By David S. Owen
Among cause and heritage examines the position of the belief of development either in Jurgen Habermas’s serious social thought and in serious social thought often. The reception to Habermas’s magnum opus, the idea of Communicative motion, has tended to downplay the idea of social evolution it includes, yet there are not any in-depth examinations of this element of Habermas’s serious concept. This booklet fills this hole by way of supplying a complete and specific exam of Habermas’s thought of social evolution, its importance in the wider scope of his serious social idea, and the significance of a theoretical realizing of background for any sufficient serious social theory.
Reviews:
"The first full-length examine in English of this significant element of Habermas’s concept, this can be a sincerely written, rather well researched, and cogently argued book."--Thomas McCarthy, writer of The serious thought of Jurgen Habermas.
"This ebook is a true gem. between scholarly works on Habermas, it's infrequent to discover a e-book that so deftly combines scholarship, analytic precision and readability, and hugely readable prose. it's the in basic terms booklet dedicated to treating in serious aspect what's arguably an important characteristic of Habermas’s idea of social evolution." --David Ingram, writer of Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason
"It is a space of Habermasian reviews that students have all too frequently missed for the final two decades. however the writer not just offers rather well with the fabric, but additionally finds why this zone is primary to Habermas’s serious project." -- James C. Swindal, writer of mirrored image Revisited: Jurgen Habermas’s Discursive thought of fact
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Additional resources for Between Reason and History: Habermas and the Idea of Progress (SUNY Series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences)
Sample text
Both frameworks are necessary to adequately ground the normative claims of critical social theory. On this view, society in general can be viewed as being structured in both the horizontal, or synchronic, dimension and the vertical, or diachronic, dimension. For a critical social theory to justify its normative claims, it would need to provide an account of its normative grounding in each of these dimensions. Only by attending to both of these dimensions can critical theory ground its descriptive and prescriptive claims.
Assuming with Marx that the point is not simply to interpret the world, but to change it, then the fundamental motivation of social critique is to reduce social injustice. It seems rather incoherent for social critics to claim that they perform social critique without any intention at all of reducing social injustice. Thus, internally the actual performance of public social criticism—that is, social criticism that is performed in the public sphere, and not done only privately—tacitly assumes the possibility of theoretically distinguishing between progressive and regressive social change.
I further substantiated this claim by critically engaging the claims of critical hermeneutics, which shares the purpose of social critique with critical theory, but without, or so it claims, resorting to reifying theoretical constructs. I argued that critical hermeneutics implicitly presupposes a conception of progress, and that its refusal to make this explicit amounts to a dogmatism that is at odds with the fundamental self-reflective nature of critical 30 Between Reason and History theory. To further set the grounds for my inquiry into Habermas’s theory of social evolution, in the next chapter I will sketch an overview of Habermas’s conception of critical social theory.