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find wha t she calls political acti on, it is inappropria te to subsume it
under the same ca tegori es used to expl ain processes or structures.
Uncoerced , symmetri call y organized communica ti on which leads
to
the crea ti on of shared mea nings is not equival ent to the technical,
instrumental, utilitari an rel a ti ons tha t characterize so much of human
interacti on .
The fruitfulness of this di stinction , whi ch is one of the healthier
legacies of the h ermeneuti c and existenti alist movements, is perhaps
mos t apparent in the work of ]urgen Habermas, the leading member of
the Frankfurt Schoo l's second generation . Habermas's debt to Hannah
Arendt has rarely been noticed, but in both
Strukturwandei l der
Offentlichkeit
and
Th eorie und Praxis,
he cited
The Human Condi–
tion
with approval, crediting it (a long with the work of Hans-Georg
Gadamer ) for calling his a ttenti on to the Aristo teli an distinction
between
techne
a nd
praxis.
Without ri gidl y absolutizing the difference
between po litics and society, Habermas has pursued the found a tions of
the type of communi ca ti ve interacti on Miss Arendt endorsed by draw–
ing on a combina ti on of philosophi cal sources from H egel
to
Wittgen–
stein. He has, however, avoided the
polit ique pour la po /itique
dil emma by linking communi ca tive competence in an undistorted
speech situa ti on to an emancipa tory cognitive interes t tha t embraces
all men , not merely a po litica l elite. Unlike Hannah Arendt, Habermas
has been keenl y aware of the social preconditions which may make
such a utopian communi ca tive situation possible. As he wrote in a
review of
On R evo lu tion:
We can meaningfully discuss the conditi ons of political freedom
only in connection with an emancipation from domination . This
ca tegory of domin ati on must not separate political force
(G ewalt )
from social power
(Macht ),
but instead must show them as they both
are: as repression. Under conditions of social dependency the bes t
right to politi ca l freedom rema ins ideology. On the other hand,
Hann ah Arendt insists with good reason that the realization of
welfare does not correspond to the emancipati on from dominati on .
Hannah Arendt must also be prai sed for her a ttempt to rescue the
notion of freedom from its purely "negati ve" interpreta tion , although
she was wrong
to
den y the moment of " freedom from" in an y more
embracing definiti on of that term. T o have a non-Marxist theorist
stress the importance of ending political ali enation and realize tha t an
intersubj ecti ve definition of freedom has somethin g
to
be said for it is a
refreshin g change from the con ventional state of affairs. As all obser–
vers have noted , Hannah Arendt was diffi cult to pl ace along any
