“Some twenty years ago Jürgen Habermas introduced his idea of a critical social theory that would be empirical and scientific without being reducible to empirical analytic science, philosophical in the sense of critique but not of presuppositionless “first philosophy,” historical without being historicist, and practical in the sense of being oriented to an emancipatory political practice but not to technological-administrative control.”

Translator's introduction to "Communication and the Evolution of Society, p. vii"