CONF 803: MACRO THEORIES OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION

Professor Ho-Won Jeong
George Mason University
Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution
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Catalina Navarrete

Habermas, Jurgen. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, Beacon Press, 1987.

Intermediate Reflections: System and Lifeworld, pp. 113-52

- Habermas starts by explaining Durkheim's ideas about society. In this regard, Durkheim coincides with Spencer in that "social life, just as all life in general, can naturally organize itself only by an unconscious, spontaneous adaptation under the immediate pressure of needs, and not according to a rational plan of reflective intelligence".
- Spencer explains that the "market is a mechanism that 'spontaneously' brings about the integration of society…".
- But Durkheim states that "even the organic form of social solidarity has to be secured by values and norms."
- A self-regulated system, "according to which every event… is ascribed a meaning on the basis of its functional significance, is gradually replaced by the communication-theoretic model, according to which actors orient their actions by their own interpretations."

- "Communicative action relies on a cooperative process of interpretation in which participants relate simultaneously to something in the objective, the social, and the subjective worlds, even when they thematically stress only one of the three components in their utterances."
- "A situation is a segment of lifeworld contexts of relevance that is thrown into relief by themes and articulated through goals and plans of action. … For those involved, the action situation is the center of their lifeworld…"
- "Language and culture are constitutive for the lifeworld itself."
- "In everyday communicative practice there are no completely unfamiliar situations. Every new situation appears in a lifeworld composed of a cultural stock of knowledge that is 'always already' familiar."
- "The lifeworld is… the transcendental site where speaker and hearer meet, where they can reciprocally raise claims that their utterances fit the world… and where they can criticize and confirm those validity claims, settle their disagreements, and arrive at agreements."
- Schutz and Luckmann state that: "In every situation only a certain segment of the world is given to me. Only part of the world is in actual reach… As a consequence, my experience of the social world has a specific structure."
- "…situations change, but the limits of the lifeworld cannot be transcended… Thus every understanding of a situation can rely on a global preunderstanding. Every definition of a situation is an 'interpretation within the frame of what has already been interpreted, within a reality that is fundamentally and typically familiar."
- "Collectivities maintain their identities only to the extent that the ideas members have of their lifeworld overlap sufficiently and condense into unproblematic background convictions."
- "Under the functional aspect of mutual understanding, communicative action serves to transmit and renew cultural knowledge; under the aspect of coordinating action, it serves social integration and the establishment of solidarity; finally, under the aspect of socialization, communicative action serves the formation of personal identities."
- "… communicative action is not only a process of reaching understanding; in coming to an understanding about something in the world, actors are at the same time taking part in the interactions through which they develop, confirm, and renew their memberships in social groups and their own identities."
- "…what binds sociated individuals to one another and secures the integration of society is a web of communicative actions that thrives only in the light of cultural traditions."

- "The fundamental problem of social theory is how to connect in a satisfactory way the two conceptual strategies indicated by the notions of 'systems' and 'lifeworld'… Until then, we shall have to be content with a provisional concept of society as a system that has to fulfill conditions for the maintenance of sociocultural lifeworlds."

- "…societies are systemically stabilized complexes of action of socially integrated groups."

HABERMAS AND THE THESIS OF INTERNAL COLONIZATION
doga eralp

Acc. To Habermas today there is a negative requirement of preventing holistic intrepretations from coming into existence.
§ Everyday consciousness is robbed of its power to synthesise and becomes fragmented.
§ Today instead of false consciousness we have fragmented consciousness!!!that blocks enlightenment through reification.
§ When stripped of their ideological veils imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their ways into the lifeworld from the outside/colonial masters coming into a tribal society/ force a process of assimilation upon it.

Theory of Capitalist Reification: reformulated in terms of system and lifeworld, supplemented by an analysis of cultural modernity that supersedes the theory of consciousness.
§ Not as a critique of ideology but as an explanation of cultural impoverishment and fragmentation of everyday consciousness, in other words colonization of the lifeworld.

Colonization of Lifeworld occurs when:
§ Traditional forms of life are so far dismantled that the structural components of the lifeworld(culture,society,personality) have been differentiated to a great extent.
§ Exchange relations between the susbsystems and the lifeworld are regulated through differentiated roles.
Ex/employment at organised workplaces,consumer demand of private households,relation of clients to government beuracracies, formal participation in legitimation process.
§ Real abstractions that make the labor power available and makes the mobilization of the vote of the elecrtorate possible by those affected as a trade-off against social rewards(in time& money).
§ These compensations are financed according to the welfare state pattern from the gains of the capitalistic growth and are canalized into role which prvitize hopes for self-determination in the roles of consumer and client.

