Jürgen Habermas

The aim of this lecture (March, 1980) was to introduce the advantages of an hermeneutical sociology for an American public as a better alternative to the empirically reduced sociology; an empirical sociology that is widely spread in the US. In contrast to this empirically reduced sociology, Habermas emphasized the importance of the „hermeneutical researching dimension”. Additionally, unlike in the one year later published afterword of The Theory of Communicative Action, he gave specific importance to the continuity with the On the Logic of the Social Sciences. However, while in his latter work phenomenological, linguistic, and hermeneutical starting points were at the same level, in his lecture held in Berkeley the hermeneutical starting point was in the foreground, and the opposer was the „empirically reduced” sociology.