Utopia and Social Structure (1/5)

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A new consensus is emerging. We have available a shared sense of communicative rationality that incorporates the hopes and insights of the enlightenment and modernism, informed by a respect for otherness, language, finitude, and belonging that embraces the best of postmodernism. Naturally, my particular proposal for the new consensus takes place within an historical context involving my own concerns, background, and biography; it is unabashedly American. My view is also indebted to the New Right philosopher Friedrich Hayek and the New Left philosopher Jürgen Habermas. On a deeper level, it is indebted to the Aristotelian and Kantian traditions. I nevertheless believe that the core beliefs and values offered here can have general validity and applicability. In this spirit, I wish to introduce and offer a philosophy of collective individuation.

The thesis offers an interdisciplinary research program for the social sciences with a moral-practical intent, aiming to rationally address human agency—understood as meaningful human action—within the context of a wider social, biological, and material reality. In order to provide an appropriate setting, the first part presents a selective, intellectual-historical survey of (1) the Psychoanalytic School, as founded by Sigmund Freud and furthered by the work of Carl Jung and Ludwig Binswanger; (2) the Austrian School of the Social Sciences, as it began with Carl Menger and matured into the work of Friedrich von Hayek and Alfred Schutz; and (3) the Frankfurt School of the Social Sciences, as it began with Max Horkheimer and developed through the work of Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas. Drawing on these traditions and their mutual influences, the second part outlines a philosophically-based synthesis of the socio-analytical ("social") approach of Friedrich von Hayek with the psycho-analytical ("individual") approach of Carl Jung. The third part then argues that (1) Jürgen Habermas's interdisciplinary approach overstates the communicative and pre-communicative forms of social evolution at the expense of other forms of human evolution, so that it is ultimately reductive and inadequate for human freedom and fulfillment; and that (2) Habermas does not adequately address the favorable functions of unconscious and unintended social-systemic processes, so that his approach perpetuates hubristic dangers inherent in Enlightenment thought. In this way, the thesis explores some wider implications of the proposed Hayek-Jung synthesis, emphasizing the saving power of its (a) fuller understanding of human evolution and (b) compensatory respect for unconscious and unintended social-systemic processes, and thereby suggesting its improvements on and advantages over the radically-reconstructed Marx-Freud synthesis of Habermas and the Frankfurt School.

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• Utopia
• Lifeworld
• System
• Structure
• Hayek
• Habermas
• Jung
• Weber
• Parsons