Capitalism and Contradiction in Legitimation Crisis

My ultimate aim in the first sections of this book is to present Habermas’ mature social theory, his two-tiered theory of society as system and lifeworld, and to show how this theory, after the pattern of classical critical theory, serves to point out and articulate the interests of groups who embody a potential for protest or resistance within the societal formation of advanced capitalism. On the basis of this discussion, in the Intermediate Reflections, I then turn to the sociology of schooling as a means of critically evaluating the empirical adequacy of the theory. But, although it is in the two volumes of The Theory of Communicative Action that Habermas develops his mature social theory, I’d like to make a running start at that account by way of an earlier and much less discussed work, Legitimation Crisis. There are a few reasons for this: