Philosophy & Social Criticism

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the new obscurity: the crisis of the welfare state and the exhaustion of
utopian energies: translated by phillip Jacobs
Jrgen Habermas
Philosophy Social Criticism 1986 11: 1
DOI: 10.1177/019145378601100201

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 JÜRGEN HABERMAS
the new obscurity: the crisis of the
welfare state and the exhaustion of
utopian energies*
translated by phillip Jacobs

Since the late eighteenth century a new time-consciousness

has been developing in Western culture which conceives of
history as a world-encompassing process that generates its
own problems. In this new consciousness, time is valued as
a scarce resource for the future-oriented mastering of prob-
lems left to us from the past. Any exemplary models from the
past, by which the present could unhesitatingly orient itself,
have faded. Modernity can no longer borrow its standards of
orientation from the models of other epochs. Modernity sees
itself as left entirely on its own: it has to draw its normativity
from out of itself. The authentic present is from now on the
place where innovation and the continuation of tradition
intertwine with one another.

Both the devaluation of exemplary models from the past and

the necessity of gleaning normatively substantive principles
from modern experiences and present forms of life explain
the altered structure of the Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist becomes
the medium in which henceforth political thought and political
discussion move. The Zeitgeist receives impulses from two
contrary, yet interdependent and commingled streams of
thought: the collision of historical and utopian thought ignites
the Zeitgeist.

At first sight these two ways of thinking seem mutually

exclusive. Historical reflection, permeated as it is with actual
experience, seems called upon to criticise utopian models;
utopian reflection, given to overexuberance, seems to have

*Special thanks to Tom McCarthy for his many helpful suggestions regarding
translation

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 the function of opening up alternatives and possibilities that
push beyond the limits of historical continuity. In fact, how-
ever, modern time-consciousness has opened up a horizon
in which utopian and historical reflections merge. This
gradual movement of utopian energies into historical con-
sciousness characterizes the Zeitgeist that has influenced
the political public sphere of modern peoples since the days
of the French Revolution.

In any case, that is how it seemed to be-until yesterday.

Today it seems as if the utopian energies have been used up,
as it they had withdrawn from historical reflection. The
horizon of the future has now narrowed itself and in doing so
has fundamentally changed both the Zeitgeist and politics, at
least in Western Europe. The future is occupied with the
merely negative; on the threshold to the 21 st century we find
the terrifying panorama of a world-wide threat to the interests
of life in general; the spiral of the arms race, uncontrolled
proliferations of automatic weapons, structural impoverish-
ment of developing countries, unemployment and growing
social imbalance in the developed countries, problems of
overburdening the environment, and the nearly catastrophic
operations of high technology are the catchwords that pene-
trate by way of the mass media into public consciousness. In
Europe, the answers of the intellectuals reflect the same
helplessness as do those of the politicians. It is by no means
just realism when forthright helplessness more and more
replaces attempts to find orientation determined by and
directed toward the future. It may be that the situation is
objectively obscure. Nonetheless obscurity is also a function
of the readiness to take action of which a society believes
itself capable. At issue, then, is western cultures confidence
in itself.

11

There certainly are good reasons for this exhaustion of

utopian energies. Classical utopias depicted conditions for a
life worthy of a human person, for a socially organized
happiness. Blended together with historical thought, the later
social utopias introduced into the political discussion since
the l9th century, awaken more realistic expectations. They
present science, technical skill, and planning as promising,
unfailing instruments for the rational control of nature and of
society.
But, in the meantime, this very expectation has been shaken
2 by massive new evidence. Atomic energy, weapons technol-
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 ogy and its expansion into space, genetic research and the
bio-technical intrusion into human behavior, information pro-
cessing, data management and new communications media
are technical accomplishments which inherently have con-

flicting consequences. In addition, the more complex these

systems which require management become, the greater
becomes the probability of dysfunctional secondary effects.
We discover daily that productive forces transmute them-
selves into destructive forces and that capacities for planning
can likewise become potentialities with disruptive conse-
quences. For that reason it is no wonder that theories gaining
the greatest influence today are ones that try to show how the
very forces for increasing power, from which modernity once
derived its self-confidence and its utopian expectation, in
actuality turn autonomy into dependence, emancipation into
oppression, and reality into the irrational. Jacques Derrida
draws from Heideggers critique of modern subjectivity the
conclusion that we can escape the treadmill of western
logocentrism only through aimless provocation. Instead of
trying to master Foreground contingencies in the world, we
should rather devote ourselves to the mysteriously encoded
contingencies found in the disclosure of the world. Foucault
radicalizes Horkheimers and Adornos critique of instrumen-
tal reason into a theory of the eternal return of power. His
proclamation of the ever same cycle of power returning in
ever new discourse formations also has the effect of extin-
guishing the last sparks of utopian thinking and western
cultures confidence in itself.

