Archive for the ‘Habermas’ Category
Habermas, Critical Theory and Education
The sociologist and philosopher Jurgen Habermas has had a wide-ranging and significant impact on understandings of social change and social conflict. However, there has been no concerted and focused attempt to introduce his ideas to the field of education broadly. This book rectifies this omission and delivers a definitive contribution to the understanding of Habermas’s oeuvre as it applies to the field. The authors examine the contribution Habermas’s theory has and can make to: pedagogy, learning and classroom interaction; the relation between education, civil society and the state; forms of democracy, reason and critical thinking; and performativity, audit cultures and accountability. Additionally, the book answers a range of more specific questions, including: what are the implications for pedagogy of a shift from a philosophy of consciousness to a philosophy of language?; What contribution can Habermas’s re-shaping of speech act theory and communicative rationality make to theories of classroom interaction?; and how can his theories of reason and colonization be used to explore questions of governance and accountability in education?
Reading Freire and Habermas: Critical Pedagogy and Transformative Social Change
In this book, two well-known scholars of critical educational studies provide a compelling introduction to the thoughts of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and German critical theorist Jurgen Habermas. While there are many other books about these influential thinkers, this is the first to compare their theories in-depth and situate their thinking in relation to other social theories and philosophies of education. The authors demonstrate that, despite their differences, these philosophers share crucial views on science, society, critical social psychology, and educational praxis that are mutually illuminating and offer a new point of departure for a critical theory of education. The book is organized around the following themes: (a) Freire and Habermas’ philosophies of the social sciences as a form of critical social theory; (b) their theories of society; (c) the critical social psychology that underlies their conception of the dialogical and developmental subject; and (d) the implications of their overall perspective for educational practice.
Habermas on Communicative Freedom and Genetic Engineering
The biotechnological revolution unleashed by both the prodigious advances in information systems and the convergence of science and technology over the last century, thus giving rise to what is now called “technoscience,” has raised a series of questions that pertain to our most fundamental beliefs about human nature. These questions have in turn cast doubt on the nature of political modernity. The biotech revolution has allowed us directly to intervene in the processes of the production of biomass and bioplasm.
It is this group of questions about the fate of our nature and the project of political modernity that are the heart of Jürgen Habermas’s recent book: The Future of Human Nature: On the Way to a Liberal Eugenics? This book, published toward the end of 2001, shortly after Habermas had received the Peace Prize of the German Association of Booksellers, is made up of two texts.
On Weber’s and Habermas’ Democratic Theories: A Reconstruction and Comparison
While the meaning and possibility in modern times of democracy has been a central concern for Weber and Habermas, and both thinkers’ political theories have been the subject of several inquiries, there is a lack of comparative investigations on this particular subject. This may be surprising as Habermas is himself a Weberian scholar, and Weber has been one of his most important theoretical sources. Our first task will be to introduce the comparative literature on Weber and Habermas as thinkers of modern Parliamentary democracy. The democratic theories of these two authors will be then reconstructed; their ideological orientations outlined; and their conceptual definitions and theoretical propositions compared. This comparison, it is hoped, will not only fill a gap in the literature, but also contribute to contemporary democratic theory and political philosophy. This potential contribution will be dealt with in the last part of the article.
Habermas on Adorno
What seems to be trivial in retrospect could not be taken for granted by the time I joined the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research); that its reputation would be more dependent on Adorno‘s incessant productivity, which was only then heading for its climax, rather than on the success of the empirical research with which the institute was supposed to legitimize itself in the first place. Although he was the nerve-center of the institute, Adorno could not handle administrative power. Rather, he constituted the passive center of a complex area of tension. When I arrived in 1956 there were symmetrical differences between Max Horkheimer, Gretel Adorno and Ludwig von Friedburg that were defined by the fact that their respective expectations toward Adorno were thwarted.
If I want to try and describe the change in consciousness and the impact of the mental influence that the daily contact with Adorno had brought about in me, then it is best captured by the distancing from the familiar vocabulary and the outlook of the very German historical humanities that are rooted in Herder’s romanticism.
