HABERMAS’strongSstrong THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION AND THE THEORY OF.pdf

HABERMAS’S THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION AND THE THEORY OF SOCIAL CAPITAL Roger Bolton Department of Economics and Center for Environmental Studies Williams College Address: Department of Economics, Williams College, 121 Southworth Street, Williamstown, MA 01267 Roger.E.Bolton@Williams.Edu Paper read at meeting of Association of American Geographers, Denver, Colorado, April 2005 (previous version read at meeting of Western Regional Science Association, San Diego, California, February 2005) **************** 1 I. INTRODUCTION I am bringing together two clusters of ideas I think are important. One is the thought of the German writer Jürgen Habermas, a prominent philosopher whose ideas are meaningful to many of our colleagues who are what I’ll call “planning academics,” that is scholars who teach planning in universities. The other is a cluster of ideas on social capital and social networks. Habermas is a contemporary philosopher with a worldwide reputation. One of his best-known ideas is communicative action, in which actors in society seek to reach common understanding and to coordinate actions by reasoned argument, consensus, and cooperation rather than strategic action strictly in pursuit of their own goals (Habermas, 1984, p. 86). However, it’s not only his general fame that makes him relevant to social capital and networks. There are other reasons more specific to geography and regional science. One is that many geographers, sociologists, and 1 planning theorists appeal to his ideas in their work (th