Ashenden - On Violence in Habermas's Philosophy of Language

European Journal of Political
Theory
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On violence in Habermas's philosophy of language

Samantha Ashenden
European Journal of Political Theory 2014 13: 427 originally published online 30 August
2013
DOI: 10.1177/1474885113499146
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On violence in Habermass
philosophy of language
European Journal of Political Theory

2014, Vol. 13(4) 427452
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885113499146
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Samantha Ashenden
Birkbeck College, London, UK
Abstract
Habermas does not rule out the possibility of violence in language. In fact his account
explicitly licenses a broad conception of violence as systematically distorted communication. Yet he does rule out the possibility that language simultaneously imposes as it
discloses. That is, his argument precludes the possibility of recognizing that there is an
antinomy at the heart of language and philosophical reason. This occlusion of the simultaneously world-disclosing and world-imposing character of language feeds and sustains Habermass legal and political arguments, where he states that in order to achieve
consensus rational deliberation must eliminate force. In this paper, I claim that this
argument operates through a manoeuvre that leaves Habermass position curiously
blind to its own predicament. To explain why, I turn to Kants treatment of the problem
of evil in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Here, as in the Western philosophical tradition more generally, evil has no separate existence: it is folded back into
Kants philosophical scheme. Arendt notes that as soon as Kant identifies the problem
of evil he rationalizes it into comprehensible motives. I will show how, through a move
that is structurally similar to Kants rationalization of evil, Habermas rationalizes and
attempts to eliminate violence from his consideration of law and language. In
Habermass work, law and language appear as ciphers for reason. The case to be
made here is that Habermass inability to recognize the paradoxical character of language and reason makes his work blind to the violence in which it is unavoidably
implicated.
Keywords
evil, Habermas, Kant, philosophy of language, proceduralism, violence
Several scholars have noted that peace is a recent invention, some 200 years old,
and that Kant is its pre-eminent philosopher.1 We can place Habermas in a direct
line of descent from Kant: both share an assumption of original (and ideal future)
harmony in which violence and evil is derivative. For Kant, as for Habermas,
Corresponding author:
Samantha Ashenden, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX, UK.
Email: s.ashenden@bbk.ac.uk
428
European Journal of Political Theory 13(4)
peace or consensus has chronological and ontological priority over violence. We

can see this in Kants providentialism in Perpetual Peace, and in his wholly derivative account of evil as the result of the arbitrariness of Willkur in Religion Within
the Boundaries of Mere Reason.2 It is evident in Habermass philosophy of language
in which systematically distorted communication is secondary and derivative from
a horizon of communicative consensus, in his sociological account of the way in
which the system separates from the lifeworld, and in his account of the future
possibility of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, reecting on Kants Perpetual Peace,
Habermas explicitly comments on the need to reformulate Kants idea in the
light of the contemporary global situation, re-conceiving peace as a process to
be achieved by properly distinguishing politics, law and morality in a way that can
assist a cosmopolitan transformation of the state of nature among states into a
legal order.3 For both writers, peace has chronological and ontological priority,
and war and violence are conceived as privation or lack.
Kant and Habermas can thus be counterpoised sharply to those political theorists, such as Hobbes and Schmitt, whose work begins from the assumption of
primordial violence and whose arguments tend to issue in political realism and in
romanticism.4 But Habermass work can also be contrasted with the work of historical sociologists who recognize an important role for violence not only in creating but also in sustaining the conditions for politics.5 For Habermas, despite his
sociological sensitivity to the conditions necessary for the formation of states,
violence is ultimately a failure of politics, not a mode of its instantiation. My
aim in this paper is to examine the impact of this orientation to harmony, and
the erasure of violence it entails, in the work of Habermas. This is crucial because,
as the leading critical theorist of his generation, Habermas has inspired extensive
work in legal and political theory, international relations and related disciplines.
It is his work that many claim holds out the strongest possibility both of enlightened social criticism and of the re-orientation of world politics in more peaceable
directions.
This paper emerges from a longstanding unease with Habermass work that his
recent writings on constitutionalism and international law have only rekindled.
This unease might be specied in a preliminary manner in the following way.
Habermas has made a serious and sustained attempt to de-transcendentalize
social criticism: in the modern world, and particularly after Kant, he maintains,
there is no room for metaphysics.6 I am sympathetic to this: contemporary
attempts to secure metaphysical justications or ontological grounds for arguments
seem to me to exceed what we can legitimately claim to comprehend, resulting in
dogmatic and messianic moments that push social criticism back through the door
of religion. And yet insofar as Habermass post-metaphysical move is successful,7
this refusal of metaphysics and ontology leaves us with bare proceduralism at the
level of justication. The argument I want to advance here is that if we accept
Habermass own arguments about the post-metaphysical, purely procedural status
of communicative rationality, then his work faces the same jeopardy as Kants in
relation to evil. Kants attempt to discern a purely procedural, and thus universal,
account of moral reasoning is designed to produce a criterion for autonomy as the
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429
subject giving itself its own law. But this purely procedural argument is capable of
inversion, so that Kant himself notes the nightmare scenario of the subject willing
radical evil.8 My aim in this paper is not to suggest that Habermas is in some
totalizing sense wrong, any more than Kant can sensibly be considered to have
been wrong in toto. Rather, it is to elucidate the predicament that Habermass
work reveals as our predicament. The case I want to make is that Habermass
emphasis on purely procedural law and deliberative democracy, whilst it may look
like the only way adequately to respond to pluralism and the end of metaphysics
and religion as strategies of justication, in fact has its own dark side: Habermass
proceduralism opens itself to problems of its possible perversion, without overcoming problems of political foundationalism.
In order to pursue this argument the paper rst situates Habermass work in
debates about violence, showing that whilst he conceives peace as prior to violence
he also, curiously, construes violence as potentially all-pervasive. Section two
examines Habermass attempt to separate power from violence in order to
ground the legitimacy of law in the possibility of communicatively achieved consensus as qualitatively distinct from coercion. In order to do this, he argues for a
radical separation of world-disclosing and problem-solving uses of language; a
distinction that I argue cannot be sustained. Building on this discussion, section
three develops some reections on the legal and political ramications of
Habermass account of language specically in relation to the attempt to separate
force and rational agreement. I turn to Kant to argue that purely procedural
argument is unable to guard against its own inversion, with potentially perverse
eects, before tracing the eects of this proceduralism in Habermass depoliticizing
of political language. The argument advanced is that Habermas provides a puried
account of legitimate political power that depoliticizes political conicts, severely
constrains the role of civil disobedience, and leaves us unarmed in the face of nonconsensus. Finally, the paper reects upon the ambivalences in Habermass own
rendering of contemporary problems in order to question the sustainability of his
purely procedural approach.
1. Habermas on violence
At rst glance one of the most notable features of Habermass work is the absence
within it of explicit and sustained discussion of violence; this is, as ONeill notes,
odd in a critical theory.9 In fact, Habermas has a maximal conception of violence
conceived as systematically distorted communication;10 however, this is predicated on a logically prior notion of consensus against which distortion might be
measured, so that violence is understood as derivative. That is, the idea of rational
harmony, the possibility of a rationally achieved consensus, is for Habermas logically and chronologically prior to violence, and at the same time guides his idea(l) of
communicative rationality as a future-oriented rationality potential.
We can clarify the simultaneously extensive but secondary character of the conception of violence in Habermass thinking by referring to other recent discussions
of violence. One key distinction is between those who favour a restrictive denition
430
of violence as physical harm and those who wish to expand the concept to include
symbolic and structural dimensions. The OED oers a parsimonious conception of
violence centred on physical harm: The exercise of physical force so as to cause
injury or damage to a person, property, etc.; physically violent behaviour or treatment . . . . LAW. The unlawful exercise of physical force . . . .11 This restrictive definition is favoured by writers such as John Keane and Shane ONeill,12 both of
whom emphasize the importance of limiting the concept of violence to something
like physical force on the grounds that otherwise it is apt to become so broad as to
lose all critical purchase. At the other end of the spectrum are those who emphasize
the symbolic and structural character of much violence, including amongst others
Bourdieu, Butler, Galtung, Harris, Lukes, and Zizek.13 This latter grouping can in
turn be subdivided: on one hand are those such as Galtung, Bourdieu, and Lukes,
for example, for whom violence is present when human beings are being inuenced
so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realization;14 on the other hand are those like Butler and Zizek who emphasise the
normative or structural violence that they claim is bound up with language.
Zizek in particular alights upon Hegels account of the violence involved in
symbolization:
Language simplies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. It inserts the thing into a eld of meaning which is ultimately external to it.15
This kind of violence is the violence of the attempt to name all that Adorno refers
to in his discussion of the identitarian logic of instrumental reason: for Adorno the
concept does not exhaust the thing conceived, there is a remainder that indicates
the untruth of identity.16 Similarly, Butler points to the existence of normative
violence, violence to be found at the heart of language insofar as language forcibly
enacts classication. This violence of classication, she suggests, simultaneously
enables the more readily recognized violence of physical force, and erases this
from view by rendering it normative.17
We can use this distinction between physical violence on one hand and symbolic
and structural violence on the other to begin to account for the understanding of
violence that runs through Habermass work. Habermass conception of violence is
of the broad, structural variety, but it is also cast in terms of a criticism of social
conditions that prevent the full realization of human life. It does not coincide with
the broad, structural conception of violence mobilized by Butler and Zizek,
amongst others, precisely insofar as Habermas does not recognize the force of
the post-structural argument that language imposes as it discloses. It is this structural but derivative or secondary account of violence that enables Habermas to
stand as a successor to Kant specically as a philosopher of peace. This runs
through his social theory and his philosophy of language, allowing him to conceive
of modern societies as pacied internal orders and of language as a medium of
potentially unconditioned communication.
Ashenden
431
In his sociological work, Habermas gives an account of the modern state as the
result of processes of dierentiation and rationalization. Specically, he argues that
through rationalization the state and economy separate from lifeworld contexts of
communicative interaction and become instrumentally ordered systems of communication organized through money and power.18 In this, pace Weber, he describes
the modern state as a rationalized administrative structure that is characterized by
its claim to a monopoly of the legitimate use of force, and, pace Parsons and
Luhmann, its codication through power as an instrumental, delinguistied
medium of communication. Thus, Habermass sociology of the modern state at
rst sight appears to chime with those historical and political sociologists who have
conceptualized the state as an organization claiming a monopoly on the legitimate
use of violence, and with organized power as its regular means of operation.19 But
Habermass work does little to foreground the role of violence in state formation
and functioning. Rather, he places emphasis on endogenous change produced
through the development of more complex divisions of labour and rationalized
communication systems. 20 Within this, administratively organized coercion has a
positive, progressive role in maintaining complex systems: the development of
administrative power in the modern state is, according to Habermas, necessary
to system complexity.
Nonetheless, Habermas recognizes that the potential for what we might call
symbolic violence is an immanent aspect of the operation of administrative
power. The second volume of The Theory of Communicative Action in fact demonstrates a preoccupation with such violence understood in terms of administrative
mis-descriptions of lifeworld practice; this is summed up in his thesis of the colonization of the lifeworld.21 Habermas, following Weber, calls administrative
power Gewalt; however, unlike Weber Habermas counterpoises administrative power or use of force with Macht, conceived as a distinct form of communicative power that he suggests is jurisgenerative and which emanates from
lifeworld contexts of communicative action. Here Habermas uses Arendts characterization of the distinction between Macht and Gewalt as a way of distinguishing
communicative power on one hand, and instrumentally conceived and enacted
administrative power on the other.
Arendt divides power and violence so that they are conceptual opposites:
power and violence are opposites: where one rules absolutely, the other is
absent.22 According to Arendt, violence is mute instrumentality, whereas
power is established when people come together to enact the political.
Habermas uses exactly this division to designate the dierence between communicative and administrative power. Macht, on Habermass reading, is jurisgenerative, and to be contrasted sharply with Gewalt. Habermas recognises
that the legitimate force of administrative power signied by the term Gewalt is
part of politics, but this is read as the administrative ordering of the state
machine, as opposed to the communicative power of the people acting
together.23 Habermas claims that this distinction enables him to separate the
communicatively generated power of discursive consensus from any hint of
432
violence or coercion. In this model violence is external to, and a failure of,
politics considered as the practical activity of people coming to agreements in
language.
For Habermas therefore, violence is a derivative category. This is so in two
senses: it is derivative in a chronological sense, in that the state and its administrative systems are separated from their original lifeworld contexts through a process of societal evolution, where the lifeworld is conceived by Habermas as
primarily a context of shared meaning and interaction rather than power; and it
is derivative in a conceptual sense, insofar as rational consensus is the horizon of
intelligibility of communication, and symbolic violence conceived as systematically
distorted communication gures as a parasitic aberration from this.24 For
Habermas violence and language are thus in principle antithetical; language can
be used violently, but only as distorted communication. Rational argumentation,
the potential for which makes sense of our language use as such, can be described in
purely formal terms: it excludes all force. . .except the force of the better argument.25 To understand how Habermas conceives a moment of jurisgenesis in a
power that is separate from force via the unforced force of argument and to
examine the impact of this on his account of politics, it is necessary to examine
the conceptual distinction he makes between world-disclosing and problem-solving
uses of language. This is the task of the next section.
2. Distinguishing coercion and consensus: Habermass

