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Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity by Seyla Benhabib and Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Pp. ix + 305. $35.00, cloth; $17.00, paper.
The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and Foucault by Hans Herbert Kogler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Pp. 322. $35.00.
The reception of Jurgen Habermas's work presents a certain paradox. Habermas is widely recognized as having developed the most ambitious and fully articulated version of a critical theory of society, one that incorporates work from anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and psychoanalysis into a framework sensitive to the linguistic turn in philosophy and postempiricist currents in twentieth-century thought. However, his particular formulations have attracted a good deal of criticism, and his program for a formal pragmatics that would replace ideology-critique, as well as his diagnosis of the pathologies of modernity as stemming from blocking communication or the colonization of the life-world, have inspired little research. In contrast with the broad influence of the best-known postwar French thinkers, Habermas's direct influence is mostly limited to the work of close colleagues and students.
In the culmination of his early work, The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas locates the normative foundations of a critical theory in the formal conditions of communication, in particular the purported necessity of the attempt to reach mutual understanding. This conception of communicative action, and the richer conception of reason associated with it, illuminate and correct Max Weber's pessimism concerning modernity, which was adopted by the first generation of critical theorists, such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who for Habermas tacitly modeled reason as such solely on instrumental reason, the human appropriation and transformation of nature. The critical resistance to Habermas's program has centered on dissatisfaction with the claim that appeal to the validity presupposed in each communicative act can achieve the goals intended by earlier theorists' ideology-critique without reference to concrete social practices, human needs and desires, configurations of power, actual social groups, and substantive conceptions of happiness and the good. This rejection of the features of "universality, ideality, and transcendence" in Habermas's work helps explain the resistance of philosophers to his account and the lack of interest in sociology and cultural studies in pursuing research in its terms.
Following the publication of The Theory...