Habermas and Modernity explores whether the modern project is exhausted, compromised, or still salvageable.

The contributors approach Jürgen Habermas from different directions—critical theory, sociology, pragmatism, psychoanalysis and political philosophy—testing his attempt to recover reason from both instrumental rationality and the more totalising pessimism of earlier Frankfurt School thought.

Albrecht Wellmer returns to Adorno and the Dialectic of Enlightenment; Anthony Giddens presses on Habermas’s theory of communicative action; Martin Jay, Joel Whitebook, Richard Rorty and others probe the tensions between emancipation, modernity, subjectivity and rationality. Habermas himself contributes essays on rebellious subjectivity and neoconservative cultural criticism. The result is a compact map of one of the central late-twentieth-century disputes: whether reason can be reconstructed without simply reinstalling the authority structures critique was meant to dismantle.

Polity Press, Cambridge, in association with Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1985. First edition. Paperback. Light shelf wear and mild fading/age-toning to covers; internally clean and sound.