The Habermas-Luhmann Debate

Hans-Georg Moeller, coauthor of You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity:
The Habermas-Luhmann debate is a major intellectual encounter in contemporary social and political thought. Gorm Harste untangles this debate as it unfolded over three decades with equal sympathy for both thinkers. In so doing, he offers fascinating insights into profound resonances between critical theory and social systems theory.

Poul F. Kjaer, editor of The Law of Political Economy: Transformation in the Function of Law:
The Habermas-Luhmann debate has been systematically misunderstood, misrepresented, and misinterpreted in the English-reading world for the past fifty years. The consequence is that an immensely rich vocabulary and truly revolutionary leap in social theory and social philosophy has remained out of reach. This book sets the record straight through an exhaustive, nuanced, and immensely knowledgeable account of the positions of Habermas and Luhmann and their ongoing exchange. It highlights both the commonalities and differences as well as the long-term significance of what was without doubt the most important exchange in continental European scholarship in the twentieth century.

Hauke Brunkhorst, coeditor of The Habermas Handbook:
This is the most comprehensive, informed, sophisticated, and, in a word, the best book or essay that has ever been written on the famous debate between Habermas and Luhmann. Harste shows with great thoroughness and brilliance that this was not only a debate from 1971, with some smaller rearguard actions in the 1980s and early 1990s, but instead a lifelong concern of both scholars.