Abstract
Jürgen Habermas is the most distinguished, and perhaps by that token also the most controversial, social theorist and political philosopher writing in German today.1 In the English-speaking world, to adopt a well-worn phrase, Habermas’s works are well known, but they are not yet known well. In some part this is because of vagaries of translation. Four of Habermas’s major writings have been translated into English under the titles of Toward a Rational Society,2 Knowledge and Human Interests,3 Theory and Practice,4 and Legitimation Crisis. These, however, represent only part of a vast output, and they have not been published in a chronology which conforms directly to the development of Habermas’s ideas. The original version of Theorie und Praxis, for example, was published in 1962, some years before Erkenntnis und Interesse (Knowledge and Human Interests), but these have appeared in reverse order in English. A more important reason for the relative lack of impact that Habermas’s work has had among English-speaking social scientists is that he writes from the context of unfamiliar intellectual traditions: those of Frankfurt critical theory, hermeneutics, and Hegelian philosophy, as well as Marxism. To attempt a mix of all these sounds formidable enough, but Habermas’s compass in fact extends much more widely.
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References
Review discussion of the following works of Habermas: Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Heinemann, 1971); Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Heinemann, 1972), Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (London: Heinemann, 1974); Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1975).
A collection of essays taken from Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform and Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’. A further work now exists in English, assembled from more recent essays: Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon, 1979).
Includes as an appendix Habermas’s inaugural lecture at Frankfurt, originally in Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’.
This abridgement of the fourth German edition of Theorie und Praxis includes the essay ‘Arbeit und Interaktion’, from Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’.
Cf. my ‘Habermas’s critique of hermeneutics’, in Studies in Social and Political Theory (London: Hutchinson, 1977).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975).
For example, ‘Toward a theory of communicative competence’, in Recent Sociology, No. 2, ed. Hans Peter Dreitzel (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1970); ‘Some distinctions in universal pragmatics’, Theory and Society, vol. 4, 1976; Communication and the Evolution of Society.
This book has been the subject of much commentary in Germany. See, for instance, W. Jäger, Öffentlichkeit und Parlamentarismus: eine Kritik an Jürgen Habermas (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1973).
This idea has been developed in various publications by Claus Offe.
Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie? (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971).
Fred R. Dallmayr, ‘Critical theory criticised: Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests and its aftermath’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 2, 1972.
Habermas comments on criticisms of this sort in the 1971 Introduction to Theory and Practice.
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© 1982 Anthony Giddens
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Giddens, A. (1982). Habermas’s Social and Political Theory. In: Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86056-2_7
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