Immanent critique

I just came across a brilliant article:

Jones, Paul. 2007. Beyond the Semantic ‘Big Bang’: Cultural Sociology and an Aesthetic Public Sphere. Cultural sociology Vol 1(1): 73–95.

The author attributes to Habermas' Structural transformation the method of immanent critique:

He wishes to immanently acknowledge the utopian prospect of an ideology (broadly, liberalism) while remaining fully aware of both its dramatic failure as an empirical account of ‘realpolitik’, and its possible success as a means of legitimation of ongoing domination. But he also wishes to acknowledge that such unfulfilled promise retains a normative potential as a court of appeal. The space so provided, the gap between ideal and reality, is the crucial point of recovery for normative discussion.

I would disagree that this description holds for Habermas at any point of his career, even when he was working at the Institute, but most certainly it does not hold for Structural transformations. The confusing nature of the work stems exactly from a deviance from immanent critique: Habermas is starting on his path of uncritical and undialectical acceptance of liberalism by stating that a public sphere actually existed in the 19. century. This claim goes against all historical evidence and contrary to popular belief Habermas was fully aware of it when writing the book. The problem was that he did not at the time have at his disposal nebulous concepts like "regulative idea" to obscure the inconsistencies of such an approach.

Enough about Habermas though, what I want to do is return to a classical text to shed some light on the logic underlying immanent critique. In the German Ideology Marx and Engels take a stand against a history, which analyses ideas abstracted from their material base:

This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.

This is a passage that Althusser obviously missed when writing about ideology, but one that the Frankfurt school understood perfectly. Ruling ideology is, according to Marx and Engels, paradoxical: at one point it is the ideal expression of the rule of a certain social class, but at the same time it is a critique of this same rule: because the ruling class came to dominance in class struggle it was forced to make concession to other classes, represent itself as the manifestation of universal values, and thereby its ideology by its universalist tendency necessarily opposes its particularist rule.