Benhabib on cosmopolitical democracy

In "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" (June 13, 2009):

Seyla Benhabib (Yale University) -
"Unterwegs zu einer kosmopolitischen Demokratie?
Die Kontroverse um internationales Recht und demokratische Souveränität".

Excerpt:
"Transnationales Recht schafft umfassende wechselseitige Abhängigkeiten zwischen den Nationen und drängt diese immer weiter in die Richtung von Strukturen des Global Governance. Das Weltstaatensystem ist zwar keine perfekte Kooperation nach definierten Regeln der Gerechtigkeit, aber die zwischenstaatlichen Beziehungen gestalten sich auch nicht aufgrund von «blossen vertraglichen Verpflichtungen», wie Thomas Nagel behauptet hat. Das globale System wechselseitiger Abhängigkeiten ist dicht genug, um Beziehungen der Gerechtigkeit zu befördern, die wohl schwächer sind als diejenigen in Nationalstaaten, aber gewiss stärker als die, die in dem Weltbild der Souveränitätsverfechter vorkommen.

Trotz diesen Entwicklungen – oder vielleicht ihretwegen? – gibt es auch eine Vervielfachung von «Zonen ausserhalb des Rechts», von rechtsfreien Räumen. Von der Verbringung «feindlicher Kämpfer» an unbekannte Orte aufgrund einer Kooperation zwischen der US-Regierung und europäischen Regierungen bis zur Entstehung der maquiladoras in Zentral- und Südamerika sowie zu den freien Wachstumszonen in China und Südostasien – um den Niedergang des Staates überall in Afrika gar nicht erst zu erwähnen – ist auch ein Prozess der «Entrechtlichung» im Gange. Es sind Versuche, die Verbreitung globalen Rechts zu verhindern und zu diesem Zweck Enklaven der Gesetzlosigkeit einzurichten, in denen den Menschen das «Recht, Rechte zu haben» (wie Hannah Arendt es formuliert hat) verweigert wird. – Ich habe keine fertige Erklärung dafür, warum Prozesse der Konstitutionalisierung und der Entrechtlichung in der Weltgesellschaft derzeit nebeneinander ablaufen. Aber ich möchte darauf bestehen, dass die Instrumente kosmopolitischer Normen wichtig sind, um jede Entrechtlichung zu bekämpfen."

Radio broadcast on "Habermas and religion"

The German radio station "NDR Kultur" has today a broadcast on Habermas and religion:

"Weil so vieles zum Himmel schreit" -
Warum der Philosoph Jürgen Habermas auf religiöse Bindungen setzt

Listen to the radio broadcast here (20 minutes) - or read it here.

The broadcast is produced by Christian Modehn. Read also his essay "Habermas und die Religion".

Abstract:
"Bis vor wenigen Jahren galt er als "säkularer", rein weltlicher Philosoph. Für ihn konnte die moderne Gesellschaft ihren Fortschritt nur finden im Verzicht auf religiöse Bindungen. Jürgen Habermas, am 18. Juni 1929 geboren, hat sich als Intellektueller von internationalem Rang immer wieder in die aktuellen gesellschaftlichen Debatten eingeschaltet. Jetzt warnt er vor einer auf Geldgewinn und Konsum fixierten Mentalität. Die großen Ideale der Aufklärung, Freiheit und Gleichberechtigung, drohten zu verkommen, zu "entgleisen", wie er sagt. "Weil so vieles zum Himmel schreit" setzt er auch auf die inspirierende und orientierende Kraft religiöser Traditionen. Um des Überlebens der Menschheit willen sollten Atheisten die Glaubenden ernst nehmen und sogar von ihnen lernen. Aber die Frommen von heute sollten sich immer auch vernünftig äußern und alle Schwärmerei ablegen, wenn sie Respekt einforderten."

Habermas - "Europe. The Faltering Project"

New book from Polity Press:

Europe. The Faltering Project
by Jürgen Habermas

Description
"The future of Europe and the role it will play in the 21st century are among the most important political questions of our time. The optimism of a decade ago has now faded but the stakes are higher than ever. The way these questions are answered will have enormous implications not only for all Europeans but also for the citizens of Europe's closest and oldest ally - the USA.
In this new book, one of Europe's leading intellectuals examines the political alternatives facing Europe today and outlines a course of action for the future. Habermas advocates a policy of gradual integration of Europe in which key decisions about Europe's future are put in the hands of its peoples, and a 'bipolar commonality' of the West in which a more unified Europe is able to work closely with the United States to build a more stable and equitable international order.
This book includes Habermas's portraits of three long-time philosophical companions, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida and Ronald Dworkin. It also includes several important new texts by Habermas on the impact of the media on the public sphere, on the enduring importance religion in "post-secular" societies, and on the design of a democratic constitutional order for the emergent world society."

