Raison et légitimité. Problèmes de légitimation dans le capitalisme avancé

by Jürgen Habermas

Face à la complexité croissante des sociétés du capitalisme avancé, J. Habermas élabore une nouvelle figure de la théorie critique qui se définit dans l'affrontement, d'une part, avec le marxisme dogmatique, de l'autre, avec la théorie technocratique des systèmes. Est-ce que la contradiction fondamentale de la formation sociale capitaliste est toujours à l'œuvre sans changement, ou est-ce que la logique de la crise a changé ? Pour Habermas, on n'assiste pas tant à un dépassement de la crise économique qu'à son déplacement, à travers le système politique vers le système socioculturel. L'antagonisme des classes plutôt que d'être résolu n'est que temporairement refoulé ; aussi la crise économique ne peut-elle être amortie qu'en engendrant une série d'autres tendances à la crise, un véritable faisceau de crises : crise économique, crise de la rationalité, crise de légitimation, crise de motivation. De par l'insistance sur le déplacement de la crise et la mise en lumière des problèmes de légitimation du système social, une nouvelle question surgit : la reproduction de la vie sociale est-elle liée comme auparavant à la raison ? relève-t-elle encore d'une "discussion" qui consisterait à déterminer des intérêts universalisables et à fonder les normes en vérité ? Contre toute réduction de la légitimité à la légalité, contre l'empirisme, contre le décisionnisme, Habermas pose la possibilité de la constitution d'une pratique rationnelle, en recourant aux normes fondamentales du discours rationnel que nous supposons dans chaque décision, ouvrant ainsi la voie à une éthique communicationnelle. Aufklärer pour qui la raison est raison décidée, Habermas fait appel à la partialité pour la raison : "On a déjà accepté le point de vue de l'adversaire lorsqu'on renonce devant les difficultés de l'Aufklärung et qu'en formulant le projet d'une organisation rationnelle de la société on se réfugie dans l'actionnisme, autrement dit lorsqu'on choisit un point de départ décisionniste... La partialité pour la raison ne justifie pas plus le repli dans une orthodoxie chamarrée de marxisme qui ne peut conduire aujourd'hui, dans le meilleur des cas, qu'à l'établissement sans arguments de sous-cultures protégées et politiquement sans conséquence." La situation présente "ne découragerait pas la tentative critique pour soumettre les limites de la résistance du capitalisme avancé à des examens concrets, et cela ne paralyserait certes pas la résolution de reprendre le combat contre la stabilisation d'un système social pseudo-naturel qui s'effectuerait par-dessus la tête des citoyens."

Genres: Philosophy, Sociology, Politics, Nonfiction, Theory, Germany, Social Science

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, the topic of his first book entitled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics—particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests.

Reviews

[Thomas Cafe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I understood about 50-60% of this and from what I get, I really enjoyed. No critical engagement in this review because I spent 2200 words doing that in an essay.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short book might be the worst written thing I've ever finished. That said, it's particularly interesting reading for our moment. Habermas wrote it to suggest what a critical theory would look like in a world no longer organized on strictly capitalist principles. As such, it is written against then prominent social scientific theories, including Luhmann's increasingly, bafflingly popular systems theory.
But that organized capitalistic world went away shortly after this was first published; then capitalism did its thing again. Now, of course, the world of government intervention and so on is back. Where to from here?
Habermas' approach is no longer tenable. It was tailored for a kind of organized capitalism which was still operated along class-war lines: capitalism had to be saved from revolution. Today, capitalism is not threatened by revolution (despite what Fox News would have you believe), but by its own dynamics and blind spots.
What is interesting is the idea that economic crises are displaced onto politics when government steps in to the economy. It seems likely that this will happen again. The next time the economy tanks, governments will be thrown out of power. But whereas Habermas argued that this was rational (since the crisis, on his view, is the fault of government), today economic crises are not the fault of governments; political turmoil is an ideological response to economic problems. Habermas thought the world was entering a post-liberal-capitalist society. It wasn't true then and it isn't true now. Instead, we have completely immoral governments taking over from completely immoral businesses. Business is driven by profit, government is driven by electability, and we all suffer.
Habermas' solution to all problems is to invoke communicative ethics. According to this, communication is possible only if there is rationality. Since communication is possible, rationality exists. It is also necessarily 'interested:' rationality leads to emancipation.
Parts of this project seem salvageable (especially the link between reason and interest). But the foundations are too wobbly.
A pretty good reading guide, only a few pages long, can be had at:

