Habermas’s Social Theory: The Critical Power of Communicative Rationality

Abstract

At the heart of Habermas’s critical theory of society is a normative account of communicative action, which sets out to show that a potential for emancipation can be extracted from everyday linguistic practices among humans. This potential for emancipation is expressed in terms of the concept of communicative rationality. The emancipatory potential of communicative rationality resides in its critical power — its capacity for identifying and evaluating forms of unreason in the modern world and pointing the way towards forms of social life that are rational in the sense of being conducive to human flourishing. Specifically, it provides a yardstick for measuring the social pathologies of modern societies and for assessing the justice of moral norms and the legitimacy of democratic decisions and laws. In the following I offer a sketch of Habermas’s concept of communicative rationality and the critical power that he attributes to it.1 After outlining some of the main lines of objection that have been directed against his project, I propose a modification of Habermas’s strategy that is intended to overcome what I consider to be one of the main objections.