 Another notable recent foray into pragmatist-inspired normative pragmatics is found in the work of Jürgen Habermas, a philosopher from the Frankfurt School who has engaged with unparalleled breadth across the landscape of 20th century philosophy. He manages to combine analytic philosophers’ goal of systematically theorising language with a neo-Marxian and hermeneutic critique of modernity, whilst drawing on Mead’s pragmatist analysis of the self as irremediably social. His central concept of communicative action (Habermas 1981) is advocated as a foil to the instrumentalist rationality that he takes to be rampantly colonising the human ‘lifeworld’ in the West. The discourse ethics  which he develops in order to scaffold an authentic communicative action that is free from the distortions of power and ideology owes much to pragmatism’s concept of the community of inquiry, although he is sceptical of Peirce’s inquiry-based analysis of truth as overly idealised (Habermas 2003). With major contributions in political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of law, aesthetics and philosophy of religion, amongst other areas, Habermas’ influence has reached far into the social sciences – something Dewey would likely have approved. 