The German Genius

have changed modes of oppression in ways not foreseen by Marx but still not appreciated by those undergoing that oppression. The new constraints are psychological and ethical rather than economic and it is in this realm that his theory of communicative action in particular applies. 68 More especially, Habermas thinks that the advent of the welfare state in capitalist societies renders true human emancipation far more difficult, that science and technology condition the way we think without our—for the most part—knowing it.
    Habermas lies in the tradition of the Frankfurt school in trying to provide a marriage of Marx and Freud. In his case, he sees the Freudian method of psychoanalysis as not just a favored method but as a metaphor for what he would like to see in the wider society, where deep reflection reveals the many hidden constraints acting (usually unconsciously) on individuals, leading to self-insight and emancipation. These, his considered reflections about reflection, are the subject of Erkenntnis und Interesse ( Knowledge and Human Interests ) . Only in such a fashion, he says, can we rediscover “ways to live together in harmony and mutual dependence, while respecting individuals’ autonomy, but without sacrificing the advances of modern technology.” 69 Habermas has never been anti-science as so many postmodernists have been. For him, we have to find ways of “sustaining [a] moral community in the face of rampant individualism.” 70 This depends on people’s being able to communicate effectively with each other.
    Habermas believes that in crucial ways the modern period differs from all previous periods. In particular the concept of reason has been distorted by the advance of science. The agenda of the Enlightenment philosophes was to develop critiques that would assess and criticize the prevailing assumptions of an age; empirically grounded and leading to greater freedoms, these critiques amounted to forms of reflection that expanded human self-awareness. Science, however—and here he agreed with Weber—offered instrumental reason, reason as a way of controlling and manipulating nature. 71 Traditional scholarship, on the other hand, he defined as human emancipation through enhanced capacities for reflection, and this is where the cultural sciences came in, to make us more aware of the achievements of reflection. 72
    L IVING WITHOUT C ONSOLATION
     
    We have today, therefore, a very different and more pervasive form of “false consciousness” from that which Marx introduced: we are living in a thoroughly distorted version of reality or, as Habermas puts it, “systematically distorted communication.” In fact, this is now the accepted state of affairs, in which we all know, at some level, that facts and values “cannot be accepted uncritically as ‘givens,’” nothing we are told can be accepted at face value: late capitalism thrives on marketing and public relations, so that we are surrounded in the mass media by acts of communication that say one thing and mean another—not completely another, but with an agenda of their own, unspoken but present. 73
    Habermas argues that the solution is “an ideal speech community,” in which politics is taken out of the hands of the “experts” and some sort of “public sphere” is created in which a consensus can emerge based on mutual concerns. 74 The natural home for this might be the university (though Habermas also considered consciousness-raising groups), but so far, it is fair to say, such a mechanism has not emerged. The contemporary university, says Habermas, has reverted more to the eighteenth-century idea of teaching institutions than homes of critical reflection.
    On top of which, he says, all the scientific progress in the world has done little to advance our understanding of suffering, grief, loneliness, and guilt, the traditional concerns of religion. Having destroyed the basis of faith, the sciences have done nothing to provide a replacement and we must “resign ourselves to living without consolation.”
    T HE “C AESURA” OF 1968
     
    Habermas was a prominent figure in the impressive survey published by Konrad Jarausch in 2006, with the title, in English, After Hitler: Recivilising Germans, 1945–1995 . This book was published in German as Die Umkehr: Deutsche Wandlungen, 1945–1995 (literally, The Turning Back: German Transformations, 1945–1995). 75 Both titles were controversial in their different ways.
    Jarausch,