FDR
Ownership of government by private power - that'll do this unread ignoramus for a definition, Chip.
And recent actions by, inter alia, your Supreme Court and your president suggest the hour is late.
As for Ken's concern ...
> ... I also think that critical
>theory rails against all kinds of pseudo-reconciliations... in other
>words, even if a telos is posited, it is defined negatively.
>Interestingly, Habermas preserves the same teleological difficulty.
>Communicative action makes instrumental action possible but it is
>instrumental actions that illuminate blocks in communicative action...
>the idea of consensus as a telos is in contradiction to the necessary
>instrumental means through which communicative action can be achieved in
>a society where communication is distorted....
Well, that sounds right if we keep everything inside the fences Habermas built for himself. I think I could (if I had the books by me) find support in Habermas for the notion that the tendency to communicative rationality and the consensus 'telos' reside precisely in language. I agree with your reasoning as to the emptiness of this insight, but only insofar as we stay within the communicative action model. I believe communication can not be torn from the category of labour, and believe Habermas only did so (in *Knowledge and Human Interests*) because he swallowed the limited Ricardian conception of labour (as concrete, hence instrumental). Had he grasped the meaning of 'abstract labour', he'd have realised he was already talking about humans relating to (inter alia) humans, albeit as it manifests under capital. Were capital to be deemed a categorically contradicted dynamic, we would then have the additional dimension Habermas needs to make his insight interesting.
I actually reckon capitalism is amidst one of the crises to which it is heir as we tap away, and discern, in my papers as much as in people's activities on the world's streets, both implicit and explicit exercising of (and sometimes effectively a conscious concern with) communicative rationality. People, sometimes in the strangest places (witness that article I posted a few days ago, wherein WTO and GATT machinations were framed as tendencies unto fascism in the Australian FINANCIAL Review!!!), are asking big questions, and years of attempted distortion from the PR suitstaffels haven't convinced 'em to look beyond the doing of reason for their answers.
Cheers, Rob.