The Contemporary Habermas: Towards Triple Contingency

1979

For an English-speaking public, the work of the Frankfurt School is doubly inaccessible: not only are the primary texts written, for the most part, in a foreign language, but ?even more daunting?they draw heavily on sociological and philosophical traditions whose reception in the English speaking world has only barely begun. When?as is the case for the rapidly expanding oeuvre of J?rgen Habermas?all of these difficulties are, in addition, compounded by a primary literature which is widely scattered and only partly translated, then the need for some kind of general overview of the available literature becomes fairly pressing. Such, at any rate, has been the experience of the authors, and we present this bibliography in the hope that it may function as a resource for other scholars in this field. This bibliography comprises, to the best of our knowledge, the first full documentation of all Habermas's published work2, and we have supplemented this with a list of all English translations, as well as some eighty reviews and review articles in both languages. (A bibliography of secondary literature is in preparation.) To facilitate easy usage of this bibliography, the following points should be born in mind. The publications?185 in all?are arranged chronologically, by year, from 1952 onwards: for each entry the number of reprints, new editions, translations, and reviews (where applicable) are indicated. The numbering system is meant to serve as a guide to the contents of the bibliographic items This paper is a revised, translated, and updated version of: "J?rgen Habermas: een primaire bibliographie" in: Kennis en Methode (Amsterdam) 2, No. 2, 1978, by one of the authors. (R.G.) The Dutch coding convention for reprint dates has been retained: thus 19765 is to be read as: reprinted for the fifth time, in 1976. 2With the exception of one publication of which the details are not available: a review of A.Gehlen's Urmensch und Spatkultur (sometime in 1956).

Heathwood Press, 2014

In a previous piece on the Heathwood website, we argued that Frankfurt School critical theory falls into two distinct periods. 1 In the first, which runs from the 1920s until the 1970s, the School's writings remain challenging and forward-looking and inspirational. In the second, during which Habermas and (following Habermas) Honneth are the main figures, Frankfurt School theorising loses its critical and revolutionary edge. In the present contribution, we add detail to these generalisations.

Political Theory, 1980

Jiirgen Habermas may be, as a recent commentator asserted, the dominant intellectual figure in contemporary Germany. But in the last decade, the works of Habermas have found a receptive audience in the English-speaking world as well. Building upon the insights of Marxist social theory, Continental hermeneutic phenomenology, and Anglo-American linguistic philosophy, Habermas has attempted to construct a comprehensive critical theory of society. As a result, his work has broad implications for the entire range of humanities and social sciences. Habermas' theories are now the object of critical discussions in political theory, sociology, philosophy, education, social psychology, and speech communication. Because Habermas's project touches such a variety of disciplines, his own writing and critical discussions of it are spread throughout a disparate array of professional books and journals. Consequently, a reader wishing to comprehend Habermas' thought and its influence has faced a difficult task in locating all relevant materials. This problem was partially erased by Thomas McCarthy, TIre Critical Theory of Jiirgen Hubennus (Cambridge, MA MIT Press, 1978), pp. 441-445, who provided a fairly thorough listing of Habermas' books and articles in German and English. The present bibliography is intended to remedy the problem completely by cataloging the critical treatments and extensions of his work which have appeared in Europe, North America, and elsewhere since 1964. Included here are books, book chapters, articles, dissertations, conference papers, and book reviews in

Theory and Society, 1974

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.

1981

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.

We have an intuitive knowledge of the intricate relations among past, present, and future where the individual is concerned; but it is far from obvious how to apply that knowledge to a collective actor like a nation.

New Literary History, 2012

Among literary scholars, Jürgen Habermas has never been the most popular Frankfurt School thinker. With his “communicative turn” in the early 1980s—a move that, for him, involved rejecting almost completely the political value of the aesthetic—he alienated what few allies he had left in the literary field. Despite this, “A Habermasian Literary Criticism” argues that Habermas's thinking holds serious value for literary studies today. The essay begins by drawing out an immanent critique of Habermas's arguments against the value of literature. Though Habermas does not see it, his later theory can help clarify literature's role as a means of enabling intersubjective communication. A focus on intersubjectivity allows critics to recognize books as part of an elaborate process by which texts make manifest changes: they shape public opinion, transform civil society, and ultimately exercise an impact on the juridical sphere. A Habermasian literary criticism, then, offers a new way to think about the relation between politics and literature, ranging from the fundamental encounter between readers and books to the way that a book—through its diverse readers and conditions of reading—can alter political practice. Unintentionally, Habermas has provided not only a methodological framework for a sociology of literature, but one grounded in the origins of critical theory.