Interview with Habermas in "The Nation":
"Jürgen Habermas Still Believes in Modernity" [open access]
Excerpt:
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: The origins of critical theory lie in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the critique of power, ideology, and domination. These ideas are less present in your book [Also a History of Philosophy], even though they played a major role in your previous works. Where do you situate your book in relation to critical theory in the broad sense?
Jürgen Habermas: In the preface to my book, I referred to the 1937 essay by Horkheimer and Marcuse, “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” from the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, which can be considered the founding document of Critical Theory. I remain indebted to this source for the basic social-theoretical assumptions that informed the background of my history of philosophy. But these assumptions themselves are not the theme of the book. On the other hand, if you ask what has become of my connection to the tradition of Western Marxism, I would remind you that the research of Critical Theory was focused from its beginnings on explaining the unexpected stability of capitalism despite all its crises. And as far as my involvement in West German day-to-day politics was concerned, I must confess that, as a leftist, I was mainly preoccupied with the struggle to liberalize the political mentality of a population that initially remained deeply attached to the Nazi regime.
As far as capitalist development was concerned, a revolutionary transformation of the liberal economic order established since the end of the Second World War was in any case no longer feasible under the conditions of systemic competition with the Soviet regime. And since the end of the Cold War even less so. From the postwar period onwards, my own interest was directed toward welfare state reforms that, if sufficiently radical, could change capitalist democracies beyond recognition. However, in the shadow of the declining superpower, we are currently witnessing the emergence of new fronts with the infiltration of liberal democracies from the right, both nationally and globally Currently, we would be satisfied if our capitalist democracies could defend themselves against a takeover by right-wing populism—but even that might well be no longer possible without extensive reforms of capitalism.