The Theory of Communicative Action

A two-volume treatise in social theory, Habermas's main work. Volume One, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, separates strategic action, aimed at success, from communicative action, aimed at reaching understanding. Drawing on speech act theory, Habermas argues that every serious utterance raises validity claims to truth, normative rightness and sincerity, which speakers can be asked to redeem with reasons. Rationality is thus rooted in everyday communication, not only in calculation. He then reworks Max Weber's account of modern rationalisation and criticises the pessimism of Lukács, Horkheimer and Adorno. Volume Two, Lifeworld and System, uses Mead, Durkheim and Parsons to distinguish the lifeworld of shared meanings from the systems of economy and administration steered by money and power. Modern social problems, he argues, come from the colonisation of the lifeworld by these systems. The work closes by restating the tasks of a critical theory of society.

It is the fullest attempt to rebuild critical theory on a hopeful account of reason, and its ideas of communicative rationality and lifeworld colonisation run through later political theory and sociology.