The Habermas Handbook

Hauke Brunkhorst, Regina Kreide, Cristina Lafont

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231535885
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Teoría crítica

Jürgen Habermas is one of the most influential philosophers of our time. His diagnoses of contemporary society and concepts such as the public sphere, communicative rationality, and cosmopolitanism have influenced virtually all academic disciplines, spurred political debates, and shaped intellectual life in Germany and beyond for more than fifty years. In The Habermas Handbook, leading Habermas scholars elucidate his thought, providing essential insight into his key concepts, the breadth of his work, and his influence across politics, law, the social sciences, and public life.

This volume offers a comprehensive overview and an in-depth analysis of Habermas's work in its entirety. After examining his intellectual biography, it goes on to illuminate the social and intellectual context of Habermasian thought, such as the Frankfurt School, speech-act theory, and contending theories of democracy. The Handbook provides an extensive account of Habermas's texts, ranging from his dissertation on Schelling to his most recent writing about Europe. It illustrates the development of his thought and its frequently controversial reception while elaborating the central ideas of his work. The book also provides a glossary of key terms and concepts, making the complexity of Habermas's thought accessible to a broad readership.

PART I

INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY

HAUKE BRUNKHORST AND STEFAN MÜLLER-DOOHM

Between the ages of ten and sixteen, Jürgen Habermas was just old enough to experience, in conscious manner, World War II and its aftermath: first, Germany’s victories and conquest of all of Europe, then, the country’s unconditional surrender and the Nuremberg Trials. In August 1939—under orders from the Führer—Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Jodl, Arthur Seyß-Inquart, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg, Wilhelm Keitel, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, and others had carried out the attack and despoilment of Poland, where they erected camps for forced labor and extermination. Millions of human beings were deported, enslaved, and murdered. Over the next five years, the same operation occurred throughout Europe, especially in the east. In October 1945, the organizers were put on trial; one year later, they were hanged. The generation that had joined the Hitler Youth during the war and even served as Flakhelfer (antiaircraft auxiliaries) or participated in the Volkssturm at the end—including later intellectual figures such as Niklas Luhmann, Hermann Lübbe, Ralf Dahrendorf, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ulrich Wehler, Odo Marquard, Alexander Kluge, the brothers Hans and Wolfgang Mommsen, and Günter Grass, as well as politicians including Helmut Kohl and Johannes Rau (all of whom were approximately the same age as Habermas)—experienced their primary and secondary socialization (childhood and school years, puberty and adolescence) under the National Socialist regime; their tertiary socialization (that is, the prolongation of youth that occurs during university study) occurred in an occupied Germany divided between the Allied Powers.

The rupture that took place after 1945 profoundly shaped members of this generation: the Reich collapsed, yet the state was preserved because of the vehement—and successful—efforts of conservative German jurists. When events of the Nazi years were brought to light, Habermas once said in an interview, it was clear that he and his contemporaries had lived under a regime that was criminal through and through. Now, however, there existed the newly founded German Federal Republic in the western part of the erstwhile Reich; it switched out almost all institutions of government in a few years and took the place of a regime that, in a world that has never lacked atrocities or crimes of state, was perhaps the worst of all time. Now, there existed a parliamentary democracy tailored to the West, without an army or the death penalty (Müller-Doohm 2014).

Even if they comported themselves differently and expressed different opinions about the past, intellectuals such as Habermas, Enzensberger, Lübbe, Dahrendorf, Kluge, and Luhmann hardly had a chance—in the transition from the authoritarianism of the 1930s to the kindly paternalism of the 1950s, the move from a state ruled by National Socialists to one governed by Christian Democrats—to repress, deny, or even come to terms with German fascism. They had to live with it. Nor could they simply carry on as before (as far too many parties in government, education, and industry were able to do). They had no past to continue. They might, like Habermas or Enzensberger, criticize others’ repression of history (especially in the so-called Verdrängungsantikommunismus of the 1950s, which forgot the past to fight communism) as the aftereffect of the Nazi regime, yet they were shocked again and again by the continuity between “then” and “now.” For example, the case of Habermas’s teacher in Bonn, Oskar Becker, made it clear that a highly esteemed professor might have a dubious political past.