Habermas, the Last European: A Philosopher’s Mission to Save the EU
Jürgen Habermas has had enough. The philosopher is doing all he can these days to call attention to what he sees as the demise of the European ideal. He hopes he can help save it — from inept politicians and the dark forces of the market. Jürgen Habermas is angry. He’s really angry. He is nothing short of furious — because he takes it all personally.
That’s why Habermas is so angry: with the politicians, the “functional elite” and the media. “Are you from the press?” he asks a man in the audience who has posed a question. “No? Too bad.”
He sees a Europe in which states are driven by the markets, in which the EU exerts massive influence on the formation of new governments in Italy and Greece, and in which what he so passionately defends and loves about Europe has been simply turned on its head.
“If the European project fails,” he says, “then there is the question of how long it will take to reach the status quo again. Remember the German Revolution of 1848: When it failed, it took us 100 years to regain the same level of democracy as before.”
Communication, Modernity and Democracy in Habermas and Dewey
Alone among Frankfurt School critical theorists, Habermas has critically appropriated pragmatist motifs. Although the Habermas-Dewey connection has been generally neglected, significant similarities as well as important differences appear in their work. Both theorists share, with Aristotle, Mead, Gadamer, and other dialogical thinkers, the view that human beings are primarily speaking and socially interacting creatures. Dewey asserted that society exists “by… and in communication,” praising it as “the most wonderful” of all activities “by the side of which transubstantiation pales“. For Habermas, too, communication is a central life activity and the fulcrum of his critical theory: “The utopian perspective of reconciliation and freedom is ingrained in the conditions of communicative sociation of individuals“.
Both theorists attack positivism, technocracy, and social domination, pointing to social forces that undermine the democratic potentialities of modern society. They also criticize the modern philosophic tradition, especially the idealist philosophy of consciousness and its subject/object dualism. Both call for a reconstruction of philosophy and social theory, offering intersubjective alternatives based on their theories of communication. In addition, they call for a unification of theory and practice, providing systematic critiques of speculative, quietistic, and conformist thought as well as of conservative ideologies. Following in the footsteps of Dewey, Habermas stresses uncoerced communication with the intent of upholding the progressive aspects of liberal social and political institutions against their critics.
Philosophy in a time of terror: dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida
The only responsible legal response to the attacks—here again Derrida and Habermas agree—is the strengthening, differentiation, institutionalization and enforcement of international law. The answer emphatically is not the fierce return to national power politics, which pretends to enhance respect for law; the right course is legal self-restriction of overwhelming political, economic, military and technological power, the recognition of existing and the creation of new supranational organizations, the universal acceptance of their judgments and decisions and, of course, their transformation from mere deliberative organizations into bodies capable of political and military action to help to create a new world order in which material inequalities can be offset, in part, through assuring equal national rights. Only a West, as Habermas says, that has more to offer than the ideology of consumerism, only a West that revives its universal normative ideal of self-determination and formal equality as means to allow differences in culture and personality will be able to overcome the deep-rooted resentment of (especially Arab and Muslim) non-Western peoples at having been materially expropriated and culturally corrupted.
Read also: Review of Philosophy in a Time of Terror
Communication, Democratization, and Modernity – critical reflections on Habermas and Dewey
Alone among Frankfurt School critical theorists, Habermas has critically appropriated pragmatist motifs. Although the Habermas-Dewey connection has been generally neglected, significant similarities as well as important differences appear in their work. Both theorists share, with Aristotle, Mead, Gadamer, and other dialogical thinkers, the view that human beings are primarily speaking and socially interacting creatures. Dewey asserted that society exists “by… and in communication,” praising it as “the most wonderful” of all activities “by the side of which transubstantiation pales“. For Habermas, too, communication is a central life activity and the fulcrum of his critical theory: “The utopian perspective of reconciliation and freedom is ingrained in the conditions of communicative sociation of individuals“.
