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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)

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I. INTRODUCTION
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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

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planning theorists appeal to his ideas in their work (though not many economists do).
Prominent examples are scholars who apply Habermas’s ideas to a general (but not
Marxist) critique of late capitalist societies, to analysis of mass movements, and to
normative assessments of planning practice (see for example Healey 1997, Forester
1985, 1992, Miller 1992, 2000, Barnes and Sheppard 1992).
Another reason is that Habermas provides a theoretical basis for a view of
planning that emphasizes widespread public participation, sharing of information with
the public, reaching consensus through public dialogue rather than exercise of power,
avoiding privileging of experts and bureaucrats, and replacing the model of the technical
expert with one of the reflective planner (Argyris and Schön 1974, Schön 1983, Innes
1995, Lauria and Soll 1996, Wilson 1997). In this view, the legitimacy of democracy
depends not only on constitutional processes of enacting laws, but also on "the
discursive quality of the full processes of deliberation leading up to such a result," as
Stephen White (1995, p.12) puts it. John Dryzek notes Habermas prompts the policy
analyst to work on conditions of political interaction and design of institutions rather than
merely the content of policy proposals, and Habermasian ideal institutions rule out
“authority based on anything other than a good argument” (1995, pp. 108-110).
A third reason, from almost the beginning of an understanding of Habermas's
communicative action one sees the possibility of a connection to social capital.
Communicative action is individual action designed to promote common understanding
in a group and to promote cooperation, as opposed to "strategic action" designed simply
to achieve one's personal goals (Habermas 1984, especially pp. 85-101, 284-8).
Habermas does not use the term “social capital,” but a reader can see possible