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Book Reviews: Political Theory

theory. Study of the traditional "steeringcapacities" (money and power) of advanced capitalist societies must be balanced by even closer attention to largely symbolic processes of reproduction. Habermas' concept of the "life-world" is his means for uncovering the needs, "action orientations," and structural requirements for this dimension of social life. This two-level approach allows Habermas to claim, unlike Nietzsche or Weber, that modernity is not fundamentally contradictory. It is instead distorted. Through one-sided development, White shows us, modernity has taken on its self-limiting, instrumentalist characteristics. Habermas' concept of "colonization of the lifeworld" is his vehicle for revealing just how this distortion has taken place and how it might be checked. White's study, however, is more than exposition. It is also a defense. White correctly recognizes that to defend Habermas is to defend his theory of a universal pragmatics; that is to say, the assertion that through analysis of the inevitable assumptions of speech, universal moral principles may be both discerned and justified. Added to this is White's conviction (with Habermas) that justification of universal moral principles can be accomplished in a "nonfoundationalist" way. White's arguments are far too subtle to be treated fairly here. Nevertheless, two features of his defense stand out. One is the argument that Habermas' universal pragmatics is correct not just because Habermas has accurately defined the unavoidable presuppositions of speech but because universal pragmatics more fully accommodates that which White deems "constitutive of what we understand as human action" (p. 14). As a result, "justice" can be viewed once again in universal terms, founded, so to speak, "in the nature of things" (p. 22). It seems to me, however, that this defense is based on something yet to be demonstrated. The other outstanding feature is White's claim that Habermas avoids the pitfalls of traditional Kantian foundationalism. How so7 For White, the answer lies largely in the limits Habermas has imposed upon himself. Unlike Kant, Habermas makes no effort to elucidate the conditions of all possible knowledge. Instead, Habermas restricts himself only to those conditions "for the validity of meaningful expressions and performances," that is to say, to "rational reconstructions of the know-how of subjects, who are entrusted to produce valid expressions and who trust themselves to distinguish intuitively between valid and invalid expressions" (p. 129). Moreover, neither White nor Habermas regards these "reconstructions" as a priori. They are instead hypothetical, subject to empirical confirmation (p. 130).