Dictionary of Arguments


Philosophical and Scientific Issues in Dispute
 
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The author or concept searched is found in the following 48 entries.
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Entry
Reference
Action Theory Habermas III 369
Action Theory/Analytical Philosophy/Habermas: the analytical action theory ((s) following Grice, Austin) is limited to the atomistic action model of a solitary actor and neglects mechanisms of action coordination through which interpersonal relationships are formed. >P. Grice, >J.L. Austin.
III 370
Therefore, it finds hardly any connection to the formation of social scientific concepts. The philosophical problems it creates are too non-specific for the purposes of social theory. >Sociology, >Method.
HabermasVsAnalytical Philosophy/HabermasVsAnalytical Theory of Action: it goes back to Kant by asking about causality, intentionality and the logical status of explanations without penetrating into the basic questions of a sociological theory of action.
>Causality, >Causal explanation, >Explanation.
Instead, questions of coordination of action should be taken as a starting point.(1)
>Actions/Habermas, >Action Systems/Habermas.
III 371
HabermasVsGrice/HabermasVsBennett/HabermasVsLewis, David/HabermasVsSchiffer: the intentional semantics developed by these authors are not suitable for clarifying the coordination mechanism of linguistically mediated interactions, because it analyses the act of communication itself according to the model of consequence-oriented action. >Intentional Semantics, >St. Schiffer, >D. Lewis, >J. Bennett.
Intentional Semantics/HabermasVsGrice: Intentional semantics is based on the contraintuitive idea that understanding the meaning of a symbolic expression can be traced back to the speaker's intention to give the listener something to understand.
III 373
Solution/Habermas: Karl Bühler's organon model (see Language/Bühler), ((s) which distinguishes between symbol, signal and symptom and refers to sender and receiver) leads in its theoretical meaning to the concept of an interaction of subjects capable of speech and action mediated by acts of communication. >Interaction, >Subjects.
III 384
Action Theory/Habermas: HabermasVsWeber: unlike Weber, who assumes a monological action model, Habermas considers a model that takes into account the coordination of several action subjects. He differentiates between action types according to situation and orientation: Action Orientation: success-oriented - or communication-oriented
Action Situation: social - or non-social
Instrumental Action/Habermas: is then success-oriented and non-social
Strategic action: success-oriented and social (it takes into account the actions and interests of others).
>Interest.
Communicative Action: is social and communication-oriented (without being success-oriented).
>Communicative action/Habermas, >Communication theory/Habermas,
>Communication/Habermas, >Communicative practice/Habermas,
>Communicative rationality/Habermas, >Agreement, >Success.

1.S. Kanngiesser, Sprachliche Universalien und diachrone Prozesse, in: K. O. Apel (1976), 273ff.

Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981

Action Theory Weber Habermas III 378
Action Theory/Communicative Action/Weber/HabermasVsWeber/Habermas: since Weber assumes a monological model of action, "social action" cannot be explained by the concept of meaning. It is based on the concept of purposive action and must extend it by two provisions to explain social interaction: a) Orientation towards the behaviour of other subjects
b) The reflective relationship between the orientations of several interaction participants.
>Purposive action, >Purpose rationality, >Action, >Interaction, >Cooperation.
Habermas III 379
Act/Action/Weber/Habermas: Weber distinguishes between procedural rational
value rational
emotional and
traditional action.
Weber therefore does not start with the social relationship.
>Value rationality, >Rationality, cf. >Rationalization.
Habermas III 380
Purpose rational action/Weber: the subjective sense here extends to: Means, purposes, values, consequences Value rational action: on means, purposes, values
Emotional action: on means and purposes
Traditional action: only on the means.
Cf. >Purpose-means-rationality, >Purposes, >Goals, >Values, cf. >Consequentialism.
Habermas III 381
Habermas: "Inofficial version" of Weber's theory of action ((s) this is a position not explicitly represented by Weber, which could, however, be deduced from his texts): here mechanisms of coordination of action are distinguished, depending on whether only interests or also social agreement are taken as a basis. (1) >Action Theory/Habermas.


1.Vgl. M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, hrsg. v. J. Winckelmann, Tübingen 1964, S.246f.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Actions Luhmann AU Cass 4
Action/LuhmannVsAction Theory: the concept of action is not suitable, because a participant is presupposed. - But they also exist, however, without an audience.
In principle, an action can be presented as a solitary, socially non-resonant cause.
---
AU Cass 11
Action Theory: insisting on rationality - comes from Max Weber. Action/Weber: first means and purpose must be distinguished.
>Purpose, >Purposive action.
LuhmannVsWeber: Problem: what should be excluded - is a certain action rather behavior?
Weber: more description of ideal types than of concrete reality.
Solution/today: Rational Choice Theory.
Cf. >Rational Choice.
Outside delimitation: Problem: what counts as consequences.
Internal delimitation: Solution: the actor, must ascribe the action to himself.
Problem: what counts as a motive?
>Motives.
LuhmannVsAction Theory: it does not clarify the contours of the concept of action. - It does not answer the question of how systems can be formed from actions, when the action is consolidated psychologically and biologically in the individual.
Cf. >Action systems/Luhmann,
>Action theory.

AU I
N. Luhmann
Introduction to Systems Theory, Lectures Universität Bielefeld 1991/1992
German Edition:
Einführung in die Systemtheorie Heidelberg 1992

Lu I
N. Luhmann
Die Kunst der Gesellschaft Frankfurt 1997

Bureaucracy Parsons Habermas IV 432
Bureaucracy/Weber/Parsons/Habermas: Max Weber bureaucratization thesis: In modern times, bureaucratization is increasing. >Bureaucracy/Weber, >M. Weber.
Talcott ParsonsVsWeber/Habermas: instead of a trend towards bureaucratization, there is a trend towards associationism. Many, however, feel an increase in bureaucracy. Symptoms of this are a deterioration ((s) of the feeling) of "community".
>Community.
Habermas IV 433
"Privatization": it is emphasized that the modern community has been "privatized" and many relationships have been moved into the context of large formal organizations. ((s) Parsons characterizes here an attitude that can be attributed to Weber). Parsons: Bureaucratization does not threaten to flood everything. On the contrary, the system of mass communication is a functional equivalent of some characteristics of the "Gemeinschaft" and beyond that, one that allows the individual to participate selectively in the context of his/her individual standards and wishes.(1)
HabermasVsParsons: 1) Mass communication: is not designed to counteract the "privatization" of lifestyle,
2) The generalization of formal legal claims cannot easily be understood in the sense of expanding democratic decision-making processes.

1.T.Parsons, The System of Modern Societies, Englewood Cliffs 1971, S. 116f.

ParCh I
Ch. Parsons
Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century: Selected Essays Cambridge 2014

ParTa I
T. Parsons
The Structure of Social Action, Vol. 1 1967

ParTe I
Ter. Parsons
Indeterminate Identity: Metaphysics and Semantics 2000


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Coercion Political Philosophy Gaus I 200
Coercion/Political philosophy/Morris: State power is closely associated with force, as we see from the popularity of the Weberian definition. >State/Weber.
Many theorists think states are necessarily or essentially coercive. 'States are ' 'grounded" in force in the sense that, by definition, they are coercive: they coordinate behavior through the use or threat of force' (Levine, 1987(1): 176); 'State-power is in the last analysis coercive power' (Geuss, 2001(2): 12); 'political power is always coercive power backed up by the government's use of sanctions, for government alone has the authority to use force in upholding its laws' (Rawls, 1996(3): 136). The view that governments must wield force or that their power is necessarily coercive is widespread in contemporary political thought.
State/Coercion/MorrisVsWeber: The incompleteness of Weberian definitions of the state is only part of my objection to them.
>MorrisVsWeber; >State/Morris) The second concern is about understanding coercion or force to be part of the concept of the state. >Coercion/Morris.
MorrisVsRawls: Why might we think, with Rawls, that 'political power is always coercive power backed up by the government's use of sanctions'? Perhaps because of the conjunction of law and sanction. But that connection is not necessary.
>J. Rawls.
Some laws are not enforced by sanctions (for instance, laws governing the obligations of officials, laws establishing powers, constitutional laws). Attempts to understand the law in terms of the coercive commands of a sovereign are implausible (see Austin, 1885(4), for the classic formulation of this position; and Hart, 1994(5), for the classic refutation).
>Command/Hart.

1. Levine, Andrew (1987) The End of the State. London: Verso.
2. Geuss, Raymond (2001) History and Illusion in Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Rawls, John (1996) Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
4. Austin, John (1995 t 18851) The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5. Hart, H. L. A. (1994) The Concept of Law, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Morris, Christopher W. 2004. „The Modern State“. In: Gaus, Gerald F. & Kukathas, Chandran 2004. Handbook of Political Theory. SAGE Publications


Gaus I
Gerald F. Gaus
Chandran Kukathas
Handbook of Political Theory London 2004
Communication Media Habermas III 458
Communication Media/Sociology/Action Theory/Communicative Action/Habermas: the liberation of communicative action from tradition-based institutions - i.e. from consensus commitments - leads to the replacement of institutions by organisations of a new type: they are formed on the basis of communication media that uncouple action from communication processes and coordinate them via generalised instrumental values such as money and power.(1) >Media, >Institutions, >Society.
These control media replace language as a mechanism for coordinating action and move social action away from integration that goes via a consensus of values and convert it to a media-controlled procedural rationalization.
>Social action, >Language/Habermas.
HabermasVsWeber: he does not recognize money and power as the communication media that enable the differentiation of subsystems of procedural rational action.
>M. Weber, >Procedural Rationality/Weber.
IV 269
Communication Media/Habermas: In the course of differentiating between understanding and success-oriented action, two types of relief mechanisms are formed, namely in the form of communication media.
IV 270
Which either bundle or replace verbal communication. >Agreement/Habermas.
For example, reputation and power are primitive generators of readiness to follow (either rationally through trust in valid knowledge or empirically through incentive through expected reward). They are the starting point for media education.
>Recognition >Power.
The communication media can be generalized themselves and thus form control media.
IV 387
Communication media/system theory/Habermas: the structural characteristics of a medium only become apparent to the extent that they are normatively anchored and enable the differentiation of a social subsystem. >Communication Media/Parsons.

1. ((s) See N. Luhmann's systems theory, in which money, power, truth, etc. are understood as symbolically generalized communication media. See in particular C. Baraldi, G. Corsi, E. Esposito GLU, Frankfurt 1997, S. 202ff.

Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981

Communicative Action Habermas III 128
Communicative action/Habermas: the concept refers to the interaction of at least two subjects capable of speech and action who enter into an interpersonal relationship (by linguistic or non-linguistic means). The actors seek an understanding to coordinate their plans and thus their actions. Language is given a prominent status here. >Agreement, >Language/Habermas.
III 143
Problem: there is a danger that social action will be reduced to the interpretive performance of the communication participants, action will be adapted to speech, interaction to conversation. In fact, however, linguistic communication is only the mechanism of action coordination, which brings together the action plans and activities of the ones involved.
III 157
In communicative action, the outcome of the interaction itself is dependent on whether the participants can agree among themselves on an intersubjectively valid assessment of their world-relationships. >World/thinking, >Reality.
III 158
Interpretation: Problem: for the understanding of communicative actions we have to separate questions of meaning and validity. The interpretation performance of an observer differs from the coordination efforts of the participants. The observer does not seek a consensus interpretation. But perhaps only the functions differed here, not the structures of interpretation. >Observation, >Method, >Interpretation, >Practice.
III 385
Communicative Action/Habermas: here the participants are not primarily oriented towards their own success; they pursue their individual goals on the condition that they can coordinate their action plans on the basis of common situation definitions. In this respect, the negotiation of situation definitions is an essential component. >Situations.
III 395
Communicative Action/Speech Acts/Perlocution/Illocution/Habermas: Strawson has shown that a speaker achieves his/her illocutionary goal that the listener understands what is being said without revealing his/her perlocutionary goal. This gives perlocutions the asymmetric character of covert strategic actions in which at least one of the participants behaves strategically, while deceiving other participants that he/she does not meet the conditions under which normally illocutionary goals can only be achieved. >Speech acts, >Illocutionary act, >Perlocutionary act
Therefore, perlocutions are not suitable for the analysis of coordination of actions, which are to be explained by illocutionary binding effects.
This problem is solved if we understand communicative action as interaction in which all participants coordinate their individual action plans and pursue their illocutionary goals without reservation.
III 396
Only such interactions are communicative actions in which all participants pursue illocutionary goals. Otherwise they fall under strategic action.
III 397
HabermasVsAustin: he has tended to identify speech acts with acts of communication, i.e. the linguistically mediated interactions.
III 400
Definition Understanding/Communication/Habermas: in the context of our theory of communicative action we limit ourselves to acts of speech under standard conditions, i.e. we assume that a speaker means nothing else than the literal meaning of what he/she says. >Meaning/Intending.
Understanding a sentence is then defined as knowing what makes that sentence acceptable.
>Understanding.
III 457
Communicative action/Rationalization/HabermasVsWeber/Habermas: only if we differentiate between communicative and success-oriented action in "social action" can the communicative rationalization of everyday actions and the formation of subsystems for procedural rational economic and administrative action be understood as complementary development. Although both reflect the institutional embodiment of rationality complexes, in another respect they are opposite tendencies.
IV 223
Communicative Actions/HabermasVsSystem theory/Habermas: Communicative actions succeed only in the light of cultural traditions - this is what ensures the integration of society, and not systemic mechanisms that are deprived of the intuitive knowledge of their relatives. >Cultural tradition, >Culture.

Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981

Confucianism Weber Habermas III 290
Confucianism/Taoism/Weber/Habermas: In his study about the economic ethics of the world religions Max Weber assesses Confucianism and Taoism solely from the point of view of ethical rationalization. Therefore he arrives at his well-known (and controversial) assessment of the low rationalization potential of these worldviews. >Rationalization, >Worldviews, >Religion, >Religious Belief.
Weber: "The inner prerequisite of this ethics of unconditional world affirmation and adaptation to the world was the unbroken continuity of purely magical religiosity, beginning with the position of the emperor, whose personal qualification was responsible for the good behaviour of spirits, the occurence of rain (...), to the (...) cult of ancestral spirits (...)". (1)
>Renaissance, cf. >Western Rationalism.
J. NeedhamVsWeber/Habermas: thanks to the groundbreaking research of J. Needham (2) it is now known that the Chinese between the 1st century B.C. and the 15th century AD were apparently more successful than the West in the development of theoretical knowledge and its use for practical needs. It was only in the Renaissance that Europe took the clear lead in this field.
Confucianism/Needham: contains the fundamentals of a world view capable of rationalization. With the concept of a concrete world order, the diversity of phenomena is systematically grasped and related to principles. However, the dominant redemption motives that exacerbate the dualism between the world of appearances and principles that transcend the world are missing.
>Principles, >Appearance.
III 292
Like the Greek philosophers, the Chinese educational class could not rely on an "academic" life devoted to contemplation and distanced from practice, on a bios theoretikos. >Ancient Philosophy.
HabermasVsNeedham: I suspect that the Chinese traditions would be put in a different light if they were compared with classical Greek traditions, not primarily from the point of view of ethics but theory. In any case, it is not a matter of salvation paths, as is the case with conviction ethically redemption religions, but of ways of assuring the world.
Cf. >Ethics of conviction.


1. M. Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Bd. I Tübingen, 1963, S. 515.
2. J. Needham, Wissenschaftlicher Universalismus, Frankfurt 1977.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Contracts Durkheim Habermas IV 122
Contracts/Law/Durkheim/Habermas: for the transfer of property, inheritance is historically the norm. The competing form of acquisition or divestiture is the contract that is considered a status change. The contract adds new relationships to existing relationships. The contract is therefore a source of variations, which presupposes an earlier legal basis with a different origin. The contract is preferably the instrument with which the changes are implemented. He himself cannot form the original and fundamental foundations on which the law is based. (1) Problem: how can a contract bind the parties when the sacred basis of law has been removed?
Solution/Hobbes/Weber/Habermas: the standard answer since Hobbes and up to Max Weber is that modern law is compulsory law.
Habermas IV 123
DurkheimVsHobbes/DurkheimVsWeber/Habermas: Durkheim is not satisfied with that. Obedience must also have a moral core. The legal system is in fact a part of a political order with which it would fall if it could not claim legitimacy. (See Legitimacy/Durkheim). Legitimacy/Civil Law/Durkheim/Habermas: Problem: a contract cannot contain its own bases of validity. The fact that the parties voluntarily enter into an agreement does not imply the binding nature of this agreement. The contract itself is only possible thanks to a regulation of social origin. (2)

1. E. Durkheim, Lecons de sociologie, Physique des moeurs et du droit. Paris 1969, S. 203f ; (engl. London 1957).
2. E. Durkheim, De la division du travail social, German: Über die Teilung der sozialen Arbeit, Frankfurt, 1977, S. 255.

Durkheim I
E. Durkheim
The Rules of Sociological Method - French: Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique, Paris 1895
German Edition:
Die Regeln der soziologischen Methode Frankfurt/M. 1984


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Decisionism Weber Habermas III 358
Decisionism/Justification/Law/Decisionism/Weber/HabermasVsWeber/Habermas: Problem: if some form of rational agreement means the "only consistent form of legitimacy of a law", how can legal rule, whose legality is based on a purely decisionist right, be legitimized at all? Solution/Carl Schmitt/N. Luhmann: Weber's answer set a precedent from Carl Schmitt to Niklas Luhmann: through procedures. This does not mean a reduction to formal conditions of moral and practical justification of legal norms, but compliance with procedural rules in jurisdiction, application of law and legislation.
>Law, >Justification, >Ultimate justification, >Legitimacy.
Habermas III 359
Legitimacy is then based "on the belief in the legality of established orders and the right of instruction of those appointed by them to exercise power". (1) HabermasVsWeber: Problem: Where does the belief in legality find the power to legitimize when legality merely means conformity with a de facto existing legal system, and when this in turn is inaccessible as an arbitrarily positive law of practical moral justification. There is no way out of this circularity. (2)
>Circularity, >Justification, >Laws, >Constitution,
>Authority, >Democracy, >State.


1.M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, hrsg.v. J. Winckelmann, Tübingen 1964,S. 159
2.J. Winckelmann, Legitimität und Legalität in Webers Herrschaftssoziologie, Tübingen 1952; K. Eder, Zur Rationalisierungsproblematik des modernen Rechts, in: Soziale Welt, 2, 1978, S. 247ff.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Disenchantment Weber Habermas III 293
Disenchantment/Worldviews/Religion/Modernity/Weber/Habermas: Weber observes enchantment primarily in the interaction between believers and God. The stronger this is designed as communication,
Habermas III 294
the more strictly the individual can systematize his/her inner-worldly relations under the abstract aspects of morality. >Communication/Habermas.
This means
a) the preparation of an abstract concept of the world
b) the differentiation of a purely ethical attitude in which the actor can follow and criticize norms
c) the formation of a universalistic and individualistic concept of persons with the correlates of conscience, moral accountability, autonomy, guilt, etc.
>Norms, >Validity claims, >Ethics, >Abstraction, >World.
The reverent attachment to traditionally guaranteed concrete orders of life can thus be overcome in favour of a free orientation towards general principles.
>Principles, >Tradition, >Cultural transmission.
Habermas III 295
Cognitive dimension: here, the disenchanting of things and events is accompanied by a demythologization of the knowledge of the existing. All the more reason for individuals to systematize their relationships with the world, this time under the abstract aspects of a cosmological-metaphysical order whose laws govern all phenomena without exception. This means a) the preparation of a formal world concept for the existing as a whole with universals for the legal, space-time context of entities in general, (1)
b) the differentiation of a purely theoretical attitude (out of touch with practice),
c) the formation of an epistemic ego in general, which, free of affects, worldly interests, prejudices, etc., can surrender itself to the view of the existing.(2)
>I, Ego, Self, >Rationality, >Rationalization.
Habermas III 296
HabermasVsWeber: Weber has never analyzed in more detail the cognitive structures that emerge on the obstinate rationalization paths of religious and metaphysical worldviews. It is therefore not sufficiently clear that there is still another step between the results of world view rationalization and that world understanding that is "modern" in a specific sense. >Modernity, >Modernization, >Worldviews.
Habermas III 297
Modernity/Habermas: Modernity has no reserves in ethics or science that would be exempt from the critical force of hypothetical thought. First, however, a generalization of the level of learning, which has been achieved with the terminology of religious-metaphysical worldviews, is required. >Generalization, >Criticism.

1. A Koyré, Von der geschlossenen Welt zum unendlichen Universum, Frankfurt 1969.
2. H. Blumenberg, Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung, Frankfurt 1974.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Foundation Weber Habermas III 358
Foundation/law/decisionism/Weber/HabermasVsWeber/Habermas: Problem: if some form of rational agreement means the "only consistent form of legitimacy of a law", how can legal rule, whose legality is based on a purely decisionist right, be legitimized at all? Solution/Carl Schmitt/N. Luhmann: Weber's answer set a precedent from Carl Schmitt to Niklas Luhmann: through procedures. This does not mean a reduction to formal conditions of moral and practical justification of legal norms, but compliance with procedural rules in jurisdiction, application of law and legislation.
>Law, >Justification, >Ultimate justification, >Legitimacy.
Habermas III 359
Legitimacy is then based "on the belief in the legality of established orders and the right of instruction of those appointed by them to exercise power". (1) HabermasVsWeber: Problem: Where does the belief in legality find the power to legitimize when legality merely means conformity with a de facto existing legal system, and when this in turn is inaccessible as an arbitrarily positive law of practical moral justification. There is no way out of this circularity. (2)
>Circularity, >Justification, >Laws, >Constitution, >Authority, >Democracy, >State.

1.M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, hrsg. v. J. Winckelmann, Tübingen 1964, p. 159
2. J. Winckelmann, Legitimität und Legalität in Webers Herrschaftssoziologie, Tübingen 1952; K. Eder, Zur Rationalisierungsproblematik des modernen Rechts, in: Soziale Welt, 2, 1978, p. 247ff.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Freedom Parsons Habermas IV 310
Freedom/Action/Parsons/Habermas: Parsons tries to give a sociological turn to the Kantian idea of freedom as obedience to self-imposed laws: the actor can first adopt a conformist attitude based on recognition of their claim to validity. >Freedom/Kant, >Validity claims.
The force that can be felt through feelings of obligation is not only compatible with the autonomy of action, but in some ways even constitutes it.
>Autonomy/Parsons, >Action, >Coercion.
This force is no longer perceived as external violence but from within by penetrating the motives.
>Motives.
Habermas: this reflects the double character of freedom, which is constituted by the personal recognition of a connection to superpersonal orders.
Habermas IV 432
Freedom/Society/Parsons/Habermas: Talcott ParsonsVsWeber: Parsons does not believe that in modern societies the disintegration of religious and metaphysical worldviews threatens the relationships of solidarity and the identity of individuals who can no longer base their lives on "last ideas". Rather, he is convinced that modern societies have brought about an incomparable increase in freedom for the mass of the population.(1) >WorldViews/Weber.

1.Talcott Parsons, Belief, Unbelief and Disbelief, in: T. Parsons, Action Theory and the Human Condition, NY 1978, S. 320ff.

