation with Habermas that I have in mind would help clarify the revolutionary hope of Christians by releasing it from its current captivity to a host of ideologies still bound in turn to an outworn philosophy of consciousness...

...Clint Eastwood and Ordinary People team up to ruin the American monetary system...

...Revelations in the following months, however, would show how this latter-day wildcat bank nearly undermined our entire monetary structure through its perverse kinship with the nation's eighth largest bank, Continental Illinois, an institution I knew better from my Chicago roots...

...Dolan is the first writer of a general history to pay close attention to Hispanics...

...Upwardly mobile Okiesmo was a white Lincoln Continental with one hubcap missing...

...Daniel Morrisseu I ULY 6, 1982, the morning after federal investigators shut down the Penn Square Bank, I was eating my first breakfast of biscuits and gravy in a Tulsa diner...

...Volume One, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, despite the impressive efforts of translator Thomas McCarthy, plods on for almost 400 pages, and Volume Two, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, promises to do the same for perhaps 600 more...

...Such is the concrete hope that Habermas seeks to vindicate...

...A number of years ago at a symposium on his significance for the development of postmodern theologies, Dorothee Soelle, a partisan in behalf of Christian liberationism, bemoaned the fact that, in her view, Habermas had become the Max Weber for this generation...

...Still, there is much to be learned here about parish life, schools, social action, and church organization...

...What is important is that the older, more institutional approach made women peripheral by definition, as Mary Jo Weaver pointed out [Commonweal, "From Immigrants to Emigrantsi January 1 l, 1985], while Dolan's bottom-up approach is inclusive...

...Questions of common purpose, meaning, and value will have been rescued from the prison of arbitrary subjectivity, and once again, indeed, perhaps for the first time, will find their appropriate place on the agenda for public discourse...

...He includes Mexican Americans in his discussion of the immigrant church and later examines the Hispanic experience in the northeast and midwest as well as the southwest and California...

...Some of both, finds Singer, along with economic factors in the late seventies and early eighties that prompted rust-belt banks to "put out their assets" with the one American industry that was not dying, "oil and gas...

...Box 2057, Venmor, NJ 08406 USA Enclosed is my check for new sub,~nptlon 'and free special i.~ne on "Evangehcal--Roman Cathohc I~a/ogue on M~ss~on " [] I yr $14 D 2yrs $26 {~ 3 y~, $37 Name Address City State ____ Zap Country _ _ FREE POSTAGE WORLDWIDE / OFFER EXPIRFS, 4- ',0-8(~ 14 February 1986:91...

...Now the fantastic story of this fateful Oklahoma City/Chicago financial axis is told in a colorfully anecdotal style by Mark Singer, a Tulsa native with an Ivy League education and ten-years' experience on the staff of The New Yorker...

...Volume One, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, squares accounts with both Weber and the Frankfurt School, by elaborating what is meant to be criticism internal to their own positions, if you will, a "determinate negation" of their errors in laying the foundations for social theory...

...This is especially true if the theorist writes at such length and in such ponderous prose that, with any luck at all, the crisis may have passed before we finish reading and absorbing it...

...The "iron cage" can be broken, and the promise of modernity fulfilled, by transforming the structures of modern capitalism...

...Within a theological paradigm shift similar to Habermas's own, the perennial truth of that revolutionary hope may at last be salvaged from the currently fading rhetorics of liberation that have perhaps unwittingly tended to obscure it even in seeking to proclaim it...

...His controversial theory of "communicative competence" -- which defines the categories of reasoning implicit in all speech acts, and establishes these as the norms and procedures of truth, rightness, and truthfulness, governing all genuinely human interaction -- this is proposed not merely as a model for checking the uses and abuses of Marxist social analysis but now, more clearly than before, as the categorical framework for a general theory of social action...

...If Dolan is to be believed, it already has...

...France Partlctpants include...

...This fresh discussion of Weber's work is indispensable for fully grasping Habermas's own agenda...

...it is a kaleidescope of images and experiences...

...The Frankfurt School, principally in the writings of its founders, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, tried to resist the political conservatism implicit in Weber's pessimistic scenario by reconstituting a Marxist critical theory of society...

...Peter Beyerhaus Joan Chatf~ld Harvle Co~n Joan Dclaney Orlando Cos~as Pterm Duprcy David Hubbard Basd Meekmg Osel-Mensah Jorge Mejla Peter Savage Pletro Rossano John R Stott Thomas F Swansky " .. it 'has been a search for such common ground ~ might be discover~l between Evangehc'As and Roman 'Calhohcs as they each try to be faithful in thetr ot~dlence to mission " For this speoal offer, payment must accompany order Send payment wtth coupon to INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH PO...

...Here a conservative theology could sometimes serve liberating purposes, and a liberal theology could legitimate power and domination...

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...Here his conceptual framework becomes less clear, and he occasionally loses control over the mass of information he presents...

...They think I play the piano in a whorehouse.' " Penn Square's problems arose because it did not behave as local banks traditionally do, making auto and small business loans to neighborhood folk...

...Yet, in Habermas's view, the Frankfurt School failed to produce the critical theory capable of vindicating Marxism's vision of revolutionary socialism...

...Louis or an Indianapolis," with "The archetypal Continental banker was a midwestern Catholic who rode the commuter train home each night to one of the leafy northern or western Chicago suburbs -- wonderful places to raise t families...

...what we must teach him about religious faith and reason we have yet to understand very well ourselves...

...If there is at times a sense of incompleteness about his discussion of the latter subject, that undoubtedly reflects the state of research...

...Such disenchantment means not just the death of God but the disappearance of any integrating moral purpose to human social life whatsoever...

