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There is a spectre haunting Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action, a close relation to the totally reified world that haunted Western Marxism's original reception of Max Weber. In the 1940s Horkheimer and Adorno had in effect abandoned Marx for Weber on the question of the emancipatory potential of modern rationality. The spread of instrumental reason represented for them the core of a domination generalized to all spheres of life. Habermas agrees that the sociopathologies of modern life can be traced to processes of rationalization; however he stands with Marx in regarding them as due not to rationalization as such, but to the peculiar nature of capitalist modernization and thus in regarding them as treatable through transforming capitalist relations of production. In this respect his position is
Thomas McCarthy (Tue,) studied this question.