ParCh I
Ch. Parsons
Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century: Selected Essays Cambridge 2014

ParTa I
T. Parsons
The Structure of Social Action, Vol. 1 1967

ParTe I
Ter. Parsons
Indeterminate Identity: Metaphysics and Semantics 2000


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Freedom Weber Habermas III 320
Freedom/Weber/Habermas: Weber's thesis of the loss of freedom: in his present diagnosis, Weber is concerned that the subsystems of procedural rational action break away from their value-rational foundations and become self-dynamically independent. Weber relates this to the fact that the structures of consciousness, differentiated into independent cultural value spheres, are embodied in correspondingly antagonistic orders of life. >Society/Weber, >Systems, >Systems theory, >Purpose rationality,
>Rationalization.
Habermas IV 432
Freedom/Weber/Habermas: Thesis: in modern societies, the disintegration of religious and metaphysical worldviews threatens the relationships of solidarity and the identity of individuals who can no longer align their lives with "last ideas". >Ideas, >Individuals,
Talcott ParsonsVsWeber: see Freedom/Parsons.
Method/Habermas: we did not need to be interested in this dispute when it came to descriptions of global trends that were difficult to verify. Parson's differing position, however, results deductively from his description of the modernization process. See Modernism/Parsons, >T. Parsons.
Habermas IV 454
Freedom/Weber/Habermas: Weber's thesis of the loss of freedom: both prevail in bureaucratization: the highest form of social rationality and the most effective subsumption of the acting subjects under the material violence of an apparatus that has become independent above their heads. HabermasVsWeber: the thesis owes its plausibility solely to the ambiguous use of the term "rationalization". Its meaning shifts, depending on the context, from the rationality of action to the rationality of the system. On the one hand it is about the perspective of members, on the other hand about the image of a rationally working machine.(1)
Habermas IV 455
"Hard as steel housing"/Weber/Habermas: Together with the dead machine, the living machine of the independent bureaucracy is working to create that "housing of bondage". HabermasVsWeber: the talk of the living machine is metaphorical. However, Weber intuitively anticipated the distinction between system and purpose rationality.

1. M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, hrsg. v. J. Winckelmann, Köln, 1964, S. 1060.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Instrumental Reason Horkheimer Habermas III 461
Instrumental Reason/Horkheimer/Habermas: With Max Weber, Horkheimer is of the opinion that formal rationality "underlies contemporary industrial culture". (1) Formal Rationality/Weber/Habermas: the provisions that enable the "predictability" of actions: from the instrumental aspect the effectiveness of the available means and from the strategic aspect the correctness of the choice of means under given preferences, means and boundary conditions. Weber uses this term synonymously with procedural rationality.
Habermas III 462
HorkheimerVsWeber: In contrast, Horkheimer emphasizes the loss of rationality that occurs to the extent that actions can only be judged, planned and justified under cognitive aspects. Habermas: The irony is that reason, which according to Kant refers to the capacity of ideas and includes practical reason and judgement, is identified with what Kant distinguishes from it, namely with the activity of the mind. (2)
>Sense/Horkheimer.

1. M. Horkheimer, Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft, Frankfurt 1967, p. 13.
2. Ibid. p. 21.


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Law Hobbes Habermas IV 122
Law/Hobbes/Habermas: Question: How can a contract bind the parties if the sacred basis of the law has been removed? Solution/Hobbes/Weber/Habermas: the standard answer since Hobbes and up to Max Weber is that modern law is compulsory law. The internalization of moral corresponds to a complementary transformation of the law into an externally imposed, state-authorized power based on the state sanction apparatus. The quasi automatic enforceability of the fulfilment of legal claims
Habermas IV 123
is to guarantee obedience. >Coercion, >Obedience.
DurkheimVsHobbes/DurkheimVsWeber/Habermas: Durkheim is not satisfied with that. Obedience must also have a moral core. The legal system is in fact part of a political order with which it would fall if it could not claim legitimacy.
>Order, >Legitimacy.


Höffe I 222
Validity/Law/Laws/Hobbes/Höffe: Because of the authorization, the
Höffe I 223
authority to make decisions does not stem from " his own grace". Because of the social contract, in Hobbes' case it is also not "by the grace of God", but ultimately "by virtue of the consent of all those affected", all those with legal rights. Thus, a second level of authority, legitimacy, is added to the moment of legality. In any case, the succinct formula "validity by virtue of authority" reads fully developed: "validity by virtue of a power authorised by each person concerned", or in shorter form: "validity by virtue of freely recognised authority" or "validity by consensus". >Legal Positivism/Hobbes. In the case of theories of validity, two basic forms are often opposed to each other, the theories of power and the theories of consent or recognition. Although Hobbes is usually assigned to the power theorists because of his "validity by virtue of authority", in reality he is to be assigned to both groups of theories because of the basic recognition of the persons concerned. And because the authority is authorized over the basic recognition, his theory of law belongs additionally to a third theory group, the empowerment theories.

Hobbes I
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan: With selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668 Cambridge 1994


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981

Höffe I
Otfried Höffe
Geschichte des politischen Denkens München 2016
Law Weber Habermas III 231
Law/Weber/Habermas: Weber calls rationalization the cognitive independence of law and moral, i.e. the replacement of moral-practical insights of ethical and legal doctrines, principles, maxims and decision rules of world views in which they were initially embedded. Cosmological, religious and metaphysical worldviews are structured in such a way that the internal difference between theoretical and practical reason cannot yet come into effect. >Morality, >Ethics, >Worldviews, >Rationalization, >Rationality.
Habermas III 232
The autonomisation of law and moral leads to formal law and to profane ethics of conviction and responsibility. >Ethics of conviction, >Responsibility.
Of course, this autonomization is still in the making even within religious systems of interpretation. This leads to the dichotomization between a search for salvation, which is oriented towards inner salvation goods and means of salvation, and the realization of an outer, objectified world. Weber shows how ethics of conviction approaches develop from this religiousness of conviction. (1)
>Religion.
Habermas III 278
Law/Weber/Habermas: for the emergence of modern law, Weber must postulate a process that is assumed in parallel, even if not simultaneously by him for the rationalization of worldviews. >World View/Weber. The availability of post-traditional legal concepts is not yet identical with the enforcement of a modern legal system. Only on the basis of rational natural law can legal matters be reconstructed in basic concepts of formal law in such a way that legal institutions can be created that formally satisfy universalist principles. These must regulate private commercial transactions between the owners of goods and the complementary activities of the public administration.
HabermasVsWeber: this does not show the parallelism of these two processes clearly enough.
Habermas III 332
Law/Weber/HabermasVsWeber/Habermas: Weber's theoretical position of law in his theory of rationalization is ambiguous in that it simultaneously permits the institutionalization of procedural rational economic and administrative action and also seems to make the detachment of subsystems from their moral-practical foundations possible. Cf. >Natural Justice.
The dialectical explanation of the conflicting developments of the development of science and religion cannot be applied to the development of law, since it appears from the outset in a secularized form.
Habermas: Weber reinterprets modern law in such a way that it is separated from the evaluative value sphere.
Habermas III 346
HabermasVsWeber: Weber empirically reinterprets the problem of legitimacy and decouples the political system from forms of moral-practical rationality; he also cuts the formation of political will back to processes of power acquisition and power competition. >Legitimacy, >Justification, >Ultimate justification.
Law/Weber: as far as the normative agreement is based on tradition, Weber speaks of conventional community action. To the extent that this is replaced by success-oriented, purpose-oriented action, the problem arises as to how these new scopes can in turn be legitimate, i.e. normatively bindingly ordered. Rational social action takes the place of conventional community action.
>Purpose rationality, >Conventions, >Community.
Habermas III 347
Only the procedure of coming into being justifies the assumption that a normative agreement is rationally motivated. Only within normatively defined limits may legal entities act rationally without regard to conventions. HabermasVsWeber: Weber fluctuates here between discursive agreement and arbitrary statute.
Habermas III 351
Modern civil private law/Weber/Habermas: is characterised by three formal features: positivity, legalism and formality. Def positivity/Habermas: positively set law is not generated by interpretation of recognized and sacred traditions, it rather expresses the will of a sovereign
Habermas III 352
legislator, which uses legal organisational means to regulate social offences conventionally. Def Legalism/Habermas: legal entities are not subject to any moral motives other than general legal obedience. It protects their private inclinations within sanctioned boundaries. Not only bad convictions, but also actions that deviate from the norm are sanctioned, assuming accountability.
Def Formality/Law/Habermas: Modern law defines areas of legitimate arbitrariness of private individuals. The arbitrary freedom of legal entities in a morally neutralized area of private actions with legal consequences is assumed. Private law transactions can therefore be regulated negatively by restricting authorisations that are recognised in principle (instead of a positive regulation of concrete obligations and material bids). Anything that is not prohibited by law is permitted in this area.
Habermas: the system functionality corresponding to these characteristics results from legal structures in which procedural rational action can become general. It does not explain how these legal structures themselves are possible.
Habermas III 353
Rather, the form of modern law is explained by the post-traditional structures of consciousness it embodies. HabermasVsWeber: Weber would have to understand the modern legal system as an order of life, which is assigned to the moral-practical way of life. But Weber's attempt to view the rationalization of law exclusively from the point of view of rationality of purpose contradicts this.
Habermas: only at a post-conventional level does the idea of the fundamental critiqueability and need for justification of legal norms emerge.
Habermas III 354
Modern Law/Weber/Habermas: separates morality and legality. This requires practical justification. The moral-free sphere of law refers to a moral based on principles. The achievement of making something positive is to shift justification problems, i.e. to relieve the technical handling of the law of justification problems, but not to eliminate these justification problems. This justification, which has become structurally necessary, is expressed in the catalogue of fundamental rights contained in the civil constitutions alongside the principle of popular sovereignty.
Habermas III 357
Modern Law/Weber: For Weber, modern law in the positivist sense is to be understood as the law that is set by decision and completely detached from rational agreement, from concepts of justification, no matter how formal they may be. ((s) > Carl Schmitt's Decisionism/Weber). WeberVsNatural justice: Thesis: There can be no purely formal natural justice.
Being-Should/Weber: The supposed to be valid is considered to be identical with that which in fact exists everywhere on average; the 'norms' obtained by logical processing of concepts of legal or ethical, belong in the same sense as the 'natural laws' to those generally binding rules which 'God himself cannot change' and against which a legal system must not attempt to rebel.
(2)
>Natural Justice.
Habermas III 358
HabermasVsWeber: Weber confuses the formal characteristics of a post-traditional level of justification with particular material values. Nor does he sufficiently distinguish between structural and content-related aspects in rational natural justice and can therefore equate "nature" and "reason" with value contents, from which modern law, in the strict sense, is detached as an instrument for asserting any values and interests. >Foundation/Weber.
Habermas III 362
Procedural legitimacy/procedural rationality/law/HabermasVsWeber: as soon as the rationalization of law is reinterpreted as a question of the procedural rational organization of procedural rational management and administration, questions of the institutional embodiment of moral-practical rationality cannot only be pushed aside, but downright turned into its opposite: These now appear as a source of irrationality, at least of "motives that weaken the formal rationalism of law".(3) Habermas: Weber confuses the recourse to the establishment of legal rule with a reference to particular values.

Habermas IV 122
Law/Weber/Habermas: Question: How can a contract bind the parties if the sacred basis of the law has been removed? Solution/Hobbes/Weber/Habermas: the standard answer since Hobbes and up to Max Weber is that modern law is compulsory law. The internalization of moral corresponds to a complementary transformation of the law into an externally imposed, state-authorized power based on the state sanction apparatus. The quasi automatic enforceability of the fulfilment of legal claims
Habermas IV 123
is to guarantee obedience. >Obedience.
DurkheimVsHobbes/DurkheimVsWeber/Habermas: Durkheim is not satisfied with that. Obedience must also have a moral core. The legal system is in fact part of a political order with which it would fall if it could not claim legitimacy.
>E. Durkheim.

