ABSTRACT
In the postwar period Marxism was either one scholarly subject among many, or the official ideology of various communist parties. Habermas successfully combines critical and positive philosophy. Habermas understands Marx’s oeuvre as science and philosophy. There are two basic problems—or rather two clusters of problems—in Marx and Marxism which are continuously interpreted, elaborated, applied, and criticized by Habermas. From the beginning Habermas has been concerned to show that Marx was in some way wrong to assign priority to forces of production. In reconstructing history Habermas’s main focus is the learning processes which make possible the emergence of higher social structures. The stages of development of the ego structures are: the symbiotic, the egocentric, the sociocentric objectivistic, and finally the universalistic. Progress can be nothing but realization of rationality, with priority given to communicative rationality. Hence there is only one true theory of progress, the one which conceives it as the realization of rationality, and progress can only validate this theory.