On the intellectual scene there is a widespread suspicion that

this exhaustion of utopian energies is not merely connected
with a passing mood of cultural pessimism, but rather
reaches much deeper. This could point to a fundamental
change of modern time-consciousness in general. Perhaps
that amalgam of historical and utopian thought is dissolving;
perhaps the structure of the Zeitgeist and the present state of
politics are being transformed. Perhaps historical conscious-
ness is being discharged of utopian energies-at the end of
the eighteenth century, with the temporalization of utopian
thought, otherworldly hopes for paradise shifted to this world;
today, two hundred years later, utopian expectations seem to
be losing their secular character and taking on once again a
religious form.I think the thesis of the arrival of the post-
modern period is unfounded. Neither the structure of the
Zeitgeist, nor the mode of debating future possibilities for
living have changed; it is not the utopian energies in general
that are retreating from historical consciousness. What had
3 reached its end is rather a specific utopian idea, which in the

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 past crystallized itself around the potential of a society based
on social labor (Arbeitsgellschaft).
The classic authors of social theory from Marx through Max
Weber were in agreement that the structure of bourgeoise
society received its form from abstract labor, that is, a labor
for profit directed by market forces, utilized for purposes of
realizing capital, and organized in the form of capitalist
enterprise. Since the form of this abstract labor exhibited
such a determining and ubiquitous power, utopian expecta-
tions could also concentrate themselves on the sphere of
production, in short, on an emancipation of labor from alien
control. The utopian images of the early socialists took on
concrete form in the picture of the Phalanstere-a laboring
society of free and equal producers. The communal form of
life of freely associated workers was supposed to arise from
a proper organization of production itself. This idea of work-
ers managing themselves still inspired the protest movement
of the late sixties. Even with all the criticism of early
socialism, Marx in the German Ideology also pursued this
very same utopian image of a laboring society:

It has now come to the point that individuals must appropriate

the existing forces of production... in order to come to their
full participation... The appropriation of these forces is itself
nothing more than the development of the individual capabil-
ities that correspond to the material instruments of produc-
tion. It is at this level that the full manifestation of the
individual first coincides with material life, which then accords
with the development of individuals to total individuals and
the stripping away of all original conditions given in nature.

The utopian idea of a laboring society of independent pro-

ducers has lost its persuasive power-and not only because
the forces of production have lost their innocence or because
the abolition of private ownership of the means of production
has clearly not in and of itself resulted in the management of
workers by themselves. Above all it is because that utopian
idea has lost its point of reference in reality: the power of
abstract labor to give structure and form to a society. Clause
Offe has compiled convincing &dquo;indications of an objectively
decreasing power of the factors of labor, production, and
profit in determining the state of a society and societal
development in general.,,3
But why should the dwindling persuasive power of the
utopian idea of a society based on labor be of consequence
4 for the wider public and help to explain a general exhaustion

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 of utopian impulses? Well, this utopian idea did not attract
just intellectuals. It has inspired the European workers
movement, and in our century it has left its mark on three very
different, yet historically influential programmes. In reaction to
the consequences of the First World War and to the subse-
quent worldwide economic crisis, three political movements
succeeded in establishing themselves: Soviet communism in
Russia, authoritarian corporatism in Fascist Italy, Nazi Ger-
many, and Falangist Spain, and social democratic reformism
in the mass democracies of the West. Only this last project,
which seeks to establish a civil welfare state, has adopted as
its own the legacy of the bourgeois emancipation move-
ments, namely, the democratic constitutional state. Although
this type of project emerged from the social democratic
tradition, it was by no means pursued only by governments
led by social democrats. After the Second World War, in the
Western countries, all governing parties have won their
majorities under the-more or less pronounced-banner of
social welfare state objectives. Since the middle of the
1970s, however, the limitations of the welfare state project
have become more apparent-without as yet any clearly
discernable alternatives on the horizon. For that reasonI
want to make my thesis more precise as follows: the new
obscurity is part of a situation in which the program of the
social welfare state, which still feeds on the utopian image of
a laboring society, is losing its capacity to project future
possibilities for a collectively better and less endangered way
of life.

