Spiraling into Control

Developed by Max Weber and the Frankfurt School, the theory of rationalization holds that instrumental reason increasingly drives out forms of political reason. Modernity is thus caught up in a technical logic of closure that eclipses its emancipatory promise, ending in Weber’s “iron cage” or Adorno and Horkheimer’s “totally administered society.” The problem with this narrative, however, is that it turns on a separation between technics and politics that is empirically and politically problematic. This chapter surveys the tenability of the theory of rationalization on the basis of Science and Technology Studies literature. It argues that rationalization’s logic of closure should be interpreted as Niklas Luhmann’s “operational closure,” which paradoxically produces political openness. This offers a critical systems theoretic vision that preserves critical theory’s core intuition of social closure while underlining the historical and political nature of instrumental reason by working through its paradoxical logic.