The New Conservatism E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 504

Beschreibung

Jürgen Habermas is well known for his scholarly writings on the theoretical foundations of the human sciences. The New Conservatism brings to light another side of Habermas's work, showing him to be an incisive commentator on a wide range of contemporary themes. The 1980s have been a crucial decade in the political life of Western democracies in general, and of the Federal Republic of Germany in particular. The transformations that accompanied a shift from 13 years of Social democratic rule in Germany to government by the conservative Christian Democrats are captured in this series of insightful, often passionate political and cultural commentaries. The central theme uniting the essays is the German problem of 'coming to terms within the past,' a problem that has important implications outside Germany as well. Of particular note are the essays on what has come to be known as the Historian's Debate: Habermas's attack on the revisionist German historians who have been trying to trivialize and "normalize" the history of the Nazi period, and his defence of the need for a realistic and discriminating approach to the Nazi period and its legacy. Habermas also takes up the recent debate concerning Martin Heidegger's involvement with Nazism and the rise of the neoconservative movement in Europe and America. In particular, the essay on The New Obscurity combines Habermas's analysis of the problems of the welfare state with his suggestions for avenues open to utopian impulses today.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction Richard Wolin

Translator’s Preface

1 Neoconservatism

Modern and Postmodern Architecture

Neoconservative Cultural Criticism in the United States and West Germany

2 The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies

3 Heinrich Heine and the Role of the Intellectual in Germany

4 The Idea of the University: Learning Processes

5 The Horrors of Autonomy: Carl Schmitt in English

6 Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective

7 Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present: On Foucault’s Lecture on Kant’s What is Enlightenment?

8 Culture and Politics

Political Culture in Germany Since 1968: An Interview with Dr. Rainer Erd for the Frankfurter Rundschau

The New Intimacy between Politics and Culture: Theses on Enlightenment in Germany

9 A Kind of Settling of Damages

Remarks from the Römerberg Colloquium

Apologetic Tendencies

On the Public Use of History

Closing Remarks

10 Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity: The Federal Republic’s Orientation to the West

Name Index

Translation © 1989 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This work is composed of essays and interviews previously published in German. With the exception of the two pieces in the section on Culture and Politics and the essay “Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective,” they are taken from the two most recent volumes of Habermas’s political writings, Kleine Politische Schriften V and VI, © 1985, 1987 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

This edition first published 1989 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers First published in paperback 1994

Editorial office:Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0 7456 0679 2ISBN 0 7456 1411 6 (pbk)

Introduction

Richard Wolin

There are not two Germanys, an evil and a good, but only one, which, through devil’s cunning, transformed its best into evil. …

Thomas Mann, Germany and the Germans, 1945

I consider the continued existence of National Socialism within democracy potentially more threatening than the continued existence of fascist tendencies against democracy.

Theodor Adorno, “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?”

Until now, Jürgen Habermas has been best known in the English-speaking world as the author of a number of seminal works on the metatheoretical foundations of the human sciences: Knowledge and Human Interests (1973), Communication and the Evolution of Society (1979), and, what will undoubtedly be viewed historically as his masterwork, the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987).1 In the Federal Republic of Germany, however, his reputation as a scholar has gone hand in hand with his role as a passionate commentator on a wide range of contemporary political themes—in speeches, interviews, and reviews that have appeared in leading German publications such as Die Zeit and Merkur.2 The present volume comprises a variety of occasional political and cultural writings conceived by Habermas in the 1980s–an extremely significant decade in the political life of the Federal Republic—which saw thirteen years of Social Democratic rule (1969–1982) come to an end in favor of a coalition headed by the conservative Christian Democrats. Led by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the Christian Democrats were returned to office (along with their junior partners, the Free Democrats) in 1987. The political transformation of the 1980s thus represents in many ways a delayed confirmation of the Tendenzwende or ideological shift first visible in Germany in the mid-1970s. The multifarious ramifications of this era of neoconservative stabilization in the Federal Republic—in the political, cultural, and intellectual spheres of life—are explored by Habermas in the essays that make up this volume. And while these texts are integrally related to the peculiarities of the West German historical-political context, many of their insights concerning the decline of the welfare state, the function of scholarship under conditions of democracy, and neoconservatism in general are, mutatis mutandis, applicable to conditions of other late capitalist societies.

It has recently become fashionable to deny the existence of a causal relation between an author’s theoretical position and his or her political convictions3—a standpoint consonant with the poststructuralist interest in exposing the limitations of theory in general, which is always suspected of promoting covert, “foundationalist” tendencies. In this respect, the work of Habermas is refreshingly traditional: the political essays continued in The New Conservatism represent a studied, practical complement of his theoretical labors of the past thirty years. Indeed, the relationship between “theory” and “practical life” has always been a paramount concern in Habermas’s work. In Knowledge and Human Interests, for example, he attempted to demystify the misguided, “objectivistic” self-understanding of the human sciences by demonstrating that the so-called observer is an inextricable element of the network of social relations under study. In a similar vein, in his introduction to Theory and Practice,4 Habermas set forth the program of a revitalized critical theory defined as a “theory of society with a practical intent.” That he has remained extremely faithful to this early insistence on the practical implications of all social inquiry is attested to by the political texts in this volume. In essence, they may be read as studies in applied critical theory. For despite his telling criticisms of the shortcomings of the first generation of critical theorists,5 Habermas has, throughout his work, remained faithful to one of the central insights of Max Horkheimer: that what distinguishes “critical” from “traditional” theory is an active interest in advancing a more rational and just organization of social life. Or, as he observes in Theory and Practice, “We can, if needs be, distinguish theories according to whether or not they are structurally related to possible emancipation.”6

The central theme that unites the various essays of this volume is the German problem of the Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit or “coming to terms with the past.” For years, the “German question” as perceived by politicians of Western Europe had been, “How can German aggressiveness be curbed?” But after 1945, this question took on an entirely different, more sinister meaning. It was rephrased to read, “How could the nation of Goethe, Kant, and Schiller become the perpetrator of ‘crimes against humanity’?” Or simply, “How was Auschwitz possible?” One could justifiably say that the very “soul” of the nation is at stake in the answer to this question. For the development of a healthy, nonpathological national identity would seem contingent on the forthright acknowledgment of those aspects of the German tradition that facilitated the catastrophe of 1933–1945. And that is why recent efforts on the part of certain German historians—bolstered by an era of conservative stabilization—to circumvent the problem of “coming to terms with the past” are so disturbing. For what is new about this situation—and here I am referring to what has been called the “Historians’ Debate”—is the attempt not simply to provide dishonest and evasive answers to the “German question,” as stated above, but to declare .