Neues Buch: "Kritische Theorie der Politik"

Kritische Theorie der Politik

Hrsg. von Ulf Bohmann & Paul Sörensen

(Suhrkamp Verlag, 2019)

709 S.




Inhalt [Leseprobe]

Ulf Bohmann & Paul Sörensen - "Zur Kritischen Theorie der Politik heute"

I. Referenzen und Gewährsleute

Nancy Fraser - "Warum zwei Karls besser sind als einer: Mit Polanyi und Marx zu einer Kritischen Theorie zeitgenössischer Krisen" [paper 2017]

William E. Scheuerman - "Die Krise der liberalen Demokratie"

Hubertus Buchstein - "Otto Kirchheimer und die Frankfurter Schule"

Oliver Marchart - "Der feindliche Zwilling. Herbert Marcuses Theorie  der Politik aus postfundamentalistischer Perspektive"

II. Politische Theorie als/oder Theorie der Gesellschaft

Alex Demirović - "Das Scheitern der Agonistik"

Hartmut Rosa - "Der Irrtum der antagonistischen Sozialontologie" [Vortrag, 2018]

Sonja Buckel/Dirk Martin - "Aspekte einer gesellschaftskritischen Theorie der Politik"

Bernd Ladwig - "Unwirkliche Kritik. Was die Kritische Theorie vom politischen Liberalismus trennt – und warum sie im Zweifelsfall verliert"

III. Gerechtigkeit, Kritik der Rechte und Normativität

Rainer Forst - "Eine kritische Theorie transnationaler (Un-)Gerechtigkeit"

Daniel Loick - "Aufgaben einer kritischen Theorie des Rechts"

Raymond Geuss - "Normativität in der Kritischen Theorie der Politik"

IV. Im Widerspruch? Negativismus, Fortschritt und das gute Leben

Michael Hirsch - "Ideenpolitik, Gesellschaftspolitik, Biopolitik"

Robin Celikates - "Moralischer Fortschritt, soziale Kämpfe und  Emanzipationsblockaden"

Amy Allen - "Psychoanalyse, Kritik und Emanzipation" [Paper]

Oliver Flügel-Martinsen - "Befragung, negative Kritik, Kontingenz"

V. Kritische Theorie der Demokratie und der Autorität

Martin Saar - "Ohnmacht und Unfreiheit"

Regina Kreide - "Politik der kommunikativen Macht"

Maeve Cooke - "Nicht-autoritäre Autorität"

VI. Grenzverschiebungen und Grenzüberschreitungen

David Owen - "Die Governance von Bewegung"

Svenja Ahlhaus/Peter Niesen - "Regressionen des Mitgliedschaftsrechts" [Paper]

Hauke Brunkhorst - "Kritische Theorie internationaler Beziehungen"

Ina Kerner - "Zu einer kritischen Theorie der Politik  in postkolonialen Zeiten"

Volker M. Heins - "Kultureller Pluralismus und Kritische Theorie.  Von Adorno bis Honneth" [paper]


Tagung anlässlich des Erscheinens des Buchs

Goethe Universität, Frankfurt/M, 31. Oktober - 1. November 2019. 
Program hier. 

Keynote: Oliver Marchart - "Kritische Theorie und kritische Theorien. Zur Verortung des Politischen in der Kritik"

Speakers: Volker Heins, Rainer Forst, Daniel Loick, Svenja Ahlhaus & Peter Niesen

Podiumsdiskussion - "Kritische Theorie der Politik im Widerstreit" : Bernd Ladwig, Martin Saar & Oliver Flügel-Martinsen

Die Veranstaltung ist öffentlich. Anmeldung hier.

Seminar with Habermas in Cortona, Italy

Jürgen Habermas will attend a seminar on "A Genealogy of Post-Metaphysical Thinking" in Cortona, Italy, on October 18-19, 2019. The seminar is organized by "La Società Italiana di Teoria Critica". Participation by invitation only.  

