Jürgen Habermas Livres

La 4e de couverture indique : "La technique et la science constituent désormais les forces productives les plus importantes des sociétés développées. Cette situation nouvelle pose le problème de leur relation avec la pratique sociale, telle qu'elle doit s'exercer dans un monde où l'information est elle-même un produit de la technique. Jürgen Habermas examine dans les études réunies dans ce volume l'incidence de la rationalité scientifique sur le «monde social vécu» et ses répercussions sur le fonctionnement de la démocratie. Il montre les limites de la technocratie qui tend à s'abriter derrière une pseudo-rationalité pour assurer le triomphe de ses intérêts. Il analyse le système des valeurs en cours, les finalités que se propose le corps social sans toujours en avoir conscience, la fonction des idéologies qui les systématisent. Du même coup il est ici abordé une des plus grandes questions de notre temps : comment le consensus social que postule la démocratie peut-il s'opérer dans les sociétés industrielles avancées ?"

Le principe de Publicité, opposé au secret de l'État absolu, a créé une sphère publique à partir du XVIIIe siècle, visant à établir une médiation entre la société et l'État par le biais d'une « opinion publique » destinée à transformer la domination. Ce principe repose sur un cadre institutionnel permettant des discussions sur des questions d'intérêt général, soumettant l'autorité politique à une critique rationnelle. Cependant, le modèle libéral de la sphère publique, qui réprime l'opinion publique plébéienne, s'avère inadapté aux démocraties de masse régies par un État social. Ce dernier a vu une interconnexion entre les domaines privé et public, entraînant une manipulation de la Publicité par des groupes d'intérêts et une reféodalisation de la sphère publique. Dans l'État social, la sphère publique politique perd ses fonctions critiques, et la Publicité actuelle se limite à des comportements dictés par un assentiment passif. Initialement un principe de critique, la Publicité a été transformée en un principe d'intégration, où le consensus fabriqué prime sur l'opinion publique. En 1990, J. Habermas propose une révision en trois volets : remettre en question le concept de totalité, réévaluer la capacité critique du public, et interroger la possibilité d'un espace public. Sa conception discursive de la démocratie envisage un dédoublement de l'espace public pour que le pouvoir communicationnel puisse influencer le pouvoir admini

Produit de la centralisation monarchique et des révolutions modernes, l'Etat-nation apparaît aujourd'hui bien mal adapté à l'intégration économique mondiale. Les eurosceptiques, qui en revendiquent l'héritage et affirment sa pérennité, redoutent l'ouverture des frontières et appellent au refus de la mondialisation des échanges. Les eurolibéraux, qui se satisfont d'une Europe du grand marché, n'ont que faire des structures politiques et se moquent des malheurs des Etats nationaux. Les fédéralistes, qui défendent à la fois l'ouverture des frontières et la formation d'un espace politique intégré à l'échelle européenne, fondent leur position sur la nécessité d'élever le pouvoir politique à la hauteur de la puissance nouvelle de l'économie afin de lui faire contrepoids. Jürgen Habermas est de ceux-là. L'un des plus grands philosophes contemporains dessine les contours d'une politique européenne qui ferait toute sa place à l'exercice de la citoyenneté et à la mise en oeuvre de la justice sociale.

We live in a time of turbulent change when many of the frameworks that have characterized our societies over the last few centuries - such as the international order of sovereign nation-states - are being called into question.

In this new collection of recent essays, Habermas takes up and pursues the line of analysis begun in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. He begins by outlining the sources and central themes of twentieth–century philosophy, and the range of current debates. He then examines a number of key contributions to these debates, from the pragmatic philosophies of Mead, Perice and Rorty to the post–structuralism of Foucault. Like most contemporary thinkers, Habermas is critical of the Western metaphysical tradition and its exaggerated conception of reason. But he cautions against the temptation to relinquish this conception altogether. In opposition to the radical critics of Western philosophy, Habermas argues that postmetaphysical thinking can remain critical only if it preserves the idea of reason while stripping it of its metaphysical trappings. Habermas contributes to this task by developing further his distinctive approach to problems of meaning, rationality and subjectivity. This book will be of particular interest to students of philosophy, sociology and social and political theory, and it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the continuing development of Habermas′s project.

Jurgen Habermas's program in formal pragmatics fulfills two main functions. First, it serves as the theoretical underpinning for his theory of communicative action, a crucial element in his theory of society. Second, it contributes to ongoing philosophical discussion of problems concerning meaning, truth, rationality, and action. By the "pragmatic" dimensions of language, Habermas means those pertaining specifically to the employment of sentences in utterances. He makes clear that "formal" is to be understood in a tolerant sense to refer to the rational reconstruction of general intuitions or competences. Formal pragmatics, then, aims at a systematic reconstruction of the intuitive linguistic knowledge of competent subjects as it is used in everyday communicative practices. His program may thus be distinguished from empirical pragmatics—for example, sociolinguistics—which looks primarily at particular situations of use. This anthology brings together for the first time, in revised or new translation, ten essays that present the main concerns of Habermas's program in formal pragmatics. Its aim is to convey a sense of the overall purpose of his linguistic investigations while introducing the reader to their specific details, in particular to his theories of meaning, truth, rationality, and action.

Essays discuss denial of Germany's Nazi past, the rise of the neoconservative movement in Europe and America, and the welfare state.

This text contains Jurgen Habermas's most recent work in political theory and political philosophy. Here Habermas picks up some of the central themes of Between Facts and Norms and elaborates them in relation to current political debates of the late 1990s. One of the distinctive features of Habermas's work has been its approach to the problem of political legitimacy through a sustained reflection on the dual legitimating and regulating function of modern legal systems. Extending his discourse theory of normative validity to the legal-political domain, Habermas has defended a proceduralist conception of deliberative democracy in which the burden of legitimating state power is borne by informal and legally institutionalized processes of political deliberation. Its guiding intuition is the radical democratic idea that there is an internal relation between the rule of law and popular sovereignty. In these essays he brings this discursive and proceduralist analysis of political legitimacy to bear on such urgent contemporary issues as the enduring legacy of the welfare state, the future of the nation state, and the prospects of a global politics of human rights.

In Between Facts and Norms Jurgen Habermas works out the legal and political implications of his Theory of Communicative Action (1981), bringing to fruition the project announced with his publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962. This new work is a major contribution to recent debates on the rule of law and the possibilities of democracy in postindustrial societies, but it is much more. The introduction by William Rehg succinctly captures the special nature of the work, noting that it offers a sweeping, sociologically informed conceptualization of law and basic rights, a normative account of the rule of law and the constitutional state, an attempt to bridge normative and empirical approaches to democracy, and an account of the social context required for democracy. Finally, the work frames and caps these arguments with a bold proposal for a new paradigm of law that goes beyond the dichotomies that have afflicted modern political theory from its inception and that still underlie current controversies between so- called liberals and civic republicans. The book includes a postscript written in 1994, which restates the argument in light of its initial reception, and two appendixes, which cover key developments that preceded the book. Habermas himself was actively involved in the translation, adapting the text as necessary to make it more accessible to English-speaking readers.