Habermas’s Social and Political Theory

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.