Habermas at the crossroads: injunctions from Eduardo Albuquerque

This paper aims at criticizing the Jürgen Habermas’ approach to the relationship among capitalism, democracy and crises. To do so, at first it presents na overview of this approach and its changes over the decades. The fundamental hypothesis that results from this overview is that Habermas progressively puts himself at a paralyzing crossroads, constituted by the amalgam that these three concepts - capitalism, democracy and crises - form nowadays; faced with the options to get out of this crossroads, Habermas hesitates. Therefore, in the second part of the paper, it presents some elements of the Eduardo Albuquerque’s economic theory that could encourage Habermas - or at least his social theory - to abandon his paralyzing crossroads.

Keywords:
Jürgen Habermas; Eduardo Albuquerque; Democracy; Capitalism; Crise.