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In Habermas and Giddens on Praxis and Modernity Craig Browne investigates how two of the most important and influential contemporary social theorists have sought to develop the modernist visions of the constitution of society through the autonomous actions of subjects. Comparing Habermas’s and Giddens’s conceptions of the constitution of society, interpretations of the social-structural impediments to subjects’ autonomy and attempts to delineate potentials for progressive social change within contemporary society, Browne draws on his own work, which has extended aspects of the social theorists’ approach to modernity. Despite the criticisms developed over the course of the book, Habermas and Giddens are found to be two of the most important theorists of democratization and social democracy, the dynamics of capitalist modernity and their paradoxes, social practices and reflexivity, and the foundations of social theory in the problem of the relationship of social action and social structure.
Craig Browne is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney. Working in the area of critical social theory, he is co-editor of Violence in France and Australia: Disorder in the Postcolonial Welfare State (2010).
Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. New Paradigms and social theory Perspectives; Chapter One Habermas’s New Paradigm of Critical Theory; Chapter Two Giddens’s Theory of Structuration – an Ontology of the Social; Part II. Institutionalizing Modernity: Development and Discontinuity; Chapter Three Habermas on the Institutionalizing of Modernity: Communicative Rationality, Lifeworld and System; Chapter Four Giddens on Institutionalizing Modernity: Power and Discontinuity; Chapter Five Intermediate Reflections on Social Theory Alternatives: Contrasts and Divisions; Part III. The Political and Social Constellation of Contemporary Modernity; Chapter Six Globalization, the Welfare State and Social Democracy; Chapter Seven Deliberative Politics, the Democratizing of Democracy and European Cosmopolitanism; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.