Habermas

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Habermas
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Critical Theory

• Habermas second generation critical theorist
• Progress AND Emancipation
• Knowledge used to achieve just and democratic
  social order
• Integrate philosophy and empirical science for
  moral critique and social change

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Goals

• Goal of Theory - Survival of democracy in an
  increasingly rationalized world
• Need to
• Reconstruct Marxism
• Use social critique to promote human freedom
• Expand public sphere and civil society to create
  possibilities for rational consensus

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Knowledge

• Structured by human interests
• Technical human interest
• Practical human interest
• Emancipatory interest
• Shifted from Interest to Communication

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Communication

• Linguistic communication presupposes and
  orientation to consensus
• Communication requires validity claims
• nature of the world
• what kinds of social rules are right
• Goal of reasoned consensus
• requires the open dialogue and informationideal
  speech situation

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Colonization of the Lifeworld

• Lifeworld commonsense world of everyday
  lifeinterpersonal communication
• System
• Structures (family, legal system, economy)that
  have source in lifeworld
• Develop own distinct existence, gradually
  separate from lifeworld

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Colonization of the Lifeworld

• Increasing complexity, autonomy and power of the
  system
• Exerts itself on the lifeworld.
• Must manage this through rational consensus