Rhetoric, Reflection, and Emancipation: Farrell and Habermas on theCritical Studies ofCommunication G. Thomas Goodnight There are moments in history that appear to be alive with emancipatory possibilities. Such were the yearsmoving toward the end of the long twentieth century. In spring 1989, students protested the communist regime in China; the Tiananmen Square massacre initiated an episode of opposition and com menced China's modern journey toward global reengagement. Revolutions in Europe that autumn were more peaceful. On August 23 two million Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian citizens held hands and announced the Baltic Way as a departure from Soviet rule.Transitions rapidly followed in Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany, culminating in the Velvet Revolution where on November 17 student protests were beaten back by police in Prague only to be followed three days later by an assembly of 200,000 demanding the transfer of power from theCommunist Party. On December 3, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly announced an imminent end to the fifty year-old Cold War. During this time of hopeful transition, two scholarswere atwork refiguring the philosophical mission of the Frankfurt school, trans forming critique from its early totalizing posture into the critical study of communication. Thomas B. Farrell and Jiirgen Habermas were trained in different tra ditions but adjacent disciplines, communication and sociology. Their works Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 41, No. 4, 2008 Copyright ? 2008 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/p-n-r/article-pdf/41/4/421/1464278/philrhet_41_4_421.pdf by guest on 07 February 2022