ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide a sympathetic account of Jurgen Habermas’s effort at the reconstruction of historical materialism. It presents Habermas’s development of the dialectic of language, labor, and interaction in his early work and discusses his development of a communicative ethic in the context of a theory of the legitimation crisis of late capitalism. The chapter examines his theory of the ideal speech situation against assaults by poststructuralists and explores what is the most undeveloped part of Habermas’s theory: the historical-hermeneutic role of rhetorical practice within a larger theory of communicative action. It provides an analysis of a concrete case study of political rhetoric informed by Habermas’s theory. Habermas’s critique of late capitalism centers on the fact that spaces for communicative action have been invaded by the state apparatus and market mechanisms. A more subtle version of Michael Ryan’s position is Richard Rorty’s argument that Habermas lacks the cardinal intellectual virtue of irony.
