ALL FINAL REPORT Habermas and Critique of Ideology Project

Jurgen Habermas and Critique of Ideology, 2021

Draft Report of the project

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.

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

The Encyclopedia of Political Thought

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.

2012

This is the publisher's version of the article published in Social Research (1982). The version made available in Digital Common was supplied by the author and is included with permission from the publisher, The New School. The journal's website is .

Brief encyclopedia entry summarizing Habermas's main arguments on ideological uses of technological thinking and instrumental conceptions of rationality.

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.