Qui est le Nous du populisme?
BONNE LECTURE
jeudi 29 décembre 2016
Le retour des États-nations
EN LIEN AVEC L'ETAT NATION un article inspirant
https://www.contrepoints.org/2016/09/29/267280-retour-etats-nations-syndrome-de-stockholm
Le retour des États-nations, ce syndrome de Stockholm
La structuration forcée de l’Europe en États-nations ne fait qu’empêcher la naissance et le développement d’associations humaines libres, spontanées et authentiques.
Par Ferghane Azihari.
Difficile de nier l’existence de dysfonctionnements politiques en Europe. Cette observation est également partagée par Jakub Grygiel, chercheur au Center for European Policy Analysis à Washington qui, dans un article intitulé The Return of Europe’s Nation-States récemment paru dans la revue américaine Foreign Affairs, s’emploie à nous livrer son diagnostic et ses remèdes pour l’Europe. Le vieux continent souffrirait d’une érosion de ses États-nations. Ces mêmes États auraient été rendus virtuellement impuissants par l’intégration européenne.
Or, l’Union serait condamnée à l’inefficacité en raison de la diversité des intérêts de ses États-membres. Tout projet politique supranational serait chimérique. La construction européenne pêcherait par vanité en prétendant pouvoir dépasser l’indépassable. L’État-nation resterait selon lui le niveau de décision politique le plus pertinent et le plus légitime. Qu’importe le domaine considéré : économie, sécurité…Une renationalisation du vieux continent serait préférable à l’Union et revitaliserait la vie politique en Europe. Que faut-il en penser ?
LES ÉTATS-NATIONS NE NOUS ONT JAMAIS QUITTÉS
Le premier problème de cette analyse tient à ce qu’elle repose sur une affirmation, certes populaire, mais qui n’en reste pas moins fondée sur des bases discutables. En effet, pour parler d’un « retour » des États-nations, encore faudrait-il qu’ils nous aient véritablement quittés. Les chiffres indiquent au contraire que le poids des États en Europe n’a jamais cessé de croître ces dernières décennies. Les États européens consomment aujourd’hui en moyenne la moitié des richesses produites par leurs sujets.
Les libéralisations ponctuelles, sectorielles et partielles impulsées par Bruxelles n’infirment pas cette tendance générale à l’élargissement du champ d’intervention des gouvernements dans nos vies. Plus qu’un mirage, l’érosion des États-nations est une grille de lecture dont il faut se méfier. La propagation de ce mythe sert en effet la promotion des intérêts de la classe politique au détriment des nôtres.
Elle permet aux dirigeants de pratiquer ce qu’on pourrait appeler le « déni de pouvoir ». Or qui dit déni de pouvoir, dit déni de responsabilité : « Je ne peux pas être tenu responsable des difficultés que vous traversez puisque ce n’est pas moi qui suis aux manettes ». Mais il est une autre raison pour laquelle ce déni de pouvoir est dangereux. En imputant nos difficultés à l’impuissance supposée des États, il rend naturellement la puissance gouvernementale plus désirable. Il fabrique ainsi notre adhésion à la réduction de nos libertés et à l’enracinement de notre servitude.
POURQUOI SE MÉFIER DE L’INTÉGRATION POLITIQUE DE L’EUROPE ?
La prospérité des civilisations réside dans la liberté individuelle. La préservation de cette liberté réside quant à elle dans la fragmentation politique et la concurrence institutionnelle. Elles demeurent en effet les seuls instruments efficaces pour réguler les ardeurs des souverains. Or l’intégration politique de l’Europe affaiblit la concurrence institutionnelle. Il s’agit là du seul argument valable contre l’Union européenne.
Mais Jakub Grygiel avance au contraire des arguments douteux pour justifier la non-désirabilité de l’Union européenne. L’État-nation est comme qui dirait « essentialisé ». Il constitue au nom d’on-ne-sait-quelle-vérité la structure politique indépassable pour organiser la vie de la Cité. Pourtant, comme le fait remarquer le philosophe Jürgen Habermas, il n’y a pas lieu de sanctifier les États-nations. Ces derniers ne sont rien d’autre que de vulgaires constructions accidentelles nées du hasard de l’histoire.
