Habermas and Taylor – a succinct introduction to language
Accounting scholars committed to Habermas’s regulative model - the Ideal Speech Community (ISC) - are implicitly committed to his theory of language. (Laughlin, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012). This is despite the observation that the Laughlin’s middle-range approach and its skeletal ontology represents a movement away from the idealisations in Habermas’s major works. The following argument suggests that a broader approach to language can supplement the middle-range framework.
Furthermore, Habermas’s approach to language guides the way critical accounting scholars use his work to examine connections between accounting and democratic theory. It is often argued that accounting is complicit in colonising the social world (Laughlin, 1987) which must be challenged by developing new systems towards a normative model of rational argumentation (Shapiro, 1998). Moreover, Laughlin and Broadbent (1997) have explored the effects of accounting on health-care systems and the implications of modern bureaucratic accounting and have offered some political recommendations. For example, Broadbent Sc Laughlin (2014) offer an interpretation that the health care sector has been colonised by free-market forms of reason and rationality, but this has been at the expense of a caring health system. Free-market reforms put money and rationality first and people second.
Background sources: Habermas and Taylor
Central to Jurgen Habermas’s argument is the claim that Taylor’s strong hermeneutic framework is built on a foundation pioneered by Herder, Humboldt, and Heidegger. According to Habermas, the framework proposed by Taylor moves too fast in that it relies on philosophical ethics at the expense of language as a problem-solving structure; that is, Taylor overemphasises the world disclosure function of language and fails to adjudicate between different political claims (Habermas, 1991a, pp. 216-217). This would mean that Taylor’s work contains illiberal possibilities which can be used by cunning political actors to further their own self-interest and thereby perpetuate political corruption (Taylor, 199If, pp. 23-36). Taylor, however, has responded that his discursive language-based politics is not an abstract blueprint, but involves normative possibilities that aim to create a life free from bureaucratic tutelage. For Taylor, therefore, it is Habermas who perpetuates an unjust political structure that condemns people to the daily grind of coping; that is, life is defined according to the parameters of a procedural rule without a vision about what it is good to be.4 Taylor explains his conception of significance in the following way:
[N]ow this engages me at a depth that using a fixed yardstick does not. I am in a sense questioning the inchoate sense that led me to use the yardstick. And at the same time it engages my whole self in a way that using the yardstick does not. That is what makes it uncommonly difficult to reflect on our fundamental evaluations. The obstacles in the way of going deeper are legion. ... [T]here is not only the difficulty of concentration, and the pain of uncertainty, but also all the distortions and repressions which make us want to turn away from this examination; and which make us resist change even when we examine ourselves. ‘Some of our evaluations may in fact become fixed and compulsive, so that we cannot help feeling guilty about X, or despising people like Y, even though we judge with the greatest degree of openness and depth at our command that X is perfectly all right, and that Y is a very admirable person. This casts light on another aspect of the term ‘deep’, as applied to people’ and it is these dimensions of human agency that the interpretative process aims to make clear.
(Taylor, 1976, pp. 298-299)
Central to Taylor’s framework is his ethic of authenticity which takes issue with the argument that procedural rules reflect the spirit of liberalism, but do not explore the potential in dialogic and expressive models (Taylor, 1992a, 2016). The modern liberal and neoliberal infatuation with procedure does not explore that common ground where differences are respected in a spirit of openness and democratic healing (Taylor, 2002a, p. 305). For Taylor, the common good reflects that political space where agreement is the fruit of democratic interchange and discourse; namely, it is that space where people’s strong values are articulated, expanded and sometimes challenged in the quest for justice (Taylor, 1971b). Justice might mean that one group gives more ground on a certain issue, owing to their erroneous stance on a particular matter (Taylor, 2016). More particularly, he dismantles the system-building intent of procedural liberal theory and advocates a republican and discursive democratic model whereby an element of the universal in a particular linguistic phenomenon is retained. Taylor’s work on language and discourse creates workable political relationships between particular cultures by locating what is common between them; this argument is based on the political projection that differences can flourish in a tolerant community. It is therefore a category error to argue that Taylor ignores the dimensions of all that are different and diverse in society by focussing on what is common. Rather, his focus is on the problems of identity which haunt modern politics and he exposes the illusions and pretensions that a fixed yardstick offers. Taylor’s solution is based on his conception of practical reason which squarely faces concerns of commonality, difference, foundationalism and proceduralism.
