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 de-Nazify 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, 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 to a progressive liberal-democratic model. Matthew Specter uniquely illuminates the interrelationship between the thinker and his culture.
This 2007 book analyzes how West German intellectuals debated the Nazi past and democratic future of their country. Rather than proceeding event by event, it highlights the underlying issues at ...stake: the question of a stigmatized nation and the polarized reactions to it that structured German discussion and memory of the Nazi past. Paying close attention to the generation of German intellectuals born during the Weimar Republic - the forty-fivers - this book traces the drama of sixty years of bitter public struggle about the meaning of the past: did the Holocaust forever stain German identity so that Germans could never again enjoy their national emotions like other nationalities? Or were Germans unfairly singled out for the crimes of their ancestors? By explaining how the perceived pollution of family and national life affected German intellectuals, the book shows that public debates cannot be isolated from the political emotions of the intelligentsia.
Jürgen Habermas a sans contredit marqué la philosophie contemporaine. Défenseur d’une éthique de la discussion, il a lui-même sans cesse poursuivi un dialogue avec des théoriciens de divers horizons. ...Ces dernières décennies, il a accordé une attention toute particulière à la démocratie et à la religion. C’est à partir de sa réflexion sur ces thèmes, mais aussi d’écrits d’autres penseurs, que l’auteur dégage un cadre théorique et normatif permettant de penser la place et le rôle de la religion dans les démocraties libérales d’aujourd’hui. Le pluralisme des valeurs et des convictions étant devenu une caractéristique de notre époque, il importe en effet d’aménager celui-ci de manière juste. Cherchant à éviter les écueils du laïcisme et du communautarisme, l’auteur mobilise ici la philosophie morale et politique contemporaine, en particulier les travaux de Jürgen Habermas, pour définir les principes constitutifs et les conditions de réalisation d’une laïcité « bien comprise ».
La pensée du théoricien allemand Jürgen Habermas figure parmi les plus importantes théories sociales issues du xxe siècle : toutefois, à ce jour, elle n’a inspiré qu’un nombre restreint d’études ...portant spécifiquement sur leur articulation à l’éducation moderne et contemporaine. Cet ouvrage présente ainsi une analyse critique de la façon dont la théorie de l’agir communicationnel développée par Habermas s’arrime à une étude macro et microsociologique de l’éducation, soit une analyse de l’organisation politique, économique et idéologique des systèmes éducatifs occidentaux depuis la modernité, puis une analyse intime et située des rouages de l’activité éducative entre l’enseignant et l’élève. Dès lors, comment réfléchir l’éducation passée et actuelle à l’aune de la pensée habermassienne, en profitant de ses apports tout en mettant en lumière les impasses qu’elle représente, notamment pour le développement du potentiel critique et communicationnel de l’enfant ? Autrement dit, comment penser l’éducation contemporaine avec et contre Habermas ?
How can the world's religious traditions debate within the public sphere? In this book, Nicholas Adams shows the importance of Habermas' approaches to this question. The full range of Habermas' work ...is considered, with detailed commentary on the more difficult texts. Adams energetically rebuts some of Habermas' arguments, particularly those which postulate the irrationality or stability of religious thought. Members of different religious traditions need to understand their own ethical positions as part of a process of development involving ongoing disagreements, rather than a stable unchanging morality. Public debate additionally requires learning each other's patterns of disagreement. Adams argues that rather than suspending their deep reasoning to facilitate debate, as Habermas suggests, religious traditions must make their reasoning public, and that 'scriptural reasoning' is a possible model for this. Habermas overestimates the stability of religious traditions. This book offers a more realistic assessment of the difficulties and opportunities they face.
Jürgen Habermas is one of the most influential philosophers of our time. His diagnoses of contemporary society and concepts such as the public sphere, communicative rationality, and cosmopolitanism ...have influenced virtually all academic disciplines, spurred political debates, and shaped intellectual life in Germany and beyond for more than fifty years. InThe
Habermas Handbook, leading Habermas scholars elucidate his thought, providing essential insight into his key concepts, the breadth of his work, and his influence across politics, law, the social sciences, and public life.This volume offers a comprehensive overview and an in-depth analysis of Habermas's work in its entirety. After examining his intellectual biography, it goes on to illuminate the social and intellectual context of Habermasian thought, such as the Frankfurt School, speech-act theory, and contending theories of democracy. TheHandbookprovides an extensive account of Habermas's texts, ranging from his dissertation on Schelling to his most recent writing about Europe. It illustrates the development of his thought and its frequently controversial reception while elaborating the central ideas of his work. The book also provides a glossary of key terms and concepts, making the complexity of Habermas's thought accessible to a broad readership.
This is the first in-depth account of his project. Emphasis is placed on the conception of the European Union that informed his political prescriptions—this approach entails a deep engagement with ...his academic and political writings, and with influential treatments of the European integration process, such as the writings of E.B. Haas.From its conception to the referenda of 2005 where it met its end, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote in support of the European Constitution. This is the first in-depth account of his project. Emphasis is placed on the conception of the European Union that informed his political prescriptions. The book is divided into three parts. The first considers the unfolding of ‘social modernity’ at the level of the EU; among the subjects covered are Habermas’s concept of juridification, the latter’s affinities with integration theories such as neofunctionalism and the application of Habermas’s democratic theory to the EU. The second part addresses ‘cultural modernity’ in Europe - ‘Europessimism’ is argued to be a subset of the broader cultural pessimism that has assailed the project of modernity in recent decades with renewed intensity in the wake of 9/11. The final section looks at the conceptual landscape of the Constitutional Convention. The authors academia.edu page can be reached using this link http://independent.academia.edu/ShivdeepGrewal/.
This book critically engages Jürgen Habermas's comprehensive vision of constitutional democracy in the European Union. John P. McCormick draws on the writings of Max Weber (and Habermas's own ...critique of them) to confront the difficulty of theorizing progressive politics during moments of radical state transformation. Both theorists employ normative and empirical categories, drawn from earlier historical epochs, to analyze contemporary structural transformations: Weber evaluated the emergence of the Sozialstaat with antedated categories derived from nineteenth-century and premodern historical examples; while Habermas understands the EU almost exclusively in terms of the liberal (Rechtsstaat) and welfare state (Sozialstaat) paradigms. Largely forsaking the focus on structural transformation that characterized his early work, Habermas conceptualizes the EU as a territorially expanded nation-state. McCormick demonstrates the deficiencies of such an approach and outlines a more appropriate normative-empirical model, the supranational Sektoralstaat, for evaluating prospects for constitutional and social democracy in the EU.
