The evolutionary perspective in Habermas' critical social theory

We seek to follow the development of evolutionary theory in the thought of Habermas, starting with the statement taken from the Prologue of Legitimation Crisis, 1973: "The programmatic character of Part I of this book makes clear that a theory of social evolution, although it must be the basis of social theory, is today still scarcely at all developed." Attention is directed to how Habermas reorients the evolutionary meaning of historical development in light of the concept of lifeworld as the sphere of the realization of communicative action. We seek to investigate how Habermas' model assigns, by means of language, the task of symbolic production and reproduction of the normative consensus among participants in the social world, while at the same time indicating that there is a telos of social integration immanent in the communicative practice itself. In this sense, we seek to demonstrate that just as universal pragmatics serves as the theoretical basis for the analysis of processes of abnormal socialization and the distortion of language, the theory of social evolution serves as a parameter for a critical social theory with the emancipatory intent of evaluating the empirical and contingent unfolding of historical dynamics.