If in what follows we appear critical, it is not because we are unappreciative of the real achievement of the work of Jürgen Habermas. The theory of communicative action makes the case that rationality is a relevant moral social concept. That humans speak with and to each other places them, he shows, in a moral relationship, simply by the actuality of the fact of that speech. Habermas develops this position into a critical defense of modernity around a vision of the “formation of autonomous public spheres, which . . . enter into communication with one another as soon as the potential for selforganization and the self-organized employment of communication media is made use of.” This is a democratic picture based upon the potential egalitarianism of uncoerced participation in discourse.