1

Borrowed Normativity: The Legacy of Hegels Critique of Kant in Horkheimer, Adorno

and Habermas

At least since the 1981 publication of The Theory of Communicative Action, the
philosophical appraisal of the early Frankfurt School has revolved around the problem of
normativity. In The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment an essay from roughly
the same period Habermas concludes that the Dialectic of Enlightenment commits a
fatal error it renders critique independent even in relation to its own foundations.
1

Because Horkheimer and Adorno suspect reason to be surreptitiously in league with
power, they attempt to detach their critical diagnosis of modernity from its basis in
reason: whichever norms may be guiding their analysis need not ultimately be justified
before the tribunal of reason because the latter, in their estimation, has become a
kangaroo court. Habermas concern here is not that Horkheimer and Adornos critical
social theory takes flight from the demands of rationality, but that when critique
becomes total when critique turns against reason as the foundation of its own
validity
2
it illicitly borrows normativity
3
from what it simultaneously condemns. His
charge is not irrationalism, but inconsistency. He objects that the critical standpoint of the
Dialectic of Enlightenment is vitiated by an otherwise avoidable performative
contradiction: Anyone who abides in a paradox on the very spot once occupied by
philosophy with its ultimate groundings is not just taking up an uncomfortable position;
one can only hold that place, he concludes, if one makes it at least minimally plausible

1
Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by Frederick G.
Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 116
2
Habermas, 118-119
3
I take the term from The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In the first lecture, Habermas claims that
Benjamins philosophy of history can be understood as a rebellion against the borrowed normativity of an
understanding of history taken from the imitation of models (Habermas, 10). The point here is that
previous philosophies of history have failed to meet the specifically modern requirement of normative self-
assurance: modernity, Habermas says explains, has to create its normativity out of itself (Habermas, 7).
2
that there is no way out.
4
It is ironic that Habermas should charge Horkheimer and
Adorno with committing a performative contradiction which obscures the normative
foundations of critique, for they only arrived at such an uncomfortable position after
lodging a very similar objection to Kants critical project.
The Dialectic of Enlightenment testifies to the autophagy of civilization. Because
reason has become bound up with domination because it implicitly draws upon what it
must disclaim it is always at risk of reverting to its own opposite: the bloody untruth
of myth.
5
With this thought, I argue, Horkheimer and Adorno resume a line of argument
that was initiated with Hegels critique of Kant that normativity, in a word, cannot be
reduced to formal rationality.
6
Purified of all empirical admixture, reason is too empty to
generate content of a specifically moral character and too alien to account for moral
motivation. Thus, in its civilizing as well as its lawgiving function, reason is involved in a
performative contradiction: it must borrow furtively from what it has defined itself in
excluding. It is no accident that Horkheimer and Adorno reiterate the Hegelian critique of
Kantian morality in the Dialectic of Enlightenment; indeed, I contend that it is precisely
the problem of normative foundations exposed by Hegel that provides the basis for their
critique of instrumental reason. And yet, Habermas analysis of the normative
foundations of critical theory completely overlooks this dimension of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment the very same dimension, I argue, in which his own critique moves. On
this account then, Habermas objection to Horkheimer and Adorno must be reassessed.
After (1) reviewing the salient features of Hegels critique of Kantian morality, I (2)

4
Habermas, 128
5
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 6
6
This is, of course, only one of Hegels many objections to Kants system. Nevertheless, it occupies a
central role in Hegels elaboration of his own normative project.
3
demonstrate how the same arguments reemerge in the context of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment. And finally, in addressing Habermas concerns in The Entwinement of
Myth and Enlightenment, I (3) aim to recast critical theorys problem of normative
foundations.

