Adorno describes reconciliation in terms of an intact intersubjectivity that is only established and maintained in the reciprocity of mutual understanding based on free recognition. George Herbert Mead had already elevated symbolically mediated interaction to the new paradigm of reason and had based reason on the communicative relation between subjects, which is rooted in the mimetic act of role-taking—that is, in ego's making his own the expectations that alter directs to him. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.390
The situation with the complementary concept of freedom is similar to that with the idea of a reconciliation made possible through intersubjectivity free of coercion. Like Mead, Horkheimer and Adorno start from the idea that individuation is possible only by way of socialization, so that the “emancipation of the individual" would not be an emancipation from society, but "the deliverance of society from atomization," that is, from an isolation of subjects that "may reach its peak in periods of collectivization and mass culture. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.390-391
Adorno cannot elucidate the mimetic capacity by means of an abstract opposition to instrumental reason. The structures of reason to which Adorno merely alludes first become accessible to analysis when the ideas of reconciliation and freedom are deciphered as codes for a form of intersubjectivity, however Utopian it may be, that makes possible a mutual and constraint-free understanding among individuals in their dealings with one another, as well as the identity of individuals who come to a compulsion-free understanding with themselves—sociation without repression. This means, on the one hand, a change of paradigm within action theory, from goal-directed to communicative action, and, on the other hand, a change of strategy in an effort to reconstruct the modern concept of rationality that became possible with the decentration of our understanding of the world. The phenomena in need of explication are no longer, in and of themselves, the knowledge and mastery of an objective nature, but the intersubjectivity of possible understanding and agreement—at both the interpersonal and intra-psychic levels. The focus of investigation thereby shifts from cognitive-instrumental rationality to communicative rationality. And what is paradigmatic for the latter is not the relation of a solitary subject to something in the objective world that can be represented and manipulated, but the intersubjective relation that speaking and acting subjects take up when they come to an understanding with one another about something. In doing so, communicative actors move in the medium of a natural language, draw upon culturally transmitted interpretations, and relate simultaneously to something in the one objective world, something in their common social world, and something in each's own subjective world. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.391-392
In contrast to representation or cognition, coming to an understanding requires the rider uncoerced, because the expression is meant to be used here as a normative concept. From the perspective of the participants, coming to an understanding is not an empirical event that causes de facto agreement; it is a process of mutually convincing one another in which the actions of participants are coordinated on the basis of motivation by reasons. "Coming to an understanding" refers to communication aimed at achieving a valid agreement. It is only for this reason that we may hope to obtain a concept of rationality by clarifying the formal properties of action oriented to reaching understanding […]. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.392
If we assume that the human species maintains itself through the socially coordinated activities of its members and that this coordination has to be established through communication—and in certain central spheres through communication aimed at reaching agreement—then the reproduction of the species also requires satisfying the conditions of a rationality that is inherent in communicative action. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.397
A subjectivity that is characterized by communicative reason resists the denaturing of the self for the sake of self-preservation. Unlike instrumental reason, communicative reason cannot be subsumed without resistance under a blind self-preservation. It refers neither to a subject that preserves itself in relating to objects via representation and action, nor to a self-maintaining system that demarcates itself from an environment, but to a symbolically structured lifeworld that is constituted in the interpretive accomplishments of its members and only reproduced through communication. Thus communicative reason does not simply encounter ready-made subjects and systems; rather, it takes part in structuring what is to be preserved. The Utopian perspective of reconciliation and freedom is ingrained in the conditions for the communicative sociation of individuals; it is built into the linguistic mechanism of the reproduction of the species. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.398
