The great social theorist Jürgen Habermas has drawn attention–for more than half a century–to the problem that he calls the “colonization of the Lifeworld by System.” Here is my explanation, based mainly on a rare concrete example from his Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2. 

The Lifeworld, for Habermas, is the background of ordinary life: mainly private, somewhat naive and biased, but also authentic and essential to our satisfaction as human beings. It is a “reservoir of taken-for-granteds, of unshaken convictions that participants in communication draw upon in cooperative processes of interpretation.” In the Lifeworld, we mostly communicate with people we know and who share our daily experience, so our communications tend to be opaque to outsiders and certainly not persuasive to people unlike us. But Habermas argues that we are incapable of thinking about everything at once. In order to reason and communicate, we must take most points as givens. Only then can “single elements, specific taken-for-granteds” be brought up for conversation and critical analysis.

Meanwhile, the “System” is composed of formal organizations, such as governments, corporations, parties, unions, and courts. People in a System have official roles and must pursue pre-defined goals (albeit sometimes with ethical constraints). For example, defense lawyers are required to defend their clients, corporate CEOs are supposed to maximize profit, and comptrollers are supposed to reduce waste in their own organizations. In the current period, there are fundamentally two Systems: markets (in which instrumental action leads to profit) and governments (in which instrumental action demonstrates power). Although the people who work in markets and governments are complex individuals with other commitments, their official work responsibilities are to maximize money or to administer power.

To illustrate the Lifeworld, Habermas invites us to envision an “older construction worker who sends a younger and newly arrived co-worker to fetch some beer, telling him to hurry up and be back in a few minutes.” The senior worker assumes that a whole set of beliefs and values are shared on the team: German construction workers enjoy and expect to drink beer at breaks during the workday, beer is for sale in the vicinity, the younger and/or most recently hired person is the one who does unpaid chores for the group, and so on. Each of these assumptions could be brought into doubt and subjected to debate. For instance, as Habermas suggests, the younger worker might say, “But I don’t have a car,” or “I’m not thirsty.” Other “elements of the situation” might generally pass unnoticed yet become relevant as circumstances change. If the younger worker is an immigrant without health coverage and he falls off the ladder as he goes to buy the beer, several relevant laws and controversies may suddenly occur to the workers, moving from their background knowledge to topics of explicit discussion. But at any given moment, simply by virtue of being human, the workers must assume most features of the situation as a shared and implicit background, a “vast and incalculable web of presuppositions.” This is their Lifeworld.

In order for the workers (or any other group of people) to be free and self-governing, they must be able to render any aspect of the Lifeworld problematic. It is a definitive feature of modernity that no assumptions are considered immune to critique; and it is a condition of democracy that no critique is blocked by law or other force. When the younger construction worker notes that no beer is available within walking distance and he doesn’t have a car, he is giving a reason for someone else to go. This turns his work group into a small Public Sphere. To the extent it is democratic and deliberative, his reasons will require responses.

Imagine (to go beyond Habermas’ presentation of this example) that the radio is playing as these men work. A news program includes an interview with a feminist activist who criticizes the construction industry for hiring very few women, followed by an immigrant leader who notes that alcohol is forbidden to Muslims (thus the assumption that everyone wants to drink beer is exclusionary), followed by a health expert who attributes disease to excessive daytime beer consumption. These people are making arguments that compel critical attention to specific aspects of the workers’ Lifeworld. They represent the larger Public Sphere of the Federal Republic or the European Union. It doesn’t matter whether the interviewees have self-interested motivations, such as selling copies of their books, or whether the radio station is a for-profit company trying to attract listeners. The format of any reasonably well-run news program will compel the speakers to give reasons that can be checked and assessed by reporters and listeners. This is a case of a democratic Public Sphere challenging citizens to reflect about aspects of their Lifeworld.

But although every particular point should be subject to discussion, the whole Lifeworld must be protected. One reason is that we need the Lifeworld to think at all, for we are capable of testing a specific assumption only while holding our other assumptions for granted. A second reason is that our Lifeworld is ours, a condition of living authentically. Any political program that tries to strip a group of people of their accumulated assumptions all at once would be totalitarian. A radio program that brings separate issues to the workers’ attention expands their thinking; but if a revolutionary government seizes all the radio stations and begins broadcasting propaganda against contemporary German working-class culture as a whole, that is a threat to their Lifeworld.

Meanwhile, the Lifeworld is vulnerable to manipulation by interested parties who act instrumentally. For example, suppose that on the radio, the workers hear men with similar accents to their own praising a particular brand of beer. Maybe women are also heard, enjoying these men’s company and appreciating their good taste. It sounds as if friends have entered the real Lifeworld of the construction site, but these supposed friends are really actors who are are paid to sell beer. Of course, the workers will understand the purpose of an advertisement, yet by skillfully imitating their authentic Lifeworld, the ad can affect their behavior. No reasons need be given; no rebuttal is invited. In this case, Habermas would say that the Lifeworld of the workers has been colonized by the System of markets. The System of government might similarly colonize their Lifeworld if a candidate for public office started talking on the radio as if he were their friend who shared their values and experiences.

