Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action

Jürgen Habermas, born in 1929, joined the Institute for Social Research as Adorno's assistant in 1956 and became the most influential figure of what is generally called the "second generation" of the Frankfurt School, though his mature philosophy departs substantially from the more totalizing pessimism of Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Erkenntnis und Interesse (Knowledge and Human Interests, 1968), Habermas argues that human knowledge is never simply neutral or disinterested but is always structured by one of three underlying cognitive interests: a technical interest in prediction and control, characteristic of the empirical-analytic natural sciences; a practical interest in mutual understanding, characteristic of the historical-hermeneutic sciences; and an emancipatory interest in freedom from unacknowledged constraint, characteristic of critically oriented disciplines such as psychoanalysis and, Habermas argues, critical theory itself.