form: colonialism – and the establishment of a semblance of international
legal order by means of international organisations like the UN. In this
conjuncture, it seemed that human societies could stabilise themselves and
develop through compromise, discussion and consensus fixed in legal contracts;
and thus that the ethics of discussion supplied these dominant social practices
with the requisite philosophical substratum.
The second factor can be called post-communism: this is the high point of
the Habermasian conjuncture, heralding its disappearance. The key moment
here, of course, was the fall of the Berlin Wall. The type of society that
Habermas seeks to found philosophically, or rather its partial embodiment,
had won the Cold War. This society no longer appeared to be the least bad,
but the best – that is, the only possible one. As a theory of society, Marxism
was now disqualified not only because of its association with the Evil Empire,
but – even more radically – because its concepts no longer explained real
phenomena. One of the results of this collapse was that in philosophy political
thinking was infected, if not replaced, by ethics. Habermas is the exemplary
embodiment of this historical development.
The decade that began in 1995 reversed the trends on which Habermas
based his consensual theory of society, his philosophy of communicative
action, and his ethics of discussion. What economists call neoliberalism had
certainly begun much earlier (readers are referred to the works of Gérard
Duménil and Dominique Lévy: they date its growth from the end of the 1970s
and the Thatcher-Reagan period).^11 But only after 1991 was its full social
impact felt across Europe. To go quickly, we shall note the imperial position
of the United States, sole superpower, exercising its power without any
restraint; the imperialist wars of expansion that ensued (in Iraq, Kosovo, etc.);
the globalisation of exploitation and class struggle, and accelerated immiseration
in the Third World, a category in which some of former socialist countries
must be included today (readers will remember the collapse of Argentina,
indicating the extremes to which imperialist domination leads).
In Europe, this change in conjuncture issued in the dismantling of the welfare
state and hence abandoning the policy of working-class integration of which
it was the vector. In particular, following pressure on direct wages by the
recreation of a reserve army of labour (the choice lying between a very high
60 • Chapter Three
(^11) See Duménil and Lévy 1998 and 2003.