--- - |2 Abstract Although Bourdieu and Habermas concur that a critical reconstruction of the lay practice must be able to help people emancipate themselves from the social forces that are beyond their recognition, they take a radically different tack to achieve that goal. In the first part of this paper, I will bring Bourdieu to a “virtual dialogue” with Habermas and show why Bourdieu's method of “participant objectivation” should be abandoned in favor of Habermas's theory of “virtual participation”. In the second part, after examining how Habermas uses his theory of virtual participation to criticize Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, I will show why Habermas's theory of virtual participation fails to accomplish what it professes to do. In the third part, by recounting the history of child abuse, I shall argue that the critique of the traditional practice of child beating was made possible not through the exchanges of validity claims about child beating as Habermas would argue but through the performance of narratives that re‐describe the “meaning” of child beating in terms that made the traditional practice of child beating look inhuman, unbearable and horrible. Keywords critical theory, participant objectivation, virtual participation, validity claim, social performance, Narrative. - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, EarlyView.