1. M. Weber, Gesammelte Ausätze zur Religionssoziologie, Vol. I. 1963, p. 541.
2.M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Ed. J. Winckelmann, Tübingen 1964, p. 638
3.Ibid p. 654

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Legal Positivism Weber Habermas III 355
Legal positivism/Weber/Habermas: Weber defines modern law and legal rule so narrowly that the principle of need for justification is ignored in favour of the principle of statutes. Weber emphasizes above all the structural characteristics that are connected with the formalism of a technically systematized law and with the positivity of set norms (characteristics: positivity, legality and formality). HabermasVsWeber: Weber neglects the moment of need for justification. In doing so, he excludes the very rational ideas that arose with the right of reason in the 17th century and have since been characteristic, if not for all legal norms, then nevertheless for the legal system as a whole, especially for the public-law foundations of legal rule.
>Rational law, >Rationality, >Rationalism, >Law, >Justification,
>Ultimate justification.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Legitimacy Durkheim Habermas IV 123
Legitimacy/Civil Law/Durkheim/Habermas: Problem: a contract cannot contain its own bases of validity. The fact that the parties voluntarily enter into an agreement does not imply the binding nature of this agreement. The contract itself is only possible thanks to a regulation of social origin.(1) >Contracts, >Contract theory.
This regulation, for its part, cannot be an expression of mere arbitrariness, not based on the factuality of state authority.
>Arbitrariness.
Solution/Durkheim: the rights that have their origin in things were dependent on the religious nature of these things. Thus, all moral and legal relations (...) owe their existence to a sui generis force that is inherent in either the subjects or the objects and that forces respect.
Question: how can two decisions originating from two different subjects have a greater binding force, simply because they are identical?(2)
>Agreement.
Solution/Durkheim: contracts have the binding character due to the legitimacy of the legal regulations on which they are based. And these only apply
Habermas IV 124
as legitimate because they express a general interest. Criterion/Durkheim: that the contract is moral is only guaranteed due to the fact that no side is favoured.(3)
>Justice.
DurkheimVsWeber/Habermas: Durkheim is not - like Max Weber - concerned here with material justice, but with the fact that the obligatory character of contracts cannot be derived from the arbitrariness of the interest-led agreement of individuals.
>Interest.
1. E. Durkheim, De la division du travail social, German: Über die Teilung der sozialen Arbeit, Frankfurt, 1977, p. 255.
2. E. Durkheim, Lecons de sociologie, Physique des moeurs et du droit. Paris 1969, p. 205. (engl. London 1957).
3. Durkheim (1969) p. 231.

Durkheim I
E. Durkheim
The Rules of Sociological Method - French: Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique, Paris 1895
German Edition:
Die Regeln der soziologischen Methode Frankfurt/M. 1984


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Legitimacy Morris Gaus I 202
Legitimacy/Morris: suppose that some states - those that serve our interests, that behave justly, and so on - are such that they are justified and that they are thereby legitimated. Do they then possess all of the normative powers they claim? We need to investigate legitimacy. When are states legitimate? What is the basis of their legitimacy? And what exactly does legitimacy entail? 'Legitimacy' is derived from lex and has the same root as 'legislation'. One sense of 'legitimate'
is being in accordance with law or lawful (legality). Any lawful or 'legal' state is legitimate in this
sense. Closely related would be the more general notion of being in accordance with the established rules or procedures relevant to the matter at issue (e.g. a legitimate move in chess, the legitimate heir to the throne). These senses of 'legitimate', largely procedural and similar to the primary sense of 'legal' (being in accordance with the law), are not very useful for our normative inquiry.
Problems: often in politics and especially international affairs a state is thought to be legitimate if it is recognized or accepted by others. There is considerable unclarity as to what this means. Sometimes the suggestion seems to be merely that a legitimate state is a genuine state. Legitimacy in this sense is uninteresting. Sometimes the idea of acceptance or recognition suggests that being a legitimate state requires being so recognized by other states, as if legitimacy were a kind of membership in an organization or club. Even if the members of this club are not all corrupt, this notion also seems uninteresting. The question is what conditions ought to be imposed for membership.
Social scineces/Weber: in the social sciences, accounts derived from Weber would have us understand the state's legitimacy in terms of the attitudes of subjects.
MorrisVsWeber: the crudest would say that a state is legitimate in so far as it is so regarded by its subjects, which is not very illuminating until we understand what it is for someone so to regard a state.
State: What is it then for a state to be legitimate in a more substantive sense? If a state is legitimate it has a certain status. At the least, its existence is permissible. It may also have a (claim-)right to exist.
>State/Morris.
Solution: a legitimate state, we shall say, is minimally one which has a liberty, presumably a
(claim-)right, to exist. It would presumably also possess the liberty or the right to establish laws and to adjudicate and enforce these as necessary for the maintenance of order and other ends. Legitimacy in this minimal sense would be the right to exist and to rule.
>Obedience/Morris.
Legitimacy, strong and weak: it is useful at this point to distinguish weaker and stronger conceptions of legitimacy. A legitimate state possesses a (claim-)right to exist and to rule.
The right to exist entails obligations on the part of others not to threaten its existence in certain
ways (e.g. not to attack or to conquer it).
a) a state is
Gaus I 203
minimally legitimate, I shall say, if its right to rule entails that others are obligated not to undermine it but are not necessarily obligated to obey it. 2) by contrast, a state is fully legitimate if its right to rule entails an obligation of subjects, or at least citizens, to obey (each valid law). This obligation may be thought of as a general obligation to obey the law, one which requires compliance with every law that applies to one except in circumstances indicated by the law (e.g. justified or excused disobedience).*
Minimal legitimacy: What establishes minimal legitimacy? Suppose a state to be just.** That is, suppose that it respects the constraints of justice and does not act unjustly. In addition, suppose that it provides justice to those subject to its rule; it makes and enforces laws, adjudicates disputes, and provides mechanisms for collective decisions (e.g. contracts, corporate law,
local governments, parliaments). Some of the laws as well as a number of social programmes seek to effect distributive justice (...).Government in general is responsive to the just interests or wishes of the governed. A state like this would be just. Suppose in addition that it is relatively efficient in its activities. (Morris, 1998(5): chs 4 and 6).
>Justice/Morris, >Justification/Morris, >Natural justice/Political philosophy.

* 'A state's legitimacy is its exclusive right to impose new duties on subjects by initiating legally binding directives, to have those directives obeyed, and to coerce noncompliers' (Simmons, 1999(1): 137). '"Justifying the state" is normally thought to mean showing that there are umversal obligations to obey the law... [T]he goal of justification of the state is to show that, in principle, everyone within its territories is morally bound to follow its laws and edicts' (Wolff, 1996(2): 42).

** 'Without justice, what are kingdoms but great robber bands?' (Augustine, 1984(3): 30). 'Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought' Rawls, 1971(4): 3).

1. Simmons, A. John (1999) 'Justification and legitimacy'. In his Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 122-57.
2. Wolff, Jonathan (1996) An Introduction to Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Augustine (1994 [1425]) Political Writings, eds E. Fortin and D. Kries, trans. M. Tracz and D. Kries. Indianapolis: Hackett.
4. Rawls, John (1971) A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
5. Morris, Christopher W. (1998) An Essay on the Modern State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morris, Christopher W. 2004. „The Modern State“. In: Gaus, Gerald F. & Kukathas, Chandran 2004. Handbook of Political Theory. SAGE Publications


Gaus I
Gerald F. Gaus
Chandran Kukathas
Handbook of Political Theory London 2004
Legitimacy Weber Habermas III 359
Legitimacy/Weber/Habermas: "Legitimacy can be considered legitimate [by the participants]: a) by agreement of the interested parties for them; b) by imposition (due to a rule of people over people considered legitimate) and submissiveness".(1) >Convention, >Interest, >Governance, >Ultimate justification,
>Justification.
Habermas: in both cases it is not legality as such that creates legitimacy, but either (a) a rational agreement, which already underlies the legal order, or (b) an otherwise legitimized rule of those who impose the legal order.
Weber: The transition from an agreed on to an imposed order is smooth. (2)
Habermas III 360
Habermas: even with flowing transitions, the two sources of legitimacy - agreement or imposition of a powerful will - can be analytically separated. Solution/Weber: the latter presupposes the belief in an authority that is legitimate in any sense. (3)
Belief/HabermasVsWeber: the belief in the legality of a procedure cannot generate legitimacy per se, i.e. by virtue of positive statutes. This is already apparent from the logical analysis of the concepts of legitimacy and legality. How did Weber come to this? I only find one argument that does not hold up either: that everyday techniques are usually no longer understood in their inner reasons. Weber points this out.(4)
Habermas III 361
According to Weber, we can understand the belief in legality as a secondary traditionalism that no longer poses any problems for institutions with prerequisites. >Culture, >Cultural tradition.
Ultimately, however, rational foundations of the legal system are again assumed.(5)
>Rationality.
Habermas: Ultimately, experts are needed to justify where laypersons are not able to do so ad hoc.
>Justification.
HabermasVsWeber/HabermasVsDecisionism: Legality based on positive statutes alone can indicate an underlying legitimacy, but cannot replace it. Belief in legality is not an independent type of legitimacy. (6)
Habermas III 363
Legitimation/Weber: thesis: the "ignorance of the ever-increasing technical content of the law" extends the path of legitimacy ((s), i.e. legitimation and legitimacy is more difficult for the individual citizen to see through, for the institutions it is more difficult to prove).
Habermas III 364
Habermas: the extension of the legitimation paths does not mean, however, that the belief in legality could replace the belief in the legitimation of the legal system as a whole. Weber/Habermas: consequently understands the reversal of polarity from ethical to purely utilitarian orientations of action as a decoupling of the motivational foundations or the moral-practical value sphere. But instead of welcoming contrary tendencies, Weber sees them as a danger to the formal qualities of the law.(7)
>Utilitarianism, >Value Spheres.

1. M. Weber, Methodologische Schriften, hrsg. v. J. Winckelmann, Tübingen, 1968, S.316
2. Ibid p. 317.
3. Ibid p. 318
4. Ibid p. 212f
5. Ibid p. 214
6. W. Schluchter (following H. Heller) introduces "legal principles" which are intended to act as a bridge between positive law and the foundations of an ethics of responsibility (1979, p. 155ff). HabermasVsSchluchter: the status of these principles remains unclear. Within Max Weber's system they are a foreign element. 7. M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, hrsg.v. J. Winckelmann, Tübingen 1964, p. 655

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Modernism Habermas III 297
Modernism/Habermas: Modernism has no reserves in ethics or science that would be exempt from the critical force of hypothetical thought. First, however, a generalization of the level of learning, which has been achieved with the terminology of religious-metaphysical worldviews, is required. >Worldviews, >Worldviews/Weber, >Method, >Discourses, >Rationale, >Ultimate Rationale.
Based on Weber's analysis, two problems are encountered on the threshold of modernity:
1. Religious asceticism must first penetrate the non-religious areas of life in order to subject profane actions to the maxims of ethics of conviction.
>Religion, >Society, >Morality.
Weber identifies this process with the emergence of Protestant professional ethics.
>Ethics/Weber.
2. In the emergence of modern science, the decoupling of the theory from practical experience must be overcome. This happened in the form of experimental natural sciences.(1)
>Practise.
III 299
Protestant Ethics/Weber/Habermas: in traditional society, the cognitive potential created by the rationalized worldviews within which the demystification process takes place cannot yet become effective. It is only delivered in modern societies. This process means the modernisation of society.(2) >Protestant ethics.
IV 433
Modernism/HabermasVsParsons/Habermas: ParsonsVsWeber: Parsons describes the same phenomena that Weber can interpret as signs of social pathologies as further evidence of the formation of a form of solidarity appropriate to the complexity of modern societies. >T. Parsons.
Parsons/Habermas: through his division of the basic concepts, he creates a synchronization of the rationalization of the lifeworld with increases in the complexity of the social system. In this way, he prevents exactly the distinctions that we have to make if we want to grasp the pathologies occurring in modernism.
>Bureaucracy/Parsons.