Contents

Portraits
1. "...And to define America, her athletic Democracy." In Memory of Richard Rorty (2007)
2. How to Answer the Ethical Question: Derrida and Religion (2003)
3. Ronald Dworkin - A Maverick among Legal Scholars (2006)

Europe, Europe
4. An Avantgardistic Intuition for Relevances: The Role of the Intellectual and European Question (2006)
5. What is Meant by a "Post-secular Society"? A Discussion on Islam in Europe (2008)
6. European Politics at an Impasse: A Plea for a Policy of Graduated Integration (2007)
7. The Constitutionalization of International Law and the Problems of Legitimating a Constitution for World Society (2008)

On Reason in the Public Sphere
8. Media, Markets and Consumers: The Quality Press as the Backbone of the Public Sphere (2007)
9. Political Communication in Media Society - Does Democracy still have an epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research (2006)

Afterword: Lessons of the Financial Crisis (2008).

All essays - except 5 and 7 and the afterword - are from Habermas's "Ach Europa. Kleine politische Schriften XI" (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008).

Review of "Between Naturalism and Religion"

In "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews", Jeffrey Flynn (Fordham University) has published a review of Habermas's "Between Naturalism and Religion" (Polity Press, 2008):

Read it here.




From the review:
"Habermas's central aim in this collection of essays is to articulate the appropriate relation between "postmetaphysical thinking" and science and religion. He takes up issues related to both the philosophical and the public use of reason, and makes interesting proposals regarding their interrelation. Habermas is clearly worried about the spread of naturalistic worldviews ("scientism") and religious fundamentalism, but he dismisses neither naturalism nor religion. Rather, he defends what he calls "soft naturalism," which embraces a non-reductionist account of human language and thought in which normativity and intersubjectivity are central. Regarding religion, Habermas maintains that philosophy has long been enriched by secular "translations" of religious ideas."

"On the ethics of citizenship, Habermas forges a middle path between Rawls and his critics (e.g., Nicholas Wolterstorff and Paul Weithman), agreeing with Rawls that a secular state requires an "institutional filter" that prevents religious reasons from entering into formal justifications of laws and court decisions, but agreeing with Rawls's critics that citizens within the informal public sphere should be allowed to use religious language without restriction. Translating religious arguments into secular terms is still required at some point in order for them to potentially pass through the institutional filter, but this burden does not rest solely on religious citizens."

On the question of restrictions on public reasons, Jeffrey Flynn comments on Chistina Lafont's critique of Habermas. See also Christina Lafont's "Religious Citizens and Public Reasons" from the blog "The Immanent Flame".

See also John Haldane's (University of St. Andrews) review of Habermas's book in "Times Higher Education" (September 11, 2008).

Frankfurt University honors Habermas

In the new research magazine from Frankfurt University - "Forschung Frankfurt" 2009-2 – there are a number of articles in honor of Habermas's 80th birthday:

They are all available online here:

Stefan Müller Doohm

Parteilichkeit für Vernunft. Jürgen Habermas als Philosoph und öffentlicher Intellektueller

Rainer Forst und Klaus Günther

Innenansichten: Über die Dynamik normativer Konflikte. Jürgen Habermas‘ Philosophie im Lichte eines aktuellen Forschungsprogramms

Thomas M. Schmidt

Gibt es eine moderne Religion? Jürgen Habermas und die Idee der "postsäkularen Gesellschaft"

Anja Karnein

Warum dürfen wir unsere Kinder nicht klonen? Habermas und seine Kritiker in der bioethischen Debatte

Interview with Axel Honneth

"Forever Young" - Die kritische Theorie. Das Jahr der Jubilare: Habermas 80, Honneth 60

Discussion with philosophers from China and translator Cao Weidong

Habermas, China und die "halbierte Moderne".

Exhibition about Jürgen Habermas

At the German National Library in Frankfurt you can see an exhibition about Jürgen Habermas from June 18 to July 8, 2009.

The exhibition is called:
”... die Lava des Gedankens im Fluss'. Jürgen Habermas. Eine Werkschau"

See here - and here.

Jürgen Habermas attends the opening reception on July 17, 2009. Other participants: Elisabeth Niggemann (Director General of the German National Library), Petra Roth (Lord Mayor of Frankfurt), Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Vice-President at Frankfurt University), Ulla Unseld-Berkéwicz (Suhrkamp Verlag) and Alexander Kluge (film director and author).

The titel of the exhibition is taken from an essay Habermas wrote in 2003 about his arrival at Frankfurt University in 1956, and his time in Frankfurt as a research assistant for Theodor W. Adorno. Here he characterized the university as a place, where ”the lava of thought was moving.”

Interview about Habermas in Vartican Radio

In honor of Jürgen Habermas's 80th birthday on June 18, 2009, Vartican Radio (Rome) had on June 7, 2009, an interview with Dr. Florian Schuller about Jürgen Habermas.

The interview was in German, and you can hear and read it here.

Dr. Florian Schuller is director of the Catholic Academy in Munich and was moderator for the famous discussion between Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI)
and Jürgen Habermas in 2004.

The discussion is documented in "Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion" ( Ignatius Press, 2007) with a foreword by Dr. Florian Schuller. (German edition: "Dialektik der Säkularisierung", Herder Verlag, 2005)

In the interview from Vartican Radio Dr. Florian Schuller talks about this discussion between Ratzinger and Habermas, and he gives a personal portrait of Habermas.

The interview was conducted by Aldo Parmeggiani.

A misquote about Habermas and Christianity

A serious misquote is circulating on the internet about Jürgen Habermas and Christianity. On a very large number of web sites you can read the following "quotation" of Jürgen Habermas:

"Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [to Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

The "quotation" has appeared in a number of books (see below), in Wall Street Journal ("In Europe, God Is (Not) Dead") and in Christian Science Monitor ("Germans reconsider religion"), and you can find it on a large number of blogs in America on Christianity.

But this is a misquotation! The right quotation is this:

"Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk." (Jürgen Habermas - "Time of Transitions", Polity Press, 2006, pp. 150-151, translation of an interview from 1999).

The misquote rewrites Habermas's statement and changes its meaning:

(1) Habermas talks about the historical origin of universalistic egalitarianism - not the foundation of human rights today. 

(2) Habermas mentions both Judaism and Christianity - not only Christianity.

(3) Habermas says that there is no alternative to this legacy ("Erbe" in German) - not that we have no alternative to Christianity.

For a detailed comment on the misquote and its history on the internet see my contribution here. 

Update (October 2015):

The misquote now also appears in the English entry on Jürgen Habermas on Wikipedia. An ignorant editor has refused to correct the misquote several times.

Here is a list of some of the books, in which the misquote appears. They are all referring to Habermas, but they have not checked the text, but based their "quotation" on secondary literature. This is an example of bad scholarship.

* Laurence Paul Hemming - "Benedict XVI" (Continuum, 2005), p. 160.

* Philip Jenkins - "God's Continent" (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 263.

* Mary Poplin - "Finding Calcutta" (IVP Books, 2008), p. 188.

* Christopher Caldwell - "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe" (Allen Lane, 2009), p. 152.

* Simon Coleman in Charles E. Farhadian (ed.) - "Introducing World Christianity" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 74.

* Peter D. Beaulieu - "Beyond Secularism and Jihad?" (University Press of America, 2012), p. xxiv.

* David N. Robinson in Daniel N. Robinson & Richard N. Williams (eds.) - "The American Founding" (Continuum, 2012), p. 107.

* M. Hakan Yavuz - "Towards an Islamic Enlightenment" (Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 137.

Habermasian and Rawlsian accounts of human rights

In an article on human rights, Kenneth Baynes (Syracuse University) compares the perspectives of Habermas’s discourse ethics and John Rawls's political conception of rights:

"Discourse ethics and the political conception of human rights" (Free)
Ethics & Global Politics, vol. 2 no. 1 (2009), pp. 1-21.

Abstract:
"This article examines two recent alternatives to the traditional conception of human rights as natural rights: the account of human rights found in discourse ethics and the ‘political conception’ of human rights influenced by the work of Rawls. I argue that both accounts have distinct merits and that they are not as opposed to one another as is sometimes supposed. At the same time, the discourse ethics account must confront a deep ambiguity in its own approach: are rights derived in a strong sense from the conditions of ‘communicative freedom’ or are they developed from the participants’ own reflection upon their ongoing and continuously changing practices and institutions? The political conception recently proposed by Joshua Cohen can, I argue, contribute to the resolution of this ambiguity, though not without some modifications of its own."

The Habermasian perspective is represented by Seyla Benhabib and Rainer Forst. The Rawlsian approach is - besides John Rawls - represented by Michael Ignatieff, Thomas Pogge, and Joshua Cohen.

Berkowitz reviews Rawls on religion

Peter Berkowitz (Hoover Institution, Stanford University) reviews John Rawls's "A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith" (Harvard University Press, 2009) in the new issue of "Policy Review" June/July 2009.

Dworkin receives honorary doctorate from Harvard

Philosopher Ronald Dworkin (New York University) received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Harvard University on June 4.

Dworkin joins a prestigious group of individuals who have received honorary doctor of law degrees from Harvard, including John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Frankin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, and leading scholars like John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas.

Reports from Zurich conference on democracy

On May 27-29 Jürgen Habermas attended a conference in Zurich on democracy (see my previous post).

Now you can read three reports from the conference:

(1) Martin Bauer in "Süddeutsche Zeitung" (June 2, 2009):
Entleerungsgefahr. Habermas und die Demokratie: Eine Konferenz in Zürich

(2) Alexandra Kedves in "Tages-Anzeiger" (June 2, 2009):
Ist die Demokratie in Gefahr?

(3) Uwe Justus Wenzel in "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" (June 2, 2009): Arbeit an der Selbstbestimmung: «Auslaufmodell Demokratie?» – eine Zürcher Tagung zu Ehren von Jürgen Habermas