III

The utopian core, deliverance from heteronomous labor, has

clearly taken on another form within the project of the social
welfare state. Emancipated living conditions worthy of human
beings are no longer seen as arising directly from a revolution
in working conditions, that is, from a transformation of
heteronomous Labor into self-directed activity. Reformed
conditions of employment nevertheless still retain a position
of importance in this project.4 They remain the reference
point not only for measures directed to humanizing a labor
that still remains estranged, but also, above all, for the
compensations meant to take care of the fundamental risks of
wage labor (accidents, illness, loss of job, an unprovided-for
old age). The resulting consequence is that all those able to
work must be included in this refined and cushioned system
of employment-full employment. This equalization only
functions when the role of a full-time wage earner becomes
5 the norm. For those burdens which are nevertheless still
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 connected with the cushioned status of dependent wage
labor, the citizen is compensated with legal rights, in his or
her role as a client of the welfare-state bureaucracies, and
with buying power, in his or her role as a consumer of
mass-produced goods. The lever for the pacification of class
antagonism remains, therefore, the neutralization of the
conflict potential built into the status of the wage laborer.

This goal is to be reached by way of welfare-state legislation

and collective bargaining to set wage scales. The welfare-
state policies are supposed to derive their legitimation from
general election and their social base in independent labor
unions and labor parties. The success of the project obvi-
ously was supposed to turn primarily on the power and the
ability of the state apparatus to effectively intervene in
societal matters. It was to intervene in the economic system
with the aim of nurturing capitalistic growth, tempering eco-
nomic crises, and at the same time of securing the interna-
tional competiveness of business and the jobs of workers,
and in such a way that growth is generated, from which
redistributions can be made without discouraging private
investors. This throws some light on the methods to be
followed: the welfare-state compromise and the pacification
of class antagonism are to be achieved through employing
democratically legitimated political power to foster and to
tame the quasi-natural process of capitalistic growth, sub-
stantively, the project feeds on the remains of the utopian
idea of a laboring society: as the status of the employee is
normalized through political rights to participation and social
rights to ownership, the general population gains the chance
to live in freedom, social justice, and increasing prosperity.
The presupposition here is that state intervention can insure
a peaceful co-existence between democracy and capitalism.
In the developed industrial societies of the West the precar-
ious conditions for this co-existence have more or less been
satisfied-at least under the favorable constellation of factors
present in the post-war and reconstruction periods. However,
I do not wish to deal with the changes in this constellation
since the 1970s, with the altered circumstances, but rather
with internal difficulties that have arisen in the social state as
result of its own success.

In this regard, two questions continually surface. First, does

the interventionist state have sufficient power at its disposal
and can it work efficiently enough to keep the capitalistic
economic system within the bounds of its programme?
Secondly, is the use of political power the right method for
6 attaining the substantial goal of promoting and securing
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 emancipated forms of life worthy of human beings? In
question, then, are firstly the limits of the possibility of
reconciling capitalism and democracy, and secondly, the
possibility of bringing forth new forms of life through legal and
bureaucratic measures.

As to the former: from the very beginning the national state

proved itself too narrow a framework for adequately securing
Keynesian economic policies against outside factors, that is,
against the imperatives of the world market and the invest-
ment policies of international business firms. The limits of the
states power and ability to intervene in internal matters are
even clearer. For here the social state, in clear proportion to
its success in pushing through its programmes, runs up
against the opposition of private investors. There are, of
course, many causes for a decreasing profitability in busi-
ness, for a declining willingness to invest, and for a falling rate
of growth. But the conditions for the valorization of capital are
also affected by the consequences of welfare-state policies-
in actual fact, and especially in the subjective perception of
business interests. Moreover, rising costs for wages and
benefits encourage investments in nationalizing production,
which, under the banner of a third industrial revolution, so
dramatically reduces the socially necessary labor time that,
despite the secular trend toward shortening the work week,
more and more laborers are apparently being released.