http://www.arasite.org/hablc.htm

[nettie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Habermas je podle mě zavřenej v pokoji a je v prdeli z toho, do jak větších kapitalistických sraček svět šel

[David M]

I confess to having great difficulty with Habermas. His encyclopedic grasp of different modes of thought is indeed impressive, but then there's this dearth of empirical content - sociology without society, historiography without history, political philosophy without politics, etc - that I find discombobulating. Also, he's just a very dull writer, no?

That said, if you can steer through the thicket of jargon, this book does address some very pertinent issues. Against his mentors Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas seeks to make a qualified rehabilitation of the enlightenment legacy. He understands the risk of a totally administered society, but does not accept that this is the only possible outcome for modern, rational humanity.

(At this level of course, it all still sounds extremely abstract. For a real world example of this peril, please see the recent history of the euro crisis. In particular I recommend And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future. )

I think Habermas's project can be fruitfully compared to that of his late contemporary Ernest Gellner - another polymath philosopher and sociologist with an ambivalent attitude toward the enlightenment. Gellner wrote in a much livelier style, and was far more generous about illustrating his concepts with references to history and culture.

[Ed Stoddard · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I was an undergraduate and asked to write a precis I on this I would probably not do a very good job to be honest - Habermas is far from an easy read. Like many continental European intellectuals, Habermas frankly does not in my view do a very good job of bringing clarity to his thought - which is one of the marks surely of good writing.
Having said that, he is influential and historian friends of mine are big fans, so I decided to give him a go after all of these years as an historian by training - which I guess makes me an historian as well as a journalist.
Writing in the 1970s, one of the things that struck me was his reference to global warming (page 42): "If economic growth is necessarily coupled to increasing consumption of energy, and if all the natural energy that is transformed into economically useful energy is ultimately released as heat ... then the increasing consumption of energy must result, in the long run, in a rise in global temperature."
He does not mention the greenhouse effect, but that was presumably what he was getting at - and that is one of his more straightforward comments.
Habermas also at the time saw government budgets burdened with "... the costs of demand for unproductive commodities (armaments and space travel)."
One thing he did not see was how military research and spending could be transferred to productive means. Nuclear power was a thing then and he missed that and of course he could not see how technologies such as GPS would be harnessed by the private sector.
Ultimately, Habermas is - I think - examining how authority in modern capitalism is facing a crisis of legitimacy, and this hs certainly been a theme of the 21st century. And he was quite right to note that "... policy planning will rapidly arrive at a limit where its capacity for processing information and building consensus is overloaded by the excessive complexity of the problems (which are distinguished by high interdependency)."
That, in one of his more readable moments, neatly sums up the challenges faced by all governments today.

[Hoai Thuong · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book for the final project in college. It sucks. I can't follow the author's argument. We are working on the legitimacy of Vietnam after COVID-19. Reading this book hoping to gain more understanding of how the author defines the legitimacy crisis and the underlying principles behind the crisis resolution, I don't find a satisfying answer here.
And of course, reading a 150-page book in 2 days is a miserable experience. This is my first time I've read a book in such a short time. Under time pressure doubled with having to make sense of a very complicated topic, I really really want to give up. There are n times I just scroll the book mindlessly, hoping I will reach the end soon. But then, my commitment does not allow me to end the experience in such a mindless way. I had to re-read the whole thing. But it does not mean that I did not skip some parts. Such a time-consuming approach.
However, this experience teaches me to physically and mentally prepare for the next similar situation when I have to read more and push the progress but at the same time attain the high quality in a short time.
One star for my efforts and one star for the author's effort :D

[Richard Newton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably worth more than 3 stars - but although I tried hard, I found this a rather tricky read. The translation did not help, which was quite literal and if you directly translate German into English it can come across as rather flat and stilted - which given it is such an expressive language means a lot is missed. It might be that I also do not have enough of a background in Habermas or related thinkers to get the most from this.

[g · Rating 1 out of 5]

Legitimation Crisis is about how the social democratic state fails to rectify the contradictions engendered by late capitalism. Rather, when the state tries to intervene to eliminate the inequalities of the system, economic problems merely become displaced and transform into political and socio-cultural difficulties, thereby damaging the legitimacy of the state. For instance, when the state offers tax cuts to capitalists in order to withstand the complexities of the global order, the public protests and argues that the state is not fair in its policies. In reality, by doing so the state may be trying to compensate for the welfare cuts that it provides to the ‘inactive proportion of the population’ (p. 66), yet it becomes more difficult for the state to make such claims intelligible, Habermas argues. Thus the inherently economic problems of the era become rendered into political problems that prompt complaints about the legitimacy of political order.

However, modernity is an unfinished project, as Habermas would suggest, and Reason will be accommodated in the system only through such legitimacy crises, eventually pushing the public sphere, that is the life-world, to engage in debates and to arrive at consensus about how to manage the system. What Habermas observes in late capitalism is the colonization of narrative/traditional knowledge by scientific/bureaucratic rationalities, and this condition will be overcome only when the society takes its own management at hand. This colonization should be reversed and the life-world should become more powerful than the system itself, Habermas asserts. Otherwise, the legitimation crisis of the political circle will develop into a motivation crisis in the internal worlds of its subjects, leading to further decay and unproductivity.

To put it in simple terms, what Habermas proposes as a method to overhaul the contradictions of capitalism is an enlightened civil society, which will have internalized Reason, and eventually unveiled the truth, thus having access to the correct tools to manage the inadequacies of the system. This civil society will be constructed through the democratic efforts of the public, and therefore the final consensus will not suffer from legitimacy problems.

However, in seeking to reveal capitalist ideology through Reason and to rid of the contradictions of the system, what Habermas suggests is to replace the state sponsored ideology by another mystification this time sponsored by an enlightened group of civil society members. Even though Habermas begins to tackle the status quo by approaching its problems as instigated by capitalism, he does not criticize capitalism per se, but rather looks for an alternative way to legitimize capitalist practices through engaging more people with the system, and through bringing their life-worlds closer to the capitalist system. While the state legitimizes its presence by formal democracy this new rule of law becomes a more ‘legitimate’ alternative as it has access to a wider variety of institutions and peoples, thus putting on a false front to sort out the problems that formal democracy did not resolve. This elitist method is not very different from formal democracy in its approach to capitalism.

In addition, the class struggles and power relations within this group that participates in discussions remain completely disregarded in the book. The idea of a consensus and universal truth are very exclusive concepts in themselves, and they become even more select when the internal utterances of the group that is constructing the universal are not questioned. For instance, in the beginning of the book (p. 15) Habermas carefully delineates how society should be educated in order to fulfill the conditions for participating in debate: this proposition on its own discloses that taking part in the public sphere requires a certain manner of conditioning, and in places that lack this sort of prerequisites further prevents the dissolving of the debates within every sphere of society. Once again, the idea of public consensus translates as a bourgeoisie rule with different institutions to back it up. This is a very Eurocentric and exclusive manner of approaching the inherent contradictions of capitalism, and it deeply suffers from a lack of imagination on the part of the author. I concur with Lyotard’s opinion on Habermas: ‘the cause is good, but the argument is not’ (p.66).