1. Hegels Critique of Kant

Already in his early theological writings, Hegel distanced himself from what he
considered an ill-conceived conflation of reason and normativity. If the Enlightenment
helped lead Hegel to the conclusion that Christianity had degenerated in its modern form
into positivity
7
a religion of authority, ossified in its isolation from public
legitimation the Strmer und Drnger convinced him that pure reason presented no
more plausible an alternative.
8
Faced with two unsatisfactory alternatives between the
dogmatism of Christian Orthodoxy and the equally uncritical Enlightenment religion of
reason Hegel rejected both. Neither position, he found, was fit to overcome the
alienation of modern ethical life; indeed, both sides merely reinforced it. For this reason,
as Habermas notes, Hegel turned his gaze backward: For the fateful reconciliation of
modernity in its state of disintegration, he thus presupposed an ethical totality thatwas
borrowed from the idealized past of the primitive Christian communal religiosity and the
Greek polis.
9
Though Hegel ultimately abandoned this strategy in his later work

7
See The Positivity of the Christian Religion, in G.W.F. Hegel, On Christianity: Early Theological
Writings, trans. T.M. Knox, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961)
8
See, for instance, G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H.S. Harris, (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1977), The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, and the fragment on Love; both in G.W.F.
Hegel, On Christianity: Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1961)
9
Habermas, 30. Though I cannot pursue these matters any further here, I would mention two significant
points. First, that in the same work that Habermas exposes the Early Frankfurt Schools lack of normative
foundations, he recognizes what motivates Hegels critique of Kantian morality. And secondly, that
4
recognizing that such consummate communities had little in common with the modern
situation he retained throughout his career that dissatisfaction with formal rationality
that had inspired his nostalgic turn to the past.
Although he developed his objections to the positivity of Christian Orthodoxy and
the Enlightenments faith in reason from a Kantian perspective, already in these early
essays Hegel was reformulating his position in light of the formers moral philosophy.
These early concerns reemerge in Hegels mature work more fully developed, cohering
into a more or less straightforward critique of Kantian morality. Two of these objections
are particularly pertinent for the normative foundations of critical theory. First, Hegel
objects to the formalism of pure practical reason. And secondly, he exposes the
inadequacy of Kants account of moral motivation. Both of these objections can be
reduced to what I will call the charge of borrowed normativity. I will treat them both in
turn.
In the sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit entitled Reason as Lawgiver and
Reason as Testing Laws, Hegel criticizes the vacuity of Kantian moral theory. For
Kant, the form of the categorical imperative provides the only valid determination of the
will: if the will seeks the law that is to determine it anywhere but in the fitness of its
maxims for its own legislation of universal laws, and if it thus goes outside of itself and
seeks this law in the character of any of its objects, then heteronomy always results.
10

Thus, in Kants estimation, properly moral content can emerge from the principle of
universalization alone: in the form of universality, heteronomous content self-destructs.

Habermas criticizes the young Hegel in this passage for failing to meet his own criteria for borrowing
normativity from another epoch in an attempt to secure the means to repair modern ethical substance.
10
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. by James W. Ellington, (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1993), 45
5
In the first place, Hegel objects that, as the principle of non-contradiction, the procedure
of universalizability
11
in and of itself can only yield tautological results. As he shows in
his example of the maxim that everyone ought to speak the truth, the universal,
unconditional form of morality is prevented in principle from acknowledging the
conditions of its application.
12
That is, if as Hegel suggests, the categorical imperative is
essentially a procedure for maintaining logical consistency it is nevertheless incapable of
generating and prescribing positive moral content, but only of testing the consistency of
those already existing ends upon which it draws. And yet, Hegel also takes issue with
reasons law-testing function. He argues that precisely as a test, the categorical
imperative is too empty to prescribe any significant specific form of action without also
unacceptably permitting practically any other form of action.
13
In subjecting moral
maxims to the test of universalization, Hegel argues, one dogmatically takes as given the
conditions under which such maxims are meaningful; one takes up their content simply
as it is, without concerning itself with the particularity and contingency inherent in its
reality.
14
Hegel argues that neither the idea of private property, nor that of its abolition is
self-contradictory, and so, both could pass the test of the categorical imperative.
15
The
only way, then, that reason could adjudicate between these two options is by taking as
unproblematic the existence of other principles and institutions for instance, the fact of

