The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas
Subtitle: Reason, Justice and Modernity
By: Stephen K. White.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1988
Place of publication: Cambridge, United Kingdom
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 190
ISBN-13: 9780521343602
Subjects: Habermas, Jürgen; Sociology -- Germany; Frankfurt school of sociology
Other titles: Razão, Justiça, Modernidade: A Recente Obra de Jürgen Habermas
Description: Jürgen Habermas is one of the foremost philosophers and social theorists in the world today. But the complexity and breadth of his thought make him often difficult to understand. In this book, Stephen White offers a clear, accessible, and reliable introduction to Habermas's work, particularly that which he has written since the publication of Knowledge and human interest (produced in English in 1971). During this period, new themes and directions have emerged in Habermas's thought, which culminated in The Theory of Communicative Action, a massive work that has not hitherto been the subject of extended commentary and analysis. This book is the first to provide a full-length study of Habermas's mature thought. Locating the latter in the context of contemporary debates, White explains Habermas's ideas about action, rationality, communicative ethics, contemporary capitalism, and new social movements, which characterize his later work. He also examines Habermas's interpretation of modernity, showing that although, like his forerunners in the Frankfurt School, Habermas maintains a critical stance towards modernity's instrumentalization of reason, he nonetheless offers a sophisticated defense of the universal significance of other aspects of modern consciousness that are too often forgotten by many recent radical critics of modernity. Throughout, White presents Habermas's work in such a way as to emphasize its coherence, and to demonstrate how it constitutes the beginnings of a distinctive new research program in the social sciences. As a well-researched and lucid account of Habermas's thought, this book will appeal to readers wanting an introduction to the complexity of his ideas, as well as to those already conversant with them. It will also interest social and political theorists concerned with the general theoretical issues that it covers.

(Source: [Cambridge University Press](https://www.cambridge.org/de/academic/subjects/sociology/social-theory/recent-work-jurgen-habermas-reason-justice-and-modernity))
Notes: Bibliography: p. 179-186.
Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Acknowledgements
pagenum: ix; title: List of abbreviations
pagenum: xi; title: Introduction
pagenum: 1; label: 1.
title: Rationality, social theory and political philosophy
pagenum: 7; label: I
title: Strategic rationality
pagenum: 10; label: II
title: Contextual rationality
pagenum: 13; label: III
title: Universalism, Strategie and rationality
pagenum: 22; label: 2.
title: Action, rationality and normative discourse
pagenum: 25; label: I
title: The critique of positivism and the linguistic turn
pagenum: 25; label: II
title: Communicative competence and communicative rationality
pagenum: 28; label: III
title: Models of action and rationality
pagenum: 36; label: IV
title: Communicative action and strategic action
pagenum: 44; label: 3.
title: Justice and the foundations of communicative ethics
pagenum: 48; label: I
title: The principle of universalization
pagenum: 48; label: II
title: The “speech-act-immanent obligation”
pagenum: 50; label: III
title: The presuppositions of argumentation
pagenum: 55; label: IV
title: Moral development and interactive competence
pagenum: 58; title: Appendix
pagenum: 66; label: 4.
title: Toward a minimal ethics and orientation for political theory
pagenum: 69; label: I
title: The discursive interpretation of the demand for reciprocity
pagenum: 69; label: II
title: A minimal ethics
pagenum: 73; label: III
title: A different voice in the conversation
pagenum: 83; label: IV
title: The communicative model and political theory: an initial link
pagenum: 85; label: 5.
title: Communicative reason, modernity and contemporary capitalism
pagenum: 90; label: I
title: Modern structures of consciousness and a “rationalized lifeworld”
pagenum: 92; label: II
title: Systems theory and rationalization
pagenum: 103; label: III
title: The costs of modernization: “colonization of the lifeworld”
pagenum: 107; label: IV
title: The costs of modernization: “cultural impoverishment”
pagenum: 116; label: V
title: New social movements
pagenum: 123; label: 6.
title: The two tasks of critical theory
pagenum: 128; label: I
title: A non-foundationalist universalism
pagenum: 129; label: II
title: Modernity and the domination of “outer’ nature
pagenum: 136; label: III
title: Modernity and the domination of “inner” nature
pagenum: 144; label: IV
title: Concluding remarks
pagenum: 153; title: Notes
pagenum: 155; title: Bibliography
pagenum: 179; title: Index
pagenum: 187