The Philosophy of Jürgen Habermas: A Critical Introduction

Jürgen Habermas seeks to defend the Enlightenment and with it an “emphatical”, “uncurtailed” conception of reason against the post-modern critique of reason on the one hand, and against so-called scientism (which would include critical rationalism and the greater part of analytical philosophy) on the other. His objection to the former is that it is self-contradictory and politically defeatist; his objection to the latter is that, thanks to a standard of rationality derived from the natural sciences or from Weber's concept of purposive rationality, it leaves normative questions to irrational decisions. Wishing to offer an alternative, Habermas tries to develop a theory of communicative action that can clarify the normative foundations of a critical theory of society as well as provide a fruitful theoretical framework for empirical social research. This study is a comprehensive and detailed analysis and a sustained critique of Habermas' philosophical system starting with his pragmatist turn in the seventies. It clearly and precisely depicts its long path from an analysis of speech acts to a discourse theory of law and the democratic constitutional state via the theory of communicative action, discourse ethics, and the attempts to apply the approach to, and support it with, empirical theories.