ABSTRACT
Jurgen Habermas, a professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, is Germany's most distinguished contemporary descendant of the Frankfurt School and among its most distinguished leftist intellectuals. Habermas has reconsidered his philosophical position during the course of his career. He has also reconsidered his politics. He has, however, never abandoned the pursuit of what Marx and the first members of the Frankfurt School had sought before him: a descriptive sociology with prescriptive force—a unification of theory and practice. The early Habermas might accurately enough be characterized as a neo-Marxist, if a neo-Marxist who had learned much from Weber. The later Habermas is sometimes characterized as a neofunctionalist, sometimes as a neo-evolutionist. Whatever else he may or may not be, he is certainly a dedicated if discriminating synthesist of the philosophies and sociologies of both the more and the less recent past. In the 1970s, Habermas began to attend seriously to the Anglo-American philosophy of speech acts, to theories of learning, and to cybernetics. By the 1980s, he had assigned to elements of all of them a fundamental place in a formulation of reason or rationality centered not in Kant's transcendental subject but instead in communication and communicative intersubjectivity. Habermas's most sustained and detailed treatment of what he calls communicative reason is available in the two volumes of The Theory of Communicative Action, translated by T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984—1987). The more summary treatment that follows is selected from The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
