Dialogic Foundations 279not Marxist in any orthodox sense, his project for a more rational legitimated society
was informed initially by the emancipatory aims of socialism. At this point, he also
flirted with Freudian psychoanalytic theories and ideology critique. In addition, he
also critically addressed the Heideggerian critique of technology, assembling, in effect,
a ‘left’ substitute to Heidegger’s ideas in hisTechnology and Science as Ideology(1968).
However, by the 1990s and 2000s, many of these preoccupations had quietly dropped
into the background and were replaced by the political and philosophical framework
of neo-Kantianism and a republican-inclined social liberalism.
Second, Habermas’ overall project in the 1960s was focused on the critical theory
motif of resisting the reduction of knowledge and human reason to instrumental–
technical or strategic calculations (of an essentially individual subject). This latter
theme was summarized in his well-known inaugural lecture in 1965, as well as his
Knowledge and Human Interest(1968). This critique of instrumental–technical reason
formed the backdrop to his ideas on emancipation, within a rational society, in books
such asTowards a Rational Society(1971) andThe Legitimation Crisis(1973). This
critique also led Habermas to the ideas of Gadamer. However, his focus shifted again
in the two volume book,The Theory of Communicative Actions(1981), and carried
through systematically in later books, such asThe Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
(1985), andBetween Facts and Norms(1992). This latter phase enunciated a dynamic
move to communication and language. The language issue is of crucial importance.
There are, though, the seeds of a possible future debate here, namely, are there two
or more Habermasian theories, or just the one singular set of arguments? For some
commentators, there are many consistent themes at work throughout all his writ-
ings (e.g. see, introduction in White (ed.) 1995: 5). Thus, the central theme of his
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere(1962), although more sociologically
configured, is still embedded in the significance of an active, rational, critical, inter-
subjective public sphere of discussion (in salons, coffee houses, clubs and a free press,
during the eighteenth century). This theme reappears, in slightly different formats,
in other works during the 1970s. For some, this also foreshadows the later focus on
communicative action and universal pragmatics in the 1980s and 1990s.^7
However, Habermas is in many ways a paradoxical thinker. On the one count, he
can, and does appear (especially in his later work) as someone who is self-consciously
post-metaphysical. He sees himself moving beyond old traditions and paradigms of
philosophy and social theory, concerned with the human subject and philosophy
of consciousness. As mentioned earlier, he has consequently taken on some of the
external accoutrements of the ‘postmodern’; yet, at the same time, he sees both
the Enlightenment and modernity as wholly unfinished projects. Habermas, indeed,
sees himself as fulfilling the inner purposes of these latter projects in his own work.
This places him in direct opposition to the postmodern. In many ways, though,
like Gadamer, Habermas presents avia mediabetween, on the one hand, the more
extravagant, optimistic, and universalist foundationalist claims of political theory,
as against the more negative, pessimistic, anti-foundationalism of the postmodern
stance. He thus negotiates his way between both universalism and conventionalism
and difference and identity. However, although obviously admiring the impetus of