ABSTRACT
Habermas agrees with Hannah Arendt that the classical political conception of liberty is best understood as a structure of unimpaired intersubjectivity brought about through unconstrained communicative action, where the purpose of unconstrained communication is just the forming and maintaining of an intersubjective space. Political community exists only through the intersubjectivity made possible through communicative action. Liberation from hunger and misery does not necessarily converge with liberation from servitude and degradation, for there is no automatic developmental relation between labour and interaction. The institutional framework determines the extent of repression by the unreflected, 'natural' force of social dependence and political power, which is rooted in prior history and tradition. A critical theory of society is a normative social theory: it distinguishes real from false consensuses, true communication from pseudo-communication, and so the appearance of freedom from real liberty. Dialogic partners are presupposed to be in a position either to accept or reject one another's claims on rational grounds.
