Theory
The theory of communicative action is a critical project which reconstructs a concept of reason which is not grounded instrumental or objectivistic terms, but rather in an emancipatory communicative act. This reconstruction proposes "human action and understanding can be fruitfully analysed as having a linguistic structure", and each utterance relies upon the anticipation of freedom from unnecessary domination. These linguistic structures of communication can be used to establish a normative understanding of society. This conception of society is used "to make possible a conceptualization of the social-life context that is tailored to the paradoxes of modernity."
This project started after the critical reception of Habermas's book Knowledge and Human Interests after which Habermas chose to move away from contextual and historical analysis of social knowledge toward what would become the theory of communicative action. The theory of communicative action understands language as the foundational component of society and is an attempt to update Marxism by "drawing on Systems theory (Luhmann), developmental psychology (Piaget, Kohlberg), and social theory (Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, Mead, etc.)"
Based on lectures initially developed in On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction Habermas was able to expand his theory to a large understanding of society.
Thomas A. McCarthy states that
The Theory of Communicative Action has three interrelated concerns: (1) to develop a concept of rationality that is no longer tied to, and limited by, the subjectivistic and individualistic premises of modern philosophy and social theory; (2) to construct a two-level concept of society that integrates the lifeworld and systems paradigms; and, finally, (3) to sketch out, against this background, a critical theory of modernity which analyzes and accounts for its pathologies in a way that suggests a redirection rather than an abandonment of the project of enlightenment.
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