Zagadnienie ideologii we wczesnych pismach Jürgena Habermasa

Abstract

The article focuses on the reconstruction of the main assumptions of the concept of ideology which are to be found in Jürgen Habermas’s early writings. Habermas redefined the task of the critical theory while facing the aporias that result from the critical theory of the first generation of so called Frankfurt School. The author of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere rejected the totalizing critique of the Western reason encapsulated in the influential Dialectic of Enlightenment and proposed to distinguish between two aspects of social life and, thus, to distinguish between two different forms of social rationalization, which were conflated by Horkheimer and Adorno. On the basis of the aforementioned dichotomy of social actions (labor and communication), Habermas defines ideology as a suppression of ethical questions, which results in reducing the practical issues to purely technical ones, which are most likely implemented into social fabric as a purposive-rational procedure. According to Habermas, ideology nowadays manifests itself in such phenomena as scienticization of politics, de-politicization of the public debate and decisionism. Their shared feature is the elimination of the sphere of the ethical and practical reasoning which consequently leads to an infringement of the fundamental interest of the human species which consists of the possibility of reaching an agreement and the ideal of the communication freed from coercion.