In discussions of Systems colonizing Lifeworlds, common examples include commercial advertisements that masquerade as authentic communications. These are cases of “commodification”: firms mining the Lifeworld for economic advantage. Habermas also emphasizes the tendency of welfare state bureaucracies to “juridify” or “judicialize” the Lifeworld. For instance, when well-intentioned states seek to protect pupils and parents against unfairness in testing and discipline, fairness “is gained at the cost of a judicialization and bureaucratization that penetrates deep into the teaching and learning process,” depersonalizing the school, inhibiting innovation, and undermining relationships.

A neo-Marxist line of criticism faults Habermas for equating juridification with commodification and the state with the market. This critique hold that the underlying process is capitalist exploitation, and the welfare-state is only a threat to the Lifeworld because it is a tool of capital. Habermas disagrees. For him the underlying process is growing specialization, a feature of modernity. He insists that in socialist societies, the state colonizes the Lifeworld in a parallel way to the market’s colonization in capitalist societies; and in welfare states, both threats operate at once.

[It turns out that I have posted 58 times before on Habermas, collected here. My broadest posts are probably Habermas and critical theory (a primer); saving Habermas from the deliberative democrats; and Ostrom, Habermas, and Gandhi are all we need.]

In the following passage from On Revolution (pp. 42-3), Hannah Arendt is criticizing the Hegelian tradition of German philosophy (including Marx) that purports to find fundamental meanings in the narrative of world history.  I think that her words would also describe mainstream social science, which attempts to explain ordinary events empirically rather than philosophically:

Politically, the fallacy of this new and typically modern philosophy is relatively simple. It consists in describing and understanding the whole realm of human action, not in terms of the actor and the agent, but from the standpoint of the spectator who watches a spectacle. But this fallacy is relatively difficult to detect because of the truth inherent in it, which is that all stories begun and enacted by men unfold their true meaning only when they have come to their end, so that it may indeed appear as though only the spectator, and not the agent, can hope to understand what actually happened in any given chain of deeds and events.

The more successful you are in social science, the more you can explain who acts and why. By explaining “deeds and events” that have already happened, you make them look determined. You seek to reduce the unexplained variance. But when you are a social actor, it feels as if you are choosing and acting intentionally. The unexplained is a trace of your freedom.

Arendt does not assert that the spectator’s perspective is epistemically wrong, but that it reflects a political fallacy. It has the political consequence of reducing freedom.

On p. 46, she gives an example: the French Revolution has been understood in ways that hamper the agency and creativity of subsequent revolutionaries. She even argues that revolutionary leaders have submitted to being tried and executed because they assume that revolutions must end in terror. Thus all later upheavals have been

seen in images drawn from the course of the French Revolution, comprehended in concepts coined by spectators, and understood in terms of historical necessity. Conspicuous by its absence in the minds of those who made the revolutions as well as of those who watched and tried to come to terms with them, was the deep concern with forms of government so characteristic of the American Revolution, but also very important in the early stages of the French Revolution.

If you are a political agent, you believe that you can invent or reconstruct “forms of government” to reflect your considered opinions. Deliberate institutional design and redesign seems both possible and valuable. But if you think of history as inevitable and driven by grand forces (the World Spirit, the class struggle), by root causes (capitalism, racism), or by empirical factors (income, gender, technology), then institutional design seems to be an outcome, not a cause; and the designers appear to lack agency. “Civic Studies” can be seen as a reorientation of the humanities and social sciences so that they take an agentic perspective and therefore avoid the “political fallacy” of determinism.

See also: Roberto Unger against root causes and the visionary fire of Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Michel Foucault wrote a great deal about punishment as a tool that governors use to discipline the governed. Voting seems like the opposite: a device for the governed to discipline the governing. But Foucault’s concept of bio-politics can be illuminatingly applied as a critique of modern voting.

Foucault begins “Security, Territory, Population” (his 1977-8 lectures at the Collège de France) with a “very simple, very childish example” of punishment in three forms.

• Juridico-Legal: The law defines a category of actions as a crime (e.g., theft), and sets a certain punishment to follow it in order to restore justice. This punishment is usually conducted in public and on the body of the accused.
• Disciplinary: Punishment is used to influence behavior, both of the person being punished and of others who may be deterred. Punishments are now designed to have results; for instance, prisons become “houses of correction.” If a given punishment lacks beneficial consequences (as Cesare Beccaria argued of torture), it should be repealed. But in Discipline and Punish, Foucault interprets this apparent humanity or leniency as a reflection of an ominous improvement in the efficiency of discipline, whose purpose is “not to punish less, but to punish better.'”
• Security: The objective becomes to influence the frequency of undesirable actions (such as theft) in the population as a whole. Outcomes are measured statistically, for instance, in terms of crimes/capita or probabilities of recidivism. A given punishment, such as imprisonment, is now a mere tool for security, to be assessed by its aggregate costs and benefits and compared against other tools, such as paying or training people to behave as desired or subjecting them to surveillance and monitoring.