1.W. Krohn, Die neue Wissenschaft der Renaissance, in: G. Böhme, W. v.d. Daele, W. Krohn, Experimentelle Philosophie, Frankfurt, 1977, S. 13ff.
2.Vgl. H.V. Gumbrecht, R. Reichardt, Th.Schleich (Hrg), Sozialgeschichte der Französischen Aufklärung, 2 Bde, München, 1981

Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981

Modernism Parsons Habermas IV 303
Modernism/Parsons/HabermasVsParsons/Habermas: Parson's theory of modernism is too harmonistic because it does not have the means for a plausible explanation of pathological development patterns.
Habermas IV 420
Modernism/Parsons/HabermasVsParsons/Habermas: Parsons' theory of modernity has a Janus face: A) it differs from a system functionalism that exclusively emphasizes the traits of complexity in modern societies. That's Luhmann's line. >Modernism/Luhmann.
Habermas IV 421
Method/ParsonsVsLuhmann/Habermas: Parsons understands social modernization not only as systemic rationalization, but as action-related rationalization.
Habermas IV 422
HabermasVsParsons: Problem: Parsons lacks a social concept designed from an action perspective. Therefore, he cannot describe the rationalization of the lifeworld and the increase in the complexity of action systems as separate, interacting, but often also contradictory processes. Therefore, he cannot grasp the corresponding dialectic and must reduce these phenomena to the degree of crisis symptoms that can be explained according to the pattern of inflation and deflation.
>Revolutions/Parsons.
Habermas IV 432
Modernism/Parsons/ParsonsVsWeber/Habermas: Parsons does not arrive at a different view than Weber through a divergent description of global trends, about which one could argue; rather, this view is deductively derived from his analysis of the modernization process: "When developed modern societies are characterized by a high degree of inherent complexity, and when they have this complexity only in all four dimensions of adaptation capacity. If we can simultaneously increase the differentiation of media-controlled subsystems, inclusion and value generation, then there is an analytical relationship between a) the high complexity of the system and b) universalistic forms of social integration and informal institutionalized individualism. Habermas: Parsons therefore draws a harmonized picture of modernity.
>Bureaucracy/Parsons.
Habermas IV 433
Modernism/Parsons/HabermasVsParsons/Habermas: Parsons must reduce sociopathological phenomena to systemic imbalances; then the specific of social crises is lost. For self-regulated systems, which must permanently secure their risky existence by adapting to conditions of a contingent and over-complex environment,
Habermas IV 434
internal imbalances are the normal state.

ParCh I
Ch. Parsons
Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century: Selected Essays Cambridge 2014

ParTa I
T. Parsons
The Structure of Social Action, Vol. 1 1967

ParTe I
Ter. Parsons
Indeterminate Identity: Metaphysics and Semantics 2000


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Natural Justice Habermas III 278
Natural Law/Habermas: the emergence of rational natural law cannot be explained solely by the ethical rationalization of world views. >Worldviews/Weber.
It depends to a large extent on the development of science and requires an analysis of the relationship between cognitive and moral-practical components of the world view.
>Science, >Progress, >Morality, >Thinking, >Knowledge.
HabermasVsWeber, Max: Weber neglects this aspect.

Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981

Organisation Weber Habermas IV 453
Organisation/Weber/Habermas: Weber still imagined the activities of organisations as a kind of purpose-rational action on a large scale. >Institutions, >Institutionalization, >Purpose rationality.
Rationality/Weber: an organization is measured by the extent to which a company or institution enables or ensures purpose-rational action by its members.
HabermasVsWeber: this purpose model has been abandoned because it cannot explain why organisations cannot solve their conservation problems only through the purpose-rational behaviour of their members.
>Purposes, >Action, >Teleology.
Habermas IV 454
Solution/Habermas: Nowadays, the reference point of system rationality is chosen: the rationalisable "knowledge" expresses itself in the ability of social systems to control themselves. >System rationaly.
As a result, purpose-rational behavior loses importance. Instead, it is about the functional contributions of places, programs and decisions that any states and elements can make to solve system problems.(1)
>Freedom/Weber.

1. N. Luhmann, Zweck – Herrschaft –System, Der Staat, 1964, S. 129ff.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Philosophy of Science Weber Habermas III 221
Philosophy of science/Weber/Habermas: Weber criticizes concepts of progress and evolution exactly when they play an implicit normative role in empirical sciences. >Progress, >Evolution.
HabermasVsWeber: The sensitivity to naturalistic fallacy in the ethical field sharpened by Kant and the Neo-Kantianism value philosophy,
III 222
and at all the mixing of descriptive and evaluative statements has, of course, its downside. Weber combines it with a completely non-Kantian, almost historistic distrust against the argumentative power of practical reason. On a methodological level, Weber firmly rejects both ethical cognitivism and ethical naturalism. >Reason, >Reason/Kant, >I. Kant, >Neo-Kantianism, >Cognitivism, >Naturalism.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Phonetics Psychological Theories Slater I 192
Phonetics/psychological theories: Liberman, Harris, Hoffman, and Griffith (1957)(1) summarized a decade of research at Haskins Laboratories that revealed a special property of the human adult auditory system. In contrast to every other type of auditory stimulus, whose perception conformed to invariant principles such as Weber’s Law. Def Weber’s Law: differences in intensity and frequency are discriminated in proportional steps, not absolute steps.
LibermanVsWeber’s Law: Liberman et al. provided compelling evidence that certain classes of speech sounds (notably stop consonants) are not perceived in this monotonic manner.
Rather, speech is perceived in a non-monotonic manner, with discontinuities in discrimination that fall approximately at the edges of perceptual categories. Subsequent work from Haskins (Liberman, Harris, Kinney, & Lane, 1961(2); Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert Kennedy, 1967)(3) provided even more definitive evidence for what became known as categorical perception (CP).
Categorical Perception (CP): This special mode of perception was characterized by two crucial properties:
(a) tokens presented from a physical continuum were identified (labeled) as a member of one category or the other, with a sharp transition in identification (ID) at the category boundary, and
(b) failure of within-category discrimination and a peak in between-category discrimination for tokens that straddled the category boundary.
>Language development/psychological theories.
Language development: Because no speech production was required to document the presence of CP, one could avoid the circular logic of claiming that competence was limited by production deficiencies. Thus, if one could develop a method to test infants on a speech perception task, and if their performance conformed to the CP pattern of discrimination and identification observed in adults, then the presence of a functioning speech mode (i.e., an innate and linguistically relevant perceptual system) would be demonstrated.
Slater I 197
Development: There is no question that infants are better at some phonetic discrimination than adults. For example, infants from a Japanese speaking environment can discriminate the /ri-/li contrast (Tsushima et al., 1994)(4), even though it is not used phonemically by adult speakers of Japanese, and these adult speakers have great difficulty improving their /r/-/l/ discrimination even after extensive training (Lively, Pisoni, Yamada, Tohkura & Yamada, 1994)(5). This suggests that listening experience must play a substantial role in at least some phonetic category discrimination. Werker and Tees (1984) were the first to show the time-course of such a tuning by the listening environment. Infants from an English speaking environment were able at six months of age to discriminate two non-native phonetic contrasts (from Hindi and from Salish, a Native American language), thereby surpassing their adult English speaking parents. But by 12 months of age the discriminative abilities of infants from an English speaking environment for these two non-native contrasts had fallen to near chance.
Slater I 198
Consonant discrimination: (…) experience with the native language can exert a substantial role in consonant discrimination over the second six months of postnatal life. (…) Kuhl, Williams, Lacerda, Stevens, and Lindblom (1992)(6) showed that the effect of native language experience operates even earlier over vowel contrasts, with language-specific tuning by six months of age. Recent evidence from Kuhl, Tsao, and Liu (2003)(7) suggests that social interaction, rather than mere passive listening, plays a key role in this process of attuning the phonetic categories, and further work from Tsao, Liu, and Kuhl(2004)(8) suggests that early attunement is predictive of later levels of vocabulary size. >Phonemes, >Phonology, >Categorical perception, >P.D. Eimas.


1. Liberman, A. M., Harris, K. S., Hoffman, H. S., & Griffith, B.C. (1957). The discrimination of speech sounds within and across phoneme boundaries. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 54, 358—368.
2. Liberman, A. M., Harris, K. S., Kinney, J., & Lane, H. (1961). The discrimination of relative onset-time of the components of certain speech and non-speech patterns. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61,379—388.
3. Liberman, A. M., Cooper, F. S., Shankweiler, D. P., & Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1967). Perception of the speech code. Psychological Review, 74, 431—461.
4. Tsushima, T. Takizawa, O., Sasaki, M., Siraki, S., Nishi, K., Kohno, M., Menyuk, P., & Best, C. (1994,
October). Discrimination of English/r-l/ and/w-y/ by Japanese infants at 6—12 months: Language specific developmental changes in speech perception abilities. Paper presented at the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Yokohama, Japan.
5. Lively, S. E., Pisoni, D. B., Yamada, R. A., Tohkura, Y., & Yamada, T. (1994). Training Japanese listeners to identify English/r/ and /1/. III. Long-term retention of new phonetic categones. Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America, 96, 2076—2087.
6. Kuhl, P. K., Williams, K. A., Lacerda, F., Stevens, K. N., & Lindbiom, B. (1992). Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age. Science, 255, 606—608.
7. Kuhi, P. K., Tsao. F.-M., & Liu, H.-M. (2003). Foreign-language experience in infancy Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, 100, 9096—9101.
8. Tsao, F.-M., Liu, H.-M., & Kuhl, P. K. (2004). Speech perception in infancy predicts language development in the second year of life: A longitudinal study. Child Development, 75, 1067—1084.


Richard N. Aslin, “Language Development. Revisiting Eimas et al.‘s /ba/ and /pa/ Study”, in: Alan M. Slater and Paul C. Quinn (eds.) 2012. Developmental Psychology. Revisiting the Classic Studies. London: Sage Publications


Slater I
Alan M. Slater
Paul C. Quinn
Developmental Psychology. Revisiting the Classic Studies London 2012
Politics Weber Habermas III 346
Politics/Power/Weber/HabermasVsWeber: Weber empirically reinterprets the problem of legitimation and decouples the political system from forms of moral-practical rationality; he also cuts the formation of political will back to processes of power acquisition and power competition. >Legitimacy, >Power, >Rule, >Law, >Society.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Preferences Parsons Habermas IV 336
Preferences/Parsons/Habermas: ParsonsVsWeber: Example: The "social action" of the entrepreneur represents only one of several types of purposive and value-rational action: The modern doctor typically acts as universally and functionally specified as the businessman of the capitalist economy, but at the same time he/she is subject to the rules of professional ethics that prevent him/her from pursuing his/her economic interests by all legally permitted means.(1) S ee Terminology/Parsons: pattern variables.
Habermas: the pattern-variables are suitable for describing the fact that modern societies may consciously adopt contrary decision patterns for different areas of life and switch from a combination of preferences to the opposite.
>Decisions/Parsons.
Habermas IV 337
Preferences/Professions/Parsons: the instrumental activism from which Parsons reads the action orientation of American businessmen and doctors in the 1940s and 1950s and which he sees as being determined by basic decisions for an emotionally neutral attitude, universalism, performance orientation and a field-independent, cognitive style directed towards the specific, is simultaneously depicted on three levels, namely in structurally analog motives for action, professional roles and cultural values. (2) HabermasVsParsons: Problem: the scope of decision regulated by preference patterns is not filled by interpretation performances of the actor. The model does not permit any initiatives that could then be investigated in terms of how the various resources of the lifeworld, acquired competences, recognised norms and traditional cultural knowledge converge and form a reservoir for action orientations.
>Preferences.

1. Talcott Parsons, The Professions and the Social Structure; The Motivation of Economic Activities, in: T. Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, Rev. ed. NY 1949.
2. Talcott Parsons, The Social System, NY 1951, S. 78

ParCh I
Ch. Parsons
Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century: Selected Essays Cambridge 2014

ParTa I
T. Parsons
The Structure of Social Action, Vol. 1 1967

ParTe I
Ter. Parsons
Indeterminate Identity: Metaphysics and Semantics 2000


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Professional Ethics Weber Habermas IV 431
Professional Ethics/Weber/Habermas: Weber's thesis: the professional ethics developed in the early phase of industrialization, which was particularly widespread among capitalist entrepreneurs and legally trained civil servants, did not prevail in the employment system of developed capitalism. Instrumentalism/Weber: professional ethics (see Protestant Ethics/Weber) was superseded by instrumentalistic attitudes that were spread into the core areas of academic professions. (See Talcott ParsonsVsWeber).

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Protestant Ethics Acemoglu Acemoglu I 60
Protestant ethics/AcemogluVsWeber/Acemoglu/Robinson: Though it may be true that predominantly Protestant countries, such as the Netherlands and England, were the first economic successes of the modern era, there is little relationship between religion and economic success. France, a predominantly Catholic country, quickly mimicked the economic performance of the Dutch and English in the nineteenth century, and Italy is as prosperous as any of these nations today. Looking farther east, you’ll see that none of the economic successes of East Asia have anything to do with any form of Christian religion, so there is not much support for a special relationship between Protestantism and economic success there, either. >Economic growth, >Religion, >Christianity, >Christian Church, >Progress.

