ABSTRACT
Jurgen Habermas is the foremost ‘Marxist’ authority on the slant to the philosophy of social theory. Habermas’s point of departure for reading the history of social theory is the so-called classical doctrine of politics. According to Habermas, the other major exception to the dominant trend in the history of modern social theory is Karl Marx. Habermas since his 1975 Legitimation Crisis has been trying to reconcile two positions which are at first glance dissonant with each other: system and lifeworld. Habermas’s attempt to resolve the dilemma between system and lifeworld led to the partial construction of a theory of social systems which gives more latitude to theory associated with lifeworld than to systems theory. System crisis is Habermas’s implicit version of a society riven by the principal alienatory feature of commodity fetishism. Habermas acclaims some constituent components or ‘universal properties’ of social systems. They both reduplicate the dilemma of idealism and materialism and show Habermas’s project to resolve that dilemma.
