In this book, published five years after Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas explored the fundamental crisis tendencies in the state-managed capitalism.

In his view, social systems possess specific organizational principles or core values[3] that are critical to a society’s continued existence and identity.

Crisis occurs when system change is so significant that it threatens these core goal values, along with the continued existence and social identity of members of society.

Vis-à-vis inner nature, Habermas finds a problem in the process of socialization, which “takes place within structures of linguistic intersubjectivity; it determines an organization of behavior tied to norms requiring justification and to interpretive systems that secure identity.”[6] He assumes that motivation to conform to decision-making of public authority should require legitimation, but this process of legitimation can be occurred outside of the communicative structure of action.

The economic crisis refers to the disturbances of output, meaning that the distribution of burdens and rewards is not realized within the expectation of legitimating value system.

A rationality crisis is the situation where the public authority cannot meet the demand from the economic system, or in his words, the situation where “the administrative system does not succeed in reconciling and fulfilling the imperatives received from the economic system.”[8] A legitimation crisis happens when political authority fails to attract mass loyalty.

Habermas summarizes this point as follows; “We have to reckon with cultural crisis tendencies when the normative structures change, according to their inherent logic, in such a way that the complementarity between the requirements of the state apparatus and the occupational system, on the one hand, and the interpreted needs and legitimate expectations of members of society, on the other, is disturbed.

By arguing so, he denies the proposition that “values and norms in accordance with which motives are formed have an immanent relation to truth.”[10] Put differently, in the course of tracing the causes and mechanism of the crisis of advanced capitalism, Habermas explored the sources of legitimacy in a more fundamental sense.

Many contemporary critical theorists reject the strict distinction between the system and the life-world but nevertheless follows the basic tenets of Legitimation Crisis to this day.