 Dear students, in this module, we are going to discuss a postmodern theorist, Jürgen Habermas. Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher, a significant contributor to the critical theory and the Frankfurt School. Habermas works spans multiple disciplines yet focuses heavily on the structures of public life and the nature of communication in modern society. His central theme is the idea of communicative action, a form of cooperative action undertaken by individual based upon the mutual deliberation and argumentation. This emphasis on the power of discourse underscores Habermas commitment to the democratic society. Jürgen Habermas was although a German sociologist basically, he was more concerned about the postmodern societies, atrocities on the individual's life. And he was in favor of the democratic society, where there should have been a communication not only from the powerfuls, but also from the marginalized ones. So, he criticizes the postmodernism, viewing it as a form of cultural relativism that undermines the consensus-building processes he champions. He advocates for a communicative rationality. The ability of society is to reach understanding through dialogue and to produce the democratic outcomes. So, his concept of public sphere, an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss the societal problems has been influential in the study of social movements. So, actually his idea was that there must be a public sphere just like the traditional societies where everyone should be allowed to come, discuss and talk about the problems, the issues and the areas on which people are concerned. For instance, the party house in Lahore can be understood as the manifestation of that public sphere where everyone can be allowed to come and have contact with the intellectuals. So, his theory of communicative action presents the society as being built on communication, rejecting the determinism of social theory. So, in his view, the language and dialogue can create a shared understanding and consensus. So, for Jurgen Habermas, it was very important that people need to be in communication and there must be no gap between those who are on an advantageous position while they can communicate their ideas. On the other hand, those people who are on a marginalized position, they do not have the etiquette platforms to communicate their understanding of the life and their understanding of the existing word. So, there should be no gap and that gap can be covered only by producing more and more dialogue possibilities in the public sphere. So, Habermas' legitimation crisis is another major concept where he explains that the modern states often face crisis in their ability to justify their rule to the citizens. Such a crisis might be observed in the form of growing political apathy and public protest. Like the recent Yellow West movement in France, these weekly protests in France began on 17th November 2018. At first, the protests advocate the economic justice, so later they call the institutional political reforms. So, he basically theorized the colonization of the life word where the system imperatives like the market or the state system encroaches upon the areas of the life word, which is the culture, tradition and intimate aspects of your personal life. Leading to the social pathologies, a possible example of this could be the cooperation, intrusion into the cultural festivals and celebrations in various societies. So, today we can observe that whether it is an Eid festival in the Muslim countries or it is a Christmas festival in the non-Muslim or Christian countries, there is so much corporate activity which is encouraging people, motivating people for the consumerism. So, everything is being consumerized in today's world. So, Habermas' work also includes the concept of ideal speech situation, a situation where everyone has an equal chance to speak, understand and question. This scenario like although we can consider it more utopian because it seems like more ideal underlines the democratic values that Habermas' work represents. To examine these ideas from the Pakistani context, let's consider the trend of social media outlets in the recent years. This rapid growth reflects the unfolding of the vibrant public sphere where individuals engage in the dialogue on different social problems. However, the challenge of achieving an ideal space situation becomes apparently given a certain constraints on the freedom of speech and censorship issues in the country. For instance, certain topics are considered sensitive and are not open for the public discussion. So, in a nutshell, the influence of the powerful entities pose the challenges to realize the ideal speech situation no matter whether it is Pakistan or any other country.