Hiding from History: Habermas's Elision of Public Imagination

Generally, the issue of modernity is associated with the fate of reason in modern European history. Specifically modernity is related to how reason was conceived as a critical and emancipatory guide towards the ontological, social, political, technical and overall development of humanity. As Lawrence Cahoone, in his, From Modernism to Postmodernism, Abstract This essay tries to critique the concept of modernity through a discussion of Jürgen Habermas's communicative rationality and modernity as an unfinished project. Habermas tried to defend modernity conceived as communicative rationality by strengthening everyday communicative action against the instrumental rationality of the economy and the state. After considering the insights of transmodernist, African, feminist and intercultural thinkers on modernity, I will try to show how the conventional understanding of modernity as progressive and reflective fails to fully address issues of otherness and domination.

u ̈rgen Habermas (b. 1929) has for decades been recognized as a leading European philosopher and public intellectual. But his global visibility has obscured his rootedness in German political culture and debate. The most successful historical accounts of the transformation of political culture in West Germany have turned on the concept of German statism and its decline. Viewing Habermas through this lens, I treat Habermas as a radical critic of German statism and an innovative theorist of democratic constitutionalism. Based on personal interviews with Habermas and his German colleagues, and by setting the major work alongside his occasion-specific political writings from 1984 to 1996, I interpret Habermas’s political thought as an evolving response to two distinct moments in German history: first, the mid-1980s, and second, the revolutions of 1989 and German reunification in 1990. This essay challenges the dominant interpretations of Habermas’s mature statement of his political theory. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Democracy (1992), which have described it as marking a distinct break with, and reversal of, the commitments of his earlier work. By contrast, I describe the work as an intellectual summa, consistent with Habermas’s previous thought and career, and containing remarkable historical interpretations of two intertwined phenomena: the intellectual and institutional dimensions of the Bonn Republic and Habermas’s own biography.

This book follows postwar Germany's leading philosopher and social thinker, Jürgen Habermas, through four decades of political and constitutional struggle over the shape of liberal democracy in Germany. Habermas's most influential theories-of the public sphere, communicative action, and modernity-were decisively shaped by major West German political events: the failure to denazify the judiciary, the rise of a powerful constitutional court, student rebellions in the late 1960s, the changing fortunes of the Social Democratic Party, NATO's decision to station nuclear weapons in Germany, and the unexpected collapse of East Germany. In turn, Habermas's writings on state, law, and constitution played a critical role in reorienting German political thought and culture toward a progressive liberal-democratic model. Matthew G. Specter uniquely illuminates the interrelationship between the thinker and his culture.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023

Jürgen Habermas is one of the leading social theorists and philosophers of the post-Second World War period in Germany, Europe, and the US, a prodigiously productive journalist, and a high-profile public intellectual who was at the forefront of the liberalization of German political culture. He is often labelled a second-generation Frankfurt School theorist, though his association with the Frankfurt School is only one of a rather complex set of allegiances and influences, and can be misconstrued. This entry will begin with a summary of Habermas's background and early and transitional works, including his influential concept of the public sphere, before moving on to discuss in detail his three major philosophical projects: his social theory, discourse theory of morality (or "discourse ethics"), and discourse theory of law and democracy. It will then more briefly address Habermas's methodology and philosophical framework (rational reconstruction and postmetaphysical thinking), his applied political theory, focusing on issues of national identity and international law, and finally his recent work on religion.

Thesis Eleven, 2015

In this paper, I show how the notion of the political as an emerging reality, characterized by a fundamental indeterminacy and a propensity to produce its own borders, features in Habermas’s work. The motif of the public sphere is bound with topics that all seem to attach the political to principles or authorities that precede or surpass it: the validity attributed to political statements, the weight of morality in the public sphere, and the concern to preserve science and complexity. I examine each of them in turn, in order to demonstrate how, precisely, the responses provided enable us to identify a place for the political in Jürgen Habermas’s philosophy. This place could be called an interstice; nevertheless, it is located at the normative level of his theory, and it is a recurring aspect of Habermas’s work.

Political Theory, 1989

Theory, Culture & Society, 1990

Having completed his primary task with the publication of his magnum opus -the Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981) -Habermas turned to a closer examination of the history of philosophy and the contemporary meaning of philosophy. Habermas presented the critical evaluation of 'old European' paradigms in Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne in 1985. The results of this attempt to situate political and social philosophy became the Tanner Lectures in 1988, which were published in the same year as Nachmetaphysisches Denken.

1981