Autonomy and Solidarity

Peter Dews is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex, and the author of Logics of Disintegration (Verso 1987). He is an editor of Radical Philosophy and New Left Review.Jürgen Habermas was born in 1929, and grew up in Gummersbach, Germany. He was educated at the Universities of Gottingen, Bonn, and Zurich, after which he worked for a while as a freelance journalist. In 1956 he became Adorno's assistant at the University of Frankfurt. From 1961 to 1964 he taught philosophy in Heidelberg, and from 1964 to 1971, philosophy and sociology in Frankfurt. From 1971 to 1983 he was Director of the Max Planck Institute for Research into the Life Conditions of the Scientific-Technical World, in Sternberg. Among his influential publications in English are: Knowledge and Human Interests (1971), Theory and Practice (1973), The Theory of Communicative Action (1984/1987), and Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1990).

Both seasoned readers of Habermas and those who are still plucking up the courage to join them will greet Peter Dews's useful and timely volume of interviews with joy... This collection not only makes the substance of his thought more understandable than does any other available source; it also offers an insight into the inner dynamism of his theory.