Si ce constat n’est pas suffisant pour justifier la centralisation européenne comme le fait Habermas, il permet néanmoins de contrer le révisionnisme des nationalistes qui s’emploient à affirmer sur un ton péremptoire que les États-nations vont de soi.
LE PROBLÈME DU NATIONALISME MÉTHODOLOGIQUE EN SCIENCES SOCIALES
Cette idée fallacieuse puise notamment sa force dans le nationalisme méthodologique, un biais cognitif dominant dans les sciences sociales. Le nationalisme méthodologique consiste à analyser les phénomènes sociaux en prenant l’État-nation comme unité d’analyse principale. La société « nationale » est ainsi considérée comme un corps social parfaitement homogène qui se distinguerait parfaitement des collectivités humaines soumises à une autre juridiction nationale.
Un tel biais se ressent notamment lorsque Jakub Grygiel impute l’infaisabilité de la construction européenne à la diversité des intérêts nationaux. Très bien Monsieur Grygiel. Simplement, les intérêts des Français ne sont pas plus homogènes que les intérêts des Européens. Dans ces conditions, s’il nous faut rejeter la construction européenne en raison de la multiplicité des intérêts, alors il nous faut dans le même temps exprimer le même scepticisme vis-à-vis des États-nations.
L’ÉTAT-NATION À L’ÉPREUVE
« Les États-nations ont fait leurs preuves ». C’est ainsi que les nationalistes justifient régulièrement ces structures. Mais qu’est-ce que cela signifie au juste ? Est-ce à dire qu’ils ont prouvé leur capacité à maintenir la paix ? Une telle affirmation serait plus qu’audacieuse compte-tenu du fait que ces organisations ont perpétré durant le XXe siècle les crimes de masse les plus retentissants de toute l’histoire de l’humanité.
Est-ce à dire qu’ils ont prouvé leur capacité à garantir le développement économique ? Non, puisque c’est, la division du travail l’accumulation de capital, les gains de productivité ainsi que le progrès technique qui favorisent le développement. Les États ne jouent aucun rôle dans le processus de création de richesses et ne savent faire que le ralentir par leur activisme réglementaire et fiscal. Si développement économique il y a, il se fait en dépit, et non pas grâce aux États-nations.
Est-ce à dire enfin que les États-nations ont su bâtir des allégeances solides ? Cet argument n’est qu’une pétition de principe. Lorsqu’on se dote d’un système éducatif monopolistique et centralisé, il est facile d’inoculer le virus du nationalisme chez les populations pour forcer des allégeances qui n’auraient jamais existé sur un marché libre des idées. La légitimité des États-nations n’est donc ni plus ni moins que le fruit d’un rapport de force propre à un contexte social particulier.
Et cette légitimité est visiblement très fragile puisque certains gouvernements font aujourd’hui face à des pressions indépendantistes de plus en plus significatives (Catalogne, Écosse, Flandre, Corse, pour ne prendre que les exemples les plus évidents).
Syndrome de Stockholm
On ne peut certes pas nier un retour des nationalismes sur le vieux continent. La montée des partis autoritaires et la radicalisation du discours des partis traditionnels l’attestent. On aurait cependant tort d’attendre de ces idéologies tribales qu’elles revitalisent la vie politique en Europe. Elles précipiteraient au contraire son déclin.
Le nationalisme agit comme le syndrome de Stockholm. Il nous pousse à développer une affection toujours plus profonde vis-à-vis d’une institution qui ne sait rien faire d’autre qu’entraver la poursuite de nos desseins. C’est pourquoi il est important de se délivrer de ces schémas de pensée pour réaliser tout le potentiel des sociétés humaines, pour peu que l’on s’abstienne d’enfermer les individus dans des cadres institutionnels dépourvus de fondements rationnels.
Ainsi, loin de requérir une quelconque « renationalisation », la vie politique européenne a au contraire besoin d’une cure de « dénationalisation ». Cela n’implique pas nécessairement de recourir à une nouvelle forme de centralisme politique à l’échelle du continent. Il n’est pas question de choisir entre Charybde et Scylla.
La structuration forcée de l’Europe en États-nations ne fait qu’empêcher la naissance et le développement d’associations humaines libres, spontanées et authentiques : des institutions qui seraient sans doute plus profitables pour tous car plus respectueuses des aspirations de chacun.
