Habermas

Moreover, a moral-practical self-understanding of modernity as a whole is articulated in the controversies we have carried on since the seventeenth century about the best constitution of the political community. This self-understanding is attested to both by a universalistic moral consciousness and by the liberal design of the constitutional state. Discourse theory attempts to reconstruct this normative self-understanding in a way that resists both scientistic reductions and aesthetic assimilations.

The concept of communicative action is developed in the first set (Chapter III) of "Intermedicate Reflections" [Zwischenbetrachtung], which provides access to three intertwined topic complexes: first, a concept of communication rationality that is sufficiently skeptical in its development but is nevertheless resistant to cognitive-instrumental abridgments of reason; second, a two-level concept of society that connects the "lifeworld" and "system" paradigms in more than a rhetorical fashion; and finally, a theory of modernity that explains the type of social pathologies that are today becoming increasingly visible, by way of the assumption that communicatively structured domains of life are being subordinated to the imperatives of autonomous, formally organized systems of action. Thus the theory of communicative action is intended to make possible a conceptualization of the social-life context that is tailored to the paradoxes of modernity.

"Under 'democracy,' the conditions under which all legitimate interests can be fulfilled by way of realizing the fundamental interest in self-determination and participation are no longer understood. It is now only a key for the distribution of rewards conforming to the system, that is, a regulator for the satisfaction of private interests. This democracy makes possible prosperity without freedom."

"The world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only... The public sphere becomes the court before which public relations faces are displayed—a court before which a public opinion is manufactured rather than formed."

"The public sphere, once a forum for rational-critical debate, has been transformed into a court before which public relations displays its wares. The public is no longer a partner in dialogue, but an audience to be manipulated." (p. 162)