11
I rely heavily in this section on the discussions of Hegels critique of Kantian morality offered by Karl
Ameriks in Kant and the Fate of Autonomy and Seyla Benhabib in Critique, Norm, and Utopia.
12
As Hegel concludes in 427 of the Phenomenology: All that is left, then, for the making of a law is the
mere form of universality, or, in fact, the tautology of consciousness which stands over against the content,
and the knowledge, not of an existing or a real content, but only of the essence or self-identity of a
content. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), 256
13
Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical
Philosophy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 310
14
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 257
15
See, for instance, G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, H.B. Nisbet, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 135
6
private property, a conception of human needs, etc.
16
Hence, Hegel concludes that the
formalism of the categorical imperative can be used to justify any action, however
problematic, so long as it remains logically consistent.
17
Seyla Benhabib summarizes:
If the universalizability procedure is interpreted as one of non-
contradiction, on this basis alone we cannot decide among different
normative contents. If such a decision is reachedthen this can only be so
because certain additional principles, which are themselves inconsistent
with the required formalism of the universalizability procedure, have been
introduced. In one case, the theory would be so empty as to be irrelevant;
in the second, contentful but self-contradictory and dogmatic.
18


In both cases, as law-giving and as law-testing, pure practical reason is unable to generate
or judge normative content: rationality is only concerned with the form of morality.
19
But
as soon as it is used to determine moral validity, reason becomes implicated in a
performative contradiction it borrows from the normative content which it must purge
to secure its own legitimacy.
In his criticism of the motivational deficiency of Kants moral philosophy, Hegel
articulates an objection similar to the charge of emptiness. Just as reason is unable to
provide normative content, so it is unfit to explain the ultimate ground of normativity.
Moral reasoning, for Kant, is reliant upon what he calls, in Religion within the Limits of
Reason Alone, the splendid frailty of humanity that in her fundamental heteronomy,
the human is determined by two opposing factors: the causality of nature and the

16
As Lukcs puts it in The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought: The moment this ethic attempts to make
itself concrete, i.e. to test its strength on concrete problems, it is forced to borrow the elements of content of
these particular actions from the world of phenomena and the conceptual systems that assimilate them and
absorb their contingency. Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone,
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), 125
17
even if such a particular content for action is taken into consideration, there is no criterion within that
principle [of non-contradiction] for deciding whether or not this content is a duty. On the contrary, it is
possible to justify any wrong or immoral mode of action by this means. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy
of Right, 162
18
Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), 75-76, my emphasis
19
Or, as Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology: The criterion of law which Reason possesses within itself
fits every case equally well, and is thus in fact no criterion at all. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 259
7
causality of freedom. Insofar as the human is determined by the causality of nature, she
acts according to the principle of self-love, that is, in accordance with the personal gain
she anticipates receiving in performing an action. Kant juxtaposes this with the causality
of freedom the humans ability to raise herself up out of her sensuous determinacy,
subjecting herself solely to the dictates of pure practical reason. An action only has moral
(sittlich) worth, Kant holds, if it is done out of respect for the moral law and without a
view to the principle of self-love; and yet, he continually remarks throughout his moral
writings how difficult it is to resist human sensuousness (Sinnlichkeit). It is at precisely
this difficulty which Hegel aims his critique.
20
If Kant is obliged to radically separate the
causality of freedom from the causality of nature duty from inclination and to suppose
that humans are only motivated to act by the latter, Hegel objects that Kant fails to
explain how they might be moved to engage in moral action. Even if action on Kantian
principles is metaphysically possible and specifiable, Karl Ameriks explains, we would
absurdly be left with no moving reason to act on such a morality
21
because Kant has
merely presumed reasons normative authority. The issue here is not only that Kant
abstracts duty from those extra-moral concerns that he admits can come to motivate
otherwise virtuous behavior for instance, the concern for human happiness
22
but also
that without such concerns, one may be unmoved to pursue a moral life in the first place.
Hence, Hegel objects that although Kant believes he has found in pure practical reason
the ultimate determining ground of the will, he has reached this point by erroneously

20
As Hegel writes in 6 of the Philosophy of Right: Those who regard thinking as a particular and distinct
faculty, divorced from the will as an equally distinct faculty, and who in addition even consider that
thinking is prejudicial to the will especially the good will show from the very outset that they are totally
ignorant of the nature of the will. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 37-38
21
Ameriks, 310
22
As Benhabib notes, happiness is neither mere whim nor can it be simply juxtaposed to the good. Hegel
names it the right of private welfare (Benhabib, 83). See, for instance, Phenomenology of Spirit, 602
and 603.
8
severing reason from desire and by bracketing the educative and formative role of
reason and reflection.
23

In both of the above criticisms, Hegel objects that, under the constraint of formal
rationality, Kant is compelled to borrow normativity. Before turning to the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, I will briefly indicate the source that Hegel thinks Kant is borrowing
from. When Hegel criticized the vacuity of the categorical imperative, he argued that pure
practical reason could neither generate normative content nor adjudicate between
competing moral maxims without overstepping its own self-imposed strictures. However,
if, like Hegel, Kant had acknowledged that reason is of a piece with the ethos of an
historical community, he wouldnt have to had to simultaneously admit and expel
relevant content from the scene of moral reasoning. Likewise, after criticizing Kants
theory of moral motivation for mistakenly opposing Sittlichkeit to Sinnlichkeit, Hegel
suggested that no supplemental incentive is required to act morally if one has been
socialized into an ethical community. In both cases, then, Hegel proposes that Kant
covertly draws normativity from the social and institutional practices that are organized,
legitimated, and reproduced in public life what Hegel calls ethical life (Sittlichkeit).
But, as I will show next, if Hegel considers Kants moral view of the world and the
standpoint of ethical life as two mutually complementary expressions of human freedom,
Horkheimer and Adorno distrust formal rationality as well as the social world which it
encompasses as two overlapping sources of domination.

2. The Critique of Instrumental Reason

23
Benhabib, 81
9
Horkheimer and Adorno locate in the notion of instrumental reason
24
the
historical form of domination that drives civilizations continual retrogression from the
logical subsumption of the particular under the universal to the logic of commodity
exchange. With the rise of monopoly capitalism, they argue in the works opening essay,
reasons old ambition to be purely an instrument of purposes has finally been
fulfilled.
25
That is, if in times past reason had found itself entangled in the ideals of
Enlightenment humanism, in the current epoch it has become unencumbered of such
concerns. As will soon become clear, however, it is not that Horkheimer and Adorno
understand reason to have finally achieved that indifference from content that Kant had
envisaged, but rather the opposite. Appropriating Hegels conception of Sittlichkeit,
Horkheimer and Adorno contend that reasons critical power has atrophied in a world
where disinterestedness has itself become an interest. In this section, I will argue that,
insofar as it reiterates the confrontation between Kant and Hegel, the Dialectic of
Enlightenment should be seen as an attempt to recast the problem of the normative
foundations of critique not as an effort to evade it.
Although the analysis of instrumental reason which pervades the Dialectic of
Enlightenment follows upon Hegels critique of Kantian morality, in the second excursus
Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality this inheritance is made explicit.
In Juliette, Horkheimer and Adorno document the divergent assessments of rationality
offered by the dark writers of the bourgeoisie and its Enlightenment apologists. While
the light-bringing writers protected the indissoluble alliance of reason and atrocity,

