Reason

At issue in the previous chapter were conflicting ideas about the ways in which economic and political rationality affect everyday life under late capitalism. Indeed, conceptions of reason or rationality lie at the very core of both Adorno’s and Habermas’ social theories. Their indebtedness to Lukács is especially evident here. Citing “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics,” Andrew Feenberg observes that, for Lukács, “history itself can become the study of reason” because “‘history consists precisely in the constant transformation of those forms which earlier modes of thinking, undialectical and stuck fast in the immediacy of their present as they always were, regarded as suprahistorical’.”1 In fact, Habermas had already advanced this interpretation of the early Lukács in the first volume of The Theory of Communicative Action where he accepts Lukács’ claim that reason is objectivated “in the relation of human beings to one another and to nature,” and adopts Lukács’ terminology in his own account of late capitalist societies.2 According to the Hungarian philosopher, correctly to identify the forms of objectivity (Gegenständlichkeitsformen) that have succeeded each other in the course of human history is tantamount to acquiring “a knowledge of the historical process in its totality.”3 In his attempt to reconcile the insights of Marx and Weber, Lukács fashions an original account of history in which “intellectual genesis must be identical in principle with historical genesis.”4