[Steven Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jurgen Habermas' Legitimation Crisis explores crisis tendencies in late capitalism and the possible order that might follow. Crises themselves come about from unresolved problems that begin to raise questions about the nature and efficacy of the system. When people lose faith in the values undergirding a system, the regime in power and, perhaps, even the entire system itself comes to be at risk.

The underlying engine of crisis is the economic system. He notes that "In liberal capitalism, crises appear in the form of unresolved economic steering problems" and ". . .crises become endemic because temporarily unresolved steering problems, which the process of economic growth produces at more or less regular intervals, as such endanger social integration." Economic crisis might occur when output declines and its distribution becomes increasingly unequal, so disproportionate that it raises questions about the fairness and viability of the system. In this way, the ideology supporting capitalism would come under question and cease generating loyalty from the people. If government capabilities are questioned too much by citizens, crisis develops, and people come to lose faith in the ideology supporting the system and the system's legitimacy in dividing up the pie so that all gain "fairly."

People will not be actively involved in politics as long as their careers, family lives, and enjoyment of consuming material goods continue. Under such circumstances, they allow the capitalist economy and government to operate with rather little question. By providing an appropriate level of "goodies" to the people, the system renders the masses quiescent and allows the elite to remain in power. When questions arise as to whether the system is generating consumer goods at the proper rate, then the political disengagement may end and a legitimation crisis begins as people begin to doubt the validity of the current system.

Habermas' ideal system would be based on dialogic communication and open discourse. The question here: If the current late capitalist system suffers a legitimation crisis and transformation of the system looms, how will new norms develop? Habermas answers: "Only communication 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 into (or were to enter into) a process of discursive will-formation."

Citizens will test the validity claims of the various ideas and norms under debate. In the final analysis, "The validity claim of norms is grounded not in the irrational volitional acts of the contracting parties, but in the rationally motivated recognition of norms, which may be questioned at any time." And what determines which validity claim is best? Habermas contends that the better argument that emerges from a cooperatively engaged in dialogue should rule--if a consensus forms around this one possibility.

This is a powerful work, whether or not one agree with the thesis. Habermas has faith in the ability of people to create the norms that will govern politics and society. Is he too optimistic? That is the key question that readers will have to grapple with.

[Chelsea Szendi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to this book with lots of prejudices about how to read Habermas, although this is my first real try. His communicative theory and public sphere etc. etc. have become part of the air breathed in graduate school programs, which means that lots of people toss about the word "Habermasian" and embrace their own caricatures of what that means (and, important for graduate students, why it's lacking/naive/wrong). So I had that monkey on my back, but I was mostly interested to read this book as a historian.

Since Habermas was writing in the early 1970s, part of the implicit background for the kind of identity crises he notes in advanced capitalist nations is that of mass demonstrations and student unrest (although the only moment in which a glimmer of a real challenge appeared, for Habermas, was in "May 1968 in Paris"). I could feel his urge toward clear, structured communication (which, naturally, I was also seeking): none of those topsy-turvy textual layerings of Adorno... but also so few specifics. Habermas is trying to hammer out the outlines of a model (yeah, I know: that's what theory is), and trying to be so clear and careful, but without explicit clues to what specific circumstances he has in mind, he ends up being very vague at moments. I suppose this book is rather a slim volume, and to include examples and explications would quickly triple it.

My reading coincided with desperate maneuvering by the Fed to save the US dollar and observers in Japan going batty over the outrageous strength of the yen. The public expectations for the state to intervene in these issues underlined Habermas' point about legitimacy in late capital ("organized capitalism") requiring state stewardship of the market. Of course, the counterpoint to those expectations is the lingering utopia of the free market that Polanyi discussed in the 1930s and still resonates in populist discourse in the United States.

This phrase in particular came back to me when I put aside Habermas to glance at the newspaper:

"No previous social formation lived so much in fear and expectation of a sudden system change, even though the idea of a temporally condensed transformation -- that is, of a revolutionary leap -- is oddly in contrast to the forms of motion of system crisis as a permanent crisis."(25)

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exceptional book by an exceptional philosopher. Habermas presents a sweeping analysis of contemporary economic, political and social philosophy and their associated crises of legitimation. As western societies emerge from natural explanations for the legitimation of social strata and organization, the technocratic rationality that functioned as a liberating medium, in turn, finds itself unable to ground its own action or make reference to an other for its grounding. As a result, western social systems become mired in positivisms or decisionisms incapable of justifying their actions.

This book is a joy to read, with Habermas's precise and complex thinking on full display.

[Aaron Crofut · Rating 1 out of 5]

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 trying to hide weakness in thought behind a verbal smoke screen. Crises of legitimately occur, but they have little to do with the supposed difference between surplus value and use value. This book is a sad attempt to keep Marxist class theory alive well after Marx's theories have been refuted by time.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE GERMAN SOCIAL PHILOSOPHER SKETCHES A THEORY OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION

Jürgen Habermas (born 1929) is a German philosopher and sociologist who is one of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School.

He wrote in the Preface to this 1973 book, “The application of the Marxian theory of crisis to the altered reality of ‘advanced capitalism’ leads to difficulties. This fact has given rise to interesting attempts to conceive of the old theorems in new ways or, alternatively, to develop new crisis theorems in their place. In the preparatory phase of empirical projects … we have also examined such approaches; the argumentation sketched in Part II of my essay sums up what I have learned from these discussions… referring to in-house working papers is intended … to indicate the unfinished character of the discussions, which have by no means yet led to consensus.

"In addition, I am concerned that the clarification of very general structures of hypotheses not be confused with empirical results… a theory of social evolution … is today still scarcely at all developed… [but] the close connection between material questions of a theory of contemporary social formation and foundational problems that… can be clarified within the framework of a theory of communicative competence.”

He states, “It is my conjecture that the fundamental mechanism for social evolution in general is to be found in an automatic inability not to learn. Not LEARNING, but NOT-LEARNING is the phenomenon that calls for explanation at the socio-cultural state of development. Therein lies, if you will, the rationality of man. Only against this background does the overpowering irrationality of the history of the species become visible.” (Pg. 15)

He admits, “At the moment I can see no possibility of cogently deciding the question about the chances for a self-transformation of advanced capitalism. But I do not exclude the possibility that economic crises can be permanently averted, although only in such a way that contradictory steering imperatives that assert themselves in the pressure for capital realization would produce a series of other crisis tendencies. The continuing tendency toward disturbance of capitalist growth can be administratively processed and transferred, by stages, through the political and into the socio-cultural system.” (Pg. 40)

He suggests, “The class compromise weakens the organizational capacity of the latently continuing classes. On the other hand, scattered secondary conflicts also become more palpable, because they so not appear as objective systemic crises, but directly provoke questions of legitimation. This explains the functional necessity of making the administrative system, as far as possible, independent of the legitimating system.” (Pg. 69)

He argues, “The patterns of priorities that [John Kenneth] Galbraith analyzed from the point of view of ‘private wealth versus public poverty’ result from a class structure that is, as usual, kept latent. In the final analysis, this class structure is the source of the legitimation deficit.” (Pg. 73) He adds, “As long as the welfare-state program, in conjunction with a widespread, technocratic common consciousness … can maintain a sufficient degree of civil privatism, legitimation needs do not have to culminate in a crisis.” (Pg. 70)

He asserts, “Since all those affected have, in principle, at least the chance to participate in the practical deliberation, the ‘rationality’ of the discursively formed will consists in the fact that the reciprocal behavioral expectations raised to normative status afford validity to a COMMON interest ascertained WITHOUT DECEPTION… The discursively formed will may be called ‘rational’ because the formal properties of discourse and of the deliberative situation sufficiently guarantee that a consensus can arise only through appropriately interpreted, generalizable interests, by which I mean needs that can be communicatively shared.” (Pg. 108)