24
There is a well-known ambivalence in the text: at some points, the authors decry instrumental reason, and
other times, reason as such. If I use the two terms synonymously here, it is not because I affirm the
conflation that Habermas criticizes, but rather out of convenience. I will return to this issue in the final
section of the paper, where I deal explicitly with Habermas critique.
25
Horkheimer and Adorno, 23
10
bourgeois society and power, they write, by denying that alliance, the bearers of darker
messages pitilessly expressed the shocking truth.
26
The shocking truth of Juliette,
however, is not that of Odysseus that reason is fundamentally an instrument of
domination but that, in its neutrality, reason is no closer to morality than immorality. It
is by virtue of historical contingency
27
not teleological necessity, they argue here, that
reason has become complicit with power. Though Horkheimer and Adorno develop this
insight through an engagement with Sade and Nietzsche, they owe its emergence
primarily to Hegels critique of Kant. In fact, their position can be elucidated along the
two lines of critique I emphasized in the preceding section: reason becomes instrumental
when (1) it is compelled in its emptiness to import normative content from an alienated
form of life that prioritizes efficiency over autonomy, and (2) when the motivation to act
is reduced to the bare interest in self-preservation required under monopoly capitalism.
Horkheimer and Adorno are concerned in Juliette about the potentially ignoble
ends which reason, pared down to logical consistency, could be made to justify perhaps
even more so than Hegel. Hegel recognized the arbitrary endorsement of normative
content to be an essential feature of the categorical imperative; that the work of pure
practical reason always depends upon the ethical totality within which it is embedded.
Horkheimer and Adorno take over this Hegelian insight in Juliette and expose its dark
underbelly, insisting as Adorno would later put it that wrong life cannot be lived
rightly.
28
Following Hegels critique, Horkheimer and Adorno underscore the emptiness
of instrumental reason: The principle of contradiction, they write, is the system in

26
Horkheimer and Adorno, 92
27
They write, for instance, that once the utopia which inspired the hopes of the French Revolution had
been absorbed, potently and impotently, into German music and philosophy, the established bourgeois
order entirely functionalized reason. Horkheimer and Adorno, 69
28
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life, (London: Verso, 2005), 39
11
nuce. [] Reason contributes nothing but the idea of systematic unity, the formal
elements of fixed conceptual relationships.
29
In this respect, Kants practical philosophy
is no different than the systematic libertinage of Sades Juliette, who abominates any
veneration which cannot be shown to be rational.
30
In each case, they argue, a purely
formal procedure amounting to no more than prejudice and tautology is entrusted
with the task of generating and testing practical maxims. Thus, Horkheimer and Adornos
juxtaposition of the lighter and darker writings of the bourgeoisie leads them to the
following conclusion:
As long as one does not ask who is applying it, reason has no greater
affinity with violence than with mediation; depending on the situation of
individuals and groups, it presents either peace or war, tolerance or
repression, as the given state of affairs. Because it unmasks substantial
goals as asserting the power of nature over mind and as curtailing its own
self-legislation, reason, as a purely formal entity, is at the service of every
natural interest.
31


Though they do not quite replicate Hegels argument, the point is the same: when one
seeks in reason a guide to overcome the dictates of natural consciousness, she inevitably
borrows from what has become for her second nature from Sittlichkeit. Nevertheless,
Sittlichkeit presents to Horkheimer and Adorno not the solution to the problem of the
foundations of normativity, but an intensification of it: insofar as reason remains bound
up with the ends of a given society, it can be made to bow to the most heinous of
purposes. Moreover, connecting up Hegels critique of the tautological nature of the
categorical imperative to his objections to Kants theory of moral motivation, the authors
of the Dialectic of Enlightenment warn that, in class society, reasons power of
abstraction perpetuates the status quo. Not only is reason too empty to prescribe any

29
Horkheimer and Adorno, 63-64
30
Horkheimer and Adorno, 76
31
Horkheimer and Adorno, 68
12
specific practical action; reason is so thoroughly formal that it is incapable of offering
even a fundamental objection against murder.
32
In other words, far from motivating
moral action, instrumental reason disburdens bourgeois society of its remaining scruples.
Hegel objected that the Kantian opposition of reason and sensuousness of the
causality of freedom and the causality of nature artificially separated two moments of a
single consciousness; that, in severing duty from desire, Kant cut the very sinews of
moral motivation. Horkheimer and Adorno resume this second point of contention in
their critique of instrumental reason, revealing once again the more extreme implications
of Hegels argument.
33
As a function of the existing order, they contend, instrumental
reason becomes a hindrance to moral action: after purifying the modern world of all
irrational that is, subversive content, it seeks to purge those affects that remain left
over from a better life. Raising the stakes of Hegels reproach, Horkheimer and Adorno
point out that instrumental reason not only subordinates happiness to duty, but utterly
invalidates the claims of remorse and pity: to be free of the stab of conscience, they
claim, is as essential to formalistic reason as to be free of love or hate.
34
Nevertheless,
instrumental reason would not be so sinister if it did not absorb the barbarism latent in
class society. The citizen who renounced a profit out of the Kantian motive of respect
for the mere form of the law, they write, would not be enlightened but superstitious a
fool.
35
This is not only because the law itself presents no incentive to act morally, but
because instrumental reason draws normative authority from the only source of