In a situation in which an insufficient willingness to invest,

economic stagnation, rising unemployment, and a crisis in
the public budget can be suggestively connected in the
perception of the public with the costs of the welfare state, we
can see clearly the structural limitations within which the
social welfare state compromise has to be worked out and
maintained. Because the social welfare state must leave
uncontested the economic systems mode of functioning,
there is no possibility for influencing private investment
activity other than through interventions that conform to the
economic system. And it lacks even the power to do that,
since the redistribution of income essentially is limited to a
horizontal reshuffling within the group of those dependently
employed and barely touches the class-specific structure of
property, particularly the distribution of the private ownership
of the means of production. So it is precisely the successful
welfare state that slips into a situation in which it becomes
apparent, as Claus Offe shows in &dquo;Arbeitsgesellschaft,&dquo; that
it is not itself an autonomous &dquo;source of wealth&dquo; and that it
cannot guarantee as a civic right the security of a place to
7 work.

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 In such situation the social welfare state comes into danger
a
of having its societal base slip away. The upwardly mobile
voter groups, who have directly reaped the greatest benefits
of the formation of the social welfare state, are capable in
times of crisis of developing a mentality concerned with
protecting their standard of living. They also may join together
with the old middle class, and in general with those classes
oriented towards productivity, into a defensive block against
underprivileged or excluded groups. Such a regrouping of the
electoral base threatens, first of all, the political parties that
for decades have been able to rely on a steady clientele in the
welfare state: for example, the Democrats in the United
States, the English Labor Party, or the Social Democrats in
West Germany. At the same time labor union organizations
come under pressure through the changed situations in the
labor market: the power of their threats diminishes, they lose
members and dues, and they themselves are forced into
policies tailored to the short-term interests of those who are
still employed.

Secondly, even if there were more favorable conditions under

which the social welfare state could retard or completely
avoid the side-effects of its success that endanger the
premises for its own functioning, there would still remain an
unresolved problem. The advocates of the welfare state
project always looked only in one direction. The foreground
was occupied by the task of taming the economic power of
capitalists and warding off the destructive consequences of
crisis-prone economic growth from the life-world of depen-
dent workers. Government power attained by parliamentary
means appeared as both a harmless and an indispensable
resource: the interventionist state had to draw on political
power for the strength and ability to act in the face of the
systematic obstinacy of the economy. The active states
intervention not only into the economic cycle, but also into the
life cycle of its citizens was seen by the reformers as totally
unproblematic-reforming the conditions of life for the em-
ployed, indeed, was the goal of the welfare state programme.
In fact, a higher degree of social justice has been achieved in
this way.

Yet the very people who recognize this historical achieve-

ment of the scdai welfare state and who do not engage in
cheap criticism of its weaknesses, have also realized in the
meantime a particular failure that cannot be attributed to this
or that contingent obstacle, nor to a half-hearted implemen-
tation of the project itself. All scepticism about the perhaps
8 indispensable but not only seemingly innocent medium of
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 power, has been tuned out. Welfare legislative programmes
have used up a great deal of that power in achieving
legislative efficacy, in drawing finances from the public bud-
get, and in being implemented in the life-work of the
beneficiaries. Thus, an even tighter net of legal norms, and of
governmental and supporting bureaucracies has been drawn
over the everyday existence of potential and actual clients.

The extensive discussions concerning excessive legal regu-

lation and bureacratization in general, concerning the coun-
terproductive effects of government social welfare policies in
particular, and concerning the overconcentration on &dquo;trained
professionals&dquo; and &dquo;scientific approaches&dquo; in the social ser-
vices have all made one thing clear: the legal and adminis-
trative means for the implementation of social welfare state
programmes do not represent a passive medium, devoid of
its own peculiar properties. Rather, they are bound up with a
practice that isolates and considers separately the legal facts
of the matter, that normalizes and places under surveillance.
It is this reifying and subjectivating power that Foucault has
traced into even the thinnest capillary branchings of everyday
communication. The distortions within such a regulated,
analyzed, controlled, and watched-over life-world are cer-
tainly more subtle than the obvious forms of material exploi-
tation and impoverishment; but these conflicts, shifted into
the domains of the psychological and the bodily, internalized,
are no less destructive for all that. In short, inherent in the
project of the social state is a contradiction between goal and
method. Its goal is the establishment of forms of life which are
structured according to egalitarian standards and which at
the same time open up arenas for individual self-fulfillment
and spontaneity. But apparently this goal cannot be achieved
directly through a legal and administrative transformation of
political programmes. Producing new forms of life is beyond
the capacities of political power.

