Jürgen Habermas
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen.
Suhrkamp, 1985. First edition. 3518577220 449 pages.
Softcover volume, measuring approximately 5.25" x 8.25", is in fine condition, with solid binding, clean and bright pages. 
"Buzzwords such as postmodernism, post-enlightenment, posthistory characterize the increasing distancing from a self-image of European-American modernity that developed over the course of the 18th century. The modernization of state and society found expression in rational natural law and political economy, the rationalization of bourgeois worlds of life ("Rationalisierung bürgerlicher Lebenswelten") in the awareness of the difference between belief and knowledge as well as in the philosophical reflection on the independence of science, morality and art. Hegel understands modernity as the challenge to overcome these "divisions" brought to the term by Kant. He develops his concept of reason as a response to a contemporary interpretation of modernity.This reconciling complementarity of reason and modernity evoked three incisive reactions in the 19th century: in Marx, the right-wing Hegelians and Nietzsche, to which the current theories of modernity can be traced back, namely: (1) the philosophy of praxis("Praxisphilosophie") emerging from Western Marxism, American pragmatism and French existentialism, which adheres to the reasonable claim of Western rationalism and to a continuation of the project of modernity, no matter how skeptically broken; (2) Neoconservatism, which follows Max Weber's diagnosis of the times and is more strongly determined in the West by liberal traditions, in Germany more by pessimistic anthropology (A. Gehlen) and Right-Hegelian compensation theories (J. Ritter, E. Forsthoff): the neoconservatives are carrying out their identification with social modernity at the expense of (rejected) cultural modernity; (3) the "philosophy of farewell to modernity", which, following Nietzsche, is inspired by the basic experiences of the aesthetic avant-garde: from Heidegger and Bataille to Derrida and Foucault, that system of basic concepts in which modernity has found itself since the 18th .century is "destroyed".
Following the guidelines of communicative reason, Jurgen Habermas attempts to show other ways out of subject philosophy."