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When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Habermas redefined critical social theory as a study of communication, with communicative competence and communicative rationality on the one hand, and distorted communication on the other, the two versions of critical theory began to overlap to a much greater degree than before. [citation needed]
The critical communicative perspective arises from different theoretical contributions. Jürgen Habermas (1984,1981), in his theory of communicative action, argues that the relationship between subjects should be based on validity claims rather than on power ones, seeing the relevance of the subject's interpretations following Alfred Schütz phenomenology (Schütz & Luckmann, 1974) However ...
Habermas' form of critical theory is designed to rediscover through the analysis of positive potentials for human rationality in the medium of language, the possibility of a critical form of reason that can lead to reflection and examination of not only objective questions, but also those of social norms, human values, and even aesthetic ...
The result of the theory is a conception of reason that Habermas sees as doing justice to the most important trends in twentieth century philosophy, while escaping the relativism which characterizes postmodernism, and also providing necessary standards for critical evaluation.
Associated with the Frankfurt School, Habermas's work focuses on the foundations of epistemology and social theory, the analysis of advanced capitalism and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, albeit within the confines of the natural law tradition, [6] and contemporary politics, particularly German politics.
The Theory of Communicative Action was the subject of a collection of critical essays published in 1986. [34] The philosopher Tom Rockmore, writing in 1989, commented that it was unclear whether The Theory of Communicative Action or Habermas's earlier work Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), was the most important of Habermas's works. [35]
Habermas adds to this the observation that speech acts can either succeed or fail, depending on whether or not they succeed on influencing another person in the intended way. (1979:35) This last method of evaluation—the theory of speech acts—is the domain that Habermas is most interested in developing as a theory of communicative action.
Critical theory – the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism.