"The Theory of Communicative Action" (1981)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Project: Critical Theory on a New Foundation
In 1981 Habermas’s major work appears - the result of thirteen years of labor since “Knowledge and Human Interests.” The book is a monumental attempt to place Critical Theory on a new foundation by synthesizing various traditions: Weber’s theory of rationalization, Mead’s interactionism, Austin’s and Searle’s speech act theory, Parsons’s and Luhmann’s systems theory.
The basic idea, already laid out in 1968, is now systematically developed: there are two types of rationality - instrumental and communicative. Instrumental rationality (means-end calculation) was analyzed - and rightly criticized - by Weber, Horkheimer, and Adorno. But there is another form: communicative rationality, which is inherent in language itself.
Whoever speaks implicitly raises validity claims: truth (what I say is true - relating to the objective world), rightness (what I do is normatively correct - relating to the social world), truthfulness (what I express, I actually mean - relating to the subjective world), comprehensibility (what I say is grammatically well-formed). These claims can be contested - and then they must be redeemed through argument. The “peculiarly unforced force of the better argument” is what constitutes communicative rationality.[1]
System and Lifeworld
Habermas’s answer to the controversy with Luhmann (-> Chapter 4.4, 7.4) is the distinction between system and lifeworld:
The lifeworld is the horizon of self-evident convictions, shared meanings, cultural traditions. In the lifeworld we act communicatively - we come to mutual understanding, interpret, criticize. It is the domain in which language and understanding are primary.
The system designates the self-sufficient mechanisms (market, bureaucracy) that are steered through media (money, power). Systems function without mutual understanding - they coordinate actions without communicative consensus. The market needs no discussion about prices; the bureaucracy needs no understanding about jurisdictions.
Modern societies are characterized by the differentiation of system and lifeworld. This is initially a form of progress - a way of managing complexity. But it harbors a danger: the “colonization of the lifeworld” by systemic imperatives. When money and power penetrate domains that depend on mutual understanding (family, education, culture), pathologies arise.[2]
The Four Validity Claims - A Systematic Problem
Habermas’s four validity claims (truth, rightness, truthfulness, comprehensibility) are among his best-known constructions. But where do they come from? Why these four in particular?
Habermas offers no systematic derivation. He finds them empirically-phenomenologically - through the analysis of everyday communication. This is methodologically unsatisfying. The question remains: are these four claims complete? How do they relate to one another? Why not three, or five?
The problem becomes clear in comparison with Heinrichs’s approach. Heinrichs shows how the four dimensions of language follow from the structure of the sign itself: sigmatics (reference to the “it”) - relation to the objective world; semantics (reference to the “I”) - subjective appropriation; pragmatics (reference to the “you”) - intersubjective enactment; syntax (reference to the medium) - structural regulation. This fourfold structure is not arbitrary but follows from the reflexive structure of the sign itself: the sign (medium) refers to something (the “it”), for someone (the “you”), through someone (the “I”).
Habermas intuitively grasps the same structure - but he does not ground it. Hence his four validity claims remain a “fact” of his reconstruction, not a necessity derived from the concept. Heinrichs’s “Reflection-Theoretical Semiotics” (Part 1: Theory of Action, 1980; Part 2: Theory of Language, 1981) appeared at the same time as Habermas’s major work - the more systematic alternative was available but was not received.[3]
Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols., Frankfurt am Main 1981. The distinction between instrumental and communicative rationality runs through the entire work. ↩︎
The distinction between system and lifeworld and the thesis of the “colonization of the lifeworld” appear especially in the second volume of “The Theory of Communicative Action.” ↩︎
Johannes Heinrichs, Reflexionstheoretische Semiotik, Part 1: Handlungstheorie. Strukturalsemantische Grammatik des Handelns, Bonn 1980; Part 2: Sprachtheorie. Philosophische Grammatik der semiotischen Dimensionen, Bonn 1981. These works appeared at the same time as Habermas’s major work and offered the grounding through the logic of reflection that Habermas lacks. ↩︎