Il est temps de démystifier ces structures périmées héritées d’un passé décadent.
jeudi 15 décembre 2016
Alain Badiou
Il est toujours inspirent d’écouter ce que Badiou dit
https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2016/01/11/alain-badiou-la-frustration-d-un-desir-d-occident-ouvre-un-espace-a-l-instinct-de-mort_1425642
Alain Badiou : «La frustration d’un désir d’Occident ouvre un espace à l’instinct de mort»
jeudi 13 octobre 2016
Le piège identitaire
Le piège identitaire
Selon le socioloque Pierre Birnbaum, le rêve de Jürgen Habermas, à propos d’un espace public de modèle républicain, c’est la France. Mais voilà qu’un tel modèle, qui se voulait détaché de toute forme d’identité ethnique, se voit remis en question par ce que les médias de masse appellent les communautés. Or les communautés sont construites. Et artificiellement nommées.
mercredi 12 octobre 2016
Le 11 septembre et l’aveuglement des intellectuels
UN BON ARTICLE
Le 11 septembre et l’aveuglement des intellectuels
mardi 6 septembre 2016
right-wing populism
Jürgen Habermas: How to pull the ground
from under right-wing populism
In a timely and insightful interview, Jürgen Habermas proposes a strategy for neutralizing the right-wing political forces that have recently emerged in Germany, in Europe as a whole, and beyond. Read an excerpt from the interview below, or the full text here .
Even worse than the right-wing populists would appear to be the “contagion risks” among the established parties – and indeed, throughout Europe. Under pressure from the Right, the new prime minister in Great Britain has undertaken a hard-line policy of deterring or even expelling foreign workers and migrants; in Austria the social democratic head of government wants to restrict the right to asylum by emergency decree – and in France Francois Hollande has been governing for nearly a year already in a state of emergency, to the joy of the Front National. Is Europe even alert to this right-wing revolt or are republican achievements being irreversibly eroded?
Habermas: In my estimate, domestic politicians mishandled right-wing populism from the start. The mistake of the established parties lies in acknowledging the battlefront that right-wing populism is defining: “We” up against the system. Here it matters hardly a jot whether this mistake takes the form of an assimilation to or a confrontation with “right-wing”. Take either the strident would-be French president Nicolas Sarkozy who is outbidding Marine Le Pen with his demands, or the example of the sober-minded German justice minister Heiko Maas who forcefully takes on Alexander Gauland in debate – they both make the opponent stronger. Both take him/her seriously and raise his/her profile. A year on we here in Germany all know the studiously ironic grin of Frauke Petry (AfD leader) and the demeanour of the rest of the leadership of her ghastly gang. It’s only by ignoring their interventions that one can cut the ground from under the feet of the right-wing populists.
But this requires being willing to open up a completely different front in domestic politics and doing so by making the above-mentioned problem the key point at issue: How do we regain the political initiative vis-à-vis the destructive forces of unbridled capitalist globalisation? Instead, the political scene is predominantly grey on grey, where, for example, the left-wing pro-globalisation agenda of giving a political shape to a global society growing together economically and digitally can no longer be distinguished from the neoliberal agenda of political abdication to the blackmailing power of the banks and of the unregulated markets.
One would therefore have to make contrasting political programmes recognisable again, including the contrast between the – in a political and cultural sense – “liberal” open-mindedness of the left, and the nativist fug of right-wing critiques of an unfettered economic globalization. In a word: political polarisation should be re-crystallised between the established parties on substantive conflicts. Parties that grant right-wing populists attention rather than contempt should not expect civil society to disdain right-wing phrases and violence. Therefore, I regard as the greater danger a very different polarisation towards which the hard-core opposition within the CDU is moving when it casts a leery eye on the post-Merkel period. In Alexander Gauland it recognises anew the pivotal figure of the Dregger wing of the old Hesse CDU, or flesh of its own flesh, and toys with the idea of winning back lost voters by way of a coalition with the AfD.
mardi 30 août 2016
Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt, le penseur de l’ennemi
Il aurait pu être le juriste du IIIe Reich, mais trop catholique, adorateur d’un Etat total dépassant le Parti national-socialiste, il fut écarté. La droite l’a adoubé en gommant son engagement, des intellectuels de gauche l’empruntent pour cerner ce qui menacerait la démocratie : Etat d’urgence, populisme, excès du libéralisme.
LA SUITE SUR CE LIEN
samedi 21 mai 2016
Linguistification of the Sacred
RETOUR SUR UN AXE TRES IMPORTANT CHEZ HABERMAS
https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/15/habermas-contentious-concept-the-linguistification-of-the-sacred/
Habermas’ Contentious Concept: the Linguistification of the Sacred
The concept of the linguistification of the sacred has certainly got Habermas into a lot of hot water. On the surface, it does look like Habermas has pronounced the obsolescence of religion in the West’s jagged and bloodied travels to the Land of Modernity. There is a deep ambivalence inscribed into the concept of the linguistification of the sacred.
With the emergence of monotheism, the Creator is imagined as radically apart from his creation. Nature gods and spirits vanish into thin air. We are left alone, standing like Giacometti’s forlorn sculptures, facing away from each other as we gaze into empty space. And in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation—as we will see with Habermas’ engagement with Weber’s classic theme of the “disenchantment of the world”—the “Protestant ethic” turns to purposive rational and calculating work (which successfully manifests in wealth accumulation) as an ironic sign of God’s grace.
But Habermas’s motivation is not in the tradition of God’s debunkers. Rather, the concept of the linguistification of the sacred is used to examine our journey to modernity—to the world of the primacy of communicative action—from another angle. Habermas is not making an anti-religious form of argument.
He is interested in the learning process whereby the “socially integrative and expressive functions that were at first fulfilled by ritual practice pass over to communicative action; the authority of the holy is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus” (Habermas, 1987, p. 77). Here we are talking about social evolutionary, historically grounded processes having to do with the function that religion plays in modernity. This, to reiterate, is not an anti-religious argument as such.
If religion is rendered obsolete, it is more in the function it now plays in a social order where the state has separated itself from church, a legal and normative system has created its own rules, churches mainly do pastoral and charitable care and social integration is mediated through communicative action. Mosques, churches and synagogues still operate and religious participants craft forms of piety and observance to sustain their faith commitments; and they do participate sporadically in the public square. But there can be no doubt that the “authority of the holy” is, at best, a faint halo around the contemporary system and lifeworlds of human beings in the West.
What does the “linguistification of the sacred” mean?
The “disenchantment and disempowering of the domain of the sacred” had to clear the way for a “linguistification of the ritually secured, basic normative agreement; going along with this is a release of the rationality potential in communicative action” (Habermas, 1987, p. 77). Like a new creature cracking through an egg-shell, communicative action is released from its captivity to the sacred.
“The aura of rapture and terror that emanates from the sacred, the spellbinding power of the holy, is sublimated into the binding/bonding force of criticisable validity claims and at the same time turned into an everyday occurrence” (ibid.). Drawing from Durkheim, Habermas chooses legal development as powerfully compelling evidence of the way the “sacred foundation of law” (p. 80) has disappeared. Durkheim, as is well-known, believed that religion, or the holy, symbolized the collective interest of the society. No longer does the law proceed downward from the high mountain or the threatening oracle; it is not divinely commanded.
The only thing that will hold the new creature released from captivity will be the “common will, communicatively shaped and discursively clarified on the political public sphere” (p. 81). Humankind is on its own, its wobbly legs revealed, its way forward resolutely set out on the horizontal plane with the ground shaking under foot.
Habermas exclaims: “To the degree that the basic religious consensus gets dissolved and the power of the state loses its sacred supports, the unity of the collective can be established and maintained only as the unity of a communicative community, that is to say, only by way of a consensus arrived at communicatively in the public sphere” (p. 82).
The phrase the “linguistification of the sacred,” Habermas argues, captures the important learning process propelling the movement from ritually formalized contracts to bourgeois private law. In the former, the sacred speaks for itself; in the latter, a “communication community of citizens” uses its “own words” to bring “about the binding consensus” (p. 82).
For his part, Durkheim observes that the “evolution of law” registers “change in the form of social integration affecting society as a whole” (p. 82). This now classic idea—of the shift from organic to mechanical forms of solidarity—was accompanied by a gradual “shrinking down [of] the domain of the sacred” which left “behind a nature bereft of gods” (p. 83). Habermas insists that only when the new creature’s “structures of action oriented to reaching understanding become effective does a linguistification of the sacred arise, determining the logic of the changing form of social integration as described by Durkheim” (p. 88).
Now, with the domains of the cognitive-instrumental, moral-normative and aesthetic-expressive differentiated from each other (each with its own validity claims), under the conditions of the linguistification of the sacred theologians must process the streams of knowledge that flow in from these domains. Religion becomes a “cultural tradition in need of being communicatively continued” (ibid.). It is forced, so to speak, to give reasons for its faith affirmations and learn to dwell with others, secular and religious, hostile and friendly.
Thus, the “conversion of society” occurring over many centuries leaves the “communities of faith” with a range and variety of problem-situations: ontological, epistemological, political and the delicate task of discerning the nature of religious experience in the post-Kantian world. Habermas makes the exceedingly important argument that “neither science nor art can inherit the mantle of religion; only a morality, set communicatively a flow and developed into a discourse ethics, can replace the authority of the sacred in this respect”(p. 92).
But the aura of the sacred lingers on. It is as if modernity has not only freed itself to walk on its own two feet, but also released the sacred to wander around, searching for a place to return (often with vengeance).
Habermas engages Weber to search out the relationship between religion and rationalization
Habermas, the consummate social evolutionary learning theorist, finds in Max Weber a deep well of concepts to understand the relationship between religion and rationalization. He states: “Max Weber’s theory of rationalization extends, on the one side, to the structural changes in religious worldviews and the cognitive potential of the differentiated value spheres of science, morality, and art, and, on the other side, to the selective pattern of capitalist rationalization” (Habermas, 1984, p. 141).
In “Science as a vocation,” Weber (1918-1919) writes: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (p. 155). Although the Habermasian concept of linguistification of the sacred holds within itself the notion of a disenchanted world, Weber’s famous aphorism seems to be more than a mere dispassionate social scientific axiom. Indeed, darkness and fatalism hover melancholically around his apocalyptic image of the “iron cage”—our ironic fate as moderns.
“No one knows who will live in this cage (Gehause) in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished in a sort of convulsive self-importance. For the ‘last men’ (Letzen Menschen) of this cultural development, it might will be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of humanity (Menschentums) never before achieved’” (Weber, 1904-5/1992, p. 182). Weber and Adorno dwell disconsolately in the same barred cage. Instrumental rationality triumphant! Humanity emptied of spirit! Weber’s dystopia manifest fully in neo-liberal rationality!
The momentous journey to modernity
One of Habermas’ intellectual tasks in The Theory of Communicative Action (1984) will be to offer us an alternative way of thinking about the rationalization of society. But before he attempts to find the key to unlock the iron cage, Habermas, typically, scouts through Weber’s work to gather necessary insights on the momentous journey to modernity. Habermas discovers that Weber interprets the rationalization process as a social learning process: this means that the differentiated “cultural spheres of value” (science and technology, art and literature, law and morality) emerge through reflective learning and become institutionalized in “cultural systems of action” (scientific enterprises, artistic institutes, legal systems and religious congregations).
To oversimplify, Habermas accentuates Weber’s central theme: “Occidental rationalism is preceded by religious rationalization” (p. 167). This means that the cultural rationalization process is the pacemaker of modernity—the expunging of the magical enchantment of nature, with its roots in the Judeo-Christian worldview, frees the natural world for the calculating mentality.
In fact, theological and scientific disputes in the seventeenth century indicate that economic interests pressed the idea (often associated with Spinoza and Toland) that God indwelt nature to the sidelines in favour of a distant Deist God-in-exile who was external to nature. Nature was now freed to be a brute thing easily exploited once de-spirited. Habermas knows, as Weber does, that ideas (residing in culturally stored knowledge) must have interests propelling them to transpose into the “life conduct of individuals and groups and into social forms of life” (p. 187).
Habermas (1984) argues brilliantly that for societal rationalization to occur, “cultural rationalization” must be released into profane domains. That is, there must be social carriers (or pedagogical forms). Habermas illustrates the way the “social carriers of those strands of tradition that were combined, amazingly, in modern science—the Scholastics, the Humanists, and above all the engineers and artists of the Renaissance—played a role in releasing for purposes of research practice the potential stored in cognitively rationalized worldviews—a role similar to that played by the Protestant sects in transposing ethically rationalized worldviews into everyday practice” (p. 215). He adds that the “cognitive potential” was “set free only in modern societies; and this process of implementation meant the modernization of society” (p. 216).