IV

I have been considering the obstacles that the successful

social welfare state puts in its own path. By thisI do not want
to say that the development of the social welfare state has
been a mistaken speculation. On the contrary, its institutions
constitute, in no less a measure than the organizations of the
democratic constitutional state, an achievement of the polit-
ical system, for which in societies of our type there is no
recognizable alternative-either in regard to the functions
fulfilled by the social welfare state, nor in regard to the
9 normatively justified demands it satisfies. Above all, those
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 countries that still remain behind in the development of the
social welfare state have no plausible reason to diverge from
this path of development. It is specifically this lack of alter-
natives, perhaps even the irreversibility of the still-debated
structures of the compromise, that today pose for us the
following dilemma: developed forms of capitalism can just as
little afford to live without the welfare state as to live with its
further expansion. The more or less befuddled reactions to
this dilemma show that the political potential of the utopian
laboring society to stimulate new suggestions is exhausted.
Simplifying considerably, one can distinguish three patterns
in
of reaction countries such as the Federal Republic and the
USA. Those who defend the legitimacy of industrial society
and the social welfare state-such as the more conservative
wing of the Social Democrats-have been put on the defen-
sive.I understand this characterization in a broad sense, so
that, for example, it applies to the Mondale wing of the
Democrats in the United States and to the second govern-
ment under Mitterand. The &dquo;legitimates&dquo; are deleting from the
welfare state project precisely those elements that it took
from the utopian idea of a laboring society. They are giving up
on the goal of overcoming heteronomous labor, to such an
extent that the status of the free and equal citizen, extending
now into the sphere of production, could become the crystal-
lization point for autonomous forms of life. The legitimists are
today the real conservatives, who want to stabilize what has
been attained so far. They hope to discover once again the
equilibrium point between expansion of the social welfare
state and market-based modernization. The disrupted bal-
ance between a democratic orientation toward use-values
and the inner dynamic of a moderated capitalism is to be
restored once again. This programme is fixating on preserv-
ing the existing achievements of the social welfare state. It
fails to recognise, however, the potential for resistance that is
gathering in the wake of a progressive bureaucratic erosion
of communicatively structured forms of life that are being
jarred loose from their quasi-natural contexts. Just as little
does the programme take seriously the shifts in the social
and labor union base which has until now supported the
policies of the social welfare state. In view of the regrouping
in voting patterns and the weakening of the position of the
unions, such a political position is in danger of entering into a
desperate race with time.
A neo-conservatism is on the rise, which is likewise oriented
toward industrial society, but comes forward as decidedly
10 critical of the social welfare state. The Reagan administration

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 and the government of Margaret Thatcher emerged under its
banner; the conservative government in the Federal Republic
has come around into a similar direction. Neo-conservatism
is essentially characterized by three components.

First of all, a supply-side economic policy is supposed to

improve conditions for realizing capital and once again set in
motion the process of capital accumulation. It is willing to
accept a relatively high unemployment rate, which is intended
to be only temporary. As the statistics in the United States
attest, the redistribution of income is to the disadvantage of
the poorer groups in the population, while only the large
capital holders achieve a clear improvement in their income
status. Hand in hand with that comes a curtailment of
services of the welfare state.

Secondly, the costs of legitimizing the political system are to

be reduced. &dquo;Rising Expectations&dquo; and &dquo;ungovernability&dquo; are
the catch words for a politics that aims at a stronger separa-
tion of administration from public opinion and democratic
participation. In this context a neo-corporatist development is
being promoted, which means the activation of non-govern-
mental associations, primarily business organizations and
labor unions, to replace formal decision making procedure.
This shift away from normatively regulated parliamentary
processes to merely functioning systems of negotiation make
the state into one discussion partner among others. The
shifting of competency into the neo-corporate gray zone
withdraws more and more social concerns from a mode of
decision making which is required by constitutional norms to
take into consideration on an equal basis all the interests
affected.5

Thirdly, cultural policy is assigned the task of operating on

two fronts. On the one hand, it is supposed to discredit
intellectuals as a power-crazy and non-productive social
class supporting modernism; for post-material values, espe-
cially expressive needs for self-fulfillment and critical judge-
ments of universalistic morality, are threats to the motiva-
tional resources of a functioning labor society and a
depoliticized public sphere. On the other hand, conventional
morality, patriotism, bourgeois religion and folk culture, is to
be carefully nurtured, in order to compensate for personal
burdens on ones private life and to offer some cushion
against the pressures of a competitive society and its accel-
erated modernization.

