Jürgen Habermas: References & Edit History

Martin Beck Matuštík, Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile (2001), is an intellectual biography. Habermas’s work through the late 1970s is introduced in Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (1978). David M. Rasmussen, Reading Habermas (1990), covers later work from the theory of communicative action to discourse ethics and law. Martin Beck Matuštík, “Habermas’ Turn?”, in Philosophy and Social Criticism 32(1):21–36 (2006), and Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope, chapters 2 and 3 (2008), discuss Habermas’s development since 2001. David Ingram, Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason (1987), comments specifically on the theory of communicative action; and James L. Marsh, Unjust Legality: A Critique of Habermas’s Philosophy of Law (2001), analyzes Habermas’s more recent expansion of communicative theory into legal theory.

Representative anthologies are Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (eds.), Communicative Action: Essays on Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action (1991); Stephen K. White (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Habermas (1995); Johanna Meehan (ed.), Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse (1995); Peter Dews (ed.), Habermas: A Critical Reader (1999); Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.), Perspectives on Habermas (2000); and David M. Rasmussen and James Swindal (eds.), Jürgen Habermas, 4 vol. (2002).