Habermas paper

This essay will be effort to enact this meta-philosophical stance by offering a commentary on Levinas’ 1934 article “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Levinas’ article, written from the (Heideggerian) phenomenological perspective, confronts the relationship between politics and philosophy. It contrasts the immanent (via Hitler and Heidegger) with the transcendent (via Christianity, Judaism, liberalism, and Descartes). While Levinas is still discovering his own critique of Heidegger, he is here careful not to argue for transcendence over immanence, but rather to begin pointing out a path (yet not a Marxist path) between, or perhaps through, these two poles.

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.

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.

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.

Central European History, 2010

Central European History, 2012

autonomy? To read Specter, one gets the impression that the key difference between Habermas and Horkheimer/Adorno is their readings and interpretations of Weber-but weren't their differing appraisals of Nietzsche also significant in shaping Habermas's early and late projects? To read Specter, one gets the impression that Adorno was strictly an "ivory tower" mandarin, which obscures the fact that he was the driving force behind the famous Gruppenexperiment, as well as a major public intellectual who shared many of Habermas's concerns about the future of German democracy and society. In a similar manner, Specter briefly mentions Habermas's debt to the American pragmatist tradition-which would seem to indicate that he fails to appreciate the importance and significance of that inspiration for his philosophy. Habermas is an undeniably German thinker with firm commitments to German intellectual traditions and contemporary history, but he is also a transatlantic scholar-a thinker who has supplemented his intellectual inheritance with foreign imports when necessary. In general, one worries whether Specter may have given the reader too much of a good thing. The political/legal context is illuminating and offers new and significant vantage points for reconsidering Habermas's social theoretical project, but these new offerings come at the expense of an underemphasis on the broader and more technical philosophical debates that have also shaped Habermas's writings.

Third Text / Thinking Gaza: Critical Interventions, www.thirdtext.org/thinkinggaza-teixeirapinto-shrinkinghorizons, 2024

Whether a story has a happy ending, Orson Welles famously quipped, depends on where you decide to stop telling it. In Germany, Israel represents the undoing of the Holocaust, or, as researcher Emily Dische-Becker put it, the ‘happy ending’ that could be conjured out of the ashes of Auschwitz. [1] The history of the founding of the Jewish state thus becomes a story about the righting of wrongs, and by extension, about the redemption of Germany – no wonder the country finds it hard to divest from it. There is an element of sincerity to collective culpability. One can certainly commiserate with a generation that grew up tormented by the question ‘what would I have done had I lived under Nazism?’ now seizing the moment to prove they would defend Jewish life. But the plight of Palestinian civilians puts pressure on the established narrative. To acknowledge indiscriminate bombardments and the targeting of infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, or the deliberate destruction of farmland, opens up the terrifying possibility that a different story might hide behind the official one, a story in which present-day Israel might not represent the righting of wrongs but the wronging of wrongs. [2] The prospect that ‘standing with the Jewish state’ might not be equivalent to ‘standing with the victims’ is highly disturbing: it unsettles the atoning work for which the country believes it deserves congratulations. As a result, to quote Palestinian artist Jumana Manna’s article ‘The Embargo on Empathy’, solidarity with the Palestinian struggle becomes ‘the limit of Germany’s self-proclaimed pluralism’. [3] Rather than ‘acknowledge that no single narrative recounts the whole of history’s polymorphous cruelty‘, as put by Barnett R Rubin, Die Welt argues that ‘Free Palestine’ is ‘das neue Heil Hitler’. [4] For the German punditry, calling for a ceasefire is equivalent to calling for the erasure of Jewish people, expressing concern for civilian casualties implies support for terrorism, and having a sense of empathy is a symptom of moral bankruptcy. That which would warrant discussion cannot be discussed because the very idea that a discussion ought to take place, as Judith Butler argued, can render you an abject apologist ‘complicitous in hideous crimes’. [5] This is where the story changes: it is no longer a story about the Israel–Hamas conflict, although it intersects with it. This is a story about a society that drew the wrong lessons from history and its ongoing efforts to re-narrate the struggle against antisemitism as a struggle for imperialism.

Central European History, 1992

Agora, 2014

How did the churches - and their communities - respond to Nazism as a political religion? This paper examines this topic by taking one of the dominant schools of thought––that Nazism was a ‘political religion’––and dealing directly with an issue that is often encountered when teaching the history of the Nazi Party: what could be known about the Nazis when they came to power? It answers this question by using a case-study of the 'Temple Society' (Tempelgesellschaft), examining how members of this theologically liberal Christian community understood Nazism on the cusp of 1933.