The programme:

Section I: The roots of postmetaphysical thinking
Chair: Elena Pulcini (Florence)

* Jürgen Habermas: Opening remarks
* Marina Calloni: Post-metaphysical thought and post-secularism
* Virginio Marzocchi: Was ist Religion?
* Alessandro Ferrara: What the battle over the reasonable reveals
* Habermas’ reply, interventions, general discussion

Section II: In dialogue with Jürgen Habermas
Chair: Alessandro Ferrara (Rome)

* Lucio Cortella: Das normative Erbe der Religion
* Walter Privitera: Die Idee des sakralen Komplexes und ihre Folgen
* Habermas’ reply, interventions, general discussion

Section III: Habermas global
Chair: Marina Calloni (Milano)

* Stefan Müller-Doohm: Kommunikatives Handeln als gesellschaftliche Einheit
* William Outhwaite: Habermas in a Cold Climate
* Luca Corchia: Habermas’ reception in Italy
* Habermas’ reply, interventions, general discussion

"Habermas global. Wirkungsgeschichte eines Werks" (ed. by Stefan Müller-Doohm, William Outhwaite & Luca Corchia) will come out on Suhrkamp Verlag on October 28. See a preview here (PDF).

Blog entry by Habermas - on Siegfried Landshut (1897-1968)

A blog entry by Jürgen Habermas on the German sociologist Siegfried Landshut (1897-1968): 

"Eine persönliche Bemerkung zur Rezeption der Schriften von Siegfried Landshut",
Politik 100 x 100, Blog des Fachgebiets Politikwissenschaft an der Universität Hamburg, September 17, 2019.

Papers on Ronald Dworkin's Late Work

Papers from the Balzan Conference on "Ronald Dworkin's Late Work", New York University, September 13-14, 2019:

Panel 1: Dworkin’s "Religion without God"

Eric Gregory (Princeton) - "Confessions of a Religious Liberal: Ronald Dworkin’s Religion Without God"

Moshe Halbertal (NYU) - "Ronald Dworkin Religion Without God: Morality and the Transcendent"

Larry Sager (Texas) - "Solving Religious Liberty"

Panel 2: Dworkin on international law

John Tasioulas (King’s College, London) - "Fantasy Upon Fantasy: Some Reflections on Dworkin’s Philosophy of International Law"

Panel 3: The idea of integrity in "Law’s Empire"

Andrei Marmor (Cornell) - "Integrity in Law’s Empire"

Jeremy Waldron (NYU)  - "The Rise and Decline of Integrity"

Panel 4: Law and morality in "Justice for Hedgehogs"

Mark Greenberg (UCLA)  - "What Makes a Moral Duty Legal?"

Ben Zipursky (Fordham) - "Jurisprudence in Justice for Hedgehogs: Metaphysical, not Political"

Los Angeles Review of Books on Habermas at 90

Eduardo Mendieta - "The Unfinished Project of the Enlightenment: Jürgen Habermas at 90"

Matthew Specter - "Habermas in German, European, North Atlantic, and Global Perspective"

María Pía Lara - "Habermas’s Concept of the Public Sphere and the New Feminist Agenda"

Martin Jay - "Habermas and the Light of Reason: On Late Critical Theory"

Noëlle McAfee - "The Public Sphere in Dark Times"

Martin Woessner - "Habermas: Up from Heidegger"

Matthias Fritsch - "Futures of Habermas’s Work"

Habermas - 90th birthday interview

Jürgen Habermas has not given any interviews to the major German newspapers on the occasion of his 90th birthday. But he has given a short interview to a newspaper journalist, Andreas Arnold, from Gummersbach near Cologne - his place of birth. The interview has now been published on the web site of "Kölnische Rundschau":

"Ein Gespräch über Heimat, Europa und die Zukunft"
(Kölnische Rundschau online, July 8, 2019) 

Excepts:

Q: Womit kann man Ihnen eine Freude machen, wenn man Sie heute beschenken möchte?

A: "Am meisten habe ich mich gefreut, als mir meine Kinder vor Jahrzehnten bei einem runden Geburtstag einen Maulwurf aus Stoff schenkten – sie hatten mich bei meinem vergeblichen Kampf gegen die Maulwürfe im Garten beobachtet. Wie schon Marx wusste, ähnelt das Denken der Philosophen am ehesten der unterirdischen Wühlarbeit dieser Tiere. Sie sind blind, erkennen aber Widerstände und geben trotzdem nicht auf."

Q: In Ihrem Studium haben Sie sich mit Philosophie, Geschichte, Psychologie, deutscher Literatur und Ökonomie befasst. Was war damals eigentlich Ihr Berufswunsch?

A: "In meinem Abiturzeugnis habe ich „Journalist“ als Berufswunsch angegeben. Ich hatte schon während der letzten Jahre auf dem Gymnasium Film- und Theaterkritiken geschrieben; das habe ich als Student etwas professioneller bei Otto Vormstein auf der Lokalredaktion des „Kölner Stadtanzeigers“ fortgesetzt. Für Philosophie, Psychologie und Genetik habe ich mich schon früh interessiert; aber es wäre Größenwahnsinn gewesen, mit dem Ziel zu studieren, später einmal Professor zu werden."

Q: Welchen Stellenwert haben Religion, Kirche und Glauben in Ihrem Leben?

A: "Ich bin nicht religiös, aber wenn ich die Diskussionen des hohen Mittelalters verfolge oder Luther lese, denke ich manchmal, ich wäre auch ein guter Theologe geworden."

Q: Die Europawahl ist gerade vorbei. Sie gelten als Anhänger eines großen Europa. Wenn Sie sich an Ihrem Geburtstag wünschen könnten, wie Europa in zehn oder 20 Jahren ausschaut, was würden Sie sagen?

A: "Ich glaube, dass die wachsende wirtschaftliche und soziale Ungleichheit innerhalb der Mitgliedsländer der Währungsgemeinschaft und vor allem zwischen ihnen ein Sprengsatz ist, der nur durch eine politische Euro-Union und eine engere Kooperation auch auf den Gebieten der Fiskal-, Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik entschärft werden kann. Für die Hauptursache halte ich den rücksichtslosen Wirtschaftsegoismus, den die Bundesrepublik mit unschuldigem Augenaufschlag seit 2010 betreibt.
Wenn man dem dramatischen Verfall der Kooperationsbereitschaft und der politischen Kultur in Europa weiter zuschaut, kann der Moment der Wahrheit erst eintreten, wenn die Rechtspopulisten die Mehrheit in Parlament und Rat übernehmen und beim Versuch, die EU abzuwickeln, feststellen müssen, dass sie es gar nicht können – weil sie sehen, dass der Schaden zu groß wäre."

Videos: “John Rawls and After” (Harvard University, 2019)

Videos from a conference on “Inequality, Religion, and Society: John Rawls and After”, held at Harvard University, January 24/25, 2019:

“Opening Remarks”, Danielle Allen (Harvard) and Michael Rosen (Harvard)

Panel: “Rawls and the Project of Modern Political Philosophy”, Leif Wenar (King's College, London), Katrina Forrester (Harvard), Kenzie Bok (Harvard). Chair: Eric Nelson (Harvard)

Keynote Lecture: ”Rawls on Equality - Looking Back at A Theory of Justice", Thomas Scanlon (Harvard). Chair: Michael Rosen (Harvard)

Panel: “Morality, Reciprocity, Political Justice”, Stephen Darwall (Yale), Samuel Scheffler (NYU), Danielle Allen (Harvard). Chair: Erin Kelly (Tufts)

Panel: “Religion and Democratic Society”, Andrew March (Massachusetts), Paul Weithman (Notre Dame), Jeremy Waldron (NYU). Chair: Eric S. Gregory (Princeton)

Panel: “Social Inequality & Economic Justice”, Joseph Fishkin (Texas), Gina Schouten (Harvard), Lucas Stanczyk (Harvard). Chair: Eric Beerbohm (Harvard)

Keynote Lecture: “John Rawls's Theory of the Good", Christine Korsgaard (Harvard). Chair: Arthur Applbaum (Harvard)

Panel: “Humanity and the Future”, Partha Dasgupta (Cambridge), Clark Wolf (Iowa State), Anja Karnein (SUNY Binghamton). Chair: Johann Frick (Princeton)

“Conclusion: Round Table Discussion”, Teresa Bejan (Oxford), Rainer Forst (Frankfurt), Tommie Shelby (Harvard). Chair: Dennis Thompson (Harvard)

Thanks to Markus Rutsche for the pointer!

Habermas honors Ágnes Heller (1929-2019)

In memory of the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller, who died on July 19, Jürgen Habermas wrote a comment in “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (July 22, 2019):

“Abschied von einer Philosophin”

Excerpts:

“Ágnes Heller war eine Philosophin der alten Schule. Als ich sie Mitte der sechziger Jahre bei Iring Fetscher in Frankfurt kennenlernte und ihr bei den jährlichen Treffen der Praxis-Philosophen auf der Insel Corcula wiederbegegnete, erschien sie uns, bei aller Verwandtschaft in der kritischen Orientierung ihrer Gedanken, als die junge, bestechende Verkörperung eines philosophischen Profils, das wir aus der Generation unsrer Lehrer kannten. Aus unserer Perspektive hatte sich unter den interessanteren Kollegen des "Ostblocks", wie man damals sagte, ein Erbe des deutschen Idealismus erhalten - eine vom Fallibilismus der Wissenschaften noch unberührte Selbstgewissheit, die wir aus der zeitgenössischen Philosophie der westlichen Länder nicht mehr kannten. Dieses ungebrochene philosophische Selbstbewusstsein verband sich bei der jungen Ágnes Heller mit der Frische eines unbefangen-offenen Geistes - und traf wohl überhaupt einen Zug an der Mentalität jener Schüler, die sich im Budapest der fünfziger Jahre um Georg Lukács versammelt hatten. Aber diese Beobachtung konnte den Blick auf die geistige und politische Unabhängigkeit, den humanistischen Impuls und die wissenschaftliche Produktivität dieser Gruppe nicht verstellen. Das Bewusstsein geistiger Souveränität war wohl auch ein Schutzschild für Ágnes Heller und ihre Freunde, die nach der Niederschlagung des Aufstandes von 1956 als politische Dissidenten verfolgt und schließlich zur Emigration genötigt wurden.

Im Laufe der Jahrzehnte habe ich gelernt, in diesem idealistischen Selbstverständnis und dem Gefühl, ja, einer gewissen Berufung zur Philosophie nur eine andere Seite des bewundernswert festen Charakters einer stolzen, zugleich mutigen und lebensklugen Frau zu sehen. Angesichts der Präsenz dieser starken Persönlichkeit frage ich mich, ob nicht den Lesern, die nur ihre Bücher kennen, ein guter Teil der Energie und der Leidenschaft dieser Autorin unzugänglich bleiben muss. Das mag für ihr erstes, 1967 in Ungarn erschienenes Buch "Der Mensch in der Renaissance" am wenigsten zutreffen: An dieser Epoche und ihren großen Erscheinungen feiert Ágnes Heller ganz unverstellt den humanistischen Geist und die in ihm kristallisierten Tugenden. Was sie als Philosophin auszeichnet und mit Hannah Arendt tatsächlich verbindet, ist die Fähigkeit, diese Emphase für erhebende Ideen mit den verblüffend einfachen Evidenzen alltagskluger Erfahrungen und Weisheiten zusammenzuführen.

Ágnes Heller ist eine Philosophin im alteuropäischen Sinne. In ihrem Denken spiegelt sich ein ungewöhnliches Leben, eine schmerzhafte Lebensgeschichte. (….)

Ágnes Heller hat sich nicht als Intellektuelle verstanden; sie hat auf ihre Weise als Philosophin gelebt. Und daraus die Kraft geschöpft, an den Widerständen des Zeitalters nicht zu zerbrechen.”

Symposium on Axel Honneth's recent books

The new issue of "Philosophy & Social Criticism" (July 2019) features a symposium on Honneth's two books: "Freedom’s Right" and "The Idea of Socialism". The articles are based on papers presented at a workshop with Axel Honneth in March 2018 at the University of Rome.

Giorgio Fazio & Alessandro Ferrara - "Introduction" [Abstract]

Alessandro Ferrara - "Social freedom and reasonable pluralism: Reflections on Freedom’s Right" [Abstract]

Giorgio Fazio - "From Hegel to Foucault and back? On Axel Honneth’s interpretation of neoliberalism" [Abstract]

Marco Solinas - "Immanent teleologies versus historical regressions: Some political remarks on Honneth’s Hegelianism" [Abstract]

Eleonora Piromalli - "Socialism through convergence, or: Why a socialist society does not need to be a fraternal community" [Abstract]

Roberto Frega - "Reflexive cooperation between fraternity and social involvement" [Abstract]

Stefano Petrucciani - "Rethinking socialism with Axel Honneth" [Abstract]

David M. Rasmussen - "Can socialism move beyond political liberalism without accommodating pluralism?" [Abstract]

Axel Honneth - "Recognition, democracy and social liberty: A reply"

A discussion about discussion - Raymond Geuss on Habermas

Overview. Raymond Geuss's crititical essay on Jürgen Habermas and some responses: 

1. Raymond Geuss - "A Republic of Discussion. Habermas at Ninety" (June 18, 2019)

[See the full German version here.]

Excerpts:

Is “discussion” really so wonderful? Does “communication” actually exist? What if I were to deny that it does? (....) Discussions, even discussions that take place under reasonably favorable conditions, are not necessarily enlightening, clarifying or conducive to fostering consensus. In fact, they just as often foster polemics, and generate further bitterness, rancor and division. Just think of Brexit. I get along with most people better the less I know about what they really think and feel. (....)

When I talk with Brexiteers, I certainly do not assume that what Habermas calls the “power of the better argument” will be irresistible. And I am certainly very far from assuming that an indefinite discussion conducted under ideal circumstances would eventually free them from the cognitive and moral distortions from which they suffer, and in the end lead to a consensus between them and me. What makes situations like this difficult is that arguments are relatively ineffectual against appeals to “identity. (.....) 

There is good reason to be skeptical about the main thesis Habermas proposes in this context: that the main contemporary problem is a deficit of legitimacy for social institutions, and that this can be remedied by developing a theory of communication. First of all, as has been mentioned above, it is a Kantian prejudice that “legitimation” is the basic problem of philosophy or even the basic problem of philosophy in the modern era. It is even less plausible to think that it is the basic social problem of the modern world. Then, Habermas’s conception of “discourse-without-domination” makes no sense: communication has no stable, invariant structure, certainly not one that would allow us to infer from it criteria for a universally valid set of norms, and for the identification and criticism of all forms of domination. In other words, there is no communication, at any rate in the following sense: there is no rule-governed form of linguistic behavior that is necessarily oriented to universal norms that are implicit in it, can be anticipated and are always presupposed by those who participate in that form of behavior. (......)

The foolish claim that “we live in the best of all possible worlds” is not the best defense of the status quo. It is much more effective to hide one’s affirmation of the given social and economic structures, while trumpeting the opportunities one’s philosophy provides for criticizing a wide variety of individual flaws, defects and inadequacies. An ideology of “discursive criticism” also has much better chances of establishing itself because of certain psychological advantages it gives to those who adopt it. It is well suited to absorb, deflect and channel destructive energies that might otherwise get out of hand, by, thanks be to Kant, imposing discipline on existing discontent and dissipating it in small packets of reformist criticism of individual imperfections and blemishes of the social system.

2. Seyla Benhabib - "Jürgen Habermas’s 90th Birthday" (July 2, 2019)

Excerpts:

Geuss reduces the complex architectonic of Habermas’ theory of communicative action which blends language analyses with social theory and a critique of contemporary capitalist societies, into a series of insultingly simple-minded propositions. (.....)

That Geuss is not interested in Habermas’s complex and subtle defense of democratic constitutionalism, as discussed in Between Facts and Norms (Faktizität und Geltung) is nowhere more evident than in his claim that discussions are “not necessarily enlightening, clarifying or conducive to fostering consensus.” That is undoubtedly sometimes the case, but if we desist from engaging in discussion altogether, if we cease to try to persuade each other with the best arguments possible as we believe them to be, if we do not seek to understand each others’ reasons and reasoning, then there can be no democracy, no parliamentarism. Period. (.....)

Let us listen carefully to what Putin is saying, because the battle lines are drawn: a new authoritarianism that is sweeping across the globe from Brazil to Turkey, from Hungary to India, is upon us. It intends to destroy democratic constitutionalism, the liberal culture of tolerance and diversity and yes — pace Geuss — government based on the idea of reaching agreement among citizens and residents of a polity who show one another equal respect. In this current climate, whether we criticize liberalism à la Rawls or à la Habermas, it is incumbent upon us to state more clearly where we draw the lines between an internal critique of liberal democratic constitutionalism and autocratic authoritarianisms — lest we end up with strange bedfellows! 

3. Martin Jay - “The Liberal Idea Has Become Obsolete” - Putin, Geuss and Habermas" (July 5, 2019)

Excerpts:

Let me begin by conceding that the current political discourse in liberal democracies—Geuss’s main case is the cacophonous Brexit debate, but it would be easy to give other examples on both sides of the Atlantic—provides ample evidence that we are a long way in practice from Habermas’s ideal speech situation. Of course, he always posited it as a counterfactual, which could only be approached asymptotically with no guarantee that we are going in the right direction. Like the democracy that is always “to come,” as Derrideans are wont to say, or “the perfect union” that is always a task, not an accomplished state of affairs, it is an aspirational goal. By making the obvious point that we have not yet achieved it, does it follow that its function as such a goal is negated?  (....)

Ironically, Habermas’s own study of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ruefully concluded that the institutional breakthrough that was the bourgeois public sphere was losing ground in the late twentieth-century, when media manipulation was overwhelming the power of the better argument. Rather than being a starry-eyed utopian, he showed himself to be realistic about the obstacles to communicative rationality, even if the ideal, once articulated, was hard to suppress entirely. Although he later postulated a latent telos of communicative rationality in discursive interactions, it was always a regulative ideal and never a constitutive one. Only weakly transcendental, it has always been understood as dependent on specific circumstances for its potential actualization.

4. Raymond Geuss - "Professor Benhabib and Jürgen Habermas" (July 7, 2019)

Excerpts:

I stopped reading what Habermas wrote in about 1980 when I discovered that he continued to be committed to pursuing a general line which seemed to me a dead end. I did, in fact, read a further one of his books, Diskurs der Moderne, when I was asked to review it, but I thought it was a tissue of misunderstandings, and so that was my last attempt to keep up with his writing. (.....)

I wrote a short essay in German about what I remembered about Habermas (and also T.W. Adorno and John Dewey) on communication. I praised Dewey for his open-ended idea of communication as an empirical process with potentially changing rules, and also Adorno for his criticism of liberal claims about the universality of the communication of truth. In doing so, I contrasted their views with those of Habermas, who held that communication had invariant, universal rules which imposed rules of behaviour on all speakers. In the sense in which Habermas used the term, ‘communication’, I thought, did not exist. My main target, just to repeat, is transcendentalism (or, in Habermas’ formula, ‘quasi-transcendentalism’ which seems to me in fact to amount to the same thing). (.....)

I note that the position I outlined was not that what we usually call ‘communication’ is never possible or never a good thing, only that Habermassian ‘transcendental theory of communicative action’ was an illusion. Now perhaps I am wrong about this, although I see no reason in Professor Benhabib’s text to think so.

5. Seyla Benhabib - "Contra Geuss: A Second Rejoinder" (July 7, 2019)

Excerpts:

Geuss’s principal critique of Habermas is that the program of searching for “transcendental conditions of communication” is a philosophical failure. This is a perfectly legitimate philosophical disagreement but Geuss simply does not state the problem precisely. Habermas is NOT searching for transcendental or quasi-transcendental conditions of communication überhaupt; rather, in the tradition of speech-act theory, he is analyzing the conceptual presuppositions which we as speaking agents make in order for our utterances to be intelligible to each other. The distinction here is between “knowing what” and “knowing that,” or between implicit and explicit knowledge. Speech acts are embedded in communicative actions in the lifeworld. (.....)

As one of my mentors at Harvard, Judith Shklar argued convincingly, society is dependent for its functioning upon a certain hypocrisy and many of us do not even know our “deepest opinions, feelings and motivations.” But democracies cannot simply be republics of hypocrites. Sometimes, somewhere we must speak truth to power and to each other if we are to succeed in living together with respect and dignity.

6. Michael J. Quirk - "Why I Believe in Communicative Action: A Response to Geuss" (July 9, 2019)

Excerpts: 

(.....) you can de-transcendentalize Habermas and still have an intelligible way of talking about the need for undistorted communication as a central element in liberal democratic discourse. Habermas de-transcendentalized is shorn of the Kantian emphasis on the rigid distinction between fact and norm, and the political-moral priority of the Right over the Good. But for all that transcendental baggage Habermas rightly views political communication — in the form of public discussion of common goods and individual rights, where each communicator is considered an equal, and each communicant is committed to interpretive charity and “the power of the better argument” — as central to liberal, democratic, republican politics. (....)

What Dewey was advocating, along with Whitman and Lincoln, was this democratic culture, democracy as the very form of community life. So while Habermas is guilty of overreach in insisting that this culture requires a synthetic a priori of communicative competence, Geuss is similarly overreaching when he assumes that, without such an a priori, we are mysteries to each other as well as ourselves, adrift in the morass of late-modernity where ignorant armies clash by night, and wind up delivering Brexit and Donald Trump. Dewey’s defense of liberal republican democracy — participatory, deliberative, and discursive democracy — is not a matter of theory. But as a kind of shared attunement and set of shared judgments, it is a culture, and a pretty desirable one given the present alternatives.

Video: Habermas's lecture on "Moralität und Sittlichkeit"

Jürgen Habermas' lecture "Noch einmal: Zum Verhältnis von Moralität und Sittlichkeit" at the Goethe University in Frankfurt on June 19, 2019.

Habermas' lecture begins at 18:16. (A fire alarm interrupted Habermas's lecture at 39:10. It has been cut out.)

See Habermas paper here: "Noch einmal: Zum Verhältnis von Moralität und Sittlichkeit" (PDF).

Reports from Habermas’ lecture in Frankfurt, June 19 [updated]

On June 19, Jürgen Habermas gave a public lecture on “Moralität und Sittlichkeit” at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Nearly 3000 people attented the event - 600 in Hörsaal HZ1, where Habermas gave his lecture, and over 2000 were following the event on video screens in other locations at the university.

Among the invited guests were Axel Honneth, Richard Bernstein, Seyla Benhabib, Cristina Lafont, Thomas McCarthy, Oskar Negt, Claus Offe, and Nancy Fraser. 

Four reports from the events:

Thomas Assheuer in Die Zeit [NEW]

Felix Kämper in Süddeutsche Zeitung

Martin Steinhagen in Frankfurter Rundschau

Michael Hierholzer in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Miryam Schellbach in Tageszeitung

+ my photos: