Der sanfte Individualismus in den Theorien von Yamazaki Masakazu und Jürgen Habermas

Abstract The aim of this paper is to compare the theories of Yamazaki Masakazu und Jürgen Habermas. Yamazaki believed that the hard, ascetic individualism with a focus on production would alienate us from our humanity. He saw in a slowed down consumption a way out of this regressive development. Habermas on the other hand believed that system-oriented rationalization process would colonize the communication-oriented lifeworld. This negative trend could be overcome by developing a discourse free of power interference that enables consensus-building. This gentle individualism of Yamazaki and Habermas corresponds to a compromise between the extremes of a hard individualism (capitalism) and collectivism (communism or nationalism). The surprising result of the analysis is that Yamazaki’s theory is not only easier to realize than Habermas’s, but also more universally applicable.