Can a social or political theory insofar as it aims to be critical avoid appealing to normative (moral or ethical) criteria? This question has in one form or another haunted the tradition of Hegelian Marxist social theory. Here, I am only concerned with a specific variant of it. In the 1980’s Jürgen Habermas came up with an analysis and critique of what he called the problem of the ‘normative foundations’ of critical theory. Habermas’s analysis of the problem with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and of the direction in which they subsequently took critical theory, has been hugely influential. However, it is freighted with his (controversial) theories of meaning and communicative rationality. This has two bad consequences: first it clouds the real issue of ‘normative foundations’ that besets Frankfurt School critical theory; second, because of the theoretical hostages to fortune Habermas’s criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer needlessly takes, it looks vulnerable to objections. All this has obscured the nature of the debate on the normative problem of critical theory. After analysing and interpreting Habermas’s original criticism, I reconstruct it in five steps by presenting and defending five theses to which, I believe, the first generation Frankfurt School critical theorists are committed. These five theses give rise to a dilemma that captures what I take to be the real normative problem of critical theory. This argument is then used to throw new light on some recent interpretations of the legacy of (first-generation) Frankfurt School critical theory, and on its development at the hands of subsequent ‘generations’, namely Habermas and Honneth.

(This article is one I published in Politics and Ethics Review 3:1, 144-162 under the title, Habermas versus Rawls Redivivus. It appears here without footnotes. I remain unsatisfied with it since I did not manage to do what I set out to.  Still there are a lot of things in it that I like and which I stand by. I'm presently working on a much longer and better version of it. 

1.    This article is an attempt to refocus and revive interest in the dispute between John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, two of the most important and arguably the two most important contemporary Western political philosophers.   When one considers how many works have been committed to print about each of them, it is surprising that more attention has not been paid to the dispute between them.  This may be because the debate has been plagued by misunderstandings on either side, and because commentators have tended to canvass relatively unimportant side issues while the real issue between them has been missed.  I argue that the debate is best understood as one between two accounts of the justification of political norms, and two conceptions of democratic legitimacy, which is what makes the Habermas-Rawls dispute germane to the theme of this volume. Failure to grasp this has led to the dispute’s having been peremptorily dismissed as uninteresting and unworthy of comment.