What is dangerous, however, in Habermas’s view, is that the sorts of rationality and media appropriate to system integration inevitably, by their own “irresistible inner dynamics” (1981, 331), infiltrate the lifeworld, “suppress[ing] forms of social integration in those areas where a consen- sus-dependent coordination of action cannot be replaced” (196). This is what Habermas has famously called the colonization of the lifeworld by system imperatives. “Capitalist modernization,” he writes, “follows a pat- tern such that cognitive-instrumental rationality surges beyond the bounds of the economy and state into other, communicatively structured areas of life and achieves dominance there” (304). The result is a loss of freedom and meaning and the conversion of what had been opportunities for ethical and responsible behavior into occasions of “technicized” (342) and “norm-free” (307) sociality. Hence, any incursion of profit interests or monetization into areas of the lifeworld should, according to this theory, be protested (395).
Habermas did not invent this view of the economy. He draws deeply on the early twentieth-century work of Max Weber, whose use of the economy-as-machine metaphor is most famously expressed in this passage: “The tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order . . . today de- termine[s] the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism . . . with irresistible force. . . . The care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak.’ . . . But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage” (Weber 1930, 181). And, of course, Habermas draws deeply and explicitly on the nineteenth-century work of Karl Marx, as is especially apparent in his discussions of “intrinsic capitalist dynamics” (Habermas 1981, 343) and the pathology of the “wage labor relation” (335).
The roots of Habermas’s mechanical image of the economy go back further than Weber and Marx, however. Several times in The Theory of Communicative Action Habermas harkens back not to the nineteenth- century work of Marx but to the eighteenth-century social science of Adam Smith. This, he writes, is the origination point of theories of systems (Habermas 1981, 113, 173, 202, 402).
The two centuries preceding Smith’s era were marked by the rise of scientific thought and by great growth in technology and the use of ma- chinery. Not surprisingly, when Smith described economic and political life, he used the popular mechanistic metaphors of his day. “Power and riches,” he wrote, are “enormous and operose machines” ([1759] 1976,
182). Smith was impressed by what he imagined as “the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine or oeconomy by means of which [power and riches are] produced” (182–83). Habermas’s assertion that capitalist economies are regulated unconsciously and mechani- cally—without subjectivity, deliberation, or communication—is a direct descendent of Smith’s idea that a person acting in a market is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention” (Smith [1776] 2001, 351).
Of course, Smith’s view of the economic system is considerably less conflicted than Habermas’s. While Habermas fears the incursion of eco- nomic factors into the lifeworld, Smith bemoans the presence of non- economic grit within the economic machine. His thought provides the ideological basis for contemporary neoliberal policies that seek to remove any barriers to the expansion of markets: “The perfection of [policy], the extension of trade and manufactures, are noble and magnificent objects. . . . We take pleasure in beholding the perfection of so beautiful and grand a system, and we are uneasy till we remove any obstruction that can in the least disturb or encumber the regularity of its motions” ([1759] 1976, 185). While Smith and Habermas disagree on where the threats to society lie, they are firmly in consensus in believing that the economy is, at heart, a machine.
It is from the time of Smith, a classical economist, then, that we derive this metaphor. Rational self-interest has been assumed to be the energy source driving the gears of economic production.4 The affinity of “cal- culable amounts of” money-measured variables (Habermas 1981, 183) to mathematical treatment further cemented the perceived links between economics and impersonal science. In the late nineteenth century neo- classical economists began developing calculus-based models that bor- rowed directly from earlier developments in mechanical physics.
Thus while Habermas’s Marxist-influenced economic model is often per- ceived as radical, progressive, or part of critical theory, in fact, the mech- anistic image of economic functioning is thoroughly traditional and is a close cousin to the view of economic functioning that underlies contem- porary neoliberal thought. Habermas’s and mainstream modernist neo- classical economic thinking, while wildly different in their elaborations of
4 Proponents of this view are fond of quoting Smith’s famous lines, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages” (Smith
[1776] 2001, 19). A fuller reading of Smith’s work shows that he did, in fact, hold a more complex view of human nature and that he allowed a considerably larger role for regulation of markets than do contemporary neoliberal economists. But this does not change the fact that his notions of “system” and the motivating effects of self-interest form the original underlying inspiration for free market policies.