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6 Jürgen Habermas and Risk An Alternative to RAP? In essence, democracy implies that those vitally affected by any decision men make have an effective voice in that decision. This, in turn, means that all power to make such decisions be publicly legitimated and that makers of such decisions be held publicly accountable. —C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959) Risk as a Sign of Legitimation Crisis T he German theorist Jürgen Habermas has been remarkably silent about risk. He does set the groundwork for recognition of this central topic in Legitimation Crisis (1973), with his anticipation of the problem of climate change (“the limit of the environment’s ability to absorb heat from energy consumption ”) and his recognition that population and economic excess are the key drivers of environmental degradation (“an exponential growth of population and production—that is the expansion of control over nature—must some day run up against the limits of the biological capacity of the environment,” propositions supported by later empirical evidence ([Habermas 1975: 42; see also Rosa, York, and Dietz 2004; York, Rosa, and Dietz 2003). However, just as with the fields of ecological science and risk, where—like Hawthorne’s ships— there is barely any touching, Habermas never conceptualizes risk as an organizing concept or elevates it to a central element in his sociological thinking. Despite this, we argue here that Habermas’s version of critical theory (Ha­ bermas 1970, 1971), which he later named the theory of communicative action (HCAT; see Habermas 1984, 1987), provides an effective meta-framework and operational conceptualization needed to harness risk theory to effective democratic management processes. The compass of HCAT is sufficiently broad to offer both a theoretical framework for understanding the risk society and a moral directive toward alternative solutions to the democratic governance challenge of the risk society. In this chapter, we first provide a broad overview of critical theory into which we situate HCAT. We then describe the core elements of HCAT and elaborate on the intended insights that HCAT offers for demo- Jürgen Habermas and Risk 111 cratic risk governance and the likely unintended insights that it offers for understanding three recurring paradoxes in the risk field. Critical Theory and Habermas Habermas developed HCAT partially as a complement to and partially as a critique of critical theory (Geuss 1981). Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the two major advocates of critical theory, had positioned themselves against the Weberian tradition of a value-free, nomological concept of sociology. Critical theory was inspired by a neo-Marxian concept of power and interest in society, by a combination of analytic and normative perspectives of the social sciences, and by the idea of enlightenment as a way to individual and social emancipation (Horkheimer 1982; Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). In the course of his scholarly life, Habermas distanced himself from the Marxian idea of dialectic development and based his universal belief in the potential of emancipation on the power of discourse as means to resolve cognitive, expressive, and normative claims (Webler 1995). Critical theory, a body of thought consisting of an extended critique of modernity that emphasizes the contradictions and untoward consequences of advanced or late capitalism, is based on a set of normative assumptions that are the most explicitly teleological among sociological schools of thought.1 First, it argues that since there is no clear boundary between facts and values, the proper goal of theory is to unite scientific inquiry with political action within a single theoretical framework. Furthermore, Habermas (1970) does not eschew science but views it as one form of rationality, and like all forms of rationality , scientific knowledge is mediated by social experience—culture. In one contrast to Luhmann, Habermas emphasizes the importance of communication between systems in a public sphere. In another, he argues for empirical evidence as the rudder to correct the course of reason and theory that has gone astray. Second, critical theory is based on a systems approach with an overarching rationality that bridges the partial rationalities of other theories and of the institutions found in a pluralist society. Critical theory suggests that, due to the decline in the Enlightenment belief of a universal rationality, new social norms and values need to be generated. The fundamental goal of these emergent ele­ ments of rationality is to provide collective orientations that do not conflict with personal aspirations and agency (Habermas 1968, 1970, 1989). The new form of universal rationality is communicative rationality. It embraces Weber’s two forms...

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