separation of world-disclosing and problem-solving uses
of language
The idea of the unforced force of argument rests upon a model of language as
problem-solving, where this is normalized via the assumptions of speech act theory.
Habermas takes up JL Austins account of the felicity conditions of speech and
builds on this in giving an account of language in its problem-solving mode as
stable and transparent, with clear contextual parameters.26 This has a profound
eect upon Habermass political and legal discussion, as we will see in section three.
In particular, the separation of the language of argumentation (philosophical or
problem-solving language) from other forms (ones apparently less transparent),
whilst essential in enabling the Macht/Gewalt distinction to stand, in turn provides
the ground for a peaceful politics from which violence is excluded.
It is well known that Habermas uses ordinary language philosophy to argue for
the primacy of the communicative use of language. This argument suggests that
fundamental to language is the attempt to reach understanding, and that other uses
of language are derivative of and parasitic upon this basic use.27 While a comprehensive account of Habermass critical appropriation of ordinary language
philosophy is beyond the scope of this paper,28 this section builds upon some
well-established criticisms of Habermass use of the philosophy of language in
order to open up the peculiar eects of this on his politics. In particular, this section
examines the distinction between problem-solving and world-disclosing uses of
language that underpins Habermass conception of language as a transparent
Ashenden
433
vehicle for communication separate from force. The aim is to bring into question
how Habermas thinks it is that we can know what constitutes a problem to be
solved within problem-solving uses of language, and to assess his suggestion that
we can thoroughly separate the languages of religion, science and art. I will suggest
that Habermas presupposes that we can discern the character of political and other
problems in a neutral manner, when this is far from obvious.
We can begin by noting how Habermass privileging of communicative,
problem-solving language underpins his discussion of Derrida in The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In this context Habermas asserts that
Derrida is engaged in levelling the genre distinction between philosophy and literature such that he dulls the sword of the critique of reason itself.29 Against this
Derrida states that he makes no such levelling, but equally points out that philosophy uses natural language and as such is more opaque than it would like to be,
and than it appears to itself. Philosophy has practiced a disavowal in relation to its
own language;30 there is and can be no rm and nal genre distinction. My point
in focusing on this debate is to clarify the normalizing features of Habermass
philosophy of language, a step that is necessary if we are to examine his understanding of the relationship between violence and politics.
Habermas accepts speech act theorys reliance on standards of stability and
normality of context in which a performative statement occurs, what Austin
called the felicity conditions of speech.31 Derrida radically calls into question
this basic distinction between felicitous and infelicitous conditions by pointing
out that the context(s) of an utterance can never be fully and nally stabilized. He
observes that Austins analysis requires the idea that a context can be exhaustively
determined so that no residue [reste] escapes the present totalization. 32 As we will
see, this dependence on exhaustively determined context also characterises
Habermass way of proceeding. We can demonstrate this by developing
Derridas line of questioning, applying his insight to Habermass texts.
Habermas states that in Derridas hands, language as such converges with literature or indeed with writing. This aestheticizing of language, which is purchased
with the twofold denial of the proper senses of normal and poetic discourse, also
explains Derridas insensitivity to the tension-lled polarity between the poeticworld-disclosive function of language and its prosaic, innerworldly functions.33
Moreover, For Derrida, linguistically mediated processes within the world are
embedded in a world constituting context that prejudices everything.34 Derrida,
on Habermass account, equates philosophy with literature and criticism.35
Against this purported levelling36 Habermas asserts a need for sharp distinctions
between philosophy and literature, logic and rhetoric, normal and abnormal uses
of language. In asserting a clear distinction between poetic or literary language and
philosophical language, he argues that the former is world generating or world
disclosing (something that requires the bracketing of illocutionary force) whereas
the latter is problem-solving.37 According to Habermas it is in problem-solving
mode that we acquire knowledge, form personal identities, undergo socialization
and maintain social integration. The claim of a fundamental division between
world-disclosing and problem-solving uses of language is in turn tied to
434
Habermass account of social evolution as a process of the progressive dierentiation of rationality domains or value spheres.38 Following Kant and Weber,
Habermas argues that in modern societies science, morality and law, and autonomous art, form distinct domains and that their corresponding cultural systems of
action produce problem-solving capacities with respect to science, law and morality, and a specialization for world disclosure in art and literature.39 As such, arguments respectively concerning propositional truth, the rightness of norms, and
aesthetic judgments take place in specialized argumentative forms as part of
expert cultures. Aesthetic criticism and philosophy are then attributed the task of
mediating between expert cultures and the everyday world.40
In sum, Habermass account places law, morality and science on one side, and
art, literature, and also religion, on the other.41 He writes of specializing the language of philosophy and science for cognitive purposes so that they are cleansed
of everything metaphorical and merely rhetorical, and kept free of literary admixtures.42 In practice, although he recognizes that rhetorical elements are ineradicable, he nonetheless argues that these elements recede: [in] the specialized
languages of science and technology, law and morality, economics, political science, . . . the rhetorical elements, which are by no means expunged, are tamed, as it
were, and enlisted for special purposes of problem-solving.43 Here, whilst seeming
to recognize the ineradicably rhetorical elements of science and philosophy,
Habermas nonetheless claims that these moments are contained such that they
are no longer disruptive.44 It seems to me that there are at least two diculties
with this attempt fundamentally to divide problem-solving and world-disclosing
uses of language, both of which contribute to the erasure of violence from
Habermass thinking; one problem centres on the question of problem denitions,
and one is focused on the idea of boundaries between spheres of validity.
First, the account of the ways in which rhetorical language is tamed in problem-solving uses of language noted immediately above might work, assuming we
already know and agree on the contours of the particular problem being addressed;
it is less clear that it can be sustained in respect of problems whose denition is
contested. Thus whilst the distinction may be a useful way of thinking about, for
example, the dierences between reading instructions on how to mend a washing
machine and reading a poem, I would still want to contest the idea that one can
usefully draw a sharp analytical distinction between problem-solving and worlddisclosing language in the manner Habermas suggests. To assert a category dierence between these two uses of language assumes that for science, law, politics, and
so on, the dicult boundary issues are already resolved and problems to be
addressed extant. The rst question then is: how do we know when we have
identied and outlined a problem suciently well to go about solving it?
What is an adequate or complete description of a problem? This may be exactly
what is at stake in a political conict. Think, for example, of contested distinctions
between the terms freedom ghter and terrorist found in many civil conicts,45
or of the US Governments insistence on use of the terms enhanced interrogation
techniques or later, abuse, rather than torture, to describe the mis-treatment of
Ashenden
435
prisoners at Abu Ghraib.46 In politically charged contexts, neutral descriptive

terms are often unavailable.
Habermas is himself, to an extent, attentive to this. In an interview on war and
peace he comments critically on the tendency of the Bush administration and its
allies eacing important distinctions via the prosecution of a War on Terror, as
though al-Qaeda were no dierent from the guerrilla campaigns of terrorist independence and resistance movements conned to specic territories.47 This seems to
reect recognition that in politicized contexts, language inevitably has rhetorical
force and cannot straightforwardly be pruned to carry the unforced force of reason
only. Yet, If one examines Habermass discussions of discourses of justication and
application in Between Facts and Norms and Justication and Application one can
see that he relies upon an Austinian notion of the possibility of standard situations in which there can be a complete situation denition and a description of a
problem whose relevant features have been described as completely as possible,48
in order for a discourse of justication or application to take place.
This goes to the heart of Habermass distinction between normal and abnormal uses of language noted earlier. He identies normal use of language as normal
linguistic utterances from which all complex, derivative, parasitic and deviant cases
have been ltered out.49 But how are we to know in advance, in practical contexts,
which are the deviant cases? This is a signicant problem with respect to political
conicts but also with respect to science: indeed it is not clear on this model how
scientic or political innovation is to take place; is science to be reduced to technology and politics to be reduced to administration?50 On the other hand,
Habermas goes on to qualify his discussion of normal language use by stating
that As long as language games are functioning and the preunderstanding constitutive of the lifeworld has not broken down, participants rightly count on world
conditions being what is understood in their world community as normal.51
Here it looks as though meaning rests to a substantial extent on prejudice, yet
can still be reliably stabilized without remainder.
Habermas has attempted to argue then, for an account of language that in one
mode, its problem-solving mode, is neutral in respect of world descriptions: a pure
technique available for scientic communication. But he can only do this insofar as
he conceives philosophy, science and so on as working on already established
problems. Insofar as this is not the case, I venture that the problems broached
by politics, law and economics, are in important ways constituted by the manner of
their description, and that rhetorical resources are often far from tamed or contained in this. Thus the boundary between world-disclosure and problem-solving,
between the capacity of language to disclose the world and to impose interpretive
schemata, is neither clear nor secure.
The second diculty with Habermass account concerns the standing of dierent spheres of validity. He oers an evolutionary account of the development of
modern dierentiated societies through processes of rationalization. He argues that
up to the threshold of modernity52 mythological, religious and metaphysical
worldviews provided a totalizing unity that has subsequently broken down through
436
rationalization. Habermas expresses this latter development in terms of a process of

disenchantment or linguistication of the sacred,53 whereby totalizing ways of
thinking are displaced by procedural forms of rationality. Rationalization thus
produces the dierentiation of religion (morality and law), science (knowledge)
and art (aesthetics) such that each develops its own internal criteria of validity.54
In Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter Habermas asserts that there is no
need for a philosophical justication of modern dierentiated structures of rationality, that these just require description and analysis. He states: Reason has split
into three moments modern science; positive law and posttraditional ethics;
autonomous art and institutionalized art criticism but philosophy had precious
little to do with this disjunction.55 Habermas then asserts that the sons and daughters of modernity have learned to deal with these aspects of rationality truth,
justice, and taste - discretely rather than simultaneously. He goes on to say that
these trends toward compartmentalization, constituting as they do the hallmark of
modernity, can do very well without philosophical justication, although they do
pose problems of mediation.56 This, according to Habermas, is where philosophy
can take on the role of interpreter on behalf of the lifeworld, where it might then
be able to help set in motion the interplay between the cognitive-instrumental,
moral-practical and aesthetic-expressive dimensions that has come to a standstill
today, like a tangled mobile.57
Habermass argument here seems to be that the divisions between scientic
reasoning, law and ethics, and art and aesthetics, because they have developed
through processes of social dierentiation, need no justication. They are selfevident. But he then goes on to attach normative value to this dierentiation as
a progressive evolution and adds substantive claims about these moments of
reason by tying them to specic contexts. This is the force behind his criticism of
those, like Derrida, whom he accuses of regressing back behind the achievements
of modernity:
The unmediated transposition of specialized knowledge into the private and public
spheres of the everyday world can endanger the autonomy and independent logics of
the knowledge systems, on the one hand, and it can violate the integrity of lifeworld
contexts, on the other. A knowledge specialized in one validity claim, which, without
sticking to its specic context, bounces across the whole spectrum of validity, unsettles
the equilibrium of the lifeworlds communicative infrastructure. Insuciently complex
incursions of this sort lead to the aestheticizing, or the scientizing, or the moralizing of
particular domains of life.58
In this quotation one sees Habermas asserting the need for clear boundaries
between science, law and morals, and art, where these boundaries, although they
do not themselves require justication since they are the very hallmark of modernity, nonetheless do need policing lest insuciently complex incursions across
their borders produce disequilibria in the lifeworld.59 In short, Habermass
assumption of an evolutionary schema enables him to bridge the factual development of dierentiation and the normative evaluation of this as progressive and
Ashenden
437
requiring defence, while at the same time the felt need to police these boundaries
hints at the strains in Habermass philosophical system.
Of course, recognition of the specicity of dierent kinds of judgement is
important: aesthetic judgements are neither judgements of utility nor epistemological arguments. As a model for communication about political, scientic and
other problems, however, Habermass account of language as sharply divided
between problem-solving and world-disclosing uses is unsustainable insofar as it
recommends a model of communication in which language is stripped down in its
task within a specic domain only, with philosophy necessary to mediate its relation to the lifeworld. Yet insofar as philosophy has to navigate three dierent
realms for the lifeworld its language cannot be specied ahead of time and must
be more porous than the distinction between world-disclosure and problem-solving
allows. Furthermore, if political theory and practice cannot generate worlds as well
as arguments, surely they cannot convince, but remain either impotent or subsumed to technical calculation. This becomes especially signicant in respect of the
limits of Habermass capacity to recognize the possibility of the existence of genuine political disputes that may be incapable of rational resolution.
In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action Habermass specication of
the rules of argumentation includes the injunction: Dierent speakers may not use
the same expression with dierent meanings.60 One might instead say that political theory and practice can only take place with the possibility of transforming
existing meanings; as James Tully puts the matter, emancipation implies using the
same words with dierent meanings.61 The assertion of a sharp division between
world-disclosing and problem-solving uses of language, and the injunction to
uphold boundaries between science, law and morality, and aesthetics, seems to
have the (unintended?) implication of removing all capacity for criticism, save
for the clarication of concepts, from theoretical knowledge and moral-practical
argument. For, inasmuch as Habermass conception of philosophical language is
that of a technical code or algorithm, this seems to foreclose the most eminently
political of questions.
In the next section, I argue that the attempted sharp division between worlddisclosure and problem-solving, and the purely procedural conception of communication it promises, occludes the multi-valence of language. This occlusion is the
basis for Habermass legal and political arguments that rational discourse works to
eliminate force. A purely procedural philosophical language is necessary to uphold
the distinction between Macht and Gewalt that articulates Habermass distinctive
account of the legitimacy of a political power separate from any trace of violence;
however, this has the eect of eliminating from his account the possibility of properly considering the role of force in politics.
3. Political language: Proceduralism and perversion

