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  • "With Reason on Our Side..."
  • Wendy Brown (bio)

1. Loving and loathing Legitimation Crisis

In 1976, in my senior year of college, I had to write an essay on three books that had profoundly effected me. I chose Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Dan Georgakis's and Marvin Surkin's Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution and Jurgen Habermas's Legitimation Crisis. I found Mitchell's book breathtaking for its complex intertwining of Freud, Levi-Strauss and Marx in the final chapter; she offered a historically specific theory of gender subordination organized by kinship, political economy, and ideology that was simultaneously intellectually sophisticated, rigorous, complex, imaginative and radical. Georgakis's and Surkin's book built on Black radical thought for opening the possibilities of addressing labor and community, race and class, theory and concretely embedded practices, to build an emancipatory and egalitarian future. Habermas introduced me to thinking theoretically about the relations of capitalism, the state, social and psychological life. It brought together, in an extraordinarily powerful and systematic critique, profit-motivated economics, ecological thresholds, political institutions, and bourgeois ideological formations ranging from individualism and consumerism to family values.

Retrospectively I see that what I loved about these books was their capacity to put many balls in the air at once, to refuse domination by a single issue, vector of power, or modality of thought and yet also to offer stunningly comprehensive theories of state, economy and social relations. I loved their reach, their systematicity, their investment in connecting every element of human existence. I also loved their relentless commitment to exposing the contradictions in the present order of things and their figuration of a rationally ordered alternative.

These are the qualities I still find dazzling in Legitimation Crisis. These are the qualities I also find disturbing in Legitimation Crisis. In its overtly avowed aspiration to provide a theory of a social scientific crisis in the first part, and to develop that crisis theory into a comprehensive account of late capitalist society in the second part, this little text is at once a fulfillment of all that critical theory ever promised and a work of totalizing theory. In its effort to include on its theoretical map every stage of human history (from "primitive" to "advanced") every element of human existence (from labor to sexuality to civic mentality), and every scene of society, state and economy (from production to state rationality, from human motivation to political legitimation), it carries both the grandness and the grandiosity of the Marxist-Weberian arc of critical social theory. All that is missing is Freud.

But apart from confronting anew this marvel of excess in the theoretical will to power, and thus having to revisit and reconsider what is so attractive about it, I found a second order of seduction in Habermas's early work. This is the ardent yet strained attachment to rationality on which every element of the text rests. In this little text, the commitment to rationality is so thoroughgoing and so hyperbolic–comprising human subjects and defining the very idea of a motivation crisis; comprising the state and its authority; comprising the science of society and science of crisis; comprising the notion of a socio-political system and the indispensability of system integration–that it recalls Nietzsche's remark in Twilight of the Idols about the state of emergency that such a rationalism betokens. (Twilight 33) ( Nietzsche's reference was to the hyper-rationalism of the Greek philosophers in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War). Yet there is, across Parts I and II of Legitimation Crisis, recognition of this state of emergency in the form of the occasionally remarked doubt about whether the commitment to rationality is positive or normative, and in the move to openly permit the normative to take over when dubiousness about the positive arises.

One could even say that this text is haunted by the question of whether the presumption of rationality suffusing its every move actually governs human beings and human societies. Indeed, what now appears fascinating about Legitimation Crisis is the internal intellectual battle it stages about its multiply staged premise of rationality–our's, the state's, the one that...

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