32
Horkheimer and Adorno, 93
33
Benhabib also recognizes Horkheimer and Adornos indebtedness to Hegel on this point: In their
psychoanalytic reformulation of the concept of autonomy, Adorno and Horkheimer ironically return to one
of Hegels main criticisms of Kantian morality, that is, to the contradiction between duty and inclination,
between the moral law and the affective-emotive constitution of the individual (Benhabib, 188).
34
Horkheimer and Adorno, 75
35
Horkheimer and Adorno, 67
13
motivation sanctioned under monopoly capitalism that of self-preservation.
36
In this
way, the civilizing process which began in an effort to raise humanity out of the brute
conditions of natural causality concludes in a regression to mere nature: once the last
trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute
tautology,
37
and nothing remains for reason but the consecration of the status quo.
I have just shown how Horkheimer and Adornos critique of instrumental reason
the core of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is indebted to Hegels critique of Kantian
morality. Before moving on to address Habermas criticism in The Entwinement of
Myth and Enlightenment, I would like to briefly reiterate two points. First, while
Horkheimer and Adorno endorse Hegels critique, they are dismayed by its implications:
a damaged Sittlichkeit offers no better consolation than a reason wholly abstracted from
social life. And secondly, it should be noted, given their rather solicitous endorsement of
reasons social situation, that Horkheimer and Adorno recognize the contingent basis of
instrumental rationality. If reason has degenerated into a mere instrument of the existing
order, this has more to do with social and historical determinations than its essential
teleological character: Juliette presents a counterbalance to the pronouncements of
Odysseus.

3. Habermas and the Problem of Normative Foundations
Habermas argues in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that one can
discern in the development of recent thought traces of that pervasive experience of
historical rupture that was ushered in with the modern age. With Weber, Habermas

36
If all affects are of equal value, they argue, then self-preservation, which dominates the form of the
system in any case, seems to offer the most plausible maxims for action. Horkheimer and Adorno, 71
37
Adorno, 123
14
recognizes that although the rationalization of society has liberated the scientific,
aesthetic, and moral value spheres from their strained union in religious and metaphysical
worldviews, it has also left deep fissures in social life. In evaluating the philosophical
response to this historical development, however, he goes beyond Weber: Habermas
submits that the trajectory of recent philosophical thinking can be understood as an
attempt to work through the traumatic unraveling of religions power of unification
and a failed one at that. Thus, he undertakes in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
to retrace this trajectory, locating instances where the Western philosophical tradition
could have circumvented the aporias in which it would become ensnared. At each of the
conceptual crossroads that Habermas identifies, he indicates the contours of that
alternative path his interlocutor has overlooked that of communicative rationality. In his
fifth lecture, The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno,
Habermas examines the apparent failings of his intellectual forerunners at the Institute for
Social Research. Because Horkheimer and Adorno are unable to definitively disentangle
the claims of reason from those of power, because their analysis borrows from the very
rationality it intends to indict, Habermas concludes that the Dialectic of Enlightenment
must renounce its pretensions of offering a legitimate diagnosis of modernity. I would
like to challenge this conclusion. Earlier, I invoked a similarity between Habermas
criticism of Horkheimer and Adorno and their critique of instrumental reason: both
critiques, I suggested, warn of illicit normative foundations of borrowed normativity
and remain in this way within the orbit of Hegels critique of Kantian morality. For this
reason, I would like (1) to revisit Habermas criticism of Horkheimer and Adorno in The
Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment, and (2) conclude by reassessing the validity
15
of his objections in light of the Hegelian dimension of the Dialectic of Enlightenment that
I have tried to illustrate here.
Habermas begins his analysis of the Dialectic of Enlightenment with the avowed
intention of forestalling a confusion between the moods and attitudes of Horkheimer
and Adorno and those that have recently emerged under the sign of a Nietzsche
revitalized by poststructuralism.
38
It is a matter of differentiating his predecessors
attempt to enlighten the Enlightenment about itself
39
from the anti-modern counter-
Enlightenment tendencies of such latter-day Nietzscheans as Heidegger, Bataille, and
Foucault. And yet, The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment also stands as an
incisive critique of Horkheimer and Adornos distinctive approach to social criticism.
The fact that Habermas is able to conjoin these two tasks in his essay, however, already
intimates a potential limitation of his analysis: his appraisal of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, in focusing too closely on the texts Nietzschean faade, fails to
appreciate its Hegelian underpinnings. Nevertheless, if Habermas had attended to the way
in which Horkheimer and Adornos critique of instrumental reason is informed by the
normative considerations of Hegels critique of Kantian morality, he may have revised
his criticism of their project.
Habermas has two major objections to the Dialectic of Enlightenment. On the one
hand, he takes issue with their rather bleak assessment of rationality. How, he asks,
can these two men of the Enlightenment (which they both remain) be so unappreciative
of the rational content of cultural modernity that all they perceive everywhere is a binding