In communicative action, beyond the function of achieving understanding, language plays the role of coordinating the goal-directed activities of different subjects, as well as the role of a medium in the socialization of these very subjects. Mead views linguistic communication almost exclusively under these last two aspects: the social integration of goal-directed actors, and the socialization of subjects capable of acting. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, p.5
Mead traces the emergence of linguistic forms of communication using as his guideline the step-by-step transformation of obiective or natural meanings of systemically ordered mean-ends relations between observed behavioral responses into the meanings that these modes of behavior take on for the participating organisms themselves. Symbolic meanings arise from a subjectivizing or internalizing of objective structures of meaning. As these structures are mainly found in the social behavior of animals, Mead tries to explain the emergence of language through the fact that the semantic potential residing in gesture-mediated interaction becomes symbolically available to participants through an internalization of the language of gestures. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.7-8
It is not the differentiation and independent development of cultural value spheres that lead to the cultural impoverishment of everyday communicative practice, but an elitist splitting-off of expert cultures from contexts of communicative action in daily life. It is not the uncoupling of media-steered subsystems and of their organizational forms from the lifeworld that leads to the one-sided rationalization or reification of everyday communicative practice, but only the penetration of forms of economic and administrative rationality into areas of action that resist being converted over to the media of money and power because they are specialized in cultural transmission, social integration, and child rearing, and remain dependent on mutual understanding as a mechanism for coordinating action. If we assume, further, that the phenomena of a loss of meaning and freedom do not turn up by chance but are structurally generated, we must try to explain why media-steered subsystems develop irresistible inner dynamics that bring about both the colonization of the lifeworld and its segmentation from science, morality, and art. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.330-331
[…] the theory of late-capitalist reification, reformulated in terms of system and lifeworld, has to be supplemented by an analysis of cultural modernity, which replaces the now superseded theory of consciousness. Rather than serving a critique of ideology, this analysis would have to explain the cultural impoverishment and fragmentation of everyday consciousness. Rather than hunting after the scattered traces of revolutionary consciousness, it would have to examine the conditions for re-coupling a rationalized culture with an everyday communication dependent on vital traditions. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.355-356
If one studies the paradoxical structure of juridification in such areas as the family, the schools, social-welfare policy, and the like, the meaning of the demands that regularly result from these analyses is easy to decipher. The point is to protect areas of life that are functionally dependent on social integration through values, norms, and consensus formation, to preserve them from falling prey to the systemic imperatives of economic and administrative subsystems growing with dynamics of their own, and to defend them from becoming converted over, through the steering medium of the law, to a principle of sociation that is, for them, dysfunctional. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.372-373
I gave a systematic presentation of Mead's attempt to explain, by way of reconstructing. symbolically mediated interaction and action in social roles. The first of these two stages of interaction is characterized by the emergence of a new medium of communication, the second by the norming of behavioral expectations. In the first phase, communication switches over from expressive gestures that stimulate behavior to the use of symbols; in the second, the transition to normatively regulated action means a shift to a symbolic basis for steering behavior: it is no longer only the means of communication that are symbolically restructured, but behavioral schemes and dispositions as well. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.43
If S learns to adopt toward himself the negative positions that T, U, V... take toward him when he goes wrong "semantically" (and if T, U, V, for their part, deal with similar disappointments in like manner), the members of this tribe learn to address calls to one another in such a way that they anticipate critical responses in cases where q0 (the expression / utterance) is used inappropriately to the context. And on the basis of this anticipation, expectations of a new type can take shape, behavioral expectations (c) based on the convention that a vocal gesture is to be understood as "g" only if it is uttered under specific contextual conditions. With this we have reached the state of symbolically mediated interaction in which the employment of symbols is fixed by meaning conventions. Participants in interaction produce symbolic expressions guided by rules, that is, with the implicit expectation that they can be recognized by others as expressions conforming to a rule. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.22