He observes, “the repoliticization of the biblical inheritance observable in contemporary theological discussion (Pannenberg, Moltmann, Solle, Metz), which goes together with a leveling of this-worldly/other-worldly dichotomy, does not mean atheism in the sense of a liquidation without trace of the idea of God---although the idea of a PERSONAL God would hardly seem to be salvageable with consistency from THIS critical mass of thought. The idea of God is transformed …into the concept of a Logos that determines the community of believers and the real life-context of a self-emancipating society. ‘God’ becomes the name for a communicative structure that forces men, on pain of a loss of their humanity, to go beyond their accidental, empirical nature to encounter one another INDIRECTLY, that is, across an objective something that they themselves are not.” (Pg. 121)

This book will appeal to those studying Habermas’s thought and its development.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Chapter 1. System and Life-World

To use the expression "late capitalism" is to put forward the hypothesis that, even in state-regulated capitalism, social developments involve "contradictions" or crises. I shall therefore begin by elucidating the concept of crisis.

Prior to its employment as a social-scientific term, the concept of crisis was familiar to us from its medical usage. In that context it refers to the phase of an illness in which it is decided whether or not the organism's self-healing powers are sufficient for recovery. The critical process, the illness, appears as something objective. A contagious disease, for example, is contracted through external influences on the organism; and the deviations of the affected organism from its goal state [Sollzustand]-the normal, healthy state can be observed and measured with the aid of empirical parameters. The patient's consciousness plays no role in this; how he feels, how he experiences his illness, is at most a symptom of a process that he himself can scarcely influence at all. Nevertheless, we would not speak of a crisis, when it is medically a question of life and death, if it were only a matter of an objective process viewed from the outside, if the patient were not also subjectively involved in this process. The crisis cannot be separated from the viewpoint of the one who is undergoing it the patient experiences his powerlessness vis-a-vis the objectivity of the illness only because he is a subject condemned to passivity and temporarily deprived of the possibility of being a subject in full possession of his powers.

We therefore associate with crises the idea of an objective force that deprives a subject of some part of his normal sovereignty. To conceive of a process as a crisis is tacitly to give it a normative meaning the resolution of the crisis effects a liberation of the subject caught up in it.

This becomes clearer when we pass from the medical to the dramaturgical concept of crisis. In classical aesthetics, from Aristotle to Hegel, crisis signifies the turning point in a fateful process that, despite all objectivity, does not simply impose itself from outside and does not remain external to the identity of the persons caught up in it. The contradiction, expressed in the catastrophic culmination of conflict, is inherent in the structure of the action system and in the personality systems of the principal characters.
Fate is fulfilled in the revelation of conflicting norms against which the identities of the participants shatter, unless they are able to summon up the strength to win back their freedom by shattering the mythical power of fate through the formation of new identities.”

[Sinan Öner]

Professor Jürgen Habermas' famous book "Legitimation Crisis" is one of the main works about the social-political crisis in the Western democracies - in the governing of European countries after the 2. World War in the new conditions of continental restoration period. Why did the European nations live a governing crisis although the victory of democracies, what were the questions in the formation of a new democracy in the world? Professor Jürgen Habermas uses the concept of legitimacy for understanding the roots of social-political crisis which affects on the governing structures, did European democracies' institutions which are tools of ruling their societies loose their legitimacy although their power to restorate their countries, why? Professor Jürgen Habermas thinks on the social classes' relations to formulate the conditions of probable reforms to end legitimacy crisis. Professor Jürgen Habermas writes on the law which was changed radically after the war for describing the necessary social reforms; "Legitimation Crisis" is a conceptual questioning of Professor Jürgen Habermas on the new world before foundation of the European Union.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been told many times that Habermas is kind of a frustrating writer, but didn't entirely believe it until I waded into this volume. The object of his various ires is not always clear here, he does a less-than-stellar job of attributing theories and ideas and tracing their connections, and I'm still not 100% convinced I understand the main problem that he's addressing in this book. Still, though, the moments of clarity that are on display here are quite interesting, and when he does form a meaningful connection it really does mean something and adds a lot to the developments that he's arguing about. Some of this, of course, is surely my own ignorance of some of the theories and theorists that he's dealing with. I can say, though, that in the end I found a lot here to be interesting and, I hope, useful. Habermas may not be clear, and he may be frustrating, but he is also interesting, and sometime's that's enough.