11 Neo-conservative politics has a certain chance of being

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 implemented if it can find a political base in the social
darwinism of the split society it is at the same time promoting.
The excluded and marginalized groups have no veto power
since they represent a separated minority isolated from the
process of production. The pattern that has played itself out
more and more in the international arena between the
metropoles and the underdeveloped periphery appears to be
repeating itself inside of the most developed capitalist soci-
eties : the established powers are now less and less reliant for
purposes of reproduction on the labor and willingness to
cooperate of the poor and the disenfranchised. However, a
political policy needs not only to be implemented, it has also
to function over time. Such a decisive renunciation of the
welfare state (class) compromise would have to leave gaps in
the states ability to function that could be closed only through
repression or neglect.

A third pattern of growth shows itself in the dissidence of

those critical of growth, who would have an ambivalent
attitude toward the social welfare state. So, for example, in
the new social movements within the Federal Republic,
minorities from the most divergent backgrounds are joining
into an &dquo;anti-productivist alliance&dquo;: one finds old and young,
women and the unemployed, gays and handicapped people,
believers and unbelievers. What unites them is the rejection
of that &dquo;productivistic&dquo; vision of progress which the legitimists
share with the neo-conservatives. For these two parties, the
key to a modernization of society as free as possible from
crises lies in a proper distribution of burdens between the two
sub-systems, state and economy. The first group sees the
causes of the crises in the unbridled inner dynamic of the
economy; the other group, in the bureaucratic shackles that
are put on the economys inner dynamic. The corresponding
therapies are the social restraints of capitalism, on the one
side, and shifting the problems away from the administrative
planning and back to the marketplace, on the other. One side
sees the source of disruption in the monetarization of labor
power; the other, in the bureaucratic laming of individual
initiative. However, both sides agree that those areas of
interaction in the lifeworld which require protection play only
a passive role over against the actual motors of social
modernization, the state and the economy. Both sides are
convinced that the lifeworld can be sufficiently decoupled
from these subsystems and protected against systematic
encroachment if only the state and the economy complement
each other in a proper relationship and mutually stabilize one
12 another.
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 Only the dissidents from industrial society start from the
premise that the lifeworld is threatened to the same degree
by &dquo;commodification&dquo; and &dquo;bureaucratization&dquo;-of the two
media, power and money, neither is fundamentally &dquo;more
innocent&dquo; than the other. Only the dissidents consider it
essential to strengthen the autonomy of a lifeworld that is
being threatened in its vital foundations and its communica-
tive infrastructure. Only they demand that the inner dynamics
of a sub-systems steered by power and money should be
broken, or at least restrained, through forms of organization
that are closer to their base and are self-administered. In this
connection conceptions of a dual economy and suggestions
concerning the uncoupling of social security from full-time
employment come into play.6 The differentiation is to take
effect not only in the role of the wage-earner, but also in the
role of the consumer, the citizen, and the client of the welfare
state bureaucracy. The dissidents from the industrial society
inherit, therefore, the radically democratic elements of the
social welfare state programme, which have been aban-
doned by the legitimists. However, insofar as they do not go
beyond mere dissidence, and insofar as they remain ab-
sorbed in the fundamentalism of the Great Refusal and offer
nothing more than a negative programme for halting growth
and differentiation, they fall back behind one insight of the
social welfare state project.

The formula of socially containing capitalism not only ex-

pressed resignation before the fact that the frame of a
complex market economy could no longer be burst from
within and democratically recast by using the simple recipe of
workers self-management. It also expressed the insight that
an external and indirect attempt to gain influence over the
mechanisms of self-regulation calls for something new,
namely, a highly innovative combination of power and intel-
ligent self-restraint. At the root of that insight lay the idea that
a society could operate on itself without danger by using the
neutral means of political and administrative power. If now, it
is not only capitalism, but also the interventionist state itself
that needs to be &dquo;socially contained,&dquo; the job becomes
considerably more complicated. For then that combination of
power and intelligent self-restraint can no longer be entrusted
to the states planning capacity.