...The loss of freedom and meaning documented by Weber must not be attributed to modernization in generalt but to distortions quite specific to the development of modern capitalism...

...Modernity, for Weber, consists in the ambiguous triumph of calculative reason (ZweckrationalithO, according to which the mastery of the world through scientific management and technology is achieved at the price of its disenchantment...

...Most of all, Dolan's is a history of real people...

...William Vendley, Associate Dean, Seminary of the Immaculate Conception Huntington, Long Island, N.Y 11743 Tel...

...COSTS THAT AREN'T UNGODLY Rock-bottom room and board on a beautiful campus located a short walk from beaches and fifty minutes from Manhattan...

...The line of thinking running from Descartes through Kant to the epigoni of Logical Positivism unwittingly governs Weber's formulation of the problem of modernizing rationality...

...Marxism, we theologians should know in order to teach Christianity well...

...In contrast to both Weber and the Frankfurt School, Habermas shifts the foundations of critical social theory from an implicit paradigm of consciousness to an explicit paradigm of" language in use of speech...

...For better or worse, unboundedness, confusion, incoherence, even mystery, may be more accurate characterizations of what was going on than superficalty coherent notions of "Americanization...

...I prefer to think of Habermas as perhaps the Aristode of our times...

...Singer's fine grasp of the details of oiland gas-financing is amply matched by his deft characterizations of the two worlds that came together in this fiscal fiasco...

...Yet while I EARN A MASTERS IN THEOLOGY DURING SUMMER VACATION...

...1977-1984, m Vemce, Cambridge, 'and 9 Lan~vennec...

...Weber, in other words, fails to recognize the extent to which his own theory of social action rests on the unexamined presuppositions of a solipsistic philosophy of consciousness...

...As a result he is unable to define the necessary boundaries of calculative reason, and thus is left disoriented and ambivalent in the face of modernity...

...Dennis P. McCann T HE CRISIS within both church and society has been announced and analyzed so often and in so many ways that we may be tempted to turn a deaf ear toward anyone who would continue to theorize on such an overworked topic...

...Special Report: Evangelical-Roman Catholic Dialogue on Mission For new subscn't~rs to the / . ~ International Bulletin of /~4~:~j p.v~ m~tmgs ~ took pl~ l ~ /I over a period of seven years...

...The regulars around me kept asking each other in their strange drawls, "What is this F.D.I.C...

...Their eclipse in the totalitarianisms of both the left and Commonweal: 90the right, and more recently, in the technocratic schemes of those who fantasize that the survival of Western civilization depends upon the advent of a society totally administered by a hierarchy of managerial bureaucracies, may thus turn out to be more apparent than real...

...In addition he is consistently attentive to the roles and experiences of women...

...seen from the bottom, religious history is not confined to church but spills over into families and workplaces, into economics, politics, and culture...

...Since the loss of cultural freedom and meaning implicit in this scenario is irreversible, Weber counsels a stoic resignation before our fate as modern masters of a disenchanted world...

...In that sense, it may be more rather than less Catholic, even if it may not easily provide the clarity and coherence readers may be looking for...

...For those who dream of an indigenous American Catholicism or of a unique American contribution to the universal church, this is where it must start...

...Is it some agency of the federal government...

...It will open imaginations beyond too easy generalizations about the immigrant church to rich patterns of religious experience and organization of churches, which at one and the same time were social institutions reflecting human needs, and communities of faith which called persons beyond the world of daily experience to larger worlds of spirit and myth, to experiences of memory and possibility...

...He has integrated Catholic history more fully into American history and has broken open the too simple slogans which pass for historical consciousness among many theologians and church leaders...

...Should this paradigm shift prove to be as fruitful as Habermas intends it to be, the specter of metaphysical pessimism haunting the legacy of the Frankfurt School will have been dispelled...

...Extended conversation with Habermas could only lead, as had similar conversation with Weber among liberal Protestant theologians, to a progressive abandonment of the revolutionary hope of Christians...

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...In particular, Marx's insight into how capitalism rationalizes human work into a mere factor of production, and its dehumanizing consequences, provides the key to refuting Weber...

...Weber's generalized critique of modernizing rationality, and hence his pessimism, misfires because it remains unaware of the ultimate grounding of all forms of consciousness in communicative interaction...

...In short, Dolan's is an exciting and suggestive book...

...According to Habermas, during the 1940s Horkheimer and Adorno thus began to transform the Marxist critique of capitalism into a generalized critique of domination...

...Dolan's work lacks the clear definitions and sharp boundaries of the earlier history...

...Since the one meant a loss of freedom and the other a loss of meaning, their unexpected convergence appeared to confirm, rather than refute Weber...

...516) 423-0499 IB 14 February 1986:89don't expect every reader to take up Habermas, I do insist that the various tribes of public philosophers and practical theologians who have interpreted our crisis so far ignore his work at their own peril...

...Instead, it aggressively courted high-rolling energy prospectors and "upstreamed" their business to Continental and other major institutions like Chase Manhattan and Michigan National that followed the well-reputed Chicago bank's lead...

...Driven into exile by the Nazis, Horkheimer and Adorno were bewildered not only by Stalin's bureaucratic tyranny, which betrayed Marxism in the Soviet Union, but also by the consumer culture which the New Deal masterminded in the United States...

...Still, fiscal restraint might have prevailed if not for the peculiar brand of business brashness that Singer calls "Okiesmo...

...Ironically, Horkheimer and Adorno wind up at the same impasse because of a similar failure...

...Was it outright greed or blind stupidity that caused this debacle...

...Compare: "Another friend once endeavored to explain to me how Oklahoma City is distinctive -- how it differs from, say, Tulsa, which is regarded as sleek and 'Eastern' by Oklahomans who have never tasted the delights of a St...