Alternatively, one might overlook or tacitly justify collaboration between scholars and Nazi authorities by following the motto “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and observing “communicative silence” (kommunikatives Beschweigen) on the “brown” portions of professors’ biographies. One could view the employment of instructors from the Nazi era as a catastrophe of “social hygiene” (Habermas) or consider it a morally problematic and “asymmetrical” operation that, all the same, was necessary for maintaining social order (Lübbe). Finally, one might compare—in markedly disengaged terms—the functional equivalency of the Nazi regime, however hated it was, and the subsequent rule of the occupiers. Luhmann observed that he was beaten by a German superior when he was a Flakhelfer and then by the English soldiers who took him prisoner. He added laconically—if without the intention of neoconservatives—that “personnel” and “contents” had changed but functions and roles remained the same. This sociological insight, which represented a theoretical gain for Luhmann, necessarily appeared to be a “bad abstraction” (in Hegelian terminology) to Habermas, his foremost intellectual opponent in later years; at any rate, it exemplifies what Habermas, in his debate with Luhmann at the beginning of the 1970s, called the “epitome of technocratic consciousness.”

The change that occurred in 1945 marked intellectual figures belonging to the generation of Wehler, Habermas, Enzensberger, Luhmann, Kluge, Grass, and Dahrendorf personally and politically, and it left an imprint on their writings. One can see the traces in almost every sentence that Habermas has written. In one way or another, the personal experience of fascism—and, even more, the shock of liberation—is always there. The intellectual aggression that Habermas has displayed, time and again, comes from his abiding concern for the weal of political culture in the Federal Republic, which he means to defend. This is also the case for Luhmann. Even though he was much less engaged politically, he avoided, as much as Habermas did, the many thinkers around Carl Schmitt; in Luhmann’s works, the twelve years from 1933 to 1945 form a constant presence. Just as Habermas replaced Martin Heidegger (with whose thought his studies began) with Charles Sanders Peirce, Luhmann distanced himself from Arnold Gehlen and certain other German intellectuals when he took up the works of Talcott Parsons. Whether they said so or not—and whether they wished to do so or not—the sixteen-year-olds of 1945 could hardly, after the fact, perceive the year of 1945 as anything other than the “new beginning” that Hannah Arendt announced—abruptly yet full of hope—at the end of her grim book on totalitarianism.

A few exceptions notwithstanding, the vehemently polemical debates that distinguished this generation’s relationship to its teachers did not concern relativizing a war of aggression or questioning the legitimacy of decisions at Nuremberg so much as explaining “National Socialist” or “fascist” (the very terminology is contested) horror—whether it was at all comparable to other forms of totalitarianism (in particular, to Stalinism). It is no coincidence that the idea of a “causal nexus” between the revolution in Russia and Hitler’s crimes, which later gave rise to the Historikerstreit in the 1980s, came from the generation immediately preceding the war, whose ideas were then taken up by younger, neoconservative historians.

For the most part, members of the war generation and parties belonging to the generation before the war, whose tertiary socialization coincided with the period of Nazism (or who, indeed, engaged actively for the cause in 1933), balked at the ideas of egalitarianism, freedom, and political autonomy that now penetrated Germany from the West. Contempt for liberalism and democracy remained. Intellectuals such as Heidegger, Schmitt, Hans Freyer, Ernst Jünger, and Gehlen belonged to the first group. Habermas’s teacher, the Bonn philosopher Erich Rothacker (who even published an essay on the importance of philosophy for the war effort in 1944), Helmut Schelsky, Ernst Forsthoff, and Joachim Ritter belonged to the second—a generation that was politically and professionally active in the “Third Reich.” In either case, eloquent silence, repression, and denial predominated. Carl Schmitt even displayed malicious defiance and open anti-Semitism in the self-justification he presented in a collection of aphorisms right after the war; still today, the work counts as holy to his students and apologists. Schmitt acted as if he had always warned of the demise of the Nazi state, even though he only “discovered” an unambiguous formulation of this position after the war had ended. In 1963, he added a foreword to The Concept of the Political; thereby, he took aim at the Federal Republic and not at the “Third Reich.”

The only parties belonging to these two generations who could not repress or deny anything had been illegal resistance fighters like Wolfgang Abendroth, who, after his cover was blown in 1937, was imprisoned before being sent to join the notorious Strafdivision 999 for the remainder of the Nazi period. Alternatively, they numbered among the few liberal opponents of the Hitler regime who stayed in the country and did not go underground—for example, Karl Jaspers. There were also individuals such as Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Thomas Mann, Karl Löwith, Franz Neumann, Hans Kelsen, Ernst Fraenkel, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, who had to leave not just Germany but Europe. Finally, a few escaped from concentration camps—like Eugen Kogon, in 1945. During the war or immediately afterward, these individuals authored books that, to this day, remain the most important works on National Socialism and the epoch of fascism: Neumann’s Behemoth (which he wrote secretly in Germany in the 1930s), Fraenkel’s Doppelstaat, Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Kogon’s SS-Staat. However, given the public sphere in Adenauer’s republic—which, despite the occasional emergence of voices of opposition, stood under hegemonic control and was hermetically sealed—their views could not be heard until the 1960s. Adenauer, the erstwhile centrist opponent of Nazism, adopted a strategy of communicative silence whose stakes were made plain when he knowingly surrounded himself with figures from the regime such as Heinrich Globke, the coauthor of the Nuremberg Laws.