In Between Facts and Norms,62 Habermas argues that in order to deliver consensus,
rational deliberation must eliminate force. While he recognizes both the role of
438
conict, bargaining and strategic action as inevitable aspects of political life, and
that the legal system can only demand that its addressees behave in a legal
manner,63 he is keen to stress that in modern societies legitimate legislation can
only be grounded in rationally achieved agreement.64 This underpins his argument
that deliberative democratic mechanisms are capable of producing political decisions that are qualitatively dierent from, for example, those that result from bargaining over interests. As such, Habermass account of argumentation as a process
of rational deliberation leading to consensus plays a key role in his normative
theory of democracy.
The idea that rational agreement eliminates force presents a distinctive and
puried account of political power. To see the implications of this, it is worth
briey developing the comparison of Habermas with Weber mentioned earlier.
In Webers classic denition the state is a human community that (successfully)
claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.65
While Weber does not suggest that actual use of force is the modus operandi of
political power, such force stands in reserve. So, for Weber even legitimate power is
bound to violence and in this sense violence is structurally and ineliminably bound
up with the state. One might even say that for Weber it is through the state that
violence or its threat achieves regularized social form: violence is not eradicated by
mechanisms of agreement; rather, it is routinized through legal and political means.
As noted above, the German concept Gewalt denotes this, usually implying violence but also suggesting power or legitimate authority. We have seen that
Habermas contrasts his position with Webers. He posits a political power separated from violence: communicative power (Macht), which can be discerned in the
potential for rational consensus contained in communicative action.66 Habermass
position, in positing a moment of communicative power beyond the entwinement
of power and violence (Gewalt) in politics, rests on the possibility of a moment of
the pure (unforced) force of rational consensus as the underlying, idealizing presupposition of communication.
Arendt, as Habermas notes, conceptualized power and violence as opposites,
with power understood as a potential produced by humans acting publicly in concert.67 Habermas reconstructs this as an account of a common will produced
through non-coercive communication, and by doing so opens a distinction between
power (Macht) and violence (Gewalt) that separates his account from Webers.68
At the same time, Habermas separates this aspect of Arendts account from her
broader conception of politics, claiming that her separation of labour, work, and
action produces an account of politics from which all strategic aspects are screened
out as violence.69 Instead, Habermas holds onto Arendts communicative concept
of power as key to engendering political power, to what he calls the jurisgenesis of
political power, but insists that strategic action is also part of the political.70 This
enables him to develop a conception of political power fundamentally rooted in the
idea of communicative action, but without counterpoising this to the necessarily
administratively organized aspects of the modern state.
Habermass discussion of Arendt is brief but pivotal. It is on this basis that he
begins to mark out the dierences between modern natural law theory, which he
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claims aligns power and violence, and his own position that counterpoises power
and violence and aligns power with law. Habermass claim that communicative
power is jurisgenerative is a claim to have overcome the problem of the arbitrariness of political foundations found within the natural law tradition.71 For
Habermas discourse and the possibility of rational consensus that is at its core
stands in place of Arendts recognition of the need for some higher law; this
makes sense of his statement that:
the constitutional state has a twofold task: it must not only evenly divide and distribute political power but also strip such power of its violent substance by rationalizing
it. This legal rationalization of force must not be conceived as taming a quasi-natural
domination whose violent core is and 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 self-organization of the legal community
expresses itself.72
If we ask of this statement where does law come from? the answer is from language,
or at least from the form of communicative rationality advanced in discourse. But
we should note that it is only by assuming a model of language in which orientation
to agreement has priority over other language uses, and where rhetorical elements
have been tamed to achieve a proceduralized consensus, that Habermass formulation stands. So we see that Habermass philosophy of language must do vital work
here in overcoming the problem of the arbitrariness of beginning. The idea(l) of
rational consensus as the inherent goal of communication provides an immanent
normative structure such that Habermas can claim to overcome the problem of
political foundations. Violence and politics are thus counterpoised via an account
of argumentative language as a transparent vehicle for legitimation.
With this move Habermas eviscerates an important sense of the violence of
politics that is central to Webers case. Weber uses the term violence in its standard
form, not as linguistic violence or force of argument, but as the warring conicts
between players whom the state subdues through law but also through arms if
necessary. Its monopoly of the means of violence is literal, in the form of the
army and police, as well as authority to pass laws. Habermass argument that
rational agreement grounds the legitimacy of laws obscures this sense of violence
as intrinsically bound up with the state; for Habermas violence seems to mean
something like doing violence to the truth, or wilfully mis-communicating or misrepresenting. I suspect that Webers insight is more realistic and useful than
Habermass when thinking about politics and state formation and functioning.
Rather than merely re-asserting a standard realist position against Habermas,
however, I want to develop the implications of this argument further and to suggest
that the danger of Habermass insistence on the separation of violence and rational
agreement is, paradoxically, the possible perversion or corruption of his own
system.
At the outset I argued that rational deliberation can only be regarded as eliminating force if one accepts Habermass claims that language can be a transparent
440
vehicle for reason; that it can be used in problem solving mode tout court and that
the deliberative use of language can therefore eect rational resolutions to political
problems without residue. This idea of the transparency of language, of language as
capable of operating as a neutral cipher for political decisions, underpins
Habermass proceduralism. And yet this proceduralism contains a dark side.
To examine this we can turn to Kant. To develop the parallel between Kant and
Habermas, and so advance my critique, it will be useful to look at Kants similar
attempt to produce a purely procedural form of argumentation and criterion for
judgement with respect to morality, in his account of the categorical imperative and
in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. The purpose of making this
comparison is to indicate the presence of a problem that neither is able to resolve
(or even recognize?) and which each thus leaves as a lacuna, for similar reasons that
are intrinsic to their approach.
Habermas notes that Kantian philosophy marks the birth of a new mode of
justication.73 Although he concludes that the epistemological foundationalism
and attempt at transcendental justication found in Kant can no longer hold
sway, Habermas nonetheless maintains that there is in Kants work a theory of
modernity, and he develops his own approach as a form of linguistic
Kantianism.74 That is, Kant eected a rejection of substantive rationality found
within metaphysical and religious worldviews, and fore-grounded procedural
rationality in relation to the domains of objective knowledge, moral-practical
insight and aesthetic judgement.75 Habermass conception of modernization as a
process whereby substantive ways of thinking are progressively displaced by proceduralized rationality thus owes a direct debt to a de-transcendentalized Kantian
argument. This is most illuminating regarding the arguments and shortcomings
I have been pursuing.
Kants categorical imperative aims to provide a formal and universal criterion
for moral judgement. It is centred on autonomy, on the idea of the freedom of the
subject to make its own law: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at
the same time will that it should become a universal law.76 The categorical imperative is imperative because it is necessary; categorical because it is without reference to a purpose, concerned only with the form of an action (unlike conditional
imperatives). This formality grants its universality: Kants categorical imperative is
generated as a purely procedural criterion for right and thus as a statement of the
moral law. So from Kant we have an account of a procedural universal that produces a criterion for autonomy as the subject giving itself its own law. As noted
above, Habermas de-transcendentalizes this and transforms it from a subjectcentred model of reason to one centred on communication and inter-subjectivity.77
But he retains the emphasis on purely formal, procedural justication and this is
what I want to bring into question here.
Let us continue with Kant for a moment. If the categorical imperative species a
formal criterion for right action, his account of radical evil is the inversion of this.
Kant states that we do not consider a human being evil because he performs
actions that are evil (contrary to law) but because such actions allow the inference
of evil maxims in him. He is referring to the subjective ground of the exercise of
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human freedom that is logically antecedent to every deed falling within the scope of
senses. In other words, the source of evil is a maxim, a rule made by the will for the
use of its own freedom. This evil is radical because it corrupts the ground of all
maxims, going to their root, and evil because it is grounded in the subjects capacity for freedom.78 In the structure of Kants argument, freedom of choice
(Willkur) is necessary to the subject as a moral subject, and yet evil is its immanent
possibility and resides in human frailty, impurity or wickedness, in failure to make
duty the sucient motivation for conduct. He comments that we may presuppose
evil as subjectively necessary in every human being, even the best.79 Nonetheless he
argues that it must be possible to overcome this evil, since it is found in the human
being as acting freely.80 He then refuses the idea of diabolical evil, saying that this
should rather be named perversity of the heart, and adding An evil heart can
coexist with a will which in the abstract is good. Its origin is the frailty of human
nature.81
There are two things to note about Kants discussion. First, in its formalism
the account of radical evil is simply the inversion of the categorical imperative.
The formalism of this argument is necessary to Kants attempt to sustain its
universality, and yet this formalism implies that the categorical imperative
and radical evil are symmetrical: as Lacan put it the categorical imperative
and the Sadean system are mirror images.82 Secondly, and as a result of this
formalism, Kants account of evil is derivative; evil is an error bound up with
the frailty of human nature and is therefore not a positive principle in itself. 83
Bernstein notes that Kants account of evil is thus little more than a way of
designating the tendency (propensity) of human beings to disobey the moral
law.84 This is the source of Arendts frustration with Kant, noted in the
abstract to this paper: Arendt wants to use the term radical evil to designate
a special kind of evil that has emerged in connection with a system in which
all men have become equally superuous but she nds that Kant rationalizes
evil as an error.85
We might compare Arendts complaint against Kant with Derridas observation
on the way in which Austin regards infelicities as errors rather than as structural
features of speech acts. Derrida comments:
Austins procedure...consists in recognizing that the possibility of the negative (in this
case of infelicities) is in fact a structural possibility, that failure is an essential risk of
the operations under consideration; then, in a move which is almost immediately
simultaneous, in the name of a kind of ideal regulation, it excludes that risk as accidental, exterior, one which teaches us nothing about the linguistic phenomenon being
considered.86
Thus, according to Derrida, the ordinary is marked by the exclusion of that which
is considered parasitic or abnormal.87 Reecting on the same limitation,
Matus tik observes that Kants account makes of evil a weakness, not a power
that can be positively asserted. He states Kant does not conceive anything unforgivable adding that If radical evil amounted to moral guilt then ethical
442
community, democratic procedures, and just courts could replace Yom Kippur as
well as the Kyrie eleison or Buddhist meditations on nothingness.88 There are
crucial similarities between these features of Kants argument and the dilemmas
attending Habermass specication of a purely procedural discursive justication of
validity claims.
What does radical evil amount to in Habermass system, once Kants monological and subject-centred reason is turned into the polyphony of communicative
inter-subjectivity (as one of my reviewers eloquently put the matter)? It is here that
the demand for consensus haunts communicative reason and structures
Habermass arguments in a manner that makes them parallel Kants. First
we can note that Habermass insistence on a sharp distinction between problemsolving and world-disclosing language, an insistence that as we have seen is integral
to the possibility of a purely procedural language of justication, eaces dierence in much the same way as Kants account of the subject of the moral
law eaces individuation. For Kant the subject requires freedom (Willkur) in
order to count as a subject capable of morality, though it is not in his individual,
dierentiated, choices that morality resides, but rather in his accession to or recognition of the moral law. Similarly, though in Habermass system we nd a polyphony of voices, the language of justication transcends dierence such that the
voices in communication are, logically speaking, substitutable.89 Human plurality
is, at this moment, elided.
But there is a second, and perhaps more telling, parallel. Kants radical evil can
be thought in Habermass scheme in terms of systematically distorted communication, where this might, in a totalitarian context, be writ large. We can specify this
by noting that, despite modifying his previous commitment to a consensus theory
of truth and advocacy of a pragmatic epistemological realism,90 there is nothing in
Habermass account of deliberative democracy that would necessarily act as a
brake on a pernicious consensus concerning moral and legal norms. His assertion
that accounts of propositional truth and normative rightness are analogous does
not help because, as Habermas himself notes, The concept of normative rightness can be reduced without remainder to rational justication under ideal conditions. It lacks the ontological connotation of reference to things about which we
state facts.91 The limit situation implied by the potential totalization of systematically distorted communication suggests that agreement cannot equal rightness, yet
in discourse theory Habermas is explicit that nothing stands outside communication. Others have noted that this leaves Habermass argument in a weak position
when it comes to grounding the rights needed to protect individual dierences and
foster their expression.92 This would be a corruption of Habermass aims, but it
remains an immanent possibility of his position and demonstrates the limits of
procedural arguments concerning violence and evil.
Even disregarding the limit possibility of totally distorted communication, there
is a third parallel between Kant and Habermas. Signicantly, Kants account of the
corruption of the will as a turning away from the moral law nds a strong echo in
Habermass account of the limitations of political arguments that insist on the
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virtues of politics understood as the achievement of a modus vivendi or pragmatic

