Soon after leaving Hannibal for New York in 1853, Sam Clemens wrote home to his mother: “I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people.”'As the youth who would be Mark Twain wrote these words, Christy's Minstrels were at the peak of their extraordinary eight-year run (1846-54) at New York City's Mechanics' Hall, and many other blackface troupes battled them for public attention. Meanwhile, the new phenomenon of the “Tom show” - dramatic blackface productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published the year before - was emerging to (briefly) displace and reorient the minstrel tradition; by 1854 there were several such shows running in New York alone. Probably the prominence of blackface in New York only clinched Clemens's love of minstrelsy, which extended back to his Hannibal childhood.

Blackface minstrelsy - "the genuine nigger show, the extravagant nigger show," Twain calls it in the autobiography he dictated in his last years – had burst upon the unwitting town in the early 1840s as a "glad and stunning surprise." Usually involving a small band of white men armed with banjo, fiddle, tambourine, and bone castanets and arrayed in blackface makeup and ludicrous dress, the minstrel show, from the 1830s to the early years of the twentieth century, offered white travesties and imitations of black humor, dance, speech, and music. It most often opened with assorted songs, breakdowns, and gags, followed by an "olio" portion of novelty acts such as malapropistic "stump speeches7' or parodic "lectures," and concluded with a burlesque skit set in the South. In his Autobiography Twain averred: "If I could have the nigger show back again in its pristine purity and perfection I should have but little further use for opera" (AU 64). This quite unguarded attraction to "blacking up" perhaps made it inevitable that in a letter to his mother Twain would reach for the blackface mask to finesse his response to racial difference in the northern city. For the rest of his life, Twain's imaginative encounters with race would be unavoidably bound up with blackface minstrelsy.

INTRODUCTION

Consider an experience that is free from all theory, an experience precisely as it is experienced, with no superadded interpretations (derived, for example, from physics or biology or myth or religion). It is Husserl's thinking on this topic that will concern us in what follows. We shall set forth initially the main features of what we shall call common-sense experience. We shall then, by way of contrast, set forth some parallel remarks on the nature and status of physical theory. Finally we shall examine Husserl's “phenomenological” account of the ways in which the worlds of common sense and of physics may each be conceived as reflections or products of certain special sorts of mental acts.

As basis for our inquiries we shall adopt the second book of Husserl’s Ideas, a work stemming largely from the period 1912-15 which presents above all an account of the fine structures of perceptual experience and of the world that is given in and through perception. We shall deal also with Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences, a work that dates from around 1935 and presents a speculative history of the development of the scientific world-conception in its relation to what Husserl calls the “life-world” of common sense. Ideas II, which forms the hidden basis of the later work, was held back from publication in Husserl’s lifetime. Our aim in what follows is not that of textual exegesis, however, nor is it one of presenting an account of the development of Husserl’s thought. Rather, we seek to elucidate as clearly as possible the most important ingredients of Husserl’s ideas on the topic of common-sense experience, and to show how they form a coherent whole from which much can still be learned.

One can explore the overlaps and tensions between Adorno and Habermas on diverse and related themes concerning instrumental reason, the potential for crises in contemporary capitalist democracies, the prospects for historical transformation, the relationships between critical theory, social science and analytic philosophy, the normative positions of critical theory, and so on. Depending upon one's thematic focus, assessments of proximities, distances, advantages, and disadvantages will vary markedly. In this essay my analysis of the relationship between Adorno and Habermas is limited to questions concerning the normative character of critical theory. On my reading Adorno provides a more interesting and promising position than Habermas recognizes, and both illuminates and gestures beyond some of the most important weaknesses of Habermas's communicative ethics.

Habermas once noted with a certain melancholy that his writing had not succeeded as much as he would have liked in “awaken[ing] the hermeneutic willingness requisite for its reception” Ironically, given Habermas’s often harsh and repeated criticisms of Adorno, there is a sense in which Habermas may indirectly contribute to just such an awakening for the reception of Adorno's work. For the former's emphasis on communicative ethics has contributed to an interrogative framework - a set of compelling questions concerning ethics and dialogue - which illuminates and brings into sharper focus themes that are often missed because of their oblique, sometimes illusive (though persistent and promising) treatment in Adorno’s work. Thus illuminated, Adorno appears to raise the question of whether Habermas’s self-proclaimed movement beyond him is not more adequately to be characterized as “one step forward, two steps back.”