Acemoglu II
James A. Acemoglu
James A. Robinson
Economic origins of dictatorship and democracy Cambridge 2006

Acemoglu I
James A. Acemoglu
James A. Robinson
Why nations fail. The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty New York 2012

Protestant Ethics Marcuse Habermas III 320
Protestant Ethics/Rationalization/MarcuseVsWeber, Max/Marcuse/Habermas: Marcuse objects to Weber whether the instability he observes in a rationalized society is not due to the fact that capitalist development permits only a limited form of post-traditional orientations for action, which promotes a pattern of rationalisation according to which cognitive-instrumental rationality penetrates into other areas of life beyond the economy and the state and takes precedence there at the expense of moral-practical and aesthetic-practical rationality.(1) >Rationality, >Procedural Rationality, >Rationalization, >M. Weber,
>Instrumental Reason.

1. H. Marcuse, Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus in: O. Stammer (Hg.) Max Weber und die Soziologie heute, Tübingen 1965 S. 161ff.


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Protestant Ethics Parsons Habermas IV 431
Protestant Ethics/Parsons/ParsonsVsWeber/Habermas: contrary to Weber's thesis that Protestant ethics had been replaced by growing instrumentalistic attitudes in modern professions, Parsons is of the opinion that it is an important factor of orientation today as it was in the past (in the 1970s of the 20th century). Parson's thesis: Ultimately, work is evaluated against a religious background.(1) >Labor, cf. >Calvinism, >Religious Faith, >Religon.

1.Talcott Parsons, Belief, Unbelief and Disbelief, in: T. Parsons, Action Theory and the Human Condition, NY 1978, p. 320.

ParCh I
Ch. Parsons
Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century: Selected Essays Cambridge 2014

ParTa I
T. Parsons
The Structure of Social Action, Vol. 1 1967

ParTe I
Ter. Parsons
Indeterminate Identity: Metaphysics and Semantics 2000


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Protestant Ethics Weber Habermas III 299
Protestant Ethics/Weber/Habermas: in traditional society, the cognitive potential created by the rationalized worldviews within which the disenchantment process takes place cannot yet become effective. It is only delivered in modern societies. This process means the modernisation of society.(1) >Rationality, >Rationalization, >Tradition, >Cultural Tradition,
>Modernity, >Modernization, >Society.
Habermas III 307
Profession/Protestantism/Weber: modern professional culture is precisely that implementation of ethics of conviction that ensures motivationally the procedural rationality of entrepreneurial action in a way that has consequences for the capitalist enterprise. >Ethics of conviction.
Habermas III 308
Weber does not want to explain why the Catholic inhibitions against commercial profit-seeking have fallen, but what made the conversion possible. He discovered the corresponding teachings in Calvinism and around the Protestant sects. In religious community life he finds the institutions that ensured the socializing effectiveness of the teachings in the supporting layers of early capitalism.(2) >Institutions, >Religion.
Habermas III 310
Profession/Weber/Habermas: professional work as a whole is ethically charged and dramatised. The sphere of the profession is released from traditional morality and becomes the sphere of procedural professional probation. This is connected with an ethics of conviction limited to individual graces, which eliminates the Catholic coexistence of monk, priest and lay ethics in favour of an elitist separation between virtuoso and mass religiosity. >Purpose rationality, >Value spheres.
Consequences are the inner loneliness of the individual and the understanding of one's neighbor as another neutralized in strategic contexts of action. (3)
Habermas III 311
Protestant ethics/Schluchter: the ethics of ascetic Protestantism puts the relationship of the individual to God above his relationships to people and gives these relationships a new meaning: they are no longer interpreted in piety terms.(4) Habermas: even the objectification of these relationships destroys the basis of legitimacy of piety. It degrades all traditional norms to mere conventions. However, this does not require the special objectification required for capitalist economic transactions and which allows segmentation of a legally organized area of strategic action.
HabermasVsWeber: Weber denies such a possibility of development.
Habermas III 312
This is because of the structural incompatibility of any consistently ethicized religion of redemption with the impersonal orders of a rationalized economy and objective politics. >Economy, >Politics.


1.Vgl. H.V. Gumbrecht, R. Reichardt, Th. Schleich (Hrg), Sozialgeschichte der Französischen Aufklärung, 2 Bde, München, 1981
2. M. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, hrsg. v. J. Winckelmann, Bd 2, Hamburg 1972, p. 232.
3. Schluchter, Die Entwicklung des okzidentalen Rationalismus, Tübingen 1979, p. 250f.
4. Schluchter ibid p. 251.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Purposive Action Parsons Habermas IV 336
Purposive Action/Parsons/Habermas: ParsonsVsWeber: Example: The "social action" of the entrepreneur represents only one of several types of purposive and value-rational action: The modern doctor typically acts as universally and functionally specified as the businessman of the capitalist economy, but at the same time he/she is subject to the rules of professional ethics that prevent him/her from pursuing his/her economic interests by all legally permitted means. (1) >Terminology/Parsons: pattern variables.
Habermas: the pattern-variables are suitable for describing the fact that modern societies may consciously adopt contrary decision patterns for different areas of life and switch from a combination of preferences to the opposite.

1.Talcott Parsons, The Professions and the Social Structure; The Motivation of Economic Activities, in: T. Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, Rev. ed. NY 1949.

ParCh I
Ch. Parsons
Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century: Selected Essays Cambridge 2014

ParTa I
T. Parsons
The Structure of Social Action, Vol. 1 1967

ParTe I
Ter. Parsons
Indeterminate Identity: Metaphysics and Semantics 2000


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Rationalization Habermas III 22
Rationalization/Sociology/Habermas: Understanding rational action orientations becomes the point of reference for understanding all action orientations. For sociology, this means the following relationship between meta-theoretical and methodological level:
a) At the metatheoretical level, it chooses basic concepts that are tailored to the increase in rationality of modern life.
b) At the methodological level, the understanding of rational action orientations becomes a reference point for the understanding of all action orientations (>Theory of Meaningful Understanding). This is about internal relationships between meaning and validity.
>Sociology, >Levels/order, >Levels of Description, >Theory, >Method.
III 209
Rationalization/HabermasVsMarx/VsAdorno/VsHorkheimer/VsWeber/Habermas: the concept of rationality of these authors is too narrow to grasp the comprehensive social rationality they have in mind. >Rationality/Habermas, >Rationality/Adorno, >Rationality/Weber,
>HabermasVsAdorno, >HabermasVsMarx, >HabermasVsWeber.
The term would have to be used at the same level as the productive forces, the subsystems of functional rational action, the totalitarian bearers of instrumental reason.
>Productive Forces/Habermas.
That is not happening. The concept of action of these authors is not complex enough for this.
>Actions/Habermas, >Action Systems/Habermas, >Action theory/Habermas.
In addition, basic concepts of action and system theory must not be confused: LuhmannVsMarx, LuhmannVsWeber, LuhmannVsAdorno: the rationalization of action orientations and lifeworld structures is not the same as the increase in complexity of action systems.(1) >LuhmannVsWeber.
III 457
Communicative action/rationalization/HabermasVsWeber/Habermas: only when we differentiate between communicative and success-oriented action in "social action" can the communicative rationalization of everyday actions and the formation of subsystems for procedural rational economic and administrative action be understood as complementary development. Although both reflect the institutional embodiment of rationality complexes, in another respect they are opposite tendencies. >Communicative action/Habermas, >Communication theory/Habermas,
>Communication/Habermas, >Communicative practice/Habermas,
>Communicative rationality/Habermas
III 459
Rationalization/Habermas: the paradox of rationalization, of which Weber spoke, can be understood abstractly in such a way that the rationalization of the world allows a kind of system integration ((s) of subsystems with non-linguistic communication media such as money and power) that competes with the integration principle of ((s) linguistic) understanding and under certain conditions has a disintegrating effect on the world of life. >Lifeworld.

IV 451
Rationalization/Modernism/HabermasVsWeber/Habermas: Weber could not classify the problems of legitimacy that a positivistically undermined legal rule raises within the pattern of rationalization of modern societies, because he himself remained imprisoned by legal-positivist views. >Legitimicy/Habermas.
Solution/Habermas: Thesis:

(p) The emergence (...) of modern societies requires the institutional embodiment of moral and legal concepts of a post-traditional nature, but

(q) capitalist modernization follows a pattern according to which cognitive-instrumental rationality penetrates beyond the realms of economy and state into other, communicatively structured areas of life and takes precedence there at the expense of moral-practical and aesthetic-practical rationality.

(r) This causes disturbances in the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld.

IV 452
Problem: a progressively rationalised lifeworld is simultaneously decoupled and made dependent on increasingly complex, formally organised areas of action such as economics and state administration. This takes sociopathological forms of internal colonization. To the extent that critical imbalances can only be avoided at the cost of disturbances in the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld (i.e. of "subjectively" experienced crises or pathologies threatening identity).
IV 486
Paradoxically, rationalization releases both at the same time - the systemically induced reification and the utopian perspective from which capitalist modernization has always inherited the stigma that it dissolves traditional forms of life without saving their communicative substance. >Reification


1.N. Luhmann, Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität, Tübingen 1968.

Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981

Rationalization Weber Habermas IIII 208
Rationalization/WeberVsMarx/Weber/Habermas: Weber assesses the institutional framework of the capitalist economy and the modern state differently: not as production conditions that capture the rationalization potential, but as the subsystems of procedural rational action in which occidental rationalism develops socially. >Capitalism, >K. Marx.
Of course, as a result of the bureaucratisation, he fears that social conditions will become reificationary, which suffocates the motivational impetus of rational living.
>Reification, >Bureaucracy, >Rationality, >Purpose rationality.
Horkheimer and Adorno, later also Marcuse, interpreted Marx from Webers' perspective. In the sign of an independent instrumental reason, the rationality of natural domination merges with the irrationality of class domination, the unleashed productive forces stabilise the alienating production conditions.
>Rationalization/Marx, >Instrumental Reason.
Habermas III 228
Definition Rationalization/Max Weber/Habermas: Weber calls rationalization any expansion of empirical knowledge, of forecasting ability and of instrumental and organizational control of empirical processes.
Habermas III 238
Rationalization/Max Weber/Habermas: Weber wants to explain the institutionalization of procedural-rational action in terms of a process of rationalization. >Institutionalization, >Institutions, >Organisation.
Initial situation: the methodological lifestyle of entrepreneurs and civil servants oriented towards professional ethics as well as the organisational means of formal law. The corresponding structures of consciousness are embodied in institutions on the one hand and personality systems (dispositions of action and value orientations) on the other. Ultimately, for Weber, ethical and legal rationalism is the result of a process of disenchantment reflected at the level of worldviews.
III 239
There are two major waves of rationalization: 1. rationalization of world views, 2. translation of cultural into social rationalization. >Worldviews.
Habermas III 306
Rationalization/Weber/HabermasVsWeber/Habermas: in the transition from cultural to social rationalization, Weber's theory of action, which is tailored to the type of procedural rational action, narrows the concept of rationality with many consequences. He begins directly with the actual figures of Western rationalism without reflecting them on the counterfactual possibilities of a rationalized world. >Lifeworld.
If, however, he needs standards for his further investigations for measuring a shrunken rationality, these problems reappear.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Religion Weber Habermas III 235
Religion/Weber/Habermas: Weber examines the religious foundations of rational living in everyday consciousness, e.g. of Calvinists, Methodists, Pietists, Anabaptist sects. Main features are - Radical condemnation of magical means
- loneliness of the individual believer
- Secular fulfilment of professional duties as an obedient instrument of God
- Transformation of Judeo-Christian world rejection into an inner-worldly asceticism.
- Principle-led autonomous lifestyle.
>Calvinism, >Judaism, >Christianity, >Religious belief.
Habermas III 273
Religion/Weber/Habermas: Weber thesis: there is a commutated rationalization of all world religions. According to F. H. Tenbruck, Weber was thus in the group of evolutionism at that time.(1) >Rationalization.
Tenbruck: "The rational constraints that religions are to follow arise from the need to receive a rational answer to the theodicy problem, and the stages of religious development are the ever more explicit versions of this...
Habermas III 274
...problem and their solutions. (2) >Theodicy.
Monotheism/Weber/Tenbruck: for Weber, monotheism was an idea that first had to be born, but then had far-reaching consequences.
Punitive God: the idea of a rewarding and punitive deity was also new, as was the sense of mission, according to which the human had to understand himself/herself as an instrument of God.
Protestantism/Weber/Tenbruck: added to this the predestination. (3)
>Protestantism.
Habermas III 274/275
R. DöbertVsWeber: Weber does not distinguish enough between the problematic content and the structures of consciousness that emerge from the ethicization of world views. (4) Contents: reflect the various solutions to the theodicy problem.
Structures: can be seen in the statements on the world, which are determined by formal world concepts.
>Worldviews.
Habermas III 281
Weber: The world religions try to satisfy "the rational interest in material and immaterial balance" by explanations that increasingly meet systematic demands. (5)
Habermas III 293
Disenchantment/World Images/Religion/Modernity/Weber/Habermas: Weber observes de-enchantment above all in the interaction between believers and God. The stronger this is designed as communication,
Habermas III 294
the more strictly the individual can systematize his/her inner-worldly relations under the abstract aspects of morality. >Disenchantment.
This means
a) The preparation of an abstract concept of the world
b) The differentiation of a purely ethical attitude in which the actor can follow and criticize norms
c) The formation of a universalistic and individualistic concept of persons with the correlates of conscience, moral accountability, autonomy, guilt, etc.
The reverent attachment to traditionally guaranteed concrete orders of life can thus be overcome in favour of a free orientation towards general principles.

Habermas IV 281
Religion/Weber/Habermas: Weber has shown that the world religions are dominated by a fundamental theme, namely the question of the legitimacy of the unequal distribution of happiness among people. Theodicy/Weber/Habermas: the theocentric world views designed theodicies to reinterpret and satisfy the need for a religious explanation of the suffering perceived as unjust into an individual need for salvation. Cosmocentric worldviews: offer equivalent solutions to the same problem. Common to religious and metaphysical worldviews is a more or less pronounced dichotomous structure that makes it possible to relate the socio-cultural world of life to a background world. The world behind the visible world of this world and phenomena represents a fundamental order; such worldviews can assume ideological functions if the orders of the stratified class society can be represented as homologies of this world order.
>Metaphysics.

1.F.H. Tenbruck, Das Werk Max Webers, KZSS, 27, 1975, p. 677
2. Ibid p. 683
3. Ibid p. 685
4. R. Döbert, Systemtheorie und die Entwicklung religiöser Deutungssysteme, Frankfurt 1973. 5. M.Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Vol. I Tübingen, 1963, p. 253.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Sense Weber Habermas III 22
Sense/Rationality/Max Weber/Habermas: Weber's hierarchy of action terms is based on the type of purpose-driven action, so that all other actions can be classified as specific deviations from this type. >Purpose rationality.
Weber analyzes the method of understanding the sense in such a way that the more complex cases can be related to the borderline case of understanding purpose-rational action: The understanding of the subjectively success-oriented action requires at the same time its objective evaluation (according to standards of correctness rationality).
>Success, >Rightness, >Rationality.
Habermas III 229
Sense/Weber/Habermas: the empirical and completely mathematically oriented world view develops in principle the rejection of any viewpoint that asks for a 'sense' at all of the inner world happening. Wherever rational empirical recognition has consistently carried out the de-enchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism, tension finally emerges against the claims of the ethical postulate: that the world is a God-ordered, thus a somehow ethically meaningful cosmos. (1)
>Ethics, >Justification, >Ultimate justification.
Habermas III 315
Sense/Rationality/Weber/Habermas: That the world as a cosmos meets the requirements of rational religious ethics, or has some 'meaning', had nothing more to do with religious recognition. The cosmos of natural causality and the postulated cosmos of ethical equal causality were incompatible. The intellect created an unbrotherly aristocracy of rational cultural heritage independent of all personal ethical qualities of human beings.(2) >Protestant Ethics/Weber, Rationalization/Weber.
HabermasVsWeber: this explanation of social rationalization is unsatisfactory: Weber fails to prove that a principle-driven moral consciousness can only survive in religious contexts.
Habermas III 335/336
Sense/Weber/Habermas: Weber, Thesis of the loss of meaning: in view of the rational laws of modern life orders, both the ethical and theoretical unification of the world - whether in the name of religion or in the name of science - is no longer possible. >Unity, >Unification.
Weber sees (in reference to the late work of J. St. Mill) a new polytheism, an objective figure of an antagonism between impersonal value and life orders. (3)
Habermas: this reflects the generation-typical experience of nihilism.
>Nihilism.
Habermas III 337
Habermas: Weber justifies the thesis of the loss of meaning in this way: reason itself splits into a plurality of value spheres and destroys its own universality. The individual should now try to create this unit, which objectively can no longer be produced, in the privacy of his/her own biography. >Value spheres.
Habermas III 377
Sense/Weber/Habermas: Weber introduces "sense" as an (undefined) basic concept for defining action. Thus, Weber has no theory of meaning behind him, but an intentionalist theory of consciousness. I.e. he does not refer to linguistic understanding but to the opinions and intentions of a subject of action.
Habermas III 378
So it is a matter of purposive action, not communication. Communication can then only be constructed secondarily with the help of a concept of intention. (4)

1. M. Weber, M. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, (Ed) J. Winckelmann, Vol. 2, Hamburg 1972, p. 569.
2. M. Weber, Gesammelte Ausätze zur Religionssoziologie, Bd. I. 1963, p. 569.
3.M. Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, (Ed) J. Winckelmann, Tübingen 1968, p. 603f.
4.M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, (Ed) J. Winckelmann, Tübingen 1964, p. 3.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
State (Polity) Weber Gaus I 195
State/Weber/Morris: [a „definition“ of the state most often is] an abbreviated version of Max Weber's well-known characterization of the state as 'a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory' (1919(1): 78). Weber says that 'the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the "right" to use violence. >Violence, >Governance, >Coercion.
MorrisVsWeber: This oft-cited definition, however, is problematic for a number of reasons.
The first thing to note about it now is its simplicity.
Gaus I 196
Could an organized criminal organization or one of Nozick's protective agencies be a state? >R. Nozick.
Weber: Elsewhere [Weber] offered a much more complete characterization: „Since the concept of the state has only in modern times reached its full development, it is best to define it in
terms appropriate to the modern type of state, but at the same time, in terms which abstract from the values of the present day, since these are particularly subject to change. The primary formal characteristics of the modern state are as follows: It possesses an administrative and legal order subject to change by legislation, to which the organized corporate activity of the administrative staff, which is also regulated by legislation, is oriented. This system of order claims binding authority, not only over the members of the state, the citizens . but also to a very large extent, over all actions taking place in the area of its jurisdiction. It is thus a compulsory association with a territorial basis. Furthermore, today, the use of force is regarded as legitimate only so far as it is either permitted by the state or prescribed by it.“ (1947(2): 156)
Morris: A number of additional features or attributes are singled out by Weber in this passage: the existence of an administrative and legal order subject to change by legislation, maintained by a substantial administrative staff, itself regulated by legislation (...).
>State/Morris.

1. Weber, Max (1946 [1919]) 'Politics as a vocation'. In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociologv, eds and trans. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.
2. Weber, Max (1947) The Theory of Social and Economic O,'ganization (Part I of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft), trans. A. M. Henderson and T. Parsons. New York: Oxford University Press.

Morris, Christopher W. 2004. „The Modern State“. In: Gaus, Gerald F. & Kukathas, Chandran 2004. Handbook of Political Theory. SAGE Publications

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Gaus I
Gerald F. Gaus
Chandran Kukathas
Handbook of Political Theory London 2004
Subjectivism Weber Habermas III 317
Subjectivism/Weber/Habermas: Weber assumes an argumentation determined by the positivism of his time, according to which ethical value judgements merely express subjective attitudes and are not capable of an intersubjectively binding reasoning. >Positivism.
VsSubjectivism/Habermas/HabermasVsWeber: His own arguments for the superiority of responsibility ethics over ethics of conviction, which have their limits in religious ethics of brotherhood, contradict this.
>Ethics of conviction, >Responsibility.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Subsystems Habermas III 457
Subsystems/Communicative Action/Rationalization/HabermasVsWeber/Habermas: only when we differentiate between communicative and success-oriented action in "social action" can the communicative rationalization of everyday action and the formation of subsystems for purpose-rational economic and administrative action be understood as complementary development. Although both reflect the institutional embodiment of rationality complexes, in another respect they are opposite tendencies.
IV 247
Examples of subsystems are market economy and modern administration.
IV 399
Subsystems/Habermas: are indicators of a successful formation of subsystems: - the crisis-like fluctuations in the quantitative ratio of the values embodied by the medium (here: money) and the real values represented by them (i.e. the dynamics of inflation and deflation)
- The reflexive upgrading of the medium, which makes capital markets possible, for example.
A subsystem such as the economy can only become more differentiated via the medium of money if markets and forms of organisation emerge that bring the system's inherent traffic with the relevant environments under monetary control.
This regulation does not necessarily require a double relation in the sense of an exchange of pairs of factors and products, which runs over two different media. E.g. it is not foreseen that in the relationship between the economy and the private household sector, labour enters the economic system through a non-monetary medium such as value retention.
>Marxism/Habermas, >Systems, >Systems theory.
IV 400
Subsystems/Habermas: for the development of a media-controlled subsystem it seems sufficient that boundaries are created across through which a simple exchange with all environments can take place controlled by a (single) medium. This also triggers changes in the interaction areas that form environments for the subsystem. >Communication Media/Habermas, >Control Media.
IV 418
Subsystems/Lifeworld/Media/Technocracy/Habermas: Subsystems that are differentiated via media such as power and money can become independent from a lifeworld forced into the system environment. From the perspective of the lifeworlds, the conversion of action to the media appears both as a relief of communication effort and risk and as a conditioning of decisions in extended contingency scope. In this sense, they appear as a mechanization of the lifeworld. On the other hand, a generalization of the inlfuence of the medium cannot have such an effect.

Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981

Systems Weber Habermas III 337
Systems/Subsystems/present diagnosis/Weber/Habermas: Weber puts forward the thesis of the subsystems becoming independent of procedural rational action, which threatens the freedom of the individual. However, it does not necessarily result from the thesis of loss of meaning. >Sense/Weber.
Weber thesis: "One of the constitutive components of the modern capitalist spirit (...): the rational lifestyle based on the idea of the profession is (...) born from the spirit of Christian asceticism (...).By transferring asceticism from the monk's cells into professional life and beginning to dominate morality within the world, it helped (...) to build that mighty cosmos of modern economic order linked to the technical and economic prerequisites of mechanical machine production, which today determines the lifestyle of all individuals (...) with overwhelming compulsion.
>Christianity, >Coercion, >Ideas, >Norms, >Rule.
Habermas III 338
(...) By transforming (...) the world, asceticism gained increasing and ultimately inescapable power over humans. (...) Today its spirit [the spirit of asceticism] has escaped from this housing. In any case, since it rests on a mechanical basis, victorious capitalism no longer needs this support. (...) Then, however, for the 'last humans' of this cultural development, the word could become the truth: 'experts without spirit, bon vivants without heart': this nothing imagines having reached an unprecedented level of humanity". (1) ((s) Key passage for the keywords: "The housing as hard as steel", "inner-wordly asceticism".
>Internal world, >External world, >Society.
Habermas III 339
HabermasVsWeber: The thesis is not plausible in itself: Weber goes too far when he concludes from the loss of the substantial unity of reason that there is a polytheism of struggling powers of belief. >Sense/Weber).
Habermas III 340
Weber has not sufficiently differentiated between the particular value content of cultural traditions and those universal value standards under which the cognitive, normative and expressive components of culture become spheres independently of value and form stubborn complexes of rationality. >Cultural tradition, >Value spheres, >Values, >Norms.

