ABSTRACT
Jurgen Habermas’s exchange with Hans-Georg Gadamer in the late 1960s and early 1970s is one of his more substantial, along with those with Niklas Luhmann, who had been Theodor Adorno’s temporary replacement, and later, in the 1990s, with John Rawls. These contrast with the largely missed opportunities with Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu who had briefly analysed law. In Habermas’s analysis, each of the approaches goes beyond or transcends the previous one(s). In the phenomenological approach to the constitution of meaning in everyday life, ‘language has not yet been understood as the web to whose threads the subjects cling and through which they develop into subjects in the first place’. In Habermas’s work of the 1970s, law appears most systematically in a structural role as part of his reconstruction of historical materialism and his account of modernity in the second volume of The Theory of Communicative Action.
