Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas's The Theory of Communicative Action

Front Cover
Axel Honneth, Hans Joas
MIT Press, 1991 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 301 pages
These critical essays on Jürgen Habermas's major contribution to sociological theory, The Theory of Communicative Action, provide an indispensable guide for anyone trying to grasp that large, difficult, and important work. The editors' introduction traces the history of the reception of the work and identifies the main themes on which discussion has focused: a concept of communicative rationality; a theory of action based on distinguishing communicative from instrumental reason; a two-level concept of society that integrates lifeworld and system paradigms; and a critical theory of modernity meant to diagnose the sociopathologies of contemporary society. ContributorsJeffrey Alexander, Johann P. Arnason, Johannes Berger, Günter Dux, Jürgen Habermas, Hans Joas, Hans-Peter Krüger, Thomas McCarthy, Herbert Schnädelbach, Martin Seel, Charles Taylor

From inside the book

Contents

The Transformation of Critical Theory
7
Language and Society 23
23
Remarks 336
36
Beyond the Marxian
49
On the Reconstruction
74
The Unhappy Marriage of Hermeneutics and Functionalism
97
or the Seducements of Systems
119
Communicative Action or the Mode of Communication for
140
The Linguistification of the Sacred and the Delinguistification
165
Modernity as Project and as Field of Tensions
181
A Reply
214
Bibliographical Note
265
Index
295
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information