Review of Habermas and social research: Between theory and method

The American Sociologist, 2009

Political Studies, 1997

Since the foundation of the Frankfurt School, critical theory has conceived of its relation to practice in a number of ways. While it sought to produce a theoretical analysis which might, in some way, assist those actually participating in processes of enlightenment, it was also careful to limit its direct application to practical matters. Theory was, variously, to have indirect effects, to be sub-ordinate to the primacy of practice, or even to itself be conceived as a kind of practice. Yet no matter how limited, critical theory always had some irreducible utopian element. Recently, critical theory has received significant adjustment, particularly by Jeurgen Habermas. His work replaces categories at the heart of the original project, such as social labour and historical materialism, with a theory of communicative action. While striving to retain some utopian content, he has also inherited the traditional concern to carefully limit the practical intentions of theory. As he has famously put it, `in a process of enlightenment there can only be participants'. According to Habermas then, provided we understand its limits, theory does have its uses. It can, he suggests, inform a research programme in the social sciences, and it can offer some limited guidance for action. Habermas' articulation of these practical intentions' has stimulated a plethora of attempts, from across the social sciences, to use his theoretical advances to generate critique, to guide empirical research and to inform an emancipatory politics. This article offers a critical survey of the resulting attempts to use Habermas's work.

German Studies Review, 1994

The main purpose of this paper is to assess the validity of the contention that, over the past few decades, the public sphere has undergone a new structural transformation. To this end, the analysis focuses on Habermas's recent inquiry into the causes and consequences of an allegedly 'new' or 'further' [erneuten] structural transformation of the political public sphere. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part considers the central arguments in support of the 'new structural transformation of the public sphere' thesis, shedding light on its historical, political, economic, technological, and sociological aspects. The second part offers some reflections on the most important limitations and shortcomings of Habermas's account, especially with regard to key social developments in the early twenty-first century. The paper concludes by positing that, although the constitution of the contemporary public sphere is marked by major-and, in several respects, unprecedented-structural transformations, their significance should not be overstated, not least due to the enduring role of critical capacity in highly differentiated societies.

2011

The main purpose of this paper is to examine Habermas's account of the transformation of the public sphere in modern society. More specifically, the study aims to demonstrate that, whilst Habermas's approach succeeds in offering useful insights into the structural transformation of the public sphere in the early modern period, it does not provide an adequate theoretical framework for understanding the structural transformation of public spheres in late modern societies. To the extent that the gradual differentiation of social life manifests itself in the proliferation of multiple public spheres, a critical theory of public normativity needs to confront the challenges posed by the material and ideological complexity of late modernity in order to account for the polycentric nature of advanced societies. With the aim of showing this, the paper is divided into three sections. The first section elucidates the sociological meaning of the public/private dichotomy. The second section scrutinizes the key features of Habermas's theory of the public sphere by reflecting on (i) the concept of the public sphere, (ii) the normative specificity of the bourgeois public sphere, and (iii) the structural transformation of the public sphere in modern society. The third section explores the most substantial shortcomings of Habermas's theory of the public sphere, particularly its inability to explain the historical emergence and political function of differentiated public spheres in advanced societies.

European Journal of Social Theory, 2001

Given powerful globalizing processes under way, the topic of how to conceptualize the modern public sphere is becoming increasingly urgent. Amidst the array of alternatives, the efforts of Jürgen Habermas to attempt to balance out the two main conceptual requirements of this idea, a universalistic construction of the principle of shared interests and a sensitivity to the fact of modern pluralism, might seem a particularly promising option. In order to reconstruct the main motivations of, and to determine a set of criteria of assessment for, Habermas's ongoing attempt to outline a theory of the public sphere adequate to the conditions of the present, the article turns first to a discussion of the seminal formulations of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. I suggest that the later writings are only partially successful in their attempt to redress some of the main conceptual difficulties that emerge in this early account.

2006

Habermas If we are to believe what many sociologists are telling us, the public sphere is in a near-terminal state. Our ability to build solidarities with strangers and to agree on the general significance of needs and problems seems to be collapsing. These cultural potentials ...

European Journal of Social Theory, Vol 17, No 4 , 2014

At a time when ideas of crisis and critique are at the forefront of public discourse, this article seeks to understand moments of crisis vis-à-vis critique as a key feature of critical social theory. It addresses Jürgen Habermas’s strong claim that this relationship accounts for a ‘model of analysis’ concerned with grasping the ‘diremptions’ of social life. To elaborate this reading, the article pays attention to the main problems Habermas identifies in conventional ways of understanding the concepts of ‘crisis’ and ‘critique’ in social theory. The aim is to examine the mode in which he reconsiders each of these terms and then reasserts the dialectical link between them. I reconstruct this relationship by taking as cases two of his most substantive works of social theorizing: The Theory of Communicative Action, and Between Facts and Norms. Based on this interpretation, I suggest that though Habermas contributes to resituating the practice of critique as a communicative translation of objective crisis, he does not adequately account for another key movement: when critique actually initiates, enacts and furthers the moment of crisis.

Thesis Eleven, 2015

In this paper, I show how the notion of the political as an emerging reality, characterized by a fundamental indeterminacy and a propensity to produce its own borders, features in Habermas’s work. The motif of the public sphere is bound with topics that all seem to attach the political to principles or authorities that precede or surpass it: the validity attributed to political statements, the weight of morality in the public sphere, and the concern to preserve science and complexity. I examine each of them in turn, in order to demonstrate how, precisely, the responses provided enable us to identify a place for the political in Jürgen Habermas’s philosophy. This place could be called an interstice; nevertheless, it is located at the normative level of his theory, and it is a recurring aspect of Habermas’s work.