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Philosophical Review

Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory by Seyla Benhabib
Review by: Allen W. Wood
The Philosophical Review, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Jan., 1988), pp. 107-111
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review
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choices resulting from them, and so forth. I have found this book exceed-
ingly difficult to read. The prose has a stilted, labored quality to it, and too
much space is devoted to elementary exposition and compare-contrast ex-
ercises. As though it were the proverbial broth to which too many cooks
had contributed, the thread of the argument is often so obscured by extra-
neous issues the author feels obliged to address that she herself must reca-
pitulate the main point sometimes two or three times in a section. Ull-
mann-Margalit covers so many topics of interest and significance that one
hopes she will focus her considerable resources on each of them in depth
in future works.

ADRIAN M. S. PIPER
GeorgetownUniversity

The PhilosophicalReview, Vol. XCVII, No. 1 (January 1988)

CRITIQUE, NORM, AND UTOPIA: A STUDY OF THE FOUNDATIONS


OF CRITICAL THEORY. By SEYLABENHABIB.New York, N.Y., Co-
lumbia University Press, 1986. Pp. xviii, 455. $35.00.

It is not easy for most of us to understand the tradition of "critical


theory" (or the "Frankfurt School"), because it is difficult for us even to
imagine the peculiar intellectual traumas which produced it. For critical
theory grows out of the experience of German Marxists in the 1930's who
were confronted, quite suddenly and almost simultaneously, with the
fateful betrayal of socialism by Stalinist Russia and the catastrophic
triumph of Nazism in their own country. Only such a painfully unnatural
milieu could have produced the weird blend which we find in the forbid-
dingly obscure writings of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer-the
conceptual forms of academic German -idealism filled out with Weberian
social science and Freudian psychoanalysis, an ardent and shamelessly
utopian radicalism wearing the black mourning garb of desperate irratio-
nalist pessimism, a robust scientistic Marxist activism turning (like milk left
too long on the back porch) to a precious, occult modernist aestheticism.
Yet whether we like it or not, the tradition has proven fruitful. It is the
direct heritage of Jurgen Habermas and his school, which serves at
present as the reigning heir to the post-Kantian German philosophical
tradition, and represents the most formidable movement in continental
philosophy and social theory in the late twentieth century. Seyla Ben-
habib's Critique,Norm, and Utopia is a book about the tradition of critical
theory from within, a critical reconstruction of its history and an attempt
to evaluate its current state.

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Of course the story line is predictable virtually a prior: Defects in Hegel


and Marx will lead to a transformation of their project by Horkheimer
and Adorno; aporias in the thought of Horkheimer and Adorno will re-
quire a rethinking of the critical project by Habermas. But the characters
in the drama are presented vividly, with depth and originality; their
problems are brought to life, and their tensions in dealing with these
problems are explored with both conviction and sophistication. To those
unfamiliar with critical theory, it may be an obstacle that the book is
written by an insider, a practitioner, rather than by someone with the de-
tachment of a sympathetic interpreter. But this is more than compensated
for by the fact that the author speaks articulately in the language of her
tradition, so that we are always reading contemporary critical theory at the
same time as we read about the tradition of critical theory.
The best part of Critique, Norm, and Utopia is its detailed and critical
treatment of Horkheimer and Adorno (with occasional references to Mar-
cuse) and its more sympathetic exposition of Habermas. But these discus-
sions are grounded philosophically in a certain vision of the origins of
critical theory in Hegel and Marx, and of their shortcomings. This is the
aspect of the book with which I found most to disagree; so I will devote
the remainder of my review to it.
Benhabib organizes her discussion of critical theory around three tasks
of "criticism": (1) "immanent critique" (2) "defetishizing critique" and (3)
"crisis diagnosis." All three represent "criticism" (an exercise of rational
judgment) used in relation to a social "crisis": an objective social process
involving conflict and controversy (pp. 19-21). "Immanent critique" at-
tempts to show how a social order fails to live up to its own self-conception
or to meet its own standards. "Defetishizing critique" reveals a social pro-
cess or formation as a result of human agency rather than a mere unalter-
able natural fact. And "crisis diagnosis" attempts to understand the causes
and dynamics of a social crisis in such a way as to point to its "integration."
Benhabib traces all three modes of critique back to Hegel. Immanent
critique is first found in Hegel's criticism of modern natural right theories
in 1802 (pp. 22ff.). Defetishizing critique is traced to Hegel's Phenome-
nology of Spirit (1807), and its representation of labor as the model for all
spiritual activity (pp. 45ff.). "Crisis integration" begins in Hegel's critique
of modern (Kantian) moral philosophy (pp. 71ff.) and his attempt to pro-
vide an integrating theory of modern society in The Philosophy of Right
(1821) (pp. 95ff.). In all three cases, Benhabib sees Marx as taking over the
Hegelian project, with significant, though never essential, modifications.
At the basis of the Hegelian and Marxian critique for Benhabib is a
"philosophy of the subject" whose fundamental features are its acceptance
of labor as the model of human activity, and the conception of human
history as the story of a self-constituting and self-interpreting "transsub-

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jective subject" (Hegelian spirit or Marxian collective humanity) (p. 54). As


anyone familiar with German philosophy from Heidegger to Habermas
can guess from the choice of its name alone, this "philosophy of the sub-
ject" is going to be held responsible for the defects of the Hegelian-
Marxist project, and the shortcomings of the Horkheimer-Adorno phase
of critical theory are also blamed on their failure to "go beyond" the
philosophy of the subject.
Yet the appropriateness of this pejorative name, and the attribution to
Marx of the position associated with it, seem to me somewhat question-
able. Marx's writings before 1845 clearly subscribe to a conception of "hu-
manity" as the subject of historical development. But this conception is
roundly condemned in The German Ideology, and seems to me alien to
Marx's thought after the advent of his materialist conception of history. In
the same way (and for much the same reasons) Marx abandons the mysti-
fied moralistic conception of the proletariat as a "universal class" found in
his famous 1843 "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction."
The soon-to-be repudiated views in this early text seem to me the only real
basis for ascribing to Marx the idea that the proletariat represents "hu-
manity" as a "transsubjective subject." Benhabib's attribution to Marx of a
view of history based on a "transsubjective subject" thus seems to me cor-
rect only for an early, immature phase of Marx's thought. Her most telling
criticisms of Marx (pp. 129-133) are really criticisms of a view Marx con-
sciously abandoned between 1843 and 1845.
Benhabib is certainly correct in ascribing to Marx throughout his life a
conception of human activity as collective, self-expressive labor. It is also
correct to find the origin of this conception in Hegel, but it is a rather
one-sided (if sympathetic) reading of Hegel which identifies Hegel's con-
cept of spirit with the model of labor. Yet it seems questionable to name
this conception "the philosophy of the subject," if that is to imply that the
labor model inherits all the defects associated (in the twentieth-century
German tradition) with the subject-object metaphysics of German ide-
alism. Whether this is so depends on what one thinks those defects are.
We find out more about what Benhabib thinks they are when we ex-
amine her critique of "transsubjectivity," a term she contrasts with "inter-
subjectivity." The two terms represent, she says, two "social-epistemic per-
spectives." "Intersubjectivity" is "the standpoint of individuals qua partici-
pants in social life," while "transsubjectivity" is the perspective which
"reflects the view of the observerwho analyzes and judges social relations"
(p. 12). According to the standpoint of intersubjectivity, "the perspective
of human agents is constitutive of the validity of their interactions,
whereas the standpoint of transsubjectivity locates this validity and
meaning in a source external to the shared perspectives of social agents, in
the standpoint of a thinker-observer" (pp. 89-90).

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Throughout the book, Benhabib is engaged in a running polemic


against "transsubjectivity," and an advocacy of "intersubjectivity." It is im-
plied that those who adopt a "transsubjective" perspective are committed
(or at least prone) to a totalitarian style of political thinking which ruth-
lessly pursues a set of social goals decided on "objectively" by the "outside
observer" in total disregard of the feelings and opinions of others. By
contrast, "intersubjectivity" appears to acknowledge no truths or norms
except those which are accepted (or at any rate those which would be
rationally accepted) by the people participating in the society for which
they are valid. Thus Benhabib's verdict on Hegel's social philosophy (pp.
95- 101) sounds depressingly like that of Popper or Tugendhat, and the
critique of Marx seems aimed partly (though seldom explicitly) at exor-
cising the specter of totalitarian bolshevism (cf. p. 348). On the other
hand, "intersubjectivity" is committed to an irreducible plurality of per-
spectives, and to the task of forming society on the basis of a "polity" com-
posed of those who occupy them (pp. 343ff.).
There seems to me a good deal of confusion in all this; or at least there
are a number of assumptions implied in it, which are not clearly identified
or supplied with adequate argument. To begin with, it is not at all clear
that "intersubjectivity" and "transsubjectivity," as originally defined, rep-
resent alternative perspectives in any real sense. There may be unreflec-
tive social agents who never observe, analyze or judge their society, and
there may be anthropologists who study societies while remaining aloof
from them. But any reflective social agent is surely at one and the same
time a participant in social life and an observer of it, who tries to analyze
and judge the relations in which she participates. It seems to me mis-
leading to say even that such an agent occupies both the intersubjective
and the "transsubjective" perspectives; instead, the standpoint of such an
agent must be simultaneously that of participant and observer, and if
there is any disharmony between what the agent lives and what she ob-
serves, then that points to a disharmony within the agent and the society.
Next, the two formulations of the intersubjectivity/transsubjectivity dis-
tinction quoted above (from p. 12 and pp. 89-90) seem to me to mark two
quite different distinctions. I see no reason why a participant in social life
must regard the norms of society as deriving their validity from the per-
spective of human agents. In many societies, even our own, participants
commonly believe that the social norms have some foundation "external to
the shared perspectives of social agents"-in the will of God, for example,
or in objective facts about human nature which might be discerned as well
by an outside thinker-observer as by participants in the society. Con-
versely, it might very well be the conclusion of a thinker-observer of a
society that the validity of its norms depends solely on the shared perspec-
tive of its members.

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And of course it is obviously untrue that those who believe norms are
founded on an objective source rather than on intersubjective consent are
committed (or even prone) to ignoring what others think or want. If I
think that the objective norms in question include the value of individual
autonomy or concern for the desires and preferences of others, then I will
be committed precisely by my belief in the objectivity of these norms to not
ignoring what they think and want.
I suspect that what the superiority of intersubjectivity over "transsubjec-
tivity" is supposed to do for Benhabib is provide some sort of argument
for a certain kind of ethics, represented these days by Rawls and Ha-
bermas, which proposes to derive the validity of norms from some ideal
process of communicative action, collective deliberation and mutual con-
sent. (On pp. 90-95, Hegel's ethical theory in the Philosophyof Right is first
interpreted in such terms, and then criticized because the interpretation
can't be carried through.) But the distinction is too unclear to get such an
argument off the ground. As Benhabib employs it, the distinction also
seems to me to give a misleadingly subjectivistic twist to such ethical theo-
ries, as though they were not committed to the objective truth (indepen-
dently of the perspectives of individuals) of the claims involved in certi-
fying that certain principles meet the test of the ideal deliberative scheme.
The upshot is that "intersubjectivity" often looks disturbingly like the con-
temporary forms of subjectivism and relativism from which Benhabib ex-
plicitly wishes to distance herself (p. 14).
These defects touch some of the philosophical conclusions Benhabib
wants to draw from her reconstruction of the history of critical theory, but
they do not prevent the book from being an excellent and philosophically
informed discussion of that history.

ALLEN W. WOOD
Cornell University

The PhilosophicalReview, Vol. XCVII, No. 1 (January 1988)

HAVING REASONS. By FREDERIC SCHICK. Princeton, N.J., Princeton Uni-


versity Press, 1984. Pp. 158.

Having Reasons has four main aims. It seeks first to distinguish two com-
peting explanatory theories of choice: theories of rationality and theories
of sociality. The former explain all human choices as rational in this sense:
Whenever a person chooses deliberately he does so because he believes the
option chosen is likeliest to cause outcomes he prefers most. Theories of
sociality hold that many choices are not so motivated; a person may choose
an option simply because another wants or orders him to.

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