The opposite occurred among members of the generation following Habermas, Luhmann, Dahrendorf, Grass, Lübbe, and Mommsen—that is, among the student revolutionaries of 1968. Born after (or at) the end of Hitler’s Reich, theirs was the first generation to be shaped by the Federal Republic and the West, by Europe and America—that is, by an upbringing that had become more liberal. They did not view the events of National Socialism in terms of their own biographies; whatever parts of their parents’ lives were connected to the regime preceded their birth. They knew about National Socialism only from newspapers, books, films, and anecdotes. The Spiegel affair and the Auschwitz trial provided the key experiences of their political awakening. Through these events, National Socialism turned into a present past; at the same time, it remained an unattainable past present as far as personal biography was concerned, for it could not be brought to bear on their own lives other than by accounts from witnesses, history, literature, art, and acts of imagination.

Such a mediated presence of history facilitated the perception of the latent fascism in everyday life in the Federal Republic as well as in the imperialism of Germany’s western neighbors—especially during the Vietnam War. The state of affairs also promoted immoderate exaggeration: the copying of left-wing radicals and communists of the Weimar Era (an act that only seemed to be revolutionary); the tendency to confuse enduring Nazi sympathies in a country governed by Christian Democrats with overt, fascist rule; and the overly hasty equation of imperialistic military engagement with the purposes of American democracy as a whole. Most fatefully, it encouraged actionistic efforts to make latent fascism manifest through calculated provocation and experiments in violence (as in the case of Rudi Dutschke), so that the public might see what radicals knew was lurking beneath the surface.

While still a student—one year before submitting his dissertation—Habermas published an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (July 1953) entitled “Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken: Zur Veröffentlichung von Vorlesungen aus dem Jahre 1935” (“Thinking with Heidegger Against Heidegger: On the Publication of His Lectures from 1935”). Here, Habermas not only took Heidegger to task for his involvement in National Socialism but took issue with his thought, as well. Heidegger had republished a lecture from the 1930s without any commentary; for the sake of his own reputation and renown, however, he touched up remarks concerning the “inner truth and greatness of this movement”—which referred to National Socialism, of course. In the process, he also added a parenthetical remark to “this movement”: “(namely … the encounter between technology on a planetary scale and modern man).” Yet Heidegger had explicitly taken issue with technology only after the war; now, his amended text would appear, to readers familiar with his earlier writings, to provide an early indication of his distance from the Nazi regime (cf. Texte, 76).

In the 1950s, Heidegger’s main work of the 1920s, Being and Time, shaped German philosophy as a whole. Significantly, Heidegger’s abiding respect for National Socialism did not occasion controversy; rather, it was Habermas’s critique of his person and work that was considered scandalous because it violated the commonsensical agreement to observe communicative silence. Philosophical minds were shocked and dismayed not so much by the fact that Habermas recommended thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger but that he justified doing so in political terms.

In the following years, Habermas moved further to the left. His involvement with two figures who had been persecuted by the Nazis—Adorno (at whose Institute for Social Research he studied and practiced sociology) and, a little later, Abendroth (under whom he wrote his Habilitation)—made Habermas, the left-wing Heideggerian, into a neo-Marxist, even if he did not adhere to orthodoxy and revised many of its tenets. Still today, idiosyncratic Marxism forms a key component of his work; much of Habermas’s thought cannot be properly understood without a thorough knowledge of Marx and Marxist literature—especially an understanding of the cultural conditions and tremendous intellectual upheaval that occurred in the times between Hegel and his heir. Even though Kant has come to play a greater and more fundamental role in Habermas’s thought, Marx remains essential (see chapter 1).

Habermas’s work differs from that of his contemporaries—both sociologists like Luhmann and philosophers like John Rawls (chapter 19)—inasmuch as it combines normative claims with empirical theory. Marx had replaced Hegelian Spirit with the concept of social interaction; this reorientation separated modern critical thought from that of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Habermas’s project preserves this dialectical synthesis—and adds to it elements derived from critical theory in its New York exile (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marc...