The key is the transition from symbolically mediated interaction to grammatical speech. We can at least make plausible the idea that the familiar structures of speech acts are, from a genetic standpoint, the result of integrating three, prelinguistically rooted, cognitive, moral, and expressive relations to external nature, to collective identity, and to inner nature […]. With these steps we will have recovered at the phylogenetic level the structures that Mead presupposed at the level of socializing interaction: normed expectations and grammatical speech. They supplement one another to yield the structure of linguistically mediated, normatively guided interaction, which is the starting point for sociocultural development. Mead and Durkheim agree in characterizing the latter as a trend toward the linguistification of the sacred […]. To the degree that the rationality potential ingrained in communicative action is released, the archaic core of the normative dissolves and gives way to the rationalization of worldviews, to the universalization of law and morality, and to an acceleration of processes of individuation. It is upon this evolutionary trend that Mead bases in the end his idealistic projection of a communicatively rationalized society. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.46
In that talk he defined his task as follows: "We shall show that moral rules are invested with a special authority by virtue of which they are obeyed simply because they command. We shall reaffirm, as a result of a purely empirical analysis, the notion of duty and nevertheless give a definition of it closely resembling that already given by Kant. Obligation is, then, one of the primary characteristics of the moral rule.” Violations of these norms are punished because they claim validity in virtue of moral authority; this validity does not accrue to them because external sanctions compel their observance. "The term 'moral authority' is opposed to material authority or physical supremacy.'' The aspect of the validity of moral rules calling for explanation is precisely that they possess a binding power that, rather than itself presupposing sanctions, justifies the applications of sanctions when they are violated. This is what Durkheim is driving at with his comparison between technical and moral rules: "Thus there are rules that present this particular characteristic: we refrain from performing the acts they forbid simply because they are forbidden. This is what is meant by the obligatory character of the moral rule.” Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.48
This neglect of the dimension of linguistic understanding also explains the unsatisfactory dualism Durkheim maintains in regard to the relation between the individual and society. As he sees it, the individual is divided into two heterogeneous components: one part that is subject to nonsocialized self-interest and the imperatives of self-preservation, and a second - moral - part that is stamped by group identity, or, in Durkheim's words: "an individual being which has its foundation in the organism, and the circle of whose activities is therefore limited, and a social being which represents the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that we can know by observation - I mean society.'' The split of the social universe into the domains of the profane and the sacred is repeated psychologically in the antithesis of body and soul or body and spirit, in the antagonisms between inclination and duty, sensibility and understanding. Durkheim remains tied here, more clearly than anywhere else in his work, to the mentalistic conceptualizations of the philosophy of consciousness. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.57
When communicative acts take the shape of grammatical speech, the symbolic structure has penetrated all components of interaction; the cognitive-instrumental grasp of reality and the steering mechanism that attunes the behavior of different interaction partners to one another, as well as the actors and their behavior dispositions, get connected to linguistic communication and are symbolically restructured. At the same time, this transposition of cognitions, obligations, and expressions onto a linguistic basis makes it possible in turn for the means of communication to take on new functions-in addition to the function of reaching understanding, those of coordinating action and socializing actors as well. Under the aspect of reaching understanding, communicative acts serve the transmission of culturally stored knowledge-as shown above, cultural tradition reproduces itself through the medium of action oriented to reaching understanding. Under the aspect of coordinating action, the same communicative acts serve the fulfillment of norms appropriate to a given context; social integration also takes place via this medium. Under the aspect of socialization, finally, communicative acts serve the construction of internal controls on behavior, in general, the formation of personality structures; one of Mead's fundamental insights is that socialization processes take place via linguistically mediated interaction. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.63
The scope for freedom is characterized by the fact that under the presuppositions of communicative action a hearer can reject the utterance of a speaker only by denying its validity. Assent means then that the negation of the invalidity of the utterance is affirmed. Whenever participants in interactions are pursuing mutual understanding by means of whatever symbols, there are alternative possibilities of understanding, not understanding, or misunderstanding; on this basis, cooperation and conflict already assume a different character. But it is only at the level of grammatical speech that an agreement can take on the form of communicatively achieved consensus. Linguistic communication presupposes understanding and taking positions on criticizable validity claims. Any explicit agreement thereby has something of the nature of a disagreement that has been avoided, excluded; it is mediated through an at least implicit rejection of a contradictory utterance, that is, through a negation. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.72
If the rejection of an assertion 'p' means that the statement 'p' is untrue, the affirmation of 'p' implies a negation of this rejection, that is, of the sentence: 'It is untrue that p’. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.73
If the rejection of the command 'q' (where 'q' stands for an action that is to be carried out or refrained from) means that in the given situation the command is not justified by the norm N invoked to authorized it, and is to this extent not right, the affirmation of 'q' implies the negation of this rejection, that is, of the sentence: 'It is not right for the one commanding to utter q in s with reference to N: If, finally, the rejection of the avowal 'r means that ego does not mean what he says, the affirmation of'r implies the negation of this rejection, that is, of the sentence: 'Ego's utterance r is insincere’. The binding effect of illocutionary forces comes about, ironically, through the fact that participants can say "no" to speech-act offers. The critical character of this saying "no" distinguishes taking a position in this way from a reaction based solely on caprice. A hearer can be "bound" by speech-act offers because he is not permitted arbitrarily to refuse them but only to say "no" to them, that is, to reject them for reasons. We are already familiar with two consequences for the structure of communication that flow from this "being able to say no’. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.73
A further consequence of being able to say "no” which was merely suggested above, concerns the actors themselves. If one aims to reconstruct how participants learn to orient their actions explicitly to validity claims, and wants to do so by means of the mechanism of taking the attitude of the other, the model of inner dialogue, which Mead used rather too unspecifically, turns out in fact to be helpful. In anticipating from alter a negative answer to his own speech act, and raising against himself an objection that alter might raise, ego understands what it means to make a criticizable validity claim. As soon, then, as ego masters the orientation to validity claims, he can repeat the internalization of discursive relations once more. Now alter already encounters him with the expectation that ego is not assuming the communicative role of the first person only in a naive manner, but will expand it, if necessary, to the role of a proponent in argumentation. If ego makes this attitude of alter his own, that is to say, if he views himself through the eyes of an arguing opponent and considers how he will answer to his critique, he gains a reflective relation to himself. By internalizing the role of a participant in argumentation, ego becomes capable of self-criticism. It is the relation- to-self established by this model of self-criticism that we shall call "reflective:” Knowing that one does not know has, since Socrates, rightly been regarded as the basis for self-knowledge. The reflective relation-to-self takes on different shadings according to the modes of language use. Ego can take up a relation to himself by way of a critique of his own statement, his own action, or his own self-presentation. The self to which he then relates is not a mysterious something; it is familiar to him from the communicative practice of daily life; it is ego himself in the communicative role of the first person, as he asserts the existence of states of affairs in an objectivating attitude, or enters into an interpersonal relation regarded as legitimate in the norm-conformative attitude, or makes a subjective experience accessible to a public in an expressive attitude. Correspondingly, ego can relate to himself according to the model of self-criticism: as an epistemic subject who is capable of learning and has already acquired a certain knowledge in his cognitive-instrumental dealings with reality, or as a practical subject who is capable of acting and has already formed a certain character or a superego in interactions with his reference persons, or as an affective subject who is sensitive, "passionate" in Feuerbach's sense, and has already demarcated from the external world of facts and norms a special domain of subjectivity marked by privileged access and intuitive presence. The reflective relation to self is the ground of the actor's accountability. A responsible actor behaves self-critically not only in his directly moralizable actions but also in his cognitive and expressive utterances. Although accountability is at bottom a moral-practical category, it also extends to the cognitions and expressions included in the validity spectrum of action oriented to reaching understanding. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.74-75
