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The Philosophical Discourse of Modernityis a tour de force that has the immediacy and accessibility of the lecture form and the excitement of an encounter across, national cultural boundaries. Habermas takes up the challenge posed by the radical critique of reason in contemporary French poststructuralism. Tracing the odyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity, Habermas's strategy is to return to those historical "crossroads" at which Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Nietzsche and Heidegger made the fateful decisions that led to this outcome. His aim is to identify and clearly mark out a road indicated but not taken: the determinatenegation of subject-centered reason through the concept of communicative rationality. As The Theory of Communicative Actionserved to place this concept within the history of social theory, these lectures locate it within the history of philosophy. Habermas examines the odyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity from Hegel through the present and tests his own ideas about the appropriate form of a postmodern discourse through dialogs with a broad range of past and present critics and theorists. The lectures on Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Cornelius Castoriadis are of particular note since they are the first fruits of the recent cross-fertilization between French and German thought. Habermas's dialogue with Foucault - begun in person as the first of these lectures were delivered in Paris in 1983 culminates here in two appreciative yet intensely argumentative lectures. His discussion of the literary-theoretical reception of Derrida in America - launched at Cornell in 1984 - issues here in a long excursus on the genre distinction between philosophy and literature. The lectures were reworked for the final time in seminars at Boston College and first published in Germany in the fall of 1985. Jurgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernityis included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

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CHOICE Review

In this set of twelve lectures with five excursions, Habermas tells his side of the story about the rise and fall of Western rationality. He attempts to rehabilitate a socially transformed core concept of critical rationality against the various contemporary Continental detractions of reason. Habermas argues that what is called for is not a total rejection of the standard of rationality but an improved and extended understanding of reason that leaves behind the limitations of the modern subjectivist conception of rationality without endorsing an absolutist, Hegelian notion of reason. A detailed account of Habermas's alternative conception of intersubjectively based rationality is to be found in his The Theory of Communicative Action (1984). Compared to the latter work's learnedness and abundance in technicalities, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is far more accessible and provides a timely antidote to the fashionable misology that, in some quarters, is taken for philosophy's last word. An outstanding and original contribution to the recent debate between German hermeneutico-critical thinking and French neo- and poststructuralism. Highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate libraries.-G. Zoeller, University of Iowa

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Jurgen Habermas is a German sociologist who studied at the universities of Gottingen, Zurich, and Bonn. He taught at Frankfurt am Main, Marburg, and Heidelberg before becoming professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. His works, widely translated, have made him one of the most influential social theorists of our time.

Habermas is considered by some to be an intellectual heir to Max Weber and what has been called the Frankfurt School. His work has centered mainly on the role of communication and technology in changing patterns of social relations, human activity, and values. An outspoken advocate of the Enlightenment and a champion of reason, he has also cautioned that the technical rationality associated with modern capitalism often functions as ideology and may stand in the way of human progress.

(Bowker Author Biography)