'The socio-cultural system receives its input from the economic and political systems in the form of purchasable and collectively demandable goods and services, legal and administrative acts, public and social security, etc. Output crises in both of the other systems are also input disturbances in the socio-cultural system and translate into withdrawal of legitimation. The aforementioned crisis tendencies can break out only through the socio-cultural system. For the social integration of a society is dependent on the output of this system—directly on the motivations it supplies to the political system in the form of legitimation and indirectly on the motivations to perform it supplies to the educational and occupational systems. Since the socio-cultural system does not, in contrast to the economic system, organize its own input, there can be no socio-culturally produced input crisis. Crises that arise at this point are always output crises. We have to reckon with cultural crisis tendencies when the normative structures change, according to their inherent logic, in such a way that the complementarity between the requirements of the state apparatus and the occupational system, on the one hand, and the interpreted needs and legitimate expectations of members of society, on the other, is disturbed. Legitimation crises result from a need for legitimation that arises from changes in the political system (even when normative structure remain unchanged) and that cannot be met by the existing supply of legitimation. Motivational crises, on the other hand, are a result of changes in the socio-cultural system itself.

In advanced capitalism such tendencies are becoming apparent at the level of cultural tradition (moral systems, world-views) as well as at the level of structural change in the system of childrearing (school and family, mass media). In this way, the residue of tradition off which the state and the system of social labor lived in liberal capitalism is eaten away (stripping away traditionalistic padding), and core components of the bourgeois ideology become questionable (endangering civil and familial-professional privatism). On the other hand, the remains of bourgeois ideologies (belief in science, post-auratic art, and univeralistic value systems) form a normative framework that is dysfunctional. Advanced capitalism creates 'new' needs it cannot satisfy.

Our abstract survey of possible crises tendencies in advanced capitalism has served an analytic purpose. I maintain that advanced-capitalistic societies, assuming that they have not altogether overcome the susceptibility to crisis intrinsic to capitalism, are in danger from at least one of these possible crisis tendencies. It is a consequence of the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist system that, other factors being equal either

—the economic system does not produce the requisite quantity of consumable values, or;
—the administrative system does not produce the requisite quantity of rational decisions, or;
—the legitimation system does not provide the requisite quantity of generalized motivations, or;
—the socio-cultural system does not generate the requisite quantity of action-motivating meaning.

The expression ' the requisite quantity' refers to the extent, quality, and temporal dimension of the respective system performances (value, administrative decision, legitimation and meaning). Substitution relations between different system performances themselves are not excluded. Whether performances of the subsystems can be adequately operationalized and isolated and the critical need for system performances adequately specified is another question. But it is insoluble, in principle, only if levels of development of a social system—and in this way identity-guaranteeing limits of variation of its goal states—cannot be determined within the framework of a theory of social evolution" (Habermas 1975:48-49).

Habermas, Jürgen
1975[1973] Legitimation Crisis. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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