Criticisms of Knowledge and Human Interests

In 1973 Habermas left Frankfurt in order to become Director of Research at the Max Plank Institute for Research into the Living Conditions of the Scientific–Technical World in Starnberg. An initial product of this new working environment was Legitimation Crisis, published some five years after the completion of Knowledge and Human Interests. Legitimation Crisis (the direct translation of its German title is Legitimation Problems in Late Capitalism) is concerned with the nature of contemporary capitalism. Habermas formulates a series of immensely rich and subtle conjectures about the potential for fundamental structural and political change in capitalism, grounded in an analysis of the various forms of crisis that are understood to assail it, and which are managed with greater or lesser effectiveness.

To read Legitimation Crisis after Knowledge and Human Interests is to encounter a new, and at times bewilderingly unfamiliar, Habermas. This is not due to a change in subject matter – from philosophy to social theory – for the substantive concerns of Legitimation Crisis are those of the essays collected in Towards a Rational Society and Theory and Practice, albeit that Habermas does acknowledge that certain themes of his earlier work, and not least the argument against scientism, are rendered less pressing as they have been taken up by others (KHI: 354). The unfamiliarity lies rather in what is, superficially at least, a staggering shift in grounding theory.