1. M. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, J.Winckelmann (Ed) Vol. I, p. 187-189.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Value Rationality Weber Habermas III 244
Value rationality/Max Weber/Habermas: Weber: "He who acts purely value rationally, regardless of the consequences to be foreseen, in the service of his conviction of what seems to command duty, dignity, beauty, religious instruction, reverence, or the importance of a 'thing' of whatever kind. ... value rational acting is acting according to 'bids' or according to 'demands', which the actor has posed for him- or herself."(1) >Actions, >Morals, >Ethics, >Norms, >Principles.
Habermas III 344/345
Value Rationality/Purpose Rationality/Law/Weber/HabermasVsWeber/Habermas: In connection with Weber's treatment of law, there is an unclear interference of two different questions under which Weber understands processes of modernization as processes of rationalization: a) as rationalization in all areas of life as a rationalization of means for purposes that are required under particular values,
b) under the aspect of a value-rational transformation of the institutional system.
>Law/Weber, >Rationalization.
HabermasVsWeber: From Weber's economic, state and legal sociology one must gain the impression that in modern societies rationalization processes can only begin with empirical-theoretical knowledge and the instrumental and strategic aspects of action, while practical rationality cannot be institutionalized independently, i.e. with a subsystem-specific stubbornness.
>Rationality, >Purpose rationality.

1. M.Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, hrsg. v. J. Winckelmann, Tübingen 1964.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Value Spheres Horkheimer Habermas III 464
Value Spheres/HorkheimerVsWeber/Horkheimer/Habermas: Horkheimer assesses the separation of cognitive, normative and expressive value spheres differently from Weber. Starting from the emphatic concept of truth in metaphysics, Horkheimer dramatizes the inner division of reason to both sides; on the one hand, he sees the normative and the expressive value sphere deprived of any immanent claim to validity, so that moral and aesthetic rationality can no longer be spoken of. On the other hand, he believes that speculative thinking, which has been turned into criticism, still has a restitutive force that Weber would have considered utopian and suspected of the false charism of reason. >Critique, >Critical Theory, >Norms, >Rationality, >M. Weber.
Weber/Horkheimer/Habermas: Weber and Horkheimer agree, however, that the meaningful unity of metaphysical-religious world views is disintegrating, thereby calling into question the unity of modernized life worlds and seriously endangering the identity of the socialized subjects and their social solidarity.
>Life world, >Society, >Community.


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Values Putnam V 232f
Value/values/Max Weber: there is a distinction between facts and values (VsObjectivity of value judgments) "Non-judgmental understanding": ideal type: is the understanding of rational "instrumental" actions. Karl-Otto Apel: these can be reconstructed as transpositions of if-then rules. Sociology: does not have to prove that maximum demands are fulfilled, but only that it was rational for the actor, how he/she has fulfilled his/her objectives. PutnamVsWeber, VsApel: this is only operationalist and too instrumentalist, to understand rationality only from purposes.
>Operationalism, >Instrumentalism, >Rationalism, >Teleology, >Purposes.
---
I (d) 217
Facts/values/Putnam: facts are not separated.
Parisi I 311/312
Facts/values/economic theories/Putnam: In an economic analysis of law, disputes and conflicts between parties are often framed as disagreements as to facts. When facts are in dispute the parties can undertake further investigation and they can recalculate their choices and reassess their optimal course of action. The focus on factual disagreement lends itself to the objective and rational point of viewlessness that grounds the claim that economics is a science. In law, however, disputes are frequently about something more than a disagreement as to facts; they involve disagreements as to values (Putnam, 2002)(1). These value-based disagreements shape the facts as people understand them, and influence the relative importance attributed to any given fact by any particular party. Value disputes are not easily resolved by appeal to economic analysis. At best, economics can only offer some indirect input on factors to consider in a given situation, but in the end law must operate to make a judgment—a value choice between and among competing claims that are often based on emotion, culture, and other human characteristics that are not easily subject to an economic calculus. Consequently, when economic analysis is applied to law, it often functions to redirect attention away from a conflict involving deeply held values and translates the disagreement into one of competing facts. The problem with this move is that it may function to “mask” what the law is really doing and can undermine the traditional role of law in working to mediate tensions among competing and deeply held values in our system of democratic governance (Noonan, 1976)(2).
1. Putnam, Hilary (2002). The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
2. Noonan, Jr., John T. (1976). Persons and Masks of the Law. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Driesen, David M. and Robin Paul Malloy. “Critics of Law and Economics”. In: Parisi, Francesco (ed) (2017). The Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics. Vol 1: Methodology and Concepts. NY: Oxford University.

Putnam I
Hilary Putnam
Von einem Realistischen Standpunkt
In
Von einem realistischen Standpunkt, Vincent C. Müller Frankfurt 1993

Putnam I (a)
Hilary Putnam
Explanation and Reference, In: Glenn Pearce & Patrick Maynard (eds.), Conceptual Change. D. Reidel. pp. 196--214 (1973)
In
Von einem realistischen Standpunkt, Vincent C. Müller Reinbek 1993

Putnam I (b)
Hilary Putnam
Language and Reality, in: Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2. Cambridge University Press. pp. 272-90 (1995
In
Von einem realistischen Standpunkt, Vincent C. Müller Reinbek 1993

Putnam I (c)
Hilary Putnam
What is Realism? in: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 (1975):pp. 177 - 194.
In
Von einem realistischen Standpunkt, Vincent C. Müller Reinbek 1993

Putnam I (d)
Hilary Putnam
Models and Reality, Journal of Symbolic Logic 45 (3), 1980:pp. 464-482.
In
Von einem realistischen Standpunkt, Vincent C. Müller Reinbek 1993

Putnam I (e)
Hilary Putnam
Reference and Truth
In
Von einem realistischen Standpunkt, Vincent C. Müller Reinbek 1993

Putnam I (f)
Hilary Putnam
How to Be an Internal Realist and a Transcendental Idealist (at the Same Time) in: R. Haller/W. Grassl (eds): Sprache, Logik und Philosophie, Akten des 4. Internationalen Wittgenstein-Symposiums, 1979
In
Von einem realistischen Standpunkt, Vincent C. Müller Reinbek 1993

Putnam I (g)
Hilary Putnam
Why there isn’t a ready-made world, Synthese 51 (2):205--228 (1982)
In
Von einem realistischen Standpunkt, Vincent C. Müller Reinbek 1993

Putnam I (h)
Hilary Putnam
Pourqui les Philosophes? in: A: Jacob (ed.) L’Encyclopédie PHilosophieque Universelle, Paris 1986
In
Von einem realistischen Standpunkt, Vincent C. Müller Reinbek 1993

Putnam I (i)
Hilary Putnam
Realism with a Human Face, Cambridge/MA 1990
In
Von einem realistischen Standpunkt, Vincent C. Müller Reinbek 1993

Putnam I (k)
Hilary Putnam
"Irrealism and Deconstruction", 6. Giford Lecture, St. Andrews 1990, in: H. Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (The Gifford Lectures), Cambridge/MA 1992, pp. 108-133
In
Von einem realistischen Standpunkt, Vincent C. Müller Reinbek 1993

Putnam II
Hilary Putnam
Representation and Reality, Cambridge/MA 1988
German Edition:
Repräsentation und Realität Frankfurt 1999

Putnam III
Hilary Putnam
Renewing Philosophy (The Gifford Lectures), Cambridge/MA 1992
German Edition:
Für eine Erneuerung der Philosophie Stuttgart 1997

Putnam IV
Hilary Putnam
"Minds and Machines", in: Sidney Hook (ed.) Dimensions of Mind, New York 1960, pp. 138-164
In
Künstliche Intelligenz, Walther Ch. Zimmerli/Stefan Wolf Stuttgart 1994

Putnam V
Hilary Putnam
Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge/MA 1981
German Edition:
Vernunft, Wahrheit und Geschichte Frankfurt 1990

Putnam VI
Hilary Putnam
"Realism and Reason", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association (1976) pp. 483-98
In
Truth and Meaning, Paul Horwich Aldershot 1994

Putnam VII
Hilary Putnam
"A Defense of Internal Realism" in: James Conant (ed.)Realism with a Human Face, Cambridge/MA 1990 pp. 30-43
In
Theories of Truth, Paul Horwich Aldershot 1994

SocPut I
Robert D. Putnam
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community New York 2000


Parisi I
Francesco Parisi (Ed)
The Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics: Volume 1: Methodology and Concepts New York 2017
Values Weber Habermas IV 430
Values/Weber/Habermas: Weber takes a sceptical view of values according to which a moral consciousness guided by principles can neither be philosophically explained nor socially stabilized without being embedded in a religious world view. >Values, >Norms, >Morals, >Ethics, >Religion.
HabermasVsWeber/RawlsVsWeber/KantVsWeber/Habermas: this view cannot be maintained in view of the cognitivistic approaches from Kant to Rawls.
>I. Kant, >J. Rawls.
It is also empirically refuted by the spread of a humanistically enlightened consciousness since the days of the Enlightenment.
>Enlightenment.
ParsonsVsWeber/Habermas: Parsons secularization theory is more plausible.
>Secularization/Parsons.

Weber I
M. Weber
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - engl. trnsl. 1930
German Edition:
Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus München 2013


Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981
Weber Habermas III 207
Weber/Habermas: HabermasVsWeber: the following inconsistency is instructive: Weber analyses the process of disenchantment in the history of religion, which should fulfil the necessary internal conditions for the appearance of occidental rationalism, with the help of a complex but largely unclear concept of rationality;...
III 208
...on the other hand, in his analysis of social rationalization, as it prevails in modernity, he is guided by the limited idea of purpose-rationality. >Rationalization/Weber, >Procedural rationality, >Western rationalism.

Ha I
J. Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne Frankfurt 1988

Ha III
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. I Frankfurt/M. 1981

Ha IV
Jürgen Habermas
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bd. II Frankfurt/M. 1981


The author or concept searched is found in the following 2 controversies.
Disputed term/author/ism Author Vs Author
Entry
Reference
Behaviorism Parsons, Ta. Vs Behaviorism AU Kass 11
Action/Luhmann: what is actually not meant by this? How do I distinguish them? Action theory: causes difficulties: in the literature there are various exclusion experiments. E.g. Behavior is something that even animals can do, perhaps a little more sophisticated in humans. Excludes the subject to a certain extent.
Talcott ParsonsVsBehaviorism: has always seen himself as the leader of an uprising against behaviorism. VsComparison of students and guinea pigs.
Thus Parsons was considered as almost European or philosophical by the Americans.
Action Theory/New: insistence on rationality (comes from Max Weber).
Action/Weber: first, means and ends must be distinguished.
LuhmannVsWeber: this brings the problem of what is to be excluded. Is a certain action then no action anymore, but rather behavior?
Today: rational choice theory: no longer a problem: it is believed that if someone opts prospects at expected benefit, it is rational action which is amenable to theoretical treatment.
Weber: relies more on ideal types than on a concrete description of reality.
Action/Luhmann: two other problems: external and internal demarcation of action.
External demarcation: unclear which consequences belong to action and which do not. E.g. does my talking take place in their minds, how far does it go? When you start with that, you tend to include more and more.
Internal demarcation: question of motivation. Usually you want to fix the intention to speak of an action. That's why there is a tendency to conceive action attribution-theoretically: action must be attributed by the actor to himself.
Problem: what are the motives then, are they real? One can cite anything that is obvious to oneself. One is prepared.
Question: did the Neanderthals have motives already?
Action Theory/Luhmann: could be regarded as a kind of glue between individual and society, action is something that cannot be cut into an individual part and a social part.
Neo-Kantianism Luhmann Vs Neo-Kantianism Reese-Schäfer II 37
Subject / Object/Luhmann: this juxtaposition is no longer necessary, sense is a kind of potential for unrest with built-in force to self change. Sense relates to a process oriented at differences. Not subjective. (VsWeber, Max, VsNeo-Kantianism).

AU I
N. Luhmann
Introduction to Systems Theory, Lectures Universität Bielefeld 1991/1992
German Edition:
Einführung in die Systemtheorie Heidelberg 1992

Lu I
N. Luhmann
Die Kunst der Gesellschaft Frankfurt 1997

Reese-Schäfer II
Walter Reese-Schäfer
Luhmann zur Einführung Hamburg 2001