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No Consensus – Because Why? Interview with Maren Lehmann and Ingrid Volkmer

2021; Emerald Publishing Limited; Volume: 50; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1108/k-12-2020-862

1758-7883

Markus Heidingsfelder,

PrologueAt the beginning of the 1970s, the German public was introduced to a debate over the correct contemporary theoretical understanding of society.The circumstances leading up to it make it seem almost entirely coincidental.When Luhmann gave a lecture on the sociology of love in Frankfurt, his apparent coldness with regard to the topichis professional scientific attitude, in other wordswas met with a similarly cold reception amongst the politically engaged students there, as a result of which they asked Habermas for a statement.Habermas, who was Adorno's assistant at the time, invited Luhmann to one of his own seminars, with their discussion eventually culminating in the book Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (Theory of Society or Social Technology, Habermas and Luhmann, 1971).This "Theorie-Diskussion" (as the subtitle of the book clarified) had all of the elements for mass media consumption on a national stage: it met the demands for conflict, and it allowed for the personalization of said conflict in the form of a duel between two great German master thinkers.On the one side was Jürgen Habermas, who demanded that sociology consist in a critique of societyi.e. he considered it a moral obligation to uncover suboptimal social conditions, and identify the means by which to improve them.Taking aim at his antagonist prior to the discussion, he had criticized Luhmann's view of society for being too conservative and for lacking any vision of social utopia, while Luhmann insisted that morality, judgement and social criticism require a theory, whereby he placed particular emphasis on an adequate description of social reality, which Habermas did not provide because he parroted utopias instead of actually pursuing a contemporary sociology, and clung to centuriesold ideals instead of daring to come up with something new.If one subtracted all details, what remained wasaccording to Lyotarda rivalry between two models: that of society as a functional whole, and that of the bipartite society (Lyotard, 1986, p. 42).An interesting aspect of the debate was the fact that truth, from a systems-theoretical perspective: the medium of science, fell precisely at its center; a characteristic it shared with another scientific meta debate of the time, the one between Karl Popper and T.S. Kuhn (Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970).For Luhmann, truth takes on the function of making methodologically sound statements generally acceptable.It is not much more than a label attached to the knowledge gained according to scientific standards in order to guarantee its binding nature.Habermas, on the other hand, understands truth as a claim of validity that is raised by particular actors in communicative action.And although both parties acted rationally over the course of the debate, no consensus between them could be reached.In Habermas' terminology, the ideal to which the claims to validityas asserted in his theory -