1001Philosophers

Jurgen Habermas vs Michel Foucault

Habermas and Foucault represent the two great late-twentieth-century continental responses to the Frankfurt School inheritance and to the Enlightenment project. Their disagreement is over whether and how the Enlightenment can be defended against its critics.

At a glance

Jurgen HabermasMichel Foucault
Datesb. 19291926 – 1984
NationalityGermanFrench
EraContemporaryContemporary
Movements Critical Theory, Continental Philosophy Continental Philosophy, Post-Structuralism
Profile Jurgen Habermas → Michel Foucault →

Where they agree

Both held that modern social institutions need critical analysis, both took the relation of knowledge and power seriously, and both worked in extended dialogue with Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Weber. Both rejected naïve Enlightenment self-understanding while remaining serious philosophical theorists of modernity.

Where they disagree

Habermas defends a reconstructed rationality grounded in the implicit norms of communicative action: every act of communication presupposes claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity that can be redeemed in unconstrained discourse, and this provides a normative basis for criticizing distorted communication and illegitimate institutions. Foucault rejected the project: power is not external to rationality but constitutive of it, and Habermas's communicative norms are themselves products of disciplinary regimes. Where Habermas hopes to redeem the Enlightenment through better discourse, Foucault is suspicious that the very ideal is a regime of normalization.

Representative quotes

Jurgen Habermas

  • “Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a subject implies the claim of individuation.”

    Habermas (1972) "Sprachspiel, intention und Bedeutung. Zu Motiven bei Sellars und Wittgenstein". In R.W. Wiggerhaus (Ed.) Sprachanalyse and Soziologie . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). p. 334 | This is called the paradoxical achievement of intersubjectivity

  • “Habermas (1972) "Sprachspiel, intention und Bedeutung. Zu Motiven bei Sellars und Wittgenstein". In R.W. Wiggerhaus (Ed.) Sprachanalyse and Soziologie . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). p. 334”

    Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a

  • “This is called the paradoxical achievement of intersubjectivity”

    Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a

Michel Foucault

  • “I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.”

    Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)

  • “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are.”

    p. 785

  • “The soul is the prison of the body.”

    [L]'âme, prison du corps.

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