bargain rather than communicatively achieved consensus. Such bargains, from
Habermass viewpoint, look wanting in legitimacy in a manner that can be compared with Kants account of the frailty of human will and its failure to live up to
or tendency to turn away from the moral law; pragmatic bargains (though they
may be the instantiation of peace understood as the absence of conict) are failures
to realise consensus/harmony and as such are insucient to ground a legitimate
polity.
We can take up the implications of these parallels between Kant and Habermas
by turning directly to Habermass political arguments. We will do this rst by
examining the ways in which his insistence on separating reason and rhetorical
force depoliticizes political language, secondly reecting on the limits of civil disobedience in his account, and thirdly noting Habermass own recent ambivalence
toward his strict proceduralism. This will take us back to the fundamental role of a
notion of originary peace/consensus that for both theorists produces a blind spot
concerning violence.
The idea that one can separate reason and rhetorical force, world-disclosing and
problem-solving uses of language, is surely undesirable even if it could be achieved.
It would produce a wholly ineectual, depoliticized political language. This is
apparent in Habermass description of terrorist violence as systematically distorted
communication in Philosophy in a Time of Terror.93 Here he is discussing what he
calls the structural violence he believes we have become accustomed to. He cites
unconscionable social inequality, degrading discrimination, pauperization, and
marginalization94 as examples. A broad denition of violence is used here.
Habermas goes on to explain such violence as follows:
conicts arise from distortion in communication, from misunderstanding and incomprehension, from insincerity and deception. When the consequences of these conicts
become painful enough, they land in court or at the therapists oce. The spiral of
violence begins as a spiral of distorted communication that leads through the spiral of
uncontrolled reciprocal mistrust, to the breakdown of communication. If violence
thus begins with a distortion in communication, after it has erupted it is possible to
know what has gone wrong and what needs to be repaired.95
This passage is perhaps best read as a narrative of emergence, of the way violence
in language (distorted communication) can spiral into visceral violence. It reveals
several important aspects of Habermass thinking. As already noted, violence is
dened very broadly here, and with several dierent senses, to the point that one
might think the concept begins to lose purchase. But, more tellingly, violence is also
marked out as derivative, as parasitic on and secondary to communicative action.
In the process, Habermas assumes rst a unitary world of validity and secondly
that our primary world-orientation is not to hate (as e.g. Freud suggested) but to
communicate. Habermass idea of communicative consensus provides a horizon of
harmony against which violence, evil and the like can be measured, yet in light of
444
which they are dened as derivative, secondary, and thus capable of being overcome. Habermass theoretical scheme thus leaves us unarmed with respect to disagreements that cannot be resolved rationally. His observation that conicts land
in court or in the therapists oce assumes in relation to the rst case that the
parties recognition of the court is not in question, and in relation to the second
case that there exists positive willingness to engage in a therapeutic reconciliation.
That is, a unitary world of validity, and the prospect of consensus, is presupposed.
Similarly, appeal to the idea that over time intractable conicts might succumb to
reasoned deliberation and consensus,96 does not help to resolve problems in the
here and now, nor help to work out how to engender or even impose peace to the
point where arguments might replace arms. 97
Recognizing the way in which an assumed horizon of harmony structures
Habermass thinking also helps explain his position on civil disobedience.
Habermas limits legitimate civil disobedience to non-violent action;98 that is, for
him political violence can never be morally justied.99 Nonetheless, asked whether
terrorism should be distinguished from ordinary crime and other types of violence,
Habermas responds Yes and no. From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for
terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried
out. Nothing justies our making allowance for the murder or suering of others
for ones own purposes.100 However, he goes on to dierentiate political terror
and ordinary crime during change of regimes, in which case former terrorists
may come to power and become well-regarded representatives of their country. In
such cases Habermas suggests former terrorists may gain some retrospective legitimation for their actions to overcome a manifestly unjust situation.101 So, while
political violence can never, according to Habermas, be morally justied, he
remains ambivalent about whether it may (retrospectively) be politically or legally
justied. This suggests that Habermass account is not as pure as he would like, and
that we could productively pursue a dierent strategy here, emphasising the impurity of his concepts.
This is indeed the route recently taken by White and Farr, in an essay emphasising the role of negativity in Habermass account.102 Referring to Habermass 1985
essay on civil disobedience, they claim Habermass emphasis on no-saying bears
witness to the insuciency of communicative reason and demonstrates that dissensus has ontological ground in his argument. Their re-reading certainly makes
Habermass work look more open to agonistic conceptions of the political and
produces a useful corrective to the multiple readings of his account as a consensus
machine. However, the suggestion that negativity, no-saying, is embedded in the
core of his conception of communicative action in a way that dislodges the priority
of consensus is doubtful. In particular, though Habermas suggests that civil disobedience is the touchstone of a mature constitutional democracy, he is quite clear
that such disobedience takes place always already within a legal order, and importantly involves recognition of that order: Civil disobedience does not place the
existence and fundamental signicance of constitutional order in question.103
Thus whilst there is clearly space for dissensus in Habermass system (otherwise
why would discursive democracy be necessary?), this does not break with the
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ontological and chronological priority accorded to consensus which continues to

