The Young Parsons and the Mature Habermas.

The article compares philosopher Talcott Parsons's views with Habermas's theory. The entire basis of Habermas's communicative action banks on the distinctions Parsons made some sixty years previously, namely Habermas's notion of the universal validity claims underlying all speech. The three dimensions corresponding to the three validity claims are the subjective world, the objective world and the social world. This makes sense only in post conventional societies, because prior to that time, persons often drew upon only one world in making claims such as appealing to tradition, the divine right of kings, aesthetics, religion, or whatever. Habermas's penchant for grand, overarching theory was borrowed from Parsons and Parsons himself had been earlier influenced by that unique German brand of theorizing tracing back through Hegel and Marx, Simmel, Weber and Mannheim. In effect, the same logic underlying Habermas's analytic of the three worlds and the three validity claims can be found in the pages of Parsons's Amherst papers.