Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Paradigm of Critical Theory

Abstract Chapter 5 reconstructs Jürgen Habermas’s communicative paradigm of critical theory, which responds to the limitations of Adorno’s negativist paradigm and seeks to grasp the emancipatory potential of the new-founded constitutional-democratic order of postwar Europe. In doing so, Habermas undertakes a turn to an intersubjective paradigm of reason and develops a philosophical foundation for a critical theory of society in a pragmatic reconstruction of the universal rational infrastructure that he finds in ordinary language communication. This reconstruction of communicative reason enables Habermas to develop a sophisticated theory of social evolution and an ambitious social theory that sees modern capitalist society as both a cultural lifeworld and a system of functional subsystems. This two-concept theory of communicative action in turn allows Habermas to reconceptualize the concept of reification as a pervasive social pathology of modern democratic capitalism: namely, as the colonization of the lifeworld by systems imperatives, which undercuts the social and psychological conditions of individual autonomy. Habermas’s reconstruction of communicative reason also grounds the normative dimension of his critical theory, which comprises an account of the moral point of view in terms of a theory of discourse ethics and a reconstruction of the ‘self-understanding’ of modern constitutional democracy. He construes the latter in terms of a system of rights and a two-track theory of deliberative politics that charts how processes of democratic will-formation in the public sphere are channelled through an elected parliament, which submits the functional subsystems of the capitalist market and the public administration to democratically enacted law.