The Communicative Rationality And The Discourse Politics

Habermas is one of the most famous scholars in contemporary western academic field. It is well known to Habermas' theory of communicative action. Since 1990,with the issue of his great important political philosophy-- Between Facts and Norms, we have become interested in his primary interest in recent year. This thesis concentrates on analyzing the political philosophy of Habermas'Habermas establishes the communicative rationality as the foundation of the whole philosophy, which is based on the formal pragmatics and criticizes the demerit of the traditional rationalism.Habermas investigates the late capitalism's legitimacy crisis with the applying of communicative rationality on the political sphere. He insists on the concept of legitimacy containing both normal connotation and empirical meanings. After criticizing Weber's concept of legitimacy, Habermas puts forward the reconstructive legitimacy concept and analyses it from the structural transformation of public sphere and the colonization of life-world.Habermas claims that the " legitimacy crisis "of the capitalism reflects theoretically in the competition between the republicism and the liberalism, but both are unilateral. Therefore, he constructs the theory of discourse politics based on the core of the discourse democracy and emphasizes on the consanguinity both human rights and popular sovereignty.Habermas' political philosophy affords a new legitimate basement for the capitalism's democracy politics and try to overcome the western democracy crisis, but we can't ignore that his political philosophy is built on the value view of the western centrism, which contains the great meanings of Utopia.