Habermas has always implied that discourse ethics contains or leads to a theory of democratic legitimation. Only recently, however, has he begun a systematic investigation of the political potential of discourse. He and much of the wider critical debate have focused in the past on discourse ethics as a moral philosophy - a cognitive ethics in the neo-Kantian tradition that sets out to articulate the modern moral point of view of impartiality. As a contribution to moral philosophy, Habermas often stresses that discourse ethics is more descriptive than normative, for it represents “a reconstruction of everyday intuitions underlying the impartial judgment of moral conflicts of action”

Drawing on language philosophy and an analysis of what we mean when we say such and such is morally right, Habermas concludes that what we mean is that we could redeem this claim in an ideal conversation. To put this another way, to believe something is right is to believe that we have good reasons to hold this position. To believe that we have good reasons entails the idea that given enough time, given interlocutors of goodwill, and given a constraint-free environment, everyone would come to the same conclusion as we have. Thus, impartial judgments are judgments that would gain universal agreement in an ideal communication community.

It has long been a curious feature of Jürgen Habermas's reception in the English-speaking world that, for all the intense and exhaustive scrutiny of his critical social theory, Habermas's role as a politically engaged intellectual, polemicist, and essayist in the political public sphere has received relatively little attention. Given the consistency with which Habermas himself has worked toward a normative theory of political participation - and also given the fact that, over the last decade or so, Habermas has rather unobtrusively emerged as Germany's most prominent intellectual as well as its most influential social theorist - this lack of interest in Habermas's “moonlighting role as an intellectual” seems difficult to explain.

In what follows, I would like to sketch in very broad strokes the major focus of Habermas’s activity as a politically active intellectual over the past few years, in order to suggest that, to an unrivaled degree, Habermas has single-mindedly worked to bring his theoretical and his political writings into a steadily closer relation with each other. The universalism that lies at the heart of Habermasian theory remains an empty abstraction unless it can be reconstructed within the context of a concrete lifeworld; it thus cannot be disassociated from the particular fate of universal mentalities - what Habermas calls “constitutional patriotism” - in the Federal Republic. Conversely, Habermas’s political writings on the Federal Republic are unified by the single-minded project of protecting and cultivating a form of republican commitment that only makes sense insofar as there is a corollary theoretical justification of moral-political universalism.

The tradition of radical democracy includes, in different ways, figures such as Jefferson and Emerson, Marx and Gramsci, John Stuart Mill and Dewey. What unites these otherwise diverse thinkers - what makes them “radical” democrats - is the view that democratic participation is an important means of self-development and self-realization. They also hold that more participation will produce individuals with more democratic dispositions - individuals who are more tolerant of difference, more sensitive to reciprocity, better able to engage in moral discourse and judgment, and more prone to examine their own preferences - all qualities conducive to the success of democracy as a way of making decisions. For the radical democrat, democracy is always more than a means of checking power and distributing values, as it is for most liberal democrats. Radical democrats hold, in the well-known reversal of Lord Acton's phrase, that powerlessness corrupts, and absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely. Democracy is a way of life, a mode of decision making that generates its own ethics and values - expectations I have referred to elsewhere as the self-transformation thesis in democratic theory.

As the idea of an ultimate foundation for moral and political beliefs has become increasingly implausible, theorists have turned to “discourse” to provide a basis on which to defend the legitimacy of social and political practices. The turn to discourse, which includes but is not limited to communicative ethics, is in part a move from a substantive to a procedural conception of moral and political theory. Rather than providing values grounded in an account of human nature or reason, discourse-based approaches offer a set of procedures that, if followed, would yield principles legitimating social practices and institutions. The fundamental intuition underlying the move to discourse is the ideal of a moral community, one whose norms and practices are fully acceptable to those subject to them, a society based not on imposition, but on the agreement of free and equal persons.

Jürgen Habermas has presented one of the most powerful accounts of a discourse-based morality,- it is grounded in an understanding of practical reason which explains how the validity of norms can be tested, thereby demonstrating their cognitive character. According to Habermas, valid norms can be freely accepted by all of the individuals who are affected by them. Thus, a society whose institutions and practices were governed by valid norms would instantiate the ideal of a moral community.

