Only those with a voice have rights. Jürgen Habermas and justice as dialogue

What does 'justice' mean in a pluralist, technology-dominated and now fully globalised society? And what basis can the legitimacy of public institutions have if we can no longer appeal to absolute moral values or shared religious codes? These are just some of the questions underlying Jürgen Habermas' research and in particular his most important work The Theory of Communicative Action (Il Mulino, 1981). What emerges is a veritable proposal to refound the ideas of rationality and justice in order to make them compatible with modern democratic systems and move as far away as possible from the only viable alternative: an illiberal and armed regime.

The starting point of Habermas' discourse is the diagnosis of the rupture, with modernity, of the profound link between reason and morality. Rationality has increasingly been reduced to a means of calculating efficiency, of 'controlling' the world rather than understanding it. As Thomas McCarthy, translator of the work from the original German into English, well points out in his introduction: 'Technical progress has by no means been an unqualified blessing; and the rationalisation of administration has all too often meant the end of freedom and self-determination. There is no need to go on listing these phenomena; there is a widespread feeling that we have exhausted our cultural, social and political resources. But it is necessary to subject these phenomena to careful analysis if we want to avoid a hasty abandonment of the achievements of modernity. What is required, one might say, is an enlightened suspicion of the Enlightenment, a reasoned critique of Western rationalism, a careful calculation of the gains and losses that 'progress' entails.

Today, once again, reason can only be defended through a critique of reason'. An enlightened suspicion of the Enlightenment and a reasoned critique of Western rationalism is precisely the attitude that animates Habermas, whose first step, in fact, concerns precisely the scrutiny of the concept of reason through the instruments of reason itself. "I try to support the thesis," the philosopher writes in the opening of the Theory, "that the problematic of rationality is not brought into sociology from outside. Any sociology that claims to be a theory of society encounters the problem of employing a concept of rationality - which always has a normative content - on three levels: It cannot avoid either the metatheoretical question relating to the rationality implications of its guiding concepts of action; nor the methodological question relating to the rationality implications of accessing its object domain through the understanding of meaning; nor, finally, can it avoid the empirical-theoretical question relating to the sense, if any, in which the modernisation of societies can be described as rationalisation'. What emerges is a radical change of perspective that starts from the critique of 'instrumental rationality', which has as its end the success of individual action, utility, and in fact dominates the economic and technical worlds, and flows into the proposal of a 'communicative rationality', based on language and the intersubjective dimension, on the practice of mutual understanding and recognition. A mode and criterion of action typical of the world of norms and democratic logic.

"If we assume that the human species," writes Habermas again, "maintains itself through the socially coordinated activities of its members and that this coordination is established through communication (...) then the reproduction of the species also requires fulfilling the conditions of a rationality inherent in communicative action. Communicative rationality thus indicates that very special capacity that characterises our species, to reason together, through language, in order to reach what Habermas calls Verständigung, that is, an agreement on meaning. Reaching an understanding does not only mean agreeing, but, at an even deeper level, it means understanding each other, agreeing on meaning. In this perspective, our acting does not appear to be based solely on an individual mental activity, but on a dialogical process through which people understand, justify and convince each other in a non-coercive manner. Communicative acting, therefore, describes the attempt through which social actors try to coordinate their behaviour through rational consensus, obtained through argumentation.

It is a strategic process, because in each case coordination with others requires conjecture about their actions on the basis of which we then calibrate our own, but in the context of communicative action this strategic interaction is always a positive-sum game where there is no manipulation or overpowering. The absence of manipulation and overpowering arises as a consequence of three 'validity claims' that every linguistic utterance implicitly raises. For Habermas, dialogue is rational if of each utterance that goes into it we can say that it is 'true', i.e. that it corresponds to the facts, that it is 'right', i.e. morally justifiable, and that, finally, it is 'sincere', i.e. that it is stated honestly. Only if these claims can be justified in dialogue can the consensus that eventually emerges be considered legitimate.