[Gede Suprayoga · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me, this book is an uneasy read.

Yet, arguments in the book about the crisis posed by the post-capitalism state are worth reading. It seems to have the ambition to provide complete coverage of problems occurring in liberal democratic regimes: public distrust of government, unsatisfactory public services, accountability demands, fair competition, etc. Habermas went deep into the problem's roots and created a framework for argumentation.

We can borrow the elements of the legitimation crisis theory to prevent the actual crises from happening. The theory also implies a diagnostic framework for evaluating existing conditions.

But my understanding is still superficial. I probably need to read more than one for better comprehension.

[Adrian Fanaca · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for anyone who is a fan of Habermas. I did not read many Habermas books in my life, actually this is the first book I read from the famous German philosopher. I recall him teaching us in this book about the various types of crises: system crisis or identity crissi, legitimation crisis, motivational crisis, rationality crisis, and the economic crisis. I enjoyed this book very much as it explains how a crisis leads to another. The solution is that we need a big restart in the political administration and economic model, you need a new tradition for legitmation, you need a political system that give total autonomy to the new traditions of legitimacy.

[Madison Freeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Habermas approaches advanced capitalism with a balanced critique that I think has a lot of merit. He is much more detailed than Marx, and I think a lot of people mischaracterize him as being an anti-capitalist. I actually think his critiques offer a great guide for where to begin if the United States were to ever actually try to fashion capitalism in a way that actually works for everyone and does not fall into the same repressive and oppressive features that currently fail us. I also think his emphasis on rationality and what we perceive as rational under capitalism is really well-thought-out.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very solid book. Tight and well-argued. Difficult to summarize in a few sentences, but the basic gist is that modernity can no longer tell a coherent story about itself. Awkward. We can fix it, but to fix it we need to take discourse a bit more slowly and seriously. The ISS is a big concept, and unfortunately the only way to restore legitimacy is to pass through it. Bummer.

[Aaron · Rating 1 out of 5]

Most useless book I've read all year. I not only couldn't understand most of Habermas's arguments, I couldn't understand why I should make the effort. I only read this because it's short and I've had it for years, and even then I nearly gave up.

[Chase Hanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense but insightful contribution to understanding advanced capitalist system crises and especially legal organization and rationally.

[George Togman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting systems theory re: advanced capitalism.

Main thrust is that crisis tendencies have been displaced from the economic sphere to the state.

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this because of its relevance to Wolfgang Streeck's recent writings on crisis theory. The book is almost a forensic explanation of what we mean by a crisis. The Habermasian stuff about his overall worldview was less interesting to me than the core idea of a legitimation crisis, but I see why he had to defend the various components.

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did my college thesis on this, in German, so I bet I'd get a little more out of it if I read it in English, but it was very interesting nonetheless.
It is fascinating to think about it in terms of the current American administration.

[Steve Cucharo · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're interested in the subject matter, I'd suggest reading a paper about this book rather than reading the book itself. Nancy Fraser has written plenty about it and she makes it pretty digestible. Habermas just can't write.

[babak haghighi · Rating 4 out of 5]

read it carefully,so useful and so brilliant

[Adam]

No