A case of distorted communication: A Note on Habermas and Arendt

Political Theory

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 1983, Pages 105-116

  Canovan, Margaret ^a  

^a KEELE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84970789345     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591783011001006     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 2nd ed. (London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 176.
2. Jürgen Habermas. “Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence,” Inquiry 13 (Winter 1970), p. 372
3. See also idem, “What Is Universal Pragmatics?” in J. Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (London: Heinemann, 1979)
4. T. A. McCarthy, “A Theory of Communicative Competence,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 3 (1973), pp. 135-156.
5. Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 150-151. The implications are very clearly spelled out in Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (London: Hutchinson, 1978), pp. 326-327.
6. On “decisionism,” see Habermas, Theory and Practice, p. 266.
7. Jürgen Habermas, “On the German-Jewish Heritage,” Telos 44 (Summer 1980) p. 128. Habermas had previously acknowledged Arendt's part in calling his attention to Aristotelian concepts of action; see Habermas, Theory and Practice, p. 286.
8. Habermas, “On the German-Jewish Heritage,” p. 128.
9. Habermas, “Hannah Arendt,” p. 4.
10. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber, 1963), p. 227.
11. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (London: Faber, 1961), p. 220.
12. Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” p. 115.
13. Habermas, “Hannah Arendt,” pp. 22-24.
14. For a few of Habermas's constant references to “discursive formation of the public will,” see Theory and Practice, pp. 3-4, 37, 255. On intellectualism as the characteristic vice of Critical Theory in general, see Heather and Stolz, “Hannah Arendt and the Problem of Critical Theory,” p. 4.
15. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 197-198; On Revolution, pp. 72-73.
16. Habermas explains in “A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests” (Knowledge and Human interests, p. 369) that the need for this distinction had only recently occurred to him. The various types of speech are most clearly explained in Habermas, “Universal Pragmatics,” especially in Note 2, p. 209.
17. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 369.
18. See, for example, habermas, “Hannah Arendt,” pp. 21-22.
19. “How would the members of a social system … have collectively and bindingly interpreted their needs (and which norms would they have accepted as justified) if they could and would have decided on an organization of social intercourse through discursive will-formation?” J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (London: Heinemann), p. 113.
20. See also Heather and Stolz, “Hannah Arendt and the Problem of Critical Theory,” throughout.
21. See M. Leslie, “In Defence of Anachronism.” Political Studies 18 (1970), pp. 433-447.
22. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, p. 70.
23. Habermas assumes that deviations from perfect communication “increase in proportion to the degree of repression which characterises the institutional system within a given society”; “Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence,” p. 374.
24. R. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), p. 220.