In On the Pragmatics of Communication Maeve Cooke gathers together Habermas’s key writings on language from the period when he first began to develop the theory of communicative action in the mid-1970s. In taking a linguistic turn away from epistemology toward questions of mutual understanding, Habermas sought to break decisively with the philosophy of the subject and to reconceive rationality in intersubjective terms. The cornerstone of Habermas’s critical social theory is the idea that the most fundamental form of social action is action oriented to reaching understanding. In his formal-pragmatic reconstruction of the universal competencies involved in this form of action, Habermas analyses the way in which we raise and respond to validity claims in everyday acts of communication. The collection includes important writings on communicative rationality, theories of meaning and truth, formal pragmatics and speech-act theory. There are also two essays from 1996 which appear in English for the first time. In one of these Habermas introduces an important distinction between weak and strong forms of communicative action, or the use of language oriented to reaching understanding and that oriented to agreement in a strict sense. In the other he offers a belated elaboration of his pragmatic conception of truth where he makes it clear that, while he no longer thinks of truth in terms of an idealized rational consensus (not that critics of the long-abandoned ‘ideal speech situation’ will notice), he does reject Rorty’s view that the concept of truth is superfluous. This collection will be indispensable to those who seek to get to grips with these central aspects of Habermas’s work but they should be warned that they will have to be willing to trace the evolution of his thinking for themselves as the earlier essays have not been revised to take account of the later developments.

The Inclusion of the Other will be of more immediate interest to those engaged in contemporary debates in political theory. One of the burdens of Habermas’s critical project is to unearth the rational basis of moral and legal norms. He does so by drawing on his account of the pragmatic pre-suppositions of communicative action so as to argue that valid norms have cognitive content. Since outlining his discourse theory of law and democracy in Between Facts and Norms (published in German in 1992), he has explored the political implications of what he calls the ‘universalistic content of republican principles’. This collection gathers together the most important of these essays. It includes further elaborations of Habermas’s discourse theories of morality (part I) and democracy (V), as well as essays on John Rawls’s liberalism (II), the future of the nation-state (III) and questions regarding the implementation of human rights in both global and ‘internal’ contexts (IV). In the more recent of the two essays on Rawls, Habermas makes it clear that there are some important remaining differences between his ‘Kantian republicanism’ and Rawls’s ‘political liberalism’, particularly concerning the overly restrictive conceptions of public reason that Rawls continues to employ. In other essays Habermas offers normative-theoretical reflections on sovereignty in an era of globalization by outlining a context-sensitive form of cosmopolitan republicanism based on the mutual pre-supposition of human rights and popular sovereignty. He proposes the reform of international institutions, including the United Nations and the European Union, in ways that would help to realise this cosmopolitan and democratic ideal. Finally, he shows how his principles support policies that are sensitive to multicultural realities by endorsing an inclusive conception of citizenship that rejects assimilationist tendencies by ensuring equal rights for all citizens through the recognition of cultural difference.

As an evaluation of Habermas’s discourse theory of law and democracy, the collection edited by Michael Rosenfeld and Andrew Arato is the most comprehensive yet. It is the fruit of a major conference that was held in 1992 at the Cardozo School of Law to celebrate the publication of Between Facts and Norms. All of the papers appeared in a special issue of the Cardozo Law Review in 1996. There is a rather unfortunate asymmetry in the volume. Habermas’s very extensive reply includes some discussion of papers from the journal’s special issue which do not appear here, while he does not, for a variety of reasons, reply to some of the more forceful critiques that are present, including an excellent essay by William Forbath that challenges effectively the ambiguities in Habermas’s understanding of the relation between politics and the economic system. For this reason, rigorous editing and revision would have produced a more user-friendly result (even the notes are only updated in a long, attached list of errata). Still, there are many insights to be gained from the exchanges here between Habermas and some of the most astute of his critics. These include both those who are in broad sympathy with the discourse model, notably Thomas McCarthy, Robert Alexy, Klaus Günther, William Rehg, Richard Bernstein and Frank Michelman, as well as those who write from competing perspectives including the deconstructionist position of Jacques Lenoble and the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann and Gunther Teubner. This book makes a strong claim to be the essential companion to Between Facts and Norms but, from the perspective of contemporary political theory, this role should go to The Inclusion of the Other. Not only do the essays by Habermas included in the latter volume make the implications of the discourse theory of democracy more accessible to a general academic readership, but in them he outlines his political position in a clear, illuminating and provocative manner.