Quotes from book
The Theory of Communicative Action

Name: The Theory of Communicative Action
Author: Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas Original title Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (German, 1981)

The Theory of Communicative Action is a two-volume 1981 book the philosopher by Jürgen Habermas, in which the author continues his project of finding a way to ground "the social sciences in a theory of language", which had been set out in On the Logic of the Social Sciences . The two volumes are Reason and the Rationalization of Society , in which Habermas establishes a concept of communicative rationality, and Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason , in which Habermas creates the two level concept of society and lays out the critical theory for modernity.After writing The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas expanded upon the theory of communicative action by using it as the basis of his theory of morality, democracy, and law. The work has inspired many responses by social theorists and philosophers, and in 1998 was listed by the International Sociological Association as the eighth most important sociological book of the 20th century.

“As medium for reaching understanding, speech acts serve: a) to establish and renew interpersonal relations, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of legitimate social orders; b) to represent states and events, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of existing states of affairs; c) to manifest experiences that is, to represent oneself- whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the subjective world to which he has privileged access.”

Jürgen Habermas book The Theory of Communicative Action

Source: The Theory of Communicative Action, 1987, p. 308