Review: Reconsidering Habermas's Colonization Thesis

Reconsidering Habermas's Colonization Thesis: A Critical Theory of Neoliberal Society #

By Roderick Condon Routledge, 2025, Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

Condon, Roderick. 2025. Reconsidering Habermas's Colonization Thesis: A Critical Theory of Neoliberal Society. Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought. Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-367-47095-1. DOI: 10.4324/9781003033349.

Roderick Condon opens with an unusually clear map of a literature that rarely gets mapped this cleanly: the critique of neoliberalism, sorted into four strands (political-economic, Foucauldian, psychosocial, discourse-analytical), each defined by what it takes neoliberalism to be, how it understands "economization," and what it leaves unexplained. This literature review is genuinely useful, the kind a doctoral student would photocopy. Condon's diagnosis of the shared gap across all four strands is sharp: none of them possesses a full theory of society capable of explaining how economization actually happens as a communicative process, and none clearly explicates the normative, democratic ground from which the critique itself speaks. That lacuna is where this book, adapted from Condon's PhD thesis at University College Cork, tries to build something new: a return to Jürgen Habermas's system-lifeworld framework, reconstructed through Honneth, Luhmann, Parsons, and Marx, to produce what Condon calls a theory of relinguistification. While I admire the architecture, I will argue that the book's persuasive power stops at the edge of that architecture; the theory explains itself compellingly, but Condon has not yet shown that it explains much else.

What the theory actually claims #

The core move takes Habermas's distinction between "delinguistified" communication (the coded, media-steered communication of money and power that constitutes economic and administrative systems) and "linguistic" communication (the ordinary language of the lifeworld) and makes it, rather than the more familiar system/lifeworld split, the real spine of the colonization thesis. Neoliberalism, on this account, is not simply an ideology or a policy regime; it names a specific kind of translation failure between these two registers, an "immanent relinguistification" in which system imperatives get smuggled into ordinary language as though they were natural facts rather than contestable claims. Condon's worked example, developed at real length in the book's final chapter, is the concept of human capital. Read through his framework, human capital is not just a Foucauldian description of neoliberal subjectivity; it is a piece of monetary coding translated into language, deployed again and again without ever being opened up to the kind of argument that could contest it, thereby quietly converting communicative action into what Condon calls "latent strategic action." The mirror concept, "transcendent relinguistification," describes how critique itself works: Condon reads neoliberalism as a critical term, tracing its migration from Pinochet-era Chilean economists' own self-description through anti-globalization movements to academic diagnosis, as an act of counter-language that reopens the boundary the neoliberal lexicon tries to seal shut.

In my estimation this constitutes a real theoretical contribution, not a restatement. Condon identifies actual gaps in Habermas's original elaboration of colonization (he counts four specific ones in the translation between delinguistified and linguistic communication), and the three-part structure of the book coheres architecturally, moving from economy (Part I, refining the concept of "system" against Honneth and Luhmann) to society (Part II, expanding colonization through Parsons's AGIL scheme into a fuller account of cultural rationalization and ideology) to communication (Part III, where the theory of relinguistification finally lands). The synthesis of Honneth's normative economic institutionalism, Luhmann's systems theory, and Parsons's structural-functionalism into a single Habermasian frame is ambitious in exactly the way serious critical theory is supposed to be ambitious, and Condon clearly knows this terrain from the inside.

The cost of the abstraction #

The problem is that almost the entire book operates at this level of conceptual architecture, and it rarely comes down to test itself against anything outside the architecture. Compare it to Peter Fleming's Capitalism and Nothingness, published the same year and covering adjacent ground: Fleming builds his theory out of the Juukan Gorge mining disaster, the Sackler deposition, Robodebt. Condon builds his almost entirely out of other theorists. The human capital chapter comes closest to a sustained empirical or textual case, and even there the "evidence" is Foucault's own conceptual treatment of homo oeconomicus, not any actual instance of human-capital language doing damage in the world. A reader finishes the book able to recite the theory of relinguistification in detail without having seen it applied to a single concrete controversy, policy debate, or discourse sample. For a theory whose central claim concerns how specific language operates in specific communicative situations, the absence of any transcript, speech, policy document, or media artifact marks a real lacuna. The theory explains itself compellingly; it has not yet been shown to explain much else.

The prose compounds this abstraction. Sentences routinely run past 80 words, stacked with hedges and self-referential markers ("this study," "the present framework," "as outlined above"), and the citation density is heavy even by the standards of social theory monographs, with entire paragraphs built from strings of parenthetical author-year references rather than sustained engagement with any one of them. An irony surfaces here that Condon seems not to notice: a book arguing that neoliberal language works by closing off ordinary communicative access to concepts is itself, at the sentence level, close to inaccessible to anyone outside a narrow specialist readership in Habermasian social theory. That choice is defensible for a monograph in a series called Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, and Condon is not writing for a popular audience. But it does mean the book's own form sits in some tension with its argument about what communicative openness requires; the diagnosis and the delivery pull in opposite directions.

Where the book is strongest #

Chapter 5's account of ideology as a "mediation problem" in modern culture, and its novel reading of Parsons's underappreciated theory of ideology, genuinely illuminates and probably stands as the most self-contained, citable piece of the book for readers who do not want to take on the full architecture. The historical framing in Chapter 7, tracing neoliberalism from its origins as neoliberal economists' own affirmative self-description through its adoption by Chilean and Latin American critics after 1973 and its subsequent globalization as a term of resistance, is a small, well-executed piece of conceptual history that stands on its own regardless of whether the relinguistification apparatus around it persuades.

Verdict #

Reconsidering Habermas's Colonization Thesis is a serious, technically accomplished piece of Habermasian system-building, and specialists working on the colonization thesis, the Habermas-Luhmann debate, or the theoretical foundations of neoliberalism critique should read it closely; it earns its place in that literature. But it remains a book of theoretical architecture rather than social diagnosis, built almost entirely from theorists talking to other theorists, and it asks readers to accept the explanatory power of the theory of relinguistification on the strength of one worked example and a great deal of conceptual scaffolding. The PhD-thesis origins show: the ambition to synthesize four major theorists into a single frame is real and mostly successful, but the corresponding empirical demonstration that would make the synthesis persuasive to anyone outside the specialism never quite arrives.