William Outhwaite - Habermas: A Critical Introduction

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank John Thompson for his enormous help and patient encouragement throughout the long preparation of this book. I also benefited from discussions with a number of Sussex University students and colleagues working on Habermas in particular Angela Clare, Christy Swords, Simon Hollis, Julien Morton and Catherine Skinner. Roy Bhaskar and others took time off from their own work to read the manuscript and encourage me to finish it, and Barbara Kehm in Kassel and Stefan Mller-Doohm in Oldenburg generously kept me up to date with Habermass output over the past years. My thanks also to Diane Jordan, who typed the greater part of the manuscript, and to Linden Stafford for her meticulous copy-editing of the first edition.

For this second edition, I should also thank the translator for the Danish edition, Henning Vangsgaard, who pointed out some errors in the references. Thanks also to Jay Bernstein, Maeve Cooke, Gordon Finlayson, Hans Joas, Daniel Steuer and Simon Susen for various bits of help and advice.

In rededicating this book to Laura Marcus I must also thank her, not just for a further fifteen years of happy companionship, but for leading me to Edinburgh. Thanks also to Daniel Outhwaite for good-humouredly accepting this transition, and to my new colleagues and friends at Newcastle for making me so welcome.

The author and publisher are grateful for permission to reproduce copyright material:

Figure 1 (fig 16) and text extracts from The Theory of Communicative Action by Jrgen Habermas, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Beacon Vol VI 1984, and Polity Vol I 1986), Copyright 1984 by Beacon Press. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press and Polity Press.

Figure 2 (fig 28) and text extracts from The Theory of Communicative Action by Jrgen Habermas, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Beacon Vol VII 1987, and Polity Vol II 1988), Copyright 1987 by Beacon Press. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press and Polity Press.

Table 1 : from The Critical Theory of Jrgen Habermas by Thomas McCarthy (Polity, 1984). Reprinted by permission of Polity Press and MIT Press.

Introduction

Jrgen Habermas is still remarkably active and productive, but the overall shape of his work is now firmly established. It was dramatically altered by his Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and, developing and applying the model worked out there, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Between Facts and Norms (1992) and a number of more recent shorter works. It is also only since the beginning of the 1980s that he has dealt systematically with the complex issue of the relationship of his thought to that of the earlier generation of critical theorists, notably Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.

The Theory of Communicative Action and Between Facts and Norms also, however, recall some of the themes of one of his earliest works, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Finally, the issue of his relationship to the history of Germany and the development of the Federal Republic has been given a new twist by his edited volume on the Spiritual Condition of the Age, his critical interventions in the so-called Historians Dispute over the interpretation, forty years on, of the Third Reich, his discussion of the 1989 revolutions and of the reunification of Germany and his analyses of the postnational and the postsecular in relation to contemporary Europe.

Habermas has described modernity as an incomplete project, and the same is true of his own work. In this book, I attempt to bring out the continuities in Habermass developing work, while paying due regard to the shifts of orientation and emphasis and the reasons for them. My aim is to present his thought and indicate its interest and importance, rather than to argue for an alternative theoretical model; the more important criticisms will, however, be noted, especially where they have led to modifications of Habermass own position.

Compared to the dramatic experiences of exile forced upon the first-generation members of what came to be called the Frankfurt School, Habermass life has been relatively uneventful at least after the overthrow of the Nazi regime. Born in 1929, he grew up in the small town of Gummersbach, some 35 miles east of Cologne, where his father was director of the Chamber of Commerce. He describes the political climate in his family as one of bourgeois adaptation to a political environment with which one did not fully identify, but which one didnt seriously criticize either, and recounts the impression of a normality which afterwards proved to be an illusion.