[RonPrice]

In 1962 Jurgen Habermas(b. 1929-), a German man who became one of the most influential sociologists and philosophers in the world during the decades of his middle and late adulthood, accepted the position of extraordinary professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. That same year, he also published one of his now famous books on the nature of society. He was 33. In 1962 I began my matriculation studies in Ontario and began my travelling-pioneering life for the Canadian Baha’i community. I was 18. I am now 66 and Habermas is 81.

I have followed the career and the writing of Habermas since the 1990s when I was a teacher of sociological theory in Western Australia. Like much writing in the field of sociology, the content of this eminent thinker’s work is dense and complex and most students find it a parched and arid wasteland. But some catch an intellectual fire of enthusiasm for Habermas among one or more of the many wide intellectual currents and territories of sociology, as I did back in the 1960s and got a B.A.(sociology) in 1966.-Ron Price with thanks to “Jurgen Habermas,” Wikipedia, 15 August 2010.

It’s pretty turgid stuff for the average
person; it dried me out by the end of
my third year of university as many
other aspects of life took me to that
tether’s end like a dry dog-biscuit or
a frozen wasteland just surviving by
the skin of my teeth, little did I know
back then just what my problems were
for it is impossible to see the end in the
beginning: so many things take time as
those wheels of God grind very slowly.

But the fires of my enthusiasm for that
new science of groups was rekindled on
my way to Baffinland & then at the other
end of the Earth in Tasmania...they raged
in my mental-set and they’ve been going
out and getting set on fire off-and-on now
for nearly 50 years….You were lucky that
those fires, Jurgen, kept burning, burning!

Ron Price 15 August 2010

[killim]

Habermas is quite cool. I like his theories and ability to discuss. However he can get very unfair in a discussion too if he wants to and this is really funny to watch. It can get out of hand Reich-Raniki style.

[Paradigm]

Habermas is quite cool. I like his theories and ability to discuss. However he can get very unfair in a discussion too if he wants to and this is really funny to watch. It can get out of hand Reich-Raniki style.

I respect his body of work, but actually watching him speak? He's got the most painfully annoying voice ever.

[anticlimacus]

While I will say that Habermas can be torturous to read, he is well worth the reward. It has taken me several years to finally come to a basic understanding of Habermas and I now find myself very much indebted to his work...Needless to say, I'm glad I didn't give up because of his somewhat dry style. I would also suggest that one of the most difficult aspects of Habermas is the span of his interests and writings. Students interested in reading him with hopes of quickly putting together the "essence" of his thought will be sorely dissapointed. Finally, I'm glad somebody opened up a post on Habermas...I hope that there can be further more in depth discussions of his work on PoFo...

[RonPrice]

Thanks for those responses, folks. I make the assertion that narrative is the basis of community. It is not the only basis, but it is an important one. The story of our lives, our communities, depends on this narrative paradigm. Communities are co-constituted through communicative transactions in which participants co-author a story that has coherence and fidelity. The sociologist Jurgen Habermas takes the view that genuine communication is an ideal transaction, an uncoerced, educative and mutual exchange. The philosopher John Dewey says that communication is a process of sharing experience ‘til it becomes a common possession. It modifies the disposition of both parties who partake in it. –Ron Price with thanks to Barbara Schnelder and Daryl Caswell, “Using Narrative to Build Community and Create Knowledge in the Interdisciplinary Classroom,” History of Intellectual Culture, Vol.3, No.1, 2003.
------------------------
DIMENSIONS OF REASON
The year I began my travelling-pioneering life in the Baha’i community and the year before I took my first course in sociology, Jurgen Habermas, a sociologist and culture theorist, published his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere(1962). Habermas was, then, a student of the Frankfurt School of Social Research which, since the 1930s, had been advancing a Marxist critique of western capitalism and its discontents. Habermas wrote The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere to explore the status of public opinion in the practice of representative government in Western Europe. I knew nothing of this book in 1962 and my sociology courses in the next four years told me nothing about Habermas. Parsons reigned supreme in the early to mid-sixites. Habermas's days of fame were yet to come.

