Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Jürgen Habermas is arguably the most influential social theorist of the second half of the twentieth century. In a body of work beginning in the late 1950s, Habermas has covered an enormous range of problems and disciplines, and produced a stunning array of interlocked theoretical works: historical analyses, epistemology and philosophical anthropology, social theory, moral philosophy, legal theory, a huge amount of political analysis, even literary criticism. However, this sprawling œuvre – which shows no sign of slowing down – has remained remarkably consistent in the basic normative and theoretical commitments that form the foundation of all else that Habermas writes: the internal connection between rationality and agreement, and the attempt to delineate the normative implications of this connection in a critical theory of democratic society, morality, and law. This half-century-long project has established Habermas's social theory as the most prominent consensualist treatment of power in the twentieth century. Human rationality, Habermas argues, consists in a capacity for intersubjective coordination of action based on universal capacities for communicative competence, an ability to create a shared lifeworld through discursive practices. Hence, rationality is a “communicative power” that embodies the normative ideals of equality and freedom characteristic of the Enlightenment ... log in or subscribe to read full text