Habermas and Foucault

The aim of this book is to analyse the views of each author on contemporary ethics in the works of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. The two thinkers have very divergent points of reference and thinking. Foucault's ‘History of Sexuality’ for example shows how subjects can be constituted as thinkers and protagonists of an ethic focussed on subjectivity and personal self-care. His texts take us back to Greek life and the possibility of a life based on an aesthetic of existence in which universal precepts have no place. Habermas on the other hand starts from a different and practically antagonistic paradigm. He believes that the lived world has been colonised and instrumentalised by a systemic world in which money and the state are its most expressive bulwarks. Habermas' solution to this colonisation is his “Theory of Communicative Action” in which subjects interact and seek consensus through the use of argumentative rationality. In this way Habermas and Foucault present different ideas about what ethics is but reflection on the subject remains alive and does not have an end point.