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PARTISAN REVIEW
remind us of the early poems and
Trial of a Judge,
and make us respect
Spender; together with, through all the decades and "periods," a
persisting element of genuine idealism .
w.w.
ROBSON
THE USES OF LANGUAGE
COMMUNICATION AND THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY.
By
Juergen
Habermas.
Beacon Press. $11.95.
Over the last fifteen years, Juergen Habermas's wfltmgs
have earned him a secure p lace in the front ranks of European social
thought. Building on the work of the first generation of the Frankfurt
School, from Horkheimer to Adorno and Marcuse, his wide-ranging
mind has managed to profit from encounters with an extraordinarily
large number of thinkers in the continental but also the English–
American tradition. He has attempted to arrive at a synthesis of Marx,
Freud, Dilthey, Peirce, British linguistic philosophy, the hermeneutic
tradition of Gadamer, and the genetic psychology of Piaget and
Kohlberg.
Habermas sees his work as grounded in a tradition of critical
enlightenment. Freudian psychoanalysis serves him as an example. He
is not particularly interested in Freud's substantive theorizing, but
believes that the Freudian approach yields most from it when it is
conceived as a method
to
overcome "systematically distorted communi–
cation" through a critical d ialogue between analyst and analysand.
Both collaborate to arrive at a reconstruction that is free from distor–
tion of the patient's life history. Only if and when this reconstruction
has been consensuall y va lidated, when the patient has appropriated the
undistorted view of himself that emerges from the dialogue, has
en lightenment been reached.
Taking his cue from the structure of psychoanalytical therapy,
Habermas then contends, more genera lly, that a great deal of current
and past human misery and alienat ion has its roots in distorted
communicative patterns. Hence, he argues in the first part of the
present work, what is needed is the deve lopment of "universal prag–
matics," able to identify and to reconstruct the universal conditions of