provide the horizon of his work.
Habermas is clear: civil disobedience assumes the legitimacy of the law, and does
not seek to bring the whole legal order into question. Under his scheme we remain,
as we do with Kant, with the notion that law is necessary. There are important
dierences of course: Habermas refers approvingly to the right of resistance
enshrined in the post-war German constitution, whereas Kants work gives no
such right and in fact imposes a duty to obey even evil authority. Habermass
account also attempts to heal the rift between the addressee and addressor
of law, to straighten the crooked timber of humanity, by levelling us up through
a requirement for participation in discourse, whereas Kant prefers that we do
not enquire too thoroughly into the grounds of the authority of the state.104 But
both look like natural lawyers engaged in a coercive proceduralism that always
already has law as its horizon (thus Habermass uncomfortable ambivalence
over the retrospective legitimation of what have previously been regarded as terrorist acts).105
If we return directly to the reversibility of Kants categorical imperative and
radical evil, and its potential translation in Habermass system as communicative
consensus versus distorted communication, there is a further problem. Habermas
himself comes close to recognising this when he comments that we do not have an
adequate way properly to distinguish what is morally wrong from what is profoundly evil. He makes this comment whilst discussing new reproductive technologies in The Future of Human Nature. Here, Habermas urges the secular side of
the argument to remain sensitive to the force of articulation inherent in religious
languages if secular society is not to be severed from important resources of
meaning.106 Habermas develops this by referring to Kants account of autonomy,
stating that whilst this undermines the traditional image of men as children of
God it critically assimilates religious contents in the idea of the unconditional
validity of moral duties. He continues [Kants] further attempt to translate the
notion of radical evil from biblical usage into the language of rational religion
may seem less convincing. . .we still lack an adequate concept for the semantic
dierence between what is morally wrong and what is profoundly evil.107 He
adds: Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended leave
irritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an oence against human laws, something was lost.108 Here, Habermas
seems to gesture to something not quite right with his own formula for exclusively
procedural forms of justication. Certainly it would appear that there is something
missing from problem-solving language. Matus tik interprets Habermass observations as suggestive of a need for a critical religiousity, stating that the wish for an
ideal communication community is the surviving phantom limb of a religious
longing.109 It seems to me that this is right; the idea that religion oers reservoirs
of meaning that cannot be translated into secular language and procedural rules
without leaving irritations certainly problematizes Habermass own quest for a
stable procedural philosophical form. It suggests that Habermass account is not
quite as purely procedural as it might seem.
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4. Conclusion
For Kant and for Habermas peace and consensus have ontological and chronological priority over violence and evil. The latter are derivative, understood as
failures to follow the moral law or the law of language. As Kant eviscerates
evil,110 so Habermas eviscerates the possibility of recognizing violence within language. Habermass model of language is one in which consensus has priority; thus
his account provides no way to deal with violence other than as derivative or
secondary. This has a marked eect on his political writing, where he cannot construe dissensus as potentially in-eliminable, and thus leaves us unarmed in the face
of non-consensus. At the same time, his position assumes the legitimacy of law: in
arguing that communicative reason provides jurisgenesis he aligns power with law
and claims to have abrogated the problem of the lawgiver. But this only works if
language can function as a neutral medium, something we have challenged through
the examples of the contested concepts of terrorist and freedom ghter; use of
these terms is context dependent and cannot be specied without remainder, as
evidenced in the current War on Terror.
In Philosophy in a Time of Terror Habermas comments on those he sees as
merely engaged in ontologizing communication, and complains that they nd in
it nothing but violence.111 But does anyone actually do this? Surely it is rather that
the clear dividing lines Habermas asserts, which enable him to argue for communicatively achieved consensus without remainder, are considerably more contentious and muddled than he admits. Habermass attempt at the conceptual
separation of problem-solving and world-disclosing language holds up the possibility of a language that is transparent to itself, and which is the pure opposite of
force. This paper has suggested that this is not only politically ineectual, but also
likely to produce its own perversions. Habermas rationalizes and attempts to eliminate violence from his consideration of law and language. In Habermass work,
law and language appear as ciphers for reason. But his inability to recognize
the paradoxical character of language and reason makes his work blind to the
violence in which it is unavoidably implicated. Pure proceduralism might be
where we end up after the end of metaphysics and the death of God, but this is
indeed precarious.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to participants at the Manchester Workshops in Political Theory, the sta and
students of the University of Sussex Social and Political Theory group, Steve Bastow,
Diana Coole, Sven Opitz, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their helpful
comments on the text.
Notes
1. See Otfried Hoffe (2006) Kants Cosmopolitan Theory of Law and Peace. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press; Michael Howard (2000) The Invention of Peace. London:
Profile Books; William Rasch (2008) Kants Project of Perpetual Pacification, Law and
Critique 19: 1934.
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2. Immanuel Kant ([1795] 1983) Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (trans. T. Humphrey).
Indianapolis: Hackett; Immanuel Kant ([1793] 1998) Religion within the Boundaries of
Mere Reason and Other Writings (trans. and eds A. Wood, G. Di Giovanni, and Robert
M. Adams). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Jurgen Habermas Kants Idea of Perpetual Peace: At Two Hundred Years Historical
Remove in C. Cronin and P. De Grieff (eds) (1998) The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in
Political Theory (trans. C. Cronin), pp. 166, 201. Cambridge: Polity Press. See also Jurgen
Habermas (1970a) On systematically distorted communication, Inquiry 13: 20518;
Jurgen Habermas What Is Universal Pragmatics (1979) Communication and the
Evolution of Society (trans. T. McCarthy), chapter 1, pp. 168. London: Heinemann;
Jurgen Habermas (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and
the Rationalization of Society (trans. T. McCarthy). Boston: Beacon Press; Jurgen
Habermas (1987a) The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2: Lifeworld and
System (trans. T. McCarthy). Cambridge: Polity; Jurgen Habermas (2006) The Divided
West. Cambridge: Polity.
4. Thomas Hobbes ([1651] 1991) Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Carl
Schmitt ([1932] 2005) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
(trans. G. Schwab). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
5. For example, Ernest Gellner War and Violence (1995) Anthropology and Politics, chapter 11. Oxford: Blackwell; Anthony Giddens (1985) The Nation State and Violence.
Cambridge: Polity; John Hall (1994) Coercion and Consent: Studies on the Modern
State. Cambridge: Polity; Michael Mann (1988) States, War and Capitalism: Studies
in Political Sociology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; Douglas C. North, John J. Wallis, and
Barry R. Weingast (eds) (2009) Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for
Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Charles
Tilly (1992) Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 9901992. London: Blackwell;
Max Weber Politics as a Vocation in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds) ([1919]
1991) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, pp. 77128. London: Routledge.
6. Jurgen Habermas (1992) Postmetaphysical Thinking. Cambridge: Polity.
7. Something I have questioned elsewhere (Samantha Ashenden (1998) Pluralism within
the limits of reason alone? Habermas and the discursive negotiation of consensus,
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 1(3): 11736).
8. Kant ([1793] 1998), n. 3.
9. Shane ONeill (2010) Struggles Against Injustice: Contemporary Critical Theory and
Political Violence, Journal of Global Ethics 6: 12739.
10. Habermas (1970a), n. 4; Jurgen Habermas (1970b) Towards a Theory of
Communicative Competence, Inquiry 13: 36075.
11. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. For recent collections of papers in violence see
Vittorio Bufacchi, ed. (2009) Violence: A Philosophical Anthology. London: Palgrave
Macmillan; and Hele`ne Frappat (ed) (2000) La Violence. Paris: Flammarion. The
former is oriented to analytic philosophy, the latter to continental thought.
12. John Keane (1996) Reflections on Violence. London: Verso; John Keane (2004) Violence
and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; ONeill (2010), n. 10.
13. Pierre Bourdieu (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity; Judith Butler
(1997) Excitable Speech. London: Routledge; Judith Butler (2004) Precarious Life: The
Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso; Judith Butler (2009) Frames of War
London: Verso; Johan Galtung (1969) Violence, Peace and Peace Research, Journal of
Peace Research 6: 16791; John Harris (1980) Violence and Responsibility. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul; Steven Lukes (1974) Power: A Radical View. London:
448
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
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23.
24.
25.
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27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.

