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“... affairs as (at best) a conscientious return from the heights to ‘the cave’? Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are surely the two most distinguished political philosophers of our day, and their work exhibits many parallels: but on this deeply political matter they are worlds apart. John Rawls’s writing is scrupulously, evenly distant from ...”

“... events illustrate the drawback of one possible interpretation of Faktizität und Geltung, Jürgen Habermas’s new book on the philosophy of law and the theory of the constitutional state. Under the headline ‘Jürgen Habermas makes peace with the constitutional state’, a pre-publication review in Der Spiegel sought to ...”

“... as German Neo-Hegelians on the whole are not. One would not rush to open a novel by Jürgen Habermas, but Richard Rorty no doubt has a few suave short stories inside him. There are philosophical idioms which are inherently anti-fictional – positivism, for instance – and those which lend themselves naturally to literature. It is no accident that ...”

“... In part, this choice was dictated by political events. The Frankfurt sociology of Jürgen Habermas became prominent in the wake of the Wirtschaftswunder, while the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss spoke to French misgivings about the colonial experience. In both countries these disciplines became as much means of engaging in politics as ...”

“... being shoved into Topf-style incinerators. Irony, or even memory, was at a discount. Jürgen Habermas has witnessed the republic’s divagations from Weimar through Nazism and partition to reunification, and in some measure his intellectual progress has mimicked that of Germany itself. With his recent work now barely distinguishable from orthodox ...”

“... detained in fighting their own corners in the national politics that concern them. Jürgen Habermas articulates the problem as follows: ‘This legitimation process’ – of a federal European politics – ‘has to be supported by a European party system that can develop to the degree that existing political parties, at first in their own respective ...”

“... the ‘Ode to Joy’ on the way home from the polling station. Yet it seems that only Jürgen Habermas, still the most prominent defender of the EU on the left, has seen the positive side, his position summed up by Occupy’s slogan from a different moment: this is what democracy looks like. Or does it? There are at least two problems with this somewhat ...”

“... ever – as a philosopher, as a political theorist, as an exemplary analyst of history. Jürgen Habermas has expressed admiration for her, as have avowed Post-Modernists, who share her declared freedom from metaphysical and moral presuppositions. Democratic intellectuals in Eastern Europe – Vaclav Havel, for one – have endorsed a distinction first ...”

“... and Germany’s absorption into Europe – not necessarily in the form of a federal state. Jürgen Habermas keeps pushing for a proper European constitution. Europe has been a major concern for two decades now, but his main justification for supporting the EU has shifted somewhat. Initially he saw the purpose of European integration as preserving the postwar ...”

“... influential giants of 20th-century German philosophy – Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Habermas, Arendt, Cassirer and Wittgenstein (I’m including Austrians) – he has faded from the canon. At least in the English-speaking world, Jaspers is now remembered more for his writings on other thinkers, such as Nietzsche or Weber, and his complex ...”

“... not even then, they will want a proof of possible freedom. Hence their interest now in Jürgen Habermas, that ‘unifying force’, as Gillian Rose grandiloquently describes him, ‘in the international world of sociological reason’. He produces a reasoned reflection on our collective biography in which he claims to reveal our rational will. There ...”

“... 20th-century capitalism. A good deal of work has been done on this – by, for example, Jürgen Habermas, James O’Connor, Claus Offe and Alan Wolfe – which could have been brought into even the very brief summary view that Turning-Points affords, but it is not mentioned. Without it, the picture of the world we live in, the forces at work in it, and the ...”

“... flippant and trivial. It is a measure of how far things have changed for the better that Professor Habermas of Frankfurt not only commands a substantial following in the English-speaking world but is himself as willing to proffer a citation from Austin or Ryle as from Husserl or Heidegger. He is a frequent visitor to the philosophy departments of American ...”

“... One of the two original formulations of the term ‘Post-Modern’ was in a speech made by Jürgen Habermas in 1980, published in English under the heading ‘Modernity v. Post-Modernity’. Having displayed a distinctively German preoccupation with ‘modernisation’ in the Sixties and Seventies, he sought to impose the Post-Modern label on a wide range of ...”

“... is still reeling from Heidegger’s description of him as ‘the last metaphysician’. If Habermas has his way, we shall, from now on, have to think of Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault as philosophers who tried and failed to achieve something which they were doomed never to achieve, warped as they were by a fatal genetic inheritance – what ...”