Aporias of Critical Theory in Jürgen Habermas: from communicative rationality to the problem of reflexive-systematic grounding

Abstract

This article examines Jürgen Habermas's place within the second generation of Critical Theory, understanding his work as a decisive attempt to reconstruct the critical project after the impasses left by the first generation of the Frankfurt School. The central question guiding the analysis is whether communicative rationality succeeds in providing systematic grounding for the mediations between communication, society, institutions, and the state. The article aims to critically reconstruct the development of Habermas's thought from Knowledge and Human Interests to The Theory of Communicative Action, highlighting both the philosophical strength of the communicative turn and the aporias inherent in its systematic foundation. The theoretical framework is based primarily on Habermas's own writings, in critical dialogue with Christian Iber's interpretation and Johannes Heinrichs's reflexive-systematic alternative. The analysis unfolds in four stages: the reconstruction of the communicative turn; the formulation of communicative rationality and the distinction between system and lifeworld; the identification of the principal aporias of Habermas's theory; and the discussion of Heinrichs's contribution to the problem of systematic grounding. The article concludes that Habermas remains an indispensable thinker because he rehabilitated a non-instrumental conception of reason and renewed the normative horizon of democratic emancipation. Nevertheless, his theory exhibits a deficit of reflexive-systematic grounding regarding the mediations between subject, communication, institutions, society, and the state. From this perspective, Heinrichs's proposal should not be understood as an external alternative to Habermas's project, but rather as a philosophical development that seeks to address a problem already inherent in the theory of communicative action.