Critical Theory originated in the perception by a group of German Marxists after the First World War that the Marxist analysis of capitalism had become deficient both empirically and with regard to its consequences for emancipation, and much of their work has attempted to deepen and extend it in new circumstances. Yet much of this revision has been in the form of piecemeal modification. In his latest work, Habermas has returned to the study of capitalism, incorporating the distinctive modifications of the Frankfurt School into the foundations of the critique of capitalism. Drawing on both systems theory and phenomenological sociology as well as Marxism, the author distinguishes four levels of capitalist crisis - economic, rationality, legitimation, and motivational crises. In his analysis, all the Frankfurt focus on cultural, personality, and authority structures finds its place, but in a systematic framework. At the same time, in his sketch of communicative ethics as the highest stage in the internal logic of the evolution of ethical systems, the author hints at the source of a new political practice that incorporates the imperatives of evolutionary rationality.
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Review: Legitimation Crisis
User Review - Aaron Crofut - Goodreads
I tried. Not worth the strain. For a guy best known for his communicative theory of society, the man sucks at communicating. Usually, when someone uses large and complex words exclusively, they are ... Read full review
Review: Legitimation Crisis
User Review - Goodreads
I tried. Not worth the strain. For a guy best known for his communicative theory of society, the man sucks at communicating. Usually, when someone uses large and complex words exclusively, they are ... Read full review
Popular passages
Page xix - The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
Page xix - A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.
Page 97 - Experience shows that in no instance does domination voluntarily limit itself to the appeal to material or affectual or ideal motives as a basis for its continuance. In addition every such system attempts to establish and to cultivate the belief in its legitimacy.
Page 96 - It is by no means true that every case of submissiveness to persons in positions of power is primarily (or even at all) oriented to this belief. Loyalty may be hypocritically simulated by individuals or by whole groups on purely opportunistic grounds, or carried out in practice for reasons of material self-interest. Or people may submit from individual weakness and helplessness because there is no acceptable alternative.
Page 118 - The ultimate danger of such separation, however, is the danger of meaninglessness. This danger is the nightmare par excellence, in which the individual is submerged in a world of disorder, senselessness and madness. Reality and identity are malignantly transformed into meaningless figures of horror. To be in society is to be "sane" precisely in the sense of being shielded from the ultimate "insanity
Page 89 - Only communicative ethics guarantees the generality of admissible norms and the autonomy of acting subjects solely through the discursive redeemability of the validity claims with which norms appear. That is, generality is guaranteed in that the only norms that may claim generality are those on which everyone affected agrees (or would agree) without constraint if they enter (or were to enter) a process of discursive willformation.
Page 3 - Thus, only when members of a society experience structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak of crises.
Page xviii - The chief defect of all previous materialism (including Feuerbach's) is that the object, actuality, sensuousness is conceived only in the form of the object or perception, but not as sensuous human activity, practice (Praxis), not subjectively.
Page 27 - fundamental contradiction" of a social formation when, and only when, its organizational principle necessitates that individuals and groups repeatedly confront one another with claims and intentions that are, in the long run, incompatible.
Page 105 - Habermas's vision of an evolutionary social leap into a new type of rational society, defined in communicational terms as "the communication community of those affected, who as participants in a practical discourse test the validity claims of norms and, to the extent that they accept them with reasons, arrive at the conviction that in the given circumstances the proposed norms are 'right...
Bibliographic information
| Title | Legitimation Crisis Pa Txt Volume 519 of Beacon paperback: Philosophy; Sociology Volume 519 of Beacon paperbacks |
| Author | Jürgen Habermas |
| Publisher | Beacon Press, 1975 |
| ISBN | 0807015210, 9780807015216 |
| Length | 166 pages |
| Subjects | › › History / General |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |