While I also think you've been wilfully harsh on poor Ken (whose capacity to take flak does him great credit), I do agree with the thrust of your criticisms of Habermas.
One dissenting thoughtlet before a concurring rant: societies do reproduce the meta-regulating 'moral' institutions (justified by the universalisable, the rightful province of all, applicable to all, and difficult neatly to apply to specific contexts) upon which Habermas focuses in his discourse ethics. A procedural democratic model for this inevitably ongoing reproduction does, I think serve as a useful critical ideal. The essense of democracy seems to me to demand it, and any degree of deviation from a realistic approximation there-to is a question that goes to the system's very self-legitimation. Beaut!
But, yeah, Habermas found room in his own theoritical categories to go with a flow that was itself engineered by a quarter century of corporately under-written public relations campaigns ('toxic sludge is democracy', if you like). Which means, as far as I am concerned, he has failed to address the undemocratic (indeed strategic) nature of discursive transformation with which he now makes common cause to legitimate a formal liberalism (the material inequity of which he now himself helps disguise). Thus does he manage coherently to portray American aggression as some sorta Pax Democratica. And thus does he sever himself from the Habermas of public spheres, ideal speech situations, legitimation crises, and discourse ethics.
Habermas calls himself 'critical' and 'modernist' on the grounds that his project is to 'uncover' and that he needs a founding platform from which to do this. For mine, he's now a coverer rather than an uncoverer - and he has given up on the foundation of reason-in-communication, replacing itself with a crass pragmatism that would have had old man Dewey spitting up his weetbix: truth is what works, and a squadron of PR consultants in tandem with a thousand jets works just fine.
Habermas always flirted with Dewey, but this more like necrophilia.
Surely Rorty must have written something about all this - it's just his cuppa, innit?
Cheers, Rob.
>In other words, for Habermas, individuals who are to form
>"intersubjectivity" are fundamentally abstract individuals, legal persons
>who are bearers of rights in liberal democracy (not concrete individuals
>who are ensembles of social relations), who belong to "lifeworlds" of
>liberal interest groups; in turn, Habermas's (later) works are designed to
>give a new and more sophisticated legitimation to _Rechtstaats_. (It is in
>this context that the Serbs become the Other of "intersubjectivity" of a
>"constitutional community" (_Rechtsgemeinschaft_) as the foundation of the
>legitimacy of _Rechtstaat_; in Habermas's theory, there is no room for a
>criticism of imperialism, hence his support of NATO's war on Yugoslavia.)
>
>Habermas has come a long (or short?) way from his earlier sympathy with a
>socialist project that seeks to go beyond liberalism (in, for instance,
>_Legitimation Crisis_). In "What Does Socialism Mean Today?" (in _After
>the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism_, ed. Robin
>Blackburn, NY: Verso, 1991), he says: "The liberal interpretation is not
>wrong. It just does not see the beam in its own eye." He goes further:
>"With the bankruptcy of state socialism, [welfare state liberalism] is the
>eye of the needle through which everything must pass." Therefore,
>Habermas's "rationality" also goes through the eye of the needle, in the
>process becoming the Reason of the liberal State, ridding itself of reasons
>to criticize it radically.
>
>Yoshie