Macmillan; Slavoj Zizek (2008) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile
Books.
Galtung (1969), n. 14, p. 80.
Zizek (2008), n. 14, p. 52.
Theodore Adorno ([1966] 1973) Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge.
Butler 1997, 2004, 2009, n. 14; also Sam Chambers and Terrel Carver (2008) Judith
Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics, chapter 4. London: Routledge.
Habermas (1984) (1987a), n. 4.
See, inter alia, Gellner (1995), Giddens (1985), Hall (1994), Mann (1988), North et al.
(2009), Tilly (1992), n. 6.
Gerard Delanty (2001) Cosmopolitanism and Violence: The Limits of Global Civil
Society, European Journal of Social Theory 4: 4152; Hans Joas (2003) War and
Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Habermas (1987a), n. 4.
Hannah Arendt (1969) On Violence, p. 56. Florida: Harcourt Brace and Company.
Jurgen Habermas (1983) Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power in PhilosophicalPolitical Profiles (trans. F. G. Lawrence), pp. 17188. Massachusetts: MIT Press; Jurgen
Habermas (1996) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law
and Democracy. Cambridge: Polity.
See Habermas 1970a, n. 4; 1970b, n. 11; 1979, n. 4.
Habermas (1984) n. 4, p. 25. Note that Habermas does not suggest that communicative
consensus can be achieved; rather it is a regulative idea that makes sense of everyday
language use and is thus immanent to language.
See J. L. Austin (1962) How to Do Things With Words. Oxford: Clarendon; also see J. R.
Searle (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. CUP: Cambridge.
For Habermass use of these ideas see (1979) n. 4, and Social Action, Purposive Activity
and Communication (1981), both of which are reprinted in (1998) On the Pragmatics of
Communication (M. Cooke, ed). Cambridge: Polity; for developments in his use of
ordinary language philosophy since this initial specification, see Jurgen Habermas
(2003a) Truth and Justification. Cambridge: Polity.
Habermas 1970a, 1979, n. 4. Also see Maeve Cooke (1994) Language and Reason: A
Study of Habermass Pragmatics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT.
It is possible to question the priority Habermas accords communicative action, for
example by reference to the role of jokes and irony or via psychoanalytic accounts of
the unconscious. See, e.g. Diana Coole Habermas and the Question of Alterity in
M. Passerin DEntreves and S. Benhabib (eds) (1996) Habermas and the Unfinished
Project of Modernity, pp. 22144. Cambridge: Polity; David Held and John
Thompson (eds) (1982) Habermas: Critical Debates. Cambridge: Polity; Jean-Jacques
Lecercle (1990) The Violence of Language. London: Routledge.
Jurgen Habermas (1987b) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Jacques Derrida (1995) Is there a philosophical language? in E. Weber (ed)
Points . . . Interviews 19741994 (trans. P. Kamuf), pp. 21627. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Austin (1962), n. 27.
Jacques Derrida ([1972] 1988) Signature Event Context in Limited Inc (trans. S. Weber
and J. Mehlman), pp. 123. Northwestern University Press: Illinois, at p. 14.
Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 205, emphasis in text.
Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 205, emphasis in text.
Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 207.
Ashenden
449
36. As a counter to Habermass assertions that Derrida deals with works of philosophy as
literature, it is salutary to recognize the importance of texts such as Derridas
Supplement to the Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics in Jacques Derrida (ed)
(1982) Margins of Philosophy (trans. A. Bass), pp. 177205. Chicago: University of
Chicago. In Supplement Derrida criticizes Benvenistes claim that Aristotles conception of the fundamental categories of thought was determined by the categorical structure of the Greek language itself, that Aristotles list of the fundamental attributes that
can be predicated of a subject is an effect of grammar. See Emile Benveniste (1971)
Problems in General Linguistics, chapter 6. Miami: University of Miami Press. Derrida
shows that the central category neglected by Benveniste is that of category itself, that we
need a category of category, and that Benveniste is simultaneously availing himself of
this and denying it; Derrida thus defends the autonomy of philosophy. In this regard
then, Derridas point would seem to be not that we do not need philosophy, but rather
that the purity often asserted for it, and that Habermas needs to keep his argument on
the rails, is not available.
37. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, pp. 2001.
38. Habermas (1984), n. 4, pp. 197215.
39. Habermas (1984), n. 4; (1987a), n. 4, p. 326; (1987b), n. 30 pp. 201, 207.
40. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, pp. 2078. See Pieter Duvenage (2003) Habermas and
Aesthetics: The Limits of Communicative Reason. Cambridge: Polity, especially chapter
3, for a more elaborate account of Habermass conception of the value spheres of
modernity and the ways in which this circumscribes aesthetic judgement. For the argument that aesthetic judgement has become an independent cultural sphere of value, and
that religion could achieve a similar level of differentiation but only at the price of the
neutralization of its experiential content see Jurgen Habermas (2002) Religion and
Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity, p. 84. Cambridge: Polity. But compare this with Habermass comments at the end of popular sovereignty as procedure,
where he writes of another kind of transcendence in the negativity of modern art in its
refus[al] to be assimilated by pregiven categories. Habermas (1996), n. 24, Appendix I,
p. 490.
41. Jurgen Habermas (2008) Between Naturalism and Religion, Cambridge: Polity; Jurgen
Habermas (2010) An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular
Age, Cambridge: Polity.
42. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 190.
43. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 209.
44. This parallels Habermass argument that art criticism brings the experiential content of
the work of art into normal language (1987b, n. 30, p. 208), i.e. renders the artwork
assimilable.
45. Ben Saul (2006) Defining Terrorism in International Law, chapter 1. Oxford University
Press: Oxford.
46. See Clive Stafford Smith (2007) Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons, p. 34.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; Sam Chambers (2007) Normative Violence
After 9/11: Rereading the Politics of Gender Trouble, New Political Science 29: 4360,
at p. 59.
47. Jurgen Habermas (2006) An interview on War and Peace, in The Divided West (trans.
C. Cronin), p. 98. Cambridge: Polity.
48. Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 162, 172; Jurgen Habermas (1993) Justification and
Application. Cambridge: Polity, esp. chapter 2.
49. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 194.
450
50. Nikolas Kompridis (1994) On world disclosure: Heidegger, Habermas, and Dewey
Thesis Eleven 37: 2945, notes that Habermass opposition between world-disclosure
and capacity for reason-giving implies that he identifies intersubjective learning exclusively with practices of argumentation and problem solving, and that this can provide no
account of semantic innovation and meaning change.
51. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 197.
52. Habermas (1992), n. 7, p. 17.
53. Habermas (1984), n. 4, p. 141.
54. Habermas (1984), n. 4, pp. 197215.
55. Jurgen Habermas Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter in K. Baynes, J. Bohman,
and T. McCarthy (eds) (1987c) After Philosophy? End or Transformation? p. 312.
Massachusetts: MIT Press.
56. Habermas (1987c), n. 56, p. 312.
57. Habermas (1987c), n. 56, p. 313.
58. Habermas (1987b), n. 30, p. 340, emphasis in text.
59. See James Schmidt (1989) Habermas and the Discourse of Modernity, Political Theory
17: 31520.
60. Jurgen Habermas (1990) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 87.
Massachusetts: MIT Press.
61. James Tully To Think and Act Differently: Foucaults Four Reciprocal Objections to
Habermass Theory in S. Ashenden and D. Owen (eds) (1999) Foucault contra
Habermas, pp. 90142. London: Sage.
62. Habermas (1996), n. 24.
63. Jurgen Habermas (2001) Constitutional Democracy: A Paradoxical Union of
Contradictory Principles? Political Theory 29: 76681, esp. p. 779.
64. Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 188, 282, 310, 3134.
65. Weber [1919] 1991, n. 6, p. 78.
66. Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 1478.
67. Arendt (1969), n. 23, p. 40.
68. Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 1478.
69. Habermas (1983), n. 24, p. 179.
70. Habermas (1983), n. 24, p. 180; also Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 13649.
71. See Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 13649; also J. Habermas (1974) Theory and Practice,
chapter 2. Natural law and revolution (trans. J. Viertel), pp. 82119. Boston: Beacon
Press.
72. Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 1889, emphasis added.
73. Habermas (1987c), n. 56, p. 296.
74. Habermas (2003a), n. 27, p. 7
75. Habermas (1987c), n. 56, p. 298.
76. I. Kant ([1785] 1981) Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (trans. J. W. Ellington),
p. 416. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
77. Habermas (2003a), n. 27, chapter 2.
78. Kant ([1793] 1998), n. 3, p. 59.
79. Kant ([1793] 1998), n. 3, p. 56.
80. Kant ([1793] 1998), n. 3, p. 59.
81. Kant ([1793] 1998), n. 3, p. 60.
82. J. Lacan (1989) Kant avec Sade, October 51: 55104, at pp. 5960. See also
A. Zupancic (2000) Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, p. 90. London: Verso, and S. Zizek
Ashenden
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
451
(1993) Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Kant ([1793] 1998), n. 3, pp. 589.
Richard J. Bernstein (2002) Radical Evil: A Philosophical Investigation. Cambridge:
Polity, p. 43.
She adds It is inherent in our entire philosophical tradition that we cannot conceive of
a radical evil and this is true both for Christian theology, which conceded even to the
Devil himself a celestial origin, as well as for Kant, the only philosopher who, in the
word he coined for it, at least must have suspected the existence of this evil even though
he immediately rationalized it in the concept of a perverted ill will that could be
explained by comprehensible motives. Hannah Arendt (1966) The Origins of
Totalitarianism, p. 459. New York: Harcourt.
Derrida (1988), n. 33, p. 15.
Derrida (1988), n. 33, p. 16.
Martin B. Matus tik (2008) Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope. Indiana: Indiana
University Press, pp. 92, 1501.
See, amongst others, Iris M. Young (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Habermas (2003a), n. 27, p. 7.
Habermas (2003a), n. 27, p. 42.
See Carol Gould Diversity and Democracy: Representing Differences in
S. Benhabib (ed) (1996) Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the
Political, pp.17188. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Giovanna Borradori (ed) (2003) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jurgen
Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Habermas in Borradori (2003), n. 94, p. 35 emphasis in text.
Habermas in Borradori (2003), n. 94, p. 35, emphasis in text.
Jurgen Habermas (1993) Justification and Application (trans. C. Cronin), Cambridge:
Polity, pp. 5960.
Although Habermas has argued for something like this in respect of NATO intervention into Kosovo in 1999; see (2006), n. 4.
Habermas (1996), n. 24, pp. 3824.
Habermas in Borradori (2003), n. 94, p. 34. Also see W. Smith (2008) Civil
Disobedience and Social Power: Reflections on Habermas, Contemporary Political
Theory 7: 7289. ONeill (2010), n. 10, p. 133 observes that in calling violent acts
against injustice crimes Habermas takes for granted the legitimacy of existing laws,
something ONeill finds a deeply problematic legalistic assumption. There are many
examples of the importance of violence in generating political community. See for
example Keanes observations on the Dublin Uprising 1916, see (1996), n. 13, pp.
769. In a similar vein, Howard (2000), n. 2, discusses the pervasive role of war in
ordering political power, and North et al., n. 6, (2009) focus on the role of violence in
generating social orders.
Habermas in Borradori (2003), n. 94, p. 34.
Habermas in Borradori (2003), n. 94, p. 34.
S. K. White and E. R. Farr (2012) No-Saying in Habermas, Political Theory 40:
3257.
Jurgen Habermas (1985) Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test of the Democratic
Constitutional State, Berkeley Journal of Sociology 30: 95116, at p. 105.
452
104. See Immanuel Kant ([1785] 1996) The Metaphysics of Morals (trans. and ed. Mary
Gregor). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 6: 318, p. 95.
105. Thomassen suggests two possible readings of Habermas which illuminate his ambivalence in respect of this matter. On one reading, Habermass account of rational law
presupposes that legality and legitimacy can be reconciled; on another reading
Habermass account presupposes a constitutive gap between legality and legitimacy
such that autonomy and rational law cannot be realized. Habermass more strictly
philosophical arguments tend to proceed along the former, while his political commentaries are more open to the latter reading. See Lasse Thomssen (2007) Within the Limits
of Deliberative Reason Alone: Habermas, Civil Disobedience and Constitutional
Democracy, European Journal of Political Theory 6: 20018, at p. 201.
106. Jurgen Habermas (2003b) The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge: Polity, p. 109.
107. Habermas (2003b), n. 106, p. 110.
108. Habermas (2003b), n. 106, p. 110; see also Jurgen Habermas (2008) Between
Naturalism and Religion. Cambridge: Polity, esp. chapter 5 Religion in the Public
Sphere.
109. Matus tik (2008), n. 89, pp. 62, 70. Matus tik continues by suggesting that the human
possibility of diabolical evil revisits us as a religious phenomenon after the death of
God. He asks if such evil never arose, would there be need for its rational translation?
Kant and Habermas cannot have it both ways, p. 77.
110. Bernstein (2002), n. 85, p. 34.
111. Habermas in Borradori (2003), n. 94, p. 38.

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peace or consensus has chronological and ontological priority over violence. We

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2. Distinguishing coercion and consensus: Habermass

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prisoners at Abu Ghraib.46 In politically charged contexts, neutral descriptive

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rationalization. Habermas expresses this latter development in terms of a process of

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3. Political language: Proceduralism and perversion

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virtues of politics understood as the achievement of a modus vivendi or pragmatic

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ontological and chronological priority accorded to consensus which continues to

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