38
Habermas, 106
39
Habermas, 118
16
of reason and domination, of power and validity?
40
And on the other, he objects to a
performative contradiction which, he suggests, vitiates their analysis by dissolving the
normative foundations of critique. He considers the latter a consequence of the former: a
cramped optics preventing them from recognizing the traces and the existing forms of
communicative rationality,
41
he argues, commits Horkheimer and Adorno to an
unnecessarily autophagous critique. Though Habermas links the problem of the
normative foundations of critique to his recasting of critical theorys rationality
problematic, it seems to me that the two issues need not be fused together. After all, the
problem of normative foundations remains intelligible outside the perspective of a theory
of communicative rationality. Hegels critique of Kant already made this evident.
Therefore, I will bracket questions as to the legitimacy of Habermas linguistic
transformation of critical theory, focusing instead on the validity of his elaboration of the
normative problem.
It is, nevertheless, the question of reason which anchors Habermas analysis of the
Dialectic of Enlightenment and rightly so. As I suggested earlier, the critique of
instrumental reason constitutes the core of Horkheimer and Adornos critical diagnosis of
modernity. Habermas, however, makes the understandable error of confusing their
critique of instrumental reason with an indictment of reason tout court. He summarizes
the works central thesis in the following statement: Reason itself destroys the humanity
it first made possible.
42
On this basis, he argues that Horkheimer and Adorno, taking a
cue from Nietzsche, resign themselves to the fact that reason is fundamentally an
appendage of power. Now, I have already suggested that such a reading must reckon with

40
Habermas, 121
41
Habermas, 127
42
Habermas, 110
17
the more cautious appraisal of rationality elaborated in Juliette. Horkheimer and
Adorno show in that chapter, following Hegels critique of Kant, that reason is always
bound to and expressed in the values, practices, and institutions that compose an ethical
community, and that reason becomes instrumental precisely when it absorbs the
normative content of a community dominated by economic and administrative
imperatives. Nevertheless, Habermas reaches his final conclusion that Horkheimer and
Adornos ideology critique destroys the basis for its own validity by failing to
appreciate the dissonant composition of the Dialectic.
43
Critique becomes ideology
critique, Habermas contends,
when it attempts to show that the validity of a theory has not been
adequately dissociated from the context in which it emerged; that behind
the back of the theory there lies hidden an inadmissible mixture of power
and validity, and that it still owes its reputation to this.
44


