Context: From the Communicative Turn to the Major Work
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The philosophical foundations of Habermas’s thought - the communicative turn, the three cognitive interests, the critique of the philosophy of consciousness - were presented in Chapter 7.4. The Habermas-Luhmann controversy of 1971, which raised the fundamental problem of action and system, was also addressed there and in Chapter 4.4. This chapter picks up where those accounts left off: with Habermas’s attempt to resolve the unresolved action/system problem in his major philosophical work.
“The Theory of Communicative Action” (1981) - two volumes, over 1,100 pages - appears five years after Johannes Heinrichs’s “Reflection as Social System” (1976), discussed in the previous chapter. This temporal constellation is systematically significant: Heinrichs had already solved, through the logic of reflection, the problem that occupied Habermas - the mediation of action and system, the grounding of social reflection. Habermas’s major work must therefore be measured not only against its own standards, but against the systematic alternative that already existed.
For a book on the reception of Hegel, Habermas’s increasing distancing from Hegel is also relevant. The path from “Knowledge and Human Interests” (1968), which still stood clearly within the Hegelian tradition, to “The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity” (1985), which criticizes Hegel as the starting point of a problematic line of thought, is a movement away from Hegel - toward Kant. Whether this movement was substantively necessary or intellectually opportune will need to be asked.