hello everyone after a bit of a long break welcome back to our channel in today's video we will talk about jurgen habermas our fourth critical international theorist the german social and political thinker jurgen habermas has been among the most influential philosophers of the second half of the 20th century he is also one of the most famous scholars of the frankfurt school a social research institute in frankfurt amine germany belonging to the second generation scholars of the frankfurt school after max horkheimer herbert marcuse and theodor adorno for whom he worked as an assistant between 1956 and 1959 habermas has influenced many disciplines including but not limited to communication studies cultural studies law sociology and political science before getting into the details of the importance of habermas for the ir discipline first we need to remind ourselves some features of the critical theory by the way if you would like to know more about it as a whole you can click on the card popped up on the right corner and check out our video about critical theory remember what the critical theorists were thinking about emancipation contrary to what classical marxists argued simply emancipation being equal to humanity gaining greater mastery over nature through the development of sophisticated technology and its use for the benefit of all critical theorists suggested that the humanities increase domination over nature had been bought at a high price and the kind of mindset that is required for conquering nature slip too easily into the domination of other human beings that's why we have to think about emancipation in terms of reconciliation with the nature coming back to our second generation critical theorist habermas is not thinking like the early critical theorists his understanding of emancipation is more concerned with communication and dialogue and not our relationship with the natural world according to him the route to emancipation lies through radical democracy a system in which the widest possible participation is encouraged not only in words but also in practice by identifying barriers to participation in a social economic or cultural and overcoming them also for habermas and his followers participation is not to be confined within the borders of a state rights and obligations extend beyond state frontiers one of jurgen habermas's most famous books is named theory of communicative action and it was first published in 1981 as two volumes with this theory of communicative action he argues that fundamentally humans interact with each other for communicative rather than strategic reasons in most simple terms it means that such interaction is motivated by the chance to find the common ground for mutual understanding and agreement rather than one's desire to achieve their self-interests however for such an agreement to be reached humans involved in the interaction must avoid approaching one another with non-rational coercion a world where human beings are successful at reaching this ultimate aim provides the ideal but nearly impossible communication community and according to habermas it might be possible to reach the aim of having a communicative rationality on a great extent by establishing liberal democracy according to habermas discourse theory an argumentation raised by a person who tries to justify a point or a claim needs to be pragmatically analyzed as a social practice simply because the way the claim is being justified is determined by the claim itself also he has been working on the moral theory which he calls discourse ethics it can be accepted as a guideline to be used in modern societies when they wish to justify their actions on publicly acceptable terms so that brings us to the end of this very short video about jurgen habermas we will finish the critical theory series with andrew link later as our last influential scholar of the critical theory in our next video if you like this video please do not forget to like it and for our upcoming videos please subscribe to our channel thank you very much for watching we'll see you next time