If restraints and indirect controls now have to be directed

against the inner dynamics of public administration as well,
then one must search elsewhere for the necessary potenti-
alities for reflection and control, namely, in a completely
13 altered relationship between autonomous and self-organized

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 public spheres on the one hand, and sub-systems steered by
money and administrative power on the other. This leads to
the difficult task of making possible a democratic generaliza-
tion of interest positions and a universalistic justification of
norms at a level belowthe threshold of party apparatuses that
have become independent complex organizations and have,
so to speak, migrated into the political system. A naturally
arising pluralism of defensive sub-cultures, born out of spon-
taneous defiance, would have to pass by in silence the norms
of civil equality. There would arise then only a sphere that
would be a mirror image of the neo-corporatistic grey zone.

The development of the social state has arrived at an

impasse, and this has drained the energy from the utopian
idea of a laboring society. The answers of the legitimists and
the neo-conservatives reflect a Zeitgeist that is only defen-
sive ; they express a historical consciousness that has been
robbed of its utopian dimension. Even the dissidents from a
&dquo;growth-society&dquo; remain on the defensive. Their answer
could be turned to the offensive only if the project of the social
welfare state were not simply carried on or abandoned, but
rather continued at a higher level of reflection. If the project of
the social welfare state were to become reflexive and be
directed not only to taming the capitalistic economy, but also
to containing the state itself, it would obviously lose labor as
its central point of reference. It would no longer be a question
of circumscribing the full employment held up as a norm. Nor
could such a project limit itself to introducing a guaranteed
minimum income so as to break the spell that the labor
market casts over the life histories of all working men and
women-even over the growing and increasingly marginal-
ized potential of those who only stand in reserve. This latter
move would be revolutionary, but not revolutionary enough-
not even if the lifeworld could be shielded not only against the
employment systems inhuman imperatives, but also against
the counterproductive side-effects of administratively provid-
ing for human life as a whole.
Such barriers in the exchange between system and lifeworld
could function only if there were at the same time a new
balance of powers. Modern societies have at their disposal
three resources by means of which they can satisfy their
need to regulate society: money, power, and solidarity. The
spheres of influence of these resources would have to be
brought into a new balance. By thatI want to say that the
14 socially integrating force of solidarity would have to be in a
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 position to assert itself against the &dquo;forces&dquo; present in the two
other steering resources, money and administrative power.
Those areas of life specializing in handing on received values
and cultural knowledge, in integrating groups, and in social-
izing new generations have always been dependent on
solidarity. The formation of political will must now draw from
that same wellspring; it should seek to influence the bound-
aries and the interchange between communicatively struc-
tured areas of life, on the one hand, and the state and the
economy, on the other.

At issue the integrity and autonomy of lifestyles, for

are
example, the protection of traditionally established sub-cul-
tures or the alteration of the grammar of dated forms of life.
An example of the one would be regional movements: of the
other, the feminist or ecological movements. These battles
remain mostly latent; they take place in the micro-areas of
everyday communication, and only now and then do they
consolidate into public discourse and higher level inter-
subjectivity. In such areas, autonomous public spheres can
take shape that enter into exchange with one another as soon
as they make use of the potential for self-organization and for
the self-organized employment of communications media.
Forms of self-organization strengthen the collective capability
to act below the threshold at which organizational goals
become detached from the orientations and attitudes of
organization members and become dependent on the self-
maintenance imperatives of autonomous organizations. The
capacity to act of such organizations positioned near the
political base will always remain below their capacity to
reflect. That need not be a hindrance to accomplishing the
task that comes to the fore with the continuation of the project
of the social welfare state. Autonomous public spheres would
have to attain a combination of power and intelligent self-
limitation, that would make the self-regulating mechanisms of
the state and economy sufficiently sensitive to the goal-
oriented results of radically democratic formation of public
will. Presumably that can only succeed if political parties
relinquish one of their functions and do not replace it, that is,
do not merely make room for a functional equivalent: that
function would be the generation of mass loyalty.