Ideology critique, however, becomes total when it turns on its own rational foundations
when it throws into doubt the legitimacy of this very procedure. Once critique becomes in
this way severed from its foundation in reason, Habermas argues, it must renounce its
own claim to validity: if it does not have anything in reserve to which it might appeal,
45

critique will have to draw from the same sources it has condemned as illicit. In short,
Habermas brings a familiar charge to bear upon Horkheimer and Adornos project: that
of borrowed normativity. Ideology critique, which seeks to expose the impermissible
elements without which a given theory cannot operate, becomes defunct, Habermas
contends, when it is revealed that this procedure cannot in fact function without such

43
Benhabib also testifies to this textual incongruity: Whereas in the Excursus on the Odyssey it is argued
that the structure of Western reason as such is one of domination and sublimation, the Excursus on
Enlightenment and Morality defends the weaker thesis that it is not Western reason as such which is
incompatible with autonomy, but the specific instrumental form it assumes in the service of self-
preservation (Benhabib, 163-164).
44
Habermas, 116
45
Habermas, 118
18
elements. As I have suggested, however, Horkheimer and Adornos critique would be
susceptible to this objection only if it unequivocally averred the identity of reason and
power a thesis which, I have argued, Juliette problematizes. Although the incongruity
between the two excurses offsets the charge of a performative contradiction, Horkheimer
and Adornos argument in Juliette furnishes an even stronger response to Habermas
criticism. It is with this thought that I would like to conclude.
Habermas insists that, if Horkheimer and Adorno do not want to renounce the
effect of a final unmasking and still want to continue with critique, they will have to
leave at least one rational criterion intact for their explanation of the corruption of all
rational criteria.
46
With this requirement, however, Habermas opens himself up to
Hegels critique of Kant. Hegel objected to Kants reduction of normativity to rationality,
arguing that the latters moral theory could not function without implicitly drawing from
the irrational content which it undertook to exclude. In obliging Horkheimer and Adorno
to leave at least one rational criterion intact, Habermas seems to suppose, like Kant,
that reason can be safely abstracted from the vicissitudes of ethical life that even if the
social has been corrupted by instrumental rationality or colonized by systemic
imperatives, reason retains its transcendent capacity. Horkheimer and Adorno, however,
have learned from Hegel that, because it is fundamentally bound up with Sittlichkeit, to
abstract reason from its situatedness is, at once, to sacrifice its critical function.
47
It is not,
as Habermas supposes, that the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment are oblivious to
the conditions under which the critique of ideology derives its legitimacy. Rather, their

46
Habermas, 126-127
47
This is, of course, also near to Habermas own concern. He is intent on preserving the normative content
of modernity from its potential liquidation in a lifeworld assimilated to systemic imperatives. The
rationality endemic to the lifeworld communicative rationality must be defended, Habermas maintains
in Postmetaphysical Thinking, from the purposive rationality utilized in expert cultures.
19
sensitivity to the normative basis of critique leads them to reject the plausibility of ever
locating such pristine, impartial grounds from which criticism could proceed.
48
In short,
Horkheimer and Adorno have via Hegel anticipated Habermas objection. Their
response is to reject the validity of Habermas critique not on logical, but historical
grounds. A performative contradiction becomes necessary only, as Habermas say, when it
is clear that there is no other way out. While Habermas recasting of rationality allows
him to perceive the rational content of cultural modernity all around him, the Dialectic of
Enlightenment is bound by the concern that, if reason has been historically transformed
into a tool of monopoly capitalism, social theory has no other option but to engage in the
paradoxical labor of self-referential critique. Such a move, Habermas claims, is
paradoxical, because in the moment of description it still has to make use of the critique
that has been declared dead.
49
This paradox is illegitimate, however, only from the
standpoint in which the claims of reason can be definitively distinguished from those of
power, that is, only from the perspective in which, according to Horkheimer and Adorno,
critique becomes unnecessary.


48
And this, I submit, is precisely the concern Horkheimer and Adorno would have with respect to the
quasi-transcendental status of the formal pragmatics underlying Habermas linguistic transformation of
critical theory.
49
Habermas, 119