It is in this context of understanding that the process of modernization is not just about changing beliefs; rather, structures of consciousness require “motivational anchoring and embodiment” (ibid.) as men and women struggle with the demands of economic reproduction and for political power. That is, cognitive potential must “become operative at the societal level” (ibid.).
Habermas admits that there are different pathways for the transference of “understanding of the world from cultural tradition to level of institutionalized social action” (p. 207). To illustrate, by the “eighteenth century there had arisen a scientific enterprise organized into academic disciplines, a university-based jurisprudence, and an informal legal public, as well as an artistic enterprise organized through the market. At the same time, the church lost its global responsibility for the interpretation of the world; along with its diaconal functions, it maintained a partial responsibility for moral-practical questions, in competition with secular authorities” (p. 217).
Habermas and the Protestant ethic under scrutiny
But Weber directs specific attention to his now famous theory of the “Protestant ethic.” For Weber, attention was directed to the “royal road of rationalization: between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries [where] there arose in Europe a broadly effective institutionalization of purposive-rational action with structural effects on society as a whole” (ibid.). Both Weber and the Frankfurt School critical theorists acknowledge that: “From an organizational point of view, what is characteristic of both capitalist enterprise and modern state administration is ‘the concentration of the material means of operation’ in the hands of the rationally calculating entrepreneur or leader” (ibid.). What is the origin of this calculating mentality? Weber locates the origin in Protestant vocational culture and the modern legal system.
The Reformed Protestant idea of the calling had ironic consequences for the Christian presence in the world. Habermas provides his paraphrasal explication of Weber. According to “Calvinist doctrine successful activity in one’s calling does not count directly as a means for attaining salvation but as an outward sign for ascertaining a state of grace that is in principle uncertain. By means of this ideological connecting link, Weber explains the functional significance that Calvinism gained for the spread of inner-worldly-ascetic attitudes, but especially for an objectified, systematized conduct of life centered around purposive-rational activity in one’s calling” (p. 223).
Thus, the methodical conduct of life has broken out of intellectual and institutional cloisters. “In the life of religious congregations, which also served as an inspiration to family upbringing, he [Weber] finds the institution that saw to the influence of those teachings or socialization in the carrier strata of early capitalism” (ibid.). The Protestant ethic, then, did not compel its adherents to flee from the world; indeed, the world was there for transformative action upon it.
Habermas offers this great comment. “The systematic character of life conduct that comes about because the layman, unable to rely on priestly sacramental grace or on the assistance of an official establishment for dispensing grace—and this means, unable to divide up his lifeworld into those spheres of life relevant to salvation and those not—regulates his life autonomously according to principles of a post-conventional morality” (p. 224). This is powerful spiritual commitment: one’s labour and life activity is “ethically charged and dramatized” (p. 225).
Weber and Habermas both observe that the Protestant culture of vocation and calling lived before the face of God creates a severe tension. On the one hand, the Christian entrepreneurs are driven by a purposive-rationality that accentuates “egocentric foreshortening” (p. 228); on the other hand, their “ethic of brotherliness” clashes with the unbrotherliness of the capitalist mode of production. Habermas does not think that Weber pursues the theme of the “regression of the ascetic of vocation” which drops the Christian community behind the “communicatively developed ethic of brotherliness” (ibid.).
Thus: “The Protestant ethic of the calling fulfills necessary conditions for the emergence of a motivational basis for purposive-rational action in the sphere of social labor with the value-rational anchoring of purposive-rational orientations, it satisfies, to be sure, only the starting conditions of capitalist society; it gets capitalism underway, without, however, being able to secure the conditions for its own stabilization” (p. 228).
The Christian faith-community, then, sets in motion a process that is “destructive of the Protestant ethic in the long run” (p. 228). Habermas, as we shall see, will try to rescue the “religiously grounded” ethic of brotherliness through articulating the theory of communicative action against Weber’s pessimistic idea that this form of ethics can thrive only in the religious context.
“According to Weber’s diagnosis,” Habermas laments, “the foundation of the vocational orientation in an ethic of conviction is washed away in favor of an instrumental attitude toward work interpreted in utilitarian terms” (p. 241). Habermas will go on panning to recover the gold of communicative action.
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