Habermas defined the public sphere as a virtual or imaginary community. He said it was a community which did not necessarily exist in any identifiable space and place. For me, for what was my experience back in the 1960s and since then, Habermas put this concept well and in 1962 that was how I experienced the macro public sphere.

But my micro public sphere had been “colonized,” to use a Habermas term; my “sociocultural lifeworld,” another of his terms, had taken on new ethical meaning and unity while the wider society I was a part of had lost its traditional religious worldview and its sociocultural lifeworld was being transformed. “The discontents of modernity,” it was Habermas’s view, “were rooted in the failure of society to develop and institutionalize all the different dimensions of reason in a balanced way.”(1) -Ron Price with thanks to (1)Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1: Reason and Rationalization in Society, trans., Thomas McCarthy, Heinemann, London, 1981, p.xxxvii.

I could not have put it this way
back in ’62. Little did I know
then that I had started my life
in a system that balanced the
several dimensions of reason
and nicely institutionalized them
so that I could deal with society’s
discontents and my sociocultural
world colonized, at the great turning
point in history and its transformations
wrought in my time. Yes, colonized,
not by some fortuitous circumstantial
conjunction of forces but by the one
Power that could fulfil my longing,
has fulfilled my longing and Whose
succession of triumphs I have witnessed
in more than half a century of my life.

Ron Price
April 7th 2006
Updated on: 21/10/'11

[Paradigm]

While I will say that Habermas can be torturous to read, he is well worth the reward.

I'll agree with this. Theory of Communicative Action was a monster of a book to read, but when I got done with it, I definitely felt more enriched for having done it.

Incidentally, I was curious to discover that Hans-Herman Hoppe was a student of Habermas, and has taken up his discourse ethics in his own work. I find it very curious that an ethical theory developed by a Marxist would be taken up by an anarcho-capitalist as a defense of libertarian ideals.

[The Clockwork Rat]

Once you realise that most of the founders of post-modernism were previously Marxist, it doesn't seem so incredible.

Obviously, when I say "Marxist", you can tell that they probably didn't have a fucking clue.

[Paradigm]

Once you realise that most of the founders of post-modernism were previously Marxist, it doesn't seem so incredible.

Obviously, when I say "Marxist", you can tell that they probably didn't have a fucking clue.

Well, Habermas is part of the Frankfurt school, which orthodox Marxists don't tend to like too much, though he also has criticisms of that school of thought(Theory of Communicative Action is in large part a response to Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment). He also has some potent criticisms of post-modernism. But it's true that his theory of discourse ethics is rooted more in Neo-Kantian philosophy than anything remotely Marxist. Still, I wouldn't say that he "didn't have a fucking clue" about Marx.

[The Clockwork Rat]

I didn't mean to imply that I thought Habermas was a post-modernist

Nooo... I meant that dung heap of French nitwits that sprouted out of the 70's.

[RonPrice]

Belated thanks, Clockwork Rat and Paradigm, for your responses to my post. After some 18 months I hope it is not too late to respond to your posts. I drop into this site occasionally. I' like to say one or two things about Marxism now that we are some 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I've been reading, teaching and studying Marxism since 1965/6. Criticisms of Marxism have come from various political ideologies. Democratic socialists and social democrats reject the idea that socialism can be accomplished only through class conflict and a proletarian revolution. Many anarchists reject the need for a transitory state phase. Other critiques come from an economic standpoint. Economists such as Friedrich Hayek have criticized Marxism for allocating resources inefficiently.

Some contemporary supporters of Marxism argue that many aspects of Marxist thought are viable, but that the corpus is incomplete or outdated in regards to certain aspects of economic, political or social theory. They may therefore combine some Marxist concepts with the ideas of other theorists such as Max Weber: the Frankfurt school is one example. I encourage readers to go to the modern philosophy sub-section of my website. It begins as follows:

Modern philosophy is a type of philosophy which originated in Western Europe in the 17th century, and is now common worldwide. It is not a specific doctrine or school, and so should not be confused with modernism or modernity. There are certain assumptions and topics found in modern philosophy which help to distinguish it from earlier philosophy. I will begin by listing some of the major sub-sections of modern philosophy include.