Reflections of this sort become even more provisional, in-

deed, more unclear, the more they approach the no-mans-
land of the &dquo;normative.&dquo; There the drawings of negative
boundaries is easier. The project of the welfare state, now
grown reflexive, takes leave of the utopian idea of a laboring
15 society. The latter had oriented itself by the contrast between
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 living and dead labor, by the idea of self-determined activity.
It had to presuppose that the subcultural forms of life of
industrial workers were a source of solidarity. It had to
presuppose that cooperative interrelations in the factory
would even strengthen the naturally inculcated solidarity in
the sub-cultures of the workers. But these sub-cultures in the
meantime have largely collapsed. And whether their power to
engender solidarity can be regenerated at the work place is
somewhat doubtful. However that may be, what before was a
presupposition or boundary condition for the utopian idea of
a laboring society has today moved to the center of the
discussion. And with this discussion theme, the utopian
accents shift from the concept of labor to that of communi-
cation.I speak only of &dquo;accents,&dquo; because with the paradigm
change from a labor community to a communication commu-
nity, the way of linking up with the utopian tradition also
changes.
To be sure, thewaning of the utopian contents of the laboring
society by entails the utopian dimension of histor-
no means
ical consciousness and political struggle. When the utopian
oases dry up, a desert of banality and helplessness spreads.
I stick to my thesis that the self-assurance of the modern
world continues to be spurred on by a consciousness of the
present in which historical and utopian thought are blended.
But along with the utopian contents from the laboring society,
two illusions disappear which have bewitched the self-under-
standing of the modern age. The first illusion stems from an
inadequate differentiation.

In the utopian conceptions of a well-ordered society, the

dimensions of happiness and emancipation flowed together
with those of increased power and the production of social
wealth. The plans for rational forms of life entered into a
deceptive symbiosis with the rational domination of nature
and the mobilization of social energies. Instrumental reason,
as it was released in the forces of production, and function-
alistic reason as it was developed in the capacities for
organizing and planning, were supposed to pave the way to
a humane, egalitarian, and at the same time libertarian life.
The potential for consensual relations was supposed to issue
in the end solely from the productivity of labor relations. The
persistence of this confusion is still reflected in that critical
reversal by which, for example, the &dquo;normalizing&dquo; accom-
plishments of complex centralized organizations are thrown
in the same pot with generalizing achievements of moral
universalism. Even more crucial is the turn from the meth-
16 odological illusion connected with the projections of a con-
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 crete totality of future life possibilities. The utopian content of
the communication community shrinks to the formal aspect of
an undamaged intersubjectivity. Even the expression &dquo;ideal
speech situation&dquo; leads to error insofar as it suggests a
concrete form of life. What can be normatively brought into
relief are necessary but general conditions for a communica-
tive praxis of everyday life and for a process of discursive
will-formation which would put participants themselves in a
position to actualize concrete possibilities for a better and
less endangered life, in accord with their own needs and
insights, and on their own initiative.8 One critique of utopian
ideas from Hegel, through Carl Schmitt, up until our own day
that paints a warning cry of Jacobism on the wall is mistaken
when it denounces the allegedly unavoidable marriage of
utopia with terror. It is &dquo;utopian,&dquo; in the negative sense, tQ
confuse a highly developed communicative infra-structure of
possible forms of life with a specific idea of a successful life,
which appears in the singular as a Totality. Such a Totality
cannot be anticipated.

University of Frankfurt

NOTES

1. Porn Rusen,Utopie und Geschichte. In: Wilhelm Vosskamp (editor),

Utopieforschung, Volume 1, Stuttgart: Metzler 1982.
2. Oscar Negt has carried out a noteworthy study from his perspective:
Lebindige Arbeit, enteignete Arbeit, Frankfurt: Campus 1984.
3. ClausOffe, "Arbeitsgesellschaft" , Strukturprobleme und Zunkunft-
sperspectiven. Frankfurt: Campus 1984.
4. From this perspective the recent work from Horst Kern and Michael
Schumann, Das Ende der Arbeitsteilung? Munchen: C.H. Beck 1984.
5. Claus Offe, Korporatismus als System nichtstaalicher Macht-
steuerung. In: Geschichte and Gesellschaft, H.2. 1984. -Concerning the
system—theoretic justification of "Neokorporatismus" cf. Helmut Willke,
17 Entzauberung des Staates. Konigstein: Athenaum 1983.
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 6. Thomas Schmid (editor), Befreiung von falscher Arbeit. Thesen zum

garantiertenMindesteinkommen. Berlin: Wagenbach 1984.

7. /Cf. Axel Honneths criticism of Lyotard in Merkur, Nr. 430, December
1984.

8. /Karl Otto Apel, Ist die Ethik der idealen Kommunikationsgenein-

schaft eine Utopie? in Vosskamp, Utopieforschung, Vol. 1.

18
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