Abstract
For Seyla Benhabib, a fixation on labor distorts Hegel’s account of reason and Marx’s account of capitalist society. Discourse ethics recovers the normative dimension supposedly missing from classical critical theory by appending the messy interactions of the lifeworld to the technical sphere of labor. A Hegelian response to discourse ethics eludes Benhabib. She settles for a legend where Hegel separates fact from value, system from lifeworld, and labor from social activity. Discourse ethics presupposes a generic, non-social conception of labor akin to instrumental reason. Hegel does use labor as a model for thinking but not labor as instrumental. Labor—like reason—possesses determinate historical and social forms. The notion of work as technical problem-solving without any specific social goal disguises the actual purpose of capitalism: the endless accumulation of capital. The problem that discourse ethics sets out to solve—a lack of normative foundations—is misconceived from the start.