Critical theory is often dismissed (in as much as it is ever contemplated at all) by empirically inclined social scientists as an obscure, speculative, and unscientific philosophical enterprise. Such dismissal is not reserved for critical theory alone, often extending to social and political theory more generally. It must be admitted that there are often good reasons why these social scientists should scorn the efforts of their more philosophically inclined colleagues. But here I shall argue that the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas stands out from most of what now passes for political and social theory in its ability to engage empirical social science in fruitful dialogue.

This dialogue is not just a matter of critical theory issuing philosophical and methodological guidance for the practice of social science, though any social science taking critical theory seriously could hardly emerge from the encounter unaltered. Critical theory can also provide a context and a frame for making sense of existing social science findings. Moreover, the street is a two-way one: Critical theory itself is rightly dependent on social science findings, and Habermas himself has made good (if somewhat sporadic) use of such findings. My discussion begins with the program for social science proposed in Habermas’s earlier epistemological and methodological work. I shall then turn to the more productive influence of Habermas’s later work on communicative action. I conclude with an examination of how critical theory can assimilate and make sense of more established social science research programs.

One of the most distinctive features on the intellectual landscape of the last decades of the twentieth century is the intensity with which doubts have been raised about the conceptual foundations of Western modernity. Hard questions have emerged about the predominant modern understandings of reason, subjectivity, nature, progress, and gender. With the exception of the last topic, one might argue that these questions emerged in this century in their most powerful form within two streams of German philosophical reflection. In the immediate post-World War II years, Martin Heidegger wrote his “Essay on Humanism” (1946) and “The Question Concerning Technology” (1949), and he continued for the next thirty years to articulate a thorough critique of most of what the modern West has held dear. In 1947 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer published their Dialectic of Enlightenment, developing the claim that the systematic pursuit of enlightened reason and freedom had the ironic long-term effect of engendering new forms of irrationality and repression. These critiques had an immense impact both on the initial shape of the work of Jiirgen Habermas and on its continued evolution.

These passages, from Jürgen Habermas's “What Does Socialism Mean Today?,' surely sound strange. Biblical allusions to blindness and to heaven? From one who promotes communicative rationality as the “completion of the modern project”? From one who explicitly rejects nostalgic, romantic, and Utopian visions of socialism? Yet they provide clues that help explain Habermas's continued commitment to socialism. Socialism is not dead, nor will it rise again. In response to recent events, Habermas suggests a different, less dialectical, approach to resurrection. The possibilities of “actually existing socialism” are exhausted, but “socialism-as-critique” remains a source of hope. It retains the “intuitions” and “impulses” of a humanity that makes its history with conscious will. For Habermas, socialism is to be sustained as a “discourse-in-exile.” What's left of Marx in this is the tradition of Jewish mysticism.

If in what follows we appear critical, it is not because we are unappreciative of the real achievement of the work of Jürgen Habermas. The theory of communicative action makes the case that rationality is a relevant moral social concept. That humans speak with and to each other places them, he shows, in a moral relationship, simply by the actuality of the fact of that speech. Habermas develops this position into a critical defense of modernity around a vision of the “formation of autonomous public spheres, which . . . enter into communication with one another as soon as the potential for selforganization and the self-organized employment of communication media is made use of.” This is a democratic picture based upon the potential egalitarianism of uncoerced participation in discourse.

In elaborating his theory of communicative action, Habermas distinguishes the scope of rational agreement available to theoretical and practical discourse, on the one hand, from that available to aesthetic criticism, on the other. In doing so, he distinguishes moral norms from cultural values and questions of justice from questions of the good life. In this essay, I want to examine the grounds Habermas finds for this distinction and explore the conception of communicative reason on which it rests.

COMMUNICATIVELY ACHIEVED AGREEMENT

The general question with which Habermas’s account of communicative rationality begins might be reconstructed as the question of how language has the ability to coordinate action in a consensual or cooperative way as opposed to a forced or manipulated one. In other words, how does the employment of language in contexts of interaction produce mutual agreement on a course of action, a fact in the world, an aesthetic evaluation, or an expression of intention, desire, need or the like? The presumption here is that there is a difference between consensual agreement and simple compliance and Habermas grounds this presumption in a reconstruction of the pretheoretical knowledge of competent speakers and actors.