"The aim of this contribution is to study three central revisions that Habermas has carried out in the course developing his theory communicative action, together with some criticisms raised by those revisions. A reflection suggested concerning whether Habermas’ project grounding a critical society on action definitively threatened after revisions."

My ultimate aim in the first sections of this book is to present Habermas’ mature social theory, his two-tiered theory of society as system and lifeworld, and to show how this theory, after the pattern of classical critical theory, serves to point out and articulate the interests of groups who embody a potential for protest or resistance within the societal formation of advanced capitalism. On ...

In the near future we may be able to manipulate human embryos through genetic intervention. Jürgen Habermas has argued against the development of technologies which could make such intervention possible. His argument has received widespread criticism among bioethicists. These critics argue that Habermas’s argument relies on implausible assumptions about human nature. Moreover, they challenge Ha...

Self-help groups in the United Kingdom continue to grow in number and address virtually every conceivable health condition, but they remain the subject of very little theoretical analysis. The literature to date has predominantly focused on their therapeutic effects on individual members. And yet they are widely presumed to fulfil a broader civic role and to encourage democratic citizenship. Th...

The global network-of-networks that President George W. Bush calls “the Internets” represents the first major communicative revolution since the publication in 1962 of Jürgen Habermas’ influential historical work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In that work Habermas describes a moment in the social and political history of Europe in which a rising bourgeoisie was able to ga...

In this article, I introduce the Dewey-Lippmann democracy debate of the 1920s as a vehicle for considering how social theory can enhance the empirical viability of participatory democratic theory within the current context of advanced capitalism. I situate within this broad theoretical framework the theories of Habermas and Dewey. In the process, I argue (a) that while Dewey largely failed to r...