This is a seriously great book 2005-07-14 For a long time, Towards a Rational Society topped my list of Desert Island Books, particularly the third chapter, Science and Technology as Rationality. As a social scientist, it encapsulated for me the whole problem with positivist science approaches, as well as making clear the fundamental distinction between purposive rationality and other less instrusive and more community-developing forms of communicative action. It is often seen as ironic that Habermas, a man with a cleft palate who writes in such a turgid and convoluted way, should be a premier exponent of the theory of communication, systemativally distorted or otherwise. Here is a book that shows why and how he is a genius, and in the clearest and most straightforward way. It also clearly shows his debts to Weber and Marx and the earlier critical theorists, while moving substantially on from all of them.
