The Theory of Communicative Action

Introduction

Habermas’s main work, published by Suhrkamp in 1981 in two volumes of more than a thousand pages in all. Volume one develops a theory of rationality: besides purposive action aimed at success there is communicative action, oriented towards reaching understanding, in which speakers implicitly raise validity claims – to truth, normative rightness and sincerity – that can be challenged and defended with reasons. Volume two combines this with systems theory. Society is both a “lifeworld” of shared meanings and a “system” steered by money and power; modern pathologies arise when the system “colonises” the lifeworld. Habermas works through Weber, Lukács, Adorno, Mead, Durkheim and Parsons, and the book is a standard reference in social theory.

Connections

Builds on

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism1905 · Max Weber
• Mind, Self, and Society1934 · George Herbert Mead
• Speech Acts1969 · John Searle

Criticizes

• History and Class Consciousness1923 · Georg Lukács
• Dialectic of Enlightenment1944 · Theodor W. Adorno

More works by Jürgen Habermas

• 1962The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
• 1968Knowledge and Human Interests
• 1985The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity