The “Great Refusal” and Social Theory, 1961–1981 129
and local autonomy) had lost sight of the fact that “... restricting
the growth of monetary-administrative complexity is by no means
synonymous with surrendering modern forms of life.... When this
opposition sharpens into a demand for de-differentiation at any
price, an important distinction is lost.”^174 Habermas explained that
some representatives of the new social movements of the 1970s and
the neoconservatives were both discontented with the workings of
the welfare state. Habermas had fought alongside Abendroth for an
expansive interpretation of the constitution’s Sozialstaat clauses. In
the late 1970s, after a decade of Social-Liberal rule, a new problem
had manifested itself: the problem of excessive “juridification.” The
coalition government had boosted wages and social spending to his-
toric highs, at least before the recession of 1975.^175 Social spending
increased from 24.6 to 32 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)
between 1965 and 1975, much of it on welfare provision. Habermas
argued in TCA that the welfare state had generated its own “patho-
logical side effects”:
As the social welfare state spreads the net of client relationships
over private spheres of life, it increasingly produces the pathological
side effects of a juridification that is simultaneously a bureaucratiza-
tion and monetarization of core domains of the lifeworld.... Social
welfare guarantees [inadvertently] foster the disintegration of those
life contexts.^176
Significantly, juridification [Verrechtlichung], or legal regulation,
is the primary empirical example Habermas chose to describe the
way the economic and political “system” penetrates or colonizes the
“lifeworld.”^177 “System” and “lifeworld,” the terms of art Habermas
used in TCA, were the descendants of “work” and “interaction,”
respectively. But new conflicts in advanced Western societies had
developed in the last “ten to twenty years” that transcended the
class struggle over resources:
They do not flare up in areas of material reproduction, they are
not channeled through parties and associations and they are not(^174) Thomas McCarthy, “Translator’s Preface,” in Theory of Communicative
Action, Vol. I, xliv.
(^175) Thornhill, Political Theory, 160.
(^176) Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II, 532–4.
(^177) Rüdiger Voigt, ed., Verrechtlichung: Analysen zu Funktion und Wirkung von
Parlamentarisierung, Bürokratisierung und Justizialisierung sozialer, politischer
und ökonomischer Prozesse (Königstein: Athenäum, 1980 ).