Foucault emphasizes that these three “modulations” of punishment have not simply replaced one another in a historical sequence. Even medieval law sometimes aimed at security; juridico-legal thinking remains alive today. But security has become far more prominent in the current era than it was before.

Like punishment, voting has adopted relatively durable forms but has changed its purposes and rationales in profound ways. Drawing on Michael Schudson’s accessible history, I would identify the following three stages in the history of US voting:

• Nineteenth Century: Voting is mostly a public expression of full membership in a group. By voting at all, a man shows that he is a full and free US citizen. By voting for a party, he shows his loyalty to a sub-population, e.g., Southern white Protestant farmers vote for Democrats. Voting is conducted in public (ballots are not secret) along with torchlight parades and other public rituals. Generally, everyone in a given community votes alike and reinforces each other. Voting is an obligation.
• Progressive Era: Voting is a private choice among independent candidates and ballot questions. Voting maximizes the degree to which the government represents the voter’s interests and values. Elections also punish corrupt or incompetent incumbents by rotating them out of office. To enable a free and precise choice, the ballot is now secret; candidates are distinguished from parties; numerous offices are made elective; and important questions are put to referenda. Reporters, experts, and civic educators purport to assist voters in making up their own minds. Voting is a source of power that should be employed responsibly.
• Post-Watergate: For individuals, voting is one means of influencing the government (at a time when other means have proliferated) and is one optional way to spend time and energy. A prospective voter is assumed to weigh the costs of voting–including the costs of becoming informed–against its benefits. The population is assumed to vote as a function of large external factors, such as the billions of dollars spent on campaign advertising and the constantly shifting procedures for registering and voting. Candidates are entrepreneurs who make heavy use of Big Data to target and influence citizens. Some prominent political scientists and jurists defend private campaign finance on the basis that the various campaign donors cancel each other out in a competitive market. Voting, running for office, and giving money are choices; aggregate results can be predicted.

The three stages of voting resemble those of punishment. In each case, we see a move from 1) symbolic to 2) deliberately manipulative to 3) scientific and statistical. We also see a move from 1) automatic to 2) individually tailored to 3) designed at a social scale. And a sequence of 1) physical impact on bodies, to 2) influence over individual minds, to 3) tweaking the milieux that shape mass behavior. Foucault calls scientific control over the contexts that shape human behavior “bio-politics,” which is the ascendant norm.

In the case of punishment, the tool’s effectiveness has increased, but control is increasingly dispersed. The medieval king was fully in charge of the gallows, but he couldn’t influence much of his realm with it. The modern regime of schools, prisons, and police is much more effective and pervasive, but there is no single king. Power strengthens but also multiplies.

In the case of voting, the tool may possibly have become more powerful, but the individual voter pretty clearly has less influence today, for other political acts (from drawing district lines to allocating campaign dollars) have become highly sophisticated and effective. Voting looks more like a dependent variable than the cause of anything.

If this portrait of the current situation is accurate, we need both an assessment and a strategy for improvement. Foucault proposes some theses about assessment and strategy at the outset of “Security, Territory, Population”:

I do not think there is any theoretical or analytical discourse which is not permeated or underpinned in one way or another by something like an imperative discourse. However, in the  theoretical domain, the imperative discourse that consists in saying “love this, hate that, this is good, that is bad, be for this, beware of that,” seems to me, at present at any rate, to be no more than an aesthetic discourse that can only be based on choices of an aesthetic order. And the imperative discourse that consists in saying “strike against this and do so in this way,” seems to me to be very flimsy when delivered from a teaching institution or even just on a piece of paper. … So, since there has to be an imperative, I would like the one underpinning the theoretical analysis we are attempting to be quite simply a conditional imperative of the kind: If you want to struggle, here are some key points, here are some lines of force, here are some constrictions and blockages. In other words, I would like these imperatives to be no more than tactical pointers. … So in all of this I will therefore propose only one imperative, but it will be categorical and unconditional: Never engage in polemics.

Contra Foucault, I would like to assert that the current system of elections (and much worse, of prisons) in the US is bad; that this is not a merely aesthetic judgment; that making such judgments is worthwhile if you defend them; and that effective polemics are badly needed. But I take Foucault’s point that a paper argument against the status quo can be valueless or arbitrary. As always, the question “What should we do?” requires tough-minded analysis that is about strategy as well as facts and values. Specifically, if we want to defend the Progressive Era ideal of voting, we must take seriously the deep shift toward what Foucault called “bio-power” in the society as a whole.

See also:when society becomes fully transparent to the state; qualms about Behavioral Economics; citizenship in the modern American republic: change or decline?