Jürgen Habermas assigns civil society groups ‘to bear a good portion of the normative expectations, especially the burden of a normatively expected democratic genesis of law’. This article looks at concrete attempts in the Philippine constitution to provide structures so that these groups can carry out the role Habermas envisages for them, and examines whether such attempts are sufficient to enable said groups to intervene in the political process as effectively as he expects of them.

The thesis contrasts two hostile and divergent intellectual paradigms in social sciences: rational choice and critical theory. Both rational choice and critical theory offer contrasting perspectives on the structures of social interaction. However, both critical theory and rational choice theory share overlapping concerns ie., both are preoccupied with determining what rational can mean in the realm of social and political interaction. In the case of rational choice paradigm, instrumental reason forms the cornerstone of the theoretical edifice. Ever since the publication (...) of Jurgen Habermas' The lhemy qf Communicative Action Vol. / and Vol. II instrumental reason has come under severe attack. His critique anchors on a theory of communicative reason. What makes Habermas' work distinctive is that he does not regard instrumental reason as the single inevitable concomitant of modernity. Habermas sees in modernity an alternative way of conceptualising social interaction in terms of communication rather than strategy. So in a way, his work is a challenge to the defenders of modernity aiming to build a unified social science Jurgen Habermas advances the notion of communicative reason as the centerpiece of a social theory as opposed to instrumental reason. By providing a systematic grounding of the concept of reason in human language, he hopes to establish normative basis of critical theory. This model of reaching agreement or consent constitutes a process of dialogue in which reasons are exchanged between participants. This process is perceived to be a joint search for consensus. Such a dialogic concept of collective choice would necessarily work not with fixed preferences to be amalgamated but with preferences that are altered or modified as competing reasons are advanced in the course of discussion. In rational discussion, the only thing supposed to count is the power of better argument. Both rational choice and critical theory conceptualise politics in different ways. Rational choice theories critique democratic mechanisms failing to generate general will. Consequently, the political prescriptions offered are limited government or market. On the contrary, the political implications of Habermas' theory of deliberative democracy is anchored in the notion of liberal public sphere envisaging a cognitivist, rationalist vision in which discourse forms a critical normative basis for evaluating the political and moral principles. (shrink)

A critical theory of controversy would require the integration ofthe normative study of argumentation with critical studies of practices. Jiirgen Habermas has made a substantial contribution to such a project by embedding argumentation in a theory of communication, while critically engaging academic and public debates. This essay explicates core concepts in Habermas's theory of argumentation, including his distinction between theory and practice, the different validity requirements for argumentation in general, the norms of moral and ethical-political argumentation and of bargaining. Argument (...) predicaments are posited as ways to discover and assess different types of validity claims competing as "the force ofthe better argument". Habermas's criticism of "administrative power" and "communicative power" illustrates a potential yield of critical inquiry into social controversy. (shrink)

In this article I discuss some potential problems inherent in dialogue based methods when it comes to contributing to enduring participatory change. By dialogue-based methods I refer mainly to the dialogue conference and the development organisation, as described by Gustavsen (1992) and Pålshaugen (1998), (2001) and (2002). In a broader sense I refer to the linguistically oriented framework of these methods. The empirical context for the paper is a planned enterprise development project. This will be run as a network project (...) among four to seven small and medium sized companies and at a general level it aims to increase the capacity for continuous learning and change in the enterprises. Here the involvement and mobilisation of all employees is important, and dialogue-based methods will be used. Based on prior work with these enterprises, I see some potential obstacles up front concerning the ability of dialogue-based methods to contribute to enduring participatory change. In the article these concerns are discussed through different theoretical perspectives and illustrated with examples from the field. (shrink)

Re-working the Gramscian idea of the ‘organic’ intellectual from the cultural-political sphere to Higher Education (HE), suggests the need to develop critical and questioning ‘counter hegemonic’ ideas and behaviour in community education students. Connecting this reworking to the Habermasian theory of communicative action, suggests that these students also need to learn how to be constructive in developing such knowledge. Working towards critical and constructive capacities is particularly relevant for students who learn through acting in practice settings where general principles and (...) purposes acquired in the academy need to be interpreted in response to the unique demands of specific situations. From a Gramscian perspective, enabling students to develop the qualities of organic intellectuals means that lecturers have a duty to teach critical knowledges which the student will be unfamiliar with and unlikely to possess. If teaching is not to become simply didactic, however, there is also a need to acknowledge Habermas’s contention that all knowledge is contingent. This does not mean that knowledge is merely relative, subjective, or essentially interest serving, as some postmodernists would have it. In Habermasian terms, knowledge is developed through a rigorous process of contesting validity claims according to procedures appropriate to discipline areas. In these procedures, contestation occurs to the point where there is general agreement about the best current understanding, until such time as this is overtaken by ideas with a better claim. The danger is that over commitment to contestation in the classroom undermines subject knowledge and ultimately the authority of the educator. Speaking Habermas to Gramsci, and vice versa, helps socially and politically committed educators to construct a space in which didactic and discursive moments purposefully alternate. (shrink)