Revisiting the Kantian legacy in Habermas: the philosophical project of modernity and decolonial critiques to rationality and cosmopolitanism (original) (raw)

Habermas and the other side of modernity 1

Generally, the issue of modernity is associated with the fate of reason in modern European history. Specifically modernity is related to how reason was conceived as a critical and emancipatory guide towards the ontological, social, political, technical and overall development of humanity. As Lawrence Cahoone, in his, From Modernism to Postmodernism, Abstract This essay tries to critique the concept of modernity through a discussion of Jürgen Habermas's communicative rationality and modernity as an unfinished project. Habermas tried to defend modernity conceived as communicative rationality by strengthening everyday communicative action against the instrumental rationality of the economy and the state. After considering the insights of transmodernist, African, feminist and intercultural thinkers on modernity, I will try to show how the conventional understanding of modernity as progressive and reflective fails to fully address issues of otherness and domination.

The Rational Community of Jurgen Habermas

This paper appraises Jurgen Habermas’ attempt to reclaim the emancipatory terms of "rational freedom’ on the modern terrain, paying particular attention to possibilities for a democratic public sphere generated out of the lifeworld. Habermas is firmly part of the tradition of 'rational freedom'. Looking to realise the freedom of each and all within community, Habermas is concerned to reject the postructuralist accusation that 'rational’ unity necessarily entails the totalitarian suppression of difference and autonomy (Lyotard). Arguing that the social and philosophical grounds of both individualist liberalism and orthodox marxism have dissolved, Habermas argues that a critical theory of modernity is more adequately grounded in the 'suppressed traces of Reason'.

Habermas and Oakeshott on Rationalism, Morality and Democratic Politics

Political Studies, 2012

In this article I compare Michael Oakeshott's and Jürgen Habermas' respective accounts of morality, rationality and politics. I show that they both theorise the conditions of the modern political community as a 'civil association', and I argue that this comparison enables us to challenge predominant understandings of each thinker and to address criticisms levelled against them. I demonstrate that the contextualist and Hegelian aspects of Habermas' earlier work are carried over into his later work on discourse ethics and that he puts forward a more situated understanding of rationality and morality than is usually acknowledged. I also show that Oakeshott is not a straightforward conservative and in some respect he can be seen as a forerunner of deliberative politics. However, this comparison takes us beyond an exercise in interpretation, and I also draw attention to the practical possibilities residing in the work of Oakeshott and Habermas. Indeed, it is my contention that each of their approaches has much to offer in addressing the challenges of pluralism characteristic of contemporary multicultural societies and that their respective works can contribute to a contemporary theory of critical republicanism.

JURGEN HABERMAS AND THE RATIONAL UTOPIA

This paper appraises Jurgen Habermas’ attempt to reclaim the emancipatory philosophical connection between reason and freedom on the modern terrain, paying particular attention to possibilities for a democratic public sphere generated out of Habermas' lifeworld in contradistinction to the system world of money and power. Habermas is firmly part of the tradition of 'rational freedom'. Looking to realise the freedom of each and all within community, Habermas is concerned to reject the postructuralist and postmodern accusation that 'rational’ unity necessarily entails the totalitarian suppression of difference and autonomy. Arguing that the social and philosophical grounds of both individualist liberalism and orthodox marxism have dissolved, Habermas is shown to argue that a critical theory of modernity is more adequately grounded in the suppressed traces of Reason as embodied in communicative structures. Habermas' 'rational' ideal is shown to adumbrate and justify a post-capitalist 'good' society characterised by the greatest possible happiness, peace, and community.

Reflections on Habermas on Democracy

Ratio Juris, 1999

Jiirgen Habermas is a radical democrat. The source of that self-designation is that his conception of democracy-what he calls "discursive democracy"-is and founded on the ideal of "a self-organizing community of free and equal citizens," coordinating their collective affairs through their common reason. The author discusses ris 2:

Habermas on Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

Ratio Juris, 2002

After drawing a distinction between a cosmopolitan attitude and institutional cosmopolitanism, this paper reconstructs Habermas's account of the relationship between morality and law in order to argue that this account can be the basis of a cosmopolitan attitude which, although insufficient, on its own, to ground cosmopolitan institutions, can, nonetheless, motivate interest in institutional cosmopolitanism. The paper then examines Habermas's proposal for institutionalizing a system of cosmopolitan governance. It distinguishes and explores the reach and limitations of three arguments in favor of institutional cosmopolitanism not always adequately differentiated in Habermas's work: (a) an argument from the weakness of the nation state, (b) an argument from the democratic deficit of nationalism, and (c) an argument from the state's incapacity to guarantee human rights.

Modernization, Rights, and Democratic Society: The Limits of Habermas’s Democratic Theory

Res Publica, 2005

Jürgen Habermas’s discourse-theoretic reconstruction of the normative foundations of democracy assumes the formal separation of democratic political practice from the economic system. Democratic autonomy presupposes a vital public sphere protected by a complex schedule of individual rights. These rights are supposed to secure the formal and material conditions for democratic freedom. However, because Habermas argues that the economy must be left to function according to endogenous market dynamics, he accepts as a condition of democracy (the formal separation of spheres) a social structure that is in fact anti-democratic. The value of self-determination that Habermas’s theory of democracy presupposes is contradicted by the actual operations of capitalist markets. Further democratic development demands that the steering mechanisms of the capitalist market be challenged by self-organizing civic movements.

Beyond Kant’s Political Cosmopolitanism in advance

Philosophy Today, 2019

Kant bequeaths to the present discourse of cosmopolitanism the question of how a constitutionalized global order without a world state is possible. At the core of the matter is what a legitimate public authority as the necessary enactor of the cosmopolitan sovereignty is. Habermas’s answer that this is a three-tiered, networked realm of public authority is a plausible one. The key to Habermas’s answer is the concept of a political constitution for a pluralist world. If such a constitution is possible, I believe that we need a new concept of constitution as a body politic of norms, statute laws, common laws, legal precedents, and international treaties; on this point, we should take the UK constitution as the paradigm and recognize that since the end of World War II, such a body politic of norms, statute laws, common laws, legal precedents, and international treaties of the global human community has been emerging.