ABSTRACT
The Gadamer-Habermas debate is constituted by a series of exchanges selectively brought together in the anthology Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (1971). The exchange begins in 1965, with the publication of the second edition of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. This edition contained a preface wherein Gadamer replies to criticism and a variety of misunderstandings about his work. Habermas’s first response to Gadamer, “A Review of Truth and Method,” was published in 1967 in a special volume of the journal Philosophische Rundschau (also included as part of On the Logic of the Social Sciences, 1970). In the same year, 1967, Gadamer published “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem” and “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Ideology Critique” in his Kleine Schriften. In 1970, Habermas’s “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality” appeared in the Festschrift in honor of Gadamer entitled Hermeneutik und Dialektik as well as “Summation and Response” in Continuum. The principal work serving as Habermas’s substantial contribution is articulated in Knowledge and Human Interests published in 1968 with an appendix outlining his overall project as announced in 1965. Also of relevance are Habermas’s essays “On Systematically Distorted Communication” and “A Theory of Communicative Competence” both published in 1970 in the journal Inquiry and in Recent Sociology No. 2 edited by Hans Peter Dreitzel. Gadamer’s closing response, “Reply to my Critics,” was published in Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik. Although both theorists continued to discuss one another’s works over the years, the aforementioned contributions are widely recognized as encapsulating the debate between critical theory and hermeneutics. Despite the disagreements between Gadamer and Habermas, hermeneutics and critical theory come forward in this encounter as theoretical trajectories committed to political and philosophical modernism: both theoretical orientations are steadfast in retaining the ideals of the Enlightenment in a systematic fashion
almost unparalleled in contrast to other rivaling theoretical orientations in the humanities and social sciences.
