Although many authors, such as Thomas McCarthy and Martin Beck Matustik, have written illuminating, comprehensive studies of Jürgen Habermas's expansive body of work, David Ingram's new Habermas: Introduction and Analysis should become the standard against which all other such books are judged. Ingram deftly accomplishes two tasks that in less skilled hands could undermine each other, offering thorough, fair explication of a large body of scholarship while arguing the important thesis that Habermas does not fully consider the possible contribution of aesthetic considerations to formulating social and moral theory. Ingram is able to conduct this simultaneously fair and incisive critique by highlighting undervalued themes within Habermas's corpus, therefore providing constructive criticism as opposed to merely imposing his own theoretical agenda. Thus, not only will readers gain a better understanding of multiple aspects of Habermas's thought, but they will also be challenged, whether they began the work with a sympathetic or skeptical attitude toward Habermas, to think in new ways concerning fundamental questions in political theory.
Ingram organizes the book in two main sections, the first covering Habermas's writing concerning conceptual issues such as epistemology, communication, and the philosophy of science, and the second outlining the application of these more esoteric works to politics and social theory. The book proceeds thematically, focusing on the texts Ingram believes to be most relevant to explaining fundamental concepts. Although some might quibble with his choices concerning which works to emphasize and which debates to recount, all in all he provides a clear and comprehensive account of the major concepts and arguments of Habermas's thought.
In the first section of the book, which contains chapters recounting Habermas's biography and his views on truth, ethics and language, Ingram chronicles Habermas's move away from anthropomorphic and psychoanalytical groundings of critical theory due to the “linguistic turn” in philosophy. This leads Habermas to recast his thought in terms of a communicative reason that relies on the internal logic of individuals engaged in the process of reaching mutual understanding. Although Habermas shifts his explanation of human action to contingent acts of communication, he derives the procedural necessities of the open, inclusive dialogue necessary for justification of facts and norms from what he deems to be unavoidable principles of philosophy and developmental psychology, thus endowing his concept with the “quasi-transcendental” properties he believes necessary to ground any effective critical theory.
While the outlines of Habermas's account of communicative action are well known, Ingram does an important service in linking this older work with his more recent writing on contemporary politics and social issues in the second half of the book, where he presents chapters on law, social pathology, and modernity. All of these examples demonstrate Habermas's overarching position that legitimate political institutions must reconcile the norms and interests generated through the give and take in the public sphere with the instrumental necessities of policy and efficiency. This balancing act creates a number of tensions identified by Ingram, most notably how to protect the open, egalitarian debate characteristic of public discussion free from colonization by the systems logic of bureaucracy, economy, and law, while ensuring that these instrumental social spheres remain open to the influence of communicative reason. Ingram goes on to analyze a number of Habermas's interventions concerning specific political controversies through this communicative lens. Questions of multiculturalism, immigration, and the separation of church and state are all seen by Habermas as challenges of allowing the flexible proceduralism of communicative action to operate without the interference of the rigidity of state, economy, or tradition.
Ingram seems generally impressed with the ability of Habermas's communicative proceduralism to act as a model for viable institutions and present a productive moral compromise between liberalism and republicanism. But he is not so sure that Habermas provides compelling answers to a question that preoccupied his mentors in the critical theory tradition—whether democracy, and the egalitarianism and autonomy on which it is based, can survive the incessant expansion of capitalism. This question becomes all the more important to Ingram in the current geopolitical environment where the states and publics find it harder and harder to influence the activities of GEMs (“global economic multilaterals”). Ingram criticizes Habermas for embracing the ability of the very economic and political elites he previously warned against to both respect democratic will making and curb each other's excesses. Ingram states, “in short, the immediate interest of ‘national citizens’ and government leaders in the developed world incline them toward self-serving policies that perpetuate inequitable trade relations and economic practices” (p. 304). Thus Ingram argues that Habermas relies too much on the systems of power and money that he hopes will be ultimately controlled by communicative action to solve the problems that they themselves create.
This lack of confidence in a public constituted through communicative reason and ethics to contain political and economic power might have been bolstered, Ingram contends, if Habermas had relied more on its aesthetic potentialities within communication. Ingram stresses that rhetoric often aids even the most rational communicative agreement when he claims, “in order to persuasively communicate one among several equally plausible arguments…. one must also be able to empathize with one's opponents and their counterarguments and be able to adjust the emotional pitch of one's presentation in order to dispose others to make responsible judgments about roughly plausible competing arguments” (p. 149). He goes on to argue that “aesthetic and ethical” groundings, as emphasized by theorists such as Martha Nussbaum, can aid Habermas's overly formal conception of human rights and other principles he deems constitutive of a just society. Insights such as these demonstrate Ingram's position that passionate speech and inspiring visions of the good life need to play a role in efforts to strengthen the public sphere and contain colonizing capitalism.
Ingram stresses that this focus on aesthetics does not contradict Habermas; it simply reflects an underutilized aspect of his thought. For example, he references Habermas's citation of Walter Benjamin's claim that “art harbors a utopia that becomes a reality … in the mimetic relations of a balanced and undistorted intersubjectivity of everyday life” (Benjamin quoted on p. 326). In commenting on the above, Ingram states, “this passage evokes (in a manner not too dissimilar from John Dewey's equation of art and authentic experience) the idea that genuine art articulates life as it is more vividly lived, namely as an integral and balanced whole that is imbued with emotion” (p. 326). Here Ingram implies that if Habermasians were to develop connections such as this (the Dewey-Habermas intersection on the question of aesthetics and politics seems especially provocative), then they might explore how a more “artful” public discourse, whether such innovations take the form of substantive expressions that inspire passion or formal processes that shape the manner in which individuals discuss their common problems, could aid deliberative politics. With this more expansive understanding of how aesthetics might augment the motivational power and critical capacity of communicative rationality, then the social movements that defend the public could bolster both their ability to attract participants and their power to fight an increasingly politically aggressive capitalist class. Through this suggestion and many other insights, Ingram lifts what could be a competent example of explicating Habermas into an incisive work that addresses contemporary problems, an endeavor that Habermas himself would certainly endorse.
