Habermas Essay

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Summarise and discuss the main contributions of Habermas’s theory of communicative action.

As a critical theorist of the rationalist standpoint, Habermas disagreed with the epistemological perspective of rationality portrayed by the positivist school of thought and the concept of modernity which stemmed from Capitalism. Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action (TCA) incorporates Marx’s paradigm whilst also building upon the well known classical theorists and philosophers of social sciences such as Parsons, Weber, Mead and Durkheim (cited in Eriksen and Weigard, 2003). This this essay will summarise and discuss the main contributions of Habermas’s TCA using examples throughout to illustrate his concepts.

Habermas’s TCA was first published in 1981 in a collection of critical essays spread out over two volumes. Volume one: Reasons and the rationalization of society (McCarthy, 1985) and Theory of Communicative Action, Volume two: Critique of Functionalist Reason (Habermas: 1987). The most part of Habermas’s writing was concerned with a more modern approach to Verstehende sociology by looking at three main principles (a) Phenomenological (b) Linguistic and (c) Hermeneutic. (Outhwaite, 2009). The Phenomenological brought a constitution to the everyday lives of individuals whereas the Linguistic structure of communication is used to establish a normative understanding of society as Habermas (1985) states that ‘access to symbolically pre-structured reality cannot be gained by observation alone” thus his principle of Hermeneutics enables readers with the knowledge to interpret (also known as the Science of Interpretation) (Ref: the hermeneutic Approach:ref). His writings developed the idea that actors in society seek to re...

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... end. His writing on ‘life world’ and ‘system’ he uses these two concepts to bring about an understanding that though language is a medium of communication; hence the four vadlilty claims, communication on its own is still a broader concept has he relates it culture and social capital in the social sciences. The essay discuss the way in which rationalization has been embedded within as a force which when looked upon within the modern capitalist societies ‘system’ the ‘life-world’ loses its power as the expense of theses forces. Thus he takes up examples of transactions for the gain of money. It is seen that Habermas’s use of language echoes that of other philosophers of social science it can be seen that he has done this to help familiarise the concepts and bring understanding to his TCA but he aim to make clear his different viewpoints

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