'Habermas construes systems, in the light of Luhmann, as spheres of “norm free” sociality. “In capitalist societies the market is the most important example of a norm-free regulation of cooperative contexts” (1981 [1987: 150, 154]). This puts him on the side of those who see markets as destroying rather than nourishing the web of moral relations. His predominant way of thinking about subsystems is that they are “demoralized”. This is true of the market economy, bureaucracies and state administration, and the law, which in Theory of Communicative Action he treats as a subsystem. That said, even in this text, while he claims that law in the process of rationalization becomes “detached from the ethical motivations of the legal person” (1981 [1987: 174]), he nonetheless thinks of basic rights and the principle of popular sovereignty as sources of legitimation which act as

bridge between a de-moralized and externalized legal sphere and a deinstitutionalized and internalized morality. (1981 [1987: 178])

Systems, which facilitate integration and social order through “delinguistified steering media” like money and power, have great advantages for citizens of modern societies. They fulfil functions that are too complex or burdensome to be undertaken by communicative action, that is, by individuals acting consciously in concert. For example, markets distribute goods and resources to where they are most needed, using price signals and laws of supply and demand.

However, systems also have disadvantages. For one thing, systems, once in place, operate independently of human agents. There is, consequently, a gap between an actor’s agency, and their conscious intentions and aims, and the purpose that they serve in the system. This lack of transparency is evident in firms, for instance, where the agents fulfil their roles and tasks, whether using instrumental, communicative, or moral rationality, or a mix of all, while all the time behind their backs or “beyond their consciousness” at the macro-level they are making profit for the firm’s owners and shareholders. For another, Habermas claims, agents operating in spheres steered by delinguistified media are inclined to shift from communicative to instrumental and strategic action orientations with the result that

success-oriented action steered by egocentric calculations of utility loses its connection to action oriented by mutual understanding. (1981 [1987: 196])

Whether Habermas holds that agents’ actions in economic and bureaucratic domains are merely constrained by system imperatives of the relevant steering media, or reduced to instrumental and strategic actions is moot (Jütten 2013). But it is empirically false for reasons given by Honneth and Joas and others that the mediatization of a domain of social life would force agents to adopt only one type of action. As Joas puts it, every sphere of action contains “a wealth of different types of action” (Joas 1986 [1991: 104]). Systems, economic and bureaucratic, and the specific organisations they comprise, all involve numerous different kinds of action. This is not only an empirical claim but a conceptual one that follows from Habermas’s own theory that instrumental and strategic action is parasitic on communicative action. Habermas has also been criticized for being seduced by systems theory into merely accepting spheres of norm free sociality, and the uncoupling of system and lifeworld as a normal result of modernization and social differentiation (McCarthy 1991)'.

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