The Power of Talk

In 1989 Suhrkamp Verlag of Frankfurt published Zwischenbetrachtungen im Prozess der Aufliirung: Jiirgen Habermas zum 60. Geburtstag, an 839-page compilation of "intermediate contemplations/reflections" somehow connected with Habermas (Honneth, McCarthy, Offe, and Wellmer 1989). It was coedited by four well-known theorists, including the American, Thomas McCarthy, and brought together 30 authors from several countries, all of whom somehow put Habermas's work to use. Eight of the chapters (190 pages) were printed in English, and the roster of authors stretched from well-known academics in midcareer to the venerable Hans-Georg Gadamer, nearly 90 when the book appeared. Just three years before, another 420-page Suhrkamp volume (Honneth and Joas 1986) had dealt exclusively with Habermas's Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (hereafter, TCA). An English translation of that book will soon be out, which makes sense in that, in addition to eight European scholars, Charles Taylor, Jeffrey Alexander, Thomas McCarthy, and Habermas himself provided chapters. In fact, Alexander's (1985) AJS review essay treating the first volume of TCA is reprinted there in German.2 No other living social theorist-Merton excepted-has inspired this level of concern. Even Anthony Giddens, recently assayed in three separate anthologies of criticism, does not have the international, crossdisciplinary appeal that has come to Habermas in his first 62 years of life. According to his bibliographer, Habermas published about 250 items between 1952 and 1981, and over 920 responses to his work found print in the same period in German and English (Gortzen 1982). A bibliography updated through 1990 will list over 3,000 publications about Habermas, plus scores of new entries from his own pen (Rasmussen 1990,