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“... has to be at the centre of socialist thinking. This is an assumption on which Professor Jürgen Habermas, a great authority among the German radical young back in 1968, now turns ferociously. Like En-zensberger, he dismisses the 1989 upheavals as ‘revolutions of recuperation’ with a ‘total lack of ideas that are either innovative or oriented towards ...”

“... past as the key to the present. Some try to develop what they like to call Marxism, though Jürgen Habermas is one of the very few who do so with any degree of originality. Raymond Aron’s name must be mentioned, but his great analyses – though not Clausewitz and certain other books – are now somewhat dated. In this distinguished company, Daniel Bell has ...”

“... the people than did the assorted ideologies from Rosa Luxemburg through Herbert Marcuse to Jürgen Habermas. Deep worries remain. Is all this not bound to lead to demands for the reunification of the two Germanies? When Chancellor Kohl declaimed, Wir sind ein Volk, could most of his audience fail to recall the rest of that slogan: ein Reich, ein Führer? This ...”

“... of breaking the law in a spectacular fashion to sway majorities; in the early 1980s, Jürgen Habermas defended resorting to illegal means to stop the stationing of new nuclear weapons. These lessons appear to have been forgotten in an age when the far right, centre-right and a centre-left desperate to prove that it’s ‘responsible’ have united ...”

“... Ethics. Contemporary philosophers who invoke Nietzsche, James, Dewey, Donald Davidson and Jürgen Habermas in order to strengthen their criticisms of the correspondence theory of truth typically share Nietzsche’s hope. They believe that the institutions and practices their critics see as threatened will in fact be strengthened by adopting pragmatist ...”

“... to defend the new round of market-driven integration as the best of all possible outcomes. Jürgen Habermas devotes The Crisis of the European Union: A Response to demonstrating that the balance of power ‘has shifted dramatically within the organisational structure in favour of the European citizens’. Although the citizens themselves are regrettably ...”

“... the small change of a ‘public sphere’ in English politics a century and more before Jürgen Habermas detected it in Central Europe: the outward and visible expression of a national society which had a much more ancient consciousness of being a single, centralised unit than anywhere else of similar size in Europe. Paradoxically, in an age when many ...”

“... accordingly tread a narrow line between cynicism and credulity. There are thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson who can be too positive about ordinary human capabilities, and others like Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou and the later Frankfurt School who are a good deal too sceptical of them. This is​ a bold book, not least ...”

“... I’ll shelve it at some distance from T.S. Eliot. Indeed, my copy will end up nearer to Jürgen Habermas, who first diagnosed this modern crisis of tradition – that it should be made more and more vitally necessary by the very same developments that erode it – in the early Seventies. In Oliver’s world this leading paradox finds different ...”

“... movement, who denounced him as an armchair radical. The mantle of the school passed to Jürgen Habermas, the Bishop of Durham of Marxism, proud to be counted among the believers but critical of just about every major item of the creed. The most detailed survey of the Frankfurt School to date has been Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination, a masterly ...”

“... pressure which it isn’t really robust enough to take, and end up producing in it what Jürgen Habermas has called ‘pathological symptoms’. The result will be an absurd inflation of this modest, marginal phenomenon, evident enough in the Leavisian faith that by analysing Hopkins’s syntax or Austen’s narrative form you were somehow contributing to ...”

“... hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who, in contrast to the critical theory advocated by Jürgen Habermas, assumes ‘that all understanding is embedded in a context of pre-reflective meanings and motives which reason is effectively powerless to criticise.’ And he considers it a shortcoming of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s view that ‘no narrative (or ...”

“... social change is impossible. The charge of conservatism, levelled against Foucault by Jürgen Habermas, for instance, is still a difficult one for Foucault to rebut. Much depends on how his new conception of power is understood. In turn, the new method of his most recent books must be discerned without Foucault’s help, for since the Archaeology, he has ...”

“... mock profundities. But he might just as well have picked on a fresher target, Jürgen Habermas, say. Still, this surely hints that Runciman intends The Social Animal to do what Mills’s The Sociological Imagination did nearly forty years ago: capture the hearts and minds of generations of sociologists yet unborn. He intends to capture them for ...”

“... classes were more or less critics. The concept of a ‘public sphere’ is derived from Jürgen Habermas, and has been elaborated in Peter Hohendahl’s The Institution of Criticism, a book from which Eagleton quotes repeatedly. Within the ‘public sphere’ reasoned debate and informed value-judgment can take place in relative detachment from the ...”