The debate compares and evaluates the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to questions of power, reason, ethics, modernity, democracy, civil society, and social action.
Habermas' essay Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present (1984) was altered before release in order to account for Foucault's inability to reply.
Habermas wrote: Foucault discovers in Kant, as the first philosopher, an archer who aims his arrow at the heart of the most actual features of the present and so opens the discourse of modernity ... but Kant's philosophy of history, the speculation about a state of freedom, about world-citizenship and eternal peace, the interpretation of revolutionary enthusiasm as a sign of historical 'progress toward betterment' – must not each line provoke the scorn of Foucault, the theoretician of power?
[1]Nancy Fraser's contentious, but oft-quoted, claim that Foucault's work is a mixture of "empirical insights and normative confusions" exemplifies the most common strategy of critique by those favouring Habermas.
[2] The publication of Foucault's Collège de France lectures in the early 21st century has also served to recast the Foucault–Habermas debate since the Ashenden and Owen volume.