Jürgen Habermas Archives - Public Seminar

Politics

We Need to Facilitate Informed Debate about Israel-Palestine

A preface to the open letter in response to “Principles of Solidarity”

November 27, 2023 • by James Miller

Public Seminar's executive editor introduces an open letter reply to Normative Orders research center's "Principles of Solidarity" statement....

We Need to Facilitate Informed Debate about Israel-Palestine

Uncategorized

Habermas on the Legitimacy of Lockdown

Habermas argued that the state’s duty to protect life outweighed all individual rights. His critics accused him of authoritarianism.

February 23, 2022 • by Peter J. Verovšek

Jürgen Habermas recently argued that the pandemic measures of the German government hadn’t gone far enough. To weigh the state’s duty to protect life against other rights and freedoms was unconstitutional, he warned. In the ensuing controversy, critics accused him of authoritarianism. ...

Education

The Enigma of Rescue

On a recent history of The New School for Social Research

July 30, 2020 • by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

The New School for Social Research holds a story of rescue dear. This is the tale of how its co-founder and first president, the economist Alvin Johnson, climbed a mountain of correspondence and paperwork to save scores of German scholars after Nazism’s rise to power in the early 1930s. Johnson ...

Feature

A Republic of Discussion

Habermas at ninety

July 23, 2019 • by Raymond Geuss

Is “discussion” really so wonderful? Does “communication” actually exist? What if I were to deny that it does? The public discussion of exit from the European Union has already caused incalculable, probably irreversible and completely superfluous damage to Britain. Obviously, the “conditions of discussion” before the vote were not in any ...

Uncategorized

“The Liberal Idea Has Become Obsolete”

Putin, Geuss and Habermas

July 11, 2019 • by Martin Jay

I was first alerted to Raymond Geuss’s sour anti-commemoration of Jürgen Habermas’s ninetieth birthday, “A Republic of Discussion,” coincidentally on the same day that Vladimir Putin declared the obsolescence of liberalism in a meeting with Donald Trump. Trump, with the exquisite cluelessness that has made him so easy to mock, ...

Democracy

Why I Believe in Communicative Action: A Response to Geuss

Discursive democracy is a culture and a praxis rather than a matter of theory

July 8, 2019 • by Laura Nelson

Raymond Geuss begins his insightful yet occasionally misleading essay, “A Republic of Discussion,” with the following three questions, each an entry point into his critical account of Jürgen Habermas’s treatment of deliberative discourse in his Theory of Communicative Action and elsewhere. Here’s my gloss on them: “Is ‘discussion’ really so wonderful?” Occasionally yes, equally occasionally no. ...

Democracy

The Radical Center as a Utopian Project?

7 notes on the ideal of a free, intelligent and consequential public life

October 12, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

1. From a critical point of view, “the center” is the ground of the wishy washy: too attached to the ways things are to commit to the radical change of the left, not sufficiently informed by the wisdom of customs and traditional values to fully embrace the good of the ...

The Radical Center as a Utopian Project?

Feature

Recognizing Authority, Acknowledging Power

Concepts of control in Kojeve and Arendt, Part III

February 2, 2018 • by Eli Weiner

Below is the final segment of a three-part series adapted from a final paper for Sociology of Power and Authority at UVA. Having worked through the writings of both Kojève and Arendt, each of which endeavored to provide a thorough grounding in a comprehensive schematic of authority and power, it is ...

Politics

Recognizing Authority, Acknowledging Power

Concepts of control in Kojeve and Arendt, Part II

January 31, 2018 • by Eli Weiner

Below is the second segment of a three-part series adapted from a final paper for Sociology of Power and Authority at UVA. While Kojève offered us a fully formed taxonomy of authority, complete with four pure types of authority and their attendant legitimating theories, Hannah Arendt in her text On Violence, published ...

Politics

Recognizing Authority, Acknowledging Power

Concepts of control in Kojeve and Arendt, Part I

January 29, 2018 • by Eli Weiner

Below is the first segment of a three-part series adapted from a final paper for Sociology of Power and Authority at UVA. The specific characteristics of political authority, political power, and political violence have only grown more complex in the modern era, and the lessons offered by philosophers of the past ...

Education

The New Authoritarianism and the Structural Transformation of the Mediated Public Sphere I

Reviewing the work of Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt with an assist from Nancy Fraser

August 18, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

It’s been two weeks since my return from Wroclaw. I am getting over the shock of teaching about the rise of the new authoritarianism, as the Polish parliament, The Sejm, seemed to be hammering the final nails into the coffin of Polish democracy. It turned out to be a little ...