By Jürgen Habermas
A tremendous contribution to modern social conception. not just does it offer a compelling critique of a few of the most views in twentieth century philosophy and social technological know-how, however it additionally provides a scientific synthesis of the numerous themse that have preoccupied Habermas for thirty years. --Times Literary Supplement
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Additional info for The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society
Sample text
In the other case the relation of the rule of action to the facts (and its ability to be grounded) make possible a successful intervention in the world. It is constitutive of the action's rationality that the actor bases it on a plan that implies the truth of p, a plan according to which the projected end can be realized under given conditions. An assertion can be called rational only if the speaker satisfies the conditions necessary to achieve the illocutionary goal of reaching an understanding about something in the world with at least one other participant in communication.
In particular, the inner dynamic of capitalist growth means a continuous increase in systemic complexity, an expansion of the "monetary-bureaucratic complex" into ever new areas of life. This leads to conflicts within the lifeworld when communicatively structured domains of action are transformed into formally organized domains-a process that takes the form of Verrechtlichung, juridification or legal regulationY For purposes of illustrating the kind of empirical research relevant to his thesis of the internal colonization of the lifeworld, Habermas considers the legal regulation of communicatively structured spheres of action, in particular the socialwelfare measures that are an integral part of developed capitalism.
The bureaucratic disempowering and dessication of spontaneous processes of opinion- and will-formation expands the scope for mobilizing mass loyalty and makes it easier to decouple political decisions from concrete, identity-forming contexts of life (2:480). Whereas "reification" can be traced back to the colonization of the lifeworld-the subversion of socially integrated spheres of symbolic reproduction and their assimilation into formally organized domains of economic and bureaucratic action-parallel phenomena of "cultural impoverishment" are a consequence of the professionalization that has increasingly separated the development of expert cultures from the communicative infrastructure of everyday life.