Habermas defines the juridifaction process as the steering media between the subsytems and the lifeworld throughout the course of the capitalistic age.
Juridification: tendency toward an increase in formal law observable in modern society.
He defines the juridification in four main phases:Bourgeois State,Bourgeois Constitutional State, Democratic Constitutional State, Democratic Welfare State

BOURGEOIS STATE:1st wave of juridification
Civil Law: General,Positiv,formal
§ Guarantees liberty and property of private person
§ Security of the law
§ Equality before the law
§ Calculability of all legally norms and actions
Public Law:authorizes a state power with monopoly to coerce as the source of the legal authority
§ Instrumentalist definition of sovereign
§ Legal exercise of beuracratcially organised domination
§ Goal---- means of effectively allcoating power
Hobbes(Leviathan)-lifeworld----a negative word for Hobbes:unspecific reservoir from which the subsystems of economy and state extract what they need for their reproduction
§ Performance at war
§ Obedience--------------"real abstraction" in Marxist terms-source of state legitimation

BOURGEOIS CONSTITUTIONAL STATE 2nd Wave of juridification:
Constitutional regulation of administrative authority which until then was limited and bounded by the legal form and beuracratic means of exercising power
§ Now private individuals,citizens are given actionable civil rights against a sovereign-no democratic participation yet
§ Gurantees of life,liberty,property of private persons
§ No longer only as functional side of institutionalisation of commerce in civil law
§ Achieves morally justified constitutional norms and the most the structure of political order as a whole
"absolutist state":understood itself as agent of subsystems differentiated via money and power-------treated lifeworld as an unformed matter-protection of citizens modern lifeworld

DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUTIONAL STATE 3rd Wave if juridification
Constitutionalised state power was democratised.citizens given the right of political participation.laws come into force only when they express:
§ A general interest
§ When all those affected agree to them
§ Legislation bounded to parliamentary will-formation and publis discussion.
Juridification of legitimation: achieved in forms of general and equal suffrage, recognition of seperation of powers:legislature----executive-----judiciary
Modern Lifeworld: asserts itself against the imperatives of a structure of domination that abstracts all concrete life relations
§ Process of anchoring the medium of powerinto the lifeworld that's rationalised differentiated not only goes for the bourgeoise

WELFARE STATE 4th Wave of Juridification:continues the line of freedom-guaranteeing juridification
§ In the preceding 2 phases bridled administrative system now bridles the economic system similarly.
§ Institutionalising in legal form of a social power relation anchored in class structure---freedom to organize unions
§ Bargain for wages,social security, protection from lay-offs, limitation on working hours
§ Power balancing juridifications within an area of action that has already been constituted by law
§ Welfare state both guarantees and takes away the freedom!!!!!!Ambivalence endangers the freedom of the beneficiaries.
Public Welfare Policy:Juridification and bureacratization as limits to welfare policy.
§ Restructuring interventions in the lifeworld by beuracratic implementation, monetary redemption of welfare entitlements. The bourgeois law dictates the welfare guarantees as individual.

Individualization: against the solidaristic measures of the lifeworld communities. Citizen as a client, temporarily and spatially distant from the governing/administrating beuraucracy./computerization

Social Services:consumerist redefinition of therapatic assistance.State administeration of these serivices contradict with the aim of independent and self-reliant individual.
§ Class-specific utilization of services/prison system,court assignments
§ The more the welfare state goes beyond pacifying the class-conflict in sphere of production and spreads a net of cliental relationships over private spheres of life, the stronger are the anticipated pathological side effects of juridification that entail both a bureacratization and moneterization of core areas of lifeworld.
Dillematic Structure: While the welfare state guarantees to serve for social integration, it promotes disintegration of life-relations.
Consensual Mechanisms Power and Money
Coordinating action Legalised Social
Intervention
Law----serves as a means for organizing media-controlled subsystems(money&power)
§ Takes the role of a steering medium rather than supplementing institutional components of the lifeworld.

Legal Institutions---legal norms that can't be legitimised through a positivistic reference to procedure
§ Norms need substantive juridification since they belong to legitimate orders of the lifeworld and informal forms of conduct from the background of communicative action.

Social Welfare Law: a reification effect tailored to domains of action first constituted in legal forms of organization and can be held together only by systemic mechanisms------at the same time applies to informal lifeworld contexta

Acc.to Thesis of Internal Colonization---- subsystems of economy and state become more and more complex as a result of capitalist growth and penetrate deeper into symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld.
Ex/ family law in Germany-youth&welfare office.