"The Idea of the Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory" by Jurgen Habermas,1968

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Jürgen Habermas considers his major contribution to be the development of the concept and theory of communicative reason or communicative rationality, which distinguishes itself from the rationalist tradition by locating rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication rather than in the structure of either the cosmos or the knowing subject.

UNIVERSAL PRAGMATICS :
This social theory advances the goals of human emancipation, while maintaining an inclusive universalist moral framework.
This framework rests on the argument called universal pragmatics - that all speech acts have an inherent telos (the Greek word for "end") — the goal of mutual understanding, and that human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about such understanding.
Habermas built the framework out of the speech-act philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and John Searle, the sociological theory of the interactional constitution of mind and self of George Herbert Mead, the theories of moral development of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, and the discourse ethics of his Heidelberg colleague Karl-Otto Apel.

Habermas works resonate within the traditions of Kant and the Enlightenment and of democratic socialism through his emphasis on the potential for transforming the world and arriving at a more humane, just, and egalitarian society through the realization of the human potential for reason, in part through discourse ethics.

While Habermas has stated that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project," he argues it should be corrected and complemented, not discarded. In this he distances himself from the Frankfurt School, criticizing it, as well as much of postmodernist thought, for excessive pessimism, misdirected radicalism and exaggerations.

Within sociology,
Habermas's major contribution was the development of a comprehensive theory of societal evolution and modernization focusing on the difference between communicative rationality and rationalization on the one hand and strategic/instrumental rationality and rationalization on the other.
This includes a critique from a communicative standpoint of the differentiation-based theory of social systems developed by Niklas Luhmann, a student of Talcott Parsons.

His defence of modernity and civil society has been a source of inspiration to others, and is considered a major philosophical alternative to the varieties of poststructuralism. He has also offered an influential analysis of late capitalism.

INSTITUTIONALIZATION :
Habermas perceives the rationalization, humanization, and democratization of society in terms of the institutionalization of the potential for rationality that is inherent in the communicative competence that is unique to the human species.

Habermas contends that communicative competence has developed through the course of evolution, but in contemporary society it is often suppressed or weakened by the way in which major domains of social life, such as the market, the state, and organizations, have been given over to or taken over by strategic/instrumental rationality, so that the logic of the system supplants that of the lifeworld.
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RECONSTRUTIVE SCIENCE :

Habermas introduces the concept of “reconstructive science” with a double purpose:
to place the “general theory of society” between philosophy and social science and
re-establish the rift between the “great theorization” and the “empirical research”. The model of “rational reconstructions” represents the main thread of the surveys about the “structures” of the world of life (“culture”, “society” and “personality”) and their respective “functions” (cultural reproductions, social integrations and socialization). For this purpose, the dialectics between “symbolic representation” of “the structures subordinated to all worlds of life” (“internal relationships”) and the “material reproduction” of the social systems in their complex (“external relationships” between social systems and environment) has to be considered. This model finds an application, above all, in the “theory of the social evolution”, starting from the reconstruction of the necessary conditions for a phylogeny of the socio-cultural life forms (the “hominization”) until an analysis of the development of “social formations”, which Habermas subdivides into primitive, traditional, modern and contemporary formations. This paper is an attempt, primarily, to formalize the model of “reconstruction of the logic of development” of “social formations” summed up by Habermas through the differentiation between vital world and social systems (and, within them, through the “rationalization of the world of life” and the “growth in complexity of the social systems”). Secondly, it tries to offer some methodological clarifications about the “explanation of the dynamics” of “historical processes” and, in particular, about the “theoretical meaning” of the evolutional theory’s propositions. Even if the German sociologist considers that the “ex-post rational reconstructions” and “the models system/environment” cannot have a complete “historiographical application”, these certainly act as a general premise in the argumentative structure of the “historical explanation”.

Abstract of Luca Corchia, Explicative models of complexity.
The reconstructions of social evolution for Jürgen Habermas,
in S. Balbi - G. Scepi - G. Russolillo - A. Stawinoga (eds.),
Book of Short Abstracts,
7th International Conference on Social Science Methodology - RC33 - Logic and Methodology in Sociology, Napoli, Italia, 9.2008, Jovene Editore, 2008.
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The interpretive scheme set forth by Marx for the Phenomenology of Mind contains the program for an instrumentalist translation of Hegel’s philosophy of absolute reflection:

The greatness of Hegel’s phenomenology and its end result-the dialectic of negativity as motive and productive principle-is thus ... that Hegel grasps the self-generation of man as a process, objectification as de-objectification, as alienation and the overcoming of this alienation; in other words, that he grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man, who is true man because of his reality, as the result of his own labour. [Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General]
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The idea of self-constitution of the species through labour is to serve as the guide to appropriating the Phenomenology while demythologising it.

The assumptions of the identity kept Hegel from reaping the real harvest of Kant, and they dissolve on this materialist basis.
Ironically, however, the very viewpoint from which Marx correctly criticises Hegel keeps him from adequately comprehending his own studies.

By turning the construction of the manifestation of consciousness into an encoded representation of the self-production of the species, Marx discloses the mechanism of progress in the experience of reflection, a mechanism that was concealed in Hegel’s philosophy.

It is the development of the forces of production that provides the impetus to abolishing and surpassing a form of life that has been rigidified in positivity and become an abstraction. But at the same time, Marx deludes himself about the nature of reflection when he reduces it to labour. identifies “transformative abolition (Aufheben), as objective movement which reabsorbs externalisation,” with the appropriation of essential powers that have been externalised in working on material.
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The natural sciences have developed an enormous activity and appropriated an ever growing body of material. Philosophy has remained just as foreign to them as they remained foreign to philosophy. Their momentary union [criticising Schelling and Hegel] was only a fantastic illusion ... In a much more practical fashion, natural science has intervened in human life and transformed it by means of industry ... Industry is the real historical relation of nature, and thus of natural science, to man. [Marx, Private Property & Communism,]
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Marx has only one concern,to demonstrate through precise scientific investigation the necessity of definite orders of social relations and to register as irreproachably as possible the facts that serve him as points of departure and confirmation . . . Marx considers the movement of society as a process of natural history, governed by laws that are not only independent of the will, consciousness, and intention of men but instead, and conversely, determine their will, consciousness, and intentions.
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The development of fixed capital indicates the extent to which general social knowledge has become an immediate force of production, and therefore [!] the conditions of the social life process itself have come under the control of the general intellect. [Grundrisse p594]
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The mystery of the commodity form, therefore, is simply that it takes the social characteristics of men’s own labour and reflects them back to men as the objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the social natural properties of these things. It thus also reflects the social relation of the producers to the totality of labour as a social relation of objects, one that exists independently of the producers. Through this quid pro quo the products of labour become commodities and natural supernatural or social things. Thus the light impression something makes on’ the optic nerve does not appear as a subjective stimulus of the optic nerve itself but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye. But in vision light really is projected from one thing, the external object, onto another thing, the eye. It is a physical relation between physical things. On the contrary, the commodity form, and the value relation of the products of labour in which it is expressed, have absolutely nothing to do with their physical nature and the concrete relations arising from it. Here it is only the specific social relation of men themselves that assumes for them the phantasmagoric form of a relation of things. Hence in order to find an analogy we must take flight to the obscure region of the religious world. Here the products of the human mind appear endowed with their own life, as independent forms that enter into relations with one another and with men. In the commodity world, the same holds for the products of the human hand. This I call the fetishism that clings to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and which therefore is inseparable from commodity production. [Marx, Capital]
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