Jürgen Habermas has proposed an elaborate and complex critique of Talcott Parsons' work. Moreover, the body of Parsonian thought that Habermas addresses itself involves legendary complications. To disentangle the various strands of Habermas' argument and of Parsons' potential lines of rebuttal requires a clear understanding at the outset as to what the argument is about: it is about the integration of modern society. Habermas asks whether there is today a social sphere – a realm of specifically social institutions, outside the workings of money and power – that can steer society through the upheavals and stresses of modern life. For Habermas to reckon a coordinative steering mechanism as “social,” it must be founded on mutual understanding. On these grounds, his answer to the question posed is decidedly negative. Such system integration as money and power might achieve by coordinating markets and bureaucracies does not count as social integration, which must be founded on the legitimate social relations that people undertake to form cultures, build character, and collectively resolve social problems.

Habermas has discussed this central question in a number of related texts, but in Philosophical Discourses of Modernity (1987b [1985] 358, 360–1) he makes particularly clear and unequivocal statement: