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Im Sog der Technokratie
Kleine politische Schriften XII
von Jürgen Habermas
(Suhrkamp Verlag, Juli 2013)
193 S.
Kurzbeschreibung
"Seit 1980 versammeln die Bände der Reihe Kleine politische Schriften Analysen, Stellungnahmen und Zeitdiagnosen Jürgen Habermas‘. Titel wie Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit sind längst in den allgemeinen Sprachgebrauch übergegangen. Im titelgebenden Aufsatz dieser Folge knüpft Habermas an seine viel beachteten europapolitischen Interventionen der letzten Jahre an. Angesichts der Gefahr, dass technokratische Eliten die Macht übernehmen und die Demokratie auf Marktkonformität zurechtstutzen könnten, plädiert er für grenzüberschreitende Solidarität. Neben Habermas‘ hochaktueller Heine-Preis-Rede enthält der Band Porträts von Denkern wie Martin Buber, Jan Philipp Reemtsma und Ralf Dahrendorf sowie einen Aufsatz, in dem der Philosoph sich mit der prägenden Rolle jüdischer Remigranten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg auseinandersetzt. Mit Band XII beschließt der Autor eine Buchreihe, die kaleidoskopisch Grundzüge einer intellektuellen Geschichte der Bundesrepublik widerspiegelt.
Inhalt [pdf]
Vorwort [pdf]
I. Deutsche Juden, Deutsche und Juden
1. Jüdische Philosophen und Soziologen als Rückkehrer in der frühen Bundesrepublik
2. Martin Buber – Dialogphilosophie im zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext
3. Zeitgenosse Heine: »Es gibt jetzt in Europa keine Nationen mehr«
II. Im Sog der Technokratie
4. Stichworte zu einer Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaates
5. Im Sog der Technokratie. Ein Plädoyer für europäische Solidarität
III. Europäische Zustände. Fortgesetzte Interventionen
6. Der nächste Schritt. Ein Interview
7. Das Dilemma der politischen Parteien
8. Drei Gründe für »Mehr Europa«
9. Demokratie oder Kapitalismus?
IV. Momentaufnahmen
10. Rationalität aus Leidenschaft. Ralf Dahrendorf zum 80. Geburtstag
11. Bohrungen an der Quelle des objektiven Geistes. Hegel-Preis für Michael Tomasello
12. »Wie konnte es dazu kommen?« Eine Antwort von Jan Philipp Reemtsma
13. Kenichi Mishima im interkulturellen Diskurs
14. Aus naher Entfernung. Ein Dank an die Stadt München
Jeremy Waldron has posted a tribute to the late Ronald Dworkin at SSRN:
"Ronald Dworkin: An Appreciation"
Waldron's tribute was presented at the Memorial Service for Professor Ronald Dworkin, at St. John's Smith Square, London, on June 5, 2013.
Excerpt:
Dworkin's "vision was unified, in his great ethical work, Justice for Hedgehogs, by a principle of dignity. Each person, said Ronnie, has a certain responsibility for the precious shape of his or her own life, and everyone has a duty to respect the conditions under which others are able to discharge that responsibility. That’s what “human dignity” meant for Ronnie and it underpinned both the principles of responsibility that were so important in the luck-egalitarian side of his account of equality and the principles of mutual respect that are represented in the rule of law. His great work of synthesis, Justice for Hedgehogs revealed this as the foundation of all his positions — and I do mean “foundation,” which is not the same as the fortification that allows a philosopher to see off contrary intuitions. I mean that Justice for Hedgehogs bravely identified the very deep underpinning of his various positions, even though that explicit identification made each of them somewhat more vulnerable, by presenting a deeper as well as a wider and more integrated target."
See also Waldron's article on Dworkin in "The Chronicle of Higher Education", February 19, 2013.
See also Will Hutton's tribute to Dworkin in "The Guardian", June 9, 2013: "I despair as I watch the erosion of the liberal views I hold dear."
I have made a collection of links to other tributes to Dworkin here.
Jonathan Quong has written an entry on "Public Reason" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
"Public Reason"
Excerpt
"Public reason requires that the moral or political rules that regulate our common life be, in some sense, justifiable or acceptable to all those persons over whom the rules purport to have authority. It is an idea with roots in the work of Hobbes, Kant, and Rousseau, and has become increasingly influential in contemporary moral and political philosophy as a result of its development in the work of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Gerald Gaus, among others. Proponents of public reason often present the idea as an implication of a particular conception of persons as free and equal. Each of us is free in the sense of not being naturally subject to any other person's moral or political authority, and we are equally situated with respect to this freedom from the natural authority of others. How, then, can some moral or political rules be rightly imposed on all of us, particularly if we assume deep and permanent disagreement amongst persons about matters of value, morality, religion, and the good life? The answer, for proponents of public reason, is that such rules can rightly be imposed on persons when the rules can be justified by appeal to ideas or arguments that those persons, at some level of idealization, endorse or accept."
Jonathan Quong is Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He is the author of "Liberalism Without Perfection" (Oxford University Press, 2011). See my post on his book here.
(Thanks to Reza Javaheri for the pointer!)
Benoît Peeters's biography "Derrida" (Polity Press, 2013) contains a short description of the reconciliation of Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas in 1999-2000:
"As he grew older and the thought of death obsessed him more, Derrida seemed eager to come to a rapprochement with some of his former adversaries. In October 1999, in New York, he again met Jürgen Habermas at the home of their common friend Giovanna Barradori. At this unexpected encounter, Habermas had the ‘smiling kindness’ to propose that he and Derrida hold a discussion. Derrida accepted immediately: ‘It’s high time,’ he said, ‘let’s not wait until it’s too late.’ The meeting took place in Paris shortly afterwards. During a friendly lunch, Habermas did all in his power to ‘wipe out the traces of the previous polemic, with an exemplary probity’ for which Derrida would always be grateful. The two men had not been on good terms for over twelve years, because of the two ‘unfair and hasty’ chapters that Habermas had written on Derrida in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and Derrida’s stinging response in Mémoires: For Paul de Man and Limited Inc. [......] For Derrida, the quarrel with Habermas had had serious consequences: since the mid-1980s, access to the most important German publishers had been blocked, and his influence in the German-speaking world had been greatly hampered.
Their rapprochement was initially brought about on political terrain. Even during the years when they had been at odds, they had frequently been signing the same petitions and the same manifestoes. Derrida later acknowledged this in a fine homage that he wrote for the seventy-fifth birthday of his former enemy: ‘I had always had more than just sympathy, but an admiring approval for the argued positions that Habermas had adopted in Germany itself, on problems in German history, on numerous occasions.’
In 2000, Habermas and Derrida organized a seminar together in Frankfurt on problems in the philosophy of law, ethics, and politics. Alexander García Düttmann remembers the disquiet that this ‘reconciliation’ spread among the disciples of the two philosophers. ‘This rapprochement irritated me. Philosophically, they had nothing to say to one another. But politically, okay, they agreed on several points. Also, we shouldn’t underestimate tactical considerations. Derrida could be very trenchant, but he could also be a skilled negotiator when the occasion called for it. Depending on the context, he could be radical or almost consensual, courageous or calculating.’ Avital Ronell confirms that this episode caused their respective associates some heart-searching: ‘One could write an entire history of great men or women [. . .] and their disciples, a history of associations or dissociations, of gravitational pull. [. . .] Small groups quarrel and suddenly their leader, Mafi alike, perhaps, proposes a truce.’ One thing is certain: making up with Habermas meant that Derrida quickly reassumed a position in Germany that he had lost. Several plans for translation and re-publication saw the light. But other factors also helped to thaw the situation. After many years spent in the United States, Werner Hamacher, a follower of Derrida, had returned to teach in Frankfurt in 1998; he soon invited Derrida there, to give the lecture ‘The university without condition’. On this occasion, Derrida met up with Bernd Stiegler – not to be confused with Bernard Stiegler –, who had attended his seminar in Paris a few years earlier and now had an important position with the great publisher Suhrkamp. The Adorno Prize would soon seal Derrida’s reconciliation with Germany." ["Derrida", p. 501f].
In 2003 Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida published together "A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe".
The latest issue of the journal "Javnost - The Public" (2013, no. 1) features an article by Lincoln Dahlberg on the theory of deliberative democracy:
"Exclusions of the Public Sphere Conception: Examining Deliberative and Discourse Theory Accounts" [pdf]
Abstract
The deliberative conception of the public sphere has proven popular in the critical evaluation of the democratic role of media and communication. However, the conception has come under sustained critique from poststructuralist- influenced theorists, amongst others, for failing to fully account for the exclusions that result from it being defined as a universal norm of public sphere deliberation. This paper examines how this critique may be answered. It does so first by exploring how (sophisticated) deliberative theory can reply to the critique, and second by turning to the poststructuralist-influenced critics – specifically post-Marxist discourse theorists – and asking how they might provide a way forward. With respect to the first, the paper finds that deliberative theory can, and often does, account for the exclusions in question much more than critics suggest, but that there remains concern about the conception’s radical democratic status given that exponents (seem to) derive it extra-politically. With respect to the second, the paper finds that a post-Marxist discourse theory reading – that embraces radical contingency – of the deliberative public sphere conception provides a purely political framework for theorising deliberative exclusion (and associated politics), and thus offers an ontological and democratic radicalisation of the public sphere conception. However, given the embrace of radical contingency, and thus acceptance of inelminable power, the paper concludes by indicating that this radicalisation may illicit concern about its radical democratic status.
Lincoln Dahlberg is Visiting Fellow at the Center for Critical and Cultural Studies, The University of Queensland.
At the "3:AM Magazine" (May 17, 2013), Richard Marshall interviews James Gordon Finlayson on
Habermas, Adorno, Politics
Excerpt
The debate between Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls "concerns their respective political theories. It is basically a dispute between Rawls’s theory of Political Liberalism, and Habermas’s Discourse Theory of Law. It is not primarily a dispute between Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Habermas Discourse Ethics. Principle (U) is the central idea in Habermas’s Discourse Ethics, which is a moral theory, not a theory of law or of democratic legitimacy, while the argument from the Original Position takes a back seat in Rawls’s Political Liberalism. People who interpret the Habermas Rawls dispute in the light of the contrast between Habermas’s principle (U) and Rawls’s Original Position, are looking at the wrong thing and so miss the real points of dispute.
What people should have been asking is this. What are the central organizing ideas of their respective political theories, and on what significant points do these ideas conflict? To my mind the real point of dispute concerns their different conception of the political and of democratic legitimacy. According to Rawls “ the liberal principle of legitimacy” implies that legitimate laws, laws whose enforcement is properly justified to those who must live under them, may not appeal to principles and ideas insofar as they form part of any comprehensive philosophical or moral doctrine, but only insofar as they form part of an overlapping consensus of all reasonable comprehensive doctrines. For various reasons, Habermas has to deny this. For one thing, he maintains that morality, that is principle (U) and the norms it validates, constrain what can count as legitimate law. Habermas claims at various places that that legitimate laws must “harmonize with the universal principles of justice and solidarity”. More precisely he writes that “a legal order can be legitimate only if it does not contradict basic moral principles.” Whatever way you look at it Habermas’s conception of morality (and his theory of Discourse Ethics) is what Rawls would call comprehensive moral (or philosophical) doctrines. The fact that Habermas calls his theory ‘proceduralist’ is irrelevant. After all he claims that substantive moral norms, namely all those norms that are validated by the procedure – namely discourse in conformity to (U) – constrain legitimate laws on pain of giving rise to cognitive dissonance (between moral and legal demands). There are other important differences too. Habermas allows that conceptions of the good may be germane to the justification of legitimate law, a claim that Rawls again, must deny. Finally, Rawls is right to claim that Habermas’s conception of legitimacy is comprehensive, at least in one obvious sense: it presupposes that a controversial philosophical theory is true, namely discourse ethics."
James Gondon Finlayson is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is the authour of "A Very Short Introduction to Habermas" (Oxford University Press, 2005) and co-editor (with Fabian Freyenhagen) of "Habermas and Rawls. Disputing the Political" (Routledge, 2011).
In "Die Zeit" (May 16, 2013), Thomas Assheuer writes on the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Wolfgang Streeck on democracy and Europe:
"Das böse Spiel"
[Update: now available online]
Excerpts
"In der Zeitschrift Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik liefern sich der Philosoph Jürgen Habermas und der Soziologe Wolfgang Streeck einen Schlagabtausch (Heft 4 und 5/13), der den Leser mit glasklaren Alternativen konfrontiert: Habermas will das Projekt Europa fortführen und fordert seine "Vertiefung", weil ohne eine starke Gemeinschaft die kleinen Boote der nationalen Demokratie im Meer der Globalisierung untergehen müssten. Für Streeck, der seine Haltung in seinem Buch Gekaufte Zeit (Suhrkamp Verlag) ausführlich begründet, ist es genau umgekehrt. Er möchte lieber heute als morgen aus dem Euro aussteigen und das "frivole Experiment" am offenen Herzen der "Staatsvölker" beenden. Europa werde die Demokratie nicht retten, sondern abschaffen. "Die Demokratie, wie wir sie kennen, ist auf dem Weg, vom Kapitalismus abgetrennt und um seinetwillen auf eine Kombination von Rechtsstaat und öffentlicher Unterhaltung reduziert zu werden." [.....]
"Habermas wittert bei Streeck einen linken Kommunitarismus, den er mit den europaischen Linksparteien teile. Doch diese seien drauf und dran, ihren "historischen Fehler aus dem Jahre 1914 zu wiederholen". Anstatt offensiv für Europa zu streiten, knickten sie "aus Furcht vor der rechtspopulistischen Mitte ein". In Deutschland bestärke eine "unsäglich merkelfromme Medienlandschaft" alle darin, "das heisse Eisen der Europapolitik" nicht anzufassen und Angela Merkels "clever-boses Spiel" aus Beschweigen und "Dethematisierung" mitzuspielen. Habermas setzt auf Polarisierung, wobei sich alle Seiten allerdings eingestehen sollten, dass es "weder risikolose noch kostenlose Alternativen gibt". Deshalb sei der neuen Partei Alternative für Deutschland Erfolg zu wünschen. "Ich hoffe, dass es ihr gelingt, die anderen Parteien zu nötigen, ihre europapolitischen Tarnkappen abzustreifen" – und sich zu entscheiden. Denn es gebe nur ein Land, das die "institutionelle Vertiefung der EU" vorantreiben könne: Deutschland.
See my post on Jürgen Habermas's article in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik no. 5/2013 here.
See also Arno Widmann’s report in ”Frankfurter Rundschau”.
Was is gerecht? Was ist gut?
Eine Deliberative Theorie des Gerechten und Guten
von Nadia Mazouz
(Velbrück Verlag, 2013)
464 S.
Kurzbeschreibung
Dieses Buch bietet eine breit angelegte Analyse von Gerechtigkeit und ihrem Verhältnis zum Guten. Anders als weithin üblich werden allgemeine Gerechtigkeit und Verteilungsgerechtigkeit in einem Zuge bearbeitet. Der Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf deliberativen Theorien der Gerechtigkeit. Diesen zufolge erlangen Gerechtigkeitsaussagen Gültigkeit durch Prozesse des Überlegens, die in der richtigen Weise mit den Überlegungen derjenigen, für die sie Orientierung sollen bieten können, verbunden sind. Diese allgemeine Charakterisierung der Grundidee deliberativer Gerechtigkeit zu einer Theorie auszubuchstabieren, erfordert eine Vielzahl von speziellen Bestimmungen bezüglich dessen, was Gerechtigkeits-aussagen sind, wie und wen sie orientieren können sollen, sowie: was Überlegungen sind und wie sie beschaffen sein müssen, um zu gültigen Aussagen zu kommen. Die Autorin setzt sich insbesondere mit den Theorien von John Rawls, Thomas Scanlon und Jürgen Habermas auseinander.
Eine konsequent deliberative Theorie ist, so Nadia Mazouz, erst mit einer deliberativen Theorie der Gerechtigkeit und des Guten erreicht. Eine halbierte deliberative Theorie, wie sie von den kritisierten Autoren vertreten wird, ist mit charakteristischen Setzungen behaftet, die den deliberativen Kern gefährden. Daher schlägt Mazouz vor, den Bezug des Gerechten zum Guten in einem vierten Modell – dem Perspektivenmodell – zu beschreiben. In diesem sind das Gerechte und das Gute Perspektiven auf das zu Beurteilende, wobei typischerweise Handlungen oder Institutionen beurteilt werden: Gerechtigkeit und das gute Leben sind nicht Bereiche mit unterschiedlichen Gegenständen, sie sind Weisen, Überlegungen zu beurteilen: als Überlegungen, in denen die Überlegungen anderer eine bestimmte Rolle spielen oder auch nicht, es sind Perspektiven, aus denen heraus Überlegungen beurteilt werden.
Inhalt [pdf]
Vorwort [pdf]
Einleitung
1. Was ist Gerechtigkeit?
2. Deliberative Theorien allgemeiner Gerechtigkeit: Kontraktualismus und Diskursethik
3. Theorien spezieller Gerechtigkeit: Verteilungs- versus Tauschgerechtigkeit
4. Betrachtungen zu einer deliberativen Theorie des Gerechten und Guten
Nadia Mazouz ist wissenschaftliche Assistentin am Lehrstuhl für Praktische Philosophie von Lutz Wingert an der ETH Zürich. Dissertation: "Aspekte einer deliberativen Theorie des Guten und Gerechten" (2009) [pdf].
The latest issue of "Studies in Social & Political Thoughts" features papers from a conference on "Forms of Domination and Emancipation" and two interesting papers on John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas:
"How to Understand Rawls’s Law of Peoples"
by Veljko Dubljevic
"Through the Eyes of Habermas: The Heritage of Liberalism and Deliberative Politics"
by Stephanie Morrow
The issue can be downloaded here.
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