Jill Smith

Wow! What an intense read! Flyvbjerg attempts to compare and contrast Habermas and Foucault's central ideas "as they pertain to the issue of empowering civil society and democracy" (211). The article goes on to explain the "goal of Habermas's theory of communicative action" which is "clarifying the presuppositions of the rationality of process of reaching understanding, which may be presumed to be universal because they are unavoidable" (212). This sentence is a mouthful, I can not even begin to pretend to understand completely what it means. I can guess however, that in order to reach universal understanding, that is across all scopes of humanity, that the rationality of processes need to be clarified. The participants of such a discussion would also need to be open minded and willing to accept others views. I had to split the reading in order to get a handle on it. Foucault on the other hand has a "desire to challenge every abuse of power, whoever the author, whoever the victim's" (221). Foucault seems less interested in uniformity or universality because he feels it would be unfair to all people. He rather focuses on what is good for humans. I can not wait to discuss this in class to see if I am even close!