Because communicative action demands an orientation to validity claims, it points from the start to the possibility of settling disagreements by adducing reasons. […] In the second place, I am referring to the demarcation of action oriented to understanding from action oriented to consequences. Generally, alter is moved to link up his actions with ego's actions by a complicated mix of empirical and rational motives. Because communicative action demands an orientation to validity claims, it points from the start to the possibility that participants will distinguish more or less sharply between having an influence upon one another and reaching an understanding with one another. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.74
Conversation is a domain particularly dis­posed to communism. Lies, insults, put-downs, and other sorts of ver­bal aggression are important-but they derive most of their power from the shared assumption that people do not ordinarily act this way: an insult does not sting unless one assumes that others will normally be considerate of one's feelings, and it's impossible to lie to someone who does not assume you would ordinarily tell the truth. Graeber, Debt, p.97
For the communicative model of action, language is relevant only from the pragmatic viewpoint that speakers, in employing sentences with an orientation to reaching understanding, take up relations to the world, not only directly as in teleological, normatively regulated, or dramaturgical action, but in a reflective way. Speakers integrate the three formal world-concepts, which appear in the other models of action either singly or in pairs, into a system and presuppose this system in common as a framework of interpretation within which they can reach an understanding. They no longer relate straightaway to something in the objective, social, or subjective worlds; instead they relativize their utterances against the possibility that their validity will be contested by other actors. Reaching an understanding functions as a mechanism for coordinating actions only through the participants in interaction coming to an agreement concerning the claimed validity of their utterances, that is, through intersubjectively recognizing the validity claims they reciprocally raise. A speaker puts forward a criticizable claim in relating with his utterance to at least one "world"; he thereby uses the fact that this relation between actor and world is in principle open to objective appraisal in order to call upon his opposite number to take a rationally motivated position. The concept of communicative action presupposes language as the medium for a kind of reaching understanding, in the course of which participants, through relating to a world, reciprocally raise validity claims that can be accepted or contested. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.98-99
For both parties the interpretive task consists in incorporating the other's interpretation of the situation into one's own in such a way that in the revised version "his" external world and "my" external world can—against the background of "our" lifeworld—be relativized in relation to "the" world, and the divergent situation definitions can be brought to coincide sufficiently. Naturally this does not mean that interpretation must lead in every case to a stable and unambiguously differentiated assignment. Stability and absence of ambiguity are rather the exception in the communicative practice of everyday life. A more realistic picture is that drawn by ethnomethodologists—of a diffuse, fragile, continuously revised and only momentarily successful communication in which participants rely on problematic and unclarified presuppositions and feel their way from one occasional commonality to the next. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.100-101
This very strong claim, which supports the methodological thesis that "communicative action requires an interpretation that is rational in approach," is grounded at another level in Chapter III. There Habermas attempts to expand the truth-conditional approach to semantics into a general theory of the internal relationships between meaning and validity. This involves shifting the level of analysis from semantics to pragmatics, extending the concept of validity to include types of claims other than truth, identifying the validity conditions for the different types of claims, and establishing that, in these other cases as well, the meaning of an utterance is inherently connected with the conditions for redeeming the validity claims raised by it. If these methodological and language-theoretical arguments for the inseparability of meaning, intelligibility, and understanding from validity, rationality, and assessment could be sustained, Habermas would have gone a long way toward setting the foundations of a critical social theory. McCarthy, Translator’s Introduction, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.xiv
