CRITICAL THEORY AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY

Weber argues that Western culture and society have been "rationalized" in a number of ways: from the rationalization of religion that brings the differentiation among various "spheres of value," to the institutionalization of a methodically rational conduct of life, to the rise of the capitalist economy and modern bureaucratic state. This dissertation considers three attempts to develop an explicitly critical theory of rationalization: the central question concerns the critical standard against which the process of rationalization is to be assessed.;Adorno recognizes the utopian character of this strongest sense of "reification." But his critique of rationalization as reification embraces this utopianism. Reification derives from the nature of thought itself; however, the protest against reification is equally essential. His "negative dialectic" strives toward the "reconciliation" and "redemption" that even reified thought posits as a goal; he admits, however, that in this fallen world these Ideas cannot even be positively conceived. The paradoxes in which Adorno's negative dialectic ends suggest that his utopian critical standard should be revised.;In Part Two I investigate Habermas's attempt to assess the process of rationalization without relying upon a utopian critical standard. The course of rationalization is to be criticized, he argues, to the degree to which the "functional imperatives" of rationalized economic and administrative systems impair the process he calls the "symbolic reproduction" of a rationalized society--impair, that is, the "post conventional" integration of members of the society through consensual values and norms, the education and socialization of the society's members, or the reproduction and renewal of the cultural tradition. I defend a somewhat revised version of Habermas's theory. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).;In Part One I discuss Lukacs's and Adorno's attempts to criticize rationalization through the concept of "reification." Lukacs uses the term "reification" in a number of ways. In the most radical sense, he locates reification in the structure of what Weber called "formal rationality." In his critique of formal rationality as reification, the critical standard Lukacs employs is the notion of a "realm of freedom" in which reification will be overcome. But because the very goal Lukacs sets the realm of freedom requires formally rational institutions and practices, his critical standard is utopian.