vocabulary of human rights, must not be confused with the imperialist claim
that the political form of life and the culture of a particular democracy –
even the oldest one – is exemplary for all societies.^12The language here – ‘universal validity claim’, ‘must not be confused’ – cannot
disguise a stumbling block in this line of thought: for the ‘basic political
values’ in question are closely bound up with the ‘imperialism’ whose
expansion they scarcely inhibit. If by ‘oldest democracy’ is meant American
democracy (unless it refers to British democracy), then given their history
over two centuries, from the Opium War in the mid-nineteenth century right
up to the active complicity in the massacre of a million Indonesians in the
1960s (and the unfailing support given for forty years to the bloody, corrupt
dictatorship that followed it), it will be difficult to persuade us that these
basic political values are anything but an ideological screen for the imperialists.
And it will be remembered that what Habermas rejects with typical casualness
(‘conventional explanations...intermsofideology...trivialise [the situation]’)^13
precisely, albeit traditionally, makes it possible to think the relation between
values and acts: Habermas lacks a theory of ideology. His consensual
philosophy of language is what prevents him from constructing one.
To summarise: Habermas’s philosophy of language, first philosophy, is
worth retaining, but only as a last philosophy – that is, a philosophy of
messianic hope for communism in language. If we stick with this first
philosophy, we are as it were condemned to an agreement that is always in
the process of being achieved (even if it is difficult to demonstrate that it
already has been). Here we might detect a form of the determinism characteristic
of the vulgar Marxism sometimes associated with its social-democratic version:
the economic structure of society dictates the advent of socialism; there is a
tendency to socialism at the very heart of capitalism, as its mandatory
supersession. Similarly, the interlocutory structure of language dictates a
striving for consensus, if not its realisation in the short term. The problem is
that this produces a politics of dishonest compromise and impotence and a
philosophy of language which blithely ignores a fair proportion of the facts.
If, alternatively, we adopt this philosophy as last philosophy, if we declare
ourselves communists in linguistic matters, then we accept the reality and
Critique of the Philosophy of Language • 63(^12) Habermas 2003, pp. 706–7.
(^13) Habermas 2003, p. 704.