Limitations of the critique of instrumental reason
Adorno's despair derives precisely from the fact that nothing more than instrumental reason is retained when we think through "the basic process of conscious life" radically enough in the categories provided by the philosophy of consciousness. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.396
In the atomistic perspective of much of modern thought, the subject stands over against a world of objects to which it has two basic relations: representation and action. Accordingly, the type of rationality associated with this model is the "cognitive-instru- mental" rationality of a subject capable of gaining knowledge about a contingent environment and putting it to effective use in intelligently adapting to and manipulating that environment. By stressing the fact that the goal-directed actions of different individuals are socially coordinated, Habermas shifts our attention to the broader context of individual purposive actions, to the structures of social interaction in which teleological actions are located. McCarthy, Translator’s Introduction in The Theory of Communicative Action, p.ix
His [Weber’s] hierarchy of concepts of action is designed with an eye to the type of purposive- rational action, so that all other actions can be classified as specific deviations from this type. Weber also analyzes the method of Sinnverstehen in such a way that complex cases can be related to the limit case of understanding purposive-rational action; understanding action that is subjectively oriented to success requires at the same time that it be objectively evaluated as to its correctness […] Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.6
They solved the problem of connecting Marx and Weber by leaning all the more heavily on Weber. If, following Weber, one conceives of the rationalization of life's orders as the institutionalization of purposive rational action, it is only a small step to generalizing the reification of consciousness into an expression of instrumental reason. And if, like him, one sees the subsystems of purposive rational action irresistibly congealing into an iron cage, it is only a small step from Lukacs's theory of reification to the critique of instrumental reason, that is, to the vision of an administered, totally reified world in which means-ends rationality and domination are merged. This theory has the advantage of directing our attention to the symptoms of the systemically induced deformation of communicatively structured life- contexts, which is no longer localizable in any class-specific way. Its weakness consists in deriving the erosion of the lifeworld from the spell of a means-ends rationality that has been demonized as instrumental reason. The critique of instrumental reason thereby falls into the same error as the Weberian theory and, in addition, forfeits the fruits of an approach nonetheless directed to systemic effects. The concept of instrumental reason suggests that the rationality of knowing and acting subjects is systemically expanded into a purposive rationality of a higher order. Thus the rationality of self-regulating systems, whose imperatives override the consciousness of the members integrated into them, appears in the shape of a totalized purposive rationality. This confusion of system rationality and action rationality prevented Horkheimer and Adorno, as it did Weber before them, from adequately separating the rationalization of action orientations within the framework of a structurally differentiated lifeworld from the expansion of the steering capacity of differentiated social systems. As a result, they could locate the spontaneity that was not yet in the grips of the reifying force of systemic rationalization only in irrational powers in the charismatic power of the leader or in the mimetic power of art and love. Horkheimer and Adorno failed to recognize the communicative rationality of the lifeworld that had to develop out of the rationalization of worldviews before there could be any development of formally organized domains of action at all. It is only this communicative rationality, reflected in the self-understanding of modernity, that gives an inner logic - and not merely the impotent rage of nature in revolt - to resistance against the colonization of the lifeworld by the inner dynamics of autonomous systems. Horkheimer and Adorno were unable to appropriate the systematic content of Weber's diagnosis of the times and to make it fruitful for social-scientific inquiry, because they did not take seriously enough Weber's studies on the rationalization of worldviews, or the independent logic of cultural modernity; but also because they were uncritical in two directions; - vis-à-vis Marx, in that they held fast to the basic assumptions of the theory of value as the core of their tacit orthodoxy, and in this way they blinded themselves to the realities of a developed capitalism based on the pacification of class conflict through welfare-state mea- sures; - vis-à-vis Weber, in that they remained fixated on the model of purposive rationality and, for that reason, did not expand the critique of instrumental reason into a critique of functionalist reason.
The critique of instrumental reason, which remains bound to the conditions of the philosophy of the subject, denounces as a defect something that it cannot explain in its defectiveness because it lacks a conceptual framework sufficiently flexible to capture the integrity of what is destroyed through instrumental reason. To be sure, Horkheimer and Adorno do have a name for it: mimesis. And even though they cannot provide a theory of mimesis, the very name calls forth associations—and they are intended: Imitation designates a relation between persons in which the one accommodates to the other, identifies with the other, empathizes with the other. There is an allusion here to a relation in which the surrender of the one to the example of the other does not mean a loss of self but a gain and an enrichment. Because the mimetic capacity escapes the conceptual framework of cognitive-instrumentally determined subject-object relations, it counts as the sheer opposite of reason, as impulse. Adorno does not simply deny to the latter any cognitive function. In his aesthetics he attempts to show what the work of art owes to the power of mimesis to unlock, to open up. But the rational core of mimetic achievements can be laid open only if we give up the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness—namely, a subject that represents objects and toils with them—in favor of the paradigm of linguistic philosophy—namely, that of intersubjective understanding or communication—and puts the cognitive-instrumental aspect of reason in its proper place as part of a more encompassing communicative rationality. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.389-390
Weber 'parts company with a theory of communicative action' when he defines action in terms of the actor attaching a subjective meaning to it. He does not elucidate "meaning" in connection with the model of speech; he does not relate it to the linguistic medium of possible understanding, but to the beliefs and intentions of an acting subject, taken to being with in isolation. This leads him to his familiar distinction between value-rational, purposive-rational, traditional and affectual action. What Weber should have done instead was to concentrate not on orientations of action but on the general structures of the lifeworld to which acting subjects belong.  William Outhwaite, Habermas: Key Contemporary Thinkers, 1988 in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(sociology)
In analyzing this hopeless situation, Horkheimer and Adorno keyed in on a factor that Weber had singled out: the spread of formal, means/ends rationality, which they called instrumental reason. In doing so, they completely revised Marx's positive evaluation of scientific-technological progress. What for him represented an unambiguously emancipatory potential, for them was the core of a domination generalized to all spheres of life. Subjects who, in Horkheimer's words, "have to form themselves, body and soul, in relation to the technical apparatus" are no longer potential subjects of revolution (1:353). This was empirically borne out by the collapse of the revolutionary labor movement in all industrial societies and by the dis- appearance of the proletariat into the pores of consumer society. Thus the scientific-technological progress that Marx connected with the unleashing of productive forces and the overthrow of capitalism had for Horkheimer and Adorno the ironic effect of immobilizing the very subjective forces that were supposed to accomplish this overthrow. As Horkheimer put it, "All life today tends to be increasingly subjected to rationalization and planning… The individual's self-preservation presupposes his adjustment to the requirements for the preservation of the system". Given this pessimistic diagnosis, it is not surprising that they saw little hope of changing things. Critical theory became resignative, contemplative. It could, at best, disclose the unreason at the heart of what passes for reason, without offering any positive account of its own. McCarthy, Translator’s Introduction, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1, p.xix
In Habermas's view, the dead end in which critical theory thus found itself is by no means unavoidable. To avoid it requires, however, a fundamental shift of paradigm away from the philosophy of consciousness, in which the critique of rationalization as reification from Lukacs to Adorno remained rooted in spite of itself. There are two steps to this shift: first a move from the (monological) teleological concept of action to the concepts of communicative action and lifeworld; and second a joining of the lifeworld perspective to that of systems theory. In Chapter V, which opens Volume 2, Habermas approaches these tasks through a consideration of the work of George Herbert Mead and Emile Durkheim. In the former he finds the essential elements of a communications-theoretic reformulation of social-action theory; in the latter, the lineaments of a theory that links social integration with system integration. McCarthy, Translator’s Introduction, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1, p.xix
he [Habermas] uses the theory of communication developed in Volume 1 to reconstruct Mead's account of the conceptual or logical genesis of self and society; and this reconstruction in turn makes that theory serviceable for sociological analysis. Along the way, one finds another twist in the critique of strictly individualistic models of social action. Habermas argues that individuation processes are simultaneously socialization processes (and conversely), that motivations and repertoires of behavior are symbolically restructured in the course of identity formation, that individual intentions and interests, desires and feelings are not essentially private but tied to language and culture and thus inherently susceptible of interpretation, discussion and change. At the end, one finds an attempt to explicate the ideas of freedom and reconciliation that Adorno alluded to without being able to elaborate in a categorial framework still tied to the philosophy of the subject. The explication draws heavily upon the theory of communicative rationality, particularly on the ideas of a rationally binding force that accrues to illocutionary acts by virtue of their internal connection with reasons, and the corresponding possibility of intersubjective recognition based on insight rather than on external force. Habermas maintains that this Utopian perspective is ingrained in the very conditions of the communicative sociation of individuals, is built into the linguistic medium of the reproduction of the species. McCarthy, Translator’s Introduction, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.xx