Points of Departure

The German sociologist Richard Münch has undertaken to undo the category mistake – as Schnädelbach calls it – that Habermas commits by reducing all discourse possibilities to validity discourse, and thus to widen the range of types of discourse. His assumption, which is in line with Schnädelbach's analysis, is that discourse needs to be located within the context of society. As a neo-Parsonian venture, Münch's (1984, 117–19) proposal is based on the fourfold LIGA- or AGIL-scheme. First, rational discourse, in the sense of Habermas’ pure type of theoretical and practical discourse about validity, is regarded as a subsystem of society, the rationalised cultural subsystem (‘Latency’). Three further types of discourse are identified as fulfilling a mediation and integration function: consensus-building discourse between culture and the communal lifeworld (‘Integration’), decision-building discourse between culture and the political subsystem (‘Goal-attainment’), and finally unity-building discourse between culture and the economic subsystem (‘Adaptation’). This attempt to arrive at a sociological conception of discourse is by no means without interest, but severe limitations are imposed upon it by the systems theoretical or functionalist approach preferred by its author.

Its concern with society as a system betrays its neglect of the process of construction of society in favour of society as a product of that process. Discourse is seen from the point of view of the maintenance of society as a system rather than as a factor in the process of the construction of society. As regards the latter, Habermas’ much wider conception of discourse as a meta-institution and of the general goal of discourse as being mutual understanding and agreement in the sense of bringing about a new consensus (or rational dissent), or re-establishing an interrupted one, is much more helpful than the functionalist notion of discourse as an institution of the cultural subsystem. As such, it provides a ready starting point for a sociological theory of discourse. Compared to Foucault, Münch's proposal exhibits also another limitation. Unlike Foucault, who seeks to go beyond the discourses and practices of modern society as simply expressing the way things are, Münch follows Parsons in adopting a basically uncritical attitude and hence taking a more or less harmonious view of modern society in which the different dimensions inter-penetrate each other.