The core of this book is a set of five lectures delivered by Habermas at Princeton in 1971 under the title 'Reflections on the Linguistic Foundation of Sociology'.
A labourer, journalist and a professor who lived through four successive periods of German political history from the German Empire, through the Weimar Republic and the Nazi state through to the German Democratic Republic Victor Klemperer is regarded as one of the most vivid witnesses to a tumultuous century of European history.
The Art of Conversation is a major contribution to the social history of language - a relatively new field which has become the focus of lively interdisciplinary debate in recent years.
